Militant Islam and U.S. Policy

The present relationship between militant Islam and the United States can be explained in terms of two basic human traits. The first is the belief in out-group homogeneity. The second is an irrational reliance on hope.

Out-group homogeneity can be neatly summarized by the classic bigot’s dictum – “Those people are all alike.” It is the belief that one’s perceived enemies are people with a uniform set of characteristics and motivations. In other words, our enemies are not individuals with unique personalities like ourselves; they are just a homogenous mass, each interchangeable with any other. They are people in some raw physical sense, but they are not persons like we are.

It is clear from their public statements that Al Qaeda’s leadership takes the stance that all Americans and other western peoples are a monolithic mass. They hold us collectively responsible for a variety of offenses against Islam. Their argument is that we elect our leaders, and are therefore collectively responsible for the actions of our governments. To kill any westerner, then, is to strike a blow in defense of Islam. If I were to assume that every Muslim shares this position, I would be indulging in a belief in out-group homogeneity myself. It is never quite that simple. In all likelihood, there are many more Muslims who vaguely sympathize with Al Qaeda than there are actual potential suicide bombers. It is also almost certainly true that the vast majority of Muslims care more about the immediate problems of their daily lives than they do about their grievances with distant foreigners. Only a very few fanatics live and breathe ideology; most people spend their energies on issues nearer to home.

Unfortunately, knowing that Muslims are individuals does not make the conflict between their culture and ours disappear. It is true that most Muslims, and particularly most Arabs, do not like us. Their reasons vary. Some focus on our unquestioning support of their enemy, Israel. Others resent the assortment of corrupt dictatorships we have nurtured within the Muslim world. The more devoutly religious hate us for desecrating their holy lands with our mere presence. There is, in fact, very little reason that many Muslims should like us. Their culture and ours are antithetical. Nevertheless, neither party is in a position to ignore the other. We are trapped in a mutually distasteful and unwanted embrace. We need the oil under their lands to fuel our way of life. They need the goods that they can ultimately exchange for that oil to support their growing population. They hold a power over our economy that we resent; we distort their societies in ways that they resent. It is only the pursuit of self-interest that has bound us together.

U.S. policy toward the oil producers of the Middle East has until now been fairly simple. From Franklin Roosevelt through the second Bush administration, our policy has been to support pliable authoritarian regimes in the region, and ignore the Arab populous whenever possible. Heartless as it may sound, it is pointless to be morally indignant about such policies. No nation I am aware of makes a habit of putting the interest of a foreign populous above its own national interests. Other great powers have propped up dictators and created puppet regimes. In our quest for oil, we have only pursued the most effective option left to us in a post-WW2 political climate that abjures brute conquest or other people’s sovereign lands and resources. A policy of supporting dictators has often proven successful, at least in the short term. It has only failed when an authoritarian partner overstepped his acceptable limits (as Saddam Hussein did in Iraq) or when he became excessively burdensome to his own people (as Mubarak did in Egypt or the Shah did in Iran).

Shows of international altruism and human fellowship offer an alternative approach. While such policies have a nice progressive feel about them, we should not be fooled. They are almost always motivated by some political gain, either international, domestic, or both. This strategy of friendly gestures appears to be the course the Obama administration is undertaking with Islam. Our president has made conciliatory speeches in Muslim capitols, has charged NASA’s chief administrator, Charles Bolden, with the incongruous task of Muslim outreach, and has taken a relatively cool stance toward Israel. The obvious inference is that he is trying to make friends among the Muslim public, particularly the Arabs, rather than continuing the age old policy of manipulating their resources through local authoritarian regimes. Here we have “the audacity of hope” expressed in actual doctrine. Nice though it may seem, it is difficult to have much confidence in this approach.1 People with long standing grudges are not easily swayed by words or gestures. They require real substance -- if they can be swayed at all. At this point in our history, an American president would probably need to sever our alliance with Israel entirely to make any popular headway in the Arab world. Whether one is a fan of Israel or not, one must agree that cutting them adrift would not be likely to improve stability in the Middle East. They, too, are a legacy America is stuck with.

The best that Obama’s sweet talking can hope to achieve internationally is to nudge some little fraction of non-committed Muslims a few inches toward our cause. Our cadre of crooked local rulers knows the game, and doesn’t need the public relations overtures. The fanatics of Al Qaeda and its affiliates are obviously well beyond the reach of anybody’s secular charm. The only words that interest them were written in the 7th century. A young Muslim with no future, fervent faith, and nothing better to do with his life than to end it in an explosion, is unlikely be halted in his tracks by Obama’s measured show of friendship. Bin Laden offers paradise; Obama offers nothing but his questionable charm.

The president’s gestures make a greater impression domestically, however. They serve to infuriate and terrify the American conservative base. Americans of most stripes believe in out-group homogeneity too. While friendly diplomatic overtures cheer liberals, who want to see Muslims as essentially just misunderstood (if perhaps uncomfortably misogynist), the same policies leave conservatives in an apoplectic fume. “These are the people who attacked us on 9-11!?” they shout -- as if every Muslim in the world, all 1.5 billion of them, were personally complicit in the attack. Having seen this attitude at first hand many times, I believe there is very little short of the exhaustion of war that would moderate such views.

The exhaustion of war, unfortunately, is very likely what we shall have. Whatever one may say about the hardened bigotry that exists on both sides, the fact remains that the Middle East still has the largest concentration of the world’s oil reserves, and America will not tolerate the consequences of losing that supply for the sake of either moral principle of international law. Like it or not, a widening general war between the west and Islam appears all but inevitable. The opening moves are now well behind us. Given the religious, cultural, and in most cases even racial differences, the conflict to come is bound to be a very ugly affair. With so much a stake, it is bound to also be long. A miraculous softening of popular sentiment would, of course, be welcome -- but I do not expect one.

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1 Venezuela’s Hugo Chaves attempted something similar by offering poor Americans free heating oil. This, at least, was a substantial material offer, but nevertheless failed to create any pro-Venezuelan sentiment worth noting.

