Quote of the Month
“Then alas, Alcibiades, what a condition you suffer from! I hesitate to name it, but, since we two are alone, it must be said. You are wedded to stupidity, best of men, of the most extreme sort, as the argument accuses you and you accuse yourself. So this is why you are leaping into the affairs of the city before you have been educated.”
- Plato, Alcibiades I, quoted in Massimo Pigliucci, The Quest for Character: What the Story of Socrates and Alcibiades Teaches Us About Our Search for Good Leaders, p. 15
My Recent Writing:
What I’m Reading:
1. How the United States and its allies should respond to protests in Iran
Why you should read it: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace senior fellow Karim Sadjadpour argues in the Washington Post that the United States should shift its policies toward Iran after protests that followed the death of a twenty-two year old woman in police custody for violating the regime’s religious decrees.
“The death in Iran of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini — who was reportedly brutally beaten after she was detained by the ‘morality police’ for showing too much hair — has triggered nationwide protests, led by the nation’s granddaughters against the grandfathers who have ruled their country for more than four decades… Amini’s death, and Iranian society’s response to it, should permanently alter how the outside world interacts with Iranian officials. And that shift in awareness should also include a fundamental reassessment of its own Iran policy by the Biden administration.”
“According to human rights groups, every year millions of women are stopped and harassed in Iran for ‘improper hijab,’ and numerous Iranian women are serving double-digit prison sentences for refusing to veil. This system of institutionalized violence has little to do with presumed Iranian religious traditions; authentic cultural norms don’t need to be imposed by the threats of a police state. Compulsory hijab is one of the three remaining ideological pillars of Iran’s theocracy, along with ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel…’ Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, clearly believes that compromising on the regime’s ideological pillars — including hijab — will only hasten its collapse.”
Why it matters: “History has proved that Iran compromises only when faced with a unified international front. Foreign governments, international news agencies and nongovernmental organizations should cease legitimizing the Islamic republic’s gender discrimination… The unrest triggered by Amini’s death should push the Biden administration to reassess its Iran strategy. Until now, the main focus of U.S. policy toward Iran has been a fruitless attempt to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement that President Donald Trump exited in 2018. This is shortsighted. So long as the leaders of the Islamic republic — whose identity is premised on opposing the United States — rule Iran, Washington will never be able to reach an accommodation with Tehran. Rather than responding to the symptoms of Iran’s ideology, Washington — and the West — must focus on its root cause, the regime itself.”
2. How modern environmentalism obstructs the fight against climate change
Why you should read it: Breakthrough Institute executive director Ted Nordhaus observes that the modern environmentalist movement holds the fight against climate change back with its adherence to reactionary ideology, ineffective politics, and outdated policies.
“Today, the problem with environmentalism is not simply that it is not up to the task of building a low carbon future but that it is actively obstructing that future… At the heart of modern environmental identity and consciousness is an imaginary and utopian future, easily recognizable in contemporary iconography, of bucolic landscapes with low density housing in the foreground, agricultural lands teeming with wildlife and dotted with windmills and solar panels in the middle ground, and magnificent mountains, wilderness, and wild rivers in the background. Somewhere in this world there are cities and lithium mines, factories and sewage treatment plants. But they are literally not in the picture. Environmentalism, in this way, functions as a cognitive category as much as an ideology. At its heart is a prototype, an idealized picture of humans and nature in harmony. Everyone knows that the exceptions, the workarounds, the contradictions exist and are in fact determinative of how human societies will address global ecological challenges. But they are peripheral, literally and figuratively, to the political project. It is the prototype that animates the politics and the institutions.”
