August 31, 2005

Trials Blundered Into History as Justice Sadly Watched

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Mr. Kadri, in his conclusion, throws out an odd statistic. The number of criminal cases actually resolved by a trial hovers "just above statistical insignificance." In 1839, about 75 percent of all felony charges in New York ended in a trial. Today the figure is about 5 percent, about the same as in Britain, where 95 percent of felony charges ended in trials in the 1830's.

The Demonization Of Leo Strauss

BY ADAM KIRSCH
May 17, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/32841

The demonization of Leo Strauss, in short, is one of the most dismal signs of the times. The shamelessness and baseness of much of what has been written about him is redolent of the propaganda of the 1930s, Auden's "low, dishonest decade."That is why "Reading Leo Strauss" (Chicago, 256 pages, $32.50), a sober new study by Yale professor Steven Smith, feels so heartening.By returning to the source and examining what Strauss actually wrote, Mr. Smith lets the breeze of reason into the feverish sickroom of ideology. He portrays a Strauss who cherished democracy as the best bulwark against tyranny, and who valued intellectual honesty above all. By the time Mr. Smith is done, nothing is left of the Strauss caricature except the ignorance and malice that fathered it

But beginning with Machiavelli and Hobbes - pivotal figures for Strauss, whom he regards with a mixture of admiration and dismay - political philosophy changed its premises. Instead of virtues, it began to think about human beings as driven solely by needs - above all, the need to avoid violent death in the state of nature. In modern political philosophy, politics is no longer seen as a natural part of human life, as it was for Aristotle, but as a fatal necessity.

Strauss's sense of the fragility of democracy, reinforced by his experiences in Weimar Germany, did not make him an enemy of democracy. Just the reverse: It made him aware of the tragic vulnerability of modern liberalism, whose commitment to freedom and complexity makes it tempting prey for the unfree and the uncomplex. This awareness, as Mr. Smith writes, is what links Strauss with the great "cold-war liberals of his generation - Isaiah Berlin, Lionel Trilling, Walter Lippmann, Raymond Aron." Like them, Strauss taught that liberalism has real enemies, and that moral judgments are inescapable in political life. The real question today is not why this message has important admirers. It is why so many self-proclaimed liberals are so unwilling to hear it that they would rather stop up their ears with lies and hatred.

The Washington Post's Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei report that President Bush and his team are "focusing on the fall midterm elections as the best chance to salvage his presidency and are building a campaign strategy around tax cuts, immigration and national security." LINK

in a Saturday must-read that Stu Rothenberg now has 42 Republican districts on his list of competitive races. Last September, he had 26 competitive GOP districts. LINK

This is significant at the operatinal level for the dems. lamont has a simple platform that many could agree to.

Roll Call has Gore's would-be/could-be cabinet attending his movie premiere in DC. LINK

The Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby writes: "Six years ago, Bush narrowly defeated Gore, apparently because voters thought he'd be a nicer guy to have a beer with. But after years of governmental bungling, of willful indifference to truth, the national mood seems to be changing. Voters have seen that nice guys can screw up. And technocrats with diagrams and charts have never seemed so interesting." LINK

A Note Notebook to the first person who can tell us why Karl Rove was at O'Hare last Friday afternoon around 6pm ET. Karl Rove and members of his staff are not eligible.

2006: Senate:
Paul Krugman of the New York Times uses his column to write a direct mail piece for the Ned Lamont campaign. LINK

Under a "Days of Rage" header, the Wall Street Journal's ed board writes that Ned Lamont's Connecticut performance and the reception that Sen. McCain received at the New School "speak volumes about the direction of modern liberal politics, and it's not an encouraging trend, especially if you're a Democrat who wants to take back the White House."

Dan Brown's narrative is about restoring the golden mean to contemporary Western modernity.

In order to recover the construction costs, the project proposes to charge for the use of water, based on the crop grown per Ha. The charges for the five years will be Rs. 20/ Ha, Rs. 30/ Ha for the next 14 years and Rs. 40/ Ha for 20 years after that. Irrigation cess will be levied at Rs. 10/ Ha. In order to pay these charges, farmers will have to change their cropping pattern to cash crops. Small and marginal farmers will get edged out in the process.

Other experts see this as the first step towards privatising water resources. The government will not have money to implement this hugely ambitious project. It will choose the build-own-operate-transfer route and lease rivers to concessionaires. These operators will own the water resources for several years and will charge users, both urban and rural, for that duration. This goes against the country's tradition of treating water as a community, not private, resource.

