New Start Treaty: Letter to Sen. Grassley

I recently heard Tad Daley, author of Apocalypse Never, speak about the continuing danger of nuclear weapons and the need for us to rid the world of them. I don't buy into quite that radical a project. I believe that the genie is out of the bottle, and that we can't force the genie back in. We have to contain the genie. As in the land of the blind, where the one-eyed man is king; so with nukes, in a world almost without them, the sole possessor would be in a very powerful position. Of course, the only nuclear attacks have been by the U.S., and for a few years, the U.S. did hold a nuclear monopoly. To say that our use of nuclear weapons was justified raises a difficult and perplexing moral issue. To argue that a permanent U.S. nuclear monopoly would have enhanced peace argues a point that can be challenged based on the analysis of strategy and the experience of history. For now, I favor a reduction of nuclear arms (we could probably get by with about 350 such weapons) as well as an aggressive non-proliferation policy. 

Daley mentioned the START treaty, which he believed a good move, although wholly inadequate. Accordingly, I wrote and mailed the following letter to Senator Grassley (believing Harkin doesn't need the prod--words with him if he does). I wrote:

September 28, 2010

Hon. Charles Grassley

United States Senate

135 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

Re: New START Treaty

Dear Senator Grassley,

I urge you to support Senate ratification of the new START treaty with Russia that the Senate Foreign Relations committee recently referred to the full Senate. This treaty furthers the security of the U.S. and of the world by reducing the risk of nuclear war. Reducing arsenals, limiting proliferation, and demonstrating our commitment to reducing nuclear tensions are extremely important goals that we should pursue with the utmost urgency. I was heartened to see that Senator Lugar and two of his Republican colleagues voted in favor of the treaty. I hope that you will help lead your Republican colleagues in pursuit of Senate approval. You know, and I hope that your colleagues realize, that we are already modernizing our arsenal, which appears to be a concern to some senators. You should also note that as a government, we can no more support excessive and unneeded nuclear weapons that we can justify any other wasteful government spending. We have a history of irrational and reckless spending and building when it comes to nuclear arms. Now is the time to stop this attitude. As a matter of fiscal sanity as well as defense policy, we have to get our house in order.

I hope that you will share this perspective with all of your fellow Senators. Thank you for your consideration of my letter, and I look forward to your support of the treaty.

Sincerely yours,

Stephen N. Greenleaf

Join me in supporting this effort if you agree.

Kennan on Life as Tragedy

Tragedy lies in the unavoidable conflict between man's animalistic, instinctive, primitively emotional and partially subconscious nature, on the one hand, and his capacity, on the other, for higher, more generous, less self-serving motives and impulses: for true love and friendship and charity--for a real nobility of spirit, in short. In this--in man's endlessly torn, self-conflicting nature, which the monastic orders have tried (but rarely succeeded, I suspect) to overcome, lies the first and probably the greatest sources of the tragedy. But another lies in the abundant injustice and frustration with which man is confronted at the hands of his natural environment, of the laws of chance, and of his own physical vulnerability, helplessness, and mortality. I am thinking here for example of the fact of bereavement--the fact that we do not normally die when those we love die, so that either we are left to mourn for them or they, as we know in advance, are left to struggle along without whatever help and support we might, if permitted to live, have given them. There is, again, the fact of our own mortality: not only the sadness and sometimes the agony of dying, but also the recognition that life, however successful, has never been more than partially fulfilled. And finally, if one has seen much of the human affairs, and particularly if one has been a historian, there is the recognition of the fleetingness, the impermanence, of all human undertakings and achievements.

 Kennan letter to Lukacs, July 8, 1984, from Through the Cold War.

For Teachers: Kennan to Lukacs

"The real rewards of the teacher always lie in the developments remote from the present and confused with a host of other origins, but that should not detract from the dignity of the profession or the satisfaction to be gained from it."

George Kennan to John Lukacs, November 18, 1953

I'm currently reading Through the History of the Cold War: The Correspondence of George F. Kennan and John Lukacs, ed. by John Lukacs (2010). The quote above comes from Kennan to Lukacs, as Lukacs, an immigrant to America from Hungary, seeks guidance from Kennan about his career choice. Expect more quotes from this wonderful book to appear in the near future.

