Winter solstice wishes

The winter solstice is near and it is the time of making wishes. As an unrepentant atheist, I send people generic "happy holidays" wishes, but as any generic or abstract phrase - it is pretty meaningless. What does "happy holidays" really entail? What exactly would need to happen during the holiday/winter solstice time to make a person happy? What is it that would make a person like me happy during a holiday season in a similar way that finding a new fantastic toy under the dying, electrocuted x-mas tree makes a 10 year old child happy ? 

Bringing a 10-year old into the picture is a useful mental exercise not only because it conveys spontaneous, unadulterated, and unqualified joy, but also focuses the mind on tangible objects. A 10-year old will not be satisfied with vague abstractions, he or she is hoping for tangible objects that can be touched and manipulated. An abstract promise of "peace love and happiness on earth" simply will not do. It may entail something specific to an adult, like cessation of bombing people back to the stone age in the name of democracy, sexual gratification, or winning state lottery, but they are pretty meaningless to a 10-year old. Worse yet, they look like a cheap way of weaseling out of giving a good old tangible present: a model train, a doll, a bicycle or a pair of skates. . 

So suppose that a forest fairy who is in the business of fulfilling people's wishes appears before you and says "Make your winter solstice wish, and it will be fulfilled." Most people's homes are full of gadgets: i-pads, i-podS, i-phones, big screen tee-vees, big ass lawnmowers, vehicles of all sizes and shapes, garments, fancy-schmancy kitchen appliances - in a word, anything but shit and a haystack - so I do not think another gadget will do. Getting together with friends and celebrating goes in the right direction, but we do not need holidays or forest fairies to do this. In fact, many people practice this on a regular basis all year round. 

So after pondering it for a while I thought "how about socialism?" People like me consider socialism to be a good thing - so wishing socialism during holidays seems natural. Alas, there is only one problem - socialism sounds like one of those dreary abstract ideas that cheap adults use as a way out of buying a good old fashioned tangible present.

However, socialism does not have to be an abstraction - it has been turned into one by people who like abstractions: academics, lit-critters, the commentariat, and assorted peddlers of intellectual commodities. Socialism also means living a good life in a good environment, which means good old tangible things like, say, a good job, a nice place to live, accessible health care, decent education, efficient means of transportation, opportunities to spend your time with your family and friends, pursuing activities you enjoy, like fishing in the morning and writing poetry in the evening, or if you don't like fishing and are not poetically inclined, tending your garden or building a model railroad in the morning and playing Scrabble or doing crosswords in the evening. In a word, things that you can see, touch and manipulate in a way a 10-year old can see, touch and manipulate his or her x-mas present. 

So what kind of socialism do you wish as your winter solstice present? Be specific - avoid abstractions and sweeping generalizations of the smash-the-state-abolish-the-wage-system variety. Focus on your social proximity, the place where you live and work. What specific, tangible things you would like to see happen in your social proximity, if you were to enjoy or winter solstice gift of socialism in the same way as a 10-year old enjoys his or her good old fashioned tangible x-mas present. 

In a word - think of socialism in your social proximity, not socialism in books or far away places. And think of specific, tangible and positive things, like a health clinic, school, or public transportation system rather than the absence of this or that. And please share your wish list with others. I am really curious how people visualize socialism.

A Short Soliloquy on Freedom and Fishing

When I was a student, deep down behind the Iron Curtain, an event took place that shaped my thinking about freedom for the years to come.  I was invited to a boozing party organized by the local university students.  The times were the 1970s and it was chic to be a political dissident, so the conversation centered on kvetching about “the system.”  Alas, there was a fellow there, a student at the local Higher School of Agriculture we were told, who remained silent. 

For those unfamiliar with the Eastern European scene, a word of explanation is in order.  There was a steep social stratification between the cities and the countryside.  The cities were urbane and high culture, the countryside was parvenu.  By extension, higher education institutions training for urban professions were high class, while those training for rural pursuits, such as agriculture, were déclassé.  There was even a derogatory term for the latter derived from the acronym for “Higher School of Agriculture” which, when pronounced in a certain way, connoted defecation.  To translate the situation into the American scene, it was like a duck showing up at a cock fight. 

As the empty bottles piled up, the ag school guy finally broke his silence and asked “Why do you guys hate our country so much?”  Onerous silence followed.  It was taken for granted in the Eastern European intelligentsia circles that “the system” sucked.  No further proofs or explanations were needed or expected.  Asking the “why” question was, in fact, a form of the breaching experiment pioneered by the sociologist Harold Garfinkel, a violation of an unspoken social norm that leaves everyone perplexed and bewildered.  People looked at each other, not sure what to say, but the challenge needed to be countered.  A bunch of philosophy students not being able to answer a simple question posed by a peasant meant defeat and humiliation.  So shaking my grey cells from the alcohol induced stupor I spurted “There is no freedom here.”  The ag school guy was quick to reply.  “What do you mean there is no freedom?  You can do what you want.  You can meet who you want, you can travel places, you can go fishing ….”  The “fishing” – undoubtedly high on the agricultural agenda - was nonetheless one word too many. The poor peasant should have finished with travel.  The crowd burst with uncontrollable laughter “Ha, ha, ha you can go fishing and you are free, ha, ha, ha”. 

