Asides: on Pax Americana, Libertarians and where the #$#! are our Roosevelts?

Mid-week, let's pause to get a few points out of the way. Below I will have some things to say about current American politics -- about "Galt's Gulch in Chile" and about... "The Roosevelts."

But first... clearly my most provocative stance is to defend the period -- post WWII -- called  "PA"… or Pax Americana.  It's a topic wherein I think we can distill what is loony about both sides in the current, re-ignited US civil war... as well as simplistic and comfortable cliches that are clutched by many of our friends, overseas.

PA has lasted all our lifetimes, since WWII saw the passing of Pax Brittanica… the “British Peace.”  "Pax" referred originally to Pax Romana or the Roman Peace that kept the Mediterranean placid and open to commerce for 600 years. Pax Sinica refers to similar epochs across China and east Asia. Pax Hispania was the greatest empire the world has ever known, in which Columbus's discoveries -- then Magellan's -- led to a "peace" that preached its own absolute goodness while it spread deliberate genocide for 400 bloody years. But at least there was no hypocrisy.  

Here is the crux. With the likely exception of Pax Hispania, almost every pax era has been better for average people on planet Earth than almost every era without a pax empire, when competing kingdoms would send armies slashing and burning and looting across each others’ territories. The Chinese, for example, admit that the First Emperor Chi'in, who unified the five warring states, was something of a murderous madman. But he also made it safe to travel and trade and paved the way for the Han Dynasty renaissance. He was hell on scholars and dissenters, but made things better for average folk who just wanted to live out their lives, pay taxes, practice a trade and be left alone.

Are there costs, whenever there is a ruling imperium? You bet! When the First Emperor crushed the Five Kingdoms, peace then reigned… along with brutal tyranny and a collapse of the vibrant, cultural competitiveness that had prevailed, before. Minorities had plenty to complain about, under Pax Parthia, Pax Alexandrine, Pax Romana, Pax Mughal etc, and homogenization under a single oligarchy is often harsh on progress. (So harsh that it might help to explain why few or no alien species made it to the stars.)  Indeed, it was when the nations of a divided Europe -- circa 1400 to 1900 -- vigorously competed that humanity made some of its greatest, if morally mixed, strides -- including strides toward both liberal enlightenment and industrial grade genocide.  

This is not a matter for taking sides, but for being open-minded about many pros and cons, so that understanding might help us to navigate a future course, between the Scylla of violent chaos and the Charybdis of stifling empire. Those of you out there who leap to just one, simplistic stance on all of this, making grand and righteous declarations, may thereby feel good, but you understand little about the complex morass that is human history.  And thus you are no help at all, in steering us toward better days.

== The current pax ==

Where Pax Americana is different is in having operated under a mythic system that -- even when it was only hypocritically paid lip service -- at least spoke repeatedly that there should be no empires. Indeed, while American commercial interests may have been predatory, during the weak end-days of the Chi-ing Dynasty, U.S. policy was always on China's side, at least officially, demanding that European and Japanese powers give back the colonial "concessions" they had wrested from the weakened central kingdom. Not one other nation in all of China's long history ever stood up for her that way.

Does imperfection disqualify everything? de Rochefoucauld said "Hypocricy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." Indeed, though betrayed often, the moral stance against empire has been relentlessly conveyed in American propaganda -- e.g. Hollywood films, which portray "empires" as bad things and tolerance of diversity as the greatest positive virtue.  Indeed, those of you who are now seething in anger at me, for daring to say good things about PA... um, have you thought of where you got the value system by which you judge these things?  Can you name another major culture that preached "by all means criticize the center of power!"

Ironies abound. The best that PA can preen about is that it reduced most of the bad outcomes of a pax era. Rigid domination, imperial mercantiism and repression of diversity. A priesthood with a lock on "truth." Outright and barefaced conquest.

We are talking human nature here... what groups of people do when they find themselves in a position to dominate. Go on now and name for me one people, across all of time, who behaved well when tempted by such power. One. We can wait here if you like, all day.  The real enemy is that temptation, which seems rooted in our natures.

But it can be controlled.

My assertion has been that: 

(1) The ratio of good deeds to bad - by Pax Americana - is stunningly better than any other pax power across time…

(2) Should we expose and dissect and atone for wretched events like Vietnam and Allende -- all the way down to negligent crimes of poor supervision, like those exposed in Iraq by WikiLeaks? Absolutely! I am Mr. Transparency.  And criticism is the only known antidote to error (CITOKATE.)

But these crimes, while calling for fierce retrospection and learning, do not alter the fundamental fact, that outcomes have been vastly better, under the PA system designed by the greatest human of the 20th Century, George Marshall.  

Average humans today live in more peace than at any time in the history of our species, as shown in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, with only a few percent ever experiencing personal and direct contact with war in their lifetimes. One top benefit: Pax-protected world trade has uplifted 2/3 of the world’s children out of poverty.

