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info@reason.com (Steven R. Postrel) — Sat, 01 Apr 2000 00:00:00 EST

Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle

info@reason.com (Steven R. Postrel) info@reason.com (Edward Feser) — Tue, 01 Feb 2000 00:00:00 EST

In an intellectual scene filled with critics of the Enlightenment's quest for a coherent understanding of the way the world works, philosopher John R. Searle has become a high-profile defender and exemplar of Enlightenment methods. A professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of 10 books, he attacks big questions--the nature of reality, the mind/body problem, the nature of consciousness--in what he sees as a continuation of the Enlightenment's scientific and philosophical program.

Along the way, he has become a leading voice in the debates over the possibility of artificial intelligence. Among A.I. researchers and cognitive scientists, he is most famous, and controversial, for his "Chinese Room" thought experiment, which attacks the idea that intelligence is merely rapid computation.

"Philosophy in the Real World," the subtitle of his most recent book, Mind, Language, and Society (1998), captures two important aspects of Searle's work: First, he focuses his rigorous philosophical explorations on our common sense of how the "real world" works. Searle believes that good philosophical inquiry begins by paying close attention to everyday experiences, such as speech, and noticing their strangeness. "We have to begin by approaching the problem naively," he has said. "We have to let ourselves be astounded by facts that any sane person would take for granted."

Second, Searle believes that the world is in fact real, not a mere construct of texts and word games, and that we can understand that real world--a position known as "metaphysical realism." He is famous as a vocal and vigorous defender of reason, objectivity, and intellectual standards within the academy. In 1977, he engaged in a highly publicized and often nasty debate over deconstruction's logical incoherence with French critic Jacques Derrida.

Searle, 67, says he's not particularly political, preferring intellectual life: "It's more fun. In the long run it's more satisfying" than political life. But his intellectual convictions have led periodically to political controversy. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, he was active in Students Against McCarthy, a group opposed to Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee. He left Wisconsin at 19 to study at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, returning to the United States in 1959, when he joined the Berkeley faculty. A proud supporter of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the early 1960s, he is concerned today with the erosion of free speech, free inquiry, and academic standards on college campuses.

Searle was interviewed in his Berkeley office in November by Edward Feser (star3brn@1stnetusa.com), who teaches philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and Steven Postrel, an economist who teaches business strategy at the University of California, Irvine. Searle's arm was in a sling--he broke it in a household accident he finds particularly embarrassing to discuss given his fracture-free years as an avid skier--and his office was a bustle of activity, with research assistants and students coming and going.

Reason: In your book Mind, Language, and Society, you say you're going to defend the "Enlightenment vision." How would you define this vision, and why does it need defense?

John R. Searle: During the 18th century primarily, but even going back longer in history, there was a movement, largely in Western Europe, that sought to throw off various kinds of superstitions. The parts of this "Enlightenment vision" that I find most impressive are the ideas that the attainment of scientific truth and the advance of human rights and democratic government would lead to enormous possibilities for human progress. And, despite a lot of setbacks, something like that happened.

In the past few decades there has been a movement sometimes described as the "postmodern movement." There's no single word that's really adequate to describe it, but that's one that the people [involved] typically accept. In many respects, they see themselves as challenging the Enlightenment vision that there is an independently existing reality, that we can have a language that refers in some clear and intelligible way to elements of that reality, and that we can obtain objective truth about that reality. They advance the view that what we think of as reality is largely a social construct, or that it's a device designed to oppress the marginalized peoples of the world--the colonial peoples, women, racial minorities. They see the attempt to attain rationality and truth and knowledge as some kind of power play, and what they want instead is what they take to be more liberating--a rejection of the rationalist view.

Reason: One version of "postmodernism" which you discuss is "relativism." There are many varieties of relativism, and it's pretty clear from your book that you take the arguments for these views to be pretty bad.

Searle: I think they're terrible.

Reason: How did you characterize these arguments, and what do you think is wrong with them?

Searle: There are a number of arguments. The one that most affects people today is what I call "perspectivalism." That's the idea that we never have unmediated access to reality, that it's always mediated by our perspectives. We have a certain perspective on the world, we have a certain position in society that we occupy, we have a certain set of interests that we articulate, and it's only in relation to these perspectives that we can have knowledge of reality. So the argument goes, because all knowledge is perspectival there is no such thing as objective knowledge--you can't really know things about the real world or about things as they are in themselves.

Now that's just a bad argument. I grant you the tautology: All knowledge is our knowledge. All knowledge is possessed by human beings who operate in a certain context and from a certain perspective. Those seem to me to be trivial truths. But the conclusion that therefore you can never have objectively valid knowledge of how things really are just doesn't follow. It's a bad argument. And that's typical of a whole lot of these arguments.

Reason: You've debated Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida. Are they making bad arguments, or are they just being misread?

Searle: With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure. Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me." But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that's not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?" And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.' That's the terrorism part." And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.

Foucault was often lumped with Derrida. That's very unfair to Foucault. He was a different caliber of thinker altogether.

I think I sort of understand Richard Rorty's view, because I've talked to him more, and he's perfectly clearheaded in conversation. What Rorty would say is that he doesn't really deny that there's an external world. He thinks nobody denies that. What Rorty says is that we never really have objective knowledge of that reality. We ought to adopt a more pragmatic approach and think of what we call "truth" as what's useful to believe. So we shouldn't think of ourselves as answerable to an independently existing reality, though he wouldn't deny that there is such a thing.

The problem that all these guys have is that once you give me that first premise--that there is a reality that exists totally independently of us--then the other steps follow naturally. Step 1, external realism: You've got a real world that exists independently of human beings. And step 2: Words in the language can be used to refer to objects and states of affairs in that external reality. And then step 3: If 1 and 2 are right, then some organization of those words can state objective truth about that reality. Step 4 is we can have knowledge, objective knowledge, of that truth. At some point they have to resist that derivation, because then you've got this objectivity of knowledge and truth on which the Enlightenment vision rests, and that's what they want to reject.

Reason: You are continuing your own Enlightenment program to try to solve what you think are the unsolved problems of that tradition. Could you describe how you ended up involved in this project?

Searle: My primary interest is not in fighting this lunatic fringe. The main thrust of my philosophical work is constructive.

I started off with language: How does language relate to reality? People can say, "You've said something true or false, or relevant, or irrelevant, or intelligent or stupid"--and that's a remarkable fact. In the style of philosophy, we ought to be astounded by what any sane person takes for granted, namely that by flapping this hole in my face and making noises I can give a lecture, or advance a thesis, or convince people, or all the other things you can do with language.

So I wrote my first book about that. I said speaking a language is performing certain kinds of speech acts according to rules, and I laid out the rules by which we make statements, ask questions, give orders, explanations, commands, promises, threats, vows, pledges, and all the rest of it.

My first two books were about that: speech acts. During the writing of those books, I talked about beliefs and desires and intentional actions, and that's like borrowing money from a bank: If you're going to use those notes, you've got to pay that back. You've got to at some point sit down and explain what the hell is a belief, what is an intention, what is a desire.

So I wrote another book, and this was the hardest book I ever wrote, Intentionality. It took me almost 10 years to write that book. I put all that together: What are the foundations of language in the operation of the mind? Because the meaningfulness of language is an extension of the more biologically fundamental characteristics of the mind. "Intentionality" doesn't just mean intending, but it means any way that the mind has of referring to objects and states of affairs in the world. So not just intending is intentionality but believing, desiring, hoping, fearing--all of those are intentional in this philosopher's sense.

Part of the fun of this profession is that if you solve one problem, it gives you three others. One of the problems it opened up was, How does the mind fit into the real world? How is the mind part of reality? That's the traditional mind/body problem.

So I wrote a couple of books about that, and in the course of that work I discovered that there was this new science that I would become a part of, "cognitive science." That was great, because cognitive science was overcoming "behaviorism," which had been the orthodoxy in psychology.

Reason: What do you mean by behaviorism?

Searle: Behaviorism was the idea that when you do a scientific study of the mind, you don't actually try to get inside the brain and figure out what's going on, you just study overt behavior.

Reason: Inputs and outputs?

Searle: Inputs and outputs. And the science of psychology on the behaviorist model was you were going to correlate these stimulus inputs with the behavioral outputs. It's a ridiculous conception of the mind--the idea is that there's nothing going on in there, except you have the stimulus input and the behavioral output.

The best comment about behaviorism is the old joke about the two behaviorists after they just had sex. He says to her, "It was great for you, how was it for me?" (Laughter) If behaviorism were right, that ought to make perfectly good sense, because there's nothing going on in him except his behavior, and she's in a better position to observe his behavior than he is.

OK, so I thought, We're overcoming behaviorism. That's great. We're going to have a science of the mind that gets inside the brain. What I discovered was that all these people thought the mind was a computer program. So I had a big debate with them, and that's why I introduced the argument called the "Chinese Room" argument: I imagine myself carrying out this computer program for some cognitive capacity I don't have. I'm locked in a room shuffling Chinese symbols according to the program. Now, it turns out, in my thought experiment, that I can give answers in Chinese that are as good as Chinese speakers'. But I don't understand Chinese, I'm just a computer. And if I don't understand Chinese by being a computer, neither does any other computer. Just running a program isn't enough for the mind.

