Pecunia non olet

In a thorough bashing of Gaddafi apologists, Walter Russell Mead goes to town in The Mead List: World’s Top Ten Gaddafi Toads. The London School of Economics comes in at Number Nine.

Lots of universities take money from lots of unsavory donors; as a university professor, I sympathize. The emperor Vespasian levied a tax on the urine collected from Rome’s main sewer (and used as a source of chemicals for bleaching and other processes). His son complained about the disgusting and stinky revenue source: his father held up a gold coin and said “Pecunia non olet,” the money doesn’t stink. There are plenty of Non Olet chairs for professors of this and that around the world today, and there are worse uses for money than to keep academics out of the cold.

But there are limits, and the London School of Economics went well beyond these when it accepted a gift of $2.4 million from distinguished alum (and mad-dog son of Gaddafi) Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi to establish a program on “civil society issues” in North Africa. Next up at LSE: the Herman Goering Chair in Judaic Studies.

And coming in at Number Ten, Delusional American College Professors.

There has been no tyrant so bloody, no dictator so unscrupulous in the last 100 dismal years of world history that he hasn’t found a plethora of American intellectuals to serve as unpaid flacks. Walter Duranty and the New York Times got a Pulitzer Prize for whitewashing Stalin’s crimes; plenty of American journalists and professors have praised despots ranging from Mussolini to Franco to Mao.

Gaddafi too has found his clueless American defenders. Inviting a series of American intellectuals and scholars to Libya as part of a typical PR offensive, the kind of tactic they teach in the Techniques of Tyranny 101 intro course, Gaddafi gave them the kind of snow job that Hitler and Stalin used to give visiting foreigners — and too many of them fell for it. Read this column in the Washington Post from Benjamin Barber and weep:

“Written off not long ago as an implacable despot, Gaddafi is a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat. Unlike almost any other Arab ruler, he has exhibited an extraordinary capacity to rethink his country’s role in a changed and changing world.“

And there is this chatty travelogue from Steve Walt, the self-styled “realist” who claims to have penetrated the dark and evil secrets of the Israel lobby. Walt was struck by how open and friendly everybody in Libya seemed during his stay. Well informed, charming, no problems with the regime — the Libyans Walt met had no problems with Gaddafi, and this seems to have convinced him that Gaddafi was not exactly a Boy Scout but not an unusually bad type as these perplexing foreign types go. No deranged loons here, folks, just a bunch of evolving new allies. Walt cheerily ends the account of his visit by hoping for more political change in Libya, and “more dramatic” political change in the US as well.

These men were not alone, and they never went totally off the deep end; there were a lot of Americans whose ties to reality were so loose that they assumed that anybody Ronald Reagan wanted to bomb (and Fidel Castro liked) must be a freedom fighter. But it’s a sad reflection on the state of American politics that such a bad man operating such a destructive regime could have fooled some of our most eminent thinkers with such hackneyed and unoriginal methods.

I wish I believed there were some lessons from all this that we could learn and move on. The reality is that nothing much is likely to change. Gaddafi will, one hopes, fall — and soon. But power doesn’t just corrupt those who hold it. It corrupts those who behold it: there will always be people around who are ready and willing to praise the emperor’s new clothes.

The most erroneous stories

From Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould. Page 57.

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.

Robertson Davies' Christmas Stories

I am reading a collection of essays and speeches by Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart.

Davies' favorite Christmas stories, page 258.

Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The Rose and the Ring by Thackeray
Orley Farm by Anthony Trollope
Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad by M.R. James
Christmas Afternoon by Robert Benchley
Waiting for Santy by S.J. Perelman
Christmas Story by H.L. Mencken
A Christmas Garland by Max Beebohm

A lantern on the stern

Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.

It is all in how the story is told.

I don't have it in front of me at the moment, but I was dipping into Stephen Jay Gould's Full House, The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. An excellent, though nuanced and complex story, as all his books tend to be. One of Gould's points of emphasis was that peperspective is critical. Specifically, he argued that we tend to tell stories in a directional form: beginning, middle and end. We tell the story of evolution in the same fashion, from past to present. But by imposing a story telling form on disparate facts, we sometimes confuse ourselves. Gould's particular bugbear is that evolution is not a linear story with an endpoint of excellence. Evolution is a process that is left bounded (there is a constraint on how simple life can be) but is not right bounded; there is no essential limit to how complex life can be.

