March 13, 2012
The TSA, Civil Liberty, and Reason
By official policy, and the rulings of Federal courts, the TSA is forbidden from profiling aircraft passengers on racial or religious grounds. This safeguards a few from tedious and unpleasant searches. In principle, a minority has its civil rights protected – assuming that the passengers in question are U.S. citizens and are guaranteed such rights. In upholding this laudable principle, however, the TSA has been left with a serious procedural problem: How do you find a terrorist without being allowed to use the most obvious and salient criteria to narrow the list of potential suspects? The answer has been to search everyone, and to randomly search a few more closely.
Most people realize intuitively that this is not a very effective way to conduct a search. To show how thoroughly absurd it is though, let’s consider what might happen if the same kind of constraints where placed on another Federal agency, the Centers for Disease Control.
Imagine there were a sudden outbreak of a serious disease, perhaps a lethal form of influenza, in a major US city. New strains of influenza typically originate in China. Logically, the CDC might want to quarantine people who had recently travelled in China, and generally to search for people with recent connections to China. However, since this would inevitably inconvenience a certain minority, and could conceivably even stigmatize them as possible disease carriers, the CDC, in our scenario, would be disallowed from singling them out. Instead of quarantining travelers from China, it would be much fairer just to quarantine a few people at random, and to declare a universal curfew for everybody to cut down the rate of person-to-person contact. This would, of course, do little to slow the progress of the epidemic. It would keep the CDC just as busy though, and there would be a certain comforting feeling that some action was being taken. Everyone would be inconvenienced, most of them to no good purpose.
I am a civil libertarian at heart. I am well aware that singling out minorities is not a measure we should ever take lightly. The dark example of the internment of US citizens in the Second World War, for no greater crime than having Japanese ancestors, should neither be forgotten nor minimized. Nor should we imagine that the even worse persecutions that have occurred elsewhere are impossible here because Americans are, somehow, just better than that. We’re not. However, if we are to keep our liberty, we cannot allow the ideal of social equality to trump all others on every occasion. There is an enormous difference between a search of someone’s luggage on the grounds that they share a religion or an ethnicity with terrorists, and rousting that person from their home in the middle of the night and hustling them off to a concentration camp. Not only is there a difference in severity, but there is also a difference in kind. One does not follow inevitably from the other. If I share an appearance, a locality, and other characteristics with a criminal, I should not be surprised to find myself in a police line-up – but this does not mean the common characteristics I and the criminal possess are the objects of the state’s persecution. If a tall man commits a crime, it makes sense for the police to look for a tall man – but this does not mean being tall is a crime in itself.
Further, in the process of being “fair” to everyone by inconveniencing us all equally, the Federal courts have established a precedent that should alarm every one of us: the idea that the state may inflict a harm, albeit at present a small one, on persons who are obviously innocent in the name of a social good. When a TSA agent dutifully gropes a four-year-old or an elderly nun it is not done in the furtherance of public safety, but merely in the furtherance of an absolutist sense of fairness. To put this another way, the courts have taken the position that it is not objectionable to treat the public like cattle, so long as officials do not distinguish between the color or religion of the cows. Perhaps this does not lead inevitably to worse infringements either, but given a choice between the evil of profiling and the evil of universal abuse – at least the former achieves its original purpose.
Most people realize intuitively that this is not a very effective way to conduct a search. To show how thoroughly absurd it is though, let’s consider what might happen if the same kind of constraints where placed on another Federal agency, the Centers for Disease Control.
Imagine there were a sudden outbreak of a serious disease, perhaps a lethal form of influenza, in a major US city. New strains of influenza typically originate in China. Logically, the CDC might want to quarantine people who had recently travelled in China, and generally to search for people with recent connections to China. However, since this would inevitably inconvenience a certain minority, and could conceivably even stigmatize them as possible disease carriers, the CDC, in our scenario, would be disallowed from singling them out. Instead of quarantining travelers from China, it would be much fairer just to quarantine a few people at random, and to declare a universal curfew for everybody to cut down the rate of person-to-person contact. This would, of course, do little to slow the progress of the epidemic. It would keep the CDC just as busy though, and there would be a certain comforting feeling that some action was being taken. Everyone would be inconvenienced, most of them to no good purpose.
I am a civil libertarian at heart. I am well aware that singling out minorities is not a measure we should ever take lightly. The dark example of the internment of US citizens in the Second World War, for no greater crime than having Japanese ancestors, should neither be forgotten nor minimized. Nor should we imagine that the even worse persecutions that have occurred elsewhere are impossible here because Americans are, somehow, just better than that. We’re not. However, if we are to keep our liberty, we cannot allow the ideal of social equality to trump all others on every occasion. There is an enormous difference between a search of someone’s luggage on the grounds that they share a religion or an ethnicity with terrorists, and rousting that person from their home in the middle of the night and hustling them off to a concentration camp. Not only is there a difference in severity, but there is also a difference in kind. One does not follow inevitably from the other. If I share an appearance, a locality, and other characteristics with a criminal, I should not be surprised to find myself in a police line-up – but this does not mean the common characteristics I and the criminal possess are the objects of the state’s persecution. If a tall man commits a crime, it makes sense for the police to look for a tall man – but this does not mean being tall is a crime in itself.
Further, in the process of being “fair” to everyone by inconveniencing us all equally, the Federal courts have established a precedent that should alarm every one of us: the idea that the state may inflict a harm, albeit at present a small one, on persons who are obviously innocent in the name of a social good. When a TSA agent dutifully gropes a four-year-old or an elderly nun it is not done in the furtherance of public safety, but merely in the furtherance of an absolutist sense of fairness. To put this another way, the courts have taken the position that it is not objectionable to treat the public like cattle, so long as officials do not distinguish between the color or religion of the cows. Perhaps this does not lead inevitably to worse infringements either, but given a choice between the evil of profiling and the evil of universal abuse – at least the former achieves its original purpose.
March 1, 2012
Is Fox News?
Once upon a time (always the best way to start any serious essay) the American public sat enthralled by the sober but avuncular face of Walter Cronkite, telling us, in the tight span of less than half an hour, what had happen in the world that day. He never yelled, he never sneered, and nobody that I know of ever wondered whose side he was on. I can close my eyes and still picture this time. I am fairly confident it really happened.
The CBS Evening News of the 1960’s is not the sort of news we have today. Neither the broadcast networks, Fox nor CNN bear it much resemblance. News makes only the most superficial pretentions to impartiality now. It makes not even that much to relevance. It follows the lives of Tiger Woods, Lindsay Lohan and (even posthumously) Micheal Jackson as though they were every bit important as the war in Afghanistan or the upcoming presidential election. It barks and insinuates from more sets of perfectly aligned teeth than could be had on the old Lawrence Welk show. It shows a little leg and a little cleavage. It informs a little now and then, but only as an accidental consequence of entertainment, or in the calculated service of political persuasion.
I was born in a lucky time. Cronkite and other journalists of his era stood on one of the higher points in the development of the press, when the standards of journalistic integrity were high enough to support a functioning democracy with reasonably neutral, reasonably accurate information. It was a high point, rather than the last gasp of any long standing tradition. Our nation began with dozens of small newspapers, most of which had axes to grind. 19th century politics and press coverage was every bit as partisan – and as lurid – as any seen today. What seems new to some of us is not new to America.
Before one can talk about anything intelligently, it is often necessary to clarify certain terms. Here is what I mean by “news”:
For an article of information to be “news” it has to be both reasonably factual and in some way consequential to the life of the recipient.
That “news” has to factual should be obvious. Opinions, while often interesting and sometimes persuasive, are not “facts” and neither are they “news”. Outright lies are plainly not “news”.
