Reviewing a provocative book: The Republican War on Science

After doing some catch up miscellany, I find I need feedback on a little project that will actually pay some cash (a little). Feel free to comment on the following, which I’ll post in 2 parts. A book review of The Republican War on Science, by Chris Mooney

(This review will appear in the .... edition of the San Diego Union Book Review, edited by Arthur Salm. It is posted here entirely for comment as a working draft. A final version is posted on my website.)

Sixty years ago, science emerged dramatically from its ivory tower, with a flash and a bang.

Even before Hiroshima, a multitude of technical advances - from agriculture and antibiotics to radar and rocketry - fed a burgeoning movement called Modernism, that viewed change as inevitable. But the atom bomb made it official. Science had vastly expanded the range of potential human activity, for well or ill. If used wisely, it might spill forth a cornucopia of innovations, to serve and uplift billions. On the other hand, mistakes would now have greater consequence, possibly dooming us all.

Alas, "wisdom" is seldom obvious. We rely on politics to determine policy, a definite improvement over the whim of kings. But politics, despite centuries of hard refinement, is still far more ego-driven art than craft. Habits of at least four thousand years seem to favor self-interest, hierarchies and dogma, instead of gathering evidence and cheerfully letting facts guide us.

What’s more, science has accumulated enemies. Some are put off by the ambitious and optimistic Modernist Agenda of perpetual human self improvement -- a program aimed at discovering and then applying the very tools of Creation, in order to make better societies, better lives, better generations. Some question whether this ambitious goal is possible, or ethical, or even sane.

Aldous Huxley once spoke for all grouchy intellectuals, when he derided progress as "just another idol." Grumbling that it will all come to no good, voices ranging from Bill Joy and Francis Fukayama to Osama and the Unabomber have shared a common underlying theme, protesting the West’s headlong plunge into territories and powers once left to God. Artists and authors, from Michael Crichton to Margaret Atwood, portray technological ambition as hubris, that age-old, prideful route to chaos or damnation.

It wasn’t always like this. Back in 1945, even as humanity was climbing out of the wreckage of its Nadir War, a sense of resilient, can-do determination seemed to overflow. In his famed report Science: The Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush called upon the United States to transform and multiply its martial accomplishments with unprecedented peacetime zeal -- using both technology and perseverance to rebuild cities, refute bigotries, revitalize education, end poverty and provide more fulfillment for all.

So stirring was this aspiration that cynics and curmudgeons could do little more than bide their time.

Nor was this a partisan matter. The aspiration proclaimed by Bush was thereupon propelled as much by Harry Truman and George Marshall as by Dwight Eisenhower, who established the office of Presidential Science Advisor and gave it real clout. John F. Kennedy is remembered as a gung-ho science booster, especially regarding outer space, but Richard Nixon embarked upon just as many ambitious, science-driven endeavors, for example vastly increasing funding for biological research and responding to clear evidence of human generated ecological harm by creating the Environmental Protection Agency.

Moreover, it is plain that such endeavors were generally successful, spawning genuine achievements that did tremendous good. To name only a few, weather and communication satellites transformed our lives, while advances in medicine, biology and agriculture enabled far more people to survive and thrive. Acid rain and stratospheric ozone depletion were rapidly diagnosed, prompting measures that -- at least -- checked immediate calamity. And while there is still plenty of bad news to spur activism, anyone who grew up in Los Angeles, forty years ago, should attest that five times as many people now live there, breathing air that's five times better. (Or, rather, a fifth as bad.)

If the "greatest generation" deserves acclaim for defeating Hitler, let’s add a few more feats to their credit. Like cranking up a thousand universities, combating ancient habits of racism, liberating the ambition of girls, building interstates and internets, while turning a nation of provincially isolated tenants into globe traveling homeowners. Gathered together, these and countless other accomplishments were all rooted in the modernist-scientific agenda.

So why has the whole ambitious program lately come under fierce attack?

According to Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, we need look no farther than an alliance of two reactionary forces. Big business and religious fundamentalism. This era’s burgeoning hostility toward rationality, skepticism, accountability and can-do ambition is little more, and no less than, a deliberate campaign against modernity on the part of "conservatism." A matter of right versus left.

On February 18, 2004, the conservative war on science, which had been gathering momentum for decades, finally jolted the media and American public to attention. All it took was a little star power…. Over sixty leading scientists and former government officials, among them twenty Nobel laureates, had signed a statement denouncing the administration of George W. Bush for misrepresenting and suppressing scientific information and tampering with the process by which scientific advice makes its way to government officials. Examples included distorting the science of climate change, quashing government scientific reports, and stacking scientific advisory panels. "Other administrations, have, on occasion, engaged in such practices, but not so systematically nor on so wide a front," the statement read.

Mooney presents a long list of cases to support his indictment, portraying a methodical campaign to politicize, ignore, twist or undermine science. His list of topic areas will sound familiar: the effects of smoking and of air pollution, the feasibility and benefits of energy savings through increased fuel efficiency standards, global warming and stem cell research, educational standards and the Drug War, all the way to a campaign aimed at teaching "alternatives to evolution" in the classroom.

Some of these matters are still under some legitimate dispute among reputable scientists, implying that we need more research, pursued promptly and professionally. Others have coalesced around deep and profound expert consensus, with clear majorities of qualified experts recommending urgent action.

Mooney shows there are countless tricks, some old and others innovative, that special interests can use when scientific consensus becomes politically inconvenient. One has been to banish science from centers of power – for example, when the GOP-led Congress dismantled its own, nonpartisan advisory tool, the Office of Technology Assessment, because its counsel kept conflicting with ideological views.

Another is for political aides to edit the reports of scientific panels, so that final versions offer conclusions quite different than panel members intended. Another method used more frequently, of late, has been to pack advisory groups with "experts" who were selected on a basis of ideology, or industry affiliation, or promises to reach a predetermined outcome.

A favorite maneuver, in recent years, has been to magnify uncertainty, especially regarding contentious issues like Creationism and global climate change.

Now, unlike past dogmas, science is unafraid of uncertainty, so long as it is faced in courageous and disciplined ways. Young scientists are taught to nurse some residual doubt toward even the strongest theory. (And yes, even a widely held "consensus" can sometimes be wrong. Graduate students constantly look for these rare "faulty paradigms," which can be toppled and make a newcomer’s reputation.)

This kind of healthy skepticism accompanies -- but does not generally undermine -- the collaborative process of building ever-better and increasingly valid models of the world.

Opponents of science try to turn this strength into a weakness by exaggerating doubts, calling all theories equal, or even claiming that "scientific consensus" is a meaningless phrase. (Is it ironic that officials who were elected by the slimmest of political margins then dismiss as "uncertain" concerns that are expressed by far greater majorities of experts in a given field?)

For those who view this kind of behavior as uniquely a sickness of the right, Mooney’s book will offer powerful support. Evidence overwhelmingly points to orchestrated manipulation of both science and public opinion by groups ranging from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute all the way to elements now running both Congress and the Executive Branch.

And yet, is this issue really as one-sided and simple as liberal partisans contend?

Not if you listen to a steady stream of punditry pouring from the other side, proclaiming that liberals are the ones betraying both science and modernity. Some of the very same arch-conservative think tanks that Mooney decries have issued their own accusations, for example, the Marshall Institute’s Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking and the Cato Institute’s Silencing Science.

While much is specious, one of their higher-quality efforts has been to effectively demolish the left’s rigid opposition to nuclear power, a reflex that ignores real potential to reduce carbon emissions and help bridge the next few decades, while we develop sustainable technologies.

Stepping back, we see a common theme. "My side is on the side of truth while your side is warped by dogma."

If I must choose sides, I’ll pick Mooney, because the perfidies that he describes have been accelerating in profoundly disturbing ways. For example, it is unambiguous that the GOP Congress cuts funding for the National Science Foundation even while calling for "more research" on global climate change. Nothing could be more bald-faced. In any event, rightwing abuses are inherently more dangerous, because that side currently holds sway in countless boardrooms and every branch of government.

Yet, the very title of this book - The Republican War on Science - ensures that it won’t be helpful. Providing ammo for one side, it will be contemptuously ignored by the other, while just a few -- those still with open minds -- may crack the covers with sincere interest in learning something new.

This is ironic, in light of some wise words about the scientific process that Mooney quotes from cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker:

"The success of science depends on an apparatus of democratic adjudication - anonymous peer review, open debate, the fact that a graduate student can criticize a tenured professor. These mechanisms are more or less explicitly designed to counter human self deception. People always think they're right, and powerful people will tend to use their authority to bolster their prestige and suppress inconvenient opposition. You try to set up the game of science so that the truth will out despite this ugly side of human nature."

