The Little Red Blog

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At Vox, “neurophilosopher” Patricia Churchland shares her thoughts on the role that brain chemistry has played in the evolution of human morality:

In her new book, Conscience, Churchland argues that mammals — humans, yes, but also monkeys and rodents and so on — feel moral intuitions because of how our brains developed over the course of evolution. Mothers came to feel deeply attached to their children because that helped the children (and through them, the mother’s genes) survive. This ability to feel attachment was gradually generalized to mates, kin, and friends. “Attachment begets caring,” Churchland writes, “and caring begets conscience.”

The ties that bind may not be entirely neurochemical, but the occasional shot of dopamine goes a long way toward reinforcing moral norms. Ms. Churchland’s research on this subject has included the mating habits of montane voles and prairie voles, as well as showing human research subjects “a picture of a human with a lot of worms squirming in his mouth” in order to determine the subjects’ political leanings. ¹

Ms. Churchland objects to accusations of “scientism” or “reductionist materialism,” and she insists that moral norms are indispensable whether issued by God from Mount Sinai or slowly evolved via our biological attachments and their neurological underpinnings. Still, traditionalists will take umbrage at Churchland’s cavalier dismissal of the soul:

There does not seem to be something other than the brain, something like a non-physical soul. So I think it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise to realize that our moral inclinations are also the outcome of the brain. Having said that, I don’t think it devalues it. I think it’s really rather wonderful. The brain is so much more extraordinary and marvelous than we thought. It’s not that I think these are not real values — this is as real as values get!

One school of thought says that, if moral values are human creations, then anything goes and everything is permitted; another, possibly wiser school says that, if moral values are human creations, then we must proceed thoughtfully, deliberately, and responsibly when it comes to creating, evaluating, and implementing such values. Either way, whatever the origin of values, we should probably all work a little harder at living up to them.

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¹ Spoiler: conservatives score higher when it comes to the linked categories of “purity” and “disgust"; when shown the photo of a mouthful of squirming worms, they will react accordingly. Liberals viewing the same thing are more likely just to quote Bob Dylan: “What else can you show me?”.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/7/8/20681558/conscience-patricia-churchland-neuroscience-morality-empathy-philosophy

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Speaking of values: at The American Conservative, Casey Chalk cautions Americans against undertaking foreign interventions under the guise of “spreading our values”. History has shown that Woodrow Wilson’s “making the world safe for democracy” would have been better conceived simply as “making the world safe” (a Herculean task in itself). Ironically, it was none other than the conservative icon G.K. Chesterton who, in a clear case of wishful thinking, described America as “a country with the soul of a church”. In fact, America is a country suffering from the delusion that it is a church, which in turn leads to other countries having to suffer the consequences of that delusion.

As Chalk points out, John Winthrop’s famous reference to America as “a city shining on a hill” has been serially misconstrued. Winthrop was not advocating for America to become the launch point for global crusades, whether launched on behalf of “democracy,” “freedom,” or “human rights”:

It should be remembered that the image of a “city upon a hill” is one not of aggressive interventionism, but of bearing humble witness to a certain political vision. The goal is to persuade other nations to follow our example by virtue of our domestic activity, rather than forcibly foisting our ideals upon our neighbors. The early inheritors of Winthrop understood what this “city upon a hill” vision entailed. John Quincy Adams, whose ancestors emigrated to America only eight years after Winthrop’s famous speech, warned America not to go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.”

We are not the world’s policeman or the world’s moral arbiter; our efforts to assume those roles have made us into nothing more than the world’s imperial busybody, and we’re not even very good at that.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/america-isnt-the-church-and-shouldnt-act-like-it/

Thursday Blinks

In case you hadn’t noticed, (some) men today feel very much on the defensive, as Paul Brian (at The American Conservative) explains:

Many boys today have grown up in an educational and cultural environment that believes masculine impulses are inherently harmful. Whether it’s heavy drinking, marital infidelity, fighting, bullying, or general selfishness, men have certainly not always displayed admirable traits. But to state that these traits are masculinity itself? That’s a leap. Conversely, men have historically—and in contemporary times too—risen to great heights of heroism, self-sacrifice, and noble strength to defend their families, communities, and faiths. What has changed is not so much the shortcomings of men but the technology that is allowing larger numbers of them not to develop positive masculine qualities that simply had to be developed 100 years ago to survive. Necessity is not only the mother of invention; it is also in many ways the mother of real men.

Mr. Brian writes not to bury masculinity but to praise it, and he has some suggestions on how to restore it. “There’s no manual for becoming a man,” he acknowledges; “Nonetheless, there are concrete steps men can take towards positive masculine ideals.” Those concrete steps include: “Providing strong role models,” “promoting real consequences,” “building an economy of purpose,” “reforming our media and culture,” and “portraying sex differences as complementary, not combative.”

Paul Brian may or may not be the next Jordan Peterson, but his advice to young men is all but indistinguishable from Peterson’s; or, for that matter, from your mother’s. We live in an age when “Clean your room!” and “Be responsible!” are considered (by some) to be outlandishly counter-cultural, as opposed to basic common sense; this allows the likes of Jordan Peterson and Paul Brian to pose as gurus for floundering millennial males. It’s a niche that someone has to fill, I suppose, and I believe Robert Bly is no longer available.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-the-west-can-save-masculinity/

At Foreign Affairs, Stephen Walt is kind enough to point out to us “5 Very Important Things about the World Nobody Knows”.  What Walt actually offers are five questions about the future, questions to which nobody knows the answers because, duh, they’re about the future.

