Dennis Perrin: Will To Power

For pure shits and giggles, this post by Dennis Perrin on the Samantha Power affair is not to be missed. It's also pretty much all that needs to be said.

A Cold Wind Blows

For the same reason that rising temperatures in the 1990s is not proof positive of pending climate disaster, this winter's intense global chill isn't straightforward reason for to warm up the skeptic arguments. In fact, I think the debate over this bit of evidence misses the important point. What's important about the devastating cold snaps of the past few months is not that they discount the global warming science, but that they discount the argument over the science itself. In the report linked above, it is mentioned that:

"In Afghanistan, where they have lost 300,000 cattle, the human death toll has risen above 1,500. In China, the havoc created by what its media call 'the Winter Snow Disaster' has continued, not least in Tibet, where six months of snow and record low temperatures have killed 500,000 animals, leaving 3 million people on the edge of starvation."

The same weather events would not have had the same impact in the US, or in any other industrial society. With our greater resources, we are able to dampen the impacts of these weather events. And when we don't, it is due to social and political neglect, as in Katrina, not due to any necessary threat the weather poses. The social and political change indicated by these weather events is the same indicated by any extreme weather event. Industrial development is not the problem, it is a partial solution - one whose potential is only fully realized in conditions of social and political equality. We must look to the social, not natural, causes of natural disasters.

Environmentalism and the Left

(Readers: sorry for the absence - jury duty and paper-writing got in the way)

Climate-Resistance has a nice post on the difference between the left and environmentalism, or at least, on why criticism of environmentalism is not inherently conservative. (Shameless self-promotion, they also quote an article I wrote.) The question of whether environmentalism is conservative or radical is I think one of the most important questions for us to think about these days. Environmentalism is the dominant ideology on the left, but it crosses political boundaries with ease, and draws as much of its thinking from the status quo as from any challenge to it. It's not just that mainstream institutions like the Nobel Prize committee and the United Nations have celebrated its ideas. It is also the embrace of its ideas by downright conservative politicians, like John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in the United States. Both the rapidity with which environmentalism was accepted by the mainstream (essentially one generation), and the ease with which it crosses traditional divides, contrasts strongly with left wing thinking of the past. Socialists, for instance, had to struggle for decades even to win small victories and to spread their ideas; and they were never accepted on the right. A thorough-going critique of environmental ideas from the standpoint of left political thinking is still wanting, but Climate-Resistance is right to emphasize the point that "the Left is not characterised by opposition to economic growth; its goal has been to distribute its riches more rationally amongst those who actually generate capital, rather than just those who simply own it."

Latour Redux

After I posted a review of Bruno Latour's lecture on Ecology and Democracy at the blog 'French Politics,' an observer of the French scene wrote:

"I'm pretty skeptical about the PP, which to my mind has always been a peg to which all kinds of political posturing can be attached. The recent banning of GMO corn is a good example. José Bové and his minions went on a hunger strike, it was making big headlines, so Sarko jumped all over his own review panel and strong-armed the chair into saying that there was "sufficiently grave doubt" to invoke the PP and ban the stuff. Easy enough to do, since it accounts for less than 1 pct of French corn production and all of it was going to Africa anyway. And who likes Monsanto, an American corporation. So, for me, this "democratic" use of the PP was just a cover for "screw the Yankee corporation" and shut up some troublemakers at low political cost. But Bové is the head of an authentic social movement, so I guess if you want to call that democracy, I'd have to agree.

Meanwhile, the Rhône is so polluted with PCB that you can't eat fish from it anymore, but nobody's about to invoke the PP to shut down Péchiney, DuPont, Alstom, CGE, etc."

Where I agree with the commenter is on the difficulty of doing what Latour argues. While there is merit to the way the precautionary principle forces us to think about the uncertain and unpredictable side of human intervention into nature, a democratic appropriation of the PP is a bridge too far. Not only is it too closely wedded to the pessimistic 'precautionary' ethos of environmentalism to be prized away, towards a more humanistic approach. The other side of the political spectrum for the PP is, as the commenter notes, not democracy but opportunism. Nonetheless, if Latour is wrong to suggest we can democratically re-appropriate the PP, he is right to argue that the discussion needs to be less about what scientific experts tell us (though not ignorant of science), and more about the values and ideologies that often hide behind the science.

A New Low

I happened upon this clip of Obama last night handling a ridiculous question from Tim Russert about Louis Farrakhan declaring his support for Obama. (In case you missed it, watch it before reading on.) I have always thought that Tim Russert is a mediocre journalist, but this was a new low for him, and for the campaign as a whole. On top of which, Hillary couldn't help herself, opportunistically invoking 'principle' ('I stand on principle and reject people who make anti-semitic remarks') when it was transparent that she was trying to score a few cheap points. Clinton wouldn't know a principle if it slapped her halfway across the country. Any reader of this blog knows how I feel about Obama, but in this case he was not the problem. The base problem here was the obscene (and irrelevant) choice presented between Obama 'denouncing' Farrakhan and 'rejecting' him. It's not just that these idiotic and superficial games over symbolic politics gets in the way of a serious discussion of actual political issues (ie, what exactly do they think should happen in the Middle East - essentially no difference between them.) In this particular case, it was also about banishing a segment of the population from the public sphere. Obama's response was about as appropriate as can be. He didn't look for Farrakhan's support, but isn't going to tell Farrakhan to hold his tongue like a parent instructing a child. Russert, Clinton and whoever takes the thought police position of 'rejection' isn't just trying to embarrass Obama, but attempting to remove a voice from the public sphere, as if that removal did anything to contest the views expressed therein.

Moreover, in this particular case, Clinton and Russert are perpetuating a kind of symbolic identity politics that only exacerbates differences amongst groups by making appearances matter far more than they should. Everyone could read between the lines and see what Clinton , by jumping on Russert's question, was trying to do here. She wanted to make it impossible for Obama to give the reasonable response, which would not offend Blacks, while still appealing beyond the Black commnity. She was forcing a difference and defensiveness where division did not need to be. One has to believe that any Black person, regardless of whether supportive of Farrakhan or not, watching the debate must have felt on the defensive, and felt resentment for such an opportunistic attempt to create differences where there aren't any. I felt that way, and I'm not even Black. This episode also suggests to me that Clinton has failed to understand why Obama is winning. In the middle of opportunistically seizing on these little moments, Clinton reveals that she offers nothing in the way of overcoming the petty and superficial differences that have dominated American politics. At the end of the day, that seems to be what matters most to people, and why Obama comes out looking good. After all, people know they aren't going to get real change - neither Obama nor Clinton represent anything truly new or different. So voters ratchet down their expectations, and least want lack of substance to come with less empty partisanship.

One more thing. I don't like or agree with much anything Farrakhan has said - but that's also how I feel about Clinton and Obama. If offensiveness and 'dangerousness of views' were the criteria for whose support we should reject, I can think of a far far longer and more important list than a few marginal players in African-American politics.*

*An addition to the original version of this post: In terms of active, ongoing discrimination (a term severely under-stating the actual situation in the Middle East), on wonders why walling the entire Palestinian population in, so that to get basic supplies like food and medicine they literally have to break down those walls, doesn't warrant at least five minutes, to the ten that Farrakhan got. Not that there is any difference between Clinton and Obama on that subject. But apparently the distinction without a difference between 'reject' and 'denounce' is more important than what actually goes on.

Latour and Frankenstein at Columbia

(This post is cross-posted at French Politics, a blog run by Art Goldhammer, and the best source, in English, on all things French.)

It may be unfair, but when a speaker is introduced as zany and unconventional I steel myself for an unsystematic exploration of incomprehensible thoughts. (It is probably an American prejudice of mine that this is especially the case when the speaker is French.) So it was with special trepidation that I sat down for Bruno Latour’s lecture on ‘Ecology and Democracy’ last night after hearing Michael Taussig introduce Latour as “a zany, a really zany, and original thinker.” It was with even greater pleasure, however, that I then sat through one of the best lectures I have heard in a long time. Latour is on to some extremely interesting, absolutely reasonable, but quite original thoughts about the relationship between environmentalism and democracy.

Latour’s premise is that awarding Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is proof positive that environmental ideas are mainstream. The question to be asking is not “whether environmental concern” but “how and what environmental concern.” Using the “Death of Environmentalism” book by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger as a springboard, Latour spent the hour giving an unconventional answer to the question. The puzzle, for Latour, is that there is a contradiction between the hopeful, future-oriented, emancipatory thrust of democratic politics and the doomsday, philosophy of limits, pessimistic cast of environmentalism. The rhetorical means by which environmentalism has won the day has undermined its ability to generate a democratic attitude towards nature. “It is strange,” said Latour “that just at the point when we are about to achieve our dream [control of nature] we should be afraid of it.”