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Continue to part II where I will show that Mooney DOES recognize a few left wing anti-science faults, but only a few. I will talk about how problematic a book like this is... telling scary truths, but not - in the long run - being much help.

See also my article: The Case for a Scientific Nation

More misc collected items from the Culture War front... plus an old anthem...

In the months since John Kerry's defeat last November, asking "What's wrong with liberals?" has become something of an obsession for pundits across America. Did they lose because they were crushed by the right-wing attack machine, because of those ever-nebulous moral values, because they were soft on national security, or because they hadn't bashed corporations enough? Some of these? All of these?

 In Return of the "L" Word: A Liberal Vision for the New Century, Douglas Massey takes a long, hard look at these questions and comes up with some surprising answers. His book reminds us of just how much liberalism has accomplished over the 20th century, of why it eventually declined, and what liberals need to do to usher in a new realignment in politics, one that wrestles the country back from the now-dominant right.

Part of the answer, Massey contends, is to create a new market-based vision for liberalism, one that avoids the pitfalls of both conservative free-market dogma and the leftist ideologies of old.

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"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Mead

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Fred Mitouer offers a powerful quote from James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg in The Sovereign Individual (1997) that seems to be talking about the “confidence” aspect of modernism.

"In short, the future is likely to confound the expectations of those who have absorbed the civic myths of 20th century industrial society. Among them are the illusions of social democracy that once thrilled and motivated the most gifted minds. They presuppose that societies evolve in whatever way governments wished them to - preferably in response to opinion polls of scrupulously counted votes. This was never as true as it seemed 50 years ago.

Now it is an anachronism, as much an artifact of industrialism as a rusting smokestack. The civic myths reflect not only a mindset that sees society's problems as susceptible to engineering solutions; they also reflect a false confidence that resources and individuals will remain as vulnerable to political compulsion to the future as they have been in the 20th century. We doubt it. Market forces, not political majorities, will compel societies to reconfigure themselves in ways that public opinion will neither comprehend nor welcome. "

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And now, moving toward the esoteric:

RELIGION AND SECRECY IN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION: The Gentleman, the Prince, and the Simulacrum, BY Hugh Urban Ohio State University ()

“In this article... I will suggest that we look at the Bush administration through the lenses of three controversial theorists who have had much to say about secrecy in both its religious and political dimensions: the German-born political philosopher, Leo Strauss, the Florentine philosopher, Niccolò Machiavelli, and the French postmodern theorist, Jean Baudrillard. I have chosen these three, seemingly disparate, theorists because they correspond to and help make sense of three of the most important forces at work in the Bush administration, namely: 

1) the Neoconservative movement, which is heavily indebted to Strauss' thought and has a powerful presence in the Bush administration through figures like Paul Wolfowitz (a student of Strauss) and the Project for a New American Century;
2) the manipulations of Bush's pious public i
mage by advisors like Karl Rove (a reader of Machiavelli) and Vice-President Dick Cheney (often compared to Machiavelli), who have used the President's connections with the Christian Right for political advantage; [16] and 

3) an astonishingly uncritical mainstream media, whose celebration of Bush's image as a virtuous man of faith and general silence about his less admirable activities is truly "hyperreal," in Baudrillard's sense of the term.”

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Finally, here’s a choice rant I spotted:

I'd love for some rich liberal to make a huge spashy advertised dare to red-staters. "You claim your approach is better at raising moral offspring than our humanist ways. Then test it! First, let's agree on criteria. And to prove that we really aren't morally all that much different from you, , let's agree in advance that the following things generally range from undesirable, to bad, to downright evil:

divorce
teen pregnancy
dropping out of high school
illiteracy
children born outside a stable marriage
venereal disease
addiction to drugs or alcohol
incest
adults imposing sex upon children under sixteen
domestic violence

Of course we could argue endlessly over which of these is worse that others, either truly evil or tolerable-if regrettable. But let’s agree that each and every of these things are clear markers of something gone wrong. You claim that you have a better handle on how people ought to live. Then stand up and prove it by showing that you are doing better than us, in all these measurable ways.

We, with all our urban problems, ghettos, and huge influx of immigrants, as well as our so-called loose urban moral values, ought to fare worse in all these categories than folk who are salt-of-the-earth, rural, bible-quoting red-staters, with the Ten Commandments posted in the courthouse and Intelligent Design taught in schools. Right?

Wrong. By every one of the measures listed above, blue-staters are doing not only better, but FAR better.

Just one recent example. The number of methamphetamine labs that law enforcement agencies seized in the urban states of Maryland, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire in 2004 was 5. The number seized in Missouri, Tennessee and Arkansas? 2,546.

Perhaps it’s time to stop dismissing each other and start listening for a change. We’ll start by recalling that religious folk once played a huge role in promoting liberal causes. Combatting poverty and segregation and unjust wars. If people of deep faith no longer feel a connection with progressive liberalism, maybe we played a part in breaking that old link. We blue-staters could learn a little humility, too. We don’t always know everything.

Red-staters, on the other hand, need to stop fearing tomorrow. Most children make good choices when you let them see and sample from the world. Isolating them and relentlessly preaching at them clearly does not work.

Oh, one more thing. We in blue states took all the damage from terrorism and pay most of the taxes in fighting it. Dismissing us as immoral “others” won’t help America to be strong. It’s the opposite of “united we stand.”

Still, if you insist on a “culture war” we can comply, as our forefathers did in fighting to end slavery. Dismiss the ‘decadent’ urban North and you may be in for more than you bargained for.”

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Yeesh. This guy has been eating too much chile. Reminds me of the ongoing proposal to change the “red-blue” formalism to “blue-gray”! Now let’s join him in a round of The Battle Hymn of the Republic....

Mine eyes have seen the Glory of the coming of the Lord.
He has trampled all the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored...

There’s got to be a better way.

Still clearing the decks...

More misc stuff to get rid of!

First and most important... one of the core concepts of modernism is skepticism in the sense of watching out for the worst human trait (and sometimes its best) that has been responsible for most bad governance... and some great art... our relentless subjective willingness to be fooled. As Richard Feynman said, “the easiest person to fool is yourself.”

This matter will come up here, time and again, so let me just cite a couple of interesting items. (Isn’t this the underlying notion behind CITOKATE?)

One of the great flamboyant impresarios of skepticism, “The Great Randi,” will be holding a grand festival of skepticism and magic (yeah you heard that right!) along with my pals Penn & Teller and the MythBusters and many others, in Las Vegas in January. I hereby forgive them for not inviting me. And I urge you all to drop by http://www.tam4.com/

And there are few things you can do to help that will come easier, cheaper, and better than subscribing to Skeptic Magazine. http://www.skeptic.com/

Also, buy my novel EARTH and look on the back pages. There’s a list of other organizations you can join in order to help save the world, without doing anything more than writing a check for subscription to a cool magazine, once a year. It’s called “proxy power” and if you are not doing at least THAT much - joining half a dozen groups who will use your dues to go save the world FOR you -- well, then, then you are simply part of the problem, not part of the solution.

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Now to miscellany. Any of you out there Huxley aficionados? A friend recently discovered a very direct debate in the 1940s between Aldous & Julian Huxley on the possibility of progress. Dour old Aldous called it another "idol" while Julian (co-founder of UNESCO and the World Health Organization) was all for it. JH makes his case for progress with the caveat that progress is not inevitable as some millenarians had thought. But, since we're in charge of the planet now, it is absolutely necessary.

Ah, but if you go back to my initial modernism articles, you can see that the Huxleys were arguing during in the can-do period of 1945-1969, when nothing seemed out of reach, the social diamond was at its flattest, and modernism seemed unstoppable. The unbelievable irony? We have accomplished vastly more than anybody then could have expected.

No, we don’t have unmetered/free nuclear power & nuke cars. But we have better race and gender justice than even a utopian would have imagined, then! And many wonders like this one I am using now. And after all of those accomplishments? A civilization with plummeting confidence! Aw, man.

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Among our purposes online is to help each other find useful sites. Here is one. The Progressive Policy Institute examines mostly trade matters but with an eye to policy. http://www.ppionline.org/ Here’s a recent excerpt:

”The Numbers:

U.S. "edible ice" imports, 1996: 1,024 tons
U.S. "edible ice" exports, 2000: 6,800 tons
U.S. "edible ice" exports, 2004: 16,300 tons

What They Mean:

“Ingenious attempts to cool off are not at all new. In the 16th chapter of Walden, for example, Henry David Thoreau notes the arrival of a hundred Irish workmen at Walden Pond, who spent the winter of 1846-47 cutting blocks of ice from the pond's frozen surface. By March they had built an ice tower weighing 10,000 tons, which stood by the pond, insulated under a pile of hay, until it was dismantled and shipped off to India by ice king Frederick Turner the following autumn. The ice boats left in September and reached Bengal in May. New England at the time was exporting 5,000 tons of ice a year -- a figure which reached 12,000 a year in the 1870s -- to Singapore, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Brazil, Cuba, and Central America, as well as India. Turner was also the first man to sell ice cream in Cuba, the Virgin Islands, and St. Kitts. Thoreau smugly comments: "the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta drink at my well ."

