House of Eratosthenes

Andrew Sullivan points out something interesting he’s come to realize, and it would benefit all of us to take a look at what he has to say. What he’s discovered is what I call, for reasons I’ve never discussed but will someday, “The Ninth Pillar of Persuasion.” And he makes the point that both conservatives and liberals are using it, the former with regard to WMDs, and the latter with regard to climate change.

Dick Cheney’s “one percent doctrine” means that if there’s a one percent chance that a terrorist could have access to a WMD, we must act as if it were a certainty – because the outcome, however unlikely, would be too disastrous to risk. On global warming, Gore expresses a not-too-dissimilar equation: if there’s a small chance that human behavior could lead to environmental catastrophe, we should act as if it were a certainty – because waiting too long is too big a risk to take.
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What to do? A prudent attempt to rein in carbon dioxide emissions seems a no-brainer to me. A dollar rise in the gas tax would be the most effective way to achieve this. But Cheney also made an assumption Gore hasn’t: the American public will only sign up if they have no sacrifice to make, or if others do their sacrifices for them. The political health of America in the coming years will be measured by how hard politicians are prepared to challenge that atttitude.

The Ninth Pillar has to do with the presentation of an apocalyptic event, some consequence that is either harmful to all concerned, and by that I mean mortally so, or else so undesirable that it’s generally agreed any & all steps should be taken to prevent it. The pitch to sell, is that any customary cost-benefit analyses, including any analysis of likelihood for the cataclysmic event, should be tabled indefinitely.

In short, that priorities should, for the moment, be abandoned. You need a plurality to have priorities, and for all practical purposes we only have one thing that must be done, or kept undone.

The Ninth Pillar has an ancient history. Many more people besides our two distinguished Vice Presidents, have used it.

Item!

Bono asks the world what it takes to make poverty history. Well, that’s what Yahoo says he is going to do, but it really isn’t. He has no questions for us. What he has is a progress report of the things that have been done in Africa. As you watch the video, you have to be awestruck by the presence this musician has. It’s like what people used to say about President Clinton. From the very first split-second, your feelings are drawn toward seeing what this man has to say, and doing whatever he says. He just has that natural charm. It’s the culmination of a lifetime of development, you can tell.

And yet, other than “don’t rely on the politicians,” there is no strategy in the clip for fighting poverty. None. We aren’t told what we can do to make things better, how it is that we’re making this difference, where we’re screwing up — okay, we’re told how progress has been made. I’d just like to point this out, though. Bono has presented himself, here, as someone who 1) recognizes a status quo that contains something he finds dissatisfying, and 2) desires to change the status quo to make things satisfying.

What he wants to do, can be done. Our history has shown that people who start with those two simple impulses, get things done — in fact, all we have, we owe to people who had those two impulses. Here’s the rub. Those people who gave us so much, didn’t spend a lot of energy reacting to the way people felt, or trying to affect how people felt. Maybe a trail boss or the supervisor of a railroad construction crew, trying to prevent mutiny. Thomas Edison trying to keep his workers from striking. Other than that, peoples’ feelings have always been a marginal consideration in the larger picture of trying to get work done.

I guess it’s just my opinion, but we shouldn’t be seeing this video. Without some avenue for concerned people to supply the help, maybe an address where a check can be sent, it amounts to just so much stuff. Bono helping Bono. What he is doing is a wonderful thing, but I’m left wondering how fired-up Bono would be about this project, if there was a way for him to cure poverty overnight but with nobody ever finding out that he did it.

Bono’s hat flew first-class for $1,700 in 2003. His hat. My tax money is supposed to go to debt relief for the starving countries, and his hat is too good to fly coach.

Item!

In what some believe to be the finest Western movie ever made, Gary Cooper faces down Frank Miller in the streets of Hadleyville in High Noon (1952). The film is 85 minutes long, with just a short action sequence at the end as good confronts evil — the balance of footage is spent on that Ninth Pillar. What will Frank Miller do if you men don’t come down and help me face him…versus…reasons why we can’t join you. I’m young, I have a family, I’m not really here, my trigger finger is broken, you didn’t marry your wife in my church, my ass itches, blah blah blah.

Now, what do we realize from these three items.

