This is Not a Dinner Party

In 2014 a consortium of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency will launch the James Webb Space Telescope into a solar orbit at the L2 point, permanently in the shadow of the Earth.

According to the Wikipedia article, the primary objectives of the James Webb Space Telescope are four:

1. to search for light from the first stars and galaxies which formed in the Universe after the Big Bang,


2. to study the formation and evolution of galaxies,


3. to understand the formation of stars and planetary systems and


4. to study planetary systems and the origins of life.

The expected ten year mission life will cost the consortium an estimated $4.5 billion, or about $32.60 per U.S. taxpayer. At this late stage it's just an accepted commonplace that the government funds large science projects, but how strange it is that the pursuit of such sibylline truths as the origin of the universe and the formation and evolution of galaxies should be deemed worthy of the expenditure of billions of dollars of the public money (also strange that the perspective of biology has expanded to the point where a telescope would be considered a device essential for the study of the origin of life).

And of course these space telescopes are but a small piece of a giant system of university faculty, journal publishing, government agency bureaucracy, government contracting (Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems is the prime contractor for the James Webb Space Telescope), far-flung observatories atop mountains in exotic locales, laboratories cum cavern and valley-spanning machines (cyclotrons, synchrotrons, tokamaks, scintillators, laser interferometers). Somehow the truths offered by cosmology have been determined to be of such import as to command budgets into the tens of billions drawn from the coffers of the whole society. And it's worth noting that as many of these projects are carried out by intergovernmental consortiums, they are not only national projects, but civilizational and sometimes global efforts.

What bizarre conception of the truth have we worked ourselves around to that the most advanced machinery that the species is capable of constructing are necessary for these expeditions? In a certain sense, there is something striking about religion, in that theogony seems like the kind of thing that should be without costs.

But more realistically, truth is a product of the expenditure of labor. When our system of the world was young, and much of nature was laying about as yet undiscovered, little labor was required for new insights. Mere reflection could in many cases suffice. As our system has matured, greater labors have been required (the decreasing marginal utility of verum quaerere). Apparatus became necessary — simple at first, but of growing complexity. Galileo — the great yeoman of the truth — could sire science with little more than an inclined plane. But the contrivances needed to trick out the next most obscure natural effects, to bring the investigation under sufficient control for observations to be made, to limit the range of effects to just those under scrutiny, to achieve consistency in repetition, the energy and materials necessary to proceed to ever more exotic realms of effects, all of these things have undergone similar developments as the rest of our labors: massive injections of capital replacing labor, but also extending our activity into realms that would previously have been impossible, no matter the amount of labor available.

In our era, production of new and novel truth has become perhaps the single most capital intensive — both durable and financial — endeavor in which we engage.

Regarding the possibility of the Earth remaining hidden from detection by alien civilizations by running silent, New Scientist points out that it's already too late (Shostak, Seth, "It's Too Late to Worry That the Aliens Will Find Us," 3 July 2010):

We have been inadvertently betraying our presence for 60 years with our television, radio and radar transmissions. The earliest episodes of I Love Lucy have washed over 6,000 or so star systems, and are reaching new audiences at the rate of one solar system a day. If there are sentient beings out there, the signals will reach them.

(Related: "The Noosphere Visualized," 1 January 2009)

Charles Mudede's explanation for why the slave becomes the thesis of the next order dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is surprisingly straightforward and elegant ("Marxism and Insects: Slave-Making Ants," SLOG, The Stranger, 13 May 2010):

Hegel argues that because the world is more and more made and shaped by slave labor — serving, building, putting "all to rights" — the world makes more and more sense to slaves and less and less sense to the masters ("so utterly helpless are the masters"). The masters only know how to destroy; the slaves know how to create.

If you follow the link and read the entire post, know that it is the latest installment in Mr. Mudede's recent ant phase. His explanation of Hegel quoted above is a takeoff from a description of slavery amidst the ants found in Darwin's On the Origin of Species. For the slave revolt among the ants, definitely read the article that commenter @10 recommends (Rodríguez, Álvaro, "Enslaved Ants Revolt, Slaughter Their Captors' Children," DiscoBlog, Discover, 18 August 2008).

Enough of all this who makes a mean martini and who doesn't shit. It's three (maybe four) ingredients. If you can't make a good one it's because you're an unschooled lout.

