Positive Liberty

Check out this idea:

Position cameras above all major American cities and shoot one frame — a 24th of a second of film — each day at noon. The frames would be strung together gradually to create a continuous chronicle of each city’s development.

If a camera ran for one thousand years, the result would be a four-hour epic.

I’m curious, though: Given how human tastes and interests have changed so much in the last one thousand years, isn’t it assuming an awful lot to think that people in the future will want to see a movie like this?

Of course, historians would find a film of London or Paris for the past thousand years absolutely fascinating. We’d probably study everything, frame by frame, especially the years with big events that might have left video evidence: 1348, 1666, 1789, 1870, the entire 1940s… It would be the holy grail for today’s historian–but the questions, issues, and methods of history might easily change in the future.

A historian in the year 1004 would not have cared a bit about most of the things that perplex us now; he would have been preoccupied with questions that we similarly find trivial today. What will the future want to know about us, anyway? It’s a question I can’t even guess at, despite all my historical training.

The past is but one of my obsessions; the future is the other. One of my favorite books has always been a book of predictions–published in 1981 (David Wallechinsky et al, The Book of Predictions, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1981). It solicited predictions from just about everyone–experts in all walks of life, futurists, science fiction writers, even psychics. As I get older, the collection takes on the feel of a time capsule, showing me more and more just how completely foreign the future really is.

Finding goofy predictions is largely a matter of opening the book at random:

By 1985:
–Noncarcinogenic cigarette.
–Japan will send interplanetary probes toward Venus.

By 1993:
–The U.S. will have ceased to be a great power and will be struggling to hold itself together as a viable nation. The Soviet Union (snicker) will be approaching hegemony over most of the world.

By 1994:
–Mass-manufactured implantable miniaturized artificial kidneys.

By 1997:
–The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. engage in an unpublicized robotic war in space as both sides try to establish networks of laser-armed satellites to serve as ABM weapons.

–By 2000:
First hospital on the moon.

Nuts, all of it.

But one individual stands out from the crowd. Not only were his predictions generally correct so far, but they have been so correct that they seem almost trivial. Futurist F. M. Esfandiary predicted that between 1982 and 1992 we would see the following changes:

–accelerated breakdown of industrial-age systems. Rapid shift to… teleducation, electronic mail, telebanking and electronic funds transfer, teleshopping, teleconferencing, automated and robotic manufacture, telemedicine, teleconomics, decision making via rapid referendums and direct initiatives, electronic communities, etc.

–Continued breakdown of kinship, family, marriage and exclusivity. Rapid spread of new life-styles (sic): singlehood, nonexclusive couplings and triads, nonparenthood and shared parenthood, mobilias (fluid group arrangements), and global networks of friendships.

–Continued shift from nationalism to transnationals, common markets, subcontinental blocs, continentalism, international infrastructures, world economy, global mobility, and global consciousness.

–Continued decline in the relative powers of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Accelerated spread of wealth, power, and information across the planet.

–Continued slowdown of world population growth.

–Extensive mapping of the human brain.

–Extensive mapping of genes. More and more diseases and disabilities treated through genetics.

–Self-control of pain and moods and continuous telemonitoring of vital body functions via implanted electrodes.

Not impressed? Esfandiary suggests that by 2010, “Most of the above predictions will be considered absurdly modest.” Indeed–but just try imagining all these things in 1980!

When you compare his material to all the throwaway predictions about domed cities and a cure for cancer, Esfandiary seems like a genius. Granted, he also predicted that by now we’d have jetpacks and indefinite life expectancies, but hey, no one’s perfect. Apparently he was also a bit of a nutcase; this article says that he changed his name to FM-2030.

But nothing detracts from the fact that he got so many things so completely right. As of today, I’ve added FM-2030 to my reading list; I want a sneak peek at that 1000-year movie.

A review of Fahrenheit 9/11.

It’s a pity that this November we will only elect a commander in chief; would that we also elected a filmmaker in chief. Then I could look forward in equal measure to voting against both George W. Bush and Michael Moore. In a better world, I’d put them both in some tiny, sealed room together, where they could fight things out between themselves and leave the rest of us in peace.

As Billmon has put it,

…fame and wealth and mindless adulation have created the Michael Moore we see now - a monster on a rampage (”Moorezilla”), hurling the propaganda equivalent of cars and lamppost and everything else he can lay a claw on at the object of his rage.

Fortunately for us, that object is George W. Bush. And if Moore has become the Ann Coulter of the left - but with a sharper wit - then I can see no better target for his considerable talents than the Man from Crawford. If ever a president deserved to be the subject of a vitriolic, one-sided, emotionally manipulative diatribe of a documentary, Bush is it.

Indeed. Moore has made what will likely become the definitive indictment against Bush, but it’s certainly not a job well done. In turn, Christopher Hitchens has written what will likely become the definitive indictment against Moore, and I could say precisely the same thing about his piece: In attacking the grossly unfair Fahrenheit 9/11, Hitchens stands knee-deep in unfairness himself. Before going to work on Moore, it might be best to offer a few critiques of Hitchens.

First, there’s a glaring fallacy of the excluded middle. Hitchens writes on Moore’s treatment of the cozy relationship between the Saudis and the Bush administration, “Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not.” Clearly Hitchens believes the latter, that the Saudis have no influence; he probably thinks that the former is a bit of raving lunacy.