The challenge was deflected but I knew that “we,” the urbane philosophy students at an elite liberal arts school, had lost to a lowly peasant from the Higher School of Agriculture.  Unable to answer his simple question, we simply laughed the guy out of the stage.  That is what country bumpkins do when challenged with philosophical questions.

Freedom is like god, a word that people like throwing around on every occasion, but nobody really knows exactly what it means. Or rather it means whatever one wants it to mean, that is, nothing in particular.  They are like Rorschach blots onto which people project their thoughts.  Their appeal lies not in what they denote, but what they connote, or to be more precise, in the feelings they evoke in the audience.  Such words are the building blocks of what the philosopher Harry Frankfurter calls “bullshit.”

To be sure, much ink has been spilled on the subject of freedom.  Academic distinctions and careers have been produced, lofty speeches delivered, crowds enthused, fortunes made, people swindled, sent to prison or shot, places ransacked, wars fought, empires created – all that in the name of freedom.  Yet, as the philosopher Edmund Burke aptly observed, freedom is as common as air or water – everyone has it save those few who are locked up and chained.  All people have air, water and freedom regardless of their wealth, residence, social standing, religious beliefs, political convictions etc.  What varies is the price they have to pay to use them.  If a dictator proclaims that people have to pay for the water they drink or be whipped and jailed for crossing a line in the sand or saying things offensive to the dictator – the people did not lose their water or freedom.  They still can drink and do or say what they want – all they have to do is to pay a higher price for their choices.  If they find the prices imposed by the dictator too high, they can move to another land which itself entail a cost, so the decision they face is the choice between the price they pay to the dictator, the price they pay for moving to another land, or refraining from actions that they deem outside their price range. 

What distinguishes freedom from air, water and similar nearly inalienable things is the connotations that the former evokes but the latter do not.  Uttering the word “freedom” creates warm glow, the feeling of something good and desirable which, it is often hoped, will be extended from the utterance itself to the person uttering it.  When I say “freedom” I in fact say “trust me, I am a good guy, I like good things in life.”  It was this connotation that prompted me to counter the peasant’s challenge with uttering the word “freedom.”  “Us” are the good guys because we like freedom, but “them” the functionaries and the apparatchiks are the bad guys because they do not.  That also explains why most demagogues liberally dispense the word “freedom” at the sight of a slightest challenge.

What it does not explain, however, is what happened next in my story – the uncontrollable laughter caused by uttering the word “fishing” after the word “freedom.”  The easy answer to this puzzle is that the laughter was provoked by the juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane – a common literary device used to produce comedic effects.  But that merely begs another question, why one ordinary activity (fishing) is construed as a profanity in the context of sacred freedom, but another ordinary activity (taking a train or a bus) is not.  In fact, Karl Marx mentioned fishing as one expression of individual freedom in the communist utopia, juxtaposing it with writing poetry at some later time of the day, so there is clearly something about freedom and fishing that appeals to human imagination. 

One answer to this puzzle lies in the idea of the sociologist Emile Durkheim.  Durkheim was grappled by a problem originated by the philosopher Immanuel Kant answering the ages old question whether human knowledge is subjective or objective.  His answer was “both.”  There are subjective and objective elements in human knowledge, and indeed all human perceptions of reality.  What we feel and sense is objective, that is, reflections of what is “out there” rather than figments of our imagination as idealist philosophers maintained.  However, how all our perceptions and indeed all our thoughts are organized into coherent wholes is subjective, that is, controlled by apriori forms of perception and reasoning residing in human mind rather than “out there” in reality, contrary to what realist philosophers maintained.  Kant’s solution, while ingenious, nonetheless posed a pernicious question about the origins of those apriori forms themselves.  Since different people use different apriori forms to organize their perceptions and thought process, asking about the origins of these forms is a legitimate philosophical pursuit.

Durkheim’s answer to this question was probably one of the most fruitful inventions in social science.  Apriori forms are ingrained in human mind by society in which individuals live, by ritualized forms of social behavior, such as religion or ceremonies, which in turn, reflect the idealized form of social organization, that is, how different roles, functions, statuses, rewards, etc. are distributed among members of that society.  If a biological analogy can be used here, apriori forms of cognition are imprinted in human brain, just as behavioral patterns are imprinted in the brains of young animals by following their parents or their flocks.  A duckling will treat any large bird it sees around after it hatches as its “mother”, and there are indeed reported cases of ducklings following hens or even humans if the mother ducks were absent.  Of course, human brain is far more complex and flexible than that of animals, so it is capable of acquiring and holding many imprinted forms during its life time.  However, once “imprinted,” the apriori forms organize human thinking and perceptions in a manner that can be compared to photographic lenses – they alter the image we see by focusing on certain elements of the image, and blurring or filtering out other elements, but they are neither a part of that image nor visible in it.  This invention led to the emergence of modern cognitive science as well as theories of organizational behavior.  The famous “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” postulating the influence of language on variations in human perceptions of the world is another example of this idea.  The speakers of a language that lacks the concept of snow are very bad at perceiving variations of snow when they encounter it.  It is not that they cannot see differences in, say, snow consistency but rather they do not know whether these differences are relevant. 