Although these opening thoughts seemed exactly the right question, none of it sounded that original at first. Where Latour really shined was his refusal to propose a simple synthesis between environmentalism and democracy. Instead he wove a complex argument about the problem both with environmentalism and its critics. It went something like this: Nordhaus and Shellenberger have rightly identified a deep flaw in the pessimistic attitude towards technology that plagues environmentalism. However, the problem goes deeper. For Latour, environmentalism has introduced some very important ideas about the way in which we can have a democratic relationship with nature. Through the idea of the precautionary principle, environmentalists have introduced the idea that political decisions about new technology cannot be grounded on scientific guarantees of certainty. This explodes, for Latour, the specially French idea that Reason, in the form of science, can provide us with absolute guarantees of the rightness or wrongness of a policy. For Latour, the classic French attitude towards science is undemocratic; not only does it remove real choice from politics, and reduce disagreements over value to scientific questions of facts, it also deludes itself into thinking we do not need to confront the uncertain character of human action.

What the precautionary principle does, according to Latour, is reintroduce politics into our relationship with nature, because it makes uncertainty, rather than certainty, the defining issue. It demands, as Latour put it, that “we follow through our actions through all its consequences.” (Latour made the interesting claim that it is only in France, where the religion of reason is so developed, that the counter-reaction has also been so developed – hence the adoption of the precautionary principle into the French Constitution.) However, the environmental right hand taketh away what the environmental left hand giveth. Environmentalists have also championed the idea that there are “natural limits” to what we can get from nature, that we have caused endless suffering in our quest for dominion over nature, and that the lesson of the past is that if we continue in this way we walk straight into catastrophe. Here is where Latour really got interesting.

First, he pointed out that this reintroduced the idea that science and nature impose limits on us – the very error of Reason turned on its head. Questions of value and possibility are transformed into the ineluctable fact of catastrophe. This is why, according to Latour, the precautionary principle is misinterpreted as an inescapably environmentalist tool for restraining technology, and never intervening in nature. Second, and even more interesting, Latour thought the proper position is not simply to reject his as unfounded pessimism, but rather to embrace the unknown: “we must bring emancipation and catastrophe together.” Environmentalists have learned the wrong lesson from Frankenstein. In Latour’s telling, the story of Frankenstein is not of creation gone wrong, but rather that Dr. Frankenstein repented for a sin he did not commit and failed to repent for the sin he actually committed. It was not creation that was the sin, but that he abandoned his creation: “why, why father have you abandoned me?” This, according to Latour, is what is wrong with the current environmentalist attitude. At the very moment when we have brought into view the unintended consequences of our intervention in nature; once we have become aware that our freedom entails not absolute, certain mastery, but a messy, risk-laden process of intervention and experimentation, we have suddenly run screaming from our powers of creation. In doing this, we simply run from ourselves, from our own freedom, and from democracy.

I took Latour’s argument to be for a democratic appropriation of the precautionary principle. Instead of allowing decisions about science and technology to be decided either by technocrats or misanthropes, we should embrace risk and uncertainty, and see it as an opportunity rather than a danger. There was much more to Latour’s presentation, and I will admit to not understanding all of it. But as far as I know, nobody has put the argument quite this way. It is, of course, indeterminate. Does this mean we should embrace stem-cell research and not worry so much about climate change? I don’t know, and I don’t think it was Latour’s intention to give us anything so concrete. Instead, he performed a much more important service: navigating the Scylla of technocracy and the Charybdis of environmentalism in the name of democracy itself.

Some Science in the Other Direction

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

There's No Such Thing As a Natural Disaster: Droughts and Famines

This post is a response to the following website: Humanitarian Early Warning Service – Drought and Food Security.

Droughts and famines are not natural disasters. They appear that way to us because they appear after an environmental stimulus - like a sustained drop in rainfall or a parasite – makes water and crops unavailable to some group. However, it is not the natural factor that causes the drought and famine. What causes the actual human suffering is the failure of society to adjust and manage that natural event. The main reason for failure to adjust is political. Amartya Sen, a nobel prize winning economist, was famous for demonstrating that famines do not happen because of lack of food supplies, but because of failures in distribution. That was why he was able to show that famines do not occur in democracies because democratic governments must be responsive to the needs of their population. Political factors are complex, and not always so straightforward as democracy v. dictatorship. Famines in Ethiopia and Somalia in the 1980s and 1990s were due to the mixture of civil war and humanitarian food aid. (The food aid drove farmers off the land, who couldn’t or wouldn’t compete with the free food, and Somali warlords were able to seize the food, strengthening their position and prolonging the war.)

However, one thing that is clear is that it is easier for a society to respond to its population’s needs if it has an ample surplus, and if it has the kinds of technology that assist in its response – good roads, cheap fuel, communications systems.

Regular readers know where I’m going with this. The way in which natural disasters are linked to climate change seems to me substantially backwards for two reasons. First, a common argument is that natural disasters like droughts and famines will increase because of changes in the weather (shifting, reduced rainfalls, temperature changes, etc…) Second, the response is mainly to see in industrialization a problem. The problem is fundamental enough that the priorities of development should be changed: the main objective in industrial development should be reducing greenhouse gas emissions rather than in generating cheaper resources. However, if the first is false then so is the second. If the main cause of natural disasters is social, and one important factor in society’s ability to respond is the amount and quality of technology it has to manage the disaster, then the priority really should be rapid industrialization of those areas that lack adequate resources. Industrialization will not solve all problems, especially not problems having to do with democracy and representation, but it is a powerful aid.

To substantiate my point, consider the map from the website mentioned above. Almost every country experiencing a “food emergency” or “unfavorable prospects” is in Africa, besides Colombia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Mongolia. Of that latter five, the first three are in a civil war/destroyed by invasion, and the fourth has been severely disrupted by a number of factors. While Africa experiences some distinct weather conditions, they are not so substantially different that the weather explains why it has such profoundly worse food prospects. Consider this quote from the country analysis of Kenya: “rains disrupted any potential improvements in food security by displacing households and destroying lives, livelihoods, and infrastructure…While the majority of pastoralists have migrated back to normal wet-season grazing areas, a proportion were displaced and had to move away from flooded areas…In coastal areas where floods damaged the early planted crop, particularly in Kwale and Kilifi districts, maize has only just passed the post-germination stage. Rates of malnutrition remain high in most pastoral districts...”

Rains do not have to disrupt food security, displace individuals, and force widespread migration. They do that only because Kenya lacks adequate technology to control the rains, build houses that can withstand environmental stresses, and protect farms; and because its political situation means that some groups are not politically represented and therefore left to their own devices. If we start thinking about these situations as social, not natural disasters, then the natural conclusions we draw are that the main objectives should be industrial development and political equality, not sustainable development.

Politics of Fear v. Quests for Transformation

Over at the Daily Dish Peter Suderman writes a favorable review of my environmentalism as a politics of fear piece. He accepts that environmentalism is a politics of fear, turning the quest for survival into a full-blooded political ideology. But then goes on to argue: "That said, I wonder if there is not something inevitable about collective quests for revolution and transformation." I disagree with putting it this way.

First, my point in the essay is that, to the degree environmentalism presents itself as a 'collective quest for revolution and transformation,' it is false advertising. It is no such quest. It actually has conservative aims - preserve what we have before it's destroyed - dressed up as a radical politics. For those looking for transformative projects, their embrace of environmentalism is misplaced.

Second, Suderman suggests that these "collective quests," whatever their concrete aims, are going to become more frequent. "In our secular, post-modern age, in which most people living in the first world have their basic needs met, there is an innate urge to find meaning in grand causes." This reductionist argument was first made by Ronald Inglehart in his book Modernization and Postmodernization, which attempted to explain the 'altruistic' and 'other-oriented' character of New Left movements and consumer politics in the very terms that Suderman suggests. However, I think this argument fits uneasily with some basic historical facts. For instance, one of the dominant pieces of common wisdom of our political life is the idea that we live at the end of history, and the total naturalization of certain basic issues of social structure - like capitalism and the liberal state. Most 'transformation' movements today take place within these constraints, calling into question how 'transformative' these quests really are. I would even go so far as to say that many of the 'altruistic,' value-based movements of today, like consumer politics reflect the narcissistic core of consumer society. On that point, I can't really explain myself here though.

Also, far more revolutionary movements, of a much more sustained and transformative character, are observable in earlier periods, including not just the 1960s but even more so the 1920s and 30s, not to mention 1870s and 1840s and so on. Or a more limited example: participation in American politics was much more vigorous in the late 19th century (think Populism) than in the late 20th century. Some kind of functional explanation of revolutionary energy in relation to poverty or prosperity just doesn't work (we can find reactionary periods in the past too). If it did, there would be no point of political argument, really, because politics would just be a function of economics in a rather crude way.

So I take Suderman's point, and agree with him that we need to think about why a desire for change would be poured into a conservative movement like environmentalism. But I disagree with his analysis.