Don't get me wrong: I exceeded myself just last week hitting color, aroma and blend, but per my last post, it's not about making a perfect one — in a pluralistic world no such thing exists — it's only about the minimal qualification of avoiding bad ones — and not to get me wrong again, I hold this level of ineptitude against a bar, keeping in my head a running list of places who fail even this minimal standard.

Besides, most of the important decisions about good cocktails are made at the liquor store, not while attending to the bottles, shakers and glassware. What's the right ratio of gin / vodka to vermouth? Anything from the apocryphal "glance across the room" up to four- or five-to-one. How much olive juice is tolerable in a dirty martini? Judging from the shit-talk any ol' amount you prefer. Choose high quality ingredients, meet the minimum standard, and the rest is a matter of taste — for which it is appropriately widely known there is no accounting.

So let's all stop posing as if mixing cocktails is like laying microchip circuitry or calculating digits of pi. It's an improvisational art.

Jonathan Alter's book, The Promise, about the first year of Barack Obama's presidency, is due out this week and Aaron Wiener has a bit of a preview of it ("Out of the Bailout Bedlam, Obama Emerged on Top," The Washington Independent, 4 May 2010). At the height of the financial crisis in 2008, both Senators McCain and Obama returned to Washington for a joint White House-Congressional leadership briefing, Senator McCain famously staging the publicity stunt of "suspending" his campaign over developments. Mr. Alter has Senator Obama saying as he left the meeting,

Guys, what I just saw in there made me realize, we have got to win. It was crazy in there. Maybe I shouldn't be president, but he [McCain] definitely shouldn't be.

This is admittedly an off-the-cuff remark, probably not representative of an explicit, deeply held political philosophy, but nevertheless I want to highlight it as a fundamentally conservative attitude toward politics and positions of great responsibility. The objective in selecting officers for high office is not to achieve perfection or optimum outcomes, but merely to avoid catastrophe.

What this most reminds me of is the story of the meeting between President-elect John Kennedy and Robert McNamara. Kennedy had offered McNamara the position of Secretary of Defense, but McNamara protested, "Mr. President, it's absurd; I’m not qualified," to which Kennedy responded, "Look, Bob, I don’t think there's any school for presidents, either." Both represent a recognition of the limits of human judgment and the capabilities of normal people elevated to high office (contrast this with the belief of President Bush that he was carrying out the will of God).

This is of a piece with what Robert Capps, writing for Wired called "the good enough revolution" ("The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine," vol. 17, no. 9, August 2009, pp. 110-118) or John Maynard Keynes's bit of wisdom that it’s better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right (The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money [1935]).

It's also worth pointing out that in the great (mostly right wing) debate of democracy versus its contenders — aristocracy, oligarchy, dictatorship, hereditary monarchy — it is in this high-consequences area of avoiding the worst outcomes where democracy most outperforms the alternatives. And it is in avoiding the occasional catastrophic rather than excelling at the upper end that the game is decided.

I have been saying that the fastest growing religion in the United States is not the non-denominational, evangelical mega-churches, or Mormonism or any other such easily identifiable thing, but the hazy category of "spiritual but not religious." Today the front page of USA Today brings more grist for the mill (Grossman, Cathy Lynn, "Survey: 72% of Millennials 'More Spiritual Than Religious'," 27 April 2010):

Most young adults today don't pray, don't worship and don't read the Bible, a major survey by a Christian research firm shows.

If the trends continue, "the Millennial generation will see churches closing as quickly as GM dealerships," says Thom Rainer, president of LifeWay Christian Resources. In the group's survey of 1,200 18- to 29-year-olds, 72% say they're "really more spiritual than religious."

Among the 65% who call themselves Christian, "many are either mushy Christians or Christians in name only," Rainer says. "Most are just indifferent. The more precisely you try to measure their Christianity, the fewer you find committed to the faith."

The line about seeing churches closing as quickly as GM dealerships was a nice gag, but more evocative for me would be to say that if the trend continues, we will soon start to see churches in the U.S. closing as quickly as they are today in Europe. Declining religious sentiment is an aspect of modernization and what's amazing is that religion has managed to persist with such strength so long into the age of scientific reason.

In addition to the point about "spiritual but not religious", this survey also makes Daniel Dennett's point that belief in belief is far more widespread than actual belief. There are a significant number of people who self-identify as "Christian" when asked, but don't attend church, don't ever pray, don't read the Bible, don't think "what would Jesus do", or "God's watching" in their moral considerations, don't take religious identity into consideration in forming their interpersonal associations and don't talk about god to other people.

