Note to regular readers–apologies for not writing all month. I have been really busy with my research in the mathematical domain. My ongoing work is on the question of the persistence of quantum entanglement around rotating black holes. This is interesting because, first of all, no one understands by what underlying mechanism entanglement works. I outlined it my post on the nature of reality, but let me give a shorter explanation here.

Entanglement for soccer moms

Suppose you have two fair coins. Imagine that every time one comes up heads the other comes up tails, i.e., they are perfectly correlated–even though they still have probability 1/2 of coming up heads individually! This is basically the case of maximal entanglement. Of course, we don’t observe this with coins but that is because of decoherence so that the probability of this happening with coins is vanishingly small. What is crazy is that this actually happens with quantum phenomena like spin, as has been verified experimentally innumerable times. No one knows by what mechanism such coordination takes place so this is a very mysterious phenomena. One would like to understand it better.

Rotating black holes 

Theoretically, it’s clear that entanglement persists at arbitrarily large distances in flat spacetime. Might this be true for curved spacetime? This is quite relevant since we quite obviously live in the domain of general relativity (GR). In fact, our GPS devices would be a few hundred yards off if they did not make GR corrections to Newtonian mechanics. Essentially, one wants to know if this works the same way in spacetimes that are exact solutions to Einstein’s equations of general relativity. Mathematically, rotating black holes are just an interesting example of such spacetimes with just enough symmetry to allow for analytical solutions (Crucially, the Dirac equation for spin-1/2 particles separates into purely radial and axial equations which can then be solved explicitly.) [Nerd alert: This has to do with the existence of Killing-Yano tensors, which not only guarantee the separation of variables, they also ensure complete integrability–which means that the number of constants of motion that exist equal the dimension of spacetime. For a freely falling particle these are the rest mass, energy, angular momentum and the surprising fourth first integral called Carter's constant which comes from the Killing-Yano tensor as well.]

Now, one would like to investigate whether entanglement persists in the extremely curved vicinity of a rotating black hole, maybe with one particle inside the event horizon? The point being that the resolution of each particle’s spin is then independent of the curvature of spacetime (gravity). Or, more interestingly, that it gets entangled with the black hole itself.

Since the spin of a particle couples to the curvature of spacetime, spin-spin entanglement spills over into entanglement of spin and momenta which are both described by the spinor representing the particles. (Entanglement is expressed by both particles having the same wave function which is just a spinor in differential geometry.) A rotating black hole has a very interesting feature. The event horizon is the boundary of the black hole–from which even light, and therefore nothing else (current results about superluminal neutrinos aside) can escape. There is another horizon outside it called a Killing horizon. Between these horizons, in what is called the ergoregion, you have to rotate with the black hole; it takes infinite energy not to. I suspect that this spilling of spin entanglement into spin/momenta entanglement reaches a limit as one hits the Killing horizon and enters the ergoregion. However, this is an open question.

The vicious interior

The interior of a rotating black hole is considered unphysical. Mathematical physicists literally call it vicious, which is a technical term for a region where time travel is possible. In fact, the situation is much worse. One can go from any event–a point in spacetime (t,x,y,z)–to any other event in the interior by going enough number of times around the ring singularity (it is quite literally a time machine). However, the case with one observer inside and one outside is still of purely mathematical interest.

As fascinating is the (mathematical) existence of wormholes. In a maximal extension, one wants to account for the entire history of all photons (light rays or null geodesics). Now Kerr spacetime (an isolated rotating black hole) has a maximal extension with an infinite tower of spacetimes smoothly connected by wormholes.

Information loss

The topic under discussion is of course related to the question of whether information is lost inside black holes. Do we lose the information contained in the internal degrees of freedom of particles that disappear inside a black hole? We have good reason to believe that information contained in any physical system is conserved. Hawking and Thorne had a bet with Preskill and Don Page on this. Hawking conceded the bet in 2004, prematurely in my opinion.

So far

What I understand so far is that one can correct for the curvature of spacetime and recover the entanglement in this regime. It is mathematically nontrivial–a hard and messy exercise in differential geometry, but so far it seems doable. Things are moving quickly and the hope is that we will have an explicit demonstration soon and move on to investigating the ergosphere.

I hope you found this as fascinating as it seems from the trenches.

Back on Earth

In Bahrain, there were sham elections, protests and further brutal crackdown by the US-Saudi backed al Khalifa regime. Saleh is miraculously back in action in Yemen further complicating the situation which has begun to look more and more like a civil war. Anwar al Awlaki, the American born al Qaeda ideologue was killed by a US predator drone strike in Yemen recently. Liberals who care about his citizenship have raised questions about his extra judicial killing even as they were barely done celebrating the extra judicial killing of bin Laden. On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Americans erupted in predictable triumphalism.

The Syrian National Council was established by dissidents in Syria while it’s key neighbours Turkey and Iran have started pushing against the Assad regime. The US has been reported to prepare for a post-Assad Syria and has decided to let it’s client state, Turkey, manage the transition–as the policy tensor has long expected. The Assad regime just retook Rastan, a strategic town between Hama and Homs. Things are still very fluid. There was even movement in Saudi Arabia where King Abdullah granted women the right to vote men into powerless positions on a toothless body.

The Palestinian authority is in intense negotiations with the Americans and Europeans over getting recognized as a state by the UN. Americans want them to live with the status quo and the Europeans want the Vatican option (observer status without recognition as a sovereign state). The Palestinians are inspired by the Arab spring, which is quite interesting and tells us something about the changing nature of the international discourse. I hope to write about that soon.

Others who have been inspired by the Arab spring are radicals who are occupying Wall St. The protest seem limited but they are spreading across North America. It is probably going to be a dud but it has the potential to be the biggest game changer of them all.

Next up: a review of A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey. I hope to post it sometime later this week. Stay tuned.

[Update: I apologize for the delay. It turns out that Harvey's central thesis is more or less based on Duménil and Lévy's classic Capital resurgent. In fact, I have seen numerous references to this book in the work of Giovanni Arrighi, Noam Chomsky and Kevin Phillips et cetera. I cannot do justice to the review without reading it. The meat of the claim is that the ruling elites went on the warpath in the 1970s and 80s in a bid to restore class power, whence the shift to finance, neoliberalism and the Reagan revolution. As is clear from my writing here, my understanding is closer to Robert Reich's thesis. Note that we are all in agreement that we live in a regime that is functionally an oligarchy, "rule of owners". The disagreement is more nuanced. I have a problem with assigning intent, especially to imaginary "ruling groups", especially when purely structural/institutional explanations suffice. But I will try to keep my mind open as I read Duménil and Lévy. Let's see if they can convince me.] 

[Readers of this blog might be familiar with my friend and philosopher of science who introduced me to the Van Fraassen paper that I talked about in my post on the nature of reality. He has agreed to publish the following thesis on The Policy Tensor. I will reserve my comments for the comments section. You are welcome to join the conversation.]

One thing that gets said in textbooks on macroeconomics is that it follows from the assumption that firms maximize profits that workers will be paid their marginal product — that is, that their compensation will match their contribution to the firm’s output.  This is a rather incredible thesis.  After all, one might think that a wage which is proportional to the laborer’s contribution is a fair wage.  But it is surprising, to say the least, that the firm’s fairness could follow from the firm’s greed.

Here’s how the argument goes:  For simplicity’s sake, assume that a particular firm produces its good using only labor, and no capital (no machines, tools, or intermediate goods).  Suppose, for instance, that the firm owns a large stock of land for which it pays no rent, and that it employs laborers to work the land with their bare hands.  The firm then takes the good — yams, let’s say — to market and sells them at the price of 1 dollar per yam.  (These assumptions just make the math a bit cleaner — everything I’m about to say would go through just as well without them.)

Let’s denote the total number of yams produced in year with ‘,’ the total number of laborers that the firm hires in year with ‘,’ and the wage it pays those laborers with ‘.’  Since the number of yams the firm produces is determined by the number of laborers it hires (more laborers means more yams and fewer laborers means fewer yams), we can write:

That is, yams produced in year is a function, , of laborers hired in year .  Let me make two assumption about the functional form of .  (These assumptions, unlike the ones above, do matter.  The argument won’t go through without them.)  The first assumption is that is an increasing function of — more laborers means more yams.  The second assumption is that is a concave function.  That is: it looks something like the function shown in figure 1.

