propaganda of the deed
Terrorism is armed nihilism.
There has long been a political philosophy of do-it-yourself violence.
Posted on 2011-01-09 by The Reverend
rights gone wrong
I came of age politically in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, when human rights, as John Gray recalled, were an "immemorial inheritance," even "the only possible framework for moral and political thought." They weren't, unless history began in the 1970s.
It was then, claims Samuel Moyn in The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, that human rights, as they are now conceived, were invented. A break was made with the older tradition, where "The alliance with state and nation was not some accident that tragically befell the rights of man [sic]: it was their very essence, for the vast bulk of their history."
In contrast, human rights transcend the state. That, argues John Gray in his review of Moyn's book, is how they went wrong:
IT IS partly the loss of the insight that human rights can only be secured by an effective state that explains the failure of the regime-change policies promoted by neoconservatives and liberal hawks over the past decade. If rights are what humans possess in the absence of a repressive regime, all that needs to be done to secure human rights is to remove the despot in question. But if rights are empty without the state to protect them, then the nature of the government that can be reasonably expected to emerge when tyranny has been overthrown becomes of crucial importance. The political ideas that are taught in universities do not often shape political practice in any direct fashion. But there can be little doubt that those who promoted the Iraq War believed the removal of Saddam Hussein would allow something like liberal democracy to flourish in the country, and in believing this, they showed that their thinking had been molded by theories of rights that ignored the crucial role of the state.
A willed ignorance of history was also at work. If rights are universally human, embodying a kind of natural freedom that appears as the accretions of history are wiped away, the past has little significance. But if human rights are artifacts that have been constructed in specific circumstances, as I would argue, history is all-important; and history tells us that when authoritarian regimes are suddenly swept aside, the result is often anarchy or a new form of tyranny—and quite often a mix of the two.
Many of the nearly two hundred actually existing sovereign states are collapsed, corroded, criminalized or weak. Incapable of maintaining a rudimentary peace, the task of sustaining a government, let alone rights, is beyond their competence. Contemporary human-rights movements have followed recent liberal philosophy in focusing on states as the principal violators of personal liberties; but in many countries it is tribal militias, organized crime or violent fundamentalists that are the larger threat. Anarchy is as inimical to freedom as tyranny, sometimes more so. That is one reason why regimes of the kind that exist in post-Communist Russia and China have secured a certain popular legitimacy.
Because states are often insufficient doesn't make them any less necessary. The purpose of the state is security, and security is a precondition for any liberties worth a damn. The basis for a liberal state should be a modus vivendi between rival freedoms, a way of negotiating competing claims without violence. Civil liberties require peace.
The greatest threat to a liberal order from the state is war. The late historian Tony Judt drew this lesson from the forgotten twentieth century:
War was not just a catastrophe in its own right; it brought other horrors in its wake. World War I led to an unprecedented militarization of society, the worship of violence, and a cult of death that long outlasted the war itself and prepared the ground for the political disasters that followed. States and societies seized during and after World War II by Hitler or Stalin (or by both, in sequence) experienced not just occupation and exploitation but degradation and corrosion of the laws and norms of civil society. The very structures of civilized life—regulations, laws, teachers, policemen, judges—disappeared or else took on sinister significance: far from guaranteeing security, the state itself became the leading source of insecurity. Reciprocity and trust, whether in neighbors, colleagues, community, or leaders, collapsed. Behavior that would be aberrant in conventional circumstances—theft, dishonesty, dissemblance, indifference to the misfortune of others, and the opportunistic exploitation of their suffering—became not just normal but sometimes the only way to save your family and yourself. Dissent or opposition was stifled by universal fear.
War, in short, prompted behavior that would have been unthinkable as well as dysfunctional in peacetime. It is war, not racism or ethnic antagonism or religious fervor, that leads to atrocity. War—total war—has been the crucial antecedent condition for mass criminality in the modern era. The first primitive concentration camps were set up by the British during the Boer War of 1899-1902. Without World War I there would have been no Armenian genocide and it is highly unlikely that either communism or fascism would have seized hold of modern states. Without World War II there would have been no Holocaust. Absent the forcible involvement of Cambodia in the Vietnam War, we would never have heard of Pol Pot. As for the brutalizing effect of war on ordinary soldiers themselves, this of course has been copiously documented.
War is no less brutalizing when the excuse is altruism. As George Orwell said, "a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a 'good' man [or woman] is squeezing the trigger."
