Category: Keepers

by Jonah Shepp

As a child and teenager, I attended one of those New York City magnet schools that you read about from time to time, such as when an alum tentatively proposes to shut them all down. Accordingly, I share an alma mater with some notable individuals. The year I graduated, our commencement ceremony attracted a moderate crowd of local paparazzi on account of our guest speaker: Cynthia Nixon, class of ’84. In terms of pure star power, we had outdone the class of 2002, whose distinguished alumnus had been Elena Kagan, at the time merely the first female dean of Harvard Law School. Yeah, that kind of high school.

But celebrity aside, Nixon’s address to our class was actually more insightful than I, at 17, had expected. After the customary platitudes about lifelong friendships and school pride, she got to the point, which she summed up in four words: “Get out of here.”

Now what she meant by this was that if we lived our entire lives in New York, we’d limit the expansion of our minds much more than we realized. Growing up in an international megacity, it’s easy for native New Yorkers to fool ourselves into thinking that we are citizens of the world simply because the world has moved in down the block. The thrust of Nixon’s address to us was that this was a fallacy, and that if we really wanted to get some perspective on how unusual our metropolitan upbringings had been, we ought to spend some time not just traveling but living outside the city, and if we had the chance, outside the country as well.

Four years later, after finishing college in the opening act of the Great Recession with no prospects or plans for the future, I took advantage of a random opportunity and got out of here. Specifically, I moved to Jordan, where I lived for the better part of the next several years. For those who say you can’t learn anything from Hollywood, let me tell you something: Cynthia Nixon was right.

Living abroad, especially in a milieu so different from that of my childhood, did for me what no amount of formal education could: it challenged me to look at myself, America, and the world, from the standpoint of a foreign Other; and revealed the limits of my ability to inhabit that standpoint. It complicated my narrative of history and showed me how incredibly privileged I was to be an American citizen, starting with the fact that most people can’t just up and decide to move to another country for a while.

Probably the most significant impression Jordan made on me was how it guided the evolution of my views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jordan bore the brunt of both the 1948 and 1967 Palestinian refugee crises and at least 50-60% of its population is of Palestinian origin (or rather, was; the Syrian crisis has increased Jordan’s population by 10 percent). In any case, a majority of the friends I made in Jordan are of Palestinian descent, and it’s harder to deny people’s rights or historical narratives when you actually know them. I’ve written at length elsewhere about what it was like to live there as an American Jew, and I’ll likely touch on this again in a separate post this week, but the moral of the story is that people’s world views are always and everywhere shaped by experience, and it is always worth considering how someone arrived at an opinion before holding them in judgment over it, even if I don’t share it, and even if I believe it to be objectively incorrect. This is a skill I find lacking in the most polemical of the opining class, and not only in discussions of Israel and Palestine.

I also got a good firsthand look at how incredibly lucky I am to be an American. A US or EU passport remains an object of envy around the world, even among people who care little for American or European culture or values. There’s an awful lot to be said here, most of it obvious, but it bears remembering that the accident of my birth on American soil holds open doors for me that remain shut to the majority of the world. My experience of expatriate life was completely different than those of the vast majority of emigrants, who leave their countries because they have to, not because they want to. And needless to say, living in a country that does not quite have a free press, free speech, or free religion made me all the more appreciative of what America does right. These are privileges worth checking from time to time.

More broadly, I think the experience of living abroad showed me the extent to which the culturally progressive, “when you’re cut, you bleed” attitude toward people of various races and religions—the notion that we are all fundamentally the same—is true, as well as its limits. We are not all the same. Culture matters; it is as much a product of history as anything else that matters. But the human condition is a general state of affairs. A major feature of that condition today is the city, with its attendant poverty, crowding, crime, pollution, and traffic. These problems take a variety of shapes: Amman’s unemployment problem is very different in its origins and expressions than that of Caracas or Harare or Los Angeles, but the problem is fundamentally the same, and endemic to large cities. And global events like the Great Recession really are felt everywhere, in similar ways.

My point is that those who are fortunate enough not to live in failed states or active warzones (and let’s not forget about the millions who are), are worrying from day to day about the same things: rent, bills, food, family disagreements, lovers’ quarrels. When we pay attention to world events, we think of them first and foremost in terms of how they affect us directly. This narrow perspective is a natural result of the parochial concerns that rule our day-to-day lives, but a little appreciation for how universal those concerns are (that is to say, empathy) can go a long way toward broadening the individual perspective, softening prejudices, and healing enmities, which is the only way to permanently end wars.

