Greatest Modern Thinkers

Stephen Dubner asks the question, and solicits the internet’s answers. As usual with these types of questions, the answer isn’t nearly as important as the criteria for selecting answer. And so to make this easier, I’ll limit myself to those thinkers that are A. Alive and B. made contributions whose importance are recognized by people outside their field and/or the general public. So here we go, in no particular order.

Noam Chomsky - The man invented modern linguistics almost entirely on his own. He also single handedly vanquished two theories that had dominated the social sciences before him - The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and behaviorism.

James Watson - discovered the double helix. He’s responsible (along with Crick, of course) for the biological sciences taking over physics as the science which has been making the greatest advances in explaining our world

Vint Cerf - Invented the internet.

Norman Borlaug - Not so much a thinker, but he’s the scientist who’s had a direct, positive impact on more people’s lives than just about anyone else in history.

You’ll notice that this quick list doesn’t include anyone from the humanities. That’s because even though I dearly love philosophy and literature, there are very few novelists, theorists or philosophers that I would define as “important.” That’s because very few of them ever change the material conditions in which they operate, or really have a whole lot of realinfluence (much the same can be said about economists, another filed I ignored). I guess a few philosphers (broadly defined) have - Marx, Friedman (even that is debatable) - and maybe some novelists (Harriet Beecher Stowe…), but nowhere near on the scale that any of the scientists and inventors that I’ve listed have.

Chomsy certainly seems to stand out - it’s hard to recognize the influence of his linguistics on the world at large, and it definitely pales in comparison to Watson or Borlaug - but I view Chomsky as a thinker who’s intellectual contribution, as far as changing the way people view an entire field (or inventing an entire field) is certainly comparable to Darwin or Smith, and maybe even Einstein or Newton.

Now, if we got rid of my first criteria of “alive” and just talked about “Modern” thinkers, then the list would obviously change a lot. If we define modernity as starting in the early 19th century, then the Greatest Modern Thinkers would be Darwin, Einstein, Marx and Maxwell. (Smith is only omitted because Wealth of Nations was published in 1776)

Prices, Trade and Why People Care

Ezra Klein follows up on Dani Rodrik and notes that while trade lowers prices for people who buy things (everyone), for those who make things it can be bad, because it raises the relative price of exports and make them less competitive:

Put broadly, opening ourselves up to trade is really good for people who buy things, and less good for people who make things. Now, a lot of folks both buy and make things, so the story is complicated. But one reason the elite classes are so hegemonically enamored with trade is that they don’t really make anything at all, and so experience none of the downsides of trade. As Dean Baker likes to point out, we’ve structured our trade deals such that unskilled manufacturers face a lot of international competition while reporters, say, face almost none. But if you think about how reporters deal with layoffs and cutbacks — policies pursued, like trade, because they save money and increase efficiencies — you can basically predict how they’d feel about trade if their profession was suddenly outsources to Indian reportage firms.

But while the “elite classes” don’t experience the downside of their exports becoming less competitive, Ezra is conflating what happens to the prices of what people consume (they go down for everyone) and what happens to the jobs and wages when trade is liberalized. There’s some pretty good evidence showing that since liberalized trade lowers prices of non durable consumer goods and since the poor spend a much larger proportion, they benefit disproportionally (”inflation for households in the lowest tenth percentile of income has been 6 percentage points smaller than inflation for the upper tenth percentile over this period.”) If you were Will Wilkinson, you could probably make a Rawlsian argument that liberalizing trade is morally required by the difference principle in light of this analysis. But let’s get back to Ezra’ argument.

The second point, on how people’s personal situations vis a vis trade and international competition affects their view of liberalization, there’s been some pretty good research on this question. Dani Rodrik wrote a paper arguing that, not surprisingly, the more one benefits from trade, or is already better off, the more likely they are to support liberalization:

Preferences over trade are also correlated with the trade exposure of the sector in which an individual is employed: individuals in nontraded sectors tend to be the most pro-trade, while individuals in sectors with a revealed comparative disadvantage are the most protectionist. Third, an individual’s relative economic status, measured in terms of either relative income within each country or self-expressed social status, has a very strong positive association with pro-trade attitudes. Finally, non-economic determinants, in the form of values, identities, and attachments, play an important role in explaining the variation in preferences over trade.

And why this analysis could very much apply to the journalists (and bloggers!), it most notably does not apply to the very economists whose work these advocates and analysts cite. Bryan Caplan points out that economists, despite having high job security, are incredibly open to foreign competition. To crib form him, Dani Rodrik is a Turkish born professor, and the academy is pretty open to foreigners, especially in social science as math-heavy as economics.

I don’t really know what the point of all this is, but it seems interesting and relevant nonetheless

Free Speech And The Slippery Slope

Ogged questions the slippery slope from restrictions on free speech to tyranny:

It’s dogma in the US that if you give up a strong commitment to the right of free speech, you’re well on the way to tyranny, but we have now several countries with a softer commitment to it and, frankly, we’ve come a lot closer to tyranny lately than they have. So what are the prudential or slippery slope arguments in favor of the American conception of free speech that take into account the experience of these other countries?

Well, in normal times, the US has much stricter protections for negative liberty than many European countries. England has no written constitution, very restrictive speech laws surrounding trials and incredibly loose libel standards. France doesn’t have a adversarial justice system and many fewer protections for people who are arrested or are otherwise in the criminal justice system. Now, of course, the US is in the process of carving out huge exceptions to these hallowed protections, but in the best of times, the US does better on negative liberty.

But I don’t think one needs to make the slippery slope argument to generally defined “tyranny” to defend a broad proection for free speech, but instead one needs to make a slippery slope argument about restrictions on speech becoming too broad. As Jesse Singal argues, once you enshrine certain vague categories of speech that can be restricted - “offensive” speech, speech that offends dignity etc, inevitably these restrictions will be read incredibly broadly and freedom of speech will be tampered down. So, in Canada for example, they are not on the slippery slope to tyranny, but is a world where Mark Steyn is (rightfully, I may add) a martyr for free expression a good one?

Free speech is one of those values that anyone who claims to care about liberalism must hold incredibly dearly. Liberal theorists from Mill to Rawls have put freedom of expression at the top of their list for protected and guaranteed rights because it’s a key component to two key liberal values - autonomy and open discussion. The autonomy argument is obvious, restricting freedom of speech (especially when there’s no “real” or demonstrable harm) is pretty damn close to thought control. As for the value of a multitude of opinions,  Mill argued that only a totally free speech environment could eventually figure out “truth” or good arguments. In short, we need a market place of ideas. And anyone who has any respect for the Enlightenment can tell why this argument is A. true and B. self evident.