And yet consider the nearly one trillion dollars of Saudi money in the U.S. economy. Roughly four billion of it has gone to the Bush family alone. These sums can buy things both more subtle and more useful than naked, outright political control. While the American people would no doubt balk at the Saudis openly “running” U.S. policy, still, it’s much harder for us to detect influence, bias, willful blindness, and the occasional improper favor from the American government. Moore points these things out–while Hitchens simply asserts a fatuous, non-existent “either-or.” Score one for Moore, who did quite a decent job showing what influence these billions of Saudi dollars can buy.

Second, I think the following Hitchens speculation is way out of line:

Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infant school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane on 9/11. Many are those who say that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance, and gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done any such thing then (as he did with his “Let’s roll” and “dead or alive” remarks a month later), half the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse. The other half would be saying what they already say—that he knew the attack was coming, was using it to cement himself in power, and couldn’t wait to get on with his coup.

It’s a perfectly hypothetical complaint, one with no foundation in any evidence at all. Hitchens is looking for a problem where none exists–and finding a whopper.

Most reasonable Americans do not believe a single one of the things Hitchens suggests above. We wish only that Bush had been a little prompter in the classroom–and a little more measured afterward. There’s no real contradiction between the two.

Let’s face it, Bush really did make a tremendous mistake by sitting in that classroom for so long. I could understand perhaps thirty seconds of stunned silence; I could even tolerate a minute. But seven minutes of nothing at all, while the country endures the worst foreign attack it’s ever had on its own soil? Bush couldn’t have saved the day by springing into action. But he could definitely have given a better example. Again, Moore wins this round.

Lastly, Hitchens takes Moore to task for being inconsistent on Afghanistan. In 2001-02, Moore was against attacking Afghanistan–so how come F9/11 complains that we didn’t do the invasion well enough? How can Moore complain that we sent too few troops?

Aha, says Hitchens, Moore is a hypocrite!

Not so fast, though: F9/11 makes it very clear that Moore considers a botched invasion to have been the worst of all outcomes. He then makes the case–convincingly, I think–that we blew it. We didn’t find bin Laden, we installed only a very fragile Potemkin government, and even the Taliban is still around. If we’d only used more of the effort that we spent in Iraq on Afghanistan instead, I’m confident that the entire Middle East would be a much safer place today–Except perhaps for the Iraqis, but it isn’t our job to save them from themselves. Instead, we spread ourselves far too thin and attempted far too much at once. Afghanistan has become the administration’s unwanted stepchild, and frankly I’m glad that Moore has the courage to say it.

Moore’s critiques of the USA-PATRIOT Act are also completely on target. Any educated person knows that congressmen don’t usually sit down and read bills before they sign them, so admittedly this was a bit of cheap theatrics. And yet, if a congressman could pick just one bill to read in its entirety, surely this should have been it.

Yet even for all the good he does, I find that Moore shoots himself in the foot again and again. Fahrenheit 9/11 could have made its point much more strongly if Moore had limited himself to making only those arguments against Bush that were both cogent and fair. They do exist, and Moore clearly knew enough to make quite a few of them. Yet by associating the good arguments with a number of unfair, unprincipled ones, he does little to win my sympathy.

Moore excels at making visual jokes–but the good visual jokes don’t make a good point in the process. Every time he mocked someone’s candid, unscripted remarks, I found myself wanting against all my better instincts to vote Republican. Like any reasonably-informed citizen, I accept that public figures aren’t always going to be at the top of their form. I accept that the camera is relentless and unforgiving, and that anyone, if forced to appear before it from morning to night, would stumble from time to time.

Collecting these stumbles does not make for a rational argument. Nor does comically repeating the same line from a half-dozen stump speeches. While it is true that Bush is embarrassingly bad at answering unscripted questions–and while it is true that his policies often do seem terribly simplistic–still there were better ways to show these shortcomings. One might, for instance, have replayed excerpts from the “Axis of Evil” speech, then followed it with political analysts who would pick apart the president’s policies even at their best. That would have been good political commentary; done right, it might even have been good entertainment.

We didn’t need the endless shots of Bush stammering, Bush wincing, Bush forgetting his lines, Bush repeating himself, Bush simpering and licking his lips in the moments before he goes on air. It’s funny, yes–but so what? And after a while, it wasn’t even funny anymore.

Further, Moore’s class warfare appeals neither to the right nor even to the left in today’s political climate. Poor people don’t join the armed forces because they’ve been duped. They join to better themselves, to get a decent career, or to get training for any number of other careers outside the armed forces. Poor people who enlist are not to be pitied; they are to be commended for making a wise decision. In his look at recruitment, Moore is right on one point alone: The Bush administration gave all these fine people a very raw deal by sending them off ill-prepared to an unjust war. If only Moore had left it at that.

In trying to prove too much, Moore often ends up proving nothing at all. Nowhere is this clearer than in his portrayal of Iraq before the invasion. There are kids flying kites, an amusement park–and Moore’s flat statement that Saddam Hussein had never “murdered” a single American. It’s a statement that Moore defends with equivocations that make Bill Clinton look like a straight talker. But Hussein has tried to murder Americans; he’s even succeeded at it, albeit indirectly–and this fact should neither be obscured nor denied.

We don’t need Moore’s overblown, unsupportable suggestion that there was no reason to invade Iraq. I think it’s quite clear by now that we did have some reason. But having “some” reason for war is never enough. We must only go to war for the most compelling of reasons–in response to a direct attack, for instance, or when faced with clear evidence that an attack is imminent. No such evidence has ever appeared, and this is why the war was wrong from the outset.

Yes, children die in war, and they are the exact reason why the motives behind a war must be nothing short of compelling. They are the reason why it was wrong to go to war against such a distant, indirect threat.

