The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia

The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia: "As fraud surfaced in the Afghan election, the No. 2 U.N. official in the country, Peter W. Galbraith, proposed enlisting the White House in aplan to replace Hamid Karzai."

If you've been wondering about NW flight 188 (updated) - James Fallows

If you've been wondering about NW flight 188 (updated) - James Fallows: "That's the one that 'missed' Minneapolis, overshot by 150 miles or so, then did a U-turn over Wisconsin before returning for a safe landing. Afterwards the two pilots said they had been 'distracted' by a discussion about new scheduling software on their computers and therefore just didn't notice that they were out of touch with air traffic controllers for 90 minutes. The FAA, in no-nonsense fashion, soon revoked the pilot certificates for both men.

The always-informative AVweb has an update on several developments.� A PDF of the original emergency-revocation letter from the FAA is here; a PDF of the pilots' legal appeal is here. Selections from the recordings of Air Traffic Control attempts to reach the plane are here.

I am not a lawyer or an airline pilot, but it seems to me that the heart of the two sides' cases are the contentions below. First, from the FAA letter explaining the emergency revocation. Click for a larger view, plus a chance to see the surprisingly colorful language government officials chose to use ('while you were on a frolic of your own' etc)."

Table experiments

able	Baker	Charlie	5:51 PM
Charlie		Baker	Able	12/6/2009

 

Baker

Able

Charlie

 

Poached eggs

This is a test blog entry with an embedded link.

Test of new procedure

This is a test of a new procedure for enter posts on this blog. As well as to test the use of a voice recognition application for entering new posts.

Birth is a pre-existing condition [terminal]

It is said that at the party to celebrate the late Studs Terkel's 90th birthday, someone asked "Who would want to live to be 90?" "People", Terkel said, "who are 89." Nifty reply, but the question remains: Why would anyone want to live to be 90? And beyond. The question has a long history. To quote from Euripides Alcestis. 669. "Old men's prayers for death are lying prayers, in which they abuse old age and long extent of life. But when death draws near, not one is willing to die, and age no longer is a burden to them." We stand no closer to beating the odds today than in the time of Euripides, despite the many advances in medicine and biology since. Still, hope, if not life itself, springs eternal. It is almost touching to believe, as so many of us do, that because we know so much about so many things that the answer to eternal life lies just over the horizon. The latest assurance comes from researchers who have correlated long life with fewer calories in our diets. As Ari LeVaux writing in Alternet has observed:

The idea that eating less can prolong life has been gaining traction in recent years, thanks to studies on many organisms, including mice, spiders, dogs and worms, that correlate fewer calories with longer life. . .A group called the Calorie Restriction Society has formed to encourage and assist people in reducing their long-term caloric intake for the sake of health. Their diet, called Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition (CRON), is intended to drastically reduce caloric intake without starving the body. CRONies, as they call themselves, claim that in addition to the possibility of living longer and retarding the effects of aging, they experience increased energy and mental clarity.

Not that the geriatric set is sitting around waiting for the next medical study to appear; most are out doing things including getting into trouble. For one thing the recession has caused a postponement to many retirement plans. From the Kansas City Star we learn:

Whatever the cause or ripple effect, two-thirds of Americans age 55 to 64 are in the work force — the highest participation rate among that age group since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping track in 1948.

"Had the economy been stable, I wouldn't have given it a second thought," said Rick Wright, 60, an information technology worker for the city of Kansas City, who was eligible to retire but decided to stay.
"I'm no economic genius, but I'm afraid of inflation when they pump all this recovery money into the economy. I'll have a good retirement wage, but even then, I have to be careful."

Some elders of our tribe are not staying above the law. We owe to In These Times the report that:

Crime is generally a young person's game, but that hasn't stopped an ever-growing number of older Americans from breaking the law. Following a decline through most of the '90s, over the past 10 years arrest rates for those over 50 have shot up 85 percent, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Experts predict that these numbers will continue to climb well into the next decade, as 35 million baby boomers expand America's graying population from 16 to nearly 25 percent.
Is America on the precipice of a geriatric crime wave?
"The numbers are definitely going to keep going up, no doubt about it," says Ronald Akers, a criminology professor at the University of Florida. "People are healthier and living longer, which may make crime an attractive option for some older people."

