Over at Credo Taylor Marshall does the good service of informing us that the Enlightened One has offered his first tithe to the all-knowing Demiurge in his recent reversal of the "Mexico City" policy that "banned the use of Federal funds to overseas organizations that perform abortions."
To Barry’s credit he never hid the fact that he was pro-abortion and I got the feeling that he was rather proud of his position regarding the slaughter of the innocents. How far the pro-abortion folks, ably led by our profound and gifted leader, expand the American abattoir remains to be seen but I’m thinking for children now or soon to be residing in the womb "it’s a hard rain’s a gonna-fall."
Which leads to the question of the day: Given the erudition displayed by numerous commentators, I’d like to ask those who are both Democrats and Christians (i.e. those who actually worship the Jewish carpenter) how it is that you cast your ballot for Obama and the Democrats given their pro-abortion policy?

We learned last night that Timothy Geithner was confirmed as the Obama administration’s Secretary of the Treasury.  While this outcome was never in real doubt, the revelation that he had failed to report upwards of $26,000 in self-employment taxes when he was an overseas employee of the IMF became the closest thing to a scandal in the widely admired first week of the Obama administration.  While there was some noise among conservatives – and some liberals – that it was inappropriate to have a confirmed tax evader as the leader of the IRS (yes, Geithner claims it was a “mistake,” but James Fallows, among others, thinks otherwise), with the economy continuing its deep tailspin to oblivion (55,000 job cuts announced today alone), it was clear that this particular potato would not be put in the microwave. 

Still, people are right to be troubled by Geithner’s “mistakes” given the extent to which liberals generally rely upon the tax code as a substitute for virtue.  Redistributive taxation is the single most dominant form of “rational control” that our society has adopted, in the midst of ever more pervasive forms of “rational control.”  By rational control, I adopt the recent working definition advanced by Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield in a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, in which he points to the replacement of virtue by automated controls that act on our behalf in ways that would be virtuous if we were to have effected those same outcomes voluntarily.  Says Mansfield,

What is rational control? In the brand new building where I work at Harvard, the lights go on and off, the shades go up and down, and the toilets flush automatically. Rational control has replaced individual virtue, which is subject to vagaries and may not be active or awake. As instruments of rational control, the seatbelts in your car are inferior to airbags because the former you have to buckle on your own and the latter save you without your having to lift a finger. These examples are small matters of convenience, but they add up. As intrusions into your privacy, your own control over your life, and your virtue, they also add up. In their very minuteness, they reveal the comprehensiveness of rational control.

One pervasive explanation for Geithner’s “mistake” was that the rules regulating payment of self-employment taxes in an overseas job are not automatic:  not only must they be made consciously via quarterly payments, but (I have learned from this letter to the Washington Post) the computer tax program Turbo Tax is not set with a default to alert individuals that they should make these payments.  Faced with the demand to exercise conscious and purposive virtue in the payment of his tax obligations, Geithner failed to act with precisely the form of "responsibility" that has tripped easily off of his President’s lips in recent months.

In fact, on this question of individual responsibility for virtuous action, vs. forms of automatic "rational control," lies one of the true and decisive dividing lines between conservatives and liberals.  Conservatives as a general rule hold that individuals can and should be responsible for their own actions – whether virtuous acts of generosity (hence their preference for philanthropy rather than taxation) or individual culpability (why they are tougher on criminals) – while liberals emphasize the social dimension of obligations and responsibilities.  In a recent book entitled Unjust Deserts, its authors Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly argue that the accumulated wealth and accomplishments of our society are the consequence of the collective accomplishment of generations of humans, and that all contemporary enrichment of society rests on the shoulders of a common inheritance.  Thus, no individual "deserves" what he or she earns – since they have not really achieved anything on their own at all – and all living humans should benefit from this common inheritance through widespread income redistribution.  The thrust of the book is to argue that successful people like Timothy Geithner should not only pay their taxes, but should pay significantly more and then have those larger tax receipts widely redistributed. This may be the kind of change that Geithner can believe in – as long as the taxation is more "rationally controlled."

While I’m not prepared to sign aboard the redistibutionist bandwagon – I’ll stick with the Distributivists, thank you – I find myself thinking that there is something deeply conservative to the liberal side of the argument.  Whatever conservatism is – and it is many things these days – to my mind it is a defense of the idea of an organic social fabric that needs conserving and defending against the depredations of modern liberal anthropology, politics, and economics.  Such conservatism – Burke’s conservatism – takes a dim view toward individualism.  It has a high regard for the idea of generational inheritance and obligations.  Such conservatism understands that an individualistic form of liberalism threatens the viability of community – its educative features, including and especially those that teach us forms of obligation and common care, as well as the limits upon our individual will, our greed and ambition.  Liberalism was premised most fundamentally upon the liberation of individuals from the confines – or the enculturation – of such communities, and conservatism was born of the effort to thwart this undermining of the res publica.

