Broadening the resource curse: a note on grain imperialism

Internautes,
This blog does not use the term imperialism lightly. But what else do you call the trend highlighted in this week's economists consisting of nouveau-riche nations buying up the best land in less-developed but better-endowed nations to establish their food security beyond the level world markets provide? This is first of all an affront to the principle of market competition for all that is the only real alternative to various styles of empire in an interconnected world. It is secondly an insult to the idea that democracy might just provide benefits to the citizens of less-affluent nations. Those who would argue that this is the only way to get green revolution productivity out of the land just aren't thinking. They may be calculating things such as the low probability that democratic regimes capable of providing the land reform and research into methods of locally implementing green revolution techniques, and creating functioning markets in commodities and labor capable of getting that land productivity for the rest of us will arise. But their assumptions are wrong, especially if they are based on the econometric methodology of calculating future probabilities based on the past course of a variable alone. This may be rather valid for the US stock market, but for the probability of enough information spreading to the global poor for them to demand better, in the middle of an internet revolution, it is dead wrong? Have not statistical expectations of people's abilities to implement self-determinacy been rather trumped in the past ten years? Peaceful elections in several African countries are but the happiest example. Calculating is not thought about politics. Thought about politics involves continual revision of assumptions after the natural fashion of any thought.


But there are better reasons to oppose this trend than just a better calculation of how likely the green revolution is to get implemented under the policy as opposed to without the policy; and note that the policy does not guarantee any sort of success at this goal. This latest episode in the periodic starvation due to overpopulation scare of post-Malthusian history is essentially communistic. Governments decide what they need and get others to grow it for them. Those of us who think the market allocates resources better than government should be weary of being told just how much rice China or Qatar 'needs' for its ill-defined security or why grain is 'more important' than rubber or coffee or tobacco or some other apparent luxury. If these nations want to contribute to our food security, why don't they work on annual-perrenial hybrids? That is one of the promising avenues of American research into dealing with land-exhaustion, fertilizer-depletion, and behind it all the need for organized energy. (Current-day fertilizer is made largely of petroleum). Why, might it just be because these nations are not actually internally capitalistic by lack of well-functioning internal markets? This blogger thinks so. The disaster of state-thought is upon us once more, and looking beyond its' own borders once more. That is what statist regimes do, point blank and simple.

The Economist is wrong to talk of this episode as at least a possible broadening of the benefits of efficient capitalism to places that don't have it. Efficient capitalism cannot be imported, as even the Bush administration acknowledged. I have outlined the inefficiency of the current method. Now I must say a word about the real method as it was employed from England to Thailand (hey, they both have neolithic tin mines too). In the real method, land to which property rights were previously vague is put in the hands of a definite owner. That much , I acknowlege, is being done under this new form of imperialism. However, the definite owner is not brought in by the government. He or she wins a land battle through ordinary legal means by virtue of local citizenship, or perhaps high legal status; no one ever said capitalism was an ethical advent in and of itself. In the real method, furthermore, 'security' in a single good for some entity is not the aim. The aim is the enrichment of the person who wins the battle, and they will grow a particular crop on it with market aims in mind. As it has actually happened, it took place when a local capital system was in place. And probably some other stuff I am missing, which also just illustrates a little law of human development; what is deliberately crafted to look exactly like a thing from the outside is as unlikely to be that thing as the Pygmalion method is to create artificial life.

When countries' reproducable resources are treated like money in the bag for the grabber just like irreproduceable subterranean cachets, the resource curse is extended beyond its natural bounds. It would be difficult to provide precise accounting of how exactly this will happen, but the idea is simple. If a foreigner starts buying up the land and paying taxes on it, those taxes become as oil revenues. The jobs on the land, if they are available by virtue of the foreign government hireing local workers rather than their own, are likely not to be part of a competitive labor market, if none outside the system is allowed to exist, and will thus their landing becomes a favor to cultivated from the foreigners. All this is exactly what the resource-cursed third world doesn't need.

But what else could one really expect a bunch of nouveau-riche nations to do than act just like the nouveau riche England and France of times past? The world is not an economically rational place, but that is no reason not to find policies to oppose this sort of historical repetition, to which mere knowledge of the thing will not yield a medicine. I'm with the left on this one. Let's start talking about human rights and international legality for displaced farmers, and stop using those terms to decry only the actions of nations of long-established wealth, whose violations are much less egregious than those of rising stars for simple, acultural reasons involving the universal historical pattern of development.