Moore had the footage to make this argument; he passed it up for something that may have seemed greater–but was in reality much, much less. The mere existence of children and amusement parks does not prove the innocence the government that happens to rule over them. Going to war, though, requires more than a criminal government as an enemy. Otherwise, we’d currently be at war with Iran, Syria, North Korea, Myanmar, China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Cuba, and probably five or six of the former Soviet republics. Had Moore pointed out the many crimes of these regimes, he could have shown how Iraq was just one of many, many offensive little countries out there–countries that are ultimately not worth our global reputation, our money, or our lives.

What makes Fahrenheit 9/11 so maddening is that I agreed with probably 75% of what Moore was saying. President Bush has taken us into a war with insufficient justification, with insufficient preparedness, and with a moral authority that’s now next to zero. He’s made the world drastically less safe for Americans and damaged our relations with both our allies and with the Muslim world. The latter rift may prove unmendable–and that’s exactly what the terrorists want. Bush has utterly failed to grasp these things, and he probably never will. Even setting aside his mean-spirited domestic policies, Bush deserves to be voted out of office.

But those of us who saw Fahrenheit 9/11 were hoping to see the best possible case against Bush. We certainly deserved a better film than we got.

Blogging is probably going to be light through the beginning of this week, as it has been this weekend. I’m trying to meet a deadline for a chapter, and while I’m still generating new post material, I haven’t been polishing it up or posting it–Sadly, these things take much more time.

Incidentally, the pun “The Unbearable Lightness of Blogging” had been used some 113 times before I thought of it this morning.

I console myself only by remembering that I was wise enough to search on Google before concluding that I’d come up with an original.

According to this article, a group of linguists has determined the world’s three most difficult words to translate.

Third place: Naa, which is “used in the Kansai area of Japan to emphasise statements or agree with someone.” It would, um, indeed be a hard word to translate, except that English apparently has a most precise equivalent–indeed.

Frankly, I’m puzzled why naa made the list at all. Consider the French word moeurs, which means “the sum total of manners, cultivation, moral values, and sensibility of either a culture or an individual.” Rousseau wrote about moeurs all the time, and he’s been every translator’s nightmare for the last two centuries. In my own translations, I’ve used the word “customs” or “habitudes,” and I usually just grumble at those who point out that the latter word is also French. Others have tried using “manners” and “morals,” yet none of these fully capture the big picture.

Naa.

Second place: Shlimazl, which is Yiddish for “a chronically unlucky person.” And yet the plain-old English ne’er-do-well seems to work just fine, as does the equally prosaic jinx.

First place really seems hard, though, and unlike the other two, the difficulties are perfectly clear from the definition in the article. From the Tshiluba language spoken in southeastern Congo comes the word ilunga.

Ready to feel your head spin? (“Of course. Why else do I read Positive Liberty?)

Ilunga means “a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time.”

A while ago, I heard a vaguely similar way of life described as the Silver Rule. In contrast to the Golden Rule, the Silver Rule may be stated,

Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself–but only for the first time. After that, give like for like and value for value.

In the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Silver Rule scores remarkably well against all other rulesets, while another, only slightly modified ruleset–one that Wikipedia inelegantly calls “Tit for tat with forgiveness”–scores the best of all. “Tit for tat with forgiveness” sounds even closer to an ilunga:

The strategy is simply to cooperate on the first iteration of the game; after that, do what your opponent did on the previous move. [But] when your opponent defects, on the next move you sometimes cooperate anyway with small probability (around 1%-5%). This allows for occasional recovery from getting trapped in a cycle of defections.

In other words, it’s just plain common sense, and tonight, I discovered a new way to describe my moeurs: I’m an ilunga.

Can someone see about getting this into the OED?

Paul Musgrave is doing archival research in history this summer. Here’s how he describes a typical day in the archives:

a bizarre ritual wherein introverts lock themselves away with filing cabinets full of decaying letters written by dead and unknown people. Occasionally, the researchers make little squeaky noises to announce that they’ve found something tremendously important (to them, at least).

And it’s so true. From the most tenured and dignified octogenarian down to the first-year summer research fellow, historians are absorbed in things that seem momentous to us, but which are difficult to explain and quite often inconsequential to others.

Today, I’m off to re-read for probably the fouth time a section about figurism in Jansenist responses to Unigenitus in Catherine Maire’s book From the Cause of God to the Cause of the Nation. I happen to be covering the same territory in a project I’m working on, and it’s important that I do not give even the vague impression that I’ve failed to read it.

Then someone else would get to make little squeaky noises at my expense–and this we cannot allow.

Spam blogs. It had to happen sooner or later, and I think that it just did. Consider, for instance, this one and this one and this one. They’re crowding out Technorati’s NewsTalk with nothing but sex news! And yet these obviously bot-generated non-blogs don’t appear to be selling anything.

Now, ordinarily I wouldn’t mind reading news about sex–but I really did want to learn what bloggers were saying about today’s Supreme Court decisions instead.

What’s going on here, and what’s to be done about it?

“So tell me, why are you guys so Asian, anyway?”

Still chewing my last bite of ma-po tofu, I pondered the question. Scott and I were having dinner at a friend’s apartment. A first-generation Taiwanese-American, our friend had invited us to play go with his visiting grandfather, who speaks no English. The grandfather had been astonished to find two Americans so enthusiastic about the game, and as we talked over dinner, it soon became clear that our Asian cultural interests were a lot wider than most people of our, um, genetic stock.

