D.H. Lawrence quoted by Jonah Goldberg

Goldberg has a great column on population progression today.

“If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly, and then I’d go out in back streets and main streets and bring them all in, all the sick ... the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks ...”

Yep, that's what constitutes a 'review' around here.

Who Creates Jihadists? [Michael Rubin]

Sorry, this is going to be a long one. Juxtaposing Jonah’s analysis of the NIE finding that the Iraq war sparked more jihadism with analysis by Clinton administration NSC staffers’ Dan Benjamin and Steve Simons in today’s Washington Post got me thinking. The real debate still seems to be between proponents of a long-term strategy to fight Islamist extremism versus proponents of more short-term, band-aid solutions. But what really bothered me about Benjamin and Simons’ argument is its oversimplification of cause-and-effect in terrorism. Jihadism is seldom spontaneous. Iraqis and Saudis don’t merely watch al-Jazeera, get pissed off, and go out to hunt Americans. Rather, there are networks that recruit and train. Part of our difficulties in Iraq and elsewhere stem from our failures to get at these networks. Before blaming Iraq for increasing the jihadist threat, a few questions:

Specifically, how do jihadists join the jihad?

Do they simply purchase high explosives at the bazaar or do they get supplied? If so, by whom? Who funds them? How does the money get there?

(Interviewing Iraqis earlier this month, they noted two patterns: An increase in shipments through diplomatic pouches to the Iranian consulates in Karbala and Basra, as well as shipments of appliances like television sets to import-export companies in al-Anbar, which then sell them, using the cash to purchase supplies).

Among European terrorists, how many received training in Afghan or Pakistani terror training camps? If they received such training, is their terror really homegrown? (In this regard, the Bush administration’s willingness to ignore terror training camps in southwestern Somalia may one day be seen in retrospect as just as negligent as Clinton’s willingness to ignore camps in Afghanistan.

How much money have Iranian, Persian Gulf Arab, or Saudi donors contributed to jihadist organizations? Have we charted an increase in donations? (Do we even have the information?) Can these negotiations be correlated to Iraq or to the rise in oil prices?

No doubt, jihadists have become more lethal. Indeed, lethality has steadily increased since the 1970s. But how have jihadists become more lethal? Does practice make perfect? (It’s difficult for suicide bombers to learn from their mistakes). Clearly, jihadists receive training. What is important is not only from whom, but rather who introduces them to those trainers.

(When journalists describe Palestinian suicide bombers as being teenagers from a Palestinian refugee camp, they seldom explored further to find out that UN-salaried teachers at UN-funded high schools had observed certain characteristics in one of their charges and facilitated the introduction to the terror masters. This is why many families did not know what their children were about to do; Alex Alexiev highlighted a recruitment system especially popular among followers of some South Asian strains of Islam, here).

How influential are mosque sermons? If Iraqis are joining jihad, to which sermons do they listen and where? If Iraqi mosques are contributing to incitement, did the resident imam serve the same mosque under Saddam? If so, did he receive his training in Iraq? If not, where did he come from and how did he happen to take over that mosque?

(In October 2003, Sunni Arab Iraqis spoke of mullahs being forced out at gunpoint with new imams installed; the same thing later occurred in Shi’ite mosques; in a more fashion, Uriya Shavit did a good piece on the intellectual history of al-Qaeda, here).

To what extent do jihadists use snippets of Congressional debate—whether in context or outside—in their recruitment propaganda? While Iraq impacts media coverage, to what extent does media coverage impact Iraq?

It may be tempting for political reasons to blame Iraq or, for that matter, Israel’s existence and occupation for jihadism and terrorism. If so, what did Iraq or Israeli have to do with Muslim Brotherhood terrorism pre-1948 (again, see this declassified document). What did Iraq or Israel have to do with Islamist slogans shouted in the French riots? What did Iraq or Israel have to do with the Danish cartoon controversy?

Does engaging terror-sponsoring regimes work (note this declassified document (.pdf), about US engagement toward the Taliban)?

Before we blame everything on ourselves and the Bush administration, I’d sure like to have some more answers. Because I suspect that jihadists may be far more bipartisan in their willingness to kill than some of the commentaries about them. Iraq appears to be the latest excuse. If not Iraq, then Afghanistan. If not Afghanistan, then Saudi Arabia. If not Saudi Arabia, then Sicily or Spain.

Bullies [Jonah Goldberg]

One very annoying criticism of my column today (which I am a bit fond of, btw) is the objection over my use of the word bully for Saddam Hussein. Although I didn't even directly call Huseein a bully — it is implied however — a bunch of dyspeptic anti-war types have written to complain that Saddam was no bully to America. How could he be? We're so much more powerful. Etc etc.

Frankly, I think this sort of thing is grotesque. First of all, I think Saddam's history of trying to intimidate the West — funding suicide bombers, pursuing WMDs and so on — makes calling him a bully perfectly accurate at that level. Second, one needn't be the one who is picked on to confront a bully. If you'd ever come to the aid of someone being picked on, you'd know that.

But, more importantly, he was so obviously a bully in his region. Just ask the Kurds, Shiites or the Kuwaitis. To mock my suggestion that Saddam was a bully is a sign of the corruption of liberal idealism in certain quarters in my eyes. If one can mock the notion that Saddam was a bully, then no dictator can count as one and the best parts of liberal foreign policy from the 1990s (and earlier) unravel into a form of amoral isolationism. Milosovic, Aideed, the Sudanese government: none of these governments can count as bullies either. I'm not trying to associate every anti-war liberal out there with these emailers. I know that the vast majority of them agree in broad brushstrokes that Saddam was evil. But still, I've gotten pretty versed in reading the tea leaves in my email box, and this just feels like a symptom of rot to me.

Torture Cont'd [Jonah Goldberg]

Noah at Gideon's Blog is passionately against Bush's interrogation/torture program and he makes a good case for his position. But what I found most interesting — or at least new — is that he rightly points out the grotesque disconnect between a government willing to abuse — the best compromise word I can come up with — a handful of people but abjectly terrified to inconvenience in trivial ways large numbers of people at airports and the like, if that inconvenience is disproportionately distributed along ethnic, geographic or religious lines. He writes:

Finally, I am appalled that we are even considering legalizing torture while standing resolute in our refusal to apply appropriately targeted screening techniques at points of entry into the United States. This President has been willing to go the people demanding the right to declare anyone an enemy combatant and torture that person, but he is not willing to go the people and say that ethnicity, religion, age and sex should determine who is subject to more aggressive searches before he boards an airline. I can find no good excuse, and no good moral justification, for his preference in this regard. I wish the opposition party could oppose this bill in those terms, but unfortunately they will not. So I am left hoping they will successfully oppose it in whatever terms, because this bill should be opposed, and defeated.

Jonah Goldberg on Fight or Flight

Of course the war in Iraq has made us less safe, and I didn’t need the National Intelligence Estimate to tell me so. Who could possibly deny that Iraq has become, in the words of the NIE, a “cause célèbre” for jihadists? One need only read the newspaper to conclude that Iraq is spawning more terrorists. (Indeed, one fears that all the authors of the NIE did was clip from the newspapers.)

If you’ve ever stood up to a bully, you know how this works. Confrontation tends to increase the chances of violence in the short term but decreases its likelihood in the long term. Any hunter will tell you that the most dangerous moment is when you’ve cornered an animal, and any cop will tell you that standing up to muggers puts you in danger. American colonists were less safe for standing up to King George III, and the United States was certainly safer in the short term when we stood on the sidelines while Germany was conquering Europe. Heck, we would have been safer in the short run if we’d responded to Pearl Harbor by telling the Japanese they could have the Pacific to themselves.

Rich Lowry on The reality of Guantanamo

In one camp, detainees were taking apart the push-button faucets in their cells to get at a metal spring that they would stretch out to use as a weapon. The Asian-style toilets on the floors of the cells used to have footrests, until detainees wrenched them from the floor to use as bludgeoning weapons. The guards are splashed routinely with urine and feces. The detainees have even been known to try to kick their soccer balls out of their recreation area into barbed wire, to cost the infidels the price of one ball.

All the disturbances or suicides have taken place in the camps where security has been loosened. It was in Camp Four, where the best-behaved detainees are allowed to live communally, that a minor riot took place this past spring. A detainee faked a suicide attempt to lure the guards into the living area, where the floor had been smeared with urine, feces and soap. When they slipped, the detainees attacked them with light fixtures and other makeshift weapons. The man in charge here, Adm. Harry Harris, says his conclusion was “there is no such thing as a medium-security terrorist.”

BRODER ON ROVE -- AND CLINTON [Byron York]

On Friday, the Washington Post's David Broder, who recently angered many readers by writing that some media outlets should apologize to Karl Rove for their coverage of his role in the CIA leak case, answered questions from readers in an online chat :
Washington, D.C.: Mr Broder, if you feel Karl Rove is owed an apology from the pundits and writers over Valerie Plame, did you also call for an apology to the Clintons after Ken Starr, the Whitewater investigation and the failed attempt to impeach President Clinton? If not, why not?

David S. Broder: As best, I can recall,I did not call for such an apology. My view, for whatever it is worth long after the dust has settled on Monica, was that when President Clinton admitted he had lied to his Cabinet and his closest assoc, to say nothing of the public, that the honorable thing was for him to have resigned and turned over the office to Vice President Gore. I think history would have been very different had he done that.
—————
Rochester, N.Y.: I'll be impressed if you take this one...
Mr. Broder, you recently argued that many in the media owed Karl Rove an apology, because we now know that the worst Mr. Rove might have done in the Valerie Plame case was to have misled prosecutors about a deed that was not itself a crime. If you feel this way now, then why were you so critical of Bill Clinton for misleading lawyers about a deed that was not itself a crime? Or do you now feel you owe Bill Clinton an apology? If not, then why not?

David S. Broder: We return a second time to President Clinton. What bothered me greatly about his actions was not what he said to his lawyers but what he told the Cabinet, his White House staff—You can go out and defend me because this did not happen. And he told the same lie to the American people. When a president loses his credibility, he loses an important tool for governing—and that is why I thought he should step down.
—————
Ottawa, Canada: I am curious about your statement regarding Mr. Clinton:"..that the honorable thing was for him to have resigned..." This resignation would have been because of private misconduct that he lied about. How sir, would you judge a president that overstated the facts and got the country into a war?

David S. Broder: I would judge that president harshly, as the majority of the voters in this country and in many other parts of the world has done. But I make a distinction between a terrible misjudgment and a deliberate lie. Do you?

The Politics of Apology [Stanley Kurtz]

Let’s look back at a recent episode in the politics of apology. Democratic Iran expert Kenneth Pollack tells the story of the Clinton administration’s failed efforts to draw Iran into a negotiated settlement of our national differences. From 1997 through 2000, the Clinton administration convinced itself that it was close to a breakthrough toward detente with Iran. If America could make just the right gesture, Clintonians believed, Iran would negotiate, a grand bargain would be struck, and detente would be achieved. So on April 12, 1999, at a state dinner, President Clinton confessed in “unprompted” remarks that “Iran...has been the subject of quite a lot of abuse from various Western nations. And I think sometimes it’s quite important to tell people, look, you have a right to be angry at something my country or my culture or others that are generally allied with us today did to you 50 or 60 or 150 years ago.” Note that Clinton here goes so far as to apologize, not simply for past actions of the United States, but for the acts of European countries 150 years ago.
Then in 2000, at a state dinner in Washington, Secretary of State Madeline Albright directly apologized for specific past American actions toward Iran, from our role in orchestrating the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq, to our backing of the Shah, to our backing of Iraq in its war with Iran. Albright also highlighted President Clinton’s personal belief that America “must bear its full share of responsibility for the problems that have arisen in U.S.-Iranian relations.”