Why This Blog is Changing its Name

Blogdom,
There will be no new authors on this blog, contrary to the impression the change-of-name may have given you. It will be the same old goofball by pseudonym blogging at this address without authority other than that gained through argument.
But that is exactly why I feel the need for a more descriptive name. Sure, goofball has been, is, and will be going political on your ass on this blog, so the old name had some descriptive power. But the new name has better, since I live in Berkeley, the best city in speech (or argument), that is the one that attempts to found a new perfect society through words, transforming itself first through argument and then trying to spread this argument by its example; which is rather difficult, since the city remains materially a horrendously unequal, ill-kept place with staggering problems, even as it argues its way out of these statistically and economically incontrovertible facts with argument, a truth by another criterion. I disagree with most of the common arguments, the intellectual birth-right to which I am an immigrant heir, but fit in well because I too, by these philosopheme-studded political arguments and other argumentative actions, play my divergent part in founding the best city in speech; I'm just trying to change which best city that might be.
To deserve its new Platonic name, the blog will continue to promote the essentially essentialist, but unabashedly revisionist, mode of political discourse it has so far stood for. As I'm sure my vast array of imaginary readers is perfectly aware.

Equality: the game

Suppose two men, two women, or a man and woman meet as equals, because they are in the same room and convention decrees they cannot use force or consensually recognized symbols of superiority to decide who is boss before either speaks. As we are all perfectly aware, they may or may not end the conversation considering themselves equals. As a matter of fact, equality in such a common situation is rare and difficult; the former fact stemming from the latter. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, we (might) all enter a conversation equals, but we do not all leave it equals.

There are two virtues to starting from this simple situation and build upon it to construct a definition of equality applicable to the human scene rather than analyze its previous uses. First, I thereby rid myself of the historical weight attached to the word and enable myself to think freely. However, I am still performing an analysis of the word as it exists in our language by my sheer use of the letters as they appear on the paper in a fashion that does not set us hunting for what alternate meanings I may be giving it. Like it or not, any analysis changes the meaning of the word it is analyzing just by being an attempted definitory use of it, and we constantly decide whether a word is being 'misused', given new meaning, on a 'know it when you see it' basis. Second, the atomic simplicity is wholly defined in such a fashion that it can be analyzed as a game in the game-theoretical sense. I call it a construction of equality and not a reconstruction because I make no claim that I am going to arrive at the word exactly as it has been used so far, which would be as pointless as trying to engineer a baby within a womb through completely artificial means. I am only trying to come up with a clean definition that passes the 'know it when you see it' litmus. It will however not pass the litmus test of those who use the word as propaganda with pre-fashioned objectives, since, even if their politics agree with mine, propagandists all claim that the meaning of a word is something, that its historical use can be summed up, to arrive at a solid foundation from which to organize fictions. As a social scientist needs the foundations of mathematics more profoundly than a natural scientist, so a propagandist needs essentialism-in-history claims more than an analyst; he doesn't have concrete material to work with.

Returning to the situation, I observe that as a game, equality only means that the definitory rather than strategic rules are the same for everybody. It is a debate as ancient as the hills whether this is 'fair', and that would depend entirely on what you mean. To avoid propaganda, I should disclose the following bias: I find the term 'fairness' to be inapplicable unless the things one is supposed to be fair to are the same in some real sense that includes their history and their likely behavior. Thus there is no fairness among humans, but only among the instruments that they use. For instance, if two men are at a lunch counter and one's dollar is rejected for a purchase while another is accepted, it is technically their dollars that have been treated unfairly. Now, whether the situation is the historically obvious one or not, both you and I, reader, know that there is, in the absence of a further story, an injustice involved. But how do we know this? Only because the two men are only known through their dollars. Instruments create the possibility of fairness. Two people cannot be compared without a situation with respect to which they are to be compared. This consequence follows also from the well-known fact that it is neither humanist nor possible to sum up what a person is, regardless of what evidence one has. What follows more uniquely from the above arguments is that the aspects of context that matter are the very instruments whose sameness the comparison actually rests upon.

