Schadenfreude & Sympathy

What I feel toward the Democrats. Poor dears, it must be awful, as every detail of the nightmare clicks into place.

I have recommended to Goldberry a write-in vote for Hillary. She may take me up on it. Could there be enough Goldberrys to deliver New York to McCain?

We Republicans have our own nightmare scenario still on tap. I try to remember that.

On Political Hedonism

As I was skimming at high speed through Leo Strauss' Natural Right and History, I came across the phrase "political hedonism"--that is, saith the Divine Leo, that once Hobbes and Locke have made man the center of politics, man's desires and happiness become the center of politics--hence "political hedonism." This presumably is the necessary precursor to making sex the be all and end all of discussion, society, and politics--a hedonism made the end of politics, rather than an experience serving greater virtues. So, therefore, the shift from Conrad to Deresiewicz, from amicitia/friendship--the true basis of politics, saith Schmitt--to sex-obsessed moderns, so steeped in hedonism that they cannot comprehend that people once were more interested in other people than in themselves.

Ah, aren't modern times awful?

On Joseph Conrad

William Deresiewicz writes about Joseph Conrad in the latest New Republic. Conrad is presented as an attractively off-centered figure. The essay, however, includes this appalling little bit:

The record of Conrad's erotic life, both before and after his marriage, is exceedingly thin. Sexuality seems to have been a less potent force for him than his desire for friendship-this is perhaps another reason we find him so difficult to understand.

Note to All: If, when I am famous and dead, you are curious about Withywindle, I trust the record on my erotic life will be non-existent. It's none of your damn business.

Note to Deresiewicz: Maybe you have an appallingly impoverished imagination, but don't presume to speak for all of us. And if he valued friendship so highly, it is not only comprehensible but also admirable.

On Officium and Bureaucracy

I've been reading up on the concept of officium--the specific duties one has in the public realm, dependent on one's specific office; an ethico-political concept akin to decorum, hence of course to rhetoric. Madison's conception of shaping interests and ambitions to particular government positions (president, senator, etc.) seems to draw on it. It seems to me that it's a useful way to come to a defense of certain aspects of government bureaucracy. That is, take the anti-bureaucracy government rant as read--bureaucracy clearly has a role in modern life, and I think the concept of officium helps justify it. To wit: State Department bureaucrats ought, by virtue of their office, to promulgate jaw-jaw policies, and to take account of America's specific diplomatic interests in different parts of the world. Army bureaucrats should do the same thing in relation to their different internal interests; so too should agriculture bureaucrats, education bureaucrats, etc., etc. The bureaucracies articulate the incredibly variegated interests that constitute American society and government, and so, I think provide a good deal of the officium functions. This functionality ought to be taken into account in our judgments of bureaucracy. So, yes, bureaucracies metastasize; yes, corruption, overstaffing, over-methodization of everyday life, and democratic deficits go along with bureaucracies--but this is argument, perhaps, for starving them rather than for eliminating them. And also an argument for educating bureaucrats to have a self-conscious sense of officium.

Summer Job

"Nineteenth-Century Europe," in Bree University. Combine that with "Western Civ" and "Modern Britain" at Buckland in the fall, and ends should meet; and I hope the added courses won't look too shabby on the resume. Curiously, given that I'm an early-modernist, this means by the time of the AHA convention I'll have taught four modern Europe upper-level courses (Modern Britain x 3, 19th Century Europe) to one early modern Europe upper-level course (Early Modern Britain). Oh, and World Civ once and Western Civ to 1715 three times, which I suppose gets me closer to my time period. Still, a funny balance of courses.

Since it's a summer course, I'm editing out virtually all the long books--Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier and Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon are the longest works on the list. On the last day, I may have them watch Colonel Redl. There's a pedagogical purpose, really, but it's a bit of a treat to myself--I want to watch that movie again.

David Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel, and Language

My father, great Anduin, is reading this book, about the origins of the Indo-Europeans--whom we apparently still believe were a horsey people in the Ukrainian steppes in the beginning. Anduin tells me that the book argues a fascinating revision in the historical narrative. To wit: We Used To Believe that the horse when domesticated was the size of a Shetland pony; that men later bred the horse for increased stature; and that as the horse got bigger, you first got the chariot pulled by two horses, and eventually the horse big enough to carry a cavalryman--the change in horse size tracking with the change in military technology. But Antony says that this narrative was based on archaeological digs in Western Europe and the Middle East, where the earliest horses were rather small; new digs in Eastern Europe show that you had modern-sized horses from the beginning!--horses weren't bred to be big, they already existed in a range of sizes. What is the new narrative then? Antony speculates that it was the invention of the compound bow that mattered--until that time, there wasn't any military use to riding a horse/having a cavalry army. Once you have the bow, you have a reason to use big horses, and so they spread around the known world. This isn't the new consensus, just Antony's elegant argument.

I love this--it has no modern relevance that I know of, and it just replaces one sophisticated historical narrative with another one, based upon new archaeological evidence open to multiple interpretations. Yet it changes our picture of the remote past extraordinarily!--changes the way of life of millions of people over thousands of years. And perhaps the next archaeological dig will change everything again. Who cares? It's wonderful to think through these possible pasts.

On NCOs

In McCain's recent debate with Obama and Webb over how to structure veteran's benefits, he said the following:

Most worrying to me, is that by hurting retention we will reduce the numbers of men and women who we train to become the backbone of all the services, the noncommissioned officer. In my life, I have learned more from noncommissioned officers I have known and served with than anyone else outside my family. And in combat, no one is more important to their soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen, and to the officers who command them, than the sergeant and petty officer. They are very hard to replace. Encouraging people not to choose to become noncommissioned officers would hurt the military and our country very badly.

