In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.

For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com

 
Thursday is Torah day. Let's talk about the parshah. Because of thje nature of the parshah, most of this discussion will be characterological rather than theological, ethical, or classically midrashic. Which will, perhaps, make it more accessible; who knows.

This week's parshah is Chayey Sarah - "life of Sarah" - so called because the first words are "Thus was the life of Sarah." This is the standard formulation for announcing the number of years lived at the end of a life, and indeed that's how the sentence concludes. The irony - a parshah called "life of Sarah" begins with her death - has been frequently noted. Rather than dwelling on Sarah's life, the parshah dwells on the settling of Abraham's household after her death. Specifically: Abraham needs to bury his wife, and make provision for a general family burial plot in a new land (his own family's plot was presumably back in Ur of the Chaldees); he needs to marry off his son and heir; and he needs to settle his affairs generally and prepare his will.

Sad to say but true, there is a sense, with the passing of Sarah, that a much trouble has been lifted from this family. Sarah's infertility prompts her to give her handmaid Hagar to her husband. When this plan is successful, and Hagar conceives, Sarah is furious, and drives Hagar away with harrassment. When she is finally, in old age, granted a child of her own, she drives both Hagar and Abraham's son Ishmael from their house in jealousy, causing Abraham much pain. When Abraham takes Isaac up on the mountain, the near-sacrifice appears to have been sufficient to push Sarah over into the grave; indeed, there is a midrash that Satan told Sarah that Isaac was in fact murdered by his father on the mountain, and Sarah died at the report. In any event, she does not speak to Abraham again in the text before her death. We do not know how the match between Abraham and Sarah was made; unlike with Isaac and Jacob, we have no wooing scene, and no indication that it was a match that G-d had in mind. With Isaac and with Jacob, we have testimony from the text of their loves for Rececca and Rachel, respectively; we have no similar attestation of Abraham's feelings, nor of Sarah's towards him. Sarah was infertile, but unlike Elkanah or Jacob, who professed their love of their wives in spite of their infertility, the lack of an heir clearly gnawed at Abraham, and one does get a sense that his marriage never really recovered from the strain. (And we do know it was Sarah who was infertile; Abraham has numerous children at a very old age by his concubines taken after Sarah's death.)

Abraham's first act upon Sarah's death is to look for a proper burial site. There's a lovely scene of bargaining with the children of Heth, with indirect mention of the burial plot's price (an extortionate price, in fact, of 10-20 times the fair value for the land) hidden within a protestation that the land is an outright gift. The burial plot is in Hevron, and can still be visited today; it is a holy site to both Judaism and Islam, and has a massive Herodian-era building atop, still intact, constructed in the same style as (though much smaller than) the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem. Hevron is a very touchy subject in contemporary terms; it has been an inhospitable city for Jews for many decades (even centuries), and currently there is a tiny, embattled Jewish enclave surrounded by one of the most hostile Arab populations in Judea and Samaria. The Jews of Hevron are among the most aggressive and extreme in their political views as well. The place they occupy is very holy to Jews, and there is an understandable loathing to give up an essential part of the Jewish physical patrimony in the land. Moreover, it is a part of the patrimony where the title could not be clearer: the bible states twice that Abraham, by his purchase of the field, established an uncontested title to the land for eternity. By contrast, much of the land of Israel is deeded to Israel by G-d and by right of conquest by Joshua, but not by legal contract with its prior owners and inhabitants. In some sense, then, Israel has a better title to Hevron than to anywhere in Israel. And yet it is difficult to see how the holy city can be retained without violence. What is to be done?

I think a useful insight into this question comes from Maimonides, who opined on the question of whether one is permitted to walk on the Temple Mount where once the Temple in Jerusalem stood. Maimonides argued that it is not permitted to do so, and the reason is that the Holy of Holies is still in operation, even though the building around it has been destroyed, and by walking on the Mount one might trespass on the Holy of Holies, which is a terribly grave sin, as that spot can only legitimately be entered by the High Priest, and only on Yom Kippur, the most awesome day of the year. Why, then, does he argue that the Holy of Holies is still in existence? The reason, he argues, is that while the First Temple was built on conquered land - David took the city from the Jebusites, and his son, Solomon, built the First Temple - the Second Temple was built on purchased land, and with the permission (indeed, the encouragement) of the conqueror, the Emperor of Persia. Since the First Temple was established on violence, it could be destroyed by violence; since the Second Temple was established by consent and contract, it could not be destroyed by violence.

What are the implications? I draw several. First, since the Machpelah burial cave of Hevron, like the Second Temple in Jerusalem, was established by contract and consent, the title is secure, and cannot be voided by subsequent conquests. But second, I note that the current inhabitants have their own claims based on residence and descent from Ishmael and so forth, and that it is therefore necessary, on a religious level, to establish our own claims as uncontested; for if the claims are pressed by violence, they may be voided by violence. But yet third, since the Jewish claim to Hevron is based on ancient and uncontested title, it can only be voided in an ultimate sense by consent and contract; therefore, if Israel wishes to retain that claim, and not repudiate Abraham's purchase, it must not consent to the surrender of those claims. To summarize: the Jewish people have a legitimate claim; they should not press that claim violently lest they risk having that claim voided; and neither should they surrender that claim voluntarily, for there is no turning back from such a surrender.

This analysis of Hevron holds infinitely more significance for Jerusalem. When Prime Minister Barak was negotiating at Camp David and Taba for the future of Jerusalem, and offered to give up the Temple Mount to non-Jewish sovereignty, most of the discussion focused on the practical absurdities of this decision. But there was a deeper problem: by offering to surrender Jewish claims to this place, Barak put in terrible danger the Jewish character of the State of Israel. For, had the offer been accepted, religious Jews would have been faced with two possibilities. Either (a) the Jewish people had relinquished voluntarily their claim to the Holy of Holies - and, by implication, to the possibility of the reconstruction of the Temple there - which is religiously impossible; or (b) the decisions of the State of Israel have no enduring significance for the Jewish people, a conclusion which would make it difficult to sustain the proposition that Israel is a Jewish State (as opposed to being a state with a lot of Jewish citizens). I hope that, when the time comes for a new attempt to resolve the problem of the two peoples in the Land (and the time will eventually come, however many decades it takes) that the leaders of the Jewish State have enough Jewish consciousness to take these considerations into account in their negotiations. After all, Yasser Arafat, not a particularly good Muslim, took them into account on his side; he argued that he had no authority to negotiate about Jerusalem and its holy places because they were the property of all Muslims for all time, and not only for the Palestinians in this generation. Even more so for Jews and our holy places.

Enough of today's problems; back to the text. After burying his wife, Abraham sets to finding a wife for his son. Now this whole bit of narrative is very strange, and forces one to ask: why does Isaac not go himself? Why is Eliezer sent instead? Isaac is no longer young; he is old enough to wive. Jacob, his son, will woo his own wife, as will Esau, as will Moses. Moreover, even if it were improper to woo on his own, why would not the two go together? Isaac's passivity is marked his whole life: he is the passive near-victim on Mount Moriah; his wife is chosen for him and brought back to him; and, as we will see in the next parshah, his wife is the prime mover in their household, working behind Isaac's back to establish the inheritance of the blessing by her favored son, Jacob. It is striking, moreover, that when Rebecca first comes to Isaac, the text says that by this means was Isaac comforted for the loss of his mother. It is a strange man of full age of whom you would talk this way; his relation to the world seems almost childlike here. Isaac is markedly successful in his endeavors, digging wells and otherwise improving the land. But he is terribly passive in his relations with people.

(An aside: Robert Alter notes that the wooing-at-the-well appears to be a biblical trope or type-scene. Imagine that there is an archetypal wooing-at-the-well scene, where the hero comes to the well, gives water to a maiden, and is then brought in to meet her father and be matched with her. Now see how the various biblical well-wooing scenes vary from this archetype, and how that variance sheds light on the relationships in question. First, Isaac does not go to the well himself; rather, his father sends a messenger to woo for him. Then, rather than the wooing man providing the maiden with water, the maiden provides him (or his father's servant) with water. All this points up Isaac's passivity and Recebba's strong-willed nature, which will play out throughout their marriage. In the next generation, Jacob woos at the well. In his case, it is necessary for him to remove a heavy stone to get at the water. This prefigures the struggle Jacob will have to win his wife, Rachel, from the wily Laban, her father. Finally, in the Book of Exodus, Moses will come to a well in the land of Midian and drive away bandits who are harrassing the daughters of Jethro; afterward he is matched with Jethro's daughter, Miriam. This certainly ties in well with Moses' own career as his people's liberator. It's a neat pattern, isn't it?)

This passivity is troubling. One wonders whether it has something to do with Rebecca's falling from her mount when she first spies her promised husband. The trait is so pronounced that one modern rabbi - Avi Weiss - has speculated whether Isaac was afflicted with Downs Syndrome. (This is something of a polemical point with him, not a serious historical or midrashic one, since Rabbi Weiss has had a long and noble involvement in the effort to bring Jews with mental and other disabilities into the religious community.) But, as with people with Downs, Isaac's passivity appears to be tied to some very positive traits. In spite of their troubled history, Isaac clearly has a positive relationship with Ishmael and Hagar. Isaac waits for his bride in Be'er le-Hai Ro'i; this is where Hagar had her comforting visitation from the angel when she fled from Sarah's harrassment, and where, according to midrash, she had settled, and Isaac was paying her a visit there. (After Abraham's death, Isaac settles in the same area.) And when Abraham dies, Isaac and Ishmael bury their father together in the cave. Abraham clearly feared that his son, Isaac, would not be able to hold his own against his half-brothers. While Sarah made him send off Ishmael, no one forced him to send off his numerous sons by his later concubine, Keturah. He did it of his own volition, while he was alive, and presumably in order to shield Isaac from the threat that they would seize his inheritance, since Isaac was named sole heir in Abraham's will. In any event, while that may have been prudent, it is striking that Ishmael - who overran all his brothers, and became a great king - seems to have remained on basically good terms with Isaac, his passive, simple and holy younger brother.

(Another aside: each of the patriarchs is responsible for inaugurating one of the three daily prayer services. Abraham, who waited outside his tent in the morning for the visiting angels, is responsible for the longest service, the shacharit or dawn service. Isaac, who meditated in the field at the onset of evening, is responsible for the minchah, or afternoon service (aside with the aside: I believe the root of the word is the same as the word for "rest" which would suggest that this is the "siesta" service!). And Jacob is responsible for the ma'ariv or evening service, said after dark which is, according to the Jewish reckoning, actually the beginning of the next day. Since the shacharit service is ideally said at dawn, at the beginning of one's day, and the ma'ariv can be said at the very end of the day, before retiring, they fit neatly into the daily routine. The minchah service, on the other hand, is a break in the routine. One who regularly prays the minchah service is therefore considered to be particularly pious. Another point in Isaac's favor - and again, I think, not unconnected with his general unworldliness and consequent passivity.)

Abraham dies satisfied - "full" literally. The bible does not say this of many other men. (Does it say it of any?) The contrast to Jacob, who becomes Israel, is particularly striking; when Jacob meets Pharaoh in his old age, all he can do when asked his age is to summarize the woes and misery of his life ("few and evil have been the days of the life of your servant"). I wonder if seeing Isaac living near Hagar gave him comfort and satisfaction when he knew that he, Abraham, would soon be sleeping beside Sarah.
posted by Noah at 4:47 PM

 
Michael Kelly demolishes the Chicken Hawk argument. I've nothing to add. It's a gem.
posted by Noah at 3:52 PM

 
Whoops! I guess I shouldn't have predicted the opposite only a few hours ago: Israeli government falls. Well, not exactly. Sharon still has enough votes to stay in power, so long as he keeps the far right (NRP and Yisrael Beiteinu/National Union) and the haredi parties (Shas and UTJ) happy. Which I guess was part of Fuad's plan: defect from the government to gain standing in the primary, and push Sharon to the right to make the general election environment more hospitable. Trouble is, Sharon isn't afraid of new elections; if he does something to anger the right, he can dare them to topple him. New elections might not be so soon even if the government is gone. Meanwhile, at least we'll see someone in the Foreign Ministry who's loyal to the government.

(Aside: I have never thought Peres was disloyal to Israel. I just think he's a megalomaniac who thinks only he knows best how to serve Israel, and the government who employs him and the Israeli citizens who elect the government should properly defer to him, since he knows best; and if they won't, why the only patriotic thing is to do what he thinks is best regardless of their instructions.)
posted by Noah at 2:28 PM

 
Another really strong piece from Ron Unz on the subject of the Colorado English initiative. It seems Dick Lamm, former Governor, has joined the fight.

Which leads me to the following observation. It has been clear to me for some time that one of the most achievable, cheapest and most clearly good reforms we could effect in our public schools would be to eliminate bi-lingual education. Bi-lingual education is a hugely expensive, utterly wasteful, socially and educationally destructive policy with no honest defenders left on earth. Its only beneficiaries are teachers' unions and Latino demogogues (and Spanish-language broadcasters). But hard-core conservatives - like current Colorado Governor Bill Owen, opponent of the Colorado initiative - have almost uniformly refused to make this a core issue, while the more pragmatic types - like Richard Riordan, former Los Angeles Mayor and loser in this year's California gubernatorial primary - have at least occasionally climbed aboard. What does that say about who is principled and who is not? I judge someone principled not by the extremity of his political views but by his willingness to spend capital to achieve the public good even if it is not particularly to his political advantage.

(Dick Lamm, by the way, is primarily known for having once said that the old and infirm have a duty to die, and for being seriously considered for the 1996 Reform Party Presidential or Vice Presidential ticket. He's not clearly a conservative or a liberal. He's for privatizing Social Security, cutting Medicare and Medicaid substantially, free trade, immigration restriction, higher taxes, a balanced budget, and generally telling everyone that life is getting worse. I don't know what his views on the "social issues" are. He would be out of place in today's Democratic Party, at least at the national level, though he is still nominally a Democrat.)
posted by Noah at 1:57 PM

 
Bernard Lewis wrote about it in the 1980s, in his book, Semites and Anti-Semites. Now Ha'aretz picks up on the fact that radical, racial, eliminationist (to use Goldhagen's phrase) anti-Semitism is rampant in the Arab world, among our "allies" as well as among our enemies. It is the one element holding together conservative, reactionary regimes like Saudi Arabia with revolutionary Islamists like the mullahs of Iran and the Hezbollah with secularist dictatorships - whether pro- or anti-Western - like Egypt and Iraq.

I've said before that states would have little reason to use nuclear weapons if they were certain to lose a war, because there would be no good military purpose to their use. But Hitler used gas - which he was deterred from using against British or American or even Russian troops - against Jewish civilians, and diverted important resources away from the front to assure his "victory" over the Jews. I still maintain that nuclear weapons are primarily weapons, with battlefield utility, and that even terrorism is primarily a political/military strategy to achieve concrete goals. But when the ideology animating the enemy defines murder as victory - if killing Jews, for example, is the objective of war, not gaining territory or resources or control of a state - then, as with Hitler, all bets are off.
posted by Noah at 11:54 AM

 
I guess I should have predicted this, since it's happened half a dozen times already: Compromise reached on budget; unity government preserved. (This is in Israel, in case you couldn't guess.)
posted by Noah at 9:34 AM

 
Does the Wellstone memorial pep rally do just tribute to the Senator who died before his time? Or is it a travesty? Based on my limited knowledge of the man, I'd say the former. But I still understand why Republicans would be mad.
posted by Noah at 8:39 AM

 
And one reason to hate Canada, from the inevitable Charles Johnson.
posted by Noah at 3:32 PM

 
Two reasons to love Canada: The Stratford Shakespeare Festival and Mark Steyn.
posted by Noah at 6:11 PM

 
This is interesting if unsurprising. In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, most Americans did not blame Islam. Since then, U.S. unease with Islam has jumped. Why? Because the spokesmen for Islam in America have done little or nothing to acknowledge the religious civil war in which the Islamic world is embroiled, and has done little or nothing to apologize for the war on the West being waged in Islam's name by one side in that war.
posted by Noah at 6:03 PM

 
And it looks like the National Unity government in Israel is coming to an end. Fuad has boxed himself into a corner; I don't see how he backs down from his threat to bolt the government, and I don't see how or why Sharon would back down. Ben Eliezer is doing what is best for his party and his career, and, unwittingly I suspect, for the country. Likud now has a functional majority of support; it should have a stronger hand in the Knesset. After elections, it will. And then Labor will decide whether they would rather be a decidedly junior partner in a national-unity coalition government or whether they would rather lead the opposition to a government beholden to Effie Eitam and Avigdor Lieberman. I suspect the latter, and that would not be good for the country. But we'll see.
posted by Noah at 5:59 PM

 
So first off, kudos to The New Republic for publishing people like Adam Garfinkle's piece on how to deal with North Korea. Yeah, I know, TNR is hawkish on Iraq, so Garfinkle is an ideological soul-mate. But I think it's noteworthy that under Peter Beinart's leadership, which has steered TNR's ship firmly in a more liberal direction, the magazine continues to publish strong and important pieces by people like Peter Berkowitz, Gregg Easterbrook, Adam Garfinkle, Robert Kagan, Leon Kass, Charles Krauthammer and John McWhorter, any of whom you might just as well read in The National Review Online or the Weekly Standard as in TNR. There's no comparable publication out there, on the right or left. End of commercial.

That said, I'm highly skeptical of Garfinkle's proposal for dealing with Korea (in a nutshell: get all the Great Powers together to coax and pressure North Korea into a slow, staged surrender to a South Korean takeover), because it is premised on the very unlikely agreement among the great powers in this matter.

Russia is not going to give up the Kuriles for cash, and Japan is not going to pay for them. And apart from cash, Russia has no incentive to go along with this deal, since it is minimally threatened by North Korea. (Similarly, Russia would be a minimal obstacle to unilateral American action to "take out" North Korea, since the Hermit Kingdom is not a Russian but a Chinese ally.) Russia has an interest in avoiding a refugee crisis in its Far East, true. But they are hardly going to surrender territory to prevent one.

China, meanwhile, would be horrified of the prospect of American troops on its border. And no amount of reassurance would convince China that this would not be the outcome of reunification. Russia, it was said, was similarly afraid of German reunification, but it happened nonetheless. But it happened because of a remarkable confluence of circumstances, including the implosion of the East German regime, the fundamental weakness and naivete of Mikhail Gorbachev as a leader, the determination of the Kohl government to achieve reunification, and the general collapse of Soviet power. The North Korean state has not imploded, and it's not obvious that the "Dear Leader" understands that extortion cannot go on forever. The South Koreans have not shown determination to absorb the North, but to befriend it; they are led by a Willy Brandt, not a Helmut Kohl. Moreover, they have the example of German economic failure since reunification to caution them against the economic consequences of such a policy. Finally, and most importantly, the Chinese are not weak, are not led by a Gorbachev, and they have the example of German reunification before them to illustrate the consequences of retreat at the frontier: collapse at the center. The Chinese, as we, believe that the end of the Soviet Empire began with the fall of the Berlin Wall. They do not want the same to happen to them.

