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It was around eight in the morning in the vast convention hall in Kyoto. The negotiations over a worldwide treaty to limit global warming gases, which were supposed to have ended the evening before, had gone on through the night. Drifts of paper—treaty drafts, industry talking points, environmentalist press releases—overflowed every wastebasket. Delegates in suits and ties were passed out on couches, noisily mouth breathing. And polite squadrons of workers were shooing people out of the hall so that some trade show—tool and die makers, I think—could set up its displays.
Finally, from behind the closed doors, word emerged that we had a treaty. The greens all cheered, halfheartedly—since it wasn't as though the agreement would go anywhere near far enough to arrest global warming—but firm in their conviction that the tide on the issue had finally turned. After a decade of resistance, the oil companies and the car companies and all the other deniers of global warming had seen their power matched.
Or so it seemed. I was standing next to a top industry lobbyist, a man who had spent the last week engineering opposition to the treaty, huddling with Exxon lawyers and Saudi delegates, detailing the Venezuelans to change this word, the Kuwaitis to soften that number. Right now he looked just plain tired. "I can't wait to get back to Washington," he said. "In Washington we'll get this under control again."
At the time I thought he was blowing smoke, putting on a game face, whistling past the graveyard of corporate control. I almost felt sorry for him; it seemed to me (as sleep-deprived as everyone else) that we were on the brink of a new world.
As it turned out, we both were right. The rest of the developed world took Kyoto seriously; in the eight years since then, the Europeans and the Japanese have begun to lay the foundation for rapid and genuine progress toward the initial treaty goal of cutting carbon emissions to a level 5 to 10 percent below what it was in 1990. You can see the results of that long Kyoto night in the ranks of windmills rising along the coast of the North Sea, in the solar panels sprouting on German rooftops, and in the remarkable political unanimity in most of the world on the need for rapid change. Tony Blair's science adviser has repeatedly called global warming a greater threat than terrorism, but that hasn't been enough for Britain's Conservatives; the Tory leader (the equivalent of, say, Tom DeLay) rose last summer to excoriate Blair for moving too slowly on carbon reductions.
In Washington, however, the lobbyists did get things "under control." Eight years after Kyoto, Big Oil and Big Coal remain in complete and unchallenged power. Around the country, according to industry analysts, 68 new coal-fired power plants are in various stages of planning. Detroit makes cars that burn more fuel, on average, than at any time in the last two decades. The president doesn't mention the global warming issue, and the leaders of the opposition don't, either: John Kerry didn't exactly run on solving the climate crisis. The high-water mark for legislative action came in 2003, when John McCain actually managed to persuade 43 senators to support a bill calling for at least some carbon reductions, albeit much lower than even the modest Kyoto levels. But given that it takes 60 votes to beat a filibuster and 66 to override a veto, and given that the GOP has since added four hard-right senators to its total, it's safe to say that nothing will be happening inside the Beltway anytime soon.
IT WAS NEVER going to be easy. Controlling global warming is not like the other battles (dirty water, smog) that environmentalists have taken on, and mostly won, over the years. Carbon dioxide, a.k.a. CO2, or just "carbon" for short, is not a conventional pollutant. It's tasteless, colorless, odorless. Unlike carbon monoxide, which is what kills you if you leave your car running in the garage, CO2 doesn't do anything to the human body directly. It does its damage in the lower atmosphere by holding in heat that would otherwise escape out to space. And even more unfortunate, there's no easy way to get rid of it, no catalytic converter you can stick on your tailpipe, no scrubber you can fit to your smokestack. To reduce the amount of CO2 pouring into the atmosphere means dramatically reducing the amount of fossil fuel being consumed. Which means changing the underpinning of the planet's entire economy and altering our most ingrained personal habits. Even under the best scenarios, this will involve something more like a revolution than a technical fix.
You would think the Europeans would have had a harder time making reductions; after all, they were already fairly energy-efficient, thanks to decades of high taxes on coal and oil. Their low-hanging fruit had long since been plucked. For the United States, there were loads of relatively easy fixes. We could have quickly reduced our emissions by trimming the number of SUVs on the road, for instance, while the French were already in Peugeots. However, in certain ways, America was more firmly locked into coal and oil than our European peers: sprawling suburbs, oversized houses, abandoned rail lines. We had the single hardest habit to break, which was thinking of energy as something cheap. This staggering inertia meant that even when our leaders had some interest in controlling energy use, they faced a real challenge. Al Gore wrote a book insisting that the future of civilization itself depended on battling global warming; during his eight years as vice president, Americans increased their carbon emissions by 15 percent.
What makes the battle harder still is the tangibility gap between benefits and costs. Everyone is, in the long run, better off if the planet doesn't burn to a crisp. But in any given year the payoff for shifting away from fossil fuel is incremental and essentially invisible. The costs, however, are concentrated: If you own a coal mine, an oil well, or an assembly line churning out gas-guzzlers, you have a very strong incentive for making sure no one starts charging you for emitting carbon.
At the very least, the "energy sector" needed to stall for time, so that its investments in oil fields and the like could keep on earning for their theoretical lifetimes. The strategy turned out to be simple: Cloud the issue as much as possible so that voters, already none too eager to embrace higher gas prices, would have no real reason to move climate change to the top of their agendas. I mean, if the scientists aren't absolutely certain, well, why not just wait until they get it sorted out?
The tactic worked brilliantly; throughout the 1990s, even as other nations took action, the fossil fuel industry's Global Climate Coalition managed to make American journalists treat the accelerating warming as a he-said-she-said story. True, a vast scientific consensus was forming that climate change threatens the earth more profoundly than anything since the dawn of civilization, but in an Associated Press dispatch the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change didn't look all that much more impressive than, say, Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute or S. Fred Singer, former chief scientist at the U.S. Department of Transportation. Michaels and Singer weren't really doing new research, just tossing jabs at those who were, but that didn't matter. Their task was not to build a new climate model; it was to provide cover for politicians who were only too happy to duck the issue. Their task was to keep things under control.
It was all incredibly crude. But it was also incredibly effective. For now and for the foreseeable future, the climate skeptics have carried the day. They've understood the shape of American politics far better than environmentalists. They know that it doesn't matter how many scientists are arrayed against you as long as you can intimidate newspapers into giving you equal time. They understand, too, that playing defense is all they need to do: Given the inertia inherent in the economy, it's more than sufficient to simply instill doubt.
IN SHORT, the deniers have done their job, and done it better than the environmen- talists have done theirs. They've delayed action for 15 years now, and their power seems to grow with each year. How, even as the science grew ever firmer and the evidence mounted ever higher, did the climate deniers manage to muddy the issue? It's one of the mightiest political feats of our time, accomplished by a small group of clever and committed people. It's worthwhile trying to understand how they work, not least because some of the same tactics are now being used in debates over other issues, like Social Security. And because the fight over global warming won't end here. Try as they might, even with all three branches of government under their control, conservative Republicans can't repeal the laws of chemistry and physics.
Bill McKibben is a contributing writer to Mother Jones and the author of several books, including his most recent, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscapes, Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks.
Friday, November 18
Health Economics 102
Op-Ed Columnist
A Private Obsession
By PAUL KRUGMAN
"Lots of things in life are complicated." So declared Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, in response to the mass confusion as registration for the new Medicare drug benefit began. But the complexity of the program - which has reduced some retirees to tears as they try to make what may be life-or-death decisions - is far greater than necessary.
One reason the drug benefit is so confusing is that older Americans can't simply sign up with Medicare as they can for other benefits. They must, instead, choose from a baffling array of plans offered by private middlemen. Why?
Here's a parallel. Earlier this year Senator Rick Santorum introduced a bill that would have forced the National Weather Service to limit the weather information directly available to the public. Although he didn't say so explicitly, he wanted the service to funnel that information through private forecasters instead.
Mr. Santorum's bill didn't go anywhere. But it was a classic attempt to force gratuitous privatization: involving private corporations in the delivery of public services even when those corporations have no useful role to play.
The Medicare drug benefit is an example of gratuitous privatization on a grand scale.
Here's some background: the elderly have long been offered a choice between standard Medicare, in which the government pays medical bills directly, and plans in which the government pays a middleman, like an H.M.O., to deliver health care. The theory was that the private sector would find innovative ways to lower costs while providing better care.
The theory was wrong. A number of studies have found that managed-care plans, which have much higher administrative costs than government-managed Medicare, end up costing the system money, not saving it.
But privatization, once promoted as a way to save money, has become a goal in itself. The 2003 bill that established the prescription drug benefit also locked in large subsidies for managed care.
And on drug coverage, the 2003 bill went even further: rather than merely subsidizing private plans, it made them mandatory. To receive the drug benefit, one must sign up with a plan offered by a private company. As people are discovering, the result is a deeply confusing system because the competing private plans differ in ways that are very hard to assess.
The peculiar structure of the drug benefit, with its huge gap in coverage - the famous "doughnut hole" I wrote about last week - adds to the confusion. Many better-off retirees have relied on Medigap policies to cover gaps in traditional Medicare, including prescription drugs. But that straightforward approach, which would make it relatively easy to compare drug plans, can't be used to fill the doughnut hole because Medigap policies are no longer allowed to cover drugs.
The only way to get some coverage in the gap is as part of a package in which you pay extra - a lot extra - to one of the private drug plans delivering the basic benefit. And because this coverage is bundled with other aspects of the plans, it's very difficult to figure out which plans offer the best deal.
But confusion isn't the only, or even the main, reason why the privatization of drug benefits is bad for America. The real problem is that we'll end up spending too much and getting too little.
Everything we know about health economics indicates that private drug plans will have much higher administrative costs than would have been incurred if Medicare had administered the benefit directly.
It's also clear that the private plans will spend large sums on marketing rather than on medicine. I have nothing against Don Shula, the former head coach of the Miami Dolphins, who is promoting a drug plan offered by Humana. But do we really want people choosing drug plans based on which one hires the most persuasive celebrity?
Last but not least, competing private drug plans will have less clout in negotiating lower drug prices than Medicare as a whole would have. And the law explicitly forbids Medicare from intervening to help the private plans negotiate better deals.
Last week I explained that the Medicare drug bill was devised by people who don't believe in a positive role for government. An insistence on gratuitous privatization is a byproduct of the same ideology. And the result of that ideology is a piece of legislation so bad it's almost surreal.
A Private Obsession
By PAUL KRUGMAN
"Lots of things in life are complicated." So declared Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, in response to the mass confusion as registration for the new Medicare drug benefit began. But the complexity of the program - which has reduced some retirees to tears as they try to make what may be life-or-death decisions - is far greater than necessary.
One reason the drug benefit is so confusing is that older Americans can't simply sign up with Medicare as they can for other benefits. They must, instead, choose from a baffling array of plans offered by private middlemen. Why?
Here's a parallel. Earlier this year Senator Rick Santorum introduced a bill that would have forced the National Weather Service to limit the weather information directly available to the public. Although he didn't say so explicitly, he wanted the service to funnel that information through private forecasters instead.
Mr. Santorum's bill didn't go anywhere. But it was a classic attempt to force gratuitous privatization: involving private corporations in the delivery of public services even when those corporations have no useful role to play.
The Medicare drug benefit is an example of gratuitous privatization on a grand scale.
Here's some background: the elderly have long been offered a choice between standard Medicare, in which the government pays medical bills directly, and plans in which the government pays a middleman, like an H.M.O., to deliver health care. The theory was that the private sector would find innovative ways to lower costs while providing better care.
The theory was wrong. A number of studies have found that managed-care plans, which have much higher administrative costs than government-managed Medicare, end up costing the system money, not saving it.
But privatization, once promoted as a way to save money, has become a goal in itself. The 2003 bill that established the prescription drug benefit also locked in large subsidies for managed care.
And on drug coverage, the 2003 bill went even further: rather than merely subsidizing private plans, it made them mandatory. To receive the drug benefit, one must sign up with a plan offered by a private company. As people are discovering, the result is a deeply confusing system because the competing private plans differ in ways that are very hard to assess.
The peculiar structure of the drug benefit, with its huge gap in coverage - the famous "doughnut hole" I wrote about last week - adds to the confusion. Many better-off retirees have relied on Medigap policies to cover gaps in traditional Medicare, including prescription drugs. But that straightforward approach, which would make it relatively easy to compare drug plans, can't be used to fill the doughnut hole because Medigap policies are no longer allowed to cover drugs.
The only way to get some coverage in the gap is as part of a package in which you pay extra - a lot extra - to one of the private drug plans delivering the basic benefit. And because this coverage is bundled with other aspects of the plans, it's very difficult to figure out which plans offer the best deal.
But confusion isn't the only, or even the main, reason why the privatization of drug benefits is bad for America. The real problem is that we'll end up spending too much and getting too little.
