Against Environmental Anti-humanism

By Marian L. Tupy

Thursday, May 27, 2021

 

On April 25, British Vogue published an article titled “Is Having a Baby in 2021 Pure Environ­mental Vandalism?” The author, Nell Frizzell, “worried about the sort of world” that she would bring her “child into — where we have perhaps just another 60 harvests left before our overworked soil gives out.” In the end, she decided to have a son and teach him to live within humanity’s “environmental means” and free of “the fever of consumerism.”

 

Frizzell is not alone in worrying about the increasing size of the world’s population and the accompanying growth in resource consumption. In the last few years, books, articles, and organizations arguing in favor of limits on population growth have proliferated in line with the increasing radicalization of the environmental movement. Where did that radicalization come from, and do the environmentalist extremists have a point?

 

Let’s start with a few examples. In February 2019, Repre­sentative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) told her Insta­gram viewers that, unless humanity takes urgent action on CO₂ emissions, there is no hope for the future. “It is basically a scientific consensus that the lives of our children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: Is it okay to still have children?”

 

In May 2019, a CNN segment on the newly released report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services remarked that, to prevent an environmental catastrophe, “we must act now, consuming less, polluting less, having fewer children.”

 

The logical continuation of the concern with population growth is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or VHEMT. The founder, Les Knight, told the Daily Mail in January 2019, “I’ve seen more and more articles about people choosing to remain child-free or to not add more to their existing family than ever. I’ve been collecting these stories and last year was just a groundswell of articles, and, in addition, there have been articles about human extinction.”

 

Most anti-natalists are content with voluntary reduction of birth rates. Others hope to achieve that goal through government enforcement. Prominent environmentalists, including Johns Hopkins University bioethicist Travis Rieder and science popularizer Bill Nye, have advocated — à la chinoise — in favor of special taxes or other state-imposed penalties on those with “too many children.”

 

As COVID-19 spread across the world in 2020, some environmental extremists rejoiced at the growing human death toll. The New York Times has noted that an upside of social-distancing efforts is that they may help fight climate change, and CNN ran the headline “There’s an unlikely beneficiary of coronavirus: The planet.” The BBC’s environmental correspondent gleefully reported that air pollution and CO₂ emissions fell rapidly as the virus spread. Some environmentalists worried that, when things get better, post-recession economies might see a surge in harmful emissions.

 

Of course, most environmentalists are not anti-humanist or anti-natalist. But extremist rhetoric from the fringe of the environmental movement could have a lasting effect on America’s total fertility rate (1.779 births per woman in 2020), which is already well below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman — with serious consequences for U.S. economic growth and tax rates, as well as for the national fisc and the payment of unfunded liabilities accrued by the U.S. government.

 

A 2020 study in the journal Climatic Change found that 60 percent of U.S. respondents between the ages of 27 and 45 “reported being ‘very’ or ‘extremely concerned’ about the carbon footprint of procreation,” and 96.5 percent of respondents “were ‘very’ or ‘extremely concerned’ about the well-being of their existing, expected, or hypothetical children in a climate-changed world. This was largely due to an overwhelmingly negative expectation of the future with climate change.”

 

* * *

 

The word “ecology” was coined by the 19th-century German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Ecological concerns in Western Europe were largely rooted in the Romantic opposition to industrialization and urbanization. Such concerns were particularly prevalent in Germany, which was the center of the Counter-Enlightenment and a hotbed of the general disgust with “modernity.”

 

Environmentalism took longer to emerge in the United States. According to the EPA Journal (1985), “many environmental ideas [in America] first crystallized in 1962. That year saw the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, first in serial form in the New Yorker and then as a Houghton Mifflin best seller.” In her book, Carson attacked “indiscriminate use of pesticides, . . . causing a revolution in public opinion.” Within a year, Congress passed the 1963 Clean Air Act, giving the federal government more power to regulate the environment.

 

Five years later, The Population Bomb, by the Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, caused a sensation of similar proportions. The book, which sold millions of copies and was translated into many languages, warned of the coming depletion of natural resources. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich began, following with his famous prediction that “in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

 

The speed and extent of environmentalist triumphs in the United States are noteworthy. Earth Day was born on April 22, 1970. In September of that year, the U.S. Congress beefed up the 1963 Clean Air Act. By December, President Richard M. Nixon inaugurated the Environmental Protection Agency. Private environmental organizations also flourished, along with militant groups such as Greenpeace, which was established in 1971.

 

As the 1970s rolled on, American environmentalism became increasingly anti-capitalist. Arthur Herman of the Hudson Institute avers that it was the American writer Charles A. Reich who, with his book The Greening of America (1970), brought the German ideas to America. Herman notes that “modern ecology” in the United States “replayed the same enthusiasms that had animated every modern cultural regeneration movement since the German Romantics.”

 

Reich’s book was a best seller in 1970 and 1971. “For most Americans,” he wrote,

 

work is mindless, exhausting, boring, servile and hateful, something to be endured while “life” is confined to “time off.” At the same time our culture has been reduced to the grossly commercial; all cultural values are for sale, and those that fail to make a profit are not preserved. Our life activities have become artificial, vicarious and false to our genuine needs, activities fabricated by others and forced upon us.

 

That is exactly the Marxist critique of capitalism as “alienation” of labor. Instead of acknowledging that, however, Reich veered straight into environmentalism. Yet, like a typical Marxist, he predicted revolutionary turmoil. “There is a revolution coming,” Reich prophesied, and its “ultimate creation will be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty — a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land.”

 

Other voices critical of capitalism’s effect on the environment soon emerged. They included the American biologist Barry Commoner, who argued that modern society was unsustainable. Unlike Ehrlich, who focused on “overpopulation,” Commoner focused on capitalist production techniques (e.g., synthetic textiles and pollution-causing detergents) and advocated “eco-socialism.”

 

In 1972, the British economist Barbara Ward and the Franco-American microbiologist René Dubos warned that the exponential economic growth of industrial society threatened the survival of the entire planet. In their view, wealth generation was no longer capitalism’s saving grace. It was a problem that needed to be tackled.

 

By the 1980s, environmental demands became more radical. The Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, for example, thought that reforming industrial society was not enough. Instead, he called for a change of the culture that allowed ecological destruction to exist in the first place. In his philosophy of “deep ecology,” Naess argued that the problem with modernity was that it placed humans above other life-forms, creating an inflated ego that enabled our species to destroy nature.

 

In The Modern Crisis (1986), the American social theorist Murray Bookchin called for the replacement of environmentally destructive capitalism. His utopia was radically egalitarian, with people, plants, and animals living on equal terms. As he saw it, such utopia had existed for thousands of years in the form of primitive societies. His vision amounted to an inversion of human progress. Civilization, he thought, was just domination over nature, wrenching away the last remnants of an earthly paradise that still existed among the aborigines of Africa and South America.

 

In his book In the Absence of the Sacred (1991), the American activist Jerry Mander argued that primitive societies are based on a rejection of modernity, not ignorance of it. He saw the subsistence lifestyle as a conscious cultural choice to avoid civilization. To this day, deep ecologists view primitive societies as not only ecologically harmonious but free of the desire to exploit nature.

 

In Earth in the Balance (1992), his critique of modernity, Al Gore fused some old ideas: that modern society was ecologically destructive, materialist, and shallow, that it shielded us from authentic experiences. The culprit, however, was new: humanity itself. In Gore’s vision, culture represented control over nature. To wit, stone tools and cave paintings were simply early human attempts to impose artificial order on the organic world. The West, capitalism, technology, and even sexism and racism were extensions of the innate human desire to dominate.

 

Some ecologists began to salivate at the thought of the end of the world. The American writer Edward Abbey dreamed of dams bursting and cities crumbling, forcing the last remnants of humanity to return to a primitive lifestyle. The French ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau called the idea that suffering and disease might be eliminated “not altogether a beneficial one.” He thought that “we must eliminate 350,000 people per day.”

 

The American environmentalist Christopher Manes called HIV/AIDS “the necessary solution” to environmental degradation. Paraphrasing Voltaire, he said that “if the AIDS epidemic didn’t exist, radical environmentalists would have to invent one.” In his 1994 best seller The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story, Richard Preston of the New York Times wondered whether super-deadly viruses such as Ebola and Marburg might be the biosphere’s reaction against “the human parasite” and the “cancerous rot-outs” of advanced industrial societies.

