Positive Liberty

I don’t often link to Daily Kos. I don’t agree with their politics, and I find their tone pretty much as repulsive as Little Green Footballs (a site that still won’t get a link from me). But… If these allegations of vote fraud are true, then I fear for our nation’s future. Here is just a sample from West Virginia:

In a letter, Berkeley County clerk John Smalls cites calls from a cell phone were made to Eastern Panhandle democrats telling them that they were not registered to vote. The letter also said the calls informed democrats in some cases they wouldn’t be able to vote on Election Day [...]

It’s considered an improper act because when upset citizens called the voter registration office to make sure they were registered to vote, indeed they were. So, who made these misleading calls? The Berkeley County Clerk`s Office traced the number voters gave as the source back to the Eastern Panhandle Republican Headquarters.

The same post documents further acts of fraud from Ohio, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Others can be found across the country, and the pattern is too widespread to be a coincidence.

Don’t the Republicans realize that by engaging in fraud, they are actually working against their own best interests? A victory may be sweet in the short run, but the world will remember that George W. Bush’s second term was no more legitimate than his first, and possibly quite a bit less. America can only lose in this exchange, for American democracy itself will have been undermined–and the Republicans will be dragged down with it. Don’t they see this?

At a time when we are said to be fighting a worldwide battle for democracy, it looks poor indeed to subvert democracy at home. Vote fraud gives us a bad name and–dare I say it–even hurts the war on terrorism. If for no other reason, this would be enough to throw George W. Bush out of office: He and his party have done all they can to make American democracy look repulsive across the world. Our biggest weapon is the good example, and right now, the Republicans are busy destroying it.

On a lighter note, let’s talk about the disastrous war on drugs.

Given the many other issues at stake on November 2, it might seem a thankless task to evaluate candidates based a matter that has gotten very little press this season. Still, when the issue is something I feel strongly about, the only thing left to do is to express my gratitude. DrugWarRant has compiled a voting guide to drug policy reform, and I commend it to my readers.

Whether you are a liberal Democrat, a conservative Republican, a Christian, or even a libertarian, DrugWarRant makes a plausible argument for the legalization of private, recreational marijuana use. Of course, true libertarians seldom require any convincing on that score. The voting guide covers House and Senate candidates plus voter initiatives in nineteen states. Unsurprisingly, the Libertarian and Green Parties stand strongest for legalization, though neither is expected to do particularly well this round.

In similar vein, we note with amusement that the Prohibition Party is still on the ballot in at least one state. Prohibitionists have turned to blaming the alcohol industry for their dismal failure these past 75 years; if so, then the alcohol industry has done me two great favors in life, and I happily raise my glass to them.

I write these lines while sipping a grenache/syrah blend from Boordy Vineyards, a delightful winery located north of Baltimore. I visited Boordy Vineyards just yesterday and found it to be a most agreeable industry indeed.

Time was, “industry” used to be a virtue. So did moderation.

Last cycle, Prohibition’s presidential candidate won a mere 208 votes, a total that tempts the author toward launching a party of his own: Were all the regular readers of Positive Liberty to cast their votes for him, he would have defeated the Prohibition candidate in a landslide. But wait–the Prohibition Party boasts what are probably the most expensive campaign buttons around. They’re $39 each, and, “only 50 of these buttons have been made.” Go figure.

Do I have any predictions? No. I’m going to hide in my basement until the storm is over. Assuming that the election ends peacefully, I may yet participate in National Novel Writing Month. But November 3 seems so far away that for the moment I’d prefer not to decide.

This week I received a sample ballot for the November 2 election, and it featured an issue with which I was unfamiliar. In the interests of being a good citizen, I’ve decided to see what I can find on the Internet and possibly compile about this issue for the benefit of other residents of Anne Arundel County, Maryland. For the rest of you, it will be an exercise in the limits of research. Or perhaps an exercise in boredom.

The text of the ballot issue can be found at the Anne Arundel County Citizens Information Center. It reads as follows:

To amend the Anne Arundel County Charter to permit the County Council to increase the minimum value of purchases and contracts requiring competitve bidding from $10,000 to an amount up to $25,000.

The Washington Post makes mention of the amendment, but nothing more. The County Ethics Commission does not seem to mention it. Other search hits came up essentially dry.

I then asked myself how other counties handle this problem. Here is what I found:

Shelby County, Tennessee requires competitive bidding for contracts over $15,000; on contracts over $25,000, the process is through sealed bidding.

Marion County, Oregon requires competitive bids only for contracts over $50,000.

It’s not entirely clear to me how the requirements of Durham County, North Carolina compare to our own, but it would appear that we are well within the range of that county’s “informal” bidding process either way.

Hennepin County, Minnesota requires competitive bidding for contracts only if they are over $50,000.

Nearby Montgomery County, Maryland requires competitive bidding starting at $25,000.

Across the country, then, the threshold for competitive bidding is generally much higher than it is in Anne Arundel County. The potential for future abuse of this law seems to be minuscule, and the increased efficiency of government is likely to be great: Competitive bids cost time and money, and the apparent consensus is that they should be reserved for rather pricier contracts. I’m voting for the measure, then, unless I hear any information to the contrary.

I was a luddite in the last post; now I’m going to be a technophile.

This week I attended the Digital Library Federation’s 2004 Fall Forum, where I gave a presentation of the user’s perspective on the electronic media, focusing on some online work I’ve done in history. I spoke before a group of programmers, administrators, and electronic librarians. What follow are my remarks to the conference, but first I’ve got to clear up a very serious mistake I made in my previous post.

Marcela asked in the comments below for the source to my claim that SMS and other instant messages now surpassed all other media in data content; as I recall it, the claim came from the keynote address by John Unsworth, although none of the slides of his presentation state it explicitly. It may well be that both my notes and the speaker himself were mistaken: His cited source, “How Much Information,” by Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian, gives more detailed numbers which do not bear out the claim. Instead, they indicate that telephone messages are still by far the largest source of new information. Here are the numbers from the executive summary of their report:

Telephone calls worldwide – on both landlines and mobile phones – contained 17.3 exabytes of new information if stored in digital form; this represents 98% of the total of all information transmitted in electronic information flows, most of it person to person.

Most radio and TV broadcast content is not new information. About 70 million hours (3,500 terabytes) of the 320 million hours of radio broadcasting is original programming. TV worldwide produces about 31 million hours of original programming (70,000 terabytes) out of 123 million total hours of broadcasting.

The World Wide Web contains about 170 terabytes of information on its surface; in volume this is seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress print collections.

Instant messaging generates five billion messages a day (750GB), or 274 Terabytes a year.

Email generates about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide.
P2P file exchange on the Internet is growing rapidly. Seven percent of users provide files for sharing, while 93% of P2P users only download files. The largest files exchanged are video files larger than 100 MB, but the most frequently exchanged files contain music (MP3 files).

In other words, it’s not even close, and someone clearly erred somewhere. My apologies for either originating or passing on the mistake.

In any event, here are my remarks from the conference. The title of the talk was “Engaging the User: The “Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert: Collaborative Translation Project” and New Scholarly Paradigms;” it was co-presented with Kevin Hawkins, who introduced me and outlined the future plans for the project:

I am not a computer scientist, or a programmer, or a systems administrator. I’m not even a librarian. Compared to all of you, I am probably the least computer-literate person in the room, if not in the entire building. I am here to give a user’s perspective on the digital media in the humanities, focusing on the Encyclopédie Collaborative Translation Project, on which I’ve done some work in the past. I would like to begin my remarks with a quotation that is very familiar in my own field and may well be in yours as well. In 1979, the great French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie declared that, “Tomorrow’s historian will have to be able to program a computer in order to survive.”