Figure 1: The Production Function

This assumption amounts to the claim that laborers bring the firm diminishing marginal returns — if hiring its first laborers brings the firm yams, then hiring extra laborers brings the firm fewer than extra yams.  This could be due to the fact that there is only so much land to be worked, so that, with each extra laborer, there’s less extra work for that laborer to do than there was extra work for the previous laborer to do.

 
Now, let’s consider the firm’s profits in year , which I’ll denote ‘.’  The firm earns a dollar for every yam sold at market, so it takes home from the market.  However, it doesn’t get to keep all of this profit, because it has to pay each of its workers the wage .  Since there are workers, the firm makes a total payment of to its workers.  Therefore, total profit in year is given by:

We assume that the firm is greedy — that is wants to maximize .  Then, the firm faces the following optimization problem:

And the first-order condition of this maximization problem is

But this just says that the wage is equal to the marginal product of labor, .  If we think that this is a fair wage, then it follows from profit maximization that laborers are paid a fair wage.  Incredible!  Perhaps Ayn Rand was right all along!

Unfortunately, even if we accept the dubious premise that the marginal product of labor is a fair wage, this argument does not show that firm’s greed will induce them to pay this fair wage.  What the argument shows is that the marginal product of labor will be set to the wage — and not that the wage will be set to the marginal product.  That is, profit maximization explains why the marginal product is what it is, rather than explaining why the wage is what it is.  If you think about it, the optimization problem I set up above couldn’t possibly explain why the wage is what it is, because that maximization problem takes the wage as given.  That maximization problem,

asked the following question: ‘Given that the wage is set to , what is the value of that maximizes the expression ?’  That is: we are asking how many laborers the firm will hire, taking the wage as a given.  We are decidedly not asking how much the firms will pay its laborers, taking the dispositions of the laborers as given.  In this optimization problem, the firm is choosing how many workers to employ; it is not choosing how much to pay them.

The assumption in play here is that firms are wage-takers.  They don’t have any control over the wage that they pay their employees.  That wage is set by the conditions in the labor market.  And since the firm is a small participant in the labor market, it can’t exercise any control over the wage.  If it were to offer a slightly lower wage, then it would not be able to find any workers at all, since there would be other firms who would be willing to pay those workers more, and the workers would prefer working for those other firms at that higher wage.

Suppose that we relax this assumption.  Suppose that we modify the model so that the labored supplied, ‘,’ is a function of the wage the firm offers,

and the firm must now maximize profits by deciding not how many workers to employ, but rather the wage at which it is going to employ them.  That is: the firm picks the wage, and then laborers get to make a decision about whether or not they want to work at that wage.  The number of laborers who say yes depends upon what wage the firm offers.  Of course, the firm doesn’t have to hire all the workers who say yes, but they can’t hire any more workers than the number that say yes.  In a situation like this, the firm faces the following maximization problem:

subject to 

Since the firm gets to choose the wage, however, it will surely lower the wage if labor supplied, , is in excess of the labor it demands, .  So, the constraint will be an equality , and we can reduce the above optimization problem to this:

where is a function of .

Interestingly, the first-order condition for this optimization problem is this:

That is, the firm will choose to pay its laborers their marginal products minus .  This term depends (roughly) on how many workers are willing to supply their labor for wages slightly higher and slightly lower than the offered wage .

From this perspective, we can now see that, in the first maximization problem, our assumption that the firm was a wage-taker really amounted to the assumption that was infinite.  That is, we assumed that the function looked like this:

Figure 2

(where is the equilibrium wage.)  This assumption amounts to the claim that there are no laborers in the work force who are willing to work for any less than the equilibrium wage .

But, of course, this assumption is absurd.  There are many reasons to supply your labor for less than the equilibrium wage.  For one, there are search and wait costs associated with finding other firms who will employ you at a higher wage.  However, if we relax this assumption, and assume that the labor supply function the firm faces looks something more like this:

Figure 3

Then it will turn out that is everywhere finite, and that, therefore, the wage a profit-maximizing firm will choose to pay its workers will be strictly less than their marginal product.

Moreover, there was nothing special about the firm I just considered.  So, what goes for it should go for every profit-maximizing firm in the economy.  But if every firm in the economy is offering wages lower than the marginal product, then that just means that the equilibrium wage is going to be lower than the marginal product of labor.  So, as long as we assume that firms are the ones who get to set wages – and that, for instance, employees don’t get to negotiate with their employers – profit maximization doesn’t, as a matter of fact, imply that workers are paid the putatively fair wage of .  What it implies is that workers are paid systematically less than their marginal products.

This is more a summary than a review of Society Must be Defended by Michel Foucault. It is a remarkable collection of lectures that Foucault gave at the College de France in 1976. This is my attempt to wet the beak of the reader. In what follows I will sometimes shamelessly borrow the words of the author without bothering with quotation marks. 

All history is the worship of Rome

Until the sixteenth century, all historical discourses were in a sense discourses of power. History was made up of stories about Kings, their great ancestors, their valor and their glory. These narratives of court historians were a naked exercise in the legitimization of royal power. These were, in fact, directly related to the rituals of power. The philosophico-juridical discourses of Hobbes and Locke, in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas–are discourses of right, universality and law. These are also in some sense; not in the sense of the court historians, but in a functional sense; discourses of power. They serve to legitimize the order: peace, law and sovereignty. The discourse of Machiavelli and his decedents–Richelieu and Kissinger for instance–is concerned with a sort of technical exercise in statecraft, and in this sense is completely subsumed by the narratives of power, about power, about the State.

In short, up until the sixteenth century, both the historical and the philosophico-juridical narratives, are ultimately about the State, about the King. From the Middle Ages on, the essential role of the theory of right has been to establish the legitimacy of power. The problem of sovereignty has been the central problem of right in Western societies–the technique and discourse of right has functioned to dissolve the element of domination in power, to mask it, and to reduce it by two things. The legitimate rights of the sovereign on the one hand, and the legal obligation to obey on the other. In this sense, the system of right is completely centered on the King.

By domination, Foucault does not mean the brute fact of one over the many, or one group over another, but the multiple subjugations that take place within the social body. The system of right and law are permanent vehicles for the relations of domination, and techniques of subjugation.  

There are two things to note before we go further. First, in the universal philosophico-juridical discourses, the theory of right, there are only two characters–the individual and the sovereign. The King exercises the right to judge, punish and kill the individual. Right, law, divine law and natural law are about the justice or otherwise of this exercise of sovereignty. Second, thanks to the establishment of the State monopoly over violence, war has been consigned to the outer limits of the State, to the periphery, away from the body-politic of society.

War beneath the peace

In the seventeenth century a new discourse appears. The new discourse says this–the monopoly of violence imposed by the State, the juridical-political order of the regime, is just a thin veneer of peace and order. Under it, running up and down, and cutting through the body-politic of society is constant war. This is the discourse of counterhistory. 

This analysis was made in binary terms–the social body is not made up of a pyramid of orders or of a hierarchy, and it does not constitute a coherent and unitary organism. It is composed of two groups, and they are not only quite distinct, but also in conflict. The conflictual relationship that exists between the two groups that constitute the social body and shapes the State is in fact one of war, of permanent warfare. The State is nothing more than the way that the war between two groups in question continues to be waged in apparently peaceful forms. No matter what philosophico-juridical theory may say, political power does not begin when war ends. War has not been averted. War obviously presided over the birth of States: right, peace, laws were forged in the blood and mud of battles, massacres, and conquests which can be dated and specified. Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power. War is the motor behind institutions and order. Peace is waging a secret war–a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other.

