The last Modernist: As Ophelia Benson is a victim of her own stupidity, Brian Leiter is truly a victim of his own brilliance.
Against the primacy of ideas, but unwilling to accept the primacy of process.

see below

I've been futzing with this since thursday. The paragraphs below are written in response to questions raised by two posts: by Brian Leiter on conservative Christianity, and at Crooked Timber on moderating forces in contemporary Islam. See "Fun with Ophelia Benson", below. I'm a better editor than I am a writer.
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I have more faith in American vulgarity than I do in American enlightenment, though of course I don't have much faith in either. Intellectuals no longer pretend to lead but they still believe they should. They once maintained the fiction of being foreigners in their own land (this applied to the US more than anywhere) but in the end alienation failed both as romance and as ideology. My parents lived off the intellectual remnants of the old left, cut off from working class politics and surrounded by hippies -their students- for whom they had a studied contempt. They were left wing academics of the sort one rarely sees today, both committed and superior. My awareness and my cynicism mean I'm more bothered today by the arrogance of their ex-students -now rump modernists and technocratic liberals- than I am by the conservative faithful.

Modernism argued that social transformation could begin with an intellectual awareness; it doesn't. Social change has always generated intellectual change, not the other way around. A Marxian analysis does not cure a Marxian reality. Economic factors cannot be made to follow because we now understand they lead. The successful civil rights movement was not led by intellectuals, though they followed along with pads and pencils, but by members in full of the community they represented. Martin Luther King was a preacher, and a popular one. My parents, who epitomized the contradictions of intellectually snobbish but committed leftism, always preferred the more marginal, but also more intellectually serious-read: modern (and isolate)- Malcolm X.

It's all too easy to conflate the authority of any process with that of an individual, as in the subtle rhetorical transformation that allows a policeman to say, "I am the law." It's always the reactionaries who 'are' The Church, as it's always radicals who 'are' the revolution. And authoritarians, or more often their willing servants, are often unable literally to understand just how they twist logic to insulate themselves, to keep their sense of their own morality intact regardless of their crimes. Never mind Saddam Hussein, witness the current farce in the Austrian church, and the strange psychology of Tony Hendra.

The people aren't getting any smarter, but they know more Pakistanis and lesbians than they used to. And truck drivers are eating sushi for the same reason they eat it in Japan, because it goes well with beer. I worry about religious -Christian, Islamic, and Hindu- fundamentalism. But I worry more about the response to all of them by the intellectual and technocratic elite. Protestations of logical and moral clarity by the partisans of modern society ring dangerously hollow.

Change preceeds an awareness of change. You learn to play the piano by practicing; understanding appears after the fact. Modernism posits a dichotomy between logic and faith, under which any unintellectual heuristic is seen as suspect, as undermining the primacy of consciousness. But what are the implications of our having to learn by doing, by flexing a muscle, by performing the same mindless action over and over again? And what is it precisely that we learn? Modernism has no answer, and it refuses even to ask the question, leaving it in the hands of hippies and the faithful. What about those of us who are neither Modernist nor religious? What about those us us who observe without Belief?

Where is the secular intellectualism that takes this form of learning into account, that takes into account this 'silence'?

Fun with Ophelia Benson.
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I caught some of Obama on the Sunday morning chat. He's a smart man. Russert was an ass.
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Update Tuesday: More fun with Ophelia Benson.

“Law and Anthropology.”

I'm a fan of Kitano 'Beat' Takeshi, and have been for a few years. Zatoichi will fill my mind for days.

It's art as popular entertainment, and popular entertainment as art. It's incredibly violent, and yet has passages that are as gentle as anything I've ever seen on film. The scene that describes the transformation of a young boy into a woman, made by overlaying two shots of him/her performing a geisha's dance as a child and then as an adult is simultaneously tragic, because of the act that initiated the transformation, and in every way the reverse, for the woman he becomes. And all this in a movie with fake blood, and swords and severed limbs flying everywhere. It's pure theater, and more moving for the fakery.

I had an early breakfast yesterday at The Carlyle, sitting at a banquette next to an ex, an old friend, who stays there when she's in town. The food, what I had of it, was uninteresting, but the decor was lovely and the clientele nicely dressed and very well behaved. I passed: white linen drawstring pants from French Connection and a dress shirt, collar open, sleeves rolled up two turns above my wrists; I looked like a man who doesn't need to wear a suit. Facing out into the room I watched the servants come and go, and the tall and very pretty teenage daughter who walked by our table one too many times. I'd noticed her before so that was fun.
Afterwards we walked down Madison as it began to rain. We dipped into a store to buy a pair of rain boots, another to buy a pair of socks, and another to buy an umbrella, which was small, and since I'd left my own at home and my bag is waterproof, I walked alongside my ex, chatting and getting drenched. We walked slowly. On 72nd I exchanged a smile with a handsome blonde, who was impressed that I seemed to have accepted my fate, but not so much that I would not still smile at a passing girl.

