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

 
In London on business, and once again I am struck by the fact that British men dress abominably, even compared to Americans.

The uniform of the typical City bloke appears to be: purple pin-striped suit, collar up; pink shirt; electric-blue tie in a super-wide triple-Windsor knot; and hair done in a faux-hawk.

I can deal with guys who work hard to look good, guys who don't care how they look and look like they don't care, and guys who don't know how to look good but try to stay neat and safe. But I am, I admit, mystified by women who work hard to look ridiculous, and even more mystified by men who do so.

It's a sign of something, and not anything good.
posted by Noah at 3:26 AM

 
Speaking of George Kennan (or not): earlier in the month, I made a flip comment that Peter Beinart is "delusional" to think that his strategy of Cold-War-liberalism-updated-for-the-age-of-Islamist-terrorism is the ticket back to majority status for the Democrats. Vietpundit legitimately asked in the comments why I think so. I started to answer in the "comments" section but my answer got so long I gave up and decided to make it a post.

(And, now that my comments have mysteriously vanished, I'm glad I did!)

Let me dispose of one potential confusion up front. You can construe Beinart's strategy narrowly as contriving a "Sister Souljah" moment vis-a-vis Michael Moore and his ilk. To the extent that you do that, I agree that Beinart's strategy is not only reasonable but quite necessary, albeit probably insufficient.

But I don't think it's correct to construe his strategy narrowly. Beinart does not simply want to have the next Democratic candidate take pot-shots at anti-American academics or Hollywood types, nor is he simply talking about changing the tone. He is advocating a set of foreign policy ideas, and thinks that implementing these ideas will be crucial to bringing the Democratic Party back to power. That's what I think is delusional.

Beinart's idea boils down to an analogy between Truman's day and our own. I think that analogy is strained on many levels. The part that Beinart focuses on is Communism and Islamist terrorism as analogous threats and challenges. Mickey Kaus, in the course of a longer (and, I think, devastating and largely unrefuted) response to Beinart, pokes numerous holes in this analogy that I won't repeat here. Even if you think Kaus is off-base in terms of his preferred war strategy (which, to a considerable extent, I think he is) I think he beats the stuffing out of this particular analogy, from the perspective of the nature of the enemy and the nature of our response.

I'd add that the Cold War was an ideological struggle within the West, broadly speaking, whereas it's not clear that our current war is an ideological conflict of that sort, whatever Paul Berman thinks. This may be a clash of civilizations (like, I dunno, the Pacific Theater of World War II); or it may be an ideological civil war within the *Muslim* world in which we have unfortunately been invited to participate after being attacked by one side (which is certainly the way the guys who attacked us portray it). In any event: blue jeans and rock-and-roll and so forth were real weapons in the Cold War. They are weapons in this war as well, but weapons rather more likely to backfire. (It's also possible, of course, that our enemies will find democracy so sexy that they suffer the kind of precipitous decline in fertility that has afflicted so much of Catholic Europe; who knows?)

Then there's the problem that Beinart thinks he's proposing a liberal and Democratic alternative to the Bush Doctrine, but when you come right down to it it's not clear where the difference lies. Beinart emphasizes Truman's alliance-building, among other things. But Beinart's magazine is not exactly pleased with his efforts in this area. Bush is working with semi-democratic regimes in Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia to fight Muslim militants in these countries. Beinart's magazine is highly critical of that cooperation. Bush is working with outright authoritarians in Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and has made a high-profile deal with Libya, again with a view to advancing the primary war aim of crushing radical Islamic terrorist groups. Beinart's magazine is highly critical of these areas of cooperation as well. Bush has periodically rallied the smaller European states and Britain against France and Germany. I'm not sure what TNR thinks of that, but I suspect they are ambivalent. Who is Beinart thinking is supposed to be part of the Grand Alliance - India? Well, TNR is quite realistic on the complications of getting too close to India. Turkey? Sorry, there've been a few setbacks on that score lately, and contra TNR's house view it is clear in retrospect (whether or not it was clear prospectively) that there was *no way* to wage war in Iraq without seriously freaking the Turks out. And it's hard to believe what Beinart is thinking of on the alliance side is a more "serious" effort to woo democratic Western allies like France and Germany.

This is a big conceptual problem. He wants to imagine a Democratic alternative to Bush bringing the key players together around a muscular, liberal and internationalist response to the challenge of al-Qaeda. But he has basically two choices of countries to turn to for alliances: those outside the Muslim world who are fighting Muslims outside or inside their borders (e.g., Russia, Israel, India, Thailand, the Philippines) and those inside the Muslim world who are trying to keep from being toppled by the Islamists (e.g., Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Saudi Arabia). Beinart doesn't really want to form a grand alliance with either, which leaves him pretty much without a date. But he's against unilateralism.

It would be nice for Beinart and for us if there were a bloc of Muslim democracies fighting against a blog of Muslim theocracies and fascist autocracies; that would certainly make the Cold War and World War II analogies work better. But the former are - still - entirely notional and it's the Bush Doctrine that willing this bloc into being is the key to winning the war. So, like I said, Beinart thinks he's providing a liberal, Democratic alternative to the Bush Doctrine. I'll be darned if I know what it is.

So Beinart's core strategic analogy is strained, and his critique of the Bush Doctrine is confused. Basically, he wishes the Democrats were running this war, so he's convinced himself that running on the Bush Doctrine while asserting that the Democrats are providing a more robust and magnanimous alternative to said doctrine would be the ticket back to power. This is, pretty clearly, wishful thinking.

The reasons why - the political problems with the idea, as opposed to the strategic ones - are not hard to discern. First, the base hates it. The activist base of the Democratic Party was foursquare against the Iraq War and thinks Bush has taken this whole War On Terrorism thing way too far all around. The Wallace Democrats were a minority among the real powers of Truman's day. Today, a purge of the sort Beinart favors would purge much of the Democratic Party.

But there's a deeper problem. Beinart mis-diagnoses what's wrong with the Democrats on national security. The problem is not that Democrats are not ambitious enough or idealistic enough or willing enough to use force. The problem is that they are not perceived as sufficiently nationalistic. And a Wilsonian program is not going to change that impression.

People are already convinced that Republicans generally and Bush in particular care about defending America. That's why Democrats are having such a hard time getting sufficient traction on things like, say, border security. How Democrats got into this bind is a discussion for another time, but that they are in the bind should be beyond dispute.

