A question for Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter recently appeared to speak at Brandeis University, near Boston. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School offerred to debate him, but Carter refused. Dershowitz spoke anyway, without Carter, and asked this question.

It's been clear for some time that Carter has degenerated into a delusional crank. If the answer to Dershowitz's question is yes, then Carter is also a dangerous delusional crank. He needs to be isolated from the American political mainstream; his supporters need to be ejected from American politics.

If the Democrats allow him to speak at their 2008 convention, they will have a very serious problem on their hands.
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UPDATE: Cathy Young, of Reason magazine and the Boston Globe, has more details about the Carter appearance at Brandeis. Brandeis conceded to the delusional Carter complete control over the event, a very unusual concession in an academic forum. A Brandeis professor referred to the format as "like a Soviet press conference." And Carter's rhetoric, in response to the attacks on the book, has drifted further and further into classical anti-semitic canards.

As Young discusses towards the end of her posting, Carter has had an ongoing relationship with and accepted money from, not just any old Persian Gulf sheiks, but specifically people with a track record of radical Islamic connections and views. Even more disturbing is the lurid light it sheds on the ongoing buy-out of the significant figures in American political life by Saudis and other Gulf-niks with lots of petro-$$. Many of them sound like, not ambassadors from us to them, but ambassadors from them to us. You saw some of this uncovered after 9/11; Carter has accidentally lifted the veil again. At the risk of repeating it too often: the real corruption of the oil business is not the buying of the oil; it's how those oil dollars are recycled after they get into dubious hands.

Something very cool

Maps of War features a new "empires of the Middle East" dynamic map that covers 5,000 years of history in 90 seconds: very cool.

Neoconservatives, realists, and unipolarity

An earlier posting mentioned three reasons for the decline of realism as a master foreign policy paradigm; I want to expand on one of them: the reality of unipolarity since 1991. This reality underlies much of our discomfort about America being an "empire." (Actually, it isn't one, but that doesn't get to the core of our discomfort.) This strange situation - one superpower with weak allies and potential enemies that threaten us with, not conquest, but collapse - embodies an apparent paradox: America is relatively strong, but absolutely weak. This condition of unipolarity is at the root of our increasingly haywire foreign policy situation since the Persian Gulf war.

To bring this into focus, consider US military spending and force size after the end of the Cold War. Netting out homeland security, military spending is at its lowest level - relative to national income and the federal budget - since 1940. (It's about 3% of GDP and about one-seventh of the federal budget. Five-sevenths is entitlements; the other one-seventh is everything else. That situation will become even more lopsided in the coming years.) Similarly the relative size of the US military is at its smallest since before Pearl Harbor. Should it be increased? Yes, of course, especially if manpower-intensive interventions remain the norm that they have been since 1991. It's a no-brainer. We had an all-volunteer force twice its current size 20 years ago.

OTOH, US military spending relative to its peers and rivals is far more than the rest of the world put together. Rich countries no longer spend on military force, because they rely on us. Poorer countries, like China, do spend and arm, but have a far less expensive cost structure.

Normally, relative strength is all we'd need consider; military power is counted as force relative to an adversary. But there are no obvious peer-enemies any more. There are instead a lot of potential manpower-intensive situations: stateless terrorists; humanitarian interventions; nation-building; small possible smaller- and poorer-state adversaries (Iran, North Korea). Counting military strength relative to other advanced nation-states no longer makes sense.

Different foreign policy schools have their reactions to unipolarity: is it an incomprehensible accident (realism), an embarrassment (liberal internationlism) - or destiny (neoconservatism)? Without speculating on any "deep meaning" or "goal" to history, unipolarity is not an accident. ("Accident" means "we can't explain it.") Often it seems like an uncomfortable embarrassment, which is what liberals felt in the 1990s - America as "the indispensible nation," as Madeleine Albright put it, but bothered by this nagging feeling that America shouldn't be an "empire". Maybe it's historical destiny, but whatever its ultimate reason, the nature of unipolarity has been misconstrued. It's not due to America being overwhelmingly powerful. The US is a large, wealthy, and powerful country - but it's not omnipotent. Unipolarity is due to all of its natural peers and rivals being so weak. This is what the neocons don't get. The other schools don't get it either, but they don't have as much invested in unipolarity, so it's not as crucial for them.

