Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 516

In 2015, US Natural Gas Prices Hit Lowest Annual Average in 16 Years

In 2015, American natural gas prices hit their lowest annual average this millennium, as supply swamped demand and pushed that average price down to $2.61 per million Btu. The EIA reports:

Daily prices fell below $2/MMBtu this year for the first time since 2012. Henry Hub spot prices began the year relatively low and fell throughout 2015, as production and storage inventories hit record levels and fourth-quarter temperatures were much warmer than normal.

And even as prices fell, the overall supply increased:

Despite declining prices, total natural gas production, measured in terms of dry gas volume, averaged an estimated 74.9 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in 2015, 6.3% greater than in 2014. This increase occurred even as the number of natural gas-directed drilling rigs decreased. As of December 18, there were 168 natural gas-directed rigs in operation, only about half the number of rigs at the beginning of 2015, according to data from Baker Hughes Inc. However, the remaining rigs are among the most productive, and producers have continued to make gains in drilling efficiency.

As American companies are doing in the oil market, U.S. shale gas producers are innovating new ways to stay profitable even as market conditions tilt against them. Low prices make life more difficult for these shale companies, but they’re finding ways to keep output up as they refine their processes and boost efficiencies (let’s remember that this industry is still quite young, and there’s obviously still plenty of room for improvement).

But while low prices are challenging for U.S. natural gas producers, they’re an unalloyed positive development for consumers who can now heat their homes more cheaply this winter. This kind of cheap energy is especially good for poorer households, whose heating bills take up a larger chuck of their budget.Cheap natural gas is good for the environment, too. Natural gas-fired power plants are quickly displacing their dirtier coal-fired cousins, and in the process are cutting out local air pollutants and greenhouse gases. Last April, we saw something of a milestone when, according, again, to the EIA, “[natural] gas surpassed coal as the leading source of electricity generation on a monthly basis for the first time,” a feat it would repeat in July, August, September, and October. How’s that for good green news?None of this would be possible without the shale boom, and as we look ahead to a year in which the U.S. will begin exporting LNG for the first time, let’s not forget that just a decade ago we were fretting about slack domestic supplies and planning to ramp up LNG imports. Fracking changed all of that, and U.S. energy security is in a much better state as a result.

How Real Is the Meaning?

By now, the Three Kings are almost to Bethlehem, and the Christmas season is drawing to a close. But the Three Kings (actually, “wise men” according to Matthew’s gospel) aren’t just bringing their famous three gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. They bring with them another set of questions that we have to wrestle with a bit if we are going to see Christmas clearly.