This was not the problem in Truman's day. Democrats had just led the United States to total victory in the largest war ever fought, and had not hesitated to use the most destructive weapons ever conceived against our foes. There was legitimate worry in Truman's day that Democrats were specifically soft on Communism - blind to the threat of the Soviet Union or sympathetic to its aims. Purging the party solved that problem rather neatly. There's no obvious analogy for Beinart's purge, because, again, the problem is at the core. There's no peripheral group of sympathizers with terrorists to worry about; rather, the core of the Democratic Party is perceived as not fundamentally concerned with defending our national interests.

This means three things.

First, actual policy debate must either follow a change in people's perception of Democrats or must aid in changing that perception. Beinart's program is a "me, too" and "we'd do it better" program; in and of itself, this will convince nobody. Kicking out Moore is not enough to change people's perceptions, and supporting a Wilsonian foreign policy would probably be counter-productive.

Second, Democrats could get a lot more mileage out of symbolic actions that prove their gut-level patriotism than they would out of trying to one-up Bush on Wilsonianism. It would also be a lot cheaper. One example: Democrats should immediately demand that every university that accepts Federal funds allow ROTC on campus. This will lose them exactly no votes outside of Cambridge and Berkeley, and they don't need votes in Massachusetts or California.

Third, Democrats have the real option of coming at Bush from what used to be called the Right. Specifically, they can raise the Realist banner - provided they take the responsibilities of Realism seriously, and don't use purported realism as an excuse to advocate passivity. (See my post about Kennan below.) Beinart should read his own magazine more often. I remember a feature that came out shortly after the election where someone who was canvassing in Ohio among undecideds described what he found. Basically, the people who were undecided were very pessimistic about promoting democracy, because they felt the Middle East was hopeless. They were therefore nervous about Bush. But they didn't think the Democrats were serious as an alternative. These people probably broke Bush's way. These are people the Democrats need to win, and that are winnable. Does Beinart's program speak to them?

Democrats are slowly starting to figure this out, but much too slowly. They are making increasingly effective attacks against President Bush over border security, something that is driving Republican opponents of illegal immigration wild with frustration. But some of the Democratic attempts to make these points (for example, when Democrats harp on port security) fall flat because Republicans successfully (and sometimes legitimately) accuse them of formulating their positions based on domestic political needs (e.g., the opinions of the unions) rather than real security needs. And the reason Democrats don't get traction in their responses is that they haven't yet overcome this wall of distrust.

Here's Beinart's problem. He and his magazine are ideologically committed to the notion that the a muscular Wilsonian foreign policy is a good thing. But Bush has pretty much staked out that territory. It would be very convenient for Beinart if Bush were running Eisenhower's foreign policy. But he isn't. And it just so happens that lots of Americans would vote for Eisenhower's foreign policy. So, in the end, the advice that TNR proffers is good for TNR - and may be good for America, if TNR is right on the policy merits. But it's pretty clearly bad for the Democrats as a political party.

So: what should the Democrats do? What, for that matter, should TNR do to help the Democrats?

I think Democrats have two paths to choose from in how to come back. Let me put the choices in terms of demographics. The Democrats, for the past few decades, have been trying to win with the McGovern coalition: upscale urban and suburban whites with culturally liberal attitudes plus racial and ethnic minorities. This coalition is growing and Democratic control of this coalition is growing stronger: they rack up large margins among singles and secularists, are growing their market-share in the inner suburbs, are winning huge majorities among blacks, small but growing majorities among East Asians and South Asians, and fairly stable large majorities among Hispanics. (As Steve Sailer has shown, the Hispanic vote tends to fluctuate at a fairly fixed percentage distance from the non-Hispanic white vote. By contrast, the black vote is almost impervious to GOP inroads, and the East and South Asian votes have trended Democrat *against* the national tide towards the GOP.) The reason this has not been winning them national election is that, on the other side of the ledger, whites, particularly white married people, particularly the white married working class, has been leaving the Democratic Party and trending strongly Republican.

So the Democrats can basically try two strategies to win. They can try to continue to grow the McGovern coalition. That means, basically, cementing their identity as the party of the state, a centrist governing party on the European model, like Blair's New Labor or Germany's Social Democrats or France's Gaullists. America at this time is not in the mood to be like Europe, but we're not as different as we sometimes seem, and there's room for a confident party of the state that is committed to managing that state well.

The Progressive tradition in the Democratic Party marches to this drum. Nothing is zero-sum in politics, but this strategy would concede losing more and more of the white working class and fighting to gain more share of the upper-middle class. It would probably mean hewing to center-right positions on economics while remaining culturally more liberal. It would mean taking foreign policy positions that, in Walter Russell Mead's formulation, are Hamiltonian, based on an enlightened view of national interest and a search for order and stability. Like I said: Eisenhower's foreign policy. It would mean, basically, completing the change begun by Clinton. This would certainly not require them to join a great crusade to make the Middle East safe for democracy. Indeed, such a crusade might be counter-productive.

The alternative would be to try to win back some of the white working class, and move in a Populist direction. Funny thing, though: while the white working class is very patriotic and rallies around the flag, they are far from committed to either the Iraq adventure or the more expansive and ideological formulations of the war. The gating issue is: are you ready to defend the country? To win these people back, the Democrats will first have to convince them that they are from this country - that the Democratic Party is still, as they once called themselves, the Party of the People.

In foreign policy terms, that probably means adopting policies that - again, in Mead's terms - are Jeffersonian, the kinds of policies that would be damned by TNR and others as isolationist. But really, if they go this route they have lots of lattitude in foreign policy so long as they prove they are gut-level patriotic. But on the domestic front, they'll need to make changes.

On the domestic front, winning back the white working class means moving to the right culturally pretty much across the board, while finding economic issues that speak to the needs and anxieties of working-class Americans. I think one slogan from the Edwards campaign should be adopted by Democrats generally: the war against work. I'll return to this slogan again; it's the only good thing that ever came or will come from Edwards, and I think it resonates on a bunch of levels. With that slogan in mind, I can think of three issues that would get real traction for Democrats:

1. Reducing immigration, particularly illegal immigration. It's unpopular and it pushes down wages. High legal immigration may be a net economic positive for the country (I think it is), but even if it is a net-positive the costs are born disproportionately by the working class. And illegal immigration is a huge problem on multiple levels. Bush has left this issue wide open. Democrats should seize it. (Hillary already has started to.)

