Vertical Agriculture

The Weekend Edition of the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 25, 2010) had a piece in its Review section entitled “The Farm of the Future: Harvesting the Sky (http://www.icyte.com/saved/online.wsj.com/341123).  It reviews a new book by Dickson Despommier entitled The Vertical Farm. I’ve attached a short article by Despommier and Eric Ellingsen which describes the theory of vertical agriculture in somewhat more detail than the Journal article, although the latter has a good interactive visual which is worth looking at.

Despommier, Ellingsen, and the Journal are quite excited by this new approach to intensive agriculture on the vertical rather than horizontal scale as a means of eliminating the ecological disadvantages of industrial farming (extensive agriculture) as it is currently practiced, without sacrificing its enormous productivity gains which have eliminated widespread famine and made mass prosperity a hallmark of 20th-Century capitalism. I remain skeptical; they underestimate the ecology movement’s obsessive preoccupation with “naturalness,” which will lead it to denounce the product of this new form of non-territorial agriculture as “Frankenfood.” And the movement’s hidden agenda of radical population reduction, rooted in its usually unspoken hatred of the human race as “the cancer of the planet,” will also militate against endorsing vertical farming. Nevertheless, it will be politically difficult to oppose any new form of food production which “liberates the land” from mankind’s food requirements at the same time that it harnesses so many of the new politically correct technologies like solar and windpower.

But the aspect which I find most fascinating about Vertical Farming is how it compares, and contrasts, with the role of the skyscraper in early 20th-century capitalism.

Skyscrapers first emerged on the urban skyline when Otis’ automatic speed governor (300 lbs of greasy brass -- I actually own an early version) made it possible to safely transport people for many stories up and down tall buildings. Tall buildings were a necessity if corporate capitalism was to efficiently administer its huge industrial and financial assets. Efficient administration was accomplished through military-style organization of ranks and files of middle-management and their clerical assistants, located on whole floors stacked one on top of another in huge “cathedrals of capitalism.” The skyscraper incarnated the corporate bureaucracy that managed the joint-stock enterprise, which replaced capitalism’s earlier institutional form, the family-owned business. It also conveyed a domineering presence as a side benefit.

But the skyscraper as capitalism’s premier architectural symbol has become obsolete. The computer-driven database, spreadsheet, project management and word-processing software revolutions have sharply reduced the need for middle management and its support staff in the modern corporation. They make possible a much more efficient centralization of control by eliminating middle-management’s tendency to stimulate bureaucratic “thickening.” Top management can now get almost real-time data on production and sales flow and all the other information requirements that govern business enterprise in the modern world. “White-collar” workers are now joining their “blue-collar” brethren in lumpenproletarian droves.

Enter the agricultural tower! This development transfers the vertical dimension of construction from the administrative to the production side of capitalism. It liberates agriculture from its age-old dependence on horizontal “fields” (the root of “agriculture” is the Latin word ager, “field,” or “country”) and thereby transforms verticality into an dimension of wealth generation rather than coercive oversight. Farms can now move into cities – not as space-wasting and busywork urban “greenplots” but as resource-efficient testimonials to human ingenuity. And exploitation of verticality need not stop at agriculture. Most industrial production in the world still follows the horizontal model, because it is labor-intensive. The beauty of the vertical model is that it is technology-driven – and coercion plays no role in technological functioning.

Coercion can then be liberated from its apparent roots in a non-existent economics of scarcity to assume its undisguised purpose in capitalist society, which of course we are not allowed to discuss.

Space Cadets

What Are the Chances

of There Being Anyone Out There?

Dec. 22, 2010

by Tom A. Milstein

Vanishingly small. Indeed, infinitesimal. The buzz surrounding the search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence project (ETI), akin to the spiritualism, fairy photography, and colonic irrigation crazes of earlier eras (and no doubt future eras as well), needs only a trained gimlet eye in order to be exposed for the chimera that it is. I propose my own.

But first, a few words about my qualifications. I have none. My scientific credentials derive from an avid interest acquired in olden days from a youthful reading David Dietz’ The Story of Science, but alas, always dampened by mathematical incompetence. Also, since I plan on bringing up the subject of Fundamentalist religion later in this article, I should state that I am not and have never been a Fundamentalist, although I must confess to being uncomfortable about finding myself so often among their “fellow travelers” (and would therefore appreciate their public disavowal).

With preliminaries out of the way, we turn to the meat of the subject. I must be brief, for there isn’t any. No one of sound mind has ever seen, heard, felt, or otherwise interacted with an intelligent extra-terrestrial. Or if they have, they are (wisely) keeping quiet about it. This is a cruel fact of nature. There is a paucity of evidence for ETI. In other words, none whatever.

