Quotation: Malthus on the search for truth

From the first chapter of Thomas Malthus' Essay on Population:

The advocate for the present order of things is apt to treat the sect of speculative philosophers either as a set of artful and designing knaves who preach up ardent benevolence and draw captivating pictures of a happier state of society only the better to enable them to destroy the present establishments and to forward their own deep-laid schemes of ambition, or as wild and mad-headed enthusiasts whose silly speculations and absurd paradoxes are not worthy the attention of any reasonable man.

The advocate for the perfectibility of man, and of society, retorts on the defender of establishments a more than equal contempt. He brands him as the slave of the most miserable and narrow prejudices; or as the defender of the abuses. of civil society only because he profits by them. He paints him either as a character who prostitutes his understanding to his interest, or as one whose powers of mind are not of a size to grasp any thing great and noble, who cannot see above five yards before him, and who must therefore be utterly unable to take in the views of the enlightened benefactor of mankind.

In this unamicable contest the cause of truth cannot but suffer. The really good arguments on each side of the question are not allowed to have their proper weight. Each pursues his own theory, little solicitous to correct or improve it by an attention to what is advanced by his opponents.

The friend of the present order of things condemns all political speculations in the gross. He will not even condescend to examine the grounds from which the perfectibility of society is inferred. Much less will he give himself the trouble in a fair and candid manner to attempt an exposition of their fallacy.

The speculative philosopher equally offends against the cause of truth. With eyes fixed on a happier state of society, the blessings of which he paints in the most captivating colours, he allows himself to indulge in the most bitter invectives against every present establishment, without applying his talents to consider the best and safest means of removing abuses and without seeming to be aware of the tremendous obstacles that threaten, even in theory, to oppose the progress of man towards perfection.

Just ran across it. Not thinking of anything in particular except that the public sphere is bigger and faster than it used to be, but not all that much better, perhaps.

Comment Elsewhere: Color Coded Fiscal Crisis

In response to this story and this story about state government budget impasses leading to the brink of shutdowns, layoffs, etc. -- in the comment section here, I made a suggestion (color added):

We’re going to need color-coded maps:

• Red = Republican-induced Shutdown
• Orange = Republican Brinksmanship
• Yellow = Budget Impasse but still solvent
• Blue = Blue Dog Democrat Capitulation slashes social, educational funds and corporate taxes
• Green = Sane people still in charge.

[Welcome, Avedon Carol readers!]

Pictures: Detail

Comment Elsewhere: Pony Chokers

I wrote:

A quarter-century from now, when one of your students asks you when “pony-choker” became slang for the old Republican party, you can say that you were there at the creation….

A millenium for now, some enterprising anthropologist will note that the absence of large-scale pony graveyards in the styrofoam strata suggests that the ancient tales of “pony-choking republicans” were apocryphal. Or perhaps that the tradition of pinata can explain the idiom.

You have to go read the original to see why, and it's worth it.

(also, I noted the overlap of neo-confederate and anti-New Deal/stimulus thought....

If you don't answer any questions, the result is "fearless"

Your Word is "Why"

You see life as complicated and intriguing. The only thing you know for sure is that you haven't figured it all out yet. You question everything and believe very little. And whatever you believe is likely to change. You are interested in theories, philosophies, and religions... even if you don't buy into any of them. You are also fascinated by how things work. You'd like to understand as much in the world as possible.

What's Your Word? [via]

Also, odds are good that, had I lived in the 17th century, I'd have been a peasant, or, at best, a clerk, not an artist, inventor, explorer, poet or philosopher. Oddly, that wasn't an option.

Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!

It's been a while since I bothered updating my Impeachment Index, partially out of exhaustion, attention to other matters, etc.

But the latest issue of Vanity Fair has An Oral History of the Bush White House which is a fairly extensive "greatest hits" based on interviews with a whole bunch of highly placed people. [via]

I'm too much of an historian not to say "take it with a grain of salt." But it's fundamentally consistent with the view we've had for years from the outside: they lied, and broke laws, and got most of the important stuff wrong over and over and over again.

My favorite two bits (though the whole thing is worth reading, despite its length):

Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor:
I was invited to a conference in Saudi Arabia on Iraq, and a Saudi said to me, Look, Mr. Fischer, when President Bush wants to visit Baghdad, it’s a state secret, and he has to enter the country in the middle of the night and through the back door. When President Ahmadinejad wants to visit Baghdad, it’s announced two weeks beforehand or three weeks. He arrives in the brightest sunshine and travels in an open car through a cheering crowd to downtown Baghdad. Now, tell me, Mr. Fischer, who is running the country?

Not only did they screw up the Middle East, they thought nothing of screwing over their own people:

Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: The Cheney team had, for example, technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails. I remember one particular member of the N.S.C. staff wouldn’t use e-mail because he knew they were reading it. He did a test case, kind of like the Midway battle, when we’d broken the Japanese code. He thought he’d broken the code, so he sent a test e-mail out that he knew would rile Scooter [Libby], and within an hour Scooter was in his office.

