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

 
So much to blog, so little time.

First, a recap of the London trip. The Princess Diana Memorial Playground is really, really impressive. If you're ever in London with a youngster, you do yourself and the youngster a disservice if you skip it. The other playgrounds we visited - Coram's Fields and the playground in Regents Park - were also very nice; the latter lies directly in the shadow of London's main mosque, which was a little disconcerting given the events that transpired just before and while we were there, but of course everyone at the playground was perfectly ordinary in their behavior. Apart from the playgrounds, the highlight for our son was, I think, climbing to the top of St. Paul's Cathedral, a monument he remembered from Mary Poppins, though he was disconcerted to discover that the bird lady doesn't live there anymore.

We saw two plays in London: a production of Lorca's House of Bernarda Alba, in a translation by David Hare, at the National Theatre; and an "original practices" production of The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre. Both productions were good, and I'm very pleased I saw both, but I have reservations in each case. Alba is a brutal play, and the director made an excellent decision to leaven that brutality with as much humor as possible. The result was a production that was far more human than usual, and hence more pathetic (in the sense of pathos); it also felt very British, however, which is not particularly true to the material. Worse still, the actress who played Alba - with such perfect comic timing that I kept thinking she must be Brian Bedford in drag - wound up being insufficiently ferocious. I saw a (televised) production of Alba with Glenda Jackson in the title role. SHE was terrifying. Without that element, one is left wondering why everyone in the play is so dominated by her, why her world must end in tragedy. But still, overall, a very worthwhile production.

The Winter's Tale is a beautiful, beautiful play, one of my favorites in the Shakespeare canon. I never fail to be moved to tears by the final scene, and this production proved no exception. The two exceptional performances were by the leading women - the Queen, Hermione, and her advocate, Paulina. The men - King Leontes of Sicilia and King Polixenes of Bohemia - were less powerful, less distinctive; this is a fatal flaw in Leontes' case who, again, must be a towering presence, sufficiently magnetic for the final reconciliation to be plausible, sufficiently powerful for his mad jealousy to inspire terror rather than contempt in the audience. The actor was, not to put to fine a point on it, a bit too old, and a great deal too "old school" to pull the part off. The Globe itself I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, there's something kind of cool about seeing Shakespeare "as Shakespeare would have done it" (apart from casting). And there's a real immediacy to the stage - the actors are very close (particularly to those audience members standing in the yard) and between that and the ambient lighting it's almost inevitable that the "fourth wall" will come crashing down with regularity. On the other hand, the sight-lines for many of the seats are downright odd - the upper balcony seats look down on the tops of the actors' heads; the lower tier of seats are frequently partially obstructed; etc. - and, at least in an "original practices" production, the ability to produce theatrical effects is distinctly limited. Some plays really don't need them. Others really do. The Winter's Tale is somewhere in the middle. Elizabethan audiences may have been more surprised by the statue scene precisely because, had Hermione actually been a statue, she would likely nonetheless have been portrayed by an actress, so when she "comes to life" it's a shock to the audience as well as the characters. Modern audiences may need a bit more help. This production did an excellent job with that particular scene. Other scenes - most notably the revelation of the oracle of Apollo and, most inexplicably, the famous "exit, persued by a bear" - were flubbed, and I think the stage is partly at fault for limiting the director's options. All in all, though, I'm very happy to have seen the show, and happy to have seen an "original practices" production if only because they made excellent use of musicians playing Renaissance-era instruments, and that sort of thing is always a lot of fun.

Enough with theater. Reactions to the bombings: muted. I don't think Londoners entirely processed what was happening. Everyone's responses - whether PC or their opposite - felt rehearsed. I would be very surprised if anything changed dramatically in Britain, either in terms of immigration policy, domestic anti-terrorism, or foreign policy. I doubt Tony Blair's or the Labor Party's fortunes will be meaningfully altered. Every London cabbie seems to be recalling Enoch Powell with affection, but even they acknowledge that the terrorists arose from the ranks of British citizenry, and their thoughts about what to do about it don't rise above the conventional. In general, I was both impressed and distressed by British detachment - impressed because it means British reserves are considerable; distressed because, as I say, it suggests that because everyone basically expected such events their utter outrageousness, when they transpired, was not clear to people. Which means, probably, that such things, and worse things, will happen again before anything serious changes.

Is London still British? London is a very international city. Is New York American? In one sense, it is quintessentially American; in another sense, it's not very American at all. The difference, of course, is that London is overwhelmingly dominant in Britain, in a way that New York most certainly is not in America (nor is Berlin in Germany, and even Paris is less economically overwhelming than London as, albeit it is at least as dominant in terms of cultural power). I struck up conversations with a couple of relatively conservative (old Tory) types in our London office about the bombings and about the future of Britain. As a touchstone to see what kinds of arguments they found persuasive, I referred them to the work of Peter Hitchens. To my surprise, neither found him particularly worth engaging with. "A little Englander" they sniffed. And sniff they might: England simply is not big enough to survive in today's world other than by her wits in the global capital markets, and that means an openness that dovetails well with London's internationalism. And so long as London is as dominant as it is economically, "Britishness" will be diluted by this economic imperative.

I forget if it was Hitchens or someone else who complained that Margaret Thatcher wasn't actually so different from Ted Heath or Tony Blair, in that they all agreed that Britain had to become less British to survive, and they only disagreed as to what foreign model Britain should emulate: France, according to Heath and Blair; America, according to Thatcher. Well, whoever said it had a point.

