Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Right, Wrong and Wronger

Joe Nocera has been a welcome addition to the New York Times op-ed page since his start there as a regular some months ago. On Tuesday he wrote another fine column, this one (“Germany Cuts Off Its Nose”) on why the current German leadership is on a path to do what he thinks, in retrospect, will look completely insane––not to mention counterproductive for Germany's own interests. Germany needs to bail out Europe’s insolvent euro zone economies, he argues. It should have done it with Greece when the problem was still small, but it had better do it now lest the euro zone itself collapse. He writes: “Don't they realize that the collapse of the euro zone––unthinkable year ago; perhaps inevitable now––will hurt Germany much more than Greece?”


The Germans don’t have a lot of good choices right now, but basically Nocera is right. The Germans need to do for the European Union now what the U.S. government did for the U.S. economy after September 2008 by setting up the TARP program. Just as we had to hold our nose then and do some disagreeable things in the interest of a larger good, so do the Germans now—and perhaps they can sort out the underlying problems later, more effectively, at any rate, that we have yet done on this side of the Atlantic. What is ever more unusual and hence appreciated (at least by me) is the fact that Nocera uses economic history, in this case mainly from the interwar period, to bolster his argument.


I won't repeat that argument in detail––anyone can read it for himself––but I will mention that Nocera's basic argument sounded loudly in Berlin yesterday thanks to a speech by the Polish Foreign Minister, Radek Sikorski. (Constance Steltzenmuller offers a good and sympathetic description of it in Transatlantic Trends––well worth reading.) Yet Sikorski could not under the circumstances (and Steltzenmuller did not for reasons of her own) try to explain the source of German reluctance to stand forth and lead Europe out of its crisis, as only a large, stable and wealthy Germany today can do. Nocera, on the other hand, did name the source, but he unfortunately botched its interpretation.


Nocera points out that Germany's reluctance to bail out Europe's “Club Med”, or PIIGS, countries is based on a sense of violated virtue. It's unfair, Germans think, to tease moral hazard by enabling profligate and irresponsible behavior in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain and other laggard countries. (France and Belgium are rarely mentioned in this group, but that may be only for the time being, one fears.) Nocera adds that the reaction to an earlier column about the need to reduce principal on underwater mortgages here in the United States, necessary to get the economy going again in everyone's interest, was overwhelmingly negative based on the same kind of sentiment: It's not fair, his critics asserted, for people who acted irresponsibly to be bailed out, while those who acted virtuously get stuck with the bill.


All true, but Nocera jumps the track by setting up a false dichotomy between morality and pragmatism. He writes that we need to “stop obsessing about what is fair. . . . The only thing that should matter is what works.” This is a false opposition because it confuses a superficial appreciation of morality with a more sophisticated, fully reasoned version. What “works” can be, and even to a non-utilitarianist usually is, very moral indeed if in the longer run it saves an entire society from needless rack and ruin.


The real dilemma here is how to define what works in which longer run, for the longer run, if you think about it, is not one undifferentiated, amorphous blob of time stretched out before us. German financial and political elites are not completely off-base in arguing that making other members of the euro zone raise themselves up to northern European “best practice” is not just “moral” but is also what will truly “work” best in the longer long run. As many members of these elites see it, that’s the only way to save the euro in perpetuity and pave the way to closer economic and political union—assuming for a moment one thinks that even possible in the absence of a European demos, or any near-term prospect of one….but that is another story. But the EU will never get to the longer run to test the proposition of a demos-less union if the whole thing goes down the tubes now—that’s the proximate point Nocera is making, it seems to me.


The dilemma then becomes clear: What’s best for the mid-long run, so to speak, works at cross-purposes with what’s best for the longer-long run. For the former, one must discount moral hazard in order to survive to fight another day; for the latter, discounting moral hazard puts the brass ring ever further from Europe’s grasp. As I see it, the German elite is letting the highly improbably best become the enemy of the urgently necessary good enough for government work.


