David Brooks: Cancer on the Republican Party

Obama’s Clintonian speech last Tuesday was designed to assure us, through the invocation of bland, non-radical-sounding projects like “wind turbines!” that Government Knows Best how to spend our money and will see us through the hard times, a pretense that wears thinner with every passing day. Even sensationalistic TV shows like Inside Edition can’t resist a little econ reporting, I notice, when Democratic members of Congress are taking large, expensive, near-empty military passenger jets to tour Europe with their wives while preaching austerity to the rest of us. Rome is burning too rapidly and the fiddling getting too loud to ignore.

(I also see, by the way, that Israel has adopted a bizarrely politically/culturally-loaded new tourism slogan, “Israel: No one belongs here more than you,” which perhaps we should discuss at our August 5 debate on the Israeli/Palestinian situation, once I find a good Israel-defender to butt heads with Saife Ammous.)

Real Republicans, and a healthy dose of vocal libertarians and even Objectivists, are starting to rebel at the never-ending-spending scam, doing things like organizing the American Tea Party anti-“stimulus” protest I attended at NYC City Hall yesterday (which attracted some three hundred people, I’d estimate, despite not even having an official website and being thrown together a mere three days earlier, according to one of the organizers).

Contrary to the image of the right as something now completely taken over by big-spenders, theocrats, and militarists, this was a highly energized, nearly spontaneous throng of people who all stayed focused, during numerous lengthy speeches from random members of the crowd, on the message that we must resist government spending, creeping socialism, Washingtonian management of things like healthcare, and “collectivism.” (Indeed, the one speaker who tried to ramble on about our need for God was shouted down with “USA!” chants after a polite interval, the crowd recognizing she had strayed off topic — let that be a model for all Republican activity henceforth.) By the way, one former New York Senate candidate who spoke did indeed use the “change”/pocket change joke I predicted we’d hear from a Republican politician sooner or later, but that’s OK, and he was good and feisty.

And say what you will about Bobby Jindal’s stiffness in his response speech after Obama Tuesday night, at least he too stayed on the all-important anti-government-spending message. Would that I could say the same for some of his critics, like:

1. Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas, who seized the opportunity of Jindal’s speech to lament that he hadn’t called on Obama to spend more money on infrastructure (you can tell her in person how little use she is to the free-market movement by attending the panel she’ll be on this Thursday at 6:30pm at 201 Mulberry St., with Megan “pro-bailout” McArdle, Brian Carney, and Ron Moore, for which you should RSVP to Kathleen[at]americasfuture.org [UPDATE 3/4: Gelinas and McArdle have both apparently bailed and will not have to face the music, replaced by Max Pappas and last time's Lolita Bar victor Ryan Sager]). Incredibly, the clueless Gelinas even manages, through tortuous reinterpretation, to draw a pro-government lesson from Jindal’s story about government bureaucracy hindering Katrina rescue efforts. For “insights” such as this, we need “market-oriented” thinktanks? Between the neocons, the mushy liberaltarians, handout-receiving Wall Streeters, and the countless bland bipartisan types, are there any capitalists left in this society?

2. David Brooks, that Canadian-born, New York-raised, Buckley-parodying, Milton Friedman-debating, Times-contributing, national-greatness-touting, war-mongering, war-regretting pseudo-conservative. Brooks, on PBS after Jindal’s speech, angrily denounced Jindal’s focus on opposing government spending, actually calling Jindal’s speech “insane!” I should not be at all surprised. After all, Brooks, like some googly-eyed, confused dimwit who lost his bearings during a Socialist Party meeting and wandered into the conservative camp by accident, was wildly enthusiastic not just about Bush’s military spending but about spending in general, once summing up a litany of ludicrous Bush spending proposals like the hydrogen car by saying not merely that they were tolerable (many of us, after all, hoped against hope that they’d be compensated for by cuts or entitlement reform eventually) but that “This is exactly what the Republican Party needs to hear!”

•••

How the man has managed to spend so much time among conservatives without, apparently, ever having even contemplated the argument that just because something’s a neat idea doesn’t mean government is best suited to spend money on it, I cannot imagine. Brooks and I have some mutual acquaintances who claim he’s nice and clever and all that, but then, so was witty George Bernard Shaw, and he, too, was a socialist who belonged nowhere near the levers of power. For now, poised atop the Times op-ed page, Brooks is in a position to pontificate about what’s healthy or unhealthy for the future of conservative politics, denouncing Sarah Palin as a “cancer” or praising hydrogen cars as he sees fit.

Here’s hoping that rank and file conservatives, though — like anarchists and leftists before them — are catching on to the fact that you tend to become part of the respectable Establishment precisely by flattering power-brokers and big spenders. It is no coincidence that by the time conservatives get somewhere like the Times op-ed page, they’ve usually long since stopped questioning whether we need a welfare state. Meanwhile, those of us living under the welfare/warfare state should start spending more time asking whether we need the likes of David Brooks.

(Oddly enough, Howard Stern jogged past me while I was walking to work across Central Park on Friday — I’d estimate his height at eleven feet and weight at about 111 pounds — and I find myself missing his campaign for the 1994 New York gubernatorial election, which was no more ridiculous than the respectable Establishment is these days.)

I wonder, given Brooks’s past enthusiasm for Bush spending, whether he would have pronounced Jindal “sane” or even “bold” had Jindal called for a renewed effort to complete our moonbase and Mars mission. If Brooks were a psychiatrist, I suspect I could earn a clean bill of health from him by avoiding talk of anarchism and instead calling for the construction of a starfleet to attack Jupiter and/or Syria (my spellchecker automatically capitalizes starfleet, by the way, which should delight the folks at paramount — but we can talk about that sort of thing on Wednesday at Lolita Bar).

