Monthly Archives: September 2013

Einstein and the God that Doesn’t Play Dice

30 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in Philosophy, Science

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Albert Einstein

“In his maturity, Einstein more firmly believed that there was an objective ‘reality’ that existed whether or not we could observe it. The belief in an external world independent of the person observing it, he repeatedly said, was the basis of all science.

In addition, Einstein resisted quantum mechanics because it abandoned strict causality and instead defined reality in terms of indeterminacy, uncertainty, and probability. A true disciple of Hume would not have been troubled by this. There is no real reason—other than either a metaphysical faith or a habit ingrained in the mind—to believe that nature must operate with absolute certainty. It is just as reasonable, though perhaps less satisfying, to believe that some things simply happen by chance. Certainly, there was mounting evidence that on the subatomic level this was the case.

But for Einstein, this simply did not smell true. The ultimate goal of physics, he repeatedly said, was to discover the laws that strictly determine causes and effects. ‘I am very, very reluctant to give up complete causality,’ he told Max Born.

His faith in determinism and causality reflected that of his favorite religious philosopher, Baruch Spinoza. ‘He was utterly convinced,’ Einstein wrote of Spinoza, ‘of the causal dependence of all phenomena, at a time when the success of efforts to achieve a knowledge of the causal relationship of natural phenomena was still quite modest.’ It was a sentence that Einstein could have written about himself, emphasizing the temporariness implied by the word ‘still,’ after the advent of quantum mechanics.

Like Spinoza, Einstein did not believe in a personal God who interacted with man. But they both believed that a divine design was reflected in the elegant laws that governed the way the universe worked.

This was not merely some expression of faith. It was a principle that Einstein elevated (as he had the relativity principle) to the level of a postulate, one that guided him in his work. ‘When I am judging a theory,’ he told his friend Banesh Hoffmann, ‘I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way.’

When he posed that question, there was one possibility that he simply could not believe: that the good Lord would have created beautiful and subtle rules that determined most of what happened in the universe, while leaving a few things completely to chance. It felt wrong. ‘If the Lord had wanted to do that, he would have done it thoroughly, and not kept to a pattern . . . He would have gone the whole hog. In that case, we wouldn’t have to look for laws at all.’

This led to one of Einstein’s most famous quotes, written to Max Born, the friend and physicist who would spar with him over three decades on this topic. ‘Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing,’ Einstein said. ‘But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but it does not really bring us any closer to the secrets of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not play dice.’

Thus it was that Einstein ended up deciding that quantum mechanics, though it may not be wrong, was at least incomplete. There must be a fuller explanation of how the universe operates, one that would incorporate both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. In doing so, it would not leave things to chance.”

__________

From Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.

For related reading, click below:

Albert Einstein

Einstein’s daily routine

Baruch Spinoza

Spinoza’s view of the universe

Living a Life of Value (But What ‘Value’?)

26 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by in Philosophy

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Ronald Dworkin

“People who blame their parents or other people or society at large for their own mistakes, or who cite some form of genetic determinism to absolve themselves of any responsibility for how they have acted, lack dignity because dignity requires owning up to what one has done. ‘The buck stops here’ is an important piece of ethical wisdom. This also requires taking responsibility in a different, more material, way: dignity requires that I not expect others to subsidize my decisions by bearing their financial or other costs.

I do not take responsibility for my own life if I demand that others absorb the cost of my choices: living well means making choices, and that means choosing a life with an eye to the consequences of that life that I should bear myself. Of course there is abundant room in self-respect for accepting, with gratitude, the help of others…

Living a good human life, a life one can look back on with pride, is rarely valuable because that life, abstracted from the process of creating it, has any great value in itself. It is valuable because the process of creating it is valuable. The analogy between art and life has often been drawn and often ridiculed. We should live our lives, the Romantics insisted, as a work of art. We distrust the analogy now because it sounds too Wilde: as if the qualities we value in a painting — fine sensibility or a complex formal organization or a subtle interpretation of art’s own history — were the values we should seek in life: the values of the aesthete. These may be poor values to seek in the way we live, but to condemn the analogy for that reason misses its point, which lies in the relation between the value of what is created and the value of the act of creating it.

