Then Obama zagged back, more quickly than he had zigged, and Clinton won New Hampshire – and after that Nevada. In the New York Times, political scientist Daron Shaw wondered if the bandwagon effect – a.k.a. “momentum” – had somehow gone away:

Dr. Shaw expected Mr. Obama in New Hampshire and Mr. McCain in Michigan to benefit from voters’ long-demonstrated propensity to flock toward expected winners.

“If Giuliani wins Florida,” he said, “you’ve got a real case for saying, ‘Is momentum dead?’ ”

But Giuliani has already faded in the polls, in Florida and elsewhere. And “momentum,” a.k.a. the “bandwagon effect,” hasn’t died. It just has competition, in our ultra-wired society, from other factors that can swing the electorate at short notice.

A huge percentage of “independent” New Hampshirites admitted in exit polls that their minds had been made up only days — or less — before the vote. Flung towards Obama by the post-Iowa bandwagon effect, these people then apparently swung back towards Hillary, perhaps influenced by her show of vulnerability, or by Obama’s supercilious treatment of her in a day-before-the-vote debate — both events having been widely televised.

The same mercurial voters feature, by the way, in political science accounts of the bandwagon effect. A study from 1994, by researchers from the University of Southwestern Louisiana and the University of Kentucky, found the effect to be particularly strong among “independent” voters not affiliated with any party. A study in 1996 blamed “particularly unsophisticated independent voters” for the effect in a German election. A UCLA study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology in 1998 hinted that the effect was rooted in traits similar to suggestibility:

Bandwagon effects were stronger for women compared with men, and for 2 of 3 PAD (Pleasantness, Arousability, Dominance) basic temperament factors; that is, for individuals with more arousable and less dominant temperaments.

Just how irrational the bandwagon effect can be was shown by the famous Asch Social-Conformity experiments, published in the early 1950s by psychologist Solomon Asch. In these experiments, subjects would frequently give the wrong answer to simple, seemingly obvious perception tests merely because people around them (i.e., the experimenter’s lying confederates) expressed certainty about the same wrong answer. A much more recent study using functional-MRI scans indicated that the subjects in experiments like these really do perceive things differently under the influence of other (wrong) opinions, and that contrarian thinking – though correct – lights up subjects’ emotional centers, suggesting an inner struggle.

One of Asch’s students, Stanley Milgram, would later go on to do similar experiments showing that the same instinct towards social conformity can also severely distort moral perception. Ditto for romantic perception, which psychologists recently have found to be skewed in favor of prospective mates whom the crowd seems to find attractive. Ditto again for economic perception, and the bubbles and bursts to which it can lead when groupthink sets in.

Some people like to think of all this as a kind of “social contagion,” which in a sense it is. But it is a broadcast contagion. Remember Marshal McLuhan, and his worries about a wired, “global-village” with its “panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence”? Even today, with all the different ways we have to plug into the media, we still tend to get very similar, very centralized coverage for big events like a presidential race.

The immediate effects of mass media are obvious: We are inoculated by the same influencing events — like Hillary’s tears — more or less all at once. To the extent that these events are unpredictable, their broadcast injects unpredictability into our opinions. But when the event in question is an expression of our own opinions, for example a poll or primary vote, there is potentially even more volatility — because our opinion now can feed off itself.

Broadcast and bandwagon effects will sometimes conflict, and sometimes align. But on the whole they will turn what arguably should be a sober debate over policies, experience and character into something like a sporting contest, with a strong emphasis on the flow of events and a strong element of unpredictability. No wonder we (and the rest of the world) find the process so fascinating to watch.

What we really ought to do is to consider it dangerous, because to the extent that our individual opinions move towards McLuhan’s “total interdependence” they are prone to be unwise as well as unstable.

Remember the concept of the “wisdom of the crowd”? As described by James Surowiecki in his book of the same name, it requires that opinions be relatively independent of each other. In principle, random errors of judgement cancel out this way, effectively amplifying whatever valid information remains.

If, on the other hand, opinion biases take hold via broadcast effects or bandwagon effects, whatever wisdom a crowd had is apt to swing towards collective madness.

And by the way: The more tightly our attention is wired to the media, the more rapidly these volatile, irrational effects will be able to move us, and the further we’ll be liable to drift from the anchoring influences of family, community and tradition.

Can we at least make our elections less susceptible to these effects? Probably not in any structural way. To do so would mean limiting our connection to the media, coalescing the primaries — perhaps into a single nationwide election — and of course censoring poll results. None of these is likely to happen soon.

The one handy tool we have is awareness. If people learn how to recognize when broadcast and bandwagon effects can sway them, they have a chance to combat those effects with more analytical thinking.

Unfortunately, the concept that human social behavior is largely media-driven and crowd-driven doesn’t seem to get much traction in the popular imagination. It seems to be one of those things we’d just rather not think about. Apparently we prefer to see not chaos but order in the world, to find patterns and to navigate by them. Thus when a candidate surges in the polls we are tempted to rationalize it by reference to his or her attributes – electability, freshness, plainspoken honesty – just as we rationalize the to-ings and fro-ings of the stock market, the fates of sports teams, and all the other things in life that are never fully rationalizable.

Note: This is an update/rewrite of a piece — “The Bandwagon Effect” — I posted in early December.

From a piece last week by David Grinspoon in Seed:

“We’re talking about initiating communication with other civilizations, but we know nothing of their goals, capabilities, or intent,” reasons John Billingham, a senior scientist at the private SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Billingham studied medicine at Oxford and headed NASA’s first extraterrestrial search effort in 1976. He believes we should apply the Hippocratic Oath’s primary tenet to our galactic behavior: “First, do no harm.” For years Billingham served as the chairman of the Permanent Study Group (PSG) of the SETI subcommittee of the International Academy of Astronautics, a widely accepted forum for devising international SETI agreements. But despite his deep involvement with the group, Billingham resigned in September, feeling the PSG is unwisely refusing to take a stand urging broad, interdisciplinary consultation on Active SETI. “At the very least we ought to talk about it first, and not just SETI people. We have a responsibility to the future well-being and survival of humankind.”

Billingham is not alone in his dissent. Michael Michaud, a former top diplomat within the US State Department and a specialist in technology policy, also resigned from the PSG in September. Though highly aware of the potential for misunderstanding or ridicule, Michaud feels too much is at stake for the public to remain uninvolved in the debate. “Active SETI is not science; it’s diplomacy. My personal goal is not to stop all transmissions, but to get the discussion out of a small group of elites.”

It all sounds pretty scary. The number of stars that fall within the ballooning expanse of our earliest radio, TV and radar signals is rising exponentially. And conceivably the only other civilizations out there are rapacious conquistadors, survivors of eons of Darwinian struggles — in other words, more or less as Western civilization was, when it conquered the “heathen lands” of Earth.

Then again … as the writer Stanislaw Lem (Solaris) liked to point out, there is something deeply naive about the idea of meaningful communication with a truly advanced civilization. Against some cosmic Cortes we would not be like the doomed Aztecs. We would be like so many ants, unable even to apprehend the power with which we dealt. The idea that such a power would bother to “conquer” us is absurd. Indeed, its very alien-ness, to our narrow, ant-like ways of seeing, might render it more or less invisible — so that it could come and go as it pleased, even as our “elites” denied its existence and fruitlessly pumped energy into the void in a “search for intelligent life.”

But the fact that our brains are practically hardwired to electronic media these days makes us susceptible to all kinds of social contagion, not just “panic terrors.” One of these contagion phenomena, known to social scientists as “the bandwagon effect,” is particularly relevant in primary-election season.

The bandwagon effect refers to the tendency of voters to be supportive of a candidate purely because he or she is perceived as popular. Thus a small or local success for a candidate – a good outcome in an early primary, or a jump in a local poll – can lead infectiously to a broader popularity, however undeserved by other criteria. After his wins in Iowa and New Hampshire in early 2004, for example, John Kerry moved up sharply in the polls and became the front-runner.

The effect is far from being the only influence on voter decision-making. But its existence has been demonstrated in several well-known social science experiments, and the importance that candidates, journalists and voters now deliberately place on early primary contests.

Perhaps because of the unflattering light it sheds upon the electoral process, the bandwagon effect is seldom called by its right name. George H.W. Bush celebrated it as momentum — “the big Mo” — after unexpectedly winning the Iowa Republican caucuses in the 1980 presidential campaign. Others have called it “the Iowa bounce.” Hillary Clinton’s surging poll numbers a year ago had commentators talking about her newly-perceived “electability.”

If the bandwagon effect is merely about electability, then in a sense it is less worrisome. To the extent that a voter is decidedly partisan, and merely wants to choose the most electable candidate to lead his party to victory in the nationwide contest, his sensitivity to other voter choices during the primaries would be perfectly rational.

But the experimental data tend to contradict the notion of the bandwagon effect as a rational partisan strategy. A study in 1994, by researchers from the University of Southwestern Louisiana and the University of Kentucky, found the effect to be particularly strong among “independent” voters not affiliated with any party. A study in 1996 blamed “particularly unsophisticated independent voters” for the effect in a German election. A UCLA study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology in 1998 hinted that the effect was rooted in traits similar to suggestibility:

Bandwagon effects were stronger for women compared with men, and for 2 of 3 PAD (Pleasantness, Arousability, Dominance) basic temperament factors; that is, for individuals with more arousable and less dominant temperaments.

All this ought to be unsettling. But should it really surprise us, given that political candidates are sold using some of the same irrational, mood-altering techniques – wavy flags, smiling children, stirring music, flannel shirts – that advertisers use to sell consumer products?

A few weeks ago, reading about Obama’s surge in the polls, I sensed my own inner readjustment: Before, when he’d had only half Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers, Obama had seemed little more than a smooth-talking political queue-jumper. After his post-Oprah surge he seemed … less objectionable somehow. Even Mike Huckabee, as he exploded in the polls, earned a twinge of acceptance. Maybe he’s not as ridiculous as I’d always thought. I should mention that I am not at all partisan, and have not registered as a Republican or Democrat. Neither Obama nor Huckabee fits into any political category that I find appealing. In other words, “electability” is not their only problem, in my eyes. Nevertheless I felt better about them, knowing that others did. This shift in thinking, by the way, felt perfectly normal and natural. But it felt better to recognize it as an instinct and reject it.

