The Great Seduction

The American Crash

Should we blame our supposedly "feckless" political class for the crisis? The editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal believe that the Beltway class are so incompetent that they can't even make sausage:

America has survived a feckless political class in the past, and it will again after this week. But Monday's crash and burn of the Paulson plan on Capitol Hill reveals a Washington elite that has earned every bit of the disdain that Americans have for it. This crowd can't even make sausage.

Using stock conservative language to criticize his own party, David Brooks, the house Republican at the Times, agrees. In "Revolt of the Nihilists", Brooks blinks at the lacunae at the center of American political culture. But instead of sausage, Brooks tells us, it's "authority" that our political leaders are failing to produce:

This generation of political leaders is confronting a similar situation, and, so far, they have failed utterly and catastrophically to project any sense of authority, to give the world any reason to believe that this country is being governed. Instead, by rejecting the rescue package on Monday, they have made the psychological climate much worse.

It's not just repentent conservatives like Brooks who are hungry for the sausage of authority. Robert Scoble, a left-liberal blogger of some popular repute, is also going through a nasty metamorphosis of his own. After confessing that he's turning into Andrew Keen (what a fate, eh?), uber-blogger Scoble acknowledges his own hunger for the authority of expertise:

I find I’m looking to experts and elites more and more, because the crap I’m seeing out of all of our mouths is just so, um, wrong. As my history teacher back in the 1980s used to say “the masses are asses.” This is shaking my belief system pretty thoroughly, because I actually do believe that a decentralized system is stronger than one with one guy or gal in the middle controlling everything. But for a decentralized system to work we have to 1. be smart and 2. believe in each other. Those two things are proving to me to be pretty trying right now.

The Journal describes the crisis as a "Beltway Crash".  But it's actually the American Crash. Brooks correctly accuses the Republican Congressional rump of confusing "talk radio with reality" and Scoble is right to yearn for the wisdom of the expert rather than the crowd. Yet this problem can't just be blamed on Rush Limbaugh or the Daily Koz. American media -- both new and old -- has successfully been confusing their message with reality for years. The blogs, reality tv, call-in radio, fake news shows, Madison Avenue -- they've all personalized reality so effectively that now Americans can't collectively see beyond themselves and their own immediate interests. In our unwillingness to accept the authority of experts like Paulson and Bernanke, we have become the collective Smoot-Hawleys of the 21st century. And the casualty of this collective nihilism is the sausage of authority. Congress revolted against the bail-out because the American voter revolted against it. The scarcer authority becomes, the less anyone wants to bail anyone else out. Our culture of mutual suspicion means that we are all in this for ourselves now. And confidence -- which is another word for mutual trust -- can't be restored if nobody believes anyone else anymore.

Was it only in 2006 that Time made YOU the person of the year? Two long years later, it is "us" -- you and me -- who have become the problem rather than the solution. As NPR's Dick Meyer argued in a wise essay last week, our entire culture has become a "predator class" preying on itself:

All this tells me we are wrong to scapegoat the I-bankers, hedge fund wizards and baby billionaires. We are right to worry far more broadly. Indeed, there is a predator class, but it is preying on a culture that is wounded and weak. That is our culture today; that is us. Sorry.

Richard Cohen wrote in yesterday's Post that the breakdown of economic confidence results in desperate people embracing the ersatz authority of fascists like Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin. Cohen is indeed right to remind us that "hard times are hard on truth." And given the hard time that truth has had in the prosperous America of the last twenty five years, I shudder to imagine its fate in an America of hard times.

The Meltdown: 9/11 or 11/9?

Is the economic meltdown of September '08 a comma or a full stop in America history, does it symbolize the fall of the Twin Towers or the fall of the Berlin Wall, is it 9/11 or 11/9?

For the British anti-utopian polemicist John Gray, the meltdown represents a "historic geopolitical shift", it symbolizes the end of the American global leadership and is, therefore, the US equivalent of the collapse of the Berlin wall on 9 November 1989. Just as the crumbling of the Wall in 11/9/1989 marked the death of the utopian dream of Soviet communism, so, for Gray, today's meltdown represents the death of utopian dream of American free market liberalism:

The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In American and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot. Like the Soviet collapse, it will have large geopolitical repercussions. An enfeebled economy cannot support America's over-extended military commitments for much longer. Retrenchment is inevitable and it is unlikely to be gradual or well planned.

