Stranger in a Strange Land

Victor Davis Napoleon Thucydides Gauis Iulius Hanson has a post at The Corner called "The Martian Perpsective." Thus it begins:

A person from Mars reading the latest communication from the Hamas/Fatah summit in Saudi Arabia might conclude there is something very wrong with the West that would inspire the Palestinians to say such crazy things.

To paraphrase Mencken: Where it goes from there is anyone's guess! It's a neat first date question, though: If you were stuck on Mars and could only bring one communication from the Hamas/Fatah summit in Saudi Arabia . . . ?

But seriously, Vic, I totally grok you. Let's eat our ancestors and have some group sex, baby.

Is that your erotic arrow pointing up, or are you just happy to see me?

We have already entered the age of biotechnical enhancement: growth hormone to make children taller; pre-implantation genetic screening to facilitate eugenic choice (now to rule out defects, soon to rule in assets); Ritalin and other stimulants to control behavior or boost performance on exams; Prozac and other drugs to brighten moods and alter temperaments—not to mention Botox, Viagra, and anabolic steroids. Looking ahead, other invitations are already visible on the horizon: Drugs to erase painful or shameful memories or to simulate falling in love. Genes to increase the size and strength of muscles. Nano-mechanical implants to enhance sensation or motor skills. Techniques to slow biological aging and increase the maximum human lifespan. Thanks to these and other innovations, venerable human desires—for better children, superior performance, ageless bodies, and happy souls—may increasingly be satisfied with the aid of biotechnology. A new field of “trans-humanist” science is rallying thought and research for wholesale redesign of human nature, employing genetic and neurological engineering and man-machine hybrids, en route to what has been blithely called a “post-human future.”

-"Neon" Leon Kass, defending younz's dignity-

Drugs to erase painful or shameful memories or to stimulate falling in love? I'm going to have to double-check my notes, but I'm pretty sure the kids call it alcohol (street slang: "alcohol").

As for slowing aging and increasing lifespan, Kass always seems to be moving in the opposite direction, and ten minutes spent skimming his ruminations always feel like thirty taken off the back end of my life. Here's a guy who's built a lucrative speaking and writing career around "human dignity," but who can't seem to define it in terms that anyone but Leon Kass himself can understand. It has something to do with potential, or it has something to do with procreation, or it has something to do with joy, or it has something to do with euthenasia. Who honestly knows? We might say that a man truly concerned about the dignity of the person would quit jabbering about physical mutants injecting themselves with anabolic steroids so they can swat little white balls of twine even farther with sticks and start talking about the nation that destroys a weaker one on a collection of phony hunches. Our post-human future? How about our post-humane present? Unfortunately, this latest speech was set at the American Enterprise Institute, where transpostfuturehuman hypothetical dignity is a matter of serious speculative yibber-yabber, but the actual demise of several hundred thousand actual human beings is but a bump in the road of necessary-but-mismanaged conflict.

Yes, we can all agree that it would be capital-B Bad if John could zap Jane's uterus with a home child-selector kit and make sure that little Jimmy and Suzy come out the cutest little übermenschen you ever did see, even if John is a negro and Jane is Jewess. But do we really want want to give over the discourse on our ethical future to a man who can say, without, apparently, the aid of a toke on the pipe or a bing on the bonger:

But eros comes fully into its own as the arrow pointing upward only in the human animal, who is conscious of the doubleness in his soul and who is driven to devise a life based in part on the tension between the opposing forces. Human eros, born of this self-awareness, manifests itself in explicit and conscious longings for something higher, something whole, something eternal—longings that are ours precisely because we are able to elevate the aspiration born of our bodily doubleness and to direct it upwards toward the good, the true, and the beautiful. In the human case, the fruits of “erotic giving-birth” are not only human children, but also the arts and crafts, song and story, noble deeds and customs, fine character, the search for wisdom, and a reaching for the eternal and divine—all conceived by resourcefulness to overcome experienced lack and limitation, and all guided by a divination of that which would be wholly good and lacking in nothing.

There is nothing worse than a speaker unaware of his own double-entendres. I am almost certain that our less talkative ape and moneky cousins can point their arrows upward just as well, and with fewer hang-ups about it. The "erotic giving-birth" is aesthetics by way of a second-rate poetry slam, and reeks in any event of earth-mother romantacism. I called my own mother to ask what she thought of the phrase, since she's a woman of good opinions and sharp wits, and she said, "Don't get me wrong, sweetie, you and your brother were the best thing that ever happened to your dad and me. Giving birth is an incredible thing. But it's not erotic. Birth hurts like a bitch even after they give you all the good drugs."