I have had plenty of debates about that, and that still goes on. A book about 20 years of the Chinese Room is going to come out.

Reason: A little sick of that argument, are you?

Searle: I'm kind of bored with it, to tell you the truth. I tell people, "Look, I got an A in Chinese Room. I took the course for credit, I got my term paper in on time--why do I have to keep taking it over and over?"

Reason: Do people continue to come up with new arguments, or is this becoming a ritualized debate, like gun control or abortion?

Searle: I'm familiar with most of the moves. Sometimes you see wrinkles on them. One common move is to say, "Well, you don't understand Chinese: It's the whole room that understands Chinese." That's no good, because the reason I don't understand Chinese is that I have no way of knowing what the words mean. But then neither does the room. The room has no way to get from the syntax to the semantics. You can see that by imagining that I get rid of the room and do all of it in my own head: memorize the rules, memorize the box of symbols, and do all the calculations in my head, memorize the program. But even still I don't understand Chinese, because I have no way to get from the syntax, the formal symbols, to what they mean.

As I said, part of the fun is when you get some questions solved, you get a whole bunch of others. There's a question that's always bothered me and that is, How can there be an objective reality that's only real because we think it's real? Take money. I mean, it's just bits of paper. But it works. People don't say, "Well, maybe you think that's money, but we don't." They accept it, and it works. And what goes for money goes for universities and property and marriage and journal interviews and language in general, and cocktail parties and tenure and a whole lot of other things that are socially constructed--they're socially created. And I wrote a book about how that works: How does the mind of an individual cooperating with other individual minds create or construct a social reality that can then have an objective existence? So, even if I stop thinking it's money, it has an institutionalized status, so it still remains money. It isn't just my opinion it's money.

But you still have a lot of problems left over. Right now I'm writing a book on rationality. That's a tough one. What makes behavior rational or irrational? What's the logical structure of the process of reasoning that results in a rational decision? And what kind of structure can do that? That's a hard question. And I think most of the accounts we have of that in decision theory and so on are really inadequate.

Reason: So you started out with language, then mind, then society, the whole set of bigger questions. Is there a relationship between language, mind, and society, and so forth that's inextricable?

Searle: If your theory isn't coherent, it's not a good theory. Now here's the overall picture: The world consists of entities that we find it convenient to call particles. That's it--there are just particles in fields of force, and everything else is consequences, or organizations, or effects of those particles.

Some of those particles are organized into systems, some of those systems are made largely of carbon-based atoms, and some of those carbon-based systems, especially the ones with lots of hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, evolved into organic systems. And some of those organic systems now are alive, and those evolved by process of selection over long periods of time into living organisms.

Some of those living organisms have got neurons, and some of those neuron-based systems have got consciousness and intentionality. That's where I come in. I've got nothing to say about that other stuff. All the other stuff, from the quantum mechanical level right up through evolutionary biology, I just get out of undergraduate textbooks. I come in when we get to systems that have consciousness and intentionality.

Then it seems to me you've got a lot of fascinating questions, and that's what I'm interested in. How do consciousness and intentionality work in the brain? How is it they function logically--what are the logical structures of these phenomena? How does one organism relate to the consciousness and intentionality of other organisms? How do you get the structure of language? How does language give you the basis for the rest of society?

Now that, I think, is a continuation of the Enlightenment project. We want a unified account of our knowledge, and I think we can get it.

Reason: While the approach is different, the intention isn't that different from something like E.O. Wilson's Consilience, trying to unify all knowledge into a single structure.

Searle: Right. I don't agree with the details, but he's certainly somebody whom I would think of as sharing my overall objectives.

Reason: So would you say that the same unity would be true of facts and values? Or are you more of a Humean?

Searle: What I'm doing now in my book on rationality is to try to show how we shouldn't be thinking in terms of ethics vs. science. We ought to think of what we call ethics as a branch of practical reasoning--how the conscious, intentional organism reasons about what to do, particularly if the organism's got a language. If you think of it that way, then the traditional debates between ethics and science seem kind of irrelevant.

I'm not attacking the traditional philosophical problem head-on, because I think that gets us nowhere. I'm trying to show that there's a different way of looking at these issues, about the relation of the individual and culture, about the relation of biology and culture, the relation between the mind and the body. And if you look at it from this different point of view, then it seems to me you get different and more truthful results.

Now this carries over to political philosophy. It seems to me that we don't have what I would call a political philosophy from the middle distance. Let me give you an example. It seems to me the leading sociopolitical event of the 20th century was the failure of socialism. Now that's an amazing phenomenon if you think about it, because in the middle years of this century, clever people thought there was no way capitalism could survive. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1950s, the conventional wisdom was that capitalism, because it is so inefficient and so stupid, because there's not a controlling intelligence behind it, cannot in the long run compete with an intelligently planned economy.

It's hard today to recover how widely that view was held among serious intellectuals. Very intelligent people thought that in the long run capitalism was doomed, and some kind of socialism was our future. Some people thought it was Marxist socialism, and other people thought we were going to have democratic socialism, but somehow or another it had to be socialism.

Where is it today? It's dead. Even the European socialist parties, though they still keep the names, are adopting various versions of capitalist welfare states. I would like an intelligent analysis of this, and I can't find it.

Reason: You mean why people believed it?

Searle: Why it failed. Why did that belief die so spectacularly? I'm not convinced that we even have the apparatus necessary to pose an answer to the question. I think we need a conceptual improvement, and it would be piecemeal. It would be like the additions that Max Weber made when he introduced notions like rationalization, charisma, and all the rest of it.

Reason: Along these lines, you wrote an article for a German paper in which you said that Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom was the "book of the century."

Searle: Like every other undergraduate of my generation, when Hayek's book came out, I found it was treated as an object of ridicule. I remember a professor of economics saying, "Hayek is the last of the Mohicans of the classical economists. He's the last one left, holding this absurd view that's long since been refuted."

As a result, I never read the book when I was a student, but many, many years later, I sat down and read it, and it seems to me a remarkable book to have written in 1944. It's a kind of a prophetic book. If we're going to talk about the failure of socialism, an awful lot of the failures had to do with exactly what Hayek predicted. It would be interesting for somebody to analyze in a more scholarly vein to what extent he was right: that there wasn't any halfway point of democratic socialism, that it would naturally collapse into various forms of oppression, that however well-intentioned the setting up of the socialist bureaucracy was, it would be bound to have calamitous effects.

So I was asked by this very prestigious German magazine--it's a weekly newspaper really, Die Zeit --what was the book of the century. Of course, there are a lot of books that I admire, but many were already taken by others, and I couldn't pick Joyce's Ulysses, for instance. So I fastened onto Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and wrote an article [about] why I thought that was, if not the book of the century, certainly among the books of the century.

Reason: What was the response?

Searle: I got a fair number of letters, all sympathetic. And a lot of my fellow professors who read German were impressed by it and agreed with me that Hayek had seen the limitations of socialism.

Reason: The tide is turning in his favor?

Searle: I think it is.

Reason: Among the academics?

Searle: Yeah. I think he's becoming more respectable. There are books out about him. Now I don't know the details of his work well enough to make an intelligent appraisal of it. I think he overstates some of his cases. He says, for example--not in The Road to Serfdom but somewhere else--"If there's one message that I would like to leave, it is that there's really no such thing as social justice." That justice is always something that goes on at an individual level. You might do an injustice to me, or I might get an unjust decision out of the courts, but the idea that there's such a thing as justice at the level of society--he rejects that. And I'm not sure he's right to reject that.

I'd like to think that through more, because I sense that the idea that there are socially just and socially unjust forms of social organizations would follow from my account of social reality--that you can create unjust social institutions. If you get massive inequities that become ossified, I would have doubts about it. But Hayek's point was that the inequities of a free market distribution system are not by themselves unjust. And I would agree with that up to a point.

One good thing about Hayek is he explodes this sort of glib talk that people have about social justice and social injustice. If you're going to talk about a gain in social justice, you'd better know exactly what you mean.

Reason: At least some aspects of your recent work, such as your book on the construction of social reality, resonate with certain themes in Hayek's work. Is there any influence there?

Searle: There wasn't, no. Because everybody spoke so badly of him, I never took Hayek seriously until after he was dead. I'm embarrassed to say that. When I wrote Mind, Brains, and Science, he wrote me a very gracious letter and sent me a book. I thought it was real nice, and I wrote him back and I was surprised to get his book on perception.

Reason: The Sensory Order?

Searle: The Sensory Order. It's quite interesting. But that came out of the blue--I mean, I was not a Hayek fan. I didn't know anything about Hayek.

Reason: He was known as a very wide reader.

Searle: Here's the irony: I'm an admirer of his. I'm sure I admire him far more than he ever admired me, but he read more of me than I did of him. (Laughter)

Reason: To get back to our earlier discussion, a lot of the radical ideas we talked about started gestating in the 1960s, as did a change in the role of politics in the university. You were involved in the Free Speech Movement (FSM) here at Berkeley.

Searle: I was very active.

Reason: I wonder if you could say a little bit about your role in it, and any reflections you might have.

