Liberal media meltdown

The reaction in the media to Romney's criticism of the administration on Egypt and Libya is almost enough to make Romney look good. I haven't been impressed by Romney. But the prejudiced reaction by much of the press - to turn something which genuinely does call into question the whole Obama approach to the Middle East into a "Romney gaffe" - is just astonishing.

Here's an example in a muddled and confused NYT column. It rightfully praises the assasinated US ambassador to Libya. But it attacks the "visceral hatred" of Islam in parts of the United States.

The Obama administration never expressed sympathy for the assailants. It never apologized for American values. What the Cairo embassy did, as violence brewed in the Egyptian capital and well before the Benghazi attack, was to condemn “actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others” — specifically Muslims.

Since when was extreme bigotry that portrays the followers of one of the world’s great religions as child molesters an American value? Religious tolerance is as fundamental an American value as free speech. For Romney to offer implicit defense of a scurrilous movie in the name of free speech, while misrepresenting the Obama administration’s actions and offering not a word about hatred toward the world’s more than 1.5 billion Muslims, suggests he is deluded or desperate or both.

The same liberal media has only been too happy to portray the Catholic church as mostly made up of molesting priests. You could have read much of the Democratic National Convention as "hurting the religious feelings" of anti-abortionists or people who wanted God mentioned in the party platform. Last week G and I were offended by Madonna's latest concert tour, which received a positive review in the NYT, which did not consider whether it would "hurt the religious feelings of others."

There is a deep hypocrisy here. Apparently only the hurt religious beliefs of those who riot and kill matter. And that's the problem, and why Obama got it wrong.

Americans have been remarkably tolerant of thirty years of attacks from Muslims claiming to act in the name of Islam. No Muslim ambassadors were attacked after three thousand Americans died on 9/11. It would have been unthinkable.

The issue is one of thresholds. It clearly sounds as if the offending video in question has no redeeming merits. But the kind of multicultural tolerance Roger Cohen has in mind here only runs one way. America does not erupt in riots when the American flag is burnt in Egypt. It would be ridiculous.

This September surprise has given the world cause to appreciate the cool head in the White House and worry about the hothead who aspires to replace him. Romney, in Jacques Chirac’s immortal phrase, “lost a good opportunity to keep quiet.”

If Romney' first instinct is to think of American interests instead of the dignity of Islam, that's a good thing - hard-headed as opposed to soft-in-the-head. Appeasement is not cool-headed. It invites further violence.

Think about it. Romney is a "hothead" for raising legitimate questions about US foreign policy, but storming embassies and threatening Christian minorities should be overlooked? The issue is the people whose religious feelings are "hurt" are clearly the hotheads. Refusing to recognize that does not help.

I think what this shows is irrational panic in the media about the other "narrative" in this situation - the long shadow of Jimmy Carter.

Or perhaps it shows there is hard-wired incomprehension of the situation. The instinctive liberal response is to fail to see anything except issues of fairness towards Muslims. They simply cannot see anything beyond that. Liberals simply don't understand they are part of a very small subculture, which is why the left has done so badly in the midst of the worst economic crisis in seventy years. Far from understanding other peoples' point of view, they are unaware alternative viewpoints even exist, outside of the various slurs they hurl. Articles like this one come across as pompous, self-righteous and utterly out of touch.

As I said below, the right response here is not more praise for Islam from the United States, but containment and disengagement. If you meet a crazy drunk in the subway, the right response is to move away, not walk up and give speeches about your great respect and tolerance for his preferred brand of liquor.

What Obama should have said is: the same openness and tolerance which protected Muslims in the United States from riots and attacks and internment after 9/11 is the same openness which allows people in the US to disrespect Islam, too. And we make no apology for that.

 

Bertrand Russell and leisure

I followed a few references in this NYT article I wrote about yesterday. It turns out there is a famous essay by Bertrand Russell with a somewhat scandalous title: "In Praise of Idleness".

I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.

Huge resources were devoted to military effort in the First World War, he says. Ordinary production was carried on with far fewer resources.

The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.

It is the morality of the slave state, he says.

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. ..

If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure

Interestingly, we saw exactly this attitude from Judge Posner recently, and I think this is an important factor in attitudes. Militaries generally like to keep recruits training and drilling for similar reasons.

Russell continues:

When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours' work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently.