Gray calls this a "shattering moment in America's fall from power." And he sees its consequences in an increasingly multipolar world, a stronger China, Russia and Iran, above all a world that American "can no longer shape." To Gray, however, what is odd about this great geopolitical crash is that nobody seems to have noticed it. Americans, he says, are so "mired in their rancorous culture wars" and so busy "squabbling among themselves" that they are oblivious to the historical magnitude of the collapse of their financial system.

The American journalist Anne Applebaum certainly isn't oblivious to its significance. But observing the September '08 meltdown from overseas, Applebaum sees it in terms of 9/11 rather than 11/9:

For if September 11, 2001 was the day that we had to reassess our ideas about America's role in world politics, September 15, 2008, the day Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, may well be remembered as the day we had to reassess our ideas about America's role in the world economy. It's that cataclysmic, that decisive, that irreversible.

Thus, for Applebaum, the meltdown of September '08 represents "an economic 9/11". What strikes her about this comparison, however, is that just as 9/11 brought Americans together, so September '08 has separated them into un-9/11-like warring factions of indignant Democrats and Republicans, and of Wall St and Main St, all furiously baying for somebody else's blood. But Applebaum is less convinced than Gray that the meltdown represents a historic geopolitical shift:

Myself, I think it's too early to say that these events spell the end of American economic dominance: it's just as likely, after all, that they spell an end to the era of post-Cold War prosperity, not just for the US but for everyone else too.

Where Applebaum and Gray are in complete agreement is their observations about the rancorousness of political and cultural life in America. Once-upon-a-time, Tocqueville saw this as evidence of the inherent strength of democracy in America. But if John Gray is indeed right to argue that America's Berlin Wall came crumbling down in September '08, things are going to get ugly in America. Rather than a full stop or even a comma, the September '08 financial meltdown actually marks the first letter in a new chapter. Stay tuned. The American story is about to become very very rancorous.

Winding up Winer

I was wound up yesterday by Dave Winer, Berkeley blogger extraordinaire, who first angrily described me a "broken watch" and a serial enflamer, my book as a "piece of trash" and then went on to generously agree with my Cult of the Amateur analysis of the Sarah Palin show which I laid out on the Gillmor Gang last week.

So let me wind up Winer too. It goes without saying, of course, that Dave is a broken watch, his blog is a piece of trash and he only says things to enflame people.

That said....

As a destructive creator, wealthy idealist and innocent cynic, he is a self-described "party of one" American who can't be categorized as anything but Dave Winer. If spiteful, ignorant Sarah Palin represents the unacceptable side of American exceptionalism, then the prickly Winer -- in his moody mix of anger and generosity, of faith and skepticism -- is a less imperfect version of American uniqueness. All his indomitable incorrigibility was on display today when Winer simultaneously castigated and embraced his political enemy -- small town Republican America:

People in Flyover Land, when you lose your manufacturing jobs and are reduced to government handouts, think about how we can work together, not who Did This To You -- for that we all need to look in the mirror. Boy were we blessed, we could have been really smart and worked together, but we didn't. Some of that is the bluestaters' fault because we cared too much about your hatred of us. So be it. That's the past. I believe we still have many blessings, and we're no worse off than anyone else on this planet. But we're also no better than they are either. It's our hubris, our arrogance and ignorance that led us to believe that we were.

Stuck at Gate 14 of the airport yesterday with a nation of Willy Lomans, Peggy Noonen asked Where is America? She should leave Gate 14, jump on a flight to Oakland and have dinner with Winer. Rather than a ghostly Willy Loman, she'll find a full-bloodied American optimist. Here's Winer on why he still has faith in America:

More than any other country, the United States is a product of and part of every other country on the planet. That's our legacy, and our strength, because to get here, our ancestors had to be smart, hard-working and brave. That's the advantage of America.

A nation of Willy Lomans

In her upcoming new book, Patriotic Grace, a wistful Peggy Noonan asks: Where is America? And the Reagan nostalgist finds it at Gate 14 of the airport -- where CNN is reporting the election but nobody is watching:

The TV monitor is on. It is Wolf Blitzer. He is telling us with a voice of urgency about the latest polls. But no one looks up. We are a nation of Willy Lomans, dragging our wheelies through acres of airport, walking through life with a suitcase and a slack jaw, trying to get home after a long day of meetings, of moving product.

America, Noonan says sadly, isn't really paying attention to Wolf Blitzer. The America that perpetually drags its black wheelies through airports is made up of small town folk who are "curiously unillusioned" by national politics. This America of disbelieving salesmen aren't sold on the sales talk of either candidates:  both the left and the right, she thinks, suspect that their candidate isn't up for the job; both know that America has somehow gone wrong, that its institutions and elites have lost their way. And this nation of Willy Lomans, Noonan says, is acting out its own theatrical tragedy -- not dissimilar to the fate of the fictional Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's 1949 play Death of a Salesman.

