Month: May 2005

The Discovery Channel is doing a new series to determine who the “greatest” American is. The list of 100 nominees will be whittled down by voting over the course of the series.

The list of nominees is pretty presposterous. Apart from the obvious inclusions, there are a lot of people that seem to be on there for no other reason than that they’re alive or celebrities of various sorts.

Here’s the list; I’ve bolded the people that seem to uncontroversially belong there (i.e. they would be on anyone’s short list), and italicized those who seem completely ridiculous as candidates (plain text means I can see reasons for inclusion, but they’re not an obvious choice):

Abraham Lincoln
Albert Einstein
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Hamilton
Amelia Earhart
Andrew Carnegie
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Audie Murphy
Babe Ruth
Barack Obama
Barbara Bush
Benjamin Franklin
Bill Clinton
Bill Cosby (William Henry Cosby, Jr.)
Bill Gates
Billy Graham
Bob Hope
Brett Favre
Carl Sagan
Cesar Chavez
Charles Lindbergh
Christopher Reeve
Chuck Yeager
Clint Eastwood
Colin Powell
Condoleezza Rice
Donald Trump
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Eleanor Roosevelt (Anna Eleanor Roosevelt)
Ellen DeGeneres
Elvis Presley
Frank Sinatra
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Frederick Douglass
George H. W. Bush
George W. Bush
George Lucas
George Patton
George Washington
George Washington Carver
Harriet Ross Tubman
Harry Truman
Helen Keller
Henry Ford
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Howard Hughes
Hugh Hefner
Jackie Robinson (Jack Roosevelt Robinson)
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Jesse Owens
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Stewart
John Edwards
John Glenn
John F. Kennedy
John Wayne
Johnny Carson (John William Carson)
Jonas Edward Salk
Joseph Smith Jr.
Katharine Hepburn
Lance Armstrong
Laura Bush
Lucille Ball
Lyndon B. Johnson
Madonna (Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone)
Malcolm X (Malcolm Little)
Marilyn Monroe
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
Martha Stewart
Martin Luther King Jr.
Maya Angelou
Mel Gibson
Michael Jackson
Michael Jordan
Michael Moore
Muhammad Ali (Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr.)
Neil Alden Armstrong
Nikola Tesla
Oprah Winfrey
Pat Tillman
Dr. Phil McGraw
Ray Charles
Richard Nixon
Robert Kennedy
Ronald Reagan
Rosa Parks
Rudolph W. Giuliani
Rush Limbaugh
Sam Walton
Steve Jobs
Steven Spielberg
Susan B. Anthony
Theodore Roosevelt
Thomas Edison
Thomas Jefferson
Tiger Woods
Tom Cruise
Tom Hanks
Walt Disney
Wright Brothers (Orville & Wilbur Wright)

As a general rule I would exclude any current Hollywood stars as well as politicians who have as yet to really accomplish anything substantial (John Edwards??). Personally sports stars leave me cold, but I can recognize that certain ones have acheived iconic status (Muhammed Ali, Babe Ruth). Ditto for singers (Elvis, Sinatra).

(link and idea via Professor Bainbridge)

There is nothing conservative about war. For at least the last century war has been the herald and handmaid of socialism and state control. It is the excuse for censorship, organised lying, regulation and taxation. It is paradise for the busybody and the nark. It damages family life and wounds the Church. It is, in short, the ally of everything summed up by the ugly word “progress.” — Peter Hitchens

Reason‘s Jesse Walker surveys some of the recent nonviolent protests in Latin America and elsewhere, pointing out that those which are seen as not aligned with U.S. interests tend to receive much less favorable coverage in the mainstream press.

He also discusses some of the more interesting and creative ways that people have been taking power back from oppressive and exploitative governments, not by guerilla war and insurrection, but through strikes, protest, nonviolent resistance, and even setting up alternative social structures.

Ronald Bailey thinks that the political conflicts of the 21st century will not be chiefly between right and left but between “transhumanists and bioconservatives/bioluddites.”

He worries that bioluddites will want to curtail “technologies that will enable people to boost life spans, enhance intellectual capacities, augment athletic abilities, and choose their preferred emotional states” and obstruct the transhumanist goal of enabling “people to use technology to transform their bodies, brains and progeny in ways they deem beneficial.”

Bailey appeals to the libertarian fetish of “choice” as a universal solvent of potential conflicts; he doesn’t think such technologies should be subject to democratic limits any more than others should “get to vote on whom you have sex with, what recreational drugs you ingest, what you read and watch on TV and so forth.”