(3) That propaganda campaign about tolerance and suspicion of authority and individualism may have been hypocritical! Nevertheless, it engendered people like you who are generous in your citokate-criticism and who push for exactly those values! Memes that you express, even as you fume at me for praising the pax that taught you all those values. While never once pausing to realize "Hey I am part of an organic process!  And any other empire would have killed me for this, by now."

(4) Combine all this and there may be a unique opportunity -- that we might actually tip into an era when pax law is no longer needed. An era portrayed in Star Trek, when the very idea of one dominant power is viewed by all as repugnantly retro and archaic.  No other culture ever preached that eutopian notion, though you illustrate it right now, as you seethe at these words. 

Here is more about Pax Americana: Pondering Pax Americana and the Government Shutdown.

== Basics ==

It merits reiterating. Was PA awful at times? Sure... except compared to every single other nation that was ever tempted by such power. If you make that comparison, PA is day to their night. Moreover, you know it.

Was PA drooling-insane-stupid under both Bushes? Sure. So much so that you have to wonder if that Saudi-owned family did it on purpose. (The wretched irony? That the phrase "Pax Americana" is only uttered nowadays by right wingers, who eviscerate its promise at every turn, with almost every immoral and incompetent act of foreign and domestic policy. Meanwhile the liberals who are PA's true spokesmen, glower at the one thing that made their dreams possible. Oh, we are weird, all right.)

Should Pax Americana be replaced with something grownup, at last, bringing an end to all empires? Sure! That's the idea!

Would Star Trek be better? Yep! 

Do you have a better idea? We'd all love to see your plan. But please, one that is only half impractical preaching but also looks at what progress has been made, so far, and how that progress happened.)

Will the end of all empires come, if PA simply goes away? Or prematurely stops enforcing peace? Baloney. Before you prescribe nothing as a replacement to the current pax power, please find for us, across 6000 years, a lasting era when that prescription worked well.

PA is the only empire that ever had as its (hypocritically uneven) policy "there should be no empires." And that hypocrisy has one saving grace...

...it will make itself come true.  

== Too-big means get-smaller ==

And now a couple of politically redolent items: The Federal Reserve is pushing the biggest U.S. banks to shrink so that they're less of a risk to the financial system. Fed proposals include imposing additional capital requirements for the eight largest banks — including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America — that exceed the levels mandated by international regulators. “Capital surcharges" would increase in proportion to how risky the regulators deem a bank to be.

Which leads one to ponder...

Ken Burns documentaries are always a great buy, for your viewing time. His most recent — “The Roosevelts” -- focuses on Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor. Terrific. Fascinating stories. 

Only… I find my own thoughts drifting  -- and as I watch this series I can only contemplate our parents in the Greatest Generation... who overcame the Depression, crushed Hitler, prevented a mad Soviet Empire from world conquest, built a vibrant/free/open/flat/fair capitalism that created so much wealth that we could then afford to take on ancient, bad habits like racism, sexism and environmental neglect.

That generation... so admired by folks on the American Right... try asking your Fox-Watcher... "which human being did the Greatest Generation of Americans -- and indeed, nearly everyone on Earth -- adore, above all others?"

Watch them go goggle-eyed and choke. But make them say the name. Aloud.

== And finally? ==

Galt’s Gulch Chile? One common theme that spans from leftist-hippies to followers of Ayn Rand is the notion of anarchic utopianism — that those who have free spirits and the right ideology can create an ideal community, free of the ills they perceive in our complex, compromise-ridden civilization. On rare occasions, these communities have thrived… ironically those that have been run patriarchally by brilliant administrators, replicating feudalism-of-old, with a patina of egalitarian catechism. But most such experiments swiftly collapse. As in the case of the AnyRandian ideal community described here.

This is not the only libertarian dream community in the works. Perhaps more sturdy, but still problematic, are seasteading efforts propelled by Patri Friedman and Peter Thiel.

In the end, however, this is tragic for us all. Libertarianism might have served as a rational and pragmatic counter-balance to the other utopian tendency, to try solving all problems with statist approaches. It might also have held true to the sane vision of Adam Smith - to do what is needed in order to maximize the number of skilled and capable young competitors in a flat-fair-open society. 

Instead, it has been hijacked by solipsists who never, ever mention the word “competition” anymore, in their obsessive defense of towering accumulations of PROPERTY, never noticing how this serves the proto-feudal wishes of the oligarchs who were denounced by Adam Smith, and have always been the greatest enemies of markets and freedom.

See my dissection of Any Rand here: http://www.davidbrin.com/aynrand.html

==Return to Part One of this Series: An Unstable World

Contempt for the Masses - a modern curse?

I want to riff upon some common drug-highs that most people partake-of.  One is the alluring condition of despising our pitiably stupid neighbors.  Another is the temptation to believe that history comes and goes in "cycles."

Are your neighbors all stupid?

This topic came up last time, flowing out of my observations about the recent movies, Surrogates.  And, while I have groused about the obvious - even blatant - overlaps with both my novel Kiln People and the widely distributed Leslie Dixon screenplay, that was not what bugged me moist about the Bruce Willis film.  Rather, it was the dismally uniform premise -- shared by far too many Hollywood productions -- that all new technologies are inherently evil and that they will automatically be horribly misused by nearly all human beings.

