The history of Islam's relationship to scholarship is an odd one -- with something to teach us about the West.
Islam and Scholarship: A Brief History
The oddity is this. In the middle ages, the Islamic world was a fountain of scholarship. Indeed, the great European renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, indeed, the birth of the university, though supported by numerous cultural and economic developments in Europe, took almost all of its intellectual inspiration from the reconquest of Muslim Spain. In Spain they found the works of the great philosophers Averroes (the Latinized form of ibn-Rushd, d. 1198) and Avicenna (ibn-Sina, d. 1037), who had kept alive the philosophy of Aristotle when he was totally lost to Europe. In fact, the first texts of Aristotle to reach medieval Europe -- the original stimulus for all subsequent intellectual development in the West -- were translated not from Greek but from Arabic.
Averroes and Avicenna, along with other greats like al-Ghazali (d. 1111), al-Farabi (d. 951), and many more, were the greatest philosophers of their time. And they came from the far reaches of the Muslim Empire: Avicenna, al-Ghazali, and al-Farabi were in Persia (modern-day Iran), while Averroes was in Cordoba (modern-day Spain). This period of the Muslim Empire also oversaw some great non-Muslim scholars, most notably the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (d. 1204), who was born in Cordoba, died in Egypt, and contributed enormously to the progress of philosophy throughout the Western world.
Yet within a few centuries, Muslim scholarship was dead. By the time of the 15th- and 16th-century Renaissance in Europe, scholars were fleeing the Islamic world; indeed, Muslim immigrants to Europe were a great stimulus to that flowering of letters and culture. Since that time, Europe has pulled far ahead of Islam, at least in political philosophy, economics, science, and technology, and arguably in art, literature, and philosophy.
The standard explanation for this decline in Muslim scholarship is that the religious authorities clamped down on philosophers when the philosophers started discussing political things, because Islam demands total control of the political realm. I think we can take that a step further.
The Nature of Islam
Theologically, Islam is defined above all by a radical monotheism, undergirded by a vigorous denial of any "association" with God. God is to be totally separated from creation, totally exalted. Islam rejects the Trinity as a kind of polytheism; they also reject the Incarnation as bringing God into too much contact with the world. God is not to be "associated" in any way with worldly things.
Thus the first pillar of Islam is the simple confession, "there is no God but God," and Islamic art, beautiful as it is, is confined to only calligraphy: no images, lest we associate anything with God. (Protestantism, of course, took up this same kind of anti-image anti-associationism; but Judaism and pre-1517 Christianity insisted, to the contrary, on God's connection to earthly realities, proclaimed specifically through the proper use of cultic materials, sacred spaces, and imagery.)
The word Islam (and its participial form, Muslim) means "submission" -- but this is only a correlate to the doctrine of God's absolute supremacy. The Muslim accepts and bows before God's absolute sovereignty. The other four "pillars" of Sunni Islam (only slightly modified in Shi'a Islam) are all aspects of submission. First, the five times of prayer, defined not by what is prayed but by the obligation to affirm God's sovereignty at each hinge of the day. Second, "alms-giving." Insofar as this is about giving to the poor, it is simply an affirmation of God's sovereignty over our material resources. But it is also an affirmation of the Muslim community, and is given for the spread of the religion as much as for the care of the poor. It is a sign that the Muslim is part of a political body -- more on that in a moment. Third, fasting. Unlike Christian fasting, which is fundamentally about the training of desires, this is simply a proclamation of Allah's lordship: thus it is accompanied by wild feasting after sunset. And fourth, the Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, made once in a lifetime, to proclaim one's fidelity to the religion.
What is notable about these pillars is their externality. There are no Beatitudes in Islam (though there are small pockets of mystics). There is no virtuous transformation, no personal relationship with God. Islam is about God's sovereignty, not about friendship. And thus heaven is not a Beatific Vision, not an embrace with God, but simply acceptance into a happy place, marked by worldly delights: costly robes, bracelets, perfumes, exquisite banquets, strong drink (prohibited in this life), and yes, for men, carnal delights with untouched virgins.
Islam touches life in a different way from how Christianity and Judaism touch life. There is, of course, Sharia. But this governs public interactions, mostly relating to sex, politics, and property. It's not about personal transformation.
The Spread of Islam
Now, I think we can account for the rise and fall of Muslim scholarship based on the nature of Islam. Islam spread as it did -- conquering everything from France to India within a hundred years of the Prophet's death -- in part because it doesn't demand any internal transformation.
The Qur'an can never be translated: it is, in Muslim thinking, inherently an Arabic document. I think that's a good metaphor for Islam as a whole. Christianity demands inculturation -- translation -- and so Christianity conquered Rome from the inside out. Christianity brings every aspect of culture into contact with faith.
This makes it hard for Christians to raise armies. Though there certainly have been Christian armies, and various sorts of Crusades, they always run up against moral qualms. Within the bounds of Sharia, Islam has no fundamental problem with slaughter, rapine, etc. Christians have committed these crimes, but our religion prohibits them. Although most Muslims are not terrorists, it really isn't beyond the pale of Islamic theology to say that you can commit a horrible deed and then go to your eternal reward. That makes armies easier.
It also makes conquest easier. Christianity has to consolidate its gains, bring real conversion, of morals and manners and customs and ways of thinking. But once Islam has gained the upper hand, it can keep moving. The rejection of "association" fundamentally means that Islam doesn't care how people think, as long as they submit to the rule of Allah. It's an easy religion to convert to.
This explains the rapid spread of Islam, I think -- but it also explains the initial success of philosophers. In the first few centuries of Islam, philosophy flourished precisely because the religious authorities didn't care. Averroes, Avicenna, al-Farabi, al-Ghazali were able to pursue truth unfettered by religious demands, internal or external: their religion didn't really affect the way they thought, and the religious authorities didn't really care. This explains, also, the success of Maimonides: it really didn't bother the religious authorities if Maimonides wanted to pursue his quest for knowledge, so long as he paid his taxes and didn't cause revolution. Early Islam was a kind of paradise for philosophers, a place where they could be left alone to do their work.
But while Islam didn't threaten the philosophers, it also didn't support them. It's noteworthy that the great thinkers came from the borderlands: Cordoba (Spain) and Persia (Iran). On the one hand, these were the frontiers, the places where the authorities were a little less concerned with what the philosophers were doing. From the beginning, the heartland of Islam was a more rigid place, both because the authorities didn't have their attention focused on external concerns and because they were looking for ways to deepen Islam's hold on the local culture. Where Islam had time to consolidate its gains, philosophy suffered.
On the other hand, these were precisely the lands that weren't originally shaped by the Arabic, Muslim way of thinking. Cordoba was ancient Roman territory, thoroughly conquered by Christianity. Indeed, not a century before the Muslims came (711-718), it was home to St. Isidore of Seville (d. 636), one of the greatest scholars of the ancient world. We might say that Muslim philosophy in Spain was "coasting": the perdurance of something that predated the Islamic conquest.
The same could be said, of course, of Persia. Persia had been one of the greatest opponents of the Roman Empire -- indeed, the one civilization Rome could not conquer. It was a great crossroads of culture, keeping alive the splendors of ancient Greece, mixing them with those of China, and pursuing its own cultural greatness. Ultimately, the West rediscovered Plato and Aristotle only because they had never died in Persia. Muslim Persian scholarship continued because Islam left it alone -- indeed, it seems that Iran, despite its repressive government, retains one of the richest and most thoughtful cultures in the Islamic world.
But if Islam didn't threaten philosophy, it also didn't cultivate it. When strains of fundamentalism arise -- and they naturally do, for reasons both religious and political -- there is nothing to push back in affirmation of philosophy. Mostly, Islam leaves philosophy alone, but when, for one reason or another, it attacks the philosophers -- for being too politically active, for undermining the faith of the people, for befriending outsiders -- philosophy can only push back through non-Muslim means.
I am no expert on Iran, but I note that Iranian culture is divided among modernists, fundamentalists, and -- ready for this? -- "traditionalist humanists." What that means, I think, is that Iranian humanism, the strand in that society that supports art and culture and philosophy and science, takes its grounding in the long, pre-Muslim, Persian tradition. (Not unlike the 15th-century Renaissance in Italy harkened back to Ancient Rome as the fount of all human accomplishment.) But when Islam takes notice of such things, it is always a force against humanism.
The West
Now, I have written enough of an essay already, but at the end, I would like to add one plot twist, in order to make this say something about the West as well as Islam. I will assert: secularism is the Islam of Europe.
As early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a battle waged in Europe between the humanists and the fundamentalists. When the texts of Aristotle came to Europe -- from the Muslim lands -- there was a strain of Christianity that was deeply threatened. Indeed, Aristotle's philosophy was condemned over and over at the University of Paris through the thirteenth century. (The repetitions are interesting because they prove that they were ignored: if the first had worked, there wouldn't have been need for a second.) The role of St. Thomas Aquinas -- the inspiration for this blog -- was to argue that Aristotle and Christianity were not opposed. But the battle raged furious between fundamentalists and philosophers.
The battle continued through the 15th- and 16th-century Renaissance. European art took off precisely where the Church lost its hold on culture. But be careful of what this means. In fact, Christianity was the source of culture. That's a big argument, but note that the great artists were depicting Christian scenes; that the vivid naturalism of European art has never been touched by a culture unendowed with Christianity's doctrine of Creation and Incarnation; that the European artistic project, both visual and musical, collapsed precisely as Christianity passed out of our culture. Modern "secular" art is hardly art at all: because it no longer exalts in creation. Johann Sebastian Bach exalted in creation: precisely because of his passionate love for the Creator.
Nonetheless, the Church needed to take its hands off the wheel to let the artists do their thing. Where the Gospel was preached, but art was allowed to flourish on its own terms: there was art. But where Churchmen painted over the works of artists -- and where the Gospel was no longer preached -- art failed.
It happened again with technology, and economics, and political philosophy. The American Constitution owes much to Christian philosophy. Indeed, without the doctrine of "Nature and Nature's God," human equality, which is anything but self-evident, would never -- and indeed, has never -- been given serious consideration. And, only to assert -- because really, I have another essay on my hands here -- the modern world was most creative, both technologically and economically, when creators were allowed to create, but inspired by a greater love.
Secularism is like Islam. It supports philosophy precisely to the extent that it leaves it alone. When Churchmen get too close a handle on things, humanism tends to suffocate. We get more worried about usury than about providing for the poor, more into having moral rules for everything than seeing human flourishing. And so secularism has been a force for good. We might even say that a nation like Victorian England was more "Catholic" than was 18th-century Italy, precisely because it allowed Christians to pursue their loves.
Yet like Islam, secularism turns to an intolerance that cannot handle humanism. It does not support humanism, and gives us only the ugly "art" of the Soviets. It does not support excellence. And at times, in its fundamentalist zeal, it turns on those who are too creative, crushing them under a weight of "equality" and "liberty" (and yes, "fraternity" and "the common good") that ultimately destroys the very things it claims to exalt.
There's something to be learned from the experience of Iran.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
Race and Ethnicity
Across from our house in this historically black neighborhood is an old-fashioned black church. Twice on Sundays the congregants appear, dressed to the nines, men and women in fancy hats and flashy suits -- often white for men, purple or yellow or bright red for women -- that we would call out of style. Over the summer there are occasional tent revivals, with a week of preaching and, um, spirited singing out on the lawn, and even more often there are long evening prayer services, with lots and lots of music: drums, hollering, clapping.
But what we love best is the barbecue. All through the summer, they drag out a big smoker on a trailer every Saturday and cook ribs all day long. I don't know if it's a fundraiser or a membership drive or community service or what, but the ribs are sure good.
Last Saturday we had the good fortune to be walking home from a yard sale in mid-morning, and my gregarious, wheelchair-bound four-year-old struck up a conversation, across the four-lane street, with the barbecuer-in-chief. "Is that a real fire?" "What are you cooking?" He invited us back at lunch time for free ribs. (There are perks to being a kid in a wheelchair: people are always doing nice stuff for us!)