Well what Sullivan has come to realize, is this certain universality in imploring people to forego the forensic deliberations of what is, what is not, what may be, what probably is and what probably isn’t…how this leads to what should be done. Since the human race was young, we have appealed to each other to stop thinking and start acting, with a some surplus urgency above what we would normally have, and maybe at a stage premature compared to that to which we are accustomed. Conservatives do this and liberals do this…and it turns out to be a good idea, and a bad idea. There’s really no ideology to it. It’s just something that simply is.

Always, there is some justification in making the request. It’s made when there is much at stake, and when indisputable facts are luxuries that, for the time being, cannot be afforded. Sometimes, in the absence of proven facts, you just have to assume. You have to do. You have to take action. Like Gen. George S. Patton said, a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

Sometimes, there is no consequence for taking action incorrectly. Other times…there is such a consequence, and you have to risk something. You have to take a gamble.

These are desperate times, and out of such times, a hero will rise.

That hero is not like Dick Cheney or Gary Cooper or Christopher Hitchens or Bill O’Reilly. That hero is like Bono, or Al Gore, or Bill Clinton, or David Letterman, or George Galloway. A rabble-rouser. Someone who speaks with his energetic smile or his appealing scottish burr, and suddenly, you don’t want to do any more thinking, you just want to find out what this fellow wants you to do and get it done.

A Bono. A man who says nothing of note, but whose voice just hypnotizes you.

A natural leader. He can read the phone book to you, page after page, and you’d much rather keep listening to him than sit in a bucket of water if your ass is on fire.

A Yang. Not a Yin, but a Yang. Someone with that built-in antenna, who just somehow seems to know from one split-second to the next, what “everybody” is thinking, and energizes us with an unstoppable momentum with a single syllable.

That is the hero who rises and figures out for the rest of us, what needs to be done…

…when, that is, we can afford to follow him!

You see, I’ve been noticing something. It’s a theme you might have been picking up if you’ve read several pages of this blog. It’s something really disturbing…as we confront these dangers, and triumph over them, eventually shunting them aside, we gradually start to live in an environment more and more cloistered. Eventually, some among us come to be born in this cloister, and live out their entire lives sheltered from any real harm. Danger, to those green, sheltered individuals, is always something that rises up to threaten somebody else.

And because of this, they think differently.

Now, before the roads are all paved, and before the swamps are all drained, and before the snakes are all killed, we live in a different world. We live in a jungle. The Ninth Pillar has a place in the jungle just as it has a place over the asphalt, and you’ll see a hero rise out there too…but this is not a Bono. This is someone more like Gary Cooper’s Marshall Will Kane, a wholly different sort of man. A different hero, for what might as well be a different planet. This is Yin.

This hero doesn’t have the “aura,” he doesn’t have the voice inflection, he doesn’t change the emotional current charging through a room when he starts speaking. Bill Clinton forgets more about “charisma” in a single day, than this guy will ever learn in his life. On the other hand, the Jungle Hero is personally exposed to the danger that confronts us all; equally exposed compared to the rest of us, or moreso. And this is why people listen when he speaks. His words lack finesse, but they carry old-fashioned weight. He is George Washington or King Arthur or Ulysses Grant or Peter the Great or Douglas MacArthur or William the Conqueror or the aforementioned Patton.

People remember the Yin-Hero after his bones have withered into dust, and what do they say?

Nobody ever says “he opened his mouth, and right away changed the atmosphere in the room.” Nobody says that. Grant, in his own way, was pretty shy. He was a man of few words, not at all fond of public appearances. As far as General Patton, people who served under him say he lacked the theatrical baritone of George C. Scott, hesitated to address large crowds, and actually sounded kind of squeaky.

This was a completely different flavor of man. He just did stuff, period. The theme was set because the example was set. MacArthur wore his hat while addressing his troops, and everybody thought “well if the old man can wear his hat, I certainly can.”

What people remember about this kind of leader, is that bullets hit the dirt all around him, or on occasion one of them might even have found a mark, and he didn’t flinch. And…the hero said if you do this after I’m gone, there will be consequences, and we went ahead and did the thing, and there were consequences. The guy knew what he was talking about.

A lot of these guys come from the military. This, it appears, is an environment that works well for cultivating them. Danger is personal. When the sergeant faces it with the corporals and privates, that says so much more than a flashy inflection can ever say. With that big metal door getting ready to come down at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, Bill Clinton himself would be just another soldier. Nobody would listen to a word he had to say. Maybe he’d earn a reputation as the Party Boy. But to do something, because Private Clinton said it was a good idea? Pfft.

