Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 121

“Inflation Is Dead. Done. Whipped.”

That’s what Matt O’Brien declares:

You can see that above. Inflation is just 1.6 percent in China, 1.5 percent in the U.S., 1.2 percent in the U.K., and a minuscule 0.3 percent in the Eurozone. Then there’s Japan, which is harder to compare since its sales tax hike just bumped up prices, but would only have 1.1 percent inflation, if not for that. And it’s probably even lower than that there and everywhere else. That’s because, as Jessie Handbury, Tsutomo Watanabe, and David Weinstein show, measured inflation tends to overestimate actual inflation by about 0.6 percentage points. So inflation might really be about 1 percent in all of the world’s biggest economies.

Drum’s bottom line:

Nobody knows what will happen in the long term, but for now we simply shouldn’t be worrying about inflation. We should be worrying about growth and unemployment. Inflation just isn’t a problem.

But Amity Shlaes doesn’t regret her inflation fear-mongering:

[S]omeone in the world ought always to warn about the possibility of inflation. Even if what the Fed is doing is not inflationary, the arbitrary fashion in which our central bank responds to markets betrays a lack of concern about inflation. And that behavior by monetary authorities is enough to make markets expect inflation in future

Chait pounces:

The inflationistas got the balance of risk totally wrong — unemployment, while falling, has remained above target, while inflation has stayed below it. Shlaes’s defense is not just factually wrong, it’s conceptually bizarre. Somebody has to worry about bear attacks, yes. But if you demand that all children be kept home from school for the year to protect them against bear mauling, it’s not enough to point out that bears exist. You need to somehow engage with the idea of a tradeoff.

Krugman quips:

The ability of inflation derp to persist, even flourish, in an age of disinflation remains remarkable.

You Can’t Hurry The Supremes

Dahlia Lithwick puzzles over the recent spate of high-impact SCOTUS decisions that came in the form of injunctions and cert denials. She looks to explain why “unsigned, unexplained reasoning is the new black”:

Between the state legislatures getting way out in front [o]f the court’s doctrine on voting rights and abortion, and the court’s decision to hang back and wait for conflicting decisions from different circuit courts in the marriage equality cases, what we seem to be witnessing is a Supreme Court that is dealing with events moving at lightening speeds. It may be attempting to impose what [former acting solicitor general Walter] Dellinger describes as “procedural dignity” upon the process. Even when the court issues late-night stays and unsigned orders, the court is clarifying that it gets the last word, even when the last word is haughty silence.

Thus, in the voting rights context, the court is merely ensuring that states do not put new systems in place immediately prior to the midterm elections. In the marriage equality context, the court is simply affording the states the opportunity to arrive at the correct conclusions on their own schedules.

And in the Texas abortion context, the court is reacting to a set of Texas regulations that appear to completely reinterpret (if not blatantly disregard) the rule announced by the court itself in its 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. As Greenhouse notes, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals more or less ignored Casey when it ruled on the Texas abortion regulations: “In holding that the forced closing of every abortion clinic south and west of San Antonio, requiring women to travel hundreds of miles to exercise their constitutional right, was not an undue burden in purpose or effect, the Fifth Circuit ruled in blatant disregard of the Casey standard.” Really, was the court going to permit that to happen? When the court bats these issues away, it’s merely saying that nobody rushes the highest court in the land. Not even Texas.

A Declaration Of Independents

Surveying the independent politicians on today’s scene, from Michael Bloomberg to current South Dakota Senate candidate Larry Pressler, Michael Kazin waxes nostalgic for when the term meant more than press-pleasing moderation:

“Independent” wasn’t always a synonym for vapid. In the early decades of the last century, independent politicians played a far more serious and largely beneficial role. Stalwart “progressives,” they advocated open primaries instead of closed party caucuses, non-partisan elections for city government, replacing partisan hacks in the federal bureaucracy with dedicated civil servants, banning corporate spending on campaigns, and giving voters a chance to initiate their own laws or turn down ones passed by often corrupt state legislatures. Figures like Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette, and Fiorello La Guardia left their party, temporarily or for good, to speak out for ideas that were later converted into policy. “There once was a time in history when the limitation of governmental power meant increasing liberty for the people,” TR told his followers in the independent new Progressive Party in 1912. “In the present day, the limitation … of governmental action, means the enslavement of the people by the great corporations, who can only be held in check through the extension of governmental power.”

Not everything such bygone independents did or tried to do lived up to their ambitions.