This misconstrual of unipolarity is an important fallacy in the canon of neoconservative fallacies. Others include: trying to achieve liberal ends by unilateral means; trying to achieve non-military ends by military means; America as the "universal nation"; attempts to rewrite American history and wrongly identify past figures as neocons avant la parole. More about the origins, nature, and fate of neoconservatism anon.

But unipolarity isn't just an intellectual problem. It's a political-military condition that calls for change. The US needs a larger military; it also needs allies that contribute more (and I don't mean just, or even mainly, Europe). Such allies also need to be more involved politically. Only then can we move away from relative strength and absolute weakness.

Europe needs a democratic Right

And it doesn't have one right now.

What I'm thinking of is Churchill, De Gaulle, Adenauer, Thatcher, and so on: leaders with a continental and civilizational view. Unfortunately, there is instead a vacuum filled up with nutcases, as described in this article about Filip Dewinter, the leader of Belgium's Flemish far-right Vlaams Belang party (requires subscription). Dewinter talks a good talk, but given the people he's associated with, he can't walk the walk.

The sort of people surrounding him and other far-right parties in Europe are lobotomized pygmies from a swamp of stupid and violent parochialism. They jabber about the need to save Europe - forgetting that their spiritual ancestors seventy or eighty years ago were busy, not saving Europe, but destroying it.

Blogging Dr. Stein

Binah recently heard Dr. Kenneth Stein, professor of Middle East history and politics at Emory University and former head of the Carter Center there, speak on Jimmy Carter's new book and his own resignation from the Carter Center. His was a speech both impassioned and enlightening, about the errors, distortions, half-truths, and plagiarisms in Carter's book, and partly about the book's larger negative impact on Americans' understanding of the Arab-Israel conflict.

Stein had a somewhat different take on Carter and the book than that taken earlier on this blog. Stein might not agree with this concise reduction of his argument, but my impression boils down to one of Carter, increasingly over the last two decades, falling into the grip of delusions of grandeur. Starting from a seed in the early 80s, this delusion has since grown into a kind of monstrous fantasy: I'm Jimmy Carter, and in spite of what you think, I'm still president, and I'm the real peace negotiator. His post-presidential career has featured some - shall we say? - unusual level of interference in American policy and "I'm-really-still-president" criticism of later presidents. Carter's tendencies in this direction got worse after Clinton became the next Democratic president after himself. His receipt of the Nobel peace prize in 2002 inflated his delusions all the more. Apparently, part of these delusions interacted with his older dislike of Begin and other Israeli leaders to create, in his mind, a collection of bogeymen - in his faulty thinking, those really responsible for the lack of Middle East peace. He derives from this a "right" to change facts and rewrite history at will. See here for a detailed critique of some of Carter's most egregious errors, concerning the nature of UN resolution 242 (dating from immediately after the 1967 war) and what it does and does not require of all parties to the conflict.

Carter always believed that he had been turned out of office unjustly. Many people at the time - including much of his own party - believed his presidency to be a failure, and more people and certainly many historians have come to believe the same since 1980. But in his own mind, his failure was really a sign of a higher morality and purpose not shared by other presidents. This delusion enables him to sit in questionable judgment of other leaders and diplomats, read their minds, and tell them what they "really" did, said, and thought. His book is full of such embarrassing material.

A revealing example of this came recently in a radio interview in which Carter simply denied Hamas' publicly and repeatedly stated goal of destroying Israel. At first, he said, that's not true, they didn't say that - a bald falsehood. But he finished by saying, I didn't hear that. That's the real Jimmy Carter - he didn't hear that, and a lot else besides - not because it wasn't said, but because it doesn't fit his delusions.

