Paul Vitols's Blog, page 22

what I’m up to: reading The Republic again

How time slips away. When I launched this website 2 years ago, I intended to post often; indeed I intended it to be a kind of online record of the thoughts that right now I still keep mostly in word-processing documents on my PC. But I haven’t evolved that far yet. I still feel that my thoughts are in many ways not ready for prime time.

Still, with so many days creeping by between posts, I want to write something. I know some of you check in regularly to see whether I’ve posted anything, and I actually prefer not to disappoint.

One thing I can mention is that I have a sideline nonfiction project that I’m tentatively calling Green and Free. It’s intended to be a work of environmental philosophy. I’ve decided to do it because I have a strong interest in the environment, but it seems that the environmental movement as a whole, if there is anything that corresponds to that blanket term, does not have a consistent philosophy, and I suspect that this fact is what makes progress difficult in improving our relationship with the environment. My proposed title points to what I think may be the root problem for achieving the improvement of environmental deterioration: that we believe that acting in ways that are not environmentally harmful will cost us at least some of our personal freedom. It’s possible that this is true, but it’s also possible that it’s not, or so it seems to me.

This focus has given me new path in my self-directed liberal education. Now my plan is to read my way through the Great Books, starting with the works of political philosophy. Right now I’m reading Plato’s Republic. I remember reading it in 1980 or 1981, while I was a janitor at Vancouver General Hospital. I’d sit at a table in the Heather Pavilion cafeteria after lunch reading my Penguin paperback. I remember being pleased with how readable it was, but although I was able to follow the argument well enough, I don’t think I got much out of it. It’s not enough just to read such a book; you have to study it.

All my reading now is studying—or more like studying. I read a little each afternoon, highlighter in hand, and in the morning type what I’ve highlighted into Word documents. This is still busy-work and not really study, but it is a step closer to it. I try to let the ideas work on me.

I’ve just been reading the section in which Socrates is trying to discern the structure of the soul. He comes up with three distinct agencies within the soul: reason, the desire nature, and what he calls the spirited nature—that in us which stands up for ourselves and shows courage. He has an ingenious argument for showing that there are in fact different agencies within us. For temptation reveals this: we really want another cookie, but we deny ourselves in order to limit our caloric intake. The desire is real, and so is that which overrules the desire. According to Socrates, this points to actual different parts within the soul.

This notion made me think of Freud, and his analysis of the psyche into the three agencies of ego, superego, and id. These too are apparently separate actors within the individual mind. I don’t know to what extent Freud was influenced by Socrates and Plato, but to me it seems a clear descendant of the same idea. (Freud is later on in the Great Books series, indeed he is the last author in the set.)

Socrates is further arguing that the different parts of the soul are closely analogous to the different parts of a state, by which he means the main classes of a society, which also have their different functions within the state. This isomorphism between individual and state seems to be one of the main themes of The Republic. For Socrates, getting the state to function properly is closely analogous to getting the individual to function properly. That proper functioning, which is the harmonious cooperation of the different agencies, seems to be what Socrates means by justice, the search for which is the launching-point of the dialogue as a whole.

So there you have it: a bit of what I’m up to.

The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides

Herodotus | Thucydides by Herodotus

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

These two classics establish the poles between which all subsequent history-writing has navigated.

This review will focus on Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, since I have already reviewed The Histories of Herodotus separately.

The “poles” I referred to above are the storytelling approach exemplified by Herodotus and the “chronicle” approach exemplified by Thucydides. For while Herodotus tells his history as a series of yarns, hearsay, and human-interest stories, Thucydides sees himself as a searcher for and reporter of literal, factual truth. Thucydides himself is conscious of the disadvantage that this approach puts him under, as he explains near the end of chapter 1:

The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

I wonder whether Thucydides, writing in the 5th century BC, in using the phrase “a possession for all time”, imagined that his work would still be read 2,500 years later.

His history is an account of the Peloponnesian War, a grim 21-year conflagration that consumed Greece in Thucydides’ own lifetime; indeed he himself took part in it as a commander of forces at Thasos. This war, though long and brutal, may seem to be a mere byway of ancient history, but I took interest in it because Arnold J. Toynbee, in his A Study of History series, identifies it as the turning-point of the Hellenic Civilization, when its period of flourishing ended and its Time of Troubles began. Here, according to Toynbee, began its long and bumpy ride downward to its final dissolution as a distinct civilization, manifested in the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. If the Peloponnesian War really was the beginning of the end for the Hellenic civilization, could the Greeks somehow have pulled themselves back from the precipice and found a way to inject new creative life into their society?

The war itself was about which of the two dominant states in Greece, Athens or Lacedaemon on the Peloponnese, would be masters of Hellas. In the days since the Greeks had miraculously fought off the invading Persians (the story told by Herodotus in his book), Athens and Lacedaemon had both acquired little empires for themselves within Greece: leagues of subordinate states that paid tribute to the hegemons and joined with them in military alliances. But running these teams of “allies” was like herding cats, for the member states were always fighting amongst themselves and switching sides when it seemed convenient.

As I read Thucydides’ description of the causes of the war in chapter 2, I was reminded of the events leading up to World War I in the sense that such seemingly trivial beginnings led to such a ferocious catastrophe. In this case it had to do with the civic politics of Epidamnus and Corcyra (modern Corfu), two states on the Ionian Sea. Internecine conflicts dragged in their imperial masters, and hey presto: regional war. Athens and Lacedaemon make repeated attempts to resolve their differences, and even sign more than one peace treaty, but all to no avail. At bottom, they both think they can win, so war it must be.

