Obama's Great White Whale

You expect politicians to have hackneyed political ideas, and President Obama doesn't disappoint.

It's been obvious all along that his central concern is "inequality" and a post-election piece by Zachary Goldfarb points that up.

As Obama did in legislative fights during his first term, he also will be striving to reduce a three-decades-long wave of rising income inequality that has meant that fewer Americans have prospered while more struggle to get by.

Three decades, you'll note, takes us back to the beginning of the Reagan administration.  It means that the astonishing economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s was a mirage.  It's the basis of  "you didn't build that," of Joe the Plumber and "spread the wealth" and just about everything the president has done.

And the rest of the liberal political culture is not far behind.  That's what all the nostalgia talk about "good jobs at good wages" in the 1950s is all about.  Back then we had big corporations and strong unions and the working stiff made out well.  Today with outsourcing and greedy bankers and vulture capitalists like Mitt Romney the little guy is getting screwed.

That's the liberal line.

The conservative line comes out of people like Charles Murray and his Coming Apart.  The conservative line is that the mechanical liberal administrative welfare state hurts the very people it is supposed to help.  It encourages people in dependency, breaks up families, gives the children of the poor a lousy education, puts government under the thumb of government employee unions and business into the corruption of go-along-to-get-along crony capitalism.  Oh, things are going swimmingly for the cognitive elite, the people that are good at going to school and getting credentials and navigating bureaucratic hierarchies.  But if you are a meat-and-potatoes kind of person, one that learns by doing, and that lives in a face-to-face rather than a memo-to-memo culture--well tough luck for you.

But there's another troubling aspect to this, and it is coming out int he fiscal cliff crisis.  We learn from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that the basic fiscal-cliff proposal from the Obama administration is basically $1.6 trillion in tax increases.  If this is true, it means that the Obamis are not advancing a serious proposal for entitlement reform.  It means that, if there is any entitlement reform, it will be just a bargaining chip in the power struggle between the two factions of our ruling class.

This tells us a lot more than you might think.  Republicans and conservatives would like to reform the government entitlements so that they are self-financing, so that the federal government finances can get onto a long-term balance.  They want to get the government out of the middle of all this.  The Democrats don't.

When the Democrats stopped observing the Budget Control Acts after 2009 they opted for the annual cliff-hanger like the 2011 debt-default crisis, and now the fiscal-cliff crisis.  They are reducing policy to an annual national cage fight.

In my judgment this is a serious betrayal of the "little people," the welfare-state dependents that rely on those government programs.  It shows that the Democrats don't really care about them except for their votes.

Because when the crash comes, Arnold Kling's "sudden stop" when the government has to balance spending and revenue because it can't borrow any more, then the welfare-state dependents are going to be hurt the most: "women and minorities hardest hit" as the headline goes.  Eating the paint off the walls, as the Russians say.

But really, anyone that relies on a government to keep themselves in groceries deserves what they get.  Government is force, politics is for bullies.  If you cast your vote with the bullies, you get what you pay for.

I don't think that President Obama is really interested in the long-term fate of the dependent classes.  He has a facile answer for all that: "inequality."  Just lower the level of struggle for the struggling classes by making the rich pay a little more, and you can make America a better country.

There's another way of putting this.  Just let politicians do what comes naturally, dividing people by income and class and looting the producers to pay off their supporters, says President Obama, and all will be well.

Well.  The whole thrust of modern conservatism since Edmund Burke has been that you surrender society to "sophisters, economists, and calculators" at your peril.  He means, in our modern argot, that society cannot be reduced to system and administrative routine.  We humans are social animals, not mechanical animals.

Conservative Storytelling

Liberals tell their story better than conservatives.  That's the message from Lee Habeeb and Mike Leven.  Habeeb is a VP at conservative Salem Radio Network, home of Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager, so he should know.  Conservatives should tell our stories better.



No doubt.  And the liberal advantage goes back to the invention of the movie.  Even conservative icon Margaret Thatcher was affected when the movies came to Methodist Grantham in the 1920s.  What a world outside the dull Methodism of the old ones!



But it's not just storytelling; it's hegemony.  Liberals get to force their stories down our throats and stigmatize our stories as racist, sexist, homophobic.  That is the key.  Liberals sit in the cultural catbird seat and they don't intend to give it up or anything else.



And anyway, the main consumers of cultural product, young people, want edgy stuff that annoys their parents.  How are they to tell that the real "parents" are the edgy liberals running their schools and their TV shows?