Not all would use leisure for higher purposes, of course. But some would, and they could produce more genuine value and originality than idle aristocratic classes or isolated ivory-tower academia.

Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle.

That might be hoping for too much.

Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.

Russell was often criticized for his more popular writings, of course, brilliant and fluent as they are. An economist would be imclined to see this as an example of the "lump of labor fallacy." And perhaps Russell was very premature, given how much productivity has increased since.

But what I take from this is our ideas about work and virtue are tangled up in all sorts of subterranean, hidden ways. Work is now ultimately a question of who deserves what, not survival.

And it is also a matter of how and why people get bored, and the kind and degree of stimulation we want. Some people apparently want it in drugs, or endless tv. Work is often a substitute for purpose.

 

The "right" to respect and honor culture

G and I were just talking about what respect means, and the extent to which people can expect or compel respect for their culture or religion. It is a live subject in view of the horrific attacks in Libya and Egypt.

There's no right to respect, says G, but mockery goes too far. I think you do have a right to a fair hearing, she says, a right to be listened to, even if you don't have a right to positive approval. I also don't think there ought to be automatic negative views of a culture or religion any more than there should be automatic positive views.

I agree with that, I say. People tend to live within their own separate realities, though, and will fight to preserve them, and that is a problem. We have an abstract tradition of formal human equality in the West, which probably stems from the ancient Christian idea of the soul and the equality of souls. But that doesn't necessarily entail equality of substantive respect or recognition. We get confused about this. People don't have a right to compel others to think their cultural preferences and traditions are praiseworthy or valid.

However, perhaps the deeper problem here is not respect, or Islam per se, but a much older unreconstructed honor/shame culture in the Middle East. It's the same disposition that drove early modern aristocrats to fight formalized duals for perceived insults or sleights upon their honor. It's impossible to imagine two US politicians fighting a deadly duel like Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr in 1804.

David Pryce-Jones writes in his book The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs that

What otherwise seems capricious and self-destructive in Arab society is explained by the anxiety to be honored and respected at all costs, and by whatever means. ..Honor is what makes life worthwhile: shame is a living death, not to be endured, requiring that it be avenged. Honor involves recognition, the openly acknowledged esteem of others which renders a person secure and important in his or her own eyes and in front of everyone else. (p35)

We find it almost impossible to understand parents killing their children in honor killings, but it happens even in the US and Canada.

James Bowman points out in his book Honor: A History that although we find this way of thinking extremely hard to understand in the contemporary West, it is pervasive in most other times and places.

When we hear such people speak of Islamic "honor" as being at stake in the jihad against the "crusaders" of America and the West, we naturally regard it as an exotic growth, or perhaps a bizarre survival of an age long past in the West. Yet we are, in global terms, the odd ones out. Our disdain or disregard for honorable imperatives cited by others as a reason for action is at least as bizarre to most of the world as honor seems to us. p23

Bowman traces how appearance matters more than truth or reality to the honor culture. Of course, it was embedded deep in our own culture for centuries, but always sat more uneasily with "turn the other cheek" Christianity, and sank with the aristocracy and the revulsion at the First World War.

The problem is how you deal in practice with people obsessed wih honor. It isn't an argument about abstract free speech rights or "live and let live". Appealing to truth or common interest will not work because it is not what is at stake. But truth will continually wound a sense of honor that is sharply divergent from it.

And eventually people in the West may feel humiliated and angered by incidents crazed intolerant fanaticism in Islamic countries. "Turn the other cheek" has always had its limits as a political philosophy as well. Walter Russell Mead has written about the Jacksonian approach to foreign policy, which is sensitive to US national honor in his book Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. It still has broad appeal in the US, especially in the South, which is why Obama has to be very careful not to appear like Jimmy Carter.

Part of the answer has to be to avoid as much as possible the obsessives and honor-crazed. Seal them off. Contain them hermetically. Reason will not work.

 

Repugnant anti-American violence on 9/11

I am furious about the attacks on our embassies in Libya and Cairo. Islamic mobs marked the anniversary of 9/11 with bigoted violence and killings of diplomats.

The appeasement reflex of our embassy in Cairo, condemning those who "hurt the religious feelings of others" more than the perpetrators, is also shameful.