 

* * *

 

The environmentalists of yore were concerned that we would run out of resources. Today’s environmentalists are concerned about, in addition to the well-known issue of rising CO₂ emissions, the possibility of “running out of nature.” As the American environmentalist Bill McKibben has explained, “it’s not that we’re running out of stuff. What we’re running out of is what the scientists call ‘sinks’ — places to put the by-products of our large appetites. Not garbage dumps, . . . but the atmospheric equivalent of garbage dumps.”

 

Overconsumption, in other words, will not exhaust planetary resources. Instead, the environmental catastrophe will be brought about by the destruction of humanity’s broader environmental support systems, such as high-quality soil, groundwater deposits, biodiversity, and so on. The key to understanding this “problem” is the concept of an ecological threshold, or “the point at which a relatively small change or disturbance in external conditions causes a rapid change in an ecosystem.”

 

Unfortunately for the environmentalists, scientific debate about “ecological thresholds” remains unsettled — even when it comes to the basic question of measurement. In August 2020, for example, the monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Ecology and Evolution published a study based on 36 meta-analyses of more than 4,600 individual studies covering the past 45 years of research on ecological thresholds. The nine authors — German, French, Irish, and Finnish ecologists — found that

 

threshold transgressions were rarely detectable, either within or across meta-analyses. Instead, ecological responses were characterized mostly by progressively increasing magnitude and variance when pressure increased. Sensitivity analyses with modelled data revealed that minor variances in the response are sufficient to preclude the detection of thresholds from data, even if they are present. The simulations reinforced our contention that global change biology needs to abandon the general expectation that system properties allow defining thresholds as a way to manage nature under global change.

 

Put differently, nature adjusts to human activity in a multitude of ways and, the greater the human impact, the greater the natural adjustment. So, instead of seeing natural collapse, humans are encountering nature’s resilience.

 

Several additional points are in order. First, many environmentalists assume that humans will continue to reproduce with abandon. In reality, birth rates are falling throughout much of the world. Writing in The Lancet, researchers at the University of Washington estimate that the global population will “peak in 2064 at 9.73 billion people and decline to 8.79 billion in 2100.” Other estimates, such as that of Wolfgang Lutz from the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, see the world’s population peaking at 8.9 billion in 2060 and declining to 7.8 billion (i.e., exactly where it stands today) by 2100.

 

Environmentalists worry that even if the human population shrinks, consumption of resources and the concomitant pressure on the environment will increase. Yet, as Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered when he looked at U.S. consumption of 72 resources (from aluminum to zinc), the absolute annual use of 66 resources peaked prior to 2019. Even energy use decreased between 2008 and 2017, while the U.S. economy expanded by 15 percent in the same period. The U.S. economy, in other words, has reached such a level of efficiency and sophistication that it is possible for it to produce an ever-increasing amount of goods and services while, at the same time, using ever fewer resources.

 

To give just one simple example: When aluminum cans were introduced in 1959, they weighed 85 grams. By 2011, they weighed 13 grams. Why pay more for inputs if you don’t have to? The universality of the profit motive should drive other economies in the same approximate direction.

 

Economic growth does not have to come from bigness — bigger and deeper mines, larger and more-polluting steel mills, and so on. It can and does come from “smartness” with processes such as miniaturization (the computing industry, for example, saw the replacement of massive mainframe computers with smaller and much more efficient personal computers) and dematerialization (a smartphone, for example, combines functions that previously required a myriad of separate devices, including a telephone, camera, radio, newspaper, compass, television set, alarm clock, photo album, voice recorder, and maps).

 

Environmentalists assume that humanity will sit idly by and allow environmental problems to overwhelm our planet. That is highly improbable given our species’ track record of tackling challenges. According to Ted Nordhaus of the Break­through Institute in California, it took six times as much land to feed a single person in the Neolithic period as it does now. If we were still harvesting einkorn with sticks and stones, we would certainly transgress our “environmental means,” as Nell Frizzell put it. Instead, we’ve improved our agricultural efficiency so much that less than 2 percent of the U.S. population has to farm at all.

 

In fact, if the productivity of the world’s farmers increases to U.S. levels, humanity will be able to restore at least 146 million hectares (about 560,000 square miles) of cropland to nature, according to Jesse Ausubel et al. in their article “Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing” (2013). Such efficiency-driven “human withdrawal from the landscape,” noted Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine, could be a “prelude to a vast ecological restoration” over the course of the 21st century.

 

Many additional problems identified by the environmentalists are being addressed or are on the cusp of being addressed. Forest coverage is growing in rich countries, species are being protected at record levels throughout the world, freshwater reserves are being replenished through desalination in the Middle East, soil erosion is being reduced through precision agriculture in Israel, and CO₂ emissions have fallen in nuclear-friendly France and Sweden. In the future, genetically modified crops could lead to a decline in the use of nitrogen and phosphorus, and wild fish stocks could bounce back through greater use of aquaculture, which is rapidly expanding in China.

 

What’s needed to address current and future problems are freedom, brainpower, and rational optimism, not hysteria, fatalism, and anti-human nihilism.

Israel Has Every Right to Destroy Hamas

By Mario Loyola

Thursday, May 27, 2021

 

For more than 50 years, the diplomacy surrounding major outbreaks of Israeli–Arab violence has followed a standard progression. The United Nations Security Council goes into emergency session, with most members calling for an immediate cease-fire. America uses its veto power to stave off Security Council action for a few days or weeks, buying Israel a bit of time to in­flict significant damage on its enemies. Then America decides that time’s up, and Israel — beholden to America’s moral and material support — is forced to suspend large-scale military operations. All sides declare victory and live to fight another day.

 

The bloody ritual was performed once again last month, and once again Israel’s principal assailant was Hamas, which brutally rules over 2 million Palestinians in a part of the “occupied territories” known as the Gaza Strip, which is be­tween Israel and Egypt, and which Israel stopped occupying in 2005. Hamas is an Islamist terrorist organization that is supported by Iran and totally devoted to Israel’s destruction; it has stockpiled tens of thousands of missiles for the purpose of terrorizing Israeli communities whenever the fancy strikes.

 

This time, the fancy struck over a mundane landlord–tenant dispute in East Jerusa­lem and Palestinian riots on the Temple Mount. Hamas used this as a pretext to unleash a new barrage of missile terrorism across Israel, reaching every major city with hundreds of missiles per day in its most expansive and destructive offensive yet. Even as Israel’s sophisticated Iron Dome missile-defense system knocked most of those missiles out of the sky (at the lopsided cost of about $80,000 per intercept), millions of Israelis scrambled into bomb shelters, and scores were injured or killed. After eleven days of fighting, Israel caved in to American pressure and agreed to an Egyptian cease-fire proposal.

 

Israel has decided to tolerate Hamas’s existence for now, partly because the costs of truly defeating Hamas seem prohibitive, even if destroying it is entirely within Israel’s military capabilities. Hamas values a Palestinian life at about 1/1,000th of the value of an Israeli life, judging by the fact that it demanded the release of about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of a single Israeli soldier in 2011. It places even less value on the lives of Palestinian women and children; given that it systematically hides its rocket launchers among them, it’s clear that Hamas sees them principally as propaganda assets that are most valuable when they’re dead.

 

From inside schools and next to hospitals, Hamas barbarically launches indiscriminate missile attacks against Israel, a war crime against both Israel’s civilians and its own. Its strategy is to turn Israelis’ concern for human rights into a weakness. The strategy has worked. Israel cannot stomach risking as many Palestinian lives in order to preserve itself as Hamas would gladly sacrifice in order to destroy Israel. Golda Meir long ago said, “We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us,” and so it has proved.

 

Apart from the question of prudence, and more important from the diplomatic point of view, is the question of rights. Simply put, Israel has the right to demand that Hamas surrender unconditionally or be destroyed. It has a right to use whatever level of force is necessary and proportional to that end, whether punitive or preventive. And the U.S. government should say so unambiguously.

 

The reflexive push for immediate cease-fires, which has become institutionalized in American foreign policy, only perpetuates the conflict in the Middle East. It has helped entrench the dangerous fallacy that Israel’s self-defense actions must be “proportional” to the attacks against it. And it takes no account of the strategic threat posed by missile terrorism.