The demand that “news” be consequential is equally important. If a city floods and you were planning to go there, then knowledge of the flood is “news”. On the other hand, the image of a microphone shoved into the face of a weeping flood victim followed up by the question, “how does it feel to lose your family?” isn’t “news”. It isn’t going to tell you anything you either need to know – or have any special right to know. Nor does the knowledge of how Tiger Woods’ divorce is going fill any pressing need. Such things are merely a prurient form of entertainment.
The definition of the “news” I offer here is a narrower one than people are used to, and it is narrow for a reason. It is intended to define “news,” as consisting chiefly of those things which members of a free society must know to participate intelligently in the political process. Non-factual or inconsequential information (e.g. lies, opinions, and trivialities) simply do not add to our ability to participate in elections responsibly. To put it more succinctly:
A broad public knowledge of relevant facts is a necessary precondition for meaningful democracy.
Intelligent people can argue about who is or isn’t providing the public with relevant facts, but I don’t think any rational person can argue that people who don’t have access to relevant facts can still be capable of voting wisely.
The CBS Evening News of the 1960’s provided a concise stream of relevant facts. It wasn’t perfect. I remember the daily body count figures from the Viet Nam War – a sort of football score that was probably neither meaningful nor altogether factual. In the main, however, the institution sought out relevant events and reported them plainly, unemotionally, and without much spin. There wasn’t time in the short broadcast for either trivialities or much editorial comment.
Today’s “news” programs, of all stripes, are much less austere. To begin with, without the time constraint imposed by the half-hour format, “news” networks have a great deal more air time to fill. They need to keep their audiences entertained for hours on end. Maintaining bigger news bureaus to generate ever more news in ever greater depth might be a theoretical possibility for a news network, but in practice there are cheaper and more reliable ways to hold an audience’s attention. The democratic process would be better served by more news and more background material (the causes and history behind events) but in actually practice networks get better ratings and make more money by treating “news” as just another form of amusement. It is much harder to really find out what is going on in Pakistan than to have a reporter follow Lindsay Lohan around and simply recount her social pratfalls. Likewise, it is easier for Fox to invite Ann Coulter onto one of their “new analysis” shows to spin her usual web of unsubstantiated invective, than it is to make the usually abstruce facts of politics clear and interesting.1
So – is Fox news? The best answer would be – “occasionally.” The same answer that holds for nearly every other organ of the press at in these stirring and irrational times.
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1 I have often wondered whether Ms. Coulter only puts on her performance for the camera, or only during her waking hours, or if in fact she even sneers in her sleep.
The CBS Evening News of the 1960’s is not the sort of news we have today. Neither the broadcast networks, Fox nor CNN bear it much resemblance. News makes only the most superficial pretentions to impartiality now. It makes not even that much to relevance. It follows the lives of Tiger Woods, Lindsay Lohan and (even posthumously) Micheal Jackson as though they were every bit important as the war in Afghanistan or the upcoming presidential election. It barks and insinuates from more sets of perfectly aligned teeth than could be had on the old Lawrence Welk show. It shows a little leg and a little cleavage. It informs a little now and then, but only as an accidental consequence of entertainment, or in the calculated service of political persuasion.
I was born in a lucky time. Cronkite and other journalists of his era stood on one of the higher points in the development of the press, when the standards of journalistic integrity were high enough to support a functioning democracy with reasonably neutral, reasonably accurate information. It was a high point, rather than the last gasp of any long standing tradition. Our nation began with dozens of small newspapers, most of which had axes to grind. 19th century politics and press coverage was every bit as partisan – and as lurid – as any seen today. What seems new to some of us is not new to America.
Before one can talk about anything intelligently, it is often necessary to clarify certain terms. Here is what I mean by “news”:
For an article of information to be “news” it has to be both reasonably factual and in some way consequential to the life of the recipient.
That “news” has to factual should be obvious. Opinions, while often interesting and sometimes persuasive, are not “facts” and neither are they “news”. Outright lies are plainly not “news”.
The demand that “news” be consequential is equally important. If a city floods and you were planning to go there, then knowledge of the flood is “news”. On the other hand, the image of a microphone shoved into the face of a weeping flood victim followed up by the question, “how does it feel to lose your family?” isn’t “news”. It isn’t going to tell you anything you either need to know – or have any special right to know. Nor does the knowledge of how Tiger Woods’ divorce is going fill any pressing need. Such things are merely a prurient form of entertainment.
The definition of the “news” I offer here is a narrower one than people are used to, and it is narrow for a reason. It is intended to define “news,” as consisting chiefly of those things which members of a free society must know to participate intelligently in the political process. Non-factual or inconsequential information (e.g. lies, opinions, and trivialities) simply do not add to our ability to participate in elections responsibly. To put it more succinctly:
A broad public knowledge of relevant facts is a necessary precondition for meaningful democracy.
Intelligent people can argue about who is or isn’t providing the public with relevant facts, but I don’t think any rational person can argue that people who don’t have access to relevant facts can still be capable of voting wisely.
The CBS Evening News of the 1960’s provided a concise stream of relevant facts. It wasn’t perfect. I remember the daily body count figures from the Viet Nam War – a sort of football score that was probably neither meaningful nor altogether factual. In the main, however, the institution sought out relevant events and reported them plainly, unemotionally, and without much spin. There wasn’t time in the short broadcast for either trivialities or much editorial comment.
Today’s “news” programs, of all stripes, are much less austere. To begin with, without the time constraint imposed by the half-hour format, “news” networks have a great deal more air time to fill. They need to keep their audiences entertained for hours on end. Maintaining bigger news bureaus to generate ever more news in ever greater depth might be a theoretical possibility for a news network, but in practice there are cheaper and more reliable ways to hold an audience’s attention. The democratic process would be better served by more news and more background material (the causes and history behind events) but in actually practice networks get better ratings and make more money by treating “news” as just another form of amusement. It is much harder to really find out what is going on in Pakistan than to have a reporter follow Lindsay Lohan around and simply recount her social pratfalls. Likewise, it is easier for Fox to invite Ann Coulter onto one of their “new analysis” shows to spin her usual web of unsubstantiated invective, than it is to make the usually abstruce facts of politics clear and interesting.1
So – is Fox news? The best answer would be – “occasionally.” The same answer that holds for nearly every other organ of the press at in these stirring and irrational times.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 I have often wondered whether Ms. Coulter only puts on her performance for the camera, or only during her waking hours, or if in fact she even sneers in her sleep.
February 15, 2012
The Gay Marriage Debate
The entire debate over gay marriage shows a tragic misunderstanding by both sides.
Let us consider what marriage is. It consists of three components – though not all three are essential in every instance. In no particular order, there is a contractual component, a social component, and sacramental component.
The contractual component is a legal arrangement between two parties, largely dealing with common property rights. Most of the legal ramifications of marriage have been adequately covered by the new institution of civil unions. Even most social conservatives are content to concede to gays and lesbians the right to civil unions. There have been objections from gay and lesbian groups that civil unions fall short of marriage. Some legal recognitions are not strictly property related – the right of spouses not to testify against one another in court for example. However, it does not appear that such legal rights as are currently not covered by civil unions constitute the major sticking points for opponents of gay marriage. Civil union could probably be extended to include all the legal rights accorded to marriage without too much difficulty. There might be some friction over the issue of adoption of children, but even that can probably be resolved.
The social component of marriage is, in most cases, an agreement and public declaration of monogamy. There are some “open” marriages and some polygamists about, but these are still exceptions in America. On the matter of enforcing such social constraints, however, the civil government has, for many decades, decided to be silent. Adultery may be frowned upon, but it is no longer a punishable offense. As such, monogamy is a legal non-entity, enforceable only by individual and public reproach. Further, I know of no one who specifically objects to monogamy on the part of homosexuals. Even people who consider homosexuality categorically sick or deviant don’t argue that monogamy makes it any worse. This social component is, therefore, not a matter of contention.