If your curiosity is piqued, here are Walt’s concerns: “China’s future trajectory”; “How good are America’s cyber-capabilities?”; “What’s going to happen to the EU?”; “How many states will go nuclear in the next 20 years?”; and “Who will win the debate on U.S. grand strategy?”

Note that Walt’s queries do not include “How devastating will the effects of climate change be?” or “What will be left of American politics after Trump is done trashing it (assuming he’ll ever be done with it)?”  It seems to me that those latter questions will have a lot to do with how Walt’s five questions—some of them, at least—are answered.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/02/5-very-important-things-about-the-world-nobody-knows/

At Vox, Sean Illing interviews computer scientist Rizwan Virk about Nick Bostrom’s hypothesis that we may very well be characters living in a simulated reality (as in The Matrix). By way of background, Illing explains:

In an influential paper that laid out the theory, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom showed that at least one of three possibilities is true: 1) All human-like civilizations in the universe go extinct before they develop the technological capacity to create simulated realities; 2) if any civilizations do reach this phase of technological maturity, none of them will bother to run simulations; or 3) advanced civilizations would have the ability to create many, many simulations, and that means there are far more simulated worlds than non-simulated ones.

We can’t know for sure which of these is the case, Bostrom concludes, but they’re all possible — and the third option might even be the most probable outcome. It’s a difficult argument to wrap your head around, but it makes a certain amount of sense.

Illing and Virk proceed to chat about the possibility that the entire world around us, and possibly our very existence, is nothing but digital pixels being manipulated by some hyper-intelligent beings (though my existence seems more like it’s being manipulated by someone with a very slow learning curve). All of this is either risible or terrifying, depending on how seriously you take it; but I’ll say this much for Bostrom’s “simulation” thesis—it’s the only plausible explanation I can think of for Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the White House.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/10/18275618/simulation-hypothesis-matrix-rizwan-virk  

Tuesday Blinks

{TRIGGER WARNING: Two of today’s blinks are from conservative authors and may cause discomfort (they did for me, at least); however, the third blink, from Jackson Lears, provides a “safe space” in which to recover from the trauma.  Also, all three articles referenced fall into the category  "TL, DR".}

Abby McCloskey (at National Affairs) lauds President Trump for turning around the “weak economy during the Obama years,” though she does not explain how such an unprecedented turnaround could have taken place so quickly with only one significant piece of economic legislation having passed (and that, one year into the president’s term). Nor does she mention that GDP growth in Trump’s first year was 2.2%, compared to GDP growth over Obama’s last seven years, which averaged, um, 2.2%; and while GDP growth under Trump in 2018 was a healthy 2.9%, that merely equaled the growth in 2015 under Obama. As I have painstakingly demonstrated previously, the Trump economy is by and large the Obama economy, except with a world-historic level of braggadocio and entirely unwarranted credit-grabbing. 

The thrust, however, of Ms. McCloskey’s article (“Beyond Growth”) is that man does not live by GDP alone. She acknowledges that “As Republicans tout the soaring stock market, growing economy, and low unemployment rate, their rhetoric has become disconnected from the experiences of many Americans…Our social fabric is fraying, and people are losing a sense of purpose, dignity, and connection to one another.” Wage stagnation, lack of economic mobility (“70% of children born poor will never make it to the middle class”), income inequality: one by one, Ms. McCloskey notes the same woes that those of us on the Left have been talking about for decades.

McCloskey even concedes that “Democrats' themes of inclusivity, fairness, and equity strike a chord because, by many measures, the gains of economic growth have not been reasonably shared — and Republicans have done little about it.” Not that she thinks Democrats can be trusted to provide solutions, given that their current proposals “would be devastating in their effects on work, industry, and the federal debt.”

In her long, detailed article, Ms. McCloskey suggests we focus on “Investing in Relationships” (families and communities), “Supporting Workers” (through tax credits, not by encouraging unions), “A New Vision for Entitlements” (means-testing), and “Growth and Opportunity” (“an economy that is both dynamic and inclusive”). Much of this sounds like a repackaging and rebranding of traditional conservative policy prescriptions, and much of it should be rejected by anyone on the Left; but at least Ms. McCloskey acknowledges some of the current shortcomings of our growth-oriented economy.

Now if she (and her conservative colleagues) would only stop pretending that the "Trump economy" is anything other than a continuation of the "Obama economy"...

https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/beyond-growth

Daniel McCarthy (at First Things) also wants to clarify the conservative/Republican agenda, but his focus in “A New Conservative Agenda” is not the economy but the broader cultural values which underly specific policy choices. According to McCarthy, we are at, to use a trendy term, an inflection point:

The class compact that came out of the Great Depression and World War II stabilized many of the social tensions dating back to the very beginnings of industrialization. It has broken down. The welfare state is heading toward bankruptcy. Americans are increasingly working as contractors rather than salaried employees, with fewer benefits and less security. Industrial jobs are vanishing. A family wage, lifelong work, retirement guarantees, and brighter prospects for one’s children and grandchildren are not part of the bargain anymore. Economic growth is concentrated in cities and college towns, leaving everyplace else to wither. If the country continues on its present course, all of this will get worse.