“America's modern ice trade, though growing fast, is still pretty small. The "edible ice" totals last year were $3 million in exports, mainly to Mexico, and $28 million in imports. U.S. trade in ice cream is considerably bigger, at $50 million to $100 million a year in exports and $10 million in imports. Hong Kong and Singapore are still on the ice cream export map, but India is not. Trade in air conditioners and refrigerators of course is bigger still...” “... Probably more interesting, China's first major industrial manufacturing venture in the United States is in refrigeration. Appliance giant Hai'er opened a plant in Camden, South Carolina, in 2003, which now employs 225 people and has the capacity to produce half a million refrigerators a year...

Fascinating! Now more snippets. Mostly about science persevering amid and despite the new barbarians...

'Strange Things' Along Pacific Coast Waters -- (Associated Press -- August 2, 2005)
Marine biologists are seeing mysterious and disturbing things along the Pacific Coast this year: higher water temperatures, plummeting catches of fish, lots of dead birds on the beaches, and perhaps most worrisome, very little plankton - the tiny organisms that are a vital link in the ocean food chain. "The bottom has fallen out of the coastal food chain, and there's just not enough food out there," said Julia Parrish, a seabird ecologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Siberia's Rapid Thaw Causes Alarm -- (BBC -- August 11, 2005)
The huge expanse of western Siberia is thawing for the first time since its formation, 11,000 years ago. The area, which is the size of France and Germany combined, could release billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This could potentially act as a tipping point, causing global warming to snowball, scientists fear.

Scientists Sound Alarm on Arctic Ice Cap -- (CBC News -- July 29, 2005)
Satellite data for the month of June show Arctic sea ice has shrunk to a record low, raising concerns about climate change, coastal erosion, and changes to wildlife patterns. The National Snow and Ice Data Center in the United States uses remote sensing imagery to survey ice cover at both poles. The center says 2002 was a record low year for sea ice cover in the Arctic, since satellite observations began in 1979. There's evidence that may have been the lowest coverage in a century. Now scientists fear this year could be worse

How Earth-scale Engineering Can Save the Planet -- (Popular Science -- August 1, 2005)
As scientists stretch to find a solution to global warming, an array of innovative and imaginative ideas have emerged that constitute tinkering on a global scale. We already are inadvertently changing the climate, so why not advertently try to counterbalance it? asks a community of forward thinking scientists and designers. Here are some of the proposals.

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And a FINAL QUOTE... which could be almost a modernists motto or manifesto...

“We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.” --- Richard Feynman

(I met Feynman several times and attended lectures while I was a student at Caltech. In fact, at a party he once borrowed my date to dance, not realizing the song was Inna Gaddadavita! After 20 mins he (sweating/panting) returned her saying “You...you must take my place.”

(Like an idiot, I misunderstood and switched my major to physics. Agh! ;-)

...and now, misc catching up...

So much for Diamonds and pyramids and SOA. Again, you can find much of that at: Horizons and Hope: The Future of Philanthropy. I am sure we'll discuss these matters again, as we keep trying to come up with metaphors that can serve as weapons for the Enlightenment, capable of taking on the seductive insanity of an insipid "left-right political axis."

This blog has (as I feared) turned into a major time sink. While I am impressed with the intelligence and cogency of many participants, I have no idea whether there are enough of you to merit such effort, at some cost to writing novels.

What HAS been positive is that I've been inspired to dredge up some older projects to put online. One of these will be the "religion" essay that I plan to post next month, episodically. It's title alone -- "Twelve Modern Questions About Humanity’s Relationship With its Creator In the Context of an Age of Science" - should provoke interest and argument.

Even before delivering that promised bombshell, some of our discussions have spurred me to revisit a longstanding frustration, having to do with the ongoing epidemic of bilious partisanship and romantic dogmatism that has been polluting our great nation's grand experiment in pragmatism, propelling the so called "culture war". One place where I've explored this issue is at: The Real Culture War: Defining the Background.

...but it is a topic with many levels. Those hoping to rescue a scientific society from indignant jerks might consider ways to use science as a weapon against indignation itself!

To this end, I have corresponded for years with experts in several fields, suggesting certain lines of investigation. (I'm not shy.) And now... you are all invited to drop in and view An Open Letter To Researchers In The Fields Of Addiction, Brain Chemistry And Social Psychology.

 ... and feel free to tell your biologist pals. I cannot think of any single scientific result that might do more to help heal society and empower the pragmatists, while marginalizing screeching dogmatists of every stripe.

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Well... there are some other things we can try. (We’re supposed to be problem-solvers, right?) So do not let me forget to raise these possible methodologies:

* a citizen rebellion against gerrymandering
* the “Bill Clinton Gambit”
* “all right, it’s a 2. Get over it.”

...and others. We gotta start brainstorming, boys and girls. I have been following reports that show one of the prime tests of the health of modernism... the market for science fiction novels... is at a low ebb for 4 decades! If anything should be a dangerous sign....

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And now... after proving my evenhandedness by skewering hypocrisies of the left... let's have another kick to the right! Or several kicks. There are so many, we have to stack them efficiently!

(Don't any conservatives have the imagination to picture what would have happened, if Bill Clinton had tried to get away with even ONE of these things? The skyrocketing deficits? The relentless secrecy & lying? The mega scale cronyism and outright thievery? The PORK? Dang, what hypocrites.)

* This one is supplied by Russ Daggatt: We are creating terrorists:

New investigations by the Saudi Arabian government and an Israeli think tank -- both of which painstakingly analyzed the backgrounds and motivations of hundreds of foreigners entering Iraq to fight the United States -- have found that the vast majority of these foreign fighters are not former terrorists and became radicalized by the war itself.

The studies, which together constitute the most detailed picture available of foreign fighters, cast serious doubt on President Bush's claim that those responsible for some of the worst violence are terrorists who seized on the opportunity to make Iraq the ''central front" in a battle against the United States. ''The terrorists know that the outcome [in Iraq] will leave them emboldened or defeated," Bush said in his nationally televised address on the war at Fort Bragg in North Carolina last month. ''So they are waging a campaign of murder and destruction." The US military is fighting the terrorists in Iraq, he repeated this month, ''so we do not have to face them here at home."

However, interrogations of nearly 300 Saudis captured while trying to sneak into Iraq and case studies of more than three dozen others who blew themselves up in suicide attacks show that most were heeding the calls from clerics and activists to drive infidels out of Arab land, according to a study by Saudi investigator Nawaf Obaid, a US-trained analyst who was commissioned by the Saudi government and given access to Saudi officials and intelligence.

A separate Israeli analysis of 154 foreign fighters compiled by a leading terrorism researcher found that despite the presence of some senior Al Qaeda operatives who are organizing the volunteers, ''the vast majority of [non-Iraqi] Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any terrorist activity prior to their arrival in Iraq."

As I’ve often said, I do NOT contend that it’s proved that our rulers have been suborned by a foreign power. But seriously, is incompetence any longer as effective or likely an explanation for (say) the savage demolition of our alliances and military readiness and officer corps and social cohesion... while recruiting enemies at such a furious (and apparently deliberate) rate? Which theory is gaining ground? The rational one of outrageous, shortsighted incompetence? Or the outright screeching paranoid explanation? The explanation that creepily fits every single fact.

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Of course, this was all based on preventing use of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction against us, right? Hmmm... Well, here's an interesting item. A suspected chemical weapons lab has been found in Mosul. One of recent origin. Presumably for use against US soldiers. So while Pres. Bush never found the WMDs he used as a pretext for this war, that very war is now generating the WMD we were supposed to be worried about! Ironies abound.

Still, one has to sympathize. Like when VP Dick Cheney took a lot of flak last year for saying that the insurgency in Iraq is in its "last throes". Now SoS Condoleeza Rice is saying that the insurgency is "losing steam."

No wonder this administration holds open press conferences at a rate lower than any other administration in a century. (Can conservatives defend even THAT factoid? At all?)