2. Health care reform. You heard that right. Democrats have flubbed this issue by talking almost exclusively about the elderly and by talking about it in terms of goodies from the government. But one of the biggest problems with America's health care system is its effect on employment. A major reason people are afraid to become self-employed or change jobs or what-have-you is fear of losing health insurance. It's also a major reason why some women work who otherwise would stay home with the kids: because they may be the ones with better benefits (even if they have low salaries as, say, teachers or office secretaries). The cost of health benefits, meanwhile, is strangling many old manufacturing enterprises with unionized workforces (e.g., General Motors). Democrats can't get a free lunch on this issue (any public provision of health coverage will raise a host of issues, and there will always be losers) but they could do a lot better with it politically if they framed the issue more effectively.

3. Taxes. For 25 years, the tax burden has been shifting increasingly to wages, a consequence of the way we finance our entitlement system. Democrats could propose eliminating the payroll tax entirely and replacing it with a Value-Added Tax. That would be a pro-growth reform of the tax code that, I suspect, Republicans would have trouble signing on to, but that you could get a whole pack of economists to support, that would help raise employment and that would put money disproportionately in working people's pockets. Democrats are still suffering from being the party of high taxes and no ideas. This would be one way to rebut both charges.

Democrats have been lazily assuming that their basic economic pitch works fine but that they keep losing on other issues like culture, presumably because the American people are bigoted or irrational. That's less than half right: the Democrats are right that the GOP economic pitch is not persuasive to a majority of Americans, but they are wrong that the Democrats have formulated a persuasive alternative pitch. And they are wrong that the culture issues are a matter of bigotry or irrationality, and as long as they think they are they'll never find out a way to satisfy Americans that they can be trusted with them.

I'm going to come back to Kaus, because I think this quote summarizes a lot of what I've been saying: "At times [Beinart's] piece --and his magazine!--read like the Howell Raines Fallacy writ large (the HRF being the easy assumption that the great and good American people, offered a fair choice, will of course choose the course you happen to advocate). Beinart may support the Iraq War abroad and gay marriage at home, and he may have good reasons for it. That doesn't necessarily mean there's a majority to be had if only a politician dares claim the waiting "Pro-War/Pro-Gay" mantle. It seems just as likely Beinart would find that his views put him in a relatively small political foxhole with Andrew Sullivan and a few of TNR's other contributing editors. This doesn't mean he's not right. It means he can't avoid waging and winning the debates he's avoiding (about Iraq, and the ways in which the fight against terror is and isn't like the Cold War) if he wants to actually win elections."

So my advice to Democrats, in a nutshell, would be: when you think about foreign policy, think about what's actually in the national interest, and advocate that. Then package it with appeals that prove your gut-level patriotism. Then, think seriously about what your domestic program should be, and what segments of the country you can sell it to (because whatever it is, you won't be able to sell it to everybody).

My own feeling is: the Democrats would be better off and the country would be better off if the Democrats tried to win back the white working class, because this would divide the country less by race or religious intensity and would mean that someone is looking out for these people's economic interests. I'm a Republican, and I tend to think that classic Republican policies - free trade, lower regulation, lower taxes - are good for "making the pie higher" and thereby benefitting us all. But sometimes the little guy gets the shaft even as we all, as a whole, do better, and somebody has to be the party looking out for the little guy. That used to be the Democrats.
posted by Noah at 3:01 PM

 
Two other comments re: demographic change.

First, anti-natal policies work. Iran has experienced what I think is the steepest, certainly among the steepest, declines in fertility in any country in recent years. In 1985, the average Iranian woman had 5.6 children; now, the number is below 2. The change is not just in urban areas; the decline is even more dramatic in rural areas. The only part of the country that now has >3.0 children/woman fertility is the remote, ethnically distinct, deeply impoverished and rather wild region of Baluchistan. One reason for this dramatic decline: the aggressive promotion of contraception and birth-spacing by, yes, the government of the Islamic Republic, which did a 180-degree reversal from their early pro-natalist policies. China, obviously, is the, well - I won't say poster child because that would be in poor taste - classic example of a country that dramatically changed its demographic profile through conscious anti-natalist policymaking, but there are other, less dramatic instances in the Islamic world, including Indonesia and Bangladesh. It's notable that Indonesia has experienced faster fertility-rate declines than neighboring Malaysia, and Bangladesh faster fertility declines than "nearby" Pakistan (actually, they are nowhere near each other, but they used to be the same country, so what the heck), because in each case the *poorer* country experienced faster fertility declines than the richer country, because of government anti-natalist policies.

Second, I hope this isn't too obvious, but a major reason why demographic change can happen quickly is the constraints of female biology. A woman's most fertile years are from her late teens through her early twenties. If the age of first marriage for women is 18, the average fertility in that society is going to be a lot higher than if the age of first marriage is 22, just because of the facts of biology. Similarly, if women just space births out by 1 additional year, that dramatically lowers their lifetime fertility. And because there's no opportunity to catch up, any discontinuity in female fertility - caused by economic dislocation, or war, or what-have-you - moves along like a pig in the python. If times are bad for a few years, and the men can't find jobs and so can't marry, so the women of marriageable age in that society therefore marry a few years late, fertility will take a noticeable blip south. Take a look at U.S. fertility trends since 1940 for an illustration of just how big the swings can be. Note further that most of the change on this graph - from just over replacement fertility in 1940, to over 3.5 children/woman in the mid-1950s, and back down to replacement by 1970 - happened before the sexual revolution, before widespread use of the birth-control pill (introduced in the early 1960s), before abortion was legalized generally (abortions didn't take off until the late 1970s, well after the bulk of the decline in fertility), and so on. The point is not to contradict my first point above, but to show that you can have big swings in fertility without dramatic changes in birth-control technology because there is so much "leverage" in the system. You only have to change women's childbearing behavior at the margins to dramatically change the demographic trajectory of a society.

That's all. Not sure why I'm even bringing this all up.
posted by Noah at 1:46 PM

 
Apropos of absolutely nothing, here's a list of predominantly Muslim countries, and their fertility rates as estimated by the CIA World Factbook.

