A panoramic view

Panoramic photography was popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, before the rise of movies. Photographers would take multiple still photos from different perspectives on a scene, then assemble the photos next to each other to recover the full scene. A panorama could project a scene wider than a person could see at one glance by the naked eye.

The Library of Congress' American Memory collection includes almost 4,000 panoramic photos, from 1851 to 1991. Most date from the heyday of panoramic photography in the early 20th century. The panorama on the upper left is of Boston around 1894, looking west from the Old North Church. The State House sits almost at dead center.

If you browse by category, you'll find all sorts of fascinating subjects: African-Americans (including early civil rights meetings), airplanes, the Anti-Saloon League .... My favorites are "bathing beauties" and "beauty contests." Curiously, they all date from the 1920s -- the first decade in which such things were not a complete scandal, I suppose.

Walden Pond revisited

A posting a short while ago talked about important distinctions often lost these days: between environmentalism and ecology, between conservation as a human choice and a false worship of nature's non-existent wishes. Henry David Thoreau was an early American prototype of the Romantic movement's anti-social and anti-civilization tendencies. He spent two years at Walden Pond (1845-47), a small and shallow, glacially-cut lake in Concord, just outside Boston, living in a hut. The hut is gone, although there's a replica there now, and Walden Pond and the area around it have been conservation land since the late 19th century.

The Pond is not far from the center of Concord and easily walkable, as it was then. Thoreau's two-year sojourn there was not prompted by a yearning to commune with chipmunks or hug trees. Thoreau was not seeking nature, but withdrawing from human society. To use a modern word, he was a drop-out. But human society and modern conveniences are not, and were not, far from the Pond. The railroad ran and still runs on the southwest side, and the roads, now paved, reached Concord and other nearby towns within a few hours walk or no more than an hour's horse or carriage ride. By all evidence, Thoreau made regular use of these conveniences.

The essentially anti-social nature of Thoreau's quest was obvious to his friends, particularly Emerson. While Emerson wrote a whole essay in praise of self-reliance, his notion was unambiguously social. He was uninterested in isolation, and did not want others to isolate themselves. His "self-reliance" meant simply standing on one's own feet, while being part of society. Emerson had limited patience for what he saw as self-indulgence on Thoreau's part, a dip into the "insidious ethic of conscience." Somewhat more than a century later, one man's navel-gazing would become a mass phenomenon.

When the State of Massachusetts took over Walden Pond in 1922, they were expressing a wish, to preserve something as partly natural, partly manmade, for future generations. It wasn't nature that made that decision; it was the state legislature and, ultimately, the state's citizens. And the site wasn't shut off from access either -- that would have undermined the point. That purpose was not to take humanity out of nature (we can't be in any case) or put nature far away out of human reach, but to take care of a selected spot for others to enjoy. In the process, the spot has been inevitably changed in some ways, prevented from changing in others, while itself changing the people who conserve and appreciate it. It's human art and artifice at work here, not wilderness untouched by human hands.

The odyssey continues

Here's a review of Keir Dullea's appearance two Thursdays ago in Boston and the screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey for its 40th anniversary.

Celtics rule!

The Celtics finally did it this past week, clinching the NBA championship for the first time in 22 years.

Thoughts on the environment

Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique.

- Charles Peguy

Thinking about pollution as a public health problem and selective conservation of the natural world, for the sake of present and future generations, are in no way new endeavors. They arose toward the end of the 19th century, led by a variety of people who never dreamed of reading humanity out of nature or expressing hostility toward scientific understanding of nature, then emerging from its infancy. One of the best-known representatives of this movement - which predates the modern environmentalist movement by almost a century - was Teddy Roosevelt, who experienced raw nature first-hand, exploited it by hunting, wrote about it - and then created parks so others could taste the same experience. He was our first, and so far only, "environmental" president. There was nothing coffee-table-ish or armchair about his views, and he made his forays in the wilderness before cell phones, waterproof matches and tents, and other hi-tech paraphernalia were available. Today's environmentalist movement has moved far that orientation, representing a very different and basically mistaken view of nature and of humanity's relation to it. Environmentalism is a movement, not a science. The science is ecology, as practiced by ecologists. That hasn't prevented a long-standing and pervasive confusion between the two.

Born during the period that saw the breakdown of liberalism and its turn towards punitive and backward-looking guilt, the environmentalist movement started as a piece of counterculture and absorbed the older conservation and public health movements, usurping popular acceptance of the latter for its own ends. These ends are motivated by a hatred of technology, science, and modern civilization and bring in train all the classical fallacies of Romanticism: pre-existent "natural harmony," "noble savages," and the evil corruption of civilized humanity. Only once American civilization had reached a certain level of material development could such thinking take hold among more than a tiny number of the unbalanced. It's had a longer run in Europe, where it arose in the late 18th century in reaction to the rise of modern science, industry, and commercial society. The Germans gave a special twist to this thinking, one that merged nature-mysticism with reverence for the Volk and pre-industrial life.

