Henry

Via Political Theory Daily Review, a review of Robert Conquest’s new book, _The Dragons of Expectation_ which apparently makes some rather outrageous claims in the course of a general attack on leftist academics and internationalists. I haven’t read the book yet (I’m trying to get my hands on a copy),[1] but if the reviewer is quoting him accurately, Conquest argues that a fair portion of the blame for September 11 can be laid at the feet of left-leaning professors. The reviewer quotes from Conquest’s introduction:

bq. “And we are told that a number of members of the Middle Eastern terror groups had originally been in the local communist movements … The members of [the Real IRA and the Shining Path], as with those in Italy or, for example, the Naxalites in India, were almost entirely recruited from student elements who had accepted the abstractions of fashionable academics. And the September 11 bombers were almost all comfortably off young men, some having been to Western universities and there adopted the extremely anti-Western mind-set.”

According to the reviewer, Conquest doesn’t bother even to try to provide any evidence in support of this accusation.

There’s an interesting juxtaposition between this and the disgusting efforts of Glenn Reynolds and others to use Ward Churchill’s comments as a means to smear the left. On the one hand, Conquest’s language and claims are less inflammatory and offensive than Churchill’s. On the other, Conquest is one of the right’s most senior and respected figures, a fellow of the Hoover Institute, and a key player in the Anglo-American right’s intellectual network. Churchill, in comparison, is a relative nobody who represents no-one except himself. I’ve always had a fondness for Conquest; he was dead right on Stalinism, and he comes across as a very human figure (and a first rate composer of limericks and light verse) in his letters to Kingsley Amis. But if he’s seriously trying to claim, on the basis of no apparent evidence, that leftwing professors in Western universities shoulder some of the blame for September 11, he should be deeply ashamed of himself. It’s a vicious, disgraceful slur, and it’s every bit as unacceptable as the claim that the West and the US had September 11 coming to them. Still, I don’t think that Reynolds or any of his cronies will be following their advice to the left and disassociating themselves from Conquest (indeed, judging by Reynolds’ dishonest and hate-filled post, I wouldn’t be surprised if he agrees with Conquest’s claims).

Update: to be quite clear (there’s already one rather bizarre misinterpretation out there in the blogosphere), Conquest isn’t referring in this passage to Western ideas percolating through into radical Islam in some indirect fashion. First, he draws a link between “the abstractions of fashionable academics” and the propensity of the students accepting those abstractions to then become terrorists. Then, in the very next sentence, he asserts a direct connection between the fact that some of the 9/11 terrorists attended Western universities, and the fact that they absorbed an anti-Western mindset. In the absence of any evidence of a connection between what the 9/11 terrorists were taught in Western universities, and what they then did, this is a slur, clear and simple.

Update 2: “Armed Liberal” replies (or, more precisely, purports to reply) to my post.

fn1. If, when I get the book, I find that the reviewer has seriously misrepresented Conquest, I’ll very happily apologize – however, given the unambiguous slur in the quote above, I don’t expect that I’ll be in a position where I need to.

I’m very excited about the launch of Inside Higher Ed, a new web-based publication with “news, opinion and career advice and services for all of higher education.” This is, of course, not entirely dissimilar from what the Chronicle of Higher Education has been offering for many years, but there are some very important differences. The Chronicle has some great writers, but it’s primarily a print-based publication, and it shows. Most of the interesting web content is only available to subscribers. This is highly frustrating for bloggers, who don’t, as a rule, like to link to articles that most of their readers can’t access. Individuals within the _Chronicle_ are pretty understanding about this, but there is only so much that they can do. _IHE_ is beginning from a very different model, one which I think is much better designed to capitalize on the explosion of web-based discussion over the last three years. All their content is going to be free, which means that bloggers can link to their stories without a second thought. Furthermore, they’re deliberately seeking to integrate _IHE_ into the debates that are happening among blogs, highlighting and picking up on the more interesting discussions. They’ll also have a jobs service (which will be the bread-and-butter of the website), and a weekly email digest.