This discourse that comes about in the seventeenth century is the first discourse in postmedieval Western society that can be strictly described as being historico–political. When the new subject speaks of his right, it is both grounded in history and decentered from a juridical universality. It bypasses the great philosophico–juridical systems. This discourse has nothing to do with Hobbesian notion of sovereignty, nor with the Machiavellian politics. This discourse, so to speak, cuts off the head the of the King. This discourse actually begins properly in the seventeenth century, twice. In pre-revolutionary and revolutionary England, and then fifty years later, in France at the end of the reign of Louis XIV. The war that is going on beneath order and peace, the war that undermines our society and divides it is a race war–ethnic differences, linguistic differences, differentials of force, vigor, energy and violence; the conquest and subjugation of one race by another. The clash between the two races runs through society from top to bottom and we see being formulated for the first time by Bougainvilliers.

Note that this is very different from the war of Hobbes. That primitive war of every man against every man, is born of equality and takes place in the element of that equality. He says that if there were marked differences between men, then one of two things will happen; either there will really be a clash between the strong and the weak–and that clash would immediately end with the victory of the strong over the weak, and that victory would be definite precisely because of the strength of the strong; or there would be no clash because noting their own weakness, the weak would surrender even before the confrontation began. In other words, in a state of insurmountable power asymmetry, there is no war. So what happens in a state of insufficient differences? In other words with a flat society? This then leads to the institution of a Commonwealth and the birth of sovereignty. According to Hobbes, another way that sovereignty is established is through conquest. How can sovereignty be established by conquest?? 

The vanquished, at the end of the battle, are at the mercy of the victors. If they are all killed then the problem goes away. If they are allowed to live, then they can either rebel, in which case the war is resumed. Once they are pacified, the threat of rebellion does not go away, so force-relations remain till the threat goes away. Its a matter of who has the weapons?  This leaves a body mark on the body-politic of society. The regime encodes the terms of surrender in the entire juridico-political order. Sovereignty is shaped from below, by those who are afraid. It is precisely at the point at which the threat of rebellion dissolves that sovereignty is established in this territory by annexation. The different points at which technologies and mechanisms of dominance and coercion are applied to the body-politic of society, encode the terms of surrender of the vanquished.

Race struggle

The discourse of “race struggle” does not begin at both ends of this relation. It begins with the victors. The race of conquerers are now the feudal lords. Remember that this is the early Modern period, so Bougainvilliers talks about Normans in England; Franks and Germans in France et cetera. Bougainvilliers is the first to use war as an analyzer of history. In his narrative, history is shaped precisely by war, in the mud and blood of battles. The invaders were a race of warriors who maintained their dominance by maintaining a monopoly of the weapons of war, over the economy of weapons of war. If the race of conquerers take over the land and establishes an aristocracy then its dominance can be maintained. It is an attempt to check the growth of royal absolutism. It says that the King was only a first among equals. It was the crusades that distracted the lords. Since then the growth of mercenary armies of the King have undercut the military order that was the core of the dominance relations established between the warring races. His is a call to arms aimed at the knights. The race of invaders ought to assert their right of conquest. It is a darwinian struggle between two warring races. There is no center. This is the decentered view: either you are with us or you are with them. 

It is at this point that a new subject appears in history for the first time, that of the “nation”. A new actor appears on the stage of history apart from the King and the individual. Let us look at the other side of the equation before digging into this further.

On the other side of this equation, the vanquished of history, the losers of the last war make the same call. But this time its a call of rebellion against the race that shackles them down. It is not until prerevolutionary England that a new “nation” appears on the scene, a new actor. The Third Estate. The idea of the nation an imagined community of people, an ethno-linguistic majority of a territory, does not appear till the eighteenth century. In the lead up to the Revolution this is a counter history, a call to rebellion, an attack on sovereignty. At the end of that century, the notion of “race struggle” gets tamed by the State, and passes into history. The English and French revolutions of the eighteenth century are co-opted by power, precisely by taking over, by colonizing, and reformulating a specific discourse of race struggle–that unleashed by the Third Estate. This then becomes a Statist discourse, a universalist discourse; it tamed and tied to the juridico-political discourse of law, order and sovereignty. This is the birth of the modern sense of the word Nation; and of the Nation state.

Note that the Marxist discourse of “class struggle” is nothing but a discourse of “race struggle”, as Marx points out to Engels: “You know very well where we found the concept of class struggle”. In fact, the conception of bourgeoise as the nation, pitting the town against the country, that is against the landed aristocracy, is also a discourse of “class struggle”. 

Note also that this is before the growth of biopower and the medico-biological conception of race that comes about in the nineteen century. To develop into State racism we need to wait till the techniques and technologies of biopower begin to make their mark on the medico-biological body of society in the nineteenth century. In the coming together of absolute power and State racism in Nazi Germany, we get the final solution and collective suicide. The State turns on the body-politic and unleashes a total war exposing every single individual to annihilation. State racism and absolute power combine again in the Soviet Union to give us the gulag.

Remarks and promises in lieu of a conclusion

There are multiple lines of investigation one can pursue by inverting the dictum of Clausewitz–politics is war by other means. War, as an analyzer of power, is a powerful tool. Even though the view is decentered, it lets us go beyond and deeper than the philosophico-juridical discourses of right, law, universality and sovereignty. One runs the risk of historicism, but without running that risk, no historico-political discourse is possible outside the theory of right.

It is my intention to analyze the discourse of the town against the countryside in the context of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. I want to explore the birth of the Nation state further and the connection between the discourse of race struggle and the theory of the balance of power–as it first appears in the discourse of Richelieu. Finally, I want to reread Nietzsche.

One must reckon with the genealogy of knowledge and power. Michel Foucault died too soon to make more than a dent in the vast enterprise of the archaeology of the order of things. That task is left to us.

This is a review of Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit. Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights & Journalism at Bard College, and Margalit holds the George F. Kennan chair at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. This short book came out of an article published in the New York Review of Books shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center. Akeel Bilgrami, a prominent philosopher at Columbia University, wrote a devastating critique of this book. While much of his criticism is valid, there is something to be salvaged in this work. I will try to arrive at a synthesis that does justice to both.

Bilgrami identifies five broad points Edward Said makes in his seminal work Orientalism. First, the material inequalities generated by colonization gave rise to attitudes of civilizational condensation and the societies and people of the Orient were as a result depicted as inferior and undeveloped. Second, it stereotyped them and reduced them to monolithic caricatures. Thirdly, even when it made an effort to find civilizational glory in the Orient, it’s attitude was of wondrous awe reducing the living reality to an exotic object. And fourth, Said argued that all of these three features owed in more or less subtle ways to the proximity of such writing on the Orient to the metropolitan sites of political and economic power. This point is absolutely central to the power of the analysis. Said refuses to see literary and scholarly production as self-standing, disconnected to their locational privilege. 

Orientalism infantilized the Orient and consciously or unconsciously served to justify the White man’s burden. It is this nexus of power and writing that Said explored further in Culture and Imperialism among many other noteworthy works. It is compulsory to read Edward Said, and I will leave it to the reader to discover the full power of his work by herself and return to the task at hand. 

Occidentalism

In non-Western writing critical of, and dehumanizing the West, there are common threads which Buruma and Margalit explore. In their words, 

“These strands are linked, of course, to form a chain of hostility–hostility to the City, with its image of rootless, arrogant, greedy, decadent, frivolous cosmopolitanism; to the mind of the West, manifested in science and reason; to the settled bourgeois, whose existence is the antithesis of the self-sacrificing hero; and to the infidel, who must be crushed to make way for a world of pure faith.” The claim is that these together constitute a ”dehumanizing picture of the West” which they label Occidentalism.

The City of Man

The idea of the City as a wicked symbol of greed, godlessness, licentiousness and rootless cosmopolitanism has a long history. At least since Biblical times, this notion has been a common threat in narratives pitting the virtuous, trustworthy people of the country against the greedy, hedonistic, sinful cheats of the City. The great city is seen as inhuman, a zoo of depraved animals, consumed by lust. The great cities of Islamic world, China and Japan were bigger than the biggest Western cities, including London, until well into the nineteenth century. When and how did this become almost completely associated with the West?