Searle: In 1959, when I came back to the United States from Oxford, where I had been teaching, I wanted to be more active in the life of the community than I could be as an expatriate. I've always been active in civil liberties issues--I believe in human rights and especially the right to free speech and free expression. I was active in opposing what was then called the House Un-American Activities Committee. [HUAC] put out a movie called Operation Abolition, and this movie was going to be shown in the law school [at Berkeley]. I was asked to comment on the movie, and just a couple of hours before I was to address these law school students, they got a call from the chancellor's office saying my speech was canceled. I, an assistant professor in this university, was not to be allowed to address the students on this sensitive issue unless they got someone to rebut me.

This was in December of 1961, and at that point I decided this university was not deeply committed to free speech. So a couple of years later, when some students came to me and said, "We are campaigning on behalf of free speech," they found a sympathetic listener. I became extremely active on behalf of the FSM. In fact, I guess I was the first regular faculty member to come out for the FSM.

My disenchantment with student radicalism came not because of the FSM but because of the events that occurred afterwards. After the FSM abolished itself, there was this sense of expectation of the '60s [activists] that somehow they were going to revolutionize society and overthrow capitalism and do all kinds of things that I did not want. I wanted free speech. But I discovered that there were a lot of people who, when they got free speech, wanted a whole lot of other things that had nothing to do with free speech. Truth to tell, some of them didn't much care about free speech. They only wanted free speech for views that they agreed with.

So I was then placed in an awkward position: I thought that the forces that had become unleashed by the '60s were really threatening to the university. We wiped out the old chancellor and the old system of authority--totally destroyed it. So the new chancellor asked me if I would come in and work in his administration as his adviser on student affairs, and I did for two years. And that was much harder than the FSM, because that's when we had to put the revolution back in the bottle. You cannot run a major university on the principle of permanent revolution.

The result of that was that I lost a lot of my old friends. They wanted to keep the revolution going. I did not. I thought, one revolution is enough. But not everybody agreed with me, and there were a lot of tense times as a result of that. We did, however, succeed.

In '69 there was an off-campus event--the People's Park debacle--that really was not an on-campus student event. That was a battle primarily between the nonstudent element living on the south side and the university, and especially those state authorities when Reagan came in with the National Guard. But the battle for academic control of Berkeley had been won by '67. So what happened in Paris and Columbia and Harvard and Stanford and a whole lot of other places occurred after what had happened there.

Reason: What do you think of the prospects for the future?

Searle: I left my crystal ball in my other pajamas. (Laughter) I don't know which way it's going to go. I have a sense that the present generation of undergraduates just thinks all those old '60s ideas are ridiculous.

I think that the movement of the '60s has done a lot of long-term, permanent damage, in certain departments, because they gave up on their educational mission. Certain departments, especially in literature and cultural studies, are, as far as I can tell, permanently demoralized. But in the departments that I deal with most directly there has been almost no effect. The philosophy department today is pretty much the same kind of philosophy department we had here 30 years ago.

Reason: Your direct experience is positive?

Searle: My students are as good as ever, and maybe better than ever. My perspective is skewed by the fact that I happen to get really superior students. I teach very difficult upper division courses, and I get the most self-selected bunch of students in the university, because nobody takes the courses who isn't highly motivated. You come to my lectures, and you'd be amazed at the quality of the questions asked.

But I don't teach many large freshman courses. When I did a few years ago I found I couldn't teach at the level that I could when I started teaching here in 1959. And the reason was that I could not take for granted the cultural references. I couldn't assume that everybody knew who Plato was. In 1959 the freshmen hadn't read Plato, but they had heard of him. But by, say, 1975, you couldn't assume that.

Also, affirmative action had a disastrous effect. We created two universities during affirmative action. We had a super-elite university of people who were admitted on the most competitive criteria in the history of the university, but then we had this other university of people who could not have been admitted on those criteria, and who had to have special courses and special departments set up for them.

Now affirmative action meant two completely different things. When it first started out the definition was that we were going to take affirmative actions to see that people who would never have tried to get into the university before would be encouraged and trained so that they could get admission. I was all for that--that we were going to get people into the competition who would otherwise not have been in the competition. What happened though, and this was the catastrophic effect, is that race and ethnicity became criteria not for encouraging people to enter the competition, but for judging the competition.

But now a lot of that is changing. The idea that we're going to admit people just on racial and ethnic criteria, we've given up on that. Now we're trying to get people prepared to compete in the university, and that's a good thing if we can do it.

Creative Matrix

info@reason.com (Steven R. Postrel) — Sun, 01 Aug 1999 00:00:00 EDT

"Whereas the distracted state of England, threatened with a cloud of blood by a civil war, calls for all possible means to appease and avert the wrath of God, it is therefore thought fit and ordained by the Lords and Commons in this parliament assembled that, while these set causes and set times of humiliation continue, public stage plays shall cease and be forborne."

–Parliamentary edict, September 2, 1642

In the United States, Congress does not close the playhouses. It just holds periodic hearings to bully the people who produce popular entertainment. They bow and scrape and halfheartedly apologize for their audience-pleasing products, usually by vague reference to unnamed works that go too far. Then everyone goes back to their business until the next time a committee chair decides the nation’s distracted state warrants an attack on its favorite arts.

All of which happened, pretty much according to script, in response to the murders in Colorado. The Senate Commerce Committee convened its show trial in early May. The agenda was to make popular art into the equivalent of cigarettes: a demon drug sold by greedy liars to corrupt our youth. "Joe Camel has, sadly, not gone away," said Sen. Joseph Lieberman (R-Conn.), the committee’s most eager attacker. "He’s gone into the entertainment business."

Bill Bennett, described as "the conscience of America" by committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), came prepared to name works deserving censure, and possibly censorship. He showed clips from Scream and The Basketball Diaries. "Can you not distinguish between Casino and Macbeth, or Casino and Braveheart, or The Basketball Diaries and Clear and Present Danger?" Bennett said. "I can make that distinction."

Despite some chilling moments, the hearings flopped. Executives from the movie studios and record companies declined to come and cooperate in their own denunciation. Deprived of dramatic confrontations or lying CEOs, reporters and the nation yawned. A month later, the House soundly defeated two bills to regulate entertainment products–one through outright bans, another through cigarette-style labeling. A significant, bipartisan majority disagreed with Bennett that "in the matter of the protection of our children, nothing is off limits."

Not so the Clinton administration. It acted unilaterally to appease the soccer-mom gods. Adopting the tobacco model, the president ordered the Federal Trade Commission to investigate "whether and how video game, motion picture and recording industries market to children violent and other material rated for adults." The commission will exercise de facto subpoena power, demanding proprietary memos, private e-mail, and internal marketing studies. The attack on Hollywood is now part of the Clintonite campaign to restore the FTC’s pre-Reagan punch; the issue is not free speech but free markets. The president is embracing Bennett’s belief that "this is predatory capitalism."

If you want to eliminate a product from the American marketplace, this is the way you do it–not by act of Congress, but through administrative agencies helped along by liability suits. Clinton has unleashed the regulators, and, as Jesse Walker discusses below, the lawsuits have begun.

But what does it matter? Suppose all violent movies vanish from the theaters, made uneconomic by regulatory burdens, unpredictable lawsuits, and congressional harassment. Who cares?

The audience, for starters. Tens of millions of people saw The Matrix, a blockbuster hit and one of the recent movies most often attacked as a blight on our culture. Most of those moviegoers, including me, think The Matrix is a fine film whose existence is a positive good. It is visually striking, well acted, and intelligently written. It explores classic themes, arguing that it is better to face reality and struggle for freedom than to accept comfortable slavery and live in illusion. It is not Great Art, but it is good art, and good entertainment. We, its paying audience, would not want to see it destroyed.

This raises the problem that so annoys Bennett: the subjectivity of distinctions. Any objective standard that would censor The Matrix (or Casino) as too violent would have to curb Macbeth and Braveheart as well. Shakespeare’s Scottish play is horrifyingly violent–Akira Kurosawa’s retelling is aptly called Throne of Blood–and so is Mel Gibson’s Scottish movie. Braveheart depicts torture and celebrates warfare. You cannot ban Scream, The Matrix, and Casino and make an exception for Bill Bennett’s bloody favorites. The distinctions required are too fine, and a different critic would cut things differently.

I do sympathize with Bennett on one point: It is tiresome and clichéd to keep invoking Shakespeare, whom no one would dare ban today. But there’s a reason the Bard keeps coming up, and it isn’t that everyone in Hamlet ends up dead.

That reason is seared in the consciousness of every English-language player, right down to the members of the Screen Actors Guild: You can ban Shakespeare. It happened. In 1642, the greatest period of English theater was ended by an act of Parliament. The milieu that had produced Shakespeare, and that continued to perform his plays, was destroyed. Those theaters were full of sex, violence, and special effects–and of poetry, ideas, and creative promise. English drama never fully recovered from the loss. Had the closure come a mere 50 years earlier, we would have lost Romeo and Juliet and everything that followed.

Loss and near loss haunt last year’s Shakespeare in Love, Hollywood’s fondest vision of itself and its art. A Puritan preacher appears early on, denouncing the theaters as "the devil’s handmaidens," and the authorities are always closing the playhouses. Romeo and Juliet barely finds a stage. "I would exchange all my plays to come for his that will never come," says Will Shakespeare when Kit Marlowe is killed. We modern moviegoers are presumed to know better. But it is not that easy a call. Marlowe’s small oeuvre is extraordinary, all written before he was 30. Who knows what might have been his Hamlet?