The Germans are not wrong to care about morality; the problem politically in Berlin today is that most of them are not very good at understanding moral behavior in its fuller, more sophisticated manifestation. Just as the German penchant for pacifism, understandable though it may be, seems to many Germans very moral but in fact is not, so their unwillingness to reward improvidence is, for most, shortsighted simply because not doing so threatens much worse near-term consequences for everybody in Europe. (Yesterday’s dramatic central banks intervention, led by the U.S. Federal Reserve, buys needed time, but in some ways it complicates both the problem and Germany’s decision……we shall see what we shall see.)


Both attitudes reflect shirtsleeve morality rather than the real thing––points of view that feel right and look good in mixed company, but aren't right at all. Just as pacifism in the face of aggression often leads to enormities of historic proportion––as Germans, more than most people, should realize––so an insistence on anal-retentive economic behavior in this case is likely to lead to economic calamity, and not just in Europe. While there are many exceptions (I think I’ve met most of them), large numbers of Germans reason like Neville Chamberlain about security issues when, by all that is right and fair in history's light, they should be followers of Winston Churchill. Similarly, many Germans today reason about matters of political economy like a Puritan when they should be thinking more along the lines of a potlatch provider.


As for Joe Nocera, he is right in his analysis of the current situation, and what Germany ought to do for its own and the common European good in the near term. But he is wrong to contrast pragmatism with morality as though the two were mutually exclusive opposites.


Finally, although Nocera names the source, he is understandably reluctant to speculate on why the Germans are taking what amounts to a morally based but morally counterproductive perspective. No one can blame him for not delving deeper in a less–then–thousand-word newspaper column. But I have a theory.


If I may simplify a fair bit, let me put it tersely: The German generations that experienced first the Great War and then the Nazi era came to the conclusion that Germans had behaved immorally, and that Germany’s lack of democracy was somehow associated with or the cause of that immorality. After World War II, as Germany became a democracy, the most important thing in Germany’s reborn political culture was to seize the moral high ground in compensation for the perception that Germany had been deeply and destructively immoral, for some going all way back to 1870.


The German elite has proved so effective at seizing the moral high ground, or believing that it has done so, that it has conditioned its entire political syntax so that no other mode of thought or debate is possible except one grounded in what is taken (sometimes correctly, sometimes superficially and hence misleadingly) to be morality. Hence the attitude taken by most ordinary people now in Germany toward the Greeks, the Italians and the whole mess in general: We must do the "right" thing, and the right thing cannot possibly involve rewarding a lack of virtue. The idea that doing the right thing in the longer run involves some tactical compromise of principles right now seems not to occur to most as a possibility. These Germans remind me some of Henry Clay, who once said, as you probably know, that he would rather be right than elected. (Personally, I wish he had been elected: maybe we would have been spared the Civil War.)


Alas, those who insist on morality as the lodestone of all political behavior, but can only reckon what morality means in the shirtsleeves short term, are the bane of history itself. It is often said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it is a statement nevertheless too seldom heeded.



Tuesday, November 15, 2011

On Fun with Hobbies, Religion, U.S. Foreign Policy and Henry Kissinger

One of my admittedly arcane little hobbies is to discover behavior in our avowedly secular society here in 21st-century America that looks, feels and quacks not like a duck, but like what in earlier ages would have been recognized as obviously religious in character.

When I describe a behavior as religious in character I mean something quite specific but not necessarily obvious: I mean a behavior whose logical syntax differs from other modes of behavior, such as instrumental behavior of the sort necessary to, say, design and build a garage or go shopping for dinner ingredients, in that it generates questions, and at least tentative answers, concerning generally more abstract and, as best I can tell, universal concerns. Among these are the mysteries of mortality, the sources of love and other social bonds, the stunning connectedness of causality in the world, the nature of the beautiful in the context of the sacred, and above all the human capacity for moral reasoning (essentially, for the philosophically literate, cosmology, epistemology, logic, aesthetics and ethics).

