Journolist

The most frequent excuse coming out from the exposed Journolisters is that the splashy comments are being taken out of context, that most of the discussions were far more prosaic. They are quick to point out that there was no co-ordination, no conspiracy, just people expressing opinions, some of which were extremer than others. I don't doubt that most people who agree with them find this an acceptable explanation.

It is unfortunately not one they extend to their opponents. The most recent Tea Party racism scandal concerns a satire that wasn't especially racist. It merely transgressed the way they think we should talk about race. By extension, they think this must mean there is racism driving it.

What they demand from their opponents they should have demanded from each other, if they want credibility. When such unfair tactics as shutting down Fox, or intentionally downplaying a story to help Obama, or calling opponents racist as a mere tactic to put them on the defensive, or describing violent fantasies of "find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear," or watching Rush Limbaugh suffer a horrible death, they should have been denounced instantly. Decent people should have said "either she goes or I do."

An additional point, supporting my oft-repeated contention that this is a socially-driven, primitive tribal group rather than an intellectual movement. In advocating that the government shut down Fox News, one said

...shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.

Exactly as I have said. They enforce by social pressure, sneers, and condescension. When thwarted, some are apparently quite ready to encourage personal destruction instead. Not that they would engage in any violence themselves, of course. They leave that to others.

Postconservative

Terri's comment under Tribalism and Christianity-Continued should be read, for those who don't follow threads that far. What she describes, may I be so bold, is something like Postconservatism. Even without reading that, you can likely intuit some of it from my post in response.

I feel your pain, sister. I sent my sons to Christian - Baptist, really - schools for at least part of their educations, and encountered many folks much as you describe, including the schools themselves. I was always conscious of having to counteract certain attitudes, both religious and political, without encouraging my children to be smartasses who challenged everything and developed an attitude of contempt. The trickiness of this differs at different ages. When they were younger, I didn't want to undermine the classroom teacher, who was often doing excellent things for my child's education. When they were older, the first two children in particular had enough intelligence and general knowledge that they could have become intellectual bullies had that been allowed - including, in some cases, with the teacher. My giving them assistance in the background would have enabled this attitude. And most of all, they had to do their own thinking and come to their opinions themselves. As I am a dominant conversationalist - more than just talking too much - I was already in danger of overinfluencing.

So I also know these folks, and should fairly point out, if they were in charge of us in this culture war I would have much to object to with them as well. At the moment, I think the Christian social conservatives would be greatly relieved at eliminating all late-term abortions and most earlier ones, forbidding gay marriage, not being actively undermined by curricula in the teaching of evolution and sex education, and allowing more public religious expression, especially in the schools. But most of them would no longer want to return teacher-led prayer, or teaching 6D creationism exclusively, or any of the other dire predictions of their opponents. Some would. I know some. Not enough to make it happen, because even conservative Christians would balk at a lot of that.

But however much people dislike any of those things and wouldn't want to live under them, it's a limited list, and we have essentially lived under it most of our national existence anyway. The worry would come if those goals were achieved, because human beings have a way of finding one more thing they would like to make it all perfect. So were those folks in power, they might also start grasping - no, they would start grasping, because that's what humans do.

There are groups and pockets in America where this sort of society-wide strictness was enforced, so there are certainly people who would do this if they could. But key point number one, they can't. Even the Puritans could only sustain it for a century under highly unusual circumstances: people were bonded by common hardship; people could move away if they chose. People drank in Kentucky even with dry counties. Mormons changed over the years despite owning a whole state.

But it is the second key point that keeps me focused on the tribalism, arrogance, and incompetence of liberals. They're running the joint. We're in no danger of preachers, let alone evangelical preachers, ruling the country, not even by proxy through congregants. Calvinist Switzerland isn't anywhere on the horizon. But the government, spending our money and telling us what to do, is increasingly ruled by a set of people of very similar social and economic beliefs.

I agree that there was little that was brand new in Codevilla, and also that he gets his own personal hobbyhorses mixed in with a general description. And I would add that he needs a good highschool English teacher to edit that sucker down to about one-third its length. But he refined many of these culture war ideas into a framework that has explanatory power.

There is a further point. There is actually a long line of culture warriors complaining way back that their values weren't represented. And they were right, their ideas weren't being taken seriously. In many cases, that's a good thing, too. But the number of Americans whose views aren't being taken seriously by those who call the shots is ever-expanding. In contrast to leadership in business, or the military, or churches, which continue to allow for a certain social mobility and meritocracy, the levers of power in government, in lobbying, in secular non-profit and advocacy groups, and in media has been increasingly dominated by a self-reinforcing elite. It is no longer just the cranks who are excluded. As the media dominance is eroded by alt-media, we see the really frightening viciousness that those who have power display when it is taken away. Those people are no worse in this than most other folks would be in the same situation. But the damage is real nonetheless.

Tribalism And Christianity - Continued

The hospital chaplain commented that more people have been killed in the name of Jesus than any other religion. I suppose it's a nice, humble thing that chaplains now are willing to admit error on behalf of their faith rather than reflexively defend all our historical actions, but I have to suspect that she has at least some allegiance to the New Religion of liberalism (there's a Codevilla tie-in there, I suppose). Her comment just before -in reference to a threatened Moslem honor killing - was about how all fundamentalists are dangerous. As we never use the term fundamentalist except to describe either Moslems or Christians, it's a pretty clear message. While she might theoretically think that if some other belief-system was being discussed, and it had an ultra-rigorous branch, she would describe that as fundamentalist and describe that as dangerous also, I think it is safe to conclude that the similar dangerousness of Christian fundamentalists was the point she was trying to make sure I didn't miss. Can't have other Christians going away without being evangelised in the beliefs of the ruling class.

Yet it was the first comment that I went after a bit. I won't recreate the arguments I made then. Suffice it to say that she said she allowed for some validity to my challenge to the her "most-killed" comment, but kept gently reminding me, as one would a child, that the statement was essentially true as stated.

It's just not. It's insane on many levels. But I will keep to a single level, that of tribalism, my favorite prism.

Whatever war you are looking at, you can describe in terms of tribalism and be much more accurate than by referring to any of the other usual culprits: economics, religion, class. The World Wars were not fought over ideas (except perhaps the idea of Prussian superiority, but that would only further prove my point), and certainly not religious ideas, but over tribal land and power. That every nation that goes to war invokes its religion is a given. Sometimes the religion concurs, and when that is Christianity I feel personally shamed and angered. But it's never the cause. Germany did not exempt Jewish converts. Even in the Crusades, which might be thought to be the best example of religious war, the Christians were treated by the Moslems as just one more tribe for potential alliance - and several did ally with them to fight against other Moslems. Even the poor Jews slaughtered by Crusaders along the way were not killed by crusaders in general, but by a few closely-related Germanic tribes.

The Troubles in Ireland aren't fought over consubstantiation or the authority of the Pope. They are historically tribal, with religion simply being one identifier of tribe. As the saying goes, it is a conflict between those who don't go to church and those who don't go to Mass.

Persecution for religious reasons, Christians have to own up to. We have indeed done that, obscuring tribal boundaries for the sake of religious ones. But even then, tribal issues often popped up - and the overall number of dead does not approach wartime dead.

Lest one think I am just trying to get Chrisitans off the hook here, I apply this to other religious groups as well. Moslems may too readily give sanction to religious reasons for war, and speak often of common war against the infidel, but they behave differently in different places. Africa has been beset by war continuously long before Christianity and Islam even existed. In fact, everywhere has been beset by tribal war long before Christianity or Islam existed. Tribal war is the normal state of affairs for mankind. If one regards communism as a religion - I think the case can be fairly made - then we might make accusation against that faith as the greatest religious culprit. (Conservatives sometimes do talk like this.) But Russian expansion existed long before Marx was born. Adding in the socialist angle provides no overwhelming new explanatory power.

There are forces which do seem to hold tribalism in check. Empire is one. The Romans might seem to have been in constant war, but Pax Romana was not a myth. Behind the lines, the empire had relative peace. At the points of conflict, they made war on tribes who had been fighting with each other continually for centuries anyway. It would be hard to prove a net increase in dead humans, especially knowing that early man and current hunter-gatherers had a higher rate of war-death than modern industrial man, even with World Wars and communism. Those low-intensity struggles, punctuated by occasional exterminations of one's neighbors, add up fast.

The British Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the empire that called itself the Soviet Union, all had places and times of internal peace. It might be a peace bought with oppression, but empire works for reducing war.

Confucianism would get some credit on this score. The prevailing value of the community living in peace and harmony did reduce warfare. Like Rome, it did so with brutal conquest of neighbors, but it eventually accomplishes something. Buddhism, not so much. Individual Buddhists are very good at eschewing war, but their inability to prevent injustice, their tolerating any evil, has ultimately been an encouragement to evil and violent men.

