Kim Stanley Robinson's THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE: A Review

 ...by me, but not here; it's at The Ancillary Review of Books, and you can read it here:

https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2021/01/20/even-this-is-too-good-to-be-true-review-of-the-ministry-for-the-future-by-kim-stanley-robinson/

TWO IMPORTANT LANGUAGE NOTES

1) The proper English term for the Jewish celebrations in early adolescence is hereby termed "b'mitzvah" (both singular and plural). This allows easy sentences like, "when are your kids' b'mitzvahs?" or "we've been going to a lot of b'mitvahs lately", to say nothing of gender-noncomforming kids.

2) The word ducking is now an intensifier, as in "I can't ducking believe Pelosi actually had the guts to start impeachment hearings", and "I hope that the GOP is willing to do its ducking job and convict". Easier on kids & Apple ducking lets you type it.

Signed,

The English Language Academy

Recursive Conspiracy Theories

From Justin Gills at the New York Times (via):

Dr. Lewandowsky’s survey results suggested that people who rejected climate science were more likely than other respondents to reject other scientific or official findings and buy into assorted fringe theories: that NASA faked the moon landing, that the Central Intelligence Agency killed Martin Luther King Jr., that the AIDS virus was unleashed by the government, and so forth.

This piece of research appeared in a specialized journal in psychological science, but it did not take long to find its way onto climate skeptics’ blogs, setting off howls of derision.

A theory quickly emerged: that believers in climate science had been the main people taking Dr. Lewandowsky’s survey, but instead of answering honestly, had decided en masse to impersonate climate contrarians, giving the craziest possible answers so as to make the contrarians look like whack jobs.

So, a paper about a tendency among this group to believe in conspiracy theories was met by … a conspiracy theory.

Words fail me.

But one further wrinkle occurs to me.  This is all a secondary finding of the initial study.  The primary finding was "that ideological belief in an unregulated free market tended to be a predictor of someone’s willingness to reject the findings of mainstream climate research." As Gills says, "no surprises there"; after all, that's a straightforward ideological pairing in a country where beliefs are more and more partisan (and the right has an echo-chamber devoted to spreading falsehoods).

But how do other conspiracy theories fit in?  Are they part of the right-wing nonsense machine somehow?  Does getting one's news from that machine simply predispose one to believing other conspiracy theories?  Are they somehow in sync with right wing beliefs?  Or are these two different groups -- a big group that deny climate science because of right wing beliefs, and another group that denies them because they believe other conspiracy theories?

Damn. Now maybe I'll need to read the #$%^& papers.  (Oh, and by the way: here's a link to the first paper, which spawned the conspiracy theories, and here's a link to (a preliminary draft of) a second paper, written about the response to the first one.)

Surprises in Rereading Classic Children's Literature: Kipling's Just So Stories edition

Content warning: this post quotes a book using two extremely offensive racial slurs.

So I took Joseph (now at the ripe old age of 3 and 3/4, as he'll tell you if you ask) down to the Ithaca Booksale today (currently on its second weekend of three of its biannual sale).  We got a bunch of things, ranging from simple picture books to longer chapter-books, of a sort we're starting to read Joseph (and which he likes to listen to as audiobooks -- he's heard Alice in Wonderland (both abridged & full) and The Wind in the Willows (each chapter full but some omitted) that way, for instance).

One of the books I got was a nice hardback copy of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.

Now, what I remembered from Kipling's Just So Stories were a general impression that most were about how various animals got various features -- "how the elephant got its trunk", for example, with the elephant's nose being pulled by something-or-other until it got long.  And I remembered the story "The Butterfly That Stamped" very well, because it was always my favorite, and because I had a recording of it that I listened to repeatedly.  And I remembered that it was incredibly iconic -- not only a classic children's book, but one that has entered our language as a phrase in other contexts.  But I remembered little else.

Now, returning to a children's book for the first time in not-quite-four-decades is always a particular experience, a Zebra-stripes experience of familiarity and surprise.  A lot of this is just about memory.  "How the Elephant Got Its Trunk", for example -- I would have sworn that was the title; and it was, in fact, the story; -- but it's actually called "The Elephant's Child".  I remembered the story, and what it explained, but not the title, nor the details (all that spanking! I'm pleased to say that the second time through Joseph interrupted me to ask, "What does 'spank' mean?")

One particular fashion in which (I've found) the stories differ from my memory is in quality -- in both directions.  The Winnie the Pooh stories are utterly fabulous -- far better than I remembered; so are the Frog and Toad stories.  On the other hand, Babar is much worse -- not just in the colonialist implications, but the actual plain writing.  Curious George is kind of eh.  (But -- as has been true almost since the day of his birth -- Joseph's taste is not mine: he loves Pooh and Frog and Toad, but he loves Babar and Curious George equally well.)

Just So Stories was both far better, and far worse, than I remembered.

The first story we read was the first in the book, "How the Whale Got His Throat".  And it was fabulous.  Fabulous in many dimensions: an exciting and fun story for Joseph; filled with over-his-head but fun wordplay for me (always an important element in kids' books that are going to be read aloud (but see above re: Joseph's taste is not mine)).  It has a lot of great passages for reading outloud, which surprisingly many children's books are mediocre or even poor at.  But read this description of what a man does when swallowed by a whale (and to get the full effect, you should read it outloud):

But as soon as the Mariner, who was a man of infinite-resource-and-sagacity, found himself truly inside the Whale's warm, dark, inside cup-boards, he stumped and he jumped and he thumped and he bumped, and he pranced and he danced, and he banged and he clanged, and he hit and he bit, and he leaped and he creeped, and he prowled and he howled, and he hopped and he dropped, and he cried and he sighed, and he crawled and he bawled, and he stepped and he lepped, and he danced hornpipes where he shouldn't, and the Whale felt most unhappy indeed. (Have you forgotten the suspenders?)

How fabulous is that?

Then there's the picture captions.  Kipling drew his own pictures, and writes his own captions, which not only tell what part of the story they're from, but which also tell what's in the picture, and tell what's left out, and complain about how much better they'd be if he were allowed to color them, although he isn't.  They include facts and details about the story which is not in the text.  They're quite simply wonderful.  Here, for example, is the caption to the picture above, which occurs right about the same point in the story as the above quote:

THIS is the picture of the Whale swallowing the Mariner with his infinite-resource-and-sagacity, and the raft and the jack-knife and his suspenders, which you must not forget. The buttony-things are the Mariner's suspenders, and you can see the knife close by them. He is sitting on the raft, but it has tilted up sideways, so you don't see much of it. The whity thing by the Mariner's left hand is a piece of wood that he was trying to row the raft with when the Whale came along. The piece of wood is called the jaws-of-a-gaff. The Mariner left it outside when he went in. The Whale's name was Smiler, and the Mariner was called Mr. Henry Albert Bivvens, A.B. The little 'Stute Fish is hiding under the Whale's tummy, or else I would have drawn him. The reason that the sea looks so ooshy-skooshy is because the Whale is sucking it all into his mouth so as to suck in Mr. Henry Albert Bivvens and the raft and the jack-knife and the suspenders. You must never forget the suspenders.

Note that the name, Mr. Henry Albert Bivvens, A.B. (fabulous!) is not otherwise given in the story, nor is the name Smiler.

So after the first story, I was utterly delighted, and ready to keep reading more.

"How the Camel Got His Hump" was fine -- a bit dominationist in how it thought animals related to humans, but whatever.  A fine story, although not quite as good as "How the Whale Got His Throat" in my opinion (Joseph didn't differentiate, that I could see).  "How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin" had the rather unfortunate phrase describing a hat as something "from which the rays of the sun were always reflected in more-than-oriental splendour".  The phrase is repeated, too -- one of the wonderful things about the Just So Stories, and one of the things that make them particularly good for reading outloud, are the long repeated phrases, a technique of oral storytelling famous from Homer if not before, but one oddly underused in children's books.  Well, I wasn't thrilled about that, but this was Kipling after all, to say nothing of 110 years ago.  And frankly I doubted Joseph would pick up on it, or get that there was a questionable connotation (it's not even negative -- just orientalist).  So I plunged on to story four, "How the Leopard Got His Spots".

Oh, dear.