Ah, but there is, say the ETI searchers. You just have to know where to look.

Now we enter a realm in which I am eminently qualified, having just read Mark Twain on statistics: “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” For the entire case for the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence is based on Twainian statistics. In the absence of any solid empirical evidence, it has to be. So I shall demonstrate, according to these same statistical formulae, that there are no ETI’s.

The ETI searchers base their quest on the Vastness of the Universe (VotU) stochastic principle. We know that there are trillions (Quadrillions? Gazillions? I told you I was a mathematical incompetent) of stars in the universe. We can actually see some of them. Some of these stars have planetary systems. We can see these too, or at least detect evidence of their existence.

But VotU takes matters a step further, beyond what we can actually observe: VotU informs us that some of these systems have life-supporting planets, and that some of these planetary life-forms have evolved intelligence akin to or beyond our own. Hence the search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence! VotU proves you’re out there. We just have to look for you.

VotU accomplishes this remarkable feat on the basis of Twain’s statistics. Let me demonstrate. If there are “some” planetary systems in the Vastness of the Universe, then there must be a lot. “Some” as a fraction of infinite vastness is still a mighty big number. By the same logic, “some” of “some” is still pretty big. So some of these planetary systems must contain planets that harbor life, and some of these life-forms must have evolved intelligence – well, you get the stochastic principle, and if you don’t, you’re too dumb to be reading this article.

But if you are with me so far, you are now trapped! And by your own logic, too! For if our intelligence leads us to search for intelligent life-forms “out there,” then it stands to stochastic reason that They are also searching for us. It would be the sheerest human egocentrism to think that only we have arrived at this level of scientific curiosity. Not only that, we must assume that “some” of these extra-terrestrial searchers are a lot smarter than we. After all, who are we to believe that our evolution has achieved the highest form of intelligence and technological competence.  A little humility, please.

So the question arises, why have we not heard from these “smart ones?” Why do we have to shoulder the SETI burden alone? But it appears that we do, in embarrassing violation of VotU stochastics.

Ah, but perhaps the Smart Ones are so smart that they deliberately refrain from contacting us, out of respect for our puny human limitations, or because they are waiting for us to destroy ourselves so they can colonize our planet, or whatever. But even these speculations contradict VotU. “Some” of the Smart Ones may not be as smart – or may be a lot smarter – than the others. Statistically speaking, that fraction of the Smart Ones must be conducting their own SETI projects. Yet we have not heard from them either.

The conclusion is inescapable, based on sound VotU principles, that They are not Out There. The ghastly fact is that we are alone in the Universe. We are peerless.

How shall we treat this stunning news? I don’t know how you may react to it, but I must tip my hat to the Fundamentalists, who somehow have preached it all along, without benefit of Twainian statistics. God bless ‘em. They seem to know something we do not.

Fire the Bodyguard - Part Three

Fire the Bodyguard

Part Three

Capitalism, the Indispensable System

America, the Indispensable Nation

“Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, called America the ‘indispensable nation’ a decade ago.”

So writes the Wall Street Journal in its lead editorial on Oct. 10, 2009, commenting on the Nobel Peace Prize award to President Barack Obama (attached). The Journal reveled in the delicious irony of Madam Albright’s remark:

Mr. Obama sees the U.S. differently, as weaker than it was and the rest of the planet as stronger, and so he calls for a humbler America, at best a first among equals, working primarily through the U.N. The world's challenges, he emphasized yesterday, "can't be met by any one leader or any one nation." What this suggests to us—and to the Norwegians—is the end of what has been called "American exceptionalism." This is the view that U.S. values have universal application and should be promoted without apology, and defended with military force when necessary.

No doubt the former Secretary of State wishes she hadn’t uttered her memorable phrase, or at least that President Obama’s critics hadn’t pounced on it.

But the Journal misinterprets the Nobel Committee’s agenda. It is precisely because the “American exception” has proven the world’s rule that the prize was bestowed. Far from attacking American values, the Nobel Committee – and President Obama – reaffirmed them. In the Journal’s own words, “Mr. Obama sees the U.S. … as weaker than it was and the rest of the planet as stronger, and so he calls for a humbler America, at best a first among equals, working primarily through the U.N. The world's challenges, he emphasized yesterday, ‘can't be met by any one leader or any one nation’.”

