The “Iron Triangle” of poor incentives

MIT professor: global warming is a ‘religion’

By Michael Bastasch 

Throughout history, governments have twisted science to suit a political agenda. Global warming is no different, according to Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It has also been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions,” writes Lindzen in the fall 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

According to Lindzen, scientists make essentially “meaningless” claims about certain phenomenon. Activists for certain causes take up claims made by scientists and politicians respond to the alarmism spread by activists by doling out more research funding. — creating an “Iron Triangle” of poor incentives.

“How can one escape from the Iron Triangle when it produces flawed science that is immensely influential and is forcing catastrophic public policy?” Lindzen asks.

The Arab Spasm

In the Middle East, all bets are off when deluded Westerners spring into action

By Peter Hitchens 

IT IS BECAUSE we no longer understand our own societies that we cannot understand other countries. We learn little from their problems and crises because we have stopped thinking about our own constitutions, laws, and liberties. The disappointment of the supposed Arab Spring—better described as an Arab Spasm—follows only a few years after the similar broken hopes that attended the fall of communism. Also cast aside are the brief delusion that China would become free once its people owned automobiles, and the theory that countries that hosted McDonald’s burger bars would never go to war with each other. The last of these optimistic fancies was blown to pieces when Russia and Georgia, both thoroughly colonized by the Big Mac empire, fought their savage little conflict in 2008.

The abiding belief that we can plant democracy anywhere, and that it will then flourish in harmony and love thereafter, is never cured by facts or upset by anomalies. It is immune to warnings. And whenever intelligent people ignore facts and defy reason, something interesting is happening. What is it this time? 

When George W. Bush first suggested that democracy might be brought to the Middle East—the last wretched excuse for his Iraq adventure—a few haggard skeptics wearily pointed out that there might be a problem with this scheme. Put simply, majority rule in these countries would inevitably mean Islamist rule. In several of them, divided between Sunni and Shia, it would also mean sectarian rule and a choice between cruel repression and civil war. Enthusiasts for liberal intervention dismissed these doubts as “simplistic,” one of those words always used by people who want to appear cleverer than they are. But for some years the question was not tested. Now it has been, and the simplistic skeptics have been shown to be right in every particular, most especially in Egypt, where nice liberal-minded ACLU types are currently excusing a classic army putsch. Yet for some reason it is still considered impolite for those of us who were right to laugh and jeer at those who were wrong. I am not sure why. Mockery is a good teacher, and leaves a lasting mark on the sort of mind that is untouched by ordinary criticism or mere facts.

Screw the periphery, hail the core

The Global Economy Suffers From Hypothermia

By Raul Ilargi

We've used the analogy before, in particular to describe what happened to the Roman Empire during the latter days of its existence. Looking around various economies in the world today, the same analogy once again comes to mind. One might say that what we see these days is analogous to the more advanced stages of hypothermia.

Early hypothermia may show in nothing more than cold feet, in itself an amusing analogy perhaps. But a body that is exposed to extreme cold over longer periods of time will at some point start to exhibit symptoms such as frostbite, which are the result of the core of the body trying to save itself at the cost of the periphery, the extremities. Typically, a human body, for instance, will lose its toes first because the heart can no longer pump enough blood (heat) to them and at the same time keep the body's core above a minimum temperature.

In our economies we see the same pattern. It is not generally looked at or even recognized, however, since 99% of us live in denial of the possibility that such a thing would even be an option. This is a direct consequence of the fact that, first, all major news makers and decision makers reside in the core, and second, that saving that core while letting the extremities die off is somehow seen as a good thing. Post-crisis policies around the globe are directed at saving the financial system, not the people the crisis has pushed into poverty. Since these people are not seen as crucial to the survival of the core, and the system as a whole, they are - almost ritually - sacrificed on the system's economic altar.

In a reason-driven society one would expect a discussion on the viability and the intrinsic value of the system itself, but our global economic system, as I've said many times before, exhibits far more symptoms of a religion than a rational scheme. Our "analysis" of the system and the crises it goes through takes place in the part of our brain that deals with belief rather than rational thought. Therefore, we are bound, nay, certain, to get this wrong. You might think that a body can survive minus a few digits, but that is questionable, not in the least, to stick with the hypothermia analogy, because additional problems and afflictions such as gangrene are a major threat to the body's ultimate survival.

As Coal Plants Shut Down, United Kingdom Faces a Power Crunch

The coming close encounters of the blackout kind

An increasingly strained grid will power the lights of London and the rest of the United Kingdom, as the country shuts down its coal plants and awaits new ones.

By Thomas K. Grose

London at night sparkles with beautiful lighting, from the 11,500 lights that brighten the Edwardian facade of iconic department store Harrods to the 4,000 that illuminate the outline of Albert Bridge, spanning the River Thames. But are these popular tourist attractions—and the rest of the United Kingdom—at risk of going dark?

British authorities have been issuing some dire-sounding warnings. In February, the man then in charge of Ofgem, Britain's industry regulator, warned of an impending "near-crisis" of energy supply, calling the situation "horrendous" and likening it to being on a roller coaster headed "downhill—fast." Deputy Minister Nick Clegg was quoted saying that he was working to "keep the lights on." (See related quiz: "What You Don't Know About Electricity.")