As a read I found this book tough going. There are many detailed and circumstantial accounts of particular episodes in the long war, involving many different places and people. To follow these in detail would require vastly more time and effort than I was prepared to put in. Occasionally I referred to the maps at the back of the book, but mostly I just let the information wash over me, sitting up straighter as I reached passages where the author summarizes things and also where he reports the speeches of various characters involved, for here could be found a number of powerful arguments on different aspects of politics and war. Thucydides describes his own handling of speeches thus:

With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; in all cases my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said. [slightly compressed]

One famous dialogue occurs when the powerful Athenians are trying to persuade the much weaker Melians to surrender to them without a fight. When the Melians point out the injustice of the Athenians’ actions, the Athenians give this chilling reply:

You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

There in capsule form lies the political theory that underlies just about all of human history.

As a writer Thucydides is sober, astute, and understated. His goal is not to tell a captivating story, but to provide, for people who have not actually participated in this war, the next best thing to being there. His prose reads like a long military report, including signs of special interest and eagerness over the tactical details of specific engagements.

Here again I found myself flummoxed by the star-rating system. For while this book was not pleasure reading for me, I found it to be deep and worthwhile. My impression is that societies become prone to war when they become rich, bored, and lacking in intellectual vigor. It was true 2,500 years ago, and it’s true right now.

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The Politics of the Earth by John S. Dryzek

The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses by John Dryzek

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This well-organized book, in cataloguing the different ways in which people think about the environment, shows why so many environmentalists talk at cross-purposes.

I was drawn to this book because I was hoping to find something akin to the dialectical analysis of ideas performed by Mortimer J. Adler’s Institute for Philosophical Research in the 1950s and 60s, which resulted in such books as The Idea of Freedom: A Dialectical Examination of the Conceptions of Freedom and The Idea of Justice. The aim of these books was to elucidate, using a rigorous, impartial methodology, the discussion of the ideas in the history of Western thought. In order to expunge bias, these works were team efforts, and all the terminology adopted in them was carefully chosen so as not to favor any one strand of thought over any other. I was excited by the notion of finding something comparable which treated the idea of environmentalism as its subject.

While The Politics of the Earth is not a dialectical analysis in that sense, it does organize the discussion of environmentalism by showing the various ways that the environment and environmentalism have been talked and written about. It turns out that the subject can be resolved into 9 separate “discourses.”

The author defines discourse as “a shared way of apprehending the world” that

enables those who subscribe to it to interpret bits of information and put them together into coherent stories or accounts. Each discourse rests on assumptions, judgments, and contentions that provide the basic terms for analysis, debates, agreements, and disagreements. . . . The way a discourse views the world is not always easily comprehended by those who subscribe to other discourses.

The discourses are mostly very different from each other. Some address other discourses and some do not. Dryzek groups them into 4 categories:

Global limits and their denial
Solving environmental problems
The quest for sustainability
Green radicalism

In the first category are two discourses. The first of these he calls Survivalism, which contends that global resources are finite and that human consumption of them will necessarily run into an absolute limit when they are exhausted. The result will be global disaster.

The second discourse here he calls Prometheanism, and it consists of denying the Survivalist premise, holding instead that human ingenuity has always and will always surmount the problems it faces, including those problems caused by itself. The history of human development has been not one of increasing scarcity but of increasing abundance; this has been due to technology, which will press on.

One of Dryzek’s ways of showing evenhandedness toward the the discourses is to break them all down in the same way, analyzing them briefly and examining their features under a series of 4 headings. He even provides a little box of bullet-points for each discourse, summarizing its main tenets and allowing the reader to clearly grasp the differences between discourses. I loved this feature, really appreciated the author’s clear organization of the subject matter.

But a couple of things troubled me while reading the book. One was my own lack of clarity about what exactly a discourse is, at least as Dryzek uses the term. To me the word suggests above all a way of talking about a subject, in this case the environment. But it’s clear that these discourses are not just ways of talking; they also imply or urge particular actions and policies. To the extent that they do this, I wondered whether the discourses might be the same as what I think of as ideologies.

Robert Higgs, in his book Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, spends a chapter discussing ideology, and contends that every ideology has 4 aspects:

cognitive
affective
programmatic
solidary

He goes on to say:

It structures a person’s perceptions and predetermines his understandings of the social world, expressing these cognitions in characteristic symbols; it tells him whether what he “sees” is good or bad or morally neutral; and it propels him to act in accordance with his cognitions and evaluations as a committed member of a political group in pursuit of definite social objectives. Ideology simplifies a reality too huge and complicated to be comprehended, evaluated, and dealt with in any purely factual, scientific, or other disinterested way.

This is not a bad fit with Dryzek’s environmental discourses. And in case you may think that Higgs has a negative view of ideology, here is his next paragraph:

Every sane adult has an ideology. Every ideology must deal in part with factual, scientific, and other “hard” knowledge. To the extent that it makes assumptions or claims inconsistent with such well-confirmed, socially tested knowledge one may properly accuse it of “distortion.” Some ideologies commit this sin more than others. But all contain unverified and unverifiable elements, including their fundamental commitments to certain values. These elements are neither true nor false.

Perhaps here there is a parting of ways between Higgs’s ideologies and Dryzek’s discourses—but I’m not sure. This point is surely important because if the discourses are fundamentally about values rather than facts, then it seems to me that the prospect of resolving environmental problems through any agreed program of action is dim. At the bottom of, say, the Promethean discourse, is there the “fact” of the limitlessness of human ingenuity, or is there the “value” that the human freedom to think and act must be held supreme above all else? Is it a question of knowledge, or a question of what we like?