The story is pretty and the ideas are rich: But what actually happened in Bethlehem some 2,000 years ago?  How much of the Christmas story is “real” and how much of both this story—and ultimately the entire record of the the Scriptures—is historically accurate?This is a much more complicated question than it may appear at first glance. Many Christians argued long before the rise of modern historical and scientific criticism of the Bible that much of it was written to be interpreted allegorically rather than read as a historical or scientific account. Others have made the point that books like the Book of Jonah (in which, among other things, we find the famous story of Jonah and the whale) were widely accepted as “true” in the sense that the Narnia stories or the Lord of the Rings are true. Those 20th century English literary classics tell real and valuable truths about our world, but there isn’t a lot of archaeological evidence to support the claim that elves once walked the earth. And there are other Biblical books—like the Song of Solomon, the Book of Ecclesiastes, and the Psalms—that are obviously literary rather than historical.So the question of Biblical accuracy is complicated, and both believers and non-believers in the Bible’s religious message have reached a variety of different conclusions about its historical reliability. But even for people—like me—whose personal experiences with God and Christ tell us that there must be something important behind all this noise and excitement, the question of how to make sense of the Biblical record is convoluted and thorny.It’s not as easy for an infinitely transcendent God to reveal himself to culture-bound, historically placed people as you might think. When God committed Himself to humanity, He made the decision to enter history. He took us where He found us and met us where we stood. Even today, we have to figure that there are ways that our knowledge of the universe and of human history places sharp limits on what we can understand about God. The difference between our times and the era of Jesus often complicates our ability to make sense of the stories we are reading, or to understand what they meant to the original audiences who heard them.After all, when the wise men get to Herod, they turn out to be astrologers. They have seen a star in the heavens that announced that a king of the Jews had been born, so they traveled to Jerusalem to find the child. In a sense, it was a journey of scientific discovery: If they found that such a child had been born, their interpretations would be confirmed. The science of astrology would take a step forward.We know enough about the astrology of the period to have some idea what they were doing. With roots that have been traced back to ancient Mesopotamia long before the Jews got to Judea, astrology in some ways was humanity’s first science and it rested on a very complex set of observations and measurements. Charting the course of the sun, the moon, the stars, and the planets through the skies, ancient thinkers noticed that the movements of those bodies formed patterns. Furthermore, they saw that these patterns corresponded with regular events on earth. When the sun was in the region of the sky that matches the constellation Aries, the earth renewed itself after the winter cold and the crops once again began to grow. As the sun and the other planets and stars moved round the skies in their stately progressions, other cycles took place on earth. Birds migrated for the winter and returned in the spring. Sheep and camels migrated across the pasture lands; fish had their seasons for breeding, at times disappearing and at other times returning in great numbers.In one of the great intuitive jumps—a great scientific discovery, actually, which is still the basis of much of our knowledge of the universe today—the ancient thinkers posited that those heavenly bodies acted at a distance. The sun not only warmed you when you looked at it; somehow the sun’s rays caused the seasonal changes taking place all around. The moon’s power somehow caused tides, and the tides were greater or less depending on the positions of the sun and the moon in their complex dance. Over the centuries, the sky scanners found that these observations had predictive power; by the time of Jesus’ birth, they were regularly predicting eclipses of the sun and the moon and Julius Caesar relied on this science to produce a calendar so accurate that, with Gregory’s tweak, it remains the basis on which the world organizes its affairs to this day.Somewhat ironically, the ancient astrologers worked like the climate scientists today: That is, they built models and looked for correlations to establish cause and effect. If Jupiter turned retrograde (if the planet’s apparent motion in the sky changed direction) and a great king died, then astrologers would assume that Jupiter’s change of direction caused the king’s death. These models were always being tweaked, but with enough tweaking they still seemed to work. Even in classical times skeptics sniffed that “correlation isn’t causality” and denounced astrologers as quacks—their “models” never quite seemed to predict with precision.Still, with so many demonstrable connections between the heavens and the earth, studying the heavens impressed many people as the best way to forecast future events. It was an approach so intuitively obvious and so intellectually compelling that down through all the recorded years of history, right into the Reagan White House, powerful women and men have sought the advice of qualified astrologers for insight into unfolding events.As we noted in an earlier Yule post, there are a number of theories about what happened in the skies over Bethlehem, but it appears that a powerful astrological event occurred around the time scholars think Jesus was actually born; there are several independent accounts of astrologers predicting the birth of a major new ruler at about this time. When the wise men said they were “following a star” they had something very specific in mind.So what do we make of this? Is the Bible putting its seal of approval on the “science” of astrology, so that we must be either Christians and believers in astrology or scoffers at both the religion and the “science?” Do we, as some Christians do, think that rather than an astrological event, the Bible refers to a special cosmic miracle, a light set in the sky to mark this special occasion in the history of the world? Or does this all sound like a bunch of legends collected by ignorant and superstitious people a long time ago and far away?All this gets us into deep theological waters where wiser and better educated writers than I have gotten into trouble. Yet, the issue is too important to ignore. It brings us to the questions that any serious person has to ask sooner or later when looking into these things: How true is all this? Are these historical narratives or beautiful myths? What are these ancient documents trying to tell us, and how far can we trust them?My intellectual starting point for questions of this kind is to come back to the ideas we looked at earlier in this series: The question of a universal God who reveals Himself in a particular culture. Jesus was a Jew, shaped by Jewish customs, Jewish history, Jewish theological ideas, and Jewish scholarship. And it was not only necessary that Jesus be born to a particular mother speaking a particular language and inheriting a particular culture; He also had to be born at a particular time.And just as He was a man of his people, a Jew, He was a man of his time; the people around Him had no special access to scientific or archaeological knowledge other than what was generally known. And in a world without the Internet or printing, the people around Jesus would have likely been less well-informed than the cultivated, educated, and widely traveled Roman elite.In Jesus’ time, modern ideas of science and scholarship did not exist. In an age without printing, libraries were rare. Greek and Roman historians, the best of their time, believed that it was appropriate for a historian to write speeches for historical characters based on the historians’ knowledge of character and their understanding of the events. The great speeches in Thucydides’ classic  History of the Peloponnesian War  weren’t copied from the speakers’ drafts or notes or even necessarily from interviews with those who heard the speech. A well-trained historian at this time wasn’t somebody who searched the written archives and other records and then wrote articles and books that carefully separated what was and was not known. A well-trained historian was somebody who, after careful study of the available information, was able to make intelligent deductions about what was missing, critique the obviously legendary and biased sources, and, on the basis of experience, intuition, and skill, was qualified to fill in the large gaps that the incomplete records of the day inevitably left.When the author of Luke’s Gospel tells us at the beginning of his work that he made a systematic and orderly investigation of the events to give us the best information available, he could only mean that he was doing what a responsible and serious historian of his time understood as his duty, whether or not that would qualify him for tenure in a modern American history department. And in trying to make sense of the oral histories and evidence available to the historian of a persecuted movement widely scattered across the Levant, many of whose members would have been semiliterate at best, Luke had a more difficult job than his secular counterparts. But if Jesus was going to be born when and where He was, and was going to reach out to the poor and the marginalized, a writer like Luke was only kind of historian around for the job.That makes it tough on contemporary readers who want to apply the standards we use in modern history and science to events that took place long ago and far away. When we read a historical document, we have a very clear standard of what we mean by whether the document is accurate. If the wise men had brought a video camera with them, what would have been on the pictures of the Holy Family that they uploaded to wisemen.com on the web?We want answers to questions like this—and we can’t get them. Until and unless we build time machines, we must deal with the information that we have, collected by people whose ideas of historical verification and science were very different from ours.I’m not sure that this matters as much as some people—Biblical ultra-literalists on the one hand and scoffing atheists on the other—think it does. Human beings almost never have the kind of knowledge and certainty that we want, but we press on nevertheless, making choices and commitments. From where I sit, it seems pretty certain that Something Big happened at the first Christmas and that history somehow turned on its hinges. As I see it, the old AD/BC division points to something important and real. History turned a corner with the birth of Jesus Christ, and while the written reports of that event don’t tell me everything I want to know, they do tell me everything I need.Most Americans seem to share that view. As William Galston wrote in the Wall Street Journal, summarizing the results of a Pew poll on American attitudes toward religion and, specifically, the Christmas story, “73% of U.S. adults believe that Jesus was born to a virgin; 81%, that the baby Jesus was laid in a manger; 75%, that wise men guided by a star brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh; and 74%, that an angel announced the birth of Jesus to shepherds. Fully 65% of Americans believe all four of these elements of the Christmas story, while only 14% believe none of them.” The Gospels, whatever their problems, seem to carry more conviction than the Warren Report on the assassination of President Kennedy.But there’s something else about the way the Gospel stories relate to readers. As we saw yesterday, Jesus was born into one nation to be the Savior of all. In the same way, He was born at a particular time in world history in order to reach out to people all over the world in many different historical eras.The time of his birth is an interesting one from this perspective. The Greco-Roman world is enough like ours, that it is understandable to “moderns”  in ways that, say, Egypt of the pharaohs or ancient Babylon is not. The rules of logic and many of the basic philosophical ideas that we still use today had been developed. The historical tradition that shaped Luke’s work is recognizably the foundation of the discipline of history as it is still practiced.  Modern historians have more resources and have developed their craft well beyond anything Luke knew, but he and they share a basic understanding of what it is they are trying to accomplish.Jesus was born into a culture and a historical epoch that are relatively open and accessible to us today. When we read the letters of Paul or study his exploits and speeches through the writing of Luke, we can understand the intellectual traditions and literary forms being employed. Jewish theology and exegesis on the one hand, Greek philosophy and literary forms on the other (the “epistles” of Paul are letters that follow well-recognized patterns in other letters written at the time): These are not exactly the same as the intellectual and literary instruments we use today, but they are close enough and comprehensible to us that it is not, for example, like the Epic of Gilgamesh or other ancient literature that is more remote and less comprehensible on its own—or indeed sometimes on any—terms.At the same time, the circumstances and culture into which Jesus was born are also accessible to people in many pre-modern and non-Western cultures. Pastoralists and agriculturalists around the world who would be almost as bewildered by contemporary London or Shanghai as anybody in Jesus’ time are able to understand the world of the Gospels. Jesus spoke in simple ways about realities that farmers and illiterates around the world can grasp. Bread, wine, sheep, goats, planting seeds, catching fish: Not everybody around the world is directly familiar with all of these reference points, but the message of the Gospels is, demonstrably, clear enough so that people in every world culture at all kinds of levels of development can find meaning and coherence in it.If the Gospels came out of a culture that was closer to Western modernity, and they had therefore been written in ways that satisfied contemporary academic historiographic models (complete with photos and footnotes), the resulting 900 page biographies of Christ might be more satisfying to us, but perhaps much less accessible to poor farmers in Africa or simple fishermen in Indonesia.Shockingly, that matters a great deal to God. The story of the Gospels is a story for everybody, not just for sophisticated, college educated citizens of advanced industrial democracies. Just as we find just enough common ground, intellectually and culturally, with these documents to grasp what they are getting at even while we are frustrated by their indifference to some of our cultural expectations, so other people in other places and times have found them clear enough to hear and believe. The Gospels occupy a kind of center point in human culture as a whole: products of a particular time and place, but comprehensible to all.Medieval maps often placed Jerusalem at the center of the world. That was less a literal description of the way the makers thought about the physical universe (many medieval scholars knew that the ancient Greeks had not only figured out the shape of the earth, but that they had calculated its size), than a statement about the central importance of the Gospel stories in human life. If we could somehow make a cultural map of the world, the Gospels might well go somewhere near the center as well.The wise men who followed the star were led to the center of all things. They did not understand the difference between astronomy and astrology as well as we do, but they used what they knew to get to where they needed to be.It was enough for them, and people today can still do the same thing. We can follow the light we have to the center of all things, to a place that both shepherds and scholars can find, and when we arrive, like both the shepherds and the wise men, we will find that it has what we need and is the source of a greater light that will illuminate many things we moderns, wise as we are, don’t understand.