So now when we run the list, Christianity actually seems to be the smart kid in the dumb row. We have been pretty inadequate at preventing our various tribes from continuing on in their primitive aggressive violence against neighbors - but not wholly inadequate. It seems otherwise for two prominent reasons, and a host of smaller ones.

1. We advertised that we could do much better, and would do much better. We moved in and called converted those whose king said they were. So long as they went along with our worship, we called them ours, and claimed - even bragged - that we were going to demonstrate sanctity. It may seem faint praise to say we partly succeeded with that kind of extravagant promising, but it's something. The Jews can claim a better record.

2. We kept better records, and especially better records of our own sins. We still have only the vaguest estimates of how many Chinese Christians were killed by the communists, and that was only about 60 years ago. Can any of us name how many were killed in Thailand, or Namibia, or even Poland in the last few hundred years, and what factor religion played in those?

Best of December 2006

I discuss this quote from CP Snow’s remarkable Two Cultures essay.

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics, law of entropy. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: 'Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?'
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, 'Can you read?' — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had

.

Americans, especially conservatives, indulge in these fantasies of frankness that are not ever going to happen. “You know what we should tell those nutcases? We should tell them that they have one week to start…” Sure, I agree. I would love to give that approach a try for a year. Put up or shut up. Fish or cut bait. Yo, Egypt! These are your two choices! Even if we went back to the old way after, it would be an unspoken threat. The Roman Empire would have a dictator for a year in time of war. Having one year of Donald Trump as president might be just what the doctor ordered...

It is the centre of that European arrogance that pretends to be tolerant, worldly-wise, calm, and combining the best of all worlds, while actually being a mess and in danger of bankruptcy were it not for the money that the rest of the EU sends in, plus the tourist trade from the US...

Women's Tribal Christmas. It is not original to note that while it is women who do most of the complaining about how much food there is just lying around, begging to be eaten at the numerous Christmas festivities, it is also women who organize 90% of it and bring 90% of the food. Ditto the small cute objects exchanged, followed by complaints about how cluttery the house is and how out of control it feels. If women ran the world, we would spend a great deal of our time exchanging small presents and feeding each other snacks...

Inapproprite Use Of Polls. Is OJ guilty? Will this be a snowy winter? Is Chicago west of Detroit? Some things are just not poll questions.

I bring up these obvious errors because most of the poll questions in the major media are not much better, but we don't tend to notice that. "Do children study more or less than they did thirty years ago?" "Is there more crime than there was ten years ago, or less?"

The God who is never in the middle. When we picture Adam in the garden, we have just come from the story of this mysterious huge thing that created worlds and lights and oceans, and we miss what Eve saw. Adam & Eve don't seem to have much awareness that Whoever it is they are talking to is in charge of much more that just Eden, some animals, and them. He is a very intimate god and quite local. If He is more powerful than they are, He doesn't seem to be so intimidating that they don't dare disobey. A traveling snake-oil salesman is enough to get them to disregard the one they call Lord. This seems to be a Lord of the Manor, or Lord of the Waterfall, not the creator of the universe...

Admitting that I have no superpowers. (I still don't)

One of my favorite urban legends, up in smoke. The idea that Ring Around The Rosie is actually about the plague – “all fall down” meaning falling over dead? It’s completely untrue...

Evolutionary Psychology: Disclaimer. I do think that we overrate our own rationality, and are subject to primitive schema which we don’t acknowledge. I give things a tribal description because it provides a way of looking at ourselves and each other that is often illuminating. But behavior is multideterminate, and we are not trapped in a narrow range of behaviors. We have predilections, predispositions, and tendencies, but we are often able to override one desire and replace it with another...

At A Department Meeting

"I'm not really a liberal. I see myself as a Creative Anarchist."

I think that's sufficient evidence to be assured the speaker is a liberal.

Profile

I updated my profile, away from cuteness to bare facts. As I like that info when determining the credibility of other bloggers, I thought I should do that for my own readers. Between that and chimney repair (repairs not encouraging), I did not organise much on further Codevilla posts. And tomorrow evening we are having what's left of the congregation over.

I do have two other things previously promised going up. I should keep promises rather than show off for larger audiences of visitors - which according to my stats, may have come and gone.

God is reminding me to love those who have been faithful to me, I suspect.

I love you guys.

Codevilla: Here Goes.

(The thunderstorm kept me off the computer. I scratched outline notes on the porch. Good thing. This is going to be many posts, so it's better to divide it up.)

First off, it's not a conspiracy, this ruling class thing. This hardly needs to be said to my readers, but I bring it up because that is going to be the accusation, that Codevilla and all these nonliberal commentators are claiming that they are victims of a conspiracy. No matter how many times that is specifically denied, it will be repeated, as a way of ridiculing and marginalising critics. The ruling class does not choose its members or keep its power by conspiracy. It doesn't have to. It was a cultural wave of the 20th C, the right people absorbed the lessons, and they can intuitively sense who qualifies and who doesn't - not with perfect accuracy, but well enough.

After all, you don't have to teach a cat to catch mice.

Even speaking about something called a ruling class smacks of weird guys complaining about the Illuminati and pointing to the pyramid eye on the back of the dollar bills. (That we react that way is part of how we have been influenced as well.) Nonetheless, I'm not backing off from it.

The same charge was leveled 20 years ago when accusations of media bias started arising. Larry King would tell a caller - who had said nothing about a conspiracy - "There is no conspiracy, caller! Get a life!", hang up, and sneer "the country is being taken over by lunatics." Newsweek and Time ran articles about the supposed bias, which they disbelieved in but no one doubts now, focusing large portions of their coverage on how ridiculous the idea of a conspiracy was, and what nutcases the people who believed it were.

The second accusation will be that powerful forces - secretive wealthy businessmen, conservative think tanks, and corporate interests - are encouraging this kind of irresponsible talk, with hints that this groundswell may eventually result in violence.

All part of the automatic tribal response to criticism. Codevilla and others will be accused of being publicity hounds, playing to the masses, whatever. Attend to content. Keep to the data, not the social disciplining by our betters.

So not a conspiracy, this ruling class. It is an automatic response of any tribe threatened with loss of status, because in evolutionary biology, loss of status always meant loss of food, mates, and protection. We respond to any attack as if it were existential. We're just wired that way, and have to work to overrule it. They perceive a threat to their tribe, interpret it as a threat to their safety, and conclude that the nation itself must be in danger.

So just pretend for the moment, just to try it on, that the ruling class consists of 15% of the population. Most of this class are aspirants and supporters, only 1% actually rule. But the remainder identifies strongly with its goals - believes that the rulers have been drawn out from its number - partly true - and are the best hope of the world. They perceive the ruling class as an all-star team drawn from their league, so they root for them.

So, if this class of people is a sort of special interest group, what groups are the possible competitors? Which groups have a reservoir of money, or moral authority, access to the eyes and ears of the people, or even (gulp) weapons? Yeah, make that list.

Which of those groups is not systematically painted as evil, dangerous, or ridiculous by the ruling class and its supporters? Answer: none. If the ruling class were indeed just another tribe vying for power, wouldn't its footsoldiers spend their energy just this way, mocking businessmen, churches, the military, alt-media, and any other group that might become too big for itself? Would it not automatically perceive them as a threat and move to discredit them? Not the 1% rulers, of course. They would remain aloof from that and even get their polite cliches in a row about these other groups.

There are more captive power groups as well, and groups that are in current symbiosis while it is determined which shall digest which. More about those later.

On the basis of Codevilla's essay, I am rethinking the relationship between the Arts & Humities Tribe and the Government and Union Tribe. I think the good professor gets closer to the truth. But I hope to have something to add to the understanding.

Vindication: Codevilla!

I am expecting visitors - perhaps many visitors - here at Assistant Village Idiot. Indeed, they have already started to arrive, and me without a post to show. The American Spectator article by retired BU professor Angleo Codevilla enitled America's Ruling Class - And the Perils of Revolution affirms and improves upon everything I have been saying about the Arts & Humanities Tribe for years (including, Terri and others, why the people like us who actually read Medieval and Renaissance literature for pleasure and knowledge were always unpromoted footsoldiers in the A&H Tribe, useful but little-regarded. Ungrateful bastards.)

For those coming over because of my comments about Codevilla elswhere, I direct you to my Tribes Collection, a list of 28 themed posts, each with a teaser, over a few years time. Codevilla's essay is more valuable. Read it in full before sampling the buffet here. But if you liked Codevilla, you will find these posts an enjoyable supplement.

I do have further posts on this, already swimming around in my head, so please, check back. We're small enough here that your comments won't be lost in the crowd.

I'll have to update my profile, I think. But right now, I'm working on a chimney before the sun goes down.