Commenting on all this, national security expert, Thomas Donnelly says, “Even as Albright was speaking, the Iranian government had begun to crack down on internal dissent and resume a hard line, anti-American stance abroad. Donnelly then quotes from Pollack’s own verdict on Clinton’s hoped-for opening to Tehran:

“I [Pollack] felt [at the time] that we had come very close to making a major breakthrough with Iran and that if only we had done a few things differently...we might have been able to make it happen. Over the years, however, I have come to the conclusion that I was wrong in this assessment. Any rapprochement that could be nixed by two words in a speech was a rapprochement that was doomed to failure anyway. That is the fundamental lesson of the Clinton initiative with Iran. The Iranians were not ready....Iran was ruled by a regime in which the lion’s share of the power–and everything that truly mattered–was in the hands of people who were not ready or interested in improving ties with the United States.” (See Pollack’s book, The Persian Puzzle. For Donnelly, see his essay in Getting Ready for a Nuclear Ready Iran.)

So when dealing with Islamists determined to knock heads with the West, apologies for colonial history or past American foreign policy don’t work. If anything, apologies–especially anxious apologies for wrongs that were never even committed by us–convey an impression of weakness that simply invite further defiance. Yet Democrats like Clinton, Albright, and the New York Times seem to rely on such apologies as critical instruments of foreign policy–even (or especially) when dealing with hardened Islamists. And you’re telling me that when a show-down with Ahmadinejad sure to come in the next two years, we can afford to let the Democrats win this election? I don’t think so.

The Pope, by the way, has not apologized for his remarks, but only expressed sorrow at their having been misunderstood. In this respect, the Pope has hewed to a much tougher line on apologies than President Clinton and Secretary Albright.

Thomas F. Madden on Benedict XVI

A decent summary.

In November 1095 Pope Urban II called the First Crusade. To judge from the comments issuing from some Muslim groups and politicians, Pope Benedict XVI has done the same thing. According to Salih Kapusuz, a deputy leader of the majority party in Turkey, Benedict, “has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages. He is a poor thing that has not benefited from the spirit of reform in the Christian world.” Kapusuz maintains that the pope is engaged in “an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades.” And so it is that protesters across the Middle East are hastily sewing together pope effigies. In Ankara a black wreath was laid before the Vatican embassy and in Cairo people are chanting “Oh Crusaders, oh cowards! Down with the pope!”

So, what about that Crusade? Well, as one might expect, there isn’t one. Is it nonetheless true, as Muhammad Umar, chairman of the Ramadhan Foundation in Britain has claimed, that Benedict “has fallen into the trap of the bigots and racists when it comes to judging Islam…”? Not exactly. But he has fallen into the trap of association, even from the distance of six centuries, with someone who once criticized Islam. And that is clearly not acceptable.

On Tuesday, September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI addressed scholars and scientists at the University of Regensburg on the topic of “Faith, Reason, and the University.” It was a very learned and scholarly lecture, which means that it would put most people comfortably to sleep. However, it is in this lecture that, some believe, Benedict revealed his true colors when it comes to Islam. Early in the address he referred to an interfaith dialogue between a Persian scholar and the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus which probably took place in 1391. Manuel was the leader of the last Christian state in the East. The descendent of the once mighty Roman Empire, Byzantium had by Manuel’s day been reduced to little more than a few crumbs floating around in the soup of the ever-expanding Ottoman Empire. This was a world in which the forces of Islam were the real superpower, and they knew it. Manuel spent his reign flattering and appeasing the Turks on the one hand and desperately seeking aid from Europeans on the other. In neither case was he very successful. Less than three decades after his death, the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II destroyed the Byzantine Empire and made its capital, Constantinople (modern Istanbul), his own.

But back to Benedict XVI. The pope resurrected Manuel II in order to make a point. He noted that the learned Manuel was well aware that the Koran states that “There is no compulsion in religion.” But he also knew, as someone who had been on the business end of jihad himself, that the Koran also speaks of holy war. With “startling brusqueness,” the pope continued, Manuel tackled this seeming contradiction by saying “’Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’ The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.”

The pope’s purpose in citing this passage is made clear almost immediately. “The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor [of Manuel’s dialogue], Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.” Now here is where it gets a little complicated. (I said that it was a scholarly lecture.) Benedict asks the question, “Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?” He concludes that the Greek concept of reason, bound together with Christianity, fundamentally shaped, even gave birth to Europe. He then describes a process which he calls “dehellenization” in which Europeans from the Late Middle Ages onward have chipped away the fusion of faith and reason, placing them in completely separate spheres. This separation is the main focus of the lecture. It is, in fact, not about Islam at all. Benedict is calling a crusade, but it is one against a Christianity stripped of reason and a science stripped of transcendent truths. “In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith. Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.”

This is a tough lecture to boil down to one sentence, but if forced I would characterize it as: Theology belongs in the university because only by studying faith with reason will we find solutions to the problems of our time. However, if instead of reading the lecture we simply cut out everything except the words of Manuel II Palaeologus written six centuries ago, then we have a good justification for Pakistan’s parliament to unanimously condemn the pope. If we further pretend that it was Benedict, rather than a long-dead emperor, who expressed these sentiments we have a sound basis for the Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah of Lebanon to demand “a personal apology — not through his officials — to Muslims for this false reading (of Islam).” Or we can rage with Syria’s top Sunni Muslim religious authority, Sheik Ahmad Badereddine Hassoun, who replied to the pope, “We have heard about your extremism and hate for Arabs and Muslims. Now that you have dropped the mask from your face we see its ugliness and extremist nature.”

During Friday prayers in Iraq’s Shiite Muslim stronghold of Kufa, Sheik Salah al-Ubaidi reminded the faithful that “last year and in the same month the Danish cartoon assaulted Islam.” The pope’s comments were now a second assault, he said. Al-Ubaidi is at least partly right. The furor over the Danish cartoon brought in stark relief the cultural differences that exist when it comes to matters of free speech and expression. At least with the cartoon, the illustrator and publisher really were criticizing Islam and its founder. In the case of the pope, however, we have someone who is merely citing a medieval source within the context of a scholarly address. Is that really sufficient justification for Mr. Kapusuz to characterize the pope as “the author of such unfortunate and insolent remarks… [who] is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini”?

In the coming days there will undoubtedly be more protests, more outrage, and perhaps even more violence (a nun in Somalia was murdered this weekend) in response to the 14th-century words of Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus. Pope Benedict XVI has already apologized to the world’s Muslims, assuring them that he had no desire to offend them. Heads should soon cool. But the underlying problem will still remain. Interfaith dialogues, by their very nature, require some criticism and some understanding of the shared histories of the respective faiths. If these are stifled, if reason is exiled, then we will never understand, let alone bridge, the religious and cultural gulfs in the world today. And that is what the pope’s lecture was all about.

Derbyshire takes the larger view

and has a strategy to enforce it:

"So far as the jihadists elsewhere are concerned, I am happy to let them have Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, or any other donkey-powered dustbowl they want. They will only make these wretched places worse. I do think we should watch such jihadist states carefully, and act against them unapologetically and with major force if they look like making a nuisance of themselves."

Buckley asks some tough questions

"Two challenges are posed. The first is relatively manageable: Lower the flag on American universalism—not to half mast, but not as toplofty as it has been flying since the end of the Second World War. The second is tougher. Why is Islam burning bright? What on earth do they have that we don't get from Christ our King? If what they want is a religious war, are we disposed to fight it?"

A Lance into Cotton Wool; Frank S. Meyer on Lolita

Never has a society been more smugly proof against satire than ours. When one idea is as good as another and one institution is as good as another, when a dully equalizing relativism destroys all definitions and distinctions, satire is impotent. For the satiric genius works by shocking the reader into using the standards he implicitly holds but has failed to apply. It achieves its results by creating so savage a presentation of contemporary evil (exaggerated, caricatured, grotesque, but a true simulacrum of the essence of the social scene) that the bland and habitual surface of actuality is riven apart. But where there are no standards, satire has no ground from which to fight.

It is not on record that even the bitterest enemy of the Irish greeted Swift's A Modest Proposal with dithyrambs of praise for his great acuity and daring in breaking the bonds of conventional morality that had previously kept men from publicly espousing cannibalism. The smuggest of the eighteenth century recognized satire when it hit them in the face.

Today things are different. Vladimir Nabokov writes a novel, Lolita. With scarifying wit and masterly descriptive power, he excoriates the materialist monstrosities of our civilization — from progressive education to motel architecture, and back again through the middle-brow culture racket to the incredible vulgarity and moral nihilism in which our children of all classes are raised, and on to psychoanalysis and the literary scene. He stamps indelibly on every page of his book the revulsion and disgust with which he is inspired, by loathsomely dwelling upon a loathsome plot: a detailed unfolding of the long-continued captivity and sexual abuse of a 12-year-old girl. To drive home the macabre grotesquerie of what he sees about him, he climaxes the novel with a murder that is at the same time horrible and ridiculous, poised between Grand Guignol and Punch & Judy.

What happens? The critics hail his "grace and delicacy" and his ability to understand and present "love" in the most unlikely circumstances. The modern devaluation of values seems to have deprived them of the ability to distinguish love from lust and rape. And first among them that dean of critics, Lionel Trilling, who compares Lolita to the legend of Tristan and Isolde!

This succcs d'estime is matched only by its success of pocketbook, as it reaches the top of the best-seller list with a current sale of over 100,000 copies, completely successful and having completely missed the target at which the author shot. One wonders what Mr. Nabokov thinks. It is as if Swift had been fitted for his pamphlet by the King's Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, or Juvenal banqueted by the degenerate Roman rich and powerful, and their more degenerate toadies, whom his satire celebrates.

Without exception, in all the reviews I have read — and they are many — nowhere has even the suspicion crept in that Lolita might be something totally different from the temptingly perverted surface it presents to the degenerate taste of the age. Not a whiff of a hint that it could be what it must be, if it is judged by the standards of good and beauty which once were undisputed in the West — and if it is, as the power of its writing shows it to be, more than a mere exercise in salaciousness.

Only the editors of The New Republic, speaking in their editorial columns (after the fact of their review, and against their reviewer, who had done the usual with Lolita), smelled a rat. But, as so often with The New Republic when it departs, as it sometimes does, from the safe paths of moderate liberal conformism, it smelled the wrong rat and went dashing off in the wrong direction. The editors of The New Republic, to their credit, cannot stomach the idea advanced by the critical gentry that no moral judgment of the brutal and tawdry central theme of Lolita should be made. They accuse Mr. Nabokov of saying that the moral abomination he describes does not matter, since it is no worse than the tawdriness of our social scene — a view of the fruits of liberalism that very much upsets them.

They have at least come close enough to the secret to suspect that Mr. Nabokov is implying some sort of relation between the horror of his plot and the social scene; but they reverse his meaning. Mr. Nabokov is not saying that what happens to Lolita is excusable because it is no worse than the general mores of our society. So insensitive a judgment would be impossible for a man who can write with his intense sensitivity. He is saying the opposite — and saying it clearly to all who have ears to hear. He is saying that Lolita's fate is indeed fearful and horrible; and that the world ravaged by relativism which he describes is just as horrible. He is not excusing outrage; he is painting a specific outrage as the symbol of an outrageous society.

The editors of The New Republic, with justice, attack the indecent blindness of Lionel Trilling, who writes of the perverted protagonist of Lolita: "In recent fiction no lover has thought of his beloved with so much tenderness." They themselves, however, look with so much tenderness upon their world that they cannot recognize the terrible satire whose essence they have dimly perceived. De te fabula narratur. Satire couches its lance in vain.

And satire, I am sure, considering his ability and the quality of what he has written, was Mr. Nabokov's intention. Of course I may be wrong. He may simply be an immensely gifted writer with a perverted and salacious mind. But if the latter is true, it does not change the situation much. Lolita, in the context of the reception it has been given, remains nevertheless a savage indictment of an age that can see itself epitomized in such horror and run to fawn upon the horror as beauty, delicacy, understanding. But I hope that this is not so, that Mr. Nabokov knew what he was doing. It is so much more exhilarating to the spirit if the evil that human beings have created is castigated by the conscious vigor of a human being, not by the mere accident of the mirror, the momentary unpurposeful reflection of evil back upon evil.

