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

 
Around this time of year, I generally post a run-down of charitable organizations that I support, and encourage my readers to do likewise. Here is last year's post. Here is a post from 2002.

Rather than repeat the list, I'm going to talk about new charities that I've gotten involved with, and also give an update on some of the "regulars" on my list year after year.

Before I do that, though, I wanted to clue readers in to an interesting quirk in the tax law this year. (Although this is probably too late to do any good, I'm going to do this anyway.) In September, President Bush signed the Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act of 2005. Among this law's provisions were the following changes to the law regarding charitable deductions. Outright gifts of cash made in 2005 after August 27th of this year to most public charities - whether involved in Katrina relief or not - are exempt from certain restrictions on claiming deductions that would have normally applied. Specifically, the contribution limit was increased from 50% of adjusted gross income to 100% (this applies only to outright gifts of cash, not gifts of securities, real property, etc.), and the same outright gifts of cash are exempt from the 3% reduction in itemized deductions for individuals with an adjusted gross income over $145,950. What this boils down to is: depending on how much you give and what your income is, it might save you money to contribute to your favorite charities in 2005 rather than in 2006.

(The reason, by the way, that all contributions are exempt from these limits is that otherwise donors who typically gave more than they could deduct would have had a strong incentive to reduce contributions to other charities and give to Katrina relief organizations instead so as to benefit from the exemption, and the intent was to increase overall giving and giving to Katrina relief specifically, and not to drain money out of other charities towards Katrina relief.)

In any event, let me tell you about two schools I've gotten involved with - two very different schools, each with a profound sense of mission and a great deal to offer their students and communities.

The first is a recently-approved charter school to be based in Harlem, Democracy Prep Charter School. I joined the board of trustees of this prospective school this past summer. I am incredibly impressed with the founder and proposed Head of School, Seth Andrew, and with his vision for the school. We're drawing on the proven methods applied at schools like KIPP and North Star Academy and Amistad Academy: a disciplined environment, a strong school culture, an extended day and year, a strong, substantive curriculum and regular assessments of students on a relative and absolute basis. We're also intending to introduce a number of innovative elements, some from other successful schools and school systems that haven't been used in our model charters (e.g., looping students in two-year "academies") and others that reflect the special mission of Democracy Prep (e.g., a mandatory civics curriculum and participation in competitive speech and debate).

I like a lot of things about the school in concept. Here are some of things I like best of all. Seth manifests a rare and invaluable combination of realism and idealism. He's got to be idealistic if he's going to try to make a difference to the student population of Harlem, which has atrocious stats on almost any metric. He's got to be realistic if he's going to actually make any kind of a difference. I think he's got the balance right. He's thinking about how high-performing charters have succeeded in the past, but also about where they've stumbled - notably, in transitions out of the highly supportive and structured environment of a high-performing inner-city charter to a selective high school or prep school or (for students coming out of charter high schools) college. A big part of the thinking about innovations for Democracy Prep has revolved around how to make those inevitable transitions more successful. I also really like the emphasis on civics and forensics, the one a vastly under-taught subject vital to a successful republic, the latter an activity that nurtures vastly under-taught skills that are an asset to any citizen and, indeed, in any field of employment.

I am a strong supporter of the charter school movement for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, charters are the only currently plausible way of getting around the onerous restrictions of the union contracts that govern our nation's schools. Charter schools can hire and fire teachers just like any private business or school, and are exempt from the byzantine array of work rules and from most of the grievance process. I say they are the only plausible way of getting around these contracts because head-on assaults on the teachers' unions appear to be politically impossible, and vouchers face numerous legal and political obstacles (some of them legitimate, others not). Charters, by contrast, are overwhelmingly popular.

Second, some form of competition for students is an essential complement to any system of evaluative testing. The reason is that absent competition, there is no real feedback mechanism for the information coming from testing. The only feedback is through the bureaucracy - the No Child Left Behind Act gives the Feds the power to shut down schools that repeatedly fail these assessments - and the bureaucracy can be (and is currently being) gamed in a variety of ways. If you know your career depends on passing a test, you will find a way to pass that test - and that's exactly what school districts across the country are doing, by making the tests easier, by teaching exclusively to the test and dropping real content, and by outright cheating. In the right context, with competition and proper oversight, NCLB could be an essential element in improving education in America. Much of that necessary context is now absent, and in some districts NCLB has actually exacerbated preexisting negative trends.

Third, charters thread an important ethical needle. We are committed, at least rhetorically, to providing a decent education for all. That should mean that the public school system has to take all comers, and do its best with them to provide them that education. Private schools don't have to do that - they must not have to do that; selectivity is part of their mission, frankly, whether they are selecting for academics or for "fit" with a particular scholastic, religious or other ethos. Because charters (at least in NYC) must take randomly selected students from the pool of eligible applicants, they don't therefore raise the interesting ethical question that vouchers do about what happens to the students who are not selected. Of course, there is still a selection bias with charters; you have to apply, after all, which means the parents must care something about their children's futures. And they have more lattitude than the public schools to remove students who are discipline problems from their classes. But this kind of selectivity is, I think, overwhelmingly positive. Moreover, because charters are sited in the neighborhoods where their student population largely resides, they do not raise the problem that private schools do of pulling the most talented and promising segment of the local youth out of the neighborhood; rather, they generate social capital in the neighborhood that can have real collateral benefits beyond the school. Of course it doesn't always work that way; but it can, and often will.

Fourth, I'm very much a believer that one-size education does not fit all. The student population is very diverse, with varied levels of basic scholastic aptitude, of specific abilities, of temperaments and learning styles, and (it goes without saying in this age of diagnostic proliferation) disabilities. All this before we even start talking about culture, language, family background, etc. Different schools will suit different students. One nice thing about at least some charters is that they have distinctive characters and missions, some of which might be more appealing to one set of students and some to others. So long as certain basic standards are maintained, I think that kind of diversity - a variety of types of schools, each with a strong and internally unified culture - is a strong positive for our education system.

Finally, and not least, even when different charters look pretty similar to one another, they benefit from having a strong sense of mission, and a staff that is dedicated to that mission. In that sense, they pose another selection problem - charters are attracting the best teachers. They are surely doing more good in their new environments than they were in their old schools, but even if the net some is positive it is a drain on the school system. This equation isn't static, though; as the charter movement grows, it should change the incentives for entering - and staying in - the teaching profession, which should result in gains for the system as a whole and not just for the individual charters. It will take a long time for schools of education to begin to change in response to the charter movement, but it will eventually happen, and it won't happen without the charter movement.

I wound up involved in Democracy Prep mostly by accident. But I'm very, very energized by what Seth (and the rest of the team) have done so far. We're now in the process of evaluating possible spaces for the school, as well as in the process of recruiting teachers and other staff. Leads on either are always welcome; feel free to email me and I'll pass the information along to the relevant parties.

The other school I intended to mention is one I'm currently not as involved in, except as a donor, but I expect to get more involved as time goes on - because I expect my son will attend. The Hannah Senesh Community Day School is something too rare in the Jewish community: a school that genuinely strives to be a community school rather than a denominational one. It is very difficult to achieve the balance necessary to keep such a school afloat; a school that has modern Orthodox and totally unaffiliated families is going to have to negotiate questions of kashrut standards, mixed-sex education and prayer, and so forth - and there's no way everyone will be happy with the compromises that result. But negotiating those compromises is vital, because the denominalization of the Jewish community has had very deleterious consequences for both the Orthodox and liberal ends of the spectrum.

As for the quality of the school, I have had moments of nervousness about how "progressive" the instructional model is; I'm kind of an old-school type myself, and think that much of progressive education is sheer hogwash, and some of it quite destructive. But a number of our friends send their students to Hannah Senesh and they are uniformly thrilled with the quality of the instruction and with how happy their kids - from kindergardeners to teenagers - are to go to school. And the graduates are thriving in tough high schools, which is a pretty strong recommendation, in my view.

Hannah Senesh and Democracy Prep could not be more different and they could not be more similar. One is sectarian and private; the other, public. One serves a self-selected population of Jewish students in Brooklyn; the other, a randomly selected population of mostly black students in Harlem. One has a strong focus on creating a disciplined and orderly school culture, and the curriculum in the early years will be significantly informed by the methods of Direct Instruction (though this evolves very much in the later grades); the other takes a certain amount of discipline for granted and takes a more "child-centered" approach to education. So much, so different. And yet they have crucial aspects in common. Both have a relatively long school day. Both have strongly motivated staff, a strong school culture, and are "bootstrap" organizations that started with nothing. Both bring a strong ethical and civic component to their educational philosophy. Both believe in a high level of parental involvement (Hannah Senesh was created a decade ago by a group of parents unhappy with the choices available for Jewish day school education in brownstone Brooklyn). Both are committed to teaching students of varying abilities and with disabilities. And both are committed to preparing their students for success in college and in life.