The final component of marriage is the sacramental one. A sacrament, or course, is a fixture of religion. To have a religion is to hold certain beliefs and submit to such rules as define a certain faith. Under the American Constitution, this is a strictly voluntary submission – or at least one that cannot be compelled by government. It may be that one’s church constrains one’s range of acceptable partners in any number of ways, but it is should not be within the jurisdiction of federal, state or local governments to mediate any behavior purely on religious grounds. To do so is, in effect, “to make a law respecting the establishment of religion” – which is prohibited, at least to Congress, by the First Amendment. While there is reason to be skeptical about the ease of applying John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, here is an instance in which it ought to be considered. This is to say, the case has yet to be made that gay marriage posses some demonstrable harm to non-gays. If such a case can be made then certainly it ought to be, but it is insufficient to merely to argue that it offends one’s Christian sensibilities.
The problem is that the various levels of government have, through licensing, law, and even the required language of marriage ceremonies, deeply insinuated themselves into marriage as a sacrament. I have heard, on many occasions, ministers intone the words “by the power vested in me by God and the State of Ohio” – and found them both amusing and incongruous. Both those who advocate and those who oppose gay marriage are implicitly relinquishing to government a kind of sacred authority it ought not to possess. The function of laws regarding “marriage” should be to provide a workable contractual framework for such relationships as actually exist. This is to say, that all relationships between consenting adults that are not explicitly illegal (polygamy, incest, etc.) ought to be eligible for civil union, and the whole notion of marriage as a sacrament bestowed by government should be repudiated. If you want to say you are married because your church says so, or because it suits you, you should be free to do so. If sacrality exists at all, it is inherently an individual and inalienable experience – not the rightful realm of government. Let the state confine itself to contracts.
It seems likely that gays and lesbians look to the state as a surrogate for traditional churches that have rejected them. This void is not the state’s responsibility to fill. If they feel a need for sacred validation, they are free to concoct their own religious institutions in the time honored human way. Conversely, it is not the right of religious conservatives to get an extra helping of sacrality from their government by having their particular religious views mandated by law. That this has already occurred over long decades of relative consensus makes it no less an erosion of individual liberty. Ask most religious conservatives the direct question – “Do you think the government should regulate your sacraments?” – and they would balk immediately.
The whole debate, again, is not so much about what is good or fair as it is about the way we look at liberty in general. Both parties seem perfectly content to give up a little freedom for a bit illegitimate law that happens to suit them, and a bit of validation they are not entitled to.
Let us consider what marriage is. It consists of three components – though not all three are essential in every instance. In no particular order, there is a contractual component, a social component, and sacramental component.
The contractual component is a legal arrangement between two parties, largely dealing with common property rights. Most of the legal ramifications of marriage have been adequately covered by the new institution of civil unions. Even most social conservatives are content to concede to gays and lesbians the right to civil unions. There have been objections from gay and lesbian groups that civil unions fall short of marriage. Some legal recognitions are not strictly property related – the right of spouses not to testify against one another in court for example. However, it does not appear that such legal rights as are currently not covered by civil unions constitute the major sticking points for opponents of gay marriage. Civil union could probably be extended to include all the legal rights accorded to marriage without too much difficulty. There might be some friction over the issue of adoption of children, but even that can probably be resolved.
The social component of marriage is, in most cases, an agreement and public declaration of monogamy. There are some “open” marriages and some polygamists about, but these are still exceptions in America. On the matter of enforcing such social constraints, however, the civil government has, for many decades, decided to be silent. Adultery may be frowned upon, but it is no longer a punishable offense. As such, monogamy is a legal non-entity, enforceable only by individual and public reproach. Further, I know of no one who specifically objects to monogamy on the part of homosexuals. Even people who consider homosexuality categorically sick or deviant don’t argue that monogamy makes it any worse. This social component is, therefore, not a matter of contention.
The final component of marriage is the sacramental one. A sacrament, or course, is a fixture of religion. To have a religion is to hold certain beliefs and submit to such rules as define a certain faith. Under the American Constitution, this is a strictly voluntary submission – or at least one that cannot be compelled by government. It may be that one’s church constrains one’s range of acceptable partners in any number of ways, but it is should not be within the jurisdiction of federal, state or local governments to mediate any behavior purely on religious grounds. To do so is, in effect, “to make a law respecting the establishment of religion” – which is prohibited, at least to Congress, by the First Amendment. While there is reason to be skeptical about the ease of applying John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, here is an instance in which it ought to be considered. This is to say, the case has yet to be made that gay marriage posses some demonstrable harm to non-gays. If such a case can be made then certainly it ought to be, but it is insufficient to merely to argue that it offends one’s Christian sensibilities.
The problem is that the various levels of government have, through licensing, law, and even the required language of marriage ceremonies, deeply insinuated themselves into marriage as a sacrament. I have heard, on many occasions, ministers intone the words “by the power vested in me by God and the State of Ohio” – and found them both amusing and incongruous. Both those who advocate and those who oppose gay marriage are implicitly relinquishing to government a kind of sacred authority it ought not to possess. The function of laws regarding “marriage” should be to provide a workable contractual framework for such relationships as actually exist. This is to say, that all relationships between consenting adults that are not explicitly illegal (polygamy, incest, etc.) ought to be eligible for civil union, and the whole notion of marriage as a sacrament bestowed by government should be repudiated. If you want to say you are married because your church says so, or because it suits you, you should be free to do so. If sacrality exists at all, it is inherently an individual and inalienable experience – not the rightful realm of government. Let the state confine itself to contracts.
It seems likely that gays and lesbians look to the state as a surrogate for traditional churches that have rejected them. This void is not the state’s responsibility to fill. If they feel a need for sacred validation, they are free to concoct their own religious institutions in the time honored human way. Conversely, it is not the right of religious conservatives to get an extra helping of sacrality from their government by having their particular religious views mandated by law. That this has already occurred over long decades of relative consensus makes it no less an erosion of individual liberty. Ask most religious conservatives the direct question – “Do you think the government should regulate your sacraments?” – and they would balk immediately.
The whole debate, again, is not so much about what is good or fair as it is about the way we look at liberty in general. Both parties seem perfectly content to give up a little freedom for a bit illegitimate law that happens to suit them, and a bit of validation they are not entitled to.
February 14, 2012
What Malthus knew and didn't know
The last 150 years can be characterized by a single under-recognized but still remarkable trend. Over the course of just a few generations, industrialized societies have temporary divested themselves of many of the normal constraints of nature. We banished the darkness with electric light. We banished distance with the steamer, the locomotive, and later the automobile and the airplane. We banished hunger, to a considerable degree. We pushed back many diseases. We built our own environments, in which sunlight and fresh air were mere embellishments. In short, we came to think not only that man was the measure of all things, but also the maker and the master of all things.
As an extension of this trend, many of us have fallen into confusion about the very nature of reality. We’ve gotten used to thinking that the process of moving data and pixels around means more than it actually does. We’ve also begun to blur the distinction between persuasion and truth, assuming, at least subconsciously, that truth is simply what enough people believe. On the matter of climate change, for example, I often wonder if most people might be satisfied that an entertaining debate between Al Gore and Sean Hannity would settle the issue once and for all, the forces of nature being wholly irrelevant compared to the awesome power of celebrity. Even environmentalists seem to have created nature from their own social consensus, and endowed it with purposes and preferences that it cannot, in the aggregate, have. Nature, of course, can neither be conquered nor destroyed. It is the indifferent, immutable sum of everything that is.