Another thing that bothered me sometimes was the author’s level of objectivity. In his introduction the author admits that he has views of his own concerning the environment, but postpones telling the reader what these are until the end of the book when he sums up. I would have preferred full disclosure at the beginning; this would have allowed me, as a reader, to adjust for his possible bias as he treated each of the discourses. As it was, I sensed the author’s relative approval and disapproval through such things as ironic remarks made in the course of the analyses.

In a thoroughgoing “dialectical” analysis of the kind done by the Institute for Philosophical Research, the terminology and the exposition are chosen carefully so that, ideally, each of the viewpoints is depicted in such a way that none of its own adherents would not object to the presentation. In such an approach, each of the discourses would be described almost as an advocate would do it, presenting its logical argument as forcefully as possible while leaving aside any emotional appeals. As I was taught while attending a Buddhist monastic college: “when presenting your opponent’s case, try to make it sound stronger than your own.”

That’s hard to do, and it’s not what Dryzek was attempting in this book; but it’s what I would have liked best.

However, this book is still good, and the author has done a valuable service to environmentalism and to thought about public policy generally. I had found the various arguments and programs around the environment to be confusing and contradictory, and this book has gone a long way toward showing me exactly why. Now, when I hear or read anything about environmental problems and their solutions, I find myself classifying the arguments in terms of these discourses. My thinking about the subject is better organized, and I like that.

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Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This long, loose, playful series of adventures poses a challenge to idealists, whatever their time or place.

I bought and read my Penguin Classics paperback of Don Quixote in July 1979, when I was 20. I had already formed the intention of reading the great novels of history, and I knew that this was one of them. I didn’t find it too hard to read, for, although it is long (940 pages), it is a comic adventure story narrated in a straightforward way; but I did find it to be a bit of a chore, feeling that it was kind of a one-joke idea stretched out to great length, padded further with incidental side-stories that had only a tangential connection with the main plot.

This time I enjoyed and appreciated the book much more. If you haven’t read it, the story concerns a middle-aged Spanish country gentleman, tall and lean to the point of appearing emaciated, whose “surname was Quixada or Quesada—for there is some difference of opinion amongst authors on this point.” This man has a large collection of books on the adventures of medieval knights errant, and, inspired by these and convinced of their truth, he decides to take up the vocation of knight errantry himself under the name of Don Quixote. Recruiting a plainspoken local peasant named Sancho Panza to be his squire, he sets out on his broken-down horse Rocinante to protect the weak, avenge the wronged, and terrify the wicked.

The narrator of the story is candid that Don Quixote is mad and deluded, and all the characters around him see him this way, including Sancho Panza, who nonetheless is tempted by Don Quixote’s firm promises that great rewards will come to him if he serves such a dauntless knight as himself. Don Quixote’s housekeeper and niece, as well as his neighbors, all try to talk him out of his crazy idea, but he is adamant. He is determined to prove that Don Quixote of La Mancha is not only a knight errant, but the greatest knight errant of all time.

His delusion causes him to see the world in terms of his ideals. In a famous early adventure, he sees a windmill as a menacing giant, and, lowering his lance, fearlessly charges it, only to be badly tumbled by the moving arms of the mill. Many more humiliating reverses await Don Quixote in his quest for fame and honor, but he always has a ready explanation: all knights errant are persecuted by malicious magicians, and Don Quixote is no exception. It is the task of the knight to face these cruel tricks with courage and unwavering resolve. Pain, suffering, and hardship are the knight’s path, and he is indifferent to them.

Another feature that knights errant have in common is the state of being in love with a beautiful woman who treats the knight with haughty disdain. To fulfill this role in his own case, Don Quixote has created the figure of Dulcinea del Toboso, the identity of whose human substrate is not clear, but seems to be a certain plain girl from a nearby village. But to Don Quixote, his lady Dulcinea is a woman of matchless beauty and nobility, and winning her regard and her love is his fondest wish and his deepest desire. Those he defeats in combat—and there are a few strange cases of this—are ordered to take themselves to Dulcinea del Toboso to report that they have been beaten by Don Quixote and to put themselves at her disposal.

But Don Quixote is a lunatic and nobody takes him seriously. Indeed, many people, when they perceive his madness, decide to play tricks on him, encouraging him in his delusion for the sake of some laughs at his expense. Not infrequently these take the form of cruel practical jokes. Don Quixote bears it all with courage and as much dignity as possible.

And madness is not the whole story with Don Quixote. For when he is talking about anything other than knight errantry, he speaks with such good sense and erudition than people are struck by his wisdom. He is a kind of idiot-savant that people find impossible to understand. How can a man who is so intelligent and well spoken attack flocks of sheep thinking that they’re armies of Turks? How can these parts of his nature not see each other? It’s a mystery that no one can solve.

His faithful squire, Sancho Panza, is caught in the vice, so to speak, of these contradictions, for although he clearly sees, and is not shy about pointing out, his master’s craziness, he is also won over by Don Quixote’s cogent explanations, and even more by his assurances that riches and honors await the squire of any knight errant. This part of Don Quixote’s delusion Sancho is ready to believe.

On this second reading of the book I found my response to the story more complex. For I found myself inspired by Don Quixote’s character and by his view of the world, and I had to believe that the narrator himself shared this inspiration, even as he mocks the knight for his madness. For the “real world” that Don Quixote is not part of is not such a great place: it is a place where people do play cruel jokes on each other and take advantage of each other; where people are motivated by greed and selfishness; where people are jaded, cynical, and scornful. Our heart knows that Don Quixote’s commitment to courage, justice, and honor is the right attitude to have; but is there really no way that these values can be squared with life on Earth? In some ways Don Quixote is a long, and yes playful, meditation on this question.