A friend of mine asked me, when I hit him up for money for Democracy Prep, why he should support a school that he wouldn't send his kids to? And it's a fair question. But it's wrongly premised. I don't know what my son's abilities and needs are going to turn out to be, so I don't know whether, ultimately, he belongs in a highly academic environment or a school geared towards students with more average academic gifts; whether he'll prove to have profound musical or mathematical or athletic or oratorical talents that we would want his school to be well-equipped to nurture; whether he will thrive in a highly Jewish-oriented school or whether he will chafe against it. I think there should be lots of different kinds of schools because there are lots of different kinds of students. And I think we should support models that work for the population they are aiming to serve.

Those are the two new names on the list that I wanted to highlight. There are a number of other charities that I've given to for the first time this year, but none that I've been involved in to a significant degree. (There's a theatrical group that I may join the board of, but it really depends on whether they get their act together, as it were, so I'll save them for next year's post on this topic.) So let me now turn to a few organizations I've mentioned in the past and give a brief update.

For a number of years, I've given to Technoserve, a charity that helps rural agricultural entrepreneurs in Latin America and Africa. The more I read about the developing world's economic problems, the more convinced I am of the importance of the work Technoserve does in getting these business-owners access to credit, access to both financial and technical expertise, and access to the large buyers that drive the global agricultural markets. Technoserve's work is not the solution to poverty in the developing world; there is no "the" solution. But their work is an essential part of the solution, because self-sustaining businesses create capital, financial and social, and there is no prospect for improvement in the developing world without locally-generated capital. I am interested in hearing about other charities that are effective that are working with the same philosophy in urban areas. The International Rescue Committee and International Medical Corps never lack for work, unfortunately, and I continue to support both. But I'm very interested in finding more outfits that can actually solve problems instead of just ameliorating them.

Among the Jewish organizations that I've been supporting the longest is Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life. Hillel has recently had a change in leadership, and has also taken somewhat of a different direction than it had in the past. Specifically, Hillel is increasingly focused on outreach to largely unaffiliated Jews on campus. And they are approaching this population segment with two new focuses: one, "Judaizing" (for lack of a better word) social action that the students may already be interested in; two, approaching Judaism more as an activity from a suite of activities, rather than as a defining affiliation. Or, perhaps better, as part of a kaleidescopic identity with many facets. I am troubled by both trends. I understand why the organization is going in this direction, and I could imagine the first, at least, being done very well. But I can also imagine it being done badly. If Hillel sends a student to Guatemala for the summer to build houses with Habitat for Humanity, Hillel has done a good deed, but it's not obvious to me that Hillel's mission has been advanced. If Hillel puts a student interested in reproductive rights in touch with Planned Parenthood to do an internship for the summer, it seems to me that Hillel has either (a) taken sides on something utterly divorced from its mission, or (b) if Hillel would equally happily send a student to a group that lobbies on the other side of the abortion controversy, become entirely incoherent. What worries me is that Hillel may have reached the end of the line in terms of promoting Jewish life on campus while trying to stay agnostic on what Jewish life means. "Social action" as the liberal denominations like to call it is assuredly part of Jewish life - but if that action isn't embedded in a Jewish life, then how does Hillel know what kinds of action are consonant with its mission and which are counter - or which could cut strongly either way depending on one's ideology? And what about Judaism, if anything, is being communicated this way? I guess my point is: if Hillel wants to do more "social justice" stuff that raises the bar for religious seriousness in the organization; it doesn't lower it. Hillel does a whole lot of very good things - besides providing a base camp from which a variety of Jewish groups, religious and cultural, can operate on campus, it runs the birthright program that sends young adults to Israel, a program which has proven enormously successful. I'm still very supportive of the organization. That's why I don't want it to lose what it has achieved by trying to be all things to all people.

In the wake of the transit strike, I have redoubled my support for The Manhattan Institute. The Manhattan Institute is the only right-leaning think tank I'm aware of that focuses specifically on urban issues. And they understand these issues - they are not knee-jerk libertarians or the type of cultural conservatives who would prefer to saw off the eastern seaboard. Their fellows, like E.J. McMahon, Julia Vitullo-Martin and Steven Malaga have been ubiquitous in the New York media on a whole host of issues vital to the future of New York and, by extension, other cities. I also think they deserve credit for keeping Heather MacDonald and Tamar Jacoby under one roof; if the GOP can continue to manage that same trick constituency-wise, I'll be even more impressed. Mayor Bloomberg has not been nearly so attentive to their advice as was his predecessor, but he hasn't been entirely closed either. I sincerely hope the next governor of our state is a regular reader. I'll certainly be listening to how they handicap the various prospects.

Overwhelmingly our biggest arts-related charity remains the Stratford Festival of Canada. Next year's season looks like a real winner; we may see as many as a dozen shows. We did substantially increase our support for the Brooklyn Museum, however. They just did a fabulous renovation of the front entrance to the museum, making it vastly more appealing to the eye (here's a picture, so you can see if you agree with my assessment) and creating a lovely new public plaza that our son loves to tear around in before (and after) going to the museum. The Brooklyn Museum is a wonderful collection in search of a mission. Their big problem is that they draw an audience overwhelmingly from Brooklyn and, well, there just isn't a big enough audience in the borough to sustain a major museum of the caliber that you find on Museum Mile in Manhattan. So they try a little bit of everything to drum up interest, and sometimes they do wonderful shows (for example, the current exhibit of Edward Burtynsky's photographs), and sometimes . . . not. The only way to keep a treasure like the Brooklyn Museum from being wasted or trashed is to get involved, though, and that's what we've begun to do.

I'm not attempting to make a comprehensive list of charities here, and many of those that I've mentioned before - the Nature Conservancy, the Prospect Park Alliance, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Masorti Foundation for Conservative Judaism, etc. - I continue to support and in some cases have increased my support to. But this post has already gotten incredibly long, so I thought I'd shift gears and solicit ideas for next year - places to give that I may not currently be giving to but would like to.

Here are some examples of things I care about where I would like to find honest, effective organizations to support.

If there is an iconoclastic (but accredited) school of education that is out to revolutionize the way teachers are trained in this country, that is serious and research-based and is neither infected with progressive nonsense nor addicted to navel-gazing, I want to know its name.

If there is an organization devoted to bringing either of the following to American youngsters that is not infected with bad aesthetic notions or worse political ones, I'd like to know it's name: (1) the English poetical tradition (or, failing that, Shakespeare); (2) drawing and draftsmanship.

I would love to know an organization devoted to improving the lives of animals raised for food that is sane, realistic and morally grounded.

I suspect Steve Sailer is right that there are nutritional and other environmental deficiencies that significantly impact the cognitive potential of the poorest people, in America and in the world. The only "cause" in this regard I've ever heard discussed publicly is lead poisoning, which is mostly a tort racket at this point. Are there organizations devoted domestically to this question? Internationally? I would be interested in any or all of research, public education, and direct service delivery. I'm sure the good work CARE and other such organizations do have a positive effect in this regard; I'm interested in whether there is a highly targeted organization working on this question from some angle.

I believe strongly that Israel has done itself an enormous disservice by investing insufficiently in the development of the Negev. The American states of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico are no less barren and desertified, and they've become significant contributors to the American economy. There's a good argument to be made that the Negev is a net economic contributor to Israel's well-being in spite of being an "underdeveloped" region. I'm highly suspicious of the kind of top-down, centrally-planned (non-)development that Israel has typically engaged in. I'm very interested to know whether there are good private organs working - effectively - on development of the Negev, from a residential or industrial point of view. The only organization I currently support that fits the bill is Ben Gurion University of the Negev. I'm interested in hearing other ideas.

These are examples. I'm open to any other suggestions people have.
posted by Noah at 12:25 PM

 
UPDATE: well, only minutes after I predicted that the union would win, comes the news that the union has agreed to end the strike and resume talks. This either means that I was spectacularly wrong . . . or spectacularly right. It all depends on what the MTA offered to get the subways running again.

We shall see soon enough.
posted by Noah at 11:05 AM

 
I'd say our current transit strike illustrates one of the most important reasons why I am a registered Republican. Except that Republicans in New York haven't been that much better than Democrats - especially, especially, especially Governor Pataki, who rolled over for Dennis Rivera of 1099 to win reelection.

I wish Mayor Bloomberg would fire every single transit worker and break the union. But (a) I don't think he (nor, I suspect, anyone else) has the clear authority to do so, and (b) he'd never do it if he did have the authority; he's a cautious, centrist, consensus managerial type. That's still a whole lot better than Pataki; Bloomberg has done much less to actually sell out the city's economic interests that Pataki has the state's. But he's no Ronald Reagan.

Instead, I expect the MTA to partially cave tonight. The strike might well be over tomorrow. And, whatever compromise is agreed upon, the TWU will effectively have won.