Twenty-five years later, I am tomorrow’s historian, and I still cannot program a computer. In one sense, it’s not surprising: Nowadays we distinguish between programmers and content providers, a distinction that was by no means clear in 1979. But as the gap between the two has widened, however, it has become more and more important to allow for effective communication between the programmers and the content providers. In the big picture, I fear that historians have been quite reluctant to become content providers in the digital media, and I believe that their reluctance is partly because of this growing divide. Only very recently and tentatively have historians embraced the digital media, and they have done so quite slowly even when compared to other disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities.

The issues and subject matter that historians examine have changed tremendously since the nineteenth century, but our methods of production and dissemination have more or less stagnated. In the last hundred years, we have created entirely new fields of history, including demographic history, labor history, the new economic and cultural histories, and the histories of gender and sexuality. But production and dissemination remain very similar to the model perfected with the rise of the modern research university in the nineteenth century: Historians gather information at physical archives; they digest information at universities; they lecture on it to students, and they write up texts with formats that are substantially similar to those produced in the nineteenth century. Their texts are almost always articles or books that are published in paper-based, peer-reviewed outlets.

Where computers have entered the discipline, they certainly have not revolutionized it–at least not yet. Structurally, the computer has replaced the typewriter, leaving the rest of the process more or less intact. Historians may take laptops into the archives, but notetaking and information transfer methods are frequently just digital re-creations of the old-fashioned paper notecard. I can recall that as an entering graduate student, I asked how I might better use computers in gathering my information. And–at a university that is not Johns Hopkins–I was told that I shouldn’t bother. A tenured faculty member and a well-known authority in the field declared in no uncertain terms that notecards were the best and really the only way to do research: Write the cards in pencil while you’re at the archives. Then come home, set the cards out on your floor, and arrange them into the story. To this day, it remains the way that many of us work.

As a tool for dissemination, we view the Internet with suspicion. Do a search for the Holocaust, and you will soon understand why this is. Generally speaking, what history can be found on the web often ranges from the mediocre to the mendacious. The peer review process has created very high standards in most published historical journals. But it’s powerless to weed out the Internet cranks, and let’s face it, there are a terrible lot of cranks on the Internet. Conspiracy theorists, promoters of racial hatred, plagiarists, and advocates of thinly evidenced “alternate” histories abound. In one term, a student actually submitted a paper that had been plagiarized directly from a Holocaust-denial website; the following term, I entirely forbade my students from using the Internet, and promised to fail them if they did. Even before a group such as this, I can’t honestly say that I regret the decision.

For those of us who know how to find them, however, there are some bright spots out there, and the Encyclopédie Collaborative Translation Project is undoubtedly one of them. The original Encyclopédie is arguably the most important document produced in eighteenth-century France; if anything, its importance is surpassed only by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. While it was not the first encyclopedia, it was remarkable in its systematic approach, its wide scope, and its enunciation of the Enlightenment idea that all things are in principle knowable.

Generally speaking, the eighteenth century was the first age to share that ideal; it may well have been the last age where human knowledge was still small enough to render the project of compiling it all possible. This compilation is exactly what Diderot envisioned, and to that end, he engaged some of the brightest minds of his era: Besides himself and d’Alembert, the Encyclopédie featured articles by Rousseau, Montesquieu, d’Holbach, Turgot, and Voltaire. In today’s terms, this would be a little like arranging a collaboration among Stephen Hawking, Madeleine Albright, Richard Rorty, J. D. Salinger, and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Historically, the Encyclopédie is the starting point for virtually all questions touching on the Enlightenment, as it set the tone for how an entire generation of philosophers approached the world. The work’s direct descendants, from Britannica all the way to Wikipedia, owe the Encyclopédie an enormous debt. And to speak still more generally, the project of the Encyclopédie is also the project of the modern library itself: The systematic classification of human knowledge is an idea that we now take for granted in large part because of the efforts of Diderot and d’Alembert. Thus the Encyclopédie’s importance to the historian is absolutely paramount.

But how are we as historians to teach this source? At 70,000 articles, very few have ever read the entire thing, and I’m certainly no exception. Making it accessible to a non-francophone general reading public virtually requires any presentation of the Encyclopédie to be rapidly browsed, scanned for interesting content, and parsed according the needs of the user. Only with the rise of the computer has such a project truly become feasible. The original Encyclopédie was arranged not alphabetically, but by the branches of general knowledge as understood in the 18th century. It is cumbersome and difficult even for specialists like me to use. Within the past few years, most of us have come to rely on French-language electronic versions of this text in part for this very reason.

The Collaborative Translation Project now features nearly two hundred articles in translation, and these offer an excellent starting point for non-francophone students to learn about the state of 18th-century knowledge in many—though certainly not all—different fields.

One of the most important factors determining the relative success of the project so far is that the Encyclopédie Collaborative Translation Project does not exist in a vacuum. One reason that historians trust the veracity of the translations so far is simply the good reputation of the contributors, a reputation that has mostly been built in more conventional channels. For example, Dena Goodman, was already a leading published historian of the French Enlightenment long before she took over supervising this project. The same is true of many others who have contributed articles; indeed, as an advanced graduate student rather than a full-time professor, I am a rather junior partner in the whole enterprise. The Collaborative Translation Project, then, represents an expansion of traditional academic activities, but it is certainly not yet a fundamental revisioning of how historians do their work.

Besides the sources of the project’s authority, much of its material also comes from more conventional channels. Most articles that have been translated so far have come at the prompting of requests made on the Internet mailing list H-France, which is a private, highly-selective list open only to graduate students and faculty; that same list is a frequent discussion site for articles in progress and those that have already been translated. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the project ever succeeding without the H-France mailing list to supplement it.

While individuals not associated with the list may certainly submit translations, my impression is that they seldom do. To my knowledge, the production of new translations has not been assigned in history classes; for most undergraduates, the work is beyond their abilities. French language classes would probably be a better venue for the assignment. I understand that it has already been offered on several occasions, and I look forward to this type of practical and often quite fascinating assignment becoming more common in the future.

Still, the extant translations were for the most part done by specialists in their own subfields of history. For example, I have translated several articles from the area of religious history, where I could be expected to give a more competent translation than most. On the other hand, I have left the mathematics entirely alone, because I must confess that I simply don’t follow it. Thus, one weakness of the Collaborative Translation Project to date is that many of the translated articles reflect the interests and areas of relative expertise of those who have done the translations.

This bias shows in the selection of articles so far, which tends to favor articles on economics, anthropology, religion, languages, and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The sections on engineering and mathematics, both extensive in the original document, have not been so well-represented in our efforts to date. One way of correcting this bias would be to enlist bilingual people with competence in these fields to do some translations as well.

One last way that the project might be improved is ambitious, but I thought I would offer it anyway, simply to generate discussion and to perhaps learn a bit more about the technical limitations of the project itself. Just as the Collaborative Translation Project does not exist in a vacuum, so too one text does not make history, not even a tremendously important text like the Encyclopédie. In this light, I would like to propose some changes.

Even before the Encyclopédie had fully appeared, contemporaries began critiquing, correcting, and in some cases flatly condemning its content. Voltaire devoted much of the last period of his life to a series of “Questions about the Encyclopédie,” often writing point-by-point refutations of others’ articles. And the debate has continued ever since.

Indeed, one of the best definitions of history that I have ever heard is that history is an argument about the past. For the Collaborative Translation Project to really do the work of history, besides merely being an excellent resource, it would have to have a much greater measure of user feedback than it currently possesses. Besides the translated article, could contributors perhaps be invited to submit commentaries on their translations, lists for further reading, notes on difficult words or phrases, and relevant historical responses? Could we perhaps implement a discussion forum under each article, much as weblogs now have?