This, I think, is a truism to anyone in the military, but I'd like to underscore, from a historical perspective, just how right he is. I'm convinced that in the story of the rise of the West to military superiority over the last five hundred years, the rise of the NCO is absolutely crucial. That is, the reforms of Maurice of Nassau (1590s) and Gustavus Adolphus (1620-1630s) centered on drill and volley--both of which require the articulation of the army into small units (10 men, say), each of which is commanded by (as it turns out) a non-commissioned officer--a commoner risen to a position of authority. This in contrast to a mob of soldiers commanded by a few officers, with perhaps some gentlemen volunteers in the rank to provide motivated shock troops. The rise of Western military since then has continued (as a rule) to require greater articulation, knowledge, and initiative--always involving the NCOs as the crucial military component. In effect, pre-modern armies consist of a few soldiers surrounded by a mass of rabble; thanks to NCOs, who discipline, inspire, initiate, and articulate, a modern army consists of a mass of soldiers.

There is a fascinating dynamic relating the rise of the NCO with Western social structures. To have an effective NCO, you need the sort of commoner who's willing and able to accept and use the responsibility of command--and you need gentlemen/officers who are willing to delegate such authority. This is delicate: delegate such authority in the army, and you possibly need to delegate such authority in civilian life--and for traditional societies, with a few noble thugs at top and a mass of peasants below, this is dangerously revolutionary. So when you look at the social structure of early modern England, with its mass of aldermen, constables, jurymen, etc., you see the mass of dispersed authority and command that makes the NCO possible--and to which, I suspect, the existence and necessity of the NCO contributes in return. Of course, the person who goes into the army isn't generally your alderman--it's the scum of the earth, the starving peasant, who has no chance of becoming an alderman at home. He goes into the army to avoid starving to death--to avoid a murder charge, or to avoid marriage or steady work--with no expectation (save for a freak of fortune) of any savings; expecting to serve as a soldier, isolated from civilian society, until dead or lamed--if lamed, then its beggary or the very limited social services of early modern England to support him until he dies. The rise of the NCO offering an alternative for a private who stays in the army for a while, and aspires to corporal or sergeant: slightly greater pay, the chance of social mobility and savings, the chance to command people as much as any alderman, perhaps, even, the chance of returning to civilian society at a slightly higher level--at any rate, the Cromwellian veterans seem to have included some respectable tradesmen. The NCO doesn't just command soldiers; he offers the soldier the chance of something more than serving until death.

The expansion of the West owes a great deal to the NCO. Consider Britain in India, dependent on the sepoys. Why did the sepoys fight for the British? Not just pay, I think, but the chance for a peasant to rise and become a havildar--a chance to command men, and become prosperous, he could never have at home. Why do various armies (Latin American, Turkish, etc.) regard themselves as the modernizing hubs of nations? Not just the poor boys made good as officers, but the poor boys made good as NCOs, and the changed attitudes of officers, who have learned to accord minimal respect for NCOs, for common men. Why the difference between the modern West and Arab armies nowadays?--see Norvell de Atkine, Why Arabs Lose Wars:

The social and professional gap between officers and enlisted men is present in all armies, but in the United States and other Western forces, the non-commissioned officer (NCO) corps bridges it. Indeed, a professional NCO corps has been critical for the American military to work at its best; as the primary trainers in a professional army, NCOs are critical to training programs and to the enlisted men’s sense of unit esprit. Most of the Arab world either has no NCO corps or it is non-functional, severely handicapping the military’s effectiveness. With some exceptions, NCOs are considered in the same low category as enlisted men and so do not serve as a bridge between enlisted men and officers. Officers instruct but the wide social gap between enlisted man and officer tends to make the learning process perfunctory, formalized, and ineffective. The show-and-tell aspects of training are frequently missing because officers refuse to get their hands dirty and prefer to ignore the more practical aspects of their subject matter, believing this below their social station. A dramatic example of this occurred during the Gulf War when a severe windstorm blew down the tents of Iraqi officer prisoners of war. For three days they stayed in the wind and rain rather than be observed by enlisted prisoners in a nearby camp working with their hands.

The military price for this is very great. Without the cohesion supplied by NCOs, units tend to disintegrate in the stress of combat. This is primarily a function of the fact that the enlisted soldiers simply do not have trust in their officers. Once officers depart the training areas, training begins to fall apart as soldiers begin drifting off. An Egyptian officer once explained to me that the Egyptian army’s catastrophic defeat in 1967 resulted from of a lack of cohesion within units. The situation, he said, had only marginally improved in 1973. Iraqi prisoners in 1991 showed a remarkable fear of and enmity toward their officers.

Machine-guns and airplanes are meaningless without men who can use him; NCOs are the human component that make the modern military possible. So, yes, McCain is absolutely right to want to structure veterans' benefits to encourage the strengthening of our NCOs--and if Obama is ignorant, Webb damn well knows how important NCOs are, and is deliberately monkeying with our NCOs as a tool to get us out of Iraq. Shame on him.

On Hymns

I went to an Episcopal elementary school, and learned Episcopal hymns. Whenever I attend the Methodist church--Goldberry's--I find the hymns insufficiently grand, reverent; even the same lyrics often have different tunes. I prefer an Episcopal diction -- "Immortal, invisible, God only wise," not "Jesus loves me like a football," or whatever the latest hymn is. (The 18th century Methodist hymns are quite good, but most of the Methodist hymnal is more modern.) Indeed, the diction of Episcopal hymns is also the diction of my preferred religiosity--awe, reverence, dignity, and good English prose and poetry. The last, ideally, an aesthetic pleasure subordinated to religious purpose.