When we showed up to claim our prize, I was struck by how black the guy was. His skin was black, of course, but far more, his person. A middle-aged guy, he had a thick deep-south black accent (this is Minnesota), lots of big gold jewelry, a Randy Moss jersey, and an easy, laid-back charm.
And how black is barbecue. We all do it, of course, but I was struck by the primitiveness of this set-up: the big fire, with meat left all day in the smoke (apple wood and cherry wood, he told me). My four-year-old pointed out how "simple" the rib bones are: it's just meat. Barbecue is an African tradition -- and even more, a Black American tradition. It's not hard to imagine the plantations and share farms this barbecue comes from.
RACE?
"Race" didn't use to mean skin color. I have here The New Century Dictionary. (There's a lot to be learned from raiding your grandparents' library.) "The New Century" in question, of course, began in 1900, not 2000. I don't know the full publishing history; the last copyright on this one is 1940, though the first one is 1927. So perhaps these definitions were written as early as the '20s, but they were still considered current at the start of World War II.
For "race" we have: "a group of persons connected by common descent or origin; a family; a tribe or people; a group of tribes or peoples forming an ethnic stock." Yes, there's also reference, further down, to the "great divisions of mankind": Caucasian, Mongolian, and presumably Negro, "having certain physical peculiarities in common." But the examples are far more limited: even the sentence quoted that does include a "negro race" compares it to the "Jewish race" and the "English race."
This understanding of race was current in 1940 -- which is to say, up to when the Civil Rights Movement got going. Certainly in that eugenic period when Margaret Sanger was founding Planned Parenthood, the "inferior races" she was setting out to eliminate were not just blacks, but also the Irish, Italians, and Polish. The notion that "white" is a race is a product, not a cause, of the Civil Rights movement.
SOME HISTORY?
Here's a conspiracy theory -- it sounds crazy, but it does fit the facts, and the rhetoric of the first half of the 20th century. Certainly there were many people sincerely committed to the Civil Rights Movement -- the movement to give the black "race" full rights in the South, and full political rights in the whole American nation. But in the Northern cities, there were also people manipulating it for other purposes.
In early-20th-century America, the WASP establishment was pretty scared about the rise of what we'd call the urban ethnics -- what they called inferior races. Especially Irish, Italian, and Polish, but also some Bavarian, Russian, and Jewish communities were rising, with very different loyalties from the WASPs': different ideas of political power, different ideas of political argument. One part of this was religious: the Catholics in particular were terribly threatening, because they answered to a higher religious authority, undermining the right of the WASPs to determine right and wrong. Another part was merely cultural: WASPs didn't want these dirty ethnics, Catholic or otherwise, imposing their festivals and mores on "their" cities.
The Civil Rights Movement was a useful, and successful, weapon in the WASP arsenal. On the one hand, it was a way to discredit the urban ethnics -- the inferior races. WASP authorities set the ethnics against the blacks, mostly through forced integration, moving black families into Irish, or Italian (or whatever) neighborhoods. The ethnics responded with racial animosity -- but again, note the ambiguity of "race." In the context of the Civil Rights Movement, the Irish seemed to be "racists," anti-black, and thus presumably pro-white. But in the context of the ethnic cities, the Irish were no more opposed to the black "race" than to the Italians, Jews, Russians, Germans, or WASPs. It had nothing to do with skin color, everything to do with ethnicity. They just didn't want to lose control of their neighborhood.
Still, to the WASP majority, it looked bad, because the WASP authorities framed the debate as black vs. white, instead of ethnicities defending their communities. The Catholic (and other) ethnics looked like "racists" -- and this accusation legitimated forcible destruction of ethnic neighborhoods. Legitimate concerns for the Civil Rights of blacks were used as a cover for attacks on undesirable ethnics -- inferior races. The real "racists" were the white WASPs baiting the white Catholics, not the Irish fighting the blacks.
The second prong of this attack was to push the Catholics themselves to re-identify. Through the excessive use of race -- that is, black vs. white -- rhetoric, the powers that be pushed the Irish, Italians, and Poles to re-identify themselves, not as Catholics or ethnics, but as whites, fleeing the blacks. "White flight" -- one of the most profound tools in building suburuban America -- was not just whites fleeing blacks, but ethnics leaving their ethnic neighborhoods for neighborhoods defined instead by generic whiteness and socio-economic status.
Again, whether you buy into the power narrative or not, the effects are clear. People used to define themselves by the thick bonds of ethnicity -- what The New Century Dictionary called "common descent or origin; a family; a tribe or people; a group of tribes or peoples forming an ethnic stock." Now, it's just the effort to move up the socio-economic ladder. Whether or not this suburbia has to be this way, it is certainly a dominant feature of it today.
RACE TODAY
To a large extent, Martin Luther King has triumphed in America. It's no longer acceptable to judge a man by his race -- or rather, "by the color of his skin." All we're allowed to care about is "the content of his character."
Of course, there is still discussion of race, but it's mostly in terms of what is (abusively) called "affirmative action." (The word is abused, because affirmative action ought to mean much more than quotas.) Liberals think it's right to advance someone based on the color of his skin -- but only because they think it helps undermine the importance of skin color. More black lawyers means we recognize that what really matters is "what's inside," not race. More radical liberals think that only a black man can empathize with the plight of another black man -- but the concern is still to find ways to use race to overcome race: only a black man can see that the blackness of the other man doesn't matter.
Most conservatives respond that instead of working for color blindness, through affirmative action, we should just apply it, now. Thus the black conservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas says affirmative action made people assume that he was dumb, advancing because of the color of his skin instead of the content of his character. On the death of William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of National Review, and thus one of the most important voices in American conservatism, many of his closest associates said his best book was The Unmaking of a Mayor, about his unsuccessful attempt to spoil the New York mayoral election of 1965. The real theme of the book is Buckley's incomprehension that urban voters take ethnicity seriously, instead of just thinking of themselves as individuals.
Note the similarity of liberal and conservative: in the modern conversation (as early as 1965) race is irrelevant to a person. And, of course, there's something to that -- skin color is a pretty shallow criterion for judging a person.
THE PROBLEM
But to see the problem, consider the newspeak term "African American." It's an odd way to describe a community who has been here since the very beginning -- indeed, a community whose immigration ended in 1808, long before the wave of other non-WASP ethnicities even began.
And it's an odd conflation, since there are real African Americans, people who have recently come to these shores from, you know, Africa, and who have very little in common, culturally, with Americans descended from the slaves. Indeed, we can well imagine the frustration of parents whose children grew up as French Catholics and are now lumped together with a totally different, and grossly abused, culture. Whom do we serve by using language that denies the difference?
Certainly not American blacks themselves. (I wish there were a term to distinguish them from African blacks, but I am not the one to coin it.) What is gained by denying the very existence of the culture that produced the church, and the barbecue, across the street? What is gained by denying the struggles unique to this community, the challenges of a heritage that includes a share-cropper grandfather who couldn't vote; a flight to Northern climes and the attendant effort to preserve a unique culture, with its ways of relating, its foods, its religion; the frustrations of the 1968 riots and the effort to perdure as a community when the majority treats "integration" as the highest goal?
Ethnicities -- races -- need to interact. They need to get along, without violence. They need to be accorded basic civil rights. But I do not see what is gained by throwing the baby out with the bath water, by making culture an irrelevant part of an "individual's" make-up. "Integration" is a genocidal word, an effort to erase ethnicity and culture, leaving us with nothing but naked individuals. It has not served us well. We worry about the loss of community, the loss of values, the loss of identity, the loss of quality. Then we proclaim race the enemy.
A good society would accord everyone civil rights -- would be color blind when it comes to who can vote. But it would not try to enforce color blindness to the detriment of culture. There's a lot to be said for those old ethnic enclaves, so long as we are bound to them by culture, not law.
"A group of persons connected by common descent or origin; a family; a tribe or people; a group of tribes or peoples forming an ethnic stock." Doesn't sound so bad to me.
But what we love best is the barbecue. All through the summer, they drag out a big smoker on a trailer every Saturday and cook ribs all day long. I don't know if it's a fundraiser or a membership drive or community service or what, but the ribs are sure good.
Last Saturday we had the good fortune to be walking home from a yard sale in mid-morning, and my gregarious, wheelchair-bound four-year-old struck up a conversation, across the four-lane street, with the barbecuer-in-chief. "Is that a real fire?" "What are you cooking?" He invited us back at lunch time for free ribs. (There are perks to being a kid in a wheelchair: people are always doing nice stuff for us!)
When we showed up to claim our prize, I was struck by how black the guy was. His skin was black, of course, but far more, his person. A middle-aged guy, he had a thick deep-south black accent (this is Minnesota), lots of big gold jewelry, a Randy Moss jersey, and an easy, laid-back charm.
And how black is barbecue. We all do it, of course, but I was struck by the primitiveness of this set-up: the big fire, with meat left all day in the smoke (apple wood and cherry wood, he told me). My four-year-old pointed out how "simple" the rib bones are: it's just meat. Barbecue is an African tradition -- and even more, a Black American tradition. It's not hard to imagine the plantations and share farms this barbecue comes from.
RACE?
"Race" didn't use to mean skin color. I have here The New Century Dictionary. (There's a lot to be learned from raiding your grandparents' library.) "The New Century" in question, of course, began in 1900, not 2000. I don't know the full publishing history; the last copyright on this one is 1940, though the first one is 1927. So perhaps these definitions were written as early as the '20s, but they were still considered current at the start of World War II.
For "race" we have: "a group of persons connected by common descent or origin; a family; a tribe or people; a group of tribes or peoples forming an ethnic stock." Yes, there's also reference, further down, to the "great divisions of mankind": Caucasian, Mongolian, and presumably Negro, "having certain physical peculiarities in common." But the examples are far more limited: even the sentence quoted that does include a "negro race" compares it to the "Jewish race" and the "English race."
This understanding of race was current in 1940 -- which is to say, up to when the Civil Rights Movement got going. Certainly in that eugenic period when Margaret Sanger was founding Planned Parenthood, the "inferior races" she was setting out to eliminate were not just blacks, but also the Irish, Italians, and Polish. The notion that "white" is a race is a product, not a cause, of the Civil Rights movement.
SOME HISTORY?
Here's a conspiracy theory -- it sounds crazy, but it does fit the facts, and the rhetoric of the first half of the 20th century. Certainly there were many people sincerely committed to the Civil Rights Movement -- the movement to give the black "race" full rights in the South, and full political rights in the whole American nation. But in the Northern cities, there were also people manipulating it for other purposes.
In early-20th-century America, the WASP establishment was pretty scared about the rise of what we'd call the urban ethnics -- what they called inferior races. Especially Irish, Italian, and Polish, but also some Bavarian, Russian, and Jewish communities were rising, with very different loyalties from the WASPs': different ideas of political power, different ideas of political argument. One part of this was religious: the Catholics in particular were terribly threatening, because they answered to a higher religious authority, undermining the right of the WASPs to determine right and wrong. Another part was merely cultural: WASPs didn't want these dirty ethnics, Catholic or otherwise, imposing their festivals and mores on "their" cities.
The Civil Rights Movement was a useful, and successful, weapon in the WASP arsenal. On the one hand, it was a way to discredit the urban ethnics -- the inferior races. WASP authorities set the ethnics against the blacks, mostly through forced integration, moving black families into Irish, or Italian (or whatever) neighborhoods. The ethnics responded with racial animosity -- but again, note the ambiguity of "race." In the context of the Civil Rights Movement, the Irish seemed to be "racists," anti-black, and thus presumably pro-white. But in the context of the ethnic cities, the Irish were no more opposed to the black "race" than to the Italians, Jews, Russians, Germans, or WASPs. It had nothing to do with skin color, everything to do with ethnicity. They just didn't want to lose control of their neighborhood.
