Subj: More Words About Buildings and Food.

Date: 05/19/95

To: MrPool

DBurch1108

TNSims

To: lukerwa@po1.dal.bls.gov

Douganews

GaryBorde

Gentlemen:

This is long (winded) so you may want to down-load it to read off-line.

Apart from seeing "Jefferson in Paris" as I was reading Sahma's "Citizens", the timing of my having read that book seems apt in another way, that being that it came just as the New Right begins the institution of its program for re-shaping the country. In that regard, I wonder about Frank's personal reaction to the book, i.e. confirmation of his hatred for revolution and civil war and admiration for the American War of Independence for its lack of "utopian" motivations (that it was not a "social revolution").

[A personal note. I had a couple of nightmares while I was reading the section in "Citizens" about the Terror. They centered on the guillotine and were triggered by the slang terms the Terrorists had for their favorite form of ending political debate -- "Holding the Hot Hand" and "Looking Through the Republican Window". Just typing the words sends chills down my spine. The illustrations in that part of the book were some of the most horrific things I have ever seen for the way they so calmly depicted the industrial savagery of those bloody last months before Thhrmidor ...]

I used to say that if one knew the history of Periclean Athens and Rome from the Grachii through the Caesars one knew the entire pattern of politics in a democracy and a republic and, knowing that, one knew all the history one needed to know as a guide for our own country's governance. Having begun my long-delayed study of the French Revolution (backwards, I'm sure) by reading Sahma, I may be prepared to say (in an equally incautious manner) that if one knows the history of the French Revolution, one knows the pattern of the politics of revolution. For instance, the extreme "telescoping" of the time scale of radicalization one sees in the accelerating move to the Left from the calling of the Estates General through the coming of the Terror -- all in just four years -- seems to be a pattern that repeats itself thereafter in the history of Russia from the entry into the Great War to the Bolshevik victory.

So I am set to wondering whether there may be aspects of "revolution" and "utopian" scheming in the Right's current program in our country. First "utopianism". I know from long experience that this word has a largely pejorative character when written by Frank. I know, because he has flung the word at me. It didn't used to hurt -- I accepted it as a badge of honor. For me the word implied good things, planning for a bright future where things were rightly ordered, people were happy. I tried on futures like new t-shirts. Utopias were just tools for exploring what we wanted or the future. ("Social teleology simulators"?) In this respect, I still enjoy a good utopia from time to time, although I'm probably a little pickier than I used to be; more of a connoisseur of projections. And I certainly am much more skeptical about what lies between NOW and any alternative future in which I might want to romp.

Perhaps the question in use of the word "utopia" lies in what we believe or know (or believe that we know) the "natural" constraints on the future may be. As a pejorative term, "utopia" is a characterization of a projection for the future as unnatural or urealistic. Again, I think we are driven in the direction of first principles: What IS human nature and does it place a limit on what we can want for the structure of society?

Here we have the essence of the New Right's program. It is an attempt to legislate into existence an embodiment of what they think is right based on what they think we are. We must remove welfare, they say, because people are motivated primarily by the desire for economic security and without insecurity, people become unmotivated, lazy and BAD (but certainly have an amazing natural rhythm). Perhaps the program of the Old Left was motivated by a model of human nature premised on "man the consumer": People are motivated by the desire to HAVE and without the power to GET, they become dissatisfied, surly and violent (but often have interesting music and make good boxers). Do I miss the point, or is this what lies behind Bill's (certainly inflammatory) motto, "Give them money"?

[Confess, Bill. You love to fling rhetorical gasoline around and then start making gestures with matchbooks .... ]

I honestly think the problem is not about MEANS such as whether and how much to cut the budget deficit, but rather about ENDS. Cutting the deficit will certainly bring immediate hardship on poor people, inefficient businesses that depend on government subsidies, college-age children of middle class families and a whole lot of government employees, probably in that order. The question is, do we want to inflict this on these people in the name of some greater good and, if so, what exactly is that greater good? But, as much as I would like the public debate to focus on these questions, I'm sure it will do so only in the simplistic, iconic fashion of holding up caricatures of downtrodden entrepreneurs and welfare mothers, disenfranchised minorities and chopped down old-growth forests. So, a brief return to empiricism ...

The budget was balanced last back some time in the sixties, if memory serves. Has our country changed so much that we can't return to the economic structure we had back then and try again, if we want to? Here's an empirical question -- Are there more poor people now (that perhaps MUST be kept on the dole somehow) -- and by "poor people" I mean people who couldn't afford essential goods and services like food, housing and medical care?