Yet, our contemporary conservatives are the most ardent defenders of individualism and our liberals are the proponents of a more social and even socialized understanding.  This reversal is not only because of the intervention of Communism – of course that’s of central importance – but, I would argue, because of liberalism’s introduction of "rational control" as the means of achieving some of the very social ends that might once have been similar to those pursued by a Burkean conservative.  Liberalism seeks to put acts of social justice on "auto-pilot," above all because the form of society that have helped make liberalism ascendent relies upon a profound weakening of any sense of social solidarity or understanding of generational gratitude and responsibility.  In liberating us from the confines of community, the immediate, instinctive and palpable sense of a community was replaced by a generalized, abstract and generally theoretical vision of Society.  Having liberated us from the confines of community, now we are freed to care for the universal "community" of humankind – except that there is no such community.  Any such care cannot be cultivated, but must be achieved by forms of "rational control."  Indeed, in making their case for the generational inheritance of social forms of knowledge, Alperovitz and Daly cite innumerable academic studies proving the inherited sources of collective human knowledge, whereas in a Burkean community, our inheritance would be obvious in the lessons we learn at the feet of our grandfathers and father, in the kitchen beside our grandmothers and mother.  In such a community, you don’t need a book to understand the inherited nature of knowledge – or a complex tax code that even confuses the NYC Fed Chairman – but the doing of a thing learned and taught from one generation to the next.

What liberals seek are the effects of virtue without its causes or the conditions that make it possible.  Liberalism was born of a deep and pervasive mistrust of paternalism (read Locke’s FIRST Treatise for confirmation), but it ends with a grotesque version of paternalism without fathers.  We inhabit a society in which lights are turned off, in which shades are lowered and toilets are flushed, but in which we effect none of these actions, and in which we are not required to even think why we would take such actions.  We act socially without socialization; responsible actions are effected albeit without responsibility.  As Kant predicted, modern republicanism could be created out of a nation of devils – as long as systems of "rational control" could be established. I imagine that in hell, all the toilets are automatic flush, though the sewer pipes lead right back to the people who couldn’t be bothered to pull the lever.

Modern conservatives should understand that their defense of individual responsibility is ultimately a defense of the communal, the source of a cultivation in virtue.  Virtue is never the accomplishment of any one individual – I will agree with Alperovitz and Daly to this extent – but it is enacted and fostered by individuals, in concert with a healthy community of continuity, memory, and gratitude.  Conservatives should properly understand the nature of their own commitments to the role and place of the individual – not as the monadic and disencumbered selves of Locke’s fantastic and fanciful vision of "childless men without children" – but as humans between the beasts and the gods, formed by and in communities and responsible ultimately for passing along the goods of those lessons learned to a new generation.

I will say – as a father of three – getting kids to flush toilets is damned hard.  But, when they do, there are few more satisfying moments in a father’s life.  Better even than the rush that accompanies automatic flush toilets…..

Their argument was that, by comparing politics to family, I had degraded politics—settling for a contest of muscle when I should have aimed for real dialogue and eventual consensus, sacrificing conservatism’s ability to be self-critical for the sake of movement loyalty, wanting to be strong when I should want to be right. Now, between the lines of Reihan’s post on Animal Collective, I detect the other objection to "All politics is tribal": When we compare politics to family, we degrade family.

Politics can’t look like family, because family is our refuge from the political—Reihan puts this argument in the mouths of Animal Collective and Rod Dreher, but they’re certainly not the only ones who have said so. When cultural conservatives threaten to withdraw from politics—the right-wing equivalent of threatening to move to Canada—they talk about going out to the sticks, raising a family, and pulling the white picket drawbridge behind them. For them, family is the opposite of politics.

But this idea, like the latest Animal Collective album, is awful. Something is lost when we put a double yellow line between our Getting & Spending and Having & Holding. Consider this model as an alternative to Reihan’s: Someone who spends every workday sweeping floors can hold onto his manly dignity by coming home to a kingdom of his own—family as a different kind of refuge, one that depends on regarding home and hearth as a playground for power and authority. I can imagine a world in which fatherhood (or motherhood) is simply a matter of love and tenderness, but do we really want to relieve parents of the burden of leadership?