The reason conservatives are in such a world of hurt is that liberals have deliberately hitched up their efforts at cultural hegemony in the last couple of decades.  Let's say it goes back to the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was carrying all before him.  Liberals responded with the Clintonian New Democrat feint and with efforts to corral their supporters into ethnic enclaves. with naked racist appeals.  Along the way liberals taught themselves to stop listening to conservative critiques.



It is a mistake to imagine that the culture war is merely a matter of competing stories.  That's not the way the world works.  Each era has a dominant culture, the taken-for-granted stories about the way the world works and came to be.  That dominant culture doesn't really get challenged until it starts to fail.



The reason that Obama got elected and reelected is because liberals ran a full-court press to sell the idea that Bush had failed, and the American people bought the idea.  Never mind that the main reason for the Crash of 2008 was the popping of a 30-year real-estate bubble, and the biggest reason for the pop was the loans to people that couldn't afford to service them.  Nothing to do with greedy bankers and crazy derivatives.  Just bad liberal government policy.  And the fact is that liberals have the cultural power to push their narrative on the American people.



Liberals will find that their stories will cease to persuade when things start going wrong.  Oh they'll blame the insurance companies for the failure of Obamacare, and they will keep blaming class size for the failures of public education.  But in the end, people will stop listening and just say: things aren't working; we have to change.



At that point people will be ready to listen to another story.  It is then we will need conservatives with a story to tell.

After Patronage Politics Fails

Conservatives are full of foreboding these days.  The debt isn't $16 trillion; it's much, much worse.  The student debt problem is yet another case (after mortgage subsidies) of good intentions screwing the people it was meant to help.  Ditto Affirmative Action at the university.



The basic divide in this country is between two ideas of the individual.  There is the "responsible self," a notion that Robert Bellah attributes to the Axial Age when all modern religions got their start.  And there is the client self, the powerless peasant that attaches himself to a powerful patron.



Thus it makes sense that the average Republican thinks of himself as a "typical American" and the average Democrat thinks of himself as a hyphenated American.  If you adhere to the notion of the "responsible self" then you don't need and don't want to think of yourself as an embattled class.  But if you adhere to the idea of yourself as powerless, then you need to group together and identify a powerful patron, someone that will protect you and your group from a cruel and heartless world.



What I wonder is what happens when this breaks down, when the powerful patron can't or won't deliver.  In our terms, what happens when the entitlements run out.  What do the people do, and what do the leaders do?



The simple answer, from David Hackett Fischer in The Great Wave, is that you get default, revolution, and war.  The end game of the patronage/client business, when there is no more money, provokes people to seek an answer in the street.



Of course, the war and the revolution don't really solve anything.  Their contribution is to focus and concentrate the rage of the disappointed in a great battle.  After it's over the rage subsides, people accept the result, and life goes on.  The glorious principles to which people vowed solemn oaths lie trampled in the mud and blood, and people make do with what remains.



As the endgame unfolds in the near future we can expect that the client groups of the Democratic Party will lunge to grab more loot with tax increases.  And they will partially succeed.  The responsible selves of the Republican Party will try to tame the entitlements, and they will partially succeed.



Then we will come to the real default and the real disappointment.  All predictions and prophesies will disappear into the fog of war.



That's the whole point of war and revolution.  When you are brutally disappointed, you make one last violent gesture, to mix it all up and hope that after the confusion you come out on top at the end.



Medium term, you can see what is coming.  Barack Obama has set federal spending at about 25 percent of GDP.  Federal revenue has never really got about 19 percent of GDP.  When the current effort to make the rich pay a little more raises federal revenue to about 19.5 percent of GDP then the Democrats will call for a Value Added Tax.  Guess what.  That will fall on the middle class and the Democratic voters.



And what will the clients and the victims do then, poor things?

Does Kant Rescue Cause and Effect from Hume?

Perhaps the stickiest wicket that Kant faces in his Critique of Pure Reason is to roll back Hume's argument that there ain't no such thing as cause and effect.  For Hume, all we can say about events in the world is that B follows A.  We can never say that A caused B.

Since the Brits invented cricket, you can see that the German Kant would have to be really on his game to deal with the googlies from bowler Hume.  (Although I don't know if googlies had been invented yet).

In a way, Kant's whole transcendental machinery is designed to deal with Hume's challenge: what warrant can there be for any assertion of A being the cause of B?  The whole idea of the external experience of objects as appearances rather than things-in-themselves is the center of Kant's cunning plan to deal with Hume and his tricky bowling.