At first it seems ok -- animals with different looks, and a just-so story about how they're going to change looks.  Fine.  Then Kipling introduces a character referred to as "an Ethiopian" -- one who, incidentally, does not seem to be actually a person from the country of Ethiopian, but simply someone who is black.  And I got Worried.  Unfortunately by then I was already into the story -- not far in, but too far for Joseph to tolerate my stopping.  So with fear & trembling I explained to Joseph that an Ethiopian is a person from Ethiopia (true, of course, although somewhat disingenuous in this context: but then to children, my wife's rule has always been to tell the truth but not necessarily the whole truth, so I did). and I pressed on.

The story itself is questionable: the Ethiopian changes his skin, to fit in with a changed habitat, but then again so does the Giraffe, the Zebra and the Leopard.  You could debate how to take that -- making the Ethiopian into an animal?  Or implying that skin is ultimately changeable or unimportant?  It's hard to say.  Again, it's not something that I am thrilled about, but on the other hand I doubt it will do much harm, if part of a mixed and diverse literary diet.

And then -- in the midst of reading outloud -- I see this exchange:

'But if I'm all this,' said the Leopard, 'why didn't you go spotty too?'

'Oh, plain black's best for a nigger,' said the Ethiopian.

Oh, God.  I've already begun the sentence by the time I hit that phrase.  Improvising, I read "plain black's best for me", and continue.  Then one of Kipling's picture captions -- which I've been reading, because heretofore they've been marvelous -- includes the sentence "The Ethiopian was really a negro, and so his name was Sambo."  For that caption I simply stop before getting to that sentence.

Mixed with my general delight in the book, the overall effect is that of finding a dead cockroach in an otherwise excellent bowl of soup.  I felt rather nauseous.

Or perhaps I'm a hypocrite, because if I find a cockroach in a bowl of soup I wouldn't eat another bite (nor anything else from that restaurant, if I were eating at a restaurant); I certainly wouldn't pluck the thing out, throw it away, and keep eating.  But in this case I think I'm going to do that.  In fact, I did: I finished the story, after all.

Now the above-quoted phrase -- with the N word -- is sometimes simply edited out, even from otherwise unabridged editions.  (So if you have the book at home, you might not see it.)  Here, for example, is a copy of the text that seems otherwise unedited which ends the sentence with the word "best".  But the one we now have -- and a very nice edition it is too, especially for a used book bought for $1.75 -- has it.

My wife suggested we take a pen and simply black it out -- make it unreadable since (as she noted) Joseph will learn to read soon enough, and might stumble upon it.  I'll do the same for the sentence with "Sambo" in it, too.

Now, I'm against censorship in grown-up books, and queasy about the idea in kids books.  On the other hand, racial slurs need to be put in complex historical context -- the kind that a three-year-old, or even a vastly older child like a three-and-three-quarters-year-old, wouldn't understand.  I'm not sure a ten-year old would either, for that matter.  And of course the book doesn't have any such context.  And we don't want him, say, reading that and using it not knowing its actual history, meaning, and (especially) connotations.

Honestly, I should have known.  The story is based on a phrase "can the leopard change his spots?", which is the basis for the novel The Leopard's Spots by Thomas Dixon, one of the two Dixon novels which served as the basis for The Birth of a Nation, a film whose hero is the Klu Klux Klan -- as I should know, since I taught the film in one of my classes not three weeks ago.*  Actually, Kipling alludes directly to the phrase in the final paragraph of his story:

Oh, now and then you will hear grown-ups say, 'Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the Leopard his spots?' I don't think even grown-ups would keep on saying such a silly thing if the Leopard and the Ethiopian hadn't done it once--do you? But they will never do it again, Best Beloved. They are quite contented as they are.

...and of course Kipling uses the longer, explicitly racist version of the phrase, whose existence, I'm ashamed to admit, I had forgotten until getting to it in this story.  I can't decide if the story supports or undermines the sentiment, although I think it's the latter -- and I certainly can't decide whether the fact that Kipling undermines it (if he does) in any way mitigates its use in the story.  (I'm not at all sure it does.)

Honestly, if I'd pre-reread the stories, I would have been sorely tempted to skip this one.  But I read it, and it's part of the book now -- if I try to skip it, Joseph will notice and ask for it.  (We read Joseph the first Babar book similarly without any memories more recent than our own childhoods, and came unprepared on the infamous page four where Babar's mother is shot and killed.  The next time we read it, we tried to skip that part, and Joseph noted that we skipped it and ordered it put back in.  It doesn't actually seem to bother him.)

And it is a very lovely story about "How the Whale Got His Throat", and so is (we skipped ahead to reread my favorite) "The Butterfly that Stamped".  I'm not quite willing to "loose" the book.  But (once it is no longer in the room where he's sleeping, and when he's not looking) I shall edit it.

Now, I can imagine some people criticizing me for reading the book at all (there are questionable implications in that story even aside from the offensive language).  I can imagine others criticizing me for bowdlerization.  But in dealing with the reality of great, flawed texts, and the reality of morally terrible pasts and how to explain them, any action is a compromise.  I think this is the right one.  At least for us, at least for now.

*****

Links discovered while poking around on this topic:

• If you're curious, here's an old metafilter thread discussing this issue which I turned up googling for "Rudyard Kipling Just So Stories Racism".  People take, well, more or less the sort of stances you'd expect.
• Here are some scientists arguing that (in scientific contexts) the phrase "just so stories" shouldn't be used dismissively, but embraced.
• Here's a review of Kipling's Just So Stories from 1903, the year after it appeared.

---------------------
* It's not the only place where Kipling's racism crosses a topic I raised in the class: his other racial slur, "sambo", comes out of Minstrel Shows (Sambo was a minstrel show character who became a racial slur -- nor was it the only one to do so), which was the first topic in my class on the history of American culture.  What can I say?  American culture is, among other things, racist; nor is ours the only one, as Kipling demonstrates.

Can We Have An Update on the Acutal Work of Art, Please?

Apparently Andres Serrano's long-controversial photograph Immersion (Piss Christ) has been destroyed (some news reports have "damaged") by fundamentalist Catholic protesters in France. All the various news stories and blog posts I've seen on this (e.g.) have focused on the culture-war angle -- the photograph has always been controversial, the rise of Christian fundamentalism and so forth; P Z Myers (reasonably) compares this to the Taliban's destruction of Buddhist statuses. Etc.

But I'm primarily worried about the artwork. Can it be repaired? More importantly: Immersion (Piss Christ) was a photograph, which are often (but not always) made in series -- so that there are a handful of "originals" rather than just a single original, as in the case of a painting. Is this true with Serrano's work? Nothing I've seen so far has addressed this, but I'm actually very eager to find out.

Because here's the thing: apart from the politics and the controversy... Immersion (Piss Christ) is a very beautiful work of art. Take a look at it, and try to forget what you know about its origin, and just look at it as an image:

Gorgeous. And also, as many people have noted, a very religious image. Serrano himself has said that "I have always felt that my work is religious, not sacrilegious... I am drawn to the symbols of the Church.... I like to believe that rather than destroy icons, I make new ones." A writer for the Guardian makes a similar point here. Even PZ Myers, not known for his sympathy to religious expression, notes that the "luminous golden glow" is "reverential".

I hasten to add that this shouldn't make a difference: anti-religious art can be as beautiful as religious art, and I hope it goes without saying that the destruction of artwork is immoral whatever viewpoint it promotes or the intention of its artist to shock or not. Saying Serrano's work is religious is a description, not a defense, since I don't think that the claims (blasphemy, offense, intentional sacrilege) against which it would be a defense are ones that in fact require a defense. If those charges are true, it doesn't matter. But, as it happens, I think they're not. Immersion (Piss Christ) is a work of religious art -- one focusing on (among other things) the physicality of the incarnation, with all that that entails.*

But mostly it's beautiful. I've only seen reproductions, which never do a work of art justice, and I'd love to see the original someday. Can I? That is, are there other, still-undamaged originals made by Serrano from the same negative? Or was there only one, and it is truly gone? I'd really like to know. Anyone feel like doing (or linking to) any reporting on this angle?

Update: Telling this story to a photography buff, he assured me that more than one copy of "Piss Christ" was made (photos are often made in series, usually in the 3-12 range I think). So it does still exist, somewhere. Just don't tell the wackos.

______________
* I'm reminded of the line which the late David Foster Wallace quoted from a novel by William H. Gass (which I've not read and know nothing else about), Omensetter's Luck: "The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not."

