Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 519

Toxic Smog Keeps Chinese Children Indoors

It’s winter again, and that means dangerous air pollution is once more choking China’s megacities as spiking demand for heating necessitates brings sooty coal-fired power plants back online. Beijing has already issued two “red alerts” this month—for the first and second time ever—that have kept cars off the road and warned people to stay indoors and wear protective masks. This week, the smog in Beijing might not be quite that bad, so healthy adults have their run of the Chinese capital. But the city is warning children and the elderly to avoid going outside and breathing in the toxic pollutants. Bloomberg reports:

Beijing advised children and the elderly to stay indoors today after pollution levels in the Chinese capital reached “heavy” levels.

The concentration of PM2.5 particles — considered the most hazardous to people’s health — was 320 micrograms per cubic meter as of 8 a.m. near Tiananmen Square, according to the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center’s website. The World Health Organization recommends PM2.5 exposure of no more than 25 over 24 hours.

Concerned parents have banded together to raise money to install air filters in their children’s classrooms. China Daily reports:

The lasting air pollution in Beijing has driven increasing numbers of parents to collect money and install filters in classrooms, but many were rejected by schools. The reasons given included disapproval from the Beijing Commission of Education. […]

The commission said student health is among its top concerns, and it has been working with experts, research institutes and environmental protection authorities to seek the best way to control air pollution at schools.The efforts made include reducing outdoor activities on smoggy days and suspending classes after a red alert for pollution has been issued.

Polluted air is an insidious beast, and for Beijing’s residents at this time of year it is an ever-present one. It was “linked to 1.2 million premature deaths in China” in 2010, not to mention the material damages, health care costs, and hits to the tourism industry the smog entails. Parents now consider the quality of a building’s air filtration system when choosing schools for their children, while giant bubbles have popped up over sports fields to allow children to play outside.

Smog is a deadly serious problem for China, and it’s certainly a large driver behind Beijing’s recent rapprochement with the global green order. China’s promise to curtail emissions late last year and its willingness to play ball at the Paris negotiations earlier this month weren’t driven by a sudden appreciation for the beauty of nature unspoiled, but rather by a bit of dispassionate analysis that shows that China’s pollution problems—whether we’re talking about its water, air, or soil—foment dissent in a population that now, thanks to social media platforms like Weibo, can make its voice heard. And that’s not to mention the economic damage those problems wreak, with or without citizen pushback. And if you’re a parent, what could be more frightening than being told not to let your children outside for the day, for fear of causing lasting lung damage?

Renzi: EU Not Living Up to Refugee Redistribution Promises

Three months after Europe’s interior ministers agreed on a refugee relocation deal, Italy says that the EU isn’t living up to its promises. The Wall Street Journal reports:

“I’m happy in political terms, but unhappy in practical terms,” the Italian premier said during his traditional year-end news conference in Rome.

Under the plan, some 160,000 asylum seekers from front-line countries such as Italy and Greece will be relocated to other countries across Europe over the next two years. To meet European Union targets, thousands would have to be moved around the continent every month.But, Mr. Renzi said, the EU plan was operating at around 0.2% of its intended relocation levels.

Renzi has been increasingly vocal about the asylum and redistribution scheme recently, arguing in an interview before Christmas that despite earlier failures, Italy is now living up to its responsibility to fingerprint and document refugees, while Germany, though criticizing others, was failing to do so.

While some of what’s going on here is Renzi shifting blame for a political problem as Italy continues to be a destination for migrants and refugees, it’s hard not to conclude he’s put his finger on a real problem. The U.N. recently confirmed that Europe received over a million immigrants by sea alone this year, including 844,176 in Greece and 152,700 in Italy.Whether they are met or not, the redistribution goals, in other words, were just a drop in the bucket to begin with, and left many big problems unresolved. (See, for instance, this story about Iranians stranded in Greece.) And if the EU isn’t delivering even on this minimal redistribution scheme, long-term solutions will become harder to find than they already were. Meanwhile, as Renzi’s previous comments indicate, this crisis is (like the euro crisis before it) wearing on North-South relations within the EU, and in the spring, crossings will likely increase again with the warm weather. Stay tuned . . .

Saudis Promise to Keep the Oil Coming

Riyadh already has a New Year’s resolution in mind: maintain high levels of production, seemingly no matter how far global prices plunge. Just today, Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi backed the country’s current strategy of pumping oil in a business-as-usual way, saying the approach “is a reliable policy and we won’t change it.” The WSJ has more:

“We will satisfy the demand of our customers. We no longer limit production. If there is demand, we will respond. We have the capacity to respond to demand,” [Ali al-Naimi said]. […]

Wednesday’s remarks are Mr. Naimi’s first public comments since OPEC failed to reach any agreement to restrain production earlier this month, leaving members to continue pumping crude at near-record levels into an already oversupplied market. The group abandoned its production ceiling of 30 million barrels a day, which it had breached routinely.

Going off of these remarks, it really doesn’t look like the Saudis are interested in acting as the world’s swing producer again. While in times past, Riyadh has done the heavy lifting within OPEC to scale back production during periods of prolonged low oil prices, this time around, the Saudis have strong-armed the cartel into a policy of inaction, choosing to fight for market share instead of coordinating to inflate prices.

The downside of this, of course, is that petrostate regimes will find their finances imperiled when they’re suddenly making $75 less per barrel of oil. To that end, Saudi Arabia is working to trim its budget to lessen the impact of the bearish market. Reuters reports:

The 2016 budget and reforms announcements marked the biggest shake-up to economic policy in the kingdom for over a decade and aimed to cut the government deficit to 326 billion riyals, down from 367 billion riyals or 15 percent of gross domestic product in 2015.

Next year’s budget projects spending of 840 billion riyals, down from 975 billion riyals spent in 2015.The government also said it was hiking prices for fuels, water and electricity as well as gas feedstock used by industry, as part of politically sensitive subsidy reforms.