Still, to the WASP majority, it looked bad, because the WASP authorities framed the debate as black vs. white, instead of ethnicities defending their communities. The Catholic (and other) ethnics looked like "racists" -- and this accusation legitimated forcible destruction of ethnic neighborhoods. Legitimate concerns for the Civil Rights of blacks were used as a cover for attacks on undesirable ethnics -- inferior races. The real "racists" were the white WASPs baiting the white Catholics, not the Irish fighting the blacks.
The second prong of this attack was to push the Catholics themselves to re-identify. Through the excessive use of race -- that is, black vs. white -- rhetoric, the powers that be pushed the Irish, Italians, and Poles to re-identify themselves, not as Catholics or ethnics, but as whites, fleeing the blacks. "White flight" -- one of the most profound tools in building suburuban America -- was not just whites fleeing blacks, but ethnics leaving their ethnic neighborhoods for neighborhoods defined instead by generic whiteness and socio-economic status.
Again, whether you buy into the power narrative or not, the effects are clear. People used to define themselves by the thick bonds of ethnicity -- what The New Century Dictionary called "common descent or origin; a family; a tribe or people; a group of tribes or peoples forming an ethnic stock." Now, it's just the effort to move up the socio-economic ladder. Whether or not this suburbia has to be this way, it is certainly a dominant feature of it today.
RACE TODAY
To a large extent, Martin Luther King has triumphed in America. It's no longer acceptable to judge a man by his race -- or rather, "by the color of his skin." All we're allowed to care about is "the content of his character."
Of course, there is still discussion of race, but it's mostly in terms of what is (abusively) called "affirmative action." (The word is abused, because affirmative action ought to mean much more than quotas.) Liberals think it's right to advance someone based on the color of his skin -- but only because they think it helps undermine the importance of skin color. More black lawyers means we recognize that what really matters is "what's inside," not race. More radical liberals think that only a black man can empathize with the plight of another black man -- but the concern is still to find ways to use race to overcome race: only a black man can see that the blackness of the other man doesn't matter.
Most conservatives respond that instead of working for color blindness, through affirmative action, we should just apply it, now. Thus the black conservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas says affirmative action made people assume that he was dumb, advancing because of the color of his skin instead of the content of his character. On the death of William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of National Review, and thus one of the most important voices in American conservatism, many of his closest associates said his best book was The Unmaking of a Mayor, about his unsuccessful attempt to spoil the New York mayoral election of 1965. The real theme of the book is Buckley's incomprehension that urban voters take ethnicity seriously, instead of just thinking of themselves as individuals.
Note the similarity of liberal and conservative: in the modern conversation (as early as 1965) race is irrelevant to a person. And, of course, there's something to that -- skin color is a pretty shallow criterion for judging a person.
THE PROBLEM
But to see the problem, consider the newspeak term "African American." It's an odd way to describe a community who has been here since the very beginning -- indeed, a community whose immigration ended in 1808, long before the wave of other non-WASP ethnicities even began.
And it's an odd conflation, since there are real African Americans, people who have recently come to these shores from, you know, Africa, and who have very little in common, culturally, with Americans descended from the slaves. Indeed, we can well imagine the frustration of parents whose children grew up as French Catholics and are now lumped together with a totally different, and grossly abused, culture. Whom do we serve by using language that denies the difference?
Certainly not American blacks themselves. (I wish there were a term to distinguish them from African blacks, but I am not the one to coin it.) What is gained by denying the very existence of the culture that produced the church, and the barbecue, across the street? What is gained by denying the struggles unique to this community, the challenges of a heritage that includes a share-cropper grandfather who couldn't vote; a flight to Northern climes and the attendant effort to preserve a unique culture, with its ways of relating, its foods, its religion; the frustrations of the 1968 riots and the effort to perdure as a community when the majority treats "integration" as the highest goal?
Ethnicities -- races -- need to interact. They need to get along, without violence. They need to be accorded basic civil rights. But I do not see what is gained by throwing the baby out with the bath water, by making culture an irrelevant part of an "individual's" make-up. "Integration" is a genocidal word, an effort to erase ethnicity and culture, leaving us with nothing but naked individuals. It has not served us well. We worry about the loss of community, the loss of values, the loss of identity, the loss of quality. Then we proclaim race the enemy.
A good society would accord everyone civil rights -- would be color blind when it comes to who can vote. But it would not try to enforce color blindness to the detriment of culture. There's a lot to be said for those old ethnic enclaves, so long as we are bound to them by culture, not law.
"A group of persons connected by common descent or origin; a family; a tribe or people; a group of tribes or peoples forming an ethnic stock." Doesn't sound so bad to me.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Private Public Transportation
Our cities need to make a strong and clear distinction: transportation that serves the public does not need to be provided by the public. We should encourage “private public transportation.”
Nationwide, the current regime penalizes private providers of public transportation services. “Medallion” systems strictly limit the number of taxis in our cities while charging a massive tax on taxi ownership. Bus companies face even stricter limitations: most cities prohibit private bus services unless they serve a strictly private function (such as university transportation).
Sometimes such restrictions are directly discriminatory. In the 1950s (I think) there was a black-owned and operated bus company serving black residents of Harlem and Brooklyn. In the name of “efficiency,” the city outlawed this company. Its services were not replaced; those communities were simply not deemed worthy of “public” transportation.
But even in the absence of such civil-rights violations, limiting public transportation to public companies is a disaster for our cities.
Public transportation is an enormous good for cities. For those who cannot afford a car, it provides the only means of travel: for work, shopping, entertainment, visiting, and more. The freedom of those without cars is strictly limited by the provision of public transportation.
But even for those who can afford a car, public transportation is a great good. Consider this: we would pity anyone who spends more than two and a half hours a day – 10% of their time – in the car. But that means that every car spends 90% of its time sitting unused. What would our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our shopping areas look like if we did not have to provide parking for cars that spend most of their time idle? What would our cities look like if we could eliminate even half of our traffic, with its noise, pollution, and above all, roads?
How would our cost of living change – especially the cost of rent – if most of our parking and half of our roads were made available for other uses? How would our quality of living change if there were half as many lanes of traffic every time we crossed the street? Yet that would require only two people in every car that now carries one.
If anything, we should be subsidizing public transportation—private buses and taxis—rather than taxing them and limiting their numbers. At the least, we should facilitate them.
Here is a proposal. For public safety, private taxis and buses (and any other form of private public transportation) should only be required to register, carrying a clearly visible sign that they have passed a background check. (The background check should be provided free of charge, as a minimal form of subsidy for this public service.)
For the convenience of riders, public-transport vehicles should carry a clearly visible explanation of fares. The city might register a few standardized fare charts: a red badge, for example, might mean $1.50 for unlimited travel (a bus fare); a yellow badge, $2/person, plus .20/mile(taxi fare) —or whatever. But there is no reason that providers should not determine what fare system works best for them, so long as it is clearly visible. If the goal is to get more providers involved, city governments should not dictate terms.
Current bus routes could be maintained – and expanded. Publically operated buses could even continue to run on current schedules, until proven unnecessary. The addition of new providers, however, would greatly improve service. Rather than waiting 20 minutes for the next bus, one might find another provider coming along the desired route in 2 minutes. If the provider is a car rather than a bus, one might even go direct to one’s stop instead of waiting for other people to be picked up and dropped off.
The city could allow private drivers to purchase fare-card readers, for a reasonable charge. Some drivers might prefer to be cash-only, as taxis now are. But others might offer their customers the option to pay by credit card or fare card. I know I would prefer that option – though there are times I would take the fastest car available.
This proposal would cost cities little. If the new system takes business away from the old buses – by providing cheaper, faster service – publically-operated bus companies would lose fares, but could run fewer buses. Since publically-operated buses currently run at a net loss, the city would come out ahead. The city would lose the revenue from the sale of taxi medallions. But if taxis became more widely available, and cheaper, cities could sell off some parking facilities, which are inevitably located in places where people want to be, and thus where real estate prices are high.
Above all, such a system would benefit the people of a city, providing greater mobility, lower costs of living, and higher quality of life. These things are worth the loss of taxi-medallion revenue.
Of course, such a system might not work. Perhaps there is no one who wants to get into this business. But if that is so, there is no reason to outlaw private public buses. If taxi driving was not a good business, there would be no need to limit the number of medallions, and no way to explain the astronomical prices paid for them. Cities would do well to put people first, and give private public transportation a chance.
Nationwide, the current regime penalizes private providers of public transportation services. “Medallion” systems strictly limit the number of taxis in our cities while charging a massive tax on taxi ownership. Bus companies face even stricter limitations: most cities prohibit private bus services unless they serve a strictly private function (such as university transportation).
Sometimes such restrictions are directly discriminatory. In the 1950s (I think) there was a black-owned and operated bus company serving black residents of Harlem and Brooklyn. In the name of “efficiency,” the city outlawed this company. Its services were not replaced; those communities were simply not deemed worthy of “public” transportation.
But even in the absence of such civil-rights violations, limiting public transportation to public companies is a disaster for our cities.
Public transportation is an enormous good for cities. For those who cannot afford a car, it provides the only means of travel: for work, shopping, entertainment, visiting, and more. The freedom of those without cars is strictly limited by the provision of public transportation.
But even for those who can afford a car, public transportation is a great good. Consider this: we would pity anyone who spends more than two and a half hours a day – 10% of their time – in the car. But that means that every car spends 90% of its time sitting unused. What would our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our shopping areas look like if we did not have to provide parking for cars that spend most of their time idle? What would our cities look like if we could eliminate even half of our traffic, with its noise, pollution, and above all, roads?
How would our cost of living change – especially the cost of rent – if most of our parking and half of our roads were made available for other uses? How would our quality of living change if there were half as many lanes of traffic every time we crossed the street? Yet that would require only two people in every car that now carries one.
If anything, we should be subsidizing public transportation—private buses and taxis—rather than taxing them and limiting their numbers. At the least, we should facilitate them.
Here is a proposal. For public safety, private taxis and buses (and any other form of private public transportation) should only be required to register, carrying a clearly visible sign that they have passed a background check. (The background check should be provided free of charge, as a minimal form of subsidy for this public service.)
For the convenience of riders, public-transport vehicles should carry a clearly visible explanation of fares. The city might register a few standardized fare charts: a red badge, for example, might mean $1.50 for unlimited travel (a bus fare); a yellow badge, $2/person, plus .20/mile(taxi fare) —or whatever. But there is no reason that providers should not determine what fare system works best for them, so long as it is clearly visible. If the goal is to get more providers involved, city governments should not dictate terms.
Current bus routes could be maintained – and expanded. Publically operated buses could even continue to run on current schedules, until proven unnecessary. The addition of new providers, however, would greatly improve service. Rather than waiting 20 minutes for the next bus, one might find another provider coming along the desired route in 2 minutes. If the provider is a car rather than a bus, one might even go direct to one’s stop instead of waiting for other people to be picked up and dropped off.
The city could allow private drivers to purchase fare-card readers, for a reasonable charge. Some drivers might prefer to be cash-only, as taxis now are. But others might offer their customers the option to pay by credit card or fare card. I know I would prefer that option – though there are times I would take the fastest car available.
This proposal would cost cities little. If the new system takes business away from the old buses – by providing cheaper, faster service – publically-operated bus companies would lose fares, but could run fewer buses. Since publically-operated buses currently run at a net loss, the city would come out ahead. The city would lose the revenue from the sale of taxi medallions. But if taxis became more widely available, and cheaper, cities could sell off some parking facilities, which are inevitably located in places where people want to be, and thus where real estate prices are high.
Above all, such a system would benefit the people of a city, providing greater mobility, lower costs of living, and higher quality of life. These things are worth the loss of taxi-medallion revenue.