New Hampshire Will Lag

Much of the political blog news over the weekend involved the American Spectator article by Angelo Codevilla about the ruling class mentality from both elected Republicans and Democrats. I have little doubt he has a point, but it is going to be hard to sell in NH. Our Republican Senators over the last two decades have been John Sununu, Judd Gregg, Bob Smith, Gordon Humphrey - all yearly winners of "taxpayer friend" awards for spending little on their own offices, keeping away from graft and patronage, and consistently voting for small government. These guys were on this decades ago. It used to be part of our character up here. Our big Washington corruption scandal was in 1958, and centered around the gift of a fur coat. (We got a new great ski resort out of Adams' firing, though.)

So we don't share the throw-them-all-out attitude up here as much as we might. Perhaps we should though, now that 40% of our population comes "from away," especially Massachusetts (and not even Republican areas of MA like Scituate or Sudbury). We've not only elected a Democratic earmarking cipher like Jeanne Shaheen, but looking at Craig Benson (a New Yorker), elect a deteriorated form of Republican now as well. I credit Democrat John Lynch for being a throwback incorruptible.

Given all that, maybe we will recognise what we've lost and stress integrity again. But the dissatisfaction isn't in our bones as it is in other places.

Trilemma

Kenneth Anderson over at Volokh references what he calls the classic trilemma of the existence of evil: all good, all knowing, all powerful – pick two. I like the elegance of trilemmas as well: Greg Mankiw’s trilemma of international finance; the engineer’s “better, faster, cheaper – pick two” or the related “done right, done on time, done on budget – pick two” or the CS Lewis trilemma bout Jesus “Lord, Liar, or Lunatic – all opinions ultimately resolve to one of these.”

I could ramble on about the logical weaknesses of Anderson’s “classic” trilemma concerning God (short answer: only for limited definitions of good, knowing, and power), but what intrigues me at the moment is the irony of a libertarian writer negating the value of free will. The existence of free will is another discussion, one we aren’t having today. Presumably, a libertarian believes in free will and thinks it has some value. But if we are to define good as the absence of evil – which logically has to be at least part of the definition if we insist on the forcing nature of “pick two” in the trilemma – we can only get there by setting the value of free will at zero. If it has any value, no matter how small, it must then be multiplied over the 10 billion people who have lived on the planet.

One could still argue that whatever this value is, multiplied by 10B, still does not make up for great evil in the world. Many pious Jews leaving Europe after the Holocaust lost their faith over this accounting, that nothing could make up for such evil. Most people of faith have this thought several times in their lives as well. But I am arguing a much blander point here, a point of logic. If free will has any value, then it might theoretically outweigh whatever value it costs to enable its occurrence. And, as I said, it would be at least ironic that a libertarian should set this value at zero.

Because none of us lives 10 billion lives, but only the one we are given, and that one may suck, it may be fair to reject the multiplying effect for the value of free will. If one billion have infinite good reward, that may balance the overall equation, but it hardly adds up as anything fair for the 9 billion who didn’t get that (though in truth, we don’t know who gets what in the end). Does my argument work for smaller numbers?

Let us set the population of the world at one and see if great suffering is likely to be redeemed by later events.

Let us call this one Cain, then, and ponder whether there is anything God might do: along the way, at the end of time, or even beyond time, to make even the one say it was worth it.

Tribalism And Christianity

I describe historical and social events through the prism of tribalism because I find it has enormous explanatory power. When I am lazy, I can become nearly reductionist on this. Underneath the elaborate explanations people give for their attitudes and actions, if you identify what their real tribe is and predict behavior on the basis of what is good for that tribe, you will not often go wrong.

I usually focus on liberal tribalism, not because they are the only group that shows this (they aren’t), nor because they are the worst offenders (they might be), but because they are so willing to see it in others and attribute ill-motive to others, yet their own tribalism is entirely opaque to them. Tea Partiers, libertarians, blacks, Mormons, military – all of these recognise their own tribal tendencies and can be engaged on the topic. Most even try to make adjustments in their own attitude to compensate. That their group’s advantage might be part of their motives these other groups can often admit. But frustratingly, sometimes infuriatingly, progressives deny that particular legislation or societal changes is good for them personally. They are certain their preferences are good for America, for all of us, for the downtrodden in particular.

But put that aside for the moment. That’s just a favorite soapbox of mine that I worked in unnecessarily. Tribalism shows up all over our social behavior – between departments at work, especially if they represent different professions; between ethnic groups within a geographic area; between classes in a society. The roots of this behavior go back 100,000 generations. Only in the last 100 generations, or even the last ten, have we tried to clean this up. When Shiites and Sunnis compete for power and resources, their behavior resembles far more the behavior of their prehuman ancestors than it does a university debating society, however many diplomats and newspapers they bring into play to compete. When the engineers are arguing with the design team, some of their behavior concerns content, reason, objective truth, and financial advantage for the company. But much of it – far more than any of us care to admit about ourselves – is just fighting over fishing rights at a particular waterfall. We argue over what resources are going to come to our tribe, however sure we are that we are looking at things objectively.

I don’t say that reason and objectivity have no part in our behavior. The beauty of recent civilization, especially Anglospheric civilization, is that we have learned some ability to overrule these impulses, stand back and act in some nobler or general interest. We can do what is not best for our tribe of 20 or 20 million, but what is good for some larger entity. But that is not our first impulse, and Advantage For Us lurks below the surface in all our actions. Even the nicest of us. Even the most educated, or most religious, or most cultured of us. (Even liberals.) In a very Screwtapian, that is to say diabolic irony, these nobler ideals are often the best disguise for our group selfishness, for we can thereby disguise our primitiveness even from ourselves.

I came to this idea relatively late. Mostly, I learned it from my children. Not from observing their competition, but indirectly, through experiences I had because of these particular children. When Jonathan came back from his freshman year at Asbury, he brought Radical Son, David Horowitz’s book about growing up a red-diaper baby. As my own political journey had been a milder version of the same thing, I took to the politics of it quite easily. But what struck me like a wall was his description of leaving the leftist fold, and the primitive, vindictive-out-of-proportion response previous friends had to him. It mirrored entirely the experience of a person leaving a strict religious group, or marrying out of their birth-tribe. My daughter is dead, says Tevye, echoing the rejection by two thousand generations of fathers of their children leaving the Jewish faith. It is dramatic onstage because it seems so primitive, so cruel, so unnecessary. Yet here it was happening in late 20th C America, among magazine editors, professors, artists, authors.

Before I first visited Romania in 1998, I read up on its history and current state of affairs. It is not news to observe that the tribal competition among Hungarians, Romanians, Jews, Germans, Turks, Gypsies, Hutsul Ukrainians, and Slavs is the history of Romania, and continued to dominate its history through the 20th C. Resolutions are passed in parliaments; books are written, papers are passed, envoys are sent – suits are worn, cell phones used, references are made to great thinkers – and yet it is all maddeningly like the invasion of Magyars a thousand years ago into a land ruled in turn by Avars, Pechnegs, and Dacians.

A long-running battle between departments at work brought this into even clearer focus. Each profession tended strongly to see some of the others as not merely wrong or stupid, but evil. Intelligent people developed elaborate arguments why their proposal for distribution of power and resources was the better. Yet their conclusions always matched their self-interest entirely, as if the many meetings and arguments were mere dramatizations in polite form of the spear-throwing and taunting of a collision of neighboring New Guinea tribes.

Sc.D psychologists complain that certain services are not reimbursable by insurers (those evil insurance companies) and how unfair this is to the poor and downtrodden, the most helpless among us. Social workers will complain that it took them 20 years before they made $50K, while others without even a BA make so much more. Professors of education will be incensed at how little this society cares about its children, because they cannot get the legislature to require more than two courses in early childhood development for certain childcare licensures. (Licensure is a particular focus for fury in many fields.) And in all these complaints there is always some other group that they resent, nearly always mentioned explicitly, that makes more money or has more influence. Athletes are a universal favorite for comparison, perhaps because of the longstanding resentment by the self-styled intellectuals for jocks at school – entertainers making similarly outrageous amounts are criticized less. But many professions – perhaps any profession outside one’s own – come in for this resentment. And significantly, the greatest resentment is reserved for those who quite obviously belong to another tribe, another political or social class. Dinesh D’Souza has an excellent book chapter “The Lottery of Success” which includes

I have no doubt that academics with Ph.D.s have, on average, higher IQs than entrepreneurs. Indeed, one reason so many of them resent entrepreneurs, I am convinced, is that they know they are smarter and yet they must manage on $80,000 salaries while some fat Rotarian with a gold chain on his chest pulls in $1.4 million a year selling term life insurance.

I haven’t gotten to the Christianity part yet, have I? Yet I have gone too long. This must go to two essays, then. I am not going in the direction of why Christian denominations compete with each other, as my writing to this point might suggest. I am going to discuss how much we think Christianity should be able to change this primitiveness in human tribes (Preliminary answer: apparently not much), and what this tells us about understanding history.

