Posted Friday, March 14
I used to be able to read the blogosphere like I was walking around my backyard. Now I can't even get through Instapundit plus the Volokh conspiracy before collapsing in a weary puddle of needing to get actual work done. (The Volokh's are particularly to blame. I feel ganged-up on, the way they've been posting.)

And, by the way, here is a very interesting Joseph Epstein review of a new edition of Paul Valéry's notebooks.

I've never read Valéry, largely because practically the only thing I have ever known about him until this very day (yes, I also knew he wasn't a planet or a kind of dinosaur) was that he ungraciously skewered Anatole France - excuse me, Anatole Freedom - on the occasion of ascending to the man's vacated seat in the Académie Française. I like France - excuse me, Freedom - very much. Freedom wrote at least three first-rate books; and, I rather suspect, he wrote many more, if I would only stop reading blogs and go to the library. As I was saying, I ignorantly but staunchly took Freedom's side and boycotted Valéry.

It would appear this was a very foolish policy. These quotes are delightful. First, the poke at Freedom:

Blessed are those writers who relieve us of the burden of thought and who dextrously weave a luminous veil over the complexity of things. Alas, gentlemen, there are others, whose existence must be deplored, who have have elected to strike out in the opposite direction. They have placed toil of the mind in the way of its pleasures. They offer us riddles. Such creatures are inhuman.

To accuse Anatole Freedom in this way is utterly unjust, yet not nastily so - as I had been led to expect - and rather delightfully phrased. I like this as well:

It is impossible to think seriously with such words as Classicism, Romanticism, Humanism, Realism, and the other -isms. You can’t get drunk or quench your thirst with the labels on bottles.

It is ridiculous to conflate intellectual sobriety with the potential for intellectual inebriation. Yet it is somehow true that serious thoughts get you drunk.

Mildly intoxicating are the following meditations (mixed up with Mr. Epstein's words, composing a pleasant cocktail):

He disliked irony, except in conversation, and felt that it chiefly gave a writer an air of superiority, adding that “every ironist has in mind a pretentious reader, mirror of himself.” He also had a distaste for eloquence, “because eloquence has the form of a mixture, adapted to a crowd. It has not the form of thought.” He cared more for precision than profundity, and precision was only accessible through the utmost clarity: “the kind that does not come from the use of words like ‘death,’ ‘God,’ ‘life,’ or ‘love’—but dispenses with such trombones.” No trombones, no trumpets, no brass section in Valéry’s prose; a solo cello, deep strings played under perfect control and superior acoustical conditions, is all we ever hear.

Of course, Valéry's arch-superior Académie acceptance would appear to have been wickedly ironic at Anatole France's expense. And France, I must say, was no literary John Philip Sousa. (I am sticking by my friend.)

I think I like this bit best of all. There is a Platonic urbanity to it:

“I consider politics, political action, all forms of politics, as inferior values and inferior activities of the mind,” he wrote. Politics is the realm of the expedient, the rough guess: “crude, vain, or desperate solutions are indispensable to mankind just as they are to individuals, because they do not know.” In politics, he wrote, “by a trick of inverted lights, friends see each other as enemies, fools look impressive to the intelligent, who in turn see themselves as very tiny indeed.” Politics calls, inevitably, for the polemic, which carries its own peril: “that of losing the power of thinking otherwise than polemically, as if one were facing an audience and in the presence of the enemy.” Valéry could think of nothing in the realm of thought “madder” or more vulgar “than wanting to be right,” which is of course what politics is chiefly about.

This makes me think about what it's like to write an academic paper: the habitual effort to conceal, by means of some flourish or deflection, the weakest point in the argument.