As it is now becoming obvious to the more observant among us that we have reached the end of our collective binge (and have begun our collective struggle with delirium tremens) it may be useful to put down our brand new IPADs and other gadgets and pick up a few real books. One of these is an old book, Thomas Robert Malthus’s great work of 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population 1. This is neither a very entertaining nor a very soothing book, but it is still a remarkably relevant one. Malthus’s key thesis is quite simple. Population, he asserts, in the absence of anything to impede it, would increase geometrically. This is to say that if an average couple has four children, and each of those children marries and has four children, the population will double every generation – about every twenty-five years. In fifty years, the population will reach four times its original number. In seventy-five years, the multiple will be eight. In one hundred years, the multiple will be sixteen – etc. The production of food, on the other hand, being dependent on a fixed amount of land, cannot keep pace with a population that is expanding geometrically. Inevitably, then, the increase of population is held in check by the limitations of the food supply. Nearly everything that Malthus has to tell us is derivable from this simple observation.
The consequence of this mechanism, not only in Malthus’s time (the early 19th century) but throughout most of history, has been stark. Some portion of any society has had to either watch their children starve, or forgo having children to avoid this. With the exception of a few small groups in peculiarly favorable circumstances (a surplus of arable land), this situation has prevailed everywhere, and still does in many parts of the world. One need only consider the frequent famines south of the Sahara for modern examples in which the land is simply not productive enough to support the number of people living on it. Human beings, in their relationship to the food supply, are not unlike any other species of animal. Our tendency is to multiply until we reach a natural limit. Having done so, we are at the mercy of any circumstances that lower that limit.
Malthus’ core idea, though once quite well known, has been neglected or ignored – though never actually discredited. I believe this neglect has occurred for three reasons, two material on one psychological.
We will dispense with the psychological reason first. Malthus drew criticism, even in his own time, for the sheer fatalism of his thesis. He believed that because the expansion of population would always leave some people in a state of want, poverty and some degree of competition leading to social stratification were inevitable. This runs contrary to the modern idea of progress. The very widespread notion that human society can be steadily improved until it reaches an ideal state is, by definition, a utopian view. One cannot have poverty in any utopian scheme, and most utopian ideas will not admit much social stratification either. Thus, the 19th and 20th centuries’ great reform movements tended to condemn Malthus (I think unfairly) as a narrow reactionary while leaving his actual assertions unaddressed. This dogmatic optimism is with us still. Given a choice between a comforting illusion and a well-documented but unpleasant fact, most people will still cling to the former. While Malthus did believe that society could be improved, and that maximizing the proportion of the population in the middle class was a worthwhile pursuit, he never allowed any exceptions to the cruel mathematics of population and food supply. Misery, he thought, was simply the natural consequence of the reproductive proclivities of human beings. Inevitably, there would always be at least a few too many mouths to feed.
The first material circumstance to change the world in a way that Malthus could not have anticipated was a revolution in agriculture. This can be subdivided into two processes: the mechanization of farming and the use of artificial pesticides and fertilizers.
Mechanization allowed farming to be much more labor efficient. Prior to mechanization, a typical farm in the American Midwest occupied 40 to 80 acres of laboriously tilled land. Some of that land had to be devoted to raising food for the draft animals needed for tillage. Now, farms of 600 to 1000 acres are quite common in the same region, with relatively little land devoted to pasture. One of two people can farm such a huge expanse with machinery, so the percentage of people employed in agriculture has declined from 70 or 80% of the total population to less than 1%. Further, the large families that used to be an advantage in the working of farms have become less of an asset. Diesel fuel and steel do what was once done by animals and children.
Tractors and combines alone did not necessarily increase actual agricultural yield (that is, the quantity of food produced per acre) but in driving the excess farm labor into other occupations, typically in cities, they did produce a world that Malthus would not have recognized – a world in which the percentage of people who actually produce food is insignificant. It is true, too, that as fewer of us produce food, more of us take food production for granted. I heard an interesting anecdote a few years ago in which two coworkers were discussing some grievance among local farmers that had actually made it into the news. One of the interlocutors confessed that, frankly, she didn’t care what happened to the farmers – all of her food came from the grocery. While I hope this level of ignorance is not the norm, one could certainly imagine that groceries get their food from a magic store room, or from Santa Claus, and still live an otherwise normal life in contemporary America.
If we consider rural electrification as a part of the mechanization process, increases in the total yield of agriculture really did result. Refrigeration and drying processes greatly reduced spoilage, thus more of the food that is grown actually makes it to the market. The same can be said for improvements in transportation. By bringing food to market faster, less is left to rot. Finally, irrigation -- starting with the once ubiquitous wind-driven water pump and culminating in huge electric water pumps watering otherwise marginal land in the great plains and California -- has greatly expanded both local and national yield. All of this is simply an outgrowth of the machine age and the oil age.
Artificial pesticides and fertilizers are products of the oil and natural gas industries, respectively. Pesticides are, in a broad sense, a further attack on the problem of spoilage. The less of our food that insects eat, the more is left for us. Nitrogen enhancing fertilizers (primarily anhydrous ammonia) directly increase plant growth. The old rhyme for corn growth was “knee high by the 4th of July” – meaning that if the plants were smaller than that one could expect a poor harvest. Now, corn is often up to my shoulder by the 4th of July. The average yield per acre of corn in the US has increased by more than 400% since 1940 2, thanks mostly to a good dose of chemistry.
From the 1940’s on, this Green Revolution of mechanization, irrigation, and chemistry spread across much of the world, greatly increasing the global food supply. Again, Malthus could not have foreseen this (agricultural improvements in his day amounted to a good manuring) but he could and did predict the outcome. In 1950, the population of the world was 2.6 billion; as of 2011, it is 7 billion. I will discuss the unsustainablility of this increase in population later, but for now it is sufficient to acknowledge that it occurred, and that it could not have occurred without an unprecedented expansion of the food supply.
The second material circumstance that Malthus could not have predicted was the invention, and widespread use, of effective means of contraception. In Malthus view, the natural consequence of human sexual desire would always be to produce more children than the replacement rate – which is to say, more than about two per couple. He allowed that there was some latitude in the overall rate at which people might reproduce – for example, that a policy of early marriage would make matters worse – but he argued that under no circumstances could human nature be so suppressed as to let the rate of reproduction sink to or below the rate of replacement. The higher the reproduction rate happened to be, the greater the amount of misery in a society. In the absence of effective contraception, it would be hard to argue with Malthus on this point. Even in nominally “advanced” societies, it is plain that large families reduce the resources available to each child. It would require an extraordinary amount of wealth to put eight or ten children through college, where educating one or two might at least be manageable. It is easy to understand, then, that in poorer societies in which a greater proportion of a family’s income is spent on food, an excess of mouths means hunger, sickness, and early death. In the industrialized world most of us have forgotten this harsh dynamic, which, only a few generations ago was the daily reality of our ancestors. It is all too common for any genealogical study to turn up very high rates of infant mortality. While the recorded cause of death in such cases is usually infection or disease, this often only masks an underlying weakened condition brought on by simple hunger. I recall hearing that in my own family, my grandfather, as breadwinner, always got not only the most but the best food. The reasoning, very common at that time, was that if he weakened and could not work, the children would be even worse off. This was as recently as the 1930’s.
There are many countries now (Japan and Italy spring to mind) in which the population is actually in decline, and has been for some decades. In Malthus’s time, population only declined under conditions of some terrible outside pressure, such as drought or a plague. In the case of many modern nations, it declines through family planning. Some small-minded paranoiacs look at this trend with alarm, but in truth it is quite a laudable (if accidental) achievement. Every year, the crowded, overburdened island of Japan is now divided among slightly fewer Japanese. It would not be a better or a happier place if there were more of them. Contraception, however, does not disprove Malthus’s thesis but merely amends it. The world as a whole is still careening toward a Malthusian catastrophe as the rising population outstrips Earth’s resources. What contraception does do is offer the possibility of escape from the eternal cycles of overpopulation and die-off in the wake of the impending catastrophe.
