Gideon's Blog |
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In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.
For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com
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Friday, May 31, 2002
An important reminder about the terror toll in Israel, from WorldNetDaily: Survivors face agony in suicide attacks. This is pretty gruesome reading, but worth remembering when you hear the statistics about the number of dead and injured in terror attacks. Injured doesn't mean a broken arm; it frequently means a lost arm, or much worse. Since 9-11, a number of people have suggested that they now believe that the EgyptAir crash was not either an accident (who ever believed that?) or a simple suicide (which is what seemed most likely at the time) but an act of terrorism. That seems implausible to me. But has anyone brought up the TWA mid-air explosion in light of this news story? Dan at Happy Fun is being serious, re: arming pilots. He's relatively agnostic on the idea, skeptical that it will make a significant difference in security. His alternative? "We need to build on the example of Flight 93" he says, and develop a real civil defense. Here's his best suggestion: How about a[n] 'airplane proctor' certificate and training program that any citizen who passes a minimal security clearance can take, which would train him or her in the use of the defensive gear on the plane, some simple hand-to-hand combat skills, and training in things like emergency egress from airplanes, how to find the communication radio in a cockpit and use it to alert the ground in case the pilots are incapacitated, etc. Persons who present their certification cards could be seated in strategic locations (near the cockpit, for example), and could be shown the location of the defensive equipment locker. They would even be an asset on regular flights because of their additional first-aid and emergency egress training. Can't you just picture George Bailey taking such a course? And it's only a logical extension of things like neighborhood watch patrols and the like. Very interesting review by John O'Sullivan of Pat Buchanan's book, The Death of the West. I haven't read Buchanan's book, but I think I'm pretty familiar with his arguments, which I fundamentally reject, for many of the same reasons that are advanced by Ben Wattenberg, whom I admire greatly. But his arguments need to be engaged. As O'Sullivan points out, it is interesting that Pat's biggest critics, lately, have been conservatives. But I don't think it is surprising, because it is conservatives who are most threatened by Buchanan, as his arguments, if adopted by them, would be disastrous. Buchanan is right about the demography; no one really disagrees with him. Western nations are declining in absolute terms and as a percentage of world population. Western nations are also graying, and are increasingly importing people to make up for their own falling birth rates. Southern Europe and Russia are in particularly parlous states, with fertility rates far below replacement. And, increasingly, immigrant populations are failing to assimilate to their host countries, raising the spectre of serious social conflict down the road. And yet, here in the United States, we have seen this movie before. At the beginning of the 20th century, the United States was flooded with immigrants from regions not considered western at the time: Ireland, Italy, Poland, etc. These largely Catholic immigrants were seen as fundamentally hostile to the American institutions of ordered liberty. They lived in ethnic enclaves and frequently did not learn English. They maintained close ties with their home countries, with many migrating back and forth in the manner of Caribbean or Mexican immigrants today. How did America assimilate these people to the point where, now, they are the kinds of people most likely to read a book by Pat Buchanan with sympathy? O'Sullivan takes Buchanan to task for saying that America may be either a creedal or a "blood and soil" nation of the traditional variety, asserting that there is a middle-ground called "culture." But in America, creed is culture. Back in the early 20th century, Raldolphe Bourne argued for what we would today call multi-culturalism; he called it "Transnational America." He advocated immigrants keeping their traditional cultures, and America becoming a kind of superstructure that would contain these various ethnic groups and thereby serve as a model for a future world government. He feared that the alternative was the assimilation of the immigrants to the emerging mass culture that he, as many conservatives today, saw as debased morally and aesthetically. Nativists, meanwhile, favored an end to immigration or the aggressive assimilation to a WASP model of the American (Henry Ford was the exemplar of this approach). But what actually happened? The immigrants assimilated to American culture largely by assimilating to American institutions, in particular to democratic politics. A vigorous and confident public education system brought up their children to think of themselves as Americans. And what finally completed this process was the mass-mobilization of World War II. Along the way, American attitudes toward the Catholic church changed, American food changed, the American language itself changed - and America emerged all the stronger for the cultural synthesis that developed under the aegis of the institutions that are themselves the concrete expression of the American creed. O'Sullivan worries along with Buchanan about the Mexicanization of the American West. But I suspect that the demographic picture is little different from that of the 19th century if the Irish were substituted for the Mexicans. We did not, ultimately, assimilate the Irish by making them Protestant, though American culture was inescapably Protestant at the time of the greatest Irish immigration. We assimilated them by making them American. Bi-lingualism is a political program that Mexican-Americans themselves do not endorse, whatever their purported champions in the academy may claim, and is currently suffering a series of spectacular and lopsided defeats thanks to the lonely efforts of Ron Unz of English for the Children. Moreover, America is now exporting Americanism. O'Sullivan and Buchanan have a fairly expansive view of what constitutes the West. O'Sullivan even seems willing to include Russia under the umbrella, though it is far from certain that Russia is any closer to being a solidly Western country than Mexico. But in 1914, Germany was not clearly part of the West; this was so much the case that racial theories explaining the innate difference between Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic races were popular in both America and Britain. And it would be a rare individual who would have considered Italy or Ireland to be comparable bastions of Western "values" to Britain or America. And today, the "new class" bureaucrats and academics who are behind the European "project" like to distinguish their civilization from the vulgar Anglo-Saxon model. And yet this model is getting more and more adherents around the world, from Chile to Uganda. Mexico in particular has changed dramatically, from being dominated by an anti-American outlook to developing a strong consensus that America is the model to emulate. This bodes very well for America's ability to assimilate its Mexican immigrants, if that is what it wishes to do. What are the boundaries of the West? The heritage of Athens? In medieval days, that belonged to Islam, not the Christendom. Of Rome? This would include northern Africa and exclude Sweden. Anglo-Saxon institutions? That includes India and arguably excludes France. A Christian majority? That includes all of Latin America and an increasing proportion of Africa, but excludes more "westernized" nations such as Israel, Turkey and Taiwan. Political democracy? Such a definition would have excluded much of continental Europe for various parts of the 20th century, and today would include Japan but perhaps exclude Russia. The only definition that maps to the part of the world O'Sullivan wants to protect is not cultural but racial: the part of the world dominated by white people. But even the definition of "white" is subject to change. Many Afghans and Iranians are light skinned and even blue eyed, and northern Europeans used to say that Africa starts at the Pyrenees. Once you throw out race as the criterion, the question becomes not of defending the West as a geographic region but defending and extending the West as a set of values and institutions that express them, and the latter is mostly a matter of cultural confidence, something that America, at least, still has in abundance. So, I'm an optimist on America. I believe we will abandon the destructive and dangerous doctrine of multiculturalism and embrace again the assimilationist ethic of the past. I believe that the bulk of our immigrant population will embrace this ethic as well, and will integrate effectively into the American system. I believe that the primary reason that this will be so successful is that the American creed is the core of American culture; both the strength of that creed and the flexibility of the other aspects of our culture will continue to make it easier for the American nation to grow and thrive on immigration than is the case for other nations. But others - such as France - have had their own success with assimilationist projects in the past, and there is no reason to think that they could not in the future. Except for one factor. Muslim immigrants to non-Muslim lands have been extraordinarily resistant to assimilation. Christians inherit a tradition that separates the kingdoms of the earth from the Kingdom of Heaven, and have had frequent historical experience of persecution at the hands of a pagan or non-Christian majority. Jews have 2000 years of history in learning how to be members of a polity without giving up their unique identity, and have rarely in their history been a majority in the lands in which they lived. Sikhs have a similar experience, as do Mormons, as do the Chinese with their extensive Asian diaspora. Hinduism and Buddhism have their own strategies for adapting to varying political and social circumstances, and have been quite successful at doing so. The nations of the Western Hemisphere are new societies, racially and culturally mixed themselves, and so their emigrants should have little difficulty blending in with any larger polity they join, if properly incentivised to do so. Islam is different. Islam strongly discourages Muslims from living among or under the rule of non-Muslims. Islam does not recognize a natural division between sacred and secular, and does not defer the reconciliation of worldly and heavenly authority until some ultimate future, but expects them to be united now as they were in the early days of Islam. There is considerable diversity among Muslims, and many if not most are eager to be good citizens of the societies that they have joined. But as a rule the Islamic faith and Muslim cultures have not developed the strategies necessary to maintain a peaceful and civil diaspora. And the trend lines on this question have all been going in the wrong direction. That's why Europe has a demographic problem that it may not be able to solve while I am confident of America's ability to solve its problem. America is importing people primarily from Mexico, secondarily from elsewhere in Latin America, the Caribbean, East and South Asia, and Africa. The only stand-out element in the mix is Mexican, and Mexico is getting more Americanized as time goes on at least as much as America is getting more Mexicanized. The rest of the mix is eclectic, and should be easily assimilable. Europe, by contrast, is importing people primarily from the Muslim world, particularly the Arab world, and secondarily from Africa and East Asia. These immigrants will be coming to cultures with less experience with or inclination to assimilate immigrants - but more important, the immigrants themselves will be far more resistant to assimilation because of the nature of their cultures of origin. Good synopsis from Ha'aretz of the dangers from the Iran-Syria-Hizballah axis. I continue to believe that if the U.S. doesn't want a regional war in the Middle East, we have to take direct military action in Lebanon. Thursday, May 30, 2002