“American exceptionalism” never had anything to do with America’s global power. In decrying the hegemonic presumption supposedly associated with being the world’s only superpower, both the Committee and the President actually repudiated the traditional European reliance on upholding powerful states in securing a peaceful and orderly world, through old-fashioned Realpolitik, balance-of-power calculations, and deterrence. Exceptionalism has always stood apart from that “Old World” realm, and counterposed to it the values associated with the American Enlightenment, the values of national self-determination, human rights, anti-imperialism and radical individualism. Exceptionalist doctrine crystallized in the 19^th Century era of American isolation from Europe’s “corruption” and “decadence” and its entangling games of power politics.

Covert European anti-Americanism undoubtedly contributed to the motives of the Nobel Committee, but the values which the Committee publicly rewarded, and which President Obama acknowledged in his message of acceptance, were affirmations of precisely the exceptionalism that made America a unique nation, and as such were a fundamental rejection of what might be termed “European exceptionalism.”

The source of the confusion between the ideals of  “American exceptionalism” and the realities of American power lies in the old bipolar world which emerged as the de facto result of World War II. America was obliged to become a superpower by virtue of the fact that if it hadn’t, the Soviet Union, by default, would have had the field to itself – unacceptable to everyone (except the Soviets), especially the still quite anti-American Europeans. But now the confusion has different roots. The Soviets are defeated, but America remains – as the world’s only superpower!

America now finds itself in a position not unlike that of the world’s economic system, capitalism: hegemonic by virtue of having no substantial opposition! And the putative opponents of both of these hegemonies end up strengthening them with their anti-establishment effusions. The proponents of American power seek to defend its superpower status by inventing surrogate after surrogate for the old Soviet menace, ranging from Saddam’s Iraq, to Iran, to North Korea, to Islamic terrorism, to rising Chinese economic power, to reborn Russian totalitarianism. You name it, there’s an expert and his associated think tank who will forecast it. But the world, and Americans, grow jaded. So the enemies of American power retaliate by seeking to weaken American might. Of course to do so they must strengthen all the global Americanizing tendencies they so loathe.

America defeats her antagonists with the wall of indispensability: you can’t beat somebody with nobody. In other words, if you want to tear down America, you can only do it by Americanizing the world. And that’s where capitalism, the indispensible system, comes in.

Want to defeat America? You’ll have to beat her at her own game. Enrichez vous!

- Oct. 12, 2010

Response to Yoram Hazony’s Essay,

ISRAEL THROUGH EUROPEAN EYES

By Abraham Berkowitz and Tom A. Milstein

August 15, 2010

Yoram Hazony’s essay, published in his “Jerusalem Letters” email series on July 14, 2010 (http://via.readerimpact.com/v/1/792bc4b1ec4cad1e102bfb9bbcc0325c6b7210346658c26c), has had a substantial impact on Jewish political opinion both in and out of Israel. Hazony certainly deserves credit for presenting a significantly original perspective on the so-called Delegitimation crisis now facing Israel. It deserves the widest possible circulation.

And yet it is dangerously flawed. We wish to point out these flaws in the context of expressing our overall appreciation of Hazony’s contribution, which opens new pathways for understanding Israel’s current predicament even as it closes off consideration of the necessary steps which the Jewish state must take to overcome the dilemmas he so eloquently describes.

Hazony’s essay is deeply indebted to the ideas of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962. This approach is itself rather novel in conservative and neo-conservative  thinking, which has not previously been noted for its sympathy with Kuhn’s remarkable sociological analysis of scientific thought. Conservatives have tended to dismiss it as an early expression of postmodern “deconstructionism” – and as such, a pernicious influence on Western intellectual development. Hazony instead offers this glowing description of Kuhn’s book,

… the most influential academic book of the last half century, selling over a million copies in a dozen languages. Kuhn’s book dropped a depth charge under the foundations of academic thinking about the way we search for truth, and about the way we come to believe the things we believe. And although the subject of the book is the way the search for truth works in the physical sciences, it has implications well beyond the sciences.

Kuhn describes the “progress of science” as taking place not as a steady, incremental advance in mankind’s knowledge of nature, but through a series of “paradigm shifts,” each of which produces what he calls a “scientific revolution.” In between these revolutions, science does proceed in an incremental, step-by-step fashion, locked into the reigning paradigm, which not only supplies a coherent perspective on nature, but also a regnant definition of the very nature of science. Until a revolution disrupts their sense of certainty, most scientists are not even aware of operating under a paradigm. It is only when paradoxes arise that cannot be adequately explained under the old paradigm, stimulating “geniuses” like Copernicus, Newton or Einstein to present alternative paradigms, that this awareness emerges. Even then, scientists trained under the old paradigm tend to reject the new. Since paradigms define the very nature of the factual, they find themselves unable to comprehend even the terminology, much less the advantages, offered by the new paradigm. As Hazony quotes Kuhn,

The proponents of competing paradigms are always at least slightly at cross-purposes. Neither side will grant all the non-empirical assumptions that the other needs in order to make its case…. [Thus while] each may hope to convert the other to his way of seeing…, neither may hope to prove his case. The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.