Assuming that the bandwagon effect is a basic instinct, we might ask why it exists. Did it have some adaptive function during our early cultural development? Was the tendency to “pick a winner” a necessary survival trait when politics was more brutal than it is today? Or was it merely part of a general mental interdependence that held early human society together? And could it date back further still, to the very basic mammalian instinct to stay safely within the herd?

Whatever the answer turns out to be, there is no shortage of evidence that in modern societies human opinions remain deeply interdependent. Social psychologists have found this even in the romantic market, where “romantic popularity” turns out to be a key factor in people’s mating preferences: In other words, to a person in the mood for love, a prospective mate will seem more attractive than otherwise if it is perceived that the crowd finds her attractive too. (Small wonder that our culture places such high value on celebrity.)

Conceivably, such a trait could have evolved as a way of leveraging one’s individual decision-making with the summed “wisdom of the crowd.” But the wisdom-of-the-crowd effect, described by James Surowiecki in his book of the same name, requires that opinions be relatively independent of each other. The more tightly interwired and interdependent a crowd becomes, the more its opinions amount not to wisdom but to herd-like madness.

One can view this process as a contagion, but arguably it is better seen as a runaway autofeedback phenomenon, in which our collective judgement comes to depend more and more upon itself, thereby becoming less stable, more subject to sudden movements, and less connected to reality — in other words, more “volatile,” as pollsters and pundits now routinely observe of public opinion.

Periodically, it is recognized that Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primaries have a disproportionate effect on the presidential race. Typically it is suggested that all the state primaries be held on or near the same day. But Iowa and New Hampshire are only parts of the problem. Literally every revelation of public opinion prior to the national election feeds back into that opinion and distorts it. And because that feedback effect can cause strange, sudden movements, upward or downward, in a candidate’s popularity, the management of political campaigns is now largely about the management of those irrational swings – damping the slumps, boosting the surges, and getting the candidate’s poll numbers to peak at election time.

The logical way to prevent these herdlike movements is not only to condense elections to the fewest possible dates, but to hide poll results from the public, at least until all votes are cast. In the world of commerce, information is routinely kept secret to prevent unwanted feedback effects. But in a society with a bedrock faith in free speech, the censorship of poll results seems unlikely at best.

Even an acknowledgement of this issue is culturally problematic. We humans have a deep need to see not chaos but order, to find patterns and to navigate by them. We are inclined to rationalize the swings of public opinion as if they were driven entirely by real-world events. Thus the opinion bubble that lifted Huckabee from single-digits to the top GOP spot in the space of a few slow-news weeks has been explained as the product of “Huck’s” aw-shucks style, his Christian principles, the weakness of Giuliani and so forth. In a like manner we explain the to-ings and fro-ings of the stock market, sports teams, fads and fashions, the fortunes of celebrities and more or less everything else in life: We are instinctively, irrationally bent on rationalizing what is never fully rational.

Links to other essays by Jim Schnabel:

Bringing People Together?  (14 September 2008)

Gross Domestic Runaway ( 4 September 2008 )

The Robot Menace (4 December 2007)

… even if humans stubbornly cling to the steering wheel, they could still end up sharing the road with smart cars. By around 2030, according to some believers in Moore’s Law, there will be computers more powerful than the human brain, leading to the emergence of superintelligent “post-humans.” If these beings do appear, I have no doubt how they’ll get around. They’d never be stupid enough to get in a car driven by a member of Mr. Magoo’s species.

Yeah, funny. But come to think of it, isn’t the prospect of “superintelligent ‘post-humans’” really a lot more inkworthy than the prospect of safe-driving robot cars?

And isn’t it a lot less appealing?

It certainly used to be. When Karel Capek wrote his 1921 play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), and thereby introduced the term robot to the language, it probably seemed natural to his audience that his machine-men ultimately rebelled and snuffed out their human creators. Rebellion and havoc-making was what creatures made by hubristic mortals always did, from Frankenstein’s monster back to the Hebrew Golem. Even God had his problems with those wayward kids, Adam and Eve.

By the 1930s, robots had become standard monster-figures in pulp sci-fi. But by the early 1940s, Isaac Asimov had begun to refer in his stories to the restraining “Three Laws of Robotics,” and lawful robots began to mingle with rebellious ones.

To anyone who works in AI these days, the Three Laws must seem absurdly naive – just the sort of thing a sci-fi writer would have come up with back in the early Forties. But the “Laws” did what Asimov had wanted them to do. They got sci-fi out of the robophobe rut it had been in, persuading readers that smart machines could be sympathetic, peaceful characters — even trustworthy, Tonto-like companions to humans.

The “good robot” theme hasn’t always prevailed since then in Western culture. Films like Westworld, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator and The Matrix occasionally have brought our deeper fears to the surface. On the non-fiction side, writers including Bill Joy and Bill McKibben have raised the warning flag, too. But since the turn of the century, it seems to me, the robophiles have been stomping the competition in the mass media. The three big robot films of this decade so far – AI, I Robot and Transformers – have all featured good robots who prevail in the end.

How did the robophiles gain the upper hand in this culture war?

One big reason, I suspect, is that there are now robots, even if mostly in toy form – and people are starting to think seriously of all the roles in which they might be useful, from housekeeping to construction work to sex work. For related reasons, the advertising industry also now has an interest in portraying robots positively.

Yet for all our newfound enthusiasm for robots, the existential threat they pose hasn’t gone away. In fact, that threat now seems closer and less hypothetical than ever.

I don’t mean that robots necessarily threaten us with violence. To me it’s plausible that the humanoid machines living and working among us twenty years from now will all be as gentle and unassuming as the C3PO character from Star Wars. They might even have such lifelike “skin” that they visually fit right in. But their presence would still be cataclysmic.

Merely by their low cost and utility, they would make human labor obsolete. Working constantly, never complaining, consuming only electric power and the occasional spare part, they would be, dollar for dollar, more productive by far than the cheapest Third World sweatshop toiler. And they would evolve their way up the labor value chain too swiftly for any human to stay in the game.

A few years ago, Salon ran a piece on this topic, and among others interviewed Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor. Reich’s point was that “There are all sorts of jobs that can’t be done by robots because the essence of the job is providing personal attention.” And that was essentially the conclusion of the piece: that robots in the foreseeable future would merely hasten the labor market tilt, in America and other developed countries, towards personal-service and high-creativity jobs, and away from jobs that machines and cheap foreign workers can do.

This concept would be bleak enough even if it were correct, given the labor market upheaval it predicts. But I think Reich’s idea is actually wrong, in a way that is probably typical of people who don’t know much about robots or AI. He assumes that the robots of tomorrow will be like the computer-driven automated systems of today. Even Tierney’s comment about Moore’s Law illuminates a common misunderstanding.

*

“Moore’s Law” was just Gordon Moore’s observation that the computer chip industry tends to advance quickly enough to double the maximum density of chip elements every 18-24 months. To some extent the widespread faith in this “law” ensures its accuracy. But there is no guarantee that will continue to hold. In any case, Moore’s Law refers to computer chips, not to the vastly different, brain-like architecture needed to make recognizably “smart” robots and AI systems.

Brain-like architecture is essentially parallel-processing and hyper-interconnected, not serial-processing and centralized like computer CPUs. It is true that AI researchers now often use traditional computer chips to run software modelling how brains work, and with this inefficient architecture, brain-modelling does require great processing power. But researchers are already beginning to experiment with more “neural” hardware, which is enormously more efficient at performing animal-like tasks.

True neural hardware could be scalable in ways that modern computer chips aren’t. Mammalian brains consist to a great extent of repeating structures known as neocortical columns, so if the basic architecture is right, and the initial wiring/programming is right, most of the ground between small robot brains and big ones could be covered with more neurons and more interconnections.

Obviously, some further design changes would be needed to turn, for example, a mouselike brain (~15 million neurons) into a humanlike brain (~100 billion neurons), but those changes could prove to be relatively minor, and in any case, given that they apply to a totally different architecture, they are unlikely to be limited by the state of traditional computer-chip technology.

The point is that walking, talking (or at least chirping or barking) robots could become a reality very quickly — long before “Moore’s Law” gives traditional computers the power to model brain processes at human-like scale and speed.

*

Robots and AI systems with artificial brains won’t seem like the automated systems we have today. They won’t even seem like machines at all. They will seem like the living, sentient creatures in whose images they are made.

Will they be conscious? Probably not — but they won’t have to be conscious to perform virtually all the economic functions of humans, from building houses to writing novels and doing advanced theoretical physics.

And waiting on tables. And assisting shoppers in retail stores. And serving as executive assistants. The idea that these artificial creatures would necessarily be inept at personal services is ludicrous; it seems to rest on nothing more than the old stereotype of the “emotionless” robot. From a neuro-engineering standpoint, the ability to recognize emotions appropriately is not inherently more difficult than, say, the ability to recognize faces or words or terrain patterns. So there is no reason robots shouldn’t learn to exceed humans in this department — and in all the others, too.

Personal services already represent a huge growth area for robotics. Even before the technology is really in place, the Japanese are making a major push to build personal-service robots — housekeepers, butlers, receptionists, street-corner direction-givers, hospital orderlies, trashmen, home companions for the elderly, even prostitutes — because their population is declining and they would rather not import workers from “lower” countries and risk cultural dilution.

*

Even if we were to assume, conservatively, that robots and AI systems with a broad range of human or superhuman abilities won’t be around until 2030, we’d have to believe that lesser but still useful automatons will be available much sooner. With robots, even a little utility is likely to go a long way. Any product — for example — that can walk reliably, can recognize a few hundred faces and objects and words, can hold things as dexterously as we, and in addition can interface directly and rapidly with computers and the Internet, will be able to do what waiters and waitresses do, what counter clerks do, what office staff do, what pilots do, and what common laborers do, only at far lower cost. How far are we from such a prospect? Fifteen years? I doubt it will be even that long.

