Category Archives: big picture stuff

Ideology, Pragmatism, Conceptual Frameworks, Ideals, Prejudices, and Yogachara

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Chris Hayes has written an essay on pragmatism versus ideology that is inspiring much thoughtful commentary. It’s worth reading all the way through, but to simplify, Hayes looks at the reigning conventional wisdom that the Bush Administration failed because it is too ideological, whereas the Obama Administration promises to be pragmatic.

However, Chris argues, ideology and pragmatism do not neatly sort themselves into cleanly separated dichotomies.

For one thing, as Glenn Greenwald has astutely pointed out on his blog, while ideology can lead decision-makers to ignore facts, it is also what sets the limiting conditions for any pragmatic calculation of interests. “Presumably, there are instances where a proposed war might be very pragmatically beneficial in promoting our national self-interest,” Greenwald wrote, “but is still something that we ought not to do. Why? Because as a matter of principle–of ideology–we believe that it is not just to do it, no matter how many benefits we might reap, no matter how much it might advance our ‘national self-interest.'”

One frustration I had with Chris’s essay, and most of the essays written in response to it, is that definitions of “ideology” and “pragmatism” remain a bit fuzzy.

For example, Hayes quotes Alan Greenspan: “Well, remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to–to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.”

Here’s where I come in. I think Greenspan is right when he says that people deal with reality through conceptual frameworks. Buddhist teaching is that our self-identity is merely a kind of conceptual framework. The way we perceive reality is a conceptual framework. The Yogacara school of Buddhist philosophy, for example, says that everything that exists, exists only as a process of knowing. That is, everything is just space and matter until our brains organize it into this or that, and this process of organization is in large part conceptual.

However, from this perspective, everything short of Anuttara-Samyak-Sambodhi (and good luck with that) is ideology, which renders the word ideology into mush.

The American Heritage dictionary defines ideology as

1. The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture. 2. A set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.

So an ideology would be a set of values, perhaps, or a belief system. Let’s work with that. Now, what is “pragmatism”? Back to the dictionary —

1. Philosophy A movement consisting of varying but associated theories, originally developed by Charles S. Peirce and William James and distinguished by the doctrine that the meaning of an idea or a proposition lies in its observable practical consequences. 2. A practical, matter-of-fact way of approaching or assessing situations or of solving problems.

“The meaning of an idea or a proposition lies in its observable practical consequences.” I like that. One of my problems with current conservative ideology is that its observable practical consequences are light-years apart from its stated goals or ideals. For example, one gets the impression that conservatives think “freedom” is acquired by cutting taxes, deregulating business, and waging wars against hostile heads of state on the theory that, given the means and opportunity, those heads of state might attack us first.

However, the observable practical consequences of the Bush Administration’s tax-and-war policies are that our economy is wrecked, our military is weakened, our credibility is shot, and we’re in debt up to our eyeballs to China, which has one of the most heinously nasty governments on the planet. I contend that this is less freedom, not more freedom. Therefore, we can define “movement conservative” ideology as a plan for making America poorer, weaker, more vulnerable, and less free, since it results in limited options and puts us in the position of having to kiss China’s ass.

After several years of holding up Bush as the Conservative’s Conservative, now conservatives complain that Bush is not a “real” conservative, because he “grew” government, as in raising expenditures. However, one can argue that growing government is an observable practical consequence of movement conservatism. The truth is that Bush has been a purer Reaganite than Reagan himself. Bush has been more aggressive about cutting taxes, more favorable to business — to the point that regulatory agencies have been handed over to the industries they regulate — more opposed to regulation and oversight, more determined not to back down from fights even if they are stupid fights. Yes, federal coffers have hemorrhaged money under Bush, but that’s mostly because of war, incompetence and corruption. And the war and corruption parts, at least, go hand-in-hand with conservative “ideology.”

From this perspective, pragmatism is pursuing a course that will give you the result you want, and not-pragmatism is pursing a course that will not give you the result you want.

For example, in a response to Chris Hayes, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that “People forget that there is pragmatic, if ultimately flawed, case for torture.” However, people who have studied torture say that it gives you bad intelligence, and further, it complicates trying to get convictions for whatever the tortured people allegedly did. Thus, torture is not pragmatic at all.

And why do people do things that are not pragmatic? Because they want to.

Torture is its own end. People who want to do it, want to do it for the sheer emotional gratification of it. They won’t admit that, but it’s the truth. Torture has no pragmatic application; therefore, no honest pragmatic argument can be made for it. Genuine pragmatism is, IMO, centered in self-honesty, whereas un-pragmatic ideology is centered in self-deception.

Pragmatism is, IMO, pursuing a course of action in order to obtain an achievable result, rather than pursuing a course of action because it is emotionally gratifying. The flaw in my definition is that people are dishonest with themselves about why they do things. People who are motivated by resentment, bias or greed will nearly always throw a cloak of ideals over what’s really driving them.

For example, conservatives want to do away with regulation on the grounds that regulation is unnecessary and gets in the way of business. Regulation is unnecessary, they argue, because corporate executives would not do something, such as cheating customers or stockholders, that is detrimental to the long-term interests of the company. But the fact is that corporate executives do stupid and underhanded things all the time. Why? Because they want to. Greed trumps good business practice every bleeping day.