That there will be a catastrophe is almost certain. It has already begun, and only the herculean efforts of government statisticians and the public’s own penchant for wishful thinking can temporarily hide the fact. Many have explained the nature of our present material overreach in great detail, and I will not attempt to replicate their efforts here. I would recommend James Kunstler’s badly under-recognized work, The Long Emergency, as the clearest, most eloquent, and least ideologically burdened treatment of the subject. To summarize, however, what Malthus observed about the limitation imposed by the food supply is similarly true of fossil fuels. In some respects, the fossil fuel situation is worse because, unlike food, these resources are functionally non-renewable. As I’ve outlined earlier, our agricultural system has long been heavily dependent of oil and natural gas for tillage, transportation, pesticides, refrigeration, and fertilizers. There is no magic store room at the grocery. The planet will not support anything close to seven billion people if we are reduced to pre-industrial forms of agriculture, or even fossil-fuel-impoverished forms of agriculture. In all likelihood, we will have the latter. There will probably be enough solar and wind power to run irrigation pumps, provided that local groundwater supplies are not themselves overtaxed. Genetic engineering may yield heartier, more disease resistant crops – instead of merely the pesticide-tolerant varieties it has produced thus far. I do not expect to see electric tractors or trucks, however. Neither will there be enough energy for the amount of refrigeration we are used to, nor enough natural gas to make fertilizer, heat and cook with, and use to extract the dwindling oil supplies from tar sands. New extraction technologies like “fracking” may slow the decline a little, but cannot avert it. We would not even be using such technologies if we were not already desperate.
To the extent that all of our contemporary political ideologies are bound to the notion of progress – a continual bettering of our standard of living – we have gotten confused about the direction of causality. Most people implicitly assume that increasingly humane and liberal attitudes over the last two centuries have brought about a more materially secure and comfortable way of life. I would argue, rather, that it is the more materially secure and comfortable way of life that has brought about increasingly humane and liberal attitudes. We did not acquire a plentiful food supply and approach the dream of universal home ownership because well-meaning reformers convinced us all to be nice, but rather because the magic of a fossil-fuel-driven economy brought these things temporarily within reach. Our standard of living did not improve with the enlightenment, but only with the middle stages of the industrial revolution. I myself am very fond of personal liberty and compassion, but I am not naïve enough to believe that people can live in houses made of freedom or eat nutritious meals made of brotherly love. Our material bodies require material sustenance. Nature reigns triumphant.
That the next few decades will be very hard there can be little doubt. Whether or not what follows this decline is a return to the world Malthus described does depend on what kinds of beliefs and ideas survive the transition. Ideas may be inedible, but they are not irrelevant. Even in an energy-impoverished, post-oil world the raw materials necessary to produce contraceptives should not be physically unattainable, and their use might make the difference between misery and relative comfort to our descendents. Birth control pills and IUD’s are much cheaper to produce than cars and big suburban homes. The long term future, then, must hinge on what people believe – on whether our descendants have the foresight to cope with population rationally, or persist in ancient, often religiously validated, tendencies to multiply just beyond the available food supply. Contemporary examples show that, in educated populations even with widely varying cultures, population growth arrests itself if only given access to the means. The often cited Chinese model of a “one child policy” is not the only way to achieve a low or negative population growth. Indeed, such a policy is only even arguably worth pursuing to overcome entrenched cultural or religious beliefs. The choice between widespread hunger and draconian government control is, after all, a choice between two very serious evils.
Malthus himself, ironically, was a clergyman. It is interesting to note that, in his day, Christianity tended to restrain population by censuring extramarital intercourse, but now both fundamentalist and orthodox forms of Christianity tend to encourage population by discouraging contraception. There is also a tendency to foster the attitude that “God shall provide” and to reiterate the biblical injunction to “go forth and multiply.” Such notions aren’t prohibitively painful in societies where food is cheap. Malthus wrestled with the obvious tensions between scripture and his observations in a world in which food wasn’t cheap. As a non-believer, I have no need to reconcile God with observable reality, but Malthus’s struggle in this area is nonetheless poignant. In his view, the divine purpose of the whole human enterprise was to produce enlightened minds. Cruel as it seemed, he could accept that God might sacrifice a few people for the sake of instilling both compassion and industry in others. He could not believe, however, that God would find a purpose in leading the whole of humanity into an abyss of suffering by encouraging them to reproduce without restraint. In the context of his times, and who he was, this was probably the most enlightened philosophical compromise that Malthus could make. It clearly pained him. We are indebted to his intellectual courage.
----------------------------------------------------------------
1 Available free online at http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPop.html , if you cannot find it in print.
2 http://www.sage.wisc.edu/pubs/articles/F-L/Kucharik/Kuch2005EarthInt.pdf
As an extension of this trend, many of us have fallen into confusion about the very nature of reality. We’ve gotten used to thinking that the process of moving data and pixels around means more than it actually does. We’ve also begun to blur the distinction between persuasion and truth, assuming, at least subconsciously, that truth is simply what enough people believe. On the matter of climate change, for example, I often wonder if most people might be satisfied that an entertaining debate between Al Gore and Sean Hannity would settle the issue once and for all, the forces of nature being wholly irrelevant compared to the awesome power of celebrity. Even environmentalists seem to have created nature from their own social consensus, and endowed it with purposes and preferences that it cannot, in the aggregate, have. Nature, of course, can neither be conquered nor destroyed. It is the indifferent, immutable sum of everything that is.
As it is now becoming obvious to the more observant among us that we have reached the end of our collective binge (and have begun our collective struggle with delirium tremens) it may be useful to put down our brand new IPADs and other gadgets and pick up a few real books. One of these is an old book, Thomas Robert Malthus’s great work of 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population 1. This is neither a very entertaining nor a very soothing book, but it is still a remarkably relevant one. Malthus’s key thesis is quite simple. Population, he asserts, in the absence of anything to impede it, would increase geometrically. This is to say that if an average couple has four children, and each of those children marries and has four children, the population will double every generation – about every twenty-five years. In fifty years, the population will reach four times its original number. In seventy-five years, the multiple will be eight. In one hundred years, the multiple will be sixteen – etc. The production of food, on the other hand, being dependent on a fixed amount of land, cannot keep pace with a population that is expanding geometrically. Inevitably, then, the increase of population is held in check by the limitations of the food supply. Nearly everything that Malthus has to tell us is derivable from this simple observation.
The consequence of this mechanism, not only in Malthus’s time (the early 19th century) but throughout most of history, has been stark. Some portion of any society has had to either watch their children starve, or forgo having children to avoid this. With the exception of a few small groups in peculiarly favorable circumstances (a surplus of arable land), this situation has prevailed everywhere, and still does in many parts of the world. One need only consider the frequent famines south of the Sahara for modern examples in which the land is simply not productive enough to support the number of people living on it. Human beings, in their relationship to the food supply, are not unlike any other species of animal. Our tendency is to multiply until we reach a natural limit. Having done so, we are at the mercy of any circumstances that lower that limit.
Malthus’ core idea, though once quite well known, has been neglected or ignored – though never actually discredited. I believe this neglect has occurred for three reasons, two material on one psychological.
We will dispense with the psychological reason first. Malthus drew criticism, even in his own time, for the sheer fatalism of his thesis. He believed that because the expansion of population would always leave some people in a state of want, poverty and some degree of competition leading to social stratification were inevitable. This runs contrary to the modern idea of progress. The very widespread notion that human society can be steadily improved until it reaches an ideal state is, by definition, a utopian view. One cannot have poverty in any utopian scheme, and most utopian ideas will not admit much social stratification either. Thus, the 19th and 20th centuries’ great reform movements tended to condemn Malthus (I think unfairly) as a narrow reactionary while leaving his actual assertions unaddressed. This dogmatic optimism is with us still. Given a choice between a comforting illusion and a well-documented but unpleasant fact, most people will still cling to the former. While Malthus did believe that society could be improved, and that maximizing the proportion of the population in the middle class was a worthwhile pursuit, he never allowed any exceptions to the cruel mathematics of population and food supply. Misery, he thought, was simply the natural consequence of the reproductive proclivities of human beings. Inevitably, there would always be at least a few too many mouths to feed.
