Alternate History Novel I: Huitzilopochtli's Cherry Blossoms

In the early 1400s, the Ming fleet under Cheng Ho heads east instead of west, discovering America. The smallpox epidemics rage, but by the time Columbus et al arrive, the Native American population has begun to recover. A mixed Chinese-Japanese-Korean-Filipino-Ainu settlement diaspora exists from Alaska down to Acapulco, with the major population base centered on San Francisco Bay. When Cortes arrives in Mexico City, a small contingent of mercenary samurai are in Aztec service, ready to help defend their lord against the Invaders from the West. Or will they conspire with Cortes against the Aztecs? High melodrama ensues, plus a pastiche of Aztec, Japanese, and Spanish anthropology. The plot borrows heavily from The Seven Samurai.

Some Enchanted Question (UPDATED x2)

Michelle Malkin beat me to the idea. But heck, it takes time to write these things down!

Some enchanted evening
You may see Zeleny
You may see Zeleny
Across a crowded room.
And somehow you know,
You just ascertain,
That he’ll throw a softball:
Benign and inane.

No need to doubt it:
Money in the bank.
This twit’s your lackey.
This tool’s in the tank.

Some enchanted evening
You’ll pick Jeff Zeleny
You’ll call on Zeleny
Across a crowded room.
And then it transpires:
It’s strange but it’s true
His fatuous question
Astounds even you.

Inside, you’re laughing.
What a useful clown!
Out loud you’re saying:
“Let me write this down.”

Some enchanted evening
When you get that question
When you hear that question
Across a crowded room
Then field it with verve:
Indulge, condescend;
Act thoughtful and "humbled";
The Times is your friend!

Handling the press is
Easy as can be!
Handling the press is
Easy as can be!

UPDATE: Okay, it turns out everyone heard the same music in his or her head when Zeleny asked his question. I guess that's the point: "enchanted" isn't a word that gets used a lot outside fairy tales.

2ND UPDATE: Wah. It seems it's pronounced ZEL-eny, not zel-EN-y. So...my little parody doesn't scan. Alas.

Local College Republicans

Various student groups had their tables up at the university where I teach. The College Republicans had an "affirmative-action bake sale" going. Aside from the small point that a very large number of students here are non-white, and unlikely to have their hearts thrill when they see such a sign, what a drearily negative first impression to get of Republicans! Why not a Liberty bake sale? A Tea Party bake sale? If even the College Republicans are so mired in old political theater, the party is going to be in the wilderness a long time.

Speaking As An Opponent Of Affirmative Action.

On The Secret to Withywindle's Amazing Popularity

1) Advocate policy positions somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun.

2) Advocate nominating moderate Republicans, so as to win elections among an electorate whose policy preferences are somewhere to the left of Attila the Hun.

3) Badmouth Attila the Hun, that dirty rat!

I fully expect a million hits on this blog, any day now.

On What Was Gained By Supporting Specter in 2004

A Senator who provided minimal support to the Republican party and to conservatism for five years. I am sure that Bush, Rove, and various Republican staffers will look back and say "not as good an investment as we hoped; still a reasonable return." I think they would be correct to say so: all we can hope for in politics is temporary victories, and Specter assisted in a few of them, at a time when the Pennsylvania electorate tilted Democratic. The value of Specter as a Republican, even for a few years only, will become increasingly clear as we experience Specter as a Democrat.

I've added David Frum's New Majority site to the blogroll. I suspect I shan't agree with a large number of his policy preferences, but I think his voice ought to be listened to, to prevent Republicans from shriveling into a saintly sect.

Scattered Political Thoughts: One Hundred Days In

I haven't said so much about the political scene. The Republicans have little power; it's largely a question of watching the Democrats exercise the creaky machinery of government, and seeing how much they accomplish. But my thoughts, such as they are:

* I disapprove of the general goals of the Obama administration, and suspect they will do long-term damage to the country. Obama appears to be stopping short of inflicting immediate catastrophe on the United States in any arena, for which small mercy I am duly thankful. In his tactics, Obama has made a fair number of unforced errors (see Unannounced Flyover, New York City), but seems to be grinding toward his desired goals slowly but surely. I have no sense that the middle of the country has turned against Obama or the Democrats, uneasy though they may be about some of his policy goals.

* The Republican free-fall continues - see Arlen Specter. Clearly the party's political exhaustion continues. While I am not sure whether the middle of the country dislikes most the economic conservatives, the religious conservatives, or the foreign-policy conservatives, since they seem cordially to loathe all of them, I do note the Club of Growth's unparalleled record at promoting Democratic victories. Wherever lies the road to Republican recovery, I think we should avoid the suggestions of the Club of Growth.

* Speaking as an unrepentant conservative: the country doesn't like conservatives right now, and doesn't look like it will any time soon, bar real disasters occurring to the nation under Obama. Conservatives' political choices really ought to take account of our profound unpopularity with the nation's center.

More on the Israeli-Russian Alliance

So, if I were contemplating a long-term reorientation of Israel and Russia toward an alliance with one another - based, shall we say, both on 1) an Obamized America that diminishes both its commitment to Israel and its interference in Russia's near-abroad, on 2) a sense of mutual besiegement by Muslim foes, and 3) coolness toward the European Union; I would contemplate the following:

1) A certain number of "Russian" nuclear engineers aiding the Iranians at Bushehr and other places nuclear would actually be Israelis, or in Israeli employ, scouting locations and perhaps setting up equipment in unhelpful manners.

2) The KGB and the Mossad would buy, sell, and trade information with one another about objects of mutual interest.

3) Russia and Israel would agree not to be too obnoxious about selling weapons to Georgia, Syria, etc.

4) A certain amount of American military technology would filter from Israel to Russia, for a price. Possibly some Russian technology would head to Israel. Israel and Russia might pool financial and scientfic resources for certain military R&D.

5) Some Mossad agents would be Russian, or have Russian passports; particularly for work in the Muslim world. Some KGB agents would be Israeli, or have Israeli passports; particularly for work in Western Europe and America.

6) Certain assets of the Russian elite would be deposited in Israeli banks, and gently scrubbed.

7) The Israeli and Russian general staffs would engage in long-term negotiations considering a redeployment of the Turkish option - the possibility for Israeli air forces to train on Russian territory, and the possibility that certain Israeli military operations would originate in, be resupplied from, or overpass Russian territory.

8) As a concommitant to cooling Israeli-Turkish relations, and improved Russo-Israeli relations, Israeli-Armenian relations would warm up.

Choices for Mayor

Withywindle: I'm not going to vote for Mike Bloomberg for mayor. He broke his term-limits pledge, he's contravening the democratic spirit. I'm going to vote for a Democrat, almost no matter what. How about you, Goldberry?

Goldberry: Well, I don't like what he did, but it really does depend on who the Democrats run.

Withywindle: Who could they possibly run that would make Bloomberg the better choice?

Goldberry: I heard Eliot Spitzer was thinking of running for mayor in the Democratic primary.

Withywindle: (Pause.) OK, that would be a vote for Bloomberg.

Why Only One Government?

In a post on government regulation at NRO's The Corner, Mark Steyn writes: "[B]y definition there can only be one federal government." And I wondered, not for the first time, why?

For a while now, I've harbored the thought that there's no necessity for the various functions that governments perform to be united in a single executive under the direction of a single legislature. There's no reason why the division of the state into executive, legislative and judicial branches is the only way to produce a balance of contending forces within the state so as to safeguard liberty. In fact, the original theoretical justifications for the present tripartite division of government, as found in ancient writers like Aristotle and Polybius, had more to do with the desirability of distributing power among various classes in society than with any inclination to limit the scope of government.

In principle, I don't see why you couldn't have, within one country, multiple "governments" with different spheres of authority. There could be one legislature (with its associated bureaucracy) to make foreign policy and wage war; one legislature (plus bureaucracy) to oversee education; one legislature (plus bureaucracy) to regulate commerce -- and so on. The different authorities could be structured differently from one another, according to the functions they were intended to perform. For example, you'd almost certainly want an elected chief executive for the authority that handles diplomacy and war.

Such a system of multiple authorities, radically separate from one another, would mean more elections...but what's wrong with that? You could hold an election for a different authority every few months, and each election would mean that the public was given the opportunity to closely scrutinize and directly influence the operations of some aspect of government. The people could also elect different kinds of people with different sets of policy preferences to govern the various authorities: there wouldn't be the perennial dilemma of liking one party's candidates' proposals for education but trusting the other party's candidates more when it comes to national security.

The most obvious objection to the sort of system I've just sketched is the difficulties it might create for public finance. Somehow, revenue would have to be raised and apportioned to the various authorities. But why couldn't you have a legislature concerned exclusively with taxes and budgeting -- an authority that did nothing but finance all the other authorities? Such an authority, the only one allowed to tax or to borrow, would be the most important of the various power centers, and would be obviously the main target for special interests trying to gain influence within the state. But for that very reason the public would be more closely attuned to the central importance of budgeting in state policy. Every election for the budgetary authority would be a referendum on the size of government and its proper functions, and this would be a good thing (at least from my democratic-libertarian perspective).

I'm not sure the separation of the police authority or the courts would be a problem at all in such a system. In America, we already try to shield the Justice Department and the judiciary from political influence, even if we don't achieve much success. You'd want to make sure, of course, that the courts couldn't boss around the various other authorities and tell them how to conduct affairs in their own spheres -- that would defeat the point of the whole structure.

Such a radical division of the the responsibilities we entrust to government might have considerable advantages. It would allow democratic review of individual aspects of government's activities: particular elections wouldn't deal with such a bewildering range of issues and, as a result, the public would probably be more knowledgeable about their government. Representatives themselves would be better informed by virtue of having a more limited number of topics to worry about. Most importantly, there wouldn't be the same opportunities for logrolling and horsetrading -- i.e., mutual corruption -- among elected representatives. The constraints thus placed on the growth of government would probably more than offset, at least for large countries, the cost redundancies of having a dozen different legislatures and bureaucracies.

I understand that, as a practical suggestion, the idea of one country where lots of mini-governments shoulder against one another sounds a bit crazy. What I'm really trying to do with this thought-experiment is make the point that the idea of a separation of powers could be carried much further than it generally has been by mainstream political theory.

Disciplines, Grad School, Etc.

Gateway forwards me the latest modest proposal for academia; Miss Self Important has already discussed it. So, what to say? Abolishing tenure - dude. Getting rid of disciplines - umm. But although Taylor doesn't quite make this argument explicitly, I think one can connect the argument against disciplines with the awfulness of exploiting grad students so:

The multiplication of disciplines, and of specialization, also multiplies the number of professors wanting validation by having grad students, and hence the number of grad students accepted. All these specialized professors teach obscure specialty courses, leaving a greater demand for grad students and adjuncts to teach the survey courses. Get rid of specialization and disciplines, and you get rid of the incentives that lead to a glut of exploited grad students and gypsy profs.

To which I would say: well, yes, but the real trouble is too damn many grad students admitted into (humanities) grad school. Getting rid of disciplines seems a clunky way to do it. How about just halving the number of fellowships for grad students, and increasing the pay of everyone who teaches surveys? How about halving admission of grad students? How about having the MA qualify you to teach basic survey courses? Giving a financial bonus to senior profs to teach survey courses? - lots of stuff you can do that leaves the disciplines intact.

Disciplines embody tradition and accumulated knowledge; I am wary of "interdisciplinarity" that consists of inventing new disciplines every seven years - especially ones with stupid names like Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water. Yes, political scientists ought to learn about economics, but letting umpteen years of accumulated knowledge about political science go rot seems like a bad idea to me.

