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July 31, 2007

Environmentalism is not a religion (but it's still bad)

There's a meme that circulates among right-wingish folk that attempts to score polemical points by alleging that environmentalism is a form of religion. I've recently established my own anti-environmentalist credentials by objecting to the nihilist strain in environmentalism, so I'd now like to take this opportunity to explain why I think that the "religion" accusation is misguided.

Let's start with a rough (but fairly accurate) definition: A religion is a belief-system affirming the existence of a supernatural agent or agents. Now with the exception of "Gaia"-worshippers, if there really are any of these, environmentalism does not posit the existence of any supernatural agents. It is a manifestly naturalistic philosophy, concerned with the status of the natural world (for better or for worse). This is my chief objection. Perhaps there are ways in which environmentalism is like religion. But it is not literally a religion, and this has important implications.

Consider the following note from Leonard Peikoff, in response to a question about which is worse, environmentalism or religion:

The global-warming movement is one offshoot of today’s mysticism and statism. As many have observed, it represents in essence the onetime pro-industrial Reds changing—with the same purpose, but to be achieved this time by different means—into the anti-industrial Greens. The global-warming call to statism will have harmful effects but, I think, the movement is going to be short-lived; too many people remember how recently we were terrorized by the prospect of an imminent, man-caused ice age, and before that by the doom of over-population, DDT, etc.

Understanding why environmentalism is not a religion helps to understand why the threat it poses will be relatively short-term.

Peikoff's comparison of the Greens with the Reds is apt here. Indeed environmentalism is the New Left incarnation of anti-capitalism. In virtue of their common Leftist origins, both Reds and Greens make testable predictions about the natural world, rather than making promises about an afterlife in a supernatural dimension. Whereas communism predicted a glorious future when the proletariat took control, environmentalism predicts environmental disasters, offering only stopgap measures to slow their approach.

Testable predictions can fail. First, notice how communism failed when, after 70 years, its predictions about the glorious future were not confirmed, because collectivism couldn't produce. Environmentalism makes predictions, too. Unlike communism, it even does so using numbers. The Earth's temperature is supposed to rise X many degrees in Y many years leading to Z many feet of sea-level rise. If their prediction is wrong (and it will be easy to tell in much less than 70 years), the movement will be clearly discredited. If they're right about it, then we should pay attention to them.

Compare this to religion, whose predictions concern life after death. As Peikoff has mentioned elsewhere, religious civilizations can endure for hundreds or even thousands of years, because there is no way to check to see if promises about the hereafter are being fulfilled. Not so for communism or its descendent, environmentalism, because neither worldview contains an afterlife or a supernatural dimension.

Incidentally, notice the oddity that whereas communism was motivated by love (of humanity), environmentalism is motivated by fear (of the destruction of nature). Fear does not motivate in the long-term. It is a response to imminent danger. Also, a motivation expressed in terms of love of humanity is essentially of higher quality than one in terms of fear for the loss of nature. All things being equal, human beings have natural affection for each other. Not so for rocks and trees and snail-darters. So in addition to being an essentially secular ideology open to relatively quick disconfirmation (in historical terms), environmentalism is even less motivating than communism.

As a philosophic worldview, communism already had very little to offer in the way of guidance for living. Did it have any ethical code beyond "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"? Environmentalism has even less to offer in this regard. Its essential advice is negative: don't pollute, don't consume, don't produce, don't disturb, don't grow—in the end, don't live. Perhaps it offers positive advice about recycling, but that's not much of a catechism.

So why do people think environmentalism is a religion? Leftist ideologies do have many things in common with religion. They reject reason, oppose selfishness, and suppress individual freedom. Fine. But there is a world of difference between naturalist and religious versions of these doctrines. One world, to be exact: the naturalists believe in just one, while religion believes in two. As I've illustrated, that also makes a world of difference.

Frankly, I think that the "environmentalism is a religion" charge originated among the religious, particularly those on the right, who saw environmentalism as a competitor. After all, according to monotheism, it is a great sin to worship false gods. You can see the same objections among the religious in relation to the New Age movement and the Harry Potter books. But Harry Potter isn't a religion and neither is environmentalism. Other religious folks have had an easy time assimilating environmental views to religion, by saying that God has made us the steward of the Earth, etc. But that doesn't make environmentalism a religion any more than the religious adoption of socialism makes it a religion.

So I really wish that secular opponents of environmentalism wouldn't resort to the "environmentalism is a religion" charge. Compare the two, say that environmentalism is a lot like religion in all of the bad ways if you want to score points with secular environmentalists. But don't equate the two, especially not in your own thinking. The way to battle environmentalism is to separate its scientific from its philosophic component: evaluate the first, and challenge the second on principle.

Posted by admin at 08:33 PM | Comments (18)

Undercurrent call for submissions

Received from Eric Brunner of the fine campus publication, The Undercurrent:

Submissions Deadline for the Undercurrent

The next issue of The Undercurrent will be coming out in mid-September. If you are interested in writing for it, please note that the submissions deadline for first drafts is August 17th. (Early submissions welcome!)

Anyone interested in writing should email the editors at content@the-undercurrent.com. We will have some specific suggestions and guidelines to offer you.

If you want to write but do not have a specific topic in mind, please let us know! We can point you to some news stories and make some article suggestions.

On the other hand, if you already have an article in mind, we encourage you to send us an abstract/outline so that we can give you an early indication whether we're interested in publishing.

Thanks for your interest and support,

The Undercurrent Staff

Posted by admin at 12:24 AM | Comments (0)

July 30, 2007

In which I reveal my seedy green underbelly?

