national review review

D.H. Lawrence quoted by Jonah Goldberg

2006-10-18T13:15:00.000-07:00

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]

2006-09-29T11:08:00.000-07:00

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]

2006-09-29T11:05:00.000-07:00

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]

2006-09-29T08:25:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-29T08:22:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-29T08:14:00.000-07:00

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]

2006-09-18T10:52:00.000-07:00

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]

2006-09-18T10:44:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-18T10:37:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-17T11:06:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-17T10:36:00.000-07:00

"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

2006-04-26T20:00:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-25T14:47:00.003-07:00

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

2006-04-22T08:02:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-22T07:59:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-22T07:44:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-03-31T23:51:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-24T15:19:00.000-08:00

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.

>>>>>

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.

Jonah Goldberg on Liberal Books Worth Reading

2006-01-24T14:04:00.000-08:00

"As I've written a bunch of times, I think liberals have cut themselves off from their own intellectual tradition, to the point where the giants of the true liberal tradition — Locke, Smith, the Founders, etc. — are vastly more celebrated on the right than on the left. But even the founders of "modern liberalism" (i.e. Progressivism), which means almost the exact opposite of traditional liberalism, are very rarely celebrated by self-described liberals today. Don't take my word for it — E. J. Dionne admits as much in his book Stand Up Fight Back: "Liberals and Democrats tend not to view themselves as the inheritors of a grand tradition. Almost on principle, they are suspicious of such traditions, of too much theorizing, of linking themselves too much to the past." Modern liberalism has lots of intellectual giants, but liberal totem poles tend to feature activists more than thinkers and writers. Indeed, of the intellectual giants who formed (or deformed) modern liberalism — Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, et al. — "not one of them is routinely celebrated by today's liberals," according to Dionne. (Meanwhile, the avatar of movement liberalism these days — that Daily Kos guy — admits he doesn't really read books much at all)."

John Derbyshire on the life force and death

2006-01-18T12:51:00.000-08:00

"In Stay of Execution, his memoir of the inoperable cancer than at last killed him, the political journalist Stewart Alsop wrote of waking in his hospital room late one night with the conviction, induced by chemotherapy drugs, that he was in a railroad carriage. He got out of bed and walked to the door of his room, steadying himself against the swaying of the "carriage" floor. When he reached the door, the swaying suddenly stopped, and all went still. He peered out into the dark, empty corridor. The train, he somehow knew, had reached Baltimore, and he should get out at Baltimore. However, he did not want to get out at Baltimore. The thought took him with great force: He did not want to get out at Baltimore. He turned from the door and went back to bed."

Goldberg on Kennedy

2006-01-17T14:17:00.000-08:00

Ted Kennedy is going to quit an organization he's been a member of for five decades -- and to which he still pays dues -- because he's just discovered that it discriminates against women. When Kennedy tried to smear Alito as a sexist, critics noted the Senator belongs to an all-male group called the Owl Club. In 1984 Harvard cut ties to the group because of legislation Kennedy sponsored but he remained a member nonetheless.

But here's the best part. He says he will quit, “as fast as I can.”

Because, you know, the Owl Club is like one of those LA gangs where you gotta walk the line of a beat down by other members before you can leave and so it takes a while to get in good enough shape to quit.

Oh, he also says that he "probably" couldn't pass muster on the Judiciary Committee himself.

Mary Jo Kopechne was unavailable for comment.

POPE SAYS ISLAM CAN'T REFORM reports Rod Dreher

2006-01-09T15:57:00.000-08:00

"The Asia Times Online columnist Spengler notes that Pope Benedict XVI is recently reported to have observed that Islam cannot reform itself along the lines the West is depending on. The reason is very simple: unlike Judaism and Christianity, which take the Bible to be the inspired word of God, mediated through humans and therefore subject to interpretation, Islam believes the Koran is the literal and direct word of God, dictated to the Prophet. If you believe this, then it's easy to see why diverging too far from the plain text of the Koran is blasphemous (and we know what happens to those deemed to have blasphemed against Islam). Spengler is amazed by the silence from the Western media over this remarkable statement attributed to the current Pope -- a statement Spengler endorses -- and he suggests that we shrink from acknowledging it because the consequences of the Pope being right about this is too horrible to contemplate."

Bradford William Short on Bioethics and Dead Presidents

2006-01-05T19:49:00.000-08:00

Many bioethicists are striving to create a grim future for America, one in which such outrages as infanticide are tolerated. But disfiguring the future isn't enough for some of them. They're doing the same thing to the past.

Pro-assisted-suicide bioethicists have time and again made false and often preposterous claims about the history of suicide and assisted suicide in Western (and especially Anglo-American) thought. Further evidence of this fiction can be found in the just published Ending Life: Ethics and the Way We Die, written by the influential University of Utah bioethicist Margaret Pabst Battin. (She was one of the signatories to the bioethicists' March 2004 letter protesting President Bush's appointment of new members to the Kass Commission.) In this book, Battin advances arguments in favor of legalizing and legitimating assisted suicide. One of them is that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who uncannily both died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1826, may have both deliberately killed themselves.

Goldberg on an Unlikely Firebrand

2006-01-05T19:44:00.000-08:00

Among the proud recipients of Time magazine's fluffy end-of-year "People Who Mattered" feature is Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Here's how his blurb begins: "He is an unlikely firebrand: the soft-spoken son of a blacksmith who still sometimes drives a 30-year-old Peugeot. But Iran's new President doesn't shrink from controversy. After winning a disputed election, he said . . ." Now, before I finish that sentence, let's at least note that so far Time is using the same tone it might use to talk about John McCain, Joe Wilson, George Clooney, or some other "soft-spoken" "unlikely firebrand" beloved by the media. (Time has referred to both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sen. Joe Lieberman as "unlikely firebrands"as well. To date neither has proposed genocide.)

So, does Ahmadinejad have a wacky blog? Did he admit on Larry King Live that he voted for Ralph Nader in 2000? What makes him such a charming rogue?

A Muslim makes a case for Intelligent Design, with a few words about Seattle's own Discovery Institute

2005-12-03T08:56:00.000-08:00

When President Bush declared his support for the teaching of intelligent design (ID) theory in public schools along with Darwinian evolution, both he and the theory itself drew a lot of criticism. Among the many lines of attack the critics launch, one theme remains strikingly constant: the notion that ID is a Trojan Horse of Christian fundamentalists whose ultimate aim is to turn the U.S. into an theocracy.

In a furious New Republic cover story, "The Case Against Intelligent Design," Jerry Coyne joined in this hype and implied that all non-Christians, including Muslims, should be alarmed by this supposedly Christian theory of beginnings that "might offend those of other faiths." Little does he realize that if there is any view on the origin of life that might seriously offend other faiths — including mine, Islam — it is the materialist dogma: the assumptions that God, by definition, is a superstition, and that rationality is inherently atheistic.

That offense is no minor issue. In fact, in the last two centuries, it has been the major source of the Muslim contempt for the West. And it deserves careful consideration.

An Old Wall
The conflict between Christian Europe and the Islamic Middle East has a long history, marked by many crusades and jihads, all of which had both sacred and mundane motives. Yet in the last two centuries, a new kind of West, a modern one, arose, and the relationship between the two civilizations became asymmetrical. Western Europe became overwhelmingly superior to the world of Islam and its sole superpower, the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans' realization of the West's ascendancy led them, in the late 18th century, to initiate a process of Westernization. The process, which began by importing Western technology, broadened throughout the 19th century with the adaptation of Western educational systems and legal structures, including a system of constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament. Other than marginal fanatics such as the Wahhabis of the Arabian Peninsula — who launched a revolt against Ottoman rule, asserting that "the Turks became infidels" by abolishing slavery — the Ottoman ulema (religious scholars) and Islamic intellectuals welcomed these reforms.

But it was more than just telegraphs, trains, and constitutions that started arriving from the West; philosophies came as well. And since late-19th-century European thought was predominantly atheistic and anti-religious, these philosophies alarmed Muslim thinkers. When the theories of Comte, Spencer, and Darwin became fashionable among the Westernized Ottoman elite, an intellectual war began. Istanbul, the Empire's capital, became the stage of hot intellectual debates. While Francophile atheists such as Abdullah Cevdet and Suphi Ethem were quoting the works of Darwin and Ernst Haeckel to argue that man is an accidental animal and religion a comforting myth, Muslim scholars were writing tracts to defend the Islamic faith and refute the "theories of disbelief" pouring in from Europe.

Sadly, it was secularist Europe — and especially, theophobic France — rather than the religious United States that the Islamic world encountered as "the West." No wonder, then, that the West eventually became synonymous with godlessness. Moreover, within Muslim societies, Europeanized elites grew in number and were seen — with a lot of justification — as soulless, skirt-and-money-chasing men drinking whiskey while looking down upon traditional believers as ignoramuses.

The Muslim reaction to this kind of Westernization was to erect a wall of separation between the West and their communities. "We will get the technology of the West," declared Said Nursi, a leading Muslim scholar of late Ottoman and early Turkish life, "but never their culture." That culture, according to Nursi, had a major problem: It was "plagued by materialism."

The gap between the West and the Middle East deepened owing to the political faults of the West, such as European colonialism and the American support for Middle East tyrannies, and, more recently, the barbaric terrorism of fanatics who act and kill in the name of Islam. Yet, despite these political conflicts, the perception of the West in the minds of devout Muslims remains the greatest underlying problem. Although they admire its freedom, they detest its materialism.

In a recent Spectator piece, titled "Muslims Are Right about Britain," Conservative British MP John Hayes pointed to the same problem. "Many moderate Muslims believe that much of Britain is decadent," says Mr. Hayes, and adds, "They are right." He explained that because of the prevailing culture, "Modern Britons . . . are condemned to be selfish, lonely creatures in a soulless society where little is worshipped beyond money and sex," and asked, "Is it any wonder that the family-minded, morally upright moderate Muslims despair?"

The distaste for American culture in the Islamic world is based on similar feelings. The America that people see is one represented by Hollywood and MTV. A recent poll in Turkey revealed that 37 percent of Turks define Americans as "materialistic" while a mere 8 percent define them as "religious." Not surprisingly, 90 percent say that they know the U.S. mainly through television.

From all this, one can see that the much-debated cultural gap between the West and the Muslim world is actually a two-sided coin: While the latter has some extremely conservative or radical elements that turn life into joyless misery, the former has extremely hedonistic and degenerate elements that turn life into meaningless profligacy. And if we look for a rapprochement between Westerners and Muslims, we again have to see both sides of the coin: While Muslim communities need reformers of culture that will save them from bigotry, the Western societies need redeemers of culture that will save them from materialism. Of course, the manifestations of the former (such as support for terrorism) are far more dangerous and intolerable than those of the latter, but as root causes, both must be acknowledged.

Richard Dawkins & the Material Girl
Yes, but what exactly is materialism? Isn't it more obviously represented by the extravagance of pop stars than by the sophisticated theories of atheist scientists and scholars? Isn't the cultural materialism of, say, Madonna, quite different from the philosophical materialism of Richard Dawkins?