Loss is at the heart of the argument against regulating creativity, whether in art, technology, or enterprise. The innovative process is a fragile one, dependent on a complex, often messy interplay of imagination, competition, and exchange. Curbing new ideas hurts not only individual creators but the audience for which they create and the posterity that inherits their legacy. Regulators destroy some goods directly, and we can count the cost. Other losses, like Marlowe’s never-written plays, we can only imagine.

This not simply a matter of great work but of the milieu from which it springs. To get the good stuff, you have to put up with the experiments that fail and the junk produced to pay the bills. Alongside the hack work of Greene and Dekker, even Shakespeare wrote some dogs. But crush Titus Andronicus, and you will lose King Lear. The same process produced them both.

How does it matter that in the 15th century China turned its back on exploration and innovation, that the world’s most technologically creative nation became a backwater by decree? We cannot know for sure. But the loss, to the Chinese people and to the world, was surely significant.

When congressional pressure and anti-competitive opportunism created the Comics Code, declaring American comic books an inherently childish medium, EC Comics was destroyed and its readers bereft. That was the short-term effect. The larger loss was in the stories untold, the techniques unexplored. We can infer something of its magnitude by looking at the development of graphic storytelling in Europe and Japan. But we can never know what might have been.

In The Future and Its Enemies, I argue that individual creativity and enterprise are not only personally satisfying but socially good, producing progress and happiness. For celebrating creativity and happiness, I have been called a fascist by critics on both coasts. It is a peculiar charge, since fascism entails subordinating the individual to the nation–hardly a recipe for either self-expression or joy. But the charge expresses a coherent worldview, one that imagines freedom as the will to power and the good life as docile obedience.

This view quite naturally leads to crusades against popular art, particularly American art, since our native culture is anti-authority. Writing in The American Spectator, movie critic James Bowman denounces The Matrix, whose science fiction setting he clearly does not understand, for teaching "kids contempt for the values of work and sobriety and conformity to social norms." This critique condemns not just the movie but the inventiveness that made it possible. It is a prescription for the death of creativity and an attack on the American spirit. By this standard, Hamlet is safe. But what about Huck Finn?

Stars in Her Eyes

vpostrel@dynamist.com (Virginia Postrel) info@reason.com (Steven R. Postrel) — Thu, 01 Oct 1998 00:00:00 EDT

Reason magazine -- October 1998

REASON * October 1998

Stars in Her Eyes
Astronomer Sallie Baliunas on sunspots, global warming, and the benefits of privately funded science

Interviewed by Virginia Postrel and Steven Postrel

When she became an astronomer, Sallie Baliunas never thought she'd be posing for magazine photos. But her life as a scientist hasn't been a matter of pure research. In her quest to study the stars, she has found herself drawn into the world of entrepreneurship and public policy.

An astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, Baliunas is also the deputy director of the Mount Wilson Institute in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Pasadena, California. She spends about a week a month on the West Coast, using Mount Wilson's historic 100-inch telescope to study "sun-like stars." Baliunas came to the observatory as a graduate student in 1977. On her very first night, a lightning bolt struck a tree outside the dining room. "All the windows in the building were shattered from the shock wave of the tree disintegrating," she recalls. "This was an omen whose meaning was not clear until years later."

The observatory where modern astronomy was born would go through similar shocks in the years to come, as its owners turned their attention elsewhere. But for the dedication of a handful of technical staffers and astronomers, Baliunas among them, Mount Wilson would have been essentially abandoned. Instead, the observatory has not only a new lease on life but some of the best observational equipment in the world. The reborn facility is demonstrating how private funding and advanced technology can nurture innovative science.

Baliunas's own work benefited from Mount Wilson's years of neglect. Telescope time is rare, and few astronomers have the luxury of studying the same stars night after night, year after year. She's the first to admit that her research "could only have been done at an essentially `abandoned' facility, where the competition for telescope time had disappeared." Baliunas is returning the favor, working without pay to raise funds, improve equipment, and manage the operations so such long-term research can continue. She never expected to be a manager but, she says, "The choice seemed clear: either grow the observatory or lose the research program."

In between observing and management, Baliunas can also be found testifying before congressional committees and giving papers at conferences on global climate change--a subject she was drawn to by her research on the sun's fluctuating magnetic field. She is a leading greenhouse skeptic. How, she wondered, could climate models be so specific when we hardly understand the sun or its effect on the earth? Baliunas talked about this and other questions with REASON Editor Virginia Postrel and her husband, Steven Postrel, an economist who teaches business strategy at U.C.-Irvine, under the Mount Wilson dome in late June.

Reason: What do you study?

Sallie Baliunas: I'm interested in why the sun has a regular cycle of magnetism. There's a clock, so to speak. Sunspots come and go every 11 years, and the sun's energy output changes in step with those changes in magnetism. The sun also changes on longer time scales. That has an influence on the earth's environment. So the question is, Why does the sun do that? There is no good basic theory that says why the sun would have a magnetic clock.

Reason: So you look at other stars to try to figure out what's going on with the sun?

Baliunas: Right. Here's an analogy. You're an extraterrestrial and you come to Earth, and you have 24 hours and you want to study the life cycle of a human. You can do one of two things. You can sit and follow one human for 24 hours and watch tiny microscopic changes in that human, or you can gather together a whole town and take information and look at the commonality. You can say, here's an infant and he needs to be taken care of, and here's a kid, and here's a young adult, and put together a picture of the human life span that way. I look at what I call "sun-like stars" at different phases of long-term evolution. It's a great deal quicker than waiting around for the sun to do something.

Reason: Have you gotten any interesting results?

Baliunas: My mentor here--who is buried outside the dome, Olin Wilson--asked the question, Is the sun's 11-year cycle common on other stars, or is it something peculiar about the sun? He began a program here at the telescope in 1966 to follow 100 stars, month after month, year after year. When he retired, I came aboard, and now we have over three decades of records. We see at first glance, what the sun does is not unique. It's a universal trait.

Reason: Eleven years?

Baliunas: Eleven years, on average, if the stars are as old as the sun is. Age seems to make a big difference. When the sun was younger and life was forming on Earth--the sun was about a billion years old, about 3.5 billion years ago--the sun was spinning several times faster than today. That meant that the dynamo that powers the surface magnetism was working much more efficiently, and so the magnetism was much higher. There were more sunspots, there were more high-energy particles, there was more variability of ultraviolet and X-rays.

Reason: How would that affect conditions on the earth?

Baliunas: In several ways. One way is, with that higher amount of activity, there's much more X-ray and ultraviolet flux. The X-ray flux would be about 100 times larger than today. That energy certainly has biological effects--effects on DNA; it can even kill cells. So the environment was much more dangerous to life than today. The ultraviolet fluxes would also be larger, maybe 10 times larger. In addition, the changes over time scales of years or so would also be much larger. So not only are they at a higher sustained level, but they vary, and the variations are larger. The total energy of the sun would have been varying by several percent over a time scale of a few years, during the sunspot cycle. That would play havoc with the climate.

Reason: You've been writing some papers suggesting that terrestrial climate today may be affected by solar variations. In fact you've suggested that some of the warming that people have attributed to burning fossil fuels may actually be the result of natural fluctuation. How did you get involved in that?

Baliunas: Nearly 15 years ago, I started hearing that there now were models--imulations--of the earth's climate system that could be projected 100 years into the future. I was curious and thought, "Wow, that's a significant leap in meteorology and climatology. I want to learn about that." So I began looking at the models and how they can make predictions so far in advance. I also began to look at climate simulations run on computers and ask the question, What is the natural level of climate change? What is the influence of the sun?

The reason for asking how the sun might influence it is that there is lots of direct evidence that the sun has an impact. For example, the sun changes in its brightness [an average of] every 11 years with the magnetic cycle. We know that from recent satellite measurements. But going back further in time, we know the sun changes every few centuries. During the 17th century, which was an unusually cold period on Earth, the sun had very little magnetic activity for about a century--the Maunder Minimum, coincident with the Little Ice Age.

Reason: What is the Maunder Minimum?

Baliunas: The Maunder Minimum is this episode in the 17th century where the 11-year cycle was suppressed--was very quiet--and the sun dropped to very low levels of magnetism.

Reason: The 11-year cycle disappeared?

Baliunas: Almost. There were certainly long months of time, and even a decade toward the end of the 17th century, when sighting a sunspot was very rare.

Reason: Is there any theory for what caused that?

Baliunas: That's the hot question. We have to explain the 11-year cycle in the first place. There's a crude picture that says we know the sun's magnetism changes with time because of the way the sun spins and the way the outer layer rolls with convection. Beyond that, it's not a good theory. Making an 11-year repeating cycle is difficult in most theories. Making it disappear every few centuries is even more difficult.

Reason: How do you know magnetic records of the sun from the 17th century?