The morning was a very pleasant lie.

Renoir and Mallarmé, with Degas—the photographer—reflected in the mirror.

From an old friend of my father, and an occasional reader of this blog:

Dear Op-ed Editor and Public Editor:

I think the Times needs to provide a correction for a statement by
Stephen Sestanovich in his Op-ed article "How Saddam Failed the Yeltsin Test."

In his next-to-last paragraph Mr. Sestanovich writes: "When Saddam
Hussein forced out United Nations inspectors in 1998, President Clinton
responded with days of bombings. . . ." This statement, which presents
a view repeated endlessly during the run-up to the Iraq war, perpetuates
misinformation about the cicumstances under which UNSCOM inspectors left Iraq in Decembeer 1998. Coming from someone who held a high post in the Clinton administration at the time and who is currently a senior fellow at the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, this statement would seem to carry considerable authority. But it is wrong--or, at the very least, misleading--as the Times reported in 1998 and has reaffirmed within the past two years.

UNSCOM Executive Chairman Richard Butler withdrew the weapons inspectors from Iraq in a coordinated arrangement with Washington just two days in advance of a new bombing campaign by the United States. Butler, the head of a UN agency, took this action without securing the agreement of the UN Security Council. The correct story of the inspectors' withdrawal is essential because the issue of what was seen as the inadequate response to renewed UN inspections under Hans Blix and Mohammed El Baradei in 2002 was so important a part of the Bush administration's justification for acting unilaterally in invading Iraq.

I find Mr. Sestanovich's statement astonishing and one calling for
correction, not just because it is false but because, uncorrected, it
becomes part of the backlash by the Bush administration and its
supporters against the recent criticisms of the Bush administration's
case for going to war in Iraq. Both the Clinton and Bush
administrations should take responsibility for undermining the UN
inspection regime and so opening the door to the war policy upon which
the Bush administration chose to act.

Sincerely,

Joel Isaacson

If I put up anything later this evening or tomorrow, I'll probably stay away from politics; I'm not really in the mood.

There's a part of me, the part with the blackest sort of humor, that thinks it would be sort of fun if Bush won in November, only to be destroyed by scandal. This is so much worse than Vietnam or Watergate; this is farce; but the longer it takes for him to fall, the more people he'll take with him. I'm not voting for Nader, it's not worth the risk or the cost, but if Bush gets a second term the Democrats will attack more than ever, and they'll be getting more ammunition by the day.
The way things are going, bookies will be giving odds on impeachment before the race is over.


[I was so wrong]

''That was not something that required a war,'' he said.

Link from: Holden@Eschaton

Sailing Towards a Storm

Quietly and with minimal coverage in the U.S. press, the Navy announced that from mid-July through August it would hold exercises dubbed Operation Summer Pulse '04 in waters off the China coast near Taiwan.

This will be the first time in U.S. naval history that seven of our 12 carrier strike groups deploy in one place at the same time. It will look like the peacetime equivalent of the Normandy landings and may well end in a disaster.

At a minimum, a single carrier strike group includes the aircraft carrier itself (usually with nine or 10 squadrons and a total of about 85 aircraft), a guided missile cruiser, two guided missile destroyers, an attack submarine and a combination ammunition, oiler and supply ship.

Normally, the United States uses only one or at the most two carrier strike groups to show the flag in a trouble spot. In a combat situation it might deploy three or four, as it did for both wars with Iraq. Seven in one place is unheard of.

Operation Summer Pulse '04 was almost surely dreamed up at the Pearl Harbor headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Command and its commander, Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, and endorsed by neocons in the Pentagon. It is doubtful that Congress was consulted. This only goes to show that our foreign policy is increasingly made by the Pentagon.

According to Chinese reports, Taiwanese ships will join the seven carriers being assembled in this modern rerun of 19th century gunboat diplomacy. The ostensible reason given by the Navy for this exercise is to demonstrate the ability to concentrate massive forces in an emergency, but the focus on China in a U.S. election year sounds like a last hurrah of the neocons.

So stupid. So fucking stupid

Some people wonder aloud why there are those, mostly from backgrounds where access to information is limited, who believe the world was created in six days. I wonder more at those, from backgrounds where information is plentiful, who believe that capitalism is just, economics is a science, Rachmaninoff is a great composer, and Spiderman 2 is an interesting movie.

