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Wednesday, July 16, 2008 |
THE DEATH OF NEWS (CONT'D): I have explained elsewhere why selling "news" -- industrially packaged information -- is a doomed business model in the digital age. The response to his argument is usually shock and horror. Nobody would grieve if, say, McDonald's or Walmarts went bust -- but somehow the NYT and the WaPo and BBC stand on a higher moral and spiritual platform, at least according to themselves.
Democracy, we are told, depends on an informed electorate. I don't really believe that having an opinion about the subprime crash makes me a better or worse citizen -- but let's grant the point. If being informed is my duty, would I dispense this obligation by a faithful daily reading of the news?
Consider this event. Earlier this month, a Palestinian went on a rampage with a bulldozer in East Jerusalem, murdering three Israelis and injuring many others, before being shot dead by the police. The initial headline by the BBC, probably the most prestigious news organization in the world, was this: "Israel bulldozer driver shot dead." It was later corrected, but why would the death of the killer ever take pride of place on any sensible account of the killings in East Jerusalem?
Well, it turns out BBC headlines show a consistent pattern when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians. This study offers a series of rather depressing examples. In each case, the Israelis perpetrate horrors on helpless victims ("Children killed in Israeli strike"). Conversely, bad things happen to these same Israelis, but in an inexplicable, impersonal way ("Rocket injures dozens in Israel"). And when Palestinians kill other Palestinians, the BBC headline writers again takes a lofty, impersonal tone: "Gaza explosion kills two children."
Israelis kill children. Rockets kill Israelis. The information-seeking citizen will have to make do with this. But isn't Israel an ally and a democracy? Haven't Palestinian groups, like Fatah and Hamas, frequently embraced terror against civilians? If the BBC stoops to mention such distateful possibilities, it's to offer "Palestinian militants" a bizarre backhanded -- and immediately contradicted -- compliment:
Attacks by Palestinian militants in Jerusalem have been a rare occurrence in recent years, with none of their trademark suicide bombings since September 2004.
The last deadly attack was in March this year when a gunman killed eight students in a seminary before he was shot dead.
Increasingly rare -- eight killed last March. In forming my own personal, informed citizen's Middle East policy, which way should I incline?
Now consider this event: news about news. On September 30 2000, Palestinians in Gaza staged a demonstration to protest Ariel Sharon's visit to Temple Mount. The official French TV network, France 2, transmitted heart-rending footage from the location, showing a young boy and his father being gunned down while cowering against a wall. The boy was said to be Mohammed al Dura, and the killers, according to Charles Enderlin, the France 2 correspondent, were Israeli sharpshooters.
The killing of Mohammed al Dura helped spark the second intifada, in which hundreds died on both sides. The boy's name was shouted by Palestinian mobs when they lynched and mutilated two Israeli reservists. It was invoked by the thug who decapitated Daniel Pearl. It was repeated by Osama bin Laden in justification of 9/11. Postage stamps with al Dura's picture have been issued by several Arab countries. He became, quite literally, "the poster boy for the Palestinian and Islamist war against the West."
One small problem: the death never happened. As this article by Melanie Phillips relates, Enderlin, who wasn't on the scene at all, relied on a Palestinian cameraman. The full footage of the supposed shooting of Mohammed al Dura has now been released, due to a court case brought by Enderlin against a French critic of the France 2 report. Anyone can watch the footage: after the death scene, the boy miraculously starts moving again.
You see the boy slumping to the ground. But before he does so, while he is still hanging on to his father and screaming, a voice shouts in Arabic: 'The boy is dead! The boy is dead!' Asked to explain this astounding prescience, Enderlin's team replied that the Arabic in fact meant: 'The boy is in danger of dying.' At this, the courtroom laughed out loud.
After Enderlin pronounces the boy to be dead, the corpse mysteriously assumes four different positions. You see the cameraman's fingers making the 'take two' sign to signal the repeat of a scene. And then you see the lifeless martyr raise his arm and peep through his fingers -- presumably to check whether his thespian services are still required or whether he can now get up and go home.
The Paris court ruled against Enderlin. The ruling cited "the 'inexplicable incoherence' of footage, whose images did not correspond to Enderlin’s commentary; the 'inexplicable inconsistencies and contradictions' in Enderlin’s explanation; and the lack of credibility of France 2's Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma," who was obviously and successfully shilling for a cause rather than reporting the news.
So, here is a colossal scandal -- right? The symbolic event and probable cause of much Arab mayhem and slaughter was almost certainly faked. The TV network owned by the government of France was duped at best, complicit at worst. The news, informational bedrock to democracy, can be staged just like a Viagra commercial.
One would expect the most respectable news outlets to be all over such a juicy scandal. Not in France, however. Zero reporting on the matter. So maybe the French feel a certain reticence about exposing their mistakes. How about BBC -- surely the Brits will rejoice over a Gallic blunder? Nope. Nothing from BBC, either. They have their headlines all prepackaged, and this story runs against the grain.