Martha

When I was a child, I was introduced to the story of the passenger pigeon. About the size of a dove and rather nondescript in appearance, this bird was once so common that its flocks could fill the sky. It was hunted to extinction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely to provide cheap meat for cities in the eastern United States. As a boy of five or six, I saw the stuffed bodies of several passenger pigeons at the Cincinnati zoo. There was also a bronze statue of the very last surviving pigeon, who had died at the zoo in 1914. The zookeepers had named her Martha. A tiny stone building housed some stuffed examples and a few pictures as a sort of memorial gesture. I remember looking up at the desiccated, dusty specimens in the display case, trying to imagine that they had once been alive. They were as inanimate as corn husks. Thinking about this pigeon holocaust, back in the distant past before my parents had been born, was enough to bring a tear to my eye. “Human beings are cruel and thoughtless,” I concluded then and there. I was ashamed of my species.

I am long since grown. I have almost forgotten the age when I had no idea there was any difference between emotions and the truth. I rarely cry over anything now, least of all dead pigeons. Nature doesn’t change because we have certain feelings about it, and neither does it stay the same because we want it to. If we want to see nature as it really is, we have to put aside our notions of how we feel it ought to be.

Facts are simply facts. All wild animals (and probably most tame ones too, including people) spend their lives in one long quest for food, mates, and security. Each individual will die. There are no exceptions. Sooner or later, either the probabilities of predation or accident will catch up with you, your food will run out, or you will succumb to old age or disease. This is nature. I do not now believe that the last passenger pigeon suffered in any special way that ordinary pigeons don’t. Martha, the last of her kind, lived, probably had good days and bad days in some unknowable pigeon way, and died. Individual animals know happiness and suffering; species do not. In the same way, individual human beings know suffering – while nations do not. It is each of us that possess the fleeting quality of being alive – it is never the collective.

Nature isn’t kind to species. The various forms of plants and animals arise through the inexorable processes of biology. Some are well adapted to their circumstances and thrive for a time. Others, that are less well adapted, decline and disappear. This is evolution. It is nature in actual practice. Our hubris as humans is that we have settled on the peculiar idea that we are not a part of nature – that we are somehow above the process looking down. This is nothing but make-believe and human chauvinism. Like Martha, we are born, we live out our measure of summers and winters, and we submit to the permanent dissolution of our consciousness in death. This is nature too.

We now may be more numerous than passenger pigeons ever were. We are unusual animals, to be sure, with our technology and social complexities, but we are subject to natural limits whether we like them or not. We thrive under conditions that are favorable to us and will decline when those conditions become unfavorable. We just happen to be dynamic enough, and numerous enough, to drive many other species into extinction. Humanity, from a neutral point of view, is like a swarm of locusts or a bloom of algae. Collectively, we are an enormous, sudden and spectacular natural event. Individually, we are just hungry, restless, inquisitive animals. Civilization is neither a noble march of progress nor an environmental evil. It is just what biology makes it. Like locust swarms and red tide, it is a population event – something that expands to meet its natural limits and then subsides. We are neither a threat to the processes of biology as a whole, nor are we the custodians of those processes. Nature is not our friend. Nature is not our enemy. It is the context in which each of us exists, even if we never see the ocean, a wild animal, or a tree firsthand.

The emotion that I once felt for the fate of the passenger pigeon may have been intellectually misplaced, but it certainly was real. The fact that our feelings do not change reality to suit us doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Hearts, too, are natural things. Whoever decided to call the last pigeon Martha did so with some sense that she was a being, an animal with life and a mind, and not an inanimate lump of bronze like her statue. We may be subject to nature in every respect, but we are not just mechanisms. We have the capacity of awareness, and the most fundamental things of which we are aware is that we are alive and conscious, and that other beings around us are alive and conscious too. To look into the eye of a stuffed specimen in a display case is to see only a body – but to look into the eye of any living animal, be it a pigeon or a human being, is to be aware of a mind, however unreachable or alien. We see an unmistakable reflection of ourselves. We experience, directly, what life is.

It is when we begin not to see people and animals as beings that we descend into a mere mechanical existence. Perhaps what we should remember about the passenger pigeon is not that we drove them to extinction, but that we mined them as unfeelingly as though they had been a seam of coal. We treated them as things, and to that extent we became mere things ourselves.

Life on Earth is not going to end because we snuff out the existence of a group of birds with a certain pattern of plumage, or a type of fish with a certain number of stripes. The biosphere has recovered from more egregious insults than we are likely to inflict. Our actions are unlikely to put an end to photosynthesis, sexual reproduction, the tetrapod body plan, lungs, wings, or any other of biology’s pivotal inventions. We will reshape the world. The damage that we do is almost all attributable to our exponentiating numbers, but it would be naïve to imagine that any individual is going to forsake reproduction, let alone existence, for the sake of a bird or a fish. Our collective trajectory will play itself out, a collection of forces too large for us to grasp except in fragmentary glimpses.

Martha’s little shrine is not an apology to nature. It is a monument to the irreconcilability of our compassion and our appetite. This is who and what we are.

Global Warming Reheated

The public wrangling over global warming reveals more about human nature than it does about the physics of the atmosphere. A scientific proposition with such enormous negative social consequences was bound to produce an active and not-particularly-scientific opposition. Likewise, the creation of an active opposition to the global warming hypothesis has itself produced a counter-reaction of activist supporters. Between the two camps – conservatives on one hand and liberals on the other – a great deal of hot air has definitely been produced, and a wholly scientific question has been obscured with ideology. Worse still, this ideological bickering has seized the public’s attention, masking a more immediate fossil fuel crisis that is likely to make the global warming debate seem painfully naïve.

Let’s start with what passes for “debate.” In brief, the common conservative position is that global warming is a hoax. This is really quite a claim. To believe global warming is a hoax, you have to assume that a very large number of the world’s scientists are willing participants in a conspiracy. You have to believe they all got together in secret and agreed to just dispense with the core scientific principle of fidelity to the data, and proceeded to cook the books in a way which might wreck havoc on the world’s economy but offer no obvious benefit to themselves. As I said, it’s quite a claim.

Those of us who remember the beginnings of the global warming debate, back in the 1970’s or before, remember a scientific community that was very reluctant to commit itself. “It might be happening,” they said, “but let’s wait for more data.” It took an enormous amount of data and a great deal of time, often decades, to convince the great majority of the world’s scientists that the global warming hypothesis was a fact. The hoax position, which implies that the world’s climate scientists coalesced enthusiastically around a handful of prominent activists, is not only contrary to the discipline of science itself, but is contrary to the actual history of the global warming hypothesis.

