metamorphoses

A proposal to amend the political spectrum

2011-03-15T09:08:00.000-07:00

It's needed fixing for a while, after all, hasn't it? We see left-wing, so-called "progressives" locked in a defense of the status quo (e.g., Wisconsin), and right-wing, so-called "conservatives" advancing schemes of far-reaching change. To cope with these anomalies, a common dodge has been to propose a two dimensional political space as opposed to a linear one (e.g.), but this has never had much impact on everyday political usage, and, in any case, such a space often reasserts the usual one-dimensional spectrum in the form of a diagonal line across the more populated quadrants.

So I propose to accept the unidimensional structure of a left-right political spectrum, but amend the definition of its wings or poles. The left-wing would, once again, be defined in terms of the long term, progressive project to advance the cause of individual emancipation, and the right-wing would, also again, be seen in terms of the defense of statist authoritarianism. The extreme right would be the location of totalitarian politics, whether socialist or fascist, while the extreme left would be the location of the anti-state politics of anarchism and anarcho-capitalism. Between those extremes, of course, would lie the vast majority of current political positions, but now those positions could be more clearly understood and labelled in terms of their relative location vis-a-vis the respective projects of left and right. Thus, most of what's thought of now as the contemporary left, for example, is defined by its adherence to, and advance of, the proscriptions, regulations, and requirements of the so-called welfare state (aka "nanny state"), and hence is actually a form of state-based authoritarianism -- i.e., is really right-wing. Similarly, a sizable chunk of what's now considered the right is actually concerned with the progressive or evolving liberation of the individual from such constraints or chains, and hence is really left-wing.

Now, of course, there are many other aspects of beliefs, orientations, values, etc. that provide the basis for alliances and oppositions over many particular issues, but these are more cultural or even psychological rather than political as such, and their variety may well require many more than even two dimensions. The virtue of this proposed amendment is that it lays bare the purely political structure that lies in back of most if not all actual political disputes -- behind issues such as abortion, re-cycling, unions, education, e.g., there is the question of what kind of options or policies are even appropriate for dealing with them. How one answers that question is what determines one's position on the revised political spectrum.

In thus reversing much of our conventional notions of the political left and right, this amendment resolves the anomalies mentioned above, in which putative "leftists" defend entrenched special interests, and supposed "conservatives" propose new and even radical solutions. It both simplifies and clarifies the political landscape, in other words, and blows away a good deal of the rhetorical fog that has served merely to confuse.

And for me personally, there's the interesting irony in finding myself once again labelled a leftist.

Gen X saves civilization?

2011-02-07T10:46:00.000-08:00

Popping back into blogging to post about a Superbowl commercial -- this one:

Now, it's a jump -- okay, a stretch -- to go from the commercial to the title of this post, but bear with me. First I have to explain that I came across the commercial from a post at Ann Althouse's blog, which in turn simply quotes from a post on Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist blog, entitled "Volkswagon Super Bowl ad is an anthem to Gen X". Here's why, in Penelope Trunk's words:

So I love this commercial because it captures the shared experience of Generation X. We like being home to make our kids peanut butter and jelly. You could not sell Baby Boomers with this. They think it’s lame to sit in a kitchen waiting for your kid to be hungry. We like having a male breadwinner and we’re not afraid to say it.

And we are surrounded by little boys in love with Star Wars.

When we look back, we will see that Gen X redefined family and work.

Which explains the connection to Gen X at least. With one more step, we can connect Gen X to the salvation of civilization. And that involves a self-reference, to this post a little while back: "Is modern civilization viable?", which noted that the populations of all industrialized nations (i.e., the representatives of "modern civilization") were imploding, for reasons that seemed inherent in the very nature of such cultures -- namely, the rise of wealth and individual freedom. This has tended to undermine the traditional functions and role of the primary procreative institution of society, the family, particularly within the left-liberal, statist ideologies that have long had a dominant position within all such societies. But here was my own bit of cheer, however vague, near the end of that post:

Or -- to speak of more hopeful predictions -- the ongoing evolution of the modern world includes a renewed or revived view of the family, seeing it once again in its multi-generational dimensions, but within a redefined view of the roles of men and women as both unique individuals and as fathers and mothers.

Which, in the context of the oft-expressed contempt for "family-values" that you find within the self-styled "progressive" camp, would certainly be a conservative development. But, in the context of the real world, in which children are necessary for any future at all, this would be simply a correction to an unfortunate generational dead end, and the real route forward. Maybe, then, as I say at the end of the post, "for the latest generation to come of family age, children are making a comeback".

Big banks and state capitalism

2010-12-15T10:41:00.000-08:00

Very good post by Ross Douthat here: "Tyler Cowen's Counsel of Despair", commenting on a pair of great posts by Cowen. The gist of Cowen, as related by Douthat: the recurring financial crises in capitalism are a product of the state's perpetual willingness to "socialize" (i.e., bail out one way or another using taxpayer money) the failures of financial institutions, which in turn induces entirely rational willingness by those institutions to take on greater risk -- a willingness that no amount of regulation by bureaucrats will ever be detailed or micro-managerial enough to overcome. And size isn't the problem -- many small banks can fail in waves too, as the Savings and Loan bust a while back demonstrated, and a few large institutions can behave in stable, relatively low-risk ways, as the example of the Canadian banks in the latest crisis indicates -- so Douthat's addition to Cowen seems not just beside the point but may well be counter-productive in the usual unintended consequence manner. The basis of the problem is rather what Cowen referred to as "state capitalism", and part of his solution deserves his own words:

Breaking up the large banks would be striking at symptoms rather than at root causes, namely the ongoing growth of political power and the reliance of that power upon an ongoing inflow of capital.

If you do wish to break or limit the power of the major banks, running a balanced budget is probably the most important step we could take. It would mean that our government no longer needs to worry so much about financing its activities.

Iraq, the media, and a dream Presidential candidate

2010-12-13T07:52:00.000-08:00

The dream candidate is the one on the right (in both senses):

Thanks to SDA

Politics and its limitations

2010-12-04T10:36:00.000-08:00

I thought I should maybe give a little more explanation for my taking a breather from the blog. It began, as I said, as an experiment, but, a little more specifically, as an experiment in political blogging. Clearly, I have no shortage of political opinions, though I'll say that I have somewhat less interest in the various issues, gaffes, scandals, gossip, and general slagging matches that characterize so much of partisan politics, and a little more in the ideological issues that stand in back of these. But even on that level, it eventually begins to seem as though politics as such is a bit thin and a bit dry -- lacking juice, so to speak, whether in comparison with the denser level of actual human interactions, or with the richer alternatives of history, art, philosophy, science, etc. In any case, some such sense as that was increasingly nagging at me, and making the blogging itself more burdensome than enjoyable.

Politics, in other words, is just one kind of interest that people can take in the world. But it is one interest, and like the others, it's inexhaustible. So -- I may be poking my head back here from time to time, and at some point may find myself once again absorbed in it.

Bloggish reflections

2010-12-01T15:21:00.000-08:00

I started this blog about six months ago, as an experiment. It's been fun and interesting, including the debates in the comments (which have sometimes gotten a little heated, as debates sometimes do). More than that, it's given me an opportunity to think through some issues and put those thoughts into words. And it's provided me at least with a way to store and tag links to some excellent content elsewhere on the Web. But six months is a good run for an experiment, and a good point to pause to examine the results. So, just to whom it may concern, this is a notice that posting will likely be interrupted, at least for now.

Oh, and thanks to all who've looked in thus far....

The myth of Palin

2010-12-01T09:27:00.000-08:00

From the astute Jennifer Rubin, at her new venue with the Washington Post, comes this assessment of the Sarah Palin phenomenon, the full title being "The myth of Palin's frontrunner status". It's one of the very few such analyses I've come across on either the left or the right that would qualify as perceptive -- not just vis-a-vis Palin but other, more likely GOP frontrunners as well:

For months now the real story on the right has been the search for new presidential contenders. There is far more awareness than many in the media imagine among conservative activists, Tea Partyers included, of Palin's limited appeal to independent voters. ... Is she admired for her ability to rally the base? Yes. Is she especially talented at throwing the White House off stride? Obviously. Does she give voice to populists' suspicion about media bias and liberal elites? Better than most anyone on the political scene. But the notion that she is a frontrunner is an eye-roller for most elected GOP officials (Chris Christie tipped his hand a bit on late-night TV) and even for many fans who furiously defended her against what conservatives saw as excessive and unfair criticism during the 2008 race.

Indeed, more Republicans -- on the Hill and around the country -- are beginning to suspect that she might not run. Why risk her fame and her rock-star status by running and possibly losing?

Instead, and as examples of new possibilities, Rubin mentions Chris Christie, of course, as well as Mike Pence and Paul Ryan. But she's quick to acknowledge that "Right now the frontrunner is 'none of the above.'"

Getting away from it all

2010-11-28T17:18:00.000-08:00

When the world is too much with us, late and soon, we can contemplate leaving it. And I don't mean suicide, I mean leaving it physically -- you know, space, the Final Frontier, etc.?

I've brought this up before -- e.g., here and here -- but the context was pretty much limited to just getting off the planet, or going as far as colonizing Mars. Turns out, though, that there is no real "final frontier" -- each step we take only opens up a further and greater step, challenging and daunting both. We've already gotten off the planet, after all, and as far as the Moon in exploratory modes, but Mars is now an enormous leap for which we haven't yet mustered either the nerve or rationale. And beyond Mars lie still greater gulfs.

Ultimately, though, the Solar System itself is just a backyard, and it's interesting to find that a few people are already getting serious about looking further out -- so here, for example, is a "Status Report on the Tau Zero Foundation":

Ideally, we want to cover all the technologies and implications related to the ultimate goal of reaching other habitable worlds, and we want to do that in a manner where you can count on the accuracy of our information (which is why we include reference citations so that you can check any questionable assertions). This span includes understanding ‘what’s out there,’ examining all the options for ‘how to get there,’ and being sure to tie this all to its ‘relevance to humanity.’

One of the most hotly debated items is how best to get out there. To be explicit, Tau Zero covers the full span of options, from the seemingly simple solar sails to the seemingly impossible faster-than-light travel. For each option within that span, there are different levels of readiness and performance, and accordingly different types of work.

Within that span of options, here's one that seems at least plausible with known technology, and able to reach speeds of between 10% and 92% light:

Failing the discovery of something akin to 'sub-space' we will be forced to obey, in our exploration, the seemingly unbreakable laws of relativity – which gives us a universe limited by the speed of light. It is now, and probably forever shall be the case, that the universe, and we, must play within the bounds of the chessboard discovered by Albert Einstein.

Most of the equipment for the rocket itself can be assembled using today's technology. Providing the fuel, however, becomes problematic. We would require an array of solar powered linear accelerators ('atom smashers') girdling the moon's equator. Mega-engineering projects require, in their own turn, miniature self-replicating factories that draw building materials directly from the lunar soil. Current advances in robot technology teach us that we should be able to climb this technological hurdle by about 2040....

What makes it possible for the realities of scientific achievement (Valkyrie rockets) to catch up with the fiction (starships) is that Valkyrie is the ultralight of rockets, consisting mostly of naked magnetic coils and pods held together by tethers. Indeed, it can best be summed up as a kite (with magnetic field lines instead of paper sheets) that flies through space on a muon wind of its own creation.

All of which, of course, is certainly a far remove from, oh, say, the recent mid-term elections, or the latest spins and tantrums of the politically obsessed. But that's the point.

Rage Boys of the left vs. the Kool Kidz of the culterati

2010-11-27T10:45:00.000-08:00

This is an old piece but it's been recirculated lately because someone (Treacher?) finally noticed its conclusion:

Anytime anyone says anything libertarian, spit on them. Libertarians are by definition enemies of the state: they are against promoting American citizens’ general welfare and against policies that create a perfect union. Like Communists before them, they are actively subverting the Constitution and the American Dream, and replacing it with a Kleptocratic Nightmare.

Ah, the old argumentum ad sputum -- the sort of thing that usually merits a time out these days, now that we're too civilized to spank. You might think, well, at least he's anti-communist, but the screed in general is so incoherent that it's difficult to be sure of even that much. It's called "The rally to restore vanity: Generation X celebrates its Homeric struggle against lameness", by one Mark Ames, writing obviously in the wake of the Jon Stewart rally, and it's so ornately, baroquely, ragingly incoherent, in fact, that it exerts a kind of morbid fascination all its own -- here's more, e.g.:

The problem with the Left wasn’t that they were too fixated on proving they were right, or that they didn’t make enough noise before the war about the lies that led us into that war…the problem is that the Left doesn’t stand for anything Big because it’s not guided by a vision or an Ideal. What does the Left stand for? Let me suggest a few things in people’s own personal interests in these decaying times that the Left should stand for: first, people need money. Then if they have money, they need Life. Then they might be interested in “ideals” set out in the contract that this country is founded on. Ever read the preamble to the Constitution? There’s nothing about private property there and self-interest. Nothing at all about that.... That’s what it is to be American: to strive to form the most perfect union with each other, and to promote everyone’s general betterment. That’s it. The definition of an American patriot is anyone promoting the General Welfare of every single American, and anyone helping to form the most perfect Union—that’s “union”, repeat, “Union” you dumb fucks.

So maybe he's a bit of a communist after all, but at the same time an American patriot, someone who believes people need money first, even before Life with a capital L (as distinct from "life"?), but isn't too big on private property, but thinks the Constitution is a "contract", and is really big on perfect unions or Unions (this time case doesn't seem to matter, though who knows). Blah-de-blah-de-blah, you dumb fucks.

Alright. This is fun, but kind of fish in a barrel stuff. What gives poor Mr Ames' zany diatribe a little more interest is that the target he spends most of his time on is, of all people, Tom Hanks' daughter, E. A. Hanks. It seems that, a while ago, she wrote something called "Dear The Left: A Breakup Letter", the gist of which is, admittedly, a little hard to figure out but maybe comes down to the idea that "The Left" has become too preoccupied with protest posturing and has neglected substantive accomplishment. Or something.

Now, just by dint of her parentage, EA is automatically a member of the culterati, and these are the people who set the tone, so to speak, for the herds of what I've been referring to as the bien pensant, or the fashionably orthodox. So maybe, in light of that, we can start to feel a smidgen of sympathy for the Rage Boy after all. Yes, he's loopy and incoherent, and his proposals for lefty Big Ideals -- money, Life, perfect Union or whatever -- are so pathetically thin and meaningless as to be embarrassing, but you can kind of see how he might be driven to an edge of some sort just by the cutesy title alone of EA's "breakup letter". In many ways, I think Ames is a good representative of what's become of the once serious left -- having been hollowed out by the historic collapse of the socialist ideal, they're now mere husks, clinging to a kind of vague, oppositional stance but no longer with any real content or substance other than a few stray abstractions. Then, when anyone even hints that that's the case, all they've got left is rage and spittle.

Little wonder then that the Kool Kidz are looking to move on. Of course they're not serious about politics -- they're serious only about setting and/or following a style, of which political opinions are simple accessories. But that's all right. There's room on the right for fashionistas too.

Is modern civilization viable?

2010-11-25T17:32:00.000-08:00

The question doesn't involve the usual "sustainability" suspects -- e.g., green house gases, running out of resources, or overpopulation. None of those are serious problems in the sense that they implicate the very foundations of what we used to call Western civilization, but is now generalized to the modern world as a whole -- i.e., the technological, industrial, capitalist civilization that has emerged in the last few centuries from traditional cultures everywhere. In fact, ironically, the last named so-called problem, overpopulation, is exactly the reverse of the real existential threat that resides in the nature of modern culture itself -- depopulation.

That at least is the implication of Philip Longman in an interesting little piece called "Survival of the Godliest". Longman is a questionable figure, to say the least, but he's on to an important idea here -- that modern secular society, despite its manifest economic and technological success, is steadily losing a long-term demographic struggle. As his title indicates, his focus is a comparison between secular and religious cultures, where the demographic contrast is especially marked:

In a world in which childbearing is rarely accidental and almost never rewarding economically, birthrates increasingly reflect values choices. And so, by Darwinian process, those who adhere to traditions that preserve and celebrate the ancient injunction to “go forth and multiply” wind up putting more of their genes and ideas into the future than those who don’t. As Kaufmann shows, fertility, over time, plays out like compound interest. That is, even if religiously fundamentalist families only have a few more children than secular or religiously moderate counterparts, and they can keep those children holding on to fundamentalist faith and values (especially related to child-bearing), the passage of generations will greatly magnify their numbers and influence. Similarly, secularists and others who choose to have only one or two children, and who pass those values on to their children, will, over time, see their population decline precipitously.

Ironically, the structure and sensibility of secular society is bringing about its own demise.

But it's not just fundamentalist competition that's the problem here -- the simple and almost too obvious fact is that a society that averages less than two children per family, as all so-called First World societies do, will eventually waste away to nothing. I say almost too obvious because when I've brought this up in conversation before I've found a surprising, perhaps willful blindness about it. Everybody recognizes the demographic facts: just a few generations ago, when many still lived on farms, 5 or 6 child families were common; in the next generation, as those children moved to cities, 3 or 4 children were the norm; and then the families of those children, the ones we see around us now, consist of 1 or 2 children at most -- more is looked upon as odd, and somehow not quite right.

As I say, everyone sees this, but hardly anyone sees it as a demographic phenomenon that strikes at the long-term survivability of our society. No doubt there are a number of reasons for this -- we're so accustomed to think of overpopulation as the problem, for example, that we can't get our minds around the inverse; Third World immigration has tended to mask the problems associated with a society not replacing its young; and, of course, there's the simple tendency of people not to see problems associated with a lifestyle they're hardly conscious of having chosen. And that last is what makes this trend so deep and intractable -- it's something, as Longman says, built into the very "structure and sensibility" of the modern world as such. Children, no longer being necessary either as help in the field or as caregivers for aging parents, have simply become an option, which frees up women to realize their own individuality, and which in turn leaves most with little time or inclination to devote to looking after more than the 1 or 2 that can be accommodated within the other demands of life and career.

This is not to indulge in the usual moralizing of cultural critics -- it's not, for example, simply that we're all "selfish", and certainly not that women in particular are. It's that the very trends that have defined modern civilization and are at the basis of its greatest achievements -- freedom and plenty -- may also be at the basis of its decline and undoing. So, three possible long-term scenarios:

Modern civilization, in the sense of a secular, rational, individualist, democratic, market-oriented culture, really is not viable in the long term, and will eventually be replaced, as the Longman piece intimates, by a renewed religious fundamentalism the world over, through purely demographic, Darwinist processes.

Or our culture turns increasingly statist, and the whole process of human procreation, including reproduction, gestation, and birth, becomes increasingly woven into bureaucratic state policies, a la Brave New World, e.g., -- this too, I would say, would represent the ultimate failure of the liberation that the modern world once promised.

Or -- to speak of more hopeful predictions -- the ongoing evolution of the modern world includes a renewed or revived view of the family, seeing it once again in its multi-generational dimensions, but within a redefined view of the roles of men and women as both unique individuals and as fathers and mothers.

That last scenario is admittedly vague, and, given current demographic trends, perhaps doubtful. But, as I've stated in the "Theme", there's every indication that the leap in cultural evolution the modern world represents is far from finished, and the emergent individual at its center is still adding layers of complexity, still generating new forms of relationship and community. In fact, I think I saw somewhere that, perhaps with the waning of environmentalist alarmism (a version of fundamentalism in its own right), replacement numbers of 2 to 3 children per family are again becoming acceptable and increasingly common -- so maybe for the latest generation to come of family age, children are making a comeback.

Thanks again to Itzik

On not idolizing science

2010-11-23T11:29:00.000-08:00

I'll start with some self-description (which I've done before but worth doing again in this context): I'm an atheist; I think reason and evidence constitute the only path to empirical truth; and I think that science and technology are central aspects of Western or, now, modern civilization.

Having said that, I want to say why I think this piece by Susan Jacoby is wrong: "The Myth of Separate Magisteria". The "magisteria" she's talking about are science and religion, or the teachings of science and religion, and while the term sounds pretentious it stems from a very good essay by Stephen Jay Gould, who took it from Catholic theology. Here, for example, is Gould on "Non-Overlapping Magisteria", or NOMA:

Just as religion must bear the cross of its hard-liners. I have some scientific colleagues, including a few prominent enough to wield influence by their writings, who view this rapprochement of the separate magisteria with dismay. To colleagues like me—agnostic scientists who welcome and celebrate thc rapprochement, especially the pope's latest statement—they say: "C'mon, be honest; you know that religion is addle-pated, superstitious, old-fashioned b.s.; you're only making those welcoming noises because religion is so powerful, and we need to be diplomatic in order to assure public support and funding for science." I do not think that this attitude is common among scientists, but such a position fills me with dismay—and I therefore end this essay with a personal statement about religion, as a testimony to what I regard as a virtual consensus among thoughtful scientists (who support the NOMA principle as firmly as the pope does).

I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have enormous respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution, paleontology, and baseball). ...

I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between our magisteria—the NOMA solution. NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectua] grounds, not a mere diplomatic stance. NOMA also cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions properly under the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world's empirical constitution. This mutual humility has important practical consequences in a world of such diverse passions.

And here, by contrast, is Jacoby:

By now, nearly everyone with a passing interest in science or religion is familiar with Stephen Jay Gould’s description of the two disciplines as “non-overlapping magisteria” with separate domains — science in the physical universe and religion in the moral realm. On this website, the philosopher Roger Scruton recently made the sweeping declaration that “genuine science and true religion cannot conflict.” A 2004 editorial in Naturemagazine insists that science and religion clash only when the two “stray onto each other’s territories and stir up trouble.”

One might as well say that conflict arises between men and women only when they stray onto each other’s territories and stir up trouble. Science produces discoveries that challenge long-held beliefs (not only religious ones) based on revelation rather than evidence, and the religious must decide whether to battle or accommodate secular knowledge if it contradicts their teachings.

I know both scientists and religious believers for whom the idea of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) has become an unexamined fiction designed to skirt the culture wars. It is clear, however, that NOMA (a term Gould adapted from Catholic theology; the "Magisterium" is the Church's term for its teaching authority) is not only a fiction but a useless fiction — from the standpoint of both religion and science.

She is at least no skirter of the culture wars. But, as her nonsensical analogy with men and women demonstrates, she's no deep thinker either, a failing she shares with her co-belligerents, the so-called "new atheists". The notion that the two "magisteria" are necessarily in conflict has its origins in a crude positivism which holds that only empirical or factual questions or issues are of concern, when it's quite evident that not only are there important issues of aesthetics and morality, but also, in a more general but more directly consequential sense, issues of meaning, value, and purpose. Any and all of those issues can be aided, of course, to a greater or lesser extent, by factual matters, as everybody has always known -- and as Jacoby herself allows near the end, to avoid looking completely silly -- but none simply are matters of fact or empirical truth; i.e., none are matters of science.

The attention given to these simplistic and crude new atheists by the liberal-left, however, reveals an irony in that side of the politicized culture wars -- just as Marxism, for example, once wanted to vanquish religion and in the process simply became a new opiate for a class of intellectual acolyte, so now science is rapidly becoming the focus of a new idolatry among those who so often flatter themselves as "reality-based" but who accept uncritically the pronouncements of white-coated authority figures that flatter their political faith. So now I want to take the opportunity Jacoby's essay provides to make a few points about how a misplaced veneration of science can easily lead people astray -- I'm copying these, by the way, from a comment I left on a posting by Itzik at BasmanRoseLaw which pointed me to the Jacoby piece in the first place, and for which I thank him:

First, there's a difference between science and scientism -- and the "veneration" of science seems to stem from or lead to the latter (i.e., making an ideology of science, making lab-coated scientists into priests, etc.).

Second, once you make an ideology of science, you perpetually risk turning your wishes, political fixations, and the like into pseudo-science (e.g., psycho-babble, random statistics, etc.), thinking that this confers on them some sort of validity which of course is spurious.

Third, scientists, not being priests, superior beings, or aliens, are in fact just as human as anyone else, and therefore susceptible to intellectual fads, political fashions, and the religious yearning for purpose and meaning. This doesn't necessarily interfere with their purely scientific work as long as that work is sufficiently removed from their political, moral, or quasi-religious concerns. When it isn't, however -- as it isn't, e.g., in the current climate dabates, or in virtually the whole of social science -- then scientists too are motivated to "arrive" at politically correct results, and frequently do so in various inappropriate ways, all of which outside observers need to be aware of and be willing to discount.

Which is simply to say that we should avoid scientific idolatry, and bring the same critical intelligence to the pronouncements of scientists, particularly in political areas, that we do with any other profession.