The betting had been that the union couldn't win this one - public opinion, across the political spectrum, was massively against them; they didn't have a lot of money in the bank to withstand a strike; etc. But they struck anyway, because they have the leverage to do so, and public opinion, frankly, doesn't matter. The public may support Bloomberg if he stands firm, but they will hardly punish him if a "reasonable" compromise is reached, because in the public's mind the most important thing is for the strike to end. Toussaint is clearly happy to go to jail, and even if the union is fined $1 million per day, the city is losing more like $500 million. To put the number in context, when Bloomberg took office he faced (if I recall correctly) something like a $4 billion deficit, and that was considered a major crisis for the city's finances.

I am normally highly resistant to Leninist "the worser the better" logic, but in this case we really do need to highten the contradictions. The sooner NYC and our other major cities and blue states realize that their contracts with public sector unions are absolutely unsustainable, the better for everyone. For that reason, I would say that the Bush Administration tax proposal I most strongly favor is also the proposal that would most hurt New Yorkers, and would cost me personally a great deal of money every year: eliminate the deduction for state and local income taxes.

Bill Weld has already started attacking Spitzer for being insufficiently hawkish (if that's the right term) on the strike. Potential GOP candidates for Governor should be competing almost exclusively to one-up each other on issues like this. I will vote and contribute to whichever Republican candidate running in the primary (and I do very much hope there is a contested primary) is most likely to successfully fight New York's public-sector unions. (That is to say: multiply odds of victory in the general election times seriousness about fighting the unions times likely effectiveness in fighting the unions, and the highest score gets my support.) Nothing else matters as much for the future of my city and state.
posted by Noah at 10:22 AM

 
Okay, I've given it another shot.

I'm not planning to stop, but when I step back and look at what I've written over the last couple of days, what do I see?

- I ruminated about a weird Holocaust undertone to a bunch of Dreamworks kids movies. This is basically coctail party conversation, isn't it?
- I played a meme game. No net value added to the universe. Maybe I got through the exercise without sounding awfully pretensious, but I doubt it.
- I staked out the daring and controversial position that we should not ignore Latin America! No, definitely not - we should stay engaged! Surely I've changed the world by writing that.
- I rambled on the subject of religion and science without especially advancing anybody's argument in any direction or even really clarifying anything for myself.

Quite unsatisfying.

One of my readers comments that my piece on Morales' election proves only the depths of my ignorance about Latin America. I can only concur. You know, when I was an undergraduate, I intended to write my thesis on a topic in early colonial Latin America (16th century). I was to work with a professor whose area was early modern Spain, which was close enough, but then he left to go to another school who would actually offer him tenure. So I wound up working with a graduate student, and settled eventually on a topic: the taqui oncoy rebellion in 16th century colonial Peru. I was a couple of months into my researches, starting to work on a first draft of a paper for my seminar which, in the next semester, I would expand into my thesis, when I came across an article in Spanish claiming basically the following: everybody who studies the taqui oncoy is wrong. The key to understanding the rebellion is to realize that oncoy is an Aymara (I think - it's been about 15 years) word for the constellation of the Pleiades. The rebellion was actually triggered by, and its most salient features (bizarre dancing, speaking in tongues, etc.) related to astrological events around the Pleiades at the time. Now, I read this article, and one thing became clear. I did not have the foggiest idea whether the author was right or wrong. And I did not have the foggiest idea how to determine whether the author was right or wrong. And my opinion on whether the author was right or wrong was pretty darned important to my thesis. I did not know anything about pre-Inca Andean astrology, and I was not going to learn enough about it in the time available. My grad student advisor didn't know anything about pre-Inca Andean astrology either, so we radically downscaled the scope of the paper, from an attempt to actually explain the rebellion to a historiographical piece on the difficulties of using Inquisition testimony and other Spanish records to get a real picture of what was going on. This was very unsatisfying, and not thesis material, so I switched topics, and advisors, and wound up writing about ancient Israelite stuff. And I also wound up dropping the idea of academia as a career.

What's my point? There is so much world out there that I am interested in. Writing this blog has, indeed, helped me become a better thinker, and a better writer. But that doesn't mean I know what I'm talking about. I'm making it up as I go along like the rest of the bloggers - heck, like most of the rest of the writers. How can I feel good about that, either as a way to spend my time or in terms of what good I'm doing for my poor deluded readership, such as it is?

Well, I'm going to bed. See how things seem in the morning.
posted by Noah at 11:57 PM

 
Two links in as many days, Ross - I should send you flowers. Instead I'll just return the favor.

I'm very glad to read a clarification of Cardinal Schonborn's views. I intended to say something about all this apropos of the Gertrude Himmelfarb fracas in The Corner last week (and perhaps I still will . . . but not tonight I think) in which the difference between science and scientism featured prominently on her and her defenders' side of the argument.

And yet. Here are some nagging questions.

I usually take the postmodern pragmatist side of these kinds of debates, and argue that "truth" means different things in different contexts, which is why it is reasonable to be a religious believer and also accept modern science. The one speaks to the subjectively perceived human condition and the other to how physical reality works. But I'm going to take the other side of the argument for the sake of argument. God asks us to love Him with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your means. "Heart" means intellect in this context. That does seem to force a choice, doesn't it? You can't love God with one part of your intellect and rule Him out with another, can you?

Pressing the point, natural selection does not sound like the kind of mechanism Jesus would use to create beings capable of participating in the incarnation of God. (Set aside for the moment that I'm not a Christian; this is easier to do using Christian tropes.) It's all well and good to say that this is a fallen world and the original design of creation was something rather different before our sin caused nature itself to fall. Darwinism doesn't support that narrative. We never had a nature prior to that which emerged from natural selection. Doesn't that have some implications for the Christian theodicy?

And now to the crux. The moral philosophers tell us that is cannot be construed to imply ought. The scientists rightly caution us that ought cannot be presumed to imply is - that is bounds ought. You cannot morally oblige someone to do the impossible. And yet the advance of science has steadily constricted the space within which ought is bound by is. Forget about Darwin; there are already people running around claiming that the self is an illusion, and that's a far greater threat to ethical monotheism of any stripe. I myself find the denial of the self logically problematic; illusions are perceived by selves - no self, no illusion. How then can the self itself be an illusion - who's doing the perceiving? But I recognize that while science has done essentially nothing to illuminate the deep abyss of consciousness itself; and while I can attest that consciousness feels like a kind of singularity - the kind of thing that cannot by its nature be penetrated; and while I have instinctive sympathy for scientists from Schroedinger to Penrose to Eccles who have bet the same way; nonetheless, it has not escaped me that this is but a variation on the "God of the gaps" that has lost so many bets through history. So what makes me think this time she'll come up seven? Even if consciousness turns out to be a singularity, it does not strike me as at all impossible that we'll unpack some very large chunks of what we currently attribute to that singularity and discover that they are in fact reducible to physical phenomena governed by law. I can imagine, for example, our discovering that what appears to be free will is, in fact, an illusion, a story we tell ourselves after the fact about how we came to decisions that were not consciously made at all. That's certainly the way my own mind feels to me some days. Would a discovery like that really have no implications for one's religious beliefs?

I want to go along with Schonborn. I don't think science teaches us the most important things about the human condition. But it does seem to me to be going too far to say that it teaches us nothing, or that religious teachings are immune to scientific discoveries. And if they are not immune, then the neo-Darwinians or the neuroscientists may in fact discover things that undermine religious dogma - may already have done so, in fact. It has not escaped me that most theists who accept evolution try to maintain that while evolution is a scientific fact, that doesn't rule out God "guiding" the process. To which one can only answer: if randomness is a sufficient explanation, then what does it add to say that it's God throwing the dice? And if randomness turns out to be an insufficient scientific explanation, then we're back to the God of the gaps.

I don't want to make it sound like this is just a Christian problem. There is a dictum from the Talmud: ein kochav l'yisrael - "there is no star for Israel." That is to say: the destiny of Israel is not determined by astrology, because the Holy One, Blessed Be He has taken our destiny directly into His hands. Now, this is not a denial of the validity of astrology; astrology was considered a legitimate science at the time, much as evolutionary biology is today, though with vastly less robust evidence to justify that status. Rather, it was an assertion that a religious dogma trumped the precepts of science. There are plenty of people today who assert, similarly, that God, touching them directly, changed their very natures; our President is one of these people. Science is trying to explain away what they know. I'm unpersuaded by Schonborn that science categorically cannot do any such explaining.

But, as I said before, I'm a theist of a sort. I believe in a God who created the heavens and the earth, and who is mindful of me, for reasons that I cannot fathom, because I cannot believe otherwise. So I'm open to further, more convincing arguments.
posted by Noah at 11:03 PM

 
Questions for John Derbyshire, apropos of the decision in Dover, PA:

Granted that we agree entirely that ID is fundamentally dishonest as a project, is not science, does not belong in a science classroom, etc. - where in the Constitution does it say that schools have to teach science?