Kant makes his argument that, for any experience in the world, there must be a rule that predicts the occurrence of an event from a previous event, for if there were no rule in the mind connecting events then indeed all sequences of perceptions would be merely subjective, received impressions having no connection with any outside object.  On that view there would be no way to cognize any outside object.

The cunning trick is, of course, that we are not talking about events-in-themselves or outside-objects-in-themselves.  The events are appearances, impressions that the mind processes into unified judgments about what is going on out there.  If I see a boy in the neighbor's yard in the act of throwing a baseball towards my house I take note of that appearance.  If half a second later I receive the impressions of a crash and tinkle in the front room and a a boyish squeak from the neighbor's yard, I am justifying in applying a rule that baseballs thrown at my house are quite likely to hit my house and that the appearance (or hear-ance) of a crash and tinkle shortly after the appearance of the neighbor boy and his baseball justify my judgment that it was the boy wot done it.

It all revolves around the appearances vs. things-in-themselves game.  In the game of appearances I could always be wrong.  It's possible that I didn't see the other kid across the street and his baseball.  Or it could be that a meteorite came out of the sky and broke my window.

But none of that matters.  What matters is that Kant's transcendental machinery describes how my sensibility receives impressions from the outside world, which I process in accordance with my forms of intuition about space and time and then combine them into a manifold using the categories of understanding.  Then I apply judgement to bring the manifold to a unified experience of possible external objects of experience.  But those objects are only appearances, not things-in-themselves.

Good old Kant.  Gin clear, as always.  And four runs for the Königsberger against the best bowling in England.

Kant's Problematic Refutation of Idealism

Immanuel Kant came up with a wonderful idea.  Let's just say, he writes, that we can't see things "in themselves" but only as appearances.  In that one idea he elegantly avoids claiming that we can ever know the whole truth about life, the universe and everything.

Kant's idea is, of course, not much different from St. Paul's talk about seeing through a glass, darkly.  And it is echoed by the quantum mechanical dictum that you can't see anything in the sub-atomic world without disturbing it.  So you do not see an item "in itself" but only after you have nudged it, with some kind of electromagnetic or sub-atomic energy.  So whatever you are looking at, it is not the same as it was.

But Kant feels the need to demolish his predecessors with his Refutation of Idealism.  He wants to dispatch the Dogmatic Idealism of Berkeley and the Problematic Idealism of Descartes.

Problem is that most everyone agrees that Kant doesn't quite pull it off, thus violating the first rule of politics that if you come to overthrow the king you had better succeed.  Or else.

Kant wants to refute the Cartesian idea that the outer world is "doubtful and indemonstrable."  Kant crosses over Descartes' division between knowledge of internal and external states by setting out to prove that the "empirical consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me."  Kant's argument is based on the idea that I am conscious of my existence in time and the presupposition of something "persistent in perception" and so on.  

The commentators all seem to agree that Kant doesn't finish the job.  Actually, they begin with contesting the first premise of his proof: "I am conscious of my existence as determined in time."  They say he doesn't even start the job of refutation properly.  

Even a tyro like me can see the problem.  Way back in the Transcendental Aestshetic Kant declares that time is a form of intuition that resides in the mind.  So we are using an intuition cooked up in the mind to argue for the existence of the real world?  Come on Immanuel.  You can do better than that!  You are really arguing Descartes' point that the only thing we can be sure about is the thinking "I"!

Really, Kant should stick with the beauty and the elegance of his central creative insight.  We can't know things in themselves.  Everything we know about anything (including our internal self) is founded on belief.  We believe in an "I"; we believe in an external world.  And until our brains start to rot in old age, that belief seems to work for us.  It gets us food, shelter, and a new generation on the ground and out of the nest.  

There's a refutation of idealism for you: grandchildren!

Kant and "Dogmatic Idealism"

Kant set himself a big task in his Critique of Pure Reason. It was not perhaps as big a task as that of the Rev. Edward Casaubon in his "Key to All Mythologies," but big nonetheless.

Kant wanted to spike Descartes's skeptical idealism, that the "I" was indubitable, but the world not so much. He wanted to whack Berkeley for his dogmatic idealism that the world was an illusion.  But he also wanted to deal with Hume and his denial of cause and effect.  Never mind that he also had a mind to derail the whole global industry busily proving that God existed, not to mention the rapidly growing atheist startups aggressively insisting that God didn't exist.

