Easily Distracted

Oh, well, if the truth is going to get our soldiers into trouble, by all means, let’s airbrush it out of existence. Why stop with photographs? Let’s shred all remaining records from the last eight years. We clearly need a national security-oriented amendment to the Constitution as well so that the government can use prior restraint to suppress any reporting that the Pentagon thinks could cause trouble for whatever war we’re in at the moment. Sure, people in countries we’re occupying might know a few things about how we’ve carried out the occupation, but who are they going to tell? Al-Qaida? We all know that terrorists don’t believe anything they read unless it appears in the U.S. mass media.

So recently there was a good bit of blogging reaction to the public disagreement between four of the most tendentious intellectuals on planet Earth: Stanley Fish, Terry Eagleton, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. All four of them are prone to making and then furiously humping straw men while avoiding introspection about their own previous work and thinking. In this particular case, the issue was the muscular public atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens, which Eagleton and now Fish have criticized as ignoring the genuine virtues of religious thought.

I completely agree with the criticism that Eagleton and Fish aren’t talking about religious practice or religious institutions which actually exist in the world, but instead a secular person’s ideal spirituality, primarily concerned with the limits to knowledge, the importance of mystery, the meaning and phenomenology of human life, and so on, and that both of them rig the game so that there can be no legitimate challenges to religion. Many actually-existing religions have very strong truth claims that are expansive in scope rather than the kinds of tentative, humble embrace of the unknowability of human existence that Eagleton and Fish see as the essence of religion. Dawkins and Hitchens, on the other hand, irritate me not just because they lack even the slightest trace of introspection about their own past errors and exaggerations, but because on the subject of religion and atheism, they have such truncated tunnel-vision arguments.

A pox on the whole discussion as these four construct it. This isn’t exactly a new debate. Finding the shrillest or most tendentious formulation of long-standing arguments on these issues is not much of an accomplishment.

As with many similarly well-worn discussions, I’d just as soon review the available lines of argument about why secular or atheistic thinkers perhaps should have an interest in religion or spirituality which goes beyond being resolutely hostile, which takes religion to be an interesting subject to investigate with an open mind (rather than just finding new ways to arrive at familiar criticisms). Any of these lines of argument has its own shortcomings, and none of them seem to me to prevent strong criticisms of some or all religions, but all of them seem to me to provide some intellectual texture and complexity lacking from recent “muscular atheism” of the Dawkins-Hitchens type. It’s not that they don’t consider some of these lines of argument, but that they simply see them as speedbumps on the road to the crusade.

Here’s what I come up with when I make a list.

1. Religion is adaptive, instinctive, or inevitable (in human consciousness or in social experience), and therefore arguing against it is largely beside the point. I know that Dawkins has entertained versions of this argument, as have other evolutionary psychologists who have a critical perspective on religion. There’s a familiar dodge in this kind of argument about the evolutionary roots of a contemporary behavior of which the arguer disapproves: that the behavior was once adaptive and is now maladaptive. But this claim is often asserted rather than studied or demonstrated, usually with striking disregard for what “adaptive” means in evolutionary biology, as well as weak arguments about why the new norms are preferable. In the context of contemporary global society, in what respect is strong religious faith maladaptive? The most secular populations in the contemporary world have the lowest birth rates. Where’s the evidence that the reproductive success of religious populations is threatened by their religious belief or practices? These uses of evolutionary argument have never really escaped the intellectual failings of social Darwinism, in that they’re used to make moral or social claims about what human beings should be instead of what they are while ignoring actual evolutionary science. In any event, this kind of argument should really be a much bigger impediment for Dawkins-style atheism than it appears to be.