Killer angels and liberal fascists

2010-11-20T19:26:00.000-08:00

Well, this is in Newsweek after all, so I know we can't expect much, and the headline is obviously just link bait: "Tea Partiers Are Today’s Slave-Owners". Oh sure -- or, you know, today's Nazis, or the Hun, or psychopathic racist killers, or whatever other bogeyman you can think of. But how did he get to "slave-owners" particularly? Turns out it's because before the Civil War southern whites thought of slaves as property, and now Tea Partiers think of, well, property as property. Or something:

The rhetoric in 1860, as now, was essentially about throwing off the burden of federal authority, getting rid of the tariffs and taxes Washington imposed, and protecting private property from the depredations of central government. There was one essential difference back then, of course: the private property in question in 1860 was human. But the fire-eaters of the Old South never put the emphasis on “human,” they always put it on “property,” and they pointed to their (white man’s) rights enshrined in Article I, Article IV, and the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which declared no person can be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

Get it? The important connection here is property, and wanting not to be deprived of property is much like wanting not to be deprived of slaves -- isn't it obvious?

So what should Obama and the anti-slavery/property Democrats do about it? Why, take a lesson from Abraham Lincoln when faced with secession, of course -- call out the troops and crush the ~~slave~~property-owning Tea Party:

If, in the end, Lincoln did manage to hold the Union together, it was not because of the better angels of human nature, but because he finally found the killer angels among his generals who could, and did, and at enormous cost, crush the secessionists.

These basic facts about a moment of history that Obama obviously holds dear are worth going over again right now because, in fact, the secessionists of 1860 are the ideological forebears of the Tea Party movement today.

Now, okay, this guy Christopher Dickey is no doubt just a goofy hack and no better than you can expect from a news magazine struggling to keep its head above water. But the problem is he's not alone -- try putting "eliminationist" into the search box at Instapundit (where I got the link to Dickey's little piece) and note the multiple links to left-lib death curses of one sort or another just on his blog alone. And the thuggish behavior isn't limited just to rhetoric, as a couple of recent incidents at Canadian universities illustrate. I'm not above a little link-baiting myself, but if we're going to get into historical comparisons, then comparing today's increasingly frustrated, resentful, and violence-spouting "progressive" left to the sort of liberal fascists Jonah Goldberg wrote a book about makes vastly greater sense than the laughable comparison of today's Tea Partiers to antebellum slave-owners.

Thanks to John at Verum Serum (via Instapundit).

Why I'm not a conservative, again

2010-11-19T09:06:00.000-08:00

Every so often I come across something that reminds me why, and here's the latest, a post on the ironically(?) titled Postmodern Conservative blog by Johnathan Jones, called "The Quest for Community". It's a review of a book with the same title by Robert Nisbet first published in 1953 -- a date that, in itself, tells you something about it -- and now re-issued. Back when I was myself a lefty, this was just the sort of thing I abhorred, confirming my fervent anti-conservative, left-wing beliefs:

Humans are, intractably, social creatures built for communion. So prevalent is the belief that an equal satisfaction of preferences is a high social good, and that the purpose of politics and morality is the working toward that supposed good, that Nisbet can be a bit of a shock. As this blog argues, liberalism is very insufficient to maintain social order. Freedom and equality as high principles can harm other realities necessary for social harmony.

And it still bothers me. What, prey tell, is "equal satisfaction of preferences" supposed to mean? If human creatures are "built for communion", then wouldn't communion/community also be a preference? Is "social harmony" really supposed to trump everything else -- freedom, equality (of status), and even justice? In other words, this seems like vague, abstract, confused, and even somewhat menacing mush.

But, being wiser at least than I was, I can now pick out some threads that do make some sense, even if incomplete and poorly grounded. Here, for example, he brings up a theme I've called "hubristic Reason", originating in the Continental (as distinct from the British/Scottish) Enlightenment, and that is a serious flaw in contemporary collectivist/liberal statist schemes:

... the aspirations that inspired the founders of modern thought – the conquest of nature through science, perhaps even the conquest of human nature, and the emancipation of power from moral restraint – could be “achieved” at a great and unpredictable cost. [my emphasis]

And the emphasis on family and association generally is a good theme, however simple, and a welcome contrast to the sort of politicized "solidarity" that characterizes the left. This I think, as another example, makes a good point about the need to bring together things that contemporary liberal orthodoxies tend always to oppose:

Far too many lifestyle choices and social, political structures shatter what the authentically familial would hold together – consumption and production, sensuality and fertility, freedom and virtue.

So fine, but where does that leave us? If Jones' answer is that it leaves us stuck in a 50's style time warp, then he's no help, and this perverse mock rallying cry -- "Down with the statist-individualist symbiosis!" -- just underlines his confusion and haplessness. It also points to his crucial mistake -- to accept, uncritically, the left-wing denigration of the individual, leaving him with the only apparent alternatives of leftist collectivism or an antique conservatism. But the modern individual is a much more complex, and still evolving, phenomenon, that is at the heart of new and potentially richer sorts of community. Like any emergence, this process is not without its tribulations, but the true progressives are those who support the individual and the freedom that defines him -- and resist the reactionaries on both the left and the right that would try to re-submerge her in collectives either traditional or statist (or both).

Another try at explaining the quantitative easing

2010-11-17T18:20:00.000-08:00

Sort of following along from the previous post, suggesting doing away with the Fed as a thought experiment, here's a video I found from a link at Greg Mankiw's blog. I should point out that, despite it, Mankiw himself is cautiously supportive of the Fed on the issue -- in his own words, "While I do not agree with its conclusion, I did find this video on QE2 amusing" (and so did I):

The real economy and the problem of money

2010-11-16T15:37:00.000-08:00

This arises from two recent developments -- the Fed's latest so-called "quantitative easing" moves ("QE2") and the appearance of a column by Richard Salsman in the Financial Post, called "The deflation myth".

The problem or question of money is one that's taken on added pertinence with the Fed's recent manipulations, but it's also one that underlies a deeper issue of state or state-like manipulation of a society's economy. Of four main areas of such manipulation -- direct state ownership or control, state regulation, fiscal policy, and monetary policy -- the last is in many ways the most obscure and mysterious, not only to onlookers but also, I think, to the architects in central banks, as evidenced by the unresolved debates that swirl around it, both contemporary and historic. Part of that problem is that money itself is inherently mysterious or confusing -- it's not just the naive, King Midas idea that money per se constitutes actual wealth, but even the idea of it as just a measure of wealth leads to difficulties, since the question then arises as to what measures the value of money itself? And when these kinds of questions get mixed into the contemporary world of multiple currencies, various measures of the quantity of money, "velocity" of money, money markets, etc., it can easily seem as though the real, underlying economy of goods and services, work and trade, gets lost beneath deep layers of this artificial token of wealth.

So a while back I started to wonder what an economy would look like if you could excavate through those layers of artifice, so to speak, and get back to the real economic activities of production, trade, and consumption themselves. Now, you can't do without money of some sort, but suppose you could at least treat money in a neutral fashion without it being the focus of state manipulation? Of course, the gold standard provided that to some degree, but commodity money possesses its own kinds of mystifications -- suppose, more simply, that we have fiat money, but a fixed or constant supply of it. Or, so that money is unaffected by changes in population, suppose a fixed amount of money per capita -- i.e., the money supply can grow or shrink only as the population does. And, by "money supply" we would mean only money actually held -- in bank vaults, tills, safes, pockets, or mattresses -- not money lent, so that credit would not be considered to affect the supply. No more "quantitative easings", then, and no more playing about with interest rates. Interest rates would move just in the same way prices move, and since the supply of money is more or less constant, they would rise or fall only as demand grows or shrinks -- an automatic countervail for economic booms and busts. We could take the Fed out of the picture altogether, in fact, since all monetary "policy" would now be handled automatically. Would that not tend to remove at least one big source of financial uncertainty, and make economic decisions a little more clear, or at least a little more reality-based?

Well, it's an intriguing thought-experiment. One interesting consequence, however, is that the value of money would still be variable. Since the supply of money is assumed to be constant per capita and since, under the usual conditions of increasing productivity, the supply of goods and services is increasing per capita, a unit of money would have to be a token for an increasing amount of real wealth -- i.e., money would be deflating, exactly to the extent that productivity is increasing (ignoring the issue of "velocity" for now). Now, deflation is usually treated as a horrible development that threatens utter financial ruin, but it's not clear to me exactly why. True, it means that borrowers would have to pay back money that's worth more than when they borrowed it, rather than less as they've been used to; and lenders, of course, would be in the reverse situation. But, as long as both sides knew this up front, which they would, then these changes in the value of money would get reflected in interest rates, just as they are now, though in the opposite direction -- that is, just as both borrowers and lenders typically take account of the inflation rate in order to arrive at a nominal interest rate, so they would in the case of a deflation rate.

I realize their would be complications. And I'm no expert, certainly, but this is where Salsman comes in:

Many economists presume, falsely, that deflation necessarily coincides with (or causes) a contraction in economic output. In fact, deflation by itself in no way curbs the motive to produce, because it doesn’t preclude the maintenance of business profit margins. During the Industrial Revolution, deflation was common. It was also a bullish phenomenon in the second half of the 19th century, the period of the fastest economic growth in human history.

So, back to the thought-experiment: imagine a world in which investors, businesses, and even ordinary home-owners could confine their attention to what's really happening in the real economy without also having to wring their hands worrying about what Bernanke or whoever is going to come up with next -- imagine, in other words, a world without the Fed altogether. As Lenin said, "It's easy if you try."

UPDATE: See Alex Tabarrok's questioning of the Fed's efficacy at Marginal Revolution: "Has the Fed Been a Failure?" And note as well the link to a post on the desirability of deflation that accompanies productivity gains.

UPDATE2: See also Don Boudreaux's post at Cafe Hayek, "Denationalize Money", which links to a George Will column criticizing the Fed's "dual mandate" of both stabilizing money and maximizing employment.

UPDATE3: And here, just to wrap things up, is Tyler Cowan's response to Tabarrok's post above, in which he defends the Fed. Most ominous line: "The world's preeminent military power simply will have a Fed, for the same reason that it has lots of nuclear weapons."

UPDATE4: Okay, I can see this isn't likely to be "wrapped up" any time soon, but here, with a hat-tip to Tyler Cowan above, is Bryan Caplan's "What I learned from the crisis", which, besides lacing into the Fed in general and Bernanke in particular, also has a lot of interesting links.

Palinism vs. corporatism

2010-11-15T14:20:00.000-08:00

Sarah Palin, corporatist scourge? That's the thesis of James Pethokoukis in "Why Wall Street should fear Sarah Palin". "Corporatism", just to be clear, is distinct from "capitalism" -- the former is used to describe an alliance between the state and corporate business, while the latter is used simply to describe free market activity. And they're not just distinct, they're in opposition, since the the more the state is involved in economic activity, even if in support of certain corporations or economic sectors, the less markets and trade are free. One variety of corporatism, for example, is the notion of a national "industrial policy", of the sort that once was popular when Japan was more economically ascendant than it is now; another variety would be so-called "crony capitalism"; and still another is fascism, once quite the rage, but now of course fallen out of fashion. It's important to note, as an earlier post made clear, that versions of corporatism appear on both the left and right ends of the political spectrum.

The rise of the Tea Party phenomenon, however, has given added weight to the anti-corporatist right, and Sarah Palin is indeed front and center in that opposition. Here's a passage from her Facebook page, as quoted by Pethokoukis:

Of course, the big players who can afford lobbyists work the regulations in their favor, while their smaller competitors are left out in the cold. The result here are regulations that institutionalize the “too big to fail” mentality. … The president is trying to convince us that he’s taking on the Wall Street “fat cats,” but firms like Goldman Sachs are happy with federal regulation because, as one of their lobbyists recently stated, “We partner with regulators.” … You’ll find the name Goldman Sachs on many an Obama administration résumé, including Rahm Emanuel’s and Tim Geithner’s chiefs of staff. We need to be on our guard against such crony capitalism.

And here's Pethokoukis' own assessment:

Palinomics, embryonic as it is, seems to be rooted in “free-market populism,” a version of conservative thinking that is pro-market rather than pro-business. It says the role of government is to help markets function more fairly and efficiently for everyone, encouraging competition and “creative destruction” (which Palin specifically mentioned in her book). Pro-business policies, by contrast, can end up subsidizing favored companies, raising barriers to entry and otherwise entrenching the status quo.

All of which makes for an interesting potential conflict within the Republican Party itself, since, as that earlier post indicated, that consummate Party insider, Newt Gingrich, may well be a leading figure of the "pro-business" as opposed to the "pro-market" politicians.

"You don't deserve us!"

2010-11-14T14:38:00.000-08:00

Here's another nice little political parable for our times (courtesy Jessica Van Sack at The Boston Herald via Ed Morrissey): "Closed market’s valediction ironically explains its failure". Once upon a time, it seems, some people decided to start a business, as happens every day. They had a plan or business model, as usual, but the model didn't really work, and both the plan and the business failed, as also happens all the time. What's different about this time, and what makes it such a delightful parable, is the attitude of the failed owners (it was an upscale food market):

“Don Otto’s Market wants to say we had few customers that understood customer loyalty and its importance to our business,” a message on its Web site reads, later adding: “If you came in only for baguettes, the occasional piece of cheese, the occasional dinner . . . you can not tell yourself you were a supporter of our market.”

Heh. Apparently, the business plan amounted to: "have customers that understand customer loyalty and its importance to the business". Somehow I doubt that's going to revolutionize the business schools. But, you know, given what I'm sure was their target demographic -- the bien pensant liberal elite and their wannabe's -- perhaps the surprise that it didn't work is understandable; certainly that churlish bit of moral bullying on the way out is in keeping.

Now, the point of a parable is that it has a point. In the example of the unnecessary traffic lights a while back, the point was that a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom can open new, unexpected paths to freedom. Here, the point is that a foolish acceptance of fashionable beliefs is no sign of elitist superiority and no ticket of entitlement. Sound familiar? Think of large portions of the Democratic Party in particular the last few years, and of the liberal-left in general. As Morrissey says, speaking of the writer of the bitter words above, they're really exhibiting a peculiar sort of contempt:

Her contempt for her customers is not dissimilar to the contempt shown by those in political office who pass laws barring restaurants from using saturated fats in their cooking, who ban Happy Meals, and who overhaul entire economic sectors because they believe people can’t make their own choices.

And then, when their policies lose them support on historic scales, the response is never to question policies or the plan itself -- instead, it's the customers' fault! You people are too angry, they say, too bitter, too clinging, too racist, too stupid, and you just don't listen! You don't deserve us!

And you know what? We don't. So maybe the lib-left should just close their doors, like any other business too good for their customers, and try to live off their sense of their own rectitude.

Anarchism vs. classical liberalism

2010-11-13T10:54:00.000-08:00

This stems from a review of an interesting new book by the always interesting James Scott: The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. As the reviewer, Daniel Little, states,

The book takes up the argument that Scott began in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed: that a central task of the state it to render its territory and population "legible". The state needs to be able to regiment and identify its subjects, if it is to collect taxes and raise armies; so sedentary, mobile, peripheral peoples are antithetical to the needs of the state. This argument begins in Seeing Like a State; and it gains substantial elaboration here.

What's significant about that argument is the way in which it provides us with quite a different view of the state as an institution than we're used to -- here the state starts to appear as a kind of predatory social entity, benefiting its own political class at the expense of the mass of people whom it must make "legible" in order to prey upon. Somewhere, I think, Scott refers to himself as a kind of Marxist-lite, and this view of the state is certainly in keeping with Marxist notions of the state as an instrument of class oppression. But, if you adjust the notion of "class" -- throwing out the outmoded Marxist categories based upon economic role, and substituting a simpler and clearer classification based upon proximity to state power -- then this view is also quite familiar to modern conservative and libertarian critiques of our current political systems.

What's also interesting, then, is the portrayal of resistance to state predation, something that people seem to do when- and wherever they can, which is typically in mountainous as opposed to lowland regions*. Contrary to Hobbes' famous summary of the life of man in the state of nature -- his notion of what "not being governed" meant -- their lives may be harsh but seem quite sustainable, and they've adapted their cultures in a number of ways to make them illegible to the state; in contemporary terms, they've opted to live "off the grid". Their very persistence is a testament to the fact that not being governed is not only possible but, in many ways, preferable.

Perhaps not in all ways, however. The cultures being examined here are not complex in comparison with the modern world and not what we would call "advanced" in terms of wealth and individual opportunity. And were it not for the surrounding modern world, from which they can borrow, their conditions of life would no doubt be worse than they are. There is, in other words, a limit to what can be achieved by anarchic societies. To get beyond those limits, we need to add more complex forms of property than simple anarchy can manage -- we need, in other words, as Hernando de Soto has argued, codified and legible property rights, and a justice system to enforce them. Which gets us back to the state, true, but a state restricted in its predatory inclinations by its limited mandate -- it gets us, in fact, to the state of classical liberalism.

*See also a comment to this effect referring to a passage in Braudel's The Mediterranean.

Recognizing anti-Semitism when you see it

2010-11-11T16:06:00.000-08:00

Ever since the Holocaust, dedicated anti-Semites have had a tough time -- once accepted into polite WASP society everywhere, after that they were rudely and quickly shoved into the same social cesspool as other bigots and shunned. The creation, finally, of a Jewish homeland, however, gave them a new focus for their hate and new opportunity for its expression, and in the last few years, particularly, the political left everywhere -- to its lasting shame -- has given them shelter, aid, and comfort. Of course, it's still considered ill-mannered to openly voice a hatred of Jews as such, but no lefty gathering is complete without some expression of hatred of Israel and Isrealis. They think, pathetically, that this can provide a cover or mask for an age-old bigotry, but in singling out -- in the context of a world full of vicious tyrannies, and in the midst of a region supporting the worst kinds of misogyny, homophobia, and oppression, not to mention terrorism -- singling out the one Jewish homeland in the world for special and perpetual condemnation they only make themselves look ridiculous as well as despicable.

In light of this, and the often craven response of so much of the world before the overt anti-Semitism of an oil-rich region, it's rare to find anyone in a leadership position outside of Israel itself to make a strong and clear statement of support for that country and plain condemnation of bigotry as an evil -- like this:

“The horror of the Holocaust is unique, but it is just one chapter in the long and unbroken history of anti-Semitism. Yet, in contemporary debates that influence the fate of the Jewish homeland, unfortunately, there are those who reject the language of good and evil. They say that the situation is not black and white, that we mustn’t choose sides.

“In response to this resurgence of moral ambivalence on these issues, we must speak clearly. Remembering the Holocaust is not merely an act of historical recognition.

“It must also be an understanding and an undertaking. An understanding that the same threats exist today. And an undertaking of a solemn responsibility to fight those threats.

“Jews today in many parts of the world and many different settings are increasingly subjected to vandalism, threats, slurs, and just plain, old-fashioned lies.

“Let me draw your attention to some particularly disturbing trends. Anti-Semitism has gained a place at our universities, where at times it is not the mob who are removed, but the Jewish students under attack. And, under the shadow of a hateful ideology with global ambitions, one which targets the Jewish homeland as a scapegoat, Jews are savagely attacked around the world, such as, most appallingly, in Mumbai in 2008.

“One ruthless champion of that ideology brazenly threatens to ‘wipe Israel off the map,’ and time and again flouts the obligations that his country has taken under international treaties.

Or this:

“We must be relentless in exposing this new anti-Semitism for what it is. Of course, like any country, Israel may be subjected to fair criticism. And like any free country, Israel subjects itself to such criticism — healthy, necessary, democratic debate. But when Israel, the only country in the world whose very existence is under attack — is consistently and conspicuously singled out for condemnation, I believe we are morally obligated to take a stand. Demonization, double standards, delegitimization, the three D’s, it is the responsibility of us all to stand up to them.

The speaker here is the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, at the Ottawa Conference on Combating Anti-Semitism, and the speech should really be read in its entirety -- it's not that long, and it's a remarkably powerful and refreshing expression of support not just, as he says, for Israel and the Jewish people, but for free people everywhere. I can't resist adding a bit more:

“And I know, by the way, because I have the bruises to show for it, that whether it is at the United Nations, or any other international forum, the easy thing to do is simply to just get along and go along with this anti-Israeli rhetoric, to pretend it is just being even-handed, and to excuse oneself with the label of ‘honest broker.’ There are, after all, a lot more votes, a lot more, in being anti-Israeli than in taking a stand. But, as long as I am Prime Minister, whether it is at the UN or the Francophonie or anywhere else, Canada will take that stand, whatever the cost. And friends, I say this not just because it is the right thing to do, but because history shows us, and the ideology of the anti-Israeli mob tells us all too well if we listen to it, that those who threaten the existence of the Jewish people are a threat to all of us.

“Earlier I noted the paradox of freedom. It is freedom that makes us human. Whether it leads to heroism or depravity depends on how we use it.

“As the spectre of anti-Semitism spreads, our responsibility becomes increasingly clear. We are citizens of free countries. We have the right, and therefore the obligation, to speak out and to act. We are free citizens, but also the elected representatives of free peoples. We have a solemn duty to defend the vulnerable, to challenge the aggressor, to protect and promote human rights, human dignity, at home and abroad.

...

“As I said on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, Israel appeared as a light, in a world emerging from deep darkness. Against all odds, that light has not been extinguished. It burns bright, upheld by the universal principles of all civilized nations — freedom, democracy and justice.

Star formation

2010-11-10T15:00:00.000-08:00

Continuing what's turned into a series of second looks at the US midterm elections, here's more on what I'd earlier called a "genuine political star", and a clear success for the Tea Party insurgency, Marco Rubio. First (with a nod to Instapundit), John McWhorter on Rubio's much noted victory speech -- "There is a good chance that he's next":

That's coming from a guy who backed Obama, but is now "truly unhappy, for the first time" with him. But here's the victory speech itself -- note particularly the notice given to the Republican Party early on:

Midterms again - the wave election

2010-11-09T20:27:00.000-08:00

I have to thank Rand Simberg for this fascinating find from Stuart Rothenberg, in April 2009: "April Madness: Can GOP Win Back the House in 2010?" Here's how Rothenberg answers his own question:

Yes, Republicans have plenty of opportunities in good districts following their loss of 53 House seats over the past two cycles. And yes, there are signs that the Republican hemorrhage has stopped and even possibly that the party’s fortunes have begun to reverse course.

But there are no signs of a dramatic rebound for the party, and the chance of Republicans winning control of either chamber in the 2010 midterm elections is zero. Not “close to zero.” Not “slight” or “small.” Zero.

Why? Well, because --

Big changes in the House require a political wave. You can cherry-pick your way to a five- or eight-seat gain, but to win dozens of seats, a party needs a wave.

...

Waves are built on dissatisfaction and frustration, and there is little in national survey data that suggest most voters are upset with President Barack Obama’s performance or the performance of his party.

Granted, this was a year and a half out, but over a year later he was still saying, "At this point, Republicans appear poised to gain two or three dozen seats but fall short of the majority." In the end, of course, they gained 64 seats, a bigger swing than anything seen since 1948. It's not just, in other words, that it was a "wave" election, and not just that it was a wave of historic proportions, but that it was a monster wave that developed so fast and so apparently mysteriously.

Not that losing politicians, pundits, and spinners don't have their usual assortment of hind-sight explanations -- bad economy, bad communications, "outside" money, fear and anger, bitter clinging, racism, blah, and more blah. Any of which would be fine for a more normal mid-term "correction", but none of which seem sufficient to account for what actually happened.

Now, I think, on a kind of meta-political level, the only thing that can really account for it is the idea of a longer-term shift in the political fulcrum, as I posted previously. But on the surface, what's the one explanation you don't hear from anyone on the liberal left? The answer: bad policies, or at least a rejection of Democratic policies by the electorate. But, as Mickey Kaus points out with reference to a distinctly odd, and even misleading column by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker, that's an explanation that actually accounts for some statistical correlations: "the more [the House Democrats] opposed the Obama agenda on health care, the stimulus, and cap and trade, the better they did given the makeup of their district." Well, no doubt the lib-left is a little shell-shocked, and even grief-stricken -- but, if they're going to make opportunistic adjustments in time for the next electoral tide in 2012, they'll need to emerge from the denial stage soon.

How to get out from under BigGov

2010-11-08T10:53:00.000-08:00

An interesting article by Janet Daley in The Telegraph: "The West is turning against big government - but what comes next?".

On this side of the Atlantic, there is now a broad understanding that the social democratic project itself is unsustainable: that it has grown wildly beyond the principles of its inception and that the consequences of this are not only unaffordable, but positively damaging to national life and character. The US, bizarrely, is running at least 10 years behind in this process, having elected a government which chose to embark on the social democratic experiment at precisely the moment when its Western European inventors were despairing of it, and desperately trying to find politically palatable ways of winding it down.

The American people – being made of rather different stuff and having historical roots which incline them to be distrustful of government in any form – immediately rejected the whole idea. But in Britain, too, among real people (as opposed to ideological androids) there is a general sense that governments – even when they are elected by a mass franchise – become out of touch and out of control, and that something essential to human dignity and potential is under threat from their overweening interference.