“To be honest, I hadn’t really thought about it,” I said. And yet if being Asian were a crime, Scott and I would have a lot of explaining to do. By blood we’re just typical Euro-American mutts, but you might never guess it if you couldn’t see our skin color.

In the mornings I drink green Japanese tea, and for dinner we’re as likely to use chopsticks as a knife and fork. There’s a half gallon of kimchi in the fridge and a pint of miso paste. I recently bought some high-quality kitchen knives, mostly so I can make my own sushi.

Scott grows bonsai trees and makes homebrew sake, a batch of which is bubbling away behind me even as I type. We both play go, Chinese chess, and mah jong. We’ve also recently taken up Chinese-style ink painting.

We each have our areas of expertise, to be sure. Scott always wins at Chinese chess and mah jong, but I win at go, and for reasons that I can’t fully explain, I’m a natural at the ink painting. I’ve still got a lot to learn, and I don’t have any real masterpieces yet, but the strokes and techniques–use this much ink, and that much water, press here, not there, maybe three more strokes until I have to reload the brush–just seem intuitive to me.

Mah jong is intuitive for Scott. He just wins all the time. The other day we bought a set of stunning mah jong tiles on E-bay. They’ve got a very 1950s look, with transparent plastic backs that reveal a shimmering metal fabric beneath. Orientalist imports are the only things in the world allowed to glitter like that, and these certainly do.

Thankfully the tiles were made in the era when you could still get good quality plastic. They’re heavy and solid, like a good chess set, and I suspect that they’re nearly indestructible. In retrospect they might have been worth more unopened, but it’s too late for that now. Ten games in, and Scott’s won seven of them–with two draws and one doubtful win to my name. We’d also love to find company to play with: Four-player mah jong is much better than two.

Like I said, if being Asian were a crime, we’d be in a lot of trouble.

So now for the question that drives the whole essay: Are we doing this stuff because we just happen, by some extraordinary chance, to like all of these things on their own merits? Or are we doing them because we fetishize the exotic, because at some level we’re elitists who want to set ourselves apart from the ignorant masses? Or is it somehow patronizing to go in for all this stuff, demeaning to lump together the many diverse cultures that created them–Am I practicing a kind of genteel, affected racism, in that I like Korean kimchi, Japanese sushi, Chinese-American mah jong, and a good hot Thai curry every so often? Is some crabbed corner of my mind lumping “those people” all together, and placing some nice, reassuring label on them?

I’ve thought a lot about these things recently, in part because of the disturbing questions above, and in part because of the Implicit Association Test, a test that supposedly reveals the subconscious racist assumptions that nearly everyone carries within them.

A typical test flashes on your computer screen a series of words; half are words generally deemed “good” or “bad;” the other half are names that are associated with a given racial group. The test measures how quickly you can pair the names with the words in various combinations.

There are also variant IATs for religion and sexuality. There’s even a test comparing George W. Bush and Franklin Roosevelt, one which I have not yet taken.

By measuring an individual’s reaction time when manipulating the various names and value-laden words, it’s thought that implicit associations can be revealed that the person himself may not even be aware of. The researchers running the test have found an apparently remarkable fact: White and even Asian people tend to find it easier to pair “good” words to “white” names. Blacks show no such preference, although the data for black people is still inconclusive. Intriguingly, people of all ages show a strong tendency to pair “good” words with youth, while a gender-based IAT shows that women are more easily associated with the liberal arts, while men are more easily associated with the sciences.

So how did I do on the IAT? I’ve only taken some of the fourteen IATs at the site, but in most the ones I’ve taken, I’ve had no implicit biases whatsoever. My measurable implicit associations are roughly equal for blacks and whites, for young and old–and for Asians and whites.

I’m at a loss to explain it, because I know I encountered at least some pro-white racism in my formative years. Granted, I don’t believe it now, but I still figured some of it would be up there somewhere. If it is, the test can’t find it. Maddeningly, I’m left exactly where I started: Whatever racism or racial preferences I may or may not exhibit are purely my own damn fault.

Once I also took a now-defunct IAT measuring self-centeredness versus other-centeredness, and here I found the one place where I’ve got a measurable implicit association: I strongly prefer myself over others. Given that I am a philosophical egoist, I’m not surprised. Rational self interest is also my explicit attitude, and to tell the truth I was faintly satisfied to find that my subconscious was keeping up with it all. Additionally, this finding suggests that the other results–showing no implicit racial or age biases–are correct.

I know better than to get all lyrical about the “Asian sensibility.” It’s nonsense, of course. There isn’t any one American sensibility–and there’s a lot more cultural diversity over there than over here. And let’s not forget that I’d definitely prefer America when it comes to greater personal liberties, economic freedoms, and limits on the power of government. Somehow, though, all of that is beside the point when choosing my hobbies.

So… What’s with the kimchi, the bonsai, the mah jong? I still don’t know. We’re not doing it to impress anyone or to fit in with a crowd. Neither of us have any Asian travel experience, and we don’t (yet) speak the languages. I can only barely recognize a few characters of Chinese, just enough to get me started on the ink painting. Next to “real” Asians–like our friend and his family–Scott and I must seem odd indeed.

Perhaps one day it won’t matter, and I won’t have to ask myself these annoying questions. Maybe then, in the far-distant future, race will no longer arbitrarily associate skin color with a set of constraining cultural dictates. Maybe–after our children’s children’s children are all a nice, uniform tan color–race will be nothing more than a very loose set of affinities, adopted taken off again as we see fit, following the inscrutable, unmeasurable dictates of the soul. In that great future time, the one that we all dimly know is coming, there might not be anything threatening about race. And perhaps there need not be anything threatening about it now.

