Ethnic America: The Scholarly Reference

I actually came across this while engaged in a different Google search, but let's add it to the discussion:

Eric Kaufmann, "Ethnic or Civic Nation?: Theorizing the American Case".

It has footnotes and everything, and therefore it is all true.

Illegal Immigrant Grandmothers

(I know, I know, I obsess.)

John McCain loses the good will he's been gaining with a particularly stupid imaginary example:

What about the 80 year-old grandmother who has been here literally all her life, whose son or grandson is fighting in Iraq? I’m not interested in calling them up and telling them we’re deporting their grandmother. .... But if you’re prepared to send an 80 year-old grandmother who’s been here 70 years back to some country, then frankly you’re not quite as compassionate as maybe I am.

Let us do the math, gentle readers: this lady arrived in the United States in 1937?!?!, and has somehow been living a furtive life in the shadows ever since? Although her son or grandson are fighting in Iraq?--she somehow married an illegal immigrant, because she's never gained citizenship via marriage, who also managed to spend most of the time, from say, 1950, without gaining citizenship? Or via her native-born children (if she's been in the US since 1937, they have to be native-born), who must be US citizens? And she missed taking advantage of the amnesty back in 1985? Let us set aside the fact that I am clearly one of those unafflicted with the good senator's highly developed compassion; this little scenario is an insult to my intelligence. (In which I take no pride--see an earlier post--but which still can be insulted!)

That's why McCain shouldn't be president--he can't make his immigration arguments without resorting to such idiocies, and in the process he has to sneer at his opponent's character. Ugh. Now to consider the rest of the insufficient field.

Music, English and American

I said to Phoebe in comments that any comparison of the weight of English and non-English elements in American culture would be impressionistic, subjective, and highly contestable; that said, I suppose one ought to make an attempt, rather than just duck the matter. So, by way of example, how much does American music owe to English music?—I choose a field where I am a mildly informed amateur, but by no means a professional. Anything I say is with an awareness that similarities between English and American music may simply reflect a common European background, and that lines of influence are doubtless less simple and causal than presented here.

1. America inherited from England a provincial position in the European classical musical tradition, ambivalently distrustful, with a pronounced dichotomy between that tradition and its own, popular music. England was a participant in the classical tradition—Tallis, Purcell—but from at least circa 1700, it was more a consumer of foreign classical music (Handel at the English court) than itself a producer, and it developed the curious habit of listening to opera in the original languages rather than developing an English opera itself. (This habit of consuming music is itself distinctive; more later.) The American urge to hire Dvorak, conducting in New York a century ago, or pay to hear Jennie Lind or Luciano Pavarotti sing, reflect an English, consuming attitude toward classical music. Yet this appreciation of classical music was distinctively an appreciation of a foreign music, perceived as divergent from the popular, native music. So John Gay’s Beggars Opera by the 1720s already burlesques opera by setting up an operatic structure—filled by English folk songs! (Gay in essence wrote an early jukebox musical; I shouldn’t really claim a direct line between Gay and Mamma Mia, but, oh, it is tempting!) This sort of burlesque of high culture, both dependent and distant, is constituent of English and American popular music for centuries, music hall and vaudeville—in recent times, consider Tom Lehrer singing “Clementine” as a Mozart aria. I even recollect watching a Bob Hope routine on TV in the 1980s, “What if Soap Opera were Sung Like Opera?”—rather lame, but an updating of John Gay’s basic technique. The very prizing of popular music in the Anglo-American tradition derives some of its energy from provincial suspicion of classical music. And those Anglo-American classical composers who do acquire some reputation are curiously attracted to the folk tradition: Benjamin Britten gives classical settings to folk songs, redoes Gay’s Beggars Opera, and, as I recollect, even collaborates with Auden on an operetta/musical of Paul Bunyan! Ralph Vaughan Williams returns to English folk song, as (letting a Celt in for the moment) Peter Maxwell Davies does to Scottish folk song; Charles Ives spends a certain amount of time deconstructing the American popular song of his time into atonalities.

2. Anglo-American popular music is very much a commercial, consuming affair. By the 1500s and 1600s, London is already selling printed ballads to be distributed throughout the streets of London and the highways of England; these commercial compositions enter into the popular lore to become the folk-songs of a later day. In early modern England, the mythic folk composer living in immortal, isolated splendor far from corrupting civilization, is precisely that—mythical. Commercial music publication is what makes music popular. Now, I can’t trace a direct lineage from early modern English music publication to nineteenth-century American music publication, but I’d be astonished if it didn’t exist—Occam’s Razor and all that. By the time you get to Stephen Foster, the interplay of commerce and popular music is in full swing. This creates its discontents—country and folk position themselves as more genuine (more later on that) than commercial Tin Pan Alley music. But, of course, country and folk are also rooted in the market—the New Republic, I believe, had a fascinating article on how radio stations in the 1920s helped form country music as a genre, and their anti-commercial positioning was, of course, itself a marketing ploy. Modern pop, rock, jazz, commercial and popular, are not so very different from the London ballads sold and sung in Yorkshire farms and towns.

3. Anglo-American music prizes “authenticity” over musical sophistication. This is related to the mistrust of classical music, the prizing of the national and popular, some sense that the popular must be unsophisticated. But I would take this to express something of Puritan religious sentiment as well. The Puritan aesthetic, after all, distrusts a great deal of aesthetic sophistication as either a distraction from God, or an idol replacing God. This doesn’t just lead to iconoclasm, whitewashing cathedrals, and simplified church architecture (of which the Quaker meeting house is the ne plus ultra), but also to plain style in language, as a clear window to express the meaning of God, plain clothing (with a nod to the fashions of Phillip II of Spain, and the possibility that a Puritan lord will dress in plain clothing of very fine fabric!), and, not least, plain music—music that worships God without being itself a distraction, music which opens man to God with simple sincerity, just as he is in his individual particularity, just as a man ought to in all worship. So the classical music tradition is suspected for its ornateness and its Catholicity—and, indeed, I recollect that Elizabethan composers remained largely Catholic even as the nation became more Protestant. Now, this impulse took different forms. In Elizabethan times, the Puritans adopted popular music to godly hymns, on the theory that the devil shouldn’t have the best tunes. A generation later, distrust of music in all forms led the Puritans to adopt an unmelodic chant for their hymnody—by all accounts, one of the most godawful braying ever invented. Virginia gentlemen in the 1700s, as part of their tours of New England, would attend Congregational church services for the perverse pleasure of hearing an entire congregation chant, each in their own key. This Puritan sense that simple, rough music best expresses the man I take to inform modern American music, even where the audience is other men rather than God. Particular singers—Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan—make a fetish of their rough, unmusical voices, as a guarantee of authenticity. All expressive American music, music and song that prizes expression of emotion over musical sophistication, betrays something of this Puritan, English attitude.