The environmentalist movement has raided non-Western cultures and creatively invented bogus quotes about their attitudes toward the natural world. As shown by Dan Botkin and others, almost all of the supposed wisdom the movement peddles about natural "harmony" and "balance" comes from pre-modern and pre-scientific thinking within Western history, precisely the thinking that has been abandoned by modern science. (It wouldn't be modern or scientific otherwise.) The "pre-existent harmony" or "balance of nature" metaphor is the most common of these fallacies. Such discoveries as organic evolution and chaos (in the technical sense of the word) have forced ecologists to give up "equilibrium" pictures of ecosystems and face the reality of their ceaseless and usually messy change. Ecosystems come and go, start from a little, grow into a lot, mature into a period of glory - then fall apart and are replaced by something else. For example, it's precisely because the chaotic atmosphere and oceans have only a limited "invariant" structure that pinning down what "climate" means is so hard. So it has been throughout the 3.5 billion-year history of life on Earth; human activity just adds some more twists to the mix of permanent chaos.

But the "harmony," "balance," and "equilibrium" metaphors have, since the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries, taken on a life of their own, now divorced from scientific thought and philosophical criticism. They continued to be sustained by religious feeling and the rise of counter-Enlightenment Romanticism. It helps that the core of Western religious thought since the rise of Christianity has been the template of Paradise-Fall-Redemption, with perhaps an apocalypse in there somewhere. The relationship of environmentalism to this paradigm and the related concept of Original Sin is too obvious to require comment. So is the environmentalist hope that humanity's supposed trashing of the planet demonstrates that humans are still at the center of things, if only in a negative way. High German Romantic thought of the 19th century (with echoes and variations from the American Transcendentalists) recommended withdrawal from both human society and the five senses as a preliminary to communing inwardly with Nature - not the thing you can perceive, but a "telephone from the beyond," as Nietzsche wittily once put it.*

This is the paradigm of Thoreau's time living alone at Walden Pond, a Romantic exercise if there ever was one. He wasn't scientifically studying the ecosystem at Walden, getting his hands dirty. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was staring at his navel.** The root of environmentalism lies in a restless search for a new religion to replace older faiths no longer believable or relevant.

After the fallacy of pre-existent balance, the most powerful bad metaphor reigning over environmentalist thinking is its misplaced and often childish anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. Wild animals are not pets or farm animals, which are selectively plucked out of "wild" nature and bred by us to heighten characteristics that fit into human domestic and food needs. (After all, the wild ancestors of dogs could have been selectively bred to heighten other characteristics and turned into mean predators with no socially redeeming features.) Ecosystems and, indeed, the whole planet lack the integrated purposive and functional unity of individual animals and humans. It's a gross mistake to take metaphors like "Gaia" as more than fanciful poetic usages; the Earth doesn't think, feel, remember, or command anything.

But environmentalist literature and discourse are thoroughly polluted with such language and the concepts behind it. "Charismatic megafauna" (such as polar bears and baby seals) are projected as quasi-pets (instead of, respectively, hungry predators and their tasty, blubbery lunch). Gorgeous nature photography (itself a selective and superposed human art) is twisted into a "picture-window" or "don't-spoil-my-view" environmentalism that is really little more than middle- and upper-class kitsch. Debate about the human and non-human environments is mired in superstition and dishonesty if it assumes that nature would remain frozen were it not for our interference. It becomes enlightened and honest when the question shifts to, "Well, what do we want it to look like?" Not that we always get our wishes - but they're our wishes, not nature's. Nature has none.

If we're interested in a scientifically-informed view of nature and our relationship to it, we must abandon any notion of pre-existent "harmony" or "balance" that we are violating, restoring, or revering as an authoritative command. Nature commands nothing and speaks nothing. Or - better - it speaks many contradictory things: it's prodigious, wasteful, and hidden; beneficent and poisonous; abundant and barren; peaceful, aggressive, and indifferent - all at once. It is relentless change, on all scales of space and time, with incessant destruction, creation, and overturning. Any harmony or balance we bring to our relationship with nature is a balance or harmony strictly of our own devising. We're not even "managing" nature, except in a limited way. In limiting and modifying how we use nature, we really managing nothing but ourselves.

That is why environmentalism is not science, but a political and religious movement. It is why this movement so frequently turns tyrannical: there's nothing so satisfying to a fanatic than "managing" other people as a vehicle of righteousness.† Perhaps this is the unwittingly ironic sense in which Job urges his friends to "speak with the Earth, and she will teach you." She will teach you all right: she'll teach you that she has no trite moral lessons to offer. Equilibrium, balance, and harmony are not the norm, but temporary and local. Indeed, at the center of Job's encounter with the divine is, not a garden or a zoo, but a whirlwind.