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...and finally.... on the direct topic of Modernism and its Enemies... Stefan has provided another wonderful mini-rant, about what has been rightfully called "the American Taliban". From the same guy as last time. This fellow is apparently on a real roll. Keep your eye on him. He may be the next Bruce Sterling (hopefully just as smart and on-target, but nicer).

"Remember Republicans? Sober men in suits, pipes, who'd nod
thoughtfully over their latest tract on market-driven fiscal conservatism while grinding out the numbers on rocket science. Remember those serious-looking 1950's-1960s science guys in the movies -- Republican to a one.

"They were the grown-ups. They were the realists. Sure they were a bummer, maaaaan, but on the way to La Revolution you need somebody to remember where you parked the car. I was never one (nor a Democrat,  really, more an agnostic libertarian big on the social contract, but we don't have a party ...), but I genuinely liked them.

"How did they become the party of fairy dust and make believe? How did they become the anti-science guys? The anti-fact guys? The anti-logic guys?"

For the rest of this piece, go to: http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2004/12/i-miss-republicans.html


--- next... more clearing the decks....

More on Diamonds... and those who hate them...

DemetriosX wins the Best Response Of The Week award. Several excellent points concerning our recent topic of the Diamond-Shaped Social Structure. The irrefutable fact that America and most of the West has lived a miracle for half a century - in societies wherein the well-off and empowered Middle Class has - for the first time in human history - actually outnumbered the poor.

Of course, critics of the diamond metaphor have attempted to refute its core lesson - that progress and the modernist agenda of human and social improvability work, and indeed work much better than anything else that humanity has ever tried. They try to do this by ignoring the diamond, or calling it doomed, or else by claiming that it is a mirage, resting atop an ongoing pyramid of privilege. As modernists who welcome criticism, we analyzed two of these proposed pyramids last time, finding one of them somewhat plausible and the other easily disproved.

Of course there is some level at which this complaint about the diamond must be true. As DemetriosX aptly points out, the real "pyramid" that our diamond rests upon is a vast number and variety of patient and (mostly) uncomplaining machines that has replaced the servant/peasant/slave classes.

Just go to India, today, and look around. Someone in YOUR class and occupation will have servants, who do many tasks that you assign to your dishwasher, clothes washer and microwave oven. Much is still done by hand. It is wonderful that the Indian economy is rising. But it is a rising pyramid, at least so far.

Moreover, many of our machines consume copious resources, exactly as a human servant would. Hence the multiplier effect of how vastly more resource-hungry an american household is, compared to others around the world. For this reason, we are behooved, obligated, to expend a large portion of our surplus on research to make all servant machines vastly more efficient. Only thus could it ever be possible for everyone on the planet to enter the diamond-pinnacle of citizen-humans, living in relative decency.

Note that the right does not foster such research, choosing instead to undermine it at every opportunity. Why is that?

1. Some believe it interferes in capitalism. Nonsense, of course. One of the chief roles of government is to invest in portions of future horizon space that lie beyond the 3-5 year ROI (return on investment) limit of the typical CEO. (Actually, this is relatively visionary, for CEOs today. Most have an eye only on timing stock peaks to coincide with their options-parachute.) In any event, this stance is utter hypocrisy. The latest energy bill is filled with so called "research" that suits the short term needs of the most influential in-group CEOs, plus many billions of tax breaks for companies that are already highly profitable. (See below)

2. They cannot allow their minds to encompass an ambitious goal of actually eliminating poverty and welcoming ALL of the world inside a rising diamond, even though we face a time limit. When there are ten billions on Earth, many of them far more educated and skilled than happy, do you really think that terror and destruction will not spill across us all?

3. Certain elements of our current ruling Troika actually relish the prospect of a looming doomsday, driven in part by a failure of human problem-solving. (In a month or so I will discuss this, when we start a series about religion.) Indeed, they consider the whole Modernist Agenda to be sacreligious. Arrogating the miracle-working powers of God.

In fact, modernism should impel any reasonable person to pull out the stops on efficiency research, almost above any other priority. It should be the top imperative, a goal driven by sure knowledge that our childrens' lives and comfort will depend on vastly muliplying wealth while reducing resource impact by two orders of magnitude. There should be a dozen "Manhattan Projects" aimed at achiving this sustainability goal - including the resumption of building modern and improved nuclear power plants. (Aha! Brin swerves and delivers a kick to the LEFT!)

Note that all of this is driven by this one metaphor... that of the diamond social structure... our greatest accomplishment. THE greatest human accomplishment, possibly, of all time. It is the very emblem of the Enlightenment and its servant, modernism. And it can only endure if we do everything in our power to nurture it.

DemetriosX is right that the diamond LOOKS unstable. Because it is. Pyramids are reinforced by the utterly predictable and almost-automatic self-serving actions of empowered elites at the top, who do not need sophisticated science to tell them how to stay on top. This is what's natural, as testified by 4,000 years of recorded history.

In contrast, markets - oft mythologized as "natural" are the most unnatural things going. Libertarians will tell you "market laws are laws of nature", what baloney. Markets -- and the other great modernist cornucopian tools -- are magnificent wealth generating machines, built ad-hoc, through trial and error, constantly fine-tuned and refined, tinkered, adjusted. The same way the diamond needs tuning, adjusting, reforms and investment, in order to keep its shape and keep rising. (Remind me some time to resume this line of thought. Meanwhile, have a look at: http://www.davidbrin.com/disputationarticle1.html)

All right, I've psychoanalyzed why the RIGHT despises the diamond. What about the LEFT?

What's interesting about the left is that they DO call for many diamond-tending processes and reforms. (After all, civil and gender rights were overwhelmingly important to altering the old pyramid.) And, despite their own kind of anti-science antimodernism, the left does support efficiency research.

But they hate the image of the diamond because it implicitly admits that there's been progress. In their sanctimonious contempt for the masses, they believe that ANY admission of progress will remove the guilt-driven pressure to do more. A dismal obsession that actually undercuts their credibility and effectiveness. Refusing ever to use praise, only guilt, they wind up driving people away, and turning "liberal" into a curse word on the lips of citizens whose votes they desperately need.

But let's probe just a little deeper, into the implications of the Diamond Metaphor.

First a challenge. I defy anyone to go back more than two hundred years and find anyone urging practical programs and social measures to eliminate poverty entirely from society. I doubt very much that you'll succees. Yes! There were countless sages and saints who urged good people to give alms, and even the shirt off their back, to the poor. But this was always myopically aimed at easing nearby suffering and elevating the karmic state of the giver. No one ever spoke of eliminating poverty altogether. Instead "the poor will always be with us" more numberous than grains of sand.

The reason is obvious. When society is pyramidal, the broad bottom is the poor! Hen poverty is a vast sea, surrounding a steep island of privilege, the mind is limited in its imagined range of ambition. How can you empty the sea?

But this changes when progress finally creates a diamond shaped structure. Now, the poor are fewer than the well off! Suddenly, poverty is a bitter lake, surrounded by affluence. And it is possble to imagine draining a lake. Indeed, suddenly poverty itself becomes a scandal. If we can imagine ending it, then why hasn't it happened yet? It must be somebody's fault.

It began with the American Revolution, when European observers reported the first true diamond. And the blame casting commenced in the French Revolution, with Marxism and the New Deal and Johnson's War on Poverty. Some moves were delusional, others crude-though ambitious. Nu? You expected competence, when humanity started taking on a previously unimaginable task?

I will officially end here, having talked (again) much too long for a blog. But stay tuned for some supporting material (below)

Till next time....

=======

ADDENDA: Here's what the only hardhitting and unafraid journalist in America - Jon Stewart - has to say about the recent "energy bill": "Oh, Oil!! Giver of power, corrupter of governments, non-sticker of surfaces... Must you taunt us with your slick, non-renewable goodness?

"Yes, energy is clearly an important topic with Americans. That's why, before going on recess, Congress broke a 4 year impasse by approving a massive energy bill. And while it did nothing to address our dependence on foreign oil, or fuel efficiency, or in any way simplify the strategic nature of our relationship with the Middle East, it does give oil and gas industries 500 million dollars for research and 2.7 billion dollars in tax breaks, even though a company like Exxon-Mobil made 7.6 billion dollars in pure profit just this last quarter..."

Or, as expressed by Republican Representative Joe Barton of Texas: "This bill is based on the premise that we believe in private, free-market capitalism to develop the resources of this land in a cost-efficient manner."

Um.... And as deficits skyrocket, impoverishing our children in favor of the "Great Raid" of pork -- the biggest charge of outright theft from our treasury in all our lifetimes, here is a trip down memory lane for a quotable goodie from George W. Bush's 2005 State of the Union address: "America's prosperity requires restraining the spending appetite of the federal government. I welcome the bipartisan enthusiasm for spending discipline."