The counter argument of many conservatives, from commentators on Fox News to many ordinary mortals that I work with, tends to take the following form: “Look at all the snow and cold weather we’ve had this year – you call that global warming!?” It is as if these people envision the Earth’s atmosphere as a bathtub full of hot water. Pour a little hot water in, and pretty soon the bath water will be at the more-or-less the same temperature from end to end. When scientists say the world is getting warmer, they mean that the average world temperature is on the increase – not that it is getting warmer at each and every location on the world’s surface. Thinking global warming means that it gets warmer everywhere is like thinking your car’s air conditioner will work better if you dump a bag of ice in your gas tank. Climate, in reality, is an extremely complex thing -- much more complex than the energy ecology of an automobile. It may, in fact, be so complex that we will never be able to predict its changes except in crude generalizations. This is one of the reasons why scientists don’t agree about just how much global warming we can expect. This lack of certainty about the future, however, does not mean we know nothing about the present.

The global warming problem has two aspects. One of these aspects, prediction, presents an extremely difficult problem scientifically. The other aspect, measurement, is far more straightforward. We know how to measure air temperature with great precision from a location on the ground. Our measurements from space are less precise, but the method is more than accurate enough to detect substantial change. Decade by decade, if not always year by year, these measurements show that the average overall world temperature is increasing.1 Yes, it might get really cold in Pennsylvania now and then, but this is more than offset by warm temperatures in oceans, in Siberia, etc. Unless the data itself is being fabricated, the assertion that Earth has consistently gotten warmer for the last few decades is not a theory, but a brute and simple fact. Any scientist worth the name would welcome as many honest reviews of their data and their methods as anyone would care to make. The whole purpose of science, after all, is to uncover facts in nature. If the data were fraudulent, any decent scientist would want to know.

The anti-global-warming people do point to frauds and conflicts of interest. I have no doubt that there are a few unscrupulous scientists out there, who take positions for reasons other than the scientific rigor. I have even less doubt that there are liberal activists who would happily bend the facts to match their particular agendas. What many people do not seem to understand, however, is that in matters of physics motivations are not determinants of fact. The question of whether the world is round or not really never hinged on whether Christopher Columbus was going to make a profit by getting his backers to believe it was. It just is round. Even if you could prove that Columbus himself was a malicious con artist, whose real goal was to make the Spanish crown look silly by going out and sailing off the edge – it would not make the world flat. In exactly the same way, Al Gore’s personality and motives do say something about whether or not you can trust him as a human being, but they neither prove nor disprove assertions he promotes about the physical world. In the end, only measurement, reason and time can actually resolve these questions.

Many conservatives do now take the position that climate change is actually happening – but that no one can prove that human activity is the cause. They are correct. Causality is difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove. The principle article of evidence that human beings are causing global warming is the correlation between rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and rising global temperatures. The two graphs look very similar, so a causal relationship is implied but still not proven. We do know from actual experiments, however, that carbon dioxide really is a greenhouse gas – which is to say, it is more opaque to heat than ordinary air. It would be ridiculous to say that atmospheric carbon dioxide doesn’t produce any global warming, and it would be equally ridiculous to say that human activity does not produce substantial amounts of carbon dioxide. The burning of fossil fuels undoubtedly contributes to climate change, but it is true that we cannot say for certain that it constitutes the dominant cause. There may be something else going on – again, the climate is a very complex thing.

So, conservatives that believe in climate change tend to argue that it’s probably not our fault, we probably can’t prevent it from getting worse, and we will just have to deal with its consequences as they come. Most climate scientists believe that human activity probably is the principle cause, but they admit that they cannot predict either the magnitude or the detailed consequences of the change. Liberal activists take the worst case scenario, which we will get to shortly.

A final argument some conservatives make, usually quietly – though I have heard Rush Limbaugh actually express this on the air – is that God just wouldn’t allow a thing like global warming to happen. From my perspective, this is seeking reassurance in the land of make-believe, but let’s grant them God’s existence for the sake of argument. Even if there is a God, the historical record, let alone the scriptural one, doesn’t show him coming to humanity’s rescue very often. Civilizations rise and fall. We are not spared plagues, earthquakes, floods, or bad cable TV shows. We have no reliable evidence that God bends the rules of nature in sudden and surprising ways to solve our problems, and certainly no non-scriptural evidence that he spares us the consequences of our collective actions. Further, if there is a God, I don’t see any obvious patterns in his behavior that would lead me to believe that anyone can predict his actions. Perhaps Mr. Limbaugh hears the voice of God inside his head. It is more likely, though, that the voice inside his head is actually his own.

Having scrutinized the deniers, let us turn our scrutiny on the activists. Science aside, the conservatives have assessed the cultural dynamics correctly. Whether it turns out turns out to be scientifically demonstrable or not, anthropogenic global warming is the perfect liberal cause celeb. What could fit the liberal narrative better? Global warming is the ultimate white industrial mea culpa. We wicked, nasty Europeans are ruining the entire Earth! More delicious still, the most obvious culprits are big corporations, who pollute the air then force us to buy their wicked products, big cars, gasoline, etc. The contemporary liberal mind is drawn to such a proposition like a fruit fly to a pile of old bananas.

The problem with activists, as opposed to scientists, is that they tend to measure ideas against their existing narrative, not against the empirical data. In this deprecation of reality, they are much like conservatives. Conservatives don’t want anthropogenic global warming to exist, not merely because it would have unpleasant physical consequences, but because it would repudiate some key features of their worldview. They want to believe that more and more is better and better, that the physical world itself will never change, and that if grandpa had a two-ton vehicle then they shouldn’t have to settle for anything smaller. Liberals also have an emotional stake in anthropogenic global warming. They want it to exist. It not only reinforces their worldview, it offers all sorts of petty conservational measures they can take – measures which chiefly function to make them feel better about themselves.