So a generation after the collapse of totalitarian socialism, its democratic form is finally crumbling as well.

A good diagnosis generally, though one should question whether the principles behind the social democratic project didn't doom it from the start. And her prescriptions -- lower taxes, lower immigration -- are predictable. (Immigration, particularly, is a troublesome issue, and while I'm sympathetic to concerns regarding cultural change -- especially re: cultures antipathetic to Western values -- I'm not sympathetic to employment protectionism.) At the end, though, she at least puts her finger on what's really needed, while leaving its actual content entirely vague:

Finally, government must make us an honest offer. The rhetoric needs to be turned into a systematic programme that takes the moral instincts of ordinary people as its starting point, but goes on from there to outline a feasible idea of what it will be like to live under this new dispensation – which makes clear that there is as much to be gained as will be lost. Get past the threats and the vague hopes: give us a clear picture of where this is all going, and what is expected of us.

Except, of course, that there is much more to be gained than lost, and that it's not government that must do this, but we ourselves.

More Midterm reaction

2010-11-07T18:30:00.000-08:00

And a nice contrast to the deranged screed a couple of posts ago -- here's what the BBC's Paul Adams describes as "one minute and nine seconds of pure advertising genius":

See, what I like -- nay, what I love -- about Sarah Palin is just the effect she has on the so-called "elite", on both left and right. She grates, she baffles, and she just generally messes with their heads -- look what she's done to poor, excitable Andy Sullivan, for example. Now, like David Gergen, I doubt that she'll actually run for President -- though the temptation to be the first female candidate for the office might be enough to do it -- but I think she's having a great time making a lot of people nervous just by threatening to run.

Why take such schadenfreudean delight in the discomfort of the putative elites, you might ask? Oh, just because they tend to treat political ideas and values as they treat fashion -- something merely to be donned and displayed as status symbols rather than thought about seriously. Which is true more on the liberal, bien pensant side, of course, as distinct from the conservative, snobby side. But on both sides the fun is mainly just in seeing an obstreperous opposition get in the face of complacent orthodoxies, and stay there.

So you go, girl.

UPDATE: While we're doing videos that spook the liberal elite, I might as well add this one, called "Fire from the Heartland":

Fire From The Heartland from Citizens United on Vimeo.

Why capitalist societies are not like casinos

2010-11-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

I have great respect for Virginia Postrel, and particularly for her book, The Future and Its Enemies. But in this essay, "In Praise of Irrational Exuberance", she makes an important mistake -- important, both because it's seriously misleading in itself, and also because it indirectly illuminates an important truth (or two). The mistake is to compare entrepreneurs in a capitalist society to gamblers in a casino:

Entrepreneurship is not, in this view, a rational risk calculation. It is, as critics of capitalism sometimes charge, a bit like gambling. The few big winners are usually people who shouldn’t have bet their time, money, and ideas. They overestimated their chances of striking it rich. But they beat the odds — to everyone’s benefit. These “lucky fools” create new sources of wealth, new jobs, new industries offering less-risky opportunities, and new technologies that improve life. Society plays the role of the casino, enjoying the spillover benefits from foolish bets.

Now, Postrel is not, in fact, a critic of capitalism, and in making this comparison she still, as the passage above makes clear, wants to make the point that a free market economy is greatly beneficial to all -- to spell it out: just as a casino itself is enriched by the gambling of its customers, so capitalist society is enriched by the gambling of its entrepreneurs.

Capitalist societies are indeed rich, and entrepreneurs do indeed take risks, or gambles, but this comparison nevertheless goes astray for the following reasons:

First, casino gambling is rightly looked upon as of dubious value because it's a zero-sum game -- the only way for the casino to make money is for the customer to lose, and vice versa. In fact, from the point of view of the customer alone, the game is negative-sum, or a net loss on average. Capitalist economic activity, on the other hand, is positive-sum -- individuals may sometimes lose, but on average everyone gains, and gains considerably. This is because, unlike casino gambling, capitalism actually creates wealth.

The second important difference has to do with the nature of the entrepreneur's risk itself. Unlike gambling on the fall of dice or a roulette ball, where the odds are known in advance, the entrepreneur is constantly active or engaged to influence the outcome of the gamble, so that the actual odds of success depend heavily on those actions and the planning behind them -- in other words, on the abilities and character of the entrepreneur herself. It's certainly true, as Postrel points out, that most such enterprises ultimately fail, but that statistical fact obscures the real differences between those enterprises and the people behind them -- differences, for example, that venture capitalists try to discern, with varying success -- and it's precisely those differences that determine the real odds of success.

This is why Postrel's title, asserting the entrepreneur's "exuberance" to be irrational, is a kind of misuse of statistics -- no doubt the exuberance is irrational for some, but not for others, and neither she nor econometricians are able to say which is which. But the difference is crucial, since it's that rather than "irrational exuberance" that really drives the whole wealth-creating machine.

"Our ankles survive."

2010-11-04T14:57:00.000-07:00

For other reactions to the Midterm results....

This couldn't be funnier if it were in the Onion and were it not for its context, you'd probably take it as satire -- but, given where it is, I think we have to take it as symptom, with a soupçon of pathos added. See "An Open Letter to the White Right, On the Occasion of Your Recent, Successful Temper Tantrum" by tim wise (note the self-effacing lower-case) in Daily Dementia (or, more formally, Daily Kos: State of the Nation):

You’re like the bad guy in every horror movie ever made, who gets shot five times, or stabbed ten, or blown up twice, and who will eventually pass -- even if it takes four sequels to make it happen -- but who in the meantime keeps coming back around, grabbing at our ankles as we walk by, we having been mistakenly convinced that you were finally dead this time.

Fair enough, and have at it. But remember how this movie ends.

Our ankles survive.

You do not.

Michael Meyers, Freddie Kreuger, Jason, and that asshole husband in that movie with Julia Roberts who tracks her down after she runs away and changes her identity--they are all done. Even that crazy fucker in Saw is about to be finished off for good. Granted, he’s gonna be popping out in 3-D to scare the kiddies, so he isn’t going quietly. But he’s going, as all bad guys eventually do.

And in the pantheon of American history, conservative old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

Think there might be a little, you know, bitter clinging in all that (and it goes on)? Well, but that's not really adequate, is it? More like deranged death-grip, if it's the outpouring of anyone past early adolescence. Which is maybe a point in timmy's favor -- no idea of his (and it's pretty likely a "he", right?) own skin tone or age, of course, but if you had to guess wouldn't you say white, male, and maybe about 14? Could be younger, but then a bit precocious, because I will say that if the level were just dialed back to maybe 10 or a little less, screeds like this would be a perfect candidate for Stuff White People Like.

Thanks to Instapundit (seems like I'm always sending him traffic)

Congratulations, America

2010-11-03T14:06:00.000-07:00

Maybe about as expected overall, but a very good night, with some disappointments in the Senate, but a possibly historic (see Nate Silver, the electoral guru) result in the House, and big gains in Governorships, and state legislatures. A genuine political star in Rubio, and an interesting trio of Rubio, Allen West, and Nikki Haley. And speaking of the new Governor of South Carolina, a pretty good night for Sarah Palin too -- kind of amazing to see how, just a couple of years after a big defeat as a running mate to John McCain, she's now a national political force in her own right, while McCain's just back to being a Senator. The Tea Party in general had mixed results -- and needs to draw some lessons from that -- but I actually think McConnell was right to say that it's changed the Republican Party for good. More interesting, perhaps, has been it's impact on the Democratic Party, scaring a good many into repudiating their own left wing, and defeating many others who tried to buck that tide.

So, after a couple of setbacks starting in 2006, another substantial swing to the neo-progressive right -- now on to 2012.

Taking the Rally to Restore Smart People seriously!

2010-11-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

Funny at any time, but in the context of people who describe themselves as "smart", funnier:

Thanks to Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin
and of course Reason TV

Taking Jon Stewart seriously

2010-11-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

See Taranto, Best of the Web, "Rally to Restore Authority":

The "sanity" for which Stewart claims to long is the authority of the old mainstream media--their ability to set the boundaries of newsworthiness and respectable debate, claiming to be above politics while actually skewing leftward--though not so far or so intensely leftward as, say, MSNBC ranter Keith Olbermann.

Stewart mimics this authority by insisting that he is nonpartisan and nonideological. In truth, he is no more above politics than were Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather. But he's clever enough to know that a Ratheresque assertion of authority would make him look ridiculous. So instead he makes an appeal to antiauthority, escaping scrutiny by insisting he's just a comedian. "If you want to compare your show to a comedy show, you're more than welcome to," he smirked at Tucker Carlson on "Crossfire," back in 2004.

The kind of "sanity" for which Stewart claims to be nostalgic is a thing of the past. Its last redoubt is National Public Radio, which by firing Juan Williams has made itself look more like the Radio Moscow of a half century ago than the CBS.

Not that anyone should take Stewart seriously, but others do. Also, he did a good number on Olbermann once.

Anti-cultural relativism

2010-11-01T20:25:00.000-07:00

From Nicholas N. Eberstadt, "The Global Poverty Paradox" -- read the whole thing, as they say, but here's an abridged narrative:

First, the world as a whole and the poorer parts of the world more specifically have generally done very well under capitalism and global trade, especially in the last half of the last century:

In the half century between 1955 and 2005, by Maddison’s reckoning, the planet’s per capita income levels nearly tripled, growing at an average tempo of more than 2 percent per year, despite the unprecedented pace of population increase in the Third World over those same years. The expansion of international trade—and thus by definition, of markets for export produce—was even more dramatic: on a worldwide basis, real per capita demand for international merchandise and commodities jumped almost tenfold during those same years....

There should be no doubt whatsoever that the health revolution facilitated by the postwar era’s knowledge explosion, and all that has accompanied it, has been fundamentally “poor-friendly.” ...

The worldwide surge in prosperity over the past two generations has been nothing like the winner-take-all race that some insinuate it to be. The plain fact is that countries at every income level have benefited tremendously from the global economic updrafts of our modern age.

But, a significant fraction of the world's population, in the worst regions, have not only not shared in this improvement -- they've actually regressed:

By the World Bank’s calculations, nearly two dozen countries suffered negative per capita economic growth over the course of the quarter century from 1980 to 2005. ...

Thus, it is not just that an appreciable swath of humanity today lives in countries that have not yet managed to customize, and apply, the global formula for sustained growth that has been propelling the rest of the world out of poverty and into material security, or even affluence. No—hundreds of millions of people in the modern world live in places where the development process is manifestly stuck in reverse....

National examples of prolonged economic failure dot the modern global map: in the Caribbean (Cuba, Haiti); in Latin America (Paraguay, Venezuela); even in dynamic East Asia (North Korea). But the epicenter of prolonged economic failure is sub-Saharan Africa.

And foreign aid won't help:

The MDG [Millennium Development Goals] project avers that the primary impediment to more rapid progress against poverty in low-income countries nowadays is the lack of funding for practical, tested programs, and policy measures that would reliably and predictably raise living standards in the world where they are lowest today. ...

The trouble with this narrative is that foreign aid is not exactly an untested remedy for global poverty in our day and age. To go by figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, total flows of development assistance to recipient countries since 1960, after adjusting for inflation, by now add up to something like $3 trillion.

... since 1970, sub-Saharan African states have taken in the current equivalent of more than $600 billion of official development assistance—over three times as much aid on a per capita basis as Marshall Plan states received. As we know all too well, these subventions neither forestalled long-term economic decline for the region as a whole nor prevented the rise of poverty in many “beneficiary” states in the sub-Sahara.

So what will? Well, cultural change might:

The proposition that a local population’s viewpoints, values, and dispositions might have some bearing on local economic performance would hardly seem to be controversial. Decades ago, the great development economist Peter Bauer wrote that “economic achievement depends upon a people’s attributes, attitudes, mores and political arrangements.” The observation was offered as a simple and irrefutable statement of fact, and it would still be unobjectionable today to most readers who have not been tutored in contemporary “development theory.” But for development specialists, discussion of “culture”—much less its relationship to such things as work, thrift, savings, entrepreneurship, innovation, educational attainment, and other qualities that influence prospects for material advance—is increasingly off-limits.

But at this point, Eberstadt becomes pessimistic, and maybe unduly so. He sees that much of the problem stems from corrupt and often evil regimes that have imposed themselves on a populace, thinks that only outside intervention can get rid of such regimes, and doesn't think that the world is willing to undertake such intervention (no doubt rightly). But what he doesn't see, or rather sees but doesn't connect to the problem, at least emphatically enough, is just the politics of international aid that he identifies above. This willing blindness to dysfunctional cultural/political attitudes turns aid agencies and governments into a kind of enabler, as in dysfunctional drug dependencies -- the aid becoming simply a way of prolonging the misery of a terrible cultural, political, and economic cul-de-sac.

At one point, Eberstadt quotes from the MDG project's overview document: "'many well-governed countries [today] are too poor to help themselves.'", and then adds: "Social-science and policy-research literature, to be sure, has committed a fair share of howlers during the past century, but this may be the single most empirically challenged sentence of the new millennium."

Multiculturalism and the right

2010-10-31T10:07:00.000-07:00

And now for some Canadian content. A little while back there were two surprising elections here, even though both were predicted by polls -- in Toronto, perhaps Canada's most liberal (small-l) city, a fat, white, presumably heterosexual, male conservative (small-c) soundly defeated a liberal Liberal (also white and male, but not so fat, and openly gay); and in Calgary, perhaps Canada's most conservative major city, a Muslim was elected as the first Islamic mayor in Canada. Now, in themselves, these results might be a bit unusual, but hardly that interesting -- it's what they suggest about that familiar theme of multiculturalism that's significant. For reasons both naive and opportunistic, liberals have made this theme a pet project, viewing it in the former sense as perhaps just "more pavilions at Folkfest" (thanks to Kate at SDA for the expression), and in the latter, more cynical, sense, as the source of an easy supply of immigrant votes in any given election. But the naivete is rapidly falling away, as the previous post indicated, and now even the electoral opportunism seems threatened -- Rob Ford, the Toronto conservative, apparently outpolled his liberal rival by about 52% to 30% of respondents born outside of the country.

Granted, these are just a couple of Canadian municipal elections, but sometimes small events can portend larger things. Here, for example, are some possible take aways:

Liberal attempts, both in Canada and the US, to pander to new immigrants, including bribing them with tax-intensive programs, may finally be reaching the point not just of diminishing returns but of negative returns -- more than most, immigrants as a group tend to be hard-working family people who dislike seeing their earnings taken from them to fund easy election-time promises as much as anyone.
Conservatives recognize cultural diversity, once no longer a fetish, as indeed a rich source of vitality and energy within any society, as are a continual influx of new immigrants -- but add two general provisos: first, that the rate of cultural change be contained within supportable limits; and second, that the most general principles of a free society be recognized by all, including the supreme value of the individual.
And immigrants, so many, as I say, from family-oriented, hard-working backgrounds, are increasingly finding contemporary conservatism a more natural political expression than contemporary liberalism -- indeed, the small government emphasis on freedom, tolerance, and opportunity is frequently a primary reason so many left their homes to seek this society out in the first place.

Multiculturalism and the left

2010-10-30T15:53:00.000-07:00

A while back now, German Chancellor Merkel caused no small amount of consternation within the liberal-left everywhere with her announcement that the German experiment with "multikulti" was a failure (e.g., Yahoo News: "Merkel says German multi-cultural society has failed"). Now, partly this failure is just a result of some short-sighted labor policies that Europe in general, Germany in particular, has followed for years after WW2, of using immigrant labor to first rebuild, and now maintain, their societies (a policy that the US is having trouble with now as well). But little or no effort was made to assimilate these workers into the Western societies, and, whether out of necessity or a naive idealism, an ideology of "multiculturalism" was used to justify this, the idea being that "tolerance" will allow all the world's cultures to mingle freely while still preserving intact their distinct customs, beliefs, values, and practices. In Canada, this ideology underlay the use of a new metaphor for this mingling -- the idea of a cultural "mosaic" as opposed to the supposedly less tolerant American notion of the "melting pot". As a mosaic, however, it's a facade that's crumbling here as everywhere.

One reason for this failure, which one would think would have been obvious, is that mixing cultures in this way changes them -- not a bad or insupportable thing in itself, but there is a rate of change beyond which people everywhere begin to feel that they are foreigners or aliens in their own land, and they resist this. But there's a larger and much more significant reason as well -- it can be seen in an essay by a self-described liberal, Susan Jacoby, entitled "Multiculturalism and Its Discontents": "I am an atheist," she writes, "with an affinity for non-fundamentalist religious believers whose faith has made room for secular knowledge. I am also a political liberal. I am not, however, a multiculturalist who believes that all cultures and religions are equally worthy of respect." After quoting Ayaan Hirsi Ali to the effect that "'All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. . . . The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better.' (italics in the original)", Jacoby goes on to lament the fact that so many of her fellow liberals have failed to grasp this about what's supposed to be their own cultural heritage.Worse, it's as though they're unnerved by such a clear and frank statement and are driven to a perverse sort of relativism that forces them to disavow it as a result. And this leads Jacoby to make some observations that, perhaps unwittingly, also say much about the relative positions of the political left and right in the contemporary world:

Finally, it is a politically strategic error as well as a form of moral blindness for liberals to push people like Hirsi Ali into the eager arms of the political Right. ...

This muddled thinking allows the American religious and political Right to misrepresent itself as the chief defender of Enlightenment values. More important, reflexive liberal multiculturalism fails every child being denied, in the name of faith and family, full access to the promise of this nation.

At some point, it may be possible for Jacoby and many others like her to come to a realization that perhaps the American right today is representing itself accurately as the chief defender of Enlightenment values. And at that point a choice will be necessary -- between continued allegiance to an old but now reactionary political label, or to the values they thought that label stood for.

On moral bullying

2010-10-29T10:39:00.000-07:00

This came up in a comment exchange from an earlier post, and I thought it was important enough to post on its own:

We all would like to think of ourselves as good people, right? And to be thought of as such. But this is exactly what provides the leverage point for the moral bully -- the ones who, big with a sense of their own swollen rectitude, like to morally push around anyone they think might be vulnerable. This is an old story within religions, with the self-righteous inflating their own egos and sense of power by denouncing the sins of others. But it's a modern story too, especially within the quasi-religious politics of the modern liberal-left, where the sins take the form of failing to re-cycle, for example, or exhibiting one of a number of "phobias" (homo-, Islamo-, etc.) or -- the most popular form of denunciation by far -- of racism. Some of which, of course, may well be genuine forms of bad behavior or consciousness, but that's not the point here. Because the characteristic of the bully is his/her focus -- it's not really on the sins as such at all, but rather on the putative sinner, and the point is not to correct or change anything, but rather simply to morally dominate. This is what makes such tactics so prominent and ugly a part of political debates, after all, and all the more so when one side or the other is losing the debate on substantive grounds.

Now, in order to be a target for such bullying, whether of the older religious sort or the more recent political sort, you have to have bought into the mind set from which it emanates, and this is what makes the pseudo-elite of the fashionably orthodox today, the bien pensant, so easy to herd -- that reflexive anxiety that they might have strayed in their mind from the path of correctness, and so in danger of stepping on some lurking social landmine by expressing one of the many forbidden thoughts. As, for example, did Juan Williams quite publicly recently, and look what happened to him. So in order to build a defense against the moral bullies, the first thing you have to do is reconsider your engagement with the socially fashionable, particularly in politics -- and this is true on both political wings, by the way, depending on your social context. That is, the first step is a declaration of personal independence from the tyranny of political labels and fashions. The problem is that the next steps will require some thinking on your own, as opposed to the ease of simply putting on whatever everyone else is wearing.

A week out from the midterm

2010-10-26T20:49:00.000-07:00

I should preface this with a reminder that I'm a Canadian, and so an observer rather than a voter. But US elections have a significant impact north of the border too -- the effect is more indirect, obviously, than our own elections, but it may well be deeper, in the influence on our political culture generally.

In any case, while I think of myself as a long-range optimist, in shorter ranges I'm inclined to prepare for worst-case scenarios. So, a week away from the mid-terms, I'm concerned that predictions of a huge Republican sweep are over-confident, and anything short of a monumental overturn will be taken as a Democrat "moral victory". Not that that means much except in the immediate aftermath, but it would have been better to see more modest expectations, and be pleasantly surprised, rather than the opposite. My own sense is that the Republicans should retake control of the House, and make gains in the Senate but be short of a majority -- that seems to me a reasonable expectation, with anything significantly more than that being a genuine Republican victory, anything less a genuine Democratic victory.

My real point, though, is that it's a mistake to look upon any one election or set of elections as some epochal, climactic, make-or-break event. That's an understandable tendency when things seem dire (and I don't doubt it's easier to say when you're out of the fray yourself, as I am) but it invites all the risks of triumphal overconfidence when things go one way, and despairing resignation when they go the other. When what's really needed is a long-term focus on changing the underlying political culture I spoke of above.

Along those lines, it can be helpful to stand back a bit and look at the real nature of the political alternatives before us, or the dimensions of political space. Elections tend to force alternatives into the single dimension of left and right, but political realities are usually more complex. So, for example, despite the general BigGov/smaller-state distinction between Democrats and Republicans, there is a BigGov, corporatist wing of the Republican Party too, just as there is limited state, free-market/capitalist wing of the Democrats. And on both sides there are the usual divisions over "social issues". But the social issues needn't separate people politically, unless they see the state as a means of enforcing their particular views or values -- in other words, it makes sense to pursue a long-term strategy of forging alliances among smaller government proponents, who are prepared to use persuasion rather than power to advance their values. And that, as I've said elsewhere, would be truly progressive.

How do people change their politics?

2010-10-25T16:25:00.000-07:00

One of the more interesting comments to come out of the Juan Williams brouhaha (as opposed to a foofarah) is this one by Doctor Zero, "Juan Williams And The Preference Cascade". A "preference cascade" is a phrase he borrowed from Instapundit himself, Glenn Reynolds, and the good Doctor defines it thusly: "a preference cascade occurs when people trapped inside a manufactured consensus suddenly realize that many other people share their doubts." That consensus might be "manufactured" in a variety of ways, some crude, some subtle -- e.g., a crude totalitarian surveillance, or a more subtle social imposition of "right thinking" -- but however it's done, it becomes increasingly fragile under circumstances that undermine it, including, obviously, those who question it. At some point, there need be only a small event, a single voice, to trigger the "preference cascade" that suddenly shatters the consensus. Doc Zero's contention is that Williams was fired because he threatened to be that voice, with the firing intended to shore up the consensus by sending the message that such sentiments, such "feelings", cannot even be expressed within the confines of the bien pensant liberal orthodoxy that NPR symbolizes.

Whatever the case may be with respect to this episode, however, I think the idea of a preference cascade is a handy one, in the way it can be used to explain fairly sudden, and otherwise quite surprising, changes, not only in political groups, but within individuals as well. It's not just a social consensus, in other words, that gets undermined or hollowed out by disconfirming events, it's also one's own overt beliefs. One can continue to think of oneself as liberal or conservative, left-wing or right-wing, even as one's opinions about this or that particular issue are the opposite of one's long-standing self-labeling -- until something occurs, and it may be quite small in itself, that precipitates a kind of internal cascade, and the old labels just don't seem to have the same relevance any longer. It's why change sometimes seems to come in lurches.

Rehabilitating Herbert Spencer?

2010-10-22T18:54:00.000-07:00

This is a curious but interesting sequence -- starting, approximately, with this post by Brian Tamanaha, "Racist Progressives, Meet Hard-Hearted Libertarians", which references, going back a further step, a couple of posts by libertarians asserting that the forebears of contemporary left-liberals or "progressives" were often bigoted and racist. Okay, says Tamanaha, but your forebears were often cold-hearted social Darwinists willing to let the poor starve in the streets, and he uses Herbert Spencer, apparently the originator of the phrase "survival of the fittest", as exhibit one -- e.g., taken from Spencer's Social Statics:

It seems hard that a labourer incapacitated by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows, should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of the highest beneficence—the same beneficence which brings to early graves the children of diseased parents, and singles out the low-spirited, the intemperate, and the debilitated as the victims of an epidemic.

As Tamanaha says, "That's cold".

Now, as a tu quoque argument this is maybe a bit silly, but it does go to the way in which older and uglier predecessors continue to affect or influence contemporary inheritors. Ilya Somin, in a response post on Volokh, "Of 'Racist Progressives' And 'Hard-Hearted Libertarians'" largely agrees with Tamanaha about Spencer's social Darwinism, but argues that

Few modern libertarians even cite Spencer or other social Darwinists at all. By contrast, modern liberals do often cite early 20th century progressives as inspirations for their ideology. And until recently, few of them paid much attention to the more unsavory aspects of early 20th century Progressivism (though I should add that some far left radical scholars, such as Gabriel Kolko, were much more critical).