The authors never answer this question and forget they posed it. An answer must be sought in European expansion and colonization of much of the world which reduced it to a periphery of the great European metropolises. They are not just identified as great hubs of global trade and commerce; but as centers of cultural hegemony, the source of cultural symbols emanating from the West that came to be associated with modernity itself.

Western women as whores

Sexual morality is about women, about regulating female behavior. A man’s honor is seen as dependent on the women related to him. The exposed women of the West are the very negation of this idea. Being oblivious to this role as a guardian of his women makes the Western man not dishonorable, but more disturbingly, without a sense of honor. Kwame Anthony Appiah elaborates on this notion in the context of honor killings in his brilliant book The Honor Code. The lack of sexual morality and the permissiveness of Western society makes it depraved. Morteza Motahhari, a leading thinker of the Islamic revolution in Iran, links this to materialism. In his view, the obvious differences between man and woman were deliberately obliterated in the West, so that women could be exploited more easily in the interests of capitalism.

Komfortismus 

Perhaps the most interesting chapter of the book is called Heroes and Merchants which was the title of a book published in 1915 by the German writer Werner Sombart. This is the view of the West as a decadent civilization addicted to pleasure. Sombart begins by describing the Great War as an existential battle between cultures, or Kulturkampf. England, the land of shopkeepers and merchants, and republican France represent “West European civilization”, “commercial values”, “the ideas of 1789″; Germany is the nation of heroes and poets. The typical merchant is interested only in what life can offer him in terms of material goods and physical comforts, this is the bourgeois mentality, Komfortismus. Liberal democracy is the political system most suited to merchant peoples. It is a competitive system in which different parties contend, and in which conflicts of interest can be solved only through negotiation and compromise. It is by definition unheroic, and hence despicably wishy-washy, mediocre and corrupt. This notion of liberal democracy as unheroic and mediocre cannot satisfy those who wish to see heroism and glory. Fascism appeals precisely to the mediocre man because it gives him glory by association, by feeling part of a supernation. Self sacrifice for a higher cause, for an ideal world, cleansed of human greed and injustice, is the one way for the average man to feel heroic. Better to die gloriously for an ideal then to live in Komfortismus. The Occident is seen as a threat because its promises of material comfort, individual freedom, and the dignity of unexceptional lives deflate all utopian pretensions.

However unheroic and unexceptional life may be in liberal civilization, there is much to defend in the dignity of the private life. The Weimar republic fell also because too few people were prepared to defend it.

The Western Mind

The mind of the West is capable of great economic success, and of developing advanced technology, but cannot grasp the higher things in life, for it lacks spirituality and understanding of human suffering. It is a mind without a soul, efficient like a calculator but suffers from a form of higher idiocy. Antithetical to the Western mind is the Russian soul, a mythical entity constructed by intellectuals in the nineteenth century. To be sure, this is common to all strands of the counter Enlightenment and Romantic traditions.

Rationalism is the belief that reason and reason alone can figure out the world. Associated is the idea of Scientism, the idea that science is the sole source of understanding natural phenomena. Together these constitute a cognitive totalitarianism whereby all criticism of modernity is branded as irrational. I will return to this in the context of Bilgrami’s critique.

Jahiliyya

In the context of religiously motivated Occidentalism, in particular, in Islamist representations of the West, we have the notion of the West as ignorant and idolatrous. The original jahiliyya, the age of ignorance, describes the state of ignorance among the Arabs before the revelations of the Prophet. A better translation would be not ignorance but barbarism, in the sense in which the Romans regarded those on the periphery of civilization. The new jahiliyya identifying the West as barbaric is thus a dehumanizing idea. All the aspects identified above flow into this notion. 

Sayyid Qutb, a leading ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, sees the Westernized world as being in a state of jahiliyya. He sees the West as a giant brothel, steeped in animal lust, greed and selfishness. Greed, immorality and oppression would end only once the World is ruled by God, and His laws alone. 

All the above threads connect in a obvious way to forge a narrative that dehumanizes the West. For now, just note that most of them are squarely anti-Enlightenment. 

The Bilgrami Critique

Akeel Bilgrami sees this as a contribution to a new Cold War, inaugurated by Huntington’s influential article Clash of Civilizations shortly after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the end of the usefulness of anti-communism as an organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy. Not to put too fine a point on it, he sees it is an attempt to answer the rigged question: Why do they hate our freedoms?

I must warn the reader here that it would be best for her to read the text itself and jump straight to the next section. The notion we need to work with is that of the “thick” notion of rationality and its Classical liberal critique. He explains it thus: 

“[T]he dispute was about the very nature of nature and matter and, relatedly therefore, about the role of the deity, and of the broad cultural and political implications of the different views on these metaphysical and religious concerns. The metaphysical picture that was promoted by Newton and Boyle, among others, viewed matter and nature as brute and inert. On this view, since the material universe was brute, God was externally conceived with all the familiar metaphors of the “clock winder” giving the universe a push from the outside to get it in motion. In the dissenting tradition – which was a scientific tradition, for there was in fact no disagreement between it and Newton/Boyle on any serious detail of the scientific laws, and all the fundamental notions such as gravity, for instance, were perfectly in place, though given a somewhat different metaphysical interpretation–matter was not brute and inert, but rather was shot through with an inner source of dynamism that was itself divine.”

Furthermore,

“[To say that] these early dissenters were unleashing an irrationalist and unscientific critique of the “West” as they define the “West”, is to confuse and conflate science and its ideals of rationality with a notion of rationality defined upon a very specific metaphysical outlook that started at a very specific historical moment and place and grew to be a presiding orthodoxy as a result of alliances that were formed by the scientific and clerical and commercial establishment in England and the Netherlands and then spreading to other parts of Europe. It is this outlook and its large consequences for history and culture and political economy, which made Gandhi and his many conceptual predecessors in the West anxious in a long tradition of dissenting thought. What this helps to reveal is that while one works with a “thin” notion of rationality and an innocuous notion of the “West”, it is absurd to call these freethinkers, either “irrational” or “unscientific”, or “enemies of the West”. But if one works openly and without disguise (in a way that Buruma and Margalit do not) with a thick notion of rationality, understood now as shaped by this very specific intellectual, political and cultural history, it is quite right to call them “irrationalist” and “enemies of the West”–for those terms, so understood, reveal only the perfectly serious, legitimate and, as I said, highly prescient anxieties of the dissenters. It is only when we make plain that these thick meanings are being passed off in disguise as the thin ones, that one can expose the codes by which an edgy and defensive cold war intellectual rhetoric tries to tarnish an entire tradition of serious and fundamental dissent.”

Synthesis

If one is to do any justice to the spirit of Orientalism, one has to relate the nexus of power and writing about the West in the rest of the world. I am going to argue that the impact of Western power in the preceding few centuries has created a common frame of reference for those at the receiving end. Everywhere it has prompted adoption of Western institutions and technology in an attempt to cope with Western power. In particular, it has prompted the question Bernard Lewis asked with What Went Wrong? 

There have been two identifiable major strands in non-Western narratives critical of the West. Both can be identified by their answer to Lewis’ question. We can call them Enlightenment and counter Enlightenment schools. 

The Enlightenment is what Bilgrami calls the Radical Enlightenment, and Noam Chomsky has called the Classical Liberal tradition going back from Dewey and Russell to Adam Smith. Central to it, is the kind of notion underlying the defence of liberal civilization; the right to have a private life, the rule of law, democracy and the rights of man. These are also the aspirations of the activists who took Tahrir Square, and of Edward Said himself. It is precisely the Western notion of liberty that requires the West to be supportive of the revolutionary regimes and the activists of the Arab Spring. 

What is inconsistent with this tradition is the reality of U.S. foreign policy. Realism is inconsistent with the values of the Enlightenment, because the same rights belong to Bahrainis as well, to take an example familiar to the readers of this blog. What Bilgrami calls the “thick” notion of rationality is the intellectual underpinning of the kind of notion underlying the practice of Orientalism and the exercise of Western power on behalf of Western capital. It is what one relies on to say that it is cool to imprison billions of animals in cages where they can never turn around, rape the planet and disregard unpeople. Nothing in the Enlightenment tradition makes all this “rational” independent of the “thick” notion of rationality.