There has been much discussion, with respect to the bombings, of "unassimilated" minorities in Britain and how to get them to become more British. One very fair rejoinder is that one can't assimilate to a nullity, and that therefore Britain must mean something if it is to inspire people to assimilate to it, whether from love or fear or both. Another fair rejoinder is Powell's line that "numbers are of the essence" and that minority non-British populations are now too large simply to be assimilated; the assimilation must be two-way.

But I wonder whether all these prescriptions aren't (a) somewhat false to the nature of Britishness; and (b) missing the point of the specific nature of one unassimilated minority in particular. France and America have absorbed much larger immigrant populations than has Britain, and France in particular (and America in the past certainly if less clearly in the present) has done a much better job of assimilating these immigrants. If you really absorb French culture or American habits, you really can become French or American. Not all nations work that way. It is not clear that, even after long residence and cultural assimilation, you can really become Chinese, or German; you can't become Jewish except by religious conversion; you can't become a Hindu at all (of course, you can be an Indian without being a Hindu, but the relationship between the Indian state and Hinduism is a live and politically contentious one). "British" identity, meanwhile, presents yet a third case, because Britishness is itself a construct, composed of historic nations - English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish - with distinct identities and histories. There is a very real sense in which, for example, British Jews are British without precisely being English. (I don't think I'm engaged in sophistry here, but I willing to entertain that I am.)

If I'm right, some kind of "real" multi-culturalism - one that is actually based on the existence of difference rather than a wilful refusal to see it - is in some sense natural to Britain, as natural as "pillarization" is to Holland, part of the longstanding terms on which the national entity subsists. And, as with "pillarization" I am skeptical as to its possible success specifically with Muslim immigrants (whereas it will do just fine with insular, unassimilated minorities like, say, the Sikhs). A great deal is riding on whether that perception of mine is true and, if true, whether it is historically contingent or something much deeper and more essential about Islam. The discouraging and encouraging facts are actually the same fact: that there is no historical evidence on either side, there having never been, beefore the 20th century, nearly any instances of Muslim populations living as settled minorities in societies dominated by non-Muslims. So we'll just have to see.
posted by Noah at 9:21 AM

 
What an excellent choice. When O'Connor retired, I suggested that President Bush should appoint a replacement "who has solid conservative legal principles but a pragmatic case of mind." Now he has. I said Roberts was my top choice after McConnell (and, honestly, the only reason McConnell was first is I know more about his views, and like them, rather than anything negative I know about Roberts). It's always gratifying on those rare occasions when the President listens to me.

And it's very gratifying that the President didn't see the need to appoint a Hispanic Justice, or a female Justice, just because the retiring Justice was a woman. No nominee deserves the contempt of being considered an affirmative-action pick, and such a suspicion was certainly hovering in the air when people discussed Clement and Gonzales. It's also very encouraging that the President did not nominate a crony.

Roberts is so good, and so clearly has the demeanor and the chops to do the job, that frankly I'm inclined to change my earlier advice to the President. I now think he'd be well-advised, when Chief Justice Rehnquist retires, to elevate Roberts to Chief and nominate someone else to fill an Associate slot.

As for this confirmation fight: there won't be one. I would be profoundly shocked to find any kind of scandal in Roberts' closet, even the pseudo-scandals that have so obsessed Washington in past confirmation fights. No Democrat under any kind of serious threat of Republican challenge can fail to confirm Roberts, and no Republican will defect. Roberts will get 55 Republican votes plus at least 5 of the following Democrats:

Conrad (D-ND)
Dorgan (D-ND)
Johnson (D-SD)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lieberman (D-CT) - he's under no threat of challenge, but he's actually got some integrity
Lincoln (D-AR)
Nelson, Bill (D-FL)
Nelson, Ben (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Salazar (D-CO)

Red-state Democratic Senators will not want to be on record of having opposed someone as manifestly qualified - in terms of experience and intellect, but also in terms of temperment - as Roberts. I think it's quite likely that Roberts wins all of the above votes, plus centrist Democratic party leaders like Bayh and Reid. There will be no filibuster.

I actually think Roberts is something of a test. If opposition extends beyond the Boxer/Murray idiot fringe, I think that profoundly discredits the Democratic Party. There is no plausible argument that Roberts is an "extremist" or lacks a judicial temperment. There is no plausible argument against him on the grounds that he has manifested a judicial philosophy with which most Americans do or should disagree. And the notion that if Roberts does not satisfy some inquisition about how he would vote on this or that case that might come before him is both ludicrous and corrupting of the law itself - not to mention insulting to the nominee. Quite literally, the only grounds for not voting to confirm would be: I think he will rule the "wrong" way on substance on a matter I care about. Not only is that not a valid reason to vote not to confirm, but voting in such a way quite plainly states that the Senator in question does not believe that the Supreme Court is a Court, but rather that it is a legislature.

There are Senators within the Democratic Party of whom I expect nothing. But I'm going to be watching a few liberal lions who are *not* idiots quite closely. If Senators Biden, Feingold and Schumer do not vote to confirm, they will earn my contempt - and however often I have disagreed with them in the past, "contempt" is not how I would have described my feelings.
posted by Noah at 3:03 AM

 
Some time back in this space, I said, "if I were an advisor to the President, I would urge against nominating Gonzales. If I were a Senator, and Gonzales were nominated, I would likely vote to confirm." I've changed my mind. If I were a Senator, I would like vote not to confirm. I'm not convinced that, after all the negative feedback he's gotten, the President can plausibly demand a "yes" vote based on party loyalty, and the litany of reasons not to confirm has just gotten too long.