In short, I reckon that _IHE_ is going to be an extremely valuable resource for bloggers and non-blogging academics. It will provide the kinds of reporting and detailed analysis that bloggers themselves aren’t much good at. It’s worth noting that the people behind _IHE_ include Scott Jaschik, who was editor of the _Chronicle_ during its glory days, Doug Lederman, who has done some superb academic reporting and editing at the _Chronicle_ and elsewhere, and Scott McLemee, who will be their ‘Essayist-at-Large.’ Scott McL has his first column up today, where he describes the blogosphere as

bq. that agonistic realm routinely combining the best qualities of the academic seminar with the worst traits of talk radio

With any luck, _IHE_ will mean less talk radio, and more grounded discussion. As I’ve said, I’m excited.

Crooked Timber aren’t the only lefties to be attacked for failing to celebrate the Iraqi elections before the sun hit the yardarm yesterday morning. Intrepid sleuth-columnist, Justin Darr, of Renew America, is on the case. He outs Stephen Bainbridge, that notorious radical and bête-noir of the Republican establishment, and Stephen Green, the saturnine Svengali behind Bolshevik agitprop collective Vodkapundit, as undercover members of the “Let’s Pretend It Didn’t Happen Faction” of the allied Internet Liberal Bloggers of America.

bq. a group who broke with the traditional liberal habit of talking endlessly about anything so long as it can be twisted into a childish penis reference about Vice President Cheney, and said nothing.

Still, Mr. Darr is more charitable than Ms. Malkin – he acknowledges that there may be an innocent explanation for the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy’s failure to blog on Iraq by lunchtime.

bq. Perhaps it was unfair of me to look into their sites on Sunday afternoon when so many liberals are just beginning emerge from the drug induced haze of their traditional weekend medicinal marijuana benders.

Brad DeLong spares me the effort of completing a half-written post about how badly Gregg Easterbrook misses the point of Jared Diamond’s wonderful Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond isn’t arguing that material circumstances trump human inventiveness but that they structure it. Still, there’s another aspect to Easterbrook’s review of Diamond’s new book which is worth discussing. In Easterbrook’s closing paragraph, he says:

bq. Diamond fears our fate was set in motion in antiquity — we’re living off the soil and petroleum bequeathed by the far past, and unless there are profound changes in behavior, all may crash when legacy commodities run out. Oddly, for someone with a background in evolutionary theory, he seems not to consider society’s evolutionary arc. He thinks backward 13,000 years, forward only a decade or two. What might human society be like 13,000 years from now? Above us in the Milky Way are essentially infinite resources and living space. If the phase of fossil-driven technology leads to discoveries that allow Homo sapiens to move into the galaxy, then resources, population pressure and other issues that worry Diamond will be forgotten. Most of the earth may even be returned to primordial stillness, and the whole thing would have happened in the blink of an eye by nature’s standards.

This crystallizes something that I’ve been struggling to articulate for a while. It seems to me that there’s a shared attitude towards science among various right-leaning technophiles (Glenn Reynolds being a paradigmatic example). Roughly speaking, they tend to agree with science when it suggest new possibilities for human beings (the Singularity! nanotechnology! conquering the universe via spaceflight! longer lifespans!) and to strongly disagree with scientific results or prognoses that suggest fundamental limits to human beings’ can-do ability to prevail over their circumstances (global warming, ecological collapse).[1] This comes out very clearly over the course of Easterbrook’s review, where it becomes clear that Easterbrook’s objection isn’t to the specifics of Diamond’s arguments – it’s to the very notion that material limits might determine our collective fate, a contention which Easterbrook bizarrely describes as ‘postmodern’. This faith in boundless possibilities is at best a-scientific, and at worst pseudo-religious feel-good claptrap along the lines of Easterbrook’s previous muddled attempts to reconcile cosmology and religious belief. Of course, it may be true that future discoveries will enable us to leave the Earth, conquer the galaxy, exploit the “infinite resources” of the universe etc. But half-assed appeals to the limitless opportunities of the future aren’t an argument; they’re a statement of faith. It’s a wonder that Easterbrook should have been asked by the NYT to review a serious book; it certainly shouldn’t happen again.

Update: A commenter over at Brad’s points out that Fred Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth’s wicked corporate satire, The Space Merchants, anticipated Easterbrook’s basic argument over fifty years ago.

bq. The Conservationists were fair game, those wild-eyed zealots who pretended modern civilization was in some way ‘plundering’ our planet. Preposterous stuff. Science is *always* a step ahead of the failure of natural resources. After all, when real meat got scarce we had soyaburgers ready. When oil ran low, technology developed the pedicab.

fn1. While Easterbrook isn’t a global warming skeptic as such, he is skeptical about many of its adverse consequences.