Freedom of speech is one of those issues that goes to the very heart of what it means to be a liberal. A liberal who doesn’t support expansive protections for speech, especially offensive speech, can hardly call themselves a liberal. Free speech is a value in its own right, and it’s one that goes to the very heart of what it means to live in a liberal democratic society.

The Mangling of Orwell

One of the longstanding intellectual pet peeves is the use and abuse of George Orwell, namely those who would use his classic Politics and the English Language as a bludgeon against dense, obscure academics. Richard Ford, in response to Rick Hills’ tired encomium against hard-to-read academics, makes the crucial point that the target of Orwell today would be those bureaucrats and lawmakers who use legalese to jusify horribly immoral acts. John Yoo, not Jean Paul Sartre:

But tragically Hitler did not need Martin Heidegger because he had Joseph Gobbels as well as plenty of other less obscure apologists in Germany, elsewhere on the continent, and for quite a while in England and the United States. And let’s not forget that today it is not intellectual obscurantism that has managed to defend torture and indefinite detention without trial but rather conventional legalese, familiar political jargon, and some deceptively homespun abstractions. I think John Yoo and his ilk would be Orwell’s target were he writing today-not Judith Butler or the students of Foucault.

More importantly, Hills attack on various intellectuals is just faulty, ” It takes the convoluted abstractions of a Carl Schmitt or a Heidegger to offer apologetics for Hitler; a Sartre, to temporize about Stalin; a Foucault, to defend Khomeini. In this respect, I stand with George Orwell who spent the 1930s and 1940s denouncing the obscurity of intellectuals’ prose as a cloak for tyranny (and, incidentally, who was also accused of being an anti-intellectual).” But the big problem is that, for the most part, the scholarly writings of Foucault and Sartre and even Heidegger, are far removed from politics. If you read Madness and Civilization or History of Sexuality, you’ll find nothing about Khomeini. And even with Sartre, who wrote about politics more and was actaully a communist, his scholarly works aren’t really about communism. With Sartre, he very explicitly and simply wrote about his support for various radical political projects. I don’t think anyone can accuse his introduction to The Wretched of the Earth of being obscure or a masked justification for anti-imperial violence. It’s a very straightforward and explicit justification for anti-imperial violence. As for Being and Nothingness or La Nausée, there’s no defense, implicit or explicit, of Soviet Communism. Sartre was a multi-faceted thinker, who had both political and scholarly committments, that didn’t always intertwine. Sure, the Critique of Dialectical Reason is a more straightforward mixing of Existentialism and Marxism, but it can’t stand in for everything else he did.

With Heidegger, the disconnect between his work and politics is a little more complicated. One can only deduce Nazism or sympathy with Nazism from Being and Time with prior knowledge of his political committments. Of course, Heidegger himself used many of his ideas to justify the Nazi state in his address to Freiberg “The Self-Assertion of the German University.” But to say that Being and Time, written in 1927, is noting more than a hifalutin Mein Kampf is just intentional ignorance. I’m not trying to absolve Heidegger of his moral culpability in being a full-throated supporter of the Nazi state, but it’s just untrue to say that he used academic denseness to justify Nazism. He justified Nazism rather plainly, by joining the party, becoming rector at Freiberg and by making public statements that can only be read as support for the Nazi project. But still, if you read Being and Time, you will not find a justification or coded support for Nazism.

As for Carl Schmitt, this guy was a total Nazi whose jurisprudential theories, despite their scholarly and historical rigor, can easily be read as a justification for the specific actions taken by Hitler. And still, even The Concept of the Political and Political Theology are still positively very valuable as descriptions of how politics and government work, especially in times of turmoil and “exception.”

Reclaiming Hayek

Jesse Lerner has a fantastic piece in Dissent appraising the work of Friedrich Hayek from an explicitly left wing prospective. In Lerner’s opinion, Hayek got one thing absolutely right: that planned economies are horrible, horrible ideas. He thus spends a lot of time on Hayek’s most famous work - The Road to Serfdom - but not so much on his ideas about pricing in markets and the importance of dispersing knowledge.

What’s interesting about these two ideas, which are by far Hayek’s most influential intellectual contributions, is how obvious and almost redundant they seem today. The Road to Serfdom is either horribly overblown or very narrowly descriptive. His description of what inevitably happens when a state controls and plans the entirety of the economy is early prescient and perceptive, but is only applicable to situations in which the state control the entirety of the economy. Road became horribly bastardized when conservatives and libertarians would point to every instance of European social democracy or the existence of some state-owned industries and then wave around Road and say that tyranny was just around the corner(arguably, Hayek is partially to blame for this unfortunate tendency). But when we see that European social democracies are some of the most substantively and formally free nations on the face of the earth, we must grapple with the fact that either Road was wrong, or it was right about a system that has little relevance today. That’s not to say that Road wasn’t an important contribution in 1944, when many British socialists were promoting an incredibly technocratic, “enlightened totalitarian” model, but it’s hard to discern its relevance today when the most “socialist” states (Scandinavian social democracies) have the freest economies.

Hayek’s second great idea, his price theory, has a similar historical pedigree. His theory, that prices can only be determined efficiently by decentralized, dispersed markets, as opposed to central planners, came out of the Socialist Calculation Debate. Basically, in the 30s and 40s, lots of socialist economists argued that a planner and technocrats who were operating a centrally planned economy could set prices for goods that would efficient for their pseudo-market to function. Hayek pointed out that the equations and calculations necessary to determine prices from a centrally-planed perspective were just too complex for any planners, and thus the knowledge inputs that determine prices should be distributed widely and communicated through a relatively free market. Hayek, of course, was totally correct. But like his claims about an entirely planned state leading to totalitarianism, his arguments about pricing have largely been assimilated into mainstream thought and economics, and no one really disagrees with him anymore.

Hayek was a very influential and prescient thinker, and on the big questions of his day, he was indisputably correct. But when it comes to the messy part of actualizing Hayek’s thought into politics, too many have used his work to justify a doctrinaire libertarianism that is neither wholly supported by his thought or particularly commendable.

More On Said…and a little on Foucault

Alan Johnson, a writer of the Euston Manifesto and the editor of Democratiya, has responded to my post about Edward Said, and more particularly, my argument that many in the Eustonite left - and especially those at his journal - have been going after Said particularly vehemently, partially because his arguments in Orientalism are being horribly borne out.