Neither Plagiarism Nor Hope

As is typical of this election race, reportage about a particular event, like Clinton's famous pre-New Hampshire breakdown, or the most recent furore over Obama's plagiarized' stump speech, has covered everything but the interesting part. For those who missed it, Obama recently defended himself from Hillary's accusation that he is all words no substance by more or less reiterating a few lines from a speech by Obama's friend, Massachussetts Governor Patrick Duvall. As ABC reports

In 2006 Patrick gave a speech quoting famous phrases: "'We have nothing to fear, but fear itself,' … just words. 'Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.' Just words. … 'I have a dream' … just words,'" he said, switching effortlessly from FDR to JFK to MLK.

On Saturday in Wisconsin, Obama said, "Don't tell me words don't matter. … 'I have a dream.' Just words. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.' Just words. 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself.' Just words. Just speeches."

Hillary's supporters accused Obama of plagiarism, and since then the media has dutifully reported the ongoing spat. But reporting the mutual accusations misses the point. In politics plagiarism is not a problem, and in some sense is a necessary virtue. Unity, solidarity, and joint pursuit of cause means that more than one person will say the same thing. They should say the same thing if they jointly believe in it!

The problem in Obama's case is a congenital lack of originality and the way in which he empties past slogans of their meaning. Obama has been campaigning off the reflected glory of 'hope' mantras for a while, making 'Yes We Can'/'Si Se Puede' a chant since he became a viable candidate. But the only thing left of the words of FDR, JFK, MLK or Cesar Chavez are the mere words themselves, and their lingering aura, rather than the politics to which they refer. This is why they are useful to Obama. I have already described the disanalogy between Obama and MLK so let me illustrate my point with a different slogan.

'Yes We Can' used to be the expression of a politics of a solidarity amongst the working class, and later immigrant labor, that was combined with an intense, militant, dare we say partisan, attitude towards politics. This militant partisanship is precisely the kind of thing Obama wants to nullify. Obama rejects that one even has to take sides in politics. So when Obama claims that 'We hold these truths to be self-evident' 'I have a dream' and 'yes we can' are more than 'just words' he is wrong...now. They once summarized and helped produced the solidarity of an actual political movement - be it civil rights struggle, class politics, or the fight for independence. These words once referred to political substance; they were slogans in the good sense. Now they really are just empty words, referring nothing more to the glossy hopes of an electoral movement revolving around a single personality, unable to generate a politics beyond himself.

Black man vs. white woman

Over at the Boston Globe Ideas Section, Drake Bennett writes:

"It would be a gross oversimplification to reduce the Democratic race to the white woman versus the black man. Factors like Obama's eloquence and inexperience and Clinton's policy mastery and her association with the ambivalent legacy of her husband have played a larger role in how the race has been talked about. And indeed, this presidential contest can be seen as the country's attempt to lurch beyond a blinkered, monolithic identity politics.

But in a campaign in which it's hard to find many substantive policy differences between the leading Democratic contenders, it's notable how well the psychological research on bias predicts the race we've seen so far."

The piece explains that psychological research has discovered gender prejudice to be somewhat stickier than racial prejudice. (Full disclosure, Drake is a friend of mine.) However, to me the most interesting point is the one from above. Superficial considerations are given greater play when there are few profound, political questions raised by a campaign. The campaign is already an invitation to obsess about symbolism, personality, character, rather than program and substance. It would not actually be that surprising is some kind of superficial, gender mediated prejudices end being the determining factor. Although, even here, one has doubts that it really is a contest between prejudices. After all, if psychological race v. gender studies 'predict' the current voting outcomes, this prediction is just a correlation. It is more likely to me that this correlation is spurious. If confuses the accidental fact that the boring, establishment candidate is a white woman woman and that the more exciting, charismatic anti-establishment Democrat is black man, with the actual reasons for Obama's (very small) lead. As they tell in the first day of stats class, correlation is not causation.

Global Warming 'may cut deaths'

From the BBC - more on the heat wave v. cold snap issue:

"milder winters mean deaths during this time of year - which far outstrip heat-related mortality - will continue to decline."

"While summers in the UK became warmer in the period 1971 - 2003, there was no change in heat-related deaths, but annual cold-related mortality fell by 3% as winters became milder - so overall fewer people died as a result of extreme temperatures."

You Can't Make This Stuff Up: Ecopsychology

I have nothing more to say*:
Anxious About Earth’s Troubles? There’s Treatment - New York Times

*I'm actually not sure which is more bizarre the above or the below:
EcoMoms

Somalia: the forgotten crisis?

According to the BBC, Somalia is 'the forgotten crisis', though one wonders about the poor Afghanis, steeping stones on the way to invading Iraq. But if Somalia is a forgotten crisis, it has not faired well when remembered. The 'humanitarian' intervention in 1992, nominally under UN-control (UNOSOM I and later II), but really directed by the United States, guaranteed Somalia would have deep trouble putting the state back together. And as a precursor of subsequent humanitarian efforts, showed that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Among other things, the food aid of the 1980s, and aid increase in the early 1990s helped sustain the civil war, itself the major cause of famine, rather than improve the situation. This was because the different warlords who controlled Mogadishu and its outlying areas were able to seize the food aid and use it to bind Somalis to them. The previous decade of food aid, combined with fluctuation in world food markets and European protectionism, had ensured that Somali farmers moved either to subsistence farming or away from their farms altogether. Without a source of income or means of survival besides aid, Somalis in Southern Somalia switched from being clients of the international aid industry to clients of warlords who controlled supplies. Moreover, what possibility of overcoming the divisions of the civil war in the south were destroyed by the blundering, inept and frequently violent actions of the intervening forces, which included 30,000 American troops.

The crisis in Somalia is not just the outcome of the failures of the early 1990s, but is a case study in a fundamental problem with humanitarian intervention that goes beyond the "road to hell" issue. It is not just what the intervening powers don't know that creates problems, but what they think they do. A humanitarian intervention is always cast in black and white terms, as a question of doing good and preventing evil. Doing good is often reduced to just preventing evil - this prevention has even been worked up into a 'duty to prevent.' This orientation turns complex political situations into a simplified moral spectacle. Intervening with that kind of outlook produces blunders, small and large, while making diplomacy that much more difficult.

Even worse, humanitarian interventions mean that a people's salvation depends upon the good will of others. This good will tends to have the attention span of a five year-old, and the memory too. It is possible to sustain the public interest of other nations only for so long, both because they have their own political swings, and because each humanitarian situation competes with so many more. Humanitarian sympathy for some quickly appears as callous indifference towards everyone else. It is not just the absence of intervention in Rwanda, soon after Somalia, but also more recent claims about the Congo and Sudan that reveal the problem. Being dependent upon the political mood of other, powerful nations for one's own political fate is a recipe for chaos. Somalia is a case study. After the interventions of the early 1990s, the US became gun-shy, and pawned off peace negotiations to international negotiations. Under the war on terror, a new interpretive frame opened up whereby Somalia became a threat, another misjudgment that eventually had disastrous consequences. The US supported a reinvastion of Somalia by Europe to overthrow the first Southern government with any chance of uniting that region of the country. Hence the new crisis. Indeed, calling it a 'forgotten crisis' is highly misleading. It is more like an ongoing crisis aided and abetted by international forces, which have always, in one way or another, been intervening in Somalia. It is only to the apolitical humanitarian sensibility that such a crisis could be considered forgotten, and need more intervention.

The More Things Change

A nice post at EconoSpeak pokes some serious holes in Obama's message of unity and change by looking at his intellectual roots. EconoSpeak notes that one of Obama's main advisers is Cass Sunstein, a well-known constitutional scholar at University of Chicago. Sunstein has been aggressive in his defense of Obama, lodging numerous interpretations and ripostes in defense of Hope's Messenger. I already commented on the conservatism of Obama's 'visionary minimalism,' but when one starts to put together his team of 'intellectuals' one really does wonder about the 'change' he speaks of. Sunstein is not just a pragmatist, he also supports some of the most retrograde aspects of the jurisprudence around the war on terror. For instance, he supports the idea of 'unlawful combatants,' under which individuals can be indefinitely detained and tried by military tribunals, even though this designation arises out of a hideous, pathetic and bizarre Supreme Court decision (ex Parte Quirin) from World War II. Indeed, in his letter to the American Prospect linked to above, Sunstein makes no effort to address how badly decided ex Parte Quirin was, and how awful the parallel case, In re Yamashita, also was. Sunstein hides behind the idea that 'this is what the law says' to defend his basic argument that "President Bush's choice stands on firm legal ground insofar as he seeks to use military commissions to try people who planned and participated in the September 11 attacks (and similar actions)." We are, of course, seeing the fruits of these military commissions now. As with the original case, ex Parte Quirin, these commissions are designed not to bring criminals to justice, but to cover the government's ass and conceal misdeeds (especially, in this case, evidence acquired by torture.)

