Month: May 2009

After Chesterton, Emerson, an Atlantic forebear:

The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Travelling is a fool’s paradise.

Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home.

The best named activist of the 1990s – "queer" turned "Christianist" – has emerged again. Yes, he's now a bear. It happens to the best of us. And doing great work for HIV orphans in Haiti.

Michael O'Hare pushes back:

Romm, in the end, has a romantic and illusory view of how a CAT program will actually work, imagining that it will empower government to impose a great national mobilization, steamrolling lobbyists and special pleaders for exceptions and gimmicks, in which the public will ignore costs and put Stakhanovite shoulders to the common wheel. And he has a naïve understanding of how taxes and charges really affect the behavior of firms and people.

Once over quickly: a well-designed CAT and a properly set CIC will reduce global warming the same amount and at about the same cost. The cost will be large and painful, larger the longer we futz around not getting started on the work. The administrative complexity of both will be enormous, though the CAT will be much more bureaucratic and intrusive. Either will attract an army of lobbyists and whiners trying to get sweetheart deals that will test the resolve of Congress and citizens, and the additional complexity of the CAT will offer them more places to hide bad stuff. In the long run, the CAT will be stickier and harder to adjust as technology advances and we learn more about the costs of climate change, and will lead to an inferior result. And having either is far, far, better than having neither: if the price of getting off the dime on climate is having to do it the second best way (something that may be true, but that Romm only asserts), it's worth paying.

Buner refugees travel by road as they flee fighting on May 6, 2009 near Swabi, Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of Pakistani people have fled their homes due to fighting between the Pakistan army and Taliban forces in the Northwest Frontier Province. By Daniel Berehulak/Getty.

Josh has it. He says Jeff is going to respond soon to the charge of anonymously sourced smearing.

Ryan Avent says those who favor a carbon tax over cap and trade are hurting the climate change bill. Joe Romm makes a more convincing argument along the same lines:

…nothing bugs me more than this notion that Congress would ever pass a “simple” carbon tax, even if it were politically feasible, which it most certainly is not.  Well, one thing bugs me more — people who attack the first serious chance we have to get major energy and climate legislation because they are operating under the severe misimpression that the political system of this country might embrace a tax.

Drum seconds Romm:

I don't really understand how it is that smart people don't get this.  Politically, cap-and-trade is the only climate plan that has even a remote chance of getting through Congress, it's the only plan that institutes a firm limit on greenhouse gases, and it's the only plan on the table.  Is it really worth giving all that up for the chimera of a tax that has some esoteric technical advantages on a whiteboard, but in the real world can't pass and wouldn't solve the carbon problem even if it did?  It's hard to see why anyone serious about real-world change would buy into this.

Because we actually believe that a carbon tax will bring green benefits without the kind of crude regulatory scheme that could stimgatize environmentalism for a long time? Because we think it will work better?

Scott Horton reminds us:

More details from Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball.

A reader writes:

I was ambivalent regarding your post on Buddhism. I am by no means any kind of expert; I've merely read a few books on Buddhism. I have a lot of respect for it because it is generally not attached to supernatural concepts, it is not dogmatic, and it encourages practitioners to side with their own judgment or logic if they find parts of Buddhist thought erroneous. The idea of dependence-arising (that nothing exists on its own) and that everything eventually ends are mature, true, profound, and often missing from religious thought. Buddhism accommodates itself enthusiastically to scientific knowledge and guides its followers to an understanding that not only are they very similar to other living creatures, but that they could have easily *been* those living creatures (human or otherwise). However, ultimately I could not choose to follow that path for two reasons.

One, while it claims in some ways to teach acceptance that all things must end, it really ultimately dodges the issue through the conceit of reincarnation, which is scientifically baseless. Reincarnation means that Buddhism, like most religions, deals with the problem of death by pretending that it doesn't really exist. Its flimsy and pseudo-scientific explanation that consciousness must be caused by prior consciousness is false because short-term case/event chains cannot be extended through eternity; consciousness is an emergent phenomenon.

The second and most disturbing flaw, in my opinion, is that Buddhism essentially blames victims for their circumstances (karma). Good behavior and thoughts will earn us rewards the next time we're reincarnated. If we're exceptionally kind and disciplined we'll come back as safe, comfortable humans. If we're exceptionally bad, we'll come back as ants or fish or something.

When I read this (in one of the Dalai Lama's books), I thought: What does Buddhism have to say about the political prisoners and slaves in North Korea's death camps? That they were all very bad in their prior lives? I was disappointed that despite appearances to the contrary, Buddhism avoids the problem of death, and it also (contra its claims) avoids the problem of injustice by teaching that living creatures, to some extent, get what they deserve. I caveat all of this by saying that I've only read a few books by the Dalai Lama, and I know there are all kinds of other sects and kinds of Buddhist thought.

A form of Buddhism that deals honestly with death (all things – ALL – eventually end) and with injustice (people don't always get what they deserve) would be much more appealing to me. Perhaps I'm reading the wrong books. I'd love to hear that I'm mistaken, but so far Buddhism has struck me as a very incomplete and imperfect religion.