Lies, Damned Lies, and....

An op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times by Charles Blow contains the following sentences:

There was one very telling (and virtually ignored) statistic in CNN’s exit poll data [on Proposition 8] that may shed some light: There were far more black women than black men, and a higher percentage of them said that they voted for the measure than the men. How wide was the gap? According to the exit poll, 70 percent of all blacks said that they voted for the proposition. But 75 percent of black women did. There weren’t enough black men in the survey to provide a reliable percentage for them. However, one can mathematically deduce that of the raw number of survey respondents, nearly twice as many black women said that they voted for it than black men.

This seems like a pretty striking finding, and indeed it forms the whole basis of the op-ed piece, which goes on to suggest reasons why black women would be far more likely than black men to support Proposition 8.

But Blow is performing a pretty iffy maneuver when he relies on "the raw number of survey respondents." In fact, I'm pretty sure this column by Blow deserves its own appendix in the next edition of Darrell Huff's classic book How to Lie with Statistics.

In the online version of his article, Blow links to CNN's exit poll data here. We find, in addition to the numbers mentioned by Blow, the fact that African Americans were 10% of the total sample -- 6% of the total sample were black women, and 4% were black men. The percentage of support for Proposition 8 among black men was not reported, presumably because CNN's pollsters considered the sample for that subgroup too small to draw to draw meaningful conclusions about the total population. But that's exactly what Blow proceeds to do.

First, Blow must have calculated (or "mathematically deduced" -- to use his somewhat more authoritative, not to say grandiose, phrase) the unreported percentage for Proposition 8 among black men in CNN's sample.

Black women were 6% of the total sample and 60% of the African American sample. Three-quarters of them voted for Proposition 8: that would be 4.5% (roughly -- there's always rounding error) of the total sample and 45% of the African American sample. So to get to a 70% level of support for all blacks, a fraction of black men amounting to 25% of the African American sample must have voted for the measure. Black men were 40% of the African American sample. And 25/40 is 62.5%, which is the proportion of black men in the sample who must have supported Proposition 8.

So, disregarding the fact that the pollsters felt the sample of black men was too small to draw conclusions from, we find that there was 75% support for Proposition 8 in the sample among black women, and only about 62.5% support among black men. Maybe it's an interesting difference, but would it look compelling as a basis for a whole column in The New York Times?

Perhaps not. Which is why Blow took his next weird and intellectually dubious step.

There were 3 black women in the sample for every 2 black men. 75% of 3 is 2.25, and 62.5% of 2 is 1.25. So 2.25 black women in the sample supported Prop 8 for every 1.25 black men who did. And 2.25 is almost twice 1.25. Ah, that magic almost twice! Now we're in business! Mr. Editor, I'm almost ready to file my column!

But notice the magnitude and chutzpah of Blow's misdirection. He's actually used the larger number of black women sampled by CNN's exit poll to magnify the difference between levels of support among the different sexes in the black sample. To fully grasp the degree of dishonesty involved, consider this: using the same methodology, even if black men in the sample had supported proposition 8 at the very same rate as black women (75%), Blow could still have claimed that, "of the raw number of survey respondents," more than 30% more black women than black men supported Proposition 8 (2.25 black women for every 1.5 black men). Or some such nonsense.

So Blow's column turns out to be based entirely on statistical slight-of-hand. The horrible thing, though, is that Blow is not alone in his misuse of statistics to justify his column inches. Astonishingly, the people who publish medical and epidemiological studies do something similar -- though not quite as flagrantly bad -- all the time.

In recent years, they've taken to using something called "relative risk." If they want to compare the proportions of their treatment and control groups who get a disease (for example), they don't just subtract one percentage from the other and report the difference in percentage points. They compare the two percentages as a ratio instead. And this offers wonderful possibilities for misleading a statistically unsavvy public.

For example, say that 1.2% of people who live near a chemical plant get cancer, but only 1% of people in the control group do. Now, that may be a statistically significant difference if the sample size is big enough. But it's a little misleading to say, as they do -- and as the drive-by media will eagerly report -- that the people who lived near the chemical plant had a 20% higher chance of getting cancer. It's literally true (1.2% is 20% greater than 1%) but it's misleading, because people will assume that the proportions of cancer victims in the two samples differed by something like 40% as against 60%. See here for more on the use and abuse of "relative risk" and the related concept of "odds ratios."

Of course, doctors and medical researchers don't do anything as grossly bad as to exploit a meaningless difference in raw numbers between treatment and control groups. They're generally more sophisticated than Times columnists, and Charles Blow could have learned from them. He could have taken the 75% and 62.5% levels of support for Prop 8 among black women and black men, respectively, and written that black women were 20% more likely than black men to support Proposition 8. In a way, Blow should get credit for his explicit reference to "the raw number of survey respondents." He was, at least, flagrant in his disingenuousness.

"Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up"

Hot Air links to this weird story in the Daily Mail and calls it "Lysistrata v2.0." Only instead of refusing to have sex with their men until war ceases, the women in these New Guinea villages decided to kill all the male babies, thereby preventing them from ever growing into warriors.

Needless to say, this practice elicits horror from most commenters both at Hot Air and the Daily Mail. And not only horror: most of the comments also point out a certain illogic -- both ethical and practical -- in the practice of killing males now so they won't kill or die later. (It was the first commenter at the Daily Mail who introduced the analogy of Lysistrata, and implicitly noted her apparently superior solution.)

But of course there are always the mindless cultural relativists. Here's one of the other commenters at the Daily Mail site:

Stop judging these people with Western ethics. The commenters here have no idea how these people live and deal with life. I've lived with New Guineans and their minds do not work in the same way as Westerners. Overall they are gentle people and things must have got pretty bad for the womenfolk to kill their own children. In their minds it was the only way to save the village. Save your disgust for the baby killers in this country who should know better.

If "their minds do not work in the same way" as ours, then how do we know things must have gotten pretty bad for womenfolk to kill their own children? Maybe that sort of thing is just fun for ladies in New Guinea?

Of course, I have absolutely no doubt things had gotten pretty bad: a Mrs. Luke in one of the villages is quoted as tearfully saying that "the women had to do it" although it was "a terrible, unbearable crime."

On the other hand, I think it's bullshit to say that New Guineans' minds do not work in the same way as Westerners'. This kind of worse-than-the-problem solution is a feature of human society everywhere. And, in human society everywhere, an impulse to violate moral norms is a fairly common way to deal with what seems to be an intolerable situation. Look at terrorism, for goodness' sake. Look at the genocides of the twentieth century. Look at the growing popularity of the idea of involuntary euthanasia on the grounds that it costs too much to keep the infirm and elderly alive. Look at the recent insistence in this country -- incorrect, it turns out, as it always rather obviously was -- that we had no alternative to harvesting fetuses for stem cells. Look at proposals to deal with pollution by shutting down civilization.

The proper response (apart from intervening to stop both the baby-killing and the wars, which were being fought "over claims of sorcery") is neither to cluck our tongues and murmur "crazy savages" nor to excuse the women of these villages as so different from us that we can't possibly judge them. The response, I think, is somehow to judge ourselves in judging them -- to see here another instance of the human capacity for foolishness. These women aren't so different from us, and we aren't so different from them.

On a positive note, it's really striking to see how many people at Hot Air have read their Aristophanes.

The Further Heresies of Keith Windschuttle

Lurking out there in cyberspace, on some server maintained by blogger.com, are a fairly large number of Alpheus posts for Athens & Jerusalem that for one reason or another never got finished. One of the very oldest of these unfinished posts took as its point of departure the Australian freelance journalist and historian Keith Windschuttle.

Windschuttle provoked a huge controversy in the Antipodes by publishing, in 2002, the first volume of a projected multi-volume series on The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. What had been fabricated, according to Windschuttle, was the hitherto widely-credited idea that European settlers exterminated the native peoples of Australia and Tasmania in a series of systematic massacres that could reasonably be called a genocide. Windschuttle's thesis has been attacked with great energy -- indeed ferocity -- but the accepted narrative of European colonization in Australia now seems to be on its way to disintegrating. (Windschuttle's web page maintains a list of links to articles relevant to the debate.)

Windschuttle has made his case largely by exposing as utterly fraudulent many of the "facts" that professional historians had used to build the case for Australian genocide. The cumulative effect has been humiliation for academic historians in Australia. Documents cited by major historians of colonial Australia have proven not to exist. Those that do exist have been misquoted, misdated, or radically misreported. Readily available sources which undermine claims crucial to the arguments of particular historians have been passed over in silence. One of Windschuttle's critics was reduced to the less-than-compelling argument that, well, "historians are always making up figures." An interesting article by the always-readable Theodore Dalrymple on the character of the opposition to Windschuttle's anti-revisionist revisionism can be found here.

I haven't thought about Windschuttle much in the past year or so, but now I learn that he's become the editor of Quadrant, an Australian journal which is sort of like OZ's answer to Commentary or The New Criterion. And with Windschuttle at the helm, Quadrant seems increasingly to be directing its fire at global warming. For example, the November issue leads with this nice article by Robert Carter on "The Futile Quest for Climate Control." In October, Quadrant carried this even more valuable article by William Kininmonth on "Illusions of Climate Science." In addition, Quadrant is apparently sponsoring lectures by notable Australian climate-change skeptics like Ian Plimer. (The three men mentioned in the last three sentences are all environmental or geological scientists of some note down under.)

So obviously I'm pleased by Windschuttle's latest venture into Questioning Authority. May he and Quadrant have as much success in the realm of (pseudo-) science as he has in the sphere of history. Meanwhile, I plan to start checking Quadrant's web site from time to time, if only to read anecdotes like this:

Once in Melbourne I saw a lot of angry young women protesting about the world not being green enough for their taste.... I stopped at the street light, waiting for it to change. My car and the women’s column were facing each other from opposite sides of the road, going in opposite directions. The girls were repeating the screams of the studded gauleiter in front of the column. They looked like a mob of sheep from Animal Farm.

Using a minute pause in the wimmin’s consciousness-raising empowerment, when they stopped chanting, I stuck my head out the window and politically incorrectly screamed: “Four legs good, two legs bad!” And what do you know? These tzedreitern* repeated it in one breath! All as one! My jaw dropped to the floor. But when I saw the black-clad madam, clutching her baseball bat, striding towards me looking as if she intended to do maximal damage, I hit the gas pedal.

[*A Yiddish word which apparently means something like "deranged people."]

Got an Interview!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On Not Caring About Eric Holder

Just recycling a private conversation with Gowanus ... like Montaigne, I have a bad memory. Alpheus, my Étienne de La Boétie, has a much better one. So here is my reaction when I hear that Eric Holder will be nominated to be Attorney General.

Who?
He was Assistant Attorney General under Clinton, or something like that.
Oh. What did he do?
He was involved in the Elian case.
Who? What? Oh, that thing about that Cuban kid. Is he grown up yet? What else?
The Mark Rich pardon.
Oh, yeah, I remember that. That was corrupt. What did he do there?
He signed off on it.
OK, that's not so great. Anything else about him?
Standard-issue liberal.
I am standardly opposed to him then. So, second-level Clinton hack to become first-level Obama hack. Yawn. Next issue, please!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I may not have much internet access until Sunday. Happy Thanksgiving! I am, of course, most thankful this year for Shirebourn.

An Issue For Sarah Palin

Opposition to sex-specific abortions throughout the world. A way for her to combine evangelical, right-to-life issues with foreign-policy--do good by doing well for herself.

Incidentally, the areas where sex-specific abortions are supposed to be worst, in absolute numbers, I believe are China, India, and Pakistan. Does anyone know if Christians in those three countries abort girl babies at the same rate as their non-Christian peers?

Asocial, Opinionated, Luddite Blogger; Unhelpful To The Revolution

Over at the National Review Online, Patrick Ruffini wants conservatives to become the Internet-friendly, social messaging party of the future. Also, we should provide information and not just commentary. I don't think I'm going to be able to contribute much to this brave new world; I'm not a tech wizard, I'm not overwhelmingly sociable, and I'm most informed about British history between 1560 and 1640. As I think about this, my spirit most revolts at the idea that we have to Twitter our way to the White House. Let some other twit be president, I say.