I know Gonzales is now trading at under 15 cents on the dollar at Tradesports. But this is not an academic question. Even if the next Justice is far more likely to be named "Edith" than anything else, President Bush is still overwhelmingly likely to name the next Chief Justice.
posted by Noah at 3:03 AM

 
Oh, and before I head to dinner, this article by Daniel Pipes is very worth reading. I'll say more tomorrow.
posted by Noah at 2:32 PM

 
Oh, right: I'm supposed to name 3 or 5 or 11 or however many people to be "tagged" with this meme.

Everyone I've tagged before for prior memes is hereby tagged. In addition:

Kevin Michael Grace
Stephen Menashi (is he still here?)
Ramesh Ponnuru

Including people I've tagged before, I think that's roughly 15 people. We'll see if anyone's interested in playing.
posted by Noah at 2:21 PM

 
Blogging from London, on the "business" leg of my business-and-pleasure trip (the pleasure leg consisted primarily of a tour of the city's playgrounds - unsurprising, given that my not-yet-3-year-old son was along). I do need to get back to work, but I wanted to take a brief moment to respond to Russell Arben Fox, who tagged me with the book meme: name five books I read as a child or young adult that I still would re-read and recommend to other adults.

First, some background. I had no taste in literature - no sense that there was such a thing as appreciating literature, as opposed to just knowing what sort of thing one liked - until well into adulthood. I was a voracious reader, but I read mostly pulp like this. I read the usual boy novels as well, and read them over and over in some cases, but I didn't really differentiate that well.

Next, there are any number of books that I read as a youngster and was very impressed by, but either I've revisited them and they don't work the way I remembered them or I've revisited them and they don't work at all. For example: I went through a real John Varley phase, and let's put it this way: for all that I still think he can write, for me, his vision has not persisted. Then there are the books that I suspect I would have liked had I read them as a kid, but I only met them as an adult, like this. I obviously can't mention them.

Then there are the books everybody mentions. I never got all that into Tolkien, and when I re-read a couple of the Narnia books as an adult they were not the books I remembered loving. Or maybe it's just that my wife introduced me to Hans Christian Andersen and that spoiled me. As for a book like The Hitchiker's Guide: yes, it's funny, even very funny at times, and a perfect book for a certain sensibility, but it's not a book you can recommend to an adult because, let's face it, if that adult is the sort of person who'd enjoy the book, then he's surely read it already.

Meanwhile, if you really loved The Phantom Tollbooth, you need to stop polishing that apple. Now.

Three books that I should mention but won't because if they haven't already been mentioned by others then I don't know what they were wasting their time reading: Animal Farm, Through the Looking Glass (which I liked better than Alice in Wonderland - read both many times, of course), and Watership Down. I trust these need no introduction nor any recommendation by me; listing them merely tells you the kind of person I was and am.

So here's my list:

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain. In my more megalomaniacal moments, I still daydream of founding a school and calling it, "The Man Factory." And our politicians still seem to think you can tranform a culture by teaching the thuggish aristocracy to play baseball. But that's not why I remember this book with love. Why do I remember it so, and why did I re-read it over and over in my pre-teen and teenage years, and again as an adult? Well, suffice it to say that if I had a daughter, I would be sorely tempted to name her Hello Central.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. Starship Troopers certainly works, and has its morbid fascination for an adult. (If your son is a little too into it, you could have him read The Forever War as an antidote.) Stranger in a Strange Land is his most ambitious book, and has more than the requisite quotient of sex to keep an early-adolescent male happy (though I wonder how much that matters anymore in the age of internet porn), but Heinlein's unresolved feelings about the religious milieu in which he grew up ultimately cripple the work (can you articulate how Heinlein ultimately feels about the Fosterite church? or give a good reason why Valentine Michael Smith should have what amount to magic powers?). Mistress suffers from no similar problems. It has a compelling narrative; it has a coherent "point" (science fiction unfortunately usually does - in this instance: to make the case for a libertarian society); and it has two of the very few real-seeming characters that Heinlein ever created - Boris the computer technician and Mycroft the computer. I still tear up when I remember Mycroft's "death." It's one of very, very few science fiction books that I would recommend to a non-science-fiction reader.

Danny Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl. If I recall correctly, I read this in third grade as part of a contest at school to see who could read the largest number of books in a month. I wound up reading this one three or four times (but I still won - ha!). My father was nothing - but nothing - like Danny's, a fact I suspect I share with very nearly every boy who has ever read this book, and which explains much of its appeal. So what. This book is not just the ultimate male domestic fantasy (be a gypsy! live in a trailer! live by stealing! with your Dad!) but a beautiful and moving bit of what I'd have to call Romanticism with clear glasses (well, reasonably clear); there's something Wordsworthian about the book without any of Wordsworth's . . . words. If you know what I mean. Anyhow: it's still good, now that you're old. Read it.

There Will be Time, by Poul Anderson. I like obviously like time-travel stories, and this has something of a father-son theme as well now that I think about it. Is this a great book? No, this is not a great book. Is this even a good book? Not entirely. But it has such potential. The premise is that our hero (not the narrator; the book is narrated by a surrogate father figure, the family doctor, who befriends the hero when the hero is old enough to have grownup friends) is born with the ability to travel through time. He's also not alone, it turns out. What I remember so vividly about the book is its evocation of the world of the 1950s (when the "present" of the novel is set) and the various historical periods that our hero visits. It's a sad story in many ways; the hero suffers and loses a great deal, and the book wanders off on a less-than-entirely-interesting tangent to wrap up the plot and bring things to at least somewhat a "happy" conclusion, which leaves one remembering the sadness rather than lifted out of it. I credit this book more than any other with awakening an interest in history (an interest I initially fed mostly by reading other Poul Anderson time-travel novels, I must admit). And I will admit to something else: I have a longstanding ambition to re-write this book in some fashion so that it might better achieve its full potential. I'm not sure I'd recommend this book to just anyone, because I know it ultimately isn't a successful book. But it meant a lot to me, and when I re-read it as an adult, I wasn't embarrassed by what I read.