And again, taking this still-relatively-crude robot technology and scaling up its brain and skillset could turn out to be a relatively simple matter. In any case it seems a fair bet that a child born today, even a gifted child with the best possible education, will graduate from college, about 21 years from now, into a labor market where humans have become a decidedly inferior product.

Conceivably we humans will be able to earn money in a robot-worker economy by running our own businesses or otherwise managing assets. But as robots march into the upper reaches of the labor market, they will start to compete even with human entrepreneurs. Operating from huge robot-worker conglomerates, controlled by dwindling numbers of colossally wealthy human CEOs and senior managers, they will be able to exterminate smaller, human-run businesses all the way down the “long tail.” In a free market, there will be nowhere for expensive, high-maintenance humans to run.

And robots will be able to achieve this conquest while remaining the passive, gentle chattel of humans — appliances with legs! Should they go on to acquire the same civil rights as ours, we’ll be out of political options too. Think this won’t happen? The post-humanists consider it inevitable. And they have a point: The more sympathy robots evoke in us, the more rights we will want to cede to them. Believe me, there will be money in it for anyone who designs robots to evoke sympathy.

*

Like global warming, the functional obsolescence of humans, and their consequent demoralization and cultural decay, would be one of those “unintended consequences” of our more or less freely-evolving market system. But unlike the case of global warming, technological innovation would not offer us a viable solution. Technological innovation would really be the problem.

Roboticists, unsurprisingly, tend to see technological innovation — “evolution” — as sacred and unstoppable. Carnegie Mellon professor Hans Moravec, one of the pioneers of modern robotics, has argued that we should accept the obsolescence of humanity the way we have always accepted our demises as individuals. In other words, we should “silently fade away,” passing on the torch of existence to robots as if they were our children. “We have very little choice, if our culture is to remain viable,” he wrote in his 1988 book Mind Children. “Societies and economies are surely as subject to competitive evolutionary processes as are biological organisms.”

Seemingly less suicidal, but not really, is the proposal of the post-humanists, whose most prominent representative these days is an inventor and futurist named Ray Kurzweil. In his recent book, The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil whooped and cheered about the technologies that would soon “enable us to transcend our biological limitations” — i.e., by turning ourselves into robots. Kurzweil saw this happening in the next two or three decades.

There are a few shortcomings to this approach. One is that humans have “human” needs, for other people and so on, whereas a robot wired for economic superiority wouldn’t be held back by such needs. To become such a creature, totally inhuman, merely to keep up with a supposedly “inexorable” technological evolution, strikes me as even more idiotic, suicidal and inhumane than Moravec’s idea — and Moravec set the bar pretty high. Yet we seem to be chasing this insane goal already.

There is also the consciousness problem. We don’t know — and we have no experimental or theoretical reason to believe — that the circuitry of a robot brain can generate the sense of conscious awareness that humans and other animals experience.

Kurzweil nevertheless blithely suggests that each of us will be able to transfer all the information in his old brain (as if it were the content of a hard drive) to a new, solid-state brain and live happily ever after. But isn’t it obvious that a “transfer” of a brain-state from one medium to another would, at best, represent a copying process? Whether or not self-awareness could be generated in the new brain, the old self would remain and die in the old brain. Conceivably, if non-biological material could generate consciousness (and again, there is zero evidence for this), one could transform a brain, slowly and in place, from flesh to robot-stuff, and the subject of this freakish experiment might feel enough continuity with his old self, throughout this process, to believe that he had lived through it.

But wouldn’t it be a lot easier, and more sane, and a lot more humane, simply to take control of our cultural and technological development, and to block it where appropriate, before this creeping dystopia overwhelms us?

That, of course, is the third possible solution to the problem posed by “post-human” robots. It has been suggested already by others, including Bill Joy, Bill McKibben and Francis Fukuyama.

To no avail. Theirs have been the proverbial voices crying in the wilderness — mocked for their archaic notion that “progress” could ever be stopped.

Links to other essays by Jim Schnabel:

Bringing People Together?  (14 September 2008)

Gross Domestic Runaway ( 4 September 2008 )

After this mysterious fellow, Albert Einstein, had wreaked his havoc, hardly anyone thought such a thing could happen again in physics – the lone outsider riding into town, working wonders where conventional minds had failed, and living happily ever after in a bright haze of global adulation.

One reason was that the society of scientists that had grown up around Einstein’s theories had become, ironically, even less receptive to outsiders than it had been in Einstein’s day.

The physics elaborated by this society also had drifted into arcane realms, farther and farther from public apprehension. As the science writer John Horgan put it two years ago:

Many of physics’ best and brightest are obsessed with fulfilling a task that occupied Einstein’s latter years: finding a “unified theory” that fuses quantum physics and general relativity, which are as incompatible, conceptually and mathematically, as plaid and polka dots. But pursuers of this “theory of everything” have wandered into fantasy realms of higher dimensions with little or no empirical connection to our reality.

Despite Horgan’s point, I believe Einstein had more going for him than the fact that his theories were relatively accessible. He had an appealing personality. He gave the public what it wanted. He gave us the archetypes of genius, from the Plucky Outsider to the Kindly Old Sage. To probably 95 percent of the people who have ever revered Einstein, he has been little more than a celebrity – a genius because other people said so, and because he looked the part, not because he ever demonstrated it in a way a layman could understand. (Ditto for Richard Feynman and his bongo drums.)

All of which helps to explain, I think, the hoopla now surrounding A. Garrett Lisi, a surfer and snowboarder with no academic affiliation (and, it seems, no fixed address) who just might be making as big a splash as Einstein did – and by doing what Einstein failed to do, namely to unify general relativity and the standard model of particle physics, in a way that is conceptually not too arcane.

On November 6^th, Lisi sent to a popular online pre-print archive, arXiv.org, a paper titled “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.” I quote from the Daily Telegraph, which was one of the first to cover all this (after New Scientist, which broke the story):

Lisi’s inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 – a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says “I think our universe is this beautiful shape.”

What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.

Lisi’s breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8’s structure matched his own. “My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing,” he tells New Scientist. “I thought: ‘Holy crap, that’s it!’”

What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8’s 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.

Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but this arises naturally from the geometry of E8, he says. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. “How cool is that?” he says.

Dude, it is way cool. But let’s face it, what’s even cooler about the theory, in the popular mind, is that it was invented by an unemployed surfer. “Surfer Dude Stuns Physicists with Theory of Everything” was the Telegraph’s headline, above a photo of the guy riding a wave. The piece has been pegged to the top of the most e-mailed list ever since it appeared. “Laid Back Surfer Dude May be Next Einstein,” announced Fox News, following the Telegraph’s lead.

From the “surfer-dude” photos of himself that Lisi has made available on the web and to the press, it seems that he deliberately cultivates this image of a super-cool wandering genius-surfer. On his C.V., freely available on his website, he includes “Hiking Guide, Maui Eco Adventures,” and “Snowboarding Instructor, Breckenridge, Colorado,” among his teaching experiences. In a recent e-mail interview for a physics blog, he noted that “mostly I spend time in Maui because it’s beautiful and the surf is good,” and “surfing really nice waves is simply the most fun one can have on this planet.”

In fact, Lisi was an outstanding undergrad at UCLA, winning the Kinsey Prize for the best graduating senior physics student. He went on to do his PhD at UCSD, winning two fellowships, and although he soon quit academic physics because of its bias towards string theory, he has been working in the field, and publishing papers, for almost a decade and a half.

In a way, his lifestyle choice is perfectly rational:

We have these big brains, and a limited amount of time. So what to do? A lot of people spend their time making money, sometimes with the hope that they’ll be able to do what they want after they make it. But you never get that time back. Theoretical physics is the most abstractly beautiful and challenging pursuit there is. It’s what I want to spend my time thinking about, so that’s what I do… But all thinking and no action would make for a dull life. So I surf. A lot.

Lisi’s work on E8 also doesn’t come out of the blue. In the 1950s the future Nobel winner, Murray Gell-Mann, used a less complex geometry known as SU(3) to predict the existence of the “omega-minus” particle, which was later confirmed. And earlier this year, after mathematical physicists number-crunched the structure of E8, it was anticipated that the results would be useful in predicting new fundamental particles and generally in determining the fine structure of the cosmos. In a sense, Lisi was merely the first to capitalize on an opportunity that was in plain sight.

In any case, notwithstanding the talk of geometry and beauty and simplicity, the concept of E8 symmetries and Lisi’s work on it are going to be hardly more accessible to the popular mind than string theory. For a taste of what E8 is all about, check out its page on wikipedia, from which I have taken this relatively digestible sample:

The compact real form of E₈ is the isometry group of a 128-dimensional Riemannian manifold known informally as the ‘octo-octonionic projective plane’ because it can be built using an algebra that is the tensor product of the octonions with themselves. This can be seen systematically using…

Lisi’s theory, which predicts at least 20 new particles, may be confirmed by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in the next year or two. If it is, Lisi’s laid-back, have-surfboard- will-travel image will probably become as iconic as that old photo of Einstein with his tongue hanging out. That’s because surfing is something we can all understand. Wacky creativity we can understand too. To some extent, we can understand even the beauty of E8, or at any rate its humble 2D shadow (see below).

But the rest we’ll pretty much have to take on faith.

This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative’s birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.

To Thompson, this was something to be concerned about. “Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?” – for example, the way that involves “slowly ingesting and retaining a lifetime’s worth of facts”?

It seemed like a good question, and Thompson’s piece stayed on Wired’s most-e-mailed list a long time – long enough, apparently, for New York Times columnist David Brooks to absorb it and offer his own perspective on mental outsourcing:

Personal information? I’ve externalized it. I’m no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins….

Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.

I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic…. Om.