So in that setting, we aren’t so wild for the “aura” we otherwise insist is all-important. We want calm, and we want courage. We also want smarts, although I hasten to add, not just raw I.Q. We want the leader to know what he knows, and to know what he doesn’t know. He says, “there is a Nazi machine gun nest over that sand dune,” and I don’t very much care whether he knows the nest is there or if he thinks it is there. But he himself should know, whether or not he knows. The very idea that my leader may have lost track of what is a fact versus what is an opinion, fills me with dread. In short, I want him to think just like Eratosthenes himself (FAQ, Questions #7 and 8), even if I’ve lost my ability to do so. He is, first and foremost, my anchor. And then he is my oracle. I have a head full of stuff I know, because he told me they were so, and I trust him.

But once the danger has passed, after the snakes are killed and the swamps are drained and the brush is cleared and the roads are paved, it’s all different. That mystifying inflection of the voice suddenly becomes important; not one moment before then, though. My need for an anchor — gone. My need for an oracle — gone. Suddenly, my leaders can tell me they didn’t have sex with such-and-such a woman, and it’s all okay. I don’t care about truth; I can afford to be mistaken. Nothing really matters anymore. A recurring theme here, in The Blog That Nobody Reads, is that as we lose our exposure to danger, we lose our intellectual capacity to ever confront it again. I hold that as a given, even more at the societal layer than at the individual layer, and it isn’t hard to see why. Our status in life, changes the way we choose our leaders.

Our biggest complaint today is that gas is above three dollars a gallon, yet, the people who complain the most bitterly drive something that gets eleven miles a gallon or less — and they have no plans to change. Our second biggest complaint is that our social security benefits aren’t waiting for us when we retire. But the people who complain most loudly about that, have shown little-to-no initiative in getting a private plan going and keeping it strong.

We don’t know what danger is. We haven’t a clue.

George Washington, today, would not be our President. He wouldn’t get anywhere close to it. I have strong doubts that he would even survive. He probably would be one of the few among us with a real shot at dying, forgotten and homeless, in a gutter. We simply have no use for him. Those who lead us when we are safely out of danger, follow others when we are in danger, and the leaders we have when we are in danger, are cast aside once we’re out of danger.

Thing I Know #16. A man’s determination to punish the guilty tends to wax and wane with his prospects for living amongst them.
Thing I Know #44. A little bit of fear once in awhile is a healthy thing.
Thing I Know #62. Throughout history, very little of note has been accomplished by people who made a paramount of concern out of what others thought.
Thing I Know #91. “Esteem” is something sought with the greatest urgency by those who struggle with doubts about whether they’ve earned it.
Thing I Know #130. The noble savage gives us life. Then we outlaw his very existence. We call this process “civilization.” I don’t know why.

got shtein?

this page has a nice look to it.

B-o

——-
- doctor chip | 07/08/2006 @ 14:03
Interesting. I think your arguement is a clear indicator that we’ve given up on Iraq and the War On Terror. We have no intention of fighting either war with any seriousness. We are hamstringing ourselves every way possible and the news is dominated by negative imagery of Iraq or the latest insipid celebrity antics.

Unless or until we get another brutal blow like 9/11 we’re going to carry on in the same half-assed manner.
- Duffy | 07/10/2006 @ 09:03
dichotomy:

yin = an exploration
yang = an evocation

That’s quite profound. But I don’t agree that an evocation requires attention. I do agree that the best evocations emanate from within.
- Mike LaSalle | 12/01/2006 @ 14:53
[…] Items of Interest FAQ Things I Know Things I Don’t Get Rules For Living With Me Bathosploration What Is A Liberal? Yin and Yang I’m a Crawly Amphibian […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 12/03/2006 @ 13:32
[…] Note: This is the eighth installment of a continuing series. Previous installments are available behind the following links: VII VI V IV III II I. Share This Article With Others:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/04/2007 @ 21:51
[…] Items of Interest FAQ Glossary Things I Know Things I Doubt Things I Don’t Get Movies You Ought Not Spoil Rules For Living With Me When I Start Running This Place Bathosploration What Is A Liberal? Yin and Yang If We Really Cared […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/21/2007 @ 18:55

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