On Peter Bellamy

Peter Bellamy, a suicide nearly two decades ago, was an English folk-singer I rather liked. This requires some explanation: even by the standards of folk musicians, he had a terrible voice--an unearthly yowl that made Bob Dylan sound like Pavarotti. But the yowl was supposed to be "Norfolk" sound, and Bellamy knew what to do with his voice, and what effects he could make with it: a terrible instrument, but a well-used one. He had a compelling sound, albeit as an acquired taste.

(He first sang with The Young Tradition, a 1960s folk trio. Also worth listening to, though not as good as his solo work.)

Then he was a conservative. He even voted for Margaret Thatcher--possibly the only folk-musician in England to do so. He appreciated the red line of radicalism in the folk tradition, but he never confused it for the whole of the folk tradition, as too many of his peers did. And this political sensibility played into two of his great projects.

First, he turned an extraordinary number of Kipling's poems into folk-songs--rather good ones. Bellamy makes "Recessional" a terrifying hymn; brings out all the black humor of "Cholera Camp"; brings out an epic love of England in "The Land." The tunes are good in themselves, and fitting to the words--they ought to be whistled in the streets of England, and maybe in time they will.

Second, he wrote a ballad-opera called The Transports, about the settling of Australia. It mixes real sympathy for the poor, knowledge that there's real criminality among them as well, and acknowledges the possibility of human kindness among their rulers--"The Human Turnkey" is one of the better songs. I especially like songs such as "Norwich Gaol":

So early in the morning the turnkey rings his bell;
So early in the morning we wish his soul to hell;
So early in the morning when the night begins to fail
We wonder if we'll ever see the last of Norwich Gaol.

The food is foul, the air is bad, the company not choice;
T'would make you scowl to hear that mad old turnkey's rasping voice;
T'would make you wonder would you ever live to tell the tale
Of the hardships and the miseries you've known in Norwich Gaol.

Our water here is scummy green, our beds is heaps of straw;
There's water running down the walls, rats running o'er the floor;
There's nought to eat but rotten meat that'd make a dog turn pale;
Oh, it's dainty food and lodging when you visit Norwich Gaol.

So early in the morning the turnkey rings his bell;
So early in the morning we wish his soul to hell;
So early in the morning when the night begins to fail
We wonder will we ever see the last of Norwich Gaol.

Whene'er we fancy bathing, we paddles in the drains;
And when we wants a concert, we rattles of our chains;
And when we want a banquet we drink sludge and call it ale;
If you want a good time commit a crime and come to Norwich Gaol.

Now if you fancy gaming here the race is run by fleas;
The stakes are perilously high, a crust of moldy cheese;
The first time that I tried my luck, I nearly lost my shirt;
But lucky for me they couldn't see the bugger for the dirt.

So early in the morning the turnkey rings his bell;
So early in the morning we wish his soul to hell;
So early in the morning when the night begins to fail
We wonder will we ever see the last of Norwich Gaol.

If they'd sent us to America today we would be free,
But since the Revolution that land we'll never see;
We are not for New England's shores three thousand miles away;
They say we're bound for some further ground and they've named it Botany Bay.

Well perhaps it's out by India, or maybe near Japan,
Just off the coast of Canada or in the hills of Spain;
But wherever that strange land may be we know it cannot fail
To be a far, far better place than stinking Norwich Gaol.

So early in the morning the turnkey rings his bell;
So early in the morning we wish his soul to hell;
So early in the morning when the night begins to fail
We long for the day when we'll sail away from stinking Norwich Gaol.

As you might tell from these lyrics, sympathy for the poor is the dominant note here--all the more powerful, I think, for not regarding them as mere angelic victims. The humor is wonderful here. And what I like most, I think, is the way it shifts from an eternal human set of emotions to a specific historical situation, and provides insight into what it felt not just to be a convict, but a convict who settled Australia in 1789. Music that transforms historical specificity into art--wonderful.

I like Bellamy in part for the politics of his art--but not, I trust, just because of it. He's worth listening to, whatever your politics. You already have to have a taste for British folk music--but if you do, you might like him.

Cross-Party Vice-Presidential Picks

If Obama chooses Webb, and McCain chooses Lieberman, the Democratic Veep would be a Reagan Republican and the Republican Veep a Kennedy Democrat. Oo, wackiness. But if the Republicans would rumble about Lieberman, would the Dems be that happy to have a Reaganite Veep?

On Proportational Representation in Democratic Primaries

It would seem to me that this favors deep-pocketed candidates slightly more than the winner-takes-all system. That is, granted this year is atypical, but McCain's Hail-Mary couldn't have worked if he had had to slog out a primary battle for four months, and Obama's bankroll has been essential for this endurance contest. So the Democratic system, curiously, is more responsive on average to financial prowess than is the Republican one--something I would take to be a virtue, since financial interests ought to be well-represented in politics. It also has the effect of skewing the Democrats farther to the left, since their moneymen seem to cluster on the ideological extreme--but this ought to be a second-order effect.

If Obama were willing to be more Burkean, he could argue to the superdelegates that his ability to raise money is not merely a tactical advantage, but a legitimate register of his approval and his authority. Maybe he does in private. Anyway, it will be interesting to see if proportional representation continues to throw up fundraising-types among the Democrats to win the nomination.

I'm not sure any previous Democratic primary actually supports this hypothesis.

Language Notes

* Passion and emotion have slightly different connotations. Passion, I think, is the movement-to-action; emotion an inner state that has no necessary relation to action--an inner state one contemplates, even cultivates as an end in itself, but disjunct from the deed.

* The word "enthrall" captures by itself one definition of rhetoric--sweet bondage. The root "thrall" is wonderfully Teutonic; adds a new lexicon to rhetoric's Greek and Latin vocabulary.