I heard Chuck Hagel speak at the World Affairs Councils meeting in Washington DC yesterday (C-Span link here ), and thought it was pretty interesting. The content was vague, as is typical for US politicians warming up for a run at President, but in tone. Hagel was very clearly setting out his stall as the anti-Bush on foreign policy issues. He began his talk by talking about the need to focus on the allies, then spoke of how US public diplomacy had “lost its way,” of how our experience in Iraq should give us pause about trying to impose democracy by force etc etc. Most interesting in the short term, he hinted at some openness to the idea of Senate hearings on the disaster in Iraq, speaking at length about how Senator William Fulbright had come in for enormous criticism from his own party for holding hearings on Vietnam back in the day, but had been vindicated over the longer run. In Hagel’s words, we “should not be party to a false consensus on Iraq, or any other issue.” I’ve no idea of whether anything will come of this – but Hagel seemed to me to be presenting a possible opening for Democrats and reality-based Republicans.

We’ve had a few discussions over CT’s life span where commenters have claimed that free markets produce just deserts; that is, that if markets are working correctly, people end up more or less where they deserve to be. Elizabeth Anderson has a great post over at Left2Right setting out Hayek’s argument that free markets can’t and shouldn’t lead to just deserts if they’re going to have the informational efficiencies that Hayekians see as essential. Key grafs:

bq. Let’s consider first Hayek’s claim that prices in free market capitalism do not give people what they morally deserve. Hayek’s deepest economic insight was that the basic function of free market prices is informational. Free market prices send signals to producers as to where their products are most in demand (and to consumers as to the opportunity costs of their options). They reflect the sum total of the inherently dispersed information about the supply and demand of millions of distinct individuals for each product. Free market prices give us our only access to this information, and then only in aggregate form. This is why centralized economic planning is doomed to failure: there is no way to collect individualized supply and demand information in a single mind or planning agency, to use as a basis for setting prices. Free markets alone can effectively respond to this information.

bq. It’s a short step from this core insight about prices to their failure to track any coherent notion of moral desert. Claims of desert are essentially backward-looking. They aim to reward people for virtuous conduct that they undertook in the past. Free market prices are essentially forward-looking. Current prices send signals to producers as to where the demand is now, not where the demand was when individual producers decided on their production plans. Capitalism is an inherently dynamic economic system. It responds rapidly to changes in tastes, to new sources of supply, to new substitutes for old products. This is one of capitalism’s great virtues. But this responsiveness leads to volatile prices. Consequently, capitalism is constantly pulling the rug out from underneath even the most thoughtful, foresightful, and prudent production plans of individual agents. However virtuous they were, by whatever standard of virtue one can name, individuals cannot count on their virtue being rewarded in the free market. For the function of the market isn’t to reward people for past good behavior. It’s to direct them toward producing for current demand, regardless of what they did in the past.

i.e. – you can’t have it both way folks. Via Brad DeLong

More on trade-unions as the Bush administration tries to restrict collective bargaining at the Department of Homeland Security, and ask Congress “to grant all federal agencies similar authority to rewrite civil service rules governing their employees.”

bq. Yesterday, union leaders decried provisions that would curtail the power of labor unions by no longer requiring DHS officials to negotiate over such matters as where employees will be deployed, the type of work they will do and the equipment they will use. They also object to provisions that would limit the role of the independent Federal Labor Relations Authority and hand the job of settling labor-management disputes to an internal labor relations board controlled by the DHS secretary.

After going back and forth on this, I’m coming to the conclusion that this is of a piece with tort reform and the privatization of social security. They’re all part of a massive experiment in conservative cultural engineering, which aims to transform the Democratic party into a permanent minority by eviscerating the political power of its key constituencies (trade unions, trial lawyers) and transforming ordinary citizens into a new investing class. As I’ve said before, I don’t think that this will work – but I’ve no doubt that the administration can do some serious damage to Democrats’ ability to raise funds, and (much more important) get volunteers out on the streets to canvas for votes. I’ve no doubt that the Democratic party could live without the trial lawyers – but if the administration succeeds in crippling unions, it will very seriously hamper Democrats’ ability to win back the Presidency and other offices in 2008. I suspect that many middle class bloggers simply don’t realize how important unions are in organizing and getting out the vote in the Midwest and elsewhere. As Sam Rosenfeld has said, it’s frustrating that the Democratic leadership in the Senate isn’t saying anything about strengthening labour law – improving the bargaining position of unions is clearly in the long term organizational interests of the Democratic party.