But what does that have to do with freedom or, for that matter, fishing?  Freedom, like god, belong to the category of nondescript feelings and conceptions grounded in general human experience. When we are born, we are totally dependent on our parents for survival, food, protection, etc. which imprints in us the idea of an omnipotent human-like being that watches after us, aka “god.”  This is a generalized nondescript feeling that gets specific and manifest shapes from the cultural environment in which we grow up.  If we happen to live in, say, India our conceptions of god take the form of dancing men and women, or monkey-like figures, if we happen to live in a Catholic country, then our conceptions of god take the form of an old bearded man on a throne or a youngish guy nailed to a cross, and so on.  What matters here is that our generalized experience of god – which originates in general human condition of growing up – is shaped by our cultural experience that presents some empirical forms as legitimate manifestations of god while other as illegitimate.  Portraying god as a monkey is perfectly legitimate in India, but it is a sacrilege in Catholic countries. 

Ditto for freedom.  We get our generalized experience of freedom from our childhood, as absence of parental supervision and control.  We feel the thrill of doing new and exciting things when parents are not watching and this gives us the positive vibes associated with freedom.  This generalized positive feeling is again shaped by the social environment in which we grow up.  If we are born to a family of serfs or slaves, then the ability to change place of residence or hunt and fish on the lord’s land is indeed a legitimate expression of freedom.  If we are born to bourgeois family, however, fishing is parvenu pursuit of house servants and of little concern to us.  On the other hand, the ability to travel or grub money without hindrance from governmental authorities is of significant concern, and freedom takes the form of the unhindered ability to engage in these pursuits.  This explains why peasants see freedom as the ability to fish while the bourgeoisie see it as freedom from government regulations.  It also explains why the latter see the juxtaposition of freedom and fishing as comic, if not sacrilegious.  Fishing is one of many mundane pursuits that bourgeoisie can pursue for pleasure, and as such lacking any significance.  Using it as an example of the sacred freedom to grub money is like using the image of a monkey to express the idea of deity.  Only primitive parvenus can do it in good faith, otherwise it is a joke of the “holy shit” or “fart in an opera house” variety juxtaposing the sacred and the profane.

Americans are enamored with the notion of freedom to the point of calling their piece of real estate “the land of the free.”  I can see the historical roots of this infatuation – the indentured servants shipped off to the colonies, the slaves captured in Africa and sold like cattle to American plantation owners, the refugees escaping imprisonment by dictators or invading armies – they all dreamed of freedom understood as the ability to hunt, fish, marry and raise children without fear of someone else hindering that ability.  It was a simple, and in a way, a noble human dream to live a normal life.  But some way down the road that dream was captured, colonized, and subverted by conniving entrepreneurs, businessmen, shysters, gangsters, and sociopaths who sought a different kind of freedom – that from government oversight and social control hindering their criminal or money grubbing activity.  At that juncture, the freedom has been defined as “liberty” or lack of government oversight and social control of any kind, the ability to get what I want and to kill anyone who stands in the way.  And, strangest of all, the peasant who used to dream of the freedom of fishing to feed his family went along with this subversion.

This is another puzzle that begs an explanation.  Why do people adopt ideas and viewpoints that are irrelevant or even contradictory to their own interests?  Many answers have been given to this question, but I would like to hint one suggested by my story of the freedom of fishing – because guys like me, the aspiring intellectuals, laughed the guys who wanted the freedom to fish out of the stage.  In other words, because intellectuals stopped identifying themselves with people who work for a living, and instead became lackeys of the money grubbing entrepreneurial class, begging for scraps from their tables and aping their manners and their speech. 

I personally managed to get over the anti-statist bent and shed the libertarian/anarchist conception of freedom, not an easy feat for an Eastern European intellectual who grew up behind the iron curtain.  The drivel of the imbecilic American political discourse liberally dispensing the words liberty and freedom was a helpful push factor.  Studying sociology rather than economics or business management was a strong pull factor.  But many of my friends and acquaintances still profess this notion of freedom colonized by businessmen, gangsters, and sociopaths.  Maybe they too see the light some day.

A sociologist whose name escapes me at the moment once observed that intellectuals a peculiar socio-economic class – they have more power than they think but not as much as they think they should have.  This builds on the idea of “organic intellectuals” proposed by Antonio Gramsci.  Organic intellectuals are producers of ideas that have close affinity to particular socio-economic classes, the working class, the professionals, the bourgeoisie, and so on.  As such, they are able to draw power form the class interests they represent, and articulate and amplify those interests.  Gramsci hoped that the development of the organic intellectuals of the working class is the key to transforming a bourgeois society into a socialist one.  If there is such a thing as organic intellectuals of the working class in the US, EU or elsewhere they indeed face an uphill battle, as neoliberalism has thoroughly colonized the public discourse.  A good way to start is to take back the stolen concept of freedom that is the pivot of the neoliberal ideology.  Freedom resonates with universal human experience and liberating it from the clutches of neoliberalism will travel a long way in liberating the entire public discourse from this scourge.  We should be able to say that all we need is freedom to fish and feed our families without fearing of being laughed out of the stage by neoliberal hacks.

What is social class?