One problem that comes up is in Bailey’s mention of “progeny.” If we get to “design” our progeny according to certain specifications, then what happens to their “choice”? As C.S. Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man (a book that looks more prophetic as time goes on),

In order to understand fully what Man’s power over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other men, really means, we must picture the race extended in time from the date of its emergence to that of its extinction. Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. (My emphasis)

Even on the libertarian’s own terms, other people (both their descendants and those who have to live with them) are affected by their “choices” to augment or modify their faculties via bioengineering. Not to mention that a lot of funding for biotech enterprises comes from public funding (As a libertarian, Bailey presumably opposes that. But is he prepared to disavow the fruits of such research?).

But the more fundamental problem is the libertarian’s failure to recognize that discrete individual choices contribute to a social environment that we all have to live in whether we like it or not. Bailey’s denial of the legitimacy of democratic decision-making looks a lot like loading the dice in favor of the outcomes he favors, not unlike those who demand that religious values be kept out of the public sphere.

Check out this interview (at, of all places, Ariana Huffington’s new multi-contributor celebrity blog thingie) with Rene Girard talking about Pope Benedict XVI and the “dictatorship of relativism.”

I discovered (via Clark Stooksbury) that the current issue of The American Conservative features a lengthy article on factory farming and why conservatives should care about it by Matthew Scully (It’s not online at the AmCon site, but you can read the article at Scully’s personal site here). Scully is a former speechwriter for President Bush and the author of Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.

Conservatives often balk at the notion of “animal rights,” but Scully points out that if you think (as nearly everyone does) that we have moral obligations toward animals, such as to not treat them with wanton cruelty, this is effectively the same as to say they have a right not to be treated cruelly by us. (Come to think of it, I made a similar argument here, in one of my very first blog posts.)

The other main plank in Scully’s argument is that it makes no sense to say that, for instance, dogs must be protected from cruel treatment but not pigs since there are no morally relevant differences between dogs and pigs that would justify different treatment. As Scully says:

Having conceded the crucial point that some animals rate our moral concern and legal protection, informed conscience turns naturally to other animals—creatures entirely comparable in their awareness, feeling, and capacity for suffering. A dog is not the moral equal of a human being, but a dog is definitely the moral equal of a pig, and it’s only human caprice and economic convenience that say otherwise. We have the problem that these essentially similar creatures are treated in dramatically different ways, unjustified even by the very different purposes we have assigned to them. Our pets are accorded certain protections from cruelty, while the nameless creatures in our factory farms are hardly treated like animals at all. The challenge is one of consistency, of treating moral equals equally, and living according to fair and rational standards of conduct.

This seems to me about as good an example of iron-clad moral argument as we’re likely to get.

I give you…the Bush fish.

(via Jim Henley)

Henley comments: “Despite all the talk among the pro-Administration media about ‘Bush hatred,’ the truly interesting phenomenon is Bush love. Who could have imagined that this well-born gladhander could become the object of the strongest personality cult in my lifetime?”

Good question.

Another interesting piece from NR this morning is by Warren Bell, who says he’s conservative on everything but food:

I am against the modern food industry. I think industrialized food, especially beef, is a menace to our way of life. I stand athwart the checkout line, shouting “Don’t eat that crap!” The weird thing is, this is a fairly new belief. When I was 21 and voting Crazy Insaneson for President, my favorite food was a snack of my own brilliant design called Fri-Nuts — take a bag of Fritos and a jar of Planter’s, mix, enjoy. My left-ward progress regarding food began with a 2002 New York Times Magazine article by Michael Pollan called “This Steer’s Life.” After that, it was Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and then some other books and articles, all leading me to the same conclusion — food as big business is a disaster.

[…]

The profit motive of the food industry drives them to do two things: They need to make food cheaper, and they need to make it taste better. This couplet of motives is not in itself bad, but one of the outcomes is the feedlot system of raising cattle. If you want details, read the sources I’ve cited, but the goal of the cattle farmer is to feed a cow as much corn as possible as fast as possible and then slaughter the cow just before eating all that corn kills it. The corn diet causes diseases in the cow, so bring on the antibiotics. The corn also makes the meat more fatty, what we beef-lovers call marbled, and this is why the phrase “corn-fed beef” is still used to mean a top-quality steak. It really means “cow that was poisoned” and double up on that Lipitor.