The picture resembles a famous painting by Bruegel more than it does a brochure for an old people's home. What is wrong with this picture? For a better perspective, there is this, entitled Can Aging Be Solved, from Technology Review, M.I.T.'s magazine about innovation. It is in the form of an interview with a gerontology pioneer, Leonard Hayflick, a professor of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco. "In the 1960s, Hayflick discovered that human cells grown in a dish will multiply a finite number of times--a property now known as the Hayflick Limit. These cells later helped ignite the search for the cellular sources of aging, and Hayflick, a former president of the Gerontological Society of America, has since become well known for his skepticism toward claims that human longevity can be significantly lengthened through science. Hayflick spoke with Technology Review about his theory for the biological causes of aging and explains why he thinks that research directed at the fundamental processes of aging will yield greater returns than studying diseases of aging, such as Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease." The following is excerpted from that interview.

Several people in this field believe we do understand the biological cause of aging, which is the same as the cause of nonbiological aging. It's the second law of thermodynamics. Like all molecules, biological molecules dissipate energy, losing structural integrity and functional capacity. Our bodies have enormous repair capacity, which evolved to repair dysfunctional molecules until reproductive maturation, after which the accumulation of these molecules exceeds repair capacity. Otherwise, the species would vanish. The accumulation over time of dysfunctional molecules leads to the properties of aging at the clinical level that we all recognize.

TR: So it doesn't imply that there is a solution to aging?

LH: Why would you want to do that?

TR: Some people would like to slow or halt the aging process.

LH: They haven't thought about the consequences. We relate to each other by perceptions of differences in age, which would be destroyed if some chose to increase their longevity and some did not. The social, political, and economic discontinuities that would occur would be enormous. People who say they want extended longevity say they want it to be so when life satisfaction is greatest. Yet they won't know [when that is] until late in life. If you're in your eighties and you decide you want life extended when you were happier, at fifty, it's no longer possible.

TR: So you don't want to extend life span. But do you think it's theoretically possible?

LH: I think it's highly improbable. Let's take something infinitely simpler than your body and mine: automobiles. Even if you put the car in a garage and don't use it, it won't stand there forever. Eventually, it will age and disintegrate. This is an inevitable law of physics. Some people have proposed changing the parts as they wear out. But when is the original no longer the original? Replacing your brain becomes an insurmountable problem.

TR: You have often pointed out that even in the research world, there is great confusion over the meaning of the term "aging." What is the confusion?

LH: The facts are these. There are four aspects to the finitude of life: aging, longevity determination, age-associated diseases, and death. Aging is what we call a catabolic process--the breakdown of molecules. Longevity determination is the reverse--the repair or maintenance of molecules. Aging gets confused with longevity determination. The aging process increases vulnerability to age- associated diseases. These concepts are distinguishable from each other and fundamentally different.

TR: Why is it so important to distinguish between aging and the diseases of aging?

LH: You cannot learn about the fundamental biology of aging by studying disease processes. Resolving age-associated diseases tells us nothing about the fundamental biology of aging, just as the resolution of childhood diseases, such as polio and childhood anemia, did not tell us one iota about childhood development.

TR: Why, then, is it important to do research on the fundamental processes of aging?

LH: Because the fundamental processes of aging increase vulnerability to all age-associated diseases. That is why cancer, cardiovascular disease, and stroke, the three leading causes of death in developed countries, occur in older age. The root cause of age-associated diseases implies--demands, even--that for anyone to understand the causes of age-associated diseases, they should know something about the fundamental processes of aging. Learning something about why old cells are more vulnerable to pathology is a key question for which we have little research being conducted. . .

Copyright Technology Review 2009

.

Perhaps we should listen more to some oldtimers: "Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man,-- yesterday in embryo, to-morrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hair's-breadth of time assigned to thee live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it." ~ Marcus Aurelius Meditations. iv. 48.

So much for experience: Now comes Nicholas Wade, in The New York Times, to report on a new drug in the testing stage:

"It may be the ultimate free lunch — how to reap all the advantages of a calorically restricted diet, including freedom from disease and an extended healthy life span, without eating one fewer calorie. Just take a drug that tricks the body into thinking it's on such a diet.

"It sounds too good to be true, and maybe it is."

Wanna bet?

Unbelief by any name

Thanks to the 82nd annual Scripps National Spelling Bee, and especially to its champion, Kavya Shivashankar, an eight-grader from Olathe, Kansas, I can stop pretending to be an atheist. In a flash, her spelling of Laodicean freed me of further discussions that begin typically with the question "Do you believe in God?" Ordinarily, I would reply that I believe in a secret ballot. But if the questioner persists, or deserves better of me, I would answer as best I could.