The Voynich Manuscript is one of cryptography’s greatest puzzles. Two days ago, Wikipedia featured it as the “Entry of the Day,” a choice that brims over with ironic implications.

Probably composed around 1450-1520, no one alive today can read the manuscript. Since its rediscovery in the late nineteenth century, the U.S. Navy, the NSA, MI-8, and a host of private cryptologists have worked on the text. Proposed solutions have been adopted and then rejected, one after another.

On the whole, researchers have little to show for their efforts, despite the many tantalizing illustrations that adorn the text–and presumably serve as clues. These pictures show what are apparently botanical, alchemical, and astrological formulas, though many of them remain quite mysterious and are not duplicated in any known book.

But two things are clear: First, statistical analysis indicates that the manuscript probably does contain some meaningful data. It is almost certainly not a hoax or a string of arbitrary characters. We know this because word frequencies observed in the text conform to statistical models of language developed only in the twentieth century, and the manuscript is known to have existed before this date: A forger would not know to make his meaningless characters fit these unknown models.

There is a message, if only we can figure it out.

The second thing we can say with some assurance is that no one has been able to read this message for roughly the last five hundred years. If the word “arcane” applies to anything, then this is it.

Ironically, most of the Voynich manuscript is now online. Nobody can read it, yet everyone can “read” it: The perfectly esoteric knowledge of the manuscript has met at last with the utterly exoteric knowledge of the Internet.

I can hardly think of a more dramatic contrast between the social epistemology of the premodern world and that of the world that we live in today. It’s been a long time in coming, but we are now near the very end of a process that has transformed our understanding of knowledge itself. Knowledge has changed from something that must be kept secret–into something we almost view as a universal right.

As a bit of moral advice, “knowledge wants to be free” isn’t perfect; anyone who doesn’t believe me is welcome to set free their credit card numbers. But most other forms of knowledge are now understood as a perfectly self-replicating commodity: It’s far better to exchange and disseminate knowledge rather than hoarding it.

Things weren’t always this way.

There was a time when knowledge in all its forms carried with it a duty to secrecy: If you wanted your knowledge to work for you, then you had best keep it hidden. Common knowledge was just that–common, and therefore worthless. In the ancient world, this was a view that held significant sway in virtually all realms of thought.

In ancient religion, almost all educated people believed that esoteric doctrines, secret societies, and secret cultic practices held the real truth–Everyone knew that public religion was a show put on for the gullible. Christianity demolished this view, insisting on the public nature of religion in all of its aspects. We now view with skepticism and even horror the religion whose doctrines are a secret, while the Bible is the single most widely-distributed book of all time.

The transformation goes beyond Christianity, though. In alchemy and medicine, secret formulas were once the state of the art. Now we look with suspicion on anything that isn’t peer-reviewed.

In government, it was long assumed that the public had absolutely no right to know about the business of state: Virtually all documents were hidden from public scrutiny; public debate, of course, was long unknown. Now we find secrecy in government to be the very root of tyranny.

The old understanding held that knowledge must be secret, carefully protected, and eternal. Today we hold that the eternal needs neither careful protection nor secrecy. If it really is eternal, then it can easily stand up to a little criticism. Today’s knowledge demands an entirely different social epistemology: For a fact even to count as knowledge, it must be public, and accessible, and subject to revision at any moment.

We still have cryptography, and so long as there are spies in our midst we probably always will. Interestingly, though, even this most arcane of modern sciences is open to the public: Anyone who wants to can learn a wide range of cryptography techniques. Talented amateurs can even make significant contributions in the field.

Perhaps one day these very amateurs will crack the Voynich manuscript. My partner Scott is eager for us to give it a try, despite our complete lack of cryptography experience. And who knows–Perhaps two people with a graduate-level knowledge of history and mathematics will be able to solve the puzzle if they work together. It might even help me get a job with the NSA, though unfortunately I won’t be able to say anything if it does.

Whatever the Voynich manuscript may tell us about the history of cryptography, and whatever new cryptographic methods it may hold, we are not likely to learn anything new from the botanical, chemical, or astronomical knowledge held within the book. The moderns have it right in at least one respect: Knowledge isn’t eternal. For knowledge to live at all, it must interact with other knowledge, with human investigations, and with the general play of lived experience. The Voynich Manuscript–eternal, unchanging, and arcane–is the very opposite of modern knowledge; decoded or not, it’s likely to remain dead forever.

Update: Improved Clinch points to an article from Scientific American, arguing that the manuscript contains no coded information–but was instead generated in the sixteenth century merely to appear as though it did. It’s very interesting stuff, and oddly, this only confirms my original point: The manuscript offers a great cryptological puzzle, but little else that might contribute to the great dialogue of knowledge. Information must be challenged if it’s ever going to live.

Scaled Composites, a private corporation, may be close to winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize for development of a commercially-viable nongovernmental space vehicle. I can only hope that it’s a sign of things to come. At the very least, they are scheduled to conduct the first manned spaceflight by a private corporation on June 21, a remarkable accomplishment in itself.

“Let the Enterprise in Space be Private,” writes Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe, and I heartily agree:

The idea that space travel ought to be partly or wholly privatized is no libertarian whimsy. In recent years, it has been embraced by an array of experts and enthusiasts. Britain’s astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, wants to see wealthy adventurers plow their own funds into exploring outer space. The Economist last year called for scuttling the shuttle and letting the private sector take over routine space transport. “If NASA were a customer, and not a competitor, in the business of building spacecraft,” it suggested, “companies might have the incentive to extend their craft all the way into orbit.”

