Rod Dreher's Blog, page 495

Weirder Than The Trumpening?

Even stranger than the Trumpening! (Refat/Shutterstock

I keep asking myself: What sequence of events, in all human history, was stranger, more bizarre, more tragically ridiculous than this?

— William Gibson (@GreatDismal) January 20, 2017

That a Corsican second lieutenant of artillery would defeat all the monarchies of Europe within little more than a decade. https://t.co/dgZmoeKITW

— Adrian Vermeule (@avermeule) January 20, 2017

This is a fun game. Can you think of more historically implausible events? It’s pretty amazing that a tiny Palestinian Jewish cult based on the claim that a man murdered by the state rose from the dead, and was God, had, within three centuries, displaced ancient cults that had the support of the all-powerful Empire. Even accounting for three hundred years of ferment, that’s still pretty amazing. Then again, it’s also phenomenal that a tribal religion of the Arabian desert founded by a man who claimed he had a divine vision had, within only a hundred years of his death, conquered all of the Near East, North Africa, the Iberian peninsula, and part of France before being stopped. Still, I recognize that the timeline might make it less amazing than Napoleon’s ascent.

What do you think? Put on your thinking caps.

The Trump Years: What We May Hope For

Welcome to Inauguration Day, everybody. As it happens, I will be on the road with my family for most of today, so I won’t be able to blog according to my logorrheic custom. I’ll be following Inauguration events on the car radio, though, and pulling over to post updates when I can. Please be patient with my approving comments.

The other day, I blogged on conservative writer Michael Brendan Dougherty’s fears going into the Trump presidency. Today I want to blog on the column he’s written setting out his hopes. Here’s one of them:

The post-Cold War commitment to increasing free movement of people and capital has coincided with incredible gains for those who are already successful, and stagnating wages or disappearing jobs for everyone else. It has coincided with the hollowing out of the middle class, and it goes together with the economic and cultural secession of America’s elite into a global clerical class. The left has responded with a renewed interest in socialism. The right has latched onto the nationalist populism of Trump.

It is in this nationalist populism where the Janus-faced nature of the Trump administration’s potential is apparent. Many critics want to see Trumpian populists like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller sidelined. And I have no doubt that in these men you find some of the worst of Trumpism, like a willingness to enflame racial antagonism for a political kick, and an authoritarian attitude about law and order. But these men also push most aggressively for putting “the forgotten man” at the heart of our political imagination — the men and families and entire regions that have gotten kicked in the teeth by globalization.

These populists recognize that so much of the claimed devotion to markets, private property, and entrepreneurship among Republican policymakers is a thin ideological veil covering the naked self-interest of the rich. Right-wing populists know that a government isn’t just here to protect the operating of the market, but also that it guards the social fabric. If Trumpism turns into an authoritarian nightmare domestically, it is Steve Bannon and Co. who will be to blame. But if Trumpism really will contain a substantive economic and social nationalism that reaches to all citizens, these will be the men responsible for that too.

MBD says he also has hope that Trump will institute a more sane immigration policy, and hope too (though thin) that Trump will be more dovish in foreign policy. To sum:

But in the end, after reviewing my fears (rather grave) and hopes (somewhat tentative) for the Trump administration, I have to conclude that I am pessimistic about Trump’s presidency. I lean toward my fears because I believe Trump has low character. No one who grew up in the tri-state area could think otherwise. I believe his party is undisciplined and fat. And I am pessimistic about a nation that would elect a man like this. I am pessimistic about a nation that would make Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, and then Hillary Clinton his only serious obstacles to power.

That’s my view too. Read the whole thing. I would add a couple more things.

For one, I have some hope that Trump’s court appointments will protect religious liberty; they cannot be worse than those judges who would have been appointed by Hillary Clinton. I have full confidence that his Justice Department, under Jeff Sessions, will cease and desist harassing the faithful. But the best I believe that social and religious conservatives can hope for is to be left alone. I don’t believe that the currents of late modernity that have carried our civilization to this place can be turned back. At best, we can ride them until they play themselves out, and keep ourselves from being dragged under by them. The best Trump can possibly do — and I believe this is true even if he were a saint of God — is protect our institutions for a while longer, and give us time to prepare for what’s coming.

For another, I hope that Trump will break the power of political correctness over public discourse. He’s a crude man who has violated speech norms in contemporary American life. As a conservative, I find that troubling, mostly, but he has also torn down taboos built around topics that really ought to be more discussed, if not for liberals setting the bounds of discourse. The problem with this is that Trump doesn’t understand the difference between straight talk and rudeness — and neither, increasingly, do the American people. I’m all for standing up to PC and not being intimidated by its shrill dogmatism, but if that means a cruder, nastier society, that’s a steep price to pay. This vicious little liberal brat who burned a Trump poster at a DC protest last night is the face of America today, I fear.

Still, these are my hopes. Though I’m pessimistic about nearly all of it, I may be surprised. Tell us what your hopes are. Even if you hate Trump and voted against him, is there any promise in him that you can see? What might change for the better?

UPDATE: Folks, only post if you have genuine hope that something, anything, might change for the better. I know a lot of you believe it’s going to be nothing but misery for the next four years. I respect that view, but I don’t want it on this thread.

Hollywood Vs. A Foreign Country (America)

You might want to read Todd Purdum’s long, well-reported story from Politico, about how Hollywood is freaking out over Trump, just for the big fat gob of Schadenfreude at the top. Here’s a glistening, savory morsel:

There has also been denial and cocooning, More than a few liberals report that they have faced the rise of the alt-right movement by just retreating and binge-watching the idealistic alt-reality of all seven seasons of “The West Wing.”

“My sense, in psychiatric terms, is that everybody is still ‘splitting,’” says a longtime political consultant to major entertainment figures, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to offend clients. “They’re putting the election result on the shelf and are in some kind of denial, so they can just keep putting one foot in front of the other. It came as such a huge shock. People believed, understandably enough, that everything that could be done was being done and it was being done well.”