I can understand wanting that particular relief. Leadership means putting on the mask of command, and, if we can’t drop all our masks at home, then where can hope to?* Good old Richard Sennett thinks this is a dumb question that only someone raised in a nuclear family would ask:

The nuclear family simplifies the problem of order by reducing the number of actors and thereby the reducing the number of roles any person in the family must play. Each adult need have only two, spouse and parent; with no grandparents in the house, the child will never see them as someone else’s children. The child himself will have only one image of adult love and adult expectation before him; he will not have to sort out what is different about the way you are supposed to behave in front of parents from the way you behave in front of grandparents or uncles.

Authenticity is not a family value.

I would be interested to hear someone weigh in on the relationship between the Reihan/Animal Collective/Crunchy Con model of family and smaller family size, so, to that end, I’ll quote a friend of mine: "I only want one or two children—I don’t want them to have to compete with each other for my love." A fine sentiment, but one that ignores the helpful side of growing up with eight siblings and struggling to find your own place in the family hierarchy. And then, of course, struggling to keep it. (Call it the What’s Eating Gilbert Grape model.) The give-and-take of political negotiation could be seen as a burden from which we periodically escape, or it could be second nature. Politics, like charity, begins at home.

^{*Um, at prayer?}

UPDATE: Consider this quote from the First Provincial Council of Mexico (1555), as cited by Claudio Lomnitz in Death and the Idea of Mexico:

The Indians shall be brought together in towns to live politically. . . And because in order to be true Christians and political, like the rational men they are, it is necessary to be congregated and subjected in towns, and in convenient and accessible places, that they not live dispersed through the sierras and jungles, and that they be congregated where they can live politically, like Christians.

"To be true Christians and political"; we cannot love except politically. Read it twice.

One of the most telling but least commented upon lines in President Obama’s inaugural speech was his promise to "restore science to its proper place". Since he doesn’t expand upon this restoration in the remainder of the speech it’s not immediately obvious what this amounts to. Of course, this assumes that science has been unjustly abused or neglected by the previous administration but even if one concedes that (and I don’t) that still wouldn’t settle the much thornier issue of how precisely we should understand the relation between science and politics.

It’s instructive to consider Obama’s defense of science in light of the more developed attack on the enervating effects of partisan politics–Obama promises to transcend the political differences between us for the sake of realizing a previously elusive common good. It’s not clear how Obama will achieve this or even if he’s capable–neither his primary or national campaign captured the whole of American support. This is not a criticism of Obama but an observation of the stubborn recalcitrance of partisan dispute. He has consistently advocated a kind of post-political brand of governance that seems to assume that partisan conflicts are never reflections of genuine versus spurious disagreement, are always based upon miscommunication or ideological dogmatism, and are never the result of competing worldviews that are held with deep, thoughtful conviction and are therefore resistant to facile revision. In other words, if politics is reducible to technocratic competence then there is something benighted about the clash of interests–out interests seem to be little more than idiosyncratic expressions of our rationally indefensible attachments.

For our new President, the proper place of science is beyond the murky waters of political compromise–it must be untethered from our old fashioned moral strictures and the bumbling roadblocks to progress that are the consequence of political restraint. Just as he denies in the speech that there are any potential tensions between our ideals and the practical demands of ensuring our security in an often less than ideal world, he simply rejects that there are any moral or political complexities born of out technological innovation that might justify some measure of political prudence, or even the admonishment of science. Obama’s view is not merely a oversimplification of the relation between science and politics, and consequently of science’s “proper place”, but a willful ignorance of the lessons regarding the dangers of a science divorced from prudence the twentieth century has provided.
 

But I was provoked by a recent post at David Frum’s newmajority.com, which is representative of recent efforts to salvage some honor for the Bush administration. Sure, the argument goes, waterboarding was torture. But,

Be that as it may, that technique was used three times, the last being in 2003, and was banned internally by the Bush administration in 2006.  So, even if you think waterboarding is unquestionably torture, then the "end of torture" came in 2003, or at the latest 2006.

The author, one Michael Anton, goes on to argue that the President recent executive ordering limiting interrogations to military standards therefore can’t be described as banning torture. He asks,

So what other practices does Obama’s Executive Order end?  According to the article, "temperature manipulation and stress positions," as well as "trick[ing] prisoners into believing they would face physical harm from foreign intelligence services if they didn’t cooperate."  Maybe these are very terrible things.  But are they "torture" either under US law or in any reasonable person’s definition?

It’s hard to judge whether Anton is really as ignorant as he would like to appear. Because there is no question that the methods are torture. One reason is that the US has signed international conventions prohibiting them, and treaties are, as every high-school student ought to know, the law of the land. Another is that they are explicitly identified as such in various military manuals on interrogation. For purposes of criminal prosecution, incidentally, there’s no distinction between torture and less dramatic violence. Coerced statements are inadmissible, period, in a court of law. 