Nothing to fear but the climate change alarmists by Mark Steyn Sun-Times Columnist

From the Chicago Sun-Times, actually. But he writes for National Review.

Do you worry? You look like you do. Worrying is the way the responsible citizen of an advanced society demonstrates his virtue: He feels good by feeling bad.

But what to worry about? Iranian nukes? Nah, that's just some racket cooked up by the Christian fundamentalist Bush and his Zionist buddies to give Halliburton a pretext to take over the Persian carpet industry. Worrying about nukes is so '80s. "They make me want to throw up. . . . They make me feel sick to my stomach," wrote the British novelist Martin Amis, who couldn't stop thinking about them 20 years ago. In the intro to a collection of short stories, he worried about the Big One and outlined his own plan for coping with a nuclear winter wonderland:

"Suppose I survive," he fretted. "Suppose my eyes aren't pouring down my face, suppose I am untouched by the hurricane of secondary missiles that all mortar, metal and glass has abruptly become: Suppose all this. I shall be obliged (and it's the last thing I feel like doing) to retrace that long mile home, through the firestorm, the remains of the thousands-miles-an-hour winds, the warped atoms, the groveling dead. Then -- God willing, if I still have the strength, and, of course, if they are still alive -- I must find my wife and children and I must kill them."

But the Big One never fell. And instead of killing his wife Martin Amis had to make do with divorcing her. Back then it was just crazies like Reagan and Thatcher who had nukes, so you can understand why everyone was terrified. But now Kim Jong-Il and the ayatollahs have them, so we're all sophisticated and relaxed about it, like the French hearing that their president's acquired a couple more mistresses. Martin Amis hasn't thrown up a word about the subject in years. To the best of my knowledge, he has no plans to kill the present Mrs. Amis.

So what should we worry about? How about -- stop me if you've heard this one before -- "climate change"? That's the subject of Al Gore's new movie, ''An Inconvenient Truth.'' Like the trailer says: "If you love your planet -- if you love your children -- you have to see this movie." Even if you were planning to kill your children because you don't want them to live in a nuclear wasteland, see this movie. The mullahs won't get a chance to nuke us because, thanks to rising sea levels, Tehran will be under water. The editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, says the Earth will "likely be an uninhabitable planet." The archbishop of Canterbury, in a desperate attempt to cut the Anglican Communion a slice of the Gaia-worship self-flagellation action, demands government "coercion" on everything from reduced speed limits to ending cheap air travel "if we want the global economy not to collapse and millions, billions of people to die."

Environmentalism doesn't need the support of the church, it's a church in itself -- and furthermore, one explicitly at odds with Christianity: God sent His son to Earth as a man, not as a three-toed tree sloth or an Antarctic krill. An environmentalist can believe man is no more than a co-equal planet dweller with millions of other species, and that he's taking up more than his fair share and needs to reduce both his profile and his numbers. But that's profoundly hostile to Christianity.

Oh, and here's my favorite -- Dr. Sue Blackmore looking on the bright side in Britain's Guardian:

"In all probability billions of people are going to die in the next few decades. Our poor, abused planet cannot take much more. . . . If we decide to put the planet first, then we ourselves are the pathogen. So we should let as many people die as possible, so that other species may live, and accept the destruction of civilization and of everything we have achieved.

"Finally, we might decide that civilization itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population -- weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example."

Hmm. On the one hand, Dr. Sue Blackmore and the bloke from Coldplay. On the other, Dick Cheney. I think we can all agree which people would be "needed" -- Al Gore, the guy from the New Yorker, perhaps Scarlett Johansson in a fur-trimmed bikini paddling a dugout canoe through a waterlogged Manhattan foraging for floating curly endives from once-fashionable eateries.

Here's an inconvenient truth for "An Inconvenient Truth": Remember what they used to call "climate change"? "Global warming." And what did they call it before that? "Global cooling." That was the big worry in the '70s: the forthcoming ice age. Back then, Lowell Ponte had a huge best seller called The Cooling: Has the new ice age already begun? Can we survive?

The answer to the first question was: Yes, it had begun. From 1940 to 1970, there was very slight global cooling. That's why the doom-mongers decided the big bucks were in the new-ice-age blockbusters.

And yet, amazingly, we've survived. Why? Because in 1970 the planet stopped its very slight global cooling and began to undergo very slight global warming. So in the '80s, the doom-mongers cast off their thermal underwear, climbed into the leopardskin thongs, slathered themselves in sun cream and wired their publishers to change all references to "cooling" to "warming" for the paperback edition. That's why, if you notice, the global-warming crowd begin their scare statistics with "since 1970," an unlikely Year Zero which would not otherwise merit the significance the eco-crowd invest in it.

But then in 1998 the planet stopped its very slight global warming and began to resume very slight global cooling. And this time the doom-mongers said, "Look, do we really want to rewrite the bumper stickers every 30 years? Let's just call it 'climate change.' That pretty much covers it."

Why did the Earth cool between 1940 and 1970?

Beats me. Hitler? Hiroshima? Maybe we need to nuke someone every couple of decades.

Meanwhile, Blackmore won't have to worry about whether to cull Jacques Chirac in order to save Sting. Given the plummeting birthrates in Europe, Russia, Japan, etc., a large chunk of the world has evidently decided to take preemptive action on climate change and opt for self-extinction. Pace the New Yorker, much of the planet will be uninhabited long before it's uninhabitable. The Belgian climate specialist will be on the endangered species list with the spotted owl. Blue-state eco-bores will be finding the international sustainable-development conferences a lot lonelier.

As for the merits of scientists and artists over politicians, those parts of the world still breeding are notable for their antipathy to music, haven't done much in the way of science for over a millennium, and politics-wise incline mostly to mullahs, nuclear or otherwise. Scrap Scarlett Johansson's fur-trimmed bikini and stick her in a waterlogged burqa.

©Mark Steyn, 2006

Mark Steyn in the City Journal: Facing Down Iran

Our lives depend on it.

Most Westerners read the map of the world like a Broadway marquee: north is top of the bill—America, Britain, Europe, Russia—and the rest dribbles away into a mass of supporting players punctuated by occasional Star Guests: India, China, Australia. Everyone else gets rounded up into groups: “Africa,” “Asia,” “Latin America.”

But if you’re one of the down-page crowd, the center of the world is wherever you happen to be. Take Iran: it doesn’t fit into any of the groups. Indeed, it’s a buffer zone between most of the important ones: to the west, it borders the Arab world; to the northwest, it borders NATO (and, if Turkey ever passes its endless audition, the European Union); to the north, the former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation’s turbulent Caucasus; to the northeast, the Stans—the newly independent states of central Asia; to the east, the old British India, now bifurcated into a Muslim-Hindu nuclear standoff. And its southern shore sits on the central artery that feeds the global economy.

If you divide the world into geographical regions, then, Iran’s neither here nor there. But if you divide it ideologically, the mullahs are ideally positioned at the center of the various provinces of Islam—the Arabs, the Turks, the Stans, and the south Asians. Who better to unite the Muslim world under one inspiring, courageous leadership? If there’s going to be an Islamic superpower, Tehran would seem to be the obvious candidate.

That moment of ascendancy is now upon us. Or as the Daily Telegraph in London reported: “Iran’s hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.” Hmm. I’m not a professional mullah, so I can’t speak to the theological soundness of the argument, but it seems a religious school in the Holy City of Qom has ruled that “the use of nuclear weapons may not constitute a problem, according to sharia.” Well, there’s a surprise. How do you solve a problem? Like, sharia! It’s the one-stop shop for justifying all your geopolitical objectives.

The bad cop/worse cop routine the mullahs and their hothead President Ahmadinejad are playing in this period of alleged negotiation over Iran’s nuclear program is the best indication of how all negotiations with Iran will go once they’re ready to fly. This is the nuclear version of the NRA bumper sticker: “Guns Don’t Kill People. People Kill People.” Nukes don’t nuke nations. Nations nuke nations. When the Argentine junta seized British sovereign territory in the Falklands, the generals knew that the United Kingdom was a nuclear power, but they also knew that under no conceivable scenario would Her Majesty’s Government drop the big one on Buenos Aires. The Argie generals were able to assume decency on the part of the enemy, which is a useful thing to be able to do.

But in any contretemps with Iran the other party would be foolish to make a similar assumption. That will mean the contretemps will generally be resolved in Iran’s favor. In fact, if one were a Machiavellian mullah, the first thing one would do after acquiring nukes would be to hire some obvious loon like President Ahmaddamatree to front the program. He’s the equivalent of the yobbo in the English pub who says, “Oy, mate, you lookin’ at my bird?” You haven’t given her a glance, or him; you’re at the other end of the bar head down in the Daily Mirror, trying not to catch his eye. You don’t know whether he’s longing to nut you in the face or whether he just gets a kick out of terrifying you into thinking he wants to. But, either way, you just want to get out of the room in one piece. Kooks with nukes is one-way deterrence squared.

If Belgium becomes a nuclear power, the Dutch have no reason to believe it would be a factor in, say, negotiations over a joint highway project. But Iran’s nukes will be a factor in everything. If you think, for example, the European Union and others have been fairly craven over those Danish cartoons, imagine what they’d be like if a nuclear Tehran had demanded a formal apology, a suitable punishment for the newspaper, and blasphemy laws specifically outlawing representations of the Prophet. Iran with nukes will be a suicide bomber with a radioactive waist.

If we’d understood Iran back in 1979, we’d understand better the challenges we face today. Come to that, we might not even be facing them. But, with hindsight, what strikes you about the birth of the Islamic Republic is the near total lack of interest by analysts in that adjective: Islamic. Iran was only the second Islamist state, after Saudi Arabia—and, in selecting as their own qualifying adjective the family name, the House of Saud at least indicated a conventional sense of priorities, as the legions of Saudi princes whoring and gambling in the fleshpots of the West have demonstrated exhaustively. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue—though, as the Royal Family has belatedly discovered vis-à-vis the Islamists, they’re somewhat overdrawn on that front. The difference in Iran is simple: with the mullahs, there are no London escort agencies on retainer to supply blondes only. When they say “Islamic Republic,” they mean it. And refusing to take their words at face value has bedeviled Western strategists for three decades.

Twenty-seven years ago, because Islam didn’t fit into the old cold war template, analysts mostly discounted it. We looked at the map like that Broadway marquee: West and East, the old double act. As with most of the down-page turf, Iran’s significance lay in which half of the act she’d sign on with. To the Left, the shah was a high-profile example of an unsavory U.S. client propped up on traditional he-may-be-a-sonofabitch-but-he’s-our-sonofabitch grounds: in those heady days SAVAK, his secret police, were a household name among Western progressives, and insofar as they took the stern-faced man in the turban seriously, they assured themselves he was a kind of novelty front for the urbane Paris émigré socialists who accompanied him back to Tehran. To the realpolitik Right, the issue was Soviet containment: the shah may be our sonofabitch, but he’d outlived his usefulness, and a weak Iran could prove too tempting an invitation to Moscow to fulfill the oldest of czarist dreams—a warm-water port, not to mention control of the Straits of Hormuz. Very few of us considered the strategic implications of an Islamist victory on its own terms—the notion that Iran was checking the neither-of-the-above box and that that box would prove a far greater threat to the Freeish World than Communism.

But that was always Iran’s plan. In 1989, with the Warsaw Pact disintegrating before his eyes, poor beleaguered Mikhail Gorbachev received a helpful bit of advice from the cocky young upstart on the block: “I strongly urge that in breaking down the walls of Marxist fantasies you do not fall into the prison of the West and the Great Satan,” Ayatollah Khomeini wrote to Moscow. “I openly announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological vacuum of your system.”

