Michael Austin's Blog

One of the strange, yet non-negotiable principles upon which I base my life is that poetry actually matters. This bizarre quirk of mine got a big boost this week when Dr. Christopher P. Long came to Newman to talk about the liberal arts, and, specifically, Aeschylus’s great tragedy The Eumenidies—a presentation that, quite by coincidence, took place on the very day that the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the first of two marriage-equality cases that it will consider this term. Strangely enough (and really quite wonderfully), I now find myself characterizing this week's debates in terms set out 2500 years ago by democracy’s first great poet.

So let’s do a whirlwind tour of the Oresteia, the cycle of plays of which The Eumenidies is the third and final part. It all starts when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods in order to get good winds for the Greek voyage to Troy. Ten years later, when Agamemnon returns from Troy, his wife Clytemnestra kills him in revenge. Their son, Orestes, is bound by Greek law and custom (and instructed by Apollo) to kill his father’s murderer, who happens to be his mother. When he does, the Eumenides (we usually call them “Furies”) punish him savagely for his matricidal act.

Since they are gods too—albeit gods of an older generation than Apollo—the Furies are not bound by Apollo’s instructions. They have an ancient right to torment the hell out of people who do really bad things, and they intend to collect. So it comes down to a trial scene where everybody agrees to allow a jury, led by Athena, to determine Orestes’ fate. The jury deadlocks and Athena gets the final vote, which she casts for Orestes. And that’s when the fun really starts.

Athena must somehow persuade the Furies to go along with her decision. And Apollo is no help at all. His bright idea is to tell the Eumenides what stupid, old-fashioned troglodytes they are. Not only are Apollo’s actions immoral (Athena could care less about that, really), they are strategically unsound. Though the Furies are part of an older generation of gods, they are still very powerful, and they can make everybody’s life miserable for a very long time.

But civilization itself depends on Athena’s response. And as long as the community is mired in an “eye-for-an-eye” system of personal retribution, it can never become the center of art, wisdom, and democracy that Athena envisions for the city that bears her name. Athens needs a judicial system based on the rule of law, not a personal code of ever escalating revenge.

So, what does Athena do? Four things. Four really good things. And, as I look across America this week (as represented by my Facebook and blog feeds at least), I have become convinced that they are precisely the four things that proponents of marriage equality need to try too (feel free to skip over the actual lines, but I am going to include them because, darn it, poetry matters):

1. She reminds them that the decision was the result of a deliberative process that they accepted, even if they did not like the outcome. In this way she privileges the rule of law over any particular result of that law:

Listen to me. I would not have you be so grieved.
For you have not been beaten. This was the result
of a fair ballot which was even. You were not
dishonored, but the luminous evidence of Zeus
was there. (793-97)

2. She assures them that they will have an honored place in the new social order that will result, thus easing their fears that they will simply be cast aside when a new order, with a different value system, emerges:

In complete honesty I promise you a place
of your own, deep hidden under ground that is yours by right
where you shall sit on shining chairs beside the hearth
to accept devotions offered by your citizens. (804-07)

3. She offers them respect for their experience, and she values their perspective the same time that she asserts the superiority of her own:

I will bear your angers. You are elder born than I
and in that you are wiser far than I. Yet still
Zeus gave me too intelligence not to be despised
If you go away into some land of foreigners,
I warn you, you will come to love this country. Time
in his forward flood shall ever grow more dignified
for the people of the city. And you, in your place
of eminence beside Erechtheus in his house
shall win from female and from make processionals
more than all lands of men beside could ever give. (848-858)

4. She subtly reminds them of her coercive power without being a jerk about it.

No, not dishonored. You are goddesses. Do not

in too much anger make this place of mortal men

uninhabitable. I have Zeus behind me. Do

we need to speak of that? I am the only god

who know the keys to where his thunderbolts are locked.

We do not need such, do we? (824-28)



The social upheaval that Aeschylus characterizes in The Eumenides—the transition from a society based on personal codes of retribution to one based on the rule of law—was as profound as any transition the world has ever seen. The older set of values (personal retribution) had been in place for a long time, and they seemed wholly in accord with the laws of nature. If somebody kills your father, of course you are supposed to kill him back. Duh!

Democracy and the rule of law, on the other hand, were completely untested ways to govern a society. And that made many people legitimately scared. Apollo cannot recognize this at all, so he spends his time insulting, sneering at, and feeling superior to, those who represent the older value system. This makes him feel good, to be sure, much like the perfect snarky zinger on Facebook makes me feel like, well, a Greek god. But it does not actually persuade anybody of anything.

Athena, however, does not have the luxury of throwing feel-good rhetorical grenades. If she fails to persuade her immortal opponents to accept her judgment, Orestes, and Athens, will suffer tremendously. All of the good that she plans to do rests on her ability coax cooperation where it can only be imperfectly compelled. She has a moral duty to be persuasive.