When I was referring to Democratiya’s Said criticism, I was obliquely talking about three pieces by David Zarnett. The first two are substantive attacks on Said’s politics, and namely his opposition to intervention in Kosovo and his commentary following the Iranian revolution. I don’t wish to argue the merits of either piece - I’m not a Said scholar, per se - but I do wish to argue about the motives for these pieces. Said was something of a neophyte when it came to the two issues that Zarnett discusses. His specialty in academia was a very broad conception of literary theory and criticism, it’s in this strain that Orientalism clearly falls. And when it came to politics, his passion and what he devoted the bulk of his commentary to was the Israeli-Palestinian issue. He was even a member of the Palestininan government. I’m sure that Zarnett disagrees with Said on Israel-Palestine, and I think that his time would be much better sent examining Said’s thought there.

What Zarnett is doing - finding tangential issues that left-wing academics were wrong on - is just another example of a strategy among Eustonite types to discredit a whole host of left-wing academics. Another great example of this type of intellectual distraction was Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson’s Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, a book that looked at the great French philosopher’s short-lived and incredibly odd infatuation with Khomeini. Although the work is interesting in a historical standpoint - the more we know about Foucault the better - it came along at a time when many on the left were looking to go after their own for not being hawkish enough about war in the Middle East or about culture war against Islamism in Europe. And so we take a philosopher who was mostly concerned with the nature of knowledge and history, and look at his idiosyncratic, far-left political committments. And although Foucault’s politics and his thought can’t be completly separated from each other, obsessively focusing on his politics can often lead to missing the larger picture.

To bring it all back to Said, Zarnett is essentially using a shot-gun strategy to discredit his thought. Before his review essay about Orentialism itself, we only heard about Said’s rather common - but no less obtuse - political committments. And at a time when we have an imperialistic war in the Middle East that was partially justified by racist and “scholarly” depictions of Arabs as the totalistic inverse of the “West” and also at a time when the Palestinian problem is at its gravest and most intractable, it’s indeed interesting that some are so interested in going after Said.

Gerson, Gerson, Gerson

Michael Gerson, on the occasion of the Pope’s visit, once again chastises us for failing to remember that to recognize human dignity and universal human rights, one needs to reject a material conception of humanity, and secularism while you’re at it:

Secularism has traditionally taught that human beings will eventually outgrow religious conviction and moral absolutism — that skepticism is evidence of maturity. Benedict contends that modern men and women, unguided by reasoned moral beliefs, turn toward adolescent self-involvement. Their intellectual growth is stunted. In a world where all moral claims are seen as equally true and equally false — the world, for example, of the modern university — human conscience is reduced to biology or prejudice. Moral behavior may continue to ride in grooves of socialization or genetics, but moral assertions are fundamentally arbitrary — always trumped by a two-word response: “Says you.”

Ok, Gerson is jumping all over the place. There’s the false connection between secularism and relativism. The idea that a secular philosophy can’t capture “reasoned moral beliefs” is just false. Just look at the last 200 or so years of moral philosophy. There have been plenty of deontologists who derived universal, absolute human rights in a totally secular fashion. There’s also the historical trend that the belief in universal human rights has traditionally recognized by explicitly secular institutions, like the French Revolutionary government or the UN (yes yes, the French weren’t exactly the best protectors of these rights, but they sure got around to recognizing the Rights of Man quicker than the Church). Not to mention that the Church, which has always held a spritual conception of humanity, hasn’t been above massive human rights violations.

Gerson also implies that secularism inevitably means relativism. That if we don’t adhere to a belief in God and that humanity is more than physical, then we’ll be “In a world where all moral claims are seen as equally true and equally false.” This again, is a horrible misrepresentation and simplification of the state of secular moral philosophy. Utilitarians, who Gerson no doubt despises, don’t believe that all moral claims are equally true and equally false. Please, call Peter Singer a relativist and see what happens.

Sure, moral non-cognitivists think that the truth of moral claims is debatable, but Gerson is attacking the entire secular ethical tradition, not just a small subset of it. If you want moral absolutism, or deontology, or non relativistic ethics (three different things, despite Gerson’s muddling the issue) you don’t need to believe in god! Just go to a philosophy class!

Gerson claims that us secular materialists, who see humans as “the meat and bones of materiality” make oppression and exploitation easier. Well, Gerson, I recognize universal human rights, and I’m a secular materialist, so what now? Even Peter Singer, who surely gives Gerson nightmeres, supports an angelic ethics, whereby the rich devote themselves to the betterment of the poor. How does this square with Gerson’s impugning of secular morality?

Gerson also refuses to mention the War in Iraq. Of course, the Church opposed it and Gerson supported it. How did Gerson respect the dignity of the approximately 100,000 dead Iraqis, the millions internally displaced and hundreds of thousands maimed? Could Gerson say to the families of those dead Iraqis that “every apparently worthless life is not really worthless at all.”? Sure, he feigned at supporting it purely in the name of humanitarianism and human rights, but considering his inside view of the Bush administration, he should have known that the intention was not to secure the dignity of the Iraqi people or to remove a horrible dictator. He also should have known, or at least by now admitted, that unjust, imperialist wars do little to advance the cause of human rights.

What Does Theory Tell Us? Why Should We Care?

Stanley Fish’s long, detailed and incredibly sympathetic defense of French Theory (by which he means Derrida and his offshoots) is quite good and should be read by anyone who reaches for his gun whenever the D or T word is mentioned. Here’s the nut graff:

Obviously the rationalist Enlightenment agenda does not survive this deconstructive analysis intact, which doesn’t mean that it must be discarded (the claim to be able to discard it from a position superior to it merely replicates it) or that it doesn’t yield results (I am writing on one of them); only that the progressive program it is thought to underwrite and implement — the program of drawing closer and closer to a truth independent of our discursive practices, a truth that, if we are slow and patient in the Baconian manner, will reveal itself and come out from behind the representational curtain — is not, according to this way of thinking, realizable.

That’s a loss, but it’s not a loss of anything in particular. It doesn’t take anything away from us. We can still do all the things we have always done; we can still say that some things are true and others false, and believe it; we can still use words like better and worse and offer justifications for doing so. All we lose (if we have been persuaded by the deconstructive critique, that is) is a certain rationalist faith that there will someday be a final word, a last description that takes the accurate measure of everything. All that will have happened is that one account of what we know and how we know it — one epistemology — has been replaced by another, which means only that in the unlikely event you are asked “What’s your epistemology?” you’ll give a different answer than you would have given before. The world, and you, will go on pretty much in the same old way.