Do you buy into the argument that religious "motivations" are sufficient to deem an activity a violation of the Establishment Clause? Can you see any potential problems for other traditional educational objectives if one embraced this principle?

Do you see any merit in Clarence Thomas' argument that the Establishment Clause doesn't apply to the states at all?

Or, let's put the question more pragmatically. The school board that introduced ID into the Dover, PA school system has already been driven from office by an angry public. Do you think that the public will be more or less aroused to defend the schools against the imposition of ID on the curricula if the courts forbid such imposition? And which do you think will win more success for ID in the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans: losing at the ballot box or losing in the courts?

The Dover decision is clearly a victory for truth and right on the question of ID. Whether it is a victory for democracy, or a long-term victory for public understanding and appreciation of science, is much less clear to me. Whether conservatives should be applauding a court-ordered victory of this type is less clear still.
posted by Noah at 12:39 PM

 
Ironically, I only just read Amy Chua's very persuasive book, World On Fire, a few weeks ago, and here we have Bolivia electing an Aymara-nationalist to their presidency. What are we to do?

I'm sympathetic to Ralph Peters' answer - nothing - but I don't think that quite cuts it. Here are some problems with just ignoring the obvious and growing trend of Indian nationalism in Latin America (which is the way Chua describes it, and which I think is a much better description than "leftist" or "socialist").

1. They won't necessarily stay home. Yeah, we built up Castro by making such a big deal about him. But he also actively assisted revolutionary and terrorist groups in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Nicarargua, Angola . . . it's a long list. Were we supposed to ignore that, too? Hugo Chavez has made repeated military threats against Colombia and Guyana. Morales has similarly made threats to reverse the outcome of the War of the Pacific. Once again, one can say: if Venezuela and Colombia get into a war, or Bolivia and Chile, that's their problem, not ours. Perhaps. But at some point mayhem to our south starts to become a problem for us, no? And in my book, war between Venezuela and Colombia crosses the line from "ignorable" to "not-ignorable" as problems go.

2. Benign neglect hasn't been working out so well. President Bush came into office promising a foreign policy that paid less attention to Europe and more attention to East Asia and Latin America. I thought that made a whole lot of sense back in 2000. Obviously, events originating in the Middle East changed that picture somewhat. But I'm still amazed at how neglectful this Administration has been of Latin America. So far as I can tell, all we've done since 2000 is push for a massive guestworker program (something Mexico obviously wants) and prematurely support a coup against Hugo Chavez. (Oh, and Doug Feith apparently speculated about attacking the Colombian narco-terrorist insurgents, FARC, in response to 9-11, just to keep 'em guessing.) It's during this period of purportedly benign neglect that Latin America has taken this turn. Obviously, there are more fundamental reasons for this change than American neglect; the economic problems of Latin America are very long-standing, and globalization probably has much to do with both the exacerbation of economic divides and the growing racial aspect to politics in the region (in both cases because globalization has accelerated internal migration, and the countryside is more indigenous than the cities). Nonetheless, it is difficult to argue complacently for a policy of benign neglect when benign neglect is what we've mostly been doing, and the ominous trend continues to accelerate.

3. What about Mexico? Events actually on our southern border have, quite obviously, much more significance than events a continent away. In the past couple of decades, indigenist movements in Mexico have been limited mostly to the Mayan regions bordering Guatemala that were never well-integrated into Mexico, going all the way back to pre-Columbian times. But that could change. Bolivia, Guatemala, Peru and Ecuador are out on one end of the curve in terms of the percentage of the population that identifies as Indian or that speaks an indigenous language rather than Spanish as a primary tongue. But as the rise of Hugo Chavez demonstrates, what is more commonly the majority in a Latin American country - people of mixed blood - can effectively be radicalized and turned against the dominant minority of more pure-blooded whites. Do we care if that happens in Mexico? We do. Instability or economic failure in Mexico would radically worsen our already quite bad illegal immigration problem. Solving that problem depends on serious effort both in the U.S. and in Mexico: in the U.S. to defend our borders and in Mexico to provide enough economic opportunity for internal migrants (whereas currently the Mexican government actively encourages these folks to keep on moving all the way to el norte). It might be tempting to think that an indigenist government that renationalized big companies, distributed land, etc. would provide that opportunity, or a semblance thereof, and hence reduce migration northward, but the overwhelmingly likely result is the precise opposite: precipitous economic decline and far more massive movements of people.

4. What makes Peters so sure that Chavez & Co. will be turned out when their policies fail? It's a funny thing: once you are el presidente, there are all sorts of things you can do to assure that you remain so. Chavez is doing most of those things right now. And to the extent that the current indigenist turn is a consequence of resentment of a distinct market-dominant elite that has disproportionately benefitted from globalization, it's not obvious that, in the short- or medium-term, current supporters will be that upset if they don't benefit much or at all from renationalizations and the like, so long as that elite suffers. Mugabe is still popular, at least in the countryside where most of Zimbabwe's people live, and he's brought those very people to the brink of starvation. More broadly, since World War II we've seen a bunch of countries make a turn towards democracy, in Northeast and Southeast Asia, in Central and Eastern Europe, in Latin America and in Africa. And there's a common thread to the countries that have made that transition successfully, becoming mostly democratic and remaining pretty stable and economically successful: they achieved modest economic success before the transition, they are not characterized by economic domination by an ethnic or racial minority, and they have been firmly embraced (in at least one case - South Korea - garrisonned) by America. (There are, of course, exceptions, most notably India, but this post is getting too long already.) The first and second condition do not clearly obtain in Bolivia, or in a number of other Latin American, though I would argue they do obtain in Mexico. The third condition, though, surely cautions us against expecting some law of history to work to assure a positive outcome in the end, whatever the setbacks along the way.

I gave President Bush some unsolicited advice over a year ago with respect to Latin America. I made basically three points. We need to reward our friends in the region, such as Colombia, and work to remain friends with countries that have been our friends in the past and that are reasonably stable and successful, such as Chile. We needed to be much more aggressive about courting Brazil, a country we know almost nothing about and that is emerging as a real regional power (and which is being courted aggressively by both China and the EU). A good relationship with Brazil would do an enormous amount to stem the tide of anti-Americanism in the region. Finally, we need to do much more to get Mexico to work to solve our illegal immigration problem rather than exacerbating it. It is obviously in Mexico's interest for there to be a completely integrated North American labor market. But it's not in American interests. Where our interests overlap is in Mexico's economic success. And we are the overwhelming external factor that will affect whether Mexico thrives or stagnates. That should give us at least some leverage, leverage we have steadfastly refused to use.

Do I think we should be ringing alarm bells about Morales? No. That would probably make things worse. Do I think we should be completely disengaged from Latin America, and let things take their "natural" course? No, I don't think that either.
posted by Noah at 11:32 AM

 
Okay, one more thing before I go. The Meme of Four:

Four jobs you've had in your life: mail-room guy, sales assistant, structurer/marketer trader/structurer, all at the same firm (I've only worked one place - sue me).

Four movies you could watch over and over: The Third Man, The Philadelphia Story, Flirting With Disaster, Groundhog Day.

Four places you've lived: Yonkers, New Haven, Brooklyn, Chicago (one summer - does that count?).

Four TV shows you love to watch: No television! So I'll pick things I'll watch in hotel rooms or rent: Cheers, Ren and Stimpy, The Prisoner, Due South.

Four places you've been on vacation: South Ontario, Death Valley, Ireland, Israel.

Four websites you visit daily: The American Scene, iSteve.com, Kausfiles, The Corner.

Four of your favorite foods: lamb chops, malfatti, creme brulee, wasabi peas

Four places you'd rather be: mostly home, where I'm going momentarily, but if we're talking peak places to be: exploring my favorite spots at the Frick Museum (too crowded this time of year); chatting with Scott Wentworth (actually, it's my wife who's monopolizing him; I guess I'm talking to his wife) at Down The Street in Stratford, Ontario; sipping wine on the porch of Madrona Manor in Healdsburg; and, just because something active should probably be thrown in, swimming in a mountain lake with my wife and son on Mount Desert Island. But there's a long list of places I'd rather be. I should probably go to one of them.

posted by Noah at 5:49 PM

 
On the other hand, I can't be too sanguine about the state of art for children made by my own co-religionists. I'm afraid I must rise to give voice to my real discomfort with a certain aspect of the Dreamworks children's movie oevre.

My son (age 3) has gotten a few movies as gifts over the last few months, including a couple of Dreamworks offerings: Shrek and El Dorado. He's alarmingly interested in movies (particularly classic movie musicals like Singin' In The Rain and The Music Man. But of course if he got new movies he'd want to see them, and so we did. And they got me thinking about other Dreamworks movies for children I've seen: Chicken Run, Antz, Prince of Egypt. I haven't seen Madagascar or Shark Tale, so maybe this is just a coincidence of what movies I've seen. But it does seem to me there's a . . . theme to these movies. One that is . . . peculiar for the children's movie genre.