2. Religion is sociohistorically embedded. You could argue that regardless of one’s personal opinions of religious belief or practice, that religions and spirituality are as deeply embedded in human social organization as state sovereignty, law, kinship structures and so on. You might be able to make a philosophical argument against a specific religion or religion in general, but it would be irresponsible to allow that opposition to blind you to your intellectual responsibility to explore the complex history of religious practice and sentiment or to unrealistically assume that this history can be simply dispensed with because of the cogency of a philosophical argument. I suppose you could go from this line of argument to suggest that a passionately anti-religious person needs to understand that their political project is a profoundly revolutionary one, no different in scope than an anarchist who wants to eliminate the nation-state. And as with any revolutionary project, the scope raises a moral problem about the costs of pursuing it and a practical problem about the plausibility of pursuing it.

3. Religion is functional. This approach is where a decent number of secular intellectuals who have studied religion tend to alight, conceding that whatever the philosophical problems of religion, it serves some kind of useful long-term or short-term functions for its adherents and as such, makes some kind of sense. This argument has all the problems that functionalism has applied to any practice, but it’s still a pretty serious challenge to the strongly anti-religious, in part because the range of possible functions is so broad: psychological comfort, social networking or mobilization, territorially expansive form of political connection that doesn’t rely on kinship, enforcement of moral norms, you name it. The anti-religious might argue that these functions can be better served by other institutions or belief systems, but it’s up to them to demonstrate that. Or they can argue that these functions are themselves bad, but that’s a much harder thing to do in many cases than knocking some specific bit of theology from a given religion.

4. Local religious practices and experiences and large-scale religious institutions are different. E.g., this is the conventional “I’m not against religion, just against organized religion” argument, an observation that an anti-religious critic who reasons about all religion from the actions or beliefs of a large-scale formal religious institution is missing an important distinction. This is the reverse of what the commenters at Crooked Timber noted about Eagleton and Fish, which is that they construct an idealized philosophical account of spirituality that ignores the concrete institutional reality of religion.

5. The private or local habitus of religious life is different from the ideological life of religion. Similar to #4, an observation that how the experience of spirituality may have little or nothing to do with formal ideologies or philosophies put forth by religious organizations, and that a critical view of the latter should not be projected easily onto the former.

6. Religious ideology is a superficial gloss on top of bad social action; the bad action is not caused by religious ideology. So, for example, if an anti-religious critic were to ascribe the cause of the Crusades to the existence of religious faith or religious organizations, they might arguably be missing deeper or more powerful underlying social, economic and political causes of the Crusades. This is a fairly familiar kind of debate between historians whether we’re talking about religion or not, about whether or when cultural, intellectual or social conflicts visible at the “surface” of events are are actually causes of those events or not. I think at the least you could suggest that long lists of bad events attributed to religious faith or organizations are intellectually lazy, that almost any given event is a lot messier when you poke into it. For example, just saying that the Catholic Church suppressed Galileo’s findings and ergo, that religion suppressed scientific truth and human progress is pretty much greasy kid’s stuff as far as understanding that specific history, which also involved Italian court politics, the economic and social transformation of Renaissance Italy, debates within Western European Catholicism about many subjects, and a good deal else.

7. Religious thought and experience is a subclass of philosophical exploration of questions about the meaning of human life. This is where Fish and Eagleton are coming from, and while they make the argument in manipulative fashion, there’s certainly a more interesting version of it available which acknowledges that the norm of religious life may not involve philosophical exploration but that religion is at least one example of a broader class of such explorations, and that the broader class involves something valuable and important that cannot be provided by most scientific thought.

More? I’m fairly unsympathetic to some of these lines of argument, but I at least know that a lot of ink has flowed under all of these bridges.

I’ve not had a lot to say on the blog about stories that I have a lot to say about, partly because of an upswing in my periodic feelings of discomfort with the echo-chamber aspect of blogging as well as my irritation with the debasement of public discourse by hacks, pundits and talking heads. It seems completely worthless to say anything about US policy on torture when Karl Rove can go on TV and complain that the release of the memos makes torture ineffective by disclosing the details. As Jon Stewart said, “What, is torture some kind of magic trick that’s ruined when you know the secret”? It almost seems beside the point to be outraged about both the policy and the apologists for it. It’s like complaining that people at a nudist camp don’t have any clothes on.