In absorbing and condescending to the older public health and conservation movements, the nearly forty years of modern environmentalism have done our society a large disservice. It is the most potent social force today in attracting the general public away from science. Scientists involved in ecology themselves often lead mentally conflicted lives, caught between knowing and believing. People now routinely use meaningless or wrongheaded concepts to misunderstand the world around them and how human activity affects it. Recycling is often more harmful than just throwing things out. No one has a "carbon footprint," unless they've rubbed graphite on the bottom of their shoes. The Earth's climate is not a greenhouse. Nuclear power plants are not bombs, any more than a coal-fired power plant is a firearm. Runaway metaphors and bad policies motivated by them are the fallacies of the Boomers - history's first mass over- and miseducated generation - and now constitute the brainwashing of the next generation. Led by their delusional gurus, currently starting with Al Gore, they have injected a potent revulsion against modern technological and progressive civilization into our politics.†† But that passion proves nothing about the rightness of their cause, which is essentially romantic, pessimistic, and reactionary.‡

POSTSCRIPT: For an example of what I'm talking about, consider M. Night Shyamalan's embarrassing new movie, The Happening, "the most morally abhorrent film ever made" - but still, important for laying bare the logic, which pervades conventional environmental politics in a watered-down form. Or just read this New Republic blog posting and skip the film itself :)

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Everyone interested in this problem, whatever their opinions, should read Wallace Kaufman's No Turning Back: Dismantling the Fantasies of Environmental Thinking. Published 14 years ago, it is more relevant than ever, and a blog posting cannot do it justice. In related vein, consider as well the two books by Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood and Playing God in Yellowstone.
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* While not able to speak English, Nietzsche could read it and counted an edition of Emerson's works as one of his prized possessions; he annotated it, heavily in places. His famous Übermensch, or Overman, probably owes something to Emerson's Oversoul. I don't know if Nietzsche read any Thoreau.

** That said, I like Walden Pond as it is now and try to swim it at least once every summer. There's been no attempt to "freeze" it in some mythical past, and it is accessible by car. It was pretty accessible in Thoreau's day, and he was never more than an hour walk from the center of Concord and medical and food supplies. Thoreau even took his laundry home to his mother for washing periodically. The old railroad line, already in existence when Thoreau spent his two years there, still runs right past the pond, behind some trees. Even more than in Thoreau's day, the setting now is as much a product of human artifice as it is of nature and a perfect example of the older conservation movement - but not of modern environmentalism.

† Thoreau himself said it: a man feels a disturbance in his bowels - and he sets off on a crusade to save humanity.

†† Using "progressive" again in the right sense.

‡ The absolute weirdness of our political vocabulary strikes me more and more. Opponents of environmentalism are usually called "conservative" - are they, really? And is environmentalism really "liberal" and "progressive"?

"Open the pod bay doors please, HAL"

Arthur Clarke is no longer around to guide us into the future. But the 40th anniversary of the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey brought one of the film's stars, Keir Dullea, right here to Boston (the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, to be precise) last night for an evening's talk about his career and the filming of 2001, co-written by Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick. Dullea played astronaut/starman David Bowman, the sole survivor of the Hal 9000's murder spree. A fun evening of interviewing and audience questions was had by all. A screening of 2001 followed. The movie was released in April 1968.

POSTSCRIPT: Dullea's co-star Gary Lockwood, who played astronaut Frank Poole, one of Hal's victims, has his own web site. Hard-core Star Trek fan's will remember that he also starred in that series' second pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before.

More on the end of PCU*

One sign of the impending fall of PCU is the aggressive sniffing of state legislatures around college endowments and other academic assets and income streams. States don't have much leeway here, because of federal charitable tax rules. Yet the trend is striking, for example, right here in Massachusetts and Beantown. See also this, about the explosion of non-educational costs in academia. Might this not be like the dissolution of the monasteries and economic assets of the Catholic Church during the Reformation? The comparison is neither new nor unique to me.

The rise of PCU was never enough to provoke a large, direct revolt by alumni, taxpayers, and students, although it has greatly diminished the prestige and influence of academia in the larger society, compared to 30 or 40 years ago.** Rather, it's costs that will stimulate the revolt, and more generally the perception of academia as an island of bloated privilege. It's not a completely correct perception, but there's enough truth in it that political hay can and will be made.

The right solution is not to revoke universities' charitable status (unless the whole concept is changed across the tax code), but to take a hard look at public and private subsidies to universities and their unwillingness or inability to control costs. Profit-making activity by schools should be spun off into taxable regular commercial enterprises that universities own, but which are legally separate. That's what some schools do already, and it's a common approach in other countries. In any case, the financial problem is not for-profit activity, but "cost-plus" activity.

Such academic blogs as those mentioned last time (Althouse, Instapundit, Volokh Conspiracy, as well as so many others: Augean Stables, Cranky Professor, Professor Bainbridge, Daniel Drezner, and ChicagoBoyz) keep a steady track on the bundle of trends that define PCU: costs, endowments and other subsidies, political correctness, censorship, and declining standards. They know the insides as only insiders can.
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* Politically Correct University, like the movie!

** One major reason for the rise of think tanks, especially conservative and libertarian ones.

And they all ran home ...

... and home it was, Beantown, or elsewhere. It was a glorious Patriots Day, with perfect weather, maybe a little on the hot side. All the Marathon coverage here.

Chag Pesach sameach: And it's Patriots Day ...

... here in Beantown, and it's Boston Marathon day. Celebrating freedom in, not one, but two - count 'em - two ways :)

Check out the world's fastest seder (in Hebrew, and fast).

