Positive Liberty

My husband is over on the bulletin boards at Orson Scott Card’s web site. He’s been using the handle Syzygy there to reply in the endless discussion recently re-sparked by Card’s latest homophobic comments. He’s been doing some great research on the radical right, the false studies they have conducted to smear gay families, and how intellectually bankrupt the entire case against gay America really is. He’s also valiantly fought off all my requests to make his posts more snarky.

I’ve already said all I care to about the subject, but regular readers already know that.

Feel free to help him out if you like.

Our yard sits behind a cheap restaurant. Despite our complaints, they often leave their dumpster open, and a lot of things get blown into the lawn. Recently I found a parent-teacher note. It read “I know that Brett earned 105% in Health Class. Thank you, Kathy B—–” The note’s signature caught my attention: Apparently Brett had traced and re-traced over Kathy’s name in pencil, erased his efforts, and started again. His spidery attempts to copy his mother’s handwriting had nearly eaten through the paper. Then Brett threw the note away, hoping to hide the evidence. Instead it came to me, and I may yet send it to Found Magazine.

My Inner Ethical Council, whom I consult on such matters, formerly had a Moral Relativist as one of its members. Three worldviews ago a lettre de cachet sent the Moral Relativist to the Bastille. The guards put him in an iron mask and left him to rot in the dungeon. On finding Brett’s note I decided to pay the Moral Relativist a visit. Of anyone I know, he could surely give me some insight on cheating. I opened the peephole of his cell and peered inside.

“Come in, come in… It’s so lovely to see you again. You’re here about academic dishonesty?”

“Um.. Yeah. How did you know?”

“I bribed the guards.”

“With what?”

“Absolution. From time to time, I persuade them that their sins don’t matter, and in return they give me the dirt on you.” Suddenly I remembered why the Old Regime had imprisoned him.

“So what do you want to know?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. Cheating is such a big, complicated, inescapable problem. It makes me sick every time I think of it. I get scared that maybe cheating really is the way of the world. Maybe it’s actually how everything gets done, and maybe the few people who don’t cheat are just being naive. It bugs the hell out of me, and I don’t have a good answer. Just tell me something… I don’t know… anything…”

“Everyone cheats,” said the Moral Relativist. “You’ve done it yourself.”

“I cheated once, in first grade.” Back then I’d had the damnedest time learning to spell the word “indian.” I wrote it down on a tiny piece of paper and put it in my pencil case. During the test, I pretended to need a different pencil.

“I bet you’ve cheated more than that.”

“I haven’t. I honestly haven’t.”

“That’s what they all say, until they get caught.”

He’s right. When I say I don’t cheat, I mean it. But of course, everyone says that they don’t cheat, and everyone says that they mean it. Brett’s mother probably knows about the 105% in health. I wonder if she knows about the 45% in math? Right now she probably thinks her son is a dear little angel. Quite possibly she thinks he’s a math whiz, too. She won’t understand how he got such a bad grade when the report cards come home. Then again, I’ve seen kids forge those, too.

A recent study found that 75% of students cheat at least once in high school, often by copying papers from the Internet. You will notice that none of my academic papers appear at Positive Liberty, and none ever will, because cheaters in high school go on to cheat in college. Every term I warn my own students that I am good at catching plagiarists; every term, at least one more student gets caught. I’ve flunked them, had them put on probation, and even denied one individual the chance to go on to law school. It’s a grim duty indeed. Yet the pervasive anti-ethic of cheating goes on and on, through high school, then college, into the world of Enron, WorldCom, and Halliburton.

“How did we get into this mess?”

“It really is the adults’ fault; the kids see them and learn which way the wind’s blowing. If everyone does something, then obviously it isn’t wrong.”

I got the feeling he was grinning behind his iron mask, and I didn’t like it one bit. Then something clicked. A few days ago, while waiting in line at the computer lab, a thought occurred to me: An intense social conditioning sustains the act of waiting in line, which is itself an abstraction of a very high order, run entirely on the honor system. The process, though, is so automatic, so flawless, that we hardly notice it. In the adult world, trying to cheat the unwritten law of the line is almost unknown. We wait in line at the computer lab, in the grocery store, and at the ATM machine. No one ever questions it.

Imagine that we did. What if someone came into the computer lab after me and thus behind me in line. When a computer became available, what if he didn’t alert me to the empty spot? What if he ran up to it and sat down instead? I imagine a dialogue something like this:

“Excuse me, but I was waiting in line.”

“Excuse me, but I was faster.”

“There’s a line here. See? We’re all waiting in line.”

“Well I don’t wait in line.”

“Everyone waits in line. That’s how things work. Everyone takes a turn, and no one gets left out.”

“Taking turns is for suckers. Besides, there’s nothing you can do about it anyway.”

“But that’s not the point.”

“Shut up, I’m trying to play Pong.”

“Look, asshole, if it were an emergency, you could have just asked me. I’d have gladly let you go first. But if you’re only playing games–”

“Go cry to your mommy, crybaby.”

A line presupposes a social contract in miniature. We all agree that the needs of every person in line are pretty much equal: Our needs are equal in worth, more or less equal in degree, and they deserve essentially equal treatment. On this basis, we all renounce the use of force or fraud. Lines are self-governing when everyone has a strong assurance of eventually getting served. They reflect a near-universal preference for decorum over promptness, a preference that holds true save in those few situations like soccer matches and rock concerts, where emotions run high and the rules of decorum are already weaker than usual. Still, it almost always works.

“What about standing in lines?” I asked the Moral Relativist in triumph. “Adults almost always respect a line, even if they could cheat and get away with it.”

“People only wait in line so they can look like they’re good. When no one’s watching, all bets are off. Deep in their heart of hearts, everyone secretly knows that they don’t have to play by the rules if they won’t get caught. That’s why even Christians cheat. Not only that, but Christians cheat about money. It’s the one thing that their religion says they shouldn’t care about, and still they cheat to get rich. Remember the Hanssen spy case? He was as Christian as they get, and he sold his country to the godless Soviet Union. You can’t get better proof of moral relativism than that. Brett’s a smart kid; I bet he’ll be president one day. Maybe he’ll make himself dictator. I mean, hey, why not? Taking turns is for suckers.”

Now I really wasn’t liking where the conversation was going. The slow tread of wingtips on the limestone floor told me that the Malthusian was approaching. I looked up; the rest of the Inner Ethical Council was close behind him.

“How did you get in here?”

“I bribed the guards.”

“Not you too.”

“As an economist, I know that every man has his price, and I simply resolved to pay it. I was even generous enough to spring for my colleagues. Intriguingly, there’s a diminishing marginal cost on each additional spy smuggled into the Bastille. I’m thinking of writing a pa–”

“Spare me. Do you have any suggestions about the real problem here?”

“No, I don’t. One person can’t change the world, you know. You’ll never stop people from cheating, be they politicians or even your own students.”

“That’s the most dismal thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s my job to be dismal.”

“If I can’t change the world, then at least I won’t be a part of the problem. I won’t cheat on my taxes. I won’t be mean to others. I won’t be a dictator.”

“No one asked you to,” snapped the Malthusian.

“Well I won’t cut in lines. I’ll recycle as much as I can. I might even pick out other people’s trash from time to time, you know, when they throw it in the wrong bin.” The Moral Relativist rattled his chains.

“Now he gets all crunchy-granola. I bet he draws the line at washing other people’s bottles.”

“What’s so wrong about that?” asked the Malthusian. “There’s only so much time in one life, and even virtue has diminishing marginal returns.”

Sometimes I’m glad I keep him around, dismal though he is.

“What do you others think?”

Old Mother Utopia shook her head and said nothing. The Humanitarian spoke up.

“It’s not just Christians who cheat, so you can’t pin it on them alone. Americans of all faiths do it, and that, to me, is incomprehensible. Americans have the easiest lives of any people in the world. They aren’t cheating to survive. They’re just cheating for the sake of cheating. Frankly, I don’t understand it. Don’t most American faiths say the rich should give away their money rather than accumulate it?”

The Capitalist had a quick answer. “Let’s forget about this spiritual stuff and focus on the material. A whole lot of moral problems don’t really have their answers in the heavens, but in how society sets itself up. The simple answer is that we can minimize cheating by punishing more cheaters. All we have to do is make sure that cheating is too risky to be profitable, then make sure that everone knows it.” I thought of the Malthusian’s bribery and made a mental note to flog the prison guards in the public square.

“That will never work,” said the Cynic. “The vast majority of cheating goes entirely unnoticed by anyone.”

“Unnoticed by anyone?” the Stoic asked. “Surely someone sees every single act of cheating, and that’s the cheater himself. A cheater’s victories, good grades, successes, happy marriages… They’re all empty. Looking back on his life, a cheater dies in wretched misery. Cheating is its own punishment, because it steals the happiness of success. Lots of people cheat, and lots of people are unhappy. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”

The Epicurean was smiling.

“Are you suggesting,” he asked, “That honesty is the only hope for real happiness?”

“I, um… suppose so,” said the Stoic. “But there’s still no guarantee.”

“Agreed,” said the Capitalist. “Convincing people that honesty brings happiness won’t always be effective. Honest but unhappy people do exist, and some of them will always be tempted to cheat. So what can we do about them?