Yeah, interesting. But he might not have left it there, with a clunky joke. And Thompson might have done better than to end with the mild wish that “At the very least, I’d like to be able to remember my own phone number.” Because the more you look at “mental outsourcing,” the more it looks just like its cousin, business-task outsourcing – theoretically a good thing, but in reality riddled with traps and hazards.

The Argument for Outsourcing

Outsourcing is unobjectionable in theory because it is a form of trade, and, in theory, benefits both parties. In the business sphere, a company can outsource functions formerly handled internally to some cheaper external provider, and in so doing can save money and free up management to focus on higher-value tasks – tasks for which the company retains a “comparative advantage.”

In mental outsourcing, the transaction is consumer-to-business (or, in a sense, consumer-to-machine) rather than business-to-business. The “layoffs” and other shifts in labor occur in the consumer’s neocortex, rather than in the company’s workforce.

But otherwise the two phenomena are virtually the same. The consumer pays the provider to handle, externally, via some gadget or online service, some function that had been performed internally – such as the memory of telephone numbers, or directions to Aunt Sally’s house. How does the consumer get a return on his investment? Consider the GPS navigation device David Brooks says he has in his car. In principle it saves time (no more wrong turns) and money (no more maps, no more wasted fuel) and overall psychic health (no more stressing out over wrong directions or lost maps). In principle it also frees up “management” to focus on higher-value tasks by demobilizing the gray matter once dedicated to driving directions.

The logic couldn’t be simpler, could it?

Failure of Consideration

But here’s one problem: You might end up not saving time (or enjoying even a sustainable aesthetic benefit) with some new gadget. It might be one of those “ultrasound toothbrushes” or “voice-activated grocery list” thingamabobs from the Sharper Image catalogue that looks good when you buy it but doesn’t improve your efficiency one iota, and ends up lying around wasting space.

It also might not “free up” any real mental capacity. The brain is not perfectly plastic, and the fact that one neural network, formerly engaged in a task, gradually withers doesn’t necessarily cause the “freeing” of significant resources for other tasks. In fact, the whole process of forgetting one skill and learning a new one (i.e., to manage the newly externalized task) might end up being an insurmountable barrier in terms of time and effort, especially for an older brain.

This barrier-to-change problem can happen to an outsourcing company, too – for example when its offshoring scheme ends up unexpectedly bogged down in the red tape or corruption of some Third World bureaucracy, or becomes unmanageable due to the previously-concealed incompetence of the foreign service provider.

Admittedly this is a relatively mild hazard-category, but it serves as a good introduction to a more serious one.

Outsourcing the Core

Supposedly when you outsource a task you are better able to focus on your remaining higher value functions, and perhaps – for a business – even on a single “core competency.”

But what happens if, flushed with the faith that “all outsourcing is good,” you end up outsourcing your core competency?

Think it doesn’t happen? Exhibit A is the U.S. government, the largest outsourcer anywhere. Among the traditionally in-house functions it has recently outsourced are prisoner-interrogation, field espionage, intelligence analysis, and perhaps most notoriously, personnel security – to companies like CACI and Blackwater who haven’t always performed creditably, to put it mildly. Just what is the government’s core competency, if it can’t handle basic military and intelligence functions but must hire contractors (many of them newly-discharged servicemen) for sums that seem vastly, stupidly more than the services are worth?

Exhibit B is the more subtle core-loss alluded to by Clive Thompson, when he worried that the cognitive potential that comes from “slowly ingesting and retaining a lifetime’s worth of facts” could be eroded by too much outsourcing of memory to gadgets and the Web.

This problem might be even easier to see in terms of an organization, say a business or a branch of government. Such groups have what might be called an “ecology of competence” that arises from the symbiosis – and perhaps just as importantly, the creative serendipity – of different skills and backgrounds. Mary in Manufacturing benefits from bouncing ideas off Eric in Engineering and Martha in Marketing, and so on. Like a coral reef’s ecology, this system may be somewhat fragile. Remove one element and the performance of the whole may begin to decay.

From a management perspective, this problem is really a failure to perceive the ecology of a company’s competence in the first place, and thus to prevent outsourcing from intruding on it and damaging it. And there may be no easy way to perceive this ecology until it has already been harmed – and by then it may be too late.

Sounds bad, doesn’t it? But there are far worse hazards to be encountered in the outsourcing game.

The Wall of Obsolescence

Outsourcing, mental or corporate, is a basic mechanism of evolution. Done right, it represents an increment of innovation and successful adaptation for a person or a company. As such we are likely to treat it as a kind of progress and, at the very least, will be disinclined to stand in its way.

But consider the reality of biological evolution on Earth: Almost no species survives in the same form for a significant span of geological time. Almost inevitably, a species runs into a situation where it can’t adapt quickly enough to cope with the changing competition or the environment. It hits a kind of wall – the “wall of obsolescence,” we might call it – and is surpassed by its rivals or overwhelmed by the environment, and becomes extinct.

Something like this is happening now, to millions of businesses in developed countries. They are outsourcing and offshoring function after function, until they are down to their remaining “core competencies.” And then they are finding that these core competencies simply aren’t good enough to make it against, say, Indian IT workers, or Chinese electronics manufacturers, or the high price of oil. And so these companies are going extinct.

One of the most influential academic perspectives on offshoring these days comes from Alan Blinder, an economist at Princeton who was formerly on President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. Blinder is a free-trade supporter, but lately he has styled himself as a modern “Paul Revere,” warning Americans (and Westerners generally) of the economic cataclysm that lies before them. As he put it in a paper several months ago, the Internet-enabled offshoring of service jobs from rich places like America to less-rich places like India will force “a nasty transition, lasting for decades, in which not just millions but tens of millions of jobs are lost” and another huge number of workers see their real wages depressed by global competition.

Blinder advocates massive worker-retraining programs to speed Americans into jobs that aren’t easily offshorable, and thus to shorten this painful adjustment process. He looks forward to a “promised land,” a couple of decades from now, in which Americans return to full employment, having regained global competitiveness in a healthy range of skills.

But is such a happily-ever-after believable? Blinder neglects to mention the other, ongoing form of outsourcing which is not to cheaper human labor but to cheaper machine labor – which, unlike Indian IT workers or Chinese factory workers, is always getting cheaper. It is hard to see how there could be any “promised land” for American labor, or any economic role for human labor generally, if this trend runs its course.

Robotics and AI experts have a better handle than ever on the architecture and processing power needed for machines to perform most human tasks. Typically, they put the arrival date of such “smart” machines about two decades from now – in other words, around the time that a child born now would graduate from college into the job market.

But its not as if we have another twenty years to prepare for this socioeconomic tsunami. Robots and computers and other automated systems are already here and evolving their way up the labor value chain as fast as they can. Receptionists and toll booth operators have been losing their jobs to automated systems for years. Checkout clerks are starting to feel the chill now, thanks to the tagging of merchandise with automatically readable RFID-tags. Roboticists have already developed an autonomous vacuum cleaner and pool cleaner, and are scrambling to invent robot housekeepers and waiters that will put many millions of flesh-and-blood ones out of business. By the time they do there might be few human pilots left too, given the increasing sophistication of flight computers. The Pentagon now has so many unmanned and autonomous aircraft on its drawing boards that it’s hard to see how any young person today could seriously look forward to a career in military aviation.

In any case, it is interesting to speculate on how the economy would work in a post-labor world. Will the present trend away from labor, and towards capital (i.e., money and technology) as the driver of GDP continue all the way to its logical conclusion? Will people survive economically, two decades from now, either by managing their assets (such as armies of robot workers and AI systems) or by becoming dependent, in one way or another, upon those who do? How long will it take for supersmart machinery to push even human entrepreneurs out of the market?

All that is hard to know from here in 2007, but one thing should already be clear: Despite our best efforts to enhance our productivity with various hardware and software, those external systems are evolving faster than our brains are. The wall of human obsolescence isn’t far off, and it seems like a bleak prospect.

Here it might be objected that the wall of obsolescence is about natural limitations on evolvability, and as such isn’t caused by outsourcing per se. It is merely an acknowledgement of what every student learns in high school biology – that evolution yields few winners and many losers. But as I’ve argued, cultural evolution is largely driven by outsourcing, mental and corporate. If we were to stop outsourcing – to stop making and using new technology, to stop the global labor arbitrage that sends American jobs to Hyderabad and Guangzhou – we effectively would stop the process that leads to human obsolescence.

Not an attractive choice, is it? By stopping cultural evolution, we would become something like the Amish, frozen in time.

But what is the alternative? To keep running, faster and faster, always adapting until we have evolved into robots ourselves – as some AI enthusiasts have suggested we do? That strikes me as hardly different from human extinction anyway.

Outsourcing Autonomy

I want to give some attention to David Brooks’s point about the loss of autonomy. This is arguably only another way of looking at the “outsourcing the core” problem I mentioned above. But looking at it as an autonomy problem makes it easier to discern all the hazards.

The most obvious aspect of the autonomy-loss problem is dependency. As a society outsources goods and services offshore it becomes increasingly dependent on those foreign suppliers. Beyond a certain point, that dependency may be deemed too hazardous, because the risk and the costs of an extended interruption in supply (or a surge in prices) are too great. Unfortunately, governments, like individual humans, seldom have the foresight to hedge successfully against this problem.

America’s deep reliance on imported oil is a case in point. What happens when the tap is shut off, or when oil becomes too expensive? Similarly, on the scale of a single human, what happens when all those functions conveniently outsourced to technologies such as cellphones and GPS systems suddenly stop working – leaving one, for example, lost and incommunicado in a wilderness?

But the autonomy problem isn’t just about the risk of a sudden cutoff of outsourced functions. In fact, that should be among the least of our worries. The greater and more present danger is that the systems on which we depend become corrupt and malign.