"Define your terms, especially the term God."

"Well, do you believe in a God?"

"That's not much help."

"Well, do you believe in a Supreme Being?"

"Supreme, in what sense, and to whom or what?"

These discussions seldom get very far and degenerate soon into a discussion of whether you call yourself an agnostic or an atheist. No one likes to be typecast by others, no matter how benevolently. So that Ms. Shivashankar's triumph after 15 rounds awakened in me a new possibility accompanied by visions appropriate to the Shakespearean [Flourish exeunt].

As it happens, the word Laodicean refers, as every eighth grader knows, to a Christian community established in the ancient city of Laodicea on the river Lycus in the Roman province of Asia minor. I shall skip over a lot of the, although fascinating, stuff known about this community and go directly to this passage from Wikipedia:

John's vision, recorded in the book of Revelation, Christ instructs John to write a message to seven named churches in Asia Minor. The message to Laodicea is one of judgement with a call to repentance. The oracle contains a number of striking metaphors.

"I wish that you were cold or hot" (3:15–16)

"I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth" .

    

It is thought that the Laodiceans were being criticized for their neutrality or lack of zeal (hence "lukewarm"). Based on this understanding, the pejorative term Laodicean is used in the English language to refer to those neutral or indifferent in matters of faith.

    

A slightly milder version:

    Revelation 3:15-16 (New Living Translation)

"I know all the things you do, that you are neither hot nor cold. I wish that you were one or the other! 16 But since you are like lukewarm water, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth!

No matter: from this time on, I shall be known as an indifferentist. (It's tough to raise a banner for "lukewarmism."; besides, one is recognized as a word in English, the other is not,)

Still, if you adopt this new tag, don't count on its getting you off the hook entirely. The Catholic Encyclopedia is downright combative, as if it can deal with atheism, but not so much "Indifferentism".

The term given, in general, to all those theories, which, for one reason or another, deny that it is the duty of man to worship God by believing and practicing the one true religion. This religious Indifferentism is to be distinguished from political indifferentism, which is applied to the policy of a state that treats all the religions within its borders as being on an equal footing before the law of the country. Indifferentism is not to be confounded with religious indifference. The former is primarily a theory disparaging the value of religion; the latter term designates the conduct of those who, whether they do or do not believe in the necessity and utility of religion, do in fact neglect to fulfil its duties.

So that I can imagine a future discussion going:

"Do you believe in God?"

"I'm an indifferentist"

"What in hell is that?"

I shrug, pointedly and profoundly.

"No seriously. . .

In fact, if you Google "Indifferentism" you can learn a lot, including this from one of Karl Marx's many tracts, which, if you think about it, is to the point::

The working class must not constitute itself a political party; it must not, under any pretext, engage in political action, for to combat the state is to recognize the state: and this is contrary to eternal principles. Workers must not go on strike; for to struggle to increase one's wages or to prevent their decrease is like recognizing wages: and this is contrary to the eternal principles of the emancipation of the working class!

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1873/01/indifferentism.htm

And this:

 A colourless indifferentism was the pest of the age. — The English Church in the Eighteenth Century

Such a mood of amiable indifferentism is abhorrent to Browning's feelings. — Robert Browning

 

 Men are beginning, once more, to awake to the fact that matters of belief and of speculation are of absolutely infinite practical importance; and are drawing off from that sunny country "where it is always afternoon"--the sleepy hollow of broad indifferentism--to range themselves under their natural banners. — Science ; Education

 At present, as all methods, according to the general persuasion, have been tried in vain, there reigns nought but weariness and complete indifferentism--the mother of chaos and night in the scientific world, but at the same time the source of, or at least the prelude to, the re-creation and reinstallation of a science, when it has fallen into confusion, obscurity, and disuse from ill directed effort For it is in reality vain to profess indifference in regard to such inquiries, the object of which cannot be indifferent to humanity. — The Critique of Pure Reason

Wow!

 

CNN says that "Shivashankar attends California Trail Junior High school. Her hobbies include swimming, cycling and traditional Indian dance, according to the contest's Web site. She plans to become a neurosurgeon"

God bless you, Kavya.

 

 

 

 

 

    
 

 

 

Three Sisters

Three sisters - edengberg@gmail.com - Gmail

Three sisters - edengberg@gmail.com - Gmail

Three sisters - edengberg@gmail.com - Gmail

A creationist speaks up

Complains of bungled creation.