Mawwiage

Segueing smoothly away from discussions of torture ... to marriage, which is only torture in certain plays. As with food, I feel a certain aversion to justifying marriage in terms of social science. That is, rah Moynihan, and alerting us to the problems that result from the breakdown of marriage - but putting the bulk of your argument on the rational reasons to marry seems oddly desiccating. And note at the end of this latest blog-bait (as Peter Suderman so nicely puts it over at The American Scene), this odd passage:

Jennifer, a 23-year-old former student of mine ... [is] getting married this fall. It wasn't religion that made her do it. It wasn't fear of being alone. It was simply affection. She met Jake while still in college and decided that there was no point in barhopping through her 20s. Her friends balked. She stood firm. Now they're bridesmaids.

Good Nelly, it wasn't religion that made her marry! We wouldn't want that, would we? So strange, the very thought. And, no, Dr. Freud, it vas not ein sublimated fear of being eine spinster. It was simply affection - "affection"?

You know, Jake, I feel quite affectionate toward you.

Jennifer, I also feel affectionate toward you.

Jake, since we feel affectionate toward each other, should we marry?

Jennifer, that is an excellent idea. While you resist the peer pressure that frowns on this untoward act, I will register at Williams & Sonoma.

Hello? True love? Passion? Romance? Irresistible desire, for which economic benefits, much less peer pressure, are irrelevant? All tied up in a bundle with marriage? I'm familiar enough with the social class the author describes to 1) recognize that he's right about some of the assumptions they have about marriage; and 2) that they aren't quite such robotic drips as this very peculiar passage implies.

This should be a rant about subjecting love and marriage to social science, and maybe a rant about our secular-minded liberal overclass, but maybe I just want to rant about the conventions of the op-ed, which puts a premium on this social-science gobbledygook to analyze everything. Lord knows our secular-minded liberal overclass has its flaws, and they may have a peculiar distaste for marriage, but they do fall in love, and not just in affection. And who knows? Maybe some of them marry late because they haven't fallen in love yet.

American Borgias; A Republic of Torturous Virtu

This post inspired by some private chit-chat with Alpheus and Gowanus.

Torture is not a failure to live up to American ideals; it is the embodiment of American ideals. Or at least the republican (rhetorical, prudential) strand of them. That is to say: we latter-day Machiavellians founded a republic based not (only) on rational ideals or divine sanction, but (also) on amoral self-interest; we nation of Princes, citizens forsooth, swore amity to one another, embodied in the iron bounds of law, to preserve ourselves and further our interests; our relationship to one another as fellow-citizens embodied the Republic, whose preservation we also swore to preserve. The republican ideal consists in acting as a friend to all people who have sworn the covenant of fellow-citizenship; of regarding the survival of the Republic as embodying the survival of the best part of us, our love for our fellow-citizens. All this, mind you, an idealism firmly rooted in the preservation of our individual selves, and never meant to dissolve that basic goal.

Liberal America, Christian America, have their parallel foundation myths - "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" covers both of these variants. To which the Machiavellian republican may say

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

Or the Machiavellian republican may say that these ideals are only appearances to cover the essential republican truth of America. The perfect Machiavellian, knowing that appearances are reality, will speak nothing but liberal and Christian ideals, and act to preserve the Republic by any means necessary - or, perhaps, act in a liberal and Christian manner, from Machiavellian motives, and the motives will be undetectable in his actions. But in all cases, the Republican will smile ironically at these alternate ideals, which have for him only a secondary value.

The republican ideal is the preservation of the Republic; and all cruelties are justified by this virtu(e). Expropriation, expulsion, and mass slaughter of the Indians; acquiescence in slavery and butchery of rebellious slave-owners, by turns; conquest of half-Mexico by fair means and foul; savage conquest of the Philippines; fire-bombing of German cities; fire-bombing and atom-bombing of Japanese cities; mass slaughter of Vietnamese. Can liberalism or God justify all these? - one can make the attempt, but it distorts these ideals to try to do so. It is the republican ideal that best justifies these cruelties. And torture, even the rather second-rate torture at issue here, is no stretch at all to justify on these grounds. After Dresden and Hiroshima, what is a little waterboarding?

That was then, this is now. We're better than that now

You do what you need for the Republic to survive.

What is the Machiavellian Republican part of America? The psychopath that helps you survive. Easy Rawlins' friend Mouse; the X-men's Wolverine; V in V for Vendetta; Iorek Byrnison in the Golden Compass books - etc., etc., funny how your friendly neighborhood psychopath recurs in popular culture. Of course it is a sublimation, a rejection of the truth: each citizen is a psychopath seeking his survival at all costs, who has sworn to put his psychopathy in the service of his fellow citizens, in expectation that they will do likewise for him. When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way, and the citizen is a gang member who has fixed his affections on an abstract gang 300 million strong.

Indeed, America is an idealistic country, lacking in as strong ethnic underpinnings as France or Ireland - and the republican ideal, as much as the liberal ideal, is that much more essential for it to persevere. The French can betray one another by failure to torture their enemies sufficiently, and France may still survive; America without its ideals - without citizens willing to torture for the sake of other citizens - is fragile, far more likely to collapse. Precisely because America is uniquely a country of ideals, it uniquely requires a willingness to torture for survival - a willingness to do anything necessary for the survival not only of our fellow citizens but also of their survival as Americans.

The only relevant counter-argument is that of the iron cage of law. (Note, by the by, that the Republican fervently endorses Alpheus' quasi-libertarian defense of the rule of law against judicial dissolution of the bounds of law. Remove iron law, and you remove the essential constraint that converts princes into citizens; that sheathes the knives of the psychopaths. Judicial disrespect for the law is very, very dangerous.) (Note also that the affections of common history, tradition, and ethnicity also underwrite the necessary affection of citizens for one another; mass immigration and multi-culturalism attenuate the affections that keep our knives sheathed; this is one reason I oppose both.) If law forbids torture of our enemies - national law, not international law - then the Republican will oppose such torture - not for its own sake, but because the iron cage of law must be preserved. Even then, he will keep a weather-eye to the argument of necessity - but the preservation of the law is the preservation of the Republic.

Music, China, Spengler

Spengler's various posts argue that the rise of classical music proficiency in China is a proxy for the general rise of China. While I'm all in favor of praising classical music, and urging improved standards of everything on America, I have a few hesitations. (Many of which Spengler alludes to in his columns, but perhaps not sufficiently.)

1) Classical music is really all that special? Jazz, for example, doesn't require playing with time? - and shouldn't the improvization required of jazz make it even more useful as a proxy for economic success? Traditional Chinese, Indian, Muslim music just can't hack it compared with the Classical tradition? Much as I enjoy such arguments, I'm the teensiest bit dubious. And music, after all, is the last part of traditional culture to go - there is apparently a very deep-rooted love of traditional music in the Muslim world, that survives the adoption of blue jeans, etc. I could read the rise of Chinese participation in classical music as registering the enormous collapse of traditional Chinese culture; classical music, like Christianity, filling a void in a culture devastated by Communism.

1A) East Germany and the USSR had excellent classical-music education systems, and they didn't conquer the world.

2) First-rate Chinese musicians will spend 25 hours a day on practice; but China's superiority comes from second-rate Chinese musicians becoming first-rate engineers? Or will the first-rate engineers never have bothered with music study? Is Spengler saying that second-rate musicians become second-rate engineers, but second is good enough? Why shouldn't I take the devotion to music by China's middle class as a sign that they've already begun the collapse into mediocrity that afflicts the West?

3) Music education has exploded in America over the last several generations; I would not be surprised to learn that more Americans, absolutely and relatively, are proficient in classical music than ever before in our history. Are we up to Chinese or European standards? Perhaps not. But read Willa Cather's Song of the Lark, set in the early 1900s; only immigrants, European or Mexican, really care about music. The British core of Americans are musically illiterate. We're probably more attuned to classic music than we ever were before - and one could argue that the decline of American grit and striving for excellence correlates with the advance of classical music in our culture.

3B) How many Chinese listen to vile Hong Kong pop and watch meretricious music videos? Comparing Chinese classical music enthusiasts to American pop music enthusiasts is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

4) Spengler notes that pride in knowledge of classical music was a German/Nazi trait. Yah - and he should ponder that.

5) Spengler varies between praising 1) the craft of making music; 2) the soulful-rational appreciation of music. He should recollect that in most of history, the mere craft of making music was the province of despised craftsmen; the elite prided themselves rather on the appreciation of music. The cult of the genius applied to composers before musicians. Indeed, I think there was an anti-Semitic overtone to this in Germany and other places; Jews made good violinists, but good Christian Germans understood the spirit of German music. Spengler's praise of craft is a shift from the traditional view. And to the extent he praises craft rather than soul, then indeed music trains you to be an engineer, but not a good person or a good citizen. I think Spengler wants to say classical music gives you everything good, but there's a touch of the snake-oil salesman in that claim.

6) China's parents have no toleration of mediocrity? None of them? And the Communist Party elite parachuting their children into command of the crony-capitalism network? - there are no incompetents among their children? I am skeptical.

All of this is not by way of outright contradiction of Spengler's theses. I suspect he's onto something. But I think his theses may need some nuance and revision.

Withywindle has the Collywobbles

Bleagh.

Enemies of the State

Nate Silver asks, "Are Republicans turning into libertarians?" My first reaction was, hell, yeah. But I was a bit puzzled when I read this:

Maybe you see a pattern there and maybe you don't. But of the roughly four different pathways the Republicans could take in the post-Obama universe -- toward Ron Paulesque libertarianism, toward Sarah Palinesque cultural populism, toward Mike Huckabeesque big-government conservatism, or toward Olympia Snowesque moderation/ good-governmentism -- the libertarian side would seem to have had the best go of things in the First 100 Days.

Those are indeed four differentesque paths, but it's not clear to me that Republicans or conservatives have to take any one of them at this particular moment. There's a time to build up and a time to break down. Now is a time to break down. Specifically, it's time to break the power of government, and I'm just not sure doing so requires that we choose any one of the four paths listed by Silver until such time as our enemies' stronghold -- whose guns command all four routes -- lies in ruins.

I admit "Snowesque moderation" may be a non-starter, since it's not so much a path as a pose. And I suppose one could even say the same thing about Happy Huck's Traveling Medicine Show, which offers such an odd variety of wares that I've never quite figured out what there is, apart from the guitar-strumming pitchman standing on the seat, to tie the inventory together.* Honestly, I think a lot of Huckabee's appeal may just be "Palinesque cultural populism" with a Southern twang. And in the Age of Obama, I don't see why libertarianism and cultural populism -- be it Alaskan or Arkansan -- can't go hand in hand.

The unexpected blessing offered to conservatives by the Age of Obama is that the threat posed by left-wing cultural elites has become basically indistinguishable from the threat posed by the encroaching power of the state. There is simply no way, at this point, that Big Government can be wrested from the Left and turned to recognizably conservative ends. The makeup of the bureaucracy, the courts, the educational system, the media and indeed the national electorate all militate against any attempt to save cultural conservatism while retaining the federal government in its present form.

Think of it like this: the cultural right is the Rebels from Star Wars and Big Government is the Death Star. Commandeering the Death Star is not a realistic option. You can't just replace Darth Obama with Darth Romney. And even if you could get rid of Grand Moff Pelosi as well, the Stormtroopers manning the complex are all clones reliably loyal to the Empire. The only viable option, if you want to ensure your survival, is to blow up the superweapon.