Some sociologists need to get on this "spiritual but not religious" category. What do people who so identify believe? I have no idea. I imagine that being so ill-defined it's a bewildering hodge-podge of belief.

I always joke that "spiritual but not religious" means you like green tea and yoga. But maybe there's no accident in these two tropes. The future belongs to Asia and "spiritual but not religious" might be an early manifestation of Asian culture beginning to exert the kind of global influence that Western culture used to enjoy.

Is "spiritual but not religious" a sort of scientific illiteracy? There are all these people for whom religion has no practical consequence in their life, but find the alternative unpalatable? I've known a number of people who believe in what I call a "prime mover" god: the whole big bang story sounds too implausible so they invoke god to get the story rolling, but then he drops out as a narratively compelling actor.

I know plenty of people who are essentially atheists but owing to the stigma of the label, simply won't take the final step of self-identification as such.

Is it a bad faith version of Pascal's wager, where people think of non-declaration as a hedge: If I don't say anything, god won't know and I may still be eligible for the afterlife should I turn out to have been wrong.

Do the "spiritual but not religious" respond to religion in politics? I imagine that to be "spiritual but not religious" means rejection of religion as ideology and dogma in favor of religious sentiment. Political invocations of religion tend to be religion as ideology and dogma at its most strident. But many of these people continue to identify as Christians. Is their identification sufficiently deep for them to respond to the identity group politics of religion?

Steve Clemons in his summation of President Obama's winning streak on nuclear issues invokes the notion of "strategic depth" ("Obama's Nuclear Wizardry and the Iran Factor", Politico, 13 April 2010). It's not an uncommon term, but one rarely given much by way of explication. Fortunately Mr. Clemons isn't just breaking it out to conceptually pad his article, in that he calls out an element of this week's accomplishments that serves as an excellent illustration of the idea:

In a quick succession of deals focused on pre-empting a 21st-century nuclear nightmare, Obama has mended the foundation and infrastructure of a global nonproliferation regime that United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Vice President Dick Cheney and others of the pugnacious nationalist wing of the last administration worked hard to tear down.

And, by bringing together 47 key leaders, Obama is signaling to all stakeholders that a nuclear crisis with Iran and other potential breakout states would undermine the global commons.

Yet he is not vilifying Iran or its leaders. He is not making the same "axis of evil" mistake President George W. Bush did.

Instead, Obama is showing the benign and constructive side of U.S. power to other great states like India, China, Brazil and Russia. He is also inviting Iran to get in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and get back into a club that matters — where Iran could be respected for adopting a sensible course.

The Obama administration is restoring the non-proliferation norm to "a club that matters." For the previous administration, either a state wanted to adopt a certain policy, or they didn't; there was no context in which they may have preferred to do one thing over another, so there was no need to apply the nation's diplomatic energies to construction any particular sort of international régime.

That was a strategically thin diplomacy. If it appears that the future of the international system is the gradual breakdown of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, if the system is lowly regarded, treated with apathy and abandonment on the part of the great powers, if declining compliance and the emergence of a number of new nuclear powers seems the likely future, then there is little to recommend compliance or membership. What incentive is there to join a system one anticipates failing in the near future?

But if the NPT seems the way of the future, if great energies are devoted to shoring up and extending the non-proliferation framework, compliance is the norm among the respectable states, if the nuclear powers are making headway toward their Article VI obligations, if the possibility of new nuclear powers seems increasingly remote, then that's a strategic context in which an entirely different set of decisions will seem the best means to a country's objectives of security, prestige, diplomatic latitude and so on.

Further, broadening the circle of compliance and advocacy takes some of the lime light off of the United States. This makes it much more palatable to recalcitrant elements. In the case of Iran, if faced with knuckling under to the hated United States, the answer will certainly be no. If asked to cow to a group of flunkeys subordinate to the United States, the prospects won't be much improved. But joining the global consensus among nations is something they might do. It allows them to save face among their citizens and their international constituents should they chose to back away from their nuclear program.

By imbuing the present architecture with a sense of a bright future, increasing compliance and broad support, the Obama administration is bringing the weight of a whole international system to bare on Iran. This seems like a program with more potential than just the usual carrots and sticks.