However, there is one sense in which the legal sanctioning of torture under the Bush Administration, with all of its obscene bureaucratic precision and full-on banality-of-evil legalese, was in fact a magic trick.

The anthropologist Adam Ashforth argued that commissions of inquiry in southern Africa (and by inference, elsewhere) were largely a form of theater designed to affirm the state’s authority over information and knowledge rather than open-ended processes of investigation, that they were elaborate performances. My only caveat to this observation has been to argue that while commissions, blue-ribbon panels, and so on may be theatrical, they are sometimes improvisational rather than scripted, that officials do not always control or anticipate what takes place within such a process.

Ashforth extended this argument in an article by observing that torture is frequently a very similar phenomenon, that it has rarely been about obtaining actual information which the state requires, whether that’s about ticking time bombs or the names of dissidents. Instead, he argued, modern states torture in order to prove that they can torture, as a performance of power over the bodies and lives of people within their territorial sovereignty. For this to work, torture both has to be secret (which amplifies its drama) and yet also a spectacle hazily retold and represented within popular discourse.

Which fits the policies of the last eight years pretty well, and makes you wonder whether some of the people leaking information, memos and photos were doing so with the intent of enhancing their understandings of the usefulness of torture rather than contesting it. It’s pretty clear that if you’re waterboarding the same person over a hundred times in a month, you’re not looking for urgent information. You’re doing it because you can, to perform vengeance and toughness and resolve through operatic sadism. It’s a very different way of saying, “Yes we can!”. It’s Romper Room 101, not quite yet up to the full rats-on-face horror but well on its way.

My quibble with Ashforth’s argument still holds: this was a performance with many improvisations. Moreover, as with many performances, what the players and directors imagined audiences would think and do and what audiences actually felt about the staging may have been and will continue to be rather different.

The only new thing with the current disclosures is really that every pretense and excuse and hypothetical, every fig-leaf, is gone. No bad apples, just an orchard the size of an entire political class. No “it was just enhanced interrogation, not torture”. No Mark-Bowden-style “These are professionals who know what they’re doing and do it only when they must”: the people who signed the memos and drafted the policies were totally clueless about the actual precedents and roots of the methods they endorsed. No time-bombs to defuse. Just the need to be seen as capable of the same authoritarian brutality as many other states around the world, just keeping up with the Joneses.

There’s been two legal cases in the news lately involving officials and teenagers, and you’ve probably read about both of them. The first involves a young woman who was strip-searched because administrators suspected she had a double-strength ibuprofen concealed in her clothing, the other involves a threat to prosecute a teenager who sent a picture of herself in a bra to another teenager’s cellphone.

Allow me to recommend to you my colleague Barry Schwartz’ TED talk, “The Real Crisis? We Stopped Being Wise”. I don’t always apply Barry’s arguments in this talk the way that he does, but I think the thrust of what he’s saying is spot-on. This is why I have such a strong interest in the perverse or unexpected affects of bureaucratic initiatives or fixed policies, whomever is promoting those approaches, to whatever ends, because so often we turn to policy to save us from having to work through the human world around us one step at a time, with our hearts and minds fully engaged.

In a wise society, it’s possible that someone would have asked whether the fair enforcement of an anti-drug policy required being tough on ibuprofen. It’s possible that concerns about “sexting” and exploitation of young people would lead to concern about any pictures of that kind. But equally, I feel like in a wise society that someone would say, “No, let’s calm down here and not do something dumb.” If someone didn’t, in the face of the colossal mistake of threatening a prosecution for child pornography or a humiliating strip-search, in a wise society, the person responsible would own up to their mistake, apologize, and try to find a way to make up for their error in judgment.

Just as the common thought about Watergate is that the cover-up was worse than the crime, so too is the stone-walled refusal to admit error in these cases far more infuriating than the original mistakes. The observers who think the enforcement of the rules are more important than the mistakes end up siding with the rules even when they concede that maybe the particular actions of authorities were a bit imprudent. It just makes me feel that somehow we’ve really lost our way. Maybe we never were on the right track in the past, either, but these cases feel in some ways like such a simple matter of the misuse of authority, of letting the rules rather than ordinary human common sense drive the business of everyday life.