While we tend to focus on the miraculous complexities that can and do arise, Gould argues that we should not lose site that the predominant life forms are bacterial, fungal, etc., i.e. most biomass is exceptionally simple in form. The longer life runs, the more opportunities there are for complexity but we too often try to impose a narrative direction when there is simply a statistical process at work. That process may be no less miraculous but it is different.

While there are any number of deep and interesting aspects that could be debated, I believe the fundamental insight is that about perspective. We always are seeking patterns and we always want to fit the data to the patterns we know best and use the most. Sometimes that works, sometimes it leads us down false trails.

The three images that Gould uses in Full House to illustrate the difference in perspective regarding life as a directional process versus life as an increasingly dense bush are useful.

In the nineteenth century there was an especially strong proclivity to directional narration of evolution. A couple of examples were attempts to communicate the path way of the evolution of horses from the little critters scurrying around to the animal with which we are familiar today. These stories tended to look like this.



And this.



The story is linear from small, simple beast to magnificent and complex animal.

The equivalent for humans is the iconic progress of man from ape to modern man.



By standing at the bottom of the path and looking back towards where we came from, Gould effectively argues that we lose site of all the digressions and alternate paths that were taken and came to an end. Once you can ride a bike, it is hard to recall just how difficult it was to do so in the first place, just how many mistakes you made. Gould's view is of life's emergence more in the form of a complex bush which shows all those tributaries and divergences that get lost in the storytelling.



Click on the image to enlarge it.

You can see that there are some twenty branches of Equus history that have not advanced into the present and only one that has. If you run a horizintal line across the image and then raise and lower the bar, you can see that at any instant of time, we would have a quite different perspective of both the past and anticipation of the future.

If you let the bar sink to the late Miocene, there are nearly a dozen branches of Equus thriving. Who at that time might have anticipated that these dozen wonderful and superior adaptations would shrink to a single branch, which we still instinctively regard as a marvelous adaptation.

I see this issue of perspective (and attempts to over-read the data) all the time with teams with whom I work. In trying to solve a problem, they will identify which other companies or organizations are achieving that which they wish to achieve. They look to Walmart, to Coca-Cola, to Google, and many others, to try and learn lessons about what they, the team, ought to do.

This is not in itself a bad thing. We should seek out data and find patterns where they exist.

It is important though, just as with evolution, to realize that the final form (or more properly, the current form) is not especially explanatory of the steps taken towards the current form. There is a fair amount of chance involved in the process. Attributes which are especially critical to current success were not necessarily the ones that allowed the organization to survive back then. We have to be aware of the other paths taken as well as those not taken. We can learn from current success but there are boundaries to our understanding. Sometimes it is very hard to factually establish why Sears fell while Walmart rose and it is a mistake to retrofit the conditions of current success onto past circumstances.

It is all in how the story is told.

A favorite position for anointed visionaries

The Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell, p. 108. He is speaking of the unreflecting commitment that many in North America and Europe had to non-armament prior to World War II despite the threatening actions of Hitler and Japan in the years leading up to 1939. These advocates argued that being disarmed prevented giving Hitler a pretext for aggressive action. Sowell is dismissive not so much of the position as of the unreflecting nature of the position.

The irrelevant argument that the people of various countries did not want war proved to be as politically indestructible as it was as an indicator of what the governments of those countries were likely to do. This same argument was repeated on many occasions on the other side of the Atlantic by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and was to re-surface a generation later during the Cold War and be repeated innumerable times once again, as if it were a new and deep insight. In September 1938, Chamberlain spoke of "the desire of the German people for peace." less than a year before the most catastrophic war in history was unleashed by Hitler. Similarly, Chamberlain spoke of "the passionate desire of the Italian people for peace," which was no doubt equally true and equally irrelevant to Mussolini's actions.

Like many others during the years between the two world wars, Chamberlain warned of an "arms race" - what he called "this senseless competition in rearmament which continually cancels out the efforts that each nation makes to secure an advantage over the others." This echoed what Bertrand Russell had said in 1936, that "every increase of armaments by one Power is met by an increase by the first Power." Such neutral assessments from above the struggle - a favorite position for anointed visionaries - overlooked two crucial facts in the life-and-death decisions that have to be made about military preparedness.