McCarthy spends a great deal of time explaining how we came to be in this predicament, an explanation best summarized in his own words: “The success of the twentieth century’s grand ­bargain—the welfare state and the middle-class growth economy—weakened family and religion, providing individuals unprecedented freedoms that, with the collapse of the bargain, have turned into unprecedented loneliness. The relief that church and family once provided is now supplied by fentanyl—another low-priced consumer product from China.”

He then eviscerates what he refers to as contemporary “palliative liberalism,” beginning with three of its representative “elite” figures:

In their presidential campaigns, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and Hillary Clinton all provided insight into how the elite views those they consider part of the unproductive class: as “bitter clingers,” as a parasitical “47 percent” who are not “job creators,” and as moral “deplorables.” They are simply unnecessary to the next stage of economic and cultural liberalism. They want wages that are too high and career prospects to which they are not entitled. Their expectations are too great, in contrast to those of immigrants whose prospects only brighten if they come to the U.S. from the developing world.

McCarthy, of course, pointedly ignores actual policy proposals of both Obama and Clinton (higher minimum wage, better access to both college and vocational training, guaranteed healthcare, etc.) that might have benefitted what McCarthy and Romney call “the unproductive class”.  Instead, he goes on to level the following remarkable accusation, worth quoting at length:

For the ­unproductives, the elite prescribes what might be called “palliative liberalism,” involving wage subsidies, tax credits, and other measures short of restoring inherent dignity and power to work. Palliative liberalism is not the same thing as the old welfare liberalism. The welfare state of the twentieth century was, at least in America, meant to be only an adjunct to a productive private economy in which almost all could participate. Palliative liberalism, on the other hand, aims not to repair labor-capital relations but to euthanize, as humanely as possible, millions of economically unneeded and politically retrograde Americans.

The justice of this euthanasia is said to be found in the laws of nature and the arc of history. The only nature that the prescribers of palliative liberalism recognize is the natural order of economics, whereby creative destruction applies not only to firms but to families, nations, and individuals. For the good of all, the inefficient must give way to the more productive. Only selfishness and ignorance can account for the resistance of privileged (or formerly privileged) working-­class or middle-class Americans to this “natural” process. They, unlike the entrepreneurial worthies of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, are not deserving of their status. They don’t “create value” and should in effect trade places with the poor of the developing world. This is what being on the right side of history requires. The injustices of Christopher Columbus and Jim Crow will be repaid by the desolation of America’s “red” counties.

If you wonder about McCarthy’s failure to offer quotations, citations, or examples of policy proposals to buttress his risible claim that today’s liberals are ruthless social Darwinists, it’s because such evidence does not exist; like “palliative liberalism” itself, all of this is a figment of McCarthy’s fevered imagination. 

Having invoked the liberal bogeyman, McCarthy recommends what he calls “mild nationalism” as the only feasible alternative to either “resurgent socialism or suicide by liberalism, whether of the libertarian or palliative sort.”  McCarthy believes Trump’s instincts are correct when it comes to issues like tariffs (as leverage against predatory competitors like China) and restriction of low-skilled immigration (so that Americans will be motivated to have more children to fill the low-skill/low-wage jobs!). He concludes:

The way forward requires ­refocusing on the American citizen as the basic unit of the economy. This is the essence of a nationalist political economy, which we very much need if our country’s tradition of personal independence and limited government is to endure, a tradition in which government’s primary economic role is not to provide welfare but to safeguard the conditions that make productive work possible.

How we will manage the "way forward" while avoiding being euthanized by vengeful palliative liberals is anyone's guess, but Daniel McCarthy seems to think it's possible as well as necessary. 

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/03/a-new-conservative-agenda  

Finally, a note of sanity from Jackson Lears (New York Review of Books), reviewing two recent books about “American Empire”. Lears begins by noting “It is hard to give up something you claim you never had. That is the difficulty Americans face with respect to their country’s empire. Since the era of Theodore Roosevelt, politicians, journalists, and even some historians have deployed euphemisms—“expansionism,” “the large policy,” “internationalism,” “global leadership”—to disguise America’s imperial ambitions.”

Both books under review (EMPIRE IN RETREAT and REPUBLIC IN PERIL) earn Lears’ praise for their willingness to face the facts:

The refusal to contemplate the scaling back of empire shuts down what ought to be our most urgent foreign policy debate before it has even begun. That is why these two new books are so necessary, and so welcome: they are the most serious efforts since Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback series (2004–2010) to reopen the question of American empire by taking for granted that it exists.

Lears provides a useful review of American foreign policy—and imperialism—in the 20^th century and right up to the present moment, concluding:

Trump and his opponents in the Washington consensus still envision a unipolar world, where the United States can ignore the legitimate claims of rival nations and do pretty much whatever it wants, whether because of its sheer greatness (Trump) or its exceptional goodness (Clinton et al.). Obama was cautious about intervening in Syria and eager to negotiate with Iran, but his administration maintained or intensified commitments to global military supremacy, blanket surveillance, targeted drone assassinations, and modernization of nuclear weapons, as well as engagement in the Middle East and East Asia. Fundamental policies persisted despite Obama’s misgivings.