On Colonialism

Another way to describe the internal tensions in America that I obsess about is to say that our overclass is turning itself into a colonial class, rulers emotionally estranged from the American nation state, who, lacking connection to the American nation, are willing to import no end of foreigners to act as their cheap labor. But this is obviously a debatable way of putting it. Another is that the overclass hopes to pull all the old Americans into the overclass--an optimistic hope, but obviously one motive. Another is that we have contested definitions of 'American' at issue--America as British settler-state, America as British settler-state plus white immigrants, America as British settler-state, white immigrants, and racial minorities, America as nation of immigrants, America as abstract ideals, America as convenience, America as legal and territorial shell. At issue at present, I think, is the conflict of definitions between "America as British settler-state, white immigrants, and racial minorities" and "America as nation of immigrants"--the latter the definition of the overclass, but shading into America as abstraction, convenience, and shell. As I say, I think this is a colonial attitude. Time for underclass Americans to make Frantz Fanon their text?

Freedom

I continue to be irked by the idea that the election of Obama is the most important political event that ever happened for black Americans, or the culmination of a political arc. Back around the election I said that 1620 and 1776 were more important by a long shot--and, yeah, they are. But let us look at this from the perspective of black Americans. (Assuming the existence of such a collectivity.) What should matter most is their exercise of the freedom they have achieved themselves, not liberties given to them. The daily exercise of civic liberty, the annual, biannual, and quadrennial exercise of the vote, each should matter more to any individual black American, and the millions of votes, the millions of exercises of freedom, should infinitely outweigh in importance the receipt by a black American of other people's suffrages. What mattered during the Civil War?--not that blacks were given freedom from slavery, but that they fought for it, died for it, and acquired it not least by their own merits. What matters in modern times? Likewise, the Civil Rights struggle matters most in that blacks acquired the right to vote, not that they were given it. And the achievement of the right to vote far outweighs in importance any individual exercise of that vote; every single vote cast by black Americans--for Americans in general--matters equally, no matter who won the election. And besides, the election of Obama is the story of the voting choices of Americans writ large--or, if of any group of Americans, is the story of the voting choices of white Americans. Puff up the significance of Obama's election, and you're really talking about white America again, and the self-congratulation that comes as the Surpass Another Moral Barrier; blacks are again mere props in the story. The fact that black Americans voted in this election is what matters, as it mattered in 2004. The 2% of blacks who voted against Obama achieved a daily freedom, now as before, just as much as the 98% who voted for him.

Why does the exercise of the vote matter so much? Because it is the means by which we make judgments, tell our histories, create new history; it is the political act creating narrative, uniting past, present, and future. I used earlier the phrase "what should matter"--but this is in some ways an imposition. The vote constitutes the sense of what should matter--if black Americans choose to vote for Obama, and to create and invest meaning in his victory, this is both their right and their duty, and the stuff of politics. But all such votes and meanings are provisional--his election is a culmination now, but will be something different in 2012, 2062, 2112, at the eventual fall of the Republic, etc. Each new election, each new exercise of liberty, will inevitably create a new meaning out of the previous election, re-create its moral significance, underline how all such culminations and judgments are temporary and contingent. And this is why the exercise of the vote really matters, and not the mere object for whom one votes: to vote, to be a citizen, is to be a historian, to engage in the perpetual task of making and remaking the moral structure of the polis, the world. The value of the vote lies precisely in the fact that it never culminates, that our judgment remains active and unfixed, that the judgments of the past become material upon which we invent new judgments, not unquestioned authorities. It is splendid to be a citizen; it is contemptibly lesser to be an Obamalator.

America, Dominatrix

Apropos of Hillary in thigh boots ... I take there to be a very important sense in which this is America's image abroad -- a land of sexual freedom/corruption, full of bold hussies who eye men and sleep with them without compunction/without morality/before marriage/because they want to/without requiring marriage/without getting murdered by their family, who are equally corrupt for not doing so. (The sexual corruption of tolerating homosexuality only being a later twist on this theme.) This image of America as a land of sexual freedom and corruption essential both to its appeal and to its repulsiveness abroad, central to its fascination, and coexisting curiously with the image of America as militarily powerful -- I'm not sure there are any cultural representations explicitly of America as Dominatrix, but I think that isn't a bad image for the combined imagery of America abroad. This drawing on the traditional conception of England as allowing its women more liberty than the continental Europeans do, which I believe dates at least as far back as 1700, and on the European sense, first contra the Islamic world, that their women have more liberty, and that this is a good thing--probably from about the same date, though I'm fuzzier on that. As for America itself, I get the sense from Henry James novels and the like that American women in the late nineteenth century were already viewed as remarkably free-spirited, but that the Puritanical ethos (especially strong in the American upper-class women who traveled to Europe) kept the sexual implications in minor key. The image of American women as particularly hoydenish I think dates from the spread of Hollywood movies abroad--there being a time in the 1920s and 1930s when Americans viewed foreign women (French/European/Asian/etc.) as sexually promiscuous, and foreigners viewed American women as sexually promiscuous; ah,irony--and may have faded in the last decade or two, as the women's revolution and the sexual revolution spread to the rest of the world. But still I think America, Dominatrix remains as an image. I'm thinking particularly of Roy Mottahadeh's Mantle of the Prophet, which mentioned the concept of "Westoxification," the translation of a Persian-language pun and concept in some Iranian religious writer in the 1960s, I believe, where the revolt against the West was particularly a revolt against its (libertine) culture. Then the disgust with America of Sayyid Qutb, influential early Islamic radical, who in 1946 in Greeley, Colorado was disgusted by a church dance (!!!): "Every young man took the hand of a young woman. And these were the young men and women who had just been singing their hymns! Red and blue lights, with only a few white lamps, illuminated the dance floor. The room became a confusion of feet and legs: arms twisted around hips; lips met lips; chests pressed together." All this still relevant.

So, America, Dominatrix; America, the Sexually Free; America, the Sexually Perverse; America, Master and Mistress of the World. So, yes, let's follow up on Condy in thigh boots with Hillary in thigh boots, and embrace our image as Dominatrix. And consider, after all, that Orwell analyzed the intellectuals who fell for Nazism and Communism as in love precisely with its violence, that they worshiped the power; looking backward, we might say the eroticized power. America, by contract, eroticizes, well, sex -- which I am just enough of a modern to think is a more virtuous alternative. Better the Dominatrix than the leather-clad SS man, or the icon of Che Guevara. Liberty that refrained from complete sexual license would be even more to my taste, but there's only so far I will go with that theme, when our enemies take Colorado church dances as icons of immorality.

Miscellaneous II

* A snarky Chinese fortune cookie today told me 'The odds of hitting your target go up dramatically when you aim at it." I hope the fortune cookie factory goes up in flames, and thank you so much for that helpful advice.

* I wasn't a valedictorian in my high school, or anywhere close. We may therefore take my dislike of self-confident meritocrats as pure envy by an untermensch. On the other hand--as I have thought for a while--I do think that realizing fairly early on that I Wasn't The Smartest Guy In The Room was good for my soul.

* I'm still reading Montaigne and Gormenghast, but slowly. The fact that I play hooky, and relax, by reading British history explains why I really ought to be a British history professor. I've decided not to write the occasional post saying How Wonderful The Latest Essay By Montaigne Is, because it would be unbearably conceited. Telling people about Christopher Fry or Hans-Georg Gadamer in my books counts as introducing the reader of this blog to someone you haven't heard about; praising Montaigne is just namedropping and patting my own shoulder. So, yes, Montaigne is amazing, but note that I'm not the sort of person who can read him straight through at high speed.

* Every time I read a new history book, I dream about teaching a new course. Now as I read about the fall of British Asia in World War II (Malaya, Burma, the Bengal), I dream of teaching a course on the fall of the British Empire, 1880 - 1960, from Ireland to Singapore, by way of Israel, Kenya, and Suez. So much I don't know ... clearly I would have to ask Tim Burke for a reading list.

Meritocrats

This is really a follow-up to Withywindle's post expressing skepticism about the fact that Obama is staffing his incoming administration with "the best and the brightest," the flower of the American meritocracy.

I'm not a fan of the so-called meritocracy. I suppose you could argue that attending, then teaching at, a few fairly snazzy institutions of higher learning makes me some kind of member of its ranks, but I've never really belonged to the club or liked the fact that it exists.

Why? Well, mainly because I don't think that the "best and the brightest" actually are the best and the brightest. With quotation marks, the phrase refers to those people David Brooks was hyperventilating about in his column in yesterday's New York Times:

This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes.If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.

All right. Let's stipulate that there is something impressive about graduating first in your class and acing standardized tests. Not everyone can do these things. They're real measures of certain kinds of valuable talent.*

But consider two things. First, there are lots and lots of kinds of valuable talent, and most of these are hard to measure and don't lead directly to the sort of success that might catch the eye of a president-elect. Second, there are lots and lots of talented people in America by any given measure, and only a tiny handful of these are going to wind up in the high councils of the Obama administration. In fact, only a fraction of the total number of talented people ever really rise to prominence at all.

I hope that these don't seem like startling assertions. I don't think they should startle anyone. Almost every day, I meet perfectly ordinary people -- people who do not belong to the "best and the brightest" or "the great and the good"** -- who impress me with their acuity, courage, good sense, eloquence, wisdom or any of a range of other qualities that would seem to recommend them for high status and great influence. Nor do these people seem to have countervailing vices or weaknesses that would have to disqualify them from such status and influence. As far as I can tell, these meritocrats manqués usually just made slightly different choices from the people who wound up rising to the top: they didn't cultivate the right people, they didn't sacrifice family to ambition, they didn't work hard enough on refining their image, or they really preferred fixing old cars to drafting legal briefs, or volunteering at hospices to volunteering on political campaigns.

And sometimes it's just dumb luck that separates the conspicuously successful from everybody else. Be in the wrong place at the wrong time, fail to be in the right place at the right time, make a bad decision at what turns out to be the crucial moment and there goes your membership in "the best and the brightest." People like to downplay the role of luck in life, but as far as I can tell, there's no force more potent in shaping human destiny. It's not a fact we should think about too much, lest we despair, but there it is.

So one thing that bothers me about the meritocracy is the illusion that these people really are better than the rest of us. And what bothers me most of all -- and what's most dangerous for everyone -- is the fact that the meritocrats tend to share the illusion. They tend to believe that there's nothing odd or special about the lives they've lived. They tend to think that they must be exceptionally smart, or exceptionally diligent, or exceptionally decent. Worse, because "the best and the brightest" are almost automatically those people who have lived relatively trouble-free lives, they tend to overestimate the gentleness and manageability of the world.

In fact, it's almost axiomatic that they'll tend to overestimate either their own abilities or the ease with which the world's problems can be solved. Because things haven't been that hard for them, have they? It's the rare human being who can resist judging everyone's experience of life by his own.

Consider the following analogy to the success of "the best and the brightest." There's a clever type of con game that involves sending out large numbers of advertisements to prospective marks chosen from the phone book or some similarly indiscriminate source. These advertisements advertise the con man's s skill and a prognosticator and actually make predictions about the winners of sporting events. The trick is that different advertisements make different predictions so that, whatever the outcome of the event or events in question, a large number of the advertisements will have contained predictions that were 100% correct. After the first mailing, the con artist limits his next mailing to the people who have received true predictions, and once again offers a range of predictions that some proportion of the total can't fail to be accurate. And so on. Pretty soon, the con man has on his string some very impressed people who are ready to pay him tidy sums of money to hear more of his "predictions." But the guy's predictive powers are no greater than anyone else's. In fact, the guy doesn't even have to be an especially adept con man to pull off this trick. He's got the best con artist in the world working as his partner. Her name is Lady Luck.

Just as some of our con man's predictions are guaranteed to come true while others are guaranteed to prove false, it's also a guarantee that there are plenty of people out there who would be where the "best and the brightest" are now, but just didn't get lucky. The "best and the brightest" represent the outcome of a stochastic process in which other equally talented people were selected out before they could become "the best and the brightest." The fact that lots of people would never have been eligible for the competition to become "the best and the brightest" is important to remember, but it doesn't change the fact that the competition could very easily have turned out differently.***

And in the case of "the best and the brightest," it's not only the rest of the world that risks being conned by the success of the few into thinking that these people are very, very special. Too often, the seductive Lady Luck cons them into thinking that they're special too.

All this is really just a long gloss on Withywindle's comment on his own post:

[T]he Best and the Brightest are 1) perhaps not as Besty and Brighty as they like to think; 2) are subject to hubris; 3) in their overweening confidence commit the country to disastrous policies, disastrously executed.