“Lines may work on the honor system–But what makes the honor system work? It isn’t honor. It’s probably not even happiness. The trouble is that despite all codes of ethics, and despite the Stoic’s insights about happiness, there will always be some people who are willing to run the psychic risks of cheating in pursuit of a short-term gain. People compartmentalize; they put their victories in one box and their sins in another. Which box do you think they open more often?”

“I have an idea,” said the Academic. “It won’t work everywhere, but it could be a start.”

“Spill it.” The Academic craves respect. I deny him that pleasure whenever I can.

“There are probably a million essays out there about Rousseau’s Social Contract, all of them just waiting to be plagiarized from the scholarly journals, cribbed from the Internet, and inherited from one fraternity brother to the next. So bypass them all. Make your class read the Social Contract. Then instead make them write about an utterly unknown pamphleteer who borrowed a lot of ideas from Rousseau. Ask them to apply the Social Contract to analyze an obscure poem or play about the French Revolution. The following year, choose a different subsidiary text. Let’s face it, there’s no shortage of obscure, derivative writers out there.

“Are your students learning Shakespeare? Fine, let them write on King Lear, but only if their paper is a response to a literary critic from the 1970s. Structure the assignment. Pare it down until they can’t borrow anything useful from anyone else. Most importantly, never give the same assignment twice. As an added bonus, you’ll never have to grade another summary of King Lear again.”

I liked the sound of that. Students might like it too: I suspect that on some level most of them really do want a test that’s impossible to cheat. As it stands now, average students feel compelled to cheat to keep up, while bright ones dread having to compete with the cheaters.

“Practical, practical,” said the Cynic. “You still haven’t touched the root of the problem. You’ve forgotten what the Moral Relativist said, about how everyone knows that the rules are fake to begin with. Christians know it just as well as atheists: God is dead, no one’s watching, and that means they can still cheat whenever they can get away with it. All the Academic has done is to make up a narrow little workaround, a trick, if you will. It might not even work in the Academy itself, and supposing it does, still the Academy is a lot smaller than you like to think. What are the rest of us to do?”

Old Mother Utopia finally spoke.

“You’re right, of course. The Academic has come up with a clumsy little workaround. When I first left my homeland, I probably would have hated the very idea of conceding that students can’t be trusted. I’d have insisted on their honesty and then punished them for their failings, again and again.

“In Utopia, no one ever thinks of cheating, and people who start out in Utopia all too often set up regimes of punishment to get everyone else to where they are. Anyone who sets up an honor system, expecting it to run on its own, winds up bitter and disappointed; those who play into such an honor system lose all faith in honor itself.

“Sure, any true Utopian would see the Academic’s anti-cheating plan as a wretched scam. I’ve mellowed out a lot though, living in this imperfect world of yours. Accepting life, here on Earth, means learning to love clumsy. It means accepting that there are no guarantees, and that there can never be a sure thing. If we are only working around the Essential Evil, only minimizing its effect, then so be it. If we can’t presume honesty, we must produce it.

“That’s why we get new $20 bills every few weeks,” said the Malthusian. The Cynic giggled. Old Mother Utopia ignored them.

“Produce honesty by managing the terms of your encounters with others, so that honesty is the only option, and then honesty itself becomes a habit, little by little. Like standing in line.”

The Cynic looked momentarily satisfied. Then he noticed that I was looking at him. He put a cynical look back on his face and spoke again.

“Next question: How do we set up our marriages so that cheating isn’t a problem there, either?”

“Ah,” said Old Mother Utopia, “That is a question for another day.”

Like most Christian radio stations, 105.1 WAVA was talking about The Passion of the Christ this afternoon. The interlocutors all agreed that the film was absolutely not anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish in any way at all. On the contrary, Mitch Glaser of Chosen People Ministries made a pitch for the film as a “unique… historical” opportunity for Christians to reach out to Jews. What could be kinder to the Jews than to share with them the good news of their Messiah? He was taking donations so that his group could give out free information packets to Jews as they left the film (One wonders how they plan to recognize most Jews, but I digress). The free packets included a book they consistently referred to as SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "I Thought It Sounded Suspicious", url: "http://www.positiveliberty.com/2004/02/i-thought-it-sounded-suspicious.html" });

I have been asked by several people whether Positive Liberty could add a comments feature after every post. I have indeed been trying to do it, but I’ve not been able to get the cgi script to work properly yet. To give some sense of reader feedback, though, I thought I would post some highlights from the letters I’ve received. It’s been an emotional 24 hours.

Kris writes:

If it passes into law, FMA will be the stupidest, most senselessly divisive political legislation I will ever have had the misfortune to witness. I sincerely doubt that FMA will ever pass congress, but if it does, I would view that as all the more reason for you to stay. This is no more than a speedbump on this country’s bumpy road toward civil equality, but we’ll get there eventually with patience. Black people had to use separate bathrooms and sit in the back of the bus less than 50 years ago, and now look at us.

If thinking, politically motivated people like you fled our shores, then those that remain would have a rougher time of it for sure (not everyone has the luxury of renouncing citizenship). There are more politically constructive ways to make a statement; I hope you see that.

There are many good points here. I entirely agree that the FMA is unlikely to get out of Congress. Also, the decision to leave can’t be taken lightly. I have had several readers ask me not to go even if the worst does happen, and in the cold light of morning I’m not so sure that I stand by what I wrote last night. Still, being explicitly prohibited from having a family is a lot to bear. In the unlikely event that the FMA succeeds, the chances are good that I will not live to see its repeal. This is not like Prohibition, where everyone openly supported the amendment yet still drank in secret. Unlike Prohibition, only some people will feel the consequences of the FMA. The Edict of Fontainebleau–Louis XIV’s disastrous attempt to enforce Catholicism–seems a much closer analogy. It stood for 102 years.

Marcela writes:

Sigh…I really don’t feel like the U.S. is a land of opportunity anymore
and it’s always been split between being oppressor and welcoming
oppressees depending on who you are. I’m almost expecting a backlash
since everything’s happening so fast, but doubt the amendment will get
passed. The Jew example is stretching it a little since you’re not being
targeted for death and concentration camps. But it still sucks. Just got
a copy of the Utne Reader so it’s refreshing to see that there are a lot
of liberal, progressive thinkers out there. There was actually an article
about whether to leave the country in Jan/Feb issue that you might be
interested in.

I admit I was stretching things a bit. I am just tremendously disheartened to see the president endorse the FMA after all of the progress of the recent decade, even of the past year. It is so depressing that as a gay man, there really is only one political party that I can vote for in good conscience, whether or not I fully agree with its policies. I simply don’t need my brain anymore when it comes to American politics. I suspect I’m not the only gay person who feels this way.

Economically, I’m actually a lot closer to the classical Republican line than I am to the Democrats; one’s sexual orientation truly has nothing to do with what one thinks about economic policy. I mistrust government entitlement programs and want the overall size of government to shrink. I would have gladly supported the Bush tax cuts if they had been tied to actually realizing the long-lost surplus, a recommendation made by Alan Greenspan and ignored by everyone else. If the Republican party could be entirely divorced from the religious right, I would have to think a lot about every single election, because as I see it the Democrats are better on civil liberties, while the Republicans have tended to favor smaller government–or at least until recently. As it stands, I vote Democrat to stop the awful thing that the Republican party has become in the last two decades. In the past I’ve been attracted to the Libertarians, but they have objectionably close ties to anarchists and a serious gay rights problem of their own. If someone could create a new, more moderate Libertarian party, it would win my vote every time, and not merely as a vote against all the other guys. Instead, though, everything seems to be sliding continually toward the fundamentalist right.

On a much happier note, I have gotten several e-mails of support in response to “The Life of the Party.” It is very exciting as a comparatively new blogger to get a number of positive and challenging responses from people I have not met as well as from my friends. It gives me all the more reason to stay right where I am, to keep thinking, working, and fighting, and to keep at these confounded cgi scripts.

Écrasez l’infame,
Jason

It’s a simple choice.

If the so-called Federal Marriage Amendment passes, my husband and I are leaving. We will go to Canada, to France, to the Netherlands, or to any country that will take two highly educated people who are willing to work for a living. I suspect that we won’t be alone. Anything would be better than remaining in a land whose founding document includes a declaration of war upon us. It is possible to live amid the unthinking discrimination of historical custom, even while working to end the old bigotries. But a recent and hateful addition to the fundamental law of the land can not be endured.

Am I unpatriotic? Absolutely not. I adore the United States. We–get this–we Americans invented the gay rights movement. For that alone I love my country. I love freedom of religion, and the free market, and the ability to say whatever I damn well please on the Internet. Come to think of it, we gave the world the Internet, too. We’re the cleverest, most independent-minded, most spirited and most enterprising people in the world. America has always been a land of opportunity and a home to the oppressed. If the FMA passes, though, I won’t be able to call myself an American any longer. “America” won’t mean what it used to mean.

I love America so much that I’ve got tears streaming down my cheeks right now… Go ahead, laugh if you want, but it’s true. Maybe only right-wingers are allowed to go wrapping themselves in the flag, but I don’t really care. It’s times like these, when the very idea of “America” is threatened, that everyone must be a patriot.