I do not know whether these steps are technically feasible or even whether the principal architects of the project would approve of them. From my perspective, though, I could see how all of these steps could make the Encyclopédie Collaborative Translation Project a more useful teaching tool. In a larger sense, they might also bring more of the work of history to be done online, and we can only hope it might day replace the cranks.

So to start the discussion, the biggest question I have might actually be too general: I’d like to know how much of what I have just said was new or surprising to you, how much of it was familiar, and how the technology of both this project and more generally the digital approach to history can be made better from our interactions. While historians are adept at providing content, very often we don’t understand very well the available systems of collection and dissemination on which our careers may increasingly depend.

From the intimate to the anonymous, computers are ruining us. The last stage of the computer revolution will consist of our learning where the machines do not belong, and I’ve got two candidates right here.

My father has been a curmudgeon-in-training since before I was born. Retired, he’s now sliding into that role with gleeful abandon. “You know what computers are?” he asked me recently. Then, without waiting for an answer: “They’re the new television. Everyone said that TV would make people smarter, and closer, and happier, and better citizens. But it did just the opposite. It turned everyone into stupid, isolated, dreary, ill-informed couch potatoes. And now computers are doing the same, but worse.”

These are big words coming from someone who has never owned a computer–and who pledges that he never will. While I don’t share his pessimism, I think he’s completely right to blast the optimists.

At least in theory, nothing is more neutral than the Internet: Here, all your interactions are exactly you make of them, because it is possible for you to project yourself, in whatever form you consciously choose, to whatever audience might be out there: Here, your inside is your outside.

True, “Positive Liberty” is a persona I’ve adopted, and I’m exactly the same person in real life. But I’ve chosen this persona more or less deliberately, to reflect what I truly believe. It’s altogether different from choosing one’s house, or clothing or even one’s hairstyle, where you must work with what you’re given in life. Here, it’s as much or as little as you want. It’s whatever you want.

Think about that the next time you find boorishness on this, the most plastic of media: The person behind those words could have chosen differently–and they did not. They chose to be what they are, unlike the passive viewer of a television program, who might be excused for happening upon something idiotic. The Internet is exactly what we wish we were. God help us all.

Case in point: Online chatrooms, instant messages, and SMS. At a conference this week I learned that in terms of raw data generation, SMS and similar media now surpass all others. They’re bigger than books, newspapers, movies, radio, or TV. They’re even bigger than phone.

The text-based chat promises instant contact, but it delivers only basest and most banal of human emotions: reflexive acknowledgement, lust, rage, and the occasional spam. Oh, and stupid jokes. When was the last time that anyone wrote a genuine love letter?

I used to think that the lust factor of text messaging was primarily a gay phenomenon, because quite frankly gay chatrooms are filled with very little else–and straight chatrooms didn’t seem to exist. Then I discovered Yahoo! Games, which (especially if you play video pool) seems to be little more than a cruising ground for horny heterosexual teenagers.

Now, I play traditional Mah Johng–the antique four-player strategy game, not the solitaire version–and even there, I get seventeen-year-old females asking me for my intimate details. Yikes. I can only imagine what I’d find in the world of heterosexual chat if I ever went looking for it. By contrast, we gays are discreet indeed.

Text-based chat is at its best with one individual whom you already know very well. But even then it gives all the excitement of a 20-minute conversation–packed into three and a half hours, and stripped of vocal nuance.

Good old-fashioned voice phone has it all over SMS, and I suspect that the latter only prevails because we can politely ignore our interlocutors when they become tiresome. Oh, and it’s cheaper.

In turn, we’ve cheapened our human relations. We’ve reduced them to a set of crude and interchangeable glyphs. Someday, someone will look at the SMS phenomenon and see it as proof of our barbarism, like the Neanderthal in the Far Side cartoon, who carved a magnificent piano in stone–only to pound his head on the keyboard.

On the other side of human relations, there is a realm where crude and interchangeable glyphs are precisely what we want: These are called elections, and computers have done their level best to ruin them as well.

The Athenians were among the first to practice a really successful democracy. They had two simple and foolproof methods of voting: In one, the assembly divided into two groups, and the leaders did a head count. In the other, they used the ostracon, a piece of broken pottery on which a voter scratched the name of the individual they wished to elect–or, as the name suggests, the person they wished to ostracize:

(Original image from The Ohio State University can be viewed here.)

As a great philosopher said in a completely different context, “These were sane rules, and it would have been better if they had not been changed.” The move toward paperless elections may seem sleek and modern, but tampering becomes infinitely easier the moment the controls become invisible electromagnetic blips. We could do a recount of an Athenian election today, provided only that the potsherds were gathered up again and counted.

Will we ever have the same accountability from a system whose inner workings cannot be examined by the average voter? Elections will only be transparent when anyone capable of voting is also capable of verifying the vote. Anything more difficult than that isn’t democracy anymore: It’s election by a college of technocrats.

Now, I am not accusing anyone in particular of fraud. Absolutely not. But then, I still lock all the doors before I go to bed. It doesn’t do to put temptation in the way of another. The evidence suggests, at least, that our current technocrats will not necessarily abuse their privileges. Yet we have no way of knowing whether they will always be so honest.

Even an electronic device that created a paper trail would not in my view be acceptable: Just as a computer can deliberately mis-register votes, it is a simple matter to program a computer that will count one way and print another. There would be endless disputes, and those holding the papers would inevitably be accused of forgery. Let us scratch our votes on discarded Pepsi bottles, like the ancients did, sooner than fall for this modern nonsense.

In the meantime, let’s learn to write love letters, too.

Tim Sandefur writes as follows about one of my recent comments:

Less coy than [Ed] Brayton is Jason Kuznicki, who I think showed too much of his hand when he said “once Bush is safely out of office—and Kerry is safely in office–you’ll see me attack him with all due savagery. But not a moment before.” That’s a remarkable statement. It’s okay to hand the keys to John Kerry without skepticism; only once he’s in office for a good solid four years will we turn our eye on him!

If I may say so, I believe this is a somewhat unfair characterization of my position. Let me be utterly clear: I believe that Kerry will be a poor president. I believe he will bumble through his term only semi-competently, and I look forward to retiring him after four undistinguished years.

The key point, though, is simple: Whatever Kerry manages–or does not manage–as president, I am convinced that he will do better than Bush. I’ve asked myself, in this battle between two very poor candidates, which one will do worse. I have found the answer to be Bush, and I have acted accordingly.

If I were running a newspaper, we might call this a bias. But in the personal opinions of one individual, coming to a decision does not automatically denote bias. A faulty rationale must be found, and one that the individual in question holds to tenaciously, without ever stopping to examine the consequences.

What, then, might my faulty rationale be? It is often heard that those who incline against Bush do so merely because they incline against Bush–a tautology, as it were. But I disagree that my reasons are tautological; I believe on the contrary that they are quite well-founded.

John Kerry will no doubt bring to the executive branch a great many Clinton-era officeholders. While these do not share my opinions on very many things, at least I can expect them to concede some greater measure of public accountability than what we have seen from the current administration. I can expect from them a greater measure of respect for individual rights, particularly the rights of the accused. I can expect them not to alienate our allies so tactlessly either. I can expect from them at least a neutral attitude toward gays and lesbians, rather than the egregious bigotry of the present administration. I can expect that they will not attack the right to abortion at every turn, and I can expect that future court appointments will protect women’s access to abortion. I can expect the creeping Christian theocracy to be halted in its tracks.