At least Brooks, or someone at the Times, gave his recent pro-bailout column an accurate title: “Money for Idiots.” The column, with its tired appeal to the mythical and battered social fabric, is a perfect example of why talk of “communal” life — even when it comes from a professed conservative instead of an admitted socialist — is almost always a formula for disaster (though it shouldn’t have to be). America rose to greatness on individualism — it will continue to do so, or it will die through collectivism of the sort Brooks, Obama, and most of the rest of the intelligentsia love.

(A trillion dollars is spent madly, and all Brooks’s Times op-ed colleague Gail Collins can find to mock about it, in Dowd-like fashion, is Republican obstructionism and people’s petty obsession with a few billion misspent here or there on some nonsensical things — ha ha! Watch funny country die!)

•••

I was pleased, incidentally, to hear at least one person during yesterday’s protest directing some ire right here at City Hall — and libertarian Paul Jacob just wrote a piece reminding us that NYC’s formerly-Republican mayor has something in common with Hugo Chavez: aversion to term limits. Paul also notes that Putin — Putin! — is now warning America it may be getting too socialistic, clear evidence we dwell on Bizarro World. In another recent piece, Paul laments, as we all should, the corrupt judges who put kids away for long sentences to get kickbacks from detention facilities, in one case for mocking a high school official with a parody MySpace page.

It’s all a reminder that the old rhetoric about differences between “the free world” and the rest of the world — and between America and Europe or Latin America — is fast becoming obsolete, and I think a certain amount of anger and panic may finally be in order. People the world over have the same fight on their hands, as I hope they’ll soon realize, and we all have one common enemy: government, in all its forms, whether leftist, rightist, centrist, or Islamic-totalitarian.

Nonetheless, let’s spend the rest of the week talking about sci-fi, superheroes, and other more pleasant topics. After that, we’ll pause and reassess.

Death and Romance

People have a tendency to romanticize — to weave narratives that sound nice, fit snugly in the brain, but do not necessarily reflect reality. Take, for example, the faux-medieval vision at work in this notoriously sword-and-sorcery-nerdy rock video from Chris Dane Owens, pointed out to me by fellow ex-Film Bulletin writer Liz Braswell (and if Liz, herself a fantasy author, thinks it’s geeky, well…).

That romantic impulse in turn causes other nerds to rebel by deconstructing and de-romanticizing things — including superheroes, as in next week’s big Watchmen movie, about which this highly educational video was created by your government, for your protection, so it is every citizen’s duty to watch. Are YOU in violation of the Keene Act?

Two men (gods? man-gods? men-becoming-gods? shining Moorcockian cosmic messiahs?) who may well be in violation of the Keene Act are, of course, Scott Nybakken and Dan Raspler, a current and former (respectively) DC Comics editor who will duke it out in a Debate at Lolita Bar this coming Wednesday about nostalgia’s value or lack thereof in sci-fi, so more about that in a couple days.

In the meantime, Scott forwards this decidedly un-PETA and de-romanticizing video of a killer whale performance at an aquarium gone awry — no dead people, just one very unlucky pelican. (No demon, Scott also sends this cuter video of Australian firefighters rescuing a wildfire-surviving koala. And as it happens, our April 1 debate will be about religion and our May 6 debate about animal welfare, so all these themes are in some sense connected — and then there’s our likely June 3 debate about UFOs. By the way, Ryan Sager, victor in our last debate, just blogged about this unintentionally darkly-humorous excerpt from Werner Herzog’s Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World, featuring a suicidally-deranged penguin.)

•••

Say what you will about the Darwinian view of the world, at least it helps keep us from over-romanticizing non-human animals. Then again, there is apparently a part-animated, part-live-action 3D Yogi Bear movie in the works, so have we really learned anything? Perhaps we could learn more from a 3D Yogi Berra movie. Berra (who, like Abe Vigoda, is still alive) is, after all, the man who inspired the book What Time Is It? You Mean Now? Advice for Life from the Zennest Master of Them All.

And speaking of wisdom and carnivorous activity, check out the way the best species of all — homo sapiens — turns food into calorie-dense art on the glorious site ThisIsWhyYoureFat, pointed out to me by one of my ACSH co-workers, Jeff Stier (who is actually quite the gourmet, I should note). As my “Month of Evolution” draws to a close, I would advise other species who wish to compete with us on this planet to stop being so tasty.

Of course, some animals work better as pets than as food, such as the Portuguese water dog, which looks more than a little like the late Uber, my parents’ lovable prior mutt. It’s the breed the Obamas are considering getting. That’s plenty cute, but I must nonetheless say some negative things about the President’s recent speech — and even more so about David Brooks — in tomorrow’s entry.

Underworld: Evolution (and Race War)

A black man co-wrote and co-created the Underworld movies (specifically, that huge guy who plays one of the werewolves). I find this interesting because all three of the movies are, in some way, about forbidden interracial love — albeit between vampires and werewolves. I’m not saying everything a black writer does must be viewed through a racial lens, but it probably crossed his mind — and by the third film (this year’s weak prequel), the werewolves (including him) have become sympathetic escaped slaves, whereas the vampires are the ultimate white-as-ghosts aristocrats.

It all makes sense in context but may have a subtle deeper message, too (and the first film still has one of the coolest opening sequences ever, no matter how Matrix-derivative it is). The movies automatically put us on the side of hybridization and the overcoming of boundaries — and by extension, pit us against isolationists, preservationists, and protectionists (both cultural and economic) whether right or left. (I wrote about our growing love of vampire-hybrids for Metaphilm, as I’ve mentioned before.)