Everything we know about health economics indicates that private drug plans will have much higher administrative costs than would have been incurred if Medicare had administered the benefit directly.
It's also clear that the private plans will spend large sums on marketing rather than on medicine. I have nothing against Don Shula, the former head coach of the Miami Dolphins, who is promoting a drug plan offered by Humana. But do we really want people choosing drug plans based on which one hires the most persuasive celebrity?
Last but not least, competing private drug plans will have less clout in negotiating lower drug prices than Medicare as a whole would have. And the law explicitly forbids Medicare from intervening to help the private plans negotiate better deals.
Last week I explained that the Medicare drug bill was devised by people who don't believe in a positive role for government. An insistence on gratuitous privatization is a byproduct of the same ideology. And the result of that ideology is a piece of legislation so bad it's almost surreal.
Tuesday, November 15
Why Colleges Must Promote Unamerican Activities
What should students be studying in college? No one seems to agree anymore. Slate has taken the occasion to ask an array of prominent academics to tackle the question at the heart of this debate. Click here to read more from our symposium on reinventing college, and here to read more from Slate's "College Week."
Un-American activities.
By Mark Lilla, SLATE. Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005
1. American higher education is mass education. And it is not clear that mass education can, or even should, be liberal education. American universities are vast machines devoted primarily to vocational training, professional preparation, middle-class socialization, and research. Liberal education is the main aim of some smaller colleges, but not of our universities. That is why, in those institutions, it is crucial to establish small programs, majors, or residential settings where liberal education can be cultivated for those who really want it. Reforms of curriculum requirements for all university students contribute little to this end since they must cope with students who have little inclination for a liberal education.
2. American higher education is civic education. While we Americans may disagree about the nature of our values, most of us see our schools as vehicles for inculcating them. No one in the culture wars thinks of himself as working for a foreign power. But the aim of any liberal education worthy of the name is to transport students out of the world they live in, making them less certain about what is valuable in life. It does not seek to overcome alienation, it tries to induce it. Genuine liberal education is, of necessity, an un-American activity.
Continue Article
Inducing alienation in American students is not easy, though. They are a self-satisfied bunch—optimistic, pious, indifferent, and egalitarian. They need to be shocked, and nothing is more shocking to them than the alternatives to what they know: tragedy, impiety, commitment, and hierarchy. World history and literature are full of examples, which is why the study of foreign languages and basic history must be the foundation of their education. Anything can be built on those stones.
Footnote: The study of things foreign cannot guarantee alienation. As anyone in a university knows, it is possible to teach foreign cultures from a flat, multicultural perspective that sees the whole world through democratic American eyes. And the study of certain things American, taught from the right perspective, can be deeply alienating, too. Cf., Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, the Civil War. Just steer clear of anything polluted by Emerson.
3. The best reason to rely on the "great books" in liberal education is that they are almost impervious to bad teaching. A great teacher can shake his or her students up with a mediocre book, but even a dull teacher will have trouble ruining Moby Dick. Most attacks and defenses of "great books" curricula miss the point. There is nothing sacred about these works; they do not teach moral uplift, good values, civic inclusion, toleration, or proper hygiene. They are open, radically so, to interpretation and questioning. Their effect depends less on teachers than on a chance spark falling from them onto a young mind ready for combustion. And that's a good thing.
4. Combustion usually takes place outside the classroom, in private study, which should be encouraged. A core program in the first two years is a necessity in this country, given the failure of our high schools to provide a foundation. But, after that, students need to be free to connect the themes of the great books to some deep question that is meaningful to them individually. A system of tutorials, culminating in some sort of exam on a few books and/or a senior thesis, seems best suited to this end. I am involved in one such program at the University of Chicago, and it has taught me that genuine liberal education is possible in America. For my students and, in teaching them, for me.
Mark Lilla is Professor at the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago.
Un-American activities.
By Mark Lilla, SLATE. Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005
1. American higher education is mass education. And it is not clear that mass education can, or even should, be liberal education. American universities are vast machines devoted primarily to vocational training, professional preparation, middle-class socialization, and research. Liberal education is the main aim of some smaller colleges, but not of our universities. That is why, in those institutions, it is crucial to establish small programs, majors, or residential settings where liberal education can be cultivated for those who really want it. Reforms of curriculum requirements for all university students contribute little to this end since they must cope with students who have little inclination for a liberal education.
2. American higher education is civic education. While we Americans may disagree about the nature of our values, most of us see our schools as vehicles for inculcating them. No one in the culture wars thinks of himself as working for a foreign power. But the aim of any liberal education worthy of the name is to transport students out of the world they live in, making them less certain about what is valuable in life. It does not seek to overcome alienation, it tries to induce it. Genuine liberal education is, of necessity, an un-American activity.
Continue Article
Inducing alienation in American students is not easy, though. They are a self-satisfied bunch—optimistic, pious, indifferent, and egalitarian. They need to be shocked, and nothing is more shocking to them than the alternatives to what they know: tragedy, impiety, commitment, and hierarchy. World history and literature are full of examples, which is why the study of foreign languages and basic history must be the foundation of their education. Anything can be built on those stones.
Footnote: The study of things foreign cannot guarantee alienation. As anyone in a university knows, it is possible to teach foreign cultures from a flat, multicultural perspective that sees the whole world through democratic American eyes. And the study of certain things American, taught from the right perspective, can be deeply alienating, too. Cf., Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, the Civil War. Just steer clear of anything polluted by Emerson.
3. The best reason to rely on the "great books" in liberal education is that they are almost impervious to bad teaching. A great teacher can shake his or her students up with a mediocre book, but even a dull teacher will have trouble ruining Moby Dick. Most attacks and defenses of "great books" curricula miss the point. There is nothing sacred about these works; they do not teach moral uplift, good values, civic inclusion, toleration, or proper hygiene. They are open, radically so, to interpretation and questioning. Their effect depends less on teachers than on a chance spark falling from them onto a young mind ready for combustion. And that's a good thing.
4. Combustion usually takes place outside the classroom, in private study, which should be encouraged. A core program in the first two years is a necessity in this country, given the failure of our high schools to provide a foundation. But, after that, students need to be free to connect the themes of the great books to some deep question that is meaningful to them individually. A system of tutorials, culminating in some sort of exam on a few books and/or a senior thesis, seems best suited to this end. I am involved in one such program at the University of Chicago, and it has taught me that genuine liberal education is possible in America. For my students and, in teaching them, for me.
Mark Lilla is Professor at the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago.
Monday, November 14
Health Economics 101
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Several readers have asked me a good question: we rely on free markets to deliver most goods and services, so why shouldn't we do the same thing for health care? Some correspondents were belligerent, others honestly curious. Either way, they deserve an answer.
It comes down to three things: risk, selection and social justice.
First, about risk: in any given year, a small fraction of the population accounts for the bulk of medical expenses. In 2002 a mere 5 percent of Americans incurred almost half of U.S. medical costs. If you find yourself one of the unlucky 5 percent, your medical expenses will be crushing, unless you're very wealthy - or you have good insurance.
But good insurance is hard to come by, because private markets for health insurance suffer from a severe case of the economic problem known as "adverse selection," in which bad risks drive out good.
To understand adverse selection, imagine what would happen if there were only one health insurance company, and everyone was required to buy the same insurance policy. In that case, the insurance company could charge a price reflecting the medical costs of the average American, plus a small extra charge for administrative expenses.
But in the real insurance market, a company that offered such a policy to anyone who wanted it would lose money hand over fist. Healthy people, who don't expect to face high medical bills, would go elsewhere, or go without insurance. Meanwhile, those who bought the policy would be a self-selected group of people likely to have high medical costs. And if the company responded to this selection bias by charging a higher price for insurance, it would drive away even more healthy people.
That's why insurance companies don't offer a standard health insurance policy, available to anyone willing to buy it. Instead, they devote a lot of effort and money to screening applicants, selling insurance only to those considered unlikely to have high costs, while rejecting those with pre-existing conditions or other indicators of high future expenses.
This screening process is the main reason private health insurers spend a much higher share of their revenue on administrative costs than do government insurance programs like Medicare, which doesn't try to screen anyone out. That is, private insurance companies spend large sums not on providing medical care, but on denying insurance to those who need it most.
What happens to those denied coverage? Citizens of advanced countries - the United States included - don't believe that their fellow citizens should be denied essential health care because they can't afford it. And this belief in social justice gets translated into action, however imperfectly. Some of those unable to get private health insurance are covered by Medicaid. Others receive "uncompensated" treatment, which ends up being paid for either by the government or by higher medical bills for the insured. So we have a huge private health care bureaucracy whose main purpose is, in effect, to pass the buck to taxpayers.
At this point some readers may object that I'm painting too dark a picture. After all, most Americans too young to receive Medicare do have private health insurance. So does the free market work better than I've suggested? No: to the extent that we do have a working system of private health insurance, it's the result of huge though hidden subsidies.
Private health insurance in America comes almost entirely in the form of employment-based coverage: insurance provided by corporations as part of their pay packages. The key to this coverage is the fact that compensation in the form of health benefits, as opposed to wages, isn't taxed. One recent study suggests that this tax subsidy may be as large as $190 billion per year. And even with this subsidy, employment-based coverage is in rapid decline.
I'm not an opponent of markets. On the contrary, I've spent a lot of my career defending their virtues. But the fact is that the free market doesn't work for health insurance, and never did. All we ever had was a patchwork, semiprivate system supported by large government subsidies.
That system is now failing. And a rigid belief that markets are always superior to government programs - a belief that ignores basic economics as well as experience - stands in the way of rational thinking about what should replace it.
Several readers have asked me a good question: we rely on free markets to deliver most goods and services, so why shouldn't we do the same thing for health care? Some correspondents were belligerent, others honestly curious. Either way, they deserve an answer.
It comes down to three things: risk, selection and social justice.
First, about risk: in any given year, a small fraction of the population accounts for the bulk of medical expenses. In 2002 a mere 5 percent of Americans incurred almost half of U.S. medical costs. If you find yourself one of the unlucky 5 percent, your medical expenses will be crushing, unless you're very wealthy - or you have good insurance.
But good insurance is hard to come by, because private markets for health insurance suffer from a severe case of the economic problem known as "adverse selection," in which bad risks drive out good.
To understand adverse selection, imagine what would happen if there were only one health insurance company, and everyone was required to buy the same insurance policy. In that case, the insurance company could charge a price reflecting the medical costs of the average American, plus a small extra charge for administrative expenses.
But in the real insurance market, a company that offered such a policy to anyone who wanted it would lose money hand over fist. Healthy people, who don't expect to face high medical bills, would go elsewhere, or go without insurance. Meanwhile, those who bought the policy would be a self-selected group of people likely to have high medical costs. And if the company responded to this selection bias by charging a higher price for insurance, it would drive away even more healthy people.
That's why insurance companies don't offer a standard health insurance policy, available to anyone willing to buy it. Instead, they devote a lot of effort and money to screening applicants, selling insurance only to those considered unlikely to have high costs, while rejecting those with pre-existing conditions or other indicators of high future expenses.
This screening process is the main reason private health insurers spend a much higher share of their revenue on administrative costs than do government insurance programs like Medicare, which doesn't try to screen anyone out. That is, private insurance companies spend large sums not on providing medical care, but on denying insurance to those who need it most.
What happens to those denied coverage? Citizens of advanced countries - the United States included - don't believe that their fellow citizens should be denied essential health care because they can't afford it. And this belief in social justice gets translated into action, however imperfectly. Some of those unable to get private health insurance are covered by Medicaid. Others receive "uncompensated" treatment, which ends up being paid for either by the government or by higher medical bills for the insured. So we have a huge private health care bureaucracy whose main purpose is, in effect, to pass the buck to taxpayers.
At this point some readers may object that I'm painting too dark a picture. After all, most Americans too young to receive Medicare do have private health insurance. So does the free market work better than I've suggested? No: to the extent that we do have a working system of private health insurance, it's the result of huge though hidden subsidies.
Private health insurance in America comes almost entirely in the form of employment-based coverage: insurance provided by corporations as part of their pay packages. The key to this coverage is the fact that compensation in the form of health benefits, as opposed to wages, isn't taxed. One recent study suggests that this tax subsidy may be as large as $190 billion per year. And even with this subsidy, employment-based coverage is in rapid decline.
I'm not an opponent of markets. On the contrary, I've spent a lot of my career defending their virtues. But the fact is that the free market doesn't work for health insurance, and never did. All we ever had was a patchwork, semiprivate system supported by large government subsidies.
That system is now failing. And a rigid belief that markets are always superior to government programs - a belief that ignores basic economics as well as experience - stands in the way of rational thinking about what should replace it.