What is social class?  The classical Marxist view on the subject is that class is a group of people who have the same relation to the means of production.  In a nutshell, people who own means of production (factories and capital investments) form the capitalist class, people who sell their labor to the owners of the means of production are the working class, those who both own their means of production and work in them (e.g. small shop owners) are petite bourgeoisie, and those who do not sell their labor but rather live off others (criminals, prostitutes, etc.) are the lumpenproletariat.  The Weberian (and neo-Marxist) view, introduces additional elements defining class: occupation, social status, socio-demographic characteristics etc.  As a result we have multiple classes or class fractions defined by various combinations of these characteristics.  A good illustration of this concept of class can be found in the book of French sociologists Pierre Bourdieu “Distinctions.”

One of the most important corollaries of these theories of class is the claim that class membership determines collective interests of its members (“class interests”) and this in turn can predict behavior.  This is link between empirically observable “objective” characteristics and subjective states of mind (interests) and their outcomes (behavior) are the main draw of this argument for empirical social scientists, such as myself.  It is so, because it allows a “clean” causal argument without falling into the chicken and egg fallacy that often plagues arguments about states of mind and behavior.  “Why did he do it?”  “It was in his best interest?”  “And how do we know it was in his best interest?”  “Because he did it.  He would have done it if it were not in his interests.”  Class membership makes it possible to empirically define interests without relying on the alleged empirical manifestations of those interests, i.e. purposive behavior.

I am currently involved in a book project, to which I am a major contributor, whose central premise is a relationship between socio-economic class and institutional social security arrangement.  This premise is built on previous research in the neo-Marxist tradition (Barrington Moore, Dietrich Rueschemeyer etc.) arguing that the strength of the working class was essential for building democratic institutions.  The book argues, in a nutshell, that the strength of the working class is essential for building collective security arrangements - the stronger the working class the stronger collective welfare protections arrangements (aka the welfare state), the weaker the working class the stronger the individual welfare protection arrangements (e.g. charitable organizations or reliance on family networks).  It is of course more complex than that - but this is the main gist of it. 

But the more I study it, the more I doubt that this premise is true.  To begin with, Australia had historically had strong working class vis a vis landowners and industrial bourgeoisie - yet it developed predominantly individual welfare protections and rather weak welfare state.  Her neighbor New Zealand is in the same league.  What is more, in countries with strong collective welfare protections, like Sweden or Norway, the push toward collective security arrangement primarily came not from the working class but from the professionals and government administration.  Ditto for the UK, the social welfare was spearheaded not by Labour but by professional bureaucrats (Beveridge, etc.). 

Germany is even a more telling case - social security arrangements were first introduced by Otto von Bismarck, basically against the wishes of both the high bourgeoisie and and labor.  His main motivation was that collective security was instrumental in his project of German unification - it created a sense of collective "German interests" while neutralizing radical elements among high bourgeoisie and militant labor.  Similarly in the Netherlands and Belgium - collective security was an element in a defense mobilization against the German threat in the 1930s. 

In short, the connection between working class and collective security arrangements is at best dubious, if existing at all.  The question is why, because on the surface such collective welfare security arrangements are in the material interests of the working class.  Of course, the significance of it for the US is quite obvious - it raises the question why would a significant proportion of the 99 percent who would materially benefit from collective welfare arrangements actively oppose such arrangements (the What is the Matter with Kansas thing).

The standard explanation of this is based on the "false consciousness" thesis - that people have been duped in one way or another to act against their own interests, I find that explanation unsatisfactory, because it is not an explanation at all, but a semantic argument to save the central premise that socio-economic class is central driver of political behavior from empirical refutation.  The refutation part comes from the fact that the purported cause (objectively defined class interests) does not have the claimed effect (behavior leading to the attainment of those interests).  In the same vein, a priest or a shaman may tell people to pray for rain, and if they follow his advice and rain does not come, his answer is that they probably did not pray hard enough. 

My own thinking goes in a different direction - that broad concepts of class based on a single distinguishing factor, such as the relations to the means of production - are not very useful and bound to produce falsehoods like every other generalization.  We need to define class in a more precise way by taking into account several other factors in addition to the relations to the means of production, including occupational status, level of formal education, cultural preferences (thank you Bourdieu) as well as socio-demographic factors such as gender, ethnicity or nationality.  From that point of view, evangelicals and tea party supporters in the US form a class - but it is unclear how to define that class.  Calling them petite bourgeoisie does not do it because it is based on the false consciousness assumption - those members of the working class that do not have working class consciousness must be petite bourgeoisie.  Moreover, petite bourgeoisie referred mainly to small shop owners - and most evangelicals and tea party followers do not belong to this category.  

So this raises the first question - what defines them as a class?  It may sound like an academic hair splitting, but it entails a serious problem of practical consequences.  If people have objectively defined class interests, why do they act against those interests?”  If we accept that they are rational actors i.e. know what they are doing, it stands to logic that the claimed connection between class interests and behavior is not supported by facts.  Ideologues and religionists may not want to be bothered with facts, but empirical social scientists do not want facts contradicting their theories.

The second issue is how class interests are defined.  The simplistic - and false - answer is that every individual knows his/her best interests and those interests are aggregated to a collective level by some spontaneous process.  That is basically the classical and neo-classical economic theory, which I may add is grounded in Anglo-Saxon individualism.  In reality we know that people can hardly agree on anything, let alone such nebulous concepts like "class interests."  Studies show that even in formal organizations, which have much tighter rules and control mechanisms than socio-economic classes - there is always a struggle in defining what the goals and interests of the organization are.  So for socio-economic class - it is far more difficult and contentious to define class interests.