And how does North Korea threaten China? If the Japanese showed any sign of nuclearization, that might indeed frighten the Chinese into cooperation. But there is no sign of such a movement; rather, Japan seems determined to withdraw further and further into its shell. So long as Japan and South Korea are willing to pay ransom, North Korea's aggression serves Chinese interests. And if we let China know that we're expecting it to bring North Korea to heel, then North Korean aggression could serve Chinese interests even more, as China gets to play good cop to North Korea's bad cop, and extract Western concessions in return for the promise of keeping North Korea relatively restrained. China's long-term foreign policy aim is the expulsion of the United States from the western Pacific and the establishment of a Chinese zone of dominance stretching from Kamchatka to Indonesia. Selling out one of their few clear allies will not serve that objective in any way.

Finally, Japan. Japan will go along with whatever we devise for the penninsula so long as there is no threat of war. But without a threat of war, there will be no incentive for China, much less North Korea, to cooperate with an effort to bring about peaceful reunification. That's our key problem. If Japan were threatening unilateral action, the United States could come in and say to China: your interests are better served by our mediation than by Japanese rearmament. You bring North Korea along and we'll bring Japan along. But so long as Japan is more inclined towards appeasement, we can make no credible threats, and so long as we can make no credible threats any plan will ultimately devolve into appeasement.

And this brings me around to a major bugaboo of mine: America has forgotten how to have allies. We have gotten used to thinking of our allies as dependencies, and this has corrupted our relations with them. The Left thinks they are dependencies, and is embarrassed, and so wants us to defer to them, restrain our power, subject ourselves to international institutions where one state has one vote regardless of the relative natures (free or unfree) or power (weak or strong) of the regimes in question. The Right thinks they are dependencies, and expects them to heel, and obey their master. These are both terribly wrong attitudes, and are getting us into more and more trouble.

We do not want weak allies. We want strong allies. Strong allies must be reckoned with in their own right; they cannot be counted on simply to follow our leader. Of course, we will aspire to remain by a fair margin the strongest among our allies as among our enemies. We shall seek to remain the dominant power. But we cannot defend all of our common interests that we share with our allies without our allies' active and vigorous support. Our position on Iraq is weaker than it might be because European nations - who are more threatened than we by the rise of radical Islam - are trying to avoid their responsibilities as they did in the Balkans. Our position on North Korea is weaker than it might be because Japan - who is more threatened than we by a nuclear armed lunatic in Pyongyang - prefers not to assert itself in its own defense, and leaves us seeming silly should we try to assert ourselves in their stead. We need allies who are strong and vigorous, who assert themselves against us some of the time even as they understand that their most important relationship is with the world's superpower, because allies who do not do this are unlikely to be useful to us when we need them.

If this is true, it has significant implications both for our choice of allies in the world (the only major, rising power in the world whose interests roughly coincide with America's is India) and for how we relate to longstanding allies like France and Germany. It has even more significant implications for how we relate to internal political developments in countries like Japan, Turkey and Israel, where we have tended to prefer governments that are tractable to government that are more nationally assertive, even if the latter retain a pro-American orientation.

As for what I think we can do about North Korea, I honestly don't know. My instincts tell me, though, that Kim Jong Il will not be toppled gently from his pedestal unless he is utterly deprived of outside support. That means stiffening Japan's spine and driving a wedge between Beijing and Pyongyang. These are predicates as well of Garfinkle's proposed solution. But neither he nor I know how these are to be accomplished.

(An aside: the biggest threat from North Korea is not that they would nuke Seoul or Tokyo, though that is significant, but that they have happily assisted the development of the Iranian, Iraqi and Lybian nuclear and missile programs. In other words: it's not the evil, it's the axis. But in this regard we may have passed the point of no-return; after all, we've read that Pakistan was the source of much of North Korea's nuclear know-how, and now the DEBKA-oids are claiming that North Korea's nukes include Iranian bombs sent there for testing. The cats are out of the bag. Anyone have a plan for herding them back in?)
posted by Noah at 5:52 PM

 
You're never going to get on my bad side by bashing a French President (particularly one responsible for the "special relationship" between France and Iraq), so here's to Tim Hames for giving taking it to him soundly.
posted by Noah at 4:54 PM

 
I'm the last man in the blogosphere, obviously, to weigh in on the death of Paul Wellstone. Nonetheless, a few comments.

* One of the first things I thought of when I heard of his death was Brutus' line from Julius Caesar (well, I was at a Shakespeare festival at the time): "There is tears for his love; joy for his fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his ambition." Being a politician is not usually considered a hazardous profession. But flying around from one corner of the state to the other, over and over, to remote airports, in all kinds of weather, is quite hazardous. It's apt to get a significant percentage of those fired by ambition for high office killed. Ambition may be yoked to honorable or base motives, but in either case can be deadly.

* I never met Senator Paul Wellstone, and did not know him as a person. The testimonies to his character have been moving. But I cannot join the chorus who laud him as a leader on the grounds that he was a politician of integrity. Faithfulness to ideology is not integrity, and that, I believe, is what Paul Wellstone manifested as a Senator. I'm pleased and impressed that he showed warm personal feelings for ideological opposites like Senator Jesse Helms, and I think that speaks well of him as a man. But such comraderie across party and ideological lines is, actually, not terribly rare in politics, witness the Jeffords-Lott, McCain-Kerry and Kennedy-Hatch friendships. So: those who knew him attest that he was a kind and loving man. Was he an admirable leader, because he remained true to his convictions? I cannot say that. From my little experience of him, his convictions were not learned and labored over but received. And what he practiced was not the art of leadership but that of noisy dissent. It is relatively easy to elect oneself a martyr to principles; much harder to lead people in a principled fashion. I'm not saying Wellstone was the worst sort of Senator. I prefer his sort to the Jim Jeffordses of the world. But he was no Ted Kennedy. And no Barry Goldwater either; I don't recall Senator Wellstone leading a movement to purge the Democratic Party of its accommodationist wing, damn the electoral consequences. My point is not that he wasn't principled; he was. It's that he wasn't a leader. He was less interested in seeing his principles achieved - and making the deals or leading the intra-party fights necessary to do it - than in showing his willingness to stand against consensus in the name of principle. I know I sound a little peevish pointing all this out about a man who died tragically. I have no doubt he was a good man. But when we eulogize we set a standard, and Wellstone was not my model of a good Senator. I would frankly prefer a Senate full of Charles Schumers - who has, I suspect, a pretty similar voting record - to a Senate full of Paul Wellstones.

* Moreover, I think the torrent of conservative encomia are in somewhat bad taste. I do not remember any of these people saying that Paul Wellstone was their favorite liberal Senator when he was alive - or, if they did, it was with imperfect ingenuousness. To whit: conservatives liked to cite Wellstone as being an "unabashed" or "honest" liberal - one who was unafraid to speak his full agenda. They liked to cite him as such not because they admired such forthrightness but because they think his principles are generally unpopular; by calling him the "real deal" they tarred all of those dissembling liberals with the Wellstone brush. An entirely fair move; don't get me wrong. But it does make me less than impressed with their outpouring of posthumous support.

* I heard the news when in the company of members of my family and their friends. Democrats all, they were uniformly convinced that Senator Wellstone's death was a blow to Democratic fortunes. (I disagreed, citing Missouri's Senate race last year and this year's race in New Jersey; with Mondale potentially the candidate, I think it's even clearer that this seat, once within GOP reach, is now a long-shot, Ramesh Ponnuru's wishes notwithstanding.) What was much more disturbing was that no fewer than three people immediately speculated on whether this was a hit, whether the GOP or its allies planned the death in order to ensure a Republican takeover of the Senate. Now, these were educated people, people who had never feared for their lives from the American government, who had never lived in a regime based on corruption and political repression. These were not people who grew up in Argentina during the dirty war, or in Communist East Germany, or even in post-Communist Russia. These were people who had never known anything but freedom and security, and yet it did not seem odd to them to speculate that American was a country where a major political party routinely engaged in murder to win power from the other major political party. I was always disturbed by the paranoid fringe of the Clinton-hating right, the sorts of people who thought that the black helicopters were coming for them and that everyone who ever died and knew Bill Clinton was bumped off. But in general I wrote these people off as obvious fools, people who could entertain such fantasies of corruption because they had never come close to power, had little of it themselves, had little education about the world, and got their ideas from cheap novels or movies. But how to explain a comparably paranoid style by doctors, lawyers and such, educated people who probably have met Senators, or have met people who have met Senators, people who in general are not afraid of the world and the unknown, who get their ideas from purportedly reputable newspapers? These are the most bitter wages of the New Left, the spring from which Senator Paul Wellstone drank deeply: that a great many "right-thinking" and educated liberals out there assume they live in a functional dictatorship, assume that murder is a routine tool used by those in power in our Republic, assume that their ideological opponents as a class - not merely one dubious individual - are willing to do anything to remain in power. This is the important backdrop to understanding the outrage over the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, and the willingness of Vice President Gore to accuse (implicitly) the Bush Administration of starting a war for political reasons. It's hard for me to express how disturbing I find these kinds of casual allegations, and they are made - casually - by all sorts of people on the left, up to and including the highest-ranking Democrats in our politics.
posted by Noah at 4:50 PM

 
Back from Stratford, and the trip was wonderful. Moses' first time on a plane, first trip out of the country, and first stay with a non-relation as babysitter. As for the shows, reviews to follow, hopefully later today.
posted by Noah at 12:12 PM

 
Off today with the wife and kid to the Stratford Festival of Canada (never to soon to introduce a youngster to culture, I say). I'll post reviews some time after our return; last round of reviews, from this June's trip, are here.

Since I'm leaving this morning, I won't have time to post much about this week's parshah, which includes, among other episodes, the destruction of Sodom and Gemorrah and the binding of Isaac. On the latter, see here for a September 11th related post that touches on this critical moment in the Torah. See here for an old Rav Riskin drash that I liked on the same episode.

With respect to S&G, I will just point out three things. First, contrary to popular belief, this story is not primarily, if at all, about homosexuality. Rather, it is about hospitality. Abraham meets the three strangers (the angels) and goes out of his way to be hospitable to them, inviting them to eat and sit with him and preparing an elaborate meal. He is established, in this incident, as the epitome of hospitality. Later, when the angels descend into the city, Lot and his family are the only ones who take them in. And when the denisens of the city surround Lot's house and demand to "know" (which certainly seems to imply to know carnally) the strangers, Lot offers them his virgin daughters instead. To such an extent does traditional hospitality extend. The rabbinic exegetical tradition upholds this view of the story, and has a grand old time imagining the depths of depravity of Sodom's citizenry; they are imagined as living in a kind of moral Bizarro world, where it is a crime to show hospitality, a crime to give alms to the poor, etc.

Second, the whole conversation between Abraham and G-d where Abraham bargains with G-d for the city of Sodom has always bothered me. After all, we know in real life that the presence of righteous people in a city will not save the city from destruction if destruction is decreed. Moreover, it seems like the principle at issue cannot be a matter of numbers; Abraham's argument - of 50, why not 40? If 20, why not 10? - seems to be extendable down to 1, and even below, to a single righteous deed of a single person. So it occurred to me that the whole conversation is best understood as a discussion between Abraham and G-d after the fact of the destruction. In other words, the party of G-d attempts to argue that the destruction of the city was an unequivocal act of justice, because of the utter wickedness of the city, while the party of man argues that you can't call it justice if the righteous are destroyed along with the wicked - indeed, if the party of G-d promulgates such a view, then they will defame the name of G-d as a righteous judge. The cataclysm must therefore be understood differently.

Third, it has struck many commentators that Abraham argues for Sodom but does not argue for his own son when G-d's decree of destruction (apparently) falls on him. Why is this? In the traditional Jewish moral psychology, humans are understood to be possessed on both an impulse to good and an impulse to evil. Both are part of our G-d given nature, and therefore both must have a purpose. As is traditionally understood, the "evil" impulse is better called a "selfish" impulse, and so there is an expression: without the evil impulse, no one would ever build a house, or found a business, or start a family. Greed, pride and lust are necessary to the development of the earth. Where they get us into trouble is when these desires are in charge of our natures, and not harnessed to serve the moral faculty. Why do I bring this up? Because it is said that Abraham is the only man in history to have completely vanquished his evil impulse. And it seems to me that is related to the fact that Abraham cannot argue on behalf of his son. Had it not been his own son, he might have seen the injustice in G-d's apparent command, as he did with Sodom. Because it was his own son, he effectively "recused" himself, and so, had he not heeded the second command of the angel, a terrible evil would have been done, one that would have effectively destroyed the presence of G-d's blessing in the world. There is a danger is striving for selflessness, a danger that can lead to a more terrible kind of immorality even than selfishness.

Have a good weekend; see y'all on Monday.
posted by Noah at 8:58 AM

 
By the way, in case anyone wondered in the wake of my comments on the northeastern GOP that I'm just a namby-pamby socially-liberal but fiscally conservative type, nothing makes my blood boil quite like stories like this one about the attitudes of abortion providers towards statutory rape.

(Actually, taking campaign contributions from Red China gets my blood boiling even more. But let's let that pass for the moment . . .)

The funny thing is, I understand how the Planned Parenthood types think. I know they think they are doing what is best for these girls. They think that if anyone else gets involved, the girls will be more frightened, less "in control" of their lives, and less safe. Far better the girl get an anonymous abortion and then undergo counselling for whatever other "issues" she has that may have contributed to her pregnancy (notice how, in a statutory case of rape, it's now her fault; what happened to blaming the perpetrator, not the victim?) than for her to be thrown into the criminal justice system against her will and forced to deal with her crisis in front of so many other people (parents especially). And besides, so many of these girls are in troubled circumstances: broken homes, family abuse and neglect. Shouldn't we just place our trust in the abortion providers and let them do the job that needs to be done?

I went to school in the early-90s heydey of date-rape hysteria, and even then feminists got themselves all confused on the subject of underage sexuality. They wanted teens to be entirely free to control their destiny - have sex if you want, with whomever you want (preferably of the same sex), and deal with the complications however you want (if these include pregnancy, preferably by means of abortion; you don't, after all, want to "ruin" your life). And they managed to hold all these opinions simultaneous with a terror of male predation and opinions that sexual relations between men and women were per se oppressive. If you can hold all these notions in your head simultaneously, and you have convinced yourself that an abortion is an entirely morally neutral decision, and if you have convinced yourself that sexual experimentation is a positive good, then it makes perfect sense to hold a young girl's right to an anonymous abortion to be more important than bringing a statutory rapist (and possibly a forcible rapist) to justice.

I'm sorry, I'm getting a little upset. I'm going to go back to work.
posted by Noah at 4:02 PM

 
You know that line about how all evil needs to triumph is for good men to do nothing? Good Men Do Something, in Indonesia.
posted by Noah at 1:14 PM

 
Remember that scene in A Fish Called Wanda, when John Cleese's wife discovers John with Jamie Lee Curtis on the sofa, and then Kevin Klein pops out from behind a door (or a curtain; I forget) and explains that this isn't what it seems: it's a complicated intelligence ploy of some sort. At which point it turns out that Cleese's wife is the daughter of the former head of British Intelligence, and Klein begins spinning like mad to explain his supposed intelligence scenario - and then ducks out of the house to escape. At which point John Cleese is off the hook because everyone has been so confused by Klein's appearance that they've forgotten all about Jamie Lee Curtis. You remember?

Is that the sort of thing Glenn Reynolds is talking about?
posted by Noah at 10:27 AM

 
David Frum has a great series going at the Telegraph, Four Myths and a Truth (about America's impending - or, rather, about to escalate - war with Iraq. In five parts. Here's part I, part II and part III. IV and V to follow tomorrow and the next day, presumably. Really worth a read.
posted by Noah at 10:14 AM

 
Ben Domenech has his own predictions (not the same as wishes, of course, but there's always some bleed) for the Senate: GOP up 2. He gives us CO, MO, SD, NH and MN, gives them AS, IO, NJ and GA, for a net gain of 2 seats. But I note the GOP gets 5 nail-biters while the Dems appear clearly ahead in the 4 races he mentions. (Never say never, and I'd love to see the GOP win in Iowa and New Jersey, but that's not what it looks like 2 weeks out.) So I think +2 is the best the GOP is likely to do, with the worst being a loss of 3. Losing 3 is less likely than gaining 2 - there are good reasons to think all the nail-biters are GOP-favored - but gaining 2 is also, I think, more wish than prediction. We'll see in November.
posted by Noah at 8:51 AM

 
Last word on the electoral hobby horse for the night:

There are five Senate races that I'm watching closely: Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, South Carolina and South Dakota. The GOP looks like it's coasting to victory in North Carolina and Tennessee, and bully for them; the candidates in those races are robots whom I could care less about. Iowa looks to be lost, and too bad, 'cause Ganske seemed like a decent fellow and Harkin is a blowhard and an ideologue. Minnesota has not been looking good lately, and it would really be too bad to lose it because Norm Coleman is practically a template for the kind of pragmatic candidate the GOP needs to run in the northeast and Wellstone practically the template for the kind of hopeless Democratic ideologue that needs to and can be beat. Missouri I'm interested in mostly because the Carnahan appointment was ridiculous, and it looks like Talent is more likely than not to pull it out. Good for him. He seems a little oily for my taste, but whatever. South Dakota everyone is following for all the obvious reasons; I'm following it for the same. South Carolina I'm following both the Senate and the gubernatorial races, in both cases because the candidates running seem like the real deal: honest, committed individuals who could make a real difference to how the country is run. (Also because anyone willing to run against the gambling interests in that state deserves victory.) And I'm following five other gubernatorial races: Arizona, California, Florida, Maryland and Massachusetts. Arizona looks to be lost, which is too bad; Salmon was one of the good guys. California looks to be lost, too, and that's a real tragedy because Riordan would have walked away with this race and the GOP wouldn't have him. The GOP in California is - and I mean this in the most insulting way possible - behaving like northeastern Democrats, and they deserve to lose because of it. (I'll grant you that Riordan ran against the GOP in that state. So what? In the last New Jersey Governor's race, Schundler ran against the GOP as well, only from the right. I thought he was doing New Jersey a service. I thought Riordan was doing the California GOP one, pointing out what was rotten and an election-loser and running against it.) Florida, frankly, I can't make myself care about. I know I should, but I've long though that Jeb was the stupid Bush and he has governed exceedingly poorly. I want the President to get what he wants in this race, but I can't make myself care for its own sake. Maryland and Massachusetts, meanwhile, seem like additional test-cases for my northeast GOP theory, so I am very eager to see GOP victories here - particularly in Maryland, where the Democratic nominee seems so profoundly odious, as Kennedys always do.

