- Foucault in California, dropping acid Eric Bulson, Times Literary Supplement
- Tiananmen and the New Authoritarianism Ian Johnson, New York Review of Books
- Is philosophy conservative or progressive? Matt McManus, Areo
- David Hume’s book burning bonfire Nick Nielsen, The View from Oregon
Nightcap
- When Europeans came to Asian shores Chris Nierstrasz, Aeon
- The origins of the military-intellectual complex Daniel Bessner, New Republic
- Notes from the Islamic Republic of Iran Bill Merritt, Liberty
- Switzerland’s little-known fifth language Molly Harris, BBC
Nightcap
- Monarchy in American political thought Zach Bates, JHIBlog
- Make school hard again John Nye, Reason
- Nationalism’s dividends Liah Greenfeld, American Affairs
- Lysistrata among the hippies Titus Techera, Law & Liberty
Nightcap
- Enchiladas, a culinary monument to colonialism Alexander Lee, History Today
- The Marginal Revolutionaries of Austria-Hungary Tyler Cowen, MR
- The other side of British India Soni Wadhwa, Asian Review of Books
- Old Tokyo, time telling, and the Chinese zodiac Claire Kohda Hazelton, Spectator
Nightcap
- Clarence Thomas and abortion Corey Robin, Crooked Timber
- NYC’s war on Asian children Dennis Saffran, City Journal
- Race, racism, and the law in America Jacques Delacroix, NOL
- How often has the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal law? Keith Wittington, Volokh Conspiracy
Will the conservatives usher in a federal Europe?
Bill Wirtz does a great job reporting, in the American Conservative, on recent developments in European politics. Basically, the “populists,” who are socially conservative by European standards and anti-immigrant, are not actually opposed to the European Union. In fact, these right-wing parties are building international coalitions as you read this in order to better wield the dormant power of the EU; nobody is “actively seeking to leave the EU.”
Wirtz concludes that the anti-immigrant populist parties will spell the end of the European Union as we know it, but how can this be if these populists now want to use the EU rather than leave it? Wirtz is a great reporter but I think he wanted to mock Europhiles and the dreams of Euro-federalists rather than think things through. I’m happy to pick up where he leaves off, though.
For example, what if these populists succeed in federating Europe, rather than breaking it up? It’s not as radical as it sounds. The populists are small-d democrats. The populists are actively working with each other in an internationalist framework. The populists share the same anti-immigrant goals. The populist parties of Europe share the same opinion of Western civilization and believe their way of life is under threat. The populists realize that the EU can help them achieve their goals, and they share an affinity for some semblance of local (“national”) sovereignty. The ideological underpinning of these populist parties seems to be, then, that their way of life – their freedom – is under threat, and that they are not united and therefore susceptible to outside threats, and that the European Union is a great way to help them achieve some semblance of unity and security. Why not federate? Why not cure the mischiefs of faction?
Conservatives have a long track record of supporting radical change if it suits their worldview, too. The best example of this in politics is Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian diplomat who patched together a unified German state in a federal manner, but you don’t have to stop there. Examples abound everywhere.
The populists and could-be federalists aren’t going to usher in a new era of fascism, either. Today’s anti-immigrant sentiments are very different from the anti-Semitism that has plagued Europe for centuries. While I am disappointed that the European elections were essentially won by the anti-immigration faction, I am not surprised. I would not be surprised, either, to see a strong federalist push by these populists.
Nightcap
- Oakeshott versus the American Originalists David Glasner, Uneasy Money
- The limits of common sense Charlotte Allen, Law & Liberty
- Woah. Catherine Kim, Vox
- Getting to definitions and then getting beyond them Nick Nielsen, Grand Strategy Annex
Economists, Economic History, and Theory
We can all come up with cringeworthy clichés for why history matters to society at large – as well as policy-makers and perhaps more infuriatingly, to hubris-prone economists:
- to understand the present, we need to know where we came from
- history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes!