(I've organized these roughly by geography)

North African Coast:

Morocco: 2.81
Algeria: 2.04
Tunisia: 1.79
Libya: 3.42
Egypt: 2.95

West Africa:

Mauritania: 6.01
Mali: 6.58
Chad: 6.38
Niger: 6.83
Nigeria: 5.32
Burkina Faso: 6.28
Senegal: 4.84
Gambia: 5.46
Guinea: 5.87

East Africa:

Sudan: 4.97
Eritrea: 5.67
Djibouti: 5.48
Somalia: 6.91

Levantine:

Turkey: 1.98
Syria: 3.61
Lebanon: 1.95
Jordan: 2.86
Judea/Samaria: 4.52 (NOTE: these figures have come under challenge recently)
Gaza: 6.04 (NOTE: these figures have come under challenge recently)

South Asia:

Iraq: 4.40
Iran: 1.93
Azerbaijan: 2.39
Pakistan: 4.29
Bangladesh: 3.15

Central Asia:

Kazakhstan: 1.90
Kyrgyzstan: 2.71
Uzbekistan: 2.97
Turkmenistan: 3.45
Tajikstan: 4.11
Afghanistan: 6.98

Arabia:

Saudi Arabia: 4.11
Kuwait: 3.03
Bahrain: 2.67
Qatar: 2.95
United Arab Emirates: 3.02
Oman: 5.90
Yemen: 6.75

Southeast Asia:

Malaysia: 3.10
Indonesia: 2.47

Europe:

Albania: 2.05
Bosnia: 1.71

Does anyone notice any pattern here?

One is really obvious: black African countries have very high fertility.

Another one that seems clear: so do very poor countries (Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan. etc.). There's a lot of overlap between the first pattern and the second, of course. The lowest fertility rates in the list above: Tunisia, Turkey, Iran, Kazakhstan (which has a very large Russian minority; I suspect that their fertility is well below the Kazakh fertility rate), Lebanon (ditto vis-a-vis the Maronite Christian population) and Bosnia. These are all also among the wealthiest countries on the list on a GDP-per-capita basis; moreover, none are natural-resource welfare states like Saudi Arabia (a relatively wealthy state with high fertility). Correlation, of course, does not imply causation, nor does it tell you whether the arrow of causation, if one exists, goes one way or the other.

Some things that don't seem to correlate: ethnicity (Turkmen have high fertility and Turks low; Iraqis high fertility and Jordanians relatively low; Omanis high fertility and Bahrainis - another Shiite oil state - relatively low), religious sect (Iranians and Omanis: both Shiites, wildly different fertility rates; same thing with predominantly Sunni Tunisia versus Afghanistan) and political system. The last should be a surprise to those who have argued that, for example, religious coersion or political repression are the causes of either low or high fertility. In Iran, a repressive religious establishment coexists with low fertility; in Saudi Arabia, with high fertility. In each case, some commentators have been inclined to credit/blame that religious/political environment for the general fertility rate. On the other side, Algeria ruthlessly suppressed its Islamist movement, at a cost of tens of thousands of lives. It has one of the lowest fertility rates. So did Saddam's Iraq and Assad's Syria. They have some of the higher Arab state fertility rates.

Demography is a weird science. In some sense, demography is clearly destiny; if, say, you have twice as many Muslim babies today as Christian in a given country, while the ratio of adults is reversed, you know that the country is going to change in certain fundamental ways. But demographic trends can also change surprisingly quickly. Look at Catholic Europe:

Italy: 1.27
Spain: 1.27

These are some of the lowest fertility rates in the world. And it wasn't long ago that anti-Catholic groups used to fret about Catholics out-breeding Protestants. It's also noticeable that the recent history of these countries is pretty diverse. The list includes a country (Spain) that emerged a generation ago from a Catholic and pro-natalist dictatorship; another (Poland) that personified Catholic resistance to Communist oppression; others (Austria, Italy) that have been free and prosperous since their recovery from World War II; and another (Croatia) that but recently was effectively engaged in a demographic war (as well as a literal shooting war) with its neighbors over a religious/ethnic difference.

I'm not suggesting that religion or politics are epiphenomena. But it does seem like explanations of demographic trends that start with these variables run the risk of having to turn on a dime when, rather suddenly, the demography changes.
posted by Noah at 11:22 AM

 
There's a good piece on Tech Central Station by someone named Carroll Andrew Morse about George Kennan of recent memory, and how contemporary liberalism, neo-conservatism and conservative realism all fail to do justice to the quality of his thought.

Kennan was an odd bird in the foreign-policy aviary. He was a small-government guy who advocated a vigorous, forward strategy to respond to the Soviet challenge. He was a diplomat and a great believer in diplomacy who advocated systematic confrontation. He was a realist whose strategy became identified with a view of foreign policy as a moral crusade. The left mistakenly understands containment to have been a passive strategy and the Soviet Union's collapse to have been inevitable because of its internal contradictions; Kennan believed neither. The right mistakenly understands Kennan to have advocated confrontation because the Soviet Union was, for ideological reasons, inexorably expansionist, and therefore had to be resisted with similar ideological fervor; Kennan didn't believe that either.

One does not have to wonder what he would make of the political and foreign-policy scene today. Kennan, late in life, was sufficiently depressed by the long-term prospects for the United States of America to have mused - in print - about breaking up the United States into twelve constituent republics. He felt, simply, that the United States was too big, in terms of population and land area, to both defend its interests and remain the land of a free, self-governing people. That in itself suggests that we should not take too much to heart his personal view of our failures as a nation; it is, among other things, hard to listen to a man say out of one side of his mouth that our success in foreign policy depends on being a country that knows what it wants and out of the other that perhaps we ought not even be a single country. But it is very worthwhile to restore access to the mental habits of a man like Kennan. Most important, it would be instructive to recover the ability to construct a theory to suit the case at hand, rather than, as we too often are, operate intellectually at one or the other extreme: deriving everything from first principles or reacting in a narrow fashion to details without any overarching concept whatever. The former is the great failing of this administration and its theoreticians; the latter, the great failure of the last two administrations and theirs.
posted by Noah at 10:25 AM

 
Something has happened to the comments on this blog. I am, as long-time readers know, a technological idiot; I have absolutely no idea what happened. Does anyone out there have a clue what might have transpired? If so, email me.

