Crooked Neighbors

Clive Crook writes, re libertarianism, liberaltarianism [which sadly has nothing to do with altars], etc:

Libertarians disagree with progressives about markets and with conservatives about "values", and that is really that.

I think he's dodging the issue by putting "values" in scare quotes -- as if "value" judgments had no overlap with markets -- so I'm going to read the sentence without the quotes. This brings out an obvious inconsistency: if libertarians and conservatives agreed about the probable outcomes of markets (or anything else) and disagreed about how to value those outcomes, they would disagree about policy. Since they agree about policy they must have either common values or inconsistent forecasts -- for instance, some libertarians believe in trickle-down economics whereas conservatives don't really want wealth to trickle down.

The debate about "liberaltarianism" has brought out some of the bizarreness of libertarianism as an "ideology." To set up a contrast, conservatism in the typical, Ross-Douthat sense is a complex of things, based around the notion of a body politic: (a) a belief that people ought to behave in traditional, "normal/natural" ways -- these change over time -- and that such behavior should be encouraged or enforced; (b) a belief in social hierarchies, currently the family, previously the feudal extended family incl. servants that are in some sense "personal," i.e. that are maintained by stronger than commercial bonds (being personal, such bonds are exclusive, hence the xenophobic streak); (c) a sense that most of the existing order is just, and that malcontents are (currently) freeloaders or (formerly) people unhappy with their station or (eternally) Deviants. Populism is quite close to this, but instead of (c) has (d): the body politic is sick because of a cancer (deviant/freakish behavior at the head) or because of invading outsiders. Similarly, classical liberalism is a complex of tendencies based around the notion of the explorer: (e) it values freedom, individuality, and self-fulfillment; (f) it has strong anti-hierarchical tendencies, and is anti-feudal -- it prefers contractual to personal relations; (g) it is xenophilic (the "explorer" strain) and stands for the individual against the mob, even when the mob has a point (e.g., murderers and rapists). In addition, some classical and most modern liberals believe (h): the penalties for failure should be limited; everyone should be guaranteed a decent standard of living. Obviously each of these ideologies comes with a certain class identification -- conservatives with the small businessman who's a "pillar of the community" and liberals with travelers, scholars, and to some extent "The Other" in general.

You can't describe libertarianism in these terms at all. Being a libertarian is more like being a prohibitionist than like being a liberal or a conservative -- it's an agenda without a specific worldview. (Many libertarians dishonestly pretend that getting rid of government will make life better for everybody; this, however, just reinforces my point.) Of course it's possible to be a libertarian conservative -- you might believe (e.g.) that the government is weakening "local communities" -- or a libertarian populist -- if you think the govt. is run by special interests and actively oppresses the poor -- or a libertarian liberal -- if you think the govt. is basically a wiretapping agency. None of these ideologies is about government in any direct way -- rather, they're about desirable and undesirable outcomes. It is admittedly true that the relevant political parties have partly been hijacked by narrow interest groups that have little to do with worldviews per se; libertarians make a perfectly sensible pressure group; but there are excellent reasons why more self-aware pressure groups like AIPAC don't agonize over whether to think of themselves as liberal or conservative.

The politics of poverty

It is sometimes argued that American politics is bad for the poor because (a) interest groups have a huge amount of influence through campaign donations, etc., (b) the poor are not a powerful interest group. One could attempt to solve this by taking steps to decrease the influence of interest groups; however, this is not feasible because everyone currently in power is beholden to a range of interest groups: in particular, incumbents gain enormously from interest-group connections, and would be less safe if the groups did not exist. Besides, the swing-voter subset of the public is too ill-informed and clueless to care about relatively high-order "process" issues like campaign-finance reform. In addition to such practicalities, I would argue that lobbyists are a bit of a red herring: the real problem is that the poor are not numerically a powerful political force, esp. when one accounts for age-related disparities in voting -- democracies are, by and large, perfectly happy to give minorities the shaft. Besides, one could argue that technocrats (the alternative, I suppose, to vested interests) are themselves an interest group in some ways; in particular, as a socio-economically homogeneous bunch, they are liable to underestimate the costs of policies when these costs fall on other groups, and to overestimate the costs that fall on themselves and their friends. Very few policies are good for everybody or bad for everybody; most have winners and losers; in these situations, educated elites are likely to adopt policies that shift the costs onto other demographic groups.

One should, therefore, be concerned with how to make an interest group out of the poor: or, more realistically, how to align the interests of the poor with those of extant interest groups. A naive approach to this is Tony Judt's "social democracy of fear" idea -- persuade the [lower half of the] middle class that, in an uncertain world, it is desirable to have some stays against extreme privation. Unfortunately this idea suffers from bad psychology: in an uncertain world, what people actually do is cling bitterly to whatever they have, and protest mosque-building. (However, it is possible to get the middle classes to support existing programs that they benefit from.) The next most obvious solution seems to me as follows: have the govt. subsidize groups such as health-insurance providers, transportation companies, etc. to provide services to the poor and perhaps to employ them. In order to pay for these services, one will need tax raises; if geared toward the super-rich, these might create conflicts of interest between corporations and their CEOs, so gear them toward the middle class or even the poor, by flattening the tax structure somewhat. In other words, if a policy redistributes wealth both upwards and downwards from the middle class, that would mean (a) an interest group with clout will defend the policy, (b) it will ostensibly serve the poor and thus might keep the socialist left only boundedly unhappy. Certain segments of the middle class will be extremely irritated but they would probably have voted Republican anyway.

This sort of coalition of the rich and the poor against the middle class has happened in the past; I believe it was the basic political alignment in 18th-century England. As the GOP's populist-nativist streak grows stronger and stronger, I suspect that this is the sort of anti-populist coalition that would have the best shot at keeping the GOP out of power. The most serious danger is, of course, that the corporations will pocket the money and not provide services to the poor; this can to some extent be ameliorated by making the services broad-based so that the middle class (which is vocal) gets to benefit from them. (They wouldn't be getting their money's worth but I'm not sure they'd notice.) So -- in short -- we should be soaking the middle class in order to provide broad-based services that would make help the top 2% and the bottom quartile. The (electorally necessary) remaining 23% can be picked up through social liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and other "values" issues, as well as by buying the votes of clueless independents w/ the money of the top 2%.

Interest, sensibility, soft paternalism, etc.