Of course, such a system might not work. Perhaps there is no one who wants to get into this business. But if that is so, there is no reason to outlaw private public buses. If taxi driving was not a good business, there would be no need to limit the number of medallions, and no way to explain the astronomical prices paid for them. Cities would do well to put people first, and give private public transportation a chance.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Liberal Fascism?
Jonah Goldberg has a popular book out right now -- I think it was the number-one non-fiction seller on Amazon -- called Liberal Fascism. I like Jonah Goldberg a lot, so I'm interested in his point of view (though I'm concerned there's some human solidity missing: Buckley minus any religious or high-cultural sensibility is not Buckley).
And there is clearly a very important point here, made strongly in Paul Johnson's classic Modern Times. (I haven't read Goldberg's book, but I've read enough to be pretty sure it's the same idea.) The point is basically this: standard wisdom says socialism and fascism are opposite ends of the spectrum. Therefore (since, I guess, there must be a simple spectrum) the farther one gets from socialism, the closer one gets to fascism. Particularly, anyone who is opposed to Big Government must be more or less a fascist.
But wait! Nazi is short for National Socialist. Fascists are socialists. And not only in name. Fascism is not anti-government -- that couldn't be farther from the truth. Fascism is about big government, about everything-inside-the-state, nothing-outside-the-state. Hitler had a lot more in common with FDR than with Barry Goldwater.
Now, this is a really important point. Hitler is unthinkable apart from statism. One of the greatest arguments for limited government -- made especially in Hayek's classic The Road to Serfdom -- is precisely that as the state grows, in tends to demand more and more, and be less and less tolerant of outliers. Big government is always bad for minorities; it may be coming for the rich and the Mormons now, but it will come for you eventually, as you fail to participate (be assimilated!) in the ways the state wants you too. Compulsory public education, for example, is a lovely tool for the Hitlers of the world, who cannot tolerate minority opinions. So is a state-dominated economy: they come for the CO2 now; what will they find intolerabe tomorrow?
So fine, fascism is a kind of socialism.
Nonetheless, Goldberg's Liberal Fascism argument has a crucial flaw. The flaw is essentially this: he tries to tarnish liberalism -- which is a kind of socialism -- with what's bad about fascism. But what's centrally hated about fascism is precisely the way it is different from liberalism. It's like saying, "Jacob and Esau are the same, because they're from the same family!" But the problem is, they relate to that family in opposite ways. What makes Esau reprobate (wish I could think of a non-theological example!) is not that he's Isaac's son, but that he's a bad son. What's bad about fascism (in the popular estimation) is not that it's socialist, but that it's national socialism.
I'm reading the first volume of Churchill's history of World War II -- that's the volume about the political lead-up; I'll read the military-history volumes another time, maybe. I just got to Churchill's summary of Hitler's philosophy; very nicely done.
Hitler was first and foremost, not a socialist, but a nationalist. Hitler believed in the German people. He hated everything that was internationalist. His hatred of both the Jews and Communism was precisely because they were international, not bound to the genius of a particular people -- specifically, the German people. He was a socialist, concentrating power in the state, precisely to strengthen the nation, the Volk. He believed the nation's strength was in struggle (Kampf), in fighting against other nations. He wanted war to make his nation strong.
Hitler is hated, not because he was for big government, not because he was a socialist, but because he was a racist, killing the Jews, and a war-monger, conquering his neighbors. I'm sorry, Mr. Goldberg, but it is simply absurd to try to smear this on liberals -- as much as I hate liberalism! It is like saying, oh, look at those chess pieces, they're both kings, they're just the same. No. One is black, one is white. They are opposed. Someday I'll study logic and know the technical name for this fallacy, but let's call it a smear: you say that because A is like B in one respect, it must be alike in all respects. Not so fast! Especially when the critical respect is precisely the one where A and B are opposite.
Liberalism is internationalist. Liberalism denies the genius of the American people. And you know, conservatism exalts the genius of the American people. "American exceptionalism," by itself, bears much more resemblance to the critical aspect of fascism, nationalism, than do liberal desires to be liked by Europe and the Middle East, to abandon the American Constitution for international law, to give up on our language and heritage and political philosophy in favor of what everyone else is doing.
And of course, the whole movement of "conservatives" (I don't think it is genuinely conservative) against immigration is much more akin to fascist concerns about racial and cultural purity than it is to liberal desires to water down anything distinctive about America. (Anti-immigration "conservatives" claim to be worried about illegal immigration, but if that were the case, the simplest answer would be to liberalize our immigration laws; instead, most of this clique wants to tighten the laws, and explicitly appeals to arguments about cultural purity, as well as the economic danger of outsiders; the latter argument is so manifestly anti-market that it seems clear these folks are really driven by the cultural argument.) Unfortunately, that's where the immigration argument is being played out: on cultural purity.
Conservatives are right to want legality; conservatives are right to oppose more-or-less open liberal efforts to water down American distinctiveness by promoting non-assimilating immigration. But when conservatives take the side of Big Government (fences, crack-downs on businesses, more militarization, stricter scrutiny of who deserves to be part of America, based especially on central-planning economic criteria) in order to maintain cultural purity, they have no right to claim that the liberals are fascists. Nationalist socialism: big government used to preserve the Volk: that is fascism.
The rest of conservatism, however, is at least as unlike National Socialism as liberalism is, because fascism needs the State in order to pursue its kind of nationalism. The irony of calling conservatives facists (apart from the immigration debate) is that conservatives appeal to a Constitution that rejects racial purity in favor of liberty. Conservatives want a country in which the government can't crack down on minorities, in which minorities of every kind flourish. Conservatism is based on this idea of limited government; and nothing more undermines the purposes of fascism than limited government. Hitler would never accept limited government. Limited government can't invade its neighbors and gas its minorities.
There is a very strong argument to be made that Unlimited Government tends toward fascism. Even Stalin, the great Internationalist leader, ended up a fascist, killing more Jews than Hitler, cracking down on dissenters, limiting travel and free speech and universities. This is the real Liberal Fascism argument: not that the essence of Nazism is socialism -- it isn't; the essence of Nazism is nationalism -- but that socialism, Unlimited Government, inevitably contradicts internationalism, because it inevitably ends by stifling dissent, the free movement of peoples and goods (notice that our Big Government folks are terrified of free trade), and the creativity of the people. Liberalism intends to use Big Government to make the world more tolerant; but the lessons of Stalin -- and Mao, and everyone else who has tried, even our homegrown anti-marriage,* public-education liberals -- is that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat ends up being more and more Dictatorship and less and less Proletariat; the attempt to eradicate intolerance ends in the greatest intolerance; the move to make the world fair and happy through force makes things more arbitrary and dreary than ever before.
International Socialism is, at its root, as opposed to the Nationalist part of National Socialism as Black Queen to White Queen. But by seeking its internationalist ends through socialist/Unlimited Government means, it ends up as intolerant as Hitler. The question, however, is not whether Internationalists and Nationalists are essentially the same -- they aren't! -- but whether the means, Unlimited Government, tends to pervert the ends to which it is directed. That is an argument better made, I think, by Hayek than by Goldberg.
*Is the defense of marriage Limited Government? Liberals -- genuinely confused on this, I think -- believe that marriage laws are an attempt to impose a particular culture, Christianity, on others. The association of Christianity with particular culture is already odd, from a historical perspective, pretty dumb. And of course it's worth noting that at this stage of the game, a central part of the argument is about self-determination, about whether courts can overrule the overwhelming voice of the people and a couple states can overrule the opinions of other states. Nonetheless, the key point is whether liberals are right that heterosexual marriage is merely the preference of a particular culture.
In brief, the response is no. First, heterosexual marriage is a product of nature, evolution: children need parents, both biologically and, therefore, socially. This has nothing to do with culture, everything to do with reason. And since heterosexual unions are universally the cause of new citizens, it does have to do with securing the rights of every single individual (we all begin as children) against those who would treat those individuals themselves as someone else's "right": the right to adopt, to call yourself a mommy when you aren't, to deprive a child of a parent, etc.
Second, and maybe more important, marriage is just a Thing. There is, simply, something out there that is Marriage: the commitment of the two biological partners in procreation to create an environment in which procreation can reach its natural end, adulthood. The real argument against gay marriage is not anti-gay, but pro-marriage.
The equality argument here is really upside down. Gays say they want the same rights everyone else has. But they have the same rights: they can enter into a heterosexual marriage if they want; the fact that they don't want to do that is not a deprivation of their rights (at least not in the political order). What they, in fact, want is to take away the rights of others to enter into marriage; what they are asking for is an elimination of a particular Office in the polis, not its expansion. They want to deny that there is any such thing as Marriage, by replacing the definition of that Thing, in politics, with a new one.
The proponents of "traditional marriage" don't always speak this clearly -- though democracy should not require you to speak clearly -- but in fact, heterosexual marriage is simply the right of citizens to enter into the most fundamental contract in the political order and to have that contract recognized by law. Eliminating the right of people to make that contract is a usurpation: Government stepping in where it doesn't belong; as in many things, it abandons one of the necessary functions of Limited Government in favor of a new intrusion of Government into life: in this case, Government redefining the pre-existing office of Marriage. Marriage law is a matter of Limited Government, not fascism.
And there is clearly a very important point here, made strongly in Paul Johnson's classic Modern Times. (I haven't read Goldberg's book, but I've read enough to be pretty sure it's the same idea.) The point is basically this: standard wisdom says socialism and fascism are opposite ends of the spectrum. Therefore (since, I guess, there must be a simple spectrum) the farther one gets from socialism, the closer one gets to fascism. Particularly, anyone who is opposed to Big Government must be more or less a fascist.
But wait! Nazi is short for National Socialist. Fascists are socialists. And not only in name. Fascism is not anti-government -- that couldn't be farther from the truth. Fascism is about big government, about everything-inside-the-state, nothing-outside-the-state. Hitler had a lot more in common with FDR than with Barry Goldwater.
Now, this is a really important point. Hitler is unthinkable apart from statism. One of the greatest arguments for limited government -- made especially in Hayek's classic The Road to Serfdom -- is precisely that as the state grows, in tends to demand more and more, and be less and less tolerant of outliers. Big government is always bad for minorities; it may be coming for the rich and the Mormons now, but it will come for you eventually, as you fail to participate (be assimilated!) in the ways the state wants you too. Compulsory public education, for example, is a lovely tool for the Hitlers of the world, who cannot tolerate minority opinions. So is a state-dominated economy: they come for the CO2 now; what will they find intolerabe tomorrow?
So fine, fascism is a kind of socialism.
Nonetheless, Goldberg's Liberal Fascism argument has a crucial flaw. The flaw is essentially this: he tries to tarnish liberalism -- which is a kind of socialism -- with what's bad about fascism. But what's centrally hated about fascism is precisely the way it is different from liberalism. It's like saying, "Jacob and Esau are the same, because they're from the same family!" But the problem is, they relate to that family in opposite ways. What makes Esau reprobate (wish I could think of a non-theological example!) is not that he's Isaac's son, but that he's a bad son. What's bad about fascism (in the popular estimation) is not that it's socialist, but that it's national socialism.
I'm reading the first volume of Churchill's history of World War II -- that's the volume about the political lead-up; I'll read the military-history volumes another time, maybe. I just got to Churchill's summary of Hitler's philosophy; very nicely done.
Hitler was first and foremost, not a socialist, but a nationalist. Hitler believed in the German people. He hated everything that was internationalist. His hatred of both the Jews and Communism was precisely because they were international, not bound to the genius of a particular people -- specifically, the German people. He was a socialist, concentrating power in the state, precisely to strengthen the nation, the Volk. He believed the nation's strength was in struggle (Kampf), in fighting against other nations. He wanted war to make his nation strong.
