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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
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Thursday, December 30, 2004
Does anyone else think this list of predictions for 2005 is a little thin and timid? Things missing: - No one dared to predict where the markets (bond or stock, domestic or international) are going. My bet: stocks up in the 1st quarter, then down the rest of the year; bonds flat the first quarter, then strongly down as short rates hike higher and higher in response to continued dollar weakness. - No one called a scientific or technological breakthrough of any kind. Here's a prediction: if scientists attempting tissue regeneration in monkeys using embryoinic monkey stem-cells show any results whatsoever, they'll get major media play. I don't know the state of that research, though, so I don't know if 2005 is the year it'll happen. But surely something interesting will happen in 2005 in nanotech, or genetics, or psychopharmacology, or artificial intelligence, or nuclear fusion, or fundamental physics, or something. Won't it? No one wants to predict what? - No one predicted anything significant with respect to arts or culture, and only one writer (Derbyshire) dared make an Oscar prediction (The Passion, Best Director, and it ain't gonna happen - though the film will probably be nominated for one or more of the big categories, I don't think it'll win anything big). So: Best Picture nominees: The Passion, Sideways, The Incredibles, Kinsey and Vera Drake. Winner: Sideways. The movie got perfect press and people are ready to honor Payne. Best Director usually tracks Best Picture pretty closely, but I bet Richard Linklater gets a nomination for Before Sunset because he's so sweet. He won't win the Oscar, though. Maybe they give the Oscar to Gibson for directing The Passion, but I bet not. Best Actor: I don't know who gets nominated. Could be Johnny Depp for Finding Neverland, Don Cheadle for Hotel Rwanda, Paul Giamatti for Sideways, Liev Schrieber for The Manchurian Candidate, or Liam Neeson for Kinsey, but it won't be all of them because the winner will be Jamie Fox wins for Ray. Best Actress: again, nominees could be Julie Delpy for Before Sunset, Kate Winslet for Eternal Sunshine, Hillary Swank for Million Dollar Baby, Imelda Staunton for Vera Drake, or Catalina Moreno for Maria Full of Grace, but I'd bet Laura Linney for Kinsey. Best Documentary of course goes to Fahrenheit 9/11; the interesting question is whether it gets nominated for Best Picture. I think it has a real shot. Best Foreign Film: I bet Maria Full of Grace beats House of Flying Daggers, Motorcycle Diaries and A Very Long Engagement. But why are you listening to me? To the first approximation, I've seen NONE of these movies. In other news: 2005 is an odd number so the Nobel Prize for Literature goes to someone reasonable this year, probably Philip Roth or Salman Rushdie. - Every prediction with respect to legislation is negative: laws either won't be passed or will fail in their intended objective. No tax reform, no social security reform, no action on illegal immigration, and intelligence reform will fail. That's the consensus. The only success Bush is predicted to have in Congress is in confirmation of at least one Supreme Court justice. The Bush Administration has been extraordinarily eager to pass laws, and passed almost the entirety of their legislative program (in one form or another) for the 1st term; the only things that failed entirely were Social Security reform and the energy bill. Will he really get nothing he campaigned on legislatively this time around? Even after gaining seats in the House and Senate? - Only one writer predicted who will be Chief Justice (K. J. Lopez voting for Ted Olson), but several assumed two nominations. Who's the other guy? And who's he (or she) replacing? My bets: Thomas for Chief Justice, to replace Rehnquist as Chief; Michael McConnell (this is wishful thinking on my part, probably), to fill the empty spot on the Court; and Emilio Garza to replace the next Justice to retire - and I'm betting that Justice is O'Connor, who is getting tired and is probably only sticking around to see if she gets to be Chief. Bush won't have a big fight on his hands until a hands-down liberal like Stevens either dies or retires, because that would actually shift the balance of the Court. - Everyone is willing to predict what will happen in Iraq; some are willing to predict what will happen in Israel and the Palestinian territories (though no one is willing to say: Sharon will withdraw from Gaza, which I predict he will, no matter what the Palestinians are doing); Derbyshire and Stuttaford are willing to predict that Iran will get the bomb (no one contradicts them); and everyone seems to think they have a basis for predicting whether or not Osama bin Laden will be captured. That's it for foreign policy (Derb does say that "something" will happen "somewhere" else). Will Taiwan declare independence? (I predict: no.) Will Musharraf live another year? (I predict: yes.) Will there be the big news from Latin America in 2005? (I predict: a kind of alliance between Brazil and Venezuela that further isolates pro-American countries like Colombia and should - but won't - serve as a wake-up call to Americans to start paying attention to the region again.) Will there be serious unrest in Saudi Arabia? (I predict: no, just the same occasional bombings we've seen so far. But give it another couple of years.) Will there be civil war in Ukraine? (I predict: either there will be civil war in Ukraine or we will see a significant rise in ultra-nationalist sentiment in Russia as the new Ukrainian government pulls hard away from Russia in favor of the West. Most probably the latter.) - No one is willing to predict the unpredictable. I don't mean something truly unpredictable, like the tsunami or 9-11. I mean the event that was in retrospect predictable but in detail unpredictable. For example: the Massachusetts Supreme Court turned a simmering question into a dominating one by ruling that marriage in Massachusetts needed to be redefined in a unisex manner to square with the state's constitution. What will the equivalent event be in 2005? What could be the potential shockers of 2005? Here are some possibilities: (1) A European party explicitly calling for the repatriation of immigrant non-citizens wins a plurality in the Parliament of a major state, causing an EU-wide crisis; (2) Muslims and "fundamentalist" Mormons join forces to bring suit in Canada for the recognition of polygamous marriages on the grounds of freedom of religion; (3) Tony Blair announces the next step in his reform of the British Constitution is the disestablishment of the Church of England, igniting fierce debate about whether this would in fact be good or bad for said church; (4) Sharon orders the withdrawal of all settlements from Gaza, and a handful from Judea and Samaria, triggering multiple, coordinated acts of serious Jewish terrorism against the Israeli government, and major right-wing Jewish organizations abroad, like the Zionist Organization of America, split over how to respond to these events. There. The gauntlet is thrown down. 3 follow-ups to the last post: First: thanks to Ross Douthat, Steven Menashi, Ramesh Ponnuru, John Derbyshire and Paul Cella for linking. An embarrassment of kindness and of riches. Second: I wanted to clarify one thing about the whole "Western Civilization" thing, in case it wasn't clear. I was not primarily making a point about "us" but about "them." Western Civilization is, in its ambitions and self-conception, universal. But the fact that we see it that way doesn't mean that they - whoever they may be - see it that way. And that's something we have to factor in when we think about how we approach them. The Polish opponents of their Communist regime wanted to re-join a West that they felt fully part of. The Russians who supported Yeltsin were, in many cases, Westernizers - people who wanted to join a West they did not yet feel fully part of. From what I gather (and I'm no expert) the current Iranian regime is deeply unpopular - but the opponents of the regime do not, in general, want to join, much less re-join, the West. They may indeed want to end Iran's conflict with the West, but that's not the same thing. That difference between Iran and Poland should have an impact on how we approach Iran, and should caution us in drawing simple analogies between the Cold War end-game and our situation vis-a-vis Iran. Third: another factor that distinguishes Poland from Iran: Poland's Communist dictatorship was widely (and correctly) seen as having been imposed from without (and by a historic enemy and oppressor: Russia). Ditto for all the other Communist regimes of Europe. By contrast, the Communist regimes of Russia, China, Vietnam and Cuba were the product of domestic revolutions. I note that all the European Communist regimes are no more, that Russia saw a revolution by Westernizers that is now in the process of unravelling under Putin (and when we contemplate the alternatives to him that might realistically come to power, they are less congenial to the West, not more so), while the Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban Communist dictatorships endure. They may fall yet, or they may evolve (as China's regime has been) into non-Communist (and probably more successful if still dictatorial) regimes. But they have so far proved vastly stronger than the optimists, in the immediate post-1989 glow, anticipated. So with Iran, whose revolutionary regime, while deeply unpopular, is also authentically a product of the Iranian people rather than a foreign imposition. This, too, should bear on our approach to them. Wednesday, December 29, 2004
The Douthat-Ledeen contretemps continues! I think Douthat is by far getting the better of the exchange, but I should be clear what that means. Ledeen argues by trotting out general principles that it seems peevish to disagree with. And, indeed, I don't disagree with them. John Quincy Adams said that America, while the "well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all" is "the champion and vindicator only of her own." I turned that famous phrase around in the conclusion to the convention acceptance speech I wrote (in a fit of presumption) for President Bush back in August, as follows: "America is the custodian only of our own freedom. But we are, and we must be, the friend of freedom everywhere." So I'm on-board with America's mission in the world and so forth. But that is not the end of the argument, and Ledeen seems to think it is. Russia had a democratic revolution - an inspiring one remarkably free of bloodshed. A bit more than a decade later, she seems to be descending back into tyranny. India has been a democracy since independence, a vibrant and important one, and one that, arguably, refutes the contention of some that poor countries cannot be successful democracies. But India has also fought a series of wars with neighboring Pakistan as well as a war with China, and was the first third-world country to become a nuclear power. And those wars were not fought because of some inevitable conflict between freedom and tyranny; they were fought over territory and national interest. (For that matter, France and Prussia were both arguably fairly democratic and certainly highly developed when they fought their wars in 1870 and 1914-1918.) Democracies can vote for belligerent politics. The Palestinian Arabs recently had fairly free elections, and 40% of the vote went to Hamas. Now, the Iranians, if allowed to vote freely, are very unlikely to vote for Islamist parties. But who's to say they won't vote for Persian ultra-nationalism? Who's to say the great challenge of the years 2015-2025 won't be a Turkish-Iranian rivalry for influence across Central Asia - a region previously dominated by Russia (which is now in catastrophic decline) and whose peoples are mostly either of Persian or Turkic origin? Again: I'm not making an argument why democracy in Iran would be bad; I'm making an argument why democracy in Iran is not a cure-all. I'll also note that in addition to India, France and Israel are two democracies that became nuclear powers because they felt that nuclearization was in the national interest. And Iranian opponents of the regime have not attacked the nuclear question; if anything, they have supported the idea of a nuclear Iran. I quote Franklin Foer in his piece on neocon dissention over Iran: [E]ven longtime opponents of the regime have defended Tehran's atomic This is what Ledeen doesn't want to engage with: the fact that while a democratic Iran would be better than what we're facing right now, there's no reason to believe that a democratic Iran would necessarily be an American ally or that it would cease to pursue nuclear weapons. Democracy in Iran would be a good thing. But it would not solve all our problems - and pursuing that aim might have trade-offs with other policies that might be more urgent. That is a legitimate argument and must be addressed. As for Douthat's remark about the Iranians not being "our people" - I think Douthat's follow-up is a bit disingenuous, but I also think he was right the first time. Douthat did not just mean that America is fundamentally responsible for the welfare of its own citizens, not for people in other countries. He does believe that, I'm sure, but that wasn't what he meant by the statement that the Iranians are not "our people." Rather, he meant some combination of the following two things: (1) Iran's national interests may conflict in important ways with America's, so we shouldn't assume that even a post-revolutionary Iran will be all buddy-buddy with us; and (2) Iran is not part of Western civilization, and so it is not unreasonable to assume that a primary motivation behind the Orange Revolution in Ukraine - the desire to join (or re-join) the West - may not really be operative in Iran. Both of these objections to the Ledeen program strike me as salient. Iran's rivals in the region include Pakistan (a nuclear power), Russia (a nuclear power), Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel (a nuclear power) and Turkey. While American embrace has done a good job of moderating and smothering the rivalries between Greece and Turkey, or between South Korea and Japan, embracing the entire Middle East is another order altogether. And the business about not being part of the West is important as well. Japan is a very special case (Turkey is another) of a non-Western country that actively embraced the ambition to join the West. Russia has announced that ambition several times, and has always fallen back. Maybe this time it will make it; maybe not. I'm hopeful, but no longer optimistic. Turkey is still something of an open question as well, though I remain quite optimistic, and more so rather than less so because of the emergence of the AKP. And Japan, remember, is the only country to have suffered an attack with atomic weapons, and the United States the only country to have conquered Japan, so there are profound reasons for its exceptionalism entirely apart from any unique characteristics of Japanese civilization. I asked this question of Daniel Pipes once, and didn't get an adequate answer. In the Cold War, our opponents, to a considerable extent, wanted to become like us, and this was an important factor in the end-game of that conflict. Reagan's line, remember, was "tear down this wall" - let Europe be whole again. The people who rose up in Gdansk and Berlin and Budapest and Prague were rising up to declare that they were part of Europe and the West; to a considerable extent, Boris Yeltsin and his supporters were declaring the same thing, and Victor Yuschenko and his supporters are certainly declaring the same thing. In our current war, we face peoples who do not, fundamentally, want to be like us. They may want to learn from us, accommodate us, teach us, surpass us, convert us or destroy us. But they do not, generally, want to become us. The Kurds of Iraq, some of our best friends in the region, do not want to order their society along American - or Western - lines. That is an enormous difference from the Cold War, where the bulk of the people of Hungary and East Germany and Poland and Latvia who thought about such things - and certainly the bulk of those who actively opposed the Communist regimes - basically wanted to become just like the people of France and West Germany and Britain and Belgium (or an idealized notion of what those people were like, or had been like once, or what-have-you), and order their societies similarly. That difference implies a necessary change of strategy. Again, I want to stress, I'm not talking about fundamental principles here. I don't think only Western peoples can "do" democracy. I don't think Western Civilization lacks universal aspirations or is not universally applicable. Many non-Greeks became Hellenists and many non-Romans became citizens - and many non-Western countries have, and hopefully more will, become liberal democracies. But first principles are not enough to know about reality. And the reality is: Iran is not part of the West; most Iranians don't want to become Western; and this probably means that the analogy to Ukraine has problems. I think Ledeen is probably right that a democratic Iran would not harbor al Qaeda and would probably drop support for Hezbollah and become more neutral in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Iranians would not like Israel, but they also don't like Arabs. I think he's wrong in assuming the country would abandon its nuclear program or that it would necessarily seek an alliance with the United States. But the biggest problem with the whole debate is that it's focused on only one aspect of Douthat's critique - the question of what a post-revolutionary Iran would be like. The much more important aspect of the critique is: how do we get there? There are very good questions about how weak the regime really is and whether the kinds of measures proposed by Ledeen would do anything substantial to bring about his desired outcome. Douthat is not the only one raising these questions. Ledeen is not really answering them - and he's consistent in not answering them. That should not inspire confidence in anything Ledeen says on the subject. It is very disappointing to me that so many in the NRO camp prefer boosterism to sober analysis. It should not be necessary for everyone who writes on the subject to, over and over again, assure everyone that they believe in democracy and the brotherhood of man, that they are not racists, that they believe in the power of freedom to change the world, etc., etc. before they are allowed to raise any objection to either tactics or strategy in our war. I'm going to propose a syllogism: any course of action that follows directly from first principles is almost certainly wrong. We need facts, and we need to hear serious responses to critiques rather than a re-statement of said first principles as if that settled everything. Something I did not know: the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, whose primary mission is to help needy Jewish communities abroad, also provides assistance to non-Jewish communities in times of natural disaster and the like. They've set up a special fund to raise money for communities that have been hit by the tsunami. Information is here. I note as well that a donor to the International Rescue Committee, which I noted below is a charity I've supported for a long time, and which will surely be one of the biggest players in responding to the crisis, will be doubling all donations to the IRC up to $1000 per donation made through their website before the end of the calendar year. Tuesday, December 28, 2004
How does Ross Douthat. By which I mean: how does a self-professed "theocon" and skeptic of the war to Make the Middle East Safe for Democracy get picked by Andrew Sullivan, scourge of theocrats and best-buddy of Trotsky-fan Christopher Hitchens, to write for his blog while Sullivan is on vacation? He's a breath of fresh air. And I have to give Sullivan enormous credit for giving such prominent exposure to someone who, frankly, I imagine he doesn't agree with all that much. Maybe Sullivan should go back to being an editor, instead of writing the same column over and over again? He did very interesting things at TNR back when he was editor there. And his guest-bloggers are doing a marvelous job sprucing up what had become a rather tired space. So: what about it, Sullivan. You've pioneered blogging as a legitimate form of journalism. Now take it to the next level: discover, by experiment, the value and role of an editor in blog-space. Monday, December 27, 2004
Eveyone seems to be making lists of the best movies of the year. Hey: I've got a 2 year-old at home, and I'm not very organized about getting babysitters. I saw four movies in the theaters this year: Sideways, Before Sunset, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, and Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi, the last at a mini Israeli Film Festival at my synagogue so it barely counts as a night out (well, we did need to get a babysitter, so I guess it counts). I saw more movies than that on airplanes, most of them mediocre releases from this year or last (examples, probably not exhaustive: Anchorman, Big Fish, Dodgeball, House of Sand and Fog, Mystic River, School of Rock). But you know the nice thing about Netflix? It keeps track of what you rented, so you know what you watched! This is a big help for someone with very little memory, like me. And, as we have a 2 year-old at home, we seem to have rented a rather lot of movies. Here's the list, with my one-word reviews: American Splendor - excellent Back to School - classic