Jonathan Bernstein, re horse-race politics:

Pick something that you pay no attention to.  For my dad, I always suggest NASCAR. [...] If you asked him to name a NASCAR driver he'd probably look at you as if you were nuts...but if you named some of them, he'd probably recognize the names.  The idea is that lots and lots of people have about that level of knowledge about most of what happens in politics.  It's just background noise.  We, the people who write and read political blogs, and watch debates, and pay attention to politics even in the off season --we're the minority.

Of course, with politics unlike sports, we're "supposed" to be paying attention, and a lot of people probably don't like to admit that they really aren't. 

This is related to a general set of issues about "paternalism." There's some evidence that poor people are relatively uninformed about (say) the nutritional content of various kinds of food, the correct approach to diet and exercise, etc. By a quirk of character, I'm also clueless about this stuff, because it bores me to death. Really a lot of things bore me to death. When people start talking about carbon footprint or omega-3 fatty acids, or anything of the sort, my eyes glaze over and I start thinking about something else; this is a tendency I can't help, there is just nothing about the subject that engages my imagination. I also absolutely hate shopping. When I'm forced to go to Walmart or a supermarket to buy X, I try to find the aisle that has X, then grab the first item I can find and move on. Labeling requirements would have no impact on my buying habits because I don't look at labels. When I want to buy a computer I pick a manufacturer's website at random and navigate as rapidly as possible to the "buy" button. And so on. This leaves me with the same take on things like ethical shopping and informed consumerism and the rest; yes I agree that one ought to do it, but it's a colossally tedious waste of my time. I would much rather have a trusted agency of some kind tell me what it's OK to buy, and keep me from getting swindled or poisoned or from leaving a "carbon footprint," than have to try and wade through the information myself. I believe a lot of others are similarly situated, esp. the poor, except that it's because they're more preoccupied than uninterested.

(Similarly, regarding Yelp reviews of restaurants, or Amazon reviews of electronics: is there anything quite as dispiriting as wading through 20-30 barely grammatical and usually off-topic rants? It's almost as bad as NYT blog comments. I would much rather just have someone reliable/accountable just certify that certain things work. Similarly, an hour that I spend comparing ticket prices is an hour of mild suffering that I would pay a finite amount to avoid.)

Now, given that I interact mostly with highly educated people, who care about these things, I can make things easier for myself by trusting their judgment. Besides, the market goes some way towards taking care of these issues as long as a critical mass of customers care enough to do their homework. However, customers who care are largely people of a certain socioeconomic status, and in markets that cater largely to poorer people, one presumably does not have such a critical mass, and the arguments for regulation of some kind become fairly strong.

Of course, one must weigh this against the interests of people who do care; who have done their homework, and want to experiment with things that might harm them -- or, for that matter, with people who simply aren't that invested in not being poisoned. It is bad to forbid people from doing things they might have chosen rationally: even if most people make such choices because they're clueless, odds are that you are blocking a fair number from doing something that's victimless. So one is led to a form of soft paternalism according to which it is hard to find something potentially bad for you unless you're really looking for it. In some respects the Great Firewall of China is exemplary: it imposes slight barriers that anyone can overcome if they want to.

However, I do find it rather irritating when such people get sanctimonious about the need for others to be informed browsers or customers or whatever. This shouldn't be necessary: we live in a highly specialized world in which people have better things to do than read labels and compare prices and be well-informed about random stuff that they're not experts about: there are actual experts out there. In addition to the sheer waste of time, "a little learning is a dangerous thing" -- as well as being intellectually rather unsatisfying -- as I guess the example of WebMD suggests.

As for politics -- I think the political scientists' picture of swing voters voting based on whether they feel well-off or not leads to an OK equilibrium, which is quite possibly the best equilibrium achievable with an uninformed public. Would having a more informed public improve political outcomes by enough to overcome the cost to individuals of becoming more informed? I don't know, but I would guess not.

PS in the third world the real choice is between rule by the uninformed and rule by the uniformed.

In Praise of Blunt Instruments

From today's David Brooks column:

The [FinReg] law also calls upon government experts to make some heroic judgments. For example, it calls upon regulators to break up banks that might be about to pose a risk to the country’s economy. That is to say, investors may believe a bank is stable. The executives of the bank may believe it is stable. But the regulators are called upon to exercise their superior vision and determine which banks are stable and which are not.

When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era — when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute it to the have-nots. It’s not a conservative era, when the governing class concedes that the world is too complicated to be managed from the center. It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems. 

I'm reminded of this old Yglesias post -- responding to yet another Brooks column -- that I think is worth quoting at length:

in just the areas where we’d most like effective regulation, we’re sort of unlikely to get it. If traders are likely to overestimate the effectiveness of their risk models, then regulators are prone to those exact same errors. Where does this leave us?

Brooks, I think, thinks it leaves us just as skeptical of regulation as we were before we took the behavioral turn. I think it arguably leaves us somewhere else. It leaves us with an appreciation of crude measures rather than hubristic efforts to get the regulations precisely right. Until the 1980s, banks couldn’t operate across state lines at all. This didn’t make any real sense. Some states (California, New York, Texas) are much bigger than others either in terms of land area or population or both. And of course New York City is much more integrated with parts of New Jersey (and even some parts of Connecticut) than it is with, say, Buffalo. So whatever the “right” rule was here, this clearly wasn’t it. At the same time, this rule, for all its arbitrariness, has the virtues of being clear and largely self-implementing. It doesn’t depend on anyone’s discretion being used wisely or honestly, and it doesn’t depend on anyone’s calculations being right. And it had the effect of limiting the size of banks so that you never had a really enormous bank failure.

Now that’s not to say we should go back to the ban on interstate banking (I honestly have no idea), but I think it shows the general shape of what we should be looking at. The best you can hope from a regulatory regime is that it will be a satisficing solution wherein some fairly crude rule will improve on the outcomes generated by the unfettered market. When that’s not the case, we may as well let the market go unfettered even though that, too, will be somewhat sub-optimal. But at the same time when we’re looking at a regulatory regime that seems to be working okay, and the regulated parties start saying we need tweaks x and y and z and oh there’s no danger there we should be very suspicious. We shouldn’t count on being to fine-tune our results to perfection, we should either lean in with a heavy hand or else stay away.