Look, any sensible person is of two minds about "the masses," recollecting Churchill's line that democracy is the worst form of government... except for every other that's been tried.  We have seen how flawed popular government can be.  I am mindful of what happened to Periclean Athens and to Republican Florence.

Indeed, when Ronald Reagan removed the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had erected on the White House - and got adulation for calling upon his followers to "think only of this morning!"  - I knew that we'd be in for a generation of spendthrift foolishness. Thirty years of delays in doing much about energy independence coincided with virtual abandonment of ambition in science or space, while we spent ourselves into deep debt, based upon a Supply-Side theory that made no sense, even before it was disproved. The left did chime in, with idiocies of its own.  And then came a high-treason madness called Culture War...

Oh, no question that our neighbors have given us plenty of reason to suspect them of -- ahem, at best -- shortsighted and parochial thinking.

But note that this reaction spans all boundaries of politics, whether or not the facts support your particular prejudice.  Surface rationalizations differ, from left to right, but we all suckle the same, deeply smug fantasies from popular culture.  The underlying inclination is too common to ignore, flowing from movies into real life.

If the shared theme that drives most Hollywood plots is Suspicion of Authority (SOA), then the most common background assumption is that the majority of people around the hero (and hence, around you) are nincompoops.

Of course, that ninnie majority never, ever includes you.

See my article: Our Favorite Cliche: A World Filled with Idiots. 


Defending the masses

Of course, I am human.  Indeed, this very screed reflects a meta-irony... that I feel contempt for the masses, because they give in to this blandished hypnotic trip  so easily!

And yet, since contempt for the masses is the most common reflex, I am forced, out of sheer contrariness, to stand up for the other side. The "people" after all, have repeatedly been polled as much more willing to invest in new energy
than our aristocracy ever was.

Moreover, there are plenty of counter-examples that suggest the opposite.  For example, recall the era of the "Clinton Surplus?" Members of Congress salivated over spending it all on favored programs. Others promoted giant tax cuts, especially for the wealthy classes. Amid all of this, only two groups spoke up for using the surplus instead to retire the national debt. Those two groups were economists and ... the general public.

 It was the middle class "populace" who wanted to pay off the debt before getting a tax cut!  Their forward-looking citizenship was far greater than the "gimme!" attitude of most of the aristocracy.

This runs diametrically opposite to the cynics' favorite quotation, variously attributed to "Tytler" or to Alex Tyler --

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising them the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years.

These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to
complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage."

As it happens, this spurious "quotation" has also been repeatedly proved to be utter and complete drivel. It has taken an unprecedented propaganda campaign to drive wedges into and between components of the middle class, in America.  And even so, it is still the bourgeoisie that not only puts up most of the taxes but also relentlessly proves to be the caste the least interested in "largesse" and the most willing to pay for the civilization that they live in.

... next time... Contemptuous Memes Part II: Cycles of History"

--Read more about the Tytler Calumny

finally some news...

 Looking for something to help you through the long commute?  Or to listen-to while basking under the sunlamp?  Recorded Books has just issued the full book-on-tape version of BRIGHTNESS REEF read by George K Wilson.  This will soon be followed by INFINITY'S SHORE and HEAVEN'S REACH.

H+ asked David Brin, Ben Goertzel, J. Storrs Hall, Vernor Vinge, and others: "Is a Terminator-like scenario possible? And if so, how likely is it?" 

See a Planetary Report on the discovery of a likely "skylight" opening in a volcanic lava tube on the moon.  It suggests that such lava tubes currently exist and offer large subterranean spaces for possible human use as shelters, in future colonization.

"Albedo Yachts" and Marine Clouds: A Cure for Climate Change? A proposal to create 1500 robot ships that use wind power to inject micron sized droplets into the atmosphere.  Sounds better than most forms of geoengineering because it ivolves no toxins and can simply be stopped at any time.  But I wonder, might these wind powered vessels be combined with wind powered STIRRING of shallow sea bottoms (as depicted in my novel Earth?  This stirring would fertilize desert ocean areas the way nature does it, instead of through the proposed method of dumping powdered iron (which has unintended consequences like acidification.)  In contrast mud-stirring has no conceivable way to do harm because it replicates nature's own method.

Two Victoria University professors who specialize in sustainable living, say pet owners should swap cats and dogs for creatures they can eat, such as chickens or rabbits, in their disturbingly titled new book Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living. The couple has assessed the carbon emissions created by popular pets, taking into account the ingredients of pet food and the land needed to create them.  "If you have a German shepherd or similar-sized dog, for example, its impact every year is exactly the same as driving a large car around," Brenda Vale said

And now... loons of the left prove that it isn't a monopoly

All right then, you've been warned to expect some of my trademarked "contrariness," this time.  A tendency -- call it a compulsion -- to always turn and point in some unexpected direction, especially if I have been looking one way for too long.  It drives everything from my chosen profession to science to politics.

And yes, today I plan to take a break from decrypting the political madness of the far-right and instead point my j'accuse finger to the left.