 

Many legal authorities, particularly in Europe and at the United Nations, nowadays argue that force may be used in self-defense only to repulse an actual attack, and never for retaliatory or punitive reasons. A bit more in touch with reality, other authorities say that force may also be used to prevent an attack, but only if that attack is “imminent.”

 

A moment’s reflection should suffice for one to see the absurdity of these claims. The right of self-defense must include the right to remove immediate threats to a state’s security. The concept of “immediate threat” is broader than that of an “imminent attack.” It involves many situations in which an attack is not even theoretically imminent. For example, an adversary’s acquisition of a weapon against which there is no effective defense, such as a nuclear weapon, is an immediate threat, whether or not the adversary intends to use the weapons imminently or ever. Hence, President Kennedy was entirely justified in imposing a naval quarantine on Cuba (classified as a “threat or use of force” under the United Nations Charter) in response to the placement of Soviet nuclear missiles there. And even Barack Obama, in a speech to AIPAC, endorsed Israel’s de­struction of a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007, though the reactor was not yet completed.

 

Apart from the question of when force may be used (jus ad bellum) is the question of how force may be used (jus in bello). For example, the long-standing consensus is that force used in self-defense must be “necessary and proportional.” But necessary and proportional to what? Many commentators appear to think that the requirement of proportionality in self-defense turns on the level of force being used against the victim. But that would be a preposterous rule, as it would in effect make it illegal to achieve decisive victory in a war started by somebody else. The best you could ever hope for would be a stalemate, which would reduce the potential penalty facing any would-be aggressor — the opposite of deterrence.

 

Under Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime to risk civilian casualties that would be excessive in relation to the “concrete and direct military advantage” to be gained by the attack. The United States has never ratified Protocol I, with good reason. It is wrong to suppose, as most commentators do, that the objective must be purely tactical, such as the destruction of a particular military installation. International law must also allow for objectives that are broadly strategic, such as the destruction of Hamas’s military capacity.

 

Wars usually end when one side loses the will to continue fighting. That usually happens when one side faces such overwhelming force that it loses hope for ultimate victory and accepts defeat. The modern developments in the law of war make such a scenario hard to imagine.

 

Indeed, those developments have something remarkable in common. They would have all but guaranteed the victory of the Confederacy in the Civil War. They would have made it even more difficult for democracies to prevent the outbreak of the Second World War — and would have made it virtually impossible for them to win it. And today, they prevent democracies from doing much of anything to stop the proliferation of the world’s most dangerous weapons in the hands of the world’s most dangerous people.

 

If the strategic objective is legitimate, then any level of force that is “necessary and proportional” to achieve that objective should be considered legitimate. That understanding corresponds to the law of war as it was always understood before the United Nations began making the world safe for aggressive dictatorships, state sponsors of terrorism, and nuclear proliferation.

 

With more than 4,000 powerful missiles fired across a wide swath of Israel’s civilian population, in just eleven days, Hamas demonstrated that it poses an intolerable threat to Israel. In much of Israel, life came to a complete standstill as Hamas’s missiles rained out of the sky. Streets were deserted and Ben Gurion Airport was closed. Millions of Israelis have already learned to live with the sounds of the warning sirens, knowing they must run for cover within seconds, even with the protection of Iron Dome. If Hamas emerges from the recent conflict with its long-term capabilities largely intact — and there is little reason to think it won’t — many Israelis could decide to leave Israel for safer shores. This is especially true given that the threat of missile terrorism grows worse by the year, as those devoted to Israel’s destruction amass ever larger stockpiles of ever more powerful and sophisticated rockets.

 

A state that can’t ensure the basic security of its citizens is not a viable state. That is why the specter of missile terrorism poses an existential threat far beyond the casualties and considerable destruction of the rockets themselves. Faced with such a danger, Israel would be entirely justified in concluding that it cannot tolerate the continued existence of Hamas. The destruction or unconditional surrender of Hamas would be an entirely legitimate war aim, just as the Allied powers in World War II gave the Axis a choice between destruction and unconditional surrender.

 

Like everyone else, Israel has an obligation to avoid civilian casualties that are avoidable. But civilian casualties arising from Hamas’s abominable tactic of hiding its rocket launchers among its own civilians are war crimes attributable en­tirely to Hamas.

 

Certainly, the destruction of Hamas would entail consequences that Israel might not want to deal with, such as having to reoccupy Gaza, which nobody on earth would want to do. But before Israel decides what course of action is most practical, let’s be clear about what it has a right to do.

 

It’s time for the U.S. to end its reflexive policy of imposing cease-fires on Israel in conflicts started by enemies that practice missile terrorism. The U.S. should make clear it will give Israel all the time, re­sources, and diplomatic cover that it needs to inflict upon those enemies a defeat from which they will never recover.

Are Americans in the Mood for a Humiliating Defeat?

By Noah Rothman

Friday, May 28, 2021

 

It doesn’t take much to establish and enforce a consensus around a pearl of conventional wisdom these days, and we have been woefully underserved as a result. Today, another critically unexamined but fashionable opinion is upon us. It is leading the Biden administration toward the vigorous execution of one of its chief policy priorities: That is the idea that Americans want out of Afghanistan, and they want it yesterday. They don’t care how we get to that preferred outcome; they just want out. And they’re willing to absorb any costs along the way.

 

In April, Joe Biden announced his intention to seek the withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan by an auspicious date, September 11, 2021. Withdrawal would be entirely unconditional, independent of the conditions on the ground. American military commanders objected. A pullout that dramatic would risk U.S. gains and force local interests to accommodate the Taliban as it seeks a return to power. But Biden held firm. This month, the president accelerated the timetable for withdrawal. All American troops are now on track to leave this Central Asian nation no later than mid-July.

 

But the Pentagon was right to worry. As the New York Times reported, since U.S. forces began their withdrawal, the Taliban has filled the vacuum that’s been left behind. Since May 1, at least 26 outposts in four Afghan provinces have surrendered to fundamentalist insurgents, taking government forces hostage and securing critical intelligence along the way.

 

The restoration of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan seems a foregone conclusion now. America’s allies are shutting down their diplomatic missions in Kabul, and the Afghans credulous enough to trust America’s commitment to their safety are scrambling to get out before the old guard returns to kill them. Administration officials still have no clear idea how to prevent Afghanistan from once again incubating the kind of terrorists that attacked the U.S. 20 years ago, or even whether the U.S. will provide air support for the Afghan forces still capable of fending off the Taliban.

 

Make no mistake, this is an American defeat. But the unduly self-confident arbiters of America’s political discourse are convinced that the voting public will be just fine with it.

 

Americans are exhausted from the Afghanistan conflict, the polls suggest, even if they’re not following the situation all that closely. Many–Democrats, primarily–are convinced that the conflict had been a costly error from the start, and few could tell you what has really been accomplished by our presence there. At least, that’s how those who favor withdrawal justify their own predilections.

 

But those polls could be misleading. As Brookings’ researchers, Madiha Afzal and Israa Saber, recently observed, fewer and fewer Americans even respond to questions involving the troop presence in Afghanistan. “In previous polls, one conducted by the University of Maryland in October 2019 and the other by YouGov in 2018, approximately one-fifth of respondents opted not to answer questions about troop levels in Afghanistan,” they noted.

 

And those who do choose to weigh in on the matter are more ambivalent about it all than you might think. In 2019, one poll found that only one-third of Americans backed “a rapid and orderly withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan.” Last fall, another poll found that just 34 percent supported troop withdrawals, as long as they were buttressed by a counterterrorism agreement with the Taliban (which has since failed to materialize).

 

Sure, public opinion may be more ambivalent than you’ve been led to believe. But the time has come to get out, with or without public support, right? The blood and treasure invested in Afghanistan over 20 years are more than enough, a familiar refrain contends. But the public’s growing ambivalence toward the conflict reflects the declining costs associated with America’s advisory commitment to Afghan security.

 

Since 2001, the number of U.S. deaths in Afghanistan totals just over 2,300, with about 20,000 soldiers wounded. Combat-related casualties suffered by the tiny 2,500-solider U.S. footprint in Afghanistan are relatively rare today. And as for treasure, U.S. military operations over the 20 years we’ve spent in Afghanistan total roughly $825 billion. Not exactly small change, but the federal government today talks about spending $1 trillion over the course of a weekend like it’s nothing, much less 20 years–and on projects with prospects for success not nearly as defined as the West’s mission in Afghanistan.