Today many people in the West don’t take that any more seriously than Gorbachev did. But it’s pretty much come to pass. As Communism retreated, radical Islam seeped into Africa and south Asia and the Balkans. Crazy guys holed up in Philippine jungles and the tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay who’d have been “Marxist fantasists” a generation or two back are now Islamists: it’s the ideology du jour. At the point of expiry of the Soviet Union in 1991, the peoples of the central Asian republics were for the most part unaware that Iran had even had an “Islamic revolution”; 15 years on, following the proselytizing of thousands of mullahs dispatched to the region by a specially created Iranian government agency, the Stans’ traditionally moderate and in many cases alcoholically lubricated form of Islam is yielding in all but the most remote areas to a fiercer form imported from the south. As the Pentagon has begun to notice, in Iraq Tehran has been quietly duplicating the strategy that delivered southern Lebanon into its control 20 years ago. The degeneration of Baby Assad’s supposedly “secular” Baathist tyranny into full-blown client status and the replacement of Arafat’s depraved “secular” kleptocrat terrorists by Hamas’s even more depraved Islamist terrorists can also be seen as symptoms of Iranification.

So as a geopolitical analyst the ayatollah is not to be disdained. Our failure to understand Iran in the seventies foreshadowed our failure to understand the broader struggle today. As clashes of civilizations go, this one’s between two extremes: on the one hand, a world that has everything it needs to wage decisive war—wealth, armies, industry, technology; on the other, a world that has nothing but pure ideology and plenty of believers. (Its sole resource, oil, would stay in the ground were it not for foreign technology, foreign manpower, and a Western fetishization of domestic environmental aesthetics.)

For this to be a mortal struggle, as the cold war was, the question is: Are they a credible enemy to us?

For a projection of the likely outcome, the question is: Are we a credible enemy to them?

Four years into the “war on terror,” the Bush administration has begun promoting a new formulation: “the long war.” Not a reassuring name. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs—our strengths. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower—their strengths, and our great weakness. Even a loser can win when he’s up against a defeatist. A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it’s dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us? If you add to the advantages of will and manpower a nuclear capability, the odds shift dramatically.

What, after all, is the issue underpinning every little goofy incident in the news, from those Danish cartoons of Mohammed to recommendations for polygamy by official commissions in Canada to the banning of the English flag in English prisons because it’s an insensitive “crusader” emblem to the introduction of gender-segregated swimming sessions in municipal pools in Puget Sound? In a word, sovereignty. There is no god but Allah, and thus there is no jurisdiction but Allah’s. Ayatollah Khomeini saw himself not as the leader of a geographical polity but as a leader of a communal one: Islam. Once those urbane socialist émigrés were either dead or on the plane back to Paris, Iran’s nominally “temporal” government took the same view, too: its role is not merely to run national highway departments and education ministries but to advance the cause of Islam worldwide.

If you dust off the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, Article One reads: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.” Iran fails to meet qualification (d), and has never accepted it. The signature act of the new regime was not the usual post-coup bloodletting and summary execution of the shah’s mid-ranking officials but the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by “students” acting with Khomeini’s blessing. Diplomatic missions are recognized as the sovereign territory of that state, and the violation thereof is an act of war. No one in Washington has to fret that Fidel Castro will bomb the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Even in the event of an actual war, the diplomatic staff of both countries would be allowed to depart.

Yet Iran seized protected persons on U.S. soil and held them prisoner for over a year—ostensibly because Washington was planning to restore the shah. But the shah died and the hostages remained. And, when the deal was eventually done and the hostages were released, the sovereign territory of the United States remained in the hands of the gangster regime. Granted that during the Carter administration the Soviets were gobbling up real estate from Afghanistan to Grenada, it’s significant that in this wretched era the only loss of actual U.S. territory was to the Islamists.

Yet Iran paid no price. They got away with it. For the purposes of comparison, in 1980, when the U.S. hostages in Tehran were in their sixth month of captivity, Iranians opposed to the mullahs seized the Islamic Republic’s embassy in London. After six days of negotiation, Her Majesty’s Government sent SAS commandos into the building and restored it to the control of the regime. In refusing to do the same with the “students” occupying the U.S. embassy, the Islamic Republic was explicitly declaring that it was not as other states.

We expect multilateral human-rights Democrats to be unsatisfactory on assertive nationalism, but if they won’t even stand up for international law, what’s the point? Jimmy Carter should have demanded the same service as Tehran got from the British—the swift resolution of the situation by the host government—and, if none was forthcoming, Washington should have reversed the affront to international order quickly, decisively, and in a sufficiently punitive manner. At hinge moments of history, there are never good and bad options, only bad and much much worse. Our options today are significantly worse because we didn’t take the bad one back then.

With the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a British subject, Tehran extended its contempt for sovereignty to claiming jurisdiction over the nationals of foreign states, passing sentence on them, and conscripting citizens of other countries to carry it out. Iran’s supreme leader instructed Muslims around the world to serve as executioners of the Islamic Republic—and they did, killing not Rushdie himself but his Japanese translator, and stabbing the Italian translator, and shooting the Italian publisher, and killing three dozen persons with no connection to the book when a mob burned down a hotel because of the presence of the novelist’s Turkish translator.

Iran’s de facto head of state offered a multimillion-dollar bounty for a whack job on an obscure English novelist. And, as with the embassy siege, he got away with it.

In the latest variation on Marx’s dictum, history repeats itself: first, the unreadable London literary novel; then, the Danish funny pages. But in the 17 years between the Rushdie fatwa and the cartoon jihad, what was supposedly a freakish one-off collision between Islam and the modern world has become routine. We now think it perfectly normal for Muslims to demand the tenets of their religion be applied to society at large: the government of Sweden, for example, has been zealously closing down websites that republish those Danish cartoons. As Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, has said, “It is in our revolution’s interest, and an essential principle, that when we speak of Islamic objectives, we address all the Muslims of the world.” Or as a female Muslim demonstrator in Toronto put it: “We won’t stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.”

If that’s a little too ferocious, Kofi Annan framed it rather more soothingly: “The offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were first published in a European country which has recently acquired a significant Muslim population, and is not yet sure how to adjust to it.”

If you’ve also “recently acquired” a significant Muslim population and you’re not sure how to “adjust” to it, well, here’s the difference: back when my Belgian grandparents emigrated to Canada, the idea was that the immigrants assimilated to the host country. As Kofi and Co. see it, today the host country has to assimilate to the immigrants: if Islamic law forbids representations of the Prophet, then so must Danish law, and French law, and American law. Iran was the progenitor of this rapacious extraterritoriality, and, if we had understood it more clearly a generation ago, we might be in less danger of seeing large tracts of the developed world being subsumed by it today.

Yet instead the West somehow came to believe that, in a region of authoritarian monarchs and kleptocrat dictators, Iran was a comparative beacon of liberty. The British foreign secretary goes to Tehran and hangs with the mullahs and, even though he’s not a practicing Muslim (yet), ostentatiously does that “peace be upon him” thing whenever he mentions the Prophet Mohammed. And where does the kissy-face with the A-list imams get him? Ayatollah Khamenei renewed the fatwa on Rushdie only last year. True, President Bush identified Iran as a member of the axis of evil, but a year later the country was being hailed as a “democracy” by then-deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage and a nation that has seen a “democratic flowering,” as State Department spokesman Richard Boucher put it.

And let’s not forget Bill Clinton’s extraordinary remarks at Davos last year: “Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency. It is there that the ideas that I subscribe to are defended by a majority.” That’s true in the very narrow sense that there’s a certain similarity between his legal strategy and sharia when it comes to adultery and setting up the gals as the fall guys. But it seems Clinton apparently had a more general commonality in mind: “In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.” America’s first black President is beginning to sound like America’s first Islamist ex-president.

Those remarks are as nutty as Gerald Ford’s denial of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. Iran has an impressive three-decade record of talking the talk and walking the walk—either directly or through client groups like Hezbollah. In 1994, the Argentine Israel Mutual Association was bombed in Buenos Aires. Nearly 100 people died and 250 were injured—the worst massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. An Argentine court eventually issued warrants for two Iranian diplomats plus Ali Fallahian, former intelligence minister, and Ali Akbar Parvaresh, former education minister and deputy speaker of the Majlis.

Why blow up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires? Because it’s there. Unlike the Iranian infiltration into Bosnia and Croatia, which helped radicalize not just the local populations but Muslim supporters from Britain and Western Europe, the random slaughter in the Argentine has no strategic value except as a demonstration of muscle and reach.

Anyone who spends half an hour looking at Iranian foreign policy over the last 27 years sees five things:

contempt for the most basic international conventions;
long-reach extraterritoriality;
effective promotion of radical Pan-Islamism;
a willingness to go the extra mile for Jew-killing (unlike, say, Osama);
an all-but-total synchronization between rhetoric and action.
Yet the Europeans remain in denial. Iran was supposedly the Middle Eastern state they could work with. And the chancellors and foreign ministers jetted in to court the mullahs so assiduously that they’re reluctant to give up on the strategy just because a relatively peripheral figure like the, er, head of state is sounding off about Armageddon.

Instead, Western analysts tend to go all Kremlinological. There are, after all, many factions within Iran’s ruling class. What the country’s quick-on-the-nuke president says may not be the final word on the regime’s position. Likewise, what the school of nuclear theologians in Qom says. Likewise, what former president Khatami says. Likewise, what Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, says.

But, given that they’re all in favor of the country having nukes, the point seems somewhat moot. The question then arises, what do they want them for?

By way of illustration, consider the country’s last presidential election. The final round offered a choice between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an alumnus of the U.S. Embassy siege a quarter-century ago, and Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of the Expediency Council, which sounds like an EU foreign policy agency but is, in fact, the body that arbitrates between Iran’s political and religious leaderships. Ahmadinejad is a notorious shoot-from-the-lip apocalyptic hothead who believes in the return of the Twelfth (hidden) Imam and quite possibly that he personally is his designated deputy, and he’s also claimed that when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly last year a mystical halo appeared and bathed him in its aura. Ayatollah Rafsanjani, on the other hand, is one of those famous “moderates.”

What’s the difference between a hothead and a moderate? Well, the extremist Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” while the moderate Rafsanjani has declared that Israel is “the most hideous occurrence in history,” which the Muslim world “will vomit out from its midst” in one blast, because “a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counter-strike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world.” Evidently wiping Israel off the map seems to be one of those rare points of bipartisan consensus in Tehran, the Iranian equivalent of a prescription drug plan for seniors: we’re just arguing over the details.

So the question is: Will they do it?

And the minute you have to ask, you know the answer. If, say, Norway or Ireland acquired nuclear weapons, we might regret the “proliferation,” but we wouldn’t have to contemplate mushroom clouds over neighboring states. In that sense, the civilized world has already lost: to enter into negotiations with a jurisdiction headed by a Holocaust-denying millenarian nut job is, in itself, an act of profound weakness—the first concession, regardless of what weaselly settlement might eventually emerge.

Conversely, a key reason to stop Iran is to demonstrate that we can still muster the will to do so. Instead, the striking characteristic of the long diplomatic dance that brought us to this moment is how September 10th it’s all been. The free world’s delegated negotiators (the European Union) and transnational institutions (the IAEA) have continually given the impression that they’d be content just to boot it down the road to next year or the year after or find some arrangement—this decade’s Oil-for-Food or North Korean deal—that would get them off the hook. If you talk to EU foreign ministers, they’ve already psychologically accepted a nuclear Iran. Indeed, the chief characteristic of the West’s reaction to Iran’s nuclearization has been an enervated fatalism.