When pigs fly

I use this picture quite a lot these days as an indication of how I feel about the political scene and anything that suggests the doings of bankers as they go around fleecing people as if it's their God given duty. It comes in handy also as an antidote to the buzz of hyperbole to which one is subjected -- incessantly.

Memorable moment

Fireman lefted Juliet into cab during Jesusita Fire when everyone at Karen's was told to find shelter elsewhere .

Nostalgia

I selected this image while fooling around with Google and Picasa. Puts me in mind of days spent with the Webbs at Friday Harbor.

Juliet James Welsh Person

Tony

Ol' rockin' chair.

A Kristin sketch

Kristin drew this sketch of me practicing on the cello.
She was 11 years old at the time.

Vanessa

This is Vanessa, taking a degree (her nth), this one from NYU

Juliet James

Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

Von Hoffman and the media

April 23, 2005

 
 

Guardians of the Truth, Or Protectors of Privilege?

by Nicholas von Hoffman

 
 

In pre-computer times, when reporters smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey in public, the night city editor on the Chicago Daily News was Bill Mooney, a man who could type faster with one finger than anyone else in the place could with 10. One evening, when the news was slow and the teletype machines were hardly ringing their bells, Mooney—with little to occupy him at the moment—was taking a call from what we called an irate reader. He puffed and listened, puffed and listened to the voice at the other end of the phone until he could stand it no longer. "Lady," he broke in to ask her, "just what the hell do you expect for a dime? The truth?"

 
 

Mooney, who was not given to the gaseous seminarizing of our own time (and who didn't use the word "journalism" if he could get around it), nevertheless understood its limitations. He knew it is a lick-and-a-promise business in which one does one's best, fails and moves on to try again. Mooney figured out early in his career a reporter couldn't get it right—not really, really right.

 
 

Mooney lacked a Harvard education. I don't think he went to any college, for he said that the first story he covered was as a copy boy in 1937. In those days, copy boys were male and in their teens. It was a helluva story which he only got to cover because it happened on a holiday, when the real reporters wanted to be off with their families, so the city editor sent Mooney out to the far South Side, to the Republic Steel plant, where the union people were trying to organize. He sent him there just in case something happened, which wasn't likely— except it did happen. The cops opened fire on the union people and killed 10 of them, and the Memorial Day Massacre took its place as one of the pivotal events in the New Deal decade.

 
 

His introduction to reporting taught Mooney that he didn't have to go to J-school to do this kind of work. Later on, he came to believe that a person might do it better if he didn't think that reporters were members of a priestly caste.

 
 

Not everybody can be a competent reporter, but it isn't rocket science. When the Watts race riot erupted in 1965, the Los Angeles Times—a paper decidedly behind the times—had to draft an African-American out of the advertising department to cover the fighting that had turned the center of the city into a battleground. The paper had no persons of color on its reportorial staff. That worked out well enough for the paper to be awarded prizes for its coverage. Reporting is a skill which is perfected by apprenticeship, and a lot more people can do it than Dana Milbank—who is much too young to have known Bill Mooney—seems to think.

 
 

For four years, Mr. Milbank was The Washington Post's White House guy. His byline is a respected one, but he hasn't learned to take his lumps even though he says he knows they "come with the territory." Recently, he wrote a piece in his paper in which he said the accusatory cow pies of bias are flying at him and his colleagues at a greater pace than ever before, which led him to opine: "I think the growing volume and the vitriol of the bias accusations are part of a new—and dangerous—development. Partisans on the left and right have formed cottage industries devoted to discrediting what they dismissively call the 'mainstream media'—the networks, daily newspapers and newsmagazines. Their goal: to steer readers and viewers toward ideologically driven outlets that will confirm their own views and protect them from disagreeable facts. In an increasingly fragmented media world, ideologues have already devolved into parallel universes, in which liberals and conservatives can select talk radio hosts, cable news pundits and blogs that share their prejudices."

 
 

A word about the recent history of the word "mainstream." Until it got turned back on them, mainstream institutions like Mr. Milbank's Washington Post used the word to mean a newspaper or church or school of thought that was respectable, reliable and rational. The rest was beyond the pale. In due course, with the changing of the times and the invention of new means of communication, those living outside the pale have struck back at the mainstream, which for so long "dismissively" scored it off as down-market and disreputable.