In June, Ofgem released a capacity assessment warning that "risks to electricity security of supply over the next six winters have increased since our last report in October 2012." The report warned that Britain's ability to provide spare electric power capacity could plunge to between 2 to 5 percent, about half what it is now.

The main reason for the possible crunch: Britain is closing a number of aging coal-fired plants—as well as some oil and nuclear ones—to meet European Union environmental laws. One fifth of the existing power stations are scheduled to close over the next ten years. According to Reuters, the U.K. is set to lose more than 12 gigawatts of generating capacity in the next two years.  Currently, the country operates 13 coal plants, but nearly half are slated to close by 2015, and all of them could be shut down by 2023, according to government figures.

Higher Prices and Supply Pinches

Though Britain does face a bleak shortfall of energy in the coming years, "consumers are more at risk from higher prices than blackouts," said Wilf Wilde, executive director of the Durham Energy Institute at Durham University. Indeed, Ofgem was quick to say in its recent assessment that it "does not consider disruption to supplies is imminent or likely, providing the industry manages the problem effectively."

The potential for central bankers to do harm remains bigger than that to do good

Markets reject ‘forward guidance’ – for good reason

by DETLEV SCHLICHTER

The British media is obsessed with Mark Carney, the new boss at the Bank of England, who, this week, made his first public appearance as governor with a speech in Nottingham. There were adoring comments about his looks (the vague resemblance with George Clooney, supported with plenty of photographs) and his voice (deep, confident, reassuring), and as most journalists are more in awe of money and wealth than they are willing to admit, references to his generous pay package were also not missing. But there was also consternation that the words of the ‘most talented central banker of his generation’ seemed to carry so little weight with the markets.

The Wall Street Journal had previously described Carney as ‘a pioneer of forward guidance’. Forward guidance is the allegedly new central bank technique of telling the market where policy will be heading (or rather, assuring the market where it will not be heading), supposedly in order to make policy more effective. Despite Mr. Carney’s repeated assurances that rates will only be moved higher when unemployment drops to a certain level (7% is Mr. Carney’s magic number) and that this will not occur until 2016, the market has recently been happily selling fixed income securities, and in the process, has allowed the forward curve to start pricing in earlier rate hikes. To Mr. Carney’s pledge to keep rates low, the market has practically been saying, in the words of the inimitable Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, ”Yeah, well, that’s just like…your opinion, man.”

Whether the market will be proven right and whether rates really will move higher earlier than Carney contemplates today, is a question we cannot answer. The future will tell. (Personally, I remain of the opinion that the talk of ‘tapering’ in the US is overdone, that central banks will not manage a smooth ‘exit’ from their position of extreme accommodation, and certainly not anytime soon.) But the market is undoubtedly correct to not allow itself to be guided in its assessment of the economy’s future performance, and therefore future policy, by the BoE’s new super-bureaucrat.

On Decadence

The choice is ours to make

by Charles Hill

Decline” we Americans and Westerners mope about daily; “fall” most of us still hope to postpone. Decadence, it would seem, is the mean between the two.

The much-overused decline and fall trope, fixed permanently into our abstract vocabulary ever since Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire took a then-experimentally post-Christian Western Europe by storm, was meant to demonstrate the mortality of all human constructions. Oddly enough, however, Gibbon did it in spite of the Enlightenment’s discovery of progress by retreating to the oldest trope of all—the cyclical, organic metaphor of birth, growth, decay, death. Much of the 19th century was spent trying to reconcile progress with the cyclical via the uses and abuses of Darwin. In the 20thcentury, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee and Paul Kennedy rejoined that intellectual dispute, traceable to remote antiquity: Either the human condition is cyclical, like the seasons and the life cycle, or it is linear, starting someplace, going someplace, with a positive goal ahead. 

German, Briton and American all knew that America was perhaps the key to the answer. The greatest event in history, the discovery of the New World, had apparently put America on the linear track, destined to escape a cyclical fate. The presumption had a religious basis made clear by St. Augustine’s diatribe against cyclical thinking in Book XII of The City of God, and it even waxed imperial in Virgil’s time-transcending Aeneid, a very American epic, as illustrated by those three Virgilian quotations on the dollar bill. Like Gibbon, Spengler and Toynbee ultimately sited their declinism in the cyclical rhythms of life. Kennedy, American and steeped in all things Christian and imperial, instead found the fatal flaw in linearity. It was linearity of the Faustian kind: The rise to wealth and power generates delusions of inevitably more successful adventures ahead until “overstretch”, a form of national self-indulgence, brings down the entire enterprise.

Kennedy’s approach seems to have been inspired more by mechanics or physics than by that most influential, and also ancient, variation on the “rise and fall” theme, that of moral decay, or decadence. Livy’s Roman Republic maintained its manly virtues because “they turned away from a thousand daily temptations”, but, Tacitus said, the Empire was doomed as Romans “indulged every desire as soon as it came to mind.” George Kennan extended the Roman experience with decadence to our own:

Poor old West: succumbing feebly, day by day, to its own decadence, sliding with debility on the slime of its own self-indulgent permissiveness; its drugs, its crime, its pornography, its pampering of the youth, its addiction to its bodily comforts, its rampant materialism and consumerism—and then trembling before the menace of the wicked Russians . . . .1

Far more seriously and exhaustively than the supercilious Kennan, the French-born American historian Jacques Barzun took up the matter in his monumental From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present. 