In a comment on my post about environmentalist nihilism, "Galileo blogs" asked the following good question:

Your last paragraph is a teaser. Could you elaborate? What environmental problems need solving? How do you see man contributing to global warming?

More importantly, how should these problems be solved, if at all?

What I said in my earlier post was that there are probably some environmental problems that need to be solved, and this maybe even includes manmade global warming. Let me discuss just the issue of global warming, because it applies to the other possible environmental problems/solutions, too.

I've gone back and forth about global warming over the years. I think the first point to make is that, as far as I can tell, there is nothing arbitrary about the idea that human emissions might produce warming, and there is of course nothing about this idea that contradicts my knowledge of a) common sense, or b) philosophy. There's nothing arbitrary because scientists offer quite a lot of evidence for this theory.

The big question is whether or not the evidence is any good. I used to think that I could definitively say "no." I had read a number of the enviro-skeptic books produced by right-wingers, and could rattle off half a dozen problems with the idea that there is warming, that it is caused by human beings, and that it is bad. Many of them were plausible objections.

But in the last year or so, I've decided that I'm not so sure. I read a variety of newspapers and blogs from all over the political spectrum, and as a result of this, I discovered that defenders of the manmade warming hypothesis have answers to nearly all of the objections right-wing skeptics usually make. (A good example of a site rebutting most of the objections is realclimate.org.) Some of these answers sound plausible.

Now I am not prepared to say that pro-GW arguments are sound. The thing is, I'm not a scientist, and I'm simply not in a position to evaluate them. I don't think one would need to be an environmental or climate scientist to make the proper evaluations. One could simply have advanced training in statistics and/or physics. I have some background in physics, but even less in math, so I am simply not the right person to decide on a controversy like this. When I can't decide for myself, I will either remain agnostic or defer to the authority of experts.

I would very much like for the manmade GW theory to be false. Not so much because I want environmentalists to be wrong (though that would be a rhetorical side-benefit), but mainly because I don't want the Earth to be warming. So I'd be very happy if serious scientists were to disabuse me of my agnosticism and show me that the GW theory was just wrong. But none of the arguments presented in the popular press have been very compelling. If you're reading this and have a favorite, defensible argument, please do post it. I'll see what I think.

"Galileo blogs" also had a follow-up point:

If the solutions are consistent with individual rights and capitalism, as an Objectivist I do not find myself gasping that you make these statements. In fact, most pollution problems are the result of inadequate property rights and poverty -- i.e., too *little* capitalism.

Well, I know that this is true for some environmental problems, but I'm not sure that it's true for all of them. Clearly any environmental problem involving a definable tort would be subject to individual rights-based solutions. But one of the problems with the GW hypothesis is precisely that the torts are so ill-defined. An individual driving a car is contributing to the problem in a negligible way, but when the acts of all individuals are aggregated, there is supposed to be a more serious problem.

I remember Harry Binswanger wrote on a related topic on HBL, suggesting that local smog problems might be solved by permitting unlimited traffic in afflicted areas up until a certain point. If it could be determined that more than X many cars would make smog intolerable, then car x+1 and on would need to install special emissions equipment if they wanted to buy a car. This would not violate anyone's property rights because by hypothesis cars X+1 could be shown to be committing a known tort without making proper modifications. This sounds like a good solution to me, and I note that something like this is already what California does. Of course there is probably a serious debate to be had about the value of X.

But would a solution like this work for a problem like global warming, if it is a problem? Of course it's harder to define the nature of the tort. Is it a threshold of hurricane intensity, sea level rise, or water shortages? Part of this is because of the uncertainty inherent in the science itself, which is perhaps a reason to doubt the theory, not the rights-based solution. Leaving this aside, even if the tort is definable, it would only be definable on a global scale. How is the government of the United States, for example, supposed to enforce tort claims from a potentially afflicted citizen of Tuvalu? I suppose there are precedents for this kind of question outside of environmental torts, perhaps having to do with extradition treaties.

So my final question is: assuming a tort could be defined, and assuming a jurisdiction could be worked out for it, in what way is it meaningful to call this is an individual rights-based solution, given that the cause of the problem is not any individual's action, but only the aggregation of individuals' actions? Even if only emissions above a certain threshold bring the atmosphere to a "tipping point," it's hard to blame only the people making those additional emissions. Without the previous emissions, theirs would not be a problem. Once the tipping point has been reached, everyone is contributing to the problem equally. At this point, it would seem unfair to punish only the newest polluters.

Perhaps there are good answers to all of my questions about a proper solution to a global environmental problem. But I do think they are questions that need to be answered, particularly because it is not at all obvious to me that there is anything arbitrary about the GW theory that motivates them. Philosophy qua philosophy should answer these hypothetical questions, particularly because it cannot decide questions of science, and because as humanity becomes further integrated, technologically, it is likely that we will begin to encounter more and more of these collective action problems (just consider the internet).

Posted by admin at 12:29 AM | Comments (13)

July 29, 2007

We flunked the "Iraq test" from word one

Robert Tracinski has now posted his second pro-Iraq war article. I would like to make a few choice remarks.

In my earlier criticism of Tracinski, I pointed out that it was ridiculous to justify a continuing war in Iraq on the grounds that stopping now would cause us to abdicate the principle of pre-emptive self-defense, when the administration seems to have abdicated that principle long ago. Tracinski claimed that the goal of spreading democracy was never a serious justification for the war, and he embellishes on this point in the new article:

As I hinted at in the first part of this article, the greatest proof that the Bush administration did not invade Iraq primarily to spread "democracy" is the fact that they made no preparation to use military force to achieve that goal. The invasion was designed only to topple Saddam Hussein's regime, with the assumption that a relatively free society would simply emerge on its own in the absence of a tyrant to suppress it. And the administration assumed that this new liberal society would require only our diplomatic and political support--since that is the only real support it offered.

