Review: Black Mass

I finished reading Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray. The language is a bit of a struggle. Whereas the words and sentences are clear, the organization within the paragraph and from section to section is often lacking. (This functions as a reminder that a good part of the work of a writer is to organize his thinking into a form that communicates effectively to his reader. For all his obvious erudition, Gray often fails on this account. I’m also bugged by the absence of commas in many places that causes me to focus on parsing sentences properly rather than on content. That’s an editorial value rather than a rule, and it favors flow over excessive interruption, but it’s poorly applied in this book.) In addition, since Black Mass draws on 2,500+ years of Western intellectual history, one has to be pretty well read to fully grasp the weave of so many threads. I’m probably not quite up to the task, but I wanted to offer a brief review anyway.

Gray’s central thesis is that free market ideologues and neoconservatives, for all their confusion and revisionist history, find intellectual antecedents in a variety of questionable political movements that arose periodically but were ultimately defeated or abandoned in the wages of history. Perhaps most notable among those antecedents are revolutionary, militant, apocalyptic religious beliefs sprung from early Christianity and associated with millenarianism or chiliasm. Gray believes that classical liberalism and free market ideology (or more succinctly, globalization) have been transformed in the last 30+ years into a secular religion that represents, for some at least, a panacea for all types of social organization and a Utopian project worth imposing globally by force. Although not exclusive to America, this attitude is most virulent here. This new Zeitgeist bears similarity to other transformative projects and purges, especially the French Terror, Nazism, and the rules of Lenin and Stalin in Soviet Russia.

Here’s a good example of neoconservative revisionist history:

The classical economists themselves had serious doubts about the commercial society they saw coming into being around them. For Adam Smith[,] commercial society was the best kind of human association, but it was highly imperfect. At times[,] he refers to the market — or the ’system of natural liberty’, as he often calls it — as being a Utopia; but he means that it is the best achievable system, not that it is without serious flaws. While he was impressed by the productivity of free markets, Adam Smith feared their moral hazards. Workers did not need to be well educated to perform the simple[,] repetitive tasks required of them in the factories that were being set up in the north of England, while the anonymous cities that were springing up around the factories did not encourage virtue. In the long run[,] this posed a risk to commercial civilization. Smith’s anxieties echoed those of earlier thinkers in the civic republican tradition and influenced later critics of capitalism. Marx’s theory of the alienating effects of wage-labour owes a good deal to Smith’s insights into the flaws of commercial societies. Caricatured by twentieth-century ideologues as a market missionary, Smith was in fact an early theorist of the cultural contradictions of capitalism.

I especially like that last phrase: cultural contradictions of capitalism. It impresses me that cultural critics such as Smith and Marx (among many others) could see coming what we are now experiencing in late-stage capitalism, namely, the cumulative effects of moral hazard, lack of civic virtue, and alienation of wage-labor. Gray identifies this condition as anomie and suggests that it often results in disaffected young adults attempting to forge meaning in life through born-again religion and radical politics or a lethal combination of the two. Such antidotes to anomie are arguably as bad as or worse than the sicknesses. Since most of us are conditioned within this system, it’s fundamentally antithetical for us recognize our spiritual decay (not the same a religious decay) or to criticize it effectively from within the bubble.

Here’s where I depart from Gray. If we’re indeed embarked on a historical trajectory at all similar to those mentioned above, it’s probably fair to say that in the early stages, the worst effects are being felt in societies around the globe where democratic capitalism has been imposed by force, often through the International Monetary Fund, sometimes by conventional military force, which has had the effect of destabilized sovereign states, since their cultural institutions are not amenable to such wholesale transformation. Iraq and modern-day Russia spring to mind. When the full sweep of history catches up to us in the West, however, following on the strains being felt in financial markets over the past year in particular, we may well prove to be vulnerable to an intensified Fascism, replacing the creeping Fascism we know today, probably led by some messianic ideologue more bold in his thinking and rhetoric than Obama is subtle.

Techies and Fuzzies

During a drinking expedition with a few coworkers, the friendly conversation turned toward the curious directions we all take in life and how many of us probably wouldn’t choose the same college major today with the benefit of hindsight. The enthusiasm of youth lends itself toward declarations of life-long fidelity to some field about which one feels passion, or perhaps more typically, one drifts purposelessly into a major only to discover at some later time what would have been a better choice. That isn’t to say anyone should live with regrets for not knowing something before being prepared to know it. Such wisdom has a tendency to be acquired after it’s already relatively useless, which calls to mind the George Bernard Shaw remark that youth is wasted on the young.