Evolution has no teleology, purpose, or inherent morality to it, but you have to like the metaphorical laissez-faire message that it’s wrong to forcibly stand in its way. You wouldn’t want to stop us becoming gods, after all — or would you? Let us conclude the “Month of Evolution” tomorrow with a bit more on that question (and superheroes).

And if you’re looking for something to do in the meantime, consider attending one of these American Tea Party anti-government-spending rallies (today in most of the numerous cities involved, tomorrow here in NYC).  Sadly, werewolves are not the only slaves, and movie villains are not the only vampires.

Push vs. Push

I notice that, somewhat amusingly, there are two movies called Push out at the same time — one a grim film about a teenage girl impregnated by her father, the other an action film featuring formerly scandalous teen-actress-who-played-a-rape-victim Dakota Fanning as a psychic. To avoid confused customers asking for their ticket money back, I think they should just combine them into one film, which doesn’t seem like it’d be that difficult. Something having to do with genetic codes and self-defense, writes itself [UPDATE: Tyler Perry, who is helping promote the film, has announced that the grimmer film is changing its title to Precious to avoid confusion -- not as interesting as my solution, but workable].

Alas, I do not think the real world will ever see the evolution of supernatural abilities in humans — nor, indeed, that there is a scrap of evidence for any supernatural phenomena of any kind at all. (But recall that we’ll probably at least contemplate such things at Lolita in six days.)

Cavemen, Butlers, and Other Loose Ends

An old DC Comics page e-mailed to me by Michael Malice depicts as glorious the inevitable day when we will all have robot butlers, advising us to “Get Ready for the Robots!” — but a compromise may be possible between the seemingly opposing dreams of having a monkey butler or robot butler: Ron Bailey writes in Reason of the possibility (and the troubling ethical implications) of “resurrecting” dimwitted and largely helpless Neanderthals via cloning (and he makes use of the awesome psychology term “Uncanny Valley,” which sort of sounds like a Marvel-DC crossover comic book series revealing that Azrael is a mutant — but we can discuss that at Lolita Bar one week from tonight).

Of course, a subservient race of semi-humans is exactly what Francis Fukuyama, a decade ago, sternly warned me to expect from our dark future if biotech remains unchecked, saying (almost verbatim) that the future would not be one built along the lines of my naive utilitarian dreams but instead a brutal, Nietzschean world of big-brained supermen and subservient monkey-men. I’m not scared — and I’m something of an expert on the caveman-resurrection issue, having dated a woman back then who had been an extra in the pool party scene in Encino Man.

My current girlfriend, notoriously, prefers monkey butlers (unlike Congress), but she can be made to feel conflicted about her love of the past and her suspicion of high-tech modernity sometimes, as when shown this old-timey footage confirming that surveillance cameras are nothing new — a steampunk panopticon, if you will, pointed out to me by Brian Floca (much more about him and steampunk at a later date, and until then just a quick note that in addition to getting his comic about the race to the moon in April, you might also consider getting this one drawn by the Cannons, one of whom — Kevin Cannon — I’ve met and who also, as noted at the end of that article, draw comics about evolution).

I Sing the Body Politic

•I expect both Obama and Jindal will give good speeches tonight — but if grunts and whistles preceded the rise of language, you ask, might music have existed, even been used to create a feeling of community, before humanity ever gave speeches? I think my friend Joann Kahn’s brother is directing a movie based on the novel Neuromancer, which asks that question [CORRECTION: No, wait, Snow Crash asks that question].

•It’s also a question that may pass through your mind tomorrow night (Wed., Feb. 25) if you join me at my local karaoke bar, Iggy’s on Second Ave. between 75th and 76th, where the non-Krogh faction of the annoyingly identically-named New York Young Republican Clubs will be singing. Much as I like to try new things, I feel obliged under the circumstances to once more do the libertarian anthem “Tom Sawyer,” fostering fusionism through sound — though not precisely “conservatism for punks” (I’ll be there circa 8:30, for those interested).

•Questions such as whether language was preceded by song (instead of the other way around) were also very much the sorts of topic under discussion in 2005, when I attended the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference — the big recurring evolutionary psychology event — in Austin, TX, visiting L.B. Deyo and my de facto e.p. advisor Diana Fleischman (of the University of Texas, Austin) in the process.

Without Diana’s able tutelage (in combination with research made possible by the Phillips Foundation), this “Month of Evolution” blog series probably wouldn’t be occurring. I was fortunate enough to rub elbows for a week with Fleischman and others interested in interpreting and predicting modern human behavior in the light of probable evolutionary pressures from humanity’s past — that is, things that contributed to our ancestors’ relative likelihood of reproducing, such as, say, ability to detect offspring that were not their own.

•••

Still a relatively new discipline, e.p. is the human-centered outgrowth of the slightly broader and only slightly older field of sociobiology, which was sparked by entomologist E.O. Wilson’s mid-70s book by that title, which popularized the idea that if ant behavior and social structures can be understood in terms of the struggle to reproduce, so can human society. Interestingly, though, E.O. Wilson’s talk at the 2005 HBES centered on the revelation that some types of ants are genuinely indifferent between their own behavior vs. that of others in the colony, all members being so genetically-similar and so interdependent that there is no great survival advantage (at the level of genes) for them to selfish behavior. As Wilson put it, “Marx was right — he just had the wrong species.”

A research program as broad as the evolution of all behavior needn’t have any particular narrow political agenda (beyond a rejection, of course, of the handful of religious fundamentalists who deny evolution altogether), and the leading lights of evolutionary psychology range from libertarian (in more than a few cases) to conservative to socialist to apolitical, but it’s not surprising that political fallout was rarely far from the minds of the conference participants — and not surprising they all tend to be skeptical of the conventional empirical claims of feminism, since e.p.’s core insight may be the observation that plentiful sperm and more-precious eggs are likely to lead to instinctive (and rather reasonable) double standards and differential mating strategies and preferences, despite pretenses that it’s all just arbitrary social constructs.