Chris Anderson: How web video powers global innovation

This TED talk by curator Chris Anderson that Presentation Zen alerted me about provides a view into what TED hopes to accomplish. The participation by slum dwellers in Kenya (toward to end) shows how innovation through shared information by internet video can improve the lot of people throughout the globe. As a wordy guy, I’m skeptical of some aspects of video. Too often it can merely serve as a toy, a narcissistic tool, but this is true of words as well. An awfully lot of junk now fills the internet, but hidden in the midst of all of the junk, as Anderson points out, are some real diamonds.

Thoughtful Conservatism

Some who follow this blog or who know me might describe me as a liberal. In a broad sense, this is correct. However, I remain very reluctant to limit myself, and I flatter myself that I cannot be easily pigeon-holed politically. Nevertheless, in order to be fair to “conservatives”, I recommend that collective reading list from the great site, FiveBooks. Here they aggregate voting to come up with the 47 (?) best books on conservatism. Unlike the nonsense that we’re hearing out on the stump today, if you read these books, you will receive a very useful education. Hayek, the Federalist, Burke, Toqueville, Garry Wills (a heretic makes the list!), Mancur Olsen, Leo Strauss, and others represent some very serious and worthwhile thinking.

Krugman & Brooks on Great Britain

Here’s a blog post by Krugman referring to a Brooks column. Krugman’s addresses the issue of Great Britain’s relative decline by a reference to a remark by Robert Solow, but the Brooks article considers a more explicit hypothesis. Nothing too special, but for Anglophiles, they raise interesting questions. Also, I’m now listening to Winston’s War: Churchill 1940-1945 by Max Hastings, which addresses Great Britain’s situation as a great power during the war. (This is a really interesting and insightful book, of which I must write more later).

Paul Krugman & Manhattan Transfer

In this blog entry, Paul Krugman provides a reminder of why I really enjoy his blog: here he includes a clip from Manhattan Transfer performing “Boy from New York City”. No particular reason, other than Krugman was in the City for the weekend. In previous posts, he’s included Monty Python clips, clips from “Dr. Strangelove” and this clip from a 70’s pop hit. Now I ask you, what economist can match this sense of humor while remaining our best Cassandra?

A Great Year to Be Spanish!

This NYT article about Rafael Nadal winning the U.S. Open and thereby obtaining a career Grand Slam comments toward the end of the article about the year in sports for Spain. This year includes the World Cup championship, as well as Gausol for the Lakers and Cantatdor in the Tour de France. The article notes that Raffa went straight from Wimbledon to South Africa and was allowed into the Spanish locker room after the championship match, along with members of the Spanish royal family. He even got to bite the trophy! Well, anyway: Que bueno Raffa y Espana! (Or something like that.)

Newt Gingrich, Fox News, Dinesh D’Souza: Shockingly Outrageous

I don't know how I came across this report, but I hope that it's all wrong. I hope that I've fallen into the trap of believing some outrageous stuff from the internet, so outrageous I shouldn't even read it. Please, help me, tell me it ain't so! Gingrich, per this account, says that we understand Obama by understanding that he has a "Kenyan, anti-colonialist outlook". (Newt, the "thinker" and "intellectual" apparently having forgotten the U.S. has a long history of anti-colonialism. Hm, Newt, wonder why? My ancestors (well, some of them) were anti-colonialists, then called "patriots". But of course, all of this has nothing to do with Obama. Really, who buys this kind of slipshod B.S.? BTW, D'Souza is cited as the source of this "insight" in an article published in National Review. Really, can't we have some thoughtful, honest conservatives in this country?

This kind of nonsense, along with anti-Muslim attitudes and other growing attitudes, suggests a new era of McCarthyism? I wish—I hope—that such a thought is too extreme, but some of this stuff is genuinely shameful.

Stephen Walt on Obama’s Failures—Or Are They?

Stephen Walt sounds off in his Foreign Policy blog about the many complaints about Obama that come from various locations on the political spectrum. He argues that many forces are simply beyond Obama's—and implicitly—any president's control. A bloated military, foreign policy inertia, vested interests of elites, client states, and so on, make changing policy very difficult. The electorate wants to change policy and outcomes as quickly as a motor boat wheels around on a large quiet lake, while in reality, changing American policy is more like trying to guide the Titanic through North Atlantic waters—you just can't often make turns quickly enough.

The more I read Walt, the more that I like him. He seems to have his head on straight.