Published in 2000 when Barzun was 94, From Dawn to Decadence covered a half-millennium of “Western Cultural Life”, describing four phases in nearly encyclopedic detail: from Luther’s Reformation—really a revolution that tore the West apart—to the Scientific Revolution, which provided the basics for universal material progress; from the Royal Courts of Europe to “the Tennis Court” of the French Revolution; from Goethe’s Faust as a driver of the modern era to modernism’s fragmentation of arts and letters; and from the mass illusion of a socialist utopia to the horrors of the Great War and finally on to the late 20th-century protest mob’s gleeful chant of “Hey, hey, ho, ho: Western Civ Has Got to Go!” Across the centuries in Barzun’s chronicle history moves in both a linear and cyclical manner. An explosion of dynamic individualism propels civilization forward toward a better future; but that same dynamic proves incapable of virtuous control, causing greed, violence and deepening self-indulgence to spiral society downward toward chaos. Barzun liberates us from the tyranny of either-or, but fails to offer much hope of escaping decadence in the process.

But pace Barzun, if America is exceptional, might it not be an exception to the inevitability of decadence? It is, at the least, a matter to which Americans have been attentive over much of their history.

Early on, Americans sensed that they were somehow exempt from Old World cycles of rise and fall, but that sense was nonetheless powerfully counteracted by a continuing, pervasive fear of decadence. The Puritans were consciousness personified, assiduous diary-keepers who were ever watchful for the slightest signs of grace or degeneracy. Yale was founded because Abraham Pierson and other divines concluded that Harvard was becoming doctrinally depraved. Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” revolved around the biblical warning of the prophet Amos that “thy feet will slide in due time.” Thomas Jefferson sought to refute the theory of the French naturalist Buffon that the plants, animals and even geographical features of the New World were degenerate, declining and weakening as a result of the fetid swamps and clogged forests that bespread the Western Hemisphere. Jefferson, outraged, sent troops to New England to gather evidence on the size and strength of the bull moose, and later instructed Lewis and Clark to be on the lookout for mastodons.

Thought Control In The Name Of Mother Earth - Part 3

"I have seen the future, and it works."

This is the third part of a three-part essay.

by Steve Kogan

In Assignment in Utopia (1937), Eugene Lyons offers what were at the time perhaps the best eye-witness accounts of Stalinism as a state religion. He was UPI's journalist in Moscow during the early years of Stalin's rule (1928-34), which coincided with Stalin's first Five Year Plan, and, despite all we have learned since then, his first-hand observations remain both vivid and strange to this day. Among several websites that I chose at random, for example, all give 1928 -1932 as the official dates of the plan, but none comments on the transformation of five years into four. Lyons literally saw how it happened. In his chapter "Two Plus Two Equals Five," he describes the frenzied proclamations of the arithmetic that would later appear as an instrument of psychological torture in George Orwell's 1984:

Optimism ran amuck. Every new statistical success gave another justification for the coercive policies by which it was achieved. Every setback was another stimulus to the same policies. The slogan "The Five Year Plan in Four Years" was advanced, and the magic symbols "5-in-4" and "2+2=5" were posted and shouted throughout the land... . Under their pseudo-scientific exterior of charts and blueprints the planners were mystics in a trance of ardor.

Even this "trance" was centrally planned, and it was set in motion by Stalin himself several years after the death of Lenin, when he took control of the state. The public declaration of his ascendancy, as Lyons witnessed it, took place during the May Day celebrations in Moscow in 1929. From that point on, he writes, Stalinism became the official religion of the regime. Lyons notes that "Russia is a nation of icon-worshipers. Symbols have a potency beyond anything in the West," and on this May Day "The great shaggy head of Karl Marx receded in the ... decorations," while images of Stalin were "lifted to a place of equality with Lenin in the outward symbolism of the faith."

After the wreckage of the First World War, the Bolshevik seizure of the state, and the civil war, the process of environmental devastation, coupled with the human cost, would now be raised to untold levels of horror. Two forces were now combined in one: "Stalin - and industrialization. Those were the two ideas from this time forward. They were blended. They became interchangeable. Stalin's dark, fleshy visage came to mean smokestacks, oil derricks, scaffolding, tractors, and each of these things came to mean Stalin." The celebrated "workers' state" lost whatever reality it might once have had now that "The last pretense that the workers owned the state was dropped - the state frankly owned the workers." The prisons of the Gulag turned ownership into servitude, and, in the wake of the first show trial (1928), which was aimed at engineers dubbed "wreckers," Stalin's grip on the nation became absolute. In Lyons' words, "The population of the slave-labor camps was now estimated in the millions, and thought control was made increasingly rigid."