The keynote speaker that year was linguist Steven Pinker, whose book The Blank Slate argued against the view that humans are born without instincts, without gender, ready to be molded as if from scratch by the politics of the societies into which they are born (and Pinker has just become an Advisor to the American Council on Science and Health, where I work, as it happens). When Pinker spoke, since-ousted Harvard president Larry Summers (previously part of the Clinton administration and today part of the Obama administration) had just generated controversy and shocked the Harvard faculty by suggesting that the insights of Pinker and other e.p. devotees might explain why men and women seem to sort themselves into different academic disciplines in unequal proportions despite affirmative action efforts to achieve perfect parity.

(On another gender-related note, one HBES speaker had devoted a great deal of research time to the importance of waist-to-hip ratio for determining female attractiveness in the eyes of males — even going so far as to use photos to confirm that males care less about weight than about said ratio, which is what men like me keep telling skinniness-obsessed dames, to little avail.)

To the extent that e.p scholars are willing to acknowledge competition, inequality, and differential success rates as fundamental explanatory facets of human existence, the e.p. crowd are bound to make liberals nervous, and since, obviously, they are ardent Darwinians and spend a great deal of their time reducing human motives to sexual strategizing, they make social conservatives nervous as well. To the extent they are willing to dispense with sanitized, popular rationales for human action and hardheadedly examine real motives, though, they are a welcome antidote to the naive fantasies of all camps (and their close cousins, behavioral economists, have even shaken some libertarians’ assumptions about rational agency in the marketplace, since, to make a long story short, people’s preferences are often nuts).

•••

The irony is that even the truth generates fantasies, though, and those fantasies will tend to reflect the already-existing political allegiances of those who conjure them. Is evolutionary theory right-wing or left-wing, brutally authoritarian or subversively anarchic, Nietzschean or revolutionary, Supermannish or X-Hominoid?

It ought ideally to just be science, purely descriptive and not even given to just-so stories (avoiding rationalizing all observed phenomena as suvival-enhancing adaptations when they may be no such thing) — but as Diana and I were reminded by some frank pro-eugenics comments from Watson of Watson-Crick DNA fame at the 92nd Street Y (to dismayed interviewer Robert Krulwich), well before Watson’s embarrassed departure from the Cold Springs labs and not too long after HBES, it’s awfully tempting to draw sweeping conclusions when you’re unlocking secrets of human design — not to mention when you’re on LSD, as Crick apparently sometimes was, making him sound even more entertaining than the eugenics alone does.

In any case, easy as it is to make jokes about such gaffs, I would be ashamed to find we’ve become a culture more frightened of what we might discover than of remaining p.c.-but-ignorant. Another friend whose job likely makes her want to remain anonymous forwards news of a scientist who thinks profound gender differences in the brain and elsewhere ought to be more frequently studied. If this is all conventional wisdom a century from now, our contemporaries who insist for political reasons that such question cannot even be broached will look just as stupid as people a century and a half ago who insisted that Darwin was going too far, you mark my words.

(Reminder: stupider even than everyone doing karaoke tomorrow night at Iggy’s.)

Swedish Model vs. Zombies (plus Bobby Jindal)

•No matter how grim our economic situation — and the prospect of bank nationalization as a remedy for continual subsidies — is, it’s sort of fun to have people saying, “We may need a Swedish model to prevent the survival of zombies.”  I think I saw that movie on USA Network on a Friday night (you know, the network behind the rare skeptical detective show Psych, which my non-skeptic girlfriend was nice enough to show me).  Here’s one Swedish model the government might want to contemplate, Anna Sundstrand, living right here in New York City.  She may not look combat-tough, but keep in mind she’d be fighting sluggish, old-school zombies, likely wearied by their slow trek uptown from Wall Street.

•In somewhat zombie-like news, DarkHorizons reports that the actor playing Jason Voorhees was attacked by a confused and fearful (yet brave) fan at an event celebrating the release of the new Friday the 13th.  I’d like to take this opportunity to note one important difference between the new film and the original (aside from the fact that I actually watched the original): In the first film, it wasn’t Jason who was killing people — as you may recall, it was his mother, with Jason only appearing at the very end in a dream sequence.

•Zombies turn a man’s mind to thoughts of New Orleans, which is America’s voodoo capital, and that in turn reminds me that (fellow 90s Brown alum) Bobby Jindal, in his capacity as Louisiana governor, will be giving the official Republican response speech tomorrow night (circa 10pm Eastern) to Obama’s State of the Union address (I want to be on record in advance as saying that I am not being racist if anyone hears me in days ahead say “I met him years ago — he’s a Brown guy”).

As I’ve noted in recent entries, the audience at Lolita Bar last week may have thought the right is still headed downward for a time — and young folk like those in Yale’s Party of the Right may offer greater hope for the future than any current GOP Establishment types can — but if Jindal strikes a note of semi-youthful, multiculti, refreshed, free-market optimism, this speech could be a much-needed shove in the right direction.  If the right instead just gets more socialistic now, though, rest assured I’ll spend my time in the wilderness in a completely separate lean-to than them (or the Democrats).  Jindal sounding skeptical of the stimulus bill was a good sign, though (as is a revolt against one bad, expensive plan for paying for the bailout, pointed out to me by Elizabeth Cochran).

As my old boss, Stossel, recently noted, by some measures things were worse in 1982, and hardly anyone even remembers there being an economic crisis then (very different though circumstances were).  Let the market do its thing, then move onward and upward, as always.  May the Republicans and libertarians alike rally around that simple message.  And may government never spend another dime.