Even as late as 2006, when we were beginning to use counter-insurgency techniques in Iraq, the overall military strategy (now usually referred to as the "Rumsfeld-Casey strategy") was simply to keep the insurgents suppressed until we could goad the Iraqis into achieving a grand political reconciliation. The handover of sovereignty to the interim government, the drafting of a new constitution, the Iraqi elections in 2005 and 2006--all of these events were supposed to create that political breakthrough, on the assumption that a political reconciliation would cause the insurgency to wither away. It was assumed that purely political means could be used to win a military conflict (an illusion that still holds sway among many members of Congress). It is only now that General Petraeus is attempting to implement a unified political and military strategy against the insurgency.

My first big comment: This argument is really preposterous. Here are three reasons why.

First of all, if the Bush administration really believed that the new Iraq would require only diplomatic and political support, rather than military support, then why did they bring any ground troops at all? Why didn't they just bomb the Iraqi government to hell and let the "new liberal society" take control? Or, if they thought that ground troops were necessary to clear out the last vestiges of the Baathist regime, why didn't they withdraw the ground troops shortly after those last vestiges were gone? Why did they almost immediately start to build long-term bases? No, it defies all common sense to say that Bush had no long-term intentions to occupy Iraq. Even if he did not intend to use this long-term presence to spread democracy, it is entirely implausible to disqualify that possibility by saying that Bush only wanted to topple the regime and let the Iraqis do the rest on their own!

Second, it is utterly mindboggling for Tracinski to assert that only now is the administration attempting to use a military, as opposed to purely political, strategy in Iraq. If the military strategy has only just started, then what were we doing in Fallujah in 2004? What were we doing at Tal-Afar in 2005? Why have our troops been dying continuously since 2003? They haven't just been sitting in their bunkers. Indeed Tracinski himself has often been the one to catalogue the progress he alleged the troops to be making, urging us to continue his military solution.

Third, and this is a point that I probably should have made in my first post, but if the Bush administration never seriously intended to justify the war on the basis of spreading democracy, then why did Tracinski himself cite that justification himself in defense of Bush's war, back during the 2004 election?:

So why would Bush be better than Kerry?

He is better because of the "forward strategy of freedom."

The "forward strategy of freedom" is the name Bush has given to his grand strategy--the administration's highest-level plan of action--in the War on Terrorism. It is a grand strategy that necessarily puts America on the offensive, committing us to spreading representative government and free institutions to overhaul the political system of the Middle East....

The only long-term answer is that the Arab and Muslim worlds must be civilized. They must have imposed on them a better system of government, one that allows, for the first time in the Arab world, the material vibrancy of a relatively free economy and the spiritual vibrancy of the free exchange of ideas. This would do exactly what the clashing examples of East Berlin and West Berlin did in the Cold War: it would provide an unanswerable demonstration of the benefits of a free society on one side, contrasted to misery and oppression on the other side. It is, in my view, the most important thing that can be done in the military and political realm to defeat the philosophy that animates Islamic terrorism.

Considering the above, it seems that Tracinski's justification for war has changed as much as—and seemingly in lockstep with—the Bush administration's.

Second major comment: I find it stunning that Tracinski has now consciously chosen to try to justify the Bush administration's use of the term "War on Terrorism":

But there is one final, broader reason why an insurgency war is a strategy peculiarly suited to the advocates of modern Islamic totalitarianism. I used to grumble about the use of the term "War on Terrorism," citing the objection that terror is a tactic, not an enemy. But I eventually accepted the term, in part because terrorism is a tactic that is distinctive to our enemy and describes his particular methods and goals. The same applies to an insurgency, which is a terror bombing campaign writ large.

First response: Terrorism is certainly not a tactic distinctive to our enemy. There have been terrorists all of the world who have used the tactic to destabilize local regimes, without any ambitions against the United States. Tracinski knows this, which is why he does not (I presume) advocate exporting the "War on Terrorism" to Colombia or Sri Lanka.

Second, I would think that the proper name for a "terror bombing campaign writ large"—particularly if it is a campaign by one religious group against its civic peer—is a "civil war."

Finally, it is suprising that Tracinski should begin to embrace the term "War on Terrorism" only now that some mainstream, even liberal commentators, like Sam Harris, are starting to realize that we are fighting a War on Islam.

My third major comment on Tracinski's article regards the following:

For all their talk of an Islamic "caliphate," today's Islamists do not really have such an organized vision. Their ideology is not taken from Lenin but from Mohammed--a cruder, more primitive source. It is a charter, not for a modern state, but for tribal gang warfare, and the rule of the Islamists has been dominated by the capricious whim of holy warriors, usually without much pretense of scientific organization or the rule of law.

This can be seen in many of the societies where Islamists have risen to power: their model of the ideal society has been on display in Somalia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Gaza, and Waziristan. It is best described as anarcho-totalitarianism: total control over the individual, not by an organized state, but by roving criminal gangs of religious zealots.