When Louis XIV declared in 1685 that one must be Catholic to be French, tens of thousands of French Protestants left the country. They were among the most affluent and hardworking of his subjects, and they went to Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United States. All three of them prospered at France’s expense. When the Nazis came to power, the United States received a large cohort of Jewish intellectuals with Albert Einstein at their head. Would that we had taken more! Freedom-lovers of all persuasions fled the Soviet Union, and the loss of their talents contributed richly to that state’s demise. I will not enjoy leaving America, but ask yourself: Would you tell a Jew to remain in Nazi Germany?

And is our situation any different? What if you’re reading this and happen to be straight? You say that you don’t really care? Don’t kid yourself. You have gay friends, family members, and co-workers, and the president is attacking them directly. Nor would an amendment against gay marriage be the end of the issue; it would be only the beginning. Emboldened by their success, the fundamentalists will not stop there. Americans–straight Americans–would soon find their own rights eroded too. Abortion, the teaching of evolution, even contraception might be next. We would continue to slide toward a Christian theocracy, and the chances are good that your own brand of Christianity won’t be the one in power. Gay rights may be the leading edge of American freedom, and the leading edge may always be controversial, but the fundamentalist agenda will not end when gay rights have been denied.

It is said that in the 2000 election, one million gay people voted for George W. Bush. Is there even one gay person who would vote for him now? If you are gay, register and vote. Call your elected officials, write letters to the newspapers at all levels, and talk to your neighbors. Do you want America to remain your country? Then exercise your rights, show your patriotism, and win it back.

Sometimes I listen to Christian radio; I like to expose myself to a very different perspective from my own. On 95.1 WRBS this morning, Focus on the Family’s Dr. James Dobson was interviewing Mel Gibson about The Passion of the Christ. Gibson explained that part of the reason he’d made the film was because he thinks, and I quote his exact words, “Everyone faces what I like to call the Dark Night of the Soul.”

Is that what you like to call it? Pretty clever. What about St. John of the Cross? I thought–correct me if I’m wrong–I thought that that was his idea, in the sixteenth century no less. Dobson said nothing to correct Gibson, nor even to indicate that he knew the original attribution of the phrase.

The interview continued, and Gibson let loose another theological howler: He called ALL FOUR gospels “synoptic,” (yes–all four of them), and then he said that they were called snyoptic…. because they provided a synopsis! His movie, on the other hand, gave a full picture of what happened. I was appalled.

Never mind that only THREE (count them, THREE) of the gospels are synoptic. Never mind that they are called this because Matthew, Mark, and Luke take a roughly similar point of view compared to the rather idiosyncratic gospel of John. Gospels are apparently all synoptic in Gibson’s warped view of things.

Further, from a traditional perspective, claiming to do better than the authors of the gospels is pretty much a de facto confession of heresy. Placing yourself above Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is also a colossal act of pride, one that even the new medium of film can’t excuse.

Astonishingly, Dobson didn’t contradict him. He’s a doctor of what, exactly? Sigh… I suppose it’s my curse to know Christianity better than those who use it against me.

A friend on Live Journal passed me this questionnaire recently.

1.What’s your favorite book?
Right now it’s Island by Aldous Huxley.

2.What book made you laugh?
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. I read it while I was living in France with a bunch of people who were only just learning French, so many of the jokes hit home especially hard. There were times when I nearly threw up from laughing.

3.What was your favorite Required Reading book?
The Once and Future King, by T. H. White. It was a retelling of the Arthurian legends, written in the 1950s and making all kinds of references to the problems of modern life. It was thought-provoking but also tremendously funny, very sad at times, and altogether beautiful.

4.What was your least favorite Required Reading book?
Wuthering Heights was one of the dreariest and most appalling books I’ve ever read. It was like a soap opera, but minus most of the sex and violence.

5.What book bored you to death?
Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers. I was told by someone for whom I have great respect that I absolutely must read this book, and that I would love it. Unfortunately I didn’t.

6.What book do you think everyone should read before they die?

I don’t think that there is any one book everyone should read before they die. There are so many different points of view out there that just one book isn’t going to speak to everyone. I would suggest, though, that everyone should be forced to read the sacred texts of a religion that is not their own. I think it would do a lot to broaden people’s horizons and encourage mutual respect.

I also think that everyone in the world should buy a copy of my dissertation. It’s ok if they don’t read it.

I’m a historian. I’m also a lover of science fiction, and this means that past and future are both fascinating to me. They just don’t always sit so easily with one another.

Today I received from amazon.com The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith. Smith was among the first of science fiction’s universe-builders, and his are stories of planoforming ships, extradimensional religion, and a planet with the improbable name of Old North Australia. They’re amazing stuff, obviously the inspiration of later writers like Frank Herbert and Orson Scott Card. Still I can’t help but notice that, like many other science fiction writers, Cordwainer Smith has it in for historians.

Much like Isaac Asimov, Walter Miller, and a host of others, Smith holds that our future will be almost entirely ignorant of the past as we now know it. In his imagined future, Christianity is remembered only as the Old Strong Religion, whose sign was a fish… and that’s about it. Famously, Asimov’s future humans even forget the name of Earth: Mankind’s origins will lie entirely forgotten in the legendary past, and the question, “Where was our home world?” will be left to crank archaeologists who have nothing better to keep them busy.

What if they’re right? What if all the effort of teaching and learning facts about human history is utterly futile, doomed to be overwhelmed one day by entropy, technological complexity, and the ever-growing volume of history itself? I’d like to think, perhaps, that in ten thousand years, someone could still go to a computer, type the words “Maximilien Robespierre,” and get information about the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution. He’d be able to read about the days when mankind lived on only one planet, before they’d learned the secret to faster-than-light travel. Perhaps my hypothetical future human will find something meaningful, but perhaps he will not. We don’t have enough experience with history yet to know how it will hold up in ten thousand years.

Let’s take the worst-case scenario: Suppose that every effort of every historian to discover the facts of the past, to impart those facts to the public, and to catalogue and interpret them, will one day come to naught. What are we then doing as historians? Albert Einstein once said that education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. What will remain of history, after all of the detail has been forgotten? Learning history is beside the point: What will be the historical education of humanity’s future? That is to say, what are the great, enduring lessons of history? Has anyone really worked on this question lately?

In the land of Gnomerica, the gnomes maintain one of the most curious governments in the world. Although their system is alluded to in many of mankind’s proverbs, humans themselves rarely understand it. This exposé is designed to show exactly how it works. The reader is assumed to have a basic familiarity with gnomismatic concepts such as democracy, paper money, and compound interest.

The Gnomericans refer to their system as a “democratic plutocracy.” They consider it infinitely superior to a classical plutocracy, which is, alas, still to be found in many other countries. Democratic plutocracy is based on the principle that those who have money are the rulers, but it adds a refinement that most plutocracies miss. Every dollar (the Gnomerican currency) also counts as exactly one vote in any election, nothing more and nothing less. Whenever a matter of consequence comes before the gnomes, they gather at the nearest bank, which also serves as a polling place. Each adult gnome places an undisclosed quantity of paper money in a sack, then drops it into one of two ballot coffers marked “yes” or “no,” both of which are enclosed in a small private booth to prevent anyone from seeing how he or she votes.

Everyone votes as often as they like. Not only is this a convenience for the indecisive, but it also reduces the work of election monitors in busy precincts; provided that they earned their money honestly, no one ever needs to register to vote. Each gnome pledges as much money as he or she feels appropriate, but no one has any information about anyone else’s votes. Lest anyone ruin themselves on an expensive election, the voting may happen only on the day before each gnomish payday; on election days, no one may offer money at interest. At the end of the election, the sums for “yes” and “no” are tallied in a great ledger-book without regard to the mere number of individuals voting on either side. It’s the money that counts, and in all cases, the names and even the numbers of the voters are kept entirely secret. When all the votes are counted, the greatest sum of money wins.

The process of voting is technically known as a “Glendelfritz Auction,” after the renowned tenth-century gnomish economist and academician Glendelfritz the Gloomy. Glendelfritz was only gloomy by gnomish standards. When he made his first (and last) appearance at a human academic conference, he was so ungloomy that half the participants gave up on economics entirely, ran away, and joined the circus. Human economists have placed his books on the Index, and the “Laughing Economist”–another one of his titles–is only read by those with special dispensation from the Chairman of the Feudal Reserve.

Among his many works, Glendelfritz is credited with a mathematical proof that the concept of the “fungibility of money” is in all cases equal to the concept of the “secret ballot.” It was a discovery that revolutionized Gnomerican society. In his later works, Glendelfritz continued to employ this discovery as one of his central axioms. He went on to prove that stuffing the ballot box is precisely equivalent to counterfeiting, since all genuine money constitutes a de facto valid vote–and vice versa: To stuff the ballot box therefore absolutely requires an act of forgery. The final, unfinished work of this great thinker was a treatise proving that buying votes in a future election is mathematically the equivalent of borrowing money at compound interest. Faced with the fundamentally innocuous nature of the practice, buying votes for an upcoming election is now perfectly legal throughout all of gnomish society. Buying votes for a current election is of course an utter waste of time.