I have more patience with the defensiveness of the uneducated than the arrogance of the educated, but I stand by what I said before: by denying Bullshit its role and proper place, you lose the ability to communicate anything of objective worth.
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On the front page of the NY Times this morning, below the fold, is a photograph taken be a camera hovering two feet above the ground, of a naked emaciated child with her head leaning on her mother's thigh.

Get up and walk away from the keyboard, into the middle of whatever room you're in. Bend forward and put your hands in front of your face as if holding a camera; close one eye and look towards the ground with the other and imagine that child at your feet. Move your index finger downwards toward your thumb and make a clicking sound, and see if you can understand what you've become.

I hate photojournalism.
I hate the educational mandate that teaches the acquisition of knowledge before imagination.
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I have no fear of Islam, Judaism, or Christianity; one can argue with any theological defense of violence. In any language there's debate over the meaning of words, Koran or Constitution makes no difference. But what can defend against the pure mechanistic rationality of scientistic logic, or the illusion that it can be made to apply to our lives without stripping away their complexity? What defends us from the likes of Brad DeLong, from the polymath who poses as a humanist?

Max Speaks.

The editorial page issues a mea culpa, but the culpa's all wrong.
They claim the problem with the war is not enough international support. Rubbish. More international support would get us more beheadings of Germans, French, and Russians.
They claim they should have disbelieved the WMD stories. But Saddam with WMDs is still not a credible threat to the U.S. North Korea has WMDs. Why don't they come after us? Why haven't they blown up Seattle. Because they're not crazy. Nor was Saddam. Even Dick Cheney once enunciated a case for not toppling Saddam.
The third bankrupt premise is that, whatever the ill-advisedness of the invasion, now we have to stay until "stability" is achieved. But there is nothing about what that means. There is no meaningful exit criterion.
Bottom line: New York Times liberalism condones invasions under international auspices for bad reasons absent considerations of feasibility and without exit strategies.
We need regime change more than we know.

"Foundations change with every decision, but are still foundations; languages change, but are still language. There is no either/or. Such a narrative philosophy, by way of, rather than concerning narrative, is as frustrating to leftists as it is to conservatives, as frustrating to bureaucrats as it is to analytic philosophers. It simply denies the law of non-contradiction. Such a process can be rigorously formal and intellectual, but it can not be static, except inasmuch as we are limited by the parameters of being. One person can not invent language, and it is impossible to circumvent the ambiguities caused by its creation."

At some point, philosophy fails, and something else must take its place. To practice philosophy as if this point does not occur is to choose systems in isolation from the world, over a reciprocal relationship with what they are supposed to represent.

In other words: By denying Bullshit its role and proper place, you lose the ability to communicate anything of objective worth.

Fix/re-edit, of below.

Well, Fuck. I take it back.
Brian Leiter

Addendum [to a long, and very good, post on the topic du jour, the relation of science to economics] (July 16, 2004): It does seem to me in retrospect that too much is made to turn in this analysis on whether economics is a “science”; I was prompted originally to write on the topic after hearing lawyer/economist colleagues state, in all seriousness, that they viewed economics as on a par with physics, not quite as successful yet, of course, but still…. Making clear why this was utterly silly seemed worthwhile. But having done that, it would be a mistake to conclude that we should not try to bring scientific techniques, methods, and styles of explanation to bear on unruly human phenomena. Qualitative and generic predictions can be worth quite a lot, especially if it’s all we have! And holding our theorizing about human affairs to epistemically robust standards like those we see exemplified in the hard sciences seems good for intellectual hygiene, even if the results are never going to be as powerful. How well, of course, economics fares by even these more relaxed criteria is an open question; as Hausman and Rosenberg document, the record is mixed. (And, conversely, the record of much maligned explanatory paradigms, like Freud’s, are actually rather good—but more on that on another day.)

He took the words, some of them anyway, right out of my mouth; the Freud reference is spot on. Leiter's response is much more interesting to me than what I read at Crooked Timber.