I think the blame for the borderline-zenophobic, belligerent response to Theory among many neoconservatives and plenty of soi-disant enlightenment liberals can be placed on those who claimed that Theory and deconstruction either had some grand political implications or that it fatally undermined any political program. That’s because Theory in its more benign form just serves as a reminder that the language we use to describe the world is important and that there are certain structural barriers to perfectly understanding and describing the world “out there.” This Theory will not bring about the demise of any political action or movement, after all, making normative conclusions from deconstruction is kinda missing the point. If anything, the political take-away from deconstruction (as many Marxists, Feminists and liberals realized) is conservative in that it raises questions about grand ideological projects or visions of the world ( or grand narratives, if I may mix up my French authors)*

Matt Feeney, in his post responding to Fish, claims that Theory, and deconstruction more specifically, is indeed political because it “represents a spirit of tireless critical vigilance against all claims to final possession of the truth of absolute justice, which is to say that it is committed to the task of delegitimizing received understandings…it has political implications.” I would argue that the political implications Feeney describes mostly undermine liberal and progressive projects, as well as cast doubts on what Lyotard called “grand-narratives.” So maybe it’s not political in the sense that you could base a political program or ideology around deconstruction, but it certainly gives us insight into certain political problems. I guess what I’m trying to say is that deconstruction can help us when we discuss the nature or desirability of something kinda meta like idealism in international affairs or the existence of natural rights, but it won’t tell you much about, say, welfare reform.

Anyways, the book Fish is reviewing/discussing, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States by Francois Cusset sounds pretty awesome.

* If I ever find myself writing a dissertation on political theory, I shotgun the definitive account on how Foucault = Skeptical Conservatism a la Burke Oakeshott and Hayek. I know that plenty of people have toyed with this idea, including Andrew Sullivan, but when I hear Jonah Goldberg rant about Liberal Fascism and I start thinking of passages from The History of Sexuality, clearly something is up.

Position and Momentum…But No Objectivity!

As someone who feels that postmodernism, broadly defined, gets all sorts of senseless criticism from people who clearly aren’t familiar with the literature or who never made a good faith effort to deal with it, I shouldn’t try to pile on unnecessarily. But, Daniel McCarthy, in his review of a work trying to claim that Russel Kirk was something of a post-modernist (not a totally implausible claim, but I think the links between libertarian-conservatism a la Hayek are much stronger - incidentally Foucault agrees) goes over a common shibboleth that comes up way too often in post-modern texts. Namely, that Heisenberg’s uncertainly principle implies that our observations and interpretations of events are necessarily uncertain, provisional and can never “objective”:

Elsewhere in the same chapter, Russello relates the dubious idea that Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in quantum physics, which Russello says “struck a terminal blow to the idea of scientific objectivity,” tells us something about historical knowledge. What does our inability to observe simultaneously the velocity and position of a subatomic particle have to do with our ability—or lack thereof—to understand what happened at, say, the Battle of Hastings? Even if there is uncertainty about both kinds of events, we are not talking about the same kind of uncertainty. We may not know whether King Harold was really killed by an arrow to the eye, but if he was, we can say with certainty that both the position and velocity of the arrow could have been observed simultaneously, if anyone had been in a position to do so.

This is really just psuedo-intellectual BS, and it deserves to be called out as such at all times. The reason why this particular example of pomo BS needs to be called out is because it is especially alluring. After all, everyone knows that quantum physics is cool and complicated and that sounding like you know about it makes you appear intelligent, and so it’s tempting to throw around quantum references. Also, it gives people a cover to make a highly contestable claim, and make an end-run around people’s insistence that events can be objectively described. After all, if quantum physics supports your claims, then you’re good! The problem comes when you look at what the Uncertainty Principle actually means. What the Principle states is that you can’t both locate a particle and know its momentum - exactly. And that’s it. Nowhere in this small quirk of quantum physics is there any implications for how we interpret events, in which hundreds of billions of particles are interacting over huge spaces, in which the quantum correction is just meaningless.

The problem with this misleading, pseudo-intellectual and fatuous application of the Uncertainty Principle is that it is so transparently false and when you get past the veneer of scientific support, the thesis that our ability to objectively discern history and events is greatly overestimated looks like it’s been disproven. But the basic claims of “postmodernism” - broadly defined - are on firm enough ground without this stupid example. Rorty’s pragmatism or Lyotard’s suspicion of grand narratives doesn’t rest on quantum mechanics anymore than Kantian absolutism rests on Newtonian mechanics.

Disagreeing on the Basics

Robert P. George’s “Erasmus Lecture” starts thusly:

The obligations and purposes of law and government are to protect public health, safety, and morals, and to advance the general welfare—including, preeminently, protecting people’s fundamental rights and basic liberties.

It goes without saying that I disagree with much of George has to say, but as a formulation of first principles, I think I can neutrally say that there is something quite suspect here.  And that is that the government should protect “morals.”  While everything else George says — public health, safety, rights and liberties — all follow from “general welfare”, his smuggling in of “morals,” a value for whose protection a governmental value is assumed, is hardly a logical step from protecting basic rights and liberties and the general welfare.  Under what moral or political theory is the protection of morals assumed to be a governmental role?

Mill devotes much of On Liberty to explaining how, contrary to George, it’s government’s responsibility to protect the governed from “morals.”  It turns out that, shockingly enough, Robert George’s morals aren’t shared by everyone, and that the cultural constraints he valorizes are oftentimes tyrannical and get in the way of individual self definition and liberty. It’s those values that most liberals see as the legitimate sphere of governmental protection, and George’s idealized liberalism — citing Tocqueville, as every conservative is wont to do — where protection of morals is an affirmative government interest is rather alien to the liberal tradition.

You and I are gonna live forever

It’s a general rule that any webzine/online debate forum (Cato Unbound) edited by my two favorite libertarians, Brink Lindsay and Will Wilkinson, should always be read, and this month’s issue on radical life extension is no exception. Aubrey de Gray and Ronald Bailey defend that medical science should try to expand life expectancy and forgo aging as much as possible while Diana Schaub and Daniel Callahan think that there would be profound negative moral, psychological and societal consequences of radically prolonging death. You can read the four articles if you want a more in depth summary, but this argument Callahan makes is typical of his side of the debate:

There are a few premises of de Grey’s convictions that need to be examined. One of them — and I say this at age 77 — is that getting old is “tragic and potentially preventable by medical intervention.” Maybe age is “potentially preventable”; it is a mistake in science to say that something could never happen. But the word “tragedy” sounds like the voice of youth to me. Most of us who are getting old, or are already there, have many complaints about it, physical as well as mental; it isn’t the best stage of life (but then adolescence wasn’t great either).