You can see what we are up against, oh modernist boys and girls....

==See: Class War and the Lessons of History

Globalization and Social Diamonds... p.III (with a note re "purges")

First off, I am told that this blog was cited in discussion of A. Huffington's recent column about the four-star general who was recently fired under questionable (and likely politically-motivated) charges. At minimum, it shows a double standard, applied by politicians against a clade that is almost universally more honest and upright than they are. At worst, it is one more stage in an intimidation campaign of major and vile proportions. So far, such cases have been adding up incrementally, one after another with disturbing rhythm. Yet, it's here at this site, and nowhere else, that it was first proposed that this is all part of a concerted purge of the US Officer Corps.

You heard that first right here.

And no, I never claimed to be ready with overwhelming proof, meriting indictments. Indeed, I might be wrong! (The phrase that all scientists are taught to say aloud, and the one mature statement that can hope to save civilization.)

Hey, I am paid to be BOTH imaginatively paranoid and ecumenically skeptical. Both are modernist traits, especially when properly mixed. Hence, I do not insist (without a lot more evidence) that this scenario is true. What I do contend is that an awful lot of circumstantial evidence is pointing to a possible phenomenon that, if true, could bode worse for us than any threat since the Civil War. (Indeed, one could look at this as a resumption of the Civil War, in some ways. But more on that, anon.)

SO? Spread the word and start helping to gather evidence! And tell the democrats to get off their asses on this issue. One of many areas where liberals are simply not doing their job.

.

Back to concluding my remarks about the loonyleft and "globalization".

First, here is a fine online magazine produced by a very pro-business group that calls itself - well - The Globalist. (http://www.theglobalist.com) Here is a sample article: (http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=4738) You will note that while being pro-business, they are not necessarily pro-neocon. In my opinion, in fact, the two perspectives are quite opposite.

(See the mini-rant at the end of my NEXT posting!)

Now, let's follow up on a question one of you asked (quite cleverly) about the "social diamond". (I am hoping somebody will publicly notice that Brin came up with a truly great metaphor here! ;-)

The diamond - featuring an empowered and comfortable middle class that vastly outnumbers the poor - shows how huge and obvious genuine progress has been, at least in the West, under our Modernist Agenda. No image demonstrates more clearly how this society is different from all predecessors, how much we ALL have benefitted from science and accountability...and how much we have to lose if we return to the traditional human social pyramid.

Moreover, this metaphor helps to show just how loony both the left and right are. The far right hates the diamond and does everything it can to rationalize and justify counter trends, especially those fostering re pyramidalization. But the left is worse, refusing absolutely to admit that the diamond has happened at all!

The former tendency - at least - is human; we've seen conspirators strive for pinnacle position atop their social pyramids - and to maintain that structure - in every large culture recorded . (Under communism, it was the CP nomenklatura that did precisely the same thing!) We must fight this endlessly recurring theme. But at one level, it's a yawner.

(The ironies can be outrageous, such as when Julian Simon and other neoconservatives relentlessly cite diamond progress (in economic terms) as reason to abandon the very same processes of self-critical problem-solving and market fine-tuning that brought the cornucopia into being! They do this by crediting a mystically perfect "market" with all of this progress, and not a process of relentless reform, negotiation, re-appraisal of costs and fine-tuning that has gone on ever since Teddy Roosevelt.)

Nevertheless, it's the latter thing - the betrayal of the diamond by the left - that really outrages me. By refusing to admit the palpable existence of progress, lefties discredit all of liberalism, undermining its effectiveness for the sake of their own righteous indignation high.

In effect, they are saying to the public: "You bought our product for eighty years and it never worked! At all! Ever! So buy more!" Would you buy a product that was offered with such a sales pitch?

Worse, they insult those earlier generations of activists who helped citizens to craft genuine progress in fields ranging from civil rights and gender rights, to increasing access to university, to cleaning the air, to saving the Ozone Layer and reforesting much of America. By saying that nothing meaningful has been accomplished, they spread despair, a sense of futility, and prove they are romantic enemies of progress.

But let me pause. (And now we get back to your question, sir.)

In fairness, smartaleck lefties (sometimes very smart young fellers) do try to look at the diamond - now and then - with honestly critical eyes. (I am "Mr. Criticism" so bring it on!) They do this by saying "the American so-called 'diamond' rests atop an old-fashioned pyramid of third world resources and third world labor!"

Actually, that's a clever and well-put attempt at falsification. It deserves real scrutiny.

And at one level the rebuttal is true. We ARE basing much of our prosperity on unsustainable practices, by greedily grabbing and squandering under-costed resources.

Especially, we are stealing fossil petrochemicals from our grandchildren and outrageously burning them, instead of cautiously preserving some and using the rest to finance a leap to new plateaus. We need to use the present surplus to complete the modernist goal of achieving genuinely sustainable technologies, so all people on Earth can have diamond-middleclass life styles... at only 5% of the resource cost of a current american life style.

(Sound impossible? Modernism has already achieved greater miracles. Come on, that's LESS than a two-order-of magnitude increase in efficiency! We can do it. We can. Or... we could. But alas, it will not happen on the investment ROI schedules of myopic corporations. The obstinacy of right wing economists, who actually believe that CEOs are capable of looking beyond three years, seems truly staggering.)

So, at one level, the rebuttal of the diamond has some genuine relevance.

Still, the diamond-atop-pyramid image is fallacious overall. It is easily disproved by one simple, direct and irrefutable correlation. The places in the 3rd World that are doing best are those MOST closely tied to our economy.

Those doing worst are places LEAST connected or globalized. This is true even ecologically! Deforestation in Burma is worse than anywhere. Because there isn't even a semblance of law to stop the aristocracy from logging, smuggling and exporting the products of their theft.

No. The left is doing it all wrong. The things they complain about are real. But their suggestions are sterile and many of them are rooted in romantic rejection of the very things that enabled and empowered true liberalism.

Empowered it to make a better world.

.

I was going to follow with a kick to the right, but this posting is too long. So I'll do it tamale....

Return to Part I

The Left's Loony Obsession vs "Globalization" - part II

Actually, I am going to deliver a one-two punch to the left and a kick to the right.

I have to. There are too many kicks stored up. I have to spread em out.

First, proof that conscience does not always translate into common sense. It is all well and good to sympathize with Third World poor folks and with a planet being raped by uncaring commerce. (My eco-credentials are so far beyond reproach, it's laughable.)

But it's quite another to explore what steps would actually help poor people around the world and the environment. And here, the left is completely wretched. Must we be stuck between socialist fanatics and pro-aristocrat market fanatics?

Let's take apart one of these sides. (Continued from part I)

-

The 'anti-globalization movement' is currently a transfixing focus for what used to be called the Activist Left. Young people follow world leaders around, creating urban theater neat World Bank & other meetings, decrying abuse of the environment, of labor, of children, etc.

Don't get me wrong. These concerns are genuine and laudable and based on real excesses that, if left unchecked, would wreak profound injustice and pain upon generations. By all means, shine light on scandals in Addidas factories! Force revelation of the ownership paths of supertankers! Document deforestation and track those conflict diamonds.

But the irony and - yes - hypocrisy that's generated by dogmatism can be profound. These activists seem incapable of noticing one paramount fact. That both labor and environmental abuse were addressed in their home (western) countries by the very last method they think people in the Third World capable of using -- politics and law.

They want to protect these people and lands by cutting off links between those lands and major international corporations... presumably so those "rapacious" corporations will stop exploiting both workers and the environment. But this approach has no track record of accomplishing a single thing, either for the poor or for the Earth.

How did labor, children, and the environment all benefit in the activists' own homelands? In fact, these things benefied from INCREASES in interconnectivity, along with development of political and legal structure.

In other words, their reflex revulsion toward 'globalization' is ill-considered. The decreases in interconnectivity and structure that they demand can only succor local bullies and oligarchies and kleptocracies that currently are far worse enemies of the environment, labor and children! At least the global conglomerates, when they move into a country, try to foster actual civil law, if only for their own protection and for predictability.

And, as shown in the recent works of Hernando de Soto, it is LAW, even imperfect, but predictable, systematic, that (so long as it is not corrupt) ultimately favors the poor even more than the rich, by allowing them to keep and leverage their small but growing earnings. Recent studies of micro-lending have shown that Mom & Pop mini-capitalists are the most powerful force for economic development, far more potent than any multinational, per capita. Give them jobs and a little capital... and above all civil law... and things really happen.

(I emphasize that the true enemy of all this is corruption, generally a tool of local aristocracies that fosters kleptocracy. Law, in this case, must be at least evenhanded in PROCESS, even if it is unfair on paper.)

