Henry

[This is the first of a few book reviews that have been piling up on my desk – next up is Chris Mooney’s _The Republican War on Science_, and then sometime in the not _too_ distant future, Glyn Morgan’s _The Idea of a European Superstate_].

_Digital Phoenix: Why the Information Economy Collapsed and How It Will Rise Again_ by Bruce Abramson, (the MIT Press 2005). Available from “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=29956&cgi=product&isbn=0262012170 and from “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=henryfarrell-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/0262012170/qid=1124806131/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1?v=glance%26s=books (deprecated).*

Bruce Abramson’s’ _Digital Phoenix_ is a smart read – it combines an excellent overview of the recent developments of the digital economy, with some important insights into how it works. The writing style is pacey, the stories (the Microsoft-Netscape battles, the MP3 wars, the birth of open source) are well told, and the quite substantial intellectual content is delivered in a user-friendly format. It’s the best non-technical account I’ve read of how network economies do and do not work in the information age. I’ll be assigning it to my students – as far as I can see, it’s the best and most complete account available. This said, there are two problems. First is its slightly breathy enconium to the new economy. All we need to do, says Abramson, is to renew our faith in the “corporate innovators and entrepreneurs who make growth possible,” and we can achieve the original promise of the information technology revolution. It isn’t that simple; the New Economy was never “everything it was cracked up to be”:https://crookedtimber.org/category/henwood-seminar, and the future, insofar as we can discern it, seems likely to be considerably weirder than Abramson gives it credit for being. Second is the concluding section which feels a bit tacked on, jumping into an argument over the fight for control of the information economy between terror movements and authoritarian governments on the one hand, and democratic liberals on the other. It reads like the conclusions of a very different book, and a substantially inferior one. [click to continue…]

As Kieran “says”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/21/why-does-chuck-hagel-hate-america/, Chuck Hagel is now talking bluntly about the Iraq quagmire. But as Matt Yglesias has noted many times, prominent Republican legislators who are unhappy about administration policy have been all talk and no action. What could Republican dissenters in the Senate be doing? Let’s ask “Hagel himself”:http://www.worldaffairscouncils.org/Conference2005/Speech%20Text%20Sen%20Hagel.rtf :

bq. More than thirty years ago, the former Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright, held hearings on Vietnam that raised critical questions about U.S. policy. Fulbright received criticism for holding public hearings on Vietnam, especially with a President of his own party in office. Fulbright later wrote that he held those hearings, “in the hope of helping to shape a true consensus in the long run, even at the cost of dispelling the image of a false one in the short run.” Today we must not be party to a false consensus on Iraq or any other foreign policy issue.

Hagel drew this analogy back in January of this year; he hasn’t done much about it since. While he and his colleagues have asked a few sharpish questions of generals and others, they haven’t cared to demand the kind of “concerted examination”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulbright_Hearing of the conduct of the war (and whether the US should withdraw) that Fulbright instigated. Hagel is an influential member of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee; if he demanded proper hearings it could have consequences. Time for him to put up, or shut up.

Update: “Mark Leon Goldberg”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/08/index.html#007465 has similar thoughts.

Update 2: modified slightly following comments.

Something that’s been bothering me for a while – the ever-smushier and less critical lovefest between leftwing opponents of the Iraq war and rightwing realist opponents of same. “Steve Clemons”:http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000904.html, who has contacts in both camps, quotes an unnamed _Nation_ person yesterday as saying that “realism has become the new liberal foreign policy ideology.” When it isn’t (quite rightly) ripping shreds out of the “liberal hawk” establishment, Ari Berman’s _Nation_ article reads like a mash-note to an emerging “dissident establishment”:http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050829&s=berman that unites left and right against foreign policy adventurism. Now there’s a lot to be said in favour of building a short-term alliance to push back against the lunacy of recent years, and inject a little reality into foreign policy thinking. Rightwing realists have smart and interesting things to say, and are, all in all, a vast improvement on the crew of yahoos and me-too cheerleaders who gave us “Operation Wishful Thinking”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005/08/power-of-imagination-giblets-will.html. I’d be delighted to see the Perles, Boots and Ledeens of the DC foreign policy establishment consigned to the outer darkness. But leftwingers who rush too quickly to embrace their new friends on the right should meditate upon the malign example of Henry Kissinger, and the implications of _Realpolitik_ for the causes and issues that they’re committed to. We should all be in favour of the reality-based crowd taking over Republican foreign policy making – it’ll mean that our arguments with them will be conducted on a saner basis. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that those arguments will magically disappear. Whatever realism is, it isn’t a good basis for a leftwing approach to foreign policy (though it may have valuable lessons to impart to such an approach).