But then there is no 'justice as fairness' ala Rawls, and the famed 'veil of ignorance' reproduces certain instrumental situations in our assessment of how people ought to be treated at the expense of others. And this with neither a guarantee nor even a reason to believe that the same instrumental situations are being considered by all; in which case the laws arrived at from Rawls's fair state of nature are an unthought and probably incoherent compromise. I will tackle this contentious point further elsewhere. For now, this sketch of an argument is sufficient to point out why I don't think we can make any simple appeal to what's 'really' fair without dehumanizing ourselves and others by restricting the contexts of possible humanity to certain specific games at the expense of others in a judgement. Fairness is a final condition, fit only for sizing up the dead from what we know of them. For the living, there is an infinity of extant further potential information.

Then we can say nothing at all about the 'meaning' of equality. All we can say is that it is a game theory axiom underlying an infinite class of games which nonetheless stand in a one-to-one 'ratio' to all possible games; from the standpoint of cardinality, there is no difference between the class of games that have the axiom and those that don't. Though the latter set may still be richer in possibilities we can actually think up, which is different from cardinality, the former offers no real limits to our imagination. Furthermore, since transfinite mathematics of this sort is completely paradoxical if we apply it to our numeric intuitions, it would be ludicrous to say that restricting the games of life to games with equality of players with respect to definitory rules be limiting or dehumanizing even if those without it were more 'numerous'.

This equality may or may not be a noble condition to impose upon the games we play. To answer that question, I would begin with the literal meaning of the word 'noble' and ask whether its metaphorical meanings really have complete independence from it. But this is a political philosophy post, so I won't go into that here. For me, what matters is that it is not dehumanizing like 'fairness.' This means that equality as a game-theory axiom is under investigation like anything else, but that fairness is not even a proper term for the picture, and is really only mentioned here because of previous uses of it. I am inclined to accept the virtue of equality under this minimal view as an axiom to other political values I may espouse without knowing what other adjectives apply to it.

This minimal view of equality in which it has an uninterpreted definition but no meaning, by the virtue of the infinite class of games it helps define raises many more questions than it answers. But since I happen to think it is also the best view, I will take on these questions in an abstract fashion.

Now what are the 'games' that exist? Since it does not answer the question to say that this class is also infinite, I must pretend it is finite to show it is out there. The games Gi,...,Gn that exist, I claim, and have an equality condition, are the number of 'ways' in which human beings may interact with like instruments that will be treated similarly. An instrument is anything measurable whose likeness can thus be ascertained. Banned from the best city in speech are the soul, the mind, the heart, knowledge, tradition, and the like. There is, then a reason why people complain in one way or another of the soulessness of the modern democratic state. It's supposed to be that way.

The most obvious instrument is the dollar as in the example above. Some people might say there is nothing equal about a man with 10 dollars having those dollars treated the same way as those of a man with an additional 90 dollars. But I maintain that there is, and that any proof to the contrary has to pass through the idea of fairness. Clearly, if the instruments are the relevant aspects of context, and there is an inequality in available instruments of the same type, there is a context of inequality. But since trying to remedy this inequality in practice involves making a massive judgement concerning fairness, based not on partial and limited facts but on no facts whatever, since establishing point equality in a moment would require ignoring the entirety of the past, it is the duty of the person establishing equal situations to remedy them by different means. These do not currently exist on any significant scale but are not difficult to imagine. Imagine, for instance, a city where every store had a sign on its door stating the maximum amount of money that could be spent there in one go, or situation. Those who did not have this maximum sum could not enter, because they could not there be treated as equals in negotiation. If this was all the public business of the city, it would be an equal one.

Some utopia, you may be thinking, and you would be right. This is not yet a description of a minimal implementable view of equality, but only a particular equal game that cannot sustain a society. I need to discuss also how goods are made, how workers are paid, how money is inherited. I will tackle only the last and probably the most sensitive issue. Money can be legally mandated to be inherited by children, by whoever the doner wishes to stipulate in his or her will, by the state, or by some combination thereof. The presently espoused view of equality as game demands only that there be a fair process to determine who inherits it in the sense described in the previous example. This means competition. There cannot be no-brainer inheritance to a legally stipulated party, and the parties must have like instruments. Clearly, then, either the state or individuals are out unless they can be made to yield like instruments. Therefore, if we must keep the estate tax as an economic necessity, which certainly appears to be the case, the state must somehow be represented by an individual with the same rights as everybody else in this process. His goals, though, are different. He is not acting on his own behalf, and this creates a principal-agent problem that is not so immediately solvable. Furthermore, it would be idiotic to introduce the veil of ignorance rejected above for the overall organization of society into a particular game. Society is here only the sum of games, with some of them determining the shape of future rounds of play.