That we live in a civilized society today is proof that Athena knew what she was doing. And big social changes regarding the definition of marriage are on their way. All of the entrails point that way, and even Nate Silver, our very own Delphic oracle, agrees. Big social movement means that, whatever the decision of the Supreme Court this term, the coercive power of the state—laws, court decisions, etc.—will be increasingly on the side of those favoring marriage equality.

And, though much has changed from the earliest days of recorded time, persuasion is still a better strategy than invective, for the Euminides are destined to be with us always. Large blocks of voters, even if in the minority, retain (and should retain) a great deal of power to hamper even the most inevitable social changes. And all those who think themselves right about important issues have the same moral duty that Athena had: to be persuasive.

I hereby prophecy that, at no point in the foreseeable future will the government of the United States or any state therein 1) ban guns or start confiscating the firearms of law-abiding citizens; or 2) allow people to own personal nuclear devices. If you will join me in discounting the end points of these two popular slippery-slope arguments, then we can start talking about what happens in the middle.

As it turns out, the middle is where most Americans live—on gun control and on just about everything else. Recent polling data suggests that a bare majority (52%) of the American population supports the generically worded “stricter gun control regulations.” Specific measures, however, do better.

· 56% of Americans support a ban on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines.

· 67% support a law that prevents people with mental illness from purchasing guns.

· 92% support universal background checks for all gun buyers

The NRA, of course, opposes all of these measures, which should not come as a surprise to anybody. Many people who are not shills for the gun industry, however, oppose them too, often on historical grounds or on the assumption that these sorts of thing are not compatible with the Second Amendment, which, they assume, prohibits gun regulation absolutely.

But both history and the Second Amendment are a bit more complicated than that—something that the Supreme Court recognized in their recent District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago decisions. And both of the authors of those decisions—Justices Scalia and Alito—made it very clear that they based their idea of acceptable regulations on the fact that the Founding generation accepted, and encouraged, quite a few regulations on guns at the time that the Second Amendment was created.

In 1789, for example, local government officials kept lists of what guns people owned, so that their service in the local militias could be tracked. They required people to be trained to operate and store weapons safely, they permitted “background checks” to prevent gun ownership by classes of people deemed dangerous to the state (that included Native Americans, anybody with African blood, people who refused service in the militia, and, in several states, Catholics and Jews.) And, as Justice Scalia remarked in a 2012 interview, eighteenth-century common law provided for the punishment of people who “carried around a really horrible weapon just to scare people, like a head axe or something.”

What does this all mean? Quite a bit, actually. Gun ownership did not just become controversial in the 21st century. There have been such controversies throughout American history—including the generation that debated and passed the Second Amendment. This history does not solve our problems, of course, but it gives us plenty of middle ground to stand on as we search for our own solutions.

I did not talk much about these controversies in my bookThat's Not What They Meant!: Reclaiming the Founding Fathers from America's Right Wing I now realize that this was probably a mistake. To make up for it, I have written a new “chapter” of the book, which is available as an Amazon single for .99 cents. For anyone who makes it to the end of this post, however, I am cutting .99 cents off of the price and making it FREE as a PDF file that you can get here.

Because, really, what’s a 35% commission on .99 cents among friends.

Here's the link: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10761561/TNW...

On January 8, 2013, I was "freeped." Until 3:30 that day, I had no idea that "freep" could be used as a verb. Or even a noun. But now, and probably for a long time, "freeping" will define the Amazon page for That's Not What They Meant!

"Freeped," as it turns out, is a portmanteau of "Free Republic," a conservative commentary and blog site based in Fresno. It advertises itself as "the premier conservative site on the web," and I have no reason to think otherwise. At 3:53 on January 8, the following message was posted to the Free Republic Site

FREEP THIS BOOK
Book: That's Not What They Meant!
Posted on Tuesday, January 08, 2013 1:52:09 PM by Jacquerie
Remember how the DUs trashed Mark Levin's books at Amazon? Well, here is our chance. Some English prof named Michael Austin wrote a scatterbrained hit piece that is full of cheap shots directed at the Tea Party, Mark Levin, Hannity, etc. To do this, he took teaspoons from various works of our Framers, mixed them up with some Howard Zinn, and baked them with social justice gravy at high heat.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Click the link and give this radical leftist clown Austin the zero rating he deserves.

I did not quite know, but I suspected, what would come next. And it did. Within an hour some 15 brief, one-star reviews had appeared on my book's Amazon site, all of them, with one exception, containing boilerplate phrases that could be applied anything left of Ron Paul or Glenn Beck. The one review that actually does refer to something in the book (a story about Elbridge Gerry), actually refers to the forward that, while not actually written by me, is available in the Amazon preview.