And many of the leaders of the Right who push deregulation and small-government ideology do so not because of “freedom,” but because they want to cash in. Whether they are able to admit that to themselves I do not know.

Let’s get back to the original contention, the conventional wisdom that the Bush Administration failed because it is too ideological, whereas the Obama Administration promises to be pragmatic. Yes, the Obama Administration, so far, promises to be relentlessly pragmatic. We see this in the way Joe Lieberman was “forgiven.” Yes, it would have been emotionally gratifying to kick Lieberman’s ass off of the Senate Homeland Security Committee chair, but to what end? Democrats are better off with Lieberman caucusing with them rather than with the Republicans, like it or not.

However, the Obama Administration also promises to be ideological, in the sense that it promises to operate within the parameters of values and ideas. We can debate what those values and ideas might be, but we can’t say there aren’t any.

The Bush Administration, on the other hand, most certainly was not pragmatic. Just look at the results.

I have argued in the past that all ideologies are wrong, because none of them are the whole truth.

I define ideology as a kind of cognitive filing system. The cosmos is an infinitely complex place, and we have very finite brains, so as we grow and learn we tend to organize input in certain ways to make sense of it. The way we learn to file depends a lot on our upbringing, the social and cultural values we absorb, our experiences, the limitations of our intelligence, etc. etc. We use cognition to interface with absolute reality, breaking the awesome absolute down into little digestible relative bits that we can comprehend, label, and file. And we all do this, unless maybe you are a superduper Einstein-level genius, and then I suspect you still do it most of the time.

I still think that’s true. However, a wise person is able to learn, adjust, and adapt his ideology to fit changing reality (or, his changing understanding of reality). A fool cannot do that; fools will continue along an obviously unwise course because their ideologies have become a cosmic security blanket, something they cling to for safety and comfort rather than consult for answers. And there’s your distinction between ideology and pragmatism.

Xtianists, Make Up Your Minds

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Have you ever noticed how often the Christmas guerrillas trivialize Christmas even as they defend it? Here’s an example, by a Darlene Darleen Click [she won’t debate me, but she wants her name spelled correctly, so I’m obliging], who is upset because the University of North Carolina libraries will not be displaying Christmas trees this year. According to Eric Ferreri of the Charlotte Observer,

The trees, which have stood in the lobby areas of Wilson and Davis libraries each December, were kept in storage this year at the behest of Sarah Michalak, the associate provost for university libraries.

Michalak’s decision followed several years of queries and complaints from library employees and patrons bothered by the Christian display, Michalak said this week.

To which the above-linked Ms. Click wrote,

If these cranks aren’t loudly complaining in restaurants about being offended by the birthday cake on the next table, we can safely chalk this up to another lesson in Cultural Tolerance(tm) by Judea-Christophobic Leftists.

Ah, Ms. Click, how art thou stupid? Let me count the ways.

Let us first take up the knee-jerk assumption that people complaining about the Christmas trees must be “Leftists.” They might have been atheists (surely there are right-wing atheists), or Jews (could a Jew be a “Judea-Christophobic Leftist”?), or Seventh-Day Adventists. They might have been small-government conservatives complaining about their taxpayer dollars being spent on decorations.

That last part always confuses me. Small-government conservatives don’t want to spend taxpayer dollars on anything — well, except war. They don’t want to fund public education, maintain infrastructure, rebuild New Orleans, keep starving children from dropping dead on the streets, etc. But suggest not spending taxpayer dollars on religious displays (with which some taxpayers may disagree), and suddenly one is a “Judea-Christophobic Leftist.”

One can argue that Christmas is as much a secular and cultural holiday as a religious one, for which much of the trappings (notably anything to do with Santa Claus, flying reindeer, Christmas elves, etc., not to mention mistletoe and Yule logs, which are leftovers from Druidism) have nothing to do with the Christian religion, Claus’s mythic connections to Saint Nicholas of Myra notwithstanding. I think that’s a legitimate argument. But if you’re going to make that argument, you can’t very well complain that not observing that holiday is dissing Christianity.

But let’s get back to the trivialization part. Is Ms. Click comparing Christmas to a birthday party that might annoy other patrons in a restaurant? How is that comparison valid? Is she saying that Christmas is no big deal and if one doesn’t like it one should just ignore it? That’s fine, except to make the comparison parallel to the UNC library trees we’d have to have the annoyed patrons being forced to not only tolerate the party, but to pay for it. And then be told they won’t be allowed to have their own parties in the same space.

(I’m not going into the Establishment Clause today, although of course it applies; here’s an old post about it.)

Christmas is either a big deal, or it isn’t. Christians believe Christmas is the observance of the birth of Jesus, who, per the Council of Nicea, is “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.” And that this birth was an essential step toward redeeming the sins of mankind, a teaching at the heart of Christianity.

So, one would assume that Christmas is profoundly sacred to Christians. And if Christmas is profoundly sacred, it should not be trivialized by being compared to birthday parties or, for that matter, used to sell merchandise in department stores. One would think.

Awhile back on the other blog I wrote a post about South Carolina selling Christian license plates. The plates feature a Christian cross, which is a sacred symbol for Christians. It struck me that a practicing Buddhist would not want a Buddhist license plate, because to place a sacred symbol of Buddhism in a place where it would be splashed with mud and slush and road grime would be unthinkable. (I’m sure people have put sacred Buddhist symbols on their bumpers, but a deeply devout Buddhist would not do that.)