“Today, by contrast, the debate pits those who emphasize continuing efforts to develop better technology through research, development, and demonstration against those who emphasize deploying current technology, mostly wind and solar energy. Notably, and despite claims that environmentalists had always supported industrial policy to deploy clean technology, the deployment side of that debate, in both its original and present day iterations, has always overwhelmingly focused on demand-side interventions - pricing, tax credits and renewable portfolio standards. The result, even when those policies have succeeded, has been the outsourcing of clean tech production - both its impacts, in terms of mining, processing, and industrial pollution, and its benefits, in terms of economic development and jobs - to other places, mostly China - a development that we were among the first to anticipate… Part of this turn away from carbon pricing orthodoxy has been the serial failure of efforts to establish significant pricing policies in most places. And part of it is due to the failure of those policies to make much difference where they have been established. But as much as either of these factors, the turn away from pricing has been due to the success of innovation, investment, and industrial policy. Against claims that significant emissions mitigation could not succeed without a price on carbon, emissions have fallen significantly across most developed, technologically advanced economies over the last 15 years, primarily due to decades of public investment in nuclear, solar, wind, natural gas, and energy efficiency and without a significant or explicit price on carbon in most places.”
Why it matters: “If there is one shibboleth that has not yet fallen, it is the conceit that alarmism and protest is necessary to advance meaningful climate policy… What a decade of catastrophizing protest has produced is equal parts fatalism and nihilism. Increasingly extreme rhetoric has been directly proportional to the movement’s increasing impotence. On one hand, leading climate advocates and scientists continued to insist that ever more dire warnings about the fate of the planet are necessary, even as they bemoan the growing scourge of ‘doomism.’ On the other, many of the same leaders now insist that there is hardly any point in cutting emissions if those efforts fail to bring an end to capitalism or economic growth or corporate power… Green techno-optimism, as such, is not at all what it seems, restricting itself to only renewable energies, and explicitly rejecting all technology, whether nuclear, carbon capture, carbon removal, or even space-based solar power that would bring more energy into the terrestrial environment while opposing the infrastructure and production that would be necessary for the renewable powered future they ostensibly advocate to ever materialize. There is no serious commitment from either the institutional [environmental] movement or the activists to expand mining and processing of metals and minerals, expedite the siting and construction of long-distance transmission, or build all of the pipes and industrial production that a hydrogen economy would require… In this, the regressive and obstructionist impulses of the environmental community do not represent a deviant impulse, a failure to grapple with the scale and nature of global climate change, or a mistaken turn toward utopianism when pragmatism is called for. They are central to the ideology and identity. Caring for the environment and being an environmentalist are not the same thing—and can even be antithetical. An abundant, just, and ecologically vibrant future will require a very different sort of politics and a very different sort of movement.”
3. Why reports of liberalism’s death have been greatly exaggerated
Why you should read it: Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh notes that liberalism remains a fighting faith despite the claims of decadence and lassitude made against it by its autocratic rivals.
“I am sure a contrarian finance bro will insist, if you look at the right geospatial data, from a certain angle, adjusting for media bias, that the invasion of Ukraine is going well. For now, though, it seems the Kremlin has put too much store in western decadence. Neither the resistance on the ground nor the staying power of its sponsors in the democratic world were bargained for. By way of consolation, Russia has plentiful historical company. Terrorist clerics, godless Marxists and other enemies of the west, or ‘Occidentalists’, share few beliefs. One is that free societies have an innate flakiness: a sort of will to impotence. Even as those enemies have failed to survive, the trope does.”
“I don’t pretend that the average westerner has read their Hume and Spinoza. I don’t even pretend they deal in such abstractions as ‘the west’. But there is a way of life — to do with personal autonomy — for which people have consistently endured hardship, up to and including a blood price. Believing otherwise is not just bad analysis. It leads to more conflict than might otherwise exist… Vladimir Putin [reportedly] saw the US exit from Afghanistan last year as proof of western dilettantism. From there, it was a short step to testing the will of the west in Ukraine. You would think that US forces had rolled up to Kabul in 2001, poked around for an afternoon, deplored the lack of a Bed Bath & Beyond, and flounced off. They were there for 20 years. Whatever the mission was — technically inept, culturally uncomprehending — it wasn’t decadent.”