I had a child who died a few months after birth, and I considered that tragic as did everyone else, but when my mother died at 86 of cancer, no one considered it a tragedy or even a great evil. Those who knew her said at her funeral that “we loved your mother and will miss her, but she had a good and full life.” I have never heard anyone say it is a tragedy that Socrates, Shakespeare, George Washington, and Albert Einstein died and are no longer with us. And while I hope in my more self-regarding moments that my friends and families will wail and gnash their teeth at my funeral, I doubt at my age they will do so; and I can, so to speak, live with that. I will get old and will die, an ancient story, but not a tragic one.

It is certainly true that with today’s technology, medicine and life expectancies, gracefully dying at 88 isn’t really a tragedy. The thing is, and Callahan even hints at this, is that in the 13th century, one could say that dying at the age of 32 wasn’t a tragedy. Or in 1850s, when the life expectancy at birth was 40 years. I should include the caveat that life expectancy numbers are slightly misleading because these awfully low life expectancies are mostly due to high child mortality, if one got to middle age, one had a decent chance of making it to old age. But with that caveat, it’s still true that people are living longer and that lifespan is going up, which means that our standards for what constitutes a “full life” are not fixed. While de Gray talks about “radical life extension” and Methuselah-like 1000 year lives, in the short to medium term, we are talking about lifespan gains of 15-30 years. Against that tableau, Callahan and Schuab’s arguments against life extension fall apart. Who are they to deny the possibility of a longer life — to those who want it? How odd would it seem to those who came before us that there are people who seriously think that we shouldn’t try to live longer?

The deal breaker for the pro-mortalists is the option of choice. If you are like Seneca or Callahan and think that the problem with our lives is that we don’t live them to the fullest, not that they’re too long, then you don’t have to take advantage of increased life expectancy. But why can’t those who want, as Ronald Bailey put it, to pursue “an ever-increasing menu of life plans and choices” do so? Even putting aside the specific claims and counter claims made by both sides, it’s important to look at what the pro-mortalists have to disprove: that the extension of the human life span, whose average has almost doubled in the last 200 years, is fundamentally undesirable and we should arbitrarily decide that for the first time in human history, we should make a society-wide decision to stop living longer. That’s quite the burden to overcome and neither Callahan nor Schuab do so very well.

The Case For Mill

Ezra Klein links to this piece in the New Statesman which discusses John Stuart Mill’s relevance to modern left wing struggles, mostly in Britain, but the argument is applicable everywhere.  David Marquand argues that we have simply outlived many of Mill’s concerns, in Britain at least  Mill’s enemies in On Liberty were the twin dragons of social conformity and governmental tyranny.  Britain’s society is much more open, and there aren’t many like Napoleon III striving across Europe these days, so maybe Mill isn’t the most useful liberal lodestar out there.

What Marquand at the same time acknowledges and ignores is how much the industrialized West is a fulfillment of Mill’s views.  Especially outside the United States, social conformity has been practically erased.  The individual’s right to define oneself is practically enshrined in Western Europe and the blue states.  The threat of “the tendency of society to impose…its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them” is a diminishing one. Marquand largely admits that the chains of societal tyranny get more and more broken every day, but state tyranny is making a comeback, “State oppression, however, is a real and present danger as the politics of fear takes hold.”  Yet to say Mill is blind to the dangers of state oppression seems to be missing the point.  The man, after all, formulated the harm principle, whose strong application is the basis of many versions of libertarianism and provides a strong justification for individual freedoms.

What Mill doesn’t do is make any foundational or contractual claims about individual rights.  He didn’t just write On Liberty, but also Utilitarianism.  What Mill does so wonderfully is to reject the false claim that the primacy of the individual and a concern for average utility are necessarily conflicting.  Instead, his politics of an individual protected from the state and society is preferred because it is the most likely to promote happiness.  And this is what modern liberal or social democratic politics is at its best.  It recognizes that people face two threats to freedom and autonomy — the state and societal structures.  It acknowledges that individual rights, while important, are not absolute in their strongest forms and are in no way “natural.”  Thus, we can pursue a pragmatic politics that constantly strives to answer the question, “how can we protect the individual’s ability to be happy best?” And as long as we have a politics that doesn’t do that, then Mill is relevant.

Books That Would Have Been Useful

When I read Theory of Justice last December while on vacation, not only did I oftentimes have little idea what was going on in the book — having just about zero experience with Kant beyond What is Enlightenment? and and ill occasioned dive into Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals sure didn’t help — I was also on the beach, with waves literally lapping at my feet, so it was easy to get distracted. This is all just a long way of saying that Samuel Freeman’s book on Rawls looks really good, and probably could have helped out at the time. Even though carting two massive philosophy books to a Mexican beach probably would have been the nerdiest thing ever…

Liberal History

Jonah Goldberg launched an attack yesterday on liberals for not having a detailed history of canonical texts that conservatives could comb through and endlessly misrepresent:

Liberalism’s canon is largely unwritten, it’s dogma made-up as they go along (and yes, I’m over-generalizing to make a point; there are plenty of important liberal philosophical treatises that go unread by politicians and political journalists).

As someone who subscribes to the view that liberalism is a secular religion, it is very frustrating that liberal politicians do not offer up a paper trail for people to scrutinize the way conservatives do. Liberalism has a dogma as rich and serious as conservatism, but you can’t go to a liberal politician and ask: Are you loyal to John Dewey? Richard Rorty? John Rawls? You can’t ask what their bible is because they are acolytes of the bookless faith of good deeds, the cult of do-goodery. So when they argue for keeping “religion” out of politics they are saying “keep your religion out of politics.” When they say that we need to “get past ideology” they are saying we need to get past your ideology. This means that conservatives must constantly defend their own territory rather than demand a similar accounting from liberals.