Well, it is self-evident that they look dissimilar, but the worldviews they represent are intertwined. Cultural materialism means living as if there were no God or moral absolutes, and all that matters is matter. Philosophical materialism means to argue that there is no God to establish any moral absolutes, and matter is all there is. The former worldview finds its justification in the latter. Actually, in the modern world, philosophical materialists act as the secular priesthood of a lifestyle based on hedonism and moral relativism. The priesthood convinces the masses that we are all accidental occurrences who are not under any Divine judgment; and the masses live, earn, spend, and have relationships according to this supposition. A popular MTV hit summarizes this presumption bluntly: "You and me baby ain't nuthin' but mammals; so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel."

The biological justification for promiscuity — that we are "nuthin' but mammals" — is no accident: The idea that we are all mere animals is at the heart of cultural materialism. And that idea is, of course, based on Darwinism. That's why Darwinism, in the words of Daniel Dennett, one of its hard-core proponents, acts as a "universal acid; it eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview."

That "revolutionized worldview" — in which God is denied, attacked, and ridiculed — is the grand problem we Muslims have with the West. It is true that some fanatics among us hate the West's liberty and democracy, too. Yet for the sane and pious Muslim majority, those are welcome attributes. This majority's only problem is the materialism that encompasses the West. And they would welcome those who would save the West — and thus the whole world — from it.

A Discovery Zone
That's why something called the Wedge Document — although horrifying to America's secularist intelligentsia — offers a message of hope for Muslims. The Wedge Document is a 1999 memorandum of the Discovery Institute (DI), the Seattle-based think tank that acts as the main proponent of ID. In this document, the Institute explains that its long-term goal is "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies." Much of the fuss made about the Document by its opponents is absurd; it does not propose the transformation of the U.S. into a theocracy. But, as official DI documents point out, there is nothing wrong in expecting cultural impact from a scientific theory; Darwinians, after all, revel in the cultural impact of their own doctrines.

By its bold challenge to Darwinian evolution — a concept that claims it is possible to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist" — ID is indeed a wedge that can split the foundations of scientific materialism. ID presents a new perspective on science, one that is based solely on scientific evidence yet is fully compatible with faith in God. That's why William Dembski, one of its leading theorists, defines ID as a bridge between science and theology.

As the history of the cultural conflict between the modern West and Islam shows, ID can also be a bridge between these two civilizations. The first bricks of that bridge are now being laid in the Islamic world. In Turkey, the current debate over ID has attracted much attention in the Islamic media. Islamic newspapers are publishing translations of pieces by the leading figures of the ID movement, such as Michael J. Behe and Phillip E. Johnson. The Discovery Institute is praised in their news stories and depicted as the vanguard in the case for God, and President Bush's support for ID is gaining sympathy. For many decades the cultural debate in Turkey has been between secularists who quote modern Western sources and Muslims who quote traditional Islamic sources. Now, for the first time, Muslims are discovering that they share a common cause with the believers in the West. For the first time, the West appears to be the antidote to, not the source of, the materialist plague.

Is ID True?
Of course, ID — like any other scientific theory — stands or falls not according to its political and diplomatic utility, but according to the evidence. So: Is ID true?

There is a huge and growing body of ID literature produced by some of the world's finest minds, and I won't attempt even to summarize the overwhelming evidence it presents for design in nature. Yet I think an examination of the main premise behind the current opposition to ID might be helpful.

To see that premise, we first have to note how ID theorists criticize Darwin. They do this by applying his own criterion for falsification. "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications," said Darwin, "my theory would break down." ID theorists, such as biochemist Michael J. Behe, apply this criterion to complex biochemical systems such as the bacterial flagellum or blood clotting and explain that they could not have been "formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications" — because they don't function at all unless they are complete.

What is the Darwinian response to this? Here's Jerry Coyne again, in The New Republic: "In view of our progress in understanding biochemical evolution, it is simply irrational to say that because we do not completely understand how biochemical pathways evolved, we should give up trying and invoke the intelligent designer." Note that Coyne is here denying the falsification criterion that Darwin himself acknowledged. According to Darwin, if you demonstrate "that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications," the theory will break down. According to Coyne, you will only be pointing to a system about which "we do not completely understand how [it] evolved."

In other words, Coyne leaves no way that the theory can break down. Whatever problem you find with the theory today will somehow be solved in the future. Actually Coyne, quite generously, does give a criterion to refute Darwinism: Should we "find human fossils co-existing with dinosaurs, or fossils of birds living alongside those of the earliest invertebrates," that would "sink neo-Darwinism for good." But ID proponents aren't questioning the fact that dinosaurs predated humans and invertebrates predated birds; our question, rather, is how they came to be. Coyne sounds like someone who would silence a serious critique of the theory of plate tectonics by saying, "Hey, show me that the Earth is flat and thus sink my theory for good, or shut up forever."

With his solid faith in Darwinism, Coyne also assures us that the gaps in the fossil record — which should have been filled by the 150-year-long desperate search for the fossilized remains of numerous, successive, slight modifications — "are certainly due to the imperfection of the fossil record." But why can't we consider the possibility that the gaps might be real — that forms of complex life might have appeared on Earth in the way they are, as the fossil record suggests? The standard reply to this question is the "god of the gaps" argument: that theists have imagined divine powers behind natural phenomena in the past, and science, in time, unveiled the natural processes behind those phenomena. But if we had seen a cumulative filling of gaps since Darwin, we would have agreed. What we have actually seen is the reverse: Ever since Darwin, and especially in recent decades, the problems with the theory of evolution have been deepening and widening. With the discovery of the unexpected complexity of biology, and the sudden leap forward in the history of life with the Cambrian explosion, the Darwinian theory turns out to be based on an atheism of the gaps, in which lack of knowledge about life led to the wrong assumption that it is simple enough to be explained by a non-design theory.

God & Muslims
There are many other attacks on ID in the media, and they are all useful in that they demonstrate the true intellectual force behind Darwinism: a commitment to materialism. The most common argument against ID, that it invokes God and so cannot be a part of science, is a crystal-clear expression of that commitment. Instead of asking, "What if there really were an intelligent designer active in the origin of life?" the Darwinists take it for granted that such a designer doesn't exist and limit the definition of science according to that unproven premise. Similarly, the evidence for the existence of a pre-Sumerian civilization would not be "a part of history" if you define history as "the discipline that examines the past of human societies starting from the Sumerians and never, ever, accepting the possibility of something else before." A saner approach would be to question the definition of the discipline that is challenged by evidence — not to ignore the evidence in order to save the definition of the discipline. The reason this saner approach is not the mainstream view in biology is the same old dogmatic belief: materialism.

Of course, Darwinians have the right to believe in whatever they wish, but it is crucial to unveil that theirs is a subjective faith, not an objective truth, as they have been claiming for more than a century. This unveiling would mark a turning point in the history of Western civilization, by reconciling science and religion and letting people become intellectually fulfilled theists. Moreover, it would mark a turning point in the history of the world, by changing the meaning of "the West" and "Westernization" in the eyes of Muslims. They have been resisting the influx of godlessness from the West for a long time; they would be much less alarmed in the face of a redeemed West.

Phillip E. Johnson once said that the ID debate is about the question whether the U.S. is a nation under God or a nation under Darwin. We Muslims see the latter as a plague; we have no problem with the former. We might have disagreements, but we agree on the most fundamental truth of all — that there really is a God out there, and He is the One to Whom we owe our very life and existence.

— Mustafa Akyol is a Muslim writer based in Istanbul, Turkey, and one of the expert witnesses who testified to the Kansas State Education Board during the hearings on evolution. His website is www.thewhitepath.com.

Goldberg on the Congressional Christmas Tree

2005-12-03T08:45:00.000-08:00

"Just this week, the Capitol performed its own minor Christmas miracle of transubstantiation. At the beginning of the week, House Speaker Denny Hastert unveiled a "holiday tree." But a few days later, after some entirely predictable bah humbugs, he rechristened it a "Christmas" tree. (Similarly, when the city of Boston tried to unveil its official "Holiday tree," the premier of Nova Scotia, which had provided it as a gift, called it a nifty trick since, "when it left Nova Scotia, it was a Christmas tree.")

These miracles aren’t exactly up there with keeping lamp oil burning for eight days, never mind rising from the dead, but they’re pretty good for government work.

Personally, I take no offense at the government unveiling a Christmas tree on the grounds of the “people’s house.” Besides, a place that in love with pork is hardly kosher to begin with."

Ponnuru and Goldberg on Torture and Killing

2005-11-30T22:35:00.000-08:00

THE BLACK BOX OF TORTURE [Jonah Goldberg]

Okay, I finally got my thoughts organized enough to write a short piece for the mag on what really bothers me about the torture debate, so maybe I can do it even more briefly here.

The anti-torture absolutists take it as self-evident that torture (variously defined) is self-evidently evil. Context doesn't matter. Context cannot justify it. Further, they argue that torture is what defines our enemies in an existential way. We cannot become "like our enemies." And no matter what the circumstances, employing torture would make us like them.

But nobody to my knowledge has demonstrated why torture holds this unique status.

For their argument to be true, torture must be worse than killing, indeed it must be worse than the killing of innocent people. Ask any educated person if war will result in killing innocent people and they will say yes. That’s the nature of war. If taking innocent lives was always and everywhere an unconscionable evil that could not ever be tolerated in American law, then war would have to be illegal. And yet, it is not illegal. We even speak openly about “collateral damage” and the need to “minimize” it, not eliminate it.

It seems to me that one could quite easily argue that killing many innocent people is worse than torturing one evil person, particularly if doing so will save many innocent lives. This may not be the case, but if so nobody has explained why it is so to my satisfaction.

Instead, torture has been made into a moral black box, a stand-in for “something existentially and self-evidently evil.” Thus, in effect, the torture issue has succeeded where all other efforts at moral equivalence have failed. During the Cold War, the left (and some segments of the Right) claimed moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union because we had many of the same tools. The Soviets had nukes, so did we. We put people in asylums, they put people in asylums. We went to war to defend our way of life, the Reds went to war to defend their way of life. And so on.

Morally serious people saw through this. We put crazy people in asylums and murderers in prison. They locked-up Solzenytsins and Sharanskys. We went to war to fight oppression and defend liberty, they fought to oppress liberty and defend oppression. These are, to put it mildly, significant differences. An ambulance driver and a hit-and-run killer both have driver's licenses, but a serious person doesn’t claim the two are therefore morally equivalent.

But torture seems to be the one thing that changes all that. Suddenly, no matter what the context, no matter what the reason, torture is a stand-alone context-killer. Whereas even many liberals accepted that in some cases dropping atomic bombs on civilian populations could be morally acceptable given the right circumstances, torture never, ever, can be. Again, I'm willing to be persuaded that this makes sense. But as of right now, I can't get my head around the idea that it might be morally acceptable to nuke untold thousands or millions, leaving many to endure vastly greater agony than involved in 2 to 3 minutes of waterboarding but it is absolutely morally unacceptable to humiliate and hurt a terrorist in order to gain information that might help us stop just such an attack on our own citizens.