- “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
- it broadens your horizon, allows you to “zoom out“, “see the bigger picture” and draw parallels to what came before.
And we could add the opposite position, where historical analysis is altogether irrelevant for our current ills, where This Time Is completely Different and where we naively disregard all that came before us.
My pushback to these positions is taken right out of Cameron & Neal’s A Concise Economic History of The World and is one of my most cherished intellectual guidelines. The warning appears early (p. 4) and mercilessly:
those who are ignorant of the past are not qualified to generalize about it.
We can also point to some more substantive reasons for why history matters to the present:
- Discontinuities: by studying longer time period, in many different settings, we get more used to – and more comfortable with – the fact that institutions, routines, traditions and technologies that we take for granted may change. And do change. Sometimes slowly, sometimes frequently.
- Selection: in combination with emphasizing history to understand the path dependence of development, delving down into economic history ought to strengthen our appreciation for chance and randomness. The history we observed was but one outcome of many that could have happened. The point is neatly captured in an obscure article of one of last year’s Nobel Prize laureates, Paul Romer: “the world as we know it is the result of a long string of chance outcomes.” Appropriately limiting this appreciation for randomness is Matt Ridley’s rejection of the Great Man Theory: a lot of historical innovations seems to have been inevitable (When Edison invented light bulbs, he had some two dozen rivals doing so independently).
- Check On Hubris: history gives us ample examples of similar events to what we’re experiencing or contemplating in the present. As my Glasgow and Oxford professor Catherine Schenk once remarked in a conference I organized: “if this policy didn’t work in the past, what makes you think it’ll work this time?”
History isn’t only a check on policy-makers, but on ivory-tower economists as well. Browsing through Mattias Blum & Chris Colvin’s An Economist’s Guide to Economic History – published last year and has been making some waves since – I’m starting to see why this book is quickly becoming compulsory reading for economists. Describing the book, Colvin writes:
Economics is only as good as its ability to explain the economy. And the economy can only be understood by using economic theory to think about causal connections and underlying social processes. But theory that is untested is bunk. Economic history provides one way to test theory; it forms essential material to making good economic theory.
Fellow Notewriter Vincent Geloso, who has contributed a chapter to the book, described the task of the economic historian in similar terms:
Once the question is asked, the economic historian tries to answer which theory is relevant to the question asked; essentially, the economic historian is secular with respect to theory. The purpose of economic history is thus to find which theories matter the most to a question.
[and which theory] square[s] better with the observed facts.
Using history to debunk commonly held beliefs is a wonderful check on all kinds of hubris and one of my favorite pastimes. Its purpose is not merely to treat history as a laboratory for hypothesis testing, but to illustrate that multitudes of institutional settings may render moot certain relationships that we otherwise take for granted.
Delving down into the world of money and central banks, let me add two more observations supporting my Econ History case.
One chapter in Blum & Colvin’s book, ‘Money And Central Banking’ is written by Prof. John Turner at Queen’s in Belfast (whose writings – full disclosure – has had great influence on my own thinking). Focusing on past monetary disasters and the relationship between the sovereign and the banking system is crucial for economists, Turner writes:
We therefore have a responsibility to ensure that the next generation of economists has a “lest we forget” mentality towards the carnage that can be afflicted upon an economy as a result of monetary disorder.” (p. 69)
This squares off nicely with another brief article that I stumbled across today, by banking historian and LSE Emeritus Professor Charles Goodhart. Lamentably – or perhaps it ought to have been celebratory – Goodhart notes that no monetary regime lasts forever as central banks have for centuries, almost haphazardly, developed their various functions. The history of central banking, Goodhart notes,
can be divided into periods of consensus about the roles and functions of Central Banks, interspersed with periods of uncertainty, often following a crisis, during which Central Banks (CBs) are searching for a new consensus.”
He sketches the pendulum between consensus and uncertainty…
…and suddenly the Great Monetary Experiment of today’s central banks seem much less novel!