The other noteworthy point that Somin makes is that bigotry against whatever minority group is out of favor at the moment becomes much more dangerous when backed by an interventionist state, and along these lines he quotes his colleague David Bernstein:

“[a]s a matter of American history, activist government was often used to oppress minority groups. As a matter of world history, the record of “activist government” with regard to minorities is even worse. And as a matter of political theory, it’s not at all clear why one would expect public policy in a democracy to necessarily be helpful to minority groups.”

And then Damon Root steps in with a defence of Spencer himself, in a post on Reason's blog, "Battle of the 'Embarrassing Grandparents': Racist Progressives vs. Herbert Spencer" (that Somin referenced in an update):

As for the much-abused phrase “survival of the fittest,” Tamanaha seems ignorant of what Spencer actually wrote. By fit, Spencer most certainly did not mean brute force. In Spencer’s view, human society had evolved from a "militant" state, which was characterized by violence and force, to an "industrial" one, characterized by trade and voluntary cooperation. Thus any increase in private charity and “the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other” count as prime examples of the “survival of the fittest” as articulated by Spencer.

So, I have a couple of responses myself to this little teacup tempest. First, I'll admit I've never read Spencer and never thought to do so, but I think Root makes an interesting case for him -- enough that I'm inclined now to look him up. But I also think that the extended passage Tamanaha quoted is indeed "cold", as he says, and what's worse, wrong. It's wrong in the same way that the cruder versions of contemporary evolutionary psychology are wrong, in overlooking or dismissing culture as the primary system for environmental adaptation, as opposed to the biological organism -- and cultural adaptations that build upon compassion or a desire to help the weak may well make for a stronger or "fitter" social structure within which we all can thrive. What Root says about Spencer above mitigates this criticism, but doesn't eliminate it.

The second point, though, is just to point out that the state is by no means the only way we have of acting together, being social, exercising compassion, or helping the weak. Indeed, the state, because of its inescapable connection with force, will always have a tendency to devolve into either tyrannies large or small, or wasteful, dehumanizing, dependency-inducing bureaucracies, or both. This too Spencer apparently saw, and partially integrated into his case. And here is where we can really use some of that willingness to think outside of accustomed limits that we saw in the parable of the traffic lights, to find more creative and human approaches to providing for human needs than the state.

Have cold - can't blog

2010-10-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

To put it in the manner of that snobby elitist, Homer Simpson. Back soon though, promise.

Well, what about traffic lights?!

2010-10-19T14:31:00.000-07:00

Any time you try to talk about reducing the intrusive role of the state in human affairs, that's the question that almost always comes up at some point, right? We need state regulation of behavior, as symbolized by traffic lights, or there'd be, you know, chaos! Anarchy! The end of civilization as we know it!

So take just five minutes and have a look at the video below (thanks to David Zetland, at Aquanomics):

Surprising, no?

Now, of course, not that much hinges on traffic lights per se one way or another -- but, as in the question in the post's title, they're a symbol, and so the video above operates as a kind of parable, with a meaning beyond its face value. I don't want to make too much of it, but I think there really is a sense that, as we've become accustomed to, and dependent upon, an increasingly dense mesh of rules and regulations, requirements and proscriptions, our sense of what's possible becomes shrunken, our imaginations stunted. As a parable, this just asks that we question those acquired reflexes again, allow for the possiblity of regained, or even new kinds of freedom. Which might just make us not only more free, but also richer, and even safer. It's a thought.

Oh, and if you're interested in a little more context, here's Part 1: "Roads unfit for people".

The moving fulcrum

2010-10-18T20:21:00.000-07:00

In a previous post I talked about some signs of a slow retreat from statism in terms of an ebbing tide. But I'm thinking now, because of the cyclic aspect of tides, that wasn't quite the right metaphor. It's not that there aren't cycles in historical change, because there are, in political change especially, as we can see in the oscillations between left and right in most democratic polities, and in, for example, US Presidential politics over the last few decades. But those cycles tend to obscure deeper movements that are more directional -- a spiral would be a better model than a simple cycle, and a pendulum whose hinge or fulcrum is moving would be better still. A pendulum swing, after all, is a familiar trope in politics, and we saw it illustrated in the 2008 election that swept not just Obama but Democrats everywhere into power after the Bush years. The swing seemed to have enough momentum that liberals and so-called "progressives" could be excused in thinking it would carry them and their statist agenda into a new era. But when the pendulum's fulcrum itself is moving, and moving in a direction contrary to the swing, the momentum is dampened considerably -- and that's exactly what the statist liberals have run into, with the startling rise of the Tea Party phenomenon and the sharp resistance to additional state intrusions, spending, and taxes.

In other words, the primary movement of the American polity, over and above the usual back and forth oscillations, is to the right, and this is shifting the terms of the debate on both right and left. Marxist terminology, once common on the left, has now almost completely disappeared, apart from some zombified remnants on college campuses, and Hayek and markets are at least more widely understood than ever -- as Brad DeLong nicely illustrates with this post, "How Much Does the Market Organization of Economic Life Matter?", and its revealing little chart of the results of an historical experiment. And even more telling is this confessional article by Kevin Drum, in Mother Jones, on "Schools and Poverty":

I'm going to get the ed people mad at me again — and I guess I'll add the poverty people too this time — but I continue to think that the biggest problem here is simply that no one has any really compelling answers. Movies like Waiting for Superman (which I haven't seen), along with an endless stream of credulous punditry, keep suggesting that the answers are out there if only we'll fund them and take them seriously. But they aren't.

His despair goes beyond the usual left lament that people are maybe tapped out when it comes to yet more tax increases -- he actually begins to question whether the taxes would do any good anyway:

... the tolerance of the middle class for raising its own taxes to improve education is pretty low. One reason, I suspect, is that people have largely lost faith that their taxes are being used for anything useful. If they pay more, they won't get better schools, they'll just get higher teacher salaries as the teachers unions hoover up all the dough.

And this is in Mother Jones!

Of course, as Adam Schaeffer says, in the post from which I got the link ("Why Won’t this Pig Fly? We’ve Tried Everything to Fix Education and Poverty. . ."), there actually are some answers or approaches that can address these problems:

We know what improves education, allows success to scale quickly, and saves money as well; a real market in education, aka private school choice, the freer and broader the better. The education problem is intractable only if the government continues to monopolize education services.

But getting to such solutions will still require a change in fundamental political mindset -- the hinge of the pendulum still has a distance to go.

Fractals

2010-10-17T10:31:00.000-07:00

Since the sub-title of this blog is "On fractal change", and since, as Jason Kottke notes, the inventor of the concept of the fractal, Benoit Mandelbrot, has died, I thought this might be a good moment to expand a little on what I mean by the word, and what the word means for me. First, here's Wikipedia's entry, and here's its initial definition, borrowed from Mandelbrot himself: "A fractal is 'a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,'[1] a property called self-similarity." ([1] The Fractal Geometry of Nature). Which may not be all that helpful by itself, but that last word, "self-similarity", is a clue to why the concept has spread so widely, to cover things like the shape of leaves or clouds or coastlines or financial charts or culture.

Mandelbrot gave the term a technical and mathematical meaning, but what I want is its metaphoric aspect. As a metaphor, "fractal" describes things in which similar, though never identical, patterns reappear at all scales large and small. And this can help in two ways: first, by providing a kind of handle or way of grasping the structure of systems that otherwise appear monolithic and either chaotic or complex; and second, by alerting us to the way in which patterns, whether spatial, temporal, or otherwise, can change in scale abruptly or discontinuously -- Mandelbrot's book on financial markets, for example, The (Mis)Behavior of Markets, was in many ways an early insight into the "black swan" phenomenon that Nassim Taleb has popularized. So, in speaking of "fractal change", I'm referring to historical patterns that repeat on scales varying from an individual's day to day job, to vast "phase changes" in the very structure of human societies. And I'm also referring to the way in which change can surprise us by sudden shifts in scale, as in a televised rant becoming the seed of an anomalous political movement.

But here, with a hat tip to Jason Kottke again, and in memory of Benoit Mandelbrot, is a journey into the infinite depths of the greatest fractal ever, the Mandelbrot Set:

Mandelbrot Fractal Set Trip To e214 HD from teamfresh on Vimeo.

Transitions to capitalism

2010-10-15T18:03:00.000-07:00

The economic system we call capitalism was a kind of cultural discovery, and, in terms of its consequences, probably the greatest cultural discovery in human history. Like the advent of urban civilization thousands of years ago, capitalism opened up a whole new continent, a new world, for development, and we're still just in the process of exploring that space. It was, in other words, a huge and relatively quick success, despite introducing some new strains associated with alienation (as I sketched in the theme).

But in the transition to capitalism, other kinds of issues arise, associated with a period in which an old order is disintegrating even as a new one is still not fully formed. Before a stable establishment of capitalist legal and property relations, in other words, not to mention some kind of democratic government, the rule of law rather than people, and the status equality of everyone, there is ample opportunity for abuse, which is usually realized. We see this both historically and currently, in the three major transitions to capitalism:

The first, of course, occurred in the West, starting perhaps as early as the Renaissance, with the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and gave rise to issues surrounding the enclosure of formerly common land, among other problems.

The next was the transition from non-Western traditional cultures to capitalist that occurred along with Western expansion and imperialism, starting from perhaps the mid-18th century and still continuing today, and this has had some severe problems associated just with the encounter between cultures.

The third one was, and is, the transition from socialism to capitalism, starting at the end of the 80's of the last century, and still to come in the case of Cuba and North Korea. The worst case of abuse here has obviously been the rise of an oligarchic kleptocracy in the remnants of the Soviet Union, and it remains to be seen whether China's autocracy will be able to avoid that fate, or will be just another form of it.

These sorts of transitions, by their nature, can't be easy, and in some cases in the past -- thinking of tribal and aboriginal cultures in particular -- have been, or still are, tragic. But change happens, at all levels, and while we can do our best to mitigate its bad effects, I don't think we can realistically hope to eliminate them all. And certainly, though I'm by no means any sort of historical determinist, I do think that efforts to halt or reverse such overwhelmingly beneficial developments as arise in the wake of the emergent, modern individual -- emancipation, equality of status, democracy, rule of law, individual rights, freedom of trade, etc. -- would be a tragic error of vastly greater scope.

The China question

2010-10-14T21:02:00.000-07:00

In a short piece in Foreign Policy, "Reinventing the Wheel", William Easterly talks about economic development, linking it to past levels of technology, going back as far as 1000 BCE. This is a result of both the way in which technology builds upon itself, as Easterly points out, and also of the geographical and cultural separation of societies before recent communication and transportation improvements (which I don't think Easterly makes enough of). But the idea of the cumulative, snowballing effect of early technological development runs into some objections:

The most important counterexample is China, which in 1500 had plow cultivation, printing, paper, books, firearms, the compass, iron, and steel, and yet failed to emulate Europe's Industrial Revolution in the centuries that followed. Scholars have argued that autocratic Chinese emperors killed off technological progress for domestic political reasons. For example, one Ming emperor banned long-distance oceanic exploration for fear of foreign influence threatening his power, after Chinese ships had already reached East Africa in 1422.

Which didn't happen in Europe largely because of Europe's political incoherence:

Fragmented Europe did not have any one autocrat who could kill off technological innovation, and the constant threats of living in a hostile neighborhood spurred the advancement of military technology. And because borders were relatively open around 1500, the reality that citizens could leave for more advanced places -- the forerunner of today's "brain drain" -- kept alive the spirit of innovation.

So what lessons can be drawn from this about current problems of development? What's interesting is that China pops again as an illustration that past failures needn't prevent playing catch-up: "As China's history has shown [meaning presumably recent, free-market history, though he doesn't say], when governments stop killing innovation, good things happen." Yet, as we all know, China's political system seems hardly less autocratic now than it was when it did kill innovation -- what is it that makes the difference?

The answer is likely to be that understated aspect of communication/transportation improvements, that have shrunk the world down to dimensions considerably smaller than 15th century Europe, and that put contemporary China in a position similar to that of an early modern European state. Note how, under these conditions, capitalism is the default evolutionary path. The question that China poses, then, is whether the other aspects of modernity will follow as well -- specifically, democracy, the rule of law, and individual rights? These features took a while to develop in the West, as the transition was made from feudalism to capitalism. So I think there's a reasonable expectation that we'll see them develop in China as well, since they seem to be very much of a single cultural piece or pattern -- the only real question is, how peacefully?

The vice of equality

2010-10-13T03:39:00.000-07:00

This post a while back talked about a certain impasse you're at when one or more of your moral values or assumptions lead you to conclusions that are at odds with the real world -- that is, in conflict with reality as you know it. At that point, as I said, your options are either to condemn or at least lament reality as not being good enough for you, or, as in reductio ad absurdam arguments, to begin to re-examine and question some of those moral values and assumptions that lead you into this impasse in the first place. I ended the post by singling out the assumption that I think is the one real culprit here, and the source as well of a great deal of moral and political confusion and worse in society generally -- this is the notion of equality.

First, let's try to be clear about the term. The equality contained in a phrase like "all men are created equal" is not a vice -- on the contrary, it's a great moral truth. But what does it mean? It clearly doesn't mean that all people are created equal in intelligence or looks or athletic ability or circumstances of birth or any other quality that may enable one to do better than another -- since that is manifestly false. It means, simply, that all people are created equal in status. Which means, among other things, what Anatole France famously mocked in his witticism about the law, in its majestic equality, forbidding the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, etc. He was right, certainly, about the limitations of such equality, but wrong to disdain its majesty -- because until the great bourgeois/capitalist transformations, such equality was virtually unknown, and the great mass of people everywhere lived permanently as inherently lower or lesser beings within an explicitly hierarchical structure of class or caste.

So, I'm referring here to substantive equality, not status equality, and when I use the term "equality" hereafter, it should be understand in the former sense as opposed to the latter. Nor do I mean that equality just as such is evil -- in itself, whatever equality or inequality occurs naturally or unforced is morally neutral. So the title of this post should really have been "The vice of forced substantive equality", but I thought the gain in technical accuracy wasn't worth the loss in impact.

"Forced substantive equality" means simply taking something away from one to give to another in order to make them more equal in whatever that "something" is -- typically money, of course. And it that sense it seems wrong just on the face of it -- not only because such taking ignores questions of desert or merit, not to mention simply differential desires or objectives, but also and primarily because it simply skips over the issue of "right". Who or what does this taking, and what gives them the right to do it -- i.e., how can you assume that the person from whom the money (say) is taken doesn't have a right to it in the first place?

At this point, philosophical egalitarians typically try to move into some variety of either consequentialism or contractarianism, and in either case the arguments can go, and have gone, on for a very long time. Both arguments, however, suffer from the technocratic delusion of grandeur -- the notion that some one or group is able to oversee the whole of society and judge who deserves what, or who has "agreed" to what, or what are the consequences of what. I've dealt with this to some extent in this post on "'Social justice' vs. 'just society'", and I don't want to get any more involved in that very basic error here. For now, it's enough to point out how forced equality violates our ordinary moral instincts, and how, as a result, what we might call "populist" egalitarians (to distinguish them from the more philosophical variety) typically try to attach the goal of substantive equality to other goals or issues that do have moral standing, such as helping the less fortunate.

But helping people who need help is obviously not the same as trying to make them more equal, even if, as a side-effect, it ends up doing so. In fact, one of the more effective ways of helping people is to provide them with a job, an action that might well have the equally irrelevant side-effect of increasing inequality.

Another source of confusion is mixing equality up with issues of merit, as in denying (a presumption of) merit to those with more -- presuming, instead, that luck or nefarious practices accounts for their greater wealth, and assuming, therefore, that it's all right to take away such wealth. But merely presuming that someone's wealth is ill-gotten is obviously prejudiced and wrong. And just as wrong is the desire to take away the good fortune of others. Certainly we question the good luck of bad people or the bad luck of good people, but fortune per se, whether good or ill, can't tell us whether a person is good or bad. Luck itself, in other words, is morally neutral, but the wish to deny it to others is morally flawed.

So, once we strip away the confusions and irrelevancies surrounding the notion of forced substantive equality -- that it's not the same as equality of status, not the same as simply helping people who need it, and not required by some notion of merit -- then we're left with a core that has a distinctly unappealing aspect. Or, rather, a core the appeal of which is only to the darker impulses of human nature -- impulses such as common envy, or an embittered animus at the achievements of others, or a desire to pull down the successful. Here lies the real reason that the urge for this sort of equality persists in human societies -- not because it's a noble aspiration, like freedom or justice, or a virtue, like compassion, but simply because it's a vice, like greed or gluttony. In fact, while other vices seem driven by a more natural desire for mere creature comforts, this one appears to be one of the nastier, more neurotic, and more malicious, driven by its resentful comparison with others. It may well be responsible for more real harm in human society than all the other vices put together, and in any case it is the erroneous assumption at the root of a number of moral absurdities, of which Cohen's notion of socialism is just an example.

Cultural relativity of another kind

2010-10-11T23:24:00.000-07:00

The idea that some cultures may be better or worse than others is enough of a taboo, at least within certain political groupings, that a friend of mine literally gasped when, not realizing just how much of a taboo it was, I said as much in a casual conversation. It was as though he were actually worried about being overheard by the Thought Police (this was in Canada).

So it was indeed a breath of fresh air when another friend referred me to this John McWhorter review of a book by Amy Wax, entitled Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century, in which it's argued that the primary current cause of poverty and dysfunction within black communities is the dysfunctional culture of those communities. Wax clearly recognizes that that culture especially is the result of great historic wrongs, but just as clearly asserts that the only possible remedy for those wrongs now rests within the black communities themselves. Here's the opening paragraph of McWhorter's review:

This book is depressing because it is so persuasive. There is a school of thought in America which argues that the government must be the main force that provides help to the black community. This shibboleth is predicated upon another one: that such government efforts will make a serious difference in disparities between blacks and whites. Amy Wax not only argues that such efforts have failed, she also suggests that such efforts cannot bring equality, and therefore must be abandoned. Wax identifies the illusion that mars American thinking on this subject as the myth of reverse causation—that if racism was the cause of a problem, then eliminating racism will solve it. If only this were true. But it isn’t true: racism can set in motion cultural patterns that take on a life of their own.

I'd only add a generalization to this -- other examples of less functional or even malfunctional cultures in the context of the modern industrialized world might include many aboriginal or tribally-based Islamic communities; on the other hand, cultures that are currently flourishing in the same context might include many Asian or Jewish communities.

But the most important consideration in all this -- what should alleviate a little of McWhorter's depression -- is that, unlike race, culture is changeable, and dysfunctional cultures will evolve into more functional forms in time, as long as they're not being being continually supported or enabled by the withholding of judgment or making excuses.

But here's Amy Wax herself, in dialogue with Adam Serwer:

"Nutrition or character?"

2010-10-10T19:16:00.000-07:00

Mickey Kaus makes an interesting point in the course of an argument that sides with Gingrich against Pelosi about the apparently minor issue of food stamps: "Pelosi's Wrong About Gingrich and Food Stamps". It starts out like this: Gingrich says Republicans should campaign for "paychecks" not "foodstamps"; Pelosi accuses him and the Republicans of trying to divide people between those who need foodstamps and those who don't; Kaus says Pelosi is wrong about Gingrich in that he's really saying everyone is in danger of becoming too dependent on government handouts, of which foodstamps are just an illustration.

But Kaus expands on his point by arguing that a sign of this spreading dependency is the loss of stigma associated with accepting such handouts, and an associated loss in work ethic, an aspect of character. So, Kaus says:

The real issue isn't whether food stamp use goes up during a vicious economic slump--that's what they're there for. The issue is whether, thanks to the justified stigma, food stamp use goes down again when the recession ends.

Gingrich, rightly, worries that it won't. It's a valid left-right point of disagreement. A few months ago, I thought I was stacking the deck when I phrased the disagreement like this:

If you came across two societies--Society A, in which food stamps were stigmatized, with families reluctant to go on the dole even if they were eligible, and Society B, in which they weren't, you would want to bet on (and live in) Society A.

To my surprise, blogger Matt Yglesias of the liberal Center for American Progress immediately chimed in on behalf of Society B, if it produced better-nourished children who became a "better-educated workforce" with "lower crime" and "less disabilty."

Well, there you have a choice. What's America's bigger problem--nutrition or character? "Which future do I want?" asks Gingrich. "More food stamps? Or more paychecks?" Society B or Society A? But not "us" versus "them."

Remember that Churchill quote about those who would trade honor for peace ending up with neither? Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that a similar fate might befall those who would trade character for nutrition?

Labels and Llosa

2010-10-08T18:16:00.000-07:00

David Boaz, at the Cato blog, has an interesting post on the Nobel prize winner in literature, entitled "The Politics of Mario Vargas Llosa". Interesting, because of what he calls a "missing word" -- "liberal". That's the political label that is never used by others to describe Llosa's views, though they might resort to such various terms as right-wing, conservative, or even -- the latest scarecrow put up by the atavistic left -- "neoliberal", but never simply "liberal". Yet, curiously, that's the label that Llosa himself uses. Why? No doubt part of the answer would involve the international context of his politics, as distinct from the more parochial and peculiar usages that have come to prevail in the US. But the more important part, the reason that underlies that globalized context, is that he refuses to to abandon the meaning that made the label such a powerful political force from its origins -- that "liberalism" is, as Boaz quotes from the Encyclopedia Brittannica, the "Political and economic doctrine that emphasizes the rights and freedoms of the individual and the need to limit the powers of government", or, as Llosa himself puts it, with a little more economy and force, a liberal is "a lover of liberty, a person who rises up against oppression".

Here's a little more from Llosa on true liberalism:

...the liberal I aspire to be considers freedom a core value. Thanks to this freedom, humanity has been able to journey from the primitive cave to the stars and the information revolution, to progress from forms of collectivist and despotic association to representative democracy. The foundations of liberty are private property and the rule of law; this system guarantees the fewest possible forms of injustice, produces the greatest material and cultural progress, most effectively stems violence and provides the greatest respect for human rights. According to this concept of liberalism, freedom is a single, unified concept. Political and economic liberties are as inseparable as the two sides of a medal.

...

Political democracy and the free market are foundations of a liberal position. But, thus formulated, these two expressions have an abstract, algebraic quality that dehumanizes and removes them from the experience of the common people. Liberalism is much, much more than that. Basically, it is tolerance and respect for others, and especially for those who think differently from ourselves, who practice other customs and worship another god or who are non-believers. By agreeing to live with those who are different, human beings took the most extraordinary step on the road to civilization. It was an attitude or willingness that preceded democracy and made it possible, contributing more than any scientific discovery or philosophical system to counter violence and calm the instinct to control and kill in human relations. It is also what awakened that natural lack of trust in power, in all powers, which is something of a second nature to us liberals.

And here is his description of collectivism, or the anti-liberal:

Collectivism was inevitable during the dawn of history, when the individual was simply part of the tribe and depended on the entire society for survival, but began to decline as material and intellectual progress enabled man to dominate nature, overcome the fear of thunder, the beast, the unknown and the other--he who had a different color skin, another language and other customs. But collectivism has survived throughout history in those doctrines and ideologies that place the supreme value of an individual on his belonging to a specific group (a race, social class, religion or nation). All of these collectivist doctrines--Nazism, fascism, religious fanaticism and communism--are the natural enemies of freedom and the bitter adversaries of liberals. In every age, that atavistic defect, collectivism, has reared its ugly head to threaten civilization and throw us back to the age of barbarism. Yesterday it was called fascism and communism; today it is known as nationalism and religious fundamentalism.

Which, to speak of another political usage often mentioned alongside "liberalism", is the reason I always try to put "progressivism" in scare quotes -- given its tendency to share in that "atavistic defect, collectivism", it would be far more accurate and honest to label it "regressivism".

So many levels

2010-10-07T09:45:00.000-07:00

Now, I really think this is a spoof, but I'm not certain, and anyway it's good enough that it doesn't matter -- Eugene Volokh has the following post about a unique service: "Hire an Atheist to Watch Your Pet After the Rapture", which points at this.