That's my list. We'll see if I get my wish.
posted by Noah at 7:03 PM

 
And now, a couple of words about the New York gubernatorial race and what it says about the health of the Democrats and the GOP in the Northeast. That's right: I'm going to get on my hobby-horse again.

The national GOP is convinced that the liberal northeast must be written off. This is truly, deeply stupid, for three reasons. First, writing off any huge region of the country is stupid. Why give the other guy comfort? Second, in writing off the northeast, the GOP writes off a whole host of groups and their issues who could be promising GOP targets. Such as: urbanites, immigrants, non-whites (I recognize there's some overlap here). And these groups are increasingly important outside of the northeast. By ceding the region, the GOP makes it tougher to make the case to the same groups of people in the Midwest or the Pacific coast states. And when you write off those regions, well, you're back to that red-and-blue map of the 2000 election. Which is not where you want to be. Third, writing off the northeast threatens to make the GOP a regional party (centered in the South and Mountain States) which, in turn, causes the GOP to betray its principles. How? Because a regional party will always be more beholden to narrow sectional economic interests than will a broad-based national party. The GOP has gotten increasingly shaky on free trade because it keeps losing some of the most pro-trade constituencies: the economic regions of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The only solid pro-trade GOP region is the farm belt, and the farm belt is in favor of open markets, not free ones; it's very happy to suck at the public teat through subsidies so long as it can sell wheat around the world. Hence the catastrophic farm bill. The GOP should not be ceding the high ground on economic matters. But they are getting nibbled to death because they have not been able to expand their base beyond the core - and while that core is expanding, it just isn't enough.

But finally, the biggest reason why writing off the northeast is stupid is that the Democrats of the northeast are a disaster. And you don't have to look any further than New York to see it. In 1988, when Mario Cuomo ran for re-election, he walked to victory over a divided opposition that split its vote between the GOP and the Conservative candidate, neither of which was a serious contender. Now, George Pataki is coasting to victory over an opposition divided between Carl McCall and Tom Golisano. No one can figure out if Golisano is running to Pataki's right or McCall's left (because Golisano keeps changing his pitch; his only goal is to come in second, and it doesn't matter how). But what's clear is that the vulnerable candidate is not Pataki but McCall. And this is in a state with an overwhelming Democratic advantage.

Why is McCall vulnerable? Not because he made phone calls to help relatives; if his base were excited about him, that wouldn't matter for an instant. But his base isn't excited. He's not beholden to the far-left ideologues or the racial thugs who control part of the Democratic base. And Pataki has given him little room to pander to the unions (again, some overlap here) who control another part of the base (more on that below). The party machinery could still deliver the nomination to him against the stunningly awful Cuomo kid, but they can't deliver the state.

The Cuomo-McCall contest was, in many ways, similar to the Green-Ferrer primary contest for mayor: an abrasive and stupid white liberal against a time-serving and innocuous non-white liberal. In the mayoral race, Ferrer played the race card hard, and almost took the nomination from Green; because of the nastiness of the primary, Green was unable to win in the general election. In the governor's race, McCall let the race card speak for itself, and didn't make an issue of it publicly, and the machine delivered for him (and, to be fair, for other reasons, like the fact that McCall had loyally served his time and that Cuomo was an obviously awful candidate). But McCall has been getting it coming and going, because he's not a "race man." If he had lost, black voters would probably have punished the victor who knocked out the black candidate. But now that he won, he's getting punished for not being black enough. In any event, the similarity between the two contests is that in each case the Democrats have destroyed their own nominee through ideological and racial litmus testing, leaving the field open for a Republican win in an overwhelmingly Democratic city and state.

There is a reason why Republicans are going to retain the statehouse in New York, may retain it in Massachusetts, and may capture it in Maryland. These are overwhelmingly Democratic states, and the Democratic Party in these states has gotten ossified and inbred and deserves to lose. The GOP has made hay out of these victories in individual contests, but hasn't translated it into an institutional presence in the northeast. And I believe that's because no national GOP leader has been ready to build on the Giuliani achievement and build a northeastern Giuliani wing of the GOP. It would be a wing devoted to urban issues, and focused on a simple message: we are the only party competant to govern. The Democrats will spend all the money on absurd ideological projects. We will focus on economic development, improving the schools, cutting bureacracy, cutting taxes, and improving the quality of life. I don't think the GOP in the northeast should be a "Rockerfeller Republican" party; I don't think the opening is for RINOs. In fact, I think the RINO phenomenon is the result of the GOP's lack of attention to the region; the assumption is that the only way to win is to be a "me-too" and so no thought is really put into developing a coherent alternative message. It's a lot easier for Pataki to win re-election by coopting the unions than stretch himself and try to tackle, say, the education monopoly, or rent control. But these issues matter, and there's a downstate opening for a party that spoke to these issues. If you want a blueprint for what the northeastern GOP could be, read CityJournal, the publication of the Manhattan Institute. You'll find an occasional piece there about abortion, or gun rights, or other issues that work well for the GOP nationally. But you'll find a constant stream of articles about effective policing, and freeing up the housing market, and rebuilding downtown, and bringing competition to education, and liberating urban entrepreneurs from stifling regulation. This stuff matters, and you'd be surprised how many liberal urbanites who would never dream of voting for someone who they considered a "gun nut" or a member of the "religious right" would consider voting for a party that actually promised to govern and improve life, in stead of fighting about race or about obscure ideological issues. Maybe the GOP should do what Minnesota's populists did many decades ago, and call themselves something else (the Farmer-Labor party), only loosely and belatedly affiliated with the national Democratic Party. But one way or another, we've got to get moving on building an actual party in the northeast, and not just a shell to be filled by this or that candidate taking advantage of Democratic folly and weakness for a single election cycle.

posted by Noah at 6:47 PM

 
My Dad would love this: What European Tribes Think About One Another.
posted by Noah at 2:29 PM

 
I'm glad to see the Chief Rabbis of Israel are keeping their eyes on the main issue, per my post yesterday about the opposition to the IDF's dismantling of illegal outposts. Unfortunately, in the settler community, the rabbis don't count for much.
posted by Noah at 12:28 PM

 
Meanhwile, the death toll in the bus bombing is twelve, fourteen if you count the murderers. Jihad Islami has claimed responsibility. But actually, if you think about it, isn't it more logical to believe that the real perpetrators aren't from the group who admitted it, but from those who really stand to benefit: the bus companies. After all, someone is going to have to pay for a new bus to replace the one they just craftily blew up. I say, investigate Grumman. And what about the rent-a-cop firms? They've certainly never had it so good. And they've got just the right training and know-how to pull this kind of thing off. And the Red Cross! All that demand for blood everytime there's a "terrorist" attack! I can the PhD thesis now: Hemoglobalism: the War on Terror and the Price of Blood. Someone alert the Daily Californian.
posted by Noah at 4:59 PM

 
I've got a theory. The Daily Californian - or, more likely, the University of California - is the actual organization behind the World Trade Center and Bali massacres. Without a war, after all, there can be no anti-war movement. And without an anti-war movement, Berkeley just wouldn't be Berkeley. It's all very neat. And much more logical than believing that the attacks were the work of an Islamist terrorist group that has declared war on America, and the West generally, and even more generally on all Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and any Muslims they don't like, and that has admitted to numerous acts of terror including the World Trade Center massacre. And hey, I've met people from Berkeley; they are perfectly capable of this sort of thing. I've never met a member of al Qaeda. (Or a member of the Bush Administration, for that matter. Maybe it doesn't really exist, either. Maybe it was made up by Ralph Neas as a fundraising ploy. I wouldn't put it past him.)
posted by Noah at 4:51 PM

 
A good piece from the Jerusalem Post on the hopeless ambition of Chaim Ramon to "lead losing Labor." Here and here are my own thoughts on the future of Labor (and of Likud), and here is the platform of my dream party.
posted by Noah at 3:48 PM

 
I don't know how much people out there are following developments in Israel. The big news over the past few days (now somewhat eclipsed by the latest bombing, in Pardes Hannah - eight dead so far, and what else is new) was the fight over the illegal outpost known as the Gilad farm. Basically, the settlers claim that they had come to a compromise with the government, and that Fuad, the defense minister, broke the deal and brought in the army to dismantle the place. What followed was something of a mini-riot as well as a crisis in the cabinet between the NRP and Labor.

The crisis has three components. First, there is the issue of the supposed broken promise. This is hard to evaluate; no one independent of the matters at issue can affirm that there was any such deal. Second, there is the particular issue of Sabbath desecration. The Israeli Defense Forces includes a substantial contingent of observant Jews; I've read estimates that they form 40% of the officer corps, for example. In general, these soldiers are allowed to be Sabbath-observant - with the attendant restrictions on work - unless they have to go on a mission that requires Sabbath-breaking (as pretty much any mission would). The presumption is that all missions are for the saving of life, and this takes precedence over the Sabbath. (A religious Jew would not, for example, be required to do a training exercise on the Sabbath, but would be required to join a combat operation). So how does this mission fit the bill? Is it an operation "necessary" for the saving of life or is it discretionary? This should not be something that individual soldiers question for even an instant; they should be able to rely on rabbinic rulings that they must trust their commanders and obey orders. And, indeed, that's what the soldiers did - but the rabbis are now angry that they were never consulted on the operation, and saying that they would have rejected it if they had been. The problem with that is that the army doesn't trust the rabbis to make a neutral halachic judgement on the matter, because the rabbis in question (those affiliated with the settlement enterprise) are in favor of these illegal outposts and against their demolition, and therefore will rule that the removal is not necessary for the saving of life not because that is the only reasonable halachic stance (in general, the rabbis show great deference to the IDF's determination of what constitutes a necessary operation, as well they should) but because that is the conclusion that best accords with their political views.

And this brings us to the third and most important reason: politics. The left - even that portion of the left that agrees with the necessity of the current war - views the settlers as an obstacle to peace. The right, meanwhile, is divided between those who view the settlers as an important bargaining chip and those who view the settlement enterprise as an essential good in itself. (An analogy that readers might recognize: the SDI debate of the mid-1980s. There were those who believed that the pursuit of strategic missile defense was in and of itself a threat to peace, and should be abandoned. Most of the Democratic Party stood on that ground, and much of it still does. There were those who thought that the pursuit was a positive because it put pressure on the Russians, and would force them to make concessions in other areas like intermediate-range nuclear weapons; much of the GOP stood on this ground. And there were those who thought that the pursuit was a positive because it would lead to deployment and thus would protect our country from nuclear missile attack; that's what Ronald Reagan believed, along with his strongest supporters, and it's where much of the GOP stands today. Similarly, the Labor party in Israel and everything to its left is against the settlements per se, but some Labor leaders (including Fuad) believes that it is important not to concede on the settlements in the absence of a more general agreement. Meanwhile, part of the Likud and everything to its right believes in the settlement enterprise for its own sake, but a good portion of the Likud leadership (possibly including Sharon; it's hard to know) believes that the settlements are useful mostly because without them the Palestinians would never agree to anything.

So the right charges that Fuad called in the army to break up the Gilad farm because that was the only way to fend off attacks from Chaim Ramon, who is challenging him for the party leadership. Taking on the settlers would show his independence from and influence on the government, which is important for him to demonstrate since he is the only Labor leader running who is in favor of the national unity government. Meanwhile, the left points out - correctly - that the outpost was unauthorized and that these outposts put the IDF in danger, since the army has to defend them once they are in place. The settlers, thereby, steer government policy by themselves, which, it is alleged, has been leading to disaster. Moreover, it is charged, now the settlers are escalating the matter by rioting against the IDF and charging that religious soldiers can no longer trust the army command to deal with them honestly.

I think both sides have a point, but I think the left has the better of this particular argument. The settlers are indeed setting national policy by establishing these outposts, and they need to know that they are subject to the state's needs, not the drivers of it. And the rabbis need to restrain themselves on this business of Sabbath desecration. It is for the army to decide what is a critical operation for the saving of lives, and not for the rabbis; if this operation fell into a grey zone - and it clearly did; there was no imminent threat to anyone's life at the Gilad farm - then the rabbis have to give the benefit of the doubt to the army. If the army didn't inform the rabbis in advance, that's a breach of ettiquette, not the basis for a major crisis. Whether Fuad acted from base motives, well, the right may be right about that, but the place to settle that particular score is at the polls. There is no excuse for damaging national institutions when there is a democratic basis for settling the dispute.

The left is rightly afraid of the latent violence on the Israeli settler right. And the right-wing settlers are rightly afraid that the Israeli political leadership, and a good section of the public, does not support them, even though they live on the front lines of the current war. But who on the right thinks that the solution to this problem is to undermine national institutions like the IDF? There is a part of the right in Israel that considers itself more legitimate than the state. That's not an acceptable stance; it's a stance that, carried to its conclusion, ends in civil war. The last time such logic was followed to its conclusion, the Second Temple was destroyed. That ought to be enough of a caution to get Effie Eitam to calm down.

The only winner in this dispute, meanwhile, is Sharon, who is above the squabbling of his ministers and can make a big show of bringing them both to heel.
posted by Noah at 2:59 PM

 
The Atlantic is funny! I really need to subscribe.
posted by Noah at 2:08 PM

 
James Fallows in the Atlantic has a pretty exhaustive run down the implications of a war with Iraq. His assumptions: that we will go to war; that we will have virtually no allied support; and that we will win easily. He then asks: what next?

I think it behooves all of us who are pro-war to reckon with the issues he raises. I think he's right that a lot of those in the pro-war camp are blase about the aftermath, assuming that once the case for war is made, the argument is done. It isn't. As I've expressed before, I'm highly skeptical that Iraq will easily become a functioning democracy - heck, I'm skeptical that it will become a functioning state of any kind. I think it will be a ward of the international community for years if not decades. And the occupation will be a long-term drain on the U.S. Treasury.

But I still favor war. I favor war because the costs of not going to war are higher, far higher, than the costs of war and post-war occupation. I favor war because I believe that while the costs of war and post-war occupation will be high, the risks are over-estimated by "realist" opponents of war. I do not believe that the region will explode as a result of war, or that pro-American regimes will fall across the region. I do not believe that terrorism will be greater after a war with Iraq than before; indeed, I believe that backing down now will give great encouragement to the terrorists that will be far worse than any reaction to a war with Iraq. I do think that a strong American show of force followed by a clear commitment to the reconstruction of Iraq will give great encouragement to the pro-American forces in the region, particularly in Iran but also within the ruling cliques of countries like Egypt, where the case for staying friends with America, even if their people are restive, will have been made crystal clear. I also believe that the death or trial of Saddam Hussein will be understood by our enemies as a great defeat for them, and they will be weakened as a consequence. But I do worry about whether the pro-war party has thought through the post-war environment sufficiently. The United States can do this all alone, if we want to. The question is whether we have steeled ourselves for the cost the commitment entailed.

I worry about this for a particular and somewhat paradoxical reason: the war is going to be too easy. Twice before in American history, the United States conquered an enemy, imposed its will and reconstructed the enemy's society. The two instances were: the Civil War and World War II. In each case, the United States was fully mobilized for war, was engaged in combat for years, suffered significant losses before the war was over and achieved an unambiguous victory over the enemy's entire society. None of this will be true in Iraq: we will fight without anything like total social mobilization; we will win quickly and hopefully without many losses (the latter is hard to be sure about; what if Saddam has a bomb, and uses it? Or what if his nerve gas is a more effective battlefield weapon than Gregg Easterbrook thinks it is? But even so, the war will be over quickly); and we will win a victory over a regime without popular support - assuming we win it at all, for it is possible that Saddam will escape as Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden did. For all these reasons, America will not be reconciled to the heavy responsibilities and cost of reconstruction, and Iraq will not be reconciled to the justice of a long-term American presence. We will not be used to shouldering a heavy burden, and Iraq will not feel conquered, but liberated - liberated for each group to pursue its own sectarian vendettas or to struggle for the spoils of a fallen state. For these reasons, Iraq will look very little like Japan or Alabama. And yet our task will be rather similar.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the pre-Civil War period in American history. It seems to me that many of the pro-war faction on Iraq are as right on the merits and as naive on the consequences as the pro-war faction in the antebellum North. War with the Slave Power was inevitable; burning Kansas proved it beyond any question. The moral case for war was as strong as the strategic case, and vice versa. But many Northern supporters of war had little idea of what the war would mean in terms of social transformation and psychic cost; they romanticized the sacrifice of blood and the glory of combatting evil, not reckoning with the horrible evils of war itself. They were right on the merits, but their naivete discredited them in the post-bellum period, and contributed to the tragic failure of Reconstruction. We should not make the same mistake in Iraq.
posted by Noah at 12:44 PM

 
Ohio has opened the door to the teaching of "intelligent design" theory in science classes. This is a very bad decision on Ohio's part, and conservative organs like The National Review should not be applauding.

The scientists quoted in the article - saying things like "science is not a democracy" and "science is not a viewpoint" - are 100% right. Science is a discipline. It has rules. We "believe" in science because of the objective results of the discipline - specifically, it has a successful track record of predicting the future. There is absolutely no justification for diluting or confusing the nature of the discipline, as nothing good can come of it, for science or religion.

There are legitimate criticisms to be made of Darwinism. Many scientists and philosophers of science have articulated them, among them the late Stephen Jay Gould, scourge of the creationists. And some evolutionists cross the line from science to scientism. Sociobiology is notorious for this defect (so notorious that I hesitate to call it a branch of science) but it also shows up in the writing of mainstream evolutionists like Richard Dawkins. Moreover, some evolutionists - I'm again thinking of Dawkins - evidence their positions with thought experiments that actually are better proof of their contrary. Thus, for example, when Dawkins tries to build computer models that simulate the evolution of the eye, he builds in a factor that selects for designs that are closer to a functioning eye. But this isn't evolution at all; it's design, because the selection process operates with an end goal in mind. That doesn't mean his thought experiment "proves" intelligent design; it doesn't prove anything at all. But it provides no proof for evolution and confuses the discussion about what evolution is.