Now listen to what Eddin Hussein says in the independent Egyptian daily, al-Shorouq, 

“God have mercy on Osama bin Laden… He did everything he thought he could to serve the Muslim cause. But in the end, if America and Israel had launched a multi-trillion dollar campaign to demonise Muslims, they couldn’t have done a better job… Al-Qaeda ended up killing more Muslims than anyone else. They inflicted indescribable damage on the Muslim nation, while failing to inflict any real damage on the West…For us to confront the West, we need to be strong. But we will only become strong when we become free, well-educated citizens of democratic nations. If we could achieve that, Israel would not be able to push us around—the West would not be able to occupy our lands. Who knows—maybe they would start giving us the respect we deserve without us having to fire a single shot.” [Emphasis mine.]

I am identifying the strand by its answer to the question of what to do about Western power. This is the school that regards the talisman of Western success, to borrow Bernard Lewis’ words, as precisely the Western institutions whose intellectual underpinnings are the values of the Enlightenment: when we become free, well-educated citizens of democratic nations. 

The other strand is the counter Enlightenment tradition going back to German Romanticism, and down to radical Islam. In the words of the authors, ”When people are not only humiliated by foreign forces but oppressed by their own government, they often retreat to the “inner life” of the spirit, pure and simple, where they can feel free from the corruption of power and sophistication.”, thus making them susceptible to Romantic notions which the authors trace especially to the high Romanticism between 1797 and 1815. These are equally modern, in that they are also themselves a response to modernity, and the disenchantment of the world. And precisely for this reason, they fall into the same totalizing cognitive stance as that provided by the “thick” notion of rationality.

In the narratives of radical Islam (à la Qutb), Arab and Muslim impotence in the face of Western power is ultimately due to Arab/Muslim decadence and turning away from Islam. Therefore, the appropriate response is not Westernization but rather purification. That is, to regain the vitality of the Golden Age of Islam, we need to purify Muslim societies and return to a purer form of Islam. The more totalizing this notion becomes, the more fascist; the closer it gets to the bin Laden doctrine. Hence, the need to be watchful of Islamo fascism, which has its intellectual underpinnings in the subordination of self for the glory of the organism: the nation, the race, the ummah. It is of interest to trace these narratives historically and the authors do a fair job of it. 

The “thick” notion of rationality in ostensibly Enlightened narratives; say some of the texts in the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, to take the most influential agenda setters; certainly has a less totalizing cognitive stance. But there is a de facto support for the subjugation of individual rights, and the nonexistent rights of the Other and Nature, to those of Western capital. In as much as these collections of narratives deviate from the values of the Enlightenment, and are in a strict sense in conflict with them; one should not regard them as bastions of Classical liberalism and the Enlightenment. Let me elaborate. 

It is clear that antagonism to the West, as a response to the exercise of Western power is common to both strands and constitutes a common frame of reference. It is also clear that it is the former which is ascendent, while the latter, the counter Enlightenment tradition à la Qutb, should now be regarded as a spent force. Moreover, it is precisely the conditions perpetuated by the Western policies, say for instance, supporting the authoritarian and reactionary regimes of the Gulf, which adds fuel to the latter. Whence, the ideologies deriving from the “thick” notion of rationality; Free market fundamentalism, Neoliberalism, and The Washington consensus et cetera; which underlie the Business consensus behind a muscular U.S. foreign policy and ideological commitment to state capitalism as embodied by Davos; should be properly seen as the driving force behind resistance to the current world order. It is then that one can make sense of both strands in the Third World at the periphery of the West, and in the hinterland and the internal Third Worlds of the West itself: the Tea party and the Muslim Brotherhood on the one hand, and the Wisconsin and Arab Spring activists on the other. 

Occidentalism is an exercise in looking at the intellectual heritage of non-Western narratives dehumanizing the West, but being devoid of any analysis of it relationship to power, falls far short of earning its title as an inversion of Orientalism. 

This is partly a review of ‘QUANTUM: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality’ by Manjit Kumar. See the New York Times review here. 

The Great Debate

Quantum theory is the most successful scientific theory in history. Since its formulation in the heady days of the late 1920s it has been tested innumerable times and has been found to be in complete accord with experimental results. Yet its implications for reality and science are radical. To quote the Times reviewer, 

“For Bohr, physics was not about finding out what nature is, but about what can be said about it. Quantum mechanics was a complete theory of the behavior of matter and light, and we just have to come to terms with the limitations it places on what can be known, for example as illustrated by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Einstein was having none of it. He believed that there is an objective world out there and that it is the job of scientists to describe it.”

In particular, Quantum theory says that when the momentum of a particle is known, its location has no physical reality. Einstein was so troubled by this that in 1935 he co-wrote a paper with Podolsky and Rosen, commonly referred to as the EPR paper. (Check it out, the math is trivial). They define reality as follows.

“If, without in any way disturbing a system, we can predict with certainty the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of physical reality corresponding to this physical quantity.”

They declare a physical theory to be complete if “every element of physical reality has a counterpart in physical theory”. To prove the incompleteness of the theory they set up a thought experiment with a pair of maximally entangled particles. This means that both particles are described by one wave function in such a way that measuring the property of one fixes the property of the other, thereby making it an element of reality. One can measure one particles’ velocity and thus predict the other particle’s with certainty. But this would violate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle since we can always measure the other particle’s position with certainty. Thus, we are forced to require that two or more physical quantities can be regarded as simultaneous elements of reality only when they can be simultaneously measured or predicted. Since this contradicts the aforementioned definition of reality, they conclude that quantum theory is incomplete.

Bohr and the other orthodox quantum theorists subscribed to the Copenhagen interpretation. They effectively denied the existence of external reality, claiming that a theory is good to go as long as it describes the outcomes of all possible measurements, and that any talk of what-actually-exists-out-there goes beyond the realm of science. 

To everyone’s surprise there turned out to be an empirical test that could distinguish between these views of the world.

The Bell Tolls

In 1964, John S. Bell published a paper titled On the EPR Paradox. He proved that local realism implied that a certain inequality, now called Bell’s inequality be satisfied. This inequality was then found to be violated thus proving that no local hidden variable theory could ever replace quantum mechanics. For some, this settles the question decidedly in favour of the Copenhagen interpretation. Quantum theorists are happy to give up reality itself but many thinkers hope to find a non-local hidden variable theory. I have harboured similar hopes myself because I think there are strong epistemological reasons not to deny the existence of an external reality.  

Metaphysical Issues

Not too long ago I visited a close friend of mine who is a philosopher of science. He showed me a very interesting paper by Bas C. Van Fraassen titled The Charybdis of Realism: Epistemological Implications of Bell’s Inequality. Fraassen reformulates Bell’s Inequality in a manner that strips the issue at hand of all paraphernalia, reducing it to the core epistemological conundrum. I am going to quote shamelessly without quotes from this paper in the rest of this section. 

A fundamental metaphysical question is: How is reasonable expectation about future events possible? To which a realist like me would answer: Reasonable expectation of future events is possible only on the basis of some understanding of (or, reasonable certainty about) causal mechanisms that produce those events. 

Suppose there is a correlation between two (sorts of) events, such as lung cancer and heavy smoking. That is a correlation in the simultaneous presence of two factors: having lung cancer now and being a heavy smoker now. An explanation that has at least the form to satisfy us traces both back to a common cause (in this case, a history of smoking which both produced the smoking habit and irritated the lungs). Characteristic of such a common cause is that, relative to it, the two events are independent. Thus present smoking is a good indication of lung cancer in the population as a whole; but it carries no information of that sort for people whose past smoking history is already known.

Now let L and R be perfectly anti-correlated phenomena that have a given common cause C. Moreover, suppose that L given C is independent of R, and R given C in independent of L. That is, we have in terms of probability distributions

P(L + R = 0) = one
P(L | C & R) = P(L | C) = zero or one
P(R | C & L) = P(R | C) = zero or one

These innocuous assumptions along with basic probability theory imply Bell’s inequality. But we know that it is violated in experiments. Thus we find that a casual theory of the world is at odds with the way the world is. 