Leaping from Death by Fire to Certain Death Below: Two New York Tragedies

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: you can read about it here, talk about it in this thread, or listen to a good radio report from today's Democracy Now! here.

In brief, a sweatshop factor in New York caught fire; 146 people, mostly poor immigrant women, died. The deaths were caused in large part by the fact that exit doors were chained, on the theory that workers would otherwise steal from their employer. In other words: women burned to death in a building because they'd been locked in by their employer.

It was a major scandal at the time, leading to a lot of reforms; a lot of the fire codes you see can be traced back to the Triangle fire.

But what struck me today, listening to the Democracy Now! report while driving to work, was the detail that some of the women leapt to their death from where they were trapped on the 10th floor.

Sound familiar?

While all the murders of 9/11 were equally criminal, I must admit that the ones that touched me the most emotionally -- tied, I suppose, with the deaths of the firemen who raced into the building to help those inside and died -- were those who leapt to their death from the top of the World Trade Center. Something about the sheer horror of that act was incredibly palpable; the images of those falling bodies, shown on TV, were among the most horrifying of all those shown in that horrifying time.

And I suspect I wasn't the only one for whom those deaths helped symbolize the sheer, unthinkable evil that would cause such a thing.

Well, it's worth remembering that it's not only murderous religious/political ideologies that can do that. Other things can too.

It would be nice and simple to chalk it up to the greed of the owners of the factory; but while they were fully morally culpable, their reform would not have solved the issue: as long as such a practice was legal, any given virtuous capitalist will simply be driven out of business by a less virtuous one.

No, what caused those deaths were the evils of unregulated capitalism -- that, when not held back by law, will burn women and children to death if there's profit in it.

And, of course, law is not enough: to sustain those laws, we need political counterweights to the ever-increasing power of money in our politics.

We need organizations who fight for the poor -- or, rather, which enable the poor to fight for themselves.

What the women of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory needed was a union.

Laws to regulate capital, and unions to balance its political power: or a foe ever bit as evil in its deeds (albeit not in its motives) as any other we face will burn us all alive.

In the memory of those who died, let's fight for that.

Happy to Oblige

The world Parker actually wants... is merely a world in which one can walk down an average city street and not be confronted by a 4-year-old in a "Future Porn Star" T-shirt, a world in which most women do not own stripper poles, a world in which most people do not know that sex-equity experts even exist.

-- Profile of Kathleen Parker (via)

I think Kathleen Parker's in luck. I myself, in a lifetime of walking down city streets, have never see a 4-year-old (nor a child of any age) wearing a "future porn star" T-shirt; despite having not looked into the matter, I feel quite certain that most women do not, in fact, own stripper poles (I don't know of anyone who does); and I had remained blissfully unaware of sex-equity experts until I had the misfortune of reading Kathleen Parker sound off about the concept in the above-linked profile. While I admit that my experience may not be typical, my hunch is that Parker's living in her own little utopia here.

I admit, however, that the second list of demands is slightly more problematic:

[The world Parker actually wants is] a world in which most people don't say "vagina" in polite conversation, vice presidents are expected to know something about the country that elected them, abortion is stigmatized but not illegal, and racial profiling is permitted but not celebrated.

Abortion is -- sadly -- terribly stigmatized in this country, but despite recent efforts by our house of representatives, is not quite yet illegal. So Parker's in luck there. On the other fronts, I don't know. Certainly the current vice president knows something about our country -- as did the previous one, although that "something" did not apparently include anything about its constitution nor its ideals. And while I myself personally have no idea how widely "vagina" is said in polite conversation, I suspect that saying it is (like abortion) sadly stigmatized,* so I think Parker's currently safe there too.

But racial profiling is, I have to inform her, not permitted. And based on the evidence of the above linked-profile, it is, indeed, "celebrated" -- at least by "the most widely syndicated female columnist in the nation," Kathleen Parker. So in one respect she has something still to strive for.

_____________________
* Obligatory quote:

Maude Lebowski: The word itself makes some men uncomfortable. Vagina.
The Dude: Oh yeah?
Maude Lebowski: Yes, they don't like hearing it and find it difficult to say whereas without batting an eye a man will refer to his dick or his rod or his Johnson.
The Dude: Johnson?

-- The Big Lebowski (1998)

Some Arguments Are Self-Refuting: Roman Polanski Edition

Robert Harris, from his op-ed in today's NY Times defending Roman Polanski:

Of course what happened cannot be excused, either legally or ethically.

Right. The crime -- which Harris, as is all-too-common among Polanski's defenders, never mentions -- is that Roman Polanski raped a child. Rape, as has been noted, in three separate ways -- rape because she was too young to consent, rape because she was drugged and unable to consent, and rape because she said no. Polanski plea-bargained to the first of the three in order to avoid trial on the entire set; but it all, y'know, happened. Any one of the three would make it rape.*

So this "cannot be excused" -- including legally. Inexcusable.

Which renders the rest of Harris's op-ed utterly moot. If something cannot be excused, then all the excuses offered in practically every other sentence of the op-ed are besides the point.

(In addition to the Salon story linked above -- which I think is the "if you're only going to read one" for this particular issue -- I also recommend this and this, both via these posts, which also contain more sensible points and relevant links.)

I am frankly really shocked at the number of people coming forward to defend a man who has admitted the drugging and raping of a 13-year-old-girl. I kinda thought the underlying facts of this case would scare people off. But there are an awful lot of defenders out there.

Of course, I shouldn't be shocked by the number of filmmakers and writers coming forward to defend Polanski; being a great artist has no relation to being a decent person -- exhibit A here being Polanski himself. But I am shocked nevertheless.

(The basic point in regards to the art/morality connection in this case was well put by Scott Lemieux: "...evaluations of Polanski's art should be kept distinct from his crimes, but this cuts both ways -- the fact that he's produced great art shouldn't give him immunity for a severe violent crime.")

And yeah, like a number of others, the obvious connection which occurs to me here is to the war-criminals in the Bush administration. A rapist shouldn't serve his sentence because he's an important filmmaker, or it was decades ago, or it would politicize art; orderers of torture shouldn't be prosecuted because they were important politicians, or we need to look forward not back, or it would politicize politics. Being unable to return to or leave the U.S. (respectively) and having their reputations sullied are sufficient punishment -- at least for those sorts of people.

Now, I believe in grey areas, and that the law is hardly always just. But I would like to think that torture and rape are two of the areas which we can pretty much all agree are, well, inexcusable.

Yet two large crowds have come forward to defend the perpetrators of these crimes. Half of each crowd would be offended to be compared to the other; another large chunk are simultaneous members of both camps. But the common thread here is that people who aren't just the little people should be allowed to get away with torture and rape.

Because being an artist, or being a high-ranking Republican politician, or simply being a member of the well-connected set, are licences to commit any crimes. Even those.

How can people think this way? What leads people to defend these things?

It's Chinatown.

________________
* I admit there are grey areas in statutory rape laws -- two kids having consensual sex being the prime example here -- where the law and morality are at odds. Even absent the other factors, this -- a 40-year-old man with a 13-year-old girl -- isn't close. With the other factors, bringing it up would be a joke if it weren't so damn evil.

Update to footnote: Two links to over-thought, excessively analyzed, pretentiously-academic-about-common-subject posts that any reader of this blog should like (you can tell from my adjectives that I'm jealous as hell and wish I'd written 'em). Firstly, this explanation of why the grand jury testimony is important to consider even though it's one-sided and one should normally be wary of such things for precisely that reason; and secondly -- and while they're both good if you read only one read this one -- this post about the meaning of statutory rape, which talks about Wittgenstein, famous cognitive psychology experiments and the sort of intellectual slippage that might cause (some of) Polanski's defenders to defend someone who has committed so vile a crime. Who knew that the route to understanding Polanski's seemingly clueless moral defenders was through Wittgenstein and violations of gricean maxims?

On Kirby, Marvel, Copyright and Moral Claims: Scattered Thoughts

Thoughts on the copyright reclamation by the heirs of Jack Kirby, sparked by this post by Alan David Duane.

(In reading the below, remember I'm neither a lawyer nor a policymaker nor even one who has read the relevant legal documents; I'm going by a (semi-informed, but distinctly) layman's readings of the news stories about them. If that doesn't interest you, bail now.)