That's why it's important to leaven the meritocracy with qualities that don't really seem to "belong" in the meritocracy: unconventional backgrounds, unconventional life choices, unconventional tastes, unconventional experiences -- especially adverse experiences. All these things illuminate the world and help stave off the hubris that comes from feeling like the path has always been straight and clear. Being unconventional and taking tortuous paths teaches you something about the complex and contingent nature of the world. The person who's taken an unconventional or tortuous path is more often aware of the role of uncertainly and luck in shaping outcomes. And unjust suffering is especially educational -- it teaches you something about how tough it is to make the world work the way you'd like it to work.

That's a big part of the reason I thought so highly of John McCain's experience in that North Vietnamese prison. A lot of liberals kept asking, "how is suffering a qualification for the president?" Answer: because a president ought to sympathize with innocent suffering and understand the reality of evil and the limits of human life. Anyone else who had been in the pilot's seat of McCain's fighter plane could have made the mistakes that got him shot down, imprisoned, tortured, and crippled. Not everyone "gets" these things, at least not in a way that really informs their judgments and actions.

In a similar vein, Sarah Palin was so attractive to so many of us because of all the unconventional elements in her background. She didn't take the well-marked path to power. Among the elites, people who are first in their high school class are a dime a dozen.**** Moose-hunting Alaskan pageant winners who wandered from college to college and chose to keep their Downs Syndrome children, less so.*****

It's sometimes forgotten that the word "meritocracy" was coined as a criticism, not an endorsement, of the reality it stood for.****** A meritocracy, after all, is still an -ocracy, and one ought to suspicious of that suffix wherever it appears. (Even "democracy" started as a pejorative term, and only enjoys respect today because it's so closely associated with the rule of law and inalienable individual rights.) When the term "meritocracy" is used approvingly, the merito- is an attempt to disguise and justify the -ocracy, and to obscure the fact that the rulers in a meritocracy have no very special claim to merit, any more than the aristocrats do in an "aristocracy" -- which means, after all, the rule of the best.

Again, I'm not saying that the people who rise to the top in a meritocracy aren't talented and capable people -- better than most of us, in fact. I am saying that I think Withywindle's skepticism is a lot more justifiable than David Brooks's enthusiasm.

[*Though note a disturbing fact in the fifth paragraph of this New Yorker article: the significant number of students who get extra time on the SATs on the basis of various claimed disabilities get substantially higher scores than students who don't receive extra time. Some elements of success are just a matter of the squeaky wheel getting the grease.]

[**The Greeks called them "the beautiful and the good" (kaloi k'agathoi).]

[***A man from the insignificant island of Seriphos once told Themistocles that he (Themistocles) would never have achieved his present greatness had he born in Seriphos. Themistocles answered: "Yes, I would never have been great if had been born in Seriphos. Nor would you, if you had been born in Athens."]

[****Alpheus would cost a penny, since it's a little more expensive if you don't buy in bulk.]

[*****As some observers have recently noted, Barack Obama is black, which is also somewhat unconventional among our elites. One imagines this has given him a broader perspective on life in some respects.]

[******See this article for some interesting reflections on the idea of meritocracy in its original sense.]

The Best and the Brightest

Don't the Democrats remember the last time they cheered an administration staffed by the Best and the Brightest? Are there no faint premonitions of possible danger?

Meanwhile, with a tip of the hat to Goldberry, I present the following question: How would Hillary look in thigh-boots? For the probable answer, refer to the title of the previous post.

Horror Beyond Imagination

Withywindle: Can you just imagine what it would have been like if H. P. Lovecraft wrote modern poetry? Awful sonnets instead of awful short stories?

Alpheus: He did. The sonnet sequence Fungi from Yuggoth.

Withywindle: You're joking.

Alpheus: Really, he did.

Withywindle: The horror. The horror.

Don't Wanna

Don't wanna grade papers. Don't wanna prepare for classes. Don't wanna revise rejected articles. Don't wanna work on novel draft. Don't wanna work on play draft. Do wanna play with Shirebourn and read books for fun and sleep. Really don't wanna grade papers.

Frustrating Rejection

I followed up on an article I submitted back in June, to see where it was in the review process. It turns out it had been rejected back in July, and I never received the e-mail. This is particularly frustrating--not just to have been rejected (doubtless with cause) but to have wasted four months when I could have revised it in the meantime. Ugh.

Evangelicals, Race, Republicans

Just to reiterate some old points, but in a slightly newer context ... Various pundits say that Republicans are doomed so long as they rely on white voters. Various pundits say that Republicans are doomed so long as they cater to evangelicals. I would like to refer back to the 2004 election (I haven't seen the relevant 2008 statistics), where Bush essentially won his majority, or a very large portion of it, from non-white evangelicals, and that non-white evangelicals voted Republican in much larger numbers than other non-whites. The logical thought: evangelicism is a route--I strongly suspect the only route--for Republicans to construct a voting majority in an increasingly non-white America. The alternative is to believe that fiscal conservatism, law-and-order, and social liberalism are the way to a majority--that a Guiliani-Republicanism is the way to go. Much of this turns on whether you think Mexican-Americans will behave politically like Italian-Americans if they stay Catholic; I think this is a parlous bet. Better, I think, to turn Mexican-Americans evangelical, and make them start behaving politically like evangelicals. Note, by-the-by, that I take evangelicals to be the only part of the once-general assimilationist American political culture that is still functioning at all well; assimilationist conservatives--assimilationist Americans--I think should support evangelicals for Americanist reasons, until such glorious time as they can get the rest of the assimilationist machinery working again.

Kaboom!

So Iran has enough nuclear material for one atom bomb. Cool.

I love this paragraph from the Times article:

Several experts said that was enough for a bomb, but they cautioned that the milestone was mostly symbolic, because Iran would have to take additional steps. Not only would it have to breach its international agreements and kick out the inspectors, but it would also have to further purify the fuel and put it into a warhead design — a technical advance that Western experts are unsure Iran has yet achieved.

Hmm...let's think about these "additional steps."

Iran would have to "breach its international agreements and kick out the inspectors."

Is there such a thing as laughing in terror? Because that's what I'm doing at the idea that this is some kind of real obstacle for the Iranians.

"[I]t would also have to further purify the fuel..."

Okay, that sounds a little trickier. Except...well, there's this paragraph further down:

To further purify it to the highly enriched state needed to fuel a nuclear warhead, Iran would have to reconfigure its centrifuges and do a couple months of additional processing, nuclear experts said.

Well then, a couple of months. Good. I estimate that should give us until 2012 or so.

And finally:

"...and put it into a warhead design — a technical advance that Western experts are unsure Iran has yet achieved."

Hm...does "achieved" mean "downloaded"? For that, they'll need computers and a good internet connection. Pray god they don't have them.

Do you think they know about this web page?

Did the authors of the Times article know about this one?

Thanks to FLG!

Wow. A&J has been awarded a "Best Blog Darts Thinker" award. A very warm thanks to Fear and Loathing In Georgetown for the honor!

The award "acknowledges the values that every blogger shows in his/her effort to transmit cultural, ethical, literary and personal values every day." Its protocol requires us to

1) Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person that has granted the award and his or her blog link.

2) Pass the award to other 15 blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgment.

I think this post fulfills the first part of the protocol. I guess Withy and I will have to discuss what other blogs to pass the award on to (though I think it's fairly clear already that this one won't be among them....)

Correcting an Error: Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis

Withywindle's last post, on the medical malpractice which cut short Anthony Eden's career, made me think of how many eminent men have suffered or died because of their doctors' bad decisions. Bloodletting seems to have greatly hastened the death of George Washington, and Ariel Sharon's doctors' administration of blood thinners was probably responsible for his death during the Israeli election campaign of 2006.

And this made me think of an error I made on this blog more than a year ago that I want to correct. In a post on October 17, 2007, I mentioned the French physician Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, who pioneered the quantitative method (la méthode numérique) of evaluating medical treatments. Quoting from a comment on another blog, I repeated the claim that Louis, having demonstrated that bloodletting was an ineffective and often dangerous form of treatment, nevertheless made the absurd recommendation that doctors should bleed more aggressively.

In fact, even a fairly cursory internet search reveals that Louis did not suggest such a thing. Rather, his opposition to the widespread use of bloodletting was resolute, and he engaged in fierce controversy with others in the medical profession -- including the muddle-headed phrenologist Broussais, representative of the Parisian medical establishment* -- who tried to dismiss his evidence or to claim, as I erroneously suggested Louis had, that the failure of bloodletting only meant that it wasn't being pursued enthusiastically enough. Although Louis did qualify his opposition to bloodletting (see the eighth paragraph of this short article -- he apparently believed it might be useful in cases of severe pneumonia), he did not discard his evidence or mindlessly submit to convention.

I offer a sincere apology to the memory of Dr. Louis. One of the main functions of history, according to the ancients, is to honor and condemn the men of the past in accordance with justice, and Louis deserves to be remembered -- even in a forum as insignificant as this -- as the hero of science that he was. I will modify the original post containing the error by adding a link to this one.

[*Broussais, incidentally, had been an enthusiastic Jacobin in his youth, so maybe he did know something about bloodletting after all.]

Reasons of Health

Have now finished the biography of Anthony Eden. What I hadn't known before: a botched operation in 1953 permanently impaired his health, and did do a number on him during the Suez Crisis and after. (He may also have suffered a nervous breakdown, but this is in addition.) He resigned not immediately after Suez, but after going on vacation to Jamaica after Suez to recover his health, and coming back and finding he hadn't. So many times "health" is a euphemism for any other reason a politician skedaddles; here it was the truth. As the biographer notes, Eden's career was blighted by medical malpractice. Ugh.

Black Eye

Somebody Tomorrow: Why do you have a black eye?

Withywindle: My baby Shirebourn, happily throwing himself around in my arms, whacked my eye with the back of his head. Gave me a beauty, didn't he?

Somebody Tomorrow: You don't have to make excuses. It was Goldberry, wasn't it?

Withywindle: No, really.

***

I don't actually think I'll get a black eye, but it was a fair whack.

"Antifessors"?

Over at What's the Rumpus, a commenter on one of stewdog's posts makes the argument that Barack Obama must respect the constitution because he was a professor of constitutional law.

And this made me roll my eyes, because it's a pretty serious error to assume that any professor, particularly in a substantive discipline*, necessarily likes the material that he or she purports to teach.

There are plenty of academics who have gone into a field not because they love the traditions with which that field is concerned, but because they hate and fear those traditions and enjoy attacking them. The most common example of this phenomenon, I think, is religion professors who like vivisecting (or just plain making fun of) religion. But there are also plenty of literature profs who don't care for the canon. There are history profs whose whole approach to history is to caricature or belittle the past. There are philosophy professors who don't believe in the idea of truth. There are even professors of ethics whose whole aim seems to be to subvert the idea of right and wrong. And yes, Virginia, it's probably the case that many, or even most, professors of constitutional law don't much care for the constitution as it's conventionally been read and understood.

Such professors' motive isn't hard to understand: they have a bee in their bonnet. They see something they really, really don't like -- that threatens or disgusts them on some deep level -- and they devote their lives to opposing it. This isn't even unusual. Lots of people dedicate themselves to fighting some powerful ideology or institution. (Many of the anti-religious religion professors I mentioned were raised to be devout and rebelled in a big way.) The only difference is that these folks do it under the guise of inducting students into the tradition whose living force they're seeking to destroy. (BTW, I think that the knee-jerk anti-traditionalism of much modern college-level instruction should be central to any conservative critique of academia.)

And the modern academy sort of encourages such people in their career choices, because advancement nowadays is based on publication and New Ideas, and the easiest way to have -- or to seem to have -- a New Idea is to find fault with an Old Idea. This not only gets you publications; it can also make you more popular with students, because you're catering to the inconoclastic urge that's natural and proper to their stage of life. (For a closet conservative, it's getting easier and easier to play small versions of this game, so pervasive within contemporary education are certain eminently mockable "liberal" ideologies.)

So Barack Obama may very well respect the Constitution. In fact, I have no doubt that there is some sense in which he does, or thinks he does. But the argument that a professor must respect that which he studies or teaches is pretty darn absurd for anyone who's spent much time around the modern academy.