Remarks in Lieu of a Conclusion

To say that I am uneasy with the implications of the above is an understatement. Before reading the Van Fraassen paper, I had convinced myself that there will be a non-local hidden variable theory that would eventually supplant quantum mechanics. Now its clear that not just local realism, but causation itself is not really kosher. In other words, the realist’s answer to the fundamental metaphysical question is flawed and is, at best, incomplete. 

How, then, are reasonable expectations about future events possible at all?

Without causality, in what sense is nature still intelligible? The very idea of science as natural philosophy is shaken. As Peter Dear put it in The Intelligibility of Nature, “The hallmark of natural philosophy is its stress on intelligibility: it takes natural phenomena and tries to account for them in ways that not only hold together logically but also rest on ideas and assumptions that seem right, that make sense; ideas that seem natural.”

Science is reduced to mere instrumentality and natural philosophy declared dead. This result belongs in the same league as Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, Arrow’s Impossibility theorem, and apparent incompatibility of determinism and free will. For a great survey of these dismal topics read ‘Impossibility:The limits of science and the science of limits‘ by John D. Barrow. 

If the universe gets any more depressing, I am never getting out of bed again.

[Update: The philosopher who showed me the paper has pointed out that a non-local theory is entirely possible. The possibility is not in doubt and I stand corrected for suggesting such a thing. While that may be true as an existence result, we don't even have a causal theory to comprehend something that has been known for a century. By shunning the question, quantum physicists  have so far failed to construct a covariant quantum field theory, even as philosophers have failed to construct a credible zoo of non-local causal structures. We fail completely when it comes to such questions, the entire miserable lot.]

So I stumbled upon a great website. Its called The Browser. They collect the best articles on the web. To start off the reading list I am going to list the ones I really enjoyed reading. Here goes. 

Day 1

Robin Yassin-Kasaab argues in Foreign Policy that its too late for the Assad regime to save itself in Syria. Venkat writes at RibbonFarm about the history of the corporation since its orgins in the East India Company in the year 1600. Ha-Joon Chang busts myths about free markets at Truthout in a brillant article titled There is no such thing as a free market. Tyler Durdun (terrible pseudonym btw) has a great post on inequity at ZeroHedge. Donald MacKinzie talks about High-Frequency trading in perhaps the best article on the subject so far in the London Review of Books. Mens Journal (surprise surprise) has a great article on Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor who shot and killed two people in broad daylight in Pakistan.

Day 2

The first thing I found in my inbox this morning was this hilarious article in Foreign Policy about the cow theory of political systems in the Middle East. The Times has an amazing article on the spectacular scenes around the University of Sana in Yemen. Another must-read is a report on the surging protests in Syria. How much longer can the regime survive is unclear. That its days are numbered is becoming increasingly obvious. 

Day 3

The editors think that Obama ought to do more to pressure the Assad regime. I am coming around to the view that it might be time for Turkey to conduct a humanitarian intervention. Even amassing troops on the border and arranging F-16 sorties should be enough to concentrate Assad’s mind. American and Western intervention is possibly a bad idea, but Turkish? Its almost natural. I need to mull over this some more before being convinced either way.  

Daniel Gross talks about the miserable returns to the Goldman Sacs shareholders while the executives award themselves 8-figure bonuses. And while we are talking about Goldman, the seminal article by Matt Taibbi is a must read. Its called The Great American Bubble Machine. I am going to quote the first paragraph because it remains the most entertaining first paragraph in the history of the long form article.

“The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.” 

Day 4

Saudi women driving in the cities is creating a bit of a furor. There was a New York Times Magazine article on Keith Olbermann recently. He is certainly one of the more entertaining talk show hosts and his rage feels just right most of the time. After famously getting kicked out of MSNBC, Olbermann has joined Current TV where he will anchor the prime time show at 8PM. Its likely that Comcast bought MSNBC precisely to remove Olbermann. In any event, they wanted to get rid of him and they did. Is Comcast controlled by the Koch brothers? (Kidding of course).

Here is another gem I found on the browser. This GQ article on the epic Wimbledon match last year that lasted for 3 days. Sarah Stillman has a shocking article in the New Yorker about the conditions of military subcontractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its called The Invisible Army.

And the last update for this post: Meet the Gomboc 

Noam Chomsky thinks that Usama bin Laden’s extra judicial killing should prompt us to consider what our reaction would’ve been if Iraqi commandos had penetrated the White House and executed George W. Bush.

This is one of those rare occasions where I think Chomsky is missing the point. Even though one always gains an interesting perspective by reversing the tables and evaluating our reaction; this particular analogy fails to apply in the case of bin Laden.

The Monopoly of Violence

A state is an institution which claims the monopoly of violence over its domain. Since the dawn of complex society, institutional entities have existed which sought to impose coercive authority over human settlements. Early proto-states are likely to have evolved from roving bandits who settled down once they gained a near monopoly of coercive capability and realized that it was better to rule and tax than to roam and loot. However they evolved, states have bestowed enormous benefits to human society.

This is evident not just in successful societies where strong states coupled with the rule of law and functioning institutions have promoted peace and prosperity. In sub-Saharan Africa, where states routinely fail to ensure a monopoly on coercive capability, the populace is constantly coerced by non-state actors. This doesn’t just stifle peace and commerce, it erodes civil institutions and arrests socio-economic development.

The question of the legitimacy of state power is more subtle.

Legitimacy of state power

When Tamerlane (Timur the great Uzbek conqueror) consolidated control over all of central Asia, he could not proclaim himself Emperor because he lacked Genghis Khan’s blood. In fourteenth century Central Asia, you could make a claim to the throne only if you were a direct descendent of the Great Khan. Tamerlane had to settle for the title of Amir (Prime minister), and maintain a puppet Emperor to rubber stamp his rule.

The point of telling this story was to emphasize how variable the notion of legitimacy has been historically. Throughout most of human history, the principal claim to a legitimate throne was royal blood, indirectly derived from the right of conquest. That is, I am the legitimate claimant of this throne because my great, great grandfather conquered this land and bestowed it with peace and stability.

It was not until the early modern period that the King came to be seen as an embodiment of a people. This was the first sign of the emerging notion of nationalism. A peculiarly European phenomenon until surprisingly recently, Nationalism spread with European conquest around the globe. It would be a stretch to date the emergence of nationalism prior to the 19th century in Latin America, the late 19th century in South and South East Asia, and the 20th century in sub-Saharan Africa.

The notion of a Nation-state: the idea that the state derives its legitimacy and claim to the monopoly of violence from an imagined community called a nation is even newer. Moreover, it is evolving. By now, no matter how much dictators seek to represent a people, anything less that a democracy can hardly be accepted as legitimate.

Legitimate armed struggle against states

This leaves us with the following question. If a state is seen as illegitimate, for instance if its predatory, seen as an alien colonizing power, not representative of the people et cetera; when is it appropriate to conduct an armed struggle to fight to state?

One case is clear. If a community demands independence and formation of their own state and exhausts all peaceful means to obtain it, it is hard to argue that it should be forced to submit to state power. Let’s call this exception the case of a resistance struggle. No one can seriously argue that the American fight for independence was illegitimate. And that was based on the peculiarly American unwillingness to pay taxes. The case for East Timur, South Sudan, Western Sahara, Palestine, Kashmir, and Xinjiang peoples is certainly stronger.

So a revolutionary armed struggle against a state may be justified if one intends to replace it with another, more legitimate state. Note that there is still no hope for justifying revolutionary violence against innocent civilians, and no hope of justifying violence if peaceful means are available. 

Terrorism

Can we distinguish between a resistance struggle and violence by non-state actors? The short answer is that not only that we can, but we must. At the minimum, the slaughter of hundreds of innocent people in the Bali night club bombing, the Mumbai terror attack of 2008, the London Tube bombings and the attack on the World Trade Center in New York; need to be recognized for what they are: terrorism, disconnected from even the vaguest notions of a resistance struggle.