Baliunas: The records of sunspots go back to 1609, to Galileo's day, and that's almost long enough to see this episode. But we have some unbiased records: The sun has a wind that carries the magnetic field toward the earth and acts as a shield. There's a rain of cosmic rays coming from deep space. When the sun's magnetic field is strong, these cosmic rays tend to be deflected. When the magnetic field is weak, these cosmic rays penetrate the upper atmosphere of the earth. When the cosmic rays come in, they make radiocarbon in the upper atmosphere, and that carbon-14 ends up in carbon dioxide molecules. It's breathed in by a tree and put in its tree ring, so the amount of carbon-14 over time in tree rings tells you what the sun has been doing in the past. Those records trace the sun back about 10,000 years. So we know the ups and downs of the sun's magnetism for the last 10,000 years or so.

After looking at this, I began to ask, How well do the climate simulations handle this relatively new knowledge about the sun? And the answer is, not very well. We don't know the mechanism for change in the sun very well. We don't know the response of the earth to such changes. So I thought, How do you make predictions 100 years in the future if you don't even know what all the sources of change are?

Reason: If the magnetic activity on the sun is changing, what mechanisms are there that might affect the earth's climate?

Baliunas: It depends what time scale one is talking about. The sun brightens and fades over the sunspot cycle, the 11-year cycle. But also the intensity of the 11-year cycles has been building over the centuries.

Reason: What do you mean by "intensity"?

Baliunas: Looking back several hundred years, the sun's magnetism is at an all-time high. The last four peaks have been quite high.

Reason: Do these fluctuations produce a big effect?

Baliunas: It's relatively small from cycle to cycle, but we estimate that from the 17th century to now it could have been four or five tenths of a percent of the sun's energy output. Run that through a climate model, and that's enough to explain the temperature change.

Reason: Using the current models...

Baliunas: Using the current models...

Reason: Which you're not sure are right anyway...

Baliunas: Nobody's sure--all models have similar problems.

We're saying [with] a few tenths percent change, which we don't think is unreasonable for the sun, you can explain everything. Now that's not the only mechanism. That's the first one, which one might think of as brightness change. There's some new work coming out of Europe on clouds. The amount of cloud coverage on the earth is changing by a few percent every 11 years --it's anti-phased with the cycle. The latest idea is that it's the sun modulating the cosmic rays that are coming in making nuclei of clouds.

So after looking at all these vast unknowns, I then saw the key problem for the greenhouse extremists. We always read about how the temperature has warmed about a degree Fahrenheit--a half degree centigrade--in the last 100 years. But if you look at the temperature records, it's quite clear: All the warming occurs early in the century. But most of the greenhouse gases are put in the atmosphere after World War II, in the last 50 years. So they can't cause most of the warming of the last 100 years. Something else had to. The sun's changes fit that very well. That just may be a coincidence, but that's what we're pursuing.

Reason: What has the sun's effect since 1940 been?

Baliunas: That's a harder question because we consider changes of the sun on time scales of several decades or more. So asking me what has gone on since 1940 is almost at the limit of what I'm looking at. If you want to look back over the last 100, 200, or 300 years, it's a little easier for me to talk about it.

Reason: Would this solar variability research say anything about what would happen if we were really to increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere a lot?

Baliunas: That experiment has been done. We've increased the amount of greenhouse gases by an equivalent of going halfway to a doubling of carbon dioxide--and doubling is the benchmark that everyone talks about. And then you look at how the earth's temperature has responded, and it has not warmed more than a tenth or two-tenths of a degree. So a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation says a doubling is a few tenths of a degree. That's not significant, because it's not noticeable above the natural background changes.

The real test of this is the last 20 years, with very precise satellite measures of the earth's temperature made globally. The global average temperature of the atmosphere, just above the surface of the earth, has not warmed at all. There's been no warming trend in the past 20 years, and the models all say that there should have been a warming of several tenths of a degree centigrade in that time.

Reason: I've seen flat denials of this by people who claim that the satellite data are either inaccurate or who say they don't care about the air up there, they care about the air down here.

Baliunas: It's true that people live at the surface and not where satellites measure, which is a few kilometers above the surface. But the models make predictions at that layer of the atmosphere, and most of the models make a prediction that that layer should be warming more than the surface, so in fact it's a good test of the models. The satellite data make measurements essentially globally, unlike the surface data, which are very, very irregularly sampled and spaced and have significant systematic errors.

Reason: Where do those systematic errors come from?

Baliunas: There are systematic errors arising, first of all, because of coverage. There is very little coverage of the polar regions of the earth and there's little coverage of the southern hemisphere oceans. People don't live there; there are no thermometers there. But the satellites measure these areas dutifully. Systematic errors also come from the urban heat island effect, which says that as cities have grown--buildings, concrete, pavement, tree clearing--they have warmed that environment. So you can look at the population growth in a city and you can look at its temperature just going hand in hand.

Reason: Critics of the satellite data have argued that you get different results at different altitudes that satellites do reach.

Baliunas: That is true.

Reason: And the atmosphere has warmed at certain levels.

Baliunas: No. There's been no warming in the satellite data. There's been a cooling in the lower stratosphere, and no warming in the lower troposphere. And at the surface, I should mention that the continental U.S. has very good measurements over the last 100 years and there's been no net warming there either.

Reason: How does this fit in with your solar explanations?

Baliunas: We're trying to subtract the sun's influence [from climate fluctuations caused by other sources]. The sun is particularly good at explaining this early 20th-century warming, which can't have been caused by the greenhouse gases. If we had a good prediction for what the sun would do next, given the past calibrations that we've done, we then could make a prediction. But we're not at the point where we can predict what the sun will do 50 years from now.

Reason: There was an International Panel on Climate Change, whose results have been widely disseminated. What do you think about the IPCC report?

Baliunas: The IPCC report actually is very careful to say that the models have not been validated. That tells you that you can't make a prediction with them. The executive summary says that there's a discernible human influence, but the information in the chapter on which that conclusion was based has been overturned by the scientific process. The report is obsolete.

Reason: What overturned it?

Baliunas: The executive summary's conclusion was based on the results of new climate simulations that made predictions both in three dimensions and time. That's the way to go: Global warming won't be uniform over the globe--certain areas or different levels of the atmosphere will warm more than others. So you look at the regions that are supposed to warm first--for example, the Arctic or, in the case of that report, a region of the lower atmosphere over the southern hemisphere oceans. And in the report, it was claimed that there was good agreement between the theory and the observations. But when that underlying paper was published, it was very quickly overturned by a longer stretch of data.

Reason: By whom?

Baliunas: One paper is by Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger. That was published in Nature.

There had been a short uptick in the temperature of that region, but when looking at a longer temperature record that was both earlier and later, it was seen that that uptick was just part of a long-term null trend. So the models had predicted wrongly. There had been no increase in that area.

Reason: The idea of looking for places where the models make strong predictions is that if it's right anywhere it should be there?

Baliunas: It should be right where the warming is felt first-- for example, the polar regions, the Arctic. In the last 50 years, the Arctic has cooled. And the models say it should be warming profoundly. Then the area over the southern hemisphere oceans should be warming, but it has not been warming either.

Reason: There's a particularly compelling figure you've used in your publications, which is a graph of North American land temperature data vs. the magnetic activity of the sun, with multiple turning points that are coincident. [See graph.] First a technical question: What are the units for the magnetic activity?

Baliunas: This is the length of the sunspot cycle. The cycle averages 11 years or, if you count polarity, 22 years. But the cycle can be short, say, eight years, or it can be longer, say, 12, 15 years. So you look at the length of the cycle and plot that to see the relation.

Reason: If the cycle is short, what does that mean?

Baliunas: If the cycle is short, the sun's magnetism is much more intense, and that leads you to the expectation that the sun's brightness would have been greater than if the cycle is long.

Reason: And that correlates beautifully with the turning points...

Baliunas: Right, so the mechanism is that you're still seeing changes in the brightness of the sun, and you're just using as a marker for that something we have a measurement of going back that far, which is the length of the magnetic cycle.

Reason: Given that you've said that the radiant effect, just the pure heat, probably isn't enough to explain it, that's a very striking concordance.

Baliunas: The [radiant] effect is borderline. And it may be that we have the wrong mechanism or that our model has the wrong response, since nobody's model has the right response. Some people have worked on not just looking at the total energy of the sun but, say, a portion of spectrum such as the ultraviolet. A woman in England, Joanna Haigh, would say that the ultraviolet changes in sun, although they seem small, profoundly affect the ozone layer and that those changes in the ozone layer then change the dynamics of the climate system strongly. We may be looking at the right marker but the wrong reason, and that may be why models are still equivocal.

Reason: Mount Wilson was closed for a while...

Baliunas: The 100-inch telescope was closed in 1986. The owners, the Carnegie Institution, had built a large telescope in Chile, and to conserve resources, they wanted to focus on that. By then, a group of us from other universities were already using the other resources on the mountain. I was working my long-term project on the 60-inch telescope; the solar towers were in use. The 100-inch telescope was closed for about eight years while we raised the money to refurbish the telescope, put in modern computerized pointing, and also redirect where it was going. It wasn't going to do cosmology at the faint edges of the universe--the telescope was now only a modest-sized telescope compared to the 10-meter telescope [at Mauna Kea in Hawaii], and the lights of L.A. were getting too bright. So it took a turning point around 1991.