TORTURE AND KILLING [Ramesh Ponnuru]
Jonah writes: "For [the anti-torture absolutists'] argument to be true, torture must be worse than killing, indeed it must be worse than the killing of innocent people" (emphasis his). It must be worse because none of these absolutists think that war should be outlawed even though it results in the death of innocents. I think Jonah's argument goes seriously awry at this point, because it neglects intention. It isn't absurd, and I think it is indeed right, to regard the deliberate torture of a person as worse than the unintended, though foreseen and accepted, killing of an innocent. Launching a just war might very well cause many noncombatants to lose their limbs or their eyes. That the war might still be justified, even given that cost, doesn't mean that you can pluck out someone's eye during an interrogation to get him to talk.

RE: TORTURE AND KILLING [Jonah Goldberg]

Maybe, Ramesh. (And again for the record, I'm horrified by the idea that we would pluck anyone's eyes out). And I agree with you that intent matters a great deal. There's a reason you've had to spend so much time dealing with the ticking time bomb scenario -- because a scenario involving torturing someone for the fun of it is unpersuasive on its face.

But again, what is it specifically about torture that is demonstrably more evil than all these other things no matter what the context? I understand that aesthetically torture shocks the conscience. But so do thousands of maimed children from, say, the Dresden bombing. We all have access to the moral arguments -- just war, etc -- that help us accomodate the gruesome realities of war. But nobody has put forward a similar argument about torture, at least not that I've seen.

I have one partial explanation. The rights explosion. We have come to accept that human beings -- all human beings -- have certain immutable rights. This isn't new or bad. But what is new is that for some these rights cannot be forfeited based upon the actions we take. I have a right to life and free movement. If I murder someone, I forfeit my claim to those rights. But more and more it seems the idea that you can forfeit rights is falling out of favor.

Some pro-lifers take this view toward the death penalty. They argue that it simply doesn't matter what a person has done, the state has no right to execute him. I disagree, obviously, but it's an honorable position. It seems that torture is a stowaway in this worldview. Again, I am open to the argument that torture (real torture) deserves to be off limits but I want to know why. Is it because of the essential dignity of all life? Is it because cruelty -- even when the intent is to prevent greater cruelty -- is always wrong? Is it because in the long run it will corrupt our natures?

There's a bit of an echo to the animal rights debate here, I think. Animal rights activists want to argue that animals have inviolable right to certain humane treatment. Many of us sympathetic to the plight of animals still reject the idea that they have rights. Instead we've argued that animals don't have rights but humans have obligations. A decent person is not needlessly cruel to animals because cruelty to animals is at odds with our conceptions of decency.

I don't know about others, but this is where I'm most persuadable on the issue of banning torture always and everywhere. I don't think Osama Bin Laden has any rights. There isn't an ounce of kindness the man deserves. He doesn't deserve fair treatment under the Geneva Convention or any other custom of law because he's rejected those customs willy-nilly. Our rules are set up to protect the innocent, not the guilty. If we had some sort of God-given super-computer which could tell us with 100% who was guilty of murder, there would be no need for trials.

But, what Bin Laden and other murderers deserve isn't the issue. It's what we owe to ourselves and the kind of civlization we want to have. That's why I favor all sorts of things which on a practical level might make war -- and law enforcement -- more difficult. That gets me pretty close to your position. But that still doesn't quite get me to thinking it'd be wrong to waterboard Bin Laden all day long if that was the only way to prevent the next 9/11 -- or worse.

Jonah Goldberg in Seattle!

2005-11-28T23:05:00.000-08:00

How'd I miss this? I've gotta start reading the corner every half hour, I guess. Anyway, here's what he has to say:

I'm heading back to DC in a few hours. I always have such mixed feelings about Seattle. On the one hand, there's a lot to like about this town and this region. It's my kind of weather, my kind of food, etc. But I'm always amazed at how pre-Giuliani so much of the downtown is. I'm baffled at how the business community and the tourist industry can cave to the drug-addict romanticizers and panhandler enablers. There is so much skeeviness and bummery going on right at the heart of why people come to this town in the first place. And, it's not just to prey on the tourists, there are half-way houses, methadone clinics, etc all near Pike's. I don't folllow Seattle politics so I don't know how the arguments play out, but I'd have to guess there are West Coast versions of the same jackasses who thought drug dealing, transvestite hookers, and robbery were what gave Times Square its authenticity and "charm."

Sorry you didn't have a better time, Jonah. Yeah, you're right about the bums. I think what's happening is a growth in shopping districts such as the University Village, just north of Husky stadium, which is privately owned and is therefore free to boot out anybody who doesn't have a latte in their hand. Which leaves the SPD mounties free to loaf around on top of their horses and watch the homeless vomit in the streets.

What I've noticed are the hordes of mentally ill staggering about the streets, and somehow I think that's connected to a lack of public funding for mental hospitals. But that's a whole nuther story. Anyway, give us some advance warning next time. Would like to buy you a drink or three next time you're in town.

Rick Brookhiser Goes On Killing Spree

2005-11-27T23:02:00.000-08:00

from the Corner

"My Thanksgiving was dominated by the killing of my first deer--not with a manly rifle, though it is deer season (WELCOME HUNTERS say the signs on all the bars in my neighborhood) but with my car. The accident happened on Wednesday. The doe ran across a busy two lane road an hour before dusk. Didn't quite make it across the second lane--I struck her with the right side of my car (a Subaru Outback Impresza, going about 50-55). I saw the impact with my own eyes, and yet I can't remember where exactly she was hit. I have an impression she spun, or sprang up, but that may be an illusion. She fell in the front yard of a house along the road, as we pulled over, and lived for perhaps five minutes.

911 summoned the county sheriff. The only other mourner was an old man in hunter's camo who came out of one of the houses and tapped her with his shoe. The cop, young and businesslike, dispatched the matter in a few minutes. He did not inform us that we could have taken the creature for our own consumption; perhaps it went to charity, or the PBA.

The hood was crumpled, and there was a dent in the right fender. But the car drove--for 30 hours. The next day we had Thanksgiving dinner at the best restaurant I know of in the Hudson Valley, The Depuy Canal House in High Falls. We had driven about ten miles and were three miles from home when the engine began making noises, and the temperature shot up. Pulled into the parking lot of a bank, spread with snow and empty as the moon. At 10 PM in the country things roll up pretty tight. Steam billowed from the hood. Called our friend Doug, who was home and awake. He came with a bottle of Benedictine and two glasses, and his knowledge. The radiator hose had been pushed back against the fan belt, which had finally frayed a leak. We rolled the car to the side of the lot and called it a night.

Next morning we went back with Doug, who made a quick fix with duct tape, the philosopher's stone of home repair. Drove down the hill to a body shop, where the couple ahead of us had brought in a van, totalled from swerving to avoid a bear. Detroit should look into it--hunting could be their salvation."

John Henry Cardinal Newman

2005-11-24T10:03:00.000-08:00

God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission—I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.

I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place while not intending it—if I do but keep His Commandments.

Therefore I will trust Him. Whatever, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends, He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me—still He knows what He is about.

The Peanut Butter column

2005-11-19T21:49:00.000-08:00

This has always been one of my favorites. I think it's the poem.

For many years I have labored under the burden of an unrequited passion. What have I done for it, in return for all it has done for me? Nothing. But I have wondered what I could use as what the journalists call a "peg."

I have found one. This may strike some of the literal-minded as attenuated, but it goes as follows: This is the centennial year of the Tuskegee Institute, which was founded on the Fourth of July, 1881, by Booker T. Washington. Tuskegee continues to be a remarkable institution, and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is the head of a committee of illustrious men and women who are devoting themselves to raising $20 million to encourage it in its noble work.

What noble work? We have arrived at step two. It was, among other things, the principal academic home of George Washington Carver, and it was G. W. Carver who to all intents and purposes invented the peanut. What he did, more specifically, was document that the cultivation of the peanut despoiled the land far less than the cultivation of cotton, and then he set out to merchandise the peanut in order that there might be a market for it.

He discovered an estimated three hundred uses for it, many of them entirely removed from the peanut's food value. But it is this, of course, that is the wonder of the peanut. The Encyclopedia Britannica informs us that "pound for pound peanuts have more protein, minerals, and vitamins than beef liver, more fat than heavy cream, and more food energy (calories) than sugar." And George Washington Carver discovered — peanut butter.

I have never composed poetry, but if I did, my very first couplet would be:

I know that I shall never see
A poem lovely as Skippy's peanut butter.

When I was first married and made plain to my wife that I expected peanut butter for breakfast every day of my life, including Ash Wednesday, she thought me quite mad (for the wrong reasons). She has not come round, really, and this is a source of great sadness to me because one wants to share one's pleasures.

I was hardened very young to the skeptics. When I was twelve I was packed off to a British boarding school by my father, who dispatched every fortnight a survival package comprising a case of grapefruit and a large jar of peanut butter. I offered to share my tuck with the other boys at my table. They grabbed instinctively for the grapefruit — but one after another actually spit out the peanut butter, which they had never before seen and which only that very year (1938) had become available for sale in London. No wonder they needed American help to win the war.

You can find it now in specialty shops in Europe, but I have yet to see it in anyone's home. And it is outrageously difficult to get even in the typical American hotel. My profession requires me to spend forty or fifty nights on the road every year, and when it comes time to order breakfast over the telephone I summon my resolution — it helps to think about peanut butter when you need moral strength — and add, after the orange juice, coffee, skim milk, and whole-wheat toast, "Do you have any peanut butter?"

Sometimes the room service operator will actually break out laughing when the request is put in, at which point my voice becomes stern and unsmiling. Often the operator will say, "Just a minute," and then she will turn, I suppose to the chef, but I can hear right through the hand she has put over the receiver — "Hey Jack. We got any peanut butter? Room 322 wants some peanut butter!" This furtive philistinism is then regularly followed by giggles all around. One lady recently asked, "How old is your little boy and does he want a peanut butter sandwich? To which I replied, "My little boy is twenty-eight and is never without peanut butter, because he phones ahead before he confirms hotel reservations."

I introduced Auberon Waugh to cashew butter ten years ago when he first visited America, and although I think it inferior to peanut butter Auberon was quite simply overwhelmed. You can't find it in Great Britain so I sent him a case from the Farmer's Market. It quite changed his writing style: for about ten months he was at peace with the world. I think that was the time he said something pleasant about Harold Wilson. In the eleventh month, it was easy to tell that he had run out. It quite changes your disposition and your view of the world if you cannot have peanut butter every day.

So here is yet another reason for contributing money to the Tuskegee Institute. For all we know, but for it we'd never have tasted peanut butter. There'd be no Planter's, no Jif, no Peter Pan — that terrible thought reminds us of our indebtedness to George Washington Carver.

VDH on Bush's Critics

2005-11-19T21:44:00.000-08:00

Happy Blogiversary to J.W. @ Korrektiv!

This is the mantra of the extreme Left: "Bush lied, thousands died." A softer version from politicians now often follows: "If I knew then what I know now, I would never have supported the war."

These sentiments are intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible for a variety of reasons beyond the obvious consideration that you do not hang out to dry some 150,000 brave Americans on the field of battle while you in-fight over whether they should have ever been sent there in the first place.