1)

The heirs of Jack Kirby have filed a notice of copyright reclamation in the case of superheroes he had a hand in creating for Marvel in the early 1960's, characters such as the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and even Spiderman (who was created by Steve Ditko more than Jack Kirby).

2)

It's important to remember what's going on here. Kirby's heirs aren't suing anyone -- at least not yet. They are filing a notice of reclamation. They are able to do this because of the odd nature of our current lengthy copyright system.

Until 1976, copyrights were good for 56 years -- an automatic 28 with a single optional renewal. In 1976, Congress extended that period -- first to 75 and then later to 95 years (oversimplifying but in essence). This was not only prospective, applying to works copyrighted in 1976 and later, but retroactive, applying to old works too.

But this created an odd situation for those who had sold their copyrights prior to 1976. What they'd sold was copyright as it existed then, i.e. the 56 year term. What to do about the extensions for sold copyrights? Should they belong to the original owner (on the grounds that they only sold the existing copyright of 56 years and not any more), or should they belong to the new purchaser (on the grounds that the purchaser bought the copyright and the extension doesn't affect that)?

(Note that this is also a different legal situation than the one involving DC/Superman/Jerry Siegel's heirs.)

3)

This entire debate is distorted by a broader misconception in our culture about the relation of worth and wealth to merit and effort.

It is a strong cultural myth in our society -- an essential undergirding of one of the two major political philosophies of this country, and an almost-as-important one for the other -- that people who get rich deserved it. They worked hard, or had a good idea, and therefore they made it. Conservatives tend to (implicitly) assume this is the end of the story: if you work hard and/or are smart, you'll get rich; if you're poor, it's your own damn fault. Liberals, in contrast, recognize unfairness and randomness to a degree, so they tend to say that people can work hard and stay poor. But neither side tends to see the fact that wealth is at least a much a matter of chance and luck as it is of merit or effort.

The reason we don't like to see that, of course, is that it upends the supporting intellectual assumptions of most of our society: if the rich are simply lucky, then the enormous favor they receive is unearned and unfair.*

This is never more true than when we are talking about intellectual property.

I'm not (repeat, not) saying that artistic merit has no relation to how well a work does. But it's been extensively argued on theoretical grounds, amply seen throughout history and shown in controlled laboratory studies that merit is, at best, a necessary but not sufficient factor. Harry Potter may have been a good series of children's books -- but there are a lot of other books that are equally good (as I've had children's librarians say to me); J. K. Rowling may have been good, but she was mostly very, very lucky.

However true this is of the success of original works, how much more strongly true is it of intellectual properties** which have success in derivative works!

This distorts our discussion in numerous ways. In part it leads to people saying things like

I won't argue with anyone who tells me Herb Trimpe is unlikely to return to Marvel and create a blockbuster, breakthrough character that generates millions of dollars, no matter what sort of compensation deal is in place.

...which implies that the talent and effort of Herb Trimpe (who was the first man to draw (although he did not create) Wolverine) was a major role in Wolverine's becoming a breakthrough character. This is not because of what Herb Trimpe did or didn't do.*** It's because time and chance -- and broad social forces such as create a market for characters such as Wolverine -- and, above all, fashion are what made Wolverine worth what he's worth today.

The fight that will follow over the ownership of the Fantastic Four isn't quite like a fight over a lottery ticket; but it's far, far closer than anyone is granting in this discussion.

4)

There is a third party to every legal battle over intellectual property, one which has neither lawyers nor lobbyists on its side. Thanks to the recent intellectual growth of the copyleft movement, it has some advocates; but their position is largely based on reason and fairness and the public good, and is therefore extremely weak. But it is the most important party nonetheless.

I speak, of course, of the public.

Intellectual property -- a misnomer, really, since there is no thing to be owned -- is a government-enforced monopoly restricting freedom of speech. It restricts your ability to say what you want to say, in person or print or on film or in comics -- if what you want to say is, for example, "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure of the windowpane; I was [REMAINDER DELETED DUE TO DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICE]" It equally, and even more indefensibly, to your ability to tell an original story -- if that story is about, for example, Superman or Spiderman.

There are reasons for so limiting speech -- which is why the power to do so is explicitly granted in the Constitution -- but given that it is limiting very basic human rights, the power is moral only insofar as it is necessary to accomplish its stated ends. (Whether or not it is legal is a separate matter.)

5)

The moral case for creators' rights is both essential and irrelevant to the Kirby-copyright issue.

It's irrelevant because neither party has a very good moral (as opposed to legal) claim. On one side we have Kirby's biological heirs; on the other, the corporate descendents of the companies he worked for. Neither set of people had much to do with the effort or talent put into these characters; they are fighting for an inheritance, and like any fight for inheritance they are fighting for things they may have title to but don't in any moral sense particularly deserve.

But it's essential because it was only because of the (perceived) moral rights of creators that copyright was extended in the first place.

If the case before Congress had been that companies wished to extend their intellectual monopolies to make more money from them, then even that bribery-pliant group of sellouts would have a hard time justifying such a vote. So it was all talked up in terms of the struggling, lonely dreamer, hoping to turn his or her talent into a win for his or her heirs.

This was a fiction, of course -- as much of a fiction as the notion that estate taxes hit small farmers rather than wealthy businessmen, and a fiction of the same kind, i.e. a propagandistic one designed to hide the true beneficiaries of public policy. But in terms of the copyright extensions passed in the 1970's, and then again in the 1990's, and then again whenever Mickey Mouse next threatens to go out of copyright, it's an essential one. Without this fiction, the extra value that came from the copyright for years 57 - 95 of an intellectual property simply wouldn't exist -- or would, rather, be held by the public and not by anyone in particular.

This is why you can't say of copyrights what you'd say of, for example, real estate. If you sell a house in a poor neighborhood, and then it becomes trendy, and the owner therefore (through luck) becomes rich, you can't complain that you didn't know its worth when you sold it. But no one seriously doubts (pragmatically if not morally) the perpetual property rights to real estate.****

Whereas the purchasers of these monopolies, which have become valuable only due to chance (and the efforts of thousands, morally and artistically indistinguishable from similar efforts which led nowhere), have any chance of extending them at the expense of the public only by appealing to the moral claim of their creators.

Marvel wants to argue that, for the good of people like Jack Kirby, it must have the right to hold a monopoly on his creations -- against, in this case, his actual heirs. They need the appeal to Kirby's rights to win the broader public debate, and need to squash that same appeal to win the narrow legal one.

The myth that wealth is earned is necessary to make us think that the financial windfall is significantly due to Kirby's talent in the first place, and that this fight over a lottery ticket is a fight over who really deserves it -- blinding us to the real answer, no one.

7)

Artists can't threaten to withhold their next breakthrough character from big companies if they're not fairly compensated, because they have almost no say in whether they can create one. They put their effort and talent into what they make; but what makes it valuable is fashion, and the efforts of others, and luck, and a host of other factors.

Companies have extended copyright based on a myth of the individual creator -- who they are trying to screw over at every other moment so as to make money for themselves.

Of course artists should be fairly compensated for their work -- and there is, as I have said, a very strong pragmatic argument for copyright, one I don't disagree with (assuming that said copyright is, as provided by the U.S. constitution, "for limited terms"). But the vast wealth at stake here is irrelevant to that right, since it is all-but-irrelevant to that success.

And of course companies should be able to get funding to make (say) movies, and then profit from those endeavors. But they want more than that; they want to maintain a public monopoly on the ability to tell stories about certain characters who, for whatever reason, have caught the public's imagination, so that not only can they make and profit from stories about their characters, but so that they can ensure that theirs are the only stories about those characters that are there to be told.

8)

Since I'm not a lawyer or policymaker, but simply a citizen with opinions on public policy, I can say that I support neither Kirby's heirs nor DC/Marvel. I think that, 56 years after their creation, all works should be in the public domain. The supreme court, alas, disagrees -- which seems to mean little more than their unwillingness to open the can of worms of recognizing that our current Congressional system is so poisoned by legalized bribery that no judgments of Congress (or the President, or really the Courts) can be understood as representing the public interest save incidentally. They said it was Congress's call to make -- which would have been a reasonable argument if Congress wasn't bought and paid for by the stakeholders on one side of this particular issue.