Why it matters: “How much carnage has this misperception of the west triggered? The Empire of Japan couldn’t believe the hermit republic that America then was would send armed multitudes 5,000 miles away in response to one day of infamy. (And, remember, never leave.) The Kaiser in 1914 and Saddam Hussein in 1990 made similar assessments of the liberal temper. It is not out of vanity or machismo that the west should insist on recognition of its fighting spunk, then. It is to avert the fighting… Occidentalists can’t believe that a creed that makes so few truth claims would inspire devotion. But here we still are, and here so many of them aren’t. The historical record is clear: it is possible to be committed to a political system that itself abjures commitment. Knowledge of the dire alternatives helps. In the end, rousing though it was, [Frank] Capra’s [World War II propaganda] work was squandered on a domestic audience. It is the other side that wonders why we fight.”
4. Why Ukraine represents the front line of democracy in the fight against nihilism.
Why you should read it: In Foreign Affairs, historian Timothy Snyder lays out what’s at stake in Ukraine.
“Russia, an aging tyranny, seeks to destroy Ukraine, a defiant democracy. A Ukrainian victory would confirm the principle of self-rule, allow the integration of Europe to proceed, and empower people of goodwill to return reinvigorated to other global challenges. A Russian victory, by contrast, would extend genocidal policies in Ukraine, subordinate Europeans, and render any vision of a geopolitical European Union obsolete. Should Russia continue its illegal blockade of the Black Sea, it could starve Africans and Asians, who depend on Ukrainian grain, precipitating a durable international crisis that will make it all but impossible to deal with common threats such as climate change. A Russian victory would strengthen fascists and other tyrants, as well as nihilists who see politics as nothing more than a spectacle designed by oligarchs to distract ordinary citizens from the destruction of the world. This war, in other words, is about establishing principles for the twenty-first century. It is about policies of mass death and about the meaning of life in politics. It is about the possibility of a democratic future… At a time when democracy is in decline around the world and threatened in the United States, Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression provides a surprising (to many) affirmation of faith in democracy’s principles and its future. In this sense, Ukraine is a challenge to those in the West who have forgotten the ethical basis of democracy and thereby, wittingly or unwittingly, ceded the field to oligarchy and empire at home and abroad. Ukrainian resistance is a welcome challenge, and a needed one.”
“Unlike Czechoslovak leaders [in 1938], Ukrainian leaders chose to fight and were supported, at least in some measure, by other democracies. In resisting, Ukrainians have staved off a number of very dark scenarios and bought European and North American democracies valuable time to think and prepare. The full significance of the Ukrainian resistance of 2022, as with the appeasement of 1938, can be grasped only when one considers the futures it opens or forecloses. And to do that, one needs the past to make sense of the present… The Putin regime is imperialist and oligarchic, dependent for its existence on propaganda that claims that all the world is ever such. While Russia’s support of fascism, white nationalism, and chaos brings it a certain kind of supporter, its bottomless nihilism is what attracts citizens of democracies who are not sure where to find ethical landmarks—who have been taught, on the right, that democracy is a natural consequence of capitalism or, on the left, that all opinions are equally valid. The gift of Russian propagandists has been to take things apart, to peel away the layers of the onion until nothing is left but the tears of others and their own cynical laughter. Russia won the propaganda war the last time it invaded Ukraine, in 2014, targeting vulnerable Europeans and Americans on social media with tales of Ukrainians as Nazis, Jews, feminists, and gays… The defense of Putin’s regime has been offered by people operating as literary critics, ever disassembling and dissembling. Ukrainian resistance, embodied by President Volodymyr Zelensky, has been more like literature: careful attention to art, no doubt, but for the purpose of articulating values. If all one has is literary criticism, one accepts that everything melts into air and concedes the values that make democratic politics possible. But when one has literature, one experiences a certain solidity, a sense that embodying values is more interesting and more courageous than dismissing or mocking them.”