This is an important question, I think, because I recall a lot of social violence in the sixties -- Watts, Detroit, etc. Presumably cutting the dole would place us back in the same shape we were in then, at least, because most entitlement programs that eat the public fisc now either didn't exist then or were very much smaller in scope as well as cost. Could cutting the dole unleash violence of those proportions or greater? Of course LA burned after the King trial, and we had a dole then, so maybe it won't matter. Maybe urban blight zones burn every generation or so, regardless of what you do.

I notice that I am asking a lot of questions without offering any answers, a habit I've probably picked up in the last eight years by taking about six zillion depositions.

I guess my point, buried in all the wool I've gathered here, is that we may be talking about utopias on both sides of the issue. If a utopia is a social program inconsistent with human nature, then essentially all but one social program is utopian and will either be doomed to failure, or at least will be damned uncomfortable for most people. Logically, if human nature is fairly constant, then there is only ONE realistic program, and all the rest are just the pipe dreams of idealists. Or there isn't a right answer, and the right social program is the one that's best for me. If that's the case I think everybody should pay a lot of taxes, except for people over six feet tall whose last names begin with "B". The latter category should be given large government grants to do research on [content edited for Web version in the interest of privacy]. That's my social policy and I'm stickin' to it.

Seriously, I think that some basis in human nature can be found for at least some elements of social policy. People need the basics of life and they need to have useful work to be happy. They appear to need to have children, so we need to have some way to educate the little darlings, or they will all walk around saying unpleasant things in loud voices when we're older and I'm sure we won't like that. Oh yes, we have to have an army and we have to have police, because a Jeffrey Dahmer would pop up every once in a while, even in the ideal society. Beyond this, there doesn't seem to be much agreement. It seems people on the far left believe that we should be forced to just give the basics to people who don't happen to have them right now, and people on the far right think those same people should just starve, tough noogies!

So, I suppose we may have to do a little more work on this human nature problem.

[An aside on the "human nature" thing. I'm currently reading "The Flayed God", a relatively scholarly book on Mesoamerican mythology. I havn't even gotten to the Olmecs yet, and they're already slicing people's skin off and wearing the result as part of the death-and-rebirth cult of Xipe Totec. This despite the fact that late neolithic artifacts are dominated by swollen-bellied fertility gals a la Euroasian and African neolithic cultures. I know that there was "the king must die" stuff in Europe and that Druids had a taste for the odd sacrificial virgin from time to time, but the Mesoamericans gods were bloodthirsty on a completely different scale. How did these people end up with such a different route to the spirit world? Maybe there isn't much to "human nature" ... ]

As for "revolution", I wonder how we would delimit "revolutions" from other brouhahas in history. I've wondered about that since managing to escape the "Hot Hand" in my dreams a few weeks ago. I have to say that I don't feel too comfortable about revolutions myself. I think that's because I'm not sure even someone with my formal training in dissimulation could dance fast enough to stay ahead of the pattern of revolutions eating their own I mentioned above, although it may simply be because I have become a somewhat successful defender of the status quo in my work life. At any rate, I'll leave that question to further discussion ...

I have read Frank's and Bill's counterbattery of articles regarding the effect of cutting the deficit with interest. I was just starting to think that Frank had to be right since this is what I always read in the Wall Street Journal and hear on the business show I listen to after All Things Considered on my commite sometimes, when Morning Addition had a "liberal economist" on this morning basically saying that the effect of reducing the spending power of people on the dole (my term, OK) would likely cause a major recession. So there's one other guy with enough sound bite power to fire off a major volley on that vector. HOW CAN ANYONE KNOW WHICH SIDE IS RIGHT? Bill, does anyone REALLY claim to have a suffciently powerful and accurate model to be RIGHT about this?

A Little Light Metaphysics and Epistemology. "I hate facts. They are as elusive as first principles. In fact, they do not exist apart from the context in which they are generated. However, truth does exist , and therefore lies exist as well." Obviously there are truths that are purely symbolic (Socrates and the mortal men, etc.). Equally obviously, "truths" about purely empirical experience are of a different character, if they are truths at all. I suppose it is certainly true that facts can't exist without context (I can't know what it means to say that there are 260 million Americans without knowing at least something of what an "American" is) and that "context" networks out into an infinitely extended web of other "facts". But I like networks.

That's all on that ...

Practical Stuff About Having Fun. Is everything copacetic on the Death March? Will there be a meeting to discuss packing? I won't be there, but I will almost certainly get a group-sized cook set, as I mentioned before, making some group meals possible. Beyond spaghetti, does anyone have any ideas for group meals.

Gotta Go

GB