This gets us to the issue of sacred symbols and how one takes care of them, and sacred days and how one observes them. IMO a large part of people who use tax money and government authority to push their religion on the rest of us don’t seem terribly interested in taking care of the sacred symbols as sacred symbols. Apparently it’s more important to shove crosses in everyone’s face — obviously, as a display of tribal dominance — than to show respect for the cross as a sacred symbol and keep it out of the mud.

Likewise, years ago, Christian ministers complained that Christmas was too commercial; that Christmas observance should be taken out of department stores and kept in church. Now we’re told that if store clerks say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” that this is an affront to Christianity. (What if the store clerk — or the customer — is Jewish, and being forced by commercial enterprise to pay lip service to a Christian holiday? What is that an affront to?)

All that is really important about the observance of Christmas is that Christians are free to observe it, and I pledge that I will stand up for them in defense of that freedom if it is ever threatened.

However, religious observance of Christmas does not require that the taxpayers of North Carolina pay for Christmas trees in the state university libraries.

This week those of us practicing many forms of Japanese Buddhism, particularly Zen, are observing Rohatsu. Rohatsu is something like Zen High Holy Days. It is an observance of the enlightenment of the historical Buddha more than 25 centuries ago, and right now in every Zen monastery in the world — well, except for some western ones that observe Rohatsu later in the month — monks and lay students are cloistered in silent retreats, meditating. On December 7 (last night of Rohatsu, which ends December 8 ) many will meditate through the entire night. It’s a way big deal. (I’m doing Rohatsu Lite — I’ve driven to the local Zen center to meditate for an hour and a half every day this week, and will be there all day tomorrow.)

We do this because it is important to us to do this. We’re not asking taxpayers to pay for it, nor do we expect anyone who is not a Buddhist to give a bleep.

Likewise, Christians are free to put up as many Christmas displays as they like — on their own or the church’s property, with their own money. It’s their religion, and it’s up to them, not taxpayers, to take care of it.

I’m not personally bothered by Christmas displays, including taxpayer-funded ones. I think wreaths and Christmas trees are pretty. Some of my Buddhist readers of the other blog say they observe Christmas, albeit in a non-Christian way. “After I took refuge, my Christmas tree became an enlightenment tree,” said one.

Still, apparently the trees bothered some people. Back to Eric Ferreri of the Charlotte Observer,

Michalak said that banishing the Christmas displays was not an easy decision but that she asked around to library colleagues at Duke, N.C. State and elsewhere and found no other one where Christmas trees were displayed.

Aside from the fact that a UNC Chapel Hill library is a public facility, Michalak said, libraries are places where information from all corners of the world and all belief systems is offered without judgment. Displaying one particular religion’s symbols is antithetical to that philosophy, she said.

“We strive in our collection to have a wide variety of ideas,” she said. “It doesn’t seem right to celebrate one particular set of customs.”

Or, you could display all of them. I believe today is the first day of Hajj, for example. I’m sure Ms. Click wouldn’t mind if the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill used taxpayer dollars to put up a Muslim display to go along with the Christmas trees.

My point is that if Christians would stop taking affront at non-Christians who don’t kowtow to Christmas, and instead just observe Christmas with all the solemnity and reverence it ought to require, the world would be a better place.

(BTW, as thick as Ms. Click is, she’s a genius compared to Don Surber. He seems to think that because the UNC is in a town named Chapel Hill, the library must be a chapel. Or something.)

Time and Tides

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These days events and issues and the nation seem to be sweeping toward some irresistible something that’s bigger than all of us. It feels like river currents rushing toward a waterfall. Have you felt that, too?

History shows us that no status quo lasts forever, no matter how solid and immutable it seems. Sometimes changes are slow and imperceptible, but occasionally some confluence of events breaks the old order apart and sets up a new one almost overnight, or at least within the space of a few years instead of a few decades. Most of the time invasion or insurrection are involved in these changes, but not always. The breakup of the Soviet Union is a prime example of events taking over and forcing change almost overnight without gunfire.

I’m not saying I expect armed revolution or a change in our form of government. I am saying that the political status quo that has prevailed in America for the last few decades is disintegrating rapidly. I suspect the next two or three years will be disorienting for most of us.

Assuming Barack Obama wins the election — it’s looking good, folks, but it ain’t inevitable — I don’t expect a replay of the Clinton years, in which a huge right-wing juggernaut worked relentlessly to destroy the Democratic administration.

Oh, they will try. I fully expect that within two weeks of an Obama inauguration, Tony Blankley will be all over cable television explaining ever so unctuously that the Obama administration has already failed. Hell, he might not even wait until Obama is inaugurated before declaring the Obama administration has already failed.

But Blankley is complaining that other “conservatives” are abandoning the cause, leaving him to fight on alone. His old comrades in arms, like George Will, Peggy Noonan and David Brooks have left the field of battle, he thinks.

In an Obama administration, George Will will still be an insufferable prick, Peggy Noonan will still mistake her psychological projections for insight, and David Brooks will still be an idiot. Some things will not change. What will change, I believe, is that the Right’s ability to dominate the national conversation and overwrite real issues with its phantasmagorical agenda will be much diminished. This will happen not because they’ve changed, but because the political climate of America will have changed.