Every civilization in human history has had religion, if by religion one means the focus on such abstract but cloying subjects as almost invariably accompanied by ritual for purposes of social bonding, intersubjectivity and catharsis in relation to them. Our civilization also has religion even if the actual religion in which we believe, the one that aims at and promises to answer such questions, is often something other then what we call “religion.” In the temples of much organized American religion today, ritual has been denatured into mere ceremony. For the educated and the upscale, genuine religious behavior, defined as I have done so above, goes on elsewhere, generally unawares, and it is called something else if it is called anything at all. When it comes to the nature of consciousness and what used to be called ethical behavior, for example, the educated and the upscale these days find more genuine religion in the exploits and interpretations of neuroscience than they do in any Bible. On a somewhat more pedestrian level, supposed non-believers who would never go to a clergyman for advice think nothing of going to a psychiatrist, a professional counselor of this or that description, or even to a “new age” pyramid-power svengali (eg., palm-reading for the Bvlgari set). None of the latter, of course, has anything to do with “religion”……perish the thought.



There is another domain, however, that has long been a repository for religious behavior on the part of Americans but that has for many decades, accumulating by now into centuries, been called something else: foreign policy. Before the United States had a serious foreign policy, or much of a need for one beyond the exigencies of living in North America with the remnants of the British, French and Spanish empires, there was always missionary work. “America is a nation with the soul of the church”, said G.K. Chesterton, and he among many were really onto something.

Not that it matters, but on several occasions in my writings about U.S. foreign policy over the years I have insisted that much of what we do, or would do if only we could, is missionary work in secular drag.[1] In a fairly recent essay evaluating the 9/11 decade (“Reflections on the 9/11 Decade”), for example, I wrote:



American political culture is not as secular as most Americans think it is: The contemporary American idea of democracy is an attenuated expression of aspects of Anglo-American Protestant Christian tradition. Our longing to spread it to the Muslims is the 21st-century version of what was, in the 19th-century, a much more honest and self-aware missionary movement. . . . Looking at U.S. behavior in the 9/11 decade as a manifestation of a secularized political theology actually explains far more than the standard parsing of the usual-suspects schools of thought approach. . . . Indeed, America at war after 9/11 became, in the late Michael Kelly’s words, “a secular evangelism, armed.”


All that said, by far the most impressive articulation of this thesis is that of James Kurth, professor of political science at Swarthmore College for many years—and just by the way an Episcopalian deacon—in his magisterial essay “The Protestant Deformation” (The American Interest, Winter 2005, which is an extension and update of the original in the Spring 1998 Orbis). At one point, as he traced the transformation of the original Protestant religion into what he called a secular heresy, Kurth wrote of American foreign policy in the 20th century:


Analysts have debated for decades the relative influence of different factors in the shaping of American foreign policy. . . . In the 20th century, it seemed abundantly clear that one could (and should) write the history of American foreign policy with no reference to Protestantism whatsoever. This was, and remains, a mistake. American foreign policy has been and continues to be shaped by the Protestant origins of the United States. . . . [A] characteristic pattern had developed in the conduct of American foreign policy in peacetime. When a country was strong in relation to the United States, the United States . . . acted toward that country in ways similar to those of the other great powers. In contrast, when a country was weak in relation to the United States, American foreign policy was marked by "idealism" (really secularized Protestantism)—by the drive to convert that country to free markets and liberal democracy. The United States sought to remake that country according to the tenets of the American Creed.



Let me now reveal why it occurs to me to tell you all this: Henry Kissinger.


I am a long-time admirer of Dr. Kissinger. I know him personally if glancingly, having met with him a few times and dined with him once some years ago along with the late Alexander M. Haig, Jr. I am no fan of his recent China book, but I think that even at his advanced age Kissinger has no peer when it comes to getting at the gist of things in the invariably complex convolutions of international politics. And so, given my hobby and my anchoring take on the sources of American foreign policy, you can imagine my delight upon reading what Dr. Kissinger had to say in this past Sunday’s New York Times book review section (“The Age of Kennan,” November 10, 2011) in what was billed as a review of a John Lewis Gaddis’s new book, a decade and more in the making, on George F. Kennan.