Consider the high-efficiency light bulb. A nice device. It uses less energy – at the socket. Of course, it requires a good deal more energy to make than a conventional bulb. It also contains more toxic substances, and is therefore a much nastier thing to toss in the garbage. Don’t think about those things, though, and you can pat yourself on the back for making a difference. Ethanol is an even better example. What could be better than running your car on the wholesome goodness of corn? The problem, fortunately, is that by the time you work out all the fuel costs of growing corn, fertilizing it, spraying pesticides on it, transporting it, and processing it – you use more energy making ethanol than you get out of it. The ethanol scam is on the decline now, but it served its real purpose while it lasted. It made many people feel they were being ecologically responsible – and no doubt made a fortune for others. Hybrid cars are certainly a nice idea too. Like the high-efficiency light bulbs they are costlier in energy to manufacture and full of toxic substances, particularly in their batteries. They might be a net success, as far as carbon dioxide emissions go, but they are hardly an unmitigated advance. The most telling invention of recent years is probably the hybrid SUV. They burn about as much gas as a conventional mid-sized car, but some are nearly as big as a Suburban. Here we see the truth about what the average liberally inclined American really wants. It is to live a lifestyle of excess with the smug satisfaction of not noticing. To put some high efficiency light bulbs in the living room, then burn several hundred gallons of aviation fuel to fly somewhere interesting on vacation. In short, to push the conscience just a little beyond where the intellect might go looking for it.

An interesting aspect of the liberal perception of global warming is that they leap not merely to the worse predicted case, but to the worst imaginable case. After watching An Inconvenient Truth, my stepdaughter walked away with the impression that life of earth itself was at stake. If she did not altogether grasp the science, she did at least grasp the film’s core message – we bad Americans are destroying the Earth. Without the science to mark out its natural limits, the famous hockey stick temperature curve implies a rapid temperature increase that will burn the Earth to a cinder – unless, of course, we all pitch in right now with those high efficiency light bulbs and those hybrid cars.

I used to believe that liberals, on average, were a more rational, better educated group of people than conservatives. I now think the two groups have approximate parity as far as education and rationality are concerned. They just have different delusions that they live by.

All of the actual climate change predictions that I am aware of are based on computer models. Their margins of error are immense by scientific standards, simply because the complexity of making such predictions is immense. At worst, not including certain speculative complications like the total demise of the deep ocean currents, these predictions call for a few degrees of temperature rise over the course of the century, accompanied by perhaps a few feet of sea level rise. This would not be insignificant. I would not recommend buying beach front property in the next hundred years, nor even a condominium in a low lying coastal city. If there is more heat in the atmosphere, we will have more hurricanes and other extreme weather. Changes of local climate can be expected to force populations to move in some places, which will cause political tensions and provoke some wars. Some species of animals will become extinct, some will decline, and others will flourish. Despite all of these changes, however, I see nothing in the climate models that is likely to exterminate us as a species, nor utterly change the trajectory of civilization. Forces and conditions that could produce such crushing outcomes do exist in nature, but I think the threat of global warming is an inconvenient pressure rather than a catastrophic blow.

We stand on the brink of a far more immediate, far more certain disaster, one that only a few of us seem willing to even recognize. Typically, this disaster is labeled peak oil, but it is really whole collection of shortages that either will occur or are already occurring as the demand for global resources outpaces the declining supply. Others have articulated the nature of this problem better than I can hope to, but for those who are unfamiliar with the idea I will do my best to lay it out in brief.

All of our major energy resources are essentially non-renewable. There may be new coal, oil, and natural gas in Earth’s future, but it will not be created on anything like a human time scale. Fossil fuels are a limited pool of stored energy that we are rapidly burning up. We have been consuming oil for about a hundred years. We have been consuming significant quantities of coal about twice that long, and natural gas for slightly less time. Almost all the evidence indicates that we have now consumed a little more than half the oil that exists on Earth. Statistical evidence indicates that once you have extracted half of any non-renewable resource like oil, annual production will decline inexorably until it is either all gone or what remains is not worth the cost of extracting. This has been clearly demonstrated in countless individual oil fields, in dozens of whole nations, and is inevitably true of the world in general as well. We face a future of not merely increasing oil prices, but actual shortages. This is simply what happens when an inelastic, exponentiating demand exceeds a declining supply. Natural Gas reserves are threatening to peak soon too, even with improved extraction technology. Coal reserves, which we are used to being told are practically infinite, may also peak in twenty years or so. The usual optimistic estimates include a great deal of coal that would cost more energy to extract than could be gotten from it, and are also based on rates of consumption that are decades out of date. What seemed like an unlimited resource two hundred years ago, when the world had a little more than a billion people, is now looking very limited when the world has nearly seven billion and a much greater energy demand per capita.

Again, this is merely a brief sketch of the problem. I would encourage anyone who reads this to look at the evidence others have put forth. I have included a number of reasonably concise video links below.2
If the anthropogenic global warming theories are correct to any degree, there can be no doubt that burning fossil fuels has caused some amount of climate change. However, most of the climate models global warming experts are basing their predictions on assume a rate of fossil fuel consumption that may simply not be possible. To get the grand catastrophes the global warming activists are worried about would probably require the burning of more fossil fuels than we have left, or at least more than we will be plausibly able to extract. In essence, they are urgently advocating that we avoid a future that real circumstances make highly unlikely anyway.

One has to wonder why energy depletion and its multiplier, population growth, have received so little attention. Actually, I believe the lack of interest is not that difficult to understand. Neither people on the political right nor people on the political left really want to know about this problem.

All the right’s aversions to global warming apply with redoubled force to energy depletion. Global warming threatens worsening weather disasters and other consequences by late century, but energy depletion puts a stake through the heart of the myth of endless economic growth – right here, right now. It means that we are absolutely not the masters of the world, and that civilization will have to shrink and stabilize to survive. It is bad news for both wealth and freedom.

The people on the left, on the other hand, love their human tragedies to stay a nice safe distance in the future or in some suitably pathetic third world country. A sudden and permanent shortage of oil is not going to be a problem they can demonstrate against on the weekends. Energy depletion is an all-inclusive, omnipresent sort of problem, one for which our full participation won't be optional. The hybrid and the fancy light bulbs will not dispel the darkness anymore.

Scientists, with a few gleaming exceptions, have ignored the problem because it really doesn’t involve much science. Energy depletion does not require any science to prove – it is simply an accounting problem. It is a much duller issue than global warming, which offers many interesting scientific challenges. Proving that peak oil is happening is at best a job for an economist, most of whom, unfortunately, have an almost religious faith in unlimited economic growth. For most successful economists, market forces are more real than the limitations of the physical world. Most of the people who have raised the warning on this issue are geologists, with a few scientists from other disciplines, a scattering of journalists, and few oil men of unusual integrity.