The extreme version of this is something Hollywood imagines from time to time in films like 2001, The Terminator, The Matrix, and I Robot. But a less extreme version happens in real life every day, in the form of identity theft, malware and spyware, tracking cookies, robocalls, billing errors, and so forth. And let us not forget advertising, which infects an increasing number of the systems to which we outsource our daily functions, and coerces us relentlessly – to buy things we don’t need, to want things we can’t have, and generally to be dissatisfied with the way things are.

The Selfish Servant

All the tools and gadgets and systems to which we humans, over the millenia, have been outsourcing our mental functions are collectively known as culture. We tend to think of culture as a kind of high-level servant. But arguably, we are now its servants. Over those millenia (here in the West) we individuals have been shrinking in importance, and our culture has been growing – so that today, a Westerner is almost powerless in the world without access to his culture. (Of a New Guinea tribesman we could not say the same.)

Conceivably this is still a bargain – the theoretical bargain of outsourcing. We empower culture, but culture in turn empowers us: to be wealthier, to live longer, to have more choices in life. Which of us would choose to turn the clock back even twenty years, to the world before the Internet, before the cellphone, before the prospect of indefinite lifespan?

But the question we really should be asking is, How long can this go on? The connections between our lives and the culture, particularly via its high-bandwidth backbone, the electronic media, are ubiquitous and ever-growing. And as our culture has been evolving and wiring itself into us, various bits and pieces of our autonomy, including our traditional social ties, have been withering away – to a degree never seen before outside the worst totalitarian states and totalist cults.

The point is not merely that we are losing control. It is that we are losing control to something which, in a real sense, wants to take control from us, and not necessarily for our benefit. In a Darwinian world of competing cultures, this is a trait we might have expected to arise.

The evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins has repeatedly warned against this situation. In The Selfish Gene and subsequent works, he has famously described culture as a set of ruthlessly co-evolving ideas and behaviors, a.k.a. “memes” – analogous to the genes of a biological genome. Relatively few social scientists these days regard Dawkins’s analogy between biological genes and cultural memes as an exact one. But one of Dawkins’s less central points has gained general acceptance, and that is the simple but alarming notion that memes, and by implication the cultures they make up, thrive only insofar as they benefit themselves – in other words, not necessarily for humane reasons. A culture’s espousal of humane values may only be temporary, and starkly inhumane values may be sustainable indefinitely if the culture can exert sufficient control over how people think and act.

Dawkins has referred to this Darwinian, self-aggrandizing aspect of cultures as a selfish “tyranny,” against which our “capacity of conscious foresight” is our only effective weapon.

But speaking of foresight – when have we in the West ever treated cultural evolution as anything other than a sacred cow, to be allowed to run where it will? When have we ever blocked major technological pathways on long-term humanitarian grounds?

Down the road, should the socioeconomic picture become darker, it is conceivable that more and more people will go for such an option – or anyway will choose a pattern of existence whose logical conclusion isn’t a post-human dystopia. But given the spreading power of our culture, and the means of persuasion at its disposal, one has to wonder how many of us will even retain the capacity for making such a choice.

The news here, which I’ll try to clarify in layman’s terms below, comes from a small conference of quantum physicists in Waterloo, Ontario, last weekend, where two Oxford researchers, David Wallace and Simon Saunders, reported a solid mathematical confirmation of the controversial “many worlds interpretation” of quantum physics.

New Scientist magazine quoted Andy Albrecht, a physicist at UC-Davis, saying, “This work will go down as one of the most important developments in the history of science.” That could be an understatement. Acceptance of the many-worlds interpretation, in its present form, could cause an existential earthquake more severe even than those brought about by Darwin and Galileo.

The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) is sometimes popularly referred to as the “theory of parallel universes.” As such, it is apt to seem like a bit of hand-waving, sci-fi speculation ginned up by some cosmologist in his spare time. In fact it is anything but that.

Remember how Einstein used to fret about some of the implications of quantum theory? That the theory did not allow firm predictions about the behavior of particles at the quantum level, but threw up only a haze of probabilities, really bothered him. In a letter to fellow scientist Max Born in 1926, he famously wrote, “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.”

A Maryland-born physicist, Hugh Everett III, felt much the same way. At Princeton in 1957, where he studied under the famous physicist and cosmologist John Archibald Wheeler (coiner of the term black hole), he published the concept of MWI as his Ph.D. thesis. Essentially, Everett argued that God does not play dice – that all the possible characteristics of a particle at any given moment, as defined in the equations of quantum mechanics, are not an abstract set of “probabilities” but are all the real characteristics of the particle in all possible alternate “worlds.”

Everett’s work was a challenge to the prevailing “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum probability, according to which the act of consciously measuring a characteristic of a particle causes the particle’s cloudy mathematical wavefunction to “collapse” to a specific set of values. To Everett there is no mysterious “collapse” caused by an interaction with human consciousness. In his MWI concept any event that can have more than one outcome has all those outcomes, each representing a new branch of the multiverse. A coin toss, for example, would result in two sets of worlds, one in which versions of you observe the result “heads” and the other in which versions of you observe “tails.”

Where do these constantly branching worlds go? Everett’s interpretation assumes that they more or less coexist. At large scales the quantum states of all their elements are so dissimilar that they do not interact. But at small scales, with very simple systems, the alternate outcomes of an event may be similar enough to interfere with each other. In the classic demonstration of quantum spookiness, known as the two-slit experiment, a single electron is fired at a metal plate with two slits, and somehow forms a rippled interference pattern on the other side. According to the MWI concept, the pattern represents the interference of all the possible trajectories of that electron.

By the 1960s Everett had abandoned theoretical physics, in part because MWI (which he called, less colorfully, “the relative state formulation”) had been virtually ignored. He worked in the defense industry, eventually became a consultant and entrepreneur, and died of a heart attack in 1982, at the age of only 51.

But by then other physicists had discovered and begun to work with Everett’s concept, including Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman at Caltech, and Stephen Hawking at Cambridge. In the past decade or so, quantum computing pioneer David Deutsch, currently at Oxford, has become MWI’s best known proponent. Deutsch has tried to show mathematically that the “probability” distributions observed in quantum physics experiments are essentially illusions generated by the ever-branching structure of the multiverse. The work reported in Ontario by Wallace and Saunders is being described as a rigorous confirmation of Deutsch’s ideas.

MWI appears to be a more elegant and comprehensible explanation for the weirdness of “quantum probability” than any other that has been discussed so far (in my worlds anyway). And many top physicists have already adopted it – or some variant of it – in their work. But many others still dislike it, if only for the obvious existential reasons. Even those who have embraced it find it disconcerting. “The multiverse will drive you crazy if you really think about how it affects your life, and I can’t live like that,” Saunders told New Scientist. “I’ll just accept Everett and then think about something else, to save my sanity.”

Worries about sanity are understandable here. For example, although MWI is normally thought of as prohibiting communication between two worlds at a usefully large scale, Deutsch happens to think that there are circumstances where the transference of information would be possible. This would permit something like time travel. The idea that separate worlds could interfere with each other also hints at explanations for such weird phenomena as ghosts and ESP (which would be ironic, given that Everett’s mentor, John Wheeler, has long been a vocal opponent of the “pseudoscience” of parapsychology).

But the most profound impact of MWI, now harder to ignore thanks to Saunders and Wallace, could be its conflict with human religious and moral ideas – which seem silly in a “multiverse” of all possible choices and behaviors.

From the perspective of the multiverse, any idea, any life, presumably would be as good as any other, and as infinitesimally insignificant. Morality would be as illusory as the notion of personal “choice.”

MWI also would seem to make the experience of consciousness less exalted. A living person records in conscious memory the experiences of a particular life path. He may be tempted to ask such questions as, “Why am I here, in this world, rather than in a different one?” The chilling answer implied by MWI is that he has to be here – because the path that stretches back into the past could have brought him nowhere else. All alternative paths, all alternative worlds, are populated with other, conscious versions of himself — and perhaps most of those versions are asking the same fruitless question, “Why am I here, in this world?”

Everett himself, though he attended Catholic University as an undergraduate, was an atheist by the time he developed his theory. Strangely (or perhaps not so strangely, given human nature) he took a rather heavenly view of MWI, believing that his consciousness at each branching is bound to follow the path that keeps it alive. How we might reconcile this belief with his early death is unclear, but Everett certainly wasn’t the only one attracted to such beliefs. A number of physicists in recent years have argued for an “anthropic cosmological principle,” according to which our universe and its laws must be inherently friendly to human life because, if they were not, we would not be here. Theorists including Frank Tipler and Paul Davies have even proposed that future worlds can have causative influences on past worlds to ensure the survival of intelligent life in the multiverse.

It is all speculative and wishful thinking, of course — a sort of space-age version of the philosopher Leibniz’s notion that “we live in the best of all possible worlds.” MWI in its less optimistic, unadorned form seems much more plausible, and much more depressing. On the other hand, if we really do live in the best of all possible worlds, then perhaps a convincingly happy version of the many-worlds concept is just what we should expect to emerge.

Let’s start with Harnden’s piece: His premise is that neither Fred Thompson (divorced) nor Rudy Giuliani (twice divorced) shows any interest in attending church or otherwise humoring the party’s Christian base – whereas Hillary Clinton (never divorced) is a regular churchgoer and says God helped her through the rough patches with Bill.

Yes, this argument looks weak, and Harnden weakened it further with quotes from Christian-right activist Gary Bauer, who countered obviously that Ronald Reagan was a divorced non-regular-churchgoer, while Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were both non-divorced regular-churchgoers (and self-described “born again Christians,” I might add). Bauer also stated that “[Christian v]oters are looking for somebody that they can agree with on the definition of marriage and on life and religious liberty and the larger war on Islamo-fascism and who can defeat Hillary Clinton.” In other words, Christians still prefer the Republican brand no matter who the new CEO might be.

Strictly speaking, that appears to be true. Although Harnden didn’t mention it, Gallup did a poll in July showing that churchgoers preferred Rudy over Hillary 53% to 42%, while non-churchgoers preferred Hillary by roughly the same margin. These two populations are about the same size, which helps to explain why Rudy and Hillary polled evenly, back in July, in a hypothetical head-to-head race.