All this was preliminary to what could have been an ugly dispute: the value of a liberal arts education versus a technical or professional degree. Being clever folks, we deftly and diplomatically avoided extreme positions and agreed that both types are necessary for a pluralistic society — sometimes even coexisting in one person. One of the older, wiser in the group offered for use techie and fuzzy. Both terms are pretty reductive and not so charitable, depending on how one interprets them, but everyone understood the harmless intent. He also communicated his surprise that his daughter, who had excelled at precisely the techie subjects that are stereotypically rare among females, later took an abrupt turn toward the fuzzy side in graduate school. By my lights, it’s a fairly logical development for anyone leaning somewhat heavily to one side or the other to become interested in contrasting disciplines. Curious people break new ground again and again throughout life, which isn’t something that one can typically do by continuously deepening knowledge within a single field. Of course, extremely high achievers do tend to focus exclusively on one subject and are accordingly vulnerable to character distortions and notorious blind spots.

My own trajectory is fairly typical. Without revealing too much, I focused my early efforts on a fuzzy subject, which in its more advanced stages began to rather paradoxically take on the flavor of vocational school, which while not quite being techie was very much applied. While I continue working in the field, I’ve become an autodidact in a number of other disciplines that offer new perspectives on the world. Although I have no regrets other than I can’t do it all again and again, I’ve wondered if an education in anthropology or Western intellectual history would have launched me sooner in the areas of my current interest. These are arguably just more fuzzy subjects to add to my principal focus, but I’m less concerned with covering all parts of the spectrum than I am in seeking out what interests me now.

One further comment: a Classical education (the study of the art, literature, languages, culture, and history of ancient Greece and Rome) strikes most people as hopelessly remote and pointless in the modern world. To the contrary, as history plods on, it’s clear that we are little closer to solving the quintessential problems of the human condition (a fuzzy issue) than were the ancients, despite our putatively impressive techie prowess. This is sometimes regarded as the intent behind the Shakespearean line that there is nothing new under the sun — human nature remains essentially unchanged. And not so surprisingly, if craftsmanship interests you, I have heard that the History Channel show Life After People suggests that the architectural works of the ancients may actually prove more enduring than anything we have managed in since the Industrial Revolution.

And Condemnation for All

It’s not often that one reads an honest-to-goodness, full-on condemnation of someone, either a person or a group of people. Most acts of condemnation are more like posturing or theater than actually consigning someone to an eternity of woe at the hands of some scaly red-skinned demon with a forked tongue, a trident, and possession of the forfeited soul. Isn’t it ironic, then, that the person lobbing all this animus at others doesn’t actually believe in a life after death in which to suffer and repent? No, the damning is for the here and now, not some ethereal realm of our imaginations.

The fellow in question is P.Z. Myers, who writes about modern-day Isaacs, children sacrificed by their own parents in the name of faith via withheld medical treatment. Myers’ blog Pharyngula (in my blogroll at right) is ostensibly a science blog, but he spends more time taking believers to task than writing about science. The volume of comments demonstrates that lots of people find this activity highly entertaining and/or worthwhile. One can debate whether correcting misguided faith is a legitimate objective of science; I think it probably is.

A child killed by a parent (or both) is an ancient story, not just in the sense of religious sacrifice (a la Abraham and Isaac) but more commonly in the practice of infanticide. It’s tragic and sad but not without abundant precedent in history. It’s also hard not to feel empathy for the children, who are especially vulnerable and blameless. But that’s the case for defenseless victims of all sorts, not just children. Also, if we feel special remorse over the wasted potential of a life cut tragically short, I wonder why we don’t feel something akin to anger at the billions of lives lived past the age of 50, say, that are a similar waste, though conceptualized from the opposite end of the arrow of time?

The really breathtaking part of Myers’ attack, though, is the wholesale condemnation of the enablers of parents who sacrifice children. The enablers are the other faithful who form the religious context for such irrational behavior. Myers calls them mealy-mouthed moderates for their implied complicity and literal refusal to intervene. This damning by association applies equally to the clergy and the media, both of which look patronizingly favorably upon extreme acts of faith and appear to be more committed to protecting religious freedom in the abstract than protecting a child in a specific instance.