Sunstein's judicial pragmatism doesn't look so much like the good kind of unity so much as an unwillingness to rock the boat. As EconoSpeak notes in his criticism of Obama's unity message, there is a bland 'willingness to listen to all sides' and then there is a real diversity that comes with the clash of all kinds of opinions: "We need to really extend the conversation to the vast regions beyond the pale of approved discourse. The resulting zone of consensus will be moderate by the standards of intelligent human thought but extreme with respect the political constraints we live under today."

This is exactly what Obama will not do. Indeed, for all of those anti-war lefties who think Obama is also the messenger of Peace, they might think about his intellectual inspiration in foreign policy. Samantha Power
one of the most dogged, unflagging defenders of humanitarian intervention, was personally tapped by Obama to advise him on foreign policy. Alongside the leftover bits and pieces from Bill Clinton's neoliberal, humanitarian foreign policy team, Power's inspiration is not so much change for the future as throwback to the 1990s - that period of sanctions, inspections and continuous bombing of Iraq, as well as interventions in Somalia, Haiti, ex-Yugoslavia.

If Obama's current intellectual inspirators are anything to go on, the more things change, the more they will stay the same.

Conventional Wisdom v. Science

One of my favorite blogs, Climate Resistance, has a post today skewering a Green member of the European Parliament, Caroline Lucas. The most interesting and relevant part to me of the post is where they start trying to track down some of Lucas 'scientific' claims such as "that 'increasing numbers of scientists' are pointing to the link between toxic chemicals and breast cancer, or that 75% of cancers are caused by environmental factors." They even called her office to ask for the source of her claims and figures, and didn't get much response.

What has made the debate about the environment so complex is precisely situations like these. Conventional wisdom, prejudice, superstition used to be much more distinguishable from science. Conventional wisdom took the form of something like 'don't go to sleep with your arms crossed, because you're tempting death.' To the extent superstition took the form of testable propositions, science could distinguish between the actual wisdom contained therein and plain old superstition. An example might be herbal remedies for various colds, or the boiling of willow bark for pain. Now, however, the boundaries are much more difficult to establish, ironically because the authority of science is so hegemonic. Conventional wisdom and superstition are expressed in the language of science; to state something in scientific terms is to make it acceptable without it necessarily having any scientific basis. When Climate Resistance comes across someone claiming '75% of cancers are caused by environmental factors,' it already sounds scientistic, and the fact that it is expressed that way is enough to lend it de facto plausibility, even though it appears that there is no study to support it. What's more, some deeply unscientific and anti-modern (one might even say, superstitious) ideas, are expressing themselves in these scientific phrases. As the Climate Resistance post points out, there is literally no mention of the upside of chemicals, of the way they have extended and improved human life, and that is because the actual interpretation of the facts is driven by a hostility toward modern advances. (Others have pointed to how selectively science, for example science on genetically-modified organisms, is used to defend certain positions) The plausibility of the 'scientific statements' is driven by an unscientific mentality, but one that is difficult to address directly because of the way it expresses itself.

One upshot, I suspect, is that it is inadequate simply to defend science itself, at least in the narrow sense of a procedure for generating knowledge about the natural world. Something probably needs to be said about the way science is more than just a technical procedure for producing neutral facts to fit any particular outlook. And something more probably needs done unwinding the way the authority of science is misused in politics. None of this is very easy, it seems to mean, because of how deeply science and superstition are now intertwined.

Adaptation or Mitigation?

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of responses to climate change. In the lingo of the debate, these are 'mitigation' and 'adaptation.' The former refers to reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases, on the hope of reversing the changes (until when?), the latter refers to developing new technologies and forms of social cooperation for dealing with whatever nature throws our way. Each is a theory of the best way to allocating resources. I am very partial to a version of the 'adaptation' strategy, and therefore agree, in part, with
a post by John Tierney over at his NYTimes blog.

Tierney sites a report by Indur Goklany, an analyst at the libertarian CATO Institute, which accepts the science of the International Panel on Climate Change, but argues adaptation is still the best use of resources. While I do not agree with all of the libertarian prescriptions of Goklany's report (and which Tierney supports), I agree with the basic conclusion. As Tierney puts it:

"I think [Goklany] points to a real risk in making large sacrifices today to address problems that will be easier to address when people are richer and more technologically advanced. If anything, Dr. Goklany writes, these projections underestimate the capacity of future generations to deal with these problems because they’ll have technologies we can’t imagine today..."

The proper technologies, the best way of developing them, and the process by which we produce and distribute them are all serious questions. But since resources are limited, it makes more sense to me to devote those resources to improving our ability to control nature's effects, rather than to slow down or inhibit our industrial growth. Mitigation, especially at the levels required to bring greenhouse gases down to a 'natural' level (whatever that means), would require dramatic limitations on development in industrial areas, and even more limitations on undeveloped countries. In the end, it's hard to see how this would be a humane way of setting up our relationship to nature. After all, even if we were to 'reverse' global warming, the weather would still happen. There would still be fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, heat waves, cold snaps and earthquakes. How they impact us depends on the technologies at our disposal, and the way we organize society.

Ben Casnocha: The Blog: The Politics of Fear and Environmentalism

A blogger, Ben Casnocha, made an interesting comment on a piece I wrote identifying environmentalism as a politics of fear. The most important point of his post is the following:

"Look, I believe in most environmental issues, and think we need to deal with global warming in a proactive manner, but enough with the shrieking and doomsday overreach. Three billion people live on less than two dollars a day; 790 million people are chronically undernourished; 1.1 billion people lack daily access to clean water; etc etc. I don't know about you, but poverty strikes me as a much more pressing moral issue than global warming."

I think this is a fair point, but I would push it a bit further. There is something undeniable strange and disturbing about the way so many liberal elites, from Gore, through Elizabeth Kolbert at the New Yorker and Andrew Revking at the New York Times, on down, will immediately get on their high horse about global warming and environmental problems, yet can only shake their head in dismay at the far more devastating and immediate human consequences of global inequality. Of course, a common argument is that they're not mutually exclusive concerns, one can 'care about both,' or, more perversely, as a comment on Casnocha's blog claims, concern for the environment 'is' concern for the poor, because climate change will make the poor poorer ("If Africa and south Asia get drier, it follows that those places will get poorer and more people will suffer famine or starve").

I've already developed some arguments as to why the latter is not true. But it's also just not true that one can 'care about both.' This is not what happens. As I mentioned in the post about Katrina, environmental concerns consistently displace concerns about equality. There is a degree of passivity and hopelessness about the possibility of changing society that goes hand in hand with environmental activism. That is one of the reasons, I think, for why some people think that climate change means the poor will get poorer. If you really think society is static, then it is true that changes in nature will harm that society. If you really think Africa and South Asia can't develop better irrigation technologies and dams (or think they shouldn't), then it's true they will remain dependent upon rainfall patterns, and the alteration of those patterns will screw them. But if they were more developed, and if their uneven development has to do with things like the (alterable) structure of global markets, concentration of wealth in certain nations, and international and national regulations, then it just isn't true that changes in rainfall patterns would be that devastating at all. There would be no reason to think they would get poorer. Rather, they would get richer, and have more technology at their disposal to improve their fate.

But the truth is, this is not how environmentalism tends to think. Poverty is mainly a function of nature, not social organization, on the environmental view. And for the most part, it has managed to trade off pessimism about the possibilities for social change (despite its best efforts to present itself as utopian.) It is with unerring consistency that environmentalism has proven, despite its protestations otherwise, that one can't be concerned with the environment and poverty at the same time. They really speak to distinct moral concerns and attitudes towards politics.

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I complained recently about how climate science has turned into something else. This recent article, trying to figure out why everything from childbirth to gender differences are measured in terms of their impact on the environment, says it well: "Climate change science and policy is rapidly becoming carbon fundamentalism, an over-simplistic but comprehensive structure of moral valuation that can be applied to virtually any individual or institution." What's disturbing about this 'structure of moral valuation' is not just the way it has become fundamentalist and oversimplified. It is also the morality itself. Despite its own claims to the contrary, it is clear that environmentalism's ultimate object of concern is nature, not human beings. That is why it leads to measuring human events - birth, movement, eating - in relation to their impact on nature, rather than nature in terms of its ability to serve human needs.

Confessions of a Snarky Politico

A friend of mine has a great post answering the question “Daniel, you are a leftie, why aren’t you voting for Barack Obama?”

Why Remember Hitler?

The NYTimes ran a couple of op-eds today reflecting on the 75th anniversary of Hitler's rise to power in Germany. They are, to varying degrees, less reflections on the past than the present. While each make important points, they nonetheless put on display a kind of humanitarian sentimentalism that disturbs me, mainly for its political implications. The first, by Susan Neiman, assesses whether Holocaust memorials should remember the Holocaust's victims or its heroes. Since memorials are for the living as much as the dead, she proposes "we restrain our attention to the suffering of the victims of those crimes and turn to the courage of those who worked to stop the criminals." The reason being that she thinks the emphasis on the victims is socially and politically enervating. It does not, in fact, inspire to resist new evils as they arise. Focusing the heroes shifts emphasis "on what you’ve done to the world, not what the world did to you."