Common sense tells us that the world exists; that's what Dr. Johnson insisted by kicking a stone with his foot and saying of Berkeley's idealism "I refute it thus."  Common sense tells us that every effect has a cause, even if we didn't see the cause coming before the effect.  So somehow those clever Dicks had to be wrong.

Now you might think that Kant was also a dogmatic idealist.  After all, his repeated insistence that we do not know things in themselves but only appearances suggests that we do not have knowledge of things in the outside world.

I prefer to interpret Kant as setting out the first modern attempt to figure how our mind/brain actually deals with the outside world.  He does this by accepting (even as he insists he refutes) the positions of his predecessors.  Yes it's true that we cannot be too certain about the outside world (Descartes) and that it could all be an illusion (Berkeley) and that cause-and-effect is a tricky business (Hume) especially if you get the cause for an effect wrong.  So what?

So Kant sets up what we would call a "model" of the way that humans deal with the outside world, whatever it really is.  We possess "sensibility", the "capacity... to acquire representations" from the outside world.  From the representations we form "intuitions" based on the forms of intuition inside us about space and time.  We apply the categories of the understanding to our intuitions and then form a unified judgment about the result through the power of "apperception" or self-consciousness.  This judgment is made about the object given in sensibility, its appearance as conditioned by our intuition our understanding and so on.  But what the object really is, in itself, can never be known to us.

It all comes down to common sense.  We know, if we know anything, that we should never assume that we have nothing left to learn, that we have grasped the complete truth about life, the universe, and everything.

Because the moment that you figure you have everything figured out, the world will refute you, "thus."

Can Kant Comprehend Sub-atomic Particles?

Kant's transcendental philosophy is an odyssey between the Scylla of rationalism and the Charybdis of empiricism.

He does not deny that thoughts are real, or that the world is real.  He just says that we cannot know the world as it is in itself.  We can only know appearances.  Our knowledge of the world is constructed upon the way that we manipulate and synthesize sensation into a unified object of experience.

But what about quantum physics?  The recent discovery of the Higgs boson was predicated on the statistics of the recording of certain energetic events on certain detectors at a government-funded particle accelerator designed especially for the discovery of the Higgs boson.  Does that count as sensation?

Locke speculated about a "microscopical eye" that could  see into the "secret composition and radical texture of bodies".  And Kant in the Architectonic of Pure Reason talks about the limited reach of an idea, for the elaboration of the idea into a scientific schema "seldom corresponds to the idea; for this lies in reason like a seed... hardly recognizable even under microscopic observation."

But does the gigantic apparatus of a particle accelerator boil down, in essence, to a microscopical eye or a microscopic observation?  Is the experimentation of modern physics contemplated by Kant's transcendental machinery?  He says that the "capacity (receptivity) to acquire representations through the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility."  Does sensibility extend to the eye reading the report on the statistics prepared by a team of physicists detailing six months of particle collisions in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva?

So if we accept the results of the physicists, does that make the Higgs boson an "object of possible experience"?  Here, of course, we are getting beyond individual experience to the notion of science as the project of a social community of scientists, as divined by Thomas Kuhn.

The larger purpose of Kant's first Critique was to deal with the conundrums arising from Descartes, who thought that the "I" was indubitable but the world was dubitable, to Hume who argued that knowledge was a rickety construction built on a bundle of impressions, to the impossibility of proving God's existence on reason alone.  Yet here we were in Kant's time with science burgeoning and generals using the results of science in their very real artillery.  Kant built the first detailed analysis of human cognition, recognizing it as what we would call a feedback loop.  Objects act on us through our sensibility and we form judgments about objects as objects of possible experience.  But we do not know them as they are in themselves.  We only know them as they appear to us and as we think them.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of modern science and technology is how they have changed the way that objects can act on our sensibility.  Years ago I remember watching a TV science program in which they showed how human objects on a beach appeared in different forms of light, from infrared to ultraviolet.  Things look very different when you illuminate them with different light.  And how really do they look "in themselves?"  All we know is how they appear to us, as illuminated to us.  A snake has infra-red detectors, all the better to detect warm-bodied mice in the nighttime.  Why not?  Sense organs are not there just for the contemplation of the ineffable; they are there for survival.

Of course Kant didn't predict everything.  But he did set the stage for us moderns.  Don't think that what you see is what you get.  The "thing-in-itself" may be very different from its appearance.  If indeed there is such a thing as the "thing-in-itself."