Muldoon: Glaucus

Glaucus
Paul Muldoon



It went without saying that a king of Corinth
should keep his prize fillies out of the fray
and, rather than have them enmesh
themselves in horse toils, horse tattle,

set them up, each on a plinth,
and fillet their manes with knots and nosegays
and feed them the choicest human flesh
to give them a taste for battle.

It went without saying that after he lost control
of his chariot team at Pelias, and made a hames
of setting them all square,

Glaucus was still on such a roll
it was lost on him that the high point of the games
was his being eaten now by his own mares.

Administrative note

I tried dealing with the Chinese spambot menace by turning on comment moderation but this is clearly a terrible solution because I never remember to check my unmoderated comments. So I've decided to give up and capitulate to our spambot overlords.

Good "primitive" writing

I don't, as a rule, feel comfortable judging modern poetry written in foreign languages; some of it -- Montale, Szymborska, a lot of French stuff -- comes off in English, given the right translator, because the "sensibility" fits into the English tradition; but the bulk of it doesn't work and you wouldn't expect it to. It's odd how different foreign folk poetry is in this regard. For instance I'm pretty confident that this is a good poem, even though it seems to have been translated indifferently:

I want to sing to the memory of my beloved father
who gave me a beautiful, special cow
so I could walk slender-hipped like a handsome prince
before my unjust murder.

(It gives me "the shudder.") This poem/fragment is from the folk tradition of the Batwa, a tribe formerly known as the Pygmies (a deeply necessary bit of rebranding); but this is basically irrelevant to its merit and it could have come from any pastoral tradition. Something similar seems true of this bit from Sappho:

Hesperus, you bring back again
What the dawn light scatters,
Bringing the sheep: bringing the kid,
Bringing the little child back to its mother.

"Hesperus" isn't the operative word. This is all a little puzzling on the face of it, because one's appreciation of these poems seems to have nothing to do with the way they were meant to be appreciated; certainly many of them were lullabies or festival songs, and we're not appreciating them as such. I can think of four sorts of resolutions:

1. Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. This would presumably go along the lines of "what we're hard-wired to find affecting hasn't changed much over the years; people like poems about cows and farmers and basic universal things; a lot of modern work just consists of running away from our real propensities." This line of argument seems unhelpful: if the hard-wiring has to do with content, the argument is false as there are tons of examples of extremely dull pastoral; if it's about style, it's vacuous as it doesn't explain what it is about the style.
2. Conditioning. People "appreciate" poems for being like other poems they appreciate. A few primitive poems have come down to us as examples of what is "great"; we have been told to appreciate Sappho and the ballads, so we tend to appreciate things that bear a family resemblance. I believe there is something to be said for this, but it leaves "the shudder" unexplained: what causes, and what constitutes, the emotional response we have learned to have when reading these poems? Taste might begin in snobbery, but it ends in delight; the snobbery doesn't explain the delight.
3. Imposed richness. People who've read much, of literature or of history, have minds that are teeming with associations for common words. Modern work that is boring is so because it forces the associations in stock ways; primitive work is interesting because it's a relatively blank slate, but with enough pegs on it that one isn't entirely free-associating, and the multitude of associations you pile onto a simple description gives the description a sort of intellectual iridescence, a shimmer of schlock, which makes it pleasing. This seems like the correct way to think about the Greek Anthology, the "Imagists" and e.g. Pound's Chinese poems, and maybe also about Empson's theories of ambiguity.
4. Flattening and distancing; accidental "wit." The Batwa poem works partly because it has juxtapositions that are jarring and unexpected, like cow -> slender-hipped -> prince -> murder. While these might not have been jarring in context, this is irrelevant because we're not reading the poem in context. A generic estranging feature of primitive work is the flattening of hierarchies and registers, the less "developed" hence less ossified state of language and thought; one might find this exciting because it comes off as transgressive even if it wasn't meant that way. (A corollary would be that it's hard to judge ancient work even remotely objectively, as the bits that we find most arresting are in a sense historical artifacts.)

Hitch

That Hitch's sins caught up with him just as his autobiography was being reviewed is a fact that should give him solace; it's a dramatic coincidence, will keep things busy for now, and should bury under an unassailable excuse the coming decline of interest in him. For the rest of us, it is fortunate that the reviewers weren't tempted to pull their punches; there are some marvelously unpleasant takes, like Runciman's (which is accurate) and Jennifer Senior's (which starts out well but runs out of steam and cattiness) and Decca Aitkenhead's (frankly nasty but entertaining), that probably wouldn't have been written if he'd come out with the cancer any earlier than he did.

I've got some obvious points of affinity with the Hitch -- Auden, Orwell, wordplay, politics, contrarianism, and slovenliness come to mind -- and used to be a fan, esp. of the Mother Teresa book, but I'm afraid I've soured on him since then. It doesn't have much to do with politics; the Iraq war was not an important issue for me, and to his credit Hitchens has not been racist about "Islamofascism" unlike e.g. Martin Amis. I think his real problem has been that he let himself go soft, and has never properly faced up to this. I would attribute it to the fact that both his heroes, Orwell and Auden, were bad influences on him, having been soft on themselves in orthogonal ways; they both provided precedent for aspects of his fundamental laziness, and his using them in this way was ultimately, I think, a mark of bad character.

As far as I know the Hitch-Auden connection hasn't been dealt with anywhere, so I suspect I'll come off as riding a hobby-horse here. (The Orwell connection, otoh, one can just assume as Hitch wrote a book about Orwell.) I assure you it's true though. Hitch's Atlantic book reviews are studded with Auden quotes, and he often brings Auden up for no good reason (e.g. while spanking Somerset Maugham for being seedily gay). Hitch is/was also close friends with James Fenton, who was once going to be the next Auden. The NY'er piece about Hitch sounds remarkably like, e.g., Robert Lowell on Auden in Manhattan -- the squalor, the martinis, the tendency to grow prematurely old and repetitive -- and I don't think the imitation was entirely unconscious.

What Hitchens never developed was the intellectual restlessness, the compulsion to introspect and revise, and the fidgety playfulness with ideas, that kept Auden's table-talk and essays interesting. Auden was essentially both creative and donnish, and his worst moments are partially redeemed by the sense that he was trying to do something with the ideas he was playing with. His posturing was tentative and experimental: one cannot imagine him getting all pissy at a dinner party and saying, e.g.,

I was telling you why I knew that Howard Dean was a psycho and a fraud, and you say, ‘That’s O.K.’ Fuck off. No, I mean it: fuck off. I’m telling you what I think are standards, and you say, ‘What standards? It’s fine, he’s against the Iraq war.’ Fuck. Off. You’re MoveOn.org. ‘Any liar will do. He’s anti-Bush, he can say what he likes.’ Fuck off.