[see also David Rieff here and here]
[to appreciate where John Gray is coming from, consider Enlightenment's Wake]
Posted on 2011-01-08 by The Reverend
Glenn the Revelator
Morbidly curious, I attended Restoring Honor. I haven't read a better account of Glenn Beck's rally than the one by Mark Lilla. The crowd before the Lincoln Memorial, of about 87,000, was placid but standoffish. Beck deftly played, as Lilla said, "themes dear to the religious right—family, church, honor—without sounding angry or exclusionary." Glenn Beck is gifted as a demagogue, by Lilla's cogent definition of the craft:
The truth is, demagogues don't have cores. They are mediums, channeling currents of public passion and opinion that they anticipate, amplify, and guide, but do not create; the less resistance they offer, the more successful they are. This nonresistance is what distinguishes Beck from his confreres in the conservative media establishment, who have created more sharply etched characters for themselves. Rush Limbaugh plays the loud, steamrolling uncle you avoid at Thanksgiving. Bill O'Reilly is the angry guy haranguing the bartender. Sean Hannity is the football captain in a letter sweater, asking you to repeat everything, slowly. But with Glenn Beck you never know what you'll get. He is a perpetual work in progress, a billboard offering YOUR MESSAGE HERE.
As anyone who witnessed his performance on the Washington Mall can attest, what makes him particularly appealing to his audience is not his positions, it is that he appears to feel and fear and admire and instinctively believe what his listeners do, even when their feelings, fears, esteem, and beliefs are changing or self-contradictory. This is the gift of the true demagogue, to successfully identify his own self, rather than his opinions, with the selves of his followers—and to equate both with the "true" nation.
To understand someone like Beck, and the people who love him, you need to stay on the surface, not plumb the depths or peek behind the curtain.
The "true" nation, for Glenn Beck, is a Godly nation. He said, "we have to put our lives in shape so we will be on God's side." Beck enjoins everyone to submit to something greater than themselves. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch has described Beck as a "very genuine, extremely well-read libertarian." Mark Lilla locates the contradiction not in Beck, the mirror, but in his audience:
Beck's libertarianism is a more developed and consistent reflection of the Tea Party's own highly individualistic political rhetoric. But as some thoughtful conservative commentators have noted, those who identify with it also believe that American society, not just the government, has gone off the rails, that families are weaker, people less honest, less respectful, less good—that, as the pollsters put it, "the country is headed in the wrong direction." But what these same commentators fail to appreciate is that the social developments that the movement's sympathizers worry about are consequences of the very same individualism the Tea Party says it wants to advance. As I've suggested in these pages before, the Tea Party movement is yet another expression of a libertarian urge that has reshaped American politics and civil society over the past half-century.
But it also expresses the disquiet of people unhappy about the more atomized and anarchic world they now find themselves in. Tocqueville would have understood this. One of the lessons of Democracy in America is that the prospect of absolute freedom is terrifying, the world it delivers lonely and hard. The freer a nation becomes, Tocqueville conjectured, the more people feel they are on their own and must create themselves, the less willing they and their fellow citizens are to accept authority and traditional obligations, then the more they will crave a connection to each other and to the Beyond.
In other words, conservatives are bewildered by the unintended consequences of their own movement, as mentioned here.
Posted on 2010-12-28 by The Reverend
identity and crisis
notice: what follows is, in many respects, a restatement of previous posts on the financial crisis
No modern economy is an island autarky, and the private sector isn't Robinson Crusoe. The nation's economy is more like a network of flows between three sectors: government, private domestic, and foreign. (Outstanding liabilities and assets are stocks. Additions to or subtractions from stocks over time are flows.)
In the housing bubble, the private sector of the United States spent more than it earned, accumulating debt. (In this schema, the private domestic sector consists of both businesses and households.) After the bubble burst, the private sector was compelled to spend less than it earned, paying down the outstanding debt—deleveraging.
SOURCES: the Fed's Flow of Funds; BEA's National Income and Product Accounts
The private sector was able, in the bubble, to spend more than it earned because another sector earned more than it spent. That was the foreign sector, which produced more than it purchased from the United States. (The foreign sector consists of the rest of the world in its relation to the United States.) Foreign saving financed domestic borrowing, and Wall Street was the intermediary. But whereas the private sector has reversed its behavior, the foreign sector continues producing more than it purchases from the United States.
Without a reversal in our relation to the rest of the world—without exporting more than we import—the greater expenditure on private sector production must come from somewhere else. Otherwise, aggregate demand falls, idling more of the nation's productive capacity—with more employees fired.
Every borrower has a lender. In the world economy, finance flows between interdependent sectors. Each sector has a balance, which means the difference of inflows minus outlays (a surplus when positive; a deficit when negative). The balance of each sector is a term in this identity:
Private Sector + Public Sector ≡ Current Account
Without a surge in net exports, the federal deficit enables the private sector to delever. Under these circumstances, slashing the deficit means slashing revenues to the private sector. The United States has been in a balance-sheet recession, which means that instead of maximizing profits, the private sector minimizes debt. As Richard Koo testified before Congress:
When a debt-financed bubble bursts, asset prices collapse while liabilities remain, leaving millions of private sector balance sheets underwater. In order to regain their financial health and credit ratings, households and businesses in the private sector are forced to repair their balance sheets by increasing savings or paying down debt, thus reducing aggregate demand.