But read on, because there’s some genuinely interesting stuff here about why the entertainment industry is the way it is — that is, why the same junk gets made over and over again. Excerpt:

A prominent network executive summed up the sense of shock in the industry to me. “One thing interesting is that people in L.A. and Hollywood, we supposedly have our finger on the pulse of the American people,” he said. “And one of the things that people feel truly rocked by now—truly rocked—is that those of us who spend our lives anticipating and understanding the tastes and the preferences of the American people suddenly have to wonder whether what we’re feeling is causing us to make, for a large part of the audience, the wrong thing. And that the agenda a lot of our creators have is a reinforcing loop of a lot of things that people have just rejected.

“Because,” the executive added, “people here exist in a closed feedback loop and writers’ rooms that are similarly liberal, where nobody voted for Donald Trump. So their feedback is completely distorted on the meaning of this, and what to do about it.”

Hollywood is always a bit surprised when a Christian-themed movie or a red-meat patriotic film like “American Sniper” becomes a hit, because such works embody a basic conservative value set that most of the industry doesn’t share.

“Everyone sits around the writers’ rooms or on a notes call and nods in agreement and that’s how we get shows like ‘Transparent’ and ‘American Crime Story,’” says Quinton Peeples, a writer and the producer of shows like Hulu’s recent Stephen King adaptation “11-22-63” and TNT’s “The Last Ship,” who also happens to be that rarity in Hollywood, a practicing Christian. “Now, I’m not arguing that’s a bad thing. I’m just pointing out how it works. Then we have a bunch of awards shows to pat each other on the back and talk about what a challenge it has been to bring the ‘truth’ to television.”

“I can’t count the times I have gone out with pitches that represent the point of view I grew up with in small-town Texas, only to find there is no appetite for something that is derisively referred to as a red state show,” Peeples adds. “Because no one can go to a kids’ birthday party over the weekend and brag about the great numbers they are getting with their ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ reboot. And at the end of the day, that’s what they want on a personal level: to have someone whisper as they pass, ‘That’s the “Black Mirror” guy.’ ”

Some people like to say that money rules the creative industry, that Hollywood will cold-bloodedly make what sells. That’s just not true. There’s a lot of status involved. I remember seeing a trailer last year for “Miss Sloane,” the political thriller starring Jessica Chastain as a heroic Washington lobbyist who advocates for universal background checks on gun buyers. Along with her scrappy band of diverse helpers, she outsmarts the wicked gun industry lobbyists. Honestly, who the heck wants to see that kind of movie? Needless to say, it bombed. But Jessica Chastain got a Golden Globe nomination, and the Alliance of Women Film Journalists nominated her for, ahem, “bravest performance.” (As opposed to all those cowardly performances?)

Media: ‘Dear America, Please Hate Us’

screen shot

That’s the headline of a Washington Post story, which begins:

Computer scientist David Gelernter, a Yale University professor who has decried the influence of liberal intellectuals on college campuses, is being considered for the role of the Donald Trump’s science adviser. Gelernter met with the president-elect at Trump Tower in New York City on Tuesday, according to press secretary Sean Spicer.

Gelernter is a pioneer in the field of parallel computation, a type of computing in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously. The programming language he developed in the 1980s, Linda, made it possible to link together several small computers into a supercomputer, significantly increasing the amount and complexity of data that computers can process. Since then he has written extensively about artificial intelligence, critiquing the field’s slow progress and warning of AI’s potential dangers.

In 1993, Gelernter was seriously injured by a letter bomb sent by Ted Kaczynski, the anti-technology terrorist known as the Unabomber.

Beyond computer science circles, Gelernter has made a name for himself as a vehement critic of modern academia. In his 2013 book, “America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats),” he condemned “belligerent leftists” and blamed intellectualism for the disintegration of patriotism and traditional family values.

So wait: this guy is a computer scientist at Yale University, a leader in his field, author of a number of books, including one on consciousness, others on computing, and one on Judaism … and he’s “fiercely anti-intellectual” because he has criticized the liberal intelligentsia? Good grief. They don’t even know what they don’t know.

Mollie Hemingway cites that and three other very recent examples in this broadside against the media. Conclusion:

If the media would like to understand why they’re not viewed as the innocent victims they believe themselves to be in their war against Trump, this tiny little sample is a good place to start.

If the media can’t be trusted to fairly report on successful governors, genius Yale professors, or Martin Luther King III, they can’t be trusted to have the emotional distance, objective aims, respect, tolerance, journalistic skills, or sanity to cover Trump himself.

A strong media is required to hold politicians accountable and help preserve a functioning republic. Our media, who are swinging wildly from eight years of sycophancy into an era of cartoonish hostility, are in no position to hold anyone accountable. This is a crisis, and one that nearly everyone except those in the media establishment and the political movement they support seems to recognize.

True, true, true. They’re making it so, so easy for Trump.

 

 

The Mathematics Of Mottramism

Over a decade ago, I Mark Cameron wrote:

I would like to propose a name for this phenomenon of inveterate support for any and all Papal actions, imputing to him wisdom and spiritual insight beyond all the Saints and Popes of past ages: Mottramism.

This takes its name, of course, from Rex Mottram, Julia Flyte’s husband in Brideshead Revisited. At one point, Rex decides to convert to Catholicism in order to have a proper Church wedding with Julia. But the sincerity of his conversion becomes suspect when he is willing to agree with any absurdity proposed in the name of Catholic authority, and shows no intellectual curiosity into its truth or falsehood. As his Jesuit instructor, Father Mowbray describes his catechetical progress:

“Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He said: ‘Just as many as you say, Father.’ Then again I asked him: ‘Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said ‘It’s going to rain’, would that be bound to happen?’ ‘Oh, yes, Father.’ ‘But supposing it didn’t?’ He thought a moment and said, “I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.’”