EDIT: I’ll add this case discussed today at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog, just for an example of an authority in charge doing the right thing. A Dallas cop stopped a family who ran a red light as they rushed to the hospital to try and see a dying family member before the end. Cop doesn’t pay any attention to what he’s being told and proceeds to berate the driver. But the police chief is a straight-shooter: not only does he say bluntly that his officer was in the wrong, he makes it clear that your authority and training aren’t expected to substitute for your ordinary human empathy and understanding, that there’s no excuse for failing to show common sense. That’s what wisdom first, rules second looks like.

Some connected capstone thoughts about various debates on the AIG bonuses and related matters:

1. It’s fair to say that I’ve been a bit flip about the continuing market value of expertise within AIG and related businesses which have received TARP funds (or, in fact, those which have not). Nevertheless, I think some pretty harsh skepticism is important, and I’m still fairly gobsmacked at the degree to which some writers take it at face value that it is vitally important to have highly experienced personnel working at AIG-F.P. and other similar enterprises and to compensate them at very high levels accordingly. Or the degree to which they trust the assurances of people inside those businesses that they possess that kind of expertise.

If there’s one thing we all can see about this crisis, it’s that people with this allegedly vital expertise are the ones who made catastrophic mistakes in the first place.

Over at Megan McArdle’s blog, one commenter objected to my devaluing of expert knowledge in AIG-F.P. by saying that it’s crucial to continue to employ people who know the value of the assets involved.

Problem: the people who are employed there didn’t know the value of the assets they were dealing with before all this happened. That’s why we’re in this mess. Even if they didn’t directly work with credit-default swaps, a lot of experts in those businesses didn’t seem any more alert to or knowledgeable about the true character of those investments before the house of cards collapsed.

When experts get things this wrong, I need to hear more from them than “I wasn’t involved” in order to believe that their expertise remains indispensible. The analogy I made at Megan’s blog was to many high-level experts in the politics and economics of the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s. Very few of them, looking back, seem to have noticed or understood the dynamics that led to the eventual collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet state, even right up to beginning of those events. I can understand that. That lack of understanding didn’t seem to humble a lot of those experts, or make them rethink their general practices or methodology. I went to a conference on ethnic identity in the early 1990s where several prominent former Sovietologists were key speakers, having moved into this new field to become important prognosticators and policy advisors. They seemed to me to be just as wrong in some disastrous ways about this new field of expertise, but more importantly, not a single one seemed to have given up an ounce of the hubris with which they had previously applied to knowledge about the USSR.

So far what I see mostly among financial experts is, “Some other expert got it wrong, my knowledge is intact” or “markets just do this kind of thing every once in a while, funny old world ain’t it” or “actually I was right about everything, it’s just that the unwashed masses did a bunch of stupid things that I never thought they’d do and screwed up all my really quite correct analysis”. So I think some skepticism about the high market value of that kind of expertise remains legitimate.

This is not a skepticism that I apply only to financial expertise. Long-time readers of this blog know it’s something I worry about constantly within my own professional world.

2. I feel like there is an asymmetry in public discussions about how and when we feel obligated to think about the interactions between systems, agency and individual responsibility. I’d like to think that I care about those interactions all the time. I would certainly like to care about them all the time. However, I know I have cases where I’m more inclined to maximize individual culpability for actions and cases where I’m more inclined to stress systematic or institutional causality.