For various reasons, the new renewables (wind, solar, and biofuels) cannot hope to make up for the loss of cheap oil and cheap gas. They may eventually keep us from a future without any electricity at all, but none of them will replace the liquid fuels used in transportation and agriculture, and none of them are ready to replace coal very quickly. People who are glib about solar and wind power tend not to do the math. Enough wind farms and solar collectors to produce even a significant fraction of our electricity would require an enormous investment in energy to produce, just at a time when energy is growing more expensive and more scarce. We are accustomed to thinking of such industrial production as something that just happens, as if by magic and a sprinkling of dollars, but the magician’s trick behind it all is the power of cheap energy.

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1 There is also a huge body of circumstantial evidence. Glaciers are retreating in most places, from mountains in the tropics to the polar regions. The number and severity of storms is on the increase. Such things consistently point to a greater amount to energy in the atmosphere.

2 I strongly recommend the following videos:

Albert Bartlett is a physicist who has been following the problems of overpopulation and energy depletion since the 1960’s. This video (1 of 8) is the best-argued and most politically neutral presentation of the problem that I am aware of. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

Richard Heinberg is a geologist and lecturer on the subject of peak oil. This video (1 of 5) is one of his lectures. There is much more Heinberg material online. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybRz91eimTg&feature=related

There are several full length documentaries on the topic of peak oil, but “A Crude Awakening” is, again, the most politically neutral. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z9T5XPrDvg&feature=related

Casualties

One early morning in late 2001, during the initial phase of the war in Afghanistan, I was astonished by an item on the network news. Sometime in the previous day, Taliban soldiers had succeeding in shooting down an American helicopter with a dozen or so men on board, killing them all. What astonished me was not that we had lost a few men, but that both the military spokesman the reporter covering the event seemed to be in a state of indignant shock. It seemed not to have occurred to either of them that if American soldiers engage in warfare, even against people fighting for an admittedly nasty regime, it’s understandable that the enemy will do their best to kill us. If I remember correctly, the military spokesmen even used the phrase, much used by President Bush at the time, that the enemy troops who shot down the helicopter would be “brought to justice,” – as though the mere act of killing American soldiers in battle were now a war crime.

Let us take a long look backward. On June 6th, 1944, American forces landing on the coast of Normandy suffered the loss of 1465 dead and several times that number wounded or missing. This was a bloody day for America, though not the bloodiest day in World War Two, and by no means the bloodiest in American history. America lost nearly 420,000 lives during the course of World War Two, an average of over 300 per day. While widespread hatred of our German and Japanese enemies was understandable and unquestioned, there is no evidence that the American public expected the slaughter to be altogether one-sided, or considered the fact that the enemy was killing American soldiers morally shocking in itself. We were shocked by the Holocaust, and by the mistreatment of prisoners, but not by the tragic consequences that have always been the nature of armed conflict. Between then and now, two important things have changed. The first is America’s attitude toward war. The second is the way in which America conducts war.

Americans now see wars differently for several reasons, but I believe that chief among those reasons has been that, over the last forty years or so, the media has gradually redefined our expectations.1 Ever since the Viet Nam War, wars have become TV shows. Television (and now the internet) brings the carnage of war into people’s living rooms in a way that overwhelms the purely military aspects of these events. The Normandy invasion, for example, was a military success – but if a TV cameraman had been there, walking down that beach and showing us hundreds upon hundreds of dead and mutilated men, any ordinary viewer would have thought it a disaster. War is horrific even in its success. The natural reaction of non-sociopathic people to witnessing violent, individually senseless killing is revulsion. If a hundred people die in a plane crash that’s a tragedy, and it naturally seems an equal tragedy if a hundred soldiers die in a battle. There is, however, a difference. It is not the purpose of airplanes to kill their occupants, so a plane crash is straightforwardly a tragedy. It is the purpose of warfare, however, to achieve some political end by typically lethal means. This is an ugly but irrefutable truth. Wars are not sporting events. When, as a society, we become too squeamish to accept more than a handful of casualties in war, we greatly limit the means by which we can conduct wars.

The direct consequence of the revulsion of Americans for paying for their government’s political ends in blood has been the contemporary focus using drones and other long range means of killing. Though spectacularly expensive and militarily limiting, long range weapons have the inestimable political advantage of reducing field casualties on our side. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, America lost a mere 300 soldiers, largely because the Iraqi army (and more particularly its command structure) was broken in advance by tremendous numbers of smart weapons. The media, and the American public, came to assume this level of casualties would now be the norm. Smart bombs and cruise missiles, in the civilian mind, offered the promise of making war an almost one-sided affair. World War Two, and even Viet Nam, were now forgotten.

It would be a mistake to think that our technological prowess has made us any more peace-loving. Rather the contrary. As far back as the Reagan administration, American Presidents apparently stopped considering the bombing of other nations tantamount to going to war with them. Reagan bombed Libya, Clinton fired cruise missiles at Afghanistan and bombed Serbia, George W. Bush and Obama have both fired cruise missiles into Pakistan. None of these actions have been publicly acknowledged as acts of war, and, in general, the American public has taken little interest. What matters is simply that few if any Americans have been killed in such attacks. This stands in stark contrast to public reaction to the truck bombing in Beirut in 1983 and the helicopter shoot down in Somalia in 1993. Both of these incidents forced the withdrawal of US forces due to casualties well less than we incurred on an average day in World War Two.

Notably too, during the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, we kept our troop numbers to a bare minimum, and have expanded our deployments only very grudgingly. Our peak deployment in Iraq was 165,000. Our current deployment in Afghanistan is 98,000. By contrast, our peak deployment in Viet Nam was 537,000. Small deployments not only save money, but reduce the attritional casualty risk. The fewer Americans there are on duty guarding foreign street corners, the fewer there are to kill. Still, this policy has obvious consequences. In Viet Nam, the most favorable ratio of native civilians per American soldier was 37 to 1 – in a conflict we ultimately lost. In Iraq, that ratio never got any better than 182 to 1. In Afghanistan, the ratio is now about 306 to 1. It is hard to see how such a small commitment in troops can hope to control a hostile nation street by street.2 America’s new reliance on technology over soldiers has other serious consequences, both moral and military. Obviously, getting too comfortable with the notion of conducting foreign policy with cruise missiles and bombs alone has odious moral implications. That hardly seems to need elaboration. Less obviously, our preference for such means probably also makes the American civilian population a good deal less safe.