Consider the now exasperating (and tired) argument that almost anyone who looked at the intelligence data shared the same opinion about the threat of weapons of mass destruction — former presidents, U.S. congressmen, foreign governments, Iraqi exiles, and numerous intelligence organizations.

The prewar speeches of aJay Rockefeller and Hillary Clinton sparked and sizzled with somber warnings about biological and chemical arsenals — and, yes, nuclear threats growing on the horizon. Politicians voted for war at a time of post-9/11 furor and fear, when anthrax was thought to have been scattered in our major cities and the hysteria over its traces evacuated government buildings. In response, the Democrats beat their breasts to prove that they could out-macho the "smoke-em-out" and "dead-or-alive" president in laying out the case against Saddam Hussein, especially after the successful removal of the Taliban.

To argue recently, as Howard Dean has, that the president somehow had even more intelligence data or additional information beyond what was given to the Senate Intelligence Committee can make the opposite argument from what was intended- the dangers seemed even greater the more files one read attesting to Saddam's past history, clear intent, formidable financial resources, and fury at the United States. If the Dean notion is that the president had mysterious auxiliary information, then the case was probably even stronger for war, since no one has yet produced any stealth document that (a) warned there was no WMDs, and (b) was knowingly withheld from the Congress.

A bewildered visitor from Mars would tell Washingtonians something like: "For twelve years you occupied Saddam's airspace, since he refused to abide by the peace accords and you were afraid that he would activate his WMD arsenal again against the Kurds or his neighbors. Now that he is gone and for the first time you can confirm that his weapons program is finally defunct, you are mad about this new precedent that you have established: Given the gravity of WMD arsenals, the onus is now on suspect rogue nations to prove that they do not have weapons of mass destruction, rather than for civilization to establish beyond a responsible doubt that they do?"

Even more importantly, the U.S. Senate voted to authorize the removal of Saddam Hussein for 22 reasons other than just his possession of dangerous weapons. We seem to have forgotten that entirely.

If the Bush administration erred in privileging the dangers of Iraqi WMDs, then the Congress in its wisdom used a far broader approach (as Sen. Robert Byrd complained at the time), and went well beyond George Bush in making a more far-reaching case for war — genocide, violation of U.N. agreements, breaking of the 1991 armistice accords, attempts to kill a former U.S. president, and firing on American aerial patrols. It was the U.S. Senate — a majority of Democrats included — not Paul Wolfowitz, that legislated a war to reform and restore the wider Middle East: "...whereas it is in the national security of the United States to restore international peace and security to the Persian Gulf region".

So read the senators' October 2002 resolution. It is a model of sobriety and judiciousness in authorizing a war. There are facts cited such as the violation of agreements; moral considerations such as genocide; real worries about al Qaeda's ties to Saddam (e.g., "...whereas members of al-Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq"); fears of terrorism (" ...whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of American citizens."

No doubt many Democrats in the Senate who voted to authorize the war took their cue from Bill Clinton's own November 1998 indictment of bin Laden (still, how does one indict an enemy that has declared war on you?) that explicitly stressed the connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein: "In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq."

Thus the honest and moral argument for the now contrite would be something like: "I know now that Saddam did not try to kill a former president, did not commit genocide, did not attack four of his neighbors, did not harbor anti-American terrorists, did not ignore U.N. and 1991 peace accords, and did not attack Americans enforcing U.N.-mandated no-fly zones — and so I regret my vote."

Or if the former supporters of the war had character, they would be more honest still: "Yes, Saddam was guilty of those other 22 writs, but none of them justified the war that I voted for, and I should not have included them in the resolution."

Or they could be more truthful still: "I didn't really want a war, and only threw in the bit about al Qaeda and Saddam. So I just voted for the authorization in case some crisis emerged and the President had to act swiftly."

I doubt any will ever say, "I voted to cover myself: If the war proved swift and relatively low-cost like Bosnia or Afghanistan, I was on record for it; if it got bad like Mogadishu or Lebanon, then I wasn't the commander-in-chief who conducted it."

Given such an incriminating record, what then is really at the heart of the current strange congressional hysteria?

Simple — the tragic loss of nearly 2,100 Americans in Iraq.

The "my perfect war, your messy postbellum reconstruction" crowd is now huge and unapologetic. It encompasses not just leftists who once jumped on the war bandwagon in fears that Democrats would be tarred as weak on national security (a legitimate worry), but also many saber-rattling conservatives and Republicans — including those (the most shameful of all) who had in earlier times both sent letters to President Clinton and Bush demanding the removal of Saddam and now damn their commander-in-chief for taking them at their own word.

In the triumphalism after seeing Milosevic go down without a single American death, the Taliban implode at very little cost, and Saddam removed from power with little more than 100 fatalities, there was the assumption that the United States could simply nod and dictators would quail and democracy would follow. Had we lost 100 in birthing democracy and not 2,000, or seen purple fingers only and not IEDs on Dan Rather's nightly broadcasts, today's critics would be arguing over who first thought up the idea of removing Saddam and implementing democratic changes.

So without our 2,100 losses, nearly all the present critics would be either silent or grandstanding their support — in the manner that three quarters of the American population who polled that they were in favor of the war once they saw the statue of Saddam fall.

In short, there is no issue of WMD other than finding out why our intelligence people who had once missed it in the First Gulf War, then hyped it in the next-or what actually happened to all the unaccounted for vials and stockpiles that the U.N. inspectors swore were once inside Iraq.

So the real crux is a real legitimate debate over whether our ongoing costs-billions spent, thousands wounded, nearly 2,100 American soldiers lost-will be worth the results achieved. Post facto, no death seems "worth it". The premature end of life is tangible and horrendous in a way that the object of such soldiers' sacrifices-a reformed Middle East, a safer world, enhanced American safety, and freedom for 26 million-seems remote and abstract.

Nevertheless, that is what our soldiers died for: a world in which Middle East dictators no longer murder their own, ruin their won societies, and then cynically use terrorism to whip up the Arab street and deflect their own self-induced miseries onto the United States. This is the calculus that led to 9/11, and the reason why Saddam gave sanctuary to 1980s terrorists, the killer Yasin who failed in his first attempt to take down the twin towers, and the likes of Zarqawi.

While the U.S. military conducts a brilliant campaign to implement democratic reform that is on the eve of ending with an Iraqi parliament, while there has been no repeat of promised 9/11 attacks here at home, and while the entire dictatorial Middle East from Lebanon and Syria to Egypt and Libya is in crisis — baffled, furious, or impressed by a now idealistic United States pushing for something different and far better — our intellectual and political elite harp on "WMD, WMD, WMD..."

Sadder still, they stay transfixed to this refrain either because polls show that it is good politics or it allows them a viable exit from an apparently now unpopular war.

But no, not so fast.

History has other lessons as well — as we know from the similar public depression during successful wars after Washington's sad winter at Valley Forge, Lincoln's summer of 1864, or the 1942 gloom that followed Pearl Harbor and the fall of the Philippines, Singapore, and Wake Island. When this is all over, and there is a legitimate government in the Middle East that represents the aspirations of a free people, the stunning achievement of our soldiers will be at last recognized, the idealism of the United States will be appreciated, our critics here and abroad will go mute — and one of the 23 writs for a necessary war of liberation will largely be forgotten.

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200511180818.asp

Korrektiv Appearance

2005-11-18T22:27:00.000-08:00

Happy Blogiverary, Korrektiv!

Jonah Goldberg on the Battle of Gaulistan

2005-11-12T16:15:00.000-08:00

I tried. I really did. I wanted to deal dispassionately with l'affaire francaise. I even resolved to refrain, until my Schadenfreude wore off, from commenting on the situation in the country formerly known as "France." (Possible future names include: Paristine, Gaulistan, Frarabia, and the Algerian North Bank.)

Schadenfreude is a German word meaning to take pleasure at the misfortune of others. And much like La Resistance in '40 (and '41, '42, '43, '44 and '45), I just can't shake off the Germans in this case. Since my Schadenfreude seems inextricably linked to the duration of the French intifada, I can't wait any longer. After all, the troubles promise to go on long enough for the French to lobby the International Olympic Committee to add the "Peugeot Burn" to the summer games.

To be fair, which I have not been so far, I don't actually believe the current riots are about Islam. This puts me to the left of a great many conservative Nostradamuses who've prophesized for so long that France's north African and other Muslim "immigrants" are going to bring jihad to the home front. I don't think their predictions are necessarily wrong, I just believe that this is at best a dress rehearsal.

I put "immigrants" in quotation marks for the simple reason that most of the rioters are no such thing — they were born in France and hold French passports. Their parents or grandparents were from former French colonies. But the French establishment — a term I use in the most catholic sense possible, so as to include Katie Couric and her colleagues — has had a very hard time coming up with a useful vocabulary to describe these events. French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy came out of the blocks with "scum," but the uncharacteristic lack of nuance didn't go over well in a culture that has always believed there are two sides of the story for every murderer, never mind every window smasher.

Goldberg and York on Plagiarism

2005-11-12T12:19:00.000-08:00

PLAGIARISM: TWO VIEWS [Jonah Goldberg]
From a reader:

This is not a big deal, and I think conservatives will look silly if they try to make it one.
I think it is completely fair to say this guy deserves ridicule because he can't come up with his own ideas, or even language. But this is not the same as journalistic or academic plagiarism. This guy was not (a) using it for commercial purposes (as a journalist or other published writer is), which would be theft, or (b) defrauding himself and others re: his education (remember, the victim in academic plagiarism is not the professor; it's the student (and his peers if they are being graded on a curve)).

Should he have sourced it? Of course. But this is neither theft nor fraud; it's just laziness and discourtesy. And the victim of the discourtesy doesn't even seem to care.

And from another:

Jonah,

I am an academic, and so the plagiarism issue weighs heavily with me.

The issue is not whether or not Newman cares if his material was attributed. The problem is that by publishing or signing a letter, Brown is claiming that the work is his own. I care if my students cite works in the public domain because I want to know what is original thinking on their part and where they are following someone else (even if that work is in the public domain). It is a question of whether or not the ideas (and words) are the author’s own or not. I assume that when someone writes something, the ideas and words are their own if there is no attribution. In academic circles, that is the normal assumption. Why it should be otherwise for politicians (or, as you note, construction workers) is beyond me.

If you should choose to post any of this, please withhold my name and institution.

IT'S NOT PLAGIARISM! IT'S NOT! NOT! [Byron York]
Judging from emails received, a number of people on the left are working furiously to find a distinction that will allow them to exempt Democratic Rep. Sherrod Brown from charges of plagiarism. After an initial group of "it's OK if a politician does it" emails came a group of "dailykos disclaimer" emails like those sent to Jonah. "Don't you get it?" writes one. "Bloggers *want* their ideas to be adopted by politicians!" Still another cites Nathan Newman's embrace of the dailykos disclaimer as proof that anything lifted from a public domain source is fair game:
The reporter saying that Brown's letter "was plagiarized" is flatly inaccurate. The reality is that politicians used public domain sources in a whole host of ways and using my blog post was no different.

