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Saturday, July 08, 2006Lest my earlier posts seem jingoistic, I feel it important to answer this question: Will America ever and always vanquish its every enemy, as I seem to optimistically suggest? No.The truth of the matter is that America has been on the wrong side of history many times, and has known proper defeat almost every time. At the dawn of our nation - like the Chinese - we had an economic system that relied largely on slave labor or what, for all intents and purposes, was slave labor. While our natural bounty gave us much, there is no way to value the American economy at the time because the human cost was inestimable and the wages due but unpaid did irreparable harm to a vast portion of the citizenry. In the end, for our wrongful social and economic approach, we faced war with a greater nation: America. Our country was literally split in two, with the America of the future finally gaining victory over the America of the past. Slaveholding America went on the ash heap of history. With the industrial revolution gaining steam, robber barons, oil tycoons and factory owners exploited the labor of immigrants who didn't know their rights, poor people who knew they had none and children who could hardly consent to what became their lot. Eventually, reform movements and unions put an end to child labor and brought improvements in factory conditions, public health questions, etc. The America of the Robber Barons and the Company Store gave way to a new and progressive America. While the Civil War brought Blacks personhood, it didn't do enough to give them their rightful place in American society. From the sharecropper farms of the post-Civil War era to the whites only bathrooms of the '50s and '60s, America was a land of petty tyrannies where the lowliest white man wrongfully took charge of the free movement, economic lot and even very lives of Blacks, especially in the Old South. A Civil Rights movement came, with peaceful marches and violent riots. The battles are still being fought, but an America of racism and segregation is giving way to a freer, more open nation where everyone can claim their rightful place. In the late 1960s, America continued its fight against Communism abroad. But as the nation divided over the merit of one cause - Vietnam - leaders in both parties placed power at home over the advancement of freedom's cause, with a president too involved in war strategy and a candidate promising a secret exit plan that would not come till years after his election. Both ended in disgrace, the first giving up the nomination of his party lest it be taken, the second resigning lest he be impeached. And an America of political machines and powerful schemers gave way to something somehow different, even if it doesn't seem like it today. Through all its painful moments, the America of the past has fallen - to the America of the future. Through it all, it has been America, but not exactly. The one deep and abiding trait that can be ascribed to the nation across its centuries is its capacity to change in the face of changing realities. If you look at the real great powers of our age, and the emerging great powers as well - the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Japan - they combine two things: ready access to sea lanes and a ready ability to change. Other Asian nations will probably join this list. Some Latin American nations might as well. But China is not a likely candidate at the moment. Their leadership is too invested in not getting it wrong - or at least not getting caught getting it wrong - and their mechanisms for changing course are too murky and potentially violent. The would-be great men like Castro and Chavez, too, are headed for oblivion. There's no room for drastic course correction. The future belongs to those democracies that are willing to reach out, willing to go in new directions and have a strategic position from which to project themselves, not because democracy is inherently right, but because it's the most effective system man has found for making large-scale course corrections when he's wrong. Will America ever fall? Countless times - especially to herself. But that's okay, because our system was designed to work that way. And what of the Chinese? They'll fall too, but before what? There's no good system in place for going in a new direction. Which is why while I am uncertain what America will look like in 50 or 100 years - nor England, nor Australia - I am fairly certain it will be around and still a great power, even as the world speculates about which among the emerging poweful nations is sure to surpass it this time. I don't think China will be a candidate, at least not a China whose system's intellectual forefathers include Mao, Deng or Hu Jintao. 
posted by gbarto at 3:06 PM The central point this Instapundit post should raise is not whether Mr. Kudlow's enthusiasm takes him too far, but whether it is really possible to compare the U.S. and Chinese economies. The U.S. economy is relatively transparent. You can go to websites all over the place to find the latest data, what people think it means and why other people disagree. The Chinese economy is measured by a currency the goverment won't let float. It includes a banking system heavily subject to the desires of party officials and an economic infrastructure of which a major component is a government owned military-industrial complex whose real value is unknown and unknowable. Equally unclear is the number of businesses owned or partially owned by party members that might not be afloat without the force of the state behind them. Some will argue that the U.S. economy grew equivalent to 15% of the Chinese economy, others 50% and Kudlow 100%. I see no reason not to guess that the real answer is 200% or 500%. If you're going to play with made up numbers - which is what the Chinese economy is - you might as well go all the way. We've been here before. I remember when Soviet advances in mind control, superlearning, etc, combined with the organizing arm of the ultimate superstate was going to overshadow us. How did we think the U.S. economy compared to the Soviet in 1979? How about 10 years after that? Ten years still further on, you couldn't even ask the question. In the 1980s, it was just a question of time before the Soviets overtook the Americans and our sunny belief in freedom and free markets fell to cold reality. Twenty years later, college students don't really even know what the Soviet Union was! The Pacific Rim has its Asian Tigers. But for the moment, China is a paper tiger. Were it as strong as the gullible believe based on Chinese numbers, their officials would let the currency float and the books be opened. Now, to be fair you can't value a Mississippi boatworks either until you find out how much Trent Lott has been slipping its way. But, on the whole, the U.S. economy is transparent and becoming more transparent, and its floating currency means that if we get too funny with economic policy we'll get punished in fairly measurable terms. With China, by contrast, we just don't know. The real story of the 21st century isn't going to be the war on terror, which is already being won. It's going to be whether the 21st century ends like the 20th with a totalitarian superpower imploding as the Chinese way joins the Communist revolution on history's ash heap, or whether the post-Communist oligarchy manages a soft landing into the 2nd world (developing, between underdeveloped and developed) from which a quasi-democratized truly free market China can emerge.