We value great art most fundamentally not because the art as product enhances our lives but because it embodies a performance, a rising to artistic challenge. We value human lives as they are lived not for the completed narrative, as if fiction would do as well, but because they too embody a performance: rising to the challenge of having a life to lead…

If we want to make sense of a life having meaning, we must take up the Romantic’s analogy. We find it natural to say that an artist gives meaning to his raw materials and that a pianist fives fresh meaning to what he plays. We can think of living well as giving meaning – ethical meaning, if we want a name – to a life. That is the only kind of meaning in life that can stand up to the fact and fear of death. Does all that strike you as silly? Just sentimental? When you do something smaller well – play a tune or a part or a hand, throw a curve or a compliment, make a chair or a sonnet or love – your satisfaction is complete in itself. Those are achievements within life. Why can’t a life also be an achievement complete in itself, with its own value in the art in living it displays?”

__________

From the chapter “Dignity” in Ronald Dworkin’s philosophical tome Justice for Hedgehogs.  

Dworkin’s distinction between the ‘product value’ and ‘performance value’ of a life is one that is overlooked but crucial. It is just too daunting to try to orient and understand your existence in terms of the whole story of the world; attempts to locate oneself in history are as futile as attempts to locate oneself in astronomy. The scale overshadows the unit of measure.

Instead, to consciously evaluate your life by its ‘performance value’ actually puts you, I would think, in a freeing and productive state of mind. Two of the favorite observations I’ve recently read — posted on my quotes page — affirm this idea.

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” – Bertrand Russell

“I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” – Joseph Campbell 

In the concluding chapter of his book Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos, physicist Michio Kaku echoes in less sophisticated terms this point from Justice for Hedgehogs. However, Dwokin would contend that Kaku’s second commandment — to leave the world a better place than you found it — is a cliché that does not stand up to substantive analysis, given that most lives do not have much ‘product value’ by this standard. Although you’ve definitely heard it before from other mouths, it’s worth being refreshed on Kaku’s take,

“Beyond work and love, I would add two other ingredients that give meaning to life. First, to fulfill whatever talents we are born with. However blessed we are by fate with different abilities and strengths, we should try to develop them to the fullest, rather than allow them to atrophy and decay. We all know individuals who did not fulfill the promise they showed in childhood. Many of them became haunted by the image of what they might have become. Instead of blaming fate, I think we should accept ourselves as we are and try to fulfill whatever dreams are within our capability.

Second, we should try to leave the world a better place than when we entered it. As individuals, we can make a difference, whether it is to probe the secrets of Nature, to clean up the environment and work for peace and social justice, or to nurture the inquisitive, vibrant spirit of the young by being a mentor and a guide.”

In an almost irreverent but deceivingly profound scene from Cat’s Cradle: A Novel, Kurt Vonnegut channels his inner Beckett and infuses the Genesis creation story with a dose of existentialism:

“In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness.

And God said, ‘Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.’ And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat, looked around, and spoke. ‘What is the purpose of all this?’ he asked politely.

‘Everything must have a purpose?’ asked God.

‘Certainly,’ said man.

‘Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,’ said God.

And He went away.” 

At the close of the novel, there is a similarly farcical scene depicting the end of creation, when man tries unsuccessfully to coax answers from God after an apocalypse. I’ve posted it, and written some about it, here.

Ambition

25 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by in Photography, Poetry

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A Car at the End of the World

My ambition is truly limited to a few clods of earth,
some sprouting wheat, an olive grove. 
-Vincent Van Gogh

For weeks there is no poetry.
Months. There are the same songs
surrounding rhythms we call work,
the sense upon waking of something to begin,
the sense that sleep is a calculated concession to weakness.
And then, driving east in the winter morning,
you find sunlight on wet marshes and machinery,
a gathering of birds.