How about America, home of the NYT, WaPo, and the information-starved citizen? Again, nothing. The Mohammed al Dura scandal is like a tree that falls in the media forest: the sounds of silence. The NYT can be excused: no doubt its resources are fully engaged, reporting the inequalities in the women's grill of the Phoenix Country Club.
What about the WaPo? Lo, I have read the WaPo, my hometown newspaper, and I have rejoiced. Was there (you ask) a hard-hitting investigation of the al Dura mess? Lord, no. But it doesn't matter. The jihad is over. Iraq and Afghanistan -- over. The US has won. The world is calm.
How do I know this? Chandra Levy is back on the front page -- this is the news that gets the hard-hitting investigative treatment at the WaPo. Can shark attack stories be far behind?
9:25:58 PM 
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Sunday, July 13, 2008 |
MEMBERS OF THE VICTIMS' COUNTRY CLUB: Justice is a rough and ready virtue. We understand without difficulty gross violations of justice: the civil rights marches of the early Sixties, which provoked a vicious response from segregationist state governments, banked on the ability of Americans to perceive and reject wholesale injustice. The Jim Crow South collapsed because it was visibly loathsome, even to itself.
That's the traditional approach. It judges large matters, and settles them roughly. Minute and perfect justice, in which every person obtains his just desserts exactly, is not to be hoped for this side of paradise.
To the rationalist, on the other hand, nothing can be too minute for righteous rage. The rationalist is a lover of formulas, and nourishes a childish delight in symmetry. If "equality" is the formula for justice, then only complete and perfect equality, in every aspect of human life, can be tolerated, and the slightest failure -- the smallest pea under the mattress -- should will bring forth gigantic media crusades and calls for redress and punishment.
The result of this attitude is usually comedy: large claims about small matters tend to sound funny. This piece by Heather MacDonald, on a crusade to allow women into the "men's grill" of the Phoenix Country Club -- pursued and publicized by the mighty NYT -- is a pretty hilarious example.
The Phoenix Country Club has male and female members and a common dining room. But like many clubs, it has separate men's and women's grill rooms -- an innocuous arrangement to which members agree by joining the club. The Times points out darkly: "Women at the club are not permitted to have lunch in the men’s grill room with their husbands after a round of golf." It could as justly have observed that after the same round of golf, men at the club aren't allowed to lunch with their wives in the women's grill room.
The Rosa Parks role in this break-down-the-barriers battle is played by the Van Sitterts, a couple who, two years ago, wanted to eat eggs together in the men’s grill room rather than in the club’s formal dining room. Having failed to persuade the board to change its policies -- presumably because most members are happy with the single-sex socializing options -- they did what any self-respecting aspirant to victimhood does today: they went whining to the government. Instead of resigning their membership and joining another club, they petitioned Arizona's attorney general to intervene. The AG was only too happy to comply, brushing aside the legal nicety that private clubs are in theory not subject to antidiscrimination laws and ruling that the club was violating those laws, since (pending renovation) the women's grill room has neither a television nor its own bar. Television and booze are available elsewhere in the club, and women can bring drinks into their grill. But in the spirit of angry young wives who tally every pair of socks that they and their husband fold, the absence of absolute tit-for-tat equality in one room’s appurtenances means that women occupy an unbearable position of inferiority. [. . . ]
Time was when liberals would have professed to care about the dishwashers in the Phoenix Country Club, not the members who send them their dirty dishes to be washed. But the narcissism of today's elites knows no bounds. Undoubtedly, a certain percentage of the Times’s readers found their blood boiling at its front-page exposé of alleged second-class status among society's most privileged members. With any luck, this most decadent stage of the privileged Western women's movement is also its last.
Blacks in the Jim Crow South were victims of injustice. The Van Sitterts -- great name -- are simply members of that exclusive institution, the victims' country club.
11:16:57 PM
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Thursday, July 10, 2008 |
QUESTION FOR THE DAY: Am I a bundle of perceptions? The phrase comes from David Hume, a philosopher who was rarely wrong. Among "perceptions" he included everything buzzing inside our heads: thoughts, feelings, imagination, memory, as well as true sense perceptions. Hume opposed the identity of the "self" -- myself, yourself -- which philosophers of his day believed to be a "simple and continued" entity. Instead of an integrated, pilot-like controller of our actions, he found flow and fragmentation. "I never can catch myself at any time without a perception," he wrote, "and never can observe any thing but the perception."