* Rather late in the day, I've been listening to the lyrics of "King of the Road" for the first time. It has a brilliant line: "I am a man of means by no means." Consider all the different meanings packed into this phrase:

I am a man of means by no means -- a man of means = a wealthy man

I am a man of means by no means - by no means = not at all. "I am not at all a wealthy man."

I am a man of means by no means - means = a way of earning a living

I am a man of means by no means - means by no means = a way of earning a living by not earning a living = beggary. But "by no means" also has the "not at all" meaning, so "I am not at all a man who has a way of earning a living."

I am a man of means by no means - means by no means = more broadly, and with sad philosophy, the ability to do anything at all = "I am a man who does things at all by not doing anything." And again, "I am not at all a man who does things."

So the one phrase plays with multiple meanings of "means," including in two different idiomatic expression, and also plays with the internal break-point of the phrase, whether before or after the first "means," compacting all the possible meanings into nine short words. Isn't this one of the best lyric lines in the English language?

On Hunger

The slave-owners had a point; free markets in food leave a lot of people hungry. They starve less, yes; liberating the market in food is essential for economic modernization; in the long run people are enormously better fed--but the long run is remarkably difficult to appreciate when your belly is empty. ("First feed your face, then talk of right and wrong.") Sometimes you get an Irish famine--you really need democracy and a thick civil society before you totally free the market in food. And when the uncertainty of the market applies to the price of your next meal, it tends to erode your faith in the market writ large. Food, let us say, is the first point where those of us who are not free-market absolutists should consider market controls. Yes, it's a dangerous and slippery road to start down, but being doctrinaire about food supplies is inhuman.

(I don't take housing ever to have operated in a free market, so it figures in a somewhat different range of arguments.)

Spengler's column I linked to below by-the-by mentions the rise of world food prices lately--a little bit ethanol, more a flight to commodity stocks as a store of value while the dollar depreciates, and then the purchasing power of a billion-odd Chinese, etc., getting richer; he sees a spike in world hunger coming soon. And this will be the Globalization Hunger--one where the demand for food is more global than ever, and will, unprecedentedly, countervail against the globalization of food supplies. Spengler, of course, is a pessimist. But if he is right? Then the issues of hunger and free markets will be before us once again, more acutely than it has been for a while.

Fascinating Article

By Spengler.

Hat tip Mark Steyn on NRO.

On Eating as Much as we Want

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," said Senator Obama.

Other people around the blogosphere are channeling Oliver Twist--"Please, sir, can I have some more?"--but I'm reminded of an article I read back in, I think, my American Social History seminar in college. Part of the argument in antebellum America--an argument with latter-day scholarly repetitions--about the moral status of slavery turned on the amount of food the slaves ate. Why, said the slave-owners, our slaves eat five pounds of meat a week; your Northern white factory workers eat three pounds of meat a week. (I may have the exact numbers wrong here; what matters is their comparative value.) And this statistic was apparently true. You can be Marxist and emphasize the misery of the Northern working class; non-Marxist, and talk about the relative cheapness of meat in the southern countryside, but slaves apparently did eat more meat than northern factory workers. But, said the article I read, take a look at how much meat a week black freedmen were eating in the 1880s--eight pounds a week. What matters isn't the comparison between black slaves and white factory workers--what matters is how much blacks would have chosen to eat themselves, and how much they were given to eat. Three pounds of meat a week you couldn't eat was what made slavery--as much as the whippings, the family separations--the cruelty of daily being denied the opportunity to eat as much as you want.

(Note from Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll: blacks pilfered and poached food in addition to their assigned rations. Judge as you will whether the ability to eat more makes up for the necessity of stealing it.)

That article made a very deep impression on me. When people start talking about how we don't need so much food--well, I hear a slaveowner echo, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Magic Jews

Cinque Henderson has an interesting article in The New Republic on why one black man doesn't much want to vote for Obama. The reasons: misrepresenting black churches by saying Jeremiah Wright is normal for them, that whites are voting for him more because he's half white than because he's half black, and at the core:

So much of the educated white people's love for Barack depends on educated white people's complete ignorance of and distance from the rest of us. Barack is the black person they want the rest of us to be--half-white and loving, or "racially transcendent," as the press loves to call him. And, since picking a candidate makes you allies with his other supporters, why would I want to be allies with educated whites whose glorification of Barack depends in large part on their implicit denigration of the rest of us?

In other words, as has been argued by various and sundry, Barack plays the Magic Negro every white boy ever wanted, the smilin' darky in the liberal minstrel show, and why should a self-respecting black man vote for a man like that?

It seems to me that there's a Jewish analog to this--Gottfried Lessing's eponymous hero in Nathan the Wise, the wise old non-threatening Jew who exists solely to let Christians learn We Shouldn't Be Bigoted. A saintly rabbinical sort, prey to no human vices. (Saintly women who redeem sinful men by their saintliness are a related trope, one equally irritating to a great many women.) Albert Einstein. Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. The grateful Holocaust victim is another variant--hence the joy of reading Melvin Bukiet's novel After, which narrates the adventures of Holocaust survivors after the war who proceed to thieve, be sinful in various ways, anything but cardboard saints. Hence one aspect of Zionist critique--which Phoebe might endorse--that you cannot be Jewish in the diaspora and succeed in any sphere of life without playing the minstrel show of the Saintly Jew, and that in Israel one can be fully human rather than the Magic Jew for Christians.

I do occasionally think that Joe Lieberman plays the Magic Jew. I think I'd rather the first Jewish president (come the day) be someone like Rahm Emmanuel or Chuck Schumer (or Elliot Spitzer!)--an unapologetic schmuck who doesn't feel the need to play nice.