So it's not a bad idea to teach that evolution is a theory, not a law, and to teach some of the problems the theory has manifested. But intelligent design is not an alternative scientific theory; it is not a scientific theory at all. The designer in intelligent design theory, by its very nature, cannot pass Occam's Razor, because the intelligent designer is necessarily a more complex entity than the entire edifice of physical law. Intelligent design begins with a teleology, the assertion that the universe has a purpose. Absent that assertion, the theory falls to pieces. That assertion is not scientific; it cannot be evidenced or refuted by its very nature. Admitting such discussion into the science classroom destroys the integrity of scientific education.

One could argue, I suppose, that a version of intelligent design theory - a theory, say, that posited a natural direction for evolution, pulling life upward towards greater complexity and awareness of the universe, a kind of vitalist theory - could be scientific. But two points are relevant in this regard. First, a vitalist theory, if it presumes to be scientific, should enter the lists in the tournament of science, not politics. We should be presented with evidence and arguments for how vitalism should and must work. Such theories have been presented before, and have attracted some worthy adherents - I count Erwin Schroedinger as one, and I suspect that Roger Penrose is another. But they have not been generally accepted, and they have not proven to have greater explanatory power than Darwinian evolution. But second, and equally important, a vitalist theory would have to acknowledge that life evolved from one form to another over time. It would have to acknowledge macro-evolution, in other words; its dissent would be in denying that this process was random rather than directed. Intelligent design as usually presented is not a vitalist theory, but a "theory" of miracles: life was created in all of its diversity by a force operating from outside the universe. If you don't believe in macro-evolution, and you accept the fossil record, then you believe that new forms of life come from . . . where? It should be obvious that what we're talking about is religion, and radically supernatural religion at that, and not science, and that it has no place in the science classroom.

The defenders of policies like Ohio's like to say that all they are calling for is "balance." But science should not be balanced. Theories that are not scientific should get exactly zero representation in a science classroom. An argument can be made that science should be more humble - that teachers should be articulate about the limits of science; about how scientists sometimes change theories in response to new evidence; about how science does not presume to level value judgements but only to explain the world in a way that enables us to predict the future with reasonable confidence in certain narrow ways. But it should never be balanced with non-science or anti-science.

posted by Noah at 10:55 AM

 
Okay, I'm actually going to do the parshah discussion on time this week. The downside is that I don't expect it to be terribly coherent.

The parshah begins with G-d's command to Abraham (actually, Abram, at this point in the narrative) to leave his native land and head to Canaan; it ends with the circumcision of Abraham's entire household on the command of G-d. Along the way, we get the story of Abram presenting his wife (then called Sarai) to Pharaoh as his sister; the arrival of Abram and Lot in Canaan, and their agreement to divide the grazing lands between them; the war among the cities of the plain; G-d's elaboration of His promises to Abram; the change of Abram's name to Abraham, and Sarai's to Sarah; the birth of Ishmael, and the flight and return of Hagar.

I've going to zero in on a few points and make some probably not very interesting observations.

(1) A couple of times in the parshah (versus 12:8 and 13:4), when Abram builds an altar and sacrifices to G-d, calls in the name of G-d - the ineffable Name, the tetragrammaton. This is not the only name that G-d is known by in the Torah, and not the only name in this parshah. I want to call attention to only one use of another name for G-d, by Melkizedek, who is called the priest of "the most-high G-d." I'm not sure that this is the only use of that particular title in the Torah, but I think it is. Melkizedek blesses Abram in the name of "the most-high G-d, possessor of heaven and earth." After Abram tithes, we then return to the post-war negotiations with the king of Sodom (Melkizedek has vanished as mysteriously as he appeared) and Abram, in refusing any spoils, tells the king of Sodom: "I have lifted my hand [i.e. sworn an oath] to HASHEM [the tetragrammaton, the ineffable name], the most-high G-d, possessor of heaven and earth."

What Abram has done is appropriate the divine epithet favored by the priest-king Melkizedek to his understanding of G-d. This, to me, is enormously significant. In Near Eastern religion, epithets of a god and idols of the god and objects for worshipping those idols and so forth frequently took on the attributes of gods themselves. Thus we find incriptions not only to Canaanite gods such as 'Il and Ba'al but to the 'Il of such and such place or the Temple of Ba'al or the Asherah of 'Il of the Temple of such and such place - and these all were considered as, in some sense, separate beings. Many of the Hebrew names fod G-d are shared in common with the names of Canaanite deities; most notably, the word "G-d" in Hebrew is "El" which is the same word as the Cannanite god, "'Il" - whose name, incidentally, means "god." By appropriating Melkizedek's epithet for G-d and annexing it to the ineffable Name, Abram is doing two things. First, he is identifying Melkizedek as a righteous gentile, one who understands the true nature of G-d, and not an idol-worshipper or one who denies G-d's sovereignty. Second, he is saying: this most-high G-d is the ineffable in whose Name I call. He is making a profoundly monotheistic statement.

The significance for us is illustrated when we ask: how have different biblical religions identified Melkizedek? Jewish tradition understands him to be the king of Jerusalem. He is called the king of Salem, which is understood to be the same city; moreover, tzedek, or righteousness, is an epithet of Jerusalem. He is also understood to be Seth, the son of Noah, the ancestor of all the Semitic peoples. He is a marker, then, for the historical unity of the region and a remnant of its true connection with the one true G-d, as well as a link to the future manifestation of the G-d in the Holy Temple in the city that he ruled. In orthodox Christian understanding, Melkizedek is an antetype for Jesus, and prefigures Jesus' own universalization of the divine blessing that is promised to the world through Abraham. And finally, in LDS theology, Melkizedek is the bearer of a more powerful and universal priesthood than that of Aaron, a priesthood lost until its restoration in the generation of Joseph Smith. For all three traditions, Melkizedek is a figure who points toward the universal manifestation of G-d's blessing. When Abraham, the progenitor of the Jewish people and the carrier of G-d's particular blessing, arrogates Melkizedek's epithets to the ineffable Name by which he knows G-d, he is saying: your universal blessing is in no conflict with my particular blessing, for both spring from the One whom we both acknowledge as the only sovereign of heaven and earth.

(2) In verses 15:9 through 15:21, G-d makes a very peculiar covenant with Abram. Abram has just been promised a multitude of descendants, and he is frankly skeptical. It's been a while since G-d started making these promises, and there've been no kids. It appears, in fact, that Eliezer, Abram's servant, will inherent all his wealth and, presumably, the blessing. To prove the veracity of the promise, G-d tells Abram to take a heifer, a goat and a ram, and cut them in half. The sun sets, and Abram has a sense of deep dread and foreboding. G-d then appears, and reiterates the promise, but with an unexpected twist: Abram will indeed be father to a great nation, but that nation will be enslaved for 400 years before coming into its inheritance. (I sense a bit of poetic justice here: Abram is upset that a slave will be his heir, so G-d reveals to him: your own descendants will be your heir, but they, too, will be slaves!) And then, as the sun sets, a flaming brazier appears between the halves of the animals, and the covenant is reiterated, promising to Abram and his descendants all of what would be called the Land of Israel.

So what is the deal with the flaming brazier and the bi-sected animals? No, this is not an antetype of Damien Hirst. Rather, we're dealing with another ancient Near Eastern symbol. When two kings made a covenant, they might bisect and animal and stand between them, saying, effectively: if I break this covenant, may what happened to these animals happen to me. When G-d commands Abram to bisect the animals, He is enacting the same kind of pantomime, playing the part of the king. Effectively, G-d is saying: if I do not perform on my half of the covenant, may I be split in two like these animals. I leave the question of what it might mean for G-d to be split in two to more inventive theologians; suffice it to say that it is a powerful image, fully capable of inspiring deep dread and foreboding in a Patriarch.

(As a side note: the Covenant between the Pieces makes a prominent appearance early in the Passover Haggadah, because this is the first point where the slavery and exodus from Egypt is prophesied.)

(3) Last week I talked about Noah and the debate over how righteous he was - was he especially righteous to have held on to righteousness in a wicked age, or was he only righteous in comparison with that wicked generation, and not at all righteous when compared with Abraham or Moses. The phrase used to describe Noah is: Noach ish tzadik tammim hayah bedorotav; et ha-Elohim hithaleich Noach. ("Noah was a simple righteous man in his generation; Noah walked with G-d.") In my translation last week, I left off the word "tammim" - simple. This word could also mean honest, innocent, or perfect; when you look at the list of associations, the general idea is of something unspoiled. The use of this word tips the scales for me to the positive end with respect to the character of Noah. So notice what G-d says to Abram just before giving him his new name (in 17:1): Ani El Shaddai; hithaleich lephanai ve-heyei tammim - "I am G-d Almighty [or the G-d of the Mountain]; walk before me and be simple/honest/innocent/unspoiled." Noah is described as walking with G-d and being unspoiled. Abram is charged to walk before G-d, and to be unspoiled - on the one hand, to exceed Noah and walk before G-d, to do G-d's work in the world unprompted; on the other, to aspire to Noah's condition, to be simple and true as he was.
posted by Noah at 6:37 PM

 
A moving editorial from The: Jerusalem Post on Rabin's yahrzeit. See here and here for my own thoughts on the great and tragic man.
posted by Noah at 2:53 PM

 
Jonah Goldberg goes through the Times' archives, and finds their editorial in praise of appeasement of North Korea. Anyone want to give odds on the NYT admitting error? Anyone want to give odds on them recognizing that these revelations have some bearing on war with Iraq?

(Anyone want to bet that the reason the North Koreans admitted this finally is that they recognize, per our threats to Iraq, that we're now serious about taking out potential nuclear rogue states, and that if they stonewalled they might well be next on the U.S.'s target list? Anyone think the Times will figure that out some time in this century?)
posted by Noah at 1:50 PM

 
So I've been kind of thinking about this for a while, and I thought I'd take a stab at it today:

Why am I a Republican?

(For those of you who are shocked that I am a Republican: you have not been paying attention. For those of you who have no interest in me talking about myself, please skip this post entirely.)

I was one of those freakish kids who was way too interested in politics from a young age. As a kid, I read an awful lot of Robert Heinlein and basically picked up his outlook on life, which could be described as: technologically optimistic, fervently anti-Communist, generally libertarian and strongly in favor of large-breasted women. And I went to a Zionist day school, and picked up some more of my outlook from there. Since I understood nothing about economics (indeed, I had only the vaguest notions of what constituted "work" for adults), that meant I picked up two doses of patriotism - Jewish and American - which stuck, and a bunch of social and economic ideas that contradicted each other and cancelled out. I think by the time I was thirteen I was convinced that the state was evil and property was evil, fighting for one's country was good but having to go to work was selling out. I was a kind of patriotic anarchist. Which doesn't make much sense. In other words, I was a kid. I mention this pre-history of me only because I think the impressions one forms at what they call an impressionable age do linger. One is stirred emotionally by things that one no longer believes consciously, and this shapes what one does believe. As a trivial example, while the first President I recall consciously is Jimmy Carter, the man who is forever President in my mind is Ronald Reagan. I knew Reagan was controversial, and I wasn't politically mature enough to have a meaningful opinion on the sources of controversy. What I knew was that Reagan was President. And he always will be, on some level. And that, in itself, shapes what I expect of a President.

Anyhow, then I got to high school, and with it, high school debate. For those of you who didn't do competitive debate in high school, you don't know what you were missing. It was a serious intellectual and hormonal hothouse. At least in my day, high school debaters got props from their peers for taking on big, he-man arguments with lots to say on all sides, especially military or foreign-policy arguments. Intermediate-range nuclear missile deployment, the Strategic Defense Initiative, nuclear proliferation, Chinese encirclement: these were what were called "meatballs," and real men wanted to debate them all the time. (It goes without saying that whatever the topic actually was, you got props for artfully changing the subject to one of these meatball topics.) So I learned a lot of information that would be useful to me if I ever planned to launch a career as the next Tom Clancy. But my political convictions progressed from uninformed and radical to painfully boring. How boring? In my senior year, the first Presidential election in which I could vote, I supported Al Gore for President.

Nonetheless, in the midst of my boringdom, I recall that high school debate taught me my first lesson on the road to becoming a member of the GOP. I remember vividly the experience. High school debaters, as youngsters, tend to favor action, of whatever sort, and to be attracted to doomsday scenarios. When supporting a proposition, the emphasis was always on the horrible things that would happen if x or y was not done; when opposing, the emphasis was always on the horrible things that would happen if x or y was done. Very little emphasis was placed on how likely it was that x or y would actually be effective in preventing the horrible things. Somehow, all of a sudden, I realized that in fact there was often very little evidence for this important point, that most debaters were unprepared to argue that their proposed initiatives would actually work. It happened in a debate against a team from Gulfport Mississippi - wonderful boys, by the way, both spirited and polite - who had put together a new affirmative case: they argued in favor of signing a treaty to ban chemical and biological weapons. And I realized that we had done no research on this topic (no one was arguing it; the official topic was Latin America) and that we were therefore in a bit of a pickle. So we were thrown back on our wits, and had to figure out why this treaty was a bad idea without having any doomsday scenario evidence (such as that we would need chemical weapons to win a war against China, or some such). At which point it dawned on me that the treaty was utterly unenforceable and would never work. And it was largely on the strength of that reasoning, together with some research we had on nuclear nonproliferation treaties and their problems, that we were able to win that debate.

I know this sounds fairly trivial, but it didn't feel that way at the time. I'd been basically a full-time debater for four years (classes were a secondary, if not tertiary committment), but it felt like I'd only just figured out how to do it. It felt like a revelation, like a whole new perspective on reality had been revealed. We made it to the finals of that tournament, our best performance at the most competitive tournament we'd attended, and did so largely on the strength of repeated attacks on the likely effectiveness of opponents' plans at solving the problems they were attended to address.

The next comparable revelation happened in the fall term of 1989, my sophomore year in college. I was taking a political science seminar called Comparative Socialist Politics, by which was meant comparative politics of the Communist bloc, with a special emphasis on the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe. This was my first exposure to the history and politics of these countries, and we came at them from a peculiar angle, neither clearly anti-Communist nor clearly pro-Communist. (As you might guess, the professor was an expert on Yugoslavia, the heretic of the Communist world.) Some books we read were particularly ridiculous; Theda Skocpol's book, States and Social Revolutions was a classic example, a mendacious hymn to Maoism and permanent revolution disguised as a sober, scholarly analysis of revolutionary movements and states. Other books we read were real eye-openers, such as Miklos Haraszti's book, A Worker in a Worker's State (in Hungarian: piece rates), which described what life in a Communist factory was really like, and how the workers coped with living under management that was not so much brutal as absurd. Both the similarities and the differences from Western factory life were telling. And this was not a book I would otherwise have encountered. In any event, we're poking along in our way, learning about Hungary's experiments with a more market-based agricultural policy and other obscurities (I wrote my essay on Yugoslavian and East German environmentalist movements), and then we get to the end of the term and the Berlin Wall comes down.

Back when I was a high school debater, one of the more loony debate arguments was something called Russian Revolutions. The premise, derived largely from the writings of Richard Pipes, was that Russia was on the verge of collapse from internal rot and that anything we do to let up on the pressure on them will delay or prevent that collapse, so we should keep the pressure on and thereby win the Cold War. This struck virtually everyone on the debate circuit as utter folly. Surely the heirs of Stalin would never let their empire simply crumble under them; surely they would maintain their power by force if necessary. Besides, it was crazy to think that just because Communism produced lousy consumer goods that it was going to collapse; after all, they seemed to have no trouble producing armaments. Even the kids who made the argument didn't believe in it. And now, only a couple of years later, the Soviet Empire was crumbling before our eyes. Pipes, whom we had ridiculed, had been right.

(That summer I travelled to Eastern Europe, and I did so again two summers later. I was hardly the only American college student to make the trip, and I admit my interest in the region's political development took a backseat to strenuous efforts to meet and get physical with the local girls. So while the visits did produce additional revelations, they are not particularly germane to the topic at hand.)

A second revelation that happened during my college years involved the Gulf War. Again, I agreed necessarily with all my peers and my professors that the war was going to be a disaster; that it was deeply ironic and arguably unjust since we had been arming Saddam only years before; and that Kuwait, a corrupt monarchy, was hardly worth defending with American blood. I took all this very seriously, and began to make plans, at least in my head, for what I would do if there were a draft. I decided, in conversation with a couple of friends, that if the war looked like it would drag on a while, we would join the navy. We reasoned that Iraq did not have a navy, so we'd be safe, and that as long as we actually joined the armed forces we'd be doing nothing dishonorable.

In any event, because I, like everyone I knew, thought that the war was folly, I went to an anti-war rally. And I was genuinely shocked to hear the speakers gleefully predicting civil unrest in America, and whooping the students into repetitive chants about refusing to serve if called. I don't know why I was shocked; now it seems obvious that that is how anti-war protesters would talk, that the focus would be on making noise and trouble while keeping oneself safe from harm, rather than on articulating arguments against the war. But I guess I was idealistic enough at the time to think these were the thinking people, the ones who weren't just following orders but were considering the consequences of our national actions, and responding as they saw was appropriate. So it was a jolt to discover that it wasn't the case.

Another debate revelation: I spent a couple of years going occasionally to meetings of the Political Union, which fancied itself as something like its counterpart at Oxford but whose members demonstrated considerably less eloquence. I once embarrassed myself there by being spectacularly wrong on a matter of fact in front of Elliot Richardson, who interrupted my speech to correct me, at which point I sat down and conceded. In any event, one evening they were having a debate about Roe v. Wade. The proposition was that it should be overturned. I was, of course, on the anti side. I was taking a Constitutional Law class at the time, and so I thought I knew a thing or two. But I decided to give a more personal speech. I had a friend at the time who had just discovered she was pregnant, and she was planning to have an abortion. It did not occur to me that she had any choice in the matter; she was in no position financially to support a child, nor was her mother an appropriate parent for a variety of reasons. Having a baby would have, as they say, ruined her life. And I didn't want her life ruined any more than she did. So I stood up at the P.U. podium and began my speech: "I have a friend who is planning to have an abortion. Which one of you will take the child?"

I thought it was a pretty good rhetorical point. If someone wants to oppose abortion, they should admit that they are saying that women should have to bear the children they conceive even if they can't afford, financially or emotionally, to raise them, and so they should, if they have the courage of their convictions, be ready to relieve them of that burden by other means if they will not let them do so by abortion. What I was unprepared for was the response of one student, a member of Campus Crusade for Christ, who responded, "I will." It turned out his aunt was trying to adopt, and would have eagerly taken a call from my friend, supported her during her pregnancy, and taken the child when it was born.