This is not about beauty.
At night before meals we take silence,
our hands encircling what cannot be said.
Not beauty but vastness.
The black winter creek through pillows of snow.
The wild fox before dawn loping down wet roads,
passing under streetlights, then gone.

__________

Winner of the Oxford University Review’s 2013 Poetry Competition: Ambition by American Rhodes Scholar Willy Oppenheim.

I took the photograph while with my dad watching the sun rise over the summit of the Mauna Kea Observatories on the Big Island of Hawai’i. When the picture was exhibited at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts a few years ago, I called it A Car at the End of the World, a title I still like.

Updike, C. S. Lewis, and Wittgenstein: Can We Just Assume God Exists?

23 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in Philosophy, Religion

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John Updike, Massachusetts, 1984; photographs by Dominique Nabokov

“Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

Perhaps there are two kinds of people: those for whom nothingness is no problem, and those for whom it is an insuperable problem, an outrageous cancellation rendering every other concern, from mismatching socks to nuclear holocaust, negligible. Tenacious of this terror, this adamant essence as crucial to us as our sexuality, we resist those kindly stoic consolers who assure us that we will outwear the fright, that we will grow numb and accepting and, as it were, religiously impotent. As Unamuno says, with the rhythms of a stubborn child, ‘I do not want to die – no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live forever and ever and ever. I want this ‘I’ to live – this poor ‘I’ that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now.’

The objections of material science and liberal ethics to this desperate wanting to belong to the outer, sunlit world, of sense and the senses; our wanting and its soothing belong to the elusive dark world within. Emerson, in Nature, points out ‘the total disparity between the evidence of our own being, and the evidence of the world’s being.’ Evidence of God’s being lies with that of our own; it is on our side of the total disparity that God lives. In the light, we disown Him, embarrassedly; in the dark, He is our only guarantor, our only shield against death. The impalpable self cries out to Him and wonders if it detects an answer. Like the inner of the two bonded strips of metal in a thermostat, the self curls against Him and presses. The need for our ‘I’ to have its ‘Thou,’ something other than ourselves yet sharing our subjectivity, something amplifying it indeed to the out rim of creation, survives all embarrassments, all silence, all refusals on either side. The sensation of silence cannot be helped: a loud and evident God would be a bully, an insecure tyrant, an all-crushing datum instead of, as He is, a bottomless encouragement to our faltering and frightened being. His answers come in the long run, as the large facts of our lives, strung on that thread running through all things. Religion includes, as its enemies say, fatalism, an acceptance and consecration of what is.

The thermostat image needs adjusting: God is a dark sphere enclosing the pinpoint of our selves, an adamant bubble enclosing us, protecting us, enabling us to let go, to ride the waves of what is.”

__________

From John Updike’s Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. No one writes with such self-assurance and style about the metaphysical headaches that plague anyone who honestly tries to find answers to The Big Questions. Updike brings to this task the same eye for detail and consummate precision that make his novels so distinct and so engrossing.

Still, there are some additional voices which may be worth bringing into this discussion about whether belief in the existence of God may be rightfully called ‘properly basic’ — that’s to say, whether it may be reflexively assumed by “the elusive dark world within”.

In Whit Stillman’s movie Metropolitan (1990), a scene at a posh Manhattan cocktail party kicks off with the following heady exchange between two of the film’s young protagonists:

Charlie Black: Of course there is a God. We all basically know there is.

Cynthia McLean: I know no such thing.

Charlie Black: Of course you do. When you think to yourself — and most of our waking life is taken up thinking to ourselves — you must have that feeling that your thoughts aren’t entirely wasted, that in some sense they are being heard. Rationally, they aren’t. You’re entirely alone. Even the people to whom we are closest can have no real idea of what is going on in our minds. We aren’t devastated by loneliness because, at a hardly conscious level, we don’t accept that we’re entirely alone. I think this sensation of being silently listened to with total comprehension — something you never find in real life — represents our innate belief in a supreme being, some all-comprehending intelligence.