A century later: The Dreyfus case

Boston University is currently showing an exhibit, with a symposium, on the Dreyfus affair, the legal case and scandal that engulfed France between 1894 and 1906. The bare facts are easy enough to state. The French military's general staff had a turncoat in its midst, a certain Colonel Esterhazy, who prepared, for sale to Germany, France's enemy, a complex document (bordereau) of military secrets. He framed Dreyfus for this treason. Dreyfus was then tried and convicted, with falsified evidence, and sent to the French penal colony at Devil's Island, off the coast of Guyana. He was tried and falsely convicted again by a military court in 1899, but pardoned by the French president.

The exhibit ("The Power of Prejudice: The Dreyfus Affair," with participation by such Boston luminaries as Alan Dershowitz) tries hard to connect l'Affaire (as it still called in France) to the present-day, and there are some connections and echos, although many aspects of it seem strange today - the past really is a foreign country. And unfortunately, some of the real lessons of the Dreyfus scandal (shouldn't it be called the Esterhazy scandal?) are not the ones the exhibit so clearly and earnestly wants to draw.

At the heart of the injustice lay the French military and military courts, which were dominated by officers of a strongly royalist, aristocratic, and Catholic-reactionary bent, deeply hostile to successive French revolutions and the contemporary Third Republic. Although France underwent strong, if uneven, economic growth then, and the whole pre-1914 era is remembered as la Belle Époque - the era of the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, and of Saint-Saens, Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, and Satie - French political life in that era did exhibit deep weaknesses, constant scandals, and incessantly falling governments. (To prevent a new Bonaparte, the Third Republic had a weak presidency and incoherent parliamentary-cabinet government.) Strong political subcultures arose at the end of the 19th century in reaction to these developments, all of them hostile to the Third Republic. Among these tendencies was what might be called an anti-patriotic Right. Hostile to the republicanism, egalitarianism, dynamism, and secularism of modern France, they dreamed vainly of restoration - restoration of the monarchy, the established Church, the landed aristocracy, and the pre-industrial, pre-democratic age generally. Under modern conditions, these tendencies could not go but nowhere, but they seeded something that would later flower in demonic form - the word had not yet been coined by Mussolini - the phenomenon of fascism. Actually, it isn't quite correct to call them "anti-patriotic." They were deeply chauvinistic (to use the word the French themselves use) about all things connected to what they called "deep France" (la France profonde, a somewhat mythical place), but viscerally antagonistic to the post-1789 world of middle- and working-class France, of republican institutions, and lack of respect for the Old Regime and its manifestations. The roots of their own treason to France lay here, although it would be a generation after Dreyfus before the rot came to its fullness.

Contrary to legend often repeated later, the intellectual and educated classes of France did not, by and large, rush to Dreyfus' defense at the time of his first and second trials. Educated opinion in France was divided among a small but devoted group of Dreyfusards, a larger and vicious group of anti-Dreyfusards, and a lot of people of mixed or no opinion in the middle who were eventually swayed by a certain Colonel Picquart, who came forward after the first trial with definitive proof that Dreyfus was framed and his writing on the bordereau forged. After the first trial, the Dreyfusards came under the leadership of novelist Émile Zola, but it was well after Dreyfus' second trial before most educated French opinion came to see the truth of how Dreyfus had been railroaded. (Zola quipped that the original Dreyfusard party could be fit into a small room.) Educated persons outside of France were, on the whole, more sympathetic to his plight - they could see more clearly the conflict between democratic-republican France (exemplified by an emancipated Jew falsely accused of treason) and the heavily reactionary French military, which had never reconciled itself to the post-1789 world.*

Lessons today? The one Professor Dershowitz wants us to learn is that we should doubt the conviction of anyone on trial for anything. But - sorry, Alan - that's not the point. (The exhibit features his disembodied head and voice droning on about such things.) The most striking facet of the scandal to the modern eye is the largely negative and sensationalistic role played by the then-new mass media in their graphical, dumbed-down form, featuring crude antisemitic cartoons and the like. The French mass media, too, was slow to come around to Dreyfus' innocence. The point about miscarriages of justice is not that everyone accused is innocent - we have trials to make that determination - but that crimes and trials can be expressions of larger political conflicts, ones in which individual innocence and guilt don't matter. There was a guilty officer in this case, but it was Esterhazy. He came precisely from the reactionary aristocratic class mentioned earlier. Beyond simple personal sympathy for Dreyfus, it is this conflict that energized Zola, who had a remarkable intuition of the dangers posed by an official institution so antagonistic to the larger public order and society. The hostile ambivalence that this class felt toward the French republic was to show its full face in the 1930s, culminating in the disgrace of defeat and surrender to Germany in 1940, followed by the Vichy episode. This anti-patriotic Right was hostile enough to France itself, that they felt, better to be ruled by the Germans than by some damned - **

At the top of the list of striking continuities remains the immense power and usefulness of antisemitism: it's the rocket fuel of a certain type of ugly politics. The Dreyfus affair began shortly after the rise of the first modern antisemitic parties in Austria, Germany, and France, in the 1870s and 1880s. Antisemites repeatedly attribute to Jews a preternatural power of protean shape-shifting - "rootless cosmopolitanism" it was to be called in Stalinist Russia. But the most striking protean power is antisemitism itself. Sometimes used by the 19th century Left to agitate against the mysteries of international finance and the then-new commercial society, it proved useful to reactionary classes of the late 19th century, who then passed it on to a new force, the antisemitic populism that succeeded the old politics of aristocracy with an anti-democratic but mass politics of agitation and bigotry.† The most successful practitioner of this politics would turn out to be Hitler, but junior versions of the same type appeared all over Europe in the generation before 1914 and became a dominant force in the interwar years. While the Left belatedly joined the Dreyfusards by the time of his exoneration, it largely felt out of tune with a middle-class republic and typically middle-class concepts like individual guilt and innocence, as well as Zola's intense patriotism and love of republican France. And, while modern, political Zionism was already in existence by that point, the impact of the Dreyfus case on Theodor Herzl, visiting from Vienna, sent him in a new and unexpected direction: the realization that Jews were not just a religion, but a people as well.