What this example shows is that, if social interaction is to be composed of minimally equal games, some of these games must help shape the rules of future ones. Constitutions are necessary. The contrast in outcome between a constitutionally mandated outcome for inheritance and a locally decided one requires only the total inequality of wealth at the time of drafting and a putting it to a plebescite to be maximal. I suspect that the local versus global distinction is equally drastic in other games. Therefore, anybody who accepts my equality as a condition on games ought to think seriously and creatively about what the constitution of his or her utopia says. But he or she should do so without a 'veil of ignorance'; there is nothing either noble or necessary for equality about remembering only semantic rather than historical reality in proceeding forth, regardless of what the undefined but meaningful term noble may actually imply.

The war we deserve?

So what would Sartre say now? The man who gave existential accounts of occupied Paris, attempting to give some sort of meaning to the horror Europe witnessed, and famously declared that 'each person got the war he deserved' with far greater respect for catharsis than for any notion whatever of historical accuracy, would yet be a better voice from the Cartesian land than the current French intelligensia. So let me take up the challenge and ask whether the non-Muslim world is getting the war it deserves. But first, I will make a slight foray into causal analysis, flawed though it may be, and defend the simple thesis that the global war of reactions against terror has one overwhelming cause, and that it is the obvious one.
It is frequently said that poverty and despair, not Islam, are the causes of terror. This is true; the behavior of the Islamic and non-Islamic people living in similar circumstances are not different in terms of their willingness to resort to violence, their attitude toward human life, in the epistomological and ethical attitudes they reveal. Accounts of the conflict in Sri Lanka I read in an anthropology journal a few years ago, countless reports on African wars, and the known historical record all confirm this beyond the shadow of a doubt. But does this mean that we should treat it similarly? Absolutely not; organization makes all the difference.
Put bluntly, local violence is a much more limited threat than global violence, even if it replicated in just as many places, causes just as much death and suffering, etc. A collection of locales does not the world span. Violence that takes aim at a global order is a threat to our vision of cosmopolitan identity, to a world where it is possible to identify with anything beyond one's immediate physical circumstances and the cultural representations these spawn. It is a threat to the ability of people everywhere to defect geographically and dissent intellectually. It is not bodies and lands which the Islamists are fighting. It is minds.
Whether perverting monotheism or simply laying bare what it does in certain circumstances in its original, unmitigated form, the Islamists attempt to destroy our global order because they have their own, a vision of how everybody everywhere should live that they find imminent. Only it bears no resemblance other than being a global vision to cosmopolitan ethics. The French commentator Baudrillard or his translator, writing in Harper's magazine, called Islamic terror the necessary other of globalization. But as Alain Badiou wrote in an anti-Levinas essay, 'the other must not be too different'. His sarcasm was as unwarranted as Levinas's initial idea of embracing the other would have been if he had been referring to a cultural other, as Badiou pretended to believe. This view is flatly correct; only a global vision is compatible with another global vision and can interact with it in a space. I am not Hegelian enough to think it necessary, although the long and checkered history of global visions since its obscure beginnings in the ancient middle east was in some sense bound to leave behind some traces of its many mutually distrustful selves. I leave it to others to explain to me exactly what the Islamic global vision is, although frankly my concern for its' finer points is limited. Since I believe ethics, the science of discovering the implications of one's actions for the life and liberty of others, can't start from any other basis than self-preservation, and is a logical extension thereof (as Charles Peirce among others wuite brilliantly demonstrated) I have a duty not to stop and ask whether those who would destroy my global vision have one with merits. I don't care, and I hold the particular stream of Islam known as 'Islamic radicalism' completely accountable for its actions. Trying to understand what poverty drives people to regardless of their traditions is an ethical duty. Understanding the Islamic worldview is ethically counterindicated. The duty of verstehende of the universals of poverty can be classified as an application of the cosmopolitan duty to enrich the world by comprehension of its' impersonal laws and to make these part of the personal soul. The interdiction of compatible other comprehension falls under the duty of self-preservation, a pre-ethical requirement for any coherent ethics, cosmopolitan or not. They are not contradictory, but complementary. The cause of terrorism may be poverty, but the cause of the terrorist threat to the world is radical Islam. Noone should feel required to mince words about this; quite the contrary.