He doesn’t use the word, but our friend Carlo Lancellotti, a mathematics professor who comments on this blog, and who has translated the work of Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, writes today about Mottramism in the current papal court — specifically, in the public statements of Father Antonio Spadaro, a Jesuit priest who is in Pope Francis’s inner circle. Earlier this month, Fr. Spadaro tweeted:

Theology is not #Mathematics. 2 + 2 in #Theology can make 5. Because it has to do with #God and real #life of #people…

— Antonio Spadaro (@antoniospadaro) January 5, 2017

Which is true in a certain sense. God is not a divine watchmaker, after all, nor is God the sum total of a vast number of syllogisms. God is a Person (three Persons, actually). There is always a temptation among Christian intellectuals to confine God to a rationalist box. When Father Spadaro, in a previous tweet, quoted Benedict XVI saying, “God is not just mathematical reason,” this is what he’s talking about. There’s nothing objectionable about that.

But that’s not what Father Spadaro is getting at. Here’s Carlo:

Fr. Spadaro’s constant concern seems to be to fend off “rigid thought,” of which mathematics is apparently the paradigm. We must deal instead with “the real concrete historical man, each man, not the abstract one,” because the work of pastors “is not just to apply norms as something like mathematics.” We could venture that for Fr. Spadaro, mathematics symbolizes what Hegel called “Verstand”: “reason that stands,” static reason, reason that does not move with history and experience. Famously, Hegel opposed Verstand to “Vernunft”: reason that flows, reason that moves, “reasonable reason.” Indeed, Fr. Spadaro repeatedly tweets about “processes,” about “subverting conventional perceptions to bring new ones to birth,” and “delight in creative disruptions that open new possibilities.”

The Italian Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce described modernity as the victory of the “metaphysics of the primacy of becoming” over the “metaphysics of the primacy of being,” which had been first developed by the Greeks and remained prevalent during the Middle Ages. “Primacy of being” implies that human reason can perceive an uncreated, eternal order of being (just like it can contemplate mathematical truths!). Humans find their freedom by participating in this order, which delivers them from the influence of worldly powers. Conversely, under a “primacy of becoming,” truth is always historical, and human beings reach for the divine by swimming with the flow of history, which is literally the self-revelation of the spirit. In this view, the transcendent reveals itself as historical transcendence.

Carlo says that Father Spadaro (and Pope Francis, it would seem) are saying, to put it crudely, that the Church needs to change with the times for pastoral reasons. If what the Church proposes today contradicts what the Church said yesterday, then we don’t really have to worry, because God doesn’t expect mathematical precision. Thus does an unproblematic theological statement — that God is not mathematical reason — become an excuse for doing whatever we want today. The Holy Spirit is the same thing as the Zeitgeist.

Here is a powerful interview with Cardinal Caffara, one of the four signatories of the dubia, asking Pope Francis for clarification on the interpretation of his encyclical Amoris laetitia — the part concerning communion for divorced Catholics who have not received an annulment. The cardinal says “there is great confusion in the Church” over Amoris. More:

The foreword to the letter [from the four cardinals to the Pope] notes, “a grave disorientation and great confusion of many faithful regarding extremely important matters for the life of the Church.” In what do the disorientation and confusion consist, specifically? Caffarra answers:

“I received a letter from a parish priest which is a perfect snapshot of what is happening. He wrote me, ‘In spiritual direction and in confession I do not know what to say anymore. To the penitent who says to me, ‘I live in every respect as a husband with a woman who is divorced, and now I approach the Eucharist,’ I propose a path, in order to correct this situation.

But the penitent stops me and responds immediately, ‘Listen, Father, the Pope said that I can receive the Eucharist, without the resolution to live in continence.’ I cannot bear this kind of situation any longer.  The Church can ask me anything, but not to betray my conscience. And my conscience objects to a supposed papal teaching to admit to the Eucharist, under certain circumstances, those who live more uxorio [as husband and wife] without being married.’

“Thus wrote a parish priest. The situation of many pastors of souls, and I mean above all parish priests ” — observes the cardinal — “is this: they find themselves carrying a load on their shoulders that they cannot bear. This is what I am thinking of when I talk about a great disorientation.

“And I am speaking of parish priests, but many [lay] faithful are even more confused. We are talking about questions that are not secondary. It is not being discussed whether [eating] fish violates or does not violate [the law of] abstinence. These are most serious questions for the life of the Church and for the eternal salvation of the faithful. Never forget, this is the supreme law of the Church: the eternal salvation of the faithful, not other concerns. Jesus founded His Church so that the faithful would have eternal life and have it in abundance.”

The division to which Cardinal Carlo Caffarra refers originated primarily from the interpretation of the paragraphs of Amoris laetitia ranging from numbers 300 to 305. For many, including several bishops, here is found the confirmation of a change that is not only pastoral but also doctrinal. Others, however, [claim] that everything is perfectly integrated and in continuity with the previous magisterium. How does one escape from such disorientation?

[Said Caffara:] “I would specify two very important postulates. To think up a pastoral practice that is not founded and rooted in doctrine means to establish and to root pastoral practice in arbitrariness. A Church with little attention to the doctrine is not a more pastoral Church, but a more ignorant Church. The Truth of which we speak is not a formal truth, but a Truth that gives eternal salvation: Veritas salutaris [the Truth of salvation], in theological terms.

“Let me explain. There exists formal truth. For example, I want to know whether the longest river in the world is the Amazon or the Nile. It turns out that it is the Amazon River. This is a formal truth. Formal means that this knowledge does not have any relationship with the way that I can be free. Also, if the answer was the contrary, it would not change anything about the way that I can be free.

“But there are truths which I call ‘existential.’ If it is true — as Socrates had already taught — that it is better to suffer injustice than to do it, I state a truth that brings about my freedom to act in very different way than if the contrary were true.