More interesting things from around the WWW.

Scott McLemee is back from a break, with two great columns. The “first”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/08/16/mclemee is on Alfredo Perez’s “Political Theory Daily Review”:http://www.politicaltheory.info/, which is one of my daily reads, and imo a simply terrific resource. It beats the better-known “Arts and Letters Daily” hands-down in terms of depth of coverage and (for me) interest. Somebody needs to give this guy a paid job doing this full-time The second is an “essay”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/08/18/mclemee on the mutual disdain of academia and journalism for each other, defending intellectual border-crossing and amateurism, in the original sense of the word.

The American Institute for Contemporary German Studies has set up a “German elections blog”:http://new.aicgs.org/news/ with commentary in English from German journalists and experts. Speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to give a plug to “Sign and Sight”:http://www.signandsight.com/intodaysfeuilletons feuilletons page for a while; it’s a great way of keeping up with the intellectual debate in Germany and elsewhere.

Tim Harford and others have set up the World Bank’s first “blog”:http://psdblog.worldbank.org/psdblog/, which aims to promote private sector approaches to international development.

My old colleague, Ron Deibert has set up “Civiblog”:http://www.civiblog.org/, a free blogging service for people involved in NGOs and civil society organizations.

A point of occasional confusion for people linking to, or commenting on CT – “Henry Farrell” is not the same person as “Harry Brighouse” . When a post is by “Henry,” it’s written by me, and when it’s by “Harry,” it’s him. I’m not really complaining about this, as I get much the better end of the deal – while I get to “author books on political theory”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/13/more-brighouse-promotion/#comment-89465 without actually having to write them, he “gets attacked”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006239.php for saying rude things about Robert Conquest that he didn’t in fact say. But still, perhaps better to keep things straight.

Spotted yesterday morning at the Amish Market in Battery Park, NYC.

!http://nicoleandhenry.smugmug.com/photos/32473971-S.jpg!

I’ve gone through the “comments”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/12/trahisons-des-clercs/#comments to my previous post, and found a quite considerable number of people who appear to have made egregious claims about opponents of the war rooting for the other side. I’ve excluded people who don’t fit the criteria for being well-known etc (including a couple of bloggers). I’ve included both Glenn Reynolds and Hindrocket of Powerline, who both seem to me to qualify as well-known individuals beyond the blogosphere. Where there’s some real degree of ambiguity, I’ve not included the links; where (as with the _Wall Street Journal_ editorial board’s slur-in-passing), I think that any reading other than the obvious one is simply making excuses for the inexcusable, I’ve included them. Which is not to say that I don’t fully expect some of our regular commenters to engage in aforementioned excuse-making, special pleading etc. The links are below the fold.
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Eugene Volokh “responds”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_08_07-2005_08_13.shtml#1123863417 (or so I take it; for some reason he doesn’t provide a link) to Ted’s post below by requesting that his readers send in instances of “Western commentators who defend the Iraqi insurgents, or at least justify their actions as being a supposed campaign for self-determination, allegedly justifiable rage at Western misbehavior, and so on.” Fair enough, to an extent. As one of his commenters notes, he’s moved the goalposts from Taranto’s quite specific “those Westerners who side with the ‘Iraqi resistance’ against America and its allies” to a much more ambiguous category of statements, but perhaps he feels that there’s a “slippery slope”:http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/slippery.htm leading from the latter to the former style of argumentation. In any event, in the spirit of Eugene’s appeal, I’d like to put out one of my own. I’d like instances in which commentators make egregious claims that a substantial section of those who opposed the war are, in fact, rooting for the other side. As per Eugene’s rules, please provide the name and brief description of the person (who should be a journalist, official or famous person), the exact quote, and the URL at which the original article is to be found. This _Dolchstosslegende_ style hitjob on the vast realist-liberal-internationalist-conspiracy, by famous neo-conservative intellectual, Norman Podhoretz in the February 2005 issue of _Commentary_, URL “http://www.commentarymagazine.com/special/A11902025_1.html”:http://www.commentarymagazine.com/special/A11902025_1.html is the kind of thing I’m looking for.

bq. Before November 2, some realists had feared that Bush’s reelection would, in Hendrickson’s words, “confirm and ratify the revolutionary changes he has introduced to U.S. strategy.” Having calmed down a bit since then, they are now hoping to avert the apocalypse through another possible outcome that some of them envisaged before November 2: namely, that “once revolutionary zeal collides with hard reality, . . . the Bush policies . . . will end in tears.”