PLAGIARISM CONT'D [Jonah Goldberg]

2005-11-12T12:17:00.000-08:00

This, I didn't know. From a reader:

While I condemn the laziness that simply quoted Newman's paice, calling it theft when it was cross-posted to Kos's site (http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/1/91136/3637) where it explicitly states that "Site content may be used for any purpose without explicit permission unless otherwise specified." strikes me as wrong. It isn't theft if it is given away.
Me If true -- and if this is why Brown felt free to copy a blog -- it strikes me as a fair point (though I have to assume it was a staffer who wrote the letter in the first place). But I think my point about the nature of plagiarism stands nonetheless.

Update The reader who sent me the above, adds:

To be honest, I don't think Newman remembered it at first himself. He added the comment as an update to his original post: http://www.nathannewman.org/laborblog/archive/003529.shtml

Goldberg on Plagiarism

2005-11-12T12:16:00.000-08:00

That's what every college Freshman is taught whether they become journalists, scientists, lawyers or construction workers. Construction workers are more likely to steal power drills than they are to steal words. Journaists are more likely to steal words. Wouldn't it be odd to argue that it isn't theft for a journalist to steal power drills?

Construction sites create special procedurs to protect the theft of power tools, because the temptation is so much greater. Similarly, journalism (like science) creates special rules for plagiarism because the temptation and risk is so much greater, not because it's a sin unique to journalists.

I'm not a huge stickler about plagiarism. I've never done it intentionally mind you, but I've made a mistake once or twice and I can see how it happens, which is why I've usually not made a big deal when people have plagiarized me. One Canadian writer lost her job because she ripped me off, for example. I never made a stink about it. But one can be easygoing about enforcement of a principle whithout arguing the principle doesn't exist.

And there's a special irony here. I think all reasonable people can agree that plagiarism is a theft of intellectual property. Well, I did a very quick Nexis search and it seems Sherrod Brown's been out front in opposing trade deals because they don't provide enough protections for intellectual property.

Brown has said this sort of thing more than a few times:

I'm still waiting to see this administration take or even propose actions to pry open the Chinese market for U.S. goods, combat import surges from China, and protect the intellectual property of America's knowledge-based industries from Chinese theft.

There seem to be a lot of similar citations.

Happy Guy Fawkes Day

2005-11-04T19:33:00.000-08:00

By John Derbyshire

Around this time of year, my American friends ask me about Guy Fawkes night. What’s that all about, they want to know? Is it really a big thing over there in England? Well, I am totally out of touch, but when I was a kid, Guy Fawkes Night — November Fifth — was a huge thing, second only to Christmas on the fun scale. There were fireworks; there was a bonfire; on top of the bonfire was a Guy — a dummy, of course, not an actual person — who got burned up when you lit the bonfire. In the days prior to the Fifth, you trundled your Guy around the neighborhood in a wheelbarrow for the appreciation of passersby, appreciation expressed by the giving of “pennies for the Guy.”

When we were tots, the actual burning was done in the family backyard. Catherine wheels were nailed to the clothes-line posts, rockets were fired off from empty milk bottles, and we little ones were given “sparklers” to hold — wires coated with something like magnesium, that burned with a fizzing white brilliance for a minute or two. The fireworks were sold in boxes at the local store, the same store we got our newspapers, candy, and soda from.

When we were older, enjoying the liberties that older boys enjoyed then — the liberties boys had enjoyed forever, back through Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, to the beginning of time, but which were abolished around 1980 as part of the general girlification of postindustrial society — the focus was the neighborhood bonfire, a 12-foot pile of old wood, painstakingly gathered over several weeks, and jealously guarded, so far as supper-time and bed-time rules permitted, against the danger that some sociopath, or a commando squad from some envious other neighborhood, would torch it prematurely. On the great night the whole thing would burn gloriously, with us boys standing round tossing squibs at each other, trying to smoke cigarettes, and failing to make ourselves appealing to the few girls present. Older yet, we made general civic nuisances of ourselves, as teenage boys always will, by roaming the streets in small packs, singing bawdy songs, and throwing fireworks into people’s front gardens.

From the surge of excitement when, sometime after supper, you heard the first fireworks go off, to the sight of burned-out rockets littering the streets on our way to school the next morning — I remember it so well. I hope it still goes on in some fashion over there; though I am sure that the new, lawyered-up England does not permit barely adolescent boys to buy boxes of minor munitions for their own amusement, or to assemble great towers of waste wood for combustion in public places. But what was it all about, actually?

Guido Was the Guy
Guy Fawkes — his baptismal name was Guido — was one of a group of plotters who, in 1605, schemed to blow up the House of Lords while the king was in it. The cellars and basements of the House were used for storage of firewood and coal. In among all this, the plotters hid 36 barrels of gunpowder, to be ignited by Guy Fawkes when the king arrived. These plotters — there were at least 13 of them — were, in short, terrorists. (Though Fawkes was no suicide bomber. The gunpowder was to be ignited by a slow fuse.) To give the thing an even more contemporary cast, they were inspired by religious zeal, or at least were disgruntled because of religious persecution.
The persecution was real. The plotters were Roman Catholics, at a time when England’s throne, parliament, and most of her people, had turned away from Rome. Many English people had gone all the way to Puritanism. Others had accepted, and got used to, Anglo-Catholicism — the Old Faith, but minus allegiance to the pope, and with the great monastic orders broken up and dispossessed.

There were still a good many Englishmen in communion with Rome. It wasn’t actually illegal (though public celebration of Mass was). In fact, there were many Lords still adhering to the Old Faith. That was what led to the discovery of the plot. The plotters sent a letter to one of these Catholic peers, Lord Mounteagle, to warn him, and to tell him to pass the warning to his coreligionists. The peer, a patriot, showed the letter to the King’s Privy Council, and the uncovering of the plot followed.

Though legal, however, the Roman faith was deeply unpopular. This was a legacy of the previous 70 years, from the time of King Henry’s break with Rome in the 1530s. Those decades had seen the brutal campaign of dimwitted Mary Tudor (reigned 1553-58) to return her country to the Old Faith, the consolidation of Anglo-Catholicism under Elizabeth (who was circumspect about her own beliefs, but was none the less excommunicated by the pope), the plotting to replace Elizabeth by the Catholic Mary Stuart, the attempts by Philip II of Spain, one of history’s greatest troublemakers, to annex or destroy the English monarchy, the Irish rebellion (with the assistance of the Catholic powers, including a body of 4,000 Spanish troops) of 1601, and the terrible religious wars and persecutions in France, England’s ancient enemy — most especially the St. Bartholomew’s Eve massacre of Protestants by Catholics in 1572.

Probably most English people who clung to the Old Faith were, like Lord Mounteagle, patriotic and harmless. Many kept very quiet about their faith, worshipping in privacy and secrecy. Some scholars believe, on circumstantial evidence, that William Shakespeare, 41 years old at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, was one such. (According to our best guesses about when the plays were written, the Gunpowder Plot probably came in between King Lear and Macbeth.) At any rate, there were severe laws — the Penal Laws — restricting the activities, property, and careers of citizens unwilling to swear allegiance to the national Church. Some of these laws were specifically anti-Catholic. Some applied to Puritans as well as Roman Catholics — that is why the Puritans eventually left for the New World. Heavy fines were imposed on these “recusants,” and some of the November Fifth plotters were well-born gentlemen who had been bankrupted by these fines.

When Elizabeth died in 1603, King James of Scotland came to the English throne. He was a clever man — an intellectual, in fact, author of several books. Unfortunately, like many intellectuals, he was seriously deficient in common sense and what we would nowadays call “people skills.” The Spanish Ambassador came up with a tag that stuck to James because it fitted so well: “the wisest fool in Christendom.” James had no grasp of political science, and could not understand the function of England’s parliament, once opining: “I am surprised that my ancestors should have allowed such an institution to come into existence.” He was foul-mouthed, had a speech impediment, and was physically unattractive. (He was, for example, extremely hairy, and had his clothes made a couple of sizes too big, so that their looseness would permit him to scratch freely. The early 17th century was not a high point in the progress of English personal hygiene.) James was also a homosexual, and his court degenerated at last into a whispering, bickering nest of favorites.

James’s defects did not really show up until later in his reign, though. For the first few years, the masterly statecraft of Elizabeth’s court survived, most notably in the person of the brilliant Robert Cecil, son of the equally gifted William Cecil, a remarkable case of great political wisdom running in a family. Unfortunately, cold Cecilian statecraft was at odds with the intellectual idealism of the new King. James was sympathetic to the Old Faith. His wife and his mother were both devout Catholics. He personally favored relaxation of the Penal Laws, and made this known. His advisers dissuaded him, believing — probably correctly — that the religious situation was not stable enough to permit open toleration without major problems of public order arising. The hopes of English Catholics, briefly raised, were dashed. The Gunpowder Plot was a natural consequence.**

The uncovering of the plot led to a surge of anti-Catholicism. New life was given to the suspicion that every Catholic was a traitor. The first “Guys” burned were actually effigies of the pope. (This was still the case in some parts of England well into the twentieth century.) These prejudices echoed down through the centuries in England and her offspring nations, like the U.S.A. They could be heard in the 1960 presidential campaign, when it was wondered aloud whether a Catholic like John F. Kennedy, owing allegiance to a large international church, could be a true patriot. A character in one of Evelyn Waugh’s novels (Waugh was a Catholic convert) grumbles that still, in the 1940s. English Catholics dwelt under the suspicion of being spies.

By the middle 20th century, though, anti-Catholicism already seemed a little quaint in England. English Catholics had redeemed themselves in the eyes of their fellow-countrymen by good citizenship and dogged patriotism, with particular attention to serving, like Waugh’s Guy (!) Crouchback, in England’s wars with valor and distinction. (Perhaps with this as their model, English Jews followed suit, so that England is now one of the least anti-Semitic nations in the world.)

Today & Tolerance
Does any of this offer lessons to the many Muslims now living in Britain and America? Some commentators think so. Writing in the London Daily Telegraph a few days ago, Philip Johnston drew a parallel between the English Catholics of 1605 and the Muslims of present-day England. He congratulates his countrymen on their refusal to follow the jihadist bombings in London this year with a general persecution of Muslims: “As we remember once more the Fifth of November, let us also not forget what a frightened and intolerant society we once were and how far we have come in the intervening 400 years.”
I think Mr. Johnston’s self-satisfaction is misplaced. Muslims in present-day Britain enjoy full civil rights, and always have. The plotters of 1605 came from a background of decades of persecution, when Catholics had been dispossessed, exiled, hanged, and burned at the stake. Whatever you think of religious terrorism, Guy Fawkes’s grievances were real.