Dots Wanting Connection: A Press Review

In recent days I have been occasionally breathtaken (a modest neologism meaning, pretty obviously, to have one’s breath metaphorically taken away) by things I have read in the newspapers. This is not particularly uncommon in my life, but there have been a rash of such occasions lately, caused, I suspect, by holiday leave schedules and the need for editors to throw something into print, even into their lead features, as in above-the-fold, right. Four items stick to memory at the moment, and they exhibit a common quality that will be made clear to you, dear reader, anon.

First, last week, the New York Times ran an above-the-fold, right headline piece about the wealth defense industry. It revealed to readers that very rich people, but not just merely rich people, can avail themselves of ways to avoid paying taxes on very large sums of money. How so? Because, while it may cost $1 million or more to buy the services available, that investment repays itself dozens of times over in benefits. The article quoted Jeffrey Winters of Northwestern University, someone that TAI featured in its fairly frequent and, I would contend, incisive coverage of this topic already years ago.So to me this feature, despite its admirable level of detail, counted as just another BFO (that’s “blinding flash of the obvious” for those of you unaware of the meaning of this particular pseudo-acronym). Of course, I’m not the only reader of the newspaper, and I realize that other readers may not be aware of this “news”, so I don’t begrudge the Gray Lady for running the piece as an off-normal peak front-page feature. On the contrary: I’m glad to see the establishment’s liberal flagship increasingly willing to run stories that piss off the advertisers in their special fashion and holiday gift copy. If the NYT’s editors want to tease the hometown plutocrats from time to time, who am I to complain? At least it diverts them temporarily from their obsession with their own and other people’s designer genitals.But the essay drew no links to pre-primary presidential politics. There is only one candidate who is trying, in his own intellectually monomaniacal and disappointingly vague way, to draw attention to this sort of thing, and that’s Bernie Sanders. But is Sanders mentioned in the piece? No, he is not. No dots connected here.Second, there was a feature, this time in the Washington Post, about the ISIS phenomenon redrawing the map of the Middle East. It warned, notably through several quotes from Fawaz Gerges, a popular and personable LSE academic, that defeating ISIS would not end the violence in the Levant, but only reshape it as new forces contend to fill the vacuum left by two collapsed and irreparably destroyed states.He’s right about this, of course, as any reader of this column has known for some years—specifically, that it’s the artificially imposed Westphalian “nation-state” units themselves that are decaying and de-institutionalizing, causing the regional state system (often erroneously termed the “Sykes-Picot system”) to fall apart, and not the other way around, as is commonly (mis)understood. And again, I don’t mind the story’s having appeared, because a lot of people, not least in the risk-averse bowels of the U.S. government, still think that the solution to the problem lies in putting Syria and Iraq back together again, just as they were before the vaunted “Arab Spring.” That even applies to some Sunni Iraqis, as the article noted, who don’t like the spate of proposals in the air suggesting that some kind of Sunnistan or Sunni Regional Government be formed in a redrawn Middle East. Some of them still feel the lingering glow of minoritarian Sunni domination of Iraq and dream of its restoration. They have their own kind of trouble connecting new dots in an onrushing reality. That domination was destroyed by a very poorly planned U.S.-led invasion of Iraq beginning in March 2003. Does the article mention this? Nope. No dots connected here either.Third in line is an article from just the other day, in the New York Times, on how jihadi organizations are swarming all over North Africa, using in particular ungoverned spaces in Libya as launch and refuge points. There was nothing much new in the article, although yet again a lot of the details—about the big-time smuggling that finances these groups, for example—had to be new to readers who have not been paying much attention to these kinds of things, and that would likely be most readers, since these are not phenomena that appear to impinge upon most people’s daily lives.The larger point, however, is this: Why is Libya ground zero for the phenomenon being described in the article, just as Libya has been ground zero as launching point for much of the swell of asylum immigration into Europe last year (alas, a datum not mentioned in the article)? Because the Obama Administration, against the advice of the then-Secretary of Defense and all the members of the Joint Chiefs, started a war there in March 2011 that shattered the fragile shell of a state that kept the place more or less in one piece.Is this core fact mentioned in the NYT article? Barely, not by name, and only in passing. But that is better than par. This war that we and our allies started is rarely if ever mentioned, for example, as key relevant background in the ridiculous and transparently partisan witch-hunt about the Benghazi incident of September 11, 2012. Everyone seems happy with the ambient amnesia, the Democrats because it’s embarrassing and the Republicans because it’s even more embarrassing. Most of the Republican witch-hunters in this case seem congenitally incapable of imagining any use of U.S. military power that could create more problems than it solves, because admitting that would put a real burden on easy resort to their kneejerk response to any apparent national security problem: send the Marines, or at least the Special Forces guys. For these special reasons, then, Libya takes the cake for unconnected dots.Fourth and finally for now, the New Year’s Day Washington Post big headline—above the fold, right—read as follows: “Obama’s big push on ISIS strategy.” Now, if you don’t bother to read the article, the headline would suggest that the President is rethinking, fine-tuning, advancing, detailing, updating, or is in some other way focused on actual strategy matters. The article makes clear that this is not the case. On the way to Asia on Air Force One this past month, it seems, the President berated his aides for not doing a better job of marketing and spinning the “strategy” as is. As the President’s post-Bernardino speech made clear, his view is that there is nothing wrong with the strategy and that it is working. But the criticisms have been withering, and this is what bothers our not-always-thick-skinned Commander-in-Chief. So who took point on this new effort, according to the article? Well, of course, the irrepressible Ben Rhodes did, he of the creative writing degree, long since risen from chief speechwriter to the post of Deputy National Security Advisor.Maybe the President is right. Maybe all that U.S. Levantine strategy needs to prove its worth is persistence on the government’s part and patience on our part. The strategy is getting a boost, unbidden in the original sketch, from a post-November 13 French effort: French aircraft, based in Jordan, whacked oil-related targets around Raqqa the other day. That raises anew an awkward question for the Administration: Why did it take so agonizingly long for U.S. aircraft to hit such obvious targets as tanker trucks engaged in “illicit” cross-border oil sales that pumped an estimated 45 percent of the Islamic State’s revenues into its coffers? It did this only after nearly a year of a weirdly feckless air campaign.Still, as a strategy goes, the President’s may at any rate do less harm than one that would send tens of thousands of U.S. troops to seize Raqqa and Mosul without having a clue as to what we might do with those cities after we took them. When over the years I have criticized the President’s strategic thinking, or lack thereof, I have tried to do it in a calm, objective, non-partisan, and non-ad hominem fashion. I don’t hate Barack Obama and I don’t pretend that presidential decisions about such matters are ever obvious or easy. But, as I have noted over the years, there is a repeating sort of tic displayed by this White House that is both curious and sort of alarming—and this New Year’s Day brought it squarely into focus.Some have referred to this tic as the permanent campaign—in other words, the strong penchant to focus not on things as they actually are but on how they appear politically, or optics over substance. (This is not entirely new as a worry; during the Bush Administration someone inside the White House once famously chided a journalist for being stuck in a reality-based world.) This White House, however, is inordinately full of political aides left over from campaigns who have acquired substantive de facto authority in areas they really know very little about. Valerie Jarrett is the poster child for the type, but she is hardly alone in that category. Fred Kaplan’s useful Foreign Affairs essay “Obama’s Way” refers to this tic in the context of the “Assad must go” remark from September 2013. On the basis of his many interviews, Kaplan concludes that the purpose of the White House spinning here was to get the President “on the right side if history” on the cheap—to make him look good in a circumstance where he would not need to actually do anything to appear statesmanlike and visionary. And he’s right, on this point anyway.There is another way, however, to describe this tic. Some cultural anthropologists use the phrase “votive act” to describe a verbal behavior that is meant to substitute for, or be the functional equivalent of, an actual behavior (in the sense of doing something we commonly understand as impinging on physical reality in one way or another). The term is Latinate and comes proximately from the vocabulary of Christian prayer, and it is often accompanied by the noun “candle,” as in votive candle. It means a verbal statement with ritual power that is offered, given, undertaken, performed, or dedicated in fulfillment of, or in accordance with, a vow. The lighting of the candle symbolizes that such a statement is about to be offered.The concept long predates Christianity, of course. There is in the Hebrew Bible the Nazarite vow, which is a textbook case of a votive act. The ancient Greeks had a word for the same concept, tama, which has carried over into the rites of the Greek Orthodox Church (instead of candles they use little metal decorated icons). The basic idea goes back much further, into the origins of word magic: the belief that if someone knows the name of something, he or she has power over it. This mystical dimension of language manifests itself in many ways in religion, as with the first sentence of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word.”That is testimony to the depth at which this linkage lies within human culture, and apparently within the human psyche. Note that children everywhere regularly demonstrate the belief that simply saying that something has been or will be done is tantamount to the actual doing of it. Alas, however, sometimes adults do this too.And further alas, for reasons we will not go into here, some cultures are more prone to such behavior than others. One cultural anthropologist down at Duke, William M. Reddy, pointed out a long time ago (1997), as did others before him, that the prevalence of votive acts in non-religious frames—in other words, in seemingly ordinary life—differs from place to place, and from time to time in any given place. There is or can be such a thing, in other words, as an historical ethnography of emotions. Reddy calls a votive act an “emotive”—but it’s really the same thing with a jargony academic twist. See William M. Reddy, “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,” Current Anthropology (June 1997).Now, Reddy doesn’t come right out and say it—though others did back in the days before Saidian anti-Orientalism and other forms of stifling political correctness made doing so seem impolite—but premodern cultures, and premodern pockets of population within post-Age of Reason societies, are more prone to votive acts in everyday life than, say, post-Renaissance Western cultures. In these latter cultures the causal lines between intentions, actions, and outcomes have become more or less universally acknowledged, at least among adults, and have created near-universal expectations of reciprocity in acknowledging these connected dots.What does this have to do with a New Year’s Day article in the Washington Post set on Air Force One? The article illustrates this President’s and this White House’s unusual penchant for votive acts in high office. From the very start of the Administration one got the impression that a great foreign policy speech would, in the minds of the principals and the aforementioned speechwriter, be self-implementing. Declare in Cairo that America is not at war with Islam, that we’re engaging our adversaries and putting old, unnecessary conflicts behind us, and poof! If one closes one’s eyes and yearns hard enough for these things to happen, they will just happen. (This too is not entirely novel, of course: Remember Kellogg-Briand, and Locarno, for example?)It is easy to sympathize at least a little with this penchant, because actually using the clattering, clunking, and unfathomably complex apparatus of the U.S. government to govern is very hard, and arguably getting harder all the time. Besides, if what you really care about is raising campaign money, getting yourself and your ideological kin elected and re-elected, and focusing on what you define as domestic fairness (read: redistribution) issues, then concentrating on the optics of national security issues instead of their reality, short of just a few truly vital ones, serves well enough for the purpose that is really to hand most of the time.We used to amuse ourselves a few decades ago by quoting back into English a Russian Cold War “people’s” witticism: “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” We thought it was wryly funny, because it contained more than a grain of truth. Well, now we have a new manifestation of a similar wit, to wit: We, in the Obama Administration, pretend to actually do good things (as opposed to merely packaging words, in grand speeches and in grandly promoted but vacuous or one-sided, Potemkin-style agreements—with Iran, with Cuba, with the Burmese generals, with multitudes in Paris over climate change), and you pretend to believe us. In other words, we in government will but rarely and reluctantly undertake difficult, uncertain, and dicey efforts to connect our world of ideas, which is rich and well populated, with the world of extant reality, and you in the sympathetic mainstream press will not strain to connect the dots revealing same. But how funny is that, really? Not so much.If the source of this behavior is a self-interested political tic, one that is calculated and self-aware, that’s one thing. Genuine leadership is not overly interested in optics or popularity or “legacy,” but rather in seeing to the longer-term good of the community; if we lack such leadership today it’s not remotely rare in our experience. But—and it’s a dot that I am reluctant to connect—if it is a revenant of a pre-modern addiction to word magic, that would be something else again. That would not be funny at all.