In less geeky terms, the only hope for traditional values conservatives is in federalism, shrinking budgets, term limits, school choice, and all the other libertarian remedies that can allow the communities that nurture traditional values -- towns, neighborhoods, churches, small businesses, schools, families -- to survive in their traditional forms. Small-government policies have got to be the top priority even for cultural conservatives.

If you want to end abortion, or prevent gay marriage, or institute school choice, your best bet is to take power away from the courts and give it to legislatures; to take power away from the federal government and give it to the states; to insist on a narrow reading of the powers granted to both the federal government AND the states by the federal constitutions; to make it harder for special interests to co-opt elected representatives -- the libertarian to-do list goes on and on and on. But virtually every item on it is something that, for the foreseeable future, will also be good for cultural conservatives.

So yes, we should all be libertarians now, at least for a while.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[*This is probably going to sound anti-Southern or something, but Mike Huckabee reminds me of Mr. Haney from Green Acres: whatever you think you might need, he's got it for sale. If Silver wants an figure to embody big-government conservativism, he might consider David Frum or Rod Dreher -- but I understand that it Silver prefers to refer to someone to whom other people are actually listening.]

Conservative Philosophy of Food?!?!?

Conservative food philosophy? Food philosophy? We are going to think about what we put in our mouths? We are going to dignify our random thoughts with system and theory? Oh, please, no, no, no. Here is the sum total of Withywindle's food philosophy. Listen, my children, and you shall hear, of the thoughts of Orwell, whom we revere:

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

If "conservatism" begins to attract the food philosophers, I will have to stop being a conservative. Food philosophy?

1) If you shoot it, it's fresh.

2) If it tastes good, order seconds.

3) Give the kids veggies until they learn about junk food.

4) When you feel full, stop eating.

5) Say grace.

Spengler on Boyle

Spengler (now revealed as David Goldman) thinks Susan Boyle embodies dangerous Western fantasies of effortless success. Well, yes and no.

I'm strongly in sympathy with Goldman's belief that Americans, and Anglo-Saxons generally, now lack the diligence, thrift, and grasp of reality that are turning China into a great power. I think it's true that a lot of us have, without fully admitting it to ourselves, bought into the gratifying idea that our inherent excellence, so well known to ourselves, will inevitably be recognized by an appreciative world without any very difficult concessions, on our part, to that world as it really exists.

Eventually, we will pay a price for our failure to face up to reality. We are, in fact, already beginning to pay that price. But, for the time being, shows like American Idol and Britain's Got Talent are popular because they confirm us in our appealing dream-world. As I say, I agree with all that.

But I'm not so sure about Susan Boyle. I think she may actually represent a kind of revolt against one of the most damaging features of the contemporary West, namely the obsession with style at the expense of substance. It's human nature to respond favorably to beauty, youth and charm, but in recent decades America has begun privileging these commodities rather drastically.

Spengler mentions the glad-handing frat boys who have been running Wall Street and the "weekly Walpurgisnacht" of clubbing that is the focus of so much young ambition. In truth, the skills needed to succeed at a frat party or a dance club have been, for many years now, very marketable in almost every field of endeavor in the prosperous West. I've argued here before that "fitting in" has become the key to membership in the American elite. Well, the best way to fit in is to have an appealing style. Looks and charm have always been important in achieving recognition and success, but now they're heavily weighted like never before.

It's true, amazingly, even in higher education. It's almost a commonplace that the ideal candidate for an academic job is young, inexperienced(!), personable, hip and (ideally) good-looking. I think I'm fairly safe in saying that these "qualifications" are also valuable for other fields in which performance is difficult to evaluate, especially ex ante.

Don't even get me started about Obama.

Anyway, in pop music -- and pop culture generally -- it's fairly obvious that sex appeal especially is overvalued relative to other kinds of skill and talent. It's rather extraordinary that for the really big singing stars, it's more important to have a certain look and style than to be able to sing, write songs, or play instruments. Britney Spears, Hannah Montana, and most hip-hop "artists" are evidence that it isn't really about the music any more. Video didn't just kill the radio star; it killed popular appreciation of music. One can almost understand those tuneless contestants on American Idol who don't get it when Simon and the gang tell them they can't sing. So what? In contemporary pop, vocal ability seems almost like a technicality.

Susan Boyle can sing. She's not the best there ever was; she might not even be outstanding by the standards of recording artists a half-century ago. But she is very, very good. And (pace Spengler) it probably took her years of practice to develop her talent to its present level. She's the antithesis of people who succeed in the entertainment industry because they slot neatly into a fantasy of what a celebrity should be. Obviously, that's a big part of her appeal. It was a big part of Paul Potts's appeal as well.*

So, I would argue that Boyle represents an impulse to reject the television notion that superficial allure is a sufficient measure of aptitude in all things. And that's a good thing.

Sure, Boyle probably appeals most strongly to people who have been screwed over by the cult of beauty and charm. To that extent, Boyle-worship is a form of self-indulgence and potentially a retreat from one fantasy into another. But nobody would be taking Boyle seriously if she couldn't actually sing, whereas we've elevated lots of mediocre singers to superstardom on the strength of how good they look in a tube-top. We've elevated CEOs, politicians, and journalists based on very little more. A little ressentiment right about now might be a healthy thing.

Insofar as Boyle represents a reaction against a culture of preferment based too much on style, she might even be a sign of hope for our society as a whole.

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[*I should note that I agree with those commentators who think the Susan Boyle phenomenon was orchestrated by the producers of Britain's Got Talent. I think they knew she was a good singer before she walked in front of the audience, and they staged -- or emphasized by editing -- the derision she faced before she opened her mouth. But that doesn't change anything about the nature of her appeal.]

Uncertainty, Torture, Abortion, Etc.

Following up on Alpheus' post on Abortion and Uncertainty, I would add that one corollary of uncertainty is not to remain permanently suspended in doubt and inaction, but to defer to the accumulated wisdom of mankind embodied in precedent, custom, tradition. For abortion, torture, what have you, our uncertainty ought to canvas custom and tradition, and (ceteris paribus) follow their wisdom. This not a universal remedy: there are multiple traditions and evil customs; as mass abortion becomes ever more enduring, for example, the argument against it will have to rely ever less on tradition and custom, ever more on universal moral values. But if custom and tradition are not a universal remedy, they are still a remedy in many circumstances.

Andrew Sullivan's "conservatism of doubt" seems insecurely grounded on the rock of tradition, at least where gay marriage is concerned. Nu, we all pick and choose as to when we choose to innovate and depart from custom; but Sullivan's unwillingness to acknowledge that he has departed from tradition and custom is deeply annoying.

The torture issue is peculiarly unprecedented, therefore peculiarly resistant to the aid of custom. Consider, after all, the varieties of torture: 1) for pleasure; 2) for the ritual satisfaction of honor; 3) to enforce the disciplinary terror of the state on the human body so as to render it obedient; 4) as legal procedure; 5) as a military tactic. Most critiques of torture - most custom regarding torture - speak to the first four categories; for the fifth we have relatively little precedent to guide us. As Rich Lowry notes, the "torture memos" are remarkable for their lengthy attempt to search for precedent in an unprecedented situation; to apply law to a blank map. (The memos, by the by, do use the significant phrase "you have informed us" about matters of fact as they seek to apply legal guidance. One of the nubs of the argument against torture is, of course, that what the government informs you may not be true. Worth keeping in mind.) We are forced to innovate, and our innovations will have great power in the future as precedent.

I wander somewhat. The main point is that uncertainty is an indication that relying on our own powers of reason may be a dangerous folly.

Speaking of Beauty Queens Straying From the Script

At about the 1:35 mark.

Bad News

No Costa Rican reality show for Blago. As Matthew Arnold said, the world "hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light...."

Abortion and Uncertainty

Like most Americans, I'm ambivalent about where to draw the legal line on abortion. Only one thing seems clear to me, and it's that abortion is not morally unproblematic. It's not something we want to sanctify, or celebrate, or view with total untroubled calm. Even politicians like Obama who have supported extremely laissez-faire positions on abortion (not to say infanticide) have to admit as much.

Which is why Ruth Marcus's column in the Washington Post today is so obtuse, intellectually as well as morally. Ironically, "obtuse" is the very adjective that Marcus throws at Palin in her column.

Marcus quotes extensively from Sarah Palin's recent remarks at a right-to-life event in Indiana. At that event, Palin acknowledged that, when she learned she was pregnant with her son Trig, and again when she found out Trig would have Down's Syndrome, the possibility of having an abortion crossed her mind.

Marcus then argues that, under a regime where abortions were prohibited, Palin wouldn't have been able to make what she believes is the choice to carry Trig to term. Likewise, Marcus says that, if abortion were outlawed, Palin wouldn't have had the chance to be proud of her daughter Bristol's similar choice in the case of Palin's grandson Tripp.

What the hell is the point here? Should we legalize murder, rape, arson, burglary, and the whole roster of acts our society now recognizes as crimes just so that, when people refrain from these crimes, they can feel good knowing they refrained entirely out of decency and not partially out of fear? That would be stupid, but Marcus doesn't give us any reason to believe it's not exactly what her reasoning implies.

Marcus's concluding paragraphs put a cherry on top of the stupidity sundae:

For the crowd listening to her at last week's dinner, Palin's disclosure served the comfortable role of moral reinforcement: She wavered in her faith, was tempted to sin, regained her strength and emerged better for it.

As for those us less certain that we know, or are equipped to instruct others, when life begins and when it is permissible to terminate a pregnancy, Palin's speech offered a different lesson: Abortion is a personal issue and a personal choice. The government has no business taking that difficult decision away from those who must live with the consequences.

But it seems to me that, if there's any significant uncertainty about "when life begins and when it is permissible to terminate a pregnancy," then we ought to err on the side of protecting life. If I'm anti-abortion, it's exactly because I don't know how to think about the early stages of human life, and this epistemological modesty inclines me to believe that asking a woman to carry a child to term -- even if it has serious genetic defects -- is probably less cruel than extinguishing a human life. I remain ambivalent about exactly what strictures should be placed on abortion. But the idea of strictures seems reasonable to me.

It's Marcus and the staunchest defenders of access to abortion who look to me like absolutists. They're either sure that the fetus isn't human life which demands moral consideration, or they're sure about the value of that life in relation to the life of the mother (or the preferences of society). And we've seen the weird, disturbing effects of their need to defend their certainty as the abortion issue bleeds over into other "what is life?" issues like stem cell research and euthanasia. The thinking clearly runs from consequence to cause: (1) women must be allowed to have any abortions they want, (2) therefore the fetus cannot deserve moral consideration, (3) therefore no "unwanted" life, and no life that can't speak for itself, can deserve moral consideration, (4) therefore....

My own thinking on the subject is a lot less clear-cut. I don't know where morally significant life begins. I don't know when it's permissible to destroy life and when it's not. And that's exactly why abortion bothers me.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

I kid you not:

Duke University anticipates receipt of award funding from the 2009 Economic Stimulus Act (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act). As a result, Duke is currently seeking individuals interested in potential employment in a variety of postdoctoral research positions.

Largely science fields, so I can't quite say they're funding historians, but still ...

Military Cultures

I occasionally wonder - but not so much as to do any actual research - about the political culture of various officers corps around the world. To wit:

* Are the European officer corps really enthusiastic about this whole eunuch culture social-democratic wuss-state? Is the sort of person who becomes a military officer in Europe remotely like the rest of his countrymen? Are they recruited from tight familial castes? And in particular, what are the French officers like nowadays? They did mount a soft coup in favor of de Gaulle in 1958; have they given up such ambitions?