But don’t take my word for it. Ask Susan J. Crawford, the chief judge of the military tribunals at Guatanamo, who explicitly identified the "sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold" to which Mohammed al-Qahtani was subjected as torture. The opinion of a "reasonable person" is legally irrelevant. It will now be impossible to try the alleged 20th hijacker. 

It’s true that al-Qahtani was interrogated in 2002, and that the torture techniques used on him were later banned. But if you’re inclined to wonder, like Anton, why "America’s reputation has suffered or that so many Americans believe the worst of their own government",  you might begin with the fact that the public was lied to for years about what was being done in its name and, ostensibly, in its defense.

It would be nice to think that Obama’s executive order only formalized prohibitions that were already in place. But it’s just such disingenuous defences of what the Gestapo called verschaerfte Vernehmung that show why it was necessary. 

The words “global warming” may have achieved Pavlovian status.  Like the ringing of the bell that accompanied the Alpo fed to Pavlov’s dogs, the words foster an immediate and instinctive response by adherents of our disparate political faiths.  Among liberals it fosters the an immediate desire to put a halt to the unleashing of new greenhouse gases, a Gore-ish propensity to quote the latest scientific research and deep disapproval of the American way of life.  Among conservatives it causes a condition close to the foaming at the mouth, a knee-jerk rejection of “purported” science, a denunciation of Statist paternalism and proud assertion of the rightness of our industrial project.  The two sides could not be further apart on this issue.  Yet, what strikes me is how opposite these respective reactions are to the stated political philosophies of liberalism and conservatism – so-called.

Contemporary liberals are marked, perhaps above all, by the modern faith in science and a rejection of the claims of mere nature.  Liberalism was built on the modern scientific project inaugurated by Francis Bacon who rejected that nature was a fixed and permanent entity, but instead urged humankind – through its ingenuity and capacity to understand and decode – to exert governance, dominion, and even mastery over nature.  Liberalism ecstatically welcomed the 19th-century research of Charles Darwin for its fundamental rejection of the idea of a notion of fixed and permanent nature created with intention and design by God.  Darwin refuted the idea that nature was static, and instead – while it purportedly demoted mankind by rejecting the idea of a “Great Chain of Being” – implicitly promoted the idea of humankind as a self-fashioning creature who was capable of changing the natural world that was itself constantly subject to changing forces.  Our contemporary effort to reduce everything to Darwinian terms (even religion!) reflects the view that all human artifacts and efforts are part of the instinctive effort to exercise control over our environment.  We shape and reshape the world in our own image, and reject the antiquated notion of a fixed or “normal” conception of the natural world.

Yet, it is our contemporary liberals who argue against the human contribution to climate change, who appear to embrace the notion that the climactic conditions of the past several centuries constitutes the normal or what should be permanent condition of the world’s climate.  Contemporary liberals seem to exhibit a reverence for nature that belies what is otherwise nearly everywhere a hostility to mere nature shorn of the human ability and imperative to govern its working (e.g., birth control, abortion, etc.).  There is even a strong element of anti-humanism in the arguments of many opponents to climate change, the sense that human ingenuity in utilizing exosomatic energy represents an abuse of the existing natural world – and not a Darwinian survival strategy.  Rather than understanding climate change within the dominant liberal framework of Darwinism – which would suggest that we are at least neutral to creaturely alteration of the world, if not welcoming of the dynamism it will unleash that may force further evolutionary developments and adaptations – instead we witness the invocation of a “normal” condition of nature that seems to be based upon a curiously fixed and unchanging view of how the world should be. 

By contrast, conservatism – particularly as inaugurated by Edmund Burke – arose as a critique of the often Pollyanish and optimistic worldview of liberalism.  It argued on behalf of caution and insisted upon an awareness of the law of unintended consequences.  Conservatism was the locus of at least once principle – “the precautionary principle” – which urged great caution in the face of claims that human actions would always and everywhere result only in good and positive outcomes.  Classical conservatism was firmly wedded to a conception of unchanging human nature – and, in turn, a created order reflected through nature – that demanded hesitation and doubt in the face of claims that the human or natural order was alterable at will.  Conservatism regarded the governing claims of science with suspicion and hesitancy, arguing against its universalizing tendencies and its efforts at dominion, and arguing on behalf of the legitimacy of longstanding  local practices of culture and tradition that modern science often sought to eviscerate. 

