What History Tells Us About the Market: The breathtakingly volatile week has left investors numb. A close study of the Great Crash, and the decades that followed, offers some unnerving context, and some reasons for optimism. (JASON ZWEIG, 10/11/08, Wall Street Journal)
Just eight days before the Dow hit rock-bottom, the brilliant investor Benjamin Graham -- who many years later would become Warren Buffett's personal mentor -- published "Should Rich but Losing Corporations Be Liquidated?" It was the last of a series of three incendiary articles in Forbes magazine in which Graham documented in stark detail the fact that many of America's great corporations were now worth more dead than alive.More than one out of every 12 companies on the New York Stock Exchange, Graham calculated, were selling for less than the value of the cash and marketable securities on their balance sheets. "Banks no longer lend directly to big corporations," he reported, but operating companies were still flush with cash -- many of them so flush that a wealthy investor could theoretically take over, empty out the cash registers and the bank accounts, and own the remaining business for free.
Graham summarized it this way: "...stocks always sell at unduly low prices after a boom collapses. As the president of the New York Stock Exchange testified, 'in times like these frightened people give the United States of ours away.' Or stated differently, it happens because those with enterprise haven't the money, and those with money haven't the enterprise, to buy stocks when they are cheap." [...]
Robert Shiller, professor of finance at Yale University and chief economist for MacroMarkets LLC, tracks what he calls the "Graham P/E," a measure of market valuation he adapted from an observation Graham made many years ago. The Graham P/E divides the price of major U.S. stocks by their net earnings averaged over the past 10 years, adjusted for inflation. After this week's bloodbath, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index is priced at 15 times earnings by the Graham-Shiller measure. That is a 25% decline since Sept. 30 alone.
The Graham P/E has not been this low since January 1989; the long-term average in Prof. Shiller's database, which goes back to 1881, is 16.3 times earnings.
But when the stock market moves away from historical norms, it tends to overshoot. The modern low on the Graham P/E was 6.6 in July and August of 1982, and it has sunk below 10 for several long stretches since World War II -- most recently, from 1977 through 1984. It would take a bottom of about 600 on the S&P 500 to take the current Graham P/E down to 10. That's roughly a 30% drop from last week's levels; an equivalent drop would take the Dow below 6000.
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FCC Clears Free Wireless Web (AMY SCHATZ, 10/13/08, Wall Street Journal)
The FCC is expected to finalize rules this year and could begin auctioning off airwaves in early-to-mid 2009.The report released Friday was bad news for T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG, which uses airwaves that abut the chunk of spectrum that's set to be auctioned off. T-Mobile USA bought its spectrum for about $4 billion a few years ago.
T-Mobile has fought FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's proposal to encourage development of free Web access by raising concerns that the service would disrupt the company's 3G wireless network, for which it charges customers.
Scores die as Taliban suffer heaviest defeat for months: Taliban fighters suffered one of their heaviest defeats on Sunday when scores were killed in Afghanistan's southern province of Helmand. (Ben Farmer, 10/13/08, Daily Telegraph)
Apache helicopers, flown by Britain's Army Air Corps, and local security forces inflicted the losses when the Taliban attacked the local capital, Lashkar Gah. This was the first time in months that the insurgents had tried launching a frontal assault on a fixed position.These highly risky tactics expose them to the superior firepower of their opponents and had been largely abandoned in favour of hit-and-run strikes and attacks on civilian targets.
But Taliban fighters were seen gathering west of Lashkar Gah on Saturday night, apparently preparing to fire mortar bombs at the town. Soldiers from the Afghan National Army intercepted the insurgents on the town's outskirts and called in air strikes from British Army Apaches.
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Haider died driving at twice speed limit (Tony Paterson, 13 October 2008, Daily Telegraph)
State prosecutors investigating the crash said his car, a three-month-old Volkswagen Phaeton V6, careered off the road after overtaking another vehicle and flipped several times, causing the populist leader massive injuries to his head and chest even though he was wearing a seatbelt.