4. English hymnody and popular song forms the structure of American popular music. The sound of American music has drifted substantially—Celtic and African influences are famously prominent, and it becomes more global by the year—but the structure of narrative ballad, short verses repeating the same melody—music based on brief song—is very much English. (Very much Irish and Scottish too, I suppose; this particular argument is more qualified than the others.) American song sounds remarkably like English song—the National Anthem, as I imagine every five-year-old learns nowadays, is sung to the tune of the English drinking song, “Anacreon in Heaven”; “God Save the King” becomes “Pilgrims’ Pride.” (Is that the title?) But the influence is particularly strong via church music—which should not be underestimated as a component of American music, both because it is what has been popularly song, Sunday after Sunday, and on the other six days as well, and also because it forms the model for secular genres of music. (Gospel becomes soul; hymnody informs country.) Here I take the initial Protestant/Puritan wave of Reformation hymnody to have been remarkably reinforced by Methodist hymnody in the eighteenth century, which made catchy, punchy, emotional hymns far more central to worship. (The Methodists were influenced by the Moravians; I fancy that Methodist hymnody also owes something to German hymnody.) It is this Methodist emphasis on lively church song I take to have informed the hymnody of nineteenth century America, black and white, in a great many denominations, which in turn informs the popular music of America in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I think the stamp of John Wesley is remarkably strong on all the manifestations of modern American popular music.

5. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century English music continued to influence American music. Obviously American and English music were never identical; obviously they diverged more and more over the years. Yet the continuing influence of English music, itself changing, continued to set American music in an English mode. English music-hall and American vaudeville were obviously allied traditions, with a constant interchange of music and musicians. The comic song—the working class song and persona—music for an increasingly autonomous working class audience and culture, expanding to become a mass audience and culture—is very much a Victorian English innovation that spread to America. English operetta, with roots in the music hall, likewise had a very great influence on the American musical. Now, the English operetta also has roots in the Paris or Vienna operetta—and these had direct influences on American music!—but I believe the English operetta articulated the European genre in America to a remarkable extent—Gilbert & Sullivan were more popular, and perhaps more influential, than Strauss or Lehar. Is the English brass band absent from Sousa? By the time we get to the British Invasion, the reflection of American music via the Beatles or the Rolling Stones is only dubiously English. Still, it’s interesting to hear the music hall elements, and brass bands, in the Beatles or the Kinks, and consider that this, too, is reinforcing the English influence on American music.

None of this should be taken to deny the existence of non-English elements in American music. By the time one gets to Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints or Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, their presence is enormously strong. Read Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark, and you get a portrait of an extraordinarily vibrant non-English musical culture in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century America. Even setting aside the contributions of various immigrant groups in the last 125 years, both in musical personnel and in the influx of non-English musical traditions, American music, as noted above, depends strongly on early Celtic and African contributions—and doubtless, though I am ignorant of the details, on colonial-era Dutch, German, Spanish, and Indian music. The English contribution is also often, no doubt, generically European rather than specifically English. Some of what I call English might be called generically modern. With all these caveats and qualifiers, I am still enormously impressed by the English imprint on the deep structures of American music and American musical culture—an imprint which, if weaker today than in 1950 or in 1900, I still take to be quite powerful. Are the non-English elements more powerful in the construction of American music than the English ones? I’d be glad to see someone make an alternate list, emphasizing the non-English contributions to American music, so that one might make a proper comparison. But this, at any rate, is my very hasty attempt to justify, with reference to music, the contention that English culture is the most important constituent, indeed the predominant constituent, of American culture.

Intelligence

A couple of different posts lately discuss race and intelligence. What strikes me about this debate is how much intelligence seems to have become the essential value, without which we are somehow inferior. Have I mentioned how much I loathe the pride in intelligence that seems to be the assumption in such debates? My race is superior because we have higher intelligence! No, all races are equally intelligent and that makes us equal in everything that counts! (If one is going to obsess about intelligence at all, this assumption is pleasingly egalitarian.) Ugh. What does intelligence have to do with decency, humanity, dignity, the worth of a man? What intelligence do we need beyond the ability to realize that an intelligent man can be a wicked fool? And why be proud about one’s intelligence? I’ve heard the claim that it need not have any invidious connotations, that one can simply wish, with all humility, to use one’s intelligence to serve humanity—but I doubt more than a few saints sustain that pose. Why, the point of intelligence is to say that I am smarter than you, I am a better judge of the world than you are, and by dint of my intelligence you should defer to me when I tell you what to do. I, of course, will defer to someone smarter than me when they tell me what to do. (Ha!) All these arguments about intelligence incline one toward some point of view where intelligence trumps all other human virtues, and the intelligent few get to dictate to the less intelligent many. Feh. If we must have pride, let us have pride in our decency instead!—our virtues, which are less hierarchical, exclusive, and domineering than intelligence. Yes, I know, various people have claimed that virtue adheres to race, to class, to sex, no less than they have claimed that intelligence adheres to such set groups—but such arguments seem more obviously ludicrous to me, hence less worrisome. Anyway, pride in intelligence seems to be the sin of the day—let’s focus on it first.

Commonplace Book: Ulysses S. Grant

Personal Memoirs, on the Mexican-American War:

Even if the annexation [of Texas] itself could be justified, the manner in which the subsequent war was forced upon Mexico cannot. The fact is, annexationists wanted more territory than they could possibly lay any claim to, as part of the new acquisition. Texas, as an independent State, never had exercised jurisdiction over the territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. Mexico had never recognized the independence of Texas, and maintained that, even if independent, the State had no claim south of the Nueces. I am aware that a treaty, made by the Texans with Santa Anna while he was under duress, ceded all the territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande; but he was a prisoner of war when the treaty was made, and his life was in jeopardy. …. In taking military possession of Texas after annexation, the army of occupation, under General Taylor, was directed to occupy the disputed territory. The army did not stop at the Nueces and offer to negotiate for a settlement of the boundary question, but went beyond, apparently in order to force Mexico to initiate war. …. The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.

Cancer Nonsense

National Review Online has an article debunking the World Cancer Research Fund's latest report. The report, which got hyperventilating coverage in the media, attempts to make the case that being fat puts one at risk for various kinds of cancer. (Much less widely covered were two studies, which the authors of the NRO article mention, that came out at roughly the same time and dealt serious blows to the theory that there is any link between obesity and cancer -- or indeed between diet and cancer.)

I'm glad to see skepticism about widely bruited medical claims is beginning to make its way into the major conservative organs. The way has already been paved, of course, by conservative doubts about climate change, but the evidence for climate change looks pretty compelling by comparison with the flimsy support for much more widely believed claims about health and fitness. And climate change alarmists may not be as close to refashioning society in the statist image as health alarmists are.

At present, there is, in essence, a massive campaign underway to exaggerate the health consequences of obesity -- and, indeed, the prevalence of obesity itself. Although this campaign has spawned a dedicated army of debunkers (Sandy Szwarc at Junkfood Science and Gina Kolata at the New York Times have been especially assiduous in exploding myths about the "obesity epidemic") and several recent books from major presses have attacked the obesity hype, the media continues to amplify the claims of the obesity alarmists while ignoring countervailing claims. The result may be that a role for the state in hitherto personal decisions about calorie intake and expediture becomes more and more acceptable to the public.

The future of politics is science -- and its impersonators. The real battle, as Foucault would have understood, is to control what is allowed to pass itself off as knowledge. What Foucault might not have grasped, of course, is that there is a reality is out there behind the rhetoric -- a reality which needs champions now as much as ever.

Illegal Immigration and Farm Subsidies

Goldberry points out another illegal immigration tie in: our farm subsidies in effect susidize a fair bit of employment of illegal immigrants in the agricultural sector. Withywindle therefore suggests that immigration restrictionists ought to consider focusing some of their energy on cutting agricultural subsidies, on the theory that this might be disproportionately effective in reducing the number of illegal immigrants.