Consider the position of our enemies and potential enemies. Bombing cannot help but kill some number of non-combatants, especially if it is conducted anywhere near settled areas. The foreign soldier on your street corner might at least be seen as keeping the peace, but there is no such thing as a friendly cluster bomb. Everyone hates a faceless enemy who kills civilians from the sky. A desire for vengeance is inevitable, but who can serve as a target for such vengeance? American soldiers, if the enemy sees them at all, are few and far between. They patrol from one fortified base to another, protected by armored vehicles most of the time. Our enemies probably realize that if they could kill a hundred Americans in one fight at one time, they might drive us out of their country like the people did in Lebanon and Somalia. However, American soldiers have gotten remarkably good at killing while not getting killed themselves. Standup battles against American troops are losing propositions. While guerrilla warfare is an option, an enemy’s preferable choice, if he has the means, is to take the fight to our civilians. America’s weakest links are its open borders and its well-known intolerance for pain.

Historically, there seem to be only two workable methods of defeating the kind of guerrilla force we now have to face around the world. The first is to flood the enemy’s country with so many soldiers that you can isolate the guerillas from the non-combatants that support them. As the record makes abundantly clear, we have neither the political will nor the fiscal resources to draft a half million or more soldiers for such an undertaking. Our politicians know all too well that reinstating the draft for any overseas adventure has become political suicide. They no longer even suggest the possibility. The second method of dealing with guerillas is simply to wait them out. Sooner or later, the people of an occupied country may simply grow tired of the fight. This can take decades or more. Consider the British experience in Northern Ireland. This option, too, takes a patient stoicism Americans no longer have.

In practice, American military capabilities are now limited to the following. Using our impressive technological might, we can destroy the militaries and infrastructures of most other nations, at a high financial cost but a relatively low immediate cost in American lives. We can deter direct, large scale attacks on the US itself using both our conventional forces and the threat of nuclear retaliation. We can conduct small, convert, Special Forces operations. Anything further would risk too many casualties.

Despite what most of us would like to believe, America is an empire. We consume a disproportionate amount of the world’s resources, and we have, since World War Two, been willing to manipulate other nations by threats, embargos, espionage and occasional force to maintain that resource flow. Whatever one might feel about it, even a cursory examination of US foreign policy will reveal this to be a fact. Conflicts since the war in Viet Nam, however, have revealed that we are now an empire with a weakness. While we are militarily capable of destroying other nations, we have become quite incapable of occupying them effectively, whether for resource extraction or any other purpose. As oil becomes more scarce, it is always possible that Americans may decide that maintaining their lifestyle a few more years is worth the blood of their sons and a few of their daughters. Mass psychology is difficult to predict. At the moment, however, we appear to be trapped between our desire to maintain our imperial status on the one hand, and our refusal to accept the violent realities of war on the other.

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1 Whether or not the media’s manipulation of our expectations has been deliberate or accidental is an interesting question, but one I cannot answer. It would be hard to say that it was deliberate without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. Personally, I believe the shift in expectations has been the result of underlying attitudes on the part of reporters and editors nationwide, most of whom came of age during the Viet Nam war. I would be surprised if such realignment were the result of a deliberate plan.
     Americans, as a nation, have developed peculiarly incompatible attitudes toward war. On the one hand, we have gotten very squeamish about the loss of American lives. On the other, a certain preoccupation with the warrior image is beginning to permeate American society. We no longer have “soldiers.” We have “War Fighters.” I’m not sure who “War Fighter” is, but I think he is a friend of Superman and Spiderman. This is an interesting topic in itself.

2 It is not my intention to slight the role of our allies, but the preponderance of troops in all these conflicts have been Americans.
     Some would argue that we have defeated the insurgency in Iraq. Let’s wait ten years and see. Let’s not forget that we declared victory in Viet Nam in 1973.

Why Rational People Disagree

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.
-- Voltaire

A few months ago a friend sent me an email, asking, in obvious frustration, how we could share so many common beliefs about the world yet come to such disparate conclusions about political issues. I think this was an excellent question, and well worth answering seriously.

Fundamentally, people disagree because most of their beliefs are supported by evidence that is at best fragmentary and at worst imaginary. To make the distinction between beliefs that are substantially justifiable and those that are not, let’s look at a simple example of each type. First, consider the following rough-and-ready proposition:

Water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

Assuming we are talking about more-or-less pure water in typical conditions that prevail on the surface of the earth, and putting aside miscellaneous philosophical problems involving measurement, etc., this proposition is quite straightforward. We all know what water is, at least in a raw, experiential way. Most literate people are at least vaguely aware that the property they perceive as hot or cold is reliably measurable, and even if they aren’t familiar with the Fahrenheit scale they are familiar with the relationships between numbers. 32 is greater than 31.

The freezing water proposition can be put to the test any number of times and yield the same result within a very small margin of error. It is not a proposition about which normal, reasonable people can differ. There are no special sects of people that firmly believe that water freezes at 78 degrees Fahrenheit because their ancestors believed it, or because it was so written in their holy books. The freezing point of water is a testable, reliable, and comprehensible fact.

Sadly, most of our beliefs are far less straightforward than the one described above. Consider this proposition:

Doubling the length of jail sentences will substantially reduce the rate of criminal theft.

Let’s assume we are proposing this as a general rule – that we are making an assertion we expect would be applicable to all societies at all times. This claim would be extremely complex and difficult to prove.

In the case of the freezing water proposition, we were dealing with an inert physical substance – not with the convoluted causal logic of human beings. Considered as a physics problem, it is not especially difficult to understand how the behavior of water molecules causes a change of state from water to ice at a certain temperature. Having understood this, it doesn’t matter whether we are talking about a drop of water or an arctic lake. The same physical principle applies. Even if we do not understand the underlying physics, we can still take note of the monotonous reliability of the phenomenon of freezing.