When he was eighty-four, the renowned Oxford philosopher and lifelong atheist Anthony Flew wrote There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, a short treatise that justified his controversial late-life turn to theism. In it, he writes about a challenge made to one of his arguments for atheism:

By far, the headiest challenge to the argument [Flew’s ‘presumption of atheism’: the argument that the burden of proof is on the theist] came from America. The modal logician Alvin Plantinga introduced the idea that theism is a properly basic belief. He asserted that belief in God is similar to belief in other basic truths, such as belief in other minds or perception (seeing a tree) or memory (belief in the past). In al these instances, you trust your cognitive faculties, although you cannot prove the truth of the belief in question. Similarly, people take on certain propositions (e.g., the existence of the world) as basic and others as derivative from these basic propositions. Believers, it is argued, take the existence of God as a basic proposition.

Another great Oxford don, C.S. Lewis, provided a foundation for Plantinga’s theory in his 1945 lecture “Is Theology Poetry?”. This talk contains the following excerpt, which is widely acclaimed but often ignored or distorted by those who merely quote its final sentence:

This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams: I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner: I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience.

The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world: the dream world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific point of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.

While Lewis was making this speech at Oxford, Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself as resolute a skeptic as Flew and Lewis and Updike had once been, was at Cambridge compiling the text of his famed Philosophical Investigations, which contain the following affirmation of god as a properly basic belief:

A proof of God’s existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is give their ‘belief’ an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs. Perhaps one could ‘convince someone that God exists’ by means of a certain kind of upbringing, by shaping his life in such a way.

Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don’t mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the ‘existence of this being’, but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, — life can force this concept on us.

I have posted more from this work as well as some further reflections on in on it: Wittgenstein on God and Belief.

If you want to read more about Updike’s cosmology, check out his discussion of it in Jim Holt’s book Why Does the World Exist?:

John Updike

 The Universe Was Once Bounded in a Point the Size of a Period.

If you want some heavier and headier stuff, wade through a challenging section from Plantinga’s essay “Game Scientists Play”:

Alvin Plantinga Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame

Evolutionary Psychology and Christian Belief

Hemingway’s First Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald

20 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by in Literature

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Ernest Hemingway

Burguete, Naverre, Spain.
July 1 [1925] –

Dear Scott –

We are going in to Pamplona tomorrow. Been trout fishing here. How are you? And how is Zelda?

I am feeling better than I’ve ever felt — haven’t drunk any thing but wine since I left Paris. God it has been wonderful country. But you hate country. All right omit description of country. I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.

To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic. Then there would be a fine church like in Pamplona where I could go and be confessed on the way from one house to the other and I would get on my horse and ride out with my son to my bull ranch named Hacienda Hadley and toss coins to all my illegitimate children that lined the road. I would write out at the Hacienda and send my son in to lock the chastity belts onto my mistresses because someone had just galloped up with the news that a notorious monogamist named Fitzgerald had been seen riding toward the town at the head of a company of strolling drinkers.

Well anyway were going into town tomorrow early in the morning. Write me at the /

Hotel Quintana
Pamplona
Spain

Or don’t you like to write letters. I do because it’s such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something.

So long and love to Zelda from us both –

Yours,
Ernest

__________

A letter from Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald sent on July 1st, 1925. You’ll find it and other gems from their correspondence in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 2, 1923-1925.

The journey Hemingway was making, to the Fiesta de San Fermin at Pamplona, would provide the semi-autobiographical basis of The Sun Also Rises.

The two men had met at the Dingo Bar in Paris in May of that year, yet already in this letter we see Hemingway’s mixture of affection and condescension toward Fitzgerald. The truth, which Fitzgerald undoubtedly knew (though perhaps not yet), was that Zelda and Hemingway had a reciprocal distaste for one another; they did not, and never could, get along.