[*By "substantive discipline" I mean a discipline structured primarily in terms of its content, like history or philosophy, as opposed to a discipline structured primarily in terms of its methodology, like biology or economics. ]

On Teaching The Prince

I enjoyed myself. Some of the students did too. I was amused that the business studies major and the marketing major said that they found it useful preparation. I emphasized to the students that this manual for proper behavior 1) offers up the psychopath Cesare Borgia as a worthy model of imitation; 2) that the Prince is supposed to force fortune as a man is supposed to force a woman; and 3) that this is one of the most influential texts from the Renaissance. Ah, history; ah, Western Civ.

On Exhaustion

You often read about how political parties become mentally exhausted, politically exhausted, after a while in power--that they fall from power partly because they have nothing new to offer. Reading about Anthony Eden--and earlier about Churchill--I would add physical exhaustion to the list. Governing a country is hard work, especially in modern times, and it runs people ragged. The mental and political exhaustion in part proceeds from the physical exhaustion. There's something to having parties alternate power, just to allow politicians to recover their physical strength.

New Comments Policy

Posts that add nothing but bile will be deleted.

On Footnotes

Although I’m not Anthony Grafton, I have a few thoughts about the footnote, as a way of embedding the scholar within a tradition. That is, the footnote isn’t just a way of rendering one’s sources, one’s facts, transparent; it is about locating oneself with tradition, debate, argument. Even when you’re simply referencing the archival location of your quotation, you’re providing another scholar the means with which to argue with your interpretation. But as often as not, you’re referencing the other scholars who have considered the question—acknowledging their arguments, explicitly situating yourself within the debate, within the scholarly tradition of assembled argument that constitutes the starting point for productive debate. The footnote is Gadamerian: it assumes that tradition provides the basis for knowledge, provides the self-awareness of the scholar as to the localized position of his knowledge, provides that positioning to scholars who follow after him. Unlike the classical author, unlike the self-avowed revolutionary, unlike the autodidact, the scholar who footnotes other scholars takes (correctly, I think) knowledge of the tradition as the prerequisite for scholarly originality and inventiveness on his own part.

But this isn’t the end of the matter—the scholars you choose to cite, the ordering of footnotes, your attitude toward other scholars, the silent omissions, are ways to select traditions, create new ones. If you only have space to include the five most important works on a subject—you are making a judgment of importance on scholars of the past, selecting some for continuance in the tradition, eliminating others. If your survey of American history cites ten works of social history for every one work of political history, you are making a statement about the worthwhile historical tradition, about the nature of history itself. Footnotes are not only the registers of debate, but themselves debates, about the question of what matters in history—or even the basic facts of history. The Journal of Palestine Studies, to choose a not-so-random example, is likely to publish articles with quite selective footnotes—creating a very partial historical tradition, and a very partial history.

But the glory of the footnote is that it provides a means to check up on the tendency of historians to tendentiousness. Look at the footnotes, and you can judge the judgment of a scholar; see whether he has opened himself fully to the knowledge of the tradition or kept himself cramped and small. The method allows for self-correction, no matter how tendentious any one scholar, or the academy as a whole, might be.

This does not, of course, speak to the institutional choke-holds provided by political group-think, the winnowing of tenure, etc. The apportionment of academic jobs is also a means of judgment, a way to create or continue scholarly traditions—and I am afraid I have no great faith that these means allow for self-correction. Rather the reverse. But to gripe with the way professors appoint one another is not the same as to gripe about the ways they do their research.

This is to say that I am somewhat less dyspeptic about academia than I used to be. I continue to think there are great distortions in it, not least in its judgments of what areas of research are most worthwhile, and I continue to think the solution to hiring distortions must lie outside of academia, which has lost the ability to regulate itself properly. But the way to restore the proper balance to history, or any other discipline, is not to forget the latest generations of scholarship, to pretend they never existed and don’t matter. We will be lesser scholars if we don’t acknowledge these arguments—don’t footnote them—don’t answer them and argue explicitly against them. The argument to make against much newer scholarship is not so much that is wrong as that it is less important than it thinks it is. Argue this well enough, and this judgment will become an enduring scholarly tradition.

More Bad Climate Science

So we've had another gigantic "oops" from the global warming crowd. Yet some of my friends who believe in global warming still talk as if James Hansen is deeply wise, instead of a publicity-hound who's repeatedly been caught in untenable claims. "What about Dr. Hansen?" they say, when I manage to show them I have good reasons for not believing half the stuff in Al Gore's movie.

In a way, though, I'd almost prefer a world where the ice caps were melting and we were all going to drown to one in which intelligent, decent people jump to such drastic conclusions on the basis of such flimsy evidence.

A New Reading Ambition

Clearly I must read the biography of every British Prime Minister, from Walpole on--it does provide a unique angle of access to British political history. I have so far read biographies of Wellington, Gladstone, Disraeli, Lloyd George, Churchill, and now Eden; shouldn't take more than a decade or so.

At some point I would like to teach a course called "Biographies," on the history of the genre from Plutarch and Suetonius to Natalie Zemon Davis, ideally assigning the students to write a biography themselves. The fact that I have written no biography myself is an unpleasant fact I will happily ignore.

On Alpheus' Last Post

Given this, it's not the worst thing for conservatism that the Republicans are on their way into the electoral wilderness. It's in the wilderness, after all, that ideological clarity tends to be found.

Samuel Danforth, Errand into the Wilderness:

Attend we our Errand, upon which Christ sent us into the Wilderness, and he will provide Bread for us.

The Amorphous Center

This reflects most everything I know or intuit about the "political center" in America.

I've been bothered by a lot of opinion pieces in the aftermath of the election suggesting that Republicans need to shift their policies toward the "center." All the elections in my lifetime have turned not on policy but on image, emotion, and the impression that the party in power has or has not done a good job. The so-called center consists of the most malleable segment of the electorate, and they need to be approached not as people who believe certain definable things but as people who rarely think about political positions in a sustained and systematic way. In fact, they seem to be wary of anyone whose politics seem too sharply defined: that betokens "rigidity" or "partisanship."

Broadly speaking, the trick to getting elected in America is (as Gimpel makes clear) to fire up your base while not looking like a narrow ideologue to folks in the center. This is easier for Democrats, given their lock on so many elements of the public discourse. As we saw in the campaign just concluded, the left can protect its candidates from information or arguments that could damage its "brand" and at the same time define the character of its opponents in ways that have little to do with the facts. In particular, the left is quite good at sending one message about its policies to its base and another to the so-called center. That's why, when Republicans win, it's usually not been on substance but because they managed to create a more favorable impression based on character and general impressions. Republicans have also gotten an occasional assist from manifest threats from abroad.

Put another way, Republicans tend to have to soft-pedal the substance of their policies while highlighting other issues. Democrats can afford to talk more about their policies because they can afford to lie about what those policies mean. Needless to say, this is especially true when the Democrats are out of power. Obama benefited from being personally appealing, from bad times under a Republican administration, and from a media that seemed to know few limits in its effort to support his campaign. Apart from promising tax cuts(!), he hardly highlighted policy positions at all.

What Republicans and conservatives need to do, then, above all else, is to break the Democrats' control of the public discourse. Attempts to accommodate themselves to that discourse may help win short-term victories, but only at the expense of long-term strength.

Breaking left-wing control of the discourse involves two main elements, ideological and institutional. The institutional element is discrediting left-leaning media. Republicans should not hesitate to tell the American people that their major news sources are systematically lying to them. However painful such a strategy might be in the short run to treat the New York Times and NBC as the enemy, it is the only path to ultimate parity in public discourse. Such a strategy is facilitated by the fact that (1) it serves to fire up the Republican base like few other things can and (2) it can be pursued simply by telling the unvarnished truth as loudly and consistently as possible.

The ideological element of a conservative battle for the center is more complex, but even more necessary. Conservatives need to identify the core elements of their thinking that distinguish them from the Democrats and that Democrats will have the most difficulty pretending to agree with -- difficulty either in terms of the actual facts or in terms of alienating the Democratic base. (which, by the way, is fundamentally weaker than the Republican base in that it is really a coalition of special interests whose long-term aims conflict with one another). The Republicans then need to hammer home these principles as relentlessly as possible -- make these principles the center of controversy in the public discourse -- in an effort to educate the electorate.

The last Republican to do anything like a good job of educating the middle in America was Ronald Reagan. The main principle that he insisted upon, again and again over the course of his life, was that Big Government was fundamentally dangerous. His other principle, of course, was that Communism was dangerous and could only be confronted with strength.

Both these principles had the merit of being true, and Reagan's attempt to convince the public of their truth worked exceptionally well. Communism collapsed in part because of the resolution on the part of the West that Reagan's insistence on its evil inspired. Conservatives still benefit, though, from the perception that they're better at diagnosing and confronting threats from abroad.

Big Government proved a tougher foe, but Clinton gained and kept power only by accommodating the Democrats to Reagan's ideology. In the two decades since Reagan, Republicans did a very bad job of sustaining the ideological attack on Big Government. One result is that voters who don't remember Ronald Reagan were much more likely to vote for Barack Obama than other groups of voters.

It goes without saying that I think a resolutely anti-Big Government position needs to be one of the ideological keystones of the conservative movement and the Republican Party as we go forward. Another core principle, I think, should be respect for the constitution and the Rule of Law. If Republicans could manage to see the public discourse, the whole of American politics, as an argument on these and related principles, they might just begin to shape the ideology of the so-called Center and make things much harder for the left and the Democrats.

The biggest problem for conservatives of course, is that the Republican party is a most imperfect vessel for our aspirations. Politicians are, by their nature, more egoists than True Believers. As long as the Democrats have the advantage in the public discourse, Republican politicians are going to want to adapt rather than confront the way Clinton adapted to Reagan's small-government ideology in the 1990s. Given this, it's not the worst thing for conservatism that the Republicans are on their way into the electoral wilderness. It's in the wilderness, after all, that ideological clarity tends to be found.

Out of the Past

Archaeologists working in Turkey have found sophisticated structures that they estimate are 11,500 years old:

[T]he three dozen T-shaped standing limestone monoliths arranged around the site are 10 feet high, weigh several tons each and bear detailed, stylized carvings of foxes, scorpions, lions, boars and birds. The builders may not have been farmers, but they weren't primitive.

That last sentence is the really amazing part. The site (which archaeologists are of course calling a "temple") may predate the advent of agriculture in its part of the world. Evidence from the site shows lots of evidence of the eating of wild game, none of domesticated animals or farming. Here's an article on the site in Smithsonian that gives a few more details, along with a brief but awesome photo gallery.

It was always assumed that certain kinds of human activities were unthinkable before the "Neolithic Revolution" that led to the rise of settled farming societies sometime around 10,000 B.C. Well, maybe not. Maybe these pillars were, as the archaeology seems to suggest, erected by hunter-gatherers, coming together at this place -- Gobekli Tepe or "belly hill" in modern Turkish -- at regular intervals over the course of decades or centuries to carve huge limestone monoliths with their primitive stone tools. If so, that's pretty darn amazing.

Or maybe not so amazing. After all, man's reach has always exceeded his grasp. His spiritual aspirations have always given his economic considerations a pretty good run for their money. And the pre-agricultural peoples of North America probably produced fairly similar, albeit more perishable, types of monuments. In any case, Gobekli Tepe is yet another reminder that history -- which begins long after the advent of agriculture -- tells us only a tiny fraction of the human story: language, religion, and sophisticated social organization are far, far older than the earliest written records.

On Anthony Eden

I got waylaid at a used bookstore and ended up with a biography of Anthony Eden. I've already learned some interesting things about him--that he grew up as son of an irascible, artistic baronet and his spendthrift Lady Bountiful wife; that two of his brothers died in World War I; that he himself served with distinction in the trenches for 29 months, and miraculously emerged without even a wound. But the most astonishing thing about him is the photos--my God, the man was gorgeous! Not so much as a young man, but from his thirties on he looks like a movie star, an embodiment of masculine beauty. I trust the biographer will comment, but I imagine this should be a theme in his life -- a politician with leading-man looks, who is not perhaps quite the leading-man inside, and some of the tensions playing out in Suez. All this in addition to the whole second-fiddle-to-Churchill-for-a-generation complex.

LATER: I have now done research! Wikipedia has an article on the Anthony Eden Hat. It speaks to all this.