They're back. And I can't decide for sure if this is good or bad news. We'll have to see whether Sharon concedes anything significant on the budget. If not, it's good news: Shas knows Sharon isn't afraid of them and so does the rest of the country. If so, it's bad news. William Saletan isn't worried. I still am. Why? (1) I believe Iraqi intelligence was involved in the 9-11 attacks on America. If our government believes this too, Baghdad should be slag. If other countries in the region believe this, Baghdad should be slag. If we don't destroy a state that perpatrates such attacks on us, we lose the war. Period. (2) Time is not on our side, and Bush may be moving too slowly even if Saletan is correct that his moves are all part of a superb master plan. (3) We need to occupy Iraq to achieve two key war aims: the establishment of a solidly pro-Western beachead within the house of Islam and the decisive breaking of the taboo about non-Muslim rule of Muslims that is the cause of so much violence in Israel, Kashmir and, increasingly, Europe. (4) The services seem to be complaining that we don't have the resources to take on Iraq, which does not fit with Saletan's explanation. It attests either to real and distressing military deficiencies that need to be corrected through procurement and recruitment or a real and distressing failure of will on the part of our military that needs to be corrected through firing timorous generals and admirals. It's nice to see someone still has faith. But I'm not ready to put away my McCain 2000 pin yet. Wednesday, May 29, 2002
Last one: It's that 70s flag (actually the Seychelles, but it could just as easily be the new flag for the EU). That was fun. Why does the flag of Bosnia look like the wrong solution to a flag jigsaw puzzle? And why does it look like the right solution is the EU flag? Why does the flag of Belize look like the NY State flag as reworked by a Habonim Labor Zionist Youth group? Smart and frightening article in STRATFOR.com : Triangle of Tension: India, Pakistan and the United States. The gist: America is trying to use the threat of an Indian attack to compel Pakistan to be more helpful in combatting Islamic terror groups, on both the Afghan and Kashmiri frontiers. But Musharraf cannot actually deliver, and India's goal is not simply to end the terrorism but to destroy Pakistan. India may actually want war, and Pakistan may be unable to avoid one. The best way to prevent a nuclear war would be for America to take out Pakistan's nukes. But this would make an Indian attack more likely, and such an attack could devastate Pakistan, leaving it wide open for control by al Qaeda. Pressuring Musharraf pushes him further into a corner, from which it makes sense for him to simply lash out by refusing to cooperate with anyone, blackmailing them by reminding them that after him comes the deluge. (This was, and to a great extent remains, the Arafat strategy.) I disagree with this assessment on a few points. First, I don't think India wants chaos on its western frontier, and therefore I don't think India's objective is to destroy Pakistan and cause it to break up into warring mini-states. The author talks about Pakistan "ceasing to exist" but this is nonsense; borders can change and countries can break up but the enormous Muslim population of Pakistan is not going anywhere, and talking about it ceasing to exist is just stupid. Rather, India wants a neutered Pakistan, one that is practically dependent on India. And the biggest threat Pakistan poses to India is not and has never been military. It is that the logic of partition could be applied equally well to religiously distinct Kashmir, Punjab, or to the ethnically distinct south. The integrity of the India state remains at risk from rampant secessionism; Pakistan has an interest in fomenting this and, by its very existence, proves that it can be done. Second, I question whether Pakistan really cannot tackle the terrorist groups that operate from its soil. Jordan eliminated the PLO presence in its territory in 1970, and Jordan's population is majority Palestinian. Egypt has taken strong measures to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood, which I daresay is more popular than the Egyptian government. Hundreds of thousands have died in the Algerian military's war on their own Islamic revolutionaries. If the government of Pakistan wanted to wipe out the Islamist elements in the country, it could be done. But Pakistan is basically a failed state, lacking in self-confidence or legitimacy. The problem is not India's threats to Pakistan's existence; it's that Pakistan can't come up with a good reason for its own existence. Pakistan's only rationale for existing is that Muslims must live under a Muslim government, a rationale which only helps the Islamists' case. Peter Beinart does it again. This one's about the mayoral election in Newark, the perfidity of Sharpe James and his backers, including NJ Governor McGreevy and national black "leaders" like Jesse Jackson. So far so good. But if I recall correctly, TNR lined up behind McGreevy in 2001 and against Brett Schundler, the conservative GOP mayor of Jersey City, a town that Beinart contrasts James's Newark with. So, an admittedly right-wing (and swelled-headed) but honest, earnest and urbanist GOP mayor cleans up Jersey City, runs for governor against a machine Democratic candidate, and The New Republic backs the machine. Then it cries foul when the machine governor backs the corrupt mayor who put him over the top. How many times do you get to lose your innocence in this game? Paul Berman is one of the smartest, most liberal souls around - liberal in the best sense of the word. I have been stumping for him for quite a while on the strength of an essay he wrote for The New Republic about Joschka Fischer. Anyone who wants to understand Fischer and what has become of the handful of decent souls among Europe's radical left needs to read Berman's work. Now, he has a new and important essay in the Forward (a publication I had largely abandoned) which I strongly encourage everyone to read. Berman has correctly identified a profound change that has gripped the world since the fall of the Barak government. We are seeing the rebirth of real anti-Semitism, of every variety: religious, racial, the whole gamut. People who consider themselves friends of Israel casually make assertions that undermine or deny the legitimacy of the Jewish State. People who have been leaders in interfaith dialogue casually adopt tropes and principles that deny the validity of Judaism or even assert the essential perfidity of the Jewish people. People who consider themselves merely critics of Israel actively work to abet and excuse murder and work for the destruction of the only state that represents the Jewish people, and avowed enemies of the Jewish state, who nonetheless purport to work from liberal or progressive premises, stand shoulder to shoulder with people who chant for the murder of Jews, who call the Jews the killers of God, who call Israel worse than Nazi Germany and who proclaim that Judaism is an evil religion. As Berman says, this is new. This was not happening two years ago. Berman is at pains to argue that this phenomenon transcends left and right, but I can't help but notice that all his examples come from the left. The right has in fact been quite supportive of Israel and the Jews in their time of trial. Not universally of course; there are still David Dukes and Joerg Haiders out there. Moreover, some support has come from dubious premises. In some quarters, support for the Jews is really an expression of the new opinion on the right that Israelis are white people - they are in the club, and the Arabs are out. This is why, for example, Jesse Helms has been so supportive of Israel since the 1980s. In other quarters - Le Pen is an example, as is Pat Buchanan - saying nice things about Sharon is a way of rebutting legitimate accusations of anti-Semitism. A broader phenomenon is Christian Zionism, which is in part an expression of religious support for Jews as the bearers of a covenant with God - and, as such, unobjectionable - but which is also, in some cases, an expression of expectation of the imminent End of Days that none of us should encourage, and that is potentially quite dangerous, to Jews most of all. But by and large, the democratic right has been the strongest and most reliable source of support for Israel and the Jews, and the most vigilant about opposing anti-Semitism. And it is on the liberal, Socialist and radical left that there has been an explosion of anti-Semitism since the collapse of Oslo. Why? Berman doesn't say. My own theory is as follows. Israel had become an embarrassment to a liberal mind because it is an unabashedly national state, and the liberal mind increasingly associates nationalism with evil, as against the combination of multiculturalism and transnational or nongovernmental institutions. Moreover, Israel got it coming and going, because it was a national state apparently founded on the principle of denying another nationalism, that of the Palestinian Arabs. In entering into Oslo, Israel embraced the left-liberal solution: accept that both sides are right, that the PLO is as legitimate as Israel, and compromise. The more "forward-thinking" on the left looked forward to the end to Israel as a Jewish state and the embrace of a "New Middle East" where borders would mean nothing and identities would be fluid. They saw Oslo, in other words, as the beginning of the non-violent dismantling of Israel and of Zionism - and, ultimately, the elimination of the Jews as a distinct people. This was not undertaken as a sinister project. These same people want their own cultures to wither away in favor of a multicultural salad of quaint customs and beliefs united under a bland and characterless but maternal state. In a way, these left-liberals were asserting the same thing that many of Israel's right-wing supporters assert: Jews are white people now. If, to some right-wingers, that means they deserve support, to the left that means they should properly disestablish themselves and usher in the glorious muticultural future. But Oslo failed. It failed dramatically and obviously, as the Palestinian leader walked away from an unprecedented offer by the Israeli Prime Minister and after unprecedented attention by the American President, walked away without making a counter offer or even responding concretely to the Israeli offer, and walked away to pursue a war of terrorism and murder against all of Israeli society. Oslo failed because Yasser Arafat's PLO, like Hamas and Hizballah and the other Palestinian groups that actually possess power, do not want to coexist with Israel in a happy common market of states with fluid borders. They want to annihilate Israel, kill or expel its inhabitants, and build either an Islamic or a Palestinian national state (depending on whom you are talking to) on its ruins. This is obvious to any dispassionate observer of events since 1999; the only real room for disagreement is over what to do about it. Now, you would think that this would cause the liberal left to turn against the terrorist groups that dominate Palestinian life and politics. Good liberals and progressives should stand against murderers and for the side that pursued peace and compromise, who embraced their vision of the future. There are indeed people on the left who have done exactly this. Benny Morris, the "post-Zionist" historian is one. Dennis Ross, Clinton's peace-processor, is another. But they are the exception, not the rule, because for most folks on the left accepting that Oslo failed requires rethinking everything. It would require them to accept that officially oppressed groups can also be evil. It would require them to accept that force is acceptable in self defense. It would require them to decide whether, in fact, Israel - or any Western society - has a right to exist, a right to defend itself. After all, their premise is that their own culture is evil and should vanish. They would prefer it to vanish peacefully, but if it is evil how can one defend it passionately, even against another evil? Far easier to take another step in the direction they were already going, and openly assert that it is wrong to kill terrorists who claim to represent an oppressed group, and that it is right for such terrorists to murder babies, old women, anyone in any numbers in order to destroy that which should never have been permitted to exist. And far easier, if the Jews refuse to surrender, to explain their stubborn determination to live, and live as Jews, as part of a unique Jewish perfidity rather than as a normal, healthy, moral response of a society under attack. The global left is now an objectively anti-Semitic force. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the primary enemies of the anti-globalization "activists," the European Union bureaucrats, the United Nations, the Anglican church heirarchy, the major human rights groups, etc. are the Jewish state and the Jewish religion. These people may have Jewish friends and relations; some of them may be Jews themselves. They are as surely enemies of the Jewish people as, say, the Jewish-born members of Christian mobs in 4th century Alexandria who massacred professing Jews and burned their synagogues. There are many Jews who, for both very good reasons and less good reasons, orient themselves on the left end of the spectrum. There is no reason why the current anti-Semitism of the left should change these convictions. They are not discredited by association. But this is a time for choosing, for separating from organizations and movements that have been fatally compromised by anti-Semitic elements and for expelling those elements from organizations and movements that have not yet been so compromised. In the charities, political organs and social groups that we are active in, we have to do with anti-Jewish elements what America's unions nobly did with Communist elements in the 1940s: throw them out or, if this cannot be done successfully, leave the organization and found a competitor. Tuesday, May 28, 2002
Nadav Shragai has a piece in Ha'aretz arguing against the division of Jerusalem. He's right. Unfortunately, many of the same arguments obtain against the creation of a Palestinian State in the territories, which is still the policy of the Labor Party, of Ariel Sharon and of the United States government. Quite apart from the historic Jewish connection to these regions, there is no plausible plan for separation from the Palestinians of the territories that would not be devastating to the Palestinian economy, Israeli security, or both. Even if the settlements did not exist, it would be impossible to create a viable, truly independent Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria. Any Palestinian state that Israel could accept would be a practical dependency on Israel, and therefore anathema to Palestinian nationalism. And acknowledging the claims of Palestinian nationalism as part of the "legitimate aspirations" of the Palestinian people amounts to the repudiation of Zionism and of the legitimacy of the Jewish State. The Palestinians must have practical control over their own lives and communities. Denying them this, which first Jordan, then Israel, and now Arafat's P.A. have serially done, is manifestly unjust. Since it is impossible for the State of Israel to carve a viable Palestinian state out of the heart of the Land of Israel, there has only ever been one way to achieve this. Israel must come to some kind of arrangement whereby Jordan would have an acknowledged extraterritorial interest in protecting the rights of the Palestinians living within the borders of Israel, including Judea and Samaria. This would protect the Jewish character of the state, and uphold the historic rationale for a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, at the price of accepting a role for Jordan within Israel's borders. The price of the Oslo policy - undermining the legitimacy of Zionism itself, even to the point of surrendering the Jewish capital and Judaism's most holy places - is too high. It is time to evaluate the alternatives. Richard. Z. Chesnoff has a piece on the growing threat from Hizballah. I've been arguing for some time that the next front in the war, even before Iraq, should be Lebanon. Hizballah are the front-line troops of the Axis of Evil, and they are the most likely delivery mechanism for weapons of mass destruction as well. Attacking Hizballah directly could potentially spark a fatal crisis of credibility in the Iranian regime, dramatically strengthen our allies in Jordan, and, not incidentally, wipe out a gang of murderers drenched in American blood. Any action we took in Lebanon would leave us free to pursue whatever policy we wanted with respect to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Israel, after all, withdrew unilaterally from Lebanon; striking at Hizballah could more easily be described as a reward for that pullout than as support for Sharon's actions vis-a-vis the P.A. And it would represent an overdue American action to defend the independence of Lebanon from the Syrian and Palestinian invaders who have done it do much damage over the past 35 years. Monday, May 27, 2002
Take a look at this piece from MEMRI , excerpting a letter to Ayatollah Khamenei from one of the founders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and now a dissident. The Iranian dissidents get it, in a way that no group in the Arab world does. They want a free, Western-oriented government. They think that the Islamic Revolution has destroyed their country, and destroyed Islam along with it. THEY GET IT. These are our best allies, bar none, in the current war. Why is our government doing so little to support them? Friday, May 24, 2002
I am getting madder and madder and I have to go home to make Shabbat dinner. Here's Rich Lowry eviscerating the spokespeople of our purportedly conservative government as they attempt to defend the decision not to allow pilots to arm themselves. Military Bids to Postpone Iraq Invasion (washingtonpost.com). Who is running this damned country anyway? A committee, or a President? Okay, get this. Pilots, many of them former officers in the military, aren't going to be allowed to be armed. But, according to our nation's real paper of record, our vaunted new air marshalls aren't required to pass the usual marksmanship test. Excellent piece in The New Republic this week about the successful efforts to combat HIV in Uganda. (Unfortunately, the article doesn't appear to be online. Go buy the issue. Heck, subscribe; it's a great magazine.) Here's the twist: Uganda's efforts have focused predominantly on (a) abstinence before marriage, and (b) marital fidelity. Condoms are almost an afterthought. The results have been to reduce HIV infection rates from on the order of 20% to on the order of 6%. As a collateral benefit, there's been an increase in marriage, particularly among young people. The contrast to other countries that have tried a more prophylactic and less moralistic approach is striking; infection rates continue to rise in countries like Kenya and Botswana that have extensive condom-oriented efforts. Why is this? The reason appears to be that condom-oriented efforts work only if they are applied essentially universally. If you have a culture of promiscuity, and even a small failure rate with prophylactic use, then you'll continue to see high rates of infection. The assumption among public health types is that changing promiscuous behavior is much harder than getting people to use condoms, and besides, asking people to make different life choices is a taller moral order than asking them to wear what is pitched as a kind of sexual seatbelt. But if you need a 99% success rate with condoms to significantly reduce infection, but only, say, an 80% effectiveness rate with a campaign to reduce promiscuous sexual behavior, that changes the equation. (I'm making these numbers up, by the way.) Moreover, cultural changes are reinforcing. If more people marry rather than having multiple partners, peer pressure will cause others to adjust their behavior to meet the emerging norm. By contrast, condom use is entirely private; no one besides your partner knows if you are failing to meet the norm. (This is the case with adultery as well, of course, but to a lesser extent; adulterers are often found out, and if the social norm is to stigmatize that behavior, a lot of people won't take the risk.) The guy who wrote the article is not religious, and the people he cites who promote the program aren't either. This is a legitimate public health story, with obvious implications for the debate currently going on in this country vis-a-vis abstinence education, etc. Here's a gem of an item from MEMRI . An Arab League-run think tank, a pillar of the establishment in the Arab world - Al Gore, Jim Baker and Neil Bush spoke there IN THE PAST YEAR - recently hosted Theirry Meyssan, the French author of "The Appalling Fraud" who accuses the U.S. military of having masterminded the September 11th attacks. Not that it's a surprise that these guys would host M. Meyssan; he's a natural. But what are Gore, Baker and Bush doing at a forum that would host such a guy? We're having a very hard time remembering that the Arab world is dominated by lunatics and criminals. Harvard invites a Hamas fundraiser to be a commencement speaker. Bush invites Wahhabi extremists to the White House for photo-ops. Gore speaks at a think tank that entertains a lunatic who blames the U.S. for September 11th. I expect the U.N. to cater to Holocaust deniers, mass-murderers and more prosaic gibbering maniacs. But I expect better of America. We have this delusion that the evildoers are this small, scattered minority, unsupported by the establishment in the Arab world and trying to overthrow it. But the evildoers either run that establishment or they have corrupted it utterly through blackmail and terror. I despair of us ever getting that fact through our thick, smiling American skulls. Thursday, May 23, 2002
So, serious question. If the Pi Glilot attack had succeeded, Israel would have been struck with a force comparable to September 11, with thousands of fatalities. Given Israel's size, of course, that's the equivalent of more like tens of thousands in the United States. What would Israel do in response? And why should Israel scale back that response because the attack failed? Israel cannot afford even a single attack of this scale. The fact that one has been attempted suggests that Israel's deterrent is very weak. The Pi Glilot bomber was trying not to wear down the Israelis in a war of attrition but to ignite a regional war. Israel has got to bolster its deterrent sufficiently that the Syrians, Iraqis, Saudis, etc. don't think they can use weapons of mass destruction (that's what this would have been) without facing massive, devastating retaliation, including the use of similar weapons. And Israel has got to establish real security control in the territories, even if it means permanent reconquest of Area A. If anyone wants a different solution, let them come forward to put their troops on the line. Israel cannot afford even one attack of this scale, and we had all better be thinking about how to prevent one. To balance the post about Harvard's Hamasnik speaker, Glenn Reynolds has links to three items predicting that campuses are ready for a turn to the right. And Francis X. Rocca is against single-sex ed, because it didn't work for him. But he's arguing with a straw man. No one is contending that most kids would do better in a single-sex environment. Indeed, there's a lot of research to show that most boys and girls benefit from coeducation - indeed, specifically it indicates that boys generally develop healthier attitudes towards girls (and later women) if educated together than if educated separately. But there are some kids for whom this isn't true, and some kinds of education that can't be purveyed this way. And it's absurd to deny parents the opportunity to educate their children in a single-sex environment because of concerns about