I think there are reasons why I have those inclinations. For example, I think the more social or economic power you have as an individual, the more culpable you are for how you use it. (Consider this the Spider-Man theory of society.) Because I know I have this bias, I also agree that it’s important to look at the institutional, systematic and habitual worlds around the powerful. I’ve long argued that this is one of the problems with cultural studies, cultural anthropology and social history. Those fields often act as if the social and institutional contexts of power are already well-understood or known simply because the powerful often represent themselves so forcefully through documents, texts and other expressive culture. If you’re interested in the ethnography of everyday life in a small farming village in southern Africa, you should be just as interested in forging an ethnographic understanding of neoliberal development experts in Washington DC or in the upper reaches of postcolonial bureaucracies, and in both cases, treat the subject as something that you don’t know about in advance of doing ethnographic work. (There are practical problems in studying the powerful in this way, but that’s a different problem.)

However, to flip this around, I find it disconcerting when commenters argue that we have to sensitively appreciate the systematic and institutional pressures operating within the world of someone like Jake DeSantis and then proceed to argue that underwater mortgages are very simply understood as the collective stupidity of greedy or ignorant people for which they are entirely culpable.

Conservative and libertarian writers often sneer that liberals are too obsessed with social explanations for behavior that privilege underlying or structural preconditions, but I haven’t noticed that they’re any less inclined to those explanations when they’re well-suited to their ideological priors.

3. Building off my second point, I guess I’m struck by the way the discussions of the AIG bonuses tends to reveal one’s predispositions of sympathy and trust. While a lot of loosely libertarian writers tend to believe in the wisdom of crowds as a general construct, some of them tend to view the wealthy with a tautological reasoning that if you’re wealthy, you must have done something right, and ergo, your representations about what you did right (or what you didn’t do wrong) are trustworthy until proven otherwise. If you’re just an ordinary schlub earning an average salary, that makes your representations of why you’re in the situation that you’re in somewhat untrustworthy: you must have done something wrong at some point.

It’s a kind of Calvinist libertarianism: you don’t have to prove that your work has produced wealth because you’re talented; if you’re wealthy, you must have been so. The elect know they’re going to heaven because they’re the elect: what they do in life matters not so much.

I really do think that some people get ahead in the world because of talent, insight, drive, skill and so on. And if I can be really simplistic for a moment, I think in an ideal world that’s the way it should be. But clearly also there are people earning a great deal who are in that situation because of dumb luck or pedigree or because their industry has locked in structural advantages that overflow their coffers with so much cash that they can’t help but dole it out in buckets to every employee. Or because they’ve effectively stolen those earnings from other people through legal, institutional, economic or social chicanery.

I’m not saying that there should be some great redistributionist crusade until we’ve limited wealth to the “deserving rich”. All complex social systems generate parasitic as well as constructive niches. I am saying that we shouldn’t just trust that everyone who is earning $750,000 after taxes did work or contributed expertise that has that actual value to a free-market economy. You could call that the Catholic branch of libertarian or free-market thought: not only prove that you are indeed doing good (value-creating) deeds in the world, but be anxiously humble and vaguely guilt-ridden about whether your proof is adequate to that challenge, be concerned about your sins and shortcomings. This is why a lot of the talk about “going Galt” and other extreme Randian flavors of libertarianism seems so utterly silly to me: the people who talk that way come off as so utterly certain of their own membership in the elect, their own superiority. If they’re not rich yet, they’re sure that’s because society or government is keeping them down.

4. Just an observation from studying games. Players may accept and tolerate a rule that puts them at a disadvantage as long as they think that adapting to that rule is possible and open in theory to any player. However, there is nothing more likely to absolutely enrage the players in a game than a late change in the rules engineered by a player who previously benefitted from the earlier ruleset but is now being harmed by it. This is especially true if it’s felt that the earlier beneficiaries were cheating, or something close to it.

I think as far as risk and consequence in free-market economies go, this is precisely what’s happening right now. This is why I do think it’s absolutely right to be infuriated by post-bailout compensation at TARP-receipient companies even if it’s not right to come up with complicated clawback mechanisms. In this sense, there is nothing minor about the way in which the players who took the biggest risks now want to change the rules so that people who avoided risks get stuck with the consequences.