This seems to me a perfectly sound argument - why emphasize hopelessness and loss in the face of evil, rather than put forward the possibility of resistance? What bothers me, though, is that it is far too vague and bland in its generality, to the point of being apolitical. The problem, after all, in using the Holocaust as a source of inspiration is that it is not really the victim-consciousness that stands in the way of action. The aggressive humanitarianism of our time has not really been paralyzed by a sense of hopelessness. The problem, rather, has to do with the way we think of evil as self-evident, while the great powers compete to tramp around saving others to whom they have attributed victim-status. In this, the general formula of bravery and action over passivity and victimization fails. Neiman ends her op-ed "After all these years, isn’t it time to send a message to Germany’s children — and everyone else’s — that will help them to stand up against present evils as well as mourning past ones?" But this was never the issue. The real political issue s have been, which evil, and whose responsibility? These are questions that cannot be answered if a situation is reduced to a confrontation between Good and Evil, in which the evil-doer is self-evident, and in which the only question is, who has the will and the power to act. If the lesson of the Holocaust is that it was a great evil, which should inspire us to present similar ones, we lose any sense of the political texture of the present, and how this intense moralization of politics can be counterproductive and its own cover for sheer violent domination. Indeed, one would think the Iraq War would have sucked some of the confidence out of this highly stylized way of thinking.

Ian Kershaw, one of the most famous historians of Hitler and the Nazis, also wrote an op-ed, which initially promises to present us with a more politically nuanced comparison of 1933 Germany and the present day. He lists a whole host of present day leaders who have been compared to Hitler - Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Robert Mugabe, Pervez Musharraf, European neo-fascists - and notes that "None of these examples, however, poses a close parallel to what happened in Germany in 1933." Kershaw specifies "neither in their acquisition of power nor in their use of it do modern authoritarian rulers much resemble Hitler." The value of reflecting upon and remembering the Holocaust is to emphasize the difference, the tremendous political gap between now and then. Thinking politically and carefully about the two periods, rather than through the flimsy dichotomies of good and evil, reveals the 20th century to be a complex series of political struggles and conflicts, rather than a timeless struggle against 'fascism.' The thrust, it seems, of Kershaw's point is not just to clarify that the present requires real thinking about the present, but also that the past, too, was more complex. Although he doesn't mention it, one thinks of the fact that the 'good v. evil' narrative of the Holocaust has led many to believe that from the very beginning it was about exterminating the Jews, when in fact the first groups to be targeted for political repression and assassination were union leaders, left-wing political activists, and leading figures in the Communist and Socialist parties. This is the kind of knowledge about the past that disappears when it is filtered through humanitarian sentimentalism.

But Kershaw, too, can't resist closing the gap between the past and present in a flim-flam way. Despite the fact that "what happened in Germany in 1933, and its aftermath, will remain a uniquely terrible episode in history" it nonetheless "reminds us — if such a reminder is necessary — of the need for international cooperation to restrain potential “mad dogs” in world politics before they are dangerous enough to bite." Here again, a free-floating, highly impressionistic view of the world based on a superficial comparison with the past - 'mad dogs' running wild on the global stage - is the lesson derived. One doubts that Kershaw supported Bush's invasion of Iraq, but one struggles to find the difference in their relation to world politics. Even if Kershaw's practical judgment about Iraq, or Bosnia, or whichever recent conflict, was different, it is precisely this view of the globe, as populated with 'mad dogs', vaguely-Hitler like in their potentiality, that creates the climate within which such ill-advised adventures like the Iraq War take place. It is never good when an opponent has been turned either into the incarnation of the Devil, or into a crazed mad man. This is simply preparation for the exercise of power, not an assessment of the other side's political and social circumstances. If anything, once we turn others into these symbols of Evils past reincarnated, it is we who go mad.

Obama: Not a Black President?

It might seem a bit unfair to beat up on the underdog, as he rolls into Super-Duper Tuesday, especially as I might be mistaken for a Hilary supporter. So let me make this clear: I dislike Hilary just as much, I simply have less to say about her. Also, most of my friends are Obama supporters, and so I know the various arguments made for him better. Moreover, he gets invested with high hopes in a way, for better or for worse, Hilary does not. I think those high hopes are misplaced.

One common theme in left-liberal support, especially amongst my friends, for Obama is that he would be the first (truly) Black president. In a recent panel discussion, Cornel West fairly and clearly explained why this is just not so. The whole commentary is worth watching, but it boiled down to the argument that the criteria for assessing a president, or anyone else, has to be political, not symbolic: "What kind of courage have you manifested in the stances that you have?." The truth of Toni Morrison's otherwise irritating and endlessly reprduced proclamation that Bill Clinton was the first Black President is that being a 'Black politician' is not something one can be born into, and depends upon one's social position and political stances, rather than mere skin color. In fact, Obama has taken no risks for Blacks as a candidate, and indeed the offending incident that spurred West's criticism was Obama's decision not to participate the "State of Black America" forum.

The point is not just that Obama counts on Black support while never making any distinctive, risky appeals to them. It is that he seems to behave as if there simply is no serious, fundamental problem worthy of conflict and chance-taking in the first place. A comparison with Martin Luther King Jr. clarifies the point. Both Obama and King are seen as Black political figures who nonetheless managed to appeal to segments of white public opinion. They are therefore sometimes seens as 'unifiers' in the horrible lingo of American punditry. However, the difference(s) are more important than the similarities. Obama's message of unity is one totally opposed to the idea of fundamental or serious conflict. This has played well to those who quite fairly feel that much of the partisanship on Capitol Hill is empty and meaninglessly spiteful. However, he has taken his message of pragmatic unity, of let's all just get along and work things out, and turned it into an approach to all political problems. King, on the other hand, saw no problem with combining the idea of unity with a politics of conflict. To somewhat crudely summarize the relevant part of his politics, he recognized that society was already divided, and that his antagonists were the source of this division. It was only through his movement, which stood in conflict with the source of division, that some kind of unity could be achieved - that blacks and whites could live in harmony. His politics and rhetoric was at times militant, and became increasingly so as he realized just how deep the inequalities in American society were, and how intransigent certain elements - at the top no less than the bottom - were. If a kind of social harmony was the aim of politics, it was not the means. And he recognized the necessity of polarization and ideological confrontation. Obama admits of no such divisions, and rejects the necessity of serious disagreement, even militant conflict, in politics.

One might say the race issue no longer requires the kinds of militancy it did in the past. That might be true. Or at least, it might be true that the race issue can't be resolved as purely a race issue. Regardless, these are the kinds of issues that at the very least should be raised, and on which a Black president would at least be willing to take a stand, rather than gloss over and keep at a distance. Any group can tell when they are being used yet kept at an arms length. Obama is a Black presidential candidate in precisely that sense - only insofar as it helps him win votes, but never to the extent that it might be dangerous.

Our Model Dictator

John Pilger has written a superb obituary on General Suharto, dictator of Indonesia for thirty years ago. As a whole, Pilger's piece reminds us that, for sheer callousness, the neo-cons have nothing on the political class during the Cold War. I quote below the bizarre and chilling conclusion to the piece:

Shortly before the death of Alan Clark, who under Thatcher was the minister responsible for supplying Suharto with most of his weapons, I interviewed him, and asked: "Did it bother you personally that you were causing such mayhem and human suffering?"

"No, not in the slightest," he replied. "It never entered my head."

"I ask the question because I read you are a vegetarian and are seriously concerned with the way animals are killed."

"Yeah?"

"Doesn't that concern extend to humans?"

"Curiously not."

There's No Such Thing As a Natural Disaster (I): Heat Waves

There is no such thing as a Natural Disaster. This seems like a strange thing to say. After all, from Hurricane Katrina to the European heat wave, haven't we seen nature's terror? In a series of posts, beginning today, I want to suggest something else: that in our technological age, there are no pure natural disasters. In fact, all natural events are socially mediated, and increasingly so. The impact of nature on human life is now more and more amenable to political and technological control.

To a degree, we already think this way, but in a distorted way. The theory of man-made global warming locates a human agency behind ostensible natural disasters. But the problem here is twofold. First, it often exaggerates the human impact. Hurricane Katrina, for instance, just was not caused by global warming, even if some hurricanes, or their increased intensity, might in the future be attributable to the human contribution to climate change. Second, more importantly, the impact of human activity is, on this narrative, largely considered to be negative. It is our effort to control nature, and bend it to our purposes, that has led to these unintended, devastating effects.

What really goes wrong here, is to overlook where individual and collective decisions (and non-decisions) have a far greater impact on the human outcomes of natural events. I'd like to use heat waves as my first illustration of the general point that there is no such thing as a natural disaster.