The powerful Rabid Right is becoming old and shabby and, like, so last decade.

Please let me be clear that I do not expect to wake up on January 21 living in political utopia. I’m a Buddhist, remember; all phenomena are dukkha. And as I said, there will be massive disorientation while the Powers That Be figure out the new rules — indeed, until they begin to notice there are new rules. And there will be disorientation across the political spectrum, not just on the Right. It will take some time yet before Democrats in Congress stop cringing in fear of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

We see disorientation already in the way the McCain campaign evokes a “real” America that looks like the America they thought was out there somewhere, but which they are finding strangely elusive. Rosa Brooks writes,

The GOP code isn’t hard to crack: There’s the America that might vote for Obama (a suspect America populated by people with liberal notions, big-city ways and, no doubt, dark skin), and then there’s the “real” America, where people live in small towns, believe in God and country, and are … well … white. … But with each passing year, the “real” America of GOP mythmaking bears less and less resemblance to the America most Americans live in.

At the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove writes that “the tax argument still works.” He lays out the arguments that he thinks McCain might still employ to pull off a win. Remarkably, these are the same arguments McCain has been employing and which are not working.

Meanwhile, Karl’s masterpiece, his personal Frankenstein monster, is a pariah even in his own party. People still listen to Karl … why, exactly?

The GOP is losing because they are marketing to a demographic that doesn’t exist — America circa 1980-2004. The political shift began with Katrina. It is being accelerated by the financial crisis. We are rushing toward something that is very different from where we have been. My hope is that Barack Obama is the leader he seems to be, and will steer us into a soft landing.

See also: Joe Klein, “Why Barack Obama Is Winning.”

Fairness, Justice, Equality, Stability

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As anticipated, Sec. / Gen. Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama this morning. Yes, we all remember how Powell allowed himself to be a tool, but many still admire him. Matt Yglesias:

His endorsement helps ratify the post-Palin trend toward McCain solidifying his base but losing his once-formidable support from moderates. Plus I bet it’ll inspire someone at the Corner to say something racist.

We can all look forward to that. And speaking of racism and other forms of discrimination, I give you the Rightie Genius of the Week, Robert McCain, who writes,

This idiotic liberal tendency to equate inequality with injustice is indefensible as logic.

If you need to stop and reflect on that for a bit, take your time.

In context, I believe Mr. McCain was using the word equality to mean identical, which I think only works in mathematics — not even then, if I’m doing the mathematics. However, here in Real World Land, equality — as in equal treatment under the law — is the cornerstone of justice. When elements are equal they are not necessarily identical, but they have the same intrinsic value even if they have different attributes.

Mr. McCain was commenting on this column by Jonathan Cohn, “What’s So Awful About ‘Spreading the Wealth’?” Cohn’s primary point is that progressive income taxes are fairer than flat taxes. As part of this argument, he writes,

Another rationale for progressive taxation is the fact that random chance has profound effects on everybody’s financial well-being. (A guy named John Rawls once wrote a thing or two about this.) Mandating economic equality–i.e., carrying out a truly socialist agenda–would obviously be wrong. But there are compelling moral and economic arguments for asking the fortunate to pay a little more in taxes, in order to blunt the influence of chance on people’s lives.

Mr. McCain is having none of that. Which takes us to equating inequality with injustice:

Why is random chance “unjust”? Whence the “moral” obligation to equalize outcomes? This idiotic liberal tendency to equate inequality with injustice is indefensible as logic.

But Cohn didn’t use the words justice or injustice anywhere in his column. Mr. McCain leaped to the conclusion that Cohn wants to “blunt the influence of chance on people’s lives” out of a sense of justice, but that’s not what he said, and that wouldn’t be my primary argument, either.

What is the purpose of government? Cohn writes, “Government performs certain essential functions, from education to national defense.” How do we know which functions are “essential” and which are not? And why would blunting “the influence of chance on people’s lives” be a function of government? This is what we need to think about.

I say government is a means — not the only one, but the major one — by which people maintain civilization. Through government, theft and murder are criminalized and discouraged. Through government contracts are enforced, which enables people to work together to build cities and engage in commerce.

Put another way, the principal purpose of government is to maintain some sort of orderly and stable system that allows people to live peacefully in proximity to other people. Ideally, public and private sectors work together to maintain conditions in which people can provide for themselves and pursue their own interests as freely as possible.

Reasonable people can disagree about which functions should be public and which should be private. But that argument often is not about “morality” or “equality” or “justice.” It’s about balancing stability and liberty.

A classic problem for democratic government is the balance of civil liberty versus crime control. Like it or not, totalitarian governments generally do a better job of controlling crime than democratic governments. If you want to really clamp down on crime, whip up a police state. But most of us don’t want to live in a police state. So we put limits on police powers and accept a higher risk of crime. In this equation, we take away from stability and add to liberty.

For years conservatives have called for deregulation for this or that part of the private sector, because regulations get in the way of profits. But the point of many of those regulations is to discourage risk-taking. Recent events ought to be teaching us that risk-taking has its down side. If it were just a matter of some investors taking risks with their own money that would be one thing, but we see that risk-taking can create widespread financial instability with widespread harmful consequences.