To enforce what Lyons calls "a conquest of the peasantry," Stalin initiated a similar reign of terror over the countryside:

Hell broke loose in seventy thousand Russian villages... . A population as large as all of Switzerland's or Denmark's was stripped clean of all their belongings - not alone their land and homes and cattle and tools, but often their last clothes and food and household utensils - and driven out of their villages... . The total was beyond reckoning. Forcible migration of millions could not be organized or provisioned, but must proceed in fearful confusion. Tens of thousands died of exposure, starvation, and epidemic diseases while being transported, and no one dared guess at the death rate in the wilderness where the liquidated population was dispersed.

These and even earlier reports were swamped by decades of Soviet propaganda until they were corroborated in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's epic study The Gulag Archipelago (1974).

It was only in the mid-1980s, however, under Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, that detailed information on the ecological catastrophes in the USSR began to emerge. The sheer scope of destruction, both in time and space, roughly corresponds to the duration and geographical dimensions of the Gulag; yet even a well-informed researcher such as Paul R. Josephson has found a way to describe the industrial world, the American scene in particular, as though it corresponds to what happened in Russia. He does this by viewing the world in light of "brute force technologies," a catch-phrase that he calls his "analytical tool" for examining the "worldwide" transformation of nature. What was once an organic phenomenon has now become a scientifically engineered resource factory, in which the mass production of food, electricity, etc. is depicted as a kind of "Fordism" in the natural world. Like other environmentalists, Josephson claims a deep and special expertise, so much so that nations which have come under the spell of "big technology," be they as different as the former Soviet Union, Japan, Germany, Norway, the United States, and Brazil, "share more than they can truly fathom." As he writes in his prologue to Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World (2002): "In most cases, the economic and political systems, whatever form they may take, and nature itself matter less than the way in which brute force technology is embraced, developed, and diffused." The term thus serves the same purpose as "the rape of the earth," "The Plunderer," and "the matricidal spirit," which is to advance a one-world concept that trumps every consideration except saving the planet.

Thought Control In The Name Of Mother Earth - Part 2

Progressive visions of the Apocalypse

This is the second part of a three-part essay.

by Steve Kogan 

By 1948, the time was ripe for a second world enemy to be proclaimed at large since the French Revolution. Ruling class oppression was the first, but now the ravages of two world wars, economic crises in the intervening years, and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s provided the necessary fuel to ignite new fears of ecological and social collapse. On the first page of his introduction, Osborn writes that, "towards the end of the Second World War," it occurred to him that another and far older planetary war had been taking place, a "silent war, eventually the most deadly war," which was responsible for more human misery "than any that has resulted from armed conflict" and "contains potentialities of ultimate disaster" beyond even the reach of "atomic power." Our Plundered Planet would have made a fitting subtitle for The Communist Manifesto, for in both works war is another word for the course of human events, in Marx by his fixation on class warfare through the ages and in Osborn through the "silent war" that "The Plunderer" began waging thousands of years ago against the earth. Even Marx's view of capitalism as the ultimate predatory force in history finds a corresponding echo in Our Plundered Planet, with "the story" of America's relationship to the land in the nineteenth century representing "the most violent and destructive of any written in the long history of civilization."

Published in the same year as Osborn's best seller, William Vogt's The Road to Survival also found a wide audience for its attack on the "European and American economic system"; but where Osborn darkly speaks of "vast industrial systems" superimposing "new environments ... like crusts, on the face of the earth," Vogt pulls out all the stops and demonizes "the parasite of European industrial development," which buried "its proboscis deep into new lands," thus making the Europeans who arrived in North America "one of the most destructive groups of human beings that have ever raped the earth."

An instructive point of comparison appears fifty years into the industrial revolution in the second stanza of William Blake's "Jerusalem" (c. 1804): "And was Jerusalem builded here / Among these dark Satanic mills?" Blake's demonic factories are evil incarnate, yet there is nothing accusatory about the poem, for they appear in a redemptive setting of spiritual wonder ("And did the Countenance Divine / Shine forth upon our clouded hills?"), and the work ends with the poet's promise not to "cease from mental fight / Till we have built Jerusalem / In England's green and pleasant land." Blake's lyrical poem was set to music by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916 and became a kind of national anthem, whereas Vogt's fear-inducing image of Europe's "proboscis" sucking up "new lands" might almost have been crafted in view of Hieronymous Bosch's weirdly grotesque and unnerving creatures of hell.

It is Vogt's image of Europeans, however, that is particularly vicious, because it insidiously suggests that the continent which still lay in ruins deserved its recent wartime fate. Indeed, Vogt intends his words to convey precisely this suggestion, which follows from his earlier remark that, over the course of the nineteenth century and the twentieth to date, Europeans ravaged the planet "with the seemingly caculated inexorability of a Panzer division," as though the victims of Hitler were the last in a long line of ecocidal Nazis, while "The handwriting on the wall of five continents" was now telling mankind that "the Day of Judgment is at hand."

Eco-theology also plays a part in Osborn's book, in which he speaks as though he were the Dostoevsky of environmentalism as he reflects on nature's abuse at the hands of man, who has "disregarded the words of the gentle Nazarene" and "destroyed a large part of his inheritance" as prophecied in the Sermon on the Mount: "'Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.'" There is even an echo of Dostoevsky's Christian faith in redemption through suffering, in which the destroyer's only "hope for the future" lies in remorseful "recognition of his failures in the past."