First of all, an obviously aggressive nation, such as Nazi Germany during the 1930s, launches a military buildup in order to accomplish its goal by force or the threat of force, while those who build up counter-force are seeking to avoid being attacked or forced into surrender. If a defensive military buildup - an "arms race: - fails to secure any net advantage whatever against the aggressor, it is nevertheless a huge success if it prevents aggression or the need to surrender. From the standpoint of the non-aggressor nation, it is not trying to gain anything at the expense of anybody else, but simply recognizes the grim reality that military preparedness is part of the price of maintaining the peace, independence, and freedom that it already has. If military deterrence permits that to be done without bloodshed, it is not a "waste" because the arms are never used, but instead is a bargain because they were formidable enough that they did not have to be used, nor lives sacrificed in the carnage of war.

Knowledge without character

Mahatma Gandhi. See Wikipedia for the background.

Seven Blunders of the World

Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Knowledge without character
Commerce without morality
Science without humanity
Worship without sacrifice
Politics without principle

His grandson, Arun Gandhi, to whom he gave this list, added an eight blunder.

Rights without responsibilities

The costs of envy can be especially high

The Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell, p. 78

The first kind of envy - the more or less natural and potentially beneficial envy that spurs self-development and achievement - creates few incentives for third parties to try to mobilize and heighten it for their own benefit. It is the second kind of envy, expressed in hostility toward others, that is useful for third parties pursuing careers as politicians, group activists, or ideologues. It is this kind of envy which can have high costs to society at large and to the poor especially. It is not simply that the poor may suffer psychically from having less than others and from being encouraged to dwell on their current situation, rather than concentrate on improving it. The very terms of the discussion encourage them to attribute their less fortunate position to social barriers, if not political plots, and so to neglect the kinds of efforts and skills which are capable of lifting them to higher economic and social levels.

Poorer Groups

For the currently less fortunate members of society, when it misdirects their conceptions and energies. Where poorer people are lacking in human capital - skills, education, discipline, foresight - one of the sources from which they can acquire these things are more prosperous people who have more of these various forms of human capital. This may happen directly through apprenticeship, advice, or formal tutelage, or it may happen indirectly through observation, reflection, and imitation. However, all these ways of advancing out of poverty can be short-circuited by an ideology of envy that attributes the greater prosperity of others to "exploitation" of people like themselves, to oppression, bias, or unworthy motives such as "greed", racism, and the like. Acquisition of human capital in general seems futile under this conception and acquisition of human capital from exploiters, the greedy, and racists especially distasteful.

A Story is a Doorway

I don't have a source citation.

A Story is a Doorway
by Richard Peck

A story is a doorway
That opens on a wider place.
A story is a mirror
To reflect the reader's face.

A story is a question
You hadn't thought to ponder,
A story is a pathway,
Inviting your to wander.

A story is a window,
A story is a key,
A story is a lighthouse,
Beaming out to sea.

A story's a beginning,
A story is an end,
And in the story's middle,
You just might find a friend.

Mutually incompatible

Finished The Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell.

His ire with the self-anointed visionaries can detract from his argument a bit but fundamentally an interesting read. His core argument, about which the book is an elaboration, is that there are three irreconcilable positions we can take regarding justice. Our traditional Western Enlightenment view is that one of the critical responsibilities of any organized group of people is the creation of the rule of law.

The rule of law - "a government of laws and not of men" - implies rules known in advance, applied generally, and constraining the rulers as well as the ruled.

Under this approach, justice is served when all are treated equally before the process of law. It is indubitably the case that under this approach, equal process, the individual outcomes attained will vary widely depending on individual talents, circumstances, behaviors and decisions.

The second approach to justice is that tried by many dozens of countries in the 20th century and that is to focus on ensuring the equality of outcomes. This approach has been disastrously unsuccessful.

The third approach attempts to tackle the issue of disparate outcomes by assuming that disparate outcomes are generated by disparate starting points. Consequently under this approach, the effort is to ensure that all have an equal starting position. This approach, under which some third party attempts to take from some to give to others in order to achieve some "fairness" to make up for different initial starting points, Sowell refers to as a search for "cosmic justice."

As Sowell summarizes it,

What is crucial at this point is not whether we agree or disagree with one or the other of these conceptions but that we clearly understand that they are mutually incompatible, that their fundamental contradictions cannot be blended or finessed.