In short, for anyone who wants financial capitalism to continue to exist in some form similar to what is has been, this is an important moment to lose this round of the game by the rules that you previously argued legitimated your victories. If the reason why you were entitled to huge gains in the last twenty years was because you took the big risks, now’s the time to accept that the pain coming your way should be exactly proportionate to the gains of the past.

If you want a very real-life example, the computer game Diablo 2 was a wildly popular multiplayer game when it first came out. The game’s creator, Blizzard, was indifferent to the proliferation of cheating and exploitative behavior. The result: eventually people either cheated or left. Many people chose the latter. This left the cheaters with each other, and an ecosystem that is all wolves, no sheep, tends to dwindle down to a small number of permanently famished wolves. (This is one reason Blizzard is now so intensely vigilant about cheats and exploits in their current flagship product, World of Warcraft.)

5. I think we’re all afflicted with some really messy, unresolved views of the moral and rational meaning of contract, obligation and negotiation.

There was a story a while back about a University of Florida professor who has a 1/1 teaching load with some administrative responsibilities who was fighting pressure from her administration to teach an additional course because she was hired with an explicit contractual agreement that her teaching load would be 1/1. I suspect that most of the people who rained down outrage upon her and called upon the university to break that contract by whatever means necessary might be the same people arguing that AIG and the federal government have to make good on their contract to Jake DeSantis and pay what they agreed to pay. The reverse is probably equally true, however.

In both cases, some of those who argued that contract is legally sacrosanct also agreed that the contract in question was unwise, foolish or morally reprehensible. I think that’s actually a fine combination of arguments: that contracts should stand, but that we can continue to talk about how unwise or problematic they are, perhaps in order to discourage such contracts in the future. What makes a contract unwise or immoral, however, tends to be something that most of us tend to have contradictory thoughts about.

In any case, where this gets even messier is when we come to believe that the consequences of an existing contract are so disastrous or unwise that efforts should be made to convince the parties to such a contract to renegotiate its terms. I actually felt that the University of Florida professor in question should really step back and think about the harm that her contract does her own institution and her larger profession, and that this should condition a willingness to add an additional course. But for the same reason, I’d say it’s perfectly legitimate to argue strenuously to AIG-F.P.’s remaining staff who are owed large retention bonuses that accepting those bonuses not only harms their own company but the society as a whole. Making those arguments strongly while staying clear of any implied threat to compel parties to contract to do the right thing is clearly a tricky business.

Dear Mr. DeSantis:

Thank you for your heartfelt resignation letter printed today in the New York Times.

I would be remiss if I did not reply with a few comments. Since your company is now effectively owned by the government to which I pay taxes, consider this a reply from one of your employers.

You concede that you and your colleagues may have been overcompensated overall for your work in the past. You’ve worked ten or twelve-hour days in the past few years, and your division of AIG-F.P. made a profit. You do not discuss the exact compensation you received during those previous years. Yet in this year, after your company as a whole has suffered a catastrophic failure, has received massive amounts of public funds and your work has consisted of dismantling your company’s financial products division you believe you have earrned your after-tax compensation, paid in the form of a “retention bonus” of $742,006.

Again, that’s your after-tax income, being paid by a company which lost more money than any other business in history, after it came close to destroying the entire global financial system. I don’t work the same hours you do, and I don’t produce profit for a company as you once did, but that’s just shy of a decade’s worth of work for me. And I’m exceptionally well-compensated in comparison to 90% of working Americans.

I appreciate that you’re going to give away this money to charities working to undo the damage your company and others caused. Respectfully, may I suggest that you don’t understand that many of us believe that if you reaped the benefits of your company’s risky conduct, you should be exposed in equal measure to its failure. This should not just mean that you lose whatever value you held through AIG’s stock, but that your compensation this year should reflect your company’s failure. The fact that there is anything at all available to compensate you is a consequence of your company being bailed out by the American taxpayer.