The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapaille

I finished this book recently. I read it on the recommendation of Karl Rove. Karl Rove! Well, yes, in a sense. I attended a seminar for plaintiffs' lawyers recently, and the speaker told how an Atlanta attorney discovered that his beach house neighbor was none other than the prince of darkness. Discussing tradecraft (did Rove know that he was talking to the enemy, a trial lawyer?), Rove revealed his admiration for the work of Rapaille. The trial lawyer looked at Rapaille's work, specifically, The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do
(2007, 224 p.). Rapaille has two main ideas that he works from:

1. The theory of the triune brain developed by Yale neuroscientist Paul Maclean, which postulates that humans have, in effect, three brains. The survival-oriented brain of the reptiles (eat, sleep, fight or flight, and sex); a limbic brain for emotions that we share with other mammals, and the neo-cortex, which provides our distinguishing reason. Rapaille believes that when fear is in the air, the reptile brain, motivated by fear, takes over and guides our actions, reason be damned.
   
2. Rapaille, who trained as an anthropologist and psychiatrist, has done a sophisticated form of group testing to discover deeply held attitudes toward food, sex, doctors, nurses, hospitals, health, cars, the nation, and so on. These are the "culture codes" that he says predominate in a society and that differ from one society to another.
   

The book makes a lot of sense and provides what I believe to be very insightful perspectives on group attitudes here in the U.S. (especially important for jury work), as well as differences between the cultures of different nations. This was a fun and interesting read. If you want to know more about the attitudes of your fellow citizens, as well as obtaining a sense of how we differ from others, I highly recommend this book.

Economist v. Historian

I found an interesting exchange in the Financial Times (London) about the role of economists vs. historians. I dissent from the argument to the extent that I see social science as frozen history. It may have some predictive value, but nature (including us) is always changing, sometimes imperceptively slowly, sometimes with obvious and dizzying speed. So economists can make models and test them against history (the past) and in the future. They are useful tools, but like all tools, limited by our own fallibility. History doesn't repeat itself (in any certain sense) and we can't predict the future (with a high degree of certainty in anything other than the trivial). We have to muddle through.

U.S. Senate Iowa 2010: Conlin vs. Grassley

If you're in doubt about who to support in the U.S. Senate contest in Iowa, you can get a good sense of the candidate's abilities, perspectives, and positions on issues from this joint appearance on Iowa Press. In case you don't' have time to watch it, I'll give you my take: my money (and Iowa Guru's) money and votes are going with great enthusiasm to Conlin. Senator Grassley is showing his age, but its worst manifestation is that he's become more of a right-wing Republican, sacrificing a sometimes pleasantly surprising independence that he used to show in the past (and his past goes back a long way!).

Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, by Charles Hill

This book has quite a title, and amazingly, it lives up the grandness of its title. Hill, a former Foreign Service officer, now teaches a course at Yale with John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy entitled "Grand Strategy". Based on this book, and the biography of Hill that I'm currently reading, that would be one heck of a course.

Simply put, this book tours the world, in time and place, and considers regimes, society, and international relations through the lens of great literature. In the Prologue he considers Cao Zueqin's The Dream of the Red Chamber, Dante's Comedia, and Conrad's The Rescue. From there, Hill takes us through the Classics (Homer, Thucydides, and on to Virgil, among others), and then into medieval, Renaissance, early modern, and Enlightenment authors. Nearer to our own time, he discusses Rushdie, Liu E, Ma Jian, and others. A truly amazing tour. (I throw in the Chinese authors of the benefit of 1HP, as I have only heard of them here.) Each of these works of literature, philosophy, and history reflects and molds the order of the society in which it was written. Hill makes the case for considering these works by relating a tale about Chairman Mao, who kept a copy of The Dream of the Red Chamber (among many other literary works) and claims to have read it five times. As Hill notes, this doesn't make Mao a humanitarian (far from it!), but it shows that he was a student. Hill also worked with long-time American diplomat Paul Nitze, and he reports that Nitze would be found reading Shakespeare on long flights across the Atlantic, where he traveled to negotiate arms control agreements with the Soviets.

Hill discusses these numerous texts, explicating their perspectives on society and statecraft. The scope and depth of his erudition is impressive. However, I'd say that this book isn't just for those interested in international relations. Indeed, I'd argue that relations between nations isn't so different than relations between individuals. (No agency problem—or is there?) In any event, even if you took this book as a reading list, you'd have years of great literature to read.