More on Satloff, Holocaust-denial, and the Arab world

In an earlier posting, I mentioned Robert Satloff and his new book, Among the Righteous, about the long reach of the Holocaust into North Africa and Arabs who saved Jews from it. He is interviewed on NPR here (requires RealPlayer).

Hat-tip to Adam ... :)

POSTSCRIPT: Listening to Satloff, reading book excerpts, and thinking about our postings here on the Arab world made me think: fascistic ideologies had a strong influence in parts of the Arab world, most of all in Syria and Iraq, less so but still significantly in Iran, Turkey, and Egypt. However, they had little to no influence in North Africa, whose countries have also had since the 1940s a more moderate stance in the Arab-Israel conflict. I wonder why? (That's not a rhetorical question.) I have half-baked theories, but nothing that stands up.

Another thought on Jimmy

In the mail today, I received another solicitation from the Carter Center - guess they're in big trouble now with their donor base.

Looking over Carter's book, I still can't decide if he's an anti-semite or not. But the charges against the book are true: there's serious misrepresentation of his own 1979 Camp David negotiations; a fantasy of "what must have happened" at Clinton's negotiations in 2000 - in conflict with the exhaustive account of Dennis Ross, who actually was there; obvious plagiarism and distortion of Ross' tables and maps (just lay the books side by side, and you'll see); and willful amnesia when it comes to Arab terrorism and rejectionism.

There's something else about the book, too, that struck me: it's profoundly cynical - and by implication, so is Carter, in spite of his carefully groomed image as holier-than-thou. On the surface, there is moral outrage at the supposed "apartheid" of Israel and constantly repeated attempts at lining up the reader's sense of underdog-David-ness with the Palestinians and top dog-Goliath-ness with Israel. Towards the end of the book, however, Carter acknowledges the obvious truth that there is no apartheid, only conflict over religion, nationality, and sovereignty - not so different from other such conflicts: Kashmir, Lebanon, Iraq, Ireland, etc.

The David-and-Goliath comparison is far from obvious and actually cuts both ways. Until recently, it was Islam (in the form of the Ottoman empire) that was top dog in the Middle East, and in most respects, Islam still is. Oriental Jews were, until almost yesterday, among Islam's oppressed minorities. The sudden rise in their status in the last 50 years has far more to do with this conflict than any imaginary "apartheid." The sudden rise in status of Iraq's Shi'ites and Kurds has a lot to do with what's going on there. The top dogs of the Middle East (Muslims, Arabs, Sunnis, males) have had a lot of adjusting to do - sort of like white Southerners in the civil rights era. Such changes are not simple winner-take-all propositions either. Few would argue today that the South isn't better off after the civil rights revolution - better for everyone, including whites.

Why does Carter engage in such offensive bait-and-switch tactics? One answer is that he very publicly oozes his Christianity and wants to stick it to Jews. But there's another explanation. He's also, like other ex-presidents, a frequent visitor in the Persian Gulf states, where he gets hefty speaker fees. It can't be a simple quid-pro-quo; Clinton and Bush Sr. also speak in the same countries and don't pander to Muslim prejudice like this. But in Carter's case, I believe there is a half-hidden fear of the once-powerful Islamic world and an awed feeling in the presence of its fabulous petro-wealth.

The feeling that Christians have to put on kid gloves when dealing with Muslims was also at work in the attitude of the last Pope, who was otherwise very willing to take on oppression. Partly it was a post-Crusades hangover, an historical fear that a tougher stand towards the Islamic world might endanger declining Christian minorities there. You might call it a kind of civilizational appeasement. The current Pope is clearly not in the same camp, which is a good thing. We need less appeasement and more clarity. Making unilateral concessions just leaves the Islamic world hungry for more, because it reinforces a bogus sense of victimhood as the master explanation for why the House of Islam is in such trouble.

This is Carter's real failure: he's muddled about who the historical oppressors are and can't disentangle himself from white/Christian guilt. He expects Jews to share in this self-hatred; when they don't, he's puzzled, then mad.
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POSTSCRIPT: Speaking of civil right eras, a belated happy MLK birthday holiday to all!