Needless to say, this put something of a kebosh on my speech. I was unfortunately unable to do anything for the fellow's aunt. I had fudged the facts slightly in my speech, as my friend had already had her abortion; I thought it worked better rhetorically to place the event in the immediate future. But the exchange opened my eyes to another aspect of the world that I had not considered. I had never been comfortable with the idea that abortion was morally neutral; I had thought of it as sometimes the lesser of two evils, and saw it as such in my friend's case. Now I saw that it was not always necessary to choose between evils; sometimes one can choose good. And why wouldn't one, if one could? Why wouldn't everyone? Why wouldn't we want to spend at least as much energy trying to make those choices possible as trying to protect the right to choose between evils? And why had I thought of the Campus Crusade types as, basically, the enemy, when they were the very ones trying to do this?

(A minor revelation from the same debate: none of the pro-Roe side of the debate could muster a single constitutional argument in defense of their position. I thought this was appalling - so appalling that I rose to make a second speech, in violation of P.U. convention, laying out the basic constitutional defense. It was only as I did so that I realized how weak it was as a court decision.)

One final revelation, also personal. My sophomore year in college, I got involved in a rape crisis counselling group. Now, this sort of thing was all the rage in the early 1990s, the heyday of the date-rape hysteria. This was the period, as well, when Ms. Magazine chose to run a story - they gave it the cover - calling on all good feminists to believe those who claimed to have been victimized by Satanic ritual abuse. If culture-studies types weren't afraid to lay into feminists, that whole episode of American cultural history would be a gold mine: a perfect updating of the Salem witch trials. In any event, what was I doing in such a group?

Well, the simple answer is that I was trying to do good, and trying to do penance. Without going into any real personal detail, I didn't feel like I'd treated the young women and girls who were my peers in high school especially well, and I felt very guilty about it. And this seemed like a good way to do penance and assuage that guilt.

It was, that. I have to say, the whole process of being indoctrinated in rape-crisis stuff was devastating to my personality for a while. But I do believe it did me good. It taught me, for one thing, how to listen to people who are in distress, for whatever reason, which is an invaluable skill and not one I possessed beforehand. I met some very impressive women in the group who, political disagreements aside, I still admire enormously. I can't say I helped any women in crisis. Let's face it: a rape crisis center without male volunteers is like a fish without a ballistic missile defense. I was pretty superfluous, and had little to do. But I kept some of the other volunteers company on long lonely nights when no one called the hot line. And no one ever called the hot line. Which was how I figured out that the whole date-rape epidemic thing was pretty much a hoax.

Pretty much, but not entirely. By the end of my time at college, I did become convinced that something was deeply wrong in relations between the sexes. I didn't think that men were animals and women were helpless victims. I didn't think that all sex was rape. And I didn't think that Antioch rules were much use in dealing with the intricacies of the human heart, or even the pressures of human hormones. But I did think something was broken, and badly. And I came to this conclusion one night when I, along with several other folks from the rape-crisis group, went to talk to male students at a nearby prep school about date rape.

Now here was a venue where I could actually do something. These were teenage guys, smart, hormone-filled, cocky and arrogant, and they were not inclined to listen to what the rape-crisis women had to say. All the boys wanted to focus on was how unfair the new date-rape rules seemed to be, how a guy shouldn't be faulted because a girl changed her mind the next day, etc., etc. I didn't want to lay the party line on them, which was that all that complaining proved that they hadn't had their consciousness raised sufficiently. And I didn't want to be a lawyer, and say: I don't make the rules, I'm just telling you what they are and how to live by them and stay out of trouble, So I tried to change the topic on them. I said to them: what kind of man do you want to be? Do you want to be the kind of man who maybe took advantage of a girl? Do you want to be known as the kind of guy that girls should avoid? Do you want to have on your conscience that you pressured a girl into doing something she didn't want to do? Does the conquest mean so much to you that you'd risk hurting someone to win it? Or are you so weak that you can't control your impulses - once you get excited, if a girl doesn't satisfy you, you're not responsible for your actions. Are you proud of yourself for having no self-control? What kind of a man do you want to be?

The whole talk kind of threw everyone off-balance. To be honest, I think I confused the other rape-crisis counsellors a bit, and the conversation turned back to more conventional paths. But I remained convinced that this was the kind of talk that was missing from these boys' lives. No one was telling them how to be a man, or that being a man meant something other than winning, that it had something to do with chivalry and self-control and honor. These were not kids from a slum; these weren't gang-bangers. They were the wealthiest, most priviledged boys in the country. And they were not sexually inexperienced, I suspect. And they had only the vaguest idea of what mature sexual relations were like.

It's hard for me to articulate how this particular, personal revelation fed into political matters. I don't think it did for years, probably not until the impeachment crisis, when I came face to face with a President who was, really, not very different from the boys at that prep school.

Anyhow, by the time of my senior year my outlook had changed a great deal but my politics hadn't changed at all. I was still terminally boring. How boring? I supported Paul Tsongas in the Democratic primaries. Why Tsongas? Because he was a tightwad, and I was the kind of guy who worried about the deficit. And because I didn't trust Clinton. I didn't care about Whitewater, and I didn't care about Gennifer Flowers. What I cared about was that letter explaining how he wasn't going to serve his country like he promised. The one that talked about preserving his "viability" within the system. That letter disgusted me. I could deal with Clinton even if he avoided the draft legally; I understood the desire not to put one's life in danger, and not to have to kill people one had no desire to kill, all for a cause that seemed pointless or even wrong. And I could deal with him even if he openly refused to serve; I don't know if I could have voted for him for President, but I could have respected him as a person. But I could not deal with a personality who thought his political career was more important than his integrity, someone who thought the system should exempt him because he was too valuable to lose. People with such high opinions of themselves are profoundly dangerous.

But I voted for him anyhow. I thought George H.W. Bush was a putz, and his Veep was an idiot. I thought the recession was deep and serious, the S&L scandal proof of Republican corruption and the inevitable failure of deregulation. I thought we needed a vigorous industrial policy like Germany had. And Clinton said all kinds of nice things to a moderate like me: he was for more police, a tougher policy on China and Yugoslavia, better teachers, welfare reform, making abortion rare, a New Covenant and all that. I bought it all.

And then: the hangover. The obvious incompetance of his first year in office, particularly in the arena of foreign affairs. I never made sense of Hillary's health plan, and I consider myself a smart person. The only things that were clear about it were: it was complicated; it was massive; and it was assembled in secrecy. The scandals of the first year didn't affect me much. What affected me was the sense that these guys were, pardon the expression, bush-league. I'd always thought "our" guys were so much smarter than "their" guys. Turned out, brains weren't everything.

And then: the New York City mayoral election. In spite of all his massive flaws, which I was well aware of, I was reluctant to vote against Dinkins. I really thought he was a decent fellow, and I really thought Giuliani was a grandstander and a thug. I was ambivalent right into the voting booth, and I couldn't make myself pull the level for a Republican. I voted for the devil I knew. And when Giuliani won, I was quietly pleased.

It was only later that I became actively ashamed of my vote. The city, my city, the city I loved, began to improve almost overnight. I worked at a hedge fund in Times Square, and the transformation of the immediate vicinity, both the Times Square and Grand Central area, from a slum to prime real estate, was astonishing. The city really was turning around. And it was turning around in large part because we'd elected a mayor determined to get tough on the forces of chaos that had laid the city low. Giuliani had an enormous impact on my outlook, and more than anyone made me a Republican. Indeed, if I had to say what kind of Republican I am, I'd say: a Giuliani Republican. Your typical conservative is a liberal mugged by reality. Well, I'd grown up in a reality of mugging, and assumed that was normal, and so I was still a liberal. I'm a liberal who was floored by the success of conservative ideas in changing reality - particularly, the reality of mugging.

Working at a hedge fund, I was learning a little something about the markets and the economy, and this also influenced my political outlook. Seeing the power of the bond market in 1993 and 1994 to lay low the best-laid plans of Democratic Presidents mainly reinforced my own deficit-hawk convictions. But it also made me realize that the entire old-style Democratic discussion about the economy was completely divorced from reality. I gave Clinton credit from the first for jettisonning his entire economic program in the face of market opposition. But it didn't escape me that it was the core Democratic economic program that he was throwing overboard, and Eisenhower Republicanism that he was embracing. The remaining economic debate, it seemed to me, was between supply-side Republicans focused on taxes and green-eyeshade Republicans focused on deficits. Democrats, it seemed, had little to say.

And then: Oslo. I had long believed that Israel needed to get rid of the majority of the territories captured in 1967 to achieve peace. I thought Israeli rule over the Palestinians was unjust and damaging to Israel, and that a Palestinian state shouldn't be ruled out so long as it was demilitarized. But I was always skeptical of Arafat's intensions. I never forgot who he was. And I watched how, as early as 1993 when the accords were signed, Arafat began to violate them systematically. And I saw how the most extreme groups could use the accords to build their own power base, attacking Israel in an effort to torpedo peace, leaving Israel stuck with the choice of striking back and undermining their "peace partner" Arafat or sitting and being hit, and watching their deterrence wither. By 1994, I was convinced that Oslo was a failure. The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin almost turned me back into a dove, but not really. What it did was awaken me to the danger of Jewish extremism. But the awareness of that danger did nothing to reduce me concern about the danger of Palestinian extremism. I visited Israel in 1996, and it struck me that the Moslem Quarter of Jerusalem, which I had visited without fear even during the intifadeh of the 1980s, was now, in a time of a supposed peace process, too dangerous to visit. Some peace. But while the experience of Oslo was hardening my views on Israeli matters, this had no impact on my domestic political views for some time.

The GOP sweep of 1994 had a long-term psychological effect on my politics, in that it scrambled the categories I was used to. The Gingrich Republicans were brash, opinionated, and eager for change. They wanted a balanced budget, a missile defense, welfare reform and a more efficient, reduced government. These were all things I favored - indeed, apart from missile defense they were all things I thought Clinton favored, but that he'd shown little interest in once elected. I didn't agree with everything on the agenda, but at least these guys looked like they were committed to moving the ball downfield.

And even some of the old guard showed some real courage on issues that matter. I remember that Bob Dole was one of the few American leaders who called for arming the Bosnian Muslims. I was aware of the complexity of the situation in Yugoslavia (that Comparative Socialist Politics course had actually come in handy!) but it was obvious that the Bosnian Muslims were the least wrong and the most wronged of the various warring parties, and that the U.N. regime was consigning them to being slowly murdered by the Serbian army. If the West was unwilling to impose a solution, the least it could do was allow the Bosnians to defend themselves. And it did not escape me that in the absence of Western arms, Iran and Saudi Arabia were becoming the Bosnians' staunchest allies.

By the 1996 elections, it was clear that I could not vote for another Clinton term. Everything he had done that I had supported he was pressured into by the GOP, the welfare reform bill above all. He was utterly incompetant in foreign affairs and his domestic agenda, when I didn't disagree with it wholeheartedly, was in tatters. And the sleaze factor was piling up. I was no longer afraid of apostasy. I was still a registered Democrat, but I voted for Dole.

And then: the Chinese revelations. It is difficult for me to overstate the degree to which I was radicalized by the news that the Clinton White House had taken money from the People's Liberation Army. There is no question in my mind that Clinton knew where the money was coming from; he was interested in plausible deniability, not in staying clean. The subsequent impeachment debate about perjury and sexual harrassment struck me as to some extent a poetically just reward for a man who had supported the independent counsel law and the erosion of privacy in sexual harrassment cases, but let's get real: this was petty stuff; taking money from Red China was treason. I didn't like Clinton before. Now I was a card-carrying Clinton hater.

And, for the first time, a Gore hater. Remember, I'd supported him way back in 1988, as a teenager. But he was right in the thick of the Chinese fundraising, and there was no way he didn't know what was going on, and no way he wasn't corrupted. He had bought into the Clinton-Arkansas crony capitalist system of government. I would never forgive him. I don't really understand why Marty Peretz did.

The rest of the story is less interesting. I switched parties formally in 1998. As you might imagine, given the foregoing, I was an enthusiastic McCainiac in 2000. He was the first candidate I raised money for. He was, to say the least, a disappointment, vain and self-destructive as a campaigner and, I believe, ultimately a guy who wanted to lose. In retrospect this was all predictable. But I still have enormous affection for him, and I still listen to what he has to say. In the meantime, I got to know George W. Bush. I admit, I had a lot of contempt for him at the start of the campaign. I'm still angry about how he campaigned in South Carolina. But I got to know his virtues. It was hard for me to vote for him - I wrote myself (and my family) a 20-page essay explaining why I was going to, which I won't post here - but I ultimately knew I had no choice.

And after September 11th, I heaved a huge sigh of relief that Gore was not in office. I have my quibbles with the way the Bush Administration has handled one thing or another, but if anything my criticisms have tended to come from the right, not the left. And that's on domestic matters as well as the conduct of the war. I'd have to describe myself now as fairly conservative, and the GOP is my natural home. And if it weren't, if I grew disgusted with the Republican Party - as I have been, at times - I could not go back to the Democrats. I look at the farce of the Democratic mayoral primary in 2001. I look at the absurd and really evil way that Tom Daschle plays politics with our nation's security - that's the only way to describe the majority leader's stance on Iraq. I look at how beholden the Democrats are to posing idiots like Barbara Streisand, people who have never had to grapple with the simple realities of life, much less thought about what it means to govern a country. I look at the utter hollowness of the party I was raised in, and I realize: there's nothing there to go back to.
posted by Noah at 6:51 PM

 
I've beat the drum for Ron Unz before, but his most recent column on the fight over English in Colorado is both fierce and eloquent. And depressing, given that the prospects look far dimmer than they had of late.

We've all got to have priorities. On the domestic front, for those who believe in the integrity of the American nation, there is probably no higher priority than ending so-called bi-lingual education.
posted by Noah at 5:59 PM

 
As long as I'm blogging Stanley Kurtz's pieces, I might as well blog people he recommends reading: here is a speech by Martin Kramer making many of the points that Kurtz makes. It's very good. So now, of course, I'll take issue with Kramer, too.

Actually, that's not fair: I agree with Kramer pretty much. I agree that elections without a democratic - or, better, liberal - culture are a virtual guarantee of revolutionary dictatorship or anarchy. I agree that much of the Middle East could be worse, that we do not want instability for its own sake, and that authoritarianism is preferable to failed states.

But it must still be asked: what kind of authoritarianism? I can live, and America can live, with legitimate authoritarians. I can live with the patriotic Turkish military. I can live with the pale ghost of Nasserism that rules Egypt. I have in the past compared that ghost with the ghost of the Mexican revolution, which was similarly nationalist, socialist and anti-Western, but which was tamed over time and slowly, with increasing prosperity and American influence, began to give in to democratic pressure. I can live with the monarchies of Jordan and Morocco and Tunisia, which are as far from absolute as they are from democratic. I could even live with the odious regime in Riyadh if they did not purchase their survival by paying off those who murder us.

But we cannot live with the regimes in Baghdad or Tehran - or, for that matter, Tripoli or Damascus. Not because they are authoritarian but because they are radical, violent enemies of the West. To use Jean Kirkpatrick's old distinction, they are not authoritarian but totalitarian. Their legitimacy is derived from war on America and its allies; they rule not by tradition or consent but by terror. They are natural enemies. And now that they have shown their determination to do us harm on our own soil, and are amassing the weapons to do us far greater harm, they must be destroyed.

I think we all agree on this. So the only question is: what will we do with, to take the first example, Iraq once we have liberated it? And how will we arrange that liberation to bring the maximum benefit and the least collateral damage to our interests? That's where the whole discussion of democratization belongs.

I agree, as I said, with Kramer that political democracy is a long shot. But we need to install a regime that has popular legitimacy, which is not the same thing, if only because without one our clean-up job will be much harder. And similarly, we need to install a regime which begins to inculcate liberal values that will eventually blossom into democracy. Maybe that means giving the country to the Hashemites. Maybe it means installing a military government for a while. Maybe it means disarming it and bringing in the U.N., as was done in Cambodia, for instance. I'm not averse to some kind of authoritarian rule temporarily, if I thought such a regime were plausible for Iraq, which I think it isn't. But if it were, I wouldn't be averse. Kramer talks about Algeria as a caution, but the story of Algeria is that the military won. The Islamists have destroyed their credibility by launching their horribly violent civil war. The military was utterly despised by the general population in the early 1990s because of their corruption, but the civil war has proven them to be, of all things, patriots, because they were determined not to let their country be destroyed by the Islamists. I recognize this is a somewhat disturbing view, but that's the underlying message I get from, for example, Gilles Kepel's book, Jihad: that where the state has been willing to crush the Islamists by force, it has succeeded; and when it has succeeded, it has left the society better prepared for the slow work of transitioning to more democratic norms than was the case beforehand.

I could live, in any Muslim country, with the equivalent of the pro-Western dictators of South Korea or Taiwan or the Philippines or Indonesia, all of whom saw Communism as the primary enemy and kept their nations out of the Soviet orbit. I could live with kings and autocrats who similarly saw Islamism as the enemy, and crushed it, so long as these kings and autocrats were strong, and strong in their friendship with us. If those conditions are met, then eventually, if they took American tutelage, their societies would enjoy some Western freedoms - such as religion - even as they failed to enjoy others - such as the franchise - and over time would progress politically and economically to the point where some degree of democratization was inevitable. The Egyptian democrats now in prison are not all or even mainly Islamists; they are crushed by the regime because the regime can crush them, not because they are America's natural enemies. But unless Egypt begins to unravel as a functioning state, and turns against the West, I do believe there will come a day where these democrats peacefully take power in that country, as they did in Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan and, for that matter, Mexico and Russia.

But that won't work in Iraq. We have to take that regime out, and we have to do it ourselves. We can't rely on, for example, a palace coup to do the work that needs to be done. Iraq is structurally unsound. Hussein is an acute problem, but the larger problem is that Iraq is already a failed state, and it is too powerful a state to be left alone as such a dangerous failure. There will be more and more such states in the Muslim world, and we need to policy for how to deal with them. Building a city on a hill is insufficient.