Who They Are: The double standard that underlies our torture policies.
By David Cole, SLATE Posted Friday, Nov. 11, 2005, at 12:32 PM ET
"It's not about who they are. It's about who we are."
So said Sen. John McCain, in defending his amendment to a defense appropriations bill that would bar U.S. officials from inflicting "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" on detainees in the war on terror. But while Sen. McCain is surely right that how we treat those in our custody ultimately reflects back on us, this debate is also very much about who "they" are. That's because the Bush administration's justification for employing "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" against certain individuals expressly turns on the fact that these individuals are foreign nationals held abroad. The coercive-interrogation policy is predicated on a double standard: According to the administration, we can do it to "them" because "they" are different from "us."
On this theory, what would indisputably be illegal if done on U.S. soil, or if done to a U.S. citizen anywhere in the world, becomes lawful when inflicted on foreign nationals held abroad. It is this theory that drove the administration to warehouse hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, under our control but technically beyond our borders. It is this theory that drove the administration to open a network of CIA-controlled secret prisons—dubbed "black sites"—in undisclosed locations around the world. Application of the theory has already resulted in multiple homicides in the course of interrogations, one of which is recounted in gruesome detail by Jane Mayer in the Nov. 14 issue of The New Yorker.
And just when Congress appeared to be on the verge of doing something about it, Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the principal co-sponsors of the McCain Amendment, convinced the Senate to undercut the amendment by making it unenforceable—at least for the hundreds of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On Thursday night, the Senate approved Graham's proposal, which would selectively suspend the writ of habeas corpus for foreign nationals held at Guantanamo, denying them any access to a court for violations of constitutional or international law—even if they are being subjected to precisely the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment that the McCain Amendment prohibits. Graham's amendment is predicated on the same double standard as the Bush administration's interpretation of the Torture Convention—namely, that it is somehow permissible to do to foreign nationals what would be patently unacceptable if done to citizens.
This double standard is deeply flawed. Legal protections for fundamental rights of those we have locked up should not vary depending on the passport they hold. And this flaw raises a serious question not only about administration policy in the war on terror, but also about American constitutional doctrine.
The administration's justification for treating foreign nationals held abroad in the war on terror differently from those held here first surfaced with respect to the prisoners held at Guantanamo. When lawyers challenged the legality of those detentions, the administration responded that the Constitution does not extend to foreign nationals outside our borders, and that therefore the Guantanamo detainees have no constitutional rights. That issue is now being litigated in the courts—although not for long, if Graham's amendment becomes law.
Then, during Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' confirmation hearings, the administration disclosed that, in its view, not only does the Constitution not apply to foreigners held abroad, but a key part of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment doesn't either. That treaty, signed by virtually every country in the world, and signed and ratified by the United States in 1994, absolutely prohibits such conduct, without exception, even in a state of war.
After 9/11, however, the Bush administration took the view that the prohibition on "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" simply does not apply to foreign detainees held outside the United States. It pointed to the fact that when Congress ratified the treaty, it stated its understanding that "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" comprised conduct that would violate the United States Constitution—whose Fifth Amendment prohibits any coercion that "shocks the conscience" in interrogations. Claiming that the U.S. Constitution does not extend to foreigners overseas, the administration reasoned that the treaty prohibition on "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" is similarly limited.
This legal sleight of hand allows the president to insist repeatedly that he does not condone torture and acts only in accordance with the law, while simultaneously dispatching the vice president to Congress to preserve the loophole that allows the infliction of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment on foreign suspects abroad. That loophole is the legal underpinning of the CIA's reported practice of "disappearing" foreign suspects into secret "black sites" and then using interrogation tactics against them that would unquestionably be forbidden if employed at the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters. The CIA's approved tactics have reportedly included water-boarding—in which the suspect is made to think he is drowning to convince him to talk—mock burials, and threats to send individuals to countries with a known track record for even more brutal forms of torture.
The administration's treaty interpretation makes no sense. The Torture Convention is predicated on the principle that the conduct it prohibits is fundamentally incompatible with human dignity—and all human beings have equal dignity, regardless of their nationality, and regardless of where they are held. There is no evidence that Congress sought to limit the Torture Convention prohibition to conduct within our borders. Abraham Sofaer, who submitted the treaty to Congress on behalf of the first Bush administration, has written to Congress stating that the current administration's position is inconsistent with the original understanding of the convention and improperly turns an effort by Congress to give substantive definition to the terms "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" into a geographical loophole that frees U.S. officials to commit actions just short of torture when acting abroad.
Sen. Graham's proposal to cut off judicial review for foreign nationals held at Guantanamo exploits a similar double standard. By its terms, it applies only to foreign nationals—denying them habeas review that is preserved for citizens. There is no basis for selectively denying judicial review to foreign nationals—if anything, they need such protection even more than citizens, since, unlike citizens, they are unlikely to find any protection through the political process.
These efforts to exploit the vulnerabilities of foreign nationals raise even more fundamental questions about the proper scope of our constitutional obligations. If a particular tactic—say, water-boarding—is unconstitutional because it shocks the conscience when used against a citizen within the United States, why should the result be any different when U.S. officials employ the same tactic against a foreign national overseas?
Distinctions based on nationality and location have historical roots, but those roots are of doubtful validity today. For example, the Supreme Court's failure to treat freed slaves as "citizens" was the basis for its infamous 1857 ruling against Dred Scott. But Congress rejected the rationale of the Dred Scott case in the constitutional amendments adopted after the Civil War, guaranteeing equal protection and due process to all "persons."
When the Constitution was initially adopted, there were also strong distinctions between domestic and international law and jurisdiction—so much so that there was a question whether even U.S. citizens would be protected by the Constitution overseas. Indeed, in 1891, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field wrote that "the Constitution can have no operation in another country."
But while such territorial distinctions might have made some sense in the 18th century, they make little sense today and have for the most part been abandoned. We routinely extend our laws abroad, prosecuting individuals for conduct overseas if it has any effect on U.S. citizens or property. Since the 1950s, the Supreme Court has held that the Bill of Rights is not limited by our borders and protects U.S. citizens from their own government wherever in the world they may be. Shouldn't the same principle apply to foreign nationals—at least in cases where U.S. officials have exercised coercive authority over them? The rights not to be locked up arbitrarily or to be protected from treatment that shocks the conscience are human rights, not privileges of citizenship. We should honor these rights wherever we are acting and on whomever we are acting.
Hermann Cohen, a 19th-century Jewish philosopher, once wrote, in an exegesis on the Bible, "The alien was to be protected not because he was a member of one's family, clan, or religious community, but because he was a human being. In the alien, therefore, man discovered the idea of humanity." We are in danger of losing that idea.
David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, is author of Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism.
"It's not about who they are. It's about who we are."
So said Sen. John McCain, in defending his amendment to a defense appropriations bill that would bar U.S. officials from inflicting "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" on detainees in the war on terror. But while Sen. McCain is surely right that how we treat those in our custody ultimately reflects back on us, this debate is also very much about who "they" are. That's because the Bush administration's justification for employing "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" against certain individuals expressly turns on the fact that these individuals are foreign nationals held abroad. The coercive-interrogation policy is predicated on a double standard: According to the administration, we can do it to "them" because "they" are different from "us."
On this theory, what would indisputably be illegal if done on U.S. soil, or if done to a U.S. citizen anywhere in the world, becomes lawful when inflicted on foreign nationals held abroad. It is this theory that drove the administration to warehouse hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, under our control but technically beyond our borders. It is this theory that drove the administration to open a network of CIA-controlled secret prisons—dubbed "black sites"—in undisclosed locations around the world. Application of the theory has already resulted in multiple homicides in the course of interrogations, one of which is recounted in gruesome detail by Jane Mayer in the Nov. 14 issue of The New Yorker.
And just when Congress appeared to be on the verge of doing something about it, Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the principal co-sponsors of the McCain Amendment, convinced the Senate to undercut the amendment by making it unenforceable—at least for the hundreds of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On Thursday night, the Senate approved Graham's proposal, which would selectively suspend the writ of habeas corpus for foreign nationals held at Guantanamo, denying them any access to a court for violations of constitutional or international law—even if they are being subjected to precisely the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment that the McCain Amendment prohibits. Graham's amendment is predicated on the same double standard as the Bush administration's interpretation of the Torture Convention—namely, that it is somehow permissible to do to foreign nationals what would be patently unacceptable if done to citizens.
This double standard is deeply flawed. Legal protections for fundamental rights of those we have locked up should not vary depending on the passport they hold. And this flaw raises a serious question not only about administration policy in the war on terror, but also about American constitutional doctrine.
The administration's justification for treating foreign nationals held abroad in the war on terror differently from those held here first surfaced with respect to the prisoners held at Guantanamo. When lawyers challenged the legality of those detentions, the administration responded that the Constitution does not extend to foreign nationals outside our borders, and that therefore the Guantanamo detainees have no constitutional rights. That issue is now being litigated in the courts—although not for long, if Graham's amendment becomes law.
Then, during Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' confirmation hearings, the administration disclosed that, in its view, not only does the Constitution not apply to foreigners held abroad, but a key part of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment doesn't either. That treaty, signed by virtually every country in the world, and signed and ratified by the United States in 1994, absolutely prohibits such conduct, without exception, even in a state of war.
After 9/11, however, the Bush administration took the view that the prohibition on "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" simply does not apply to foreign detainees held outside the United States. It pointed to the fact that when Congress ratified the treaty, it stated its understanding that "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" comprised conduct that would violate the United States Constitution—whose Fifth Amendment prohibits any coercion that "shocks the conscience" in interrogations. Claiming that the U.S. Constitution does not extend to foreigners overseas, the administration reasoned that the treaty prohibition on "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" is similarly limited.
This legal sleight of hand allows the president to insist repeatedly that he does not condone torture and acts only in accordance with the law, while simultaneously dispatching the vice president to Congress to preserve the loophole that allows the infliction of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment on foreign suspects abroad. That loophole is the legal underpinning of the CIA's reported practice of "disappearing" foreign suspects into secret "black sites" and then using interrogation tactics against them that would unquestionably be forbidden if employed at the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters. The CIA's approved tactics have reportedly included water-boarding—in which the suspect is made to think he is drowning to convince him to talk—mock burials, and threats to send individuals to countries with a known track record for even more brutal forms of torture.
The administration's treaty interpretation makes no sense. The Torture Convention is predicated on the principle that the conduct it prohibits is fundamentally incompatible with human dignity—and all human beings have equal dignity, regardless of their nationality, and regardless of where they are held. There is no evidence that Congress sought to limit the Torture Convention prohibition to conduct within our borders. Abraham Sofaer, who submitted the treaty to Congress on behalf of the first Bush administration, has written to Congress stating that the current administration's position is inconsistent with the original understanding of the convention and improperly turns an effort by Congress to give substantive definition to the terms "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" into a geographical loophole that frees U.S. officials to commit actions just short of torture when acting abroad.
Sen. Graham's proposal to cut off judicial review for foreign nationals held at Guantanamo exploits a similar double standard. By its terms, it applies only to foreign nationals—denying them habeas review that is preserved for citizens. There is no basis for selectively denying judicial review to foreign nationals—if anything, they need such protection even more than citizens, since, unlike citizens, they are unlikely to find any protection through the political process.
These efforts to exploit the vulnerabilities of foreign nationals raise even more fundamental questions about the proper scope of our constitutional obligations. If a particular tactic—say, water-boarding—is unconstitutional because it shocks the conscience when used against a citizen within the United States, why should the result be any different when U.S. officials employ the same tactic against a foreign national overseas?
Distinctions based on nationality and location have historical roots, but those roots are of doubtful validity today. For example, the Supreme Court's failure to treat freed slaves as "citizens" was the basis for its infamous 1857 ruling against Dred Scott. But Congress rejected the rationale of the Dred Scott case in the constitutional amendments adopted after the Civil War, guaranteeing equal protection and due process to all "persons."
When the Constitution was initially adopted, there were also strong distinctions between domestic and international law and jurisdiction—so much so that there was a question whether even U.S. citizens would be protected by the Constitution overseas. Indeed, in 1891, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field wrote that "the Constitution can have no operation in another country."
But while such territorial distinctions might have made some sense in the 18th century, they make little sense today and have for the most part been abandoned. We routinely extend our laws abroad, prosecuting individuals for conduct overseas if it has any effect on U.S. citizens or property. Since the 1950s, the Supreme Court has held that the Bill of Rights is not limited by our borders and protects U.S. citizens from their own government wherever in the world they may be. Shouldn't the same principle apply to foreign nationals—at least in cases where U.S. officials have exercised coercive authority over them? The rights not to be locked up arbitrarily or to be protected from treatment that shocks the conscience are human rights, not privileges of citizenship. We should honor these rights wherever we are acting and on whomever we are acting.