Hitler is hated, not because he was for big government, not because he was a socialist, but because he was a racist, killing the Jews, and a war-monger, conquering his neighbors. I'm sorry, Mr. Goldberg, but it is simply absurd to try to smear this on liberals -- as much as I hate liberalism! It is like saying, oh, look at those chess pieces, they're both kings, they're just the same. No. One is black, one is white. They are opposed. Someday I'll study logic and know the technical name for this fallacy, but let's call it a smear: you say that because A is like B in one respect, it must be alike in all respects. Not so fast! Especially when the critical respect is precisely the one where A and B are opposite.
Liberalism is internationalist. Liberalism denies the genius of the American people. And you know, conservatism exalts the genius of the American people. "American exceptionalism," by itself, bears much more resemblance to the critical aspect of fascism, nationalism, than do liberal desires to be liked by Europe and the Middle East, to abandon the American Constitution for international law, to give up on our language and heritage and political philosophy in favor of what everyone else is doing.
And of course, the whole movement of "conservatives" (I don't think it is genuinely conservative) against immigration is much more akin to fascist concerns about racial and cultural purity than it is to liberal desires to water down anything distinctive about America. (Anti-immigration "conservatives" claim to be worried about illegal immigration, but if that were the case, the simplest answer would be to liberalize our immigration laws; instead, most of this clique wants to tighten the laws, and explicitly appeals to arguments about cultural purity, as well as the economic danger of outsiders; the latter argument is so manifestly anti-market that it seems clear these folks are really driven by the cultural argument.) Unfortunately, that's where the immigration argument is being played out: on cultural purity.
Conservatives are right to want legality; conservatives are right to oppose more-or-less open liberal efforts to water down American distinctiveness by promoting non-assimilating immigration. But when conservatives take the side of Big Government (fences, crack-downs on businesses, more militarization, stricter scrutiny of who deserves to be part of America, based especially on central-planning economic criteria) in order to maintain cultural purity, they have no right to claim that the liberals are fascists. Nationalist socialism: big government used to preserve the Volk: that is fascism.
The rest of conservatism, however, is at least as unlike National Socialism as liberalism is, because fascism needs the State in order to pursue its kind of nationalism. The irony of calling conservatives facists (apart from the immigration debate) is that conservatives appeal to a Constitution that rejects racial purity in favor of liberty. Conservatives want a country in which the government can't crack down on minorities, in which minorities of every kind flourish. Conservatism is based on this idea of limited government; and nothing more undermines the purposes of fascism than limited government. Hitler would never accept limited government. Limited government can't invade its neighbors and gas its minorities.
There is a very strong argument to be made that Unlimited Government tends toward fascism. Even Stalin, the great Internationalist leader, ended up a fascist, killing more Jews than Hitler, cracking down on dissenters, limiting travel and free speech and universities. This is the real Liberal Fascism argument: not that the essence of Nazism is socialism -- it isn't; the essence of Nazism is nationalism -- but that socialism, Unlimited Government, inevitably contradicts internationalism, because it inevitably ends by stifling dissent, the free movement of peoples and goods (notice that our Big Government folks are terrified of free trade), and the creativity of the people. Liberalism intends to use Big Government to make the world more tolerant; but the lessons of Stalin -- and Mao, and everyone else who has tried, even our homegrown anti-marriage,* public-education liberals -- is that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat ends up being more and more Dictatorship and less and less Proletariat; the attempt to eradicate intolerance ends in the greatest intolerance; the move to make the world fair and happy through force makes things more arbitrary and dreary than ever before.
International Socialism is, at its root, as opposed to the Nationalist part of National Socialism as Black Queen to White Queen. But by seeking its internationalist ends through socialist/Unlimited Government means, it ends up as intolerant as Hitler. The question, however, is not whether Internationalists and Nationalists are essentially the same -- they aren't! -- but whether the means, Unlimited Government, tends to pervert the ends to which it is directed. That is an argument better made, I think, by Hayek than by Goldberg.
*Is the defense of marriage Limited Government? Liberals -- genuinely confused on this, I think -- believe that marriage laws are an attempt to impose a particular culture, Christianity, on others. The association of Christianity with particular culture is already odd, from a historical perspective, pretty dumb. And of course it's worth noting that at this stage of the game, a central part of the argument is about self-determination, about whether courts can overrule the overwhelming voice of the people and a couple states can overrule the opinions of other states. Nonetheless, the key point is whether liberals are right that heterosexual marriage is merely the preference of a particular culture.
In brief, the response is no. First, heterosexual marriage is a product of nature, evolution: children need parents, both biologically and, therefore, socially. This has nothing to do with culture, everything to do with reason. And since heterosexual unions are universally the cause of new citizens, it does have to do with securing the rights of every single individual (we all begin as children) against those who would treat those individuals themselves as someone else's "right": the right to adopt, to call yourself a mommy when you aren't, to deprive a child of a parent, etc.
Second, and maybe more important, marriage is just a Thing. There is, simply, something out there that is Marriage: the commitment of the two biological partners in procreation to create an environment in which procreation can reach its natural end, adulthood. The real argument against gay marriage is not anti-gay, but pro-marriage.
The equality argument here is really upside down. Gays say they want the same rights everyone else has. But they have the same rights: they can enter into a heterosexual marriage if they want; the fact that they don't want to do that is not a deprivation of their rights (at least not in the political order). What they, in fact, want is to take away the rights of others to enter into marriage; what they are asking for is an elimination of a particular Office in the polis, not its expansion. They want to deny that there is any such thing as Marriage, by replacing the definition of that Thing, in politics, with a new one.
The proponents of "traditional marriage" don't always speak this clearly -- though democracy should not require you to speak clearly -- but in fact, heterosexual marriage is simply the right of citizens to enter into the most fundamental contract in the political order and to have that contract recognized by law. Eliminating the right of people to make that contract is a usurpation: Government stepping in where it doesn't belong; as in many things, it abandons one of the necessary functions of Limited Government in favor of a new intrusion of Government into life: in this case, Government redefining the pre-existing office of Marriage. Marriage law is a matter of Limited Government, not fascism.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
A Twenty-First Century Idyll
Here's the bad news:
Our country is living beyond its means. It has been for a long time, though it spiraled out of control in the last decade. There is a sense of magic, as if the government can keep taking more debt and, since it hasn't failed yet, it never can. But of course that is silly. "Too big to fail" is a moralism, not a statement of fact: we may desperately want big things not to fail, but ultimately the only way to save them is to appeal to something bigger. Unfortunately, the buck stops with Uncle Sam: who can bail out the bailer?
Without someone to bail him out, an individual (or an institution) eventually has to pay his debts. At some point, even the most bogus credit card will no longer lend me money. I will have no more to spend, and those to whom I am obligated will want to be paid back. Without someone to bail me out, I will certainly never have money of my own again -- the lenders will make me pay back the last cent. And perhaps I will suffer violence, from those who are frustrated.
Yet the lenders themselves face the same predicament. If the bank keeps lending money to people who cannot pay it back, the bank itself will not be able to pay back legitimate investors. The bank itself will fail. The investors will lose their money, the bank will lose its good name -- and perhaps there will be violence, from those who are frustrated.
This is the truth in the bail-out mentality: bad debt is a social disease, because it always involves a lender. If I cannot pay back my debts, that hurts me -- but it also hurts everyone who loaned money to me. And if it gets out of control, and even my lenders are bankrupted, it hurts everyone who loaned to them, too. We have to do something!
But there is a lie in the bail-out mentality, too. That lie is that government evades the logic. Government lends money to bail out bad debt. Uncle Sam is giving money to those who made bad mortgages, to those who invested in those who made bad mortgages, etc. But where does Uncle Sam get the money? One source is investors: Uncle Sam just acts like another bank. But when a bank lends to debtors who can't pay back, the bank fails. The US can sell a lot of Treasury Bonds, but ultimately, people want to get their money back, with interest. Whether it is down the street or in Washington, if a bank borrows money from Tom, lends it to Harry, and then cannot get it back from Harry, then Tom will not get his money back. Tom suffers -- and he stops putting his money in the bank. The flow of Treasury-Bond revenue may be fine for now (maybe), but it will not last forever. We have to do something about our debt problem, that is true -- but taking more debt, or passing the debt around, does not fix the problem. Lending money to people who can't pay it back is the problem.
Of course, the difference between Uncle Sam and any other bank is that Uncle Sam can just print more money. But this is purely a ruse. Printing more money devalues money. If I get my $200 back, but now it doesn't buy a week's groceries, I'm in trouble. Investors know this: when it becomes apparent that Treasury Bond yields will be paid back only with massive inflation, people will stop buying Treasury Bonds. But more to the point, all the people who have bought Treasury Bonds will be in need of a bail-out themselves. If I think I can fund my retirement on funny-money inflationary Treasury Bonds, I'm going to be in big trouble when I retire.
We have a debt problem. We are living beyond our means. There is a limit to how many times Daddy can bail us out -- and there is a limit to how many people can bail Daddy out. At some point, bail-out ceases to be an option. At some point, we run out of money. At some point, we lose the house, and the SUV, and we have to work instead of retiring. The only solution to living beyond our means -- the only solution to bad debt -- is to work more and cut spending. I am not talking about only at the federal level. Uncle Sam will have to cut spending, sure -- but so will we.
Being a recent Ph.D., I have no investments, no savings, no assets, so all of this doesn't affect me. Except that it affects my employers. Bad debt is a social disease. I was just hired at a university -- and I need that income! But if all the parents who pay for kids to go to college -- and pay my salary -- have to cut back, it may be me who gets cut. If Uncle Sam no longer has money to hand out for scholarships and financial aid, my salary dries up. Bad debt is a social disease. Eventually we all have to cut back our life styles, and learn to live a more meager existence. We can't just keep taking loans we can't pay back.
If I make $50k a year, but spend $75k, eventually people are going to stop lending me that extra $25k. First, I will have to cut back, and start living at $50k. But then I will have to pay back my debts, and live on less than $50k. Government doesn't evade this logic. Shell games make it all complicated, so that the debt gets shoveled around so quickly that we think it's disappeared: but it hasn't. Everyone eventually wants their investments back, and if they don't get them back, they will stop investing. And if it turns out that, in a great shell game, everyone has loaned everyone else money they didn't have -- why, we all end up in a big mess.
That's the bad news. Eventually we will have to cut back.
But here's an idyllic possibility -- not necessarily likely, but possible, and hopeful. Perhaps when the reckoning comes, when the debt bubble bursts, and we all have to come to terms, perhaps we will take stock of what's really important. Hitting rock bottom can do a person a lot of good. When the debt-collectors come for the McMansion, and the big screen tv, and the SUV, there's always the possibility that we'll say, you know, what really matters is my dog, my kids, and the softball league. (Or whatever.) You move to a much smaller house, sell the SUV, make the kids share a bedroom, and focus on what really matters.
What would this look like on a social level? Here's a trivial example. Right now, our society spends an awful lot of money on food. There's the whole organic movement -- leave that aside for a moment -- but there's also things like grapes from Chile. Now, I like grapes, and I'm glad to have them year round. And in current circumstances, they aren't expensive at all. But it isn't easy to get grapes from Chile to Minnesota. On the most basic level, they have to get on a plane and fly, with refrigeration. But it is far more complicated than that. Thousands of people are employed by the airline, making reservations, fixing planes, fixing runways, making sure that the airplane travels to where a commodity is wanted from where it's available. We do that very efficiently now, so Chilean grapes are cheap -- but only because there is a huge system in place.
This transaction is maintained, moreover, by a massive financial sector. People are busily shuffling money around, from investors to firms, from grocery stores to Chilean-grape middlemen to farmers to farmworkers, etc. This isn't as easy as it sounds. Grapes are cheap now, because there's an enormous industry, countless people working hard, to keep this whole system lubricated. But what happens if the financial system collapses?