There is no war without an internal war. As every empire falls from both within and without, the Western vision of cosmopolitanism has its cowardly dissenters, its enemy sympathizers, and even its collaborators. Many have reacted to the Islamist demands with a belief they must somehow be justified. They are not. Our world visions are not justified by external sources, so there is no way for the Islamist demands to be understood from without. There is only mitigation of its cost in human lives and suffering, and even were intellectual synthesis a possibility, I do not see the reason to believe it would get us any closer to achieving this goal. What I have learned of world history has taught me neither that mutual comprehension stops bloodshed or that mutual incomprehension causes it. Unreconcilable worldviews are perfectly fine, as I see it, and the duty of synthesizing our views and our enemies' is anything but fine. This view does not affect one's degree of hawkishness.
Should we choose to indulge in noble quests beyond self-preservation, we find it necessary to understand what circumstance drives people to, which is to say what we ourselves would do in their shoes. Trying to understand their traditions, a name for that part of their behavior that does not fall within a universal range of reactions, varying no more within tribes than between them, is no ethical or cosmopolitan duty at all. It is without malice that I say to radical Islam that I don't give a damn what it thinks.

So is this the war we deserve? I don't think we can answer that question any more than we ever could or ever will be able to. But it certainly has only a theatric rather than an historical meaning.

Hesparus Unhinged; An Armchair Anthropology of the Election

Blogdom,
Instant history is generally considered garbage. Anthropology is current, and a debate persists over whether it is appropriate to apply the ahistorical methods of anthropology to specific historical events. The author, one goofball by pseudonym, thinks that since it would be a plainly biased choice of evidence and problems to focus the science of man only on those who are reputed by outsiders to have an 'everpresent now' view of time in which specific historical events do not intrude, and who undeniably have no systematic writing, the answer must be that the science of man and proper study of mankind must deal with historical events. If it is to be a study other than history, it must have different criteria. In particular, the criterion of past-ness is abandoned in favor of the criterion of having been there. History is there to correct anthropology, but anthropological speculation being there gives it something to correct it otherwise wouldn't have. If there were no Thucydides, but only political documents, ancient Greek history would be completely other to what it studies; one kind of narrative applied to another. Similarly, if people like me didn't attempt instant anthropology, historians of our lifetime, operating as historians on a shorter time scale than the classical historian, would have nothing formally equivalent to their own texts to correct. So here tis.

Perpetual Exceptionalism for Perpetual Normalcy

'American exceptionalism' is a well known ideology. But how does the belief that a nation represents an irrational ontological category actually affect external reality, that cares not for these claims? To answer this is as difficult as answering any question concerning the interface of mythology and reality. When I first attempted to answer this question, once and for all, in the naive fashion that marks any answer to a question one has just thought of, I took a page from my nomadic ancestors and considered mythology by analogy to something more concrete, a possession, a weapon, a contract; whatever the precise analogy, a means of creating utility beyond some given material basis. Being a student of economics at the time, I thought that this made sense, and justified a discrepancy between the confusing observable world, which did not and could not validate the straightforward theory, with the economists' usual tool of hidden variables whose values surprise our intuition when presented with them. A true variable, though, is never always and everywhere hidden until culled from the situation because it explains it. Many variables have surprising values if measured (e.g. 95% of what is said about 95% of people applies to a surprisingly smaller percent of people), and many are sometimes hidden, but some of the variables I made up simply didn't exist except as explanations, like the concept of utility from which they spawned. Variables must be things that were measured at one time, or at least ones that someone has thought of measuring without the hope of explaining the matter at hand. Otherwise, the variables become entirely other to what they are trying to explain, that is arbitrary.