My own thinking goes in a different direction again - class interests do not emerge from below but are rather imposed from above, by a vanguard party if you will.  However, there are many cliques vying for the status of the vanguard party, and the question is which one of them actually becomes one.  My hypothetical answer to this question is the clique that faces the least resistance and opposition - which is consistent with institutional theories organizational behavior.  In other words - the clique that expresses views that look most in line with what is consistent with the "stock knowledge" or a set of beliefs and value taken for granted by members of a given collective - be it organization or nascent socio-economic class becomes its vanguard party that defines the class interests and class itself.

To sum it up, socio-economic class is defined not by some objective characteristics of its members but by the vanguard party being followed by members of that class.  That is to say, social classes are social spaces created by various cliques vying for the status of the vanguard party that attract different followers.  This is pretty much like sports team and their fans - the “you will build they will come” thing.  People may like sports in general, but that does not translate into liking football, soccer or baseball, let alone following a particular team.  The reverse is true - sports teams create particular sports and niches within those sports which gradually attract followers.  In the same fashion, tea party followers are a class because the "vanguard" tea party defines them as class and they consider that claim to be legitimate. 

Stated differently, social classes are socially constructed.  They are constructed by vanguard parties, small groups of professional activists or leaders who articulate collective interests of other people (organizations, communities, nations, etc).  These articulated interests act as a catalyst attracting different followers who adopt them as legitimate expressions of their own views. How much following a particular articulation of interests attracts depends on three broadly defined factors: the affinity of that articulation to the “stock knowledge” of a particular grouping of people, the opposition this articulation faces from competing vanguard parties and from the broader environment, and the relevance and plausibility of the articulation to address a specific set of problems faced by the prospective followers.  Anyone can belong to that class regardless of occupation, relations to the means of production, cultural background, gender, ethnicity etc.  There may be correlations between these characteristics and membership in different classes, but they just that - correlations not causes or defining factors.

Islamism vs. Islam

This is a reply to a piece by Hatem Bazian "Religious Authority, State Power and Revolution"

Religion has always been in the business of legitimating the authority of the state - be it Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, or Hinduism.  The modern state is an exception - its legitimacy is manufactured by its claim to superior economic rationality - that it - its superior capacity to deliver material goods.  It has been working rather well for the advanced capitalist countries, and it worked for a while for the developmental states challenging the hegemony of the advanced capitalist states.  

However, the capacity of capitalist economies to deliver the goodies is fraught with problems of social stratification. This means that some will get them in excess, while most will suffer shortages.  This posed a serious threat to the legitimacy of secular capitalist states, exploited by various Communist movements in the 19th and 20th centuries that promised to distribute the goodies to all.  Western Europe staved off that challenge by the creation of a welfare state that combined superior economic rationality of capitalism with economic redistribution of communism.  The developmental states, otoh, failed on one or both of these fronts.  The Soviet style economy achieved redistribution but started failing behind on economic rationality.  The developmental states of the Middle East (except perhaps Turkey) failed to achieve redistribution and to achieve economic rationality on a par with advanced capitalist economies.

As a result, these developmental states lost their legitimacy.  In Eastern Europe, this was manifested by the "downfall of communism" and the implementation of Western European welfare capitalism.  In the Middle East, this loss of legitimacy of the secular developmental state was a bit more complicated.  The wholesale transfer of welfare capitalism  along Eastern European lines was not feasible, so the loss of legitimacy resulted in growing repression by secular elites to maintain their power by brute force.  This further eroded the legitimacy of these states, and the need for an alternative emerged.  That alternative was Islamism - which must NOT, and I repeat, MUST NOT be confused with Islam.  

Islamism is a form ideology that the US historian Barrington Moore called "Catonism" after the Roman politician Cato the Elder.  Catonism is an ideological reaction of elites whose traditional grip on power has been challenged by economic development and modernization.  It represents the glorification of "tradition" or rather its idealized image to counter the ideological influences of modernity.  Catonism is thus characterized by anti-intellectualism, hatred of foreigners, and the advocacy of stern "traditional" virtues. 

Islamism is a form of Catonism manufactured by state elites as an ideological weapon against their democratic opponents.  PakistaniGeneral Zia ul Haq is a good example - he restored to Islamism as an ideological weapon against his opponent Ali Bhutto.  This was a pure political move that has nothing to do with religion, tradition, culture and what not.  Zia ul Haq used religion in a way politicians use any form of knowledge or culture - for support rather than enlightenment.  This, btw, not that much different from the way Soviet leaders used Marxism or for that matter the way the Roman Emperor Constantine used Christianity.  In all instances, they selected certain traits from a certain body of theological or philosophical thought to manufacture ideology that legitimizes the power of a political elite or the state.  

It is important to note that this recourse to religion as "Catonist" ideology owes its status to political-military elites rather than to religious scholars.  The latter are basically nothing more than mouthpieces for the political-military elites that use them.  However, it also creates an opportunity for religious scholars to grab power for themselves.  This happens in situations of political vacuum, when power is "dropped on the floor" so to speak.  This happened in Iran where secular authority was undermined first by the Western powers conspiring against the Mosaddegh government and then by the downfall of the corrupt Pahlavi regime.  At that point, there was no institutional force in Iran capable of governing a state except the Islamic clergy that used this opportunity to grab the power for themselves.