Wretched modernization of Aristophanes' The Frogs

Reasonable review here. Relevant paragraphs:

[Playwright David] Greenspan and director David Herskovits, a tremendously talented duo who pulled off Target Margin's excellent "Faust" in 2005, have larded this plot with so much preening, in-jokey shtick that the story is crushed like an ant trying to carry a dictionary. It's impossible to figure out what's going on, or where, or when, or to what end.

Instead, the most clearly explained and defined ideas in the play are those that the increasingly homogenous Off Broadway audience least needs to hear: George W. Bush is a bad leader, Times Square is destroying the American theater, playwrights must change the world, people who don't live in New York are ignorant. Dance break! Drag skit!

There's an interesting (if unintentional) continuity between the bumper-sticker politics and the whining about theater: The same people get blamed for the war in Iraq and for "The Little Mermaid." But if the price of freedom is going to see "Old Comedy," it is indeed high.

It also fulfilled Goldberry's rule: the truly wretched plays have no intermission, so you can't flee.

Obama Juvenilia

So the New York Times has published two old poems by the nineteen-year-old Barack Obama. I have to admit, despite the fact that I'm predisposed nowadays to dislike the man, that they're not at all bad. Of course, they're in free verse, with all the free verse techniques that have been done to death by a thousand adolescent poets, and yes, the longer one is about a pretty stereotypical adolescent topic, but the guy is clearly a writer of real skill.

It's true, I'm not crazy about the "amber stain" in the first poem because I'm afraid it might refer to semen and not Seagrams, which would be unnecessarily vulgar -- truly adolescent. And the apparently glaring lapse in grammar (misplaced modifier) in the second sentence of the second, otherwise perfect, short poem bothers me. But these things stand out only because the poems are so good otherwise. The young Obama is actually thinking about where to break his lines, how to combine sounds and reintroduce metaphors. This is not just the artless effusion typical of adolescent poetry.

Anyway, it's interesting -- and quite easy, actually, to imagine his now-familiar voice reading these aloud. It's also interesting to compare these poetic efforts to those of other men who sought or attained the presidency. Washington's youthful verse was pretty dreadful. Lincoln didn't become a halfway decent poet until he was well into adulthood and always tended toward doggerel (though his prose, of course, was as great as anyone's has ever been). As for more the poetry of more recent presidents, well, the less said the better.

Finally, it bears noting that even Obama-haters praised the style of his first book, Dreams of My Father. Is it possible that this guy missed his calling?

Most Unexpected Reference to the Winter War

A fire engine's red.
A newspaper's read too.
Two and two are four.
Three times four is twelve.
Twelve is a ruler.
Queen Mary is a ruler.
Queen Mary is a ship.
The ship sails the sea.
The sea has fish.
The fish have fins.
The Finns fought the Russians.
A fire engine's always a-rushin'.
A Russian is red.
That's why a fire engine's red.

Oh, Come On

I try to joke about fearmongering and scapegoating disguised as science. Really I do. But sometimes it just gets to be too much for me.

All I can say is, if you believe this is worth taking seriously, then you're a moron -- and however much CO2 you're generating, it's too much.

What, there was no way to stir secondhand smoke into the mix? Or is that passe?

An Abominable Omission

If polar bears are going to be put on the endangered species list purely because of the prospect of eventual climate change, why not add yetis to the list as well? Their habitat -- the snows and ice of the Himalayas -- will be very much imperiled by long-term warming trends. Not to mention that the Himalayas themselves may eventually be submerged by rising sea levels.

Now, I know some people -- mostly partisans with heavy corporate backing -- continue to deny the existence of yetis. But my non-falsifiable theories, backed up by models regularly revised to match the new data that those models were unable to correctly predict, say unmistakably that the creatures do exist.

Besides, isn't the threat of yeti extinction sufficiently alarming that we should take it seriously regardless of the current evidence?

Machiavelli would favor high immigration

Also, the razing of Toronto, and the importation of its accountants to serve as our helots.

"Those who design a city to create a great empire must strive with great diligence to fill it full of inhabitants, because without this abundance of men it will never succeed in becoming a great city. .... It is done through love by keeping the pathways open and safe for foreigners who wish to come there to live, so that everyone may live there willingly; it is done through force, after nearby cities are destroyed, by sending their inhabitants to live in your city."

From the Discourses on Livy, II, 3.

Priorities of President Obama

The attentive reader will recollect some posts back my thesis that priorities are everything in politics, that only the first two or three priorities have any real meaning. In terms of modern American politics, I'd also put it that it takes so long to wrestle changes of policy through Congress and/or the executive bureaucracy, that only two or three big policy changes a year are possible. (This might change if you don't have a minority in the Senate that can conduct filibusters--if the Republicans drop below 40 in the Senate, all bets are off.) So even a President Obama with a Democratic House and Senate would have to choose among their menu of disastrous policy promises, prioritize some, and leave others to fall by the wayside. Which would they choose?

Tax policy would be easiest. The Bush tax cuts expire automatically, so by doing nothing, you can raise taxes enormously. Even if there is effective political pressure to retain some of the tax cuts, the sunset provision provides leverage for enacting Democratic tax policy. So I would expect tax policy to be a top domestic priority, since relatively easy to do.

Withdrawing from Iraq--not just because it's a rhetorical priority of the Democrats but also because much can be done by the exercise of commander-in-chief power, without bothering to deal with the legislature. (Which wouldn't object anyway.) On the other hand--even assuming this doesn't provoke an instant and massive crisis--managing the State and Defense Departments, plus handling all the diplomacy to smooth the way for a withdrawal, will probably be a pretty big time sink. So, if slightly less time intensive than a major domestic policy initiative, not by much.