Nationalism

Why is it the folks who are most suspicious of nationalism want to nationalise everything?

Comments off the left seem to regard nationalism as Fascism Lite, or at best, an unstable attitude that could descend into vengeful war at any time. Whenever my uncle sends me one of those checklists that purport to show how the Tea Party/George Bush/conservatives/yahoo-of-the-month are causing America to descend into Nazism, nationalism is always prominent. Yet we have just partly nationalised our health insurance/care and auto industry, and have numerous czars for all manner of bypassing usual channels (red tape, if you hate it; legislation, if you like it) to get things done.

I don’t mean to simply be playing with words or pointing out ironies here. When there are questions of policy and direction, I try and create an analogous situation from a different era, to see if that illuminates anything. When others do this, they tend to choose either the time of the founding fathers or the time of their own childhood as a comparison, nearly always unfavorably to the present era. Both of those have too many other associations for us to clearly isolate a single factor, so I try and choose other places and times in American history.

We are currently in an all-in-this-together mode in terms of federal social legislation. That may be the best place to be, but it certainly isn’t common in our history. Consider the late 19th C, say 1880. We are looking at 1) midwestern farmers from northern Europe, 2) recent immigrants to NYC from Eastern Europe, perhaps Jews, 3) recently freed slaves farming 40 acres in Mississippi, and 4) a ship’s crew based out of Boston. If any of them hear that one of theother groups has widespread illness, even deathly illness, do any of them believe it is their job to do anything about that? Perhaps if the need is especially dire and affects many people, their houses of worship might collect money to send. But government collectors showing up and insisting that money be handed over to fix such problems would be greeted with blank stares. What is that to us? I feel bad for them but why is it my problem? We take care of our family, our neighbors, maybe people in the next town in an emergency. Our own.

I am not here debating whether that is a superior attitude or whether our current system is better. Well, okay, I am debating it a little. We have drawn the circle for which we are responsible ever wider throughout our history. Family, town, county, state, country. The people who insist that each widening is obviously more moral are coincidentally the ones who personally benefit from the widening, because they get to be in charge of more stuff. Funny thing, that. And they do it even over the objections of the smaller governmental divisions. Ultimately, because they have the power, I guess.

Got distracted. Sorry. My point is to ask, if nationalism is such a danger, who is it that is being more nationalistic, claiming that all issues must be addressed at a national level?

Mankiw's Ten Principles

Greg Mankiw, economics prof at Harvard, has ten core principles of economics. This actually is understandable, and seems commonsensical, adjectives that seldom modify "economics."

Although the study of economics has many facets, the field is unified by several central ideas. The Ten Principles of Economics offer an overview of what economics is all about.
How People Make Decisions
1. People Face Tradeoffs.
To get one thing, you have to give up something else. Making decisions requires trading off one goal against another.
2. The Cost of Something is What You Give Up to Get It.
Decision-makers have to consider both the obvious and implicit costs of their actions.
3. Rational People Think at the Margin.
A rational decision-maker takes action if and only if the marginal benefit of the action exceeds the marginal cost.
4. People Respond to Incentives.
Behavior changes when costs or benefits change.
How The Economy Works As a Whole
5. Trade Can Make Everyone Better Off.
Trade allows each person to specialize in the activities he or she does best. By trading with others, people can buy a greater variety of goods or services.
6. Markets Are Usually a Good Way to Organize Economic Activity.
Households and firms that interact in market economies act as if they are guided by an "invisible hand" that leads the market to allocate resources efficiently. The opposite of this is economic activity that is organized by a central planner within the government.
7. Governments Can Sometimes Improve Market Outcomes.
When a market fails to allocate resources efficiently, the government can change the outcome through public policy. Examples are regulations against monopolies and pollution.
How People Interact
8. A Country's Standard of Living Depends on Its Ability to Produce Goods and Services.
Countries whose workers produce a large quantity of goods and services per unit of time enjoy a high standard of living. Similarly, as a nation's productivity grows, so does its average income.
9. Prices Rise When the Government Prints Too Much Money.
When a government creates large quantities of the nation's money, the value of the money falls. As a result, prices increase, requiring more of the same money to buy goods and services.
10. Society Faces a Short-Run Tradeoff Between Inflation and Unemployment.
Reducing inflation often causes a temporary rise in unemployment. This tradeoff is crucial for understanding the short-run effects of changes in taxes,government spending and monetary policy.

Liberals, Libertarians, Conservatives

Ilya Somin over at Volokh had a long essay commenting on the debate at Reason magazine about whether libertarians should ally with liberals or conservatives. (The participants were Cato's Brink Lindsey, NRO's Jonah Goldberg, and Matt Kibbe, coauthor with Dick Armey of the soon-to-be-published Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto.) Ilya's post drew over 200 comments, so the the post, original debate, and comments could keep you busy a long time.

I did want to pass on a few stray lines, not from the pros, but just the regular folk writing in the comments, that I thought useful.

most liberals compare real markets to idealized governments.

and

A benevolent government is better than a malevolent market, but neither of those extremes exist. Those that pretend they exist are delusional, and solutions that rely on their existence are doomed to failure.

Mbube

How long before you recognise it?



The full story is here.

Via Volokh and the NYT World Cup summary.

Oh, That Liberal Media

Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball took exception to a Tea Partier's comment "We're not racist, we're anticommunist." He claimed that this is exactly what the John Birch Society used to say, and went on to add "this is the old Dixie crowd."

Well, it is what the John Birch Society used to say. It might also be said by virtually every American, plus a few billion people from other countries. Trying to associate it with an organization discredited in public sentiment is thus either deceitful or dim. Or both.

There's another point, a bit more subtle, that bothers me more. The problem is more than the tu quoque of You're a bigot, No, you're a bigot. Nor is even the irony of making bigoted statements while talking about bigotry the central difficulty. It is the complete absence of self-observation, the thorough lack of clarity of thought, which cannot see these ironies, even when they are pointed out.

The Collapse of Civilization

If you want, this can be an article about sex instead of something academic. Or about rifts among the feminist theorizers. Or a reflection on personal morality's effect on society. Me, I liked the evolutionary psychology and the spectre of civilizational collapse. From the Weekly Standard, The New Dating Game. It's 12 pages, but you're up for it.

CWCID, Instapundit.

Miami Heat

Pat Riley can read a stat sheet as well as I can, and will find some way to fill holes with better players than he has got, but the specifics of the Heat rotation has got to be a concern. With the addition of Lebron and Bosh - they are not adding Wade, remember - the Heat are very powerful at the starting and backup 2,3,and 4 positions. Haslem is an excellent backup at PF, and with mix and match lineups, takes some SF minutes as well. Mike Miller provides and excellent backup for Wade and Lebron. The Heat were quite weak at the 3 last year, and average at 4, so Bosh & Lebron are a significant upgrade. Miller is an upgrade over Daequan Cook.

After that it all falls apart. Does it matter? Carlos Arroyo and Mario Chalmers are a below-average PG combination, but they were last year too, and the team won 47 games. At the 5-spot, Joel Anthony was not even an adequate backup, but is their best center. The Heat drafted a center in the second round - I forget his name. I have to think Riley is looking for someone, even a one-dimensional player to put in that slot.

Defense. Bosh seems to be getting called a good defender largely on the basis of being compared to Amare Stoudemire. Faint praise. When that is out of the equation, he is called solid-when-he-wants-to-be. One evaluator said he had never seen 30 minutes of defense from Bosh in any game. But late in a close game, paying attention - probably fine. Dwayne Wade is a gambling defender, and generally makes it work with athleticism when he gets burned. For this he has a reputation as a great defender, because his blocks and steals are high. But that is an overrate - he is above-average. He is 28. That is considered peak ability age in basketball - but that is founded on skill, smarts, and craft in the ascension just as athletic ability starts to come off the peak. There may be enough of a dropoff to bring him back to the average category. Probably not this year, though. At the point, Chalmers is a good defender, Arroyo a poor one. Whoever the Heat get at center, it is unlikely they will get two out of three at defense, rebounding, and putback scoring, and whoever the backup is will be even worse. Think Orlando and Dwight Howard. Think Tim Duncan, Al Jefferson, Joachim Noah. The Heat will be above-average on their best nights defensively, but usually average.

One injury and this team is vulnerable. Missing either Lebron or Wade, this is a 55-win team. Missing Bosh, they still don't win 60. With young, healthy players they might not have one serious injury. Ideally, they are a developing team, learning to play together, which becomes offensively devastating by playoff time, and badgered into focus defensely by Pat Riley to close that vulnerable spot. 63 wins this year, high 60's the year after.

