Q is for ... Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The phrase, literally translating as "who will watch the watchmen themselves," first found expression in the Satires of the Roman poet Juvenal. The inference is that setting up one group to have authority over another does not make them intrinsically worthy of that power: specifically, the creation of a police state does not, in and of itself, guarantee that the police will not abuse their authority and flout the law.

Societies throughout history have recognized that law must be enforced if it is to be respected, which is the rationale for having police in the first place. This philosophy found its clearest expression under the Greek lawmaker Draco, who produced the first written constitution of the city-state of Athens and whose name is preserved in the eponym "draconian." Even minor infractions against the laws set down by Draco earned the death penalty; Draco himself is said to have remarked that he considered these so-called lesser crimes deserving of such a harsh punishment, and had no greater to offer for crimes of greater severity. In the draconian perspective, the fundamental crime is to break the law - the specifics of which law is broken, how and why, are unimportant. The rule of law itself is paramount, and sufficient justification for even the strictest interpretation of its codes.

Neither is this "zero tolerance" approach an historical aberration. The application of Shar’ia law in modern states such as Saudi Arabia frequently appears in Western eyes to be harsh and barbaric; Singapore treats littering as a major crime; in Maricopa County, AZ, Sheriff Joe Arpaio charges persons unable to verify their American citizenship with the crime of human trafficking - the 'traffic' being themselves, on the assumption they're in his jurisdiction illegally. All of these examples illustrate a philosophy of law in which justice consists of a strict implementation of the fullest penalties possible to all criminal acts; if, in the Platonic sense, law is seen as an instrument of the Platonic Good, then this conception of justice is essentially applying the standards of the Platonic ideal to the imperfect real world. The problem with this approach is that it assumes laws which are finite in scope and fallible in application - because they are created and maintained by imperfect human beings, and not manifestations of some Platonic higher realm - to be infinite and infallible.

What most of us would think of as "justice" applies a more casuistic perspective. Fairness dictates that we consider all factors that contributed to a criminal act, including factors that might mitigate the responsibility of the criminal or the severity of his punishment; further, fairness dictates that we consider the possibility that the law itself, either in its conception or its application, may be at fault. The essential components of a system of justice, as opposed to one of law, are doubt and development. A just system is one that is never certain of its pronouncements, and always willing to revise them.

It is also marked by accountability. There are, broadly speaking, four aspects to a legal system: the legislature that drafts laws, the executive that authorizes them, the judiciary that rules on cases before the law, and the police that enforce the laws. After Montesquieu, we are accustomed to see these as separate - indeed, as citizens of a police state we are accustomed to see the fourth as something separate from the first three - but in fact all four can coexist within one body and still constitute the essence of government. In fact, no government can exist that does not embody these four functions. Governments may exist to provide services under the social contract, but they can only do so if they first serve some corpus of law, even if that law is as primitive as the arbitrary pronouncements of a capricious dictator. It is not too far a stretch to suggest that the fairness of a social contract is predicted by the fairness with which the government conducts its fundamental functions in regard to the law.

This brings us, by a circuitous route, back to Juvenal's question. Plato's resolution, incidentally, was to have the watchmen watch themselves - tell themselves the "noble lie" that they were not as other men, that their duty made them greater, stronger, impervious to temptation and duty-bound to demonstrate their superiority with exhibitions of selfless and even-handed process of law. If one accepts Plato's reasoning here, it seems not unreasonable to ask why only policemen should tell themselves this "noble lie" - can not a whole society lie to themselves in this fashion, and do away with both police and criminals in the process? Further: if everybody is capable of deceiving themselves into accepting a weight of moral duty that does not actually burden them in practice, there seems no more need for any of the other three functions of prosecuting law than there is that of policing it. Then there is no need for government of any kind, and a state of anarchy exists. This chronicler encounters serious difficulty when attempting to reconcile such a state of affairs with a general acceptance of any coherent moral code; it seems, rather, that all we would have accomplished would be to rename what we now call "crimes" as mere "actions," no more reprehensible than kissing a baby or eating an ice-cream.

Moreover, there seems a flaw in Plato's premise that anybody can succeed at telling themselves this "noble lie" indefinitely - especially when they occupy a position of power over others, the temptation must arise to define, rather than simply accept, the rights and wrongs of human conduct. This tendency in the powerful towards overreach and corruption of the highest ideals is thoroughly explored in Alan Moore's seminal graphic novel, Watchmen - the title is, of course, a nod to the ancient Juvenalia, inter alia. The arrogance of Ozymandias; the intolerance of Rorschach; the cynicism of the Comedian; the despair of Nite Owl; the cosmic indifference of Dr. Manhattan; all of these illustrate the perils of power.