That's about a movie a week. That's probably too many movies. I need to read more. Steve Sailer posts on "colonialism's surprisingly weak impact" in response to an interesting article in Legal Affairs. The article asserts that the legal inheritance of different countries has a lot to do with their subsequent relative success or failure, and starts by comparing two countries, Malaysia and Indonesia, both Southeast Asian Muslim societies, but one a former British colony and the other a former Dutch colony. Malaysia, formerly British, has economically outperformed Indonesia, formerly Dutch. This the article attributes to their different legal inheritance: Malaysia's legal system is based on the British common law approach, while Indonesia's is based on the French civil law approach. Sailer replies: C'mon, the main reason Malaysia is better off than Indonesia is because about a quarter of Malaysia's population are Chinese, who, according to Malaysia's former President Mahathir Mohamad, are smarter and harder working than the indigenous "bumiputras." Mahathir set up a clever system of affirmative action for the majority that keeps them from rioting against the Chinese while not burdening the more productive group so much that they all leave Malaysia. In contrast, as Amy Chua pointed out in World on Fire, Indonesia is only 3% Chinese, and the ruling Suharto family climbed in bed with the Chinese businessmen, so that when the Suhartos were overthrown in 1998, the Chinese were attacked in populist pogroms, many fled to Chinese-run Singapore, and the new "democratic" government nationalized $58 billion worth of Chinese-owned businesses, with the usual disastrous results for the economy. Good point. I will point out that the second paragraph of the Legal Affairs article reads as follows: Economists might explain these divergent paths by pointing to the countries' different responses to the Asian financial crisis of the mid-1990s. Sociologists might find a cultural explanation in the close-knit community of Chinese immigrants who are the most powerful force in Malaysia's business community. Historians might point out that Malaysia's struggle(Emphasis added, of course.) I'm not trying to twit Sailer; I think he does have a very good point. You don't have to get on some kind of genetic-determinist hobby-horse to recognize that group interactions and relative competitiveness are, well, really important if you want to understand the world. Sailer gets in trouble for pointing this out all the time, and God bless him for it because somebody has to. And at least Sailer, while possessed of a number of politically incorrect opinions, is unequivocally not a "bigot" or a "hater" as anyone who's read his series on how to help the "left half" of the bell curve can attest. (That series can be found here, here, here, here and here.) Not to digress too much into a defense of Steve Sailer (though he probably deserves such a digression; maybe I'll write something more lengthy at another time), the suggestions he comes up with are a mix of right-wing, left-wing and no-wing ideas, and the only thing that they have in common is that they are certainly sincere in their aim to improve the well-being of those American citizens who most need their well-being improved. But because he's a rational empiricist, and follows the facts where he thinks they lead, he gets regularly pilloried in the mainstream press (whenever they notice he exists, that is). In any event, to return to the main point: I wonder how the LLSV folks would account for the similarity in outcome between Taiwan and Singapore: both Chinese, both formerly colonies of more developed powers, both highly developed today and with almost identical GDPs per capita. But Singapore has a British pedigree and Taiwan a Japanese one. (Ironically, of course, Singapore is the one that's a dictatorship, while Taiwan is a democracy.) There's obviously some real value to not being ruled by Mainland China, but it doesn't seem to matter half as much who does the colonizing. Or compare Malaysia and Thailand. They have roughly similar GDPs per capita (Thailand is a little behind). But Thailand was never colonized at all. (Thailand, by the way, is about 14% ethnic Chinese, not so wildly different from Malaysia's 24%.) Thailand's legal system is described in the CIA factbook as "based on civil law system, with influences of common law" so maybe that "influence" is decisive. (Taiwan's system is based on civil law, while Singapore's is based on common law.) Or, heck, compare Britain and France. Britain has a per-capita GDP of $27,700 on a purchasing power parity basis. France has a per-capita GDP of $27,600. And you'd think legal differences related to the treatment of shareholders and so forth would count for more in an advanced, finance-based economy than in a developing economy. I took a look, finally, at Africa. Looking at the various African countries by former colonial power and GDP per capita, there's no obvious connection between the latter two factors. You can find pairings that look like they support the Legal Affairs contention and pairings that look like they refute it. Ghana ($2,200 gdp/cap, fmr British) is doing better now than Togo ($1,500), Benin ($1,100) or the Ivory Coast ($1,400) (all fmr French). But Nigeria ($900) and Sierra Leone ($500) (both fmr British) are doing substantially worse than Cameroon ($1,800) and Guinea ($2,100) (both fmr French). And Senegal ($1,600) (fmr French) and the Gambia ($1,700) (fmr British) look pretty much identical. Algeria ($6,000, fmr French) and Egypt ($4,000, fmr British) each have Arab populations, lots of sand and some oil. But Algeria is doing better economically in spite of the fact that it's been more politically unstable of late, and the fact that Egypt has the canal and massive American support. The bottom four basket cases on the list, in economic terms - Tanzania ($600), Malawi ($600), Sierra Leone ($500) and Somalia ($500) - were all at least partly colonized by Britain. Britain's most successful former colonies in sub-saharan Africa in terms of current GDP per capita are South Africa ($10,700), Botswana ($9,000) and Namibia ($7,200), plus Swaziland ($4,900) and Lesotho ($3,000), which were never precisely colonies. South Africa dominates the economy of the region, and it is only 75% black African. Namibia is 87% black African and Botswana's stats are not usefully broken out (they count white in the category "other" and I don't know what else is in that category; "other" is 7% of the country). So it's plausible to attribute the outperformance of this entire region to South African exceptionalism, which is surely related to the exceptional racial heritage of the country. (And no, I'm not saying black populations can't be economically successful; I'm just pointing out that South Africa and, to a lesser extent, Namibia and Botswana had a substantial First World population plonked down in the middle of a Third World population for a long period of time, which would surely be expected to affect their economies overall.) Of the next batch - Ghana ($2,200), Zimbabwe ($1,900), Gambia ($1,700) and Uganda ($1,400) - none has a non-African population above 2%. Meanwhile, the most successful French former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa (I'm leaving off the Arab- and Berber-dominated colonies of North Africa because they have very different histories and populations) are Gabon ($5,500), Guinea ($2,100), Cameroon ($1,800), Senegal ($1,600) and Togo ($1,500). Gabon is 1% French, but 11% "other Africans and Europeans" and it has a tiny population, so maybe it's an outlier and we should discount it. The next four countries have non-African populations of well under 2% - smaller, on average, than the four British successes. And their average GDPs are pretty similar to the four British successes. Here's a table for easier comparison: Country.....................Colonial Power........Non-African-%.......Total-Population........GDP per Capita Ghana..........................Britain..........................<1%.........................20.8mm...................$2,200 Guinea.........................France..........................<1%...........................9.3mm...................$2,100 Zimbabwe...................Britain..........................<2%.........................12.7mm...................$1,900 Cameroon....................France..........................<1%.........................16.1mm...................$1,800 Gambia.........................Britain............................1%...........................1.6mm...................$1,700 Senegal.........................France............................1%.........................10.9mm...................$1,600 Togo..............................France..........................<1%..........................5.6mm...................$1,500 Uganda.........................Britain............................1%.........................26.4mm...................$1,400 Do you see a pattern here? I don't. It looks to me like the French legal heritage works about as well as the British if you compare otherwise similar countries. Now, all that said, the LLSV guys do have some kind of a point. Corruption is an enormous barrier to development; maybe the British legal system is one of the more effective in terms of combatting corruption. And, similarly and not unrelatedly, a bad property rights regime where many people (particularly poorer people) don't have good title to their property is another big barrier to development. This is the factor that Hernando de Soto has made his own personal hobby horse. But these things aren't either-or. And it's pretty obvious that a British legal heritage means precious little if the guy who comes to power after independence decides to nationalize everything and burn down the estates of the blood-sucking landlords. Here's a trickier post-colonial development question. Sailer concludes that colonialism had a pretty superficial impact when all's said and done. But its impact clearly went deeper in some places than in others. Might that - the intensity of the colonial experience - correlate with economic development? Again, let's look at Africa with the ends lopped off - take out North Africa and South Africa/Namibia/Botswana as culturally and economically distinct, and look at the rest of the continent. It's pretty clear that the countries that are economically best off now are to the west of the ones that are worst off. Up at the top of the charts are Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Guinea, Angola, Mauritania Cameroon, the Gambia, Senegal, Togo and the Ivory Coast, all with coasts on the west side of Africa. The only interior or east-coast states with comparable GDPs per capita are Zimbabwe (which I would argue is a special case, like Botswana), Sudan (which is half Arab) and Uganda. At the bottom of the charts, meanwhile, are interior or west-coast states like Somalia, Malawi, Tanzania, Burundi, both Congos, Comoros, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Niger, Madagascar, Zambia, Mali, Kenya and the Central African Republic. The only west-coast states with comparable GDPs per capita are Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Liberia (ironically, all countries with common-law legal systems, two of them former British colonies). I suspect that what's at work here is the intensity of the colonial experience. The countries on the west African coast were more intimately involved economically with the colonial metropole, and so got more developed. That in turn is probably in part a matter of simple geography. But geographic positioning for easy trade isn't enough; look at Tanzania, which you'd think would benefit more from their position on the Indian Ocean than they have if geography was all there was to it. And there may even be an aspect to this geographic correlation that cuts the opposite way from the LLSV thesis. After the Indian Mutiny, the British shifted their colonial approach from direct to indirect rule - the latter meaning: rule through the local elites. And the latter system is the one that got implemented in Africa and the Middle East. So it's not inconceivable that French West Africa got a more intensive imperial administration than did many of Britain's African colonies, and that this fact is positively correlated with post-independence performance. But this is not really my area of expertise, I'll admit. What's clear is that the LLSV thesis is by no means some kind of "magic bullet" explanation for relative underperformance among developing countries. The data is all over the map. Of course, as soon as you start talking about charitable giving, you raise - in specific cases but also in general - the problem of unintended consequences. With investing, the objective is narrow: to make money. Fundamentally, you don't care about externalities because they are, well, external; you are trying to maximize the value of your investment. But with charitable giving, the objective is to do good. So you have to take account of these externalities. Sometimes they are very large. The International Rescue Committe does terribly important work. Millions of people around the world depend on them for their very lives. But: it is no less true that the existence of the IRC shapes geopolitical realities, and it is very hard to know in what way. It is entirely possible that there are wars that would have been shorter and more decisive were it not for the intervention of international humanitarians, and that while the bad guys might have won fewer people might have died. That's obviously not the case when you're talking about a natural disaster such as has just struck so many countries bordering the Indian Ocean, and the IRC does help out with natural disasters as well as man-made ones. But with those man-made disasters, unlike the natural ones, there's a feedback loop, where people learn from the presence of humanitarians and may take advantage of them. In a case like this one, I think the question to ask is whether the organization in question is aware of as tries to counter the most egregious advantage-taking. For example: it's well-known that Hutu militias from Rwanda have operated in the refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and from these positions keep alive one of the world's bloodiest ethnic conflicts. Do the organizations running the camps realize this danger, and are they taking steps to try to prevent their camps from being used as "safe-houses" for warring factions? The IRC, according to their own materials, is alive to these problems. (At the other extreme is the UN, where there have been on the one hand allegations of rape and sex-trafficking by staffers, and on the other hand there is substantial evidence of active collaboration between UN staff and terrorist groups in Palestinian camps.) But even if they are alive to and try to prevent these problems, I'm sure their record isn't perfect. And that's something we all just have to live with to the extent that we can't correct it. Or take something much smaller scale. The Stratford Festival's endowment is supposed to support, among other things, their experimental stage and their conservatory. Well and good. But how will these two eminently worthy projects distort the operation of the Festival as a whole? Will the existence of the experimental stage mean that the main stage takes fewer risks? Will the existence of the conservatory create an obligation to push graduates into roles they aren't really ready for (this is, after all, part of why they want to come to the conservatory: to have a chance to play Stratford)? Along with Shakespeare, other classic theater and some contemporary Canadian works, the Festival now regularly programs two major musicals from what I suppose you'd call the American Musical Canon - last year they put on Guys and Dolls and Anything Goes. About 50% of their revenue from ticket sales comes from the musicals, as I understand it. It is a very, very good thing that they have this cash cow. But it also inevitably affects the decisionmaking by the management of the Festival as to what they will program and what will get the lion's share of the financial resources. Again, on balance I think the benefits outweigh the costs by a wide margin in each of these cases. But that doesn't mean that there are no costs to be cognizant of. Or let's look at Hillel. I had a meeting recently with one of the people whose job it is to meet with people like me (i.e., with donors) to fill me in on their plans for taking the "next step" in terms of their mission. What's the next step? Well, according to my interlocutor, Jewish students on campus fall into three categories: there's about 20% for whom Jewish identity (religious or cultural) is already important to them. Hillel is doing a good job of reaching these students, providing them with a home and helping them to deepen their involvement. Then there's about 30% who are either entirely aware that they have a Jewish background, or for whom it is insignificant, or who are aware of their Jewish background but actively hostile to it. These students are not people Hillel is really focusing on trying to reach. Finally, there's about 50% who are aware they are Jewish but who are relatively lacking in knowledge or connection. These are the students Hillel is not reaching in large numbers now. And a major effort of the new leadership is focused on trying to reach this very large contingent of students. Right now, the basic approach is the "smorgasbord" method: provide a lot of different "entry points" for students coming from very different perspectives. So: you provide space for a kosher kitchen, an Orthodox minyan, and so forth. You bring lecturers on topics related to Jewish history, culture and religion to campus. And you host a Passover seder, Friday-night dinners, etc. But you also bring contemporary Jewish musicians to campus, particularly those working in a contemporary idiom but with a Jewish cultural point of reference; you sponsor programs related to "social justice" to connect to the many left-liberal Jewish students for whom that kind of activity is what Judaism means to them; you send students to Israel on the Birthright program; you sponsor Jewish theater, Jewish dance, Jewish film; and so forth. One of the most effective programs for connecting Jewish students with the Jewish people and Jewish concerns is the Birthright Israel program. But also very effective, Hillel has found, is bringing Israelis - particularly young Israelis just out of the army - to campuses in America to talk to American Jewish students about what life is like there. That kind of personal connection is a whole lot more effective than a propaganda or guilt session. Okay, so this is the direction the organization is going. So there are two objections to Hillel I can anticipate from my readers, which I will attempt to answer. The first: am I not promoting multi-culturalism, a Jewish identity at the expense of an American identity, by supporting an organization that tries to give Jews a stronger Jewish identity at a formative point in their adult lives? To which I answer: yes, and no. I see nothing wrong with promoting a particularist identity, whether religious or cultural or otherwise, if it is grounded in something positive and constructive. An identity which consists entirely of resentment is not a very good identity. But an identity grounded in a strong cultural and religious tradition is a wonderful thing that enriches America as well as the individual in question. Randolphe Bourne, in his essay on "transnational" America (his early 20th-century term for what we would now call multicultural America) considered the many immigrants from Europe and worried what would happen to their moral character if they should lose their own traditions but gain no new ones. He worried that they would fall prey to a newly-emergent popular culture whose values, moral and aesthetic, were shallow, and which would turn them into an undifferentiated mass of great power by virtue of its sheer size, but very dangerous for being culturally unmoored. Bourne therefore encouraged immigrants to retain their traditional cultures even as they learned how to be Americans. I think Bourne had a point. And I think that point has force when applied to an elite group like Jewish college students as much as it does when applied to the just-off-the-boat huddled masses of America's early 20th-century slums. I think it's a good thing when Chinese kids go to Chinese school, when Greek kids go to Greek school, and when Jewish kids go to Hebrew school. And I see no contradiction between this kind of activity and assimilating fully to American life. But it is also crucial to distinguish between private efforts to keep up a tradition and a culture and public efforts to do so. I'm strongly against the latter, basically because I think this turns a minority culture into a political program, and thereby damages the minority culture, and because it institutionalizes the separation of Americans into groups, and thereby damages America. This kind of public act is wrong