In the West, whose example we are following in the "development" of water resources, large dams are being decommissioned. The government's argument that such "development" of water resources is necessary to remove poverty, is specious — it is the poorest who get displaced in the process. There are enough examples of drought mitigation at the local level around the country. However, the drawback from the government and industry's perspective is that these are driven by local communities and do not benefit either babudom or industrialists. A mega project is a feast for bureaucrats, politicians and businessmen. This alone will be sufficient reason to go ahead with river linking despite objections and agitations by local people.

Nuclear power is not the only weapon Iran has at its disposal – its population is growing seven times faster than Britain’s. In this exclusive extract from his new book, Niall Ferguson reveals how Islam is winning the numbers game

Yet the extreme violence of the 20th century had been caused by much more than clashes of ideology. Ethnic conflict, economic volatility and empires in decline: these were the factors that had generated so much conflict and cost so many millions of lives. And events dating back 10 years before the fall of Communism pointed to a recurrence of what I have called 'The War of the World'.

The year 1979 brought a woman to power in England, a woman wholly committed to the idea that salvation lay in the free market. (Mrs Thatcher, it might be said, was one of the root causes of the subsequent Soviet crisis.) But 1979 also brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power in Iran, a man just as committed to the idea that salvation lay in the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.

ronically, the United States had a hand in its spread. The Soviets found their occupation of Afghanistan so difficult to sustain because they found themselves fighting a new and highly motivated foe, the mujahideen, armed and trained by the CIA on the principle that my enemy's enemy is my friend.

And which regime has done more than any other to spread the teaching of Islamic fundamentalism since 1979? The answer is Saudi Arabia, the United States's most important ally in the Arab world. For it was not the poor of the Middle East who rushed to join the jihad; often, it was those who had received a Western education.

although the average fertility rate in Muslim countries did decline from the 1970s onwards, it remained consistently more than twice the European average.

The two things went together. Women wanted to work, or maybe economic pressures obliged them to work. It was much harder to work with three or four children to look after as well; so women opted to have just two, or one, or - in the case of many of the most professionally ambitious - none at all. From the late 1970s, the average West European couple had fewer than two children. By 1999 the figure was just over 1·3, whereas, for a population to remain constant, it needs to be slightly over two.

A hundred years ago - when Europe's surplus population was still flocking across the oceans to populate America and Australasia - the countries that went on to form the European Union accounted for around 14 per cent of the world's population. By the end of the 20th century that figure was down to around 6 per cent, and according to the UN by 2050 it could have fallen to just 4 per cent. That begged at least one awkward question: who was going to pay the taxes necessary to pay for Old Europe's generous state pensions?

The UN estimated that to keep the ratio of working to non-working population constant at the 1995 level, Europe would need to take in 1·4 million migrants a year from now until 2050. The annual figure for net migration in the 1990s was 850,000.

In the 52nd chapter of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon posed one of the great counterfactual questions of history. If the French had failed to defeat an invading Muslim army at the battle of Poitiers in 732, would all of Western Europe have succumbed to Islam? 'Perhaps,' speculated Gibbon with his inimitable irony, 'the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.'

The idea was to amuse his readers, and perhaps to make fun of his old university. Yet today work is all but complete on the new Centre for Islamic Studies at Oxford, which features, in addition to the traditional Oxford quadrangle, a prayer hall with a dome and minaret tower. That fulfilment of Gibbon's unintended prophecy symbolises perfectly the fundamental reorientation of the world which was the underlying trend of the 20th century.

Now little remains of Western imperialism, aside from America's waning military presence in the Middle East and Asia. Then, the frontier between West and East was located somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Now it seems to run through every European city. That is not to say that conflict is inevitable along these new fault lines; history suggests that there may be as many clashes within civilisations as between civilisations in the years that lie ahead. But it is to say that, if the history of the 20th century is any guide, the fragile edifice of civilisation can very quickly collapse even where different ethnic groups seem well integrated.

We will avoid another century of conflict only if we understand the forces that caused the last one - the dark forces that conjure up ethnic conflict and imperial rivalry out of economic crisis, and in doing so negate our common humanity. They are forces that stir within us still.