Last but not least, Epstein throws in an extra Karl Kraus quote along the way - a little verbal cut I'd heard before but forgotten: a journalist is “someone who, given time, writes worse.” That goes double for most bloggers, possibly including myself, though I hope not.
Posted Thursday, March 13
With an impulse towards topicality of a literal kind (we're in Singapore) I recently read Anthony Burgess’ Malaya Trilogy (Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket, and Beds in the East). I didn’t like it very much. It left a sour taste in my mouth. Still, I didn’t hate it; it had amusing bits, and I did read all 577 pages. I wanted to describe what, exactly, it was that I didn’t like, and I have been having trouble putting my finger on it.

On the aesthetic sensibiltites side I confess to a quirk: I can’t enjoy books that give me a negative impression of the author’s character. I share this tendency to imagine a face for the author behind his work with Orwell, so it can’t be totally disreputable. And if the face I see leers back at me unpleasantly? Who wants to spend time with jerks, even smart ones?

Of course, if they are smart enough, brilliant, enough, then I can get over it. I have a very strong impression that Nabokov wanted to have sex with little girls, and I regard that as unwholesome. I like to tell myself that he didn’t actually have sex with any, so it’s OK. I think I’m whistling past the graveyard on this one, though. I know he’s got a vivid imagination, this Vivian Darkbloom, but haven’t you ever thought that the passages about having sex with child prostitutes in Ada are a little too well realized? And even a Nabokov partisan can admit that if he had ever indulged those desires with some luckless nymphet, he wouldn’t feel the least bit bad about it.

But I’m willing to let all that pass, in his case. Nabokov can be the exception, etc. If you’re not a world-class genius, however, and you come across as an asshole… Here we come to the nub of the problem, which is, how can I tell? Do I have psychic antennae which allow me to divine the moral contours of the author’s soul? Um, well, sort of.

The thing I find most annoying is a male author who creates a male hero who is meant to be flawed, or perhaps a likeable rogue, but is nonetheless someone for whom we are meant to feel sympathy and rueful fellow feeling. Accompanying this hero (or “anti-hero”) are female characters drawn with varying degrees of crudity and malice. I never sympathize with the bastard. Another post-colonial Malaya book, set in Singapore, is a prime example of this: Paul Theroux’s Saint Jack. The title character is meant to be a pimp with a heart of gold. Enough said. On the whole, I prefer Iceberg Slim.

This isn’t quite what’s gone wrong in Burgess’ case, however, since he can make a plausible claim for misanthropy rather than misogyny. I square the circle by saying he’s a misogynist and a misanthrope, and it’s the extra malice involved in sketching the female (and to some degree, the non-white) characters that I object to. Plus, even though he mocks the fading British colonial regime, he just seems to be missing the point. Yes, its world-historical moment had passed (as he recognizes). But there were other problems with colonialism such as, for example, it’s not right to just go to other people’s country and take over. Yes, even if some contender for the sultanate invites you in to outfox his rivals. Yes, even if you build railroads. Yes, and even if you become a picturesque alcoholic. What time is it! (Don’t want to waste it…I can almost taste it!). It’s Tiger Time, it’s Tiger Time! (This last is an ad for the local beer, meant to be sung energetically, from which the first novel in the series takes its name.)
Posted Wednesday, March 12
Have read with interest Orin Kerr's occasional posts on TIA and the Patriot Act, over Volokh way. He has another today. (Libraries in Santa Cruz putting up signs alerting patrons Ashcroft may be looking over their shoulders, checking out what they are reading. As Kerr notes, this is misleading only in that the relevant section of law applies to all 'tangible records'; and, since your library card is not made of ectoplasm; well, you do the math.)

And the lately-leaked Patriot II may be officially unveiled soon. What to think, what to think? Kerr tentatively suggested that Patriot II appears to be a mixed bag - good and bad; maybe a turkey, but hardly the monster many will make it out to be. Before that he suggested TIA might actually be what civil libertarians are looking for, i.e. a 'first eat what you've got on your plate' measure, in line with the oft-heard complaint that, post 9/11, the government does not need more information; it needs first to process the information it's got more thoroughly, effectively, efficiently.