 

Ultimately, what keeps those invested in American geopolitical hegemony and domestic security up at night is the prospect that we won’t be gone from Afghanistan for long. We’ll be back, at a time and place not of our choosing, when it once again becomes a terrorist haven. After all, that’s what happened in Iraq in 2014, the last time Washington deemphasized strategic goals in favor of political narratives. “We’ve seen this movie before,” said Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin. And we know how it ends.

 

Those who refuse to question their own certainty about how the future will unfold don’t seem all that concerned about the political fallout that will settle over the American landscape following our capitulation in Afghanistan. They seem to think voters are in the mood to be defeated. They have not considered the potentially far-reaching psychological effects that may follow from watching the collapse of everything Americans spent a generation working toward in Central Asia. They don’t believe there will be any repercussions when the Taliban forces women and girls back into the shadows, tortures the Afghans who worked with American forces but couldn’t get out in time, and overruns American outposts and diplomatic missions. They don’t think anyone will care when the instruments of American power are foisted over the shoulders of jihadists as trophies—forcing us to confront the symbols of America’s inexorable decline.

 

And maybe they’re right. But what if they’re wrong?

A Dangerous State of Affairs

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, May 31, 2021

 

Fort Worth, Texas  — “I thought I was a gun nut,” he says. “But that was before I started working here.”

 

Here is the firearms department of a suburban chain sporting-goods store, where customers and soon-to-be-disappointed would-be customers line up outside before the store opens hoping for a chance to purchase ammunition. You see the same thing all over, outside Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops and Academy and independent local retailers: signs apologizing for the paucity of the firearms inventory, signs advertising a two-box limit for what little ammunition is available, the anxious faces of frustrated shooters.

 

I want to ask him about the co-worker who has just informed me that we are no more than ten years away from building concentration camps for white people thanks to the public-school curriculum in New York City. But I don’t push — he’s busy with paperwork.

 

In March 2020, more than 1 million background checks for firearms purchases were recorded in a single week for the first time since the FBI started keeping records. The million-a-week mark has been surpassed several times since then. For a while, it was difficult to buy firearms of the sort that people buy when they are scared: AR-pattern rifles and semiautomatic handguns. The best ones are still pretty hard to come by: Wilson Combat, the Louis Vuitton of the semiautomatic-firearm business, currently lists not a single rifle or handgun in stock and hasn’t in months.

 

But it isn’t just the mall-commando stuff. Here in Texas, in the heart of gun country, the cash registers are ringing everywhere from modest independent sporting-goods stores to the tony Beretta boutique in Highland Park Village, where shooters can shop for European shooting tweeds while fondling shotguns that cost as much as a serious sports car.

 

Some firearms have returned to the shelves. But ammunition is another matter. That market was subjected to what everybody in the business insists on calling a “perfect storm”: Demand went through the roof as Americans stocked up at the beginning of the coronavirus epidemic, and demand continued to be strong throughout the lockdowns and the riots and political violence of 2020, through the election; at the same time, production was interrupted as factories went dark, and Donald Trump’s ill-advised trade war with China left certain raw materials difficult to source. The company that makes Remington-branded ammunition reported a production backlog of a year or more at the end of 2020. Other manufacturers were in a similar position. Shooters whisper rumors to one another like subjects of the Soviet Union looking for bread or shoes: “I hear they’re getting some .357 next week.”

 

People have started making gun-buying decisions based on what ammo is available.

 

Factories have prioritized production of the most in-demand rounds, which, the times being what they are, aren’t hunting cartridges like the .30-06 but the 5.56mm and 7.62mm ammunition used in AR-style rifles and the 9mm and .40-caliber rounds that feed the most popular semiautomatic handguns. While defense-oriented semiautomatic firearms are selling briskly at high prices, formerly coveted hunting rifles sit unsold in part because no one can get their hands on the ammunition to go with them. A thriving barter trade has developed.

 

A man who must have a rogue bull elephant bothering him asks a clerk about the availability of .500 Nitro Express, a favorite of Africa-bound hunters. The answer: “Good luck.”

 

In Dallas, a recent class for those seeking a license to carry was well attended in spite of the fact that Texas is about to implement “constitutional carry,” under which no license would be required to carry a firearm that the carrier is legally eligible to own. Middle-aged African Americans made up almost exactly one half of that class. Black buyers account for about one in five of the guns sold nationwide in recent years, and Hispanic buyers a similar share. And about one in five buyers last year were first-time buyers.

 

That’s a lot of guns in a lot of inexperienced hands, as in the case of the student in the Dallas license-to-carry class who tried to cram .45-caliber rounds into a 9mm pistol. Another first-timer bounced a round off the floor, throwing up sparks. A 40-ish man who had sauntered in with a pistol sticking out of the pocket of his sweatpants — and here I’ll repeat that this was a class for people seeking a license to carry, not a class for people who already have one — discovered to his dismay that he needs 50 rounds for the shooting test, and all he has is the 19 rounds in his pistol. There’s ammo for sale, but he doesn’t have any money. Spent it all on the Glock, I guess.

 

We sometimes talk about “American gun culture,” but another way of saying “American gun culture” is “American culture.”

 

As a matter of civil liberty, the Second Amendment is every bit as important as the First or the Fourth or the Sixth, and it is no accident that the semiautomatic rifle has taken the place of the cannon on the Texas revolutionary flag, emblazoned over the slogan that has over the centuries made its way from Thermopylae to Fort Morris to Gonzalez to the bumper of a whole lot of F-150s: “Come and Take It.” At least one of the shoppers looking for ammo over the weekend had the version Plutarch attributed to Leonidas — μολὼν λαβέ — tattooed on his forearm. It’s a popular bumper-sticker, too.

 

And that “Don’t Tread on Me” spirit matters to a people whose two great formative episodes were the Revolution and the frontier experience. That attitude is an important part of what has kept America free. But it also is bound up in some of the worst aspects of our national character: paranoia, our unarticulated antinomianism, our taste for political and religious extremism, and our horrifying addiction to violence. Americans are a murder-happy people — not only with firearms but with knives and clubs and hammers, with bombs, automobiles, and standing water. There are lots of countries where people have guns. Switzerland is a gunned-up country, and there are millions of privately owned firearms in France, Austria, and Italy — walk around Tuscany at the right time of year and you can hear the shotguns of the pheasant hunters, a blast in the distance every few minutes.

 

I hear shotgun blasts where I live, too — but this is an American city, and they aren’t shooting at pheasants.

 

But this isn’t really about the guns. It’s about a society that is, palpably, wobbling on the brink of something awful, with failing institutions, incompetent government, reciprocal distrust among rival social groups, and widespread simmering rage.

 

On Memorial Day, we remember those who took up arms because they thought their civilization represented something good and worth preserving. But we increasingly take up arms for the opposite reason: because we believe this society to be corrupt, failing, doomed. We half dread the possibility of breakdown and bloodshed — and are made half-giddy by it, too.

 

And that is a dangerous state of affairs. Americans don’t have a well-regulated militia — we don’t have a well-regulated anything.

Criminal-Justice Reformers Have a Murder Problem

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, May 30, 2021

 

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg is not the stuff right-wing monsters are made of: She serves Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, and she is a progressive Democrat and “America’s Top Gay Cop,” as OutSmart magazine puts it.

 

But she is a special kind of Democrat: The kind who can count.

 

And here is the count: In 2015, Harris County tallied up 6,348 crimes committed by 3,200 accused criminals out on bond, and, by 2020, those numbers had trebled to 18,796 crimes attributed to 10,500 people out on bond. A significant number of them were murders.

 

While much of the rest of the country is pushing in the opposite direction, the Republican-dominated Texas legislature is considering a new law that would make it more difficult for some people accused of violent crimes to be released on bond. Ogg testified in favor of the bill, saying: “Judges are supposed to, under the law, consider two essential purposes of bond: the defendant’s return to court to answer the charges, and the community’s safety. And it’s this second public interest that is being failed in Houston under the current bail system.”

 

And not just in Houston. Texas has no city in the top tier when it comes to murder rates — Dallas, the state’s most dangerous city, has a murder rate that is one-fifth that of Saint Louis, while the border city of El Paso has a murder rate that is one-twentieth that of Baltimore. But with its 11.5 non-negligent homicides per 100,000 residents per year, Houston is more dangerous than Miami, while major cities such as San Antonio and Fort Worth are more dangerous than Seattle or Portland. Even gentle Austin has a higher murder rate than does San Diego. And Texas cities look worse when it comes to nonlethal violent crime: Houston has more robberies per capita than Philadelphia or Newark, and you’re more likely to suffer an assault in Dallas than in New York City, Las Vegas, or San Francisco.