With these reforms, the Saudis are sending a signal to Iran and Russia: We can take the pain of low oil prices better than you. They are also giving a message to American fracking firms: We have no intention of making life easy for the upstart non-OPEC producers of the world.

And for the rest of OPEC’s members, the question now has to be: What good is this cartel? Its largest, most influential member—the only one really capable of scaling production back enough to affect prices—has lost interest in setting prices. 2016 looks to be yet another year of bargain crude. And while every country and company in the business of selling oil will move through this next year with a permanent scowl on its face, perhaps the biggest loser of them all will be Venezuela, whose deeply dysfunctional economy can’t bear the strain of much more bad news like this latest Saudi announcement.

Al Qaeda Resurgent in Afghanistan

On the same day that General John Campbell said he would seek more troops in Afghanistan if needed, the NYT reports that Al Qaeda is back in the country:

Even as the Obama administration scrambles to confront the Islamic State and a resurgent Taliban, an old enemy seems to be reappearing in Afghanistan: Qaeda training camps are sprouting up there, forcing the Pentagon and American intelligence agencies to assess whether they could again become a breeding ground for attacks on the United States.

Most of the handful of camps are not as big as those that Osama bin Laden built before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But had they re-emerged several years ago, they would have rocketed to the top of potential threats presented to President Obama in his daily intelligence briefing. Now, they are just one of many — and perhaps, American officials say, not even the most urgent on the Pentagon’s list in Afghanistan.

The Times says these developments seem to have surprised American officials, and that, after an October assault on one of Al Qaeda’s new bases, other installations have become difficult to detect. Some of the camps have been operating for upwards of a year and a half, but went unnoticed. In other words: Officials likely don’t really know how many training camps Al Qaeda is operating in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda has returned right under America’s nose.

We knew the fight against the Taliban was not going well (this Washington Post map helpfully shows their gains), but this news about Al Qaeda is especially disconcerting. This White House has insisted that Al Qaeda is on the run and that ISIS is contained. But even as the Iraqis have retaken Ramadi from ISIS, the situation in Afghanistan—the “just war” in President Obama’s book, remember—paints a bleaker picture. President Obama has been trying to calm terrorism-inspired fears, and that’s a difficult message to get across to a frightened public even if threats are well-monitored. But news like this makes it even harder. Ultimately, President Obama’s attempt to calm fears is being undercut by the way the Middle East has deteriorated under his watch.

Personal Meaning

Yesterday’s Yule Blog featured an essay about how theists and atheists are the not all that different from each other; we are almost all transcendentalists in the sense that almost all of us find some kind of moral, ethical, and even spiritual meaning as we encounter the world. Life, we feel, amounts to more than eating, buying cool products, and scratching our various itches, and whether or not we believe in God, we want to do something real with our lives. We have one itch that mere scratching won’t fix, and that is the itch to understand what life is all about and to live meaningfully by the measures that really count.