In the immortal words of Homer Simpson, it works on so many levels. Here are a few:

Theological: Yeah of course the Supreme Being (SB) is not going to worry too much about the atheists, right -- they had their chance and made their choice. But what about the pets!? How is it that the SB doesn't care as much about the sufferings of the other beings He/She/It has created as their owners do? Or even as much as the carefully screened ethical atheists do, who after all are volunteering to look after them at their own expense for the rest of the lives left them after the Almighty has forsaken them?
Ethical: Okay, forget about God's own ethics -- we could just say the ways of the Lord are mysterious and let it go. But what about those who are willing to abandon not just their pets but their pets' caregivers to whatever fate is left after they get theirs? Doesn't that smack a bit of the old "I'm all right, Jack" morality -- I got mine, too bad about you? Yet, these are supposed to be the good people, aren't they? And, of course, from the other side, what about those atheists who are supposedly ethical enough to be trusted to look after a stranger's pets, but who are willing participants in what they must believe to be a kind of scam, taking advantage of gullible, and perhaps theologically confused believers?
Psychological: Quite apart from the ethics as such, what would be going on in the minds of people, on either side, able to hold such complicated, conflicting views on divine justice, ethical behavior, pragmatic considerations, etc. Compartmentalization? Screening-out? Simple-mindedness? Complexity? "Negative capability"?
Economic: So the believer pays a one time fee for some peace of mind; the company gets a revenue stream that depends on finding new believers/suckers at least until the market is saturated; but what do the atheists get, and when? And what happens to the business after the Rapture?
Weird: "[Please note: we can now offer rescue services for horses, camels, llamas and donkeys in NH,VT, ID and MT ]"

Ah, it dost tease us out of thought....

Socialism and a moral reductio ad absurdam

2010-10-06T17:51:00.000-07:00

In mathematics, "reductio ad absurdam" is a type of proof that works like this: if you want to prove that something is true (or false), assume the opposite -- i.e., assume that it's false (or true) -- and then show that this assumption leads to an absurdity (typically a contradiction), from which you conclude that your assumption of the opposite was wrong, and that therefore the something is in fact true (or false). Indirect, but, in math at least, irrefutable. Outside of math, things are always a little messier, but a similar argument can be used in the case of moral or ethical issues as well -- if it can be agreed that a particular moral position runs into serious conflict with reality, then that alone should lead us to question the assumptions that led up to that position.

As a case in point, consider this review of G.A. Cohen's Why Not Socialism by Andy Lamey (entitled "The Thinking Man’s Marxist"). Cohen's brand of so-called "analytical Marxism" is immediately an oddity. To his great credit, he saw it as a contrast to what he apparently called "bullshit Marxism" -- namely, the vaporous rhetoric of the French post-structuralist, post-modern, post-post poseurs. But Marxist socialism, with its origins in Hegelian dialectic and its roots in a collectivist political backlash is, to say the least, a difficult fit with the arid, logical procedures of Anglo-American philosophical analysis. Nevertheless, Cohen tries to force the two together, with the result being the illustration of the moral reductio I've mentioned, at least as summarized by Lamey, who quotes Cohen as saying:

“The socialist aspiration is to extend community and justice to the whole of our economic life. As I have acknowledged, we now know that we do not now know how to do that.”

Cohen’s conclusion is thus a mixed one. We should endorse his two moral principles even though there is no sign they will lead to socialism any time soon. But perhaps they could have some application here and there, as in the education or health spheres. Or perhaps one day our circumstance will change and socialism will become possible. Cohen’s closing lines refer to markets as systems of predation. “Our attempt to get beyond predation has thus far failed. I do not think the right conclusion is to give up.”

There's a kind of pathos here -- Cohen, raised in the socialist faith and desperately hoping to cling to it at whatever cost, was still both rational and honest enough to admit that, as far as he or anyone could see, it was an impossibility. What he could not do was take that one next step in the reductio sequence -- re-examining the moral assumptions that had led him into this fatal conflict with the real world.

Cohen is by no means the only one brought to this sort of moral impasse, though he's more explicit about it than most. Others reaching the same dead end may decide that it's the world that's false -- or, in moral terms, not "good enough" -- rather than their beliefs, a kind of insanity, perhaps, that cultural processes akin to natural selection will tend to weed out. But there's no denying the depth of the crisis in which one is immersed when one's most fundamental values appear to be implicated in fundamental contradiction with reality. In a subsequent post, I want to look at the value that I think is primarily responsible for this kind of crisis: equality.

Obama the neocon?

2010-10-05T17:40:00.000-07:00

Probably not, but an editorial by Fred Hiatt, "Will Obama's foreign policy follow his new democracy rhetoric?", raises the possibility just enough that it lets me get in a plug for that prominent bogeyman of the left, that banner for the hideous Bush-Cheney foreign policy, necoconservatism.

This was -- and may still be -- a "third way", if you like, between two other strategic alternatives for foreign policy. On the one hand, there was the naive idealism/crass cynicism of "liberal internationalism", which was an attempt at a top-down imposition of order by creating the shells or facades of global institutions fluffed up with a lot of talk about "international law", etc., but behind which facades sheltered the worst sorts of despotisms and petty tyrannies engaged in the same old squabbles that states have always fought over. As a general strategy, it failed miserably the first time it was tried, with the League of Nations, and at least as miserably the second time, with the United Nations, except, of course, that nuclear weapons have preserved us from another world war. On the other hand, there is the older notion of realpolitik, exemplified by Kissinger, which at least has its realism, or attempt at realism, to save it from cynicism. But, even in Metternich's or Bismark's day, its lack of any moral principle other than national self-interest was never realistic enough in a long term sense, and fails all the more dismally today when nations and their economies are so much more tightly interlocked. So, on the third hand, we have the strategic approach known as neoconservatism, which views a truly realistic foreign policy as one guided by some long-range and general principles, such as democracy, the rule of law, and individual rights. Contrary to popular leftist opinion, this doesn't imply a policy of belligerent intervention and nation building in states that lack those principles now (except under exceptional conditions, where alternatives are worse), but instead a policy of positive encouragement and help, in a long-term effort to build a bottom-up world order chacteristized by peace and mutual prosperity.

Now, as I indicated, I don't hold out much hope that Obama even understands these kinds of distinctions -- not because he's stupid, but simply because his whole background indicates a kind of can't-we-all-just-get-along foreign policy naivete at best, and a lefty, America as the real "evil empire" mind set at worst. See this post summarizing Kenneth Anderson's take on the present Administration's underlying foreign policy assumptions for a more nuanced, but no less skeptical, analysis. But it would be nice to think that, regardless of the label used, and notwithstanding the forum in which they were uttered, words like these had some real "neoconservative" substance behind them:

The idea is a simple one -- that freedom, justice and peace for the world must begin with freedom, justice, and peace in the lives of individual human beings. And for the United States, this is a matter of moral and pragmatic necessity. As Robert Kennedy said, "the individual man, the child of God, is the touchstone of value, and all society, groups, the state, exist for his benefit." So we stand up for universal values because it's the right thing to do. But we also know from experience that those who defend these values for their people have been our closest friends and allies, while those who have denied those rights -- whether terrorist groups or tyrannical governments -- have chosen to be our adversaries....

...experience shows us that history is on the side of liberty; that the strongest foundation for human progress lies in open economies, open societies, and open governments. To put it simply, democracy, more than any other form of government, delivers for our citizens. And I believe that truth will only grow stronger in a world where the borders between nations are blurred.

Among the eco-fans

2010-10-04T10:43:00.000-07:00

Where it's important to remember that "fan" is short for "fanatic".

First up, of course, has to be that demented ad for something called the "10:10 climate change campaign" in Britain. Apparently, it was thought that showing warmist believers in positions of authority blowing minority skeptics, including school children, to bloody bits would be funny. Which, in terms of the comedy of stupidity, it kind of is, but not in the way intended. Anyway, here's a link to the original (hastily taken down by the 10:10 campaign itself, but not hastily enough to prevent it going viral). And here's a re-mix, which nicely exposes the murderous rectitude at its base:

Thanks to Hot Air

The next stop doesn't have quite the impact of the previous, and at least doesn't pretend that it's "funny" -- it's a post by Doctor Science at Obsidian Wings, entitled "Of Stink Bugs and Men". It's point is simply that human beings, in coming out of Africa, are an "invasive" species, like, oh, stink bugs, kudzu, or cane toads. Never mind that the nasty examples mentioned are nasty only in a human-centered orientation in the first first place, nor that every single land animal is also an "invasive" species, nor that the "invasion" of new ecological spaces is a natural aspect of evolution for every species that ever existed -- no, what's intended by this particular observation is just a variation on the common theme in the large pathological wing of eco-ideology, that human beings are a "cancer on the planet". As the Doctor says:

The overwhelming factor, for H. sapiens as well as stink bugs, is that our native range is adapted to us -- humans or bugs become dangerously invasive when we can escape not just the limited space of our native range, but the constraints on our population that come from other co-native species: predators or parasites (including diseases).

Thanks to Megan McArdle

If we strip the pathology from this, though, it becomes more interesting -- human beings became successful, in an evolutionary sense, when we escaped the constraints of our initial environment and began to colonize wider spaces, following retreating glaciers into environments that must have seemed impossibly harsh in comparison to our origins. The courage and drive of those early "invaders" can provide us with a good lesson now -- having spread to all corners of the globe, isn't it time that we start to look beyond it? Those who look upon humanity as a kind of stink bug or cancer, of course, would say no.

I'd say yes.

Tide going out?

2010-10-01T10:37:00.000-07:00

It's looking that way -- the tide of statism, that is. There are signs that it may have reached its high-water mark sometime in the 70's of the last century, and has been slowly receding since -- lower marginal tax rates, privatization initiatives, deregulation, etc. And, of course, the momentous collapse of "actually existing" socialism in the early 90's. In the midst of history, as we always are, it can be difficult to see real turning points, and there have certainly been some big waves washing in to obscure the trend. But as we now watch even the welfare states of Europe begin to step back from the path they'd been following, as though from an abyss (to mix metaphors a little), it's increasingly difficult to avoid seeing what's before us. The latest example may be that Nanny State bellwether, Sweden, as an article by Duncan Currie, "Sweden's Quiet Revolution", indicates:

The broader story of the 2010 election is the collapse of Sweden’s old political order, which was dominated by the Social Democrats (who held power for all but nine years and a few months between September 1932 and October 2006). “There is a general change in Swedish society,” Stockholm University political scientist Jenny Madestam told the New York Times prior to the vote. “Social-democratic ideas are losing their grip on Sweden, and we are getting more and more individualistic.” Indeed, the country is a far more market-friendly place today than it was 20 years ago, thanks in part to reforms implemented by the Social Democrats themselves. Over the past two decades, it has been one of Western Europe’s most energetic liberalizers — cutting taxes, loosening regulatory shackles, and increasing competition.

This is what gives the left -- liberal, green, anti-capitalist, or "progressive" -- such willies. For some time now they've had to pin their dwindling hopes not on their ideas, which even they recognize as a bit old and stale, if not sclerotic, but on things like demographics -- more immigration! -- or, or, maybe a great big capitalist crisis! And so, when a great big capitalist crisis (GBCC) came along, as they routinely do, imagine the relief and even exhilaration of the left -- especially as, in the US, it coincided with not just the first black president but with the first black "progressive" President!

Little wonder, then, at their confusion, consternation, and bitterness now, when they see that even a GBCC doesn't seem to be able to turn the tide.

P.S.: here's an earlier take on the bellwether.

UPDATE: Oh, and for a little more on the greens (green being the new red for many old lefties who can't quite bring themselves to say the word "socialism" anymore), here's a piece by Johnathan Adler, "The Sorry Green Giant", showing how much of the politicized environmental movement has been taken over by an ideological rump of displaced anti-capitalists, with the result that that movement too is experiencing the ebbing of trust and interest we see in projects to expand the state everywhere:

The environmentalist love affair with big government leads to counterproductive policies and alienates large portions of the electorate. Americans may support environmental protection, but they don’t support a massive, overweening regulatory state. If the only Green answer to ecological concerns is yet more government control of private economic activity, many Americans will turn away.

This year the environmental movement suffered a tremendous political defeat — some would even call it a reckoning.

Versions of the state

2010-09-29T20:19:00.000-07:00

Brad DeLong has a "reaction essay" entitled ""Perhaps. And Sometimes.", to Scott's Seeing Like a State recap discussed in the previous post. What he's reacting to is Scott's contention that the state's interest in so-called "legibility" as a means of ensuring state control comes at a cost to local or vernacular knowledge, systems, and practices, and is therefore often oppressive. Using a classical example, DeLong makes a good point that the control such legibility enables may well be preferable to an alternative in which local lords and warlords become much more oppressive than the central government. But, just as Scott tried to overextend his argument re: standardization, so DeLong overextends his good point -- as he puts it in the terms Scott uses:

A state that makes civil society legible to itself cannot protect us from its own fits of ideological terror, or even clumsy thumb-fingeredness. A state to which civil society is illegible cannot help curb roving bandits or local notables. And neither type of state has proved terribly effective at constraining its own functionaries.

In some ways, the “night watchman” state — the state that enables civil society to develop and function without distortions imposed by roving bandits, local notables, and its own functionaries, but that also is content to simply sit back and watch civil society — is the most powerful and unlikely state of all.

Translating that into more common terminology, he's saying that there are only two likely versions of the state available to us -- either a non-intrusive but weak version (i.e., what's usually called a "failed" state today) or a strong but intrusive, and frequently oppressive, version. But this rather bleak set of binary alternatives is really just an illusion resulting from flattening all versions of the state into a 1-dimensional spectrum, from weak to strong. In reality there are many other dimensions -- states can range along an autocratic to democratic spectrum, for example, and there can be weak or strong versions at either end. They can also vary along a constitutional to tyrannical dimension, and again display weak or strong, autocratic or democratic versions at either extreme. And once we see that there are more than two possible versions of the state, we can see our way out of the trade-off between freedom and safety that DeLong presents. We can see, for example, that a limited state is not the same as a weak state -- i.e., that there's no inherent reason a state needs to be oppressive itself in order to control and suppress local oppressors.

What DeLong seems really to be talking about is just the perennial tendency toward oppression by rulers everywhere, whatever the scope of their rule -- which is certainly both an old problem and a current one. But that's only to say that the work to achieve, defend, and extend human freedom is as perennial as the efforts to oppress it. In our day, that work takes the form of upholding a version of the state that does indeed, as DeLong indicates, enable civil society without at the same time disabling it through bureaucratic intrusions. It's called making progress.

Standardization: state vs. capitalist

2010-09-28T20:18:00.000-07:00

James C. Scott, author of the well-received Seeing Like a State, has an interesting lead essay on Cato Unbound a while back, entitled "The Trouble with the View from Above", which largely recaps the argument of his book. Briefly, that argument is that states, in their efforts to improve what he calls "legibility", tend to introduce and enforce various forms of "standardization" to societies -- in names, measures, practices, and so on -- which, in ignoring or overriding local or "vernacular" knowledge and practices, can and often does result in considerable social damage. Legibility -- meaning being able to see what people are actually doing -- is important to states (or, more concretely, to state rulers) because without it they lack the means to control the society effectively -- especially, of course, to tax, but also to regulate, commandeer, and administer. So this is what he means by "seeing like a state".

Now, this argument in itself is an excellent one, and he develops it with an impressive and fascinating attention to detail and concrete example. The problem is that he tries to carry it too far -- into an argument dealing not just with state-enforced standardization but with standardization as such, and particularly with what he calls "large-scale capitalist" standardization. As he says at the end:

... large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state, with the difference that, for capitalists, simplification must pay. The profit motive compels a level of simplification and tunnel vision that, if anything, is more heroic that the early scientific forest of Germany. In this respect, the conclusions I draw from the failures of modern social engineering are as applicable to market-driven standardization as they are to bureaucratic homogeneity.

This, I think, is just mistaken -- in a number of ways, but in one important and interesting way in particular. To deal with some of the other ways first, it's a mistake to ignore the difference between the state and the capitalist firm in the purpose or use of standardization -- for the former, it's primarily for the purposes of control, with obvious potential for abuse; for the latter, primarily for efficiency, with just as obvious potential for benefit. It's also wrong in its focus on standardization as such as the problem rather than on state-enforcement, which latter really does override and often suppress vernacular practices rather than co-exist with them.Whereas standards that are used or even prevail not because they've been imposed but because their general efficiency or even "legibility" make them generally attractive, to individuals as well as to firms and states, and often in conjunction with other local systems and practices, are real improvements, and not just in the state's ability to collect taxes. And the routine academic disdain for the "profit motive" here seems merely simple-minded prejudice, especially since, as I'll get to, it may well be that motive that requires more rather than less attention be paid to local knowledge, preferences and the like.

Which leads me to the more interesting aspect of his error. He's right that large-scale capitalist enterprises generally foster standardization, and even impose it where they have property rights to do so, since this is really an aspect of their scale itself -- that is, the competitive advantage of their size lies precisely in the efficiencies that widespread standardization brings, allowing them to provide goods at a lower cost than smaller, more local rivals can. But cost is not the only economic variable, and in becoming dependent on standardization (among other problems of size or scale), this is also the source of their primary disadvantage. This is because, without being able to impose standardization in the way states can, such large-scale enterprises are vulnerable to other, typically smaller and more local or regional competitors that can make use of local knowledge, cater to more particular tastes, and/or accommodate vernacular practices -- that is, in other ways than raw cost, small is not just beautiful, it's typically more flexible, adaptable, and nimble. The economic landscape everywhere, in other words, is a fractal one, with a few large entities competing more or less stably at one end of the scale, innumerable small start-ups constantly appearing and disappearing at the other end, and all manner of enterprises of mixed sizes and durability in between, all existing in just those vernacular niches that the large-scale firms have had to neglect in order to achieve their standardization efficiencies.

And all of this is driven by the so-called "profit motive", which requires not just minimizing costs but also maximizing the quality of service and/or goods at the same time. Contrast that with the control motives of the state, and it becomes apparent why capitalist and statist standardization are radically different phenomena, with quite different consequences for society.

Pilgrimages of the left

2010-09-27T15:08:00.000-07:00

Ed Driscoll:
Springtime for Algore: A Romantic Pilgrimage to Germany’s ‘Eco–Anschluss’

A nice, brief encapsulation of the history of various neuroses associated with the contemporary liberal-left, from bogus, pathetic religiosity to a fascination with whatever version of Big State power and planning is the current fad -- Soviet-style communism, Mussolini-style fascism, Nazi-style architectural theatricality, or the latest Green-style invasion of everyday life.The latter is displayed in the breathless prose of a travel piece in a glossy airline mag, on Berlin of all places, the city involved in every loopy utopian swamp of the century past -- an article that gushes about the city's "anti-consumption ethic", for example, adding that piquant hint of a moral sensibility for its affluent readers, amid the ads for dream trips, hot hotels, and ultimate travel picks.

Thanks to Kate at SDA

The modern future: brain prostheses

2010-09-27T09:59:00.000-07:00

See MIT's Technology Review: Brain Coprocessors.

Now, this has some disturbing aspects, I won't deny -- particularly if you couple it with some of the latest schemes coming out of DARPA. But the fact is that we're already well along the path toward the integration of organic and mechanical, as we learn to attach devices to nerve endings, provide paraplegics with exoskeletons, and so forth -- and so far, no Borg-like "assimilation" seems imminent.

What's intriguing about the idea of a brain prosthesis is just the way it refocuses what's been happening for some time now anyway, with the Internet in general, Google in particular -- something foreseen perhaps in the title of Vannevar Bush's famous and prescient essay 60 some years ago: "As We May Think". Consider, for example, how we do think now when we're trying to remember something -- we know we know it, we just don't have it, and we typically perform a kind of algorithmic search of our memory's contents by riffling through as many associations with "it" as we can think of, hoping that this will flush out other associations, one of which will be the "it" we're looking for. And now consider how quickly we -- or at least I -- resort to Google to do much the same process for us, whenever we're at a keyboard -- typing in some random associations with a term or concept we're looking for, and letting Google flush out the thing itself, which it so often does with an ease and accuracy that we can't match. We don't need brain-reading helmets, in other words, to experience this extension of memory into the cloud of the global network. And when you think, too, of how we're not only internalizing that cloud, we're also externalizing more and more of our selves -- our memories, thoughts, wants, dreams, activities, etc. -- in the burgeoning social networks of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc., then it becomes apparent we're already engaged in a cultural process that is tending to blur the boundaries between self and environment, mental and physical, internal and external worlds.

It took a while for people to become reconciled to the idea that human beings were just another species of animal. But ever since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, at least, and from Metropolis to the Terminator flics, we've been culturally haunted by a fear of the machine vs. the human. Ironic if we're now being gradually forced to the conclusion that that distinction too is dissolving. This post on "explanatory models" has more.

States, guns, and legitimacy

2010-09-26T10:15:00.000-07:00

See Kevin D. Williamson, Exchequer vs. Economist, on the distinguishing feature of states as social institutions:

Socialist or otherwise, all states finally rest on force: You decline to participate in whatever is the Netherlands’ version of serving the community through the instrument of the state long enough, they send a guy to your house with a gun to seize your stuff or haul you off to jail; resist and there will be violence. That’s what states do, and it is not necessarily illegitimate.

The resort to violence is what makes the question of what kind of things it is legitimate for states to do an important moral concern. It seems to me perfectly reasonable to shove a gun in somebody’s face to stop him murdering, raping, or robbing. It seems to me entirely unreasonable to shove a gun in somebody’s face to extort from him money to fund a project to get monkeys high on cocaine. Those seem to me fairly reasonable distinctions. It is illegitimate for government to use force or the threat of force for projects that are not inherently public in character.

By itself, of course, this last isn't that good a criterion for state legitimacy, since people will always try to argue that their pet project is indeed "inherently public in character". But Williamson sharpens the criterion a little later:

... I would like to make it clear that I am not indulging in a figure of speech: I think it’s a pretty useful heuristic: If you’re not willing to have somebody hauled off at gunpoint over the project, then it’s probably not a legitimate concern of the state.

Which is at least an interesting rule of thumb, particularly as a reminder of the violence that lies at the basis of the state as such.

Economists as witch doctors

2010-09-24T19:58:00.000-07:00

An interesting answer to the question of why economists -- specifically "macroeconomists", or what used to be called "political economists" -- are used by policy makers at all, when their predictions, obtained at some considerable cost, are no better than those of a "trained parrot": see "Ask a Trained Parrot", at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, which refers to a study here (PDF). Since their theories and models are of little use in actually determining outcomes, in other words, why bother with them at all? Answer:

Much of what government does is about signaling and allocating status, not about doing any actual good. But to get the process started, we have to signal the professionalism and the integrity of the government — its objectivity; its science....

Second, we have to signal that certain groups are valued and loved by the government — farmers, auto companies, large foreign financial institutions, Pakistan — and here we hit a problem. How do we do it?...

Enter the macroeconomists. Anthropologically, they act as soothsayers, interpreting the random walk of experienced history (and experienced favoritism) as part of an eternal cycle, only dimly seen, of transcendent justice — understood, à la Rawls, as fairness, or à l’Hayek, as conforming with abstract, impersonal rules. The latter being harder, but only by a little.

And usually understood, I'll add myself, as a mixture of Rawls and Hayek, or as conforming with "fair rules".

(Note that, in substituting witch doctors for soothsayers in this post's title, I mean no disrespect to the former. Just thought that it made the point even clearer.)

How will we know when we're in the future?

2010-09-23T17:17:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who used to think it would be when cars all had gull-wing doors -- an early fan of the DeLorean, obviously. There are the other familiar signs and markers, of course -- glass-domed cities, rocket back-packs, "blasters", robots, and so on -- but for a while there it was really the car that seemed to be the key to the future, embodying it in its very shape, tail fins promising the personal flyer that was just around the corner....

I don't think anybody, not even Vannevar Bush, thought that the future would be when people walk around talking into the air and carrying on conversations with people hundreds of miles away, or thumb words into little hand-held keypads to communicate with dozens of people at a time, or routinely look up maps, menus, sales, books, or general information on small screens they carry about with them. All of which is good, definitely, and might have been even magical back when cars were only hinting at the future ... but still, it just doesn't feel like this is really the future yet, does it? Cars look fine now, in fact better in more functional ways than they did back then, but they don't seem to carry a promise anymore.

Okay, I'm just being nostalgic (and giving away my age in the process). There's still a future out there -- Moore's Law still has a way to go and we haven't even started on quantum computing yet, there's still space (again), domed cities might yet happen, nanotech, supersonic trains, and of course that crescendo of all futures, the Singularity (which should always come with Twilight Zone music attached), are all coming at us. There's still the thrilling possibility of apocalypse too, though climate change or Peak Oil doesn't have quite the cachet that Global Thermonuclear War did back in the tail fin days. And ~~Marxists~~ anti-capitalists can still dream of a future that isn't just Later-still Capitalism. But is it just me, or is there something lacking in the present-day future -- a vision, perhaps, a hope, even a kind of warmth?

Maybe it is just me. Who cares -- here's to the "Cars of Future Passed"!