Kissinger wrote an essay of very high quality, but a book review essay it was not: John Lewis Gaddis pretty much disappears from the text. But in the course of his peroration on the age of George F. Kennan, Kissinger had this to say, almost in passing, of years 1946-47:


At this stage, Kennan served a country that had not yet learned the distinction between the conversion and the evolution of an adversary––if indeed it ever will. Conversion entails inducing an adversary to break with its past in one comprehensive act rude gesture. Evolution involves a gradual process, a willingness to pursue one’s ultimate foreign policy goal in imperfect stages. . . . The issue [of dealing with the USSR] became an aspect of the perennial debate between the realism stressing the importance of assessing power relationships and an idealism conflating moral impulses with historical inevitability.


Kurth also specifically invoked the metaphor of conversion (and much more—you should read the essay if you have not yet done so, for no summary can do it full justice). I, too, implied that this was the real gist of the Bush Administration’s so-called forward strategy for freedom, and that the locals were entirely correct to interpret it as an effort at religious conversion. But to now have Henry Kissinger make reference to the identical mode of explanation, I must say, is gratifying.

As far as I know (but I might have missed something), in all of Kissinger’s writings heretofore he has avoided explicit reference to the essentially religious modalities of American idealism. Now he has come out into the open on this; I don’t know why, or why now. The next time I see him I will be sure to ask him about this. I hope to be able to report back on his answer.



By the way, I know of only one other member of my hobby club: Walter Russell Mead. Doubtless there are more with similar interests. If you are one, or wish to join, you are most welcome! Let’s trade stories and observations. Aren’t hobbies such fun?!



[1]On occasion I have been explicit about this; see “Die bewaffneten Missionare”, Die Zeit, January 30, 2003 [reprinted in Michael Thumann, ed., Der Islam und der Westen (Berlin: Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003)].

Thursday, November 10, 2011

On the Sociology of Improbable Beliefs

Having written such a serious post about Smart car issues recently, I thought I would lighten things up a bit with some remarks about the sociology of religion.



It occurred to me recently that one somewhat glib way to define a religious believer is to say that he (or she) is a person who counts every other religion’s narrative as impossibly far-fetched, except his own. (It may be that my reading something about a Broadway show that mocks Mormonism is what accidentally stimulated this thought, or pushed it from its hiding places in my head into consciousness, but that is not important.) If one puts aside Unitarianism and a few other rather bland, intellectualized modern products (defined as any “religious” form in which ceremony has displaced ritual), it is striking how deep in the mythic consciousness (I mean “mythic consciousness” very specifically, tied to the understanding of Ernest Cassirer notably in the second volume of his The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms; but that is another story) are the stories at the base of religious belief—and not just of the Abrahamic religions and their offshoots, but of all religions, as far as I can tell. I used to think this was just a coincidence, or more likely, an atavism from a pre-scientific, magical-efficacy age in human development. Now I have come to understand, or at least to suspect, that there is something else going on here.

One of the several reasons that every civilization, even every culture short of the august status of a civilization, has something like a religion is that it defines the boundaries between who is in the group and who is outside of it. Nicholas Wade recently wrote a book about this which strikes me as in the main on target, even if it’s a little fuzzy on the chicken-and-egg question of what came first, social-cohesion producing ritual or religion: The Faith Instinct (Penguin, 2010). But Wade doesn’t speculate much as to the character of religious/mythological narratives. A belief in the very improbable may function as a kind of loyalty test to the group.

It is not that people do not really believe outlandish origins stories; they obviously do believe them much, if not most of the time—although it is worth thinking about what the verb “to believe” actually means in different phenomenological contexts. (In a magical efficacy suffused mythical culture, believing in the improbable depends on the definition of the improbable, and in such cultures that word obviously means something different than it does in the 21st century cultural West.) Rather, I am postulating that, as social animals, the coherence of the group and its capacity as a group to defend its interests trumps, in social-evolutionary terms, the truth value of what is believed. People will conform even to outlandish beliefs, as Solomon Asch proved, if the social dynamics are right. And part of the social dynamic involved in transmitting religious cosmologies concerns the authority of the elders who are handing the beliefs down to younger generations. If the younger generation wants the authority and status of leadership, the context is such that they need not only to believe privately, but be willing to preach publicly, belief in the improbable. The function of leadership, which acquires it power on the basis of inherited authority first before it is ratified by performance in office, is in part to articulate the improbable that can serve as the basis for group cohesion and high morale.