Antisemitism of course has moved on since 1945 to new forms. Within the Western world today, its main carriers are to be found on the Left, who, like those displaced and resentful French aristocrats of a century ago, resent the nature and evolution of modern capitalist society and global civilization. As always, it's starts with a need for scapegoats and reaches its climax with a general crisis of society or civilization - it's really not about Jews. It never is.

Dreyfus was finally exonerated in 1906. He went on to serve in French military ministries at the cabinet level and then with distinction on the western front in 1914-18, along with millions of French and German troops, counting many thousands of Jewish soldiers and officers among them on both sides. But that's another story.
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* It was amusing to read the reaction of the overwhelmingly pro-Dreyfus British and American educated classes to the obvious injustice of the Dreyfus case - the Anglo-Saxon tendency to view the French as "degenerate" and "perverse" has a long history :)

One imaginative artist's sketch from 1896 has the military court sitting under a large painting of Jesus on the cross. At first, you might think this is supposed to symbolize the hyper-Catholic class dominating the proceedings. But it's really one railroaded innocent Jew looking down on another. It was probably understood that way at the time.

** The last French prime ministers before the German invasion in 1940 were Léon Blum, a French-Jewish socialist, and Édouard Daladier, leader of the middle-class Radicals - not the "right sort of the people," in either case.

There's no real analogue in American experience to a large political force of this type, except in some respects the wave of nostalgia that swept over the South after the Civil War. The admittedly tiny fringe of the "militia movement" of the 1990s might fit: intensely racist, believing in an America that's never existed, hating the actual one.

† It would be wrong to view the French aristocracy and Church as uniformly opposed to the Republic, the 1789 revolution, and its emancipation of the French Jews. After all, the earliest stages of revolution were led precisely by liberal aristocrats and clerics. While the middle class was the backbone of the revolution and the peasants and working classes its foot soldiers, these aristocrats and clerics had something the toiling classes lacked, which were leisure and contemplation. They were pivotal in the spread of the Enlightenment, and the modern world is profoundly in their debt.

More blogosphere incest

Oh the sheer deliciousness of it .... Solomonia now posts on the Boston blogger meeting I posted on earlier.

And thanks to everyone who stopped by in the last couple days! Read on.

The bloggers' coven

So there we all were, a generation lost in ... Blogistan, or something. Some decidedly dissident bloggers of the Boston area met tonight in an undisclosed location, and I had the distinct pleasure of meeting the people behind these outstanding sites, whom I now count as friends:

• Solomonia (who made it all possible)
  
• The Augean Stables
• Libertarian Leanings (runs Chris Muir's Day by Day, which is A-OK in my book :)
  
• JihadWatch
• Miss Kelly
• Neoneocon
• Sisu
• Boston Maggie
  

Apologies to bloggers present whom I overlooked!

To start with, we all laughed ourselves silly by reciting out loud Iowahawk's priceless parody (but is it?) of the current Archbishop of Canterbury and his take on the rise of shari'a in Britain. It's a rewrite of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and not to be missed, especially its surprise ending:

Whan in Februar, withe hise global warmynge
Midst unseasonabyl rain and stormynge
Gaia in hyr heat encourages ....

On a more serious note, we discussed the provocative and controversial short movie Fitna, which has led to death threats for Dutch filmmaker Geert Wilders. We also discussed the larger problem in Europe of developing a consistently non-supremacist approach to opposing the rise of shari'a. There is a wing of the European right with a questionable past and questionable present-day democratic credentials, and who are opposed to Muslim immigration altogether - they were mentioned here last year and denounced perhaps unfairly in overly-sweeping terms. The problem is that serious and difficult issues like this are still often avoided by Europe's mainstream parties, leaving fringe parties to capitalize on them.

Finally, I must mention that the divine Sisu, Mr. Libertarian Leanings, and I had a lengthy discussion on climate. My contribution, besides trying my best to be the evening's instant expert on the subject, was to mention the two most important recent popular books on the subject:

• Essex and McKitrick's Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy, and Politics of Global Warming, revised edition out last fall. It's not available through any US outlet, but the Canadian Amazon has it (click link).
  
  
• Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It!, which I have not read, but keep hearing good things about.

Sisu has an excellent recent posting on temperature and ice trends in Antarctica, which not only continue to track colder and colder, but just this past year, have gone more in that direction than any year recorded. In a rational world, that decisively stop the "global warming" insanity cold, if you'll excuse the expression. Whatever's going on in the Asian/Pacific Arctic, isn't global - it's local.