There is even a feeling, a faint sense sometimes that we have been relegated to the role of walk-on in someone else's drama, that as citizens we are crucial and yet somehow...extraneous.

In this observation that her citizens are simultaneously crucial and extraneous to the election, Noonan gets to the theatrical truth about the tragedy of American democracy today. All around them -- in airports and shopping malls and bars, online and on television -- "somebody elses" like powerful politicians and wealthy commentators are speaking on behalf of the "American people." But at Gate 14 of the airport, this nation of Willy Lomans is too tired, too disbelieving, too confused, too irrelevant perhaps to watch its own drama.

The idea of America as a small town nation of exhausted Willy Lomans alienated from its own reality is fine as the theatrical metaphor of a Reaganite journalist on a scavenger hunt for patriotic grace. Let's just hope that the American story hasn't, in truth, become indistinguishable from the tragic plot of Death of a Salesman.

Google's Utilitarianism

As Stephen Baker argues in The Numerati, his new book about the centrality of mathematical data in the epistomology of knowledge, the company that is most shaping this new numerical age is Google. But the science of numbers, Baker reminds us, is not new:

The science that developed over the centuries, and we now have experts who are comfortable working with ridiculously large numbers, the billions and trillions that the rest of us find either unimaginable or irrelevant. They are heirs to the science that turns our everyday realties into symbols. As the data we produce continues to explode and computers grow relentlessly stronger, these maestros gain in power. Two of them made a big splash in the large 1990s by founding Google. For the age we're entering, Google is the marquee company. It's built almost entirely upon math, and its very purpose is to help us hunt down data. Google's breakthrough, which transformed a simple search engine into a media giant, was the discovery that our queries -- the words we type when we hunt for Web pages -- are of immense value to advertisers. The company figured out how to turn our data into money.

While Baker is thoughtful on the business and marketing aspects of the Google age, he is less successful on the moral front. I was disappointed, for example, not to find Jeremy Bentham -- the ethical godfather of Numeratistas like Larry Page and Sergei Brin  --anywhere in the book. It was Bentham, of course, who is the best-known proponent of utilitarianism -- the numeratist philosophy that quantifies morality on the mathematicatical principle of "the greatest good for the greatest number." 

In his excellent book The Shock of the Old, David Edgerton reminds us that most new technological thinking is actually quite old. That is certainly true of Google's utilitarian outlook on the world. Their Do No Evil credo is indebted to Bentham -- as best seen in their Project 10 to the 100th announced earlier this week. This project is using the utilitarian language of quantifying happiness to introduce a $10 million project to improve the lot of mankind:

Never in history have so many people had so much information, so many tools at their disposal, so many ways of making good ideas come to life. Yet at the same time, so many people, of all walks of life, could use so much help, in both little ways and big. In the midst of this, new studies are reinforcing the simple wisdom that beyond a certain very basic level of material wealth, the only thing that increases individual happiness over time is helping other people.

And it's not just in the moral realm that Brin and Page are indebted to Jeremy Bentham. The Google search engine which, as Stephen Baker explains, allows the numerati to quantify the habits of its users, is simply a higher tech version of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, the all-seeing prison Bentham designed to enable moral reformers like himself to observe and thus improve the behaviour of criminals. When, I wonder, will the utilitarian numeristas at the Googleplex add two and two together and realize that they have in their hands the greatest engine for reforming the human condition in the history of mankind. Since their digital panopticon sees everything we do, why doesn't Google award that $10 million to itself and use the money to numerically improve all of our well-being by directing us to websites that will maximize our happiness (those sites would, of course, be determined by the wise crowd).

Now that would be progress. Even the everlasting Jeremy Bentham would be nodding sympathetically in his "Auto-icon" resting-place at University College, London (Benham -- that dude over there in the hat -- is still watching us) at such an utilitarian use of technology.

Project 10 to the 100th

In Project 10 to the 100th, the generous geeks at Google have launched a $10 million competition for ideas to change the world. There is only one simple rule:

Those who help the most win

As with all-things-Google, this contest is rich in all the ironies of Google-thought. The most obvious mathematical irony is that Project 10 to the 100th only has eight categories for changing the world and thus helping people:

• Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
• Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
• Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
• Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
• Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
• Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
• Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
• Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don't fit into any category at all.