“When the Church speaks of truth” – adds Caffara –” she speaks of truth of the second type, that which, if obeyed in freedom, produces true life. When I hear it said that it is only a pastoral change, and not doctrinal, or it is thought that that the commandment which forbids adultery is a purely positive law which can be changed (and I think that no righteous person can believe this), instead, it means to admit that yes, generally a triangle has three sides, but there is the possibility of constructing one of them with four sides. This is, I say, an absurdity. After all, as the medievals once used to say, theoria sine praxi, currus sine axi; praxis sine theoria, caecus in via [theory without practice is a chariot with no axle; practice without theory is a blind man on the road].”

A triangle with four sides. 2+2 = 5. What is at stake here? Cardinal Caffara again:

We ask Cardinal Caffarra if a certain confusion does not also arise from the conviction, deeply-rooted even among so many pastors, that conscience is a faculty to decide autonomously regarding what is good and what is evil, and that in the end, the final word belongs to the conscience of the individual.

“I retain that this is the most important point of all,” he responds. “It is where we meet and clash with the central pillar of modernity.”

That is the core of the matter here. As the cardinal says,

“These are matters of a disturbing gravity. It would elevate private judgment to the ultimate criterion of moral truth. Never say to a person: ‘Always follow your conscience’, without adding immediately and always: ‘Love and seek the truth about the good.’ You would be putting into his hands the weapon most destructive of his own humanity.”

UPDATE: Now you’ll be able to buy Vatican-issued Martin Luther stamps for mailing postcards back home from St. Peter’s Square. Wow. Just, wow.

UPDATE.1: Former blogger Mark Cameron alerts me that I was not quoting myself from all those years ago, but him. I’ve corrected the mistake above, and want to apologize unreservedly to him. It was an honest mistake.

‘Daddy Pence, Come Dance!’

Above, scenes from the gay dance party protest outside Mike Pence’s house last night in suburban Maryland. At the 17:00 mark, see the protest’s leader twerk while standing atop a truck, and lead the crowd in a chant, “Daddy Pence, come dance!”

It’s going to be a long four years.

Run, Trump! Fiona Apple Is Coming!

Fiona Apple, feminist (Featureflash Photo Agency/Shutterstock)

On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of women are expected to march in Washington after Donald J. Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. This past Tuesday, the singer-songwriter Fiona Apple gave those preparing to protest a signature chant.

The chant is on a new one-minute track called “Tiny Hands,” which repeats 10 words recorded by Ms. Apple on a phone:

“We don’t want your tiny hands/anywhere near our underpants.”

They’ll be chanting that while wearing their Pussyhats, I reckon. Wow. Just, wow. Could these irritated ladies possibly make themselves more trivial? Why yes, they can. Here in south Louisiana:

A panty-painting event is planned for Saturday at Moncus Park at the Horse Farm.

The event, Femme Puissance: Painting Panties for Protection, will be held from 8 a.m. until noon.

To see the event’s Facebook page, click here.

Lafayette artists came together to organize the event, “in solidarity with the Women’s March on D.C.,” organizers wrote.

“We will be promoting women’s equality as well as addressing other vitally important issues facing women today. We invite the public to join us in this “artistic happening” by painting on our larger-than-life pair of ladies undergarments,” organizers wrote. ” We also encourage women to showcase their undergarments in any (legal) way they like! Bring your voice, your instrument, and your creativity to stand with us for women everywhere!”

If Fiona Apple and the rest of that lot think that these forms of protest are going to do anything other than make themselves look ridiculous and harden the views of Trump supporters, they are quite deluded. It’s weird how so much left-liberal protest doesn’t seem at all aimed at changing the minds of the public, but rather in pleasing themselves and people who already agree with them.

Let me ask the room: if you were trying to come up with protest gestures and routines for the Women’s March that would stand a chance of being taken seriously, and winning the sympathies of people who are not attending the march, and not sure where they stand on the issues at stake, what would you do?

Heat And Futility

We have hardly had a winter in Louisiana. We had two cold days, but that’s it. It’s been warm here all winter long. I have spent most days in January outside in a t-shirt. It’s miserable. Mosquitoes are lingering. Nobody really likes very cold weather, I don’t suppose, but the summers are so long and punishing here that we love a respite from the heat, however short it is. This year, it hasn’t been hot, exactly, but it has been warm — so warm that it feels that we’ve not had a winter at all.

So I wasn’t all that surprised to read this news today:

Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016 — trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row.

The findings come two days before the inauguration of an American president who has called global warming a Chinese plot and vowed to roll back his predecessor’s efforts to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases.

The data show that politicians cannot wish the problem away. The Earth is heating up, a point long beyond serious scientific dispute, but one becoming more evident as the records keep falling. Temperatures are heading toward levels that many experts believe will pose a profound threat to both the natural world and to human civilization.

More:

Since 1880, NOAA’s records show only one other instance when global temperature records were set three years in a row: in 1939, 1940 and 1941. The Earth has warmed so much in recent decades, however, that 1941 now ranks as only the 37th-warmest year on record.

The modern era of global warming began around 1970, after a long stretch of relatively flat temperatures, and the past three years mark the first time in that period that three records were set in a row. Of the 17 hottest years on record, 16 have now occurred since 2000.

I feel that many of us are like the Mayor of Amity in Jaws: ignoring the threat because the cost of facing it realistically is too high.

Did you know that ExxonMobil (then just Exxon) knew about anthropogenic global warming 40 years ago? From the NY Review of Books:

In 1977, for example, an Exxon scientist named James Black gave a presentation to the company’s Management Committee. He explained, accurately, what the “greenhouse effect” is and how measurements of atmospheric CO2 that had been taken since 1957 showed it was steadily increasing. And, although emphasizing that climate science still had to deal with untested assumptions and uncertainties, he said that “current opinion overwhelmingly favors attributing atmospheric CO2 increase to fossil fuel combustion.” “Present thinking,” Black added a year later, “holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”

By 1980, a report written by Exxon’s Canadian subsidiary and distributed to Exxon managers around the world stated matter-of-factly, “It is assumed that the major contributors of CO2 are the burning of fossil fuels…and oxidation of carbon stored in trees and soil humus…. There is no doubt that increases in fossil fuel usage and decreases in forest cover are aggravating the potential problem of increased CO2 in the atmosphere.” The next year Roger Cohen, director of Exxon’s Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Laboratory, wrote in an internal memo that by 2030, projected cumulative carbon emissions could, after a delay, “produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the earth’s population).”