Health care--because it does seem to be the domestic issue Obama and Clinton spent the most time on, and I think socializing medicine rises to the top of the domestic to-do policy for Democrats. (I suspect spending other people's money on your health care is more of a vote winner than preventing global warming.) And health care is such an enormously complicated tar-baby of an issue, with so many interests involved, I bet not much else gets done for the first few years of the Obama administration.

I note an interesting little incentive here, if my analysis is remotely accurate: if Obama sets Iraq policy on autopilot, he has more time to spend on domestic policy. He might, therefore, be tempted to opt for minimal changes in Iraq policy, so as to get more stuff done at home. Sheer inertia may keep the Iraq War going, even under the Democrats.

On Character and Values

I want to stipulate a possibly specious, possibly unoriginal, distinction between character and values--this being my rhetoric/reason bugaboo. Both are ways of describing the self in its individuality--but the one refers to its particular affections, the other to the general principles it esteems. Both give you a map of a person--but values, I think, are as dry and thin as every other creation of reason, lacking blood; character is more properly human. Someone who tells you "these are my values" in some way is telling you nothing about their character--and in other ways is telling you precisely what you need to know about him.

On Saudi Arabia

Have we given sufficient recognition to the virtu of the House of Saud? They are so often criticized as backward, parasitic, jihad-fascinated, etc., but consider what they have done: they have maintained control over Saudi Arabia since the 1920s; they have avoided invasion and revolution, which cannot be said of Egypt, Iran, Iraq, etc.; they have forged a disparate collection of tribesmen into something like a nation-state; they have built an oil industry and modernized their nation, with the adroit use of foreign business and foreign labor, both of which have always, ultimately, been kept in their place; they have conciliated the religious hierarchy that provides the moral underpinnings for their rule, not least by the safety valve of supporting jihad abroad; they have grown successively more skillful in the arts of propaganda necessary to influence Western democracies. They have proven far more apt at world politics than the supposedly advanced Arabs of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, and arguably at domestic politics too. Their great lack is of an effective armed forces with which to defend themselves--but their people were probably culturally unsuited to make for a modern army, and if they had been made into an effective army, they might then have become revolutionary. In the circumstances, the choice to depend on Britain and America for protection has been wise. Yes, the Saudis have been helped by the fact that they sit on the world's biggest pile of oil--but that was a dangerous gift, inviting universal cupidity, and the virtu they have displayed in retaining that oil is perhaps all the greater for its immensity. The House of Saud deserves some applause for their continued political excellence--and that greatest of all compliments, they deserve our determination to oppose them with all our own virtu in all areas where they oppose our interests and ideals--for we will need all our virtu to best them.

On the Fall of France

David Foster nominates the collapse of the French army in 1940 the most important event of the twentieth century. We all have our private preferences: I rather like the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in 1918, which, according to one history book I read, pushed Austria-Hungary to the point of actual collapse, with all the consequences that followed from the fission of that empire. Counterfactuals are contestable; for example, David speculates that "Most likely, there would have been no Communist takeover of Eastern Europe." Perhaps, perhaps not: maybe Stalin's planned offensive against Hitler in 1942 or 1943 would have brought Eastern Europe over Communist dominion if France had survived. And I do think the discussion of France's fall ought to include mention of Ernest May's Strange Victory; there's an interesting discussion on the subject by Fred Smoler. Short version: the collapse of France may have been more strange luck for Germany and less inner rot of France than is usually thought.

But the consequences of the collapse of the French Army are interestingly complex. So, yes, it leads to the Gotterdammerung of the Third Reich, and all that follows directly from that. It also leads to the primacy of France in the postwar European Union--because, I think, France had a fascinatingly marginal role in World War II. On the one hand, de Gaulle maintained the crucial illusion that France was among the bravely fighting, moral victors, and this gave France a moral primacy over Germany and Italy. On the other hand, the France of the Vichy bureaucrats, the co-operators with Germany and Italy, re-emerged after the war to continue the old Fascist-Nazi plans of European integration under democratic, French leadership--and able to do so, perhaps, because, beneath the illusion of bravery and morality, they shared with the other continentals the moral taint of the Nazi years, and so were more acceptable to the continentals as leaders than the more truly untainted British. And, with Germany divided, France is able to be first among equals, the state that stamps the European Union in its image--more influential, by dint of its defeat in 1940, than it could have dreamed of being in victory.

The fall of France also leads to the discrediting of the right half of French culture for a generation--the Celines, the Brasillachs--and to the hegemony of the leftist-Sartrean section of it. Even the Maritains, Camuses, and Arons wrote in the context of left domination. France, the center of culture for much of the world, was therefore a megaphone for Communist agitprop. What would French culture have stamped on the world if its right half had persisted undiscredited? It's more than usually difficult to speculate about cultural counterfactuals, but it probably would have been greatly different.

Then the collapse of European imperialism. So many factors, but consider just how much progress the Japanese made in 1940-41 by their occupation of Vichy Indochina; how much it prepared the way for the Japanese advance to Singapore, Indonesia, Burma. (Japanese aircraft flew from Cambodia to sink the Prince of Wales and the Repulse.) The French collapse played an important, if lesser, role in the collapse of the European empires.

Free Europe gave up their military-scientific jewels to the United States in 1939-41, because they were convinced that nothing less could free them from Germany. So, nuclear physicists from all over continental Europe, a-bomb research and radar from Britain--and (as I recollect, but can't confirm by a quick Google search) a fair bit of sonar technology from France. So the fall of France also contributes to the concentration of military technology in the United States, giving it an advantage it still has not lost.

All these consequences follow; maybe more as well. Yes, the collapse of the French army in 1940 mattered a lot.