Michigan Boosts Minority Enrollment Without Affirmative Action

Affirmative action is in trouble. The Supreme Court seems intent on scaling back the use of race in admissions in Fisher v. Texas, and even if it doesn’t, support for the practice has been declining for a generation, leading a growing number of states to ban it at their public colleges and universities. At Via Meadia, we think that this is more or less a good thing: Remedying historical injustice is a hugely important project, but we don’t see many signs that today’s militant academic diversity bureaucracy is competent to execute it responsibly. Moreover, in a 21st-century America wracked by class inequality, it makes little sense for striving immigrants or poor whites to be penalized for past misdeeds they took no part in.

That said, continuing racial mistrust in the U.S. is a real cause for concern. The year 2015 saw the assertion of a particularly strong form of identity politics. Racial gaps in employment, housing, and income persist, and, despite much progress toward assimilation, our society is still too divided along racial and ethnic lines. So we are encouraged to see that the University of Michigan has had some recent success at building a racially diverse student body—and, therefore, a more racially diverse pool of potential future elites—without resorting to racially biased admissions policies. The New York Times reports:

A year after Dr. Ishop began her new job here as enrollment manager at the University of Michigan — responsible for shaping the makeup of incoming classes — the university increased the number of minority students in the 2015 freshman class by almost 20 percent, to the highest percentage since 2005.

African-Americans gained the most. It was a significant change at an institution where minority enrollment plunged after Michigan voters banned affirmative action in 2006.

“It’s a courtship,” Dr. Ishop said, explaining the strategy.

The piece goes on to detail what that “courtship” looked like in practice; it’s worth a read. It’s too early to tell whether Michigan’s new strategy of aggressive minority recruitment combined with race-blind admissions will succeed in the long term, much less whether it is transferable to other states with different demographic makeups. Still, other colleges should study Michigan’s efforts closely, and attempt to replicate and improve on them where possible. The development of a permanent racial underclass is incompatible with America’s melting pot ideals, and colleges have an important role to play in promoting integration (given their unfortunately large role in determining access to middle class careers). Affirmative action is not the answer—indeed, there are some compelling arguments that it helps perpetuate racial divisions on campuses. And if the promising numbers out of Michigan hold up, the case against affirmative action will grow even stronger, as continued success would help show that race-conscious admissions are unnecessary.

How Not to Offshore Balance

After the Iranians burned and looted the Saudi Embassy in Tehran, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain cut diplomatic ties Iran, while the U.A.E. “downgraded” theirs. Now, Sudan and Kuwait are also making diplomatic moves. Like Bahrain, Sudan opted to go all the way: “In response to the barbaric attacks on the Saudi Arabian embassy in Tehran and its consulate in Mashhad… Sudan announces the immediate severing of ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the Sudanese foreign ministry announced in a statement. Kuwait was more measured, tracking more closely with moves made by the UAE yesterday, recalling its ambassador as a reaction to the “flagrant breach of international norms” but not kicking out Iran’s ambassador or severing all ties.

The Sudanese reaction is interesting in that, until very recently, Sudan was one of Iran’s closest regional allies. However, as we covered in August, the increasingly bitter, sectarian nature of the regional split between the Saudis and Iran led the Sudanese regime to throw its majority-Sunni country onto the side of coreligionists in Riyadh. Today’s news should come as a reminder of just how much the Sunni-Shi’a conflict is starting to twist other, historical ties in the Middle East.But that’s not the only dynamic that’s shifting. According to the New York Times, an informal survey of European political opinion indicates that, though official reaction in Europe’s capitals has been muted, elites across the continent appear to have grown exasperated with the Saudis and are tilting towards Iran. “[F]or many Europeans, Iran—long a pariah because of its anti-Western rhetoric and its nuclear program—has suddenly become, at least in comparison with Saudi Arabia, an object of sympathy,” the article notes.Meanwhile, the U.S. Administration also seems to be gingerly weighing in on the side of Iran. Writing at Bloomberg View, Eli Lake and Josh Rogin note that:

The State Department has criticized Saudi Arabia before for executions and its human rights record. But this time, its spokesman, John Kirby, undermined the Saudi claim that Iran’s government was culpable for the attacks on its embassy, noting in his opening statement that Iran appears to have arrested some of those responsible.

There is no doubt that the Saudis make ugly and uncomfortable regional bedfellows. Their record on human rights is indeed appalling. It appears that after years of having to put up with and defend a state that represses women and employs barbaric punishments against its own people, European and U.S. diplomats are indulging in a bit of cathartic release. Furthermore, as Aaron David Miller noted in the BV piece, our room for maneuver is genuinely constrained: “The Iranians hold the Obama legacy in their hands [. . .] We are constrained and we are acquiescing to a certain degree to ensure we maintain a functional relationship with the Iranians.”