As a slight concession to Goldberg, I like reading and thinking about political philosophy, so personally, I’d be happy if liberals talked more about whether liberalism is foundational (Rawls, and to lesser extend Mill) or anti-foundational (Rorty) or any other philosophical and theoretical disputes within liberalism. But Goldberg misunderstands what American liberalism has always been about. If you want some philosophical homebase for liberalism, it’s pragmatism. The simple effect is that liberalism involves the bracketing off of these philosophical questions and approaching governance with the question of “how can we improve people’s lives” or, in the Shklarian formulation, “how do we reduce cruelty.” There really isn’t a whole lot to American liberalism, in its idealized form, than that. Conservatives can object to the means with which we try to answer those two questions, and the rise of neo-conservatism is the late 60s and early 70s largely attempted to grapple with that question. Welfare et al wasn’t bad because government shouldn’t try to improve people’s lives, but because it produced bad results. Or so the argument went.

The rejoinder to pragmatism-as-American-liberalism is that if a conservative were to go back to Dewey or even Rorty, they’d easily find much to object to and try to tar modern-day liberals with whatever objections they had. What this analysis misses is that liberalism is (or ought to be) forward looking, we like Dewey or Rorty’s approach to problems, but the circumstances and context of the time should determine the answers more so than any book. Kevin Drum put it best, “We don’t wonder what Charles Beard would think of something? Of course not. The whole point of liberalism is change, so who cares what Beard would have thought? By now he’s just an old fuddy duddy.” Contrast this viewpoint with the standard conservative one, where being forward thinking and present-oriented is the opposite of what you’re supposed to do. Reverence for past thinkers is at the core of the doctrine. Goldberg is playing a rigged game by accusing liberals of some type of shortcoming because they aren’t…conservative. Yes, Jonah, we aren’t conservative. Can we move on now?

Quickening Canard

Minipundit points to a Gary Wills Op-Ed where he makes the (good) argument that Jesus didn’t have much to say about abortion or homosexuals and the (bad) argument that because Thomas Aquinas didn’t really know anything about human development, he was relatively open to abortion:

Lacking scriptural guidance, St. Thomas Aquinas worked from Aristotle’s view of the different kinds of animation — the nutritive (vegetable) soul, the sensing (animal) soul and the intellectual soul. Some people used Aristotle to say that humans therefore have three souls. Others said that the intellectual soul is created by human semen.
Aquinas denied both positions. He said that a material cause (semen) cannot cause a spiritual product. The intellectual soul (personhood) is directly created by God “at the end of human generation.” This intellectual soul supplants what had preceded it (nutritive and sensory animation). So Aquinas denied that personhood arose at fertilization by the semen. God directly infuses the soul at the completion of human formation.

This is all well and good for pro-choicers to be able to say “hah! Thomas Aquinas is on our side.” But it’s also pretty intellectually dishonest. Aquinas argument is one made in ignorance of modern medical science, he did not know that a genetically unique individual (not a person, if you ask me) is created at conception. Aquinas was essentially grasping at straws to create a rubric for understanding a process of which he was totally ignorant. What Wills is doing is the functional equivalent of citing Aristotle’s metaphysics, which are rooted in his false physics. If Aquinas were to know medical science now, I’m pretty sure he would take the standard pro-life line of genetically unique individual at conception = person. Peter Singer, in Rethinking Life and Death, has the best explanation of why the Aquinian position on abortion is rather nonsensical:

It is true that the condemnation of abortion form the time of conception as mortal sin is a relatively new doctrine for the church. But the reason for the church’s change in view on the stage of pregnancy at which abortion becomes the killing of a human was surely…a sound one. Once modern biology had shown the actual nature of early human development, the church had little choice but to abandon its support for the unscientific Aristotelian embryology of Thomas Aquinas…After quickening was rejected as the point from which human life was sacrosanct, to embrace any other point in the development of the fetus would have given rise to awkward questions about where to draw the line…Thus the prohibition on abortion at any stage of pregnancy became a necessary part of the church’s teaching on the sanctity of human life.

There are many better arguments for the pro-choice position than the gimmick of trying to convince the world that the most important Catholic theologian in history is one of us.

Who Recognizes Kojeve?

Chris Hayes mentions Alexandre Kojeve, the Russian-French Hegelian who is a key influence on Francis Fukuyama and his End of History thesis. Fukuyama develops the theoretical side of his argument — that liberal democracy is the fulfillment of human governmental evolution — using Kojeve’s idea that, as Chris puts it, “[the]constitutive feature of what it means to be human is the desire for recognition.” Fukuyama contends that liberal democracy allows the most recognition for individuals, and thus is the natural endpoint for capital H History. And while Fukuyama is very persuasive and presents his point well, the methodology always troubled me.

How do we know that humans desire recognition? Sure Kojeve says so, and Fukuyama is able to construct a plausible historiographical extrapolation of that theory, but besides their assertions, there’s no great way to verify their conception of human nature. Hobbes said that humans desire security, Rousseau said that humans are, as Mark Lilla put it, “theotropic” (desiring religion), Marx thought that man was fundamentally productive and so on and so forth. Some political philosophers just sidestep this debate, or at least don’t make a conception of human nature axiomatic the same way, say, Hobbes does. Rawls’ assumptions about human nature is that in his highly abstract veil of ignorance, people will use maximin reasoning. Nozick just starts out with Lockean natural rights and moves on from there.

But putting aside Rawls and Nozick, how do we sort out these competing claims about human nature? We can look at the societies and political systems based on certain conceptions of human nature. This method is rather imprecise, besides telling us that Marx probably was wrong, it’s really hard to say which conception of human nature any given country lends validity to or falsifies. Is the United States evidence for a Lockean, Hobbesian or Rousseaun view? What about Sweden, Canada or Singapore? Clearly, if you’re going to put claims of human nature at the center of your political philosophy, you need to provide a good method to inspect their validity, or at least a traceable claim to show where you got your conception of human nature from. So, how does one do this?

For the time being, it looks like Evolutionary Psychology is the way to go.  So from now on, if you have a political theory that’s based around a specific conception of human nature, you must talk about alleles.  Peter Singer agrees, and Robert Wright has gotten the closest to using evolutionary psychology and theory as a basis for large scale political and social thought.  Kojeve and Fukuyama, haven’t really managed this feat, and so I’m forced to put their theory of politics and history into the “sounds interesting, but not really verifiable in a systemic way” pile.