So much for what we have in common. On this sixth day of the Yule Blog, approaching the midpoint of the season, I want to blog (respectfully) about how theists and atheists are different. While both groups think life means something, we understand that meaning in different ways.Virtually all human beings encounter something in life that seems to transcend ordinary experience. This is true whether or not we believe in one God, many gods or no god at all. Almost all human beings have “peak experiences” from time to time. There are moments and relationships in life that point beyond the physical realities toward the meaning of life. Painting a picture, talking with a friend or a loved one, holding the hand of a small child, volunteering in a homeless shelter, watching the surf roll up the beach as the sun rises on the horizon: At certain moments in our lives, these very ordinary experiences connect us with something that somehow feels more real than the superficial and trivial concerns that usually engage us.That feeling of deeper, truer perception seems to illuminate the rest of our lives. Something triggers a moment of special clarity and insight that puts the issues and problems of our daily lives into a new and more meaningful perspective. Mystics and people with strong religious beliefs see these moments as encounters with God. But others feel that these experiences are “spiritual” rather than “religious”: They experience a feeling of intense meaning and perception that isn’t grounded in any specific religious or theological context.Some of us have these moments more than others and they seem to be more common at some stages of life than at others, but I’ve never met someone who doesn’t have and doesn’t cherish these moments when things all seem to come together, when the universe seems to make more sense than usual and we feel somehow at home.A second way that theists and non-theists are in touch with something bigger than themselves comes when we perceive the power of ideas and ideals. Things like justice and freedom can’t be bought in a store or seen on TV, but we feel they are important and real. They have no physical existence, yet not only do we know what they are, but if we don’t have them, we hunger for them as much, if not more, than we hunger for real, physical food.The idea of truth has the same kind of power. Whether we think about scientific truth or moral truth, we want to know what it is and we want to see it recognized and honored. We dislike hypocrisy because it is a crime against truth. We hate censorship for the same reason. We believe that human reason ought to be free to operate, free to reach its conclusions, free to share its findings with others.None of this necessarily has anything to do with religion. You don’t have to be a religious believer to feel, for example, that there are causes in whose service you should be prepared to die—or that you ought to be willing to make financial sacrifices to help the poor. You do not have to believe in God to believe that there is an objective standard of fairness by which your conduct is judged, and that some human actions are clearly right (as when a fireman goes into a burning building to save an endangered child) and others (as when a fraudster establishes a Ponzi scheme to bilk the credulous and the elderly out of their life savings) are clearly wrong.  “Right” and “wrong” are abstract ideas, but they are ideas with great power over us and both religious and non-religious people acknowledge their sway.Mystic or spiritual experience that leads us to appreciate freedom, justice, and the dignity of human life: You don’t have to be a saint or a monk to discover these truths. Values that speak directly and powerfully to our hearts in ways that cannot be denied are means by which almost everyone on earth experiences the power of transcendence in ordinary life. Having these experiences is part of what it means to be human; interpreting these experiences is what often divides people into different theological and political camps.Most of the atheists I’ve known have a profound and moving faith in the meaning and value of human life and in the value of abstract ideas and ideals. Some believe in these virtues and values enough to stake their lives on them and they have faith that doing so results in a life that is more meaningful and more real than one squandered simply on the pursuit of material goods or prestige and success. The late Christopher Hitchens was one such person; Hitch passionately believed in social and political ideals and thought it was his duty to speak up for them whatever the consequences.Theists take things another couple of steps. Like Hitchens, religious believers look at values like justice and truth and find them to be compelling in their own right. That power is real. But theists also think these values point beyond themselves and tell us something about the way the world is made. The concept of justice isn’t just a product of our evolutionary upbringing, a flicker of sensation in our synapses that points to nothing beyond our conditioning or our genes. Justice claims to be a real value, objectively rooted in something beyond human perception, a legitimate demand on our consciences based on the nature of reality. Theists don’t think that this is a lie.For theists, the universe isn’t just a place with scattered bits of meaning in it. Meaning isn’t decoration or illusion, a subjective human response to hardwired stimuli in our brains or grace notes that accompany us on our meaningless journey through the dark void. Existentialists and others who believe that the universe is ultimately meaningless but who still choose to act as if meaning was real are among the moral heroes of the world, but theists think there is more to life than the brave but doomed affirmation of meaningless ideals in the face of an idiot, uncaring universe.Theists think meaning really means something, that it all adds up. The transcendence that comes to us in life doesn’t just happen in our heads; it points to the nature of ultimate reality. That ultimate reality transcends our ability to comprehend, and we only get scattered glimpses of it here and there, but whatever it is, it is greater than we are.When theists think about that meaningfulness we experience in peak moments, we find ourselves thinking about its source. Theists believe it makes sense that the source of meaning and existence hang together. “Meaning” for theists is like “justice” and “truth”; it is something we don’t completely see or grasp, but it is real. And because meaning is the ground out of which such meaningful ideas as justice and beauty grow, its existence is even more important and more consequential than the existence of these other ideals for which people are willing to die. Theists are people for whom this concept of the meaning of life is so powerful, so present, so active that they find that it can’t be talked about except as a supreme force of transcendence and world-shaping power, the truth behind all truths. Something this beautiful, this lively, this intelligent, this powerful, this transcendent, theists believe, cannot be less than alive and self-aware. Meaning is not a Thing, but a Person.Part of this comes from experience; theists often feel that they have directly experienced God in some of those moments of transcendence that we all feel. They feel they are encountering Somebody in those out-of-the-ordinary experiences of intense perception and awareness, not just Something. At those peak moments of insight, and even in the midst of everyday life, for many theists, there is an experience that the universe doesn’t just sit there while we experience it. It responds to us in a meaningful way that can only be called personal.For Christians, the core of the meaning they experience in their lives and see around them is love. The feeling we have of transcendence, the connections we experience with the people around us, the beauty we find in works of art, the power and glory of the ideals by which we try to steer our lives: These all come down to love in the end.This leads very naturally to the concept of a personal God. Love is a personal quality; there is a lover and a beloved. If this is a universe built on love, then it is a universe of persons, of community, of connection. For Christians, belief in a personal God is connected to their faith that the ideals and values that inspire them reflect the nature of the universe rather than a quirk of human perception.Many people who aren’t religious or don’t have much religious education or experience in their backgrounds think that believers are buying some kind of mythological package that attempts to explain the world. They often think that faith in God is a lot like faith in Santa Claus. Why are there presents under the tree? Because Santa Claus brings them. Look: The milk and cookies are gone, and the presents have come. Proof that Santa is real.Non-believers often think that the difference between belief and unbelief in God is comparable to that between believers and non-believers in Santa Claus. People with more mature minds, more fully developed scientific understandings of the world, say many skeptics, understand what the naive and the emotional do not. Once an individual or a culture grows up, it puts away these childish beliefs and deals unsentimentally with the world as it is.But for believers, the question isn’t why there are presents under the tree. It is whether the love around the family circle speaks of a larger reality and in some way reflects the meaning inherent in the universe as a whole, or whether that happy Christmas morning feeling is nothing more than the biologically conditioned response of a collection of primates in a kinship setting.I won’t try to speak for Islam or Judaism, but to understand where Christians are coming from with this whole God thing, it’s probably more useful to start your thinking about God as the Heart of the universe rather than as its King. God isn’t the Santa Claus who brought the presents to the tree; He’s the Source and the Power of the love the family members feel for one another on Christmas morning. He’s found in the trust the child feels in the parent, the commitment and love the parent feels toward the child.Christmas is so widely celebrated because it expresses as well as celebrates some essential Christian ideas.  God is the Baby in the heart of His Family, the adored Child whose presence gives new meaning and hope to the Parents and friends. This is not God as the Punisher and the Avenger; it is God giving Himself to the world out of uncontrollable, unstoppable, and vulnerable love. As an adult, Jesus would show through His teaching and death that God loves people with the deep and sacrificial love that parents have for their children; as a baby and child, he taught us that God yearns for us and turns to us with the absolute attachment that children have for those who feed, shelter, clothe, teach, and love them to maturity.For Christians, the familiar scene around the manger reminds us that the universe is a home, a family circle; despite the immensity of stars and space stretching away from us on every side, it is love and intimacy and sharing that make it all go round.There is something else to celebrate: Love doesn’t just exist, Christians believe. It rules. That Baby in the manger isn’t just the center of a circle of affection that includes his Family and the adoring shepherds; He is the King and Lord of the universe. Meaning lives and meaning loves and meaning rules; that is what Christians are celebrating at this time of year.Love is here, love is real, love rules. That is what Christmas means to Christians.

A New Year’s Present for California Trial Lawyers

As businesses and people flee from California to escape the notoriously inhospitable business environment and the high costs of living, the state’s government is moving, based on dubious statistics, to enact another impossibly broad, costly regulation: a “Fair Pay Act” requiring businesses to prove that “they pay both genders equally for ‘substantially similar’ work.” The WSJ:

The rules have spurred employers ​to reassess the way they pay and classify workers. Some are puzzling over what “similar” means in legal terms, such as whether a marketing manager and a supply-chain manager have roughly equivalent jobs. Others are conducting complex audits of their payrolls, seeking to uncover any disparities […]

The law leaves open the question of which jobs can be considered similar. Is a women’s soccer coach similar to a men’s soccer coach? An assistant manager of HR, and one in accounting?“It will take several court decisions or agency decisions to work out how broadly the term ‘similar’ will be defined,” said Ms. West.