 

(American cities are a Bacchic festival of murder by world standards: The 600,000 people of Baltimore commit a total of seven times as many murders a year as do the 8.6 million people of Switzerland, and the 2.7 million people of Chicago commit 85 times as many murders a year as do the 5.7 million people of Singapore.)

 

As anybody who has been through airport security knows, it is possible to simultaneously do too much and too little when it comes to public safety. The TSA is so bad at airport security that its failure rate on “red team” drills (in which government agents see what they can sneak through airport security) is something on the order of 70 percent — and while you can’t bring a full-size tube of toothpaste into the secured area, you can have a riot there.

 

The same principle holds true for the criminal-justice system. We have too many felonies and too many misdemeanors, and too many people in jail for them. We have police that are dangerously militarized, probation and parole systems that are disproportionately hard on poor people, a trial system that is equally stacked against them, and (probably most important) an economy that makes it very difficult for convicted felons to lead productive and dignified lives after prison even when their personal commitment to rehabilitation is very strong. The war on drugs has been to a considerable extent a war on poor people and poor neighborhoods. Policing for revenue is a real problem.

 

All that is true. But it also is true that there is no decent arrangement under which murder, assault, robbery, burglary, etc., are not treated as serious crimes. The reason we constitute governments is precisely to combat such abuses — not to pursue shared meaning or social equality or community improvement. There are many ways to deal with cocaine or people who are behind in their child-support payments, but there aren’t that many ways to deal with people who commit violent assaults, armed robberies, or similar crimes. This isn’t Saudi Arabia — incarceration is the main tool we have.

 

Of course we should make addiction treatment, mental-health care, job training, and other services available to incarcerated people — and, where possible, to troubled people who have not yet entered the criminal-justice system. But none of that solves the basic problem of how to protect the public from people who already have shown a propensity to commit violent crimes. This isn’t a problem that can be dreamt away.

 

There is a great deal of room between a “locking people up for being poor” regime — under which low-level, non-violent offenders are kept in custody because they can’t put up cash bail and won’t be released under personal recognizance — and the lax practices that put someone like Vernon Menifee on the street. Menifee was released on bond three times for felonies in 2019 and 2020 and had six felony convictions to his name when he was charged with the murder of Guy-Anthony Owen Allen in Houston. There are dozens and dozens of cases like his in Texas and hundreds or thousands of them each year across the country, in which violent offenders out on bond commit more violence, up to and including murder.

 

While “defund the police” hysteria mostly has been talk, the loosening of release practices has had real effects on communities around the country, from Texas cities to Albany County, N.Y., where a suspect recently was released without bond after his fourth bank-robbery arrest. In Memphis, a carjacking and attempted-robbery suspect has just been released on bond in spite of his having had 14 active warrants and 13 open criminal cases at the time of his arrest. The guy arrested over that tiger roaming around the Houston suburbs? Out on bond for murder. The list goes on.

 

There were more than 20,000 murders in the United States in 2020 — a 25 percent increase from the year before. That doesn’t mean “lock ’em up and throw away the key.” But it does mean operating in the knowledge that the people who have already committed violent crimes are the people who are most likely to commit more of them. Too many progressives act as though our violent-crime problem can be dealt with by having $10 per hour clerks at sporting-goods stores process a few more ATF forms. But those who can count understand that it’s a bigger and deeper problem than that.

Jacques Barzun, Historian for All Time

By M. D. Aeschliman

Sunday, May 30, 2021

 

Eighty years ago, in that ominous year 1941, the Franco-American historian Jacques Barzun (1903–2012) published a work of cultural history that has retained power and relevance when most such books, however worthy, live a life of temporary influence and then are occasionally consulted on the shelves of university libraries. Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage has had a longer and deeper subsequent influence, being republished in only slightly revised editions but with new prefaces in 1958 and 1981 and frequently reprinted in paperback. It is a great, antiseptic book, almost as necessary now as it was at the high tide of German National Socialist “racial science” and Soviet Communist “scientific socialism” in 1941, and just as these two ferocious states and ideologies commenced their terrible war on the European Eastern Front, caused by the unexpected betrayal by Hitler of the Nazi–Soviet “nonaggression pact” that had been in effect since August 1939 and that had allowed these two totalitarian predators to conquer, divide up, and devour the small, free states of Eastern Europe.

 

Barzun’s book was very timely as the political and even allegedly scientific prestige of Nazism and Communism was at its zenith all over the West, and one or other of these two novel, hypermodern ideologies seemed to many people of all classes to be the wave of the future that the economically depressed, morally bedraggled states of Western Europe and North America could only look on with envy and trepidation. France, Britain, and the United States had gone through an intellectually “Red decade” in which Marxists had not taken power but nevertheless occupied the high ground in public debate. Roosevelt’s New Deal had not achieved American recovery, whereas Japan and Italy had taken the Fascist-Nazi-Nationalist-Imperialist road so spectacularly, vigorously, and apparently unstoppably pursued in the conquest of most of continental Europe by Hitler and his high-tech War Machine between 1938 and 1941.

 

Barzun’s targets were three thinkers whose works and perspectives had acquired in the period after 1859 an immense influence, leading at first to what Barzun’s teacher Carlton J. H. Hayes called, in a fine political and cultural history also published in 1941, “a generation of materialism” (referring to the period 1871–1900), and then to a deepening application of its materialistic and deterministic theories of “the struggle for survival” and “the survival of the fittest” of races, nations, and classes, transforming the theories into the ferocious modern totalitarian ideologies of the early and mid 20th century — Communism, Fascism, and Nazism.

 

Though the composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) may seem to us an anomaly in this connection, his prestige and glamour in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were immense and a key part of the German nationalist-Nazi “Kultur” mystique, and his aestheticism (the artist as hero, art as salvation, aesthetic experience as the highest truth) was widespread throughout the West, and in fact has left a toxic residue on Western — and now world — culture ever since. The English musicologist A. E. F. Dickinson wrote reverently of Wagner in 1926: “He has virtually discovered the means of expressing the character of man and god in pure form, in the form most congenial to his nature, music.” Art had become a religion.

 

Barzun himself was a French emigrant to the United States, along with his cultured, Parisian parents, in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic World War I, which affected them all deeply. His father was a poet and art theorist and his mother a sophisticated modern woman — and the younger Barzun would become a distinguished scholar of music and art as well as of literature and history at Columbia University, where he was educated and spent a very distinguished career as professor of history and as an administrator (dean of graduate faculties, provost) for a half century, ultimately winning major recognitions as one the country’s most outstanding humanistic scholars and public intellectuals — president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Mellon Lecturer at the National Gallery of Art (1973), recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George H. W. Bush (2003), and the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama (2011). The American Philosophical Society created the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History in 1993 and an endowed chair was named in his honor at Columbia.

 

The human person’s “supreme pleasure and prerogative,” he was to write, “is to feel himself at once a moral being and a natural philosopher.” It is precisely the idea that all persons are ultimately “philosophers” and must make evaluative judgments and decisions in the many areas of life that made Barzun, from early to late, a philosophical historian — our greatest — and one with a great respect for republican and democratic institutions and for public literacy and civic discourse. (In late life he called himself “a Chestertonian.”) It is the very clarity of his prose and his critique of mystification and corrupting jargon that make all of his books, however vastly learned, a pleasure to read. Deploring the massive educational influence of John Dewey, whom Barzun had as a teacher at Columbia, he said late in life that Dewey “could not talk coherently, in intelligible language. He would eject phrases. His books are little better than his conversation and lectures. He was revered because he rendered William James’s conclusions in a more abstract way — worked them out for the academic mind, which mistrusts clarity” (emphasis added).