(As an aside, the repression of Islamism in countries like Algeria may - I'm not saying it will, but it may - clear the decks for the next generation of Muslim leaders in these countries to consider democracy as an alternative to endless terror, war and misery. Islamists have failed in power in Iran, Afghanistan and Sudan. They have discredited themselves utterly in the civil war in Algeria through extreme violence. While they are gaining ground elsewhere - in Pakistan, for instance, and in Saudi Arabia - where they have failed and lost there is a chance - whether it will be seized, I don't know - to build an understanding of Islam that is compatible with and reinforces democratic and liberal norms, rather than undermining them. This would be a hugely positive development if it happens, because Islam is the main vehicle for the operation of what passes for civil society in many of these countries. That's a problem primarily because Islam has, increasingly, been unable to function as an alternative, non-coercive social organism outside the state, rather functioning as an opposition to the state per se or a political organism devoted to taking over the state. But this is not something immutable about Islam, and if Islamic leaders in places like Algeria could turn away from Islamism they could become a powerful force for the liberalization of their countries. This is the vision that Kepel outlines in his book. Where I disagree with him is in the assertion that this change is already well underway, and well-nigh inevitable. I think it's still in its infancy, and is more likely to fail than not. But that doesn't mean it's overwhelmingly unlikely, or that there's nothing we can do to create more favorable conditions for success.)

posted by Noah at 4:08 PM

 
Stanley Kurtz has another excellent piece on NRO, this time about Bali and Pakistan and what they show about the likely future of democratization in the Muslim world. Needless to say, he's a pessimist.

I think most of his argument is right on. I am a skeptic generally of the idea of imposing democracy from above. I do not think Iraq will be like Japan, for a host of reasons. Here are three big ones that have nothing to do with Islam. First, when we conquer the country, the nation will not have been defeated but only the regime, because the nation will not have been committed to the fight. For that reason, there will be no national soul-searching of the sort that happened after World War II. Second, there is no nation. There are no Iraqis, only a variety of ethnic and religious groups, some broadly Arabic and some not at all (Kurds, Turkomans, etc.) thrown together. Without a national consciousness, you can't have a functioning democracy. Third, Japan had had considerable experience with Westernization and Parliamentary government prior to the American conquest. Iraq has had none. These are all reasons why you hear talk of breaking up the country or installing the Hashemites: because just keeping Iraq together and functioning after a war will be horribly difficult, to say nothing of trying to make it a democracy.

But that doesn't mean that no Islamic country is a good candidate for democracy and a solid pro-Western orientation. I think Indonesia is one of these candidates, more so now after Bali than before. I think Iran is another, once the mullahs have been deposed. I even think Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria all have considerable potential over a longer term. And I think Kurtz sells Turkey very short in his assessment.

Let's talk a bit about Turkey. Secularism has been important to Turkey because that was the way that modernism found its expression, and modernism was part and parcel of the effort to create a real Turkish national consciousness. And that national consciousness, and the seriousness of the Turkish military's patriotism, are the reasons why Turkey is a relatively successful state where so many Muslim countries are failures. Turkey would be no different if it had a moderate and modern religious establishment such as exists in, say, Britain or Italy. Kurtz is absolutely correct that secularism has not penetrated the Turkish hinterland, and that Islamism has posed challenges to the regime. But the regime has decisively defeated these challenges every time they were posed. The real question is not whether the Turkish state can withstand the internal pressures but whether the Turkish military continues to feel it can rely on the West as a friend. Turkey, far more than Pakistan, is the country we need to be wooing with economic and political connections as well as military ties.

Let's talk about Indonesia. As Kurtz correctly states, the deposed dictator and his clan have tried, with indifferent success, to use Islamism to distract the populace from their gross incompetance and win back some share of power. I think it is far more notable, however, that Indonesia is still in one piece and basically pro-Western than that it has flirted occasionally with Islamism. Indonesia went through two humiliations in the past decade that can be easily blamed on the West: the currency crisis that wrecked the economy and the intervention in East Timor that resulted in that area's independence. Of course, Indonesia's crony capitalism was ultimately to blame for the currency crisis, but the proximate cause was the action of Western investors and the intervention of Western economic institutions in ways that favored Western banks and left locals high and dry. And the annexation of East Timor was a cruel act of violence by a nasty regime, followed by decades of repression and violence that fully justified Western intervention. Nonetheless, it is easy to see how Indonesians could interpret that intervention differently, as a sign that the West felt that Christian minorities should be allowed their own countries rather than live under majority Muslim rule. In any event, four years ago I would have predicted that Indonesia would not exist as a state in 25 years. Now, I am more optimistic. The country has been through terrible turmoil, but it has not gone off the deep end. And the Bali bombing seems more likely to rally Indonesians to support the West and oppose the Islamists than the opposite. There's a long road ahead, but nothing in Bali makes me more pessimistic about Indonesia than I was before, and much makes me more optimistic.

Enough has been said in this space and elsehwere about Iran. Let's talk instead about Pakistan, where I agree completely with Kurtz's analysis. Pakistan is an impossible situation for the United States, and one that seems likely to get worse rather than better. We have invaded a neighbor and an ally, removed its government and replaced it with one that is more likely to be a friend to Pakistan's enemies - Russia, India and Iran - than to Pakistan. Pakistan itself has a very weak national consciousness that is founded, ultimately, on the idea of a Muslim ethnic group, a concept that is foreign to Islam and foreign to the Pashtuns, Sindhis, Baluchis, Kashmiris and other actual ethnic groups that populate Pakistan. The United States had an overriding interest in fostering good relations with India, because we share enemies in the Muslim world and in China. India's overriding foreign policy goal is the elimination of Pakistan as a serious power. Pakistan's elite, both military and civilian, is notoriously corrupt. Moreover, Pakistan is the home country of one of the original Islamist movements of modern times, the Deobandis, who have had enormous influence around the Muslim world and have grown increasingly radical with time, moving from quietism and rejection of the infidel state to an engagement that often results in terrorism. Finally, Islamism has had a strong presence in the Pakistani military and intelligence since the days of Zia ul-Haq's dictatorship. The odds of "losing" Pakistan have been very good for some time now. And it is not clear what we can do to alter the situation. To the extent that we need Pakistan's help, we become hostage to its corrupt elites, and our mutual collaboration further alienates the Pakistani people. To the extent that we pressure Pakistan to clean up its act and democratize, we encourage a nationalistic and anti-Western reaction. It's a bad case. We could well be at war there a few years after Iraq - and Pakistan already has nuclear weapons.

What I guess I'm stressing is that each country is different. Will the "Arab street" (or Muslim street - I haven't talked about any Arab countries here) explode when we conquer Iraq? Maybe, but I'm skeptical. I think that the invasion will make vulnerable regimes more vulnerable. That means preeminently Pakistan, Saudia Arabia and Iran. Instability in the first two could mean the advent of radically anti-Western regimes; instability in the last could mean the end of a radically anti-Western regime. But an invasion of Iraq will also give the United States the opportunity to deepen its ties with genuinely friendly Muslim regimes, which will be heavily involved in the effort to police and reconstruct Iraq. Countries like Turkey and Indonesia, Morocco and Jordan and maybe even Egypt (not to mention a post-revolutionary Iran), have the opportunity to establish themselves as leaders of a Muslim world oriented towards self-betterment rather than fruitless war against the West. We'll see which if any of them take the opportunity, but we should make sure the opportunity is there. Those that take it, and act in their national interests rather than in the service of a corrupt clique or a revolutionary ideology, will be in a position to lead the Muslim world towards modernity and democracy.
posted by Noah at 3:17 PM

 
John Derbyshire is feeling crunchy. This I like.
posted by Noah at 9:56 AM

 
Well, I guess we have the answer to the question: how will the idiotarians justify the attack on multi-cultural partygoers in Indonesia. Here's Robert Fisk arguing that the mass-murder was only the rational response to John Howard's support for the anti-terror war.

How I wish these people would have the courage of their convictions and argue that Western civilization should be destroyed, and replaced with an Islamist theocracy. I could almost respect them then. Almost.
posted by Noah at 4:22 PM

 
Peter Berkowitz is really, really smart. Can I be him?
posted by Noah at 4:18 PM

 
Nice little article by Alan Mittleman in First Things on the subject of Conservative Judaism, Jewish acculturation and Jewish advocacy of the "naked public square." The article provides me with a pretext to muse on these subjects myself.

It is striking to me to think of a time when Conservative Judaism appeared to be the future of Judaism in America. From where I sit, Conservative Judaism is the movement most likely to go extinct; Orthodox and Reform Judaism are far healthier and far more self-confident than Conservative Judaism is. Why do I say this? Why do I think this is so? And why, given the foregoing, do I consider myself a Conservative Jew?

Let's start with the last question: why am I a Conservative Jew? There are a number of reasons, but the bottom line, simply, is that I believe Conservative Judaism to be true. That's not the kind of language that Conservative Jews tend to use, and that fact has a great deal to do with why Conservative Judaism is endangered.

What is distinctive about Conservative Judaism to me? Historically, Conservative Judaism is a reaction to Reform Judaism, which in turn was an effort by German Jews of the era of Emancipation to rationalize and modernize Judaism in accordance with the best thinking of the Enlightenment. Reform Judaism was utterly unlike the Protestant Reformation, which was an attempt to return to first principles and pure revelation, not an attempt to impose rationality. It bears more resemblance to the emergence of Unitarianism out of the Protestant ranks. In any event, the Conservative reaction was, in turn, nothing like the Conter-Reformation, because Conservative Judaism accepted the basic premise that Judaism needed to be made more Enlightened, but disagreed that this meant jettisoning all of Jewish law.

What Conservative Judaism wound up affirming was the notion that Jewish law existed, and had normative power. However, they denied that this law was entirely self-contained (what might be termed the formalist position) and they denied to established precedent and custom the force that it historically had within Judaism. In effect, they gave to the living body of the rabbinate vastly more power than was the case in traditional Judaism, and consequently diminished the authority of the decisions of dead rabbis as embodied in the Jewish codes of law and associated commentaries.

I agree with both of these propositions. I do not believe that the law interprets itself; as a committed pragmatist (there's a contradiction in terms!) I reject formalism as a philosophical position. And I reject the notion that precedent cannot be overturned even when its premises have been undermined. Because of these heresies, I would have a very hard time fitting in as an Orthodox Jew, even if my observance were up to snuff (which it isn't).

Here's an example of a Conservative reversal of longstanding precedent: granting women a formal role in the prayer service. Very long-standing precedent, deeply rooted in the Jewish religion, mandates that only men are counted in a prayer quorum; that only men can serve as witnesses; that only men can lead a prayer quorum; that only men can read aloud from the Torah in the synagogue; that only men can be rabbis; etc. The question therefore becomes: is it permitted to change these precedents? The Orthodox view would be: no. Even among liberal Orthodox, where there has been a concerted effort to provide new roles for women (as exegetes and advocates if not decisors; as leaders of their own prayer services if not the leaders of official (male) quorums, etc.) there is a universal agreement that these traditional restrictions cannot be changed. But the basis for at least some of these restrictions is the fact that, at the time of the decisions, women were not full masters of their own fates in law, but were subject to external authority (of father or husband), and were, moreover, expected not to be publicly assertive as a matter of modesty. Since these are matters external to the law, if these external conditions change one would expect that the law could change - not that it must change, but that it would be permitted to change if the community saw it as appropriate. This is what Orthodoxy says is not permitted, but Conservative Judaism permits.

The problem is that, in practice, the Conservative rabbinate has tended to ratify the errors of the people rather than ratifying what it thought was right. So, for example, with driving. Most Conservative Jews drive on the Sabbath. For that matter, most Conservative Jews are not Sabbath-observant in any meaningful sense. And it is because of the latter that the Conservative rabbinate decided to allow driving to synagogue on the Sabbath in spite of the fact that there is no plausible legal rationale for the practice, which is a prima facie violation of the Sabbath laws. (I should note in passing that, while I generally walk to synagogue, I am not Sabbath observant myself.) The rabbinate had a choice. They could either uphold the traditional view, and face the consequences, which would include flagrant disobedience on the part of the majority of congregants and continuing battles with congregants over such matters as building parking lots at the synagogue (which might encourage driving). Or the rabbinate could break with tradition, and endorse what the congregation was doing anyhow. The rabbinate chose the latter, and the only definitive result is the loss of respect for the rabbinate, which has shown itself to be willing to be swayed by popular opinion. Sometimes, it is better to be hypocritical, to turn a blind eye to blatant violations of the law rather than to say that the violations are legal.

And now, with the next generation of the Conservative rabbinate, the chickens have truly come home to roost. The last generation already rejected the fundamental bases of the faith in divine revelation. They did not need to do this in order to justify their authority, but they thought it was enlightened to do so, and so they did. Now the next generation has absorbed this lesson, and the lesson of corruption: that the law is suited to the needs of ideology or philosophy that come from without, and has no integrity of its own. And so the next generation is ready to remake the faith entirely in line with their prejudices. As an example, the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary caused a scandal when he argued that unmarried rabbinical candidates should not be cohabiting. This should have been an utterly uncontroversial statement; such behavior is, even if widely practiced, inconsistent with Jewish sexual ethics, which these candidates, once given smicha (rabbinic ordination) will be expected to uphold. It should be no more controversial than to expect rabbinical candidates to be Sabbath observant or to keep kosher. Nonetheless, it caused quite a ruckus, because these young men and women followed the mores of the times and saw nothing wrong with prevailing sexual ethic of cohabitation as a prelude to marriage, and felt it hypocritical to be told to uphold a standard in which they no longer believed.

These rabbis will increasingly be drawn closer to a Reform Judaism that, in turn, has done much to move in the direction of Conservative Judaism. Where once Reform Judaism was a dedicated soldier of the Enlightenment, determined to wipe out such medieval vestiges as the Hebrew language, kosher and Sabbath laws, and ritual articles like tallis and tefillin, now Reform is dedicated to a new and more post-modern understanding of these same things. Hebrew is coming back; so are kashrut and the Sabbath and ritual objects. But they are now approached with a certain alienation, as objects of a lost civilization appropriated by that civilization's conquerors. Reform Judaism refers to the Jewish tradition as a resource that each individual can use to make something useful of. There's no concept of normative law because every individual is autonomous. It's a very enticing picture, in its way, and very appearling to your average Bobo in paradise; it's a relation to Judaism very similar to the his other lifestyle choices, a Judaism of personal growth and cultivation through consumerism. It's even enticing to me; it bears a family resemblance to Franz Rosenzweig's notion of an existential Judaism, where the force of law as normative derives from the subject experience of being under divine command, a notion which I find highly appealing. And it is particularly enticing for believers used to being pandered to by their rabbis; at least now the pandering is over, and responsibility is placed squarely on the shoulders where it has truly rested for some time, those of the laity.

Conservative Judaism is in crisis because those who accept that the law is normative and has its own integrity will be inexorably drawn to Orthodoxy, which takes these ideas very seriously indeed, while those who buy into postmodern relativistic morality will increasingly be drawn to Reform Judaism, with its radically autonomous individuals. Conservative Judaism could stake out a vigorous claim of its own, to defending the integrity of law and the moral capacity of living Jews - as it has done, for example, in Israel, where it suffers under the contempt of the rabbinic establishment. But then it would need more self-confidence than it has demonstrated, more willingness to decide what the law is and to demand faithfulness to it.
posted by Noah at 3:17 PM

 
When Israel was the one being hit, some said the reason was the "occupation," so the rest of the world needn't worry - indeed, we'd do well to push Israel to do more to end the occupation, and so end terrorism.

When America was the one being hit, some said the reason was "imperialism," so the rest of the world needn't worry - indeed, we'd do well to push America to pull out of the Middle East, and so end terrorism.

This weekend the ones hit were partying tourists of various nations in the nightspots of Bali. Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim but multi-religious and multi-ethnic society that has been dragging its feet in supporting the war on terrorism. Bali is a tourist island of no religious significance to Muslims, of no political or military significance, with no outstanding grievances against foreign powers. Tell me: what message were the terrorists trying to send this time? Which policies should be changed to satisfy them, and so end terrorism?

An Australian calls Bali "As Australian as meat pie." Think about that statement. We, Western countries like Australia, are the ones who identify with a diverse, multi-religious world where different folks can live lives as they choose. Bali is a Hindu island in a Muslim archipelago. It's a favored tourist destination of Australians. The terrorists murdered all these innocents to say: Hinduism in a Muslim land is unacceptable; Western tourism is unacceptable; parties are unacceptable; good relations between Western and Eastern societies are unacceptable.

That's what this war is about. Anyone who doesn't understand that this is a war of all civilized countries against an absolutely evil movement - any left-winger who thinks George Bush is the biggest threat to the world today rather than a nuclear-armed militant Islam - would rather be dead than think. After September 11th, there's no excuse for anyone like this in the United States, and anyone who says these kinds of things should have no credibility not only on anything related to national security but anything at all. I don't want to buy a used car from someone who would rather be dead than think!

I just hope every nation on earth doesn't have to go through a September 11th - or worse - before they join the fight.
posted by Noah at 10:44 AM

 
Have you been thrown for a loop by the fallout from the German election? I have.

Check out the latest Victor Davis Hanson piece at NRO. He says pretty much the same thing you'll read in the Weekly Standard, or even in non-right-wing publications on the topic. People are really, really pissed at - and scared of - the current German government.

I admit, I missed this. My first read was: the Germans are indulging themselves by sticking their heads in the sand and behaving like children who want the scary world to go away. The main significance, it seemed to me, was that it strengthened France's position vis-a-vis America, and weakened Germany's, a switch from what has been the default relationship for the past couple of decades. But maybe I'm not taking this all as seriously as it deserves.

I also really believed that what we are looking at is the unique perfidity of a particular German politician. Schroeder is a really odious piece of work, an Al Gore type more than a Clinton (to whom he is frequently compared) in that he has in many cases embraced many centrist positions as a policymaker but resorts to rank demagoguery to maintain power. Gore did a lot of damage to race relations and partisan relations in this country with the way he campaigned, but I don't think the long-term damage to America is serious at all. Ditto Germany. Schroeder's margin of victory was just that: marginal. Basically, he took votes away from the Communists in the old East Germany, and that is how he won. This does not scare or impress me as a long-term matter.

As for the question of German nationalism: which are we more afraid of, German nationalism or Belgian? You know what I mean: which is a bigger threat, a resurgent, confident Germany pushing its own national interest, or a European Union bent on becoming a super-state opposed to American power. It is not such a bad thing if the European remember that they are afraid of each other and like to have the Americans around to keep everyone friendly. And it is far from categorically bad for Germans to look to their national self-interest. It's just very important that they be enlightened about it, and recognize that their national self-interest depends on a close relationship with the United States.

Meanwhile, it is clearer than ever that just as the Europeans, left and right, always prefer a Democratic administration in Washington, the United States, whichever party governs, should always prefer conservative governments in Europe.
posted by Noah at 4:35 PM

 
If you need to be consoled after the awful results of the elections in Pakistan, check out this article by an Egyptian liberal. I'm genuinely impressed. These people exist, and one day I believe they will be embraced by their societies rather than relegated to the margins. But I suspect a lot of blood will be spilt between now and then. Anyhow, read.
posted by Noah at 3:26 PM

 
Apologies for not posting this yesterday; work has been extraordinarily hectic, and sad to say, I'm going to skip a self-imposed blog deadline before I skip a work deadline. In any event, here are some thoughts on this week's parshah: Noah.