But first, do not even begin to interpret what I am about to say as "both sides are equally crazy."  Anyone who read my previous missives can tell which direction I condemn most harshly, as the core of madness and outright treason in American life.  I've spoken at length about the rightwing cult that has taken over the conservative movement, sending poor Barry Goldwater spinning in his grave and betraying America by sending our great nation into debilitating "culture war."   It is still monstrous and unbelievable that Rupert Murdoch and his co-conspirators can get away with posing as populists, while pursuing oligarchic takeover of the country.  Without  any doubt, that is the direction from which civilization and the American Republic face their greatest danger.

Anyone who doubts the tenacity with which I've fought this fight should have a glance at any of the following extended (and, I'm told, influential) missives:
     http://www.davidbrin.com/neoromantics.htm
     http://www.davidbrin.com/neocons.htm
     http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2007/09/real-bush-war-neocons-vs-us-military.html

Nevertheless, I have also made clear my utter contempt for those who simply choose one of the major ideological cults and thereafter march in uncritical lockstep.  People who pronounce themselves proud individualists, but then turn their suspicion of authority reflexes in only one direction.

Yes, the right is presently far more noxious and dangerous, having allowed their entire movement to be taken over by monsters.  But Lefties who forget Stalin and Mao are intellectually as bankrupt as righties who ignore 4,000 years of oppression by kings and lords and preisthoods.

In fact, nearly all ideologues can be categorized together by a set of sharedpersonality traits that run deeper than their differences of surface policy.  Far-lefties and far-righties both partake, for example, in a near-universal propensity for dismissing civil society as futile.

Contempt for the masses is the common steam that rises from every pore, as they preen over things that they "know" that "the majority is too blind to see."

(Am I unaware of the irony of my having typed the previous three paragraphs?  Since a majority of my fellow citizens do seem to swallow the abysmal notion of "left-vs'right" - doesn't that make me a masses-contemptuous snob?  Har!  Hey, I am human too.  The difference is that I know this pitfall and have schooled myself to be wary of it.  And yes, that is snobbery, too.)

So, as promised, I am going to offer a little balance, this time.  To remind us that the left can be as crazy as the right (even while being less dangerous, during THIS decade) go have a look at a horrific piece of preening nonsense that keeps being sent to me by liberals, who think that it is the best thing since spray-on cheese. It's called Sheeple of Amerika.

Feh!  Gawd, this thing is a calumny, on so many levels that I am tempted to call it deliberate psychological warfare against the Enlightenment.  Perhaps one of Murdoch's put-up provocations, crafted precisely in order to undermine liberal credibility.

Look, no one can teach me a thing about rambunctious contrarianism and suspicion of authority.

But think.  What is the most pervasive and relentless "propaganda" campaign in the history of the world?

When asked this question, people name all sorts of messages that they perceive as responsible for turning the masses into contemptible sheep.  Lefties point to pervasive "buy this" consumerism.  Rightists screech over the other side's incessant demands for conformist political correctness.  What's never mentioned is the propaganda that actually worked... on them!  If you asked these guys for a week, a year, and even if their lives depended on it, they would never guess.

Surprise, surprise. We are self-flatterers and so we never attribute OUR favorite traits to propaganda that filled our very pores, from a young age.  But there's a pair of messages that inarguably and statistically outnumber both "buy this" and Tolerance Fetishism, combined.

 We all grew up suckling Suspicion of Authority (SOA) combined with "I'm a F4$#$@king individual and everybody else are lemmings!" 

You see these twin themes conveyed in nearly every film, most of which also portray civilization itself (and its institutions) as utterly hopeless.  Usually evil. With some central/awful authority being bravely opposed by one -- or a few -- stalwart individualist heroes who don't need no institutions to stand between them and justice!

Think about it.  List the themes in nearly every Hollywood product.  Name any messages that occur more often than this pair.  But people never notice the propaganda that made THEM the way they are.  Now add in the most alluring theme of all.  Yes, our old pal contempt for the masses.  Go ahead and TEST YOURSELF with my questionnaire.


So, will Brin ever get to the point? How does all of this apply to "Sheeple"?

Let's be frank.  THE message of this 'film' is not urging folks to wake up, or fomenting rebellion; it is contempt. Feeding the producers' sanctimonious sense that they are privileged and smarter and more insightful than their sheeplike neighbors, like gods above mere animals.  Self-flattery is the cheapest drug around.  Any addict can get all he wants, and these guys have it hard. http://www.davidbrin.com/addiction.htm

But it gets worse. For, you see, it's been shown that the surest way to get the masses under control is NOT to inculcate worshipful passivity, but rather to spread a dull, simmering state of generalized resentment, aimed in all directions and at each other.

What?  You've never studied Machiavelli?  Really? What do you think "culture war" is all about? The whole "populist" theme driving Red America to hate the cities and anyone with a graduate degree?