Thanks especially to Brian Wang at NextBigFuture

Some non-hysterical takes on the Tea Party phenomenon

2010-09-23T10:49:00.000-07:00

The elites, left and right, tend increasingly to flip-flop between alarm and condescension toward the Tea Party thing, with a big dollop of bafflement as well, all of which gets churned into a rising mass of anxiety. Well, they've got their status to worry about, after all. For everybody else, here are a few links that have come up recently that look at the phenomenon a little more calmly:

First up is Johnathan Rauch's now well-known article in the National Journal, "How Tea Party Organizes Without National Leaders", with the sub-title, "By embracing radical decentralization, Tea Party activists intend to re-write the rule book on political organizing". It's a look, in other words, at exactly the aspect of the Tea Party that so upsets the various political, media, and cultural gatekeepers -- that they're going around the gates, over the walls. And here's the key point:

As for the objection that headless groups are bad at negotiating and strategizing and leveraging influence, the Tea Party Patriots' answer underscores the unconventionality of their thinking: We don't care....

... tea partiers say, if you think moving votes and passing bills are what they are really all about, you have not taken the full measure of their ambition. No, the real point is to change the country's political culture, bending it back toward the self-reliant, liberty-guarding instincts of the Founders' era.

Next is a piece by P.J. O'Rourke in World Affairs: "Innocence Abroad: the Tea Party's Search for Foreign Policy". The gist of which is that the movement doesn't really have much of a foreign policy, which is perhaps unsurprising given its decentralized nature described by Rauch and its focus on shrinking government. But O'Rourke's article is nonetheless an interesting portrait of this "centerless swarm" on a more concrete level, and his final words, echoed by Glenn Reynolds, from whom I found the link, are exactly right:

If the Tea Party movement, so-called, achieves “small, effective government with low taxes and free enterprise,” America will be a much richer nation. A much richer nation will have a much more powerful foreign policy, whether it means to or wants to or not.

And finally a video, with thanks to Dr. Helen, aka the Instawife (and featuring the InstaOne himself, giving a quick history):

In the face of this movement, the left is reduced to bigoted insults and an increasingly hysterical and meaningless "I see racists" refrain, and the establishment right to a confused, bewildered mix of condescension, mockery, and attempts at co-optation. And, on top of that, there's the usual mix of special-interest, agenda-driven opportunists or genuine nutballs that are attracted like flies to anything with this sort of energy. But all of that seems like a mere buzzing distraction at this point, beneath which lies the simple but difficult aim that O'Rourke quotes from a participant: "small, effective government with low taxes and free enterprise".

News flash: people's circumstances a result of their own efforts!

2010-09-22T16:28:00.000-07:00

I'm indebted once again to that rightside-up Aussie, Tim Blair, for another gem (two in a row!): "Mining tax row 'reflects changed values'". It's short but it's very sweet, and works on so many levels, as Homer would say. The reporter here has dug up a "professor of public ethics", no less, who's unhappy that the Aussie government is abandoning a proposed "super-profits tax", a proposal that was one of the reasons for a surge of support for the center-right just a short time before an election that nearly cost the young Labour government its life. Speaking to a -- get this -- Happiness and Wellbeing at Work conference, he says that "the controversy is indicative of a belief among Australians that people's circumstances are a result of their own efforts, and that rich people deserve to be rich". I mean, can you imagine!? How could Australians ever have sunk so low! And where could they have got such notions?? Do the octopus arms of Beck-Palin-Limbaugh (and now maybe O'Donnell, and not the Rosy one) reach all the way to the other side of the world?!

Well, I wouldn't doubt that last. But the good professor has a more limited, if less satisfying, explanation: "'we are much more tolerant of inequality than we used to be'", apparently. "But societies that were more equal were happier, he said". Sure is a head-scratcher. Maybe Australians are happier being unhappy, or something.

Or, of course, maybe they, like the Tea Party in America, and similar popular movements everywhere, are seeing the bovine stupidity and moral obtuseness that have long characterized the culturati for what they are, and are finally just blowing them off. Which would certainly give the elite, at least, a real reason to be unhappy.

George Monbiot is down in the dumps

2010-09-22T10:23:00.000-07:00

And no wonder -- here's a professional alarmist, who writes alarmist books and numerous alarmist columns, delivers alarmist speeches, and generally makes a good living* by striving to alarm everyone, who is now waking up to the fact that his ride is over. As the title of his latest effort says, "Climate change enlightenment was fun while it lasted. But now it's dead" (with accompanying tear-drop from melting ice -- not quite as aww-inspiring as the lost polar bear, but similar):

Perhaps we [environmentalists] should have made people feel better about their lives. Or worse. Perhaps we should have done more to foster hope. Or despair. Perhaps we were too fixated on grand visions. Or techno-fixes. Perhaps we got too close to business. Or not close enough. The truth is that there is not and never was a strategy certain of success, as the powers ranged against us have always been stronger than we are.

Pretty depressing stuff, no? A last ditch effort to stir up the remaining True Believers, do you think? Are the concluding words maybe hinting at some more drastic action?:

All I know is that we must stop dreaming about an institutional response that will never materialise and start facing a political reality we've sought to avoid. The conversation starts here.

Might George be turning revolutionary?

Oh, probably not. More likely, as the first comment on the column indicates, he's just casting about for a new bandwagon, another scare. The comments themselves are interesting, by the way -- half seem made up of symbolic hair-shirt types who feel bad about their own wasteful ways and are frustrated that everybody else doesn't share their neuroses; the other half people fed up with Monbiot's Chicken-Little alarmism, and basically telling him to get over himself.

Two additional points:
First, I got this link from Tim Blair, who does a better, more thorough job on Monbiot than I do. And second, for those sincerely and practically concerned about real climate change -- as opposed to those who are merely signalling their status as evolved, spiritual beings or whatever -- there are a large number of actions other than immediate emission curbs that can and will be brought to bear, without the hysteria, over time. One of the more interesting, for example, is the idea of carbon re-cycling, mentioned in this earlier post.

(* I don't actually know how good a living Monbiot makes, admittedly, but if it's any significant fraction of fellow eco-crusader AlGore, he's making out just fine.)

The spooking of the elite

2010-09-21T18:27:00.000-07:00

A specter has been haunting the elites for a while now, of course, largely in the form of Sarah Palin -- she who will not go quietly into obscurity as they expected. It wasn't just that -- it was the frightening fact that every nail they tried to put into her coffin only seemed to give her extra strength, as though she were some unearthly, vampiric Barbie. And now, with the advent of the Palin look-alike Christine O'Donnell, not only is she growing in power, she's multiplying! Elite reps in the media have had to take their eyes off of Palin for the moment and execute a swift pivot to O'Donnell, but still without any other weapon at their disposal than repeated exercises in pointing out just how terribly, ridiculously, unfashionably non-elite she is. We can get a sense of their rising panic from noting the strain of their reach in a couple of recent examples.

First up is William Saletan in Slate, on "Christine O'Donnell, masturbation socialist". Saletan notes that O'Donnell is against socialism and then notes that 14 years ago, when O'Donnell was 27, she also expressed an opinion contrary to masturbation. Which last might be a bit silly, but, as Saletan is at least honest enough to note, was also merely echoing the teaching of a major faith. What is truly silly, on the other hand, is Saletan's vein-popping stretch to link anti-masturbation with socialism -- how does he do that, you ask? Watch:

In other words [paraphrasing O'Donnell], masturbation is wrong because you do it alone, outside the "moral order" of social relations in which you're supposed to perform your proper function. It's something you do for yourself instead of "giving" yourself to the larger purpose of human procreation. You're just a cog in the wheel. You exist to serve the community.

Oooookayy. I get it. So because you oppose the state treating you like "a cog in the wheel", you should logically be opposed to any moral claim of the community, right? Ross Douthat, who provided me with the link in "Why We Have a Culture War", takes this down at far greater length than the simple guffaw it deserves.

The other one is also from Slate, a quick little potshot that, while it can't match Saletan for silliness (which would make a nice slogan of some sort), outdoes him in catty pettiness. It's about that other O'Donnell find:

... the thing I can't get past about Christine O'Donnell's assertion that she tried witchcraft is the way in which she describes her experimentation with it. What she said--twice--was that she "dabbled into witchcraft." Can we just point out for the record that you don't dabble "into" witchcraft, you dabble in it?

It's funny enough that she takes this seriously, as though no one else garbles the language, even twice, in the midst of an interview, but what really shows the tension is her sudden thought that, ... what, ... what if she planned this?! "I guess O'Donnell could have deliberately inserted a casual malaprop to enhance her populist appeal and distinguish herself from the nitpicking media elite, but she said this long enough ago that it doesn't seem purposeful." It's a nerve-wracking thought though, right? As Ann Althouse says (for whose link I must give thanks), "Hey! What if these rubes are just pretending to be rubes?"

Ah well. This is what gives an atheist like me such delight in Sarah and Christine and their ilk -- not just for the nature of their enemies, but for the confounding fear they inspire in the fashionably orthodox.

"Social justice" vs. "just society"

2010-09-18T10:59:00.000-07:00

(Note: this is largely a re-post from another, earlier blog, which I'm putting up here as a reference point for another discussion in that site of useful, and occasionally illuminating, error and confusion, Crooked Timber -- in this case a post there on "Should we fight for 'Social Justice'?")

In a much earlier post I suggested that, after making allowance for some Hayekian skepticism regarding the phrase, the concept of "social justice" might be interpreted in a broader sense than the usual blanket rationale for left-liberal state confiscations and distributions. There, and borrowing from another post, I called this broader context a "just society".

Now it's plausible, and interesting, to think of those two notions as strongly related, if not synonymous -- wouldn't "social justice" prevail, after all, in a "just society"? And it's also enjoyable to see how, as the original article relating to the Tea Party movement pointed out, the latter notion either forces an enlargement of the meaning of "social justice", or forces the partisan narrowness of the concept out into the open. But it's also possible, and maybe instructive, to consider the two notions as distinct in an important way. The notion of justice that's contained in the phrase "social justice" is the notion of a just end or condition of society, in which everyone receives exactly what's due him or her, and is maintained in this condition. The notion contained in the phrase "just society", on the other hand, is the notion of a just structure or framework for society, within which everyone is free to act as they see fit and obtain what they're able and willing to.

This is a familiar enough distinction, perhaps, but laying out the alternatives in this way I think helps make clear some of the oddities and difficulties inherent in the "social justice" view. First, how are we to determine just what is "due" to a particular individual, or even to some grouping of individuals? Second, even if we could determine this, how are we to ensure that individuals actually get what they're due, and no more than they're due? Third, even if we can make this sort of "just" distribution once, how are we going to ensure that everything stays just, as people go about their daily lives? It would certainly help if we had a divine perch from which to look down on and into the lives of individuals to determine what was each their due, and then a divine power to dispense or distribute goods, like Santa Claus at Christmas, as well as to reach into their lives on an ongoing basis so as to maintain this just distribution. Note that, for reasons not obvious, luck, whether good or bad, is typically regarded by "social justice" proponents as unjust or at least somehow lacking in justice -- usually they'd eliminate luck if they could. Lacking that godlike perch and power, though, "social justice" proponents tend to fall back on the simple notion of dividing the available goods equally, regardless of merit, character, motive, choice, etc., -- not to mention right -- and relying on the tax man and other state bureaucrats in lieu of God to enforce this rough state of "justice". In the real world, of course, few such proponents any longer think it's possible to impose such an absolute egalitarianism -- there aren't many real communists left. But that simply means, in practice, that they'll always be striving to impose their notion of "social justice" by determining who's "deserving" and who's not (who's been naughty and who's been nice) and then taking from the latter to give to the former.

All of which, stepping back from it, should make it clear that the notion of "social justice" as some sort of just end state or condition of human society really is a mirage, the pursuit of which is folly. And, worse than that, it's also wrong, or unjust in itself. Because we're not God or gods, nor are our political representatives, nor the bureaucrats they appoint, and the pretence that anyone can determine what is justly due everyone is nonsensical and arrogant.

"Justice", however, as a form or structure rather than as a substantive condition is quite another matter. In this sense, justice consists of a set of fair or just rules for behavior, within the limits of which the varying human situations are all equally just, regardless of condition. This doesn't mean that we should do nothing about such varying conditions -- justice isn't the only human virtue, after all, but is only one among such others as mercy, compassion, and love. But, unlike the way in which "social justice" often subverts virtue, the "just society" is one that provides a foundation and structure for the exercise of virtue.

Something is happening here, but --

2010-09-17T20:30:00.000-07:00

-- do we know what it is?

Here's Chris "Tingle" Matthews giving his usual calm and sober assessment:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Now, actually David Corn, perhaps not surprisingly, makes the more substantial, even if obvious, point that it's quite a different matter for the Tea party insurgents to take on Democrats in a general election than establishment Republicans in primaries. So I'm not at all convinced that November will be quite the electoral upheaval that many are predicting. And if the economy turns around in the next year or so, which it may well do, then 2012 will likely see an Obama second term as well.

But regardless of short term outcomes for partisan politics, there is unquestionably something quite startling in this widespread phenomenon of non-elite outsiders suddenly breaking loose from the control of their established gatekeepers -- a phenomenon in which a comment on Facebook can have greater effect than a New York Times editorial. And this effect is working on a deeper level than party politics, a kind of tectonic level on which the parties themselves merely float. What its ultimate effect will be, of course, remains to be seen, but the Tea Party and those riding its coattails have already had an effect on the American body politic the like of which we haven't seen in some while.

Here's excitable Chris again, summing up:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII, though, was not taking it sitting down at his morning's grapefruit:

"Gentlemen, at long last it is time to draw a line in the sand," I announced. "For too long we have stood by idly while these insipid cretins - the Palins, the Limbaughs, the Becks - have run roughshod over our once proud party, making it a mockery and ruining our social standing, advancing the insane notion that years of Washington experience and good breeding are somehow trumped by idiotic pledges to dismantle the very government on which their very existence depends. Well, my friends, I say unto you, with this Delaware disaster they have gone a bridge too far. Today we begin the counterattack, and we will make it plain to the insurrectionists that they shan't see another dime of our inheritances."

The polite huzzahs and claps emanating from the speaker-phone indicated to me that my call to arms was striking a chord within the heart of traditional Republicanism.

Mr. Jones himself was unavailable for comment.

Thanks to Neo-neocon, NewsBusters, and Instapundit

UPDATE: See also this from A. P. Stoddard, on The Hill, "Tea Party's already won":

What debuted in nationwide protests on April 15, 2009, has taken less than 18 months to become the current driving force in American politics. The Tea Party insurgency will not only cost Democrats dozens of seats in Congress, and likely their majority — it will define the coming GOP presidential nominating process, determine the direction of the GOP for years to come and threaten any remaining plans Obama has for sweeping reforms of education, energy policy or our immigration system.

Thanks to Itzik

In the wake of the primaries: the real American debate

2010-09-16T21:36:00.000-07:00

This is actually a debate that's been going on for a while now, but the Republican primaries have brought it into the open in a way it really hasn't been previously. For one thing, virtually the whole of the liberal-left, including the whole of the Democratic Party, has been, and remains, largely irrelevant to it. Perhaps out of shock at how quickly what looked like their epochal 2008 victory has dissipated, or exhaustion trying to defend widely disliked legislation on healthcare and the stimulus, they've been stuck in a purely reactive mode for a long time now, reduced to little more than making repetitive charges of racism.

But some of that has been mirrored on the conservative-right as well, as we see the old conservative and Republican establishments, concerned to retain their tolerated niches within the liberal elite, making condescending, even sneering remarks about, e.g., the Tea Party phenomenon or the Palin-Beck-Limbaugh triumvirate. The Tuesday primaries, though, may have been enough of a shock to that establishment that they're finally realizing they need to actually confront the upstarts on an intellectual plane. In any case, we can see David Brooks (one of the "two mighty Davids of conservative intellect") now trying to make an argument, as opposed to a snark, in favor of what he calls "limited but energetic government". He doesn't do much of a job explaining just what that is (he uses FDR's New Deal as an example), or how it might differ from the liberal-left's simpler "energetic government" -- but, hey, at least he's putting some cards on the table.

What makes his attempt particularly interesting, though, is that you can see the other side quite plainly -- it's a piece in the Wall Street Journal by Arthur C. Brooks and Paul Ryan, the latter one of the lights of the Republican Party, accurately entitled "The Size of Government and the Choice This Fall". Unlike Brooks, in other words, they clearly sound the "choice not an echo" theme, and moreover, they focus this choice on exactly the right issue -- the size of government. Here's where you can see the contrast between David Brooks' efforts to obscure that issue, and theirs to clarify it -- first Brooks' almost comic litany of despair:

The social fabric is fraying. Human capital is being squandered. Society is segmenting. The labor markets are ill. Wages are lagging. Inequality is increasing. The nation is overconsuming and underinnovating. China and India are surging. Not all of these challenges can be addressed by the spontaneous healing powers of the market.

The last statement is tacked on as an article of faith, I suppose, and he gives no indication that at least some of his "challenges" might be due to the inadvertent infecting powers of the state (and some might not necessarily even be seen as "challenges"). Ryan and the other Brooks, on the other hand, present alternatives in a fairly straightforward way:

Data support the proposition that Americans like generous government programs and don't want to lose them. So while 70% of Americans told pollsters at the Pew Research Center in 2009 they agreed that "people are better off in a free market economy, even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time," large majorities favor keeping our social insurance programs intact. This leads conventional thinkers to claim that a welfare state is what we truly want, regardless of whether or not we mouth platitudes about "freedom" and "entrepreneurship."

But these claims miss the point. What we must choose is our aspiration, not whether we want to zero out the state. Nobody wants to privatize the Army or take away Grandma's Social Security check. Even Friedrich Hayek in his famous book, "The Road to Serfdom," reminded us that the state has legitimate—and critical—functions, from rectifying market failures to securing some minimum standard of living.

However, finding the right level of government for Americans is simply impossible unless we decide which ideal we prefer: a free enterprise society with a solid but limited safety net, or a cradle-to-grave, redistributive welfare state. Most Americans believe in assisting those temporarily down on their luck and those who cannot help themselves, as well as a public-private system of pensions for a secure retirement. But a clear majority believes that income redistribution and government care should be the exception and not the rule.

What's key to the above is the idea that what needs to be decided upon is an aspiration or aim, and this is what Reihan Salam, in a short article that compares the two essays above and tries to play peace-maker, focuses upon as well:

Politics is not always about highly technical debates concerning progressive price indexing. It is often about shaping our shared normative understandings, and, as Ryan and Brooks argue in their Wall Street Journal essay, our shared aspirations for the kind of society we’d like to live in. And on those grounds, at least, Ryan and Brooks are offering an attractive alternative to a society that looks first to the federal government to solve problems.

Salam, I think, tries to keep a foot in both worlds -- conservative establishment, and Tea Partyish insurgents -- but in this article we can maybe see his weight starting to shift. In any case, though, the engagement of all three pieces in real and far-reaching political themes is at least an indication of the kind of thoughtful ferment taking place on the right now, in marked contrast to the left.

Sizes

2010-09-15T20:22:00.000-07:00

Donno what it's called, but this is very cool, intriguing, and fun.

Each circle on the screen is larger or smaller than the next by a factor of a thousand or 3 orders of magnitude. The ends, I think, are somewhat (maybe very) speculative. And notice the huge distance between the small end and the nearest theoretical structure. I liked especially to see the range of cells, and then of suns.

Thanks to Phil Bowermaster at Speculist

Why Hayek is not a conservative, again

2010-09-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

This is an exercise in comparison, suggested by a Kenneth Anderson post on Volokh, in which the following passage from Burke's Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs is first quoted:

Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform. Parents may not be consenting to their moral relation; but consenting or not, they are bound to a long train of burthensome duties towards those with whom they have never made a convention of any sort. Children are not consenting to their relation, but their relation, without their actual consent, binds them to its duties; or rather it implies their consent because the presumed consent of every rational creature is in unison with the predisposed order of things. Men come in that manner into a community with the social state of their parents, endowed with all the benefits, loaded with all the duties of their situation. If the social ties and ligaments, spun out of those physical relations which are the elements of the commonwealth, in most cases begin, and always continue, independently of our will, so without any stipulation, on our part, are we bound by that relation called our country, which comprehends (as it has been well said) “all the charities of all.” Nor are we left without powerful instincts to make this duty as dear and grateful to us, as it is awful and coercive.

And then the question of whether or not it's "consistent" with Hayek is posed. My answer, which I've largely copied from a comment on the post but expanded, is as follows:

The Burke passage deliberately runs together a couple of things that should have been kept distinct. First, as many have pointed out, he conflates a child’s duty to his parents with a citizen’s duty to her state, as though the state really were a kind of parent figure and the citizens permanent juveniles. And second, he mixes moral with legal obligation, as though the state could legitimately coerce any sort of good behavior.

Hayek, I think, would understand and appreciate the idea that there are many aspects of tradition, custom, even common law, that have evolved for reasons we don’t necessarily fully grasp, and that we should therefore be cautious about abandoning or overturning. But he would also say that we can’t stop there, because there are also many aspects of our cultural inheritance that are remnants of earlier superstition, ignorance, and bigotry. And he wouldn’t have made the sort of rhetorical confusions above, that Burke indulges too readily.

Just how moderate is "moderate" Islam?

2010-09-14T10:31:00.000-07:00

That's the question that Lawrence Wright raises, no doubt inadvertently, in yet another piece on the variously named Ground Zero Mosque/Park51/Cordoba House, titled, with bludgeoning simplicity, "Intolerance". After a dubious comparison with the Danish cartoon uproar -- how many people opposed to the project have called for beheading the Imam and his followers so far? -- Wright goes on to to argue not for tolerance as a virtue in itself, but rather for "tolerance" lest we alienate the great masses of "moderate" Muslims, who apparently are always just on the edge of regarding America as their enemy, and hence turning into those extremist Muslims (who aren't supposed to be real or true Muslims at all, but apparently that doesn't cut much ice with these unstable "moderates"):

The most worrisome development in the evolution of Al Qaeda’s influence since 9/11 is the growth of pockets of Islamist radicalism in Western populations. Until recently, America had been largely immune to the extremism that has placed some European nations in peril. America’s Muslim community is more ethnically diverse than that of any other major religion in the country. Its members hold more college and graduate degrees than the national average. They also have a higher employment rate and more jobs in the professional sector. (Compare that with England and France, where education and employment rates among Muslims fall below the national averages.) These factors have allowed American Muslims and non-Muslims to live together with a degree of harmony that any other Western nation would envy.

The best ally in the struggle against violent Islamism is moderate Islam. The unfounded attacks on the backers of Park51 and others, along with such sideshows as a pastor calling for the burning of Korans, give substance to the Al Qaeda argument that the U.S. is waging a war against Islam, rather than against the terrorists’ misshapen effigy of that religion. Those stirring the pot in this debate are casting a spell that is far more dangerous than they may imagine.

Of course, if we're talking about the interpretation of signs, many ordinary people would point out that flying planes into buildings, blowing up trains, subways, nightclubs, sawing off the heads of Westerners on video, and mass demonstrations of screaming hordes calling for the death of Western writers, cartoonists, or film-makers -- these little things might actually give substance to the argument that Islam is waging a war against the U.S. and the Western world generally.

But I'm not one of them. Yet. No, I'm one who still believes that moderate Muslims really are moderate and are, at worst, intimidated by the violent extremists among them who are a real enough threat that outspoken critics need armed guards. Not Wright, though, who exudes a nervous apprehension that the mass of Muslims are merely quiescent for now, but are always looking for some passing excuse to launch into anti-West jihad. Unlike Wright, in other words, I think truly moderate Muslims have the same sort of awareness of possible sources and causes of conflict that everyone else does, and have no more wish to give unnecessary offense than most non-Muslims. Here, for example, is Irshad Manji, a Muslim reformist, making better use of the same comparison with the Danish cartoons that Wright did:

Let me be blunt about my own emotions: I am offended by its proximity to the site of 9/11. I am also disappointed that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf—who is not an Islamist—has nonetheless played crass politics unbecoming of a man of dialogue.

So far, the imam has rebuffed accusations of insensitivity. Yet he made those very accusations about the Danish cartoons of Prophet Muhammad. In a February 2006 press release, Imam Rauf announced that he was "appalled" by the drawings. He called it "willful fomentation" and "gratuitous" to republish them throughout Europe. In the following weeks, almost no U.S. newspaper printed the caricatures.

So the question comes back to just how moderate so-called "moderate Islam" actually is. If we actually believe, contrary to Wright, that the extremists are alien to Islam, then how is it supporting the likes of Manji to cave in on this issue, as we caved on the cartoons or on other cultural issues? (As far as I know, by the way, Manji still requires bodyguards to move about.) But even if you're as ~~frightened~~ concerned as Wright and fellow liberals about the violence lurking in the "moderate" Islamic masses, what would make you believe that appeasement is an effective response?

Thanks to Itzik at BasmanRoseLaw for the link to the Wright article

The crumbling facade of "human rights"

2010-09-13T21:12:00.000-07:00

Kenneth Anderson has a very long but excellent post on The Volokh Conspiracy, "Samuel Moyn on the history of the human rights movement", that does a remarkable job of cutting through the haze of ambiguity and flighty rhetoric that so often obscures liberal foreign policy -- particularly in this case the foreign policy of the Obama Administration -- and outlining both its real background and its current underlying assumptions.