As Douglas Levene points out, this policy essentially amounts to a “gift” to the state’s trial lawyers. Employers seem not fully to know what “substantially similar” means, and companies are likely to face years of litigation before the law is clarified. Until then, many businesses are likely to take costly measures (insurance, legal fees, internal audits, and compensation changes) to protect themselves. The law may put pressure on some businesses—especially small businesses, which are less able to afford these kinds of measures—to cut back on hiring, or else leave the state entirely.

Moreover, there is not good evidence that women are currently being systematically and significantly under-compensated for doing the same or similar work as men—and the law makes no sense without such evidence. The idea of a serious “gender wage gap,” as it is presented by liberal activists, is somewhere between a gross misrepresentation and a “lie,” to use a word from the headline of a Hanna Rosin piece in Slate on the topic. Women do earn less money than men, but that’s largely because they work different jobs, in different industries, and for fewer hours. As Christina Hoff Sommers has written, once all factors are controlled for, “the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing.”Blue cities and states are already facing large and growing challenges bringing in and keeping businesses, attracting workers, and, more broadly, sustaining their expensive governance models. The last thing they need is for their economies to be undermined further by ham-fisted new regulations pushed by practitioners of know-nothing gender identity politics.

Why Are So Many People Leaving New York?

Residents fled New York State again in the first half of 2015, according to the Empire Center:

During the 12 months ending last July 1, 153,921 more residents moved out of New York than moved into it from other states, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual update of population estimates. The Census Bureau also slightly increased its estimate of New York’s prior year (2013-14) outflow to other states, to a new total of 160,329.

The latest estimates bring New York’s total “net domestic migration” loss since the 2010 census to 653,071 people—the largest such decrease of any state, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of estimated population as of the start of the decade.

The Empire Center doesn’t say why residents are leaving, but we can think of several possible reasons: high taxes, high unemployment upstate, high housing costs in the City, and a large (and corrupt) bureaucracy—for starters.

Since coming into power, Governor Cuomo has promised or proposed tax havens upstate, property tax caps and even cuts, and a simplified tax code. He’s delivered on some of these promises, but only in half measures at best, and his latest proposal to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour is bad news for upstate businesses. Despite New York City’s well-documented boom, much of the rest of the state isn’t doing so well. Moreover, as we wrote recently, there are plenty of warning signs that Gotham’s bubble may be poised to deflate. If certain financial trends continue (for instance, if the dollar continues to get stronger), Wall Street and tourism—the two great engines of the New York City economy—will have a tough 2016. And if the New York City tax base shrinks, Governor Cuomo’s upstate investment projects will be harder to afford.This isn’t just a New York story. Blue states around the country, like Illinois, California, and Massachusetts, have also experienced large net domestic outflows over the past five years. To varying extents, these losses have been mitigated by foreign immigration inflows (enough, in the cases of California and Massachusetts, to make total net migration positive). Napa Valley’s restaurants still need busboys and New York’s dairy producers still need seasonal farmhands—low-paying jobs in states with high costs of living. But when it comes to stable middle class jobs, these states’ economies often have little to offer people. Without good economic prospects, people look to move to places with lower taxes, better jobs, or cheaper costs of living (or some combination of the three) and so they flock to states like Florida. Telecommuting and the access to global markets made possible by the Internet encourages this migration even more.When the blue model succeeded, it did so because the private-public partnership delivered a stable income and safety net to millions of people. That system hasn’t worked for years, and residents of the bluest states are realizing it’s time to try something new. How long will it take for Albany and Springfield to get the message?

State Department: “Bringing Peace, Security to Syria” 2015 Accomplishment

2015 saw Iran and Russia both enter the Syrian Civil War, which is still raging fiercely. Yet, citing a U.N. resolution, the U.S. Department of State has hailed “Bringing Peace, Security to Syria” as one of its accomplishments in the last year:

Wow, the State Department unironically listed "Bringing peace, security to Syria" as one of their 2015 achievements pic.twitter.com/ozQfFzo4hh

— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) December 28, 2015

But Syria isn’t at peace, as the the text beneath the headline admits. It’s still very much embroiled in a bloody civil war, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that the resolution to that war, whenever it comes, will not primarily be on America’s terms, unless we change something dramatically. Rather, it will be on the terms of our rivals—primarily Iran and Russia.The President has argued that, as he put it on October 2, “An attempt by Russia and Iran to prop up Assad and try to pacify the population is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire and it won’t work.” But in a lengthy report in Reuters today, U.S. Administration and intelligence officials paint a much bleaker picture of Syria—where Putin, they say, is winning, and any negotiations will increasingly be conducted on his terms:

Three months into his military intervention in Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved his central goal of stabilizing the Assad government and, with the costs relatively low, could sustain military operations at this level for years, U.S. officials and military analysts say.[..]

“I think it’s indisputable that the Assad regime, with Russian military support, is probably in a safer position than it was,” said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity. [.  . . ]

Russia’s intervention also appears to have strengthened its hand at the negotiating table. In recent weeks, Washington has engaged more closely with Russia in seeking a settlement to the war and backed off a demand for the immediate departure of Assad as part of any political transition.

Putin’s run of success is something every newspaper reader in the U.S. is aware of. More broadly, even only mildly engaged citizens know there’s neither “peace” nor “security” to be found in Syria. Moreover, if any comes, it will not be due to the U.N. Resolution cited by the State Department, but from major shifts in either the military or political stances of the belligerent parties, including the U.S.