I arrived at all these insights, such as they are, in the same way: simply by standing in another person’s shoes. That’s why I think my time as an expatriate strengthened my conviction, which I call humanism, that empathy is a sufficient cause for ethical action.

So now I put the question to you, dear Dishheads. I know by the views from your windows that we have readers from Denver to Dushanbe, and I know you didn’t all start out where you ended up, so to those of you who live or have lived outside the country of your birth: what motivated you to do so and how did the experience change you? Perhaps you haven’t lived abroad but have moved from, say, rural Kentucky to San Francisco, or vice-versa: a bigger change of scenery than crossing some international borders. I’d ask you the same question. Migration has always had a significant hand in history; in a global economy, that role is even greater. What has it meant to you? Email me your thoughts at dish@andrewsullivan.com.

(Photo: The view from my window—OK, balcony—in Amman, Jordan, by my roommate Matt, who was slightly better about taking pictures than I was.)

by Bill McKibben

At Burning Man in the desert, where the proprietor of this blog, and Grover Norquist, and a lot of other people are gathered this week, they had a rare heavy rainfall, which “intensified the misery of people waiting in the will call lines” at the box office. That A similar soaking in the Mojave Desert meant that the area of California under severe drought conditions fell last week from 97.5 to 95.4%, but the effect of the ongoing record aridity keeps magnifying. On the grossest scale, the region has now lost 63 trillion gallons of groundwater, which weighs about 240 billion tons, which has caused the state’s mountains to grow half an inch taller.

But the drought in California is probably not the worst such crisis underway on the planet at the moment, in part because California is rich. In Central America last week Guatemala became the latest country to declare a state of emergency, as the worst drought in decades wreaks havoc with bean and corn crops. According to the AP:

In Guatemala, about 170,000 families lost almost all of their crops, while in El Salvador crops have completely been lost in two-thirds of the country.

In Nicaragua, where the drought has killed more than 2,500 cattle and left 600,000 people in a state of malnutrition, the government is asking international food agencies to help it feed 100,000 families in parched areas.

Gang violence is doubtless sending Central American children north to the border. Doubtless the drought is playing its part too. Drought, being slow-moving and undramatic, tends not to catch our imaginations like flood or storm. But it may be one of the most insidious results of a changing climate. Research has shown drought on the increase as temperatures rise, and a study this spring made it clear that the world was in for more and more drought–none of that should come as a surprise, given the basic physics. But researchers have also found, over and over, that drought helps breed conflict, in places from Sudan to Syria. Given the increasing centrality of the Syrian conflict, it’s worth taking a moment to remember that, as Brad Plumer points out in this Washington Post interview with regional expert Francesco Femia, during the period from 2006-2011 up to 60% of the nation experienced one of the worst droughts in history. Femia:

This drought — combined with the mismanagement of natural resources by [Syrian President Bashar] Assad, who subsidized water-intensive crops like wheat and cotton farming and promoted bad irrigation techniques — led to significant devastation. According to updated numbers, the drought displaced 1.5 million people within Syria.

We found it very interesting that right up to the day before the revolt began in Daraa, many international security analysts were essentially predicting that Syria was immune to the Arab Spring. They concluded it was generally a stable country. What they had missed was that a massive internal migration was happening, mainly on the periphery, from farmers and herders who had lost their livelihoods completely.

So if you want to know why some U.S. military officials call climate change the biggest threat to national security, this is one of the reasons. As Admiral Samuel Locklear, head of US Pacific forces, put it last year:

“We have interjected into our multilateral dialogue – even with China and India – the imperative to kind of get military capabilities aligned [for] when the effects of climate change start to impact these massive populations,” he said. “If it goes bad, you could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly.’’

(Photo: A car sits in dried and cracked earth of what was the bottom of the Almaden Reservoir on January 28, 2014 in San Jose, California. By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

by Bill McKibben

A reader writes to complain that fossil fuel divestment is a pointless waste of time:

What divestment does do is make people feel good. That they’re “doing something”, without having to do the thing that they actually need to do: use much less fossil fuel. It’s like a room full of chain smokers advocating tobacco divestment.