sexual discrimination. The issue is whether a diversity of educational models will be allowed, not whether sex-segregated or co-ed schools are better for all students. And it is about whether concerns about sexual discrimination mandate the intensive mingling of students of the opposite sex in all activities - coed gym, coed bathrooms, coed sex education, etc. For some reason, never clearly articulated, we've come to think that separating teens and young adults by sex for any reason is somehow wrong. And we're surprised when we read about a junior-high epidemic of throat gonorrhea. Jeremy Lott makes the case that USA Today is our real paper of record. Not a new argument, but still a true one. Cinescape says that Ender's Game is going to be made into a movie. This could be really, really good. Ender's Game is the story of a future in which Earth is engaged in a deadly struggle with an alien civilization about which we know little. On Earth's side, the war is fought largely by children, because only they have the lightning-fast reflexes to pilot the spacecraft of the future. Spoiler plot summary: Ender is a particularly precocious child, chosen for battle school when he kills (unwittingly) a school bully at the age of, I think, seven. The book follows Ender through battle school and into the actual wars, but Ender is never told that, at a certain point, he's fighting for real. He thinks he's still being trained when, to win the climactic battle against the aliens, he initiates a sequence of attacks which results in the annihilation of the enemy home world, and all the aliens with it. There are a couple of less-good sequels that show how Ender deals with discovering that he's the first person in history to single-handedly annihilate an entire intelligent species. Anyhow, it's a great sci-fi book. It also features a couple of other genius kids (Ender's siblings) who publish their thoughts on current affairs pseudonymously on what sounds an awful lot like the internet avant la lettre, and wind up effectively controlling the government of Earth through their columns. Kind of the ultimate blogger fantasy. I look forward to seeing if they translate it successfully to the screen. Marginal improvement in news from the subcontinent. Musharraf is talking about sharing power with an elected Prime Minister, and Vajpayee is talking less like a man determined to go to war and more like he's just preparing for the eventuality of war (an important difference). DEBKA isn't freaking out about Indo-Pak war, which would be comforting except that their fretting that Mughniyeh is planning to explode dirty nukes in major American, European and Israeli cities. Anyhow, I still think the odds are strongly against a full-scale war, much less a nuclear war, between India and Pakistan. India, after all, has no particular interest in conquering Pakistan, and Pakistan can't win a conventional war by using nukes on the Indian army. India can't simply sit there and watch terrorists attack it across the line of control; the odds still seem good to me for some kind of limited border war. But I think the most likely end of that war is not nuclear escalation but the fall of the Musharraf government - potentially to Islamists. And then the problems really start. I remain much more worried that Pakistan is the conduit by which terrorist groups will finally get their hands on atomic weapons. That strikes me still as a much more likely path to the actual use of the Pakistani bomb than in combat against India. But we'll see. Harvard blogger MATTHEW YGLESIAS alerts us to the fact that tone of the Commencement speakers at Harvard this year will be a Hamas supporter talking about "American Jihad." Thanks to Instapundit for the link. Wednesday, May 22, 2002
Peter Beinart is always interesting. His latest idea is that the Democratic Presidential contenders should take on the death penalty. He makes a good case. Scary stuff at USS Clueless: a very plausible scenario for how an Indo-Pakistani war could go nuclear. To whit: Pakistan uses nukes defensively on Pakistani territory against an invading Indian army. India retaliates, and we escalate to a general nuclear exchange. Sounds alarmingly plausible to me. Instapundit has been very good about collecting all our worries on this subject, so we don't have to do it ourselves. I happened to be reading Maggie Gallagher on the subject of the dreaded biological clock. Her key sentence: "Here is one of the great ironies of contemporary feminism: Elite young women these days take their cues about how to behave primarily from unmarried (and therefore adolescent) males." And this got me thinking on a subject that I haven't aired in a while: how cultural libertarianism is only good for guys in their 20s. The decisions we make when we are fairly young in contemporary terms shape how our lives turn out. I chose, in my twenties, to marry a woman many years my senior. (Apologies for talking about me; this is one of those dreaded personal-is-political posts.) I have no regrets about this decision; I married for love, which strikes me as a pretty good reason to get married. But it meant taking the bad end of a gamble about the rest of my life. Odds are, I would never beget children. Since I have always wanted children, that meant odds were I'd be looking to adopt a few years down the road (which my wife and I are now in the process of doing), with all the unique challenges that entails. Again, no regrets; I knew what I was doing, and what the consequences were. But all these women who spend their twenties either striving after their careers or simply extending their already extended adolescence: do they know what they are doing? My unscientific survey says: they don't. They are completely unaware or determined to deny that biology has anything to say about their destiny. And the culture they grew up in is committed to their remaining in ignorance or denial, until it is too late. Which brings me back to cultural libertarianism, or the contention that society - not government; society - should never tell us what choices to make. That our lives should be free verse, composed at leisure and without regard for social rules. Thing is, those social rules embody a whole lot of information, information most of us are not going to process if it comes as, say, a cacophany of blogs. And this information is vital because, you see, we have very few years in which to live. Once we make decisions - necessarily on the basis of limited information - they are irrevocable. Our lives move on. And, for some of the most important parts of our lives - whether and whom we will marry, whether and how easily we will have and raise children - our lives move on remarkably quickly. Those who advocate ripping up the social rule-book are arguing, effectively, that it is better for this crucial information not to be organized, better for each person to have to individually pull it all together, however long it takes. Given enough time, that's probably the right attitude. If we all lived forever, we could afford to make endless mistakes and learn from them, and become more interesting people as a result. But we don't. We need the wisdom of our forebears, embodied in social rules that let us know how life is to be lived, if only because we quite literally don't have time to get that wisdom ourselves before our lives are gone. I have no children of my own yet, but I have younger relations whom I hope to see happily married and with children some day. I also hope to see them engaged in useful and rewarding careers. I wish I knew how to tell them to find their future wives and husbands, and how to make their careers in ways that accommodate families that ought to be the center of their lives. I wish I knew, but I don't. The rule-book is gone, and "the rules" is no substitute. Ha'aretz has a couple of articles (here's another, and another and another; here's JPost's take) analyzing what Sharon is up to with the firing of the Shas ministers. Some things I didn't know; for one, the Shas ministers knew in advance they'd be fired if they voted no. That suggests Shas either wants new elections or expects, ultimately, to be invited back into the government. The former seems to me highly unlikely, because Shas will lose at least a third of their seats in the next round. Why? (1) The change in the election law means that in the next election Israelis will only cast one ballot, not a separate one for Knesset and Prime Minister. So marginal Shas votes from the last election have a strong incentive to vote Likud this time around. (2) The current Shas representation is inflated by the coincidence of the Deri conviction and the last election. Shas gained 7 seats in the last election. They could easily lose them all this time without an issue like Deri's conviction to rally around. (3) Sharon will win the next election, and two can play the game of revenge. After the next election, Likud will be the only party even plausibly able to form a government. Sharon will have the choice of several coalitions: a coalition with Labor and without Shas, with Shas but without Labor, with Labor and Shas but without the far-right, or a combination of all three. Now, he really needs all three if he is to be able to control his own government. Even after an election, Sharon will likely seek to include all three elements in his coalition, because of the various benefits they provide, domestic and foreign. But he'll be less dependent on having everyone on-board to keep his government together than he is now. I think Shas is playing a game of chicken, expecting to be invited back in. And I suspect they will lose the game. Sharon can bring the right-wing parties (Ihud-Leumi and Moledet) in and gain 7 seats; he can bring in Shinui and gain 6, though it's questionable whether the NRP would sit with Shinui. In any event, he has options. Could they take him to 2003? I don't know. The far right is probably eager to have new elections; the NRP and Ihud Leumi expect to gain significantly at the polls. They can afford to exact a high price for membership in the government. Shinui, meanwhile, is never eager to actually join a government; that would mean sacrificing their precious purity they maintain by being in opposition. So they probably don't care if there are new elections or no. Labor is probably dreading the prospect; they expect to be eviscerated. So Sharon is probably safe from Labor but somewhat vulnerable to blackmail by the far right without Shas in his coalition. But the far right also knows that they brought down Netanyahu and wound up with Barak. They may be loathe to go into new elections with the public thinking that they brought down the currently very popular Sharon. As for Netanyahu, I don't think he's in any rush to challenge Sharon, not after the fiasco of his orchestration of the Likud vote against a Palestinian state. The public blames him for playing a silly game that might have negative diplomatic consequences, and praises Sharon for being a leader of the nation. Bibi will continue to cultivate his own followers, and wait for an opening. If he is too clearly trying to make that opening, he'll be slapped down. It's possible that if Sharon calls new elections, Bibi might not even challenge him in a primary this time; after all, better not to fight than to fight and lose, and if elections were held today, Bibi would lose. But he's young. He can wait. I don't take Shinui's perspective that Shas is illegitimate. But I think it's very important that they have a big loss to make them reconsider how they relate to Israel's democracy. They need to lose big in political infighting and big at the polls. If Sharon keeps them out of the coalition, and doesn't call new elections himself, Shas will have lost in the former. The longer the government lasts, the more clearly they will have lost. And, having lost in the inside game, they'll be even more likely to lose at the outside game in new elections, whether in 2003 or before. As an aside, Roni Milo has returned to Likud. His party - Center - is now spiritually part of the Likud coalition, and should vanish altogether in the next Knesset. In the broadest sense - if you include the MKs from Gesher, Center and