So, the primary point of putting limits on what financial managers can do with investors’ money is not just to protect the investors from losses, but to keep the economy itself from becoming unacceptably unstable. Unfortunately, this is a lesson that has to be re-learned every few decades.

Likewise, the primary reason government has an interest in blunting the influence of chance on people’s lives is to maintain political and social stability. Certainly, the government cannot be ready with a band-aid every time a citizen stumbles. But history teaches us that when a large portion of citizens, especially middle-class citizens, are facing catastrophic disruption and falling through the economic cracks, political and social instability are right around the corner.

I’m not talking about saving people from their own folly. I’m talking about saving them from other peoples’ folly, or the consequences of natural disaster, or something else that’s bigger than they are. Self-reliance is a wonderful virtue, but sometimes it isn’t enough. And maintaining the integrity of the middle class as a whole is good for everybody.

Let’s go back to Mr. McCain.

The purpose of taxation is to collect revenue for the government, not to reward or punish various classes of citizens.

I agree, but the rest of this paragraph suggests to Mr. McCain suffers some sort of brain damage.

The fiscal action of government is never equal, and inevitably divides the population into taxpayers and tax consumers (as another famous guy said), and tax consumers will always argue for the expansion of revenue. If left unchecked, government become nothing more than organized theft, plundering one part of the population in order to enrich another part.

I like the part about government being unchecked. Once again, we see that the ideal of government of the people, by the people, and for the people has been forgotten. Rather than being an instrument for We, the People, to govern ourselves, government has become an alien fungus that no one can control. But let’s go on …

First, I’d like to know which Americans are not “tax consumers.” Who living here does not benefit, directly or indirectly, from the justice system, the national security system, meat inspectors, highways, etc.? Show of hands? Anyone?

Who is being “plundered” and who is being “enriched”? Certainly there’s a lot of plundering going on, but seems to me it’s the corrupt, not the poor, who are the perps. If Mr. McCain actually believes that the poor are benefiting disproportionately from his tax dollars, he should try being poor for a while. Mr. McCain may not be on food stamps, but he receives benefit from his tax dollars whenever he uses air transportation, buys a steak, or has good shipped across country.

Remember the “lucky ducky“? This would be funny if it weren’t so, I don’t know, pathological.

I’ve argued in the past that one defining features of righties is that they don’t grasp interconnections. They have rigidly linear thought processes and don’t see the complexity of interrelationships that supports all of us. Well, here it is again.

Update: Matt Yglesias again:

Meanwhile, as John McCain says, it’s true that forty percent of the workforce pays no net income taxes. But everyone who works pays payroll tax. Payroll tax is a tax, ergo if you work you pay taxes, ergo if you work you could receive a tax cut. It’s true that the method by which you deliver tax cuts to people with no income tax liability is via a refundable tax credit, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re talking about reducing the tax burden on people who pay taxes. You’re offering them a tax cut, in other words. Or as McCain puts it, “socialism.” Meanwhile, George W. Bush is nationalizing banks and John McCain wants to buy up bad mortgages so that those who currently own them don’t need to pay any financial penalty for their unsound lending practices.

It stuns me that McCain doesn’t think taxes taken out of paychecks count as taxes.

Mad Libs

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Andy McCarthy at The Corner — Did Obama Write “Dreams from My Father” … Or Did Ayers?

That’s a good one. But, y’know what? We can play this game, too. Take this sentence —

Did [name] [action] [object]?

Then, choose one item from each of the lists below to fill in the blanks and make your own stupid headline!

For example, if you took the first item in each list, your headline would be

Did George W. Bush [bleep] Sarah Palin’s secret lover?

Now, try it yourself!

NAME

  1. George W. Bush
  2. Dick “the Dick” Cheney
  3. John McCain
  4. Sarah Palin
  5. The ghost of Ronald Reagan

ACTION

  1. [bleep]
  2. feed mooseburgers to
  3. lie about
  4. suppress news of
  5. put a voodoo curse on

OBJECT

  1. Sarah Palin’s secret lover
  2. the doll that says “Islam is the light”
  3. an unidentified corpse in Bill O’Reilly’s bedroom
  4. Barack Obama’s real birth certificate
  5. Communist agents in the State Department

Have fun!

Update: Publius uncovers the shocking secret ghostwriters behind Dreams From My Father

End of an Empire

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Some are saying the United States is no longer the dominant world power it used to be. See, for example, “A shattering moment in America’s fall from power” by John Gray and “Financial Hubs See an Opening Up at the Top: Wall Street’s Long, Dominant Run Is Fading, Global Financiers Say” by Ariana Eunjung Cha in today’s New York Times.

A decline from Top Dog status is inevitable; what goes up must come down, nothing lasts forever, etc. I’d like to think that if Al Gore had become POTUS in 2001 the decline would have been long forestalled. But the fact is that the social pathology known as “American conservatism” would have used its media muscle to weaken Gore and push us toward the edge of the cliff, anyway.

The Tao brings all things to equilibrium. A nation puffed up with a myth of its own exceptionalism is asking to be deflated.

I’ve argued in the past that the U.S. has to choose between being a republic or an empire; we can’t be both. The American Right chose “empire.” But if we fail as an empire, as we seem to be doing, maybe we’ve got a shot at restoring a republic. We’ll see.