College Diversity

Instapundit linked to this Minding the Campus article about diversity efforts punishing asians and poor whites. Worth a read, though much of it isn't new to those who follow these things, just new research numbers to back up what we know, but is always denied by colleges.

Interesting to me was a paragraph halfway through the third section, almost to the end, about what activities can count against you in college admission.

But what Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call "career-oriented activities" was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. "Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, "has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions." Excelling in these activities "is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission."

It is tribalism. It is all tribalism. Rule by the 19% designated liberal in the Pew Research Center typology, with presents for their coalition partners who are conned into thinking they share power.

Festival Worship

We have many cycles rising and falling in our year. Ancient peoples had but one, combining them all. Granting considerable overlap of holidays and seasons, we nonetheless have many calendars operating independently of each other. There is the school year, with its special punctuation – Christmas vacation, winter vacation, spring vacation, summer vacation, exams and report cards, fairs and competitions, end-of-the-year ceremonies, dances and proms, and graduation, which comes with its own traditional music, costume, cliches, and ceremony.

There is the sports calendar. Life begins on Opening Day of baseball, according to Tom Boswell, and so ends with March Madness, I suppose. In between there are not only the seasons of three major sports – including playoffs, drafts, off-season moves – but minor sports as well, each with their own devotees. These sports have identifiable associated costumes, foods, music, ceremonies, shrines, histories, and authorities. And that’s just the professional, spectator sports. Add in more calendar dates for kid’s sports and participatory sports. Fishing season. Ski season.

I haven’t even really gotten started with calendars. We have a national calendar, with civic and patriotic dates, each associated with special foods, colors…you get the idea. Plus a cultural calendar, with Hallowe’en, Valentine’s Day…work calendars, different in every industry, but powerful for those living in fiscal years or seasonal busy-ness…whatever is left of the religious calendar, which especially has identifiable foods, music, themes, and history…seasons of weather and of agriculture…Old Home Days and county fairs…family calendars of birthdays, anniversaries, and usual vacations…election cycles, Olympic years. The themes of anticipation, production, celebration, with a tear in the eye, nostalgic music, and comfort foods fill them all.

And within these are the cycles of weekday and weekend 52 times, beginnings and ends of months, often important.

What if all these cycles coincided and reinforced each other? What if everyone in the culture shared most of them and celebrated them together? I doubt we can even imagine very well, nor feel with similar intensity, what it would be like if all of this energy were put into one shared package, so that harvest festival was also religious festival was also family festival was also national festival. Yet this was the life that all our ancestors lived until a very few centuries ago.

With that picture in mind, let’s add hunger (some chronic, some from fasting), pilgrimage, infrequent communication with relatives…let’s step into that frame.

You are walking or riding to Jerusalem for one of the major yearly festivals, so you are tired, hungry, and dusty before you even get there. On the plus side, you are looking forward to seeing relatives, and tucking in to some of Aunt Martha’s seasoned lamb. Uncle Jacob is known to have a pretty free hand with the wine as well, and folks will talk and laugh far into the night. If you were a married female, moved to be with your husband’s family, this would have even more meaning, seeing sisters, parents, grown children who live away. Adolescents would have the mixed excitement/apprehension of potential betrothals – a key use of festival times. Along the road, travelers will occasionally sing the appropriate songs and psalms – the local variations from your village.

However much you may fear that God might be displeased with something you are or have done, you have complete assurance you are right in this. You are going where He wants, at the time He chose. You are going to the place He visits, or even partly dwells, and following in the steps of a thousand ancestors. Psalm 42:4 These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I used to go with the multitude, leading the procession to the house of God, with shouts of joy and thanksgiving among the festive throng. There is the long ascent to the Temple, the psalms being sung with increasing agreement as the many families and villages come in, adjusting to each other’s order and variations. By the time you are halfway up, everyone in front of you is pretty much in concert, the whole mountainside singing the same words and moving forward.

You see the Temple, you sing the psalms, so this is a religious experience, focused on God. But the anticipation of seasoned lamb and seeing your little sister flit through your mind as well. There are foods brought for sacrifice alongside, and you are hungry, but soon you will eat. You reach the crest with the tired exhilaration that comes from an arduous physical task accomplished, and the camaraderie that comes from doing it with others. The sound of the musicians becomes clear, 288 trained, fulltime musicians, lifetime appointment, very skilled and heavy on the percussion, as you enter the courtyard, singing together. Don't think slow, peaceful Gregorian Chant - think marching band or military drums, Middle-Eastern style.

The priest or choir chants, the people roar response. Inside the Temple is cooler, incense-filled, wildly decorated. Every word is rarely used but completely memorised. You see Uncle Jacob across the way, arms raised, ecstatic, but eyes open. He notices you and winks.

Now that’s worship. And that’s a lot closer to heaven than cartoons of bored angels standing on clouds and holding harps.

Festival

In my reply to Texan99's comment on Window Into Heaven, a few posts down, I was going to link to my recent series on the Jewish festivals in the time of Jesus, festival worship in general, and its relation to the wedding feast of heaven we hear hints of in scripture. Except there isn't any series on that. I did one for adult Sunday School (we called it "Formation") this year and intended to post parts of the lessons, but apparently never did. So I'd better.

For a warm-up you might read my older post on Linear Versus Circular Time.

Rethinking Bernadette

I never made a ranked list as a lad, but if I had, Bernadette Peters would have been somewhere up near the top. Neo-neocon mentioned today how good she looks for 61 years old


Hard to disagree. So I went looking for a good early photo or video of Ms. Peters to provide evidence, in case any was needed, of my good eye at the time. There were clips from The Muppet Show and stills from Silent Movie, all quite uh, remarkable. I happened across an early clip from "Love, American Style" that predated my first notice of her in 1976, so I thought that might be an interesting nostalgia post. It was surprisingly uncomfortable to watch.

Then I found this, from that wonderful piece of Americana "What's My Line?"



I'm rethinking this whole thing now.

Taxpayer Barbeque With PJ

We went to a taxpayer's coalition barbeque in Hillsborough today, attracted by the prospect of PJ O'Rourke as featured speaker. The candidates for governor, senate, and representative - at least from the tax-cutting side - were there to meet and greet, plus speak for about five minutes each.

You can expect a high concentration of overweight middle-aged guys named Dave, a demographic I don't need to be introduced to, at such events. Nor was mine the only Hawaiian shirt. I hadn't counted on such a showing of earnest young people, however. Many of them were working on the various campaigns, but some where there as paid admission. There were fewer of the eccentric libertarian crew than I expected as well. Gold bugs, gun advocates, guys (nearly always guys) with long grey hair and odd glasses who have lots of bumperstickers and hand-lettered charts. We've had them here in NH a long time. Those were what I remembered as the bumperticker people from my youth, in fact. If you saw a car at a distance with multiple stickers, you were sure to find a fundamentalist or a libertarian. Nowadays, multiple bumperstickers is far more often a liberal environmentalist.

There were a few of the old-school guys, however, and it's nice to see that the breed hasn't died out. From the looks of them, it may not be many more decades before the last one expires.

There are real candidates and people who haven't a clue why they aren't real candidates. Tracy paid close attention to the former, and may have changed her mind about where her vote is going. Many people used to count on Tracy doing all the research and call her up the day before the election to find out who to vote for. She was up to eight at one point, plus whoever she influenced less deterministicly. She may be back in business again - she is on this, folks, if you are voting in NH.

These are not nuanced crowds, not a place you can say "I'm generally in favor of small government, but believe that infrastructure promotes growth." The people in the crowd could all understand that position, agree with it or no, but that's not the mood of the place. They want plain speech, core concepts, delivered well. Think fastballs in baseball. This is one of the cultural differences that make liberals wince, convincing them yet again that they do not think these people are very smart, and do not want to associate with them.

Liberal culture requires that you mix in a few curve balls, just to prove you can. The audience also congratulates itself on being willing to be exposed to new ideas this way, and everyone is reassured they are the more intelligent ones. The new ideas wash wash away with the next tide, but they have to be there, like parsley, so you'll know you're at a restaurant and not just eating at home. (Wouldn't be parsley anymore, though - pear/gorgonzola/walnut salad is more like it.) Spitballs are even better, as everyone can pretend it's really just a heckuva curveball, not an illegal pitch. It's mostly still just fastballs, though, with a fair number of brushback pitches.

Continuing the analogy, the conservative weakness is that they have a lot of pitchers who walk too many batters, missing with those fastballs too often.

PJ was a bit disappointing. His speech was mostly a series of strung-together one-liners from his book, grouped loosely around the theme that Democrats may be insane, but Republicans aren't saviors. Best one-(okay, two-) liner: I tend to vote for Republicans because they have fewer ideas. But not few enough. It was a message that didn't sit well with everyone. The real candidates had all mentioned the Republican brand name a few times in their five minutes. But it was a good corrective and reminder for this crew. When people get put in charge of things and then are sent off together with a bunch of money, bad things can happen. His famous quote giving money to politicians is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys has been slightly updated, as has the one about government not being able to deliver mail (and it's got our address right on the envelope), which now is used as a health-care illustration.