Immigration Restriction and Isolationism

John Podhoretz has been going after Mark Krikorian, in a series of posts for using the phrase "Come Home, America," in reference to draw-downs of American troops from Europe, and makes a connection between the desire for immigration restriction and the isolationist impulse. Now, I have a low opinion of Podhoretz's argumentative ability, but he's on to something here. This is how I would phrase it:

There are differing conceptions of America, along a spectrum from extreme emphasis on America as ideal-and-principle to extreme emphasis on America as flesh-and-blood-nation-state. That is, America, like the USSR (and, more limitedly, Britain and France) is in good part an ideological nation, defined by freedom, the Constitution, etc.; but it is also built on an onion-like ethnic core, with associated culture, politics, institution, society--English at the heart, Scots-Irish outside that, Irish and German outside that, generic white outside that, then all the world. (Please note that blacks, Hispanics and Asians are very much on the outer cores of the onion - part of why this set of issues is so fraught.) Americans have never fully agreed on the weight of ideal and ethnicity--indeed, the debate itself is one of the constitutive arguments of America.

Immigration of course ties into this directly. The more you emphasize America as ideal, the more congenial one is toward immigration, present and (oh yes indeedy) past. The more you emphasize America as nation-state, however defined--English, white Protestant, white--the less congenial your are to immigration; any immigrant can ascribe to America-the-ideal, but it is a much more difficult, if not impossible, process to become part of the American ethno-state. Think of America as ethnic, and you want immigration to be limited at most, perhaps non-existent.

But these conceptions of America's nature are also directly relevant to American foreign policy. The more you think of America as an ideal, the more you identify those interests as an ideal--freedom, liberty--and the interests of an ideal are universal. The more idealistically you conceive of America, the more you are aligned with a revolutionary, aggressive foreign policy, ready to intervene for freedom around the world. Another way to put it is that a multiethnic America is imperial, united most by contrast with the outside world, and that the imperial definition of America encourages imperial expansion. An ethnic America, in contrast, conceives of its interests far more narrowly, as the interests of the nation, and not of universal principle; it is, indeed, a Republic, not an Empire--not destined to quiescence (see the Jacksonian tradition of foreign policy), but allergic to Wilsonian crusades abroad, entangling alliances, etc. The idealistic conception of America lends itself both to pro-immigration and imperialistic policies; the ethnic conception of America lends itself both to anti-immigration and isolationist policies.

Now, one of the deepest tensions, as alluded to above, is how you feel about *past* immigration. The ethnic logic, after all, entails a certain suspicion of past immigrants as insufficiently American, for some number of generations, conceivably including the present. This, of course, is why Podhoretz is so ballistic about anti-immigration and isolationist policies: he conceives, rightly, that at one end of the spectrum these converge with anti-Semitism--a conviction that Jews are not, and can never become, fully American. The strength of his support for immigration, and for Wilsonian foreign policy, have something to do with defense of a conception of Americanness that claims a Podhoretz (or a Krikorian!) as fully American as a Lowell or Winthrop. But of course this also justifies the paleo-con suspicion to a certain extent: that is, it is not that all those Jewish Neo-Cons are part of the Israel Cabal, but that a certain kind of patriotic Jewish American will naturally (if not inevitably) conceive of American interest in allied pro-immigration and Wilsonian terms, as part of his/her own fierce love of America, and insistence that s/he is fully American.

It is, I think, possible to have a mixed view--one that blends ethnic conceptions and idealistic ones--indeed, one that opposes present immigration without rejecting past immigration. If one believes in the strength of moderation, compromise, and, perhaps illogical muddle, one can even have faith in this sort of muddle. If one suspects chain reactions--that a moderate position will lead inevitably to ever more extreme views--than one will be suspicious even of the muddling view. Podhoretz presumably takes Krikorian to be either disingenous or deluded--that to adopt a Krikorian-like view risks opening the way to a rigid American ethno-state. Krikorian, likewise, takes our present policy as similarly dangerous--as leaning too much toward ideals, and therefore risking a completely dissolved America, ethnic America dissolved and America with it. Krikorian, I think, takes this tack more or less explicitly; Podhoretz assumes far too many of the points at issue.

My own sympathies are more with Krikorian than with Podhoretz--which, since I am largely Jewish in ancestry, either disproves my analysis or points me out as anomalous. I would phrase it as saying that I think that culture and ancestry are very tightly bound, and that, while America must remain irreducibly idealistic and open to immigration, we should limit the influx of immigrants sufficiently to ensure that English culture, English politics, and English liberty remain hegemonic within America--and to make sure that the affections of immigrants, generation by generation, are redirected toward a physical America, a flesh-and-blood America, that is much more than simply universal ideals. I rather think I am fully American; I also think the process that made me American took several generations, and that I can be confident of my Americanness while still wanting America to be something less than a flood-gate open to the world.

I think if I side with Podhoretz, I side with various people who, consciously or subconsciously, essentially favor mass immigration as a way of destroying America. (No, I haven't substantiated that in this blog post--be so kind as to take that by-the-by.) I think if I side with Krikorian, I side with various people who would be just as glad to kick me out of America, with a good-riddance-kike as I go. I do side with Krikorian--but with a wary eye at some of my allies. I think whatever side one chooses, one ought to have a wary eye on one's allies.

Marginalia

I'm reading Karl Marx: Early Writings. On p. 326, I discover the following marginalia by a previous reader:

F*** OFF, KARL!

Further comments, more detailed, end with "You suck!"

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Happy (Thanksgiving) Holiday?

I know the issue I'm about to raise may seem banal -- especially after a long hiatus in my posting and after Withy's affecting story of his grandfather -- but I'm genuinely puzzled by something: when did people start use the "happy holidays" formula for Thanksgiving as well as for Christmas?

I was never completely on board with the societal shift toward "Happy Holidays" at Christmastime -- the phrase seems to me drab and trivial; it's hard to imagine a reformed Scrooge revealing his newfound love for his fellow man by heartily wishing Bob Cratchit "Happy Holidays" -- but at least I understood the basically commendable impulse toward religious inclusion behind it.

But yesterday and today, instead of Thanksgiving, I've found myself told on all hands to "have a happy (or "good" or "nice") holiday." So whose feelings are we being sensitive to this time? Thanksgiving is a public holiday, an expression of national gratitude for the blessings we've all received as Americans. Is there some creed that objects to the public expression of Thanksgiving and which would prefer not to hear its name? Are we worried that atheists will be offended by the idea of giving thanks, or that people who hate America will resent the implication that they have anything to give thanks for?

I know, I know. "Have a nice holiday" at Thanksgiving is just the residual effect of "Happy Holidays" at Christmastime. Probably there's been a trend in this direction for years and I only just noticed it. But it sort of saddens me that we seem to be losing (albeit gradually and unconsciously) a sense of the commonality our common celebrations.

Punditry Problematics

Apparently, the Chinese economy is not so big as we thought:

In a little-noticed mid-summer announcement, the Asian Development Bank presented official survey results indicating China's economy is smaller and poorer than established estimates say. The announcement cited the first authoritative measure of China's size using purchasing power parity methods. The results tell us that when the World Bank announces its expected PPP data revisions later this year, China's economy will turn out to be 40 per cent smaller than previously stated .... Given uncertainties about China's political and security evolution, this more moderate picture of China's economic size is reassuring. It means that the US and other developed nations have more time to engage China and interact with its fledgling institutions..