Moving in quite the opposite direction (by way of the Agora), this Findlaw article by Anita Ramasastry. She is not so sanguine as Mr. Kerr. Example:

Admiral Poindexter's proposed Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, which sought to build data profiles of all Americans, sparked a wide public outcry. Congress recently warned against using TIA as a tool against US citizens. Nevertheless, Patriot II, as draft by the Attorney General and his staff, would begin to make TIA the law.

For instance, under Patriot II, federal agents would not need a subpoena or obtain a court order to access our consumer credit reports. This provision would open the wedge for TIA to be implemented through a huge database. Our credit reports are repositories of a great deal of sensitive information - from our employment history to where we shop, borrow and transact.

To see the information, the feds would only have to certify that they will use the information "in connection with their duties to enforce federal law." Note that they would not have to certify that the person whose information was accessed was suspected of terrorism, or indeed, any other crime. And no one would be notified that their records had been accessed. When a commercial entity requests a consumer's credit report, a note is made in the consumer's file alerting him to this fact.

Then the stuff about collecting your DNA; then the part about how getting in a bar fight might make you guilty of terrorism; then the bit about criminalization of encryption in furtherance of other criminal acts. Oh, and along the way something about 'getting declared a foreign power' (can that be right? That sort of thing could ruin your whole day.) A few other things.

I would be curious to know Mr. Kerr's opinion of Ms. Ramasastry's alarm-bell of an analysis. I shall email him forthwith.

What do I think? I don't know.

It strikes me that criticism of Patriot I was relatively muted, by American standards, because 1) people feel that, post 9/11, the balance between liberty/privacy and security has to tilt somewhat; 2) people don't really have any clear sense how the tilt should go, or how far. It is hard to oppose measures that seem to go too far if one has no worked out alternative.

So it strikes me as that, as a nation, we really have to work out what we think about this. We have to decide what balance to strike. (Certainly the decision should not be made in haste, under cover of CNN coverage of Gulf War II.)

A thought experiment, then, to clear the mental palate, as it were.

In his very fine novel, Queen of Angels, hard-sf 'killer bee' extraordinaire Greg Bear envisions a not-so-distant future in which, in effect, Total Information Awareness is checked and balanced by (what shall we call it?) Total Civil Liberties Unification. Crudely: Poindexter gets what he wants, but his enemies get his job.

In the book TIA is 'Citizen Oversight'. The protagonist, a police officer, periodically goes - begging bowl in hand - to the Oversight offices, hoping for some dropped scrap of information about an elusive murderer. I quote:

Oversight controlled information pd could not get through a court order. Getting such information was an art not unlike politics. Individual pd or pd districts who asked too often were marked as greedy.

Throughout the USA vid monitors and other sensors tracked citizen activity in private cars buses trains aircraft even walkways, wherever citizens used public concourses or buildings. Private service company records all went into Oversight and new officials were publicly elected every year in each state to administer the information so gathered.

Oversight had proven its worth a hundred times over in giving social statisticians the raw data necessary to make plans track trends understand and serve a nation of half a billion people.

When first proposed and created Oversight had been absolutely forbidden from releasing any data involving individual citizens or even specific groups of citiziens whatever their activities to the judiciary or pd. But even before Raphkind [a very bad President] the wall between Oversight and the courts and pd had thinned. During Raphkind's seven years in office the walls had thinned even more, been breached and information had flowed freely to the pd and federals. Now in pendulum swing Oversight offered scant pickings to pd on a strictly regulated basis.

Discuss: what are the merits and demerits of a radical data-hoovering program run, in effect, by the ACLU; or rather - this is better - by elected officials whose performance in short-term office is judged, not by the standard of 'how many bombs did you keep from going off?' but only by the standard of 'how many innocent people's credit records did you not hand over to the FBI?'

There are moral and practical - not to mention technological and legislative and Constitutional - concerns and considerations aplenty. To pick on almost the most minor: the above system would not even be sufficient, by Ashcroftian-Poindexterian standards. The point of TIA is to eliminate barriers to the free-flow of information between agencies; this proposal expressly thwarts that ambition by erecting one single, highly-considered firewall in place of all the little accidents of imperfect technology and coordination that presently hinder the government.