Book Review Quotation in Journal of British Studies

"Roland the Farter ... held land in sergeanty in Suffolk, probably since the reign of Henry I, by the service at Christmas of a leap, a whistle, and a fart, to be executed simultaneously."

Commonplace Book: Niccolo Machiavelli

"Since there can be no clearer indication about a man than the company he keeps, it is only fitting that a man who keeps the company of honest companions acquires a good name, because it is impossible for him not to share some similarities with them."

Paging Jeremiah Wright...

Thesis to Substantiate

Violence, rhetoric, yadda yadda yadda. Thesis: within the violence-rhetoric tradition, a universalization of violence-rhetoric, and a switch to a positive valence on this universalization; all this to get you to a Violent Public Sphere at some point in the Enlightenment. So: Renaissance Rhetoric--a few leaders subject the masses with their oratory. Machiavelli: multiple citizens use rhetoric & violence. Hobbes; Everybody's violent, so we must set up the Leviathan to have a monopoly on violence & rhetoric. And then ... um ... ah, research! I'd like to find an eighteenth-century universal-violence-rhetoric-good statement from somewhere in that century, but I'm not sure it exists. I want to look at a few books on the (Machiavellian) background of the Second Amendment. The Rousseau-Robespierre tradition gets you to a love of terror, but that's universal violence as expressed by the General Will, not individually. Oh, dear, I may even have to come up with a new thesis.

Astonishing Turn of Mood

One week ago, the conservative punditocracy was gleefully spectating Democratic suicide; today they're glumly sure he'll win the nomination, and pretty darn sure he'll win the general election. Quick mood swing. The general thought seems to be, Nothing We Do Or Say Will Persuade Anyone To Vote Republican--The People Have Stopped Listening To Us. Which may be true. I'm generally in favor of such silent shifts of opinion--I take them usually to be wise. This time would be an exception, but that's no reason to toss out a general preference.

Syllabus Hernias

Course packets are heavy.

Syllabus Joys

I'll be teaching Modern Britain again in the fall, so I'm having fun tailoring the syllabus. Two more sessions to cover, but shorter page lengths per session. John Keegan's Face of Battle is toast. So is Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier. But for short readings, I'm adding essays by Hazlitt, the first act of H. M. S. Pinafore, Churchill's speech on the Amritsar massacre, and Orwell's "Such, Such Were the Joys." The books, subject to departmental approval, will be The Highland Clearances, The Irish War of Independence, and David Lodge's novel Nice Work--the intention is to provide a spread of geographical subject matter and of historical approaches. I have little themes planned--a progression from Adam Smith's discussion of English wool-export prohibitions to, in The Highland Clearances, the conversion of the Highlands into a sheep run, for example. Also, Warren Hastings' Impeachment, Churchill on Amritsar, and some Sikh (as I recollect) factory workers in Nice Work provide an Indian thread for the course. Oh, how I hope the students do the reading!

Guam in History

Guam, as I recollect, was settled by the Spanish so as to provide a pit stop for the Manila Galleon, sailing between Acapulco and Manila, trading silver and silk, and putting together the final link of the globalization of world trade in the Early Modern World--the point of which, as we Sinocentrists all know, was not to provide Europe with the capital that sparked the Industrial Revolution, but to provide China with the silver and fiscal expansion that stimulated market towns throughout the Empire, increased the population from 150 to 400 million, and provided the preconditions for China's eventual rise to hegemony over the world economy. (Waiting, waiting, any generation now.) Guam, in other words, is an underrated hinge of world history; for, without that horseshoe nail of a Guamanian pitstop, we would all be speaking Hindi in 2200 instead of Mandarin.

The Manila Galleon also managed to sail both north and south of the Hawaiian Islands for two centuries without ever stumbling across them. This proves many things, some about the winds and waves of the Pacific, but largely the single-mindedness of the Spanish sailors.

In Guamanian, there is no word for "Enlightenment."

Um...

Heard this morning on the Fox News morning show "Fox and Friends":

"This must be the first time in history that breaking news has come out of Guam."

For the record, it wasn't one their blonde newsbabes. (But it was one of their square-jawed newsstuds.)

Adjuncting

I will be an adjunct for at least two courses next fall, maybe three, beyond the Brandywine River in Buckland University. I'm also hoping to snag two courses at Hobbiton College. So the rent will be paid and, cross fingers, the food as well.

The Balance of Powers

This post is essentially my second response to Withywindle's comments on an earlier post. Withy contrasts "practical reason" with "scientific reason" and he sees scientific reason as leading naturally to a kind of intellectual hubris, a Platonic authoritarianism. He even argues that "the orator" (Cicero's name for the ideal man of thought and political action) ought not to immerse himself too deeply in scientific reason for fear of being "captured by the scientific frame of mind."

In response, I argued that the arrogance and dogmatism to which Withywindle alludes quite often is the result not of Science itself but of the desire to appropriate and oppose Science. Since then, however, I realized I have an even more fundamental objection to Withywindle's position. To put it in a nutshell, I think Withy's problem is with pure reason, and Science is not just pure reason.

Science is really at least two different intellectual mindsets or methodologies: reason and empiricism. Both of these methodologies, in the hands of humans, are quite liable to fail. Reason becomes circular reasoning, dogma, and the sort of mental masturbation that really does leave one blind. Empiricism becomes confirmation bias or misunderstanding of what we see and hear. Sometimes these methodologies succeed in isolation, but history shows that neither can hold a candle to Science.

The power of Science, and its relative imperviousness to error, derives entirely from the tension between reason and empiricism. Reason is to be checked by experiment (you must not believe what you can't test) and observation is to be explained by reason (without a model, your data are useless). At the heart of Science, properly understood, is a strong skepticism of either method in isolation, and a rigorous insistence on keeping these two approaches to truth properly balanced.