Ask poor people in, say, Sumatra etc whether they would prefer being temporarily exploited by Addidas (while saving real wages to put in real banks and using cash to buy their kids schoolbooks, so those kids can become lawyers and organize unions or sue Addidas....) Or whether they would prefer to continue under abusive feudal landlords, slaving and sharecropping and accumulating nothing, not even title to the home they built. At least under globalization, electricity and water arrive, sewers get dug. And schools. And yes, none of this guarantees democracy. That's why I urge everybody to also support Project Witness!

But when uncorrupt and reliable civil law allows people to accumulate savings and educate their kids, major oppression cannot last more than another generation. It has a built in time limit.

So no, the Left is simply not making any sense. It is not even helping a little bit. Because by spouting nonsense versions of reform economics, they only encourage people to turn away from more pragmatic forms of liberalism and listen, instead, to nonsense exaggerations on the right...

...such as the equally loony notion that markets are self-regulating. And aristocracies don't conspire to cheat and exploit unfair advantages. Or that the rich are somehow friendlier to genuine markets because they are rich. (The diametric opposite to what is shown by history.)

But stop. For the kick to the right, let me turn to our own Stefan, who provided the following excerpt from a really rich rant, You can find the whole thing at http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2005/08/president-and-intelligent-design.html

I don't go as far as this ranter. Indeed, by September I hope to start my episodic essay on religion and you may all be VERY surprised!

Still, this choice rant really is worth the price of admission. Enjoy.

"Here you are, Tsui or Sanjay, looking at a new century. A century in which the exponential curve of technology's rise becomes a sheer cliff. In which only the most intellectually nimble countries, best able to master new information technologies and couple them with manufacturing bases with high levels of technical training, will survive.

"And you're looking at that big bastard across the ocean, the US of A. First to build the Bomb. First to master the secrets of the atom. First to build the semiconductor. First and only tribe of humans who actually put men on the GODDAM MOON, to have stepped on another rock in space. Decoders of the human genome, the VERY BOOK OF LIFE !!! How will we ever stop --

"Wow, they forfeit. Cool.

"Even if your kids aren't directly taught ID or aren't in one of the new Bible Class districts, the overarching cultural damage has already been done. Through this group of RadicalRighties' constant rhetoric, they consistently strip away the idea that there is indeed a rigorous scientific process through which certain non-negotiable physical truths can be ascertained. They have suffused the county with an intellectual laziness and a terrifying narcissism. Opinion has been enshrined as superior to fact. No longer need a person take into account the way the world works when forming their worldview -- they can instead hunt down "facts" and "theories" which support their own comfort zone, and what's worse, we can NO LONGER CALL BULLSHIT. Because if our leaders -- pardon me, your leaders -- don't call bullshit, who will? They have undermined the very process by which we know WHEN to call bullshit!"

Har! That is, it would be funny... if I weren't crying....

==Continue to Part III

Another Leftward-aimed Zinger... on "Globalization"...

I told you all that I would spend a little while aiming my ire leftward, helping prove that my "Modernism and its enemies" riff is not just a liberal rant in disguise. True, I feel our civilization is under desperate danger at present from one particular direction. But let me maintain momentum and shine light on the other locus of romantic anti modernism, for a little longer.

I want to talk about the silly obsession of many leftists toward the word "globalization". A three-parter.

-

A few years ago I gave a dinner speech for the World Federalist Society (led by former independent Presidential candidate John Anderson). And before you call me a sappy "one-worlder" let me add that I also gave a keynote at a national convention of the Libertarian Party! (see: Orcs, Essences and Civilization: The Case for a Cheerful Libertarianism) So go ahead, try to cram my politics into a category!

At the WFS gathering, I pointed out a few factors they really ought to note, before pushing for new styles of international governance.

1. Antipathy toward increasing world structure or 'government' has different sources, depending on where you look.

Dictators and oligarchs see it as a threat to their local power.

Small nations see it as a vehicle for hegemony by the US et. al.

Major corporations see it as likely to become yet another taxing authority.

Western political classes see it as arising out of the UN, and thus becoming an impotent talking society in which action becomes impossible and 3rd world perceptions dominate.

Americans almost instinctively perceive it as a potentially dangerous accumulation of centralized power.

The thing I most often focus on is the last of these. (Citizen empowerment is my fetish. See:
http://www.futurist.com/portal/future_trends/david_brin_empowerment.htm )

Indeed, my own son, at age six, expressed a deep worry about even the notion of a World Government, since "There wouldn't be anywhere else to run away to, if it turned bad." (Clever boy!)

I think it's very important to peer closely at the average voters and citizens in the West - especially the US - since they will ultimately decide whether this issue becomes a front-burner item. In dozens of talks and speeches, I have found that most people I meet express a set of shared values -- whether republican or democrat etc -- a vast majority of them declaring high fealty to:

(a) suspicion of authority
(b) individualism
(c) accountability
(d) tolerance (well, mostly).

Their principal difference is nearly always WHICH real or potential center of authority they worry about. But when it comes to this particular topic, nearly all deeply worry about internationalization of authority.

The left worries about this internationalization of power falling into the hands of their particular bogeymen: imperialists, aristocrats and faceless-rapacious corporations. The right worries about socialists and UN bureaucrats and snotty "consensus scientific" or academic elites.

And yet, can you honestly try top project your mind a thousand years into the future and not picture some kind of government that spans the globe and/or Solar System, at least at some level? Okay then, how about 500 years from now? 200? Can you honestly say our present status quo will survive all consolidating pressures, in the face of crisis after crisis, even for another few decades?

Elsewhere I talk about Whatever Comes Next ... or WCN. An acronym chosen deliberately to avoid hot button words like "world government". Surely SOMETHING will come next, eh?

Or will Pax Americana last forever, as our mad neocons contend?

(Hint: their behavior is actively shortening Pax Americana's reign. Indeed, that is a chief complaint against these bright fools. At present I see no possible WCN on the immediate horizon that can claim to be better than PA has been, for 60 years of relative peace and growth. But the neocons will end it all, the way Alcibiades helped end the reign of flawed-but-noble Athens.)

In any event, I have only touched upon a HUGE topic, pointing out that the left and right each have reasons to loathe and prevent discussion and planning and argument aimed at examining the process, and ensuring that it will be done WELL.

What are the attributes that we should be aiming for, in world law? And which should be avoided?

Here's a scary thing. The one thing that both left and right never discuss is giving the individual standing before international legal bodies. The right wants corporations protected. The left wants NGOs to be empowered to protect the helpless. Nobody is talking about letting you and me stand up for ourselves! Letting individuals rambunctiously take center stage and have our day in court... even though that's what worked best, in the nation states of the 20th century.

...more on this soon...

Emotional roots for hypocrisies of BOTH left and right...

Several respondents added perspective to the quotation from Deepak Lal that I offered last time. Lal is representative of a new wave of extremely pro-capitalist Indian economists who have been unleashed by recent reforms over there, after fifty years of stifling Democratic Socialism. Of course, it is natural that this sudden release would result in both backlash and exaggeration. Hence one explanation for Lal's strawman tactics and emotionally charged venom toward anyone and anything that seems even glancingly leftist.

And yes, this effect is predictably exacerbated by cultural influences. Consider. Despite generations of effort to reduce caste-consciousness, countless Indians remain socially and emotionally wedded to ancient habits that all-too readily find new justifications on the right of the political spectrum. Habits that justify differences in wealth, or luck, by citing inherent deficiencies in grace, or karma, or membership in higher or lower classifications of humanity.

This is a classic human pattern of self-justification. Under Calvinism, varied luck was explained as a matter of Predestination of a pre-chosen elect (with everyone else fated to be damned). Under Social Darwinism, especially during America's Gilded Age, new-fangled notions of evolution were warped to justify the individual misery of millions of impoverished workers, whose suffering only manifested Nature's endless self-improvement program. During the Roaring Twenties, Freudianism was interpreted to justify evasion of social bonds and reciprocal obligations. More recently, the new apocalypt-fundamentalism has erected a simple litmus test in order to dismiss as damned all opponents - the test of whether you call it murder to thwart the development of any fertilized human egg.

And now, in Enterprise India? One needs only a little imagination to picture how right-wing Brahmin intellectuals might apply old notions of karma to the steepening differences between rich and poor. Ah, the recurring pattern.

Only, now I will surprise you and say that habitual patterns of the left are little better!

If the right is often associated with one bad habit -- justifying prejudice, in the general sense of pre-judging individuals because they are inherently members of a class -- then the left often correlates with an absurd kind of excess in the opposite direction.