The Iranian model is fundamentally not replicable in other "Islamist" states as long as secular military-political elites can maintain their grip on state power.  In those countries, Islamist scholars will either play the role of mouthpieces on the payroll of these elites, or elsewhere they will be suppressed by force if they try to pull an Iran, as it recently happened in Egypt. 

The bottom line is that Islamism and its adherents have as much to do with Islam as the Nazi Sturmabteilung have to do with Christianity.  Both are gatherings of thugs used by reactionary political forces to grab state power and destroy their liberal/democratic opposition in countries that happen to have Islamic or Christian majorities.  That is to say, this has nothing to do with religion, theology, or philosophy and everything to do with the fascist bid to grab state power.

Math and Science

Mathematics is to science what ketchup is to food - it improves the taste of otherwise unpalatable dishes, but it kills more subtle flavors of everything else. This is particularly true of social sciences, where the availability of cheap computer numerical data manipulation programs fundamentally altered not only the direction of research, but also what kinds of data are being collected.

Since qualitative data are more difficult to process by computer software, their collection often takes the back seat in favor of quantitative – or rather pseudo-quantitative - data collected by opinion surveys.  They are pseudo-quantitative, because they use numerical scales representing intensity (e.g. strongly agree, somewhat agree, neither agree not disagree, etc.), but they cannot be processed as “real” numbers. 

For “real” numbers, such as 1,2, 3, 4 etc. we can say that the difference between 1 and 2 is the same as that between 3 and 4, and that 4 is twice as big as 2.  However, when those numbers are being used as mere symbols representing multiple choices in an opinion survey, they cease to be “real” numbers.  They can be replaced with letters a,b,c,d, etc. or even pictograms representing different choices cooked up by survey designers. The reason why they are not “real” numbers but pictograms is that we cannot say that a distance between choice a and choice b (e.g. strongly agree and moderately agree) is the same as between b and c (moderately agree and neither agree nor disagree). 

Research shows that subjective perceptions of quantities themselves differ from their numerical properties.  For example, a 5 percent change in probability is perceived differently depending on the overall probability of an outcome (i.e. whether it is 10%, 50% or 90%).  When it comes to opinions and perceptions, that level of subjectivity is even higher.  For example, if I only “moderately agree” with an opinion on, say, capital punishment, it may not take much to persuade me to be an agnostic (neither agree nor disagree).  However, if I have a strong feeling (strongly agree or strongly disagree), it typically takes much more to move me into the “moderate agreement/disagreement” direction. 

Yet, assigning numbers to these options creates a false illusion that they represent numerical quantities.  More conscientious researchers may refrain from treating them like “real” numbers and limit their analysis to reporting frequency counts, but the availability of cheap data processing software make such analysis look “pedestrian” and a pressure is applied to use more “advanced” techniques.  I am speaking from experience here.  Some time ago, an anonymous peer reviewer of my paper using frequency-based contingency tables showing distributions of opinions collected in a survey called this technique “pedestrian” and suggested one based on regression.  In other words, let’s treat them as “real” numbers. This advice reminds me of the old economist joke – he could not find a can opener on an uninhabited island, so he assumed he had one. 

The problem is not limited to the assumptions about quantitative properties of the data, but the kind of research that gains dominance in social sciences with the advent of cheap computational tools.  This new research paradigm favors questions that can be answered by numerical or quasi-numerical data, because such data are easy to collect and process.  Hence the proliferation of various opinion surveys.  The idiocy of this approach lies not only in the misinterpretation of numerical data, but more importantly, in intellectual laziness is fosters.  Researchers abandon the difficult intellectual task of trying to understand how people think and under what conditions in favor of giving them simplistic multiple choice tests involving pre-fabricated opinion statements, because such simplistic multiple choice tests are easy to score and process by computers.  If this is not the proverbial drunkard’s search, I do not know what is.

Another implication of this observation is that science, or at least social science, is not progress achieved by systematic testing of scientific theories as Karl Popper believed, but rather movements between what Imre Lakatos called “scientific research programmes.”  The purpose of a scientific research programme is not theory testing, as Popper believed, but ‘problem shift” – that is, the construction of auxiliary hypotheses that render contradicting evidence irrelevant to save core assumptions of a favored theory from empirical refutation.  Problem shifts may take the form of crude “gate keeping” of the orthodoxy, for example in economics, as decried by John Kenneth Galbraith, or more subtle forms, such as changes in academic fads or the availability of new instruments of scientific research. 

The use of computer software utilizing mathematical analysis in social science represents such a problem shift due to new tools.  The problems researched and theories proposed to explain them tend to be limited to those that lend themselves to being processed by computerized tools.  This puts social science on the trajectory to become what theology was in the Middle Ages, an impressive logically coherent intellectual edifice whose empirical relevance and predictive power is on a par with that of a chimp randomly pushing computer buttons.  

Why I find many radical lefties mildly annoying, but libertarians and right wingers repulsive ...

... even if many of their ideas do not diverge that much.