Take a look at the villains of these movies:

Chicken Run: evil chicken farmer lady holds chickens prisoner in camps, forced to produce eggs; when they can no longer produce their quota, they are killed by a chicken-pie-making machine.

Antz: psychotic warrior ant general seeks to annihilate the worker ants and breed a new race of super-ants from warriors alone.

Price of Egypt: Pharaoh feeds baby Israelites to alligators for "reasons of state" and keeps the crime a secret until his son stumbles on the truth.

El Dorado: lunatic high priest is the only blot on otherwise edenic el dorado, with his demands that the new "age of the jaguar" be smoothed with the blood of copious human sacrifice.

Shrek: no mass-murders, but the villainous Lord Farquaad, gleeful torturer of gingerbread men, does seek to cleanse his realm of degenerate fairy creatures in order to build a perfect kingdom.

Am I imagining something, or are Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen trying to turn kiddie movies into one long Holocaust education seminar?

Why should all villains be deranged megalomaniacs? Why, for that matter, should the story be dominated by the struggle against enormous and powerful villainy of this sort?

Let's compare with some classic Disney movies:

Pinocchio: villains of varying villainy come and go, but the focus is on the moral development of the hero, and how he avoids the temptations that cause him to fall into the villains' clutches.

Dumbo: no particular villain at all; focus is on hero learning to make a virtue of his "specialness."

Snow White: doozie of a villain, but she's motivated by a simple and comprehensible human emotion: jealousy.

Lady and the Tramp: love story; no particular villain of note.

Or, let's compare with some contemporary cartoons from Pixar:

Toy Story: no particular villain, apart from the sadistic kid next door who doesn't play nice with his toys.

A Bug's Life: villains are a biker gang of grasshoppers; they're entirely comprehensible bullies, not exterminating megalomaniacs.

Monsters, Inc: villain is a corrupt corporate tycoon; he's certainly unethical, but again, his motive - greed - is entirely comprehensible.

Finding Nemo: no particular villain; the ocean is just a dangerous place.

You see my point, I hope. Some kids movies have important villains and some don't. Those that do generally have villains that, however terrifying, are comprehensible. Dreamworks seems to have made an inordinately large number of movies in which the villain is an inhuman monster bent on extermination, frequently based on a somewhat Hitlerite ideology.

What this has to do with entertaining - or, for that matter, educating - children I have no idea. I can tell you from my own perspective that this bizarre choice was, in most cases, detrimental to the movie in question (the exception is probably Prince of Egypt, but I'm not sure Prince of Egypt really succeeded for other reasons, nor am I sure that it would at all appeal to children).

And what are children likely to take away from this type of story? I can't see how it will be particularly good for their moral development. To the extent that it has any effects at all, I imagine they will be two: first, when they do learn about the Holocaust, it'll be ho-hum, the kind of thing they vaguely remember from cartoons (and I can't see how that's a good thing, though it's not a terribly important bad thing); second, and more seriously, perhaps they will be inclined to understand these cartoon psychopaths to be typical of the world's villains, and accordingly be especially unwilling to consider any possibility that they might harbor villainous thoughts or tendencies. To divide the world into the children of light and the children of darkness does seem to be the bi-partisan political trope of choice these days. Is more of that sort of thing what SK & G really wanted when they set out to make a kids' cartoon out of Escape from Sobibor?

I'm not sure what they are intending to get across. I'm pretty sure it's not appropriate for children. I'm more sure that they need to find a different story to tell, one that is more meaningful for the moral development of children. They could take a trip over to Emeryville, or wherever Pixar studios actually are, to see how it's done.
posted by Noah at 3:40 PM

 
I probably won't see the Narnia movies (I liked but didn't love the books) but I have been enjoying the discussion thereof. And so far, this is the best thing I've read about them.

The most annoying aspect of the Narnia "debate" has been its crouching, clenched pugnacity. I'm as much at a loss how anyone can take seriously the criticism that the book is *bad* because it is Christian as I am how anyone can take seriously the claims that the book is *good* because it is Christian. Forgive me for continuing to believe at least a little bit in the autonomy of the aesthetic.

But what I really want to know is: where's the next, better Lewis going to come from? Because one thing Lewis was not, at least not in anything I've read of his, is defensive. And I fear there's too defensive a tone to so much of what makes it into the public square from Christian circles, so much so that I wonder about the prospects for a truly great Christian work of art in our time.
posted by Noah at 3:23 PM

 
You know you're getting tired of blogging when you log on to blogger and discover that you have 6 unposted and half-finished posts, start re-reading them, and decide not to decide whether they have any destiny but the trash bin.

I need to figure out what to do with my writing impulse. It's not dead. But the blog doesn't seem to be doing it anymore.

Maybe I'll try one last shot.
posted by Noah at 3:21 PM

 
I haven't said anything about France.
I haven't said anything about Murtha.
If I don't say something about Sharon, I should probably shut down this blog.

Sharon's new party is currently polling as if it is going to win the next election. There would be more reason to doubt this if there were a plausible alternative party that could win. But I do not think Sharon's party will outlast his next premiership, if there is a next premiership.

Why do I say this? Well, Israel has a history of centrist parties that make a big splash and vanish without a trace. Moshe Dayan pulled a similar stunt decades ago, as did Yitzhak Mordechai in 1999. Why should this instance be different? Yes, in this case the sitting Prime Minister left to form a new party, and took much of the old party's leadership with him; that's very different. But Sharon is very old. Without him, what?

What does the new party stand for, other than a "responsible" stance with regard to the Palestinians (which, I suppose, should be interpreted as staging an orderly, fighting retreat to defensible borders, hopefully in the context of a diplomatic agreement but if not, not)? Does it have a coherent economic policy? A stance on religious questions? Views on governmental reform? Why did Sharon leave Likud - because of corruption in the central committee? We're talking about Sharon here, remember.

Historically, Labor was a socialist party, a pragmatic-nationalist party, and a secularist party. Over the last 15 years Labor drifted to the right on economic matters, becoming a "Third Way" party on these issues, and left on national and security issues, flirting with post-nationalism and appearing soft on terrorism. It consequently lost any chance of returning to majority, or even plurality, status in Israel. Amir Peretz appears to be taking the party back to the past - he's far to the left on economic matters compared with where Labor has recently been, and while he's historically been a dove he notably did not leave Labor to join Meretz when the option presented itself, and he's arguably not far at all from where the Israeli center is right now on security and national questions.

Likud, meanwhile, was historically a liberal party, an ideological-nationalist party, and a centrist party on religious questions - it had no religious agenda per se but was more congenial to religious Jews than Labor was. Sharon, though, has precious few economically liberal credentials (I'm using the word in the European sense) - in fact, Sharon knows virtually nothing about economics and cares less. Netanyahu was the authentic liberal. Sharon, as well, while always supremely hawkish and unilateralist, was never an ideological nationalist in the sense that he never believed in the "Land of Israel" ideology of Jabotinsky's heirs, of the Irgun, of Menachem Begin. Sharon has left behind in Likud the most committed economic liberals and all the committed ideological nationalists. How, precisely, does his new party differ, in any important way, from its opposition?

And let's not forget the other potential governing party in the Israeli center: Shinui, which is economically liberal, pragmatic-nationalist, and profoundly secularist - secularism is their religion. Tommy Lapid very nearly outpolled Labor in the last election, and if Israel is really turning inward now that the Gaza withdrawal is done, who's to say there aren't a lot of Ashkenazim and Russians who wouldn't prefer to vote for Sharon's presumptive coalition partner than for Sharon?

My point is: you now have three major parties with views on security and the national question that are not notably distinct - and these are the issues that have most profoundly divided Israel for a generation if not for longer. That's not tenable. Which is why I have a hard time picturing all three parties surviving for any length of time. And Sharon's new party has got to be counted the most vulnerable to collapse, because its appeal is primarily the trust that Israelis have in its founder - to lead the country on the most important questions, and not be hostage to ideology or narrow interest. That trust does not extend far beyond Sharon himself, if it extends at all. And Sharon is very old.

It will be interesting to see what happens on the fringes. On the Left, Meretz needs to come up with a compelling reason to exist. An economic leftist can vote for Peretz rather than Meretz; a secularist ideologue can vote for Lapid. It seems to me Meretz will have to distinguish itself on the question of dealing with the Palestinians or other "peace" issues - but it's not clear how much space there is to the left of the "consensus" on these questions. Meretz has historically been the source of "vanguard" ideas on the left that slowly propagate into the Labor "mainstream" - but until we know what is to become of Labor, it's hard to know whether that ecological niche is going to be available long-term.