Victor David Hanson writes on the National Review blog:

Obama’s effort to appease Islam is an utter failure, as we see in various polls that show no change in anti-American attitudes in the Middle East — despite the president’s initial al Arabiya interview (“We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect.”); the rantings of National Intelligence Director James Clapper (e.g., “The term ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ . . . is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam.”); and the absurdities of our NASA director (“When I became the NASA administrator . . . perhaps foremost, he [President Obama] wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science.”) — to cite only a few examples from many.

At some point, someone in the administration is going to fathom that the more one seeks to appease radical Islam, the more the latter despises the appeaser.

Wishful thinking is not a substitute for policy. The "vast majority" of the Arab street is deeply hostile, and pretending otherwise is stupid.

A first step would be to make sure anyone who thinks killing people is a justified response to an "insult to the prophet" by some obscure nobody somewhere in the US never gets a US visa and never sets foot in the United States, nor anyone who makes excuses for them. We expect people to resist provocations without killing innocent parties. It should be a required test on every US visa application: "Have you ever participated in or verbally supported killing people or rioting in response to alleged insults to religious figures." Automatic denial.

This kind of zealotry and fanaticism is not acceptable. There needs to be more of a containment model in our dealings with the Islamic world, on the model of the Kennan approach to the Soviet Union. We did not endlessly praise the wonders and peacefulness of communism during the cold war, after all. We did not think the path to peace was endless recitation of the enlightenment of Marxism-Leninism. Quite the opposite. We refused to give it ideological legitimacy.

We need more separation, rather than more engagement or attempts at suasion. And we need to argue for our own values rather than ignore problems in the hope they will go away.

 

Seeking the Big Advances

We looked before at how venture capital has failed to deliver a return in recent years, mostly because there has been little long-term thinking. Investors just flock to the latest short-term fads like social networking.

Nathan Myhrvold says he and some other software plutocrats like Bill Gates are doing just the kind of long-term investment demanded by our big problems. They are funding an alternative kind of nuclear energy that uses depleted uranium, for example. He writes in the MIT Technology Review:

So why would any rational group of people create a nuclear power company? Part of the reason is that Bill and I have been primed to think long-term. We have the experience and resources to look for game-changing ideas—and the confidence to act when we think we've found one. Other technologists who fund ambitious projects have similar motivations. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are literally reaching for the stars because they believe NASA and its traditional suppliers can't innovate at the same rate they can.

Myhrvold is scarily able, and amazingly multi-talented. He likes cooking, too. So he and a large team worked for several years to produce the massive, revolutionary and definitive guide to new food techniques, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. He turned a hobby which millions of people enjoy into a ground-breaking advance in knowledge.

So it's possible this kind of venture can deliver game-changing breakthroughs, and that's a good thing.

But we shouldn't necessarily have to rely on billionaire hobbyists to drive innovation. Myhrvold is admirable in many ways, but he is also one of the main people involved in Intellectual Ventures, which is one of the world's most obstructive and damaging patent trolling companies. There are deeper issues of intellectual property here.

So we should also ask why NASA can't innovate as fast. DARPA seems capable of funding breakthrough technologies.

Perhaps it is because government can't be seen to take risks and fail in the same way. You get a Solyndra situation and accusations of wasting public money. There is always suspicion that money is doled out for political favors instead of merit. But endless patent litigation is not the way forward either.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Work and Leisure

Gary Gutting, a professor of Philosophy, writes in the NYT:

What, then, is work for? Aristotle has a striking answer: “we work to have leisure, on which happiness depends.” This may at first seem absurd. How can we be happy just doing nothing, however sweetly (dolce far niente)? Doesn’t idleness lead to boredom, the life-destroying ennui portrayed in so many novels, at least since “Madame Bovary”?

Everything depends on how we understand leisure. Is it mere idleness, simply doing nothing? Then a life of leisure is at best boring (a lesson of Voltaire’s “Candide”), and at worst terrifying (leaving us, as Pascal says, with nothing to distract from the thought of death). No, the leisure Aristotle has in mind is productive activity enjoyed for its own sake, while work is done for something else.

 

He argues that education is needed to direct matkets towards what we want.

Capitalism works for the good only when our independent choices determine what the market must produce to make a profit. These choices — of liberally educated free agents — will set the standards of capitalist production and lead to a world in which, as Aristotle said, work is for the sake of leisure. We are, unfortunately, far from this ideal, but it is one worth working toward.

 

The US healthcare system's bill for waste

$750 billion a year, says a new report. Astonishing, but not surprising.