Thanks.
posted by Noah at 8:37 AM

 
This year, Purim and Good Friday coincide. It's an interesting juxtaposition. Purim is kind of the Jewish carnivale, with costumes, noisemakers, drinking and a general world-turned-upside-down atmosphere. It's not a blow-off before a Lenten season of abstinence (there is a roughly equivalent season: the counting of the omer, which stretches from Passover to Shavuot/Pentecost), but it is a bit analogous in that it begins a period of preparation for the commemoration of a Great Liberating Event: in the Jewish case, Passover, the season of our liberation from Pharaoh; in the Christian case, Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the death that liberated mankind from death.

But it's crucially different in that Purim is a festival in its own right. And, as I say, it makes an interesting juxtaposition to the Easter season. The story of Purim, recounted in the Book of Esther, is - like the Christian story - a comedy. It is the story of the triumph of the forces of light over the forces of darkness, a triumph that, for all its worldly events, takes place fundamentally in an esoteric realm. But it is a very different kind of comedy: absurdist, even black in its humor, with an ending that is ambivalent on many levels.

Esther is the only book of the Hebrew Bible never to refer explicitly to God, either by name or by title. (There is one oblique reference to relief coming from "another place" if Esther does not take it upon herself to save her people; personally, I've always thought this referred to Princess Leia.) For that very reason, I suspect, it has become a seminal text, both to the traditionally Orthodox and to those alienated from tradition. Indeed, traditionally it is said that in the days of the Messiah the entire calendar of feasts and fasts will be abrogated - except for Purim, which will continue to be celebrated.

On the one hand, Purim is highly valued in part precisely because of God's absence: the Jewish people, as a whole, renew their faith in God and their fidelity to the covenant in the *absence* of any explicit or miraculous evidence of the divine presence on Earth. As such, the story speaks to the post-lapsarian or post-prophetic or simply modern condition: we, after all, have to see God's presence in a world apparently governed by the cold god of mechanics and statistics. It's also been given an interesting Zionist interpretation recently, according to which the book - because of God's explicit absence - gives religious warrant to pro-active human action against evil, as well as to a certain kind of collective Jewish action, an interpretation that one can easily understand as a rebuke to ultra-Orthodoxy's traditional quietism.

On the other hand, precisely because God is apparently absent from the text, the book has been interpreted as an esoteric parable of Divine Providence. The story must, it seems, be interpreted this way, or its presence in the canon becomes alarming. Think about the literal story. The Jewish people are threatened with utter annihilation because of Haman's fit of pique and King Ahashueros's utter obliviousness. They are saved because of Queen Esther's timely intervention . . . but she is Queen only because the drunken lout of a King fired his previous consort for refusing to dance nude for his buddies, and her intervention is successful only because she, in contrast, prepares a series of debauches to delight her clueless husband. And the King does not finally turn against Haman until he (mistakenly) believes he has caught him forcing himself on Esther in the King's own chambers. So if all this is the fruit of Mordechai's canny politics, well, then Bismarck could probably learn something from Harold Lloyd.

But, once you look behind the scenes, suddenly the story appears to be a marvelous comic allegory. Esther's name is interpreted to be a play on hester, which is not just a street on the Lower East Side but also the Hebrew word for "hidden" and a term in Kabbalistic theodicy (God hides His face from time to time, during which times bad things happen). The encounter between Esther and Ahashueros is understood as an allegory for Israel's relationship with God, or between the individual Jewish soul and God. All this is a way to reconcile Esther's absurdist realism - the world is run by madmen and drunks and wild contingencies determine the fate of nations - with the Bible's vision of an orderly world presided over by an omnipotent and omnibenevolent Creator: the apparent madness is a superficial understanding, but behind the scenes a hidden hand achieves a providential outcome.

The Christian story, culminating in Easter, takes such an esoteric interpretation of reality to a whole other level. It's not just that there's a hidden hand behind the madness of the world; the world itself is only part of the story, and not the most important part. Thus what would appear, on the surface, to be a pretty decisive defeat - the man Jesus, thought to be the Messiah, is rejected by Israel and nailed to a cross and killed - is turned into a profound victory with a resurrection that implies the triumph over the most basic fact of material existence: death itself. Pathetic tragedy becomes absurd comedy - but not of the gallows-humor type that dominates the Book of Esther but something altogether more fantastic.

I've long thought that an excellent text to place in counterpoint to the Book of Esther is Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. The play is comprehensively misunderstood by directors as a sermon against puritan repression. It is anything but. Rather, it is the greatest piece of absurdist theater in history. And I think it can be interpreted as a very subtle and wicked send-up not of the Book of Esther but of the esoteric interpretation of same, and of the notion of a hidden hand of Providence generally.

The plot is highly convoluted and not readily summarized. The Duke, realizing that his duchy has fallen to a low moral state owing to lax enforcement of the law, contrives a plan to reform the country without losing his own popularity. He will abandon the state temporarily, leaving it in the hands of his young and morally upright lieutenant, Angelo - who turns out to be, in fact, a thoroughly unpleasant and unimpressive prig. Angelo immediately sets about enforcing the old laws, and the first man trapped in his vise is Claudio, a poor fellow who has knocked up his girlfriend. Though he agrees to marry her (which you would think would make the problem go away), he is nonetheless condemned to death for fornication. Claudio begs his sister, Isabella, a young hysteric and would-be nun straight out of Freud's casebook (the play, by the way, is set in Vienna; it's coincidences like that make one wonder whether Shakespeare is, in fact, the hidden hand behind the scenes of history) to plead with Angelo for his life. Which she does, and her manifest virtue turns out to be the one thing that can corrupt the incorruptible Angelo, who promptly proposes to release her brother if she surrenders that virtue to him.

So far, so good, and so far the play is an interesting study in precisely what most directors interpret it to be: sexual repression and license. And it's not unreasonable to read Angelo and Isabella in that light, albeit Shakespeare evinces a lot more understanding of these personality types than directors who turn the story into a simple inverted morality tale of which Lucio (a cynical whoremonger) is the hero.