When George Ellery Hale founded the observatory, he noticed that there was something priceless here: The air is very still, calm, and steady. That means the images from space, celestial objects, as they come down through the atmosphere are least disturbed. We have clarity here that is unmatched by any site in North America, and it's on par with the best sites in the world like Chile and Hawaii. It's a little more convenient being here than at, say, 14,000 feet in Hawaii. So that still air, which astronomers call the "seeing," and the development of technology, opened up some new areas.

We now do high-resolution astronomy. This 80-year-old telescope has now been sharpened up so it takes out the blurring effect of the earth's atmosphere, and it sees images as sharp as if it were out in space. That took about $3 million of mostly private money and some special high-tech equipment developed mostly by the Defense Department during the Strategic Defense Initiative days.

Reason: When did that "adaptive optics" system go in?

Baliunas: This became operational in late 1995.

Reason: Have people using it made any noteworthy discoveries?

Baliunas: We've got the first map of the surface of the asteroid Juno, for example. This is one of these large asteroids very similar to the junk out of which the earth was made. But unlike the earth, which has been processing everything with plate tectonics and its ocean and atmosphere, this asteroid sits out in space virtually untouched in 4 billion years. So you're looking at the primordial state of what made the earth. We're looking at the mineralogy of that.

We're also looking at the volcanos on one of the satellites of Jupiter, which blow up because it's in such proximity to Jupiter. The gravitational pull of Jupiter makes a liquid core in that little satellite.

We're looking at other stars, how stars form, what kind of dust and debris they have around them at various stages. We're taking a census of all the nearby stars and whether or not they're double or triple star systems.

Reason: Is that easier to tell with this technology than with what had gone before?

Baliunas: Yes, because you can look closer in toward the vicinity of the star, and that information had been lost in the blur.

Reason: So the main limit is how far the telescope can see?

Baliunas: Yes, how far, but we can see detail lost by bigger telescopes.

Reason: Why is that?

Baliunas: Because the atmosphere sets the limit of the detail. When the big telescopes get this kind of technology going they will start retrieving it, but right now we're one of the very few that can do this.

Reason: Is the technology making astronomy significantly less expensive to do?

Baliunas: You get images as sharp as if the telescope were in space, for a capital cost of $3 million for the new equipment and the retrofits--compared to the space program. A launch of the Shuttle is half a billion dollars, and if you settle for a Delta rocket, it's a $100 million dollar launch, plus building space-worthy equipment. So it's extremely cost-effective to do things on the ground when you can. This makes the space instruments more effective, because they focus then on the things that they do best.

Reason: You're about to open something called the CHARA Interferometer. What is an interferometer?

Baliunas: An interferometer is a clever way, a very sneaky way of getting detailed information on objects in space without spending a fortune in building a telescope. The optical interferometer will be six smaller telescopes, each one meter across, spread out over a radius of 1,000 feet. And then the light of each individual telescope is brought together and stacked, so the crests and troughs of the waves of light match up. The computer is very carefully measuring the distance to each telescope, which changes subtly. When you do that with these smaller, inexpensive telescopes you get the equivalent detail--spatial detail--as if you had a 1,000-foot diameter single telescope.

Reason: What makes that possible?

Baliunas: It's the ability to stack the wavelengths of the light coming to each telescope with a tolerance of one four-millionth of an inch. That requires sophisticated computer control, engineering control, and lasers all working to calculate the distance to stack these beams of light.

Reason: What sort of research are they expecting to do with that?

Baliunas: One of the more interesting things is to try to start looking for planets around other stars--direct sightings.

Reason: What is it about this array that will make that more likely?

Baliunas: The array can see spatial detail much finer than any other optical ground-based or space-based telescope. It can see very close in to the vicinity of these stars.

Reason: So it can see better than the Hubble?

Baliunas: Sharper detail, finer detail. It could see something as small as an astronaut's bootprint on the moon. And that's something like 100 times finer detail than the Hubble can see.

Reason: But it can't see as far?

Baliunas: Not as far. Technology is making niches, as usual, and this is our niche: fine detail, of objects either in our galaxy or nearby galaxies. Whereas Hubble can see to the faint reaches of the far universe.

Reason: What is your operating budget?

Baliunas: To operate the whole facility is about a million dollars a year.

Reason: Where does your money come from?

Baliunas: It's mostly private foundations and generous individuals, primarily in Southern California. Occasionally we have some government grants from the National Science Foundation or NASA to do some specific project, but most of it's been private.

Reason: This reopening was very much a private venture.

Baliunas: Yes, the idea was to keep Mount Wilson as an option in private hands. The national observatories have, as their obligation, to serve the wider [astronomical] community. That's terrific, but it also means that servicing as many users as possible becomes an important focus for them, which means short-term observing. We prefer to serve important projects that can't get done at the other sites. A long-term project--say, my project, which is 32 years in duration--is a different kind of project.

Reason: A lot of people have the idea that because of the capital equipment costs, you can't do good astronomy without government support.

Baliunas: I disagree with that. You can do good astronomy with government support, but you don't need it. The Keck telescope [at Mauna Kea] is an example of something that was privately funded. And in fact, some politicization often comes with government support.

Reason: Can you give me an example?

Baliunas: You have to write proposals to get telescope time [at the national observatories]. You often have to write them a year in advance. The subscription rate is a factor of several to one, overburdening the time. Three-quarters of the proposals have to be thrown away. So if you want to do something, you might have to submit a proposal several years in a row. It might be four or five years before you get it. The demand is so great that sometimes the tendency is to divide up the time in some "equitable" way, so that means you end up with two or three nights. You arrive and it's cloudy. You have to start the process over again next year.

So that's something we wanted to try to provide to the community--another avenue, where if you wanted 100 nights of telescope time, we'd be in a position to be able to work that out.

Reason: I've heard a lot of scientists in different fields complain that government funding is distorting science, distorting the peer review process. What is your take on that?

Baliunas: There is almost a crisis in the number of scientists and the amount of funding available. There's been a population explosion in the number of scientists practicing, and the amount of government resources available has been not in that proportion.

For example, NASA's budget in the Apollo program days was a much higher percent of GNP than it is today. A lot of astronomy funding has historically been a fixed fraction of the NASA budget, so that means that as a percentage of GNP, that number has gone down in real terms, but there are more people competing for those dollars. So now when you do proposals, you don't write an open proposal. You don't say, "I have this great idea," and then write it down. You look to see what targeted program your idea might fit into, and if there's not a targeted program, you go try to lobby for one to be made.

Reason: What is a targeted program?

Baliunas: For example, discovering extrasolar planets is now something very interesting, so NASA has an origins program encompassing that. But before a specific program existed for extrasolar planet studies, such research was difficult to fund. If you're doing something that is radically different, it might not fit into one of the bins. You have to bend your science into one of those bins, or you have to work on getting a new bin accepted.

Some of the targeted areas are so overburdened that nine out of 10 proposals get rejected. I've been on panel reviews where there were many excellent proposals, but you have to make a decision and throw out 90 percent of them because the budgets can't take them all.

Reason: You first came to Mount Wilson because your graduate school adviser told all his students that you should do some observing at the "mecca of modern astronomy." What makes Mount Wilson the mecca?

Baliunas: Mount Wilson is where astronomy took its modern turn. Astronomy used to be, in the 19th century, cataloging--a very personal, artistic journey of looking at the sky. George Ellery Hale, who founded the observatory, changed all that. He thought that there was something to be learned from astronomy other than positions. There was what powered the sun, the changes of the sun, how did they influence the earth, how did life begin here, and what influence does the space environment have on those larger issues? What are the stars? How big is the universe? Where did it come from? Where is it headed to? The idea of the evolution of the physical universe was very important to Hale. He was influenced by Darwin's Origin of Species.

Hale was a brilliant scientist. He worked at Yerkes Observatory in Chicago--he was born in Chicago, went to MIT. He went back to Yerkes and built the largest telescope in the world there at the end of the last century. That was the 40-inch Yerkes Refractor Telescope. He found Chicago not to be the best environment for doing astronomy, because of the high percentage of cloudy nights. He went with a committee on a site-testing tour, and decided that this mountaintop had images through testing telescopes that were the finest of any site that they had ever seen. He decided that this would be a good place to found the observatory.

He packed up the solar telescope and brought it out here in 1904. He took a great risk because at that time he had very little commitment of any funding. But his themes were always, "Make no small plans, dream no small dreams" and "More light." His father was fairly well-off and had given him a 60-inch mirror blank in 1896 as a birthday present. He was again going to build the largest telescope in the world, the 60-inch telescope. It took him 10 years to find a site, and another four years to find the money--much of which he borrowed from his friends, neighbors, and relatives--to finally get the 60-inch telescope opened in 1908.

Reason: How much did that cost?

Baliunas: I know there was a donation of $50,000 for the 100-inch mirror; the 60-inch mirror was $2,000 in 1894 dollars.

Reason: Mount Wilson is at the top of a mountain and even today, it's a bit of a haul up a winding, fairly narrow road. Certainly in 1908 or even 1917, it was worse. How did they build the observatory?