Whatever happens to follow our current monetary regimes (and Inflation Targeting is due for an update), the student of economic history is superbly situated to make sense of it.
Nightcap
- The trend of economic thinking F.A. Hayek, Economica
- Against moderate politics Jason Sorens, Cato Unbound
- Socialist fantasies Sarah Skwire, EconLog
- “From the ashes, modernity arose, but at a cost” Thomas Lecaque, Age of Revolutions
Nightcap
- Proving Einstein right on relativity Matthew Stanley, Aeon
- Alethic relativism and modern physics Bill Rein, NOL
- Central banks’ forecasts are basically garbage Joakim Book, Mises Wire
- Killing Pax Americana Paul Krugman, New York Times
Nightcap
- Michael Pollan interview on psychedelics Fresh Air
- Spinelli vs. Hayek Federico Ottavio Reho, EPICENTER
- The Rock Art of Malarrak Archaeology
- How Islam shaped the West Rowan Williams, New Statesman
History and Philosophy of Science
Disclaimer: I’m not a philosopher of science by training, but I occasionally play one in the classroom.
The above playlist is* an excellent overview to the issues surrounding the question, “How do you know?”
I first stumbled into the topic of the philosophy of science (PS) as an undergrad at San Jose State. I was required to take an upper-division general elective class from a list of what seemed like tree-hugging indoctrination courses. I don’t remember what the other options were, but this class was probably the most important class I’ve ever taken.
This spring I taught “Modern Economic Theory” which I twisted into a mix of PS and History of Economic Thought. The biggest lesson I wanted to convey was: there are no right answers, there are lots of wrong answers, and our task is to seek the less wrong answers.
From my syllabus:
I hope to convince you of two big ideas:
1. There are no “right answers” but there are plenty of wrong answers.
2. What we know about the world rests on a foundation of received wisdom. And that foundation isn’t always as solid as we’d hope.
The video playlist above does a nice job of shedding light on how and which science is difficult. There is surely some objective truth to the universe, but it’s bigger than we can fit in our limited brains. Trying to understand our universe requires a heavy dose of humility, lest we impose grand plans that make things worse.
*As far as I know… a) See the disclaimer at the top. b) There’s an inescapable irony here. Science is fundamentally about uncertainty, so even if I was a philosopher of science, I wouldn’t be in a position to guarantee anything. See Feyerabend for more details.
Nightcap
- Not In My Backyard and “Buy Local” hypocrites Farhad Manjoo, New York Times
- Why the American Left should not go socialist Joseph Stiglitz, Foreign Policy
- Who was Maxwell Taylor? (Cold War) Gregory Daddis, War on the Rocks
- The lure of Western Europe Anne Applebaum, New York Review of Books
Nightcap
- Just another story about a UCLA Bruin Wayne Drehs, ESPN
- A history of black voting rights in the US Pippa Holloway, Origins
- What is origin of China’s success? Branko Milanovic, globalinequality
- One final look at the Heisei Era Alex Martin, Japan Times
“Extreme” abortion laws
You know the story: Alabama, Georgia, Missouri and other states are competing for the strictest anti-abortion laws in recent memory. “Heartbeat bills” are rising, and millennials and younger that grew up only knowing the safety of Roe v. Wade fear its inevitable overturn. Pelosi clarifies that one does not have to be pro-choice to run Democrat. The pot of left-of-center young adults that gradually bubbles socialist renounces centrism for failing to fight this reinvigorated war on women and reproductive rights. The leftists want to kill more children, and face no timely restrictions at all on turning their womb into a uterine death chamber. Also, this is all Trump’s fault.
Or so everyone is saying about each other.