North Korea to Resume Disabling Nuclear Plant (CHOE SANG-HUN and HELENE COOPER, 10/12/08, NY Times)
North Korea welcomed on Sunday its removal from Washington’s terrorism blacklist and confirmed that it would resume disabling its main nuclear weapons complex and allow international monitors back into the site. [...][O]n Sunday, Prime Minister Taro Aso said that Japan and the other countries negotiating with North Korea in “six-party talks” on its nuclear program will have “ample opportunity” to discuss the kidnappings, the Associated Press reported. “We have not lost any leverage at all.”
The South Korean government hailed the agreement as an important breakthrough, stopping North Korea from making good on threats to reactivate its nuclear weapons program.
Some hawkish members of the ruling party, which won a majority in elections in April with a promise to get tough on the North, complained that North Korea was allowed to slip off the terrorist blacklist without apologizing for the bombing of a South Korean passenger jet in 1987.
The nation was put on the terror list after South Korea caught a woman who later said she was a North Korean agent and had planted a bomb on the jet.
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Despite the defeatism, our campaign in Afghanistan is going well: The Taliban must be laughing. Armed with battered old Kalashnikov assault rifles, primitive rocket-propelled grenades and home-made bombs put together in the Afghan equivalent of the kitchen sink, this rag-tag bunch of Pashtun tribesmen and Islamic militants have succeeded in reducing the most powerful military alliance ever assembled to despair and mutual recrimination. (Con Coughlin, 10/12/08, Daily Telegraph)
The reason British forces were sent to Afghanistan in the first place in 2001 was to help destroy the Islamist terrorist infrastructure that posed as much of a threat to our own well-being as to that of our American allies in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.And the reason that, seven years later, British soldiers are still fighting and dying in southern Afghanistan is to prevent Islamist terrorists carrying out a repeat of the July 7 terror attacks that devastated London's tranportation system in 2005.
And on that basis, the military campaign has been going pretty well.
Despite suffering appalling equipment shortages - the inquest into the death of Corporal Mark Wright in Oxford has graphically illustrated the disastrous implications of not having the right equipment in the right place at the right time - Britain's armed forces have nevertheless managed to give a good account of themselves.
If this is the case then why the unseemly spat between British and American policymakers about whether the conflict is actually winnable?
Certainly the sight of two key allies arguing amongst themselves will have given the morale of the Taliban a welcome boost, while leaving those with the thankless task of keeping the enemy at bay in Helmand wondering what's the point of risking their lives if the entire operation is going to hell in a handcart.
We have been here before, of course, in Iraq, where the decision last year to abandon control of Basra to a bunch of lawless Shia militias and criminal gangs completely undermined the reputation and the credibility of the British military in Iraq.
Since then Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, has hardly spoken to the British commanders who are supposed to be helping him to protect his country, while the Americans can hardly conceal their contempt for their erstwhile allies.
Now all the signs suggest we are about to make the same mistake in Afghanistan, sacrificing all our hard-won gains over the past two years because the policy-makers, certainly here in Britain, have decided that the challenges appear to be insurmountable.
Kadima sends draft coalition pact to Labor (JTA, 10/12/2008)
Labor would be the senior partner in a new government, according to a draft coalition agreement reportedly sent on by Kadima. [...]According to Ynet, the agreement would make Labor the senior partner in the new government, with its chairman, Ehud Barak, serving as a senior deputy prime minister and playing a significant role in negotiations with Syria.
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Are Democrats better for the U.S. economy? (CHRISTOPHER CARROLL, 10/13/08, Japan Times)
Over the period for which modern statistics are readily available, Democrats have outperformed Republicans by almost every traditional measure of economic performance (per capita GDP growth, unemployment, inflation, budget deficits).Democrats have managed to beat the Republicans on their own turf. Thanks to the profligacy of the Bush administration (and the prudence of the Clinton administration), average federal spending as a proportion of GDP under Republican presidents now exceeds that under Democrats during the measured period.