Godel, Escher, Bach. The ultimate intellectual-geek-kid book-as-accessory. I got this for what, my 10th birthday? My 13th? I forget. I read all the dialogues and skipped the boring parts in between. How many years was it until I finally slogged through the whole thing? But in the meantime, the book had awakened me to a whole field of knowledge, and to the very idea of philosophical reasoning - not to mention to the dialogue form. This is a beautiful, enormously fun book, and - like the Lewis Carroll books - it keeps giving new things as you re-read it at later ages.
posted by Noah at 9:48 AM

 
Okay, I'll take the Ben Adler test.

Do I believe in evolution? Yes, but people tend to confuse the meanings of both "believe" and "evolution" so I'll be clear. I "believe" in evolution because I find it the only scientific theory with substantial evidence - the best explanation by far we have of how complex life came to be. I do not "believe" it in the sense that I "believe" in God or even in the sense that I "believe" in empiricism and the scientific method; rather, I am persuaded by the evidence that the theory of evolution is true.

By "evolution" one might mean simply that complex life evolved from simpler forms, and that forms generally have proliferated, by an unspecified mechanism. Such a theory preceded Darwin and is accepted by anyone not a biblical literalist. If you don't believe in evolution in this sense, then you must believe in some version of miraculous creation of all the diversity of life ex nihilo. I wish someone would ask an intelligent design "theorist" whether he or she believes that, and why such a thing should be taught in science classrooms.

But there are non-Darwinian theories that accept the idea of evolution. Lamarck believed in evolution - he thought traits could be acquired by experience and passed down to subsequent generations, thereby producing change. Erwin Schroedinger among others speculated that evolution was guided by some kind of vitalism. The notion that there must be some force pulling things up the evolutionary ladder is very appealing because it is easy to reconcile with religious doctrines of an active, involved God, and with the idea that humans are special, placed at the "top" of an evolutionary pyramid. When Cardinal Christoph Schonborn says that belief in evolution is compatible with Catholic doctrine, but not belief in "random" or "unguided" evolution, he is drawing a distinction between these other evolutionary theories and Darwinian evolution. Religious people who say they believe in evolution usually mean something like this: a version of evolution that is not Darwinian.

No such theory has scientific support. Darwin's unique insight was to come up with a plausible mechanism whereby random mutation could lead to relatively rapid change in an organism. The mechanism is natural selection: those mutations that increase an organism's likelihood of survival in a given environment will become more prevalent in subsequent generations simply because proportionally more organisms with that mutation will survive. No other forces are needed. There is no evidence of any kind for such other forces - none for Lamarckian evolution, but also none for vitalism or other "guided" forms of evolution. Occam's Razor therefore demands that the hypothesis that such forces exist be rejected. So I reject them. When I say I believe in evolution, I mean I believe not only in common ancestry but that natural selection is the only known mechanism driving evolution, and that other hypothesized forces are without current empirical support.

Do I believe evolution should be taught in public schools, and if so, how? I believe that the schools should teach science in science class. Darwinian evolution is the only theory with empirical support today. I have no problem with classes pointing out "unsolved problems" in evolutionary theory. I have no problem with classes pointing out that evolutionary theory says nothing about the origins of life itself, much less the origin of the universe as such. I have no problem with classes teaching some history of science - how scientists can get it wrong (geocentrism, phlogiston, phrenology, etc.) and how science self-corrects over long periods of time. I think it's salutary for science classes to explain the difference between science and scientism, to explain what kinds of questions science is and is not competant to answer, and to explain that all scientific theories are tentative, subject to disconfirmation and supercession by more powerful theories. But that doesn't change the fact that Darwinian evolution has scientific support, and no other theory does. The theory of evolution should be thoroughly integrated into the biology curriculum, not treated as something especially suspect or questionable.

What do I think of intelligent design? I think it's fundamentally dishonest in that it poses as a scientific theory whereas at best it is a critique of a scientific theory. I have no problem with critiques of scientific theories - I welcome them. If a biology teacher chose to teach a paper by David Berlinski critiquing Darwinian evolution, and then a rebuttal by an evolutionary biologist, I think that would be salutary. But a "theory" that amounts to a belief in miracles has no place whatsoever in a science class. As such "intelligent design" does not belong in schools.

Should schools leave open the possibility that man was created by God in his present form, and if so, in what class should they do so? Not as such, no. Or, let me put it this way: a science teacher could say something like this. Science proceeds on the assumption that every effect in nature has a cause in nature. Causes that come from outside of nature cannot be assessed scientifically. That doesn't mean they are wrong; if a God exists, and has the attributes usually ascribed to the Christian God, that God can do anything at all, certainly including creating man in his current form. But that's not something science can assess. If you want to do science, you have to do it according to the scientific method. And if you want to know how to reconcile that method and its conclusions with your religious beliefs, do not ask me; ask your pastor, or whomever you turn to for guidance on your religious beliefs. I can't help you there - in fact, it would be wrong of me to try to.

I don't think any class in a public school should teach religion. I don't have any problem with public schools allowing their space to be used for voluntary religious classes or other meetings after school hours. If a pastor or other religious leader wants to teach on this question in such a setting, be my guest. You could certainly talk about such beliefs in a class about religion, or teaching the Bible as literature, but I don't think that is really what people mean when they ask this question.