First Anderson provides a long quote from a Moyn article in The Nation, pointing out the somewhat questionable origins of international human rights in the 40's:

From a global perspective, the brief career of human rights in the 1940s is the story of how the Allied nations elevated language about human rights as they reneged on the earlier wartime promise—made in the 1941 Atlantic Charter—of the self-determination of peoples. Global self-determination would have spelled the end of empire, but by war’s end the Allies had come around to Winston Churchill’s clarification that this promise applied only to Hitler’s empire, not empire in general (and certainly not Churchill’s). ... Human rights turned out to be a substitute for what many around the world wanted: a collective entitlement to self-determination. To the extent they noticed the rhetoric of human rights at all, the subjects of empire were not wrong to view it as a consolation prize.

Anderson, with some extensive personal experience in the international human rights field finds that this "accurately captures in my own experience as an NGO person who first volunteered to do work for Human Rights Watch in 1983". But from this he goes on to talk about a convergence of views between Moyn's more liberal-left position and Anderson's more conservative-right:

My own speculative view is that the human rights movement is in decline as the “apex values” of the international system — at least insofar as it means core individual human rights in the sense that both I and Moyn, on the basis of the Nation article, would mean. For one thing, in my view those human rights, and the universal conception of them, shelters not in the UN system but under US hegemony. The Obama administration has both diagnosed and embraced decline of the form of loose American hegemony that permits those values to be treated as “universal” by organizations like HRW, or funders like George Soros; if and as American hegemony declines (or to put it in Moyn’s historical terms, as the Allies of WWII and their enabling rhetoric fades as a tool of legitimacy) then so too human rights in that substantive meaning.

That does not mean that the rhetoric of human rights fades; rather, its content is redefined to other ends, and as a tool, it is defanged so as to ensure that — contra the vision of Moynihan — it is no longer a tool to go after bad regimes, excepting, of course, the United States and Israel. The Obama administration largely embraces that — human rights as a way of confessing that we are all sinners, and so it is not necessary to single anyone out.

So then Anderson sees two strands of foreign policy emerging in the current US administration:

In my take on the Obama administration and human rights, it has two wings, the liberal internationalist wing and the New Liberal Realist wing. The latter are those of Hillary Clinton’s general outlook — time to put aside childish things and get on with managing American decline, and with handing out the rhetoric necessary to fend off the problems of the world so that the intellectual firepower of the administration can focus on re-making the US domestically as a European social-democracy. Plus there’s that China-creditor problem.

The former wing, the liberal internationalists, however, who might otherwise have been thought to incline to more stern idealism, are comfortable with that for three reasons, I’d suggest. One is that they have a further belief that a weaker America — given its tendency to elect non-liberal-internationalist presidents and Congresses, and the general atavism of the American people — is better for liberal internationalism....

Outside the US, and perhaps outside the West generally, the future for "human rights", even with the scare quotes, looks increasingly dim:

My guess is that the future transcendental value, the apex values language of the UN system particularly, will morph very gradually from human rights to some version of global welfare, development, human security, income transfer, and all sorts of terms that do not carry baggage for the developing world, or the rising new great powers, in terms of obligations.

...

But “human rights,” in the hands of the NGOs like HRW and at the UN, seems to me likely to gradually convert over to a version of global religious communalism claims; a language of individual human rights gradually shifted over into a language for the protection of religious communalism, and Muslim global sensibilities in particular. The leading human rights organizations, Amnesty and HRW, already seem to see themselves in something like that role (global New Class managers of group identity relations, to put it in Telos-ian shorthand), positioning themselves as guardians of communalist sensibility as against Western publics.

But these excerpts can't do justice to a detailed and complex analysis -- in this case especially, you really need to read the whole thing.

At any rate, at some point the present managers of American, and by extension Western, decline and their cynically idealist counterparts will be gone. We can only hope that those who take their place will once again bring with them some awareness of America's exceptional origins, and some self-confidence in the cultural value of the individual and the rights thereof that America once stood for, and may still.

Althouse: on art as social work

2010-09-13T10:49:00.000-07:00

Althouse:

Why are there so many serious novels about 9/11 and so few about Katrina? — asks Chloe Schama who thinks it's just shameful.

A nice takedown of a very common notion among the Vulgar Liberals (aka the bien pensant) -- answering the question in her post's title, she says:

Oh, good lord, this is so stupid I hate to have to point it out. Katrina was a hurricane. We don't have to try to figure out its motivations and come to terms with its evil. Yes, there were human failings in the aftermath of the storm, but novelists have been chewing through the routine failings of humankind since the novel was invented.

Of course, this ignores the conspiracy theorists who think "Katrina was an inside job", just like 9/11, but then everyone ignores them, don't they?

Islam and fear

2010-09-11T17:44:00.000-07:00

Robert Fulford: Lessons of 9/11

Note that the title of this post says "Islam and fear", not Islamism. Fulford, in the link above, finally makes an excellent point exposing how some so-called "moderate" Muslims make use of the murderous violence of their more extreme co-believers:

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is responsible for the building [the Ground Zero mosque], moved the issue to a more ominous level when he said on television on Wednesday night the results will be dire if the controversy causes the centre to be located elsewhere.

“The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack,” Rauf predicted.

He said it would threaten U.S. troops and otherwise undermine U.S. security.

“This crisis could become much bigger than the Danish cartoon crisis,” he warned.

About two-thirds of Americans, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll, oppose building a mosque near Ground Zero. Rauf believes fear of violence should change the public’s attitude.

No one argues he is an Islamist, but he’s clearly playing Islamist violence as a political card.

It feels like a test case. If that threat silences opposition this time, the number of future uses of the same strategy is infinite. Rauf says his goal is to build a bridge among faiths but in this case his strategy sounds more like coercion:

“National security now hinges on how we negotiate this,” he said.

Burning books in Gainesville is ugly and mean-spirited but no more than that; Rauf is trying something more serious, eliminating free discussion by threatening violence.

Fulford is exactly right, and if before people had viewed the issue as a test of their tolerance and open-mindedness, they should now view it as a test of their courage and resolve not to be cowed by the rage-boys and worse of Islam. It's not just national security that "now hinges on how we negotiate this" -- national character does as well.

And to his great credit and courage, Fulford goes on to raise questions about the very nature of Islam in the modern world:

In the climate that was created by 9/11 the fear of Islamophobia has created another threat, more serious in the long run: It inhibits the serious discussion of Islam.

Of all the great religions, Islam is unique in believing it should not be analyzed or criticized. The key point is the divine nature of the Koran. Because Muslims believe it is unalterably holy, any discussion of it is an affront.

In this sense Islam remains medieval. In 15th-century Europe, before Martin Luther, criticism of the Gospels and the Christian church was forbidden. In the year 2010 Islam still maintains that principle.

The Koran has never been scrutinized in the way the Bible has been studied since the 17th century. Ibn Warraq, a brilliant, Muslim-raised scholar whose books bring standard scholarly principles to the Koran, finds it necessary to travel with security guards.

Why should both practitioners and scholars not argue about Islam with the same frankness we bring to other world religions? Islamist violence subverts free speech and threatens to eliminate it altogether.

For the same reason, the possibility of separating religion from politics rarely gets even cursory discussion in the Islamic world.

Much in our life has changed since 9/11, as a visit to any airport in the world will demonstrate. But in the timorous way we think about Islam, far too much remains just as it was when we saw planes fly into the Twin Towers.

Note that this is not denying the reality, nor the great preponderance, of genuinely moderate Muslims -- as opposed to the opportunistically so, like Rauf. It does, however, point out that such moderates live with much greater fear of extremist violence than do even so-called infidels, so much so that the very brave few who dare to raise their voice in criticism must have armed guards to protect their lives. We owe it to these people not just to protect them and help them spread their critique, but also to summon our own nerve and resist our own impulse to stifle and censor ourselves. We owe Islam tolerance and respect, certainly, as we do any widespread belief system -- but we owe it to both ourselves and the brave critics within Islam not to let "tolerance" and "respect" be simply a mask for our fear.

So we're nine years on --

2010-09-11T10:44:00.000-07:00

-- and much has changed. A war in Afghanistan, begun to catch the perpetrators of the terror, quickly toppled the medieval barbarians who were in power, but couldn't find the perps themselves, and now still grinds on, interminably. A war in Iraq, on the other hand, begun to oust an evil regime (which may have had Weapons of Mass Destruction), and to send a message to all such terrorist-supporting regimes in the region, has more or less ended, its mission accomplished.

For a few years after 9/11, organized terror plots succeeded elsewhere in the West, but none have for some time now. It seems clear that terrorist organizations have been damaged at least, and are largely on the defensive, for the time. Native, isolated terrorist wannabes have occasionally managed to murder a number of people, but it's small scale and sporadic, and they're often caught before they can act. There is still the spectacle, both amusing and alarming, of mobs of Islamist rage-boys in various parts of the world screaming to behead those who do something or other they find offensive, but their numbers too seem to be dwindling, whether through discouragement or boredom -- or, of course, through success, as they intimidate the West into self-censorship.

Because, on the other hand, much remains that is of serious concern. Perhaps the greatest at the moment is Iran, which still has the potential to inflame the world. But of course there's still Pakistan, the most populated Muslim country by far -- ostensibly an ally of the West, but the only Islamic country known to have nuclear weapons, with intelligence services at least suspected of having Islamist sympathies and ties, and large tribal regions uncontrolled/uncontrollable by the central government where terrorist leaders are suspected of hiding. There's Saudi Arabia and its vast oil wealth -- another ostensible ally, but one of the most backward, feudal regimes on the planet, that uses its wealth to fund and spread a fundamentalist version of Islam that underlies much of the anti-West, anti-modern world terrorist sentiment. And there are a number of other tyrannies and failed states in the Islamic world that have the potential to hide and support the terrorist organizations currently on the run, allowing them to rebuild.

More than that, there's that self-censorship phenomenon within the West mentioned above. Terrorism cannot topple regimes in the way that open warfare can, but that's never its aim or purpose. Instead, it aims to sow a kind of lurking fear and anxiety that spreads through the interstices of a society and a culture, weakening its self-confidence, leveraging its openness, undermining its own institutions, and leaving it prey to a kind of internal decay. Now, we're a long way from that, despite the hopes and fantasies of the Islamists themselves. But the exaggerated respect given to their particular belief system as compared to that given to all others is an indication that terror has had an effect on us, and only the foolish would deny it. We need to think about that every time we find ourselves, explicitly or implicitly, worrying about the reaction of the Muslim world to whatever the latest tempest in a teapot may be.

Obama's sad timing

2010-09-10T16:27:00.000-07:00

Jonah Goldberg: The Next Hoover

As Goldberg says, Obama was going to be the reincarnation of FDR, the guy who, after years of horrible tax cuts and running down the government by the nasty conservatives, and in the midst of another great, and maybe final crisis of capitalism, was going to come in and get taxes back up where they belong, introduce all kinds of peachy Initiatives, Programs, Departments, Authorities, Bureaus, and what have you, and just generally bring sexy back -- in the shape of a big, fat, greasy state.

But the problem with this fond scenario is its timing. It's not just that, as Goldberg points out, we've been there done that with "New Deals", and they don't seem quite as shiny any more. It's that, when FDR finally became President, in March 1933, almost three and a half years had passed since the stock market had crashed, and he was thus insulated from any responsibility for the Depression's endurance. His predecessor, on the other hand, had only been in office some eight months when the economy started going south, and he was the one, despite subsequent liberal mythology, who initiated a number of Programs, Committees, government Corporations, and what have you -- not quite on the scale of the New Deal interventions, but remarkably similar in form and spirit -- to try to fix things. None of it worked, of course, but that wasn't really the problem, since none of FDR's interventions worked either -- no, the problem for poor Hoover was simply that he was the guy who had to fail first, and therefore got all the blame.

So, while the crisis this time didn't exactly start in Obama's term in office, it started closely enough that Obama can't really get any insulation from the policies that fail to fix it. Marx remarks somewhere, citing Hegel, that "all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." What compounds the farce in this case is the fact that the real personage being imitated by Obama isn't the left-liberal hero-figure of FDR but rather that sad old fall-guy, Herbert Hoover.

UPDATE: John Steele Gordon, on the Commentary blog, also has some Hoover comparisons, in this case more to do with actual policies than just timing.

And then there was one...

2010-09-09T20:20:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey Goldberg:
Fidel: 'Cuban Model Doesn't Even Work For Us Anymore'

Jeffrey Goldberg has gotten a lot of mileage out of his Atlantic article on Israel, Iran, and the Bomb. It not only received a lot of attention in its own right, but it apparently also got Goldberg an invitation to Cuba for an extended interview with Castro -- who may no longer be the maximal leader himself on the island, but who can still get aquariums open for dolphin shows on days when it's normally closed. The visit was supposed to be about the article, which had Castro worried, and was supposedly part of a larger plan to project Castro's image onto an international stage. But the short admission that has raised eyebrows all over was his response to Goldberg's question whether he thought the "Cuban model" was still something that could be exported: "'The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore,' he said."

Goldberg's Latin American expert, Julia Sweig, expanded and interpreted this a little to mean: "'He wasn't rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under 'the Cuban model' the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country.'" Which sounds a bit face-saving -- if the "ideas of the Revolution" involve socialism, then it's at least odd to hear a socialist say that "the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country", doesn't it? But maybe it's just a matter of labelling -- could we call it "capitalist socialism"? "Socialist free enterprise"? Maybe not "social democracy", yet. But however you slice it, this sounds like progress. Before long, hopefully, there'll be just one remaining instance of "actually existing socialism" in the world, and that's that exemplar of cultural psychopathy, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

By the way -- Goldberg asked Castro if his recent serious illness had caused him to rethink his atheism, and Castro apparently replied, "Sorry, I'm still a dialectical materialist." Says Goldberg, "This is funnier if you are, like me, an ex-self-defined socialist", and he's right.

UPDATE: And now he takes it back: "My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn't work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious.'' Can you see how that could have been misinterpreted? Me neither. Too bad Castro never ran for office -- he's a natural. Ah well, he'll soon be out of there anyway.

The libertarians and the town councillors

2010-09-08T16:29:00.000-07:00

The Confrontation

The link above is a very interesting transcript of a meeting that grew out of a series on Reason TV dealing with the problems of one particular city: Cleveland. What's good is that you can actually read about and watch libertarian rubber meeting the political road -- some skidding and sliding, but some traction too.

Here's a video of the session:

Why government spending works -- in war, not in peace

2010-09-07T14:26:00.000-07:00

Victor Davis Hanson:
If Only It Were World War II Again?

Hanson's point of departure is a typical Krugman eye-roller telling us, for the umpteenth time, how we have to spend our way to prosperity. First, the former Enron advisor (thanks, Taranto) states the well-known fact that the only thing that got the American, and possibly world, economy out of Depression in the 30's was global war in the 40's. And this was largely because the government went deeply into debt to fund that war. So Krugman, living proof that linear thinkers too can win Nobel Prizes, thinks we should do the same now.

Hanson's column gives some reasons why that's not really an option:

The war years were characterized by frenetic hyperactivity: Americans worked long hours, women were brought into the work force, new towns and manufacturing centers sprang up, and people gave up necessities — all on the assurance that this furious pace and consumer scarcity would be short-lived.

As WWII ended and the clean-up began, there was an enormous amount of pent-up global demand for goods....

At home, four years of consumer deprivation during the war and the weak demography of the 1930s had combined to create huge demand, all while society was increasingly leaving the farm for good and becoming suburbanized.

For Krugman, though, all this is negligible: "But always remember: this slump can be cured. All it will take is a little bit of intellectual clarity, and a lot of political will." He wouldn't be the first liberal-lefty, of course, to secretly hanker after the expression of will and discipline found only in war -- think of William James' "Moral Equivalent of War", referring approvingly to that old statist, H.G.Wells. But it's not just a certain strain of "liberal fascism" that is the problem here -- there's also a kind of magical thinking that comes from too big a swallow from the Keynesian bottle, giving rise to the idea that any amount of debt can always be addressed by simply spending more and faster, as though you really do get money for nothing. That this has something in common with the mentality of compulsive gamblers, just before they crack up, should not go unnoticed.

Working ourselves up

2010-09-06T20:16:00.000-07:00

Ross Douthat:
Paranoid About Paranoia

Makes some good points about the ratcheting up of political rhetoric -- that, apart from some rare but real crazies, the talk is overblown on both sides for effect. Bu$h is Hitler, Obama is an Islamist terrorist, etc. -- these aren't things that anyone really believes but are just ways of verbally puffing oneself up, signalling that "You really need to pay attention to me and what I'm saying, not because it's particularly reasonable but because I'm like, you know, really mad about it!"

In one sense, this is old hat, at least in America -- see the book Infamous Scribblers: the Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism by Eric Burns for some good, dirty fun involving attack politics in the early years of the Republic. What seems a bit different now, to me at least, is that the sides are more ideological, or more consciously so, than previously. That too may just be an illusion, due to the shifting nature of the ideological divisions, but, on the other hand, it may be that political venom comes to a head at times of greater political and ideological change. In which case, expect a lot more rhetorical overkill before things calm down.

Beck, Palin, the rally, the Tea Party -- oh, my!

2010-09-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

I should say up front that the Glenn Beck shtick itself doesn't really work for me. But sometimes you have to pick a side, and right now Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and all are preferable in my mind to the smug political, academic, media, and cultural elites that have dominated the scene too long. Now those elites, with their venerable left-liberal orthodoxies and assorted cultural neuroses, are old, tired, and angry, with ideas that were worn out generations ago, an inchoate attachment to the state as a kind of parent-protector, and a baffled, reactionary rage that people -- the People, ironically, that entity they've long reified and fetishized as an abstraction but never really cared much for as actual individuals -- now seem to be finding ways of working around their various forms of social control.

You can see the fault lines underlying these sides in much of the reaction to Beck's rally a few days back. Two members of the old elite, from both the overtly liberal and the monority country-club conservative constituencies, voiced their distinct but similar condescension in the NY Times (natch) "conversation" that I posted about previously. Here's another take that I think illustrates the baffled rage quite well -- it's Ed Kilgore in The New Republic (thanks to commenter itzik basman for the link):

Beck’s Saturday speech was then a rehashing of the age-old Christian Right tactic of claiming every conventional virtue, from piety to patriotism, for conservatives, with the implication that their cultural and political enemies share none of them.

Of course, the fact that their cultural and political enemies routinely bash such "conventional", not to say "bourgeois", virtues may have a little to do with this implication, but that's just what Kilgore altogether misses. As Brooks said so poignantly of the people at the rally, unaware of how his words reflected on his own crowd:

They are only vaguely aware of this value system. It is so entwined into their very nature, they can not step back and define it. But they feel it weakening.

But, on the other hand, here's what I see as a little more nuanced (!) take that suggests the cultural fault lines may not yet be completely unbridgeable, at least with segments on either side -- this is Nick Gillespie, in Reason:

The organizers and the attendees are not part of the Leave Us Alone coalition. In some ways, they are proto-libertarian: they want the government to spend less money and they seemed wary of interventions into basic economic exchange (nobody seemed to dig ObamaCare or the auto bailouts or the bank bailouts). But they also want the government to be super-effective in securing the borders, worry about an undocumented fall in morals, and they are emphatic that genuine religiosity should be a feature of the public square. Which is to say, like most American voters, they may well want from government precisely the things that it really can't deliver.

Writing in Reason, Gillespie obviously doesn't want to be seen as particularly pro-religion in any way, and that may at least partially explain his own condescension at the end. "Securing the borders", after all, is one of the minimal things a government is supposed to be able to deliver. And the curious bit about an "undocumented fall in morals" (did the crowd want government to worry about it? or were they just worried about it?) is almost comical, as though implying that it takes social scientists, of all people, to tell us if our morals have fallen. But still, like Brooks as well, and in contrast to Collins and Kilgore, say, Gillespie's reflections at least convey enough basic respect to retain some hope that the sides of the fault line can continue to talk.

But, one way or another, I think the times they are a-changin', in a way they haven't since the sixties.

P.S.: See this earlier post for more on the fault line and the choice of sides: "Labels: conservatives, libertarians, and liberals"

To New Yorker readers

2010-09-04T05:01:00.000-07:00

A repost, from the usually laconic* Glenn Reynolds (I liked the whole thing, plus I'm trying to drive some traffic his way):

ILYA SOMIN: Errors In Jane Mayer’s New Yorker Article Attacking the Kochs.

The thing to understand is, this article isn’t about the Kochs at all. It’s about preparing a narrative for the New Yorker’s readers about why Obama has failed. It’s not because they were rubes who voted for an underprepared, under-skilled candidate who then proceeded to alienate the electorate. It’s because Obama was beaten by a right-wing billionaires’ conspiracy so vast as to defy understanding. That’s all. Relax, New Yorker readers. No need to feel bad about yourself for being overwhelmed with hope-and-change fever and voting stupidly. It’s not your fault. It never is!

Heh, as some people say. (Here's my earlier take on the same hit piece, this one referencing Reason's "Hit & Run".)

* in any one post.

Beck and the unease of the elites

2010-09-03T18:16:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Rubin, Commentary:

Brooks Cheers Beck — Honest!

And he does, however tepidly. It's not cats and dogs living together, yet, but coming from one of the "two mighty Davids" in the T.Coddington van Vorhees VII ratpack, it's something. Unfortunately, if you click through to the NY Times article itself, you'll see that he's in a dialog with Gail Collins, who can manage to make even Maureen Dowd read like an intellectual. "Do you think this feel-good moment is a permanent change of course?" she asks Brooks, with a flutter. "Most days the Tea Party folk still seem pretty ferocious."

Brooks, as Rubin shows, managed to hold his nerve a little better, and find some nice, if condescending, things to say:

I’m no Beck fan obviously, but the spirit was really warm, generous and uplifting. The only bit of unpleasantness I found emanated from some liberal gatecrashers behaving offensively, carrying anti-Beck banners and hoping to get in some televised fights.

And that last sentence is appreciated. But Brooks' nervousness, though more complex than Collins', is apparent throughout -- first in his repeated need to signal his good standing in the elite by dissing Beck himself, as we see even as he's praising the gathering in the quote above; and second in his need to project his own genteel but largely ineffectual conservatism on the crowd:

... at the rally I don’t think the word “elite” was mentioned. There was a sense that the moral failings are in every home and town, and that what is needed is a moral awakening everywhere. After all, the stupid mortgages happened everywhere. The excessive consumption happened everywhere. This was an affirmation of bourgeois values, but against a rot from within, not an assault from on high. Again, at least at the rally.

So, perhaps, he hopes. He's right, though, that the phenomenon is really an affirmation of basic -- yes, "bourgeois" -- values, but one of the motivations underlying the movement that drew people to the rally is that such values are indeed being assaulted from "on high". At the end, Brooks reverts to his more obnoxious mode, still whistling as he walks past the manifestation of something he can't quite get his mind around:

People like those at last weekend’s rally want the Judeo-Christian ethic back, which sweetened and softened life on the frontier (physical or technological). And so they march. They are only vaguely aware of this value system. It is so entwined into their very nature, they can not step back and define it. But they feel it weakening.

Again, note the projection of fears that are clearly evident in the elite itself. Something is happening here, but you don't know what is ... do you ... Mr. Brooks.

The eco-terrorist and the silence of the greens

2010-09-02T16:19:00.000-07:00

James Taranto, "Best of the Web":

James Lee's Awakening

From the always-excellent Taranto, an even more excellent than usual piece on the latest eco-loon cum terrorist, and the curious silence, so far, from the usual lefty suspects on any connection between their "shockingly irresponsible", extremist rhetoric and the sad spectacle at the Discovery Channel yesterday. To be contrasted with the media's repeated attempts to create links between any violent incident and, say, the Tea Party. And contrasted too with the "nothing to see here" approach of Jesse Walker, for example, at Reason's "hit & run" -- who may well be making a partially commendable effort to restrain from making partisan hay from the tragedy, but sometimes you have to whack a biased media over the head to get their attention, and this just puts them back to sleep.

Reason and passion

2010-09-02T09:29:00.000-07:00

If you think they don't go together, check out just the first minute and a half of this video. After that, you should be hooked:

Thanks to Russ Roberts, via Alex Tabarrok, via Kottke

The sadness of the bien pensant

2010-09-01T17:43:00.000-07:00

Althouse:
... I read the Utne Reader yesterday.