to a much lesser degree but for a similar reason that legally-enforced segregation is wrong. So while I applaud parents who try to ensure their children learn the language of their ancestors, I'm very strongly opposed to bi-lingual education, on both educational and national grounds. Having said all that, though, that doesn't mean my hypothetical objector has no point at all. Of course encouraging a particularistic identity - of any sort - trades off against the development of a broader communal one. That's just something to be cognizant of, though. The other objection I anticipate is that the "smorgasbord" approach to outreach inherently demeans the tradition by putting central matters like prayer and Torah study on an apparent equal level with periphera and ephemera like Jewish rap music. To which I also say: yes and no. Different organizations will, of necessity, be more stringent in their heirarchies. A synagogue that suggested that a Jewish film series is "just as good" as attending services on Shabbat morning is a synagogue with dire mission confusion. But by the same token, a klezmer-revival organization is going to be focused on the music, and should be. Hillel is not a synagogue. I asked this question of my interlocutor from Hillel in this fashion: don't you get complaints from Orthodox supporters when you sponsor, say, a Jewish gay and lesbian group? And don't you get complaints from feminist supporters when you, say, provide space for a traditional Orthodox congregation which segregates men and women at prayer? And he answered: not really. Which is, in my view, encouraging. Encouraging, but with this caveats: that "diversity" and "tolerance" are not made a kind of quasi-religion that prevents people with differing views from expressing those views, and that the very different groups of students brought together under Hillel's umbrella really are encouraged to interact, rather than treat each other with indifference disguised as tolerance. That's a hard thing to achieve, but it's imporant - indeed, it's a vital part of Hillel's mission. I think the right way to approach the ethics of philanthropy in general is thusly: - Your obligations move out from yourself in concentric circles. You should be sure you've done your duty by your community, your church or synagogue, and so forth before taking on other burdens. - Teach a man to fish. The old saw really is true, and you can feel a lot more satisfaction, a lot more of a sense of accomplishment, if you actually help solve problems instead of just treating them. - Focus on "ends in view." Look enough steps ahead on the chess board and it becomes impossible to know what the impact of your actions will be. So don't sweat that. Support things that you believe in for their own sake and you're already starting off on the right foot. - But be sure the organizations you support are cognizant of negative externalities they may create. This is their full-time job. If they are thinking about these questions, that's a very good sign. - Be reality-based. Okay: say you're worried about hate crimes being committed against underage girls by tobacco companies on the internet. Before you give money to Stop Hate Crimes Against Underage Girls By Tobacco Companies On the Internet, try to find out whether the problem actually exists. It would be a real shame if it didn't. - Measure success. Do the organizations you support have clear objectives? Can they tell if they are meeting those objectives? Do those metrics make sense? The best organizations talk in these terms. And, of course, you should not be supporting an organization that is spending all its money on fund-raising, or doesn't release proper financial records, or is otherwise less than above-board in its operations. - Donate time as well as money. I'm actually really bad at this apart from my synagogue, and even there I'm not one of the most active members of the congregation. But I can say that you get a lot more satisfaction, and a lot better understanding, if you get involved personally with an organization instead of just writing a check. - Balance breadth and depth. There are so many worthy causes out there, but you can't possibly get deeply involved in more than a handful of organizations. So don't. Feel free to make smaller donations to a large number of groups, but be sure to pick a handful that you really care about and really want to get involved in, and make larger donations to these. - Give of love, not of guilt. A colleague was once involved in raising money to build a community center in his town. Now, he lived in a rather wealthy suburb, and the community center was going to be really state-of-the-art. And he was expected, of course, to make a major donation. In any event, he told me that he felt guilty about giving so much money to a building that was going to be used by his family and their wealthy neighbors, when there are so many needy people in the world. So I told him what I'm saying here: give of love, not of guilt. You want to give a nice gift to your community? Mazel-tov! They and you should enjoy it in good health. You want to do something about world hunger? Mazel-tov again; research the different organizations that work on this problem, find one you believe in, and give generously. If you give out of guilt, or if you don't give out of guilt, you'll be resentful, and that doesn't do anyone any good. So give of love. - And therefore, set your own priorities. You know what your obligations are and what your interests are. So, based on that, you can set your philanthropic priorities. The fact that you read a cover story saying overpopulation is the most important problem facing the world today does not mean that you have to reorient your giving to focus on charities devoted to population control. You're only one person. You'll be more effective at changing the world if you care about what you're doing to change it. Anyway, that's the way I see it. It's that time of year again: the end of it. Last chance to make donations to charity that count for this tax year. I wrote a long piece a couple of years ago detailing several charities that I've been supportive of. Here's a recap, organized by category, with some additional thoughts and mention of other worthy organizations. As always, I'm very interested in hearing from readers about charities they support, as well as hearing anything negative (or positive) about the charities I list below. DOMESTIC SOCIAL WELFARE Domestically, I give to a number of organizations with a social welfare orientation. I've tried to support local organizations like the food pantry, meals-on-wheels - that sort of thing. I also give regularly to Mazon, which is a kind of Jewish United Way: they give to mainstream groups addressing various social welfare needs, but because the money comes from Mazon the recipient organizations can presume that the donors are Jewish, which is nice positive publicity for the tribe. I'm sure there are "advocacy" groups that Mazon funds that I don't love, but what can you do? Nothing is perfect. Recently I learned about and began to support the Doe fund, an innovative charity that employs individuals who are homeless or have come out of prison, helps them develop the discipline and skills to stay at work, and thereby get them back on the road to a healthy, productive existence. I also support the local Habitat for Humanity. In the area of education, I've been supportive of Student Sponsor Partners, though I haven't as yet volunteered to partner up with one of their supported students. This year, I added a number of charities from Noemie Emery's helpful list of organizations that support our servicemen and veterans. And I also learned, through the company I work for (an important client is on the board of the charity), about Shake-a-Leg, which runs a variety of sports and rehabilitation programs for disabled youngsters. I'm not sure where it properly belongs on this "thematic" list, but I've been a big fan and supporter for a few years of the Manhattan Institute. I'll list it here because a primary reason I'm a supporter is in recognition of their importance in changing New York City's approach to crime and welfare, changes that have revolutionized life in the city. They cover a lot of other ground, though. If you want to get an idea of how much ground, take a look at their website, or subscribe to their publication, City Journal. They are the only organization I know of devoted specifically to urban issues from a more conservative perspective. INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL WELFARE: My giving to organizations focused on social welfare in poor countries is dominated by two organizations: the International Rescue Committee and Technoserve. The IRC has expanded enormously in the last two decades, in response to a massive increase in the problem of refugees and displaced persons. They have a huge and important operation in Afghanistan, of course, but they also have massive operations across Africa and elsewhere in Asia and in Europe, and they also run resettlement programs across the Western world. The work they have to do only expands with time. Two specific good things about the organization: they are notable for the percentage of the money they raise that goes to field activities, and they make a great effort to employ locals to the maximum extent possible. Technoserve, meanwhile, besides having the stupidest name of any charity I've ever heard of, is a classic "teach a man to fish" kind of organization. They help rural communities in Latin America, Africa and Asia improve the productivity of their agriculture and find markets for their produce. This kind of effort is absolutely essential if we're ever going to address the enormous problem of rural poverty in the 3rd world. That poverty is the driver both of mass migration to the already overcrowded and politically unstable 3rd world cities and of mass migration to America and Europe. I also support the slave-freeing efforts of iAbolish, and the good work of the International Medical Corps. SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL: I have to admit, scientific and medical charities have not been my primary focus. I support the National Jewish Medical and Research Center, the nation's premier research hospital for respiratory diseases, which have been a growing problem worldwide. I've given to North Shore Long Island Jewish Hospital where there is a fund in memory of my wife's brother, who was a pulminologist there, and to charities involved with pancreatic cancer, which runs in my wife's family. I also support Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, which I discuss below under Jewish-oriented charities. Hey, I support my High School alma mater, the Bronx High School of Science. Does that count? ENVIRONMENTAL: The two primary charities I support related to the physical environment are the Nature Conservancy and the Prospect Park Alliance. The Nature Conservancy owns or helps manage huge amounts of land in this country, and consults abroad in numerous countries to replicate what they've done here through similar local groups in each country. They are an old-fashioned conservation group, and they do wonderful work. They had a bit of bad press not long ago because they were entering into trades with their trustees that resulted in a tax writeoff for the trustees associated with a conservation easement for their land. But I'm convinced that these transactions were above-board and entirely within the mission of the organization. It would be a shame if people shied away from this excellent charity because of concerns about these easement transactions. The Prospect Park Alliance, meanwhile, is the local group responsible for reviving the only major park in Brooklyn. I live right by the park, and use it all the time, and I'm thrilled to be able to contribute to further improvement and maintenance of this beautiful space. The story of how local people saved this park that the city had largely abandoned, and how they continue to make ever larger and more expensive improvements, is a wonderful and inspiring one, the perfect illustration that the spirit of community voluntarism that De Tocqueville so admired in America is alive and well. CULTURAL: We support many of the museums of Brooklyn and Manhattan through memberships. We're also supporters of Brooklyn Information and Culture (BRIC), which sponsors Celebrate Brooklyn, a summer series of concerts and performances which is a wonderful addition to the neighborhood. But the overwhelming bulk of our giving in the area of culture is to the Stratford Festival, which I've written about many times in this space. Stratford recently launched a campaign to build their endowment, the For All Time campaign. The endowment supports a number of crucial efforts by Stratford that extend beyond their main stages: the conservatory which teaches classical techniques to new actors; a program for training theater artisans; the Studio Theater, Stratford's new "experimental" stage; new play development; Stratford's educational efforts, including a Shakespeare "camp" and a program for high-school teachers; and various capital-improvements to the facilities. Our family's annual trip to Stratford is something we look forward to all year, and it gives you a wonderful feeling to feel that you're helping keep an institution you value so much alive. I'm not sure it belongs in this spot, but I also give to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, who are doing what they can to uphold real academic excellence and accountability to donors, and to fight the forces of mediocrity, self-dealing and political correctness. JEWISH-ORIENTED: Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life is one of the most effective Jewish outreach organizations out there. I support both the national organization and the Hillel at my alma mater. Hillel is reaching American Jews at a crucial point in their lives. College is the time when people self-consciously forge an identity. While people can change greatly after college (I did), for many people this is when they settle into patterns that impact the rest of their lives. It's also, not incidentally, when many people find their spouses. And Hillel is a particularly important organization to support now, I think, because of the increased prominence of anti-Israel activism on campus. Jewish students who are already supportive of Israel need a place where they can coalesce, and students who don't know anything about the conflict need to hear from an organization that will present a viewpoint more sympathetic to Israel. Hillel embraces under its umbrella groups that take a more right-wing and a more left-wing approach to the situation in Israel, everything from Likud-oriented groups to Peace Now; if I had to guess, the balance is tilted leftward rather than rightward. But all of these groups will comprehend the situation as it impacts Israelis and Jews, which many of the anti-Israel groups now active on campus do not. The UJA is, of course, the granddaddy of Jewish communal organizations, and of course I support it. In a more modest way, I've supported communal organizations like the Global Jewish Relief Network and the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, and cultural organizations like the Center for Jewish History. I've also been supportive of Jewish outreach organizations not specifically focused on college students, such as the National Jewish Outreach Program. And of course I'm very supportive of my own synagogue. I also give to MEMRI, which provides the invaluable service of translating material from the Arabic language press into English, and disseminating it. MEMRI has been accused of selectivity in its choice of material. Fine: if MEMRI encourages others to search the Arabic press for material they are missing and disseminate that, that's all to the good. I'm not supporting MEMRI primarily because they have a political agenda (and they do) but because they are doing a huge amount of good simply by shining a light in an area of paramount interest to America as well as to Israel and to Jews worldwide. Finally, within Israel probably the largest share of my support goes to the Masorti movement, the counterpart to the Conservative movement in America and (to a much lesser extent) elsewhere internationally. Masorti congregations and educational institutions in Israel, unlike Orthodox ones, are not provided with government funding, and precisely because the government funds synagogues and schools in Israel, Israelis do not see it as part of their job to do so privately. I think this is a pretty lousy model for how a religious establishment can work (and I do think a religious establishment can work, and is necessary for Israel). I do not agree with everything about Masorti - I don't think the changes they want to make in the religious establishment are entirely correct; I don't think they should always and reflexively ally themselves with Reform; and I think their leadership is far too left-wing on political, economic and security matters for my taste, and considers that stance too important to their mission in Israel, whereas in fact it should be relatively peripheral. But I agree with much of their religious stance (that's why I'm a Conservative Jew myself), and I strongly believe that they have something to offer the many Israelis who are in need of a spiritual home but who are alienated from Orthodoxy. On the other hand, I've also supported Orthodox institutions that I think are doing important work. Two that stand out are the Ohr Torah family of educational institutions, located in Efrat, which is on the other side of the Green Line but within the "consensus" areas that everyone expects to be integrated into Israel after a separation from the Palestinians, and Nishmat, based in Jerusalem. Ohr Torah was founded by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin and is one of the premier centers of rabbinical training for Modern Orthodox rabbis. Riskin is a very imporant modern leader among the Orthodox, a true heir to the vision of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (though he himself would never claim to be anything close to either as a scholar). I think he's trended too far in the direction of Kookite religious Zionism for my taste, but post-separation one of the tasks of the religious Zionist camp will be to reconstruct their understanding of the religious significance of the state in light of the fact that settlement of the whole Land is not a realistic option today. And I think Riskin is one of very few leaders in that camp capable of leading that effort. Nishmat, meanwhile, is doing absolutely crucial work providing to Orthodox women the equivalent of the kind of education that a modern yeshivah provides to candidates for the rabbinate. Nishmat is also active in pushing - within a strictly observant context - to address women's concerns and make more room for women to play a role in the halachic process. This is very important work for the Orthodox community, but also for the Jewish world as a whole. I support Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, which is trying to help develop this relatively depressed part of the country. Ben-Gurion is associated with the left wing of the Israeli political spectrum, but I'm not sure I understand why development of the south of the country should be considered a left-wing project, other than that Ben-Gurion himself opposed the settlement plans for the territories acquired in 1967, and favored instead a focus on developing areas within the Green Line. In any event, I think their efforts are important. I've also been supportive of organizations like Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross; Selah: The Israel Crisis Management Center, which aids immigrant victims of terror and other trauma; Sha'are Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem; Ezer Mizion, an Israeli social-welfare organzation; and other Israeli charities. Thursday, December 23, 2004