"What about arts and crafts, song and story, noble deeds and customs, fine character, the search for wisdom, and a reaching for the eternal and divine—all conceived by resourcefulness to overcome experienced lack and limitation, and all guided by a divination of that which would be wholly good and lacking in nothing?" I asked, reading on.

"What the fuck are you talking about, honey? Pardon my language."

I don't believe in gods, but I thank them every day nevertheless for being raised among the few remaining sane people in America.

Further Notes and Premises

Who Is IOZ? has a small reading audience, but an audience nonetheless, and if I may generalize, the most common complaint I get is that the writing here is insufficiently prescriptive: that I identify problems but don't offer much of a "way forward," as the popular political slogan goes. I am overly puristic; I am unwilling to make or abide here-and-now compromises, particularly with the Democratic Party; I am guilty of "heightening the contradictions," in the campus-Marxist locution. And so on. It would be helpful in any event if I laid out some of the basic premises underlying my writing here, and in particular I hope it will be an instructive response to these sorts of criticism.

The foundational idea of almost everything I write here is that the United States was a noble experiment that has already failed. Not "is failing" nor "will fail." Has failed. It failed because Homo sapiens isn't a particularly noble species, because the imperatives of comfort, security, superstition, fear, religion, tribalism, racism, atavism, violence, hubris, and the many other basic afflictions of the human animal are no more or less present in the population of America than they have been in any other people at any other time in any other place in the rather short and bloody history of our civilization--as we rather glowingly term it--here on this little planet.

America may have been founded by greedy merchants and crass commercialists; it may have been founded by slaveholders; but it was nevertheless founded as an excercise in limits. The language of the Declaration of Independence flowers, but the language of the Constitution has a peculiar austerity. Europe has a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Constitution has only an enumerated Bill of Rights, and the titular difference is telling. Most of our attention, besides, focuses on the first eight amendments, but the better guide to the founding spirit of the Republic is in the last two:

Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

"We will get out of your way." There's an old joke in my family, probably from my great-grandfather originally, first told to my by my grandmother, as an explanation of the family's irreligiosity to anyone on the outside: "We don't ask God for anything, and in exchange he leaves us the hell alone." The best blessing is to be neither blessed nor damned. The best government governs least. There are plenty of arguments about the specific duties of small government, about Rawlsian obligations to fairness and justice (which encompass likewise debate about equality), and there's plenty of room to fight over the ways and means that a government relic of the Enlightenment can accommodate modernity, whatever that is. But at the root of the American experiment is the idea that the res publica could be a guarantor of order, a settler of disputes, and a national voice in matters of commerce or defense when a common voice is necessary.

Well, no one really wanted the "Republic, if you can keep it." By 1803 Jefferson made the likely extraconstitutional purchase of the Louisian Territory. By 1812 we were invading Canada as a rather dubious response to British interference in the sea lanes, and Injun-killer Andrew Jackson's heroehood soon percolated out of the southern swamps. We began a national policy of genocide toward the various Indian nations. We fought a Civil War in which slaves were freed, but at the price of Lincoln enshrining a concept of national unity and a central executive very much at odds with the republican spirit or the already withered republican ideal. We invaded Mexico and stole the West at gunpoint. Got hungry for an empire. Got hopped up on Freddy Jackson Turner. Killed a lot of Phillipinos. Got needlessly embroiled in World War I, and with Wilson's crazy messianism did our damndest part to foment World War II. In short, we took the common path toward empire--relative freedom engendered moral vanity; moral vanity became Manifest Destiny; Manifest Destiny became worldwide landholdings, 700 foreign military bases, an almost entirely expeditionary military, "commands" for every part of the world, a doomsday nuclear arsenal . . .

The point of all this breezy history--and yes, it is knowingly breezy for anyone with quibbles about the non-existent details--is to say: I think we're basically done. We're neither the first nor the last to be done, so I don't worry about it so much. I expect a recognizable America to last beyond my lifetime. Some standards will decline, some will increase. There will be more and more opportunities to accumulate exceptional wealth, but there will be greater and greater poverty and iniquity between those who do and those who don't. We're certainly not yet at the height of our cultural decadence, for which I'm very greatful. I look forward to much better nightclubs and ever-better restaurants. And great cabaret theater. Assuming we don't plunge the world into nuclear conflagration (that's Arthur's game, and I'm stayin' out of it!), I expect the next century or so to witness first the withering of American power and preeminence, then the gradual dismantling of the empire. If and when we emerge as a smaller, more chastened, more modest country--less violent, less arrogant, more local, more small-town commercial--then maybe a few of the things I write here and a few of the ideas I boost will rattle into place.