The pattern of Republican deficiency holds up when the span of historical analysis is extended by using stock returns to measure economic performance. On average, since the inception of the Standard and Poor's composite stock index in 1926, the reward for putting your money in the market has been about 16 percentage points lower per presidential term under Republicans than under Democrats. Republican underperformance remains a stubborn fact even when the Great Depression and World War II are left out of the analysis (in the fond hope that they will prove to have been unique experiences). [...]
Perhaps the best explanation has to do with attitudes, not ideology. Maybe capitalism works better when skeptics restrain its excesses than when true believers are writing, interpreting, judging, and executing the rules of the game. The Democrats are surely the more skeptical of America's two parties.
Some evidence can be found in those features of the American economy that we believe others should emulate. There is now an overwhelming consensus that open, transparent and accountable mechanisms of shareholder control are essential for the efficient functioning of public corporations. Virtue is defined by good accounting rules.
But it is instructive to recall that many of those now universally admired rules were fiercely resisted when first proposed. The "options backdating" scandal that recently caught Apple's chairman, Steve Jobs, is a microcosm of innovation, prosecution and reform. Now that a rule has been written to prohibit backdating, this particular scam will not happen again. Thus do accounting rules approach perfection.
What do we learn from this example? It's hard to say. Maybe that capitalism works better when it is being held accountable to some external standard than when left to its own devices.
Blind rabbi takes on pro-Israel incumbent: Dennis Shulman is backed by the new dovish group J Street in his bid to unseat U.S. Rep. Scott Garrett, a Republican who enjoys the support of the country's largest pro-Israel political action committee. (Eric Fingerhut, 10/12/2008, JTA)
History was made in the race for New Jersey’s 5th Congressional District even with Election Day some six weeks away.On Sept. 21, two blind men -- Democratic challenger Dennis Shulman and Barry Honig, a surrogate for the Republican incumbent, Scott Garrett -- squared off at a campaign forum.
“My guess," said Honig, a failed state Senate candidate who served as Bergen County chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004, is that “you could search the annals of history” and not find another instance of “two very affiliated blind Jews” engaging in a political debate.” [...]
Garrett has the support of the New Jersey-based NORPAC, the largest pro-Israel political action committee in the country. Shulman, meanwhile, has been endorsed by the new J Street PAC, which sees itself as an alternative to traditional pro-Israel groups because of its championing of increased U.S. involvement in the peace process.
“It's a great microcosm” for the debate going on in the Jewish community, said J Street’s executive director, Jeremy Ben-Ami. Shulman, he adds, is “the perfect person” to be carrying the J Street message.
U.S. gasoline price marks biggest drop ever -survey (Ilaina Jonas, 10/12/08, Reuters)
The average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States recorded its largest drop ever as consumer demand continued to wane and oil prices slid, a prominent industry analyst said on Sunday.The national average price for self-serve, regular unleaded gas fell 35.03 cents to $3.3079 a gallon on Oct. 10 from $3.6582 two weeks earlier, according to the nationwide Lundberg Survey.
A trip to the zoo is all about the choo-choo Molly Snyder Edler, 10/11/08, OnMilwaukee.com)
Although my sons had a great time running around and checking out the animals, every time they heard the train whistle, they asked if it was time to ride the rails. ("Can we ride it now, mom? Can we? Can we?")Finally, I abandoned my practical course and cut back to the front of the grounds to hop the train. The boys loved every moment of it, from choosing which train car to sit in (they tried out three or four cars before picking the one closest to the engineer) to waving to every person they saw during the ride.
That night, when my husband asked them about their favorite animal at the zoo, Kai said, "We rode the train!" It's true: for many little people, a trip to the zoo is all about the train ride...
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN?: ...the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. (Jonathan Haidt, 9/09/08, The Edge)
This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures. Turiel's description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups—the working-class people in both countries who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about respect, duty, and family roles. ("Your dog is family, and you just don't eat family.") From this study I concluded that the anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right in a 1987 critique of Turiel in which he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder's ideas, I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.
When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label "elitist." [...]