But the Congress was bought and paid for, and the Court was unwilling to enforce the rights of the public. So what we are left with is a debate over who should get to steal from the public the winnings of a lottery.

9)

To anyone not convinced by all of the above:

I have one more argument for my position. It's a knock-down, irrefutable, overwhelming argument, such that if you heard it you could not even begin to imagine disagreeing with me. It would, in fact, revolutionize your thinking on every aspect of this issue.

But since this set of concepts can, as it happens, only be expressed in metaphorical terms as an X-Men story, I'm not legally allowed to share it with you until the X-Men go into the public domain.

Until then, you'll just have to trust me.

Update: Now cross-posted at Alas, a blog. Thanks, Amp!

_______________

* Incidentally, the consequence of this argument isn't necessarily a socialist economy, which I wouldn't actually favor; there are extremely strong pragmatic grounds for favoring the retention of a capitalist system and, as part of that, a robust set of property rights. It's just that such a system should be supplemented by a far stronger redistributory state (in a tax-for-social-goods-sense) than is true of the U.S. today; and also (and this is almost as important) that the public culture and debate should recognize the preponderance of luck in the outcomes of economic lives.

** What a vile phrase.

*** Although in fact I think that Wolverine's blockbuster status has far more to do with Chris Claremont, and to a slightly lesser extent Frank Miller, than it does Herb Trimpe or Wolverine's creators -- although Claremont and Miller have even less legal claim than do Wolverine's originators.

**** Except the bible, of course, which wanted everything reset to zero every fifty years to ensure justice (Leviticus 25:13). What socialist commie pinko wrote that, eh?

Cultural Continuity

Jeff Lacks, a political scientist who teaches at Columbia, writes (via):

If policy were set by state-by-state majorities of those 65 or older, none would allow same-sex marriage. If policy were set by those under 30, only 12 states would not allow-same-sex marriage.

This is a fascinating presentation of an admittedly familiar piece of data -- namely, that support for same-sex marriage is largely a generational issue, and that demographics provide a solid basis for hope that the good guys will win.

But looking at his chart made me think of another familiar piece of data -- one that this study also corroborates.

Here's a map:

And here's another:

One of those is a map of the 12 states whose under-30 population are not in favor of equal marriage rights; the other is a map of the 11 states that seceded to form the Confederacy in 1861 (kicking of the U. S. Civil War). At a glance, can you tell which is which?

If so, good for you -- you remember your U. S. history. But if not, it's not that much of a surprise; no less than nine states are among both the 12 and the 11.

(The answer: the first map, colored in red-state red, is based contemporary attitudes towards equal marriage rights; the second, colored in confederate grey, is of the Confederacy.)

Terribly surprising -- except that it's not, since the cultural continuity in the north-south divide is a commonplace (which dates back to the earliest days of colonial history if David Hackett Fischer is to be believed), one which a quick survey of election maps over a century apart will demonstrate. (Obviously the pattern comes and goes: it's hidden in landslide years, and the Democrat/Republican constituency switch hid it a lot in the intervening century, etc.) If anything, what is surprising is how unsurprising it is: even before I looked at Lacks's list, I guessed there would be a lot of overlap. Because the South is now, as it long has been, the most conservative area of the country. It's just that what causes that manifests itself in support for -- slavery or anti-gay bigotry -- changes.

What's interesting, actually, are the few differences. So here's a third map. In this case, the two states that joined the Confederacy but a majority of whose youngsters support equal marriage rights are in grey; the three states that did not join the Confederacy but whose youngsters do not support equal marriage rights are in red; the states that fall on the conservative sides of both these divides are in (a hopefully neutral) yellow:

So what is up with the five states that aren't in the overlap?

The first thing to note is that two of the three non-confederate anti-equality-youngsters states (hereafter, red states) were not even states at the time of the Civil War: Utah and Oklahoma only joined the union in 1896 and 1907, respectively. So they didn't even have a chance to do so. They are historically conservative areas whose statehood post-dates the war.

The third of the red states is Kentucky. It was one of the four slave states that did not secede; like all of them, it had a mix of Confederate and Union supporters. (The same was true in some of the states that did secede, incidentally, which is why (for example) West Virginia is now a separate state.) Obviously its conservative elements have now won out (in contrast, I suppose, to those in Missouri, Maryland and Delaware, the other three loyal slave states).

As for the two states that have moved (so to speak) in the opposite direction, Florida and Virginia are both states that have been culturally shifting to the north for various reasons, in large part having to do with immigrants to those states from elsewhere in the country (and from without it). While each has its ongoing Confederate regions, these are off-set by more liberal areas elsewhere in those states.

Despite this, however, nine states -- Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia -- show (in this as in so many other areas) the ongoing power of a historically deep conservative culture in the southern (now really better described as south-eastern) region of the country.

And Then There Were Four

Vermont just became -- along with Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa -- the fourth state in our union to allow marriage on a non-discriminatory basis.

Even better, it was the first one to do so simply through legislative action -- there was no judicial ruling that it was necessary. (The governor vetoed it; the legislature overrode the veto.) Like many other proponents of equal marriage rights, while I think the court rulings in its favor are proper, correct and entirely legitimate, I think it is preferable to have equality achieved legislatively.

Hey -- New York? My home state? We could still be #5 y'know. How about it?

I'd say "4 down, 46 to go" but actually there is another battle too -- one that is arguably more important than any victory in the remaining 46 states -- namely, getting the federal government to recognize the marriages done in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa & Vermont on an equal basis. Currently, the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" prohibits that (as well as stating that no state needs to recognize same-sex marriages done in another state). Putting aside for the moment the issues of recognition by other states, it seems to me that we should at least get rid of that provision. At the moment, same-sex couples who marry in one of the four non-discriminatory states have many benefits denied them due to federal non-recognition of their marriages. It seems to me a top priority is assuring that, at least in those states that choose to be non-discriminatory, marriages can be fully and genuinely equal.

But that's for tomorrow. For today: hooray for Vermont!

Compare and Contrast

No one voted for me in the 1964 Presidential primary who is anti-Negro. I am not myself, and I ran no such campaign, nor have I ever run a campaign that was anti-Negro.

-- George Wallace, "Hear Me Out" (Anderson, S.C.: Droke House, 1968), p. 120

While there are a few sick individuals who hate gay people, I have neither seen nor heard any hatred of gays expressed by proponents of Proposition 8. Not in my private life, not in my e-mail, not from callers on my radio show.

-- Dennis Prager (via)

...I guess going from total denial ("no one") to a broad-but-not-absolute denial ("a few sick individuals") is progress, of a sort.

(You can donate to the No on Prop 8 campaign here.)

Update: Oh, and while I'm at it:

Marriage has never been regarded as a universal human or civil right.

-- Dennis Prager, op. cit.

Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

-- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 (article 16)

Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.

-- Chief Justice Earl Warren, Loving v. Virginia (1967)

Loving v. Virginia, incidentally, for those who don't know, is a case in which activist judges overturned marriage bans which were, at the time, widely popular in the U.S.... bans under which the parents of the current Democratic Presidential nominee could not have married (had they lived in one of the states with such a ban). If that case, decided by activist judges, had been put to a vote, it would almost certainly have been overturned. But I, for one, am glad that it was not put to such a vote.

Oh, and Warren's quoting there, from a still earlier case -- Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942).

Some Religious Ideas Are Subject to Scientific Investigation

Musings prompted by, but only tangentially related to, the Michael Reiss affair.

There's a longstanding notion that religious ideas are simply in another domain than those of science (whether in the narrowest sense of the physical sciences or the broadest sense of any evidence-and-reason based knowledge). One well-known popularization of this belief is Stephen Jay Gould's NOMA ("nonoverlapping magisteria"") argument, which holds that, in regards to the "supposed 'conflict' or 'warfare' between science and religion" that

No such conflict should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority—and these magisteria do not overlap (the principle that I would like to designate as NOMA, or "nonoverlapping magisteria"). The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the arch clichés, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.

This notion, and all the variants of it, is beloved by both science teachers (since it gives them a way out of the Reiss dilemma by simply responding to tricky questions with a swift "that's not my department") and by serious religious thinkers (since it gives their subject a safe haven from any possible challenges by the relentless advance of science). It is a very neat out to the challenges posed by religious faith in a secular society.*

The problem is that, as a description of the actual beliefs of many (I'd guess most) religious believers, it is simply false. Many religions** do, in fact, make claims that are well within the bounds of science -- certainly broadly construed, but even if narrowly construed. Worse, many of those claims are, so far as one can tell from the current state of human knowledge, simply false.