Oddly enough, I can even expect that the Democrats will exercise more fiscal discipline than the current administration. They could scarcely do worse, and even if they tried, the Republican congress would never allow it.

So… If we had a president merely as bad as Clinton, it would still be a tremendous step forward for the republic. I trust John Kerry to be this president: Incompetent, wrongheaded, but somewhat less so than Bush.

I am not handing Kerry the keys without skepticism; instead, I believe I have exercised skepticism about both sides, and I have found one side to be more wanting than the other. For the moment, then, I consider that the most politically useful way to deploy my skepticism is to come down harder on Bush–until he is out of office.

Do I hate the president? No. Voting for the other guy doesn’t equal hatred, and the prevalence of this canard only shows how debased our political discourse has become. I am glad that Mr. Sandefur disavows it, but I feel it necessary to say anyway, since so many of Mr. Sandefur’s charges–like the apparent claim of tautological bias–so often come from those who also equate Kerry-support with Bush-hatred. The truth is, I find both candidates distasteful; I merely find one more distasteful than the other.

I do not hate Bush; I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for Bush’s misguided beliefs, for his poor instincts, for his abysmal grasp of the world’s complexities. I feel terrified whenever he relies on his faith–his mysticism–to make decisions. It strikes me as odd that Mr. Sandefur, an avowed Objectivist, doesn’t seem to feel the same way. I am convinced that faith is no way to govern, and I have the sense that John Kerry, however deep his personal faith may be, at least recognizes that this world must be run on something more than a collection of pious wishes. On matters of governance, Kerry can be reasoned with; Bush has demonstrated again and again that he cannot. Above all, this is why Kerry is the more deserving candidate, and why he will get my vote. And if that’s bias, then so be it.

Update: Here is a passage I wish I’d written myself, from Llewellyn Rockwell:

With a track record going back some 35 years, we do know that Democrats have tended to expand the budget less, deregulate more, pass fewer new government programs, care for certain fiscal responsibilities, protect civil liberties a bit more, bring about fewer wars, avoid aggressive protectionism, and do a better job of cleaning up the public sector. Conversely, we also know that Republicans bust the budget, create new agencies, expand the federal payroll, zoom debts and deficits, start wars, and protect favored industries with trade tricks. Yes, they do cut taxes but for the same reason that Democrats try to raise the minimum wage: sops for friends….

The Democrats are the party of government, with the owners consisting of mostly public sector employees and their dependents. These are some of the most loathsome characters in American politics. Paradoxically, however, they have the strongest interest in keeping government functioning well, which implies balancing the budget, cleaning house, stamping out corruption, maintaining some semblance of order and peace, not doing things that utterly discredit bureaucracies, finding fixes to make things work a bit better for themselves and their friends, etc. As the most direct owners of the state, they have the strongest interest in its health and well-being.

The Republicans in contrast are the party of the private sector and the government contractors. Their primary interest is in getting their hands in the pot that belongs to the government. They are anti-government alright, so much so that they are willing to loot for themselves just about everything that is not nailed down.

Bingo.

Update II: Tim Sandefur continues to misconstrue my original comment, now saying that I would “shield my eyes” from Kerry’s failings.

Nope. As I explained above, I’ve seen Kerry’s failings, and I find them deplorable–but less deplorable than Bush’s. Sandefur writes, “The question is whether it is reasonable for one to always (and frequently with a haste that ends up embarrassing one) see draw the worst possible conclusions from even the slightest suggestion of the Bush Administration’s shortcomings–and then remain silent in the face of indefensible flaws in Kerry and his supporters.” Anyone who would write this clearly hasn’t read what I’ve written. He’s also using too many prepositions.

To take just one issue, consider civil liberties. Clinton may have used wiretaps at an unprecedented rate. But what came after him? Now we have the PATRIOT act, which greatly expands the wiretap power–in secret. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, either, that 2000 is the last year for which we have statistics on the number of authorized wiretaps.

It only gets worse from here: Now we have secret military tribunals whose powers even the administration itself prefers not to define. Would Clinton ever have created these? In a sane world, would a Republican-dominated Congress ever have approved them?

Clinton may have extradited people who didn’t deserve it, and this was certainly deplorable. At least he didn’t hold American citizens incommunicado. At least he didn’t stand idly by as American soldiers tortured prisoners of war. At least he didn’t set up a system where God only knows how many prisoners are being held in secret, with no guarantees whatsoever for their rights.

Clinton was bad, and unprecedentedly so. But Bush has taken the abuse of civil liberties to an entirely new level, one that we would never have dreamed possible just four years ago.

What I most often hear in Bush’s favor is that he, unlike Kerry, somehow “understands” the nature of the conflict before us. Yet Bush’s understanding on this score must be so profound, so cosmic… that it never makes contact with earthly reality.

If Bush understood the nature of this conflict, then he would have cooperated with the 9/11 commission from the outset. He would have seen that Abu Ghraib was a decisive turn for the worse, and one that called for swift and harsh reprisals. He would have made at least some greater effort to prevent the looting and disintegration of Iraqi society that followed the invasion. He would have understood that capturing or killing Osama bin Laden would have been a tremendous public relations victory–and that al Qaeda has little left to trade on besides its public image.

Bush does not understand this conflict. That’s precisely why he’s made such a mess of things. The next time I hear someone say that they’re voting for Bush because Bush “understands,” I think I’m going to puke. What, precisely, does Bush understand?

Yes, if the Islamic militants succeed, we’ll all have to convert to fundamentalism or die. I hear all the time that Bush “understands” this–but then, I’m pretty sure that the average 5-year-old, even the average Democrat, also understands it. This one tiny, elementary point should hardly count in Bush’s favor. Why does it? Why do we give him credit for “understanding” something that everyone else already understands?

[A re-post from a few months ago with minor changes...]

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1. Don’t send money. If I thought I could make money from this, I’d go work for a national commentary magazine. Unlike a lot of blogs, I’m not going to beg for your cash. I’m not going to sell you keychains or coffee mugs or thong underwear either. I mean really, how many times have you ever seen someone wearing a thong from their favorite blog? My own husband would probably throw me out of bed for trying something like that, so I have no illusions that you might be interested.

2. If by chance you happen to work for a national commentary magazine, drop me a line. I graduate in May.

3. If you don’t work for a national commentary magazine, but you have a job opening that you’d like to fill in the DC area, give me a try; I graduate in May.

4. Tell your friends about this great blog you’ve been reading. Share the wealth, because maybe they have a job for me. Mention that I graduate in May.

5. If you spend a lot of time here, then you probably have a good sense of what this place is all about. Send me new ideas, and I’ll try to write about them. I love to get new material about GLBT issues, religion, food, history, philosophy, and economics–especially as they relate to everyday life. Some of my favorite posts have come from helpful readers, and I always welcome intellectual contributions.

6. Participate in the discussions. I love getting comments about what I write, and the talk can often lead to new full-length posts.

7. Start your own blogs. The more the merrier.

I wish I had time to read all of the blogs that have linked to me, but I don’t. I do visit them all from time to time, and every so often I add or delete one on my blogroll. Baboon Palace is one that I discovered recently by way of an incoming link, and here is why you should read it too:

..looking for info on fictional weblogs I started with a Guardian article from April 2004, How to write a blog-buster, which gives a pretty good overview of the state of this strange micro-genre. The article kicks-off with the case of Belle de Jour, the wildly popular and possibly fictional weblog of a London prostitute, (which I’d never heard of before today). Again, whether it’s fiction or not is beside the point. The point is that it could have been fictional, and this phenomenon gets people thinking about adapting creative fiction to this new medium.