This is a reasonable complaint, or at least it would be if having individual people decide to use less fossil fuel could actually cure global warming in the time that physics allows us. But it can’t, because the problem is structural: given that the fossil fuel industry is allowed to pour carbon into the atmosphere for free, they have a huge incentive to keep us on the current path. And since they’re the richest industry on earth, they have the means as well as the motive. (Chevron, for instance, offered the largest corporate campaign contribution post-Citizens United two weeks before the last federal election). If we’re going to do anything about carbon, we’re going to have to break the power of the fossil fuel industry first, which is why divestment from high-profile places is so important (just as it was in the South Africa fight). Nelson Mandela journeyed to the University of California shortly after his release to thank students and faculty there, and by extension at 155 other campuses, for pressing the case so effectively.

Here’s an example from the days news of why oil companies are rogues.  You’ll recall that on Monday a leaked draft of a new report from the world’s climate scientists stated that

 companies and governments had identified reserves of these fuels at least four times larger than could safely be burned if global warming is to be kept to a tolerable level. That means if society wants to limit the risks to future generations, it must find the discipline to leave the vast majority of these valuable fuels in the ground, the report said.

So, demonstrating the exact opposite of that discipline, Shell yesterday filed for the right to become the first big driller in the Alaskan Arctic. It’s actually a followup to their first attempt a couple of years ago, which went tragicomically wrong when a drilling rig ran aground in a storm. But forget the myriad local dangers. The real story is, the world already has four times more hydrocarbons than they can use, but Shell (and its brethren) are busy searching for more. This is like nuclear overkill, except that they’re planning to sell every bit of the oil they find. It’s business as usual, and it’s insane–and anyone who invests in it, make no mistake, is profiting from the wrecking of the planet.

“These people are paid to play and not to watch,” said Fadel Gheit, a senior oil company analyst at Oppenheimer & Company. “After all the hiccups and bad luck, the company has decided that the upside potential is greater than the downside risk and its worth another shot.”

All a game, with the only planet we’ve got hanging in the balance. Oh, and Chevron, with its mighty campaign warchest?  Check out this new piece from Rolling Stone if you’d like to see how they play. (Rough).

(Photo. A Greenpeace activist holds a banner during a protest on May 10, 2012. By Michal Cizek/AFP/Getty Images)

by Bill McKibben

As a good Dish reader, I know I’m supposed to take libertarianism seriously, and so I try, even if every time I contemplate Ayn Rand I find myself wishing I’d been born to a different species. It’s possible that my trouble stems from the fact that dealing with climate change is notoriously difficult for libertarians: if you burning the coal in your coal mine raises the sea level around my continent, something’s amiss. So too many theoretically rational and science-minded libertarians have tended towards denying the physics of global warming, just to avoid dealing with the implications for the philosophy. (There are of course honorable exceptions, like Ronald Bailey at Reason).

But this is really rich. Writing from his perch at the Cato Institute, Charles “Chip” Knappenberger explains why the U.S. should avoid taking a leadership role in any climate negotiation: because others have more at stake:

Such information is carefully concealed in Obama Administration reports, such as the one issued recently by the Council of Economic Advisors that predicts escalating costs the longer we delay serious climate change mitigation efforts. Instead of focusing on domestic costs of climate change, the report is built around an estimation of the global cost for carbon dioxide emissions—which, by the Administration’s numbers—is some 4 to 14 times greater on a per ton of emitted CO2 basis than those projected for the U.S.

Translated: climate change is going to be worse for Bangladesh, so let them deal with it. And it is going to be worse–it already is. People are starting to evacuate their island nations as seas rise. It’s true we may lose Miami, but we’re well off enough, perhaps, to take the hit. Asks Knappenberger sweetly:

Why should the President’s rush to restrict U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, which even his own officials say raises concerns about domestic energy costs and grid reliability, be justified upon supposed benefits which will largely accrue to foreign nations?

That would be piggish enough right there–but of course what Knappenberger doesn’t even mention in his column is that we’re the reason that Bangladesh has a problem. They hardly emit any co2–they’re a rounding error in any calculation. Whereas the United States has contributed more by far than any nation to the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (China won’t match us even by 2030, and on a per capita basis, we’ll be champs forever).