bq. One can only admire Hendrickson’s candor in admitting what is usually hotly denied: that even many leading realists, along with many liberal internationalists, are rooting for an American defeat. Direct action not being their style, they will not participate in the “mass demonstrations and civil disobedience” advocated by Tom Hayden, who advises following the playbook of the “peace” movement of the 60’s (of which he was one of the chief organizers) as the way to get us out of Iraq. But neither will they sit back passively and wait for “hard reality” to ensure that the Bush Doctrine “ends in tears.”

bq. Instead of taking to the streets, the realists and the liberal internationalists will go back to their word processors and redouble their ongoing efforts to turn public opinion against the Bush Doctrine. Mainly they will try to do so by demonstrating over and over again that the doctrine is already failing its first great encounter with “hard reality” in Iraq.

(Podhoretz is here patching together quotes from a review article in a deliberately mendacious fashion to make it appear as if the article’s author is saying things that he very clearly is not. For the article which he is abusing, see “here”:http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj04-1/hendrickson.html and especially the last two paragraphs; for a response by the article’s author to Podhoretz, see “here”)

Ralph Luker writes to tell me that 15 other US presidential historians “have joined”:http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/13998.html Rick Shenkman’s blog, to form a presidential history conglomerate. A nice addition to the academic blogosphere.

Robert KC Johnson “claims”:http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/13987.html that the New York State legislature’s creation of a commission to examine curricula and textbooks to see whether they properly reflect the African-American experience demonstrates the convergence of the far left and far right.

bq. Whoa. Isn’t that exactly what the Kansas board of Education is doing with intelligent design? Where is the AAUP, or the CUNY faculty union, denouncing the threat to academic freedom inherent in a politically-appointed board making “suggestions for revisions to the curricula and textbooks”? I’m not holding my breath waiting for either group to act.

Tripe and nonsense. It very obviously _isn’t_ what the Kansas board of Education is doing. What’s at issue in Kansas is whether or not a pseudo-scientific set of rhetorical claims that were consciously designed to create a “wedge”:http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/barbara_forrest/wedge.html in the heart of science are given equal standing to a well established and tested scientific theory. What’s at issue here is whether or not school curricula and textbooks should reflect the historic experience of a particular group. Now you can criticize the latter on its own terms (as Tim Burke has “done”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=40 with regard to a similar proposal in Pennsylvania), but it clearly isn’t even the same _type_ of issue as trying to steamroller Intelligent Design into the curriculum. It’s a question of the kind of collective understanding of history that schools should be teaching, which is a very different, and much fuzzier thing.

(Nor, as an aside, do curriculum committees of this sort necessarily produce the kinds of one-dimensional history that Tim rightly fears. A friend of mine was heavily involved in another committee which was mandated by the Albany legislature a few years ago to include the Irish famine on the state’s Human Rights Curriculum. It’s probably safe to guess that the Irish-American legislators who came up with this initiative anticipated schoolkids being fed wrap-the-green-flag-round-me nationalism, the wickedness of perfidious Albion etc etc. The committee’s final curriculum “didn’t do this”:http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FKX/is_2002_Spring-Summer/ai_87915679/pg_3 – instead it used the Famine and the Irish emigrant experience to ask more general questions about the relationship between politics, economics and hunger, to draw the connections with contemporary politics, and to talk bluntly about some of the nastier aspects of the Irish-American experience, such as racism and the Draft Riots).

Via “Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/8/10/102155/390, this quite repulsive comparison from “Max Boot”:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-boot3aug03,0,3318247.column?coll=la-util-op-ed between the indiscriminate bombing of civilians in World War II and the war in Iraq.

bq. Oh, how times change. Today we can put “smart” bombs through the window of an office building. Along with greater accuracy has come a growing impatience with “collateral damage.” A bomb that goes astray and hits a foreign embassy or a wedding party now causes international outrage, whereas 60 years ago the destruction of an entire city was a frequent occurrence.

bq. Does this make us more enlightened than the “greatest generation”? Perhaps. We certainly have the luxury of being more discriminating in the application of violence. But even today, there is cause to doubt whether more precision is always better. During the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. was so sparing in its use of force that many Baathists never understood they were beaten. The butcher’s bill we dodged early on is now being paid with compound interest.

So the reason that we’re in trouble in Iraq is that we didn’t carpet-bomb the hell out of the country at the beginning of the campaign. Boot demurs that he “can’t claim to have worked out the moral calculus of bombing,” and is “troubled” by the deliberate targetting of civilians. Still, the direction of his argument is quite clear, and, as Matt says, rather revealing. There’s something deeply nasty about the disconnect (which is perhaps most clearly expressed in Charles Krauthammer’s dictum that the only way to win Arabs’ hearts and minds is to grab their balls and squeeze them hard) between neo-cons’ purported aims and methods. It would seem rather difficult to make the claim that you’re acting in the best interests of the Iraqi people gel with a claim that greater brutality and more indiscriminate use of force against said people was needed to protect said interests. But that’s what Boot seems to be trying to do.