Why it matters: “Americans had largely forgotten that democracy is a value for which an elected official—or a citizen, for that matter—might choose to live or die. By taking a risk, Zelensky transformed his role from that of a bit player in a Trump scandal to a hero of democracy. Americans assumed that he would want to flee because they had convinced themselves of the supremacy of impersonal forces: if they bring democracy, so much the better, but when they don’t, people submit. 'I need ammunition, not a ride’ was Zelensky’s response to U.S. urgings to leave Kyiv. This was perhaps not as eloquent as the funeral oration of Pericles, but it gets across the same point: there is honor in choosing the right way to die on behalf of a people seeking the right way to live.”
5. How the “anti-war” camp lost the plot in Ukraine
Why you should read it: In The Atlantic, James Kirchick points out the similar styles of argumentation used by self-proclaimed “anti-war” voices on both left and right to justify and rationalize Russia’s imperial aggression against Ukraine.
“… as a fascistic Russian regime wages war against Ukraine, a motley collection of voices from across the political spectrum has called upon the United States and its allies to adopt neutrality as their position. Ranging from anti-imperialists on the left to isolationists on the right and more respectable ‘realists’ in between, these critics are not pacifists in the strict sense of the term. Few if any oppose the use of force as a matter of principle. But nor are they neutral. It is not sufficient, they say, for the West to cut off its supply of defensive weaponry to Ukraine. It must also atone for ‘provoking’ Russia to attack its smaller, peaceful, democratic neighbor, and work at finding a resolution that satisfies what Moscow calls its ‘legitimate security interests.’ In this, today’s anti-war caucus is objectively pro-fascist.”
“That the fringe left would blame America—which it views as the source of all capitalist exploitation, military aggression, and imperialist evil in the world—for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is predictable. It blames America for everything. When, two days after the Russian invasion began on February 24, the Democratic Socialists of America called upon ‘the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict,’ mainstream Democrats condemned the statement. More significant has been the position taken by mainstream realists, who similarly fault the West for somehow ‘provoking’ Russia into waging war on its neighbor. These politically disparate forces share more than a talking point. They also have a worldview in common."
Why it matters: “Russia’s war against Ukraine has exposed the incompetence of the Russian military and the hubris of President Putin. It has also revealed the bravery and resilience of the Ukrainian people, who, contrary to Ron Paul’s ambulatory talking point, had no need of any American to prod or gull them into defending their homeland. Here in the U.S., the war has also exposed the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of an ideologically diverse set of foreign-policy commentators: the ‘anti-imperialists’ who routinely justify blatant acts of imperial conquest, and the ‘realists’ who make arguments unmoored from reality.”
6. Why “effective altruism” dodges hard moral and ethical issues
Why you should read it: Philosopher Kathleen Stock takes on the new philosophical fad of “effective altruism” in Unherd, finding it out of touch with the real world and unsuited to actual ethical problems people face in the here and now.
“Beloved of robotic tech bros everywhere with spare millions and allegedly twinging consciences, [Effective Altruism] and offshoot affiliate organisations such as GiveWell, 80,000 Hours, and Giving What We Can aim to apply strictly rational methods to moral action in order to maximise the positive value of outcomes for everyone…The background to EA is austerely consequentialist: ultimately, the only thing that counts morally is maximising subjective wellbeing and minimising suffering, at scale. Compared to better potential outcomes, you are as much on the hook for what you fail to do as for what you do, and there is no real excuse for prioritising your own life, loved ones, or personal commitments over those of complete strangers. [Will] MacAskill’s new book, What We Owe The Future: A Million Year View, extends this approach to the generations of humans as yet unborn. As he puts it: ‘Impartially considered, future people should count for no less, morally, than the present generation.’ This project of saving humanity’s future is dubbed ‘longtermism’, and it is championed by the lavishly-funded Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford University, of which MacAskill is an affiliate.”