I'll write more about Hill after I've finished his biography, but if he's representative of the caliber of the men and women of the USFS, the we have some very capable persons there. A highly recommended book for anyone interested in literature or international relations.

Icarus Syndrome Review

An interesting review of Peter Beinert's The Icarus Syndrome, which I enjoyed very much. This is a thoughtful review by Yale political scientist Jim Sleeper. I think that Beinert, despite his youthful exuberance and errors, does the right thing by re-considering his position.

Ian Rankin: Naming the Dead

I finished listening to Ian Rankin's The Naming of the Dead, courtesy of ICPL. This is a one of a series about Edinburgh's police detective John Rebus. It's set during the G-8 summit of 2005 and at the time of the London train bombings, which play in the background. Like any good cop, Rebus is dedicated and hard-working, and like many a (fictional?) cop, tough and hard-drinking. Interestingly, like many a cop portrayed in fiction, for someone who must exude and represent authority ("the Man"), he tends to be very anti-authoritarian when it comes to his superiors. The performance was fine. It benefited especially from the Scottish brogue that the performer used (something that, say, a Steig Larrson book performance would not do well with—it would end up sounding like the Swedish chef on the Muppet Show). If you enjoy police procedurals mixed with a new and unique setting, this would prove an excellent selection. I have the sense that I'll meet up with DCI Rebus again.

John Lewis Gaddis: The Landscape of History

I today finished The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (2003, 183 p.) by John Lewis Gaddis, professor of history at Yale. Gaddis wrote this in the tradition, and very much considering, the precedents of E. H. Carr's What is History?
and Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft. Gaddis certainly does very well by himself while standing in the shadow of these and other illustrious predecessors. Gaddis updates our understanding of history by using complexity theory to help us appreciate how causes merge and meld into the unfolding of reality. Causes are like tributaries leading to the present, where they pause but for an instant, and then recede into the distance, from which point we try to map their course. Gaddis likens history to mapmaking or painting, which must of necessity attempt to make sense out of a present by abstracting those features that grab our attention and give meaning to us. Gaddis spends a good deal of time contrasting the aims of historians from those of social scientists. Social scientists, he says, hope to isolate variables with the ultimate intention of forecasting the future (something that I expect more and more social scientists have become more wary of attempting). Thus, whereas historians want to consider all of the causes worth noting that lead to an event or situation, social scientists want to isolate and abstract with the hope of obtaining structural knowledge, if not forecasting ability. Another interesting facet of Lewis's work is his consideration of history in comparison with the so-called "hard sciences". Lewis, who quotes and cites Stephen Gould almost as much as any historian, notes that the sciences have become more and more historical in their outlook. Some, like evolutionary biology, must perforce due so; however, this might also prove relevant to physics and chemistry, which do deal with change over time, although it's often on such a scale that it doesn't affect outcomes or actions. Historians, Gaddis argues, can't run lab tests to gauge the accuracy of their theories, but they can provide plausible explanations subject to peer review and criticism. He argues that the lab for historians lies in their minds and imaginations, much like geologists and paleontologists. Of course, both these scientists and historians diligently hunt and weigh the evidence of the past that they can identify, whether fossils or archive documents, but neither can, strictly speaking, re-run the past in order to test the accuracy of their understanding. Thus, replicability is replaced by virtual replicability as the standard of reference. Gaddis writes: "Imagination in history then, as in science, must be tethered to and disciplined by sources: that's what distinguishes it from the arts and all other methods of representing reality." (43).

I hope that the above offers some sense of Gaddis's take on these subjects, although this book is much richer than I can give it credit for in this brief report. In closing, I find that Gaddis seems to track with my thinking (greatly influenced by John Lukacs) that history is the master science in some sense. As Lukacs argues, all knowledge comes from the past. How it got here, like the path of evolution, determines what arrived. Like biological evolution, this path of travel may be so slow that we ignore that it represents change over time, nevertheless, this is how it all happens. Understanding and appreciating the interdependence of variables and complexity (and therefore uncertainty) of our world is a huge challenge; yet, understanding history through this lens will prove very fruitful, and it will continue the quest interminably into the future.

P.S. How does the "interdependency of variables" (the title of one of Gaddis's chapters) fit in with the Buddhist concept of co-origination and the like?