Hermann Cohen, a 19th-century Jewish philosopher, once wrote, in an exegesis on the Bible, "The alien was to be protected not because he was a member of one's family, clan, or religious community, but because he was a human being. In the alien, therefore, man discovered the idea of humanity." We are in danger of losing that idea.
David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, is author of Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism.
"I don't care if you think I'm racist," she says, "I just want you to think I'm thin."
Irony Maiden: How Sarah Silverman is raping American comedy.
By Sam Anderson, SLATE.COM Posted Thursday, Nov. 10, 2005, at 12:04 PM ET
It's fitting that the comedian Sarah Silverman's impending cultural moment—high-profile film, ongoing miniscandal, TV series in the making—is going to coincide with serious public moralizing about the sexual orientation of penguins. Silverman's work is a natural byproduct of the high-stakes game of contemporary American identity politics—the emotionally volatile generalizing about our moral right to generalize. But she's not just a critic of PC culture: She's a connoisseur. She handles the complex algorithms of taboo—who's allowed to joke about what, to whom, using what terminology—with instant precision: "Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I'm one of the few people that believe it was the blacks." (The joke exposes not the ancient perfidy of any particular race but the absurdity of blaming entire races for anything.) Her best jokes are thought experiments in the internal logic of political correctness: "I want to get an abortion, but my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving." A Playboy interviewer, probing for something salacious, once asked Silverman if she had a nickname for her vagina. She answered "Faggot"—a throwaway joke that manages to kink sexual identity into such an ingenious pretzel it could fuel a doctoral dissertation.
Silverman began her career as an immediately discarded Saturday Night Live writer, fired after a year or so for her controversial jokes ("Quite frankly, I think it's a good law," she wrote about a mandatory 24-hour waiting period for abortions. "I was going to get an abortion the other day. I totally wanted an abortion—and it turns out I was just thirsty.") Since then, she's been elusively everywhere, starring in either forgettable shows (Greg the Bunny) or forgettable roles: Cameron Diaz's friend in There's Something About Mary, Kramer's girlfriend on Seinfeld, the painfully unfunny girlfriend of a painfully unfunny minor character in Jack Black's School of Rock.
Through her stand-up, however, Silverman has become an important member of a guerrilla vanguard in the culture wars that we might call the "meta-bigots"—other members include the South Park kids, Sacha Baron Cohen's "Ali G", and the now-AWOL Dave Chappelle. The meta-bigots work at social problems indirectly; instead of discussing race, rape, abortion, incest, or mass starvation, they parody our discussions of them. They manipulate stereotypes about stereotypes. It's a dangerous game: If you're humorless, distracted, or even just inordinately history-conscious, meta-bigotry can look suspiciously like actual bigotry.
Silverman is particularly vulnerable to such confusion because, unlike other meta-bigots, she doesn't insulate herself with fictional characters: Her persona—an incestuous, genital-obsessed, racist narcissist—looks and sounds exactly like Silverman herself. She delivers even the most taboo punch lines with almost pathological sincerity. It looks like her face isn't in on her own jokes: Her nostrils flare, her mouth cocks meaningfully to one side, her teeth (of which there seem to be a few extra) hide and reveal themselves in strategically earnest formations. It's like a Juilliard exercise; you'd need stop-motion film to track all of her expressions. Deadpan is nothing new, of course, but Silverman's deadpan is extra dead: She stretches the distance between delivery and message almost as far as it will go. While she neutralizes mass death with self-help wordplay ("When God gives you AIDS, make lemon-AIDS!") or relinks the historically unfunny tandem of sexual assault and anti-Semitism ("I was raped by a doctor, which is a bittersweet experience for a Jewish girl"), her body language suggests she's just a concerned citizen talking about property taxes at a city council meeting.
"I don't care if you think I'm racist," Silverman says in her act. "I just want you to think I'm thin." The request has largely been granted. She's pretty in a way that baits journalists into bodice-rippingly Harlequin descriptions: Variety has called her "rail-thin yet full-bosomed," and the New York Times (the description of record) "babelicious"; The New Yorker recently described her as "coltish, with shiny black hair and a china-doll complexion" (and added, in a weirdly zoological flourish, that she "moves like a vervet monkey"). She's been on Maxim's "Hot 100" list (after Jennifer Love Hewitt, before Norah Jones) and is currently the cover girl for the Jewish magazine Heeb, for which she has also written porn reviews. In light of all this, a cynic might read Silverman's mysterious long-term relationship with the stumpy late-night host Jimmy Kimmel as her ultimate ironic performance, a complex parable of sexual disorientation (as she said at a recent roast: "Jimmy Kimmel everyone, he's fat and has no charisma!"). Though Silverman uses her beauty as a prop for her sexual humor, her act stands up without it: I first ran into her as a disembodied voice issuing from Hadassah Guberman, a hilarious but not particularly attractive puppet on the (attractive but not particularly hilarious) show Crank Yankers.
Silverman has a gift for inspiring absurdly instructive public controversy. Her most notorious fiasco occurred in 2001, when she told a joke on Late Night With Conan O'Brien that unapologetically hinged on the word "chink." This summer, she got into trouble in a venue that was supposed to be trouble-proof: The Aristocrats, a documentary that challenged 100 comedians to offend its audience as ingeniously as possible. While most of the comics went straight for the "piss-shit-suck-fuck" paradigm, which very quickly became about as offensive as a newborn koala, Silverman turned the old-school joke against an iconic old-schooler. She implied, via an emotionally supercharged soliloquy full of loaded pauses, that she had been sexually abused by the 79-year-old show-business institution Joe Franklin. At the end, she looked straight into the camera and said, dead seriously, "Joe Franklin raped me"—an anti-punch line that completely paralyzed the theater I was at. Instead of laughing, we were all stuck trying to decide whether this was some new species of joke or just plain old slander. When Franklin threatened to sue soon after the movie was released ("I didn't like the nature of that wisecrack"), it made the joke strangely better. Silverman was the only comic in the film who met the challenge of the joke: She pushed it too far.
Silverman is a prototypical ironist—someone who says things she doesn't mean and (through more-or-less subtle contextual winks) expects us to intuit an unstated, smarter message underneath. But what is that message? Does she, like Socrates, play dumb in order to make us smart? Or just to experience the cheap thrill of public racism? Every ironic statement should, in theory, be translatable out of the joke world and into the world of civic-minded sincerity (the classic example: Swift's "eat Irish babies" equals "stop oppressing my country"). But Silverman's ultimate point is hard to find, partly because it's hidden behind such a blank expression. This may be one reason why such a consistently funny voice has had such a peripheral career.
All of Silverman's controversies are essentially large-scale pieces of PC performance art—but instead of settling anything about race and humor in America, they just expose the incoherence of the debate. If her humor does have a larger purpose, it is that it maps the outer limits of our tolerance; it exposes ambiguities in the discussion that we don't like to acknowledge; it taps into our giant unspoken mass of assumptions, tensions, fears, and hatreds—not to resolve them, but to remind us that they're there. (She told the Believer recently that she likes the idea of "saying things that force people to have opinions.") By reducing all of this toxic material into a logical game, she creates a kind of public catharsis. The point of Silverman's humor—the final translation of all that irony—might simply be that, no matter how much we pretend, we're not ready for her humor. These are life-and-death problems, and our laughter has terror in it.
But it may be that all of our white-knuckled hand-wringing gives Silverman too much credit. She has said that a comedian's "only job is funny thoughts"; most likely, she's just following her joke-instincts and leaving the implications to social critics. America has a famously vexed relationship with its irony: Though our pop culture exports about 90 percent of the world's supply, the puritanical, isolationist, log-cabin region of the nation's oversoul prays nightly for its death. But in a world as complicatedly social as ours, it's not expendable—irony is social chess, the playful manipulation of lazy expectations. It's at least as important as love or sadness. Only total extermination of the species would kill it.
By Sam Anderson, SLATE.COM Posted Thursday, Nov. 10, 2005, at 12:04 PM ET
It's fitting that the comedian Sarah Silverman's impending cultural moment—high-profile film, ongoing miniscandal, TV series in the making—is going to coincide with serious public moralizing about the sexual orientation of penguins. Silverman's work is a natural byproduct of the high-stakes game of contemporary American identity politics—the emotionally volatile generalizing about our moral right to generalize. But she's not just a critic of PC culture: She's a connoisseur. She handles the complex algorithms of taboo—who's allowed to joke about what, to whom, using what terminology—with instant precision: "Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I'm one of the few people that believe it was the blacks." (The joke exposes not the ancient perfidy of any particular race but the absurdity of blaming entire races for anything.) Her best jokes are thought experiments in the internal logic of political correctness: "I want to get an abortion, but my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving." A Playboy interviewer, probing for something salacious, once asked Silverman if she had a nickname for her vagina. She answered "Faggot"—a throwaway joke that manages to kink sexual identity into such an ingenious pretzel it could fuel a doctoral dissertation.
Silverman began her career as an immediately discarded Saturday Night Live writer, fired after a year or so for her controversial jokes ("Quite frankly, I think it's a good law," she wrote about a mandatory 24-hour waiting period for abortions. "I was going to get an abortion the other day. I totally wanted an abortion—and it turns out I was just thirsty.") Since then, she's been elusively everywhere, starring in either forgettable shows (Greg the Bunny) or forgettable roles: Cameron Diaz's friend in There's Something About Mary, Kramer's girlfriend on Seinfeld, the painfully unfunny girlfriend of a painfully unfunny minor character in Jack Black's School of Rock.
Through her stand-up, however, Silverman has become an important member of a guerrilla vanguard in the culture wars that we might call the "meta-bigots"—other members include the South Park kids, Sacha Baron Cohen's "Ali G", and the now-AWOL Dave Chappelle. The meta-bigots work at social problems indirectly; instead of discussing race, rape, abortion, incest, or mass starvation, they parody our discussions of them. They manipulate stereotypes about stereotypes. It's a dangerous game: If you're humorless, distracted, or even just inordinately history-conscious, meta-bigotry can look suspiciously like actual bigotry.
Silverman is particularly vulnerable to such confusion because, unlike other meta-bigots, she doesn't insulate herself with fictional characters: Her persona—an incestuous, genital-obsessed, racist narcissist—looks and sounds exactly like Silverman herself. She delivers even the most taboo punch lines with almost pathological sincerity. It looks like her face isn't in on her own jokes: Her nostrils flare, her mouth cocks meaningfully to one side, her teeth (of which there seem to be a few extra) hide and reveal themselves in strategically earnest formations. It's like a Juilliard exercise; you'd need stop-motion film to track all of her expressions. Deadpan is nothing new, of course, but Silverman's deadpan is extra dead: She stretches the distance between delivery and message almost as far as it will go. While she neutralizes mass death with self-help wordplay ("When God gives you AIDS, make lemon-AIDS!") or relinks the historically unfunny tandem of sexual assault and anti-Semitism ("I was raped by a doctor, which is a bittersweet experience for a Jewish girl"), her body language suggests she's just a concerned citizen talking about property taxes at a city council meeting.
"I don't care if you think I'm racist," Silverman says in her act. "I just want you to think I'm thin." The request has largely been granted. She's pretty in a way that baits journalists into bodice-rippingly Harlequin descriptions: Variety has called her "rail-thin yet full-bosomed," and the New York Times (the description of record) "babelicious"; The New Yorker recently described her as "coltish, with shiny black hair and a china-doll complexion" (and added, in a weirdly zoological flourish, that she "moves like a vervet monkey"). She's been on Maxim's "Hot 100" list (after Jennifer Love Hewitt, before Norah Jones) and is currently the cover girl for the Jewish magazine Heeb, for which she has also written porn reviews. In light of all this, a cynic might read Silverman's mysterious long-term relationship with the stumpy late-night host Jimmy Kimmel as her ultimate ironic performance, a complex parable of sexual disorientation (as she said at a recent roast: "Jimmy Kimmel everyone, he's fat and has no charisma!"). Though Silverman uses her beauty as a prop for her sexual humor, her act stands up without it: I first ran into her as a disembodied voice issuing from Hadassah Guberman, a hilarious but not particularly attractive puppet on the (attractive but not particularly hilarious) show Crank Yankers.