On the other hand, this kind of refusal to engage nuance was precisely the sort of thing Orwell would do. (Exhibit A: "Inside the Whale") But Orwell was never part of the cocktail-party circuit; had he been, he wouldn't be remembered today; whether this was a conscious decision on his part or sheer luck I have no idea. The difference is that Orwell wasn't posturing as such: rather, he was an extremely (perhaps overly) serious ideologue whose obsessions were forced on him by circumstances, rather than the desire to come off in a certain light. He was clever or fortunate enough to have original obsessions, or brave enough to put himself in situations where such obsessions are likely to form; one cannot, however, imagine him as a traditional Romantic like Byron, getting into scrapes simply in order to show off.

A quick (consider the hour!) if glib way of completing this thought is to say that Auden was a fox, Orwell was a hedgehog, and Hitch has combined the worst of both traditions -- he has tended to adopt causes in a shiftless improvisatory way, like a fox, but to cling to them with an obstinacy and lack of introspectiveness that are forgivable only in hedgehogs, whose beliefs have deeper sources. Some analysis along these lines no doubt accounts for why he never wrote anything of real distinction; yet, as cautionary tales go, he is not a particularly terrifying one. As Runciman says:

His has been an enviable life: not just all the drink and the sex and the travel and the comradeship and the minor fame (surely the preferable kind), but also the endless round of excitements and controversies, the feuding and falling-out and grudge-bearing and score-settling, the chat-show put-downs, the dinner party walk-outs, the stand-up rows. Christopher Hitchens has clearly had a great time being Christopher Hitchens.

Quick thoughts about good faith

Yglesias cites Mark Kleiman saying:

Remember this the next time a conservative explains how we ought to voucherize public education. The minute that happens, the conservatives will come back and decide that we need to means-test the vouchers. That done, they’ll attack the remaining program as “welfare.”

This seems bang on, and is a good part of why I changed my mind about these things. Given a sufficient degree of good faith and such, it would make sense to argue that the government ought to means-test the safety net, and that people who've got the money to send their kids to school or themselves to the hospital ought to spend on such things. But of course any means-tested program is vulnerable to the welfare-for-people-not-like-us line of attacks unless it provides goodies for a sufficiently large number of people; conversely, any public program that provides goodies for enough people is politically invulnerable. Therefore the best model for sustainable safety-net programs is something like Medicare, which spends most of its money on people who pay (slightly) more in taxes than they get out of the program, but feel -- being irrational -- as if they're getting free stuff. [One could argue about the existence of economies of scale, as with e.g. the NYC subway, but this is beside my point.] Another promising line of attack is to make most people feel vulnerable and in need of a safety net -- this is Tony Judt's notion of a "social democracy of fear" -- but I'm not clear how much mileage an approach like this would have in countries like the US where the rate of downward mobility has not historically been very high.

Link roundup

1. The Short Career of Amy Bishop (LRB)
2. Inappropriate Witticisms (Scott Adams blog)
3. How to split up the US using facebook connectivity data (Pete Warden)
4. Binge drinking won't mess up your test scores (Awl)
5. Margaret Antwood (Book Bench)
6. A well-known case of forgery (LRB) [see also Judith Thurman in the NY'er on fake Roth]
7. Having daughters makes you a reactionary (Gelman)
8. Dead men flying (Awl)
9. Sex in space (NSS review)
10. Horse sense and heartache (NYRB, review of Lydia Davis's collected)
11. Williams kids are too dumb to form racial stereotypes (NatureNews)
12. Fake NY townhouse (Curbed NY)
13. Womb with a view (Metafilter)
14. Trustworthiness of beards (Flowing Data)
15. Europe as Marge Simpson (Strange Maps)
16. What do Norwegian dirtheads and Richard Perle have in common? (NY Press)
17. Swiss euthanasia outfit dumps ashes in lake (Awl)
18. Free land out west (Toothpaste for dinner)
19. Illusions of the year (Neural Correlate) [see also Electric Brae]
20. Three-toed sloth video (Andrew Sullivan)
21. The Froot Loops bubble (Yglesias)
22. Ambien walrus adventure (Toothpaste for dinner)
23. Liquids can form craters too (Phys. Rev. Focus)

"Laurel becomes a devastated brow"

Eleanor Ross Taylor, who I guess is pushing 90, recently won the Ruth Lilly poetry prize. The current issue of Poetry has a bunch of her stuff, some of which is enjoyable. For instance,

And the happiness of  the unconscious
is scurrying already
from the knife-edge of   light,
pain’s night-light,
waiting under the door across the hall.

Dread’s square hair stiffens,
her feet have corners,
trying to trick the stairs out of their creaking,
and the house out of  groaning before coffee,
before resurrection.

Death before resurrection is hard;
breakfast and the stars belong first;
plenty of  time to die all day
when everything does groan, and unhappiness
shakes itself out like a musty old mare
all over the house.
(from "Pain in the House")

I also enjoyed "The Young Writer's Reply," "Kitchen Fable," and "Against the Kitchen Wall."

Royal Obstetricians

From a new review article on the anomalous Hall effect:

The first discovery provided a simple elegant tool to measure carrier concentration in nonmagnetic conductors and played a midwife’s role in easing the birth of semiconductor physics and solid-state electronics in the late 1940s. For this role, the Hall effect was frequently called the queen of solid-state transport experiments.

The associative bridge here seems to have been that both midwives and queens are female. On the other hand there's something pleasantly grotesque about the logic here: you must be the queen, you're covered in someone else's bodily fluids.

"A Fabian non-socialist"

David Bromwich's anti-Obama rant in the LRB is very good. Some excerpts follow.

On Obama's relationship with the rich and famous:

He was new to the national elite and enjoyed his membership palpably. This came out in debates and town meetings where he often mentioned that the profits from his books had lodged him in the highest tax bracket. It would emerge later in his comment on Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon, the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan: ‘I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen.’ One can’t imagine Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy saying such a thing, or wanting to say it. They had known ‘those guys’ all their lives and felt no tingle of reflected glory. Obama has not yet recognised that his conspicuous relish of his place among the elite does him two kinds of harm: it spurs resentment in people lower down the ladder; and it diminishes his stature among the grandees by showing that he needs them.