As a result, actual paradigm shifts must often await the generational shift that occurs when the older generation of scientists dies out and is replaced by their younger, presumably more open-minded juniors.

Hazony invokes Kuhn in order to throw light upon a subject that has vexed many of Israel’s supporters, both left and right: why Israel is subjected to one campaign after another “of vilification in the media and on the campuses and in the corridors of power—a smear campaign of a kind that no other nation on earth is subjected to on a regular basis. “We know we will again see our nation treated not as a democracy doing its duty to defend its people and its freedom, but as some kind of a scourge.” He notes that while the left and the right differ in their responses to these campaigns – the left emphasizing policy changes, the right better PR efforts – the overwhelming evidence is that neither of these two approaches has the slightest effect in changing the minds of those who mount these campaigns, and those who are influenced by them. This impotence prevails despite the tremendous weight of factual evidence gathered by Israel’s supporters disproving the allegations upon which the campaigns are based.

According to Hazony, the reason for this abject failure lies in a tremendous paradigm shift which, unnoticed in Israel, has overtaken public opinion in Western Europe, where most of the anti-Israel sentiment has its home. He argues that it is this paradigm shift, not traditional European anti-Semitism, or even the influence of Arab petrodollars, which accounts for Israel’s political isolation and progressive delegitimation.

In order to grasp the significance of a paradigm shift, one must first understand the nature of the paradigm which has been replaced. Hazony argues that Europe’s old paradigm – which it bequeathed to the world (including Israel) – was based on nationalism. Nationalism is the ideological paradigm of the international system which arose in Europe simultaneously with the emergence of the nation-state:

The defeat of the universalist ideal in the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 led to the establishment of a new paradigm for European politics—one in which a revitalized concept of the national state held the key to the freedom of peoples throughout Europe. By the late-1800s, this idea of national liberty had been extended to the point that it was conceived not only as a governing principle for Europe, but for the entire world. Progressives such as John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson championed the sovereign nation-state, which would have the right to defend its form of government, laws, religion and language against the tyranny of imperial actors, as the cornerstone of what was ultimately to be a new political order for humanity. Herzl’s Zionist Organization, which proposed a sovereign state for the Jewish people, fit right into this political understanding—and indeed, it was under British sponsorship that the idea of the Jewish state grew to fruition. In 1947, the United Nations voted by a 2/3 majority for the establishment of a “Jewish State” in Palestine. And the birth of Israel was followed by the establishment of dozens of additional independent states throughout the Third World.

According to Hazony, the “new paradigm for European politics” launched in 1648 was subjected to a vigorous philosophical assault by Immanuel Kant in a 1795 essay entitled Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch. Kant denied that the nation-state could be the basis of a moral world order, since the selfish sovereign claims of such states would always conflict with the universal need for global peace and harmony. A single international state must emerge, abolishing individual national sovereignties and bringing all of mankind under its purview.

Kant’s visionary Sketch  was relegated to the realm of the utopian by most Western thinkers, until the carnage of two world wars came to be seen as a result of nationalism run amok by many influential political intellectuals, especially but not only in Europe. Although not openly declared as their objective, the Kantian program of an international state deriving its authority from the demolished sovereignties of formerly independent nations has become a sort of hidden European agenda in world affairs. This hidden agenda is the paradigm shift which has stealthily washed the solid nationalist ground out from under Israel’s Zionist foundations. Not Israel as a Jewish state, not even Israel as an allegedly colonialist imposition, but Israel as a sovereign nation-state represents an unacceptable affront to this new paradigm, since no realistic proposal for peace in the region can be devised which does not involve sovereignty concessions by Israel – but no such concessions can be offered by Israel which do not involve the eventual sacrifice of her national existence. Europe’s peoples, who have already conceded much of their own national sovereignties, simply cannot see what Israel’s problem is with such concessions.