Maybe only another decade, but, yes, the extra time helps. 40% off? 40% off?!? That's a pretty big Oops, guys, ain't it? Exactly how much of our strategic planning was based on an erroneous estimate of the size of China's economy? (Cf., incidentally, the overestimates for the size of the Soviet economy in the 1970s and 1980s, with great effect on our Carter-Reagan defense build-up.) How many other PPP estimates are off? -- is Bulgaria actually the economic powerhouse of Europe, but we never noticed? Is there Dark Economic Matter out there, and undetected economic growth in Lemuria? And is the current estimate that China is spending about $40 billion per annum on its military also off by 40%? Or are they simply spending a larger portion of their GNP on the military? Please, please tell me the Pentagon makes its plans based on actual satellite photos of China, not on these wildly varying economic estimates!

Next they'll tell us the climate-change estimates are off by 40%. Oops.

Thanksgiving

My grandmother told me a story after my grandfather passed on. Every year, when he paid his taxes, he would kiss the envelope, and say, "We owe so much to America. It's not just that we would have been killed by the Nazis if we had stayed in Europe. It's that here we have been able to lead a wonderful, full life--to be educated, to earn a good living, to raise our families without fear, with hope. No other country in the world could have given us all this. What we give in taxes is little enough in return." Then he would put the envelope in the mailbox.

A tale as appropriate now as on April 15, I think.

American Strategic Goals for 2050

What is an anonymous pundit to do but vaporize about Great Issues? Forsooth, I feel an urge to vaporize on Grand Strategy. I justify it with the thought that it’s a useful exercise to get away from the everyday issues (Iraq, Iran, will NYC be blown up by terrorists in 2009 or 2010?), and think about what America should want in general in the next half-century or so. A useful exercise for me, anyway; hopefully of some interest to readers.

I. General Outlook.

I’m not going to speculate about environmental change, information war, and transnational threats (=terrorists)—I’m even less competent to deal with such things, and (perhaps in consequence) think they may be overrated. I *do* think demography and culture matter a great deal, but I think I’ll take it for granted that the demographic and/or cultural collapse of the West (especially America) is the End of Everything. So let us wave our hands and assume we’ll get past those problems, and concentrate on old-fashioned thoughts of relative state strength, growing economies, etc. I assume that the US economy will continue to grow more rapidly than those of the advanced countries of Europe and Japan, and so too will its comparative strategic strength, but that the US economy will grow relatively smaller compared with the world as a whole (especially China and India), that we will have deceasing ability to act as sole hegemon in the world, and that a prudent prioritization of our goals is in order.

II. Europe.

Our long-term interest is for Europe to be able and willing to defend itself, so that we may remove our remaining forces (100K troops, much of our air power, some naval commitment) from the continent, and have them available for use elsewhere. More precisely, perhaps, we want the western core of Britain, France, and Germany to have the capability and will to defend the Baltic States, Belarus, and Ukraine from Russia, police the Balkans, and guard the Mediterranean from the Islamic world. Europe is already wealthy enough; it’s a matter of political and institutional transformation. Here I think the bipartisan American wager is correct: a united Europe is essential to achieve such a goal, and, however annoying, worth promoting. We need, I think, to promote gently the emergence of more Sarkozys, as the political means to such an end. More attention does need to be paid to that end-goal of American withdrawal: a continuing American presence in Europe is a second-best solution, not a first one. We should make a public statement of our desire to withdraw American military forces from Europe by 2050 (perhaps while preserving a skeleton of bases to aid deployment elsewhere in Eurasia), and commence long-term planning with our NATO allies for the transition.

III. Russia.

Russia is bellicose and weak; a dying nation propped up temporarily by oil wealth. We need to guard both against its short-term expansion and its long-term collapse. On the one hand, therefore, we need to prevent the reassertion of Russian power over the Baltic States, Belarus, and (above all) Ukraine; without its Western fringe, Russia is merely a powerful nation and not an imperial threat. On the other we wish to preserve Russia’s capacity to defend its sovereign integrity against Chinese expansion in Siberia or Muslim expansion in Central Asia and South Russia, and to keep on speaking terms with Russia’s rulers, with an eye to future alliances. Soft containment, combined with friendly overtures, should be our long-term policy.

IV. East Asia/China.

Policy here is intertwined. China is the great rising power of the coming century, economically and militarily dynamic, expansionist (especially vis-à-vis Taiwan), and with domestic politics sufficiently brittle that at some point a little foreign war may come to seem the necessary glue to preserve Communist political control. On the other hand, China may also be headed for demographic decline after another quarter century (growing old before it grows rich), and will be extraordinarily fortunate if it can avoid internal political convulsion indefinitely; they may be a greater medium-term danger than a long-term one. American policy should therefore aim for medium-term containment, by promoting an interlocking alliance of the US, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia, and perhaps Vietnam and India, while also considering that a US commitment may also begin to dwindle (as in Europe) in the event of some Chinese implosion. But in the meantime, a shift of conventional resources to East Asia, and discreet reminders to China that we guarantee Taiwan’s de facto independence, are very much in order.

V. South Asia.

A long-term strategic alliance with India, with an eye both to China and the Islamic world, is being pursued, and should be pursued. Some pundits, however, conceive of India as a part of the “Anglosphere”—a natural ally of America by dint of our common English backgrounds. This, I think, overstates the affinity: Hindu nationalism is on the rise, may be an essential component to Indian willingness to assert itself on the international stage in ways we consider helpful, and is by no means intrinsically friendly to the West, Christianity, etc. Our alliance with India should not be confused with solid friendliness: we have common enemies for now, but it remains to be seen how enduring will be the English influence on India.

VI. The Islamic World.

In the short term, I believe Islamic radicalism needs to be defanged across much of the Islamic world—and if it is not, we are in for grim times. But should we make it past the next decade—then the demographic bulge in the Middle East is also supposed to abate after another quarter century, and the oil wealth of all nations save Saudi Arabia will begin to dwindle. (I also suspect that we will, late and by half-measures, begin to shift away from our total dependence on oil.) The relative threat of the Islamic world will ebb with their supply of young men and oil—and they will shift from existential threat to a containable backwater afflicted with a dysfunctional political culture. We should focus very intensely on the Islamic world in the short term, but in the long term they will become decreasingly important.

VII. Africa.

Africa will become a continent of natural-resource genocides—the removal of small nations adjacent to oil wells, oil pipelines, diamond mines, etc., will become standard. We should try to prevent such genocides, but will doubtless fail much of the time. The spread of evangelical Christianity through Africa provides America, uniquely, a natural basis of alliance: we should cultivate such ties.

VIII. Latin America.

Stable democracy appears to have taken hold in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico; we should cultivate and support these democratic governments, and rely on them to endure more than the comic-opera regimes of Chavez and his imitators. We should also support the spread of evangelical Christianity here. Willy-nilly, the mass emigration of Latin Americans to the US is likely to foster closer ties and closer sentiments.

Fools Rush In

A correspondent of Mickey Kaus writes

Triangulation .... seems to involve extracting, from each side, the most ridiculous and indefensible part of the position and saying that you are against that and a resolution ought to be achieved without it. If done well, this does not really hurt the politician doing it because the issue so rejected is so ridiculous that, exposed and standing alone, that position is not defensible in the MSM or elsewhere. In the Democrats' stance on welfare, that was the position that welfare recipients should not have to work -- a position that, if forced to confront it, anyone with any sense rejected as nothing but a way of buying votes.