There was a time, perhaps, when only governments could assemble the resources to get into space. Humanity faced a much similar situation as regarded trans-oceanic voyages in the sixteenth century: Literally no one but a government could do it, all ideological preferences for a private solution notwithstanding. Technology improved, however, and the economies of Western Europe grew tremendously. Most importantly, new means of credit and capital organization arose to meet the immense financial challenges of oceangoing commerce. Ever since then, concepts like the joint stock company and the actuarial insurance policy have been leveraging capital into more and more useful large-scale ventures. Space is unusually large in its cash outlay, which may be why we’ve reverted to the old model of late. Still, I’m filled with hope and wonder that one day, perhaps, space will be open to anyone with the resources to go.

In the early seventeenth century, a series of grossly fraudulent quasi-governmental corporations like the South Sea Company in Britain and the Law System in France helped hasten the rise of truly private oceangoing commerce by weakening public trust in governmental ventures. This time around, we ought to know better, and hopefully we will transition from government-owned space programs into private ventures without any disastrous economic panics to speed us on our way.

With any luck, soon space will be wide open to private ventures, with all the innovation and profit that they bring. As Jacoby puts it,

Private enterprise belongs in space: Clearly, this is an idea whose time as come. And now a high-level panel — the President’s Commission on Moon, Mars, and Beyond — is saying so explicitly.

“The Commission believes that commercialization of space should become the primary focus of the vision,” the new report declares. It calls on NASA to clear the way for “an entirely new set of businesses . . . that will seek profit in space.” It endorses the proposal for government-funded prizes to encourage technological breakthroughs. It urges Congress to enact tax relief, protect property rights in space, and ease regulations that unduly hamper space industries from growing. It recommends turning over all low-Earth orbit launches to private companies.

In short, the commission repudiates the policy of leaving space travel firmly in the hands of the state. And about time, too. For if human beings are truly meant to slip the surly bonds of Earth, as the poem “High Flight” says — if we are destined to live on the moon, walk on Mars, explore the solar system — we will need to draw on greater reserves of imagination and creativity than government bureaucracies can manage.

Did you by chance find yourself thinking, “Wow, that’s terribly dangerous, going into space in a private vehicle…” I thought that might be the case. Sure, it’s never been tried before, but I have to say I’d trust the profit motive to keep me safe before just about anything else. Only a safe return to earth is going to bring the company any money, and we all know that money is what companies are meant to make. Perhaps one day, government spaceflight will occupy the same corner of our collective minds as government cheese. Sure, you can eat it–but there are so many alternatives.

A surprising number of people have come to Positive Liberty in search of information on homebrew beer or mead. I am a brewer, but I’m not blogging primarily about my brews. Heck, I’ve only made one stinkin’ post about them so far. For many reasons, brewing makes for lousy blogging.

First, and by virtue of its subject matter, a homebrew blog would be long, boring, and punctuated by many delays where I didn’t post anything at all: Homebrew takes time to ferment, and a good buzz just doesn’t translate into words. Hemingway gave it his best shot, and if he couldn’t do it, then I’m certainly not about to try.

And yet I may occasionally post about home brewing anyway, because homebrew fits so wonderfully with this site’s ideology: The invented life is always the best.

For instance, what do you get when you combine…

12 pounds buckwheat honey
8 pounds clover honey
5 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp tannin
5 tsp commercial yeast nutrient
4 very large sprigs lemon verbena

…in a 4-gallon pot, fill with water, simmer at 160 degrees for 20 minutes, then chill rapidly and add water to fill to five gallons, followed by a sweet wine yeast? Let’s say you also let the whole thing ferment for a few months under rigorously sterile conditions, then bottle and age for at least a year… Will it be any good?

I don’t have the answer to that question, because the recipe for this particular mead–honey wine–is something I’ve just made up tonight. In a year or so, I’ll tell you how it turns out, because aging is the most important part of the process.

I must also ask you not to be afraid, even though in my experience there are two very distinct types of meadmakers.

Mead-Maker Type One is the kind that most people meet. Sadly, the encounter leaves them soured on the sweet beverage for life. Mead-Maker Type One takes some honey, mixes it with water, and lets it sit out on the back porch, in the barn, or (worst case scenario) under the bed, hoping that mom and dad don’t find it. If he feels particularly deft, Mead-Maker Type One might add some baker’s yeast to the mix.

In a couple of weeks, he’ll drink the results, for good or ill–but usually for the latter. This concoction is also known as Really Awful Mead, and its only advantage is that one can often brew it even in prison. Sadly, Mead-Maker Type One is the reason that few respectable people drink mead anymore. In the pantheon of wretched beverages, mead has come to be associated with bathtub gin, radiator whiskey, and rubbing alcohol.

Such associations are entirely unfair, however, though only an encounter with Mead-Maker Type Two will dispel the myth. This second type of mead maker–whose company I aspire to keep–uses rigorously sanitized equipment. He’s 21 years of age or older, and he orders his honey from a specialty marketer like Beefolks. He might even raise bees himself, the lucky devil. He gets his yeast from White Labs or a similarly reputable source. His herbs are strictly from the garden out back. All aspects of the recipe are considered carefully from start to finish, long before the first ingredient hits the pot. The results? Well… You’ll have to wait a year at the least.

Sorry to be such a tease.

It has come to Our Most Solicitous Attention that certain of the faithful in the Kingdoms of History, Literature, and Cultural Studies, and in the newly-annexed Territories of Gender Studies and Critical Theory, have begun employing an odious new usage, one offensive to Our Most Catholic Ears.