Don Quixote is also the ancestor of other literary and dramatic characters who have appeared since then. He is the type of the deluded comic figure; I thought of Inspector Clouseau of the Pink Panther movies, and of Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow in his guise as Rocketman.

Then there is the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Don Quixote is also the prototype of the modern “buddy story.” But unlike the perhaps homoerotic undertones of Newman-Redford movies or the Lethal Weapon series, this relationship feels much more earthy and real, as well as loving, even though the two characters may suffer from differing amounts of mental disorder. By turns affectionate, appreciative, irritated, and exasperated, the master and his servant are inseparable. It is Sancho who gives Don Quixote his memorable epithet, the Knight of Sad Countenance, which Don Quixote unhesitatingly adopts. Their relationship is discreetly mirrored by that of their mounts, Rocinante and Sancho’s ass Dapple, who have a deep love for each other.

The second part of the book, written some years after the first, enriches the theme by showing more and more people willing to humor Don Quixote’s delusion for the sake of their own entertainment. But the more effort they put into humoring him, the more they become enamored of his view of the world, and one senses that they envy him his integrity and wish they could really see the world the way he does.

There is much more that could be said about this work. Among other things, Joseph Campbell, in his Creative Mythology, points to Don Quixote as a key figure in the long history of the mythological struggle between the lunar bull and the sun steed. The gaunt, crazy knight astride his broken-down nag is the picture of the twilight of solar, patriarchal culture, whose actual demise is depicted in Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica—also a Spanish work.

This time, when I read Don Quixote, I laughed and tears came to my eyes, and there aren’t many books of any length that I can say that about.

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The Case for Gold by Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman

The Case for Gold: A Minority Report of the United States Gold Commission by Ron Paul

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This thoughtful, well-researched examination of America’s monetary predicament has only become more relevant in the 31 years since it was first published.

The book originally appeared in the Congressional Record as the minority report of the Gold Commission formed by the U.S. Congress at the prompting of Ronald Reagan shortly after he became president. The majority of the commission did not see a role for gold in the American monetary system, but Representative Ron Paul did. Along with coauthor Lewis Lehrman, his opinion, upon surveying the history of U.S. money and banking, was and is that the only path to the creation of a prosperous, just, and decent society in the United States would be to restore gold and silver to their original place as the foundation of the monetary system.

After all, this would appear to be the explicit intention of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, whose Article 1, Section 10 states that no state shall

make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts

At the time the Constitution was drafted, everyone had had recent personal experience of the debasement and collapse of a paper currency—in that case, the Continental dollar. As a currency collapses through ever-greater printing of it by the monetary authority, inflation gives way to hyperinflation, with widespread panic, suffering, and injustice. If this provision for gold and silver coin had not been put in the Constitution, many of the states would not have signed off on it.

But the issue of how money is managed by a political authority is a complex one, with many players kicking the football. Most of this book, 125 pages, is taken up with the history of money and banking in the United States, and an interesting and little-known history it is. The authors show how the image of banks as bastions of sober, sound managers of money and risk is mostly contradicted by history (not to mention the more recent history of titanic bank bailouts). The history of banking has been largely a history of recklessness, bank runs, and busts, with depositors footing the bill.

The fundamental reason for this is the practice known as fractional-reserve banking: the ability of a bank to lend out more money than it has in its vaults. This is made possible by the substitution of metal currency by paper. Instead of carrying around gold and silver coins, the depositor could carry around more portable paper notes instead—notes that he could present to his bank to redeem for gold or silver whenever he wanted. Very convenient. And the bank, which makes its living by lending money, can now lend more of it than it actually possesses. It just needs to keep enough gold and silver on hand to satisfy those depositors who present their notes for coin. And as long as things are going well and everyone’s calm, that is not very many. So the profits of a bank can accordingly be very large compared to its “reserve” of deposits.

The problems occur when things are not going well and everyone is not calm. As soon as people suspect that they might not be able to redeem their notes for gold, they rush to the bank to do so, and when a number of people do this at the same time, there is a bank run, and the bank often will collapse as a result. And because of the interrelationship of banks, lending to each other and honoring each other’s notes, the collapse of one bank usually meant the collapse of more. In the process, depositors’ savings would be wiped out.

The history of banking is largely a history of efforts to prevent these recurring disasters, while hanging on to the oh-so-profitable practice of fractional-reserve banking that is their cause. One of the main wheezes in this effort was the creation of a “central” bank: a government-backed or government-associated entity that would guarantee the banking system as a whole by providing emergency funding in the event of bank runs. The United States has experimented with a few of these, culminating in the Federal Reserve system, launched in 1913 and still operating today. But as the bank runs of the Great Depression showed, banking panics had not been altogether eliminated. As one of his first acts upon taking office as president in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt, trying to clean up the banking mess, made it a criminal offense for Americans to own gold, and ordered them all to surrender their private gold. He also devalued the dollar from 25.8 grains of gold to 15.25 grains.

Apart from domestic ructions in banking, another problem has been international flows of gold and silver. For in the course of trade American dollars have made their way abroad, and foreign countries holding these dollars, if they suspected that the dollar has been overproduced relative to the underlying supply of gold, have turned in the dollars in exchange for the gold. In the 1960s, with the massive printing of money to finance the Vietnam War and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs, other countries were doing exactly this at an accelerating rate. For although Americans could no longer redeem their dollars for gold, foreign governments could, and did. The outflow was so great that in 1971 President Richard Nixon, alarmed at the hemorrhage, finally closed the “gold window”, and suspended all redemption of dollars. The final link between the dollar and gold was severed, and the dollar has floated without backing of any kind ever since.