Rather than becoming diverted by such oddities, perhaps a practical example will be useful instead: Let us suppose the issue was a simple one, “Shall we build a road from point A to point B?” If more money was raised for the “yes” side than for the “no,” then the road would be built using all of the money that the election drew from either side. If the election raised a great deal of money, then the road will be built in superb style, with marble paving stones and charming little hostels every few leagues along the way. But the results are not always so splendid. If “yes” draws more money than “no,” but on the whole the election raises only a modest sum, then the road may be little more than a dirt track in the wilderness.

The most controversial projects always raise the most money in this type of auction, and one would expect vexatious consequences, for the “no” side has invested much toward defeating the project. Yet in practice, we observe that the approval of a controversial project often stifles all dissent. If a hotly-contested issue passes, then by its very nature it has raised a great deal of money. The “yes” voters are of course happy to see the project accomplished superbly well. The “no” voters, on the other hand, still have their pride to keep, and rather than admit their folly for having voted no, they can instead lie through their beards and take pride in having paid so much for the project. Everyone gets what they want, whether they knew it or not, and everyone is happy.

The results are quite different but no less happy if a measure is defeated. If the “no” vote wins, then all of the capital goes to the polity’s General Fund. The General Fund pays for a wide variety of projects that all gnomes agree are important, including maintenance of existing public works, national defense, constable services, education, and support for the aged. Given the rate at which gnomes conceive of and discard projects, the General Fund is suspected of being the largest single currency reserve anywhere in the world, and gnomish public works are legendarily well-maintained. How much money is in the Fund? Let us recall that gnomes are quite wealthy and also very opinionated. The net result is that not a single Gnomerican has paid any kind of compulsory tax in the last six hundred and twenty-eight years. The elections pay for everything. Given that some 90% of elections end in a “no” vote, the General Fund must be a spectacular reserve indeed. Unfortunately, the rules of a strict Glendelfritz Auction render this total a closely-guarded state secret.

Gnomes defend their system on many grounds, but they are most compelling when they point out that an ordinary, non-plutocratic democracy gives no weight to the intensity of one’s opinion. Let us quote from Glendelfritz himself; the following comes from one of his seminars at Gnomerican University:

Suppose that in an ordinary democracy 49% of the populace votes “no.” This 49% considers it a matter of life and death. The other 51% votes “yes,” but does so only because “yes” was the first choice on a long and tedious ballot. They didn’t really feel like reading it anyway, and thus they missed the part about releasing feral baby octopi in the national wading pool; this last was buried on page 462. Clearly, justice has not been done, and a plutocratic election would have solved the problem quite neatly: The 49% would have given all they could possibly afford, while the 51% would give maybe a copper or two each to vote yes. Justice has been done, but only thanks to plutocracy. The great sums of money raised to defeat the scheme can now go toward vital projects like increasing the pay of the faculty Gnomerican University. (loud applause)

An election of this type is the origin of the phrase “giving my two cents’ worth,” which means to offer an opinion of trivial value. It is likewise the origin of the saying “in for a penny, in for a pound,” which references the archaic gnomish currency: If one is going to vote a trivial amount, why not go all the way and vote something substantial? Pennies and pounds were abandoned when both voter turnout and election revenues began to drop; the former was too cumbersome, and the latter too heavy, to serve well in a Glendelfritz Auction.

The general fund is administered by the one hundred richest gnomes of the polity, who together form a body called the Golden Council. Critics point out that the Golden Council is in fact a vestige of an older, purely despotic plutocracy. In a despotic plutocracy, of course, the rich get to rule continuously, rather than dollar-for-dollar. While it may be true that the Golden Council bears some mark of this archaic system, we can hardly doubt that the vestiges of despotism have been thoroughly channeled into useful directions. Further, the Golden Council’s members commonly vote large sums of money in every election. This has two main effects: First, it acts as a check on the concentration of wealth. Second, the Golden Council overwhelmingly tends to vote “no” on every project; by doing so, they keep some measure of control over their own money: Recall that in the event of a measure’s defeat, all of the money raised at the auction/election goes back to the General Fund, which (of course!) is administered by the Golden Council itself. These powerful “no” votes act as a force of conservatism, and one that is frankly quite needed in gnomish society.

In an ordinary, tyrannical plutocracy, the rich make all the decisions, time after time, at no cost to themselves, and the gnomes find this practice monstrous indeed. Actions, they point out, should have consequences. When a rich man’s wealth is gone, he then has to make some more money before he can vote again, and this encourages productivity, even on the part of the leisured political class. Can a single, very wealthy gnome impose his views on everyone else? In a despotic plutocracy, such an individual would be king for life. But in a democratic plutocracy, he is king only for a limited time, and after that, he will have spent all his money.

Such a fate has befallen more than one member of the Golden Council. When a member spends so much at elections that he no longer qualifies to serve, the public executioner destroys the ceremonial bench upon which he sits. Although gnomes long ago abolished the death penalty, they still have executioners. Mostly they smash things or blow them up, both of which are common punishments in Gnomerica. The practice of ejecting a gnome from his seat on the Golden Council is known as “bankrupt,” from two Old Gnomish words that mean “bench” and “break.” It is a matter of considerable public shame to go bankrupt, for it indicates that the gnome in question was foolish enough to value politics more than earning a good, honest living. The latter is what everyone in Gnomerica really aspires to, after all.

First, I’ve learned to love the LiveJournal interface. With two clicks of a mouse, I can “manage” my “friends.” Several of them have come out of the shadows with the posting of the journal, and have to say I’m happy about that. Speaking of friends, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one of Dave Jansing’s friends who regularly shaves all of his facial hair. Goatees seem to be in the dress code. It’s interesting how people self-sort in the LiveJournal environment.

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I’ve also lately realized that I’ve got a crush on Fabulist, and I’ve never even met the guy. No, it’s more than that; I’m in love with him. I want to meet him sometime, give him a giant hug, and tell him how much his writing means to me. If there is any author on LiveJournal who deserves to make it big, it’s fabulist. He shares my love of language, and dammit, he’s a far better writer than I am.

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I’ve learned that Semagic–the interface I use to upload my writings–has a spell checker that does not include the words “blog,” “blogger,” or any of the obvious variants.

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I’ve learned–the hard way–that errors in markup can be a real pain to correct.

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I’ve noticed that I’ve totally failed to keep the format that I promised in my introductory essay. Once a week, I promised, and once a week only. I feared that writing more often would lead to ill-considered entries that I’d later regret; I figured I would lose interest if I wrote less often. Reality has turned out differently. Once I’d started writing, I discovered that I was unable to stop. I blog in my sleep; I dream about writing now. It’s interfered with my dissertation, my marriage, and even my basic personal hygiene. Most of the things that I write never make it to the Internet, and that’s probably for the best. Still, I am faced with a dilemma.

It takes full-time attention to write a really good current-events blog, even one focusing on the few issues I’m really passionate about, and I simply don’t have the time for it. To write a purely personal blog would take a lot less time, but it would also speak a lot less to the Big Ideas that I want to cover, many of which I’ve not even hinted at in my efforts to date. On the other hand, if I don’t update often enough, I can never hope to sustain the regular readership that I’d eventually like to have. I’m stuck on a treadmill and I can’t get off.

I’m not sure where to go with it all, though I suspect that I will aim at a mixed format of long essays once a week or so, combined with shorter observations in the meantime. Positive Liberty can’t hope to be an up-to-the-minute hotlist of the latest news, so it will have to remain a place that a few chosen readers wander into from time to time. Here, whether they agree or disagree, I hope that they will find a good think at my expense. Maybe they’ll contribute something to my own thoughts in return, and the little economy of ideas that I’m trying to set up will pay for itself. That would be the goal… but how to reach it?

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I’ve learned that in the blogosphere, the art of writing itself often falls by the wayside, replaced by an increasingly self-referential set of slang words, abbreviations, and ideograms. Rarely does anyone stop to count the cost. An icon to indicate my mood? An icon?? Has language entirely lost its evocative powers? If you want to know what I am feeling, read my words.

Read what I write. If all goes well, I won’t have to draw little pictures to tell you what I feel. In earlier times, writing was thought to have an uncanny power over one’s very heart and mind; this is the reason why “spelling” and “casting a spell” come from the same root word. If I’ve done my job as a writer, then the same emotion that brought me to write in the first place is going to well spontaneously up from the very depths of your soul, growing stronger and stronger, until for one brief moment you and I are feeling precisely the same thing.

Let’s see an icon do that.

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Of course, maybe I’m just bitter because it took me so long to figure out how to use the damn icons in the first place. Snobbery is the first refuge of the academic, and my “wish list” of things I’d like to do is so long that I’ve forgotten half of it. On the plus side, Dave Jansing has kindly helped me with every need I’ve managed to remember. He’s been far better to me than I really deserve.

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Ironically, the last refuge of the academic is the academy itself. Am I blogging to avoid my dissertation? Arguably yes, and this too is something I’ve learned.