Poop-on-Troop

The Founders weren't fond of standing armies. Even military men like Washington thought them inimical to liberty. They thought that we might have at best a standing navy to protect the freedom of shipping lanes, being commercial men and commercially minded, and otherwise armies could be raised in times of crisis. Having no standing army was one more disincentive to adventurism and would hopefully serve to disincline the new nation from following in the warring footsteps of the European powers. In cases of invasion or insurrection, free men would freely choose to defend their nation, their land, their families, their businesses, their properties. They would be less likely and less willing to join up in order to slay dragons abroad, as the saying went.

It wasn't a long-lasting sentiment, and by the time the Jackson broke out the cheese wheel for the Western yahoos, America's ever-kind Injun policy put the kibosh down for good on that peaceable kingdom. "It is well that war is so terrible," Robert E. Lee famously observed just a few decades later, "lest we should grow too fond of it," but he was wrong, and we grew fonder as a general trend, with occasional interruptions of isolationism, until by the end of the Second World War we loved war so much that we turned our nation over to the production of an apocalyptic power to destroy. Today, factoring in the "emergency" and supplemental monies appropriated for our war programs related activities, official appropriates alone equal about $725 billion dollars, which, for those of you keeping track, makes it about the fifteenth-largest economy (by nominal GDP) in the world, somewhere between Australia and Russia. Who knows what we spend on "intelligence." Who knows how much money floats through the private war industry, the contractors and suppliers, the arms dealers and gun runners, the market for black ops and the black market.

One of the unmoveable pieties of contemporary American life is Troops-love, and nothing twists the tits of righteous indignation faster than suggesting that your political Other isn't spiritually prostrate before "the service and sacrifice of America's fighting men and women," as Oliver Willis, a broad ruminant of gaseous progressive wisdom, recently put it. The topic was David Broder, who increasingly looks and sounds like a man who should be eating oatmeal from an offered spoon and pinching nurses' asses around the home. The question was "Do Democrats love The Troops™?" Broder said not so much. Willis popped up like Punxsatawney Phil and shrieked at his shadow. The Democrats do too love the military. They have nothing but hot, soldierly love for that aquiline good-posture-monger, Wesley Clark, who bombed his way into their hearts with a song, or sang his way into their hearts with bombs at a recent meeting of the Democratic National Committee. America's Most Hysterical Homosexual™ soon joined the chorus:

I was at the DNC meeting this past weekend, and unlike David Broder, it wasn't clear to me at all that the overwhelming majority of the audience had "no sympathy" for the military. In fact, General Clark was MOBBED the entire time he was there.

Now we have recently seen Democrats mob such luminous irrelevancies as Ned Lamont, a milquetoast cable millionaire who couldn't beat a mush-mouthed goofball on the wrongest side of history since they gave Ezra Pound a spot on talk radio, so we know that the bar for Donkle mobbery is more limbo than high jump. There is also the confusion of item for category: Wesley Clark was in the military, but he isn't the earthly avatar of the platonic essence of The Troop.

Yet we know the Donkle does love him some men in uniform, doin' their duty and servin' their service and bein' brave and fightin' and soldierin' and whatever else they do in service of the empire. Your Progressive's troop-love is a part of his deep intellectual committment to have no deep intellectual committments. He claims to oppose the war and to believe it wrong, horrible, criminal, etc., but he insists on the moral sanctity of the hired help for the crime. You can't hold each individual soldier uniquely guilty for affecting policies set by his government, but this idea that the very instrument of empire should be exempted as a category and organization from the critique of imperial policy is absurd and obscene. Our "brave men and women serving in Iraq" have no right or business being there. They're occupiers. Aggressors. The Donkle says they're just doing their job. Ask: What is the nature of that job?

Marry . . . or Burn!

The Times recently published a story noting that for the first time, more than half of American women are "living without a spouse". There's the usual expertesque speculation on the sociocultural trends leading to such eventuality, and there are the requisite comparisons to Scandanavia and continental Europe, but the article is principally an innocuous and not-entirely-newsworthy demographic curiosity, a Lifestyle story promoted by the Times' inexorable editorial standards to the front page, where like a shiny bit to a packrat or a swamp to a pregnant mosquito, it attracted the buzzing attention of Thomas Sowell, the Urkell of conservative commentators, who deemed it a crime of ideology and "desperate twistings of words and numbers by the left, in order to discredit marriage." Fightin' words!