Back when nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, your average Western progressive was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute. The mushroom cloud was one of the most familiar images in the culture, a recurring feature of novels and album covers and movie posters. There were bestselling dystopian picture books for children, in which the handful of survivors spent their last days walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now a state openly committed to the annihilation of a neighboring nation has nukes, and we shrug: Can’t be helped. Just the way things are. One hears sophisticated arguments that perhaps the best thing is to let everyone get ’em, and then no one will use them. And if Iran’s head of state happens to threaten to wipe Israel off the map, we should understand that this is a rhetorical stylistic device that’s part of the Persian oral narrative tradition, and it would be a grossly Eurocentric misinterpretation to take it literally.

The fatalists have a point. We may well be headed for a world in which anybody with a few thousand bucks and the right unlisted Asian phone numbers in his Rolodex can get a nuke. But, even so, there are compelling reasons for preventing Iran in particular from going nuclear. Back in his student days at the U.S. embassy, young Mr. Ahmadinejad seized American sovereign territory, and the Americans did nothing. And I would wager that’s still how he looks at the world. And, like Rafsanjani, he would regard, say, Muslim deaths in an obliterated Jerusalem as worthy collateral damage in promoting the greater good of a Jew-free Middle East. The Palestinians and their “right of return” have never been more than a weapon of convenience with which to chastise the West. To assume Tehran would never nuke Israel because a shift in wind direction would contaminate Ramallah is to be as ignorant of history as most Palestinians are: from Yasser Arafat’s uncle, the pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, to the insurgents in Iraq today, Islamists have never been shy about slaughtering Muslims in pursuit of their strategic goals.

But it doesn’t have to come to that. Go back to that Argentine bombing. It was, in fact, the second major Iranian-sponsored attack in Buenos Aires. The year before, 1993, a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed 29 people and injured hundreds more in an attack on the Israeli Embassy. In the case of the community center bombing, the killer had flown from Lebanon a few days earlier and entered Latin America through the porous tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Suppose Iran had had a “dirty nuke” shipped to Hezbollah, or even the full-blown thing: Would it have been any less easy to get it into the country? And, if a significant chunk of downtown Buenos Aires were rendered uninhabitable, what would the Argentine government do? Iran can project itself to South America effortlessly, but Argentina can’t project itself to the Middle East at all. It can’t nuke Tehran, and it can’t attack Iran in conventional ways.

So any retaliation would be down to others. Would Washington act? It depends how clear the fingerprints were. If the links back to the mullahs were just a teensy-weensy bit tenuous and murky, how eager would the U.S. be to reciprocate? Bush and Rumsfeld might—but an administration of a more Clinto-Powellite bent? How much pressure would there be for investigations under UN auspices? Perhaps Hans Blix could come out of retirement, and we could have a six-month dance through Security-Council coalition-building, with the secretary of state making a last-minute flight to Khartoum to try to persuade Sudan to switch its vote.

Perhaps it’s unduly pessimistic to write the civilized world automatically into what Osama bin Laden called the “weak horse” role (Islam being the “strong horse”). But, if you were an Iranian “moderate” and you’d watched the West’s reaction to the embassy seizure and the Rushdie murders and Hezbollah terrorism, wouldn’t you be thinking along those lines? I don’t suppose Buenos Aires Jews expect to have their institutions nuked any more than 12 years ago they expected to be blown up in their own city by Iranian-backed suicide bombers. Nukes have gone freelance, and there’s nothing much we can do about that, and sooner or later we’ll see the consequences—in Vancouver or Rotterdam, Glasgow or Atlanta. But, that being so, we owe it to ourselves to take the minimal precautionary step of ending the one regime whose political establishment is explicitly pledged to the nuclear annihilation of neighboring states.

Once again, we face a choice between bad and worse options. There can be no “surgical” strike in any meaningful sense: Iran’s clients on the ground will retaliate in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Europe. Nor should we put much stock in the country’s allegedly “pro-American” youth. This shouldn’t be a touchy-feely nation-building exercise: rehabilitation may be a bonus, but the primary objective should be punishment—and incarceration. It’s up to the Iranian people how nutty a government they want to live with, but extraterritorial nuttiness has to be shown not to pay. That means swift, massive, devastating force that decapitates the regime—but no occupation.

The cost of de-nuking Iran will be high now but significantly higher with every year it’s postponed. The lesson of the Danish cartoons is the clearest reminder that what is at stake here is the credibility of our civilization. Whether or not we end the nuclearization of the Islamic Republic will be an act that defines our time.

A quarter-century ago, there was a minor British pop hit called “Ayatollah, Don’t Khomeini Closer.” If you’re a U.S. diplomat or a British novelist, a Croat Christian or an Argentine Jew, he’s already come way too close. How much closer do you want him to get?

Vintage NRO: Russell Kirk on C.S. Lewis

Professor Lewis, who has done almost as much to restore attachment to religious principle in our time as Chateaubriand did a century and a half ago through his Genius of Christianity, gives us now a little autobiographical volume that would make scarcely more than a chapter in Chateaubriand's Memoirs. But its explicit description of the process by which Lewis returned to Christianity excels anything of the kind in Chateaubriand's long shelf of exceedingly personal works.

Joy, as described by Mr. Lewis, is a sudden stab of intense consciousness, very different from mere pleasure. And there is something better than joy — as much better than joy as joy is better than pleasure: Christian faith. Joy comes to Lewis as often and as sharply since his conversion as before. "But I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never the kind of importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer."

A Sidelong Glance through the latest NYRB

No, it isn't NRO. Nope. Not even close. Not at all. Here's a sample from the latest issue:

The Hope of the Web
By Bill McKibben
When, less than a decade ago, the Internet emerged as a force in most of our lives, one of the questions people often asked was: Would it prove, like TV, to be a medium mainly for distraction and disengagement? Or would its two-way nature allow it to be a potent instrument for rebuilding connections among people and organizations, possibly even renewing a sense of community? The answer is still not clear— more people use the Web to look at unclothed young women and lose money at poker than for any other purposes. But if you were going to make a case for the Web having an invigorating political effect, you could do worse than point your browser to dailykos.com, which was launched in 2002 by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga.

Hamas: The Last Chance for Peace?
By Henry Siegman
Israel is facing not only the threats of Hamas, an organization that has affirmed the right to violently resist Israel's occupation and has denied Israel's right to exist, but also the more general anger from the larger Muslim world toward the West. The two are often conflated, but it is a dangerously misleading conflation, for it gives a confused view of both the dangers and the opportunities created by Hamas's election victory, however meager the latter may appear to be.

The Global Delusion
By John Gray
Though the world's diverse societies are continuously interacting, the process is producing a variety of hybrid regimes rather than convergence on a single model. Yet a belief that a universally accepted type of society is emerging continues to shape the way social scientists and public commentators think about the contemporary condition, and it is taken for granted that industrialization enables something like the way of life of rich countries to be reproduced everywhere.

Who says NRO writers are flaks?

REPULSIVE REPUBLICANS [Ramesh Ponnuru]
1) Republicans are preparing to bring the Federal Marriage Amendment to a vote. So I guess the plan from now on is to do this in all even-numbered years, and then throw the idea aside in odd-numbered ones? I know a lot of people support the FMA for principled reasons, but a decisive number of Republicans are clearly just picking on gays for political profit.

2) Republicans are leading a charge to subject "527 groups" to onerous regulations. A minority of them, again, have sincere and above-board reasons for doing this. Most of them just want to shut down groups that are trying to beat them in elections. For a majority to restrict the freedom of others to try to boot them out is pretty much a textbook definition of the abuse of power, isn't it?

Reason, Religion, and Natural Selection Thread

REASON, RELIGION, AND NATURAL SELECTION [Peter Robinson]

Andy Ferguson just pointed out Leon Wieseltier’s book review in last Sunday’s New York Times. Notwithstanding that I swore off posting until I got a couple of big writing assignments off my back, the review is so good that I want to bring it to the attention of every reader of this happy Corner.

The review is devoted to Daniel C. Dennett’s book, “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.” Wieseltier engages in a complete and utter demolition. He is stylish and wise, memorable and analytically acute. I’d urge everybody to read the whole thing, but here’s a critical paragraph:

“Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else….Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.”

Note, incidentally, that Wieseltier’s point here—“if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument”—was anticipated by C.S. Lewis:

“Granted that Reason is prior to matter [as it is in the traditional Judeo-Christian conception of the word], I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand…minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry…on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.”

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RE: REASON, RELIGION, & NATURAL SELECTION [John Derbyshire]

Peter: Well, I read Wieseltier's review of Daniel Dennett's book (which I have not read), and it left me thinking what I always end up thinking after reading Wieseltier's pieces: That the man is a bag of wind, who understands squat about science.

His argument is a strong form of the reification of reason--unusual for someone from a Jewish background, as one more often encounters this from Catholic intellectuals. It leaks like a sieve. If natural selection could come up with legs, fins, eyes, and guts, it's hard to see why it shouldn't come up with advanced intellectual faculties like reason. To say: "Well, it couldn't have, because look, we're reasoning about it!" is just fatuous.

That's not to say we know reason did emerge from natural selection. We don't know that, and Dennett's certitudes are, in my opinion, misplaced. Dennett has a nice little gig going as a polemical God-basher, and he's mining it for all it's worth. Good luck to him. He treats lots of open questions as closed, though, which is not honest. Did Something predate matter? And is reason an attribute of, or derived from, that Something? These seem to me like open questions, not unconnected to the one posed by Martin Gardner: Back in the Jurassic, when two dinosaurs wandered down to the water hole and met two other dinosaurs drinking there, were there then four dinosaurs at the water hole? But Wieseltier isn't engaging with that stuff, he's just an Eng Lit blowhard gassing off.

If you want to read something REALLY thought-provoking about science and religion, try this (which is also a chapter in this).

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LEON WIESELTIER & THE REIFICATION OF REASON [John Derbyshire]

One of the more eye-stopping responses to my post on Peter Robinson on Leon Wieseltier on Daniel Dennett, from a reader who identifies himself in the subject line as Jewish:

"We're not suckered by Aristotelean and Catholic word problems, no, but remember that there's a strong current of Marxism in secular Jewish culture, starting with... well, with Marx. And one can claim that certain talmudic traditions involve extreme reification as well.
"Although we can't prove that evolution was responsible for the ASPM gene's sudden (2 million year) catapulting of the human brain to creating shows like American Idol, but I don't see much else that speaks well of us, in a natural and sexual selection sense.

"I mean, we don't really have much in the way of claws or teeth. Our upper body strength is far less than the animals we like to eat. And as far as speed goes? Not much, either. So there we are, stuck on a savannah with no claws, bad teeth and slow, flat feet (and oy, they hurt). So how the heck are we going to get that mammoth? How are we going to spirit away the meat before other predators arrive?

"And in a sexual selection sense, it still works today. Girls still like the boys who can bring home the mammoth, er, bacon."

Bacon? And this guy is Jewish? And mammoths lived on tundra, not savannah. Apart from that... thank you for writing, Sir.

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HUH? [JPod]

I just want to say that I didn't understand a word Leon Wieseltier wrote in his review of Daniel Dennett, I didn't understand a word of Derb's response, and I didn't understand a syllable of the e-mail he just published. I do, however, know a very good knock-knock joke:

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Little old lady.

Little old lady who?

Hey, you can yodel!

Thank you very much. I'll be here all week. Try the veal.

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DERB ON WIESELTIER [Peter Robinson]

Derb, I can’t help thinking that you’re confusing two quite different concepts. To wit:

Concept One: The reification of reason—that is, the belief that reason is Reason, something with an objective and valid existence outside ourselves. The philosophical debate over Reason gets to be heavy going in a hurry, but it’s worth noting that we all behave as if reason did indeed possess an existence or truth of its own: Two plus two, we all understand, equaled four long before the first hominid mind came into being.

Concept Two: Reasoning ability—that is, the ability of the brain to add, subtract, tell truth from falsehood, and so on.