But none of this makes siding with the Iranians here a particularly good idea from the strategic perspective. The White House has been trying for some time now to step back from the Middle East, in an effort they characterize as an offshore rebalancing stance. But from the start, the Administration misjudged the relative strength of the regional powers: In the absence of American regional hegemony propping them up, the Saudis are the weak party and the Iranians have proven to be the stronger state—the one that classical offshore balancing theory would tell us we need to balance against, not toward. The consequences of balancing toward the strong party have become increasingly clear as Iran has gone on the march regionally from Syria to Iraq to Yemen, prompting the Saudis to react in an increasingly panicky fashion. The al-Nimr execution was driven partially by this, and partially by a Saudi desire to stick a finger in the eye of a U.S. Administration they feel has been abandoning them.But to react to that execution on Wilsonian, human-rights grounds—and to let that reaction guide how you deal with events in Tehran—runs counter to the realpolitik project of regional disengagement. If we really do want to draw back from the region, we’ll have to swallow some rights abuses somewhere. You can’t have it both ways. And unless we are simply throwing in our lot with the Iranians, an attack on an ally and a violation of diplomatic norms on the level of sacking an embassy is the sort of thing you have to respond to, not cover up. Failure to do so courts further regional instability, as each side perceives that the U.S. is unwilling to help its allies, contain its enemies, or enforce minimal international norms.

Migrants Molested Women in Cologne on NYE

A mob men of reportedly North African and Arab origin assaulted women in downtown Cologne on New Year’s Eve, in attacks Mayor Henriette Reker characterized as “monstrous” and “lawlessness.” Deutsche Welle reports:

Some 90 criminal complaints, including one allegation of rape, have been brought to the Cologne police department after women said they were molested by a crowd of men who had gathered in the city’s famous square between its central train station and towering Gothic cathedral. Authorities expect more victims to come forward in the next few days.

City police chief Wolfgang Albers said the crowd was composed of up to 1,000 heavily intoxicated men who gave the appearance of being “Arab or North African” in background.The police chief told German news agency dpa that the incidents represented “an intolerable situation” for Cologne. His department has already assembled a task force to deal with the matter

It’s worth taking a moment, in light of the luridness of these allegations, to note that Deutsche Welle is an impeccably mainstream source, the German state-owned international broadcaster—the equivalent of BBC World Service or VOA. DW has an explicit mission to portray Germany as a “liberal, democratic state based on the rule of law.” Meanwhile, Henriette Reker, the Mayor, is an independent supported by the Greens as well as the CDU, and she has previously been stabbed by an anti-immigration extremist. In other words, these serious allegations are not coming from far-Right sources, but from the center of the German establishment.

These kinds of stories could well change the face of refugee politics in Germany. Thus far, Angela Merkel has been successfully playing “good cop” to her partner Horst Seehofer’s “bad cop“—a dance meant to secure the sensible center from the rise of fringe actors in Germany’s politics. That little dance may not be sustainable in the face of these kinds of reports. As TAI Editor Adam Garfinkle presciently noted in September, as German elites publicly preened about their high-mindedness for flinging open the doors to the miserable masses hurtling their way from the chaos in Syria:

[W]e are about to witness the biggest boon for right-wing xenophobes since the 1930s. All this moral unction reminds me of the reality-challenged 1920s in Europe, which gave rise to the very ugly 1930s […] and we all know what happened next. How is the thinking in Berlin now different in essence from the calamity of Kellogg-Briand and Locarno?

European leaders, having embarked on the project of rapidly integrating large numbers of immigrants from a failing society into their own, may have a day of reckoning ahead, perhaps sooner than most people expected it to come.

What Analysts Miss about the Russian Orthodox Church

A recent, long article in the Christian Science Monitor profiles the revival of Orthodoxy’s political influence in Russia, arguing that religion is filling the void left by the collapse of Communism. A taste:

[J]ust before the mid-December blastoff of the latest Soyuz mission to the International Space Station, the countdown procedure was halted to allow a robed and bearded Russian Orthodox priest a few minutes to shuffle around the mighty rocket, sprinkling holy water on its fuselage, murmuring snatches of biblical verse, and calling upon God to keep it safe. He also blessed each of the three astronauts – American, Russian, and British – about to make the journey.

Such is the new normal in today’s Russia. The 1993 Constitution strictly defines Russia as a secular state, in which no religion is the official or obligatory one. But many people in post-Soviet Russia yearn for ideological certainties to fill the void left by communism. And with the ascent of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s new order, the Russian Orthodox Church, an ancient institution that was nearly annihilated during seven decades of Soviet rule, is returning to a highly visible and central role in the life of the country.

This article follows the usual path of journalism on this topic. But though the author quotes an academic to the effect that “there is no doubt” that Putin “is in charge,” the piece misses the most important point: Today’s Russian Orthodox Church is the child of the Soviet-era Church, which a relentless, murderous, and utterly determined KGB subordinated to Communist power. The KGB, now turned into the FSB, remains the backbone of the Russian state, and there is nothing to suggest that its power over the Orthodox Church’s hierarchy has withered away. Even if some genuinely independent figures managed to enter the hierarchy during the years of the Yeltsin interregnum, and even if former accomplices with the Communist regime sought to deepen the genuinely spiritual nature of the Church, a powerful, government-backed faction of clerics have retained a decisive voice inside it. Where conviction doesn’t suffice, bribes and threats will do nicely. There are, sadly, as many skeletons in the closets of the Orthodox clergy as there are in the closets of Catholic and Protestant clergy: Original Sin is an ecumenical force. Today’s FSB is no less willing than the KGB of old to use compromising information—whether financial, sexual, or otherwise—to keep people in line.

With the collapse of the synthesis of Bolshevism and Russian nationalism that Stalin forged during World War II, Putin’s state needs a new, post-Communist, legitimating ideological agency, and that is the part assigned to the Russian Orthodox hierarchy. It is less effective at this job than the Communist Party was, and there is always the danger that even the most corrupt and compromised of priests can suddenly start taking religion seriously. But this is the institution Putin has, and he is using it as best he can.None of this means that the Church is a purely passive instrument. Both in its support of the Syrian war and in its (quiet and tempered) opposition to the adventure in Ukraine, the Russian Orthodox Church has followed its own ideological principles and priorities. But to write about the role of the Orthodox Church in Putin’s Russia without taking account of the deep relationship between the Russian deep state and the contemporary, as well as the historical, Church is to miss something big.