Update: Sam Rosenfeld has more to say on this story too.

There was a minor kerfuffle among left-bloggers a couple of days ago about the dearth of blogging on trade union issues. Nathan Newman suggested that it reflected the lack of interest of middle class liberals in trade unions. This is part of the story but only part. I suspect that the lack of media coverage of union issues, or, sometimes, of good information from the unions themselves, are equally important in explaining why people don’t blog on this as much as they should. Bloggers tend to rely on their morning newspapers to find out about the world – when those newspapers don’t cover union issues, bloggers are unlikely to focus on them. Which is why I hope that this recent NYT story describing a Human Rights Watch report on the US meatpacking industry gets the attention that it deserves from lefties, and indeed from union-friendly conservatives.

bq. The report also concluded that packing companies violated human and labor rights by suppressing their employees’ efforts to organize by, for example, often firing employees who support a union. The report asserted that slaughterhouse and packing plants also flouted international rules by taking advantage of workers’ immigration status – in some plants two-thirds of the workers are illegal immigrants – to subject them to inferior treatment.

Original Human Rights Watch report available here (interested readers should also check out Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, which has a trenchant and detailed discussion of how meatpacking firms abuse immigrants).

Update: Nathan Newman suggests that bloggers should sign up for email updates from American Rights at Work, an organization which I hadn’t heard of, but which seems to be doing excellent work on union-related issues.

Matt Yglesias mentioned a few days ago that he didn’t see anything that was morally wrong with paternalism, with the implication that paternalist policies ought to be evaluated on purely pragmatic grounds. The Washington Post has an interesting test case today for those who might disagree with him. It describes how “aggressive direct-to-consumer advertising campaigns” for Celebrex and Vioxx persuaded consumers to take these drugs, even though they would predictably have been better off if they had taken other non-prescription drugs instead. As the article says, the US is highly unusual in allowing direct-to-consumer marketing of drugs – Western European countries typically only allow these drugs to be marketed to doctors through specialist publications etc.

None of this is to say that the European system is perfect – drug companies pour an awful lot of money into “seminars” in nice places, golf excursions etc where they try to persuade doctors to prescribe their drugs. But there is a strong pragmatic case to be made that doctors are going to be better informed as a rule than their patients over the benefits and drawbacks of particular courses of treatment (otherwise why use them in the first place?). Thus, they’ll be better able, most of the time, to figure out when pharmaceutical companies are trying to con them into prescribing expensive and potentially dangerous medications where off-the-shelf drugs would work as well or better. Of course, this is not to say that consumers shouldn’t be able to get their hands on relevant information (doctors aren’t infallible) – but it’s surely a bit of a stretch to argue that aggressive TV advertising campaigns provide such information. Thus, I’m pretty well convinced of the case for banning direct marketing of drugs to consumers – it’s a relatively mild form of paternalism, which seems to me to have quite substantial payoffs. Any dissenters out there?

Update: via Bill Gardner, I see that James Surowiecki is similarly critical of the marketing of Vioxx:

bq. But companies like Merck, which spend hundreds of millions on ads targeting consumers, have themselves to blame, too. Instead of getting people to think about drugs in terms of costs and benefits, these ads encourage people to think of medicine in the same way they think of other consumer goods. It would be one thing if Merck had marketed Vioxx only to people who really needed it—people who couldn’t take ibuprofen or aspirin safely. Instead, the company marketed it aggressively to everyone, so that some twenty million Americans had Vioxx prescriptions. That’s why the potential damages against Merck are so vast. If juries have a hard time accepting a risk-benefit trade-off when it comes to drugs, it’s in part because the drug companies have convinced them that no such trade-off has to be made.

I’ve been reading Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World, which is one of the most profoundly annoying books that I’ve read in the last few years. There’s nothing more frustrating than to read a book by someone who shares several of your pet aversions (trickle down economics, Deepak Chopra, obscurantist literary theory), but who isn’t bright enough to say anything interesting or non-trivial about them. It’s a rambling, shallow book which aspires to, and occasionally even attains, the intellectual level of a middling Sunday-supplement broadside.

