Henry

One for the Kipling enthusiasts over at the Volokhs (even if the author is a bit iffy on what ‘approbation’ means).

bq. Take up the Wrong Man’s burden—
And stay above the law—
No treaty or convention
Can stop America.
The moral approbation
Of others near and far
Denounce as soft on terror
And cowardice in war.

Via Maud Newton.

While the Republicans are clearly enjoying the benefits of the hack gap, Christopher Shea suggests in the _Boston Globe_ that the Democrats’ ‘professoriate gap’ doesn’t count for much. According to Shea, (1) the recent poll of academic economists in the _Economist_ where 70% of economists judged Bush’s fiscal policy to be bad, or very bad, (2) the letter signed by Harvard Business School professors suggesting that Bush flunked his tax policy, and (3) the letter from over 700 foreign policy scholars denouncing the Iraq adventure are so much hot air.

Shea’s article is lazy, one-sided, and intellectually sloppy. It tries to squash two, quite different arguments into an incoherent whole. The first is undeniably true – that academics don’t have much power to influence elections. The second is false – that this means that polls or petitions signed by academics are politically irrelevant. Academic economists and international relations scholars have real expertise in their areas of interest – that’s why they’re frequently tapped by both Democratic and Republican administrations for middle-to-senior policy positions. They’re not just living in ivory towers. Furthermore, both economics and international relations departments are ideologically and intellectually diverse – it’s notoriously hard to get them to agree on anything. When international relations scholars from both left and right unite to denounce a major foreign policy initiative, it’s a pretty good signal that there’s something horribly wrong with the policy in question. Likewise, when the great majority of economists are convinced that Bush’s fiscal policy is bad-to-disastrous, it tells us something important about how truly awful Bush’s fiscal policy is.

Update: Chris Shea responds, defending the article in comments.

Scott McLemee has an astute review of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s “The Road to Modernity” in tomorrow’s _New York Times_. I’ll leave her claim that one can distinguish between a ‘good’ Enlightenment (English theorists of moral sentiments) and a ‘bad’ one (nasty French rationalist universalists) to more qualified commentators. What I liked was McLemee’s little sting at the end, which nicely illustrates certain of the limits of Himmelfarb’s brand of conservatism, and indeed “compassionate conservatism” more generally.

bq. When Himmelfarb’s attention turns to colonial America and the early United States the results are less persuasive, and indeed reveal far more than she may intend about the limits of moral sentiment she extols. ”For economic if for no other reasons,” she writes, ”the displacement of the Indians was the precondition for the very existence of the settlers.” As for slavery, Himmelfarb acknowledges it as an evil, but is curiously silent about its cumulative effect, over 400 years, on the nation’s stock of moral capital.

bq. I was reminded of something the ”elitist” Diderot wrote, in a moment of bitter hatred for the slave trade: the Africans ”are tyrannized, mutilated, burnt and put to death, and yet we listen to these accounts coolly and without emotion. The torments of a people to whom we owe our luxuries are never able to reach our hearts.” A more robust sociology of virtue might begin with the realization that the power of moral sentiment so often fails us. Yet when it does, our moral obligations remain. Meeting them is, arguably, one function of the state. But in the eyes of the neocons, I suppose, such thoughts smack of John Rawls — or even, worse, Le Monde.

This seems to me from my limited reading in the literature to be one of the key problems of conservatism – coming up with a coherent and convincing argument about those moral and ethical obligations that don’t spring ‘naturally’ from our pre-rational loyalties to family and friends. I suppose if you were a conservative, you could retort that obligations that aren’t natural are by virtue of that fact not obligations. But this leaves conservatives in a rather awkward position, given that many of the loyalties that conservatives prize (such as patriotism) are clearly artificial in nature (nation states are relatively recent social constructs). Others, such as the belief that slavery is morally repugnant, have changed dramatically over time. I suspect that there has to be a conservative literature out there that tries to grapple with some of these problems – can anyone point me in the right direction?

try Dean R. Koontz’s “The Face,” as described by David Langford.

bq. Koontz gives us an effectively alarming villain with a set policy of disrupting society via acts of chaos, a dark Merry Prankster; but the book seems inflated far beyond its natural length by … demonstrating this fellow’s wickedness again and again as he remorselessly kills a whole series of accomplices to his ultimate Big Bad Plan, while — being a deconstructionist professor — he naturally passes his spare time starving and tormenting a kidnapped colleague who gave offence by admiring such classics as Mark Twain. But of course.