You observe that you should not be cheated of your payment any more than a plumber who fixed the pipes should be robbed of payment if an electrician subsequently burns the house down. You might want to make that analogy more precise. If the plumber who fixed the pipes was employed by the same contractor as the electrician, worked on the pipes while the electrician was connecting the wiring to the plumbing system, and watched as the electrician laid a trail of flowing gasoline between all the homes in the neighborhood, then the plumber might reasonably expect that his own payment might be at risk.

Yours,

Tim Burke

A lot of what I have to say in the following post echoes Paul Krugman’s column today.

There has been a chorus of tut-tutting in the punditocracy about the furor over the AIG bonuses, with many Very Serious People saying that we just have to get over it, that the bonuses are unimportant in the general scheme of things, that we have more serious issues to worry about.

A lot of this finger-wagging reminds me of the last group of Very Serious People who insisted that anyone who was against invading Iraq was a wild-eyed leftist dinosaur, that accepting the need for the invasion was a precondition of being a Very Serious Adult.

The scolds are even doing some of the same kind of willful misrepresentation and misconstrual of the arguments they’re dismissing.

Yes, I agree that there are grandstanders going after the AIG bonuses in nakedly and crudely political terms, who have no other point in mind. (Charles Rangel, for example.) But a lot of the concern about the bonuses is just using them to illustrate some larger concerns about the entirety of federal economic policy from the late Bush Administration to the early Obama administration. It’s not wrong to worry about a drop in the bucket when the bucket is under a roof with a ton of leaks in it.

Talking about the bonuses is a way to raise much deeper questions which virtually no one in Washington (or any of the Very Serious tut-tutters) seems prepared to discuss.

1) The management of AIG, investment firms, banks, and most of the financial sector got themselves into the mess they’re in, and thus the mess we’re in, by making consistently bad decisions guided consistently short-term sensibilities. They operated by thinking first, last and foremost about their own immediate gains. They’re in the mess that they’re in because they had no hesitation to rip off society at large in order to cover their own bad risks, because they did everything they could up to the limit of grey-area legality to cover their own asses at everyone else’s expense.

This is not because they’re uniquely evil human beings. It’s because that’s the omega state of financial capitalism at the moment, the way the entire institutional apparatus is structured. Most of these managers were doing what made sense in their businesses, their professional world. They were trained to do it, rewarded for it.

So where are the details about how those managers are changing the way they think and act? Where’s the guarantees that a more prudent, long-term manner of calculation has been established? What safeguards are being put into place to govern how they spend the funds they’re receiving? How is the structure of the business that nearly wrecked the global economy being changed by the people in those businesses?

When people complain about the AIG bonuses, this is largely what they’re asking: how do we know that these huge sums will be spent responsibly, given the evidence that the people who are doing the spending have been among the least responsible institutional actors in the entirety of our economic and social world over the last decade? There are no real assurances, no details, no safeguards coming from Geithner’s office, any more than there were from Paulson’s. There doesn’t even to be a political recognition of the need for such assurances: Geithner, like many of the Very Serious People, seems to feel that we need to let him get about his business, because there’s a world to save and only the people who really know the details can be given access to the plan.

Tell me why the people who made so many terrible mistakes, operating from so many flawed premises, with so short-sighted a view of the consequences, are now the people who can be trusted to correctly use the enormous resources flowing through their institutions.

2) President Obama concedes that part of the problem is a “culture of greed”. So, ok, it’s the culture, stupid. How do you change culture, how do you shift norms, how do you change everyday practices? Generally, by persuasion, by rhetoric, by modelling of norms, by shunning and mockery, by ritualizations of new habits. Only secondarily at best do you change culture by setting new rules or establishing new laws.

So when people rise to complain about the “culture of greed”, this is precisely what they’re up to: they’re trying to make it difficult to carry on with business as usual. They’re saying, “If you want to be CEO of one of these businesses, you’ll need to be mindful about the business first, the society second, and your own grabby need to have a six-bathroom mansion third.” This is how we collectively enforce an idea of public rectitude, of responsibility to society: by complaint, by popular anger, by using words to tar and feather the scoundrels. Does that kind of anger sometimes sop over onto targets who don’t deserve it? Yes. Does it sometimes involve profound ignorance about how things actually work in the institutions being targeted? Yes. Is it ripe for demagogic misuse? Sure. But despite those risks, the best way to really shift a pattern of normative behavior is through public attention to bad behavior, through hitting the reset button around what is considered moral, proper practice.

