Wrong turn on the way to utopia

An impassioned and astute piece by Nicholas Carr

The world wide cage

Technology promised to set us free. Instead it has trained us to withdraw from the world into distraction and dependency.

I couldn't help but think of G.K. Chesterton when I read this:

What Silicon Valley sells and we buy is not transcendence but withdrawal. We flock to the virtual because the real demands too much of us.

Over a century ago GKC was warning against this temptation in Heretics:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing that is really narrow is the clique....The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment like that which exists in hell.
...
[Modern man] says he is fleeing from his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is really fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive. He can visit Venice because to him the Venetians are only Venetians; the people in his own street are men. He can stare at the Chinese because for him the Chinese are a passive thing to be stared at; he he stares at the old lady in the next garden, she becomes active. he is forced to flee, in short, from the too stimulating society of his equals-- of free men, perverse, personal, deliberately different from himself

On a side note, I had not heard of "innocent fraud" before but it is a useful concept.

Late in his life, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term ‘innocent fraud’. He used it to describe a lie or a half-truth that, because it suits the needs or views of those in power, is presented as fact. After much repetition, the fiction becomes common wisdom. ‘It is innocent because most who employ it are without conscious guilt,’ Galbraith wrote in 1999. ‘It is fraud because it is quietly in the service of special interest.’ The idea of the computer network as an engine of liberation is an innocent fraud.

In some way, the modern MSM, with its obsession with Narratives and hot takes, exists primarily to create and perpetuate innocent frauds.


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Half-blind experts and the straw men they create

Foreign Affairs features an article by professor Tom Nichols on the Perils of Democracy and the Ordeal of one of America’s most vulnerable classes:

How America Lost Faith in Expertise

It's not just that people don't know a lot about science or politics or geography. They don't, but that's an old problem. The bigger concern today is that Americans have reached a point where ignorance--at least regarding what is generally considered established knowledge in public policy--is seen as an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to demonstrate their independence from nefarious elites--and insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they're wrong.

The article will appeal to all those in the “credentialed not educated" classes who are still dealing with post-election trauma. Like a good friend after a break up, Nichols reassures the Acela riders “It’s not you, it’s the idiots who don’t recognize your value.”

I doubt that Nichols will win many converts. G. K. Chesterton was a formidable polemicist and debater because he tried to “never let a quarrel ruin a good argument.” On Twitter (@RadioFreeTom) Nichols is the anti-Chesterton. He never argues when he can dismiss and demean.

This passage is hilarious and damning:

Conspiracy theories are attractive to people who have a hard time making sense of a complicated world and little patience for boring, detailed explanations. They are also a way for people to give context and meaning to events that frighten them. Without a coherent explanation for why terrible things happen to innocent people, they would have to accept such occurrences as nothing more than the random cruelty of either an uncaring universe or an incomprehensible deity. And just as individuals facing grief and confusion look for meaning where none may exist, so, too, will entire societies gravitate toward outlandish theories when collectively subjected to a terrible national experience. Conspiracy theories and the awed reasoning behind them, as the Canadian writer Jonathan Kay has noted, become especially seductive "in any society that has suffered an epic, collectively felt trauma." This is why they spiked in popularity after World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Kennedy assassination, the 9/11 attacks, and other major disasters--and are growing now in response to destabilizing contemporary trends, such as the economic and social dislocations of globalization and persistent terrorism.

At their worst, conspiracy theories can produce a moral panic in which innocent people get hurt. But even when they seem trivial, their prevalence undermines the sort of reasoned interpersonal discourse on which liberal democracy depends. Why? Because by definition, conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable: experts who contradict them demonstrate that they, too, are part of the conspiracy.

As recently noted on this blog (“They trusted the experts”) the ritual child abuse panics of the 1980s and 1990s were fueled by the insane conspiracy theories of experts: child psychologists, social workers, policeman, prosecutors.

Nichols teaches at the Naval War College. This piece notes that the experts of the 1990s got most of the big things wrong when it came to Future War:

Anticipating Contemporary War: How Well Did We Do?

This article by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is also well worth a read:

The Intellectual Yet Idiot

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities??but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Related:

Changing Minds

More on Changing Minds

UPDATE 3-20-2017:

Instapundit weighs in:

The suicide of expertise

It doesn’t matter what your SAT scores were, voters are under no obligation to listen to you unless they find what you say persuasive.