Thus the notion that the Earth is under 10,000 years old is both an idea integral to the religious beliefs of many Americans (in regards to which the state is ideally neutral), and a scientifically testable idea which has been conclusively demonstrated to be false.

This makes church/state issues -- both legally and socially -- far more complex than many people want to admit. A great many people -- more sophisticated religious thinkers and proponents of scientific education in particular -- cling to the NOMA idea as a liferaft: evolution is a scientific idea, and science has nothing to say about the existence of God.

The latter is true, however, only for some conceptions of God;*** or, more accurately, it may be true for the narrow question of God's existence, but it is decidedly not true for a great many other ideas and propositions which are as (or nearly as) integral to the beliefs of most believers as God's existence is. Both sides have a tendency in these debates to act as if whether or not God exists is the only important issue for religion; but it isn't, and the others are where the real trouble starts.

Thus a great many Americans believe that everything in the bible is entirely and literally true. If one is willing to interpret "entirely and literally" to include notions of metaphor, poetic language, phrasings appropriate to the time, and so forth, then this idea can probably be safely pulled onto the religious side of a NOMA divide. But for many (most?) of those who proclaim an adherence to biblical literalism, this is precisely what they don't mean. And biblical literalism in their sense is a testable idea: indeed, it has been tested, and found false.

Which is the end of the story -- for those for whom evidence (an overwhelming amount of it) and logic (as strong as any scientific logic we have) trump their preexisting ideological commitments. (This, incidentally, is what I was trying to get at when I proposed a distinction between reality-based and reality-defiant theists: the former are willing to let evidence and reason hold sway on any issue, while the latter will hold to their articles of faith regardless of what the progress of secular knowledge shows.****)

Now, most mainstream religions are willing to cede the matter of the age of the earth. But if we are willing to broaden out "science" to include "archeology" -- which basically means, if we are willing to take seriously the evidence and arguments of archeology rather than shut our ears to them while humming real loud -- then, for instance, whether the exodus from Egypt as described in the second book of the bible ever happened is also a question on the scientific side of NOMA. (An issue which some would claim is determinative for the existence of the Jewish religion.)

Of course, the historical facts about the exodus from Egypt are never likely to be settled as solidly as those about the age of the Earth -- the amount and nature of the evidence (as well as the nature of the question) simply doesn't lend itself to such solid settling. But the way that science works, and the way that a minimal adherence to the reality of evidence and argument works, isn't to hold a completely open mind on issues until they are definitively proven one way or another. So I think that the argument that archeology could be wrong here shouldn't be nearly as comforting for believers in the exodus as they assume it will be. In any event, the key point here is that the issue is one upon which empirical evidence comes to bear -- and thus one which doesn't fall neatly into the NOMA divide.

Now, some believers evade this by pointing out that old religious claims can always be reinterpreted in ways consistent with the science. And this is certainly true: one can imagine the exodus simply as a moral fable,§ and one can understand the opening of Genesis as implying something-or-other about the nature of existence that doesn't have to do with anything studied by science. In fact, millions of believers do precisely that.

But it seems worth noting that this doesn't solve so much as divide the problem. Instead of one religious claim -- e.g. that hundreds of thousands of Jews were slaves in Egypt, left, and then settled in present-day Israel -- we now have two: one, a moral claim that this is a useful story regardless of its historical truth, and two, a historical claim that this story is, in fact, historically accurate. And while the first may not be subject to scientific investigation, the latter remains so -- and this fact remains important since a lot of believers will not see the former as an adequate substitute for the latter.

(It is also somewhat disingenuous to note that there aren't two§§ different claims here -- as if the moral fable version is the only version, and thus the religious claim is entirely unaffected by science. It is particularly disingenuous to fall back on the moral fable version of the claim when considering the science, while, in most other contexts, to continue to talk about the issue as if the historical claim were true.)

I don't have any great solution to this problem. But it seems to me that a frank recognition that some religious claims are subject to investigation by secular science -- and that some have been flatly disproved by it -- is essential to any discussion of these issues.

Post Script: In addition to the issues which are clearly subject to scientific investigation, and those which are clearly not, there are a number of intermediate categories, of course. One important such category is the claim of a one-time departure from the laws of nature by God, of a sort that would (in the course of things) leave no remaining evidence one way or another. Both the claims of the virgin birth and the resurrection fall into this category: neither are thought to be anything other than a departure from the ordinary course of nature, and neither would (if true) leave evidence that could be examined by science at this point (in contrast to, say, Noah's flood, which would leave such evidence (and didn't, and thus clearly didn't happen.)) Some people will argue that our scientific understanding of the world shows that such events don't happen, but this seems to me to entirely beg the question, since the whole point is that they're supposed to be departures from observable reality. By my lights, therefore, these questions are safely exempted from scientific (or historical) investigation in a strict sense. However, any claimed evidence for them -- e.g. testimony -- can certainly be evaluated by historical standards (under which it doesn't stand up at all); so anyone who claims they have any historical basis for such beliefs is leaving the safe harbor of the religious magisterium and entering the historical one. As long as your claimed grounds are purely non-empirical, however (e.g. faith, or a burning in the bosom, or whatever), they fall on the safe side of NOMA.

_______________
* To be fair, Gould goes on to note that "two magisteria bump right up against each other, interdigitating in wondrously complex ways along their joint border." I think the situation is even worse for the principle than this implies, but Gould was not as naive as the quote above, out of context, may sound to some.

** Not all religions, since certainly some of the faithful restrict themselves to claims that are safely on the religious side of NOMA. But I suspect that most religions make such claims -- certainly as interpreted by most believers.

*** Richard Dawkins has argued that pretty much any concept of God is a claim upon which science has purchase; without wanting to hash it out right now, I think he's wrong; but I wanted to note that this line, too, is contested and arguable.

**** As I note in the original piece, the distinction is complex: where the line should be drawn will be a contested issue, and some theists might well be reality-based on most issues but reality-defiant on others.

§ With, for instance, the moral message that "if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt".

§§ Well, there are a lot more than two, really. But certainly more than one.

A Poem for California's Equal Marriage Day

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116*

I wish a lifetime of joy and delight to all the couples married in California on the day that marriages are first performed there on an equal basis. Mazel tov, to each and every one.

_____________________
* Hat tip to Patrick who quoted this in a similar context.

The Insidious Plan of Liberals to Undermine Our Best Defense in the War on Terror Unveiled At Last

As a defense of it accurately says, everyone is ridiculing Mary Grabar's latest column at Townhall, largely on the basis of its first paragraph:

An Obama presidency would signal the final salvo by the Left in the culture wars. Obama’s advance troops have already taken over our college campuses, have bound and gagged our conservative professors, have ravished our virgins, have pillaged our stores of wisdom, and have ensconced themselves in the thrones of power in deans’, presidents’ and department heads’ offices. (Emphasis added.)

Obviously, a certain misunderstanding about the binding and gaging of conservative professors is at work here -- someone should clue Dr. Grabar* about this whole phenomenon called "bondage". And, of course, I think we all will agree that the image of troops having "ensconced themselves in the thrones of power" at universities is quite terrifying. But what has been most ridiculed is the true but terrifying fact that these threatening Advanced Troops have been ravishing our virgins. This, sadly, is something that some on the left are -- horrifyingly -- taking lightly.

Obviously what is missing here is people's true appreciation for the importance of "our virgins" in the War Against Terror.

This is because people are failing to think the matter through. Obviously Dr. Grabar has learned that "we" -- America? Conservatives? It's not clear -- have a secret store of virgins which are a key component of our success in the current War.

Now, obviously Decadent Liberals will immediately assume that there is no job that virgins could do that a ravished virgin could not. But a moment's thought will reveal that this is wrong -- and, thus, demonstrate the true insidiousness of the Liberals Dastardly Plot.