Yet it is our contemporary conservatives who most blithely reject the import or relevance of many findings that suggest increases in global temperature are the result of human industrial activity.  It is our conservatives who today urge the rejection of “the precautionary principle” when speaking of global warming, who insist that it is the liberals who are Chicken Littles. At times they argue that – even if the evidence is true – we will have the ingenuity to find technologies and scientific solutions for the problems that are generated by the very successes of modern science.  They are optimistic about our mental prowess and confident that any changes will not be so significant that we cannot redress them.  They retain a commitment to our dynamic and energetic society that generates innovation and change. 

In short, when it comes to the issue of “global warming,” our liberals seem to embrace a conservative stance, while our conservatives appear to evince all the earmarks of liberalism.  What gives?

Dare I submit that global warming is not really about global warming – not really?  Global warming, it seems to me, is a proxy battle in a larger war, a bit like Vietnam was a proxy war in the greater conflagration of the Cold War.  As such, we find ourselves aligned with peculiar allies and defending uncomfortable positions. Indeed, the comparison to Vietnam is not inapt, since Global Warming is now where many of the political and culture wars have now come to rest.  It is an issue around which a now-traditional set of ideological divisions have now come to roost – ones that curiously lead our conservatives to hold a deeply unconservative position and our liberals to act illiberally. 

Of course, the immediate and most palpable issue is that of free market economics:  contemporary “conservatives” hold a adhere to a deeply anti-conservative faith in an unregulated market that is a remnant of the Cold War, while liberals dream of a world State in which we achieve Rawlsian redistributive justice that can be measured based on our respective carbon footprints.  Inasmuch as the fight over global warming can be reducible to a debate over the relative merits of the free market, the incoherence of these two positions is a direct inheritance of the Cold War.

Still, even these respective positions on the economy itself reflect a deeper divide over a more fundamental question.  What seems to be is at deeper issue is the battle over the existence of human nature.  For those on the Left, Global Warming represents the best contemporary avenue toward the age-old ambition to overcome that recalcitrant part of human nature that seems to belie the belief that we can change ourselves without limit – self-interest.  If a new form of global consciousness is possible, then its best prospect for realization appears to be through the inculcation of an immediate sense of the interconnectedness of all things.  Echoing the 19th-century hope among some utopians for the creation of a new “cosmic consciousness” (the most popular book of the late-19th century – Looking Backwards, by Edward Bellamy – was premised upon the achievement of such a form of consciousness in the year 2000), the primacy of the issue of “global warming” among today’s liberals is a continuing echo of that ambition to overcome the recalcitrant existence of the human ego.   Weirdly, the Left adopts a “conservative” stance toward the achievement of anti-conservative transformation of the human creature.

Meanwhile, for those on the Right, the effort to transform human consciousness on this issue represents a step the age-old liberal faith in the plasticity of human nature.  Their insistence that humans continue to act in accordance with the economic imperatives based in human self-interest reflects their Pavlovian understanding that underlying the utopianism of liberal efforts to foster a new consciousness is a kissing cousin of socialism and Marxism. 

Ironically, this proxy battle is taking place in spite of, and not because of, the actual issue of global warming.  It is our conservatives who should rightly be warning of a potential catastrophe for humanity out of a plenitude of caution and prudence.  Our conservatives should be urging restraint of our industrial activities out of ample concern for “the precautionary principle.”  It is our liberals who should be less wed to a conception of a “normal” or permanent natural condition, unaltered by biological activity.  They should celebrate the dynamism of our society and its success in liberating us from the constraints of culture and tradition. 

Doubtless this incoherence is with us to stay for a time – perhaps a very long time.  But we should recognize it for what it is: above all, that both camps are not really debating over global warming. Were liberals truly devoted to a reduction of greenhouse gases, they would have to sacrifice one of the fundamental pillars of liberalism:  the pursuit of human liberation from nature.  Liberalism’s admirable concern about global warming is informed by a high degree of incoherence, in the first instance partaking of a deeply anti-humanistic belief that, at base, draws on classical liberalism’s division between nature and culture.  Further, and more incoherently, the current liberal faith relies unrealistically on a kind of technological optimism that holds we can run our current civilization, continue worldwide economic growth and “development,” all the while cutting back substantially on the exosomatic energy sources that have made much of modernity possible.  Their concerns are real enough, but nevertheless they otherwise occupy a realm of unreality.