And then, of course, there's Silk Spectre, and perils of an entirely different dimension.

K is for ... Kawaii

After yesterday's foray into the darker side of pop culture, something a bit lighter today - although, just as the darkness hid a message of beauty, there are undercurrents here that might be almost sinister... but we'll get to those later.

You may or may not recognize some of the friendly little critters depicted above - there was actually only one I knew straight off, but then I'm not exactly the target demographic here - and, if you do, the executives at Sanrio will be delighted. Those guys, and their chums, net Sanrio a billion dollars or more annually. Hello Kitty, the one I recognized, is one of the world's biggest brands. Nowadays, she is the flagbearer for an army of cuteness - in Japanese, the word is kawaii - and a driver of Japan's economic success. But kawaii wasn't Sanrio's idea, and it didn't originate as a corporate gimmick.

Sanrio was set up in the 1960s by Japanese businessman Shintaro Tsuji as a silk manufacturer. Through his political connections, Tsuji later purchased the rights to the characters Snoopy and Barbie, which proved as popular with the youth of Japan as elsewhere. Tsuji learned the salient lesson: cute animals sell big, and Sanrio's business model was set. However, the market for his kawaii was not primarily the young children of Japan - it was, incongruously, teenagers, of an age we in the West might expect to be ready, in good Paulian fashion, to "put away childish things."

The 1970s were an interesting period in Japan, sociologically speaking. When Hello Kitty debuted in 1974, she was fortunate to find a blossoming market for all things cute. Traditionally, Japanese culture is male-dominated and heavy on the formality - but a movement began in the 1970s among Japan's teenage girls that was, in its own way, revolutionary. It began, as many revolutions do, with written words.

Japanese writing actually encompasses three styles: kanji, which are stylized Chinese ideographs; and the two syllabaries, languages of syllables, respectively hiragana - for native Japanese words - and katakana, for loanwords from other languages. As with Chinese, the precise ordering of the strokes that make up kanji is very important - calligraphy is an art of delicate precision. The quiet revolution of Japanese womanhood began with subtle and not-so-subtle assaults upon this stylistic regimentation. Girls would use mechanical pencils that drew fine lines, rather than the variable thicknesses of 'proper' kanji; and they would employ rounded characters where straight lines were customary, and decorate their kanji with hearts, flowers, smily faces, and so on. All of these affectations seem quite familiar to us in the West as part of an overtly feminine approach to writing; through the prism of Japanese culture, these same affectiations become radical. Kawaii was a mechanism for individualizing expression: an insidious way to undermine the rigidly patriarchal authority pervading their environment. It proved impossible to suppress, but rebellions are peculiar things. It's often easier to fight the power than to keep the power.

Corporate Japan enjoyed the 80s at least as much as corporate America. Men like Shintaro Tsuji understood that if you can find a symbol for what people want, they can be brought to accept that symbol even if it obscures - or obstructs - their original goals. The tremendous brand power of Hello Kitty and friends created immense wealth for Sanrio, wealth that the corporation channeled into diverse media interests including film and publishing. Literally thousands of products today carry Sanrio characters and proliferate their brand. Their power to shape the culture is built on a movement engendered to overthrow that power.

Makeru ga kachi.

J is for ... Jeremy

At home
Drawing pictures
Of mountain tops
With him on top...

A school is a microcosm; generally, it is the first sustained experience a child has of social interactions outside the family. School is the environment in which the values and relations developed within the family unit are put on trial in the court of public opinion - the environment in which the sweater your mom finds adorable becomes the reason you get pushed into a puddle when you get off the school bus.

Daddy didn't give attention
To the fact that mommy didn't care
King Jeremy the wicked
Ruled his world...

The phrase "child abuse" conjures vile images of pederasts, kidnappers, warped individuals with a twisted set of values - after all, you'd have to be a monster to want to hurt a child, right? Sadly, ordinary people with nothing more sinister than paint thinner in their cellars can, and do, hurt children all the time. Maybe they get drunk, or transfer aggression at a spouse or a workplace that stifles them; maybe they make themselves feel better by belittling their child; maybe they misunderstand the function of discipline and wear their child down; maybe they just don't take the time to notice, to understand, to hear the cries the child can't express - or those the child has learned to keep inside.