Yeah, the VP's office was spying on the NSC. I actually laughed out loud at that one.

Inauguration Lyrics: Power and Glory

The Power and the Glory
by Phil Ochs

Come and take a walk with me thru this green and growing land
Walk thru the meadows and the mountains and the sand
Walk thru the valleys and the rivers and the plains
Walk thru the sun and walk thru the rain

Here is a land full of power and glory
Beauty that words cannot recall
Oh her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom
Her glory shall rest on us all (on us all)

From Colorado, Kansas, and the Carolinas too
Virginia and Alaska, from the old to the new
Texas and Ohio and the California shore
Tell me, who could ask for more?

Chorus

Yet she's only as rich as the poorest of her poor
Only as free as the padlocked prison door
Only as strong as our love for this land
Only as tall as we stand

Chorus

Pride, or Pardon?

So, we're down to the wire. I've been watching the White House News Site as well as the usual outlets, and haven't seen any hint of pardons yet. What's President Bush going to do? Will he:

1. Issue pardons tomorrow morning on his way out the door? If so, will they be a select few, or a huge blanket pardon? The potential for prosecution is real, and it's their last chance to insulate themselves against the consequences of their actions.


2. Not issue pardons at all? He and Cheney seem so convinced of the rightness and legality of their actions that it would be hypocrisy to pardon anyone. More importantly, someone who is pardoned can't invoke their right to silence in the face of self-incrimination, which means that those pardoned could well be compelled to testify against unpardoned individuals.

I think the latter course more likely, but I'm going to keep watching. What do you think?

Soundtrack: Presidential Rag by Arlo Guthrie.

Why do we only psychoanalyze the misstatements of politicians we dislike? I don't know but we do.

"I'm telling you there's an enemy that would like to attack America, Americans, again. There just is. That's the reality of the world. And I wish him all the very best."
-- President George W. Bush, 12 January 2009

Comment Elsewhere and The Ten Rules of Poststructuralist Prose

In response to an Orac takedown of New Age pseudo-scientific quackery, I wrote

The challenge in studying semiotics or postmodernism is that, unlike studying literature, or history, or medicine, they are not first-order fields. Both of them are the study of the way in which we think, and as such have been very useful. Scholars like Pierre Bourdieu, Thomas Kuhn, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault have really expanded our understanding of our own linguistic and cultural habits, the ways in which we both comprehend the world and limit our scope of action therein.

That said, there have been some truly awful intellectual and linguistic directions taken by postmodernism and semiotics: the former lends itself to a kind of nihilistic relativism which denies truth and meaning entirely; the latter to a kind of free-association in which things end up meaning rather the opposite of what everyone intuitively expects. There's junk science in every field, and these are relatively new fields; the ratio is still kind of high and both tend to attract "maverick" and "ooh, it's new and cool" types.

As I said before, the woo-use of semiotics draws on the way in which "signifier" and "signified" can be very different things: the way the flag stands for the nation, or "White House" stands for the presidency (or the nation). The wooists are taking that fairly straightforward process of unpacking meaning from language, and turning it into sympathetic magic. It's no different from their use of quantum mechanics, and you won't understand semiotics or postmodernism by reading Milgrom more than you'll understand Heisenberg.

One thing I didn't say is that postmodernists and semioticists have been responsible for some of the most opaque and bizarre prose in academic history, which is part of why they are so useful to voodoo peddlers. I remembered a piece I read back when post-modernism was just getting a foothold in US academia, and it was still called by its more linguistic term, "post-structuralism." It's a funny piece, still, for those of us who have to read this stuff:

TEN RULES FOR MAKING YOUR PROSE POSTSTRUCTURALIST:
Ruth and Kenny Mostern, Z Magazine, June 1991, p. 7.

1. Change all appearances of the verb "to be" to "can be represented as." Corrolary: Always refer to the word "is" as the copula.

2. Never "analyze"; always "deconstruct."

3. Never refer to "ideas" or "thoughts"; replace these concepts with "episteme," "habitus," or "ideological structure."

4. Actions are "always already overdetermined" by the categories in rule 3.

5. Feel free to add the following prefixes and suffixes to any word in your vocabulary: "post," "neo," "dis," "over," "quasi," "co," "de," "ism," "ize," "ify," "ness," "ology."

6. Use parentheses and dashes in the middle of words.

7. Every activity is "writing"; all things are "texts"; all people are "subject positions"; all collections of things are "structures"; all that is outside a structure is a "margin."

8. Conclude all discourse with several options and a question.

9. Call anything you don't understand "essentialist" and denounce it.

10. Refer to at least one of the following three French authors in everything you write: Foucault, Derrida, Lacan. Corollary: Appropriate all untranslated French words from your English versions of their texts.

Oh, that takes me back....

See also here and here and here.