I'm in the middle of reading Marjorie Garber's new book, Shakespeare After All. I was not anticipating I'd enjoy it, largely because what she's known for as an academic is stuff I'm not terribly interested in. (Here's a rundown of some her previous publications: Quotation Marks; Sex and Real Estate; Dog Love; Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life; Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety.) But, after wading through the first through chapters without gleaning any special insight, I found the book starting to hit its stride, and myself starting to learn something. The book is organized as a series of essays on each of Shakespeare's plays, presented in what Garber believes (since no one knows for sure) is the order of their composition (with a couple of exceptions that she notes as such). The earlier chapters were, I thought, a bit pedantic and harped too incessantly on Garber's favored themes. (How many times do I have to hear that the female roles in Shakespeare's day were played by men, and that Shakespeare played off this fact in many of his plots? How many times do I have to hear that when characters talk about playing a role, there is a double meaning inasmuch as the characters are, of course, played themselves by actors?) But when we start to get to the meatier plays, the book improves dramatically. I've just finished the essays on A Merchant of Venice and Henry IV part 1 - two of my favorite plays in the canon - and it's apparent that, with such rich texts to work with, Garber has too much substantive to say to harp on tired themes. So I'm looking forward to the rest of the book. On a totally separate point, one thing Robert Novak doesn't mention about Bill Kristol's attack on Rumsfeld is that Kristol has never been on-board with Rumsfeld. Any regular reader of The Weekly Standard can confirm that Kristol has been calling for a larger military since before Rumsfeld was nominated; that he expressed skepticism before 9-11 that we could "skip a generation" in military hardware or that we could make do with a lighter and more mobile small force that relied on precision technology and air-power rather than investing in a larger force of Army grunts and Marines capable of doing occupation duty. I will also note that Kristol, unlike many neocons, never was an enthusiast of Ahmad Chalabi and always thought we needed a larger military specifically to go into Iraq. So it isn't fair to say that Kristol is trying to pin the blame on Rumsfeld because the war they both favored turned out poorly. Rather, Kristol had concerns pre-war which he aired, and since in his view reality has confirmed his pre-war concerns he's mad as hell and wants to make it clear whom he blames for not taking his concerns into account. All that said, that doesn't mean Kristol is either right about Iraq or right about his overall strategy. Kristol thought, if I recall correctly, that we needed about 30,000 to 50,000 more troops in Iraq initially to overwhelm the enemy and prevent the emergence of the insurgency that we currently face. By contrast, General Shinseki and others who calculated the required Iraq force by comparing it to Kossovo and Bosnia, and assuming we needed comparable ratios of troops to locals to enforce peace and order, came up with a figure of more like 200,000 to 250,000 more troops than we actually deployed. The latter figures were derided by neocons as figures designed to make an invasion impossible. Can they still say that with a straight face? And if they can't, do they realize the implications of the larger figures for the realism of their overall strategy? As for Kristol's overall strategy, his general approach to foreign affairs is premised on the notion that a Pax Americana is necessary to avoid a return either to a balance-of-power world such as (in some views) led to World War I or a spreading and dangerous chaos that will increasingly result in direct American deaths and will profoundly threaten our interests in more indirect ways. His camp has made the analogy to the position of Britain from 1815 to 1914, able to enforce, from its preeminent military position, a relative peace and a liberal economic order on the world. That's the role he and others want America to play today. This analysis misses a bunch of things:
Finally, the major part of the world that Britain was able to bequeath liberal and democratic norms that appear to have survived reasonably well is the Indian subcontinent, and specifically the Hindu-dominated part of that region. Chinese and Southeast Asian colonial territories seem to have absorbed some of these norms as well; no one would call Singapore a liberal democracy, and Malaysia isn't one either, but they are both relatively civilized and successful political systems and far less oppressive than what obtains in much of the world. They did not do nearly as good a job implanting these norms in the former Ottoman territories or in Africa. Whether that speaks to the relative distance these societies had to travel versus the Asian ones, or the relative depth and duration of the British presence, or other factors, it cannot be denied that the analogy does not bode well for the notion of an easy exercise in nation-building in Iraq. Rumsfeld never had any use for nation-building. And his ideas about the shape of our fighting force are rationally oriented around the response to the major military challenges we are likely to face in the most important potential theater of conflict in the future: Asia. If we want to deal with North Korea, deter or help repel a Chinese attack on Taiwan, protect the sea lanes of Indonesia, and so forth, Rumsfeld's program is a good one. It also proved capable of an extraordinarily swift and comprehensive victory over a fairly large and typically inept third world army such as Saddam fielded. Rumsfeld can legitimately be criticized for doing neither of the following: (a) telling the President that his political objectives for the Iraq War are unrealistic; (b) incorporating the President's willingness to undertake occupation duty into his thinking about the force structure. But it's not clear to me that the President's strategy was the same as Kristol's. Rather, the President appears to have accepted the advice of those who did buy into the Chalabi story, and believed that we would not need a lengthy occupation or face significant guerilla warfare. So to that extent, the critics of Kristol who have faulted him for attacking Rumsfeld rather than the President - or folks like Wolfowitz who advised both Rumsfeld and the President - have a point. Here are the facts the pro-war camp - in particular the neocons - need to reckon with:
Apropos of the last post, here's an interesting article in Comment about the New York Intellectuals (i.e., Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and all of that crowd). I've been thinking for the last few days about John Derbyshire's piece about public intellectuals, and how we don't really have many anymore. He obviously has a point. Derb compares the current crop of American public intellectuals to Britain's 1930s crop; my own point of reference would probably have been the American public intellectuals of the 1950s, folks like Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt, Lionel Trilling, F. A. Hayek, Bruno Bettelheim. It is indeed hard to think of many people with those kinds of profiles today - people whom anyone educated had to be familiar with, who were treating serious subjects and making a real contribution to human understanding, but who also spoke to a large audience and shaped the larger culture of their day. But I note some other facts about this list (which I came up with fairly quickly, without consulting sources): all but one (Trilling) were refugees from Nazi Germany who came to America as adults, and all but one (Hayek) were Jewish. Two other notable facts: the towering presence of Freud as the key intellectual precursor in the work of all the Jews on the list, and the fact that the work of most of these individuals no longer seems as important as it did at the time. I do not think these facts are unrelated; of all the intellectual revolutionaries of the 19th century, only Marx has fallen farther in general esteem than Freud. It seems likely, then, that our apparent relative lack of public intellectuals speaks more to the differences between our intellectual culture today and that of 1950 than it does to the quality of our thinking. That is to say: the place of the intellectual in today's culture, at least in America, is not what it was in 1950. Of course, to some extent intellectuals never had the kind of place in American culture that they have had in some foreign cultures. Take Russia. Has there ever been the equivalent in America to a Leo Tolstoy or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? I don't think so. We've had great novelists - Melville and Twain preeminently - who can sit comfortably on the same shelf with the great Russians (and frankly, Solzhenitsyn is not a great man because of a preeminence as a novelist), but even when their greatest works (as Melville's and Twain's do) fulfill the promise of the "Great American Novel" of singing the soul of the country, their authors do not occupy a similarly central place in the life of the nation. Neither Melville nor Twain was ever treated as the conscience of the nation, as its living prophet, in the way that Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn have been in Russia. And Russia is not unique; there is no contemporary American equivalent to the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, or to the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, or to the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, or to the Israeli novelist Amos Oz. You can point to 20th century American authors who approximate or try to approximate this kind of position of speaking to and/or for the nation - Robert Frost, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Walker Percy, heck let's throw in Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey and Philip Roth and Tom Pynchon and Tom Wolfe and Gore Vidal and David Foster Wallace if it makes you happy - but it's somehow not the same. Things work different here, at least of the time, at least when we're not importing a notion of the intellectual's role in society from abroad. But still, he has a point. And it's not hard to point to things that have changed about America that make it even harder to be a public intellectual than it was in the past. We live in an increasingly fragmented culture, which makes it hard to speak to the culture as a whole. So Antonin Scalia (mentioned by several of his readers as a name he missed) is certainly a public intellectual, but he's not even engaged with by most of those on the other side of the aisle. And even novelists who write as if they are speaking to the nation about things that it should know about itself - writers like Philip Roth, David Foster Wallace and Tom Wolfe - wind up speaking to the stylistically-sympathetic more than anything else. Relatedly, the demise of the liberal establishment means that there is no one standing for the cultural center in American life. Back when William F. Buckley was founding National Review, there was a confident liberal establishment in charge of the country and controlling the commanding heights of culture. And that liberal establishment, the heir to the Progressives of the early 20th century, embraced their position as leaders and teachers to the American people. And the great public intellectuals of mid-century interacted with that establishment, either in support of it or (as with, for example, Hayek, or Buckley, or the people Buckley gathered around him) against it. Today, there is no establishment. Conservatives are themselves intellectually fragmented, and do not control the cultural centers. The left-liberals who control those centers do not confidently embrace a mission of promulgating and advancing civilization, and politically those cultural centers are not engaged in any serious way with the centers of power. And so, logically, they are less intellectually powerful. There's also been a change in academia, particularly the humanities, which have become hyper-professionalized and specialized. I think this is a trend which has crested and is in the process of being reversed, however; I note that we're seeing a spate of books coming out that are very old-fashioned - biographies of the Founding Fathers, criticism of Shakespeare - addressed to the common reader but written by individuals of considerable learning. There's something of an impetus to reengage, but such reengagement will take a long time, and runs against structural and ideological impediments. I haven't even mentioned multi-culturalism, which obviously makes it more difficult to talk about a national intellectual culture. Finally, we no longer live in an age of systems, and this is probably a good thing. From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, the West went through a mania for systems that could explain life and reality in all their complexity, and reduce them to comprehensible rules. In the sciences we still, frequently, are system-builders, but in the humanities we are much less so. It is hard to imagine that a Marx, or a Freud, even if he lived among us today would get the same traction; we just don't think human history or the human mind *can* be reduced like that. That means we are relying less on intellectuals to explain the world to us. And again, that's probably good, on balance. And I don't think that trend is unrelated to something Derbyshire does point to: the fact that his own list of public intellectuals tilts rightward, while that of 1930s Britain tilts left. The left is, by nature, more inclined towards a systematic understanding of reality, and that kind of thinking empowers intellectuals. So it makes sense that if thinking in terms of systems is out of vogue, and leftism waning, that intellectuals will also be less prominent in public life. Doesn't Paul Johnson himself say that intellectuals should, for the good of the commonwealth, be kept as far from power as possible? Well, that's what's happened in America, and as a consequence quite interesting thinkers have only a tiny fraction of the cultural influence they might have had in an earlier age. All that said, and having acknowledged that Derbyshire has a point, I'm going to quibble with the details. It seems to me that, to be a public intellectual, you need to be doing the following:
I certainly agree that scientists like E. O. Wilson and Steven Pinker belong on the list. I don't know if Jared Diamond is quite at their level; I also don't know whether it makes sense to put someone like Daniel Dennett on a list that already includes Steven Pinker, but I'd be inclined to do so since he's a philosopher by training rather than a scientist. You could probably add a handful of other scientists in the same cluster of disciplines - evolutionary biology, psychology, psychometry, neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, philosophy of mind - that Derbyshire rightly thinks are the most fertile intellectual fields these days. I also certainly agree that Milton Friedman belongs on the list. He's the heir to F. A. Hayek and fully the equal in terms of influence in the last 35 years to Keynes's influence in the prior 35. The rest of the list is tougher to puzzle out. William F. Buckley was the crucial figure in the revival of American conservatism. But was he an important thinker in his own right? And was he communicating with a large, non-sectarian audience? I'm not sure. He brought together a hugely important collection of conservative intellectuals as well as political practitioners. But I'm not sure he's an important intellectual in his own right. I'm also concerned that letting him in means opening the door to too many others. Irving Kristol? Norman Podhoretz? Some of Derbyshire's readers mailed in suggestions like Victor Davis Hanson and George Will. This is setting the bar too low. And just think of the folks on the other side you'd have to let in. The liberal lions like Arthur Schlessinger are almost entirely absent from the list. Is it fair to exclude them but include Buckley? It's not clear to me why. Noam Chomsky presents a similar problem. His work on linguistics is too specialized (and also too suspect - Chomsky looks likely to be the Bettelheim of this day, about to be thoroughly debunked) to be crucial to his making the cut. Rather, he is the king of the anarchists, nominated for his political writing. But his political writing is, not to put too fine a point on it, drivel. He is certainly not communicating with a large, non-sectarian audience. And I strongly question whether he's making a genuine intellectual contribution. Moreover, if we let him in, why not Susan Sontag, who has better claim to being an intellectual? Why not Alice Walker, who's been at least as influential? Why not Cornel West, who is more widely respected? I want to be clear: I'm not objecting to Chomsky because he's a leftist. I object to him because I think his thought is empty. He is not in the same category as a Marx or Lenin; he is to them as the Baader-Meinhof Gang is to a serious terrorist group like the PLO or al-Qaeda. Ronald Dworkin presents a different problem: the question of whether his work is generating a response and moving the debate. Who debates "Dworkinism"? Who even knows what it is? How has he shaped the way we understand the law? Dworkin has always seemed to me a puzzling contradiction. On the one hand, he has constructed elaborate metaphors that seem, to me, to do a real service in terms of a poetic understanding of what the law actually is. His idea of the law as a "chain novel" where every decision writes another page or chapter, and the objective is thereby to construct a coherent narrative, is very pregnant and appealing. But it's not obvious to me that it leads to any substantive conclusions about how to judge. All he's done is, correctly, identify one aspect of good judging as aesthetic in nature, just as it is in mathematics, another field where you wouldn't think, at first, that the aesthetic matters. On the other hand, Dworkin spends much of his energy in highly unpersuasive attempts to deduce Justice Brennan's juriprudential record from Dworkin's own, highly abstract and not very concrete notions of how the law works. I know why he's doing this. But that doesn't mean it's intellectually interesting or persuasive. I can easily name four thinkers operating in the area of legal and moral philosophy who, I think, deserve the palm above Dworkin; one of them is recently deceased, but I mention him because his stature is so enormous and because he continued to make a contribution to intellectual life right up until the end. The four thinkers are James Q. Wilson, Richard Posner, Peter Singer and (the recently deceased) John Rawls. James Q. Wilson has been the principal figure in shaping a revolution in how we think about criminal law and public order generally. He's been at it for so long that much of what he taught has now become a commonplace. That's the sign of a successful public intellectual. That his ideas were largely a matter of common sense writ large does not detract from their stature. Richard Posner is one of the most interesting and prolific legal and moral thinkers today, in addition to being a working Federal judge. I don't generally much like his thinking, either in style or content, but that doesn't change the fact that he's enormously interesting and influential. He's not only the leader of an entire school of law - Law and Economics - that has profoundly affected how judges do their jobs and how they decide cases, but he's applied the insights of that school to a host of philosophical and political questions that extend well beyond the province of the law. He's a major intellectual, as numerous of Derbyshire's correspondents pointed out. Peter Singer, while quite thoroughly odious, is one of the most important and influential thinkers today. He's certainly a lot more important than Noam Chomsky. Singer is working in an area of decisive importance - bioethics and medical ethics - and has written several challenging, not to say terrifying books on the subject. He both represents a dominant trend in the field and has been instrumental in shaping that trend. I find his thinking vulgarly utilitarian and unpersuasive, but we should not underestimate the degree to which it dominates our world today. John Rawls, meanwhile, although ineligible because of his recent death, was a giant of 20th century moral philosophy. He is, in fact, the man who almost single-handedly rescued moral philosophy from oblivion, and who has done more than any other thinker to try to set our liberal political order on firm philosophical foundations. I think the foundations of his thought are rather shaky - Peter Berkowitz has made quite telling arguments to undermine them - but I cannot deny that no one has very good ideas about how to shore them up. Questions central to our current dilemmas as a civilization - such as the relation between a liberal political order and revealed religion - are also the central dilemmas posed by his thinking. I'd consider adding Allan Bloom if he were still alive (I only mentioned Rawls because he towers over just about everyone in the field, and died so recently) and I would consider mentioning Robert Bork or Antonin Scalia, except that both Bork and Scalia are talking mainly to the converted. If I mention them, I should put Larry Tribe on the list, and a host of other legal thinkers and practitioners who are interesting and influential, but are not similarly shaping how we think about the law in a fundamental way. Continuing down Derbyshire's list . . . Freeman Dyson is clearly an important figure in the history of physics and a man who captured the popular imagination. Is he a public intellectual, though? On what grounds? He certainly doesn't seem as important as any of the "human scientists" Derbyshire mentions. We don't need affirmative action for physicists. Francis Fukuyama raises yet another question: is he a lightweight? I know he came up with this notion of the "end of history" but does he have anything else to recommend him? I'm not sure he's making a genuine intellectual contribution, as opposed to making topical arguments that people then toss about. Here's a good way of putting my question: if Francis Fukuyama makes the cut, shouldn't Peter Drucker make the cut even more clearly? Samuel Huntington, on the other hand, seems to me to be operating at another level of seriousness. Twice in recent years he's put out unexpected arguments that challenged the reigning "paradigm" in important ways and presaged largely unexpected developments in the real world. And this comes at the end of a long and important career thinking about political and international