3) The anger at the AIG bonuses is being stoked by the lack of any ideas at all about the long-term reform of the financial sector, or the economy in general. This is Krugman’s point today: where’s the vision thing? Obama and Geithner have had virtually nothing to say about the medium-term future of any of the institutions that they’re trying to save. In Krugman’s view, that’s because they think those institutions are basically sound, and just need a bit of temporary propping up to be ok. Like Krugman, I think that’s completely wrong.

Tell us where we’re going in the longer run. Shareholder capitalism has become an utter joke at this point: tell me how we reform it so that when you buy shares of a company, you’re invested in that company and its long-term prospects, not just pushing all your chips in on red and watching the roulette wheel spin. Tell me how we get boards that represent those kinds of shareholders, and have fiduciary responsibilities to those long-term owners that are legally and morally binding, who are the skeptics who challenge CEOs and management, not collude with them. Tell me how we safeguard the aspects of this economy where the risks that businesses take are risks that we are all exposed to, so that those risks aren’t being taken without our willing consent. Tell me how we make sure that the biggest gamblers lose only their own chips, so they go home broke while the rest of us sleep secure at night when we don’t choose to gamble along with them.

Give us all a comprehensive blueprint for how you reform the whole damn thing and stop worrying about the delicate sensibilities of the people who robbed the system blind in the first place. If they want to hold the Dow Jones hostage, double-dare them to go ahead and shoot their hostage. 400 points up, 400 points down, it’s not what matters.

And if what Obama needs to do in order to get to that kind of reform is to get rid of Geithner or his economic team, fine. One of the other things that a lot of Obama voters expect from the President is that he won’t stick by his staff past the point at which they’ve made errors of judgment or action that are too grave to ignore. That’s the cronyism and naked political calculation of the last eight years (arguably, of much longer). “Change” means jettisoning that kind of calculation as well. Either Geithner will rise to the occasion and help craft a vision of reform that concedes that much of the system as it stands is broken, or the President will need a different advisor with different capabilities.

I get it. If I’m promised a pony and a rainbow by a politician when he or she is running for office, I shouldn’t expect much more than some horseshit and downpours after the election.

I’m an adult. I don’t expect magic solutions.

I do expect progress where delivering the goods is not about magic solutions or free lunches. Here are two areas where the current Administration is tilting towards failure for me.

1. Transparency on the economy in general and on bailouts in specific. Geithner is so far little different in his approach to this basic commitment than Hank Paulson. I do not buy that secrecy about the flow of resources into the financial system is a necessary precondition of the success of Administration policy. So far, in fact, every single disclosure about the joint Paulson-Geithner plan is showing that secrecy actually retards the effectiveness of government action. Either you understand that sunlight is cleansing as a basic matter of principle or you don’t. So far the Obama Administration is giving every sign that they don’t understand, and see transparency just as a buzz word.

2. Cutting back executive power to previous structural limits and boundaries. I’m so far deeply disappointed with the Administration’s approach to detention and other national security matters. What it increasingly looks like is that their strategy is to selectively engage in limited policy reforms while retaining the underlying infrastructure of Cheney’s claims about executive authority during a time of endless national emergency, e.g., to act like “enlightened unlimited executives” rather than to abjure the basic concept of limitless authority. Now if you’re one of those right-wing blatherers who had no problem with this concept when it was the Bush-Cheney Administration, kindly go stuff yourself, because you weren’t paying attention when we were pointing out the long-term structural danger this sort of claim posed. On the other hand, if you were worried about this sort of claim under the last Administration, every day that the Obama Administration fails to decisively dismantle it is more and more alarming.