Yisrael B'Aliyah who are natural parts of their coalition, and could well run with them on a single slate in the next election - Likud encompasses 31 MKs in the current Knesset. The far right - NRP, Ihud Leumi/Yisrael Beiteinu, and Herut - have 13 MKs. Labor has 24 MKs, Shinui has 6 and Shas and UTJ together have 22 MKs. Assuming a Likud-centered slate gets 40 MKs in the next election, and the far right gets between 15 and 18, Sharon will be very close to a governing coalition before he turns to Labor, Shinui or the Haredi parties. That's what Sharon and Likud need to be focused on, not on how to appease Shas in the short term. Shas wants to be in the government, so long as the government appears likely to survive. If Sharon gives them what they want, his government is more likely to survive short-term, but he will reduce his vote total in the next election. If Sharon sticks to his guns, he may face elections sooner, but he'll have something to run on that will appeal to Shinui and Labor voters that he needs to win for Likud to dominate the next government. Glenn Reynolds wants to Terraform Mars. I'm there. We'd better get moving quick, though, if we want it to be American territory. After all, the Chinese are about to beat us to founding the first moon colony. Another scare editorial on cloning and genetic engineering from The Weekly Standard: Brave New Patents. The topic: patents that have been granted to U of Missouri researchers to clones of "mammals" - as written, including humans. As I have argued before, this is the real danger of the whole cloning business: not that we'll destroy democracy in an effort to cure disease or "improve" our children, but that we're moving towards the establishment of property rights in people. Now, a few words of caution. First, you can have a patent on a process that is illegal. If I develop a new design for a nuclear weapon, I can patent that design, but I can't build the weapon. Second, no one is seriously worried about born human beings, with human capacities, walking around owned by someone else. We do still have the 13th Amendment to prevent actual slavery. But there are real worries to have short of this. Let me outline one nightmare scenario that strikes me as entirely possible. Let's say it's theoretically possible to produce clones that are anencephalic - no brains - for the purpose of harvesting their organs. Let's say we think this is the most efficient and the safest way to produce organs for transplant. The clones would be brain-dead - they have no brains - so perhaps there's nothing so horrible about growing them. After all, we would hardly object if we could grow, say, a heart in a vat from adult tissue; why would be object to growing a whole body full of organs? It sounds horrible, true, but maybe we'd get over our qualms. But even if we get over the moral objections to growing such clones, how do we learn how to do it? Don't we have to do experiments, attempting to successfully clone anencephalic humans? And wouldn't some of these experiments fail, producing humans that are severely disabled - but not so lacking in human capacities that we are comfortable calling them mere organ farms? Who would be responsible for these poor creatures? They have no parents. They were never created to live. It seems far more likely that - at some stage in development, but well past the first two weeks that researchers keep citing as their only zone of interest - they would be destroyed. We are officially in Mengele territory with this scenario: experimenting on people and destroying them when we don't need them anymore. And it is an impossible-to-imagine scenario if there are no property rights in humans or potential humans. This is why the slavery analogy is apt. In pre-modern slavery - until the 16th century, say - the moral assumption of slavers was that slaves are human, but humans without freedom. In a feudal world, where some are born to nobility and others to serfdom, this was a logical position that did not necessarily imply that slaves were mere property. The biblical codes that govern slavery contemplate it as a temporary condition with legal protections; the Aristotelian logic of "natural slavery" suggested that some people are just meant to be slaves, but never denied that they were people, any more than it denied that women were people, who were similarly "naturally" unfree. (I'm not trying to defend slavery in this period; it was a horrible institution. I am suggesting it was less radically evil than plantation slavery as it developed in the Americas.) By the generation of the Founding Fathers, it was clear - at least to enlightened opinion - that slavery was inherently unjust, because slaves are people and people have inalienable rights. But was not clear what to do about it, because the Founders respected the fact that the Southern plantation owners in good faith built up substantial capital in slaves, and that this could not simply be taken away. They had property rights in these people, and these had to be respected. The most common counsel was for benign neglect; the general assumption was that slavery would, eventually, wither away if its spread was restricted, and that the slaves would either be integrated into the American people as a whole (Washington's preference, and Franklin's) or granted their own country in the Americas or in Africa (the assumption of many other Founders). These predictions did not come to pass. And, as slavery spread, it became necessary to articulate a new ideology in its defense, one that justified treating people as property, and not merely as unfree dependents; not a feudal ideology but a radical racist one, that declared that blacks were not human. Such ideas were not invented by the Southern plantation owners, but were vigorously adopted by them, and gained a general currency that they had not had in earlier American or Western history. And these theories continued to poison Western thought down into the 20th century, and possibly into the 21st. There is a real danger of this happening to us with respect to our children. As the family decomposes as a natural institution, there is a real danger that children come to be seen as some amalgam of an adult human and a species of property, and the younger they are the more like property they will seem. We have seen how the assertion of abortion rights has radicalized the abortion debate. If a woman has a right to an abortion, that easily becomes a right to a dead child, an assertion that a child - at least until birth but, if Peter Singer has his way, well beyond - is mere property. On the opposing end, it is assumed that the only way to refute this is to assert that a zygote is a rights-bearing human being equal to a full-grown child, an assertion that flies in the face of the biological facts as well as common sense. (None of the people who believe this, for example, think that every miscarriage should result in a homicide investigation, but that is the logical implication of their belief.) And because the opposition is grounded in a kind of fundamentalism - whether religious or no - that lacks general support, the argument that a fetus is the mother's property continues to gain ground. There is the potential for another turn of the ratchet with the cloning debate, as we ignore the precedent that we set when we say that a research laboratory can own an entity that will, in the proper environment, become a child. This is what the cloning debate is about: whether, at any stage in development, a human being or potential human being can be property. This is why research cloning is more disturbing than reproductive cloning; reproductive cloning is arguably analogous to IVF and egg-donation and other efforts by parents to mimic the process of reproduction. Reproductive cloning should be illegal now because it is too dangerous, but it is not obvious to me that it should always be illegal because it is inherently immoral. But research cloning, if it is to take place, has got to be regulated such that at minimum it is impossible to have a property interest in a human clone. If that chills research, so be it. The burden is on the researchers to articulate a regulatory framework that avoids the Mengele scenarios now, before a property interest in humans develops that requires, if not the violence of the Civil War, nonetheless vast efforts to uproot, efforts that we as a society may, unfortunately, not be up to exerting. Here are a few other links to articles about the U of Missouri patent, from MSNBC, Wired, The Washington Times, The Washington Post and PNN-Online. One thing that I think is notable about the quotes from the pro-cloning Senators is that they have not thought about the questions that the anti-cloning forces are raising. That's reason enough to be skeptical of their position. I want to see research to cure genetic diseases - as well as Parkinsons, spinal-cord injuries, etc. I think such research is a moral imperative. But it is also a moral imperative to oppose the ownership of people. If the pro-cloning forces want to advance their research agenda, they should be articulating a scheme of regulations to prevent the nightmare scenarios. They are not doing that. We shouldn't allow cloning until they do. Tuesday, May 21, 2002
As someone who is genuinely concerned about the implications of the new world of genetic engineering and cloning and the like, may I register a vote for better thinkers than Francis Fukuyama or Leon Kass to make the case for caution? What is Fukuyama worried about? He's worried that deaf lesbians will make more deaf lesbians. And he's worried that boring straight people will prevent their children from being gay. And as a result, children will be born without their consent and will be both too different and too normal. How does he hold all his contradictory worries in his head at the same time? He's worried about sex selection run rampant, when this is (a) a low-tech problem (all you need is ultrasound and legal abortion) and (b) not a problem in the U.S. but in less-developed and more traditional cultures like India and China. He worries that if we are biologically differentiated then democracy will collapse. But we are biologically differentiated now - no one thinks legal equality is the same as equality of talents. And, in fact, we in many ways sort our population explicitly by talent. That is, for example, what the SAT is officially supposed to do; it's an aptitude test, measuring your ability, not your achievement. It's basically an intelligence test. And it has an enormous influence over your future earnings and, therefore, your status within society. No genetic engineering required, and we're still a democracy. There's other stuff he's worried about - drugging kids to get rid of aggression, for example - that has nothing to do with the topic. One gets the sense that, with Fukuyama and with Kass, that what they are really concerned about is not technological change but social change. They are not really worried about what responsible people will do with better science (eliminate genetic diseases, for example), but that technology will tempt us to do things that violate a proper understanding of human relationships (make an exact replica of ourselves to satisfy our egos, for example). But is this really a problem caused by, or even exacerbated by technology? As noted, the sex-selection problem is worst in less-developed countries working with more primitive technology. Does this mean we should ban ultrasound? We've got an unseemly business right now in the U.S. trading in human eggs; does this mean we should ban IVF? We've got schools pushing Ritalin on kids because their parents can't be bothered to discipline them; should we ban all psychopharmacology? Fukuyama makes the analogy to nuclear weapons. Okay, then. The United States spent enormous sums of money researching nuclear technology. We built nuclear power plants, nuclear-powered submarines, and a massive array of nuclear weapons. If "control" means slowing the pace of research, that's one aspect of control that was never exercised. What we tried to do was exercise control to make sure these technologies were safe and that they were kept in responsible