Month: February 2006

Email of the Day

A reader writes:

"You ask: ‘Isn’t it amazing that the one thing that can unite Muslims, Jews and Orthodox Christians is hatred of gay people’"

No, it’s not. Those religions aren’t propagated by persuasion and reason, like geometry or geology. They aren’t popular because they offer individuals a better way of life, like the South Beach diet or meditation.
The Abrahamic religions survive primarily by indoctrination of the next generation of children. That is why these religions don’t just celebrate birth, coming of age, and marriage, but turn them into the most sacred of rites. Homosexuality is a threat to this order, because if people can decide about something so basic as what gender they prefer, they might start thinking twice about circumcision, baptism, bar mitzvah, confirmation, and before you know it, the next generation doesn’t believe quite enough to follow the old pattern, and the generation after that is secular.
The religious right is quite correct to identify gays, public schools, science, secular literature, cohabitation, premarital sex, and liberal education as threats to their religion. Abrahamic religion piggy-backs on human reproduction: follow the rules, get married, have children, baptize them, teach them the rules, and take joy that they believe like you do. Everything listed above is a threat to that pattern. The Catholic Church differs from the protestant evangelicals in this regard only in that it knows it can’t really expect to win against science. Once bruised, twice shy. But sanction gay sex? Or marriage?? The Catholic Church would first give up on the divinity of Christ. That is not so essential to how it survives."

I’m sorry, but I’m not that cynical. By the way, the best thing I’ve read on the relationship between religion and science in a long time was published yesterday in the New York Times. It’s Leon Wieseltier’s superb dissection of scientism.

Brokeback in Britain

The movie just won the BAFTA award for best picture. It beat out the Brit favorite, "The Constant Gardener." BBM has now earned close to $70 million domestically, far ahead of any other Oscar contender, and $107 in total global take. Its budget was $14 million. Its domestic take has collapsed in the last week or so – but less so than the other Oscar contenders.

Fukuyama On Form

I have no doubt that Frank Fukuyama’s essay in the New York Times Magazine will prompt a lot of debate. For my part, I think he gets his analysis almost perfectly right. In retrospect, neoconservatives (and I fully include myself) made three huge errors in the last few years. The first was to over-estimate the competence of government, especially in extremely delicate areas like WMD intelligence. The shock of 9/11 provoked an understandable but still mistaken over-estimation of the risks we faced. And our fear forced errors into a deeply fallible system. The result was the WMD intelligence debacle, something that did far more damage to the war’s legitimacy and fate than many have yet absorbed. Fukuyama’s sharpest insight here is into how the near miracle of the end of the Cold War almost certainly lulled many of us into over-confidence about the inevitability of democratic change, and its ease. We got cocky. We should have known better.

The second error was narcissism. America’s power blinded many of us to the resentments that such power must necessarily provoke. Those resentments are often as deep among our global acquaintances as enemies – in fact, may be deeper. Acting without a profound understanding of the dangers to the U.S. of inflaming such resentment is imprudent. This is not to say we shouldn’t act at times despite them, unilaterally if necessary. Sometimes, the right thing to do will inevitably spawn resentment. We should do it anyway. But that makes it all the more imperative that we get things right, that we bend over backwards to maintain the moral high-ground, and that we make our margin of error as small as possible. The Bush administration, alas, did none of these things. They compounded conceptual errors with still-incomprehensible recklessness, pig-headedness and incompetence in preparing for the aftermath of Saddam.

The final error was not taking culture seriously enough. Fukuyama is absolutely right to note the discrepancy between neoconservatism’s skepticism toward’s government’s ability to change culture at home and its naivete when it comes to complex, tribal, sectarian and un-Western cultures, like Iraq’s, abroad. We have learned a tough lesson, and it’s been a lot tougher for those tens of thousands of dead innocent Iraqis and several thousand killed and injured American soldiers than it is for a few humiliated intellectuals. American ingenuity and pragmatism on the ground may be finally turning things around, but the original policy errors have made their work infinitely harder. The correct response to this is not more triumphalism and spin, but a real sense of shame and sorrow that so many have died because of errors made by their superiors, and by intellectuals like me.

What Next?

I’d also say that Frank gets it right again when he warns against too great an over-reaction to these failures. What we have done is done. The story of Iraq is just beginning, and we’d be nuts to predict catastrophe (almost as nuts as those who once predicted easy success). Democracy is vital for defanging Islamism in the Middle East, and whatever the real risk level of WMDs and terrorism, we have no alternative to patience. This will take a generation; and it will mean a period in which Islamists may well run countries and gain lethal weaponry. It will take huge skill on the part of our leaders to navigate this period without catastrophe. But the same could have been said for the early Cold War period as well.

I like Fukuyama’s distinction between Marxism and Leninism here – between the neocons who retained analytic distance and those who were eager to force historical change. But the real Leninists in this new millennium were not the neocons; they were the Islamists. Without 9/11, George W. Bush might still believe that China was our number one foreign policy challenge. Al Qaeda forced the historical process forward; we responded. A future conservative politics that both internalizes the importance of democratic change abroad, but is more attuned to the limits of military force and resilience of foreign culture is what we have to start building and re-thinking. I’d pay particular attention to repairing international institutions, restoring the executive branch’s respect for the rule of law, and ending the nightmare of torture. But we will forge no new approaches until we recognize our blatant errors in previous ones. Fukuyama does us all a favor by laying those errors out in full view.

What Blogs Are

A reader comments:

"The doomsayers [about blogs] remind me of those who in the early eighteenth century failed to understand the potential of the new form of mass media heralded by the Tatler and the Spectator–the magazine is still going strong nearly three centuries later. Anyway, these critics really ought to examine their assumptions. Why need anyone assume that "evanescence" makes something "dismal"? Few things are more evanescent than good conversation, yet few things are as good for the soul. It might be more illuminating to think of blogging as a superior form of conversation, rather than an inferior form of journalism."

That’s certainly how I view blogging and why I find it very congenial to my own worldview. I’m re-reading some Montaigne essays right now for my book. In the best translation, by Donald Frame, the text is littered with little letters, A, B, and C. These refer to different publications of the essays. Montaigne wrote and then re-wrote and re-wrote the essays again, adding layer upon layer to his own meanings. Sometimes, you can see how he is undermining one of his earlier arguments with a subsequent interpolation. At other times, he is embellishing them, or finessing them. He doesn’t remove words, he just adds. His philosophy is one of radical skepticism, and he floats his own ideas as provisionally as he assesses others.

Michael Oakeshott’s conservatism owes a huge amount to Montaigne (and Augustine), which is why one of Oakeshott’s central metaphors is exactly conversation. He believed that such a metaphor captures the dramatic, undetermined, spontaneous and organic association of people in free societies. And such an open-ended conversation is, of course, the exact opposite of fundamentalism, which, in its extreme forms, demands no interaction, merely submission to a sacred, pre-ordained text. That’s why blogging is a little retrovirus called freedom, unleashed into the wider world of media to replicate endlessly. And why the blogosphere’s very existence and potential power is one of freedom’s most potent allies in our generation’s war against fundamentalism. Churchill once spoke of sending the English language into battle. He saw it as a great weapon against tyranny. It still is – in print, but just as powerfully, in pixels.