* What's the prestige and pay (by informal string-pulling, extortion, etc.) of officers in Russia, China, and India? Do the sons of Chinese generals become generals, or are they all crony capitalists? How autonomous is the Russian military from KGB-Kremlin control? Are Chinese lieutenants pro-Communist? Are Indian lieutenants committed to the secular state of India? (Are Turkish lieutenants committed to a secular Turkish state?)

* How many countries have competent NCOs? How many of them have colleges for sergeant-majors, etc., the way we do?

* The French military is 15% Muslim. Apparently some French Muslim soldiers have refused to fight against fellow Muslims; non-Muslim soldiers are apparently deeply suspicious of the reliability of their Muslim comrades. How much has the growth of numbers of Muslims in European armies begun to affect military and political strategic planning in Europe? Will Europe be unwilling to fight Muslim states because it can't rely on its own soldiers?

* After 50 years and more of contact between the American military and a host of other militaries around the world, how much have we Americanized their officer corps? In what ways? Are their splits between traditionalists and Americanizers?

Torture and Terrorist Recruitment

Of all the reasons offered for why the U.S. had to stop using morally questionable interrogation techniques on captured terrorists, by far the least persuasive -- to me anyway -- is the claim that reports of torture helped al Qaeda recruitment. I heard this argument twice this morning while channel surfing through the Sunday talk shows.

Personally, I suspect that if potential al Qaeda recruits thought that capture by the U.S. was going to result in real, agonizing, honest-to-god flayed-alive-with-a-car-battery-hooked-to-the-genitals torture, they'd be a lot less likely to sign up for jihad and "martyrdom." I think it's just human nature. On the other hand, I think certainty that the worst they're going to suffer at the Americans' hands is bright lights and a lot of annoying questions will, all else being equal, embolden potential jihadis.

I'm not saying their aren't lots of other reasons to stop using controversial interrogation techniques. The purely ethical arguments against techniques that might be considered torture if carried too far seem fairly compelling. We shouldn't discount the effect on our prestige, either. But I just don't buy the idea that there are lots of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds in places like Cairo and Islamabad who are saying: "The Americans waterboard? That does it! I'm going to terrorist training camp!"

I suspect the main reason anyone takes this argument about the positive effect of torture on enemy recruitment seriously is that in general we believe the motives of Muslim extremists are purer than they actually are. There's a kind of sacred horror that attaches to suicide bombers, for example. We tend to think they must all be fanatically devoted to their cause, with nerves of steel and souls as white as snow (or black as hell). But in practice, it turns out that a lot of them are social outcasts, the mentally handicapped, dishonored women, or some other category of people easily tricked or threatened or browbeaten into giving up their lives. Frankly, secularists tend to think the religious are more fanatical than they actually are. For American leftist secularists, who tend to wonder whether there's anything that makes it worthwhile to risk one's life and limbs, the whole rest of the courage scale is apt to appear in foreshortened perspective. If the guy they knew in high school is willing to leave his wife and his comfortable home and risk his life for a U.S.A. that (in the leftists' imagination) isn't really threatened, then why shouldn't a devout Muslim from a Middle Eastern slum be willing to risk his life to punish the Great Satan for putting his co-religionists in "stress positions"?

In fact, for most humans, the instinct against suicide is fairly strong.* Ditto for the instinct that tells us to avoid severe pain. For the overwhelming majority of mankind, physical courage is in inverse proportion to the risk being run. Love and despair, two emotions that are durable as well as powerful, can affect the incentive structure -- and I buy the idea that despair contributes to Muslim radicalism. Hatred and rage, however, don't have the same staying power as motivators and I doubt they can compete with fear.

If I'm right about this, then the single best way to discourage al Qaeda recruitment is to make it very likely that an al Qaeda fighter will be killed or otherwise harmed.

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[*For a compelling attempt to express this on film, see Kobayashi's Harakiri, a savage attack on the idea of samurai honor.]

Spengler Unmasks Himself

Here.

At the Grocery Store

A Certain Song plays in the background. Different grocery-store employees sing out, at different times, That Name:

RAAAAHXANE!

Either they've heard that song too often, or they like it a lot.

Which reminds me of the Roxanne Tango from the Most Edited Movie of all time, Moulin Rouge, which Goldberry and I both love. I'd post a YouTube link, but (aside from it being illegal) none of the clips have the entire actual scene as it appears in the movie.

Women in the Military

FLG has a post on women in the military. I have nothing to say directly to his post. However, it reminds me of an old critique I have of the various people who want to get rid of women from the military: where are they going to get the men to replace them? I'm not sure we have the 200K-odd men in the country willing and fit to serve as soldiers. So while I take the various critiques of women in the military seriously - unit cohesion, ability to fight, etc. - I would absolutely refuse to make the military all-male again until I am sure we have enough men for the armed services.

Mind you, the armed services include an enormous tail behind the fighting edge, which the armed services have determined must be uniformed; that is a choice which could be revisited. Reclassify parts of the tail as civilian - and continuingly open to women - and you strengthen the case for an all-male military. But the reclassification has to come first.

And for FLG: when all our airplanes are remote-controlled drones, then there shouldn't be any problem having both sexes serve as remote-controllers.

All the News That's Fit to Print...AND NO ONE DISAGREES

A couple of days ago, I saw a TV ad for the New York Times. (I forget what I was watching; it was probably a cable news show.) At first, the ad didn't look much different to me from the other easy-to-parody ads that the Times has run on television over the years: a bunch of folks from different races -- but essentially indistinguishable from one another in being all impeccably hip, upwardly mobile, and attractive -- talked about what they liked about their favorite sections. "I took a trip to Spain and, thanks to the Travel Section, it was the best vacation of my young, successful life!" "Business and Financial keeps me up to date on all the news I need to know to stay clean-cut and telegenic!" You know the drill.*

But in this ad, which I can't seem to find online, there was something different. At one point, a large face -- older white male, stereotypically authoritative -- filled the screen and said: "The best journalists in the world work at the New York Times...AND THERE'S NO DEBATE ABOUT THAT." I'm pretty sure the capital letters were there in the guy's voice.

Of course, there is debate about that, now more than ever. But even if I didn't know that, I might infer it from the ad's weird insistence that THERE'S NO DEBATE. In general, it's not confidence-inducing to be told something and then to be told, immediately, that THERE'S NO DEBATE about it. It was a small part of the ad, but it felt incongruous -- even suggestive of anxiety.

Who exactly are they trying to convince?

[*Oddly, New York Times TV ads never feature someone saying, "I love Maureen Dowd's op-ed column. She makes me laugh and think at the same time."]

The Innumeracy Epidemic

Yet more hard-to-believe "data," this time from a Michigan obesity study:

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Morbidly obese adults are sedentary for more than 99 percent of the day, getting only a fraction of the amount of walking that experts recommend for staying healthy, a small study suggests.

The study of 10 men and women* found that participants spent an average of 23 hours and 52 minutes sleeping, lying down or sitting each day. They typically took about 3,700 steps throughout the day -- compared with the 10,000 steps that experts recommend for healthy living.

This one's a real gem. It's already incredible on its face that ten people, at any level of obesity that doesn't qualify them for a special on the Learning Channel, are only vertical for an average of eight minutes every twenty-four hours. (The Reuters article assures us that, beyond than being fat, these folks have no mobility-limiting health issues.)

But more incredible still is the idea that the the 8 minutes of average "active time" can be reconciled with 3,700 as the average number of steps per day. That's almost eight steps a second. We're expected to believe that these people hardly ever moved but, when they moved, they moved almost twice as fast as professional runners.

I'd like to believe there's some kind of typo here, but that "99 per cent" in the first sentence makes it unlikely that a mere typo is responsible for the absurdly high proportion of sedentary time. Most likely, this is an example of a phenomenon I've repeatedly noted: numbers in media-reported studies of hot-button issues (obesity, global warming, etc.) are usually crap.

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[*I'm not even going to mention the absurdity of giving national coverage to a study where N = 10. Did they think it was okay for their sample to be tiny because the people were so big?]

Philip Larkin

Is my new role model.

Unaware

Somewhere in grad school, I learned to use references to classical authors as a substitute for original thought. So my first reaction when I heard the White House's claim that Obama was "unaware" of yesterday's tea parties was to recall a story in the Anecdota (or "Secret History") of the early Byzantine historian Procopius.

I don't remember many details of the story -- late antiquity isn't really my thing -- but the gist is that the Sassanids had been waging a devastating war against the eastern provinces of Justinian's empire, and envoys were sent from Constantinople to Ctesiphon to negotiate a peace. At one point in the negotiations, a representative of the Sassanids demanded to know how the Emperor of the Romans felt about some matter under discussion. Justinian's ambassador, wishing to impress the Persians and puncture any pretensions they might have, loftily declared that the emperor didn't concern himself with minor details and was, in fact, unaware that the war had been taking place.

It goes without saying that the Sassanids, though astonished, were not impressed.

Juries & Jury Nullification

Alpheus' post on juries a little while ago has gotten me reading a bit on the history of juries and jury nullification. There is indeed an interesting history in the nineteenth century of the decline of the jury (in theory) as a decider of law, and not just fact, but an interesting afterlife to the present of the debate about whether juries 1) do nullify laws de facto from time to time; 2) should have that right and/or be instructed by a judge that they have that right. The arguments on both sides seem pretty well hashed out - should juries have the right to embody popular sovereignty? Or is the guarantee of exact and equal law more important, and the power of majoritarian democracy to set universal laws unabrogable by an arbitrarily selected few? I confess that I can see the logic behind shackling juries, and the moral weight of the use of jury nullification to uphold Jim Crow; if and when I do make a jury-nullificationist argument, it will be with a sense that the alternative have very powerful virtues. A few brief thoughts:

1) The literature seems to think of jury decisions on questions of law as a legislative power. It seems to me that, Schmittianly, one can conceive of it rather as an executive power - the sovereign ability to declare an exception, to apply ("interpret") the law. Judicial power, therefore, is also somewhat executive in the Schmittian sense.

2) How you conceive of the law bears on what you think of jury nullification. If law is Roman, a matter of universal principle, than a jury interfering in law is seeking to remake universal law. If law is common, a matter of endless precedents, than a jury interfering in law is only creating a particular precedent. Jury decisions on law work better in a common law system, it seems to me.

3) Jury nullification and jury decisions on law will not, alas, do much to restrain the horrible power-grab by judges that Alpheus so much laments. The only remedy for that has to be legislative and executive - the will of the people expressed through the ballot box, not through the jury.

Inflation, Entitlements

Something else for which inflation is a feature, not a bug ... combine massive inflation with insufficient cost-of-living adjustments for social security, medi-whatever, etc., and you reduce your real spending commitments with a maximum of cruelty and a minimum of political accountability. I think we'll get a bipartisan consensus for this.

OMG Blago!

MSI, knowing my love of all things Blagojevich, sends along the fantastic news that former Illinois Governor Milorad "Rod" Blagojevich hopes to participate in some sort of celebrity survivor show called (appropriately enough for a public figure facing prison) "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!":

The network describes the show as Swiss Family Robinson-type competition in which 10 celebrities are dropped in the heart of the jungle "to face fun and comedic challenges designed to test their survival skills." American viewers decide which celebrities stay or go, in addition to selecting the challenges used to earn food, supplies and luxury items.

The last remaining star is crowned king or queen of the jungle.