Silverman has a gift for inspiring absurdly instructive public controversy. Her most notorious fiasco occurred in 2001, when she told a joke on Late Night With Conan O'Brien that unapologetically hinged on the word "chink." This summer, she got into trouble in a venue that was supposed to be trouble-proof: The Aristocrats, a documentary that challenged 100 comedians to offend its audience as ingeniously as possible. While most of the comics went straight for the "piss-shit-suck-fuck" paradigm, which very quickly became about as offensive as a newborn koala, Silverman turned the old-school joke against an iconic old-schooler. She implied, via an emotionally supercharged soliloquy full of loaded pauses, that she had been sexually abused by the 79-year-old show-business institution Joe Franklin. At the end, she looked straight into the camera and said, dead seriously, "Joe Franklin raped me"—an anti-punch line that completely paralyzed the theater I was at. Instead of laughing, we were all stuck trying to decide whether this was some new species of joke or just plain old slander. When Franklin threatened to sue soon after the movie was released ("I didn't like the nature of that wisecrack"), it made the joke strangely better. Silverman was the only comic in the film who met the challenge of the joke: She pushed it too far.
Silverman is a prototypical ironist—someone who says things she doesn't mean and (through more-or-less subtle contextual winks) expects us to intuit an unstated, smarter message underneath. But what is that message? Does she, like Socrates, play dumb in order to make us smart? Or just to experience the cheap thrill of public racism? Every ironic statement should, in theory, be translatable out of the joke world and into the world of civic-minded sincerity (the classic example: Swift's "eat Irish babies" equals "stop oppressing my country"). But Silverman's ultimate point is hard to find, partly because it's hidden behind such a blank expression. This may be one reason why such a consistently funny voice has had such a peripheral career.
All of Silverman's controversies are essentially large-scale pieces of PC performance art—but instead of settling anything about race and humor in America, they just expose the incoherence of the debate. If her humor does have a larger purpose, it is that it maps the outer limits of our tolerance; it exposes ambiguities in the discussion that we don't like to acknowledge; it taps into our giant unspoken mass of assumptions, tensions, fears, and hatreds—not to resolve them, but to remind us that they're there. (She told the Believer recently that she likes the idea of "saying things that force people to have opinions.") By reducing all of this toxic material into a logical game, she creates a kind of public catharsis. The point of Silverman's humor—the final translation of all that irony—might simply be that, no matter how much we pretend, we're not ready for her humor. These are life-and-death problems, and our laughter has terror in it.
But it may be that all of our white-knuckled hand-wringing gives Silverman too much credit. She has said that a comedian's "only job is funny thoughts"; most likely, she's just following her joke-instincts and leaving the implications to social critics. America has a famously vexed relationship with its irony: Though our pop culture exports about 90 percent of the world's supply, the puritanical, isolationist, log-cabin region of the nation's oversoul prays nightly for its death. But in a world as complicatedly social as ours, it's not expendable—irony is social chess, the playful manipulation of lazy expectations. It's at least as important as love or sadness. Only total extermination of the species would kill it.
Sunday, November 13
Judith Rodenbeck's Impressions on Banff New Media Art Conference
I’ve just come back from “REFRESH! The First International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology” in Banff. Herewith some brief impressions of the conference. I am an art historian (and ex-performance/video artist, from the Studio for Interrelated Media at Mass Art) with a longstanding but hitherto relatively untapped interest in new media. My own field of expertise is performance of the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Fluxus projects, but I also teach on the early part of the 20th century and am currently leading an advanced seminar on what I call “mechanical transcriptions of the real ” that is, following Kittler, those analog copying technologies that have so defined 20th century experience and inflected much of its art. I attended the conference as an observer, trying to learn more about the subject. What follows is merely a report, but it comes filtered through that complex of interests & preoccupations.
The first thing to be said is that this was an enormously ambitious conference: its four days were packed from morning to evening with panels and events the overall distribution of which, in terms of topics and time, I thought was pretty good, given the mission. Sessions ranged from “media histories” to a session on “collaborative practice/networking” to “history of institutions”; there were 3 keynote addresses Edmond Couchot, Sarat Maharaj, and Lucia Santaella; a poster session; an optional hike (Banff is in the stunning Canadian Rockies); a walk-through of the media labs; und so weiter. Meals were had communally in the Banff Centre’s dining room, and at least for me, since I knew not a soul at the conference AND felt like what one snooty panelist called a “clueless newbie,” these became interesting moments of social anxiety and unexpected social pleasure. While things did tend to split out into the old pros and the young nothings, they did get a bit more productively mixed up on occasion. Before I launch into the problems with the conference, the feeling I got from those I spoke with was that it was a mixed success but a success overall. I do think the conference provided a very good starting point for something, and this seemed especially true after the final session.
High points of the conference, in no particular order: * Mario Carpo’s paper on architecture in the age of digital reproducibility, which dealt with the shift from a simply additive to an algorithmic modularity in architecture. This was probably the most professionally delivered paper at the conference, as well as the most intelligently amusing, and what Carpo presented as a paradigmatic slide was fascinating, provocative. I learned something. Philip Thurtle and Claudia Valdes showing footage of Alvin Lucier doing solo for brainwaves. I’ve forgotten what the paper was about, but was thrilled to see the footage and to have the piece presented. Chris Salter on a history of performance with media, beginning with a fantastically forceful evocation of Russian Constructivis plays. I teach this material, but Salter’s presentation was vigorous and made a very strong case for its inclusion in a “new media” history. Christiane Paul on curatorial issues with new media. This was also a very professional (by which I mean good, clear, to the point) presentation and very usefully laid out the difficulties involved, from curators having to rebuild settings to house work to problems of bitrot to audience development. Impressive and useful. Machiko Kusahara on “device art” discussed Japanese aesthetics. This was an art historically thin paper no discussion of Fluxus, very loose mention of Gutai and then Tanaka’s electric dress but not the “painting machines” of her husband but the presentation of a different value-system for Japanese “device art” (gizmos whose “art coefficient” is activated by their use) was pretty convincing as well as very thought-provoking tour of the labs AND, surprisingly, the poster session, which was cluttered and weird but also the one moment in the conference when people really talked to each other’s ideas Tim Druckrey’s screening of apocalyptic Virilio. He gave a very lazy but passionate paper, basically asking why on earth new media would want to be included in an old canon, and noting that a far bigger problem is present in Nicholas Bourriaud’s blythe “relational aesthetics” than in the October cabal’s control of high theory. Michael Naimark’s corporatist but useful analysis of the sustainability of new media institutions. Johannes Goebel’s passionate and pragmatic overview of two such institutions. The final, quasi-impromptu “crit, self-crit” session led by Sara Diamond. This was where most of the interesting meta-issues were put on the table, and it was done in such a way that those in the room I think felt it was really a high point and a great note on which to finish. Left the feeling that while there is work to be done it will be done.
I didn’t go to everything, needless to say, and doubtless there were good things on other panels. I heard that Claus Pias’s paper on cybernetics was excellent, for instance.
That said, the conference overall suffered greatly from what Trebor Scholz and Geert Lovink have dubbed “panelism”: a territorial structure in which moderators also delivered papers within the format of a way over-tight schedule and with virtually no time for questions; a few speakers went beyond their alotted minutes in the first sessions and then panels were policed to an almost draconian degree, making the entire assembly tense. Discussions were notably truncated. In fact, to this art historian it seemed weird that people would gather for a conference on something as shifting and relatively openly defined as “new media” (how many papers in fact began with loose attempts to list the salient features of new media) and then sit and hear something they could have read already for though the organizers had posted quite a number of papers on their official website beforehand, it was clear that most attendees hadn’t read those papers and then not discuss what they had heard.
What surfaced in the tension around (non) discussion was a big mess of anxieties. Topped by the anxiety over having “new media art” categorized as “art” or as “new media,” these inflected many of the panel presentations and discussions, and not in a productive way. Part of the problem, as Andreas Broeckman pointed out in the final crit session, was that the mission of the conference was probably too broadly and vaguely defined. But what I heard over and over again was “traditional art history” can’t deal with new media. The first thing I’d want to know is, what precisely is “traditional art history”? From Simon Penny’s castigation of art history as racist, imperialist, classist, etc., it sounded to me like what was meant was Berensonian connoisseurship; this seemed overwrought, but his excursus was only the most vigorous and politically thought-through of a frequent plaint. Yet while he was quite right to note that cultural studies wasn’t mentioned once at the conference his characterization of art history is way behind the times. Art history and new media share Walter Benjamin and, for better or worse, Rudolf Arnheim; new media people would do well to read Panofsky and Warburg, just as I and at least some of my colleagues read Weiner and Kittler. Art history may not yet be able to deal with new media, but perhaps it is also the case that new media doesn’t know how to deal with art history.
On this score a truly low moment was struck on the first day by Mark Hansen, whose hatchet job on Rosalind Krauss was so lame that even the new media theorists were bugged. Instead of new media bemoaning its lack of recognition by art history and then its savaging of same (“we want to be with you; we you” or “I love you; go away”) it might be more productive to stage a genuine encounter. Leaving aside Andreas Broeckman, who gave a very nice but grossly amputated (ran out of time) presentation on aesthetics and new media, and the truly awful presentation comparing the websites of the Louvre and the Hermitage, the art historians who were at the conference were either working with medieval Islamic art or with the visual culture of science. That is, there were no art historians dealing with contemporary art who were not already part of the inner circle of new media people; yet this is precisely the encounter that needs to be staged. Meanwhile Mark Tribe, not an art historian, gave an extremely art historically lame presentation on appropriation, and while the broader point was, well, okay, his presentation of the historical material was painful and for at least this listener undermined his credibility. (On the other hand, Cornelius Borck, a historian of medicine, gave a terrific presentation historically nuanced, intelligently read, and carefully researched on the optophone of Raoul Hausman and Hausman’s complicated relationship to prosthesis.) From my perspective this suggests a serious problem of disciplinarity: surely just as new media artists/theorists expect a sophisticated treatment from art historians (Simon Penny again: art historians should learn engineering, cognitive science, neuroscience before they discuss new media) so new media artists and theorists should treat the work that comes before both art and media with the historical complexity (without going to Pennyian excess) art history at its best demonstrates.
Other issues that came up: * Problems of storage & retrieval of new media work. From an historical point of view this demonstrates a remarkable degree of self-consciousness on the part of new new media something new, incidentally, in the longer history of media, and interesting as a phenomenon. Huge anxiety about the “art” status of new media, alongside a subthematic of the relation to science and to scientific s of research. Adulatory izing of cognitive science, engineering, and neuroscience (in marked contrast to the dissing of art history). Lack of a fixed definition of new media, with repeated nods to hybridization, bodily engagement, non-hierarchical structure, networking, and so on. Disconnect of the keynote speakers. Couchot had difficulty with English and seemed, while emphasizing hybridity, to be speaking from another time. Sarat Maharaj rambled for nearly 2 hours about Rudolf Arnheim and the Other; I found this talk excruciating, though I later spoke with someone (media artist, go figure) for whom it had been a high point. And Lucia Santaella’s beautifully delivered, rigorously near-hallucinatory and religious but to me quasi- apocalyptic vision of the “semiotic” and “post-human” present/future of the “exo-brain” was a chilling picture of species-death. Ongoing problem of gender and geographic distribution. While non-Western topics cropped up here and there at the conference, the one panel that dealt in any extended way with non-Western paradigms was also the one panel that was almost all female and also the panel that got the most flak in its few minutes of discussion, in part because most of those dealing with non-Western paradigms were Western. This relegation of dealing with the Other to the women is typical. There was also some grumbling that many of the non-Western projects had been tucked into the poster session rather than elevated to panel status. It would have been good to have some representation from Africa, or even a panel on doing new media in less media-rich environments than Euro-Ameri-Nippon. Comical reliance on and then debate about Powerpoint. And then, as one member of the audience pointed out, nearly all of the people at the conference in their ppt-critical right-thinking wisdom had little glowing apples at their desks. No sign of Linux. That’s a sketch, replete with opinion. I’d encourage anyone interested in more specific information about the conference to check the website at www.mediaarthistory.org, which has some papers up as well as abstracts.
From: Judith Rodenbeck
Date: 5 October 2005 12:22:18 BST
To: idc@bbs.thing.net
Subject: [iDC] REFRESH! conference, some impressions
The first thing to be said is that this was an enormously ambitious conference: its four days were packed from morning to evening with panels and events the overall distribution of which, in terms of topics and time, I thought was pretty good, given the mission. Sessions ranged from “media histories” to a session on “collaborative practice/networking” to “history of institutions”; there were 3 keynote addresses Edmond Couchot, Sarat Maharaj, and Lucia Santaella; a poster session; an optional hike (Banff is in the stunning Canadian Rockies); a walk-through of the media labs; und so weiter. Meals were had communally in the Banff Centre’s dining room, and at least for me, since I knew not a soul at the conference AND felt like what one snooty panelist called a “clueless newbie,” these became interesting moments of social anxiety and unexpected social pleasure. While things did tend to split out into the old pros and the young nothings, they did get a bit more productively mixed up on occasion. Before I launch into the problems with the conference, the feeling I got from those I spoke with was that it was a mixed success but a success overall. I do think the conference provided a very good starting point for something, and this seemed especially true after the final session.