Heat waves are the most immediate way in which global warming is represented to us. From the European heat wave to the Greek forest fires to the San Diego wildfires, many take increasing temperatures to mean more heat waves. More heat waves, more death and destruction to human life. This is not necessarily so for a number of reasons.

The most immediate, and cheapest point, is 'hotter weather, fewer deaths' because cold is a greater killer than heat. For example, "Up to 50,000 more people die in the UK during the winter months than in the summer," and these numbers are as true in balmy Athens as wintry Siberia. Numerous scientific studies have demonstrated this, and, especially given that most climate change models show warming happening mostly during winter months, there is some reason not to be all that worried, at least in terms of the direct effects of changing temperatures. (I leave indirect impacts, like drought, flooding, etc... for other posts).

However, on its own, this is not decisive, because it still suggests that on the high heat end, things will be getting worse. What is interesting, however, is that this is not true either. Over the course of the twentieth century, despite the fact that temperatures in the United States have risen with each decade, morbidity and mortality from heat waves have not gotten worse by any measure. Indeed, scientific studies (and here) that asked the question “Have mortality rates changed on a decadal basis in conjunction with heat waves?” have found a resounding Yes. But the change has been a marked decline in mortality rates. From the 1960s to the 1990s, when the most rapid warming has occurred, mean mortality has dropped almost 50%. Indeed, according to one of these studies, in some Southern cities, like Charlotte and Miami, there “the populace
exhibits no elevated mortality on days with high [average temperatures]
for any decade in our record.”

The reason for this decline is social and technological. The main technological reasons have to do with improved medical facilities, forecasting techniques, and the availability of air-conditioning in homes, cars and public places. The main social reasons have to do with declining costs of air-conditioning, the creation of cooling centers for those without access to air-conditioning, especially the elderly, and city-wide heat wave management plans.

There is every reason to believe the declining mortality from heat waves will continue, as cities improve their heat-wave management plans, as air-conditioners become cheaper – and so long as energy remains cheap. Indeed, here is a very immediate and good reason for making cheap energy, rather than lower emissions, the top priority – so people can stay cool in hot temperatures, regardless of who caused them. In a later post I will discuss one final, all-important social factor in the impact of heat waves on human beings: inequality. The point here was just to show how significant the social factors, in terms of available technology and political planning, are in determining the impact of nature on mankind. Despite the dramatic rise in temperatures over the past forty years, heat waves have been having an ever dwindling effect. This is true even including such dramatic events as the Chicago heat wave of 1995, which I shall discuss in a later post.

There is no such thing as a natural disaster, and that’s a good thing.

Goodbye US Hegemony?

Up-comer Parag Khana, a fellow at the New America Foundation, has a large piece on the decline of US Hegemony in the NYTimes Magazine today. It's a piece more interesting in its description than prescription. What it describes is a 21st century dominated by a 'Big Three' - Europe, United States, and China - each vying for enlarged spheres of influence, and competing for the favor of a swath of 'second-world' countries like Brazil, India, Iran, and Turkey. At one point, Khana admits, "The new multicolor map of influence — a Venn diagram of overlapping American, Chinese and European influence — is a very fuzzy read. No more “They’re with us” or “He’s our S.O.B.” Mubarak, Musharraf, Malaysia’s Mahathir and a host of other second-world leaders have set a new standard for manipulative prowess: all tell the U.S. they are its friend while busily courting all sides." This is not a failure of Khana's analysis, I think it captures the fluidity of contemporary international relations very well. Even the idea of a 'Big Three' over-states the the case, as Europe is not obviously unified as a state-like power, and because depending on the issue area, such as trade policy, other large, conglomerate powers might be relevant (like the India-Brazil-China spoilers at the international trade negotiations).

Khana suggests a few initiatives for the US, in this new fluid, tripolar world, but they seem oddly out of step with the structural transformations he describes: 'channel your inner J.F.K.' 'talk about global interests' 'Pentagonize the State Department.' Much of this is Washingtonese, where buzzwords no longer summarize a policy so much as substitute for it. After all, if American hegemony is in decline because its economic influence is in decline, nothing less than revamping its industrial base is adequate. It is only at his fourth point that Khana starts to come face-to-face with the issues never quite addressed in the piece: "make the global economy work for us." Khana is never quite clear whether he believes a) international competition is necessary or the product of bad diplomacy and b) whether American hegemony would be a good thing or whether a trilateral world order is better. I suspect that is because Khana, like many foreign policy experts in Washington, does not want to ask the deeper question about whether there really is enough to go around, or whether the structure of world affairs forces nations into conflict with each other. Read between the lines and the essay speaks for itself. Ultimately, a redesigned hegemonic structure, in which the Big Three cooperate to carve up the world, while engaging in friendly competition within the structure of a global triumvirate, is more or less the best choice in the face of an inevitably unequal global distribution of power. All the hard questions wash away in a paragraph of feel good common-sense. But why exactly should there be Big Three in the first place? What about other principles, like equality and self-determination? Real reflection on international affairs seems to me to require more than just an examination of the available hard and soft power opportunities, even if they are a starting point. Surely researching and writing about foreign policy can be done independent of the advice one wants to give to the next president.

Obama the Conservative

More on Obama the conservative, this time from the British magazine Prospect. This is one of the most concise versions of the argument I've seen. Don't get me wrong, I don't think Hillary is the spitting-image of progress, and I am sick of the Clinton-dynasty. There are, however, fewer illusions surrounding her candidacy. (With the glaring exception of her 'experience' - as far as I can tell, she has far less than she claims, and many of her actual decisions, like voting for the war, have been wrong. What good is that kind of experience?) Obama seems to be attracting starry-eyed visions of change, transformation, new beginnings. He does that because he is an empty vessel, most of whose actual political statements are as pragmatic and boring as any other mainstream candidate.

The Endless Fear of Terrorism

Over at the NYTimes, John Tierney says we should expect an Endless Fear of Terrorism despite the fact that, as any sober-headed analysis suggests, the risk from terrorists is extremely small, and no greater than it has been in decades. A fair point, but by now pretty well-established. The more mysterious and difficult thing is why the culture of fear lingers, and what it is about in the first place. I think there are a number of dimensions to this, but over time, I've come to think the problem isn't with how we think about security but how we think about liberty. It is not so much a failure rationally to assess different threats - which is nonetheless a necessary step. It is more that we have a narrow conception of liberty, and a conception of liberty to which we are not all that strongly committed. That is probably one reason why it always seems like our freedom is under attack. It doesn't help that our political system reproduces the narrow horizons of the present (and here), and continues to define our liberties in terms of a base understanding of security. Lest we think that I'm speaking only of the right-wing in America, here is an article I wrote trying to demonstrate the politics of fear under-pinning the most popular left-wing ideology of the moment: environmentalism.

Climate Believers and Abolitionists

The New Scientist's Environment Blog linked today to a paper comparing the rhetoric of climate and slavery. The paper's claims are that climate skeptics occupy the same moral and intellectual space today that defenders of slavery did in the 1800s. The superficiality of the argument is barely worth mention, but the lack of self-consciousness is. As I've mentioned before, the language of 'climate-denier' is a much more suggestive and potent rhetoric than the weak attempt to win the argument against skeptics by association. If anything, the attempt to link climate skeptics to every moral hot-button moral atrocity, from slavery to the Holocaust, reveals just how (non)-science based the arguments about climate change have become. Scientific argument narrowly is about natural science, but more broadly is about the appeal to reason and human intelligence. While there is of course a place for stirring moral appeals in rational public debate, what the climate/slavery paper is an example of is something altogether different. Frustrated at their failure to convince a wider swath of humanity of their views than they would like, environmentalists have decided to engage in the rhetorical equivalent of bullying. The climate issue becomes one not just of right and wrong, but us and them, savior and killer. This makes even somewhat less heated discussions of political morality, let alone calm consideration of social and natural science, next to impossible. Any departure from the orthodoxy is associated with slave-ownership and nazism, rather than with the actual problems of climate change.

Padilla Update

A friendly reader reminded me that the current Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, was unfavorably involved in the Padilla case, back when Mukasey was a district court judge. He ruled that a U.S. citizen, arrested within the United States, could be imprisoned without trial. Yep, that's our Attorney General. A pillar upholding the great house of liberty.