hands (not that we've always done a perfect job of either). We should similarly be very cautious about cloning, much less genetic engineering, because these are, effectively, medical procedures, and until they are clearly safe they should never be contemplated. And we should be talking about values, about what makes a family, irrespective of new technologies. If the social structure is resilient, it will assimilate new technological possibilities and use them to make the society stronger. If it is weak, technology will just enable reckless drivers to drive faster. But while I am strongly in favor of a regulatory structure for this nascent industry, I can't believe that the core of the problem is too much freedom or too much research. This leaves me with his last analogy, one I've made before but in a very different context. Fukuyama compares libertarians to antebellum slave-owners. The comparison, I suppose, is that the slavers believed that had an absolute property interest that the government had no right to interfere with, and they were absolutely wrong. I think the analogy is apt in that I really worry that one direction the biotech revolution can go is in making people into a species of property. I worry when people talk about creating children rather than bearing them. I worry that even potential humans - cloned zygotes, for example - will become personal property, because this property can become a rights-bearing human being and we don't know precisely when that line is crossed. I think we should be thinking about the legal side as well as the moral side of this stuff - now, before interests become entrenched and changing the legal status of, say, an embryo becomes something with significant economic consequences. Anyhow, I worry about this sort of stuff. But I wish I heard better arguments to articulate my worry than what the Fukuyamas of the world have made. Nice article by Pejman Yousefzadeh about how to foment revolution in Iran. He correctly diagnoses that society as ripe for a pro-Western upheaval. And, as readers of this space know, I have frequently made the argument that revolution in Iran is the strategic key to winning the global war on Islamofascism - more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the trial and execution of Yasser Arafat, or the liberation of Arabian oil from the Saudis. And he's got a couple of good suggestions for how to increase the pressure: a propaganda war via VOA and National Iranian Television and a military strike against Iraq. I think he may have the Iraq part backwards, though. While an American war in Iraq might very well bring about the collapse of the Iranian mullahocracy, it's even more true that revolution in Iran would make a war against Iraq ludicrously easy. My own preference for military action to destabilize Iran: Lebanon. Take out Hizballah and warn Iran to stay out or face the consequences. The mullahs have an awful lot invested in Hizballah. It'd be interesting to see how they convince their people that they should risk war with the United States over a bunch of thugs in the Bekka Valley. If they hold off, their own credibility is shot - they backed down when faced with U.S. threats. If they actually risk a war with the U.S., they would face an open revolt in their country. But fortunately, this isn't either-or. So many evildoers, so little time . . . Leon Wieseltier once again gets so much wrong in trying to be right, in his latest article in The New Republic Online: Hitler Is Dead. Wieseltier is understandably upset that people are comparing the current situation with the 1930s, and are worried that we are headed to a second Holocaust. Hence his title. He's right that the situation today is profoundly different, and that simplistic comparisons betray a lack of imagination and, possibly, a lack of historical thinking altogether. But he pushes his case entirely too far, so far that he winds up being profoundly wrong about Jewish understanding of history, about the 1930s, and about the situation today. Let's take apart his argument piece by piece. (1) He writes: "Only a fool could believe that the Passover massacre was a prelude to the extermination of the Jews of Israel; a fool, or a person with a particular point of view about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you think that the Passover massacre was like Kristallnacht, then you must also think that there cannot be a political solution to the conflict, and that the Palestinians have no legitimate rights or legitimate claims upon any part of the land, and that there must never be a Palestinian state, and that force is all that will ever avail Israel." Only a fool? The former President of Iran said that Iran needs the atom bomb so that they can wipe out all the Jews - and he was not worried about retaliation because one bomb would be sufficient to annihilate the Jewish State, while even a few bombs would be insufficient to annihilate Iran. And what is this with the opposition of force and political solutions? Why does the belief that Israel is at war with an exterminationist enemy mean that the enemy must be exterminated to the last man? Germany was ruled by an exterminationist maniac. When he was killed, and his army destroyed, there was no need to annihilate the people of Germany. There was indeed a political solution. But that political solution was predicated on a military victory. (2) He writes: "a number of things need to be said about Amalek, and about the Amalekization of the present enemy. For a start, the prescription of an eternal war with Amalek was a prescription for the Jews to be cruel. . . . So if Amalek is waging a war of extermination against the Jews, the Jews are waging a war of extermination against Amalek." I've aired my own thoughts about Amalek in this space before. First, it is very clear from the use of the term Amalek in Jewish religious literature that it is not a people in any genetic sense. Haman, Hitler and Chmelnitsky share no common cultural or biological heritage. Amalek, then, is an ideological term. Amalek is that body of people dedicated to the murder of the Jews. Such people have existed throughout history, sometimes in great numbers. The injunction in the bible is to wipe them out. Are the Palestinians Amalek? Of course not. To say so is a category mistake - the same mistake that Saul made when he thought that the war against Amalek was an ordinary war in which men are killed, women and children are enslaved, property expropriated and the king ransomed. If Amalek is not a nation, then you cannot commit genocide against it. (3) Continuing on Amalek, he writes: "I wish also to record an extraordinary comment by Isaac Abarbanel, the thinker and statesman who failed to persuade the king and the queen of Spain to revoke the edict of expulsion in 1492 and promptly fled to Naples. The sin of the Amalekites, he explained, was that their aggression against the Israelites was groundless: "Amalek attacked them without reason.... For the Israelites possessed no land that the Amalekites coveted." It would appear that there is no place for Abarbanel in the Likud. For his implication is decidedly a moderate one. If the Israelites had possessed land that the Amalekites coveted, then this would not have been a war to the end of time. It would have been an ordinary war, a war that can be terminated in a peace." Wieseltier here presumes his conclusion. There are indeed enemies whose hatred of Israel is irrational and unappeaseable. Hitler was one. There is a credible argument to be made that Arafat is another. Indeed, he does not covet land, has shown himself impervious to offers of compromise. Arab eliminationism is focused on the Jewish State rather than the Jewish people per se, but at this late date it is all one. Arafat has made it clear both by his actions and by his inaction - specifically, his refusal to accept any position that would make him accountable for his deeds, that would give him territory and a state to govern - that he is not fighting for any concrete end. He is fighting because killing Jews is what he does for a living. He is precisely the kind of evil man that Abarbanel is talking about: he is not an appeaseable enemy but one motivated by a desire to do evil. He must be destroyed. (4) He writes: "But the real problem with typological thinking about history is that it is not historical thinking at all. It is ahistorical thinking. . . . For this reason, such thinking was overthrown in the modern period by Jews who decided that their myths would not ameliorate their misery . . . that historical agency required historical thinking, that is, concrete thinking, empirical thinking, practical thinking, secular thinking. All these notions amounted to a revolution in the Jewish spirit, without which the Jewish national movement and the Jewish state could not have been brought into being. A historiosophy is not a strategy. The Jews taught themselves to attend not only to their fates, but also to their interests. That is to say, they taught themselves no longer to regard themselves as the last Jews. The lesson was called Zionism." Here I can agree with him in part, but must dissent from him in part. To a great extent, Zionism was a rejection of Judaism. In this, it has failed, because Judaism has deep roots and Zionism shallow. To a far greater extent, Zionism was the fulfillment of Judaism. The Israeli national anthem speaks of a hope (or expectation) of a thousand years. Is that the voice of interest or of fate? The Israeli national symbol is the menorah, the light of God's presence in the world. Is that a secular symbol? Indeed, what movement of any kind was driven only by interests? The early Zionists thought they were bringing forth a new Jew, a new man and a new world. That's not a particularly mundane project. Wiesletier is right that Zionism is incompatible with traditional eschatology. But he would relegate Amalek precisely to that eschatology. Wieseltier wants to have it both ways. He wants to relegate anything he doesn't like to the end of time, and therefore to preserve the traditional Jewish messianic expectation. But he wants to bring anything he does like into the here-and-now. He can't have love of Zion in this life and hatred of Amalek in the world to come. Either Judaism operates in history or it doesn't. The latter leads to anti-Zionism. The former leads not to secular Zionism but to some version of religious Zionism; secular Zionism, after all, is premised on the death of Judaism, and that's not the ground on which Leon Wieseltier wishes to stand. And another, crucial point. Wieseltier often forgets that Kristallnacht, too, happened in historical time. Hitler and Himmler were men. The Nazi party campaigned in free elections, seized power after doing particularly well in one of them, and led a nation of millions into the commission of horrible crimes. All in historical time. But he waves Kristallnacht as if it were a symbol, something that cannot be invoked but at eschatological peril. But why is this? Why cannot someone make the straightforward argument that the Arab world, saturated in eliminationist anti-Jewish propaganda, is fully primed to exterminate the Jews of Israel, man, woman and child, that many thousands have shown an eager desire to do just this, and made a start with brigades of suicide bombers, and that tens of millions more cheer them on, so that Israel is not mad to think that if it gives them the opportunity a second Holocaust will indeed occur. Why is this not historical thinking? There is a crucial difference, of course, between then and now. But it is not a difference in our enemies; it is a difference in us. Israel has a powerful military, including a nuclear deterrent. It has a powerful ally in the United States. Jews have a settled and firm place in America, and are in no danger here from eliminationist violence. Even in Europe, Jews are vulnerable because of imported violence from the Middle East and the European governments' congenitable inability to either care about Jews or do anything about civic violence. They are not in danger of wholesale extermination. But again: these differences are not in our enemies but in us. Our enemies are animated by the same