However, although I don’t know of similar polls of churchgoers before July that would help in mapping out the trend here, it’s clear that in the broader head-to-head polls Hillary has gained about ten points over the past six months and now seems to have a slight lead. It’s hard to imagine that at least some of that shift hasn’t occurred among churchgoing Christians.

The July poll also indicated that Giuliani, among all the Republican candidates, was the only one to poll markedly lower among weekly churchgoers (24%) than among less-frequent churchgoers (33%), suggesting that if he is the candidate the family-values Christians will be looking for excuses to vote for someone else – and you can bet Clinton (or Gore if he throws his hat in) will try to be there for them.

The apparent strategy of candidates like Giuliani is more or less to let go of the social-conservative right, and to reach out to the more populous center. Evidently this was the message many Republicans took home from the disastrous 2006 mid-term elections, of which CNN’s Bill Schneider said:

Look what happened in two states on Election Day. In Pennsylvania, Senator Rick Santorum embraced a deeply conservative philosophy and never wavered. He went down. Santorum lost the center. Independents voted overwhelmingly for the Democrat. In California, Schwarzenegger carried independent voters handily. He reclaimed the center.

“What do Republicans do now?” concluded Schneider. “[F]ollow the example of one Republican who had a very good year.” In other words, be more libertarian and pragmatic.

Easier said than done. Christian social conservatives don’t like being ignored or marginalized. Here’s a report on the California state Republican convention from the San Francisco Chronicle:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has championed “post-partisan” cooperation, issued a bold call for a return to Reagan’s “big tent” and moderation during the opening night of the GOP gathering of 1,400 Friday [7 September]. He warned conservative party activists who dominate the GOP to take the conciliatory middle of the road – court independents and address issues such as global warming and health care – or watch their party “dying at the box office.”

Minutes later, conservative Texas Gov. Rick Perry shattered that mood with an incendiary address deriding Schwarzenegger-style moderation and decrying California’s “bankrupt, liberal political philosophy” – exhorting Republicans to stand their ground on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. And without ever mentioning the California governor’s name, Perry launched a blistering attack clearly aimed at his direction.

“It’s a sad, sad state of affairs when liberals campaign like Republicans to get elected, and Republicans govern like liberals to be loved,” he said, getting whoops and repeated standing ovations from the 400 delegates at the opening dinner that put Schwarzenegger’s polite reception to shame.

The question is whether the Republican Party, riven as it clearly is, can still move to the center without fracturing. Remember the Whigs? Irreconcilably split over the slavery question in the early 1850s, they lost most of their northern members to the new Republican Party, leaving their southern remnant too weak to compete. By 1856 the Whig Party was effectively extinct.

These days there is no viable third party on hand to draw in the social conservatives alienated by Republican libertarianism. So some might assume that these disgruntled conservatives will stay Republican because they have “nowhere else to go.”

I don’t believe that’s true – and I suspect the Democrats don’t believe it either. The alignment of Protestant, mostly Southern Whites with the Republican Party is a relatively recent phenomenon, and the history of Republican ideology – and political “conservatism” itself – suggests that this alignment is both non-essential and temporary.

Broadly speaking, Anglo-American conservatism began with Edmund Burke’s preference for a slower, more natural and sustainable pace of social change – a pace better suited to what he saw as our slow-changing human nature. To hold social change to this more humane pace, Burke generally advocated a more limited form of government – as opposed to radical utopian projects like the French Revolution. In this sense, social conservatism and limited government went hand in hand. One was the end, the other was the means.

The Industrial Revolution severed this connection. In fact, in the environment it established, the principle of limited government began to work against social conservatism. The drivers of rapid social change were no longer radical governments; they were inventors, industrialists and media tycoons. Limited government became the enabler of the social upheaval these market-based actors tended to cause.

Needless to say, the Republican Party never portrayed conservatism in these terms. Its inner conflict was basically concealed, so that the party (lest it shrink too much) could hold onto both small-government economic liberals and social conservatives. But the former represented the party’s pro-business core. Social conservatives – true “conservatives” – were usually needed in some form or another but were never treated as essential.

In Teddy Roosevelt’s day, for example, the social conservative role was filled by the Progressive wing of the party, whose concern for the social ecology extended even to environmentalism. But this alliance did not last long. By the 1920s the Republican Party had reverted to the control of its core economic liberals, who discredited themselves by enabling the stock-market and debt bubble that burst in the Great Depression. With the New Deal and the let’s-all-pull-together spirit of World War II, policies to conserve social and environmental ecology became associated primarily with the Democrats. “Progressive” is a label now enthusiastically used by Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and a great many Democratic voters, and it encompasses the increasingly popular Green movement.

In other words, Republicans at their core are not even conservatives in the logical sense of the term. And they have already lost one large strain of conservatism to the Democrats. Logically they should abandon their pretense to any kind of conservatism.

That might seem crazy, because Republicans are so often portrayed as the party of the uncompromising Christian right. But again, that is the case only recently and incidentally. Since the 1950s, Republican ideologues have tended to define their “conservatism” not as social or religious conservatism nor even as a 1920s-style economic liberalism, but as the secular promotion of freedom in virtually all spheres. Barry Goldwater, the purest libertarian the Republicans ever nominated for president, despised religious conservatives. Even Ronald Reagan was at heart a Goldwater Republican, as he revealed in a famous Reason magazine interview thirty two years ago:

I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals – if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.

Goldwater showed, when he was trounced by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, that Republicans cannot live on libertarianism alone. Nixon and Reagan learned this lesson well enough to reach far beyond the Republican core when they ran for office, but none of the electoral coalitions they built was really built to last.

Reagan’s “big tent,” as Schwarzenegger enviously calls it, was made up of angry Southern Whites, evangelical Christians, and Americans of all stripes who had been made anxious by the Cold War and economic malaise — and by Jimmy Carter’s general ineptitude of course.

The factors that brought these groups together have been fading ever since: The Cold War is over, and the Republicans have not fared as well, electorally, with the so-called War on Terror. Feelings of economic malaise are still with us, but they can no longer be pinned on the Democrats. The evangelicals have noticed that even with a born-again Christian at its head, the Republican Party has done almost nothing for them in terms of effective “family values” policymaking. Indeed, the Republican libertarian core is in the process of repelling Republican social conservatives.

The Republicans’ loss could be the Democrats’ gain. In fact, the blue-state party might now have its greatest coalition-building opportunity since 1932. In recent years Americans with a wide variety of political inclinations have been venting a common set of complaints: These have to do with the upheaval in the job market because of offshore outsourcing; the widening “wealth gap” between the very rich and everyone else; the extinction of small businesses by big-box retailers and e-tailers; out-of-control immigration; the sexualization and consumerization of children by advertisers and the media; the ubiquity of pornography via the Internet; the media-driven decay of social ties including marriage, friendships and civic associations; and last but not least, global warming. Every one of these issues is an unintended side effect of a free market system that might have been checked with greater social conservatism. In other words these are all really conservative issues. And logically, with the libertarian ideology that lies at their core, the Republican Party is on the wrong side of all of them.

Hillary Clinton, or Al Gore if he enters the race and beats her in the primaries, might wish to play it safe by throwing the usual sops to the left-wing base, sounding tough notes on terrorism, and waiting for Giuliani to fall into the character-issue quicksand. That could be a colossal mistake. By redefining their policies as the true conservative ones the Democrats would, at a stroke, not only capture much of the huge virtual coalition that is out there waiting, they would also be clarifying, almost for the first time, the issues and the choices that Americans really face these days — issues whose origins have been obscured deliberately by parties who’ve tried to be everything to everyone.

Yes, the Democrats still have a loony, socialist left as well as an extreme civil libertarian one. Would they lose these groups if they were to redefine themselves as a moderate social-conservative party, intent upon protecting, from the corruption of the market, some of America’s traditional cultural values? I don’t think so, and I don’t think it would matter in any case. The UK’s Labour Party has had relatively little trouble transforming itself, over the past decade or so, from the rusty refuge of coal miners and dole scroungers into the ideological home of centrists — which by the way is a more profound transformation than America’s Democrats would have to undertake. (The Conservative party leader, scrambling to distinguish himself from the new Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, recently described himself ludicrously as ‘the heir to Blair’.)

How would the Democrats sell this new, essentially conservative redefinition of themselves? How would they come up with something as descriptive and unifying as Reagan’s famous “Morning in America” motif? Maybe they need look no further than It’s a Wonderful Life. As schmaltzy as the film is (and as Republican as Frank Capra was) it nevertheless presents a usefully stark contrast between the civic virtues that hold a small town together and the selfish, destructive forces that a libertarian freedom would unleash. Which version of Bedford Falls would most Americans recognize in their communities these days – the pleasant, trusting place bound by George Bailey’s communitarian values, or the unruly, nightmarish one transformed by Henry Potter’s greed? I suspect that most Americans, offered their political choices in this way, would have little hesitation about how to respond, because deep down they are conservative in the only true sense of the word.

Postscript: As Clinton widens her lead over Giuliani (Oct 4), Christian social conservatives say (Oct 1) they have begun to explore running a third party candidate who shares their values. But according to the Wall Street Journal (Oct 2) the Republicans aren’t shrinking to a base of pro-business economic liberals — because they’re losing them too.

New evidence suggests a potentially historic shift in the Republican Party’s identity — what strategists call its “brand.” The votes of many disgruntled fiscal conservatives and other lapsed Republicans are now up for grabs…. Some business leaders are drifting away from the party because of the war in Iraq, the growing federal debt and a conservative social agenda they don’t share.

Part of this “conservative social agenda” has nothing to do with the Christian right. The WSJ also cited a poll (Oct 3) that indicates (the remaining) Republican voters are against “free trade,” i.e., trade which appears to cost Americans their jobs, by “a nearly two-to-one margin.” David Brooks — did he read my post above? — says (Oct 5) the Republicans are collapsing because they have abandoned old-fashioned Burkean conservatism for the “creedal” conservatism of libertarians, neocons, and Christians.