Torture as Taboo

If in polite society we avoid discussions of sex, race, politics, death and dying, and other highly contentious or uncomfortable topics that might lead to hurt feelings following an excited exchange, cultural taboos raise the level of prohibition against certain topics and/or behaviors so heinous that they cause revulsion among normal people. Just don’t go there. Such taboos include incest, child pornography, and cannibalism. Sexual taboos are justified by biology, though they are usually established intuitively long before we uncover the science to understand why. Food taboos, on the other hand, are relatively arbitrary. For instance, cultures that prohibit consumption of certain types of meat, e.g., pork, beef, or horse, may have no underlying justification for the taboo, though breaking the taboo is still considered extremely ooky.

One taboo I wish we had but have to admit we don’t is torture. I’ve written about it repeatedly because it’s a sore subject that keeps cropping up in the news. For instance, Joseph Galloway puts the smackdown on the Obama Administration in this recent opinion column in the Ledger-Enquirer. This is the most relevant quote:

President Barack Obama doesn’t want or need this issue sucking all the oxygen out of the Congress and his ambitious agenda, and he just wishes it would go away. His position, if you can call it that, changes daily, if not hourly. He and his people look and sound like a hokey-pokey line on the issue.

The problem is they’re all thinking and acting like politicians, and there’s nothing in this issue for any of them except an opportunity to do the right thing. Whoever won an election by doing the right thing? Talking about doing the right thing is another matter.

Torture, however, isn’t a political problem, but a legal and moral problem.

It should come as no surprise, then, that other politicians, namely, those in Congress, are also acting like politicians by removing the funds necessary to close down the Guantanamo Bay prison camp as kinda sorta promised by the Obama Administration. Additional revelations have been spewing forth in the weeks since these reports (my apologies for the lack of timeliness) that further indicate that the American government and the Obama Administration really have no intention of stopping the torture barbarity or prosecuting its practitioners.

Naturally, everyone who takes a position on the subject of torture frames the activity in terms of a particular perspective, whether legal, moral, strategic, or some combination. I have done that myself, especially above where I frame torture as a taboo we ought to have. It irritates me that many of those framers start with the interdiction, “it’s not about that, it’s really about this.” Well, why can’t it be about all those things? Why must they be mutually exclusive? I’ll tell you why: so that torture can be rationalized on one ground or another, i.e., within the narrow frame of reference of the apologist.

Since it’s increasingly clear that we (the U.S.) are not going to stop and are not going to prosecute anyone, it begs the question why go to the bother of it? Why are we, among other heinous acts, murdering detainees to gather questionable intelligence on terrorism? The intuitive answer is that modern civilization has evolved into a quiet, undeclared, Hobbesian state of ongoing war of all against all. Alliances may form and shift over time, but we’re all warring for resources, for political leverage, and for various other causes such as the unimpeded spread of American notions of good, including free markets, democracy, and our trash culture.

How else, then, to explain the well over 1 million Iraqi deaths attributable to the U.S. invasion (disreputably linked to the 9/11 event)? How else, then, to explain the more than 700 U.S. military bases outside the U.S.? How else, then, to explain the wildly disproportionate size of the U.S. military budget compared to those of other countries? In truth, there are lots of reasons that are plausible and/or sensible, they’re just not very honest. As Merlin Mann has famously said, “You eventually learn that true priorities are like arms; if you think you have more than a couple, you’re either lying or crazy.” We have our priorities indeed: war-making and intimidation via torture.

God’s Eye View

Three different takes on an imaginary disease called information sickness piqued my interest. (Funny how web surfing so quickly develops into a morass of links investigated and discarded.) The earliest suggestion of such a disease comes from a 1981 novel by Ted Mooney called Easy Travel to Other Planets. I haven’t read the novel, but a manifestation of the disease is described here by Tom Frick. Apparently, regular people are periodically overcome by the daily information onslaught, the deluge of data demanding our attention, and are reduced to a quivering mass of jangled nerves and word salad. The absurdity is heightened by the gathering of gawkers on the sidewalk, where such nervous breakdowns are commonplace, and the adoption of a memory-elimination posture to purge excess information and regain normal mental function. The make-believe sickness is a metaphor for the loss of humanity in the Information Age, a notion that was perhaps just beginning to catch on in the 1980s.

We are the Bad Guys

Recently released documents from 2002 and 2003 allegedly justifying use of torture by U.S. henchmen (CIA, military, whoever) against suspected terrorists escaped my attention until yesterday. Some sources say the documents were leaked, others say the Obama Administration declassified them, yet others say they were made public through efforts of the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act. No matter; they’re public and they’re attracting lots of attention. NPR’s story is a pretty good summary.