Meanwhile, our conservatives are trapped even more deeply in a state of incoherence.  Their devotion to an unregulated free market is one of the deepest sources of anti-conservatism in our time.  Their blithe acceptance of the “creative destruction” of the market is the single greatest contribution to the evisceration of traditional “family values.”  Their implicit hostility to nature attacks the deepest source of conservatism’s meaning – the imperative to conserve.  It is my hope that a new generation of conservatives – highlighting the root word “conserve” – will change the dynamics of this debate.  By urging a concern for the natural order; by insisting upon governance of our appetites; by inculcating prudence and respect for the natural order; by pointing out the incoherence of both contemporary positions, perhaps we will indeed find a better way to exist in a natural order that we did not ourselves create, upon which we rely for life and livelihood, and of which we are finally and permanently a part.  Whether and what will happen as the planet warms is unknown to me.  To be blithely optimistic that we’ll figure out how to deal with it – that science and the market will find a way – seems to me to be the very antithesis of a properly conservative response.  Politics inevitably makes strange bedfellows, but one must always be wary of how you’ll feel about your bedmate the morning after.

(Cross-posted at What I Saw In America)

So such affirmations (we will not apologize) were parts of the speech that I warmed up to. It seems to me that such rhetoric (especially when coupled with the very striking: “these things are old, these things are true) implicitly affirms a certain particularity of our national existence that cannot be reduced to the Machiavellian-Kantian project. To be sure, Mansfield has been very discreet, perhaps too discreet, concerning the connection between this elevated view of the constitution and other things that Americans have looked up to (like God, just to take an example). In this he may be described as pursuing a kind of Tocquevillean strategy, one that lets Americans keep their philosophy of enlightened materialism (“self-interest well understood”) while encouraging institutions and practices that cannot be explained by that philosophy. This contrasts of course with Patrick’s recommended “real change” towards the “inculcation of virtue.” And Patrick may be right; it may be that the Tocquevillean moment has passed, and that there is no way to stop, slow down, or even inflect our hurtling Machiavellian-Kantian progress without publicly and explicitly affirming the priority of virtue to freedom. I’m inclined to believe that our rapid progress towards the abolition of marriage, for example, might well be enough to make Tocqueville himself take another view of democratic Providence. But just how to be a post-Tocquevillean (and in that sense postmodern) constitutionalist – now there’s a tough one. ]]> http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2009/01/22/the-end-of-the-tocquevillean-moment-reflections-on-deneen-on-obama/feed/ 11 http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2009/01/20/say-hello-to-the-new-boss/ http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2009/01/20/say-hello-to-the-new-boss/#comments Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:15:01 +0000 admin http://culture11.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2009/01/20/say-hello-to-the-new-boss/ A short time ago Barack Obama became the nation’s chief executive and the leader of the Free World.  His inauguration as 44th President was historic and nation-altering:  what was at one time an inconceivable dream – an African-American President – is now a daily fact.  Flying in on Sunday from California amid a planeload of revellers and walking yesterday on the Mall with my children in Washington D.C., it was exciting and heady to participate in the electric anticipation especially of the throngs of African-Americans from around the nation.  

Obama’s inaugural address was at times moving, and especially praiseworthy was his opening recollection of the sacrifices that were made by previous generations for our benefit, and his closing call for service to ideals greater than ourselves.  Still, at times its message was mixed, if not in contradiction to these sentiments, in general calling for hard work in the ambition to put America back on the course of greatness and growth – arguably those twin engines that have come, for most, to define the very essence of freedom that was being celebrated today.  And, in asserting that "we will not apologize for our way of life," Obama did nothing less than echo the ongoing sentiments of previous Presidents – often in times of bellicosity and national self-assertion, if not self-indulgence – such as George H.W. Bush who in 1992 declared that the "American way of life is non-negotiable," or George W. Bush’s summation of the 9/11 as either the demand that we change our way of life, or we change theirs.  Those moments were reminders that the Obama mantra of "change" did not fundamentally include the self-understanding of the regime.  We remain a modern republic in the model originally articulated first by Machiavelli, and the Presidency remains the main agent of the modern project of expansion and dominion.  The declaration today by Obama to reinvigorate the American promise – for all of its nobility of intention and inclusiveness – remained well within the mainstream of the American creed devoted to personal liberty based upon the conquest of nature and American power premised upon economic, scientific and military dominance.  In this sense, Obama’s inaugural address was not outright disappointing, but utterly expected, conforming to the project formed long before his birth, and thus generally predictable:  there will be changes in emphasis and style, but  still the dark fields of the republic roll on under the night; still we believe in the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us, and still we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…