Back in the United States the culture war was going strong, but I had lost my righteous passion. I could never have empathized with the Christian Right directly, but once I had stood outside of my home morality, once I had tried on the moral lenses of my Indian friends and interview subjects, I was able to think about conservative ideas with a newfound clinical detachment. They want more prayer and spanking in schools, and less sex education and access to abortion? I didn't think those steps would reduce AIDS and teen pregnancy, but I could see why the religious right wanted to "thicken up" the moral climate of schools and discourage the view that children should be as free as possible to act on their desires. Conservatives think that welfare programs and feminism increase rates of single motherhood and weaken the traditional social structures that compel men to support their own children? Hmm, that may be true, even if there are also many good effects of liberating women from dependence on men. I had escaped from my prior partisan mindset (reject first, ask rhetorical questions later), and began to think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society.
On Turiel's definition of morality ("justice, rights, and welfare"), Christian and Hindu communities don't look good. They restrict people's rights (especially sexual rights), encourage hierarchy and conformity to gender roles, and make people spend extraordinary amounts of time in prayer and ritual practices that seem to have nothing to do with "real" morality. But isn't it unfair to impose on all cultures a definition of morality drawn from the European Enlightenment tradition? Might we do better with an approach that defines moral systems by what they do rather than by what they value?
Here's my alternative definition: morality is any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible. It turns out that human societies have found several radically different approaches to suppressing selfishness, two of which are most relevant for understanding what Democrats don't understand about morality.
First, imagine society as a social contract invented for our mutual benefit. All individuals are equal, and all should be left as free as possible to move, develop talents, and form relationships as they please. The patron saint of a contractual society is John Stuart Mill, who wrote (in On Liberty) that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." Mill's vision appeals to many liberals and libertarians; a Millian society at its best would be a peaceful, open, and creative place where diverse individuals respect each other's rights and band together voluntarily (as in Obama's calls for "unity") to help those in need or to change the laws for the common good.
Psychologists have done extensive research on the moral mechanisms that are presupposed in a Millian society, and there are two that appear to be partly innate. First, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to suffering and harm, particularly violent harm, and so nearly all cultures have norms or laws to protect individuals and to encourage care for the most vulnerable. Second, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to issues of fairness and reciprocity, which often expand into notions of rights and justice. Philosophical efforts to justify liberal democracies and egalitarian social contracts invariably rely heavily on intuitions about fairness and reciprocity.
But now imagine society not as an agreement among individuals but as something that emerged organically over time as people found ways of living together, binding themselves to each other, suppressing each other's selfishness, and punishing the deviants and free-riders who eternally threaten to undermine cooperative groups. The basic social unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured family, which serves as a model for other institutions. Individuals in such societies are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit their autonomy. The patron saint of this more binding moral system is the sociologist Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness), and wrote, in 1897, that "Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him." A Durkheimian society at its best would be a stable network composed of many nested and overlapping groups that socialize, reshape, and care for individuals who, if left to their own devices, would pursue shallow, carnal, and selfish pleasures. A Durkheimian society would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one's groups over concerns for outgroups.
A Durkheimian ethos can't be supported by the two moral foundations that hold up a Millian society (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity). My recent research shows that social conservatives do indeed rely upon those two foundations, but they also value virtues related to three additional psychological systems: ingroup/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble). These three systems support moralities that bind people into intensely interdependent groups that work together to reach common goals. Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever "lost" him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest.
In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.
In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane—of secular life and material interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don't understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.
Religion and political leadership are so intertwined across eras and cultures because they are about the same thing: performing the miracle of converting unrelated individuals into a group. Durkheim long ago said that God is really society projected up into the heavens, a collective delusion that enables collectives to exist, suppress selfishness, and endure. The three Durkheimian foundations (ingroup, authority, and purity) play a crucial role in most religions. When they are banished entirely from political life, what remains is a nation of individuals striving to maximize utility while respecting the rules.