High points of the conference, in no particular order: * Mario Carpo’s paper on architecture in the age of digital reproducibility, which dealt with the shift from a simply additive to an algorithmic modularity in architecture. This was probably the most professionally delivered paper at the conference, as well as the most intelligently amusing, and what Carpo presented as a paradigmatic slide was fascinating, provocative. I learned something. Philip Thurtle and Claudia Valdes showing footage of Alvin Lucier doing solo for brainwaves. I’ve forgotten what the paper was about, but was thrilled to see the footage and to have the piece presented. Chris Salter on a history of performance with media, beginning with a fantastically forceful evocation of Russian Constructivis plays. I teach this material, but Salter’s presentation was vigorous and made a very strong case for its inclusion in a “new media” history. Christiane Paul on curatorial issues with new media. This was also a very professional (by which I mean good, clear, to the point) presentation and very usefully laid out the difficulties involved, from curators having to rebuild settings to house work to problems of bitrot to audience development. Impressive and useful. Machiko Kusahara on “device art” discussed Japanese aesthetics. This was an art historically thin paper no discussion of Fluxus, very loose mention of Gutai and then Tanaka’s electric dress but not the “painting machines” of her husband but the presentation of a different value-system for Japanese “device art” (gizmos whose “art coefficient” is activated by their use) was pretty convincing as well as very thought-provoking tour of the labs AND, surprisingly, the poster session, which was cluttered and weird but also the one moment in the conference when people really talked to each other’s ideas Tim Druckrey’s screening of apocalyptic Virilio. He gave a very lazy but passionate paper, basically asking why on earth new media would want to be included in an old canon, and noting that a far bigger problem is present in Nicholas Bourriaud’s blythe “relational aesthetics” than in the October cabal’s control of high theory. Michael Naimark’s corporatist but useful analysis of the sustainability of new media institutions. Johannes Goebel’s passionate and pragmatic overview of two such institutions. The final, quasi-impromptu “crit, self-crit” session led by Sara Diamond. This was where most of the interesting meta-issues were put on the table, and it was done in such a way that those in the room I think felt it was really a high point and a great note on which to finish. Left the feeling that while there is work to be done it will be done.
I didn’t go to everything, needless to say, and doubtless there were good things on other panels. I heard that Claus Pias’s paper on cybernetics was excellent, for instance.
That said, the conference overall suffered greatly from what Trebor Scholz and Geert Lovink have dubbed “panelism”: a territorial structure in which moderators also delivered papers within the format of a way over-tight schedule and with virtually no time for questions; a few speakers went beyond their alotted minutes in the first sessions and then panels were policed to an almost draconian degree, making the entire assembly tense. Discussions were notably truncated. In fact, to this art historian it seemed weird that people would gather for a conference on something as shifting and relatively openly defined as “new media” (how many papers in fact began with loose attempts to list the salient features of new media) and then sit and hear something they could have read already for though the organizers had posted quite a number of papers on their official website beforehand, it was clear that most attendees hadn’t read those papers and then not discuss what they had heard.
What surfaced in the tension around (non) discussion was a big mess of anxieties. Topped by the anxiety over having “new media art” categorized as “art” or as “new media,” these inflected many of the panel presentations and discussions, and not in a productive way. Part of the problem, as Andreas Broeckman pointed out in the final crit session, was that the mission of the conference was probably too broadly and vaguely defined. But what I heard over and over again was “traditional art history” can’t deal with new media. The first thing I’d want to know is, what precisely is “traditional art history”? From Simon Penny’s castigation of art history as racist, imperialist, classist, etc., it sounded to me like what was meant was Berensonian connoisseurship; this seemed overwrought, but his excursus was only the most vigorous and politically thought-through of a frequent plaint. Yet while he was quite right to note that cultural studies wasn’t mentioned once at the conference his characterization of art history is way behind the times. Art history and new media share Walter Benjamin and, for better or worse, Rudolf Arnheim; new media people would do well to read Panofsky and Warburg, just as I and at least some of my colleagues read Weiner and Kittler. Art history may not yet be able to deal with new media, but perhaps it is also the case that new media doesn’t know how to deal with art history.
On this score a truly low moment was struck on the first day by Mark Hansen, whose hatchet job on Rosalind Krauss was so lame that even the new media theorists were bugged. Instead of new media bemoaning its lack of recognition by art history and then its savaging of same (“we want to be with you; we you” or “I love you; go away”) it might be more productive to stage a genuine encounter. Leaving aside Andreas Broeckman, who gave a very nice but grossly amputated (ran out of time) presentation on aesthetics and new media, and the truly awful presentation comparing the websites of the Louvre and the Hermitage, the art historians who were at the conference were either working with medieval Islamic art or with the visual culture of science. That is, there were no art historians dealing with contemporary art who were not already part of the inner circle of new media people; yet this is precisely the encounter that needs to be staged. Meanwhile Mark Tribe, not an art historian, gave an extremely art historically lame presentation on appropriation, and while the broader point was, well, okay, his presentation of the historical material was painful and for at least this listener undermined his credibility. (On the other hand, Cornelius Borck, a historian of medicine, gave a terrific presentation historically nuanced, intelligently read, and carefully researched on the optophone of Raoul Hausman and Hausman’s complicated relationship to prosthesis.) From my perspective this suggests a serious problem of disciplinarity: surely just as new media artists/theorists expect a sophisticated treatment from art historians (Simon Penny again: art historians should learn engineering, cognitive science, neuroscience before they discuss new media) so new media artists and theorists should treat the work that comes before both art and media with the historical complexity (without going to Pennyian excess) art history at its best demonstrates.
Other issues that came up: * Problems of storage & retrieval of new media work. From an historical point of view this demonstrates a remarkable degree of self-consciousness on the part of new new media something new, incidentally, in the longer history of media, and interesting as a phenomenon. Huge anxiety about the “art” status of new media, alongside a subthematic of the relation to science and to scientific s of research. Adulatory izing of cognitive science, engineering, and neuroscience (in marked contrast to the dissing of art history). Lack of a fixed definition of new media, with repeated nods to hybridization, bodily engagement, non-hierarchical structure, networking, and so on. Disconnect of the keynote speakers. Couchot had difficulty with English and seemed, while emphasizing hybridity, to be speaking from another time. Sarat Maharaj rambled for nearly 2 hours about Rudolf Arnheim and the Other; I found this talk excruciating, though I later spoke with someone (media artist, go figure) for whom it had been a high point. And Lucia Santaella’s beautifully delivered, rigorously near-hallucinatory and religious but to me quasi- apocalyptic vision of the “semiotic” and “post-human” present/future of the “exo-brain” was a chilling picture of species-death. Ongoing problem of gender and geographic distribution. While non-Western topics cropped up here and there at the conference, the one panel that dealt in any extended way with non-Western paradigms was also the one panel that was almost all female and also the panel that got the most flak in its few minutes of discussion, in part because most of those dealing with non-Western paradigms were Western. This relegation of dealing with the Other to the women is typical. There was also some grumbling that many of the non-Western projects had been tucked into the poster session rather than elevated to panel status. It would have been good to have some representation from Africa, or even a panel on doing new media in less media-rich environments than Euro-Ameri-Nippon. Comical reliance on and then debate about Powerpoint. And then, as one member of the audience pointed out, nearly all of the people at the conference in their ppt-critical right-thinking wisdom had little glowing apples at their desks. No sign of Linux. That’s a sketch, replete with opinion. I’d encourage anyone interested in more specific information about the conference to check the website at www.mediaarthistory.org, which has some papers up as well as abstracts.
From: Judith Rodenbeck
Date: 5 October 2005 12:22:18 BST
To: idc@bbs.thing.net
Subject: [iDC] REFRESH! conference, some impressions
Wednesday, November 9
Creationism gets Creamed: Robertson calls on God's Fury
Voters threw out the Pennsylvania school board that approved "intelligent design." Eight of the nine board members were up for election; all eight lost to candidates who opposed the ID policy. This happened in a district that voted 65 percent for President Bush in 2004.
------
Conservative Christian television evangelist Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting "intelligent design" and warned them yesterday not to be surprised if disaster struck.
Robertson, a former Republican presidential candidate and founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and the Christian Coalition, has a long record of apocalyptic warnings and provocative statements.
"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God -- you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson said on his daily television show, "The 700 Club."
"And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there," he said.
------
Conservative Christian television evangelist Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting "intelligent design" and warned them yesterday not to be surprised if disaster struck.
Robertson, a former Republican presidential candidate and founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and the Christian Coalition, has a long record of apocalyptic warnings and provocative statements.
"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God -- you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson said on his daily television show, "The 700 Club."
"And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there," he said.
Monty Python's flying creationism: Unlike a brontosaurus, ID is thin all around
By William Saletan
Posted Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005, at 8:03 AM ET
Unlike a brontosaurus, ID is thin all around
"There is an elephant in the roomful of scientists who are trying to explain the development of life," wrote Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry, in his 1996 book Darwin's Black Box. The elephant was ubiquitous evidence of "intelligent design" in nature. Darwinian evolutionists, Behe argued, were unable to explain life's origins and its emerging complexity because they couldn't see the elephant.
Behe has the same problem, but worse. Last week in a Pennsylvania courtroom, he testified in defense of a school board's requirement that biology teachers mention ID. (For Hanna Rosin's reports from the trial, click here.) Behe offered a number of interesting criticisms of Darwinism. But it's impossible to focus on any of these criticisms, because they were so completely overshadowed by the brontosaurus in the room: ID's sophomoric emptiness.
What makes Behe's non-explanation a brontosaurus rather than an elephant is its resemblance to a famous Monty Python sketch in which a television newsman interviews a theorist.
Continue Article
Q: You say you have a new theory about the brontosaurus.
A: Can I just say here, Chris, for one moment, that I have a new theory about the brontosaurus.
Q: Exactly. Well, what is it? …
A: Oh, what is my theory?
Q: Yes.
A: Oh, what is my theory, that it is. Well, Chris, you may well ask me what is my theory.
Q: I am asking.
A: Good for you. My word, yes. Well, Chris, what is it that it is—this theory of mine. Well, this is what it is—my theory that I have, that is to say, which is mine, is mine.
Q: Yes, I know it's yours. What is it?
A: Where? Oh, what is my theory? This is it. My theory that belongs to me is as follows. This is how it goes. The next thing I'm going to say is my theory. Ready?
Q: Yes.
A: … This theory goes as follows and begins now. All brontosauruses are thin at one end; much, much thicker in the middle; and then thin again at the far end.
As though that explained anything. Which brings us to last week's cross-examination of Behe by Eric Rothschild, the lawyer opposing the school board in the Pennsylvania case.
Q: Please describe the mechanism that intelligent design proposes for how complex biological structures arose.
A: Well, the word "mechanism" can be used in many ways. … When I was referring to intelligent design, I meant that we can perceive that in the process by which a complex biological structure arose, we can infer that intelligence was involved. …
Q: What is the mechanism that intelligent design proposes?
A: And I wonder, could—am I permitted to know what I replied to your question the first time?
Q: I don't think I got a reply, so I'm asking you. You've made this claim here (reading): "Intelligent design theory focuses exclusively on the proposed mechanism of how complex biological structures arose." And I want to know, what is the mechanism that intelligent design proposes for how complex biological structures arose?
A: Again, it does not propose a mechanism in the sense of a step-by-step description of how those structures arose. But it can infer that in the mechanism, in the process by which these structures arose, an intelligent cause was involved.
The interrogation goes on like this for pages and pages. Like the theorist in the Monty Python sketch, Behe throws up a blizzard of babble: process, intelligent activity, important facts. What process? What activity? What facts? He never explains. He says the designer "took steps" to create complex biological systems, but ID can't specify the steps. Does ID tell us who designed life? No, he answers. Does it tell us how? No. Does it tell us when? No. How would the designer create a bacterial flagellum? It would "somehow cause the plan to, you know, go into effect," he proposes.
Can ID make testable predictions? Not really. If we posit that a given biological system was designed, Rothschild asks, what can we infer about the designer's abilities? Just "that the designer had the ability to make the design that is under consideration," says Behe. "Beyond that, we would be extrapolating beyond the evidence." Does Behe not understand that extrapolating beyond initial evidence is exactly the job of a hypothesis? Does he not grasp the meaninglessness of saying a designer designed things that were designed?