The Presidency was a central feature in the new Constitution that would advance the prospect of the expansive project of modern republicanism. In his book Taming the Prince, Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. argued with great insight that the modern executive is in practical effect the living remnant of Machiavelli’s Prince, the leader who, when necessary, will act outside the bounds of morality and the narrow constraints of law.   As defended first by Founding Father James Wilson (who first proposed the unitary executive in the Constitutional convention) and then Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 70, "decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch" would characterize the executive officer, a person who would act in ways often opposite to, and indeed at times in circumvention of, the slow, deliberate and "inactive" pace of a more numerous and divided legislature.  This role of the executive was seen as the force that would preserve the constitutional order:  if the Constitution was marked by a Kantian devotion to law and principle, its practical viability was made possible by the a-moral agency of the Executive who would necessarily at times act out of the forces of exigency.  To put it in philosophical terms, an agent of consequentialism was deemed necessary to preserve the deontological commitments of the Constitution.   Many of our most divisive court cases are practical distillations of these two philosophical worldviews – e.g., LIncoln’s suspension of habeus corpus, Korematsu v. U.S., or the question of the role of Guantanamo and interrogation all represent confrontations of the Machiavellian vs. the Kantian.  The famous phrase by Robert H. Jackson from his dissenting opinion in Terminello v. Chicago – "the Constitution is not a suicide pact" – expresses the belief in the permanent necessity of the "Machiavellian" to preserve the viability of the Constitutional order.  One’s adherence to either side of this divide marks one of the fundamental distinctions between "conservatives" and "liberals" in our regime, between those whose view of human nature tends toward a Machiavellian realism or Kantian idealism, between a view of humans as permanently fallen or potentially redeemable.

Mansfield’s analysis is remarkably insightful, but insufficient for its lack of exploration of what the end, or aim, of the Machiavellian exective is.  If the end justifies the means, we have a far clearer idea of the variety of means than the end.  It turns out, in fact, that why the Machiavellian and the Kantian can co-exist – if in tension – is that the ends they share are in fact fundamentally the same.  Both philosophies – deriving from a deeper philosophy of modernity itself – aim at the expansion of human dominion over the natural world and the enlargement of liberty by means of the increase of human control and mastery.  Machiavelli’s comparison of the mastery of "Fortune" to the building of dikes and dams to control the effects of flooding (see Federalist 10 for a similar argument couched in political terms) is of little difference to Kant’s embrace of Enlightenment ambitions to unleash the practical and technical capabilities of modern science in the expansion of human mastery.  For this reason, both are wedded to expansionist political projects – Machiavelli, in his efforts to collapse the ancient language of republic within a modern project of empire, and Kant’s call for an ever greater expansion of cosmopolitan republicanism culminating – for some modern Kantians – in the dream of the world State.   If Kantians have relied upon Machiavellians for the fulfillment of this agenda, similarly Machiavellians have happily resorted to calls for the expansion of liberty and democracy (sound familiar? – bon voyage, W) in the shared aims of expansion.  The longstanding purported conflict in International Relations between "realists" and "idealists" is a blinkered and diverting purported debate that masks the deeper set of agreements between these two schools – an agreement that has been practially pursued identically by "Machiavellian" and "Kantian" Presidents alike.  At the deepest level there is no disagreement about the ends sought by Machiavellians and Kantians, or more narrowly, between our Republicans and Democrats – merely a difference in means.  Growth and expansion remain the ends we seek.  Obama will be no different than his predecessors, all claims to "change" notwithstanding. 

In fact, for all the changes in parties, ideologies, philosophies and rhetoric, there has been one identical feature of the Executive from the very outset:  it is the agent of expansion, represented most immediately by its own enlargement of power over the course of the republic’s history.  The Presidency has continued to grow as the expansion of the modern project has also unfolded apace:  the very success of that project especially in the economic, but also political and social realms has demanded ever greater "decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch," and has necessarily grown impatient with, and moved beyond reliance upon, the slower and plodding pace of the legislative and deliberative branches.  While the school-house version of the Founding often stresses the idea that it sought a balance of powers and divided government, in fact its aim was to replace the clunky and slow-working system under the Articles of Confederation, and in particular to accelerate the consolidation of the various States through legislative and economic integration.  The very success of the Constitutional order in achieving that end necessarily required ever greater "decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch" on the part of the Executive, to the point now at which we witness a hope and belief that a single individual can attain the salvation of the polity and perhaps heal the world.  Obama’s claim that "the ground has shifted beneath" those who would question the scale of government is absolutely true – but was already fundamentally true from the moment that the Executive office got underway in 1789.  His assertion that what matters is what "works" begs the question of what constitutes "working."  The pretense that he uniquely represents the transcendence of old debates over the scale and scope – and more importantly, the end – of modern republicanism is a canard, since all previous office-holders of the executive office have accepted the basic ambition of the modern republic.  To do otherwise would be to represent real change – and Obama, all appearances to the contrary, is anything but an agent of any such fundamental change.  His call for sacrifice – even his invocation of "virtue and hope" – were made means to the end of renewing the modern project of expansion and growth.  In no way can his Inaugural address be construed as a call for real change, such as the inculcation of virtue aimed rather at the governance of appetite and the lessening of our reliance upon growth as the source of national meaning.  Any such call would exist in contradiction to the implicit aim of the modern Executive, and would indeed constitute real change.