But the play is aiming at something much stranger than this. The Duke has not left Vienna at all; he's been hanging around in the guise of a friar, observing the results of his plan and even advising Claudio on how to prepare his soul for his impending execution. And then, as it becomes clear that his abdication has triggered a manifest injustice, the Duke - still disguised as the friar - intervenes. He has a plan, he explains to the terrified Isabella (who has just vented her fury on her brother when he concludes - ignobly but it's hard to fault him under the circumstances - that she should, in fact, sacrifice her virtue to save his life) whereby she can save Claudio's life and retain her virtue. There ensue a series of plot twists and turns far too complex to summarize here: swapped beds, swapped heads, all manner of ludicrous goings-on. In the end, Angelo is convinced he has slept with Isabella (he hasn't); Isabella is convinced her brother's been executed (he hasn't); and suddenly . . . the Duke returns. All the characters congregate to welcome him, and Isabella asks for justice. And the Duke, of course . . . sides with Angelo, his trusted lieutenant! At which point the friar is called for, so the Duke sneaks out the back . . . and returns as the friar! Now we have to go find the Duke. And it goes on like this for several minutes until someone pulls back the friar's cowl, revealing the Duke. Who now admits that he knows the truth about everything, and concludes the play by arranging a series of matches of increasing unlikelihood, culminating with his own betrothal to . . . Isabella!

It should be apparent why I call this (with some hyperbole, I admit, though I dearly love this play) the greatest piece of absurdist theater in history. My own favored way to understand the play is as a parody of the idea of God as the secret behind-the-scenes director of things. If in the Book of Esther God is apparently absent and unmentioned (directly), in Measure for Measure the "controlling authority" absents himself but (to the audience) his continued presence is clear. The hidden hand is revealed. And the consequence is that the absurdities of our world look . . . even more absurd!

In any event, as you can probably guess there's another meta-rung to this particular ladder. Measure for Measure has been interpreted by some Christian critics as an allegory, along much the same lines as the Kabbalistic interpretation of the Book of Esther. The Duke is understood to be Christ; Isabella is a prospective bride of Christ at the start of the play (she wants to become a nun) and thus the Duke's proposal at the end is the consummation of her wish. And the very visible (and, to my mind, absurd) machinations of the Duke over the course of the play are the mysterious ways of God, all aiming to produce a change in the souls of various characters to reconcile them to God's grace (Isabella in particular, who, it is alleged - plausibly, I might add - learns mercy, an attribute of God's that she did not particularly manifest at the start of the play, to say the least). What I have taken to be a particularly rich and complex satire, some critics have taken to be a pious allegory.

Which raises the question: what about the Book of Esther?

Well, I've strayed rather far from my original intent to juxtapose Purim to Easter. That's probably because I've been walking around with an Esther/Measure essay in my head for a while now, and bits of it wanted to come out. So I'll end with just one more observation on Esther/Measure: if you're determined to stage Measure for Measure as a simple moral story about the evils of repression, do the decent thing and stage it somewhere that message might be needed.

In Persia, say.
posted by Noah at 10:36 AM

 
Another, less upbeat conversation on world affairs: with the local Lebanese (Christian) specialty grocer in my neighborhood. She's a lovely woman (the whole family seems lovely) and I shop at their store often. So last weekend I opened a conversation about events in her native land. Her face saddened. She was not at all optimistic about what would ultimately happen to Lebanon. The Syrians have armed Hezbollah to the teeth, leaving them the only effective military power in the country. If they actually do leave, either Hezbollah will take over or the civil war will start again. Either way, the result will be disastrous for Lebanon. Syria, she said, would remain the power in Lebanon; the only question is whether they will be a little more or a little less aggressive in asserting that power, and whether there will be great bloodshed on the way to that inevitable end.

Doesn't mean she's right, but she did grow up there.

Lebanon was created as a solution to a demographic problem: a Christian community that didn't want to be swallowed up by a largely-Muslim Syria. It was a delicate balancing act from the beginning between Christians, Sunnis, and Shiites (with some Druze thrown in to make it interesting), and when Yasser Arafat arrived after Black September the balance fell apart, as did the country. Now, the demographic facts do not support the Lebanon of old. There's no way the Christian community can be dominant in the way they were 50 years ago when Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East. And it is not easy to build a political system that can survive massive demographic changes. America is not unique in having done so, but we're pretty rare - including among democracies.

One can certainly hope that the current democratic moment, spurred on by our own interventions in the region, will spark a genuine nationalism, a solidarity of fellow-citizens in a political community that transcends religious, ethnic and tribal lines, the kind of thing Britain, France and America have had for centuries (and that, for that matter, many other countries, from Mexico to China, have, more or less successfully, developed). But there are plenty of reasons to worry.

And, not to sound too much like Peter Beinart, there's reason to worry about our own attention-deficit-disorder as well. Lebanon is going to be there for a long time. Are we?
posted by Noah at 9:48 AM

 
No, I don't have any clear opinions on the Terri Schiavo case. Basically, the reason is that my own instinctual response runs counter to that of the more medically-knowledgeable members of my family (both my wife and my father are physicians).

Let's begin with the almost completely irrational. I have a horror of being unable to communicate. When I see pictures of Ms. Schiavo, I don't think, "oh, that's very sad, but there's no one there anymore." I think, "my God! Someone's trapped in there!" And that is a horrific state for me to comtemplate. Along with drowning and losing my reason, losing my ability to communicate is among the fates I fear most.

That does not mean, however, that when I contemplate being in her position I imagine, "oh, I'd rather die than live like that." Quite the contrary! A big part of the horror is the fear that, unable to communicate with the outside world, I would be utterly vulnerable, even at risk of being killed by someone who thought that the "I" that I am had departed, that I was, in the msot important sense, already dead.

In other words, my instinctual response is rather like Mickey Kaus's from a year and a half ago.

Now, I say this is an irrational aspect of my response to the case because my own fears should not bear on the case. Had my horror led me to the opposite conclusion - that letting her live in such a state, which no one could bear, is an affront to her dignity - that conclusion would surely not be any more legitimate than inclining toward the views of her parents because my personal horror cuts the other way.