I can’t say that I’m surprised by any revelations the documents publicize. That’s only because I already have the lowest possible opinion of the Bush Administration and its actions in the “war on terror.” (One editorial, lost to me among a glut of commentary on this topic, suggests that scare quotes around that phrase are now permanent, as it’s become clear that neither war nor terror are accurate terms.) It used to be that villains who made a scientific study of torture techniques and “enjoyed” their work were mostly fictional, like the sometimes jokey villains in a James Bond flick. The “torture memos,” as the documents are being called collectively, demonstrate pretty clearly that we are villains every bit as bad as our prisoners, whose guilt or innocence is irrelevant as long we believe they possess information. In the cloud of confusion spewed by claims of national security and myriad justifications about how we need to torture to thwart further terrorist attacks, it’s clear that our leaders have lost their humanity. How far the synecdoche between us/we and our elected and appointed leaders extends is an open question. However, you don’t have to read far into the comments of a typical news story to find someone opining “like I give a rat’s ass about some terrorist’s civil rights,” so any separation between us, the masses, and our leader is pretty thin.

In the clear light of day, the extremity of the U.S.’s torturing of others is not merely villainous, it’s criminally insane. For instance, in the interrogation of two prisoners, their torturers found it “necessary” to use waterboarding at least 83 times during August 2002 and 183 times during March 2003. You have to be a sick, twisted, miserable fuck to believe such excess is anything other than inhumane and unjustifiable, even by obtaining useful information. Because after the first 5 times someone is waterboarded, then next time he will break and reveal all. Or is it after the 50th time, or the 100th, or some other number? One especially sickening detail is that physicians were on hand to ensure that prisoners didn’t die at the hands of their torturers. However, that’s another way of saying that those physicians, in flat betrayal of the Hippocratic Oath, took steps to prolong the suffering of those being tortured.

So just for the record, let me point out that torture is criminal. The Geneva Conventions are pretty clear on this point, and attempts to see just how much we can get away with without veering over the line — mostly by obviously self-serving attempts to redefine the line — are heading the wrong direction: back towards barbarity rather than toward greater civility and peace. But, of course, we’re not really pushing the line; we crossed it and obliterated it. The memos are simple CYA. In reality, we’re bad guys, criminals, torturers, the very people terrorists decide to attack because of our corrupted humanity.

In the movie Watchmen, a film I didn’t really like for a lot of reasons, I nonetheless responded to several ideas that were fairly high concept. One such ideal was the character Rorschach’s insistence that, while being brutally avenging, he would not compromise on anything, ever, even to his eventual destruction. That’s what our attitude toward torture should be: utterly uncompromising, meaning never even dare contemplate it, because it’s wrong. Period. Done. End of discussion. Cheney’s ranting that torture saved lives doesn’t matter. In addition, bringing torturers to justice, which appears to be gaining enough momentum to be inevitable, should not be mischaracterized as retribution. It’s about the rule of law. You break the law, you will be prosecuted. No political compromises such as selective enforcement should be tolerated. Not on this issue. If we continue to dither about it, just drive a stake through the heart of the American people, because we’re already dead inside.

Fear of Fear Itself

The New York Times published an unbelievably fatuous article in the science section called “Oversaving, a Burden for Our Times.” The article states that our current phase of hoarding (in anticipation of scarcity) and saving money leads to saver’s remorse, as distinguished from buyer’s remorse, where frugal consumers saving for a rainy day (or more likely, losing one’s job) or preparing for the future (e.g., building a nest egg for a large purchase such as a home) are missing out on too many immediate pleasures and opportunities for fun. The article also accepts rather uncritically that human happiness trumps other concerns and justifies or rationalizes otherwise foolhardy behaviors. It’s a new spin on the old value statement “wish I’d spent more time with my family than at the office.” Consumer psychologists (who/what the hell are they?) have even coopted a term to describe the condition: hyperopia (the opposite of myopia). I normally relish new coin/usage and subscribe to scientific thinking over emotionalism or market-driven appeal. However, this article promotes some very bad thinking, maybe even dangerous thinking.