Tony Judt, separately, writes

One of the fundamental objectives of the twentieth-century welfare state was to make full citizens of everyone: not just voting citizens in Robert Reich's limited sense but rights-bearing citizens with an unconditional claim upon the attention and support of the collectivity. The outcome would be a more cohesive society, with no category of person excluded or less "deserving." But the new, "discretionary" approach makes an individual's claim upon the collectivity once again contingent on good conduct. It reintroduces a conditionality to social citizenship: only those with a job are full members of the community.

Tony Judt, in other words, champions the ridiculous and the indefensible. And reinforces a point made in the Corner a few years ago, perhaps by Jonah Goldberg, that the adjective "social" should generally be taken as a negation or a reversal of the concept it purports to modify.

Mitt Chamberlain

Rereading about good old Neville Chamberlain for class, I come across the analysis that he was managerial, unideological, centrist--really more of a Liberal Unionist than a Conservative, as fit his family background. A housing man--really happy getting houses built, and somehow thinks of Hitler as a problem you can address like housing. Yes, I think to myself, he does sound like Mitt Romney, doesn't he? Neville would have gone for an MBA if they had them then, and Mitt will try to manage the Islamists away.

And Rudy? No pat historical analogies from England come to mind. He's not really a Churchill, much though he'd like to be. His appeal, though, isn't entirely dissimilar from Romney's--that is, his experience as a nuts-and-bolts mayor leads him in some ways towards an emphasis on apolitical administrative competence. (Chamberlain was Mayor of Birmingham before he entered national politics.) His mayoral policies (as Fred Siegel details in Prince of the City drew from the writings of conservative Democrats and apolitical wonks, even from conservative liberals--even from some of Dinkins' policies!--rather than from the vanishingly few Republicans in New York. (Giuliani is, to my mind, a conservative Democrat perforce running as a Republican because his original party has no room for him.) Mixed into his administrative tendencies is a great sense, also drawn from his New York experience, that ideological battle against liberals is necessary to get policy done. This, I think, makes him preferable to Romney on this particular scale of judgment: Giuliani knows, as Romney does not, that political warfare is a necessary part of governance; that management provides no safe harbor from the storms of politics.

Thompson, by his inertness, threatens to be Stanley Baldwin. Baldwin is an underrated man, I think, but still, the comparison hardly flatters.

Huckabee just isn't a British figure.

McCain still plays Churchill the best of the field. One might add that administration and management were not exactly Churchill's forte--he had strategic vision, and could micromanage all too often, but I think Chamberlain probably was a better hand at steady management. McCain--see the implosion of his campaign last summer, and his lack of executive experience in general--like Churchill, probably won't be the best manager in the world. And, like Churchill, he will be spectacularly wrong on some issues--Churchill on India, McCain (despite his backtracking) on immigration. But he will have vision and character.

I may be drifting back toward McCain as my preferred candidate, followed by Giuliani.

Student Essay Quotation #1

The lower, or working, class of England became stuck in a horrible and downtrodden position.

Where's a chiropractor when you really need one?

Un-American Activities

Robo-calls have gone forth in New Hampshire; the whisper is abroad--Mitt is Mormon! And Romney responds with the cheerful announcement that "I think the attempts to attack me on the basis of my faith are un-American." Ah, "un-American"--a concept I find increasingly unpleasant, along with "humane," for the self-conceit and exclusions implied. Long-time readers will remember a post referencing Daniel Larison, expressing my dislike of definitions of America and American-ness that wander away from flesh-and-blood Americans. "Un-American," as Romney uses it, combines both this abstracting of Americanness away from American deeds and the somewhat obnoxious equivalence of Americanness as goody-goody-ness. Oh, sorry, the proclaiming of an ideal which then inspires all us Americans to live up to the proclaimed ideal. I should think of it that way, I suppose ... but, no, it still seems smug. And in New Hampshire ... why, there's a story about the nature of American activities, which is always worth remembering when some smug type starts talking about American and unAmerican, and humane and inhumane for that matter:

Dan'l Webster's brow looked dark as a thundercloud.

"Pressed or not, you shall not have this man!" he thundered. "Mr. Stone is an American citizen, and no American citizen may be forced into the service of a foreign prince. We fought England for that in '12 and we'll fight all hell for it again!"

"Foreign?" said the stranger. "And who call me a foreigner?"

"Well, I never yet heard of the dev----of your claiming American citizenship," said Dan'l Webster with surprise.

"And who with better right?" said the stranger, with one of his terrible smiles. "When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on her deck. Am I not in your books and stories and beliefs, from the first settlements on? Am I not spoken of, still, in every church in New England? 'Tis true the North claims me for a Southerner and the South for a Northerner, but I am neither. I am merely an honest American like yourself ---- and of the best descent --- for, to tell the truth, Mr. Webster, though I don't like to boast of it, my name is older in this country than yours."

"Aha!" said Dan'l Webster, with the veins standing out in his forehead. "Then I stand on the Constitution! I demand a trial for my client!"

"The case is hardly one for an ordinary court," said the stranger, his eyes flickering. "And, indeed, the lateness of the hour ------"

"Let it be any court you choose, so it is an American judge and an American jury!" said Dan'l Webster in his pride. "Let it be the quick or the dead; I'll abide the issue!"

"You have said it," said the stranger, and pointed his finger at the door. And with that, and all of a sudden, there was a rushing of wind outside and a noise of footsteps. They came, clear and distinct, through the night. And yet, they were not like the footsteps of living men.

"In God's name, who comes by so late?" cried Jabez Stone, in an ague of fear.

"The jury Mr. Webster demands," said the stranger, sipping at his boiling glass. "You must pardon the rough appearance of one or two; they will have come a long way."

And with that the fire burned blue and the door blew open and twelve men entered, one by one.

If Jabez Stone had been sick with terror before, he was blind with terror now. For there was Walter Butler, the Loyalist, who spread fire and horror through the Mohawk Valley in the times of the Revolution; and there was Simon Girty, the renegade, who saw white men burned at the stake and whooped with the Indians to see them burn. His eyes were green, like a catamount's, and the stains on his hunting shirt did not come from the blood of the deer. King Philip was there, wild and proud as he had been in life, with the great gash in his head that gave him his death wound, and cruel Governor Dale, who broke men on the wheel. There was Morton of Merry Mount, who so vexed the Plymouth Colony, with his flushed, loose, handsome face and his hate of the godly. There was Teach, the bloody pirate, with his black beard curling on his breast. The Reverend John Smeet, with his strangler's hands and his Geneva gown, walked as daintily as he had to the gallows. The red print of the rope was still around his neck, but he carried a perfumed handkerchief in one hand. One and all, they came into the room with the fires of hell still upon them, and the stranger named their names and their deeds as they came, till the tale of twelve was told. Yet the stranger had told the truth --- they had all played a part in America.

The Right Not to Live in France

Via the blog of the Weekly Standard, I learn that

British judges have ruled that two English boys who hate living there don't have to. The boys, 11 and 16, who have a French mother and a British father, were taken to live in France after the parents' marriage broke down. But during a visit to England they asserted their "Britishness" and refused to return to live with their mother. The mother took the case to court, arguing that she had a right to decide where they should live and that the father had put the children up to it, the Times newspaper reported. But three of Britain's most senior judges decided the boys had an inherent right to refuse to live in France.