In 1982, Cohen added that “over the past several years a clear scientific consensus has emerged”: atmospheric CO2 would double from its preindustrial quantity sometime in the second half of the twenty-first century, producing an average increase in global temperature of three degrees Celsius, plus or minus 1.5 degrees. “There is unanimous agreement in the scientific community,” he went on, “that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth’s climate, including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere.”19

It was clear, too, what a problem these conclusions posed for the oil industry. As a 1979 Exxon memo reported,

Models predict that the present trend of fossil fuel use will lead to dramatic climatic changes within the next 75 years…. Should it be deemed necessary to maintain atmospheric CO2 levels to prevent significant climatic changes, dramatic changes in patterns of energy use would be required.

In other words, the world would have to curtail its use of fossil fuels substantially. Senior Exxon scientist Henry Shaw warned management that according to the predictions of the National Academy of Sciences, global warming, not any lack of supply, would force humankind to stop burning fossil fuels.

In 1982, an Exxon environmental affairs manager named Marvin Glaser wrote a thirty-nine-page primer on climate change that he distributed widely among management.22 It confirmed that, despite remaining points of scientific uncertainty, “mitigation of the ‘greenhouse effect’ would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.” If these weren’t achieved, Glaser warned, “all biological systems are likely to be affected” and “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered,” including an expected “dramatic impact on soil moisture, and in turn, on agriculture,” and, eventually, the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, which would flood “much of the US East Coast, including the State of Florida and Washington D.C.” He believed that “potentially serious climate problems are not likely to occur until the late 21st century,” but added, “once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.”

Read the whole thing. It shows how Exxon went from being a leader in global warming research to funding denial. It’s breathtaking stuff. But here we are today.

The last thing I want in the comments boxes is another tired war over whether or not global warming is real. We all know what each other is going to say, and we all know that nothing is going to change. The thing that stays on my mind about global warming is the fact that even if the US and Europe did everything we could to combat it, what’s to keep China and India from refusing? As economist Robert Samuelson (who is not a climate-change denier) wrote in 2014, “We have no solution,” Excerpt:

No sane government will sacrifice its economy today — by dramatically curtailing fossil-fuel use — for the uncertain benefits of less global warming sometime in the foggy future. (The focus of the U.S. global warming report on the present seems aimed at bridging this gap.)

Worse, almost all the projected increases in global emissions come from poorer countries, half from China alone. By contrast, U.S. emissions (and those of most rich nations) are projected to stay stable over the three decades. Economic growth is slowing; energy efficiency is increasing; and, in Japan and some European countries, populations are declining. Because poor countries understandably won’t abandon their efforts to relieve poverty, any further U.S. emissions cuts would probably be offset by gains in China and elsewhere. This dims their political and environmental appeal.

He’s got a very serious point: how do you convince poor and developing countries to slow down the engine of what is drawing their people out of abject misery? I’m not asking, “Should we ask them to do this?” but posing it as a question of basic politics and human nature. China’s own capital city is all but unlivable because of pollution and smog, and yet still, the Chinese factories and coal-burning plants chug on.

Are you going to be the one to tell a village full of extremely poor people in India that sorry, the manufacturing plant that might have pulled them all out of the mire is not going to be built because of global warming? You might be 100 percent right that the plant shouldn’t be built, but how do you tell the poor that — especially given that as a Westerner, you are already the beneficiary of industrialization? Serious question.

In 2015, Samuelson expanded on his point:

On climate change, curb your enthusiasm. It’s not that the recent international conference in Paris didn’t take significant steps to check global warming. It did. Nearly 200 countries committed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) from preindustrial times was reaffirmed. The trouble is that what’s being attempted is so fundamentally difficult that even these measures may be wildly unequal to the task.

What’s being attempted, of course, is the wholesale replacement of the world economy’s reliance on fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) for four-fifths of its energy. To be sure, the shift is envisioned to take decades, four or five at a minimum. Still, the vast undertaking may exceed human capability.

Hence, a conundrum. Without energy, the world economy shuts down, threatening economic and social chaos. But the consequences of climate change, assuming the scientific consensus is accurate, are also grim — from rising sea levels (threatening coastal cities) to harsher droughts (reducing food supplies).

Samuelson says he accepts the dominant scientific view about human-driven global warming, but points out that without a major technological breakthrough, we’re largely powerless to do much of anything. “The addiction to fossil fuels will triumph,” he says. More:

Despite Paris, we haven’t acknowledged the difficulties of grappling with climate change, whose extent and timing are uncertain. We invent soothing fantasies to simplify matters. The notion that the world can wean itself from fossil fuels by substituting renewables is one of these. The potential isn’t large enough.

Actual choices are harder. For example, Bryce argues that only an expansion of nuclear power could replace significant volumes of fossil fuels. But greater reliance on nuclear poses its own dangers, including the disposal of atomic waste, operational accidents and vulnerability to terrorism.

It’s true that technological breakthroughs could change this. We know what’s needed: cheaper and safer nuclear power; better batteries and energy storage, boosting wind and solar by making more of their power usable; cost-effective carbon capture and storage — making coal more acceptable by burying its carbon dioxide in the ground.

We have been searching for solutions for decades with only modest success. We need to keep searching, but without meaningful advances, regulating the world’s temperature is mission impossible.

It’s at this point that people get really mad, and accuse Samuelson of being a fatalist. But outrage does nothing to answer his point: the task is immense — scientifically and politically — and though we have to keep trying for a solution, there are no realistic ones now.