One of the many problems with empire, disguised under whatever name and cloaked beneath whatever supposedly noble motives, is that there is no good exit strategy; just as a king renouncing his throne can only become a commoner, a nation relinquishing empire can no longer claim pride of place. America wants to remain primus inter pares (first among equals), but it is unlikely the world will allow that: we will have to choose between primus or pares, and neither choice will be made easily or without consequences.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/02/07/imperial-exceptionalism/

Blinks

At Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson takes on the claim that "politically incorrect" viewpoints are being silenced by a liberal conspiracy. In the process, he offers a few "dangerous ideas" for our consideration, among them: 

• What if a cable news network that seemed to hate the president actually benefited from his existence?  
• What if the national idea that “people who work hard get rewarded” was actually false? What if the people who worked the longest hours often had the least to show for it?  
• What if things we consume in our daily lives are built on an almost unimaginable amount of conscious suffering?  
• What if, as we walked through our cities on warm spring days, a few miles away there were thousands of people locked in cages, slowly losing their minds? What if the freest country in the world was actually the least free? What if sentencing people to prison also often meant sentencing them to be raped? What if we put children in adult prisons? What if we executed someone who had been in prison since the age of 15?  
• What if the people who supposedly created wealth actually created nothing of social value at all? 
• What if “equality of opportunity” was a meaningless concept? 

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/05/the-real-dangerous-ideas  

For those interested in neuroscience, Alan Jasanoff (at Aeon) attempts in a lengthy essay to demystify the workings of the brain. Whether or not he succeeds, in the process he does weigh in on an issue I have recently been pondering: 

The cerebral mystique has particular significance for the way that our society grapples with the problem of mental illness. This is because of the widespread drive to redefine mental illnesses as brain disorders. Proponents argue that doing this places psychological problems in the same category as influenza or cancer – sicknesses that don’t evoke the social stigma commonly associated with psychiatric disorders. There is some evidence that using the language of brain disorders in fact lowers the barrier for mental-health patients to seek treatment, an important benefit. 

In other respects, however, reclassifying mental illnesses as brain disorders can be highly problematic. For patients, attributing mental problems to intrinsic neurological defects incurs a stigma of its own. Although people with ‘broken brains’ might not be held morally accountable or told to ‘just get over it’, the sense that they are irredeemably flawed can be just as damaging. Biological flaws can be harder to fix than moral lapses, and people with brain dysfunction can be seen as dangerous or even less than fully human.  

A large analysis of changing attitudes to mental illness in 2012 found that there was no increase in social acceptance of patients with depression or schizophrenia, despite increasing awareness of neurobiological contributions to these conditions. 

Regardless of its social implications, blaming the brain for mental illnesses might be scientifically inaccurate in many cases...A recent study estimated that as many as 20 per cent of psychiatric patients have a bodily disorder that might be producing or worsening their mental condition; the maladies include heart, lung and endocrine problems, all of which have cognitive side effects. Epidemiological surveys have found remarkable correlations between incidence of mental illness and factors such as ethnic minority status, being born in a city, and being born at certain times of year. Although these correlations are not well-explained, they emphasise the likely role of environmental factors well beyond the brain in bringing about psychiatric problems. We must be sensitive to such factors if we want effective treatment and prevention of  mental disorders. 

https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-more-than-our-brains-on-neuroscience-and-being-human  

Finally, at The Baffler, Musa al-Gharbi provides a very brief refresher on the history of U.S.-Iran relations: 

Judging from the media reaction to Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States is backing out of the agreement to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program, “the story” begins in 2013, when President Barack Obama entrusted Secretary of State John Kerry to help negotiate a deal with Iran and our European allies. Or in 2015, when an international accord was announced after two years of arduous bargaining. Or, perhaps with candidate Trump’s campaign pledge to dismantle the “terrible deal.” 

But in fact, the nuclear saga between Iran and the United States goes back about 60 years. And in order to understand the significance of the agreement Trump just shredded under the delusion that a “better deal” is forthcoming, it is worth revisiting that history. 

https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-art-of-dealbreaking-algharbi 

America the Dangerous

Good news! There is light at the end of America's tunnel of weakness; the end of our long national nightmare of "leading from behind" is at hand. Victor Davis Hanson, an historian whose theory of history amounts to "Whoever is best at killing, wins," can hardly contain his glee:

[Under Obama] U.S. defense cuts and a passive foreign policy emboldened American enemies and disheartened our allies to the point where wars broke out on several fronts. Yet America’s retreat was predicated on choices, not on fate. Indeed, America is now reasserting its past role as a dominant, deterring force on the international stage.

Not since the days of Reagan has America bestrode the world like the colossus it is, but that, says Hanson, is changing:

In just the last 100 days, the storm clouds have broken a bit. Tough talk with China on trade abuses may persuade Beijing that it would be wise to help the U.S. corral North Korea, while America assembles a well-armed alliance of Japan and South Korea to deter Pyongyang. The bombing of a few of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s air assets, with promises of possibly more action to come, could deter him from further nerve gas attacks. The dropping of a huge MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Blast) bomb on an underground ISIS lair in Afghanistan has startled U.S. enemies who rely on such subterranean sanctuaries. To America’s enemies, the signal is clear: U.S. action is not necessarily predictable, measured, or proportionate.

To be clear: Victor Davis Hanson thinks it a good thing that American policy is unpredictable and disproportionate. It keeps the world on edge, you see, when we now and then pick up some crummy little country and throw it against the wall or when we use an elephant gun to kill a fly; and keeping the world on edge is in our interest, because--well, because Victor Davis Hanson says so.

