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When Glenn Greenwald and Andy McCarthy agree on something, it’s perhaps worth taking notice. Both are now on record with severe doubts about whether the Khorasan terror-group in Syria – the one we were just informed had been bombed – actually exists. Glenn wants to argue that it was a pretext to justify bombing Syria on more defensible grounds than fighting ISIS, which officials have noted does not pose a threat to the US, while we were told that Khorasan did. McCarthy wants to argue that it’s simply a new name given to an al Qaeda off-shoot, cynically designed to hide the fact that al Qaeda is alive and well and on the offense in the Middle East. Both have ideological biases – Glenn believing that much of the war on terror is based on fantasy, McCarthy believing that we need to return to torture and aggressive war to fight a new totalitarianism the “left” is too weak to name and shame. I don’t share either assumption, but I do worry about wars against “a more direct and imminent threat” that turns out, after the fact, not to be imminent, wars which find new enemies and dire plots every day, and in which the public simply has to trust the CIA and the Pentagon and the president as to the truth of it all, while we are encouraged to “go shopping.”

And the narrative about Khorasan turns out to have been a classic bait-and-switch. In the beginning of the new war, this group was named as planning imminent threats against the US with innovative explosive devices designed to bring down airplanes. Glenn has an exhaustive account of how the US media – from the NYT to NBC – simply repeated this argument from the administration (with scary graphics and scarier rhetoric). One example from CIA-sourced Eli Lake:

American analysts had pieced together detailed information on a pending attack from an outfit that informally called itself ‘the Khorasan Group’ to use hard-to-detect explosives on American and European airliners.

So at that point, this new and lethal al Qaeda branch had a “pending” threat to US aviation.

It was only after the attack had taken place that the story evolved a little. Last week we noted a Foreign Policy story that concluded that the group was no more capable of launching an attack on the US than ISIS – which is to say, none at all. Then this classic AP account:

Senior U.S. officials offered a more nuanced picture Thursday of the threat they believe is posed by an al-Qaida cell in Syria targeted in military strikes this week, even as they defended the decision to attack the militants. James Comey, the FBI director, and Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, each acknowledged that the U.S. did not have precise intelligence about where or when the cell, known as the Khorasan Group, would attempt to strike a Western target. . . .

Kirby, briefing reporters at the Pentagon, said, “I don’t know that we can pin that down to a day or month or week or six months … We can have this debate about whether it was valid to hit them or not, or whether it was too soon or too late…We hit them. And I don’t think we need to throw up a dossier here to prove that these are bad dudes.”

The same could be said for ISIS. They pose no threat to the US, according to all the intelligence sources as well as the president. But hey, who needs “to throw up a dossier here to prove that these are bad dudes”? Yeah, that’s how far we’ve come. Remember the “dodgy dossier” that the Blair government fabricated to justify the war in Iraq? It tells you something that our protectors don’t even feel the need to fake such a dossier any more. The standard for new wars is now merely the existence of “bad dudes” which the media can be relied upon to amplify into scary monsters. The strikes take place; we do not know if they were successful; and we subsequently find the “threat” was not imminent at all.

My point is simply that a) we have no idea if these multiple, metastasizing wars are actually justified by national security; and b) even when the CIA and White House say they’re not a threat to the US, we bomb them anyway. So we’re at a point when actual debate about what the threats really are to us has no real relationship to new wars. Those wars are pre-emptive now as a matter of course. The only justification is that they are “bad guys.”

Remember when we used to debate pre-emptive war? Now it’s simply routine – and that very debate has evaporated. Obama is running several undeclared, pre-emptive wars against threats the public has no way of judging, and the CIA has an institutional interest in hyping.

At this point, we simply have to trust our rulers on all this. But how can we at this point? The key officials who are supposed to command our trust – James Clapper and John Brennan – are proven, public, bald-faced liars, contemptuous of the Congress and the public. Brennan’s most recent attempt to claim he was not lying earlier this year when he claimed that CIA officials would never look into the Senate Committee’s computers merely underlines how utterly slippery he is. He should have been fired a very long time ago. That he remains in place and that Clapper can lie to the Congress and suffer no sanction tells you all you need to know about who really calls the shots on national security. Clapper told a clear lie to the Congress and has suffered no consequences.

And our role? To cheer each war and to wait until they come back to haunt us still further. Which, given the experience of the last few months, will merely empower the CIA and the Pentagon even more. Maybe you still believe that Obama can keep a lid on the worst of this. But even if you did, can you not see that the extraordinarily permissive standards for new pre-emptive wars all over the world is a standing invitation for a Clinton or a Cruz or a Rubio to do whatever the CIA tells them? The standards under which we are now operating are light years from anything we once considered rational. Has the world really changed so much – or have we?

