Arrogant patriotism

From WSJ Best of the Web:

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Rochelle Reed, an editor at the Tribune of San Luis Obispo, Calif., published an essay recently about her son's decision to join the Army. "This was definitely not the way things were supposed to turn out," Mrs. Reed writes:

Never in a million years did I imagine my son would join the Army. Nor did Evan. In high school, he'd hang up on recruiters who called the house. He'd blurt, "Get away from me!" to the ones who trawled the local hangouts. Our home was liberal Democrat and anti-war and now, at 21, he was a Michael Moore fan. The night before he left, he spent his time reading "Stupid White Men." . . .

When I tell people that Evan has joined the Army, their reactions are almost always the same: their faces freeze, they pause way too long, and then they say, "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry for you." I hang my head and look mournful, accepting their sympathy for the worry that lives in me. But as it dawns on them that Evan wasn't drafted, as Vietnam still clings to my generation, their expressions become quizzical, then disbelieving. I know what they're thinking: Why in the world would any kid in his right mind choose to enlist when we're in the middle of a war? I begin telling them the story, desperate to assure them it wasn't arrogant patriotism or murderous blood lust that convinced him to join. What finally hooked him was a recruiter's comment that if he thought the country's role in Iraq was so screwed up, he should try to fix it.

Mrs. Reed's piece is sincere and candid, and our purpose in noting it is not to pick on her. But it is quite a window she provides into the "liberal Democrat and antiwar" subculture of which she is a part. Because of her family's politics, "never in a million years" did she think her son would join the military. The people she knows see his decision as a cause for sorrow, not pride. Mrs. Reed has to talk them out of the assumption that only "arrogant patriotism" (the adjective itself is telling) or "murderous bloodlust" would motivate someone to serve his country, that no "kid in his right mind" would do so.

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You have to wonder if there might be a larger cultural meaning to these attitudes. Giambattista Vico, an Italian who wrote in the early 18th century, had a cyclical theory of how civilizations rise and then eventually become decadent and fall. He lived at a time when educated people at least were highly enthusiastic about the newly dawning Enlightenment, and looked forward to what the rise of reason and science portended for human progress. Vico offered a caution to that enthusiasm, arguing that there was a worm in the Enlightenment apple, which was that reason might eventually become destructively skeptical and critical. If that happened, he wrote, reason might unravel society by undermining and debunking the religious faith, traditions, and other irrational elements that social cohesion depends on. It's like exposing how the magician performs his tricks; once it's done, you can never go back to believing in the magic. Once the irrational bases of social cohesion lose their force, people naturally focus on pursuing their own individual goals, and become unwilling to sacrifice those for a whole that they now view as an arbitrary and artificial construction. The society subsequently falls to external enemies, because it has lost the will to defend itself militarily. The society may be wealthy in material terms, but it has become morally decadent.

The details of Vico's scenario are often silly and wrong, but it's hard to read it without thinking about the corrosive skepticism that characterize our intellectual class and our media. When you talk about religious faith, patriotism, and national traditions, you enumerate those things that today's liberals specifically detest. There are historical reasons for that, and some of those are good reasons. But if Vico was right, there is such a thing as throwing out the baby with the bath water. What do we imagine holds a society together, especially under duress? Can the modern welfare state cohere purely on the basis of its social contract, the redistribution and flow of benefits between groups? Of course not. Well, what, then? The phony war we see lately being trumped up between science and religion is an especially bad idea, completely unnecessary and therefore supremely stupid. What every post-enlightenment society should be looking for are ways to facilitate the coexistence of scientific reason and the traditional, irrational bases of social cohesion. The alternative could be fabulous science, brilliantly incisive critical philosophy, and no country.

Northern and Western Europe appears to be the test case, where militaries have already been vastly reduced or disbanded, non-Muslim religion has been delegitimized, and an intensive program has been underway to suppress the traditional bases of sentiments of national identity. Looking at that package, it seems to be lacking only the suicide note.

Byron

The Science Whore

Climate is too complex for accurate predictions by Jim Giles published in New Scientist:

...climate policies will necessarily be made in the face of deep, irreducible uncertainties...research dollars invested in ever more sophisticated climate models offer very little marginal benefit to decision makers.

Quick, call Ripley. Not. Only someone who has never worked with prediction models could possibly take seriously these global warming predictions of temperatures decades out and within a few degrees. It's completely ludicrous. The number of arbitrary assumptions being made in those models are beyond calculation. I remember when one of the space probes first found multiple rings around Uranus, and one question raised was how they interacted. I asked a mathematician friend who did work in astrophysics, and he just laughed: "We have the math for two rings, at three it gets very hard, after that, forget it." (The guy was from India, brilliant, with a wonderful laugh. Once he got a contract from the Defense Department to find a data analysis scheme for something he couldn't tell me about. They gave him a fat contract based on the time their quantitative people thought it would take, which was something like six months. He solved it in two days, and had an enormous laugh about that.)

Global climate change is vastly more complex than the interaction of a few planetary rings -- systems in outer space are relatively simple and isolated, which is why astronomy was the first successful science. In climate systems the number of important causal variables is unknown, but surely very large. Good theories would have to specify all the important ones -- and their interactions! And you'd also have to have good measurement of them. In fact, the theories are primitive, with little agreement even about which variables are most important of the ones that are known -- thus, for example, all the dispute about the influence of the Sun.