Evidently not. "That is exactly the basis for how we detect design—when we perceive the purposeful arrangement of parts," Behe declares. The essence of science—that detection means going beyond perception—escapes his comprehension. It also escapes his interest. He says his belief that the bacterial flagellum was intelligently designed could be tested, but he's never run the test. Why not? "I'm persuaded by the evidence that I cite in my book that this is a good explanation and that spending a lot of effort in trying to show how random mutation and natural selection could produce complex systems … is not real likely to be fruitful," he says. Who needs science when you've got faith?
So, this is my theory, which belongs to me, and goes as follows. All intelligently designed things are brought about by an intelligent designer through a process of intelligently conducted design. If it's good enough for Monty Python, it's good enough for biology class.
Posted Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005, at 8:03 AM ET
Unlike a brontosaurus, ID is thin all around
"There is an elephant in the roomful of scientists who are trying to explain the development of life," wrote Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry, in his 1996 book Darwin's Black Box. The elephant was ubiquitous evidence of "intelligent design" in nature. Darwinian evolutionists, Behe argued, were unable to explain life's origins and its emerging complexity because they couldn't see the elephant.
Behe has the same problem, but worse. Last week in a Pennsylvania courtroom, he testified in defense of a school board's requirement that biology teachers mention ID. (For Hanna Rosin's reports from the trial, click here.) Behe offered a number of interesting criticisms of Darwinism. But it's impossible to focus on any of these criticisms, because they were so completely overshadowed by the brontosaurus in the room: ID's sophomoric emptiness.
What makes Behe's non-explanation a brontosaurus rather than an elephant is its resemblance to a famous Monty Python sketch in which a television newsman interviews a theorist.
Continue Article
Q: You say you have a new theory about the brontosaurus.
A: Can I just say here, Chris, for one moment, that I have a new theory about the brontosaurus.
Q: Exactly. Well, what is it? …
A: Oh, what is my theory?
Q: Yes.
A: Oh, what is my theory, that it is. Well, Chris, you may well ask me what is my theory.
Q: I am asking.
A: Good for you. My word, yes. Well, Chris, what is it that it is—this theory of mine. Well, this is what it is—my theory that I have, that is to say, which is mine, is mine.
Q: Yes, I know it's yours. What is it?
A: Where? Oh, what is my theory? This is it. My theory that belongs to me is as follows. This is how it goes. The next thing I'm going to say is my theory. Ready?
Q: Yes.
A: … This theory goes as follows and begins now. All brontosauruses are thin at one end; much, much thicker in the middle; and then thin again at the far end.
As though that explained anything. Which brings us to last week's cross-examination of Behe by Eric Rothschild, the lawyer opposing the school board in the Pennsylvania case.
Q: Please describe the mechanism that intelligent design proposes for how complex biological structures arose.
A: Well, the word "mechanism" can be used in many ways. … When I was referring to intelligent design, I meant that we can perceive that in the process by which a complex biological structure arose, we can infer that intelligence was involved. …
Q: What is the mechanism that intelligent design proposes?
A: And I wonder, could—am I permitted to know what I replied to your question the first time?
Q: I don't think I got a reply, so I'm asking you. You've made this claim here (reading): "Intelligent design theory focuses exclusively on the proposed mechanism of how complex biological structures arose." And I want to know, what is the mechanism that intelligent design proposes for how complex biological structures arose?
A: Again, it does not propose a mechanism in the sense of a step-by-step description of how those structures arose. But it can infer that in the mechanism, in the process by which these structures arose, an intelligent cause was involved.
The interrogation goes on like this for pages and pages. Like the theorist in the Monty Python sketch, Behe throws up a blizzard of babble: process, intelligent activity, important facts. What process? What activity? What facts? He never explains. He says the designer "took steps" to create complex biological systems, but ID can't specify the steps. Does ID tell us who designed life? No, he answers. Does it tell us how? No. Does it tell us when? No. How would the designer create a bacterial flagellum? It would "somehow cause the plan to, you know, go into effect," he proposes.
Can ID make testable predictions? Not really. If we posit that a given biological system was designed, Rothschild asks, what can we infer about the designer's abilities? Just "that the designer had the ability to make the design that is under consideration," says Behe. "Beyond that, we would be extrapolating beyond the evidence." Does Behe not understand that extrapolating beyond initial evidence is exactly the job of a hypothesis? Does he not grasp the meaninglessness of saying a designer designed things that were designed?
Evidently not. "That is exactly the basis for how we detect design—when we perceive the purposeful arrangement of parts," Behe declares. The essence of science—that detection means going beyond perception—escapes his comprehension. It also escapes his interest. He says his belief that the bacterial flagellum was intelligently designed could be tested, but he's never run the test. Why not? "I'm persuaded by the evidence that I cite in my book that this is a good explanation and that spending a lot of effort in trying to show how random mutation and natural selection could produce complex systems … is not real likely to be fruitful," he says. Who needs science when you've got faith?
So, this is my theory, which belongs to me, and goes as follows. All intelligently designed things are brought about by an intelligent designer through a process of intelligently conducted design. If it's good enough for Monty Python, it's good enough for biology class.
Monday, November 7
Believing Whatever
By THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA
A Vatican university is reviving its exorcism curriculum to confront burgeoning satanic cults in Italy, and a cardinal with close ties to the new pope recently backed away from the church's acceptance of evolution. Catholics can now line up with Protestant fundamentalists in the United States who are determined to get creationism into the biology curriculum because they believe in the Book of Genesis, literally. Fifty-two percent of Americans believe in astrology; 42 percent believe in communication with the dead. Forty-five percent believe in Noah's flood, and, when they visit the Grand Canyon these days, helicopter tour pilots accommodate them by describing, without judging either way, two accounts of the canyon's formation — one geological, the other being 40 days and 40 nights of rain.
Take your pick. It's a free country.
A lot of highly educated people find such developments pretty alarming, but if we want to understand what's really going on, we need to look past resurgent know-nothing movements. Try this. Take an informal little poll of a class of humanities students in any graduate school in the country. Ask how many believe in paranormal phenomena or alien abduction. If they feel free to respond honestly, the results won't be that different from what you would get if you polled an Oprah audience. They won't, for the most part, affirm a definite belief, but they won't want to issue any blanket denials either. Maybe, they will say, who knows? Who really knows anything?
How did this situation come about? A little anecdote may shed some light.
The scene: a glorious summer day on Cape Cod, circa 1975. A dear friend of mine and her mother (lifelong bonds among all three of us) are sitting on a screened-in porch, sipping lemonade. They have just returned from a three-day retreat at an ashram in the Berkshires and are telling me all about it. I was curious about meditation. I knew it was correlated with measurable physiological effects, and I had heard a lot about it from trustworthy people — I was thinking I might try it. So I was listening with genuine interest. But it soon became apparent that this particular retreat had ventured way beyond meditation. Apparently, the Maharishi (the one who hung out with the Beatles) had achieved a breakthrough. He and his closest disciples at the central ashram (in Geneva, was it?) had embarked upon a radical new phase of enlightenment. They had achieved something very special, soon to be revealed to the world at a mass meditation event that would channel peace vibes across the planet. But some of these highly secret new techniques had been shared with the fortunate participants at this particular retreat in the Berkshires, by way of preparation for the big day.
And what was this achievement, I asked?
Levitation.
I expressed a certain, ahhh, skepticism, shall we say? And they turned on me. These two extremely intelligent, Ivy League-educated women turned on me and proceeded to rake me over the coals with considerable vim. How could I be so arrogant and close-minded? How could I know that levitation wasn't possible?
As a general rule I make a practice of avoiding discussions of this kind; I smile and nod (no doubt a bit condescendingly) and wait for the subject to change. But this time I just snapped. I launched into a lecture on probability (I was reading a lot in philosophy of science at the time). I set up a scale to illustrate degrees of unlikelihood. At one extreme, logically impossible — a round square, given our definitions. Next, utterly, wildly unlikely, breaking established laws of physics at the Newtonian level — levitation. Next, very, very unlikely, given known laws — say, clairvoyance. And so on, through ESP and alien abduction and, toward the other end of the scale, I put the probability that Hitler and Eleanor Roosevelt were living together in Argentina.
All in vain. They believed.
Apparently they had been shown videotapes from the ashram in Geneva, and, though the tapes were rather grainy and shadowy for some reason, you could make out enough to tell that those yogis were ... hovering.
Plus, my friends had practiced some of these techniques themselves in the Berkshires, don't forget, and, though they never actually got airborne, they could definitely feel themselves getting ... lighter.
They wanted to believe. That's the key to this whole phenomenon, the thread to keep track of.
Exasperated, hoping to jolt them out of their post-retreat trance, I proposed a bet. Five hundred dollars each (a lot of money in those days, but I wasn't worried) that in two years levitation would be a universally acknowledged fact. Squadrons of levitating gurus floating down Fifth Avenue, on the Johnny Carson show, evidence like that.
And they took the bet!
Time passed, and no levitators materialized, but my dear friends were remarkably undisturbed. They weren't embarrassed into reassessing their worldview from the ground up, not at all, far from it. It was as if they had lost a bet on a sporting event. They had been wrong about the specifics on this one, but what did that prove? Maybe next time, who knows?
Who really knows anything?
Just recently I happened to tell one of my very best graduate students that story. I was chortling as I went along, confident that she would share my point of view, but as I reached the end of my tale I noticed a little frown on her face — and she said, guess what?
"How do you know levitation isn't possible?"
Then she told me about how she had once seen this dancer/acrobat who raised his whole body in the air on one finger.
Flabbergasted, I exclaimed, "But the finger was touching the floor, right?"
It didn't matter. Unusual balancing abilities and really strong fingers didn't interest her. She wanted to believe that this guy could have been on the way to levitating, at least.
She called me close-minded, too.
I asked her if she had studied science. Sure, and she'd done very well, as in all her studies. But it wasn't her thing. She didn't identify with it. What she most remembered, in fact, was that all those scientific theories eventually get disproved anyway — so, see?
Anything is possible. That she could identify with.
You've had similar encounters, I'm sure, from one side or the other, I hasten to add, because I'm guessing there might be some wide-open-minded readers of The Chronicle who are frowning at me too, right now. Maybe you're a blue-state educator with multiculturalist commitments and a lapsed membership in a Wiccan coven who wouldn't have minded having, say, the Gaia hypothesis in the earth-science curriculum back in the day? But, either way, perhaps we can all agree on this? For my old friend, her mother, and my student, beliefs are essentially choices. They are expressions of our freedom, interpretations that people (and cultures) construct out of an otherwise indeterminate experience.
Why does this view of beliefs persist among us, even as right-wing fundamentalists move to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by this ethos? Because make no mistake about it — that's exactly what's happening. When George W. Bush and Bill Frist say students should hear "both sides" in the debate of intelligent design versus evolution, they have the winds of postmodernism at their backs. It's awkward for so many of us to rally behind the position scientists advocate — namely, put it in the curriculum if you must, just not in the science curriculum. After all, we're the ones who've been problematizing and destabilizing such categories for the last 30 years. No, let's face it. Feyerabend and Latour helped to pave the way for creation science. And values politics on the right is a form of good old identity politics — an imposition of a Foucauldian discourse. In this context, the hard sciences, and those who represent them in popular venues, are helpless to defend the privileges of logic and evidence.
Here's why.
Take the Science section of The New York Times, for example. Every other Tuesday or so, it carries a sort of (but not really) accessible description of dark matter or multiple universes or time-space foam or quantum strings that oscillate through 10 dimensions or whateveryou know the kind of thing. But since you can't do the math on any of it, all you have to go on is the metaphors the grateful science writers borrow from the few hundred physicists in the world who can do the math.
But here's the thing. Those metaphors actually do seem to converge on the message that anything is possible. A recent one I recall concerned the in-principle possibility of time travel. I remember it so well because they chose to illustrate the main thesis (everything that ever happened or ever will happen is, at some theoretical level, always happening) by comparing the entirety of space-time to a really big loaf of bread. They splashed a drawing — in zany 1920s-cartoon style — across half a page, like a big old Mad magazine spread, very retro, lots of kooky detail. It showed the entirety of space-time as this loaf of bread, with slices falling away from each other slightly. A dinosaur was poking his head out of one slice, looking hilariously baffled. Some caveman — complete with leopard-skin toga and club — was peering out of a more "recent" slice with a question mark over his head.
Cute. Lots of mind-bending conundrums leavened with a few chuckles — that's the editorial recipe for these stories.
But consider. If you can't do the math, and all you understand about science you get from a steady diet of this kind of thing, then, over time, levitation is going to start to seem pretty tame, right?
Plus, of course, that hardy old perennial, the humanist's favorite science sound bite — the uncertainty principle — is standing by. And though you can't do the math on that either, it supposedly proves that the observer creates reality at the quantum level or something like that, right? Like with Schrödinger's cat, they always trot out this poor homeless feline to make that point, don't they? But leaving the ephemeral tabby aside for the nonce — observer-created reality? Where have we heard that before?