I now think the question of this interface as a historical question is metaphysical, a quest after a small piece of the grand causal chain of everything and anything which no piece of can be recovered. All we can do is say the myth is around, and that any reason for what is outside of it to naturally correspond to it would have to be proven by people independently coming up with it from different perspectives. Real facts, or correspondences, should have no lineage in thinkers' minds. I affirm this principle born of applying the standards of science to our understanding of the human world on the grounds that while there is neither hope of replicating controlled experiment in society nor of postulating a specific hypothesis, testable or not, concerning cause and effect in the social world, by the very assumption that the social world is a real entity, I can postulate that our analysis of it should follow those principles that are common to all of science. Therefore, I can say no more about whether the idea arose out of circumstances or was handed down as a meme from generation to generation, locale to locale. My undergraduate attempts were in vain. I can still, however, let the distinction guide both my choice of problems and my choice of cuts, or law of the excluded middle statements brought to bear on a question though they are not logically derived from the statement. These two choices belong not to science but to its necessary background.

For instance, knowing empirically that the exceptionalist view exists widely regardless of whether it is a fact, and knowing this question is undecidable, I may modify my question from 'what is the effect of the myth of American exceptionalism on the actual world?' to 'what is the effect of the belief, true or false?' which is in a different thought-world from the hovering realities previously expounded. That is, a thought-world which does not attempt to recover pieces of the grand causal chain, but only to predict a consequence of an item the evidence before our eyes happens to tell us exists somewhere in that overarching and unknowable morass; a properly social-scientific thought world.

Sitting in a room in 2009, knowing the mythology still burns strong, I can look at the latest world event of which I can establish its independence from the mythology and try to predict the consequences of the belief for our reaction to it. According to today's Times, some of the news that is fit to print involves North Korea's launch of (another) rocket and three suicide attacks in 24 hours in Pakistan (which is also not unusual). I have so far looked only at the headlines, being concerned more with American diplomatic moves than the events they are reactions to of late. But that is fine, since empirical evidence shows the headline is the thing that will chiefly stick in the collective mind, and my task here is not to correct factual errors concerning these foreign events. At any rate, I have no special knowledge of them. These events are currently commonplace, regardless of how shocking they may be ethically, and it would not be amiss to imagine that the first reaction of many people to the Pakistani event, in particular will be along the lines of 'why can't these crazies stop killing each other to prove points?' 'why can't democracy seem to function in Pakistan?' etc. Others will ask 'what have we done to make this happen, as the most powerful country in the world?' or 'Did our Musharraf support destabilize the country?' The fact these are questions has no particular relation to American exceptionalism. The first thought of any inquisitive mind out there is to question why things happen. The key ideas are rather a stupendous and willful incomprehension of the different ground-conditions of Pakistan relative to the United States on the one side and a belief that we actually run the world and have unimpeachable responsibility for it on the other. I make no secret of which side I have sympathy for; understanding of ground-conditions can be corrected if a provincial stupor merely be removed from the eye of the public. The ontological errors of the second position, thinking that preeminent influence means causative control, and declining to attach moral responsibility to those who react to this influence, that is absolving them by plea of animalism or insanity, thus making them mere mechanical reactors to our own moves in our moral assessment, cannot be cured by any known means.

The first side seems to take the other villages to be like its own in the medieval fashion. This can be labelled a false sense of normalcy. The latter seems to think the actions of the most powerful are the only ones to attach moral responsibility to simply because they are the more powerful, as if the stronger and the weaker had no other characteristics we might care about. This position strikes many as being internally consistent and properly generic in its assessment, that is according neither privilege nor special ontology to any party. Internally consistent it is, but few Americans are actually willing to follow its dictate to the permanent revolution providing its own sense of justice to which it leads. Neither is this generic maxim adopted at random, that is generically. The position that we ourselves are the root of all evil in the world many sound generic philosophically, but a cursory examination of the times, places, and instances where it is or is not adopted reveal that it is anthropologically exceptionalist. The mythology of American exceptionalism has been turned on its head, but left intact. Truth be told, noone thinks the weak are always right without thinking the strong always have some characteristic, or have so far always been the very same party. To look for this characteristic in history is almost as futile as to validate the blatantly inaccurate second and simpler claim. No sort of evidence could possibly validate it; it is inexorably metaphysical, a maxim by which to look for and organize evidence rather than a fact to which evidence could correspond. I look elsewhere; what makes a maxim look like a fact is a mythologeme. In this particular case, I happen to think the mythologeme of American exceptionalism is a good candidate regardless of the position taken on it; mythologemes do not go away being called lies. It provides the answer to the difference those who happen to be strong have relative to all other parties.