 
 

Now it gets more interesting. Mr. Milbank writes that as a consequence of those pesky bloggers and the talk-radio yammerers, people's heads are being filled with dangerous fictions. "You could dismiss my view as an admittedly self-serving claim coming from one of the dinosaurs of a dying media oligopoly," the worried writer concedes. "But the consequences are ominous for the country as well as for newspapers. Consider a poll two weeks before the 2004 election by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes: The survey found that 72 percent of President Bush's supporters believed that, at the time of the U.S. invasion, Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction or at least major illegal weapons programs."

 
 

Where oh where did those 72 percent get such crazy, misinformed, downright wrong ideas as to the facts? From the bloggers? Maybe. From the talk-radio yakkers? Could be. Or they might have gotten it from their morning newspaper, from The Washington Post or The New York Times. Some may recall that The Times felt it was necessary to publish a long article apologizing to its readers for having misled them on the question of weapons of mass destruction. Shortly afterward, Mr. Milbank's own newspaper did pretty much the same thing, confessing it had buried an important article by Walter Pincus in the weeks leading up to the Iraq invasion in which the W.M.D. premise was challenged.

 
 

In the light of these huge journalistical boo-boos, Mr. Milbank takes it upon himself to say that it is the non-mainstream media which "explain why 45 percent of Americans now say they can believe little or nothing of what they read in the papers, compared to just 16 percent two decades ago."

 
 

It would be nice to think that this mass disbelief arises out of a newfound skepticism, a quality that Mr. Milbank finds in abundance among his fellows, even praising them for it. He brags that "our [meaning his fellow journalists] dominant bias is skepticism of whoever is in power," but healthy skepticism for his crowd is dangerous tunnel vision in those out of the mainstream. Of their behavior, he writes that "the pervasive accusations of bias are making it increasingly difficult for the traditional media to play their role of gathering and reporting facts." Whimper, whimper.

 
 

Beyond feeling sorry for ourselves, some might contest Mr. Milbank's contention that the "dominant bias" of his craft is skepticism. It is true that reporters and editors are not as gullible as nursery-school kids, and it is also true that big media—newspapers especially—do some very good investigative work, but overall, as the W.M.D. coverage suggests, the desire of journalists to be liked and accepted mitigates against posing the tough questions. To be a skeptic is to reconcile one's self to being an outsider. The thought of being outsiders makes the notoriously needy journalists operating in Washington bilious.

 
 

In the 1960's, journalism had a blogger of sorts—an irredeemable outsider and far-left-winger, I.F. Stone was never invited to the dinner parties. He put out his own newsletter. It seems that every week, the newsletter carried a story about the government that only the skeptical, indomitable Stone could find. Mr. Milbank's paper wouldn't publish him—which was just as well, since this enhanced his underground following.

 
 

In our time, Sy Hersh is best known as a scoopster, the man who has followed up skepticism with the facts. While he's had more acceptance from the mainstream than Stone did, he remains a fringe personality. He also has no rival whom I can think of—which tells us something about how few and far between are the examples of mainstream media rocking the boat. And how uncomfortable the irony when their own boat gets rocked, as when the spiders of the Internet exposed Dan Rather and his forged memos during the last election.

 
 

Mr. Milbank ends his essay by exclaiming: "Imagine that! An independent press looking for the truth rather than serving as stenographers for the powerful. It's a quaint tradition Americans would be wise not to abandon." Trips right off the pen, doesn't it?

 
 

Had Mr. Milbank known Bill Mooney, he would know you don't get the truth for a dime.

 
 

You may reach Nicholas von Hoffman via email at: nvonhoffman@observer.com.

 

back to top

This column ran on page 4 in the 4/25/2005 edition of The New York Observer.

The fantasy world of high chat

Hutchinsland

 

In 1867, Charles Dickens reported on "the first meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything." A dozen years ago, on the centennial of that occasion, I became a Senior Fellow of the Center for the study of Democratic Institution in Santa Barbara, California. I was reminded of these moments in history by the news that the Center, after years of seedy gentility, has found a new benefactor. It has been taken in as a ward of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Its new director, Brian Fagan an anthropologist, proposes to "make it sing". Fagan would do well to read his Dickens.