The "God of the Gaps," Political-Philosophy-Style

One curse of being substantially smarter than the average person but not wanting to flaunt it — due to being genuinely kind, of course — is frequently realizing you’ve been overly generous, by too hastily assuming other people know what the hell’s going on. Contact with said other people, then, can sometimes be very disillusioning.

Take one’s fellow libertarians, for example. After being steeped in the philosophy for a couple decades, it’s easy to carelessly assume that nearly all libertarians have grappled with — and presumably seen through — the most obvious, PoliSci 101-type counterarguments to the creed they ostensibly treat as their moral and political foundation (except in so far as the deeper bedrock is, say, utilitarianism, as in my case). What have they been doing with their spare time if they haven’t confronted counterarguments, after all?

Just the other night, alas, I encountered someone who has, in essence, been a professional libertarian, so to speak, in years past yet now seems to think that the whole idea of basing a philosophy on property is thrown into doubt (apparently requiring some other “culturally”-dictated source of legal legitimacy altogether) by mere areas of inevitable ambiguity in property law (ambiguities that would exist whether a law code were libertarian or identical to the law code we have now, I should add), such as setting noise-pollution levels or deciding whether an odor is bad enough to warrant an injunction.

I’m stating the argument much more briefly but more clearly than it was put at the time, as a service to the reader — a service more people ought to render in speaking as well, rather than rapidly tossing out half-formed ideas, as the most careless and shallow thinkers are prone to do, treating argument as a sort of performance art aimed at one-upmanship instead of truth-seeking, though alcohol consumption at parties is an understandable partial excuse for all people engaged in such conversations (whereas enjoying game-like one-upmanship for its own sake is not and tends to be something done by bullshitters and other intellectually-dishonest types, as well as people who just like hearing themselves talk, rarely the genuinely intellectually curious, a more patient lot).

•••

Of course, even the most diehard anarcho-capitalist tomes, such as David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom, have analyzed ambiguities such as noise pollution at length, so it’s not as if anarcho-capitalists are shying away from them, let alone completely unaware of them (except maybe some of the ones I bump into at parties).

Though there is a variety of ways of dealing with such ambiguities, including leaving them to decentralized common-law court decisions, there’s (a) no reason to junk the whole system because of them (anymore than Hitler’s election all by itself should persuade democracy advocates to completely abandon democracy as a source of political legitimacy, though I might argue there are other reasons) and (b) no good reason to think that such solutions as people come up with, though they may vary, will necessarily vary in ways that are richly culturally determined (or to put it another way, strongly correlated with culture) so as to alter the very basis of the law code itself (culture over property, say, or culture over pragmatic utility).

That is, just because hypothetical future Jordanian libertarians decide to deal with the ambiguities by convening an annual legislature-like council, whereas hypothetical future Irish libertarians go the common-law courts route, doesn’t necessarily mean any substantially culture-rich element has even been introduced into law (their differing choices may not have even had much to do with the ostensible moral wellsprings of the local cultures). Similarly, ornithologists engaged in counting birds in different parts of the world may pick different methods of resolving ambiguities about what counts as a newly-observed plumage pattern, but it is entirely likely that, say, the method picked in Japan will have nothing distinctively Shinto about it and that the method picked in India will have nothing distinctively Hindu about it. They may just pick arbitrarily different numbers of colors as the hurdles for distinctiveness, say.

(I’m sure it’s already the case that both Jordanian and Japanese land surveyors face occasional uncertainty about where even something as clear-cut as a land property line lies, not for political reasons but merely because surveying land can be tricky, but there’s little reason to believe you’d even be able to tell which method for resolving such disputes was used where if you read their respective instruction manuals, just as science texts of sufficient complexity sound nearly the same all over.)

•••

But people with some agenda — an axe to grind whether political, religious, or aesthetic — are usually plenty eager to pounce on any perceived ambiguity (usually with a tone suggesting they discovered the ambiguity themselves) and suggest that the solution is (surprise!) the wholesale importation of whatever philosophical cure-all they’re pushing.

The notorious “God of the gaps” leaps up to “solve” every uncertainty in science, social democracy or unlibertarian “cultural norms” lie in wait for any problem in property law not so clear-cut as to be solved in one short sentence, linguistics majors ratchet up and down their standards for terminological exactness as their own argumentative needs require, and lawyers are more than happy to see you head to court anytime you realize that you and your business partner have poorly worded one inconsequential phrase in a long contract.

So many of these problems could be avoided if people would calm down, be a bit less eager to portray themselves as poking novel holes in theories that have been battered and remained standing numerous times since before they were born, and stop thinking that if they zigzag rapidly through a conversation they’re likely to settle age-old questions in five minutes of cocktail chatter that have already been dealt with numerous times in dry, encyclopedic tomes without eureka-like resolutions (don’t act like you’re immanentizing the eschaton, as some wise and cautious conservatives like to say, when you may simply be arriving late to the conversation wired from too much coffee).

And lest it sound like I’m complaining unduly about my (genuinely beloved) fellow libertarians, who are hardly the worst offenders in all this, let me just add that I’m about ready to strangle the next liberal (though he no doubt means well too, of course) whose eyes light up as if he thinks he’s thought of one I’ve never heard before and says, smugly, “There’s one thing you’re forgetting: What about the poor?!” (Of course, these days, with everyone from Wall Streeters to Afghanis on the dole in some sense, the focus on the poor seems to be getting watered down a bit, for good or ill. Sigh.)

By contrast, I have some nice things to say about Bobby Jindal tomorrow, on the eve of his official GOP State of the Union response speech.