With wanton audacity, they have appended the prefix “over-” to the word “determined.” The resultant word, “overdetermined,” is neither regular, nor useful, nor justifiable in any sense whatsoever.

We hereby place all works containing this term upon the Index of Disagreeable Books.

We note that this usage originated in the Duchy of Psychoanalysis, and that it spread perniciously from there to the Empire of Dialectical Materialism. We remind the faithful that our predecessor, the late and dearly lamented Sovereign Pontiff Karolus XXI, placed both of these realms under Perpetual Interdict.

For the aforementioned reasons, we declare all those persons using the word “overdetermined” to be heretics who act in flagrant violation of the Edict of Verbal Parsimony.

We remind all heretics now residing in the Duchy of Psychoanalysis, in the Empire of Dialectical Materialism, or elsewhere, that it is never too late to turn back from the disastrous paths upon which they tread. We pray that they will note the futility of the word “overdetermined,” and come to see it as one small emblem of the detestable errors in their midst.

We note that the Brotherhood of Linear Algebra has long used the word “overdetermined” in a most specific and rigorous manner. Among them it has always referred to the properties of mathematical equations and their variables. These being sufficiently removed from the humanities, we hereby absolve the Brotherhood of all guilt in this matter.

We remind the faithful that it is difficult enough merely to “determine” a fact within our realms, and we urge them to reject all those vain words that would give our pronouncements a false but high-sounding ring of authority.

Lastly, we enjoin the faithful to observe the Edict of Verbal Parsimony and to comport themselves with simplicity, candor, and sentences written in the Active Voice.

Urbi et orbi, ex luce lucellum, et cetera, et cetera…

I’m switching back to HaloScan and upgrading to allow 3,000-word comments. As a number of you have recently noted, forcing everyone to register with Blogger is a pain.

The few comments generated under Blogger will be appended to their respective posts tout de suite.

Two men who are friends of mine have just gotten married. A couple of days ago, one of them shared the following experience with me, and I’d like to pass it on to all of you. I’m curious how you would react:

I have, on the background of my computer desktop, a picture of me and Mike kissing at the end of our wedding ceremony last month.

The same photo that can be seen on my Web site. [Located here. -- Jason]

A friend of mine (for over 14 years) came by my office today. He brought his daughter and son. He was taking them to the Air and Space Museum on the next block and stopped in to say hi and show off how much the kids have grown.

He knew that Mike and I were married and I closed windows on my screen to share with him that picture.

His daughter moved around to see as well.

He covered her eyes.

How would you have reacted? What do you think the reaction should have been?

I’m asking myself the same questions–and now I’m asking you.

Jason - I would have not said anything directly at the time, as the parent’s children were right there in ear shot, but I would have followed up with the parent, later, privately, in a non-confrontational way, to determine why he had acted in such a manner (covering the child’s eyes), though I think I know why the parent acted in the manner he did. With that said, not exposing the children to the reality of same gender romantic love, and the questions that may naturally arise from a child regarding this, is simply postponing the child’s acquistion of knowledge.

John Venlet

P.S. Having to register to comment is onerous.
# posted by Anonymous : 10:55 AM

Ideally, the reaction should have been to not cover his daughter’s eyes - two people kissing is hardly pornography. However, for many it is difficult to overcome a lifetime of brainwashing and irrational prejudice on the part of others, and automatic reactions are difficult to suppress even for well-intentioned people. In a previous era his reaction might have been quite different. Taking a historical view, the fact that his friend’s only action was to cover his daughter’s eyes might even be seen as progress.

(I agree, having to register to comment is inconvenient)

–Kris
# posted by Anonymous : 11:07 AM

Yikes… You’re right. Posting comments on a different machine than my usual is a pain with Blogger. Even Haloscan was better.
# posted by Jason Kuznicki : 12:04 PM

The kilt, the skirt, the “unbifurcated garment:” Call it what you will, it’s latest thing in menswear. As always, gay men are the early-adopters of the fashion world–and the first of the fashion victims.

At a recent black-tie event for the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington DC, I counted at least six different guests who combined a tuxedo top with a traditional Scottish kilt down below. As everyone knows, men in Scotland wear kilts for all kinds of formal occasions, and sometimes men of Scottish ancestry like to point out their heritage by wearing a kilt even outside their native land. Let me emphasize that this is not what was going on. I know these people. If they’re Scottish then I’m a Trobriand Islander.

Nope, there’s something new in the air, and further proof comes from the Utilikilt, a thick, ruggedized, all-weather, unbifurcated garment made for the urban jungle warrior in us all. The androgynous sarong never won the hearts and legs of the fashion world, but the butched-up Utilikilt may yet succeed: At DC’s Gay Pride last weekend, the Utilikilt booth was full to capacity.

I don’t know how straight women feel about the kilt, but gay men all seem to agree: A good-looking guy in a kilt is hot. Really hot. Really really really hot.

I suspect we like kilts for their easy access, both real and implied.

It’s also about, well, the underwear question. As in: Does he or doesn’t he?

While gay men are on the front lines of the fashion war, there’s one way that we’re playing catch-up with the heterosexuals: Straight men have been chasing skirts for centuries. When you add up straight men, gay men, and the undeniable skirt-chasing lesbians, it’s likely that a solid majority now fantasizes about getting their hands up someone else’s unbifurcated garment.

If straight guys start wearing kilts, then pretty soon everyone is going to be a skirt-chaser. Think of it: Straight women, lingering at glass elevators, leering when the wind blows, their naughty hands venturing to places where they don’t belong… It’s only a matter of time until someone, probably a woman full of righteous anger, invents the mini-kilt, which men will feel obliged to wear whether they want to or not.