For those who like to weigh in charisma factors because of electability, know that Ovide Lamontagne is quite good, and Jennifer Horn has real charm and perhaps some star power. I liked Rich Ashooh as well, but I may be biased because of a personal connection.

Window Into Heaven

One of my repeated themes of the last year is that worship is not something we create on Sunday mornings. Worship is going on all the time in heaven, and our worship is an attempt to connect with that - to become part of it, learn the steps and the songs. If you remember the descriptions of heaven as a wedding feast, then the idea of learning all those line dances, preparing for the songs that have special meanings at various parts of the ceremony, and looking forward to drinking almost too much except now you actually have good judgment, can begin to see how the combination of pentecostal enthusiasm and liturgical familiarity might work.

But I didn't come to tell you about that. Sorry. I was thinking about icons. The Eastern Orthodox belief is that icons are windows through to heaven, into God's presence, which is why staring contemplation is so regularly used in that tradition. I found a very unexpected parallel to that this week. In our first week of visitng churches in hopes of finding a new community, we went to the physically closest house of worship, Relevant Church. It uses screens with the lyrics to its recorded music, backgrounded with the usual clouds, doves, or mountains. I'm not usually fond of this. In particular, I have disliked the trend of franchise churches, where worship designed and controlled in one location is broadcast out to many locations at once. As one who believes it should be the community that makes its own worship, no matter how unable the members are to produce music, atmosphere, or powerful reading, this newer style smacks too much of entertainment and packaging.

And yet I was brought up short this week, realising that screen-staring worship, known to be shared with other believers across incredible distances, bears some similarity to that window-into-heaven approach. If we are not quite connecting our worship to heaven, we are at least connecting it across time and distance to the church at large. If we really believe that worship is not something we make, some fingerpainting we produce each Sunday for God to put on his refrigerator, but an ever-present reality we attempt to discover in our weak way, then this screen thing has some possibilities.

I'm still not all that attracted to the idea, but I expect I'll have to give it some thought. Every worship choice gains some things and loses others.

Misinterpretation

(Photo by Molly Ott at Knoxnews)

The caption was that God is giving us a thumbs up. Looks more to me like God is hitchhiking out of here.

Don't Panic.

QOTD

Bureaucracies grow through failure. A simple premise, suddenly obvious once you look at it. The full article by Doctor Zero at Hot Air here.

Common Wisdom May Be Wrong

We tend to believe - and politicians often claim - that if someone is being criticised from both sides, they are likely to have found some reasonable middle ground. My uncle just offered that opinion about Obama, because some Democrats are mad at him. But it is the sort of thing that could have been said about any politician, that they would regard as a badge of honor.

But you can have the impression that you're getting it from both sides wherever you stand. It doesn't have to be fifty-fifty. You can have 90% of the people pissed at you from one side and 10% from the other, and still tell yourself you're in the golden middle.

Long Overdue

The Unwitting Dissemination of Error

Terri over at Wheat Among Tares has put up The Unwitting Dissemination of Error, concerning a letter falsely believed to have been sent from Ben Franklin to Thomas Paine about the latter's Common Sense.

Time and again, I found this letter described as being written to Paine. I found it on quasi-religious, patriotic sites accompanied by self-satisfied commentary that Paine was buried in a field because no American cemetery would take his blasphemous body. I found it on sites declaring that they were supplying primary source documents. I found it on Wikipedia's article on Benjamin Franklin. I found it on an atheist forum.

Franklin's reasoning, that religion is good for the mass of men to keep them from wild misbehavior, has a long history. Many of the Greek philosophers assiduously attended the civic religious celebrations of gods they no longer fully believed in, because they felt the peace and order of the city was an enormous moral good. Confuscianism has a similar focus on civil harmony.

Terri found it harder to get to the truth than one might think.

BTW, I would guess that she composed her title after reading through all the 18th C material. I find myself doing the same thing, moving toward the style of speech or writing of who I am currently reading. Great fun when it's Wodehouse or Doyle.

Birth Certificate

I am probably stepping into a swamp here and will come to regret this, but one rather obvious point about birth certificates has been bugging me. If someone is demanding to see a birth certificate, they usually aren't worried about the blace of birth that much, are they? Maybe in Hawaii, or in places where there are lots of immigrants, POB is a big issue, but more usually, two other things are what are under suspicion: date of birth or paternity. Date of birth comes up in things like Little League World Series. Before DNA testing, birth certificates were considered important documents when paternity was at issue.

Until recently, we could never be sure about anyone's paternity. Resemblance was often strong enough that no one seriously questioned it, as in my family, where my great-grandfather Charlie Wyman looks a fair bit like me, and a whole lot like my brother. With my Romanian sons, the story is a bit different, and they speculate they may have different biological fathers, whatever the certificate says. The woman's character, both her continence and her honesty, were also considered sufficient testimony in many cases. The state's interest was merely in having some male take official responsibility - whether anyone was telling the truth didn't matter much, so long as someone would stand up and sign on the dotted line.

Birth is a pretty difficult thing to hide or invent, but paternity questions are of necessity nine months removed from birth, and less frequently, er, witnessed by others. So we develop legal structures to put as much of it to rest as we can, so the arguments don't go on forever. In Obama's case, there's a legal document that declares he was born in Hawaii on whatever date, listing his parents. (It does list Barack Sr as the father, doesn't it? He was married to the mother. I've never heard anything different.) The legal case is thus closed. I understand there were accusations that there was a source document preceding the birth cert which was not released, and I always found that odd, but didn't put much stock in that. I just figured there was something embarrassing about it, like Kerry's military record, and wondered what could still be embarrassing now. I may have wondered whether there was actually another father listed, but as place of birth was what was challenged, and subsequent behavior by his mother was irresponsible enough that such a revelation would hardly make much difference - especially now, when such things are more common and don't carry the stigma they would have in the 1960's.

No, that doesn't add up either. If Barack, Sr shows up on the more modern certification, that can only have come from whatever the source document was. Am I right in that assumption? Wouldn't it have to work that way? Still, Obama's been cute about it, so I figure there's something. I don't have any other theories that occur to me.

What occurred to me this week, out of the blue, is that if there's a paternity question then Obama's whole fascinating Dreams of my Father narrative turns into something a lot more boring - just a mother who preferred to have sex with men of color for some reason. And so that would lead to what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it questions. I do figure that the boring narrative would have made him a lot less electable, even though it would settle the eligibility question.

The funny thing is, we're going to know the answer in 20, 30, 40 years. The DNA testing is improving so rapidly, and becoming more common, that we will likely be able to run the labs and say Yup. Definitely some East African DNA here, or Nope. Everything's West African. We might get to watch another of those Thomas Jefferson things unfold before us.

Petraeus

Rumors that General Petraeus may run for president keep popping up. I have little opinion on the matter at present, but want to note that a bit of information that keeps being offered to support that rumor is in fact irrelevant. Whenever Petraeus visits NH, there is speculation that this means he is starting to campaign here. In fact his domicile is here. It would be a stretch to call it his home, as it is a boathouse on a lake, but Springfield NH is where he votes and has his official residence.

Springfield is darn small, but I have actually been through there at least twice. It is right on Rte 114, which goes near my house, and I have taken to its end - just for the heck of it - in the past. I also cut through there on a trip back from Enfield to Concord once. I don't remember Kolelemuk Lake, but it's only about a quarter mile by a half mile, so I wouldn't be likely to. We've got lots of those up here.

There's apparently some family history in the area on his wife's side, which is how they ended up buying the property.

Forgotten Context

Reading Eastward to Tartary, written in 1998 and published in 2000, I was struck by the comments, made by political figures and intellectuals in the Balkans to the American journalist, about Saddam Hussein. Of course America was going to have to do something about him, they thought. They wanted only to assure the American that many people there would support this (they have, largely), and to caution them not to put up with his antics too long. They wondered what Clinton was going to do about this.

Something had to be done. The situation was inherently unstable, and obviously so. Were OIF and OEF the best choice? I would certainly entertain arguments that many other things might have been better. But we have moved into rather a fantasy land, believing that all we have accomplished is the replacement of a rather evil but generally stable situation with a more ambiguous, less-stable one. We have spent a great deal of money, and many American lives for this result, and those questioning this most vocally are among the most amnesic about our real choices. The idea seems to be that had we not gone to war, what we would have today is much the same - that Iraq would have bothered none of its neighbors, have made no threats, and would still be playing an annoying but mostly harmless game of Three Card Monty with the WMD*.