“Longtermism is an unashamedly nerdy endeavour, implicitly framed as a superhero quest that skinny, specky, brainy philosophers in Oxford are best-placed to pursue — albeit by logic-chopping not karate chopping. The probability, severity, and tractability of threats such as artificial intelligence, nuclear war, the bio-engineering of pathogens, and climate change are bloodlessly assessed by MacAskill. As is traditional for the genre, the book also contains quite a few quirky and surprising moral imperatives. For instance: assuming we can give them happy lives, we have a duty to have more children; and we should also explore the possibility of ‘space settlement’ in order to house them all… And EA isn’t emotion-free, either. In these polarised times, it is tempting to contrast EA with that other wildly successful moral movement of our time, woke progressivism. At face value, while woke seems to be all heart — about oozing empathy for certain minority groups at the expense of more hard-headed and complicated concerns — EA seems to be all head. Actually, though, the two have more in common than you’d think… Effectively, both longtermism and woke progressivism take a highly restricted number of emotional impulses many of us ordinarily have, and then vividly conjure up heart-rending scenarios of supposed harm in order to prime our malleable intuitions in the desired direction. Each insists that we then extend these impulses quasi-rigorously, past any possible relevance to our own personal lives. According to longtermists, if you are the sort of person who, naturally enough, tries to minimise risks to your unborn children, cares about future grandchildren, or worries more about unlikely personal disasters rather than likely inconveniences, then you should impersonalise these impulses and radically scale them up to humanity as a whole. According to the woke, if you think kindness and inclusion are important, you should seek to pursue these attitudes mechanically, not just within institutions, but also in sports teams, in sexual choices, and even in your application of the categories of the human biological sexes."
Why it matters: “What is perhaps particularly scary about the longtermists, as opposed to the other lot, is not that they are driven by emotion, but that they don’t know they are. And what is perhaps scary about humanity generally is that, in our perennial attraction to movements like EA, longtermism, and woke progressivism — and to the gurus within them — we seem so bent on fooling ourselves into thinking that the ethical world is relatively one-dimensional and hackable. Grand-scale fantasies of saving the world are easy. Personal relationships are hard. Ethics is an art not a science — and, in my experience, people with PhDs are probably not the most reliable guides to it.”
7. Why China’s economy won’t overtake America’s any time soon
Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal reporter Stella Yifan Xie writes that China’s recent COVID-related economic slowdown may well mean that China’s economy never passes America’s for the top spot globally.
“The sharp slowdown in China’s growth in the past year is prompting many experts to reconsider when China will surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy—or even if it ever will… But the outlook for China’s economy has darkened this year, as Beijing-led policies—including its zero tolerance for Covid-19 and efforts to rein in real-estate speculation—have sapped growth. As economists pare back their forecasts for 2022, they have become more worried about China’s longer term prospects, with unfavorable demographics and high debt levels potentially weighing on any rebound.”
“Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said China’s aging population and Beijing’s increasing tendency to intervene in corporate affairs, along with other challenges, have led him to substantially lower his expectations for Chinese growth… Researchers debate how meaningful GDP rankings are, and question whether much will change if China does overtake the U.S. The depth and openness of the U.S. economy mean the U.S. will still have outsize influence. The dollar is expected to remain the world’s reserve currency for years to come.”
Why it matters: “Still, a change in the ranking would be a propaganda win for Beijing as it seeks to show the world—and its own population—that China’s state-led model is superior to Western liberal democracy, and that the U.S. is declining both politically and economically. Over time, it could lead to more-substantive changes as more countries reorient their economies to serve Chinese markets.”
8. How high natural gas prices are shifting industrial production to the U.S.
Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal reporter David Uberti details the way high natural gas prices in Europe are causing steel, fertilizer, and other industrial companies to shift operations to the United States.
“Battered by skyrocketing gas prices, companies in Europe that make steel, fertilizer and other feedstocks of economic activity are shifting operations to the U.S., attracted by more stable energy prices and muscular government support… Washington has unveiled a raft of incentives for manufacturing and green energy. The upshot is a playing field increasingly tilted in the U.S.’s favor, executives say, particularly for companies placing bets on projects to make chemicals, batteries and other energy-intensive products.”