Concept One represents reason in itself, Concept Two the ability to work with reason. And whereas it’s perfectly true that reasoning ability may have evolved—in your neat phrase, “If natural selection could come up with legs, fins, eyes, and guts, it's hard to see why it shouldn't come up with advanced intellectual faculties”—it would have proven impossible for reason itself to have evolved.

Which brings us to Wieseltier: His review of Dennett’s book wasn’t the attack on evolution that you seem to have supposed. It was an attack instead on materialism—on Dennett’s implicit assertion that nothing exists but the world we perceive by way of our five senses. Hence Wieseltier’s question—“if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational discussion”—isn’t “vacuous,” to use your word, but absolutely basic. If “reason” is simply a physical property, then logic and truth possess no greater claim upon us than, say, the preference for red wine over white, or Bach over Wagner. Thought processes would be mere chemical reactions. Why should anyone prefer the chemical reactions of Daniel Dennett to those of John Derbyshire? Intellectual life instead utterly depends upon the opposite notion, the notion that our reasoning faculties are capable of apprehending objective truth—in a word, Reason. And if there is indeed such a thing as Reason, well, then, there’s more to the universe than the sheerly material world.

C. S. Lewis puts this all much better than I can—and I like the quotation I used yesterday so much that I may as well repeat it:

“Granted that Reason is prior to matter [as it is in the traditional Judeo-Christian conception of the word], I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand…minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry…on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.”

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HUH? HUH? [JPod]

Peter, don't get started. Please. Earlier today I had to tell a knock-knock joke because the whole reason-reification business was impossible to follow. Okay, here's another one.

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Orange.

Orange who?

Orange you glad I didn't say "reification"?

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RE HUH? HUH? [Peter Robinson]

John, think Gaslight.

Derb and I are Charles Boyer.

You’re Ingrid Bergman.

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JOHN POD, COVER YOUR EYES [Peter Robinson]

From a reader:

"If I read Wieseltier correctly, he's saying that *if* religion is discredited by its evolutionary origins (rather than by any demonstration that it is false) then reason must be likewise discredited. And his logic there seems airtight."

Me: Exactly. And you may look now, John.

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JUST SO STORIES [Peter Robinson]

Below, an email I just received from Tom Bethell. It's longish, and yet another entry on the subject that horrifies my friend John Pod. But what are weekends for? (Since I'll be attending my kids' basketball games tomorrow and then flying back East on Sunday, I hereby very merrily grant the last word on Wieseltier v. Dennett to anyone who cares to post it.)

“I, too, thought the Wieseltier review was terrific; and totally surprising….Lurking beneath this evo-ID debate, it has been said by the evo-ists, is a religious agenda that dare not speak its name. To which I say, No, lurking beneath it are some philosophical assumptions that need to be made explicit. Wieseltier was heading in that direction…

“Now the difficult thing for me to understand here is exactly what LW [Leon Wieseltier] means when he says that Dennett portrays reason as the product of natural selection. I am sure that that is right but I would like to see how Dennett argued it. I suppose what he says is that once some glimmer of reason appeared in early hominids that had survival value. So that hominid survived better than those lacking this glimmer of reason.

“Thereby, glimmers of reason were selected for. (NB: All traits in existence across the entire animal and vegetable kingdoms get the same seven word explanation: Whatever needs an explanation "arose by accident and was selected for." (How did the elephant get its trunk? It ABAAWSF. How did ants appear? They ABAAWSF. How did the leopard get its spots? ABAAWSF. Etcetera, ad infinitum.)

“No actual observation of this process is needed in any instance. Evolutionists simply contemplate the trait in question and then make up a plausible story as to how it might have been helpful in an imagined environment. Incidentally, this criticism, that Darwinism amounts to the retelling of Just-So Stories, was brilliantly made in the 1970s by Richard Lewontin of Harvard, now emeritus.

“Well, I guess I would say that it's pretty hard to deny that reason IS helpful, and if it arose by accident and it was hereditary, it's easy to claim that its possessors would outcompete rivals who are less endowed with reason. It's not that the argument is vacuous so much as that it is a pure invention as to how reason arose. It is not supported by evidence.”

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RE: REIFICATION OF REASON [John Derbyshire]

Peter: Well, thanks for introducing me (twice) to yet another statement by C.S. Lewis that I can't make head or tail of. How does CSL know that the "flux of atoms" is "meaningless"? What is the meaning of "meaningless" there? Quite a lot of physics is premised on the idea that the "flux of atoms" proceeds according to strong and inviolable laws. Are those laws, or their consequences, "meaningless"? And why should I dismiss the notion that "minds are wholly dependent on brains" as breezily as CSL does? I don't know whether they are or not; but if you were to remove my brain, put it in a blender, and switch to "puree," the notion that my mind would have ceased to exist at some point in the procedure does not seem to me to be egregiously preposterous. Etc. etc. Well, I think I shall put off my reading of Mere Christianity for another 5 years.

Dennett has written a work of speculative pop-science. His book probably (I say again, I haven't read it) contains lots of interesting ideas. Some may turn out to be fruitful. Most will probably look quaint 100 years on. That is the normal fate of this kind of book. What's Wieseltier so mad about? ("Fairy tale" ... "superstition" ... "extravagant speculation" ...)

At the time of the Bell Curve debate 12 years ago, Wieseltier was saying some very silly things indeed. I put him down as a Left Creationist, based on what little sense I could extract from his remarks. I can't say I have been keeping up with him very assiduously, but on the basis of this review, he seems to have either flipped to Right Creationism, or to be cherry-picking from both LC and RC according to some personal estimation of whichever author he has decided to be vituperative about.

As to the reification of reason (i.e. its elevation to Reason), this is one of those topics dearly beloved of Catholic intellectuals, but incomprehensible to the rest of us. Goodness knows what Wieseltier is doing with it. He's not taking instruction from Father Rutler, is he?

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PETER'S READER [John Derbyshire]

...said: "If I read Wieseltier correctly, he's saying that *if* religion is discredited by its evolutionary origins (rather than by any demonstration that it is false) then reason must be likewise discredited. And his logic there seems airtight."

Well, I can't parse anything as coherent as that out of Wiesletier's frothing, but let's take the reader's statement by itself. Religion and reason might both have evolutionary origins, but they are not the same thing, nor even the same KIND of thing. One is a set of explanations; the other is a way of arriving at explanations. If one is "invalidated" (what does this mean? I am not sure) by its evolutionary origins, why is the other one, necessarily?

If that logic is "airtight," so is my string vest.

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RE: PETER'S READER [Ramesh Ponnuru]
Derb: I don't think anyone is disputing that religion and reason are different things. Daniel Dennett, according to the review, argues that religious beliefs evolved because they served certain purposes. He argues further that when those of us who are believers understand the evolutionary origins of our beliefs we will see that our beliefs aren't really justified; they're things we believe because we're hard-wired to believe them. Once we recognize that we have a bias built into us, we can factor it out and stop believing.

Wieseltier raises a number of objections to this project. One is that Dennett's account of the evolutionary origins of religious belief is speculative. Another, which Peter Robinson and his reader have stressed, is that Dennett can't really discredit religious belief in this fashion. Even if we knew that our religious beliefs served evolutionary purposes regardless of their truth, it wouldn't follow that they aren't true. That would have to be demonstrated, and Dennett, again according to the review, eschews any interest in doing that. He doesn't want to get in to the reasons that believers give for holding their beliefs. But if those reasons are good reasons, then Dennett's story about the origins of the beliefs doesn't touch their truth and can't give anyone a good reason to stop holding them. So far, I take it, you agree with Peter and disagree with Dennett: I believe you have said a few times that you think he is wrong to try to use evolution to debunk belief in God.

The possibility that we're hard-wired to attribute intentionality to things that don't have it--such as computers, or the universe--is an implication of the larger possibility that our thinking has evolved in ways that correspond imperfectly to the truth. Just as we don't give up on trying to reason as well as we can on that account, we shouldn't give up on trying to figure out, as best we can, the truth or falsity of religious beliefs. That's what Peter's reader said, and what he said Wieseltier said. That's Peter's view too. I don't think any of them is "reifying" reason in some foolish way.

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IS WIESELTIER SENDING LOVE NOTES? [John Derbyshire]

Thanks, Ramesh. If indeed Wieseltier is only refuting an assertion by Dennett that proof of the evolutionary origins of religious belief would invalidate the truths of religion, then he is saying a thing I said on NRO a few weeks ago: "If there is a God, and He wants us to know Him, why then, of course He would endow us with a religious instinct." There isn't much to that. We have an ability, very likely an evolved one, to deduce that seven times eight equals fifty-six. Well, seven times eight **does** equal fifty-six. So I believe, anyway. The evolutionary origins of my belief are neither here nor there. I can't see why this shouldn't apply to religious beliefs too. But if it **doesn't**, and someone could prove that it doesn't, then seven times eight might still be equal to fifty-six. That was my problem with the reader's point.

I think Wieseltier is doing more than that, though. I think, in fact, his vituperative review may be a harbinger of an interesting phenomenon: Left Creationists kissing up to Right Creationists. With the ever-swelling mass of results coming in from investigations of the human genome, both positions are in deep trouble. The Right Creationists are already responding by cozying up to the Left Creationists--you will see, a little further down The Corner, Tom Bethell (RC) saying flattering things about Richard Lewontin (LC). Well, it may be that my original tagging of Wieseltier as LC was correct, but that he is sending love notes to RCs in the hope of "saving the appearances," and that his Dennett review is such a love note. Just a guess.

[NB: For those not familiar with the jargon:

A Left Creationist is a person who believes that with the emergence of modern man 50 or 100,000 years ago, Nature's creation--flash image of a 19th-century English gent with a long white beard--attained perfection, and that human beings have not undergone the slightest evolutionary change since, MOST CERTAINLY NOT by different geographical populations changing in different ways.

A Right Creationist** is a person who believes that with the emergence of modern man 50 or 100,000 years ago, God's creation--flash image of an Old Testament deity with a long white beard--attained perfection, and that we have undergone no biological change since, only improvements in our moral understanding and better hopes of a happy afterlife.

Both the LC and RC positions are threatened by (a) a growing pile of evidence that human evolution has been chugging merrily along this past 50,000 years, and (b) that we shall soon be able to lend a hand, changing innate human nature in ways both desirable and not. These are the things that need our attention, and that we ought to be talking about. LCs and RCs, however, prefer to busy themselves with organizing cavalry charges against the oncoming Panzers.

** At any rate, of the Old Earth variety--there is also a Young Earth species of Right Creationists, who believe the Genesis account of creation to be literally true, and so have no truck with time spans of 50,000 years, or with the "emergence" of anything at all.]

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LOVE NOTES [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Interesting theory, Derb. If it's true, though, Wieseltier is going to have to work pretty hard to make up for this (sub. req'd.).

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A READER DEFENDS WIESELTIER [John Derbyshire]

"Dear Mr. Derbyshire---You are almost certainly traducing Mr. Wieseltier's position. Having read (or skimmed) a fair number of his essays, I'm reasonably certain he doesn't particularly care about creation vs. evolution, and probably supports the latter whole-heartedly. He cares most (as he said in the article) about preserving a tradition of liberal, rational faith from what he takes to be fire from both sides, from both secularists and fundamentalists. It was Dennett's village atheist presuppositions, more than the scientific content of the book, that offended him. You may have run into this position most from Catholics, but there is a respectable parallel Jewish tradition of such thought as well, from Maimonides via elements of the Rabbinic tradition to the Haskalah of Germany and points east, and hence to various liberal Jewish thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries; most of whose names I have sadly forgotten, but of whose existence I am firmly convinced. If there are faults in Wieseltier's exposition, they owe in part to him having written the same argument dozens of times, and doubtless feeling weary about having to cover the same aground."