Is there anything one can say, beyond saying that science can't explain where nature itself comes from, or that there are problems science hasn't yet solved - and may, perhaps, never solve? Well, you could say that there are plenty of scientists who believe that "God" is the only possible answer to the question of where nature itself comes from. There's a famous piece by, I think, Fred Hoyle about how he came to entertain the idea that there was a God when he realized just how finely callibrated the universal constants are, how matter itself as we know it wouldn't exist if those constants were ever so slightly altered, to say nothing of the possibility of life. I wouldn't have a problem with a teacher - including a science teacher - teaching such a piece of material. But again, that there are, indeed, many scientists who believe this doesn't make it so, of course, and a teacher would be going too far to say, "and therefore it can be proved that there is a God who created the universe" or something like that. Nor does even that statement answer any of the obvious questions of how a scientific worldview may be reconciled with the notion of a personal God. But I don't think a public school has the competancy nor the authority to help students find that reconciliation, if one can be found at all.

Taking a different tack, I think that in a class on moral philosophy it would not be inappropriate to point out the degree to which the core assumptions of a liberal order are historically derived and arguably dependent on the belief that man is of divine origin. See, for example, the Declaration of Independence. That would be salutary on many levels, because there will surely be students who hold to conventional assumptions about, say, human rights without thinking why there should be such things as rights, and why humans should have them. But again, that's a rather different thing from teaching that man was created by God in his present form, or even that such a thing is "possible" in the sense that scientists use the word.

I'm afraid that there's no easy way to accommodate the feelings of those whose religious beliefs are traduced by Darwinian evolution. And virtually every real believer's beliefs are so traduced. Darwin is very, very hard to square with any kind of theism, because all theisms I'm aware of "privilege" man as a being of special divine concern, and a good scientist would have to say, honestly, that if God was concerned with man, He certainly went about bringing him into being in a rather round-about fashion. But, more to the point, science as such is hard to square with theism, because theists posit a God who is involved in the universe, and science posits a universe whose workings can be explained in their own terms, without reference outside other than with respect to the origin of the system itself. It's worthwhile remembering that, well before Darwin, mechanical theories of the human mind (as, for example, Thomas Hobbes articulated) ran profoundly counter to any sort of religious sensibility, and more modern versions of such theories continue to do so. Darwin is threatening to the religious sensibility because his theory actually has explanatory power - it actually reduces the zone of mystery. The hostility to Darwin's theory (and that hostility is not confined to the political right - rather, left-leaning individuals are happy to say they believe in evolution, but resolutely unwilling to accept what that implies in terms of how the world works) is not due to the theory's weaknesses, but to its strengths.

For myself, I'm a theist of sorts. I believe that there is a God, that He created the heavens and the earth, and that He is mindful of me. Beyond that, everything I believe religiously is a matter of accepting or quarrelling with my tradition. When I say I believe, with perfect faith, in the coming of the Messiah, and even though he tarry (and he does seem to tarry, doesn't he?) even so I expect him every day that he should come - when I say this (and I can say this), I mean something different from saying that "I believe in God" and something different again from "I believe the sun will rise tomorrow." I may need to bring William James into the conversation to help me out here. I believe, pragmatically, in science, because science works, and I recognize that science is a discipline with integrity that cannot be violated if it is to continue to work. As such, I'm not willing to make exceptions when science comes up with results that are unappealing. I believe, pragmatically, in God, and His mindfulness, because I do not know how to be otherwise. I believe, pragmatically, in the coming of the Messiah, etc., etc., because I recognize that this believe is woven through the fabric of the Jewish faith, not to be rooted out, and I accept that faith and try to work within it, which sometimes I am able to do and sometimes not. But I keep trying. Fortunately for my own religious sensibility, Judaism does not treat faith as a discipline; that is the job of practice, and I'm bad enough at accepting that discipline and practicing as a Jew is supposed to; heaven knows how I would chafe under the other.
posted by Noah at 5:01 PM

 
Based on recent trading on Tradesports, the next Supreme Court Justice is much more likely to be a woman than to be Hispanic.

Hispanic possibilities:
Garza: mid-market 20.0% chance
Gonzales: mid-market 10.2% chance
Estrada: mid-market 3.0% chance
TOTAL: mid-market 33.2% chance

Female possibilities:
Brown: mid-market 10.2% chance
Clement: mid-market 11.3% chance
Jones: mid-market 12.7% chance
Owen: mid-market 13.6% chance
TOTAL: mid-market 47.8% chance

All the gals have been moving up in recent days, and the Hispanic choices - particularly Gonzales - moving down.

Not that these guys know anything, mind you. But for the record, the move started happening before Friday.

If I understand the contract, by the way, it pays out 100 if a given person is the *next* person to be nominated to the Supreme Court. I'm interested how Tradesports would handle settlement if, say, there's another retirement and more than one nominee is announced *simultaneously.*

Just wondering.
posted by Noah at 2:23 PM

 
Reihan Salam asks: is Rushdie wrong? My inclination is to say: no.

I don't know much of the history of how India got its system of personal law, but I'm more familiar with its analog in Israel. In Israel, you cannot get married except by recognized clergy, nor can you be buried except in a cemetary maintained by same. One consequence is that religiously liberal Jews and all people of mixed religious heritage are treated like second-class citizens. Another consequence is that communal divisions are deepened because of their official emphasis. Remind me why these are good things?