She thought he was a “materialistic mystic,” “a professional he-man,” and “a pansy with hair on his chest.” He thought she was debauched and psychotic alcoholic, a corrosive influence who purposefully interfered with Scott’s writing by spiking his anxiety and sapping his creative energy. Both seem to have been partially correct, though each failed to see their own relative flaws, most likely because they each coveted Scott’s attention. Zelda did distract Scott from his writing: in his journal he described June and July of 1925 as, “1000 parties and no work.” And Hemingway did often overplay the masculine card: perhaps he was always conscientious of the fact that he could never be more butch than Gertrude Stein.

The tension between Zelda and Hemingway is amusingly contextualized in Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris.

Below: Hemingway in Zaragoza, Spain. In the top pictures he chats with Spanish matador Antonio Ordonez before a bullfight, and takes in the fight with his friend A.E. Hotchner. In the bottom pictures he is home on the couch, then feeding his cat, Cristobal Colon, one of six he had at the time.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway;Antonio Ordonez

Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Our Relationship to Our President

18 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by in Politics

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Steinbeck

“The relationship of Americans to their President is a matter of amazement to foreigners. Of course we respect the office and admire the man who can fill it, but at the same time we inherently fear and suspect power. We are proud of the President, and we blame him for things he did not do. We are related to the President in a close and almost family sense; we inspect his every move and mood with suspicion. We insist that the President be cautious in speech, guarded in action, immaculate in his public and private life; and in spite of these imposed pressures we are avidly curious about the man hidden behind the formal public image we have created. We have made a tough but unwritten code of conduct for him, and the slightest deviation brings forth a torrent of accusation and abuse.

The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else. We subject him and his family to close and constant scrutiny and denounce them for things that we ourselves do every day. A Presidential slip of the tongue, a slight error in judgment — social, political, or ethical — can raise a storm of protest. We give the President more work than a man can bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use him up, eat him up. And with all this, Americans have a love for the President that goes beyond loyalty or party nationality; he is ours, and we exercise the right to destroy him.”

__________

From John Steinbeck’s essay “Government of the People,” published in his 1966 book America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction.

I had never heard about this lesser-known work of Steinbeck’s until yesterday, when I read William Vollman’s essay “Life as a Terrorist: Uncovering My FBI file” in the newest edition of Harper’s magazine. In this account, the FBI’s bumblings and hysterical misappraisals of Vollman and his friends are counterposed to the sagelike voice of Steinbeck, that most native of American authors, whose understanding of the American project — especially its sincerity and idealism, and how it may be cynically twisted by the powerful — still echoes into our own age.

I highly recommend Vollman’s essay as well as Jonathan Franzen’s “A Different Kind of Father”, a look at literature and paternalism, in the September edition of Harper’s.

A Political Culture that Rewards Cowardice

16 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in Current Events, Interview, Politics

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Mark Leibovich

BILL MOYERS: You say that political Washington is “an inbred company town where party differences are easily subsumed by membership in ‘The Club.’” And you describe “The Club”: “The Club swells for the night into the ultimate bubble world. They become part of a system that rewards, more than anything, self-perpetuation.”

MARK LEIBOVICH: Self-perpetuation is a key point in all of this. It is the question that drives Washington now: how are you going to continue your political life? I mean, the original notion of the founders was that presidents or public servants would serve a term, a couple years, then return to their communities, return to their farms. Now the organizing principle of life in Washington is how are you going to keep it going?

Whether it’s how you’re going to stay in office, by pleasing your leadership so that you get loads of party money. Or by raising enough money so that you can get reelected, and then getting another gig — in lobbying, in party politics — after you leave.

BILL MOYERS: “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” it ain’t.

MARK LEIBOVICH: No, it isn’t. And look, I tried to find a Mr. Smith character. I wanted to… And I thought there would be people that I could root for in Washington: a person who was there for the right reasons. But I couldn’t find him or her. And ultimately, I gave up trying.

BILL MOYERS: What does that say to you?

MARK LEIBOVICH: I think ultimately it says that this is a very cautious culture. And I think cowardice is rewarded at every step of the way.

BILL MOYERS: How so?