Clearly I remember
Pickin' on the boy
Seemed a harmless little fuck
But we unleashed a lion...

"It builds character," we assure ourselves. "All kids go in for a bit of rough and tumble, it's part of growing up." We remind ourselves that we, too, were picked on - or knew somebody who was. Maybe we're honest enough to remember the kid we ostracized, teased, gossiped about, lied about, laughed at, taunted, made miserable. Maybe we rationalize that it's how children become adults - as though adults stop doing these things to each other whenever they can get away with it. Maybe we feel like what we suffered is invalidated if children today don't suffer it too. "I went through it," we tell ourselves from the safe vantage point of fifteen, twenty, thirty years later, "and I turned out okay." Maybe we feel threatened by our children's pain - maybe that's why we tell them they need to toughen up, take it on the chin, take their lumps, get in the game. Like it's a game. Like they're playing. Like it's not serious.

How could I forget
He hit me with a surprise left
My jaw left hurtin
Dropped wide open...

Of course, some kids know it's not a game - or, if it is, the stakes are impossibly high and the only rule is that the winner is the one who goes furthest. These kids understand that authority is the mask hate wears when it beats you down; that all the rules, the politeness, the please and the thankyou and the can-i-have-another - all of that is part of the fabric that ties you down, the cotton in your mouth when you're trying to scream. These kids know that there is no cavalry over the hill, no light at the end of the tunnel. They know that, if there is a God, all He has for them is themselves. And they work on themselves. They do it in whatever private place they can find - maybe in a bedroom, playing angry music; maybe in a garage, practicing on action figures, on posters, on neighbor's pets; maybe just in the space behind the eyes that won't cry any more, won't give anybody that satisfaction. They work on themselves, and they work themselves up to a sticking place. And they stick there, balanced at the acme of themselves, until something tips the balance, and finally, precipitately, they fall.

Jeremy spoke in class today...

Pearl Jam's controversial song - and video - was inspired, tragically, by a real Jeremy: Jeremy Wade Delle, who shot himself to death in front of his classmates a month before his 17th birthday in 1991. He came to school late that day, and was sent to get an admission slip from the office. Instead of collecting the slip, he brought back a .357 Magnum. His last words were "Miss, I got what I really went for."

One of his classmates, Lisa Moore, recounted how they'd pass notes to one another during in-school suspension. His would always be signed "write back"; just before he found expression for what was inside him, his last note was signed "later days."

It came from a small paragraph in a paper which means you kill yourself and you make a big old sacrifice and try to get your revenge. That all you're gonna end up with is a paragraph in a newspaper. Sixty-three degrees and cloudy in a suburban neighborhood. That's the beginning of the video and that's the same thing is that in the end, it does nothing … nothing changes. The world goes on and you're gone. The best revenge is to live on and prove yourself. Be stronger than those people. And then you can come back. ~ Eddie Vedder

E is for ... Eight Circuit Theory

The late Dr. Timothy Leary, currently orbiting this Earth in accordance with his last wishes, was a hero of the counterculture and remains a controversial figure in academic circles. The Harvard professor of psychology is infamous for encouraging his students to partake of psychedelic drugs - including psilocybin and LSD - in order to facilitate their creativity. He was inspired on this unorthodox pedagogical approach by his own experiences using so-called "magic mushrooms," from which psilocybin is obtained; he later opined that he'd learned more about his own mind and the discipline of psychology on his first trip than in fifteen years as a psychological researcher.

At the time Leary was embracing and encouraging the counterculture - his Harvard Psilocybin Project was actively supported by the beat poet Allan Ginsberg, for example - the drugs he was peddling to his students were quite legal, although they were eyed with increasing suspicion by the authorities. Marijuana, an altogether inoffensive substance by comparison, was illegal, thanks to the Marihuana [sic] Tax Act of 1937. This legislation, which marked the opening salvo of the U.S. government's long and fruitless War on Drugs, was remarkable for several reasons. Firstly, as the name implied, the legislation actually concerns imposing a tax on vendors of cannabis sativa - principally doctors and pharmacists. The letter of the law criminalizes possession of the weed only on the basis that the taxes levied under the Act haven't been paid. These taxes were designed deliberately to be unaffordable to that class of persons commonly to be found using cannabis for recreational purposes, therefore virtually guaranteeing that anybody regularly using the drug did so in contravention of the law. This may seem a roundabout way of outlawing the drug - it was not illegal to own it, to cultivate it, to smoke it, or even to sell it, only to avoid the excise tax upon it - but it should be borne in mind that, at that time, there was considerable doubt over the constitutionality of a law that forbade citizens from partaking in a form of commerce. In those innocent times before the New Deal, the Supreme Court placed considerable weight on the Tenth Amendment deference to state legislatures, and regularly thwarted federal efforts to regulate all manner of industries. Alcohol had been prohibited by the Eighteenth Amendment, but the fact that a constitutional amendment had been required to accomplish this indicates that the path to outlawing drug use was not clear - not least because prohibition had subsequently been repealed by the same mechanism.