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's Father Zossima makes this very connection between love of nature and remorse for one's sins, but he does so in view of his own life, as the Gospels themselves center on the life of an individual. Osborn, on the other hand, reads "the words of the gentle Nazarene" as an environmentalist message, which is intellectually incoherent and makes a hash of Christ's prophecy several times over. In his version of the sermon, "the "meek" become mankind, which not only cancels Christ's blessing on the humble and poor but also erases "the meek" themselves, since man remains "The Plunderer" that he always was. Literally speaking, it is Osborn himself who has "disregarded the words of the gentle Nazarene" by subverting their meaning and turning them upside down. This inversion appears at the very beginning of the passage, in which we discover that it is "The Plunderer," the very figure who "has already destroyed a large part of his inheritance," who has simultaneously inherited the earth. In Osborn's words, "Part of the saying of Jesus ... has been fulfilled" now that "humanity, in great and growing numbers, is crowded upon most of the habitable areas of the earth," as though Christ's prophecy, in "part," had to do with overpopulation.

As for Vogt's "Day of Judgment," Revelation is a mystical vision of Christ's second coming, in keeping with Christ's reply to Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world." Vogt's apocalypse, on the other hand, concerns nothing but this world and, like all environmentalist warnings of planetary doom, is a scientistic form of prophecy. Hence my earlier characterization of this movement as an irreligious religion.

In Blue Planet in Green Shackles (2008), the Czech president Václav Klaus cites a number of Czech critics of environmentalism who likewise regard it as a secular religion, among them Ivan Brezina, "a biologist by academic training," who calls it "ecologism" to distinguish it from "scientific ecology" and critiques it at length in "Ecologism as a Green Religion" (2004). Klaus also cites a passage from "An Inconvenient Demagogy" (2006) by Michal Petřík, who notes that there is nothing of real science in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, which not only "includes all the errors it could possibly include" but "completely omits" any justification for the methods by which the film maximizes "negative forecasts and coming catastrophes." With the doomsday clock running out, there "comes a politician who is the only savior averting the catastrophe and saving all humankind." It is a classic echo of Soviet-style agitprop, as in a World War II Soviet film that an American veteran who had served in our Lend-Lease program to Russia once described to me, in which a dying soldier looks up at a nighttime sky and sees Stalin's face in a full moon looking down at him.

Petřík's following observation is particularly astute:

Thought Control In The Name Of Mother Earth - Part 1

Progressive visions of the Apocalypse

This is the first part of a three-part essay.

by Steve Kogan 

On a cross country trip some twenty years ago, I pulled into a truck stop that caught my eye moments after it came into view. High above the rows of gas pumps two displays were mounted: a huge, inflated model of a polka dotted Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Christian billboard inspired by the Book of Revelation. It was a sign from above two ways in one, with the last quarter hour of a white clock face printed against a black background, the words "Jesus is coming - Be Prepared," and the hands permanently set to five minutes to twelve, Judgment time.

There they were, big as life: a whimsical echo of Sinclair Oil's Dino the Dinosaurⁱ and a message from Scripture on the hour of reckoning. It was American to the hilt: a super-sized comic representation of the one prehistoric animal that everyone can recognize standing next to a literal image of Revelation 1:3, "for the time is at hand," and both of them serving as commercial roadside attractions.

I had driven through towns and cities when Route 66 was still Main Street U.S.A. and had seen any number of signs and cartoon-like models of foods, human figures, and animals at diners, car washes, and auto body shops from the midwest to LA, but the combination of dinosaur and Judgment clock stopped me in my tracks. When I think of them now, their effect becomes all the more heightened by association with the America of Henry Miller's "air conditioned nightmare," which now includes over 65,000 miles of land-destroying interstate highways, millions of cars, buses, SUVs, and tractor-trailers overheating the planet, thousands of junk food restaurants, rampant obesity in cities and towns, new dangerous technologies in energy and food production, and all the other demonisms of America's original sin in exploiting nature for profits, to the point where the earth trembles before its imminent ruin, according to the eco-litany of the left.

I was reminded of that New Testament sign halfway through Al Gore's Earth in the Balance, when his insistent message began to sound like the voice of a secularized Bible thumper in my mind, with his scientistic proofs of nature in crisis substituting for scriptural visions of the Apocalypse. To one degree or another, the warnings of countless environmental catastrophists are similarly filled with doomsday scenarios on the coming of famine, chaos, and extinction of life; and many of the titles of the foundational works read like a secular version of the end of days: The Rape of the Earth, Our Plundered Planet, Silent Spring, and Paul and Anne Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, all written between 1939 and 1968. The alarms they sounded ring louder than ever, and all evidence to the contrary has not lessened their appeal to fresh generations of believers. There is nothing transcendent, however, about the last days they envision, nothing of Christ's "My kingdom is not of this world" or that the righteous will be spared the fate of the sinners. As Fairfield Osborn concludes in Our Plundered Planet(1948), either we send a message across the globe about "the threat of an oncoming crisis," so that "all peoples everywhere may join in common endeavor" to save the earth, or we will all succumb to "the present terrific attack" upon nature's "living resources." Osborn's work had a pronounced effect on Ehrlich in his youth, as it did on Gore when he took a course titled Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Translated into thirteen languages and reprinted eight times in the post-war year it was published, Our Plundered Planet broadcast an S.O.S. on the death of civilizations at the hands of "The Plunderer," which is Osborn's term for mankind and the title of part two. Given "the accumulated velocity" with which man was destroying "his own life sources," Osborn insisted that only world-wide planning" could end "the ongoing peril" as a result of "the profit motive," whose defenders were even now causing "mounting injury to people everywhere." In effect, Osborn was calling for a planetary form of centralized planning and describing "the present terrific attack" upon nature in similar terms that Karl Marx had used a hundred years earlier in his call for the proletariat "to centralize all the means of production in the hands of the state" and thereby end capitalism's "exploitation" of the working class "in every land." Osborn recognized the political implications of his work and in his conclusion stated that "others far more competent will have to formulate the program, or others, more audacious, grasp the right to prophesy."