Some things you can't make up.

Phillip Larkin

I blame Alpheus. He memorizes poems and recites them from memory; this struck me as impressive when I met him, and played its role in bringing me to love poetry. And while I suppose this blog should be more than just poems--and will be again, eventually--here, for now, is a poem by Philip Larkin.

Homage to a Government

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.

It's hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it's been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it's a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.

Yeats II

The Fiddler of Dooney

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney.
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Mocharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;

For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle,
And the merry love to dance:

And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With 'Here is the fiddler of Dooney!'
And dance like a wave of the sea.

Yeats I

Parnell

Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man:
'Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.'

Conservatism Peeking Out?

There I was, discussing The Road to Wigan Pier with the students, and I couldn't help myself. "Yes, we are less positive about socialism/communism nowadays because we know it's a murderous horror and an economic failure." Or words a little bit more neutral in tone--but I think I was insufficiently peppy about Communism. They may guess!

Or actually, maybe not. I don't actually know how most history profs teach Communism nowadays--the 1930s are far enough back, and the tone of Stalinism sufficiently dead, that I think even committed leftists are willing to speak openly of the horrors. So the substance of what I said may not be as shocking as all that --but I do think some of my phrasings today betrayed a certain, um, antipathy to Communism. Not too badly; but I do try to be politically opaque. Well, the students didn't complain (oh, there's proof of teaching virtue!), and at least one of them was saying cheerfully feministy things about Orwell, so I trust I didn't Silence any Voices. Which, seriously, I don't want to do.

Clearly next time around, I'll assign the students some Auden.

More Auden

Where Alpheus leads, I follow. I'm rather fond of these poems.

Voltaire at Ferney

Almost happy now, he looked at his estate.
An exile making watches glanced up as he passed,
And went on working; where a hospital was rising fast
A joiner touched his cap; an agent came to tell
Some of the trees he’d planted were progressing well.
The white alps glittered. It was summer. He was very great.

Far off in Paris, where his enemies
Whsipered that he was wicked, in an upright chair
A blind old woman longed for death and letters. He would write
“Nothing is better than life.” But was it? Yes, the fight
Against the false and the unfair
Was always worth it. So was gardening. Civilise.

Cajoling, scolding, screaming, cleverest of them all,
He’d had the other children in a holy war
Against the infamous grown-ups, and, like a child, been sly
And humble, when there was occassion for
The two-faced answer or the plain protective lie,
But, patient like a peasant, waited for their fall.

And never doubted, like D’Alembert, he would win:
Only Pascal was a great enemy, the rest
Were rats already poisoned; there was much, though, to be done,
And only himself to count upon.
Dear Diderot was dull but did his best;
Rousseau, he’d always known, would blubber and give in.

So, like a sentinel, he could not sleep. The night was full of wrong,
Earthquakes and executions. Soon he would be dead,
And still all over Europe stood the horrible nurses
Itching to boil their children. Only his verses
Perhaps could stop them: He must go on working: Overhead
The uncomplaining stars composed their lucid song.

******************

Then, the last part of "Under Which Lyre":

Keep well the Hermetic Decalogue,
Which runs as follows:—

Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases,
Thou shalt not write thy doctor’s thesis
On education,
Thou shalt not worship projects nor
Shalt thou or thine bow down before
Administration.

Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,
Nor with compliance
Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science.

Thou shalt not be on friendly terms
With guys in advertising firms,
Nor speak with such
As read the Bible for its prose,
Nor, above all, make love to those
Who wash too much.

Thou shalt not live within thy means
Nor on plain water and raw greens.
If thou must choose
Between the chances, choose the odd;
Read The New Yorker, trust in God;
And take short views.

The Problem with Intellectual History

All your clever ideas have been thought of already. When you do archival research, in some corner of political or economic or social history, you can be sure that you're saying something new, since few if any people will have looked at the source material before. But what if you want to say something intelligent and original about, oh, Adam Smith and Karl Marx? Odds are it turns out not to be original--and honkin' big names have scooped you decades ago. And you won't discover this until you've already done a fair bit of research! Ah, there's a reason to do archival research--better odds of making a genuine contribution!

Well, back to Adam Smith.

Auden on Truth

If I'm going to carp about poor Mr. Locke in my comments on Withywindle's previous post, the least I can do is provide my own example of a beautiful reflection on the limits of human intelligence. Here it is, from W.H. Auden's underappreciated "Sonnets from China":

He watched the stars and noted birds in flight
a river flooded or a fortress fell.
He made predictions that were sometimes right
his lucky guesses were rewarded well.

Falling in love with truth before he knew Her,
he rode into imaginary lands;
by solitude and fasting hoped to woo Her
and mocked at those who served Her with their hands.

Drawn as he was to magic and obliqueness
in Her he honestly believed,and when
at last She beckoned to him he obeyed
Looked in her eyes: awe-struck but unafraid
saw there reflected every human weakness,
and knew himself as one of many men.

Marx is also an Aristotelian?

So argues George McCarthy, quite convincingly. Weird and interesting. My first serious foray into Marxist theory. I now actually begin to half-understand some of the jargon, and where it comes from--that is, I half-understand the stuff that derives from Greece, not the half the derives from German idealism.

Commonplace Book: John Locke

John Locke, Correspondence, vol. I, 123: Letter to Tom [Thomas Westrowe?], 20 October 1659.

… tis Phansye that rules us all under the title of reason, this is the great guide both of the wise and the fooleish, only the former have the good lucke to light upon opinions that are most plausible or most advantageous. Where is that Great Diana of the world Reason, every one thinkes he alone imbraces this Juno, whilst others graspe noething but clouds, we are all Quakers here and there is not a man but thinks he alone hath this light within and all besides stumble in the darke. Tis our passions that bruiteish part that dispose of our thoughts and actions, we are all Centaurs and tis the beast that carrys us, and every ones Recta ratio is but the traverses of his owne steps. When did ever any truth settle it self in any ones minde by the strength and authority of its owne evidence? Truths gaine admittance to our thoughts as the philosopher did to the Tyrant by their handsome dresse and pleasing aspect, they enter us by composition, and are entertaind as they suite with our affections, and as they demeane themselves towards our imperious passions, when an opinion hath wrought its self into our approbation and is gott under the protection of our likeing tis not all the assaults of argument, and the battery of dispute shall dislodge it? Men lie upon trust and their knowledge is noething but opinion moulded up betweene custome and Interest, the two great Luminarys of the world, the only lights they walke by. Since therefore we are left to the uncertainty of two such fickle guides, lett the examples of the bravest men direct our opinions and actions; if custome must guide us let us tread in those steps that lead to virtue and honour. Let us make it our Interest to honour our maker and be usefull to our fellows, and content with our selves. This, if it will not secure us from error, will keepe us from loseing our selves, if we walke not directly straite we shall not be alltogeather in a maze.

Nifty Job Application Update

Dear Professor Withywindle,

Anonymous University's search committee for an historian in Unspecified history has received your application and would like to learn more about your work. Would you please send us two article/chapter length pieces which you believe best demonstrate your research interests? ....

I look forward to receiving your materials.

Sincerely,

The Master of Your Fate

Shmoon Demography

Always dicey.

British Demography

A recent series of articles highlights immigration to Britain--particularly East European, particularly Polish. The rigidity of German labor laws seems to indicate that even though Germany is closer to Poland, more Poles may be headed to Britain.