See also “The Evangelical Crackup” in the NYTM (Oct 28) and “Is a New Conservatism Possible?” in Salon (Oct 29).

When Gore refused to go away, the catcalls became worse. In 2004 he made a 6,600 word speech about Abu Ghraib, referring to “Bush’s Gulag,” demanding the resignations of Rice, Rumsfeld and Tenet, and saying things like: “One of the clearest indications of the impending loss of intimacy with one’s soul is the failure to recognize the existence of a soul in those over whom power is exercised.” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer said on Fox, “It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again.” Dennis Miller told his CNBC audience, “At one point I respected Al Gore, but I think he’s lost his mind.”

Since then a number of circumstances, from accelerating Arctic melting to America’s struggles in Iraq, have helped bring Gore and his causes back into public esteem. His resurgent popularity has inspired comparisons (by himself among others) to Churchill’s triumphal political re-emergence in the late 1930s – except that Gore now has a star status only a modern media could have pumped to life.

According to a profile earlier this year in New York magazine, Gore “has sounded nothing like the Gore we remember – calculating, chameleonic, soporific – from the 2000 campaign. He has sounded like a man, in the words of a top Republican strategist, who ‘found his voice in the wilderness.’”

Not to be outdone, Time recently called Gore “a natural born teacher,” and an “improbably charismatic, Academy Award-winning, Nobel Prize-nominated environmental prophet with an army of followers and huge reserves of political and cultural capital at his command” – a description almost unimaginable a few years ago.

Gore has been asked to run for president in 2008, but he says he prefers to stay where he is, opinionating, consciousness-raising, making bundles of money, and basking in the warmth of global adulation. As his unabashedly worshipful Time profiler, Eric Pooley, put it, “There’s an even deeper issue here, and with Gore, it’s always the deepest issue that counts. What’s at stake is not just Gore losing another election. It’s Gore losing himself – returning to politics and, in the process, losing touch with the man he has become.” Google CEO Eric Schmidt assured Pooley that Gore had gone “through a difficult personal transformation in order to achieve greatness.”

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Considering how swiftly the air was forced out of the Gore balloon six and a half years ago, it seems only right to wonder at this sudden reinflation. Are we are now seeing a “new” Al Gore, unhampered by all the constraints of politics, an Al Gore who says smart things and uncompromisingly sticks by them? Or is he the same old multifarious opportunist who says one thing and does another?

It isn’t hard to find evidence of Gore’s continuing hypocrisy. Although he has long been urging Americans to reduce their energy use, it was discovered recently that his huge house outside Nashville has been consuming power at twenty times the rate of the average American home. (The Gores also have a big house in suburban Virginia, plus an apartment in San Francisco.) Gore has been chided, too, for his involvement in the Live Earth concerts. Their massive carbon footprints, and the spectacle of colossal energy hogs like Madonna preaching about conservation, caused even some pop groups to stay away.

Perhaps understandably, Gore’s supporters have been apt to dismiss these criticisms as politically motivated, and Gore’s lapses as minor aberrations. But a case can be made that with Gore, hypocrisy isn’t an aberration – it is his standard operating procedure.

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“What politics has become,” Gore loftily told an interviewer recently, “is something that requires a kind of tolerance for artifice and manipulative communications strategies that I just find I have in very short supply. I just don’t have the patience for things that seem to be greatly rewarded in today’s political system.”

Gore has turned this sentiment into a thesis, in his recent bestselling book, The Assault on Reason. He claims that America makes big mistakes, such as failing to elect him in 2000, removing Saddam Hussein from power, and “ignoring” global warming, because its political culture has become steeped in propagandistic manipulation.

The relative vividness of televisual media, according to Gore, allows it more easily to activate our brains’ primitive arousal networks, stimulating emotions like fear, greed, and sexual desire, and bypassing our more rational faculties. All this stimulation creates a neurochemical rush to which we can become addicted, he says, along the way losing our ability to think critically about what we are seeing and hearing. In his book he compares “the political economy supported by the television industry” to “the feudalism that thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.” He also solemnly warns that the “systematic exposure to … arousal stimuli on television can be exploited by the clever public relations specialist, advertiser, or politician.”

Not exactly a new idea, of course. But an odd one coming from Gore, considering that as a politician he was notorious for his use of “artifice and manipulative communications strategies.” These ranged from his periodic good-old-boy affectation to his televised tongue-lock with Tipper at the Democratic convention.

Gore says now he regrets some of the things he did to play the game, back then. But he is still playing this game, as blatantly as ever. To take one of the most obvious examples: Although he says he condemns the practice of “ratcheting up public anxieties and fears, distorting public discourse and reason,” his global warming film, An Inconvenient Truth bills itself as “by far the most terrifying film you will ever see” according to its posters.

Gore’s film makes blatant use of visual propaganda techniques, and grossly distorts the science on which it is ostensibly based. All this was elaborated in an eye-opening article in March by science reporter William Broad at the New York Times. As Broad made clear, the inaccuracies in Gore’s film are not minor, random ones. They all concern the big issues in global warming research, and they are all biased to produce more fear, not less.

The film, for example, misleadingly links hurricanes like Katrina to global warming. Even its poster depicts a cyclonic storm coming out of a factory’s smokestacks – a classic use of scare-imagery of the kind Gore says he abhors. The reality is that global warming and storms are not very well connected in current atmospheric models. “We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than [Gore] is,” NASA climate physicist James Hansen admitted to Broad — and Hansen is one of Gore’s heroes.

Gore’s film also plays fast and loose with predictions about the most dramatic physical effect of global warming, a rising sea level. “Mr. Gore,” wrote Broad, “citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.”

The italics I have added to emphasize, again, that Gore here has used blatant visual propaganda. The current models actually suggest that global warming’s major side-effect will be relatively slow in coming, producing sea level rises on the order of only a foot or two by century’s end if nothing is done – and on the order of only inches during the next few decades, arguably giving us plenty of time to shift to non-polluting energy sources and to devise carbon-reduction technologies.

Gore’s film deceived in a number of other ways, for example by failing to place the current warming trend in the context of historical climate shifts, by falsely claiming that global warming has intensified malaria, and by suggesting that the scientists who question Gore’s alarmism are in the pay of oil companies (I’ve never been paid a nickel by an oil company,” Broad quoted one professor saying. “And I’m not a Republican”).

Gore’s propagandizing has not been limited to televisual media. The recent “Live Earth” concerts, inspired and promoted by him, were clearly not exercises in “public discourse and reason.” They were, instead, designed to hook young people on the “arousal stimuli” inherent in a pop music concert, so that they would accept his environmental message uncritically. (“If you want to save the planet, I want you to start jumping up and down,” shouted Madonna at one point. “Come on, mother-fuckers!”)

Gore has said he will follow up the Live Earth spectacle with a create-an-ad contest, which he hopes will generate still more enthusiasm for his global warming cause. According to the New York Times:

Mr. Gore, through his environmental group, the Alliance for Climate Protection, has sent invitations to advertising agencies to submit 15-, 30- and 60-second “ecospots” explaining the global warming phenomenon and urging action to address it, at either the local or national level. The alliance is soliciting entries from anyone with a camera or video-editing capabilities.

It doesn’t seem to embarrass Gore that campaigns like this one utterly contradict his book-length fulmination against mass-manipulation techniques. “The way nations and societies make up their minds in the modern age has much more to do with mass advertising than many of us purists would like, but that’s the reality,” he told the Times. “Since we face a true planetary emergency, we have to give the planet a P.R. agent.”

Connoisseurs of Gore’s duplicity will love his use of the phrase that’s the reality, because it is an excuse he has explicitly rejected in the past. During the 2000 campaign, at a “town meeting” of young people ginned up for him on MTV, he piously condemned hip-hop music as a seductive but harmful cultural influence:

Gandhi once said you must become the change you wish to see in the world. I don’t think it’s good enough to say, ‘Well, we’re just reflecting a reality.’

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After condemning the misuse of television and similar media by unscrupulous advertisers and politicians, Gore goes on to argue, in The Assault on Reason, that television as we know it is fundamentally incompatible with a healthy democratic society. A laudatory reviewer of Gore’s book in The Atlantic wrote that “We can have television or we can have democracy. The evidence Gore adduces suggests that we cannot have both.”

Needless to say, Gore himself is having it both ways. His argument that the TV industry is at the heart of our cultural decay hasn’t stopped him from hobnobbing in Hollywood with friends like actor Bradley Whitford (from The West Wing and Studio 60), Larry David (creator of Seinfeld) and Laurie David (co-producer of An Inconvenient Truth, and a long-time worker in the TV industry). It also hasn’t stopped Gore from joining the industry himself. In 2004 he and several other investors, including Whitford and businessman Joel Hyatt, bought a cable network, for which Gore serves as chairman of the board.

Ostensibly Current TV, as this network is now called, is meant to produce a good kind of TV, not the bad kind. Gore explains:

In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The “well-informed citizenry” is in danger of becoming the “well-amused audience.”

Current TV is supposed to “democratize” TV content, by letting viewers produce it. “We are about empowering” – said Gore, two years ago – “this generation of young people in the 18-to-34 population to engage in a dialogue of democracy and to tell their stories of what’s going on in their lives, in the dominant medium of our time.”

Specifically, Current TV encourages viewers to submit the videos – “each just a few minutes long,” says the Current TV website – that the network will broadcast.

However, two years after it started, less than a third of Current TV’s content is produced by amateurs; the rest is produced professionally. Apparently the network’s audience, which has 100+ cable channels, tens of thousands of DVDs and video games, and the video universe of the world wide web to choose from, is not exactly clamoring for more viewer-created content. It seems that the “viewer-created content” angle is helpful to Current primarily by holding down production costs. The real hook for its (young) audience is its shallow, tidbit-sized content, which is seldom political. Many of the better videos supplied by amateurs are ads for consumer products, whose producers hope for a deal with the products’ manufacturers.