Turned off by Global warming

By KATHERINE ELLISON

Published: May 20, 2006

What we need is something more imaginative and daring. But where's the discussion of anything like that? The "Take Action" page on the Web site for Mr. Gore's movie offers no such vision — the boldest action it suggests is to back the McCain-Lieberman bill. And when I recently asked David Yarnold, Environmental Defense's executive vice president, why his group wasn't offering solutions more dramatic than Congress has thought up, he replied, "Why would you want to lobby for something that can't get done?"

But Mr. Schwarzenegger has since warned of the need to move slowly so as not to "scare the business community."

Katherine Ellison is the author of "The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter."

An old communist confesses: the class war is over and even Rupert Murdoch makes sense … what do lefties do now?

 

By Brian McNair

EVERYONE remembers where they were the first time they found themselves agreeing with Rupert Murdoch. I was at my desk, circa-1995, reading a speech he had given on the global impact of new technologies. These, he said, were proving “an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere”.

As for those “extraordinary living standards” identified by Murdoch as evidence of capitalism’s success, Scots, like the rest of the UK, have seen their personal wealth increase by 300% on average since the 1950s.

In ''The Twilight of American Culture" (2000), historian Morris Berman warned that voracious consumerism and corporate greed were corroding American culture and fostering anti-American sentiment. Now, in ''Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire"

: In the book I focus on the structural properties of how we got here because claiming that it's George W. Bush is a very superficial analysis. I do consider Bush a discontinuity with pre-9/11 days, but there's also continuity with our foreign policy since World War II. Joe McCarthy said that McCarthyism was Americanism with its sleeves rolled up. Well, Bush is essentially Wilsonianism or Trumanism with the sleeves rolled up. We feel that the world is at our disposal. And when other nations move to protect their resources, for example, we get enraged and interpret it as anti-Americanism.

By the late 1790s, virtue here was defined as success for yourself and your family in a competitive market.

The real question is where 9/11 came out of. Americans have trouble getting their minds around the fact that what happened on 9/11 was reactive rather than offensive. We had been doing certain things to the Arab and Islamic worlds for decades, and finally they decided they weren't going to take it anymore. That does not mean that it's OK for 3,000 citizens to get slaughtered, of course not. But are we interested in how many of their citizens we slaughter? How could they do this when we're so good? George Bush said. Well, examine the possibility, as Jimmy Carter suggested, that we're not all that good.

That we will not decline is not a option because it's built into the structure of how we live. We've really sealed our fate. At the end of the book I say that there are two possible paths: One is that we decline rapidly; the other is that we decline gradually. And you can have gradual decline if you exercise some intelligence as to your impact on other people, but that requires something that has historically never been our strong suit: empathy.

We're riding various bubbles. One bubble is the belief that George Bush is protecting us from terrorism. Another is the illusion of economic well-being. By 2030, maybe a bit later, we'll be pretty much a second-rate power in the world.

And although I have a lot of problems with Martin Heidegger because of his association with Nazism, I think he was right when, referring to the role of technology and consumerism in our lives, he remarked, ''Only a god can save us now." There are, in other words, fundamental values we lost along the way.

What have we become, finally? A civilization dedicated to turning everything into a market. It's an empty vision, it seems to me, and that makes me sad. Surely the Founding Fathers had something better in mind, right?

Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached via e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com.

Two books decrying US intervention abroad take a narrow view, a critic argues

By Michael C. Boyer  |  May 21, 2006

House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power
By James Carroll
Houghton Mifflin, 657 pp., illustrated, $30

• Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq
  By Stephen Kinzer
  Holt, 384 pp., illustrated, $27.50

  Alerts

Engaging in that kind of history with regard to the dropping of the atomic bombs can be forgiven. But both Kinzer's and Carroll's books do the same with Iraq. They write the history of Iraq as though it has been decided; so decided, in fact, that we can now draw lessons from it about America's flawed purpose in the world. There is little question at this stage that history will harshly judge the way the war and postwar in Iraq were planned for and executed. But damning America's commitment to democracy promotion, which runs long and deep, should wait. Last November, I heard the Dalai Lama speak at Stanford University. His Holiness was asked in a question if the Iraq war was wrong. His reply was that it was too early to pass judgment. It was a wise response because it is easy to mistake failures of leadership for failures of purpose.