  The formula is simple. Inundate the prols with distractions that scatter their SOA in every direction.  And if some of those directions are "up" toward some corporations and meeting groups of the rich?  So what? So long as you shotgun a vast number of targets, you'll keep it scattered. Impotent. (Notice though, the Sheeple guys never mention Rupert Murdoch or the petroprinces who have been doing the most meddling of all.  Gee I wonder why.)

 And so, the ultimate irony.  This is exactly the sort of thing that the masters would want produced!

Do I seriously believe that "Sheeple" was generated at the AEI or Heritage or some other Murdochian pimphouse?  Naw. Funny thing is, they probably got it for free, or maybe with the gentlest prodding.  This shit is self-stirring.

Note that this film -- after purportedly demanding that people "wake up!" -- doesn't suggest any of the things that might ACTUALLY cause sheep to look up... such as actual, pragmatic links to learned and detailed analyses of world power, for example. Or self-organizing tools. Nor does it recommend the kind of "proxy power" organizations that can empower any individual to join with large numbers of others, in common cause to deal, effectively, with specific, targeted issues.

They can't offer such suggestions!  Because that would be to admit that the sheep can and do self-organize, effectively, and we must never admit that!  So, instead, "Sheeple" jumbles a huge goulash. Mixing genuinely worrisome trends, like rising income gaps, with vapid idiocies like 9/11 "loose change" conspiracies and UFO cults.  That's right, keep the paranoia spread evenly, guys.  It's what you're subsidized to do.

Oh, maybe a third of the slides do point to genuine problems that deserve attention, problem-solving appraisal, or even criminal prosecution.  So?  A two-second flicker and each issue joins the jumble of true, false, misleading and just plain stupid.
  
Is the greedy patenting of seed strains and eliminating self-fertility, so that farmers cannot re-seed their fields, evil?  Sure!  Is Genetic Modification of food crops automatically a crime against people and nature?  Bullshit!  That's pure luddite sanctimonious unscientific claptrap and the surest sign of dullard minds, while every single bite of food they eat was genetically modified by previous generations of farmers and breeders. Have these guys helped us to intelligently parse the good parts of a techno future from the bad?  Hah!

If you actually and really want to pragmatically fight evil, promote justice, save the world and advance the Enlightenment, there's a proved method.  One that bypasses all this contempt-for-the-masses malarkey and goes straight to problem solving -- combining the tiny influence of individuals into the momentum of millions.  Drop by the PROXY POWER site.

It will tell you how to do exactly that.

Oog, these guys got me exercised.  And sure, I expect to be derided as a tool of corporate interests, just for criticizing their lobotomized (or else corporate sponsored) uselessness.  But note that I never claimed that they weren't pointing to some genuine enemies of humanity and the world.  As I said, about a third of the slides were completely or partially right-on!

But they aren't helpful.  Not at any level.  As elistists, on a sanctimony drug-high, they are proof that the left contains crazies, too.*  They are part of the problem.  The REAL problem -- the insanity of culture war.

We won't defeat the Rush Limbaughs by acting just like them.  We'll defeat them by being the grownups.

DB


* Reiterating the central point, yet again.  The liberal and conservative movements ARE fundamentally different, today.  Both contain some good ideas, deepdown.  Both contain some crazies.  The crucial distinction is that one of these movements keeps its lunatics marginalized. Its leaders perpetually try -- hit or miss -- to re-awaken the American genius for honorable negotiation and pragmatic problem-solving.

The other side may have some genuine ideas, lying dormant under the snows.  But all its potential good has been rendered useless, by giving itself over, body and soul, to its psychopathic wing.

Do not hate American Conservatism.  Pity it.  Pray for the fever to break and for our fellow citizens to rise out of delirium, to rejoin us at the dinner table conversation about human destiny. And defeat them with reason, until they do.

Misc items... plus libertarianism....

While some interesting argument continues re the most recent postings -- both about Intelligent Design and the administration’s abuse of our military (please feel free to continue in comments here) -- let me offer a few pieces of miscellany...

* See a fascinating article briefly summarizing the history of US efforts to stimulate and promote pan-Islamism, as a counter to the Soviets, during the Cold War... and how we are paying for shortsightedness today.

----
* See a fascinating article about the “bottle messages” that have gone out on various space probes.  I am on a committee or two with Jon Lomberg (see below) who has been involved in most of these endeavors.

“The Cassini probe, which is currently exploring Saturn and its moons, was launched with a DVD -- one containing 614,420 signatures. Meanwhile, a rather different message was imagined for the Huygens probe, now resting on the surface of Titan. Jon Lomberg, design director for the Voyager Record (see his Web site at www.jonlomberg.com), pondered sending a message aboard Huygens. His answer, arrived at with help from physicist and science-fiction writer Gregory Benford: a diamond wafer that would survive for billions of yeas after Huygens disintegrated. (Mr. Lomberg calls the wafer an effort to make "an artificial fossil.") The wafer would contain a photograph of people and photographs of astronomical objects intended to help a potential discoverer figure out how old it was.