Please, God, let this happen. And please, Judge Zagel, agree to lift Blagojevich's travel restrictions so that he can go to Costa Rica (where this show will be filmed) and bring me televised joy. I've never called in to vote for contestants on a TV reality show before, but I swear if Blago makes it onto "I'm a Celebrity..." I'll be phoning in to vote the way a Chicago pol would want me to -- early and often.

Not that Blagojevich will need my help. Until last fall his survival skills were pretty good. In 2002, he was just a measly state representative when he knocked off former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris in the Democratic primary. In the 2006 gubernatorial election, he prevailed despite low approval ratings and vicious Republican attack ads that tried to portray him as somehow corrupt. Blago has a history of beating the odds. Blago, you see, is a fighter.

When I say Blago's a fighter, I mean it. This is a former Golden Gloves boxer, of whom his trainer once said, "He wasn't a very good boxer, but he liked to fight." Another perspective on Blago was provided by Illinois state representative Brendan Phelps. "He likes to fight," Phelps said. Finally, consider Blago's own words late last year: "I will fight this thing every step of the way. I will fight, I will fight, I will fight."

So, yeah: Blago's a fighter. He'll eat those wussy other celebrities for breakfast. He will be king of the jungle. And you'd better believe he'll earn plenty of "food, supplies and luxury items" along the way -- just like he always has.

But I don't want to make Rod Blagojevich seem two-dimensional. For Blago the man of action is also, as we know, a man of letters. He quotes Kipling, and he quotes Tennyson.

And today, to my limitless gratification, he said this:

Black care never catches a rider whose pace is fast enough. You got that?

Strong words. Strong, bewildering words. The New York Times thinks Blago is quoting Teddy Roosevelt (himself a boxer and literary man, by the way). And Teddy Roosevelt did say something very similar. But I think the Times has failed to consider the intertextual allusiveness of which Blagojevich is capable. For Blago remains a poetry man first, last, and always. And it wouldn't surprise me a bit to discover that Blago knows some Latin.

Here's Horace, Odes 3.1, 1ines 36-40

...sed Timor et Minae
scandunt eodem quo dominus, neque
decedit aerata triremi et
post equitem sedet atra Cura.

Which in English roughly translates to:

But Fear and Threats
Climb as high as the master of a house,
Nor does black Care [atra cura] disembark from a bronze ship;
It sits even behind a rider.

So Horace, as Blago surely knows, is the ultimate source of the image of "black care and the rider" And Blago, master of poetry, no doubt also knows that Horace's poem itself begins with an allusion to the thirtieth epigram of Callimachus. And, given the pervasiveness of the "black care and the rider" image ever since Horace, it's probable that Blago intends other layers of allusion too. But into those layers I can't hope to follow the former governor -- for he rides too fast.

It's enough to note here that Horace Odes 3.1 is a poem about the vanity of pursuing wealth and power. Politics and money, says Horace, yield only distress. Better to renounce high office and riches and choose an honorable poverty:

Why should I build an entry hall,
High in the modern style, with pillars to inspire envy?
Why should I exchange my Sabine valley
For more burdensome riches?

It would be easy for Blago to be thinking such thoughts right about now. Is it worth it? he asks himself. Wouldn't it better to take my lumps, withdraw from the fray, and settle down to a life away from the madding crowd -- Horace's profanum vulgus? Maybe, like Horace, I could devote my life to poetry? Maybe that would be enough....

But then, after a pause, Blago summons up his courage and whispers: No. Well, actually what he whispers has at least one F-word in it, but this is a family blog. Anyway, Blago's rejection of that option is what that quotation from Roosevelt mocking Horatian defeatism ultimately means. It means that Blago won't go gentle into that good night (Dylan Thomas). It means that he won't give way under the bludgeonings of chance (William Ernest Henley). It means that with the power of conviction, there is no sacrifice (Pat Benatar).

In short, it means that Blago is -- say it with me -- a fighter. And Blago still intends to fight. If I were a B-list celebrity with plans to be in Costa Rica this summer, I'd be more than a little scared.

Ride Blago, ride like the wind.

Leisure, Labor, Liberals, and Libertines

Alpheus mentioned approvingly an article by Fred Siegel on the linked statism and libertinism of American liberals, given significantly as a contingent development of American history between 1900 and 1940. Vaguely I wondered if there were some deeper link. Then FLG wrote that Siegel's article fails to mention leisure, and that that is a significant failing. I objected based on the modern definition of leisure; but FLG clearly has a point, based on the original (Aristotelian) meaning of leisure. (That leisure's meaning has decayed is significant in itself.) So, I've been mulling the last few days - quickly skimming the web to discover the existence of a remarkably extensive literature on the philosophy of leisure - and here are a few thoughts. (Reinventing wheels, and doubtless making them square. Where I get various philosophers wrong, please jump in to correct.)

I think the different philosophies turn on whether one ascribes moral and epistemic value to labor. That is to say: Aristotle takes leisure both to be the prerequisite, and the result, of the exercise of my old friend phronesis, that is a means both of knowing the world and, by the exercise of this form of knowledge, improving one's character. Leisure also allows the exercise of episteme, scientific knowledge, but this, strictly speaking, doesn't improve the character, and is not the ultimate goal of leisure. Techne, knowledge of craft, would result from labor, but (although the material for episteme) is not the sort of knowledge that improves character. Therefore an Aristotelian opposition between labor and leisure, both sociological and epistemological; the leisured man can know the world and himself as a laboring man cannot; the leisured man is superior to the laborer.

Smith (following various early modern mercantilists) shifts phronesis/prudence into the economic realm; takes decisions in one's own economic self-interest to be an exercise of prudence. Labor, as such, is not itself prudential; but the decision of how to use one's labor for one's own benefit is. Furthermore, the exercise of this economic prudence leads to the division of labor, and with this a specialization, ultimately improvement, of character. The exercise of economic prudence articulates and individualizes character - and increases the amount of wealth in society, hence the material prerequisite for leisure. Smith would take the exercise of such prudence to form one's character such that one exercises one leisure in a similarly prudential fashion - and prudence is supposed ultimately to be compelling, as the collective exercise of prudence that is the market economy forcibly reshapes character in its prudential mold. Smith, I think, is ambivalent about whether such prudence is superior to the life of the jobless leisured, of the idle aristocrat. On the one hand, he does take the striving, prudent man to be superior in some respects to the feckless aristo. On the other hand, prudence is meant to be a ladder by which the common man can arise to the higher prudence of the leisured; economic decision-making has value, but more as a means to an end than an end in itself.

Marx, following Hegel, ascribes this moral and epistemic value to labor, techne, itself. (And this is a natural result of shifting the political world from prudence to science, a shift going back at least to Hobbes; scientized phronesis aligns more easily with techne.) But Marx takes the exercise of private interest to corrupt, to alienate this knowledge, as well as profit, from laboring man into things, capital, etc. - and also from exploiting, bourgeois man into capital. The shift toward common interest, communism, etc., is meant to recuperate alienated phronesis as much as it is meant to recuperate alienated capital; the exercise of collective prudence will make the revolution, and the revolution will make the enlightened men with raised consciousness, possessed of the wealth that allows leisure, and able properly to exercise their leisure to their moral self-improvement.

And liberalism abandons this framework entirely. Labor has no epistemic value; neither does economic decisionmaking; nor, indeed, does the activity of leisured aristocratic intellect. The self is an isolated unit; one may doubt that it knows the world, but its ability to know does not derive from its activity in the world. The self knows because the self, in and of itself, has the capacity to know. Material conditions may hinder the self's ability to know - and liberalism may thus have an imperative to change material conditions to allow the self the full expression of its natural ability to know. Hence Dewey, taking as given the Aristotelian division between leisure and labor, and saying that one ought to provide everyone the absolute minimum of education, the absolute minimum of leisure, that will allow them to engage in the pursuit of leisure and improvement of character. Or Rawls, emphasizing the egalitarian aspects of liberalism, says everyone has a right to to a Basic Minimum of leisure. For liberalism, the value of leisure is not so much that the pursuit of knowledge improves the character, as that the accumulation of sensory experiences improves the character - or if it does not, that one has a right to accumulate sensory experiences, regardless.

Getting back to Siegel's thesis of liberalism's statism, libertinism, and hostility to bourgeois virtues: None of these frameworks are wholeheartedly in favor of bourgeois virtues, but the Smithian system is open to them as the others are not; gives economic decisionmaking in the pursuit of individual self-interest moral and epistemic value. Liberalism, indeed, should not, immediately, be as contemptuous of bourgeois virtues as either aristocratic Aristotelianism or collectivizing Marxism. Indifferent - regarding bourgeois work as a useless distraction - but not so actively hostile.

Yet there is a liberal hostility to bourgeois values. It comes, I think, from the relationship of leisure to experience. Experience (the present and future tense of prudence, says Pocock; Erfahrung say various Germans, including Gadamer) is the goal of leisure. For Aristotle, Smith, and Marx, this experience derives from the exercise of prudence (aristocratic, bourgeois, laboring); for liberals, experience is sense experience to be gathered. For liberalism, the goal of leisure is to experience as many different sensations as possible, since education of character (to the extent liberalism cares about this) comes from the variety of experience. A characteristic inclination of liberalism (and libertarianism) therefore is libertinism. Bourgeois values are opposed because they oppose the urge to sample the infinite variety of experience; not only because time spent working is time that cannot be spent in diverse leisure, but because bourgeois values themselves constrain the experimentalist desire.

This is an accurate presumption. Smith deliberately took the exercise of economic prudence to shape character willy-nilly; the line from Smith's prudent constraints on character to Weber's iron cage of economic rationality and modernity is a fairly short one. Smithian man does not desire infinite sense experiences; his urge for individuality and variety (positively valenced both in Smith and liberalism) is expressed via the division of labor, in the varieties of economic experience itself. That is to say, Smithian man individuates by working, by specializing in a particular profession; his particular economic profession is an office that shapes his character, and an individuated means of knowing. Smithian man finds fulfillment in his particular mode of knowledge, not in his variety of sense experiences. And indeed, the Smithian world does limit liberal man, for it specializes his labor, but grants no free rein to the search for sense experience, and indeed can kill the impulse.

The self-understanding of liberalism, therefore, explains the libertine impulse it contains. But why the impulse to statism? This depends on an outside critique of liberalism, rather than it's self-understanding. This would be the rather old idea that although liberalism takes the individual self as a given, it is in point of fact guaranteed, created, by an outside epistemic force - that something of enormous epistemic power must know the liberal individual. God is the obvious answer, but liberalism vitiates belief in God for a variety of reasons. The state is the obvious substitute - the man-created state, Hobbes' Leviathan - by its epistemic power (prior to its disciplinary power) guarantees the individual, allows him to be a rights-bearing creature. Not all liberals realize that liberalism requires the state - hence libertarians - but the failure of such liberals ever to achieve power witnesses how far their self-understanding is from reality. Liberalism and statism are allies; the state knows that liberal individuals exist, and allows them to pursue libertine experience. In Smith, the market forms character; for liberals, the government forms character; both underpin their desired liberties and experiences with coercive iron.

The elitism of liberalism, incidentally, would emerge from the idea that material conditions can hinder the ability to know the world properly. This idea provides both the motivation to redistribute material wealth so all can know, and the sense that, until that moment of redistribution arrives, an elite knows the world best. Smithianism also allows for the idea that leisure allows for greater ability to know the world, but has greater confidence in the ability of the working many to have some knowledge of the world prior to that moment of redistribution. Smithianism does not assume absolute equality of knowledge of the world - but I think it is less elitist than liberalism.