Indeed, if we take the insights of cognitive dissonance seriously, we may hypothesize further that the more outlandish the thing that people have to believe to be part of the group, the more loyal to the group they are liable to be once they manage to swallow and internalize those beliefs. We see this phenomenon illustrated in the famous book by Leon Festinger and his colleagues, When Prophecy Fails, about the 19th-century Millerites—the present-day Seventh Day Adventists. (Festinger, as you may know, coined the term “cognitive dissonance.”) If this is the case, then the improbability of religious narratives is not coincidental at all, but is instead essential to their social function.

This, of course, says nothing about the truth value of the beliefs. I can believe at the same time that the Cecil B. DeMille version of Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea was both necessary for the coherence of the Israelite tribes, and that it happens also to have been true. Or I can believe the former but think it is not literally true. What I think, however, has no social relevance unless I say it out loud in a crowd. Christians can “believe” in the immaculate conception, the resurrection, and transubstantiation as means to create social coherence across ethnic lines, especially at times of intense social flux and stress, and still believe that these things are true—or not. Logically, if not sociologically, the two need have nothing to do with one another.



I put this point in a private note to Peter Berger, a preeminent sociologist of religion and someone who happens to be an editorial board member of The American Interest. Professor Berger has been one of my heroes ever since I read as a graduate student both The Sacred Canopy and his book, co-authored with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. I asked him simply if, in his vast reading in this field, he has ever come across this hypothesis of mine, or hints of it, and if so to point me to sources so that I could follow up and possibly refine it. I apologized for the presumption of using him as a kind of reference librarian, but I pleaded both that this is partly what friends are for and, more important, that if anybody knew the answer to my question, it was him. His answer truly delighted me.

Peter credited me with an original sociological point, but was immediately able to find those hints I suspected had to exist. The “core idea is not new”, he said, and directed me to the succinct remark of the early Latin church father Tertullian (c.160 – c.220): "Credo quia absurdum", or, in English, “I believe because it is absurd.” There are several ways to parse what Tertullian meant. He might have meant that one has to “believe” such a thing, by which he in turn meant “take on faith”, because there is no other way to come to surety about it. He might also have been implying that the status of cosmic, or mystical, truth overrides than of empirical truth, a view that sees the material world as epiphenomenal and not the other way around. This latter notion is of course compatible with the former parsing and need not be seen as an alternative to it. But for our limited purposes here it doesn’t really matter.

In the sociology of religion, Peter noted that Durkheim implies a similar point in his classical work The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. There is a passage where he explains the (from his viewpoint “absurd”) beliefs and rituals of Australian Aboriginees as “having the sole empirical function of supporting collective solidarity.” But Durkheim does not elevate the observation into a general point or make it a part of his main theoretical apparatus.

Finally, Peter reminded me that his early interest in the sociology of religious sects led him to define a sect by the rigid cognitive boundaries it set up. “I asked myself from the beginning”, he wrote me, “How can people hold such obviously improbable beliefs?” It was in this context that he coined the phrase “plausibility structure”, which, in harmony with Asch and Festinger, suggests that given the right social context, a person will believe just about anything (and do just about anything as a consequence, as we all learned as late teens from reading William Golding’s Lord of the Flies). And then Peter concluded: “. . . and, I agree with you, the more absurd, the better for boundary maintenance.”