MARK LEIBOVICH: Moral cowardice is rewarded in Congress. Everything about the Congressional system — whether it’s leadership, whether it’s how money is raised — is going to reward cowardice. The true mavericks are going to be punished. If you want to build a career outside of office when you’re done, you are absolutely encouraged to not anger too many people.

BILL MOYERS: Not take a big stand?

MARK LEIBOVICH: Not take a big stand, right. No truth is going to be told here, because of this cowardly, go along to get along principle. And I think that there are many ways in which the system is financed — the politics are financed, the way the media works — that will not under any circumstances reward someone who takes a stand.

BILL MOYERS: As you and I both know, many Americans see Washington today as a polarized, dysfunctional city. One that is not sufficiently bipartisan. But you describe it as a place that “becomes a determinedly bipartisan team when there is money to be made.”

MARK LEIBOVICH: That is absolutely true. I mean, ultimately, the business of Washington relies on things not getting done. And this is a bipartisan imperative. If a tax reform bill passed tomorrow, if an immigration bill passed tomorrow, that’s tens of billions of dollars in consulting, lobbying, messaging fees that are not going to be paid out…

The problem is excess. To some degree, it is perfectly emblematic of the reality distortion field inside of Washington; that our political class just has no sense whatsoever that the rest of the country is struggling, that the government is, financially, in very, very bad shape, and that Washington is not doing a good job…

And I don’t think this can be sustained. I think it’s indecent. I think it is not how Americans want their government and their capital city to be.

__________

Mark Leibovich discussing his new book This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America’s Gilded Capital with Bill Moyers.

A friend in D.C. who happens to be neighbors and acquaintances with Leibovich tells me that, originally, Leibovich was planning to make the subtitle of the book “How to Succeed in Suck-Up-City,” but that his publishers swapped it out at the last minute. I think it would’ve been a slightly more pungent description of a book whose tone is as cynical as its subject matter.

If you don’t have time to read the book — or if you are unsure if you want to read it — check out the entire Moyers-Leibovich discussion below. It’s one of the most lucid and demystifying (and utterly infuriating) conversations about our broken political system that I’ve seen in the past year.

Moyers introduces the program by saying, “Whatever you’re doing these last days of summer, stop, take some time, and read this book. I promise, you will laugh and cry and by the last page, I think you’ll be ready for the revolution. The title is “This Town,” an up-close look at how our nation’s capital really works. I can tell you, it’s not a pretty picture.” And I couldn’t agree more.

On the Problems of Ad Hoc Foreign Policy: Why We Should Stay Out of Syria

06 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by in Current Events, Original, Politics, War

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Mideast Syria Anniversary

Last week, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin sneeringly compared America’s policy in the Middle East to, “a monkey with a hand grenade.” Such an image disconcerts for several reasons, not the least of which is that we in the United States don’t like to be talked to in that tone of voice (thank you, Hafez Assad’s Facebook post); but it also stings because it is an ugly take on an ugly truth, that right now the United States has no coherent strategy in the Middle East.

Or rather we have an ad hoc one. Regime change here; sanctions there. We acquiesce to, or actively support, tyrants, then attack them later on.

This is not to say that we must support a single ally or set of allies it in the region, nor that we should use the same means to support them each time. The adage “When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail” has proven true on the world stage since time immemorial; yet if this metaphor can be extended, we in the United States must now realize that there are certain tools to be used for certain projects. And certain projects that we cannot repair.

Which is, in a nutshell, my view of the current conflict in Syria. It’s easy to fault President Obama for acting too sluggishly in identifying the problem, or in acting too brashly in establishing his “red line” in an off-the-cuff remark 13 months ago. But the crucial and I think only question is whether should we attack Assad or arm the rebels now? And my answer to each of those questions is, adamantly, no.

The fundamental reason that we should not attack Assad relates to a simple cost-benefit calculus: is it more likely to do harm than good, and in what proportion do these hypothetical harms and goods exist? Sadly, it seems that the harm side of the ledger significantly outweighs the good.