The gap between the State Department’s on-the-record optimism and the realism quoted in Reuters is more than just a “gotcha” moment. Time and again this Administration has mixed optimistic promises that security problems were under control with inaction on the ground. The price has been that as those problems, which really weren’t being attended to, got worse, public trust in the government’s ability to take care of them eroded.This feeds into a broader crisis of confidence in our elites, a crisis well and truly earned by leaders of both parties. A Pew poll in November indicated that American citizens’ trust in their government is near a post-WWII record low, with only 19 percent expressing confidence that they can “trust the government always or most of the time.” And as the rise of Donald Trump and his populism shows, this is starting to affect our politics.So instead of a releasing a year-in-review bragging about accomplishments that don’t really exist, perhaps our Administration should consider some resolutions for next year. Resolutions like: Don’t over-promise and under-deliver and don’t respond to bad news with sunny statements of the “who are you gonna trust, me or your lying eyes” variety. And try as far as possible to level with the American people, particularly in situations like Syria where there are no easy, or even good, options.

Provocations

When I most recently wrote in this space, I pleaded with you, dear readers, to try to see certain dark events of the recent past—the tragic beheading of two journalists, to take one example—from the perspective of the demonized leaders of the Islamic State. My purpose was not to exonerate barbarous behavior, as I made explicit, but to better understand its motives and machinations. I was fully aware that, given the emotional character of many observers’ orientation to the subject—as morality play, not strategic challenge—my attempt to contextualize my own motives would not come across to everyone. In that I have not been disappointed. But I am also not deterred. So in this, my final post for calendar year 2015, I will provoke again—twice, in fact—in an attempt to shoehorn some sunlight into our mostly tenebrous mental caverns when it comes to matters Middle Eastern and Islamic/Islamist.