Perhaps even worse (from my perspective) is that the few existing reviews by people who had actually read my work--not all of them positive--were sabotaged according to the instructions given on the Free Republic site: "lower the stars on the gushy reviews by clicking NOT helpful and BUMP the 1 * star reviews by clicking HELPFUL!"

So now I am now a freepee. They came, they saw, they freeped. And I am trying hard not to let it go to my head. As much as I would like to think that I was freeped because somebody considered my ideas dangerous, or radical, or worthy of rebuttal, I know that this is not the case.

That's Not What They Meant! was chosen more or less at random because because somebody who participates in a blog site stumbled across it and thought that it would be fun, or noble, or brave to crowdsource their disapproval. Apparently, somebody at another site did this to another book. And so on.

Ultimately, I can have no material objection to the actions of the freepers, nor would I do anything to stop them even if I could (and I can't). I made a very conscious choice to enter the ideological marketplace with a book that criticizes some people and calls them wrong. I much prefer being criticized--even by people who have read no more than the book's title and a call to action on a popular blog--to being ignored. As far as I can tell, all of the reviews have spelled my name correctly, and, beyond that, there really isn't any such thing as bad publicity.

But I would also like to issue an invitation to the freepers--an invitation that I will post to Amazon and, if I can get access, to the Free Republic as well. Here it is: let's really talk about the issues that divide us--not in a tribal way, where we immediately divide into teams and dismiss the other side as intellectually and morally inferior, but as actual intelligent, responsible human beings who might disagree about some things, but who love our country and want it to succeed.

I currently maintain a blog site called Arguing as Friends where I invite people of all backgrounds and perspectives to come together and talk about current political issues without insults and without personal attacks. Your voices would be welcome there, and I would be very happy to discuss my view of the Founding Fathers--or anything else--with all of you on those terms. Really discussing controversial issues with people you disagree with can be a powerful experience that can lead to understanding, intellectual growth, and the kinds of deep compromises that led to the founding of our Republic and continue to be essential to its success.

This is a more difficult approach to political discourse than simply taking pot shots at each other on Amazon. But it is much more rewarding as well.

In his new book, The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver’s deals with a whole lot of things that human beings try to predict in advance: earthquakes, hurricanes, political elections, the stock market, and on and on and on. In my opinion, though, the best chapter in the book is about poker. Silver himself was once an avid online poker player who (he reports) made more than 400,000 during the years that he played the game. But his success lasted only for a few years, during what he calls “the poker bubble,” and then, for very predictable reasons, the bubble burst.

What happened is, they ran out of suckers--the bad players who lose heavily and whose losses allow the good players to win. Though anybody can win a single hand of poker, the people who win consistently over long periods of time have certain definable skills: they understand human nature extremely well, they are willing to realize small gains over long periods of time, and they have a deep intuitive understanding of probabilities. These skills are real, and they can lead to moderate-to-high incomes for the best players in the game.

But whatever the final position of the players, wealth is not created during a poker game; it is merely transferred from those who do not understand the rules of the game very well and towards those who do. But this transfer of wealth only last as long as the suckers stay in the game. When they get fed up and leave, the whole game pretty much collapses until some new suckers can befound to take their place.

And this is exactly sort of more or less what Joseph Stiglitz says in The Price of Inequality, except for “people who understand the rules of the game” read “the upper 1% of our society” and for “suckers” read “the rest of us.” It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. There really is such a thing as creating wealth, and when people do it, we all benefit by the increase in the size of the socioeconomic pie. What Stiglitz emphasizes, however, is that there is another kind of economic activity (he calls it “rent seeking”) that leverages a superior knowledge of the rules, and a higher ability to influence the game, to capture a larger share of the existing wealth without creating anything new.

Throughout The Price of Inequality, Stiglitz presents evidence that much of the current economic activity follows the logic of the poker table, where the goal is to increase one's own share of the winnings rather than the overall size of the pot. Under such logic, strategies to create jobs by stimulating economic activity do not. New jobs require new wealth, but what we are getting is old wealth in different hands. Rich people are getting significantly richer by using their knowledge and their power to transfer more of society’s existing wealth to themselves, which is propelling income disparities to third-world level.

According to one narrative of the current recession, unemployment remains high because job creators are still being taxed too much. If we stop stealing their money, they will be able to do what they do best: create new wealth and produce new jobs. But this formulation only works if we are living in an economy where the highest performers are creating new wealth.

If Stiglitz is right, we are living in a poker economy, one in which the top players are simply better able to game the system than the suckers. To the extent that this is the case, continuing to tilt the playing field towards the current winners is probably the stupidest thing that we can do. Even the worst poker players will often refuse to change the rules to make them lose their money even faster.