POSTSCRIPT: Minor updates today - thanks for comments!

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Or, Evacuation Day here in Boston :)

Toppa the morning to you!

Solomonic wisdom

There are others of us here in Beantown. Do not miss Martin Solomon's Solomonia blog.

Plus, it's updated more often than this one! :)

(Hat tip to Charles Jacobs and the David Project, another fine Boston institution.)

O the humanity ...

Wasn't there supposed to be some kind of victory parade today in Boston, or something ... oh, yeah ... hmm ....

It's raining cold and hard.

Peering into the liberal sandbox

"I was in Dorchester not long ago," Mitt Romney said in his closing statement in the fall of 1994 debate for Senator against incumbent Ted Kennedy. "Someone said, `This is Kennedy country.' ... "And I looked around and I saw boarded-up buildings and ... jobs leaving, and I said, `It looks like it.' "

And Dorchester (South Boston) hasn't changed much since then.

Friends sometimes ask me about Massachusetts politics, especially since former governor Romney is running for President. Here's the stuff they leave out of the Boston Globe.

It's a strange state: the country's most left-wing in some respects, much of its Democratic base consists of "yellow dogs," not liberals. But the state's political cultural is dominated by bleeding hearts and has been seriously dysfunctional for decades. The worst excesses of Kennedy-Johnson era liberalism were checked in a modest way in the 1980s by Dukakis, then later, in a more serious way, by a series of reasonably good liberal Republican governors. But Romney's early departure from the state for national politics left the Republicans without a viable candidate for 2006, and the governorship was captured by outsider Deval Patrick, the Democratic nominee.

Like Lousiana, Massachusetts is one of the last states in the country governed by a long-lived one-party machine not far removed from the days of patronage corruption. The once-fabled Massachusetts liberalism was really just an attempt to expand the list to include those, like blacks and Hispanics, once excluded from the patronage gravytrain. The more fundamental challenge, frontally attacking the lavish spending and burdensome regulation that makes Massachusetts one of the country's most expensive places to live in, has largely been avoided. But facing it would do far more good for everyone - the overtaxed middle class, working class folks facing an almost-impossible cost of living - than yet more spending. Patrick has attacked older forms of patronage, but he is a big friend of the newer types of pork, like his unnecessary billion-plus-dollar biotech initiative. And it's not even aimed at poor people any more; now it's the political class splurging on itself and its friends - because, you know, they deserve it. Exhibit A is the 16-year-long saga of the Big Dig, which will probably never be finished and still doesn't work properly. Its price: enough money to build twice over enough public housing for every poor person in the state.

No one knows the foibles of Massachusetts' weird upper-crust liberalism - making the "classes" feel good about themselves, while making life nearly impossible for the "masses" - than Jon Keller, author of The Bluest State: How Democrats Created the Massachusetts Blueprint for American Political Disaster. His blog for local broadcaster WBZ is a must-read for anyone interested in Massachusetts politics and the Democratic Party.

Recent Democratic electoral successes in no way invalidate his analysis: those are entirely due to the Republicans' own mistakes, not to any Democratic strength. Keller, himself left-of-center, knows as only an insider can what's wrong with the Democratic party: it's lost touch with ordinary voters in a frenzy of trendy causes, generational vanity, and hypocritical paternalism. Everyone else gets stuck with the bill. And then the voters: Massachusetts voters lack serious alternatives, yet react timidly when they appear. Not that there aren't signs Massachusetts is restless.

Armenians, Turks, Israelis, and Jews II

It would better if Turkey had continued its pre-1990s attitude of ambiguity towards the Ottoman empire and its final decades as "the sick man of Europe." That would at least make a good starting point towards recognition of what the wartime Ottoman government attempted and partly succeeded in doing, and why.

But that was not to be. In the last 15 years, Kemalism has suffered not only attacks from the outside (from the Islamic forces that deny nationalism, secularism, and republicanism), but also from an internal identity crisis. Instead of reaffirming Ataturk's basic commitment of Turkey toward a European future, Turkey's secular elites have fallen into a powerful Ottoman nostalgia, lamenting the empire's final days as a vanished golden era of Turkish power. It is not Kemalism that is the problem, but the abandonment of it. Turkey's elites are now in the grips of a romantic swoon - like Gone with the Wind - with the usual highly selective historical memory.

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What about the Kurds? The Kurds are a Muslim, but Indo-European, people who speak a language closely related to Farsi (Persian). They live mainly in the mountainous areas of northern Iraq, a tip of Syria, part of Iran, and a large chunk of mountainous eastern Anatolia. They have never had a unified state, although they have produced famous Muslim leaders such as Saladin, who defeated the Crusaders in Jerusalem in 1187.