 

    Like the Mudfog Association, the Center took as its mission to bring together "the best minds" to reflect on matters of moment for the benefit of us all. For the best part of two decades, the minds convoked every weekday morning, promptly at 11 o'clock, in a large room with a wonderful, carefully designed view of the Pacific Ocean and a pleasing extent of its shoreline. Here the minds interacted among themselves and with other minds whose owners sat in by invitation of the house minds. A bimonthly journal (The Center Magazine), a newsletter, tapes, lecture engagements, pamphlets -- "Occasional Papers" -- and the like, memorialized some of this talk and gave it circulation among those in the body politic to hope it all mattered enough to be worth paying for. These numbered as many as 80,000 at the peak.

 

    The bill for this talk came high. The Center's roomy mansion (nicknamed "El Parthenon"), employed, in good times, a staff of five dozen, including administrators, a public relations director, a direct mail marketing specialist, secretaries, a lunchtime cook, bookkeepers, people to look after the 47-acre grounds and its deer, along with editors and their assistants. To help sustain this level of conversation, the minds from time to time took to the road. With the help of ad hoc funding, they convoked best mind superstars in New York, Washington, and Geneva to raise everyone's consciousness about peace and freedom and also to "shake the tambourines" for the Center and its mission, as Harry Ashmore, a Center official put it.

 

    The Center for the Study of Democratic institutions was an early model of an increasingly common type of organization. In general, these organizations consist of a group of people huddled around a Xerox machine under shelter of a common overhead of rent and utilities; they are bound together by a group health insurance plan, a more or less common interest, and some hope of making the world a better place -- if not for everyone, then at least for themselves. If one of these high talk organizations is to thrive beyond those necessities, then its talk must be, or be made to seem, inspired by some need of those who put up the money, including you and me in the form of tax exemptions. If the talk the organization produces seems no more instructive than that which emanates from a journal of opinion, say, or a television panel show, or the op-ed pages or a political discussion at a neighborhood saloon. It must be invested with a character that transcends mere content and achieves a higher significance.

 

    Dickens's Mudfog Association, for instance, harvested its self-esteem from a dedication of science to the common good. For illustration: it is a Monday morning session (Section A. -- Zoology and Botany). Mr. Misty complains that, owing to several causes, organ grinder monkeys were vanishing from the streets of London; "the proportion of the year 1829 (it appeared by the Parliamentary return) being as one monkey to three organs." This, he felt, had grave implications to the national education as it deprived the people, especially children, of important lessons in natural history. He urged her Majesty's Government to repopulate the streets with monkeys and dancing bears, and to provide a suitable part for them, midway between the houses of Parliament. Mr. Mull disagreed sharply. His own observations had warned him that "many children of great abilities had been induced to believe... that all monkeys were born in red coats and spangles, and that their hats and feathers also came by nature," thus putting Her Majesty in the position of "diffusing incorrect and imperfect notions."

 

    The Center in Santa Barbara, assumed a mission that cannot be defined more concisely than the Advancement of Everything Good. At one time or another, depending upon its finances, the immediate audience, or the condition of the world and the night vapors troubling it, the Center proposed itself as an "early warning system" that will alert us to each rise in the tide of "critical issues," and the flotsam to be found thereon; and as the sole locus of thought generated independently of the pressure of this world; it is the protector and civilizer of great conversation. Israel Shenker of The New York Times caught the flavor of the place during a visit there in 1969:

 

    No subject is too vast for their attention, no project too visionary for their concern. They deal daily with concepts as grand as universal law and as remote as the uses of the most distant seabed.

 

    In this echoing think tank, the accent is liberal, and the optimism unbounded, as though words could bridge centuries of misunderstanding, and as though no communication were too difficult to establish. One of the fellows -- resigned Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike... says that he even communicated with his dead son, an assertion that the other fellow's pass over in uncharacteristic silence.

 

    The one woman -- Elizabeth Mann Borgese -- perfected yet another form of communication. She says she taught her dog to type.

 

    Robert Maynard Hutchins, who created, peopled, and presided over the Center, also redeemed its pretenses for hard coin. There was never enough money -- one suspects there never could have been enough money -- but there was money enough to scrape by in a manner that had to be taken seriously, and that would prevent the electricity from being shut off. Hutchins apotheosized the talk into Dialogue and converted many to belief in its salvific value. He did this in much the same way that he had sold the reforms he brought to the University of Chicago. "It isn't a great center," he often said, "merely the only one there is." He peddled the faith well, because, like every successful evangelist, he believed it.