The first material circumstance to change the world in a way that Malthus could not have anticipated was a revolution in agriculture. This can be subdivided into two processes: the mechanization of farming and the use of artificial pesticides and fertilizers.
Mechanization allowed farming to be much more labor efficient. Prior to mechanization, a typical farm in the American Midwest occupied 40 to 80 acres of laboriously tilled land. Some of that land had to be devoted to raising food for the draft animals needed for tillage. Now, farms of 600 to 1000 acres are quite common in the same region, with relatively little land devoted to pasture. One of two people can farm such a huge expanse with machinery, so the percentage of people employed in agriculture has declined from 70 or 80% of the total population to less than 1%. Further, the large families that used to be an advantage in the working of farms have become less of an asset. Diesel fuel and steel do what was once done by animals and children.
Tractors and combines alone did not necessarily increase actual agricultural yield (that is, the quantity of food produced per acre) but in driving the excess farm labor into other occupations, typically in cities, they did produce a world that Malthus would not have recognized – a world in which the percentage of people who actually produce food is insignificant. It is true, too, that as fewer of us produce food, more of us take food production for granted. I heard an interesting anecdote a few years ago in which two coworkers were discussing some grievance among local farmers that had actually made it into the news. One of the interlocutors confessed that, frankly, she didn’t care what happened to the farmers – all of her food came from the grocery. While I hope this level of ignorance is not the norm, one could certainly imagine that groceries get their food from a magic store room, or from Santa Claus, and still live an otherwise normal life in contemporary America.
If we consider rural electrification as a part of the mechanization process, increases in the total yield of agriculture really did result. Refrigeration and drying processes greatly reduced spoilage, thus more of the food that is grown actually makes it to the market. The same can be said for improvements in transportation. By bringing food to market faster, less is left to rot. Finally, irrigation -- starting with the once ubiquitous wind-driven water pump and culminating in huge electric water pumps watering otherwise marginal land in the great plains and California -- has greatly expanded both local and national yield. All of this is simply an outgrowth of the machine age and the oil age.
Artificial pesticides and fertilizers are products of the oil and natural gas industries, respectively. Pesticides are, in a broad sense, a further attack on the problem of spoilage. The less of our food that insects eat, the more is left for us. Nitrogen enhancing fertilizers (primarily anhydrous ammonia) directly increase plant growth. The old rhyme for corn growth was “knee high by the 4th of July” – meaning that if the plants were smaller than that one could expect a poor harvest. Now, corn is often up to my shoulder by the 4th of July. The average yield per acre of corn in the US has increased by more than 400% since 1940 2, thanks mostly to a good dose of chemistry.
From the 1940’s on, this Green Revolution of mechanization, irrigation, and chemistry spread across much of the world, greatly increasing the global food supply. Again, Malthus could not have foreseen this (agricultural improvements in his day amounted to a good manuring) but he could and did predict the outcome. In 1950, the population of the world was 2.6 billion; as of 2011, it is 7 billion. I will discuss the unsustainablility of this increase in population later, but for now it is sufficient to acknowledge that it occurred, and that it could not have occurred without an unprecedented expansion of the food supply.
The second material circumstance that Malthus could not have predicted was the invention, and widespread use, of effective means of contraception. In Malthus view, the natural consequence of human sexual desire would always be to produce more children than the replacement rate – which is to say, more than about two per couple. He allowed that there was some latitude in the overall rate at which people might reproduce – for example, that a policy of early marriage would make matters worse – but he argued that under no circumstances could human nature be so suppressed as to let the rate of reproduction sink to or below the rate of replacement. The higher the reproduction rate happened to be, the greater the amount of misery in a society. In the absence of effective contraception, it would be hard to argue with Malthus on this point. Even in nominally “advanced” societies, it is plain that large families reduce the resources available to each child. It would require an extraordinary amount of wealth to put eight or ten children through college, where educating one or two might at least be manageable. It is easy to understand, then, that in poorer societies in which a greater proportion of a family’s income is spent on food, an excess of mouths means hunger, sickness, and early death. In the industrialized world most of us have forgotten this harsh dynamic, which, only a few generations ago was the daily reality of our ancestors. It is all too common for any genealogical study to turn up very high rates of infant mortality. While the recorded cause of death in such cases is usually infection or disease, this often only masks an underlying weakened condition brought on by simple hunger. I recall hearing that in my own family, my grandfather, as breadwinner, always got not only the most but the best food. The reasoning, very common at that time, was that if he weakened and could not work, the children would be even worse off. This was as recently as the 1930’s.
There are many countries now (Japan and Italy spring to mind) in which the population is actually in decline, and has been for some decades. In Malthus’s time, population only declined under conditions of some terrible outside pressure, such as drought or a plague. In the case of many modern nations, it declines through family planning. Some small-minded paranoiacs look at this trend with alarm, but in truth it is quite a laudable (if accidental) achievement. Every year, the crowded, overburdened island of Japan is now divided among slightly fewer Japanese. It would not be a better or a happier place if there were more of them. Contraception, however, does not disprove Malthus’s thesis but merely amends it. The world as a whole is still careening toward a Malthusian catastrophe as the rising population outstrips Earth’s resources. What contraception does do is offer the possibility of escape from the eternal cycles of overpopulation and die-off in the wake of the impending catastrophe.
That there will be a catastrophe is almost certain. It has already begun, and only the herculean efforts of government statisticians and the public’s own penchant for wishful thinking can temporarily hide the fact. Many have explained the nature of our present material overreach in great detail, and I will not attempt to replicate their efforts here. I would recommend James Kunstler’s badly under-recognized work, The Long Emergency, as the clearest, most eloquent, and least ideologically burdened treatment of the subject. To summarize, however, what Malthus observed about the limitation imposed by the food supply is similarly true of fossil fuels. In some respects, the fossil fuel situation is worse because, unlike food, these resources are functionally non-renewable. As I’ve outlined earlier, our agricultural system has long been heavily dependent of oil and natural gas for tillage, transportation, pesticides, refrigeration, and fertilizers. There is no magic store room at the grocery. The planet will not support anything close to seven billion people if we are reduced to pre-industrial forms of agriculture, or even fossil-fuel-impoverished forms of agriculture. In all likelihood, we will have the latter. There will probably be enough solar and wind power to run irrigation pumps, provided that local groundwater supplies are not themselves overtaxed. Genetic engineering may yield heartier, more disease resistant crops – instead of merely the pesticide-tolerant varieties it has produced thus far. I do not expect to see electric tractors or trucks, however. Neither will there be enough energy for the amount of refrigeration we are used to, nor enough natural gas to make fertilizer, heat and cook with, and use to extract the dwindling oil supplies from tar sands. New extraction technologies like “fracking” may slow the decline a little, but cannot avert it. We would not even be using such technologies if we were not already desperate.
To the extent that all of our contemporary political ideologies are bound to the notion of progress – a continual bettering of our standard of living – we have gotten confused about the direction of causality. Most people implicitly assume that increasingly humane and liberal attitudes over the last two centuries have brought about a more materially secure and comfortable way of life. I would argue, rather, that it is the more materially secure and comfortable way of life that has brought about increasingly humane and liberal attitudes. We did not acquire a plentiful food supply and approach the dream of universal home ownership because well-meaning reformers convinced us all to be nice, but rather because the magic of a fossil-fuel-driven economy brought these things temporarily within reach. Our standard of living did not improve with the enlightenment, but only with the middle stages of the industrial revolution. I myself am very fond of personal liberty and compassion, but I am not naïve enough to believe that people can live in houses made of freedom or eat nutritious meals made of brotherly love. Our material bodies require material sustenance. Nature reigns triumphant.