(Predicting climate change resembles the simpler case of stock market prediction, which has absorbed tons of computer time at the hands of Ivy League math and physics Ph.D.'s that are hired as Wall Street quants. The return on that investment has been essentially zero. As with climate, you can back-test your models and get them to pretty well fit the old data. It's the data for tomorrow and the next day that turn out to be the problem. "There are more things In heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy." Is it amazing that the enormous sub-prime mess managed to sneak up on all these gurus? No, it's not amazing at all.)

What we have in the global warming area is the same combination that has pretty well destroyed the social sciences: (1) Strong ideological agendas and (2) weak, non-experimental science. It's an awful mix, especially for science, which ends up whoring for both sides. The final stage is when the science whore is recognized as too weak to be of value to anyone; then she gets kicked into the gutter, and it becomes a contest of naked political agendas. Better to recognize the nature of the controversy at a much earlier point, and leave science out of it.

Byron

French view

The excerpt below is from an essay by French philosopher Andre Glucksmann. It's a long but interesting read, and one can hope it, along with the election of Sarkozy, signifies something about changing French attitudes about the threat of terrorism.

But Glucksmann can't help making a French intellectual's typical mistake, which is to portray Islamist terror as nihilistic, an expression of "the will to nothingness." (The idea of pointless annihilation never ceases to have great romantic appeal to French intellectuals.) In fact, Islamist terror is highly purposeful, the point of the spear, in the service of a vision of society that was set out with great specificity in the 7th century. These people have a religiously-fueled program to change the world in particular ways, and terror is just one part of a larger program to achieve that goal. To label it 'fanaticism' is to miss the point, which is that it has a point.

What we are being assaulted by is not madness, but a modern form of tribal warfare. Tribal membership is not a matter of the boundaries of nation states, and those boundaries are of little consequence or interest. The goal of tribal war is generally not to exterminate the other, but to turn him into a subjugated tributary. Islam translates as 'submission to the will of Allah,' and his tribe is charged with enforcing his will among all infidel tribes. This mission from God is about as far from a nihilistic will to nothingness as it's possible to get. If that's what it was, these folks would be blowing themselves up in their own bedrooms in despair. Far from being in despair, they're energized with sanctified purpose. This is ultimately a contest of moral resources, not military hardware.

Byron

Maybe one day, we will view the last century with nostalgia, even if it was dealt Auschwitz and Hiroshima. For today’s terrorism strives to mix these two ingredients into new cocktails of horror. During the cold war, the threat to man was dual: one, between two blocs, involved reciprocal annihilation; the other, terrorist, confined the savage extermination of civilian populations to the interior of each camp. Today, global terrorism eliminates geostrategic borders and traditional taboos. The last seconds of the condemned of Manhattan, of Atocha, and of the London Underground sent us two messages: “Here abandon all hope,” the Dantesque injunction carried by a bomb that wipes the slate clean; and “Here there is no reason why,” the nihilist gospel of SS officers. Hiroshima signified the technical possibility of a desert that approaches closer and closer to the absolute; Auschwitz represented the deliberate and lucid pursuit of total annihilation. The conjunction of these two forms of the will to nothingness looms in the black holes of modern hatred... The various forms of racism, chauvinism, fanaticism, and the apparent rebirth of an aggression that was thought to be a thing of the past surprise us. Should we not be surprised at our surprise? The understandable but wrongheaded choice to sleep peacefully, whatever the price, puts us all in jeopardy.

Enemies

Some wisdom courtesy of "the official website for Revolution newspaper, voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA," a publication that does not pretend to Support the Troops. My enemy's enemy, yada yada.

Islamic fundamentalism is a reactionary force. Like other brands of religious literalism, it is a program full of oppressive and outmoded content: patriarchy, bigotry, religious warfare and the all-round promotion of superstition and ignorance.

But the U.S. is the far, far more aggressive, and dangerous reactionary force in the world. And those who live inside the U.S. have the particular responsibility to oppose this power. What is needed right now, on campuses and around the country (and the world) is to bring forward a movement, and critical thinking that opposes the crimes of U.S. imperialism, and, in the process, brings forward a whole different alternative—both in the imperialist countries and in the nations oppressed by imperialism.

Some things never change.

When it comes to picking sides, the hard Leftists never have a doubt about where the greater evil is to be found. They operated the same way in the 1930s, and (oops!) ended up playing a key role in bringing Hitler to power. He showed his gratitude by promptly killing every one of them he could lay hands on. They think it would be different this time, which would seem to be a clear case of "superstition and ignorance." Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing and expecting a different result, but I'm trying to be conciliatory and nonjudgmental here. In any case, we can plainly see the kind of impressive progress in political analysis that has occurred among these "progressives" during the past 75 years.

These folks claim to wholeheartedly accept Darwin's account of evolution by natural selection, but you get the feeling that they really haven't quite grasped the basic idea, which is that the wrong kind of environment gets you killed off. Hitler provided the wrong kind of environment for leftists, and so would the Islamists. Is this rocket surgery? Well, yes, if you happen to be a Marxist zombie. Marxist zombies can only believe Marxist scripture, which portrays history as a necessary unfolding of events, driven by an internal logic that makes the triumph of Communism inevitable. They believe that nonsense even after watching history collapse the whole project into a stinking heap, a severe test of Marxist faith indeed. Sorry, but this just looks like another helping of "superstition and ignorance" to me. These would-be vanguard thinkers may have more in common with the Islamists than even they realize.

Byron