Leiter still wants it both ways, in a way I enjoy. His arrogance gets its start in the association of the intellect with a scientific ideal, but he refuses to vulgarize his interests and he slams anyone who does so as quickly and as harshly as he slams the Texas Taliban. He reminds me of a specific sort of Modernist, one who walks a line between opposing forces. He lives a sophistication that he's unable to describe. It's not dishonest; it's conflicted, and complex.
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[I gave him too much credit]

I've just read Jack Balkin's discussion of the Youngstown decision, and its relation to the what has become known as the OLC's "Torture Memo." Here are the three paragraphs Balkin quotes from the decision of Justice Jackson:

1. When the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate. In these circumstances, and in these only, may he be said (for what it may be worth) to personify the federal sovereignty. If his act is held unconstitutional under these circumstances, it usually means that the Federal Government as an undivided whole lacks power. A seizure executed by the President pursuant to an Act of Congress would be supported by the strongest of presumptions and the widest latitude of judicial interpretation, and the burden of persuasion would rest heavily upon any who might attack it.

2. When the President acts in absence of either a congressional grant or denial of authority, he can only rely upon his own independent powers, but there is a zone of twilight in which he and Congress may have concurrent authority, or in which its distribution is uncertain. Therefore, congressional inertia, indifference or quiescence may sometimes, at least as a practical matter, enable, if not invite, measures on independent presidential responsibility. In this area, any actual test of power is likely to depend on the imperatives of events and contemporary imponderables rather than on abstract theories of law.

3. When the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb, for then he can rely only upon his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress over the matter. Courts can sustain exclusive presidential control in such a case only by disabling the Congress from acting upon the subject. Presidential claim to a power at once so conclusive and preclusive must be scrutinized with caution, for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system.

Two points: One is to acknowledge the brilliance of the opinion, which is clear even to a layman, though in my case I grew up around debates over Con Law. The other is to recognize, or be reminded of, the fragility of any line of argument as it passes through history's currents and contingencies. One understands why Justice Scalia argues so forcefully for stability, for the notion that it is the closest we can and should come to justice. How do you defend curiosity, as a value, against such ideas? By arguing for curiosity itself as a stabilizing force; this Balkin does well.

Brian Leiter's intellectualism encompasses ideas, Balkin's intelligence encompasses the ambiguities inherent in their communication. His collegial manner argues by example. On a more directly intellectual level he argues from an understanding that foundations may simultaneously exist and not. Foundations change with every decision, but are still foundations; languages change, but are still language. There is no either/or. Such a narrative philosophy, by way of, rather than concerning narrative, is as frustrating to leftists as it is to conservatives, as frustrating to bureaucrats as it is to analytic philosophers. It simply denies the law of non-contradiction. Such a process can be rigorously formal and intellectual, but it can not be static, except inasmuch as we are limited by the parameters of being. One person can not invent language, and it is impossible to circumvent the ambiguities caused by its creation.

My interests may lie in a more violently schizophrenic variation of this logic. I may have no choice given my upbringing. And sometimes in Balkin's writing I miss a certain aggressiveness or even aggression, of the sort I indulge in (and enjoy in Leiter.) In a world where his opinions were commonplace, as they should be, I'd have a lot to disagreements with him, but we are not in that world, and Balkin is pretty damn good.

"We spent a day with his lawyer discussing the knight," said one official. "Fischer said the horse's nose was too long."
And they want to drag him back into the country to stand trial.
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In Cold Blood

Brad DeLong on Jack Balkin on Posner and Vermeule, defenders of the torture memo. I liked DeLong's last paragraphs.

It seems to me that Yoo misses a great many points. The hypothetical he describes--Osama bin Laden himself, a ticking nuclear bomb, a city that cannot be evacuated, et cetera--is not a situation in which torture should be legal. It is, however, a situation in which torture is pardonable. If you find yourself interrogating Osama bin Laden in such a situation, you do what you must do--and then you ask the president for a pardon. And the president has the power to give you one.

That's what the procedure is with respect to torture. And I think that's what the procedure should be.

And this by John Yoo, author of the OLC memo: 

It is easy now for critics to claim that the work was poor; they haven't produced their own analyses or confronted any of the hard questions. For example, would they say that no technique beyond shouted questions could be used to interrogate a high-level terrorist leader, such as Osama bin Laden, who knows of planned attacks on the United States?

To Which Balkin responds: 

Here Professor Yoo shows himself to be the master of the false dichotomy. Either the torture memo is right or Osama gets off scot free. How silly of us to think that there might be a third alternative that doesn't give the President carte blanche to torture and maim. Professor Yoo is certainly right about one thing: It is easy for critics of the torture memo to claim that the work was poor. That's because it is poor work. Yoo has done many fine things in his career. This is not one of them.