Those grievances were more intense, too, from being nursed against the plotters’ own fellow-countrymen. Religion aside, there was no difference between a Catholic Englishman and a Protestant one. So far as the Church of England was concerned, in fact, even the doctrinal differences were trivial — the supremacy of the pope and the use of Latin in liturgy being the only points of any substance so far as non-intellectual worshippers were concerned. Roman Catholic Englishmen and Anglo-Catholic Englishmen looked the same, dressed the same, spoke the same language, practiced the same folk customs, ate the same food, shared the same national memories and culture, and worshiped the same God in very similar styles. Not uncommonly they were spouses, or siblings. It is a remarkable thing, in fact, that even with these advantages, it yet took three hundred years for English Catholics to convince other Englishmen that they were worthy of full citizenship and respect. The introduction of large colonies of third-world Muslims into Anglo-Saxon societies is a phenomenon of a completely different kind, bringing a degree of foreign-ness that simply was not present in the religious divisions of 1605 England, and leading to psychological tensions of the sort described by Theodore Dalrymple.

On the other side of the balance, the patriotism of an island nation like Britain defines itself in part by strong opposition to old and familiar enemies. From the point of view of an Englishman in 1605, these enemies were all colored purple. They were Catholic powers. Most hostility was directed at Spain; Anglo-French relations were actually going through a sunny spell (though this did nothing to prevent Shakespeare filling his plays with traditional anti-French quips); the Hapsburg (i.e. Holy Roman) Empire was too distant to occupy much space in English minds. Anti-Catholicism could be justified by an appeal to patriotism. Real nations, peer powers, were intent on bringing England back into the Papal fold. This was not paranoia; they really were.

This does not apply to the Muslims of today. Nobody, in England or America, takes Muslim nations that seriously. We regard them as backward, corrupt, unstable, and militarily insignificant. Jihadist terrorism is a great nuisance, of course; but no Englishman of 2005 envisages a Muslim fleet sailing up the Channel in Armada style, to put a Muslim ruler on the throne of Westminster. The thought is absurd. Even less do Americans fear forcible incorporation into the dar al Islam. An American Muslim may fall under suspicion of working for a nuisance terrorist group, but he can’t plausibly be seen as a spy for a peer nation, one that might overthrow and occupy our own. The only real Muslim nations are Egypt, Turkey, and Iran. The first two are friendly, or at any rate non-hostile. Iran is too far away, and too poor, for Americans to perceive her as a real nation-scale threat. The rest are pseudo-nations, ramshackle no-account tribal condominiums of no importance to us, except as suppliers of oil.

In respect of Iran, this may change. If that nation becomes a nuclear power, that will be one big step closer to peer status in the American public mind. Like the handguns of the 19th-century American frontier, nukes are “equalizers.” If it sinks in to the minds of Englishmen, or Americans, that some Muslim power, or powers, is a real threat to our nationhood, the tolerance that Philip Johnston boasts of so proudly may undergo some slippage. Jihadist terrorism has not seriously upset our modern national ethic of infinite tolerance. A Muslim Guy Fawkes, seen as the agent of a hostile peer nation, might do so.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
** There is, inevitably, a revisionist theory about the Gunpowder Plot, arguing that it was all, in fact, a frame-up by Robert Cecil to stop the liberalizing pro-Catholic trend. My own opinion is that this is Grassy Knoll stuff, but there is a substantial literature on it. Interested readers could do worse than begin with the Wikipedia article headed Gunpowder Plot, with the usual caveats about Wikipedia taken as understood.

Hero of the People by Kerry Dupont

2005-11-04T19:31:00.000-08:00

In 1976, Saddam Hussein ordered the execution of one Mithal al-Alusi, a member of a Sunni family in the Fallujah area.
Al-Alusi escaped execution through a series of ordeals, and finally landed in Germany, where he became a businessman in the textile industry. In his German exile, he became active in the Iraqi opposition party led by Ahmed Chalabi. After Iraq was liberated by Coalition forces, he returned to his homeland.

Then he performed a truly courageous act: He went to Israel — the first Iraqi politician to do so — and spoke there about peace between all nations of the Middle East.

Nothing could have prepared him for what was to come. First, he was expelled from the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi and the party deserted him after the backlash of threats started coming in. His party broke ties with him, and he was now a prime target for terrorists — who saw his remarks in Israel as the ultimate betrayal of Baathism and pan-Arab nationalism. Attempts were made on his life. He had every reason to leave Iraq — but he would not leave. And, to the dismay of some in the government, he would not be quiet either.

What he did instead was found the Iraqi Nation party. The premise of this party, says al-Alusi, is that "Iraqis must consider themselves Iraqis first" — before they consider themselves Muslims, Sunni, Shia, or anything else. In the elections last January, his party received about 4,500 votes; its campaign had been run on a bare-bones budget from al-Alusi’s personal funds and donations from Iraqis and others who shared the vision of an Iraq at peace with all of its neighbors.

Then, on February 8, this man bore the brunt of the attack that every Iraqi fears. The attack was meant for him, but instead killed his two sons and his guard. Just hours after his sons were killed he spoke to Radio Free Europe:

Again, the ghosts of death are going out. They are ready to kill a person, ready to kill the peace, ready to kill the victory of Iraqis and their right to life. Again, henchmen of the Ba’ath [party] and dirty terrorist gangs, al-Qaeda and others, are going out convinced that they can determine life and death as they desire. Iraq will not die. My children, three people [in all] — one of my bodyguards and two of my children — died as heroes, no differently from other people who find their heroic deaths. But we will not, [I swear] by God, hand Iraq over to murderers and terrorists.
Mithal al-Alusi was not backing down. The terrorists had made him only more determined.

There would be more attempts on his life. And he would not apologize for his views. In fact, he is known in Iraq for his unyielding position of not dealing with anyone who has ever been a true supporter of the Baath party or has supported or dealt with terrorists of any sort. Recently Iyad Jamal al-Din — an outspoken political activist who says that in order for religion to be protected, Iraq must be ruled by secular laws — tried to arrange an alliance between al-Alusi and the also-secular former head of the interim government, Iyad Allawi. While the two men had much in common, Mithal refused to bring his party into alliance with Allawi unless every former Baathist were removed from Allawi’s party.

Al-Alusi believes strongly that only America, Britain, and the other countries that have proven their allegiance to the Iraqi cause should be rewarded with Iraqi contracts and business. He has said that "without a strategic alliance with America, Iraq will be no more than another second-rate nation."

Recently, al-Alusi was called to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad to speak with U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. Only when he arrived at the embassy did he find out why he had been called there: A poll had been conducted, which found that approximately 30 percent of the Iraqi people now expressed sympathy for him and his party positions.

Since that meeting, al-Alusi has been working on how to turn that sympathy into votes in the upcoming elections. The Iraqi government recently insisted on moving him into the International Zone (formerly called the Green Zone) because of the threats to his life. Al-Alusi was against the move, but the government prevailed: It did not want to be held responsible for the inadequate security if one of the attempts on his life were successful. (He nonetheless escapes the International Zone by spending most of his days in his office in the Karada district of Baghdad.)

A politician as principled and outspoken as Mithal al-Alusi offers hope for Iraq's future. Consider some of his words to Radio Free Europe:

As for the advocates of religious intolerance willing to kill the [Iraqi] identity, or those who now imagine they might establish a [new] state in Iraq, be it religious or non-religious, I tell them, "Brothers, verily you have made a grave mistake." I tell them, "There can be no state in Iraq except for one founded on institutions and law. . . . I will continue to call for peace — even [for peace] with Israel. And may all the world hear that there will be no war if the Palestinians, Syrians, Egyptians, and Jordanians do not want war. I am not prepared to allow Iraqis to be turned into kindling for the flames of terrorists and ghosts of death.
Radical clerics such as Muqtada al-Sadr get most of the global airplay with their violence and their threats. But it's people like Mithal al-Alusi who are working to build the new Iraq.

Goldberg on WFB

2005-10-27T16:49:00.000-07:00

I suspect that in due time Jonah Goldberg will be recognized as the preeminant historian of the Conservative movement. I haven't read Nash (I'll throw his name onto the ever-growing list), but as it was first published 30 years ago, we can surely use a new one.

"But I should say this: William F. Buckley understood that conservatism can only be a partial philosophy of life, because any calling which claims to be a whole philosophy of life is not one at all. It is a religion, and in all likelihood a false one. Armed with this conviction, he changed the world by arguing with those who could not comprehend that a man could be joyful, charming, generous, and passionate about hobbies and people far outside politics while walking against what all the right people insisted was the tide of All Good Things. In this he remains the archetype for conservatism, properly understood.

Conservatives believe in dreams but we don’t believe they can ever be made reality in this life. Nonetheless, when Bill Buckley once asked, “Have you ever seen a dream walking?” he may not have realized that for conservatives, at least, he was the answer to his own question."

Looking forward to the book!

Kate O'Beirne to Harriet Miers

2005-10-27T13:25:00.000-07:00

Who said the people at NRO are all mean and spiteful?

Harriet, the hearings are going to be an embarrassing disaster. You’re being asked to do something you can’t reasonably be expected to do. You are not protected by a sterling resume or years of experience that put gaps in your knowledge or mistakes about cases in proportion. The smart money is betting you won’t be confirmed. (Are you being told that?)

Your decision to accept the nomination was ill-considered. If you accepted owing to your desire to help the president, you should know that nomination has only damaged him. That is the last thing a loyalist like you would ever want to be responsible for. It’s not your fault. As the ads say, even the best of presidents can make mistakes and your boss was poorly served by others on his staff. Someone should have insisted that you be put through the vetting wringer. Your paper trail should have been thoroughly reviewed by veteran screeners who don’t work directly for you. The negative reaction should have been foreseen and you should have been told about the angry opponents your nomination would generate.

Maybe the past three weeks have taught you something. Maybe you love your current job, your current boss, and your supportive colleagues. Maybe this ordeal is too unpleasant, personal, and divisive to persevere with for a job you have never had any interest in.

A friend only concerned with your well-being would tell you to withdraw. Issue a simple statement about the divisiveness among the president’s fellow loyal supporters and explain that you enjoy your current life. You’re grateful for the support you have received and trust it will be there for another nominee you will do everything in your power to assist.

Then resolve to work less and spend more time with your caring friends. We all need them.

Sincerely,

Your Friend

Nice work, people ...

2005-10-27T12:17:00.000-07:00

"No conservative should be in a celebratory mood now that Harriet Miers has withdrawn her nomination. For one thing, reasonable conservatives who considered her unqualified for the Supreme Court conceded that she has had an accomplished career and that she has served the president loyally and, for the most part, well. Gloating would be unseemly. For another thing, the object of conservative agitation against Miers was to get a solid justice confirmed. So the conservative opponents of her nomination have not yet won a victory."

NRO says they won't (or shouldn't) celebrate, but can they take credit? Definitely. David Frum had to have been the most prominent, certainly the most assertive, critic of the nomination. I think he got the ball rolling based on impending rumors, even before the nomination was made. Next time maybe W will trust NRO.

Goldberg on the First Amendmant

2005-10-26T16:58:00.000-07:00

The money quote:

The First Amendment was intended to keep political speech free; everything else was open to debate. Today, the leaders of the First Amendment industry see it exactly the other way around.