Some of my acquaintances has made the argument that our current economic contraction is mainly due to a crisis of consumer confidence rather than fiscal malfeasance in the C-suites and straight-up criminal behavior in the financial sector. The argument goes that in the long view, unemployment isn’t yet very high, nor are rates of foreclosure; they just look acutely bad compared to their historic lows of the past decade. Further, the toxic assets that can’t be marked to market honestly and sold because doing so would render insolvent the selling institutions (banks, investment houses, and hedge funds — most of which are de facto bankrupt despite our collective denials) aren’t really so toxic because the assets’ values didn’t decrease to zero but some other nonzero number that still retains somevalue, however low. Finally, as with the Great Depression, we can spend our way out of trouble with massive cash infusions, without triggering hyperinflation, because today’s deficits are still far cheaper than tomorrow’s production. So what we’re really experiencing is a self-fulfilling prophecy where a few nervous Nellies have sparked the equivalent of a bank run by infecting the general public with their pessimism. Phsaw.

I’d rather disdain debating the merits of these arguments head on; I’m already overtired from relentless coverage of financial news, as though money were the Holy Grail rather than the proverbial root of all evil. The only valuable takeaway from the article is the characterization of opposing character types: the hyperopic vs. the myopic, or as the article notes, the virtuous ant vs. the improvident grasshopper from Aesop’s Fables. At the risk of invoking a false dualism, many of us identify intuitively with one extreme or the other, the ant or the grasshopper. They embody character archetypes and as such are largely immune to logical argument. My  and I are driving each other to distraction because we seek evidence to support our worldviews, which spring from our character types. As a doomer, I can’t escape the nagging sense of betrayal of justice and impending collapse that my erudition and understanding of history demonstrate are inevitable, even if not predictably next week or next month. As optimists, my acquaintances can’t see why I should torture myself with worries about things so clearly beyond my control that can’t even be reliably foreseen and probably won’t occur anyway, considering how intellectuals have been fulminating and prophesying doom for generations that haven’t yet materialized. Instead, let’s have some fun. Carpe diem!

If my character weren’t already set in stone, I’d appreciate the opportunity to “don’t worry, be happy.” I’m also reminded of the subtitle to the movie Dr. Strangelove, namely, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. In other words, learn to love the thing that will kill you. But those platitudes don’t work for me. Instead, I soothe myself (or delude myself, take your pick) with the knowledge that I’m full of the sort of personal integrity about which no one cares and which will certainly keep me isolated from folks who would rather be around happy-go-lucky types. Come to think of it, misery doesn’t like company, either.

Waging Civilization

In waging war, one of the most important administrative hurdles to overcome is how to supply troops so that they can bring the fight to the enemy. As supply lines stretch farther from a military force’s homeland, maintaining the flow of food, energy, ammo, etc. places a significant burden on invading or occupying forces. Those forces are also vulnerable to supply lines being cut when bridges, roads, airstrips, and railroads are destroyed.

It occurred to me recently that in the era of globalization, we are in effect waging civilization in much the same manner as war is waged. This idea isn’t especially novel. I may have read something to the same effect, forgotten it, and mistaken the recurring idea as something I thought up. The prompts came up again as I am currently reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse. His survey of collapsed civilizations always tell the story of disappearing resources leading to decline, usually from being used up but sometimes because supply lines were cut with trading partners.

Ancient civilizations were usually geographically isolated, so once the landscape was deforested and large mammals were exterminated and energy resources were gone, there was often no readily available substitute or alternative. The modern world does not suffer from the same geographical isolation, unless one considers how far away the next planet or solar system is after mankind has exterminated and used up what’s readily available as population growth exceeds carrying capacity, a process already well underway. With that in mind, waging civilization is not unlike waging war in that the resources that make global industrial civilization go are supplied from amazing distances in an impenetrably complex web of relationships. (Further, civilization is in many respects a war on the natural world where moral dilemmas — not even hypothetical anymore — such as whether we allow polar bears to go extinct or curtail our activities are always decided blithely in favor of humans.)

Modern civilization has been revealed recently to be just as vulnerable to supply interruptions and failures as ancient civilizations. That’s the underlying idea behind energy independence: U.S. leaders (and increasingly the public) wish to be less dependent on foreign oil and invulnerable to attacks on our supply lines. Unfortunately, there is no suitable alternative to fossil fuels to keep things humming as presently organized, despite the claims and hopes of technophiles and futurists.

Death of a Skyscraper?

The Chicago Tribune’s free daily news-in-brief publication, the RedEye, suckered me in today with a cover image of the Sears Tower in a cemetery with the simple epitaph R.I.P. and birth and death dates. (I’ve blogged repeatedly on the subject of skyscrapers.)