One thing that inevitably gets added is interactivity, the bitch-goddess of online art. Before blog fiction there was something called Interactive Fiction. You know, the old text-based games like ZORK or Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy? Well, from the loins of these early pioneers two lineages burst forth: graphical adventure games, a genre which died of creative exhaustion with Gabriel Knight 3; and interactive fiction, which focused on the text.

Although Interactive Fiction was certainly interactive, it was what I like to call “shitty interaction,” a series of pointless hoops the reader must jump through in order to win the privelege of enjoying the story. I’m told that Photopia is considered the high-water mark of interactive fiction. I tried it and wasn’t impressed enough to read/play for more than a couple hours, but it’s probably great if you like to solve arbitrary puzzles to unlock paragraphs of descriptive text. Or maybe I’m just impatient. (I used to really like those Steve Jackson choose-your-own-adventure books, but that was when I was younger and stupider.)

* * *

One characteristic that distinguishes most online fiction from a novel, (for example), is that online fiction is something which occurs in time. A post is made at a particular point in time, and this is built into the interface of modern weblogs. By definition, or at least entrenched convention, weblogs are a sequence of discrete entries ordered chronologically last-to-first. Given the simplicity of the concept, it’s a wonder it took so long to catch on as the design pattern of personal websites. It certainly wasn’t because of technical limitations.

At this point I’d like to interject that when I first made a personal website in 1995, I actually did consider updating it every single day or at least very regularly. I abandoned the idea because I was convinced that everyone would want to start at the beginning of the story, which would entail a lot of reading after I’d been at it for a while. I took it for granted that no one would want to start their reading several paragraphs from the very end, then read, then back up, then read earlier, then back up, then read earlier–which is exactly how blogs read today. Looking at my server stats, I can tell you that absolutely no one ever reads in strict chronological order. And now I’m puzzled why I ever worried about it in the first place.

A weblog is more like performing a play than writing a novel, a form which allows for improvisation and interaction with an audience. If [A New York Escort's Confessions] is fictional, then the most striking thing about it is the way the author addresses her audience and reacts to their comments. After her description of the extremely sinister interview, the comments are filled with people shouting “Don’t do it!” And then Alexa doesn’t. The commentators, (the audience), feel like they have some power to give Alexa advice which may affect her decisions, and the “story”’s direction. (In this case the description of the event seemed to be consciously written such that anyone would immediately see the danger, pretty well forcing the audience to advise her to steer clear.) If anybody can find an explicitly fictional weblog that does this, I’d be very interested to see it.

In response, I’d like to say that my own fiction does take some requests. At times I’ve even blatantly stolen ideas from my audience, though it’s usually at their prompting, and probably not with the frequency that our Baboon friend would like.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is J. D. Salinger, who is the least interactive writer ever–as well as being virtually the least productive. Still, it takes real guts to write a bad book review of a classic, so here is Johnathan Yardley ripping apart The Catcher in the Rye:

Why is a book about a spoiled rich kid kicked out of a fancy prep school so widely read by ordinary Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom have limited means and attend, or attended, public schools? Why is Holden Caulfield nearly universally seen as “a symbol of purity and sensitivity” (as “The Oxford Companion to American Literature” puts it) when he’s merely self-regarding and callow? Why do English teachers, whose responsibility is to teach good writing, repeatedly and reflexively require students to read a book as badly written as this one?

That last question actually is easily answered: “The Catcher in the Rye” can be fobbed off on kids as a book about themselves. It is required reading as therapy, a way to encourage young people to bathe in the warm, soothing waters of resentment (all grown-ups are phonies) and self-pity without having to think a lucid thought. Like that other (albeit marginally better) novel about lachrymose preppies, John Knowles’s “A Separate Peace” (1960), “The Catcher in the Rye” touches adolescents’ emotional buttons without putting their minds to work. It’s easy for them, which makes it easy for teacher.

Perhaps. I remember honestly liking the book, but then I was in ninth grade, and one operating assumption of this review is that ninth graders have tastes that are not merely different, but downright and of necessity lousy.

What if I said that this book actually does something completely astounding? It shows that books can push emotional buttons–perhaps by pushing them a bit more forcefully than most adults would generally like. But to teach kids that there’s this astonishing power inside a book, to teach them to look for that feeling of wonder, when perhaps they’d never picked up on it before–doesn’t that set them on the path to better things? And if The Catcher in the Rye is children’s literature, then does it even make sense to evaluate it by adult standards?

In addition, The Philosopher’s Carnival has just linked to my earlier post titled Evil Robots. The title and general approach of that piece were inspired by Cordwainer Smith, one of my favorite authors, who featured many very evil robots in his fiction. When I wrote that piece I’d also just seen the film Logan’s Run, which employs a lot of Cordwainer Smith-type surrealist religious imagery, plus explorations of both human cruelty and human nobility reminiscent of the master. Additionally, Logan’s Run sports a robot so completely evil that you can almost forgive the fact that he’s just a guy in a box wearing some silver makeup. I had chills despite the awful special effects.

It’s interesting, too, that “Evil Robots” made the Philosopher’s Carnival, because I am neither a philosopher, nor am I a particularly evil robot. I wouldn’t even have submitted the essay, except that someone else asked me to. But now I’m dreading that I will wake up surrounded by either a) philosophers or b) vengeful good robots. Either one of them could probably turn me inside out.

Really, I think I’m aiming more to be a philosophe in the 18th-century French tradition: a popularizer, someone who makes ideas more widely known but doesn’t have to be particularly original or deep. Whenever I write for Positive Liberty, I imagine Voltaire or Diderot having precisely the opinions that I now hold. And then I let him write. As a result, I rip off genres in addition to ripping off source material and, um, basically all my ideas.

Lastly, Baboon Palace also has a take on getting out the robot vote. I wonder if he knows about A.L.I.C.E.? (Sound file warning on that last link.) Alice is fascinating and surprisingly lifelike to chat with. To wit:

Jason: Is there life after death?
ALICE: If you have faith in God, then your soul will have eternal life.
Jason: How do you know?
ALICE: A priori.
Jason: That’s an awfully big a priori.
ALICE: Thanks for telling me…

Okay, enough cultural free-association for one night. Now start following those links!

[The following is adapted from the research notes I kept while living in Paris.]

Hildegard of Bingen has had more nonsense written about her than any other medieval mystic I know–and that’s saying a lot. Today in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France I ordered a book about her miracles, dated 1996.

But something didn’t ring quite right about the book, and I soon found out why: It turned out to be a do-it-yourself homeopathic remedy guide that claimed to duplicate Hildegard’s very own methods.

What were these methods, you ask? Simple: Take a glass of pure water (a flat glass, it won’t work with a stemmed one), and place it directly on the proper page of the book. Wait a few minutes, then drink the water. The magical formulae (a couple of words of Latin and three concentric decagons) will do the rest.

It should be noted that the Bibliothèque Nationale does not vouch for the accuracy of its holdings.

The French are peculiarly susceptible to a belief in homeopathy. It squares well with the worldview of a country that values gentle, non-invasive medicine: Antibiotic doses are routinely half those given in the United States; hysterectomy and circumcision are both virtually unknown. While I tend to prefer this approach to medicine, I do have my limits. An image of Saint Hildegard looked up at me from the page marked “Maladies de la sphère sexuelle.” She was praying–for what, God only knows.

Now, I’ve struck out many a time when I’ve ordered books at the libraries and archives. It’s a part of the process, and sooner or later all historians end up staring at a mass of unrelated and often bizarre documents. This, though, was the biggest and weirdest miss I’ve ever had.