Much of what we have learned since Hume's day appears to confirm his claim. If we equate -- as I think we must -- the self with the conscious mind, we bump into the current understanding of consciousness as a highly fragmented set of capabilities. These capabilities include short- and long-term memory, attention, a theorizing "interpreter," various regulatory emotions and feelings, all interacting with a massive inflow of sense data, yet exchanging little information. How this adds up to a sense of "myself" is a total mystery to science. And the mystery has been given a name: the binding problem. If consciousness isn't simple and continued, what makes it feel that way?
Until recently, I considered the binding problem of the self to be just another gap in human knowledge. By and large, normal people don't behave in a fragmented manner, so I supposed a binding force, though not yet discovered, must exist.
These were comfortable assumptions. I have just finished a fascinating but disturbing book by Andy Clark, Being There, that undermines them by providing a method whereby a fragmented being might behave like an integrated character.
Clark's thesis is simple and persuasive. Suppose the human mind "offloads" much of its cognitive needs onto the environment -- and by environment, Clark means nature but also language and the social world. (That we do offload such needs is apparent: think of the calculator, or a list of groceries, or this blog, or the white house my wife always uses as a landmark.) In essence, we have then built a "scaffolding" around us that tremendously magnifies and integrates our thinking capacity. Much as the natural world constrains our actions -- we stop short of the precipice -- so the social and linguistic environments drive us to behave in specified, predictable ways. For example, I buy the items on the grocery list, and my wife invariably turns right at the white house.
The disturbing aspect of this explanation is that it doesn't require a self to explain human behavior. (Clark himself takes no position on the matter.) Each of our fragmented capabilities can play off the natural and cultural scaffolding, needing only a few simple rules of priority to interact with the other capabilities. Long-term memory may bring up the white house as a landmark, commanding attention and initiating a right turn in the road. Short-term memory may scan the grocery list, initiating the search and retrieval of an item. No self or central command is needed for these outwardly integrated activities, any more than for stopping short of the precipice.
Even the idea of the self as a pilot or central command, which receives signals from the sensory organs and orchestrates the appropriate actions, has been shown to be logically untenable. Thinkers observe that an internal "homunculus" or mini-me isn't much of an explanation for human behavior: it just pushes the problem one layer back. Who decides for the homunculus? Another, inside him? And another? The central command theory appears to dissolve into an infinite regress -- commands inside commands.
If the self -- the traditional source of moral agency and responsibility -- fragments and disintegrates, what is left on which to base moral judgments, or morality itself?
We have suddenly entered a Twilight Zone episode in which nothing, least of all ourselves, is what it appears to be. But the story isn't done. Here, submitted for your consideration, is the remainder of the plot.
We are not mechanical devices. We are self-reflecting organisms. Second-level cognition -- what Clark calls "thinking about thinking" -- is, Clark himself observes, the most powerful cognitive capability available to the human race, and the one that separates us from other animals. It involves self-criticism: testing one's ideas from a variety of perspectives. Clark offers an example of how we use written language to this end:
By writing down our ideas, we generate a trace in a format that opens up a range of new possibilities. We can then inspect and reinspect the same ideas, coming at them from many different angles and in many different frames of mind. We can hold the original ideas steady so that we may judge them, and safely experiment with subtle alterations.
The consequence is self-motivated change in thinking and behavior. I think about my plan, consider the facts, change the plan, and act. The reflecting agent, however fragmented, is the self. Clark, like most cognitive scientists, is enamored with the mechanisms of thought and mind, described in terms of "computations" and "algorithms." But Being There was published in 1997 -- since then, brilliant researchers like Antonio Damasio and Jonathan Haidt have shown the emotions to play a leading role in practical problem-solving and moral judgment alike. An organism capable of self-reflection and self-criticism, endowed with feelings about right and wrong behavior, possesses all the equipment necessary for morality.
We each inhabit a subjective consciousness: the consistent, persistent, integrated feeling that I am me. Some schools of thought, like the behaviorists, downplay this feeling. But that won't do. Thinking without consciousness is impossible to a normal human being. In his Chinese room metaphor, John Searle illustrated the fallacy of identifying mechanical computation with human thought. We are not calculators. We are not robots. The difference lies precisely in our ability to externalize ourselves, and reflect on what we see -- who we are, how things might be different, how we might become better.
What can I assert with confidence about the feeling that I am me? This me isn't an illusion, but neither is it a pilot-like figure, commanding my actions. I learn about my actions much as I learn about the actions of others: by watching me do things. On occasion, I have no clue why I acted a certain way. It might have been the action of a total stranger. I am, no doubt, fragmented. But I can reflect on my behavior and its consequences, and I have some power over my actions -- as I surely don't over the actions of others -- to change and align them with some model in my mind.
The me, I submit, is not myself but a model of myself: an aspiration, not a reality. And this slow march toward perfection is only possible because of the scaffolding provided by our moral traditions.