 

Barzun’s case against both Darwin and Marx is that both are writers of evasive, convoluted, confused prose that obscures not only truth itself but their own scientistic, mechanistic premises about the meaninglessness of mind, free will, and purpose in human affairs. He himself had started out his own academic career by writing a strongly anti-racialist book in 1937, Race: A Study in Modern Superstition, at a time when Darwinian “racial science” was riding high not only in Germany but throughout the West, leading to eugenic laws in several American states even before the Nazi national policy of eliminating “lives unworthy of life.” Four years later, in Darwin, Marx, Wagner, Barzun went on to write: “No doubt the ‘favoured races’ mentioned on the title page of Darwin’s Origin of Species referred to pigeons, but the extension of the term to man was easy to make; indeed it seemed to receive Darwin’s own approval on many a page of [his] Descent of Man, where the struggle of races was a part of evolutionary advance.” In 1999, Terence Kealey, lecturer in clinical biochemistry at Cambridge University, noted that “the only professional group in Germany to register a greater than 50 percent membership of the Nazi Party before 1933, when the careerists joined, was that of academic biologists. Hitler believed in the state planning of society and in eugenics, and so did they.” The English man of letters A. N. Wilson, author of a recent book on Darwin, wrote in 2006: “Darwin, the product of British imperialism, was surely the father, among other things, of European fascism.” And the American historian Richard Weikart has made this argument clearly and in documented detail in From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (2004; see my review, “Murderous Science,” in National Review, March 28, 2005).

 

In the aftermath of Barzun’s own groundbreaking 1941 critique of mechanistic Darwinism and its sociopolitical uses and effects, and clearly influenced by it, two other powerful books were published that lucidly covered the relevant and related issues — Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944) and Gertrude Himmelfarb’s exhaustive, detailed Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959). Like Barzun himself, Hofstadter and Himmelfarb are among the great American historians of the last 75 years, both recipients of the highest honors and commendations; yet the books are oddly neglected in our time, when renewed conceptions of “sociobiology” and “evolutionary psychology” are again widely promoted and uncritically taught.

 

Following on the efforts of historians such as Hofstadter, Himmelfarb, and Weikart, philosophical and scientific accounts of the deficiencies of Darwinism have been made by philosophers such as Thomas Nagel (Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, 2012; see my review, “Rationality vs. Darwinism,” National Review, November 12, 2012) and by scientists such as the award-winning English science writer and physician James LeFanu (Why Us?, 2009; see my review, “Science Illuminated,” Modern Age, fall 2011) and the geophysicist and historian of science Stephen C. Meyer in three major books that have attracted great attention: Signature in the Cell (2009), Darwin’s Doubt (2013), and, most recently, Return of the God Hypothesis (2021).

 

Regarding Marx and Marxism, in 1980, before the fall of Western Communism, the émigré Hungarian-American physicist and historian and philosopher of science Stanley L. Jaki wrote that “the enthusiasm for Darwinism of the advocates of the dictatorship of the proletariat . . . is all too understandable. Marx was quick to notice the usefulness of Darwinist theory for promoting class struggle.” The discrediting of Marxism has mainly been done by the course of large-scale human history since the fall of Western Communism in 1990, including firsthand, first-rate Russian documentary literature by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyavsky, and Nadezhda Mandelstam, and by exhaustive historical surveys such as the French Black Book on Communism (1997) by Stéphane Courtois and his associates. In the same vein, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their biography Mao (2005) have examined the crimes of Communism in China, and the theoretical pretensions of the political philosophy have been decisively analyzed and debunked by the great émigré Polish ex-Marxist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski in his three-volume Main Currents of Marxism (1976).

 

But Barzun’s short anatomy of Marx and Marxism, quietly devastating, is permanently worth reading for its clear understanding and lucid explanation of the self-contradictory and damaging character of Marxism and all forms of reductionism. He insists on the perennial need for an at least minimally accurate description of human personality, the reality of the human mind, and the scope of human free will. (Reductionism, he wrote in 1964, “is congenial to the modern temper, and what it reduces is the individual.”)

 

In regard to Wagner and aestheticism since Barzun’s book joined the critique of them to that of Darwin and Marx, a great deal of value has been written, but at least three volumes deserve mention — Frederic Spotts’s copiously illustrated Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (2003) being the most recent. The other two are by Barzun himself — his 1973 A. W. Mellon Lectures at the U.S. National Gallery of Art, published by Princeton University Press as The Use and Abuse of Art (1974), and his final masterpiece of cultural history, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (2000), many years in preparation and published when he was 93 years old.

 

From his first major publication, the 1937 anti-racialist book Race: A Study in Modern Superstition, through his many other books, to From Dawn to Decadence 63 years later, Barzun developed and deepened his analyses, but he also stayed true to a few central insights that remain perennially relevant, and particularly so in our own time when a combination of unhealthy and unhelpful factors have conspired to obscure or occlude from us certain central human realities and the implications of the apocalyptic character of much of human history since 1914, when World War I began what Sidney Hook later called “the second Fall of Man.” Documenting Darwin’s own convoluted logical and rhetorical twists and turns in the various editions of The Origin of Species (as Himmelfarb would do in more detail in 1959), Barzun says that “the gladiatorial conception of the struggle for existence was here to stay” — surely daily newspapers made the point throughout 1941. And he quotes and approves a then-recent biographer of Darwin, Geoffrey West, about neglecting the irreducible and unique moral and metaphysical dimension of the human person. By pointing out this neglect, Darwin’s old Cambridge teacher and sharp critic, the geologist Adam Sedgwick, West writes, “leapt . . . right to the heart of the matter in a prophetic passage whose insight should be more apparent now, when the increasing brutalization and degradation of humanity are no more to be denied than detached from concepts of evolution and natural selection.”

 

What “the generation of materialism” succeeded in doing was to debunk and help render less and less visible and credible that “moral and metaphysical part” of the human person in the interest of “gladiatorial” individual, national, class, and racial strife, brutal realpolitik, cynical “realism.” This had — and has — of course always been a human possibility — “homo homini lupus,” man the ruthless, wolfish devourer of man, who whom?, subject-object, exploiter-exploited; social Darwinism in its various forms. In Virtue Politics, the Harvard Renaissance scholar James Hankins has recently pointed out anew that the sly Machiavelli was the great betrayer of the ethical traditions of medieval civilization and Renaissance humanism alike. Professor Jeffrey Collins writes: “The Florentine’s ‘demoralizing’ redefinition of virtù as a manly capacity to master fortune was directly aimed at the humanist [ethical] tradition that Hankins” writes about.

 

The novelty of Darwinian “natural selection,” “survival of the fittest,” and “racial science,” and of vengeful, illusory Marxist “scientific socialism” and class war, is that both posed as truly empirical, scientific descriptions of reality. But they aren’t: they are speculative inferences, theoretically contradictory and historically false, as 20th-century history has catastrophically and tragically shown.

 

As early as his 1941 volume Barzun had seen profoundly into the real dynamics at work in Darwinism and Marxism:

 

It is no longer possible to view the storm around the Origin of Species merely as a battle over evolution — “man’s descent from the monkeys” or the literal truth of Genesis — much less as the victory of unprejudiced inquirers into Nature’s secrets over the forces of bigotry and darkness. It appears, rather, as a major incident, neither the first nor the last, in the dispute between the believers in consciousness and the believers in mechanical action; the believers in purpose and the believers in pure chance. The so-called warfare between science and religion thus comes to be seen as the warfare between two philosophies.

 

The true historian (or philosopher) needs by all means to define and identify the features of chance and necessity operative in reality; but the very capacity and process of doing so gives evidence of his own consciousness and rational purpose. By doggedly and eloquently making and applying this kind of perennial argument, Jacques Barzun became the greatest of American cultural historians and an enduring resource in the arsenal of sanity and virtue.

Rebekah Jones’s New ‘Whistleblower’ Claim Is Merely the Latest in a Long Line of Tricks

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Saturday, May 29, 2021

 

Rebekah Jones is at it again. And, this time, she has brought the Miami Herald and the Daily Beast along with her.

 

From the Daily Beast:

 

Florida’s inspector general has granted whistleblower status to Rebekah Jones, the health department worker who was fired after claiming that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration was fudging COVID-19 data—and who was then arrested for allegedly hacking the state’s emergency messaging system. “It’s pretty huge,” Jones told the Miami Herald after hearing the news.

 

But it’s not “huge.” It’s merely another example of Jones’s leveling dramatic accusations, and then, before they have been examined, pointing to those dramatic accusations as if they are evidence of wrongdoing.

 

They’re not.

 

I have written previously about the disgraceful smear that Jones has engineered against Governor DeSantis’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw. In form, this one is similar. Jones wants her marks to believe that something dramatic has happened, when in reality all she has done is advance yet another set of untested allegations. It’s circles all the way down.