“DeBeers donated diamond wafers and the "Portrait of Humanity" photo was taken, but Cassini went to Saturn without the message, which Mr. Lomberg says was scrapped amid NASA concerns about who'd get credit for the project and the fact that Fuji-Xerox had sponsored it. (He wrote an interesting article about the project for the journal Contact in Context -- you can read it and see the photo and read extensive ruminations etc at http://www.jonlomberg.com/articles-APOH.html

---
I must thank “PiMal” again for linking us to "Political bias affects brain activity, study finds." I must say the MSNBC article fits nicely into the case I am making at: http://www.davidbrin.com/addiction.html.

 I wish I could interest researchers in broadening such studies, to a scale that might actually save civilization from today’s plague of dogmatism. (Anyone care to point the authors of this study toward my “Open letter...”?)

---
And now the political lamp is lit... but NOT in order to rant against the Monsters. Instead, it is to deliver a poke in the eye in a fresh direction. Well, somewhat fresh. As a contrarian, I like to be seen prodding almost as much at friends as at enemies. Hence I quite-willingly eviscerate fallacies of liberalism and libertarianism... and even science. The difference is that many of these pokes are aimed at flaws in these movements that make them less effective at combatting the real enemies of the Enlightenment. Consider my criticism an attempt to be helpful.

But of course it is more complicated than that. In fact, there are influential members of all of these movements who are - by personality and behavior - in effect enemies of the Enlightenment. But I digress...

* For those of you who have friends with a libertarian leaning (don’t we all?), let me recommend that you have them drop by http://www.reformthelp.org/home/intro/ and especially the theory page at http://www.reformthelp.org/theory/intro/

Partly inspired by my 2002 address to an LP convention (half the delegates wanted to lynch me, prevented only by the other half who were giving me a standing ovation), several groups are trying to pull the Libertarian movement away from the iron grip of dogmatists... the same basic personality type that controls the GOP, the Greens, and keeps trying to control the Democrats. (So far, the Democratic Party remains the last American Institution marginally led by modernists, though only by a thread.) Platonist-essentialists who preach the drug-high of ideological purity at the expense of the pragmatic enlightenment revolution of Locke and Franklin.

As for the agenda offered at that web site, imagine the possibilities. An incrementalist-practical libertarian movement? One that does not grab lapels and scream at voters about how stoopid the average citizen is, for not realizing that all guv’mint is eeeeeevil? But instead offers to push a few, pragmatic steps toward the furtherance and empowerment of individual autonomy and citizenship? In other words, imagine, suddenly, a home for the 40 million somewhat-libertarian-leaning voters who now hold their noses and vote for the GOP, even though they despise Karl Rove’s Culture War.

I don’t agree with every single thing you’ll find at http://www.reformthelp.org/theory/intro/ But it is a step. And it inspired me to add few minor points.

1. I find it effective to note that Natural Rights proclaimers are essentially Platonists, in that they follow the prescription of Plato -- and Marx and Strauss and most religions, for that matter. The deep philosophical underpinning of essentialism is that the imperfect senses rule out any value for pragmatism, or studying the gritty real world, because you will never get perfect answers. (See Plato's Allegory of the Cave.) Therefore, any intelligent person should turn away from gritty pragmatism in favor of essentialist argument and dogma. (Varieties range from logic to faith to incantations to “reason” to “objectivism” even! But it’s all the same under the skin.)

What is stunning is that anyone would swallow the core essentialist assumption: that our imperfect senses are somehow less reliable than the imperfect IMAGINATIONS that carry out so-called reasoning! If we are master self-deluders in the area of perception, often mis-interpreting real world events, shouldn’t that worry go double for self-delusion inside our own heads?

At least when you are dealing with the real world, there remains the ever-present possibility of delusion-correction through CITOKATE. But a dogma that takes memic residence entirely within neurons can be impervious, even to reasoned argument. Even to overwhelming counter-evidence. It can self-reinforce by provoking the release of addiction chemicals. This happens so often that any mature person is obliged to assume that it is reinforcing his or her best-cherished belief, especially if it it held indignantly, self-righteously. With certainty, in a world whose complex and contingent nature seems to preach the sermon of self-doubt.


2. Many of these arguments rage around unspoken assumptions about human nature. But what is our natural condition? Elsewhere I speak of Rousseau, Hobbes and Locke. Here I want to mention a fourth guy .... Thog. Our ancestor, the caveman.

We spent 99% of human generations living like Thog. In other words, the circumstances that channeled baseline human nature -- those for which our genes adapted and evolved... in other words, what is "natural" -- can only be understood by peering at our life during the Neolithic.

I defy anybody, while squinting at our ancestral life in caves -- or primitive wandering tribes -- to seriously support the view that this life was some kind of libertarian/freemarket/creative paradise, rather than a Lord of the Flies era of brutal bullying, perhaps occasionally moderated with a few chastening fables. Test: if that vast expanse really were an era of individual reification and freedom, why was there only glacial progress during that million years?

Progress -- and crude markets -- only began with the arrival of cities. And those cities were managed -- at first -- by brutally hierarchical governments, only a slim improvement on bully clans. The brutality only eased gradually, and markets improved, as progress fed progress and education empowered larger fractions of the population. Incrementally.