It is a natural mistake, I suppose. We tend to believe that if we change one thing, only that will change, because there are an infinite number other possibilities, often mutually exclusive. We cannot imagine infinite possibilities - even imagining the half-dozen most likely is much more complicated than imagining one possibility which we can actually see parts of. But 7 years out, the most likely result of our not having gone to war would be...almost unimaginable. Positive or negative, it would be so thoroughly surprising to our current eyes that we would declare it completely unpredictable. The area is unstable. That particular situation was unstable. Why would we imagine (once we have brought ourselves up short and considered the matter coldly) that something like the present, plus billions of dollars saved and many people not dead, would be the most probable result? That is actually the least probable result.

*Which I continue to believe are in the mountains of Syria, moved there with the aid of the GRU (once KGB) specialists known to be present in Iraq in 2002-2003. See Sarindar, or Pacepa.

Other Salons

What other blogsites do each of you also visit? The subject comes up because there was an exchange between commenters over at neo's that referred to interactions the two of them had had on another site.

You are allowed to list your own, BTW.

In addition to my sidebar, I follow a fair number of Instapundit's daily links, which includes many of the same sites repeatedly.

Fundies and Atheists

Eric over at Classical Values ran a post which linked to earlier posts of his, demonstrating his history of having been on a certain side of an issue for years, not coming to it lately just because Obama is president. That issue is irrelevant here, but one of his 2003 links discussed a similarity of certainty shown by both fundamentalists and atheists. He wondered if there were an insecurity of belief that provoked more extreme views, and a greater likelihood of categorical, even insulting, statements about those who disagree. I don’t know about the insecurity part. It is a cultural assumption that hard-edged opinions are in fact brittle, but I don’t know that there’s actual evidence for it.

Yet this observation does seem related to my recent post, however, which closed with the idea that the more biased one is, the less able one is to perceive it. As only a great saint can sense the full depth of his sin and make adequate confession, so also can only a very objective person face the full truth of his biases.

But there was another cultural assumption in Eric’s post I thought worth mentioning. Not because the point has not been refuted by others many times (far better than I will do here), but because it persists despite all refutation, and can’t be challenged often enough. In the context of calling the fundamentalist – atheist overstatements basically a wash logically, he did give credit to atheists for being braver, for facing death without support.

Once one has that theory in place, it is certainly easy to find confirming evidence for it. That’s true of even half-baked theories, of course, and only mild evidence for truth or usefulness. But Christians do indeed talk about comfort and support from God in the face of death, or indeed any difficulty. At first glance, and given the cultural background of the early Freudians assuring us that they had read deeply into the hearts of mankind and found this to be true, it’s a belief unlikely to be challenged, once held.

Yet the theory is wrong nonetheless, and may on balance even be backward. It overlooks a great deal of available information, data that hides right in the open. As Yogi Berra said “you can see a lot just by looking.” One is in the nature of fundamentalists, the other in the nature of atheists. Both are attitudes found in a significant minority of each group. At minimum. My opinion is that these attitudes prevail in a majority of each, but I can claim certainty only about those whose words and actions betray their thought rather obviously.

Many fundamentalists are haunted people. When you hear the agonies that people go through, wondering if they are indeed saved, you would never conclude that they have embraced their faith for comfort. They may be embracing it in the hope of comfort, and you may blame the faith for providing the opportunity for torment if you like. But that is a subtle change of subject, for we were talking about the weakness of some people relying on belief in God in order to face death. In their case, their faith accuses them rather than comforts, promising them judgment and a possibility of hell. Many atheists at this point are quite dismissive – well, you brought it on yourself, then. If you’d just drop the idea you’d be free of it, wouldn’t you? As I said. This freedom you’re advocating doesn’t sound like some burden you bear with great strength and nobility of spirit, it sounds like an easier ride. Your words, not mine.

The haunting is not restricted to fundamentalists, or even to Christians. Perhaps it is inherited, not acquired, in which case it would behoove us all not to quickly criticise whatever steps people take to ameliorate it. But whether fundamentalists create it or attract it, we must treat it as a fact when discussing comfort. If one does not feel that pressure, then self-congratulation is hardly in order.

There is not much escape in considering only those Christians less emotionally intense than fundamentalists either. Much of the comfort offered is delivered as an IOU, to be granted after death, when all will be well. The comfort here is rather a down payment, a foretaste of the feast to come, as we say. Hope is indeed powerful, and a great comfort at times. But it is qualitatively different from “comfort” or “support” of our everyday speech. It’s not nothing, and is certainly one of the perks of being a Christian in the face of death. However, the description of what it is by nonbelievers seems to widely miss the mark.

Next is the psychological benefit atheists get from their belief. It is quite delicious to see oneself as self-sufficient, strong, bloodied but unbowed by life’s vicissitudes. I know it’s delicious because I have tasted it many times. If I, who see it as a flaw and try to kill it can attest to its pleasure, how much more is it sustenance to those who drink it as part of their daily diet, like water. Pride is indeed an enormous comfort and can sustain us through much. The Christian believes it is ultimately hollow. Perhaps the unbeliever finds it so at the end as well, and does truly face death bereft of comfort. But frankly, I have only heard in stories (Kenneth Tynan was one) of that realisation coming to nonbelievers facing death. I haven’t detected the self-congratulation ebbing.

I am speaking only of the obvious self-congratulation of the atheist, whose pleasure in having contempt for others is barely disguised. The others I can only guess at. But I suspect there are a great many who are less flamboyant, and certainly less insulting, who quietly congratulate themselves on their fearless intellect and emotional self-sufficiency nonetheless. The may drink with modest mien, pouring only from the top shelf and never causing a row in the pub, but they get just as drunk. They are likely in even more danger because their good manners disguise their similarity to the roaring drunkard. I suspect it not because I think atheists of necessity a condescending and self-congratulating people, but because I find such feelings in myself. All the time. The illusion of knowing how the world really is, of enduring blows with equanimity and staunchly holding one’s face to the storm has been the subject of poets and authors for so long that it may be a cultural universal.

And following my reasoning from paragraph two, if you are quite certain this does not apply to you in the slightest, you might be in greater danger.

Wikipedia

Pajamas Media has a report on political censorship at Wikipedia. Be alert.

Look, I love Wikipedia, because I have become addicted to finding out what the capital of The Gambia is, or what year Gilligan's Island started, all at a moment's notice. Though I suppose with a search engine, Wikipedia isn't so necessary after all. But I don't trust them on anything political or controversial. Its editors have not yet embraced the moral ideal of neutrality and objectivity.

If you have a strong bias about a topic, then you bend over backwards to give the other guy a fair shake. That's a very elementary morality. Which I am not capable of, BTW - I know my editing would favor one side no matter how hard I tried. But that is one reason I don't set myself up as an objective editor of controversial material. I could do pretty well, by sheer effort. But pretty well isn't good enough.

Of course, having a strong bias about a topic usually decreases your ability to see that. You just think you and your friends are right, and the other side populated by jerks and liars. The deeper the bias, the less one perceives it.

Future Economy

I discussed with friends my worry that the economy as a whole will come to resemble the economy for professional athletes: a very few qualifying for a job, with many more - 10x more, 100x more - not far below thm in ability but unable to qualify. At its full extension, a society in which 10% of the people make oodles of money, and the other 90% having nothing much to do other than entertain themsleves, supported by the food-making, house-building, car-driving robots controlled by the 10% seems far more possible at a 50 year lookout than it seemed even ten years ago. The Japanese are developing robots which carry old people, and care for them, for example.

Even if we 90% lived in fairly comfortable estate, it would seem an unstable society. Human nature seems to resent those who make ten times more than us, never mind one hundred, especially if we see ourselves as having come close but missed. We search for clues that their elevation was unfair or pure luck; we resent their advantages. This dystopia seems all the more real the more we can imagine the job we do being done by extremely clever machines, or being done by a few humans aided by technologies, replacing a hundred humans. (Perhaps the 10% will move to correct our resentments quietly.)

Even more depressing is the realization that life-extension seems to be happening even though humans start becoming obsolete in the job market at about the same age they always have. It's hard to get a new job after 55 in many fields, and nearly impossible after 65. One might be able to hang on if the type of job you do doesn't change much. I'm still fine in my job - I've got reasonably good computer skills and can keep up with the changes in agencies and approaches. But there are already those my age, or even younger, who can't adapt. Working 45 years out of your lifespan of 70 seems sustainable. Working 40 years out of your 120 revolutions around the sun, not so much.

Thinking about that this week, I think there are other ways of looking at this technology which point entirely in the opposite direction. While only a few athletes make money in sports, there are thousands of other people who make make money in the business, far more than fifty years ago. People sell shirts, have radio shows, design stadiums (no, it's not stadia), develop exercise equipment, become agents. And all those derivative businesses have offices with support staff. If there is money to be made, a lot of people discover new ways to become part of that. Just because I can't envision what the derivative businesses around robot development are doesn't mean they won't be there. Humans like their robots to have personality, so maybe pesonality design will become big. Or maybe we'll rent out our personalities to be installed in robots.