That the next few decades will be very hard there can be little doubt. Whether or not what follows this decline is a return to the world Malthus described does depend on what kinds of beliefs and ideas survive the transition. Ideas may be inedible, but they are not irrelevant. Even in an energy-impoverished, post-oil world the raw materials necessary to produce contraceptives should not be physically unattainable, and their use might make the difference between misery and relative comfort to our descendents. Birth control pills and IUD’s are much cheaper to produce than cars and big suburban homes. The long term future, then, must hinge on what people believe – on whether our descendants have the foresight to cope with population rationally, or persist in ancient, often religiously validated, tendencies to multiply just beyond the available food supply. Contemporary examples show that, in educated populations even with widely varying cultures, population growth arrests itself if only given access to the means. The often cited Chinese model of a “one child policy” is not the only way to achieve a low or negative population growth. Indeed, such a policy is only even arguably worth pursuing to overcome entrenched cultural or religious beliefs. The choice between widespread hunger and draconian government control is, after all, a choice between two very serious evils.
Malthus himself, ironically, was a clergyman. It is interesting to note that, in his day, Christianity tended to restrain population by censuring extramarital intercourse, but now both fundamentalist and orthodox forms of Christianity tend to encourage population by discouraging contraception. There is also a tendency to foster the attitude that “God shall provide” and to reiterate the biblical injunction to “go forth and multiply.” Such notions aren’t prohibitively painful in societies where food is cheap. Malthus wrestled with the obvious tensions between scripture and his observations in a world in which food wasn’t cheap. As a non-believer, I have no need to reconcile God with observable reality, but Malthus’s struggle in this area is nonetheless poignant. In his view, the divine purpose of the whole human enterprise was to produce enlightened minds. Cruel as it seemed, he could accept that God might sacrifice a few people for the sake of instilling both compassion and industry in others. He could not believe, however, that God would find a purpose in leading the whole of humanity into an abyss of suffering by encouraging them to reproduce without restraint. In the context of his times, and who he was, this was probably the most enlightened philosophical compromise that Malthus could make. It clearly pained him. We are indebted to his intellectual courage.
----------------------------------------------------------------
1 Available free online at http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPop.html , if you cannot find it in print.
2 http://www.sage.wisc.edu/pubs/articles/F-L/Kucharik/Kuch2005EarthInt.pdf
January 27, 2012
A Case for Conscription
Recently, I ran across a fascinating concept in a book1 by the late sociologist Stanislaw Andreski. He asserted that, in general, the social equality of a society stands in direct proportion to what he termed its military participation rate, or M.R.P. To put this another way, the more a society needs a substantial and diverse portion of its citizenry to fill out the ranks of its arm forces, the less disparity can exist between those citizens and their ruling elites. In even simpler terms, mass armies promote increased democracy, while elite armies promote the concentration of power. Since, for Andreski, power is always reducible to either the use of force or the potential use of force, the relation described above follows simply as a corollary.
If we accept Andreski’s rule, for which he offers an impressive body of historical support – much more than is usual for a social scientist – an examination of current trends is the United States is rather alarming. Due, among other things, to a declining tolerance for the loss of American lives since the war in Viet Nam, our military has evolved into a compact, elite, highly technological-oriented force. The idea of a draft, let alone the levying of armies on anything like the scale that we employed in World War Two, has become politically unthinkable. Even in the face of two unpopular wars, voluntary recruitment remains sufficient – if only just – to fill the ranks of our superbly equipped but numerically modest forces. Such shortfalls as occur are filled by foreigners willing to exchange their services for citizenship. As these recruits are unfamiliar with our traditions and liberties, and as they are motivated chiefly by economic need, we can only consider them mercenaries – albeit of convenience rather than disposition.
Whatever these changes in the size and composition of our armed forces may mean militarily, politically they merit our concern. While we are used to taking a certain pride in the fact that our army is composed of volunteers, one consequence of this policy has been that unpopular wars are actually easier to conduct than they used to be. The war in Viet Nam caused a great deal more controversy than the wars in either Iraq or Afghanistan have done. This is true not because the latter were more justifiable to the public, but because many dissenters (or sons of dissenters) were obliged to participate in the former. People may have reservations about the war in Afghanistan, but since they don’t have to go or send their children they are unlikely to take to the streets. Wars conducted by machines, mercenaries, and tiny minorities of citizens mostly drawn from the underclass don’t arouse the same level of either patriotism or outrage as wars that involve conscription. They are simply mediocre television programs as far as the most of public is concerned.
According to Andreski’s principle, the public’s relative indifference toward current and future wars may only be the beginning of our problems. It has generally been difficult for any government with a large conscripted army to employ it to quell rebellions or intimidate dissent. Even in the Soviet Union, the maintenance of an enormous army during World War Two forced at least a moderation of Stalin’s tyranny.2 Soldiers do not like to brutalize the civilian masses they are recruited from. The employment of highly-trained, rigidly-disciplined troops begins to overcome this restraint. The employment of mercenaries makes it negligible. The growing use of robotic devices opens the prospect of removing it altogether. In the end, we do not have civil liberties because we are protected by laws, but because we have some means of protecting ourselves. Civil liberties are meaningless when we as citizen are either impotent or indifferent in their defense. While a powerless public may not be subjugated immediately, the erosion of rights will proceed inexorably, if gradually, as those in power find their authority unchecked. An honest look at history shows this almost without exception.
Consider the second amendment to the US constitution:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
In recent years, we have tended to focus on the right to bear arms as an individual right, and I am not attempting to rebut this interpretation. Perhaps, though, we should not consider the founder’s belief in a militia a mere historical curiosity. While they obviously needed a militia to defend the republic from external enemies, I believe that they were also aware that an army drawn from the citizenry, owing its ultimate allegiance not to men but to principles embodied in the constitution, was necessary to protect us from internal dissolution. Obviously times have changed, and we cannot turn our high tech weapons over to colonial minutemen. We should, however, be wary of an overreliance on tiny bodies of over-indoctrinated special forces, mercenaries, and soulless machines.
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1 Military organization and society
2 A close examination of Soviet military policy supports Andreski’s rule, though at first glance the USSR would seem to have been an exception. It is true that the Soviet military was both enormous and drawn from all ranks of society. Two deliberate counteractive measures should be noted, however. First, the Soviet Union had a deployment practice common to many large, ethnical heterogeneous empires: they levied units of a single ethnic group and deployed them in distant parts of the country where they were functionally foreign troops. Second, the Soviets fostered resentments between soldiers levied in different years. Each year’s conscripts were encouraged to abuse those that succeeded them, the end result being that every unit’s soldiers were divided into three mutually hostile groups, according to their year of enlistment. There is no good military reason to sabotage unit cohesion. It only reduces the effectiveness of the force. The only practical reason the Soviets would have established such a policy would have been to render the army less capable of organized revolt, every soldier being automatically distrustful of most of the others. (See: Inside the Soviet Army, Viktor Suvorov)
If we accept Andreski’s rule, for which he offers an impressive body of historical support – much more than is usual for a social scientist – an examination of current trends is the United States is rather alarming. Due, among other things, to a declining tolerance for the loss of American lives since the war in Viet Nam, our military has evolved into a compact, elite, highly technological-oriented force. The idea of a draft, let alone the levying of armies on anything like the scale that we employed in World War Two, has become politically unthinkable. Even in the face of two unpopular wars, voluntary recruitment remains sufficient – if only just – to fill the ranks of our superbly equipped but numerically modest forces. Such shortfalls as occur are filled by foreigners willing to exchange their services for citizenship. As these recruits are unfamiliar with our traditions and liberties, and as they are motivated chiefly by economic need, we can only consider them mercenaries – albeit of convenience rather than disposition.