Paul and Lehrman ably narrate the twists and turns in this story. Then they turn to describing how the United States might be returned to a gold standard. It would require several legislative steps over a period of years, such as repealing the “legal tender” legislation that obliges Americans to accept paper dollars in payment of debts. The authors contend that such legislation is unconstitutional in the first place.

Why should we care? For one thing, the authors assert that much of the unpleasantness of contemporary economic life would be eliminated or greatly reduced, for booms, busts, and bubbles are all products of inflation—the practice of promiscuously printing ever more paper money. Beyond that, a proper gold standard forces discipline on governments, who can no longer spend beyond their means, and it also allows businesses and citizens to plan more rationally for longer periods, while also encouraging thrift: the saving of some of our earnings, so that the true wealth of society can grow.

I was surprised to discover that this book was a Congressional “report.” For unlike most reports, it is passionate, well researched, well argued, and well written. The biggest obstacle to restoring a gold standard is probably that people regard the topic as dull and technical. We’re not interested in monetary theory; we just like money and we want it to work. Unfortunately, this attitude has been a costly one, not just in vague social terms but in a reduced standard of living for each one of us, unless we happen to be members of those elites who actually profit from monetary inflation.

This book offers a pleasant and stimulating way to start healing that ignorance. And each of us would be well advised to set about this as soon as may be, for the fate of all paper currencies in history has been collapse and destruction. Ultimately it’s not a question for experts, but a question for citizens. It’s not an abstract issue, but a practical one, even an urgent one. The supply of dollars is exploding; the next currency is probably going to be gold. This book is a briefing for that new order.

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the panopticon state

The panopticon was a type of building designed by the 18th-century British philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham, famous as the leading thinker on utilitarianism. Designed with prisons in mind, the panopticon was a cylindrical building whose chambers all faced an inner atrium with an “inspection house” at its center. The intent was that watchmen in the inspection house could observe the inmates of the cells at all times, while the inmates would never be sure exactly when they were being observed—only that they could be. According to , Bentham said that this prison would be “a mill for grinding rogues honest.”

Reportedly, when Edward Snowden disclosed that the U.S. government has been gathering data on millions of its citizens’ phone calls and on Internet traffic, worldwide sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four bumped up. As I write this, Snowden is still apparently holed up in an airport in Moscow, searching for a country that will grant him asylum from that same U.S. government. Many have turned him down, at least some of these after receiving pressure from the United States. Snowden is wanted on charges of espionage.

Espionage. But who has really been doing the spying here? Snowden’s crime consists in alerting his fellow citizens that their own government has been spying on them, and continues to do so. The program has been secret because . . . well, because people don’t like being spied on.

“But it helps us catch criminals,” goes the rationale; “it helps us catch terrorists.”

Even if this were true, I’m afraid it’s no reason to violate citizens’ privacy. The same rationale could be used to justify surprise body searches or home searches without warrants, or to force everyone to undergo periodic polygraph testing, or to report to the police before making a trip.

One of the many humiliations of being incarcerated is the loss of privacy. In prison you are forced to eat and bathe in common; people can watch you when you sleep or go to the toilet. If people send you mail it can be inspected and read before you ever get it. If you have visitors, your interaction with them is controlled and monitored.

To be deprived of privacy in any of these ways is to have one’s human dignity assaulted. This affront to dignity is part of the punishment of incarceration, but it should be no part of being a free citizen. Those who rationalize the violation of citizens’ privacy by trying to frighten them with the prospect of crime or “terror” are serving their own interests. Anyone who asks—or demands—that you sacrifice your dignity for any reason whatever, or someone who simply robs you of it without your knowledge, does not have your best interests at heart. That person is asking you—or forcing you—to capitulate your humanity and to assume the status of livestock. Is a person who would ask you to do this worthy of your trust, your obedience?

How afraid of terrorism are you? Death by acts of terror is spectacular but rare: your chances of dying that way are close to nil. Your chances of dying in an automobile crash—or even by lightning-strike—are vastly greater. How afraid does that make you? If you’re like me, it doesn’t make you afraid enough to stop driving. You practice reasonable prudence and get on with your life.

Is Edward Snowden a criminal? Who knows? The question of the legality of what he has done is a sideshow. It justifies a vindictive manhunt the real purpose of which is no doubt to send a warning to those who may be thinking of blowing the whistle on government skulduggery: “Don’t cross us, or we’ll destroy you.”

How different in tone from these words uttered by President Barack Obama on his first day in office:

Starting today every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side, not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known.

Reassuring words. But actions speak louder. And the state’s actions say that those who seek to make information known will have to run for their lives.

prose sketch: picnic in Cates Park

Sun. 30 Jun 2013 ca. noon Cates Park

A perfect summer day on the great sloping lawn of “little” Cates. Kimmie lies prone with A Game of Thrones on our yellow blanket while boat engines chew aggressively at the water of Indian Arm. Now a seaplane growls low overhead: the air of this beautiful place trembles with engines. Our blanket is laid partly in the shade of a birch-tree; other trees rise full, mature, untrimmed: maples mostly.

A cadre of little children have run into one of the low portals into the ancient incinerator that was already a derelict ruin when Mara and I did the same thing nearly 50 years ago. We called it the Giants’ Castle. It was choked with brambles then but seems to be cleared inside now. Great trees hem the low, lichen-fogged ring of broken concrete.