A new study investigated “what size gaps people desire” when it comes to CEO and unskilled worker pay ratios:

It turns out that most people, regardless of nationality or set of beliefs, share similar sentiments about how much CEOs should be paid — and, for the most part, these estimates are markedly lower than the amounts company leaders actually earn. Using data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) from December 2012, in which respondents were asked to both “estimate how much a chairman of a national company (CEO), a cabinet minister in a national government, and an unskilled factory worker actually earn” and how much each person should earn, the researchers calculated the median ratios for the full sample and for 40 countries separately.

For the countries combined, the ideal pay ratio for CEOs to unskilled workers was 4.6 to 1; the estimated ratio was about double, at 10 to 1. But there were some differences country to country. People in Denmark, for example, estimated the ratio to be 3.7 to 1, with an ideal ratio being 2 to 1. In South Korea, the estimated gap was much larger at 41.7 to 1. The ideal gap in Taiwan was particularly high, at 20 to 1.

A quick rundown of the actual numbers on executive pay in the US:

In the 1960s, the typical corporate chieftain in the U.S. earned 20 times as much as the average employee. Today, depending on whose estimate you choose, he makes anywhere from 272 to 354 times as much. According to the AFL-CIO, the average CEO takes home more than $12 million, while the average worker makes about $34,000.

Carol Faulkner marvels at the story Rachel Hope Cleves tells in Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, a “dual biography of two women who lived together in Weybridge, Vermont, for forty-four years”:

Cleves traces the backgrounds and marriage of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake in remarkable detail, piecing together town histories, family papers, their poems, and what remains of their correspondence (unsurprisingly, much was destroyed). When the couple met in 1807, Charity was 29, seven years older than Sylvia. Charity had several previous relationships with other women, but she and Sylvia quickly became inseparable. They moved in together, on property rented from a widowed female landlord, and supported themselves as tailors.

At first, and for their relatives’ sake, Sylvia was Charity’s “assistant.” Soon, the two women became equal partners, jointly running their business, and owning their house and personal property. In public records, Charity’s name often appeared above Sylvia’s, establishing her civic identity as the husband of the relationship, a household order that their neighbors understood. The couple shared a bed, a fact that would have been clear to early visitors to their one-room house, but they later built additions, establishing some privacy and upholding the community’s reticence about their sex lives.

In an earlier review, Laura Miller described Charity and Sylvia as that rare academic book “capable of bringing tears to a reader’s eyes,” noting these details about the historical context for their life together:

Charity Bryant was born to a well-regarded Massachusetts family in 1777. A running theme of “Charity and Sylvia” is the remarkable generational divide between those Americans who came of age before the Revolutionary War, in a world dominated by tradition, and the generation raised after it. Many of the latter — known as the “rising generation” by their elders — had been orphaned or beggared by the war or by disease. Furthermore, Cleves writes, “the war for independence had not only broken the political bonds of empire, creating a new nation, it had torn the social fabric of the colonial world, birthing a new American culture.”

If it was possible to jettison England and her king, why not other authorities, as well? For while in colonial America, “no more than 2 or 3 percent of women remained unmarried for life,” after the Revolution, “an increasing number of women, like Charity, began to choose singlehood in order to preserve their autonomy.”

Last month, Maria Popova excerpted the following passage from the book, about how the two women’s marriage somehow found a measure of acceptance in their town:

Like queer people in many times and places, Charity and Sylvia preserved their reputations by persuading their community to treat the matter of their sexuality as an open secret. Although it is commonly assumed that the “closet” is an opaque space, meaning that people who are in the closet keep others in total ignorance about their sexuality, often the closet is really an open secret. The ignorance that defines the closet is as likely to be a carefully constructed edifice as it is to be a total absence of knowledge. The closet depends on people strategically choosing to remain ignorant of inconvenient facts…

The open closet is an especially critical strategy in small towns, where every person serves a role, and which would cease to function if all moral transgressors were ostracized. Small communities can maintain the fiction of ignorance in order to preserve social arrangements that work for the general benefit. Queer history has often focused on the modern city as the most potent site of gay liberation, since its anonymity and living arrangements for single people permitted same-sex-desiring men and women to form innovative communities. More recognition needs to be given to the distinctive opportunities that rural towns allowed for the expression of same-sex sexuality.