Clark's message is that we aren't the brilliant and far-seeing individuals we fondly imagine ourselves to be. Private thought stands on the stilts of the ancient wisdom of the community. By far the most powerful example is language. Individuals contribute variably to the evolution of language, but only the crazed or the perverse would try to invent a personal idiom. By the same token, the only languages that survive are those that are easy for children to learn, and that easily expand the thinking power of the user relative to his environment. The rest die out early, or are never born.
The key factor is selection. That is true for all forms of cultural scaffolding, including morality. What we call tradition is the triumph across centuries of chosen behavior over chance and necessity. We achieve integrity -- we become ourselves -- by standing on the shoulders of those who came before us.
9:24:30 PM
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Wednesday, July 09, 2008 |
A MORAL CREED: Over at Sophistpundit, a commenter challenged the eponymous blogger to state his own moral ideals, since he was so free in his criticism of the ideas of rationalism. Brave beyond words, Sophistpundit agreed. Here is a sample of his must-read "Moral Philosophy":
My understanding of how morality works in practice is owed entirely to the theories of moral sentiments of David Hume and Adam Smith, and theory of moral education of Protagoras.
The theories of moral sentiments, as one might imagine, depict morality as something that is felt by the individual. I find some actions repulsive, while others fill me with warmth. To Hume and Smith, the driving force behind the moral sentiments is sympathy, which is our tendency to feel what we imagine we might feel if we were in the situation of the person we observe. For example, if we witness an act of charity, the good feeling we get from our sympathy to the one receiving charity will for this reason tend to reflect well on the one committing the act.
Hume emphasized that we only make moral judgments about people's character. Actions are judged only in as much as they are seen to reflect more general characteristics. I very much believe this to be the case. In economics we talk about how people look for certain signals to overcome problems of information asymmetry. It makes sense to me, therefore, that actions would be seen only as signals, to be used to better judge the sort of person we're dealing with. This isn't limited to moral judgments, either; we rely on such signals to determine a person's competence as well. If technician who you have known and relied on for years makes a mistake, you will probably believe it if they attribute it to missing a night of sleep. If someone else with a poorer track record makes the same mistake, however, it will be reflected very differently in your judgment of them.
Read the whole thing -- anyone who responds so boldly to a commenter deserves all the traffic his site can bear. And while at the site, read up from this particular post, particularly the bits on science and the "basic framework." Good stuff.
10:21:09 PM
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Monday, July 07, 2008 |
DEEP THOUGHT: "In this respect, I cannot compare the soul more properly to anything than to a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination, and give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts. And as the same individual republic may not only change its members, but also its laws and constitutions, in like manner the same person may vary his character and disposition, as well as his impressions and ideas, without losing his identity." David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
8:34:26 PM
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Thursday, June 19, 2008 |
THE VULGAR MORALIST GOES ON PAUSE: No blogging over the next three weeks, while I escape to a tropical paradise in search of truly virtuous, non-hedonistic pleasures.
6:21:26 PM
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Wednesday, June 18, 2008 |
ROWDY KIDS 1, SCHOOLMASTERS 0: Honestly, I'm not sure how keen on democracy the European elites have ever been. In my lifetime, most have preferred social and political arrangements -- Marxism-Leninism, "social" democracy, the "social model" -- that centralized power in their own hands, and limited the choices available to the citizenry to those already blessed by them. In a very real sense, European culture has never outgrown its awe and admiration for the most superficial aspects of the old blood nobility.
De Tocqueville, born a noble but a liberal democrat by conviction, first perceived this tragic flaw at the heart of Europe's politics. He foresaw the rise in democratic Europe of centralized, paternalistic, "all-powerful" governments, ruled by stern "schoolmasters" whose only distinction from despots lay in having been elected. Thus the people could pretend to be free, while the elites could exercise an aristocratic authority over the people's lives and property.
Today, De Tocqueville's vision of schoolmasterly rulers is struggling to be born in the European Union. The EU sits atop the elected governments of 27 nations, and from this ungainly perch drains, vampire-like, the sovereignty of each. Interestingly, the nations' loss hasn't been the EU's gain. Nobody in Europe, high or low, wastes passion on the EU, or feels the slightest loyalty to its institutions. Sovereignty and legitimacy have simply leaked away from all politics, all government.
That might be considered a bad thing, but only if one believed in the sovereignty of the people. For those who wish to rule in the mode prophesied by De Tocqueville, with a democratic face but a despotic hand, a little confusion can go a long way. It scarcely matters whether the beneficiaries of this "project" are unelected Euro-elites in Brussels, or national elites who play the EU like a shell game to ignore the wishes of their electorates. The point is to "build" Europe like the Soviets used to build socialism: so the schoolmasters rule.
Centralization and massive bureaucracy typify the EU, but also every phase of life in the continent. Europe's elites everywhere are seized with the urge to regulate and control the welfare of the masses -- wedded, naturally enough, to fear and loathing of the opinions of ordinary people.