In these times, austerity is backasswords. Paul Krugman explained:
In the current policy debate, debt is often invoked as a reason to dismiss calls for expansionary fiscal policy as a response to unemployment; you can't solve a problem created by debt by running up even more debt, say the critics. Households borrowed too much, say many people; now you want the government to borrow even more?
What's wrong with that argument? It assumes, implicitly, that debt is debt—that it doesn't matter who owes the money. Yet that can't be right; if it were, debt wouldn't be a problem in the first place. After all, to a first approximation debt is money we owe to ourselves—yes, the US has debt to China etc., but that's not at the heart of the problem. Ignoring the foreign component, or looking at the world as a whole, the overall level of debt makes no difference to aggregate net worth—one person's liability is another person's asset.
It follows that the level of debt matters only because the distribution of that debt matters, because highly indebted players face different constraints from players with low debt. And this means that all debt isn't created equal—which is why borrowing by some actors now can help cure problems created by excess borrowing by other actors in the past. This becomes very clear in our analysis. In the model, deficit-financed government spending can, at least in principle, allow the economy to avoid unemployment and deflation while highly indebted private-sector agents repair their balance sheets, and the government can pay down its debts once the deleveraging crisis is past.
There are two effective ways, which are not mutually exclusive, to reduce the debt burden of the private sector: economic growth and the restructuring of mortgages—modifying principal.
Household debt, especially in the form of second mortgages, are bank assets. Borrower defaults have been used to divert attention away from lender hubris, but those decaying loans could not exist without signatures on both sides of the transaction. Writing down the value of these mortgages would require, as it should require, those in power to confess the doubtful solvency of the banking leviathans.
Posted on 2010-12-18 by The Reverend
vision thing
David Rieff summed up my thoughts on Wikileaks:
If you believe the United States is fundamentally a force for good in the world (one does not have to traffic in [David] Brooks's cheap millenarian language to believe this), then you should be appalled by the emergence of Wikileaks, for it does indeed make the job of American diplomats more difficult. If, on the other hand, you believe that America is an empire (one does not have to believe that this makes the United States a malign force, just not a benign one, any more than any other empire has ever been), and, if you are an American, anyway, you believe that this imperial vocation is destroying the country, and therefore you want to see the empire's end, then of course you will enthusiastically welcome the advent of Wikileaks.
Or, in the words of Tom Slee, the "Internet is a new terrain, but the battles being fought on it are old ones."
Later, David Rieff offered a second thought on Wikileaks, specifically on the vision of technology-induced enlightenment:
[W]here Wikileaks poses a serious challenge is in its application of a technological mindset that up to now had seemed both the product of and inextricably linked to the clean, enlightened liberal capitalism of the Microsofts, Googles, Apples, and Intels of this world.
Throughout the 1990s, technophiles wrote rapturously of the Internet inaugurating a new age of high-tech Jeffersonian democracy (the phrase is from Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron's 1995 critical essay, "The California Ideology"). As a leading Silicon Valley software entrepreneur, Mitch Kapor, put it in 1993, "Life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly as Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community."
In many ways, this thinking was extremely radical. In the future, people like Kapor, Apple's Steve Jobs, and of course Bill Gates argued, we would have a completely new relationship to information. "Universal connectivity," Gates wrote in Forbes in 1999, "will bring together all the information and services you need and make them available to you regardless of where you are, what you are doing, or the kind of device you are using. Call it 'virtual' convergence with everything you want in one place, but that place is wherever you want it to be, not just at home or in the office."
And what would we do with all this freedom? Well, the Bill Gates of the 1990s thought we would all go shopping, either literally or metaphorically. As he put it at the time, "[W]e [will] find ourselves in a new world of low-friction, low overhead capitalism, in which market information [will] be plentiful and transaction costs low. It [will] be a shopper's heaven." Later, as Gates's interests shifted toward philanthropy, his view of what capitalism needed to do and, more importantly, could accomplish, broadened and deepened.
What two especially sycophantic journalists have called "philanthrocapitalism" is now the order of the day with Gates. In fairness, though hardly the unassailable paragon of virtue its myriad admirers make it out to be, the Gates Foundation has done a great deal of good, and the world would probably be less well-off without it. But the Gates vision of solving the world's problems—AIDS, the global food crisis, education at home—is just as post-political as his pre-philanthropic vision of the world as shoppers' paradise.
Everything has a technical fix, or, to put it slightly differently, we all agree on what we want—an end to poverty, decent education for everyone, etc.—so the thing to do is brainstorm and research the best way to get there. The idea that one's political views, for example, on whether the established order or property rights, or, dearer to Gates's pocketbook if not his heart, the current global patent regime, so favorable to companies like Microsoft, might affect what one thought the right outcome to be, is a thought utterly outside capitalist philanthropy's ken.