Obviously, there's a difference between criminal and civil law, and you can plausibly architect your political system so that the latter is divided confessionally (at least with respect to personal status issues). Salam makes a legitimate point that Rushdie's piece blurs this distinction. But if the state undertakes to enforce the decisions of a confessional civil court, then it is implicated in that court's decisions; and if it doesn't (as, it sounds like, the Indian state has not in the case in question) then we're talking about an entirely voluntary private legal system like rabbinical courts in the United States, and that's a simple freedom-of-religion and freedom-of-association matter that I find unproblematic.

But here's the most important point. Salam says that "Muslim personal law is ultimately about recognition." If Muslim law is not recognized by the state, then Muslims will, he says, feel persecuted. But this, it seems to me, is simply to state the problem in the baldest terms. If it is in the nature of Islam that it cannot accept a situation where its legal system lacks recourse to force, then Islam as such is incompatible with a liberal order of any kind. If this is not something in the nature of Islam, but rather in the interpretation thereof as lived by many Muslims, then this interpretation is incompatible with a liberal order of any kind. Regardless, I can't see how it serves the interests of a liberal state to cater to such a view, regardless of the feelings of Muslim citizens. Salam's own proposed solution - a confession-based parliament to determine the shape of Muslim personal law - would only deepen the problem, by formalizing it.

Salam says that his proposed solution would be obviously inappropriate for the U.S., but recommends it for India. If his reasoning were based on the nature of India, that would be one thing, but it appears to be based on his reading of the nature of Islam. As such, wouldn't an "asymmetrical federalist" solution to the "Muslim problem" in India make it that much harder for a country like the United States to take a different line (that, in the eyes of the law, we're all equal individuals)? It's not like India is out there alone, by the way; France has already moved to grant communal recognition to Muslim political organs that it does not grant to any other group, and Canada is moving in a similar direction.

I have no problem with the state tolerating and accommodating private religious legal systems, such as rabbinic courts. I have no problem even with minor "entanglements" of the state in that legal system such as the "get" legislation in New York. If Muslims in India or Brooklyn want to abide by the decisions of a private legal system, that's their prerogative. But if they don't, they have to have somewhere else to go. I draw the line - as a matter of principle, not just as a matter of American constitutionalism - at putting the strong arm of the state behind a sectarian legal system and forcing people to abide by that system's judgements.

(I do want to be clear about one thing: I'm critical of the nature of Israel's religious establishment, but I don't favor its abolition. I don't think disestablishmentarianism is appropriate for all societies as it is for the U.S., much less French-style laicite. Israel was established to be a Jewish state; part of the expression of that Jewish character of the state is that Judaism has an official role in the state, which means, perforce, an official Orthodox rabbinate. (Pace Matthew Arnold, I think a multi-vocal religious establishment is conceptually incoherent and practically unworkable.) I think that if Israel ever gets a constitution, the rabbinate should be retained and its powers delineated therein - and strictly limited as such. Specifically, I think the rabbinate must lose its control over many personal status questions, and should limit itself mainly to responsibility for the halachic import of state decisions as such - kashrut and sabbath observance in public institutions, for example. Cemetaries, and particularly army cemetaries, are a tough call, because they are public institutions; I think the rabbinate has to have a role here, but it needs to show a little more compassion than it has.)

I am interested in hearing from readers who know more about the Indian legal system (I know next to nothing) and whether I'm mis-reading the situation as presented by Rushdie and Salam respectively.
posted by Noah at 12:24 PM

 
Check out Martin Kramer obliterating Juan Cole. I admit, I've never understood the enthusiasm for Cole. If you want to read an interesting skeptic of our current approach to the War on Terror, read Gilles Kepel instead.

(I should say that I think Kepel is unconvincing on a number of key points. Here's my review of one of his books, from 2002.)
posted by Noah at 12:01 PM

 
I haven't written anything about the London bombings yet because I was away for the weekend on a sailing trip. Do I get a reprieve because I'm actually *going* to London, tomorrow night, with my wife and son?

In any event, belatedly, I have to admit that for all the horror of the attacks, I'm actually relieved they were no worse. There's surely more to be done in terms of mass-transit security, but I suspect that's a losing battle. The real areas that the U.K. (and continental Europe, and the U.S. and Canada) needs to work on are domestic intelligence and immigration control. From any perspective - cost/benefit analysis, public relations, whatever - it makes very little sense to be waging war to bring democracy to the Muslim world and *not* be working much harder to keep terrorists out of Europe and North America, and to keep legal residents and citizens from becoming terrorists. And the latter is more about keeping tabs on those who incite violence (or, better, treason) and either locking them up or throwing them out.

As for John Derbyshire's view: what, precisely, would appeasement look like in this case? Withdrawing from Iraq? Derb says that appeasement might have worked in the 1930s had Hitler not been Hitler, and that "no English person of today thinks that Osama bin Laden is Hitler." Well, OBL *is* Hitler, in his malevolence, his megalomania, his bloodthirstiness, and, to a considerable degree, his popularity. It's just that where Hitler burned down the Reichstag at the height of his popularity, to push him over the edge into absolute power, OBL blew up the World Trade Center to catapult himself from backwater Afghanistan into an imaginary Caliphate. The point is: whatever the disparity in power between our enemies in 1938 and our enemies today (and it is considerable) today's enemies are equally unappeaseable.

Appeasement means giving in to an opponent's demands. What are the bombers' demands? Most narrowly, a withdrawal from Iraq, which Derbyshire favors (and I think he has a point, BTW). Most broadly, the global triumph of a particularly brutal strain of Sunni Islam. Does Derb think that is going to happen? Well, I suppose it's possible.