posted by gbarto at 3:05 PM This is usually the sort of question I answer, not ask, but... What's wrong with "funner"? I understand that you can't do the standard comparative and superlative endings (-er and -est) with adjectives that are 1) past participles - loved, hated, tired, eaten, worn 2) present participles - loving, hating, tiring, trying 3) Latinate present active participles - important, existent, dependent 4) noun derivatives whose endings make them adjectives - spatial and spacious (space), special and specious (species), famous (fame), original (origin) Of course there are more, but this gives quick access to tons of adjectives that form their comparative and superlative with more and most and of which you might not ordinarily think. The problem is: "fun" is a nice little three-letter word. Thinking in terms of euphonics, its closest analog is "thin" - consonant-vowel-"n". With "thin" you have to double the "n" in "thinner" and "thinnest" to maintain the short "i," but we do. And those who make the mistake with "fun" usually understand how this works: I've seen people write "funner" but never "funer." So, if ordinary folks who don't know better than to say "funner" know all the other stuff involved in forming a proper "incorrect" word, just what is wrong with "funner"? Should you know, please put finger to keyboard and send an explanation. Could there be a funner challenge to take on over the weekend?
posted by gbarto at 3:02 PM Wednesday, July 05, 2006Now I'm scared...News that Kim Jong-Il could hit Alaska was vaguely discomfiting, to be sure. News that he can't, but is willing to risk any location within approximately the same range from North Korea in trying to is slightly more troubling. This weekend's tests should be far more troubling to China, Japan and South Korea, not because of any danger they're targets but simply because they're closer. My prediction, for what is worth, is that the United States will face criticism for not helping out North Korea fast enough after a strike against the U.S. goes bad and a nuke blows up on North Korean soil well before we have to deal with a North Korean nuke touching North America proper.
posted by gbarto at 6:40 PM Tuesday, July 04, 2006A Day for Receiving GraciouslyWhen given a gift, we must respond with graciousness, lest we deny others the joy of giving. How often do we hear people respond to some kind gift or sentiment with that awful phrase, "You shouldn't have"? It's meant as an expression of humility, I suppose, but whatever one's reason for questioning the giving of a gift, it is wrong. It teaches us, even those who are old enough to know better, that the act of giving is a thing to which judgment is attached. That the cycle of sharing which bonds us together in kindness is somehow false. If ever there were a virtue to be honored, even in hypocrisy, it is showing proper respect for generosity. When we reject a gift, deny the good intentions behind it or tell ourselves other stories to justify the attachment of resentment to ostensible acts of kindness, we do ourselves and others a great injustice. Today, sadly, is an especially important day to be on guard against this. When we think of gifts and giving, we think of the underwear and socks grandma gave us. The sweater from Auntie that never fit. In the last few years, some 2500 American soldiers have given their lives to preserve our safety and advance our freedom. In the last few years, families have watched loved ones go overseas, not knowing if it will be their last goodbye. In the last few years, soldiers, diplomats and other government and NGO personnel have packed up and gone around the world to help others as best they can in the best way they can. We owe them our thanks. There is a tendancy in our country - in our history classes, in our college seminars, in our magazines - to run America down. Conservatives scorn this land as lacking values. Liberals scorn it as lacking generosity. Everybody tells us about slavery, about women lacking the vote, about the problems the leaders of the Civil Rights movement faced. About the struggles minorities or immigrants face today. And yet... 230 years ago, some brave men - they were all men - signed a pledge to stand for the idea that every individual man had rights, had value and was due a chance to make of his life what he might. They went so far as to say that the purpose of government was to make this ideal fact and that a government that failed to do so could be discarded. Through war and struggle, through boom and bust, through good times and bad this country has pushed forward from those ideals, building on them to create a society that over time is freer, more open, more just. Yes, there are times we slide back, as well as times we push forward. But the long-term trend is there. That's why immigrants come by the boatload and truckload. Why the celebrities who have vowed to move to France or Britain never do. Why the rest of us, too, do not strike out for fairer shores but use that control over our own destinies that our Founding Fathers gave us to make our own lives, communities and nation better. The gift we have been given by the Founding Fathers and the soldiers, workers and - God help us - politicians - who have helped this nation become what it is cannot and must not be undervalued or unappreciated. And so, as this day of celebration draws to a close, it seems appropriate to shy away from the chants of "Not in our name," the spitting upon soldiers, the bumper sticks (meant for both Clinton and Bush) declaring "He's not my president" and find within us a measure of gratitude for those who make it possible for us to take for granted the privileges that come with being an American. Many thanks.