Baliunas: The builders had this vision and just had to overcome terrible conditions. There's a hiking trail that goes up from Sierra Madre--that was the old toll road, a private road in those days--and everything had to be brought up either in your backpack or by mule trains. Everything had to be broken down into small bits and then built in place on the mountain. You see the amount of massive concrete and steel structures. They had to haul everything up, and it took at least a good day to get up the mountain. Even though it was a seven-mile trail, it was very steep. By 1910, there were primitive trucks and the trail had to be widened by human labor, and then things could be brought up that way.

Reason: Who built the observatory--the 100-inch telescope?

Baliunas: They went to a steel company in Chicago, named Morava, for the dome. They built and assembled the steel dome and structure in Chicago, then took it apart and brought it up the mountain. The concrete was put in place by the observatory staff--they had a concrete plant up here. The whole telescope was designed by the observatory staff. The mirror was cast in France, and it was ground to its fine shape down in Pasadena by the observatory staff. The telescope tube--the structure that holds the mirror and moves--was built by the Fore River Shipyards in Massachusetts, which built battleships. The telescope itself weighs 100 tons, the moving part of it--the tube.

Reason: This was all done with private money?

Baliunas: It was all private. By 1908, Hale had convinced a businessman in Los Angeles, John Hooker, to pay for the casting of the 100-inch telescope, and he got Andrew Carnegie to invest in the observatory. This is his third time he built the largest telescope in the world, and the fourth one is the 200-inch at Palomar Mountain.

Reason: You told a story about the Huntington Library in Pasadena that indicated that Hale had a dim view of government control.

Baliunas: He was talking to Henry Huntington, who had this fabulous collection of rare books. Huntington was thinking about what to do with them after his death, and he began thinking of a publicly owned--probably city-owned--library where people could use them. Hale had a view that once you entered the political process, it was a dangerous thing. He suggested to Huntington that instead, why not have a private library, for which they would raise the funds, to be run by scholars who would ensure public access. And that's worked very well to this day.

Reason: He was a little nervous about challenging Huntington--is that because Huntington also supported the observatory?

Baliunas: No, I think he just respected Huntington's desire to do what he wanted with his own property. But Hale did say, "Realizing the menace inherent in political control, I took my life in my hands and wrote him a letter."

Reason: The 100-inch telescope here opened when?

Baliunas: It opened in 1917. And this is where Edwin Hubble made his discoveries of our place in the cosmos.

Reason: Who was Hubble?

Baliunas: Edwin Hubble was an astronomer who came here in 1919 and made modern cosmology. In 1900, no one knew what a galaxy was. It's a term we all use, but it wasn't in use then. The Milky Way, which was thought to be about a 100,000 light-years across, was all there was of the universe. The universe was static, unchanging, eternal--it had always been. And it was finite, something you can grasp. A hundred thousand light years is not so bad for the human mind to wrap around.

Hubble came along, and by 1923 he was interested in something called nebulae, the Latin word for clouds, which were faint, pinwheel smudges that one would see through the telescope. Hubble looked at the Andromeda nebula, which is in the constellation Andromeda, and found a special kind of star. The star changes in brightness rhythmically. By measuring the period, you know the intrinsic brightness of that star. I use this example: When one drives on the road at night and you see the streetlights or the lights of an oncoming car, you automatically think, "I know how bright a streetlight is when it's next to me," or how bright headlights are, so you make a mental calculation as you look at how dim the lights are; you say, "OK, it's far away," or "It's near." The word in astronomy is "standard candle," but I've always found that not to evoke the right image. It's something whose intrinsic brightness you know and by looking at its apparent brightness--because the intensity of light fades with the square of the distance--you can easily calculate the distance.

Hubble saw how faint the star looked on the photo, and then he saw what its real brightness was. So he knew how far away Andromeda was. It is external to our galaxy. It is 2 million light-years away. So now it's not just the Milky Way, but each one of his smudges is a Milky Way, a hundred billion stars, and there's hundreds of billions of these galaxies. So overnight in 1923, he changed the scale of the universe, from being finite to something essentially infinite.

Now by the end of the 1920s he did something else, which is to discover that the universe is not static. He looked at these galaxies again, and he noticed that they had a speed of motion relative to us. The farther away the galaxy is, the faster it's flying away from us. He found the evidence for the expanding universe. This is a notion which is embedded in Einstein's theory of relativity, that there was a beginning to space and time, some 15 billion years ago.

Hubble overturned everything. I call it the last step of the Copernican revolution: The universe is not finite and static. It's infinite and expanding, and what's worse, it had a beginning, which means it's not eternal. And that all happened at the chair here. The little wooden rickety chair.

(SCIENCE, ENVIRONMENT)

ORIGINAL LOCATION LINK

Of Sand and Cities

info@reason.com (Steven R. Postrel) — Thu, 01 May 1997 00:00:00 EDT

How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality, by Per Bak, New York: Springer-Verlag, 212 pages, $27.00

The Self-Organizing Economy, by Paul Krugman, Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 122 pages, $18.95 paper

Theoretical physicists are famous--or notorious--among their scientific colleagues for certain stereotypical traits: self-confidence shading into arrogance; a passion for reducing things to their essentials; a conviction that other fields could be easily mastered if they could afford to take the time; and an unwillingness to actually learn about those fields except under extreme duress.

Per Bak, the author of How Nature Works, is a theoretical physicist at Brookhaven National Labs who earned his reputation working on "critical phenomena associated with equilibrium phase transitions"and organic conducting materials. Judging from this book, he is a worthy representative of his profession.

Self-confidence? Consider the book's title. A passion for simple models? Bak says, "Our strategy is to strip the problem of all the flesh until we are left with the naked backbone and no further reduction is possible."Contempt for the achievements of other fields? Bak reports his opening conversational sally on meeting famous paleontologist and PBS stud Stephen Jay Gould, co-inventor and promoter of the notion of "punctuated equilibrium," which says that evolution occurs in spurts: "Wouldn't it be nice if there were a theory of punctuated equilibria?"(To which Gould replied, "Punctuated equilibria is a theory.") Unwillingness to learn about other fields? Consider this howler: "Similarly, the emphasis in economics is on prediction of stock prices and other economic indicators, since accurate predictions allow you to make money. Not much effort has been devoted to describing economic systems in an unbiased, detached way, as one would describe, say, an ant's nest."This attitude of cocky ignorance perhaps explains the unusual absence of any promotional blurbs on the book's jacket.

That said, How Nature Works is a good book, and it is good, in large part, precisely because of Bak's stereotypical physicist attitudes. In print, at least, what might seem arrogant comes across as a kind of innocent, childlike enthusiasm, a lack of concern for anything but the sheer joy of figuring things out. His ruthless simplifications of geology, evolution, and neurology pay off because, as Bak notes, his models describe behavior that is common across these domains. This universality means that trampling across others' turf is not only acceptable, but almost mandatory, if the underlying principles are to be exposed. Finally, for the most part, Bak wants the reader to grasp the basic logic of his arguments; only rarely does he try to persuade with flights of poetic language or brute intellectual authority.

Scholars from different disciplines often feel a greater sense of kinship because of shared techniques than they do because of shared subject matter. (Economic theorists, for example, are much closer in style and interests to theoretical evolutionary biologists than they are to occupational sociologists.) As a result, new disciplines that apply common techniques to a wide variety of phenomena are more attractive to the adventurous scholar than those applying disparate techniques to a narrow range of phenomena.

These days, the grandest of the "I have a hammer and look! you're really working with nails"adventures is the study of "complexity."From the Santa Fe Institute to campuses all over the world, computer simulations are being run in which simple rules applied to simple elements generate complex, ordered-looking structures. For enthusiasts of spontaneous order in human affairs--those who maintain a sense of wonder at how intricate, unplanned networks manage to provide everything from drain cleaner to symphonies--the ongoing search for principles of self-organization carries high stakes. At the very least, the prospect that such principles might be discovered should weaken knee-jerk resistance to rigorous mathematical theorizing about social life.

Much of the early work in this area was exploratory--showing how the subtle flocking behavior of birds in flight could be mimicked by simple software rules, for example-- without really developing underlying insights or models that could be confronted with data from different fields. Traditionalists could laugh about "video games"attempting to pass as science.

But now, the complexity geeks are starting to get somewhere. On one front, John Holland and his co-workers, from a math and computer science perspective, are working on tools for modeling what they call "complex adaptive systems."(See "Learning Curve," December 1996.) The other advancing front is what might be called the "statistical systems" approach. The idea here is to note certain statistical facts about the complex macroworld, posit simple processes operating among individual elements in the microworld, and then show how (and preferably why) these processes cause those statistical patterns to appear at the macro level. Stuart Kauffman, a biologist at the Santa Fe Institute, has taken this approach in his efforts to explain the origin of life and the evolution of species. (See "Who Ordered That?,"February 1996.) But Bak, the senior collaborator on many of the most important papers from this perspective, is probably the central figure.

Bak's all-purpose hammer is self-organized criticality. A system is critical if it is poised to undergo structural changes, including possible major upheavals, upon being given a small push. The criticality of a system is self-organized if it ends up in the poised state as the result of a series of "natural"small pushes.

Bak's paradigm is the sandpile. Think of dropping individual grains of sand onto a flat surface. As the grains cumulate, they start to form a pile, which is very shallow at first. During this early period the system is not critical; each new grain of sand might dislodge a few of the grains, but that's it. As the pile grows, however, its sides become steeper, and now there is the possibility of a small domino effect, where one grain's movement downhill dislodges others, which in turn dislodge still others.