“While the U.S. economy is facing record inflation, supply-chain bottlenecks and fears of a slowdown, analysts say, it has emerged relatively strong from the pandemic as China continues to enforce Covid lockdowns and Europe is destabilized by war. New spending by Washington on infrastructure, microchips and green-energy projects has heightened the U.S.’s business appeal… Some economists have warned that natural-gas producers from Canada to the U.S. and Qatar may struggle to fully replace Russia as a supplier for Europe in the medium term. If so, the continent could face high prices, at least for gas, well into 2024, threatening to make the scarring on Europe’s manufacturing sector permanent.”
Why it matters: “Europe remains a desirable market for advanced manufacturing and boasts a skilled industrial workforce, analysts and investors say. With pent-up demand from the pandemic, many companies that have seen exploding energy prices in recent months have passed them on to customers. The question is how long the higher natural-gas prices will last… [But] European manufacturers may struggle to stay competitive without the lower energy prices or green incentives currently offered in the U.S., said Svein Tore Holsether, chief executive of Norwegian fertilizer giant Yara International ASA”
9. Will the UK stay united after Queen Elizabeth II?
Why you should read it: In The Spectator, British writer and republican Nick Cohen sees Britain slowly drifting apart now that its primary unifying force, the late Queen Elizabeth II, has departed the national scene.
“Elizabeth II’s genius was to convince the British that her presence guaranteed that they were living in a benign country. She was a reassuring figure who inhabited our dreams in a manner you could never imagine a Trump or a Putin imitating… Unlike deceitful and dangerous politicians, Elizabeth II was safe. The British head of state didn’t generate anxiety but told you that at the very summit of power in the UK was a sovereign whose liking for a nice cup of tea and worries about what to do with the children were the same as yours.”
“For much of Elizabeth's reign England’s dreams were the dreams of the constituent nations of the UK. Scottish nationalists were well aware that any threat to remove the monarchy in an independent Scotland would bolster the unionist cause. Just as, somehow, large parts of working-class Britain regarded the Queen as ‘just like us’ so, somehow, large numbers of Scottish voters saw this English aristocrat as an honorary Scot…What of her successor? To my mind Charles III’s political belief in the importance of protecting the environment has been vindicated by history, while his belief in homeopathy and mystical religion is cranky. But whatever you think of them, they are not unifying beliefs that appeal across classes and across the constituent nations of the UK.”
Why it matters: “I don’t want to overemphasise the monarch’s importance. Boris Johnson's hard Brexit put a border in the Irish Sea. Northern Ireland voted to stay in the EU. It remains in the single market and its economy will become ever more integrated with the economy to the rest of Ireland, which is, of course, a republic. The reunification of Ireland, that once seemed as fantasy, does not seem so fantastical anymore. Scotland also voted to remain in the EU. Its nationalists now use the fact that the English forced Brexit on them as a good reason for having a second independence referendum… For all that, loyalty to the Queen helped hold this strange country together. Most republicans will show a decent respect for her on the day of her funeral. At least some of us will reflect with sorrow that the dreams that bound her kingdom together are dying now.”
Odds and Ends
Could you really pull off Ferris Bueller’s day off in Chicago? (Maybe!)…
How climate change is warming the Middle East twice as fast as anywhere else…
Why Russian culture shouldn’t be canceled despite the complicated relationship many of its leading lights have had with Russian imperialism…
How and why NASA smashed a robotic space probe into an asteroid…
When archaeologists found traces of opium in Bronze Age tombs…
What I’m Listening To
A couple of covers:
“We Will Rock You,” the Queen classic performed by In This Moment and featuring vocals from female rock singers Maria Brink, Lzzy Hale, and Taylor Momsen.
“Tiny Dancer” by Elton John, played by Florence + the Machine.
“How Come You Don’t Call Me,” a cover of Prince’s 1982 B-side by Alicia Keys.
Image of the Month