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I’ve learned that Live Journal often misses the mark I’d set for it. LJ begins with the promise of plugging oneself into a vast chattering network. It appears to end in more or less total isolation. We’re a hard-working lot at LJ: In a typical minute we produce over 200 new posts. Very few of them ever reference one another or reference anything outside the individual’s highly personal life experiences. LJ is quite different from the larger world of blogging, and this is something I didn’t expect. I may soon be getting a separate web site to reach a different audience, though I expect I will keep my LJ account anyway. [Note: I did, and I did... Hence positiveliberty.com]

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I’ve noticed something interesting about the political bloggers out there. I have to say I’m one of them, of course, though I’m not entirely comfortable with the category. It is an old canard, as old as such things can be on the Internet: Bloggers provide news that is somehow more “real” than that of the mainstream media. We offer items that the big guys have failed to supply, whether through malicious conspiracy or sheer incompetence. Unlike the big guys, we bloggers belong to no conspiracy, and we watch over one another to ensure communal honesty. Curiously, both left and right are telling themselves precisely the same story.

They can’t both be correct, of course, but the story itself is wonderfully self-congratulatory. For as little as $4.95 a month, you too can be one of these heroic underground journalists, boldly providing the “real” news on line and doing a great public service to anyone who stumbles across your page.

Only a few bloggers are real journalists who actually make money on the gig. The Cynic says that they’re the ones laughing all the way to the bank. For the small-time blogger, the job is mostly a matter of repeating that Our Side Is Fighting The Good Fight. In my own work I’m as guilty of this as any. One should be suspicious, though, of any deal where you pay money to be a hero. Still worse is a deal where you have to pay money to do someone else’s job. Hear that ringing? It’s the clue phone, and I think it’s for us.

Whenever you pay for something, it’s because you are yourself getting a value out of it. Otherwise you wouldn’t be paying for it. The value that bloggers get is self-satisfaction, and the going rate would appear to be about $4.95 a month. So long as some people can be persuaded that they personally are changing the world by keeping a blog, web hosts will continue to collect $4.95 per politico per month. Quite a racket, on the whole.

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So what value are we getting besides self-satisfaction? And if we aren’t providing the “real” news, then what are we providing? My answer is that bloggers give the world the raw news. It isn’t pretty. It isn’t always accurate, as with the case with the John Kerry adultery story: Kerry denied he slept with the intern. The so-called intern denied even working for Kerry, let alone doing anything else, and her parents are planning to vote for Kerry in the fall. By now everyone knows the story despite its complete lack of truth. In retrospect, we should all have been suspicious when the “intern” was working in Africa and not available for public comment. It turned out she was indeed in Africa, and her absence allowed the story to mushroom in the blogosphere even while traditional news sources knew better than to run a story they couldn’t corroborate. As anyone quickly learns by blogging, the raw news isn’t always the most reliable news.

There are times, though, where the raw news is exactly what we need: American culture has never been more diverse, and blogs thrive in the service of the many imagined communities we’ve set up among us. Evangelical blogs, gay blogs, green blogs… I even saw a Talmudic blog a few weeks ago, and I’m kicking myself that I didn’t index it for the Jewish History class I’m teaching this spring. Bloggers feed on rumors, inside information, wire stories that don’t make the local cut, and all sorts of other miscellaneous materials. They apply filters that are different from those of the mainstream media but not necessarily less legitimate. In that sense, we’re the ultimate moral relativists. By taking the raw news and pointing up those items of interest to the imagined communities out there, bloggers perform a community service after all, provided both that they offer some original content and that they are responsible, retracting stories that they discover to be false. In the new media, alas, there are no guarantees of honesty.

What else is in the raw newsfeed? There are a whole lot of editorials that never used to make it to the public. Either they’re too long, too short, too sexually explict, too graphically violent or too technical to make it to most print publications. They might treat a subject that is of enormous concern to a mere 36 people, but of no interest whatsoever to anyone else in the world. They might be like my own musings, oddball think pieces that come from someone with no experience at all in journalism. What print publication would carry the Essay on Two Bottles of Cognac? And yet I think it’s my best writing to date.

So what hath blog wrought? Well… Our sub-communities have all gotten stronger, and frankly that’s both empowering and scary. Empowering, because I happen to belong to one of them, and scary, because I worry that these subdivisions of the republic are not making the whole of it better off. On the plus side, there are a lot more opinions out there to choose from. True, most of them still fall within the narrow camps of left and right. But that’s been around since the French Revolution. Give us a little time, and I’m sure we’ll change that too.

I had a conversation with my husband Scott this morning.

“We need to get married.”

“Again?”

“In San Francisco.“

“We’re already married.”

“I know, but why not do it again? What are they going to do, charge us with bigamy? I’d be delighted. That would be recognizing both our marriages.”

“We can’t go. It would be really expensive.”

“What are we going to tell our grandkids when they ask why we didn’t go to San Francisco? I mean, this is history in the making.”

“We’re going to tell them that we’d already gotten married, months before.”

“So what? Think of it this way: If I were alive during the sixties, I’d have dropped everything to be a part of the civil rights movement. This is like the Freedom Riders, the lunch-counter sit-ins, the march on Washington… I mean, we have to go. This is our moment.”

My aunt was a nursing student in New Orleans during the sixties, and I’d always envied her experience. A decent, fair-minded white woman, she’d sat next to people of color on the bus despite the taunts of the other passengers. The white ladies of the south poked her with their umbrellas on the way to school, but still she kept at it.

“We might go all that way and not even get a chance. They’re backlogged for days. Did you see how long those lines were?”

“I know. That’s exactly the point. If people get turned away, it will only highlight the injustice of denying gay marriage. The religious right has always said that gays don’t want to get married anyway, and this is a perfect opportunity to prove them wrong. We’ve all stayed away from civil unions because we know they aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. But marriage is different, and we need to show it.”

In the end, Scott won… for now. He came up with three decent arguments. First, I would have to miss at least one day of teaching, something the university frowns upon. Second, it would cost much more than we have to spend right now. And third–this is the really convincing reason–We ought to wait so that we can have a big ceremony on the east coast with our friends and families.

I agreed with him, but I’m still going to work on changing his mind. Watch this space…

An article in the JHU News-Letter today promotes a new fitness class at the university rec center: Strippercize. The class came “in response to the growing popularity of striptease aerobics and the exercise video Carmen Electra’s Aerobic Striptease.

Yes, you read that right.

“It’s a dance-based class that pushes the boundaries,” said Anne Irwin, one of its promoters at the athletic center. Still, she hastened to assure us that “nobody gets naked.” The class combines provocative movements, gestures, and looks with dancing for aerobic fitness; it seems the dancers take off only only the outer layers of clothing. About 25 JHU girls are taking the class this semester; boys are not allowed.

I wonder who will be the first to attack this one–conservatives, for the obvious reasons, or liberals, because the boys aren’t allowed? When will there be a Strippercize for Men? I’d even give up yoga for that.

In all seriousness, girls, it’s a great idea. I look forward to the day when men’s sexuality is just as liberated. We’ve got a long way to go.

Following September 11, the American press reached instinctively for analogies. Perhaps inevitably, Pearl Harbor came to mind: It was a surprise attack by an unquestionably malicious foe. It changed life forever. Like Pearl Harbor, an entire generation of Americans would look to September 11 as a defining moment, a call to defend the country that could never be forgotten. The analogy did much good in giving us a direction: It told us that our time had come, and that we would have momentous struggles ahead, days of sacrifice, hardship, and trial. It also suggested–for such is the power of analogy–that victory, while hard, would still be possible. It told us, drawing upon notions buried in the very fiber of our national identity, that this too shall pass. On the very day of the attack, when we conceived the idea that September 11 was another Pearl Harbor, we took the first step toward healing, for we all knew that we had won the struggle that followed Pearl Harbor.

The power of historical analogy is not merely the power to explain an event. In today’s world we have CNN, C-SPAN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, NPR, conservative talk radio, and a bevy of blogs from every corner of the political landscape. All of these are happy to explain an event for you; all that remains is to pick the explanation that best suits your worldview and tune out all the rest. Explanation is easy, and it need not be done with any reference at all to the past.

The greater purpose of historical analogy is not to explain an event, but to give it a moral. As a comparison, Pearl Harbor did a great job of moralizing. It moved the nation irrevocably away from panic or defeatism, and toward resolute action; above all it became the reigning analogy because the ethic of Pearl Harbor was exactly what we needed.

Now we have endured two post-September 11 wars; the analogy with Pearl Harbor no longer stirs us quite so much as it once did. We are not fighting World War II, after all, and shock of the attacks has largely faded for most of us. In this light I would like to propose a new analogy, one that might offer a moral lesson of a different kind. I’m talking about the 5th of November, 1605, better known in the English-speaking world as Guy Fawkes Day. On that day, a group of suicidal religious fanatics attempted to blow up the English Parliament, the seat of the freest government then known. The aim was to destroy Westminster Hall and Abbey, the members of parliament gathered within, and also King James I. The larger goal was to destroy English Protestantism, for England was officially Protestant, and the fanatics were Catholic. They feared, and with good reason, that James I would fight against Catholicism just as his predecessor, Elizabeth I had done, and their fight took them to suicidal extremes.