Big businesses and other “special interests” learned how to hijack the making of ballot initiatives, spending millions on measures designed to boost their profits and power. “Good government” mayors sometimes governed in a bloodless fashion, emphasizing tax-cutting and efficient administration instead of the better housing and health protection which city dwellers badly needed. And, of course, the major parties adapted and endured—and passed laws on the state level that made it difficult for third parties to gain a foothold or to fuse, for any given election, with the Democrats or Republicans.

But the pressure of principled independents and the friendly journalists who covered them did help create a more effective and more professional national state, which legitimated the idea that social programs should serve “the public interest” rather than just the followers of one big party or the other.

(Image: “Theodore Roosevelt Hotel Allen 1914″ by Unknown Photographer, Lehigh County Historical Society, via Wikimedia Commons)

Egg-Freezing On The Company Dime, Ctd

Last week, we covered announcements from Facebook and Apple about covering the cost of female employees freezing their eggs. Megan McArdle raises an unaddressed concern:

What I haven’t seen anyone explain is when, exactly, you’ll be ready. For most people, your 40s and early 50s are your peak earning years — is that really going to be a good time to meet that special someone, or finally step back to invest some time in having kids? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m already noticing that I have a lot less energy than I used to. It’s not that I can’t get my work done or anything like that. But it used to be that if I had to travel for six days straight and then deliver a 2,500-word essay on the 7th, I could dial up my reserves and power through it — miserable and cranky, to be sure, but functioning. Then one day, around the time I turned 40, I dialed down for more power and there just … wasn’t any. My body informed me that it was tired, and my brain would not be doing any more work today, and we were going to sleep whether I liked it or not.

Along similar lines, Rebecca Mead reflects:

[E]ven with this tantalizing suggestion of reproductive liberty, it’s hard to figure out exactly how long to postpone. A woman might skip having children in her twenties or thirties in order to focus on her career, only to discover by her forties that its demands—not to mention the encroachment of middle age—make motherhood even less manageable than it appeared at twenty-five or thirty.

And it seems overly optimistic to hope that, with nature’s deadlines subverted, a woman’s decision about whether or when to bear children might become an entirely autonomous choice—hers alone to make, independent of cultural and professional pressures as well as biological ones. Might Apple and Facebook’s offers of egg freezing be, in fact, the kind of employee benefit whose principal beneficiary is the company? What if, rather than being a means of empowerment—whereby a young woman is no longer subject to anything so quaintly analog as the ticking of a biological clock—freezing one’s eggs is understood as a surrender to the larger, more invisibly pervasive force of corporate control?

But Chavi Eve Karkowsky stands up for egg-freezing. She insists that it allows women to wait “until they can find a way to have the family they really want, with the partner they really want”:

When asked about delayed child-bearing in many studies, the two factors that come up again and again are financial stability and the availability of an appropriate partner. We really like to talk about that first factor, and tie reproductive lateness to hard-charging women who have their own career-centered, family-unfriendly priorities. But for a moment, let’s talk about that second factor: the appropriate partner. This is the one that I think creates the egg-freezing push. At some point, while dating, and waiting, and having hearts broken (or yes, breaking hearts), many women want to start working with what they have, and not waiting for the right XY chromosome carrier to come around. They want him to come around, they believe he’ll come around, but they don’t want to lose their chance at healthy, genetically related children while they wait for the father of those children.

Katie Benner also defends the corporations:

I know what informs some of the worries that got around after the Apple announcement: Big, technocratic companies might be using these perks to suck the best working years out of their female employees. Evil vampire geniuses at corporate HR ply us with fertility and adoption coverage, thus securing greater access to our young, alert minds.

What happens next? We become 40-something husks (because lord knows, women teeter on the verge of uselessness in every conceivable way at 40) and then and only then do our corporate masters allow us to finally procreate. As our weary 50-something bodies drag toddlers and teenagers from day care to soccer practice, somewhere a corporate overlord will smile with glee: “We got their best years. They never knew what hit ‘em. Heh, heh, heh.”

But you know what? That’s not what I think is happening here. For starters, it’s an insane scenario. And it’s also ageist and sexist.

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

I spent the weekend awaiting the final statement from the Synod in Rome (while catching up on Doctor Who). My take on the ongoing debate is here. I don’t have much to add tonight, except to say again that the most significant shift is merely that there is finally an open, unafraid dialogue and at the same time no consensus on the most contentious issues, i.e. how to handle divorced, re-married and gay Catholics and their families. That means that Francis has succeeded in a core early task: the beginning of a real conversation about gay people and other less-than-ideal families in search of the truth about us.