Two decades later, in the midst of the Vietnam War, environmentalist politicians and prophets began to appear. Taking the "teach-ins" and anti-war demonstrations as his model, Governor Gaylord Nelson founded Earth Day in 1970ⁱⁱ and in a commemorative speech thirty years later claimed that it was now possible "to forge a sustainable society," transform America by imbuing its institutions "with a guiding environmental ethic," and thereby "change the course of history." In themselves, there is nothing messianic about the science of ecology and its practical applications; but Nelson managed to incorporate Osborn's two types of future spokesmen in one and infused a new politics of environmentalism with an older "right to prophecy," as he did here by nailing the words "sustainable," "sustainability," and "sustaining" twenty-five times into his speech and combining them six times with "forge" and "forging," an industrial metaphor that was popular in old leftwing slogans on the "forging" of a new society, a new world, and even a new man.

Other "audacious" prophets armed themselves with an all-purpose critique that moved from the "counter-culture revolution" into universities, including the "new environmentalism" that Nelson had helped to popularize. In every succeeding variation, from new historicist and post-colonial rhetoric to feminist and social justice theory, there was either overt or implicit agreement that something was "fundamentally wrong with American government and American society" and that "traditional Western thought as a whole needed reconsideration."ⁱⁱⁱ A similar atomizing took place in the environmental movement, which came to include social justice ecology, anti-Christian ecology, "theological," or mystical ecology, eco-feminism, eco-socialism, and even anarchist-inspired eco-terrorism, as in the following outcry at a congressional hearing by a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, who struck the pose of a revolutionist facing a capitalist firing squad:

All power to the people. Long live the earth liberation front. Long live the animal liberation front. Long live all the sparks attempting to ignite the revolution. Sooner or later the sparks will turn into flame.iv

Craig Rosenbraugh's outburst bears no resemblance to Osborn's modest claim in his conclusion that he has only attempted "to present a synthesis of some of the biological and historical facts of human existence"; yet Osborn's "synthesis" is based on a series of narrow choices among "some" of these "facts," and, like Rosenbraugh's vision of a planet in crisis, they are all directed to the warning that "man is destroying the sources of his life." It has been the working premise of environmentalist ideology for at least a hundred years: "... the final goal of 'progress' is nothing less than the destruction of life,"v now rendered as "The very future of life on Earth is in danger," which Earth First! places at the beginning of its mission statement under the title "No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth." Echoing Marx's declaration that capitalism and its global "giant, Modern Industry" have modernized oppression through "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation," Osbornremarks early in his work that the industrial revolution has allowed man "to exploit far more effectively than he could previously the living natural resources of all of the continents of the earth." Both statements illustrate Simone Weil's observation in "The Power of Words" (1934) that "we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence," among them "the idea of limit, measure, degree," and "proportion," and replaced them with "myths and monsters." For Osborn, the exploitation of "our life sources" is just such a monster, which he projects onto the human record as a story of "plunder," "depletion," "destruction," and "despoliation," with man's "silent war" upon the earth playing the same part in Our Plundered Planet as the victimization of the lower orders by "the ruling class in every age" in The Communist Manifesto.vi

Ana

Royalty and Servitude 

By Yoani Sanchez

My grandmother made a living washing and ironing for others. When she died, in her mid-eighties, she only knew how to write the three letters of her name: Ana. For her whole life, she worked as a maid for a family, even after 1959 when official propaganda boasted of having emancipated all servants. Instead, many women like her continued to work in domestic service but without any legal security. For my sister and me, Ana spent part of her days in “the house on Ayestarán Street,” and we never said out loud that she was paid to clean the floors, wash the dishes and prepare the food there. I never saw her complain, nor did I hear of her being mistreated.

A couple of days ago I heard a conversation that contrasted with the story of my grandmother. A plump lady dressed in expensive clothes was telling her friend — between glasses of white wine — how she behaved with her young domestic. I transcribe here — without adding even a word — a dialog that left me feeling a mixture of revulsion and sadness:

- From what you tell me, you’re lucky. - Yes, I really can’t complain. Suzy started with us when she was 17 and she just turned 21. - Now we’ll see if she gets pregnant and you have to throw her out. - No, she’s very clear on that. I told her that if she gets pregnant she’ll lose her job. - Yes, but you know, “the fox always returns to its den.” So maybe she’ll run after some man from the village where she was born. - No way! She won’t even go to that “den” on vacation. Imagine you didn’t have any electricity, the floor of her parents’ house is dirt, and the latrine is shared by four families. – - It’s like the heavens opened up for her since she’s been with us. All she has to do is what I tell her, that’s all I ask. - That’s how they start, but later they start thinking things and ask for more.