So, I find many people on the left annoying.  It is not that I dislike their political position. Au contraire, while I am not a radical, I find myself much closer to the position championed by the left than that found on the center – be it demand for universal health care and public services, to the opposition to wars and the national security state, to defense of human and civil rights, to support of immigrants and gay marriages, and to the demand for a fundamental systemic change and redistribution of wealth. 

My annoyance with the lefties is more meta-cognitive (more about in a moment) than ideological.  To be more precise – lefties love abstractions.  They love systems and systemic forces while paying little or no attention to “men behind the curtain.”  For them, the world is a clockwork mechanism in which things follow a preordained order just as Leibniz claimed. Except that they put Leibniz on his head and claim that this preordained world order is evil, as it serves the interests of “world capital” (whatever that is).  And when they do not kvetch about evils of capitalism, they escape into hagiography of their patron saints (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, etc.) and interpretations of their holy scriptures as the ultimate truth about the world in which we live.   It is that copious knee-jerk recourse to scriptures and abstractions that I find irritating.

The usefulness of abstraction lies in its explanatory power - but if it obscures more than it explains - it is not only useless, but it becomes a noise making apparatus and thus it is dangerous.  A belief that there is a unified "world capital' with unified interests that are attained most of the time is the worst kind of conspiracism that there is. A claim that there is a cabal of a few hundred puppet masters secretly pulling strings more believable than this crap.

For anyone who came to any understanding how complex systems work, it is hard to avoid a conclusion how indeterminate those systems are.  That is to say, even in the ideal world of mathematics its is impossible to find *the* best solution or outcome, as many different solutions are possible.  A good view on this has been provided by Paul Ormerod in his book "The death of economics"  and also by Kenneth Arrow (Arrow's Impossibility Theorem).  So even if the "best outcome" cannot be found in the work of mathematical abstraction, one can only imagine how messy it becomes in the real world plagued not only with measurement errors, but also subjective perceptions, conflicting interests, coincidences, unpredictability, plain stupidity, inflated egos and the like.

A fear of circumstances beyond human control is as old as humanity itself.  It is the reason for magic and religion that gave an illusion of control - or at least understanding- of what is unpredictable, uncontrollable or inexplicable.  Of course, our modern "rational" world does not believe in magic anymore, so we have to invent "rational" magic and its shamans.  Hence the demand for the consultants who crunch their numbers to create an illusion that decision makes whom they serve are "rational" and "know what they are doing."  This is understandable - these managers and decision makers do not want to appear clueless and impotent to the public.

What I find surprising, though, is that the critics of these managers and decision makers not only swallow this illusion of control raw, but elevate it to even higher level by purporting its near omnipotence and infallibility - that even the managerial class itself would have problems believing.  This goes well beyond the ordinary fear of the uncontrollable.  I see two possible explanations of that - psychological and functional.

The psychological explanation is that people with high IQ often have a certain form of mental disorder manifested in the compulsive seeking of order and regularities where none exist.  This has been nicely portrayed in films like "A beautiful mind"  or "Pi" .  In this particular case the relatively high intelligence of these individuals is a disadvantage rather than advantage in the same way as a high power engine is a disadvantage in a vehicle with faulty brakes.  If I ride a 50cc moped and my brakes fail, I can still manage to avoid crashing by braking with my feet, but when I drive a 1000+ hp sportster and the brakes fail, the crash is nearly certain.  Ditto for high IQ individuals who fail to balance their System 2 rationality with System 1 sense of reality - they are lost in their own abstractions and often crash like protagonists in "A beautiful mind" and "Pi".

The functional explanation is that people who had high hopes of achieving "systemic changes" - as many lefties did - but realized that their hopes failed to materialize want to make sure that this was not due to their own faults or mistakes.  To do so, they portray their adversaries as far more powerful and in control than they actually are, to create an illusion that they were overwhelmed by a force majeure that was impossible to overcome.  It is easier to accept a failure when you believe that there was nothing that could be done to win, than when you suspect that you fucked things up by your inflexibility, dogmatism, intransigence, partisan bickering, and inability to work with others.  

Those two explanations often work in tandem.  They also point out to why so many people find it so irritating to be around many lefties - they are highly intelligent and on the correct side of the issues - but mad as hatters. 

To be sure, this infatuation with abstraction and doctrinaire inflexibility is not confined to the left.  It is also widely spread among libertarians and right wingers.  Yet, while I view doctrinaire lefties as mildly annoying I have visceral gut revulsion toward right wingers and libertarians, even if some of their claims are not that far removed from those of doctrinaire lefties.   

The reason goes beyond ideological claims or even rational and gets into the realm of meta-rationality of cognitive frameworks, of ways of processing information.  There seem to be two different such frameworks, which on the pain of great simplification I can label as core- boundary balanced, or core or boundary-centric. 

Some cognitive scientists, e.g. my former professor at Rutgers Eviatar Zerubavel  see cognition in terms of spatial relations, as ‘fields’ that have a “center’ and ‘boundaries.’ A good illustration is the concept of ‘neighborhood’ that has its geographical center and it is delineated by its boundaries on the periphery.  The “core” is the essential characteristics that objects denoted by it possess, e.g. to “be red” the light must have a wavelength of about 650 nm.  The “boundary” is the line that separates members denoted by that concept from all nonmembers, e.g. orange light that has a wavelength of about 590 nm.  I selected the color spectrum as an illustration quite deliberately, to underscore the fact that boundaries are often fuzzy and set rather arbitrarily.  All people who are not color blind are likely to agree what red and orange colors are, but you will not find such agreement to separate these colors near their boundaries. 