Civilization, states, and ideology: More decline of realism

Now that the Democrats find themselves back in charge of Congress, the media chatter about "realism" (often just meaning, American friends of the Saudi royal family) has faded. But it's worth exploring realism as an historical doctrine, unhooking it from its recent perversion in connection with petro-regimes. I emphasized in previous postings that classical realism, rooted in 18th-19th century Europe, has had declining relevance to foreign policy throughout the last century, and that its significance will continue to fade. Liberal internationalism is in trouble for other reasons, and the consequent vacuum has come to be filled, in a strange turn of events, by a militant sort of neoconservatism.

Schematically, the evolution of realism goes something like this:

1. Realism was the master paradigm of European foreign policy from the end of the Reformation until the outbreak of World War I, roughly 1690 until 1914.

2. The critical year of 1917 saw the entry of the US into WWI, the collapse of the French army, the March and November Russian Revolutions, and the Balfour Declaration. Ideology, of all kinds, took off in importance, especially the most spectacular cases: Communism in Russia and Nazism in Germany. But their main effect was by taking over existing or reconstructed nation- and empire-states (Germany and Russian - later, China). Few years have been so important in world history as 1917.

The two main rising powers of the early 20th century were Germany and Russia. Their ideologies became, respectively, Nazism and Communism. Their respective civilizations were Western (on the border) and Eastern Orthodox (in a revolutionary phase).

While civilizational categories might help you understand aspects of 20th century conflict, they do so only in a very general way, as a deep historical background. The political and ideology categories are far more important, and ideology is central. We spoke of fighting Germany, but also Nazism. During the Cold War, it was common to elide Soviet into Russian, reflecting the dual nature of these conflicts: between nation- or empire-states, but also traditional political units animated by radical ideologies. No one spoke that way during World War I, which, until its last year, had no significant ideological aspect. Wilson and Lenin changed all that.

3. Ideology in decline: in the European/Western world, after the death of Stalin; in the rest of the world, since the 1980s.

Now we're in a world of geopolitical tectonic plates. The plates are civilizations, and they grind past one another, often peacefully, sometimes violently. The existence of different world civilizations doesn't mean they have to come into conflict. It just means if there is conflict, they are the basic units that must be used in analysis. The nation-state is secondary; states are important only insofar as they are exemplars of civilizations. And ideology is no longer as important as some people think.

Here we see the influence of some bad analogies casually misused - reflected in the questionable neologism "Islamofascism," for example. European models had a strong influence in the Islamic world, from the mid-19th century until about 1980, and post-World War I developments kicked off the rise of one-party secular totalitarian states: successively, French and British Enlightenment ideas; then in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, fascistic ideologies; finally, in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, Soviet and Maoist Marxism. But since about 1980, outside ideologies have been in sharp decline in the Middle East, which is simply becoming more itself, laying bare the underlying culture. It's not a Western-style system of nation-states (unlike Europe or even Asia), but instead composed of tribalism, sectarianism, warlordism, and the honor-shame system - more like Europe during the wars of religion or even the Dark Ages. Of course, the AK-47 and the RPG-7 have - ahem - changed the technical details.

In the clash of civilizations between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds, certain characteristic patterns recur that fall far outside traditional realist thinking, like stateless jihadist ("terrorist") and state-sponsored proxy fighting groups. In turn, the nature of the conflict signals a breakdown of traditional nation-state-based rules of foreign policy; e.g., the Geneva Conventions (laws always written in response to the last war); the standing need for new legislation and new treaties; the question of how to deal with non-democratic countries deemed essential in the fight (Pakistan and a number of Arab countries). Troublesome policies such as rendition and detention are a direct result of this breakdown.