Michael W. Nicholson claims that the atheists he most wants to engage are those “who wrestle seriously with the implications of their affirmation that the Deus Absconditus is finally the Deus Absentia.” He puts Albert Camus at the top of that list:

Beginning with his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus focused his literary investigations on the question of how to overcome nihilism in an absurd world in which, he believed somewhat paradoxically, reason and logic pointed to a cosmos with no meaning for man: “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need [for happiness and reason] and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

Camus’s starting-point was the assumption that humanity’s own rational, scientific enterprise had revealed that the heart of existence was a closed material universe that itself was utterly indifferent to the deepest human longings. In such a universe, “suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger.” While Camus was not the first to examine the existential question of modern man’s sense of alienation, his works—The Stranger, The Plague, The Rebel, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus—were the eloquent high-water mark of the postwar existential sensibility (though Camus rejected the “Existentialist” label).

It is easy to like Camus. Algerian born, member of the French resistance, thoughtful and kind, but an inveterate womanizer. He was the Bogart of atheist existentialism; larger than life, romantic, complex, a “code hero”. No writer since has taken so seriously and expressed so well the implications of the modernist acceptance of a closed universe and the denial of transcendent meaning. Camus’s attempt to assert human value beyond the absurdity of a world without God is imaginative and appealing, but turns out to be only a loop with no exit. Camus, who believed in decency, courage, and compassion, can only assert these traditional values; he can give no foundational reasons for preferring them over selfishness, depravity, and evil.

It’s worth revisiting William Faulkner’s famous obituary for Camus, which touches on these themes. An excerpt:

Despite himself, as all artists are, he spent that life searching himself and demanding of himself answers which only God could know; when he became the Nobel laureate of his year, I wired him ‘On salue l’âme qui constamment se cherche et se demande’; why did he not quit then, if he did not want to believe in God? At the very instant he struck the tree [in the car accident that killed him], he was still searching and demanding of himself; I do not believe that in that bright instant he found them. I do no believe they are to be found. I believe they are only to be searched for, constantly, always by some fragile member of the human absurdity. Of which there are never many, but always somewhere at least one, and one will always be enough.

People will say he was too young; he did not have time to finish. But it is not How long, it is not How much; it is, simply What. When the door shut for him, he had already written on this side of it that which every artist who also carries through life with him that one same foreknowledge and hatred of death, is hoping to do: I was here. He was doing that, and perhaps in that bright second he even knew he had succeeded. What more could he want?

Related Dish on “favorite heretics” here.

(Portrait of Camus from New York World-Telegram and Sun Photograph Collection, 1957, via Wikimedia Commons)

Growing up, David Zahl noticed “how friendship didn’t seem to be an overwhelming priority for people in their 30s and 40s, men in particular.” Now that he’s approaching middle age, he finds this passage from Tim Kreider’s essay “The Referendum” an apt account of why this might be so:

The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home… So we’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning…

Zahl riffs on this insight:

In other words, the real reason certain types of relationships tail off during middle age is because these are the years when we are doing most of our “achieving”, when our capacity for comparison is arguably at its zenith, when the discrepancies are most pronounced. Not surprisingly, the Referendum is exacerbated rather than assuaged by erstwhile closeness.

Meaning, we can and do spend plenty of (happy) time in middle age with peers with whom we don’t share many natural affinities–the difficulty comes with those with whom we once did; the degree to which we identified with someone in college or high school will be the degree to which their current trajectory makes us feel uncomfortable. That goes for the church they attend and theology they espouse just as much as the car they drive. Not exactly rocket science, I know, nor the only reason why people grow apart, but a prevalent factor nonetheless, and perhaps part of what accounts for the U-Bend of Happiness.

Kreider takes things a little further, though, claiming that our once-and-future comrades represent alternate versions of ourselves. The “control group” in the experiment of our life–scary! I can only speak for the ministry-nonprofit side of this equation, but the dynamic is as widespread as it is transparent–which is to say, embarrassingly so. It’s occasionally even used as a bludgeon against those closest to us (i.e. “if you only knew how much money I left on the table when I signed up for this” or conversely “I gave up my dreams to support you!”). I’m sure social media is not helping things, especially when it comes to Marriage and Kids, which Kreider locates as the biggies.

Patrick Spaet argues that the Western obsession with work ethic strains credulity:

Our attitudes towards work are extremely schizophrenic: we secretly aspire to sloth, while we loudly praise work. There isn’t an election poster that doesn’t promise more jobs. The call for more work is similar to the Stockholm syndrome, in which the victims of hostage-taking eventually develop a positive relationship with their captors. We constantly hear the drivel of “growth,” “competition,” and “local prosperity,” to convince us that we have to “tighten our belts,” because only that way are “secure jobs” possible–while everything else presents “no alternative.” A wage increase isn’t in the cards, because otherwise the company will go broke. We can’t tax too much, because otherwise the job generators will go abroad. All of these things have become the consensus–even among the wage slaves themselves.