SyriaLet me pick up where I left off with respect to the Islamic State in light of today’s news about a small UN-sponsored ceasefire and movement of people in Syria. (This is news you will not see in today’s American mainstream press, whether print or otherwise, but that of course does not mean it’s not news in the region and in the regional press…) One town and two villages near Idlib—Zabadani, Fua’a, and Kafraya— basically exchanged populations. Some 450 Sunnis from Zabadani, for months under siege by the regime, passed through Lebanon on the way to Turkey, and from Turkey returned (supposedly) to rebel occupied parts of northern Syria. (If some of them ended up in Germany by Easter I would not be particularly surprised.) Meanwhile, Ismaili Shi‘a from the two villages were allowed to move into protected areas away from rebel siege. Altogether, about 600-750 people were involved.This is not the first geography-specific mini-ceasefire in the Syrian civil war, but it is certainly the most complicated. (This one is also very complicated in terms of the groups of fighters involved, but we’ll not go into those details here.) Some who do not know any better might think that this is the beginning of a series of local ceasefires that could accumulate into a general truce, as a first step to ending the civil war and putting Syria back together. It’s a nice thought, in roughly the same league as thoughts about sugar plum fairies and unicorns. But it isn’t warranted by the facts. As in the past, these ceasefires are part surrender and part population displacement. It is better for those affected to move than to die, no doubt, but the homogenization of sectarian settlement patterns in Syria presages partition and possibly more war, not peace and a recreated unitary Syrian state. Want referred evidence from a similar case? Look at what happened in Iraq during its post-combat intifadah in 2004–06.And this brings me to my first naughty, provocative punch to your kisser for the day. On December 15, someone named Vadim Nikitin, writing in The Independent, suggested recognizing ISIS and negotiating with it. The most recent time I looked at the comments, there were 46, and just about all of them were of the “are you insane?” variety. That’s not surprising. But this is not necessarily an insane or absurd idea, even if Nikitin’s rationale for it is less than persuasive.Let’s back up a logical step or two to see why. Anyone who seriously examines reality in Syria with a mind to remediating it knows that Syria cannot be put back together again as a unitary state under Alawi rule. Even if, for example, the regime could retake Raqqa, it could not readily rule it after spilling so much innocent Sunni blood over the past four years. It’s the same in Iraq: If, after the victory of the Iraqi Army in Ramadi, the liberation of Mosul is next, how will a Shi‘a regime supporting a Shi‘a-led army rule a near-100 percent Sunni city? (It’s the old dog-chases-school-bus problem, for the umpteenth time: The dog can catch and sink his teeth into the school bus’s left rear tire, but having caught it, what does he do with it?)This reality has led several observers to propose some sort of Sunnistan, or Sunni Regional Government (modeled after the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq) to rule the Sunni-populated areas of Iraq and Syria in a redrawn Levant. Some versions of this idea propose a new state, others autonomous zones within existing states—and of course the same kind of ideas have been proffered to deal with existing Kurdish realities, which now outstrip the KRG’s reach and domain.How does one get to this Sunnistan? Well, there has to be a negotiated settlement of the civil war before any such entity could come stably into existence. But any imagined negotiation leading to such a result has to parry the following conundrum: How do you negotiate a settlement to the civil war, leading to a new political arrangement, if those around the table fail to represent about a third of the country—namely, the third now controlled by the Islamic State? Well, the reasoning goes that first one empowers this new Sunni entity (whether to include Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar as-Sham in the formulation is still a matter of debate), and its first act as a governing body would be to make war on other Sunnis in the form of ISIS. Then, reasoning further, it wins that war somehow and then absorbs the territory currently held by ISIS into its geographical and political fold.This might work. Then again, it very well might not. If the Islamic State has gone to the trouble of writing out a 24-page statecraft blueprint, according to Nikitin, maybe one can talk to it. After all, the Ottoman Empire, complete with caliphate, eventually managed to integrate itself into the European state system some centuries ago and become a rule-following if not necessarily friendly neighbor. Why would we begin an arduous and very uncertain process of trying to create a Sunni political voice that anyway fails to represent large swaths of Syrian territory and population when we can, perhaps, figure out a way to deal with one that already (sort of) exists?Note that recognizing the existence of an entity in order to talk to it for a practical purpose is not the same, in American diplomatic practice, of extending formal recognition to a government or even to a political movement. We have often in our history made that distinction, including with the PLO in the Reagan Administration, it will be recalled, and there is no reason we could not to do it again if there were a good reason for it. I am not advocating doing so, because there are plenty of practical matters to be considered first. I am simply arguing for doing the analytical due diligence involved, and not ruling it out beforehand as a matter of course.Note that I am not making the hoary and often wrongheaded argument that, if you can “engage” an enemy, you will ipso facto moderate that enemy’s goals and behavior. Nikitin makes it, and it sounds foolish coming from him because it is foolish. I worry that the idea will appeal to the Obama Administration for the wrong reasons, because it has showed that it accepts such foolish arguments (see: Iran). But that doesn’t make the idea “insane” or “absurd.”Even if engagement doesn’t necessarily moderate an enemy threat, reality often does. Note also that the Almohads, which always seemed to me to be the closest historical analogue to ISIS, also started out radical, murderous, and crazy, as premillennarian sects tend to be—and it too calmed down eventually, before destroying itself (with help) in a frenzy of dissipation and division. Yes, that was the 12th century, and, yes, it “eventually” clocked in at more than eighty years. But you get the point: There are no quick, easy, and militarily antiseptic options to be had here. It seems to me that if we can help end the Syrian civil war sooner rather than later, and in the process save many thousands of lives, by trying to bring ISIS inside the negotiating tent, then it’s something to think through rather than get all huffy and puffy and righteously indignant.Finally on this point, thinking such contrarian thoughts might not be necessary if the Vienna process bears a good prospect of gaining a ceasefire in another, more conventional way. Secretary Kerry continues to vouchsafe much hope in the prospect. As usual, he’s gullibly wrong; the Russians are having him on, and he doesn’t know it. The Syrian regime, together now with the Russians, are the only parties with the power on the ground to declare and impose a ceasefire, complete with humanitarian supply routes to relieve afflicted areas. Some people even besides Secretary Kerry think they will soon do so, and the killing will subside if not end. I remain skeptical. We shall see.The War of IdeasLast time out I expressed a certain exasperation that American public opinion has tilted after the San Bernardino killings into a pro-war attitude against the Islamic State over an event whose actionable connection to it is nil. Want to attack and liberate Raqqa with 100,000 U.S. troops (and never mind the “dog chasing the school bus” problem)? Fine, but at least let your reason for doing so have something to do with the proposed action.Let me now be exasperated in print once more. After Paris and San Bernardino there came rollicking across the digital prairie the sounds of tocsins beating for a “war of ideas” against Islamist “ideology.” It was as if this formulation, this phrase, never before existed. It was as if 9/11 had never happened, and the reaction to it never happened. Pundits and assorted other amnesiacs trotted out this phrase as though we have not tried and failed for more than a dozen years to wage precisely this “war of ideas.” Many note the strange effects of information technology on the human capacity to actually think, which involves integrating information into knowledge within a framework of some purpose, which process of integration in turn gives a shape to the possibility, at least, of useful memory. Maybe this is a case: When seemingly intelligent people in 2015 cannot remember a huge corpus of thought and writing going under the identical label from only a dozen years before, one does have to wonder what the hell is going on.One possibility is that failure and frustration tend more to be forgotten than remembered. It’s human nature. We did not do so well the first time around with the “war of ideas” portfolio, and so we are condemned, as Dylan once put it in a song, to be “waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice.” I don’t know the price; I just know what it feels like to suffer not paying it.So already many years ago we came to the conclusion that the real war of ideas is going on, and needs to go on, inside of Islamic civilization, and that non-Muslims have very little of positive value to say about it. So U.S. policymakers were advised to network Muslim moderates—in other words, to help the good guys wage this