What Honeymoon?: The Proposals That Could Bind Obama (David S. Broder, October 12, 2008, Washington Post)
[T]he larger the Democratic majorities, the greater the pressure will be to deliver promptly on the promises Obama has made in the campaign. [...]A few forward-looking Democrats have begun to focus on what could be the first test for a President Obama with a Congress controlled by his own party: whether to insist on a pay-as-you-go rule for the budget.
More than 100 Taliban killed in Afghan clashes (AP, 12 October 2008)
Taliban militants launched a surprise attack on a key southern Afghan town, sparking a battle that killed about 60 insurgents, an Afghan official said Sunday. A second clash in the same region killed another 40 militants. [...]NATO said its aircraft bombed insurgents after they observed them gathering for a major attack, killing "multiple enemy forces," the military alliance said in a statement.
Gen. David McKiernan, head of the NATO-led force in Afghanistan, told reporters in Kabul that hundreds of insurgents had gathered for the attack.
"If the insurgents planned a spectacular attack prior to the winter, this was a spectacular failure," said Brig. Gen. Richard Blanchette, the spokesman for the NATO-led force.
Karroubi: I will run for President (Press TV, 12 Oct 2008)
[Prominent reformist figure and cleric, Mehdi] Karroubi is the Secretary General of Iran's National Confidence Party, and in August was unanimously nominated as the party's candidate in the next presidential elections, which take place on June 12 2009. [...]This will be the second time Karroubi has run for president. He was among the candidates of the reformist camp in the 2005 presidential elections.
The cleric finished third in the vote count, closely following the frontrunners, ex-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Tehran mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
MORE:
Mehdi Karroubi: Iran’s Most Prominent Reformist Speaks (Asharq Al-Awsat, 11/04/2007)
Hujjat al Islam Mehdi Karroubi sent two letters to Iran’s Guardian Jurist and Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei that changed his life forever. Karroubi who was parliamentary [majlis] speaker from 1989-1992 and 2000-20004 resigned from his post on June 19th, 2005. In those two letters, he renounced his positions as the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s advisor and as a member of the State Expediency Council and began his life as an oppositional reformist.The first letter was a ‘complaint’ and accusations against what he called a network, comprised of mosques, elements from the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basijis [Tehran University’s Basij volunteer group] who were interfering on the behalf of the conservative then-candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the first round of the presidential elections. Hashemi Rafsanjani led the race with a total of 21 percent of the votes, while Ahmadinejad came in second with 19.48 percent followed by Karroubi in third place with 19.3 percent of the votes.
In his first letter Karroubi named Mojtaba Khamenei, Ali Khamenei’s son, as one of those implicated in the network supporting Ahmadinejad, moreover calling upon the Supreme Leader to order an investigation into the transgressions. Khamenei’s answer came back in a letter in which he said that these accusations were below Karroubi, warning him that it could give turn into a political crisis in Iran and that he would not allow for that to happen. The next day, Karroubi called on his supporters to confront what he said was electoral rigging and to “defend the nation from the symbol of dictatorship” in reference to Ahmadinejad who had pledged that his victory would signify the transformation of Iran into a new ‘Taliban’ state in the region. Karroubi described the elections as, “the blackest page in the history of ideological struggle” in Iran between the different trends.
Karroubi responded by an open letter that he sent to the Guardian Jurist of which he also sent copies to the Iranian press. It contained his resignation and a call for intervention to prevent further bitterness that was already borne by the reformist trend because of the interferences that were taking place in the elections. “I ask of you to intervene to stop some of the IRGC forces and officials’ unlawful interference in the elections… You must not allow further bitterness to be added on to the old…” it said. Some newspapers published the letter, such as Aftab-e-Yazd and Etemad – they were banned from distribution on that day. It was also said that Karroubi was placed under house arrest the very next day.
Since that day, Karroubi, 68 years old, has joined the oppositional reformist movement in Iran, or rather the ‘pragmatic reformist’ movement as it should be described. Among the guiding rules of the trend is participation and involvement in the political game, which is why Karroubi voiced his criticism to Asharq Al-Awsat regarding the reformists who had decided to boycott the elections and of the large number of candidates who nominated themselves in the elections, all of which has led to the dispersion and loss of votes for the reformists. [...]