For example, the grocery store has to buy the grapes before it can sell them. It does that through investment: I lend money to the grocery store (probably through some Wall St. firm), trusting that a month from now, the grocery store will have used that money to buy grapes, then sold those grapes at a big enough profit to pay me back with interest. But it's a lot of work to figure out where to invest, what airline is profitable, how much interest to expect. Imagine if the manager of the grocery store had to meet with each individual potential investor, personally process each investment, no matter how big or small, keep track of it all himself, make payments, etc. And imagine if he had to call the guy in Chile, and the airline, and promise them money based on all these individual transactions? This is a lot of work. And it can work only because there is a massive financial sector dedicated full-time to handling these transactions, and guaranteeing that each month the grocer has enough money to buy grapes.
And it is all based on trust. I give my money to the financial sector because I trust they will pay me back. The grocer and the airline and the Chilean grape dealer all trust that contracts will be fulfilled, that the financial guys will put up the money, etc. Imagine if every one of these people demanded cash? It would be impossible. It all relies on trust.
We may be coming to the end of that trust. We may be coming to the end of Chilean grapes. And that is, in itself, bad news.
The good news is, that doesn't mean we have to starve. We put all these people to work so that we can have the specific kind of grapes we want, when we want them, even out of season. But if we ate locally -- I'm not trying to be crunchy here, just economical -- we could cut out an awful lot of middlemen. We could pay cash, and deal with individuals that we really did trust.
We'd lose a lot of processed foods, because they require an enormous network of trust: trust that we'll get what we're supposed to, trust that the factory in Arkansas will actually deliver food to Minnesota, trust that the grocery store will pay back its debts after it sells the frozen lasagna, trust that the financier will come through. We would replace that with a much more local trust: I ask the farmer to deliver me potatoes in the winter, and we trust each other to seal the deal. We would lose a tremendous lot of choice. But we gain more personal business relationships, a more thoughtful consideration of what we value (sell the tv, or the dog? are those Cheetos worth more than the steak?), and more tangible contact with our world.
This would put a lot of people out of work, of course. But here is a central fallacy in many discussions of the free market. It is often said that the free market depends on consumerism, greed, lavish spending. But quite the opposite is the case. The free market is, rather, a way of delegating resources to those activities that are valued. It says nothing whatsoever about what those activities are.
Imagine this: the financial sector falls apart, as do many systems of national trust; the nation as a whole is much poorer, and people radically cut back their spending, to live at, or even below, their means, since debt is no longer an option -- and Hollywood goes out of business. Film, of course, requires a massive financial sector, to invest money before the film starts selling tickets, to get goods, and people, from point a to point b, to distribute the film to where it will be watched, etc. And -- is this too optimistic? -- it's one of the first expenses to be cut. We watch too much television as a nation, but if movies cost $50 a ticket, and all tv was pay-per-view, and expensive, would people really pay? I think not.
So Hollywood goes out of business. Lots of people lose their jobs. But that frees up a lot of hands. Brad Pitt seems to be making between 10 and 30 million dollars per movie. That is an awful lot of work that our society puts into supporting this one man's lavish lifestyle, and pet interests (he recently spent $100,000 fighting for gay marriage in California). Eliminating his job does not hurt the economy as a whole. If he went to work, say, on a local farm, we could all save money not paying for his movies, and he could actually contribute to the local economy. It's not a zero-sum game, even for the minimum-wage stage hand: if he starts making hand-crafted boots, then more hand-crafted boots are available for all of us -- and we have more money to spend on those boots, since we're not paying for stage hands or big-shot actors.
We could spin this out in many ways. But here's my point: first, a reckoning is coming. Our debt problem can only end by all of us spending less money. But the more it flies out of control, the more national systems of trust will collapse: trust in the federal government, in the financial sector, in the grocery industry, etc. That will hurt. But it could mean a positive readjustment, as we shift resources from lavish lifestyles to more basic, and perhaps more human, investments. Perhaps we could eat locally-grown potatoes instead of Chilean grapes or Cheetos, and walk the dog instead of watching Brad Pitt. I don't think that would be such a bad thing.
Our country is living beyond its means. It has been for a long time, though it spiraled out of control in the last decade. There is a sense of magic, as if the government can keep taking more debt and, since it hasn't failed yet, it never can. But of course that is silly. "Too big to fail" is a moralism, not a statement of fact: we may desperately want big things not to fail, but ultimately the only way to save them is to appeal to something bigger. Unfortunately, the buck stops with Uncle Sam: who can bail out the bailer?
Without someone to bail him out, an individual (or an institution) eventually has to pay his debts. At some point, even the most bogus credit card will no longer lend me money. I will have no more to spend, and those to whom I am obligated will want to be paid back. Without someone to bail me out, I will certainly never have money of my own again -- the lenders will make me pay back the last cent. And perhaps I will suffer violence, from those who are frustrated.
Yet the lenders themselves face the same predicament. If the bank keeps lending money to people who cannot pay it back, the bank itself will not be able to pay back legitimate investors. The bank itself will fail. The investors will lose their money, the bank will lose its good name -- and perhaps there will be violence, from those who are frustrated.
This is the truth in the bail-out mentality: bad debt is a social disease, because it always involves a lender. If I cannot pay back my debts, that hurts me -- but it also hurts everyone who loaned money to me. And if it gets out of control, and even my lenders are bankrupted, it hurts everyone who loaned to them, too. We have to do something!
But there is a lie in the bail-out mentality, too. That lie is that government evades the logic. Government lends money to bail out bad debt. Uncle Sam is giving money to those who made bad mortgages, to those who invested in those who made bad mortgages, etc. But where does Uncle Sam get the money? One source is investors: Uncle Sam just acts like another bank. But when a bank lends to debtors who can't pay back, the bank fails. The US can sell a lot of Treasury Bonds, but ultimately, people want to get their money back, with interest. Whether it is down the street or in Washington, if a bank borrows money from Tom, lends it to Harry, and then cannot get it back from Harry, then Tom will not get his money back. Tom suffers -- and he stops putting his money in the bank. The flow of Treasury-Bond revenue may be fine for now (maybe), but it will not last forever. We have to do something about our debt problem, that is true -- but taking more debt, or passing the debt around, does not fix the problem. Lending money to people who can't pay it back is the problem.
Of course, the difference between Uncle Sam and any other bank is that Uncle Sam can just print more money. But this is purely a ruse. Printing more money devalues money. If I get my $200 back, but now it doesn't buy a week's groceries, I'm in trouble. Investors know this: when it becomes apparent that Treasury Bond yields will be paid back only with massive inflation, people will stop buying Treasury Bonds. But more to the point, all the people who have bought Treasury Bonds will be in need of a bail-out themselves. If I think I can fund my retirement on funny-money inflationary Treasury Bonds, I'm going to be in big trouble when I retire.
We have a debt problem. We are living beyond our means. There is a limit to how many times Daddy can bail us out -- and there is a limit to how many people can bail Daddy out. At some point, bail-out ceases to be an option. At some point, we run out of money. At some point, we lose the house, and the SUV, and we have to work instead of retiring. The only solution to living beyond our means -- the only solution to bad debt -- is to work more and cut spending. I am not talking about only at the federal level. Uncle Sam will have to cut spending, sure -- but so will we.
Being a recent Ph.D., I have no investments, no savings, no assets, so all of this doesn't affect me. Except that it affects my employers. Bad debt is a social disease. I was just hired at a university -- and I need that income! But if all the parents who pay for kids to go to college -- and pay my salary -- have to cut back, it may be me who gets cut. If Uncle Sam no longer has money to hand out for scholarships and financial aid, my salary dries up. Bad debt is a social disease. Eventually we all have to cut back our life styles, and learn to live a more meager existence. We can't just keep taking loans we can't pay back.
If I make $50k a year, but spend $75k, eventually people are going to stop lending me that extra $25k. First, I will have to cut back, and start living at $50k. But then I will have to pay back my debts, and live on less than $50k. Government doesn't evade this logic. Shell games make it all complicated, so that the debt gets shoveled around so quickly that we think it's disappeared: but it hasn't. Everyone eventually wants their investments back, and if they don't get them back, they will stop investing. And if it turns out that, in a great shell game, everyone has loaned everyone else money they didn't have -- why, we all end up in a big mess.
That's the bad news. Eventually we will have to cut back.
But here's an idyllic possibility -- not necessarily likely, but possible, and hopeful. Perhaps when the reckoning comes, when the debt bubble bursts, and we all have to come to terms, perhaps we will take stock of what's really important. Hitting rock bottom can do a person a lot of good. When the debt-collectors come for the McMansion, and the big screen tv, and the SUV, there's always the possibility that we'll say, you know, what really matters is my dog, my kids, and the softball league. (Or whatever.) You move to a much smaller house, sell the SUV, make the kids share a bedroom, and focus on what really matters.
What would this look like on a social level? Here's a trivial example. Right now, our society spends an awful lot of money on food. There's the whole organic movement -- leave that aside for a moment -- but there's also things like grapes from Chile. Now, I like grapes, and I'm glad to have them year round. And in current circumstances, they aren't expensive at all. But it isn't easy to get grapes from Chile to Minnesota. On the most basic level, they have to get on a plane and fly, with refrigeration. But it is far more complicated than that. Thousands of people are employed by the airline, making reservations, fixing planes, fixing runways, making sure that the airplane travels to where a commodity is wanted from where it's available. We do that very efficiently now, so Chilean grapes are cheap -- but only because there is a huge system in place.
This transaction is maintained, moreover, by a massive financial sector. People are busily shuffling money around, from investors to firms, from grocery stores to Chilean-grape middlemen to farmers to farmworkers, etc. This isn't as easy as it sounds. Grapes are cheap now, because there's an enormous industry, countless people working hard, to keep this whole system lubricated. But what happens if the financial system collapses?
For example, the grocery store has to buy the grapes before it can sell them. It does that through investment: I lend money to the grocery store (probably through some Wall St. firm), trusting that a month from now, the grocery store will have used that money to buy grapes, then sold those grapes at a big enough profit to pay me back with interest. But it's a lot of work to figure out where to invest, what airline is profitable, how much interest to expect. Imagine if the manager of the grocery store had to meet with each individual potential investor, personally process each investment, no matter how big or small, keep track of it all himself, make payments, etc. And imagine if he had to call the guy in Chile, and the airline, and promise them money based on all these individual transactions? This is a lot of work. And it can work only because there is a massive financial sector dedicated full-time to handling these transactions, and guaranteeing that each month the grocer has enough money to buy grapes.
And it is all based on trust. I give my money to the financial sector because I trust they will pay me back. The grocer and the airline and the Chilean grape dealer all trust that contracts will be fulfilled, that the financial guys will put up the money, etc. Imagine if every one of these people demanded cash? It would be impossible. It all relies on trust.
We may be coming to the end of that trust. We may be coming to the end of Chilean grapes. And that is, in itself, bad news.
The good news is, that doesn't mean we have to starve. We put all these people to work so that we can have the specific kind of grapes we want, when we want them, even out of season. But if we ate locally -- I'm not trying to be crunchy here, just economical -- we could cut out an awful lot of middlemen. We could pay cash, and deal with individuals that we really did trust.
We'd lose a lot of processed foods, because they require an enormous network of trust: trust that we'll get what we're supposed to, trust that the factory in Arkansas will actually deliver food to Minnesota, trust that the grocery store will pay back its debts after it sells the frozen lasagna, trust that the financier will come through. We would replace that with a much more local trust: I ask the farmer to deliver me potatoes in the winter, and we trust each other to seal the deal. We would lose a tremendous lot of choice. But we gain more personal business relationships, a more thoughtful consideration of what we value (sell the tv, or the dog? are those Cheetos worth more than the steak?), and more tangible contact with our world.
This would put a lot of people out of work, of course. But here is a central fallacy in many discussions of the free market. It is often said that the free market depends on consumerism, greed, lavish spending. But quite the opposite is the case. The free market is, rather, a way of delegating resources to those activities that are valued. It says nothing whatsoever about what those activities are.