Of course, one should not be blind to state terror. For instance, the American invasion of Iraq and unleashing of massive violence against a helpless population can be strictly classified as state terror. No stretching of Just War theory can convince me that it was legitimate violence. And therefore, one can reasonably argue that Iraqi resistance fighters have the right to conduct an armed struggle against the occupying force.

But al Qaeda is not a resistance force, nor is bin Laden a freedom fighter. The stated goal of creating an Islamic state is not just not credible but misleading. Its not a people rising up in an armed struggle against an illegitimate empire at all. Its a small coterie of radical clerics and fighters who think they have the right to rudely intrude in our world and kill a bunch of people because they are unhappy being impotent. 

In other words, bin Laden was a valid target for police action and one can morally celebrate his capture or killing in an encounter.

Extra-judicial killing

Its entirely possible that the White House gave explicit orders for bin Laden’s assassination even if there was a possibility of capture. This would make it an extra-judicial killing, an execution. Now, executions, even of captured enemy soldiers are a war crime for good reason. There is something particularly disturbing about the cold blooded murder of an unarmed person who is completely under your power.

But I have doubts about whether this is what actually happened. Why was there a standby team of lawyers, interrogators and translators if the plan was to kill bin Laden? Anyway, let us presume that the order was to kill not capture. Can this be justified?

I think it can. The capture or killing of bin Laden was understood to be a really big deal with unpredictable consequences. His capture would have had multiple political and military repercussions, including the possibility of ransoms, unrest among his supporters in highly volatile places et cetera. One can think of this as a purely military decision overriding bin Laden’s right to capture. For example, assassinating Gaddafi to bring the Libyan campaign to a close would be wise military decision. It may be that the commandos find him unarmed so that its closer to an execution than a encounter but it must be seen in the context of the larger situation.

[P.S. I have been really busy over the past few weeks, but now I am back. I hope to write regularly during the summer. The next one is going to be on Saudi Arabia. Stay tuned.] 

[Update: I must confess I would've much preferred to capture bin Laden. What I am arguing is that the White House had the authority to decide to take him out, just as much as the Rajasthan Police. Chomsky is right in that the long arm of the law ought to respect the rights of the suspect, modulo military targets in Just War theory. If one is fighting a legitimate war, say the fight against al Qaeda, we need military efficiency. The ability to take out executive leadership in a bid to minimize collateral damage is a good idea. Too bad utopia, welcome to reality.]

This is not a personal history of Usama Bin Laden, nor is this an account of Islamist terror or the war on terror. Rather, this is an attempt to place the ideology of bin Laden in a framework that I hope would help in comprehending the phenomena.

The New York Times obituary has the following quote from an interview Usama gave to CNN in 1997:

“[The United States] wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this. If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists. When Palestinian children throw stones against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. says they are terrorists. Whereas when Israel bombed the United Nations building in Lebanon while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel. At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the top official of the Irish Republican Army at the White House as a political leader. Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world.”

To understand Usama bin Laden, Islamist terror and Arab rage we need to ask the right questions. Here is the most important one:

What went wrong?

While Europe was engulfed in the Dark ages, the Islamic world was the center of a global civilization. It inherited the knowledge and skills of the ancient civilizations of the fertile crescent, Greece, Persia and India. For centuries, the boundaries of Civilization were marked by the frontiers of the Islamic world. Underwritten by military and technological superiority, Islam spread its dominion from Spain in the West to China in the East. Europeans were regarded as barbarians with nothing to offer in terms of ideas or technology. Christianity was seen as version 2.0 of the Abrahamic tradition, Judaism being the original and Islam being the final one. 

The rise of Western Europe can be traced to the aftermath of the Black Death. There was a sustained rise in per capita income and urbanization in the pre-industrial period 1350-1700 A.D. The discovery of the New World in 1492 led to a sustained period of capitalist development driven by the interaction of late medieval institutions and colonial trade. Europe had probably overtaken the Islamic world in wealth and trade by the beginning of the 16th century and by the turn of the century it was far superior technologically and militarily. 

This was brought home in the classic way: as a Lesson of the Battlefield in the year 1699. With the defeat of the Ottoman empire and the signing of the Treaty of Carlowitz in that year, the superiority of Western power belatedly entered Muslim consciousness. Up until then, the uppity powers to the West had gone more or less unnoticed. Bernard Lewis writes in his seminal work, What went wrong?

“The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the technological revolution passed virtually unnoticed in the lands of Islam, where they were still inclined to dismiss the denizens of the lands beyond the Western frontier as benighted barbarians, much inferior even to the more sophisticated Asian infidels to the East.

. . .  With the crumbling of the language barrier came an increased recognition and more intimate awareness of European strength and wealth. The question now became more urgent–what was the source of this strength, the talisman of Western success?”

As happened elsewhere, the proximate cause of Western military superiority was identified with Western technology and military practice, and these were rapidly copied. Such measures failed to halt the growing power inequality and the West came to dominate the Islamic world completely towards the end of the 19th century. With the spread of Western education and the printing press, there were moves to identify the source of Western strength in market capitalist and liberal social institutions. As the ideas of nationalism, secularism and liberty penetrated Muslim consciousness, efforts were made to modernize and/or Westernize ossified Arab societies. These were met with variable degrees of success in terms of creating modern societies in the Middle East and North Africa but failed to contain Western dominance. The immediate post-war period saw decolonization on a massive scale and the emergence of autonomous states in the region. But most regimes remained under Western tutelage, which by now meant the United States. 

The bin Laden doctrine

The notion that Arab and Muslim impotence in the face of Western power was ultimately due to Arab/Muslim decadence and turning away from Islam has been around for centuries. In fact, this has been traditional response to the question. For such traditionalists, the appropriate response is not Westernization but rather purification. That is, to regain the vitality of the Golden Age of Islam, we need to purify Muslim societies and return to a purer form of Islam.

Usama bin Laden wove this argument into a narrative of anti-imperialist resistance and combined this potent mix with the legacy of the fidayeen. The Assassins (from the Arabic Hashishiyya) were a puritanical Muslim sect in the 12th century. The called themselves the fidayeen, meaning those who were willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause. They tried to assassinate Muslim rulers they considered impious and debauch. The term was adopted again in the 20th century by terrorists in Turkey, Iran and the militant wing of the PLO. But while the Assassins carried out targeted killings, the modern fidayeen attacked civilian populations. But even these terrorists were nationalists seeking political rights. The origin of Islamist terror is more recent. 

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prompted the CIA to support the Islamist resistance forces, the Mujahideen. Soviet weapons captured by the Israelis from Egyptian forces were transferred via the ISI to the Mujahideen. Radical Islamists flocked to Afghanistan from all over the Islamic world to fight the Godless communists. Many came from the Wahhabi schools in Saudi Arabia, including bin Laden. At the end of the occupation, there was a standing army of battle hardened and radicalized Islamist militants who then spread out like a cancer to the rest of the world: Kashmir, Chechnya, Philippines, Pakistan, Indonesia, Britain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and eventually, of course, the United States itself.

The Arab Spring

The revolution taking place on Arab streets is a clear rejection of the bin Laden doctrine. The young, educated revolutionaries recognize that the Western ideas of political liberty, personal freedom, accountable governance and political participation are Western discoveries not inventions. They are tired of living in predatory unaccountable tyrannies. Now, more than ever, they envy the Free world and want the same freedoms that Westerners enjoy.

They want institutions that put them on the road to prosperity. By now, its well understood that the source of Western power and prosperity is institutional structures: the most important of which is liberty. The right of man to be free of harassment from a predatory state may not be God given, but it surely lies at the heart of the vitality of a society. Mohammed Bouazizi burned himself in Tunisia and set the Arab world aflame for precisely this freedom. 