Synthesized music was supposed to put live musicians out of business. Did that happen? While there are indeed a million musicians making money but not making a living, that was always true. The technology that allows a single individual to send a video of herself anywhere in the world has, if anything, increased the number of people having a try at it.

There's an enormous amount of technology in medicine now. Somehow there are even more people working in it.

Developing new technologies may not only come from the realms of the robot masters and their labs. DIY biology, making cells do fun stuff is a new garage hobby, not necessarily requiring Bell Labs to fool around with life, the universe, and everything. Each of these massive wierdnesses, as they become available, will spawn supporting industries around them. I don't know what they are going to find for relatively health 80 year old guys today, but perhaps we won't all have to become Wal-Mart greeters after all.

Fancy That

I walked in on a political conversation at work - better than most, really. One participant was bemoaning that it was hard for Obama to govern because the country was just so big. There were so many things to keep track of, and a president couldn't be everything to everyone. (To answer the obvious, no, there was no "maybe we were too hard on Bush" followup. Are you crazy?) Another mentioned that he had always thought America's size was part of the resentment other countries felt toward us, and perhaps we could devolve into some regional entities - still united, but more independent. Yes, the other noted, and this might be good culturally as well, because not all regions of America thought the same. If the Pacific Coast region wanted to legalise marijuana, they could do it. If the Midwest didn't, they wouldn't.

Wow, I said, with a bit of a smirk. What a great idea. We could call them "states."

My Problem With Orthodoxy - Reframed

I am greatly attracted to Eastern Orthodox theology, and for one such as I, that is often enough, regardless of what practical difficulties arise. Orthodox worship, I like many elements of. I cannot seem to enter into it easily, but I imagine with practice that would come.

I have held against Orthodoxy its collaboration with any number of evil governments. Because of my Baptist friends in Romania, and the executions of them the Orthodox priests arranged within my lifetime, I have an especial anger; but the pattern has been the same in Russia, in the Balkans. It was not always just infiltration by government agents, forced upon them.

Kaplan's book has given me a new spin on this, and there is much to consider. The Romanian intellectuals he spoke with offered a similar theme about the relation of Orthodoxy to the culture. They divide the Protestant and Catholic West from the Orthodox East more thoroughly than we are used to doing here. They see the underlying culture of Romania as less European, more tied to Asia and the Near East. Kaplan gives numerous examples of cultural tells and political approaches meeting with Romanian officials. Transylvania they consider a middle ground. Romanians want to be Westerners, especially Americans. They point to their Latinate language as evidence of their Westernness.

I have stories on that myself, but a section of the book says it better.

Kaplan quotes Horea-Roman Patapievici

"The task for Romania is to acquire a public style based on impersonal rules, otherwise business and policies will be full of intrigue, and I am afraid our Eastern Orthodox traditon is not helpful in this regard. Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Russia, Greece - all the Orthodox nations of Europe - are characterized by weak institutions. That is because Orthodoxy is flexible and contemplative, based more on the oral traditions of peasants than on texts. Unlike Polish Catholicism, it never challenged the state. Orthodoxy is separated from, yet tolerant of, the world as it is: fascist, Communist, or democratic, because it has created an alternate world of its own based on the peasant village. In this way, Orthodoxy reconciles our ancient heritage with modern glitz."

Indeed, Teoctist, the last leader of a major institution to profess undying loyalty to Ceaucescu, only days before his execution, was still the Orthodox Patriarch in 1998. The church here was continuing its oppression of Greek Catholic Uniates - Orthodox Christians who went over to the pope several hundred years ago. (Historically, Orthodox churches have enjoyed better relations with Moslems than with Western Christians, seeing the latter as a greater threat.)

Intersting, and a pattern I think not limited to the Orthodox. It may be a general rule that people have more enmity toward a local competitor who can be seen, who competes for goods, land, and status from the next village, than toward the faraway oppressor. Only when war is active, and the soldiers of the oppressor become visible, is the anger directed toward them.

(Note, BTW, the inclusion of Greece as an essentially non-Western country. Romanians resent that Truman rescued Greece but not Romania after WWII. They believed they were more suited for union with the West. Interesting question, in light of recent events.)

Which is chicken and which is egg? Does the contemplative, otherworldly emphasis of Orthodoxy allow the state to become oppressive unopposed, or is the flexibility a result of living under oppressive regimes?

My Other Blog

My two oldest sons have read about half of my other blog - that is, if they actually read what is sent them. My younger brother used to read some, but I have started leaving him off, as he doesn't like the nastiness. Occasionally, very occasionally, I will inclued a post to a wide range on my email list.

I have this correspondence of a dozen years with my uncle. He is generally quite liberal: anti-corporate, worried about the incipient fascism of those rubes on the right, convinced of the general stupidity of most conservatives, sure that we have too many people on the planet, trusting in government to mostly get it right keeping rapacious business in check, staunch in his contention that guarranteeing health care to the middle class is a moral imperative, automatic in his belief that any war Democrats got us into was sadly necessary, while those Republicans got us into are mere disguises for empire and enriching business. He does have some occasional conservative or centrist opinions, mostly around education.

He sends me things, and I send him things, and we argue. I comment at much greater length, but a single subject might go on daily for a week, entries on both sides. Some of my best work is in tearing up his arguments. Few read these, if any. He is 85, and never going to change his mind. I take time away from this blog to answer him. I do get some benefit, perhaps, of doing rough drafts, but mostly it is all time that could have been spent more efficiently here. I have at least four posts backed up now, for example. But my correspondence with Uncle Dave, answering back on two of his three emails today, is up-to-date.

It started when Jonathan was a freshman in college. He turns 31 in August. Long time. Not sure the world has much to show for this effort. Why do I do it?

Non-Gourmet

Trying to use up random ingredients in the refrigerator before they go bad seldom makes for great salads. But the standard green salad - lettuce, cukes, carrots - plus slivered almonds and bing cherries worked out great. We kept out the tomatoes, figuring they wouldn't work so great with the cherries.

Eastward To Tartary

I got Robert Kaplan's Eastward To Tartary for Father's Day and have just started it. I liked his earlier Balkan Ghosts, which I may reread. But what caught me right away was Kaplan's start of his journey: Budapest, February 1998. Exactly when I went for the first time, and it is interesting to read him describing the things I saw. He is, as you may guess, not only a better writer but a better observer than I.

Why Futbol Will Never Catch On

I generally love the game. For kids, it's better than baseball, which involves a lot of standing around. But watching the World Cup you can see the reasons why it's never going to make it with the American public.

The first and overwhelming reason is the officiating. There are bad calls in every sport, but in soccer, goals are rare. If you take one away or give one unfairly, it is not just an inconvenience which a team has to adjust to - it's the whole game. To get an equivalent impact in baseball, the umpires would have to get a fair/foul call wrong on a grand slam. Every day of the season. In football, basketball, or hockey, there is no equivalent. While a ref can blow a call in an NBA game that is 101-100 and give the game to the wrong team, notice that this is only in the context of two teams that have played incredibly evenly for four quarters. In soccer, where the entire point is to outplay your opponents enough to get ten good runs on the goal instead of four, hoping that the law of averages will mean that you get a goal, even if 50% of those involve some luck, a bad call gives the game to an inferior team. Often. The Argentine goal on a clear offside and the disallowed English goal are great examples. There were only four games. Two of them had horrible calls.

I grant that it's a hard game to officiate. So get more officials. Use replay. Go electronic. Whatever. With an average of 3 goals per game for the two teams combined, getting those three calls right should be the whole point of refereeing.

The preponderance of foreign names is an obstacle for Americans, sure. But baseball fans have been good at Hispanic names for decades. Hockey fans trip Slavic names off their tongues easily now. It's a contributing problem, but not overwhelming.

The flopping, as I recently noted, makes Americans crazy. Clint Dempsey has learned to flop in the international style, and I recognise why, but I can't say I'm exactly proud of him for it. Pierce and Rondo flop, but they don't lie on the court for three minutes moaning, then get back up and play full speed. Even the European basketball players - much better at flopping than the Americans - don't stoop so low.

The low scoring is an obstacle, especially when games are allowed to end in a draw. You can design your game any way you like, but I don't have to like it. West Ham ties Aston Villa nil-nil. Goodbye.

Soccer is world-wide popular because a lot of countries are poor. The fans played soccer as children because they had nothing else. The beauty they see in it is half nostalgia. I like the game, but then, I grew up on Wide World of Sports, watching wrist-wrestling, jai-alai, cliff-diving, and ski jumping once or twice a year and liking those, too. At least once in awhile.

Bad Patriotic Art

Exactly the sort of thing tha makes me crazy.