On the Right, meanwhile, there are now three parties of stature who opposed the Gaza pullout: National Union, the National Religious Party, and what's left of Likud under Netanyahu. Likud has a very short time in which to prove that it is either something other than a clone of National Union or that it is capable of absorbing National Union. And then there's Shas, which had drifted very far to the Right on national and security questions but has recently tried to correct this. These three parties (apart from the NRP) will be jockeying for leadership of the right-wing opposition to the next government. (If Sharon loses the next election, his party will probably dissolve, and if he wins, he'll almost certainly govern in coalition with Shinui and without any of the parties to his Right.) I think it's unlikely, but it's not inconceivable that a strong and united bloc on the Right makes it impossible for *anyone* to form a government other than a grand "national unity" coalition such as just recently collapsed. Such coalitions are inherently unstable, and so a successful consolidation on the Right would further accentuate the proverbial instability of the Israeli political system.

That political system is in profound need of reform. The parties are corrupt, MKs and even Ministers have no loyalty or honor, the Supreme Court is lawless, and basic disagreements between Israelis about the fundamentals of their country's political system are magnified by that system rather than brought to some kind of reasonable compromise. This has got to change. I hate to say this, but Sharon's pet project - making the Prime Minister into something more like a President, relatively independent of the legislature - is probably a good idea, but only if the legislature itself is reformed so it can act as a reasonable counterweight to the Prime Minister and does not become even more factionalized and dysfunctional than it is now. And that is, unfortunately, profoundly unlikely.
posted by Noah at 5:22 PM

 
Apparently, an old piece of mine on same-sex marriage is getting passed around two and a half years after I wrote it. So I guess I should revisit it for the sake of those who are coming to this blog through it for the first time.

First of all, having read through the post again, there are some things I still agree with and some things I'd back off from, plus some wording I'd change.

What do I still agree with? That marriage, to serve its social function, must be a social norm, not a lifestyle choice, and that marriage is unlikely to become a same-sex norm. And that women and men are equal but different, and that same-sex marriage would make it that much harder to speak about marriage in terms of the complementarity of the sexes and the nature of masculinity.

What do I no longer really agree with? Well, I think my last point is kind of a non-sequitur. It's true: marriage is not only about romantic love; probably, it's not even primarily about romantic love. But upon reflection, I'm not convinced this has anything to do with the same-sex marriage debate. More importantly, I think my first argument - about marriage being a social norm - cuts both ways. If the alternative to same-sex marriage is "marriage lite" for both hetero- and homosexual couples, then arguably same-sex marriage would do less harm to the norm. This is certainly at the core of Jonathan Rauch's argument. In the abstract, I think it's certainly true that a world in which this debate wasn't happening would be a world in which the marriage culture was stronger than ours is. Concretely, it's no longer obvious to me what is the least-damaging path out of our current dilemma.

Finally, I'm increasingly convinced that, politically, conservative leaders are "using" marriage rather than seriously trying to protect it. This is a pattern oft observed with "social issues" from school prayer to abortion. I don't want to be a part of that process.

I think there are broadly speaking six ways to approach the question of how the state should relate to gay couples.

(1) The state can anathematize homosexuality, full stop. I view that as unjust.

(2) The state can take a "don't ask/don't tell" approach, doing nothing to anathematize homosexuality but also nothing to recognize gay couples in any way analogous to the way marriages are recognized. Even if optimal in the abstract, I don't think such a position is tenable, and I am not convinced it is optimal in the abstract.

(3) The state can take a libertarian view of social relations generally, and withdraw public recognition of marriage as such. I think such a position would be highly destructive of the marriage culture and, at least as important, of our common culture generally, and accelerate the balkanization of our society.

(4) The state can adopt a "continuum" approach to marriage, recognizing various kinds of "marriage-lite" arrangements like benefits for domestic partners, joint adoptions by non-married couples, partial custody rights for "third parents" and so forth, while also retaining recognition for some kind of more stringent "traditional" marriage. This is the direction we have actually been headed in practice, and while it has alleviated some of the problems of gay couples it has done so at a serious cost to the marriage culture, and hence to our social fabric and the well-being of children. Some advocates of same-sex marriage, notably Jonathan Rauch, largely agree with this critique; so, obviously, so most opponents of same-sex marriage from the Right, notably David Frum. At least one conservative opponent of same-sex marriage - John O'Sullivan - advocated a variation on the idea of a marriage "continuum" as the solution to our dilemma. My response to his idea is here, and his follow-up (responding to me in passing) is here.

(5) The state can redefine marriage to mean an exclusive partnership, intended to be life-long, between any two individuals regardless of their biological sex. That's what advocating "same-sex marriage" means. My principal objections to this stand. That's not what marriage means, nor ever has meant, because the complementarity between men and women is at the heart of the meaning of marriage. Marriage has changed an awful lot over the centuries, and we in the West have ultimately repudiated the polygamy and consequent second-class status for women that were central to marriage for its first few thousand years as a legal institution. But the proposed redefinition would be, essentially, a linguistic falsehood. For that reason, I fear that it would have the practical consequences I identify in my original piece: because it would make the traditional language of marriage relating to complementarity of the sexes appear to be nonsensical, it would make it that much harder for men and women to learn how to relate to one another, and form stable marriages. And because it would have advanced under the banner of rights such a reform would implicitly concede that marriage is a choice rather than a norm - a choice we all have a right to make but, by the same token, the right not to make if we prefer to live otherwise.

(6) The state can recognize a new institution, call it what you will, exclusively for same-sex couples, that would have many - perhaps even all, if that's what people wish to vote for - of the rights and responsibilities of marriage. The public debate would be over which rights and responsibilities associated with marriage should be extended to this institution, along with the various presumptions associated with marriage. There would be many ways in which the institutions would be parallel, other ways in which they would not be (for example, the "marriage veil" could not logically be extended to gay male couples). I outline a bit of what this would mean in this post explaining why I oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment. In effect, creating such a parallel institution would mean legally recognizing gay people as a "third gender" rather than formalizing legal androgyny as option #5 would do.

Once upon a time, I favored option #5. I shifted over time to favor option #6. I shifted in part because of serious thinking on my own part about what marriage meant, which led me to the conclusions in my post from two and a half years ago. I also shifted in part because of serious meditation on the gay couples I know, and how their narratives are different from the heterosexual narrative, and my increasing conviction that the greater and greater acceptance of gays as part of the social fabric - an entirely welcome development - won't change the ways in which gays and straights are innately different. And I think our social institutions should be cognizant of difference as well as equality.

In the last year, though, I've been reconsidering whether option #6 is really optimal, even though I still think my main objections to option #5 stand. Why have I been reconsidering? For a few reasons.

First, I think I underestimated the threat posed by legal recognition in the West of traditional polygamy from the Muslim world. I now view that as a very likely event across the West - least likely here and most likely in Canada and Scandinavia, but more likely than not everywhere. I view this eventuality as disastrous. How does the same-sex marriage debate play into this question?

Most opponents of same-sex marriage think that it's the next step on a slippery-slope to polygamy. I'm beginning to think they are wrong. Rather, I think the "continuum" approach - option #4 above - is the most likely to lead to public recognition of polygamy, which would be presented (along with polyamory - a rather different thing) as just another part of the continuum, and a highly traditional one at that. So the question, in my mind, is: what is the most likely route off the train we're on right now, which is option #4. My option #6 - recognition of same-sex relationships as a separate category from marriage - seems at least as likely to leave the door open to recognition of Muslim polygamy as does option #5, redefining companionate marriage androgynously, if not more so.

Second, while I may think that our social institutions should be cognizant of difference as well as equality, that is not the tenor of the times. Rather, we live in an era when the hegemonic paradigm abhors difference - the constant paens to "diversity" are actually evidence of this. So, realistically, it's very hard to see the position I favor winning the kind of support necessary to become law. Rather, it's much more likely that folks like myself will be lumped together with other people "in the middle" and provide the bulk political support for a compromise more along the lines of option #4 - some kind of civil-unions or "marriage-lite" law open to same-sex or heterosexual couples, with some of the rights and responsibilities of marriage but not all. That certainly seems to be the preferred outcome in most of the bluer of the blue states, and that preference is likely to spread. Given my concerns about option #4, I can't be sanguine about this outcome.

Finally, as I said, I feel like the advocates for marriage are being used by the political process, that "gay marriage" is becoming a wedge issue rather than a serious topic, and is eclipsing the serious questions about marriage. We are talking about the non-existent "threat" from gay couples instead of talking about the real damage caused by no-fault divorce. Critics of mine such as Justin Katz have argued, in a nutshell, that advocates for a more robust marriage culture need to focus on stopping same-sex marriage because that's (a) a popular cause, and (b) a negative trend that has to be reversed before a positive trend can be started. I can't get on that train. I can't tell a lesbian couple with children that I oppose any effort to publicly recognize their relationship because fighting them is the only way to get other straight people's attention, and that I hope, some day, to use that attention to focus on the actual problems of marriage. That's simply not just. I point you to this piece of mine, particularly the last four paragraphs (though I would suggest reading the whole thing to get sufficient context).

