Why I Don't Watch the News Much

If you read enough history, ancient, medieval, or modern, you can start to get better sense of patterns in human behavior, good and bad. Being a pessimist, I tend to watch for signs of civilization's decline. Examples from history (the Roman Republic, pre-Revolutionary France, Czarist Russia, or Weimar Germany) will produce the following list:

• Political instability or "resolution" of civil political matters through violence
• Currency instability/devaluation
• Public calls for a single leader and an end to parliamentary process as too inefficient
• "Winner take all" political contests, followed by a "purging" (firing, not Stalinesque) of civil service appointees felt to be too close to the other political party/previous administration
• Concentration of the political spoils system
• Infrastructure failures
• Inability to control the border
• Unwillingness by elites to support basic tenets/values of the majority society (e.g. free speech, private property)
• Increasing "rights" to a broader range of "citizens"
• Mob rule/rule by public passions/rule by plebecite/referendum
• Federally funded bread and circuses
• Outlandish crimes/behavior
• Anarcho-tyranny
• Decline in general manners and civility in political and private behavior
• Loss in actual skills/technological capabilities
• Increase in the numbers of political "crimes" (e.g. suppression of political free speech by subtle or blatant force)
• Concentration of wealth among politically connected individuals/groups
• Politicization of "the legions"

I posited this list of trends to Lin and the Down Under Defense Expert (DUDE). Lin's comments:

I took a course at my alma mater...studying the Roman Republic. Each one of the points that you raised can be related to some degree to them. I’ll offer some (hopefully) insights later. Imagine this worst case(?) scenario. O-buma’s popularity skyrockets and he becomes an FDR...Haven’t we already entered a dark age?

  

The DUDE thought he'd forwarded that list to me (ha! possibly--it's more a sampling of trends from my various reading adventures). His additional comments included:

More apropos are Marx’ Ten Conditions necessary for Communism [Comments in brackets belong to the DUDE]:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. [There were no telephones in those days. Communication in this case refers to roads and especially to bridges, tunnels, etc.]
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. [Mao and his gang did a great job of putting waste-lands into production. Nothing grew, but it was “in production.”]
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. [Children’s factory labour in some other form is OK, however.] Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c. [So, kids get free education in things like how to work in a factory…]

This also follows from a discussion I had with Doc (who's coming at the problem from the left rather than the right), who suggested that great disparities of wealth actually will precipitate a workers' revolt...which might be the Marxist point of view, but which he strongly stated he does not WANT to see happen. In the business/economic world, there are things that can be done at the stockholder level by tying businesses and executives' income to concrete improvements to employee welfare. By treating workers better now--more flexible leave policies, more freedom to work from home, more flexible work hours, better access to health care or child care, more access to educational opportunities, etc.--companies beneft in the long run. Workers that are treated well actually are more productive and loyal, but somehow the work-60-hours-a-week-with-little-reward approach to business seems to prevail. Throw in a crumbling educational system, crushing taxes, and crumbling family structure because both parents are working and you've got a recipe for long-term decline.

So if you accept the premise that our civilization is in decline, how do you fix it? Not a clue. With any luck, though, the internet will at least allow more people access to more tools and information to fix things incrementally.

Growing More Imperial by the Day

Mr. Obama now has a food taster. Now one might be gracious about it and say that the taster is there for quality control, but really: a taster is there to make sure no one put anything untoward/evil/poisonous in the leader's food, right? Wonder what that job pays.

Speaking of Rome...

I'm usually not a big fan of the Lew Rockwell site, but this essay piqued my interest:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/case/case29.html

Some symptoms of the decay of the Roman Empire included:

• Lack of public health
• A marked decline in the morals and ethics among all Roman social classes
• Excessive government with its accompanying political corruption
• Excessive military spending with corresponding government projects and social programs
• Inflation, price controls, and the state’s attempt to completely regulate the Roman economy destroyed manufacturing along with the empire’s agricultural base.
• Inferior technology
• Civil war accompanied by external invasions
• Use of coercive force by the state to attain its ends

*

And then there's this line of thought, which came to me this morning:

President Obama is employing quite a few “czars” and other internal advisors outside the usual cabinet members and bureaucratic appointments. This organizational structure isn’t particularly efficient, as it can lead to overlapping loyalties and chains of command. Why not just put people you trust in charge of the various agencies directly? Richard Nixon ran his White House this way, and he faced all the problems previously mentioned.

The only reason I can guess as to why Obama is doing this is that he does not fully trust the information he’s receiving from the bureaucracy and wants inputs/data from people he does trust. I find this curious, given that most of the long-term, unionized civil servants tend to be supporters of the Democratic Party.

There is a more cynical, less charitable view one could take of this approach: mainly, that Obama wants commissars or “political officers” in each of his departments to make sure they’re all following the “party line” loyally. Again, agencies within agencies, or states-within-a-state are problematic because the people who are part of the “inner circle” have more immediate access to the executive than the official bureaucratic apparatus. I must do some more reading. I still don’t understand why he doesn’t just appoint the people he wants in charge of the agencies. In any case, this structure bears watching.

Is This What Happened to Rome?

Last week I encountered a food item that gave even a grease-and-meat-lover pause: The Bacon Explosion. Someone asked a barbeque chef to create a specialty item featuring bacon. The result might be equated to a sushi roll made up of bacon and Italian sausage and thrown on the grill/smoker for two or three hours. I wonder how many folks are going to end up having heart attacks, artherosclerosis, or salmonella from attempting to recreate this...food. Wow.