But are the two parties, the normalists and the exceptionalists, who are readily describable as products of different political cultures, products of different cultures, period? This is a question one could look into their surroundings and lineage for clues to. But this is merely an armchair anthropology, so I will take the existence of both positions in any class, millieu, or region, which has been well documented by Morris Fiorina among others, as good evidence that they are not. Further evidence is provided by their largely if by means exclusively similar store of quoted facts. Concerning Pakistan, they all read the same newspapers. Concerning the founding of America, the left reads books such as 'A People's History of the United States' which contains only well-known and undisputed facts with a particular spin. The difference between the parties is one of ethical stance, not culture. The political cultures are then, not cultures in the anthropologists' sense. America happens to be a multicultural society, but, as is well known, cultural differences within it are poorly correlated with political differences.

Then one must look to unite these two terms, normalism and exceptionalism, and show that they are anthropologically related. There is a philosophical justification for doing so.

If reality knows of no normalcy, then one must declare a perpetual state of exception to perpetually believe in the normalcy of what is before one's eyes. Something is normal for the exception or a mere exception to the norm; it really doesn't make a difference in practice. They may seem like opposites considered by analogy to material processes, but the forms that hover upon us are not analogous to material processes. I rely on the experience of the reader to verify this.

Philosophical grounds do not establish anthropological truth, but merely exclude impossible items from the list of possible situations. But the anthropological evidence happens to be there. Regional and cultural diversity exist but are more frequently than not ignored; this is what makes a certain cartoon show claiming to show 'middle America' by confounding its different versions funny. We no more know what middle America looks like than we are able to accurately place the Simpson family in a place, class, or grouping. We continually refer to members of other classes, backgrounds, and sometimes ideologies, as adolescents or senescents, so as to place the others within our own life-orbits, where they do not belong. This is the game of perpetual normalcy. And then we think America must be different from the others, regardless of what happens. This is perpetual exceptionalism, that while grounded in certain incontrovertible historical facts, becomes mythological by the must. I claim that the facts they co-exist and that the one can enable the other are grounds for provisionally considering the following hypothesis; the anthropological character of America is strongly defined by the positing of perpetual exceptionalism in the interest of perpetual normalcy.

And when Hesperus happens to be somewhat unhinged

Enter a new historical era, a new form of communication, and a widely reviled conservative regime that unhinges the west, or hesparic world, with frightening speed. Who does the situation elect as candidates and who does the populace select from among their number? The situation selects one candidate who wants to return America to her guiding myths, another who represents an unthought compromise on all issues and a return to something much more recent, and a third who means to change what the guiding myths mean by using the familiar rhetoric of American exceptionalism coupled with actual policies previously unthinkable under the banner of this rhetoric, insofar as thinkable within this country's context at all. Not coincidentally, the unthought compromise goes out the window on the first round. And I say this having voted for her out of overwhelming tactical and ethical objections to both sides of what would turn out to be a more straightforward election than had previously been anticipated. Revolution requires simplification.

That leaves us with the candidate representing conservative preservation on all fronts, and choosing to conserve the most stable vision of the past, ignoring recent fluctuations, and a revolutionary of whom we really know absolutely nothing other than that he is a revolutionary. The old ground for perpetual normalcy is defended by the one party as the guiding light of American exceptionalism, with the subtext that America, used to it as you may be, is not the norm in this world, and that the demagogue on the other side, promising hope through inspiring vision, is an unfortunate global norm you don't want in your living room. Enough to get my vote, despite grave disagreements with specific redistributive economic policies and the apparent lack of an agenda for education and health reform (which is not the same-thing as health-care reform. See my previous post on that subject). I'll take the proven track record and the promise to conserve what's around over the second side, which promises to achieve its particular priorities at any cost whatever, to redefine success for an adminstration in such a fashion that it must achieve it. And does not pretend to promise what the laws of political and diplomatic binding track-record assure it cannot provide; any concrete restraints on what that might mean. And win a landslide that will in retrospect seem all but inevitable.