Meanwhile, another moonbeam of hope, this time in journalism. There’s a new browser addon you can add to Firefox or Google Chrome which makes sure you don’t mistake a “sponsored content” fake article for the real thing. It’s called AdDetector. Instead of searching for the deliberately subtle fig-leaf of a disclosure, it will add a big, bright red banner to any ad posing as an article. I downloaded it and tested it a bit. Here’s what a page on Slate now looks like:

Pretty cool, huh? Sometimes, it can get very intrusive, like this AdDetector version of a fake article at the Atlantic:

Hard to miss. Download AdDetector and force “sponsored content” to be transparent. And the more often you come up against these big red banners, the more you know you shouldn’t trust the site/magazine/blog you’re reading. So far, the add-on is only for a handful of major sites – from the New York Times to Buzzfeed – but the add-on creator’s Reddit page says he’s happy to add others. Get in touch with him and get some of the worst sites on the list.

Some gems from the weekend (curated and edited primarily by Jessie Roberts and Matt Sitman): a fantastically witty cartoon with two rather plucky octopi; rave reviews of a new Rembrandt exhibit in London; the peculiar poetry of James Laughlin; a splendid defense of shitty beer; the case for hope in Israel; and a Quote For The Day from Francis Spufford that will knock your secular socks off.

Plus: the unforgettable faces of an English cock and a pissed-off Siamese fish.

The one post that made me laugh the loudest: this Tumblr of drunk J-Crew models. Priceless.

The most popular post of the weekend was this post on meditation: Compassion Is A Muscle. Next up: The Trouble With Religion which has already promoted a reader explosion (almost entirely in revulsion).

Dish t-shirts are for sale here, including the new “Know Dope” shirts, which are detailed here. I’ve been wearing mine this weekend and just remembered to take it off before Mass. 19 more readers became subscribers this weekend. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here.

See you in the morning.

(Chart via Rollin Bishop)

Quote For The Day II

“After a time, tired by his dancing apparently, he settled on the window ledge in the sun, and, the queer spectacle being at an end, I forgot about him. Then, looking up, my eye was caught by him. He was trying to resume his dancing, but seemed either so stiff or so awkward that he could only flutter to the bottom of the window-pane; and when he tried to fly across it he failed. Being intent on other matters I watched these futile attempts for a time without thinking, unconsciously waiting for him to resume his flight, as one waits for a machine, that has stopped momentarily, to start again without considering the reason of its failure. After perhaps a seventh attempt he slipped from the wooden ledge and fell, fluttering his wings, on to his back on the window sill. The helplessness of his attitude roused me. It flashed upon me that he was in difficulties; he could no longer raise himself; his legs struggled vainly. But, as I stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to right himself, it came over me that the failure and awkwardness were the approach of death. I laid the pencil down again.

The legs agitated themselves once more. I looked as if for the enemy against which he struggled. I looked out of doors. What had happened there? Presumably it was midday, and work in the fields had stopped. Stillness and quiet had replaced the previous animation. The birds had taken themselves off to feed in the brooks. The horses stood still. Yet the power was there all the same, massed outside indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in particular. Somehow it was opposed to the little hay-coloured moth. It was useless to try to do anything. One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew, had any chance against death. Nevertheless after a pause of exhaustion the legs fluttered again.

It was superb this last protest, and so frantic that he succeeded at last in righting himself. One’s sympathies, of course, were all on the side of life. Also, when there was nobody to care or to know, this gigantic effort on the part of an insignificant little moth, against a power of such magnitude, to retain what no one else valued or desired to keep, moved one strangely. Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange. The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am,” – Virginia Woolf, “The Death of the Moth.”

(Photo by Flickr user Dendroica cerulea)

Reading Camus In The Age Of Ebola

A Life Worth Living—Camus on our search for meaning and why happiness is our moral obligation http://t.co/k5uYp9m8jw pic.twitter.com/2wDu6HmHig

— Maria Popova (@brainpicker) September 22, 2014

Malcolm Jones turns to the author of The Plague as an example of sober, sane thinking about widespread disease:

Based on the evidence in his notebooks, Camus assiduously studied the literature of plague, from Thucydides to Boccaccio to Artaud and certainly the Bible. But always for this author, the plague is foremost a scientific fact, a sickness spread by rats and fleas that infects humans both good and bad indiscriminately. Like the white whale in Moby-Dick, a favorite novel of Camus’s, the plague is lethal but it has no rationale. It is a force as opaque as it is deadly.

Camus is not interested in explaining bubonic plague. He only cares about exploring its effect on a population and most particularly on their responses.