On the second try, I found what I wanted. Someone else–a genuine researcher, we presume–had carefully examined Hildegard’s prophecy titled “Insurgent gentes.” He found that it was indeed a forgery as I had speculated, but that it dated to the thirteenth century, not the seventeenth. With that, a very interesting conjecture met its end.

The conclusion is obvious: If you are having research difficulties, and you own a flat-screen computer, you should now place the screen in the horizontal position, set a glass of water upon it, wait a few minutes, and drink the water. Hildegard of Bingen, the new patron saint of remotely associated facts, will be happy to assist you.

Much to everyone’s surprise, I died and went to Heaven.

There I was, sitting at a table in an attractive French sidewalk café–in Heaven. The hours stretched languidly before me, and waves of bliss coursed through my incorporeal body. I could not have been happier. I could not have imagined happier. And the gentle afternoon sun was even more Heavenly than usual.

I looked around, and everything was perfect. The people walking by were all beautiful; the shops and apartments were unearthly in their architectural concord. Picture a quick trip from the twelfth arrondissement straight to the sixteenth–and multiply it by a hundred million. Heaven.

(Yes, when I was still alive, I always detested the snobs who referred to the neighborhoods of Paris as though everyone knew them. But now I’m dead, and I’m in Heaven, and it doesn’t matter anymore if I’m prideful.)

A gorgeous metro bus lumbered past the café–Just you try finding a gorgeous metro bus on any other plane of existence. Its exhaust enveloped my table: Patchouli.

The real proof came when I looked at the sidewalks. They were immaculate, and I knew that I couldn’t be in Paris anymore: I was in actual Heaven.

I picked up the menu. It glowed faintly in my hands. What do they serve in Heaven, anyway? (Please, God, not angel food cake. Nectar and ambrosia maybe? Or jug wine and communion wafers?)

I opened it, and there, in the middle of the page, was exactly one choice: a baguette sandwich with raw milk camembert, cornichons, arugula, and coarse dijon mustard. It was exactly what I’d had in mind–with a double espresso on the side.

An angelic waiter stood instantly at my shoulder, like Brad Pitt, but sexier. He smiled in a way that left no doubt he’d be in my bedroom later that night if only I said the word. I must have blushed; I did that easily, back when I still had a body.

“Relax, it’s Heaven.” It certainly was.

“I’ll have the…” I started. It seemed ridiculous to say anything more.

“Of course.”

“But wait, I’ve got a question for you.”

“Yes?”

“See, I’m new here, and I’m still trying to figure things out.”

“Yes?”

“What if I wanted something else?”

“Well you don’t, do you? In Heaven, we know all your wants, and we fulfill them all. Every single one.”

“What if I want a choice?”

“You don’t want a choice. You want a Camembert sandwich with cornichons and arugula.”

“No, I want a choice.”

“But then… You might be less happy. And it wouldn’t be Heaven.”

I looked at him dubiously.

“You’ll get used to it.”

To be honest, they’d figured me out: I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than that sandwich. But it was the principle of the thing that bothered me. I ordered and ate, newly malcontent with the ever-stronger waves of bliss that engulfed me. After lunch I rose suddenly and stepped in front of a patchouli-scented bus.

The U.S. presidential election comes one day after a major deadline for my job applications, so this space may not feature a lot of new content between now and then.

For similar reasons I’ve also decided not to write a novel this November; following the Nov. 1 deadline, there are several more throughout the month that will prevent me from giving National Novel Writing Month much of my free time.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting on a tremendous backlog of intellectual clutter, some of it as much as seven or eight years old. Since “Jason’s intellectual clutter” seems to be the main point of Positive Liberty anyway, I’m going to try to fill in the gaps by posting from this backlog. It might not be every day, but I’ll do what I can.

In the poetry department, Paul Musgrave posted this piece by Constantine Cavafy a few days ago, and in my mind it’s rapidly becoming the poem of the presidential election season. I’m quoting it in full, but you really should be reading Paul’s blog if you don’t already:

Waiting For The Barbarians

-What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

-Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

-Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.

-Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

-Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

-Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

Second, there is this poem by Arthur Rimbaud, which I translated myself. I often think that if I failed entirely in history, I would want to try getting a job in translation instead. I always enjoy translation, and this poem in particular has long been one of my favorites:

Eternity

We found it found again.
What? –Eternity.
The sea gone out with the sun.

Sentinel soul
We’ll mutter a confession
Of the night so void
And the day on fire

With human opinions
With common impulses
Then you break free
And fly to… to…
Since from you loners

Satin-soft coals,
Necessity breathes
Without anyone saying “enough.”

There is no hope, there
No one no where no how
Wisdom with patience
The torture is sure

We found it again
What? –Eternity.
The sea gone out with the sun.

Eszter of Crooked Timber reports on time-to-degree and degree completion rates in the humanities; she links to Duke University’s figures here and here. In history, the average degree took nine years to complete. National statistics aren’t available for completion rates, but at Duke, only an estimated 64% actually graduated.

This, my friends, is obscene.

Anyone who truly deserves a PhD should be able to teach for a few terms, pass qualifiers, and write a book, all in less than a decade. (Full disclosure: I’m doing it in six years. It would have been less, but I had to repeat a lot of my work because I transferred from one school to another after my second year.)

There are two possible explanations for these surprising numbers.

First, it might be that a lot of graduate students are simply being carried with no real expectation that they will ever earn the degree. Given a 64% completion rate at a major university, this hypothesis is plausible.

Second, it could be that many schools artificially prolong their programs, even for the deserving candidates. Universities obviously benefit from this scheme, whereby they secure inexpensive teachers who are quite nearly as competent as their full-time faculty–but who are commonly paid one-sixth as much.

Of course, the two explanations are not mutually exclusive. If you want to know what’s wrong with American higher education, simply walk into any department in the humanities and social sciences. Count the number of both faculty and graduate students. Now imagine 64% of the latter all chasing the jobs of the former. Even accounting for those who don’t graduate, the numbers still point up an enormous imbalance.

Costs are also a factor. Professors are expensive; graduate students are cheap and almost as good. The rational choice for the universities is to hire fewer professors and more grad students. But from the standpoint of the grad students, this only exacerbates the original problem.

Economically, American universities are an example of oligopsony, a market with very few buyers (in this case, we mean the potential buyers of my tenure-track labor). In any given year, at most a few dozen schools will even consider hiring me, and because there are so many of “me” around, the universities also know perfectly well that they can wait if they wish.

The rational behavior for a seller in this market is to seek alternate buyers, but this is difficult indeed, and university support for such attempts is virtually non-existent. It’s hardly surprising that universities offer little support for humanities graduate students seeking high-paying jobs outside the academy–They simply don’t want to lose that pool of cheap graduate student labor.

As I see it, the only way to solve the problem will be to fire a lot of the graduate students, get the faculty back into undergraduate classrooms, and cut average salaries across the board. Abolishing tenure might not be a bad idea either. Perhaps there could be a sliding pay scale with a variety of standard multi-year contracts. Perform well, and next time around you will be offered a better contract.

Still more radically, universities could break down the barrier between graduate students and faculty altogether. The universities could simply recruit talented young scholars right out of undergrad and hire them to teach. Don’t wince. Practically speaking, they already do.

In this system, pay increases would kick in on completion of the MA, the PhD, published articles, published books, conference appearances, awards, et cetera. Again, it’s not so very different from what we do now–except that the current system offers virtually all its rewards in one big leap–the jump from “everything else” to “tenure-track appointment.” This is inflexibility at its very worst, and the effects of it can be seen everywhere in American universities.