order. He definitely makes the cut. Charles Murray I would similarly say clearly makes the cut . . . except that he has been declared all-but anathema by almost everyone. His most recent book strikes me as a highly quixotic enterprise, and was almost universally dismissed. (People paid a lot more respectful attention to Paul Johnson's book about art, I note.) We'll need to see whether his work on The Bell Curve is treated as foundational by a rising generation of scholars and scientists, or whether it vanishes beneath the waves. It's hard to be a public intellectual when virtually everyone refuses to read your stuff. Thomas Sowell is a clearly public intellectual, but I'm not sure he's first rank because I'm not sure anyone but other conservatives pays attention to what he says. I'm not familiar with his original contributions in his area of expertise - economics. I'm just not sure, in the end, whether he's an important original thinker or whether he's one of a number of conservative thinkers making similar arguments. Remember: we're trying to put together a top-ten list. I'm not sure that he makes the cut. Finally, Gary Wills. I note that he has no Wikipedia entry. He's the only person on Derbyshire's list without one. Enough said. Now, looking at the list of rejects, I have no strong objections to any, but I want to make a comment about the humanities - as opposed to the human sciences or philosophy - and the fact that they are entirely unrepresented in Derbyshire's list of ten major-league intellectuals. People like Stanley Fish, Stephen Greenblatt and Carlo Ginzburg have profoundly shaped the way that we approach literature and history, and as such have shaped American intellectual life. But there's a degree of separation involved; these people are not writing, by and large, for an audience of educated citizens but for other scholars. So it's hard to know how to score them, but I don't think they should be entirely ignored. Nor do I think their work should be deplored; Harold Bloom likes to rant about the "school of resentment" and similary cranky historians like to complain that no one is studying great men, or military and diplomatic history, anymore; rather, everyone's interested in exhuming the lost "stories" and "perspectives" of the common, marginal or despised classes of people. But, as Gordon Wood points out in a recent review in TNR of John Ellis's Washington bio, the "pointillist" work that so many historians are doing these days will bear fruit in the future as it forms the background to a new generation interested in more sweeping narrative and analytical histories. In his words, "the advancement of professional historical scholarship usually transcends the motives of its participants." Similarly with literature, where a lot of time has been wasted reading trash and reading trashily, but some of the leaders of the gang that killed the author and exalted the critic - including Stanley Fish, Stephen Greenblatt and Marjorie Garber - are now engaged in re-engaging with the canon, and what they have to say about the works of Milton and Shakespeare is actually quite interesting. A new generation that is actually interested in reading books will be enriched by their critical perspectives on them. I hope so, anyway. I don't, ultimately, regret that I live in a country where intellectuals are more marginal than they are in, say, much of Eastern Europe. I think that has something to do with the health of our politics and society relative to theirs. But I value intellectuals inasmuch as they can, in fact, use their intellects, and I value the intellect. And if it is harder to be a public intellectual today in America, that is all the more reason for those who value intellect to seek out those who can think, and interact with their thought. A public intellectual needs a public, after all, and that's us. Hey, Andrew Sullivan and crew. You've got all these awards for appalling rhetoric, gross stupidity, monstrous pretension, etc. How about some "nice guy" awards? Here's one suggestion: the Ponnuru award for principled opposition to a partisan position. So named because Ramesh Ponnuru, in addition to being one of the smartest writers on NRO's staff, is among the most resistant to partisan talking points and arguments when he, in his own opinion, thinks they are . . . wrong. His latest piece is an excellent example of what I'm talking about. (Clarificatory note: I'm not proposing an award for "maverick" or "contrarian" writing. There are people who almost reflexively take the opposite position to the conventional wisdom, or who consistently buck their party. They don't get an award for that. I'm also not proposing an award for ideological purity - for having "principles" so ideologically rigid that you wind up opposing your party whenever it considers compromise. That's not what I'm talking about either. Nor am I talking about "give the other guys their due" journalism. I'm talking about pieces like the one linked above, or like Gary Rosen's piece in Commentary a couple of years ago saying Bush v. Gore was wrongly decided. Stuff you've got no reason to expect and every reason to respect.) Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Follow-up to yesterday's Iran post (and thanks, in passing, to John Derbyshire for linking in The Corner - I don't do enough thanking of people who link, so here's a blanket apology to all the people who have linked more than once but whom I keep forgetting to thank. And now I'm in trouble with anyone who linked whom I didn't just link to. Oh, well.) Anyhow: one option I left off the list of options was: raise the stakes. That is to say: right now the diplomatic option on the table is threat of sanctions vs. promise of security guarantees. Iran's incentive, in this game, is to do everything they can to keep the game going while cheating as much as possible on the side. But what if we raised the stakes? What if we did what Reagan did in his second term - engage in public diplomacy aimed at completely ending the Cold War rather than simply lowering tensions? I bring this up apropos of Laura Rozen's post yesterday regarding a paper drafted by Mark Palmer and George Shultz for the Committee on the Present Danger calling for dramatic new engagement with Iran, along with a strategy to isolate and harass the Supreme Leader and his clerical clique. It's a strategy worth discussing. When the Iranian people have, in recent years, protested against the ruling regime and agitated for change, I have generally described the possible outcomes in terms of Russia 1991 versus China 1989. Michael Ledeen and other neocons who believe peaceful revolution is imminent in Iran believe that we could topple the regime merely by providing rhetorical support to the people when they protest. If the President says, "we stand with the Iranian people"; if we drop leaflets; if we broadcast a message of freedom over the airwaves; etc. - if we do all these things, the Iranian people will rise up, cast off the mullahs, and install a democratic and friendly government. This has always struck me as a fantasy, precisely because the mullahs were more likely to be ruthless like Deng was than soft like Gorbachev was. Who knows if Andropov had lived until 1991 whether the Soviet Union would still be standing or not? The fact is: we don't. (We know that the Soviets could no longer afford to fight the Cold War. But we don't know whether, under an Andropov, the judicious application of violence might not have kept the Communist Party in charge even while retreating from Central Europe, standing down conflict with the West, and inaugurating major economic change.) But that doesn't mean there's nothing we could do to shift the odds in favor of revolution in Iran. One pre-war argument for war in Iraq that made sense to me was that the war would enable us to intimidate the mullahs into not crushing their people Deng-style should a true open revolt materialize. But this turns out not to have been the case: the war has made us more dependent on Iranian good will, and hence less eager to confront the regime, while giving us no additional levers against the clerical leadership. So: could we get any traction by doing something totally counter-intuitive, by engaging directly with the Iranian people in a dramatic and high-level way? The main suggestions of the report are as follows: - Declare our willingness to reopen the embassy in Tehran. - Vastly expand broadcasting into Iran. - Open direct relations with the Iranian military on areas of mutual interest and concern. - Push hard for large-scale cultural, academic and professional exchanges, with a particular emphasis on bringing democracy advocates from Iran to the U.S. - Target sanctions at specific individuals in the clerical leadership, and open foreign prosecution in absentia of key figures like Khamenei and members of the secret police. - Discuss openly a possible "return to the mosque" by Khamenei as both a way of delegitimating his rule and offering him a face-saving exit strategy. This would be a very different approach from the set of carrots and sticks currently being waved in front of the regime. Currently, basically, the Europeans are offering the regime better trade deals, and want us to offer security guarantees as well in exchange for a verifiable end to the Iranian nuclear program. The CPD approach is effectively an attempt to go over the heads of the regime and reach the people directly, while limiting threats to the regime's leadership personally. It's also a much more expansive embrace of Iran than contemplated by most of the neocon cheerleaders of a new Iranian revolution. I haven't read Michael Ledeen's book, but I don't recall him suggesting in any of his articles that we offer to reopen our embassy in Tehran. Indeed, his notion seems to be that engaging with the Iranian people means refusing to deal with the regime in any way while lobbing propaganda bombs by radio and the internet, whereas the CPD report much more realistically suggests that engaging with the Iranian people means engaging with the Iranian regime, but on specific terms, those terms being: that we communicate directly with the Iranian people and we don't flinch from actions under international or domestic law against specific members of the regime. It's an interesting proposition. One of the most interesting aspects is the way in which it deals with the nationalism problem. China has gotten enormous mileage out of fanning Chinese ethnic nationalism and paranoia, fears of foreigners perennially trying to cripple China, steal from China, divide China, etc. The Iranian regime does the same thing, and also has some success. I have no doubt that American sponsorship of an opposition would discredit that opposition in many Iranians' eyes, and that direct confrontation - to say nothing of an attack - would rally much of the country behind the regime, howsoever much they may despise their leadership in "normal" times. By openly declaring our desire for better relations, by reopening the embassy, by expressing eagerness for greater trade, greater cultural exchange, etc., we'd certainly be blunting the regime's inevitable argument that we're just trying to take advantage of the Iranian people for our own nefarious ends. You can imagine some other wrinkles on the above. Why stop with declaring our willingness to open an embassy? Why not have the President declare his willingness to go to Tehran to address the Iranian people, in a kind of Sadat-goes-to-Jerusalem moment? Why stop with our own speculation about a "return to the mosque" by Khamenei? Why not see if Sistani, the "only indispensable man in Iraq" whom we neglected to cultivate pre-war because he wasn't a Chalabi crony but whom we're now reasonably friendly with, would articulate that message? He's only the most important cleric in the Shiite world, and he has a profound interest in keeping Iran at bay (albeit he also has a profound interest in not getting too close to us). Yes, there are obvious contradictions in the proposed approach. On the one hand, we're supposed to be prosecuting Khamenei in absentia; on the other hand, we're supposed to be initiating military-to-military contacts and conducting student exchanges. Does it seem very likely to you that we could do both at the same time? Not to me, either. But maybe I'm not sophisticated enough about these things. There's also the problem that, having invaded Iraq and deposed a Sunni-led dictatorship, and invaded Afghanistan and deposed a crude Sunni theocracy, to now openly court friendship with Iran - even if we rhetorically attack and do other things to undermine clerical rule alongside that courtship - would certainly suggest to much of the Muslim world that we've sided with the Shiites against the Sunnis. That would have implications for our continued good relations with, for example, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Just saying. In any event, whatever the contradictions, one can imagine how an across-the-board effort to engage with all of Iranian society, combined with a willingness to use force where international law is on our side (example: to stop al Qaeda groups transiting from Pakistani Baluchistan to eastern Iranian territory and finding sanctuary there, or to police a post-Syrian-withdrawal Lebanon), could put the regime on the defensive and ultimately bring about the desired revolution there, in a way that either direct military confrontation or mere rhetorical support for the opposition certainly would not. Could it work? Maybe. But the real question is: on what time frame could it work. The approach above bears some resemblance to the approach the U.S. took to the Soviet Union, beginning with the Helsinki Accords and the Jackson-Vanik amendment. That human rights-based PR offensive certainly had a role in undermining the Soviet Union. But you also have to consider the Reagan military buildup and missile placement in Europe; the escalating economic strain on a bankrupt Soviet Union of maintaining a war footing; the wild card of whether SDI could actually work, and how that would affect the strategic balance; the collapse in oil prices and its affect on Soviet oil revenue; the failure of the Afghan adventure; the revival of the American economy and the apostasy from Marxist economics by the Chinese under Deng; and the serendipitous combination of sophistication and naivete in the character of Mikhail Gorbachev. How many of these other elements are in place? Iran is flush with new oil money; even if the people are hurting, the regime isn't. Iran is not engaged in an expensive arms race with anyone; in fact, since the U.S. just knocked out two dangerous neighbors, and since they know they have no hope of taking on the U.S. in a conventional war, they are probably less concerned than ever to keep up the strength of their conventional forces. Iran is not suffering a crisis of legitimacy because of a losing foreign adventure. Iran has not seen a series of dispiriting defections by allies, as the Soviets did when Sadat kicked out his Soviet advisors or when Deng declared that to get rich is glorious. Most important, there is no Gorbachev in charge in Iran. And I seem to recall that Reagan didn't shift gears from saber-rattling to charm-offensive until after Gorby came on the scene. But even if the analogy is applicable, it took ten to fifteen years to work in the case of the USSR. Does anyone think that even a pretty good arms control deal can guarantee a non-nuclear Iran for fifteen years? As Foer points out in his piece, we really have a choice between the narrow, pressing question of Iranian nukes and the broader question of the future of Iran and whether they remain an enemy. One thing I think the CPD guys are kidding themselves on is the notion that opponents of the regime would happily dismantle the nuclear program. News flash: the Shah had a large-scale nuclear program. And since his day, India and Pakistan have gone nuclear and Israel's nuclear arsenal has become an open secret. I can completely understand why a democratic and reasonably friendly Iran (as friendly as, say, Brazil, or South Africa - not a military or diplomatic ally, but no one we'd have any reason to want to shoot at) would still want the bomb, because Iran is in a very dangerous neighborhood and many of its neighbors and rivals have nuclear weapons. But even if a post-clerisocratic Iran was willing to contemplate renouncing nuclear weapons, we aren't going to get to such a place quickly enough. And in the meantime, the existing regime is almost certainly going to nuclearize as anti-regime-change insurance. So: could we live with an Iranian bomb in the context of the kind of effort the Shultz proposal envisions - engaging with Iran and the Iranian people even while taking actions to delegitimate the regime? I think that's the question Shultz & Co. be asking. To assume that a strategy of critical engagement - that's probably a good phrase to describe what they're talking about - would also be a good anti-nuclear strategy is to assume the best-case scenario - probably better than best-case. That's a poor foundation for policy. They should describe their strategy as a way of dealing with Iran that, in the best case, will work in tandem with a traditional arms-control approach to forestall nuclearization and, in the worst case, will work in tandem with a traditional containment strategy to keep Iran from using its nuclear deterrent as a shield behind which they wage aggressive war (directly or by proxy) against its neighbors and our allies. If they can't defend it in those terms, then it's probably not a defensible policy, because the tradeoffs I've outlined above are real. In the end, I still skeptical. I think the Iranian regime is strong and ruthless, and their response to a campaign like Shultz suggests would be to crack down harder on dissent and crank up a charm counter-offensive internationally. I think it would be like herding cats to keep the Europeans - i.e., the French - on message, and the Chinese and Russians would be totally unhelpful (do the Chinese really want to set a precedent for helping to undermine a party-based oligarchy through critical engagement? wouldn't a similar strategy be applicable to, well, them?). I think we'd find our PR strategy of "reaching out" to the Iranian people would rapidly conflict with the "stick" half of the carrot-and-stick that's supposed to produce a verifiable deal on nuclear material, to say nothing of making it practically impossible to bring legal actions, either civil or criminal, against Khamenei or members of his circle personally. And I think that the repercussions of an Iranian atomic test would so radically change the dynamics of the region that they would swamp any effect that our charm offensive had. But I should have listed this as one of five options for how to deal with Iran, and was remiss in leaving it out. Critical engagement is an option. It may even be the least-bad. It would certainly be a surprise, coming from the Bush Administration, as much as from the CPD. Monday, December 20, 2004