And you know what makes you less persuasive? The kind of contempt displayed by Foreign Affairs. If expertise is dead, it’s because those who claimed it overplayed their hands. It’s not the death of expertise, so much as a suicide.

This Thomas Sowell column from 2008 makes for interesting reading.

Intellectuals

First as tragedy, then as farce

Sir Edward Grey, Britain's Foreign Secretary in the years before WWI:

The German Emperor is ageing me; he is like a battleship with steam up and screws going, but with no rudder, and he will run into something some day and cause a catastrophe.

So basically Johnny Rotten wrote the Trump platform decades ago

What do Don Imus and SAE have in common?

Each were at the center of a media firestorm which came at a suspiciously convenient time for the MSM

Emmanuel Goldstein is always a red herring

Remember that the Imus scandal happened right after the Duke hoax fell completely apart. But the Imus story was SO IMPORTANT that the MSM did not have time to discuss the mistakes they made in Durham or the lies they told about the lacrosse players. As i wrote at the time:

One story allows talking heads parade their noble moral sensibility in front of the cameras. The other one highlights their intellectual shortcomings and moral corruption. Which one is filling the airwaves?

See also here.

And it is worth noting, that hateful speech by media figures (both before and after the Imus imbroglio) did not elicit the same around the clock talking head outrage:

Some one owes Don Imus and Nancy Reagan an apology

So now, the most important story in the world is the crude antics of some frat boys on a bus.

Awfully convenient that the SAE story "broke" just after the media-generated hoax in Ferguson, Misouri came crashing down around their heads.

Ayn Rand and Anton La Vey

The Fountainhead of Satanism

What would warrant the current influence of her thought within the conservative movement? Rand was a third-rate writer who was too arrogant to recognize her own ignorance (she believed she was the third greatest philosopher in history, behind only Aristotle and Aquinas). She misunderstood almost every concept she engaged with”from capitalism to freedom”and wrote nothing that had not been treated before by better thinkers. We don’t need her any more than we need LeVay.

Few conservatives will fall completely under Rand’s diabolic sway.

Sometimes i wonder

I can imagine a heavily guarded corner in the FSB archives devoted to the NKVD/KGB's greatest still-secret operations. Among those files is the greatest disinformation operation in their history. Longer lasting than The Trust. An operation that managed to outlive the primary agent of influence and which to this day promotes the collectivist cause.

"Imagine," thinks Putin to himself, "there are Americans so stupid that they still rally to Ayn Rand when they set out to fight Socialism."

Bully for them!!

Occupy Wall Street buys $15 million of Americans' medical debt

(Reuters) - An Occupy Wall Street spin-off group has bought up $14.7 million worth of Americans' personal medical debt and forgiven it over the last year as part of its Rolling Jubilee project, the group announced Monday.

Saint Jerome:

Of gold she would not wear so much as a seal-ring, choosing to store her money in the stomachs of the poor rather than to keep it at her own disposal.

Letter 127

G. K. Chesterton:

Nothing will be done until we have realized that charity is not giving rewards to the deserving, but happiness to the unhappy.

The Illustrated London News, 8 December 1906

Who is confused?

Powerline looks at the polls and is left puzzled.

Our Deeply Confused Electorate

Do you agree more politically with President Obama, or with the average member of the Tea Party? A good question, ripped from the daily headlines. The response? Dead even, 42% agree more with Obama, 42% with the Tea Party. But other findings are hard to reconcile: only 30% of voters have a favorable view of the Tea Party, while 50% are unfavorable. How can only 30% of voters view the Tea Party favorably, if 42% say they agree more with the grass roots movement than with the president?

I do not find that particular result so surprising. I believe that Ben Roethlisberger is a better quarterback than Joe Flacco, yet I am deeply dissatisfied with the play of the Steelers’s QB over the last four or five years.

Can a thinking individual (i. e. someone not confused) oppose Obama while disapproving of the Tea Party? Powerline seems to suggest that the answer is no.

I disagree.

A rational conservative in a center-right nation will look at the Tea Party’s demand for ideological purity as self-defeating. Hence, while opposed to Obama’s programs that rational voter may still refuse to endorse the Tea Party.