I thought of this today when I read Jonathan Freeland’s column at The Guardian — “This pansy-ass limey Brit won’t butt out — the US election is our business.” Three weeks ago, Freedland wrote a column saying the world would judge America harshly if we choose McCain over Obama. Naturally, this column inspired some spirited objections.

The counterblasts featured all the usual themes familiar to any columnist or blogger who wades into this terrain. America had saved Europe’s “ass” twice before — and we would doubtless come bleating for help again when we inevitably sought rescue from the Muslim hordes imposing sharia law on London, Paris and Berlin. We can’t defend ourselves, of course, because we are limp-wristed “Euroweenies”, effeminate socialists whose own decline robs us of the right to say anything about the United States, which remains the greatest nation on earth.

Britain specifically forfeited the right to meddle in US affairs more than two centuries ago, when it lost the War of Independence. Besides, Obama is a Marxist, so Europe is welcome to him. One Bill07407 managed to capture the flavour of this virtual avalanche — including the curiously homoerotic undercurrent that runs through much rightwing American invective — with this effort: “If you want Comrade Obama we will gladly ship him over after he loses in a landslide. Meanwhile you can kiss my ass. I bet you would enjoy it faggot.” Equally reflective, this from bioguy777: “I love it! A pansy-ass limey Brit begs the US to do his bidding while his own country slips further towards total Islamic rule. We’re electing McCain, and the rest of the world can piss up a rope if they don’t like it. 1776, BITCH!”

Brits may find this amusing. They don’t have to live with these creeps.

For too long, the myth of American exceptionalism has prevented us from dealing honestly and pragmatically with both foreign and domestic issues. Too many Americans seems to think our country is a fortress of might and plenty unto itself, and what goes on elsewhere has no effect on us. If what goes on elsewhere is not to our liking, we have the almighty U.S. military and and endless flow of wealth to set things right. And, of course, God is on our side.

We can endlessly analyze the social-psychological miswiring that causes this attitude. However, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to understand there’s a deeply buried existential fear at the core of the hair-on-fire need to feel “exceptional.”

Whatever the cause, can a majority of Americans come to understand that our superpower, top dog status is not what makes us a great nation? And that we might actually be a happier, saner and more stable nation if we forget about being a mighty empire and re-focus on being the best republic we can be?

***

Sort of along these lines, a few days ago columnist Kathleen Parker wrote that Sarah Palin is out of her league and should step down as veep candidate. Today she discusses the reaction —

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn’t, I should “off” myself. …

…Who says public discourse hasn’t deteriorated?

The fierce reaction to my column has been both bracing and enlightening. After 20 years of column writing, I’m familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.

This must be the first time she’s pissed off the Right.

My mail paints an ugly picture and a bleak future if we do not soon correct ourselves.

The picture is this: Anyone who dares express an opinion that runs counter to the party line will be silenced. That doesn’t sound American to me, but Stalin would approve.

Readers have every right to reject my opinion. But when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one’s own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk. (I hear you, Dixie Chicks.)

The thing is, there’s nothing new about this attitude. Anyone who has waded into the world of Free Republic has bumped into the “totalitarians for liberty” crowd. Or is it “libertarians for totalitarianism”? Whatever. We don’t call ’em wingnuts for nothing.

Whatever they are, wingnuts wrap themselves in the conceit that they are the mainstream and speak for the majority of Americans. If it ever dawns on them that they are, in fact, an unpopular minority faction, they are likely to become more dangerous.

The GOP Advantage: Stupid Is Easy. Smart Is Hard.

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It took me a while to find it, but I thought you’d enjoy this little nugget from October 5, 2004, dug out of the Mahablog Archives.

Why We’re Screwed

    Bush’s years as a good-time Charlie and heavy drinker may actually help him draw a contrast to Kerry. Bush led a more “normal” life as a young man, spending his college and postgraduation years partying, chasing women, and raising hell, while Kerry sought academic excellence, positioning himself to be a leader of his generation. Kerry’s devotion to high-minded pursuits, first through his combat service in Vietnam and then as an opponent of the war, may have impressed some, but it now is often portrayed by adversaries as opportunistic and self-important. Those accusations are rarely made against Bush, who showed little interest in leadership as a younger man. [U.S. News and World Report]

We’ve come a way from George Washington and the cherry tree, huh?

The original U.S. News and World Report article, by Kenneth T. Walsh and Dan Gilgoff , appeared in the October 3, 2004 issue. It serves as a nice time capsule to show us how the “elite” versus “regular guy” narrative played out four years ago. The paragraph quoted above still makes my jaw drop.

Smart is elitist, and elitism is, you know, bad. So we can’t elect smart people, and instead elect stupid people, because they connect with us, and they’re more fun to have a beer with, even when (they say) they’ve stopped drinking. Then we wonder why the government doesn’t work. Stupid? Do tell.

I mean, where else in the world is someone accused of academic excellence and high-minded pursuits?

Occasionally we hear that there’s an “anti-education” culture among African-American males that causes them to under-achieve. I will leave it to others to decide how true or false that is. It just seems to me that this phenomenon is not limited to African-American males. The whole country is infested with it. It’s just plain not cool to be smart.