This situation is all the more schizophrenic in that we take every opportunity every day to escape toil and work: who voluntarily uses a washboard, if he has a washing machine? Who copies out a text by hand, if he can use a photocopier instead? And who mentally calculates the miserable columns of figures on his tax return, if he has a calculator? We are bone idle, and yet we glorify work. The Stockholm syndrome of work fetishism has befuddled our minds. It is the paradox of the present: the religion of work has attained the status of a state religion, at exactly the point in time when work is dying. The sale of labor power will be as promising in the 21st century as the sale of stagecoaches in the 20th century.

Spaet, who published a version of this piece in the German paper Die ZEIT over the summer, goes on to remark on the considerable debate it stirred:

Some commentators pointed out that a lot of work is unpaid as well as underappreciated, like housekeeping, care work, and parenting. Yes, it’s a shame that this work, which is mostly done by women, doesn’t get the credit it deserves. It’s a vicious result of the pervasive work fetish that holds that only paid work is valuable work.

Other commentators were quite hostile: “Nobody has a right to be lazy,” they argued. “Those who don’t work are doing harm to society. They are just social parasites.”

Well, this is a prime example of the work fetish. And commentators like this one overlook the fact that most existing jobs are bullshit jobs. As Henry David Thoreau put it: “Most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.”

That’s the lesson Ferdinand Mount draws from Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, citing her claim that every major faith tradition “has tracked the political entity in which it arose; none has become a ‘world religion’ without the patronage of a militarily powerful empire and every tradition would have to develop an imperial ideology”:

The conversion of Constantine also meant the conscription of Christianity. It was not long before Augustine of Hippo was developing the convenient theory of the ‘just war’. Similarly the ahadith, the later reports of the Prophet’s sayings, confer a spiritual dimension on warfare which it doesn’t have in the Koran. Militant Sikhs today prefer to quote the martial teachings of the Tenth Guru rather than those of their founder Guru Nanak, who taught that only ‘he who regards all men as equals is religious’.

Christopher Hitchens had it the wrong way round in his subtitle to God is Not Great. It should have been, not ‘How Religion Poisons Everything’ but ‘How Everything Poisons Religion’. This is the misunderstanding which drives fanatical secularists to demand that faith be driven out of the public square and permanently banned from re-entry, like a drunk from the pub he always picks a fight in.

The demand was first heard in the 17th century from Hobbes and Locke, and it became an article of faith for the American revolutionaries. Jefferson believed that Church and State had proved ‘a loathsome combination’, and he was determined to build a ‘wall of separation’ between them. What he could not foresee was that nationalism would effortlessly take over the mantle of self-righteousness, and the apocalyptic language too. Within 60 years, the first explicitly non-sectarian republic exploded in the most modern and deadly civil war, its cause immortalised by the rhetoric of the non-religious Abraham Lincoln.

In an essay drawing from her book, Armstrong emphasizes one aspect of her argument in particular – that the modern understanding of religion as a distinctly private pursuit is not the historical norm:

Before the modern period, religion was not a separate activity, hermetically sealed off from all others; rather, it permeated all human undertakings, including economics, state-building, politics and warfare. Before 1700, it would have been impossible for people to say where, for example, “politics” ended and “religion” began. The Crusades were certainly inspired by religious passion but they were also deeply political: Pope Urban II let the knights of Christendom loose on the Muslim world to extend the power of the church eastwards and create a papal monarchy that would control Christian Europe. The Spanish inquisition was a deeply flawed attempt to secure the internal order of Spain after a divisive civil war, at a time when the nation feared an imminent attack by the Ottoman empire. Similarly, the European wars of religion and the thirty years war were certainly exacerbated by the sectarian quarrels of Protestants and Catholics, but their violence reflected the birth pangs of the modern nation-state.

Noel Malcolm, however, questions Armstrong’s reliance on this amorphous understanding of what religion really is:

Writing about ancient Persia, she declares that “a religious tradition is never a single, unchanging essence; it is a template that can be modified and altered radically to serve a variety of ends”. That sounds reasonable enough, but then she makes a much bolder claim. Until about 1700, she says, people were simply unable to distinguish between religious issues and political, social or economic ones. There was no such separate thing as religion. Ergo, it is wrong to single out “religion” as something to blame.

If that were true, it would also mean that you can’t single out religion as something to excuse, or at least partly exonerate. But when she discusses medieval Christian anti-Semitism, for example, Armstrong is quick to say that not only “religious conviction” but also “social, political and economic elements” were to blame. The violence of the Spanish Inquisition, likewise, “was caused less by theological than political considerations”. What was all that about it being impossible to distinguish religious issues from non-religious ones?

Recent Dish on Armstrong’s book here.

(Photo of a bronze statue of Constantine by Gernot Keller)