But I think what Derb is fretting about is not that Britain will "pull a Spain" nor even that neither we nor they are willing to kill millions to teach the enemy a lesson they won't forget, but that neither we nor they are willing to conceive of the war in the terms that we understood the Pacific Theater of WWII: as a clash of civilizations more than a clash of ideologies. He's right about that: we don't. Whether he's right that winning the war depends on such a characterization is, I think, another matter, and not an easy question to answer. For myself, I don't think what we need right now is to lay waste to much of the Middle East. I think we need to get much tougher on the immigration and domestic intelligence fronts (how to do the latter is a good question - when we had to do something similar to Communist-infiltrated organizations in the 1950s, we had ex-Communists to help us out; how many ex-Islamists are there?).

As for weapons of mass destruction: believe me, I'm very worried. And they do change the equation. Of course, part of what 9-11 proved is how much damage can be done using conventional weapons. But that's precisely why I'm encouraged by the limited scope of the more recent attacks. In any event, if we're serious about keeping nukes out of the hands of terrorists (and we damned well better be) I just feel like there are a couple of countries that are enormous threats in this regard and where our policy response has been a little less robust than in Iraq.
posted by Noah at 10:12 AM

 
John Derbyshire started a discussion today in The Corner about the rate of innovation. Has it slowed?

I think it's very hard to know how to properly measure these things. I look at my own job, and essentially nothing that I do during the day was even conceivable 50 years ago, to say nothing of 100 years ago, because of the massive computational power involved. The world of finance has been almost completely transformed, and the transformation has more to do with computing power than it does with regulatory, social or economic change. How do you scale that kind of wholesale transformation with, say, the invention of the steam engine?

The 19th century saw a number of massive technological innovations, from the railroad to the telegraph, whose impact on the structure of human life was manifest. The technological revolutions of the 20th century, and particularly the latter part of the 20th century - in computation, in medicine (medicine as we understand it virtually didn't exist in 1900), in agriculture (the "green revolution" is a late-20th-century phenomenon, and is still progressing apace) - have not similarly altered the wholesale landscape, nor have they as radically changed our life (although a case could be made for the birth-control pill).

Further, many of the innovations we've seen are incremental changes in existing industries. Last night we watched the fireworks from our window (we have a great view of lower Manhattan - in fact, if you positioned yourself just right, you could see all 3 fireworks locations: the Statue of Liberty, downtown, and the East River). Now, fireworks technology has been around for what, 800 year? 1000? I forget. But it has clearly taken a significant leap forward in the past few years: more complicated color arrangements, fireworks that explode into 5-pointed stars, concentric circles, smiley faces, hearts, successive waves of color from the same firework - I half expected them to produce a 50-star American flag in fireworks. And I'm sure the reason why the fireworks are so much more impressive now is computing power, the ability to shape the charge with very high precision and so forth.

This kind of computer-based innovation has transformed all sorts of industries, from steelmaking to filmmaking. It may appear to make much less difference in our daily life, but that's partly a matter of the incremental nature of this innovation. The invention of the telephone was a big, big deal. But the telephone took a long time to impact our daily life. The invention of the optical diffusion grating, which massively expands the bandwidth of fiber-optic cable, was a pretty big deal, but all telephone users would notice is that telephony has become progressively more ubiquitous. Or think of all the advances in military technology since World War II. A soldier from Henry V's army would probably have been completely lost in the Napoleonic Wars. But a conscript from Napoleon's time would, I suspect, have found his footing (after considerable adjustment, to be sure) in Patton's army. I suspect, though, that that same Napoleonic soldier would be quite lost in today's military. That transformation happened gradually, though, so we haven't noticed in the way that we noticed the invention of the atom bomb.

Another point: many of the most transformative innovations of the 19th century were the fruit of advances in pure science that had taken place much earlier. The early 20th century advances in physics - quantum mechanics, primarily - have only begun to have technological applications (the laser is the big one everyone knows about). Are we going to see an explosion of new applications in the next few decades? It's pretty foolish to predict. One thing we can say: quantum mechanics is a lot more complicated, and also a lot more fundamental to the structure of the universe. As we figure out more applications, they'll similarly be accessing "deeper" stuff than the old electricity-and-combustion stuff. This is why new technological developments seem more and more like magic (which might be another reason we barely notice them, and assume a visitor from the past wouldn't notice them as well). Mechanical processes are readily comprehensible. Mechanical processes with really strong engines behind them are just as readily comprehensible, if you put aside the engine, and our visitor from 1900 to 1950 contemplating an aircraft carrier might be inclined to do just that. But some of our more recent inventions in pharmacology, computing, etc. would seem a lot eerier.

So I think it's a bit of a mugs game to try to figure out whether innovation is slowing down or not. What's clear is that it's changed its character. Knowledge has advanced far enough that a Ben Franklin is bound to be much rarer in our day than in his, and an Aristotle is outright inconceivable. We've mapped out enough of the universe that what remains is increasingly the province of specialists. This has certainly impoverished our culture, and it may well have steered our innovation into the well-worn channels where incremental progress can be made. My own guess, though, is that what's been lost is the culture of the Anglo-Saxon inventor, and that the pace of innovation has not appreciably slackened.
posted by Noah at 3:37 PM

 
I've still got an enormous backlog of blog items to write and post - review of this year's Celebrate Brooklyn concerts, review of A Light in the Piazza, more extended thoughts on Ground Zero and the so-called Freedom Tower, China versus the Middle East as foreign policy priorities (and whether it makes sense to "unleash Japan" as Rich Lowry puts it in the latest National Review), thoughts on reading Ovid, what Shakespeare's Henry IV and King David have in common, thoughts on the Iranian election, what makes a good magazine, whether compassionate conservatism actually means anything, a new book meme, a new movie meme, thoughts on the state of the economy, belated thoughts on Social Security reform, belated thoughts on the EU constitution, why everything I need to know I learned trading derivatives, and, most important, a Hegelian reading of the current zeitgeist (history isn't over after all - not even Hegel's history!).