Am I going to learn to stop worrying and love the Iranian bomb? I read Franklin Foer's piece on the neocon split over what to do about Iran in TNR this past weekend. The only thing unconvincing about it is the suggestion - never fleshed out - that someone else would have handled Iran better - that is to say, that the Bush team's paralysis over Iran is due to conflict within the team rather than due to the lack of any good options. Also on my recent reading list: James Fallows' piece in the Atlantic Monthly where he arranges a sort of pseudo war-game to try to figure out whether there are any good options with respect to Iran. The consensus of his panel of experts (which cover most of the spectrum though they tilt Democrat): no. Fallows is no friend of the neocons or of this Administration. But he predicted a lot of the problems we've seen in Iraq, and pre-war the pro-war crowd pretty much ignored all such commentary, something I complained about at the time (see this post from October, 2002). And now, today, John Derbyshire is speculating in The Corner that Iran is inevitably going to get the bomb, implying the matter is more want of will than want of means, but not really pointing to any particular means to achieve the desired end. I don't really doubt the will, not profoundly. Bush has said that he will not permit an Iranian bomb, and various commentators "in the know" have said he means business. And one thing we've learned about Bush: when he says he's going to do something, he does it. So what are we to do about Iran? Basically we have four options: First, we can negotiate with the current regime and try to get them to cut it out. Needless to say, I am not convinced that the odds of success at this endeavor are very high. It's already quite late in the day, Iran's incentives to get the bomb (and hence their incentives to cheat on any deal) are very large, and the practical difficulties of enforcement of any such deal are huge. Iran is pretty far along, has much of the necessary equipment in place, and even if a sanctions or inspections regime were put in place it would inevitably leak. At least two nuclear powers - Pakistan and North Korea - would have no compunction about cooperating with Iran to surreptitiously continue a program they had formally renounced. Russia should probably be added to that list, and maybe even France and China. Iran is wealthier than North Korea, has a larger land area, has more connections around the world, and is under less intensive scrutiny; if North Korea could get the bomb, it's hard for me to see what would stop Iran from doing so. So even if we dangle the perfect combination of carrots and sticks to convince them to do a deal, I don't see it achieving more than a 1 or 2 year delay in their acquisition of atomic weapons. Second, we can attempt to change the regime by means other than invasion, and then negotiate with the new regime. Bluntly, I think this is a fantasy. Yes, most of the population hates the regime. But the country is not on the brink of revolution, and it's not at all clear to me that if push came to shove the regime wouldn't survive any attempt to overthrow it. China circa 1989 looks much more likely to me than Russia circa 1991, if comparable events transpired in Iran tomorrow. That is to say: the regime would crush any serious challenge by force, and would emerge stronger than it was before. We underestimate the degree to which force works, and to the extent that Iran feels itself threatened from the outside this will weaken internal opposition and strengthen those elements in the military inclined to support the regime. This is particularly true if the regime can point to actual outside meddling in their affairs as the justification for internal repression; China didn't have that excuse, and they got away with it anyhow. In any event, it's not at all clear that a successor regime, even if friendly to the U.S., wouldn't also be inclined to develop nuclear weapons, and a nuclear Iran would certainly make Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia far more inclined to go nuclear themselves, which would put us back where we started. Third, we can attempt to surgically eliminate their nuclear program. The problem is that the Iranians have not been fools; they have learned from Iraq's experience in 1981, and have multiple, parallel programs located in different parts of the country, many of them hardened and therefore tough to take out with a conventional air strike, and some of them located in population centers. I think the general, though not universal, consensus is that a surgical strike has limited odds of success. And the diplomatic fallout would, of course, be huge. We'd have used force, unprovoked, against another country because we suspected they were developing weapons that we didn't want them to have. If you think the Iraq war has shredded our international credibility, this would be much worse. Fourth, we can attempt to change the regime by force. But as we've learned with Iraq, this is neither cheap nor easy, and Iran is much larger, much more populous, and has a much stronger national identity. They'll fight harder and longer, and will be even less inclined to submit to an American-installed regime. I have no doubt that we could defeat the Iranian military quickly in the field. But we would not thereby control the country. War is the extension of politics by other means, and while I can see how we'd achieve a military victory, I don't see how we'd achieve a political victory, and absent the latter the former would be entirely hollow. You could, of course, argue that we should be prepared to use any degree of force, including even nuclear weapons to utterly destroy the country's capacity to make war, and that we should certainly be prepared to spend the blood and treasure to truly conquer the country, not just to defeat it militarily. This would, of course, be utterly immoral. We have no just cause for such action, nor would such action be proportionate. It would also, obviously, terrify the rest of the world into more substantial efforts to "balance" America than we've seen to-date, which would do enormous long-term harm to our national interests. I don't say it wouldn't be effective in eliminating the Iranian nuclear ambition. It's very hard to try to be a nuclear power when some of your cities are smouldering radioactive ruins. It's also very humbling to have your country thoroughly devastated by conventional means. One of the reasons we're having so much trouble in Iraq is we didn't kill enough people, or devastate the country enough. We could impose our will on Germany and Japan because they were utterly defeated: millions dead, cities flattened, economies destroyed, real debate about turning Germany into pastureland or dividing it up into multiple countries. By contrast, when Prussia defeated France almost effortlessly in 1870, they achieved almost none of their political objectives but left the French determined to get their revenge. But of course our objective in the Iraq war was to liberate them and punish their leadership, not to crush a nation that had attacked us with enthusiasm. Fighting a total war in Iraq would have been immoral as well as non-strategic. So: if we fight a limited war, we'll fail, and if we fight a total war, we'd be monsters, and would be treated as such by the rest of the world. I mean, think about what we're talking about: we're worried that Iran will get a nuclear weapon, then use it for blackmail (to increase their influence over the local region) or, in the worst-case, give it to terrorists who would detonate it in, say, Tel Aviv, or even New York, killing hundreds of thousands. To prevent that possibility, we should be prepared to wage a war of comparable destructiveness? How is that moral? I can see the point of threatening terrible consequences to deter the use of nuclear weapons against us, even on the battlefield. But to actually initiate such destruction to prevent the possible acquisition of such weapons? We're too many steps removed. I will admit, there was a point, when the North Korean crisis was burgeoning, when it made sense to me to contemplate using the most devastating weapons to eliminate the North Korean army and thereby the regime. I didn't actually say we should do anything like that, but I thought we needed to examine all the options, including eliminating an army whose only purpose was to threaten terror bombardment of South Korean civilians, and thereby deter even a much more measured and justified attack on North Korea's nuclear reactor. But: there is a difference between destroying an army and destroying a city; North Korea was openly threatening nuclear war against America and our allies; and the post-Kim political situation in North Korea would be trivial compared to Iran (because, among other reasons, South Korea would perforce take on the task of political reunification, however expensive it might be and however they might like to avoid that cost so long as there is an excuse). And even then, I thought it was essential that we lay the diplomatic groundwork for a confrontation, lest we turn the entire East Asian region against America with devastating economic and, ultimately, geopolitical consequences for the U.S. (because China would fill the void left by a departing America). North Korea was a very hard problem. Iran is much harder: we have considerably less justification for war and a much lower chance of achieving our political aims through military force. So what, precisely, is Bush too chicken to do? I want to point out, as an aside, that it's unclear to me how Bush's war in Iraq has meaningfully contributed to our inability to deal with Iran. If we need to militarily occupy countries like Iraq and Iran for a lengthy period, we need probably another 1 to 2 million men under arms - which is doable, but expensive - or even more (and more than that would surely require a draft). That we've initiated nothing like that kind of buildup means that we never intended and still do not intend to do that kind of duty. And to wipe out the Iranian army and seize the capital probably doesn't require a huge army. So Iraq didn't make choice #4 impossible. Meanwhile, no one is seriously disputing that Iran is hell-bent on nukes and getting close, in spite of our massive intelligence failure in Iraq; and diplomatically almost no one supported the Iraqi war, so had that war not happened what makes anyone think we'd suddenly have lots of support for war with Iran? The war with Iraq has done nothing to bring about an Iranian counter-revolution, one of the many reasons floated for the war (and one I bought, to some extent). But it's also not clear to me how it has made dealing with Iran more difficult. Iran was always difficult. To date, there have been five clear diplomatic anti-proliferation successes: South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. In all of these cases, the reason diplomacy worked was that the external threat that prompted the desire for nuclear weapons was itself neutralized or at least abated. You could probably add South Korea, Japan, Germany and Turkey (at least so far) to this list, as in these cases the American nuclear umbrella was the decisive factor in militating against their own nuclearization. You could possibly add Libya to the list as well; it's not clear what balance of carrot and stick induced Qaddafi to make a deal (and we don't know whether he'll keep that deal) but the Iraq war probably played a significant role, which would mark Libya as not a pure "diplomatic" solution - indeed, it's arguably the only "military" antiproliferation success (again, so far). The only case - apart from Libya - where military force appears to have prevented nuclearization is Iraq. Israel eliminated their nuclear program in 1981; ten years later America eliminated their second nuclear program (which we didn't know they had); and twelve years after that America invaded again in large part because of fears that Iraq was once again progressing towards nuclear weapons (which this time they were not). That record does not inspire confidence in our ability to prevent nuclear proliferation by direct military action. But the nuclearization of China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea suggests that diplomacy is unlikely to work as well where the regime in question quite rationally seeks nuclear weapons to deter a real external threat. Iran is a similar rational case (which is why even a post-mullah Iran is likely to seek nuclear weapons). So the only clear ways to prevent nuclear proliferation are to extend the American nuclear umbrella over the country in question, or negotiate a climb-down in the context of an actual reduction in the external threat, or be prepared to invade the country once a decade. Which of these seems like a plausible approach to Iran? None, to my mind. Which means they are likely to go nuclear. I think Bush really means it when he says that we are determined to prevent that outcome. But I'm really unclear on what we can do. It is hard to see how diplomacy will be effective, and hard to see what military options we have that are both likely to succeed and will result in less harm to American interests than an Iranian bomb. Believe me, I'm not happy about this conclusion. While I think it's unlikely Iran would be so foolish as to hand nuclear weapons over to al-Qaeda (mushroom clouds over Chicago are more likely to be the product of Pakistan's nuclear labs - and by the way: what are we going to do about them?), I think an Iranian bomb would have terrible consequences for American interests in the region, not to mention for Israel and hence for the Jewish people. Iran would surely try to blackmail European and Middle Eastern countries into supporting their agenda. They would operate more boldly in Iraq and Afghanistan to undermine American efforts there. They would openly support Shiite rebellion in Saudi Arabia's oil-producing east, to gain control over that enormous resource. They might directly attack Israel, and would certainly threaten it; nuclear war between Tehran and Jerusalem is not at all inconceivable, and nuclear war anywhere would have terrible economic, political, ecological and strategic consequences, apart from the sheer massive numbers of deaths, including deaths of allies. Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia would all probably fast-track their own nuclear programs in response to an Iranian bomb, which would mean more risk of nuclear conflict in the region and more risk of the bomb ultimately winding up in the hands of undeterrable terrorists. I'm not downplaying the Iranian threat. I just don't know what to do about it. Do you? Has anyone else been following David Frum's argument that Federalism can't work for same-sex marriage, or civil unions, or whatnot? Because I have, and I don't get it. To catch people up, here's the original article about the case that prompted Frum's comments here, which in turn prompted Walter Olson's correction here, and Frum's contention that his argument still stands in the abstract, even if it's not as applicable as he thought to this case in particular, here. So, anyway, here's what I don't understand: what is special about same-sex marriage in this regard? Doesn't varying divorce law present the same problems? If one state requires a finding of fault to win a suit for divorce, while another offers quickie divorces with no fault after a two-week visit to establish residency, does that mean divorce law must be nationalized? Or adoption law. Suppose one state permits gay adoption and another does not, and a gay couple with an adopted child moved from the first state to the second. Does this present issues that imply that adoption law must be nationalized? Or surrogate parenthood law. Suppose one state forbids contracts for surrogacy while another permits them. A contract is signed in the second state, and then, after the birth and after money has changed hands but before any formal adoption process is completed, the birth mother flees to the first state with the baby, leaving the intended adoptive mother high and dry. Does this possibility mean that law regarding surrogacy must be nationalized? In the case of the lesbian couple, isn't there a simple clear solution? If the custody question was originally decided in Vermont, Virginia could decide to enforce Vermont's judgement - just as they might if a quirky Vermont judge decided to grant visitation rights to grandma after she had a falling out with her daughter. If the custody question was originally decided in Virginia, presumably the court would find, in accordance with Virginia law, that the Vermont-ordained civil union had no status, and therefore the only parent under Virginia law is the woman who bore the child, who would be granted sole custody. Each state could agree not to allow another state's judgement to be second-guessed, just as states with restrictive divorce laws recognized Reno divorces back in the 1950s. I'm at a loss to see why this wouldn't work, or would "require" Virginia or Vermont to violate their own laws. Am I missing something? Friday, December 17, 2004
Amazingly enough, in spite of the fact that I still haven't shaken this Thanksgiving-era cough, we had our usual annual Hanukkah party last Sunday, and all went splendidly. Menu:
Everyone seemed happy with the results, except my wife who mostly seemed tired. (Actually she had a lovely time, but we both agreed that what with lingering colds and such we really should try to figure out how to reduce the workload next year, probably by hiring someone to help set up, clean up and serve drinks, and by making more things that can be done as much as a week in advance - like the quiche - without suffering, and fewer things that really have to be done day-of - like the eggs. Blini were a big hit, though, so even though they are fairly labor-intensive they'll probably be back.) Hanukkah itself was lovely. Our son got really into the holiday. He had his own miniature menorah which he was very eager to help in lighting, and learned bits of several songs and the prayers. The local Chabad lights a large, public menorah at the corner of the park, which we went to see lit two of the nights. And, unfortunately, our son was bewitched by the prospect of nightly presents. But he'll get over that. I hope. While we're on the topic, though, I thought I'd ruminate about the whole "holiday season" business. Hanukkah is a strange holiday to "program" against Christmas. The messages of the two holidays are quite different, and they are of unequal significance as well. Hanukkah is really a minor holiday. The most important holidays on the Jewish calendar are the High Holidays (the Day of Remembrance, or New Year, and the Day of Atonement); the Three Festivals (Passover in the spring, Pentecost in the summer, and Tabernacles in the autumn); and the Sabbath. All of these are of biblical origin and hence of paramount significance. After these in importance are three holidays of post-biblical origin: Purim, celebrating the redemption of the Jews from the hands of Haman, as recounted in the Book of Esther; Hanukkah, celebrating the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem after the Hasmonean victory of the Seleucids; and the Ninth of Av, lamenting the destruction of the Temple. (There are also a number of minor fast days and holidays, many of which are associated with one of the other holidays on this list - thus the Tenth of Tevet is a fast connected with the Ninth of Av, and the Fifteenth of Av is a joyous day similarly connected; the Fast of Esther precedes Purim; the 33rd day of the Omer is a holiday that interrupts the Lent-like period of the Omer that connects Passover and Pentecost; Holocaust Memorial Day and Israel's Independence Day are, respectively, days of lamentation and joy that commemorate national events of much more recent vintage; etc.). Hanukkah, then, makes the Top Ten holidays list (counting the recurring Sabbath as one holiday) but not the Top Five. It is, clearly, not in the same league as Christmas. Even among the minor holidays, meanwhile, Hanukkah is viewed with some ambivalence by the rabbis. Don't get me wrong: the holiday is canonical. Maimonides says that you should sell the shirt off your back if that's the only way you can afford to light a menorah. But there are signs that the rabbis were not so thrilled about aspects of the holiday. On Purim and the Ninth of Av, we read from canonical texts that relate to the events the days commemorate; on Purim we read the Book of Esther, and on the Ninth of Av we read the Book of Lamentations. There are Books of Maccabees that relate the events of Hanukkah - four of them, as a matter of fact - but they are not part of the Jewish canon. (Catholics value them as part of the Apocrypha.) 