The Current Financial Mess, Again Reconsidered

Dr. Pournelle's turn:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2008/Q3/view537.html#Tuesday

Pournelle's take on this is interesting because he blends in a theme he's been discussing quite often of late: the criminalizing of political actions, which he states was one of the causes of the fall of the Roman Republic. If this sounds bizarre (criminializing politics), I direct your attention to the candidate for Vermont attorney general who promises to prosecute George W. Bush for actions he performed legally as President. Or consider the attempted prosecution of Bill Clinton, or the outrage that Democrats felt about Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon before he could be prosecuted. Pournelle examines this phenomenon in his usual logical detail.

I speculated on LinkedIn.com recently that it might be cheaper to let some of these large mortgage firms to fail and to pay out unemployment insurance to their workers than to let a trillion-dollar bailout go forward. However, a full-scale panic is on in Washington, as there's an election soon, and incumbents need to be seen DOING SOMETHING, even if that SOMETHING is very, very bad. Can we, as taxpayers, stop this madness? I don't really care for all the finger pointing ("It was Reagan's fault for deregulating the banking industry!" "No, it was Carter's and Clinton's fault for forcing banks to give loans to high-risk borrowers!"). However, it might be better for the country if the congress continues to argue from now until election day instead of passing this very, very bad and expensive idea.

Again: where will the money come from? Us. How will that come about? By printing more money and raising taxes. The illness (financial instability) is bad; the proposed cure (government takeover of the mortgage industry) is potentially much, much worse and will last much longer.

CD Review: Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning

This is a rather different review from what I usually write, as it discusses a series of audio compact disks, not just a single one. What I'd like to take the time to consider is a 12-disk, 24-class collection offered by "The Teaching Company." Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning is quite possibly one of the most important classes a layman can take without attending college. Why? A sampling of talk radio on either side of the political spectrum will suffice: we are losing the collective ability to discuss matters of controversy rationally.

Western Civilization owes much of its durability to its willingness to argue. This might seem counterintuitive, given how most of civilization's nastiest wars have been born out of arguments. However, perhaps the most important gift that the Greeks (and then the Romans) bequeathed to us has been a framework for conducting reasoned arguments among political equals to prevent war. After all, if human beings are to live in a democratic (lower-case "d") society, and we are not going to resort to brute force to resolve all disputes, then we must find some other means of settling them. This was what the Greeks felt separated them, for example, from the Persians. Free men (and now women) have a whole set of tools and strategies for getting their way. Those tools and strategies are found in well-reasoned arguments.

The arguments one often hears on talk radio today (Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter are two of the worst offenders here) are not about finding a resolution or common understanding with the other side. They are all about winning. Well, of course argumentation exists to win one's point; however, the specific methods Hannity, Coulter, and many of their detractors employ--argument through ad hominem attacks, appeals to tradition or authority, appeals to emotion, etc.--do not advance the state of our national conversation. The teacher of this class, Professor David Zarefsky of Northwestern University, describes argumentation as a type of knowing. What he means by this is that argument provides a structured means for advancing different ways of settling a dispute when the correct answer to a question or the proper way to act is unclear.

For example, if a healthy man is standing in the way of a train and has the desire and means for escape, that would not require a great deal of moral questioning; however, if the man has decided to lie down in front of the train on purpose because he is protesting something that he feels is more important than his life, then there is some dispute about his actions. Is suicide worth it? Is there some other way to make his case? Is he lying down on the tracks, not for a cause, but simply because he is depressed? Those are questions that are open to interpretation and, thus, argument.

Zarefsky takes the listener through nearly the entire field of questioning and argumentation, from its historical roots to the structure of arguments to attack and defense, evaluating evidence, reasoning from parts to whole, moving from cause to effect, identifying valid and fallacious arguments, and the appropriate use of argument between individuals, experts, and societies as a whole. The level-headedness of the argumentation process is not natural; we would rather just win and get it over with. However, if we are to function as a civilized society, we must continue these traditions. Otherwise, we leave ourselves open to several dangers (as identified by me, not Zarefsky):

• Being outsmarted by those who do understand argumentation but are wholly unscrupulous.
• Losing the roots of our civil society by losing the ability to understand and rationally counter arguments with which we disagree.
• Having more and more people left out of important decisions that directly affect their lives simply because they are left out of the conversation (my primary concern with technocracy).
• Settling all arguments by irrational means, such as appealing solely to emotion, appealing to group-ism (black vs. white, men vs. women, etc.), and sheer clout or use of force. Again, wars are not the result of argumentation, they are the result of a failure of argumentation to produce results that are readily accepted and understood by leaders or nations.
• People giving up on politics and demanding a single leader to settle all disputes because debate has failed.

This set of classes will not cause conservatives to accept liberalism, nor cause liberals to better accept conservatism. Ideally what it will do is give each side a better vocabulary for understanding the other side and for learning how to take other viewpoints into account when arguing for one's views. The class also provides better tools for winning arguments than simply shouting at one another or talking past each other because each side is using a different moral vocabulary to encompass the same words or situation.

The teaching is very Aristotelian, as it strives to teach arguers in a public forum how to appeal to "the middle" or "the undecided" individual or voter rather than simply the already-converted partisans (which is how American politics was conducted up through 1968 or so). It forces issues out into the open, but it also forces those issues to be settled rationally as the antidote for civil war. And that can only be to our advantage, as our society becomes more and more fragmented. Argumentation--even something as old as Graeco-Roman methods of argumentation--just might be what we need to keep the nation together.