 

On Twitter today, Jones wrote that “the IG at DOH issued a probable cause that what I said is true after investigating.” But the IG at DOH did no such thing. Indeed, that Jones has been “granted whistleblower status” means nothing more impressive than that she has applied for whistleblower status — which, it is important to note, is a status available to anyone who (a) has worked for a Florida state agency, and (b) wishes to advance allegations of wrongdoing that, if proven, would be criminal — and that, as is usual, she has been accorded it. This grant does not mean that the merits of Jones’s accusations have been examined. It does not mean that they have been accepted, or even prejudged. It does not mean that she is telling the truth. It means she is permitted to make a complaint without retaliation.

 

As CBS12 reported last week in a detailed piece that was published a couple of weeks after my own, there is an enormous gap between what Jones claims in public (which, if true, would be an extraordinary scandal) and what Jones claims when she has to be more careful (which is that she, a dashboard manager, disagrees with how serious scientists do their job). And so there is here. Jones has already announced that, despite it being the centerpiece of her entire conspiracy theory, she is not including the charge that she was instructed to “delete cases and deaths” in her “whistleblower” complaint. Here, as before, she is clearly hoping that casual observers will conflate her casual claims and her official claims and be left with a false impression as a result.

 

Given that the purpose of Florida’s whistleblower status is to shield a whistleblower’s identity until an investigation is concluded, it might seem odd that Jones has gone public with this news. It might seem odd, too, that she so closely cropped the message she shared that her readers could not tell what else it said, or even which department it was from. But, of course, none of this is odd. Jones’s entire game relies upon misdirection, the deployment of half-truths, and the relentless conflation of allegation and substantiation. This is merely the latest chapter in a long, long book — and, once again, the press seems happy to help her write it.

The Phantom Economic Crisis

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, May 27, 2021

 

Washington is in an awkward period for good economic news — too late for Donald Trump to claim credit, too early for Joe Biden to. In Washington, news can’t just be good — the question is: Good for whom?

 

But the news is pretty good: New unemployment claims have just hit another COVID-era low, GDP growth in the first quarter was a robust 6.4 percent, and the growth in wages in that quarter was the best it has been in 20 years or more. There are some areas of concern, of course — worrisome inflation indicators, record public debt, and a workforce-participation rate that is stuck where it was last summer — but, given all that has happened, things look not at all bad — the American economy in the age of globalization has proved more resilient than many had thought.

 

So, why all the chicken-little stuff?

 

Governors Tony Evers of Wisconsin and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan demand Washington-led “transformational change” of the U.S. economy, while Biden still talks about “putting America back to work” as though we were in the depths of the Great Depression. We aren’t — we aren’t even close. We aren’t even in a recession.

 

What do you do when you are enjoying strong growth, lower unemployment, and higher wages? How about . . . nothing? Or at least not very much?

 

Seriously. Slow down. The house is not on fire — and running around like it is on fire is dangerous.

 

The priorities coming from the Biden administration and congressional Democrats are would-be solutions to problems we don’t currently have — slow growth, high unemployment — that would raise the risks associated with the problems we do have: high levels of public debt, soaring commodities prices, and a Consumer Price Index that is rising faster than it has in more than a decade. None of these alone presents a sky-is-falling, code-red situation — though that national debt will eventually be a problem, almost inevitably — but why go out of your way to make things worse, and possibly much worse, in order to mitigate troubles that already are abating?

 

What is at play here is the usual politics of catastrophe. And you know that it’s just politics because the wish-list is always the same — only the crises change: war, “inequality,” climate change, etc.

 

Washington loves a big infrastructure program — something Trump-aligned Republicans and the Democrats’ socialist caucus largely agree about. But there is no such thing as “infrastructure.” Infrastructure isn’t some amorphous commodity; it is a collection of discrete projects, and should be handled as such. What matters is the state of x road and y bridge and z airport, not whether we spend $1 trillion or $2 trillion on the package. But politicians take the price-first approach, putting money on the table and then figuring out whether somebody will pick it up, rather than a project-first approach, which would mean making a prioritized list of needs and figuring out what it would cost to address them. Infrastructure work shouldn’t be like buying a new car — a big-ticket purchase that lasts for years — but more like routine maintenance. You don’t say: “I need $400 in maintenance, let’s see what I can get.” You replace tires and brake calipers and whatnot as needed. There’s a lot of infrastructure work to be done, but the best way to do it is not in lumps rounded off to the nearest $1 trillion. Infrastructure is not best handled through emergency management — unless you want to use the emergency to buffalo the taxpayers or their representatives into supporting trillions of dollars in poorly thought-out outlays.

 

If Democrats seem particularly sanguine about the threat of inflation, they are. Inflation is, in effect, a wealth tax managed through monetary policy, eating away the value of cash savings a few points per year — which is one reason why very wealthy people hold relatively little cash and why middle-income Americans who are able to do so often lock up most of their household wealth in a single asset that they expect to appreciate: their houses. As usual, the people whose interests are ignored are the working people who are not poor enough to receive welfare benefits as such but not sitting on several hundred thousand in stocks and housing equity, either. These workers often are those with the least ability to negotiate for higher wages in the face of rising prices for housing, food, transportation, and other necessities. If you’re on Wall Street, inflation is just one more thing you can bet on — but for many other people, inflation means higher prices that make life harder than it has to be. Sometimes, the government has good reason to take inflationary steps to goose the economy a little bit — but not when the economy is already growing at a fast clip.

 

The crisis mentality is an excuse to spend big now and then get gone before the bill arrives. There was an economic crisis associated with the coronavirus epidemic. We got through it pretty well. It’s over now.

 

We shouldn’t go creating a new one.

Meat and Its Enemies

By Andrew Stuttaford

Thursday, May 27, 2021

 

Alarmed by chatter that Joe Biden was plotting to take my burgers away, I hurried online for reassurance. A journalist in the Guardian wrote that this was just scaremongering and along with the Washington Post traced the burger panic back tothe Daily Mail, which had run speculation (with caveats) that “Biden’s climate plan” could limit Americans to “just one burger a MONTH.” This was based on a single academic study, but the Mail was given its opportunity by what was described in the subheadline of a recent story in Vox as a “burger-shaped hole” in the president’s climate proposals.

 

The author, Sigal Samuel, fretted that

 

if Biden is serious about staving off climate disaster, our meat system is not something he can afford to ignore. At least 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions comes from animal agriculture. That’s largely because ruminant animals like cows emit a lot of methane, and producing feed requires using energy and clearing forests that would otherwise be trapping carbon.

 

According to the Environmental Pro­tection Agency, the entire domestic agricultural sector (from steaks to soy) in the U.S. accounts for about 10 percent of our greenhouse-gas emissions. But the overall size of our market (including imports), particularly for beef — and activists’ fondness for the hairshirt — means that climate warriors will, sooner or later, indeed be coming for your burger, or at least trying to make it much more expensive. On some estimates, more than half of the greenhouse gases arising out of livestock farming can be attributed to beef and a lesser offender, lamb.

 

Samuel mentions various ways to assist in remedying this, ranging from “meatless meat” to putting seaweed into cattle feed. (This reduces bovine, uh, emissions, although there’s a debate over how much.) Yet Samuel then cites Chloë Waterman, a program manager at Friends of the Earth. Waterman is “skeptical that relying on carrots rather than sticks can help the U.S. fix its food system at the speed demanded by the climate emergency.” “Carrots,” eh?

 

Meat-eaters who brush off concerns about the threat to their meals are too complacent. No, burgers, chops, and steaks will not be banned, but in all probability they will be rationed, if by price rather than by law. The prospect that increasingly onerous — and undeniably regressive — greenhouse-gas taxes might be imposed on meat is far from remote.

 

There are countless reports to choose from (just google “carbon,” “meat,” and “tax”), and countless different rates of tax. For example, in a New York Times article from 2018, Richard Conniff relates how researchers at France’s Toulouse School of Economics have settled on a “relatively steep” greenhouse-gas tax on beef, which would raise the retail price by about 40 percent. This could operate as a “test case” (an ominous choice of words) made politically more palatable by the ability to switch to, say, pork or chicken, which have a smaller carbon footprint.