war within the big Muslim tent. Books were written, government studies commissioned, speeches were given … and a lot of good it did. Well, it did some good, but it remains a very uphill struggle. It certainly did more good than the early post-9/11 State Department orientation to the subject, which I observed from a front row seat.Now, I’m not going to regale you with long stories about ridiculous ignorance and absurd wastes of money, nor am I going to mention names (so, Karen Hughes and Margaret Tutweiler, you’re safe). I am merely going to characterize the approach of the day, as of, say, 2004, and briefly explain why it was so wrongheaded—and why similar thinking now circulating about in the amnesic haze of the “war of ideas” 2.0 is similarly doomed.The early efforts to wage a war of ideas against Muslim extremism depended on two utterly American assumptions about the world, both of which happen to be mistaken. The first comes straight from the script of our Enlightenment-lite devolution. In this case, it adjures us to believe that, if we can only come up with the right string of highly persuasive, well-nigh irrefutable words and get them translated into Arabic, Farsi, Pashtun, Urdu, and so on, then would-be radicals and terrorists will fall to their knees before our unassailable logic and good intentions, see the error of their ways, and be nice people, like us.The second, closely related, assumed that the problem was us, not them. They did not like us and wanted to kill us, so the fault must be partly ours for not communicating to them both our general benignity and our deep regrets over any harm we may have caused them in earlier times.Taken together, these two assumptions led to a policy based on the fiction that actual ideas, or an ideology as we understand the term, is what motivates Islamist radicals and terrorists, and on the further fiction that if we manage to redefine ourselves so that we are not the enemy within this ideology, they’ll leave us alone.This nonsense is what led the U.S. government, for example, to create glossy Arabic-language magazines showing Middle Easterners how good, and fair, and free, and lovely, life is for Muslims who live in the United States. There were pictures of mosques and attendant green lawns, and dark-haired children playing in parks attached thereto. I am not making this up. I could not make this up. This is what led to the establishment of U.S. government-created Arabic- and Farsi-language radio and television programs that, initially at least, showed the same ass-backwards bias. We were not and are not the problem; they are, and the societies that reared them to some extent or other are too.And that leads to the main point, punch in the kisser number two: We do not have an intellectual or an ideological problem in the main with Islamists; we have a sociological problem. And no string of persuasive words is going to change that.What do I mean by “sociological problem”? I mean that the motivations for Islamist violence are not anchored to formal theology or any actual thinking. The political entrepreneurs who ransack the capacious traditions of Islam to gull alienated, fearful youth into joining radical organizations are very few of them well-educated Muslims. Few of them have madrassa educations. They are glassy-eyed ignoramuses in their own religion for the most part, and those youth they gull generally know even less. They cherry pick this or that Quranic verse, this or that hadith, and very creatively tell people what they mean, when they don’t mean such things at all and never have.The real motives have to do with the will to power on the part of the entrepreneurs, and such men have always existed at the margins of Muslim societies, as they do at the margins of almost every society. What has made them relatively successful in recent decades has to do with the unsettling churn in Middle Eastern societies pressed by the stresses of modernization. That churn has created massive urbanization and increased literacy levels, particularly for women. It has created different labor profiles and family dynamics. It has disrupted most traditional social forms, including the ones that disciplined people and kept them tied to traditional conservative forms of social authority.This process has a name, and it is called neo-fundamentalism. It is a process well described by many scholars over many decades, including decades that transpired before 9/11. The fundamentalism project at the University of Chicago, for example, begun by Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, dates back to 1987! Ernst Gellner wrote brilliantly on this subject, as have in more recent times Olivier Roy, Bassam Tibi, and many others. If I can simplify and abbreviate radically, let me just point out (as I have many times before) that the stresses of modernization in the Middle East have created a twinning between upward social mobility and increased standards of religious piety—exactly the opposite of what Western modernization theory predicted back in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead of learning about religion mimetically, by simply observing what others did and how they spoke of it, new urbanites have learned about religion analogically, by reading and listening to educated clerics. Standards of piety rise. Muslim women in many countries veil themselves more often these days not because their grandmothers did; their grandmothers were too busy collecting sticks to make a fire to cook dinner to bother with veils getting in their way. The granddaughters veil themselves because they can, because it is a sign of elevated status and self-esteem.Obviously, becoming more religious in one’s behavior does not necessarily make one a radical, does not necessarily make one political, and certainly does not necessarily make one a terrorist. But the dislocation and deracination that come from a loosening of traditional ties and constraints do create larger reservoirs of disaffected, lonely, and nervous young men (especially) to be lured by political entrepreneurs. The Muslim Brotherhood is a quintessential early example, founded in Egypt in the 1920s; its Leninist organization substitutes for the tight tribally based family ties and sense of belonging to a group that is otherwise hard to sustain in a noisy, confusing, stressful city. That the MB has thrived in cities among recently self-displaced rural people is no coincidence. The same may be said, with variations leaning on different times and places, for the mass membership of the AK Party movement in Turkey, as people wandered from the Anatolian countryside into the country’s larger cities—so this is not an exclusively Arab phenomenon. People who are desperate to belong to a social support group will believe practically any line they are fed. That line does not have to be any more sophisticated than the one that created cadres of nutcase Moonies in the United States forty years ago. And it isn’t.But then, dear reader, you retort that if the problem is sociological rather than intellectual, then it means that the whole idea of what is usually conjured by the phrase “war of ideas” between the West and Islam is a fool’s notion. Yes, it is. That also means that there is no quick, easy, and intellectually antiseptic solution to this problem, right? Gosh, not even the State Department can solve it? Well, that’s right too, Jack: Get used to it. We Americans cannot master this problem, only manage it. Others have to solve their own problems themselves, or they won’t stay solved—and they will do that. Painfully, bloodily, slowly, and erratically they have already begun the process. It will just take some time.Again, let me remind you that this pocket sociology of Muslim modernization is not esoteric knowledge. It is not particularly hard to understand, it is not rare, and it is not hidden away in some scholastic vault somewhere. Anyone who has been to graduate school for this sort of topic knows this stuff, and has known it for years. Even fortunate undergraduates at better schools have been exposed to all this, and as noted already, much of the better literature on the subject has been around for a long time—well before 9/11. Gellner’s Muslim Society from Cambridge University Press, to take just one example, dates from 1981—a couple years after the Iranian revolution but twenty years before 9/11. I read it once and then studied it carefully during the Reagan Administration …Now, one might suppose that serious, responsible people in the broadly defined American political class, dealing with a serious problem after 9/11, would have found their way sooner or later back to this literature and would have devoured it with a purpose. By and large, one would be mistaken to suppose this. There is little to no evidence of any such thing having happened. If it had, it is hard to see how serious, responsible people could have screwed up the first, post-9/11 “war of ideas” escapade as badly and thoroughly as they did. I watched it unfold. I tried to disabuse at least a few people on the seventh floor and few floors below of the wayward assumptions with which they were approaching the problem, but I confess I did not get very far. Morally outraged Americans in a near panic default very fast to their Manichean passion-play mentality, and once that gets locked in, whether in liberal “guilt” mode or conservative “exceptionalist” mode, it tends to stay locked in, come what may.And so it is, after Paris and San Bernardino—and there will probably be more fuel to stoke this particular fire, unfortunately—that here we go again, as if, like the Bourbons, nothing has been learned and nothing forgotten. Me, I feel sort of like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day—only this remake was made not in Hollywood but in Washington. Then again, I guess I would rather watch another futile, misguided “war of ideas” be waged than watch a division of American soldiers bite into the rear left tire of Raqqa and then wonder what to do with it. 