The sky is blue with no trace of a cloud. Off to my left one family has set up a tent-pavilion on four poles; they commune on chairs in its dark shade like nomads. Above and beyond them: the tennis courts, enclosed in green chainlink and half-shaded by forest. A quieter group plays there now—the faint voices of girls and the gentle pock of ball-hits. The young men there before did much more high-spirited hollering.

Across the greenish water: the forested humps of Belcarra, and beyond those a curtain-wall of mountains marching north from Coquitlam, also all forested.

What is that bird singing cheerfully in the tree in front of me?

The Failure of the New Economics by Henry Hazlitt

The Failure of the New Economics: An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies by Henry Hazlitt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This detailed critique of John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money is much better written and more cogent than the book it examines.

As I mentioned in my review of Keynes’s work, I learned about Hazlitt’s book from an Amazon review of the General Theory and felt inspired to take the reviewer’s advice and read the two books together, in tandem. I would read a little bit of General Theory, then I would read Hazlitt’s commentary on the text. This made Keynes’s impenetrable book understandable, and enabled me to read the whole thing (skimming certain portions).

Hazlitt admits that he himself has difficulty understanding what Keynes is saying in many places, and offers his best guess at a translation into plain language. As a reader of both books, I was grateful that Hazlitt had both the training and the patience to tackle this task, for I have neither, even though I realize that Keynes’s work has been and continues to be a major influence on the world of economics, which is to say, on the lives of each of us. On the other hand I would not want to lend too much credence to Keynes’s own assertion near the beginning of his book that it is addressed mainly to his fellow economists, and that therefore laymen may find it heavy going. For I doubt that Keynes’s ideas are recondite; rather, the problem is that they are, by him, so poorly expressed.

Hazlitt’s own stance is that of classical economics, or anyway is descended from that line. In chapter 1 of his excellent primer, Economics In One Lesson, Hazlitt sums up all of economics in not just one lesson but in a single sentence:

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

In contrast, Keynes is famous for his response to the question about the long-term consequences of his suggestions: “In the long run run we’re all dead.” Maybe this flippant remark was not meant to be taken seriously, but in fact his ideas have been applied and implemented with a willful blindness to their long-term effects.

In this book Hazlitt does his best to distill the meaning from Keynes’s thickets of words. Flipping open Keynes’s book at random, I arrive at this on page 163, where Keynes is trying to summarize the thinking of those mainstream economists with whom he differs:

In any given industry we have a demand schedule for the product relating the quantities which can be sold to the prices asked; we have a series of supply schedules relating the prices which will be asked for the sale of different quantities on various bases of cost; and these schedules between them lead up to a further schedule which, on the assumption that other costs are unchanged (except as a result of the change in output), gives us the demand schedule for labor in the industry relating the quantity of employment to different levels of wages, the shape of the curve at any point furnishing the elasticity of demand for labor.

A point that Hazlitt makes again and again is that Keynes sets out to refute positions that no one actually holds. That is, much of his book is an instance of the “straw man” fallacy. Would any economist, much less all of them, assuming that he could unpack the meaning of the above sentence, agree that it represents his understanding of how things work? It’s most unlikely. Keynes would have been more convincing if he had quoted some authority verbatim and then set out to refute him. But Keynes quotes few other authors, and these are mainly those he approves of.

Another serious recurring problem is the slipperiness of Keynes’s own definitions. Hazlitt points out repeatedly how these implicitly change from chapter to chapter, rendering them meaningless. Beyond this, some of his definitions are meaningless as stated. One of these is the notion of the labor unit. About this Keynes writes:

Insofar as different grades and kinds of labor and salaried assistance enjoy a more or less fixed relative remuneration, the quantity of employment can be sufficiently defined by taking an hour’s employment of ordinary labor as our unit and weighting an hour’s employment of special labor in proportion to its remuneration.

If you’ve read Capital by Karl Marx then you will recognize this definition, for it is essentially the same, as Hazlitt points out. Hazlitt continues:

Keynes’s “quantity of employment” is not a quantity of employment. It is the quantity of money received by laborers who are employed.

Keynes is measuring labor in units of dollars.

Not that it makes much difference, for the definition does not play much part in his argument. But it is a sign of intellectual carelessness. It’s as though Keynes’s reputation was already so great when he wrote his book that he felt no need for consistency or even evidence�—a lack that Hazlitt takes him to task for. Instead of providing evidence, here and there Keynes will say something like, “statistics could be found to show this.” Hazlitt actually looks for statistics and other data to try to substantiate Keynes’s assertions; in each case the data goes against the assertions.

In Hazlitt’s book Keynes appears in a poor light. Not only are his thinking and writing shown to be inadequate, but Hazlitt draws attention to Keynes’s patronizing and authoritarian digressions. Keynes has contempt for capitalists, rentiers, landlords, and even for regular working people insofar as they perversely try to save some of their earnings. For their own good, all of these people need to be brought under the control of the state and its wise officials.

Indeed, in reading Hazlitt’s book, which is clear, understandable, and sensible, it is hard to believe that whole generations of economists and politicians have been enthralled with Keynes’s ideas. As Hazlitt points out at the end, there have been barely a handful of works written in criticism of Keynes, while whole libraries have been filled with laudatory and enthusiastic exegeses. I’m left with the impression that his obscurity has been mistaken for brilliance.

Based on my own experience, I don’t think you should attempt Keynes’s General Theory without a copy of Hazlitt’s book by your side. I would go further: if you want to find out what Keynes’s ideas are, just read Hazlitt and forget about the General Theory. In it you will learn everything about Keynes that you could ever need to know, while also enjoying a clear, fluent read.

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The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Bad writing, confused thinking, pernicious policies.