The regulation of a trumped-up tax provided a constitutional mechanism, but it was still necessary to sway popular opinion. To that end, Congressional hearings leading up to the Act relied heavily on sensational anecdotes from people who claimed the evil weed had driven them to acts of depraved enormity. An appropriately sensational term - "reefer madness" - found its way into tabloid headlines and thence into common parlance, even becoming the title of an unintentionally-hilarious 1936 movie (which you can actually go and watch here). Dr. William Woodward, counsel for the American Medical Association, rejected the claims of drastic personality alteration resulting from cannabis use, concluding the drug was essentially harmless and questioning the approach adopted by the committee in gathering evidence. The committee not only disregarded his objections, having very compelling - if hardly altruistic - reasons for doing so; it later reported to the house that the AMA was in full support of the bill, a blatant lie that went unchallenged. "Reefer madness" had no scientific basis whatsoever, but the Congressional imprimatur saw it cited in the defense of murderers and other violent criminals - sometimes successfully.

Leary's own "madness" in dosing his students with psychoactive drugs whose effects were still poorly understood hastened the hardening of the official line against all recreational drugs - the government did, in fairness, have a much better case to make regarding the dangers of LSD and psilocybin, and they'd done the top-secret research with Project MK-ULTRA to prove it, although that, alas, is a story for another time - but there was some method to it. That method, belatedly, harks back to the title of this post: Eight Circuit Theory.

Eight Circuit Theory is a classic piece of pseudoscience, cobbling together a lot of mystical ideas with a lot of valid observations into an overarching theory that is beguilingly untestable, and so unscientific. Despite this drawback, it has a certain appeal, which is why I'm choosing to talk about it here today. Essentially, Leary's model of cognition likens the brain to a radio - a tuned circuit, or more accurately, eight separate tuned circuits, each of which receives (and broadcasts) specific kinds of information. The eight circuits are hierarchically arranged, from the instinctive processing of the bio-survival circuit to the transcendental comprehension of the non-local circuit. Much of the theoretical scaffolding of Leary's model seems preposterous; but his assertion that, for most of us, the higher circuits are customarily closed seems reasonable enough within the terms of the model. The real controversy lies in his related belief that drugs such as LSD and psilocybin could "turn on" the circuits, and allow the user to "tune in" to information that otherwise passed them by: hence the phrase "turn on, tune in, drop out." What were the participants in Leary's Psilocybin Project "dropping out" of? Robert Anton Wilson, currently percolating in the Pacific off the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in accordance with his last wishes, had theories of his own about that; but they can wait.

A is for ... Axiom.

An axiom is a particular kind of sentence, that forms the basis of a logic. Logic describes any method for establishing true conclusions from true premises, and is broadly subdivided into deductive logic, which draws specific conclusions from specific premises, and inductive logic, which draws general conclusions from general premises. The truth of the conclusions in any logic is determined by the soundness and validity of the steps connecting them to the initial premises. The overall logical process by which conclusions are induced or deduced from premises is an argument; ultimately, every logical argument begins with one or more axioms.

The thing that makes an axiom so special is that it can't be proven by any sort of logical argument. You just have to accept an axiom is true, and go from there. For this reason, axioms are generally statements that seem self-evidently true; statements we find it hard to imagine could be false. The logic most people understand and recognize as logic was formalized by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. His logic rests on a small number of axioms that state seemingly uncontrovertible assertions: the Axiom of Identity states that a given A is the same as itself, so A = A; the Law of Excluded Middle, which is actually derived from the identity axiom and so not strictly axiomatic itself, asserts that a given A must either be the same as a given B, or different from it, so A = B or A = ~B (~B means 'not B' in formal logical notation). Most of Western philosophy accepts these axiomatic principles as Aristotle formed them; but it's worth remembering that there is no logical reason that we have to. We can, for example, emulate Oscar Wilde and assert "nothing is itself alone" (it should be clear that this denies the validity of the identity axiom); we can posit that there may be a class of things which can both be and not-be one another simultaneously. It may seem absurd, to modern people conditioned to accept the assumptions - the axioms - of empirical scientific method, but it is entirely valid; even, for some purposes, advantageous.