Gay/Barr, Oscars

•I don’t know who the winners at the Oscars will be, but I do know that two of my favorite acting moments at the movies last year were sort of gay:

(1) Heath Ledger (formerly best known for playing a gay cowboy) as the Joker, called crazy by one of the other gangsters in The Dark Knight, yet insisting with such emphatic conviction “I’m not — I’m not,” even though the Joker most certainly is.

(2) Sean Penn whining “No” (as I recall) as Harvey Milk, just before being shot.

It might sound insulting or sadistic to say that I thought a final whine from a gay politician was a nice touch, but, on the contrary, I thought it was a courageous choice on Penn’s part: He didn’t feel obliged by the legend-like status that the rest of the movie had bestowed on Milk to show him as invulnerable or inhumanly stoic in that awful final moment.  We’d seen him do enough impressive things and wouldn’t begrudge him a perfectly human bit of fear or indignity at the end (made all the more convincing and natural-seeming by the fact that it sounded like he was still trying to communicate in some small way with Dan White, who after all was not some anonymous gunman but a colleague and therefore, had he been just a bit saner, perhaps persuadable).

Dare I say it, I think it worked in much the same way that Shatner choking up for a moment while saying “human” during Spock’s funeral did (even though we know now Spock was resurrected in the next two movies, went on to reunify Romulus and Vulcan on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and will briefly appear as an elderly twenty-fifth-century Spock on the big screen in May — during my second “Month of the Nerd.”)

I should also add while I’m at it that Milk worked very well as a “movement” film depicting a lot of frank, crass, strategic political organizing details that might easily have been left out by a film more bent on romanticizing individual characters.  The Van Sant/Altman/Soviet-montage approach of essentially making “Harvey + San Francisco” the only (composite) character that really mattered (besides White) seemed right to me.

•Many gays who liked the film are probably also delighted to hear that George Mason University (notoriously libertarian, not quite the same thing as the decidedly leftist film) has just elected its first male (drag queen) homecoming queen.  A Nobel in economics, an amazing basketball team, law prof Michelle Boardman, and now this — is there anything George Mason can’t do?

•In other gay/libertarian news, Bob Barr — the Republican turned Libertarian who ran for president last year (and made a stop at one of our Debates at Lolita Bar, featuring Ken Silber, who also tried unsuccessfully to persuade our audience this past Thursday that the right’s prospects are looking up) — said last month that he was wrong back in his Republican days to push for the anti-gay-marriage Defense of Marriage Act, a turnabout that comic book industry veteran Mark Evanier sees as too little too late, by the way (Marcia Baczynski and Ali Kokmen pointed out the Barr and Evanier pieces to me).

•Not being a “liberaltarian,” I think the issue of gay marriage, no matter which side you’re on, is trivial compared to the devastating consequences of rampant statism in the economic realm, such as the obscene stimulus bill just passed.  Anyone who mere months ago was touting the idea of a liberaltarian alliance — or even voting for Obama on ostensibly libertarian grounds — owes the entire population of the planet an immense apology mere months later, the idea of liberaltarianism (or a legit “Obamacon” position) permanently exploded by the socialistic stimulus bill.

Having done virtually nothing to roll back Bush war and national security measures that bothered some libertarians, Obama has greatly increased spending and plainly intends to help the one-party-rule Democrats increase the burden of regulation as well.  Liberaltarians were wrong — and may well have helped kill their nation.  But rather than apologize, they will no doubt continue their highbrow, enlightening “dialogue” with liberalism as America is sent to ruin.  Nonetheless, as a practical matter, say what they will, liberaltarianism has now been weeded out of the political genepool, so to speak, by political consequences and economic reality.

Matt Ridley on "The Natural Order of Things"

Gerry Ohrstrom, who I mentioned in Thursday’s entry, forwarded a link to an article by libertarian and evolutionary psychology popularizer Matt Ridley, who argues that biology, economic development, and technology can all be seen as (in some sense) evolving over time (when left free to do so).  Ridley is a widely respected and popular science writer in the UK — so it’s not just me seeing some libertarian/e.p. parallels, and as I’ll explore in a bit more detail this coming week, more than a few major evolutionary psychology theorists are libertarians or close to it.

On a less econ-oriented note, I can’t help thinking that evolutionary thinking may help explain why some (usually less-evolutionarily-savvy) people instinctively (or culturally) react to homosexuality as if it is a dire, existential threat, an attitude I’ve rarely observed among libertarians — but more on libertarians (including Bob Barr) and gays tomorrow, just in time for the Oscars.

The Truth Is Out of Style

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of (1) the collapse of European Communism, (2) the unscientific scare over the chemical Alar (which will be commemorated today on ACSH’s website if all goes as planned), and (3) the pro-skepticism rap anthem “The Truth Is Out of Style” by MC 900 Ft. Jesus (better known as Dallas DJ Mark Griffin but for rap purposes using a name inspired by ludicrous televangelist Oral Roberts’ claim that a 900-foot Jesus appeared to him and commanded him to build a hospital and to raise $8 million or God would “call him home,” apparently a bad thing).

I was reminded of the third of these events by Jen Dziura’s account of seeing a thirty-six-foot audio-animatronic Jesus at a Bible-themed park on her recent trip to Argentina (which sounds a little like dropping acid during the final ceremony of Burning Man, mentioned in yesterday’s entry).  The MC 900 Ft. Jesus song came out a couple years after the Oral Roberts incident — and after what was arguably the peak of New Age mysticism in American culture, the so-called Harmonic Convergence of 1987 (which happened to fall on the tenth anniversary of Elvis’s death — for those who believe Elvis is dead).