I first encountered the name Keynes when reading a Time magazine article in around 1975 about West Germany’s chancellor Helmut Schmidt. As I recall, the article was a complimentary one, in which Schmidt was portrayed as an intellectual technocrat who favored the intellectual and technocratic economics of John Maynard Keynes. I got the impression that Keynesian economics was something advanced and new, a sophisticated modern theory to be used by sophisticated modern leaders who have the necessary intellectual power and humanitarian vision.

Over the years I would see his name crop up from time to time, usually as representing one pole in an economic debate that I didn’t really understand. I did not encounter a meaningful discussion of his ideas until I read Jane Jacobs’s excellent Cities and the Wealth of Nations in 1986, in which she examines, in chapter 1, how different economists throughout history have tried to account for the phenomenon of “stagflation,” or, in other words, economic decline. On page 16 she describes Keynes as “the most influential economist of this century,” but by page 27 she sends him off into history:

Keynes gloomily commented, as he observed the economic decline of Britain, that possibly an economy could develop structural flaws lying beyond help from his remedies: another way of saying that things can go wrong which his theory couldn’t account for.

Jacobs’s own book, which is no longer than Keynes’s, goes on to answer the question that stumped the earlier economists, including Keynes. It makes an excellent work to compare with his, because it is a paragon of clarity of both thought and expression. By contrast, Keynes’s book is a paragon of obscurity and vagueness.

I had long thought that I should probably read Keynes as part of my general education, but I found myself reluctant to try him, both because of intimations of the difficulty of his writing, and because my own economic beliefs were leading me in the opposite direction to what his ideas seemed to be. When I came across a review on Amazon in which the reviewer recommended reading this book along with a critical analysis by Henry Hazlitt called The Failure of the New Economics: An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies, I immediately wanted to try it, and I bought both books at that moment.

I’d already read Hazlitt and liked him. His Economics In One Lesson is an excellent primer on the fundamentals of classical economics. Like Jane Jacobs, Henry Hazlitt thinks and writes with great clarity. Hazlitt, as a classical economist, is hostile to Keynes’s ideas, and his book is a debunking of the General Theory, but his analysis is logical, and he has performed a great service to the reader of Keynes in grappling with Keynes’s obscurities of expression to reveal their meaning and state them in plain terms.

Do you think I’m being hard on Keynes? Let’s try an example. Early in the book he sets out to define some terms. One of the terms he wants to define is “involuntary” unemployment (and the quotation marks are his). Here it is:

Men are involuntarily unemployed if, in the event of a small rise in the price of wage-goods relatively to the money-wage, both the aggregate supply of labor willing to work for the current money-wage and the aggregate demand for it at that wage would be greater than the existing volume of employment.

Got that? No? Go ahead: read it again. Take your time. It’s a definition, so in order to understand what follows in the book, you’ll have to grasp this.

Friends, I didn’t waste my time. As a sentence, it reminded me of another one penned by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake:

Utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be.

The difference being that Joyce’s sentence is an impish joke, while presumably Keynes’s is not.

All right, obscurity aside, what is Keynes actually trying to say in his book? He’s saying that the cause of unemployment in an economy is a deficiency of consumption. Consumption is deficient because of people’s “liquidity-preference”—that is, their desire to save some of their earnings. They are enticed to save partly because interest rates are so high, which in turn is due to the greed of moneylenders. The path to full employment is therefore to push down the interest rate to deter saving, and to boost consumption by all possible means: by preventing any drop in wage-rates on the one hand, and on the other by government’s stepping into the breach by doing plenty of spending of its own. If a government needs to run deficits and print money in order to spend, then well and good: these actions are not only harmless, they are positively beneficial and it is immoral to shrink from them. If these actions are undertaken vigorously enough, full employment will result and maximum prosperity will be achieved.

Keynes’s great economic discovery was that Aesop got things exactly backwards in his fable of The Ant and the Grasshopper. It was the ant who was doing things wrong, saving up for the winter. For while he was seeing to his own future, he was beggaring the rest of society by creating unemployment. The grasshopper’s poverty was due not to his own lack of industry, but to the ant’s “liquidity-preference”!

Keynes doesn’t actually mention Aesop’s fable in his book—I wish he had. But he does make repeated arch jabs at the “vice” of thrift. Not that he really blames people for trying to see to their own futures, but he laments the social damage that, according to him, results from their behavior. That damage has to be undone, or better, prevented, by a sagacious government. People are too foolish and too self-centered to do what is best for the common good.

But wealth is not created by consumption; it’s created by production. You don’t make anyone richer by consuming; you make everyone richer by producing. And while it’s true that producers produce for the sake of consumers, it’s at best a circuitous and backwards way of going about things to try to stimulate the process by pushing ever-larger amounts of printed money into consumers’ hands. Keynes puts the cart before the horse in this and in many other ways in the course of his book.

Oh yes, along the way there are some equations too. It’s not clear whether Keynes himself sees these as anything more than a metaphor or an illustrative device, and he even disparages the use of equations. Equations can only have scientific validity if the variables involved can be isolated and controlled for in an experiment. This is possible in physics, but not in economics. The mathematics in the book is halfhearted and it’s safe to skip; Keynes himself even suggests doing so.

In his last chapter Keynes briefly outlines the implications of his theory for policy-making. By and large, the investment of capital is to be taken over by the state. It will not be full-blown socialism, he says, because the state need not own the actual means of production. The state merely needs to decide where to allocate capital to the best overall social advantage. Yes, this will “mean the euthanasia of the rentier, and, consequently, the euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist to exploit the scarcity-value of capital.” Both the sentiment here and its manner of expression are worthy of Karl Marx. Keynesianism overall is Marxism Lite.