I think that this section is supposed to support the idea that terrorism is something "distinctive" to our enemy Islam. But it does nothing of the sort. The examples Tracinski cites are of aspiring or failed Islamic states, so of course they are anarchic (if they are fighting an existing regime or in the process of losing control of one of their own). But bin Laden and many other Islamist groups are very clear about wanting to re-establish an Islamic Caliphate. The fact that they don't achieve it is more a result of their differing visions about how to do it (e.g., Sunni vs. Shi'ite), than of anything inherent in Islamic ideology. The fact Tracinski cites, that the religious police in Saudi Arabia look to be a kind of vigilante force, is probably more evidence for my point: Islamists in Saudi Arabia are not in control, but they would like to be.

Finally, my last comment. Tracinski's point in urging that we do need to fight a war on terrorist insurgency, not just Islam, is completed in the following:

Let's say, for example, that we were to withdraw from Iraq now--then set out at some later point to topple the Iranian regime. Don't you think the remnants of that regime--even if they were defeated in a conventional conflict or faced an uprising from their own people--would have every incentive to turn Iran into another terrorist "quagmire," replicating the model that succeeded for them in Iraq? That would be the message of a successful Muslim insurgency in Iraq: that the US may always win on the conventional battlefield--but the Islamists will always win in the unconventional battle that follows.

...

Surrender in Iraq would validate the terrorist insurgency as an infallible winning tactic. It would validate that tactic far more thoroughly than our previous retreats from Somalia and Beirut, and losing this time would make it ten times harder to demonstrate our ability to win a counter-insurgency war in the future.

First response: Why worry so much about what will make it possible to invade Iran, when, as I emphasized in my last post, nothing can save the fact that such a war has been invalidated in the public mind already?

OK, maybe there's finite chance that we would still do something about Iran. In that case, my biggest objection to this point is that Tracinski is begging the question. He is assuming the very point in need of proof: that the best way to confront our enemies abroad is through conventional ground tactics. He assumes that if we should go into Iran, we should do so with the purpose of occuping that country and "nation-building"—just as he assumes with regard to Iraq, of course. I agree that if we were to go into Iran, we would face the exact same problems we currently face in Iraq. Which is why I would never support a war on Iran, not under the present leadership, not using the same tactics.

Tracinski neglects an approach to opposing foreign enemies that is different in-principle. As he observes, it is rather ridiculous to topple a regime only to see different hostile elements take control of the country. So instead of doing that, our approach should be as follows: Suppose that a nation state poses a genuine threat to the United States. The way to prevent the contemporary threat and its possible return is to bring such devastation to that state and its citizens that future wars will not be necessary. This may be consistent with setting up a puppet state of our own after the war, but it is not necessary. Using modern weapons, the cost of a devastating war would be small from our perspective, and still small in the case that upstart governments need reminding.

If you think it would have been ridiculous to apply a strategy like this to Iraq, then that probably reflects your conviction that Iraq did not pose a genuine threat to us. Your conviction may be different for a state like Iran which, unlike Iraq, is an openly theocratic regime, and actively developing nuclear weapons.

Posted by admin at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2007

I'm kind of a philosopher, and I love Ayn Rand

This little item just popped up on my Google news alert for the keyword "philosopher." Steve Gimbel, philosophy professor at Gettysburg College doesn't much like the progress Objectivists are making in academia. I registered a few choice comments:

I’m “kind of a philosopher” myself (Ph.D. 2007 from a major program), and I happen to like Ayn Rand very much. I don’t think it’s because it rationalizes my place in society. As an adjunct professor who makes less than $20,000 a year, there’s not much of a position to rationalize.

One of the things I learned in my education as a “kind of philosopher” is that I shouldn’t make serious comments about philosophers I haven’t read. I especially shouldn’t speculate about the psychology of people who like to read those philosophers. Yet your post provides no evidence of ever having read (much) Ayn Rand, save perhaps for secondary commentary. If you had, you’d realize that she does not object to caring for others.

What she does object to is people who regard sacrifice to others as a kind of moral virtue. And she thinks that nobody should ever sacrifice, whether they are specimens of human excellence or not. Even the meekest adjunct professor has a right to pursue his happiness, and shouldn’t sacrifice it, even to those above him with tenure. Mutatis mutandis for the meekest plumbers, whom Ayn Rand thought were usually of greater productive virtue than most tenured professors. See the character of Eddie Willers in Atlas Shrugged (which I’m positive you haven’t read).

Readers, especially of the academic inclination, are encouraged to join the chorus.

Posted by admin at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

"Intellectual stakes" no more

I haven't paid much attention to Robert Tracinski lately. I guess I never finished the critique of his "What Went Wrong?" series, but then again, Tracinski never finished the series himself. I've kept up with his mainstream press articles since then, but I've seen none that have warranted much commentary. That is not the case for his latest.

In "The Intellectual Stakes of the War," Tracinski submits the following thesis: "A withdrawal from Iraq would constitute a national disavowal of the principles used to justify the war—yet these include vital principles that are indispensable for the wider battle against radical Islam." I disagree with this conclusion, because I think that the principles in question have already been disavowed, if they were ever in play to begin with.

What are the principles Tracinski has in mind? He tells us:

If you cast your mind back to the long debate over the war in 2002, the primary justification for the invasion of Iraq—and the Bush administration's primary contribution to the debate over the morality of war—was the doctrine of unilateral pre-emption. The main principle used to justify the invasion of Iraq was the need to deny hostile dictatorships and state sponsors of terror access to weapons of mass destruction, a goal which permitted the United States to act pre-emptively and without international permission if necessary. (This last principle was significantly undercut by the administration's repeated declarations that it was enforcing UN Security Council resolutions—even though it did so without the Security Council's permission.)