The post does hit one key point that is often ignored:

So among some 30% to 40% of the electorate, the dominant factor appears to be hatred of Republicans. No matter how incompetent Obama is, no matter how hateful Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi may be, no matter how badly the economy goes into the tank, these voters consistently view Democrats as the lesser of evils. Why? Because they are subjected to a constant barrage of hate, directed toward Republicans.

Even here, however, I think they overstate the confusion and ignore the elephant in the room.

Democratic voters have been on the receiving end of so much hate propaganda against the Republican Party, that all Democrats need to do is be the not-Republicans and their voters will turn outno matter that Obamacare is a disaster, no matter that the economy is going down the drain, no matter that we are $17 trillion in debt, no matter that Obama’s foreign policy is a shambles, no matter that Obama himself has been revealed as an incompetent and a liar. Hatred for Republicans trumps everything else.

It sounds so damning until a fair-minded person asks ‘what about Bush?’

On each count of the indictment, it is possible to argue that BHO has done better than GWB.

All of this is old ground:

January 2013

Let’s not forget the biggest, stickiest Republican/conservative message of all:

We {heart} W.

The 2012 campaign was not just Obama vs. catoon-Romney. It was also Obama vs. the ghost of George Bush.

Leaving ideology aside (as swing and low-information voters do), the Bush legacy is an anchor around the neck of the right. The short version goes something like this:

Tanked the economy (worse than LBJ)

Started two wars he could not win (worse than Carter)

Is that fair? Not entirely, but it is accurate.

October 2011

It is now painfully clear that the Republican candidates have no appetite to deal with the serious problems that still weigh on the economy. They are counting on Obama's unpopularity to carry them to victory in 2012. The programs they offer are little more than warmed over talking points.

February 2009

There is no doubt that a sizable minority of the population is opposed to bigger government. This minority is large enough to boost the ratings of talk radio. It drives readership for rightwing blogs and raises money for some candidates. But is it it enough to win election?

40% is an enormous share in radio ratings. It is also the bad end of a landslide election.

The usual mantra of "No socialism, Free Enterprise!" just seems inadequate in the face of the current economic realities.

Key fact number one. As Obama moves toward "socialism", he does so at the behest of the "capitalists". It is not as if he is sending paramilitary gangs to take over successful, profitable businesses. Obama, like Bush before him, is compelled to act because the capitalists screwed the pooch, crapped the bed, and then muttered "maybe my bad" when their recklessness sent the financial system off a cliff.

The broad public knows this, and that makes it hard to win them over with cheap slogans about socialist bogeymen.

October 2008

The Bush-Cheney administration has worked assiduously to restore the power and prerogatives of the executive branch. They have been curiously loath to wield those powers at critical times. We saw it first in their lackadaisical efforts to win the Iraq War. We saw it again in the present economic mess.

Hmmm, jealous of its prerogatives yet indolent in governing. That sounds more like a decadent monarchy than a vigorous Jacksonian chief executive. I think the Right got Bush wrong. Today, he seems more like G.W. Bush II of Connecticut than he does the forceful W from west Texas.

So, sure, someone is confused. The key question is this: Is it the voters or is it conservative pundits and GOP “professionals”

Marco Rubio can save his career by answering two simple questions

1. What was the name of the idiot aide?

2. At what time did you fire him?

Rubio aide on immigration: Let’s face it, some American workers just can’t cut it

UPDATE:

Looks like Rubio would rather be temporary buds with Chuck Schumer than have a future with the GOP.

Who knew that Kristie Kreme was his role model.

Rubio Doubles Down into Disaster

This Aide to Marco Rubio Really Isn’t a ‘Star Performer’

Glenn Beck takes a principled stand

It's a sad day when a talk radio guy understands the Constitution better than media-esteemed Senators.

Beck:

I despise this terrorist and all that he has done but we must not lose who we are. HE IS AN AMERICAN. Read him his rights! We are not Russia

Esteemed Senators:

No, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Is Not An Enemy Combatant. He Is A Criminal.

When all else fails, blame the people

A couple of good posts from Jim Geraghty and Ace:

Our Big Challenge: Do We on the Right Still Trust the People?

"Do We on the Right Still Trust the People?"