Why We Shouldn’t Debate Patriotism

In the wake of Barack Obama’s refusal to wear an American flag pin, there’s been a lot of debate about patriotism. Progressives and Liberals, especially since 9/11 have (not wrongfully) associated overt, pictorial displays of patriotism with jingoism and war mongering. I don’t want to address the merits of that position right now, but Paul Waldman’s TAPPED post concerning “substantive patriotism” — which liberals and progressives favor — is the best expression of this sentiment. For Waldman, what matters is promoting policies that are best for America and its people as well as aligning your policies with certain American principles and ideals. While it’s refreshing to see Waldman try to reclaim the language of patriotism after decades of the Right assailing liberals for being “un-American” or “hating America”, these accusations and counter accusations over which side is more patriotic or more American poisons political debate and thus that discussions of patriotism should be bracketed off from the public sphere.

In Justice as Fairness, Rawls discussed the notion of public reason: a language and reasoning that people use in the public sphere whereby they don’t discuss metaphysical controversies or justifications. For example, a Catholic and Protestant could debate capital gains tax rates without one accusing the other of being a hell-bound apostate. The reason for this set-up is simple — in the political and public sphere these transcendent, metaphysical debates can not be resolved and only poison the process which should be enable different parties in a pluralist society to pursue the common good.

Patriotism, or questions of whether someone who advocates a certain policy is doing so in the best interests of the country or whether that policy aligns itself with that country’s values or principles, should be similarly bracketed off in the public sphere just as metaphysical questions are.

But when conservatives endorse torture and disregard centuries old principles like habeas corpus, surely we can say that those policies are “anti-American”? Well, yes, one could make those arguments, but one can also say that these policies are illiberal and unconstitutional and in conflict with the values that are textually embedded into our founding documents and traditions, but one ought not to say that the profounders of such polices are themselves anti-American.

A more simple case makes this point more obvious, the Chief of staff for Rep. Joe Knollenberg (R-Mich), Trent Wisecup, after a video-taped confrontation with a MoveOn.org activist in which he said “you’re not a citizen, you’re a political hack”, provided Politico’s The Crypt blog with a list of what makes someone pro-American and anti-American:

It’s un-American to cheer for the imposition of $85 billion of Nancy Pelosi CAFÉ mandates that would destroy the American car companies and the good-paying UAW jobs they provide.

True Americans make their political arguments with vigor, honor and pride. I have looked the Moveon.org movement in the eye and I speak with certainty that this element does not want America to win in Iraq. It does want Toyota to beat GM and the other American car companies. And it wants all Americans to pay higher taxes to support more government welfare. Higher taxes + more government welfare = a weaker America.

Wisecup’s accusation that CAFE standards aren’t just bad policy, but anti-American is exactly what I’m talking about. There’s ample ground to say that CAFE standards are bad public policy: they hamper investment, they restrict consumer choice, they disadvantage American producers, they don’t actually reduce carbon emissions, they’re an unjustifiable restraint on liberty — these are arguments (while bad) that are perfectly compatible with the public reason. They reflect and are born out of a deep American tradition that values productivity, economic liberty and unfettered capitalism. The accusation, however, that CAFE standards reflect a lack of patriotism is the exact type of bad faith argumentation that’s invited when you define patriotism as “substantive” — i.e. that patriotism is expressed through the endorsement of a specific set of polices and values — your political opponents are no longer mere political opponents, but are instead treasonous. It’s easy to see how having debates over mileage standards devolve into accusations of ideological and value-based treason is something a polity should avoid.

The conceptual leap we need to make is that any time someone accuses their interlocutor in the public/political sphere of being anti-American or unpatriotic, even “substantively”, they are violating what should be a near-absolute discursive ethic or rule. It’s hard to imagine a case where an accusation of anti-Americanism, or not adhering to American values or principles, could ever be germane to a policy debate. America is an amazingly rich and pluralist society, whereby liberal egalitarianism, democratic socialism, southern agrarianism, devolutionism, laissez faire capitalism, rural populism, centralized republicanism and many other doctrines and collections of principles can justifiably be described as part of the American tradition. Therefore, it is hard to conceptualize of any feasible political position that wouldn’t align itself with some “American” set of values and principles. Except for extreme cases of genuine fifth columns (i.e. foreign agents who insert themselves into the political process with malevolent intentions),this accusation will always poison the debate or simply be distracting.

Even if we don’t assume that it’s outside the realm of feasibility for someone with professed benevolent intentions to be “substantively” anti-American or unpatriotic, the accusation remains unprovable. Patriotism is not a matter of ends, it is a description of motivations and intentions. Without some sort of impossibly full disclosure of every political participant’s goals, motivations, desires and orientations it is impossible for someone else to judge another’s patriotism. Instead, a basic level or patriotism — defined as love of country and desire for one’s country to achieve good ends in adherence with certain values — must be presumed of everyone who engages in the political sphere.

Questions of patriotism, therefore become pre-political or non political , a matter to be deliberated upon within either a conceptual mechanism like the veil or ignorance or to be decided upon individually using a private reason that is incommensurable with political deliberation in the public sphere. Since the veil of ignorance isn’t real and because private justifications for patriotism are unexplainable, we must then presume that all those who enter the political debate are necessarily patriotic in intention, thus making questions of both symbolic and substantive patriotism moot.

Burke and Stem Cells

Yuval Levin, in his response to David Brooks excellent column, makes a rather strange argument about where him and Brooks come down on stem cell research:

The notion that Burke would have advocated an ideology of unrestrained science is highly implausible, though of course no one can say where he would come down in the stem-cell debate. But Brooks’s argument relies on a more serious error. He argues that what he calls “legislation to slow medical progress” is not conservative because it is grounded in an abstract principle.

But Burke believed that it was precisely such radical claims to progress as those offered by modern science that needed to be moderated by the tempering forces inherent in each society. In our society, the greatest force for the moderation of such excess (and therefore for moral progress) is the view that all men are created equal. Whether you believe the claim is true or not (it seems that Burke did in some form, though perhaps not in the same way Jefferson did), it is the organizing principle of American life, and it is also the premise in which opponents of embryo-destructive research ground their case. A Burkean would not seek carelessly to overthrow that view in the name even of progress — let alone in the name of the kind of dubious promises now made on behalf of embryo-destructive stem-cell research. He would seek, more likely, a way to advance medical research without trampling on the most essential moral and intellectual premises of his society.