[Derb] Hmmm. That Wieseltier "probably supports [evolution] whole-heartedly" I beg leave to doubt. The typical position of Left Creationists is that they do indeed support evolution, but only up to the point where it collides with the egalitarian, feminist, "anti-racist," multi-culti dogmas that are much more dear to them than any mere scientific theory. I'd call that "half-hearted" myself. As for Wiesletier preserving a tradition of "liberal, rational faith" -- well, I don't recall much liberality or rationality in his contributions to the Bell Curve debate, nor to his "cultural policeman" intervention in the 1994 controversy about William Cash's "Jews in Hollywood" piece in the London Spectator.

Still not having read Dennett's book, it doesn't seem right to go on devoting so much Corner space to Wieseltier's review of it, so I'm bailing out here. My sketchy knowledge of Dennett and his work suggests to me that "village atheist" is about right. Dennet belongs to that folorn legion of folk, patron saint the late Bertrand Russell, who believe that if only one could find the right way to show believers how silly and misguided is their belief, they would cast off the shackles of faith with whoops of joy, and convert their churches into chemistry labs. That this is an absurd belief is pointed out in that link I posted the other day--this one--and also in my Sea of Faith column. Religious belief is deepy, rootedly human, unshakeable and ineradicable. Science, by contrast, is an artificial and unnatural activity, which could be stamped out rather easily. Some historians of science think it actually was: that science came up twice in history, first among the Greeks, then disappearing, then coming up again in early-modern Europe. Religion in general, and probably even particular religions, are a thousand times more robust than science.

Science is thus a fragile thing, and might easily be lost. (The same applies to math. Readers of, ahem, my forthcoming book will learn about a key development in mathematical thinking that was discovered in ancient Alexandria, then lost, then rediscovered 1300 years later.) It is my belief in this fact that makes me so defensive of science, and so hostile to obscurantist thinking, under which heading I include both Left Creationists like Wieseltier and Right Creationists like the "intelligent design" crowd. They are playing with fire. So, by their absurd provocations, are the village atheists like Dennett. If we lose science (again?), we shall be plunged back into a world far less comfortable, far darker and crueller, than this one. If the LCs and the RCs join forces, they might just possibly bring on that world... if the Islamofascists don't beat them to it.

The natural tendency of human beings is to think religiously. Science and math are deeply unnatural activities, favored by only a scant few, who could easily be rounded up and dispatched by a mob of more normal human beings. Scientistic triumphalism of the Dennett variety is therefore foolish. An attitude of respectful humility by the more-scientifically inclined towards the more-religiously inclined is not only intellectually proper (at any rate to those of us non-Dennettians who think that religious belief is intellectually respectable, and that the reality of human nature should be faced honestly), it is prudent.

I feel somewhat the same way about conservatism, another unnatural and unpopular way of thinking....

Aren't weekends great?

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WEEKEND DEBRIEFING [John Derbyshire]

For those who take in our weekend postings: Noah Millman has two postings on his blog here (a) taking issue with some of my Wieseltier/Dennett comments, (b) discussing the Robert McCauley paper I linked to on science and religion.

I'm always a bit nervous when Noah tells me he's taken up some point of mine, because he is approximately 100 times smarter and better read than I am. You can read his posts, though (twice, preferably, for the full flavor) and make up your own mind. I'd defend myself on Noah's point comparing my dissing of Daniel Dennett to my ditto of Irving Kristol by just noting that I was dissing Dennett for being impolite, Kristol for being not altogether honest; and that it is possible to be both polite and honest. Not easy, but possible. However, you can read the posts for yourself and decide. Noah is particularly good on theodicy.

I'd only add to all this, as an orienting device, my own favorite condensation of the essence of religion. It's the one in the "Conclusion" of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience:

"There is a certain uniform deliverance in which all religions appear to meet. It consists of two parts:-- (1) An uneasiness, and (2) Its solution.

(1) The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. (2) The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers."

I'm including here a couple of long quotes from Noah Millman's Gideon's Blog, as mentioned by Derbyshire, partly because it is so informative but also because it includes a long quotation from that truly underrated Sondheim masterpiece, Pacific Overtures.

I've been following with interest Derb's debate (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here) over Leon Wieseltier's review of Daniel Dennett's latest book. (It beats reading the news from Iraq.)

I think I know what Derb is worried about. Stephen Sondheim wrote a rather underrated work about the opening of Japan, called Pacific Overtures, in the first act of which there is a scene where the Shogun, an idiot playboy, is being cajoled to pay some minimal attention to the fact that American warships are sitting in the harbor demanding to land and receive an audience (all of which Japan's laws would prohibit). Here's a bit of the libretto where the Shogun's mother suggests calling in the priests to opine on what to do:

MOTHER
It's the Day of the Ox, my Lord.
With but three days remaining
And today already waning,
I've a few further shocks, my Lord.

To begin, let me say,
At the risk of repetition,
There are ships in the bay,
And they didn't ask permission,
But they sit there all day
In contemptuous array
With a letter to convey
And they haven't gone away
And there's every indication
They they still plan to stay,
And you look a little gray, my Lord …

Have some tea, my Lord,
Some chrysanthemum tea,
While we plan, if we can,
What our answer ought to be.

If the tea the Shogun drank will
Serve to keep the Shogun tranquil,
I suggest, if I may, my Lord,
We consult the Confucians —
They have mystical solutions.
There are none wise as they, my Lord …

PRIESTS
Night waters do not break the moon.
That merely is illusion.
The moon is sacred.

No foreign ships can break our laws.
That also is illusion.
Our laws are sacred.

It follows there can be no ships.
They must be an illusion.
Japan is sacred.

Derb is surely right that if we start to reason like this, our civilization is in for a heap of trouble. And so that's not a bad thing to spend your time worrying about.

But I think I need to point out - in an entirely friendly manner - a few problems with his style of argumentation.

First, arguments exclusively from genealogy can get opponents annoyed. They got Wieseltier sufficiently annoyed to write a rather unimpressively sputtering review. Similar annoyance got people like Peter Robinson to write sympathetically about Wieseltier's effort. Is it wise - is it likely to be rhetorically successful - in such a context not merely to allude to the genealogy of Wieseltier's arguments as if that were itself an argument, but to mock said genealogy (references to Fr. Rutland and all that)? What is gained, other than self-satisfaction?

Second, Wieseltier is (attempting) to make a philosophical argument. I think it is worth the effort to tease out what that argument may be and knock the stuffing out of it on its own terms. I've got a pretty strong commitment to epistemological pragmatism, but sometimes pragmatism is the last refuge of a lazy (or, more likely, weary) rhetorical combatant. Even if you're going to argue from consequences, you're going to get a better response if you stick to consequences germane to the particular discourse, to say, "following this line isn't going to get you anywhere you want to go intellectually" when you are debating a philosophical point, rather than, "that we are even debating this question proves my point that we are falling ever further behind the Chinese in the contest for mastery of the future of the human race" - and that's true even if you believe the latter to be true.

Finally, and most troublingly (to me) on his final contribution to the debate. Derb winds up by saying, basically, that Dennett does no one any favors by playing that village atheist, and that he ought to be more respectful of the good opinion of most people - for the good of science. I seem to recall a controversy some months ago about a piece by Gertrude Himmelfarb (also a not-very-good piece, I might add - Derb seems to be making an unfortunate habit of martyring not-very-good pieces by launching wild attacks on their authors' motives) in which Derb expressed his profound distaste for "noble lie" types of compromises. It seems very much that he is urging Dennett to tell just such a lie. Dennett thinks he knows the truth, and that it will set us free. To be fair, Derb doesn't agree with Dennett on the former point - Derb is not a tub-thumping village atheist - but he is effectively advising Dennett that even if he sincerely believes what he says about atheism and materialism, he ought to keep it to himself because most people - by nature - cannot handle such a truth. I fail to see the difference between this advice and the kind of attitude that he attributed to Irving Kristol (and, by implication, his wife), who was (Derb claimed) cozying up to Intelligent Design types for the sake of social peace. The only difference I can discern is the nature of the good being protected from the unreasoning mob in each respective case. I don't like that style of argument any more than Derb does, but I do think that's the kind of argument he's making. I'll go into why I think he winds up making such arguments further on, what might be some alternative arguments, and what their big pitfalls are in turn.

I'm going to defend Derb defending Dennett, even though Derb has not read Dennett's book and, while I haven't read this one, I've read other books of Dennett's and I'm decidedly unimpressed - and not because he's a tub-thumping village atheist. Anyone who can write a book entitled Consciousness Explained has a chutzpah problem. When you write a book with that title and, in the end, do nothing whatever to explain consciousness - that is, to reduce it to understood phenomena, to explain it in a scientific sense - you have a problem bigger than chutzpah. He "explains" consciousness entirely be means of a metaphor, leaving consciousness as such just as much of a mystery as it was before the book began. But he is adamant that now the mystery is gone, and all the "mysterians" can pack up their tents. Dennett is the worst kind of science popularizer: the kind who thinks that if you admit science can't currently explain something or other and, indeed, may have a very great difficulty ever explaining something or other, then that is just giving an "opening" to the other side in some kind of conflict. He writes as if he believes precisely what religious fundamentalists believe: that anything science cannot currently account for must have been handled by God directly. No scientist should ever believe such a thing, or they'll wind up doing very bad science; no popularizer of science should ever write in such a way, or he'll only give an "opening" to the other side in a very real conflict. I'm going to defend Derb defending Dennett because I think Derb's reasons for disliking the Wieseltier review are good ones, and that those who are defending Wieseltier are a little too secure in their own intellectual redouts for my personal taste.

Now, to a substantive defense, with important qualifications.

Derb is right on the essential merits. I've never understood what humanists like Wieseltier are criticizing, precisely, when they criticize "materialism." I know what theists might be criticizing; they might believe quite literally in divine providence, for example. In their case, my question what not be what they believe but in what sense they really believe it - my inquiry would be pragmatic: how do their decisions differ because of their belief, and does this belief appear to be efficacious in their decisionmaking. But for a humanist to criticize "materialism" is perplexing. Is Wieseltier an old-fashion Cartesian dualist? Is he familiar with the litany of problems with dualism, with its internal incoherence? Or is he a panpsychist of some kind? Where does Wieseltier think the mind comes from, if not the brain? I suspect Derb is right, and that Wieseltier couldn't care less about the answers to these kinds of questions; he's committed to some notion that there is a domain of "spirit" because, say, the Nazis and Communists seemed to be against such a domain, so the good guys must be for it; or because he has a nostalgic affection for Jewish tradition that affirms the existence of such a realm; or something. Derb's got every right to be annoyed at seeing such ill-thought-out intellectual prejudices wielded like a cudgel.

And Derb's right that the faculty of reason and the religious "instinct" could be - almost certainly are - incommensurate, and that there is no teeth in the argument that if both are products of natural selection then both are equally undermined by that genealogy. To begin with, there is a cogent - though not at all proven; actually, not even evidenced, really, just hypothesized - argument that our inclination to religious belief is a "side effect" of a cognitive property of great value rather than a property selected for in its own right. That's the argument that Dennett is sketching in his book: the ability to model the intentionality of other minds is of enormous value cognitively, but the side effect is that we infer intentionality whenever we are confronted with sufficient complexity, and religion is an example of this side effect. That's not a scientific theory at this point; it's just a logical argument that fits with what minimal evidence there is on this topic at all. But it's at least as plausible that a predisposition towards religious beliefs and practices are natural in a more robust sense - that they really were selected for because they increase fitness, not because they are a sorry side-effect of some other faculty. If this is the case, though, then the religious instinct is analogous to, say, common sense, or "folk physics" that appears to be hard-wired into us. We don't have to learn, for example, about the existence of gravity, or friction, or inertia; we are born with hard-wiring about these things, and we what we learn is how to get along with these forces as we actually make our way through the world, running and jumping and throwing baseballs and the like. But we are not born knowing the actual laws of physics, and the actual laws of physics turn out to differ in far-reaching ways from the common-sense or "folk" physics we know by instinct. And it is our faculty of reason that we use to discern the differences, because it is our faculty of reason that allows us to . . . reason. Or to access Reason, if you prefer. Reason has a certain pride of place amongst our faculties when we ask questions about how things are. To repeat, then, if religious "instincts" have been selected for in their own right, it seems far more likely that they are analogous to "common sense" rather than to the faculty of reason. Which would imply that reason should, similarly, be granted the ability to overrule what religious instincts "teach" - when the question at hand is one of how things are.