Related:

Conservatives and messaging

Five quick points about the conservative tantrum

Why are conservatives mad at the GOP?

GWB and his MBA

Ross Douthat on a conservative classic

Ross Douthat on a conservative classic

The Quest for Community in the Age of Obama: Nisbet’s Prescience

The whole thing is a gem (as is Nisbet's book) but i thought these two passages help explain why Romney is struggling:

Many conservative politicians have been better friends to big business—ignoring Nisbet’s warning that “decentralization is just as necessary in the operation of the other great associations of modern society”—than they have been foes of big government.

The Ayn Rand Express is just a fast track to defeat.

Worse still, since Obama’s elevation to the presidency, America seems once more divided between “the party of the state” and “the party of the individual.” Conservatives are cracking open Atlas Shrugged and shouting about socialism, but they seem to have lost the appetite for thinking through the problem of community in an individualistic age—which is, of course, precisely the problem that make socialism so appealing in the first place.

This is how the world ends

Not with a bang but a tramp stamp

A Few Arguments Against Tattoos

Doctors traced an outbreak of skin infections back to bacteria in the ink.

An editorial in a recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine drew attention to the outbreak of skin infection caused by tattooing. The bacteria that cause the infection are of the same family as that which causes tuberculosis. They are difficult to detect, grow in culture, or treat.

The infecting bacteria can be transmitted even where the tattoo “artist” practices the strictest hygiene, for it is the inks that have been contaminated before use from sources such as water.

This calls to mind Tom Wolfe's great essay "The Great ReLearning". Jonah Goldberg discusses it here.

Years ago, Tom Wolfe wrote a wonderful essay called the "Great Relearning." He first came upon the idea while reporting on the San Francisco hippie scene in 1968. "At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic," Wofe wrote, "there were doctors treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot."

The reason all of these diseases turned up is simple. The thousands of hippie migrants seeking free love and communal living had deliberately "thrown off" all the accumulated "bourgeois" hang-ups of their parents. Which meant giving up on showers, sex with people you know by name and other "old fashioned" concepts of hygiene. This in turn brought back creepy-crawlies not seen since the age of toga parties.

Wolfe's essay is here.

Getting the Cold War wrong

A new book on the Alger Hiss case:

The case that shouldn’t go away

The author, Christina Shelton, frames the case in a completely ahistorical manner:

The story doesn’t go away, because it has become a symbol of the ongoing struggle for control over the philosophical and political direction of the United States. It is a battle between collectivism and individualism; between centralized planning and local/state authority, and between rule by administrative fiat and free markets.

This ignores the basic facts of the domestic political struggle set in motion by Whittaker Chambers's revelations. Plenty of social democrats (e.g. Sidney Hook) and liberals (the AF of L and other unions) took a hard line against Stalinism at home and abroad.

Chambers himself was hardly a radical individualist. His review of Atlas Shrugged in National Review was less than glowing. As Buckley put it, "Chambers did in fact read Miss Rand right out of the conservative movement."

What hath Murdoch wrought (II)

One of those eternal media puzzles. How is it that Greg Gutfeld is on Fox News three hours every day? A failed magazine editor is supposed to be FNC's answer to John Stewart? 

The Five is so bad it makes me miss Glenn Beck.


Previously:

The Case for Right-Wing Tennis Elbow

Three wasted years

I'm deeply pessimistic about the economy for two reasons:


1. President Obama may be re-elected.

2. President Obama may be defeated

I've already discussed the key failure of Obama's economic policies. His administration treated the financial crisis as a political opportunity rather than a grievous problem that demanded their full attention and bold action.

It is now painfully clear that the Republican candidates have no appetite to deal with the serious problems that still weigh on the economy. They are counting on Obama's unpopularity to carry them to victory in 2012. The programs they offer are little more than warmed over talking points.

Pundits on both sides spend their time attacking and mocking their opponents. Precious few voices address the critical issues in an honest fashion; everything is reduced to the thrust and parry of partisan "debate". We can already see the outlines of the 2012 campaign. Fox News will mock Occupy Wall Street as clueless dirty hippies while most of the MSM will portray the Tea Parties as ignorant fanatics who are the tools of the Koch brothers and other dangerous plutocrats.