None of this is to say that Donald Trump is right about global warming, and that we should yield to his viewpoint. At what point, though, do people start to accept that this problem is only secondarily one of US political will? I mean, at what point to people start to accept that nothing serious is going to happen on the climate change front because nothing serious can happen — because of political will globally, yes, but also because the problems are, at this moment, technologically, economically, and politically impossible to solve?

That is to say, at what point does the primary focus of we who accept anthropogenic global warming go on building up community resilience for what’s to come? What would that look like?

UPDATE: A reader writes:

I work in energy and utility policy, so I’m not going to post publicly, but Samuelson makes some great points. There are a few comparisons and points I make to friends of mine that express major concern about this:

Technological Solution – If you want to deal with this, don’t go get a policy degree, get an electrical engineering degree. A decent analog to emissions-causing electric generation is the telephone landline. It’s dying off not because we banned landlines, but because the next generation of communication device became cheaper, better, and more convenient. It’s much harder, but I don’t see a lot of realistic hope on the policy/regulation front.

Developing Countries – Samuelson mentions China, India is also developing quickly, and those are just the big blocs. But grasp the scale. There are almost as many people in India without electricity as there are people in the United States (somewhere around 300 million in the Indian cause is the most recent estimate I believe). They don’t want to forgo affordable electricity (and it will have to be cheap for them to afford it – so – coal) because of some abstract notion of the temperature going up 1.5 C, or whatever an agreement in Paris targets.

Policy for developed countries – Most people when it comes down to it are more afraid of the solutions than the problem. Controlling all major CO2 emitting activities would invade so many corners of private life, it’s hard so imagine it wouldn’t cause a tidal wave of backlash in democracies.

White Genocidaires For Trump

Michael Brendan Dougherty writes this morning (from the Right, in case you don’t know his work):

But the most immediate thing to be on guard for in the new era is the way Trump inspires both supporters and opponents to abandon their moral, ethical, and professional standards and give in to their unchecked instincts to acquire power and humiliate or denigrate their perceived enemies, usually their fellow countrymen. Trump’s political success can be partly explained by the way in which America’s culture war has a logic of escalation. Trump’s presidency may see a quickening of tempo.

We are already tempted to hate and fear each other and think the worst of each other, especially as we contemplate our country through backlit screens that draw us to them by stimulating our most basic fight-or-flight instincts. The virtues of sobriety and liberality will be denigrated as liabilities by both sides in the Trump era. Expect them to become rarer and more valuable, especially when their value seems less obvious.

That’s really true. I was shocked to see the way Betsy DeVos was treated by Democrats in her Senate confirmation hearing yesterday. Elizabeth Warren refusing to shake her hand. Bernie Sanders asking her if she didn’t think that the only reason she was there is because she’s a rich person. As MBD says, this is the kind of thing Trump inspires. I’ve felt it in myself too, in both ways. If you’re honest with yourself, I bet you have too.

Look at what Jennifer Holiday suffered:

Jennifer Holliday held back tears as she opened up about the backlash she faced for initially agreeing to perform at Donald Trump’s inaugural festivities.

“I haven’t done anything to be called names,” the Tony-winning star of Broadway’s “Dreamgirls” said Tuesday on ABC’s “The View.”

Holliday said she was called the “N-word” and received death threats.

“I woke up, and there was, like, this whole thing of terrible tweets and things on my Instagram, and I was like, ‘Oh, Lord, what did I do?'” she recalled after it was announced that she was to be among the performers at the Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration.

She later pulled out of the event.

“I live a pretty reclusive life,” she told “The View” co-hosts. “You’re not on the radio, and then one morning you wake up, and everyone hates you.”

Collaborators will be shot, I guess.

Inside Higher Education writes:

Many groups of scholars and writers are planning teach-ins or readings for Friday, the day Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated as president of the United States. Others are organizing teach-ins to focus on Trump’s policies.

Some anthropologists are taking a different approach. They are planning events that day in which people — together at locations across the country or virtually connected — will read and discuss a lecture presented by Michel Foucault, the late philosopher, as part of a series he gave at the Collège de France. The lectures have been published as a book, Society Must Be Defended. The read-in idea is being backed not only by the scholars who have organized the events but by the popular anthropology blog Savage Minds and the journals American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology and Environment and Society.

I went to the original blog post at Savage Minds to learn more. Excerpts:

At most universities there have been teach-ins, learn-ins, and panels, as well as emergency meetings of departments, faculty action groups, student groups, and other concerned parties. What more can scholars do?

Since the election, one statement we have heard repeatedly from some academics, pundits, journalists, and bloggers who write about academic life, is that scholars need to somehow change what they are doing, and how they are doing it, in order to face this seemingly new political reality in the Unites States. While the latter part of this argument has been addressed by numerous scholars and activists who write and think about race, class, sexuality, and inequality more generally – with clear and compelling arguments about how this is not a “new” political reality for many but rather a kind of contemporary culmination and re-entrenchment of the structures of power and oppression that underpin the entirety of the national political project – the former part of the argument has been allowed to stand with little critique. Do we need to change what we do and not just how we do it? Not necessarily.

Of course not, professors. Don’t change a thing. You really do understand the country you live in.

While we think that all of us–scholars, activists, journalists, and concerned citizens in general–can always do better work, we worry that by focusing on needing to change what we are doing and how we are doing it we lose sight of what we already do really well. We work to understand the world through research, teaching, writing, and reading. Along with this, we produce knowledge that allows others to understand the world and to work to change it. In addition to this, many of us are also activists whose political praxis is informed by our scholarly pursuits. We are not saying that new forms of thinking and working should not be welcomed. Instead we worry about the idea that scholars are doing it all wrong, and that this is somehow connected to the results of the last election. This suggestion is dangerous and fails to acknowledge the ways in which scholarship and scholarly practice underpins some of our ability to act, react, resist, and transform.

Wait, they really wrote this. They really are going to double down.