On Racialism and Being a Troll

Over at Tim Burke's Easily Distracted, he's attracted some commenters who go on endlessly about how Africans have an average 70 IQ, liberals don't recognize the truth, academics live in a narrow box, etc., etc., etc. They are being treated with scorn and derision by the liberal commenters on the blog. To which I have some mixed feelings. To wit:

1) I know what it's like to be commenting on Tim Burke's blog as the lone conservative, quoting various voices from the Western tradition (this lot quotes Carlyle), scorned and derided, writing at great length and with some prickliness. So I feel some vague structural sympathy for them. On the other hand, I certainly attempted to be sweeter and briefer than this lot--to rant in engaging, bite-sized morsels. I feel like I'm looking at a fun-house mirror--I should, say I hope it is a fun-house mirror rather than a true one--where I can understand perfectly how annoying I was to all the liberal commenters on Tim's blog, and yet like to think I wasn't that bad, so far as tone is concerned. But I can't be sure.

2) Then the substance, which is nothing new if you've read John Derbyshire, Charles Murray, etc., although they express such things in far more even tones. The thesis in brief: Genetics is proving that races do exist, there are racial differences, they include IQ, Africans are at the low end of the IQ bell curve. To which I say: I do think races are more than social constructs, I'm willing to believe there are statistical differences in IQ among the races, though I would want considerably more in the way of proof than the evidence currently provided, and the people who obsess about such matters make my stomach turn. Such distinctions could be true, and to spend all your time lovingly considering them would still be a mental coprophagy. And if they are true--so what? Our souls matter, our ability to judge, not our IQs. Compare this obsession with racial intelligence with the liberal obsession with how much more intelligent they are than conservatives: both base themselves on an assumption that an IQ meritocracy exists, should exist, and ought to have political power/authority. (The liberal insistence that every race's IQ must be equal reflects this belief in the political authority of intelligence as much as the racialist belief that IQ must differ by race.) If the liberal assumption disturbs you, so should the racialist one, and vice versa. But I don't see why one must think that governance depends on IQ. I have no particular reason to believe Englishmen are smarter than Frenchmen, or Americans than Europeans--indeed, I would easily believe the reverse, given how Englishmen and Americans score on various international academic tests--but Englishmen and Americans made themselves free men. They may boast of civic virtue, which I don't see requires you to be intelligent, and matters far more than intelligence. And if our system of government fails, it will be because we lack virtue, not because we lack intelligence.

3) To tie this all together: boasting about how smart you are tends to disprove your contention.

On Pacifism

My dad is a pacifist; so were his parents; my parents went on a Freedom Ride in the 1960s; I attended a Quaker college. I'm not a pacifist myself--kindergarten and elementary school persuaded me that it wasn't a philosophy I cared to practice--but I have great respect for pacifism, not least because it is a tradition of my family and of Swarthmore. Nor can I scoff at the tradition of Tolstoy, Gandhi, Rustin, and King. But it is ambivalent respect, I should say, because the best of pacifism is not all of pacifism. I admire the pacifism that recognizes evil, and decides that it should be met with non-violence. I am less thrilled by the pacifism that disguises morally repulsive neutrality--"The US and the USSR are equally bad, so I'm a pacifist"--or simple anti-Americanism--"Time to protest the US again, what do you mean protest the violence of the Iranians or the Russians?" I am also somewhat skeptical of the pacifism of religions that have simply lost their political establishment--the pacifism of the Catholic Church hierarchy, the Greek Orthodox quasi-pacifism of a Daniel Larison. These seem more of the nature of "I won't fight for you" rather than "I won't fight." The Quakers, who ceded government of colonial Pennsylvania so as to preserve their non-violence, but their money where their mouths were--most do not. But those who do have my respect. Speaking as a warmonger, and all that.

The Award for Wincing Honesty goes to George Will

"[Kentuckians made Mitch McConnell] Washington's most important Republican and second-most consequential elected official. This apotheosis has happened even though he is handicapped by, as National Review rather cruelly says, "an owlish, tight-lipped public demeanor reminiscent of George Will."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/11/mcconnell_a_man_of_the_senate.html

Belatedly, on Veterans Day

I have no veterans in my ancestry before the War of 1812--although a fair number of Revolutionary War veterans. Some of this is due to happenstance, some to the prevalence of pacifism in various branches of my family. I would like instead, therefore, to give a salute to my two great-uncles, who served in the merchant marine during World War One, as a way to honor their pacifist principles and to serve their country--and who therefore risked their lives for their country, sailing past German U-Boats, without the possibility of retaliation against their foes. We can, and should, honor pacifists on Veterans Day too.

And Now, More Posts on Beetles Until Alpheus Returns

Gosh, they scurry. There sure are a lot of different kinds of them.

...

Alpheus?

A Note to Readers...

...and an apology to Withywindle. Due to travel, work, and difficulties with connectivity -- a "perfect storm" of obstacles* -- Alpheus's contributions to this blog will be very spotty for the next couple of weeks.

*because I love clichés based on movie titles

Religion in America

This poll on American religion and 2008 voting is interesting to read for various details, but especially the following:

Evangelicals are a small proportion of the national population - just 7% of all adults. But they tend to capture the imagination and attention of the national media and political pundits. The survey data consistently show that evangelical Christians have among the highest rates of voting turnout among all voter groups and are, in fact, strikingly different from the rest of the population - even from other born again Christians who are not evangelical. .... Unlike other polls, Barna surveys classify a person as an evangelical based upon their answers to nine questions about their theological beliefs. Most national surveys simply ask people if they consider themselves to be evangelical, born again or a committed conservative Christian. As a result, evangelicals in Barna surveys are significantly different than the groups reported in other surveys. For the sake of comparison, the Barna survey also examined the voting behavior of people who identified themselves as evangelicals. The self-identified evangelicals represented 41% of the adult population, although just 16% of them qualified as evangelicals under the Barna Group’s theological-based classification questions. .... Evangelicals represent just one out of every six born again adults. .... However, born again Christians in general chose their candidate based on different criteria than did evangelicals. The major motivations among born again Christians who are not evangelical were political experience (20%), ideas about the country’s future (18%), character (17%), and economic policies (17%). To highlight the contrast in priorities, note that just 7% of evangelicals identified economic policy as a motivator, and only 8% of the non-evangelical born again Christians listed the candidate’s positions on moral issues. .... "Born again Christians" are defined as people who said they have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in their life today and who also indicated they believe that when they die they will go to Heaven because they had confessed their sins and had accepted Jesus Christ as their savior. Respondents are not asked to describe themselves as "born again." .... "Evangelicals" meet the born again criteria (described above) plus seven other conditions. Those include saying their faith is very important in their life today; believing they have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians; believing that Satan exists; believing that eternal salvation is possible only through grace, not works; believing that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; asserting that the Bible is accurate in all that it teaches; and describing God as the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who created the universe and still rules it today. Being classified as an evangelical is not dependent upon church attendance or the denominational affiliation of the church attended. Respondents were not asked to describe themselves as "evangelical."

This distinction between a larger population of born-again, and a much smaller evangelical core, strikes me as an important truth about America.

More on Rhetoric

Continuing this conversation on rhetoric and reason from below, I respond to Alpheus:

One of the key questions I've been meaning to ask you about rhetoric is: what distinguishes good rhetoric from bad rhetoric, or better rhetoric from worse rhetoric? One possible answer is persuasiveness, but if that's true then I do doubt the value of rhetoric in and of itself as a way of approaching the world. Because I think that many things that are persuasive to people, shouldn't be. We shouldn't be more ready to buy a product because the spokesperson in the TV ad is good looking. But we are.

I think one needs to distinguish here between the question of rhetorical skill, per se, the ends to which rhetoric is applied, and whether the means lead naturally to any given end. Can one be persuasive without being virtuous, without seeking out a good end? And where does the standard of virtue come from by which we can judge the ends of rhetoric? Contested answers in the tradition, as you know, where those arguing in favor of rhetoric tend to tie its practice to virtue, those arguing against it saying there is no necessary tie between rhetoric and virtue. As you also know, my take on rhetoric is Machiavellian, where I say the practice of rhetoric, of prudence, has no tie to any pre-existing standard of virtue—that any virtue must emerge from its practice. I also, following Hume, take that standard of virtue to proceed ultimately from human judgment—that morality is an argument, and that its acceptance by mankind is the only means to distinguish good from evil—morality is the acceptance of an ethical proposition, cast in the form of epideictic rhetoric. This all absent revelation, which overrides such issues. The question is the comparison to the alternative—not the exercise of rhetoric, but of reason, as a means by which to seek out moral values—and my beloved Habermas, following Weber, explicitly acknowledges that what they are doing is paralleling the philosophers who derived morality from rhetoric, as they seek to derive values from reason. Reason sometimes claims to be the discovery of the external standard of value, sometimes the means by which value emerges—but it doesn’t submit itself absolutely to human judgment, it reserves itself to the self-definedly, and mutually-recognizing, reasonable. Reason which submits itself to human judgment submits itself to fallible, imperfect judgment, of limited people swayed by passion—i.e., it becomes rhetoric. And then, yes, pesuasiveness is the touchstone—any reason which does not submit itself to the need to persuade, which decides in advance “that many things that are persuasive to people, shouldn’t be,” decides value by assertion, in the real world force. Rhetoric is value derived from universal judgment; reason is value arrived at by assertion.

I think that in the distinction between rhetors and sophists to which you refer, you're offering another way of evaluating the goodness of rhetoric: the willingness of the rhetor to be persuaded. I'm a little troubled by this too. How can we know purely from a rhetor's rhetoric if he's willing to be persuaded, if he's sincere?

The distinction between rhetor and sophist also leaves the door open to the cult of sincerity, of transcendent character—resolute, Heidegerian, Hitlerian—which also needs to be avoided. The genuineness of character has to be decided from the externals, appearances, the words and actions—there is no way of knowing a man’s inner thoughts. How can we know? We judge by externals, with no guarantee. The willingness of a man to claim he is a rhetor is a good first step—a George Lakoff, say, who says straightforwardly that he seeks to provide Democrats verbal formulae by which to persuade voters to the exact same policies, is a self-proclaimed sophist. A Frank who asks What’s the Matter with Kansas? is another sophist, avowedly unwilling to be persuaded himself. So you start with those people who proclaim themselves open to persuasion, and judge them by externals. This is a judgment of character, after all, for which no external standard is available; it can emerge only from the continual practice of such judgments.

If we can't know this from rhetoric, then what good is rhetoric in and of itself? Isn't the result of this kind of thinking that rhetors will rush to accuse their opponents of simple manipulation and bad faith? (This is something that happens too often in our political process today.)

We can’t know rhetoric from sophistry by any process independent of our judgment, making, indeed, an existential choice—the staking of our existence, our character, on that very judgment. There is no certainty in rhetoric—it isn’t any good at determining an absolute truth which is inaccessible to human beings; its virtue lies in determining as best humans can the truths that are available to us. And of course rhetors and sophists will accuse one another of sophistry—the one truly, the other falsely. You are impatient with the only means by which to approach truth.

But let me reiterate my big question, because maybe an answer will really clear up where we still seem to be disagreeing. What does rhetoric aspire to? How do you know that rhetoric is being used the right way?

Rhetoric aspires to find truth and virtue by submitting arguments to the judgment of mankind, from whose judgment will emerge the only answers available on earth. We shall know we have come close not when men think as one, but when they feel as one.

What Books Written Before 1900 Has Obama Read?

So he's supposed to very bright ... what has he read from before 1900? I just skimmed through Dreams of my Father at the bookstore, granted it's not about what books he's read, but I only found mention of Heart of Darkness I imagine, given how many Marxists he was hanging around with, that he's read Marx. The Bible, one hopes, after all that time at Trinity. He's supposed to be good at constitutional law, so he's probably read some classic interpretive texts from the nineteenth century, and I sure hope the Federalist and so on. Any philosophy of law? Has he read Blackstone? Shakespeare? (Wait, don't tell me ... Othello.) Dostoevsky? Cicero? Clinton and Bush were educated before the total collapse of modern education; I'm sure they have some vague idea of what was written in the European tradition before 1900. Obama? -- if I were more enterprising, I would look up his high school curriculum, and what college classes he took. (Quick Google search: he took some modern European political thought class at Occidental, including Nietzsche and Weber.) He transferred into Columbia, so he probably didn't have to take their Core Curriculum. Would he have done so voluntarily? Inquiring minds want to know: is Obama a blank slate as regards the Western tradition?