Europe Eyes LNG as Gazprom Alternative

It’s a good time to import liquified natural gas (LNG), so it’s not surprising to see Croatia is looking to take advantage, entertaining bids this week for an LNG terminal on an island off its Adriatic coast. Reuters reports:

The project, with a nominal capacity of 6 billion cubic metres, is expected to require investment of around 600 million euros ($655.50 million).

LNG Croatia, a joint venture between power utility HEP and gas system operator Plinacro, said it had received four bids from industrial investors and three from financial investors for the project, which it aims to complete by mid-2019. […]The Croatian government in July declared the project to be of strategic interest, which should simplify procedures for obtaining location and construction permits.

When Russia started making trouble in Ukraine two years back, policymakers across the continent suddenly seemed to recognize the problems associated with their heavy reliance on Russian gas imports. Many alit on LNG imports as a potential solution to their “Gazproblem,” but at the time we pointed out a wrinkle: LNG supplies go to the highest bidder, and Asia was paying a high premium for those hydrocarbons back then.

Now, it’s a very different story. The Asian premium has been all but erased, and a market already brimming with Qatari and Australian supplies is now starting to absorb U.S. shale gas. Prices are therefore coming down, enough to make LNG imports not just a strategically beneficial option for Europe, but perhaps an economically prudent one as well.Lithuania got ahead of the game on these imports and is already funneling supplies through a floating LNG import terminal off its Baltic coastline. Now Croatia wants a piece of the action, and it isn’t hard to understand why. As the U.S. continues to beef up its LNG export infrastructure to help offload some of our natural gas glut on the global market, Europe is going to continue to build out its import infrastructure. That’s bad news for Putin.

Labor Board Scraps Pension Reform in San Diego

With cities and states around the country facing untenable pension obligations and entrenched union opposition to reform, the last thing we need is for quasi-judicial officials to start nixing reforms when they are finally implemented through the democratic process. And yet that is exactly what is happening in California, where the state’s labor board is forcing San Diego to abandon a sensible and necessary rollback of the city’s generous defined-benefit pension program. The Los Angeles Times reports:

A new state labor board ruling casts doubt on San Diego’s aggressive pension cutbacks and orders the city to spend millions creating retroactive pensions for roughly 2,000 employees hired since those cutbacks took effect.

City Atty. Jan Goldsmith said he hopes to quickly get City Council approval to appeal Tuesday’s ruling by the Public Employment Relations Board, which he has criticized as staunchly pro-union.

Goldsmith predicted that a state appellate court would nullify the ruling and vindicate the pension cutbacks, which city voters easily approved as Proposition B in 2012. The measure replaced guaranteed pensions with 401(k)-style retirement plans for most new city hires.

Here at Via Meadia, we’ve been sounding the alarm bells about the nation’s looming public pension crisis, and advocating reforms like switching from defined benefit plans to a worker-based, portable pension system, for quite some time. Thanks to years of false promises and dishonest accounting, unfunded state and local pension obligations total in the trillions of dollars. Some blue state legislators have already started calling for massive federal bailouts. How we dig ourselves out of this mess will be one of the great fiscal and political questions of the next generation. It is a daunting task—and may turn out to be an impossible one if courts and administrative agencies keep blocking progress at every turn.

Sitting in Darkness, Blogging the Light

As the Christmas season draws to a close and the return of regular blogging looms, I’m looking back over this short period of intense religion writing and thinking about how writing on religion is and is not like writing on other controversial topics.