Knappenberger’s logic will doubtless play well in the GOP as it stymies any nascent Obama administration effort to lead the world in a new direction. But if the libertarian creed is about people taking responsibility for their actions, as opposed to getting away with what they can, this is crass.

(Chart from the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency)

by Bill McKibben

Every day there’s something more immediately important happening in the world: ISIS is seizing an airbase this morning, and California is recovering from an earthquake, and Michael Brown is being buried.

But there’s nothing more important that’s happening each and every day than the ongoing deterioration of the planet on which we depend. Though on a geological time scale it’s proceeding at a hopelessly rapid pace, in terms of the news cycle it happens just slowly enough to be mainly invisible. It’s only when a new study emerges, or a shocking new data set, that we pay momentary attention, until the Next New Thing distracts us.

Here’s one installment in this ongoing saga, released this morning by Environmental Health News and National Geographic. It’s about birds, and the fact that across the planet they’re in serious trouble:

In North America’s breadbasket, populations of grassland birds such as sweet-trilling meadowlarks are in a free-fall, along with those everywhere else on the planet. Graceful fliers like swifts and swallows that snap up insects on the wing are showing widespread declines in Europe and North America. Eagles, vultures and other raptors are on the wane throughout Africa. Colonies of sea birds such as murres and puffins on the North Atlantic are vanishing, and so are shorebirds, including red knots in the Western Hemisphere. Sandpipers, spoonbills, pelicans and storks, among the migratory birds dependent on the intertidal flats of Asia’s Yellow Sea, are under threat. Australian and South American parrots are struggling and some of the iconic penguins of Antarctica face starvation.

While birds sing, they also speak. Many of their declines are driven by the loss of places to live and breed – their marshes, rivers, forests and plains – or by diminished food supply. But more and more these days the birds are telling us about new threats to the environment and potentially human health in the coded language of biochemistry. Through analysis of the inner workings of birds’ cells, scientists have been deciphering increasingly urgent signals from ecosystems around the world.

Like the fabled canaries that miners once thrust into coal mines to check for poisonous gases, birds provide the starkest clues in the animal kingdom about whether humans, too, may be harmed by toxic substances. And they prophesy what might happen to us as the load of carbon-based, planet-warming gases in the atmosphere and oceans climbs ever higher.

This news follows by a couple of weeks a study showing that invertebrate numbers–not species, but total numbers–have fallen 45% in the last 35 years. That seemed impossible to me when I first read it, so I checked with a few biologist friends. Yep, they said, for the species that have been studied that seems right. One added, “when I was a boy and we’d go for a drive in the summer, the windshield would be splattered with bugs. That doesn’t happen so much any more.”

Or consider this: Researchers using the incredibly sensitive GPS sensors found that the ongoing western drought had cost the region 63 trillion gallons of lost groundwater since 2013, taking enough weight off the crust of the planet that the Sierras had jumped 0.6 inches skyward.

Can we just review? Forty five percent fewer invertebrates in the last 35 years. We’re talking about a scale of destruction–of habitat, of climate, of cell biology–that staggers the mind. There are some things that could be done, but they are mostly enormous too (above all, stop burning fossil fuel.) Taking those giant steps would first require really paying attention. We have the satellites and sensors and supercomputers that we need to sound the alarm, but mostly we tune out the sound.

(Photo: Residential homes sit in front of the coal fueled Ferrybridge power station as it generates electricity on November 17, 2009 in Ferrybridge, United Kingdom. By Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

by Matthew Sitman

Oh how I remember those heady days when everyone was writing about and discussing Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian famous for books like The Nature and Destiny of Man and The Irony of American History, the preacher who taught us how to think about the Cold War. As a graduate student immersed in Niebuhr’s work around this time – the “Niebuhr moment” probably peaked in 2007 or 2008, but his specter loomed over many of the arguments about the invasion and occupation of Iraq – I had the rare pleasure of feeling like my labors in the stacks really connected to contemporary debates. For once, a preoccupation with theology was cool. In his 2007 Atlantic essay, “A Man for All Reasons,” Paul Eli aptly summarized the Niebuhr-love that seemed to be everywhere:

[T]he Niebuhr revival has been perplexing, even bizarre, as people with profoundly divergent views of the war have all claimed Niebuhr as their precursor: bellicose neoconservatives, chastened “liberal hawks,” and the stalwarts of the antiwar left. Inevitably, politicians have taken note, and by now a well-turned Niebuhr reference is the speechwriter’s equivalent of a photo op with Bono. In recent months alone, John McCain (in a book) celebrated Niebuhr as a paragon of clarity about the costs of a good war; New York Governor Eliot Spitzer (at the Chautauqua Institution) invoked Niebuhr as a model of the humility lacking in the White House; and Barack Obama (leaving the Senate floor) called Niebuhr “one of [his] favorite philosophers” for his account of “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world.”