Of all the hot issues where the principle of charity is ceremoniously burnt alive in public theater, abortion stands out as the most sulfuric: “old white Christian men” want to “control women’s bodies” and make them “sexually subservient to the law” by “setting us centuries back”; alternatively, “irresponsible juveniles” want to “have sex without any consequences” by getting “abortion on-demand” and “killing babies at will.” In reality, the pro-life camp is a wide demographic pool, male and female, theist and atheist, old and young, white and not, that doesn’t give a fuck about what you do — in fact, they really seem to just not want to hear about it — as long as you’re not killing children (in their eyes), and the pro-choice people are motivated, in their most vocal advocates, by stories not of free love and reckless abandon but horror, shame, pain, trauma over their experiences with abortion in its current shackles… (in their eyes).
People are good, mostly, but the most antagonistic and moronic take the spotlight instead of the good faith representatives. Abortion is a debate between two people that hate each other but don’t have a shared language to reconcile their differences. And like the rest of political warfare, the fractures build new pits in the bipartisan schism; if abortion is Ares, then racism and sexism are its Phobos and Deimos.
Although I lean heavily on the side of choice, my peers expose their bubble by labeling some of the recent proposed litigation as “extreme.” None of it is extreme with sympathy to the opposing worldview. To the other side, we, the people with “the right ideas,” have had it extremely in our favor for a long time.
Texas recently introduced a bill transitively allowing the death penalty for women who get abortions (by allowing the conviction of homicide, which can be issued the death penalty in Texas). The pro-choice reaction to this is disbelief, a harbinger of a new Dark Ages, domestic terrorism by conservatives: extremism. I had a fruitful conversation on Facebook about the fringeness of this belief. It’s not fringe of a position at all, accepting basic tenets of the pro-life philosophy.
Anti-abortionists consider abortion to be murder, and thus their reaction to abortion should, logically, be consistent with their reaction to murder. This should be true for moral and legal questions both before and after abortion. Opposition to the death penalty is mostly about jurisprudence — it takes in many factors that supervene on a million things without the slightest relation to abortion — but moral equivalencies are not.
So, IF abortion is homicide, and IF homicides can be justifiably prevented by killing the would-be murderer, THEN abortions can be justifiably prevented by killing the abortion doctor or mother to intervene.
Further, IF abortion is homicide, and IF homicides are morally punishable with the death penalty after due process, THEN abortions are morally punishable with the death penalty in the court of law.
It’s not necessary to be pro-life and require the death penalty or self-defensive killing when it comes to abortion, but it is consistent with other basic premises that many people hold. It is not extremist.
Now, there can be lots of exceptions to the conditional premises above (killing to prevent a homicide might not always be justified, etc.), but I sincerely doubt pro-lifers accept the common ones — e.g., if I wanted to kill my vegetative spouse because I don’t feel like I could take care of her, that won’t earn me any sympathies and, consistently, should not in the analogous case of abortion (accepting the premises above…).
More pro-life people should, therefore, argue the morality of murdering abortion doctors and would-be mothers; they should also see the death penalty as reasonable if they think the death penalty is already reasonable in the case of mens rea homicide. Abortion, if murder, fits homicidal criteria like premeditation, etc. If someone who is pro-life disagrees that he needs to take this stance because the question of abortion is so socially conflicted, then it probably means he himself is actually conflicted.
Posting thoughts on abortion should be more like encouraging discussion and less like summoning Cenobites. The “extremist” pro-life position outlined above that has started to surface is not “extremist” at all; it’s part of a consistent Weltanschauung completely different than mine own. The more accepted view, the Roe v. Wade decision, appears extremist to the others.
We should all seek to understand our interlocutors as fellow pilgrims on the same journey toward truth, all of us stuck applying archaic moral and scientific categories onto new problems of autonomy, all of us quietly trying to pass a conch while the megaphone of Twitter opinion screams on. Maybe the above conclusions place pro-life into a reductio, or maybe it prompts pro-choice into a more “extreme” logical position to counter. Either way, we’d be better for it, seeing each others’ views as parts of a foreign and strange, but concrete, whole, instead of the fevered, conspiratorial plans of a hostile enemy.
Notes On Liberty 