On his humorlessness:

A spontaneous ability to laugh at oneself, or to make a witty remark that doesn’t wound, is always appreciated in a politician, but it has not been given to Obama. His self-depreciation is stiff and rehearsed, and his cutting comments always sting. His equability in interviews has partly concealed this defect from an admiring press; the radio shock-jocks make more of it, and dwell on his superior airs. When Obama feels edgy or tired, his manner turns condescending and priggish. It is at just such moments that he seems most heartily one of the elite. His saying to Hillary Clinton in an early debate when she called Obama likeable, ‘You’re likeable enough, Hillary,’ was an early example of the propensity. He did it again in the healthcare summit when John McCain was making heavy weather of the campaign promises Obama hadn’t kept, and Obama, where no response was necessary, chose to say: ‘Let me just make this point, John, because we’re not campaigning any more: the election’s over.’ Before the putdown, McCain had looked small and confused – there was dead air all around him – but Obama by his response awarded him the pathos of a beaten man. An oddly unpleasant schoolmasterish moment.

On his national security policy:

the delay in the closing of Guantánamo might be supposed an effect of sheer miscalculation, except that it so plainly falls in with the Obama style. Obama is unique among politicians in running out the clock when there are many minutes left on it and he is not ahead. He did that on Guantánamo. He did it with Israel-Palestine when he required a settlement freeze and then assumed, if he waited long enough, Netanyahu would grow amenable. He did it and still is doing it with Iran...

And again:

He is, by nature, a man of tendencies rather than commitments.He would like things to improve for everyone, even for the rich, but especially for the poor because they need it. Yet he shuns the language of economic equality. He is a Fabian non-socialist. Libertarians are right to see him as an outsize admirer of legitimate authority who relies on state power far too much and too implicitly.

Why coffee stains are ring-shaped

There's a group of clever people at the James Franck Institute (UChicago) who study some of the overlooked and bizarre regularities of everyday life -- e.g. Tom Witten, Sid Nagel, Heinrich Jaeger, and Wendy Zhang. Their work has always struck me as very beautiful and "classical" in its spirit: it is the sort of thing the founders of the Royal Society, or for that matter Euler or the Bernoullis, might have studied and would have appreciated. They work on things like the flow of sand out of thin nozzles, the fact that liquids do not splash on top of Mt Everest, and the extent to which a droplet of water that pinches off a nozzle remembers the shape of the nozzle.

An esp. nice result that I heard about at a talk yesterday was Witten's group's theory of why coffee-stains have the sharp-edged, ring-like shapes they do. [The relevant references are Nature 389, 827 (1997) and Phys. Rev. E 62, 756 (2000).] The answer goes something like this: the edge of the coffee-bearing water droplet snags on surface roughnesses and gets pinned. (On sufficiently smooth surfaces, e.g. Teflon, coffee stains are not ring-shaped but uniform.) As water evaporates the bubble has to shrink; the water evaporates at roughly the same rate everywhere so ceteris paribus the bubble would want to shrink everywhere, but it can't because that would decrease its diameter and require the edge to move, and the edge can't move because it's pinned. The only way to keep the edge where it is while all of the surface evaporates at the same rate is for fluid to flow from the center of the droplet to the edge, to replenish the water lost from the edge. So over time most of the water in the bubble evaporates from the edge, and most of the solute gets deposited at the edge, so the stain is ringlike.

Under certain conditions, the edge is "almost" pinned but periodically unsnags ("depins"), moves some distance, and then snags again; this leads to terrace-like stain patterns.

Physics and Incompleteness

Responding to new-age spewage the other day -- at greater length than was probably warranted -- I asserted in passing that Godel's (first) incompleteness theorem probably didn't apply to "theories of everything" in physics because such theories need not include Peano arithmetic, which is one of the hypotheses in Godel's proof. I'm going to think aloud about this; comments would be appreciated.

Let me remind you briefly of how Godel's proof works. You start with an axiomatic system (i.e., a list of allowed characters -- a language -- and a list of axioms in that language) that includes all the usual operations involving natural numbers. Because of the unique prime factorization property, you can assign each string in the language a unique number (called its Godel number) as follows: first assign each allowed character a number, then encode the string as 2^(number of first character) x 3^(number of second character) x 5^(...). E.g. if the language were English, you could encode the string "babe" as 2^2 x 3^1 x 5^2 x 7^5 = some large number. You could recover the word from the number by counting the 2's in its (unique) prime factorization to get your first character, then counting the 3's for your second character, and so on. Now you can start making self-referential statements within your language, you can say something like "the string with Godel number N has certain properties," which would mean "the string 'blah' has certain properties." You could drop "the string" as that's implied by the quotes.

It turns out that one of these sentences is essentially Quine's version of the liar's paradox:

“Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation” yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

(The stuff in quotes is to be encoded as a Godel number, so formally the statement would look like "The Godel number G has certain properties, and is thus possible to construct in the language of Peano arithmetic.)

Now the point is that none of this would have worked without the uniqueness of prime factorization. And it's hard to see why a physical theory of everything -- if it were axiomatizable -- would have prime factorization in it. Consider the following simple theory of everything, which is of course incorrect but is probably structurally similar to what the real one would look like -- it has a finite list of things, 1 through N, each with a charge and a mass; the forces acting on each of them in any given configuration follow from Maxwell's equations, and how they react to the force is determined by Newton's laws of motion. (Throw in gravitation as well, it doesn't matter.) The point is that you now have all the prerequisites for an axiomatic system in which one can ask all sorts of questions about what the velocities, positions, position-velocity correlations, etc. of the particles are at any time, i.e., this is Laplace's universe. The key point is that the minimal set of mathematical rules you need to make sense of this theory are rules about arithmetical operations on the real numbers. Although the reals include the naturals, they are infinitely simpler because everything divides everything else. Natural numbers do not enter the language of the theory at all -- yes, you need natural numbers to list the particles while constructing the language of the theory, but that's in the meta-language. Ergo no prime factorization, ergo no self-referential statements, ergo no incompleteness theorem. While we do not know quite what the theory of everything would be it seems almost certain to be structurally rather like the one I just described. (You might say, well, isn't quantum mechanics "grainy" and doesn't it therefore have something to do with the integers; the graininess doesn't enter into the fundamental equations, but even if this were the case, you only add and never multiply quanta so you wouldn't need all of Peano arithmetic so you wouldn't have an incompleteness theorem.)