Seven years after Elie could compare him to Bono, we seem to be hearing much less about Reinhold Niebuhr, a fact that I was reminded of while reading Dale Coulter’s short essay this week marking sixty years since the publication of Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. Coulter lays out the book’s basics, but there’s no real attempt to connect Niebuhr to present days concerns. That’s not a criticism, but it was telling, given all the previous attempts, noted above, to make Niebuhr a sage for our times. And even more, this was the first time in quite awhile I had read anything at all about Niebuhr aimed at a general audience.

I have a theory about why the Niebuhr moment has passed – and why it matters.

Part of Niebuhr’s post-9/11 popularity, I would argue, was the compelling way he connected Christian theology to modern political problems. He could use original sin to diagnose American democracy, or discuss the coming of a world community as embodying Christ’s love. He wrote about war and peace while drawing on figures ranging from St. Augustine to Abraham Lincoln. Niebuhr was no mere pundit; his writing had a depth and seriousness notable in his own day and even more rare in ours. And when we found ourselves struggling to understand how to make our way in a newly terrifying world, we turned to Niebuhr as both a model and a resource.

But as Elie points out, there were elements of Niebuhr’s thought that seemed to support, or could be wrenched into supporting, nearly every imaginable position regarding the war on terror and, especially, regime change in Iraq. Which is another way of saying we found in Niebuhr what we wanted to find, all while enjoying the heft he gave our own ideas. The way we read him confirmed our preexisting inclinations more than it provoked us to think deeply and creatively – his work should have been, but wasn’t, a mirror in which we were forced to take a long hard look at ourselves and confront our fallibility and pride, to question our assumptions and cherished certainties.

The more I’ve considered Niebuhr’s work the more I’m convinced that’s what he calls us to, and what we resist. Once we had rummaged through his work for polemical purposes, we left him behind, refusing to grapple with the most enduring elements of his thought. Niebuhr saw the self-interest lurking behind every argument, understood self-deception to be perennial, grasped that nothing in this world was pure. He should have been used not to endorse this or that particular position, but turned to as a prophetic figure who calls all of us acknowledge what, in a different time, we’d have called our sinfulness. As he wrote in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness:

Democracy therefore requires something more than a religious devotion to moral ideals. It requires religious humility. Every absolute devotion to relative political ends (and all political ends are relative) is a threat to communal peace. But religious humility is no simple moral or political achievement. It springs only from the depth of a religion which confronts the individual with a more ultimate majesty and purity than all human majesties and values, and persuades him to confess: “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.”

Niebuhr asked us to see ourselves as the flawed beings we are not to encourage pessimism, but to brace us for the hard work of engaging political life aware that there are never simple or easy answers. We are called to pursue justice, but there always will be a tragic element to that pursuit. Our “moral ideals” are never unmixed with the narrowness of our own perspective. This is less of a political program than a political sensibility, one perhaps best summarized in these oft-quoted words from The Irony of American History:

There are no simple congruities in life or history. The cult of happiness erroneously assumes them. It is possible to soften the incongruities of life endlessly by the scientific conquest of nature’s caprices, and the social and political triumph over historic injustice. But all such strategies cannot finally overcome the fragmentary character of human existence. The final wisdom of life requires, not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it…

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

Niebuhr doesn’t leave us with mere doom and gloom – he is not merely a realist or cynic. He holds out the hope that realizing the ways we all, inevitably, are caught up in a sinful world might prove the precondition for learning to love each other. Humility and repentance can lead to forgiveness. This approach to the problems we face has very few takers in American life. Which is another way of saying that, like all great prophets, he has no honor in his own country.

(Thumbnail image: Reinhold Niebuhr by Ernest Hamlin Baker. Photo by Nostri Imago)