Q: You have tried for a long time to change the electoral laws in Iran but you have failed, what are the forces that pose obstacles?
A: There were problems in the electoral law that has been amended – but we still face problems with the Assembly of Experts. There is a misunderstanding between us over the interpretation of the constitution. The Assembly of Experts monitored the elections. We concede that the Assembly of Experts should ‘monitor’ the elections so as to ensure transparency, however it upholds that it ‘has the authority’ to prevent the nomination of some of the candidates, which is the point of contention. Furthermore, some parties within the reformist movement have fanned the flames of this conflict higher, which has caused us a great deal of harm. We could have been able to convince the Assembly of Experts with our view were it not for these interferences, which have unfortunately prevented that from happening.
Q: What is the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s position on that matter?
A: The Supreme Leader’s adopted a positive stance and in some cases intervened himself to resolve the problem but when the problem escalated he no longer intervened and distanced himself. But we also have a different kind of problem and that is that the Assembly of Experts is the body entitled with the interpretation of the constitution; it is thus at once the problem and its solution. In all cases in the political world it is necessary to cooperate with others, and if that does not happen the problems only become deeper.
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The Irish Prophet: a review of Edmund Burke: Volumes I & II by F.P. Lock (Henrik Bering, Policy Review)
[B]urke was spot on with his predictions in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in November 1790, despite the fact that he had only visited the country briefly in 1773 to secure French lessons for his son. But he read everything available and had a steady stream of informants visiting him in his home at Beaconsfield. Most notably, he knew how to tune out the surface noise and hone in on the underlying essentials.Many Britons welcomed the French Revolution, among them Charles Fox, the easygoing dandy and inveterate gambler, who had taken over as party leader after Rockingham’s death in 1782 and who had allowed himself to be carried away by the ideals the revolutionaries espoused; he referred to it as “how much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world. And how much the best.”
From his reading, Burke knew what French mobs had been capable of in the past, once their passions were exited, the St. Bartholomew massacre providing a scary precedent. And just a few days after the storming of the Bastille, two Parisian officials had their heads cut off and put on pikes. Heads on pikes are always a bad portent. Burke’s intimations were only strengthened by the march on Versailles, where the queen’s bedroom was attacked and the royal family ignominiously transported back to Paris.
Burke himself had briefly experienced mob rule during the Gordon riots of 1780, when adherents of the Protestant fanatic Lord George Gordon attacked the houses of those who had voted for the Catholic Relief Act for Ireland, and Burke had been forced to remove his furniture, an incident he never forgot, according to Lock. His great fear now was that the French disease would spread to England though its British sympathizers.
The French Enlightenment philosophers bore a heavy responsibility in having paved the way for all this with their hatred of religion, their overweening faith in man’s rationality, and their fondness for abstract theory rather than past experience. Burke saw religion as the very foundation of society, and the revolution had confiscated church property and destroyed all manner of traditional hierarchies. Thus, Burke laid bare the rationalist madness of the revolutionaries, pouncing on “the geometrick folly” of their initial scheme to divide France into squares, ignoring local bonds and loyalties.
The social contract, he warned, could not just be cancelled like some trading contract on coffee, as it also involved past and future generations; the present generation therefore should not be allowed simply to follow its whims.
Again, Burke recommended taking a hard look at the people involved. As he warned Chames-Jean-Francois de Pont, the young gentleman referred to on the title page of the Reflections, “Never wholly separate in your mind the merits of any political question from the men who are concerned in it.” What Burke saw here was a bunch of restless lawyers “of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds” leading along hairdressers, tallow-chandlers, and “a handful of country clowns,” illiterates to boot. In the Assembly, he noted, there were not 50 men of property worth £100 a year, and hence there was nothing to keep its radicalism in check.