If all three of the twentieth anniversaries listed above were being celebrated fully — and the proper lessons drawn from them — our culture would be in pretty good shape: market-oriented/pro-freedom…pro-science/pro-industry…and non-religious/non-superstitious.  Let’s hope the econ focus of last night’s Lolita discussion did just a little bit to push things in the right direction.

Grand Old Burning Man

So, tonight’s Debate at Lolita Bar (between Ken Silber and Ryan Sager) is about the fate and state of conservatism — and I can’t help thinking that if conservatism were a bit more like anarchism, as it should be, it could surely reformulate itself and endure.

The theme at this year’s iteration of the near-anarchist annual art festival called Burning Man (coming in August, with more than a few of my acquaintances likely attending again, though I’ll once more refrain) is the same as that of my blog entries this month: “evolution.”  And while I expect that the neo-hippies, performance artists, drug-addled nudists, and assorted freakazoids at Burning Man will play even more fast and loose with the concept — and stray farther from the topic of biology — than I have, there is a certain metaphorical logic to that theme as one for an anarchist temporary city, balancing as it does continuity and nearly boundless potential for change (and Black Rock City, as they call the physical location of Burning Man out in the Southwestern desert, is indeed an anarchist temporary city).

I was on a panel about parallels between evolution and econ once in Las Vegas (alongside Will Wilkinson and others, thanks to Gerry Ohrstrom and the Association of Private Enterprise Education), and I remember thinking then that free-market economics, evolution, and being in a place that tantalizes with endless possibilities like Vegas somehow seemed like a natural combo (even though I didn’t gamble).

I have no intention of going to Burning Man and trying to lecture people about Adam Smith (though I see the Objectivists are throwing a massive eight-day conference in Vegas this summer, which may amount to almost the same thing).  On the contrary, though, I would love it if Adam Smith’s ostensible defenders absorbed a bit of the anarchic spirit of Burning Man, in the sense that they should all remember that markets only make sense if experimentation and failure (and learning from even catastrophic mishaps) are part of the process.  That should mean no government bailouts and subsidies, for anyone, ever — but it also means that “fiscal conservatives” should not be conservative in the short-sighted sense of thinking we must cling to and preserve the current financial institutions or, even more shallowly, fall into the stock-watching trap of thinking that whatever “reassures the market” today is politically, culturally, and economically healthy in the long run (conservatives are supposed to think about the long run — as are progressives — right?).

Despite the pro-bailout arguments that came even from some very pro-market people like Megan McArdle (initially), we should be willing to sit back, let things fail, and trust that new institutions can be created that may actually improve upon the old (perhaps rapidly-revved-up, formerly small rural banks after the death of older Wall Street firms?).  If a bunch of art-hippies can build a temporary city in the middle of the desert each year, surely rich people can evolve new institutions to replace their failed, fraudulent, unreliable old ones — and do so without government holding their hands.

If fostering the open-minded attitudes that would allow such beneficial transformations to occur necessitates mixing and blending elements of radically different philosophies — into a very broad new fusionism that cannibalizes and then transcends libertarianism, paleoconservatism, liberalism, Marxism, and other strains — so be it.  But we won’t get far thinking the economy must not be allowed to evolve beyond its precise current forms, if that’s the stagnant attitude that our current blend of liberalism and conservatism breeds.  (Perhaps this is something we can address tonight at Lolita Bar.)

P.S. I know my evolutionary psychology expert friend Diana Fleischman (about whom more next week) has considered going to Burning Man, so perhaps this year’s theme makes it the perfect time for her to go.  (Me, I’m more tempted to return to Vegas and visit the Star Trek-themed bar again.)

Those Amazing Animals

Though it’s not clearly stated in this article about that chimp attack in Connecticut, the woman who was attacked presumably had her face eaten off, since that’s what primates do.  They’re monsters, in short — yet about the best the wretched non-human animal kingdom has to offer, so keep that in mind the next time some vegan tries to convince you that animal preferences ought to outweigh humans’.  This also should kill any residual dreams about monkey butlers’ superiority to robot butlers.  By contrast with the savage primates, we can trust the robots.  For now.

I suspect, by the way, that this was the same escape-prone Connecticut chimp named Travis (how many could there be??) mentioned in my primate-crimes article for Radar a few years ago.  I’ve been well aware for some time of what violent, untrustworthy creatures primates can be, thanks in part to the tales of chimp violence at primate study labs from my evolutionary psychology expert friend Diana Fleischman (who you’ll hear more about in an entry next week) and in part to Scott Nybakken, who warned me before my trip to India ten years ago that “Monkeys go for the face.”  (Note: I know chimps are not monkeys.)

But since I’ve said so little about non-human animals in this “Month of Evolution,” let me note a few positive things about animals to compensate for the late Travis’s shabby behavior:

•Architect Dave Whitney forwards this amazing video of a massive excavated ant colony.

•Arguably the most important website about animals notes an evolutionary development of some significance.

•Strangely, the same site featured this picture of Gersh Kuntzman (through no fault of his own) interviewing a walrus about his bucket.

•Chris Nugent notes that the Travis incident at least had the upshot of producing this swell CNN headline: “Chimp had tea, Xanax before vicious attack” (he also notes these other amusing CNN headlines yesterday: “Bristol Palin: Abstinence for teens ‘not realistic’,” “Doctors test orifices for weight-loss operations,” “Stimulus: Now for the hard part,” and on a less sexual note, “Shark takes chunk out of beloved dolphin”).

•And I notice that in Connecticut, a couple years after my parents’ dog Uber passed away, someone happens to have started an Uberdog luxury kennel, where I hope the dogs will be as happy and comfortable as Uber was throughout most of her life (her successor Jaycie seems pretty content, too, despite a little tumble down the cellar stairs when I was home over Christmas — animal life can be tough).