He concentrates on a handful of characters that includes a doctor, a bureaucrat, a criminal, a priest, and a journalist. Each of these men views the plague differently. The crook, for instance, welcomes the quarantine that comes with the epidemic because he thinks it will hide him from the authorities. The priest at first sees God’s agency behind the disease, a view that changes as the novel progresses. But by far the most complicated character, and the man through whose eyes we see most of the action, is Dr. Rieux, a man of science and healing who does all he can to save lives and hold death at bay but yet a man who emerges at the end with his humanity badly damaged.

“As [Rieux] watches the exuberant crowd on the night when [the quarantine is lifted after a year of confinement and] the gates of Oran finally open, he realizes that he will always be a prisoner of the plague,” writes Germaine Bree in her brilliant critical biography Camus. “For him the plague is, in essence, the clear inner awareness of man’s accidental and transitory presence on the earth, an awareness that is the source of all metaphysical torment, a torment which in Camus’s eyes is one of the characteristics of our time.”

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

[Re-posted from earlier today]

The inevitable media headline from the final Relatio of the Synod on the Family will be: “Bishops scrap welcome to gays.” And this is literally true. The astonishing mid-term Relatio’s language of outreach, inclusion and welcome shrank last night into much more arid, cold and unsparing prose.

We don’t yet have an official English translation of the critical paragraphs, but the gist is clear. Gone are the paragraphs that extol the “gifts and qualities” of gay people; gays are no longer to be “welcomed” in a “fraternal space” but merely “accepted with respect and sensitivity”; the church should no longer “value” homosexual orientation; it should merely accept people with “homosexual tendencies.” Of the three paragraphs in the mid-term report, the two with the most positive language have been excised completely; and the remaining one reaffirms the tone and language of Benedict XVI and John Paul II. Here it is – in my unofficial Google-enabled version:

55. Some families live with members with homosexual orientation. In this regard, our view of the pastoral care appropriate to this situation refers to what the Church teaches: There is no foundation whatsoever to assimilate or to establish same-sex unions as even remotely analogous to the plan of God for marriage and the family. “Nevertheless, men and women with homosexual tendencies must be accepted with respect and sensitivity. In their regard should be avoided every sign of unjust discrimination” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons, 4).

Notice the very Ratzingerian foot-stamping:

There is no foundation whatsoever to assimilate or to establish same-sex unions as even remotely analogous to the plan of God for marriage and the family.

It’s not exactly subtle. My marriage, according to this version of the text, is light years away from the marriage of my own sister. There isn’t even a remote analogy between her family and mine. In fact, there is no foundation whatsoever to compare the two relationships in any way. Let me simply respond by saying what most Catholics who have encountered these relationships in our own lives would say: it is indeed hard to read this and believe it. This is not because I differ one iota from the church’s view that the life-long, procreative marriage between a man and a woman is a precious, beautiful and unique thing. Two men or two women cannot replicate it, if only because of basic biology. The sacrament of matrimony is a celebration of this unique institution – and cannot be re-fashioned into something else without diluting its central truth.

But where I differ from the old guard is in their refusal to see anything good or precious in the mutual love, responsibility and sacrifice that are as integral to same-sex unions as they are to heterosexual ones. To see nothing worthwhile there, nothing to value, nothing to affirm seems, well, untrue to the reality more and more of us live. As Cardinal Marx of Germany said earlier this week:

“Take the case of two homosexuals who have been living together for 35 years and taking care of each other, even in the last phases of their lives. How can I say that this has no value?”

He cannot, which is why this paragraph – along with two others on the pastoral care of divorced or re-married people – failed to win the 2/3 majority vote for it to be part of the official text.

But it was included anyway – with the vote tallies appended. And there you see why it is not wishful thinking to believe that something profound has indeed occurred so far in this Synod. Neither of the two previous popes would ever have allowed the original language to even see the light of day – Ratzinger as arbiter of church doctrine for decades could sniff heterodoxy on this like a beagle with a distant potato chip – and stamp it out with relentless assiduity. Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI would have excised the outreach to gay people altogether. And the idea of a transparent vote tally – revealing a vigorous internal division on these questions – would have been unthinkable.

The true headline of this past remarkable week is therefore: the Vatican hierarchy cannot find a consensus on the question of pastoral care for gays, the divorced and the re-married, and the Pope is happy for this fact to be very, very public. These remain open questions for a year of continued debate and discussion before the second stage of the Synod this time next year and the Pope’s subsequent summary. That these are open questions is the real result of this Synod.