In other words, history supports the image of markets and freedom as EMERGENT PROPERTIES of complex systems that are called human societies. Some societies develop good methods that help these properties to continue emerging. For example the traditions of the pragmatic wing of the Enlightenment -- individualism and autonomy, freedom and suspicion of authority.

These memes HELP the synergistic advance of markets and progress, because markets and progress still have enemies. Especially in the kingly and priestly aristocratic modes that habitually seek to restore rule-by-hierarchy. The libertarian reflex (a version of SOA) is generally healthy and right. But we must not focus so hard on the memes that we forget the PROCESS.

And the process is undeniably incremental.

Which is why essentialists hate history! Especially any thought to humanity’s formative years, the million years when our nature took shape. Marx utterly ignored Darwin. So does Ayn Rand. As - of course - does every dogmatist of the far right. They like to grab a few choice historical quotations, pretend they are historically literate, and then ignore the gritty sweep of it all.

Suspicion of Authority -- a prevalent meme

I am on an elite advisory board having to do with nanotechnology. In that discussion I engaged in a review of some topics many of you have heard before, summarizing a lot of ideas more compactly. Anyway, it should be archived and available - so I'll post it here before returning to the essay on gerrymandering. 
                                                       ---    ----   ---

One question rose: "Are nation-states really the right object of focus? Or is it is more likely to be a multi-national mega-company or a small group of hyper-rich individuals?"

Sometimes it makes sense to generalize a little, before getting back to specifics.

What are we talking about here? Will you bear with me through a riff that may seem a bit lectury. It really will become relevant to the topic at hand.

Each of us in this group was raised in a culture that’s featured a weird propaganda program Nearly every novel and Hollywood film has promoted Suspicion of Authority (SOA). Often two subsidiary messages accompany SOA. These are:

   -- Tolerance of Diversity (TOD) and

   -- Personal Harmless Eccentricity (PHE).

Often, in a movie, the protagonist will bond with the audience in the 1st five minutes by:

   (1) exhibiting some quirky eccentricity to establish individualism, and

   (2) having a run-in with some dislikable authority figure (often over the eccentricity.)

And if you want to establish viewer dislike of an authority figure, by all means let him perform some act of intolerance commensurate with the comeuppance you plan him to receive later on. If the intolerance was verbal, he may “learn a lesson.” If he kicks a dog, sucka gonna die. (See my essay: Our Favorite Cliche: The Idiot Plot.)

I raise this here because it is important for us to recognize the cultural roots of our worry. Not only do these three themes -- Suspicion of Authority, Tolerance of Diversity, and Personal Harmless Eccentricity -- express Western/Enlightenment/American/Frontier/Californian value sets. They are also rooted in the Scientific Pragmatism that has been a successful guiding principle for a century -- also called “modernism.”

Suspicion of Authority is not, in itself, completely wise. Many people in our society take the SOA message and use it as an excuse to dive into cycles of addictive self-righteous indignation, often focusing extreme “suspicion of authority” toward on one side of an insipid, ill-defined and fundamentally unhelpful metaphor... the 300 year old French “left-right political axis.”

For more on Indignation addiction, see my article: Open Letter to Researchers of Addiction, Brain Chemistry and Social Psychology.

This simple-minded version of Suspicion of Authority tends to be blinkered and myopic. Such people tend to minimize or ignore the dangers posed by the authority figures on THEIR side.

That’s the immature version of SOA -- which is fueling the so-called “Culture War.”

At its more mature end, Suspicion of Authority is simply an expression of the fundamental lesson of the Liberal Enlightenment -- that we are master self-deceivers. We fool ourselves - as Nobel laureate Richard Feynman said - all-too easily. Therefore, truth and decency cannot be delivered by hierarchically-empowered kings or priests, who have proved they can rationalize doing anything they want and calling it the Greater Good.

Instead, the Liberal Enlightenment says that both truth and good behavior can only come from markets of interaction, in which free players are empowered to hold each other accountable through criticism --  CITOKATE .

Forgive me. CITOKATE is my acronym for  Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error.

Elsewhere I talk about the four biggest “accountability arenas” -- Markets, Democracy, Science and Courts -- each of which handle the process of reciprocal accountability very differently.... but with similar underlying processes. (See: Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competitiveness for Society's Benefit.)

In fact, the SOA is a very important part of how these four arenas work. It empowers players to resent established centers of orthodoxy, giving many of them the balls to jump in the arena as challengers.

Can you see that this supplies a contextual framework for what we’ve been discussing?

What the previous discussion shows is that, in general, each of us fears seeing technological breakthroughs monopolized by some set of elites. The difference between a liberal and a conservative is often over WHICH elites you fear trying to become Big Brother. The irony is that both sides are often right!

Naturally, we feel less threatened by “the United States” developing such powers first, in part because it is home to most of us and partly because of Pax Americana’s (until recently) above average record as a fairly benign imperium, by historical standards.

Also (until recently), the principal modus for error-prevention (or palliation) in the US was open criticism. How many of those other elites instead base their methodology on secretive central control?