Isn't it kind of troubling that we have to cast our minds back? Even supposing (somewhat implausibly) that the principle of pre-emptive self-defense was in fact the primary principle cited to justify the Iraq war, if we have to cast our minds back, doesn't that mean it's no longer the going justification? That's a rhetorical question, because I don't need to gather much new evidence to answer it. Tracinski practically answers it for us:

In recent years, I have noticed a widespread misconception among Objectivists (thanks to the inaccurate analysis of a few prominent Objectivist writers) that the Bush administration's primary justification for the invasion of Iraq was the desire to achieve "democracy" there, as motivated by an altruist version of "just war theory." In fact, the administration only began to talk prominently about "democracy" after it received congressional authorization for the war and had already prepared the weapons and troops necessary for the invasion. "Democracy" was the administration's plan for what would happen after the war...—but it was not one of the main justifications for the invasion itself.

From the sound of it, Tracinski is nearly admitting what is widely acknowledged, that the adminstration's stated justification for the Iraq war changed. Yes, it began to change "after it received congressional authorization for the war and had already prepared the weapons and troops necessary for the invasion," but mainly after no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. After all, how could pre-emptive self-defense continue to be a serious justification for the war when there suddenly appeared to be no weapons to pre-emptively defend against? In fact democracy was not just something that the administration "talked prominently about" after no WMDs were found: democracy and Iraqi freedom were for some time the only serious justifications in play. So weren't the principles in question already disavowed?

Now I will concede, that in recent months Bush has made noise about "fighting the terrorists abroad, so we don't have to fight them at home." One can guess how well the democracy justification has gone over after Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. So, perhaps there's a loose sense in which Bush has returned to the self-defense justification. But the sense is about as loose as the threat of Iraqi terrorists is weak. "Al Qaeda in Iraq" is a rag-tag ad hoc terrorist group which probably would never have existed but for the American occupation and which almost certainly would disappear under Shi'ite boots in the absence of the American occupation. Saddam Hussein's support for anti-American terrorism was an extremely weak and underemphasized justification for the war in the first place—and the American public knows that when Bush tries to dredge it up now, he is desperate.

So even if pre-emptive self-defense was an original justification for the war, it ceased to be a serious justification for the war a long time ago. And when I say "serious justification," I mean one that the public can recognize as serious. Because when we talk about the intellectual stakes of a troop pullout, we're talking about how the public will perceive the changing purposes of the administration. Simply pulling out of Iraq isn't going to make the case for attacking Iran any harder than it already is, because almost nobody takes seriously the idea that we are now in Iraq to stop a terrorist threat to America. This is why Bush's approval rating is abysmally low. And even if people believed that Bush intended to defend us, a change in that perception would still be irrelevant, because Bush has botched the war with Iraq so badly that at this point the public will never accept any case on any grounds for any war with any country for 20 years.

Now perhaps Tracinski would object that the public is wrong to disavow Bush, and that they should recognize the real existence of a threat in Iraq. But then we are no longer on the same topic, the topic of what kind of new message will be sent by an Iraqi pullout. The new topic of what is in fact the best way to oppose a threat is then one that I would address by flatly contradicting Tracinski. If we are concerned about real threats to our interests, we should pull troops out of Iraq, march them to Iran, and stop worrying about the case to be made to the public. Which of course will never happen anyway, because Bush has botched things so badly.

Take a step back, Rob. Suppose that it's 1974, and we're in Vietnam. Suppose that the original justification for the war in Vietnam was self-defense against communist attacks on American ships in the Tonkin Gulf. But now suppose that nobody can understand how the the ground war is protecting ships or stopping any communists from attacking Americans anywhere. Now the war is being sold on the grounds that it will prevent the spread of communism in other Asian nations. Tell me, should we refuse to pull out of Vietnam, because maybe we'll need to make the case for invading the Soviet Union some day—and pulling out will stop us from justifying that invasion on the grounds of self-defense? Or: should we cut our losses, cross our fingers and hope that we can still hold back the Soviets, and promise never to sacrifice 50,000 men—or even 3,000—to a negligible threat?

Tracinski says that withdrawal from Iraq will be a disaster. Of course it will. But Iraq is already a disaster and nothing can change that now, slight downtick in attacks following the "surge," notwithstanding. All that we can change now is whether or not more of our men and women will continue to die senseless deaths in Iraq. Someone will need to make a better case than Tracinski to make it plausible that they should keep dying so that our President can make a better case for an impossible war.

Posted by admin at 01:46 AM | Comments (2)

July 25, 2007

Who wants a "World Without Us"?

There's a line from Bill McKibben that critics of environmentalism trot out from time to time to illustrate the nihilism that lurks in the most consistent exponents of that ideology: "Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."

But surely, you say, this McKibben fellow is just on the lunatic fringe of environmentalism. Most environmentalists are concerned with ensuring a healthy environment conducive to human survival. This is probably true. But McKibben's lunacy is not "fringe." A new book suggests that it is entering the mainstream.