The Economist has a page on the reaction in the Arab press to bin Laden’s death. They quote from an independent Egyptian daily, al-Shorouq, where Imad Eddin Hussein condemns Mr bin Laden and his approach to Islamic liberation as an utter failure:

“God have mercy on Osama bin Laden… He did everything he thought he could to serve the Muslim cause. But in the end, if America and Israel had launched a multi-trillion dollar campaign to demonise Muslims, they couldn’t have done a better job… Al-Qaeda ended up killing more Muslims than anyone else. They inflicted indescribable damage on the Muslim nation, while failing to inflict any real damage on the West…For us to confront the West, we need to be strong. But we will only become strong when we become free, well-educated citizens of democratic nations. If we could achieve that, Israel would not be able to push us around—the West would not be able to occupy our lands. Who knows—maybe they would start giving us the respect we deserve without us having to fire a single shot. But for us to simplistically reduce our relationship with the West either to complete subordination (à la Hosni Mubarak) or perpetual clash (as bin Laden would have had it)—that is the real tragedy.” [Emphasis mine.]

There are still many in Washington who fear democracy in the Arab world. They fear that power may pass into the hands of Islamists. Policymakers worry about loss of control over the most strategically important region on the globe. Such fears are overblown. Here is why:

U.S. dominance of the Persian Gulf and the rest of the Middle East is not dependent on friendly petro-dictators. It follows from the fact of overwhelming U.S. power. In fact, U.S. backed authoritarian regimes are more fragile than democracies. Moreover, these regimes have to support Islamists themselves for political survival. Even the appearance of Western tutelage undercuts the moderate reformers and strengthens the hands of Islamists and radicals who want to confront America rather than pursue prosperity at home. Furthermore, it directly plays into the bin Laden narrative. 

The United States has already spent at least 3 trillion dollars in hunting for bin Laden and the fight against Islamist terror. Killing his dream would be much cheaper: stay on the right side of history by supporting the protestors not the despots. Especially where you have most control like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.  

This is so obvious that even the Economist approves. 

A close friend recently made the observation that there is an unusually high proportion of beautiful women in New York. This is certainly true and is a very visible effect of the structure of the sexual economy. Let me explain.

It is natural to use economic analysis for sexual selection because it is based on the relative scarcity of desired attributes. Many attributes are routinely held to be desirable by males and females. Its not a question of their moral value or socio-cultural origins, what matters is that such regularities exist. So, (heterosexual) females looking for life partners look for healthy, good looking, emotionally stable, intelligent, successful, and financially secure males. Similarly, men judge women on certain attributes like beauty, intelligence, character et cetera. Its arguable that men value female beauty too much and that this is a recent phenomenon. Regardless of the merits of such arguments, we only care that it actually holds statistically for the male population. Note that some of these attributes are more easily discernible than others. Its easier to tell if someone is physically attractive than if they are emotionally stable, of good character or likely to be more successful.

The theory of asymmetric information can shed some light here. It is best formulated in terms of the job market. There is a firm that wants to hire from a pool of potential employees. Suppose there are two types: those with high productivity (High type) and those with low productivity (Low type). The workers know their type but the firm does not. In a pooling equilibrium, the firm hires without distinguishing the types and the equilibrium wage rate is the average productivity of the whole pool. Now suppose the high types can obtain an education with little effort, while the low types find it costly to do the same. Then there is another possibility. In a separating equilibrium, the high types get an education that is too costly for the low types, the firm can then distinguish between the two types and there are two wage rates in equilibrium. Note that education is purely a signalling device.

The application to the mating market is straight forward. Let us suppose that a male is either a high type or a low type. The males know their type but the females do not. Clearly, we have separating equilibria with signalling. This was understood a hundred years before game theory. That it exists among humans is hardly a revelation. What is more interesting is the dominant signalling device in the modern period. I am, of course, talking about money.

For a substantial section of the sexual economy, earnings have become the primary signalling device. Note that females’ preference for high-earning males does not make them gold-diggers. They are responding optimally given the structure of the market. The high types–capable, intelligent, educated males find it easier to make the moolah that allows them to distinguish themselves from the low types–their incompetent, dumb cousins.

There is another point to note. The above is a toy model and is at best a first approximation. In reality, given a particular self evaluation, a female does not necessarily want to look for a very high type if she thinks he might leave her for other, more competitive females. This serves as a sort of self selection mechanism. To put it ridiculously: suppose there are only two cities, New York and Detroit. Further, suppose that we are given that all the high type males find it easier to find a well paying job in New York and that all the low types find it too costly to live there so they have to live in Detroit. We will find females who think of themselves as competitive congregate to New York, while the ones who evaluate themselves as not being competitive will move to Detroit.

Put this together with the fact that Wall Street alone paid out $35 billion in bonuses in 2006 and its clear why there are an unusually higher proportion of attractive women in New York.

[Update: it can be taken to extremes.]

[Update: Ok folks. There is a lot of misunderstanding about what I mean by attractive women. A lot of people claim that there is no such thing as intrinsic beauty. Which may or may not true depending on whether you agree with Akeel Bilgrami. In either case, we can meaningfully talk about it. Here is a thought experiment.

Suppose we have two rooms labeled H and L, and a hundred randomly selected women. Imagine that Rahm Immanuel gets to pick the 50 he finds most attractive and puts them in room H. The rest go to room L. Now we remove the labels from the rooms and you get to walk into them and decide which one was H. 

Would you bet that you would be able to tell the rooms apart?]

I happen to be from India and find myself living on the East Coast. On numerous occasions random acquaintances have told me how they think Indians are unusually intelligent et cetera. This is, of course, based on their experience of Indians in the West. I like to point out that this is purely a survival bias. It just so happens that almost all Indian immigrants who come here are from the very top of the Indian cognitive distribution. Simply due to the barriers to entry, those who make it into graduate programs or get hired or otherwise make it to the West are far above the national average in cognitive ability. Since cognitive ability is at least partly inherited, this holds for second and third generation immigrants as well.

One might even speculate that this might account for the differentials in IQ test scores between Jewish people, Asians, Whites and Blacks in the U.S. The comment this post began with applies equally well to other Asian immigrants. We know that many of the top Jewish physicists and intellectuals fled to the United States from Europe after Hitler was elected. Might this be a more general phenomena? Perhaps those who made it across (and were therefore more likely to survive), were smarter on average than those who could not make it or chose not to? [Update:  Samsara points out that the Russian pogroms et cetera had the same effect, and that this is commonly understood among Jewish communities (especially those less prone to hubris).]

The standard deviation differential between Whites and Blacks in the United States also looks more explicable in light of the survival bias. Did the smart West Africans manage to flee and hide from the slave traders better, so that the average of those who were caught and transported was lower? A priori, the differential ought to be the other way around since there is a lot more genetic variation in Africa than in the rest of the world.

This notion actually generalizes quite a bit. Nassim Taleb points out a couple of very interesting examples. If you start swimming on a regular basis will you get the swimmers’ body soon? Isn’t it more likely that those born with a natural tendency to develop (or already have) a swimmers’ body become better swimmers??

If we measure the cognitive ability of convicted felons and find that it is lower on average than the population mean, does that mean we have evidence that ‘criminals are dumber’? No, of course not. It is far more likely that those who avoid getting caught are on average smarter than those who do. So criminals as a whole may be smarter or dumber than the population on average. 

Epidemiologists get this. So if one city, say New York, has a stronger campaign to exterminate rats, than another city, say Boston. Then, we will find the rats to be on average fitter and more adept at urban survival in New York than in Boston. Should we attribute that to NYC/Boston habitat differentials?

Along with other issues, this may go some way into explaining the decline effect. Some researcher reports finding a spurious effect which happens to be replicated by some others by sheer luck. Everyone hails the recent findings. Eventually, the luck will run out and the effect would be seen to disappear.

The same is true of fund managers’ ability to generate excess returns. If we start with a thousand fund managers facing stochastic returns, pure randomness dictates that some will have 5 year, 7 year, even 10 year runs of excessive returns. The cohort will still likely average the market return. If you only look at those who have been doing brisk business for 3 or more years you are bound to find them generating returns in excess of the market.

[Update: An old roommate and now a professor of financial economics sent me this paper by M. Carhart, published in 1997. It finds that the survival bias explains almost all persistence in fund returns.]

It does not hurt to think carefully.