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Ezra Klein asks “What’s could go wrong in Syria?,” and his answer is far from reassuring. He outlines ten ways in which our intervention could falter, including:

For one, our strikes could come with heavy civilian casualties – an initial consideration which must give any morally serious person pause.

Second: our strikes could result in Assad killing more civilians, as, perhaps intuitively, civilian casualties in wars often escalate when the tide shifts against entrenched, ruthless and heavily-armed regimes. (This is not even to mention the fact that Assad may use chemical weapons in response to our attacks, a move which would not only kill more innocents but also flout the international norm against chemical attacks.)

Third, our attacks may be so feeble and restrained that Assad may outlast them, survive, and come away looking stronger and more resilient before the world. As Senator James Risch asked this week, “[What] if we go in with a limited strike and, the day after… Assad crawls out of his rat hole and says, ‘Look, I stood up to the strongest power on the face of this Earth and I won?’”

Fourth is the so-called “Pottery Barn Rule”; or, “If you break it, you buy it,” “You bombed it, you own it.” The shadow of this rule extends all the way from Iraq, where members of the “Coalition of the Willing” (most notably Britain) seem to have absorbed the fact that while Syria is not Iraq, it is still a place that, if we are to intervene, will anchor us to its fate for years if not decades to come.

Fifth, there is the question of reprisal. What if, by attacking the Syrian army or its sympathizers like Hezbollah, we incite violent repercussion against Americans? We’ve seen this happen before, and the question is not necessarily would it be our fault, but rather how would or should our military respond?

And lastly, assuming these missiles devastate the regime and Assad goes down like peaches and cream. What then? What if a Jihadist group gets ahold of his vast stores of volatile Sarin gas? What if Syria’s Assad-sized void is filled by chaos? What if it is filled by something worse?

The largest and most aggressive arm of the Syrian resistance is the Jabhat al-Nusra, or Al-Nusra Front, a Sunni Jihadist militia and Al Qaeda proxy that’s been designated as a terrorist organization by the UN and US. Among the opposition, they are at this stage the most likely successors to Assad; what if they take power?

In conclusion though, I want to call attention to two rays of light which have shone through the fog of this debate and should give us some qualified optimism for the trajectory of our domestic politics.

The first is President Obama’s reluctance to use military force without Congressional approval. While I do believe Obama reached for this justification cynically, as a means of shoring up his credibility if this strike does in fact go horribly wrong, I nevertheless believe he has laudably reversed the precedent of allowing the Commander-in-Chief to use force without first consulting the legislature. Our founders knew that the Executive would be the most outward-looking branch of our government, and that therefore the Congress must vigilantly check its ability to declare unnecessary or unpopular wars. According to a recent Reuters poll, 65% of Americans agreed with the statement that, “the problems of Syria are none of our business,” and that we should thus stay out of the conflict.

John Adams was fond of declaring that the United States must not be in the business of going abroad to “slay dragons” in the name of democracy, and I’m glad that we are again becoming cynical of Presidents who tell us otherwise.

But there is a second, more subtle silver lining to this development: the growing alliance between isolationist Tea Party libertarians and progressive anti-war Democrats. On the Syria question and on the subject of our ballooning surveillance state, these two seemingly opposed sides of our politics have been marching in lock step. My two favorite politicians in Washington right now are Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Rand Paul (R-KY), statesmen who probably wouldn’t agree on what day of the week it is.

Yet their inter-party overlap on these two issues is staggering. From the Right, there are those like Paul who have a real concern for limiting government at home, while at the same time upholding a new model for foreign policy – a repudiation of the neocon view that America should intervene in internal conflicts abroad. From the left, there are voices like Grayson’s that sound more anti-war and less liberal internationalist. These people also care about privacy issues, but not because they necessarily desire a limited government, but because they embrace the leftist argument for robust civil liberties.