 

    An evangelist lives by words and music, but soon after death the music fades, leaving the words to the elements. To read old issues of Time and Fortune. for instance, now that the pews are empty and the Wurlitzer is silent, is to invite wonder why Henry Luce was ever conceded the power he carried, as if in a snuff box. Similarly, Robert Hutchins's words and those written about him, reread today, make him sound like merely a slightly updated version of one of those turn-of-the-century academic "prexies" who composed five- foot shelves of congealed learning and gave nostalgic seasoning to the soft focus memoirs of New England literati. Perhaps, given the earnestness of Hutchins contributions to the Great Books hype and other uplifts, he deserves no better. We are left, then, to ponder how he brought it off

 

    Hutchins became secretary of Yale University at the age of 24, Dean of the Yale Law School at 29. At 30 he walked down the aisle of Rockefeller Chapel as president of the University of Chicago. He flubbed a chance to ascend to the Supreme Court by being too outspokenly pacifist on the eve of Hitler's war; then he did what needed doing to accommodate the fact that history's first atomic chain reaction would take place on the Chicago campus. Having greatly improved the University amid, as usual in everything he did, much controversy, he rewarded himself at 46 with the self-created office of Chancellor.

 

    In 1952, Hutchins and Paul Hoffman, president of the Ford foundation, talked Ford's trustees into springing $15 million loose to form what they christened the Fund for the Republic. It was intended as a kind of antitoxin to McCarthyism. In 1954, the Fund's first president, Clifford Case, a prominent Republican chosen to make sure that the fund would not cause too much trouble, resigned to run for the Senate. Hutchins then took over himself

 

    Hutchins rose to prominence at a time when the American veneration of expertise gave to nearly all those who enjoyed reading and sought to live by their wits, the notion that they stood as a class apart. Homegrown varieties of the mother country's learned societies sprang up, and alongside them a more passionate species of organized, ad hoc devotions to the belief that the wisdom of the intelligentsia, if bound and tightened in the right places, might staunch the flow of evil in the world. In the ministry of the Church of the American Century, the word of Reason took the place of the word of God, and the spread of learning, took the place of the spread of religion.

 

    Hutchins followed Henry Luce by a year at Yale and was also the son of a Presbyterian minister. Like Luce, Hutchins, brought to all his missions an identifying susceptibility. He was the softest of touches for One World schemes, drafts of a new U.S. Constitution, Charles Reich- type greenings; any whole plan for the molting of the skin in which we find ourselves in order to produce in one swoop a better, purer world, the New Jerusalem. He also liked to live well. The Fund, which itself molted and became the Center, gave Hutchins an outpost, outside the mess and constraints of political, academic, and foundation life, while also providing, in the Presbyterian sense, a good living.

 

    Lewis Mumford recalls an encounter with Hutchins In 1940, at the first "City of Man." Conference, called among a "group of representative intellectuals, who would pool their wisdom and exert their authority to make clear the issues democracies now faced". Of the dozen representative intellectuals, Hutchins struck Mumford as "tall, urbane, boyish looking: keen but supercilious , rational and outwardly reasonable, but shallow; an unawakened isolationist." "Aloof," the adjective often used by friendlier critics, fell short of capturing Hutchins look and bearing of pain, as if enduring some unheard noise, as if he were bearing his assigned mission nobly, but wished constantly that he might be released for less burdensome service.

 

    Hutchins stood tall and handsome to a fault, with a presence that caricatured Mount Rushmore. When combined with two other Hutchins traits -- magnanimity and courage in controversy, and the gift of being able to worry about the right things -- Hutchins looks and his supercilious manner, helped his enterprises to maintain the pretenses contained in their self-advertisements.

 

    The transformation of the Fund for the Republic into the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions was a living symptom of Robert Hutchins's own midlife crisis. The Fund began life in circumstances bound to fire an evangelist's heart. True Goths clamored outside the house of Reason, threatening civility and the Republic itself. The fund vowed to counter the nightmares conjured by the McCarthyites. It commissioned factual studies concerning the true dimensions of communism in America, and other studies pointing to the damage McCarthyism was causing to the foundations of the going order. On top of that, It gave large sums of money to the Southern Regional Council, to the American Friends Service Committee (to strengthen the right of freedom of conscience) and to others for, among other things, studies of fear in education, and ravages being done to due process.