Padilla Again

Yesterday, the major dailies reported a story on how Jose Padilla, the American citizen detained as an "enemy combatant, received 17 Years for "terrorism-related charges." The Washington Post called this "a major setback in a terrorism prosecution for the Justice Department." It is a major setback because prosecutors had been forced to drop the real terrorism charges - dirty bomb allegations, especially - and go for lower-level category of 'terrorism-related' criminal activities. It also mean the Justice Department had to drop its demand for life imprisonment. This is, in fact, a pattern in terrorism prosecutions, which I and others have documented (I did it here and on my formerly co-edited blog here; as have others here and here, and which an internal GAO audit even admitted.) The pattern is not limited to inflated statistics, but rather to a whole host of government actions. First, the DOJ makes a high profile arrest, holds a very public news conference, and perhaps links the arrest and pending prosecution to other 'terrorist cells' like those in 'Detroit, Seattle, and Buffalo' (all of which turned out to be far less than claimed.) Then the prosecution gets under way, and, because there is still due process for most alleged terrorists,* the government actually has to start proving its allegations. Once the truth comes out, and these alleged terrorists turn out to be a mix of cranks, isolated actors with half-baked plans, or just plain victims of entrapment, the government is forced to drop the most serious charges and prosecute, or strike deals, on lesser charges. It is only because of the radical expansion of those crimes considered 'terrorism-related' (such as visa fraud or other immigration and work violations, or fencing of stolen goods to foreign buyers), and in some cases the very low burden of proof and overbroad definition of terrorism activities - especially in the case of providing 'material-support for terrorism' - that so many of these cases still fall under 'terrorism-related convictions.' In many cases the government goes for a plea bargain because it knows it can't win its case. This, for instance, is what happened with Padilla's original case, in which he got 3 1/2 years. At this point, there is just no credibility to any of the government's terrorism-related prosecutions or broader claims. Every report on one of these cases should be read with a pound of salt.


*The Padilla case is more complicated because originally he was denied nearly every possible civi**l right as an 'enemy combatant.' It was only under threat of Supreme Court review that the administration started playing games and moved Padilla to civilian court - and had actually to start making a case against him.

NATO's Humanitarian Hegemony

Key NATO leaders released a manifesto yesterday claiming, among other things, that the West should reserve a pre-emptive nuclear strike option in the current security environment. What is this security environment? The main security threats are "political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism, the 'dark side' of globalization, meaning international terrorism, organized crime and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, climate change, the weakening of nation states as well as of organizations such as the UN, NATO and the EU." What is the connection between pre-emptive nuclear strike and these threats? It can't be the threats they pose. After all, threats one and two are more or less the same thing, and neither can be nuked. What good is the phenomenally blunt weapon of a nuclear weapon against small networks of frankly not very dangerous criminals and terrorists? As for climate change, does NATO propose to induce a nuclear winter to counteract the fossil fuel summer? The strangest, but most indicative, is the weakening of NATO itself. In a wondrously self-evident line of argument, it appears that the solution to the weakening of institutions like NATO is to...strengthen them. Here, oddly enough, is where the link with pre-emptive nuclear strike, not as an actual military option, but as a political posture, makes 'sense.'

Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has struggled to justify its existence, let alone define its mission. As a Western military alliance in which the US was first among equals, only the threat of communism gave credence to the idea that NATO really was a collective security umbrella. In the early 1990s, it just looked like one amongst many international institutions that had outlived its usefulness. The only thing it could think to do was expand, replacing any long-term purpose with the short term goal of extending its reach. The first time it appeared to possess any virtues relevant to post Cold War international affairs was with the illegal bombing of ex-Yugoslavia in 1998-9. Unable to get UN authorization for the intervention, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair looked to an institution easier to control, yet possessing a modicum of international legitimacy. After the bombing, the UN extended ex-post legitimacy to the illegal intervention; the might makes right lesson was not lost on the world, especially NATO. The sudden uptick of American self-assertion under Bush appeared to eclipse even NATO, as Bush received neither UN authorization nor NATO approval for the invasion of Iraq. However, the lack of legitimacy for the Iraq War has made it clear that some degree of multilateral cooperation is even in the US' interest. In the 1990s the moral imperatives of 'humanitarianism' and other seemingly pressing crises made the creaky instruments of international law and UN procedures seem worse than useless, and in the 2000s, it became clear to world leaders that some degree of cooperation was in a common interest, if for no other reason than to remind any future great power aspirants who currently ruled the globe. Enter NATO: cooperative, yet firmly in control of the great powers, and not so bound by arduous UN procedures.

In the power vacuum that only grows with the delegitimation of American power under Bush, NATO sees an opportunity. What unites humanitarian crises, terrorism, global warming, and failed states is that they all seem like problems that can't be resolved within the existing architecture of international law and institutions. An institution that projects power, emotes pure strength, gives the impression it can bring order to the political chaos. Enter the nuclear posture - strategically useless, politically useful. In fact, NATO is no more able to bring order than the US or UN because the disorder is more the product of international political confusion than serious threats. Major wars are down, so is the violence from civil wars, and terrorism just does not kill very many people. What threats that do exist are more appropriately handled by low-level police efforts and reasonable international laws than NATO nukes. A sheer show of strength is no substitute for political purpose, nor does it even bring minimal security. To justify its posture, NATO will no doubt wish to prove its strength - which means an inappropriate show of force somewhere, an intervention that will increase the very chaos it wishes to suppress.

What Does Climate Skeptic Mean?

Climate-Resistance has a post this week on the problem with separating the climate change debate into skeptic and believers, and why this leads to problems with the website I recommended called Climate Debate Daily. While I think CDD is still a very useful website, C-R makes a good point: "One of our main quibbles with the way the climate change debate is presented is precisely that the IPCC "consensus" belies a broad range of nuanced positions and arguments - both scientific and political - as does the so-called sceptic camp." A comment to the C-R post illustrates the problem. Roger Pielke Sr., who has done very important work on the social impact of natural disasters, among other things, and who runs an important blog is classified on CDD as a 'skeptic.' What makes him a skeptic? He believes that some warming is due to human emission of greenhouse gases and supports the development of alternative energy. He just doesn't believe that global warming deserves to be treated as an imminent crisis, and doesn't support an emphasis on greenhouse gas reductions. In other words, it is his political position, not his scientific beliefs, that make him a 'skeptic.' That he doesn't toe-the-line with climate ideology, rather than climate science, is what makes him a skeptic. When a political debate is divides into religious categories - 'skeptic' and 'believer' - we already know there will be more heat than light. But in this case, what makes the issue even worse, is that the line between science and politics is blurred by this religious language. The political position is seen to derive directly from the science, when it shouldn't, and disputing either the science *or* the politics is seen as a violating the same general orthodoxy.

What do we remember about Katrina?

Immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi, devastating New Orleans, there was a sudden uptick of interest in the relationship between race and urban poverty. An all too brief, but worthy, debate over whether at heart, the loss of thousands of homes, failed evacuation, and governmental unresponsiveness was a race issue or a class issue. Adolph Reed's excellent piece in The Nation, soon after Katrina, made some of the best points during the immediate, post-disaster reaction:

"Class will almost certainly turn out to be a better predictor than race of who was able to evacuate, who drowned, who was left to fester in the Superdome or on overpasses, who is stuck in shelters in Houston or Baton Rouge, or who is randomly dispersed to the four winds. I'm certain that class is also a better predictor than race of whose emotional attachments to place will be factored into plans for reconstructing the city."

More telling, however, than the struggle to determine the relationship between race and class in the whole affair, is how rapidly this political debate was eclipsed by an altogether different debate. Within a few weeks, once the immediate images of poor blacks struggling to find shelter faded off the front pages, and once the main papers had pushed inside the stories about how those who had evacuated could not return, or did not want to because there were no jobs or money for reconstruction, and because the city government was organizing reconstruction in a way that kept the poor and jobless out. Once these stories disappeared, it became socially acceptable to replace these issues, which raised awkward questions that most in the mainstream just didn't want to face, with a more familiar hobbyhorse: global warming.

Katrina factored heavily in Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, in which he claimed we would see more Katrina's in the future. In fact, even before his movie hit the theaters, and only a few weeks after the hurricane had hit New Orleans, Gore was already giving speeches about how the real lesson of Katrina is that we should "deal with the underlying causes of global warming." The lesson, then, was not underdevelopment and poverty in the most developed country on earth, it was not about social inequality and the long slow decline of so many American cities after the fiscal crisis of state and city governments in the 1970s - a decline that halted so many kinds of public investment. The lesson wasn't even really that a bit better investment in reinforcing the levees would have done the trick. No, that would have been too specific and appropriate to the tragedy. Instead, the most lasting interpretation of Katrina has been that it's a lesson in the perils of industrial development, and the rapidity with which we must move away from universalizing that goal to all areas and people - within and across nations.

This despite the fact that even Gore admitted that Katrina itself could not be blamed on global warming, as the effects of actually man-made warming are still too faint to be detected in extreme weather events like hurricanes. In fact, the science is even more ambiguous than that. Over at a new blog I discovered, there is a discussion of a recent scientific paper in the Journal of Climate, which warns against concluding that just because there have been a few stronger, landfalling hurricanes in the 1990s, that this will increase with global warming: "Although it would be inappropriate for us to suggest that there is no linkage between global warming and hurricanes, it’s similar inappropriate to summarily dismiss the role of natural cycles in hurricane behavior."