I think this is all true so far as it goes but there's a potential loophole in the argument, which is that one might want to ask questions about the world that are not phraseable in the language of the theory. For example one might want to ask questions about thermodynamics, involving macroscopic quantities like pressure and temperature in my toy axiomatic system. I could, in principle, define pressure in terms of a sum over all the velocities of the particles near the walls divided by the number of particles (or something like that), but really what I want to talk about when I'm talking about pressure is a property that becomes well-defined only for systems, and I can't even construct my toy theory of everything for an infinite system. Therefore, what I'm really doing when I construct thermodynamics is setting up an entirely new axiomatic system by a process of taking limits over larger and larger versions of the original theory of everything.

Basically what this says is that a theory of everything in the ordinarily understood sense is not a theory in which a lot of the questions that physicists in practice work on would be well-defined. Could these "effective" theories, or the union of them, be strong enough to include PA? Maybe. In particular, a lot of natural-number arithmetic comes in from the topological properties of wavefunctions, the spaces they live in, etc. I'm still doubtful that you'd ever have to multiply natural numbers, but it's not beyond the bounds of possibility.

Dept. of complicated rhyme schemes

Brad Leithauser (I think) says this poem has the most intricate rhyme scheme of any really successful poem. BTW flush/flash is what's called pararhyme and was an invention of Wilfred Owen's. It's neither dulce nor decorum but it's kind of a nice effect. Interestingly most of the formal inventions in 20th century English poetry have been by relatively minor writers -- Owen, Marianne Moore, Kay Ryan, R.S. Thomas, Louis MacNeice, H.D. etc. -- and someone like Auden was much more of an adopter than an inventor.

from Five Songs
W.H. Auden

That night when joy began
Our narrowest veins to flush,
We waited for the flash
Of morning's leveled gun.

But morning let us pass,
And day by day relief
Outgrows his nervous laugh,
Grown credulous of peace,

As mile by mile is seen
No trespasser's reproach,
And love's best glasses reach
No fields but are his own.

Pundits on kids

E.D. Hearse takes on the most widely read morons in America:

She also challenges the claim by economists, and taken up by influential writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Kristof, that if only students were exposed to excellent teachers for three to five years in a row, the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students would be overcome. It is true that some math teachers have been able to make up as much as 33 percent of the lag for some students in a single year—whence the economists’ extrapolation to the three-to-five-year figure.

Not, of course, that one can assume either Gladwell or Kristof knows what an extrapolation is. I generally recommend the article -- a review of Diane Ravitch's [a.k.a. Dan Ravage] new book on how school choice has failed -- as it is sporadically sensible and has a lot of interesting factoids. E.g. here's Richard Hofstadter on child nature (on which see also Grobstein):

To believe that Dewey’s synthesis was successful required a certain credulity about the pre-established harmony between child nature and democratic culture which not everyone could share. It seemed…that one would have to give up either the emphasis on child nature or the emphasis on educating for democracy.

I would however part ways with both Hearse and Ravage when they rhapsodize about the "neighborhood school" as a pillar of the community. (I also find Hearse's whining about international league tables a little tiresome. Bloody awful, isn't it, that other countries educate their kids?) Most of the real problems with the school system have to do with schools for the poor; these tend to be in areas where there isn't a meaningful sense of community -- whose residents are in any case largely transient -- and the approach of the successful, no-excuses sort of inner-city schools has been to give kids an alternative social anchor from their "communities." Beyond that I don't think K-12 education can be sensibly addressed in isolation from the Big Sort -- it's a good thing to get middle-class kids into the public school system as their parents function as watchdogs, but it's not sufficient because it doesn't deal with the districts where most parents are too illiterate and/or busy to find out what their kids are learning at school.

Another bit of information that I think is crucial to this entire picture is this study (I'm quoting from an email I wrote a while ago):

[...] there's Richard Elmore's paper on high-performing schools. What Elmore found was that high-performing inner-city schools were different from both suburban schools and crap inner-city schools, which were rather like each other. In suburban schools, the instructors assumed (correctly) that parents would play the primary role in the education of students, and were hands-off; in crap inner-city schools, the instructors (incorrectly) made the same assumption, and let the kids smoke crack in class; in good inner-city schools, instructors realized that they had to make up for the lack of useful parenting, and put a huge amount of work into making sure the students were kept engaged.

Geezers in Freezers

A Winter Ode to the Old Men of Lummus Park, Miami, Florida

Donald Justice

Risen from rented rooms, old ghosts
Come back to haunt our parks by day,
They crept up Fifth Street through the crowd,
Unseeing and almost unseen,
Halting before the shops for breath,
Still proud, pretending to admire
The fat hens dressed and hung for flies
There, or perhaps the lone, dead fern
Dressing the window of a small
Hotel. Winter had blown them south--
How many? Twelve in Lummus Park
I counted, shivering where they stood,
A little thicket of thin trees,
And more on benches, turning with
The sun, wan heliotropes, all day.

O you who wear against the breast
The torturous flannel undervest
Winter and summer, yet are cold,
Poor cracked thermometers stuck now
At zero everlastingly,
Old men, bent like your walking sticks
As with the pressure of some hand,
Surely they must have thought you strong
To lean on you so hard, so long!

Birthers and calories

There's this well-known paper by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler that shows -- I haven't really read it in detail but the analysis is simple and seems pretty airtight, and it is widely cited -- that political misinformation is very hard to correct; in particular, people tend to "double down," and lend more credence, to myths that line up with their political beliefs after they are debunked. (Empirical evidence for Credo quia absurdum est.) This is, of course, a broader phenomenon than just politics; it appears to have been behind some of the hysterical reaction last year (was it last year?) when someone suggested that mammograms were unnecessary for certain age groups. Via Nyhan's blog, here's an article describing how evidence-based medicine is ineffectual when it comes to getting people to give up their false beliefs re medication. (The article also has some pretty interesting stuff about breast cancer.)