The views expressed in the Reflections led to Burke’s break with the Fox faction. The two had a great clash in the House of Commons. Fox, reminding Burke of his speeches on America, accused him of having reversed himself; Burke, in reply, proclaimed them friends no longer, reducing Fox to tears. Among those who approved of the Reflections was George III, whom Burke had fought tooth and nail earlier: “I know that there is no Man who calls himself a Gentleman that must not think himself obliged to you, for you have supported the cause of the Gentlemen.”
Picking up from Fox’s clue, Burke’s critics, including Thomas Paine, accused him of having gone from being a champion of Liberty to being a supporter of the reactionary ancien regime in France. A Gillray cartoon entitled “A Uniform Whig” shows him holding his Reflections, his left side in tatters, while the right side is spiffily dressed, with the clear implication that he had been bought off. Any such notion Lock dismisses out of hand: Burke’s acceptance of a pension came at a later stage.
Burke hit back with his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs of 1791, in which he set out to demonstrate that his views were entirely at one with his support for the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and in which he defined true Whiggism as “a rational and sober liberty upon the plan of our existing constitution,” a very different thing from the mindless uprooting in France. And as proof that he was not against reform per se, as long as it was gradual and organic, he cited his support for the revolution in Poland.
In his remaining years, he urged Britain to take a leading role in the fight against revolutionary France. William Pitt had first been unwilling to interfere in what he saw as France’s internal affairs, but when France declared war on England and Holland on February 1, 1793, this was moot. Yet Pitt still fought the war as a traditional war, rather than as a war against an ideology. Instead of marching on Paris, the center of evil, the allied army allowed itself to be sidetracked into besieging Dunkirk. And when Britain’s Prussian allies made peace with France in 1795, and the Pitt administration was putting out peace-feelers, Burke in his fury produced his Letters on a Regicide Peace.
In Burke’s view, though still the only man capable of saving Britain, Pitt had failed to provide the inspired leadership the contest required. In words aimed squarely at Pitt, he noted, “They never entered into the peculiar and distinctive character of the war. They spoke neither to the understanding nor to the heart. Cold as ice themselves, they never could kindle in our breasts a spark of that zeal which is necessary to a conflict with an adverse zeal.”
As for Pitt’s qualms about interfering in the internal affairs of another nation, Burke was rejecting the notion that those in charge of a country were entitled to act as they pleased on their own territory: “Men are never in a state of total independence of each other.” In Burke’s view, a messianic, expansionist regime like the French was simply incompatible with Britain’s national security.
Lock painstakingly demonstrates how Burke’s writing on the French Revolution grew out of his earlier writings. By 1789, the threat to Britain’s well-being no longer came from the king. It now came from the other end of the spectrum, the Parisian mob. Evil had transmigrated, to use Burke’s own term. And as the nature of the threat changed, so did Burke’s focus, but the principles of his arguments remained consistent throughout, making him a true conviction politician.
Perhaps Churchill put it best: “His soul revolted against tyranny, whether it appeared in the aspect of a domineering Monarch and a corrupt court and parliamentary system, or whether, mouthing the watchwords of a non-existent liberty, it towered up against him in the dictation of a brutal mob and wicked sect. No one can read the Burke of Liberty and the Burke of Authority without feeling that here was the same man pursuing the same ends, seeking the ideals of society and government, and defending them from assaults, now from one extreme, now from the other.”
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As Fears Ease, Baghdad Sees Walls Tumbls (STEPHEN FARRELL, ALISSA J. RUBIN, SAM DAGHER and ERICA GOODE, 10/10/08, NY Times)
Market by market, square by square, the walls are beginning to come down. The miles of hulking blast walls, ugly but effective, were installed as a central feature of the surge of American troops to stop neighbors from killing one another.“They protected against car bombs and drive-by attacks,” said Adnan, 39, a vegetable seller in the once violent neighborhood of Dora, who argues that the walls now block the markets and the commerce that Baghdad needs to thrive. “Now it is safe.”
The slow dismantling of the concrete walls is the most visible sign of a fundamental change here in the Iraqi capital. The American surge strategy, which increased the number of United States troops and contributed to stability here, is drawing to a close. And a transition is under way to the almost inevitable American drawdown in 2009. [...]