I have, needless to say, a particular and personal interest in this parshah. In the Ashkenazic (North- and Central-European) Jewish tradition, children are named after deceased relatives as a way of honoring their memory (in the Sephardic (Spanish-originated) and Oriental Jewish traditions, children are named after living relatives as a way of honoring them in life). I am not named for anyone, however, and that was a conscious decision on my mother's part in particular. She was born during the war, and came to this country only in 1951. Virtually the entire extended family was wiped out; my grandmother lost everyone and of my grandfather's family two brothers survived. Rather than name me after any of those who died, my mother wanted to name me Noah because he was the survivor of the deluge.

Noah has always bothered me as the symbol of survival, for two reasons. First, he is the survivor of a cataclysm that is very explicitly identified as a punishment, and that doesn't seem to me to be the best way to understand an event like the Holocaust. I have always preferred Job, who suffers for no good reason, as the archetype of and inspiration for survivors of tragedy or cataclysm. Second, his relationship to those who did not survive is equivocal. He seems in some ways comparable to Lot, who is rescued from Sodom because of his righteousness in providing shelter to the visiting angels, but who is otherwise a not very appealing figure. Rabbinic commentary, meanwhile, compares Noah to Abraham, noting that Abraham bargained with G-d for the lives of the sinners of Sodom, while Noah (in some interpretations) did nothing to save the lives of all the sinners of the world.

Of course, this is not the only rabbinic view. There is a debate about the character of Noah, and it centers on the apparent words of praise in the second verse: "Noah was a righteous man in his generation; Noah walked with G-d." The detractors take this negatively: in such a wicked generation, Noah was considered righteous, but in a truly righteous generation he would not have stood out. Moreover, walking with G-d in this context implies needing G-d's assistance to be able to walk; a truly righteous man would walk before G-d, confident of G-d's help and eager to advance His cause in the world. Noah's partisans, by contrast, take these terms to be high praise: even in a time of great wickedness, Noah was righteous; how much more righteous is he, then, than those who are righteous when it is easy to be righteous! Moreover, to walk with G-d is high praise indeed; most of us merit only to follow G-d, not to walk with Him. In response to the detractors who argue that Noah did nothing to plead for the sinners of the world, Noah's partisans relate a midrash that Noah in fact spent 120 years trying to convince the world to repent, and only entered the ark when the waters began to rise around his head. Noah, in this view, did more than Abraham, for Abraham only argued on Sodom's behalf on the grounds of a saving remnant of the righteous in the city, where Noah tried to change the wicked themselves, and repentance is more powerful than righteousness.

(This debate reminds me, ironically, of the debate about Pius XII and the Holocaust. Was Pius more saintly for having done what he did to save Jews and condemn Nazism in such a wicked time? Or is he to be condemned for having spent most of his energies trying to protect the Church - perhaps an analog of the ark? - while doing too little to save the many innocent victims outside of Catholic tent?)

I would like to side with Noah's partisans, of course, and I think there is some basis in the text for their view. Apart from the plain meaning of the second verse, there is more obscure support. It is noted that Noah had children later than his predecessors; this is explained by saying that Noah did not want to raise children in such a wicked world, and so waited long enough that they would still be children at the time the ark was launched, so that they would not be destroyed with the rest of the wicked. This time span - 120 years - corresponds to the lifespan ordained by G-d for human beings at this time, bringing an end to the era of extraordinary longevity. It is explained that this does not mean that everyone over 120 was killed immediately by G-d, but that 120 years was set as the period of repentance; if the wicked world did not repent by that time, it would be destroyed. And so, it is explained, Noah spent these 120 years imploring the wicked to repent, as noted.

The text also says that Noah plants a vineyard upon emerging from the ark, which raises the question: where did the cuttings come from to do the planting? It is explained that Noah brought three plants in particular onto the ark: the vine, the fig, and the olive. And this selection of plants strikes me as highly symbolic. I may be going out on a limb here, but I see in the three fruits a pre-figuring of each of the pilgrimage festivals given to Israel, as follows:

Pesach (Passover) = vine (grape)
Shavuot (Pentecost) = fig
Sukkot (Tabernacles) = olive

On what basis do I make this identification? The identification between Pesach and wine is straightforward. Wine is for celebration, and Passover is the festival of liberation, of freedom, and is characterized by celebration through wine - four cups are drunk at the seder meal, the only such injunction for a festival. The identification of Sukkot and the olive is more tentative. I make it on the basis that Sukkot is the festival of anticipation of entering the Land of Israel, and consequently of anticipation of the Messianic Era, and both of these are symbolized by the olive which provides the oil for the Holy Temple, and which is the symbol of peace. (Moreover, the olive is harvested in fall, the season of Sukkot.) Finally, the identification of Shavuot and the fig is the most tentative. I identify them on the basis of the importance of the fig in the story of Man's expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It seems very likely to me that the Tree of Knowledge was a fig tree, and it is clear that fig leaves were used by Adam and Eve to cover themselves after they discovered their nakedness. As I noted last week, I read the expulsion from the garden as the same event as the eating from the tree, and I see this as a deliberate choice by Man to descend into the world to redeem it and thereby to grow through experience, rather than remain in the gilded cage of the garden. Having undertaken this mission, Man needs moral law, and Shavuot is the season on which this law was given. (This is actually the third time law is given: first, law is given to Adam, e.g. the commands to be fruitful and multiply; second, law is given to Noah, in the form of the seven Noahide laws binding on all humanity; lastly, law is given to Moses and the children of Israel at Sinai, and this law is binding on Israel alone.) So, tying the Tree of Knowledge to the Mountain of Sinai, I tie the fig to Shavuot. (Also, the fig is a summer fruit, and summer is the season of Shavuot.)

I'm going to go further, and suggest that these three fruits are also associated with the three key rabbinic holidays, those ordained by the rabbis rather than the Torah, and that these holidays are therefore and thereby connected with the three biblically-mandated festivals. Specifically:

Pesach = Purim = vine (grape)
Shavuot = Tisha B'Av = fig
Sukkot = Hanukkah = olive

Again, the first connection is the easiest. Wine figures prominently in the story of the Book of Esther; much of the plot takes place at drunken parties attended by King Ahashueros. Moreover, on Purim we are told we should drink until we cannot tell the difference between Haman (the villain) and Mordechai (the hero) of the story. Purim is tied to Pesach both comparatively and contrastingly. Both are stories of liberation from a genocidal enemy: Pharaoh in one case, Haman in the other. But in the story of Pesach, G-d is the overwhelming active agent bringing change and revealing his power to the nations of the world. In Purim, by contrast, G-d is conspicuous by His absence. Purim, then, is a Pesach story for our world, where G-d is apparently hidden and yet, in retrospect, His influence is manifest. The Hanukkah-olive connection is also very strong. Hanukkah celebrates the cleansing rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem after the Maccabees' victory over King Antiochus of Syria, who had turned it into a temple of Zeus. The central miracle of Hanukkah is that the pure oil for re-lighting the eternal flame in the Temple was sufficient only for one day, not long enough for more pure oil to be pressed, but miraculously the oil lasted for eight days. Apart from the obvious connection through the relation with the Temple, Hanukkah is connected to Sukkot in another way. Sukkot, together with Shemini Atzeret, form an eight-day holiday, the only one on the biblical calendar; and Hanukkah is conspicuously also an eight-day holiday, which is a strange number - so strange that a special menorah, with eight rather than seven branches, is used for the holiday. The similarity suggests that Hanukkah might have its origins in a displaced Sukkot celebration: because the Temple was unclean, Sukkot could not be celebrated in its season, and so was celebrated upon the Temple's cleansing and liberation, later in the winter.

The connection between Shavuot and Tisha B'Av is the most terrible and suggestive. I can't see how the fig is related directly to Tisha B'Av, which is, after all, a fast day for the destruction of the Holy Temple. But I do think Shavuot is connected to Tisha B'Av, and as with Purim-Pesach, both comparatively and contrastingly. Both are terrible instances of the manifestation of the power of G-d on earth over His people. At Sinai, on Tisha B'Av, the children of Israel committed the sin of the Golden Calf, with the consequence that the first set of tablets - written in G-d's own hand - were lost to Israel and to humanity. And it was lack of faithfulness to that covenant (specifically, the sin of idolatry) that is blamed for the destruction of the first Temple. At Sinai, it is said, G-d held the mountain over the children of Israel and said: accept the covenant, or you will be buried here. It is something of that aspect of G-d that is revealed through history rather than through direct manifestation in the case of Tisha B'Av.

That was a long digression, I know. But I find it deeply significant in integrating Noah, understood by the lights of his partisans, not his detractors, into the larger fabric of the biblical message. In Judaism, the spiritual history of humanity is enacted through the festival cycle: Pesach-Shavuot-Sukkot. First we are freed, then we are bound to the law, then we are redeemed into a Messianic kingdom. And the echo of this spiritual history is heard through mundane history in the rabbinic holiday cycle: Purim-Tisha B'Av-Hanukkah. The hinge of the whole cycle is the process of repentance, and this is how the whole cycle is connected to Noah. Because Noah spent 120 years trying to save the world, trying to get the wicked to repent. And when his failure was evident, he took into the ark the spiritual history of humanity in the form of these three fruits - vine, fig and olive - to preserve for future generations the tools they would need to rejoin that history, and therefore life. He sought, then, not only to save himself and his family, and therefore the future of humanity, but also to save repentance, which is the key to humanity's spiritual future.

After G-d destroys the world, He places the rainbow in the sky as a sign. This is not a sign for humanity; it is a sign for G-d, to remind Him of his covenant not to destroy the world again. Since it is absurd to talk about G-d repenting, or needing to be reminded, this action in itself must be a sign for us, a kind of pantomime for us to following in imitating G-d. G-d repents of the destruction of the world, and places a sign in the heavens to Himself to remind Him of His repentance, as a final sign to us of the transcendant importance of this spiritual act, and how it could have redeemed the world from destruction.
posted by Noah at 11:59 AM

 
I've just finished Philip Jenkins' book,
The Next Christendom. I blogged about his article in the Atlantic covering much the same territory here. All my prior criticisms stand. The book is a very quick read, covering much of the same territory he covered in the article, and not in that much more depth.

Some points I didn't focus on enough, however, in my last comments:

(1) Reading between the lines, it seems to me that Christianity is growing by both natural reproduction and conversion and Islam more purely by natural reproduction. He talks about competition for conversions in Africa and Asia, but I don't think Islam is making many converts in India or China, and his own survey doesn't suggest they are making many inroads this way in Africa. Indeed, I get the feeling the main fields for conversion for Islam are in the West, particularly among the poor and racial minorities of the West. This is significant because conversions are one measure of the health of a missionary religion; if Christianity is outpacing Islam in conversions, that is a measure of its confidence and of its power as currently promulgated.

(2) The European immigration story potentially looks different than we've all assumed because there is a substantial Christian immigration to Europe as well as a Muslim one. If Europe wants to remain a Christian rather than a mixed Christian/Muslim civilization (or neo-pagan/Christian/Muslim civilization), then it would do well to import its necessary immigrants (and they are absolutely necessary) from Christian lands in Africa and Asia rather than Islamic ones. I note in this regard that France has done a far better job of integrating its Christian immigrants into French culture at large than it has of integrating its Muslim immigrants. (I would argue that Britain and Germany have failed at both.) In any event, the population stats that Jenkins cites do prove that Europe - if it wants to - could preserve its Christian identity, if not its Caucasian racial cast.

(3) When the Vatican document Dominus Iesus came out, I remember my reaction being: this is much ado about nothing. The Catholic Church has, since Vatican II, moved in a direction of dual covenant theology (I know that's not precisely right, but I'm simplifying). That is to say: to a view that the Jewish covenant with G-d is in some sense still operative, and therefore while Jewish salvation might have to be perfected at the end of days when Jesus returns, there is no urgent need for the Jews to accept Jesus prior to that point, provided they are true to their own covenant. Frankly, I think that's the best possible stance for a relationship between Judaism and Christianity; anything less still bears some of the mark of supercessionism, and anything more would seriously dilute the Christian message, and would therefore be unlikely to stand within Christendom. All that said, nothing in Dominus Iesus contradicted this position, and therefore it was not obvious to me why Jews were upset by it. (Well, I know why they were upset; because they didn't understand it. But that's not much of an excuse.) But what I didn't realize was why the document was promulgated in the first place. And this brings me back to Jenkins' book, which makes it clear that what the Vatican was responding to was the syncretism that is quite rampant in Africa and parts of Asia, whatever Jenkins may believe, and that raises real questions about the future of Christianity in these regions. Jenkins does a good job of pointing out what real syncretism looks like - how far from Christianity some Christian-influenced groups have gone - and contrasting it with more mainstream trends in African religion. But I think he underplays the degree to which the fringe trends are present in mainstream congregations. Africa is very newly evangelized, and even longstanding Christian regions are poorly integrated into the body of the Church. In any event, I know understand why Dominus Iesus was put out, and its real significance, which means I have even less sympathy for those who attacked it on liberal grounds.

(4) THAT said, it does strike me that as the Catholic Church in particular moves "South" it will become less and less interested in the process of repentance and reconciliation with Judaism and will be pushed more in the direction of returning to supercession. Which is, needless to say, bad, from a Jewish perspective - and, I think, from a Christian perspective, since the polemic against the Jews is, I believe, an enormous distraction from a Church that, as I Jew, I can affirm holds in its hands an important share of the Truth, capital "T."

(5) One last point about Catholicism, the Jews, and Africa. There has been quite a hullabaloo in Jewish circles about the potential canonization of Piux XII. It's a debate I've steered resolutely clear of, because I just don't care enough about the debate relative to those on the inside of the Church, on either side of the debate, or the Jews who have joined it. That said, it seems to me, looking on, like the heart of the debate is: did Pius XII do enough to combat the Holocaust. The arguments that he was an active aider and abettor have always struck me as highly unpersuasive. The arguments that he was the leading friend of Jews of his time, by contrast, are generally too partisan for me to evaluate effectively. But if this is the debate - did he do enough - then what, analogously, shall churchmen say in 50 years when there is talk of canonizing John Paul II, apropos of the Rwandan genocide. That mass-murder was clearly aided and abetted by some in the Catholic heirarchy in the country. And it is not obvious what the Vatican did to fight that evil. And the magnitude - 600,000 or so murdered in the space of a few months - compares well (if that's the word) with the atrocities of the Einsatzgruppen in Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and so forth. If the Church is truly global, why should not Rwanda count for as much as Croatia if we're talking about the crimes of churchmen and the actions - or lack of action - by the Church to prevent those crimes?

(6) One thing I hadn't thought about at all before reading Jenkins' book was the future of the Anglican Church. The Anglican model, which gives a high degree of autonomy to bishops (there being no Pope) but which in terms of structure and dogma otherwise looks pretty similar to Catholicism, would seem to be tailor-made for the world Jenkins describes. And, indeed, it seems that the Anglican Church, which is dead or dying in Britain and America, is surging forward in Africa and Asia. This is an interesting development, with potentially powerful implications for the future. It would be very easy to see Afro-Asian Anglicanism evolving into something like what Orthodoxy is in Russia and other East European lands, and having the same kind of tensions with Catholicism in neighboring areas. Equally interesting is what Jenkins focuses on: the new phenomenon of American Episcopals of a conservative bent going to Africa or Asia to be ordained as bishops by the more conservative leaders of the church in those regions, and coming back to America to found missions. American Anglicanism may yet enter an entirely new phase on the strength of this officially unimpeachable effective secession from their church in this country. Two trends very worth watching that I would not have known of without this book.

(7) Finally, I think it is crucial to take population projections with a grain of salt. Fertility trends have changed very rapidly in a number of countries: the Catholic collapse in southern Europe is well-known, but there have also been dramatic declines in fertility in countries like Mexico, Iran, Bangladesh, Indonesia and so forth. The echo of earlier fertility will still drive these countries to very large populations, but they will not become quite the colossi that might have been predicted 50 years ago. Similarly, projections for an Ethiopia of nearly 200 million souls seem to me somewhat unlikely, though certainly not impossible. And not only for reasons of potentially declining fertility; it is not obvious to me that there will not be a dramatic increase in mortality in Africa, from war and pestilence. India and China grew to their current proportions in a far more orderly fashion and over a longer period, and were densely populated societies (though not nearly so dense as today) for centuries before the boom of the 20th century. That's not true of Congo or Arabia, and we don't know what the consequences will be of the kind of growth they are currently experiencing. It's not pleasant to predict mass death. But it doesn't seem terribly unlikely, does it? In any event, since much of his argument is based around Africa, the ultimate population of Africa has great bearing on the validity of Jenkins' predictions. Even if he's right, I think he's too Africa-centric. If he's wrong, the case for the importance of Latin America and Asia - where the dynamics are quite different from Africa, in spite of the commonalities that Jenkins finds - is even stronger.
posted by Noah at 6:51 PM

 
The NJPS 2000-01 study is out. I'm sure you've all been waiting with bated breath. In any event, some thoughts.

The results are unsurprising. The Jewish population has declined slightly over the past 10 years. It is concentrated in the Northeast. Jews are slightly older and slightly richer than the population at large; these statistics are not uncorrelated. It is also vastly better educated on average (twice the proportion of bachelors degrees and nearly five times the proportion of graduate degrees) and considerably less poor (about 2/3 the low-income percentage of the general population - this, along with age, should explain most if not all of the slight edge in median income).

And, the least surprising result, Jews are significantly intermarried with the general population, and have significantly fewer children than the general population. I suspect that Jewish fertility rates are comparable to that portion of the general population with comparable education rates; most graduate students and young professionals delay childbearing, and delays in childbearing are the primary cause of low fertility. I also can't see intermarriage as much of a surprise; it is untenable to talk about preventing Jews who are uncommitted religiously not to intermarry. (Data on religious affiliation hasn't been released yet, and will be one of the most interesting parts of the data).

The last version of the study highlighted these same two trends, and set off a flurry of activity on the part of Jewish communal organizations to respond. By the end of the decade, a focus of debate was on whether the community should focus on inreach or outreach. In one camp were those who argued for efforts to get those already strongly identified as Jewish to live a more identified Jewish life - which inevitably means a more religious life. In another camp were those who argued for efforts to bring marginal Jews into the mainstream, and particularly to do outreach to already intermarried couples, with a view to keeping them inside the Jewish fold.