One tempting but false hypothesis is that we have been hoarding virgins to try to compete for the loyalty of those who blow up planes and buildings in the expectation that doing so will earn them 72 of them. If we offer each of these gentlemen, say, 83 virgins, perhaps we could outbid them and get them to stand down. But, tempting as this plan is, a little thought will show that it has only a slight chance of success. After all, rumor has it that the countries these men are coming from are themselves filled with virgins. Now, while there is apparently a limit of 4 imposed in those countries -- presumably due to shortages -- still, it raises the troubling possibility that these warriors insist upon non-corporeal, heavenly virgins. So clearly the "outbid" strategy can't be the purpose of our secret store of virgins which the Liberal Advance Troops have so deviously ruined.

But what else, you cry, can a virgin do that a non-virgin cannot?

Why, the answer is obvious: feed dragons.

Dragons, as is well known, feast only upon virgins. Without a steady supply of virgins to devour, most dragons get listless and cranky, and will often refuse to fly at all, much less fight.

There can be no other explanation. Given Dr. Grabar's information that we are hoarding a secret store of virgins for use in the War on Terror, we can clearly deduce that we also have an advanced fighter wing of virgin-devouring dragons to use to protect the skies of America.

But! But! If the Advance Troops get in and ravish the secret store of virgins, then the advanced fighter wing of virgin-devouring dragons will, clearly, have nothing at all to eat.

And an army, as was famously said, marches -- or, in this case, flies -- on its stomach.

So, yes, my Noble Readers: the advanced fighter wing of virgin-devouring dragons -- known, according to anonymous sources, as the "Cheney Wing" -- which are our only defense against the Enemy in this terrible war -- are being deprived of its food source by the terrible hoards of Advance Troops coming in and rendering that food unfit for dragonian consumption.

A more dastardly and unpatriotic act is hard to imagine.

Dr. Grabar has sounded the alarm, and what can any patriotic American do but answer? Defend our secret store of virgins! Preserve the crucial fuel of the advanced fighter wing of virgin-devouring dragons! Act now, before it is too late!!

For -- terrifying as it is to contemplate -- if the Virgins are Ravished... the Terrorists Will Have Won.

____________________________________
* Yes, I said "Dr. Grabar". She apparently has a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Georgia. It certainly puts the notion of "silently calculate the measure by which your university, by conferring your degree, has cheapened the value of doctoral work across the globe," which I was just talking about the other day, in a new light, doesn't it.

Refuting a Dangerous Piece of Pseudo-History

A long time ago by web standards -- y'know, last year! -- I argued that Jonah Goldberg's new book "Liberal Fascism" may be nonsense, but it is dangerous nonsense, and thus what were needed was not mere mockery (lots more linked to in my earlier post), but serious refutations, despite the understandable temptation to laugh the book off as ludicrous.

Well, they're starting to come in. And as much as I appreciate demonstrations of how Jonah's magazine has, historically, supported fascists, what I really wanted to see were hard-hitting direct refutations. David Neiwert (who I mentioned before was planning a review) has just published such a one on the American Prospect web site. It's what was needed -- although he could have easily made it thrice the length, really, and I would have been glad to see him do it. (He's promised to post some extra material on his blog, though, so he may yet do so.) But what he did serves the purpose. Here's a taste:

The title alone is enough to indicate its thoroughgoing incoherence: of all the things we know about fascism and the traits that comprise it, one of the few things that historians will readily agree upon is its overwhelming antiliberalism. One might as well write about anti-Semitic neoconservatism, or Ptolemaic quantum theory, or strength in ignorance. Goldberg isn't content to simply create an oxymoron; this entire enterprise, in fact, is classic Newspeak.

Read the whole thing. And I recommend linking the words Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism to that particular web article: it's what people interested in those four word really need to read -- an explanation of precisely why they are so laughable, rather than just the mockery they do in fact deserve.

Update: Niewert has written a lot on Goldberg since I posted this, but I think this is the most significant of his posts. So if you want more, read that. (But read the review first.)

Why My Laughter at Jonah Goldberg's Risible Book Rings Hollow

Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascists is now out, and various left-wing blogs -- especially Sadly, No!, which is definitely the go-to blog on this particular topic -- are having themselves a roar of laughter over it. (Actually, left blogs have been mocking it since well-before its publication; but more so now that they've got the book in hand, unsurprisingly.) And, of course, they're right -- any book that includes chapters titles like "Adolf Hitler: Man of the Left" deserves little more than simple laughter and mockery. It's patently silly at best. I mean, it's like people took seriously ridiculous things like stories about the world being six thousand years old and dinosaurs co-existing with humans...

Oh, wait.

Which is why, funny as I find all this stuff, I can't quite get behind the spirit of mockery. I mean, I know that they're probably right -- that (apart from simply ignoring it) mockery is probably the best response to stuff like this. But I actually find it quite disturbing that this sort of up-is-down-ism will likely seep into the national discourse... and that soon newspapers like the NY Times will be reporting on the issue in their classic "opinions on the shape of the Earth differ" fashion we've all come to know and love.

(It's worth remembering here that Goldberg himself is hardly a marginal figure in our national discourse: in addition to being an editor at the National Review, Goldberg is a columnist in the L.A. Times.)

And I'm remembering stories like this:

I have now received three (3) student papers that discuss Iraq’s attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. All three papers mention it as an aside to another point. I’ve had two papers on the virtue of forgiveness that argue that if we had just forgiven Iraq for the 9/11 attacks, we wouldn’t be at war right now. I just read a paper on the problem of evil which asked why God allowed “the Iraq’s” to attack us on 9/11. The thing that upsets me most here is that the the students don’t just believe that that Iraq was behind 9/11. This is a big fact in their minds, that leaps out at them, whenever they think about the state of the world.

And I worry that John Cole is right about the likely outcome of all this:

The most depressing thing about Jonah Goldberg’s new book is that this whole “liberals are fascist” argument is going to morph from something idiot frat boys would argue after three credit hours in poly sci. and a dozen Mickey’s Big Mouth and would be laughed out of the room to something that idiots like Peggy Noonan and David brooks will peddle with straight faces on Hardball.

Our national historical memory is messed up enough as it is. So even if Goldberg's book is worth nothing but scorn, I can't quite laugh whole-heartedly at it. Too many of us are too likely to swallow this nonsense whole... and then we'll have to battle with these falsehoods the rest of our lives.

I don't know what we can do. Ignore it, I guess (obviously I'm failing at that one!). I'd also like to see some comments on the book that take the time (and have the stomach) to actually demonstrate what nonsense it is, and not simply assume (as Sadly, No is doing) that it's just obvious. (I'm looking forward to Dave Neiwert's forthcoming review; and I hope there will be a lot more.) Since while it should be obvious, if it were that obvious it wouldn't have been published. And if obvious truths were so easy to uphold, our national discourse would be a lot healthier than it is.

Update: David Neiwert offers a small beginning of a serious demolition (rather than mocking demolition) at the link; more is promised soon. Meanwhile, mockery continues apace: Michael Berube may not match Sadly, No! for quantity (their ongoing look at the book continues here and here), but he gives them a run for their money in quality. Worth a look. In other Goldberg blogging: Ezra Klein has a nice quip: "Even after accounting for the fact that Jonah Goldberg's book is worse than you can imagine, it's still worse than you can imagine. " And finally brief-but-scornful reactions from Tim F., Matthew Duss and Andrew Sullivan.

A Liberal Society Must Tolerate Proselytizers -- Even if They're Atheists

Matt Ygelsias links to an essay by Damon Linker in the New Republic about the so-called "New Atheists" -- "Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens". Ygelsias links to it with a hearty amen added, saying:

In a raw power struggle between people who, like Harris, want public schools "announce the death of God" and those who want them to indoctrinate us all in the Gospel, the numbers aren't on the side of the non-believers and the outcome is unlikely to be a happy one for anyone. The liberal consensus, by contrast, has served the country well and undermining it from the point of view of ideological atheism is really no better than undermining it from any other direction.

But I think that both Ygelsias and Linker are conflating two different positions here. They are doing so partly because some of the new atheists say things that can be read both ways, or even make the occasional remark which can be read in the more extreme of the two positions. But they might also be doing so partly out of a less admirable motive too (although, given the two, different ones).

There are three basic points of view, I think, that an atheist can take towards the religious majority:

1) They're wrong, but so long as they don't use the government to force their religion on me, who cares?
2) They're wrong, and I'm going to try to convince them of this fact;
3) They're wrong, and I'm going to damn well make them see this -- by any means necessary.