Case in point: Saturday’s event at the Rev. Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church. Discussing this not-debate, Sally Quinn writes that she wishes she could live in John McCain’s world:

I want to live in a world where Gen. David Petraeus and Meg Whitman, former chief executive of eBay, are the wisest people I know, where offshore drilling will help ease our energy crisis, where a guy stays in a Vietnamese prison camp even when told he could get out, and has great stories to tell. I want to live in a world where I was absolutely certain that life begins at conception, where a man is a maverick and stands up against his Senate colleagues when he disagrees with them, where the only thing to do with evil is defeat it, where a guy will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of Hell to capture him.

I want to believe that our biggest enemy is radical Islamist terrorists. I want to be part of a world that doesn’t have to raise taxes; where America is a beacon, a shining city on a hill; where our values are simply Judeo-Christian values; and where a man always puts his country first. I want to be one of “my friends.”

John McCain’s world doesn’t appeal to me all that much, but let’s go on …

Obama came first, and he handled himself well in front of an audience that clearly disagrees with him on many issues. He also managed to put to rest the notion that he is a Muslim, which 12 percent of Americans still believe he is. He talked directly to Rick Warren as though they were having a real conversation, whereas McCain played to the audience, rarely looking at Warren. He was low-key, thoughtful and nuanced.

That kind of nuance is hard to understand sometimes — it’s unclear, complicated. Obama’s world can be scarier. It’s multicultural. It’s realistic (yes, there is evil on the streets of this country as well as in other places, and a lot of evil has been perpetrated in the name of good). It’s honest. When does life begin? Only the antiabortionists are clear on that. For the majority of Americans (who are pro-choice), it is “above my pay grade,” in Obama’s words, where there is no hard and fast line to draw on what’s worth dying for, and where people of all faiths have to be respected.

Stupid is easy. Stupid lets you give clear and unambiguous answers to murky and complicated questions. Smart, on the other hand, requires dealing with reality.

Columnist William Kristol, a high priest of the religion of stupid, wrote of Saturday night’s whatever it was:

Obama made no big mistakes. But his tendency to somewhat windy generalities meant he wasn’t particularly compelling. McCain, who went second, was crisp by contrast, and his anecdotes colorful.

Smart is boring. Stupid is much more “compelling,” i.e., entertaining and comforting.

(Later in the same column, Kristol challenges his readers: “Where in particular has the United States in recent years — at home or especially abroad — perpetrated evil in the name of confronting evil?” He really doesn’t know. Truly, this is the Stupidity of the Gods.)

Michael Gerson, who’s just a watered-down David Brooks as far as I’m concerned, wrote,

First, the forum previewed the stylistic battle lines of the contest ahead, and it should give Democrats pause. Obama was fluent, cool and cerebral — the qualities that made Adlai Stevenson interesting but did not make him president. Obama took care to point out that he had once been a professor at the University of Chicago, but that bit of biography was unnecessary. His whole manner smacks of chalkboards and campus ivy. Issues from stem cell research to the nature of evil are weighed, analyzed and explained instead of confronted.

Now, let’s think about that last sentence. To me, weighing, analyzing and explaining issues are inseparable from “confronting” them. You have to understand an issue thoroughly before you can deal with it wisely, and sometimes the wisest course is to leave the dadblamed issue alone. In Rightieworld, however, “confronting” an issue takes these steps:

  1. Identify what you want to do (e.g., attack Iraq; help your oil industry buddies increase their profits).
  2. Find or manufacture a reason why you should do what you want to do.
  3. Overwhelm news media and the American people with blustering rhetoric about why America must do what you want to do, accompanied by juvenile taunting of anyone who disagrees with your doing what you want to do.
  4. Do the thing you want to do.
  5. Spend the next several months or years denying or making excuses for the mess you made by doing what you wanted to do.
  6. Eventually, when the mess turns out to be an undeniable failure — blame liberals.

Notice there is neither weighing nor analyzing in the list above. Weighing and analyzing is for academics and women. Red-blooded Americans take the hairy-chested, Neanderthal approach and just smash the hell out of whatever is bothering them.

Let’s talk about moral issues. I’ve written in the past about how “moral clarity” is not clear at all. “Moral clarity” is based on bullshitting yourself; a refusal to weigh and analyze all facets of an issue.

Essentially, “moral clarity” is about bullshitting yourself. It’s about not dealing honestly and compassionately with all aspects of a moral issue. Instead, the “morally clear” begin with the position they want to take and work backward to justify it, scamming themselves and others when necessary to achieve the desired outcome. This twisted way of achieving “clarity” is founded in the dualistic thinking Glenn Greenwald writes about. This dualism assumes one side of an issue must be “good” and the other must be “bad.” Thus, in much anti-choice literature embryos can talk and women who choose abortions are either ignored or assumed to have evil or selfish motivations. But real-world moral issues often involve multiple “good” sides. It is actually quite rare for people and facts to so neatly sort themselves into “good” and “bad” boxes as the morally clear want to sort them. And by achieving “clarity” based on lies and false assumptions, the “clarifiers” actually create more pain and complication.

But, by gawd, “moral clarity” works great on television. The “morally clear” can look the camera in the eye and give decisive, sound-bite answers. People attempting to deal with reality have to explain things. They must fall back on nuance. Boooooooring.