posted by gbarto at 8:01 PM Monday, July 03, 2006Where did we get the ideal of the Noble Savage?On Instapundit and in the Asia Times, and elsewhere, there's a look at prehistoric violence followed by the question, so where does the idea of the peaceful hunter-gatherer come from? The answer is the Enlightenment, but not in the way you would think. 18th century literature is filled with Noble Savages of all varieties. As a once-upon-a-time French lit guy, the most prominent examples for me are: Voltaire's Ingénu, the feminist revived Lettres d'une Péruvienne and Rousseau's cry, "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." Reading the 18th century literature, one finds comparatively little interest in what Native Americans, Persians, Mohammedans and Chinamen (though actually the romanticization - as my term implies - didn't really hit till the 19th c.) were like. Their purpose was not to exist for themselves, but merely as a projection of their authors' notions of what a reasonable and reasoned outsider would fault in contemporary society. The most successful update, to show what the genre's really about, is Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, a story that would show us the error of our ways by the thinking of a Martian! When Voltaire created a curious savage from Canada for the Ingénu, he knew better. Which explains why he could also use Micromégas to show what a learned man from outer space (foreshadowing Stranger...) would find amiss in French society. Swift did the opposite with the Whoyouyums and others in Gulliver's Travels, telling quaint stories about quaint people to criticize social practices in his own society. What matters, and where the whole Noble Savage bit went wrong, is that the 18th century cynics and skeptics knew they were telling stories to raise hell. (Though one wonders about Rousseau.) With the 19th century Romantics, things are fuzzed. Where the return to nature, simple solitary existence and the like are hailed, one finds a slightly different form of projection: I don't think the typical Romantic poet idealized anyone other than himself, so that any outsider held up as noble, good and pure was just a figure to make the self-portrait all the sweeter. But then, somewhere, somehow, people began believing the nonsense. If you read Darwin's diaries, you discover that the people of Tierra del Fuego lived off the land as best they could, found shelter where nature provided and wore little clothing. The people of Tahiti lived off the land as best they could, found shelter where nature provided and wore little clothing. The first were primitive monsters. The second were the sweetest people you could meet. How come? Because the Tahitians had made reasonable accomodations with their environment and the Fuegians had not. But for the typical environmentalist, the picture that sticks is of the Tahitians. From the inception of the ideal of the Noble Savage, there has been a game of projection going on where sticking it to those present takes precedence over finding the actual truth of those ostensibly idealized. The difference, in blogger parlance, is that we can fact-check the idealized now, thus discovering that whatever the validity of the critique, the postulated Other does not present a proven solution that we've lost, but a past way that has fallen by the wayside in the face of the forces of history. The Native Americans hunted countless species to extinction. Their later parsimoniousness owed much to how little they had. Yet some celebrate their later approach the same way we admire Depression-era frugality, failing to take into account that it was driven by necessity, not virtue. Today we celebrate the Noble Savage, the primitive Hunter-Gatherer and the present day simple tribesman not from admiration for the Other, but from rejection of ourselves. It started, in the 18th century, as a gambit to get past the censors. Unfortunately, some people have started to believe their own nonsense. The reality of the primitive hunter-gatherer in a peaceful society makes for a pretty picture faintly believeable in Edenic Tahiti but harder to swallow when you're talking about surviving harsh North American and European winters when resources are scare. And given the mysteries of Easter Island, even the land of plenty where Noble Savages live in peace seems to have a spotted record. But when Bush Derangement Syndrome causes you to believe that peace could be made with Osama Bin Laden, telling yourself that maybe on prehistoric earth a peace-loving people amiably agreed to share the last vegetarian yak bone isn't so hard. One other note: While the ideal of the Noble Savage is, to my understanding, a thing especially of the 18th century, it's really just part of the broader pattern of false nostalgia. Peaceful hunter-gatherers on prehistoric earth are for the left what idyllic 1950s families are for Pat Buchanan. And that goes back at least as far as Homer's rant that while once upon a time there were great men, later eras had to suffer with hopelessly mortal fops - like the vain and petulant Achilles. It's actually kind of funny when you think about it. After all these years, the environmentalists and the creationists are coming jointly to believe in a time when a small number of people lived in a land free of want where God, or Nature's God, provided all.
posted by gbarto at 9:50 AM |
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