Ordinary people, given the chance, reciprocate the feeling. The elite's first attempt to erect a supranational entity was the EU constitution, written by a former French president, blessed by everyone and everything with any standing in the political, cultural, and business worlds. It went down in defeat in referendums held in France and the Netherlands.
That was the wrong answer. The constitution was rewritten, its language made even more impenetrable to discourage prying eyes, and presented yet again as the Lisbon Treaty -- which, not being a change in governmental structure, needed only the approval of the national parliaments. The elites, in other words, would ratify what the elites had wrought: game, set, match.
Except for the Irish. Because of skittishness about their neutrality, the Irish must put every foreign treaty to the popular vote. Still, nobody worried overmuch. The Irish have been the greatest beneficiaries of EU largesse and of the single market. Why would they bite the hand that fed them?
Good question. In a vote held last Friday, the Irish voted by 53 to 47 percent against the Lisbon Treaty.
We don't know why large numbers of people vote one way rather than another. We can barely guess what motivates a single voter. So I'm not going to pontificate on the intentions or higher meanings behind the Irish vote. This much is certain, though: the people spoke. Since the treaty requires unanimous approval of all EU member nations, that should be the end of the story.
Wrong answer. At present the Euro-elites are too stunned to think clearly, so they haven't yet come up with the plan to bury the Irish vote. But their opinion of democracy is of long standing -- no need to think. Democracy, by their lights, is the celebration and confirmation of their worldview. The only legitimate vote, then, was for the Lisbon Treaty. A vote against meant the people hadn't listened to their schoolmasters hard enough, and were in the grip of superstitious error.
According to the BBC, "Correspondents say many voters did not understand the treaty despite a high-profile campaign led by Mr Cowen, which had the support of most of the country's main parties." The triumph of ignorance: there's your democracy. Not to worry, though: the same source reported that European Commission President Barroso had spoken with the Irish prime minister, and both had agreed "this was not a vote against the EU." Get it right: No to Lisbon meant Yes to the EU -- but Yes also meant Yes, and Maybe meant Yes, and Silence meant, well, Hell Yes.
Liberation, the leftwing Paris daily, conveniently forgot that the French voted down the EU constitution, and sneered openly at the benighted Irish (via No Pasaran):
As always in referendum campaigns, the most absurd fantasies triumph, the most absurd rumors, the most shameless take hold multiply to infinity. They plunged again into the democracy of opinions with its demagogues, populists, confabulators, and its myth obsessed. It's a technique which is irresistible to a culture riddled with superstitions.
The Yes side had wisdom, evidence, and right reason. The other side suffered from an incurable "democracy of opinions" -- God (or Marx) help us, the vote was an effusion of the Dark Ages which the Irish apparently have never outgrown.
The immediate reaction of the leaders of France and Germany was denial: move along, nothing to see here, ratification of the treaty continues. This is a normal response to illness or imminent death -- less so to a referendum vote. According to the Guardian, the French "European" minister asserted, "The most important thing is that the ratification process must continue in the other countries, and then we shall see with the Irish what type of legal arrangement could be found." And: "'We're sticking firmly to our goal of putting this treaty into effect,' said the German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. 'So the process of ratification must continue.'"
The people have spoken, but the schoolmasters will have none of it. All EU nations must ratify the treaty, by the EU's own rules -- but what are rules among friends, or to philosopher kings? The point of the exercise was to achieve a given outcome, pre-approved by the elites, and if that outcome isn't achieved then the rules must get ditched.
I save the best for last. A former Romanian foreign minister, currently member of the European "Parliament" -- a body of vague but limited authority -- is the author of the following burst of eloquence (via England Expects):
The Irish "No" is not the result or the expression of democracy, but of the crisis of the latter. On the one hand, we have the inability of the mass to find or understand the solutions for the settlement of the complicated problems regarding the guarantee of security and social justice in the conditions of globalization. On another hand, we have the divorce between the people and the elites. The Irish referendum is not a victory of democracy, but a last blow to the idea of democracy. (Especially the direct one). Unwillingly and without knowing, the Irish proclaimed with the candor of innocence that the "king" of democracy is naked.
Undeniably, the European process cannot continue through referendum. Such a method does not function when the electorate is unequally informed and educated about the problems in discussion.
The Romanians, newcomers to the games that Euro-elites play, merely say out loud what the more experienced schoolmasters hint at. Europe must shun the will of its people. Democracy, which represents that will, is the emperor that has no clothes, and the Irish the innocent child who has now exposed its naked failure. The people must never be given an opportunity to divorce their betters.
The elites want their Lisbon Treaty, and my guess is that, by hook or by crook, they will get it. It has always gone that way in Europe. But I have a sense that even the elites, weary and demographically depleted, can tell the end is in sight. They can't "build" Europe endlessly: sooner or later, a limit must be reached. I'm guessing it was reached last Friday, by the Irish vote, and much of the noise quoted above is the political equivalent of whistling in the graveyard.