Two must read pieces by David Glenn and Mark Schmitt (discussion below fold).

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Dan Drezner and I have been conducting a friendly argument over whether or not the European Union is a standard international organization (i.e. a creature of its member states) or something more. The minor crisis surrounding Rocco Buttiglione, incoming Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs should be an interesting data point for our disagreement. The European Parliament has the right to vote no confidence in the European Commission as a whole. Over the last several years, as the Economist notes, the Parliament has assiduously sought to expand this right into the power to make or break individual Commissioners whom it doesn’t like. The Parliament has very cleverly expanded its powers far beyond the intent of the member states, by instituting “confirmation hearings” in which it claims the right to judge whether or not individual Commission members are up to the job. Clearly, it doesn’t think that Italian nominee Rocco Buttiglione is suited for his responsibilities – he’s a conservative Catholic whose personal views on gay rights and single mothers sit rather awkwardly with his responsibility to protect minority rights. A majority of MEPs seems to be willing to vote Buttiglione down; but Italy, a powerful member state, is refusing to back down and withdraw his nomination. The Commission President, who decides the portfolio of individual commissioners, is caught in the middle. As the _Economist_ says, this dispute is a reflection of “a broader philosophical question: where should power really lie in the European Union?”

The Economist‘s hopes to the contrary, it seems that the Commission President has decided that it’s more important to please the Parliament than the member states. According to the _FT_, he’s negotiating a deal whereby Buttiglione would have his powers over human rights and minority affairs stripped away from him. Even more pertinently, the President seems to be contemplating a settlement in which Parliament’s powers vis-a-vis the Commission would be expanded very substantially. This would lead to a very clear shift in the balance of power within the European Union, in which the influence of member states would be weakened, and the Parliament’s relationship with the Commission would start to resemble that between the US Congress and the executive branch. If this comes to pass, it will be very hard (perhaps impossible?) to square with theories of international relations that emphasize the power of states to determine international outcomes – it would be a development that (a) certainly wasn’t anticipated in the Treaties signed by the member states, and (b) clearly wasn’t in member states’ interests. It would also have the incidental benefits of embarrassing Berlusconi’s government, and clipping the wings of a rather dubious potential Commissioner (regardless of his views on gay people and women, his enthusiasm for camps for immigrants should be enough to disqualify him for the job).

Teresa Nielsen Hayden makes a very interesting aside in a long post about how GWB’s way of dealing with criticism reminds her of vituperative slushpile authors with middle-management backgrounds.

bq. You know how topical jokes are generally formed by adapting earlier groups of cognate jokes? I’ve been looking into the current batch of GWB jokes, and find that many of the jokes from which they’re drawn were originally about Stalin. But I digress.

This seems to me quite telling. Mark Schmitt makes a good case for GWB as a “bad CEO,” but the administration’s refusal to brook criticism and wilful contempt for “reality” seems more grotesque and dangerous than that. It verges on what the French call _ubuisme_ (from Alfred Jarry’s _Pere Ubu_). When I read Ron Suskind’s article on the administration, I couldn’t stop thinking of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book on the last days of Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, The Emperor.

bq. It was a small dog, a Japanese breed. His name was Lulu. He was allowed to sleep in the Emperor’s great bed. During various ceremonies, he would run away from the Emperor’s lap and pee on dignitaries’ shoes. The august gentlemen were not allowed to flinch or make the slightest gesture when they felt their feet getting wet. I had to walk among the dignitaries and wipe the urine from their shoes with a satin cloth. This was my job for ten years.