It seems like a bizarre game. Unfortunately, the stakes are high.

I wonder, if Lincoln gave his Cooper Union speech in a media world like out own, would he have become president? Or is it the fault of the candidates? Is there a Republican in Washington who could write a speech half as good as the one that brought Abe to the White House?

Related:  Megan McArdle suggests that we take an honest look at the impulse behind OWS.  This was especially on point:

When the gap between the number of job openings and the number of people who are out of work is so large, there are going to be a hefty number of unemployed people.  Maybe these people individually could have done more to get themselves out of their situation, but at the macro level, that would just have meant that someone else was out of work and suffering.

HT: To Rod Dreher who has an interesting discussion going in his comment thread.

Like a drunk stumbling through a maze in the dark

Sometimes I despair when I listen to what passes for political debate read what passes for political journalism. We are mired in the worst economy since the Great Depression, yet neither party has the vision or courage to address the grave problems that we face. Instead, they cling to their talking points and tired nostrums.

Tax the rich!
Reagan! Tax cuts!

This piece in the New Yorker suggests that the problems we face are deep-seated and novel (at least for this generation).

Mastering the Machine
How Ray Dalio built the world’s richest and strangest hedge fund

Dalio was one of those who saw disaster earlier than most:

Searching for historical precedents, Bridgewater put together detailed histories of previous credit crises, going back to Weimar Germany. The firm’s researchers also went through the public accounts of nearly all the major financial institutions in the world and constructed estimates of how much money they stood to lose from bad debts. The figure they came up with was eight hundred and thirty-nine billion dollars. Armed with this information, Dalio visited the Treasury Department in December, 2007, and met with some of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s staff. Nobody took much notice of what he said, but he went on to the White House, where he presented his numbers to some senior economic staffers. “Ray laid out the argument that the losses he foresaw in the banking system were astronomical,” a former Bush Administration official who attended the White House meeting recalled. “Everybody else was talking about liquidity. Ray was talking about solvency.”


His warnings ignored in Washington, Dalio issued more jeremiads to his clients. “If the economy goes down, it will not be a typical recession,” his newsletter said in January, 2008. Rather, it would be a disaster in which “the financial deleveraging causes a financial crisis that causes an economic crisis. . . . This continues until there is a reflation, a currency devaluation and government guarantees of the efficacy of key financial intermediaries.” As the crisis deepened, Dalio continued to assess it far more accurately than many senior policymakers did. When the government allowed Lehman Brothers to collapse, he despaired. “So, now we sit and wait to see if they have some hidden trick up their sleeves, or if they really are as reckless as they seem,” the newsletter said on September 15, 2008.

What's worrisome is that he is convinced that the current problems are not going away any time soon:

This spring, he told me that economic growth in the United States and Europe was set to slow again. This was partly because some emergency policy measures, such as the Obama Administration’s stimulus package, would soon come to an end; partly because of the chronic indebtedness that continues to weigh on these regions; and partly because China and other developing countries would be forced to take drastic policy actions to bring down inflation. Now that the slowdown appears to have arrived, Dalio thinks it will be prolonged. “We are still in a deleveraging period,” he said. “We will be in a deleveraging period for ten years or more.”


Dalio believes that some heavily indebted countries, including the United States, will eventually opt for printing money as a way to deal with their debts, which will lead to a collapse in their currency and in their bond markets. “There hasn’t been a case in history where they haven’t eventually printed money and devalued their currency,” he said. Other developed countries, particularly those tied to the euro and thus to the European Central Bank, don’t have the option of printing money and are destined to undergo “classic depressions,” Dalio said.

If leverage got us into this mess, then it makes sense explore ways in which we can avoid such problems in the future. Simon Johns suggests reforming the tax code which now favors debt over equity.

Could Tax Reform Make the Financial System Safer?

Ayn Rand

Joe Carter has two terrific posts:

The Fountainhead of Satanism

Ayn Rand, Shrugged

Related:

Who is John Galt
Apparently he was a child-killing psychopath


when Irish bankers went Galt

When Irish bankers went Galt

It sounds like a recipe for a new Dark Ages. Instead, the Irish survived quite nicely.

The Irish Banking Crisis: A Parable

Score:

Chesterton 1
Ayn Rand 0