Sowell does make a decent point: the Times' idea of "living without a spouse" is awfully elastic, and though the underlying point--that family arrangements are changing (due just as much to changing economies as changing mores--the two being inextricably linked anyway)--is true, the jumble of numbers that gets us there is the sort of answer-in-search-of-evidence that marks most American journalism, whether "mainstream" and partisan.

But this is The National Review, the Mad Lib of modern American conservativism, and into the boiling pot of proper thought and interpretation goes a bowlful of conservative whackjobbery, which like polenta swells to at least three times its dry volume and threatens to overwhelm the whole kitchen.

What was the point? To show that marriage is a thing of the past. As a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle put it: “Women See Less Need for Ol’ Ball and Chain.”

In other words, marriage is like a prison sentence, complete with the old-fashioned leg irons with a chain connected to a heavy metal ball, so that the prisoner cannot escape.

This picture of marriage and a family as a burden is not peculiar to the New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle. It is common among the intelligentsia of the Left.

The husband or wife as the ol' ball and chain is not, to my knowledge, a product of Marx, Engels, or Michel Foucault. Ralph Kramden, maybe, but you can hardly call that character a member of "the intelligentsia of the Left." Sowell appears to blame Rousseau:

As far back as the 18th century, Rousseau said that man is born free but is everywhere in chains. In other words, the social restrictions essential to a civilized society were seen as unnecessary hindrances to each individual’s freedom.

Really? He goes on:

It never seems to occur to those who think this way that if everyone were free of all social restrictions, only the strongest and most ruthless would in fact be free, and all the others would be subject to their dictates or destruction.

In fact it does and did occur to them; they just don't necessarily accept the argument. Is man essentially a noble creature in his state of nature, or must some of his desires be moderated and controlled by limited (constitutional?) government, or is his natural state essentially one of suffering and predation, demanding powerful social codes and central authority? This is remedial philosophy, the most basic of the basic questions of continental political philosophy through the Enlightenment, with which Thomas Sowell seems almost entirely unacquainted.

Then the old horse gets another beating: "If 'marriage' can mean anything, then it means nothing." And, to recycle Who Is IOZ's favorite Groucho quotation, "If you stew cranberries like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does." I understand that these people want to keep fags from getting hitched, and that's their prerogative. The thought of a gold band slipping off and lodging itself in a tight spot during some hot backside play makes me a little squeamish as well. The nightmare of excellent floral arrangements and gourmet cupcakes and a DJ pounding out electroclash to a roomful of tuxedo'd homos and bridesmaid drag queens is nigh at hand, and if that sort of thing upsets you, then by all means, raise the picket and refuse to buy tickets to the next Almodovar film. America may thank you! But if the object is to convince your average 20-something hetero couple to tie the knot ("a reference to lyncing! nooses! death!"--Sowell cries), then you're not going to get there by painting marriage, as is the conservative wont, as a concentric series of rigid demands and physical necessities, dessicated of romance or feeling, dedicated as a sacrament to some vague and ecumenical civic deity, proposed as a pillar of personal responsibility to The State, encouraged as a virtual obligation to the body politic--in short, a civil obligation as banal and unexciting and tedious as the biennial tramp to the polling place, as unpleasant as the April rush to file your taxes.

So the Chinese . . .

. . . are building railroads n' shit for Africa, whereas the United States has a "plan to create a new military command for operations in Africa to coordinate action and counter potential threats from the continent."

I'm no fan of communism, but I'm seriously beginning to look forward to this "peaceful rise."

I've been to two world's fairs and a rodeo but I ain't never seen no attack plan R

At The Non-Republic, Benjamin Wittes sends a firm "Shut up!" in the direction of everyone. The topic is government wiretapping. The ignorant are everywhere, except, of course wherever Benjamin Wittes happens to be at any given moment. And Benjamin Wittes, by his own repeated insistence, knows only that he doesn't know.

Wittes dismisses all those who support or oppose the wiretapping because after all they, unlike him, have never "physically set foot inside the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court." I have never been on the moon myself, but I'm reasonably confident it isn't made of cheese. I'm no great defender of a priori reason, but there are reasonable principles and practices of both deduction and induction that can allow us all to arrive at conclusions that might just be correct. One needn't be a recipient of an apple to the noggin, in other words, to figure out one's stance on gravity.