The actual, rational issues in the case are, I think, quite complicated. On the one hand: the sanctity of marriage, the principle of federalism, and the fact that this is a matter properly to be adjudicated by the courts, not by the legislature. On the other hand: the fact that this is a right-to-die-by-proxy case, which is kind of creepy. We are, after all, talking not about a do-not-resuscitate order but about terminating the provision of food and water, without which *none* of us can live. We are not talking about letting someone who is terminal die in peace rather than dragging out the inevitable; we are talking about ending the life of someone who, properly cared for, will live for years. Most important, we are not talking about someone exercising her right to die, because we cannot know the woman's intentions (assuming she can have intentions in her current condition), we do not, really, know what her prior intentions were, and frankly, even if we did know what her prior intentions were it is a bit of pious sophistry to assert confidently that *she* could know her intentions in any kind of detail in advance.

But I think there's another, more important subterranean issue that isn't being discussed entirely openly, which is the - by nature - slippery definition of death. As a matter of law (I think I have this right) the question being debated is whether Ms. Schiavo would want to live as she does. It's not, in other words, about her state of being but about her state of mind. As she is unable to make her intentions known, the courts are trying to divine them from reported past statements and other data, such as it is. As I've said, I think this exercise is mostly sophistry. But I also think that many of those who side with the husband would think a little differently if they weren't sure that, in any meaningful sense, Terri Schiavo was already dead.

Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose instead of testifying that Ms. Schiavo lacked any meaningful cognitive function, her doctors testified that she was fully aware of her surroundings . . . but completely unable to communicate. Moreover, her condition was unequivocally permanent; she would never be able to communicate, even in the most subtle ways: not with eye movements, not by tapping a single finger, not in any manner. Say, in other words, that rather than being in a persistent vegitative state, she was "locked in." Such cases do happen; there was an article in The New Yorker some years ago about one such case, and attempts to establish communication through the use of bio-feedback devices. In that case, the decline was gradual, so the patient had plenty of time to declare his intentions; say, in my thought experiment, that Ms. Schiavo became "locked in" suddenly. Say, further, that her husband attested that she had said that she had no wish to live this way. Would anyone so confidently say that her "wishes" should be honored?

I suspect that most people wouldn't. I suspect that, if they *knew* she was "in there," many of the people who think she should be "allowed to die" would be taking the other side.

I think that's healthy, because I think that whatever lip service we pay to the notion of a "right to die" we really think there are *objective criteria* related to one's state of being that are relevant. We really don't think someone depressed and worried about being a burden should be encouraged to end it all. We feel differently about someone who is terminal and in pain. And I suspect that many of those exasperated about conservatives who have championed Terri Schiavo's parents in their fight to keep her alive are exasperated because they think *she's already dead.* Which (if I have this right) is *not* the point of law at issue.

(I'm aware that the question is relevant to the point of law about her intentions, but I think it's a subsidiary point. Please correct me if I'm wrong about this. If I am, much of my argument still stands, but the question I think is subterranean is more open than I think it has been.)

There's a lot of talk about "playing God" on the part of judges and doctors, but it does seem to me that once you get into these gray areas - and our actual nature is composed of gray areas; the sharp lines are artifacts of our reason designed to keep us sane, not facts of nature - whatever you do you are playing God. The question is not whether we are playing God as we have no right to do, but what a God-fearing person should do.

Let me make an analogy. The reasoned, absolute pro-life position holds, for example, that personhood begins, from a moral and, those who reason thus hope, one day from a legal perspective, when sperm meets egg. The reasoning is impeccable, in that this is a bright-line test that works: an event actually happens, on one side of which there is an entity with a full complement of genes and the natural ability, in the proper environment, to develop into a full-grown baby. It is, as Ramesh Ponnuru likes to say, exactly what a human being looks like at that stage of development.

But it is also a biological fact that our reproductive system disposes of such human beings willy-nilly. The death rate is, I think, something like 30%. If we are really supposed to believe that these entities are morally no different than other humans, then that loss is an enormous tragedy, far greater, numerically, than the losses due to abortion. Does it make a moral difference that these losses are natural - that they are part of how we are designed? The rights-based account of why abortion is wrong would suggest that it does not: death is death, and if we're on the side of life then just as we have an obligation not to take life we have an obligation to try to save it. If that means redesigning how human reproduction works, I should think the moral case would favor such an effort.

Hopefully, my readers would agree with me that such a conclusion is absurd. What follows from the recognition that this conclusion is absurd is that once we *know* and have some degree of *control* of matters at the beginning of life, then we are in a God-like position. We don't escape that position by enacting a set of ethical rules, or even by abjuring a power we have, because the choice not to act is also a choice. The question becomes not: how do we avoid playing God? but: how should a God-fearing person with God-like power use that power?

To return to Terri Schiavo: it seems to me that, stripping away the very real concerns about things like conflict-of-interest (on one side) or federalism (on the other) the big divide is over how comfortable people are with the conclusion that there is no more Terri. And on that matter, I think both sides should exercise a little humility.

For those who are sure she is gone: how sure are you that you know this? How sure, for that matter, are you that you know what you are talking about at all when you talk about being "there" versus being "gone?" Which one of us has gone to the country of the comatose or vegitative and returned with a report? Pretty much by definition, that's something we can't do. The nature of our consciousness is deeply mysterious; it's hard to even pose well-formed questions about it. Serious cognitive scientists (e.g., Daniel Dennett) debate the question of whether the self is entirely an illusion. (To which I reply: who is the observer of this illusion?) Other scientists (e.g., Roger Penrose) appear convinced that the mystery of consciousness and the mysterious nature of reality suggested by quantum mechanics must be related (largely on the rather-unsatisfying principle that anything deeply mysterious must be related to everything else deeply mysterious). Anyone who is sure they know how this stuff works is selling you something.

For those who are sure that calling Ms. Schiavo dead is crossing an unacceptable ethical Rubicon: put aside the slippery-slope arguments that lurk in the background of your objections. Are you really sure your categories are *real* and *true* as opposed to conventional and useful? I can buy the argument that we should err on the side of life. For that matter, I can buy the argument that respect for the human form is a valuable convention that probably protects living human beings; that's why I don't think human corpses should be ground up and fed to livestock. But that's a very different thing from saying that a bright-line test for who is a living human being is something *real.* The ethical architecture we have inherited is founded on Aristotelian and Cartesian science that has been surpassed. As our knowledge expands, our ethics come under stress. That shouldn't be cause either for surprise or for alarm, but for caution. As hard cases make bad law, we should be wary of making hard cases the tests of hard principles that, if we think hard about them, are fundamentally conventional and pragmatic.