Michael C. Boyer is associate editor at Foreign Policy magazine

What distinguishes Carroll's book is not just this blending of the personal and the institutional -- a blending that brilliantly illuminates his thesis that the Pentagon's growth has been fueled by a bipolar view of the world that depends on paranoia and deceit -- but also Carroll's willingness to ask basic moral questions that almost never get asked amid the Pentagon's Orwellian language of "collateral damage" and "asymmetric warfare."

Carroll struggles to understand how, during the course of World War II, American military planners went from carefully selected bombing targets to obliterating entire Japanese and German cities in fire bombings far more devastating than the atomic blasts on either Hiroshima or Nagasaki

What makes this a compelling read is the way he weaves in the power of the Pentagon over his family, as well as the cast of personalities who thought they could control it during their stints there.

His project of curing liberalism's amnesia begins by revisiting Jan. 4, 1947, when liberal anti-totalitarians convened at the Willard to found Americans for Democratic Action. It became their instrument for rescuing the Democratic Party from Henry Wallace and his fellow traveling followers who, locating the cause of the Cold War in American faults, were precursors of Michael Moore and his ilk among today's "progressives."

Since then, Beinart argues, liberals have lacked a narrative of national greatness that links America's missions at home and abroad. It has been said that whereas the right-wing isolationists in the 1930s believed that America was too good for the world, left-wing isolationists in the 1960s believed that the world was too good for America. After Vietnam, Beinart says, liberal foreign policy was "defined more by fear of American imperialism than fear of totalitarianism."

Beinart worries that Deaniac liberals are taking over the Democratic Party much as McGovernite liberals did after 1968. He discerns the "patronizing quality" of many liberals' support for John Kerry in 2004: They "weren't supporting Kerry because he had served in Vietnam. They were supporting him because they believed other , more hawkish, voters would support him because he had served in Vietnam."

Beinart worries that "the elections of 2006 and 2008 could resemble the elections of 1974 and 1976, when foreign policy exhaustion, and Republican scandal, propelled Democrats to big gains." If so, those gains will be "a false dawn." The country will eventually turn right because, "whatever its failings, the right at least knows that America's enemies need to be fought."

Ronald Reagan said he did not want to return to the past but to the past's way of facing the future. As does Beinart, who locates the pertinent past in 1947.

Googling America's Brain

In which we discover the inner iguana

By Gene Weingarten

Sunday, May 21, 2006; Page W52

Reviewed by Jane Smiley

Sunday, May 21, 2006; Page BW09

HORSE

How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations

(From "Horse")

by J. Edward Chamberlin

By Michael Dirda

Sunday, May 21, 2006; Page BW19

BETRAYING SPINOZA

The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

By Rebecca Goldstein

who first enunciated the general principles for a secular democratic society,

poet Heinrich Heine said, "All our modern philosophers . . . see through the glasses which Baruch Spinoza ground."

On the Improvement of the Understanding . "After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire . . . whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness."

The appendices to each of the five sections of the Ethics and the periodic mini-essays called scholia provide short, even lively summaries of the arguments. Spinoza recognizes that he needs what he himself calls his "cumbersome, geometric order." People, he shows, are constantly being led astray by the randomness of their sensual experience, by their imaginations and passions. Only mathematics provides a model for conclusions that cannot be refuted, that are either right or wrong: "I will write about human beings as though I were concerned with lines and planes and solids."

As Matthew Stewart says in The Courtier and the Heretic (Norton), a highly recommended new biographical study of Spinoza and Leibniz, "To the fundamental question -- what makes us special? -- Spinoza offers a clear and devastating answer: nothing."

From this rather bleak beginning, the philosopher nonetheless goes on to lay out his Ethics proper. Human psychology, he determines, is based entirely on self-interest and self-preservation, while being largely subject to ever-changing combinations of desire, pleasure and pain. Such domination by the changeable senses and the outside world inevitably results in emotional turmoil: "Like waves on the sea, driven by contrary winds, we toss about, not knowing our outcome and our fate." To overcome this "human bondage" to ephemeral passions, we should learn to moderate our desires, live according to reason and ultimately aspire to a kind of intellectual love of God. This acceptance of the universe as it is will create an inner peace of mind, or "blessedness," during life and permit a kind of impersonal immortality after death.