Whatever these changes in the size and composition of our armed forces may mean militarily, politically they merit our concern. While we are used to taking a certain pride in the fact that our army is composed of volunteers, one consequence of this policy has been that unpopular wars are actually easier to conduct than they used to be. The war in Viet Nam caused a great deal more controversy than the wars in either Iraq or Afghanistan have done. This is true not because the latter were more justifiable to the public, but because many dissenters (or sons of dissenters) were obliged to participate in the former. People may have reservations about the war in Afghanistan, but since they don’t have to go or send their children they are unlikely to take to the streets. Wars conducted by machines, mercenaries, and tiny minorities of citizens mostly drawn from the underclass don’t arouse the same level of either patriotism or outrage as wars that involve conscription. They are simply mediocre television programs as far as the most of public is concerned.
According to Andreski’s principle, the public’s relative indifference toward current and future wars may only be the beginning of our problems. It has generally been difficult for any government with a large conscripted army to employ it to quell rebellions or intimidate dissent. Even in the Soviet Union, the maintenance of an enormous army during World War Two forced at least a moderation of Stalin’s tyranny.2 Soldiers do not like to brutalize the civilian masses they are recruited from. The employment of highly-trained, rigidly-disciplined troops begins to overcome this restraint. The employment of mercenaries makes it negligible. The growing use of robotic devices opens the prospect of removing it altogether. In the end, we do not have civil liberties because we are protected by laws, but because we have some means of protecting ourselves. Civil liberties are meaningless when we as citizen are either impotent or indifferent in their defense. While a powerless public may not be subjugated immediately, the erosion of rights will proceed inexorably, if gradually, as those in power find their authority unchecked. An honest look at history shows this almost without exception.
Consider the second amendment to the US constitution:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
In recent years, we have tended to focus on the right to bear arms as an individual right, and I am not attempting to rebut this interpretation. Perhaps, though, we should not consider the founder’s belief in a militia a mere historical curiosity. While they obviously needed a militia to defend the republic from external enemies, I believe that they were also aware that an army drawn from the citizenry, owing its ultimate allegiance not to men but to principles embodied in the constitution, was necessary to protect us from internal dissolution. Obviously times have changed, and we cannot turn our high tech weapons over to colonial minutemen. We should, however, be wary of an overreliance on tiny bodies of over-indoctrinated special forces, mercenaries, and soulless machines.
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1 Military organization and society
2 A close examination of Soviet military policy supports Andreski’s rule, though at first glance the USSR would seem to have been an exception. It is true that the Soviet military was both enormous and drawn from all ranks of society. Two deliberate counteractive measures should be noted, however. First, the Soviet Union had a deployment practice common to many large, ethnical heterogeneous empires: they levied units of a single ethnic group and deployed them in distant parts of the country where they were functionally foreign troops. Second, the Soviets fostered resentments between soldiers levied in different years. Each year’s conscripts were encouraged to abuse those that succeeded them, the end result being that every unit’s soldiers were divided into three mutually hostile groups, according to their year of enlistment. There is no good military reason to sabotage unit cohesion. It only reduces the effectiveness of the force. The only practical reason the Soviets would have established such a policy would have been to render the army less capable of organized revolt, every soldier being automatically distrustful of most of the others. (See: Inside the Soviet Army, Viktor Suvorov)
December 20, 2011
Keystone
The Keystone pipeline controversy offers a good example of the irrationality into which American public discourse has devolved. In brief, the proposed pipeline would bring oil processed from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries in the US, ultimately as far south a Texas. Despite a completed environmental impact study, the environmental lobby has persuaded the Obama administration to block the project, chiefly (though not exclusively) on the grounds that tar sand development is proving to be an environmental catastrophe in Canada.
No one, not even the oil industry, disputes that the damage being done to northern Alberta is monumental. There is no hiding the destruction that surface mining tar sands is creating. If this were the 1960’s, and the world had plenty of oil reserves, we might be able to stop this tragedy. This is not the 1960’s however. There are no cheap and available oil reserves to tap. Even Saudi Arabia is in decline. If the demand for oil had not exceeded the supply, they wouldn’t be processing oil out of tar sands in the first place. It is naïve to imagine that, in an ongoing liquid fuels crisis with oil at $100 a barrel, and gasoline fluctuating between $3 and $4 a gallon in the US, than everyone in the world is going to put the interests of Canadian wildlife before their own. The Canadian government has been very clear about their intentions. They will develop and sell the oil, if not to the US with a pipeline going south, then to the Chinese with a pipeline going west. Thus, unless the American environmental lobby is advocating and immediate US occupation of Alberta to end the development, their efforts will not save a single fish or caribou. They can have their moral satisfaction with higher fuel prices, and the heightened economic ripple effects such prices must inevitably produce, while the dirty evil tar sand extract propels trucks in China. Personally, I’m a realist. I don’t think that fish or caribou really want to die, but neither do I think they particularly feel better about dying if they are killed for non-Americans. These nasty resources are going to be tapped. The worse the global economy gets, the more desperate people will become and the more environmental concerns will recede from their attention. One should not be proud of this, but to imagine it will be otherwise is simply to deny human nature. People may love nature in the abstract, but not many will be happy to freeze or starve for the sake of preserving it.
On the other side of the debate, the oil industry and their political allies have trumped up the story that the tar sands offer a solution to American dependence on middle eastern oil. Based on the scale of Keystone, this would appear to be simply a lie. The total capacity of the pipeline, upgraded to its final phase, would be 1.1 million barrels per day. US oil demand stands at about 18.7 billion barrels per day. Keystone then, could meet about 6% of US oil demand. We currently import over half of our consumption (some sources estimate much more), so it doesn’t look like 6% from the Alberta tar sands is going to let us kiss our OPEC friends goodbye. Fools on the left, liars on the right. Take heart though – this is only the beginning.
No one, not even the oil industry, disputes that the damage being done to northern Alberta is monumental. There is no hiding the destruction that surface mining tar sands is creating. If this were the 1960’s, and the world had plenty of oil reserves, we might be able to stop this tragedy. This is not the 1960’s however. There are no cheap and available oil reserves to tap. Even Saudi Arabia is in decline. If the demand for oil had not exceeded the supply, they wouldn’t be processing oil out of tar sands in the first place. It is naïve to imagine that, in an ongoing liquid fuels crisis with oil at $100 a barrel, and gasoline fluctuating between $3 and $4 a gallon in the US, than everyone in the world is going to put the interests of Canadian wildlife before their own. The Canadian government has been very clear about their intentions. They will develop and sell the oil, if not to the US with a pipeline going south, then to the Chinese with a pipeline going west. Thus, unless the American environmental lobby is advocating and immediate US occupation of Alberta to end the development, their efforts will not save a single fish or caribou. They can have their moral satisfaction with higher fuel prices, and the heightened economic ripple effects such prices must inevitably produce, while the dirty evil tar sand extract propels trucks in China. Personally, I’m a realist. I don’t think that fish or caribou really want to die, but neither do I think they particularly feel better about dying if they are killed for non-Americans. These nasty resources are going to be tapped. The worse the global economy gets, the more desperate people will become and the more environmental concerns will recede from their attention. One should not be proud of this, but to imagine it will be otherwise is simply to deny human nature. People may love nature in the abstract, but not many will be happy to freeze or starve for the sake of preserving it.
On the other side of the debate, the oil industry and their political allies have trumped up the story that the tar sands offer a solution to American dependence on middle eastern oil. Based on the scale of Keystone, this would appear to be simply a lie. The total capacity of the pipeline, upgraded to its final phase, would be 1.1 million barrels per day. US oil demand stands at about 18.7 billion barrels per day. Keystone then, could meet about 6% of US oil demand. We currently import over half of our consumption (some sources estimate much more), so it doesn’t look like 6% from the Alberta tar sands is going to let us kiss our OPEC friends goodbye. Fools on the left, liars on the right. Take heart though – this is only the beginning.
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