The conspirators saw themselves as locked in an inexorable clash of civilizations and values. Catholics and Protestants were so radically different, they held, that peaceful coexistence was impossible. They were willing to kill to make these ideas into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Gunpowder Plot, as it came to be known, was foiled. Guy Fawkes, the would-be suicide bomber, was discovered in the basement of Parliament and arrested. Almost four hundred years earlier, England defeated a would-be September 11. In keeping with the penalties of the time, Fawkes was hanged, drawn, and quartered. November 5 became a day of public celebration, but in the years that followed, Guy Fawkes Day brought out the worst rather than the best in the English polity. It was common to make stuffed effigies both of Fawkes and of the pope and to burn them on that day. The argument ran that Catholics were naturally intolerant, dictatorial, violent, and given to suicide bombing. None of it was true, but attacks on actual Catholics were not far behind, keeping with the long tradition of intolerance that prevailed during that era. It did not matter that the overwhelming majority of Catholics were not suicide bombers and that most had little sympathy for Guy Fawkes. Any Catholic was automatically suspect, excluded from public life, and subject to harassment at least once a year–if not more often.

No analogy is perfect. In both these suicide bombings the plotters were militant fanatics, but then again, we would not see James I’s England as a model of toleration either. Sectarian violence in that country did not finally end until after a major Civil War, several further rebellions, numerous attacks on Catholic Ireland, and the Gordon Riots of 1780. Arguably, the Irish have only just recently seen the last repercussions of the disastrous religious-political policies of early modern England.

The moral lesson of Guy Fawkes Day is that we must find a way to avoid such enduring intolerance, even while defending our country and its values. So far, the United States has not even come close to matching 17th-century England’s level of bigotry, and the moral lesson is mostly a negative one: We must not allow religious fanatics like Guy Fawkes or his successor Osama bin Laden to lead humanity down the path of religious war. In the attacks of September 11 and in the continuing resistance to the American presence in Iraq, the intent of our real enemies becomes entirely clear. Whether one supported the war in Iraq from the outset or no, the goal now must be to bring about a peaceful, free, and functioning Iraqi society, because in our present position, only this will prove that the fanatics are wrong, and that there really is no necessary conflict between democracy and pluralism on the one side, and Islam on the other.

There was indeed a great deal of very troubling religious bigotry in the days and weeks following September 11. For the most part it has passed, but the idea that we are at war with a religion continues to surface from time to time. This idea itself must be combated, for an American war against Islam is exactly what the terrorists want. America can defeat a terrorist network that is despised by all decent people. America can not defeat and should not try to defeat a major world religion that is admired by all decent people.

September 11 must remain a national summons to the defense of our open society; it must not become the emblem of a clash of civilizations. While such a clash may look inevitable to some people, it can certainly be avoided. The English were right to celebrate their national deliverance from an awful catastrophe. We were right to mourn our own less happy fate. But neither one does right to blame anything, real or attempted, upon the supposed corrupting effects of another person’s religion. In doing so, we will only hurt ourselves.

The beverage: Two small bottles of cognac, vintages 1848 and 1889.

Please note that absolutely no cognac was harmed in the writing of this essay. The corks remained firmly in their bottlenecks, and I left both bottles precisely where I found them, locked behind bulletproof glass in the high-security wine cellar at Fauchon gourmet foods, on the Place de la Madeleine in Paris. Fauchon is a delightful place, but it often runs on the expensive side. These two bottles alone would have cost the same as the entire Chateaubriand Fellowship for the nine months I spent in France: fourteen thousand dollars. I’d have taken a picture, but I suspect Fauchon is touchy about photography near their security system.

If you were starving, and had one dollar to spend on one food item, your best option might well be a bag of brown rice. It is full of calories and vitamins. It comes in great quantity for very little. It is easily digested, even by the sick; allergies to rice are very rare. Rice has found a home in every major cuisine, and for good reason.

Suppose you are still starving, and someone gives you another dollar. Your next choice might be a dark green leafy vegetable like collards or spinach. These are also full of vitamins and minerals; with the aid of rice, spinach will keep starvation long at bay. Various other vitamins are lacking, of course, as are proteins and fats, but this is a quite restrictive game we are playing here, isn’t it? Living off milk or cheese is no good; while very healthy, they can’t match rice in calories per dollar. All in all, we aren’t doing too badly for ourselves by choosing a dollar’s worth of rice and a dollar of spinach.

Let’s assume that with rice and spinach in hand, you are no longer starving, and thus no longer quite so restricted by the almighty dollar. With each additional marginal dollar, the next foods you might want to consider include vegetable oils, tofu, lentils, nuts, milk, and even meat. Vitamin C might enter your diet by way of tomatoes, citrus fruits, or onions, the latter being surprisingly rich in it and also wonderfully cheap. With most essential nutrients accounted for, you need not fear so much the digestive complaints that could make your lentils useless. Following these, only a few other selections would suffice to give a human everything he or she needs to survive indefinitely.

With still more money, luxuries like salt, spices, sugar and alcohol will creep in as well, dollar by marginal dollar. Eventually, if I were in your shoes, I could put several dollars in a row toward the foods I love most: litchis, dark chocolate, sourdough bread, Camembert, Norwegian smoked salmon, or even a bottle of wine, say… a 2000 Chateau de la Dimerie Muscadet Sèvres-et-Maine, much like the one I’m drinking right now. It goes wonderfully with the smoked salmon, if you don’t mind my saying so.

But no matter how much money I had, I do not believe I could ever look myself in the mirror again if I paid fourteen thousand dollars for two bottles of cognac. Food does taste better as you pay more for it, but it never gets fourteen thousand dollars better. Puzzled by the high price of these bottles, I refer the matter to my interior moral council, a group comprised entirely of the avatars of various abstract ideas. One by one, they give their replies.

The Humanitarian speaks first, and says that for the same amount, I could feed a starving African village for a year, giving them foods perfectly suited to their cultural and dietary needs: brown rice, spinach, lentils, onions, yams, eggs, cooking oil, salt, sugar… even coffee, halal meat once a week, and a couple bottles of cheap cognac for the nonbelievers, bless their hearts. “Now think of the difference between a cheap bottle of cognac and one that runs thousands of dollars: Is that difference really worth the food of an entire village?”

The Gourmand looks at the two bottles of cognac appreciatively, but at last he too shakes his head. He says that in Paris, I could take that fourteen thousand dollars and use it on my own food for a year. I could eat like a king, provided I didn’t dine out too often but cooked for myself, as indeed I prefer. I’d have to spend like a fiend if I didn’t want money left over at the end. Do the math, and you’ll find that I would have almost forty dollars a day to spend on food, including fresh oysters, caviar, foie gras and truffles.

He too has a point. “Bon” is the name of my favorite bakery-candy shop in Paris, and it lives up to its name. I paid a visit this afternoon. I bought eight candied chestnuts, the famous French marrons glacés. They cost me fourteen dollars, a mere one-thousandth the price of those two bottles of cognac. Inversely, for fourteen dollars I could buy .75 mL out of those precious bottles, provided that I could find enough investors willing to buy shares with me. Are the marrons glacés really less a sensual pleasure than one drop of that precious liquid? Even to the Gourmand, the cognac is a ridiculously bad buy.

I’ve only eaten one of the marrons glacés so far. It was an ecstatic experience that took me seven whole hours. I tucked the sticky marrons deep in my bag to protect the fragile 18th-century books that are my daily work, but I still couldn’t concentrate. I kept thinking of these amazing candies waiting for me when I got done. I try to multiply that amount of wonderful by a thousand, but my mind locks up and I can’t do it. The Gourmand rests his case.

The Stoner coolly notes that with fourteen thousand dollars, I could buy one hundred forty fist-sized bags of marijuana, every one of them as nice as the one X bought in Amsterdam. Jesus, the Stoner says, that beats the shit out of a couple bottles of cognac. He pauses to think about the trip to Amsterdam, filled with wonderful food, jazz, chess, hash, and a big, big sack of weed. In fact, let’s forget Amsterdam. Weed is entirely abundant right here in Paris, and the laws are so loosely enforced that people very nearly smoke it in the hallways of our dorm. The cops try to pretend that the North African immigrants are to blame, but everyone knows that Amsterdam is just a train ride away. In that lovely city, a blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordic type will happily sell you as much pot as you care to smuggle back to France, no questions asked. More than one of my friends have done exactly the same, and not all of them were college students. On warm evenings in the Luxembourg garden, one sometimes finds French teenagers passing around joints right in the open. The Stoner rips another hit from his bong, shoves it my way, and suggests I think it over: Fourteen thousand dollars could buy us weed for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, every day for a year.

The Academic says that with fourteen thousand dollars, I could always keep another Chateaubriand Fellow like myself in nine months of genteel poverty. The Academic is promptly shouted down by both the Cynic and the Malthusian; neither of these two care to see any more Chateaubriand Fellows in the future. The Cynic hates being around himself, while the Malthusian fears academic overpopulation.

Then the Cynic weighs in with his own suggestion: With fourteen thousand dollars, how many people could I simply bribe into liking my dissertation? Could I bribe just one person, but do it so well that he’d write a career-making review? After all, how often does a reviewer receive a couple bottles of cognac, “for your kind consideration?” It’s surely more often than you think.

The Malthusian, an assistant professor of the dismal science from the bowels of my mind, grumbles as he is wont: “Your first dollar sure went a long way, didn’t it? Rice is a fine thing indeed. And your second dollar did pretty well too. Within ten bucks you’d kept the life in your body for a week. After that, it was off to the luxuries. Come to think of it, some of those were awful nice too. I almost enjoyed the marrons glacés,” he snarls, “until I remembered that back home, you were on the verge of perfecting the recipe yourself. You could have churned out marrons glacés by the kilo if you’d just bought a candy thermometer instead. Shame on you and your luxuries!” And he, too, has a point.