One key part of what all scholars do is read. Reading opens new scholarly connections and understandings for us almost every day. We know and understand the world, and we create new avenues for others to know and understand the world with reference to other people’s writings and insights. For many of us, since scholars tend to also be teachers, we also use what we read every day to help our students become clear and critical thinkers. Scholars read to research and to write and to teach.

And so, what book will these anthropologists and their academic collaborators nationwide be reading to understand America and the American people at this moment in our history? Tocqueville? J.D. Vance? Of course not. They’ll read a lecture by a French postmodern philosopher:

We invite all anthropologists and others to come together to read Michel Foucault’s lecture eleven in “Society Must Be Defended” which he delivered on March 17, 1976. This lecture strikes us as very good to think with at this present point: it demands we simultaneously consider the interplay of sovereign power, discipline, biopolitics, and concepts of security, and race. In light of the current socio-political situation where the reaction to activism against persistent racism has been to more overtly perpetuate racism as political discourse, we need to remember and re-think the role of racism as central to, rather than incidental to, the political and economic activities of the state.

Well, I read lecture eleven; you can find it in PDF form here; go to page 239 for the beginning.

Here’s the short, simple version: the Western order is built on white supremacy, and is racist to its core. Oh, and that white people are going to kill everyone not like themselves. Foucault wrote:

It is at this moment that racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised modern States. As a result, the modern State can scarcely function without becoming involved with racism at some point, within certain limits and subject to certain conditions.

…

The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degen­erate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.

…

So you can understand the importance—I almost said the vital importance—of racism to the exercise of such a power: it is the pre­condition for exercising the right to kill. If the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty, or in other words, a power that has the right of life and death, wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become racist. When I say “killing,” I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.

“Political death.” Ah. If you wondered where Ta-Nehisi Coates got that stuff, there you are. One more:

So racism is bound up with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elim­ination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sov­ereign power.

So, if Hillary Clinton loses the election to Donald Trump, that means that the new president is out to kill all his opponents, indeed has killed them, in a way, by winning the election. To fight against Trump and his supporters, therefore, is necessary to save one’s life, and indeed to prevent genocide. Right? Moderation in the face of genocide is no virtue, is it? And extremism to stop genocidaires is no vice, I take it.

Some of the best minds in America are coming together on Inauguration Day to teach young people that white Republicans want to eliminate people like them. It must be true, because the authority of anthropological science says so.

This is going to a very, very bad place. Again, I agree with MBD: Trump is not innocent of this stuff either, and has in fact encouraged it and profited from it. And now it has infected the other side.

UPDATE: A surprising e-mail from a reader who deconverted from left-wing radicalism, in part by reading Foucault:

It’s extremely odd to me that the radical professors would use Foucault’s “Society Must Be Defended” as a protest against Trump as that book was actually central to my deconversion from Leftism. Early on in his lectures, Foucault traces the genealogy of the Marxist idea of class war to an idea of racial conflict that emerged in the early modern period. Basically– and keep in mind this is me as a non-historian summarizing a book by a historian of dubious integrity that I read some years ago– the idea emerged in England and France in the 17th century that society was divided into two competing race, one ruling, the other conquered.

Foucault writes “…we see it emerging roughly in the 1630s, and in the context of the popular or petit bourgeois demands that were being put forward in prerevolutionary and revolutionary England. It is in the discourse of the Puritans, the discourse of the Levellers. And then fifty years later, in France at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, you find it on the opposite side, but it is still the discourse of a struggle against the king, a discourse of aristocratic bitterness.” He then goes on to insist that he is actually praising this “discourse of race war” because “until the end of the nineteenth century, at which point it turned into a racist [in the contemporary sense] discourse– this discourse of race war functioned as a counterhistory.” If you don’t know your way around left-wing postmodern terminology, “counterhistories” are ways of retelling history to give power to the marginalized. Finally, Foucault cites a letter from Marx to Engels in which Marx writes, “You know very well where we found our idea of class struggle; we found it in the work of the French historians who talked about the race struggle.”

I’m not sure if it’s obvious how this would lead to my questioning radical leftism and eventually jumping ship to conservatism. It happened this way: I was trying to figure out why Communist revolutions always ended in genocide. This was around 2011, the year of the rise and self-immolation of Occupy, and I was also trying to figure out why Leftists so often ended up turning on each other and making use of identity politics to destroy each other. Foucault provided the missing piece of the puzzle. Marxist discourse is racist discourse, with the word “class” substituted for race. Social Justice identity politics are Marxist politics, with race edited back in, along with gender and sexuality. In another direction, the historian (also a leftist, and woman of color) Nell Irvin Painter’s book “The History of White People” helped me trace the evolution of 19th and 20th century white supremacy back through time, through the ideas of Emerson and Carlyle and to that birth of race struggle as a vessel of “popular counterhistory” that Foucault had written about. In other words, Marxist regimes commit genocide, and Social Justice Warriors assault visiting speakers on college campuses, for the same reason Andrew Jackson ordered the removal of the Cherokee Indians or General Chivington massacred the Cheyenne at Sand Creek– because they’re racists.

So maybe reading Foucault instead of listening to Trump isn’t such a bad idea.

UPDATE.2: Let me clarify: I certainly don’t believe that the left was all sunshine and cupcakes before Trump came along. No reader of this blog can think that. But it’s clear to me from Trump’s behavior — first in the way he treated his Republican competitors — that he has crossed some significant lines. And it profited him greatly to do so; that’s why he’s going to be our president as of Friday. The gloves are going to be off everywhere going forward, in a way we haven’t seen in a long, long time.

Obama Springs Transgender Traitor Spy

You have heard this by now:

President Obama on Tuesday largely commuted the remaining prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the army intelligence analyst convicted of an enormous 2010 leak that revealed American military and diplomatic activities across the world, disrupted the administration and made WikiLeaks, the recipient of those disclosures, famous.