1 Maccabees was composed in the Land of Israel and was probably originally written in Hebrew (the only version we have today is a Greek translation), and the book is the textual basis for the holiday of Hanukkah, which was canonical. All these reasons should have made that book at the least a candidate for inclusion in the canon, but it was not so accepted. That points, I think, to a rabbinic problem with the story of the holiday as articulated in the book. Hanukkah was, basically, a national holiday commemorating a military and national victory, and much beloved by the common people. But the rabbis were ambivalent about these very elements that made it popular. The story - particularly as told in 1 Maccabees - largely exalts human agency. There's a scene in 1 Maccabees where the Hasmoneans are on the run, and the Sabbath is approaching; they have to decide if they will break the Sabbath to save their lives or observe the Sabbath and hope for the best. They decide to break the Sabbath. (Interestingly, 2 Maccabees - which was not originally written in Hebrew, but in Greek - tells the same story but with the opposite conclusion: the rebels observe the Sabbath, and it all works out OK anyhow.) The rabbis were probably unconfortable with a book that seems to rely so much on the power of man (albeit exercised in a Godly conflict) - particularly given the failure of the revolt against Rome that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem. The rabbis looked far more favorably on the story of Purim, with its emphasis on the hidden hand of God moving through history, than on the story of Hanukkah. Moreover, the Hasmoneans, leaders of the victorious rebellion against the Seleucids, wound up, once in power, (a) usurping the Kingship (they were not the legitimate heirs to the throne); (b) corrupting the High Priesthood (combining it with the monarchy and then ultimately auctioning it off to wealthy priestly families); and (c) engaging in the same "Hellenizing" practices that they so objected to as rebels. But Hanukkah nonetheless commemorated a genuine miracle - the miracle of the oil that lasted for eight days rather than one, and hence made possible the rededication of the Temple - and the rabbis embraced it in those terms. Besides being a minor holiday, and far from central to the Jewish religious narrative as Christmas is in the Christian religious narrative, Hanukkah is a decidedly particularist holiday, where Christmas is universalist. Judaism is, ultimately, universalist, but it gets to universalism through particularism. And Hanukkah speaks specifically to that particularism; it's a holiday of national deliverance, about the rededication of our Temple, the liberation of our people. Yes, these events ultimately have universal significance, but you're starting several steps removed. Christianity, by contrast, trumpets its universalism, and nowhere more clearly than in the story of Christmas, about God's presence on Earth becoming material and concrete. It is a bit ridiculous, then, to see how our culture has on the one hand tried to suppress official recognition of Christmas (not only by the government but by other nonpublic but impersonal bodies; how many corporations send out Christmas cards as opposed to seasonal "holiday" cards?) while on the other hand ostentatiously celebrating Hanukkah alongside what recognition Christmas gets as if the presence of a menorah somehow "kashered" a Christmas tree. A Hanukkah menorah most certainly does not "universalize" a Christmas tree; if anything, the opposite is true: it turns the tree, which symbolizes a holiday whose message is "joy to the world and peace on Earth" into a particularist symbol like the menorah itself. And it is very strange indeed that, as my boss related to me yesterday, his kids are learning Hanukkah songs at school but no "religious" Christmas songs ("Frosty the Snowman" is OK, but not "Silent Night") or that a lawyer we deal with, a Lutheran, can report that her son came home the other day and announced that he wishes he could celebrate Hanukkah (which he'd been learning about at his public school). Inasmuch as it is a religious holiday, Hanukkah should be just as problematic to the anti-religious vigilantes as Christmas; and inasmuch as it's a holiday with communal overtones, it's a holiday celebrated by the Jewish people, not the American people. Of course, as a Jew, I appreciate the gesture. Having a menorah in the lobby of my building is nice - it says, in effect, "hey, we know this is your holiday now; have a good one." But I'm not entirely happy with it. Public celebration of Hanukkah distorts the holiday. There is, for example, no obligation on Jews to see someone else light a Hanukkah menorah; the obligation is to light one yourself. Public officials, meanwhile, will inevitably aver that Hanukkah is a celebration of "religious freedom" which, really, it isn't; the Hasmoneans were revolting against a regime they thought was corrupting proper religious practice, and the miracle the Hanukkah celebrates is about the continued efficacy of the traditional means of atonement (Temple sacrifice). Neither of these has anything to do with religious liberty. If I ran the zoo, public recognition of Hanukkah would, very simply, mean public officials and forums making space for Jewish groups to recognize and celebrate the holiday. I think it's great that the Lubavitchers can put up a big, public menorah in my neighborhood. And if any other religious group wants space and time to celebrate publicly and openly, without disrupting traffic or otherwise making themselves a nuisance, God bless them and I hope Kings County and the City of New York make it as easy as possible for them to do their thing, and that Borough President Marty Markowitz and State Senator Carl Andrews show up to say a few words. But if your company wants to send out Christmas cards, or your building wants to have a tree with a creche and some wise men and donkeys under it in the lobby, God bless you, too, and you certainly shouldn't be under any social obligation to be "inclusive" in your celebration. If I had to compare Hanukkah to an American and Christian holiday, it would not be Christmas, but rather Thanksgiving. What, ultimately, are we giving thanks for on Thanksgiving? For the fact that the American experiment was going to go forward, apparently with God's blessing. The Pilgrims of Massachusetts saw that they would survive, and our presence here is a consequence of their survival. Hanukkah, similarly, celebrates God's continued favor: the cleansing and rededication of the Temple was made possible by a miracle, which proved that God still showed favor on the Temple and on the people who depended on its rites for atonement. If I had to compare Christmas with a Jewish holiday, meanwhile, the best candidate would be Tabernacles - Sukkot, in Hebrew. Sukkot is referred to in Hebrew as "The Season of our Joy" (Passover is "The Season of our Liberation" and Pentecost is, "The Season of our Receiving the Torah"). The holiday commemorates the Israelites' wandering in the wilderness prior to entry into the Land of Israel. But the thrust of the holiday points forward, to Messianic days when the Temple will be restored and, as Isaiah prophecies, all nations will worship at God's holy mountain. Significantly, unlike the Passover sacrifice which only Israelites could partake of, the sacrifices of Sukkot could be joined in by any nation who worshipped the one true God. Sukkot is a major holiday, of comparable religious significance to Jews as Christmas is to Christians; and it is a holiday with a particularly universal message, and one of joy and peace and Messianic fulfillment, just as Christmas' message is. There are even below-the-surface resonances. For example: on Sukkot, we dwell in booths, temporary structures open to the elements, to symbolize our dependence on the Divine for protection and to recall the wandering in the wilderness. That surely resonates with the Christian story of Jesus born in a manger (and for all I know there's a historic connection between the two; you tell me). And Sukkot, unlike Hanukkah, offers non-Jewish proprietors and building owners the opportunity to actually help Jews practice their religion, should they choose to. On Sukkot, as noted, we "dwell" in booths. This is understood, minimally, to involve eating meals in these booths, which must be temporary structures open to the sky, with only loose thatch on top. They must be erected after the High Holidays and are taken down after Sukkot. Obviously, the need to eat in one of these structures is a problem for working people at lunchtime (and for some, like apartment-dwellers, at all times). A business who wanted to show "sensitivity" to Jewish citizens could allow a local synagogue or whatnot to erect a small sukkah (booth) on the business's property during the holiday, for the convenience of those who need a place to fulfill the mitzvah. Unfortunately, Sukkot falls in the autumn, in late September or October. So it's never going to be the Jewish "answer" to Christmas. Fortunately, there is an obscure connection between Hanukkah and Sukkot. So I can end this rumination on a positive note that looks forward to the resolution of all difficulties. The connection is both historical and spiritual. The historical connection revolves around the origins of Hanukkah. Why is Hanukkah an eight-day festival? Eight is a strange number, rarely cropping up in Jewish contexts; our preferred number for holidays is seven. The Sabbath comes around every seven days; Passover lasts seven days; after Passover are seven weeks of the counting of the Omer until Pentecost; and Sukkot is seven days. Why is Hanukkah eight days? "Eight" in a Jewish context frequently means "seven plus one." And, interestingly enough, there is a festival that is "seven plus one" days: Sukkot is followed immediately by Shemini Atzeret ("Eighth Day of Assembly" or "Conclusive Eighth Day"), a holiday that along with Sukkot is part of the "Season of Joy" but that is a distinct holiday in its own right. Outside the Land of Israel, the major holidays (other than the Sabbath and the Day of Atonement) are doubled; thus we have two Passover Seders and two days of Pentecost where in the Land of Israel there is only one Seder and one day of Pentecost. Shemini Atzeret is likewise doubled, but also split; the holiday is not only the conclusion to the Sukkot season but also the conclusion of the cycle of reading the complete text of the Pentateuch over the course of a year, and in the Diaspora the two aspects of the holiday are split into two days: Shemini Atzeret and then Simchat Torah ("Rejoicing in the Torah"), and most Americans, if they have heard of either, have only heard of the latter. So Sukkot plus Shemini Atzeret is an eight-day festival. And the fact that Hanukkah is the only other eight-day holiday is probably not a coincidence. The Sukkot holiday was probably not celebrated on time as a consequence of the Hasmonean rebellion and the defilement of the Temple, and some historians think it is likely that the first Hanukkah was a belated celebration of Sukkot, out of season; and the original miracle of Hanukkah the fact that the rains came even though Sukkot was celebrated belatedly (among other things, Sukkot, like Passover and Pentecost, is an agricultural festival, and includes a prayer for rain). But there is a more profound spiritual connection. Each of the minor holidays in Judaism - Purim, Hanukkah and the Ninth of Av - has a spiritual connection with a major festival. Passover is connected to Purim, both directly and ironically. (Directly: both celebrate liberation from a tyrant; ironically: in Passover the Divine manifests His power by intervening overtly and blatantly in history, while in Purim the Divine is hidden, and His hand can only be discerned after the fact.) Shavuot (Pentecost) is connected to the Ninth of Av, but only ironically. (Pentecost recalls receiving God's Torah at God's Mountain, Sinai, while the Ninth of Av mourns the destruction of God's Temple at God's other Mountain, Moriah. Moreover, the sin of the Golden Calf, which takes place at Sinai, is traditionally said to have taken place on the Ninth of Av. And there is a midrash which interprets the phrase that the Israelites stood "under the mountain" to mean that God held the mountain over their heads, saying, "if you do not accept the Law, then this mountain will be your grave." There are a number of suggestive connections between the theophany at Sinai and the "negative theophany" of the destruction of the Temple.) And Sukkot is connected with Hanukkah, directly. Hanukkah is a celebration of the rededication of the Temple. While this took place in "historic time" it echoes the hope of a rebuilding that takes place outside of or at the end of historic time, the hope that predominates on Sukkot. Hanukkah, rather than being mildly disparaged (as it appears to have been by the rabbis) for being a human-centered holiday, can be exalted as a human pre-enactment of an anticipated Divine action. Perhaps, then, there is a better way for me, and for other Jews, to approach Hanukkah. Rather than fret about the proximity to Christmas, and react by trying either to downplay Christmas or to copy it or simply to move in on its "turf," we should educate ourselves and other people about Hanukkah's spiritual and historical connection with the Jewish holiday that is most consonant with the spirit of Christmas. Perhaps, by connecting it with Sukkot, we'll be able to get away from the material distractions of the season and discover the "true spirit" of Hanukkah, as so many believing Christians are always trying to find their way back to the "true spirit" of Christmas. Or, if that doesn't work, just make a lot of good food and share it around. That always goes down well. In any event, Merry a-week-until Christmas everyone. And good Shabbos. Tuesday, December 07, 2004
My other cultural excursion was to the newly expanded, renovated and reopened Museum of Modern Art. I've never been a big MOMA fan; the place is cold and forbidding and too full of itself. But they have some wonderful things in the collection, and I really wanted to see what the renovation amounted to. There's been a lot of good stuff written already about the MOMA renovation; see, for example, Jed Perl's review in The New Republic. I'm sure I won't surpass their efforts, or even come close. Hopefully my own personal impressions are not empty of interest. First: the building is beautiful, at least on the inside, if no less chilly (emotionally) than it was before. It reminded me a great deal of the office of the firm where I used to work, which was designed by Steven Holl about fifteen years ago. But on the outside, at least on 54th street, the building presents about as brutal a front as possible. Which is, at least, honest in its high modernist way: modernist architecture never did give a damn what it did to the city around it, so presenting a façade of unadorned corrugated steel half a block long is in its way very traditional. But it's no less hideous and appalling for that. Next: the use of space. It's strange. The second and sixth floors appear to be almost empty. The sixth floor especially is like a warehouse, a vast open space with only a handful of artworks hanging along the walls. I understand that the new museum wanted space to display monumental works, but the effect is weird. You no longer feel, for one thing, like you are in New York, nor like you are in a museum. Monumental works need an appropriate context for their size to play against. But these vast, roofed spaces don't provide that context, so the works either look simply oversized or, strangely, diminished. Or, in the case of Monet's waterlilies (which I never really liked that much, to tell the truth), both. I tried to hit pretty much every gallery, at least briefly. The most pleasant surprise was the gallery of works on paper: lots of really lovely pieces from the whole history of modern art, and because most are of modest size and relatively muted color you really can cram a room full of stuff without making the viewer's eyes water. I could spend a lot of time wandering through these rooms, stopping to look at a Klee or a Gorky that particularly grabs me. Among the contemporary art, which occupies a surprising amount of space, I found very little to like, and, even more so, little sense of order. MOMA's famous "story" about modern art is about the purification of aesthetic principles; modern art begins with a questioning of academic conventions, and proceeds to break down more and more fundamental aspects of a particular art form, questioning perspective, illusionistic color, and so forth. The "march of styles" from impressionism through cubism and fauvism to an ultimate apotheosis in abstract expressionism is, according to the "story", the tangible result of a series of experiments whose aim is to reveal the underlying principles of aesthetic experience. Needless to say, art since abstract expressionism doesn't fit this narrative at all, and since the late 1950s MOMA has been engaged in "picking winners" rather than making sense of the history of modern art. Of course, much modern art never fit the "story" as articulated here, and MOMA has always paid attention to artists - Georgia O'Keefe, for example, or Paul Klee - whose work is not part of the "march of styles" towards abstraction. But while MOMA was instrumental in crowning such princes of the postwar art world as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, they have never (to my mind at least) been persuasive in defending them on aesthetic grounds. And as we come down to contemporary art, there is no coherence at all. What the art world sees in a clown like Matthew Barney I have no idea; the piece MOMA has selected for display is both ugly and stupid, but it is also indistinguishable from any number of other pieces of conceptual dreck on display. I should emphasize, as an aside, that I'm not absolutely averse to conceptual art. Conceptual art is properly understood not as painting or sculture but as theater; imagine a theatrical piece in which set design and the written program must carry all the aesthetic freight, with no script or actors to carry the main load. One "installation artist" I like: Ilya Kabakov. I've seen two works of his, one, "The Bridge", was exhibited in the 1990s at MOMA, and the other, "Treatment with Memories", at the Whitney Biennial. Both had the requisite theatricality and narrative quality; both had a quirkiness and particularity that this sort of art needs; and, while each was making a "statement" of sorts (which this sort of art inevitably does), that "statement" was neither trite nor ugly and propagandistic, as is almost universally the case with conceptual art of this sort. So my problem is not so much that you can't do this sort of thing well, as that almost nobody does, and when it's bad it's awful. And also that this sort of theater is no substitute for painting and sculpture, aesthetically. In any event, I was unimpressed by the contemporary art on display; probably the piece I liked best was a sculpture that consisted of a series of mirrored-glass bottles of varying shape placed in a mirrored box, which one viewed through a one-way mirror. The multiplicity of reflections regressing to infinity in all directions produced an effect rather like looking at an Escher print. I won't say it was a profound experience, but I enjoyed it, and I could actually spend time looking at it, which is more than I can say of much of the work on display on these galleries. But I didn't have a much better time wandering through the galleries devoted to post-1950s art. There are individual artists I appreciated - Chuck Close, for example, or Helen Frankenthaler - but most of what I saw was ugly or boring, and that includes "masterpieces" like Rauschenberg's bed or Twombly's monumental scribbles. I looked at these works and tried to remember what was important about them, because I didn't get it from direct experience. The great Ab Ex masterpieces - Rothko, Pollack, Newmann, Stills - meanwhile, seemed diminished by being treated as merely part of a series of art movements of, apparently, equal significance. These are paintings that you can install in a temple, that practically announce that they must be installed in a temple to be properly appreciated. Why not do so? It's not like MOMA doesn't have the space. I saved the heart of the collection for last. But here, too, I was surprised by my reactions. The room that stunned me most, aesthetically, was one that was rather "off track" in terms of the MOMA narrative: a room that opened with two early Kandinskys, bursting with the deep yet bright blues and reds of Russian box painting; followed by four additional tall thin works by Kandinsky that formed a series, full of energy, pulling your eye this way and that; then a lurid and beautiful painting by Kirchner; a portrait by Kokoschka; three pieces by Egon Schiele; a gorgeous work by Klimt; I forget what else. This gallery, displaying the best that Germany and Austria (and refugees thereto from points farther east) could do in the decade prior to World War I, delivered such a concentrated dose of sheer pleasure - and diverse pleasure; these artists have radically different styles and emotional tones - that I realized how much I'd been missing elsewhere in the museum. And that includes in the heart of the permanent collection on the fifth floor; the endless procession of Picassos was somehow ennervating by comparison. There's something wrong with looking at art as an experiment done for its own sake. Failed experiments are just that: failures. There were modernists who never lost sight of the centrality of aesthetic experience in art, and there were those who went so far as to repudiate the very idea of the aesthetic. The latter have been ascendant for some time now. Modernism should never have been about novelty for novelty's sake; it should have been about finding new ways to do what art is supposed to do. Matisse, Braque, Klimt, Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Gorky, Rothko: in radically different ways, each of these artists pursued an idea of modern art that had an aesthetic objective. Too many other artists, and entire movements, came to art with other objectives entirely. The new MOMA is a beautiful space for exploring modern art; it is, itself, a monument to what modernism can achieve, aesthetically. I hope that MOMA's curators take that achievement to heart. MOMA's "story" was a good thing, if, like all good things, limited. They should come up with a new story, one that they believe, and build the institution around it, rather than come up with extra-aesthetic justifications for whatever rut the art world found itself in at a given point in history. If the 1950s produced greater art than the 1970s, give the 1950s more gallery space and don't apologize. So while I've been down for the count mostly, I have managed to take in a little bit of culture. The wife and I, along with a stable-full of my in-laws, actually managed to get out to see a movie: Sideways, the new film from Alexander Payne. I've liked Payne since I saw his first film, Citizen Ruth, a wicked satire of the abortion wars. (The satire of the anti-abortion side is both more cutting and, I think, more affectionate; Payne didn't seem to find the pro-abortion folks nearly as interesting.) His next film, Election, is one of the funniest movies of the 1990s. I skipped About Schmidt, basically because I didn't think I'd like it and I didn't want to break Payne's streak. But I went to see Sideways, and I'm happy to say that, with me, his streak is unbroken. Sideways isn't satiric in the manner of Payne's first two films; only one scene - when Miles, the depressed wine-nerd who is the focus of the film, has to sneak into a house to retrieve a wallet his buddy, Jack, has left behind - reminded me of the over-the-top zaniness of Election. Instead, it reaches for more emotional depth. And it achieves it, along with an enormous sympathy for these characters, in spite of two characteristics retained from earlier Payne films: Payne's stories center on basically unattractive and failed characters and exhibit an unflinching realism about them. I'll give you an idea of what I mean by unattractive and failed characters. The two men at the center of Sideways are Miles and Jack. Miles is an unpublished novelist, mired in depression since his divorce. Jack is a washed-up former soap