Otherwise, the Europe they build will resemble a house of cards, in which the fall of a single piece will bring the whole edifice down.
UPDATE: My favorite Brit writer, Theodore Dalrymple, had done a commentary for City Journal that echoes pretty closely what I posted above. Here's the gist of it:
Is the European Union heading for a Yugoslavian-style denouement? It sometimes looks as if its political class, oblivious to the wishes or concerns of the EU’s various populations, is determined to bring one about. The French and the Dutch voted against the proposed European Constitution, but that did not deter the intrepid political class from pressing ahead with its plans for a superstate that no one else wants. To bypass the wishes of the people, the politicos reintroduced the constitution as a treaty, to be ratified by parliaments alone. Only the Irish had the guts -- or was it the foolhardiness? -- to hold a referendum on the issue. Unfortunately, the Irish people got the answer wrong. They voted no, despite their political leaders’ urging that they vote yes. No doubt the people will be given an opportunity in the future -- or several opportunities, if necessary -- to correct their mistake and get the answer right, after which there will be no more referenda. [. . . ]
Not to worry, the European political elites soon recovered from the shock. Ireland, they pointed out, is a small and peripheral country, and not a founder-member of the European Union. Anyway, what does it really matter if referendum after referendum, in Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Ireland, defeats the proposals of the European political class? The proposals can always be enacted regardless, by other means. What does it matter if two-thirds of Germans regret monetary unification, as do the French and the Italians? What does it matter if prime minister Gordon Brown refused to hold a referendum on the treaty in Britain -- having previously promised one -- once he realized how roundly voters would reject it? As European Commission president José Manuel Barroso said after the Irish vote: the Lisbon Treaty is not dead, it is living. What the people of Europe want is completely irrelevant.
For the moment, all is peaceful and quiet. The political class, which loves the unitary European state precisely because it so completely escapes democratic or any other oversight (let alone control), and for whom it acts as a giant pension fund, holds the upper hand for now. But tensions and frustrations in Europe have a history of expressing themselves in nasty ways.
5:23:23 PM
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Friday, June 13, 2008 |
THE MORAL FOUNDATION OF POLITICS: Every once in a while I find it useful to pause and recall the claims which first motivated me to start this blog. The selection by our two political parties of their candidates for the presidency, and the upcoming campaign for that office, provides a fitting moment to do so again. In the coming months, we'll hear a lot of bluster and speechifying -- let me lay down the Vulgar Morality position in advance, and then move on.
The first claim is that morality trumps politics. While the Founding Fathers understood this simple truth, we are less clear: our chattering classes surely prefer to wield the compulsive power of the state to unleash some vast collective effect, than face the embarrassment of preaching good behavior. Morality is private, they assume. Politics is public business.
But no system of government can survive unless the people embody the virtues necessary for its preservation. Despotism, for example, requires that obedience become a virtue. Liberal democracy, which exalts individual freedom, must value behaviors that navigate the narrow channel between servility and social chaos: the virtues of self-restraint, self-reliance, and community-mindedness, for example. Such virtues are demanded of the individual, and of the people as a community of individuals. Morality begins with home and family, but it is everyone's business.
A democracy with an electorate of five-year-olds will soon disintegrate into conflict and multiple absolutisms of me. Similarly, an electorate composed of infantilistic adults, obsessed with personal or tribal grievances, rights, and prerogatives, yet indifferent to the fate of others in the community, won't retain their freedom for long. De Tocqueville predicted that infantile majorities in Europe would elect powerful, centralized "schoolmasters," different from despots only in having been elected. He might have been writing about the European Union.
Freedom is a moral condition. Free political structures will be corrupted by a selfish, unrestrained people. Corruption in turn will breed unfreedom, whether as mob rule in the style of the early French revolution, or as Napoleonic tyranny. And we Americans shouldn't think ourselves immune. When I first moved to Fairfax County many years ago, all of Virginia was in the grip of a political organization, the Byrd machine, which decided elections with a confidence worthy of the Soviet Politburo. The bargain was to keep the races separated. For that deal with the devil, the Virginia electorate became like children in the hands of Harry Byrd.
The primacy of morality over politics means that the legitimate function of government must be to open and protect as large a space as possible for individual decision. That, again, goes against the grain of the chattering classes, who are perpetually discovering "crises" which demand collective solutions. Issues treated this way abound, but let me mention just two: global warming and health care. Regarding these issues, the question isn't whether or not a problem exists, but whether, given a political problem of any magnitude, the solution should be left to a brilliant clique of technicians or to the moral choices of millions of citizens.