Derbyshire on Dylan

2005-09-29T09:24:00.000-07:00

I can't believe it! A positive take on Dylan at NRO! Never thought I'd see the day. And from Derbyshire, who last I heard was accompanying Jay Nordlinger to the Met. Here's Derbyshire on his first impression of Dylan:

As artistic first impressions go, I think that was the deepest I ever experienced. I still recall the strangeness of that voice and the things it was saying, the strangeness. It sounded like nothing else at all. Of course, I had come late to Dylan. This was his fourth LP, and in the earlier ones, which I went out and bought more or less immediately, he did sometimes sound like other people, though it took me a lot of background listening to appreciate the fact.

Dylan, in fact, had done what all great artists do. He had begun by attempting dead-on imitations of his own idols: 1950s pop singers like Johnnie Ray, country singers like Hank Williams, the black blues and gospel singers, early rockers like Gene Vincent and Little Richard (the caption to Dylan’s high school yearbook photo declared his ambition “to join Little Richard”), and of course the older line of gritty folk and protest balladeers — Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie.

And from one of Nordlinger's Impromptu's a couple of years ago, here's one of the funniest things I've ever read at NRO:

Finally, the HILARITY OF THE WEEK. A couple of days ago, amid the fan mail (thank you, dear ones), there was . . . er, some non-fan mail. This guy was ripping me six ways to Sunday for offensive remarks about Bob Dylan, the musician (or whatever). It was a scalding, sarcastic, seriously personal letter.

I couldn't for the life of me remember ever writing about Bob Dylan. So, intrigued, I did a search, and discovered that the man had read an interview conducted by me with the composer Ned Rorem — who did, indeed, rip Bob Dylan six ways to Sunday.

In a mischievous mood, I wrote back — just slightly disingenuously — "Excuse me, sir, I don't know what you're talking about, having never written about Bob Dylan, to my knowledge. Do you perhaps have me confused with someone else?"

And he sent me back the following note:

"My apologies. It was someone you interviewed. The other day, a kid was throwing rocks at a turtle in a creek in my yard. I called out to him, 'Hey! Don't do that to that turtle!' He looked at me and then at the turtle, then back at me. 'That's my hat!' he said. I must be on a roll."

I'll say!

The Dress of Thought by John Derbyshire

2005-09-09T14:38:00.000-07:00

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler (HarperCollins, 640 pp., $29.95)

Most of us have, at one time or another, puzzled over such historical-linguistic conundrums as: Why did only Britain, of all the Roman provinces overrun by Germans, end up speaking a Germanic language? Why did the Portuguese language “take” in Brazil, but not in Africa, while Dutch “took” in Africa but not in Indonesia? If the Phoenicians were so important in Mediterranean history, how is it that they left not a single work of literature behind? Since we know of no nation named Aramaia, whence came Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus of Nazareth? What actually happened to Sumerian? Or Mongolian, the language of a vast medieval empire?

Plainly, what we have been needing is an account of world history written from the linguistic point of view. Well, here it is. Nicholas Ostler is a professional linguist and currently chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages. His loving fascination with languages is plain on every page of Empires of the Word, and in the many careful transcriptions — each with a brief pronunciation guide and a translation — of passages from Nahuatl, Chinese, Akkadian, and a host of other tongues. Ostler actually has a feel for languages that, he has convinced me, goes into something beyond the merely subjective. He speaks of “some of the distinctive traits of the various traditions: Arabic’s austere grandeur and egalitarianism; Chinese and Egyptian’s unshakeable self-regard; Sanskrit’s luxuriating classifications and hierarchies; Greek’s self-confident innovation leading to self-obsession and pedantry; Latin’s civic sense; Spanish rigidity, cupidity, and fidelity; French admiration for rationality; and English admiration for business acumen.”

The story he tells — the story of the languages of human civilization — is illustrated with dozens of maps, as a book of this sort ought to be, as well as a scattering of drawings and photographs. After a brief introductory section, the narrative divides into three parts. The first describes the spread of languages, mainly by land, from the remotest past up to the Middle Ages. The second covers the last half-millennium, when European languages planted themselves all over the world, carried mainly by sea (Russian being the chief exception here). In a short final section, Ostler surveys the current language map, and offers some speculations about the future.

The first section is the longest and contains much material likely to be unfamiliar to the average reader. It begins with the story of the Semitic languages, from Akkadian through Aramaic and Phoenician to Hebrew and Arabic. The main points of interest here are the odd lingering prestige of Sumerian long after Sumer as a political force had ceased to exist; the replacement of Akkadian, a firmly established bureaucratic-imperial language, by Aramaic, a nomad dialect from the desert fringes; and the dramatically different fortunes of sister-languages Phoenician and Hebrew. From the second of those points, Ostler extracts the surprising but true principle that “the life and death of languages are in principle detached from the political fortunes of their associated states.” He confronts, and refutes, the theory that Aramaic won out over Akkadian because of its superior, alphabetic, writing system, assigning the true cause to Assyrian population policy.

We then get an illuminating comparative study of two great introverted imperial systems, Egypt and China, and their languages, with the startling conclusion — the supporting argument is too complex to summarize — that “the long-term future of the Chinese language may be hanging in the balance.” On to Sanskrit, for which the author nurses a particular affection, and which he describes as “eminently learnable,” though this is not the impression one gets from glimpses of the grammar. (For example, the Sanskrit verb has a benedictive mood, used only when blessing.) Greek, says Ostler, is “an instructive example of what can happen to a prestige language when its community ceases to innovate, and the rest of the world catches up.” Celts, Romans, Germans, and Slavs in turn then march across the historico-linguistic stage, before the English, French, Dutch, and Spanish embark in leaky wooden carracks to spread their languages to the remotest regions of the earth.

The author is naturally tempted to try to extract from all this history some general principles about the spread of languages. This proves difficult, though, beyond a few truisms, such as that a language genealogically related to one’s own is much easier to pick up. “Despite 1,200 years of practice, the phonetic distinctions in Arabic which Westerners find hard to master . . . are difficult for Persian speakers too.”

Languages enlarge their numbers of speakers in various ways: through trade, conquest, migration, imperial consolidation, or religious proselytizing. The latter two — Spanish in the Americas and Sanskrit in Southeast Asia are instances — seem to be the most efficacious. Trade is an especially poor bet, as the examples of Phoenician, Sogdian (on the Silk Route), and Arabic (in the Indian Ocean) illustrate. Ostler comes to one of his few definitive conclusions on this point: “No community famous for specialization in trade has passed its language on permanently as a vernacular, or even as a lingua franca, to its customers.” The customer, you see, is always right, and the customer’s language is therefore to be preferred.

In general, though, any attempt to lay down rules here is at once swamped by counterexamples. Surveying the languages currently dominant in the world, Ostler says: “Grossly, then, one could claim that, in the political economy of languages, it pays to be the dialect of a city that becomes a national capital; it pays to be in a tropical plain, especially if it grows rice; and above all it pays to be in East or South Asia. But all these criteria have exceptions: indeed, English started out with none of these advantages.”

It is likewise difficult to see into the linguistic future with any clarity. Of a few cases, we can entertain some confidence: Russian will decline, Japanese hold its own. All else is speculation. Will the different varieties of English diverge, as post-Imperial Latin split up into the Romance languages? (Some Jamaicans hired to work on my house last year conversed with me in flawless Queen’s English, but with each other in impenetrable island patois.) Conversely, will the Turkic languages of Central Asia merge, with Anatolian Turkish, into a single language? Will Chinese attain major international status at last? What will be the influence of the Internet? Of demography? Of migration? Of Islam? The variables are so many, and the historical precedents so contradictory, one can do little more than pose the questions. This Ostler does, with all the clarity and humility of true scholarship. A marvelous book, learned and instructive.

Wodehouse sighting in the Corner

2005-08-27T23:01:00.000-07:00

"The estimable Terry Teachout, the world's most prolific man, offers a fascinating throwaway fact on his blog -- that P.G. Wodehouse's first Jeeves novel was serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1932. Cosmo paid $50,000. In present day bucks, that's more than $600,000. Six hundred thousand dollars. For a delightful comic novel about a butler and a moron. Today you'd have to be a porn star writing about your affair with Bill Clinton to get that kind of money for serial rights from a magazine."

Wodehouse being, of course, the very antithesis of porn. Funny to think that Cosmo is the very magazine to publish both Plum and Porn, or at least something very close to porn.

Matthew Mehan on Sir Thomas More

2005-08-26T00:16:00.000-07:00

"Dead nearly five hundred years, Sir Thomas More pops up all over the place. He is in the Frick Collection in Manhattan as painted by Hans Holbein. More's bust sits in the Tower of London where he was imprisoned and executed, and his statue is at the Inns of Court, the center and source of Anglo-Saxon law, where he was recently named in a British lawyers' poll the "Lawyer of the [last] Millennium." You can find him in Rome where he was canonized a saint in 1935 and named the patron of statesmen in 2000. You can find him on stage and on film in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. You can find him in bookstores the world over, still posthumously pedaling his hotly debated and famous philosophic dialogue Utopia. So hotly debated was that book that you can even find More's name engraved on a Leninist monument near the Kremlin, erected in 1918, celebrating him as one of that handful "who promoted the liberation of humankind from oppression, arbitrariness, and exploitation." Less but still surprising, you can find him in the Anglican Church calendar celebrated yearly as a martyr. When Lenin, the pope, and the Church of England all lay claim to the same man's legacy, you have to assume the following: This man is worth knowing, and no one knows this man."

Scientific Breakthroughs and Govenor Blunt's letter

2005-07-03T23:07:00.000-07:00

Another great Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez, this time with Robert P. George on the latest in Stem Cells, both scientifically and legally.

Here is George on some of the new science:

"Yes, the word is getting out about actual therapeutic breakthroughs using non-embryonic stem cells, such as cells harvested from umbilical cord blood, bone marrow, fat, and other sources. There are people suffering from a variety of diseases who have been helped and even cured by adult-stem-cell therapies. Many such therapies are well along in clinical trials. Word is also getting out about alternative methods of obtaining pluripotent (i.e., embryonic-type) stem cells. Even those of us who oppose embryo killing and reject the hype about possible embryonic-stem-cell therapies recognize that research involving pluripotent cells is desirable if the cells can be obtained without killing or harming human embryos or violating any other ethical norm. Even if they do not someday prove to be therapeutically useful, pluripotent cells may nevertheless be used in basic science and the construction of disease models. Recently, the President's Council on Bioethics issued a white paper outlining several promising avenues for obtaining these cells without violating the ethical norm against taking innocent human life. I joined the overwhelming majority of my colleagues on the President's Council, including many who do not share my ethical objections to embryo killing, in endorsing further exploration and research into some or all of these methods. There are some exciting possibilities here, especially those involving epigenetically reprogramming ordinary body cells to the pluripotent state."

Contrast this with Gov. Blunt's letter to NRO on June 30, where he writes "The overwhelmingly pro-life House and Senate share my view that somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) does not involve the creation of new human life."

In reply, the NRO editors wrote: "Gov. Blunt would have us believe that cloning isn’t cloning if he calls it SCNT, and that cloning doesn’t create a human life if he has prayed about it. But whatever we call the procedure in question, it creates a living organism of the human species. And in any case, the legislation the governor sank would have prohibited the “creation of a human being by any means other than by the fertilization of an oocyte of a human female by a sperm of a human male.” If the governor thinks that SCNT doesn’t create a human life — for some mysterious reason — he should have been able to support this bill."