The obvious problem with Hazony’s analysis is that it leaves Israel sealed within a coffin with “NO EXIT” signs prominently engraved on all 6 interior surfaces. If there has indeed been a “paradigm shift” in European and (since the election of Obama) American politics, and this paradigm shift has left Israel stranded in a realm of 19^th and 20^th Century nation-states even as the rest of the world has rushed beyond nationalism into the heady new world of Kantian political globalism, then Israel is well and truly doomed by the iron dialectic of Kuhn’s scientific revolutions. All the academic writings of the think tanks, all the military prowess of the IDF, all the political gyrations of the government, all the economic miracles of Israeli business, are not going to put the Humpty-Dumpty of national sovereignty back together again in such a world. Israel will be illegitimated by the new paradigm of international relations. And since Hazony has already conceded that Israel’s legitimacy was conferred from above, that is, by the “international community” such as it existed under the “old paradigm,”

Let’s begin with the old paradigm, which is the one that granted Israel its legitimacy in the first place. The modern state of Israel was founded, both constitutionally and in terms of the understanding of the international community, as a nation-state, the state of the Jewish people….

 ….In 1947, the United Nations voted by a 2/3 majority for the establishment of a “Jewish State” in Palestine. And the birth of Israel was followed by the establishment of dozens of additional independent states throughout the Third World.

neither Hazony nor Israel is equipped to argue that this community is unqualified to deny legitimacy under the operation of the “new paradigm.” After all, the right of the “international community” under the old paradigm to confer legitimacy was highly dubious; such powers belong to sovereign entities, and no international organization, including the United Nations, claimed the rights of sovereignty. If legitimacy nonetheless descends upon a fledgling state from the supra-national realm, then how much more credible is such a descent – or its denial – when that realm has begun to acquire some of the attributes of sovereignty which hitherto it lacked? In short, if we argue that the UN General Assembly’s 2/3 vote legitimated Israel’s existence as a sovereign state, then why, constitutionally speaking, cannot the same mechanism be employed under the new paradigm to deprive Israel of that legitimacy?

The problem with Hazony’s coffin is that it is constructed out of the materials of Western Civilization rather than those provided by our own Jewish tradition. It needs to be turned from a coffin into a platform. To do so, we need only realize one thing: the 1648 paradigm shift which Hazony describes as legitimating the modern international system never occurred. The European system of international relations that emerged from the Treaty of Westphalia was based on a grand compromise between the Protestant and Catholic nations of Christian Europe. This compromise was carried out not to realize but to avoid a “paradigm shift” – the shift which the Protestant reformation had been struggling for over a century to achieve. The architects of the Roman Catholic counterreformation were well aware of what that shift would have meant (in many cases, more aware than their Protestants opponents): the “Judaization” of Christianity, or, in Kuhn’s terminology, a religious revolution.

The core of this revolution was expressed in Protestantism’s devotion to the “Old Testament,” to Talmudic and other Judaic sources for its interpretation, and to a fundamental rejection of the sacrament-dispensing role of the Church’s clerical bureaucracy. But the Reformation sued for peace before it could achieve this program. Except for a few marginal denominations like the Unitarians, it was never able to surrender its allegiance to the pagan man-God savior figure of Jesus and to its accompanying Trinitarian theology which so deeply corrupted Judaism’s monotheist worldview. Protestantism settled for Catholic recognition of its hegemony in the lands which its princes had conquered; the Church congratulated itself for having saved the most fundamental principle of Christianity and hoped for a better day when it might yet triumph. Out of this stalemated Christian schism, there emerged those twin symbols of the disgrace of religion: the all-powerful secular state, and the Enlightenment – and a de facto international system based on expediency rather than legitimacy.

It is the illegitimacy of the international system, the fact that the paradigm shift which Hazony thinks occurred in 1648 was actually strangled in its cradle, that is the curse of the modern world. Our nation did not win its independence in the U.N. It won its independence in the same place every legitimate nation wins theirs: in a revolutionary war of independence. Ben Gurion and his minions downplayed that fact because it reflected too much credit on the Irgun and Menachem Begin. But the fact is that the international system has no legitimacy to confer or deny. It is a realm of anarchy, governed only by the law of the jungle. Its “authority” is fictitious.

The current attack on the nation-state is real, but it is not revolutionary. It is counterrevolutionary in the truest sense of that word, nothing less than the recrudescence of the unitary imperial principle in world affairs, and as such represents the failure of the Protestant paradigm shift to take place, not its revolutionary overthrow. Its aim is to build a second Tower of Babel, and the tools which it will find it necessary to employ in this endeavor are both anti-Semitic and totalitarian.

If the rise of Naziism was insufficient to mark the end of Judaism’s deadly love affair with Western Civilization, then surely the West’s shameful abandonment of its own highest institutional creation – the modern democratic nation-state – in a calculated act of revenge against its own Jewish roots, ought to be sufficient. The question is, will our best intellectuals, scholars, and political thinkers be able to meet the challenge which this repudiation has set? Yoram Hazony’s essay suggests that the first step – recognition – has been taken. But what next?