With that in mind, it is possible to define a concept in two fundamentally different ways – by focusing on its core features i.e. the essential characteristics that objects denoted by it possess, or by focusing on its boundaries i.e. features that separate its members from non-members.  In normal discourse you need of course both – you obviously have to know what the core features are, but you also need to be able identify the boundaries.  However, it is also possible to pay far more attention either the core or the boundary, which I believe defines different cognitive frameworks of processing information.

The cognitive framework that focuses primarily on the core i.e. the central defining attributes but also pays nontrivial attention to boundaries is a “balanced” one.  This is how the so-called normal cognition operates.  We are primarily concerned what the core attributes of a concept are, and that is why we construct definitions, but we also want to know how to separate members denoted by that concept from non-members.  That is why we devise operational rules.  However, a “balanced” framework accepts the fact that there are “borderline cases” than cannot be easily decide to be “in” or “out” and can live with this ambiguity.

In “unbalanced” frameworks, however, two things can happen.  One is excessive focus on the core features and the neglect of boundaries.  This is the way mystics and hippies see the world – everything is connected with everything else and everything falls into one gigantic category of one organic fluctuating being.  All has the same core principle, therefore all is one.  On the other extreme is the framework that excessively focuses on the boundaries while neglecting the core.  This is the nit-picking or academic hair splitting style of thinking that focuses on minute differences while forgetting profound similarities.

These cognitive frameworks also guide our political and everyday life thinking.  A good example is attitudes toward immigration.  The balanced framework is that we are a nation of immigrants and our core principle is tolerance of newcomers, but we certainly need to have some reasonable border control.  However, this border control does not need to be perfect, and we can live with this imperfection as long as our core values of tolerance are not too severely strained.  The core-centric framework focuses mainly on our core value – tolerance, and ignores the boundary issue.  These folks essentially believe that we should have open boundaries and welcome everyone who shows up.  The boundary-centric framework is its opposite – it does not care about core principles, all it cares is protection of boundaries.  Hence its propensity for building fences, "drawing lines in the sand,"  and dismay toward those who refuse to "toe the line."

Core- and boundary-focused frameworks are not necessarily mutually exclusive – certain individuals may adopt both, albeit in different situations.   But that is a subject for another discussion.  More to the point, people using any of these “unbalanced” frameworks often appear annoying to those who use different ones.  I would characterize myself as using the balanced framework, perhaps with a slight tilt toward the core-centric side.  That is perhaps why I find people with core-centric frameworks – the mystics, the hippies, the floozies, the dope-heads and the like funny, sometimes mildly annoying, but not particularly repulsive.  This also explains why I find the core-centric abstractions of many lefties – such as those that see only “world capitalism” and fail to draw boundaries between, say, a welfare state capitalism of Sweden or European Union, and the nasty neoliberal variety found in the US, funny and sometimes mildly annoying, but generally tolerable.  

It is boundary-centered people that I find repulsive and their views viscerally antithetical to mine, regardless of what they actually claim. My visceral disgust toward right wing and libertarian frames is grounded not as much in the content of their ideas, some of which may make sense, but in their boundary-centered cognitive framework that in my book is synonymous with extreme mental rigidity and doctrinaire hair splitting.  It is not rational but meta-rational, that is far more influential on what and how we think than commonly believed.

Public money private pockets

Recently the Washington Post published an article on the transit center being built in Silver Spring, MD where I live.  In short, the center is unsafe and unusable even before it opens because of shoddy design and construction.  This is of considerable interest to me for two reasons.  First, I am using public transit daily, and having to walk around a defunct transit center adds considerable inconvenience to my daily commute.  Second, that boondoggle is financed by my tax dollars.

A typical reaction of the gullible American public to this news can be summarized in one line "government failure"  and it is sheer nonsense.  Yet another example of how the American mind is inculcated with business propaganda.  

I do not think it is the local government failure.  It is the utter failure of the "public-private partnership" business model that prevails in this country.  Public money private pockets, which is a recipe for private businesses milking the taxpayer and cutting corners to boost their bottom line.  Bloomberg News had an article on this not long ago showing that comparable public projects cost about twice as much in the US than in EU where the governments have much greater capacity for designing and implementing projects themselves instead of contracting them out .  

The "defense" industry has been using this public- private partnership scheme for decades to milk the taxpayers for military gadgets, and the developers are following the suit.  Another good example is the newly opened Paint Branch High School in Montgomery County (also financed with my tax dollars) - inferior design, shabby construction, and the taxpayers footing the bill for what is labeled as "education spending."  A more appropriate way of labeling it is "corporate welfare state" in which taxpayers subsidize corporate salaries and profits.

This is not a failure of the local government.  This the failure of the economic model in which private business is a sacred cow and the government is a scapegoat for all private business failures.  As long as it so, failures like this will be a part of business landscape, private developers will laugh all the way to the bank, and the taxpayer will keep paying for it through the nose.  It also a proof that the public sector's  capacity to carry out public works itself instead of relying on private contractors will better serve public interests than the crooked public-private partnerships.  Keep this in mind next time you hear pro-business mouthpieces calling for "small government."