All these developments bode ill for realist-type theories of foreign policy. They also create serious problems for liberal internationalism, which only really works if everyone lives in a democratic-republican nation-state. That problem has been obvious for a long time; the problem with realism has been less obvious.
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POSTSCRIPT: Here's an interesting question: Western/Central Europe - the parts that are historically Catholic or Protestant - make up "Western" civilization - originally, Latin Christendom. Is the United States part of "Western" civilization? Think about it before answering. Is it not a nation-state in a new civilization, as yet unnamed?

Teleology: The afterparty

Maybe this posting was the real point of my earlier musings on teleology and the anthropic principle ... :=)

A friend asked why "intelligent design" - what has that got to do with purpose? I mentioned that Spinoza believed in a universe with design but no purpose. A better phrase than "intelligent design" would thus be "purposive design" - that captures the nature of the controversy better.

BTW, you might wonder what happened to Aristotle's four-fold causality after that Scientific Revolution thingie 300 years ago or so. Scientists have mostly come to rely on Aristotle's second and third categories. The material or efficient cause is the physical entity in the objective world. The formal cause is the abstract law, the ghost of Plato's Ideas, but grasped in our minds. Formal causes are the mind's form of comprehension; they're in the mind, but not just in the mind. First causes have been reduced to "initial conditions." Final causes have been rendered suspect, although for any living entity, especially conscious ones with intentionality, they're unavoidable. Locke has a sensible discussion of these issues, in somewhat different and slighty archaic language, that hasn't really been improved upon in the last three centuries.

Locke was also the first to state the basic duality of Western thought in a clearly modern form. From Plato to Descartes, it was the duality of mind and body, or body and soul. Locke was the first to recast this as a duality of subject and object. Again, the issue hasn't really moved since then, although Hume and Kant did a lot to reformulate the issue in terms familiar today.

Afterthoughts: Teleology and the anthropic principle

First, an apology: I've written before on the anthropic principle (AP), but the AP is used in widely varying senses, and my earlier postings didn't meet this issue directly. Nowadays, you see the AP popping up in two very different ways in two very different contexts - in the evolution/intelligent design controversy and in string theory. I've mainly posted about the latter case, but the former is better-known and more interesting.

There is a sense of the AP (the strong form) which implies teleology or final (purposive) causation. Stated in modern language, teleology or purposive causality is a generalization of the intentionality inherent in living and especially consciousness entities. It need not involve human-like consciousness. The key difference between final causation and reductionism is that reductionism posits a fundamental causality that is purely past-conditioned and purely forward-looking; it contains no feedback. Purposive causality requires "feedback loops" and implies some kind of circularity in the causal sequence. That living and conscious entities exhibit such circular feedback in their purposive behavior is not in dispute; the question is whether such causality is secondary, or if non-living entities and possibly the universe as a whole exhibit such feedback. If the latter, then teleology is fundamental to the universe; if not, it is a secondary phenomenon piggy-backing on a fundamentally causal but "blind" non-purposive universe.

A popular example of teleological reasoning is the "argument from design" or Intelligent Design (ID). But the AP is simpler and more general than that, and it doesn't have to be supernatural or theistic. The classic example in Western philosophy is Aristotle's four-fold causality (first, material or efficient, formal, and final); his system is neither theistic nor supernatural. Modern science started in the 17th century, attended by a philosophical revolution brought off by Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke. The agnostic or negative position of these early modern thinkers on final causality was crucial in the birth of modern scientific thinking. Spinoza's position was the most radical and consistent: he believed in a universe with design but without purpose. His militant monism (one Substance with many Modes) and unqualified belief in blind determinism have the appeal of consistency, but beg the question: purposive causality is inescapable for understanding living entities, and even more so, conscious ones. Descartes' solution was an extreme dualism: human consciousness (res cogitans = thinking stuff) is a supernatural soul; everything else (including our bodies and other animals) is a blind machine (res extensa = matter-energy in spacetime). Unfortunately, this solution, still very much with us as a pratical rule of thumb, has gradually been knocked down by modern biology, psychology, and medicine. Aristotle's unified treatment of all forms of biological teleology is theoretically superior. At the end of the 17th century, Locke had what, for modern science, has amounted to the final word on this question, which has seen no real improvement since. Agnostic on the role of teleology in the universe at large, Locke admitted that final causes are inescapable for understanding any kind of life. However, Locke also believed that "G-d could make matter think" and held out the hope that Descartes' dualism could ultimately be overcome. Hume in the 18th century attacked intelligent design and purposive causality, but from a quite different direction, casting doubt on causality and objective knowledge altogether. Such skepticism leads, not to modern science, but in a nihilistic direction first explored by Nietzsche in the late 19th century; it needn't detain us here.