Cosmo Kramer -- Kosmokrator?

Wikipedia has no entry exclusively devoted to “Kosmokrator,” the (very cool) name for the Gnostics’ demiurge, the amoral spirit believed by them to have created Earth, rather than Yahweh, thus explaining (for people as yet unacquainted with the idea of evolution) this complex but noticeably imperfect world.

But if you try doing a search for “Kosmokrator” on Wikipedia, it does ask whether you meant to search for the Seinfeld character Cosmo Kramer.  Mere coincidence?  Or might this explain why Kramer was able so easily to transform his apartment every time we saw its interior, whether into a replica of the Merv Griffin show’s set, a hot tub, wood-paneled shelves, or other dreamscapes?  Was Kramer redecorating — or was he terraforming?  And does he have the power to transform Hawkman from an Egyptian into a Thanagarian?  Does anyone?

Speaking of animal-entities — loathsome, offensive brutes, if you will — an overdue look at some actual animals tomorrow, starting with that bad, bad chimp.

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: Has the Right Hit Bottom Yet?

With the government, intended by the Framers to be small and humble, now funneling a trillion dollars through itself and into the hands of its allies and supplicants…with pop culture iconography fusing with state-worship to create an ostensible messiah-president…with self-interested elites from academia to Nobel committees now oblivious to the difference between compassion and centralized planning (whether of economies or ecosystems), can the desperate (and often stupid) forces of opposition — the exiled right, marginalized conservatism — get any lower?

I’ll host — and Michel Evanchik will moderate — a debate on that very topic, “Has the Right Hit Bottom Yet?”

This Thursday, Feb. 19 (8pm) see optimist (and writer, blogger, and Research editor) Ken Silber argue yes, that the right is already planning its comeback, while pessimist (and author of Elephant in the Room) Ryan Sager argues no, saying the movement he loves is still plummeting downward for the foreseeable future.

My fellow Phillips Foundation Fellow (possibly joined by others of our kind in the audience), Heather Wilhelm, will give us a brief report from the activist field as well [UPDATE: Due to a bad cold, she likely won't join us, alas] — and it all goes down on the basement level of Lolita Bar, 266 Broome St. (at Allen St.) on the Lower East Side, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F J M Z subway stop.

All ideological and non-ideological stripes are welcome — though non-leftists in need of some shelter from the storm might consider joining me for another monthly event, the Manhattan Project gathering, one night prior to the Thursday Lolita Bar Debate, namely Wed., Feb. 18, from 6:30-on at Merchants NY East, southwest corner of 62nd and First. You will get no pity from me if you do not read this carefully enough to tell the two events apart and thus show up on the wrong day: non-leftist social gathering Wednesday, mixed-crowd debate about the right on Thursday.

•••

And for me, tonight, an oddly-eclectic gathering of secular-leaning libertarians under the auspices of the Institute for Humane Studies in a space belonging to the Jesus-leaning King’s College, located in the basement of the Empire State Building of all places, Ayn Rand’s old headquarters. It’s a very political week for me, ending with Friday’s Phillips Foundation annual New York gathering, with talks by columnist Robert A. George and others.

In the meantime, today is President’s Day, and in addition to reflecting on the wisdom of America’s fairly-libertarian first president, George Washington, and its first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, it might be worth taking a look at this list of conservative celebrities and remembering that there is still a scattered handful of influential people out there — including Buffy, a former Superman, and a few top models — who know the current political order is not as it should be. We can add to that list David Mamet, who wrote the fine play I saw yesterday (with a group gathered by George Mason law professor Michelle Boardman, fittingly), Speed the Plow.

Less enthusiastic about the American way and American media is the Muslim founder of Bridges TV, the project aimed at softening Americans’ impressions of Islam, who has been arrested here in New York for beheading his wife, as Irwin Chusid informed me (and as Drudge has now informed the world, I see).

On a more positive multicultural note, though — and one that may well be an indicator of the right’s strategy for making a comeback, or a mere coincidental sign of the times — I notice not only that (1) a black man, Michael Steele, is now heading the Republican National Committee but that (2) the House of Representatives’ one Jewish Republican, the market-friendly Eric Cantor, is now likened to former rebel-leader Newt Gingrich and (3) my fellow 90s Brown alum, Indian-descended Bobby Jindal, is giving the pivotal official GOP response speech to Leader Obama’s first State of the Union address next week, on Tuesday, Feb. 24. For those of us more concerned (far, far more concerned) about promoting fiscal responsibility than the tribal or cultural agendas our foes fear, these are mostly good signs.

And lest we forget that econ is now the battlefield where the fate of freedom and thus civilization is likely to be determined, here’s a Robert Higgs column reminding us of the magnitude of our era’s changes in political economy — including the bailout and other intrusions upon the fragile market.

•••

My own broad predictions for the future? Things will go very badly for the economy — the main determinant of human wellbeing and voter sentiment, though people resist these twin insights — under Obama, and the GOP’s response, if things go badly, will be roughly as sophisticated as this hypothetical statement:

FAT, AGED, UNCHARISMATIC WHITE MAN, SURROUNDED BY OTHERS LIKE HIM: “This president promised change, but it seems to us he’s left Americans without pocket change!” [mugs for cameras with inappropriate good cheer, profound sense of self-satisfaction, and a big grin -- then his allies pick up a few seats in Congress for 2010 and make no significant changes in policy; they begin planning for 2012 election campaigns, which will also accomplish nothing]

I have shown you one very likely possible-future, and you know it. I almost feel the same sense of trans-temporal inevitability about it that Dr. Manhattan does contemplating time and death in Watchmen — but that’s a topic better suited to next month’s debate (and next month’s Book Selection), about which, more in two weeks.