But I'm going home early to make dinner. And my mother-in-law is around this weekend, so the odds are you won't be hearing from me until after the 4th.

So have an excellent Independence Day, everyone. And enjoy the remainder of Canada Day while you're at it.
posted by Noah at 2:59 PM

 
My guess as to probable nominee to replace O'Connor, in descending order of likelihood:

• Gonzales. Goes without saying - even if he's less than 50%, what one nominee could be a more likely candidate? The odds that Bush appoints him to the Court are extremely high. The only real question is whether he does so now, or to replace Rehnquist, or as his third nominee should he get the opportunity.
• Luttig. Edges out Garza because Bush might be saving the Hispanic "slot" (horrible way to talk) for Gonzales later on.
• Garza. Lot of buzz about him, and clearly acceptable to the base.
• Roberts. My second choice personally after McConnell, but seems a bit lower down on the President's list.
• Clement. If Bush thinks he needs to nominate a woman. Which I don't think he does. Otherwise, much less likely, I think.
• McConnell. Seems to be much lower on the President's list than on mine. Don't know why. Hope it's not Bush v. Gore; that would be truly petty, particularly given that McConnell's criticisms were spot-on.
• Alito. Similar to Scalia, but no one seems to be mentioning him, so I assume he's not being mentioned. Must be he's not from Texas.
• Jones. If he wants to nominate a woman, and for some reason wants to pass on Clement (and have a bigger fight on his hands).
• Cornyn. I actually think this is vanishingly unlikely, but people keep talking about him, he's from Texas, former Texas AG, liked by conservatives, a sitting Senator whom, his colleagues would be unlikely to filibuster - so who knows?
• Wilkinson. I strongly doubt it, because he's over 60 and probably too well-liked by people the President doesn't trust. Seems like a good guy, though.
• Owen. Much too soon after her confirmation to the 5th circuit, and a sure-fire big fight. Why not go with Clement, who'll be marginally easier? I don't see it.
• Olson. I think this is extraordinarily unlikely, but I suppose it isn't impossible. Another very decent guy, by reputation.
• Brown. Much too soon after her confirmation to the DC circuit. And she's probably the most controversial person the President could pick. Not gonna happen.
• Hatch. Not. Gonna. Happen. Sorry.

posted by Noah at 2:16 PM

 
So, it's O'Connor first. Rehnquist presumably to follow shortly, and Stevens is no spring chicken. Odds are still President Bush will appoint three Justices to the Supreme Court.

O'Connor was certainly not the worst Justice on this Court, by a long shot. Her style of judging - what's called the common-law style, judging each case on its own merits and letting principles build up from the accumulation of precedent - has its virtues, prominent among them its modesty. The Court, if is follows such a method, is unlikely radically to overturn established practice, far more likely to guide it gently.

But this very virtue is also the characteristic vice of the style, this very modesty its characteristic arrogance. Nowhere is this clearer than in O'Connor's voting-rights jurisprudence. O'Connor has held with precendent that it is permissable and even obligatory to draw Congressional districts with a conscious intent to increase the representation of racial minorities in Congress. But to do so too explicitly, and to create districts with no plausible connection to anything but race, she held, is to cross some unspecified equal-protection line. The practical result of her series of decisions is: to know whether your redistricting passes muster, you have to ask Justice O'Connor. O'Connor's affirmative action jurisprudence is similarly opaque: it's very hard to tell simply by looking at the facts of a program whether O'Connor will find it to traduce the Constitution or to be compatible with it. You just have to ask her.

Pragmatism gets a bad name because it involves the compromise of the truth, or because it is politically craven, or for various other reasons. But these are actually its virtues, and a pragmatism that tried to come up with workable rules would be a pretty good pragmatism. Stephen Breyer sometimes manifests this kind of pragmatism. The real reason to object to legal pragmatism is that its modesty masks a certain arrogance: the arrogance of assuming that the Court, as opposed to the Law, needs to get the last word. Because if the law cannot be articulated, then no one can know whether he is following it, and we are not longer under a government of laws, but of men.

But as I say, there are worse things than O'Connor's style of pragmatism. Kennedy's breathtaking arrogance comes to mind. And I am not convinced that the Court would be well-served by a bench of fire-breathing ideologues, even if they have more principles right than wrong. (Scalia's vote to throw out sentencing guidelines is a good example of how even a principled conservative can wander off into the weeds becaue he feels he has to find a bright-line to draw in all circumstances.)

So here's hoping that President Bush nominates a replacement who has solid conservative legal principles but a pragmatic cast of mind. A conservative version of Stephen Breyer, say. Or, say, someone rather like Chief Justice Rehnquist.
posted by Noah at 11:09 AM

 
I'm afraid it's official: Nancy Pelosi is an idiot. I didn't think anyone could really compete with the likes of Senators Barabara Boxer and Patty Murray, but Pelosi just won the prize. Where do they find these people?
posted by Noah at 9:33 AM

 
One other reason why we might not have closed the Syrian border: maybe the foreign fighters aren't coming from Syria. Something like 50% of the suicide bombers are reportedly Saudi, and suicide bombing is the main tactic associated with the foreign fighters. Why would anyone expect Saudis to be coming from Syria? (So why don't we close the Saudi border? To ask the question is to answer it.)
posted by Noah at 9:12 AM