The Kurds were vaguely promised a homeland of some sort after 1918. But the facts on ground defeated them. Iran remained independent and neutral. The largest group of Kurds, in eastern Anatolia, came under the rule of the new Turkish republic, and in a strange status, as Muslims but not Turks. The second-largest group of Kurds, centered around Mosul and Kirkuk, were reluctantly herded by Britain, the new Mandatory power under the League of Nations, into what became Iraq. The Kurds of Turkey have suffered from second-class status ever since. The Kurds of Iraq, in recent decades, suffered not just from second-class status, but savage persecution under Saddam, including chemical gassing toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980s.*

The more radical Kurds in Turkey formed a Marxist-oriented guerilla movement (the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK) that started to revolt against the Turkish state in the 1970s. After the Cold War ended, the PKK lost its old sponsor (the Soviets) and needed a new one. There is circumstantial, but strong, evidence that this new sponsor is - no surprise - Iran. The recent PKK incursions into Turkey (clearly modeled on Hizbollah's attack on northern Israel in June 2006) are designed to provoke Turkey into invading northern Iraq the same way that Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006. In this view, which is probably right, Tehran has an opportunity to create a new international crisis, not only for the US, but to divert attention from its nuclear weapons program - not that different from the Cartoon Jihad of early 2006.

The Turkish Kurds still have grievances, although the post-Cold War period did see a large improvement for them. They were allowed some degree of linguistic and cultural autonomy, although not self-government. That liberalization has petered out, because it ran into more and more resistance from Turkish elites and ordinary Turks in the street.

One final twist: the Kurds and the Armenians hate each other.

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What to do? Look at the Israeli attitude. At a human level, free of official obligations, everyone in Israel knows what happened to the Armenians: you merely have to walk around the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem and talk to descendants of survivors. It's a ritual Israelis know well in another context. The newspapers certainly have no difficulty talking about it. But the Israeli ambassadors have a tougher job. Turkey is a key ally of Israel, while the present country of Armenia has formed a strange alliance with Syria and Iran. So on a official level, Israeli governments maintain a careful ambiguity whenever this issue comes up.

Successive American governments have to do the same: Turkey is a key ally in the Middle East and a member of NATO. The US officially backs Turkey's membership in the European Union. Hence the manifesto from the Secretaries of State and Defense. This in spite of the fact that, over the last 15 years, Turkey has developed some nasty new strains of anti-Americanism and antisemitism and is facing apparently insuperable obstacles to its full membership in the EU.

But that doesn't mean people can't know what they know on an everyday level, even if they oppose something as in-your-face as the recent Congressional resolution. There are other ways to work on this problem without turning it into diplomatic high explosive. David Harris, the American Jewish Committee's executive director, explains:

From my experience in tackling difficult relationships, I believe that engagement, not avoidance, is the best strategy. In a perfect world, Armenian and Turkish historians would sit together and review the archival material, debate differences, and seek a common understanding of the past. To date, that hasn’t happened in any meaningful way. I continue to hope that it will. It should. We at AJC have offered our services, if needed, to help facilitate such an encounter. Ninety years of distance ought to allow for the creation of a “safe” space to consider contested issues.

Two important Turkish writers, the novelist Orhan Pamuk and the historian Taner Akcam, have written and spoken at length about the Ottoman empire's final agony and what happened to its Armenians; both now face official prosecution and freelance death-threats for their pains. And it's important to recognize that the problem, while exacerbated by the Iraq war, is not American: Turkey's strange drift and regression result from an internal crisis. The Armenian genocide of 1915-17 is a fact; acknowledgment by Turkey of that fact won't happen unless the more basic crisis of Turkish national identity is constructively resolved. Otherwise, Congressional resolutions will mean nothing. The ruling Justice and Development Party, suspected by many of being crypto-Islamist, is a better bet here than the bankrupt Kemalist elite. Although supporting the JDP involves some risks, better a moderate religious party committed to democracy than decayed imperial stench and a heavy whiff of fascism.

Hrant Dink, an Armenian-Turkish journalist, one of the few Armenians left in Turkey, was assassinated earlier this year by a pan-Turkish fanatic. His funeral was attended by tens of thousands, mostly Turks. He once said he'd rather live in a democratic Turkey that had a hard time admitting the truth about the Armenian genocide, than in an autocratic Turkey that pushed some kind of "official line" on the subject, even if it happened to be the truth.

What Dink was saying was that "official history," like "official science," is a dangerous business. History, like science, works from the bottom up, not from the top down. To acknowledge facts on an individual level is one thing; to manufacture history like a political platform is a dead-end. It serves neither historical truth, nor the dead, nor the living.**

POSTSCRIPT: The national ADL's position has always been to avoid the word "genocide" in discussing the Ottoman Armenians and try to avoid the subject altogether. The New England ADL, facing criticism from local Jewish, Armenian, and human-rights groups, rejected the view of the national ADL, which then fired its New England regional director. (The Boston area has a significant Armenian diaspora, partly from those who fled the Ottomans during and after the Great War.) Eventually, the national ADL changed its view somewhat, but only under intense pressure.

The ADL's national director, Abe Foxman, later complained bitterly about what he viewed as the mistaken "idealism" of other Jewish groups, their refusal to play realpolitik. Undoubtedly, Foxman has a point, and he seems to view himself as the only adult in the room, so to speak. Some have tried to portray this as a conflict between promoting "interests" versus promoting "values." And really, given that choice, who wants to be on the side of "values" - politics is about interests, not values, right?