You Only Live Twice

Vibrant Jewish communities were reborn in Europe after the Holocaust. Is there a future for them in the 21st century?

By Michel Gurfinkiel

Samuel Sandler, an aeronautical engineer and head of the Jewish community in Versailles, France, announced a few weeks ago that he’d had the local synagogue registered as a national landmark. “My feeling is that our congregation will be gone within twenty or thirty years,” he told friends, “and I don’t want the building demolished or, worse, used for improper purposes.”

Once the seat of French royalty, Versailles is now among the tranquil, prosperous, and upscale suburbs of Greater Paris. Among the townspeople are executives employed in gleaming corporate headquarters a few miles away. They and their churchgoing families inhabit early-20th-century villas and late-20th-century condominiums set in majestic greenery. Among the townspeople too, are a thousand or so Jews of similar economic and social status who have made their homes in Versailles and nearby towns. In addition to the synagogue and community center of Versailles itself, a dozen more synagogues dot the surrounding area.

So what makes Sandler so pessimistic about the future?

One answer might be thought to lie in the personal tragedy that befell him last year, when an Islamist terrorist shot and killed his son Jonathan, a thirty-year-old rabbi at a school in the southern city of Toulouse, along with Jonathan’s two sons, ages six and three, and an eight-year-old girl. But Sandler had faced his grief with uncommon courage and self-control. Both at the funeral in Jerusalem and in later media appearances, he had made a point of defending democracy, patriotic values, and interfaith dialogue.

Personal experience, then, may play a part in explaining Sandler’s grim diagnosis of the prospects of French Jewry, and by implication of European Jewry at large; but it is far from the whole story. Nor is that diagnosis unique to him. To the contrary, the more one travels throughout Europe, the more one confronts an essential paradox: the European Jewish idyll represented by Versailles is very common; so is the dire view articulated by Samuel Sandler.

1. The Paradox

European Judaism looks healthy, and secure. Religious and cultural activities are everywhere on the rise. Last December, in the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg, an exquisite new synagogue was inaugurated in Ulm, the most recent in a long series of new or recently restored sanctuaries in Germany. In Paris, a European Center for Judaism will soon be built under the auspices of the Consistoire (the French union of synagogues) and the French government. Many European capitals now harbor major Jewish museums or Holocaust memorials. In Paris, a visitor can proceed from the National Museum for Jewish Art and History housed at the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan, a 17th-century mansion in the Marais district, to the national Shoah memorial near the Seine, to the Drancy Holocaust memorial in the northern suburbs. Berlin hosts the Jüdisches Museum designed by Daniel Libeskind; the cemetery-like grid of the Mahnmal, the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe whose concrete slabs are spread over an entire city block in the center of the capital; and another national Holocaust memorial and educational center at Wannsee.

And yet, despite all their success and achievement, the majority of European Jews, seconded by many Jewish and non-Jewish experts, insist that catastrophe may lie ahead.

Why Syria Isn’t the Big Story This Week

Land policy in India is a bigger deal than sectarian politics in Syria

By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

The world’s eyes are riveted on Syria this week, as the United States, France and perhaps a few others organize plans to punish a bloodstained government for its use of chemical weapons against its own people. It’s a story that has everything: the prospect of violence, the political agony of an embattled White House, David Cameron’s loss of grip, and perplexing questions about right and wrong. For liberal internationalists, few international laws are more important than those that ban the use of WMD against civilians; on the other hand, when the political patrons of a war criminal block action at the UN Security Council, liberal internationalists must choose between their highest values and their most cherished institution.

That’s why the Syria story is dominating the news this week, and like the rest of the world, VM has been following it closely. But another story that is getting less attention is much more important for the future of the world: the economic crisis in India represents a much more fateful moment in world politics than anything happening in Syria.

What’s so important about India’s economic problems? It’s more what they tell us about the state of the country than the severity of the problems themselves. The stock market jitters, the currency crash, the GDP slowdown and the government deficit aren’t enough in themselves to sink India. All economies go through rough patches every now and then, but the question isn’t about a downturn. The question is whether the Indian political system has what it takes to get the economy back on track.

Two horrible things happened in India this week: an inept government reeling from serial corruption scandals and mounting evidence of economic failure pushed two bad bills towards enactment. There’s a wasteful “food security law” that will do much more to nourish India’s rich world of government corruption than to help the poor on a sustainable basis, and a poorly designed “land reform” law that could be even more crippling.