 

    

    With McCarthy defused, the fund turned reflective. Still at its New York City headquarters, it began to focus on "the great issues." Then, in 1959, Hutchins got the fund board to approve the move to Santa Barbara. Here, presumably, olive trees and the Mediterranean climate would remind all of Socrates and better times. A small clapper bell was hung outside Hutchins's office to summon the fellows to their daily devotions; a pleasant, small excerpt from the orders of St. Benedict, stamped on a tea towel and framed, was posted. The mailed appeals for money turned from present evils to eternal verities.

 

    "Centers" or "Institutes" come in two kinds. One kind, the advocate of a cause, stakes out a beat -- privacy, say, or whales -- to patrol and to make a place for in the arena of public issues. It measures its success by how much of what it wants it gets -- in the way of laws, votes, and changes in public opinion polls. The other type of organization asks for a commitment of money and moral energy to a subject or to a process -- in the Center's case "the intellectual enterprise" itself. The commitment is not to any one viewpoint, but to Dialogue. This kind of the Institute aspires to be the very conscience of the arena, or at least its tutor. There is no obvious measure of success for the second type. It can only measure its efforts as do lowlier forms, like magazines, say, or public television: does its existence bring into being valuable work that otherwise might not have been done?

 

    Little that came out of the Center owed specifically to its existence. Little of it, that is, could not have been done just as well, and maybe better, under auspices of the usual bureaucratized, historically located University or foundation, and published in say, Daedalus. Perhaps if the center had been able to attract some genuinely "best minds," it might've worked, might have become the Institute for Advance Studies West the Fellows had in mind when they talked about their plans.

 

    

    But except for expense-paid visits to spend a few days in Santa Barbara, and to deliver a paper, the Very Best Minds could not be induced to join permanently in the meditations. What, after all, did the Center have to offer, except life in a California that only makes many thinking people nervous?

    

    For all the weight The Fund for the Republic carried in New York, the Center in Santa Barbara stood essentially self accredited and self certified. Moreover, without an urgent evil to combat, much of the rally- round-the-flag support drifted away. In order to make its new self credible, the Center needed to attract the Very Best Minds. But, no self-respecting Very Best Mind would attach itself permanently to an institution run as if Hutchins were the founding abbot. The Best Minds would want to make their own rules, St. Benedict, notwithstanding. Also, the alimony from the Ford Foundation had almost run out, requiring the kind of fund-raising exertions, which, though suitable to institutions without need to explain their existence, might be seen as presumptuous in an independent center of thought.

 

    The fund-raising efforts, officially presented as attempts to broaden the public discussion of the great issues, took the usual forms, and some not so usual. Under the Hutchins banner -- "We launder money" -- Bernard Cornfeld, the mutual fund salesman, picked up the check for the Center's Pacem in Terris II meeting in Geneva. Indulgences were sold to members of the Hollywood community, who were admitted to the meditations and sometimes allowed to speak.

 

    Not knowing whether to behave like the children of light or the children of this world, the Second-Best-Minds who did sign on could not find their moorings. The Dialogue deteriorated into squabbles that would make the average college faculty meeting seem by comparison a drawing together of friars. The center continued to turn out drafts of new constitutions for the United States and the world, but the Center's own effort at collegiality broke down. In 1969, Hutchins fired nearly all the Fellows -- they had presumed their appointments were permanent -- and began to form a new fellowship based procedurally on the Apostolic Succession. This time he hoped to attract the Very Best Minds, but the Center no longer had the funds to keep up the kind of appearances necessary to bring in the kind of money needed to keep up appearances. In perhaps its most imaginative thrust, it made a deal with Alex Comfort, the gerontologist, to use the royalties from his The Joy Of Sex to pay his salary and other expenses. The Fellowship continued to disintegrate, however, until there was nothing, Comfort complained, to be a Fellow of. Comfort sued to repatriate $93,000 in royalties, and asked for severance pay and damages. The Center countersued. In November 1976, a federal judge in Los Angeles called the contract "shabby" and "unholy," and ordered some of the royalties returned with interest. The suit was the centerpiece of a complicated mess of events that left the Center in shambles.

 

    Hutchins died on May 14, 1977 in a Santa Barbara hospital. The Center, then already moribund, may be said to have formed part of his estate. Much of the acreage had been sold off to make severance payments as the purges, begun in 1969, proceeded by installments. The remaining assets, mainly cash from the sale of the land plus the list of Center members -- subscribers to The Center Magazine -- make up the stake for the new players at UCSB. They will call themselves The Robert M. Hutchins Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.