I've never understood why in theory this should be a choice. I also am very skeptical of too self-conscious efforts to proselytize. I believe strongly in the Jewish obligation to perform keruv, or "bringing close." And it is not only Jews who must be "brought close" but non-Jews also, with the difference that Jews are to be encouraged to return to their specific obligations as Jews whereas both Jews and non-Jews are to be encouraged to lead a more godly life. This being the case, what possible objection could there be to devoting resources to either inreach or outreach? Indeed, posing the question as one of allocation of "scarce resources" is to undermine the very endeavor. For to do so is to imply that the effort is subordinate to some greater goal, whereas for any legitimate effort of this kind the effort should be a good for its own sake, and should to some extent produce its own resources through the rewards of the activity itself. A sincere effort to bring people closer to G-d will bear fruit. An effort to bring Jews of whatever affiliation or none to closer identification as Jews for the sake of Jewish survival or, even worse, promoting Jewish communal interests will not bear fruit, because the effort itself will telegraph its insincerity and its primary committment to something other than the individuals being ministered to.

I find the kind of data revealed by the report to be fascinating. But in the end, the data are secondary, and the committment is primary.
posted by Noah at 6:01 PM

 
Okay, it's a pretty busy day at work, so my one-day-late thoughts on this week's parshah will be quite cursory. I expect to return to this theme in the future, however (who knows, maybe even in print) because it is of deep and abiding interest to me.

I have been deeply influenced in my understanding of the Genesis narratives by three readers: the author of the Book of Job; Rav Soloveitchik; and Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet. Not, you might think, a likely fraternity, but it makes sense to me. Here's why.

From the Book of Job, we understand that the problem of theodicy - loosely, if G-d is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then why is there evil? - cannot be separated from the narrative of creation, because the problem of evil is a problem with the nature of creation. When Job asks G-d to explain His justice, G-d replies out of the whirlwind with a narrative of creation. And it is a strange narrative, because it climaxes not in the creation of Man but in the creation of the Leviathan and Behemoth, which G-d praises for their perfection in power and violence.

From Rav Soloveitchik, I take the idea that the double-narrative of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 is a double interpretation of the same events. In the first narrative, creation is orderly and majestic, and climaxes in the creation of Man, the regent for G-d as ruler of the world. This is the creation as understood by Promethean Man, a Man who looks to G-d for inspiration to do great deeds, who seeks to comprehend and subdue creation and so emulate his Creator. The second narrative, where creation is less orderly but far more intimate, climaxes with what Christians understand as the Fall: the exile from the Garden of Eden. This is the creation as understood by Existential Man, a Man who, once his eyes are opened and sees his place in the universe, is struck low with awe before his Creator, and is dependent on Him for the very basics like clothing.

From Joseph Smith, I take the idea that this ultimate moment, the exile from the garden, is identical to eating the fruit of the tree of Knowledge. One is not the punishment for the other; each is another way of talking about the other. The exile from the garden was humanity's entry into the world of Experience, a necessary stage on the way to what Smith saw as a literal, and I would describe as a figurative apotheosis. This brings us back to Soloveitchik's Promethean Man of the first Genesis narrative.

Here is my synthesis, very much in a nutshell.

We forget, when we talk about the Garden of Eden, that it was a place. It was not the world; the world was around it, and Eden was planted within it. When people talk as if nature had fallen from some higher state to a lower state because of a human sin, then, this is an error. The world was always what it is, from the beginning. And, if Smith is correct that eating the tree and exile from the garden are one event, not a sequence, then we are also the same as we were from the beginning. What has changed is where we are. We no longer live in a garden; now we live in the world.

The world is a beautiful and fabulous place, but it is a place of wildness and violence. It is a place of natural evil - the evil of earthquakes and lightning - which is not properly evil, or immoral, but amoral. The apotheosis of this world is the Leviathan, and G-d finds the Leviathan extraordinarily beautiful, a perfection of its kind. But we were not made to live in it. We were made to live in a garden. And we know this, even though we chose - this is Smith again - to enter the world and leave the garden.

We are torn in two directions. We seek to emulate our Creator, and that is why we chose the path of Experience, with the consequence of living in a world of wildness, a world to which we are not suited. If we had not done this, we would have been far smaller beings, and less of a joy to our Creator. And yet we feel the alienation of living in a world to which we are not suited; we feel the pain of our exile, and yearn for a return to the bosom of our Creator. Our Promethean side, in response, seeks to transform the world into the garden that we long for, while from the other side of our souls we seek only to escape the world, and overcome it.

Both are valid religious impulses. The choice between redeeming or remaking the world and escaping or overcoming it is a false one. We can't deny either part of our nature, either part of our relationship with G-d. We are not supposed to reconcile ourselves to a world of pain; we are supposed to make this world a garden. The G-d who created the Leviathan is not interested only in humble submission. That is the fundamental meaning of the voice from the whirlwind to Job: that G-d wants us to be great - great in goodness, but still great, and to be great requires entering the world of Experience, the world of suffering and evil, and not fleeing from it. But we are also not supposed to deny our souls, becoming machines of creation and destruction - or even machines of management and order. We are not to forget that the garden was not just a stately pageant of animals and plants and celestial bodies arrayed in their proper order, but a place where G-d walked among us, and spoke to us, as to a friend, or to a beloved child.
posted by Noah at 3:41 PM

 
Saul Singer compares George W. Bush & Harry S. Truman on National Review Online. I think the comparison is apt in all the ways Singer outlines. And that's a big compliment by my lights; Truman is a major, major Presidential hero in my book: see here for why.
posted by Noah at 2:59 PM

 
This is Thursday, so I should be writing about the parshah. It's the first one - starting with Genesis 1:1 - so this should be easy. But I've got a rather lengthy bit of exposition to do on this particular text, and I'm not going to do it tonight. So hopefully tomorrow you'll get a first draft of my theological bloviation on the creation. Stay tuned.
posted by Noah at 10:24 PM

 
Back-filling on missed news stories after a couple of days at a conference: how many people out there caught the details behind one of the latest nasty corporate headlines, the troubles at EDS? Well, for those who didn’t, EDS – Ross Perot’s old shop – missed its projected earnings by a mile for a number of reasons, but prominent among them was an over $200 million payment that EDS needed to make to settle derivatives contracts on its own stock.

Now why, you might wonder, would EDS have had such derivatives contracts to settle? Was EDS engaged in a legitimate activity or was it speculating recklessly? Well, this I know something about, because I used to be in the business of structuring, marketing and transacting on precisely these kinds of derivatives.

Through the 1990s, a variety of company used equity derivatives on their own stock to “hedge” risks associated with stock repurchase programs and specifically with their stock options grants. I put the word “hedge” in quotes because, while the use of derivatives did hedge certain of these risks, these contracts were not typically designed to be the best hedges they could be. And the reason has to do with accounting.

Let’s start at the beginning: what kinds of derivatives contracts were out there, and why did companies use them in conjunction with stock repurchases and stock options grants? Broadly speaking, the derivatives contracts came in two forms, puts and forwards, and they were used for two reasons, to reduce the cost of repurchasing stock and to finance those purchases off balance sheet.

Suppose a company wanted to buy back between 1 million and 1.2 million shares of stock over the next year, for whatever reason. The company might simply go into the market and buy all the shares. This would seem to be the logical thing to do. But if the company did that, it would have to put up the money right now, and that might put a strain on liquidity and worsen debt-to-equity ratios. Alternatively, the company could purchase the stock on a forward basis. The company would enter into a derivative contract agreeing to purchase the stock in, say, one year at a price somewhat above today’s price for the stock (that higher price reflects the cost of financing). Then, a year later, the company could do one of several things. The company could purchase the shares per the contract. Or, if the company changed its mind, the company could settle the contract for cash. The derivative contract thus achieved two entirely legitimate corporate goals: first, it provided the company with efficient financing; second, it gave the company greater flexibility be deferring the decision of whether to actually purchase shares while locking in the economics of purchasing. So far, so good.

In many instances, the company could also net-settle the contract, either receiving shares or delivering shares of value equal to the cash settlement amount. This provision was important on the one hand because it allowed the company more flexibility; theoretically, at least, the company never had to come up with any cash to settle the trades. In practice, though, no company whose stock price had collapsed would settle a forward by delivering shares because the dilution of current shareholders would be outrageous. The real reason this provision was included was for accounting purposes. By including this provision, the company would not have to disclose the details of the transaction ANYWHERE on its financial statements. It might choose to reveal the number of contracts outstanding, and most companies did. But it would not have to, for example, reveal how large the dollar liability of a contract that went against the company was, since in theory the company could deliver stock and not have a cash liability. And the company would not have to dilute its earnings-per-share to reflect this potential issuance because the company could theoretically settle in cash. Pretty neat, huh? The end result being that a company like EDS could have a $200 million liability coming due in the next quarter and no one could tell from looking at its financials that this was the case.

Now, I don’t know if EDS was transacting in forwards. They might have been transacting in put options. In these transactions, the company writes puts on its own stock. Why would a company do this? The reason is that writing puts monetizes the view that the company would buy more shares if the stock price declined. Without going into a mathematical explanation of why this is so, let me just say the following (skip the rest of this paragraph if you would prefer to just trust me). A put option only has terminal value if the terminal stock price is below the strike price of the put (the price at which the put holder has the right to sell stock), and this terminal value increases dollar for dollar with the decline in the stock price below the strike price. The initial value of the put is the probability-weighted average of all the potential terminal scenarios for the stock price that fall below the strike price (since those that fall above are worth zero). The current value of the put increases as the stock price drops, but it does not increase dollar-for-dollar because that would imply certainty that the terminal price would be below the strike price. As the stock price goes lower and lower, however, the ratio of the change in put option price to the change in stock price approaches 1:1. Therefore, the owner of a put is in the equivalent position to being short more and more shares (or, better, a larger and larger fraction of a share) as the stock price declines. By the same token, the writer of a put is in the equivalent position to owning more and more shares as the stock price declines.

Whew! The point of all that background is to explain why a company would write puts on its own stock. If a company would buy more shares if the stock price declined, the company can capitalize on this view in one of two ways. Either the company can wait and see if the shares go up or down, and buy more if they go up and fewer if the go down; or the company can write puts. In the latter case, the company will be paid today the expected value of its preferred trading strategy of buying as the stock goes down, and will forego the actual realized value of that strategy. If the stock goes up, the company will have been better off having written puts; if it goes down, the company might have been better off waiting and seeing what happened in the market.

So EDS might have bought forwards or it might have written puts. It doesn’t matter, because in either case the contracts would obligate EDS to either buy shares or otherwise settle their contracts at a loss if the stock price declined sufficiently. And either way there would be no indication on the balance sheet that EDS had this potential liability.

That already sounds pretty bad. Now it gets a bit worse, for two reasons. First, motivationally. Remember, these contracts are used in the context of share-repurchases. So remember that the reason why there was such a huge boom in share repurchase activity in the 1990s was because of double-taxation of dividends (which made investors prefer capital gains to dividends) and because of stock-options issuance (which diluted existing shareholders, an effect that could only be offset by buying shares). And remember that the latter activity ballooned to obscene proportions because stock options were not expensed - the cost of the options never showed up on the balance sheet. But this lack of accounting for the cost of options had a further perverse effect: it encouraged riskier hedging schemes than optimal. Why? Well, think about it: if you had issued a call option to your shareholders, what would be the optimal hedge? The simple answer is: you should buy a call option. After all, you should be able to replicate the risks and returns of one call option with another call option more easily than with some other structure. But buying a call option would cost money, and since the calls that were issued were not expensed, there was no reason to spend money. So instead, companies bought forwards or wrote puts, which further increased their leverage. Instead of acquiring an asset to hedge the liability created when a company issued calls, the company acquired another liability in the form of a put or the downside of a forward.

And now the second reason. Investment banks noticed that, in entering into these contracts, they were taking on a lot of credit risk. After all, if these contracts ever went against the company transacting in them, it would be because the company's stock went down dramatically. And that probably meant the company was in some degree of financial difficulty. In the most extreme case, where the company defaulted and the stock went to zero, the investment banks holding these puts or forwards - and expecting large cash payments from the company in question - would suddenly discover they were holding worthless paper that put them at the back of the line in a bankruptcy proceeding. Investment banks didn't like this at all, so they included provisions in these contracts that forced the corporate counterpart to unwind the transactions if the stock price dropped sufficiently. Now the investment bank would get paid before the company went bankrupt. Investment banks had figured out the seriousness of the potential liability and consequent credit risk, and built a hedge into the contract. No such option was provided to shareholders and general creditors, who were not even made aware of the full existence of the risk, much less its full ramifications.

Accounting matters, and not just because loose accounting lets the crooks in. Much of what I'm describing above is potentially quite legitimate. Some of the biggest companies in America saved their shareholders a lot of money by using these derivatives strategies sensibly for a decade. But bad accounting creates perverse incentives, incentives to take risk and erode economic value for the sake of accounting. Shareholders and creditors need to have a real picture of the assets and liabilities of a company for them to sensibly allocate capital, which is what our free-market system is supposed to be all about.
posted by Noah at 10:22 PM

 
Today, Gideon's Blog is officially boondoggle blog. I'm blogging from a conference center, taking a break from incredibly boring discussions of ratings agency behavior and such.

Since that's so boring, I'm going to talk about a book I just finished: Gilles Kepel's Jihad: On the Trail of Political Islam. It was not what I expected. First off, Kepel is French, and I assumed that would mean he was even less clued in to the reality of the region than American Near East specialists. Turns out that ain't so. Kepel certainly comes at certain topics from a particular angle. For one thing, his analysis is heavily class-oriented (though not at all Marxist; he seems to be a liberal). For another, his treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian situation leaves out enough of the Israeli side to seem, not biased exactly but one-sided. It's not that he has an axe to grind so much as he seems to naturally assume that the perpective on the situation is the Arab perspective (or, rather, perspectives). In any event, these are side-comments. The main point is that Kepel looks straight-on at the phenomenon of Islamist political violence and wants to understand where it is going. So he's already way ahead of the American academy, which largely still refuses to acknowledge the existence of Islamic terrorism. (And yes, Kepel calls terrorism terrorism.)

But his conclusions are not what you'd expect. Specifically, his thesis is that Islamist political violence peaked about 10 years ago and has been going downhill since. He traces the explosive growth of Islamism to the death of Nasser, Black September, the peace between Israel and Egypt, and the Iranian revolution. These events of the 1970s led to the rise of Islamism as an alternative anti-Western ideology to rival and eclipse Arab nationalism. But he claims that all this began to peter out in the 1990s. Kepel claims that, contrary to what seems to be the case, Islamism has been on a decline for a decade, losing popular support and losing political and military battles. He doesn't deny that there has been explosive Islamist violence in the 1990s, but he calls this both a cause and a consequence of the decline in Islamism, not of its strength. He makes an analogy to Communist and related far-left atrocities in the 1970s: the terrorism of the Bader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Army Fraction, the Weathermen and related groups was not a sign of the growing strength of the radical left in the West, but both a sign of and a cause of its decline. Similarly, he argues, Islamism's extraordinary violence in the 1990s alienated many potential supporters in the Islamic world and is a sign of that alienation, a desperation gambit by a movement that time has passed.

So, if he's right, why doesn't it feel that way? I do think he is on to something - there's something very suggestive about the analogy between 1990s Islamism and 1970s leftist terrorism. In particular, the Taliban seem like a perfect updating of the Khmer Rouge, probably the most insane of the Communist groups ever to take power anywhere. But there are some crucial flaws in his argument. First, a distinction needs to be made between the West and the world at large with respect to the 1970s, and in the same way between his favored class - the devout bourgoisie of the Islamic world - and the Muslim masses. While the terrorism of the Weathermen may have been a sign of the left's decline, the advance of Communism into Nicaragua, Cambodia, Afghanistan and so forth in the 1970s was no such sign; rather, it was a sign of the West's weakness of will. There was nothing inevitable about the fall of Communism; it fell because it could not defeat a determined West, but the West might not have been determined to defeat it. Similarly, there's nothing inevitable about the failure of radical Islam just because the devout bourgoisie have turned against it (assuming he's right that they have); even if they hold the balance of power, they need to be willing to use it.

Second, and relatedly, Kepel wants to believe that the inevitable historical progression is that the devout bourgoisie will, after rejecting Islamic dictatorship, turn to democracy as the best protector of their interests, and that the consequent liberalization of the Muslim world will brnig the ultimate resolution of the worst pathologies of that civilization. I'd like to agree with him. But his own narrative belies his argument. Specifically, the core proofs of the decline in Islamism come from the cases of Egypt, Algeria and Turkey. In each case, it appeared that an Islamic movement was rising through the 1980s, and in each case that movement failed to take power in the 1990s, to the point where now, in 2002, no noe is that worried about an Islamist takeover in any of these states short-term. (Our fears, rather, are focused on Pakistan, a country he discusses only by way of providing background on the rise of Islamism, but that he does not discuss with respect to Islamism supposed decline - a telling omission). And in each of these cases - Algeria, Egypt and Turkey - the risnig Islamic movement was defeated by a ruling military elite determined to crush it. In Algeria's case, where Islamism had already won mass support, this cost over one hundred thousand lives; in Egypt, it cost a few thousand; in Turkey, none. But in all cases, the military leadership of the country decided to use force to destroy the Islamic parties that threatened their power, and without this element it is not obvious that they would have succeeded in eliminating the Islamist threat (assuming they have). His brief for liberalization, then, inadvertantly makes the opposite point: that before you can liberalize, you must go through something like a Pinochet period, a period when a patriotic military uses brutal force to eliminate a political movement that it sees as a threat to the nation.

Kepel would not like this conclusion. I don't like it either. And he could rightly point out that no such brutality was necessary in Turkey, and that Algeria was an outlier case. But I could argue in response that what distinguishes Turkey is the patriotism of its military, and what distinguished Algeria was its venality and alienation from society. The Turkish military always had more popular support than the Islamic political parties, and for that reason could disarm the Islamists without violence. And it had that popular support because it was accurately perceived as serving the national interest. This brings me back to my perennial conclusion about the Arab world in particular (and Pakistan as a non Arab instance): that its failures are largely due to these societies' failure to nurture a patriotic elite - in other words, to develop an authentic nationalism.

The book is very worth a read if only for its considerable detail of history. I certainly know more about the origins of Islamism and its varieties than I did before. And I think Kepel is on to something important with his class analysis of Islamism's growth and possible decline. But he is far too optimistic, I think. We'd best not drop our swords just yet.


posted by Noah at 4:55 PM