The people I mentioned in my last post, the people who want to attack Science with Science's own weapons, always rely on only one of Science's two components. Like Plato or the new rationalists of the 17th century, they tend to discard empiricism and identify science with reason alone. (The folks who keep empiricism and discard reason are harder to spot, but they exist: these are the folks who design bad studies, cherry-pick research findings, or appeal to "consensus.") Of course, these folks careen into dogma. But that is because they are misunderstanding or misappropriating Science.

The danger with Science is not that one will drink too much of the Kool-Aid. The danger is that one will have only tasted "the Pierian spring." For that reason I want the orator deeply educated in Science. I want him to say with conviction what Plato's Socrates says with irony: my unaided mind is incapable of attaining the truth. For that reason, we need the equipoise between methodologies -- the tension in the bowstring that has already shot so many arrows so very far.

The Impulse to "Enlightenment"

"Enlightenment" is a fraught word. It can be given either a positive or a negative spin. I tend to think of it positively, as a process of liberation from received lies. Withywindle, I think, uses it to denote a great intellectual error, an attempt to rely excessively on reason in giving purpose to human life by formulating a science of values.

For purposes of this blog post, I'm interested in Withy's conception of "enlightenment." It's easy to assume that the quest for "enlightenment" is a natural consequence of the growing influence of reason and the scientific method: drunk with success in understanding the natural world, the rationalists turn their sights on ethics -- with disastrous results. But I'm not at all sure that this is how it usually happens.

Athens: the fifth century B.C. The sophistic movement begins questioning the established moral order, subjecting traditional values to searching scrutiny based on reason and -- to a lesser extent -- on empiricism. Traditionalists fear the erosion of morality, glimpse an abyss before their feet. One of them, Socrates, has the bright idea of fighting the sophists with their own weapons: use reason to undermine the sophists' mines and thus rescue the traditional meaning of such concepts as justice, piety, excellence, and so forth. The crucial point is that the sophists seem to have been content to tear down: Socrates was determined to shore up. It was Socrates (or his successors) who felt the need to construct a new system of ethics based on reason. He did so, and his effort was welcomed, not because of excessive enthusiasm for sophistic rationality but because of fear of its power and horror at its possible consequences.

I think a similar narrative can be applied to much of the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. Men like Locke, Smith and Kant are trying in various ways to rescue moralities under threat from the corrosive forces of reason and empiricism. (I think the same might even be said of Descartes, but I'm not sure.) In so doing, they feel that they have no choice but to use the enemy's weapons, so to speak, even though those weapons were designed only to expose lies, not to fabricate value systems. The ultimate result was a feeling of spiritual starvation and a revolt against reason that is still doing harm today.

What I'm saying is this: the blame for the bad consequences of "Enlightenment" should perhaps rest only indirectly on the worshippers of reason. The real culprits are those who fear the dissolution of a particular set of cherished beliefs and on some level wish to resist reason's and empiricism's advance.

Science and Values

Here's the seed of an interesting discussion: John Derbyshire attacks Ben Stein for attacking Science based on its alleged role in the Holocaust. Various others point out that it was not science, but pseudo-scientific ideology, that motivated Nazi atrocities.

One crucial point that emerges is that true science must involve a deep skepticism, an awareness of uncertainty -- not a rush to make policy or remake society based on tentative conclusions. Auschwitz was an operation conducted in haste; it came from an unseemly and even unscientific willingness to rush to apply theories to the management of society on a large scale.

And this suggests another crucial point: Science, in and of itself, never provides a sufficient basis for action. Science is incapable of generating normative, prescriptive statements. Science's only guiding value is truth. It knows no others. Science may say (or seem to say) that not all humans have indentical capacities, and that capacities differ in measurable ways among definable groups. Science does not say -- it is not capable of saying -- "build a gas chamber."

And this is why Ben Stein, in his TBN comments, is drawing a false dichotomy. Transcendant values (love of God, compassion, etc.) and Science are not mutually exclusive. But transcendant values can come from one of two places: human nature or historical contingency. And this is where things get tricky.

Because Science has a tendency to undermine ideological systems that have been elaborated through History. It questions and it exposes. Darwin's Science did deal a grievous blow to the Christian worldview, and this may well have weakened a bulwark of morality that could have stood against the inclinations of men like the Nazis. To this extent, then, Ben Stein may be on to something. Science tends to strip away constructed moralities and leave us with unregenerate human nature, which may be fundamentally a monstrous thing.

On the other hand, Christianity has various crimes to its discredit and even the crimes of the Nazis derived some of their spirit from an old anti-Semitism whose flame had burned for centuries on the altars of the Church itself. Perhaps it would have been better if Science had subverted religion earlier and more completely. Or, one could stress the extent to which the "Science" of the Nazis was (as I said above) really an insufficiency or misunderstanding of Science which a more vigorous application of really scientific thinking would have exposed. This would suggest that the need is for more science, not less, in order that normal human nature -- which may be fundamentally NON-monstrous -- may assert itself uncorrupted by ideology. (Careful readers of this blog will have guessed that this is my own point of view.)

Either way, I think it is true that Science is no friend of the pieties of civilization -- even if it is Western civilization's greatest accomplishment, as Derbyshire asserts. The question is, is it the pieties of civilization that are dangerous -- or is it the promptings of the average human soul?

UPDATE: I'm not sure what I was thinking when I typed that last paragraph last night. I should have pointed out that barbarism has its pieties, too, which are mostly far worse (from my point of view) than the pieties of civilization. And I suppose a defender of science might note that science is far more destructive of barbarous value systems than of civilized ones.