The answer will depend on whether one considers the electorate to be made up of responsible adults -- or only the political class. Many politicians, for obvious reasons, tend to believe the latter. Their importance grows with the promotion of existential "crises" to which they, and they alone, can provide a mandated "solution" -- saving us from ourselves by the application of power from their schoolmasterly hands. This is the tempting path of Robespierre's Terror, and of Stalin's purges: feeling the buzz of self-righteousness while acting on naked self-interest.
Robespierre and Stalin both were rationalists -- and rationalism, readers of this blog will know, throws a simple-minded, mock-scientific veil over questions of immense complexity. The rationalist is never humble in the face of his own ignorance. He knows an answer -- the answer -- and must impose it on his less gifted neighbors for their own good. Rationalist solutions invariably take the form of an abstract formula: these can be vague (the greatest happiness for the greatest number) or untested (the drastic reduction of CO2 emissions), but their political effect, always, is the removal of decision-making from the individual to a technocratic elite.
Yet collective decisions are sometimes necessary, and a government must exist powerful enough to implement them: the enforcement and dispensation of criminal law, for example, can't be left to individual choice. A key question is how to tell when collective action becomes necessary.
The answer constitutes the second claim asserted in this blog: that only public opinion can decide when morality must become compulsory. In fact, a second's reflection will reveal that, in a liberal democracy, only public opinion can arbitrate the outcome of moral disputes. Religion, science, reason, nature -- all the grand systems and absolute principles -- can inform one side or another of the argument, but none has authority. Opinion alone owns legitimacy, and must be the court of last appeal.
The rule of opinion drives rationalists into a frenzy of despair. Opinion is arbitrary, they maintain: morality and justice must rest on "objective" principles. Opinion is the product of a dull conventional crowd, they insist. It's superstition. Truth requires a higher standard, attainable only by the keenest intellects. Versions of this argument have been put forward by rationalists great and small, from Plato to John Kenneth Galbraith.
But public opinion is humbler, and far less arbitrary, than the formulas proposed by rationalists in their search for objective principles. Our opinions on moral and political matters aren't just made up on the spot: the are received, by way of family and community, from traditions that have survived the test of time. We know ourselves to stand on the shoulders of moral and political giants, and few of us are foolish enough to wish to jump off to the bog below.
Human morality is a consequence of biological evolution. We are born with a moral sense which the community tailors to its specific circumstances. Traditions are the outcome of historical evolution. They weave a rousing story about those behaviors the community has, over the centuries, found adaptive to its circumstances. Public opinion merely propels the current scene of an ancient morality play, featuring the ghosts of the illustrious dead and the claims of those not yet born.
Our moral traditions are accessible to everyone regardless of education or wealth. On this domain, the garbage collector can easily be superior to the college professor and the billionaire. Such moral equality is what Jefferson meant by "all men are created equal." It's the foundation of political democracy, which at bottom is nothing more than the citizen's insistence that he alone can decide the moral course of his life.
Public opinion rooted in tradition is deeply felt, but -- like human nature -- inconsistent. A people can glorify equality and worship excellence, as the ancient Athenians once did, for example -- and, I fondly hope, as Americans do today. Yet inconsistency is the bane of the rationalist politician, who dreams of a symmetry and mathematical exactness found nowhere in human life. If equality is the ideal, then every traditional grouping of citizens -- a workforce, a student body, a social club -- must be mandated to embody some abstract formula of equality. And if the formula is not met, then a power must be erected to compel conformity on those who have failed the ideal.
The practical results of rationalist political formulas are of course more arbitrary and inconsistent than any outcome tolerated by tradition. One government-protected group, women, includes welfare mothers but also billionaires like Teresa Heinz Terry. Another such group, "Hispanics," counts Portuguese-speaking Brazilians of African descent, but not those who trace their origins to Spain -- unless they or their ancestors detoured through Latin American, in which case they do count.
None of this should surprise us. When moral equality is disregarded, even for the best intentions, all that's left is power disputed among individuals and groups. When tradition is rejected as the arbiter for collective action, the criteria for decision becomes whatever is found inside the heads of the people in power. That's the political nirvana of the rationalist and our American articulate classes: they think, they decide, we obey.
The politics of collective action, even when conducted by elected officials, are inherently anti-democratic. The president of the United States, because he wield enormous power, can inflict enormous damage to the fabric of our traditions, customs, and opinions. Political wisdom resembles the medical kind: above all, do no harm. Candidates who make extravagant promises, who exalt change as if it were a virtue, who everywhere find "crises" that require drastic "solutions" -- these will do harm proportionate to their skills, and should be sent back to private life by the electorate.
9:10:57 PM
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Monday, June 09, 2008 |
THEY WHO MUST BE NAMED: J.K. Rowling addressed the graduating class at Harvard in terms that are astonishing for a British writer. She didn't condescend. She didn't find fault. She refused to blame President Bush for the Great Plague of 1665. Instead Rowling took on the plague of despotism in the world, and did so in a starkly personal way, avoiding the gaseous abstractions so addictive to Euroblabbers.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.