So where does that leave me? Well, not in a very different place than I was before. I still think same-sex marriage is a linguistic error, and a bad idea legislatively. I still think the FMA is inappropriate for the Constitution and would have negative unintended consequences, and I would oppose its passage. So I guess was I thought before was a bad idea I still think is a bad idea, but I'm less sure than I was of what would be a *good* idea. Which is probably a good reason to take a rest from an issue and stop talking about it for a while. Which is what I did for about a year, and intend to do again.
posted by Noah at 10:01 AM

 
I cannot follow you where you're going here, Ross, and not only because I'm not a Christian. *All* successful literature is true - that's why it is successful: because it is truer than what is real. (Realist fiction is the special case that achieves its success by creating a fiction that is *realer* than what is real.) Allegory weakens fiction because it points outside to something truer than itself *by definition* - because that's what an allegory is. (By the same token, realism has failed when it reminds you of reality; it has succeeded when reality reminds you of *it*.) Tolkien is right: the allegory weakens the Narnia books, because it *has* to.

Now, that doesn't mean allegory is a bad thing per se. As a tool of philosophy, or theology, allegory is extremely useful, because it lends to those disciplines many of fiction's strengths. Allegorical stories make some of the best sermons. But they don't make the best stories.

And it is perfectly possible to construct Christian fairy tales that are *not* allegorical, but rather operate within a Christian framework. We know this because Hans Christian Andersen achieved exactly that. The Snow Queen is a whole lot better than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and one reason why (though not the only one) is that Andersen's fable, while making use of even more explicitly Christian content, is not the simplistic allegory that Lewis' is.
posted by Noah at 10:30 AM

 
Some brief clarifications, and then I really want to drop the Supreme Court for a while.

First, I overstated when I said business groups got "nothing" from Alito. Clearly, he's been pretty favorably inclined to business on employment law issues, and to some extent on shareholder suits. What I meant was: he's not someone who brings a depth of experience in corporate law to the table. He's not the go-to guy on, say, anti-trust. Business groups clearly wanted someone with that kind of background, and they didn't get it. But Alito is not someone they would actively *dislike* - just not their first choice.

Second, I am more sure than I was yesterday that Alito will be confirmed without difficulty, because the smart guys in the Democratic camp are coming out, basically, in favor - see, for example, the latest New Republic online, with basically positive pieces by Akiba Covitz (arguing Alito differs from Scalia in background and, more importantly, temperament), Cass Sunstein (arguing that Alito is basically deferential to established institutions, and does not have a radical revisionist plan for the law), and Mark Tushnet (arguing that we don't really know whether Alito will be as deferential to the Executive as is currently assumed, and that anyhow it doesn't matter much because the courts are poorly placed to check the Executive; that's Congress's job).

What's my impression, personally? I think he's kind of boring, which, personally, I don't love, because I like things to be interesting, but rationally, boring is exactly what you want on the Court. I'm a bit disappointed that Bush picked someone so similar to Roberts in so many ways; I liked Roberts a lot, but I think the "portfolio approach" to the Court has some merits, and here we have another careerist judge with impeccable credentials. He also strikes me as very much a prosecutor - again, not necessarily a bad thing, but just a comment. I think Sunstein is right that he's in no way a libertarian, and I think that's all to the good; the Constitution is not a libertarian tract, whatever Anthony Kennedy and Janice Rogers Brown, each in their very different ways, might think.

Needless to say, he deserves to be confirmed, and quickly.
posted by Noah at 4:07 PM

 
Boy, the President looked peeved announcing Alito's nomination. The way he paused and pursed his mouth when referring to his sterling (and they are sterling) credentials.

Hugh Hewitt thinks what is needed now is massive phone-banking to the GOP members of the Gang of 14 to get them to commit to the "Constitutional option" as it were (eliminating the filibuster for judicial nominees). He's jumping the gun, I think, at least if he's looking for public statements from these Senators that they will vote for said option. As well, we don't know yet whether Specter, Snowe, Collins or Chafee will vote for the nominee, nor whether "red-state" Democrats will be able to maintain party discipline. Escalating preemptively to the "constitutional option" makes it *easier* for Democrats to maintain that discipline, because they have better ground to stand on than they do if they have to stand on abortion alone. And it goes without saying that politically it's better to win with 60 votes than with 51.

Even if the point of this nomination is to have a big, public fight, I think it makes sense to draw enemy fire first, because the overwhelming arguments from the Democratic side are going to be about Casey. And I think it helps the GOP to have the Democrats say, "every member of this party must vote against nominees to the Court who think Casey was wrongly decided." Among other things, it would make for very interesting ads in the Pennsylvania Senate race.

Finally: three groups from within the Right who have reason to be disappointed with Alito. First: business groups. He offers them nothing. Miers was their gal. They are going to expect the next nominee, if there is one, to be "their" pick. The social right needs to mend some fences here. Second: evangelical Christians. It's an unfortunate fact but there are certainly people who supported Miers who think her opponents on the *Right* were casting aspersions on her religion. And Alito is another Catholic. I don't think identity politics should have anything to do with the Court, but I'm not the only person out there. Finally: advocates of a more "Talmudic" as against "Papal" model for the Supreme Court's role. Scalia's Catholicism extends beyond his religious affiliation; he is a strong proponent of the notion that the Supreme Court is the final word on the interpretation of the Constitution (as against those who, in the spirit of Larry Kramer's book The People Themselves, take the view that the Court is the final word on any one case but that every branch of government and, indeed, the American people themselves, have equal right and obligation to interpret the Constitution - honestly, of course, but independently). Alito appears to be cut from the same cloth in this regard. Those who are not happy when, for example, the Court rebukes Congress for independently interpreting the Equal Protection or Free Exercise clauses of the 14th and 1st Amendments respectively should not be thrilled by the increasing Catholicism (in this sense, not the religious) of the Court.

I have no business making predictions how this nomination will go, particularly since I have egg on my face from my very recent prediction that the nominee would not be someone like Alito, and, specifically, would not be Alito himself. But that won't stop me. Even though I argued, before the fact, that Bush was in too weak a position to have a knock-down drag-out fight over a nomination, and therefore would pick someone eminently confirmable, I think Alito will join the Court, and that he will do so without triggering the "Constitutional option." But maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part.

We'll see soon enough, won't we.
posted by Noah at 8:13 AM

 
Hmmm. I just re-read these two posts I wrote before the Roberts nomination, speculating on what would happen if President Bush nominated Alberto Gonzales to replace O'Connor. Sounds a lot like what we just went through, no?

I also found this ranked rundown of likely nominees to replace O'Connor, again from before the Roberts nomination. This list obviously needs to be updated. Garza, Alito, Luttig all need to be downgraded. As I indicated below, I don't think Bush is in a strong enough position to have a big confirmation fight. He needs a Roberts, not a Thomas. For the same reason, I think we can drop Owen and Brown from the most-likely list. (Estrada should never have been put on that list.)

For other, more obvious reasons, we can drop Gonzales, at least for now.

Michael McConnell has certainly edged up, but not, I think, to the top, for the reasons I note below. I don't think we should dismiss the idea of Senator Cornyn being nominated, for the reasons I note below, though I have no idea if he wants the job. Ted Olson is, I suppose, another possibility, though surely more remote.

I suspect that President Bush will look more closely at male candidates than he did last time, but that he will still prefer to nominate a woman. There are five oft-mentioned female candidates that strike me as plausible: Clement, Consuelo Callahan, Jones, Mahoney and Sykes. (Sykes I only read about today; gotta keep up with this stuff.) Clement would make some of the true believers nervous; they were nervous when her name was floated before the Roberts announcement. Consuelo Callahan will make them even more nervous. Jones would probably be the biggest fight of the five. Mahoney has a paper trail similar to Roberts; it's mostly work for clients, and hence doesn't give Democrats the kind of "gotcha" on social issues that they are looking for. Don't know much else about her. Sykes, as I say, I just read up on, but she sounds very plausible, and she might be less of a fight than Jones given that Feingold and Kohl (her home-state Senators) both praised her nomination to the Federal courts to the skies. NARAL will come after her with guns blazing, though, rest assured.

I don't know if any of these women would be considered sufficiently deferential to the Executive to pass Bush's "War on Terror" test, and he clearly has such a test.