Gary Kamiya of Salon reports on a new book by Alan Weisman, The World Without Us which tells the story of what the world would look like if human beings suddenly vanished. Like recent disaster movies that revel in the spectacle of New York destroyed by aliens or asteroids, Weisman paints his own picture of the consequences of environmentally-induced human extinction:

Weisman describes how millions of gallons of water under New York City, unchecked by pumps, would flood the subways. "Within 20 years, the water-soaked steel columns that support the street above the East Side's 4,5 and 6 trains corrode and buckle. As Lexington Avenue caves in, it becomes a river." Meanwhile, pavements would be breaking apart as ice expands in cracks. Weeds and potent invaders like ailanthus, with no city maintenance crews to stop them, would wreak havoc. Lightning fires would start, and gas mains ignite. As skyscrapers' windows break, water would corrode even concrete floors. Subbasements would weaken. High winds from hurricanes, more powerful in the future, would topple giant buildings. Bridges, their unpainted joints cracking as they expand, would collapse. The strongest, like arch railroad bridges, could last 1,000 years, although earthquakes could bring them down. Even the gigantic garbage fills on Staten Island would finally disappear, when the next Glacier Age returned

It is interesting to think about how a city like New York requires constant maintenance simply to keep in existence—just like every other living thing. And Weisman is hardly the first to have realized it:

Motive power—thought Dagny, looking up at the Taggart Building in the twilight—was its first need; motive power, to keep that building standing; movement, to keep it immovable. It did not rest on piles driven into granite; it rested on the engines that rolled across a continent....On her way through the plant, she had seen an enormous piece of machinery left abandoned in a corner of the yard. It had been a precision machine tool once, long ago, of a kind that could not be bought anywhere now. It had not been worn out; it had been rotted by neglect, eaten by rust and the black drippings of a dirty oil. She had turned her face away from it. A sight of that nature always blinded her for an instant by the burst of too violent an anger. She did not know why; she could not define her own feeling; she knew only that there was, in her feeling, a scream of protest against injustice, and that it was a response to something much beyond an old piece of machinery.

But Weisman doesn't share Dagny's outrage. Kamiya tells us that his purpose is not merely to engage in an interesting thought experiment:

Paradoxically, it's the fact that Weisman envisions the Earth enduring that becomes motivation for us to change our ways. The twist, of course, is that his imagined happy ending for the Earth only comes about because mankind is absent. Yet this isn't depressing, as one might think, but oddly inspiring. Weisman concludes that many of those happy endings are possible even if humanity doesn't disappear -- as long we curb our appetites and our population. And even if we end up causing our own extinction, it is profoundly reassuring to think that the Earth will not only survive, but flourish.

Did you hear that? Our extinction might be reassuring because a river begins running through New York and the buildings will begin to collapse. Hurray for the destruction of our greatest achievements! This really is pure nihilism, and its right there in Salon for all to see. And remember the virus Bill McKibben was waiting to come along?:

In Africa, unlike the New World, the megafauna survived -- because they grew up with humans, and learned to fear them. If man disappeared from Africa, Weisman notes, the big mammals would flourish, with the elephant population, which now numbers half a million, returning to perhaps 10 million, where it stood before the ivory trade. But reality is less encouraging. Africa is the only place on Earth, except Antarctica, never to suffer a major wildlife extinction. As a result of overpopulation, poachers, cattle and changed habitats, however, the extraordinary African collection of megafauna is severely threatened. In what he calls an "insidious epitaph," Weisman notes that "Only one thing, too terrible to contemplate, might slow all this proliferating before all the animals go extinct": AIDS. Noting that the HIV virus probably spread to humans through bush meat, he asks rhetorically, "Could AIDS be the animals' final revenge?"

Granted, Weisman does call the AIDS epidemic "terrible," but he also calls it "revenge"—revenge for inhibiting the "encouraging" flourishing of African megafauna.

I think there may well be serious environmental problems in need of solving. I am also now less skeptical of environmental science than I used to be. I think there may even be something to the manmade global warming hypothesis (gasp!). But I also will not tolerate the nihilistic ideology that motivates much environmental investigation. If you want to read this Weisman book to see what the world without us would bring, read it as motivation to preserve industrial civilization. For all the problems there may be in our environment, human beings and their glorious cities are still the best things to be found in it.

Posted by admin at 02:19 PM | Comments (2)

How poverty does cause terrorism

I guess I'm in a blogging mood tonight, but this next post actually connects with the earlier one on the problem of evil. Rob Tarr points to an interesting study showing little correlation between a person's economic status and his chances of being a terrorist, and wisely concludes:

This is of course ludicrous. It doesn't require statistical studies to dispel the myth that "poverty causes terrorism". Krueger's counter-hypothesis, that political oppression breeds terrorism, is equally wrong-headed. Over the past three centuries, poverty and oppression have led millions to seek to immigrate to America -- not blow up its buildings.

The notion that a person's beliefs and actions are determined by his material conditions (e.g. poverty) is simply stale left-over Marxism. In reality, it is the fundamental ideas that a person accepts which determine how he will evaluate the world, and how he will act.

I agree with this. But I also think that there is a sense in which poverty causes terrorism, in an indirect way. And I think this is still consistent with the idea that terrorists (like all men) act on their fundamental ideas.

Suppose that the demographers did a study showing that, while terrorists weren't especially likely to be poor, they were likely to have more poor neighbors than the average Westerner. The conventional liberal might embrace this as evidence that poverty is still the "root cause" of terrorism, because well-to-do but altruistic terrorists are consciously fighting on behalf of their downtrodden brethren. It doesn't need to be a blind reaction to economic conditions. After all, there is stunning poverty in the Middle East.

I think that many terrorists probably do think they are fighting on behalf of downtrodden brethren, but why? Because of their fundamental ideals, and I'm not just talking about altruism. I mean the fundamental ideal that Islam is the one true religion, that God brings glory to Muslims, and that God punishes unbelievers. Muslims terrorists look at the world, and see that the West has the power and glory—and the material prosperity—and it humiliates them.