Imagine this: the financial sector falls apart, as do many systems of national trust; the nation as a whole is much poorer, and people radically cut back their spending, to live at, or even below, their means, since debt is no longer an option -- and Hollywood goes out of business. Film, of course, requires a massive financial sector, to invest money before the film starts selling tickets, to get goods, and people, from point a to point b, to distribute the film to where it will be watched, etc. And -- is this too optimistic? -- it's one of the first expenses to be cut. We watch too much television as a nation, but if movies cost $50 a ticket, and all tv was pay-per-view, and expensive, would people really pay? I think not.
So Hollywood goes out of business. Lots of people lose their jobs. But that frees up a lot of hands. Brad Pitt seems to be making between 10 and 30 million dollars per movie. That is an awful lot of work that our society puts into supporting this one man's lavish lifestyle, and pet interests (he recently spent $100,000 fighting for gay marriage in California). Eliminating his job does not hurt the economy as a whole. If he went to work, say, on a local farm, we could all save money not paying for his movies, and he could actually contribute to the local economy. It's not a zero-sum game, even for the minimum-wage stage hand: if he starts making hand-crafted boots, then more hand-crafted boots are available for all of us -- and we have more money to spend on those boots, since we're not paying for stage hands or big-shot actors.
We could spin this out in many ways. But here's my point: first, a reckoning is coming. Our debt problem can only end by all of us spending less money. But the more it flies out of control, the more national systems of trust will collapse: trust in the federal government, in the financial sector, in the grocery industry, etc. That will hurt. But it could mean a positive readjustment, as we shift resources from lavish lifestyles to more basic, and perhaps more human, investments. Perhaps we could eat locally-grown potatoes instead of Chilean grapes or Cheetos, and walk the dog instead of watching Brad Pitt. I don't think that would be such a bad thing.
Monday, March 23, 2009
A Reasonable Measure
The French Revolution set out to replace tradition with pure reason. One of the most concrete things they bequeathed to us is the famously rational metric system. There are a hundred (rationally named) centigrams in a gram, 1,000 grams in a kilogram (cent = 100, kilo = 1,000) -- certainly more logical than 12 ounces in a pound. Centigrade temperature places freezing at 0, boiling at 100, instead of the unthinkable 32 and 212. And there are a hundred centimeters to the meter, 1,000 meters to the kilometer, as opposed to the ungainly twelve inches to the foot, three feet to the yard, and -- horrors -- 5,280 feet to the mile.
Money has been standardized, too. Most modern countries are similar to the U.S. The dollar is divided by 100; coins come in 1, 5, 10, or 25; dollars in 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100. Reasonable. Compare the old British system. A farthing was 1/4 of a penny; 12 pennies to a shilling; 5 shillings to the pound; 21 shillings to a guinea. Who can make sense of such things?
The one rationalization that did not survive the Revolution was the calendar: 365 days = ten months, each with three ten-day weeks ("decades"), plus five holidays at the end, and a sixth for leap year. The day was divided into ten hours, each consisting of 100 minutes of 100 seconds. Rational. Orderly.
And all the new systems are based on modern science. The meter is 1/10,000,000 of the distance from one pole of the earth to the equator (though it has subsequently been given a more obscure definition in terms of the wave length of light, since the earth itself isn't perfectly rational or consistent). A gram is 1/1,000,000 of the weight of a cubic meter of water (and mass, of course, does not vary, as weight does, depending on the force of gravitation). Only money avoids any scientific grounding -- on the perfectly rational realization that money is merely a means of exchange, with no fixed value.
The problem is, none of these things are all that reasonable. Begin with the idea of 10s in the first place. It looks very nice on paper, until you realize that if we didn't have ten fingers, ten is the last number we would choose to orient our counting around. We are used to it, to be sure, but five is an awfully clumsy number, stretching the limits of simple math; 100 is so big as to be beyond visualization.
It makes far more sense to orient things around threes and fours, both of which are far more intuitive. Consider the day. The 24-hour system actually consists of 12 hours before noon, 12 after. 12 divides easily by 3 and 4. 6 is half way, 3 and 9 a quarter of the way. 7 and 8 are decent divisions between 6 and 9 (whether morning or night): to further subdivide by 2's would either make the hours too long (only one division between 6/the evening and 9/night?) or too short (my head begins to spin when I consider half of half of half). Once you divide the day into quarters -- 12, 3, 6, 9 -- three is a manageable way to break things down further.
Why do we do it this way? Because it's manageable. Because it's easy to think about. 2's and 3's, even 4's, are easy to think about. 10 is too big: you have to subdivide to get a picture of it. But it only subdivides into 5's, which are still just too clumsy. Imagine, in the Revolutionary system, dividing all the time from midday to midnight into 5 parts. It's just clumsy; there's no midway, no easy parts. 100 minutes certainly doesn't help. 60 breaks into 4 fifteens -- and it's awfully nice to talk of quarter-hours. And that breaks down into 3 x 5. All right, so we have 5-minute intervals -- but notice that we really can't think in much smaller units than that; we all joke about how absurd it is to say 6:03; we rarely even break the hour down to less than quarters. In any case, those 5-minute intervals just divide 60 into 12 parts: 12 is a manageable amount, because we can visualize 4 groups of 3. Imagine asking the time and being told, "it's 2/5ths past the hour." "??"
I see this with my little boy, who's just getting into numbers. "So, 8 is four and four?" he asked the other day. Yes, Joseph. But how did he get there? Then he tells me, "8 is two squares?!" Yes. He gets there because he can see it, because four is a manageable number. Apart from fingers, 5 is just too much. A base-10 number system forces us into nothing but 2's and 5's. Pentagons are weird.
Imagine how convenient the old British system was. A penny breaks into two (hay penny) or four (farthing). A shilling is 12 pennies -- and the standard coins were 3 and 6 pennies (three pence and six pence). Yeah. I can think about that. A pound, I'll grant you, was 5 shillings. But how delightful that a guinea was 21 shillings: 4 pounds-and-a-bit. This is a coin system designed for people to think about and do math in their head, not to look nice (with lots of 0's) on paper.
Apart from the lovely 3's and 4's, the old system is based on our senses. There are 12 inches to a foot -- partly because that makes it easy to think of a quarter-foot. But how perfect that an inch is the size of a man's first knuckle, a foot the size of a man's foot. Now that's useful. 1/10,000,000 of the quarter-circumference of the Earth might sound "scientific," but who knows how big a centimeter is? It's not based on anything.
A yard is one big stride. A mile -- did you know this? -- is from the Latin "mille," a thousand; a 1,000 big steps would be 3,000 feet, a 1,000 with each foot is 6,000 feet -- and a 1,000 slightly shorter steps, the kind you take when you're walking a long distance, comes to roughly 5,280 feet. Precise? No. But workable. How much less precise is it to use the kilometer, a distance, the kilometer with no reference to anything in our experience? How would you even approximate a kilometer? Anyway, if you want to be precise, you use a machine, which doesn't need the numbers to be nice. When the numbers matter is when you're using a rule of thumb: a thousand right-foot steps.
(Note, by the way, that here, 1,000 is a decent number, since you'll end up using your fingers.)
Fahrenheit? When do you want to know temperatures? When you're boiling water, you just wait for the water to boil. When you're going higher than that, or need to be more precise than that, you use a thermometer. (Though every candy chef knows the real signs are hard crack, soft crack, etc.) But when you want a number you can look at is when you're going outside. And you know, 0 - 100 F. is actually a pretty good range for outside temperatures. Here, we use base-10 numbers, because yeah, it's just a number to look at. Centigrade may seem real scientific, but your entire range of outdoor temperatures is significantly cut down. How useful is that?
And the Revolutionary Calendar might look very neat, but isn't a seven-day work week a little easier to think about? And when was the last time you complained that May has more days in it than February?
Here's the point I'm trying to make. Rationalism isn't rational -- certainly not reasonable. Rationalism means trying to make everything fit into a system. On the way, it throws out the data. It throws out tradition, which includes both some smart systems that have been worked out over time (like the utility of the number 12, and measures based on body parts) and all our historical documents (do you really want to have to convert every date before 1793?) It throws out the senses, so that you're more interested in things like 1/10,000,000 of the quarter-circumference of the earth than the length of your own foot. Rationalism turns Reason into a creator, instead of a receiver, a way to overrule the world around you instead of understanding it. And in the end, that isn't rational at all.
Conversely, there's nothing rationalistic about being reasonable. We who keep company with St. Thomas often get dismissed for thinking too much about syllogisms, definitions, and logical consequences. But these are the things our minds can get ahold of. Working with reasonable measures, with things we can actually wrap our brains around, is not rationalism -- it is the ultimate way to prevent rationalism.
Just like knowing how long an inch is keeps the fabric merchant from ripping you off.
Money has been standardized, too. Most modern countries are similar to the U.S. The dollar is divided by 100; coins come in 1, 5, 10, or 25; dollars in 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100. Reasonable. Compare the old British system. A farthing was 1/4 of a penny; 12 pennies to a shilling; 5 shillings to the pound; 21 shillings to a guinea. Who can make sense of such things?
The one rationalization that did not survive the Revolution was the calendar: 365 days = ten months, each with three ten-day weeks ("decades"), plus five holidays at the end, and a sixth for leap year. The day was divided into ten hours, each consisting of 100 minutes of 100 seconds. Rational. Orderly.
And all the new systems are based on modern science. The meter is 1/10,000,000 of the distance from one pole of the earth to the equator (though it has subsequently been given a more obscure definition in terms of the wave length of light, since the earth itself isn't perfectly rational or consistent). A gram is 1/1,000,000 of the weight of a cubic meter of water (and mass, of course, does not vary, as weight does, depending on the force of gravitation). Only money avoids any scientific grounding -- on the perfectly rational realization that money is merely a means of exchange, with no fixed value.
The problem is, none of these things are all that reasonable. Begin with the idea of 10s in the first place. It looks very nice on paper, until you realize that if we didn't have ten fingers, ten is the last number we would choose to orient our counting around. We are used to it, to be sure, but five is an awfully clumsy number, stretching the limits of simple math; 100 is so big as to be beyond visualization.
It makes far more sense to orient things around threes and fours, both of which are far more intuitive. Consider the day. The 24-hour system actually consists of 12 hours before noon, 12 after. 12 divides easily by 3 and 4. 6 is half way, 3 and 9 a quarter of the way. 7 and 8 are decent divisions between 6 and 9 (whether morning or night): to further subdivide by 2's would either make the hours too long (only one division between 6/the evening and 9/night?) or too short (my head begins to spin when I consider half of half of half). Once you divide the day into quarters -- 12, 3, 6, 9 -- three is a manageable way to break things down further.
Why do we do it this way? Because it's manageable. Because it's easy to think about. 2's and 3's, even 4's, are easy to think about. 10 is too big: you have to subdivide to get a picture of it. But it only subdivides into 5's, which are still just too clumsy. Imagine, in the Revolutionary system, dividing all the time from midday to midnight into 5 parts. It's just clumsy; there's no midway, no easy parts. 100 minutes certainly doesn't help. 60 breaks into 4 fifteens -- and it's awfully nice to talk of quarter-hours. And that breaks down into 3 x 5. All right, so we have 5-minute intervals -- but notice that we really can't think in much smaller units than that; we all joke about how absurd it is to say 6:03; we rarely even break the hour down to less than quarters. In any case, those 5-minute intervals just divide 60 into 12 parts: 12 is a manageable amount, because we can visualize 4 groups of 3. Imagine asking the time and being told, "it's 2/5ths past the hour." "??"
I see this with my little boy, who's just getting into numbers. "So, 8 is four and four?" he asked the other day. Yes, Joseph. But how did he get there? Then he tells me, "8 is two squares?!" Yes. He gets there because he can see it, because four is a manageable number. Apart from fingers, 5 is just too much. A base-10 number system forces us into nothing but 2's and 5's. Pentagons are weird.