Considering the state of the economy and my presumption of the diminishing interest among businesses in maintaining offices in one of the preeminent North American terror targets, I inferred the story was about the tower’s inability to operate profitably. I wondered what the building’s fate would be, if it would be dismantled or demolished. Instead, the story was actually about selling naming rights to Willis Group Holdings. So the Sears Tower will be renamed the Willis Tower, though few expect the new name to be adopted quickly or to stick.

In truth, the naming rights to buildings, arenas, stadia, etc. aren’t really very important. But I felt irritated at being punked by the press, even if it was relatively harmless. But this sort of misrepresentation (or ambiguous one, if one wishes to be charitable) only strengthens my resolve to ignore the RedEye in total and limit what attention I might give to the Chicago Tribune. Admittedly, I’m not part of the target market of either publication. I’m not hip, snarky, yet stupid enough to read the RedEye, and I’m not enough of a rabid consumer, political wonk, or business maven for the Trib to be of any use to me. Accordingly, my offended sensibilities matter not at all to the editors, and those publications can continue to fade to oblivion as their business models fail whilst they abandon the adherence to quality that once made at least the Trib a prestige publication.

Failed States

Following up on the previous post, crooks and law-abiding citizens have a mutual interest in society being bounded by rules, regulations, and laws. The basic reasons are the same: a nation of laws give them operating room for their various endeavors and a certain degree of protection from depredations by others. Anarchy is much harder to manage. Crooks, whether the garden variety criminal or the professional bureaucrat found with annoying regularity in government service, fare particularly well because they are willing to use illegitimate criminal force or the state’s monopoly on legitimate force to achieve their ends. When the citizenry has been muzzled by criminal intimidation or state-sponsored learned helplessness, the forceful can by-and-large act with impunity.

The way I heard this put in a movie recently was that “winners make the rules, losers follow them.” The obvious strategic implication, quite apart from any moral question, is that you’re a chump to follow the rules. The example was set by the executive branch and the agencies it controls: Bush stole two elections, no one did anything; he and his minions lied about Iraq and Afghanistan in the run-up to war, no one did anything; civil rights laws were contravened, no one did anything; Bush enriched himself and his cronies instead of doing his job, no one did anything; the federal government failed to act after Katrina, no one did anything; and finally, Bush bankrupted the nation the same way he bankrupted baseball teams and oil companies before following the Peter Principle into government, and again, nothing happened. That model was crystal clear to the financial sector in the most recent phase of laissez faire deregulation, so they went about looting everyone and everything, damn the consequences. And it’s not over yet. It’s said that the last act of a failed state is to loot the nation. Anything look familiar? Bailout, anyone?

The monopoly on legitimate use of force is the definition of the state given by Max Weber in Politics as a Vocation. The loss of that monopoly is one of several criteria or indicators used by the Fund for Peace in its Failed State Index. Here’s the full list:

1. mounting demographic pressures
2. massive movement of refugees and internally displaced people
3. legacy of vengeance-seeking group grievance
4. chronic and sustained human flight
5. uneven economic development along group lines
6. sharp and/or severe economic decline
7. criminalization and/or delegitimization of the state
8. progressive deterioration of public services
9. suspension or arbitrary application of the rule of law and widespread violation of human rights
10. security apparatus as “state within a state”
11. rise of factionalized elites
12. intervention of other states or external factors

There is even a nifty world map in color to show the various levels of vulnerability to collapse. The index is no doubt a complicated and costly undertaking, including disclaimers that the combination of twelve indicators may not yield a fully accurate assessment.

Misassessment is clearly the case with Iceland, which ranked near the bottom of the list (meaning least vulnerable) in the “sustainable” category of the most recent revision. I’m uncertain whether Iceland’s economic collapse (I’ve heard Iceland called “a hedge fund with a flag”) has led to anarchy and lawlessness, but it’s clearly now a failed state as the result of only one leading indicator.

The term failed state is being applied quite a lot these days to various countries teetering on the brink. The two most prominent ones for North Americans are — duh — Mexico and the U.S.A., which may only reveal how obsessed we are with ourselves. In fact, the Failed State Index is stacked heavily at the top (most vulnerable) by African countries. We care less about them, obviously, despite their famines and genocides. That’s partly normal, as our immediate environment is always our greatest cause for concern, even in a global marketplace. It’s also the case that because many African countries have lower population density and have not progressed very far in terms of market economies or industrialization, they have less far to fall (back to subsistence and argricultural economies) than fully modernized countries such at the U.S.A. So our own collapse, prophesied by many, is of paramount concern. And as human nature would have us, we’re barrelling at it as fast as possible, aided in no small measure by the behaviors of crooks.