This, you may recognize, is one of the theses of Bernard Lewis' book What Went Wrong?: Muslim civilization once thrived, having conquered most of the known world. But with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire came deep humiliation, the division of Muslim lands, colonization by the West, and, most humiliating of all, the establishment of the state of Israel. Not only were Muslims being deprived of the glory they "deserved," but their most hated ancient rivals were being rewarded.

So there is a sense in which Muslim terrorists attack the West because of Muslim poverty, but it is only because they believe that the West doesn't deserve its prosperity. The West serves as a reminder of Islam's own "problem of evil." And note that they don't respond to it as the Western reporter did, by becoming atheists. They have a different subjective response: to punish the evil world for not conforming to God's will. Other impoverished peoples, whose religions give them a different sense of their place (like poor Catholics in Latin America), do not respond this way. So the response to economic conditions is, of course, a function of fundamental ideals.

Posted by admin at 02:09 AM | Comments (1)

Why many environmentalists annoy me

Because they say things that make me have to point out things like this.

Posted by admin at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)

July 24, 2007

Why many atheists annoy me

There's an interesting article in the LA Times by a reporter who covered religion, and his journey from faith to unbelief.

He recounts how he was initially inspired to cover this beat because he wanted to reveal the inspirational power of religion. But he soon encountered the Catholic sex abuse stories, the Protestant televangelist con-men stories, etc., and started to lose faith. He sums up his loss of faith as follows:

The questions that I thought I had come to peace with started to bubble up again. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God get credit for answered prayers but no blame for unanswered ones? Why do we believe in the miraculous healing power of God when he's never been able to regenerate a limb or heal a severed spinal chord?

In one e-mail, I asked John, who had lost a daughter to cancer, why an atheist businessman prospers and the child of devout Christian parents dies. Why would a loving God make this impossible for us to understand?

He sent back a long reply that concluded:

"My ultimate affirmation is let God be God and acknowledge that He is in charge. He knows what I don't know. And frankly, if I'm totally honest with you, a life of gratitude is one that bows before the Sovereign God arguing with Him on those things that trouble me, lamenting the losses of life, but ultimately saying, 'You, God, are infinite; I'm human and finite.' "

John is an excellent pastor, but he couldn't reach me. For some time, I had tried to push away doubts and reconcile an all-powerful and infinitely loving God with what I saw, but I was losing ground. I wondered if my born-again experience at the mountain retreat was more about fatigue, spiritual longing and emotional vulnerability than being touched by Jesus.

And I considered another possibility: Maybe God didn't exist.

Anyone who's taken an introductory philosophy course will recognize this as an example of the so-called "problem of evil": how do we reconcile God's alleged benevolence with all of the suffering in the world? It is a problem which, admittedly, brings many people to atheism or agnosticism. It's interesting, by the way, that these people have to see suffering first-hand before they decide to become atheists. I guess reading about it in the newspaper you work for isn't enough. But I'm happy to say that the problem of evil had nothing to do with my converting from Catholicism to agnosticism, and then to atheism. The argument has always annoyed me, and this article helps to show why.

Here's how I used to think of the problem of evil, before I even became an atheist: Quit your whining! And I still feel that way. The fact is that it is an extremely subjective response to the already subjective idea of God. I'd like to ask the reporter: If the world were filled with nothing but joy and peace and completely chaste priests, would it then be okay to believe in God? So we're supposed to decide what exists in the furthest depths of the universe on the basis of whether or not the world happens to meet your tastes today? Give me a break. What if Pastor John's tastes run in the direction of the malevolent? He obviously likes the idea of a mysterious God who sees suffering as a means to higher ends. How do we fill in our ontology on the basis of these conflicting subjectivities?

No, if you want to decide whether or not God exists, you need to a) get clear on the essence of what God is supposed to be, and b) look for evidence concerning it. You don't need to consult accidental characteristics like God's alleged all-loving nature. God knows He didn't show this side of himself in the Old Testament. The question of God's existence needs to be considered in the most general terms: Is there a spiritual being existing in a supersensible world?

When I read a section in a particular handy book describing the definitive absence of evidence for such a being, I converted to atheism from agnosticism almost instantly.

Posted by admin at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)

July 13, 2007

Brink Lindsey's Marxist libertarianism

Over at Cato Unbound, Brink Lindsey has posted a precis of his book, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture. I haven't read it and I don't plan to. I'll just note quickly some passages that bring out one of the many dark sides of libertarianism, specifically its Marxist streak. Not every one of these is evidence of the Marxist streak on its own, but taken together they are pretty damning.

First: history, it would seem, is on the side of libertarian liberty:

Nevertheless, the fact is that American society today is considerably more libertarian than it was a generation or two ago. Compare conditions now to how they were at the outset of the 1960s. Official governmental discrimination against blacks no longer exists. Censorship has beaten a wholesale retreat. The rights of the accused enjoy much better protection. Abortion, birth control, interracial marriage, and gay sex are legal. Divorce laws have been liberalized and rape laws strengthened. Pervasive price and entry controls in the transportation, energy, communications, and financial sectors are gone. Top income tax rates have been slashed. The pretensions of macroeconomic fine-tuning have been abandoned. Barriers to international trade are much lower. Unionization of the private sector work force has collapsed. Of course there are obvious counterexamples, but on the whole it seems clear that cultural expression, personal lifestyle choices, entrepreneurship, and the play of market forces all now enjoy much wider freedom of maneuver.

Make what you will of the examples. Counterexamples are indeed obvious, and Matthew Yglesias does a nice job of pointing them out. Granted, Lindsey also cites cultural and economic changes that he takes to be "irreversible" (like the sexual revolution and the deregulation of the '80s). Whether or not they are irreversible, it is curious how libertarians need to feel that history is on their side for the same reason that the Marxists did: because they lack a serious normative justification for their politics.