The academy is the last economic sector still based essentially on the rules of medieval guilds, where masters get labor out of journeymen, and journeymen get the promise of one day becoming a master. And the academy suffers precisely the same problems that its economic ancestor did: oversupply of labor, conventionalism, inflexibility with regard to market demand, and just plain insularity (Honestly, how many people read academic history books anyway?). One way or another, ending the guild system would end all of these problems.

Lastly, this site defines an “admission against interest.” For good or ill, I believe I just made several.

On the advice of Timothy Sandefur, I celebrated Banned Books Week by rereading Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale. I had first encountered this work around ten years ago; I recently alluded to it in my post “Reading Lolita in Gilead.”

Following the discussion of that post, I’d been curious how well the book held up over the years. To my surprise, I found it even more relevant today. No one writes more gripping prose, and the topics could not be more timely.

Critics have likened The Handmaid’s Tale to 1984, A Clockwork Orange, and Brave New World, and with good reason. Novels of this type perform a tremendous intellectual task: They crystallize a critique of prevalent trends and ideologies; they offer the logical consequences that no one else dares to explore. At their best, they become a permanent antibody to the dangers that they expose.

The critique itself may come from the most difficult, obscure, or maligned corners of the academy–feminism, perhaps, or principled anti-communism, or just plain civil libertarian cussedness. Into these waters the average or even the intelligent reader may be unwilling to venture. The dystopian novel insulates him from his ideological prejudices, turns over his moss-grown worldview, and shows him what lies beneath.

The Margaret Atwood of 1985 isn’t perfect, of course, and by this I mean that she holds some beliefs I do not. But then, I suppose, she wouldn’t challenge me so much if she and I always agreed.

For example, Atwood seems terribly worried about population decline, even suggesting at times that the impending demographic collapse of the west spells doom above all for feminists. I believe she’s wrong, and I’ve written about it here.

At times she also seems quite a believer in the mysterious moral power of the gene, a power that both liberals and conservatives often hold in high regard, though it ought never to be held in any regard at all. To the extent that Atwood fears the depopulation of the West, she too shares in this prejudice, and it troubles me. We ought to hold as a contemptible vulgar superstition the notion that a person is better or worse off for injecting his genes into the subsequent generation. Do we care similarly for our mitochondria? It’s a good thing we don’t: Though vital for our survival, only women ever pass on their mitochondria.

But to inject one’s character into the rising generation, and to be certain that this character is the best it possibly can be–That is the true work of humanity. (See here for more details.)

Perhaps I’m being unkind to her by suggesting that she’s failed on this score. What she describes, after all, is a dystopia, a world whose cultural axioms are almost as wrong as they possibly can be. That both the enforcers of her dystopia and its dissidents seem to share the genetic fetish doesn’t necessarily say anything about the author.

Atwood also takes some delicious shots at the modern university, and, having survived several years of graduate school since my last reading, I grinned in wry new appreciation at one passage in particular. At the end of the book, a group of post-apocalyptic scholars meet at a conference to discuss the journal of the unfortunate protagonist, which is of course the book that we real-life humans have just finished reading.

They mull over its authenticity, veracity, point of view, motivation, and the like. All of them take for granted the equality of the sexes that is so completely absent in the main body of the novel. They crack jokes, make odd cultural references, and play with sexual innuendo in the way that can only be done by those who think themselves far, far above the subjects of their studies.

In short, they do all those things a historian might do with a manuscript today. They also do it with virtually the same intellectual equipment. And here is the passage that so delighted me:

If I may be permitted an editorial aside, allow me to say that in my opinion we must be cautious about passing moral judgment upon the Gileadeans. Surely we have learned by now that such judgments are of necessity culture-specific. Also, Gileadean society was under a good deal of pressure, demographic and otherwise, and was subject to factors from which we ourselves are happily more free. Our job is not to censure but to understand. (Applause.)

I often instruct my students not to pass moral judgments in their papers, chiefly because there is nothing more depressing than getting back the South Park-esque paper that begins “Adolf Hitler was a very bad man…” I tell them that moral judgment is too easy, that it comes automatically, and should be reserved for the very end of the historical process, if at all.

The great irony of Atwood’s conclusion is that from start to finish, her book is one enormous polemic against the bigotry of Gilead. What’s more, it’s a thoughtful, necessary, and altogether praiseworthy polemic: While she inveighs against the spirit of cultural critique, she can still dish it out with the best of them.

Truth be told, this passage has been on my mind for years. In a private journal of two years ago, I wrote,

I imagine these fictional scholars performing their task at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France: The library has carefully cultivated the image of a sanitized, post-ideological technocratic future. It is easy here to forget that Bertrand Delanoë, the openly gay mayor of Paris, was stabbed on Saturday night, and that he is still slowly recovering in a hospital. The newspapers have called it a near-fatal wound: “Delanoë a tutoyé la Mort,” announced Le Parisien. In the sterile rooms of the BN, it is easy to forget that Delanoë’s assailant acted on the most vulgar and backward of motives: hatred for the Republic, for elected officials, and for pédés–fags. How far yet we have to go before we are free of politics, free of history, free of intrigue, and yet how easy it is to evoke the beautiful illusion, to surround ourselves with that beautiful illusion, and to refrain so scrupulously from all forms of moral judgment.

So is polemic a good thing or a bad one? To put it simply, polemical writing is the only way we’ve ever thought ourselves out of a whole pile of bad ideas. It’s all the more necessary in this age of triumphant moral relativism and its stepchild, ignorance. But it’s still a lousy way to figure out what actually happened.

Lastly, Margaret Atwood was a prophet. I’m sure she had no way of seeing our present world when, in 1985, she wrote the following lines:

It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.

Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control.

I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.

With that, the United States ceased to be; the Republic of Gilead took its place. Gilead, that refused women the right to work, or read, or hold property. Gilead, that turned women into little more than chattel.

Depressingly, if Margaret Atwood had written these words today, someone would probably accuse her of siding with the terrorists: Remember the task at hand, she would have been told, which is to obliterate the enemy at all cost. Forget everything else.

With stern voices, they would remind citizen Atwood that some things are more important than, well, anything. And in light of those very important things, mucking around with feminism just isn’t worth it anymore.

Idle scare stories about the loss of our liberties aren’t worth it either. To combat the Islamic threat, women need to get back into the home and start birthing babies, for right now they’re outbreeding us. And our writers, well, they’ve got no business at all in questioning the liberties we’re giving up in the process.

Someone needs to get writing again, and soon.

Historians can’t be trusted. I should know; I’m one of them. Of course, bloggers can’t be trusted either, and this puts me pretty much at the bottom of the barrel.

Bloggers take pride in their second-guessing; they doubt each others’ facts almost by instinct: If you can disprove a fact that others have generally accepted, then you win fame, fortune, inbound links, and many new readers. Historians get almost no reward for exposing the factual errors of their colleagues; on the contrary, we are more often quietly annoyed by those who do.

Historians must struggle–and it really is a struggle–to refute even the most idiotic claims about the past. We can chase them from the academy and into the backwaters of conspiracy theory, but it often takes an embarrassingly long time.

Bloggers: You face a different challenge. Rather than needing months and years to refute an error, you need exactly the opposite, speed. And speed brings sloppiness. Finding the truth often degrades into finding what makes the other bobbleheads nod more vigorously. It’s possible to surf randomly through dozens of blogrolls before you find a single blog that differs in even the slightest point of ideology from the one with which you started.

But bloggers don’t suffer fools so gladly. If a major blog makes an assertion, it will inevitably be fact-checked by at least ten different minor bloggers in the first five minutes after posting.

Three of the ten will pronounce the new fact to be false whatever happens.