Imagine how convenient the old British system was. A penny breaks into two (hay penny) or four (farthing). A shilling is 12 pennies -- and the standard coins were 3 and 6 pennies (three pence and six pence). Yeah. I can think about that. A pound, I'll grant you, was 5 shillings. But how delightful that a guinea was 21 shillings: 4 pounds-and-a-bit. This is a coin system designed for people to think about and do math in their head, not to look nice (with lots of 0's) on paper.
Apart from the lovely 3's and 4's, the old system is based on our senses. There are 12 inches to a foot -- partly because that makes it easy to think of a quarter-foot. But how perfect that an inch is the size of a man's first knuckle, a foot the size of a man's foot. Now that's useful. 1/10,000,000 of the quarter-circumference of the Earth might sound "scientific," but who knows how big a centimeter is? It's not based on anything.
A yard is one big stride. A mile -- did you know this? -- is from the Latin "mille," a thousand; a 1,000 big steps would be 3,000 feet, a 1,000 with each foot is 6,000 feet -- and a 1,000 slightly shorter steps, the kind you take when you're walking a long distance, comes to roughly 5,280 feet. Precise? No. But workable. How much less precise is it to use the kilometer, a distance, the kilometer with no reference to anything in our experience? How would you even approximate a kilometer? Anyway, if you want to be precise, you use a machine, which doesn't need the numbers to be nice. When the numbers matter is when you're using a rule of thumb: a thousand right-foot steps.
(Note, by the way, that here, 1,000 is a decent number, since you'll end up using your fingers.)
Fahrenheit? When do you want to know temperatures? When you're boiling water, you just wait for the water to boil. When you're going higher than that, or need to be more precise than that, you use a thermometer. (Though every candy chef knows the real signs are hard crack, soft crack, etc.) But when you want a number you can look at is when you're going outside. And you know, 0 - 100 F. is actually a pretty good range for outside temperatures. Here, we use base-10 numbers, because yeah, it's just a number to look at. Centigrade may seem real scientific, but your entire range of outdoor temperatures is significantly cut down. How useful is that?
And the Revolutionary Calendar might look very neat, but isn't a seven-day work week a little easier to think about? And when was the last time you complained that May has more days in it than February?
Here's the point I'm trying to make. Rationalism isn't rational -- certainly not reasonable. Rationalism means trying to make everything fit into a system. On the way, it throws out the data. It throws out tradition, which includes both some smart systems that have been worked out over time (like the utility of the number 12, and measures based on body parts) and all our historical documents (do you really want to have to convert every date before 1793?) It throws out the senses, so that you're more interested in things like 1/10,000,000 of the quarter-circumference of the earth than the length of your own foot. Rationalism turns Reason into a creator, instead of a receiver, a way to overrule the world around you instead of understanding it. And in the end, that isn't rational at all.
Conversely, there's nothing rationalistic about being reasonable. We who keep company with St. Thomas often get dismissed for thinking too much about syllogisms, definitions, and logical consequences. But these are the things our minds can get ahold of. Working with reasonable measures, with things we can actually wrap our brains around, is not rationalism -- it is the ultimate way to prevent rationalism.
Just like knowing how long an inch is keeps the fabric merchant from ripping you off.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Can We?
I recently spent some time in a children's hospital emergency room. While my four-year-old was getting stitches, we were introduced to Bob the Builder, a popular claymation children's show. The theme song is catchy, and within an hour of our coming home, even the two-year-old, who hadn't come to the emergency room, was singing along: "Bob the Builder -- Can We Fix It? -- Bob the Builder -- Yes We Can!" It's got that kind of pep that is both annoying and, from a child's perspective, sort of uplifting.
But I couldn't help notice the parallel to another pop-culture phenomenon. The night of Hillary Clinton's primary-election victory in New Hampshire, Barack Obama gave one of his more memorable speeches. The culmination is as follows:
"Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." The fundamental theme of the Declaration is "no, you can't." No, government does not have the right to overstep its bounds; and the Declaration is a long list of abuses. The first of our "founding documents" has nothing of "hope" and everything of anger at governments doing what they must not. "A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people." What "we can" do is not yet even asked.
Eleven years later, our next founding document was published, the Constitution. (It took two more years for it to be ratified.) It would be delightfully ironic to describe the Constitution as a document of "yes we can." The Constitution is fundamentally an enumeration of powers. It says "yes we can" do x, y, and z, precisely to say "no, we cannot do anything else." There are several explicit "no you can't's" offered to the states:
Of course, there is much hope in this document. But there is a difference between true "hope" and "yes we can": hope merely expresses a possibility. On leaving the Constitutional Convention, Ben Franklin is reputed to have responded to the question, "what have you given us?" with the answer "a republic, if you can keep it." True hope is always "if." Perhaps what so grates about Obama's invocation of hope is that it seems strong on the "yes we can" and weak on the "if." Does he ask anything of us, or just tell us we can do whatever we want?
But I think it is pretty well understood, by those who actually study Lincoln, that his was an attitude of restraint. The one who actually freed the slaves, the one who brought the obscure Republican party to national strength, and maintained the Union so that their abolitionist ideas could apply to the slave states: Lincoln's attitude was hardly "yes we can."
In that marvelous Gettysburg Address, Lincoln describes the precarious situation of republican government:
In the Second Inaugural, Lincoln proclaimed:
There are two fundamental weaknesses in the slogans "hope," and "yes we can." One is grammatical. These are transitive ideas. You have to hope in something. Even Bob the Builder knows this: "yes we can" is only a response to "can we fix it." "Yes we can" do this particular task. To proclaim hope and "yes we can" without proclaiming what we can is grammatically unintelligible. (Just as "change" is unintelligible without defining from what to what, and "choice" is unintelligible without saying what you're choosing: choose infanticide?)
The second weakness is metaphysical. Ability is limited. Our founding documents hope that maybe "yes we can" have a republican government, but only if we are clear what we cannot do. The Great Emancipator hopes that perhaps "we can" end the war and save the union, with its republican government: but he knows that we must ultimately submit to the judgments of the Lord of history.
It seems to me that this empty "can," "hope," "change," and "choice" are fundamental to Obama's philosophy. In any case, they define a particular liberal worldview, a view that refuses all limits, that defines its worldview by going to the moon: set any goal, and "just do it." The conservative is he who says, perhaps, but there are costs, in moral (and fiscal) discipline, there are limits to what can be achieved. A republic, like individuals, cannot stand by just "shooting for the moon." We must be careful to hope in what can be achieved, and take seriously what will be required of us to achieve it.
But I couldn't help notice the parallel to another pop-culture phenomenon. The night of Hillary Clinton's primary-election victory in New Hampshire, Barack Obama gave one of his more memorable speeches. The culmination is as follows:
when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.I'm told that Obama was evoking the 1970's labor organizer Cesar Chavez. (There's an interesting commentary there on Obama's target demographic: people who recognize Cesar Chavez, but not Bob the Builder.) I have no idea how central this speech is to Obama's mystique, though I know LA made a fancy music video out of it, blending the very catchy with the utterly pretentious. So in critiquing this theme, I do not mean to criticize Obama as a whole -- I don't know enough about him to do that. I do mean to criticize what I take to be a central theme in modern liberalism.Yes we can. (break for cheering) Yes we can. (break for cheering) Yes we can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.
Yes we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights.
Yes we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.
Yes we can.
It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.
Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes we can.Except actually, it wasn't. The Declaration of Independence opens with questions of necessity: "it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands . . . decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires . . . ." These are matters, not of "yes we can," but of "yes we must." The necessity derives from "must nots." The rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not, of course, "inalienable" in the sense that they cannot be taken away, but that they must not.
"Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." The fundamental theme of the Declaration is "no, you can't." No, government does not have the right to overstep its bounds; and the Declaration is a long list of abuses. The first of our "founding documents" has nothing of "hope" and everything of anger at governments doing what they must not. "A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people." What "we can" do is not yet even asked.
Eleven years later, our next founding document was published, the Constitution. (It took two more years for it to be ratified.) It would be delightfully ironic to describe the Constitution as a document of "yes we can." The Constitution is fundamentally an enumeration of powers. It says "yes we can" do x, y, and z, precisely to say "no, we cannot do anything else." There are several explicit "no you can't's" offered to the states:
No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility.And several direct "no you can't's" aimed at the Federal Government:No state shall, without the consent of the Congress, lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection laws: and the net produce of all duties and imposts, laid by any state on imports or exports, shall be for the use of the treasury of the United States; and all such laws shall be subject to the revision and control of the Congress.
No state shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any duty of tonnage, keep troops, or ships of war in time of peace, enter into any agreement or compact with another state, or with a foreign power, or engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay.
But more to the point, the Bill of Rights (which is, of course, nothing but a list of "no you can't's" for the federal government: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech," etc.; "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed;" etc.) is sealed with the Tenth Amendment:
The migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person.The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
No capitation, or other direct, tax shall be laid, unless in proportion to the census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.
No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state.
No preference shall be given by any regulation of commerce or revenue to the ports of one state over those of another: nor shall vessels bound to, or from, one state, be obliged to enter, clear or pay duties in another.
No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.
No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.Anything not specifically listed as "yes we can" is thereby construed as "no we can't."
Of course, there is much hope in this document. But there is a difference between true "hope" and "yes we can": hope merely expresses a possibility. On leaving the Constitutional Convention, Ben Franklin is reputed to have responded to the question, "what have you given us?" with the answer "a republic, if you can keep it." True hope is always "if." Perhaps what so grates about Obama's invocation of hope is that it seems strong on the "yes we can" and weak on the "if." Does he ask anything of us, or just tell us we can do whatever we want?
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights.Now, I do not deny that what I am describing as a fundamentally liberal attitude did exist among some of the more radical abolitionists. It is fair to put the unrestricted "yes we can" in their mouths, and indeed to root much of the rise of modern liberalism in the unrestrained desires of the radical Republicans in the years following Abraham Lincoln's death.
But I think it is pretty well understood, by those who actually study Lincoln, that his was an attitude of restraint. The one who actually freed the slaves, the one who brought the obscure Republican party to national strength, and maintained the Union so that their abolitionist ideas could apply to the slave states: Lincoln's attitude was hardly "yes we can."
In that marvelous Gettysburg Address, Lincoln describes the precarious situation of republican government:
Our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Yes, this is hope. But "yes we can"? No, I think Lincoln's attitude is, "perhaps we can." Perhaps, if we are righteous, there is a possibility. I am no expert on Barack Obama, but his hope feels a little cheap.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. . . .
It is for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us . . . that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
In the Second Inaugural, Lincoln proclaimed:
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.""We hope -- if."
There are two fundamental weaknesses in the slogans "hope," and "yes we can." One is grammatical. These are transitive ideas. You have to hope in something. Even Bob the Builder knows this: "yes we can" is only a response to "can we fix it." "Yes we can" do this particular task. To proclaim hope and "yes we can" without proclaiming what we can is grammatically unintelligible. (Just as "change" is unintelligible without defining from what to what, and "choice" is unintelligible without saying what you're choosing: choose infanticide?)
The second weakness is metaphysical. Ability is limited. Our founding documents hope that maybe "yes we can" have a republican government, but only if we are clear what we cannot do. The Great Emancipator hopes that perhaps "we can" end the war and save the union, with its republican government: but he knows that we must ultimately submit to the judgments of the Lord of history.
It seems to me that this empty "can," "hope," "change," and "choice" are fundamental to Obama's philosophy. In any case, they define a particular liberal worldview, a view that refuses all limits, that defines its worldview by going to the moon: set any goal, and "just do it." The conservative is he who says, perhaps, but there are costs, in moral (and fiscal) discipline, there are limits to what can be achieved. A republic, like individuals, cannot stand by just "shooting for the moon." We must be careful to hope in what can be achieved, and take seriously what will be required of us to achieve it.
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