After having physically encountered FISA for nigh-unto a decade, Wittes . . . doesn't know. After many interviews and much research, he doesn't know. The implication here is that the subject is unknowable, but the more reasonable explanation is that Wittes is a lousy reporter. This insistence that all will be revealed as it leaks from the government like water from a needle-pierced balloon is strange. Need-to-know is a fine principle for secret military endeavors in wartime, but it's hardly a governing principle for a free republic. Here is a general rule for a free society: Every action by government must be subject to public scrutiny, and any project about which there is insufficient information to form an informed opinion is for this very reason odious and inimical to liberty.

Don't Move in on Our Protection Racket

Sebastian Mallaby, one of the high-foreheaded mandarins of foreign folly over at the Council on Foreign Relations and a columnist for the Potomac Pravda has gotten his knickers in a serious bunch about China's policies of economic aid in Africa. In particular, he's worried that:

By pursuing commercial ties with Sudan, Hu was implicitly saying that economic development comes first and that political development is unimportant.

Now where have we heard that before?

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.

Not Mao, but Washington, you say? Does he elaborate? Yes, Madam, he does:

Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing; establishing (with powers so disposed, in order to give trade a stable course, to define the rights of our merchants, and to enable the government to support them) conventional rules of intercourse, the best that present circumstances and mutual opinion will permit, but temporary, and liable to be from time to time abandoned or varied, as experience and circumstances shall dictate; constantly keeping in view that it is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another; that it must pay with a portion of its independence for whatever it may accept under that character; that, by such acceptance, it may place itself in the condition of having given equivalents for nominal favors, and yet of being reproached with ingratitude for not giving more. There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion, which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.

In a comment on some blog somewhere last week, and for the life of me I can't recall precisely which or where, a smart commenter noted that the liberal habit of regretting an absence of "carrots and sticks" in America's bellicose posturing toward Iran ignores the true meaning of the idiom. The carrot and stick, the commenter noted, are nothing but a trick to fool a stubborn draft animal into moving. You tie the carrot to the stick with a string and dangle it in front of the animal, which pursues, but never reaches, this food.

Well there's a good, impartial model.

Mallaby's principle complaint is that China has agreed to pay for some sort of presidential palace for Sudan's miserable and corrupt leadership. But even in the middle of this complaint, we learn:

As well as paying for a presidential palace, Hu used his trip to cancel $80 million of Sudanese debt, to announce a plan to build a railway line and to visit an oil refinery that China partly owns, basking in the fact that 80 percent of Sudan's oil goes to his country.

So China, by pursuing a relatively impartial commercial relationship with Sudan has acquired great national benefits, and the Sudan, in return, has acquired some modest industrial and infrastructural gains. That won't end the killing in Darfur, certainly, but the "Western" model Mallaby hypes hasn't exactly kicked the tires and lit the fires of peace there either (though he, presumably, would blame some sort of Oriental subversion).

Mallaby:

But then there is an even more disturbing question: What does China's policy toward Sudan say about the West's policy toward China? The West is engaging with China on the theory that economic modernization will bring political modernization as well; otherwise, the West would merely be assisting the development of a communist adversary. China's Sudan policy is an assertion that this link between economic and political modernization is by no means inevitable, even in the extreme case. You can construct oil refineries, educate scientists, build ambitious new railways--and simultaneously pursue a policy of genocide.

This would seem to imprecate that China is responsible in some way for the Sudanese genocide. But the West has been intervening and "aiding" Sudan for far longer, and it would be just as easy to say, "You can chide and cajole foreign governments, deny them funding, enforce sanctions regimes, build refugee camps, and send in peacekeepers--without affecing a policy of genocide."

Mallaby's history is screwy anyway. Post-normalization China has developed politically. There have been moments of terrible violence; there has been great and continuing repression; there was Tiananmen Square. But who would argue that the degree of general political freedom in China today is unimproved from political China in 1960? China's commercial class may yet be a small percentage of its vast population, but who can contradict that many millions of Chinese nonetheless enjoy a standard of living unimaginable to any but top Party officials thirty years ago? Who can say that Western trade with China has been bad for the Chinese, either politically or economically?

The American revolution and the American republic were driven and built largely by men of property and commerce who sought freedom of action in the economic sphere and, in the end, demanded the political freedoms necessary to free commerce and property from the yolk of monarchial sovereignty. Our talkative defenders of the American hegemon today look at that history with such disdain. It is, frankly, an embarrassment.