This also applies to stuff like listing the calorie content of stuff on menus. Although salad dressing is unhealthy, it's hard to debunk the myth that salads are healthy no matter what. (If you don't like this example -- I don't know how true it is; frankly, food is not something I've ever been that interested in -- there must be other cases of deeply held misperceptions.) In general, this research on myth-busting suggests why (as e.g. Yglesias says here in passing) calorie labeling has been ineffectual so far, and will continue to be ineffectual, at getting people to form accurate beliefs about what's healthy. Of course, it might still be good for other things, like reminding people of how unhealthy the stuff they already consider unhealthy is.

snarXiv

In its own words:

The snarXiv is a ran­dom high-energy the­ory paper gen­er­a­tor incor­po­rat­ing all the lat­est trends, entropic rea­son­ing, and excit­ing mod­uli spaces. The arXiv is sim­i­lar, but occa­sion­ally less ran­dom.

The abstracts are utterly compelling. I have absolutely seen crazier-sounding stuff than this on the arxiv:

The SUSY CP Problem

Authors: D. Nelson, R. E. Fermi

Comments: 7 pages, minor corrections

Subjects: High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)

Some work has been done in recent papers on models of bubbles. We take a holomorphic approach to a primordial resolution of the fine-tuning problem, and find that observables follow from adjoint Matrix Models surrounded by a stack of (p,q) 7- branes wrapped on an Euclidean symmetric space. We conjecture that a surface defect is present as realized in the MSSM. When constructing a solution to the U(1) problem, we discover that, in the Clebsch-Gordon decomposition case, a (p,q) 7- brane reduction of superconformal TQFTs is gauge mediated.

T.S. Eliot, without the text

Eliot's book of essays on Elizabethan drama is available online; I strongly recommend it, as much for the quotations as anything else. (The pdf renders best, I think; just right for an iPad.) I'd read most of the essays in this book a long time ago -- 2004 or 2005, I think; I remember being impelled to spend a summer reading Webster and the lesser Elizabethans, who by and large did not live up to Eliot's hype -- and had forgotten a lot of the good stuff in here. A few quotations that jumped out:

Now comes my lover tripping like a roe,
And brings my longings tangled in her hair.
(Peele)

I pass'd, methought, the melancholy flood,
With that grim ferryman which poets write of,
Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.
The first that there did greet my stranger soul,
Was my great father-in-law, renowned Warwick;
Who cried aloud, "What scourge for perjury
Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?"
(Shakespeare)

Go hurtless souls, whom mischief hath oppressed
Even in first porch of life but lately had,
And fathers fury -- go, unhappy kind,
O little children, by the way full sad
Of journey knowen.
Go see the angry kings.
(Jasper Heywood, translating Seneca re the dead children of Hercules -- I found the Latin helped me parse the English here:

ite ad Stygios, umbrae, portus
ite, innocues, quas in primo
limine vitae scelus oppressit
patriusque furor;
ite, iratos visite reges.)

If thou wilt stay,
Leap in mine arms; mine arms are open wide;
If not, turn from me, and I'll turn from thee;
For though thou hast the heart to say farewell,
I have not power to stay thee.
(Marlowe)

The rawish dank of clumsy winter ramps
The fluent summer's vein; and drizzling sleet
Chilleth the wan bleak cheek of the numb'd earth,
While snarling gusts nibble the juiceless leaves
From the nak'd shuddering branch
(Marston)

Mineralnye Vody

Earlier today, some airport-related link reminded me of this marvelous old Economist piece about Russian airports (gated version; Dec 19 2006). My favorite part:

Mineralnye Vody: To reach this airport, in the north Caucasus, passengers pass through a series of military roadblocks, where documents and the boots of cars are checked by slouching policemen, looking for weapons or terrorists. But a sensible terrorist would leave his weapons at home and buy new ones at the airport, where a wide selection of enormous knives and ornamental Caucasian swords is on sale. There are also embossed Caucasian drinking horns, and a large number of Brezhnev-era copies of the Kama Sutra.

Mineralnye Vody airport is a lower circle of hell. In Soviet times, before the region that the airport serves was desolated by separatist insurgencies, blood feuds and government brutality, the nearby mineral spas were popular holiday resorts. The building is incongruously large for a part of Russia that today, for all its macho hospitality and merriment, feels more African than European in its violence, poverty and corruption. It is weirdly cold inside. Feral cats have been sighted. The floor has not been cleaned since perestroika; the toilets are hauntingly squalid. On the wall there are arrival and departure boards that no longer work, and a big, proud map of the Soviet Union.

The article is also memorable for coining the phrase "incremental babushka."

And now for sth completely different... The Telegraph has a pic of a lemur playing with an Easter egg.

"Grief is not an achievement"

Jon Venables, one of the two boys involved in the horrifying James Bulger murder, has been arrested again, on charges that the British govt. -- probably with reason -- won't divulge. Andrew O'Hagan has a very good piece on this in the LRB; I particularly liked his rant about how the victim's mother has become a media sensation:

The British papers were in their favourite mode, evident again this week: mixing vengeance with sentiment, while exuding prurience and humbug. Denise Fergus, the mother of James Bulger, is being paraded as the proper arbiter of justice: as if the mother of a murdered child should call the shots, should be the one to decide what ought to be done with the killers. She is not to be challenged: who in their right mind would seek to challenge a grieving parent?

Yet we need to challenge her, because that also means challenging the moral stupidity the media’s use of her represents, the urge towards counter-violence that always seems to make sense to the mind of the average working-class Briton. Of course she wants the boys behind bars for ever. She wants their rights taken away. Which of us, given the horror, would never be tempted down that road? No matter what the law says, a sense of entitlement nowadays devolves to the families of murder victims. The tabloids and not just the tabloids like it that way. Among the tabloids I include the Today programme.

This case has, from the beginning, involved the need to say that grief is not an achievement, doesn’t confer power, and Denise Fergus should have no say at all in the fate of the boys who killed her son. She speaks contemptuously of the justice system, feels she should be consulted on every aspect of the case, and the media egg her on because her words claim attention and sell papers. She, too, is one of the shades haunting the Strand Shopping Centre. We want to listen to her, but to act on what we hear would be criminal. She says she won’t rest until those boys are truly punished for what they did: she wants them incarcerated under their original names – a death sentence.[*] Meanwhile the justice secretary feels he must pay lip-service to her status in all of this.

That said, I suspect this would have been handled much worse in the American system, where some rising prosecutor would have mined substantial political capital out of the case.

Doctor 'Hue

It's to be regretted that Bill Donohue isn't as well-known as, e.g., Abe Foxman, because he's a lot funnier. Apparently his official role is to fight anti-Catholic tropes in the media but he moonlights as an all-purpose culture warrior. Below are some of the things he's said, they're really quite breathtaking. (I would be curious to know what a "normal" socially conservative Catholic like Ross Douthat thinks of this guy.)