Following all this takes a bit of work, but if I understand the difference between the procedure described by Prof. George and Gov. Blunt's version of SCNT, the former works towards the creation of 'pluripotent' cells "without killing or harming human embryos or violating any other ethical norm" - even though (as I understand it) they are 'organisms', while SCNT, in a process that involves the fertilization of an oocyte by sperm, does result in the destruction of life.

If I've misunderstood this or am making an unrealistic comparison, by all means please let me know.

I also appreciate these words of Prof. George: "There is no mystery about when the life of a new human individual begins. It is not a matter of subjective opinion or private religious belief. One finds the answer not by consulting one's viscera or searching through the Bible or the Koran; one finds it, rather, in the basic texts of the relevant scientific disciplines." It makes sense that arguments based on science should be used in debates about matters of science, and George and his colleague Grompe have done a great service by shining a light on this corner of the debate. Although after turning this over for a while I have to wonder if we don't need a simpler rule of thumb by which we can judge these matters. I like what Jonah Goldberg has elsewhere called 'the Ick Factor,' but the problem there is that it becomes a matter of subjective opinion, perhaps even a consultation of one's viscera. One hopes that universal taboos and simple revulsion would do the trick, but there really is no substitute for an informed opinion.

George Will on Wolfowitz

2005-05-12T06:28:00.000-07:00

Last week John Derbyshire wrote a pretty persuasive column entitled The Twilight of Conservatism, in which the most arresting comment was probably in parenthesis at the end of this paragraph:

"Our country was attacked by a terrorist conspiracy well supported by, and well funded from, the wealthy and populous Muslim Middle East. All sorts of things flowed from that, including necessary expansions of government power and expenditure. (Though whether a $300 billion experiment in Wilsonian nation-building was really necessary is a question I shall leave to another time.)"

It really stuck with me, as that was my general feeling up until, perhaps even a little after the war began. After a little while I was more and more persuaded that the war was largely a noble endeavor on behalf of a badly stricken population, even as the failure to find WMD seemed to have been proved it unnecessary. The elections clinched it, despite all the problems.

Anyway, I was very glad to see George Will's column on Wolfowitz this morning, in which he quotes the deputy secretary of defense: "I can't tell you," Paul Wolfowitz says with justifiable asperity, "how much I resent being called a Wilsonian."

That's the lead-off. The rest of the column is a solid review of the realpolitik that governed U.S. policy in the 70's and 80's, however controversial it was at home. Will ranges between subjects as diverse as the Philippines, Tomahawk missles, the invasion of Kuwait, Leo Strauss and even Saul Bellow to make the point that Wolfowitz's advancement of policies for almost 40 years has been in the defense of the national interest rather than pie-in-the-sky ideals that cost much and deliver nothing. And, come to think of it, the 'exportation of democracy' notwithstanding, how do Wolfowitz's opinions have anything to do with the League of Nations?

The Twilight of Conservatism

James Wolcott's Southern Discomfort

2005-05-07T11:10:00.000-07:00

Kathryn Jean Lopez (somewhat sarcastically) noted Wolcott's comments about the NRO fundraiser in Atlanta last night, and then Jonah Goldberg posted a yawn and Warren Bell's added a comment of his own.

I've always kind of liked Wolcott. He's witty and obviously a pretty smart guy, and on top of that he's written a pretty good novel, 'The Catsitters." So I thought I'd check out the comments on his website myself. I was a little surprised to read imagined scenarios of Jonah vomiting under a table and whatnot, but hey, envisioning Derbyshire with his arm around a Hooters waitress is sort of funny, in a school newspaper sorta way. Then I read another piece with comments about a Bill Kristol segment on Fox, and was floored when I saw him going out of his way to write about NRO:

"K'Lo at NRO, who had Richter-scale hills-are-alive-with-the-sound-of-music orgasms when a new Pope was picked, admitted she was watching the prez with only casual attention last night, and this morning had little to add, relying on a reader email from some limp noodle. . ."

Yeesh. I wish he'd write more novels.

An Adult Approach...

2005-05-04T20:18:00.000-07:00

Good article by Kathyrn Jean Lopez on the relatively barren nature of embryonic stem cells research as opposed to the more fruitful science involved in adult stem cell research. What I think may be more to the point is the extent to which greed takes over the debate.

For example, read this money quote from The Mercury News:

"The stem-cell institute was created by the statewide initiative, Proposition 71, which voters approved in November. Under it, the institute will pass out $3 billion for stem-cell research over the next 10 years. Much of the money is slated for studies on human embryonic stem cells, an area of research that has been extremely limited by federal law."

Read entire article is here.

On the national level the stakes will get even higher. In the coming years there will be tremendous political pressure put on our political leaders to deliver funding under the promise of miracles, for which as yet there really is no scientific basis.

Investment Accounts for Me, but Not for Thee

2005-05-04T19:51:00.000-07:00

This paragraph says it all:

"So why does Senator Kennedy want to deny workers the same ownership rights and higher returns that he enjoys? Because he knows such ownership will change people's policy preferences. If the value of retirement nest eggs were tightly linked to individual earnings and long-term stock-market performance, people would demand a freer economy to pump up economic growth and stock performance. Freer markets deflate Big Government, which threatens the Left — but freer markets pay off handsomely for the individual."

The same could be said about so many programs championed by the left. Senator Kennedy would doubtless favor a National Health Care plan, but would he ever use it?

David Frum on Slate, Susan Sontag and Mithal al-Alusi

2005-02-09T13:22:00.002-08:00

Uncharacteristically long diary piece by David Frum today in which he takes on the sophomoric tendency of Slate magazine, comparing their juvenile (and fashionable) sarcastic treatment of Arab dissidents with Communist dissidents of the 20th century. He quotes a Susan Sontag mea culpa regarding her own dalliance withe anti-anti-Communist left and the unjustified suspicion reserved for intellectuals such as Csezlaw Milosz. This quotation in particular shows just how well engaged conservatives such as Frum are with the left. It'd be nice to see Buckley quoted in The Nation.

The article by al-Alusi on the reaction to his trip to Israel should serve as reminder to conservatives that even the pro-American elements in Iraq do not find the occupation entirely welcome. And that al-Alusi has been targeted by gunmen and his children murdered should remind us all of the risks taken by true dissidents.

"Life of the Party" by William McGurn

2004-10-28T11:06:00.001-07:00

Man, I hope Dean Roche reads this speech. Not so much because Roche is so dead wrong on the issue (though that is certainly true), but because Democrats are in such dire need of honest dialogue on an issue that by its very nature can never go away. I also suspect that by shunning honest debate within their ranks they now avoid honest debate with Republicans on a host of other issues.

Washington Post Poll Results

2004-10-25T21:54:00.000-07:00

Best site ever!

Lowry on how The FDA Makes You Sick

2004-10-20T18:34:00.000-07:00

Clever title. Lowry's, of course, not mine.

Of course the article is more than just a clever title, providing some much needed analysis of the current vaccine debacle. The upshot - "When it ceases to be profitable to make a vaccine (or a prescription drug, or anything else), companies stop making it." Other relevant truths include the following:

* Litigation, regulation, and government pricing have hammered vaccine makers during the past two decades, chasing them out of business.

* Democrats would bring the same model of failure to the prescription-drug market and make it just as unprofitable.

* In the 1980s, many vaccine makers were driven out of business by litigation costs. Congress eventually passed legislation protecting vaccine makers from out-of-control lawsuits.

* Another blow came from Hillary Clinton. She championed getting the government into the pediatric-vaccine business in a big way in the 1990s. It now buys 60 percent of pediatric vaccines, dictating cut-rate prices that have dried up vaccine-manufacturing capacity. More regulation inevitably accompanied the government purchases.

* Rather than more government intervention, what vaccine manufacturers need is the government's permission to innovate so they can move beyond the inefficiencies of the current system.

Here are some other good articles on the subject of drugs:

Drug Prices Are Reasonable

Missing the Point

Also worth checking out is the paper "Prices And Availability Of Pharmaceuticals: Evidence From Nine Countries," which can be found here:
Link

Rosett on the U.N. Oil-for-Food fiasco

2004-10-17T18:59:00.000-07:00

Really, what does Kofi Annan have against the long-suffering Iraqi people?

Kengor on the Election in Afghanistan

2004-10-17T18:21:00.000-07:00

Helps, every once in awhile, to take a look at The Big Picture. Amazing that we haven't seen more coverage of these extraordinary events.

The Legacy of Deconstruction

2004-10-13T18:01:00.000-07:00

Great intro: “It is tempting to say that Jacques Derrida's death has been greatly exaggerated. The French philosopher was so closely associated with nihilism and metaphysical absence that it's perhaps worth wondering whether he ever lived at all.”

Great comment on contemporary academic discourse: “Derrida didn't shrink from writing sentences that rambled on for two or three pages and his books were abstruse and convoluted in the extreme. None of this put off his tweedy admirers, who regarded Derrida's density as further proof of his profundity.”

“Tweedy admirers”!

I think it’s significant that while “deconstructionism” is, as M&M say, passé, “to deconstruct” is as popular as ever as a verb. People toiling in fields far from the groves of academia use it without a second thought, as in cooking (see Link 1); I’d half expect to hear it used by a demolition crew taking down an abandoned building. In the common parlance of our times it is now used as a subsitute for “critically assess,” (see Link 2) and now among scholars and journalists with perhaps the added (and assumed) layer of “so thoroughly that there is really no need to continue the discussion.” (see Link 3)

Deconstructing Chinese Food

Deconstructing Jacko

Deconstructing the Democratic Presidential Candidate

Yikes!

2004-10-12T13:28:00.000-07:00

A mention by Jonah Goldberg in today's Corner. How in the Sam Hill did he find it? I certainly never expected this - hoped maybe, but never really expected it. I'd always thought this would be an adventure in solipsism, as I think the benign paranoia of my other site (http://quotidianquintilian.blogspot.com/) makes clear. Pressure's on now, I guess.

If I still have his attention, I'd like to press him for the longer answer about his "bias towards having arguments within groups you agree with more than not." If I understand him correctly, Goldberg isn't using 'bias towards' in the sense of 'against,' but rather in the sense that more productive arguments usually involve parties that have found some common ground to work within. I bring this up only because friends have asked about my statement that "I would rather disagree with conservatives than agree with liberals." The meaning, if not the sentiment, seemed self evident to me at the time, but here goes:

An argument between Michael Ledeen and Daniel Pipes would more than likely yield some interesting results. I'd hazzard that an argument between Micahel Ledeen and Ibrahim Hooper would be less an argument than an exercise in futility. Shows like "Crossfire" and even "Hannity and Colmes" make this pretty clear - over and over again.

Thanks for the notice!

Goldberg's post on bias can be found here

Ramesh Ponnuru on Kerry on Parental Notification

2004-10-10T18:26:00.000-07:00

This happens to be the most recent Corner posting as I start up this blog. What are the odds that we'd read this in Newsweek or the New York Times? Clearly exposes the problematic nature of Kerry's response.