What is the opposite of ideologically justifying group prejudice? It is insisting that human beings are utter tabula rasas, infinitely reprogrammable, without any natural instincts or inherited proclivities that set a course for life. Infinite reprogrammability was a notion that Aldous Huxley savagely satirized in Brave New World. And this utterly foolish exaggeration reached its culmination under Stalin, when the communist theoretician Lysenko was given control over all Soviet biological science. Lysenko fiercely repressed the entire field of genetic inheritance, in favor of a state mandated dogma that all organisms, especially people, can acquire nearly all traits, simply as a function of training and conditioning.

Indeed, were you to try to come up with a "political spectrum" that actually makes sense (and I think I have), one of the three axes would have to be this one. To what extent do you attribute differences among human beings to inherited traits, or qualities of their group, and to what extent do you attribute such differences to individual experience? Yes, it's the old nature vs. nurture debate...

...in which we modernists and moderates have always taken the obvious and sensible approach. Of course both factors play strong roles in determining what we are. Though the Enlightenment seems always to be best served when we err in one direction, rather than the other. Leaning away from prejudice. Leaning toward increasing emphasis on the individual, rather than lazily assigning them to groups. Toward letting individuals prove their worth outside of any simplistic classification.

And especially, nursing suspicion toward anything that looks like yet another ideological justification for elitism. Elitism of wealth, or power... or ideological purity.

(A risky aside: Nobody speaks of the profoundly hypocritical exception to the left's own dogma of absolute reprogrammability. This exception is an equally absolute faith in the predetermined nature of homosexuality, labeling it as genetically pre-welded and hopelessly unalterable by any post-natal influence. No other human trait is given utterly obligate status by the left. And given it by dogmatic decree! In every other case, the ideologically correct incantation is to demand that we attribute traits to individual experience and control.

(Shouldn't we find this strange and dramatically quantum reversal interesting or worthy of discussion? Yes, one can understand and even sympathize with the political-emotional roots of this dogma. But one crucial difference between modernists and romantic dogmatists is that the latter feel it is dangerous to openly discuss matters of dogma. While we feel that our morality is not put at risk by scrutinizing anything at all.

(Here, the underlying aim is clearly understandable -- to free gay people from parental or religious pressure to "change their minds." And please. I am not taking sides on this issue. I am just pointing out that this absolutely quantum reversal, in regard to one, particular, and narrowly specialized human trait, seems, well, just a bit jarring and artificial. As in countless hypocrisies of the right, the truth of this matter is obscured by ferocious ideological passion that is - in fact - completely unnecessary in order to achieve practical social aims. In this case, the admirable aim of increased tolerance of harmless human eccentricity.

(Or, at least, it is unnecessary for people like you and me, since modernist-enlightenment types are already inclined toward tolerance. Needing no dogmatic reinforcement, we are so inclined whether your harmless eccentricity originated in your genes or was a matter of choice.)

Why the parentheses, in what seemed (to you and me) an interesting topic and example? So that I can protect myself by disclaiming the preceding paragraphs as constituting a parenthetical aside. What am I afraid of? Um, duh. A firestorm of hatred, because romantic anti-modernists are incapable - whatever their official ideology - of viewing modernist skepticism as anything but evil, especially when that skepticism is applied to their favored dogma. Even when it might prove helpful in the long run, by replacing simpleminded and addle-pated justifications for tolerance with much better ones, grounded in real science and supported by genuine pragmatism.

Anyway, it was high time that I bent some attention to exposing some hypocrisies of the left. Hypocrisies that, while currently far less harmful than the latest monstrous #$*@#%@! on the right, are nevertheless deeply inimical to the modernist agenda of incremental human improvement and progress.

In fact, I will continue in this vein a little longer, in order to build needed credibility points and show that I really am evenhanded here.

I need those points. We all do. Because it's not easy standing up for sane, balanced, evenhanded, modernity in a world gone ideologically mad. A world in which the loonies of all kinds have set up a divide-and-conquer campaign, aiming to set us at each other's throats along a left-right divide that makes absolutely no sense in a practical, objective universe.

A Process of Tidying Up

After that long July hiatus, it is going to take some time to clear the stack of items and observations that accumulated in this "Modernism and Its Enemies" folder. So please bear with me if things seem chaotic or random. I hope in a week or two to get back to cogently coherent mini-essays.

Item: Moderate-conservative expresses worries that should bother any capitalist in the coming era.:

Lest this be seen as a leftist rant, look at some of the other articles that typify The Globalist. This journal is very business oriented and generally rather conservative, in the classic sense. For example, there is an article criticizing labor unions for "beggaring their employers." (A hilarious assertion, given the present state of the labor movement, though at least a comfortingly standard conservative view.) Yet, even the business-savvy writers for The Globalist have become worried that our current leaders are doing a fantastically incompetent job of playing America's hand in the modern world.


Item: In order to show that The Globalist does have a rightward tilt, let me point out another article. One that takes this tilt to a neocon extreme in order to spew the worst kind of horrific garbage. (Ah, well.) Here's an example of Orwell-speak that is truly monstrous: The Greens Vs. India and China
By Deepak Lal.

I'm going to quote from this fellow in order to show how far the will-to-demonize has gone. Stare in awe at the following two paragraphs, illustrating the kind of world we're entering, wherein what an opponent really believes does not matter an iota. Only the strawman caricature that you want to hate. (The extreme left does this too.)

"Why do the Greens persist with their crusade? The reason is that, like any religion, their beliefs are not based on reason — but on faith. ... Bluntly, they would like to perpetuate the ancient poverty of the great Eurasian civilizations — India and China."

"The various proposals to introduce labor and environmental standards in the WTO and to tie issues of human rights to trade and investment under the rubric of ethical trading are of this ilk. They have neither logic nor ethics on their side. Even if these protectionist attacks are beaten back, they can in the meantime lead to international friction, which could slowly unravel the new liberal international economic order. Moreover, they tend to aggravate the suspicion of many developing countries that the newly emerging globalized economy will lead to a form of cultural imperialism that will undermine their ancient and cherished ways of life."

...guuuuuuuuuuh...

     =====     =====     =====

Item: And now, for something completely different, here's a modernist endeavor that may give us all a chance to eat meat without guilt. (And can anyone doubt that rising morality will make this an issue even for conservative people, by 2050? Have any of you ever been to a slaughterhouse? Our present moral equilibrium is not the last word! And I say this as a practicing carnivore.)

In a paper in the June 29 issue of Tissue Engineering, a team of scientists, including University of Maryland doctoral student Jason Matheny, propose two new techniques of tissue engineering that may one day lead to affordable production of in vitro - lab grown -- meat for human consumption. It is the first peer-reviewed discussion of the prospects for industrial production of cultured meat.

Actually, here is one more example of where science fiction never gets any credit for prediction. I remember the scene (from "The Space Merchants") Pohl-Kornbluth era, that portrayed a HUGE slap of chicken meat that was steadily grown with nutrients and carved away to feed the nation. It had a name, as I recall. Chicken Little!

Unsurprisingly, the science fictional antecedents go unmentioned by the innovators OR the press. I have seen at least five new discoveries in the last year related to things I spoke of in just one novel, EARTH.

 Greg Bear also complains of advances in biology that he predicted in his novel, DARWIN's CHILDREN. Ah, well.

Enough for today. Thrive & endure.

Misc news about tech advances

We mustn't let people assume that this site is solely gloomy and fixated on antimodernist conspiracies (of both right and left). How dreary and depressing (and boring) THAT would be!

So let me post (now and then) some GOOD news. Links and other items suggesting that a brash and bold modernist agenda is still underway, based upon science, engineering and goal-oriented futurism, applied to improve both human society and human life.

No, I will NOT be gushing with optimism. For that, turn to Ray Kurzweil's Singularity is Near! materials, promising immortality and omniscience for everybody within a few short years. Actually, I believe talk like this may be helping to drive the anti-modernist movement into its recent frantic fury and rejection of the future. I doubt that it helps very much to tell average folk "we're a-gonna make gods of ya, whether you like it or don't!"

Such talk is guaranteed to provoke a backlash, and not only among middle americans. It underlies the passionate nostalgia and dread of change that we see expressed cogently by Bill Joy, perniciously by Francis Fukayama, and lividly in the purple novels of Michael Crichton and Margaret Atwood. The politically-correct Left and the apocalypt-klepto Right are fast becoming as fixated against tomorrow as any Islamist sheik.