Follow-up speculation: could it be that Britain, thanks to its freer economy, will continue to attract more immigrants than Germany or France? In particular, relatively assimilable (white, Christian) European immigrants? Will the steady rise in British population continue while Germany and France stagnate and Russia decays? Could it be that in 2050 there will be as many Britons as there are Germans or Russians--and more (white, Christian) European Britons than there are Germans or Russsians? The exodus from Eastern Europe, and the relatively expansive British economy, suddenly render this a demographic possibility. Britain, therefore, might succeed to the German role as strongest economic constituent of the European Union.

Not overwhelmingly likely--but worth considering.

Another Class

Went to a Russian history class led by a professor in the department, who most kindly let me sit in--also talked about various of her teaching tactics, some of which I'll try to implement. She is a rather polished lecturer--clean narrative thrust, lots of engaging incident. Some students I taught in the spring sat in class next to me--I asked them what they thought--yes, they liked her lecture. But one of them kindly said he liked my discussions better than lecture--my discussions were better in the spring!--and I did notice also that it was a straight lecture class, no discussion, she never stopped to ask "Questions? Comments?" as I do every so often. And I do think I get slightly bigger chuckles on my jokes! So, yes, encouraging--the class showed me that I need work on my lecturing, gave me ideas about how to do it, but also let me think I'm in the same ballpark as someone who's a pretty good lecturer. Now, I still need to think of better questions to elicit discussion, but I do feel slightly less mediocre.

Going to a class on Gender and Empire next week, if I can get permission.

Small political notes: I had no objection to the teacher's Russian history, but her explanatory modern parallels made me wince a little. She compared the Black Hundreds, the government-sponsored thugs/pogromists/terrorists, to the Minutemen on the Mexican border. Umm. Then, apropos the Tsarist government's decision to raise tuition fees so as to create a more conservative student body, she cited her experience with Duke undergraduates to say that high tuition prices in the US do the same thing. And Harvard undergrads? Swarthmore undergrads? Pretty wealthy, pretty liberal, as I recollect. I wish she hadn't indulged in these dubious parallels--something I have to remember along with her kindness and her generally good lecturing skills.

Brilliant Speech by Sarkozy

Among other things, rhetorically magnificent.

Class Addendum

One reason I pay so much attention to the syllabus is so that when my teaching is mediocre or worse, the students will still get something out of the class.

Mediocre Class Today

Leaden. And, I think, clearly my fault. I've taught the same material better in the past--I've taught this class better in the past--but, somehow, not entirely clicking. Partly it's that it's a larger class at this level than I've taught before--but partly it's a question of asking the right questions, figuring out how to elicit discussion. Students had read the material--students had read other things on the topic on their own!--but somehow, no spark. Since the material today included a discussion of how officers should inspire their men--John Keegan, The Face of Battle--I felt myself a distinctly unprepossessing Leader of Students.

Memo to self: if and when I get a tenure track job, sit in on a few classes by fellow history profs, and take notes. Indeed, maybe sit in on a class this semester, at my current place of employment!

A Different Immigration

An article on the meeting of the Pope and the Saudi King mentions by the by that one million Catholics live in Saudi Arabia--Filipinos? Indians?--and that there are other Christians too, presumably also among their guest workers. Inquiring minds want to know--do they resist pressure to convert to Islam? Are they having children in Saudi Arabia and raising them Christian? Is the Muslim exodus to Europe paralleled by a Christian exodus to the Muslim heartland? This is fascinating. I knew there were lots of guest workers in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, etc., but somehow I thought they were mainly Muslim or Hindu. That high a number of Christians creates a new, and fascinating, dynamic.

A Reason to Vote for Stephen Colbert

Doritos is his sponsor, and I am fond of Doritos, after all.

Pakistan

Let me add my voice to the chorus of those uncertain as to how deal with a nuclear-armed failed state, oscillating between military dictatorship and Islamist revolution. It's been an appalling dangerous situation for most of a decade now--remember when India and Pakistan saber-rattled with nuclear weapons a few years back?--and no good solution has appeared on the horizon since. My only thoughts:

1) I hope the US somehow quietly arranged a few years back to quietly emplace US military officers observing Pakistani nuclear weapons, with a tacit understanding that removing the officers would constitute a tripwire of some sort.

2) I hope the air force has been planning bombing runs against Pakistani nuclear sites as well as against Iranian ones. This would strike me as the minimum of prudence.

3) Also, I hope we've thought out how to resupply our troops in Afghanistan if Pakistan suddenly denies us overflight privileges.

Research Notes

I spent the evening reading through and taking notes on Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations. Just to preview: the next research project is to take my reinvention on public sphere theory from the eighteenth century to the present. Since one of the points of the first book (prospectus still languishing in a university press editor's office, grr) was to trace phronesis/prudence to self-interest, I'm now trying to trace self-interest from the eighteenth-century to the present. Adam Smith is the starting point; I'll need to read, at least, in Hegel, Marx, Dewey, and Heidegger. I think one way to put this is that there is a debate about phronesis/prudence--Marxist conceptions of class self-interest, Heideggerian Nazism, and Deweyan pluralism constituting a three-cornered debate. If I have this right--and I'm only at the beginnings of my research--this will, among other things, be a way for me to incorporate pragmatism into my own Aristotelian conservatism--or to reconcile myself to the philosophical pragmatism underlying much modern liberalism! Which would be surprising, but interesting. Or I could say that I think the critique of Marx, Dewey, and Heidegger may be the critique of transcendance--see Voegelin--and say that each of them attempts to transcend the limitations of human prudence, with ultimately disastrous results in all cases. Or I could say something completely different and unsuspected! The joy of all this, after all, is not knowing in advance what you might end up thinking.

Miracles of Modern Technology

Copying my audio cassettes onto my computer, with the aid of one cable and Audacity free-ware. I know I am years behind the times, but this is still wonderful to me. So, listening to Cat Stevens, "Footsteps in the Darks," for the first time in years!

(I listen to music on my laptop almost universally; just isn't convenient to head to the living room to my cassette deck.)

Christopher Fry, Venus Observed, Most Marvelous Sentence in English Literature

I've just now finished Christopher Fry's Venus Observed. Very good, although still not as good as The Lady's Not For Burning. It has, as noted in the title of this post, the Most Marvelous Sentence in English Literature:

DUKE: You must try
To use longer sentences. Then you would certainly feel
The fumbling in the quiver behind every syllable
And so to the arrow string, like a sudden
Swerving parenthesis.

PERPETUA: Do you think I should?

DUKE: No doubt of it.

PERPETUA: There isn’t any reason
Why a sentence, I suppose, once it begins,
Once it has risen to the lips at all
And finds itself happily wandering
Through shady vowels and over consonants
Where ink’s been spilt like rivers or like blood
Flowing for the cause of some half-truth
Or a dogma now outmoded, shouldn’t go
Endlessly moving in grave periphrasis
And phrase in linking phrase, with commas falling
As airily as lime flowers, intermittently,
Uninterrupting, scarcely troubling
The mild and fragile progress of the sense
Which trills trebling like a pebbled stream
Or lowers towards an oath-intoning ocean
Or with a careless and forgetful music
Looping and threading, tuning and entwining,
Flings a babel of bells, a caroling
Of such various vowels the ear can almost feel
The soul of sound when it lay in chaos yearning
For the tongue to be created: such a hymn
If not as lovely, then as interminable,
As restless, and as heartless, as the hymn
Which in the tower of heaven the muted spheres
With every rippling harp and windy horn
Played for incidental harmony
Over the mouldering rafters of the world,
Rafters which seldom care to ring, preferring
The functional death-watch beetle, stark, staccato,
Economical as a knuckle bone,
Strict, correct, but undelighting
Like a cleric jigging in the saturnalia,
The saturnalia we all must keep,
Green-growing and rash with life,
Our milchy, mortal, auroral, jovial,
Harsh, unedifying world,
Where every circle of grass can show a dragon
And every pool’s as populous as Penge,
Where birds, with taffeta flying, scarf the air
On autumn evenings, and a sentence once
Begun goes on and on, there being no reason
To draw to any conclusion so long as breath
Shall last, except that breath
Can’t last much longer.