On Being On The Right Side Of History

Here's one reminiscence. And another:

Now your enemies fall
We're beheading them all
Duperret and Corday
executed in the same old way
Robespierre has to get on
he gets rid of Danton
That was spring comes July
and old Robespierre has to die
Three rebellions a year
but we're still of good cheer
Malcontents all have been
taught their lesson by the guillotine
There's a shortage of wheat
We're too happy to eat
Austria cracks and then
she surrenders to our men

Fifteen glorious years
Fifteen glorious years
Years of peace
years of war
each year greater than the year before
Marat we're marching on

What brave soldiers we've got
Now the traitors are shot
Generals boldly take
power in Paris for the people's sake
Egypt's beaten down flat
Bonaparte did that
Cheer him as they retreat
even though we lose our fleet
Bonaparte comes back
gives our rulers the sack
He's the man brave and true
Bonaparte would die for you
Europe's free of her chains
Only England remains
but we want wars to cease
so there's fourteen months of peace

Fifteen glorious years
Fifteen glorious years
Years of peace
years of war
each year greater than the year before
Marat we're marching on

England must be insane
wants to fight us again
so we march off to war
Bonaparte is our Emperor
Nelson bothers our fleet
but he's shot off his feet
We're on top yes we are
and we spit on Trafalgar
Now the Prussians retreat
Russia faces defeat
All the world bends its knee
to Napoleon and his family
Fight on land and on sea
All men want to be free
If they don't never mind
we'll abolish all mankind

Fifteen glorious years
Fifteen glorious years
Years of peace
years of war
each year greater than the one before
Marat we're marching on
behind Napoleon

And if most have a little and few have a lot
you can see how much nearer our goal we have got
We can say what we like without favor or fear
and what we can't say we can breathe in your ear
And though we're locked up we're no longer enslaved
and the honor of France is eternally saved
The useless debate the political brawl
are over there's one man to speak for us all
For he helps us in sickness and destitution
he's the one who completed the Revolution
everyone know who we're cheering for
Napoleon our mighty Emperor
Led by him our soldiers go
over deserts and through the snow
a victory here and a victory there
for the good of all people everywhere
Long live the Emperor and the Nation
long live our asylum
Charenton
Charenton Charenton
Napoleon Napoleon
Nation Nation
Revolution Revolution
Copulation Copulation

OBAMA! OBAMA!

Rhetoric and Reason, Constrained and Unconstrained

I think this might be the best installment ever of Peter Robinson's Uncommon Knowledge webcast. (It's actually just the first part of five; go to the achives for the other four parts.) Robinson interviews Thomas Sowell on the subject of the "constrained" and "unconstrained" visions of politics and society, in the context of the presidential election campaign that has just concluded.

Sowell is brilliant as always. He's one of those thinkers who seems to get smarter when I get smarter -- meaning in the past I've lacked the wisdom to understand the significance of what he's saying. So the whole interview is incredibly rich. I want to focus here on only one of the ways in which it stimulated my thinking.

There's a long-running debate in western civilization, and on this blog, between reason and rhetoric as ways of approaching the world. Withywindle and I have been trying to grapple with one another's positions for about a year now, and neither one of us has convinced the other. I'm not even sure either of us has fully understood what the other one has been saying. (See this post, and the links within it, for some of our most pertinent exchanges.)

I think it's fair to say, though -- and Withy can correct me if I'm wrong -- that I distrust rhetoric because I see it as undisciplined. Its primary value is persuasion, and there are lots of ways to persuade people to see the world as the world's not and to do things that cut against their own interests. Withy, on the other hand, distrusts reason because he sees it as undisciplined: it creates a chain of logic from which there is no appeal and attempts to impose an intellectual construct on a world with which reason is not equipped to reckon.

What watching Robinson interview Sowell made me realize is that we're both right. Sowell and Robinson describe the "unconstrained vision" -- the idea that there's no limit to how well smart and decent people can understand and thus remake reality -- in terms of both rhetoric and reason. In Part Three of the interview, Sowell talks about Barack Obama's fascination with the power of rhetoric. In Part Four, he refers to the fascination that reason holds for leftist intellectuals in general. In both cases, the result is intellectual arrogance. People come to believe too heavily in the power of their own eloquence, or in the power of their own ratiocination. They trust excessively either to their mastery of ésprit de finesse or ésprit de géométrie (to use the formulations of Pascal) as a credential which allows them to redefine and rebuild the world.

So both rhetoric and reason must be disciplined and restrained. Rhetoric, I would argue, is the highest-level form of thought -- the most subtle, the most nuanced, the most complex. It must be disciplined by reason, which is more transparent than rhetoric and sits a step down in the scale of levels of thought. A rhetorical argument which violates the canons of logic is a bad argument. And more people will agree on what is a logical or illogical conclusion from certain premises than on whether or not a particular speech or piece of writing is persuasive, simply because reason is (to use the language of another 17th century Frenchman) clearer and more distinct.

But reason must in its turn be disciplined or constrained (as rhetoric too must be constrained) by experience -- the most straightforward and basic way in which humans understand the world. People who disagree about what is persuasive, and even disagree about what is logical, will often agree about what they see and hear and otherwise experience. If an apparently logical argument does not comport with experience, experience ought to win. Of course, rhetoric needs to conform to experience as well.

Given human weakness, a rhetoric that does not acknowledge the need to submit to the checks of reason and experience is dangerous. A rational argument that does not submit to the check of experience is likewise dangerous. The crucial thing, perhaps, is the embrace of what Sowell calls "the constrained vision," the ultimate appeal to experience, and especially to experience in its most basic and immediate forms. Ow, fire is hot.

Of course, whenever something complicated is under consideration -- as it always is in politics, for example -- experience often takes the form of history. Sowell makes the point that a key characteristic of the "unconstrained vision" is a failure to learn from history. But history is itself a form of rhetoric. Thus, the records of experience become contested. This may be an argument, which I had not expected I would be offering, for presenting history in schools with as little interpretation as is humanly possible. (This certainly isn't my usual style.) On the other hand, this may be so unfeasible as to argue for simply making students aware of the extent to which written history is pervaded by interpretation. (Which is very much my usual style. The trick is to do this without letting students come away thinking that nothing can be known with certainty.)

So maybe Withywindle and I have been on the same page all along? Or maybe I've just slipped past him in the night, once again?

Obama's Real Target?

Obama makes fun of Nancy Reagan for holding seances. He's only spoken to living presidents, he says.

But Nancy Reagan didn't hold seances or invoke the dead. She consulted astrologers.

What could Obama be thinking of? What first lady was it who, in recent memory, was accused of talking to dead occupants of the White House?

UPDATE: Obama does the classy thing. A good sign (even if he didn't have much of a choice). Add this to Patterico's evidence for Obama's basic decency. (I still don't feel competent to pass judgment on Obama's character, which at this stage of the game is not encouraging, but I think those conservatives who assume he must be warped or evil are jumping to conclusions.)

Needed for 2012

$1.5 billion for the presidential election campaign; comparable amounts for the congressional races. Working backward: a candidate, an organization, and a mass support capable of providing these. And $2 billion for 2016. Any thing less, and assume we lose.

On Mandates

No one kid themselves. People vote against, and accept pretty much whatever else comes along. In 1980, Americans voted against Carter; they accepted Reaganism. Bush took an extraordinarily narrow victory in 2000, and played it for everything he could get. This idea that Obama doesn't have a mandate for liberalism is silly. He has a mandate not to be the Republicans, and he can spin that pretty much as he likes. I suppose if he's prudent it won't be deKulakization and the Five Year Plan, but I fancy he can ram through something on the scale of the Great Society, and leave the Republicans no choice but to leave it in place.

Meanwhile, Steve Sailer, whom I read but to whom I will not link, provides a word of non-politics-related wisdom:

By the way, kids, the reason "Lord of the Flies" is on all school reading lists is because it's your teachers' way of letting you know what they think of you.

Hope and Pessimism

In the last couple of days, I've spoken to people enthusiastic about the outcome of the election -- people who supported Obama and were heartened, exhilarated by his victory. In the real world, among my friends and acquaintances, jerks are fairly thin on the ground, so I haven't had to deal with any "nyah nyah nyah, your guy lost" yet.

The strange thing is, it's hard even for a cynical dyed-in-the-wool conservative, an extreme Obama skeptic, not to feel sympathy for Obama supporters' happiness and optimism. Much of it seems so pure, so decent. Of course, as I've said and implied here many times, I think a lot of Obamania has a creepy underside. So my sensations are a little like the ones I have when I watch "Cabaret" and hear the German youth singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me." Such a lovely, soul-stirring song...you want to empathize, but....

Even more acute is the foreboding that Obama's victory has raised hopes so high that they can't fail to be disappointed.

Because I like linking to YouTube videos, check out the recent comments on a non- ironic piece of inspirational music, "Right Here Right Now" by Jesus Jones. You'd think this is a quintessentially conservative song, the anthem of the collapse of communism at the end of the 1980s. Obviously, it speaks to Obama supporters too, all over the world, at this moment: Vive USA!!! Nous sommes très fiers de vous ! ! Or: "congratulations USA people. god bless your country, i really hope things change for the better. We all deserve a better world. Greets from Costa Rica."

How can you not feel pleasure when you know that Obama's victory has produced sentiments like these?

Or this one, in some ways, I think, the most telling of all:

as a first responder during 9-11,
I thought that evil I witnessed during that horrible day would define my life experience forever, but I was blessedly mistaken.
When CNN projected Obama the president elect with the results of the West Coast putting him over the top, I thought to myself
"right here, right now, there is definitely no other place I would rather be"
God Bless us Americans, one and all.
Democracy prevails again..

And there's where I come up against a wall, a wall I wish wasn't there. I think this guy had it right the first time. I think we're in for a lot more sickening surprises of the 9-11 variety, and I think Obama is probably not the best man to prevent them from happening, or to help up deal with them once they have happened.

Of course, I was disappointed in Bush, too, in this respect. Iran's thousands of centrifuges are still spinning busily away, sifting their radioactive dust. Lebanon's democracy is teetering; so is Pakistan's. China's military buildup will probably make our security guarantees to Taiwan untenable in a decade or so. Russia has already signaled that they understand Obama's election as auguring well for their revanchist ambitions.

Maybe I've read too much classical literature, in which the words "hope" and "change," the slogans of the Obama campaign, usually carry a negative connotation. I want to share in all these good feelings. But I can't shake the fear that all this happiness will turn to ashes before anyone has really had time to savor it.

My hope, of course, is that I'm wrong. As a pessimist, I spend a lot of time hoping I'm wrong.

Politics and Income Inequality

Sentence for sentence, this is one of the most valuable things about contemporary American politics you could ever read. I sometimes think Withywindle and I don't make it clear enough that certain historical paradigms underpin our politics -- mine, anyway. For millennia, democracy has been predicated on a strong middle class, and threatened by elites and underclasses.

A Blog is Born

Arethusa has a blog. I think she saw how easy it was.

Can Gowanus be far behind?

On Progress

Why is it that the narrative is that white voters have finally progressed to the point where they're willing to vote for a black president? Why isn't it that blacks have finally progressed to the point where they've provided a candidate worthy of the votes of a majority of Americans?

Oh, yes, only some varieties of condescension are allowed.

A plague on this progress narrative! Hates it my precious, yes we do, hates it. Hisss.

Students Athirst For Knowledge

Regularly, I hear moaning about how our security procedures are driving away foreign grad students, reducing our long-term educational advantage, our brain-suction advantage, etc. And now I read this:

Dozens of suspected terrorists have attempted to infiltrate Britain's top laboratories in order to develop weapons of mass destruction, such as biological and nuclear devices, during the past year.

The security services, MI5 and MI6, have intercepted up to 100 potential terrorists posing as postgraduate students who they believe tried accessing laboratories to gain the materials and expertise needed to create chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons, the government has confirmed.

It follows warnings from MI5 to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that al-Qaeda's terror network is actively seeking to recruit scientists and university students with access to laboratories containing deadly viruses and weapons technology.

I'll keep our security procedures, thank you.

Politics in the Classroom

This is getting a lot of play in the conservative blogosphere: an excerpt from a Finnish television program on the presidential election that's just ended. In brief, an elementary teacher is in the tank for Obama, and she goes over the line with one of her young students whose parents support McCain. Then she justifies herself to the camera, not very convincingly.