But maybe such a stance isn’t so “liberal” after all:

[F]ood should be natural. I’m not saying that all natural things are good, and unnatural is bad — for instance, Pamela Anderson is fine by me. But food is a thing found in nature, and the food industry has turned it into Food, a scientifically derived substance found in your supermarket. Cookies are made from flour, sugar, and butter (and a few other mystery things — what is baking powder?). So why do the major brands have those other 42 ingredients? Well, one makes the cookies stay crispy even after a month on the shelf. Another makes them that awesome rich color. Another dozen or so are the hydrogenated oils that create truly unbeatable taste — that make cookies taste better than cookies! This witchcraft is the inevitable result of the “Better Living Through Science” ethic of the post-WWII generation, and what has it caused? Generation upon generation of Americans conditioned to eat only the zestiest, new and improved, nacho cheez crème-filled food-like product substances. Real food is dull in comparison.

Hey, wait a second. Follow me here. I am against the modern food industry. I prefer more natural foods, cows the way they used to be raised, cookies the way they used to be baked, real food without science’s “progress.” When it comes to food, I am a…traditionalist.

Amen, brother!

Start thinking like this, though, and you may end up questioning several tenets of the modern conservative creed. Unhampered corporate capitalism is hostile to traditions in areas besides food. Watched TV lately? And how about the replacement of small tight-knit communities by sprawl and big box stores? Hard to see anything particularly traditional about that.

As Marx saw, capitalism is actually one of the most revolutionary forces in history, not a conservative one. Which is why the alliance between social conservatism and libertarian economics has often been an uneasy one.

In fact, the article on “traditionalist conservatism” from the New Pantagruel I mentioned yesterday offers a more genuinely traditionalist take on economics. The author, Mark C. Henrie, writes that traditionalists (as opposed to libertarians) are concerned to “box in” the market with strong social and cultural institutions:

To box in the market would mean, first of all, to recognize that there are some things which should not be bought or sold because to do so would directly violate human dignity or the common good. Thus, drugs, pornography, and prostitution are appropriately controlled. So too, perhaps, various biotechnologies. In a more speculative mode, religious traditionalists even raise questions about nursing homes and day care: ought care to be placed “on the market?” To embed market logic within a strong social setting also means to recognize man as something more than a consumer. Thus, no one would disagree that Wal*Mart and free trade spell lower prices and often greater choice for Americans as consumers. But, to take the case of Wal*Mart, is there not something lost, some kind of social capital, when the proprietors of a small town’s chamber of commerce are “converted” into corporate employees — even if, as managers, they may earn a higher wage?

Henrie mentions Swiss economist Wilhelm Roepke, an economist in the Austrian tradition who nevertheless broke with the more extreme laissez-faire views of thinkers like von Mises. Roepke was a free marketeer, but he advocated what he called a “humane economy” – a decentralized, human-sized economics that had some affinities with distributism or the views of E.F. “Small is Beautiful” Schumacher.

More crucially, Roepke insisted that the rules governing the free market should be hedged in by strong social institutions; a strong framework of law and morality is necessary both for the effective functioning of the market and to ensure that the values of the market don’t displace higher human values (which, for Roepke, a Lutheran, were largely to be identified with those of Christendom).

A traditionalist, therefore, will not necessarily be averse to regulation of the market, but it will be in service to traditionalist values, rather than the values sometimes championed by left-wing critics of the market. The food industry is just one manifestation in which corporate capitalism as it currently exists will tend to undermine the values traditionalists cherish.

Two pieces of note expressing conservative dissent from the general drift of the Bush administration. And these are not grouchy fringe figures, but writers at the two most important conservative magazines.

The ever-gloomy John Derbyshire contends that, measured against the traditional canons of conservative thought, conservatism has demonstrably lost ground since Bush took office. He also makes the obvious (yet often overlooked) point that there is no necessary connection between evangelical Protestantism and conservatism as traditionally understood (cf. William Jennings Bryan). This might be partly demonstrated by the apparent shift of the energies of religious conservatives away from a “leave us alone” quasi-libertarian stance toward the embrace of a more activist government agenda.

In the Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson laments the onset of “big government conservatism” under Bush. Ferguson accuses Bush of “overreach” in embracing the mantle of “reform” (i.e. reforming the Middle East, reforming Social Security, the tax code, Medicare, etc.) which inevitably demands “a whirlwind of government activity. Each is a formula for politics without end–splendid indeed for politicians and government employees, but a bit tiring for the rest of us.”