“I admit it,” he continues. “There aren’t any real boundaries between ‘too little,’ ‘just enough,’ and ‘way too much.’ Subsistence becomes sufficiency, which turns into gluttony, and there’s never a bright line to be found—but let’s be perfectly clear. The far ends couldn’t be farther apart. I can’t see that cognac ever being a marginally good buy, no matter what my wealth might be. I would certainly never drink the stuff, and nor would anyone else in their right mind. Even if I only wanted a decoration, fourteen thousand dollars could easily do so much more. Come on, a book from 1848 wouldn’t cost you that much. It only goes to show that people value booze much more highly than they do literature.”

The Academic tries to snarl, but only manages a furious scoff. He suggests a number of vital research projects that might be funded with fourteen thousand dollars. He’s trying to avoid the Humanitarian’s eyes.

The Capitalist was promoted over the Malthusian’s head several years ago. Now he is a full professor of economics, yet somehow he still manages to smile from time to time. It’s why I like him. “Invest,” he says. “Would you take that cognac now? At fifteen percent interest, fourteen thousand dollars will give you well over a million when you retire in thirty years. Do the math already. I have a list of worthy firms just looking for some startup capital. Give them a chance; they’ll change the world–and pay you a handsome yearly dividend, too.” He’s had the best idea I’ve heard so far.

“Okay, I’ve figured it out.” It’s Old Mother Utopia. Our resident shaman, she hardly ever speaks up, but when she does, the table falls silent. Caught mid-gurgle, the Stoner puts down his bong in a cloud of embarrassed smoke. She smiles indulgently and begins.

“In a word, the problem is poverty. The person who would buy that cognac is not the richest man in Paris. He is the poorest.”

“He’s gonna be,” says the Stoner.

“He already is,” says Old Mother Utopia.

“Explain,” says the Humanitarian.

“Thoreau, one of your greatest thinkers, almost said it: A man is wealthy as his pleasures are cheap. He’s right, of course, and anyone who can’t feel pleasure until he owns one of those bottles is poor indeed.

“But there’s more to it than that. In Western society, most people never have to live on brown rice and spinach, not unless they want to. There’s almost always a little money left over for luxuries. That little bit of money, even that little tiny bit, turns into a trap if you don’t know how to use it. If you don’t, then no marginal dollar will ever make wealth any better than mere sufficiency. But clearly it should be.”

“That leftover money is a trap, because almost all of what passes for luxury is worthless, pleasureless rot. At any rate, the marginal dollar isn’t enjoyed as it could or it ought to be. People wolf down their luxuries without a thought or a feeling. Or they set them on the shelf without ever really tasting them. They spend their free time, not contemplating life and the joys it brings, but looking over their shoulders, all the while showing off all the status symbols that everyone else says they ought to like. Being wealthy is mostly just a show that everyone puts on for everyone else. Worse, it’s a show that no one really likes watching. Still, they watch and watch. They can’t help themselves.

“They’re watching, looking over their shoulders, to see just how much luxury everyone else has. They’re dreading that the next door neighbor might have more luxury than they do, instead of asking how much fulfillment they themselves might be able to get. It’s all lousy, all of it rotten. And those little bottles are pure, distilled, 200-proof rot. They’ve had a hundred fifty years to mellow, so I hope you like it smooth. What’s the value in a bottle of cognac you never even drink? It’s only there to be seen; it’s only value lies in its sheer uselessness. That cognac shows off your dollars, to the envy of the others, rather than using those dollars in any of the worthy ways you’ve offered just now.

She is out of breath, giving even the Stoner a word in edgewise.

“I know what you mean, sister. Rock on.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you don’t know what I mean. Marijuana is a magical herb, a beautiful ally. It offers the power of contemplation, even if we never knew or wanted that power before. It scares the hell out of people who’ve never actually tasted their own lives. For that alone I love it. Marijuana invites the better sort of people to a deeper life even after they’ve come back down. Where I’m from, marijuana is legal, as it should be. It’s also very cheap.

“The trouble is that over here, in the real world, you aren’t really paying for the high. What you’re paying for is the value of the vanity, and you pay an awful lot for that rebel pot-smoker image. Anyone who knew how to contemplate without the help of the herb, to enjoy life as it comes to him, would never pay so much for a knowledge he already has. A little refresher course is nice every now and then, but at what cost?”

The Stoner pushes his bong ever so slightly away; the Cynic eyes it with fascination and dread.

“You who are rich, who have so much more than rice and spinach… Live to create! Live to explore and to build! That’s the heart of it. Don’t bottle your money up in useless stuff. Make that money live, if you can. Let me suggest to you a corollary to Thoreau’s Rule: Often, a man is rich or poor only on the quality of his imagination. I’m not making light of poverty. But I tell you, the difference between “enough” and “too much” could surely be managed a lot better than it is. Has anyone even tried to solve this problem? Now where are those marrons glacés?”

With that, the meeting adjourns.

I know I said I’d post once a week, but once-a-week be damned; there’s just too much happening now….

In March of 2002, I made a batch of mead. Mead is a wine made from honey; Beowulf sings the praises of the drink, and the Society for Creative Anachronism keeps the tradition alive. Like a grape wine, a mead often needs to age for years before it is ready to drink, and the sweeter it is, the longer it takes to be ready. One may add fruit, herbs, or virtually anything else to a mead to enhance the taste. This one had been supplemented with several pints of real maple syrup.

“I’m putting this away for our wedding. We won’t drink it until then,” I told my partner Scott. In the spring of 2002, it still seemed a long way off. We promised each other that we would get married as soon as we got the chance for a full, real, legally-binding marriage, but that we would never settle for anything less.

We looked at Vermont civil unions, but these were unsatisfying: The law states very clearly that a civil union has no legal force outside Vermont, a state neither of us have ever visited. When my career took me to Paris, we looked into the European laws. Could Scott come visit, and we’d get married in Amsterdam? Alas, no. One must be a legal resident or a Dutch citizen to get married in the Netherlands. The same is true in Belgium. France has a kind of civil union, but unlike Vermont’s, the French Pacte civil is a feeble imitation of a real marriage. A “PACs,” as it is called, extends all of the obligations but virtually none of the rights that come with a marriage. Even a declared cohabitation–also an option in France–would be better than that. But we didn’t want a cohabitation. We wanted a marriage.

Then something extraordinary happened. While I was still living in France, Ontario legalized same-sex marriage. I returned to the United States on July 3, 2003, and two weeks later we were crossing the Canadian border with a trunk full of maple syrup mead. Somehow, it was all too appropriate.

“Why are you coming to Canada?” asked the customs agent.

“We’re getting married,” Scott said. I leaned over to make sure she saw who we were.

“Congratulations,” she said.

And on July 18, 2003, we got married in the town of Pelham, Ontario. We were married by John Mayer, the town’s Unitarian Universalist chaplain. He was every bit as eager and happy as we were. Our ceremony made the front page of the local newspaper for being the first fully-legal same-sex marriage in the town. The paper interviewed the enthusiastic Dr. Mayer and a local MP who worried that his voters did not approve.

For our wedding toast, we opened the first bottles of the maple syrup mead. Yes, it was sweet, but almost too young to drink. But the rest of the day was flawless–perfect weather, beautiful surroundings, a ceremony that made everyone cry. It was the proudest day of my life, and it always will be. There are fifteen more bottles of that mead in our basement, and we plan to open one bottle on every anniversary. I’m looking forward to the last one, and to all the years beyond.

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So far as I understand it, the religious argument against gay marriage runs as follows.

God designed man and woman with an evident purpose. It is a purpose so obvious that one need not even believe in God to understand it. God’s purpose was so important that to prevent any doubt, He even put it at the very opening lines of the Bible, in Genesis 2:23-24:

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

God’s plan is not merely written in the Bible; it is also found in the fabric of nature itself: The union of man and woman produces a new life spontaneously, and nothing else does. Man and woman have complimentary anatomies, complimentary natures, and complimentary emotions. They are entirely designed to be counterparts for each other, so much so that a single man or a single woman is not fully complete.

Homosexual unions, then, always lack one essential element of the human equation. Homosexual “marriage” produces no life, both literally and in a deeper, more spiritual sense. The Bible even condemns a number of gay sex acts, although in fairness scholars have debated precisely which ones these are. The consensus among conservatives is that all gay sex is forbidden, though liberal Christians often argue that the forbidden acts include only rape, prostitution, and ritual pagan sex, none of which are necessary and/or proper elements of married life.

Specific biblical prohibitions, though, are not the main issue in the current debate. Indeed, Christians have no trouble ignoring many explicit prohibitions themselves. For instance, Jesus forbade both divorce (Matthew 5:32) and swearing (Matthew 5:32). The Acts of the Apostles forbade the eating of blood (Acts 15:20), which is now common, while Paul commanded men to pray bareheaded and forbade women ever to pray without a hat (I Cor 11:5). There are a great many Christians who now ignore all of these prohibitions, despite their origins not in the Jewish law, but in the New Testament.