For a while, these avalanches are not big enough or frequent enough to stop the gradual steepening of the sandpile. All the disturbances are local, and grains of sand far from an avalanche are not affected. But then, Bak says, "Eventually the slope reaches a certain value and cannot increase any further, because the amount of sand added is balanced on average by the amount of sand leaving the pile by falling off the edges.�It is clear that to have this average balance between the sand added to the pile, say, in the center, and the sand leaving along the edges, there must be communication throughout the entire system. There will occasionally be avalanches that span the whole pile. This is the self-organized critical (SOC) state."

Bak argues that self-organized criticality, as exemplified in the sandpile model, looks like a plausible general-purpose hammer for understanding complex systems because a wide range of them possess properties which can be derived from sandpile-type models. These properties are statistical; they do not say exactly what is going to happen next, but they do constrain the possible patterns of events that can be observed. It turns out that both the SOC sandpile and a number of other real-world systems tend to behave according to what are known as "power laws."

If the logarithm of the number of avalanches in a SOC sandpile is plotted against the logarithm of the size of the avalanches, the result is a straight line. Such a linear relationship in the logarithms is called a power law. (The name is apt because an equivalent statement is that the frequency of an avalanche of a given size is equal to that size raised to some power.) In the study of earthquakes, the line is called the Gutenberg-Richter law, and the fit of the data, judging from Bak's pictures, is remarkable. "It turns out that every time there are about 1000 earthquakes of, say, magnitude 4 on the Richter scale"he writes, "there are about 100 earthquakes of magnitude 5, 10 of magnitude 6, and so on."(The Richter scale is the logarithm of the energy released in a quake.)

Fossil data assembled by Jack Sepkoski and analyzed by David Raup show that over a 600-million-year period, the magnitude of extinction waves, as measured by the percentage of all marine species wiped out in a period, is related by a power law to the frequency of those waves. Big catastrophes, where high percentages of species disappear, don't appear to be qualitatively different from small upheavals--they just happen less frequently. This suggests that no special explanations are needed to cover the big extinction waves; even if no asteroids ever hit the earth, occasional giant extinction avalanches would still run through the ecology.

Power laws also appear in data that vary over time, such as the changing water level of the Nile. They crop up in the geometry of coastlines, mountains, and trees. And they show up in human affairs as Zipf's law, which says that the magnitude of system elements is related by a power law to the rank of their magnitude. For the populations of U.S. cities, the relationship is particularly simple: The population of a metro area is inversely proportional to its rank by population, so that a city of rank 100 (Shreveport, Louisiana, with 374,000 people in 1992) is about one-tenth the size of the 10th-largest city (Houston, with 3.96 million); the line wobbles a bit with the very largest cities, but the fit is still remarkable. Zipf's law also applies to the frequencies of word use in English and, though Bak doesn't mention it, to the numbers of papers published by scientists.

Bak uses the universality of these properties to argue that some general, underlying theory must be applicable to all the systems that display them: Self-organized criticality as seen in a sandpile must also be responsible for earthquakes, solar flares, river branching structures, urban population distributions, biological extinction waves, macroeconomic fluctuations, and a whole lot more. Universality may be proving too much, however, since it is hard to believe that word-use frequencies, for example, have anything to do with sandpiles. It is a little like saying that because IQ scores and missile impacts around a target both obey a Gaussian bell curve, they must share an underlying mechanism.

The universality argument is most persuasive when applied to physical systems that have direct analogues to the gradual energy input, dissipative friction, and chain-reaction possibilities of the sandpile. For example, earthquakes get their energy from gradual tectonic plate movement; the friction along fault lines resists movement; and when the stresses do produce sudden ruptures, the stress gets redistributed to other places. The metaphor seems like a pretty good one to me, and it appealed enough to at least three other research groups that they independently published articles titled "Earthquakes as a Self- Organized Critical Phenomenon."By 1995, there were over 100 articles published in support of the idea that earthquakes are a manifestation of SOC in the earth's crust.

When we come to Bak's efforts to model economic phenomena, however, the universality argument for his SOC hammer practically disappears. He presents no data showing power laws apply to business cycle fluctuations, which are the only phenomenon he attempts to model explicitly. His model has layers of vertically related firms mechanically ordering, delivering, and producing goods. Firms follow arbitrarily imposed fixed rules for inventory accumulation and exhaustion. The analogy to falling sand in this model is a series of orders for final goods that arrives each period. The system eventually self-organizes to a critical state where avalanches of production of all sizes are possible, and the avalanches follow a power law.

More interesting than the details of the model are Bak's comments about the difficulty of working on it with two economist co-authors, Michael Woodford and Jose Scheinkman. Other social scientists view economists pretty much the way I described the stereotype of theoretical physicists, only without the legitimacy of the atomic bomb to back up their arrogance. Bak seems surprised to find out that economists are actually more careful about mathematical rigor than physicists, and he seems perplexed that his sweeping criticisms of economic theory, pungently expressed but embarrassingly uninformed, were not taken to heart by his economist collaborators.

Maybe he should pick up a copy of The Self-Organizing Economy, adapted from a set of lectures given by Paul Krugman. "For whatever reason,"Krugman writes, "the authors of articles and books on complexity almost never talk to serious economists or read what serious economists write; as a result, claims about the applicability of the new ideas to economics are usually coupled with statements about how economies work (and what economists know) that seem so ill-informed as to make any economist who happens to encounter them dismiss the whole enterprise. But it does not have to be that way."(Of course, Bak did talk to serious economists, but one gets the impression that he didn't listen.)

Krugman is an interesting case. His work as an elite economist injected increasing returns to scale into trade theory. That helped beget the deadly mutant spawn "industrial policy," which he has since tried to kill with vigorous popular writing. He does not suffer fools gladly, and is happy to puncture the pretensions of pseudo-thinkers like Lester Thurow or William Greider.

The book at hand, however, is, like Bak's work, a piece of serious popular science writing; the author tries to be engaging and clear but is not afraid to use a little mathematics. Krugman's exuberance in describing his work helps get the reader over the rough spots. As a set of lectures aimed at people with backgrounds in economics, it also includes some technical sections that would be hard going for the uninitiated. Fortunately, these can be skipped with little loss of meaning.

In the past few years, Krugman has gotten interested in spatial economics, which has been something of a professional backwater. He was intrigued by the failure of traditional urban economic models to generate modern polycentric cities such as Los Angeles. He also wanted to explain the uncanny regularity of Zipf's law for city populations: "We are unused to seeing regularities this exact in economics--it is so exact that I find it spooky,"he says, noting that the law holds for data back in 1890 about as well as it does now.

Krugman has two principles of his own for explaining self-organization. One he calls "order from instability,"which he applies to the formation of Los Angeles-style "edge cities."The other he calls "order from growth,"which he uses to derive Zipf's law.

The edge city model posits that firms placed on a circle or an infinite line want to be near one another, because there are likely to be more customers and suppliers available in crowded locations, but they want to be apart from each other to reduce competition for inputs and customers. Provided that neither the attractive nor the repulsive force overwhelms the other, and that the attractive force works over a shorter range than the repulsive force, it turns out that any random initial distribution of businesses, no matter how even, will self-organize into a set of regularly spaced business centers. ("Order from instability"enters this story because a too-uniform distribution of firms turns out to be unstable, leading eventually to a regular spacing of similar-sized clumps.) Krugman sometimes calls this process "urban morphogenesis,"because it is similar to certain stories of how cells in a developing embryo self-organize so that wings, legs, and eyes end up in the right places. This model has undeniable intuitive appeal; it's hard to imagine a radically different story that could better explain the pattern.

The random growth model for city populations is a variation on something economist Herbert Simon proposed many years ago. It supposes that cities add population in proportion to the population they already have, with "lumps"of new population attaching to existing "clumps."To prevent the largest cities from absorbing all population growth, it is necessary to add a probability of new cities forming. With this setup, Krugman proves that the distribution of urban populations evolves to a critical state represented by Zipf's law. The model is somewhat problematic, as Krugman freely discloses in his technical discussion, because the amount of new-city founding or population growth needed to get Zipf's law looks too big to represent historical United States data. But merely having a theory that is subject to refutation, and which confronts the remarkable regularity of Zipf's law, is a big step forward.

Krugman's general approach seems more plausible than Bak's for developing a general understanding of self-organization and complexity, for two reasons. First, he is willing to suppose that there is more than one process going on in the world, as shown by his instability and growth models. It really does seem absurd to suppose that the power law for word-use frequencies in English is generated by the same kind of process that determines earthquakes. SOC, order from instability, and Simon-style growth models appear to be independent explanations for power-law regularities. Second, Krugman starts with a more grounded understanding of the phenomena he studies, so that he knows better what features of reality are lost when he simplifies things in his models.

The statistical approach to understanding complexity seems unlikely ever to develop into a separate science that cuts across the wide range of subject matter discussed in these two books. But as the techniques and models are developed in each of the fields where they show promise, there may be a historical period of unusual cross-disciplinary conversation and understanding. Encounters between different academic tribes are rarely placid; adventurers on this trail are going to need a lot of exuberance and at least a little bit of arrogance.