Yes, of course, both these categories and the contest itself are noble (certainly more commendable than Larry Ellison's unpublic-spirited investment in yachting or Steve Jobs' chronic myopia to anything outside Apple). But I'm not satisfied with the categories. For symmetry's sake, why not increase the 8 categories to 10, get rid of "everything else" and include Government, Faith and Peace in the list:

• Government: How can we help people build better government institutions?
• Faith: How can we help people's of different faiths talk to one another?
• Peace: How we can eradicate warfare?

It's the absence of a government category which is the most interesting. Google's libertarian bottom up model of deriving policy wisdom is an alternative rather than a supplement to government. Not satisfied to have cornered the market in the world's information, is Google now try to monopolize global morality?

Rehabilitating Puritanism

The left, thank the lord, is rehabilitating Puritanism. The most recent convert is Barbara Ehrenreich who in the Times this morning writes against what she calls "the delusional optimism of mainstream, all-American, positive thinking" -- an opiate, she correctly argues, is most corrosively peddled by the mega church pastors, best selling authors and Oprah type cheerleaders on the television. The object of Ehrenreich's polemic is the power of positive thinking -- what the left once called "false consciousness":

The idea is to firmly believe that you will get what you want, not only because it will make you feel better to do so, but because “visualizing” something — ardently and with concentration — actually makes it happen. You will be able to pay that adjustable-rate mortgage or, at the other end of the transaction, turn thousands of bad mortgages into giga-profits if only you believe that you can.

And so, as an spiritually cleansing antidote to the cheerfulness of Oprah and Sarah, Ehrenreich goes back to the original Puritans -- those reassuringly cheerless Northern European souls who shipped themselves and their miserable Protestant Ethic over to America:

Americans did not start out as deluded optimists. The original ethos, at least of white Protestant settlers and their descendants, was a grim Calvinism that offered wealth only through hard work and savings, and even then made no promises at all. You might work hard and still fail; you certainly wouldn’t get anywhere by adjusting your attitude or dreamily “visualizing” success.

Is Puritanism about to become fashionable again? Everything in America -- the financial, the political and the moral -- does indeed seem to be failing.  When will people grow tired of a wishful personal optimism that continually fails to bear any fruit? In an age of predestined failure, I suspect that it's John Calvin rather than Oprah Winfrey who will be able to make more sense of the world to more people. Lou Dobbs is right -- the future is going to be miserable. The death of delusional optimism in America is one reason to be cheerful, one reason to burst out laughing.

Unwise conservatism

Scratch a radical American conservative and all-too-often you'll uncover an emotional Marxist -- a sentimental lover of the noble working classes. Take Hoover Institute classicist Victor Davis Hanson, for example, the house intellectual at conservative website Pajama Media. Hanson takes advantage of the Palin versus Obama debate about experience to tell us what really is wisdom. And it's not wise. Hanson compares the egg-heads he had the misfortune to meet at Stanford, UC Santa Cruz and Greece with the real working folk he came across on his Californian vineyard. Hanson says he learnt two things from his experiences both on the land and in the classroom:

While civilization advances on the shoulders of the educated, it is carried along by the legs of the muscular classes. And the latter are not there by some magical IQ test or a natural filtering process that separates the wheat from the chaff, but rather by either birth, or, as often, by their preference for action and the physical world.

Early Marx or late Jefferson? Even the baroque language is neo-marxist. Civilization carried along by the legs of the muscular classes. Sounds more painful than noble to me. Even more painful, however, is Hanson's unwillingness to address the meritocratic nature of America's democratic knowledge economy. And he's wrong, of course, on the "natural filtering process that separates the wheat from the chaff." That process is called education (it took the smart Hanson to Stanford university and Greece). Garbage collectors or orange pickers don't collect garbage or pick oranges rather than practice law or medicine because of their preference for action and the physical world. No, In post industrial America, the smartest people are the winners in the competitive knowledge economy: they go to the best colleges, earn the most amount of money. live the longest lives and have the most power. In contrast, the least intelligent people in America are the losers: they don't go to college, they earn poorly if at all, their lives are nasty, brutish and short.

Hanson's other lesson is equally absurd:

Second, I have seen no difference in intelligence levels between those who inhabit the world of the physical and those who cultivate the life of the mind. That is, the most brilliant Greek philologists seemed no more impressive in their aptitude than the fellow who could take apart the transmission of an old Italian Oliver tractor, fix it, and put it back together — without a manual. And I knew three or four who could.