There’s one unintentionally hilarious bit, where Wheen vigorously excoriates literary theorists for having been taken in by the Sokal hoax and then goes on a few pages later to deliver an extended harrumph attacking Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method. Wheen cites a passage where Feyerabend attacks the teaching of science in schools as a form of tyranny (in Wheen’s reading, Feyerabend is saying that we shouldn’t be teaching children that the earth moves around the sun; we should be teaching them that _some people believe_ that the earth moves around the sun). What makes this delicious is that Wheen, like the literary theorists whom he’s been fulminating against a few pages previously, has been taken in by a provocation. If he’d bothered to read the preface of _Against Method_ properly, he’d know that Feyerabend is deliberately and consciously putting forward as outrageous a set of examples as he can in support of a serious argument. The essay was originally planned as one half of a twofer, in which Imre Lakatos would try to top Feyerabend with an equally vigorous set of arguments on behalf of a somewhat more orthodox account of the sources of scientific progress. Sadly, Lakatos died before the project could be completed. Unlike the postmodernists (Irigaray, Kristeva) whom Wheen lumps him in with, Feyerabend was a trained scientist who knew what he was talking about, and was engaged in a very serious debate about the scientific method and its merits as a process of generating new discoveries. As an aside, Feyerabend also wrote one of the most entertaining autobiographies, Killing Time that I’ve ever read.

Spotted in “Whole Foods” while shopping this afternoon.

!https://www.crookedtimber.org/images/batard.jpg!

I saw Clint Eastwood’s _Million Dollar Baby_ last night – an extraordinary, savage little film – but there was one element that left me puzzled. When I read the Washington Post’s review of the film a couple of weeks ago, I’d been amused by the reviewer’s description of Eastwood’s character, Frankie, as someone with ‘hidden depths,’ who “reads Yeats in Gaelic.” I’d assumed that this was a mistake made by the reviewer – Yeats didn’t write in the Irish language, and if my memory is correct, his ability even to read in the language was scanty to non-existent (unlike his friend, Lady Gregory, whose translations of Irish myths Yeats relied upon). But the reviewer was correct – the film does depict Frankie as reading what seems to be an Irish language book of poetry, including Yeat’s “The Lake-Isle of Innisfree.” The film leaves the viewer with the very strong impression that the Irish language version of the poem is the original – Frankie starts reading it in Irish, and then gives the English language version for the benefit of his non Irish speaking audience. I’d put this down to traditional Hollywood ignorance except that Eastwood is a careful film maker, and the meaning of another Irish phrase is at the heart of the film. So what’s going on? A little bit of dramatic license (the most probable explanation – but a bit disappointing)? Or is Frankie a little bit of a fraud (certainly when he reads the Irish language aloud, it’s almost unrecognizable – he doesn’t know how to pronounce it at all)? Or is there something else going on entirely?

Update: some spoilers in the comments thread below.

Mark Dery on the political blogosphere:

bq. But bloggers who want to remedy what ails the corporate McMedia monopoly should grab a clue from Chris Allbritton and haul their larval, jack-studded flesh up out of their Matrix-like pods and do some goddamn reporting instead of just getting all meta about Instapundit’s post about The Daily Kos’s post about Little Green Footballs’s post about the vast left-wing media conspiracy’s latest act of high treason. It’s the Yertle the Turtle syndrome: Pundits stacked on top of pundits on top of pundits, all the way down, and, at the very bottom of the heap, the lowly hack who kicked off the whole frenzy of intertextuality: the reporter who dared venture out of the media airlock to collect some samples of Actual, Reported Fact.

A few quick links from around the blogosphere as I gear up to start teaching again …

Scott McLemee in _TAP_ on teenage crushes and Susan Sontag.

Kevin Drum professes puzzlement about why Bush has been flogging the dead horse of social security; Mark Schmitt provides a plausible reason why.

Brad DeLong on the “Salvador Option”:

bq. To claim that American officers calling for a “Salvador option” are unaware that they are calling for Death Squads is as incredible as claiming that Plantagenets calling for a “Canterbury option” are unaware of murder in the cathedral.

Finally, the BlogPAC sets up its There Is No Crisis website (via Matt Yglesias). And a good thing too. A few weeks ago, Matt, Mark Schmitt and I had a good conversation about the need to build some sort of organization around the intellectual energy of the left blogosphere’s discussion of Social Security. This is a great start.