The upshot of all this is that I thought I independently came upon an interesting sociological observation, only to find that what seemed original was actually buried my head on the basis of things I had read and thought about from a variety of sources going back 30 to 40 years. That does not mean that my synthesis is not in some way original; it does mean that in some ways it is not, however. Imagine, then, my ambivalence at being told by a master of the discipline that I have had an original observation, only to be shown in the very act of his bestowing the accolade that it is not so original as all that. Original or not, I think it is safe to say that this observation is at once dramatically underappreciated and powerful as a means for interpreting social reality all around us even today––certainly in the volcanic social soil of the Middle East and the Muslim–majority world beyond, but also, I think, in our own country at a time of “tea parties” and “occupations.”

To close, I am reminded of an old remark by Max Frankel, whose source I cannot locate. He once wrote: “In the competition of social ideas, simplemindedness is not a handicap.” He might have added that outlandishness is no handicap either, depending on context and circumstance. Note to self: Think about the relationship between simplemindedness and outlandishness. When I get stuck doing that, I suppose I might write a note or two to friends and colleagues asking for help––maybe to Charlie Hill, maybe to Joseph Epstein, maybe also to Lynne Truss in hopes of making her a friend. Isn’t that what friends, and would–be friends, are for?

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Smart Car Play

About three years ago my darling wife determined that we should purchase a Smart Car. We had seen them while living and traveling for bit in Europe, especially Germany and France. "Oh they are so cute", my wife said, "and you can park them practically anywhere. Let's get one."

"Well", I answered, "I suppose we could if they are available in the United States, depending on how much they cost."

They were and are available, though not in profusion or for very cheap if you're figuring dollars per pound of car, and so to make a long story short, after a fairly lengthy time on the waiting list, we bought one--and have not regretted it. We have taken it on the highway all the way from Washington to Indianapolis; it goes fast, and of course it also goes slow. It is not a particularly cramped car despite its small appearance. But it is not a particularly smooth riding car given the size of its wheels and its low riding predilection. You feel every bump. So falling asleep at the wheel is really hard. A lot of people worry that the thing is too small to be safe, but I don't agree. It's a well built car, as Mercedes tend to be, and anyway in my opinion a car is as safe as its driver (certain exceptions acknowledged, like when a horny five-point buck gets in your way).

One of the best features of the Smart car is the fact that it has seat warmers. I am sure that other cars have a similar option, but in my experience this is the first time I have ever been able to just push a button and have warmth emerge from beneath my keister.

My wife and I have had some innocent fun trying to come up with names for this marvelous device. Just when we think we have exhausted the possibilities, given the fact that there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, we somehow manage to come up with even more.

I want to point out to younger people that this is how us oldsters entertain ourselves in a two-seat vehicle. You may laugh and deride us now, but just you wait, you whippersnappers.

In any event, just to illustrate what I mean, I have decided to list here many (not all) of the names for this wonderful device that I can remember from our trips to Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Baltimore, Frederick, Maryland, and elsewhere. I will go through the alphabet from start to finish as appropriate, since this is how we approached the challenge ourselves.

As you will see, we tend to the alliterative in our choices, and for some reason the letter "B" just keeps on giving, but this is hardly the limit. Oddly enough, we have had a heckuva time coming up with anything very good for the very obvious starter "ass" or "arse." If anyone can think of something really "smart" to go with that, we would ever so much appreciate your telling us. Of course we'll give you full credit, right here in this blog!

So here we go, as in, "Honey, please turn on . . . ":

The Arse Oven

The Backside Baker

The Bottom Baster

The Butt Burner

The Bum Blaster

The Bun Boiler

The Can Cooker

The Cheek Char

The Crack Crisper

The Duff Defroster

The Fanny Flame

The Fart Frier

The Grundle Griller

The Hunk Heater

The Keister Kindler

The Mass Melter

The Posterior Poacher

The Rump Roaster

The Seat Sizzler

The Thigh Thawer

The Tuchas Torch (our favorite)

The Vulva Volcano (sorry about that one...)

The Underside Undulater

The Wiggle Warmer

That's 24 little phrases, some obviously better than others (a few bad or really obscene ones not included here). And to think: We thought we'd exhausted the possibilities when we got to 14. Please help us get to 25, then 30, then......who knows?