hatred that animated Hitler, and with the means they would execute the same solution. That is the fact to which attention must be drawn, and which Wieseltier wishes to avoid. And he wishes, further, to avoid the vexing question of why, as he correctly asserts, things are so good for Jews today in America. The answer has to do both with Jews and with America. America admires the Jews for their achievements, in Israel and in the Diaspora, because, as pragmatists, Americans admire achievement. And that's all to the good. But America also thinks of itself as Zion - not in replacement of the historic Israel but in imitation thereof. There is, therefore, a natural affinity between Israel and America, one that has enormous benefits for both peoples. These are historical reasons. But they are also transcendent reasons, because they point to truths - about America and Israel - that lie outside of history. I normally would not link to a Joseph Farah article, because I think he's a little nuts. But he's right on the money with this piece: The day Arafat was offered power. The article is about the period in the late 1960s when Arafat and the PLO were based in Jordan, and tried to take over that country. What is little known is that Jordan's King Hussein bent over backwards to accommodate Arafat - even to the point of offering him the Prime Ministership. Arafat turned him down, and was ultimately routed in what the PLO refers to as Black September, the Jordanian army's successful war on the PLO. Arafat has had opportunities before to take control of an actual state, to establish a legitimate power base and work for the betterment of his people. He has no interest in these things. He likes being a terrorist chieftain. He likes having no responsibility and the power that comes from rule by fear. There is no possibility of any kind of negotiation or coexistence with him - ever, by any government. He must be eliminated, ideally tried and executed but, failing that, killed or exiled. That is a precondition to any talk of peace. The sooner we understand this, the better. Thanks to Charles Johnson for the link. Ha'aretz has another article on Labor's continuing crack-up. Avraham Burg is now allied with Fuad Ben-Eliezer against Haim Ramon. Yossi Beilin and and Shlomo Ben-Ami are on the sidelines making threats. And there's always Shimon Peres, the Jimmy Carter of Israel, running a party and a foreign policy even though he is neither party head nor Prime Minister. Beilin is threatening to quit Labor if Ben-Eliezer remains leader. Burg is threatening to quit if Ramon's unilateral separation plan becomes Labor's official policy. Ben-Ami has turned against Ramon's plan and, so far as I can tell, doesn't know whom to support. What a mess! I continue to believe that the best thing for Labor would be to split in two. The dovish wing, Meretz and Am Echad are a solid left-wing bloc. Together, they can be a coherent left-wing opposition. If Labor as a whole follows Beilin, the party will simply be annihilated, and the rump that remains will be absorbed into a Meretz-led camp of the left. The government will be exclusively right-wing, and/or dependent on Shas for survival. If Labor follows Ben-Eliezer, their left wing will bolt, and the remainder of the party will be part of a Likud-led national unity coalition after the next elections. That's much better for Israel. And Peres knows this. If the left leaves Labor, he'll stay. We all know what the next election is going to bring. Sharon is going to be the head of Likud and the next Prime Minister. Shas and Labor are going to decline. The Likud, Shinui, the NRP and Ihud Leumi/Yisrael Beiteinu are going to grow. Meretz may grow or shrink depending on whether Labor looks like a viable left-wing alternative. Sharon will want to put together a national-unity coalition because (a) it helps Israel diplomatically, and (b) it means he will not be dependent on Shas. He will need a rump Labor party that he can deal with to balance the far-right and to improve his negotiating position with the religious parties. There is no chance of a left-wing government. So Labor has got to decide whether it wants to be part of the leadership of a unity government or the opposition to a coalition beholden to the far-right and the religious parties. That's their choice. Hopefully they'll make the choice that's best for Israel, and not only for their individual political careers. As an aside, the more I hear about Ramon's plan the worse it sounds. I have more respect for Ben-Ami and Burg than I had, simply for their willingness to support Ben-Eliezer rather than a fellow dove. Ben-Ami favors an imposed solution: an international force to control the territories and an Israeli retreat therefrom. That's a defensible position, if one I would disagree with. Ramon favors running away. That's not a defensible position - it's a guarantee of disaster. Andrew Sullivan gets his own shots off at Stanley Kurtz's piece. Allow me to agree in part and to dissent in part. Here's his rebuttal in a nutshell: (1) Stigmatization of gays has been tried already, and it is the cause of gay pathology. (2) Gays don't need to be tamed; they aren't animals. (3) Gay dysfunction results from the childhood trauma of stigmatization for their first sexual feelings, and from adult flight from that trauma. (4) Gays had dominated the Church for centuries, and they were not a problem for the Church - indeed, many of the most orthodox were gay, but celibate. (5) The Church's problem is that it can neither repress nor ignore human sexuality, including gay sexuality, without creating the very pathologies that repression is supposed to prevent. Here's my rebuttal of his rebuttal: (1) The very fact that gays had lived happily and celibately within the Church for centuries is proof not that celibacy is untenable or the Church's view of sexuality untenable but that these are dramatically out of step with contemporary culture. Sullivan can't have it both ways. He can't argue on the one hand that the sexual revolution was an essential human liberation that promises to end longstanding pathologies AND argue that these pathologies largely date from the advent of the sexual revolution and the Church's inability to deal with same. John Derbyshire had an excellent piece - which Sullivan praised - arguing that the problem the Church has is not so much celibacy itself as that the wider culture is extremely hostile to celibacy, in a way that it had rarely been previously. (2) Of course, I have no interest in defending celibacy. My own religious tradition is hostile to the idea, as it is generally to repression and human sacrifice. Rather, as I read Judaism, the proper response to desire is to train it in a godly direction. In other words, we are ALL animals and we ALL need to be tamed, and that is what God's law is supposed to accomplish (among other things). So I dissent from Sullivan's dismissive attitude towards his own prior arguments that marriage or its equivalent would help to socialize gay men to healthier norms of living. He did used to make that argument, but he doesn't anymore, and Kurtz is right to call him on it. (3) I think Sullivan is right that the pathologies that gay life exhibits have a lot to do with childhood, though I don't know if that's all of it. But I don't see how this could ever be remedied. Sullivan understands the special situation of gay sexuality pretty well. How well does he understand straight sexuality? Would he favor mixed-sex locker rooms for 7th-graders, for example? No? Why not? Perhaps because it would be inappropriate to put boys and girls together an such an intimate environment, particularly when they were just becoming sexual beings and had not yet attained self-control? Well, that is the world that a gay 7th-grader grows up in. He can avoid such situations of intimacy, and become "odd" - and probably advertise his incipient sexual orientation to boot. He can steel himself to survive them, struggling for self-control through repression and flight from his own feelings. Or he can fail, and alarm his peers by his behavior. These are the choices. What can we possibly do to change them? I can think of only two things we could do: to separate out gay teens and pre-teens at the earliest manifestation of such orientation, and place them in a more congenial environment, or try to undermine concern about manifestations of gay sexuality by promulgating an ethos that all sexual expression is good, and that what is bad is sexual modesty. We're currently trying both of these strategies, to, I think, disastrous effect. Sullivan himself is probably opposed to some manifestations of the segregationist impulse, but he may be sympathetic to others; I don't know. But what both strategies amount to in practice is indoctrination in a libertine ethos that is extremely destructive to healthy adult sexuality. In his more candid moments, Sullivan admits that this is what he is aiming for, and denies that there is anything to worry about. He has written in praise of promiscuity, polyamory and anonymous sex - he's written that these are spiritually fulfilling. He's entitled to his own notions about his own life, but he is not entitled to teach my children that these are proper sexual ethics, and I daresay the overwhelming majority of people in this country feel the same way. That being the case, many of the childhood traumas of young gays are probably unavoidable. I remain sympathetic to an argument for gay unions, but not when couched in cultural-libertarian terms. I do not think that human sexuality, which has been a subject for moral regulation since the beginning of history, has somehow been revealed in our latter days to be without moral significance, a matter of mere preferences. And the fact that Sullivan increasingly makes his argument for gay unions in those terms - in the terms of each person finding his or her own sexual ethics that accord with his or her unique nature - makes me increasingly uncomfortable with his argument. That's why I thought Kurtz's piece was more impressive than Sullivan did, and not an act of desperation at all. Aaron Mannes has an excellent, concise piece in National Review Online on how Bush the younger is repeating with Yasser Arafat the mistakes Bush the elder made with Saddam Hussein. Very strong and to-the-point. An article in the Washington Post: A New Thinking Emerges About Consciousness. Thanks to Mickey Kaus for linking to it. I'm not so impressed with the article, but it's a subject that I have an interest in, so I thought I'd talk about it anyhow. Most of it is devoted to folks like Daniel Dennett who deny the existence of consciousness. I have little patience with these people. Here's the key paragraph on these folks: The feeling you have as you read this sentence, Wegner argues, is an illusion pulled off by a complex machine in your skull. It not only reads and understands this sentence, he says, but also makes you feel as if you have experienced the reading of the sentence. In other words, the brain, not content with being a remarkably complex machine, also convinces itself that it isn't a machine at all. Doesn't Wegner know he sounds silly? Listen to him. Who's the "you" that has this experience (illusory as it may be) of reading a sentence? Who's the "you" that is convinced it exists? So-called scientists are adding absolutely nothing to this debate that wasn't aired by Descartes and Hume. Descartes recognized that there was an indivisible "self" that he experienced - that such a self necessarily existed or else talking about "experience" wouldn't make any sense, as indeed it wouldn't. But, since he couldn't say anything intelligent about this self, he simply made it an axiom. Locating it in the pineal gland was a distraction; what he really did was remove it from the physical world in any meaningful sense, and build his philosophy on the dubious ground of introspection. Hume, retorting, denied the existence of the self, arguing that all we knew about were empirical impressions, understood as physical processes. Our modern demystifiers of consciousness like Daniel Dennett are just cribbing from Hume's book. But what Hume's - and Dennett's - argument amounts to