opera star about to be married (Miles' first meeting with Jack's in-laws-to-be is a masterpiece of terse satire). Miles is a wine nerd and is going to take Jack on a tour of Santa Barbara wine country as sort of bachelor's weekend. But Jack is quickly bored by wine-nerdity; what he wants is a last casual fling, a last week of freedom, as he puts it. And he's determined to drag Miles along with him - or at least not have Miles drag him down. Like I said, these are pretty unappealing characters. Miles really is a hopeless depressive. But he's also spineless. When Jack does put the moves on Stephanie, a pourer at one of the wineries (neglecting to mention, of course, his impending marriage), Miles does nothing to warn the woman of the real situation. Nor does he tell her waitress friend, Maya, who is clearly interested in Miles. In another movie, that moral lapse wouldn't matter much, wouldn't even be noticed; or the film would use it as a metaphor for some larger purported cultural failure (that, it seems, is the point of Mike Nichols' new film, Closer, which I don't intend to see). Sideways is too smart, and too honest for that. So we see Jack trying to convince himself that maybe he doesn't want to get married, the better to convince Stephanie that he really loves her, and that she should therefore surrender herself to him the more fully. And we see Miles watching this deception, disgusted with Jack but somehow blind to his own complicity. Until he accidentally lets slip the truth to Maya, and she reacts with fury. Like I said, these are not appealing characters. Their flaws are large, and Payne is brutally honest about those flaws - and about their own lack of awareness of their depth. It does not, for example, occur to Stephanie that it's odd for a man to profess such love after only hours of acquaintance and a couple of turns in bed. But then, she seems equally oblivious to the needs of her young daughter, who we see shunted off to grandma at one point and, at another, awakened at night by her mother's partying with Jack and Miles. Nor does even Maya react in any profound way to Stephanie's daughter's appearance in the night. But the director knows what he's doing. These people may be blind, but he can see, and can show us - without telling us what to think about it, letting us either get ahead of the characters morally or, as likely, fall behind them. I wonder how many members of the audience were disgusted by Miles' moral cowardice, or even by Jack's thoughtless lechery, until Maya points out just how awful it is. And yet, somehow, Payne never loses our sympathy for these pathetic people. The one false note in the movie is the ending which, while not redemptive, offers hope for poor, hopeless Miles. And, frankly, he's done nothing to deserve that hope, nor is it "realistic" that he would get another chance after screwing up as badly as he did. (Nor is it likely that his novel, as described, is remotely readable. But that's another story.) But I'm glad Payne gave us that undeserved ray of hope to light our way out of the theater, because by that point I'd come to care about Miles, and, for that matter, about Jack. How, precisely, he achieved that sympathy I'm not sure. But it's what convinces me that Payne is a major artist, and Sideways a serious and worthwhile movie. Finally, a small aside, also and entirely positive. There's a danger with a movie like Sideways that trades in nerdishness about some particular field of knowledge (in this case, wine) that the movie (or play, or novel, or what-have-you) will over-extend the metaphor. That, in this case, wine, will come to stand for all of life. Melville, perhaps, gave all nerds license to treat their obsession as art-worthy, but usually it isn't, and even serious intellectual digressions, to say nothing of nerdy obsessions, can badly clutter and even hobble a work of art. (See, for example, many of the plays of Tom Stoppard, or Michael Frayn.) Payne, thankfully, steers clear of this danger. Wine is just something that Miles, and Maya, and to a lesser degree Stephanie, are nerdy about. Only in one scene does Payne make wine into an explicit and extended metaphor - but this is a scene between Miles and Maya when he, an almost pathologic introvert and a wine nerd, understandably uses wine to describe himself since that is less painful than being direct, and she responds in kind. It's a lovely and painful scene, and (granting a bit of artistic license for the actual language) entirely realistic on an emotional level. I was very close friends for a while with a man rather like Miles - more successful, and not a moral coward, but no less pathologically introverted, no less depressed, no less a nerd, no less given to bizarre emotional outbursts when his limited mechanisms for coping with reality were overwhelmed. He "dumped" me after several years of friendship, declaring that I had not been a good enough friend to him for years. I understand, through the grape vine, that since our "breakup" he moved out of his rathole apartment (finally), met a woman (finally), and actually married her, and is, to all appearances, finally happy. I surely hope so. And perhaps that's another reason I was glad of that (undeserved) ray of hope at the end of Sideways. Well, I'm still yorking stuff up, but it's no longer green. So I guess I can blog again. The cover story of the latest Economist is about the dollar, the trade deficit, and the coming global economic apocalypse. Message from The Economist: Americans need to cut the budget deficit or the world economy is doomed. Now, I'm nervous about the dollar. And about the world economy. But I find it very hard to get overly excited about America's budget deficit. The fact is, the US is about in the middle of industrialized countries in terms of public finance. Here are three key numbers: government consumption as a percentage of GDP, the deficit (or surplus) as a percentage of GDP, and overall public debt as a percentage of GDP. The first number gives you some measure of how much of a drag the government is on the economy. I presume that government spending is, in general, less productive than private spending, and how that spending is financed is secondary to the actual amount being spent (deficits are just taxes on future earnings). The third number gives you some measure of the burden of past spending; financing and paying off that public debt is the tax on current and future earnings I was talking about. And the second number gives you some measure of how fast that burden is growing. How does the US stack up against the rest of the G-7 on these measures? Like I said: we're in the middle somewhere. Country...........Gov't Spending/GDP.........Budget Balance...............Public Debt/GDP Canada.....................19.02%...........................0.70% surplus........................77.00% France......................24.28%..........................4.10% deficit...........................69.10% Germany..................19.70%...........................4.00% deficit..........................63.90% Italy..........................19.20%...........................2.30% deficit........................106.67% Japan........................17.50%...........................7.42% deficit.........................154.62% UK.............................20.50%..........................3.10% deficit...........................51.40% USA...........................18.72%...........................3.46% deficit..........................62.43% Mean.........................19.85%...........................3.38% deficit..........................83.59% Median.....................19.20%...........................3.46% deficit..........................69.10% (Numbers are from The Economist and are from 2003.) Our budget deficit is almost exactly average, slightly above the mean and exactly at the median. Our total public debt and our total government spending are below both the mean and the median. So to me, frankly, it doesn't look like America is out of line in terms of its public finance. Now, the Economist doesn't specify but I suspect none of the numbers above include unfunded liabilities that are off-budget - i.e., entitlements. But that probably makes America look better by comparison, not worse; our demographics look better than Europe's or Japan's. The other thing to recall is that America spends vastly more on defense as a percentage of our GDP than any other G-7 country (in total dollars, of course, the comparison is even more extreme). If America spent as little on defense as Canada did, our budget would be very nearly in the same state as Canada's - we wouldn't quite be in surplus, but we'd be close to balanced. Of course, defense spending is an economic drag like other government spending, in some ways more so (if the government builds bridges or roads or buildings, these at least can be used productively). But current US defense spending, while below even the lowest levels of the Cold War era, is somewhat elevated due to the War on Terror, a (presumably) temporary condition. If the US has a serious public finance problem, what about Europe, where France and Germany each have higher deficits, higher public debts, higher government spending, and much lower defense outlays? And if the deficit is the cause of the dollar's fall, why is the dollar falling against the Euro, given that public finance is arguably in worse shape in Europe than it is here? Of course, there's a key variable I left out of the above: the percentage of public debt that is externally financed. The United States, unlike the countries of Europe and Asia, finances the majority of its large debt overseas. Look at Japan, for instance. Japan has been running obscene deficits for years, and has a public debt so high that the government is, effectively, bankrupt. But this debt is financed almost entirely domestically, by private Japanese savings. The Japanese people, in effect, owe this money to themselves. Their public finance is a mess, and could result in political unrest if the government tried to solve its problem by a massive redistribution of wealth. But that redistribution would be entirely within Japan, so it doesn't really implicate Japan's exchange rate. So why is so much of America's debt financed externally? Well, there are two schools of thought about this. The one argues that America over-consumes and under-saves. We therefore run a trade deficit and a capital-account surplus: we buy goods from overseas and we borrow money from overseas to pay for those goods. In effect, this argument starts with the trade deficit, and says that the capital-account surplus is the inevitable consequence, as foreigners have nothing else to do with their dollars but buy American securities, primarily government debt. The other argument starts with the capital-account surplus. It says that America has the most efficient developed economy in the world, consistently delivering high returns on investment, and therefore attracts more return-seeking capital than we can generate domestically. Just as a trade deficit necessarily implies a capital-account surplus, the opposite is also true; in this account, foreign buying of American securities drives down the cost to Americans of financing our consumption, and props up the value of the dollar, hence producing a trade deficit. The first argument clearly implies that America has a problem - under-saving and over-consumption - that needs to be fixed. The latter argument implies that somebody else has a problem - the imbalance in the global economy is caused by relative American success, by our extremely efficient capital markets, and not by our failure. How do we know which story is right? Well, let's start with some axioms. Specifically, let's assume that markets basically know what they are doing, and that these sorts of imbalances would self-correct if one or another government didn't do something to intervene in the market. That's not 100% true - markets aren't infallible, they're just smarter, on average, than the overwhelming majority of individual market participants - but it's close enough to true for my purposes. So if Americans are over-consuming and under-saving, there must be a reason. Or, conversely, if other countries are over-investing in America, ballooning our capital-account surplus, there must be a reason for that, too. And in each case, the reason must be government intervention. As it happens, there are government culprits to point to for both sides of the argument. In the second half of the 1990s, the US ran large trade deficits, the American savings rate plummetted, and yet the dollar was very strong. Why? Foreign money fled to the US from other currencies that were collapsing because of their own domestic economic problems; the American economy was growing rapidly and productivity growth was also high, producing very high returns on invested capital; and American interest rates were globally competitive. The "American success" explanation for the trade deficit was the most logical one. Now, we're still running large trade deficits, and the dollar is falling, especially against the Euro. Why? American growth is still reasonably strong, certainly compared with much of the industrialized world, and productivity growth is notably high, which is the primary driver of returns on invested capital. But American interest rates are very low. Short-term rates are, frankly, alarmingly low considering how quickly the economy has been growing, how the dollar has been falling, and how commodity prices have risen. But long-term rates are very low as well. These low rates make it very cheap for Americans to consume, and we sure are consuming; we just went through the first recession in memory where savings rates didn't rise and household debt didn't fall. The story of the 1990s - that America is doing great and that's why money is rushing to the country - no longer adequately fits the facts. Something else, besides magnificent economic performance, is keeping our trade deficit up: artificially low interest rates. But what's keeping interest rates so low? Alan Greenspan controls the short-term rate, and he's consistently underplayed the threat of inflation and emphasized the softness of the economy. He may well be right about the economy, but commodity prices seem to be saying something else about inflation - not to mention that we have a national housing bubble, and asset-price inflation is not irrelevant. But long-term rates are set by bond-buyers. And these, as noted, are mostly overseas. Specifically: the governments of China and Japan have been consistent and aggressive buyers of American government debt. Why are they buying American government debt? Both of these countries operate quasi-mercantilist economies. Their economies are overwhelmingly driven by export industries, and they try to consistently run trade surplusses (and, hence, capital-account deficits). When their economies stall - as Japan's has been stalled for years, though it now seems to be coming out of its slump a bit - they are more inclined to stimulate demand abroad by purchasing foreign debt, holding down foreign interest rates, than to stimulate it at home. China, specifically, keeps its currency pegged to the dollar. Based on fundamentals, the Chinese currency should rise against the dollar. To defend the peg, the Chinese government must purchase American government debt. Japan, then, to defend its competitive position vis-a-vis China, must also purchase American debt, lest the Yen rise dramatically, pricing Japanese goods out of the American market. So what's happening is that the Asian countries are over-buying American debt, artificially holding down American interest rates and stimulating American borrowing and consumption, and hence the trade deficit. This, in turn, makes Euro-denominated assets much more attractive, because prevailing interest rates in Europe are higher. Thus the dramatic rise in the Euro, which threatens Europe's economies by pricing their goods out of the market. The position of the Bush Administration is, effectively, that the Asians have got to stop this game, but that we're not in much of a rush to make them stop because the Europeans, ultimately, get hurt worse by these shenanigans than we do. (We get cheap Asian imports and cheap mortgages; the Europeans get high unemployment and cheap vacations in the US, further stimulating the US economy.) But the Economist is ultimately right that the consequences, if the game goes on too long, could be very negative for the US as well as for the world economy. A sharp rise in American interest rates would be economically devastating. But if rates are being held artificially low, that's what we'll eventually get. Even worse would be a catastrophic drop in the value of the dollar, which could jolt confidence in America around the world and threaten the dollar's status as the reserve currency. (Though I think the Economist implies a higher likelihood for that scenario than is the case.) So what can we do? There are, broadly, four things we could do. First, we could attempt to end the imbalance by fiat. Warren Buffet has called for setting a quota on the total dollar amount of imports, equal to the total dollar amount of exports. This would legislate an end to the trade deficit. It would also absolutely wreck the US and world economies. Buffet is a smart investor, but his economic advice has been frequently lousy. My own inclination is to believe that Buffet gauges the health of the economy by whether he sees lots of investment opportunities. Given that he's a value investor, looking for undervalued securities, this is almost the opposite of the truth. Buffet's reputation was made in the 1970s, when stocks were doing poorly, business confidence was low, and there were lots of inefficiencies that he could exploit. The fact that Buffet is frustrated means a lot to me as an investor; it means there probably aren't a lot of good investment opportunities, and that low returns are more likely than high ones going forward. But that doesn't mean he's going to give good advice on how to run the economy as a whole. Second, we could argue with the governments of China and Japan to let their currencies rise more against the dollar. We're trying that right now, and we can keep trying it. These countries may be convinced that they are having they best of the mercantilist game they are playing; they are saving a lot, and investing that money, so they probably figure they are getting wealthier and wealthier - plus, by virtue of the fact that they own so much American government debt, they probably figure they've gained political influence over us as well. We've got to convince them that the end of the game is ugly for them, too: their savings will be wiped out by a catastrophic fall in the dollar, and they won't have a developed internal market to fall back on when global trade drops, so when it does their unemployment rates will go through the roof. Third, Alan Greenspan could raise interest rates. Little could do more to shore up the dollar short-term than a rise in short rates. That would also cool down the American economy and hence reduce the trade deficit. I happen to think interest rates are too low. But I will point out that this sort of logic ultimately ends in cutting off your head to cure a headache. Our primary economic objective, after all, is to achieve robust real growth over the long haul. We can always reduce the trade deficit simply by slowing the economy. But that's not what we want to do. I think short rates are too low because commodity prices are high and the dollar is falling, not because Americans are getting too rich and are spending their money on imported toys. Fourth, we can try to shift other government policies such that they encourage savings and discourage consumption. For example: America has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, and is one of the few industrialized countries not to have a consumption tax such as a VAT. Relative to many other industrialized countries, our tax system is somewhat more biased towards consumption and against savings and investment. The Bush Administration's tax bills have generally been oriented towards redressing that balance by cutting taxes on earned and especially unearned income. But they have also made the tax code more complex and hence less efficient. And I wonder whether it makes sense to be cutting taxes on, say, dividend income, which is frequently spent by the retirees who favor income-producing securities, rather than eliminating the corporate income tax and creating incentives to save income rather than consume it. Bush is talking a big game about tax reform in this term. He's hinted that he's going to bring on yet another economic team, which I hope is true; Snow has not been impressive. I hope he's serious, and I hope he's serious about the right kind of reform. The right kind of reform would not only address the inefficiencies and perverse incentives in the tax code, and would not only keep the overall level of taxation at internationally competitive levels, but would also start to address the American savings deficit that is an important cause of the current global economic imbalances. Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Had a lovely Thanksgiving at my in-laws', thank-you very much. Except that I contracted some flu-like illness out from under which I am still digging. Expect to resume blogging around the same time I stop yorking up green goo. |