Watching it made me flash back to my time in elementary school, during Ronald Reagan's first term. I remember a teacher (a perfectly nice woman) saying in class that Reagan had only supported the space program because someone had told him the shuttles could be used to carry bombs. I recall being shocked by the intrusion of politics into the classroom, and doubtful that the statement was accurate.

It was, needless to say, only the first -- the first that I can remember -- of many such unexpected eruptions of pro-left or anti-right politics into my education. In college, where it was pervasive, I twice wrote papers playing to professors' left-leaning politics in order to get better grades. I did get better grades than I think I would have otherwise -- better, anyway, than those papers deserved. (Needless to say, I am not proud of this.)

Do conservative teachers do the same thing, inject their own politics into the classroom? Yes, sometimes, but much less frequently. I can recall only a couple of examples from all my years of schooling. In one instance (high school), the teacher was playing devil's advocate for a conservative position against a class composed largely of left-leaning students. He went over the line in becoming frustrated by one student's ridicule and walking out of the classroom. In the second instance (early grad school) a teacher made a comment before class about some scandal (I can't remember which) involving Bill Clinton. The comment wasn't especially nasty or unfair, but it was emphatic and irrelevant and I thought it was inappropriate.

Have I ever gone over the line as a teacher? I don't think so. On a very few occasions (only twice, I think) I've made small jokes about politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, based on prevalent stereotypes. I've only done this when it seemed inevitable and harmless. I generally aim at a rigorous balance. This is tricky when teaching history, since the contemporary relevance of ancient politics often stares the students in the face and someone in the class will bring up an analogy between what we're studying and current events. I usually have recourse to the strategy of outlining both a liberal and a conservative position, as best I can. (I also try to be rigorously fair to religion, though in this case my own views are on the side of the atheist majority in higher education.)

I was once told by a conservative Latin teacher -- we recognized each other's politics in the way that conservatives in academia do, without it being recognized by those around us -- that the attempt to be apolitical or balanced is itself the mark of a conservative. In academia, I've found this to be true: conservative teachers seek either to correct for their own views or to keep them out of their teaching altogether; liberal teachers, in general, don't seem to have such compunctions.

But maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe I'm only seeing one side of the picture. I'm certainly not trying to say that conservatives automatically must be better people or better teachers. Undoubtedly, one reason why liberal politics in the classroom is more common than conservative politics is because so many more teachers are liberal. Quite probably, some conservative teachers who conceal their ideological predispositions are motivated as much by fear as by desire for evenhandedness.

Anyway, I'm wondering what the experience of readers of this blog has been. In particular, I'm curious to know whether liberal readers have ever felt marginalized or even persecuted by a conservative teacher for political reasons. Are there lots of stories from the other side that I just don't hear?

Robin Hanson on "The Evil Pleasure"

At the indispensable blog Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson writes about the pleasures of minority groupthink:

We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people. We feel an even deeper pleasure letting everyone know of this fact. This feeling is EVIL. Learn to see it in yourself, and then learn to be horrified by how thoroughly it can poison your mind. Yes evidence may at times force you to disagree with a majority, and your friends may have correlated exposure to that evidence, but take no pleasure when you and your associates disagree with others; that is the road to rationality ruin.

Hanson quotes from an article in Nature by Pascal Boyer that explains "the evil pleasure" by suggesting that there's no better way for humans to maintain social solidarity with one another than to strongly hold the same uncommon beliefs. Irrational beliefs are even better, because they signal even more clearly the strength of one's commitment to the group -- it matters more than the truth! All this may be in line with Cicero's claim in de Amicitia that real friendship without shared ideological or political commitments is difficult or impossible.

I'm pretty sure this "evil pleasure" explains a lot of the noisy left-wing politics of the academy, especially at large gatherings or when people are just getting to know each other. These are signals of in-group solidarity. Unfortunately, the same evil pleasure also goes a long way toward explaining the loyalty that unites members of the conservative minority within academia.

I was struck, even more than by Hanson's post, by this insight from one of the commenters (Grant):

The most successful societies seem to have ways of signaling loyalty to social norms without polluting the truth of things. For example, we no longer have to be loyal to a specific politician (or monarch) or a specific religion in order to be seen as "part of the group" and thus worthy of trust.

I think Grant is spot-on with his first sentence. (It occurs to me, by the way, that maybe it's best for in-group membership to be predicated on certain sorts of costly actions rather than on beliefs.) Whether he's right that "no longer" need certain specific irrational loyalties...well, I can't avoid thinking that America has become less cohesive at the same time that it's become more tolerant. This is the problem that both Right and Left in America are trying to solve -- in very different ways.

On Obama's Catch Phrase to Come

"As Election Day of 2012 approaches, and I look around the smoldering ruins of our cities, where universal unemployment is blessedly relieved by universal health care, I consider all this in light of the lingering effects of the Bush Recession."

Looking Back at Palin

Gowanus, a friend of this blog, has suggested we revise our judgments of the desirability of a McCain-Palin victory in light of some of the criticisms of Palin now emerging from McCain staffers in the aftermath of the election. The most widely noted reportage on these criticisms comes from an article in Newsweek and a couple of interviews (here, here) on Fox News with their embedded political reporter Carl Cameron.

I'm tempted to make the snarky comment that you can't trust anything you see on Fox News -- the source of the worst stuff -- but since I actually believe Fox News is at least as trustworthy as most major TV outlets, Cameron's anecdotes (and other unflattering ones from Newsweek) bear considering. Many people are, after all, talking about a future for Palin in national politics.

So what do I think? On the whole, I'm not impressed by the anecdotes, which seem to me to fall into three broad categories based on what aspect of Palin's character they criticize: (1) Palin was temperamental and difficult, (2) Palin was unprofessional and refused to take advice, and (3) Palin was stupid and ignorant.

The first two categories overlap, to some extent, and the anecdotes in these categories don't seem very damning to me: Her press coverage caused her to throw temper tantrums. She spent too much money shopping for clothes. She refused to prepare properly for the Couric interview. She went off the reservation in launching her attacks on Obama for his associations with Ayers and Wright. She answered a door in a bath towel (or bathrobe, depending on whom you believe) and with wet hair.

Meh. If it's true about the Couric interview, let's hope she's learned about the importance of interview preparation. As for the rest, it all adds up to...what? A person with a strong personality in a new and difficult situation? I have no doubt that Palin's personality grated on the people assigned to handle her. She's a self-described pit bull who's gotten where she's gotten based largely on guts. Many people, including myself, like that about her. But at close quarters, I'm sure she can be a little overpowering.

Anyway, the worst of these stories still don't seem to reflect as badly on a vice-presidential nominee as say, telling someone to his face that you have a higher IQ than he does, plagiarizing your political speeches and law school work, or spending years slandering the man who died in a car accident with your wife. Just, you know, to pick three bad things a hypothetical vice presidential nominee (or vice-president elect) might do.

Moving on to the "Palin is dumb" anecdotes. First, she supposedly didn't know Africa was a continent and not a country. Second, she supposedly didn't know what three countries were in NAFTA. On these, I have to plead incredulity. It's much easier for me to imagine petty aides twisting Palin's words out of context than to believe either that the governor of Alaska doesn't know about NAFTA or that she's never looked at a map of Africa.

In fact, I find it incredibly easy to imagine Palin misspeaking and saying "country" for "continent." I find it just as easy to imagine her aides joking over their whiskey sours that night, putting the worst possible construction on the words of someone who was making their lives difficult. Thus are exaggerated stories born.

People misspeak. Humans make mistakes. Barack Obama is on video saying 10,000 people died in a tornado that in fact claimed only a handful of lives. Not an indication that the guy's an idiot, although making up facts seems more worrisome than not knowing them. I also don't think he really thinks, or ever thought, that there are 57 states.

So, my take is that it's good to know all this stuff -- and I'll keep it in mind -- but it doesn't really add up to much. It's all second hand, and it's all little more than gossip. From my point of view, all these rumors put together don't look as bad for Palin as the worst moments of the Couric interview.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to thinking about Palin in a bath towel.

On Common Ground

Black voters voted almost unanimously for the worst of the two presidential candidates. On the other hand 70% of black voters in California voted to preserve marriage, and seem to have provided the margin of victory. It's nice to have some common ground.

On McCain II

Oh, yes ... I also note that I've been advising that Republicans change themselves, that they offer presidential candidates who appealed to the middle, that they be willing to suppress their preferences in an urge to attract the center. The Republican choice of McCain, on my part and on the part of a decisive number of Republicans, represented precisely that admirable impulse. That Republicans acted on that impulse in 2008 I think does them credit; it also offers precedent for a similar outreach in 2012 and 2016.

Poll Story

Yesterday a friend of this blog, Arethusa, served as an election judge, and sends along the following account:

I was called over to assist another election judge with helping an elderly Vietnamese man, now a citizen, fill out his ballot. (Two judges of different parties had to be present in such a case.) The man had palsied hands and also seemed to have trouble understanding the ballot (there were seven candidates for President on it, after all). We read the names to him twice. After the second time through, he burst out in impatience, "I came here today to vote for John McCain, to thank him for trying to save my country." I think that says a lot about both that man and John McCain.

I'm not entirely certain whether the voter meant the country of his birth, Vietnam, or his adopted country, America. I think the words make sense either way.

It's a touching story, but for me it raises a troubling prospect. I hate to think of some future refugee from Baghdad or Basra, emigrated here after promises made to his country were broken by a Democratic congress (and president), voting for some veteran of the Iraq War who had "tried to save" his country.

Of all the sins America has to answer for, one of the gravest is its inexplicable abandonment of Southeast Asia after fighting the communists to a standstill and extracting peace terms from them in 1973. Shockingly few Americans know or remember how sanguine the outlook was for South Vietnam (the Vietcong, like Al-Qaeda in Iraq today, was almost extinct) when the Democrats abruptly voted in 1974 to terminate all military aid to that country. This was as much as to invite the North, still armed and funded by the Soviet Union, to break the peace and invade the South. The result was the suffering and death of millions upon millions who had placed their trust in the United States. From that betrayal followed not only the persecution of the South Vietnamese and the tragedy of the boat people, but the genocides in Laos and Cambodia as well.

It's hard for me to imagine anything that would make me angrier and more intransigent than seeing Obama and the Democrats in congress cause America to make the same hideous mistake again.

Oh, yes

I wish President Obama well, for the sake of the country. I wish him success in everything he proposes that conduces to the good of the country, and will oppose him, as one of the loyal opposition, in everything that does not.

On Bureaucracy -- Hopeful Schadenfreude Edition

One thing to watch for: is the permanent bureaucracy actually left-leaning, or just inert? If the latter, Obama may find himself just as frustrated as conservatives have been the last eight years, as he discovers Change undermined by Subparagraph 3c, Codicil iv (u-w), and an astonishing rash of memos, ejected like ink from a squid, which absolutely must be digested before action is taken. And never forget the Interagency Review. Be interesting to see if he can get all the administrative ducks in a row.

On McCain

That endorsement of McCain didn't work out. I'm split about that: obviously, I take responsibility for my teeny role in nominating a losing candidate, one whom most Republicans were even less fond of than I was, and I recognize my judgment was mistaken. I look at the hypotheticals, though, and I don't see anyone else doing better, much less winning. Romney strikes me as the most plausible alternative--but I don't really see Mr. Plastic beating The One. So, for the future, I will take note of the flaws McCain had, and as like as not overreact in the opposite direction as my way of compensating.

And let us note practicalities: I didn't volunteer for the Republicans, and I donated 1/8 as much money as I did in 2004. Gloomy as I am, I don't think the consequences will be as dire as a Kerry victory would have been in 2004--and my wallet is a pretty good reflection of exactly how much worse I thought a Kerry victory would have been. Or how much less inspiring a McCain victory: when its Senator Amnesty running against Senator Government, one's enthusiasm can never entirely kindle.

Still, McCain would have done a much better job defending America and Western Civ. Here's hoping Senator Surrender is a fast learner.

Electoral Notes

The preliminary count seems to be a 52-47 popular vote split, and, if Missouri and North Carolina split the way they're leaning, a 364-174 electoral vote split. So a clear Democratic victory, but 47% is presumably a respectable Republican showing. Just for the magnitude of the Republican task ahead:

* The rank-ordering of the states, from most to least Republican, basically followed the polls. There are no surprises about which areas of the country the Republicans need to focus on to win in the future. McCain basically campaigned where he needed to campaign--it's just that the entire country was blue-shifted away from where he needed to be. (Red-shifted for him in Doppler-terms, but blue-shifted in political effect.)