“This is an audience that has become ‘media grazers,’” CurrentTV’s head of programming, ex-CNN executive David Neuman, admitted in 2005 to writer Ari Berman, “and we decided to create a network that didn’t fight that but rather facilitated that.”

“Less and less they’re trying to run a company with a social mission,” Orville Schell, dean of the Berkeley School of Journalism and a CurrentTV board member told Berman. “They want something that’s new and interesting and economically viable.”

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Gore’s sellout of his supposed beliefs about television is about as thorough as it can be. In addition to being chairman of a TV network that produces YouTubish pap, he is a prominent, active member of the board of directors of Apple, Inc. – formerly called Apple Computer, but renamed earlier this year to emphasize that it is now also a media company. With its iTunes store Apple distributes a vast amount of media content; and all the iPods, video iPods, Apple TV boxes, and now iPhones that it sells represent hundreds of millions of devices for playing that content.

Apple on its website exclaims that “You can feast your eyes on movies and TV shows for up to six-and-a-half hours” with an iPod. The company’s new iPhone, in its function as a “wide screen iPod,” can keep this moveable feast going for about as long, with its own web connection to supply the content. In other words, the company encourages the kind of TV-dependency that Gore laments in his book:

Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods, computers, instant messaging, video games and personal digital assistants all now vie for our attention—but it is television that still dominates the flow of information. According to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes every day – 90 minutes more than the world average. When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time the average American has.

Obviously, Gore has done nothing at Apple to turn this situation around. In fact he is known for only two significant accomplishments at the company, neither of which reflects well on him.

The first is Gore’s apparent inaction in the face of pressure from environmentalist groups, who complained about toxic chemicals like lead and mercury in iPods. “Why,” a writer at Fortune asked a few months ago, “would Al Gore, America’s best-known environmentalist and a member of the board of directors of Apple, oppose shareholder resolutions that ask the computer maker to become more green? That’s what Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Consumers Union, the National Environmental Trust and the Computer TakeBack Campaign want to know.”

Recently, Apple caved and announced “Greener Apple” policies. Unsurprisingly Gore has spun this his way. Through Time’s Eric Pooley, he let it be known that he had “patiently nudged the CEO to adopt a new Greener Apple program that will eliminate toxic chemicals from the company’s products by next year.”

Probably few of those who have complained about Gore’s past stonewalling will find such a claim credible. Jim Puckett, of the Basel Action Network, describes the “Greener Apple” scheme as deceptive anyway, falling well short of the environmental responsibility that his and other groups had expected: “Apple’s statement was craftily designed to obfuscate and ‘greenwash’ what they were doing. They made a statement that sounds really good to the general audience that doesn’t know the issues.”

Gore’s other achievement at Apple was his leadership of a board committee tasked with investigating grants of backdated stock options to Apple executives. Such backdating amounts to tax evasion, of course, and Jobs admitted knowing of the practice. Moreover Jobs, who avoids paying income tax by taking his compensation as stock options (taxed at the lower capital-gains rate), was found to have received options a few years ago, for a chunk of 7.5 million Apple shares, that were backed by a phony board authorization with a probably phony date. Somehow neither Jobs nor any other member of his senior management team could recall the circumstances under which the phony board authorizations had been produced. Yet Jobs was exonerated by Gore’s committee, the excuse being that he had managed to avoid cashing in any of those questionable options.

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Around this time, perhaps unsurprisingly, Steve Jobs was encouraging Gore to run for president again. He told Eric Pooley “there’s no question in my mind that he would be elected.”

But Gore says he has almost certainly left politics behind. As he modestly explained to Pooley, “I’m not convinced the presidency is the highest and best role I could play.” Plus, says Tipper, he is now “free and liberated and doing exactly what he wants to do. And that is fabulous.”

Fabulous indeed – in the old, straightforward sense of being like a fable. For although Gore is no longer constrained to adopt the phony poses of formal politics, his new milieu of media and entertainment, mass-persuasion and making money, involves its own constraints. It appears that whatever his ideals are, he cannot afford to annoy people with money and status, like Steve Jobs, who could seriously wound him if they ever turned on him. He cannot really turn his back on the TV industry without costing himself money and friends, including fellow investors. And he cannot really eschew the use of manipulative mass-persuasion techniques without, as he sees it, weakening the messages he want to put out. He seems as constrained to betray his own professed ideals as he would have been were he a politician, if not moreso.

Some may believe that Gore at any rate is saying things that do need to be said, and are backed up with some scientific rigor. His book, for example, is liberally salted with quotes from scientists and philosophers, and Eric Pooley referred to his “intellectual firepower.”

Speaking of which, no one seems to have remembered the story the Washington Post broke early in the 2000 election campaign, about Gore’s astonishingly low grades in high school and college, and at the postgraduate schools (divinity, then law) he never finished. In his sophomore year at Harvard, according to the Post, “Gore’s classmates remember him spending a notable amount of time in the Dunster House basement lounge shooting pool, watching television, eating hamburgers and occasionally smoking marijuana.”

None of that background would matter, if there was evidence that Gore had acquired some intellectual rigor later in life. But one of the reasons his speeches, essays, books, and documentaries have been mocked so often in the past is that they have just not been very carefully put together. On the subject of global warming, his posturings have so distorted the science that he has embarrassed the very scientists whose work he cites and praises – and this despite having had more than a decade to study the subject, with personal access to the top researchers in the field.

His arguments about media and culture are unoriginal, to put it mildly, and despite salting his discussions with various supportive quotations he omits a vast amount of research conducted over the past several decades. He also manages to come up with conclusions — such as his equation of amateur TV content with democratic dialogue — that seem harebrained. Obviously television or any other media content may propagandize or exploit viewers, by appealing to their baser, shorter-term impulses at the expense of the more “rational” parts of their minds. But in the ferocious Darwinian arena of a free media, most content wouldn’t survive if it didn’t push consumers’ emotional buttons in some way. The availability of those emotional buttons guarantees that, and whether the content is “viewer created” or professionally created makes little difference – except that an amateur production almost by definition will be less watchable.

To really change the character of television content, making it supportive (instead of corrosive) of civic and social institutions, would mean operating television wholly as a non-commercial public service, as many countries still do. But clearly Gore is not about to propose abolishing the commercial TV industry, with all his friendships and investments there.

There are other holes in Gore’s argument, such as his narrow emphasis on the political harm from television and relative neglect of the broader social harm. The past few decades have seen huge erosions in age-old institutions such as marriage, the two-parent family, friendships, and civic associations, and much of the blame for this has been pinned on television. But Gore would rather gripe about TV’s influence on the political culture, i.e., on the culture that inflicted on him the “terrible emotional whiplash” of the 2000 election, and then chased him into the wilderness with ridicule.

In any case, there is hardly any point now in distinguishing “television” from other electronic media. All forms of media content – TV shows, films, music, short videos, video games, web pages, books, blogs, newspapers and magazines – can exploit our animal weaknesses in their own ways, and all are now deliverable by the Internet. How this “multimedia” environment will shape our culture is already becoming clear: The current trend, which Gore’s own TV network has followed, is towards shallower, faster-paced, more swiftly consumable content. And given the much, much greater competition inherent in the Internet’s multimedia environment, we should expect to be have our arousal circuits jolted harder than ever – in other words, we should expect more of the stuff Gore says is harmful.

You would think that Gore, who as a Senator was an early promoter of the Internet, would grasp some of this. But he fatuously contends that the Internet is some kind of electronic savior:

It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason.

Yes, for “reason,” whatever that means, and also for fake Viagra, spyware and phishing scams, downloadable hip-hop and pop-up ads that buzz like mosquitos, pictures of atrocities and wayward celebrities, a mammoth porn industry, and a fast-growing population of amateur exhibitionists with webcams.

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The sophomoric flimsiness of Gore’s ideals, and the consistency with which he betrays them, make it hard to escape the conclusion that Gore, fundamentally, is not about lessening CO2 in our atmosphere, or TV in our living rooms, as much as he is about giving us more Al Gore.

In this sense, it is absurd to talk of his being “liberated” or “unpackaged” or “unscripted.” His mask is still there, just better crafted this time; and circumstances have made his audience more susceptible. But his artificiality is still evident, especially when he tries, as he has for years, to sell himself to that all-important market of 18 to 34 year-olds.

Here he is, for example, clutching a mike and hyping CurrentTV to an arranged audience of young people:

How many of y’all would like to see an opportunity to talk about what’s going on in your world that you can participate in with television?

And here he is confiding to Eric Pooley:

Did some grilling last night with my friend Jon Bon Jovi. His new record is great.

Gore’s relentless popularity-seeking is in one sense predictable. After Jimmy Carter’s own electoral heartbreak, exactly twenty years before Gore’s, he set out to restore his public reputation with a number of earnest books and pious good works, and was eventually rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize and the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism. Bill Clinton eagerly followed, setting up a foundation like Carter’s, and embarking on several humanitarian campaigns, for example to make HIV treatment more affordable.

Gore’s arc is similar, but perhaps in part because he never made it to the presidency, there is an emotional neediness about his actions that demands not just acclaim but superstardom. His relentless hypocrisy, his heavy use of self-promoting propagandistic techniques, and his hints that he is an American Churchill, suggest a narcissism that beggars even Clinton’s.

The Gore comeback story does bear a superficial resemblance to Churchill’s. However, there is in some ways a better resemblance to the political comeback of one of Churchill’s contemporaries. While in his own political wilderness (spent largely in Landsberg prison) Adolf Hitler wrote a bestselling book that, like Gore’s, was much concerned with the decline of political culture and the power of propagandistic mass-persuasion techniques. He would later make deliberate, skillful, and above all deceitful use of those same techniques, somewhat as Gore does now, to create a social contagion of apocalyptic fear and thereby empower himself.

Gore, no Gandhi, is of course no Hitler either. But given his Hitlerian fixation on media and the manipulations of crowds, we might count some of his personal shortcomings – his spinelessness, his phoniness, his still-callow intellect – as our blessings.

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