The theft proposition, on the other hand, is staggering when considered as a physics problem. The number of factors that influence even individual behavior are almost without limit. Further, the precise influence of each factor can neither be readily calculated nor measured. It is doubtful whether the human brain could grasp the operations of even one other brain of equal complexity, except in either crude generalities or fragmentary details. To make matters worse, the number of factors that must influence the rate of criminal theft would have to be something like the huge (if unknown) number of factors influencing each potential thief, multiplied by the total number of potential thieves. Even specifying what information one would need to collect is daunting, let alone the question of knowing enough about causal relationships to process that information into any sort proof.

For the sake of argument though, let’s imagine we could solve the formidable problems of working out the exact physics of the brain -- and everything that might influence the brain. Let’s further assume we have access to some super-computer with the capacity to process the consequences of every life event down to the spark of every neuron in the brains of millions of people. It would still not be enough. We would still be faced with an enormous problem of the actual data collection. How does one see into several million people’s heads – all at once, down to the precision of the last conceivably relevant neuronal event? Somewhere along the line, I suspect we would encounter some form of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. If so, it may even be that we simply cannot gather enough data – no matter how technically proficient we are.

The difference between the freezing water proposition and the theft proposition is not one of kind, but one of complexity. Both really are just physics problems – dependent on the behavior of physical things that are subject of physical constraints.1 One proposition is within our capacity to assert with something like certainty, while the other simply is not. It should not be surprising that the universe abounds with process we can never fully understand. Nothing we actually know about the universe demands that all the factors relevant to our theft proposition be wholly and simultaneously comprehensible to us. That’s a good deal to ask of three or so pounds of grey matter that did not evolve to solve that sort of problem.

Our understanding of most things (and of almost all things involving human behavior) is, to put it mildly, incomplete. When faced with propositions that are fundamentally beyond our capacity to test, we generally attempt to reduce them to the simplest approximations we can personally tolerate. We content ourselves with probabilities or explanatory constructs.2 How might we attempt to justify our belief in the theft proposition? Typically, we would look for instances in which doubling the length of jail sentences was tried. Armed with such examples, we would create an argument based on probability. However, even if declines in theft were frequently found to follow a doubling in the length of jail sentences, we would still have nothing close to certainty. We would not know whether or not other factors may have accounted for the declines. We would not know whether or not the results were peculiar to the particular cultures in which they occurred. Thus, our “understanding” would rest on the implicit assumption that the correlations we chose to identify trump all other correlations, known or unknown. In other words, we are predisposed to assume that the evidence we have represents the dominant agents of causation, and any evidence that we don’t have is unimportant. This is not a weakness, but an inherent characteristic of the human mind. If we didn’t make such assumptions, we couldn’t make inductions and our brains would not be of much practical use.

Of course, some beliefs aren’t justified with any obvious logic – not even merely inductive logic. If we believe that the theft proposition is true because it plainly makes intuitive sense, we are justifying the belief with a narrative. A narrative is essentially a coherent framework constructed from one’s own prior assumptions and imagination. It depends on the assumption that ideas that are easy to believe are probably true. We can, of course, believe all sorts of silly and erroneous things and still be coherent, because coherence (in the non-philosophical world) only demands we avoid intolerably obvious affronts to logic. Narrative arguments need little evidence; they only need an air of plausibility.3 When faced with problems that are beyond our full comprehension, we actually have no choice but to content ourselves with either oversimplifications or narrative conjectures. Since both of these alternatives are generally presented in the form of truths (typically as declarative statements) they carry more persuasive weight than they can rationally bear.4

We know little about politics, economics, sociology, etc – in the same sense that we know the rudiments of the physical sciences. While history might seem to be an exception to this uncertainty, it too crosses the threshold into conjecture when it attempts to deal in causes rather that the enumeration of mere facts. We can say with reasonable certainty that the battle of Gettysburg took place in July of 1863. When we attempt to explain why it took place, however, we are only making educated guesses. Every historical event, in time, ceases to be a collision of physical causes and becomes an author’s narrative. History tends to become a chronicle of Kings, Presidents and Generals because explaining their behavior is always much easier than explaining the behaviors of the vast, undocumented masses of humanity, let alone the clockwork of the entire physical world.

Given that we can only understand most subjects obliquely and incompletely, it shouldn’t be at all surprising that few of us have exactly the same beliefs. Each of us has a different set of incomplete and problematic data from which to wrest his or her tenuous conclusions. Watch any economics talk show on television and you will see any number of “experts” with any number of substantially different views. All that they make clear, collectively, is the chronically tentative state of their field. The same is true for politicians, psychologists, or anyone else who deals in the murky territory of human interaction.

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1 I am a reductionist in a limited sense. I believe the universe is essentially a machine – a collection of interrelated physical processes. I do not believe, however, that physics (as a discipline) can solve many of the practical problems human beings actually deal with. I have no reason to suppose that Stephen Hawking’s impressive abilities would make him either a good administrator or an effective general, for example.

2 Yes, strictly speaking the freezing water proposition can be considered probabilistic as well. We infer it is a law of nature because of its monotonous regularity. I do not argue that claims like the freezing water proposition are subject to some fundamentally different category of test, but simply that they can be tested. Broadly psychological or sociological problems can rarely even be precisely stated, let alone adequately tested.

3 One need look no further than 9/11 or UFO conspiracy theories for striking examples. While lacking in evidence, these theories mimic the structure of truth. They depict events as causal chains.

4 I do not claim any special dispensation for my own arguments, least of all my political ones.

The Great Divide

Years ago, I took a job at a midsized company in the Ohio. The company is located in a rural village of about two thousand people, and despite the isolation I decided to move there. I had only been living there a few days when I was stopped on the sidewalk, several blocks from my apartment, by a small boy staring up at me curiously. "You work with my dad," he said. Finding this a little surprising, but assuming he must be the son of one of my immediate coworkers, I asked him who his dad was. He told me, but I did not recognize the name. I told him he must have mistaken me for someone else. He shook his head confidently and pedaled off on his tricycle. The next day I asked one of my coworkers who the boy’s father was. As it happened, the boy’s father did indeed work for my company – on the assembly line in a different building half a mile away. This is when I came to understand, clearly, that I had not simply moved from a metropolitan area of nearly a million people to a village of about two thousand – but had also crossed an invisible boundary between one culture and another.