But these are tensions, not necessarily fatal conflicts. Consider David Brooks and his BoBos in Paradise - Bourgeois Bohemians who have happily fused bourgeois virtue and liberal libertinism. In a sense, the entire concept of free-market liberalism, tres American, is an attempt to keep these different principles in productive tension - and perhaps to allow the greatest possible liberty by pitting the coercive powers of market and government against each other, to allow the individual free play among them. Conceivably, then, the debates among Americans are not so much about which principle to adopt whole-heartedly, but rather about how much of each principle to mix into our nation. I grant this is an optimistic take, but why not entertain it in this most optimistic of countries?

Grumpy for Monday: In Defense of Strunk & White

The links at Arts & Letters Daily are normally well worth my time, but when they link to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which runs the A&L Daily site, it can be quite a different story.

For example, it was thanks to A&L Daily that I stumbled onto this silly attack on Strunk and White's Elements of Style. I don't know why I even bothered to read it. Maybe I was looking for something to get mad at. There are lots of teachers and critics who think they're independent thinkers because they're willing to take aim at this little handbook, but their complaints are almost always ill-considered, not to say downright stupid.

The usual beef against Elements of Style is that it's too absolutist. "Sometimes you have to use the passive voice!" the ninnies bleat. Well, duh. Strunk and White say as much. ("This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.") The aim of Elements isn't to lay down a set of unbreakable laws; it's to alert writers, especially undergraduate writers, to the most common mistakes that are likely to spoil their writing.

Anyone with half a brain should be able to grasp this. And Elements is, in my opinion, very, very good at identifying the biggest faults to which undergraduate writers are liable. I can attest that, fifty years after Elements was first published, overuse of the passive voice remains one of the major weaknesses of most college-level prose. Likewise vague language, wordiness, inconsistent tense, dangling participles, and all the other problems to which Strunk and White call attention.

Admittedly Geoffrey K. Pullum's essay in the Chronicle pretends to offer a weird new twist on hostility to Strunk and White. Pullum claims that Elements of Style "has significantly degraded" American students' mastery of English grammar.

This is pretty idiotic on its face. Notoriously, lots of American students aren't taught grammar at all any more. I've found myself having to explain concepts like "pronoun" and "preposition" to beginning Latin students. A disturbing number of these students are confused by the way both these words -- and "participle" as well -- begin with a "p" followed by an "r". Somehow, I don't think these kids were diagramming sentences with ease and aplomb until somebody, at some ill-omened hour, put a copy of Strunk and White into their ink-stained hands.

But let's look at Pullum's evidence. Oh, wait: it turns out he doesn't have any. Really. His closest approach to such evidence, and the centerpiece of his essay, is a self-satisfied claim that Stunk and White don't actually know what the passive voice is:

What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses. "At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard" is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all errors:

*"There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground" has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.

*"It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had" also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.

*"The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired" is presumably fingered as passive because of "impaired," but that's a mistake. It's an adjective here. "Become" doesn't allow a following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that "A new edition became issued by the publishers" is not grammatical.)

These examples can be found all over the Web in study guides for freshman composition classes. (Try a Google search on "great number of dead leaves lying.") I have been told several times, by both students and linguistics-faculty members, about writing instructors who think every occurrence of "be" is to be condemned for being "passive." No wonder, if Elements is their grammar bible. It is typical for college graduates today to be unable to distinguish active from passive clauses. They often equate the grammatical notion of being passive with the semantic one of not specifying the agent of an action. (They think "a bus exploded" is passive because it doesn't say whether terrorists did it.)

Sigh. It's true that the sentences quoted by Pullum do appear in Stunk and White. But the section in which they appear is not titled "Avoid the passive voice." It's titled "Use the active voice." What's wrong with those sentences is the way they begin with unnecessary copulative -- i.e., neither active nor passive -- constructions: "There were...", "It was not long before...", "The reason why he left college was..." The suggested improvements offered by Strunk and White (e.g. "Dead leaves covered the ground.") make this quite clear; so does the paragraph in Elements that immediately precedes the sentences in question:

The habitual use of the active voice, however, makes for forcible writing. This is true not only in narrative concerned principally with action but in writing of any kind. Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively or emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is or could be heard.

So the problem, if there is one, is that people -- people like Pullum, perhaps -- are failing to understand the advice that Strunk and White offer. Now, this may be understandable in the case of students who don't come to Elements with any prior knowledge of what "a transitive in the active voice" is. Strunk and White wrote in an era when students didn't come to college without a basic familiarity with grammar, and there's a real case to be made that Elements needs to be rewritten for a present in which this is no longer true. But such confusion is darn near inexcusable in Geoffrey K. Pullum, co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

What else has Pullum got for us? Well, despite his repeated insistence that Stunk and White are "grammatical incompetents," "gramatically clueless," and "idiosyncratic bumblers," he's actually got nothing else at all on the grammar front. All his other criticisms of Strunk and White are just the same old tired misunderstanding of what a style guide is for. Thus, Pullum cackles about cases where Strunk and White violate their own rules:

"Put statements in positive form," they stipulate, in a section that seeks to prevent "not" from being used as "a means of evasion."

"Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs," they insist. (The motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to me.)

And then, in the very next sentence, comes a negative passive clause containing three adjectives: "The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."

That's actually not just three strikes, it's four, because in addition to contravening "positive form" and "active voice" and "nouns and verbs," it has a relative clause ("that can pull") removed from what it belongs with (the adjective), which violates another edict: "Keep related words together."

Yeah. So what? Strunk and White are offering guidelines, not inflexible rules to be obeyed in every situation. Anyhow, people make mistakes. In fact, we have prescriptive rules precisely because we want to reduce the likelihood that we'll make them. Pullum is like those nitwits who call a moralist a hypocrite because he occasionally fails in his attempt to live by his own principles.

Actually, he's even more of a nitwit, because Strunk and White never claim for their rules any universal validity. It should go without saying that the rubrics in Element aren't "facts." But that doesn't keep Pullum from claiming that some of those headings are "false":

Some of the claims about syntax are plainly false despite being respected by the authors. For example, Chapter IV, in an unnecessary piece of bossiness, says that the split infinitive "should be avoided unless the writer wishes to place unusual stress on the adverb." The bossiness is unnecessary because the split infinitive has always been grammatical and does not need to be avoided. (The authors actually knew that. Strunk's original version never even mentioned split infinitives. White added both the above remark and the further reference, in Chapter V, admitting that "some infinitives seem to improve on being split.") But what interests me here is the descriptive claim about stress on the adverb. It is completely wrong.

Tucking the adverb in before the verb actually de-emphasizes the adverb, so a sentence like "The dean's statements tend to completely polarize the faculty" places the stress on polarizing the faculty. The way to stress the completeness of the polarization would be to write, "The dean's statements tend to polarize the faculty completely."

This is actually implied by an earlier section of the book headed "Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end," yet White still gets it wrong. He feels there are circumstances where the split infinitive is not quite right, but he is simply not competent to spell out his intuition correctly in grammatical terms.

I think reasonable people can argue about the effect of placing an adverb within an infinitive. But not splitting the infinitive with an adverb doesn't automatically mean putting it at the end of the sentence. Sometimes the adverb can go before the infinitive. Sometimes it can go after the infinitive, but not at the end of a sentence or clause. (I'm going to trust that I don't need to waste my time providing examples here.)

More importantly, though, it's a bit daft to expect prescriptions in a handbook never to exhibit the slightest logical inconsistency with one another. People are apt to err in more than one direction, and rules in a handbook are meant to point them away from excess in any direction and back toward the middle. If a list of maxims says both "look before you leap" and "he who hesitates is lost," it doesn't demonstrate the mental muddle of the person who drew up the list.

But Pullum, amazingly, just doesn't get it. He insists on treating the rules in Elements as scientific hypotheses to be proven or disproven by strict standards of logic. Toward the end of his essay, he even makes a weird show of testing a couple of them empirically. The pronoun "none" takes a singular verb, does it? Well, Pullum has found three counterexamples, one each from The Importance of Being Earnest, Dracula, and -- how on earth did Pullum pick these? -- Anne of Avonlea. Hypothesis falsified! Take that, Strunk and White!

Strunk and White, not being maniacs, didn't think of their rules in this bizarre way. In Elements, they observe over and over that sometimes their rules ought to be disregarded. For example, they acknowledge that split infinitives are an area in which "the ear must be quicker than the handbook":

Some infinitives seem to improve on being split, just as a stick of round stovewood does. 'I cannot bring myself to really like the fellow.' The sentence is relaxed, the meaning is clear, the violation is harmless and scarcely perceptible. Put the other way, the sentence becomes stiff, needlessly formal. A matter of ear.

Strunk and White understood what they were trying to do better than Pullum does. They were trying to get students thinking about the right issues so as to avoid heedlessly falling into common but avoidable mistakes. Of course it's okay to split an infinitive sometimes, but a good writer doesn't split an infinitive without giving it a second's thought. Rules in a book like this are to meant to prompt the writer to think, maybe just for that one second, about what he's doing.

Pullum seems to believe either that people don't need such rules or that they won't pay attention to them anyway. He writes that many of the rules in Elements are "vapid," "useless," or "tautologous." He doesn't think undergrads need to hear suggestions like "be clear," "omit needless words," or "do not explain too much." I beg to differ; large numbers of them do need it very badly. Heck, I still need much of this advice and so do lots of professors I know. I daresay it wouldn't do Geoffrey K. Pullum any harm either. Ease up on the adjectives, man. Do not overstate.

Oh, and by the way: Opinions scattered indiscriminately about leave the mark of egotism on a work. Reading Pullman's essay, I can't avoid the conclusion that he's a guy puffed up with his status as a top analytical linguist, in contrast to poor undereducated schlubs like Strunk and White ("Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less") who missed out on "the post-1957 explosion of theoretical linguistics." But somehow, it's Strunk and White who have achieved durable acclaim.

How can the world encompass such an injustice? Here's a hint. Writing well is a valuable skill. It always has been, and it always will be. Strunk and White produced a book which, for all its faults -- both real and imaginary -- helps people to write better than they otherwise would. I doubt one could say the same thing about The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. At least not with a straight face.*

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[*To be fair, Mr. Pullum has done some very good work in linguistics. Most notably, be once wrote a wonderful article, which I read as an undergraduate, debunking the old myth about Eskimos' having a zillion words for snow. But that doesn't mean his piece in the Chronicle isn't basically garbage.]

Happy Easter

Duccio, The Women at the Holy Sepulchre (early 14th century)

Happy Easter!

Back in a few days.

It turns out that my very tall, very large student, who clearly has read the Bible intensively, and asks a fair number of questions in class, is also a nationally regarded football player. I'm vaguely gratified that he takes my class seriously.

More on the Rule of Law

At NRO today, Andy McCarthy discusses another way in which the idea of the rule of law has been perverted, namely through insistence on the application of civil law beyond the boundaries of civil society. Once again, the problem is that the forms of the rule of law have displaced its spirit.