The best news of all is that military men and business types are now in charge, rather than politicians or effete diplomats from Foggy Bottom:

Many of these developments reflect a sharp ideological upheaval in foreign policy leadership. The prior Obama national security team of Ash Carter, John Kerry, Susan Rice, and Ben Rhodes has been replaced by General H.R. McMaster (national security advisor), Rex Tillerton (ex-Exxon CEO and now Secretary of State), General James Mattis (Secretary of Defense), and General John Kelly (Homeland Security). None of these men is a professional diplomat or former politician. Instead, they come to office either from the military or private enterprise. None is overtly political; all are widely esteemed for succeeding in cutthroat military and commercial arenas.

"Speak incoherently and occasionally drop a MOAB" is our new guiding dictum:

The new national security team seems to believe in the value of soft power as did their predecessors—but with a fundamental difference: they know that diplomatic, political, and economic strategies are not effective without a credible threat of resorting to overwhelming military force. In this regard, Trump is slowly restoring the defense budget that Obama had slashed, while sounding unpredictable rather than compliant. Allies and enemies have made the necessary adjustments as the United States becomes—to paraphrase the dictum of the Roman Republican general Lucius Cornelius Sulla during the wars of the Republic—no better friend and no worse enemy.

Now, if our unleashed military can be supported by an unleashed economy, all will surely be well:

If this new deterrent foreign policy is coupled with changes in U.S. regulatory and tax policies and expanded energy production—and if these measures help America achieve a three percent growth rate in annual GDP—then all sorts of supposedly intractable dilemmas and tensions may find resolution. In the past, it was not necessarily in China’s perceived interest to help an economically stagnant, strategically predictable, and politically diffident United States to deal with North Korea—nor Russia’s to help convince Iran and Syria to follow international norms. But it may now prove both wise and useful for China and Russia to cooperate—if America is economically robust, appears somewhat dangerous, is unapologetic about its past and future, and does not loudly lecture its rivals about their supposed moral failings while losing their respect.

Dangerous, unpredictable, unapologetic, and selectively tolerant of human rights abuses: that's the America that Victor Davis Hanson knows and loves, and it's the America that will restore sanity to the entire globe. As Hansen dreamily concludes:

In that case, the storm clouds abroad will clear as abruptly as they have so often in the past during the world’s darkest moments.

It's morning across the entire world, because America's back and there's a new sheriff in town! Like Victor Davis Hanson, I can't think of a better way to commemorate Memorial Day than to swagger across the stage, rattle our sabers, shoot off our mouths, and scare the rest of the world into behaving itself.  Someone should think about rewriting "America the Beautiful" as "America the Dangerous"; wouldn't Victor Davis Hanson love that. 

http://www.hoover.org/research/optimistic-us-foreign-policy

Breakfast Links

At The Baffler, Scott Beauchamp’s “Old School” is all about “the bold new franchise of adulting”. Trying to understand what “adulting” is all about, Mr. Beauchamp went so far as to attend some sessions at the Adulting School in Portland, Maine. Although he found the classes to be “great,” he still wondered about the point of it all:

I was still confused about what more efficient cooking and enhanced time management skills had to do with being an adult. In a sense, though, my confusion was the lesson: the subtext of every class, and the energy driving the entire event, was an unadulterated anxiety about the proper direction of one’s life—the very sort of recursive self-inspection that our intentionally unstable economy cultivates in lushly baroque fashion. 

Beauchamp finally realizes that it’s the economy, stupid, and the demands it makes upon us that makes growing up (“adulting”) not merely difficult but actively frowned upon. Given the reign of “intentionally unstable” consumer capitalism, he writes,

Adulting…makes its own twisted sort of sense. Of course it’s something you do, not a person that you become. To adult is to learn whatever skill of the month the economy requires you to master. To actually become an adult, on the other hand, entails a declaration of fixed values and identity. In other words, it means to declare yourself bound for obsolescence.

https://thebaffler.com/blog/old-school-beauchamp

The Baffler is also where you can find Laurie Penny’s meditation on “The Slow Confiscation of Everything,” in which she places our ongoing “climate apocalypse” in the larger context of apocalyptic thinking in general:

Apocalyptic thinking has a long and febrile history in Western thought, and it is usually associated with moments of profound cultural change, when people found it all but impossible to envision a future they might live inside. The notion of armageddon as something to look forward to crops up time and again at moments of profound social unrest. Today, that includes legions of lonely alt-righters celebrating the advent of a new post-democratic, post-civilisational age where men will be real men again, and women will be really grateful. This “dark enlightenment” rumbles alongside a massive revival in millenarian end-times fanaticism among the Evangelical Christians who overwhelmingly voted for a man some of them believe is the literal antichrist who will hasten the final return of Jesus and his arse-kicking angels to sweep the righteous to their reward. There are many millions of people, especially in the United States, who seem to want an apocalypse—a word whose literal meaning is a great “unveiling,” a moment of calamity in which the murkiest and basest of human terrors will be mercifully swept aside. That gentle armageddon, however, looks unlikely to be delivered. Frightened, angry human beings have always fantasized about the end of the world—and institutions of power have always profited from that fantasy. 

And yet, the threat to the climate is real:

Climate change is this generation’s calamity, and it is similar to the nuclear threat that nurtured the baby boomers in that it promises a different sort of death from the petty disasters of war, famine and pestilence—it promises near-total species collapse. The past swept away along with the future. The deletion of collective memory. This is an existential threat more profound than anything humanity has had to reckon with before except in the throes of ecstatic religious millenarianism. Rapture, in the Abrahamic understanding, traditionally meant immortality for the species. We are the first to really have to wrestle with ultimate species death, extinction in memory as well as being. Of course we are afraid. We were afraid of the Bomb. We’re afraid now, even though many people’s understanding of climate change hasn’t moved past the denial stage. It is there, however, that the similarities between the two types of apocalypse end.