Three more will pronounce it true against the most daunting odds.

Three others will fail to understand the fact in any sense at all, but come down on one side or the other just for the sake of form.

And one will digress thoughtfully.

The argument comes and goes in a matter of days or even hours. Then it is forgotten.

The problem for bloggers is that they use a rough, insufficiently tested model of information-gathering. The problem for historians is that they use a frankly outdated model of information-gathering.

A graduate student is sent to a foreign country to read documents that are not in his native language, from a century that is not his own. No one is fluent any longer in the customs and idioms of the time, but this individual–often as not, a scared 20-something who is still prone to embarrassing errors of chronology–must make sense of the entire story in a way that satisfies his committee.

Wait, I spoke too soon. “The entire story” is never, never apparent at first sight. It’s scattered in various document sets, located across an unfamiliar city and guarded by surly librarians wielding arcane registration forms. A significant portion of “the entire story” was never written down. In my own field, some of it was destroyed in 1789; certain bits of it perished in 1830 and 1848, and a very great deal disappeared in 1870-71. The rest of it is in a slow and constant state of decay, a little more perishing with every passing year.

And what remains is the stuff of history.

It’s fact-checked, after a fashion, by a committee, who has never seen the documents in question, and who must rely on this scared 20-something to tell them what he has found. If it sounds plausible, it becomes the truth, and our young historian appends three new letters to his name. If not, the now-former historian moves on to greener pastures.

Sometimes a clever set of non-facts manages to fool the committee entirely, and they then confer the doctorate upon an undeserving student. Happily for him, fact-checking in history happens about once in a generation–if that. A great many facts are never checked at all.

Whatever the case, they are the product of an afternoon’s exhausted work, by a scared 20-something, in a foreign city, in a language he does not understand, in an ocean of lost cultural signifiers. And they’re the best we’ve got.

Even the deft and decorated older historians make egregious errors. I’ve recently been working with a lesser work by one of the most important scholars in my field. I’ve never worked with the individual personally, but it suffices to say that any specialist would recognize his name and that he has written several indispensable books. But in this particular volume–and within the first twenty pages no less–I found the following mistakes:

–He misspelled the name of another historian, rather badly.

–He misplaced the building where the event supposedly took place, claiming that it was in one neighborhood, while all primary sources and contemporary maps place it on the other side of the city.

–He claimed that the event took place at the instigation of one individual who was present. He cites no evidence to support this claim. He also attributed to this individual another action without any evidence, and this act she explicitly disavowed in her autobiography.

–To top it all off, he cited a passage in the secondary literature that simply does not exist, complete with author, title, edition, and page number. Searching for that passage, I read the entire book in question; it does not appear anywhere within it.

And this individual is among the most respected in my field. What errors will one day be found in my own work? What errors have I already made?

When I think like this, I could easily open my dissertation folder, select all, and delete. I sometimes think I wouldn’t even miss it.

Could historians learn from bloggers? You bet. It’s possible to imagine history conducted along radically different lines, yet still doing the same work as today–or possibly better.

Imagine, for instance, a historians’ wiki, modeled on Wikipedia, that would include within it the full texts of major monographs in history. Each passage could be noted and commented by anyone who wished–or, if you want to keep the authority of the academy sufficiently strong, only let the advanced graduate students and higher do it.

But either way, we could all be asked to vote on the veracity of different assertions, to check off whether we personally had seen the evidence on which the claims were made, and to state as specifically as possible where the errors were to be found. No longer would a historian go into the archives, get something wrong, and let it stand for twenty to thirty years. In the wiki future, historians would be rewarded–this part is crucial–on the basis of their fact-checking, not merely on how many articles they manage to turn out in a given time.

Annotation would grow on annotation; digressions and duplications would no doubt be common. But a wiki-based approach to history would break the authority of the published text in precisely the way that bloggers have done so convincingly for current events.

It would be an enormous task, of course. But I suspect it would prevent a lot of errors from cropping up in history to begin with and would mercilessly prune out the ones that are already there.

Bloggers, you could improve your field by… Nah, don’t even get me started.

Update: Ralph E. Luker of Cliopatra replies as follows:

Read any entry in the area of your expertise in that original wiki. How many errors or misconceptions do you find? Do you want to spend time and energy correcting them? Only to have someone, maybe someone who knows less than you do, come along behind you to correct your corrections? In the process of correcting you, do they import mistakes of their own? That is what we historians do in slow motion. Kuznicki and McDaniel merely suggest that we might do it in real time.

I really have to disagree with this characterization, since what I’m suggesting here would differ from Wikipedia in one important respect: Only those with some historical expertise would be allowed to post. Yes, I’ve read some dodgy articles in Wikipedia, and these might be fun to recap in a future post. But to be fair, I have also read some really good things too–and far more than what one might have expected from a group of random strangers. My bet is that with the professional expertise and connections among academic historians, the project would produce results well beyond anything we have now in the way of both quality and timeliness.

Update II: For whatever reason, this post has for many days received an inordinate amount of spam. Comments have been closed, although I encourage you to contact me with legitimate discussion here: jason — at — positiveliberty … dot … com.

I was recently asked if I couldn’t blog a bit more about early modern French history, and to make up for the perceived shortfall, I give you the Capital Cake Company.

Their sign is visible driving into Baltimore on Route 295, but it is missing the last two letters, transforming it into the “Capit Cake Company.”

Their motto? Let them eat cake.

A lot of my readers probably know this already, but the widow Capet–formerly Queen Marie-Antoinette of France–never really said this famous line.

What they may not realize is that the original quote actually came from Jean-Jacques Rousseau; he once told the story of a certain princess (no name given) who had just learned that the peasants had no bread to eat. “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” she supposedly replied. But “let them eat brioche” just isn’t the same, I suppose.

…but not this kind of minstrel show.

From gay.com’s Bull’s Eye Blog, we read of an exchange between Tim Russert and U.S. Senate candidate Pete Coors:

In an Oct. 10 appearance on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Coors, chairman of the brewing company, spouted the predictable right-wing Republican line opposing same-sex marriage and adoption rights.

But then Tim Russert artfully cornered Coors on his company’s sponsorship of the Black & Blue 2004 Festival in Montreal, which includes “raunch fetish night” and a “male nude revue.”

That led to this enlightening exchange:

Russert: “You see no inconsistency between sponsoring male nude revues and fetish balls and opposing gay adoption and gay marriage?”

Coors: “I don’t.”

Russert: “None whatsoever?”

Coors: “No.”

Russert: “And you’re comfortable sponsoring those kinds of events? That’s part of traditional family values?”

Coors: “Look, this is a very — you know, people are going to have a lot of different ideas about what this is all about. But it is about recognizing that everybody — everyone in this country — should be valued for what they are, and I believe that’s the way we recognize it at our company.”

We should be “valued for what we are.”

When Coors Brewing, an organization with a long and very poor record on gay issues, suddenly sponsors a raunch fetish party, they are valuing us for who we are. But when we ourselves demand to be treated as ordinary people–That’s an attack on the traditional family.

In a sense, it’s the hidden curse of diversity. For years, we insisted on the essential difference between gay and straight. We demanded that gays must be accepted as different.

Then some people apparently got the message: Gays are acceptable only if they are these strange, hypersexualized, fundamentally sub-human creatures. We can dance nude on stage or wet ourselves in public–but when we try to get married or raise a family, man, that’s sick. Most gay people will probably blame Pete Coors for this, and they’re not entirely wrong. But difficult as it is, I’d also put a fair bit of the blame on ourselves.

And, as I have asked before, which way is it to “just leave me alone, please?”