A lack of modesty and self-restraint is one excellent reason Americans grew to despise liberals in the first place. The high-water mark of American liberalism came in 1993 and 1994, when President Clinton and his wife, under the guise of “health care reform,” decided they would assume control of one-seventh of the nation’s economy in order to make it more rational and fair. Voters responded by handing the federal legislature to the Republican party. History may record that what offended them wasn’t liberalism but busybodyism–the endless, frenetic search by elected officials for ever-new ways to make the country more fabulous. Bush and his Republicans are close to proving that busybodyism can become a creature of the right as well as the left.

A propos of the discussion below, historian Niall Ferguson has an op-ed (reg. req’d) in the LA Times about the “moral shortcuts” to victory in WWII.

Specifically he mentions our alliance with Stalin with its concomitant tolerance of his crimes:

Most historians today would give the lion’s share of the credit for the Allied victory to the Soviet Union. It was, after all, the Soviets who suffered the largest number of wartime casualties (about 25 million). That reflected in large measure the appalling barbarity with which the Germans waged the war on the Eastern Front. Yet it also reflected the indifference of Stalin’s totalitarian regime to the lives and rights of its own citizens. It might have been expected that in the crisis of war, Stalin would suspend the terror that had characterized his regime in the 1930s. On the contrary. The lowest estimates for the period (1942-1945) indicate that 7 million Soviet citizens lost their lives via political executions, deportations or death in the gulag system. All of this reminds us that to defeat an enemy they routinely denounced as barbaric, the Western powers made common cause with an ally that was morally little better.

Ferguson also discusses the Allied bombing campaigns, though he does suggest that they may have had more strategic value than previously thought:

For many years it was fashionable to deny that the bombing made any significant contribution to the Allied victory. Certainly, the damage to German and Japanese morale was far less than the prewar strategists had predicted.

But bombing Germany did divert air cover away from the Eastern Front. In the spring of 1943, 70% of German fighters were in the western European theater, leaving German ground forces in the east increasingly vulnerable to Soviet air attacks. Lack of air cover was one of the reasons the German tanks were beaten at Kursk.

Strategic bombing also greatly hampered Albert Speer’s considerable efforts to mobilize the Nazi economy for total war. In January 1945, Speer and his colleagues calculated the damage done in terms of what they couldn’t produce: 35% fewer tanks than planned, 31% fewer aircraft and 42% fewer trucks. The impact of bombing on the Japanese economy was even more devastating.

(We might point out, though, that just because something may have aided the war effort, it may not have been necessary. Surely justice in war may sometimes require taking the less expedient course.)

Nevertheless, says Ferguson

And yet the moral cost of this strategy, whatever its military benefits, was appallingly high. What happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is said to have ushered in a new atomic age. It also represented the extent to which the Allies threw moral restraint aside in their pursuit of victory.

After the war, the charges against the Japanese leaders who stood trial included “the wholesale destruction of human lives, not alone on the field of battle … but in the homes, hospitals, and orphanages, in factories and fields.” Yet this had been the very essence of the Allied policy of strategic bombing. At Potsdam and in the subsequent Nuremberg trials the victors also struck splendidly sanctimonious poses. The leaders of Germany and Japan had “set in motion evils which [left] no home in the world untouched.” Yet the Soviet Union had been on Hitler’s side in 1939 — something the Baltic states invaded by Stalin have not forgotten.

UPDATE: Historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft comes to similar conclusions here:

For the Western Allies, the ‘‘good war’’ was compromised in other ways, particularly by the bombing campaign that reduced the cities of Germany to rubble. Here is another somber comparison, between the 300,000 British servicemen killed in the war and the 600,000 German civilians killed by Allied mainly British bombing. At the time consciences were numbed the war had to be won, and ‘‘they had it coming’’ but it is not now easy to look back with pride on the scores of thousands of women and children incinerated in Hamburg in July 1943 or Dresden in February 1945.

Nor on the other moral compromises at the war’s end. Great Britain did not go to war to save the Jews from Hitler’s torment (and did not succeed) but to protect the freedom and integrity of Poland, an aim that Churchill, with Roosevelt’s encouragement, abandoned at Yalta. Worse still was the forcible repatriation of prisoners to torture and death in Russia and Yugoslavia. And yet all this was not simply conspiracy or betrayal: The Iron Curtain, with half of Europe under Soviet rule, was a painful but logical consequence of the way the West had let Russia do most of the fighting.

Was it ‘‘a noble crusade’’? For the liberation of western Europe, maybe so. Was it a just war? That tricky theological concept has to be weighed against very many injustices. Was it a good war? The phrase itself is dubious. No, there are no good wars, but there are necessary wars, and this was surely one.