Finally, the really great thing about stupid is that it allows you to believe whatever you want to believe. Peter Dizikes writes that gurus of the Right like Rush Limbaugh and Jerome Corsi are telling people there is all kinds of cheap and readily available oil here at home if only the snotty, elitist liberals would let the noble and virtuous oil industry drill for it. In fact, Corsi tells people that petroleum is not a fossil fuel but instead is something the earth keeps regenerating, never mind what those snotty elitist scientists with their fancy Ph.D.s say.

See how we’ve solved the energy crisis? All we have to do is drill, drill, drill and we’ll get all the cheap oil and gas we want as soon as we want it. And we’ll never have to worry about an energy crisis again. We don’t have to listen to the boring liberals and their boring explanations about science and renewable energy and technology and stuff.

Stupidity like this makes me wonder how our species survived as long as it has, frankly.

Interconnections

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James Fallows explains why David Brooks is an idiot so I don’t have to. Links are such a time-saver.

In a nutshell, Brooks’s column today is all about China’s “collectivist” mindset versus the West’s “individualistic” mindset. Fallows, who has been living in and reporting from China in recent years, explains why Brooks’s column is over-simplified hooey.

Certainly, Chinese culture has emphasized social harmony at least since Confucius (551-479 BCE). But that doesn’t mean that Asians are non-thinking automatons.

Brooks writes, for example,

If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

Brooks builds on this to explain why Asians don’t value rights and privacy as much as we Westerners do — Westerners focus on the individual fish, see. But fixating on the biggest fish is not necessarily a sign of individuality, IMO. It more likely indicates that the observer identifies with or admires dominance.

Awhile back I complained that right-wingers don’t see the interconnectedness of things. One of the differences between progressives and non-progressives is that the progressives perceive how the lives and personal fortunes of individual citizens interconnect, and how events and issues connect to and impact other events and issues. Righties, on the other hand, have rigidly linear thought processes and cannot see beyond their own personal interests. Does that make them more “individualistic”? or just more “selfish”? And “narrow minded”?

Years ago I stumbled into a virtual nest of Objectivists. These are Ayn Rand culties who have made a religion of individuality. The peculiar thing about them is that none was a particularly original thinker. They all tended to quote the same passages of The Fountainhead to make the same points and show how “individual” they were.

One guy in particular, who kept going on and on about how he didn’t need anyone else, finally got to me. Do you realize, I said, that your entire environment is a web of interconnection with other people? The roof over your head, the chair you’re sitting in, the utilities you use, the food you eat, your bleeping Internet connection are all the creations of other people.

He snapped back, I paid for these things. Of course. An economy is a facilitator of interconnection.

Righties drop by here from time to time and accuse us liberals of being “statists” and “collectivists.” Righties make a big show of loving liberty even while they support giving the Bush Administration unlimited power to violate individual rights and bully anyone who dares disagree with them. So much for “individualism.” As with the Objectivists, they like to fancy themselves rugged individuals when most of the time they are just tools, believing what they think they are supposed to believe.

I’m Buddhist enough to understand individuality as an illusion. We’re all more part of each other than we realize.

The three major philosophy-religions of China — Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism — all in different ways emphasize interconnection. Zen Buddhism — Zen Buddhism originated in China, as Ch’an Buddhism — was heavily influenced by an Indian philosophy called Madhyamika, which argues that nothing has intrinsic identity, and phenomena take identity only from other phenomena. There is neither reality nor not-reality; only relativity.

Another Chinese school of of Buddhism called Huayan came up with the metaphor of Indra’s Net. The net extends in all directions without end, and in each “eye” of the net is a multifaceted jewel. Each jewel, although existing separately, also reflects every other jewel in the net. And the jewels in the reflection reflect all other jewels in the reflection, to infinity. This represents how beings and phenomena exist. Simultaneously, we are individuals and not-individuals.

Yes, China has a totalitarian government. The form of that government is based on an economic and political philosophy originally dreamed up by Europeans, as I recall.

Robert Louis Chianese writes in the Los Angeles Times,

Without a tradition of individualism and personal rights, Chinese society represents the perfect counterbalance to our own rights-emphatic culture. If we find fault with the suppression of the individual in China, we also might fail to see the disadvantages in the West of devaluing social harmony. We in the U.S. seem to be going off in 330 million directions at once. Contrariwise, our current administration wishes to overrule the Bill of Rights in the name of security, our debased form of “harmony.”

I would say that without a tradition of social harmony, we often cannot reach consensus without devolving into schoolyard taunts and bullying. Or, that great favorite of dictators — fear.

I’ve come to appreciate more and more that “social harmony” and “individualism” are not opposites. When kept in balance, they enhance each other. When only one is valued, too often you have neither.

War Over Ossetia

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CNN reports that Georgia’s parliament approved a request by President Mikhail Saakashvili’s to declare a “state of war” with Russia. This is not the same thing as declaring war itself, apparently, nor does it impose martial law. However,

It gives Saakashvili powers he would not ordinarily have, such as issuing curfews, restricting the movement of people, or limiting commercial activities, those officials said.

Whatever. This is a serious matter, and you know the cable news channels will be covering …

John Edwards. Cernig writes,

Unbe-fricking-leivable! I am now officially disgusted with America’s insular and navel-gazing punditry. En masse and on a bipartisan basis the media, commentators and bloggers have decided that the Edwards Affair story is more important than events in South Ossetia. What happened, folks, did your minds cloud over at contemplation of events beyond these hallowed shores?

See also “Why TV news in the US is utter rubbish.”