But these matters are entirely beside the point. The spirit, conservatives argue, the spirit of God’s teachings in the Bible, prohibits recognizing homosexual unions. Hats, no hats, eating blood or not–These are incidental. Heterosexuality is central. It is not merely an important part of God’s plan; it is the most absolutely important part of that plan, for the heterosexual family is the foundation of society itself. This document from the Vatican expresses essentially what I mean, and with the Vatican, there is seldom any compromise.

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In response, I would like to propose a new argument, one that I have not yet heard from either side.

Let us grant the existence of God, and even grant that He is indeed the God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus Christ. Let us further suppose that this God has a specific plan for society. Of course, one may argue about every one of these steps, and in another time and place I most likely will. But for now, we will grant them all.

I propose that even after accepting that we live in a society designed and run by the Christian God, He has certainly not made heterosexual marriage the foundation of that society. Heterosexual marriage is clearly one key part of God’s plan, but it is not the most fundamental. Obviously God wants the species to continue, and the spirit of the Bible shows that the family is God’s intended location for bringing up children. I acknowledge all of it freely, and I even thank God, or Nature, or what have you, for setting up heterosexual procreation and marriage. I am a gay man, yes, but I want to preserve heterosexuality. It’s what produced me, after all, and I would do nothing against it.

But…

I propose that if God founded society on any basis at all, then that basis must surely be love itself, not merely heterosexuality, but love in the widest and most expansive sense of the word. My proposition here is not far from what Jesus himself taught, as can be seen in Luke 10:26-28. A lawyer had asked Jesus what must be done to win eternal life, and and Jesus replied.

He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?
And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.
And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

Jesus approved the lawyer’s maxim, and then, lest there be any doubt, he followed it with the well-known story of the good Samaritan. The poor, the wretched, the robbed, and those who suffer from prejudice are still called to love one another. Indeed, the love that exists in spite of prejudice would seem to be the highest kind.

I propose that without love, all facets of society are dead, empty forms, while with love, they are the living, thriving embodiments of goodness itself. Love, not marriage, is the foundation of society, and I propose that we recognize love as such. I suggest that we nurture and support it to the best of our ability and understanding.

Let’s look at heterosexual marriage first, and do a thought experiment for me if you will. Imagine a heterosexual marriage entirely devoid of love. The two partners live together, copulate, and raise children, all without the slightest inkling of that divine emotion. Can you picture anything more dismal? Can you wish such a fate on anyone? Certainly not. Now picture a heterosexual couple who loves one another sincerely and deeply. They live together, copulate, and raise children, all in a spirit of mutual devotion. The only element lacking from their lives is marriage, for no pastor or justice of the peace has ever said any solemn words in front of them to recognize their union. Which one is preferable, a marriage without love, or a love without marriage? Clearly, the latter is closer to a satisfying and wholesome life, solemn words or no. Love, then, is the fundamental element of marriage, and only love can make a marriage in the true, spiritual sense of that word.

We can also see this in the fruits of a marriage. Even when we admit the natural complementarity of the sexes, a marriage without love is a miserable, soul-crushing state. A man and woman who do not love each other will suffer in marriage rather than thrive. Children may do well in a heterosexual marriage, but sexual complementarity is not the guarantee of their success. If the parents are loving, the children are loved in turn, and they grow up to be loving adults. If the parents do not love one another, the children suffer, even if the parents are heterosexuals.

Love, not heterosexual or heterosocial bonding, is the foundation of society, not only because love is essential to marriage, but also because it is so flexible and because it can exist in so many situations. The romantic love to be found within a good marriage is only the highest type or aspect of a pervasive human feeling. It has many branches that spread throughout all of society, but in whatever form love takes, love itself is the bond that gives life meaning, and it does not at all necessarily depend on gender or sex.

Picture two brothers. Can it reasonably be argued that heterosexual marriage–or heterosexual love of any kind–is the foundation of their relationship? Is heterosexuality in any sense active here? Of course not. If all goes well, though, love itself keeps them on good terms.

A soldier who gives his life for his country does so out of another kind of love, a love that we term patriotism. It is nearly impossible to see heterosexuality as fundamental in this situation either–but love clearly is.

When I care for my aging parents, I am expressing a kind of familial love, and one that clearly regards at least one heterosexual relationship. But am I participating in a heterosexual or sexually complementary relationship to do so? Hardly. I may be honoring a heterosexual bond that exists, but the love between parent and child seems to have nothing essentially heterosexual about it to me. For all that, it remains loving.

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There are many other types of love to be found in society, and we need not discuss them all here. What we do need to discuss, however, is sex. Not agape, the sexless love of the Greeks, but eros, a word best translated by lust. It is a common contention of the religious right that homosexuals do not love one another in any of the senses I have described above. Instead, they merely lust after each other. Lust, they say, should not be sanctified.

So let’s talk about lust. I can’t lie; I’ve seen and felt plenty of lust in the gay world. Gay men make no secret at all of their lustfulness, and I’m not about to try. We’ve taken lust and turned it into a weapon, so badly does heterosexual society fear it. And, to some degree, that weapon has turned against us, for now we are accused of possessing nothing but lust.

There are two points that need to be made here. First, we must note that heterosexuals feel lust too. Anyone who says they don’t is either elderly, a liar or a eunuch, and even these people sometimes lust like everyone else. If homosexuals are to be barred from marriage because they are lustful, then we ought to take a close look at heterosexuals, too, and ask whether such lustful creatures ought to be marrying either.

The second point is altogether more serious. For centuries, the heterosexual world has described homosexuality as intrinsically disordered. To a large extent, it still does so today. The terms of the debate have changed somewhat over time, but in general, homosexuality could never be thought of as a love; romantic love between two men simply remained unthinkable. Law, medicine, religion, and popular opinion all agreed that homosexuality was nothing but lust. Acting on this belief, the straight world closed off to homosexuals any form of contact except lust. They prohibited all outlets for homosexual desire–except fucking. Gay art, gay literature, gay social interaction, and same-sex romance, all of them potential expressions of love, were systematically stamped out. The only thing left to do was fuck, because fucking can never effectively be prohibited. The powerful majority created the very minority it so much feared and despised.

A similar situation existed for Jews in the premodern world: Christian rulers commonly forbade Jews from making a living by anything except moneylending and small trading, the two most hated professions of the time. Jews came to be seen as greedy, untrustworthy, and secretive, but the fault properly fell to the Christians who prohibited Jews from being seen as anything else. Give homosexuals the chance to be something other than lustful, and you might be surprised at what you find. Indeed, whenever gay people have found an outlet for love beyond rubbing their genitals, they’ve often managed to do remarkable things. Openly gay contributions to literature, the arts, academics, and social science, all of them predicated on the acceptance of same-sex love, have produced a creative renaissance in the last century. Truth be told, we were never all that content with merely fucking. The pent-up energies of an entire people have now been unleashed, and from Oscar Wilde to Armistead Maupin, same-sex love is finally getting the credit it’s due.

We won’t give up on our lusts, of course, not any more than straight people will give up on theirs, but allowing gay people to be something more than lustful has done everyone good. Allowing us to marry will not be a surrender to gay lust; it will be a recognition of the transforming power of love.

It will also harm straight marriages not at all. There are an awful lot of failed straight marriages out there, but I am afraid we can claim credit for breaking up only a tiny number of them. Further, as David Brooks has pointed out, if society establishes that lifelong commitment is the ideal for everyone, not merely for straight people, then does that not strengthen the idea of lifelong commitment in itself? When we say that romantic love should lead to a permanent bond–for everyone–are we not making that bond still more absolute than it is right now?

I admit that many conservatives may not be convinced by the above arguments, and here I must fall back, as I often do, on the idea of a pluralistic society. Never once have I thought that Christian conservatives ought to be forced into gay marriages; I ask in turn the freedom from the expectation that marriage be exclusively straight. Never have I thought that straight marriages ought to be forbidden. On the contrary, I love straight marriages. I ask even less of the straight majority: I only ask that they recognize my own marriage. It is entirely possible for us to coexist, and we can work on the “love” part later.

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How events move quickly! Yesterday I learned of a brave act of civil disobedience in San Francisco, in which the city has begun marrying same-sex couples, defying the laws against it. One fact became inescapably clear:

This is the way that we will win.

Civil disobedience is a powerful weapon, but a peculiarly difficult one to use. The issues at stake must not be obscure; they must participate in the everyday life of the ordinary people watching them. The best civil disobedience strategies are those that point up the absurd nature of oppression itself, while spotlighting common people doing innocent things. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were both masters at civil disobedience, not merely because their causes were supremely just, although they were. They were masters of the art because their actions were simple, throwing oppression into the sharpest possible relief. When Gandhi marched to the ocean and made salt from its water, when he wove his own cloth to protest the bans on these actions, he laid bare the ugly soul of imperialism. When hundreds of people across the American south began systematically violating the Jim Crow laws, it was only a matter of time until those laws fell. The sight of children being turned away from a school with dogs and fire hoses was too just much to bear.

The same will be true with prohibitions on marriage. All we need to do is systematically, consistently, and firmly demand this right. From octogenarian lesbians to angel-faced lads a fourth their age, what we need to do now is throw a party, whenever and wherever we can. Sublimely, our civil disobedience is also a celebration of love. And how can anyone refuse a party, or, at long last, refuse love–the bond that holds society together?