Climate change is a different prospect of calamity—not just elementally but morally different from nuclear exchange in a manner which has not been properly dealt with. The first difference is that it’s definitely happening. The second is that it’s not happening to everyone...Today’s apocalypse will be unevenly distributed. It’s not the righteous who will be saved, but the rich—at least for a while...

https://thebaffler.com/blog/climate-collapse-penny

Finally, and also at The Baffler: Patrick Blanchfield writes about “New Praetorianism,” i.e. our “fetish for generals” and for all things military. “Let’s be frank,” says Blanchfield; one way or another, “America is heading to war.” Blanchfield finds both of our major political parties complicit in this inevitability:

There is a fundamental synergy between Democratic chauvinist exceptionalism, GOP clash-of-civilizations dogma, and Trump’s grotesque strongman antics. The Democrats may prefer a reboot of Cold War apocalypticism; Trump, for his part, looks eager to tear up global treaties, toss international law aside, and throw American weight around in building a new twenty-first century order of Great Powers. Maybe he will get his way, maybe he won’t. Maybe one of the parties will produce a more telegenic, more reasonable, and more “moderate” leader down the line. Any of these scenarios, though, skirts ever closer to disaster, and all take as unspoken that the essential business of the American state is a fundamental orientation toward war.

As Blanchfield makes clear, even the temperamentally non-belligerent Barack Obama, once in the White House, was unable to resist war (aka “the projection of force” or, even better, “kinetic military action”). War, as Randolph Bourne famously said, is the health of the State. Democrats want a healthy State in order to enact domestic programs; they accept an “orientation toward war” as the cost of keeping the State robust. Republicans, of course, have their own reasons for accepting the same status quo. Neither party knows how to conduct itself in the absence of a foreign threat; in fact, since Woodrow Wilson took America into World War I, the only time this country turned its focus inward was during the Great Depression, since which time we have always had some foreign enemy and some war, hot or cold, to fight.

https://thebaffler.com/blog/new-praetorianism-blanchfield

Random

Some random thoughts on a bitterly cold December morning (a bitterly cold morning which disproves, of course, the entire silly idea of "global warming")…

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Twice in the past six presidential elections, the winner of the popular vote has lost the Electoral College and thus the presidency.  At the same time, the party that wins more votes nationwide for Congressional seats remains the minority party in Congress; and the one million people who live in Montana have as much representation in the U.S. Senate as do the 40 million people who live in California.  

Meanwhile, Vox has an article which helpfully summarizes Republicans’ plans to repeal or at least undermine anything President Obama accomplished over the last eight years: Obamacare, of course, but also immigration rules, environmental rules, nutrition standards, food safety, banking regulations, LGBT rights, etc.  This raises the specter of an American future in which each incoming administration promptly erases the work of the previous one, making eight years the shelf life of our laws and regulations.  That is not, to be charitable, a recipe for legal, administrative, or institutional stability; it is a recipe for chaos.

It becomes more and more the case that democracy, American-style, brings to mind Gandhi’s famous response to being asked what he thought of Western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13967888/freedom-caucus-regulations

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With so much attention on Donald Trump’s cabinet of deplorables, it would be easy to overlook his selection of David Friedman for U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Mr. Friedman has said that the U.S. State Department has been “anti-Semitic and anti-Israel for 70 years” (which is the length of time modern Israel has existed); he has compared liberal American Jews to collaborators with the Nazi regime during the years of the Holocaust. Friedman is a defender of Israel’s controversial West Bank settlements, a proponent of moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and a vocal critic of any “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His appointment is one more indication that Donald Trump is committed to bluster and bullying abroad as well as at home.

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Rod Dreher, having accidentally wandered into what he describes as a “white working class” bar in Baton Rouge, and having listened in on the conversations of some ordinary white working class people, compares “Make America Great Again” to Russians’ pining for the lost days of the Soviet Union.  Here’s one of the quotes he produces from a disaffected citizen of post-USSR Russia:

I hate Gorbachev because he stole my Motherland. I treasure my Soviet passport like it’s my most precious possession. Yes, we stood in line for discolored chicken and rotting potatoes, but it was our Motherland. I loved it. You lived in a third world country with missiles, but for me, it was a great nation. The West has always seen Russia as an enemy, a looming threat. It’s a thorn in their side. Nobody wants a strong Russia, with or without the communists. The world sees us as a storehouse that they can raid for oil, natural gas, timber, and base metals. We trade our oil for underpants. But we used to be a civilization without rags and junk. The Soviet civilization! 

Keep in mind that Rod Dreher sympathizes with such sentiments, just as he wants his readers to sympathize with Trump voters nostalgic for their lost America. The fundamental question, according to another of Dreher’s Russian sources, is “Where do [you] want to live, in a great country or a normal one?”  Some might suggest that the real choice is between being a great country and being a decent country; sad to say, Americans have apparently chosen the former by electing a man who has no interest at all in the latter.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/same-bar-different-worlds-trump/    

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At The Catholic Thing, David Carlin, for one, suspects that our current notion of “greatness” is wholly inadequate.  What, he asks, is our “paramount aim”? He answers:

Making and spending money. We are above all a commercial society, as are all truly modern societies. The culture of modernity is a culture of commercial activity. [Even] modern war is a means towards making the world safe for commercial activity.