What I know even less about is: how does the business community view these various potential nominees? I think we should assume that Bush and Card talked themselves into Miers in part because they got a positive feeling about her the business community would receive her (and they were correct about that); they figured that her Evangelical Christian faith and loyalty to the President would be enough to satisfy the religious Right, and they had not been informed that only intellectual super-stars were now qualified to serve on the Court. Well, they've learned different on points #2 and #3, but point #1 still stands: the President will want to nominate someone that the business community will be happy with. McConnell will not win raves in that camp. Cornyn I'm sure would be fine. So would Consuelo Callahan. About Clement, Jones, Mahoney and Sykes, I know from nothing. Anyone else?
posted by Noah at 10:33 PM

 
So she's out of there. What now?

President Bush has, without question, been badly weakened by the whole Miers business. In this weakened state, the President's options are severely limited.

He could pick someone who would thrill the conservative Republican base, like Priscilla Owen. The problem is, the odds are kind of high that Bush would lose a fight for her nomination. Conservatives, in attacking Miers for being an unreliable conservative, have made it impossible to shame Democrats into supporting a qualified nominee whose ideology they oppose, and we already know that the Democrats can impose pretty stiff party discipline themselves when they put their minds to it (and they will, believe me). Republicans, meanwhile, in attacking the President's selection, have made it impossible to shame wayward Republican Senators - Olympia Snowe, Lincoln Chafee, Arlen Specter, Susan Collins, maybe someone else though I think that's the list - into voting for a nominee whose ideology they oppose out of deference and party loyalty. Certainly, Bush will have trouble mustering support to break a filibuster or to ban filibusters of judiciary nominees; no member of the Gang of 14 is going to want to change that rule by one or two votes.

He could go the other way, and nominate someone who would win lots of Democratic support, like Maria Consuelo Callahan. Such a nomination would force GOP Senators to decide if they are really willing to vote against a manifestly qualified nominee simply because she is not conservative enough. If they do that, (a) they destroy what's left of this Presidency, and (b) they destroy what's left of the principled conservative argument with respect to the judiciary: both parties would now agree that nominees should be evaluated first and foremost on ideology, and maybe even simply on outcomes. Such a result would not only be bad politics, it would be terrible for the judiciary itself. Trouble is, if Bush did nominate someone like the dancing judge, and the GOP Senate voted in favor, say goodbye to 2006, because the base is staying home. She seems like a perfectly acceptable candidate for the Court to me, though not a home-run, but I'm not an outcome-oriented partisan on judicial issues. And she manifestly fails pretty much any litmus test you like in terms of desired conservative judicial outcomes; she's not a "solid" vote on anything the social right cares about, at least so far as I can tell. (She doesn't have a big paper trail on this stuff, actually, but I'd be shocked to discover that she's secretly harboring ambitions to overturn Roe the minute she gets on the Court.)

He could go yet a third way, and nominate someone who would be hard for Senators to oppose - for example, a sitting Senator. John Cornyn is one option; Orrin Hatch is another; Mitch McConnell a third; Arlen Specter (admittedly, a very unlikely choice) a fourth. It's hard to know whether Democratic Senators would really be ashamed to vote against a fellow Senator, even if we were talking about a Cornyn whose views they comprehensively disagree with. It's also hard to know whether the President would be willing to nominate someone from the Senate given how annoyed he must be that they effectively killed the nomination of his friend. Senator Cornyn is a possibility, though, because he strongly and vocally supported Miers, and that's probably going to be a shibboleth for the President going forward on all matters judicial: if you opposed Miers, he's not going to listen to you. Of course, we don't know if any of these guys want the job.

He could also simply repeat the Miers nomination, but without the unique problems of that nominee (poor vetting, terrible communication skills, issues of judicial independence). In other words: he could pick another obscure individual with whom he's personally comfortable and who pleases big business but who is a non-entity in terms of a paper trail on hot-button issues. Just not someone who was his personal lawyer. (Alberto Gonzales is ruled out because that would be just *too* close a repetition of the Miers experience; all the same issues of judicial independence and cronyism would be raised all over again, plus the social right already distrusts him.) This would be a variation on the Consuelo Callahan option, in the conservative groups will be frustrated if not outright angry and Senators in that camp will have a tough decision to make, but it's just barely possible that the President could thread the needle and come up with someone who is more palatable than Miers to the base without actually being a clear win for the social right, and therefore plausibly confirmable.

Finally, he could try to find another John Roberts, someone manifestly qualified, with a paper trail that reasonably reassures the right, but who is sufficiently cautious and deferential to the legislature that at least five Democrats find it impossible to vote against. There is not a long list of options like this. Harvey Wilkinson certainly fit the bill, but President Bush apparently didn't like him. Michael McConnell might, although he has been very vocal in his criticism of Roe, but McConnell is probably disqualified for two reasons: criticizing Bush v. Gore and being unreliable on issues of Presidential powers in wartime (both, in my view, reasons to recommend him, but I suspect the President would see things differently).

Like I said, Bush doesn't have any easy choices here. My suspicion is that he's going to make a very conservative calculation about confirmability, and that therefore the least-likely outcome is someone who is a movement conservative pick. Frankly, even if confirmability were not an issue I think the President's pique at the conservative movement would motivate him not to pick someone from that list. But Senator Cornyn is a possible exception, someone whom conservatives would like, whom the President would be willing to reward (because he strongly backed Miers), and who is (probably) confirmable because he's a sitting Senator.
posted by Noah at 10:34 AM

 
So it's Bernanke. Funny, 'cause he doesn't look like much of a gym rat. But he does work right down the hall, so he had that going for him.

Actually, I think this is a good call. Bernanke is a sober, smart centrist. He doesn't think the Fed should focus on asset price levels ("pricking" bubbles) nor should it aggressively stick its nose into fiscal matters properly left to the legislature (though it should obviously let people know when fiscal imbalances are forcing hte Fed to shift its own posture). He thinks the Fed should stick to its knitting: promoting price stability.

What Bernanke is known for in terms of how the Fed should behave differently than it does is in terms of greater transparency. If the Fed is targeting a particular level of inflation (which it arguably already does, though not formally) it should announce what that level is. If the Fed is considering hiking or cutting rates, it should signal that. It should not, in other words, engage in the kind of oracular communication that has been the Greenspan style. I'm inclined to think Bernanke is right that increased transparency is good.

The other thing he's known for is for saying that "price stability" should be understood to mean a stable and very low - but positive - rate of inflation. This is, de facto, how the Fed understands price stability right now, but the idea of actually saying explicitly that a low rate of inflation is *optimal* - as opposed to, say, a zero rate of inflation or a low rate of deflation - has got some people in a lather.

It shouldn't. There are three reasons why people worry about Bernanke's view. First, there's the fear that low inflation can always become accelerating inflation. But low deflation can always become a depression; that's why we have monetary policy and not a completely self-regulated economy. Why is the one risk so much more to be feared than the other? More to the point, we now have 20 years of evidence that a vigilant Fed can keep inflation in check without pegging the currency to some commodity whose supply cannot be controlled by fiat.

Second, there are those who simply disagree about what the "optimal" level of inflation is - slightly positive, zero, or slightly negative (no one thinks high inflation or severe deflation is in any way good). The evidence on this question is mixed. What is clear, though, is that it the Fed has a lot more tools to try to keep inflation between, say, zero and two percent than between zero and negative two percent; put simply: the Fed can always quite easily contract the money supply if inflation heats up to much, but cannot so easily expand it if deflation accelerates and nominal rates are already zero. This is reason enough to be biased in favor of a small positive inflation rate.

Finally, there are those who correctly identify inflation as a kind of tax, redistributing wealth from owners to debtors. This is true, but it's also one of the safety valves of our political system. Every political system needs these kinds of safety valves, and a very low, positive rate of inflation is a pretty cheap and painless safety valve.

The most important reason why I think Bernanke is a good pick: he's got decent political skills (so they say) and the Fed Chairman is a political position. You want an excellent economist, yes, but you also want someone who can build consensus and make the markets feel confident in monetary policy. A stridently ideological or personally prickly individual is not going to be as good at achieving those objectives, even if that individual was somewhat more often right.

Like Chief Justice Roberts, Bernanke is going to disappoint some true believers. I happen to think that, mostly, Bernanke is right and the true believers wrong about the issues on which they disagree (certainly on the question of whether it would be a good idea to return to the gold standard). And anyone who thinks rates should not have been rising in 1999, or should not be rising now, is living on some other planet than the one I'm most familiar with. But regardless, these kinds of critics (who we will be hearing from) should remember that Bernanke is going to the Fed, not the Treasury, and the Treasury is where decisions about taxes are made, along with Congress.

I do think Bernanke should be asked at hearings what kinds of indicators he will use to predict the future price level (he must have some, or he'll be too backward-looking to make monetary policy effectively) and how his approach in this regard would differ from Greenspan's, if at all. But I don't expect to be alarmed by his answers.

This is a good pick. I wish I had some basis for thinking it was part of a pattern.
posted by Noah at 11:34 AM