The prospect of others taking a leap in this massively empowering technological area naturally seems worrisome. Not only other nation states, but other elites, such as unaccountable multinationals, criminal gangs, terror groups, mad billionaires, mad scientists.... etc.

Having laid that out, let me ask this; is our fear best expressed in specific terms, e,g, about China, India or Rupert Murdoch getting disruptive technologies and taking over? Or might it be better to look at it the other way.

* What fundamental cultural tools should be in place, in order to assure that is DOES NOT MATTER who gets a disruptive technology first?

Implicit throughout our discussion has been some degree of fealty toward the basic assumptions of the liberal enlightenment. That competition, reciprocal accountability, openness, skepticism, criticism (error detection) and flattened access hierarchies, are all good things.

We can see from history that the rate of grievous ERROR in a society is inversely proportional to the presence of these traits... even though every one of them runs counter to human nature and the self-interests of leaders.

The question is this. Can openness and reciprocal accountability prevent terrible mistakes and abuse of nanotechnology? Ray Kurzweil thinks so. I agree, provisionally. In contrast, many thinkers, ranging from Francis Fukuyama and Bill Joy to the Unabomber and Michael Crichton and Margaret Atwood believe our only hope is to reject and repress whole areas of endeavor.

The Fermi Paradox seems to be saying that SOME kind of worrisome mistake may wipe away  intelligent life forms. Is this it? Nano stuff? Is Crichton right?

Hell, I am loyal to the Enlightenment.

Part 10: How Liberalism has Betrayed Modernity

...excellent comments, thanks...

Now you liberals should be warned. After laying into neoconservatives for quite some time, it is time to show faults on the other side. The Left-Right political axis has been a chief tool that romantic anti-modernists use to distract us from the real struggle.

Between future and past.


Part 10. Modernism gets a bad rap from the Left.

The irony is that everybody wants to accept the fruits of the LAST generation's modernist endeavors, while romantics of both left and right want to prevent anything new. I mean, would even the neocons want to go back to segregation? Would the most anti-tech lefty give up cell phones and recent medical advances? And who could complain about that music? All that incredible music.

Still, it is not the fruits of modernity that upset romantics. It is the conceptual underpinnings. The whole personality that they find offensive.

Counter-reaction had already set in before the can-do Congress of 1964 went cold. There had always been romantics on both the left and right who hated modernism. They found justification in Vietnam and urban riots. In Three Mile Island and the Exxon Valdez, and a long list of costly errors.

On the left, dogma-driven romantics warped the natural American suspicion of authority (SOA) into a never-ending list of political axes to grind. The fight for civil rights was such a heady and successful thing - overcoming ages of stereotypes and reflex discrimination - that soon every rock had to be turned over, seeking the next and then the next intolerance to expose, amid a drug-high of indignant fury.

Make no mistake, it was a good thing to extend this trend to gays, the handicapped and even to Wiccan tree-worshippers. But along the way it became less and less about equalizing basic opportunity and ever-more about creating and stoking a movement. A movement that came equipped with ideologies, litmus tests, enemies lists, and long catalogues of forbidden words. Forbidden topics of conversation.

And forbidden technologies, forbidden projects, forbidden ideas. Former allies found themselves ejected from a liberalism that was fast becoming a dogmatic faith, led by an elite priesthood.

First to go were spaceflight and nuclear power, though both had done wonders for the planet and its people.

Then the military, although its desegregation under Harry Truman and George Marshall had been the event that gave civil rights irresistible momentum.

Then polite dissent became a crime within a thousand academic departments that veered toward doctrinal purity, purging any unacceptable deviation.

Next to be ejected from an ever-narrowing liberalism were the nation’s churches, forgetting how men and women of faith had helped to combat slavery, then to promote civil rights, then to resist the moral error of Vietnam. (Thus, they reject one of the greatest modernists of all, Martin Luther King.) And with the churches banished, so were traditional notions of parental guidance during childhood. Finally, that quintessential hippie, Jesus, got the boot from a movement that he probably would have helped to establish, at Woodstock.

Liberalism began reflexively assuming that everything white, rural or suburban, bourgeois, American, or socially demure was automatically suspect, until people with those traits began responding with hostility of their own. The very word “liberal” became a weapon in the hands of its enemies. And when this happened, the movement’s elites only made things worse by diagnosing that the common citizens had been brainwashed by propaganda. Contempt for the masses, invigorating and satisfying, thereupon displayed its deadly side-effect -- political suicide.

(Contempt is ultimately lethal, once the voting masses find out how you feel. We can hope this will be the comeuppance of the haughty neocons, before they do too much more harm.)

But the biggest break was between liberalism and modernism. Every ill-conceived or ill-executed error of the ambitious modernists came under scrutiny. Not for its pragmatic success-failure ratio, but for whether it met the Left’s growing catalogue of litmus standards. Engineers became reviled enemies. The very nerds and technologists who had been at the core of liberal-modernism’s can-do spirit were progressively alienated, until you can hardly find one who will even talk to a liberal anymore.

...on to part 11...

or return to Part 1: The Radical Notion of Modernism