Today I celebrate with my nation the peaceful transition of power and the ascent of a man of African descent to the Presidency.  Yet, too, I lament that we remain trapped within the deepest presuppositions of philosophies born in early modernity that have at their heart the premise of mastery and dominion of the world and even humanity.  Until and unless we achieve a better and truer understanding of freedom – that freedom is not achieved by the enslavement of the world, but by the governance of our appetite and desires – then we will remain ourselves enslaved to the worse angels of our nature.  We await an emancipation, but today’s proclamation portends that it still lies in a future yet distant.

The primary struggle in the movie is between tradition and culture, on the one hand, and the rootlessness often promoted by American liberalism, on the other. Eastwood’s character, Walt, finds himself completely dislocated, living in a neighborhood suddenly unrecognizable to him, populated with people that are not only strangers to him but culturally unfamiliar. He is largely estranged from his family– his sons are depicted as basically decent people but Walt is clearly incapable of connecting to them, partly because of his own austere traditionalism and his sons’ embracing of modernity and partly because of the emotional toll war took on him. Traditional culture is never given an unambiguous three cheers in the movie–one disadvantage of taking seriously the particularity of cultures and their competing claims to embodying the truth is that different cultures inevitably clash; Walt benefited from a tradition that provided him with a cetain work ethic and moral compass but it also debilitated him.

The central point of comparision in the movie is between his grandkids and the the two sets of young Asian teenagers who live in his deteriorating neighborhood. His own grandkids are depicted somewhat heavy-handedly–they are incapable of respect for others, reject Walt as an ancient relic, and seem lost in the fashionable, technology driven consumerism that dominates the day. In a sense, they’re a much softer, more banal version of the gangster teens who terrorize Walt’s neighborhood–also rootless and directionless, also driven by the most crass of desires, also living a kind of self-encapsulated nihilistic nightmare. In their case, however, deprived of the comforts that come with material success, their nihilism is often of a brutal and violent variety.

The third set of teens, also Asians, are caught somewhere between their very traditional culture and the liberalism that tolerates its exercise but also encourages the conditions that prove inhospitable to its flourishing. Walt befriends two of them despite the awkwardness created by  the strangeness of the culture in is eyes. They are both more modern and more Amercanized than their parents but respect the tradition their parents impart; they seem able to weather the tumult and danger of their neighborhood only because of the moral grounding it provides. They are the central protagonists of the movie, even more so than Walt, precisely because their lives are exemplars of the struggle between their inherited tradition the reflexive iconoclasm of modernity.

One interesting proposition the movie seems to endorse is that there’s a way in which modern liberalism can save itself through its own tolerance and prosperity–as long as we continue to attract more tradition bearing immigrants to our country with the allure of economic opportunity  we can counterbalance our own rootless tendencies. This is an imperfect solution, of course, and the movie suggests that this merely postpones the issue to the next generation who face the perils of our cultural cynicism all over again. Nevertheless, Gran Torino  manages to capture a central paradox of American life: its openness to cultural diversity and its general dismissal of the importance of culture.

Given how prone to misinterpretation the correlation coefficient is, it’s a little bit easier to talk about what it doesn’t mean. This is also a useful exercise in understanding the limits of science:

1) It doesn’t mean the probability that something causes something else.

Correlation does NOT imply causation.

2) It doesn’t even mean the probability that something and something else are correlated.

Things can be correlated in all kinds of ways. The r-squared value only measures (in a weird way that we’ll discuss soon) the probability that two things are linearly correlated. Once upon a time, physicists wrought havoc upon the sciences by writing papers claiming all kinds of correlations that didn’t actually exist. It’s rather easy to ascribe correlations to things that are not, in fact, correlated. Don’t succumb to that temptation.

3) It doesn’t even mean the probability that something and something else are linearly correlated.

Statistics can’t actually tell you the probability of something being the case without additional assumptions. The oft-abused p-values are not, as most people interpret them, equivalent to one minus the probability that a given relationship exists. Rather, they are the probability that assuming nothing but chance is at work, the given situation might be observed. This common misconception naturally extends to r-squared numbers: just consider Anscombe’s quartet.

So what on earth does it mean?

In as few words as possible, the r-squared value represents the fraction of the variability in a data-set that can be accounted for by the statistical model (in a drearily frequentist way). As for what that actually means, statisticians aren’t really able to come to any agreement. Welcome to the wonderful world of Damned Lies.