Payback’s a bitch, huh?

It’s worth pointing out that “pants” as we now know them are not universal and never have been. Greece and Rome never dreamed of wearing pants; for centuries on end, the toga was the last word in men’s fashion. Since then, men have worn robes, tabards, chain mail, stockings, leggings, culottes–the list of garments to cover the lower half of the male body is nearly as long as history itself.

If kilts come back, does that mean there’s hope for the codpiece?

Pants themselves only came into fashion with the French Revolution, when a group of Parisian radicals started calling themselves the sans-culottes, meaning “the men who don’t wear culottes.” Culottes were the lacy, delicate, tight-fitting hose worn by the aristocrats; the closest thing we have to culottes these days is panty hose, which gives you an idea of how far we’ve come.

In place of culottes, the radicals wore pantalons, or pants, which they touted as simple, durable, useful, and modest. The idea caught on, and pants quite literally became the official garment of the French Revolution. Among its many utopian projects, the First French Republic commissioned Jacques-Louis David to design the official dress for a good French republican; David’s republican proudly sported a pair of trousers.

The tricolor cockade didn’t catch on, but pants were an easy way for politicians to show solidarity with the little people. Much like Napoleon, the humble pantalon began obscurely in the Revolution and went on to conquer most of the western world. Culottes disappeared forever, the victims of a working-class fashion revolt.

[Incidentally, I read a fascinating article recently about the exposure of private parts as a political statement in the French Revolution. The author documented many examples of revolutionary mooning; he suggested that in the Revolutionary context, the term "sans culottes" should often be understood quite literally. This also is why you should never do a Google images search for "sans culotte" at work. Just trust me. And if the nudists ever want it, they've now got a great name for a political party.]

But back to kilts. At the black-tie event I mentioned above, one of the invitees combined his tuxedo top with a rugged nylon Utilikilt. This, dear readers, is a definite fashion faux pas. A tuxedo is the limousine of menswear; a Utilikilt is a shiny-but-rugged late-model SUV. Playing mix-and-match is about as sensible as those stretch Hummers you sometimes see on the roads. Merely being able to do it doesn’t mean that it looks good.

And finally, it remains to be seen whether the kilt it is just a momentary blip on the fashion radar–or whether it’s destined to overthrow the sans-culottes’ 200-year reign of terror. Even Tom Smith, a contributor to the conservative Right Coast blog, has made a serious plea for the kilt. Is the kilt about to change men’s fashion forever? Or is it headed the way of the fauxhawk?

A third possibility is that we’ll one day consign the kilt to the same category as capri pants, bell bottoms, and really tight 501s: Cicada-like, they come back with each succeeding generation, only to languish for years in the used-clothing underground. There’s also a strong possibility that kilts will come to be so closely associated with the gay male world that no one else would dare to wear them. But if this butch new fashion trend catches on among masculinity-loving right-wingers just as much as it seems to be doing among gay men, it could be the start of something big.

Me, I’m not all that adventurous: For the moment, I’m keeping my pants on.

UPDATE: Tom Smith of The Right Coast replies to my musings here.

First, he suggests that in light of the pantalon’s French Revolutionary origin, there are now solid political reasons for conservatives to take up the kilt.

The second argument he makes is a bit more implicit and also more complex. Cynically, I might restate it as follows: “Sure, kilts are gay and even radical–at the moment. But soon they may well go mainstream. And shortly afterward, conservatives will be able to say that they’ve been wearing kilts all along. What else are radicals for?”

Despite all appearances, I am not a cynic at heart, and I wouldn’t really want to put things so crudely. I know full well that this is the way of the world, that innovators always have the most to lose, and that conservatives always make the safest bets.

As an openly gay man with a strong affinity for the Scottish Enlightenment–Hume, Smith, et al.–I’m probably one of the very few people who doesn’t really mind these forecasted developments. I’d love it if more gay men were in touch with the roots of modern freedom. But I can easily see the rest of you grumbling: Bah! That’s gratitude for ya. We’re the fashion guinea pigs, and you get all the credit… And I have to say I feel a certain sympathy.

It’s also worth pointing out that while kilts are quite traditional, clan tartans are not. The tartans as we know them today are a product of the early 19th century’s obsessive nationalism–a mania that began… with the French Revolution.

I don’t think you’ll see me in a kilt regardless of how well they might catch on. I think if they really do end up getting big among gay men they will be picked up by straight men though. That’s what happened with long hair, earrings, etc. (neither of which I have ever worn either, I might add). I wish I’d know you were going to be at Capital Pride, would have been neat to have met you.
-dolphin
# posted by Anonymous : 11:30 AM

“I don’t know how straight women feel about the kilt, but gay men all seem to agree: A good-looking guy in a kilt is hot. Really hot. Really really really hot.”

I saw the Utilikilt on Russell Whittaker’s website and immediately sent a link to my husband, thinking he would be game.

Unfortunately, the man (who let me shave his head then let the hair grow to magnificent proportions, has tried on my heels for the hell of it and would quite literally do anything once) doesn’t seem enamoured of the idea at all.

I’m devastated, kilts are darned sexy - and so are the men who are assured enough in themselves to wear them.

…oh, and yes, there *is* the issue of being able to slide one’s hand up above the knee. Very handy feature, that.

I took a quick poll of female friends and have been assured that kilts make them grin fiendishly. :)
# posted by Monica White : 11:34 AM