But the deeper issue here does involve Jewish interests. A world in which genocide is practiced, then ignored and denied - and the ignoring and the denial are essential to the practice - is a dangerous world for Jews, any ethnic or religious minority, and anyone who cares about freedom and human life. As the AJC's David Harris put it,

... as the issue once again heats up in the United States, it’s important to be clear. In a book entitled Holocaust Denial, published by the American Jewish Committee in 1993, the author, Kenneth Stern, an AJC staff expert on the subject, noted: “That the Armenian genocide is now considered a topic for debate, or as something to be discounted as old history, does not bode well for those who would oppose Holocaust denial.”

He was right. Picture a day when a muscle-flexing Iran or Saudi Arabia seeks to make denial of the Holocaust a condition of doing business with other countries. Sound far-fetched? It shouldn’t.

We have many interests as a Jewish people. Protecting historical truth ought to be right up there near the top of the list.

Final thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson.

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References

Some standard references in English in print today on the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians, and World War One. Fromkin and Power make extensive use of contemporary and pre-war documents, both published and unpublished, which are not lacking on these topics.

~ Winston S. Churchill, The Aftermath (1929; supplementary volume to The World Crisis: 1911-1918), covers the period 1918-24 in connection to British policy and the Anglo-Greek war against the Turks in great detail. He includes the unforgettable story of how a monkey's bite killed the King of Greece and many more besides. Churchill was both a participant in and an important historian of these events. It covers much else as well, such as the Russian Civil War and the Anglo-Irish and Irish Civil Wars of the same post-1918 period.

~ Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (1941). Published the week Italy and Germany invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, this monumental treatment of the Balkans and modern Yugoslavia is the greatest English-language work of contemporary history of the last century. Along the way, West is detailed and damning about the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires, their final decades of rapacity and oppression, and the huge mess they left behind when they imploded. Her book has had no equal since, but Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts is a fitting sequel, paying repeated tribute to its model, and, like West's book, informs its readers of far-off places of which they knew nothing.

~ David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (1989), covers the period 1912-1924, with the greater Middle East (including Turkey and Central Asia) as the geographic frame. Best recent one-volume treatment; indispensable.

~ Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (2002), covers the major genocides of the last century, from the Armenians in the First World War to Kosovo in the late 1990s; also indispensable.

~ Accounts devoted to the Armenian genocide itself include the books of Graber, Melson, and Balakian. There is also the once-famous novel of Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1934), still worth reading and still shocking.

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* This episode is also covered in Power's book.

Even the Arabs, Muslim but not Turkish, got a nationalist movement in World War One, although ironically, they were the last Ottoman group to do so - undoubtedly because they were Muslim and the majority and thus had the least incentive to revolt.

** Bush complained recently, in connection with the Congressional resolution, that he can't be put into the position of sorting through the Ottoman empire's history. It's hard not to sympathize - that's too much homework for anyone. Clinton had Yugoslavia, and Bush lept half-blindfolded into Iraq. One leftover Ottoman mess per presidency is enough.

Congratulations Sox!

One of us here lives in Boston and can't escape the euphoria. Seems less edgy this time, compared to three years ago, but still .... The thirty-six-month long curselet has been lifted!

POSTSCRIPT: Someone proposed to clone the Babe and make the Red Sox champions forever. My proposal is more ambitious: clone all of baseball's past greats from DNA and create the ultimate fantasy baseball team. They can play at ... Fenwassic Park!

Another something very cool

That would be the Giza Archives Project, which is storing and making available tens of the thousands of documents from almost a century of archeology at the Giza Plateau, home of Egypt's pyramids. It's a joint project of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard University.

POSTSCRIPT: Are there too many amateur archeology crackpots out there? That's what Eric Cline of George Washington University thinks (requires registration). Amateurs can contribute a lot to archeology, as they still do to astronomy - it's not, and probably never will be, a fully professionalized subject. But there's no substitute for doing your homework - and eating your broccoli :)

A look back at Hopper

A short tribute to American artist Edward Hopper appeared in this space a couple months ago, following the opening of the retrospective exhibit of his work at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. The retrospective is now on the road, showing currently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, then moving to Chicago's Art Institute in January. Art and culture critic Martha Bayles of Boston College has written her own tribute to Hopper as a review of the exhibit.

The theme in her tribute is "painter of light," and that Hopper certainly is. Bayles' perceptive realization is that Hopper was a painter of light - the real thing and very difficult to capture on the canvas - and of not lighting. No one who has seen his paintings in the original can disagree. The origin of Hopper's early mastery of light is his native New England summers and autumns. This light is brilliant for a few months, but becomes unique in its mixture of shallow angle and distinctive landscape in fall and early winter.

The most common perception of Hopper's paintings is their strikingly absence of people in some cases, and their apparent alienation and lack of connectedness in others. All of them seem to be listening to something, but not to each other or to us. They also communicate a very American sense of transience and alienation. A sense of openness and possibility, but with people never seeming to quite fit in, is American as apple pie, although Americans often have a hard time recognizing it - Europeans and others usually sense it more quickly. It's a similar quality that Dvořák captured in the slow movement of his Ninth Symphony (From the New World). Amid the famous spiritual and Indian chant melodies, the movement unwinds into a musical "night on the plains," with its bright stars, distant lights and trains - and no one for miles.

If you're in Washington or Chicago during the Hopper retrospective, don't miss it.