But it gets better. Such impressions of science inevitably merge, in spite of what the scientists and their lay supporters intend, with all the special-effects depictions of the supernatural in popular culture. And just to make the whole process seamless, high-impact digital technology is making it more and more difficult to distinguish the latest installation at the natural-history museum from a sci-fi flick. The resulting flood has somehow to be processed. Internalized or passed over. Believed or not. Or, most typically, simply suspended, left hanging out there among the limitless possibilities that now surround us because — who knows?
Under such conditions (not to mention the rest of your busy life, which is what really matters), who has time for reasons when motives will suffice?
After you've decided to believe something, then you have time for reasons, to support what you've decided to believe. Supporting opinions we already have is what keeps this mediated culture buzzing, the scribblers scribbling, the talking heads talking, the bloggers blogging. But the original belief choice?
That's a matter of personal entitlement.
And that's why people tend to believe whatever they want to in the political realm as well. They feel entitled, not merely to their own opinions but to their own facts. And they can easily find media niches that will reflect back and reinforce whatever they have chosen to believe. September 11 a U.S.-Israeli plot? Step (click) this way. Saddam Hussein in league with Al Qaeda? Step (click) that way. Facts galore in every venue, custom-made for every suite of prejudices. Digitized copies of secret documents suppressed by government agencies. Photographs. Videos. Authentic-looking individuals, displaying credentials of all kinds, testifying to just about anything.
Some people live full time in one niche, but most people cruise around, cutting and pasting, cobbling together a worldview to suit their tastes, furnishing their minds with beliefs the way they furnish their homes. According to taste and subject to fashion.
Conservatives construe all this as "relativism." They want to reduce an all-encompassing context to a doctrine, something they can oppose — and blame on the 60s. Rational neocons call for a revival of the canon. Religious fundamentalists recommend us to Scripture. As if, in a culture saturated with options, choosing to believe something traditional were somehow not a choice.
But of course it is. "Relativism" focuses on, clings to, an epistemological symptom of a pervasive cultural condition. The mediated world offers so many belief options, so compellingly and elaborately represented, that you have no choice but to choose. Most people are comfortable with that freedom, most of the time — but some can't bear this last necessity. They crave the old-fashioned kind, the kind that is given by an unquestionable tradition.
That's why there are so many fanatics out there.
Thomas de Zengotita teaches in the Draper graduate program at New York University and is the author of Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It (Bloomsbury, 2005).
A Vatican university is reviving its exorcism curriculum to confront burgeoning satanic cults in Italy, and a cardinal with close ties to the new pope recently backed away from the church's acceptance of evolution. Catholics can now line up with Protestant fundamentalists in the United States who are determined to get creationism into the biology curriculum because they believe in the Book of Genesis, literally. Fifty-two percent of Americans believe in astrology; 42 percent believe in communication with the dead. Forty-five percent believe in Noah's flood, and, when they visit the Grand Canyon these days, helicopter tour pilots accommodate them by describing, without judging either way, two accounts of the canyon's formation — one geological, the other being 40 days and 40 nights of rain.
Take your pick. It's a free country.
A lot of highly educated people find such developments pretty alarming, but if we want to understand what's really going on, we need to look past resurgent know-nothing movements. Try this. Take an informal little poll of a class of humanities students in any graduate school in the country. Ask how many believe in paranormal phenomena or alien abduction. If they feel free to respond honestly, the results won't be that different from what you would get if you polled an Oprah audience. They won't, for the most part, affirm a definite belief, but they won't want to issue any blanket denials either. Maybe, they will say, who knows? Who really knows anything?
How did this situation come about? A little anecdote may shed some light.
The scene: a glorious summer day on Cape Cod, circa 1975. A dear friend of mine and her mother (lifelong bonds among all three of us) are sitting on a screened-in porch, sipping lemonade. They have just returned from a three-day retreat at an ashram in the Berkshires and are telling me all about it. I was curious about meditation. I knew it was correlated with measurable physiological effects, and I had heard a lot about it from trustworthy people — I was thinking I might try it. So I was listening with genuine interest. But it soon became apparent that this particular retreat had ventured way beyond meditation. Apparently, the Maharishi (the one who hung out with the Beatles) had achieved a breakthrough. He and his closest disciples at the central ashram (in Geneva, was it?) had embarked upon a radical new phase of enlightenment. They had achieved something very special, soon to be revealed to the world at a mass meditation event that would channel peace vibes across the planet. But some of these highly secret new techniques had been shared with the fortunate participants at this particular retreat in the Berkshires, by way of preparation for the big day.
And what was this achievement, I asked?
Levitation.
I expressed a certain, ahhh, skepticism, shall we say? And they turned on me. These two extremely intelligent, Ivy League-educated women turned on me and proceeded to rake me over the coals with considerable vim. How could I be so arrogant and close-minded? How could I know that levitation wasn't possible?
As a general rule I make a practice of avoiding discussions of this kind; I smile and nod (no doubt a bit condescendingly) and wait for the subject to change. But this time I just snapped. I launched into a lecture on probability (I was reading a lot in philosophy of science at the time). I set up a scale to illustrate degrees of unlikelihood. At one extreme, logically impossible — a round square, given our definitions. Next, utterly, wildly unlikely, breaking established laws of physics at the Newtonian level — levitation. Next, very, very unlikely, given known laws — say, clairvoyance. And so on, through ESP and alien abduction and, toward the other end of the scale, I put the probability that Hitler and Eleanor Roosevelt were living together in Argentina.
All in vain. They believed.
Apparently they had been shown videotapes from the ashram in Geneva, and, though the tapes were rather grainy and shadowy for some reason, you could make out enough to tell that those yogis were ... hovering.
Plus, my friends had practiced some of these techniques themselves in the Berkshires, don't forget, and, though they never actually got airborne, they could definitely feel themselves getting ... lighter.
They wanted to believe. That's the key to this whole phenomenon, the thread to keep track of.
Exasperated, hoping to jolt them out of their post-retreat trance, I proposed a bet. Five hundred dollars each (a lot of money in those days, but I wasn't worried) that in two years levitation would be a universally acknowledged fact. Squadrons of levitating gurus floating down Fifth Avenue, on the Johnny Carson show, evidence like that.
And they took the bet!
Time passed, and no levitators materialized, but my dear friends were remarkably undisturbed. They weren't embarrassed into reassessing their worldview from the ground up, not at all, far from it. It was as if they had lost a bet on a sporting event. They had been wrong about the specifics on this one, but what did that prove? Maybe next time, who knows?
Who really knows anything?
Just recently I happened to tell one of my very best graduate students that story. I was chortling as I went along, confident that she would share my point of view, but as I reached the end of my tale I noticed a little frown on her face — and she said, guess what?
"How do you know levitation isn't possible?"
Then she told me about how she had once seen this dancer/acrobat who raised his whole body in the air on one finger.
Flabbergasted, I exclaimed, "But the finger was touching the floor, right?"
It didn't matter. Unusual balancing abilities and really strong fingers didn't interest her. She wanted to believe that this guy could have been on the way to levitating, at least.
She called me close-minded, too.
I asked her if she had studied science. Sure, and she'd done very well, as in all her studies. But it wasn't her thing. She didn't identify with it. What she most remembered, in fact, was that all those scientific theories eventually get disproved anyway — so, see?
Anything is possible. That she could identify with.
You've had similar encounters, I'm sure, from one side or the other, I hasten to add, because I'm guessing there might be some wide-open-minded readers of The Chronicle who are frowning at me too, right now. Maybe you're a blue-state educator with multiculturalist commitments and a lapsed membership in a Wiccan coven who wouldn't have minded having, say, the Gaia hypothesis in the earth-science curriculum back in the day? But, either way, perhaps we can all agree on this? For my old friend, her mother, and my student, beliefs are essentially choices. They are expressions of our freedom, interpretations that people (and cultures) construct out of an otherwise indeterminate experience.
Why does this view of beliefs persist among us, even as right-wing fundamentalists move to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by this ethos? Because make no mistake about it — that's exactly what's happening. When George W. Bush and Bill Frist say students should hear "both sides" in the debate of intelligent design versus evolution, they have the winds of postmodernism at their backs. It's awkward for so many of us to rally behind the position scientists advocate — namely, put it in the curriculum if you must, just not in the science curriculum. After all, we're the ones who've been problematizing and destabilizing such categories for the last 30 years. No, let's face it. Feyerabend and Latour helped to pave the way for creation science. And values politics on the right is a form of good old identity politics — an imposition of a Foucauldian discourse. In this context, the hard sciences, and those who represent them in popular venues, are helpless to defend the privileges of logic and evidence.
Here's why.
Take the Science section of The New York Times, for example. Every other Tuesday or so, it carries a sort of (but not really) accessible description of dark matter or multiple universes or time-space foam or quantum strings that oscillate through 10 dimensions or whateveryou know the kind of thing. But since you can't do the math on any of it, all you have to go on is the metaphors the grateful science writers borrow from the few hundred physicists in the world who can do the math.
But here's the thing. Those metaphors actually do seem to converge on the message that anything is possible. A recent one I recall concerned the in-principle possibility of time travel. I remember it so well because they chose to illustrate the main thesis (everything that ever happened or ever will happen is, at some theoretical level, always happening) by comparing the entirety of space-time to a really big loaf of bread. They splashed a drawing — in zany 1920s-cartoon style — across half a page, like a big old Mad magazine spread, very retro, lots of kooky detail. It showed the entirety of space-time as this loaf of bread, with slices falling away from each other slightly. A dinosaur was poking his head out of one slice, looking hilariously baffled. Some caveman — complete with leopard-skin toga and club — was peering out of a more "recent" slice with a question mark over his head.
Cute. Lots of mind-bending conundrums leavened with a few chuckles — that's the editorial recipe for these stories.
But consider. If you can't do the math, and all you understand about science you get from a steady diet of this kind of thing, then, over time, levitation is going to start to seem pretty tame, right?
Plus, of course, that hardy old perennial, the humanist's favorite science sound bite — the uncertainty principle — is standing by. And though you can't do the math on that either, it supposedly proves that the observer creates reality at the quantum level or something like that, right? Like with Schrödinger's cat, they always trot out this poor homeless feline to make that point, don't they? But leaving the ephemeral tabby aside for the nonce — observer-created reality? Where have we heard that before?
But it gets better. Such impressions of science inevitably merge, in spite of what the scientists and their lay supporters intend, with all the special-effects depictions of the supernatural in popular culture. And just to make the whole process seamless, high-impact digital technology is making it more and more difficult to distinguish the latest installation at the natural-history museum from a sci-fi flick. The resulting flood has somehow to be processed. Internalized or passed over. Believed or not. Or, most typically, simply suspended, left hanging out there among the limitless possibilities that now surround us because — who knows?
Under such conditions (not to mention the rest of your busy life, which is what really matters), who has time for reasons when motives will suffice?
After you've decided to believe something, then you have time for reasons, to support what you've decided to believe. Supporting opinions we already have is what keeps this mediated culture buzzing, the scribblers scribbling, the talking heads talking, the bloggers blogging. But the original belief choice?
That's a matter of personal entitlement.
And that's why people tend to believe whatever they want to in the political realm as well. They feel entitled, not merely to their own opinions but to their own facts. And they can easily find media niches that will reflect back and reinforce whatever they have chosen to believe. September 11 a U.S.-Israeli plot? Step (click) this way. Saddam Hussein in league with Al Qaeda? Step (click) that way. Facts galore in every venue, custom-made for every suite of prejudices. Digitized copies of secret documents suppressed by government agencies. Photographs. Videos. Authentic-looking individuals, displaying credentials of all kinds, testifying to just about anything.
Some people live full time in one niche, but most people cruise around, cutting and pasting, cobbling together a worldview to suit their tastes, furnishing their minds with beliefs the way they furnish their homes. According to taste and subject to fashion.
Conservatives construe all this as "relativism." They want to reduce an all-encompassing context to a doctrine, something they can oppose — and blame on the 60s. Rational neocons call for a revival of the canon. Religious fundamentalists recommend us to Scripture. As if, in a culture saturated with options, choosing to believe something traditional were somehow not a choice.
But of course it is. "Relativism" focuses on, clings to, an epistemological symptom of a pervasive cultural condition. The mediated world offers so many belief options, so compellingly and elaborately represented, that you have no choice but to choose. Most people are comfortable with that freedom, most of the time — but some can't bear this last necessity. They crave the old-fashioned kind, the kind that is given by an unquestionable tradition.
That's why there are so many fanatics out there.
Thomas de Zengotita teaches in the Draper graduate program at New York University and is the author of Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It (Bloomsbury, 2005).
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