Keynes repeatedly talks about how to control human behavior, how to formulate public policies to neutralize people’s purblind selfishness and misguided actions. The citizens are the livestock on the great farm of the state. Their behavior needs to be channeled in ways that are productive and beneficial—a task that falls to the wise farmer and his farmhands, who in effect form the ruling class. Keynes, by presumably being free of the vices he ascribes to others, is by implication a member of this ruling class. He is its theoretician.

But could Keynes be right after all? We’re finding out. Keynes’s ideas triumphed in the 20th century, and are being implemented with even more force today in the 21st. Governments all over the world and at all levels are running unprecedented deficits; paper currencies are being printed at record rates to try to “stimulate” sluggish, faltering economies; interest rates are at zero or, in real terms, below zero; great mountains of debt have been accumulated in an effort to “capitalize” ventures of all kinds, often failed ones. And yet unemployment is high and growing: it’s higher than our governments dare tell us. Maybe if we open the floodgates of money-printing still further, that will finally create “full employment.”

The experiment has failed. We are now just racing to the catastrophic endgame of Keynes’s program. I’m afraid that Keynes’s popularity arose not from any brilliance in his thought, which was disorderly and confused, or in his writing, which ditto, but from the fact that he told everyone what they wanted to hear. He told workers that the path to prosperity was in spending and consuming, and that their wages should never go down; and he told governments that their greatest virtue lay in spending, borrowing, and printing money. Let’s party!

We’ve been partying now pretty much since this book was published in 1936. We’ve been keeping the hangover at bay by taking more and more hair of the dog. But the terrible consequences are becoming manifest. Winter is coming, and we’re now a world of grasshoppers; soon we’ll be in search of those few ants who might have some provisions put by.

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what have we got to hide? I’ll tell you

While I can’t say that I’m surprised at the recent revelation of the handing over of millions of telephone-call records to the U.S. government by Verizon (and no doubt other operators), for some reason it has stirred fresh anger in me.

I’m a Canadian citizen, which actually means that I’m probably at even higher risk of having my telecommunication activities recorded and stored by the American feds, since their ostensible target is foreign calls. Not only that, but we know that our own federal government is eager to gather such information about its citizens’ online activities (Vic Toews and his obstreperous promotion of Bill C30). No doubt it is doing so through one means or another. In a digital world, with information storage growing ever more abundant and cheap, the state will find ways to lay its hands on my data. And because the pretext for doing so is “security”, it will do it secretly—as the Verizon phone records were being transferred secretly until Edward Snowden blew the whistle.

So what’s my problem? Do I “have something to hide”?

This is the phrase used by those who seek to rationalize the secret, involuntary recording of citizens’ behavior by the state. Jonathan Kay wrote a good piece about this yesterday for The National Post, but I wanted to add some thoughts of my own.

When we hide something we are putting it out of sight, concealing it from view so that it cannot be seen or found. It is an act of secrecy. But secrecy and privacy are not the same thing; in Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary there is a list of synonyms of the word secret and private does not appear on this list. Under private the dictionary gives these definitions:

1a: intended for or restricted to the use of a particular person, group, or class; b: belonging or concerning an individual person, company, or interest; 3a: withdrawn from company or observation: sequestered

I believe the most relevant definition here is “restricted to the use of a particular person.” I am the proprietor of information about me and my actions; it is private. It should go only to those with whom I voluntarily share it. Those who take it without my consent, and especially those who take it without my knowledge, are invading my privacy.

But why do I care? The government represents me. They’re trying to protect me. They wouldn’t do anything to harm me. They do what they do for my own good and for the good of my country. Why obstruct the efforts of those who only want to help me?

My first thought here is that it’s an instance of what Mortimer J. Adler calls the “angelistic fallacy”: the attribution of angelic qualities to men. If governments were run by angels and not by men, then I would have much less cause to insist on my privacy, since angels are by their nature interested only in my good and incapable of doing wrong. My private information would be safe with them.

But governments are composed of human beings, whose motives and actions are almost always conflicted. As Peter Barnes notes in his book Capitalism 3.0, which I recently reviewed, it’s not clear who the constituents of a politician are. The voters in his district? Lobbyists? His corporate campaign donors? His party? His country? His conscience? All of these no doubt play a part, but it’s anyone’s guess how that interior tug-of-war will play out in any given instance. My government’s assurances that they act only in my interest amount to a vision statement—but to nothing more than that.

But even supposing that the government is sincerely concerned with the national good, as it understands that phrase, that doesn’t mean that the government is concerned with my good. Omar Khadr is a Canadian citizen, and his government allowed him to languish in Guantanamo Bay for 8 years without charge. Indeed, “his” government resisted the urgings of his own American military counsel to repatriate him. Was Omar Khadr’s private data safe with the government?

Jonathan Kay’s piece quoted these chilling words of John Ashcroft, the U.S. Attorney-General at the time of 9/11:

To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies, and pause to America’s friends.

America’s enemies. Who are they, exactly? Adversaries in declared wars? Of those there are none. No, America’s enemies are those designated as enemies by the regime. And by what criteria do they designate those enemies? By their own criteria. Ashcroft’s reference to “those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty” might make one such criterion: the enemy within. The enemy of the state. He looks like you and me. You’ll only know him by the fact that he criticizes the regime and its policies. But don’t worry: we can find him. He’s left traces of his actions. We can find him and put him away where he won’t hurt anyone.

That’s the real reason that your private information belongs only to you, and why you have an inalienable right to decide who has access to it.