I do not propose this sf-vision as ideal. I propose it because it vividly foregrounds two knobs on the conceptual control panel: one for 'extent', i.e. how much data-hoovering should be allowed; the other is for 'judicial review/due process'. It is instructive to start by turning both 'up to 11', as a wise man once said. It jars us out of our vague, complacent sense that we would like things to stay 'pretty much the same'. It is all too likely that, for better or worse, they won't.

Information wants to be free, some say; but equally true: information wants to get caught. And someday - someday - there will be another horrific attack carried out on American soil, possibly far worse than 9/11. We all think about that . How would we respond to that, as a free and open society? I don't think we have a clue.

One last point: I haven't seen anyone point out, regarding TIA, something that is an explicit feature of Bear's scenario. If the information gathered is 'total', there is no reason why cops should be the one's becoming 'aware' of it. Well, lots of people have said that; but I haven't seen anyone conclude: so the information should perhaps still be gathered, if it is really necessary, but not by cops.

That's enough for now.
Posted Monday, March 10
Bad cold. Can't think. I'll just sit back and take in a couple a' googlefights. First, we'll set Tolkienesque spelling head-to-head against standard English: Dwarves vs. Dwarfs.

Now something classically philosophical: Plato vs. Aristotle.

Wow. That one was a surprise. (What explains that?)

Something yet more classically philosophical: Time vs. Space.

That's enough for now. I'm going to bed.
Posted Sunday, March 9
I'm lecturing tomorrow on George Lakoff and Rafael Nuñez' book, Where Mathematics Comes From. I met Nuñez last semester - he came to give a talk, and he seemed like a smart guy. But they sure don't waste any time setting up and knocking down the straw men. A quote from page 1:

As cognitive science and neuroscience have learned more about the human brain and mind, it has become clear that the brain is not a general-purpose device. The brain and body co-evolved so that the brain could make the body function optimally. Most of the brain is devoted to vision, motion, spatial understanding, interpersonal interaction, coordination, emotions, language, and everyday reasoning. Human concepts and human language are not random or arbitrary; they are highly structured and limited, because of the limits and structure of the brain, the body, and the world.

These cognitive-neuroscientific results - we are rather breathlessly informed - are supposed to constitute a beachhead in a major, ongoing assault on the fundamental tenets of Western philosophy

To begin with, I find it hard to see how an organ devoted to all these things- vision, motion, spatial understanding, interpersonal interaction, coordination, emotions, language, and reasoning - is not, in a perfectly ordinary yet robust sense, a 'general purpose device'. (All the brain lacks, apparently, is a corkscrew and one of those things for removing stones from horses' hooves.) So if anyone's position crucially depends on the aptness of this characterization, I fail to see how these 'results' can be anything but gloriously confirmatory.

And then the stern insistence that concepts and language "are not random and arbitrary." Context makes clear this is supposed to be philosophically radical. But has anyone, anywhere, at any time, maintained that 'human concepts and human language' are 'random or arbitrary'? (What would that mean?) Maybe some social constructivists have gone so far as to test out the waters with regard to 'arbitrary'; but 'random'? 'Human concepts are random'. The concept 'triangle' is random. How could this be construed as anything like a cornerstone of Western thought? For that matter, how could you empirically prove that the concept 'triangle' is not random?

Concepts are highly structured and limited. (Again, what would it mean to deny it: human concepts are unlimited? As a card-carrying Western philosopher, I'm supposed to be inculcated with this stuff at an early age, but - I swear to you - it's ringing no bells.)

Finally: concepts are limited by 'the nature of the world'? Surely (to adapt Donald Barthelme) this is the tip-most taper on the candelabrum of triviality. Yet it is offered up as a cutting-edge scientific result. Confusion.