I also think its worth reading Pope Francis’ concluding speech to the Synod, which was granted a four minute standing ovation. It is a beautiful text – certainly more so than the unavoidable consensus-speak of what might be called the interim communiqué. Here is Francis’ Obama-style weighing of two different temptations to avoid:

A temptation to hostile inflexibility, that is, wanting to close oneself within the written word, (the letter) and not allowing oneself to be surprised by God, by the God of surprises, (the spirit); within the law, within the certitude of what we know and not of what we still need to learn and to achieve. From the time of Christ, it is the temptation of the zealous, of the scrupulous, of the solicitous and of the so-called – today – “traditionalists” and also of the intellectuals.

The temptation to a destructive tendency to goodness [it. buonismo], that in the name of a deceptive mercy binds the wounds without first curing them and treating them; that treats the symptoms and not the causes and the roots. It is the temptation of the “do-gooders,” of the fearful, and also of the so-called “progressives and liberals.”

Avoiding both these temptations is the goal – which has to be accomplished pastorally and with prudential judgment. In his speech, Francis nods to the traditionalists by quoting Benedict XVI verbatim, but then says this:

We will speak a little bit about the Pope, now, in relation to the Bishops [laughing]. So, the duty of the Pope is that of guaranteeing the unity of the Church; it is that of reminding the faithful of their duty to faithfully follow the Gospel of Christ; it is that of reminding the pastors that their first duty is to nourish the flock – to nourish the flock – that the Lord has entrusted to them, and to seek to welcome – with fatherly care and mercy, and without false fears – the lost sheep. I made a mistake here. I said welcome: [rather] to go out and find them.

It’s hard not to see a little playfulness here. After all, the word “welcome” was one of the most contentious of the Synod, in so far as it was extended to gay people. And if the final Relatio turned that “welcome” into the more neutral “accept”, Francis turns it into something more radical still: to go out and find the lost sheep.

Just as vital in Francis’ vision is the open, tough and lively dialogue that this Synod represents. Nothing like this has been experienced since the Second Vatican Council. And in his concluding speech, Francis reveled in the turmoil:

It has been “a journey” – and like every journey there were moments of running fast, as if wanting to conquer time and reach the goal as soon as possible; other moments of fatigue, as if wanting to say “enough”; other moments of enthusiasm and ardor. There were moments of profound consolation listening to the testimony of true pastors, who wisely carry in their hearts the joys and the tears of their faithful people. Moments of consolation and grace and comfort hearing the testimonies of the families who have participated in the Synod and have shared with us the beauty and the joy of their married life. A journey where the stronger feel compelled to help the less strong, where the more experienced are led to serve others, even through confrontations. And since it is a journey of human beings, with the consolations there were also moments of desolation, of tensions and temptations.

The church is not a political party, voting on a platform, and shifting from one convention to the next. Its core doctrine is unchanged and unchangeable. But it has evolved and grown and changed in the way it has encountered the world throughout history. It has absorbed and assimilated new ways of thinking and newly discovered truths about humankind and attempted over the centuries to integrate them into its internal dialogue. So you have to look at a Synod like this one and not get too caught up in developments from last Monday to Sunday. You have to look beneath that surface to the tectonic shifts beneath. And the real shift, I’d argue, has been the glasnost of Francis – which may or may not lead to perestroika. The intellectual life of the church was a dark and stifling and deadly silent place until very recently. There is now a crack in the window, where light has been let in, and words said that can be excised from the final text but not expunged from the collective consciousness. And at the end, no consensus on the most contentious questions at hand. And a year to debate them further.

Those knots? They keep unraveling.

(Photo: Franco Origlia/AFP/Getty.)

The View From Your Window

New Haven, Connecticut, 2.20 pm

“A Poet Of In-Betweenness”

In an interview worth reading in full, Henri Cole recalls the crucial encouragement he received from Seamus Heaney about his poetry:

I remember once talking to him about my book The Visible Man—it had just been published and I was feeling apologetic about the erotic content. He told me the poems were a record of something in “the arena of human emotion.” The most important thing was to contribute to the arena of human emotion, he insisted. I’ve never forgotten this. And to hear it from the son of a cattle farmer was unexpected. It seemed the most patient and generous response to a book others had dismissed as aberrant. It pushed me forward. He describes himself as being a poet of in-betweenness—in between Catholic and Protestant, in between England and Ireland, in between rural and city life, and so on. He is proof that in-between is a good place for poetry. In my own writing, I am in between the North and the South, in between formalism and free verse, in between vernacular and high speech, and, as a gay man, in between genders. Heaney’s example made me want to fly beyond all the identity markers others assign to me.