Anyone who gets the Sundance Channel should check out the Documentary “With God on Our Side,” showing at 7pm ET this evening. I haven’t seen it yet (nor do I get Sundance) – but I feel confident in recommending it, as it’s produced by David Van Taylor, who was responsible for A Perfect Candidate, the best documentary on American politics that I’ve ever seen.

“Lexington” of the _Economist_ can sometimes be pretty weird, but his most recent column is more than weird – it’s somewhere out there in the Gamma Quadrant.

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I’ve never known any more about Walt Kelly’s comic strip “Pogo,” than that it gave birth to the famous phrase “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Now, after reading John Crowley’s lovely essay on Pogo in the _Boston Review_, I want to read the lot.

It turns out that Frank Wilczek, co-winner of the Nobel prize in physics, is the father of Amity Wilczek who is now back blogging at _Nature is Profligate_. Amity has also gotten married during her hiatus – it’s hard to know where the congratulations should begin.

Ross Silverman informs me that a NYT story from last year details a multinational multi-million dollar effort by PhRMA to attack price controls on drugs. According to the NYT, the drug industry “is worried that price controls and other regulations will tie the drug makers’ hands as state, federal and foreign governments try to expand access to affordable drugs.” In order to combat this:

bq. The drug trade group plans to spend $1 million for an “intellectual echo chamber of economists — a standing network of economists and thought leaders to speak against federal price control regulations through articles and testimony, and to serve as a rapid response team.”

It seems highly probable that this – or a related effort – is behind the TCS ‘essay competition’ that I talked about on the weekend., which is pretty small stuff in the grander scheme, I suppose. We already know that Flack Central Station is in part funded by PhRMA, and that it publishes articles attacking drug price controls remarkably frequently. More generally, I don’t understand how anybody who wants to preserve their intellectual credibility could voluntarily sign up to participate in the echo chamber, or indeed to be a useful idiot providing it with cover. Some self-proclaimed libertarians clearly disagree (as, in fairness, do some sincere ones, such as Arnold Kling).

Two months ago, I noted the paucity of international relations scholars who were prepared to defend the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq. Now comes a group letter organized by Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy, which has gotten over 650 foreign policy specialists to sign up to the proposition that “current American policy centered around the war in Iraq is the most misguided one since the Vietnam period.” Nor can this be dismissed as an emanation of the anti-Bush left – some of the most senior and important IR scholars on the right have signed up to the letter – including Kenneth Waltz, the father of neo-realist theory (and perhaps the most influential IR scholar writing today), John Mearsheimer (who has already written an academic paper aimed foursquare at the lies of the Bush administration) and Christopher Layne. Stephen Walt (no wishy washy liberal he) includes a personal statement saying that:

bq. The United States stands on the threshold of a major foreign policy disaster. The Bush administration’s incompetence led us into an unnecessary war, and we are now losing that war as a result of their blindness and blunders. We can–and must–do better. Foreign policy experts from across the political spectrum must come together to chart a new course, and our letter is a call to action for anyone who is concerned about the U.S. national interest.

It’s worth noting that some of those on the right who have signed onto this letter might well pay a cost – they could reasonably have hoped for positions in a future Republican administration if they’d kept their mouths shut. Brad De Long has been calling for a long while for the grown-ups in the Republican party to speak up – now, a few of them of them are doing just that. In Jack Snyder’s words,

bq. The vast majority of American experts on foreign policy have been saying all along that the Bush policy in Iraq is based on myths cut from whole cloth. It’s time for the media to let the American public in on this news.

Well how about it?

Cosma Shalizi informs us that the 1973-74 edition of the Dictionary of the History of Ideas is online. Cosma provides pointers to some of the more interesting articles, and notes in passing E.P. Thompson’s dictum that ” to any rational mind, the greater part of the history of ideas is a history of freaks.” While you’re there, be sure to check out his unique take on Friday cat-blogging.