What Hansen is articulating is the moralizing guilt and self hatred of the American ruling class -- the very forces that have produced the cult of the amateur known as Sarah Palin. Here we have a Hoover Institute academic telling us that Edison is no smarter than the guy who fixes light bulbs for a living. It's the same message, of course, articulated by the fourteen-year old kid on Wikipedia who claims he knows as much about the Peloponnesian War as Victor Davis Hanson, the author of A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

So what is wisdom? Hanson confuses goodness and wisdom, conveniently substituting one with the other. Palin might be good (although I doubt it), but her goodness doesn't guarantee wisdom. Excellence is ammoral and it resides, amorally, in the educated rather than the muscular classes.

All too ordinary

Great piece in Newsweek this week by Sam Harris about Sarah's cult of the amateur. Harris argues that it's her very carefully packaged ordinariness that gives her candidacy such populist potency:

The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary.

I'm not sure, however, that Harris is correct to suggest that it's only in politics that there's a "mad love of mediocrity" in America. One can find identical attacks on the supposed "elitism" of mainstream media all over the blogosphere. But where Sam "End of Faith" Harris is particularly persuasive in his focus on the connection between Sarah's religious beliefs and her cult of the amateur.

You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy "baptism in the Holy Spirit," "miraculous healings" and "the gift of tongues." Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin's spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of "the final generation," engaged in "spiritual warfare" to purge the earth of "demonic strongholds." Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: "All options remain on the table"?

The point, of course, about Sarah's church is its radically democratic inclusiveness. Anyone can be a member and anyone can immerse themselves in this apocalyptic hysteria. The miracle infested nature of Sarah's church fosters her own myth of superwoman. As Harris recognizes, she is a believer and thus can do anything: be Vice President, wrestle Putin, perform pediatric neurosurgery:

"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?"

"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter."

"But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind."

"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."                 

It if wasn't so scary, Harris' critique would be hilarious. The only good news is that the American people seem to have woken up and caught onto the outrageous Sarah fraud. The polls don't lie. McCain's pick has achieved the near impossible -- making Obama appear sufficiently experienced to be President. All options might remain on the table for now. But, after 4 November, the American people will no longer require Sarah and she will be free to fly herself to Mars in a homemade space rocket and charm the Martians with her mediocrity.

American brain goes boom

“There’s something rotten in the state of America.” Rather than Shakespeare, these words were written by Dick Meyer, the editorial director of digital media at National Public Radio and the author of a controversial new book about contemporary America entitled “Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the new Millenium”.

Meyer blames American discontent on what he calls the “one two punch” of the dramatic social and moral transformation of the Sixties and the equally revolutionary transformation of the digital revolution over the last ten years.  Reminding us that the average American spends 9 ½ hours each day (yes, that’s nine and a half hours every day) consuming informational technology, Meyer argues that US media’s narcissism and hypocrisy has created a mood of low self-esteem and self-loathing in Americans -- “a crisis of phoniness, demonization, belligerence and Balkanization”.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote that the revolutionary consequences of the industrial revolution were so unsettling that “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” Meyer believes that today’s digital media upheaval is having an equally alchemical impact on the cultural certainties of traditional American life. Today’s information revolution, he believes preys on the rootless, creating an ocean of “lost, frazzled and overloaded” Americans. Meyer puts the consequences into a memorable equation:

“Social change plus technology revolution equals American brain goes boom.”

It’s the ubiquitous anger that most worries Meyer. “Americans are down on America,” he tells us. Everyone in America has become a screaming version of Howard “I’m as mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Beale (played by Peter Finch), the deranged newscaster in Sidney Lumet’s 1976 movie, Network. Today’s American media is a toxic wasteland of furious Internet users, anti-social cell-phone talkers, whinging bloggers, screaming talk radio callers and thumb-pumping BlackBerry users. This collective anger is both a cause and effect of American discontent. The more media Americans consume, the more they hate themselves and the angrier they become; the more they hate themselves, they more they turn to media as an outlet to vent their anger.

What is really worrying about Meyer’s prognosis is that it was written before last week’s Wall Street melt-down. So he doesn’t see all the anger in America as having any real foundations and suggests that Americans have an exaggerated perspective of their own “precariousness”. But, reading Why We Hate Us today – with the American financial system teetering on the precipice of complete destruction – is truly terrifying. After all, what happens to American discontent in the new millenium if and when last week’s Wall Street Crash 2.0 metastasizes into next year’s Great Depression 2.0? How will an already mad-as-hell America react to an economic crisis that could unemploy and impoverish tens of millions of its hitherto prosperous citizens?

Dick Meyer is right. There is indeed something rotten in America today. And it could get worse, much much worse. Economic meltdown plus social change plus technological upheaval could add up to one furiously belligerent America. The world needs to take note. If the American brain really does go boom, it will bust not just America, but also the rest of the planet.