The Meaning of Christmas

Happy fifth day of Christmas, and welcome back to the 2015-16 Yule Blog, where we aim to keep the holiday fires burning right up through Twelfth Night on January 6.

Yesterday King Herod’s massacre of every child in Bethlehem under the age of two shocked us out of the idea that Christmas is basically a pretty holiday about presents and elves. Christmas is serious business, at least as Christians understand it. The birth of the baby in the manger is connected with the murder of the babies in the streets of Bethlehem, a horrifying crime that is only one small incident in the chronicle of crime and suffering that mark the long and bloody journey of the human species. God made us as free moral actors, but the price is that both He and we must then live with the consequences of the choices that we make. From this perspective, Christmas is a key point in God’s plan to save us from ourselves without stripping our moral freedom from us.The shocking claim of Christmas, that the baby in the manger is the God of Abraham and Isaac, the Maker of heaven and earth, the uncreated Creator of all things, is at least as hard to understand as it is to believe. But that outrageous claim is why Christians celebrate the day: They believe that this baby, born of a virgin in Bethlehem of Judea, was the only begotten son of God, the long-prophesied Messiah, and the Savior of the world. For the people who think this, it makes perfect sense that the world’s biggest annual celebration is held in His honor; nobody ever born was more important or did more good.Forget believing or disbelieving this; if we are going to understand what Christians mean by these ideas, we have to unpack some concepts and examine some unspoken assumptions. We need to know what Christians mean by God, why they think God had a Son and what they think God’s Son was doing being born at all, much less being born in Bethlehem. These are some big questions and we won’t get them all answered in one day; those of you who stick with me through the rest of the Christmas season will, I hope, have a better idea of how this all hangs together by the time we are done.The place to start is with the idea of God: Why do Christians and so many other people believe in an invisible Ruler and Creator of the universe—and then how does the Christian idea of God differ from the others? We’ll go on from there to see how the Christmas story makes sense to Christians in the light of these special beliefs.Whether we look at Christianity or at other religions, the idea of God doesn’t come from the realms of science or philosophy. That is, most people don’t believe in God because they work through a long philosophical argument. Most people haven’t taken classes in formal logic to evaluate the claims and counter-claims of various world philosophies before making their choice. They have not been slowly driven to the logical necessity of a Prime Mover in the universe, or followed St. Anselm’s argument that existence is a necessary attribute of the greatest Being that our minds can conceive.But neither do they believe in God because they are scientifically ignorant. They don’t believe in God because they think that God makes the thunder clap and the rain fall. They don’t believe in God because they’ve never heard of the theory of evolution and need an explanation for why the physical universe works the way it does.Most people believe in God because they feel that life means something.We are born, we move through life; if we are lucky, we grow old and die. As all this happens, we feel things. We feel connections to other people and creatures—to family, friends, lovers and spouses, work and professional colleagues, fellow citizens of a nation, fellow members of our species facing a common fate on a single and fragile planet, the animals that share our lives and our world. We see astounding acts of heroism and devotion, especially in everyday life. We see parents sacrificing for the sake of their children, young people caring for aged relatives, firemen rushing into burning buildings to save people they don’t even know, inspiring teachers who earn very little money but seem contented and fulfilled, volunteers giving spare time and money to their communities in many ways, judges who give honest verdicts without favor or fear—and on and on and on.We also see beauty all around us: sunrise, sunset, the play of light on water, starry nights, the subtle colors of a grassy field, the awesome presence of a mountain range, dazzling tropical fishes, roses in a garden. We often feel there is some kind of connection between the beauty of nature and the beauty of human life well lived; many of us seek to respond to the beauty we see around us by creating beauty (whether as art, in gardens, or in our daily lives) of our own.Moral beauty, physical beauty, feelings of love and devotion to people and causes that take us beyond our selves: For most of us, the part of our life that feels truest, most real, and most fully lived revolves around these things.Our lives in the world point us towards something beyond the facts of our lives. Eating, drinking, making babies: This is all very well, but our lives do more than revolve around the simple biological necessities. They point us toward meaning.Most people, including the very large majority of those people who say they are atheists, believe that life means something. To this majority, the moral feelings we have about justice and duty (for example) aren’t just random biological signals that flash across our neurons in response to evolutionary patterns. We sometimes can’t articulate why this is true, but we feel that it matters that we do the right thing: that we bring up our kids well, that we honor our parents and care for them when they are old, that we remain loyal to our spouses and keep our wedding vows, that we behave fairly in our dealings with other people and that we contribute to the greater good through the way we live our lives. There are people and causes for which many of us are willing (though perhaps not particularly eager) to die.Maybe we feel this way because we are biologically hard-wired to do so, but the reality is that the overwhelming majority of people around the world believe that life counts and that the whole is somehow greater than the sum of the parts.This feeling that there is some meaning to our lives is the basis, I think, not only for the Christian religion and for all religions and mystical experiences; it is the basis for the many noble forms of ethical thought and philosophical reflection found among atheists and agnostics. Anyone who feels the pull of a higher path and greater responsibilities than just blindly grabbing what can be seized is moved by a vision of something outside one’s own life that compels allegiance and respect: a vision of what matters and a sense of life’s meaning.That sense of life’s meaning is our sense of the transcendent: a sense that our experience points beyond itself to something important.It seems to me that atheists and theists often exaggerate their differences. Both atheists and theists experience transcendence or meaning in their lives and both have faith that transcendence matters. Both try to live their lives in the light of their experience of life’s meaning.The difference between theists on the one hand and atheists and agnostics on the other is relatively minor compared with the difference between those who believe that life means something and those who don’t know and don’t care. Ethical atheists believe in the importance of justice, the need for self-control, and the need to live by an ethical code in the world just as much as religious people do. Like religious people, they often fail to live up to the codes they believe in, but that (for now) is not the point. The vast, the overwhelming majority of the human race thinks that life means something and that we ought to honor that meaning in the way that we live.Discussions and disputes about the nature of God are best understood as discussions about the nature of meaning. They involve the different answers people give to the question “What is life really all about?”Christians answer that question with a distinctive understanding of God; looking into that a little more deeply will help us see how Christians can possibly believe that a baby in a manger could be God—and what they mean when they say it. During the next few days of Christmas, I’ll try to tease out the features of this distinctive Christian approach to the meaning of life. But for now, the main thing is to see that for most people their religious convictions don’t come from the realm of myth and fantasy (pictures of guys with white beards seated on thrones in the sky); they come from that part of the human personality that sees the moral and physical beauty of the world and the people in it, and reaches out to try to make sense of the meaning that seems to lie all around us.Just as Christmas is about something deeper than Santa and the toys in his sleigh, so religion is about more than the stories and doctrines in which it is often expressed: Religion is born out of humanity’s experience with the mystery of love that burns so brightly in this darkest time of the year.