We’ve noted the food bill before; the land law is new and its consequences could be devastating enough to India’s growth prospects to change the course of world history. In India, under a law dating from the British Raj, the government has wide powers of eminent domain. Essentially, the government is the nation’s real estate agent, organizing transactions between buyers (often Indian or foreign companies who want to build factories, or Indian government organizations wanting to build roads or other infrastructure) and the farmers and others who own the land. For many Indians, this approach makes sense for two reasons. First, there are so many small plots in India that without the convenience of government organization (and its powers of eminent domain to force unwilling holdouts to sell), it would difficult if not impossible for private organizations to get the land for big projects. The second reason is that given the low level of education among many rural people in India and their lack of economic sophistication, there is a fear that unscrupulous investors will swindle the poor unless the government is there to protect them.

Ze Germans Aren’t Coming

23 percent of German men say “zero” is the ideal family size

By Jonathan V. Last

Last week, the New York Times ran a piece on the dire demographic problems facing Germany. The short version: Germans aren’t having enough kids, and as a result the economy is in trouble and there are all sorts of logistical problems—vacant buildings that need to be razed; houses that will never be sold, sewer systems which may not function properly because they’re too empty. If you want to read the long version, I write pretty extensively about Germany’s problems in What to Expect When No One’s Expecting. 

The Times piece reaches a couple interesting conclusions. The first is that they, somewhat surprisingly, acknowledge how much trouble demographic decline represents. This is surprising not because it’s news—most economists believe, and much of the historical record suggests, that aging, declining populations are problematic. No, it’s surprising because the Times is normally one of the last bastions of the neo-Malthusian idea that small is beautiful and that shrinking populations will be good for everyone. Because, you know, this time will be different. Maybe the reporters behind the Times’s Germany story are just conservative moles.

But probably not, because the second conclusion of the piece is that what Germany needs to do is stop trying to prod families with handouts and start focusing on helping working mothers:

There is a band of fertility in Europe, stretching from France to Britain and the Scandinavian countries, helped along by immigrants and social services that support working women.

Raising fertility levels in Germany has not proved easy. Critics say the country has accomplished very little in throwing money at families in a system of benefits and tax breaks that includes allowances for children and stay-at-home mothers, and a tax break for married couples.

Demographers say that a far better investment would be to support women juggling motherhood and careers by expanding day care and after-school programs. They say recent data show that growth in fertility is more likely to come from them.

“If you look closely at the numbers, what you see is the higher the gender equality, the higher the birthrate,” said Reiner Klingholz of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development.

And liberal bloggers agree! So, problem solved. Prop up nationalized daycare and demographic difficulties just take care of themselves.

Unsurprisingly, it’s not that simple.

For starters, the countries in the “high fertility band” from France to Scandinavia don’t really have “high” fertility. None of them is above the replacement rate and only France is even close. Germany’s total fertility rate is about 1.43. Now, sweep down the list and look at the TFR’s in Scandinavia: Norway is at 1.77; Denmark 1.73; Sweden 1.67. That’s the “success” being heralded.

Are the Scandinavian countries better off than Germany? Sure. Are they still in a whole mess of trouble, even with their super-progressive daycare programs and cultures of gender equality? You betcha. Think about it this way: If we had Sweden’s fertility rate here in America, you’d be hearing klaxon alarms every day about the demographic cliff we had careened over.

Which leaves France. France has a legitimately great fertility rate: 2.08—which is within spitting distance of the replacement rate. But is French fertility driven by its daycare centers? Not so much. Separate out the fertility rates of native-born Frenchwomen from the foreign-born population and you see a tremendous divide. Native-born French women have a TFR around 1.7. Foreign-born French women are much higher, probably north of 2.8. (Finding hard numbers here is difficult because it is taboo in France to make such demographic distinctions. Which means that in order for French demographers to get the same numbers our Census Bureau puts out every year, they have to hand-count (and sort) birth records. For a good discussion of all of this, see Christopher Caldwell’s definitive Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.)

What the gulf between native- and foreign-born French fertility suggests is that daycare centers and gender equality have only helped France so much—about as much, actually, as they’ve helped Scandinavia. What really gives France its demographic boost has been immigration which, in the French experience, has also been a source of many problems.

There’s actually been a fair amount of academic study on the efficacy of pro-natalist measures—everything from baby bribes to state-run daycare—and the evidence suggests that none of these efforts bring about much more than marginal returns. (This econometric analysis by Gauthier and Hatzius is a good place to start, if you’re interested.)

This isn’t to say that nationalized daycare is a bad idea. If people on the left (or elsewhere) want to make a principled case that such a system is an important expression of societal values and would work as a building block in showing national seriousness about pro-natalism, then that’s a perfectly good argument and we should absolutely have that discussion.

But anyone who looks at demographic decline and says, “Hey, just give us nationalized daycare and the problem takes care of itself” is either uninformed, or trying to sell you something.

I’m not selling anything myself. (Except a book—pick up your copy of What to Expect When No One’s Expecting today!) But I’d suggest that when it comes to demographics and falling fertility rates there are no easy answers. If you want to understand how truly deep Germany’s problems run, consider this: In 2005, Europe did a Population Policy Acceptance Study which looked at a broad range of demographic indicators. One of these indicators was “ideal fertility”—that is, how many kids an individual thought was the ideal number.

Twenty-three percent of German men—that’s not a typo, 23 percent—said that “zero” was the ideal family size. There probably aren’t public policy solutions to a cultural worldview like that.