Our politics reflects the supremacy of commercial concerns. Candidates for president, for instance, don’t campaign on how to make America more virtuous or more religious. No, they campaign on how to make America more prosperous.

Our education system reflects this same supremacy. Do we, as Aristotle would have done, exalt the ideal of knowledge for the sake of knowledge? Of course not. What an antique absurdity. We tell kids that education is for the sake of getting a job and making money. Education has nothing to do with wisdom. Only quaint professors believe that, and not many of them.

How will this work out in the long run? An ancient wise man once said, “Man does not live by bread alone.” I think by “bread” he meant money and other material goods. A modern wise man once said, “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” The Middle Ages spent centuries laying foundations of religion and morality. On these foundations modern centuries have built a superstructure of immense productivity and prosperity. Can this superstructure survive if we remove its foundation? Can our commercial civilization float in midair?

You do not have to share Mr. Carlin’s hankering for a return to medieval Christendom in order to agree that our modern notion of “prosperity” is disturbingly shallow; “Whoever dies with the most toys, wins” is probably the least inspirational telos ever proposed for human beings.  

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2016/12/16/can-we-float-in-mid-air/

Books Report

Mark Hannah's THE BEST “WORST” PRESIDENT amounts to a handy reference for debunking conservative myths, misinformation, and outright lies about President Obama. Hannah eschews narrative in favor of patiently providing facts: about the 2009 stimulus package, about the auto industry bailout, about the American intervention in Libya, about Obamacare, about taxes and regulations, about Obama’s use of Executive Orders, etc.  Subtitled What the Right Gets Wrong about Obama, THE BEST WORST PRESIDENT could probably have consisted of just one word: “Everything.” 

Mark Danner’s SPIRAL: Trapped in the Forever War critically assesses America’s post-9/11 “War on Terror,” indicting both the Bush administration for its ill-conceived response and the Obama administration for its seeming inability to escape the paradigm of war and violence.  Calculating that global fatalities from terror have increased “4000 percent” since 2002, Danner claims that “We have created in the war on terror a perpetual motion machine” which has further destabilized the already fragile Middle East.  His intent in SPIRAL, he explains, “is to show how it is that terrorist attacks on a single day could have led a great power into a trap of endless war and how that war has degraded that country’s values together with its security.”  

Historical background on our current quagmire is offered by Andrew Bacevich in AMERICA’S WAR FOR THE GREATER MIDDLE EAST: A Military History.  Bacevich is one of our best critics of neo-conservative foreign policy and imperial overreach; in AMERICA’S WAR he helpfully traces the arc of American overreach from the Carter administration right up to the present. The phrase “monumental march to folly” best characterizes Bacevich’s view of our Middle East policies and misadventures, all of which he seems to think have something to do with oil and its indispensable role in the non-negotiable “American way of life”.

What really, though, can we learn from history?  Isn’t history just “a lie agreed upon,” as Napoleon reportedly said?  Or perhaps, in Henry Ford’s words, “History is bunk.”  John Lewis Gaddis’ THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY attempts to respond to such criticisms as it explains How Historians Map the Past.  It’s Mr. Gaddis’ considered opinion that historians (good ones, at least) “combine the techniques of artists, geologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists” in an effort “to represent what they can never replicate”.  Gaddis also sees the historians’ task as offering “intriguing” parallels to “the new sciences of chaos, complexity, and criticality.”  In other words, no matter what (and how) you may have been taught in high school: history isn’t just a litany of famous names and important dates. History is a narrative, and like any narrative it has to be shaped; the shape of any given historical narrative casts shadows on the present, and it is in those shadows that we act.    

Bad Moon Rising

“I see the bad moon arising / I see trouble on the way / I see earthquakes and lightning / I see those bad times today.” {John Fogerty}

We are living through difficult times.  Writing at (of all places) The American Conservative, Andrew Bacevich helpfully reminds us that history provides a useful context for current affairs.  For instance, why don’t non-Western (and non-Christian) peoples behave in a civilized fashion?  Perhaps, Bacevich ventures, we civilized Christian folk have not set a very good example:

In their relations with the non-West—the peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—Western powers have rarely demonstrated a desire to be left alone. They have instead sought to subjugate and exploit populations classified as inferior. In pursuit of their objectives, they have relied not on suasion but on violence and intimidation.

To be sure, present-day Europeans and Americans bear no responsibility for the sins that their forbears committed in civilization’s name. Neither, however, should they indulge in the pretense that hostility toward the West today springs out of nowhere. History resists whitewashing. Although the tide of Western imperialism may have receded, it left behind a stain that time has yet to eradicate.  

This describes the essence of the strategic dilemma that Europeans and Americans confront today. Having belatedly discovered the virtues of peaceful coexistence, Western nations confront adversaries who have long memories and a hunger for payback.¹ Yesterday’s instigators have become today’s targets and cry foul. Now that we have all that we want, they say, please go away.

Yet as attacks inflicted upon the West pile up—Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino—it becomes apparent that violent jihadists won’t be going away anytime soon. As a consequence, support for a keep-killing-until-they-quit approach is gaining momentum. 