What's the bottom line? The rejection or suspicious treatment of final causes is not a result of modern science, but an assumption. Modern science has made far more progress on "what" and "how" questions than on "why?". That fact alone justifies this approach, but it leaves unanswered the "why" questions that everyone ever born has thought of. The status of final causality remains elusive: is it a fundamental metaphysical category or a secondary of non-purposive causality?

This type of AP makes no sense in a Newtonian world, which is just such a world of blind determinism, driven by causal laws and conditioned only by past events. In modern physics, with quantum mechanics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and modern cosmology, such questions can be asked again, but we still lack definitive answers. Obviously, a teleology acceptable today would be very different from Aristotle's, since our knowledge of physical and biological mechanisms is broader and deeper than his was. It would be more abstract and simpler, and would hinge essentially on information or entropy, treated as a co-equal to spacetime and matter-energy. Information is inherently selective; it selects some of the world as "signal" and rejects the rest as "noise." Such selectivity is visible everywhere in the living world, from nutrition and waste elimination (eat this, flush that), to consciousness (attention to this, ignoring of that), to evolution by selectional mechanisms (this fits, that doesn't).

Philosopher Thomas Nagel recently penned a penetrating treatment of final causation in the form of a review of Richard Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion (requires subscription). By way of talking about Darwinist-selectional theories of biological evolution, Nagel takes Dawkins and others to task for overstating their case: Darwin's theory explains the origin of species, but not the origin of life - it doesn't and can't answer such a question. (Amusingly, Dawkins has to fall back on the hand-waving of the weak AP, invoking billions and billions of planets, instead of billions and billions of universes - explaining nothing - see below.) And Darwin's theory is a non-teleological (although not deterministic) theory - all modern scientific theories are: by assumption, not because they prove final causes invalid.

Since the 17th century, purposive causality has lived in a limbo of "parascience"; if it involves super- or "extra"-naturalism, it falls outside science altogether. The best-known case in recent years is the ID movement, which is attempting to re-introduce strong teleology into biology, a purposive causality set up by a human-like designer. In practice, many invocations of final causes are scientifically redundant, unfalsifiable, or empty. That fact is the (generally sound) basis for attacking the ID movement as pseudo-science. And many attempts to import ID theory into biology teaching are much cruder than that, just thinly veiled forms of creation "science," an obvious anti-science, as it rejects not just Darwinian selectional theories, but the whole framework of modern cosmology, geology, biochemistry, and genetics.

But in a final irony, the "other" AP controversy raging right now - about the weak form of anthropic reasoning invoked by string theorists - shows the AP in a much worse and far more objectionable light than the ID controversy. This non-teleological form of the AP proposes an infinity of unobservable universes, with no method to enumerate them, and offers no explanatory power whatever. It gives up on the project of modern science, seeking unity among observable phenomena: matter and energy, space and time, living species as descended from a common ancestor and sharing the same biochemistry, etc. The weak AP is a flight from scientific reason, driven by blind clinging to string theory. That theory isn't a real theory anyway, only an unlikely conjecture, and its solutions are more conjecture. As astrophysicists devise thought-universes with slightly different physical laws that can also support life as we know it, the reasoning behind this form of the AP falls apart. Its sole appeal is to people who believe in string theory for other reasons anyway (and bad reasons at that). This weak, multiverse AP is truly "millennial madness." It widens the already large chasm between string theorists and the rest of science and pushes string theory even further down the road of becoming a self-validating cult. And it makes creationism and ID look good by comparison - almost like real science.