Right now in the House, Grayson is gearing up an “ad hoc whip organization,” a left-right coalition of Representatives who will vote not to authorize the use of force in Syria. And it looks like its gaining momentum: RealClearPolitics notes that in the House, 33 say they will vote yes to authorize or are leaning yes, while 195 no or leaning no (this is barely shy of the needed 218-vote majority.)

I find my feet firmly planted on these grounds, and invite you to stand alongside.

__________

I believe the Syria question is going to cast a shadow over the entire second term of the Obama administration. While he perhaps would have liked to have focused on immigration or gun control — especially before the 2014 mid-term elections — it seems this conflict has taken center stage, and I don’t think it’ll be exiting stage right anytime soon.

Sign Alan Grayson’s petition: www.dontattacksyria.com.

The full text of the petition reads:

The Administration is considering intervening in the Syrian civil war. We oppose this. There’s no vital national security involved. We are not the world’s policeman, nor its judge and jury. Our own needs in America are great, and they come first. The death of civilians is always regrettable, and civil war is regrettable, but no Americans have been attacked, and no American allies have been attacked. The British Parliament understandably has voted not to join in any attack. Notably, defense contractor Raytheon’s stock is up 20% in the last 60 days. It seems that nobody wants US intervention in Syria except the military-industrial complex. I oppose US military intervention in Syria. Join me.

Bullet Points

06 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by in Current Events, Film, Original

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GunMy short documentary “One Small Step to Reducing Gun Violence” has just been nominated by the Georgetown University faculty and library staff as one of the top media presentations of the past year.

It is now in a contest with nine other projects. Polls close Monday, so vote as soon as you can.

Help make me a winner — cast your vote here.

Watch the video below.

Being Friends with Socrates

05 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by in Philosophy

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Socrates

“Antiphon once said to Socrates in a conversation: ‘Socrates, I, for my part, hold that you are just, but not in any way wise. And in my opinion you even recognize this yourself. At any rate, you demand no money in exchange for associating with you. And yet if you thought that your cloak or your house or any other of your possessions were worth money, you would not only not give it to anyone for free, but you wouldn’t even take less for it than it is worth.

‘Surely it is clear that if you thought as well that associating with you were worth anything, you would exact no less money for this too than it is worth. Just, then, you may be, in that you do not deceive on account of greed, but not wise, since what you understand is worthless.’

And Socrates replied to this: ‘Antiphon, among us it is held that youthful bloom and wisdom are nobly bestowed, or shamefully bestowed, in like fashion. For if someone wishes to sell his youthful bloom for money to whoever wishes it, they call him a prostitute; but if someone makes a friend of one whom he recognizes to be a lover who is both noble and good, we hold that he is moderate. Similarly, those also who sell wisdom for money to whoever wishes it they call sophists just as it they were prostitutes; but we hold that whoever makes a friend by teaching whatever good he possesses to someone he recognizes as having a good nature – this one does what benefits a gentlemanly (noble and good) citizen.

Accordingly, Antiphon, just as another is pleased by a good horse or a dog or a bird, so I myself am even more pleased by good friends, and if I possess something good I teach it, and I introduce them to others from whom, I believe, they will receive some benefit with a view to virtue. And reading collectively with my friends, I go through the treasures of the wise men of old which they wrote and left behind in their books; and if we see something good, we pick it out; and we hold that it is a great gain if we become friends with one another.’

When I heard these things, I formed the opinion that Socrates himself was blessed and that he led those who heard him to nobility and goodness.

And again Antiphon once questioned him about how he could believe that he made others fit for political affairs, since he himself did not engage in political affairs. Socrates said, ‘In which case, Antiphon, would I more engage in political affairs, if I engaged in them by myself, or if I should attend to there being as many as possible competent to engage in them?’”

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From Book I, Chapter VI of Xenophon’s Memorabilia (Amy Bonnette’s translation).

Like Jesus of Nazareth, Socrates never wrote a book. We know his words through the conversations and monologues that his acolytes recorded.

Cornell West was once asked what question of history most sparked his imagination. His answer: “I sometimes wonder why Jesus never laughed and Socrates never cried.”