This paragraph in a “post”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_08_07-2005_08_13.shtml#1123523518 by Andrew Morriss, guestblogging with the Volokhs, struck me as saying some pretty odd things about publication policies in the legal academy.

bq. There are huge problems with the U.S. News rankings but there is no question that they are important. For example, a friend recently told me that she had been called by a law review about one of her manuscripts. The articles editor apologized for rejecting the manuscript and explained that the rejection had been made without reading the paper because the editors had mistakenly misclassified my friend’s school as being in a lower tier law school. Now that they realized their error, the editor told her, they wanted to consider the article on the merits. I don’t know how widespread this type of screening is, but that it occurred at a well-ranked, but not top journal is at least moderately disturbing.

Now I know that there are a lot of complaints among legal academics about the dominant role of student-edited law reviews. But (if this is at all representative), I hadn’t realized quite how bad the problem was. It’s not (as Micah has “argued previously”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/10/25/dont-blame-the-law-students-a-reply-to-posner ) the fault of the students editing these reviews – when you have so many article submissions that you’re literally unable to read them all (thanks to the practice of multiple submissions), you’re inevitably going to have some more-or-less unfair metric for deciding which ones to read, and which ones not to. The problem is a structural one. But it does suggest that it’s going to be a lot more difficult for a smart legal academic in a second or third tier school to improve her position by publishing material in good journals, than it would be if she were, say, a political scientist or a sociologist. If her school’s position in the rankings counts against her chances of getting published, she may find herself in a Catch-22 situation; the only way to get published in good journals is to improve her personal name-recognition (since her school won’t help), but the only way to improve her personal name-recognition is to get published. Blind peer review, which is the norm across most of academia, does serve as at least a modest corrective to mutually reinforcing hierarchies in journals’ publication records and department rankings. It’s possible, albeit difficult, to publish your way up. As an aside, I wonder whether the importance of name-recognition to legal academics helps explain why “so many”:http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2005/06/law_professor_b_1.html of them have started blogs – blogging is a cheap and easy way to make your name familiar to the editors of law reviews.

Update: “Steve Bainbridge”:http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/08/a_law_review_pu.html is seeking to test whether law review editors do indeed read law blogs, by soliciting “bids” for a recent article that he’s written. He’s already received an offer from a journal in the top 35-40 range.

A minor victory for San Francisco hotel workers, who are fighting a divisive battle over contracts with their employers. The American Political Science Association has announced that it is “moving its 2006 meeting”:http://www.apsanet.org/content_18472.cfm to Philadelphia, “[d]ue to the lack of progress in the protracted labor-management dispute in San Francisco.” This is the result of a deliberate strategy by the hotel workers’ union, which has been working on persuading academic organizations not to host conferences at the hotels in question, while they continue to try to hold out. Union officials figure that it’s time for academic lefties to put their money where their mouth is, and they’re damn right. I’m delighted that the American Political Science Association has done this.

Update: I should make it clear that my understanding isn’t that the APSA is taking a political stance on the underlying merits of the issues here. Instead, I read the press release to say that given the likelihood of disruption (which would stem from leftwing political scientists boycotting, or organizing pickets, alternative meetings etc in solidarity with the hotel workers), the APSA has decided to move to a less controversial location.

“Cosma Shalizi”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/%7Ecrshalizi/weblog/ on intelligent design.

bq. The thing is, this leads to bad science, and, if an unbeliever can say so, bad religion. The stakes are more serious here than with silly “devotionals with mathematical content”, but the issues are not that different. Doing what you must know is shoddy science, in the hope that it will provide cover for propagating the gospel, shows a poor opinion of your fellow creatures, of the gospel, and of God. Of your fellow creatures, because you are resorting to trickery, rather than honest persuasion or the example of your own life, to win converts. Of the gospel, because you do not trust its ability to change lives and win souls. Last and worst, of God, because you are perverting what you believe to be the divine gift of intelligence, and refusing to learn about the Creator from the creation. And for what? To protect your opinion about what measure you think it fitting for God to employ.

bq. One of the greatest passages in the Bible is when “the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind”:

bq. Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

bq. Creationism is a way of responding to this profound challenge by saying “I know! I know! You did it _just like I woulda!_”