Still, there is some cause to believe and hope that technological innovations - moderated by vigorous skeptical criticism - will continue to advance Western Civilization in dramatic and positive ways, despite every deliberate roadblock thrown in our path by those yearning for a "better" past. Here are a few examples cited recently by the nanotech-focused Foresight Institute. (I'll give the full citation for examples 1 & 2... then capsules for the rest:

1. Meeting global energy needs with clean solutions

Headline: Smog fight aided by self-cleaning materials News source: The Washington Post by Karl Ritter, UPI . In a test in 2003, the company coated 75,000 square feet of road surface on the outskirts of Milan with photocatalytic cement. It found nitrogen oxide levels were reduced by up to 60 percent, depending on weather conditions.

A similar experiment in France found nitrogen oxide levels were 20 percent to 80 percent lower in a wall plastered with photocatalytic cement than one with regular cement. Encouraged by such results, the European Union last year earmarked $2.27 billion for a project to develop "smart" construction materials that would break down nitrogen oxides and other toxic substances, such as benzene.


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2. Providing abundant clean water globally

Headline: Bacteria drive biochip sensor News source: Technology Research News
Researchers are working to connect living cells to computer chips to gain the best of both worlds. Living cells are terrific sensors, and can also be used to evaluate and emulate biological behavior, while electronics are exemplary at serving up data.

Researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel have built an electrochemical nano-biochip that detects toxic water.


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3. Increasing the health and longevity of human life

Headline: Nanotech used to target, kill cancer cells News source: San Jose Mercury News by Lisa M. Krieger


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4. Maximizing the productivity of agriculture


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5. Making powerful information technology available everywhere

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6. Enabling the development of space

Headline: The Next Giant Leap in Space Exploration The science of nanotechnology could lead to radical improvements for space exploration.

==> more soon...

The Under-reported Purge of the U.S. Officer Corps

--- The Most Critical Issue of Our Time:

The Under-reported Purge of the U.S. Officer Corps ---

I want to comment on one of our most controversial topics of the last few months... the shameful way that the American Left has chosen to virtually ignore one of the most dangerous and dastardly betrayals of our country in recent generations - a deliberate, ferocious and relentless political purge of the U.S. Officer Corps.

I believe the failure of the Left to notice or speak out about this vital issue makes them complicit in it. The matter is that serious. (Far more serious, even, than the Iraq War itself.)

I have spoken about how terribly important it is to defend the professional detachment and untampered political neutrality of men and women who volunteered to devote the core of their lives defending our civilization and freedom. Thanks to reforms instituted six decades ago by George Marshall (arguably the greatest man of the 20th Century), the Officer Corps (including the intelligence, military and diplomatic communities) has striven hard to become the third best-educated clade in American society today, right after university professors and medical doctors.

Yes, there have been some awful aberrations, cabals and crimes - from My Lai to Iran-Contra to Abu Ghraib - the sort of thing that can erupt out of fallible human nature whenever accountability gets trumped by secrecy, either because of national need or venial self-interest.

(It can be hard to tell the difference, especially from the inside -- which is why I speak elsewhere about methods to ensure accountability without giving away the store.)

Nevertheless, members of the U.S. Officer Corps tend to have a better on average record of rectitude than people in most other fields. And no one can match these men and women for devotion to Constitutional government, often in the face of either neglect or unfathomable misuse by the political caste.

How ironic, that the present phase of meddling - worse than anything seen in a hundred years - is being perpetrated by people who used to rail against "political interference" for costing us the Vietnam War. (The eerie comparison of Donald Rumsfeld's FIRST term as Secretary of Defense - overseeing our final humiliation in Vietnam - with this term in the same office, is just too creepy even to describe.)

Likewise, the same people who sneered at the"failed utopian fantasy of so-called nation building" are now spending vastly more, per day, on the openly and avowedly utopian notion of building a modern, democratic Iraq from the ground up, than any combination of their predecessors ever tried to do in, say, the Balkans, or even Cambodia.

And yet, who is to blame? A political cabal whose members are clearly acting in ways that - while corrupt and loony - at least have plenty of precedent in human history? (Find me one other time in history when aristocratic elites did NOT conspire?)

Or should we blame the "loyal opposition" for failing to even notice this shameful turn of events, let alone stand up for the brave professionals who stand between us and the cold wind?

After the Officer Corps is fully suborned, who will we turn to, when fanatics come up with pretext after pretext for re-establishing the age-old human pyramid of tyranny? By then, it will be too late.

Once upon a time, liberals viewed the military - and America's churches - as allies in the struggle to reform society, to rid it of racism, sexism and other perversions that were not only immoral, but grossly IMPRACTICAL wastage of valuable human resources. (To a modernist, inefficiency usually points to something immoral, and vice-versa.)

The military was the first major U.S. institution to desegregate, for example, becoming a giant school for tolerance that processed a majority of adult males, back in the era of the draft. Preconceptions that men had grown up with were challenged by daily exposure to the competent courage of other soldiers who just happened to look a little different. Once this happened, there was no turning back.

So then, why did liberalism turn its back upon the military, which pummeled Hitler, staved off Stalinist monsters, pioneered equality, and remained the one force standing decisively between us and any possibility of Big Brother?

Yes, Vietnam was traumatic. But I figure this attitude reversal was also exacerbated by lefty-antimodernists who have striven relentlessly to drive away Americans of faith, until the churches became de-facto strongholds of rightwing fanaticism.

How else could one of the most noble words - liberalism - have became a curse on the lips of millions of decent citizens?

Today, only a few Democratic politicians will even comment on flagrant efforts by right-wing forces to politicize the intelligence and military communities. Nor are many members of those communities speaking up.

Most are forbidden to do so until they retire. And even retirees (a rapidly growing group, as top officers resign) are reticent out of habit.

Still, they will speak, if you ask. If anybody bothers to ask. And I've had recent opportunities. As a frequent consultant on issues of "future threats to national defense," I was recently invited to speak at conferences on "Future WMD Dangers" and "Terror Threats to Soft Targets". (The latter was especially frightening, as we studied vulnerabilities of our schools, airports and shopping malls, charged to come up with imaginative ways to defend them.)

At such conferences I get to listen to intelligence and military officers after hours, in the bar, when they can let their hair down. Off the record, of course. And even after a few drinks, they are still generally more guarded and circumspect than a civilian would be at any time. So I'll respect them by not naming names or even places.

But they do talk, in general terms, about plummeting morale.

And make no mistake, things are getting VERY bad, boys and girls. The Officer Corps is being assaulted from both ends.

While radical congressmen are stocking the military academies with young fanatics, filling the pipeline with extremist zealots...

...those at the other end - generals and admirals who are the competent, brilliant and mature heirs of George Marshall - are being chased out. Subjected to political litmus tests. Cauterized in dead-end jobs....

... while middle-grade officers stare in dismay, worrying about their careers, their families, and their nation.

A majority of these guys are lifelong republicans, so this re-evaluation is hard on them. And it would be unwise to make of their despair more than it is. For example, they are not sudden-converts to Hillary Clinton! (Though, ironically, she is one of the few democratic officeholders who has taken a stand on this issue, stepping forward on their behalf.)

Still, these guys can tell that this is not the GOP of their fathers, nor of Barry Goldwater, nor even Billy Graham.

This is something else. And we had better study it carefully, before all the heroes are cowed or collared or driven into exile. If we wait too long, it will be too late.

And there won't be anybody left to stand between us and the wind.

Follow-up: See The Officer Corps Fights Back...Shall We Help Them?

                         The GOP vs. The U.S. Military: Indoctrinating the Ranks

                         The Officer Corps Stands Up!


==Personal Note==

I suppose I owe an explanation for this long absence, which has turned into a Summer Hiatus... at least for the whole month of July.

In fact, as I said at the beginning, I am not a blogger by nature, or by passion, or for lack of other outlets of self-expression. With far too little time for my novels, speeches and nonfiction projects - or even sometimes my family - this medium has to take last priority.

And yet, it does offer a place to deliver (in episodic form) some items that I want to share, such as:

- musings about where we stand in the Enlightenment's long term project to improve human society...

- ammunition for those of you out there who may be allies in what I call "the Real Culture War"... a hidden conflict that is so thoroughly masked by the hoary/stupid "left-right axis" that it appears to have gone virtually unnoticed. And yet, I feel it underlies our struggle to preserve modernist confidence against a rising tide of fear & superstition...

- commentary on recent cultural events... such as the new Steven Spielberg film...

- an upcoming serialized essay on "Twelve Major Theological Questions for Twenty-First Century Humanity." (This one ought to be way fun.)

- news about various projects and books, etc. And so on.

On the latter front, do drop by my main web site - http://www.davidbrin.com/ and see items like my recent review of Robert O'Harrow's book about privacy called No Place to Hide, published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Also try out samples of my books and stories, plus the popular graphic novel The Life Eaters, which has lately attracted some real interest from game developers!