Ann Althouse has some fun with her chance re-encounter with The Utne Reader, and it seemed to capture the spirit of the bien pensant so well that I've had to post it. "Bien pensant" is a phrase I only came across a few years ago myself -- according to Merriam-Webster, it means "right-minded; one who holds orthodox views", but that doesn't really explain its peculiar nuance. It's used not just to describe the orthodox, but the fashionably orthodox, the sort of boutique opinionating that swirls in little gusts around the cappuccino bar at the independent bookstore or organic food mart, where you'll find the Utne Reader on a rack near the cash register -- the spot occupied by the National Enquirer in the down-market, inorganic outlets.

Here's where she has the fun:

But Utne Reader is not a young man's world — or a young woman's world. It feels like an old person's place. I felt too young for it... and I'm old. Or it's for those other aging Americans... the lefties. I see these people in Madison all the time. Do they feel left behind? Do you think the day will come when "lefty" will seem to mean left behind?

And not in the unRaptured sense. I think maybe the day has come, except for the poor souls still sipping obliviously on their specialty coffees. Do you think that explains some of their baffled rage against the right?

Lomborg and climate change: what is to be done?

2010-08-31T18:56:00.000-07:00

The Guardian:

Bjørn Lomborg: $100bn a year needed to fight climate change

The first thing to point out is that this story, which is all over the Internets, is false, as you can see from the description in the first sentence in the Guardian story above: "The world's most high-profile climate change sceptic". Here's what the "sceptic" has been saying from the start, according to the Guardian's own collection elsewhere:

Bjørn Lomborg in his own words:

"This chapter accepts the reality of man-made global warming." The Skeptical Environmentalist, 2001

"Global warming is real and man-made. It will have a serious impact on humans and the environment toward the end of this century." Cool It, 2007

In other words, he's explicitly and quite clearly a believer in man-made climate change. What he is skeptical about is what follows from that, namely the net costs of the warming itself and the cost-benefit analyses involved in particular mitigation strategies now -- especially attempts to suppress carbon emissions through various taxation schemes, enough to make a significant impact on climate. From what I can see, this skepticism too largely continues -- meaning that it's false in the first place to claim he was ever a climate change skeptic, and then doubly false, in the second place, to claim that he's now made a "u-turn".

What has changed is that he's now recommending a relatively modest carbon tax be levied, not as a means of suppressing carbon emissions (which was always either futile or dangerous, or both) but simply as a means of raising funds for research on alternate energy sources, geo-engineering, and adaptation. If you add carbon-capture and either sequestration or carbon re-cycling (see this) as research targets, then this makes sense. The only thing to add is that it's always made sense and doesn't require global circuses like Kyoto or Copenhagen to implement. In fact, it doesn't require carbon taxes either -- it can or should be funded just as any other research initiative is funded. So maybe Lomborg is just throwing the True Believers a bone.

We're no. 11, objectively

2010-08-30T17:39:00.000-07:00

MIT Technology Review:

Mathematicians Create Objective Quality of Life Index

That's Canada that's no. 11 -- the US is no. 2, but only because Luxembourg is no. 1, and wealthy enclaves shouldn't count, so you could really say that, for all intents and purposes, the US is no. 1, objectively. For what that's worth.

What might be a little more interesting is that this "objective" index, for about the first 20 or so countries (the first 38 if you don't count Mideast oil states), just matches per capita GDP ranking -- meaning that per capita GDP, though often belittled by those who like to think of themselves as above material concerns, is a pretty good proxy for other good things, such as life expectancy, low infant mortality, low TB rates, and no doubt others.

The EU: its virtues and vices

2010-08-30T12:21:00.000-07:00

Ilya Somin (The Volokh Conspiracy):

The Future of the European Union

This is one of the better summaries of the whole EU project, to my mind. On the side of virtue, Somin points out the free movement of goods, services, and people throughout the ancient and varied national homelands of Europe -- a huge and amazing accomplishment all by itself. As Somin says, "the establishment of free trade and freedom of movement throughout Europe are two of the greatest advances of freedom in the recent history of the Western world".

On the side of vice, Somin is also correct to point to the "variety of regulatory and redistributive initiatives", giving rise to, and bound up in, immense layers of bureaucracy. No doubt some of that is a consequence of trying to protect various established elites or power centers from the trade winds that a free market engenders, but much is also the result of trying to overlay a market with command and control. That can be done, of course, since every country does so, but in Europe, to a greater extent than elsewhere, we see a real confusion of two distinct systems of decision-making, and two views of basic fairness. The result is contradiction, ineffeciency, injustice, and instability.

One other point should be raised -- it's not a vice, but it is at least a potential problem: the definition and security of the EU's borders. Borders matter, even for super-states, because they define the boundaries of the state's ability to establish and protect the freedoms of its citizens -- if they can be crossed with impunity, that ability is increasingly weakened, and a reappearance of old nationalisms becomes a predictable reaction, as we're seeing. There are lessons there for both sides of the Atlantic.

How do people respond to disasters?

2010-08-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

You can sit and wait for the Government to send help, of course, which in any case can provide some opportunities for political demagoguery. Or you can do what you can to help yourself. And you don't need to be a survivalist to choose the latter course.

On this 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, check out the Gulf Coast Recovery Project at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, started in the immediate aftermath of the disaster:

In 2005, Mercatus launched a five-year project to follow the long-term redevelopment of the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. By combining verbal interviews with people rebuilding the Gulf Coast and quantitative and qualitative data, the Gulf Coast Recovery Project seeks to better understand the array of complex issues facing communities recovering from disaster and the roles that the public, commercial, and non-profit sectors play in rebuilding communities affected by large scale catastrophes.

There is now a great wealth of information on the site -- working papers, talks, videos, forums, media files, etc. -- examining the question in the title of this post, and finding some interesting answers.

"Rural voters, the vast majority of whom are white...."

2010-08-29T05:43:00.000-07:00

The quote comes near the end of an Ibbotson column in The Globe and Mail, the liberal version of "Canada's national newspaper". It doesn't matter what the subject of the column is, because this fragment is entirely irrelevant to it. It doesn't even matter that the fragment itself names "rural voters", because the clause could just as well be applied in any other context to almost any other way of grouping people that wasn't, explicitly or implicitly, by race. The vast majority of urban voters in Canada, for example, are also white. The real point is that the phrase pops up in a column that has nothing to do with race at all -- the point is that, on anything remotely resembling a rational basis, it has no point.

Why is it there, then? Ibbotson could just as meaningfully have said something like: "Rural voters, the vast majority of whom speak with a rural accent....", or "Rural voters, the vast majority of whom are native earthlings....", but then the absurdity would have been too obvious. Why not in this case? The answer, sadly, is a sick political phenomenon on the liberal-left called "racialism", which is increasingly defining itself by its demagogic use of "race" as a simple club in any kind of political issue. What Ibbotson is doing here, then, is signaling. He thinks that by waving this sort of phrase he can tell people, at least his people, the bien pensant lib-lefties, that a) he himself is not a bigot -- because notice how racially hyper-aware he is, bringing up race even when it has no particular application, but b) the people he's talking about could very well be bigots (the "vast majority" are white, after all), and so the side of the issue they favor, whatever the issue, is plausibly the bigoted side.

It's fast becoming the story of the boy(s) (and girls) who cried "Race!", of course, and with the same sad result. That they can't see such a result, and resort so easily to such crude and ridiculous racial signaling, is an indication of just how impoverished the liberal-left has become.

For an alternative view of race itself, see this brief clip from a Morgan Freeman interview.

Thanks to SDA and Unambiguously Ambidextrous.

Economics and the lure of technocracy

2010-08-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

Ewe E. Reinhardt (NY Times):

When Value Judgments Masquerade as Science

Technocracy: "government by technicians; specifically : management of society by technical experts".

This is an excellent short column, that further illustrates one of the key points of the post on a cultural Uncertainty Principle. Here's Reinhardt, for example, on the difficulty of avoiding politics even when one tries -- and this pertains far beyond economics:

It must be acknowledged, however, that a researcher’s political ideology or vested interest in a particular theory can still enter even ostensibly descriptive analysis by the data set chosen for the research; the mathematical transformations of raw data and the exclusion of so-called outlier data; the specific form of the mathematical equations posited for estimation; the estimation method used; the number of retrials in estimation to get what strikes the researcher as “plausible” results, and the manner in which final research findings are presented.

And here he is on economists, in particular, who don't try to refrain from political interventions (can you think of any?):

In their application of the Kaldor-Hicks criterion to real-world problems, however, economists act like collectivists who seek to allocate society’s resources under a preferred moral doctrine. Economists take on the role of a benevolent dictator presumed to be empowered by someone to redistribute welfare among individual members of society for a larger social purpose — increases in what economists call efficiency and the maximization of what they call overall social welfare.

Thanks to Greg Mankiw

Cool and scary

2010-08-27T18:28:00.000-07:00

It's an animation depicting the asteroids in the solar system as they were discovered -- green objects are at some distance, red ones cross earth's orbit (the dot circling 3rd from the yellow dot in the center). Kind of makes you think about the dinosaurs somehow....

From the blurb at YouTube:

View of the solar system showing the locations of all the asteroids starting in 1980, as asteroids are discovered they are added to the map and highlighted white so you can pick out the new ones.

The final colour of an asteroids indicates how closely it comes to the inner solar system.

Earth Crossers are Red

Earth Approachers (Perihelion less than 1.3AU) are Yellow

All Others are Green

Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You'll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video.

Thanks to io9 and Scott Manley

Democrats getting ideas

2010-08-27T12:36:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Rubin:

Democrats Discover Raising Taxes Is a Bad Idea

In particular, note, they're worried that raising taxes on the rich is a bad idea -- so maybe you can teach an old dog new spots, or something. There is, of course, still a deficit to worry about, and Rubin quotes another batch of Democrats doing just that, which is also welcome news, even if it's a bit late. What marks them as Democrats, though, is that they see the only policy alternatives as raising taxes or raising the deficit -- they seem constitutionally incapable of recognizing the possibility of a third alternative.

A cultural Uncertainty Principle

2010-08-27T06:21:00.000-07:00

This is a kind of extension of that "attitude of epistemic humility" discussed in an earlier post. That stemmed from an article by Jim Manzi speaking of the difficulty in assessing the effectiveness of economic policies, because of the impossibility of assessing counterfactuals -- i.e., of knowing what would have happened without the policy, or if a different policy had been in place. That's a fairly narrow limitation, however, and I've already suggested ways in which such uncertainty could be reduced at least (e.g., examining different policy approaches to the same problem in different jurisdictions, etc.). But Manzi's piece itself refers back to his own earlier and more general article in City Journal on "What Social Science Does -- and Doesn't -- Know" (subtitled "Our scientific ignorance of the human condition remains profound.").

In that he brings up another kind of complication that arises in medicine and then in the social sciences, which he calls "causal density":

... as experiments began to move from fields like classical physics to fields like therapeutic biology, the number and complexity of potential causes of the outcome of interest—what I term 'causal density'—rose substantially. It became difficult even to identify, never mind actually hold constant, all these causes.

Which is a good point, though it's certainly been noted and complained about previously. And in thus merging social science with medicine, it obscures a much more problematic source of trouble. Which is this: behind every hypothesis that's tested in a scientific experiment there lies a theory of some sort, though not always an explicit or well-formulated one, nor even necessarily a conscious one. In the latter case, of course, we're talking about unconscious assumptions that can affect the whole design and outcome of the experiment or study. In the physical sciences, such assumptions are usually the result of insufficient care or analysis (leaving Kuhn aside for now), and there is a strong culture dedicating to exposing just such faults. But in the social sciences, these kinds of assumptions are very commonly interlaced with social and political values, and attempting to expose them can involve much more complex and deeply rooted political issues and conflicts, rather than simply scientific or rational ones.

So this is the first source of inherent uncertainty in this area: in touching upon our social position in the world, social science cannot avoid the political issues involved in its research -- it is inherently politicized. And unfortunately, as we all know, it's politicized largely in one direction -- toward the liberal-left (see, e.g., "The Social and Political Views of American Professors" [PDF], by Gross and Simmons, 2007, as just one among many indicators). All too often, this results in "studies" that show mainly what the studier wants them to show, though of course they usually go through the motions of a "balanced" enquiry. Such studies are what Richard Feynman referred to as "cargo cult science": "they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential", which he calls "scientific integrity", but which is often manifested in a serious commitment to finding holes, flaws, weak points, over-statements, falsifications, in both one's own and others' work. But that's precisely what's so difficult when dealing with issues that touch upon one's deepest convictions.

And there's another, even deeper, source of social science uncertainty. Knowledge or understanding is an important -- in many ways, central -- aspect of what we are, and it has a decisive effect on how we behave. But, even allowing for the inherent ideological bias mentioned above, social science itself is knowledge, and hence that knowledge itself affects -- i.e., changes -- the behavior of its object of study. There is therefore an Uncertainty Principle at work in attempts to make a science of human behavior -- not as precise as Heisenberg's, certainly, but analogous in the way in which the observed is unavoidably affected by the observer. It's an effect that has shown up repeatedly in economics, where predicted behavior patterns are internalized and taken into account, with the resultant behavior only explicable in hindsight. It's the "unintended consequences" that perpetually operate to limit the designs of would-be social engineers.

Social science, therefore, faces multiple sources of uncertainty that physical sciences do not -- in order of increasing severity or intractability, they are

the difficulty in disproving counterfactuals;
what Manzi refers to as the "causal density" of social phenomena;
the inherent politicization of social questions;
and the Cultural Uncertainty Principle: the inescapable and unpredictable effect that social knowledge has on social behavior.

All of these need to be borne in mind whenever encountering the "studies show" line so often used to justify the technocratic manipulation of social outcomes.

The slow decline of leftist economics

2010-08-26T17:33:00.000-07:00

Ilya Somin, The Volokh Conspiracy:

Scott Sumner on Liberaltarian Progress

Ilya makes the necessary qualifications to the awkward "liberaltarian" label, and also points out how progress in the economic area is countered by continued regression in the growth of the leftist nanny state:

On average, today’s liberals are more likely to support a wide range of restrictions on “noneconomic” freedom than those of forty years ago. Consider such issues as government-imposed regulation of smoking and diet, expansion of antidiscrimination laws to cover various new groups, campaign finance restrictions, and anti-“hate speech” laws.

But, as he concludes, there remain grounds for some modest hope:

The gap between liberals and libertarians on economic issues has indeed declined over the last forty years (notwithstanding some backsliding during the current recession), and it may be possible to reduce it further in the future.

UPDATE: I should have pointed out that Ilya's post, as its title indicates, was a response to this one by Scott Sumner: "The extraordinary success of liberaltarianism". And that post has attracted other thoughtful commentary as well -- two examples are Veronique de Rugy's, "What use is a libertarian?", and Nick Gillespie's concisely titled "Are libertarians really as useless as a bucket of armpits? Or do they just smell that way?"

The New Yorker as supermarket tabloid: the Koch hit

2010-08-26T07:57:00.000-07:00

Hit & Run : Reason Magazine:

The Official Koch Industries Reply to The New Yorker Hit Piece

The New Yorker piece has been getting extra attention because of some departures at CATO recently, which Koch helps fund. As Gillespie, at the link above, points out, what stands out here is just the remarkably slimy tone, from what was supposed to be -- what once was, certainly -- a high-toned magazine.

Maybe the National Enquirer will do a matching piece on George Soros.

The mosque and the question of tolerance, redux

2010-08-25T18:04:00.000-07:00

Ross Douthat:

Imam Rauf and Moderate Islam

Finally, some moral clarity amid the howls. After making a thoughtful distinction between devout, non-Enlightenment-embracing Muslims and terrorist-backing extremists, Douthat goes on:

But making these kind of distinctions doesn’t require us to suspend all judgment where would-be Islamic moderates are concerned. Instead, dialogue needs to coexist with pressure: Figures like Ramadan and now Rauf should be held to a high standard by their non-Muslim interlocutors, and their forays into more dubious territory should be greeted with swift pushback, rather than simply being accepted as a necessary part of the moderate Muslim package. (This is particularly true because Westerners have a long record of seeing what they want to see in self-proclaimed Islamic reformers, from the Ayatollah Khomeini down to Anwar Al Awlaki, and failing to recognize extremism when it’s staring them in the face.) And what’s troubling about some of the liberal reaction to the Cordoba Initiative controversy is that it seems to regard this kind of pressure as illegitimate and dangerous in and of itself — as though the First Amendment protects the right of Rauf and Co. to build their mosque and cultural center, but not the right of critics to scrutinize Rauf’s moderate bona fides, parse some of his more disturbing comments, and raise doubts about the benefits (to American Islam as well as to America) of having him set up shop as an arbiter of Muslim-Western dialogue in what used to be the shadow of the World Trade Center.

The mysteries of markets

2010-08-25T10:01:00.000-07:00

The good folks at Crooked Timber once again provide fodder for thought, and once again it's John "Make the Rich Pay" Quiggan who's churning it out. Here he is opining about "interesting intellectual evolution":

There is, I think, room for a version of liberalism/social democracy that is appreciative of the virtues of markets (and market-based policy instruments like emissions trading schemes) as social contrivances, and sceptical of top-down planning and regulation, without accepting normative claims about the income distribution generated by markets.

Which, given the context, no doubt is evidence of an evolution, even is it's only venturing onto land. The comments provided more fun, with one thinking the above description "would describe all but the far end of the American left" and then JQ characterizing his own passage as a "Rorschach blot", which he thinks means "I'm on to something, but I don't know what". The last clause, at least, is clearly true.

What he's onto, though, may be a concise illustration of the basic incoherence of the strategy of the so-called "Third Way" ("strategy", as opposed to pragmatic tactics, note). I tried to suggest that in a comment myself:

Whether Third Way, Fourth Way, or Nth Way, though, you may find that you’ll have a bit of a problem in accepting markets, etc. as “social contrivances” while rejecting the resulting income distribution. Unless of course you simply intend to ignore “normative claims” altogether. A vexing problem, no? Markets work well, or seem to, but for reasons that we don’t understand, and their outcomes are always so not fair….

But that was maybe a bit too cryptic for that neighborhood. To explain: markets only work, even as "social contrivances", because of the income distributions they generate. If you reject such distributions then you're essentially rejecting markets and their accompanying virtues. If, on the other hand, you accept the virtues of markets, then that alone is a "normative claim" -- calling them "social contrivances" doesn't get you out of the dilemma, since any and all social structures/processes can be so described. What's happening is that there are two distinct "normative claims" being asserted -- a socialist one, in which goods and services are literally "distributed" by some one or group on the basis of some notion of fairness; and a market-based one, in which goods and services are simply traded and not "distributed" in any but a metaphoric sense. And therein lies the incoherence.

On a practical level it's quite true that we routinely mix and match these kinds of claims, meaning that we routinely adulterate whatever non-market claims there are in order to obtain some benefits from market virtues for some, and then we routinely adulterate those market virtues in order to obtain some other "normative claim" as defined by ... well, we're never exactly sure. Messy, as the real world always is. But we can respect the practicalities of the situation -- social inertia, dependencies of various sorts, etc. -- while still working toward a resolution of the incoherence. In other words, we can choose fundamentally between working toward a First Way, or toward a Second Way, but striving toward a Third Way is the pursuit of a mirage.

No charity for you, say German rich

2010-08-25T08:30:00.000-07:00

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Negative Reaction to Charity Campaign: German Millionaires Criticize Gates' 'Giving Pledge'

SPIEGEL: But doesn't the money that is donated serve the common good?

Krämer: It is all just a bad transfer of power from the state to billionaires. So it's not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That's a development that I find really bad. What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow?

SPIEGEL: It is their money at the end of the day.

Krämer: In this case, 40 superwealthy people want to decide what their money will be used for. That runs counter to the democratically legitimate state. In the end the billionaires are indulging in hobbies that might be in the common good, but are very personal.

He's worried about tax write-offs, which of course are there for the express purpose of encouraging charity, but never mind. Very tempting to say something about an unhealthy historical affinity between German capitalists and the state, for which a tacked-on modifier like "democratically" doesn't help much. But that would be stereotyping, and this is probably just this particular specimen, Krämer with an umlaut. The sad fact is that there's an unhealthy affinity between some capitalists and the state everywhere.

Thanks to Freakonomics

"Avatar"-man backs down from showdown

2010-08-24T12:59:00.000-07:00

See James Cameron backs out of debate with climate-change skeptics (HotAir)

I quite liked Avatar, by the way, which was simple-minded but in a nice way. Cameron's good at some things, such as telling a story, concocting pretty fantasy worlds. Not so good at reason and evidence, apparently. Or maybe, as Allahpundit says, he was just "busy".

UPDATE (Aug 26): Another report.

Piling on

2010-08-24T09:26:00.000-07:00

From Best of the Web, Aug 23/10 (I can't resist either):

An Atrocious Sentence, but No Crime
This almost seems unsporting, but we can't resist. From a New York Times editorial on the Justice Department's decision to drop its investigation of Tom DeLay:

Mr. DeLay, the Texas Republican who had been the House majority leader, crowed that he had been "found innocent." But many of Mr. DeLay's actions remain legal only because lawmakers have chosen not to criminalize them.

By the same logic, the New York Times editorialists are not in the dock only because "criminal stupidity" is a figure of speech and not an actual law.

Wealth: trickles vs. fountains

2010-08-23T18:57:00.000-07:00

One of the more damaging and misleading bits of political rhetoric in the last few decades -- and there are a number of candidates -- has been the phrase "tickle-down", as applied in a narrow sense to cuts in marginal tax rates and in a broader sense to any policy that refrains from taking money from the relatively wealthy. I had thought the phrase was dreamed up by Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, but apparently he just recycled it -- Wikipedia, anyway, says it may have started with Will Rogers, which is a more appropriate origin. In any case, ever since Stockman it's been widely used by the liberal-left to condemn any move to, say, lower tax rates in an across the board manner, as well as to justify further confiscatory taxation since the state is better able to "spread the wealth around", in Obama's felicitous phrase, than just letting it trickle down from the rich.

But what if, rather than just a trickle, the reality is that a fountain of wealth flows from those with wealth -- i.e., capital -- already? Not because they're into sharing, though some are, as the recent news about the Gates/Buffet efforts to encourage world billionaires to increase their philanthropic efforts suggests. No, the reason is actually just the opposite -- the real wealth dispersed by rich capitalists is that which overflows from their efforts at making money rather than giving it away, efforts which are of course impeded by the various attempts to "spread the wealth around". In this post, "Bill Gates Gave at the Office", Mark J. Perry cites a 2004 paper by William D. Nordhaus, which summarizes itself as follows:

We conclude that only a minuscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances over the 1948-2001 period was captured by producers, indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers.

It's not just Gates, in other words, and it doesn't depend on what you might think of Microsoft per se -- the real source of wealth in capitalist societies is just capitalist activity itself, with all its instability, its "creative destruction", its messy booms and busts. And if you need any further evidence that, over the long term, this results in a fountain rather than a trickle, take a look at the shape of the following graph, which is essentially a flat line until about 1700, and exponential thereafter:

Of course, Keynes was right, that in the long run we're all dead. But for most of us, that's not all that counts -- some think of the children. So here's a bit of counter-intuitive advice you could give to a young idealist starting out in life, and looking for the best way to benefit humanity as a whole: forget the Peace Corps or NGOs, and aspire instead to become a "robber baron", a la Rockefeller or Carnegie or Gates. You probably won't get that far, but in the process you stand a good chance of actually creating some real wealth, most of which will splash throughout our globalized economy to the benefit of everyone in varying degrees, including, especially, the poorest of the poor; and a portion of which -- but only a "miniscule fraction" -- you get to keep yourself.

Johnny Rotten goes to Israel

2010-08-22T17:59:00.000-07:00

Rock n Roll was always about stickin it to the Man, right? (See Jack Black, The School of Rock.) And punk rock stuck it with a fist or a broken bottle. And Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols stuck it about as hard as the hardest puck rocker. Still stickin it, in fact, though he's now middle aged, living in California, and goes by the name of John Lydon -- here he is talking about why he isn't joining other performers in a boycott of Israel:

I really resent the presumption that I'm going there to play to right-wing Nazi jews [sic]. If Elvis-f-ing-Costello wants to pull out of a gig in Israel because he's suddenly got this compassion for Palestinians, then good on him. But I have absolutely one rule, right? Until I see an Arab country, a Muslim country, with a democracy, I won't understand how anyone can have a problem with how they're treated.

Now, I'm not going to defend the logic here -- it's punk logic! -- but I think the gist and the underlying instincts are dead right. And predictably, the left apparently has its knickers in a twist about it, as John might say: "The British blogosphere and commentaries in the Guardian are packed full of hysterical tirades against Rotten". So you see the main thing that's changed? It's the identity of the Man, who's morphed from your parents into those guardians of the cultural gates, those bien pensant chattering classes, the liberal-left culterati themselves, most of whom, comically, remain frozen in attitudes they formed during their extended adolescence, as self-righteous outsiders fighting an endless battle against now phantom parents.

Not John, though -- he's grown.