I want to add something without overstating it.  Brian Leiter, in his impatience with fools and foolishness, doesn't give enough importance to the formal properties of the legal process as described and defended by Balkin. I have no doubt that Leiter would defend this process, contra the arguments of John Yoo, but the full complexity and weight of the issues seems foreign to him. Why continue with the process when we know Bin Laden is guilty? Why follow a procedure when we know the outcome? Why put up with absurd arguments against evolution?
Our democracy gives time to those who are accused of foolishness for the same reason it gives time to those who are accused of crimes. Leiter et al. sound less like legal philosophers than prosecutors, arguing one side of a case.
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More on Abu Ghraib:

Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher." ...
"The disaffecion inside the Pentagon is extremeley accute," Hersh says. He tells the story of an officer telling Rumsfeld how bad things are, and Rummy turning to a ranking general yes-man who reassured him that things are just fine. Says Hersh, "The Secretary of Defense is simply incapable of hearing what he doesn’t want to hear."
The Iraqi insurgency, he says,was operating in 1-to-3 man cells a year ago, now in 10-15 man cells, and despite the harsh questioning, "we still know nothing about them...we have no tactical information.”

Link from Atrios.

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WSJ,"A 'Torture' Memo And Its Tortuous Critics"

Posner and Verlmeule's op-ed was pulled so quickly that Balkin had to link to a cache file that died within a year. Now the piece has been republished. There's no telling if it's been cut but I'm betting it hasn't. That's how far we've come. 

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"I don't know, I'm just a geologist"

Most people admit that there are others who know more than they do about many things. I'm a carpenter and a pretty good one; in matters of general construction I'm just shy of expertise. I know more than a lot of people about a variety of subjects, but beyond those few I make no great claims. That's why in my criticism I stick to basics.
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Brian Leiter is pretending to be a scientist again.

"Professor Steve Dutch, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay...imagines a critic"

"I'm sick and tired of self-appointed so-called experts and their know-it-all, arrogant attitude. Why don't you people stay out of things you know nothing about? To hear you tell it, you know everything and the rest of us are stupid."

professor Dutch replies:

"I've seen this script before. At this point I'm supposed to get all humble and apologetic and say 'There, there. We didn't mean to make you feel bad. You're really a good person and a valuable human being and your opinions do count.'

"I'm tired of playing that game.
"We're not 'self-appointed' or 'so-called' experts. We are real experts. We're not 'authority figures.' We are real authorities.

"It's not arrogance to say what you know professionally. It is arrogance to reject expert opinion without having expertise of your own.

"If hearing the experts say you're wrong makes you feel bad or stupid, that is your problem, not ours. See a therapist and work on your self-esteem. If you think this is rough on the ego, try getting a paper or grant proposal you've worked on for months rejected, something real experts face all the time. We don't know everything, but we do know more on our subjects of expertise than other people, especially people with no training at all.

"Unless you have real evidence to back up your opinions, they don't count. If you hear something that conflicts with what you think you know, and you don't bother to check it out, you shouldn't feel stupid. You are stupid. If you want to take on the experts but won't spend the time, effort and money to become an expert yourself, you're not just stupid. You're lazy, too.

"If you think I'm disrespecting you, you're right. I have no respect for people who are uninformed, get angry when someone contradicts them, but are too lazy to get informed and too cowardly to face failure, criticism, and the possibility they might have to change their minds. You're not a good person. Nobody who is lazy and cowardly can be called 'good.'

"Where did you get the idea you're so valuable? There are six billion of us. You're not all that unique. How exactly did you get the notion that you stand so high in the cosmic scheme of things that you have the right to make real experts treat you as an equal without bothering to acquire any knowledge yourself?"

BL as I've mentioned before is so addicted to his own sense of superiority he won't even link to anyone who's not an expert. Here he is on his happy discovery of Max Sawicky:

"The squishy, polite "liberal" blogs were getting tiresome, and the popular Atrios and CalPundit simply have no relevant knowledge base, intellectual framework, or technical expertise--as a consequence they never rise much beyond good intentions and light amusements.".

By all means, let us leave carpentry to carpenters and politics to politicians. [Leiter's post was updated four times and it's a confused mess, since all but one of the people he attacks are full credentialed experts]

Leiter is a Platonist who imagines himself a leftist. That he seems unable to recognize the contradiction is something I guess I find amusing.

As far as Prof Dutch is concerned, I can only say that the world is full of strange creatures, and he seems to have met a few of them. Perhaps he should write a book of short stories. I bet it would sell.
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My mention of the post at Body and Soul (see Mon.) wasn't a dig at Jeanne D'Arc. Her acknowledgement that she prefers the lesser over the greater in choosing between Ellington and Basie was the first interesting response I'd read, so I decided to put something up. It also ties into my new argument; professor Dutch's dentist strikes me as more interesting than he is. He's got more of an imagination certainly.

"Feh"