The reader will note a distant homage to Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism," particularly the following passage:

But most by Numbers judge a Poet's Song,
And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong;
In the bright Muse tho' thousand Charms conspire,
Her Voice is all these tuneful Fools admire,
Who haunt Parnassus but to please their Ear,
Not mend their Minds; as some to Church repair,
Not for the Doctrine, but the Musick there.
These Equal Syllables alone require,
Tho' oft the Ear the open Vowels tire,
While Expletives their feeble Aid do join,
And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line,
While they ring round the same unvary'd Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.
Where-e'er you find the cooling Western Breeze,
In the next Line, it whispers thro' the Trees;
If Chrystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep,
The Reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with Sleep.
Then, at the last, and only Couplet fraught
With some unmeaning Thing they call a Thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the Song,
That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along.

I Have Fan Art!

Someone has drawn anime-ish renditions of the characters of my novel! This is really, really nice.

On the New Republic (IV): Iranian Fertility

Philip Jenkins, "Infertile Crescent," notes that Iranian fertility rates have plummeted since the 1980s, with various encouraging effects predicted from this development. Among the causes he notes "the Iranian government's post-1989 decision to expand family-planning arrangements." This is remarkably superficial: Khomeini's Iran deliberately opposed family planning, partly for reasons purely theological, partly with the idea that more children would make for a larger potential nation and army in their fight against the world--and in no great length of time, since Iran specialized in human-wave attacks of child-soldiers through the Iran-Iraq War. Iran's falling birth rate is not from some "natural" pre-birth-control level, like the rest of the world, but from an ideologically, artificially inflated level--in part a desperate attempt to balance out the extraordinarily large age cohort born in the 1980s. I think Jenkins' predictions about Iran's future demography should be taken with a rather large grain of salt, given that he seems to be unaware of the particular background of Iran's demography in the past.

On The New Republic (III): Anthony Grafton on Torture

Anthony Grafton in "Say Anything" condemns torture as useless, using Renaissance European examples to substantiate his argument, specifically the judicial interrogations of Jews suspected of ritually murdering Christians and suspected witches, where torture can make you confess anything; also the torture of a rebel, Tommaso Campanella, didn't make him break. Therefore we may conclude that "Torture does not obtain truth."

1) Grafton commits category error. Judicial torture, by the state against its own citizens, is not identical with torture used by an army against enemy combatants--the relevant example today. Even were we to take Grafton's examples as representative and compelling, they would argue against the use of judicial torture, not against the use of torture per se. If the use of Renaissance European examples is to inform contemporary debate, one should select from the records of military history, not from judicial records. Grafton says Campanella may reasonably be called a "terrorist"-but this is a dubious equivalence, a gross shoe-horning of the evidence.

2) With all due respect to Grafton, who is enormously learned, three examples do not an argument make. Does all of Renaissance Europe have no examples of the effective use of torture? Even in the judicial arena? I am dubious.

3) I don't think Renaissance European armies tortured for information so much--but that's because i) noble status protected most of the officers; ii) most commoners, soldier and civilian, were scarcely motivated to hold back information; iii) military planning was so rudimentary that torture for information was generally superfluous; and iv) armies committed so many brutalities, so many mass murders and collective punishments of civilian populations, so many tortures for sheer pleasure, that torture for information was hardly at issue. That said, I suspect that if I read up on, say, the English wars in Ireland in the 1500s and 1600s, I might find examples of torture for information that worked--but this really needs a trip to the archives.

4) I actually can present an example for readers of this blog, which is closer to analagous to the modern conundrums about torture. In 1627, the Duke of Buckingham led an English expedition to the Isle of Re, in an unsuccessful attempt to break the French siege of the Huguenot city of La Rochelle. The French may or may not have attempted to assassinate him--it was a matter of fierce polemic at the time whether or not Buckingham invented the plot, indeed whether torture elicited a false confession--but, so far as I can recollect from my reading, it is not impossible that there was such a plot, or impossible that (the threat of) torture revealed its existence. For a somewhat more ambiguous example from early modern Europe than Grafton supplies, therefore, read below:

British Library, Additional MS 4106, "Account of the Expedition to the Isle of Rhe," folio 162 verso -- folio 163 recto:

on the 30th there came one from the Cittadell pretending to runne away he profest himselfe an Ingenier being searched there was found in his pocket a little Spanish dagger the balde wherof being perfumed the duke and some about him would needs have it to be thought a poisned one the D. had this man severall times in great privacy wth him to wring a confession from him that he does come to kille him yet would not he confesse any such thing but the torture being offred him as was given out he then profest that Toras had perswaded him to endevorr the murdering the Duke and related some frivolous circumstances how he had instructed him to compasse it and afterwards to escape away. a few dayes after many of the best qualitie in the Cittadell being wth the Duke for treates of quarter the D told them that the cowwardly acte of the Governour in seeking to take away his life by the hand of a villaine gave him occasion to refuse all quarter wth them. they seemed much astonisht at this story and after long discourse to assure the Duke that so base an act never entred into Toras thought the runaway was called for to justify this before them wch wth a great deal of confidence he did. many of these Monsieurs openly protest that if they could discover that Toras had done this fowle thing they would not serve wth him a day longer. the same day afternoone came Toras his brother to cleare him of this accusation wherein he was very earnest & vehement, and urged the D. that he would send some into the forte to heare his brother justify himselfe and the d. did: they retorning said that Toras wth most deep othes imprecations utterly denied the very thought if his life were taken away the maine pillar of our good fortune had bene burst in sunder other [x] he might have in the framing this device.

Pelosi's Leadership Style

Robert Novak, presumably ventriloquizing disgruntled Democrats, has an interesting article on Nancy Pelosi's leadership style. Key quote:

Pelosi so far is the most powerful speaker of the House during that same period, a reality obscured by her historic role as the first woman to hold that office. She does not confer with or defer to standing committee chairmen, whose predecessors made previous speakers dance to their tune. .... Ruling absolutely does not mean even Democrats think she rules well. .... witness her big blunder as speaker. [Ike] Skelton, a seasoned student of international relations, told her the Armenian resolution would antagonize Turkey and thus constituted a foreign policy debacle in the making. Rahm Emanuel, the House Democratic Caucus chairman, also opposed it (as he had when serving as President Bill Clinton's political aide). Pelosi insisted until some 45 House Democrats -- including Skelton -- opposed her. The Armenian episode suggests a Pelosi decision has to approach the brink of disaster before Democrats speak out.

Who does this remind me of? Let me see ... middle name begins with "W" ... and if the voters also make that connection, it may not help the Democrats in future elections.