Fred Siegel on the Origin of the Left

Jonah Goldberg, on his Liberal Fascism blog, links to this essay by Fred Siegel on the sources of modern liberalism. I haven't read Liberal Fascism -- in part, I wasn't sure I needed to, being a believer in its thesis already -- but Siegel's essay is good, good stuff. It's especially nice in its effort to explain how modern liberalism can encompass both economic statism and cultural libertarianism:

Historically, the main streams of modern liberal ideology flowed from two very different headwaters, both of which emerged from the hot springs of World War I. The first, which took a culturally libertarian course, was a response to the excesses of Woodrow Wilson's World War I propaganda campaign and to the 1919 "Red Scare," an anti-Bolshevik fright fest that followed the war with mass arrests and deportations. Its bedrock assumption was that middle-class American society was an agent of repression that stifled the creativity of its intellectuals and artists. The second statist stream flowed from the government's enhanced control of the economy during World War I. The War Industries Board created to supply the American Expeditionary Force in Europe inspired the liberal love affair with a planned economy of the sort that came to be represented by the Soviet Union. Its underlying assumption, even before the onset of the Great Depression, was that the American government, if it were turned over to the proper professionals, could be an agent of both economic and moral salvation. In its varied incarnations, liberalism embraced both the ideal of the spontaneous, culturally creative individual and government economic planning that depended on making people predictable. Over time the two streams converged as the chemically unstable admixture of cultural libertarianism and economic statism we recognize as contemporary liberalism. Different though they were and still are, the two streams flowed into the same river bed carved out by a common hostility to the middle-class mores associated with despoliations of democracy and by hopes for a Europeanized America led by a new aristocracy of talent.

Do read the whole thing. It starts slow, but on the whole it's a marvelous tour d'horizon and a Who's Who of the intellectual left between the wars. I note in passing that Siegel's explanation of how intellectuals turned against capitalism and democracy has much in common with Joseph Schumpeter's gloomy diagnosis of capitalism's future (i.e., the success of capitalism produces too many successful intellectuals who feel entitled and empowered to destroy the existing order in the service of what amounts to their own fantasies).

What I really love is that the third commenter on Siegel's essay says, essentially, "yes, I'm a liberal and this is what I believe in." Of course, Siegel himself is no right-winger, which gives his rather scathing critique of the Left additional interest and plausibility.

Dogs + Yoga = Doga

I need no further proof that MSI is right about the New York Times Style section:

Ms. Yang, 39, a financial analyst in Manhattan, has gone to doga classes for more than a year. Though she says that her 10-pound Shih Tzu, Sophie, has helped deepen her stretches by providing extra weight, the main reason she goes is to bond with her dog. “I always leave with a smile,” she said.

Such post-doga smiles run about $15 to $25 a class. Whether this is a bargain or overpriced depends on how — and why — the class is taught. Paula Apro, 40, of Eastford, Conn., owner of an online yoga retail store, tried a class near her home last summer.

“A stuffed animal — but not even a dog-shaped stuffed animal — was used by the instructor,” she said. Owners struggled to get their very real dogs to replicate the stuffed-animal poses, she said, and bags of treats were used to get the dogs to change positions. “It was lunacy,” Ms. Apro recalled. “Peanuts, my retired racer greyhound, didn’t participate at all. Instead, I did downward-facing dog while he ate the most treats he’s ever had in a 60-minute period.”

Feudal Revolution, Addendum

This is basically a note to Andrew.

So, after a few more books on encastellation, plus looking at the web-site you mentioned (the reference is to Michel Bur's article, in a book not at my local library) ... it looks to me as if a good deal of the debate re encastellation depends on the latest archaeological finds. I.e., you dig up another timber fort in Picardy, it's ten years earlier than the previous earliest timber fort ever found, off in the Dordogne, and now you get to revise your entire historical thesis: The Vikings caused encastellation, and it spread from Picardy outward, bringing the whole feudal complex with it! But what if a new archaeological dig finds an earlier timber fort off in the Loire valley? Then you have to come up with a whole new thesis. Somebody or another I was reading was suggesting a more modest approach: that encastellation pops up at a number of different places in the Frankish world at more or less the same time, perhaps independently and for different reasons, and that while it correlates loosely with the advance of the Feudal Revolution, there isn't enough evidence to give it a strongly causative role - i.e., it is possible to Oppress Peasants even without a castle, although a castle may help in the long run. I confess that while I love bold and adventurous explanations for historical change, this last version seems to have all the virtues of being diffident, modest, and shy. Your thoughts?

Ernest May, Strange Victory

I’ve just finished reading Ernest May’s Strange Victory, and I enjoyed it very much; I have some thoughts on the book.

1) The essential thesis is that flaws in the system of French military intelligence, and virtues in the system of German military intelligence – flaws and virtues which turn on the way one analyzes military intelligence, the way it is distributed through the military bureaucracies, and the integration of military intelligence with military strategy – allowed the German army to win an unlikely, but decisive, victory over the French army in May 1940. As corollaries of this thesis, May argues that French defeat was not overdetermined either by a backward military or a spiritually enfeebled French nation; absent the catastrophic failure of intelligence, and a remarkable string of German good luck, one could expect (as the French did in 1940) that a strong French army, backed by a popular will as resolute as that of Great Britain, would have achieved victory in a long war over a Germany hobbled by economic weaknesses and significant internal dissatisfaction. (Not least in the German officer corps.)

2) I take this central thesis 1) to shift the explanation for German victory over France from the socio-cultural sphere to the military; and 2) within the military sphere, to assign major explanatory weight to the operations of military intelligence. The first half seems fairly convincing: one shouldn’t look for socio-cultural scapegoats (=“contexts”) at the expense of the obvious, that the Germans plain outfought the French. The second half involves details of military history that I am not equipped to judge, lacking full knowledge of the (presumably enormous) historical scholarship on the conquest of France. I presume that May, emphasizing the value of military intelligence, is arguing against historians who emphasize (respectively) armor, air, combined arms, military doctrine, logistics, etc. Since I haven’t read those other arguments, I would be cautious about accepting everything May says as holy writ—and I would note that if one of these other military factors did matter more, this might also affect the socio-cultural vs. military argument.

3) For the operations of military intelligence itself, I note that French intelligence has this wonderfully Descartian assumption: there are facts out there, reason can discover them, one need not bother to interpret them, for they argue for themselves. The Germans, on the other hand, assume facts need interpretation, and that one needs to consider human psychology in analyzing any set of facts. This speaks to my own research interests, which focus on the debates between prudential (rhetorical) reason and scientific reason. I know there’s a direct line from Machiavelli to Clausewitz, and from there to Prussian military history and military doctrine, which are wonderfully prudential; it looks to me as if the French adopted the German military model while retaining a Descartian definition of reason, and that the intellectual misfit helps explain what went wrong for them in 1940. This also speaks to the practice of French historians, as opposed to German and other historians; I think that where French historians characteristically go wrong is where French military intelligence went wrong in 1940; in an overweening confidence that scientific reason can discover a sole historical truth, where the facts speak for themselves.

4) May is not interested in the “France-was-spiritually-rotted” thesis in itself, but only as it affects his own military-intelligence thesis. I don’t think they are as mutually exclusive as he puts it. That is: no, the French generals were not betrayed by a rotten nation, and, no, the spiritual rottenness of France does not explain the French military collapse of May 10 to May 14. But Marc Bloch included the French military in his indictment of a rotten France, and it is difficult to read his narrative of French military doctrine and strategy through the 1930s and into 1940 without considering the possibility that the French military was not only intellectually arthritic but also spiritually enfeebled. How, above all, can one understand the strong aversion of the French military to risking French lives without reference to the generals’ knowledge that the French political elite, and people, desperately wanted to avoid the carnage of another World War? May says the desire to avoid bloodshed is characteristic of democracies – and he describes the risk-averse French of 1940, confident of their long-term superiority in materiel, as very similar to the Anglo-Americans of 1944-45 whom Max Hastings describes in Armageddon – but one ought to consider the possibility that the French, as a nation, were peculiarly averse even among democracies to risk and bloodshed, and that this provided a peculiar constraint on their military planning. Furthermore, May describes (insufficiently) a riven, feckless French political elite, which had ceded semi-dictatorial powers to Daladier from 1938, whose government fell not only a month before May 1940, but again on the evening of 9 May, leaving France technically without political leadership literally on the eve of the invasion. (Chamberlain, after all, didn’t resign as PM until it was clear he would have a replacement!) The feckless political leadership, it seems to me, aligns with the “spiritually rotted” thesis – and I don’t see how one can criticize a political elite without ultimately criticizing the nation that elected them. One shouldn’t go along with the French generals’ attempt to make scapegoats of the French nation; but neither should one allow the French nation to scapegoat the French generals. One might say that the French generals lost the war between May 10 and May 14, but they never would have arrived at May 10 in a position to lose the war if France had not been subject to dry rot for many years. After all, May says France could have defeated Germany in 1938 or 1939, if it had summoned up the will to fight. Why it had no will he does not sufficiently explain. (I do need to read Eugen Weber’s The Hollow Years.)

5) A direct test of the relevance of the “France-was-spiritually-rotted” thesis to France’s collapse in May 1940 would require a different sort of military history, one that focuses more on the day-to-day experience of fighting on the front lines, (and of military service on the rear lines,) and the hour-by-hour reactions of the French officer corps. It would also focus significantly more attention on the two weeks after May 14, which May summarizes rapidly – the weeks in which France failed to recover from the initial German blow. Such a military history would also pay close attention to the political and popular developments in France during those two weeks, and how they related to the military collapse. May’s choice about what to tell in detail, and what to skim, in itself bolsters his argument. Perhaps he is correct; but I’d like to read the book I’ve just sketched, so I could see how the counter-argument works.

6) He also argues that Germany was more internally riven, weaker, than generally presumed. Much of this turns on the blather of German generals about mounting a coup against Hitler in the late 1930s. May takes this as a real possibility; I think it possible that the generals were presumptuous fools when they babbled so. At any rate, I am skeptical of this part of the book.

7) For my own interests, Strange Victory speaks interestingly to the question of civil-military relations. France and Germany were clearly both hobbled by institutionally and culturally autonomous militaries, contemptuous of civilian control, and only controllable (in Germany’s case) by extraordinarily intense charismatic leadership that, in the long run, imposed significant costs (!) on military efficiency. May argues that Hitler’s input in military decisionmaking was helpful because, even if he was rather nutty, he was a good politician, and he knew how politicians thought and behaved, as his generals did not. Clearly one would like to have such political input without requiring a Fuhrer. A comparison of civil-military relations during World War II among the major powers, including Britain and America, would be illuminating. For modern times, the tensions of the Bush administration with the Pentagon re Iraq (2003 invasion, 2007 surge), and perhaps the current and future tensions of the Obama administration with the Pentagon re the speed of an Iraq drawdown, all speak to the continuing relevance of this issue. To put it crudely, I can imagine that Cheney had read Strange Victory when he decided to drop by the Pentagon to look at the military intelligence about Iraq first hand.

8) I’m also interested in how democratic culture underpins military modernism – the contrast between modern Arab armies, where no one lower than a colonel is willing to take the initiative, and the modern American army, were every private routinely takes the initiative. Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat (which I also just read) talks of French colonels wasting time doing routine paperwork, which seems due not just to mistrust of civilians as civilians, but also to mistrust of their competence as ordinary men. May talks of the the French generals giving incredibly detailed orders partly because they don’t trust their subordinates to take the initiative – again, partly because they’re civilians, partly because they doubt their competence to do so. The German strategy relies on this French to be unable to react quickly – and apparently relies on their own men to be more able to take the initiative, at every level. Were the French correct to mistrust their common soldiers to take the initiative? Does this reflect a relative social backwardness, relative inegalitarian ethos, in France as compared to Germany? It would be interesting to read a book on the subject.

Breaking My Own Rule

You must read this post by Steve Sailer. I was in tears of laughter half-way through.