Second: historical progress is caused by developments in the economic base:

The many and complex reasons for this trend can be boiled down to one sweeping generalization: in an age of mass affluence, economic development and individualism go together.... American society has become more libertarian because, more than any other country on the planet, it has successfully adapted to the novel conditions of economic abundance. And because of the way this adaptation took place, a broadly defined libertarianism now occupies the center of the American political spectrum.... Though the exact percentages fluctuate in response to events, the secular trend is both clear and, as Ronald Inglehart has documented, global: as people get richer, their faith in government and established authority generally declines.

There may be some point to the idea that economic progress entrenches the same values that made that progress possible. But Lindsey's (and Marx's) stories neglect the original source of that progress. Something about "the goods are here" comes to mind...

Third: historical progress necessitates cultural contradictions and even "class" conflict:

As I describe in The Age of Abundance, mass affluence triggered a mirror-image pair of cultural convulsions: on the countercultural left, a romantic rebellion against order and authority of every description; and on the traditionalist right, an evangelical revival of socially and theologically conservative Protestantism. Both arose around the same time, in the dizzying 1960s. Between them, these two movements have played decisive roles in shaping America’s accommodation to mass affluence. But those roles were deeply ambivalent, mixing positive elements and negative ones in roughly equal measure. The countercultural left combined genuine liberation with dangerous, nihilistic excess, while the traditionalist right mixed knee-jerk reaction with wise conservation of vital cultural endowments.

The two movements thus offered conflicting half-truths. On the left were gathered those elements of American society most open to the new possibilities of mass affluence and most eager to explore them – in other words, the people at the forefront of the push for civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism, as well as sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. At the same time, however, many on the left harbored a deep antagonism toward the institutions of capitalism and middle-class life that had created all those exciting new possibilities. On the right, meanwhile, were the faithful defenders of capitalism and middle-class mores. But included in this group were the people most repelled by and hostile to the social and cultural ferment that capitalism and middle-class mores were producing. This is the blind vs. blind struggle of the culture wars: one side attacked capitalism while rejoicing in its fruits; the other side celebrated capitalism while denouncing its fruits as poisonous.

This conflict is still with us today, in the form of the polarized politics of Red America vs. Blue America.

Of course it's true that the progressives and conservatives represent two ends of a false dichotomy. But the dichotomy is not a response to mass affluence, and it preceded the 20th century by millennia. It's the false dichotomy between the mystic and the subjectivist--it's the "If God is dead, all is permitted" premise, which preceded even Dostoevsky.

Fourth: the conviction that the cultural contradictions will be overcome by a new (libertarian rather than communist) synthesis:

The good news, though, is that this polarization mostly concerns minorities of true believers and their media talking heads rather the bulk of ordinary Americans. Most Americans, it turns out, have moved on since the ’60s toward a common ground whose coloration is not recognizably red or blue – call it a purplish, libertarianish centrism. On the one hand, they embrace the traditional, Middle American values of patriotism, law and order, the work ethic, and commitment to family life. At the same time, though, they hold attitudes on race and sex that are dramatically more liberal than those that held sway a generation or two ago. Likewise, they are deeply skeptical of authority, and are strongly committed to open-mindedness and tolerance. Such an amalgamation of views is flatly inconsistent with current definitions of ideological purity. Despite all the talk of raging culture wars, most Americans are nonbelligerents.

Of course even if most Americans believe in patriotism and most also believe in racial toleration, this does not imply that most people believe in both. The majority with each position may cluster towards opposite ends of a spectrum. That aside, patriotism and racial tolerance are not much to work with. They aren't fundamental enough, philosophically, to spur on genuine cultural change for the better. And it's unclear that change for the better is what Lindsey actually wants, given that the most he can say about the direction of our "progress" is that it is postmodern and anti-authoritarian. Anti- what authority?

Fifth: the synthesis will be possible, but only by raising the consciousness of the oppressed:

There are some obvious objections to the idea of a libertarian center. First, as I stated at the outset, there is no libertarian political movement to speak of. Accordingly, there is no organized libertarian-leaning constituency that could ally with either conservatives or liberals to alter the balance of power. Rather, at best libertarianism exists as a diffuse, inchoate set of impulses that operate, not as an independent force, but as tendencies within the left and right and a check on how far each can stray in illiberal directions. Second, as I conceded in an earlier essay for Cato Unbound, American public opinion is noticeably unlibertarian in many important respects. In particular, economic illiteracy is rife; much of government spending – especially the budget-busting middle-class entitlement programs – remains highly popular; and the weakness for moralistic crusades, long an unfortunate feature of the American character, remains glaring (though today’s temperance movements direct their obsessive zeal toward advancing health and safety rather than virtue).

The American proletariat needs only organize and learn of its economic oppression by the collectivists! It has nothing to lose but its chains!

In fairness, Lindsey reminds us that he is not arguing for "libertarian triumphalism." He does not mean to suggest that libertarian liberty must win in the end. So he faces the same problem the communists did: how to motivate an ideological movement in the face of alleged historical necessity. He opts for the same solution: to say that history is on his side, and that we'd better join up if we want to be on the winning side. But I daresay that it is hard to claim that history is on your side when it's unclear what exactly your side is. Libertarians praise a vague "liberty" from an even vaguer "authority." It is no wonder that their ends are vague, given their lack of any basic philosophical foundations. In this respect, they've got even less going for them than the Marxists did.

Posted by admin at 02:14 AM | Comments (1)