 

But “smaller” does not mean small. Rather than jeer at the Arby’s crowd, Colonel Sanders stans should be aware that Conniff also reveals that the Toulouse researchers have calculated that a (presumably subsequent) tax on chicken could hike prices by between 15 and 32 percent. And it is not looking so good for that vegetarian eating — vegans, avert your eyes — an egg. The same data indicate a tax-driven price increase of 23 percent. Dairy, plus 26 percent under this scheme, is no refuge, either.

 

Conniff notes how one of the co-authors of the French study “readily acknowledged that the proposed carbon tax on beef has no chance of becoming reality, ‘not even in Europe’ and certainly not in the United States.” I doubt I would have agreed with that prediction even when it was made, but witnessing the once unimaginable inroads made by climate campaigners over the last few years in other areas has only reinforced my belief that climate taxes on meat, beginning perhaps with beef but not ending there, will be on the menu before too long.

 

After all, in their beef with beef, the climate warriors are not alone. Public-health activists, a formidable community, have for decades railed against the perils of many kinds of meat. Taxes are sometimes included as part of their prescription, too. The authors of a study from 2018 suggested that, in the U.S., health-care considerations could justify taxes of 34 percent and 163 percent on red meat and processed meat (bacon!), respectively.

 

The war against tobacco took a far more aggressive turn after the concept of “passive smoking” was successfully deployed to make the argument that smokers endangered the health of others, not just themselves. A similar logic is being used to demonize meat-eating as a menace to the planet and, therefore, everyone on it. The conclusion to which that logic leads is the adoption of coercive measures, of which taxation looks like the most obvious first step.

 

Then there are the vegetarians and vegans. According to a 2018 Gallup poll, together these two groups amount to around 8 percent of the U.S. population. That number has remained more or less unchanged for some years, although, in what may be a sign of things to come, the percentages (into the very low double-digits) are somewhat higher for those between the ages of 18 and 49. How much the meat-averse are willing, to use a slightly unfortunate phrase, to live and let live when it comes to the carnivorous is unclear. (That 16 percent of liberals, a word that no longer means what it should, told Gallup that they were vegetarian or vegan is not comforting.) At the very least, they would surely not object to — and many would support — efforts to rein in meat-eating in the name of combating climate change. For true believers, this will add a further layer of righteousness to what is already, to almost all of them, a moral cause.

 

It is quite possible to accept, as I do, that human activity is making some contribution to changes in the climate, while considering that the conviction that global warming will lead to catastrophe owes more to a form of religious fervor than to any reasoned attempt to follow the #Science. If that is the case, forbidding or restricting the eating of certain types of food is hardly without precedent. It does not hurt that tucking into meat is easy enough to include within another familiar religious theme — that “excessive” self-indulgence is not only sinful but will also trigger retribution — which has long been a key subtext in global-warming narratives, especially those in which ancient millenarian thinking is so evidently a major influence.

 

The fact that establishing rules governing what people eat is also a powerful instrument of psychological and social control is no coincidence, nor is the opportunity that climate-related asceticism offers for virtue-signaling by the elites. Take, for ex­­ample, Eleven Madison Park, a promi­nent and very pricey Manhattan restaurant that will now feature an exclusively plant-based menu. Daniel Humm, its chef and owner, reckons that “the current food system is simply not sustainable.” Curiously, his London restaurant will still be serving red meat.

 

In a New York Times article describing Humm’s move, some commentators stressed the example he was setting. There have been many other such “teaching moments,” from “meatless Mondays” in New York City schools to the decision by (old) Amsterdam’s city council that meals served at its events would be vegetarian (unless specifically requested otherwise), all designed to “de-normalize” meat-eating. And, yes, this too is reminiscent of the approach applied to smoking.

 

The war on meat will do little, if anything, to alter the impact that we may be having on the climate, particularly if increased economic development elsewhere will, as is typical, be accompanied by the consumption of more animal protein, not less. In the end, that probably will not matter overmuch, and neither, I suspect, will anthropogenic climate change — at least to the degree that many now expect. As with previously anticipated apocalypses, it is likely to disappoint the faithful. That said, the way to prepare for whatever the climate may have in store is not a scientifically fruitless and — thanks to its inevitably destructive effect on the wealth creation essential to fund any defenses we may need — counterproductive asceticism, but rather through adaptation and technology.

 

That is true of food, too. To the extent that scientists and food technologists can develop nutritious, cost-competitive, and tasty plant-based or lab-grown alt-meat or, aided by creative cooks, conjure up treats out of another much talked-about option, protein-rich insect-based grub, good for them. It only widens consumer choice, for carnivores, flexitarians, vegetarians, or vegans. (Never mind that not many vegetarians and, in theory, no vegans will stoop to entomophagy.) The same can be said of chefs, such as Humm, trying to turn vegetables — vegetables — into gourmet fare.

 

But the welcome availability of a growing range of alternatives (I’d try them) should not become a pathway to the prohibition or penal taxation of “real” meat, a pleasure that has benefited our species for millions of years.

Joe Biden, Budget Buster

National Review Online

Saturday, May 29, 2021

 

A president’s budget is basically his wish list. The chief executive has no power to change tax rates or spending on his own; anything he wants to do must first be approved by Congress.

 

But with Biden’s party controlling both houses of Congress for another year and a half, Biden’s pricey wish list should prompt massive pushback from Republicans and provide a wake-up call to the moderate Democrats who still care about deficits and wasteful spending.

 

In this document, the Biden administration compiles its various tax-and-spend proposals — the major ones being the multi-year infrastructure and family plans, which cost about $2 trillion apiece — and outlines what they mean for the federal budget. Even assuming that things would play out the way the White House envisions, the result isn’t pretty: massive spending, massive deficits, and massive tax hikes.

 

This is really not the time to push forward with that combination of goals.

 

In fiscal year 2019, the federal budget was already on an unsustainable trajectory. That year, the government spent $4.4 trillion while bringing in just $3.5 trillion, and the old-age entitlements were projected to spiral out of control in the near future. In 2020, COVID-19 struck, and the government spent $6.6 trillion while bringing in $3.4 trillion. And this year, thanks in large part to Biden’s wasteful COVID bill, the Congressional Budget Office predicts we’ll run a $3 trillion deficit again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For context, in a nation of 331 million, every trillion dollars represents $3,017 for each person in the country, including kids, or $7,785 per household.

 

As the pandemic recedes and the entitlement trust funds keep dwindling, one would think a return to pre-COVID levels of spending would be in the cards. But no, Biden would like the government to spend about $6 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year while bringing in only $4.2 trillion, with spending levels only growing from there. The budget will drive debt as a share of the economy to the highest in U.S. history, exceeding the World War II record. (Incidentally, the budget would reduce defense spending to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product by the end of the decade, which would be the lowest since 1940, or before the big buildup).

 

In February, before the most recent COVID bill became law, the CBO estimated the federal government would spend about $61 trillion between 2022 and 2031. Biden’s budget puts that number at $69 trillion. That $8 trillion increase is $62,280 in additional spending for every household in the country.

 

Over time, much of the new spending would (allegedly) wind down, while the new taxes would stay in place. By the administration’s math, Biden’s agenda would be paid for in about 15 years, despite the initial elevated deficits — and even that assumes no additional spending is proposed by any subsequent administration in that period. In the long term, in other words, the huge hit to the deficit delivered by Biden’s plan would be replaced by huge taxes — so long as the taxes brought in as much revenue as the administration expects. Meanwhile, the entitlement crisis would continue to grow, forcing the country to choose between benefit cuts and more taxes still. Even this analysis does not take into account inflation, which is showing signs of being on the rise, and which an expansive fiscal policy threatens to exacerbate. The massive amount of debt would also make it more difficult for the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates to control inflation, because doing so would increase the government’s borrowing costs.

 

We have already spelled out our objections to many of the particulars of Biden’s agenda, and we won’t belabor them here. Briefly: Biden’s infrastructure plan strays far from actual infrastructure investments — and our infrastructure is not in as bad of shape as many insist. His family plan warps the incentives that parents face when deciding how to care for their children by massively subsidizing professional child care. And his tax hikes could stymie economic growth, punish investment, and fall on everyday workers in addition to the dreaded rich people Biden is trying to target.

 

Biden’s budget is not yet the law. There is still time to stop it. It will become reality only to the extent that Congress chooses to enact it. But with both houses of Congress in Democratic hands, the president has far better odds than would usually be the case. Republicans should oppose this agenda every step of the way — and moderate Democrats should join them.