Axioms are enormously powerful, because when we choose an axiom we are creating a whole potential logic that rests upon that axiom. It is important to distinguish between an axiom, which is unprovable within a logic, and an assumption, which is a statement whose truth is tested by logical analysis. For example, "cats have antlers" doesn't work as an axiom, since we can inductively show that there exists no cat in particular which has antlers, and so conclude that cats in general share this lack. It is a false assumption. "Cats do not have antlers" is not axiomatic, either, although it is so obvious empirically to anybody who understands what cats and antlers are that it can be treated as such under most circumstances. The danger lies in treating what seem to be obviously true assumptions as axioms - this is a good way to close ourselves off from valid alternative hypotheses. Ironically, this sort of confusion is common among adherents of the scientific method - which properly adopts a spirit of open enquiry, continuously challenging its own assumptions.

In common parlance, an argument is a dispute, a difference of opinion; each side has a reason for believing its conclusions to be true, and each side believes the other's conclusions to be false (this can be seen to be a function of Aristotle's Excluded Middle - without that, each side could have an opinion that worked for them, and not invalidate the other's opinion thereby). Some of the most intractable arguments concern situations that resist logical analysis - theology is a fertile ground for these, beginning with the fundamental argument over whether God exists. The atheist position that there is no God is grounded in an empirical worldview, which asserts that everything we observe can be explained without recourse to a God. A rule called Occam's Razor advises us that if we don't need an extra element to account for something, we should properly discard it, so that our explanation is as simple and elegant as possible. This rule, suggesting the simplest possible explanation for a phenomenon is also the best, has disadvantages which may become clear on a little reflection; we can readily conceive of situations that arise from complicated interactions but are explicable by more simple ones, and this is for example one facet of the magician's art. These performers rely on the assumptions people make based on what they observe; they are skilled at manipulating those observations, misdirecting their audience, and producing apparently 'magical' results that are explicable only by recourse to hidden phenomena of the sort Occam disregards. It should be said that the simplest explanation - "it's magic!" - is, from an atheist's perspective, closely similar to the theistic explanation - "God makes it happen." Scientific atheists assert that what we cannot explain with our current level of knowledge about the universe will become explicable as that knowledge increases and we appreciate the greater complexities of time and space. There are reasons to doubt this, and certainly no logical reason why we must accept it, but it is as logically valid a position as its counter from the theistic perspective.

Even among theists, arguments are rife, precisely because the dogma of each religion is beyond the scope of logical refutation. Where logic derives its authority from its axioms, a religion derives its authority from the Divine - belief in its deities is therefore a necessary precursor to acceptance of the religion's claims, although in this religion functions exactly as logic does: for we will only find logical force to an argument if we first accept the axioms that underpin it. Major religions differ in their characterizations of the Divine - some are monotheistic, believing in just one God (for example, the Abrahamic God worshipped by Christians, Jews, and Muslims); others are polytheistic, believing in a whole pantheon of Gods (Norse Pagans, Hindus, and Buddhists are examples). Within a given religion, there may be differences on small points of dogma, which result in schisms or splits. These can be extremely violent. A schism within the Catholic Church of medieval Europe led to the establishment of a rival Papacy in Avignon - these Popes were known as Antipopes because they stood against the temporal authority of the Popes in the Vatican, who were officially the earthly representatives of Christ. Individuals who challenge the dogma of a religion, as Martin Luther did with his 95 Theses, or as Galileo did with his assertion "eppur si muove", can find themselves accused of heresy - under some theocratic jurisdictions, this can be a crime punishable by death. The Albigensian Heresy of the Cathars, knights who founded the first central bank in history, led to the destruction of that immensely powerful order (although several modern secret societies, like the Prieure de Sion, claim descent from them).

It comes down to this: everything any of us believe, no matter what authority we claim for it, is simply a matter of opinion. And we all know what opinions are like - something else that begins with A...