Part of Spinoza's prescription for true happiness may sound familiar. The ancient Greeks advocated a stoic indifference to the world's ills; St. Augustine confessed that our hearts are restless until they rest in God; Buddhists believe that we must free ourselves from the wheel of desire to find spiritual beatitude. Unlike these austere systems, however, Spinoza's doesn't reject the body or the delights of the world: "It is the part of a wise man, I say, to refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theater, and other things of this kind, which anyone can use without injury to another. For the human body is composed of a great many parts of different natures, which constantly require new and varied nourishment." And we should strive to be cheerful too: "Why is it more proper to relieve our hunger and thirst than to rid ourselves of melancholy?"

the Theological-Political Treatise . This is an impassioned attack on superstition and a defense of tolerance and democratic principles. All too often, Spinoza points out, people "pay homage to the Books of the Bible, rather than to the Word of God."

Spinoza "argues that men who live under the guidance of reason invariably treat others with respect, they repay hate with love, and in general behave like model citizens and 'good Christians.' "

Unfortunately, so long as most men are swayed by passions, we require the state to ensure our security. To Spinoza, a democratic republic will best maintain the rights of all its citizens, and his ideas slowly percolated down to political philosophers such as John Locke and the revolutionaries who dreamt up the United States. In particular, he argues for free speech and utter openness in government: "Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace."

Steven M. Nadler's magisterial biography, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999),

Michael Dirda's "Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life" has just been published. His email address is mdirda@gmail.com.

Passionate Minds is a biography of Voltaire’s sometime lover and long-term companion, the brave and extraordinarily gifted Emilie du Châtelet.

Even in the United States, the publication of the memoir was a huge obstacle course. U.S. Treasury Department rules forbid its publication under rules governing countries with U.S. sanctions. As a Nobelist, Ebadi probably could have won an exemption, but "as a lifetime defender of free expression, I could not countenance the thought," she writes. So she and her publisher filed a lawsuit, and in December 2004, the Treasury Department revised its regulations.

Is she ever afraid? "Fear is an instinct, like hunger," Ebadi said thoughtfully. "Without meaning to, you get hungry. So honestly, yes, I am afraid. But believing that I am on a righteous path gives me strength. I'm a Muslim and a believer in God, and that gives me strength."

Most of the people here supported the revolution too," Tajik said. "In those days, everyone was in the streets yelling, 'Death to the shah.' I supported it ... . We thought after the shah left, it would be like England. But instead it became like George Orwell's 'Animal Farm.' "

The birth of Western hubris

By William Dietrich

Special to The Seattle Times

PREV     of     NEXT  BOOK SCAN

"Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West"
by Tom Holland

And by the end, Kelly has proved his point that the Western canon "exists by chance, not necessity." If Gibbon had a longer attention span or Bakhtin had packed rolling papers, our bookshelves would look a lot different. ·

In 1980, the family purchased a cavernous American Motors dealership in a Northwest Portland neighborhood that was then largely warehouses and other industrial enterprises. This became the Powells' flagship store, and one of six that would eventually open in the Portland area.

On the Web

Information on Powell's City of Books www.powells.com

Emily was 2 when they moved into the dealership and her childhood memories are filled with bookstore moments. She recalls the bomb threats when Powell's put Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" on sale in 1989, which outraged militant Muslims.

She remembers getting all dressed up to meet Jimmy Carter on a book tour through Portland, and gaining a kiss on the forehead from the peanut farmer turned president. And she recalls the "bookie truck" — the old white pickup, which her father and grandfather used to haul around books, and how she wanted to drive that thing when she grew up.

She attended Catlin Gabel, a private Portland school, and then headed back east to Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where she graduated in 2000 with a major in urban planning and design.

' He wants to be remembered, says a senior adviser, as 'a champion of freedom abroad and ownership at home'

David Gergen writes in U.S. News that "the overriding issue isn't whether George W. Bush can climb back 5 or 10 points or who will win more congressional seats this fall. The real issue is whether we will drift through nearly three years with a president wounded, a Congress divided, and a public disillusioned. A thousand days as a leaderless nation would leave us almost defenseless against dangers bearing down upon us."

Those dangers: Mediocre schools, high medical costs, deficits, energy dependence and international competitiveness.

In a career that has spanned four decades, Dr. McGlashan, now 64 and a professor of psychiatry at Yale, has with grim delight extinguished some of psychiatry's grandest notions, none more ruthlessly than his own. He strived for years to master psychoanalysis, only to reject it outright after demonstrating, in a landmark 1984 study, that the treatment did not help much at all in people, like Keith, with schizophrenia. Once placed on antipsychotic medication, Keith became less paranoid and more expressive. Without it, he quickly deteriorated.