Really, I don't want to quibble over the science at that level, because it's not the most crucial point. What bothers me more is the way in which the global warming argument replaced the inequality discussion, and was used to draw exactly the opposite conclusions one might if one's major concern were poverty and underdevelopment. It would be better to remember what happened after Katrina as a social disaster, rather than a natural disaster. Social disasters demand political responses, rather than produce "moral imperatives." These are political responses that require us to think about the kinds of conflicts of interest, long-standing problems of social organization and inequality, which tend to get washed away in the blind panic about "moral imperatives to face global warming." Moreover, it is just more accurate to understand Katrina as a social disaster. Had New Orleans been richer, with a larger budget, and more politically engaged public, much of what happened could have been avoided, both because long-term problems (like strengthening levees) would not have been as severe, and short-term response would have been more effective. Indeed, asking so many cities in the third world not partake of the industrialization process that allows them to build dams and levees in the first place, only leaves them as or more vulnerable to hurricanes, no matter what their natural cause. If anything, concluding that Katrina teaches us the dangers of industrialization only threatens to repeat the tragedy, rather than help us go beyond it.

The Visionary Minimalist?

Over at TNR, Cass Sunstein has a very good article about Obama. I say very good because it helps prove a point I have been making to my pro-Obama friends that Obama is actually pretty conservative. Sunstein’s general argument is that Obama is a minimalist when it comes to thinking about constitutional issues, or really issues of fundamental importance to us all. Minimalists “gravitate toward the least controversial grounds” for deciding cases and reject “sweeping theories about equality and the Constitution's commander-in-chief clause.” Whatever the merits or demerits this attitude has as a theory of how to be a Supreme Court Justice, when translated into the attitudes of a political leader, it’s a recipe for middle-of-the-road pragmatism that is the opposite of real change. I think phrases like the following are perfect examples:

“Like all minimalists, Obama believes that real change usually requires consensus, learning, and accommodation--a belief directly reflected in many of his policies.”

This is a true statement only if real change means not very much change at all. What Obama does is piggyback on the word change’s radical connotation, while giving it a conservative denotation. It sounds good, but it’s really just a middle path. What Sunstein writes on Obama’s economics is another good example of this Janus-faced change. Sunstein likes that Obama thinks Dems need to think about the problems minimum wage poses to employers, while also likes that Obama prefers the Earned Income Tax Credit. But the EITC is far less useful, and more bureaucratically complex, than the minimum wage. It is also as tokenistic as anti-poverty efforts get.

“Obama's promise of change is credible in part because of his brand of minimalism.”

This makes no sense. If your first step is to reject big transformative ideas, the idea of conflict in politics, and taking a side; in other words, if what makes you a minimalist is first affirming the fundamental soundness of the status quo; then what kind of change is really possible within those boundaries? This is barely even reformism.

The only merit to Obama is a kind of rejection of the culture wars, which is really there across the board in the Dems. But really, what’s most interesting about him is that he manages to make it all about change and personality, when his politics is fundamentally managerial and technocratic. After all, if there are no real, substantive divides, and the point is to get beyond empty partisan battles to a politics of consensus, what is politics about? It becomes about intelligently administering those programs everybody ostensibly agrees about. Obama’s role is just to get everybody on board with these programs, whatever they may be, and cast anyone who objects as an uncooperative radical, hard-headed fundamentalist, out of step with the common sense. Who wants that kind of change?

It’s a very good article, actually, because it shows just how conservative Obama is. I think phrases like this are perfect examples:

“Like all minimalists, Obama believes that real change usually requires consensus, learning, and accommodation--a belief directly reflected in many of his policies.”

This is a true statement only if real change means not very much change at all. Obama is doing to the word change what advertising does to the word revolution. Ride on the back of his radical connotation, while giving it a conservative denotation. The stuff on Obama’s economics is another good example. The EITC is a canard, the minimum wage actually useful to labor.

“Obama's promise of change is credible in part because of his brand of minimalism.”

Of course, this makes no sense. If your first step is to reject big transformative ideas, the idea of conflict in politics, and taking a side; in other words, if what makes you a minimalist is first affirming the fundamental soundness of the status quo; then what kind of change is really possible within those boundaries? This is barely even reformism.

The only merit to Obama is a kind of rejection of the culture wars, which is really there across the board in the Dems. But really, what’s most interesting about him is that he manages to make it all about change and personality, when his politics is fundamentally managerial and technocratic. After all, if there are no real, substantive divides, and the point is to get beyond empty partisan battles to a politics of consensus, what is politics about? Intelligently administering those programs everybody ostensibly agrees about. Obama’s role is just to get everybody on board with these programs, whatever they may be, and cast anyone who objects as an uncooperative radical, hard-headed fundamentalist, out of step with the common sense. Who the hell wants that?

The 'Facts' of Climate Change?

Andrew Revkin, the NYTimes' major climate reporter, has a post on "basic facets" of the climate debate that "are not in reasonable dispute." He sees this as a "foundation for weighing policies" and for shifting "this discussion away from unresolvable whipsaw debates." It's a good post, and it reveals a number of things that are wrong with the climate change debate - though in ways I don't think Revkin intended.

First, nothing is gained by calling something indisputable. If it's indisputable, then nobody will dispute it. If someone disputes it, then it is disputable, and calling indisputable is a debater's trick, aimed at making the disputer look crazy, irrelevant or immoral. Phrases like "the science is over" are not only not true - climate science at all levels is still underdeveloped and evolving - but are generally pitched to favor a political position ('the globe is in crisis!'), rather than scientific conclusion. It is in that category of rhetorical devices that include calling someone a 'climate-denier,' as if to disagree with environmentalists were the moral equivalent of holocaust denial. To his credit, Revkin is trying to avoid the worst of this, but his list reproduces it nonetheless.

Second, though the list initially presents itself as ten scientific conclusions, it fast bleeds into social and moral arguments that are even more disputable than scientific facts. The first facet, it is true, is scientific - "carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas." But by point 4 we start to see a blurring of the lines:

"Coal is still abundant, has helped today’s industrial powers become rich, and is helping poorer countries grow their economies. But it comes with significant environmental and social costs (scoured landscapes, carbon dioxide, around 4,000 deaths a year in Chinese mines, tens of thousands of premature deaths from respiratory ailments linked to sooty pollution)."

Point five is similar:

"Oil is still reasonably abundant and fairly cheap, but comes with a large external price tag including international conflict, pollution, and (of course) carbon dioxide."

To take just one way in which these are not mere (and indisputable) scientific facts, there is no reason why the very existence of coal mining causes mining deaths. That is dependent not upon the properties of coal, but upon the way the Chinese organize coal mining. If workers were better represented politically, and had more control over the mining process, and had safer mining technology, I'm sure 4000 wouldn't die a year. Moreover, there are indeed negative externalities to fossil fuel production and use. However, there are also numerous positive externalities. Cheap energy allows people greater mobility, more leisure time at night, and to be emancipated from various kinds of toil and drudgery because automated tools can take their place. It allows people to cool their homes during the summer, and warm their homes during the winter, both of which contribute substantially to reducing temperature related morbidity. Indeed, the most significant relationship between industrialization (on the back of fossil fuel) and health is the radical improvement in life expectancy. Just this century, worldwide life expectancy has more than doubled, an unprecedented improvement in human history. So too have other health factors like height and weight.* It is simply a prejudice common to environmentalist arguments about pollution and fossil fuels that most of the intended effects of using coal and oil are positive but most of the unintended effects are negative. It is also an unfounded assumption, and unworthy moral judgment, that somehow the benefits are mainly wasteful luxuries (driving big cars around, jet-setting across the globe, keeping the houselights on, having plenty of consumer products) while the negative externalities are mainly bad for sheer survival (war, cancer, respiratory disease.) It's much more complex than that. Moreover, all this can't be appreciated unless we acknowledge that a number of social issues and moral ideas are being smuggled in here as 'indisputable facts.'

Finally, there is nothing wrong with talking about the science of climate change. That is one area where there should be vigorous discussion, because the facts are one dimension of the debate. But as I intend to demonstrate in future posts, I don't think the facts, even if we agreed on them, would settle very much at all about what we should do. That is to say, for the sake of argument, let's say the conclusions of the IPCC about the science of climate change really were the indisputable truth. This science would be unable to tell us what our political response should be. That is because the science is only one dimension of the argument. There are serious differences over matters of moral principle and social organization that are also at stake. Whether we should invest time, money and energy into mitigation vs. adaptation strategies - reducing greenhouse gas emissions or developing technologies to adapt to climate change - raises social and political questions that simply are not the domain of natural science. I think that thinking through all the dimensions of climate change suggest we should not invest in mitigation strategies, but rather in technologies that help us adapt to climate change, in and political reforms that make society more equal. In this post, I can't substantiate that claim. But what is clear enough is that the science, even when distinguished from other matters, doesn't actually take us as far as people would like it to.



I will get the exact, page number reference for these figures in the next week - I left the book at the office!