is: consciousness is an untenable paradox about which we can say nothing intelligent and scientific. Therefore, we will deny its existence. This is not science and not logic; it's scientism, the quasi-religious conviction that anything we can't understand with today's science does not exist. You can demystify will and emotion and calculation and intuition as sub-conscious processes. Maybe I only think I make decisions, have feelings, draw conclusions and have insights. Maybe these things are all just gears turning. But someone has the experience of all these things, and that someone is the self. Denying the self is just stupid; you can't even make intelligent sentences on that basis. Moreover, without an observer all of science falls apart; those who would deny the reality of consciousness raise the real prospect of undermining the foundations of science and of ultimately denying reality itself. I have considerably more sympathy for Chalmers' view of consciousness. Here's the key section on his views: Deacon admits that this theory, which tries to explain what consciousness does, doesn't quite get at what consciousness is. Deacon is among the many who quote David Chalmers's description of this as the "hard problem." "The hard problem is hard because no explanation of brain processes will explain subjective experience," said Chalmers, a philosopher at the University of Arizona. "I am interested in the perceptual aspects of consciousness. The feeling of pain, the taste of chocolate, the sight of blue -- all these are subjective experiences." Chalmers believes scientists will eventually conclude that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe -- like space, time or gravity -- and therefore not reducible. "Why does the law of gravity hold? No one can explain that," Chalmers said. I agree with this. There are a number of apparent irreducibles in the universe. Consciousness is one of them. I suspect that, at some level, it will always be irreducible because there's no coherent way to talk about reducing it; all analysis amounts to slight-of-hand. But irreducibles are not the realm of science; they are the edge of the universe, beyond which science cannot go. That still leaves plenty of territory for scientists to work in trying to understand how our minds work - just as we have plenty of work to understand how the laws of physics work. But why there are minds, as why there are laws of physics, is further than we can go. Monday, May 20, 2002
Stanley Kurtz has a distressingly good piece on gay priests and gay marriage on NRO. Distressingly, I say, because I have a lot of sympathy for arguments that the state should recognize some equivalent of marriage for gay couples. His argument, basically, is as follows. (1) Priestly celibacy is to some extent analogous to marriage, in that the priest is purportedly married to his vocation, and this is why he cannot marry and be a priest. (2) The induction of large numbers of homosexual men into the priesthood has dramatically undermined priestly celibacy, to the point where it seems irretrievable as a norm. (3) The collapse of priestly celibacy has coincided with a massive scandal of sexual predation against minors, and may be linked to it even if gay men are not responsible for the abuse of minors because, in a climate of wide flouting of the norm of celibacy, it was hard for the church to understand and respond to the abuse that was occurring as well. (4) All of this suggests that, if gay marriage is accepted, then gay marrieds will live largely in unfaithful relationships and will thereby fatally undermine marriage to the point where it is not a functioning institution for straight couples or gay couples. He's got a number of strong points along the way to rebut the anticipated objections. Here's my rebuttal, nonetheles. (1) Priestly celibacy is not analogous to marriage, and the Church is wrong to think it is. I'm speaking here out of the Jewish tradition, which is strongly hostile to celibacy. Marriage is in part a discipline, as is celibacy. But it is in no meaningful sense a sacrifice, which celibacy most certainly is, any more than a healthy diet is a sacrifice of the desire to gorge oneself. To marry is part of growing up, of becoming a more complete human. It is also a sanctification of the divine that is embedded in the mundane, or the training of the mundane to serve the divine. That is not the case for celibacy. Rather, in Kurtz's own estimation - and I think he's got Catholic thinking right here - celibacy is understood as a sacrifice for God. It is not my understanding that Judaism approves of such human sacrifice. If the analogy is poor outside of Catholicism, then perhaps the rest of his argument will not obtain outside of Catholic precincts either. (2) I agree with Kurtz that the significant increase in gay clergy since the 1960s is related to the decline in respect for celibacy. But there's something of a chicken-or-egg problem here. Did the Church open itself to gay clergy and thereby undermine celibacy, or was celibacy largely abandoned and therefore the clergy turned increasingly gay? The Church faces a continuing vocation crisis, in part, I suspect, because the secular culture is not producing very many straight young men who want to live celibate. Moreover, there have been numerous scandals of straight sex - and sexual abuse - in the clergy. It seems more likely to me that the Church lost its way first, entered a period of crisis of vocations, and wound up with a largely gay priesthood because these men were, for other reasons entirely, not looking to marry, where straight men were. If this reading of history is correct, then the real question for gay marriage (or a gay equivalent to marriage) is not whether it will cause the decline of marriage as an institution but whether it enthusiasm for it is a symptom of an institution already substantially in decline. Which raises the question of how to shore up that institution, and whether focusing on this particular symptom is more helpful or more damaging. (3) There's some slight-of-hand in his argument about how sexual predation relates to the dominance of gay clergy. It is possible that the bishops failed to act on flagrant sexual criminals in their midst because they saw their actions as merely part of a spectrum of corruption of the celibate ideal. But (a) this is in no way an excuse, and (b) this is an indictment of the Church's understanding of human sexuality. If the Church's leadership can't tell the difference between sexual predation and infidelity, then the Church's leadership understands nothing about human sexuality, and is in no business to try to give insight to the rest of us on the subject. (4) I think Kurtz gets off some very good shots at Andrew Sullivan in particular. Sullivan has indeed been inconsistent in his defense of gay marriage, and increasingly is making the argument that marriage itself - or, rather, the norm of faithful, monogamous marriage - is oppressive, and that a more polyamorous lifestyle is a valid alternative that should be endorsed by the state. He's increasingly showing his colors as a cultural libertarian of the Pim Fortuyn school. But the fact that gay advocates of "opening up" marriage may want to change marriage for the worse is not necessarily a dispositive argument against a gay equivalent of marriage. Here's why. Right now, the straight equivalent of gay marriage already exists. It's called domestic partnership. In New York and in many other cities, there's already legislation barring discrimination against unmarried couples - for example, in housing. I don't know if unmarrieds can adopt yet, but single men and women can. The culture has already moved a long way towards an ethos that marriage is a purely private choice, and that other choices are equally valid. If we're going to shore up marriage, one stumbling block is the assertion that efforts to do so will discriminate against gays and lesbians in long-term, committed relationships. Whether such relationships are really equivalent to marriage is somewhat beside the point; right now, many localities treat them as equivalent and, in order to accommodate them, have undermined social norms that support marriage in order to get these relationships into the tent. It may be necessary, then, in order to shore up marriage, to provide for some same-sex equivalent thereto, some way for gay couples to register with the state their intention to form lasting life-partnerships. The point is, that this should be an alternative to marriage, not marriage itself, and that it should be open ONLY to gay couples, not to straight ones. Would these couples be faithful and monogamous? I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe the model of the monogamous life-partnership isn't appropriate for gay men. That's for them to figure out. The point is that if there were a way to create such partnerships - with legal and financial consequences comparable to marriage - the discrimination argument would be significantly weakened. Yes, such unions could adopt children and so forth. But they can now. With such unions, we'd at least know that the couples involved had made some public commitment to remaining couples - particularly if we also passed legislation to roll back no-fault divorce and otherwise penalized married couples - and gay unions - who sought to break up their families. And regardless of whether these couples modelled their sexual lives on straight couples or not, the social message would be clear: the norms that govern their lives are not the norms for straight marrieds, because the institution into which they (gay couples) are united is not marriage per se but a gay equivalent thereto, designed as an alternative for them because of their unique needs. If the unsavory association can be pardoned, the message would be: separate but equal. Gay couples are not worse than straight couples, not less capable of caring for each other or for children. But they are different, and the law recognizes both the equality and the difference. There are problems with the above argument, I recognize. First, it amounts to social engineering. The government would be telling gay people what their normative lifestyle should be. It does this with straights, but with straights the government is merely recognizing a pre-existing order. It would be better if gay unions emerged as an organic institution and were then recognized by the government, rather than being imposed by it. But this may not be possible. Second, it opens the door to other "genders" asserting that they too have the right to an "equivalent" of marriage. If you can have gay unions, why not polygamous or polyandrous unions as well? An answer to this problem does exist, but it requires some work to articulate. In a nutshell - and I'll expand this argument another time - I believe there are only two workable models for marriage: polygamous and companionate. The former is associated with societies in which women are a species of property; the latter with more egalitarian societies. Polyandrous societies are, in fact, societies without families as we understand them. They are dysfunctional societies in which adult males have no settled social role, and are plagued by violence and social disorder. Think of the classic welfare-fuelled ghetto, in which families are overwhelmingly female-headed and these women have many sexual partners in a lifetime. Since we will not accept that women are a species of property, and since we know that families without fathers are disasters, we uphold companionate marriage as the model for straight sexuality, and we cannot accept alternatives to it. While I can make this argument, though, I recognize that it may not succeed in the marketplace and that, if gay unions are recognized as equivalent to marriage, other groups may similarly lobby, and successfully, ultimately leading to the decline of that institution. I fall back, therefore, on the argument that domestic partnerships for straights and gays are far more damaging to marriage than a gay union marriage equivalent would be, because such arrangements directly attack the notion that marriage is a social institution rather than a private choice. |