After the ecstatic world-simulcast party promising the end of history as we know it comes the lame duck of inescapable physical reality, under the continued aegis of the national mythology of perpetual normalcy and perpetual exceptionalism. And after the lame duck comes the new presidency, which it is beyond the scope of this note to comment on and too early to say anything about anyway. But one thing is already clear; longstanding anthropological facts about us will continue to shade our understanding of the world, even as both it and our own behavior change radically. I end on no particular hypothesis, but only the perhaps trite observation that this mythology selected candidates and victor in conjunction with all else, that its role is influential enough to be said to be determinative given the rest, and that revolutions such as the one we just had do not change the anthropological facts.

You might be an aspiring dictator if...

Goofball presents the top ten signs that you, US presidential candidate Joe Schmo, might be a dictator-in-waiting.

1) You revive imbecilic sentiments that no one remembered they had concerning crusty national mythology to bring yourself to national prominence.
2) Most of your supporters are obsessed with slogans of one or two common words they cultishly insist you embody.
3) You are the subject of a new form of pop-art iconography that might be entitled 'political reality imitates Warhol' if political reality had not been there first.
4) You have mysteriously huge amounts of funding that you insist came in five and ten dollar amounts from armies of contributors unseen or heard-of by any man or woman alive, which probably come from shady sources no one can track down.
5) Taking a page from your third-world brethren in the art of aspiring dictatorship, you boycott an election in a province you have no chance of carrying, then later get your pals in government to invalidate the election, hoping no one notices.
6) Knowing that you cannot offer any solution to a global financial crisis, you say very little about it and let everybody assume that the party in power you oppose is responsible for the trouble.
7) You jump from office to office leaving no perceivable track record of positions or associations and doing as little as possible so as to incriminate yourself as little as possible in the eyes of a public obsessed with a 'lamb of the heartland unspotted' purity.
8) You use exaggerated gestures of deference to 'formidable opponents' and 'humbling endorsements', to convince everybody of how much humility you have, which it is quite obvious from the speed of your rise you do not.
9) You say that uncomfortable issues are 'far above your pay grade' as if there were an infinite technocracy out there to decide them, when in fact this is one issue you have a record on, only one many of your potential voters don't happen to like.
10) You claim to represent groups you don't belong to by birth or upbringing.

Suma et substancia Obama (foreign policy edition)

Blogdom,
To refute the coherence theory of truth was the dream of the logical positivists which may, for all I know, have been acquired from an unknown father. I'm not sure (and in fact have absolutely no reason to believe) that A.J. Ayer's father was unknown to him, but without looking up this biographical datum, I am nonetheless just as sure that such an estranged deadbeat was the source of the wisdom of this philosopher as I am that Obama's father was the source of his. Mr. Obama's goal is different from A.J. Ayer's. Instead of refuting the idea that anything coherent is true, the blessed one seems to want us to believe, especially on Nov. 4th, 2008, that coherence is not only insufficient but also unnecessary.
What else could account for the stated sum of his foreign policy pronouncements?
A. We cannot and could never have defeated a movement that operates in 80 countries by invading Iraq, which is only one (1) country.
B. All our attention need be concentrated on Afghanistan (which is by my count one (1) country).
C. As a backup strategy in case the Afghanistan policy doesn't work, we should mosey our way over to the hella chique frontier of Waziristan, located in the (newly destabilized and nuclear-armed) nation of Pakistan.
D. Before this nation was destabilized, it was run by one Pervez Musharraf, who, while overtly an ally, followed a policy of mere containment of the tribal region of Waziristan (having as far as the editor can tell no choice). Therefore, I am very proud to have supported the removal of this Musharraf and his inevitable replacement by parties which are neither overtly nor in actuality allies of any sort. I just don't like phonies, being the authentic son of a Luo Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother that everybody knows me to be.
E. Clearly I would act like this only on 'credible' intelligence. (Editor's punctuation).
F. Intelligence is never entirely credible, as we have learned under Mr. Bush.
G. Russia-Georgia: We cannot hope to resolve conflicts of this sort, about which I take absolutely no firm position, if we have alienated our closest allies. Granted, they are with us on this one, but still... Granted, the situation I am referring to ceased to exist two years ago, as Merkel and Sarkozy are now in charge of Europe, but still...

Now let's be fair to Obama; on logical grounds, there is nothing wrong with opposing doing anything about Iran's rise to nuclear status if you start by the assumption that it is fine and dandy to go around invading nuclear-armed nations when you have 'credible' intelligence supporting their sponsorship of activities that threaten America or its' allies. I just happen to question the assumption here.