Like I said, I have very conflicted opinions. Perhaps it's because I live among doctors, and understand how uncertain are all the certainties, and how nonetheless decisions must be made. Or perhaps it's just because I'm Jewish, and this is another one of those Jewish-Catholic divides that are so interesting. (Here's an article by Will Saletan about the stem-cell debate and how it plays out on Jewish-Catholic lines; I thought it was very good, and that he has really picked up on something here, and not at all the something that you would expect from mainstream media coverage of the debate. His piece on Schiavo is rather less good, and very strident.) I am wary of a rights-based approach to many things, but to these sorts of issues above all. As so often, I think a wrongs-based approach might be more fruitful.
posted by Noah at 4:03 PM

 
Had an interesting conversation last night over drinks with a friend who for the last few years has been a private political analyst focused on Asia. He was surprisingly (to me) upbeat about North Korea. His view of the situation:

• North Korean nukes are a weapon of blackmail and a commodity to trade. They are not a direct threat of any consequence to America; the threat is that they will be sold to people who are a threat to America. So we can effectively contain the North Korean problem through aggressive interdiction of North Korean shipping, effectively laying seige to the country. This also puts increasing pressure on the regime which depends on the drug and arms trade for survival.
• China has many cards, but it is not in as strong a position as I feared - and it knows it. China does not want North Korea to implode. They want a solution that keeps the regime reasonably stable. Anything we do - such as interdiction - that puts pressure on the regime also threatens China because an implosion would create a huge refugee crisis. By contrast, a collapse of the regime is an unmitigated positive for US; the only downside is we'd have to hand over buckets of cash to South Korea to pay for reunification.
• South Korea is all bluff. They have the most left-wing government they are likely to have for a while, and it is trying to make sure the Americans don't leave. So much for their anti-Americanism. There is no danger of them being Finlandized by China; they are just whining and indulging in sentimental nationalism.
• Both China and South Korea are far more worried about what Japan will do than about what America will do - and they are both very aware that North Korea's intransigence is causing Japan to rethink their own traditional stances on military action, nuclearization, etc. This is another reason why time is on the US's side: because we are not threatened directly by the Japanese rumblings, while South Korea and China are very disturbed by them, so the longer the crisis on Korea festers the more incentive China and South Korea have to actually try to solve the problem the way America wants - i.e., by getting the Norks to back down.

His bottom line: Bush is doing exactly the right thing. We don't need a deal. China and South Korea need a deal. North Korea needs whatever it takes to stay alive. So we should hold firm, take no military action other than aggressive interdiction of shipping, but also refuse to let the crisis end by entering into a new agreed framework. Eventually either the Norks will back down, or the Chinese will force them to back down, or there'll be sudden political change in the country (i.e., a coup of some sort), or the country will collapse.

One cheeky suggestion he had for further scrambling the Norks' brains: embrace the South Korean Ministry of Unification (I think that's what it's called) and begin a formal planning process for reunification. Start talking openly with the Chinese about how to plan for the refugee crisis that will follow a collapse of the North. In general, behave in public as if North Korea is realistically likely to simply collapse and that we need to plan for the cleanup. To the extent that news penetrates the Hermit Kingdom (rather limited, I should think) it couldn't be good for the fortunes of either Kim or the regime as a whole. And even if it doesn't penetrate to the people, it should drive the Norks absolutely nuts.

Anyhow, it was nice to talk to someone optimistic.

posted by Noah at 1:48 PM

 
Does anyone else find this comment from Gregg Easterbrook kind of bizarre?

King Solomon opined that it is better to go to a house of mourning than to a house of feasting - but not because you should be happy when someone goes to their promised reward. King David sat down and ate when his son (fruit of his adultery with Bathsheba) died, and, when asked why he did not wail and fast, replied not that now his son was happy but that fasting and prayer would no longer avail him; he, King David, was going, inexorably, to meet his son, but his son would not come back to him.

Say you believe in the life to come; say you believe that that life is an abode of bliss and ultimate fulfillment, reunion with the Godhead and so forth - even so, can one throw a party to celebrate a loved-one's passing? Even if that passing is as timely as it was always inevitable?

Even the Irish don't conduct a wake in quite that spirit.

If nothing else, if Karol Wojtyla has lived the life of a saint, shouldn't we mourn when he dies that a saint no longer lives among us?

I don't recognize the religion that Easterbrook wishes people were practicing. I'm a Jew, so perhaps I've just got this wrong, but I rather think Easterbrook has confused Christianity with the Church of the New Revelation (Fosterite).
posted by Noah at 3:35 PM

 
CATO just came out with their grades of the governors for fiscal performance. They give out gold stars for cutting taxes and spending and for bringing budgets into long-term balance, and demerits for the opposite - raising taxes, hiking spending, creating structural imbalances. Check out who won the top ten grades:

Arnold Schwarzenegger (GOP - California)
Bill Owens (GOP - Colorado)
Jeb Bush (GOP - Florida)
Mark Sanford (GOP - South Carolina)
Tim Pawlenty (GOP - Minnesota)
Bill Richardson (DEM - New Mexico)
John Baldacci (DEM - Maine)
George Pataki (GOP - New York)
Mike Rounds (GOP - South Dakota)
Phil Bredesen (DEM - Tennessee)

Some of those grades are inflated because everyone is graded on their entire term in office, not just their most-recent term. Owens, Bush and Pataki have all seen their scores decline since they were first elected.

I count at least 3 top contenders for the GOP nomination or VP slot in 2008 (Owens, Sanford, Pawlenty) and 2 more who would be but for extraordinary circumstances beyond their control (Bush's family name and Schwarzenegger's country of birth). I also count 2 top contenders for the Democratic nomination (Richardson and Bredesen).

Much-discussed possible nominees (or VP nominees) who didn't grade so well?

Romney (#15, GOP - Massachusetts)
Ehrlich (#18, GOP - Maryland)
Vilsack (#22, DEM - Iowa)
Warner (#27, DEM - Virginia)

Note that only 35 governors are rated; the others are too new to merit a rating. So #18 Ehrlich is smack in the middle, and #27 Warner is towards the back of the pack.

I suspect at least two of these guys (Romney and Warner) will be trying hard to improve their scores in the next 2 years, when CATO does their next ranking.
posted by Noah at 8:40 AM