I need to dispose of one important argument, however, before moving on. It is striking that we human beings have the faculties to develop natural science - that we can, actually, unravel the rules about how things are with a very high degree of precision. That is to say: it is striking that, however hard psychologically it may be for us to deploy it, we have a faculty of reason with a high correspondence to how the universe actually works - as opposed to how we experience the universe, which is what you would expect we would have and which, in fact, any animals that manifest signs of consciousness probably have to some degree. This is a sufficiently striking fact that it has inclined some scientists - physicists and mathematicians, mostly - to understand it as proof of at least the truth of Plato's religion, though not of Moses'. It suggests an intelligence behind the existence of things, a kinship between that intelligence and our own, and a disjunction between our intelligences and the other, lesser animal intelligences with which we have made contact. But a few things need to be said about this suggestion. First, it's just that: a suggestion. It's also possible that our ability to do natural science is a happy accident, the bi-product of some other trait selected for more mundane reasons. To the extent that modern civilization requires this kind of intelligence for survival, we may now be selecting for precisely that trait, but it's not obvious to me that individual survival, as opposed to collective survival, actually depends in any way on one's ability to do math or natural science, so I doubt this is the case. Second, even if one is persuaded by this suggestion, it does not imply that there is any truth whatever to the religious beliefs that we are strongly inclined to hold. Even if it could be proved that there is an intentionality behind everything, that does not imply that there is an intentionality behind any particular thing. And it is the latter that is the meat and potatoes of religion as it has actually been lived for all of human history. Third, and finally, no analogy can be made between the correspondence of the law-governed universe to law-discerning human reason and a hypothesized correspondence between a God-governed universe and a God-knowing human soul. No such analogy can be made because science justifies itself in its own terms and has earned that correspondence. It is not at all obvious what our religions - assuming they agreed with one another on some irreducible set of axioms, which they don't - could do to earn such a correspondence for themselves.

Derb is right that Wieseltier's review is (as Wieseltier himself might formulate it) "objectively" anti-Darwinist in that it gives aid and comfort to those who want to wall off certain kinds of scientific arguments as inadmissable. But I don't think that's a very telling attack, and Derb wouldn't approve of accusations in that style made in other contexts (such as, for example, when Wieseltier has called people or arguments "objectively" anti-Semitic). The more telling point is that Wieseltier refuses to engage with Darwinian logic as such. He seems to have concluded long ago that science by definition couldn't possibly impinge on his (humanist) beliefs, and so when someone comes along saying, actually, they do so impinge, he doesn't need to engage that particular argument at all. Unfortunately, and here I get to my most important disagreement with both Wieseltier and Derb, I think Darwinian logic does impinge in a very specific way on all sorts of beliefs that, I suspect, the three of us hold in common. To take this argument further, I'm going to have to wander off into theodicy. I hope at least some of you will follow me there.

David Hart wrote a piece about theodicy for First Things last year that annoyed me to no end, and as I thought about it I decided that it annoyed me not for any reason particular to it but because I find Christian theodicy uncompelling as such, and this was a perfectly orthodox example of Christian theodicy. My initial reaction to the piece was different; I thought I was annoyed because Hart was elaborating a Manichean theodicy in that he attributed natural evil to God's "enemy" rather than to God. But, in fairness, in good orthodox Christianity, natural evil is a product of Man's Original Sin. The very nature of reality itself is fallen as a consequence of humanity's free choice to rebel. I find this theodicy unpersuasive on a gut level, I will admit. But it seems to me that the Darwinian account of creation makes it - or ought to make it - very, very hard for anyone to accept such a theodicy.

The reason is simple. The biblical account of creation, in the Christian reading, has natural evil enter the world as a consequence of human sin. Without our sin, there would be no suffering and death. In the Darwinian account of evolution, suffering and death are the preconditions to our existence. Our intelligence, and hence our ability to sin, is a faculty that was selected for in a bare-handed struggle for survival. Our religious instinct, if one is to assert that it does correspond to some objective reality as our reason corresponds to the reasoned ordering of the universe, is also the fruit of a process of natural selection. We may climb a mountain and see the face of God, but the mountain we climb is a mountain of skulls.

Put simply: natural selection is not the motor one would expect the Christian God to use to make the world go 'round.

(This is not to say that orthodox Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu theodicies are satisfying to me. Personally, I don't know a theodicy more compelling than that expressed by the whirlwind to Job: behold Behemoth, whom I made with thee . . . he is the beginning of the ways of God. If Behemoth is the beginning of the ways of God, then His ways truly are not our ways. The whirlwind does not attempt to justify the ways of God to man; the whirlwind tells man to stop expecting such a justification and get on with life, a life only possible because of God, author of all, and a life filled with wonder as well as suffering. Such an attitude isn't really a theodicy at all, which is probably why I find it more persuasive than either the attempts to justify the ways of God to man that David Hart, following Ivan Karamazov, abominates, or the orthodox Christianity that he embraces instead.)

Why do I take this digression? Because Derb would like to wall religion off from science by confining them to different explanatory realms. Religion will say absolutely nothing about how things are, and science will say absolutely nothing about why things are. The trouble is that I really do think discoveries about how things are can impact the persuasiveness of certain explanations about why things are. Which means that religion, even if it abandons any attempt to joust directly with science and accepts evolution, textual criticism, and so forth, may be threatened nonetheless by the discoveries of science.

Which leaves me with the following conclusion. If I am right that a "wall of separation" between science and religion is not tenable, because science may nonetheless threaten religion by its explanations of how things are; and if I am right that reason and science are rightly privileged in our heirarchy of faculties when we investigate the world as it is, and therefore religion must rightly yield to science in that sphere; and if I am right (and I'm agreeing with Derb here as well as in the previous point) that religion is not going to go away because human beings are born with a religious instinct (and this instinct, contra Dennett, may have survival value rather than being an unfortunate bi-product); then it follows that humanity badly needs religious leaders who take the truth - the whole truth - seriously. It seems very unlikely to me indeed that Aquinas, Averroes and Maimonides, in reconciling, as they saw it, their revealed religions with the Aristotelean science that they knew, anticipated precisely every possible challenge to be raised by science for the rest of human history. To a considerable extent, the landscape of religious thinkers today presents us with three choices: those who actively war with science; those who recycle old Scholastic arguments to reconcile science and religion as if science's challenge were unchanged in 800 years; and those who have never entertained a serious thought about such questions because they - "objectively" - treat religion as a branch of politics and/or psychotherapy. These three alternatives are not good ones - not good ones for any religious tradition and not good ones for human civilization.

And he's added this as well:

A follow-up to last night's post (which, by the way, reads to me as kind of rambling and incoherent in the cold light of day):

I realize that I forgot to include any discussion of that paper by Robert McCauley that Derb linked to in his first post. Since I enjoyed the paper very much, and had a few thoughts about it, I want to correct that omission.

First off, I think the paper is broadly speaking correct. Science is profoundly unnatural, whereas religion is rooted deeply in human nature.

I also agree that science is, for that reason, more fragile, more vulnerable to extinction, than is religion in general or even particular religions. Science is dependent on institutional continuity in a way that religion - even organized religion - is less so, because individual believers can be effective tradents while the individual scientist cannot similarly carry his tradition on his back. The vulnerability of science is a sociological observation, but it derives from a truth about individual psychology.

I do think, however, that there is a bit of confusion in the paper as to the definition of religion. McCauley presumes that religion is, quintessentially, a set of beliefs - beliefs about supernatural agents and their impact on the natural world. Even "primitive" religion begins with theories about these supernatural agents and proceeds from there to invent rituals to influence these agents. My strong inclination, by contrast, is to understand religion as quintessentially a set of practices, and to find any architecture of belief to be belated. We have a deep-seated need to engage in ritual behaviors, and to tell stories; we come up with rituals and stories about the gods because we need the rituals and the stories, not because we've got a theory about why crops fail. But, to be fair, I am at least somewhat inclined to credit theories that find much of human reasoning about our decisionmaking to be belated - that is to say, to credit psychologies that claim we decide to do something without conscious reasoning and then, after the fact, use our reason to tell ourselves stories to explain why we did what we did. So religious behavior is just a special case of behavior in general for me. (Do not mistake me: I am in no way whatsoever a behaviorist. I don't understand how anyone could possibly deny the existence of mental states or their power to impact behavior. But it may still be the case that conscious mental states are belated with respect to any particular decision - decision #1 is made unconsciously but results in conscious mental states that "set up" the board, as it were, for decision #2, also made unconsciously but plainly affected by the conscious mental states that develop after and in response to - though we think they are prior and predicate to - decision #1. Is that clear?)

I probably being unfair in calling this a confusion, because McCauley alludes at a couple of points to the difference between religion "as actually practiced" and theology. But I'm not sure he sees the full implications of this distinction. Theology is quite as unnatural as science, and as likely to be in conflict with common sense and instinct as science is. I would make the following analogy: religion is a natural practice that rests on a foundation of instinctive predilection to ritual behavior, whereas theology is an unnatural, belated intellectual activity that is wedded to but also in perpetual conflict with "natural" religion, in the same way that tool-making in the broadest sense is a natural practice that rests on a foundation of instinctive knowledge of common-sense physics, whereas science is an unnatural, belated intellectual activity that is wedded to but also in perpetual conflict with "common-sense" reasoning about reality. Science is no more in conflict with "instinctive" religion than it is with common sense - that is to say: it's very much in conflict with both, but no one takes this to mean that common sense should be eradicated. By contrast, science and theology, inasmuch as they are competing totalizing systems, may indeed come into conflict, but if they do it seems to me that theology must, in some fashion, give way, because science as such by its nature cannot do so, whereas theology, because its ultimate object is to explain why things are, to impart meaning to reality rather than to make detailed and accurate predictions about how reality will behave, should be capable of assimilating whatever science discovers about how the universe works. My point from yesterday was that while theology as such should be able to do so, individual theologies may not be so capable, and thus science and religion as such should be able to live together in peace and harmony (for long stretches, anyway) but science and individual religions may indeed come into fatal conflict (or those individual religions may survive, but so transformed as to be unrecognizable to earlier generations of believers).

Science and theology are alike totalizing ways of apprehending reality. The kind of religious instinct that McCauley focuses on in his paper is not. McCauley quotes Dennett as saying that "until science came along, one had to settle for personifying the unpredictable--adopting the intentional stance toward it--and trying various desperate measures of control and appeasement." This is a perfect illustration of the category mistake that infects so much scientific writing about religion. The philosophical and theological tradition of arguments that any such attempt at appeasement is vain long predates the development of modern science; Job and Ecclesiastes are two early examples from the Western religious canon. And the natural impulse to want to appease the gods so they will take the cancer away has not been exorcized by modern science. Rather, those who are cowed by modern science's disapproval of cancer spirits may develop ritual behaviors that look for all the world religious but that are more solopsistic in nature, making of ourselves the gods to be appeased.

I don't want to sound negative; I thought McCauley's piece was a good one. As a corrective to the nurturist assumptions of cultural anthropologists and religious studies types, it's quite useful. Historians of popular culture and popular religiosity are frequently inclined to find suppressed "traditions" fighting against institutional religion when what they are probably observing is the effervescence of natural religion. But as an entry in the science vs. religion lists, I find the piece somewhat less useful.