And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read. [. . . ]
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
Somewhere along the way, the Harry Potter books made a few half-hearted genuflections before the altar of multiculturalism, the established religion of Britain. But the core of the story was always a hard, unpalatable truth: that evil exists, that it often triumphs, and that ordinary people must resort to extraordinary means to preserve what is good in the world, in disregard of moralizing postures and fashions.
Now, if only Rowling would have a word with Richard Dawkins. . .
10:35:26 PM
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Wednesday, June 04, 2008 |
LIVING IN AN IRRATIONAL WORLD (CONT'D): To the rationalist, every problem, from the price of gas to the future of the universe, has one and only one correct solution. Every other description of reality is therefore irrational, like claiming two plus two equals five. The rationalist considers himself a worshipper at the altar of modern science, which since Newton's day has, indeed, seemed to deliver a single rational answer to every great question regarding the world we live in.
Unfortunately, problems concerning human relations can't be solved successfully by reason or science. We're too contradictory a species: against the rules of logic, we can wish for a thing and its opposite -- love and hate the same person, for example. Our actions, our beliefs, and ultimately our happiness are determined by desires, evolved biologically. Science can explain the material world, and even the drivers of human behavior, but has nothing to say about the stuff human dreams are made of.
For these reasons, I always found rationalism somewhat irrational. It expects individuals and communities to behave in ways other than they always have. Despite failures at every turn -- a depressing list can be found in Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed -- they have battered away at tradition in the name of the "science of man," or "rationalization," or "scientific socialism," or whatever. To repeat the same failed policies and expect a different outcome is the definition of political insanity.
But beyond the tangled complexities of human nature, it's now pretty clear that the material world is irrational. By that I mean that it can no longer be described by a single correct explanation. In fact, if this NYT article is correct, cosmologists are having trouble coming up with any kind of explanation at all.
The universe is expanding at ever-faster speeds. That defies what we know about gravity: it's as if Manny Ramirez's 500th home run ball were still flying through the air, picking up momentum, never coming down. That worked as great cinema in The Natural, but it's making scientists crazy.
Although cosmologists have adopted a cute name, dark energy, for whatever is driving this apparently antigravitational behavior on the part of the universe, nobody claims to understand why it is happening, or its implications for the future of the universe and of the life within it, despite thousands of learned papers, scores of conferences and millions of dollars' worth of telescope time. It has led some cosmologists to the verge of abandoning their fondest dream: a theory that can account for the universe and everything about it in a single breath.
And without further ado, and no additional comment in a field I am utterly unqualified to meddle in, I present a series of disconnected bits and pieces from the story.
"Dark energy has the somewhat unusual property that it was embarrasing before it was discovered," he said. [. . .]
No fundamental principles can explain why Einstein's constant, or any physical parameter, could be so small without being zero, Dr. Witten said. Zero can be a fundamental number, but not a 1 with 59 zeroes between it and the decimal point. [. . .]
That idea has been given mathematical form by string theory, which portrays the constituents of nature as tiny wriggling strings, an elegant idea that in principle explains all the forces of nature but in practice leads to at least 10500 potential universes. [. . .]
"As for how I feel personally, I am not sure what to say," [Dr. Witten] said in an e-mail message. "I wasn't terribly enthusiastic the first, or even the second, time I heard the proposal of a multiverse. But none of us were consulted when the universe was created."
As I wrote before: the only obvious lesson to draw from all this is to embrace intellectual humility like a long-lost lover. The arrogance of rationalism has no grounding in science. Sometimes the answers are many; sometimes they are none.
10:29:04 PM
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Monday, June 02, 2008 |
THE FUTURE OF FREEDOM: In his second inaugural speech, President Bush embraced a remarkable new policy for the US government:
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. [. . .]
Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time. So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
At the time, I thought the words wildly ambitious and overly optimistic. Tyranny, like poverty, is rooted in the human condition: we must stuggle against it, but in the near certainty that it will always remain with us. From a practical perspective, the amount of money and lives needed to liberate the world were far beyond any country's capacity, no matter how wealthy or brave.
But for a shining moment in 2005, the president's vision seemed to move in harmony with events. Color revolutions in Georgia and the Ukraine overthrew corrupt regimes and replaced them with more democratic governments. Afghanistan moved from the horrors of the Taliban to the gentler rule of Hamid Karzai. The eye-popping spectacle of elections in Iraq ushered in the "Arab spring," which saw the despots who rule Egypt challenged by a liberal movement calling itself "Enough," and the occupation of Lebanon by Syria terminated following pressure from the US and France.
It is discouraging to reflect on how much the world has changed since that brief moment of hope. The governments of Georgia and the Ukraine still cling to power, though mired in internal and external conflicts. In | | | | |