On "The Passion of the Christ" [per Wikipedia]:

Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, OK? And I'm not afraid to say it. That's why they hate this movie. It's about Jesus Christ, and it's about truth. It's about the Messiah.

On sex:

Sexual libertines, from the Marquis de Sade to radical gay activists, have sought to pervert society by acting out on their own perversions. What motivates them most of all is a pathological hatred of Christianity. They know, deep down, that what they are doing is wrong, and they shudder at the dreaded words, "Thou Shalt Not." But they continue with their death-style anyway.

Secular saboteurs have often seized the arts to make a statement. That's why the blasphemous often tracks the obscene: if the goal is to put an artistic dagger into the heart of culture, then it makes sense to use all the ammo available by attacking the sacred. And they are certainly masters of that art. From scatological artistic exhibitions to the latest obscene installation, the charlatans have succeeded in politicizing the arts and denigrating Christianity.

On pedophiles, Ratzinger, and the Catholic church:

when Ratzinger's subordinates recommended therapy for Hullermann, he approved it. That was the drill of the day: after being treated, the patient (I prefer the term offender) returns to work. It's still the drill of the day in many secular quarters today, particularly in the public schools. A more hard-line approach, obviously, makes more sense, but the therapeutic industry is very powerful.

(This is the conservative synthesis in full bloom -- the instinctive leap from purification to violence is very Jack-D-Ripperian. Pass me the grain alcohol and rainwater!)

PS has anyone seen the South Park episode that mentions Donohue?

UPDATE Gawker (via Awl) explains what Donohue meant when he said that the church had a "homosexuality problem, not a pedophilia problem":

See, if the kids were post-pubescent—12 or 13, according to Bill—then it's not pedophilia anymore, it is homosexuality. And that means it's not the fault of the church, it is the fault of Gays.

A slightly more "moderate"-sounding version of this argument emanates from Ross Douthat. I consider my initial question largely answered.

Influential books

Yglesias, Tyler Cowen, and Kieran Healy [and probably lots of other bloggers] have been posting lists of books they found particularly influential. I'm finding it harder than I expected to come up with a similar list; I feel like I've picked up most of my ideas about life, politics, etc. -- at least the valuable ones -- by trying to reconcile apparent contradictions; the contradictions are typically easy to state, but I don't find other people's resolutions of them terribly useful. Most books that have actually mattered to me have done so by raising rather than settling problems. This should explain why I have more fiction than nonfiction on the list:

1. The Prince, by Machiavelli: for exemplifying the strictly instrumental approach to politics, and reminding me that it's valuable because good policies are useless unless you have the power to enforce them.

2. Some Versions of Pastoral, by William Empson: for the notion that "life is essentially inadequate to the human spirit, yet a good life must avoid saying so" -- as Empson said elsewhere, that "life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis" -- which is at the heart of Empson's sense of the importance of literature. There's an internal paradox in this, I suppose, as Empson also declared elsewhere that "Critics, as barking dogs, are of two sorts: those who merely relieve themselves against the flower of beauty, and those, less continent, who afterwards scratch it up. I must, I confess, aspire to the second of these classes." The Pastoral book is the most important because it quite directly addresses the question of propaganda from a literary perspective, and once -- like me -- you've decided that there aren't objective moral truths, the study of propaganda becomes terribly important.

3. Collected Essays by George Orwell: especially the ones about Lear and Gandhi, which raise an important issue:

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

This is a dangerous idea to take seriously -- it seems clear that there are at least some ways in which human beings leave room for unambiguous improvement -- but it identifies something that I've always considered a bit whiffy about the saints.

4-5. The Dyer's Hand and Collected Poems by W.H. Auden: for a more-or-less worked out attempt, though ultimately a flawed one, to create a sensible contemporary ethics. Auden's essay on "making, knowing, and judging" is a classic; so are a lot of the famous -- and facially silly -- distinctions between Europe and America in "The American Scene," which periodically give way to passages like this:

As the issue between virtue first and liberty first becomes clear, so does the realization that the cost to any society that accepts the latter is extremely high, and to some may seem prohibitive. ... But if the principle is accepted, it means accepting this: it means accepting a State that, in comparison to its Roman rival, is dangerously weak (though realizing that, since people will never cease trying to interfere with the liberties of others in pursuing their own, the State can never wither away. Tyranny today, anarchy tomorrow is a Neo-Roman daydream); it means accepting a “Society,” in the collective inclusive sense, that is as neutral to values (liberty is not a value but the ground of value) as the “nature” of physics; it means accepting an educational system in which, in spite of the fact that authority is essential to the growth of the individual who is lost without it, the responsibility for recognizing authority is laid on the pupil; it means accepting the impossibility of any “official” or “public” art; and, for the individual, it means accepting the lot of the Wandering Jew, i.e. the loneliness and anxiety of having to choose himself, his faith, his vocation, his tastes.

And of course "In Praise of Limestone"

6. The Penguin Book of Everyday Verse, ed. David Wright: for a good introduction to the folk poetry of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the early 19th cent., which leaves one at least somewhat conscious of the limits of "progress" and of the extent to which human life is a zero-sum game that cannot be raised very far above the level of farce, regardless of how much technological progress one makes.

7. In search of lost time by Marcel Proust: for its brave attempt to argue that life is worth living because the pleasant recollections that pile up over time are enough to justify the drab interstices between them. (This offers an indirect resolution to the "lifespan dilemma" -- if your average utility per moment is proportional to how long you've lived before that moment, then average and total utility are the same thing and a long life is worthwhile on either count. I'm not, btw, convinced that this is the case, but Proust's way of reconstructing a life from its sensations makes it seem at least possible.)

8. Ulysses by James Joyce: for refuting the solipsists by example. You can stub your toe on Bloom.

9. The Canterbury Tales: for offering a reasonably complete portrait of what might be considered a harmonious "beehive" society; for making it seem a beautiful whole despite the lack of adequate plumbing; and for, in a somewhat limited sense, his defense of human existence as at least pleasantly vigorous if not dignified.

10. A Tale of a Tub, Gulliver, etc., by Jonathan Swift: for offering, through his unremitting and entertaining misanthropy, a credible case for the prosecution (contra Chaucer, that is).