* The states Obama won narrowly, or seems likely to win narrowly, are Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida; add those to some hypothetical Republican victory in the future, and the Republican electoral total gets you to 260. Perhaps the Republicans could win these with a better candidate and better circumstances.

* After that, the Republican road to victory gets a lot steeper: Colorado 53-46 (the bellwether state after all!--it would have gotten McCain to 269!), Iowa 54-45, Minnesota 54-44, New Hampshire 55-44, Pennsylvania 55-44. The Republican road to victory, therefore, requires overturning ten point deficits in these five states. Look at these numbers, and the advice of the True Believing Conservatives to simply Be Ourselves becomes suspect. The Republican party has to change its message, change itself, if it wants to win these states, and get to an electoral and popular victory.

The New President

So, America is in for a worse time. Aside from providence, our last, best hope lies in the improving effects of ambition, that may yet make Obama choose better policies for America than he otherwise would.

I feel no urge to join the chorus of pundits, right and left, clapping themselves on the shoulder because America elected a black president. We fought the Civil War so an inexperienced lightweight could be president? -- an inexperienced lightweight whose rise to the presidency is unthinkable absent the color of his skin? Yes, it is a moment inexplicable without reference to our history, but it is only a chapter of grim farce in that history, whose effects on America and the world may be horrific tragedy; it is no transcendence. And that self-congratulation is rooted in a progressivist sense of America and history--that we are always becoming better, sloughing off our worse elements, progressing toward the ideal America of the future. I love the America founded in Plymouth and Virginia, whose political order was constituted in Philadelphia; I love Americans as they are now; I loathe and reject the idea that America must prove itself against some hypothetical ideal--or to gratify the opinion either of those sorry specimens of humanity who are not blessed with American citizenship, or of those Americans insensate enough to have no awareness of how especially blessed our nation is, and always has been. Our ancestors made themselves a free people; we have done nothing more today than exercise that liberty with understandable and inexcusable folly. Spare me the sanctimony and self-regard.

Announcements

Subject to consultation with Withywindle, the name of this blog will soon become "HOPE AND CHANGE." Or possibly "HARVARD AND CHICAGO." The better to ingratiate ourselves with the powers that be.

And I for one welcome our new liberal overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted conservative blogger, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their wind farms, welfare offices, and illegal-alien voter registration centers.

Oh, have I mentioned I worked for a non-profit social-welfare organization? And I was recently eligible for the earned income tax credit! I recycle! I speak French! I'm an atheist! I was once the only white person at the screening of a John Singleton movie! I like Whole Foods! Many of my best friends are leftists, or, failing that, members of designated victim groups! Um...graduate school! I went to graduate school! In the humanities!

Hm, this is going to be harder than I thought....

On American Conservatism, 1980-2008

Did it change the world forever? Who knows, until the end of time. It did good things for a generation. Reagan freed the economy, rearmed the United States and played a crucial role in bringing down the Soviet Union, and appointed a generation of judges in favor of original intent and judicial restraint. The Gingrich generation of the 1990s ended the old welfare, got rid of the deficit in tandem with Clinton, and had the moral integrity to impeach Clinton and try their damnedest to get him convicted as he deserved. Bush freed a trillion dollars for the private sector, appointed another generation of good judges, kept the United States free of terror attacks after 9-11, liberated Afghanistan and Iraq, and, despite bumbling, has fought to a victory in Iraq--one Obama and the Democrats can squander if they choose, but any defeat in Iraq will be clearly a Democratic defeat, not an American one.

And Bush in particular--imperfect, but one of the good presidents of the United States. He prevented the presidency from being stolen by the Democrats in 2000, and he defeated the Democrats in 2004, when such a defeat was most necessary. (It isn't brilliant having them win in 2008, but it would have been even worse four years ago.) He went to war in Iraq, bringing over not only hesitant Democrats but also hesitant Republicans who made up about half of the party, and that was right and proper. He fought the terror war with all necessary means--including passing the Patriot Act, imprisonment of terrorists at Guantanamo, and the waterboarding of select terrorists--and that also was right and proper. He went double-for-nothing on the surge, doing the bureaucratic legwork in 2006, and facing down a Democratic Congress in 2007 and 2008--and that, at the moment of his greates political weakness, may be the most magnificent of his achievemets. There are parts of the domestic legacy worth praising, but it is his foreign policy that is his particular legacy, and, with all its faults, his greatest glory. It is one of America's glories too.

My work on rhetoric owes an enormous debt to Bush--a man unique in the combination of his acute appreciation of the power of words, and his woeful practice of oratory. Watching him at work from 2000 on, I learned how rhetoric works, how it matters. His Second Inaugural Address says concisely everything about America and the world that I have said verbosely on this blog. My rhetoric book doesn't immediately look like it will get published, so this is a moot point, but I would have wanted to dedicate it to him.

Bush has his flaws and his failures--not least, the failure to hand on the presidency to another Republican. So do Republicans and conservatives. These are topics for another time. We have done well by our country, and humanity, for a generation--this is a matter of pride and joy. We have failed now. We will not fail always. We will succeed again, and when we do, the successes of conservatism in this last generation--the successes of President Bush--will be our vital history, our tradition, and our inspiration.

I am a Bush Republican. It is a badge of honor.

Mr. President, I salute you for a job well done. May the American people come to recognize how much they owe you. May God continue to bless you.

Election Day

They are beginning to vote now, in those eccentric little hamlets in northern New Hampshire, midnight voting in those parts being one of the odd rituals of American democracy. And so it begins.

There are two famous poems written specifically for America's election day. One is Whittier's "The Poor Voter on Election Day," written for the election of 1852 which gave us the disastrous yet forgettable Franklin Pierce. The other is Whitman's "Election Day, 1884," written to commemorate the day that gave us Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat elected after the Civil War. Whitman's is somewhat less famous, and perhaps the better poem, so I post it here.

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,

’Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,

Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyserloops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,

Nor Oregon’s white cones—nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes—nor Mississippi’s stream:

This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name—the still small voice vibrating—America’s choosing day,

(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadrennial choosing,)

The stretch of North and South arous’d-sea-board and inland—Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California,

The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict,

The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict,

Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s:) the peaceful choice of all,

Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:

Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the heart pants, life glows:

These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,

Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.

Okay, This is Not the Most Charitable Thought I Could Have Had

So Madelyn Dunham, Barack Obama's grandmother has died.

How will she remembered by the world? As a "typical white person" who was kind of a racist for occasionally being afraid of strangers on the street. Which I think is sort of sad.

By all accounts she was a wonderful woman, without whom Obama would almost certainly not have had the successes he has had.

On Bubbles

In 2002 and 2004, the Democrats were clearly in a bubble--expecting victory, living in a media cocoon. Some of this is natural to being a loser--you have to have hope, even illusory--some I think due to ideological blinders. So, in 2006 and 2008, one can witness cocooning in Republicans--disbelief in defeat. I like to think it hasn't been as bad for us as it was for the Democrats. In 2006, many conservatives thought we could somehow eke out a better result than we did--yours truly among them--but I don't think that (save for Jim Geraghty and a few others) there wasn't a sense that the results were going to be bad. And now that we are accustomed by 2006 to complete disaster, I think conservatives have been fairly realistic about 2008. A few people are predicting a McCain victory, or at any rate saying it remains possible; most are predicting an Obama victory, if perhaps a narrower one than Democrats hope for, and major Democratic gains in both houses of Congress. It seems to me that conservative pundits, therefore, are being fairly clear-eyed about the scope of Republican defeat, if not necessarily about the causes. (Of which there are no end.) This seems to me an encouraging first sign for the future.

Lingua Prohibita

Thanks to Fear and Loathing in Georgetown, I learn that there's some sort of movement afoot in the U.K. to ban Latin phrases and their associated abbreviations (e.g., etc., N.B.) from official documents.

Latin, you see, is "elitist" and "discriminatory":

Marie Clair, [spokesman for the Plain English Campaign] , said: "If you look at the diversity of all our communities you have got people for whom English is a second language. They might mistake eg for egg and little things like that can confuse people.

"At the same time it is important to remember that the national literacy level is about 12 years old and the vast majority of people hardly ever use these terms.

"It is far better to use words people understand. Often people in power are using the words because they want to feel self important. It is not right that voters should suffer because of some official's ego."

It won't surprise readers to hear that I get hot under the collar when Latin is equated with snobbery. (Likewise, it's a little irritating when Nancy Pelosi's staff confuse "classicist" and "classist," but that's an issue for another time.)

Look, Latin is part of the exceptionally rich heritage of English -- the first Latin words entered English at its very beginnings, when the Angles and Saxons first began settling in Britannia. A new layer of Latin was added when William the Conqueror crossed the channel in 1066. And for centuries, especially with the rise of mass education in the nineteenth century, almost every boy and girl learned at least a little Latin.

If we start dropping the simplest Latin expressions from our language, then where do we stop? If "etc" is a problem, then what might not be a problem? What irritates me about folks like the Plain English Campaign is what George Bush called "the soft bigotry of lowered expectations." If we all restrict our range of expression to cater to the hypothetical person who might think "eg" means "egg," then we all get just a little dumber and nobody winds up any better off. If the national literacy level of Britain is "about 12 years old," is official acceptance of that fact really the best course of action?

I'm all in favor of making public documents readable, but if they're not I somehow doubt that the problem is a few Latin-derived expressions that can be looked up in any English dictionary. Vague and sloppy writing -- in part the result of previous efforts by educational reformers not to seem too elitist -- is surely a much bigger impediment to understanding.

Can I say "impediment"? Or is that elitist?

Great Hoax from Little ACORNs

A couple of weeks ago, I argued that ACORN's phony voter registrations were a real threat to the electoral process. Today, John Fund makes the same arguments -- with more evidence to back them up.

200,000 suspicious registrations in Ohio. In a way, I'll feel better if Obama wins by an electoral landslide: at least then it'll be unlikely that this election turned on fraud.

A Possible Game-Changer I Hadn't Considered

I know Withywindle thinks highly of those evangelicals of his, but in this election I'm hanging my remaining hopes on the Catholics -- specifically, on the efficacy of prayers to St. Jude.

Endorsements

Quin Hillyer's and David Frum's reasons for voting for McCain are both worth reading. The end of Frum's captures something of my mood:

This is a great and greatly enduring country. It flourishes because of the genius of its institutions and the decent and moderate instincts of its people. I look to the American future with confidence always - under a President McCain preferably, under a President Obama if it must be.

There was a recent Yahoo headline along the lines of "Republicans glum." "Resigned" more captures my mood. Yes, we will survive even Obama and a filibuster-proof Democratic Congress. Not just because of our institutions and our people; but also because the Lord protects in his providence fools, drunks, and the United States of America. And who knows? The Lord can work through Democrats too for the nation's good. No one of us knows the right course; all we can do is argue for what we think is best, and stake our selves to guarantee our arguments.

City Lights

Phoebe:

It's impossible for a national politician to expect votes without speaking of city life, with its crowded schools and streets, its tiny apartments, and its visible same-sex couples, as anything but suspect. The Republicans are the main offenders when it comes to dividing this country into the real and the rest. But the Obamercial, moving as it was, served as a reminder that the American Dream is to get out of the city--those who make so much or are so set on city life as to live in the city center have, effectively, overdreamt.

On a slight tangent, I wonder whether there is more internal diversity in urban life, suburban life, or rural life in America nowadays? How helpful is it to divide the country in three this way? I can say from personal experience that urban life in Minneapolis differs sharply from life urban life in NYC, and when they call it "the biggest small town in the world," they're not entirely joking. I suspect that the idea of suburban uniformity is very much an illusion generated from an urban point of view--and vice versa.

Somebody else should also do the hard work of finding out the average square footage of residence in urban, suburban, and rural America. I suspect it's been rising in all three--not counting illegal immigrants, which is an important caveat--but probably rising at differential rates. Is the ratio of suburban to urban residence area greater than it used to be? Lesser? One of the important variables for where you follow the American Dream, along with commute times and costs, convenience of shopping, school quality, etc. And is there an effective minimum square footage for family formation, absolute rather than relative?

For all these ways of life, it's worth considering the web of subsidies, local and national, that sustain them--that all are underwritten by tax dollars, political choices; none is natural--at any rate, none more natural than the others. We make our various nests, and the American Dream is in good part expressed by the tangle of interest and regulation that make up the twigs of every nest.