The decision by Mr. Obama rescued Ms. Manning, who twice tried to kill herself last year, from an uncertain future as a transgender woman incarcerated at the men’s military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. She has been jailed for nearly seven years, and her 35-year sentence was by far the longest punishment ever imposed in the United States for a leak conviction.

Bradley Manning, who has declared himself a woman who goes by the name of Chelsea, is a convicted spy (he was convicted of an espionage charge, not treason). According to the Times, this is what he did:

Ms. Manning was still known as Bradley Manning when she deployed with her unit to Iraq in late 2009. There, she worked as a low-level intelligence analyst helping her unit assess insurgent activity in the area it was patrolling, a role that gave her access to a classified computer network.

She copied hundreds of thousands of military incident logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which, among other things, exposed abuses of detainees by Iraqi military officers working with American forces and showed that civilian deaths in the Iraq war were probably much higher than official estimates.

The files she copied also included about 250,000 diplomatic cables from American embassies around the world showing sensitive deals and conversations, dossiers detailing intelligence assessments of Guantánamo detainees held without trial, and a video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad in which two Reuters journalists were killed, among others.

She decided to make all these files public, as she wrote at the time, in the hope that they would incite “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.” WikiLeaks disclosed them — working with traditional news organizations including The New York Times — bringing notoriety to the group and its founder, Julian Assange.

There is a reason that Dante puts traitors in the lowest circle of the Inferno: because no one is safe if they have to worry about their own comrades betraying them to the enemy. I don’t care that what Bradley Manning revealed was, in part, military wrongdoing. If he felt so strongly about it, he ought to have been willing to take the punishment for his crime. He put the lives of many people at risk, and severely damaged the ability of men and women under arms to trust each other. In a not too distant age, he would have been executed.

Instead, he got prison — and he also got sob-story liberals like The New York Times to run pieces about how agonizing it was for him not to be able to masquerade as a woman while in jail, for treason:

Court documents show that Ms. Manning has had counseling sessions with a prison psychologist, Dr. Ellen Galloway, at least once a week, and military authorities have over time allowed her access to some treatments doctors prescribed for her gender dysphoria, in part because of pressure from a lawsuit filed by Chase Strangio, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, in September 2014.

She can now wear female prison undergarments, including a sports bra, and “subdued cosmetics.” In early 2015, she was permitted to get speech therapy to feminize the tone and pitch of her voice and began cross-sex hormone therapy prescribed, Mr. Strangio said, by an endocrinologist brought in from the military’s Walter Reed hospital.

Since then, Ms. Manning wrote, she has developed breasts and curvier hips. “There have been significant changes since I’ve been taking the hormones, and I am happy with them,” she said.But, citing security risks, the military rejected the recommendation of an outside psychologist who said she should be permitted to further feminize her appearance by growing her hair longer than male military standards. Mr. Strangio is helping her challenge that restriction.

“Plaintiff feels like a freak and a weirdo — not because having short hair makes a person less of a woman — but because for her, it undermines specifically recommended treatment and sends the message to everyone that she is not a ‘real’ woman,” he wrote in a court filing.

This penis-having traitor suffers because people might not think she is a “real woman”. Think about that. Manning suffers serious psychological problems, and has tried to commit suicide. He should receive medical treatment — but not boobs grown at taxpayer expense on his traitorous breast, and not liberty for breaking his oath under arms.

Obama also commuted the sentence of an unrepentant Puerto Rican terrorist. Oscar Lopez Rivera was a leader of a terrorist group that killed and maimed innocent people in bombings:

When López Rivera was arrested in 1981, the FBI found six pounds of dynamite and four blasting caps in his Chicago apartment along with numerous fake IDs. He was convicted in federal court of seditious conspiracy, violation of the Hobbs Act, illegal weapons possession, and interstate transportation of stolen motor vehicles.

In 1988, his original sentence was extended 15 years after authorities disrupted an escape plot that included a plan to murder prison guards.

In 1999, President Bill Clinton offered to commute the sentences of 16 imprisoned FALN members. Most accepted, but López Rivera choked on the condition that he renounce his terrorist past. In 1998, he’d told a reporter, “The whole thing of contrition, atonement, I have problems with that.”

Didn’t matter. Obama let him go.

The point of a presidential pardon or sentence commutation is to show mercy. Why did Lopez Rivera deserve mercy? He wasn’t even sorry for the blood on his hands. Lest you doubt the savagery of this terrorist’s crimes:

How the FALN “fought for Puerto Rican independence” (5% voted independence in 2012) @BryanBurrough on the 1975 Fraunces Tavern bombing in NY pic.twitter.com/u8LVVQJS8m

— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) January 17, 2017

I actually find the Lopez commutation more infuriating. At least Manning admitted guilt and expressed remorse.

But come on: if Chelsea Manning were a heterosexual cisgendered convicted traitor, do you really believe that he would be getting out of jail so early in his prison sentence? “We ought not treat a traitor like a martyr,” said Sen. Tom Cotton, an Iraq war veteran. Ah, but liberal America’s politics of sacred identities can work alchemy, as President Obama demonstrated today.

UPDATE: I was thinking just now why this case made me so angry. And then it hit me. About 25 years ago, I shared an apartment with a gay friend, a college buddy, and helped him get settled and started. He ended up walking out on our lease and skipping town, owing me $800 and leaving me scrambling to find someone to take his room, because I couldn’t afford the apartment on my own. That was bad enough, but I had also loaned him my laptop so he could compose his resume and hunt for work. I found out later, after he had skipped town, that he had gone into my private e-mails, read them all, and distributed information he found good and gossipy, all at my expense. And while doing all that behind my back, he told his friends that it was okay, because I was a conservative, and therefore part of the oppressor class. They agreed, apparently. The fact that I was a conservative justified his betrayal in his mind, because conservatives oppressed gay people. Never mind that we had been friends for years, and that he stole information and money from me, while I thought he was a good friend who deserved my help.

No wonder the Chelsea Manning case infuriates me so. It felt personal in ways I had not anticipated at first.