There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s important to write about religion. Many people, both religious and non-religious, are affected by the religious beliefs and cultures around them; few of us know enough about how religion works and how different religious faiths and traditions shape the worldviews of the people and nations with whom we interact. More, religious questions touch us at our core. If we exclude the deepest issues of all from our public discourse, we end up with a dessicated and artificial public conversation. Worse, leaving religion out of the discussion sends a signal, not very subtly, to young people and others that religion isn’t really that important anyway.But it’s also true that writing about religion has its perils. One is that religious writing stirs up powerful and sometimes angry feelings. There’s a reason why our grandmothers told us never to discuss politics and religion at the dinner table. I’ve tried to make the Yule Blog as irenic as possible, and one of the really rewarding experiences I’ve had with readers over the years is the number of Muslims, Jews, and non-believers who’ve found these posts helpful.But there’s an even more dangerous pitfall of religious writing: hypocrisy. There is nothing our society likes better than to mock the pretentiously self-righteous when the lies come unglued and the feet of clay are laid bare. The famous televangelist caught in a No-Tell Motel with a lady not his wife, the family values spokesman caught in a pay-to-play tryst with a person of an inappropriate gender, the ostentatious teetotaler arrested on a DUI, the priest or the pastor who abuses a religious position to seduce vulnerable people who’ve come to the church for protection: Our whole society dissolves into righteous indignation, gales of laughter, and malicious glee as yet another plaster saint gets revealed as just another sinner.Your jittery blogger, no freer from the seven deadly sins than many other aging American Baby Boomers, can’t help but feel a bit nervous stepping into this dangerous space. What gives me the right to speak to others about what is true, or beautiful, or good?  Is my own conduct so exemplary, my spiritual development so advanced that I should be telling everyone else how it’s done?There’s an instinct to answer all of these questions in the negative, and to just shut up about religion and morals.  And that instinct has some backing. Take for example the words of Jesus as reported in the King James Version of the gospel of Luke (6:42), “How canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.”Clean up your own yard first, then join the neighborhood improvement committee.Fair enough, and a casual glance around my moral front yard reveals a couple of dumpsters worth of rubbish that needs to be cleared away. I have my own list; I am sure that my friends, colleagues, and family know about many other shortcomings that my own narcissism and blindness prevents me from seeing. It’s easier to acknowledge this than to change it; one makes progress over time, but it’s painfully slow. At best, I’m in the state Gertrude Behanna describes in The Late Liz: “Oh Lord, I ain’t what I wanta be. Oh Lord, I ain’t what I oughta be — and Oh Lord, I ain’t what I’m gonna be. But Thanks Lord, I ain’t what I USED TO BE! — Amen.”But: If only perfect people were allowed to write about faith and morals, nobody will ever say anything on the subject. Parents wouldn’t try to teach their kids right from wrong; teachers wouldn’t try to help students build moral character. No minister, rabbi, imam, or priest would stand before a congregation to preach a sermon. No Buddhist monk would give advice to the faithful; no Sufi master would counsel disciples on how to approach God.For some, like the group of atheists who rented billboards a couple of years ago to denounce all religions as scams, if a sudden silence were to fall over all the pulpits in the world, it would be very good news. But before too much time passed, even the most violent atheists would begin to notice that something was wrong.Morality isn’t a private affair. Your personal morality is your own choice and your own responsibility, but the consequences of those choices matter much more to other people—and their choices matter much more to you—than we sometimes remember. Society really does depend on the imperfect virtue of its members. Self-restraint and moral behavior, even only realized in part, really are the foundations of liberty. If too many people do the wrong things too many times, nothing can protect us from the consequences.The weaker the hold of virtue on a people, the stronger the state needs to be. If people don’t voluntarily comply with, for example, the tax codes, the enforcement mechanisms of the government need to be that much stronger. If more people lose their moral inhibitions against theft, and against using violence against the weak, then society has to provide a stronger, tougher police force—and give them more authority under less restraint.Yet at the same time the state becomes stronger, it loses control of itself. When the moral tone of a people declines, bureaucrats, and the police are not exempt from the decay of morals. Perhaps a stratum of high-minded elites and civil servants can keep up a moral tone that is significantly higher than the declining standard around them, but lesser officials and the police will reflect societal norms. They will steal; they will abuse their authority; they will manipulate the processes of the state to serve themselves and their favored clients. The courts become corrupt; the security services link up with the crime syndicates. Night falls.This is not some abstract fear; history and the world today are full of places where the collapse of moral values blights daily life and undermines the prospects for development. I’ve been to many countries where nobody trusts the courts, the police, the politicians, or the journalists. None of these countries are nice places to be, and more than anyone else it is the poor—those who most need the state and most need justice—who suffer the accumulated consequences of the moral failures of their society.Sadly, people do not spontaneously choose to behave like angels. Virtue has to be cultivated and developed. Young people have to be persuaded, cajoled, admonished, and, above all, inspired to seek wisdom, self-control, a life of service, and all the other virtues that are necessary for our civil lives as well as for the fullest development of our true selves. Older people have to be reminded of their ideals, encouraged to live up to them, and to continue fighting the good fight through the long years of adulthood and on into the twilight.For some people, reason, commonsense, and a strong innate moral constitution makes it possible to live a decent and useful life without the comforts and restraints of religion. But for many more, only the feelings of awe, gratitude, and fear occasioned by the awareness of a Creator can give them the strength and will to set out on the earnest and difficult road of struggle on the path to a moral life. More, that inner sense needs to be refreshed: People need to hear the message expressed in compelling terms, and they need to hear it again and again through a lifetime.All this can only happen if a lot of people who are still fighting their own private moral battles stand up on their hind legs in public and praise those virtues that they have not fully attained. The recovering alcoholic has to tell the newcomer that there is hope for a better future—even if nobody knows better than a recovering alcoholic how easy it is to take that beckoning drink. The pastor has to encourage couples in the congregation to strive to fulfill the ideal of a faithful marriage even if his or her own marriage hasn’t been spotless. The intellectual, struggling with questions and doubts about the meaning of faith, must share the best case for faith with a wider audience along with those honest struggles—or no one will benefit from a lifetime of study and reflection.Does this mean that I’m arguing for a world of morality based on systematic hypocrisy? GK Chesterton’s father, I once read, never went to church himself but always carried a Prayer Book on Sundays to set a good example for the lower orders. Would we be any better off if we added hypocrisy to the lengthening list of our social sins?It’s not that bad. There is a line, I think, that separates the posturing hypocrite from the honest (but flawed) advocate for morals and faith. There is a difference between the honest advocacy of hope and the self-glorification of a moral poseur—even if nobody in this business has completely clean hands.In any case, developing a sensible, honest, and penetrating discourse about corrosive human failings and their social consequence is a job that simply has to be done, particularly in a society like ours where the cultures of desire and indulgence run so rampant. I’m not thinking just or even primarily of sex, though this riveting Atlantic Monthly essay on the effects of internet pornography on our society provides much food for thought. I’m thinking about a culture of restraint and virtue that prevents (at least some) bankers from ripping off their clients and the government, that keeps the military honest and loyal to their oaths, that ensures that policemen think twice before pulling the trigger, that holds politicians back from the worst kinds of demagoguery and dirty tricks—and that punishes those who don’t.Let’s not over-dramatize or fall into moral panic. Our national culture is not going entirely downhill. The wide and deep hatred of slavery and repugnance against racism that exists in our culture, for example, is a real improvement over the past. There are some other ways in which we seem to be a less brutal, more caring society than we once were. But the signs overall are not good. The social tolerance for greed and self-indulgence that we’ve developed, the prevalence of materialism, the debasement of popular culture, the unscrupulous exploitation of human sexuality for commercial purposes: These are not making us happier, more free, or, as a society, more just. One doesn’t want to foam at the mouth and go all Elmer Gantry about it, but if nobody starts putting sandbanks on the levee, things could get ugly around here fast.The real point of faith blogging, though, isn’t to shore up the moral underpinnings of the civil order. It’s to integrate your deepest convictions into the work you do as a writer and thinker. Faith shapes the way I think about the world and the future of our species; I wouldn’t be doing my job as a political and social analyst if I didn’t make that clear. It’s both important to your clarity of thought as well as a part of the transparency you owe to your readers to share or at least to explain the ideals and the beliefs that matter most and allow you to make sense of the world, and to let readers get a better look at the heart of your vision.This annual thirteen day stint as a faith blogger leaves me morally challenged by the complexities and the ambiguities this work involves. But it’s also left me feeling that this kind of work, somehow, has got to be done. The great privilege and advantage of blogging for a writer is that you are free to shape your contributions to the discussion. That freedom isn’t much good if you don’t use it to communicate the things that move you most profoundly.And if we leave religion out of our national conversation, we end up with a vapid conversation that doesn’t address the deepest realities that move most of the people in this country. The problems we face today can’t be addressed constructively without getting into the deep stuff and asking the hardest questions about the things that matter most.