Indeed, killing our way out of the situation is a preferred solution for many:

The murderous attack earlier this month in Nice, France, prompted Jay Nordlinger, senior editor at the ostensibly conservative National Review, to propose a new approach to dealing with terrorism. His strategy is simplicity itself: ‘you have to kill these jihadists, and kill them, and kill them, until they simply tire of being killed and leave civilization alone…’ Donald Trump has demanded a declaration of war against ISIS. His running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, proposes to “defeat this enemy of civilization at its source.” Bloodlust is on the rise.

Unfortunately, as Bacevich notes, such a strategy—its immorality aside—hasn’t worked and won’t work:

Why hasn’t the Western killing perpetrated thus far yielded signs of progress? Although the fact garners only passing attention among Europeans and Americans, the number of Westerners killed by terrorists pales in comparison to the body count racked up in recent years by the United States and its allies in the Islamic world. While estimates of the overall death toll range widely, one reputable 2015 study calculated that a staggering 1.3 million Muslims have died due to violence since 9/11—jihadists and suspected jihadists along with mere bystanders categorized as collateral casualties. Yet no evidence exists to show that this vast bloodletting has diminished the threat.  

What a surprise: who could ever have guessed that violence leads only to more violence?  It’s not like anyone ever told us that he who lives by the sword is bound to die by the sword.  How could we possibly have foreseen the likely consequences of our military actions?

Andrew Bacevich says we are hoist on our own petard:

The West today finds itself caught in a paradox of its own making: Violence employed by prior generations claiming to represent civilization has elicited a violent response; the violence we employ today to defend that civilization actually feeds the very forces that imperil it.

History, as it happens, did not actually begin on September 11, 2001, nor will the ridiculous myth of “American Exceptionalism” shield us from the legacy of violence.  Maybe, instead of more killing, it's time to try "Plan B"?  

Oh, that's right; we don't have a "Plan B".

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http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/kill-all-the-terrorists/

¹ It's very much like countries building their economies through tariffs and other protectionist policies, only to turn around--once they become wealthy--and insist on free trade.

M. Gobry to POTUS: Help!

You can take it to the bank: the self-described “conservative hawk” Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is at his absolute worst when writing about American foreign policy.

Here we go:

Take the case of my own country, France, which was savagely attacked on Nov. 13 by the Islamic State in France's worst domestic calamity since World War II. Last week, the president of France was in the United States asking for help from its NATO ally in defeating ISIS. In response, Obama gave us a lot of very nice phrases, and almost nothing else.

What “else” does PEG want from President Obama?  He does not say, perhaps because the United States is already leading and orchestrating the attacks on ISIS in Syria and Iraq.  Perhaps PEG is upset that President Obama has had the audacity to suggest that France and its European neighbors step up their own efforts?

This alone would be bad enough, but in a context in which so many members of NATO, especially in Eastern Europe, are in a state of virtual panic over the credibility of American security guarantees, it is unforgivably feckless.

What proof does PEG have that “many members of NATO…are in a state of virtual panic”?  He does not say.  Could it be PEG himself who is panicky?

Given the overall context, preserving NATO deserves more American reaction than coughing and looking at one's shoes, which is essentially what America has done thus far.

What, in this context, does “essentially” mean?  It can only mean that whatever America has done thus far under President Obama has not been sufficient to calm PEG’s obviously shaky nerves.  Has PEG tried Valium?

The same scenario is playing out in the Pacific Rim, despite Obama's much vaunted "turn to the Pacific," where the Obama administration has only very leisurely responded to China's campaign of annexation of the South China Sea, that has all neighboring countries not called China deeply concerned.

Well, at least China’s neighbors aren’t in a state of virtual panic, compared to which “deeply concerned” sounds relatively calm.  How dare the Chinese assert their influence over the South China Sea!  That area is clearly an American protectorate covered by the Monroe Doctrine.

And the less said about the Iran deal, the better. Loosening sanctions on Iran will only bring more conflagration to the Middle East as the ascendant Shia power looks to assert itself and the rich Sunni kingdoms react in panic.

Once again, when PEG mentions “panic,” methinks he doth project too much.

Enough is enough. The Bush administration had a bad strategy. The Obama Administration has had no strategy. That's better than a bad strategy, but only to a point, and this point has been reached.

PEG has drawn his line in the sand, and it’s just outside the Bataclan Theater.  Regardless of his rhetorical gestures toward the Ukraine and the South China Sea, PEG’s real concern is (understandably) closer to home, where he feels (understandably) unsafe.

Obama only has a few months left in this job, and it's time he started to take an interest in it. We can't see his back soon enough, but the world can't wait that long.

Note to PEG: the “Obama is disinterested” meme is so 2013.  The new meme is “Unconstrained by any need to get re-elected, Obama is unleashing his tyrannical instincts, shredding the Constitution, and actively advancing the interests of his Muslim terrorist buddies.”

PEG concludes with a clarion call notable for both its vagueness and its tired familiarity:

It's a platitude, but sometimes platitudes, like stopped clocks, are correct. Time to lead, Mr President.

What does PEG mean, in this context, by “lead”?  He does not say.  In what way are “platitudes” any different than the “very nice phrases” PEG disdained when they were uttered by President Obama?  He does not say.

One can forgive PEG, presumably, on the grounds that, as a Frenchman, he’s entitled to be rattled by recent events.  When he calms down, I’m sure he will tell us precisely what President Obama ought to be doing that will allow PEG to sleep at night.  Until then, let’s get this French fellow a pacifier, a blanky, and someone to hold his hand if he needs to cross the street, especially near the Bataclan Theater.

http://theweek.com/articles/591019/obamas-foreign-policy-fecklessness