What is "the Rule of Law"?

As I've mentioned before on this blog, I'm basically in favor of gay marriage if -- and this "if" is critical -- it's instituted democratically. Vermont just got gay marriage the right way. Iowa just got it the wrong way.

The Iowa supreme court decision was apparently a travesty, a total perversion of logic and the law in the service of a preferred outcome. And once again I find myself thinking that the Founders made a big mistake in distrusting democracy, and that they did some things better in Athens, long ago.

The Athenians believed in, and reverenced, the rule of law. They preserved their laws on stone and they did their best to observe them. Even when the People transgressed the law, which was very rare, they usually repented afterward. What more can be asked of any polity in relation to its laws? What, after all, is the rule of law except a moral commitment to the idea of law?

But in the modern world, we've confused the rule of law with rule by lawyers -- with courtrooms and specially credentialed judges and counselors. In Washington, we have a Supreme Court -- the least democratic part of our Constitution -- which can overrule any other act of the state. In recent years, we've seen how a majority on that Court can do whatever it wants in defiance of every principle that's supposed to restrain it. Half the provisions of the Bill of Rights, and other parts of our federal Constitution, have been twisted by the courts to attack the very liberties they're supposed to safeguard -- especially the liberty of the people to legislate for themselves.

In Athens, there was one quasi-elite court, the Council of the Areopagus, but it handled very few cases: mainly accusations of deliberate murder and damage to Athena's olive trees. In addition, a few cases for trivial monetary damages could be heard and decided by various magistrates. But all other cases, including the most politically consequential, were decided by large juries of citizens -- usually between 201 and 1501 men -- chosen at random from willing citizens over 30 years of age. (Parts of the very cool equipment that was used to select these juries survive. The commitment of the Athenians to their legal system is illustrated by the curious fact that they were often buried with the bronze tickets that were used to select them for jury service.) Though there were state officials, usually themselves chosen by lot, who presided over the various courts, their role in decision-making was virtually nil. They could not throw out cases, suppress evidence, or redefine specific charges. All power was in the hands of a representative group of adult citizens.

For all the criticisms of Athenian juries in antiquity -- the most famous of which appear in the Wasps of Aristophanes -- they seem to have done a tolerably good job of deciding criminal cases: it's hard to point to a great many injustices deriving from Athens' court system. Much is made of the trial of Socrates, of course, but Socrates was duly convicted under law and, if our ancient evidence can be trusted, only received the death penalty because he wanted it -- both Xenophon and Plato, our best sources, make this clear (albeit in different ways).

Most importantly, the court system in ancient Athens was never successfully used to launch an attack on the laws themselves, or to subvert the democracy. This was because an Athenian court was the People in a very real sense, and because the People saw the law as its treasure and its safeguard. No such thing could be said about our courts, especially our appellate courts, in America today.

Maureen Dowd is a Wanton Hussy

Why?, you ask. Because pointless oneupsmanship is a trade-mark of A&J. Also, because it's so clearly true.

Convoys, Cyberwar, Countermeasures, Cylons, and China

China (and Russia) seem to be engaged in massive preparations for cyberwar against the US; every few months there's another article about hacking & entering in some crucial national security computer. I would like to think we do the same, and that similar break-ins to Chinese computers just aren't reported - but I'm not completely optimistic. I would like to think we're engaged in counter-measures - indeed, an acquaintance works in the field, and I am told that we do make some preparations - but I have no confidence that we're doing enough. I am, of course, a complete ignoramus as regards computers. It seems to me, however, that a metaphor from naval strategy is appropriate - that some nations (Britain and the US in WWII) seek to establish naval dominance; others (Germany in WWII) seek naval destruction. (There's a technical term I'm forgetting.) I.e., the Germans didn't want or need to control the sea lanes; they just needed to sink enough Allied ships to render their naval dominance useless. It seems to me that China (Russia, etc.) must have a similar strategy as regards computers (satellites, high-tech infrastructure, etc.); they don't need to dominate the military-computer-world; they just need to destroy our use of it. Two thoughts, therefore:

1) The strategic equivalent of convoys is probably a good idea - communications hubs that we can protect fairly easily, even after the cyber U-boats destroy the less-well protected, more dispersed parts of the computer world. Thinking of them as convoys would help.

2) Given infinite resources, it would be nice if the US had several back-up militaries, of vintage 1990, 1970, and 1950, that can operate even when the computers are down - Battlestar Galacticas, when the Cylons have taken down the defense net. And/or manual switches in every piece of military hardware to turn off the damn computers.

Long-Term Hollowing Out

One always has to take leaks with a grain of salt, but this is interesting if true:

Barack Obama's Pentagon will [soon] release a budget that guts the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.

This according to a report from InsideDefense.com citing sources "close to the budget process." According to those sources, Gates will essentially terminate the Missile Defense Agency and with it Boeing's Airborne Laser System which was considered particularly well suited to the missile threat from North Korea.

Gates will further announce that the United States will have to make do with just nine aircraft carrier battle groups. The Navy currently has eleven, already considered a shortfall by the Senate Armed Services Committee which objected when the Bush administration decommissioned the USS John F. Kennedy in 2006 due to fiscal constraints. The shovel-ready, already under construction USS Gerald Ford, the first of the Navy's new class of supercarriers, will be delayed.

On the upside, Gates is expected to announce an increase in the end strength of the F-22 fleet from the current 183 to 250, keeping the production line open for at least another three years. The Army's deservedly maligned Future Combat Systems program will also be restructured and the massively over-budget program to replace the president's fleet of helicopters will be terminated.

My quick and dirty analysis is that, given scarce resources, Gates is trying to win the war in Iraq, but letting the long-term strategic strength of the US erode (navy, missile defense) - perhaps in hopes that these can be recovered in another administration. Given the constraints imposed on the Pentagon by the President - insert a very negative pair of adjectives to modify "constraints" and "President" - this is probably a sensible choice. But that our President's policies will (leaks proven true) chip away at our naval dominance I cannot sufficiently deplore.

On Prettifying History II

Just to get this out from the comments to the last post ... so, I took a gander at a few more articles on the Feudal Revolution, the consensus is pleasingly more optimistic, and here is my takeaway:

* Georges Duby, Thomas Bisson, et al generalize greatly from southern France and Catalonia. (One of the critics has some wicked comment about how French historians generalize from counties of France to all of Europe at the drop of a hat, and about how American historians believe everything the French tell them.) These - and northern Italy says Chris Wickham - did see a remarkable amount of noble/knightly violence, undoing the state and capturing the peasantry, but they're not necessarily typical of Europe as a whole. In fact, they're the areas where the kings of France and the German Emperors never visited, and royal control was most disintegrated. In northern France, England, and Germany, royal control was significantly greater, and the Feudal Revolution worked more in partnership with the king. In Germany, for example, emperor and knights worked in tandem against (among other things) Magyar invaders; and the knights didn't destroy royal authority, since that sort of royal authority had never existed in the local level in Germany, as it had in France.

* Naked violence was part of the picture - but most of the critics say it wasn't everything. Knights did have their own moral codes and self-justifications, and peasants did see some advantages to local government, even at the cost of enserfment. That said, all the historians do seem to include knightly violence as part of the picture, and I do think it would be a little odd to say the knights just happened to end up as lords of serfs, and didn't make themselves lords of serfs. I think I would teach the Feudal Revolution as including violence, if not solely naked violence.

* Likewise, the historians do generally seem to say the foreign invasions - Viking, Muslim, Magyar - weren't everything, weren't all-explanatory. Factors in the breakdown of order, yes, but not everything.

* I did find in Moore or Bartlett a chronology saying castles started in Burgundy et al and moved outward; I've ordered books from the library on medieval fortifications, but haven't yet had a chance to read them.

* There does seem to be a sea-change between 850 and 1150, from aristocratic power exerted under the pleasant fiction of being a deputed office of central government, to aristocratic power openly stated as the exercise of local lordship, justified as often as not as acquired by violent means. Also, the rise of the knightly class into the ranks of the quasi-aristocracy does seem to make a great difference. Chris Wickham, I think, has a wonderful way of putting this: that this is part of the establishment of local administration in Europe, along with the creation of the village, the manor, and the parish church; a thickening of the cellular structure of society, where each village has its own lord giving justice. That makes a certain sense to me.

Intelligence and How to Get It

There's a New York Times review of a new book by Richard Nisbett, Intelligence and How to Get It, apparently arguing for "“the new environmentalism,” which stresses the importance of nonhereditary factors in determining I.Q." I haven't read the book myself, wouldn't be particularly qualified to judge it, and won't have the time to do so, but this book review does not fill me with confidence. I should say here that my general take is that there is some non-trivial hereditary component to IQ, and that if there is, there is also a non-trivial association with ethnicity. I'm not wedded to any specific claims, but I find it difficult to believe that everything IQ-related is culture - or, alternately, that there is no IQ, g, what have you. So, the commentary:

* "Nisbett bridles at the hereditarian claim that I.Q. is 75 to 85 percent heritable; the real figure, he thinks, is less than 50 percent." - This strikes me as an extraordinary victory for the hereditarian side of the debate. The old anti-hereditarian argument was that genes were 0%; the new point of view is "less than 50 percent" - which sure sounds like a euphemism for "more than 40%." The debate, therefore, is now what amount of IQ we attribute to genes between 40& and 85%. Even the low figure makes genes far and away the largest single factor (when "environment" = "everything that isn't genes," we're not being particularly analytical), and argues enormous constraints on how much environment can effect IQ. There seems to be some sort of idea that "a majority of IQ variation is environmental" is somehow a vast victory over the hereditarians, based on some peculiar totemification of the word "majority."

* "Even if genes play some role in determining I.Q. differences within a population, which Nisbett grants, that implies nothing about average differences between populations." I know how this argument goes, and it still smacks of dogma. Why is the default position that IQ has no significant correlation with population groups? Why shouldn't that position be proven rather than assumed?

* "Nisbett is similarly skeptical that genetics could account for the intellectual prowess of Ashkenazi Jews, whose average I.Q. measures somewhere between 110 and 115." Oh, sure; that standard deviation is entirely cultural. Or does he mean that Nisbett is skeptical that genetics could account for all the higher IQ of Ashkenazi Jews? - a far smaller claim.

* There is the whole chicken-and-egg thing; if what appears to be genes could be attributed to culture, the reverse also holds true. Better "environments" for IQ might result from, you know, parents with higher IQs. Doesn't have to, but I have no sense from the book review that Nisbett allows for this possibility.

* "But beyond a certain threshold — an I.Q. of 115, say — there is no correlation between intelligence and creativity or genius. As more of us are propelled above this threshold — and, if Nisbett is right, nearly all of us can be — the role of intelligence in determining success will come to be infinitesimal by comparison with such “moral” traits as conscientiousness and perseverance. Then we can start arguing about whether those are genetic." This is the reviewer (one Jim Holt), not Nisbett, but when I read this, I recollect the study asking people what was the minimum necessary IQ for a happy life; people always chose their own, and thought nothing beyond it was necessary. I take this passage to mean "I, Jim Holt, have an IQ of about 115, and so does the readership of the New York Times; anybody with a lower IQ is to be pitied and made as intelligent as we are, at which point utopia will have arrived."

I'd like to repeat that I don't have a particular positive claim to make, either for the validity of any particular IQ test, for any particular classification of groups by IQ, etc.; I just have a negative claim, that it is unlikely that IQ is trivial, either on the individual or group level. I'm registering my distrust of this review, and by extension the book; but don't take this as a closely reasoned argument.