But as Tom Slee said, "if information is not the problem, then information is not the solution." New technology for information is a different terrain for the same species. In the retribution against the opponents of Wikileaks, Rieff sees "the new bloody crossroads of our politics":
Now, (presumably state-sponsored) attacks against Wikileaks are being countered by attacks on purported enemies of Wikileaks from Sarah Palin to Visa and Mastercard by online techno-anarchist groups like anonops, which recently posted a list of e-mail addresses of institutions that had either cut off Wikileaks or criticized its message.
Speaking of the PayPal online payment service, the anonops poster wrote, "With shopping coming up and people needing to pay for their online purchases, this will really put them at a halt," and they will "regret messing with Wikileaks and Anon."
Creative destruction, as an aspiration, applies no less to "propaganda of the deed" than to the perennial gale of innovation.
Posted on 2010-12-16 by The Reverend
what rights require
Rights neither enforce themselves nor will they be enforced by unpaid interns. In other words, as Cosma Shalizi explained in this book review, liberty depends on taxes:
Exercising rights is always costly—in lost opportunities to do other things, if not in money. So is the preventative maintenance rights require, and without which they are not credible. This maintenance is glaringly obvious for property rights (police, fire departments, courts, prisons), but really exists for all of them. (If we're to have a right to free speech, there needs to be institutional machinery to support that right, and "watchdogs must be paid," as [Stephen] Holmes and [Cass] Sunstein put it, not altogether felicitously [in their book The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes].) If rights are to be equal, or even if all citizens are to enjoy a certain minimum of rights, then these costs cannot be individually borne, on, say, a pay-as-you-go basis. Rather, the cost of rights must be distributed across the citizenry. That means both taxation (to pay for rights) and state action (to implement them). Ergo, "liberty depends on taxes."
Whatever rights may be justified as points of pure ethics, the rights which citizens enjoy in practice are the result of more or less explicit political bargains, about who gets how much of what, in exchange for what else. Inescapably, there are tradeoffs between different rights, and between rights and other goals. What rights we actually enjoy depends on both our collective resources and our willingness to apply those resources to collective ends.
And a right without an effective remedy, when denied, is no right at all.
More book reviews by Cosma Shalizi are available here.
Posted on 2010-12-14 by The Reverend
the romance of business
John Dewey described business as "adventuring on the sea of uncertainty." In the Great Depression, the pretense of rationality was lost:
The present scene is only an exhibition of what is inherent in business all the time, but it now happens on such a scale that the uncertainty always characteristic of it has become too overt to be ignored. The only thing abnormal about it is that the normal insecurity has got out of hand to the extent that it cannot be concealed from general recognition. In other words, the essentially romantic nature of the idea that business is a rational way of expending energy for the satisfaction of human wants becomes apparent to those who have eyes to see. There are various "rational" explanations of the present breakdown. Each has its measure of truth, but all they explain is some aspect of the irrationality, the trading on uncertainty, which is business itself.
It is interesting to note the ways in which a recognition of the identity of business with betting on an uncertain event all but explicitly comes through. We hear every day and many times a day that everything would be all right if we only had "confidence." Undoubtedly. But confidence in what or in whom? The industrialist would be pleased if the banker had enough confidence to lend him money; the banker would be pleased if someone else had sufficient confidence to buy his frozen assets at a good price; the farmer would love to have confidence that if he plants a lot of grain and cotton he will get a good price next summer; the laborer would like to have confidence that he is going to get a job, and the depositor that he is going to get his money from the bank when he wants it. Meantime, the appeal to confidence sounds like a confidence game. Can anyone imagine anything more humorous—if it were not terribly tragic—than the appeal to put confidence in a situation of complete insecurity?
The past is irrevocable, the future is uncertain, and we are consigned to act between the two. The instability of markets comes from uncertainty. This uncertainty has no probability distribution; this uncertainty cannot be mastered by elegant equations. Today's production occurs with money lent on yesterday's assumptions about tomorrow's returns.
Uncertainty frustrates all attempts to separate speculation from investment. It is indispensable to Keynes' general theory. As a limit to human knowledge, it is potential common ground between Keynes and Hayek. As John Gray said:
For Keynes, markets are unstable less because they are driven by emotion than because the future is unknowable. To suggest that the source of market volatility is unreason is to imply that if people were fully rational markets could be stable. But even if people were affectless calculating machines they would still be ignorant of the future, and markets would still be volatile. The root cause of market instability is the insuperable limitation of human knowledge.
Investment requires the businessperson to pretend otherwise. Hence, as Dewey says, "the whole theory of the relation between business and calculating intelligence is evidently sheer fiction."
Posted on 2010-12-12 by The Reverend