There is one overriding issue when it comes to the Awakening Councils, the groups of mainly Sunni former gunmen who were hired by the Americans to stop attacking them: Will they return to violence?
Many were supporters of the Sunni insurgency, either for money or ideology, and many still feel aggrieved at the new order, in which Sunnis are no longer in charge.
The Americans won over the Sunnis by overlooking their crimes, paying them and rewarding their leaders with extra money. They held out the prospect that Awakening members would eventually get jobs in the Iraqi Army or the police. Those who did not would get civilian jobs, and the government would not conduct wholesale detentions.
But as the early-October transfer approached, it became clear that the Iraqi government would refuse to accept most Awakening members into the security forces, and that most of the civilian jobs simply did not exist. Furthermore, the Awakening leaders, some of whom had been paid thousands of dollars by the Americans, would get no more than the rank and file under the Iraqis. The Americans now say they will try to make up the difference for some of them.
The Awakening members’ fears have still not been allayed.
“Allah. Homeland. Salary,” reads one piece of protest graffiti painted near an Awakening checkpoint in Dora market, adapting the motto of a feared paramilitary unit during Saddam Hussein’s era.
Pointing to the words, Sgt. Alaa al-Janabi, 30, who works with the Dora Awakening, said, “This is our slogan.”
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Atheism and Evil (Michael Novak, July 29, 2008, First Things)
The Jewish Creator offered every woman and man in his creation his friendship, and in this way treated each as a free person, not as a slave. Such human liberty required God to create a world in which human beings can of their own deliberate choice turn away from the good. This is how Aquinas defined human sin: a considered and willful deviation from the good, an absence of the good, a deficiency.“The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. The leaders of the Anglo-American Enlightenment believed that liberty was God’s underlying purpose in creating human beings, and in shaping the rest of creation accordingly. They believed that in the war between the Americans and the British in 1776, though both worshiped the same God, the God of liberty would favor those who fought for freedom, not against it.
A world in which liberty can flower must be a world of laws, regularities, and probabilities, but also a world of contingency, happenstance, serendipity, surprise, and suspense. All the stuff of a good story depends on creation being not just a world of iron logic and inflexible arithmetic, but also a world of immense crisscrossing variation and “blooming, buzzing profusion.”
Even the “angelic” light of advanced mathematics (so highly abstract and removed from corporeality) must in a world of liberty be constituted not only by arithmetic, geometry, and deductive reasoning, but also by the statistically random.
In such a world, there cannot be human freedom without the possibility of falling away from the good. [...]
From what we know of the world we live in, the Creator, it would seem, was no utopian, and his purpose was not to make a world solely for human pleasure, painlessness, and comfort. The world instead provides a tapestry of human experience, times of joy and times of trial—even a vale of sorrows—in which the golden thread of history is liberty.
That is, at least, the Judeo-Christian story, and I’m sticking to it.
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The Ownership Myth: Homeowners are in fact better citizens, more likely to vote in local elections, studies show. (Robert Shiller, 8/20/08, NEWSWEEK)
The idea of the "ownership society," which links the concepts of good citizenship to property and stock ownership, was used effectively by President Bush during the 2004 presidential campaign. [...]There is a centuries-old connection in our society between homeownership and citizenship. We've moved from a feudal society, in which those who didn't own land were almost like slaves, to one in which homeownership is linked with class elevation, as well virtuousness and good citizenship. In the New World, Americans have long believed that broad distribution of property makes for a better society. De Tocqueville wrote in "Democracy in America" in 1835 that America "stands alone" in the equality of distribution of property and that "nations are less disposed to make revolutions in proportion as personal property is augmented and distributed amongst them, and as the number of those possessing it increases." Property ownership (and later homeownership) became a kind of national destiny. There have been studies, like the one done by Edward Glaeser at Harvard University and Bruce Sacerdote at Dartmouth, which show that homeowners are in fact better citizens—they are more likely to vote in local elections or know the name of the head of the local school system.
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