Almost all atheists, in my experience, are in group one -- and as such can join their hands with a great number of religious people who also don't want their beliefs forced on others. This is the all-important coalition of people who believe in a secular government -- and, given the nature of the Republican party right now, it is a coalition that is hardly assured of winning. That is to say, position one is not really a blasé "who cares", but a more stern, "there are theocrats here, they are the main danger -- keep your eye on the ball". Yglesias is clearly in this camp.

But some atheists are genuinely in group two: they want to try to proselytize to believers, and convert them into nonbelievers. In various ways Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens are all in this camp.*

Linker, however, portrays them as in camp three, and therefore has an argument (familiar in the political world from the likes of David Broder) of the "both sides are extremists" category: Huckabee wants to force his religion down our throats, Dawkins wants to force his atheism in the same direction. (Put aside for the moment the obvious (and, indeed, important) retort that Huckabee has a reasonable shot of winning the presidency, whereas atheists can hardly get elected dog-catcher in this country.)

Now, Linker is absolutely right that Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens all say things that blur the line between two and three at times. (I don't think Dennett does; and as I've said before, I think that it's wrong to lump Dennett in with the other three, although Linker is hardly the only one to do so.) Linker begins his essay with a good example here:

"I am persuaded," [Dawkins] explains, "that the phrase 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell." Why Dawkins refuses to take this idea to its logical conclusion--to say that raising a child in a religious tradition, like other forms of child abuse, should be considered a crime punishable by the state--is a mystery, for it follows directly from the character of his atheism.

Now, it's worth pointing out that Dawkins doesn't take this claim to its logical conclusion; that he doesn't argue for prosecuting religious parents, and in fact argues for greater (secular) religious education in the schools. This is why I think the overall thrust of Dawkins's position -- and the other new atheists' too -- is in the proselytizing, not forcing, category. (I do wish, however, that Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens would be more careful about not stepping over that line; not calling teaching basic religious doctrine to children "child abuse" would be a very good place to start.)

But Linker does not acknowledge the existence of a stable position between one and three: between the "as long as Government stays neutral" category, and the "make Government do our bidding" category. For that matter, neither, really, does Matt Yglesias. Why Linker does not I won't speculate. But I think that Yglesias does it in the interests of keeping the secular coalition strong.

This is a big impulse among some on the left. Given the power of theocratic believers in this country, they argue, we should simply focus on keeping religion out of politics together. And I see their point, I really do: theocracy is a scarily powerful tendency in this country, and it's important to keep atheists aligned with theists of good will, who believe in freedom of conscience and a secular government.

But -- if you'll forgive me for putting it this way, tongue at least half in cheek -- if atheists can't proselytize for their beliefs (even if just out of fear of religious backlash), then the theocrats have already won.

No one says to believers that they shouldn't go out and try to convince people that they're right. Believers of nearly every faith try, in various ways, to convince others that they're right. From Chabadniks trying to get secular Jews to do mitzvahs to missionaries who go door-to-door to people who hand out Chick tracts, believers try to convert non-believers a lot. And as long as they don't make the government take sides -- whether with their own particular beliefs or with belief in general against non-belief -- that's just fine and dandy, precisely what you'd want to see in a free society.

And at their best, that's all that Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens are doing from the point of view of atheism. I grant, as I said already, that some of the statements of some of them can slide into the implication that the Government should get involved. But for the most part they are simply the proselytizers on the other side.

Linker writes:

To be liberal in the classical sense is to accept intellectual variety--and the social complexity that goes with it--as the ineradicable condition of a free society. It is to accept, in other words, that, although I may settle the question of God to my personal satisfaction, it is highly unlikely that all of my fellow citizens will settle it in the same way--that differences in life experience, social class, intelligence, and the capacity for introspection will invariably prevent a free community from reaching unanimity about the fundamental mysteries of human existence, including God. Liberal atheists accept this situation; ideological atheists do not. That, in the end, is what separates the atheism of Socrates from the atheism of the French Revolution.

But Linker is conflating two issues here -- acceptance in intellectual debate, versus acceptance in a social/political sense -- and ignoring a crucial intermediate position. He is ignoring the point of view that one might be a forceful, even domineering, proponent of a position in intellectual life, while still supporting whole-heartedly the liberal consensus in a political sense. Yglesias, too, is scaring us with nonsense about atheists who "want public schools "announce the death of God"" in order to keep our eye on the preservation of a secular society -- or, really, a secular government.

The issue here is not the French Revolutionaries, but Voltaire, who both mocked religion and famously said "I disagree with what he says, but I will defend to the death his right to say it." In a baby-and-bathwater move, Linker seems to be lumping Voltaire in with the French Revolutionaries, and ruling them all out of bounds. (To be sure, some say that Voltaire led to the French Revolution; but that's like saying that Christianity leads to Crusades. Both can; neither must; we must simply keep the one from becoming the other.)

Or would Linker and Yglesias argue that any vigorous proselytizing -- which inevitably includes scorn for other positions -- is out of bounds in a free society? I find this hard to believe; rather, a society which sees vigorous proselytizing as out of bounds can't in any reasonable way be called free.

Which is to say: while I don't share what Linker characterizes as a "visceral contempt for the personal faith of others", I don't see this as a problem so long as it remains in the realm of ideas. After all, a great many believers think that nonbelievers are Satan's minions, or at the very least going to be tortured for all eternity for their beliefs. It's hard to get more contemptuous than that! Now, again, I don't claim (as DH&H might, at least in their more careless moments) that all religious beliefs are that contemptuous -- but some are. Just as not all atheists are -- but some are. And if the former isn't seen as harming a liberal, secular society, the latter shouldn't be seen as doing so either.

Linker (and Yglesias) are correct that people are right to be "nervous about the future of secular liberalism, to perceive that it needs passionate, eloquent defenders". But being one of the "passionate defenders" of secular liberalism's not what DDH&H are trying to do (at least primarily). They are trying to do something else -- to actively advocate for their own (metaphysical, not political) position. The freedom to do so (as Linker hints (in what could be uncharitably read as a veiled threat)) is dependent upon the existence of a secular, liberal society. But it is unreasonable to squash their advocacy in the name of not frightening those who are ambivalent about such a society.

I see Linker and Ygelsias's position as the equivalent of those who used to say to Jews: don't stand out, don't look too Jewish in public, or take too many Jewish holidays -- it might stir up antisemitism! Those people might, at times, have been right. But the necessity of their saying so was a sign of the weakness of liberal society -- and, ultimately, their saying it was also a weakening of it.

DH&H (I'm not so sure about Dennett) aren't working to preserve a liberal, secular society -- at least not primarily -- although I don't have any doubt that they all are in favor of one. They are trying to convert others. As an atheist, that isn't something I'm particularly interested in doing. But as a believer in a liberal, secular society, I think that it's something that we ought to see -- just as we ought to see Christians and Jews and Muslims and Scientologists and Hindus and what-have-you trying to convince people that they are right. It's all in the marketplace of ideas -- which, sometimes, involves calling other people names.

I think politeness is always a good idea (which is one reason I wouldn't say some things that DDH&H say). But I think that politeness can't be enforced in a liberal society -- and it certainly can't be enforced, as Linker seems to want, against atheists but not against theists.

Linker seems to think that a liberal, secular society requires that atheists shut up -- not argue their position forcefully to believers. I think that any liberal society that requires advocates of any intellectual position, argued simply as such, -- religious or atheist or anything else -- to shut up for fear of the consequences, hardly deserves the name. If that's where we are, then the battle's already lost.

I don't agree with a lot of what DDH&H say -- I don't think that religion is always a negative thing (although I agree with DH&H that it is, on the merits, false); I wouldn't use their rhetoric to describe it, and think that they often attack only the simplest versions of religion out there (albeit with some justification). But we have to fight for their right to say it, without fear of a political backlash, as part of the fight for a society we would wish to live in -- all of us, believers and nonbelievers alike.

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* Disclosure time: I haven't actually read Hitchens's book, where as I have read Dawkins's God Delusion, Dennett's Breaking the Spell, and Harris's two books, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. I don't intend to read Hitchens's book for a wide variety of reasons, but I've read enough of his articles and interviews that I feel like I know where he comes from. But I suppose you should take my characterizations of Hitchens with more salt than my characterizations of the other three writers on that list.