It’s obvious what is missing from Levin’s argument - the connection between all men being created equal and giving stem cells and embryos some of the rights of personhood. Brooks’ argument is that the claim by religious conservatives that embryos deserve the protections of persons is an abstract notion that can only be justified by strong religious and philosophical claims about when life begins.  The tempermental — or, for the leftist, pragmatic — argument is that it’s too counter intuitive and requires too many abstract logical leaps to conclude that bundles of eight cells are deserving of legal protection, so we should default to out shared moral sense.  In America, those who don’t go out of their way to call a bundle of cells a “person”, we have concluded that stem cell research isn’t violating any deeply shared moral principles.

What’s baffling is that Levin is writing for an audience where the assertion that “all men are created equal” implies personhood for stem cells doesn’t even require a perfunctory justification.

Though I don’t want to go into it here, Brooks and Larison hint at something that’s been bugging me for as long as I’ve been thinking about Burke:  he really has nothing to do with conservatism as practiced in the United States, ever.  If that sounds strong, it’s certainly true that post war, and especially movement, conservatism is so distant from Burke that I refuse to believe that conservative intellectuals who try to tell us that the modern GOP has any sort of Burkean foundation are doing anything less than pulling some sort of prank.

Of Course You’d See It That Way

For those of you that remember, Linda Hirshman has been teasing out a virtue-based philosophical grounding for American politics. She’s going to be releasing her opus in three parts, one every Wednesday on TPM Cafe. Part I lays out the case for why philosophical first principles are necessary to win elections and what the conservative first principles are that have allowed their rise since the early 80s.

As you all know, I’m pretty skeptical of Hirshman’s entire project from two angles.  One, that debate over first principles– while interesting and fun to have — aren’t all that important to long term electoral success.  Two, Linda Hirhsman’s proposed first principles, which would involve a shift from the procedural liberalism of Rawls to a more Aristotelian, virtue oriented politics, are either too vague to mean anything substantive and provide a heuristic or guide to what policies liberals should pursue OR it’s a sop to conservative language and framing that renders useless the major liberal accomplishments in the post war era.  Jacob T. Levy put it this way:

In the wake of the 1960s, appeals to some unitary set of virtues were going to be hard to sustain as foundations for public life, Rawls or no Rawls; the sexual revolution, women’s and gay liberation, and the suspicion of courageous military service as a virtue after Vietnam all helped make virtue-language relatively unattractive for a while. And Warren Court liberalism, in pushing hard against some traditional state practices that had been justified in moralistic, paternalistic, or overtly Christian ways, made “neutrality” a kind of liberal watchword. Rawls’ critique of perfectionism and embrace of state neutrality among conceptions of the good at the level of basic justice were a good fit with this intellectual climate.

Discussions of first principles should have an almost transcendent quality to them 0r more specifically, first principles should be the same assuming a rather broad range of scenarios and situations.  If Hirshman is proposing some sort of tectonic shift in how liberals approach politics, she needs to establish that there is a problem.  I have two questions for Hirshman along these lines.  If all the votes were counted in Florida and Gore was declared the winner, would you have written your piece or, more fairly, would you still find Rawlsian liberalism insufficient?  Democrats have taken back the House and Senate, are favored to win the presidential election, and are competitive in roughly a dozen GOP incumbent senatorial races in 2008, would a change towards different first principles change this fortuitous situation for the better?

What I think we’re seeing with the Linda Hirshman Project is a classic example of “if you have a hammer, every problem is a nail.”  Hirshman is an academic philosopher as well as a committed liberal.  Thus, her contribution to intra-liberal debates will be philosophical.  I imagine that a political scientist would see different problems with American liberalism, or more broadly, a non philosopher would never think “You know what Democrats need?  Less procedural liberalism and a more virtue oriented politics with an Aristotelian framework.”

My previous posts criticizing Hirshman are here, here and here.

Wo Carl Schmitt ist?

While reading Mark Lilla’s Aug 19th NYTM article on Political Theology, Stanley Fish’s piece on liberalism and religion, Peter Berkowitz’s review of the Stillborn God and Rebecca Goldstein’s review, I was struck by the conspicuous abscense of one name, Carl Schmitt.

Schmitt was the infamous German legal theorist who was both an early supporter of the Nazis who saw the rise of Hitler as the fulfillment of both his theory and his recommendations for how to reconstitute the state.  It didn’t help that he was a fierce critic of procedural liberalism and thought that “the political” was a ground demarcated by the “friend-enemy” distinction.  His problem with liberalism was that it couldn’t account for the political, it could not accept an order presupposed by an essential enmity between nation states and peoples.

What makes him relevant to the unfolding discussion jump started by Lilla is how he looked at the “Great Separation” between religious ends and political ends.  For Schmitt, as expressed in his essays The Concept of the Political and Political Theology, the seperation never happened — even in the West — instead, religious ends, purposes and structures were merely folded into the operation and aspirations of the “secular” state.  The most obvious evidence for this point is the existence of nationalism at all.  To use what may seem like an absurd example, look at the once dormant doctrine of competitiveness among national economies.  For Lester Thurow and his acolytes, the problem wasn’t that the American economy wasn’t productive or large enough to provide a quality standard of living for those participating in it (in both America and the world), the problem was that essentially, we were being defeated by the Japanese enemy.  National economic policy, which should a field governed by simple rationality, was forced into the rhetoric of friend-enemy, it wasn’t enough that America and Japan were experiencing astounding growth, but that Japan’s was greater.

There’s also the war on terror — which instead of being a sober look at various stateless groups who are of limited threat to the citizens of the US and to stability as a whole, we have neocons clamoring to make it to a showdown of civilizations and of cultures.  People like Chris Hitchens and Norman Podhoretz saw the threat of Islamic terrorism as something that could define our civilization through the struggle.  We, America, could be defined against the conglomeration of Salafism, or more broadly, just Islamism or Jihadism.  Both Podhoretz and Hitchens aren’t particularly  religious people — in the limited sense of basing your world view around the fixed order of a supernatural being — but they are religious in that they see the establishment of security against terrorists as an ideological struggle of the superiority of our nation and our culture.  It’s a fight to the death with the enemy, not the everyday establishment of security.

In a time where George Bush talks about giving god’s gift of freedom to the world while at the same time evoking unprecedented executive prerogative to reinterpret our nation’s laws to fight the enemy, can Lilla really be so confident that political theology is done for in the West? While Schmitt probably would have made a great Bush DoJ lawyer, his prescience is uncanny and his criticism of liberalism — while positively flawed in the greatest sense (turns out Nazis weren’t so sweet after all) — has great descriptive power.  Below the fold are some particularly choice excerpts from The Concept of the Political.  Remember, this was written in 1934.