It is my hope to show, among other things, that the fundamental difference between liberalism and conservatism is not one of competing rational ideologies but simply one of culture, and that the dominant factor behind their cultural distinction is neither ethnicity nor religion – but simply the inevitable consequence of population density.



I. Demographics and Conditions of Life

Most urban dwellers are liberal. Most people living in rural areas are conservative. Compare the two maps above. The one on the left shows US population density and the one on the right shows candidate preference in the 2008 presidential election. We will take it as given that most of the people who voted for McCain are conservatives and most of the people who voted for Obama have at least some liberal leanings. Studying the two maps will show that wherever the population density is high Obama voters (presumed liberals) predominated, or were at least more common than in surrounding rural areas. Even in the south, cities show purple rather than the surrounding red. The blue regions along the Pacific and Mid-Atlantic coast correspond particularly well. McCain voters (presumed conservatives) predominated in rural areas with only a few exceptions. In the south and west, patches of blue in rural areas correspond to one minority group or other, not surprisingly voting for our first real minority president. Only in New England and the upper Midwest did the largely non-minority rural populations contradict the trend by voting for the Democrat. Regions of intermediate population density, predictably, show a mixture of the two political cultures. The lower Great Lakes region, with its mix of cities and countryside, shows a patchy appearance on both maps. We are accustomed to thinking that political orientation is an individual choice, and to some extent it is, but the correlations shown by the maps are too strong to be coincidental, and this comparison is not an isolated example. Clearly, there is something causal at work here – some distinction between rural and urban lifestyles and interests, which manifests itself in voting patterns.

Consider the conditions of life of both urban and rural groups.

Urban life is characterized by diversity and anonymity. These traits are not peculiarities of American or even western cities, but are, to some degree, characteristic of cities everywhere. Cities inevitably contain as broad a range of human beings as exist in any particular society. Living in a city does not demand a deep philosophical belief in human equality, but it does demand a certain rudimentary toleration of people who look or behave differently. Most human interaction in cities is impersonal, occurring between strangers. The relation of the individual to the city as a whole is one of residence, not one of community. For the urban resident, the city is not so much a giant village as it is an artificial wilderness. It is a place that combines variety and opportunity with a certain degree of perennial insecurity and random danger.

Rural life, on the other hand, is characterized by uniformity and familiarity. The range of occupations, religious beliefs, and ethnic traditions are all much narrower in villages and small towns. Inevitably, the inhabitant of a village interacts with familiar people most of the time. Familiarity is an imperative of the culture. For better or worse, rural communities are not places where one can live anonymously. Not surprisingly, the pressure to conform is also much higher in rural than in urban areas. Tolerance, where it exists, is more of a personal choice and not a demand made by the nature of the environment itself. The village is a safe and comfortable place – providing one is both willing and able to conform.

To illustrate the difference more clearly, let’s consider the position of a non-conformist in each environment. Imagine a person who, for whatever reason, converts from Christianity to Norse Paganism. I could use atheism, Islam, open homosexuality, or many other interesting and topical possibilities for my example – but Norse Paganism seems nicely neutral and shouldn't inflame anyone’s emotions unnecessarily.

In a city, among the anonymous multitudes, our new covert’s religion would only be noticed by a handful of people, and then only if the convert were vocal about it or decided to make some outwardly visible sign. Those people who did notice might raise an eyebrow, but the rule of the city is generally one of at least behavioral indifference, so our neophyte Norseman would be tolerated and largely ignored. Close friendships and family relationships would be affected, of course, but the people at the bank, the grocery, and the license bureau would simply shrug and go on about their business. One Norse Pagan in a city of a million is irrelevant.

A lone Norse Pagan, in a village of a thousand, would have the misfortune of being interesting. "I noticed you weren't in church – were you sick?" the bank teller might ask. "Did you know John so-and-so is not a Christian anymore?" the bank teller might later inform the grocery clerk. The smaller the town, the fewer real strangers there are. In a village, not only will our neophyte Norseman stand out, but his eccentricity will be the topic of conversation and legend. In a city, a transient oddity is quickly forgotten; in a village it becomes part of an oral history that carries on for decades.

The sense of common interest -- of community -- which villages have and cities lack, is the very heart of the cultural distinction between the two, and is worth exploring in more detail.

The innate conservatism of the village is our common cultural history. No city on earth arose spontaneously out of the mud, stocked with ready-made sophisticated urbanites. Cities are a new thing in human social evolution; living in small groups has been the norm.

The social ties that bind people living in small, natural groups are generally functional ones. Primitive villages, like bands of hunter-gatherers, are autonomous entities. They contain all of the skills and physical means necessary to maintain their constituent members. They prosper to the extent that those members work together for the common good. If villages tend to be intolerant of outsiders and individualists, it is at root because such people are the least likely to act in the interests of the community. Bigotry may be an ugly thing, but it is rooted in survival strategy.

There are far fewer functional ties that bind the inhabitants of a city together. The taxi driver and the florist only rarely benefit by one another’s actions. The employees of car dealership and those of the corporate accounting firm do not depend on each other economically. Everyone in the city shares some common basic services (police, fire, street department, etc.) but these are administered by anonymous professionals with little direct involvement by the populous. In short, most of the conditions of life in a city are beyond one’s daily influence.

When one is unhappy with conditions in a particular urban neighborhood, one moves to another neighborhood if the means are available. Urban dwellers might be just as suspicious and resentful of outsiders as their rural counterparts, but since they have fewer social ties to their neighborhoods than a villager to his or her village, they are more likely to relocate than to fight for the preservation of the status quo.

A phenomenon that often occurs when new immigrants move into cities is that they to flock to neighborhoods populated by people from their home countries. In the U.S., this occurred among European and Chinese immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and is occurring with Mexican immigrants today. It would be a mistake to think this pattern can be explained entirely by the attractions of a shared language or a shared ethnicity. It is equally driven by a desire to replicate, as much as possible, the social relations of rural life in an urban setting. Wealthy immigrants from urban settings are far less likely to settle in such groupings. Everything else being equal (and in the absence of enduring differentiators like race and religion), "urban villages" tend to disintegrate within a few generations. This is so not merely because succeeding generations learn the language, but also because they become accustomed to the general uncertainties of urban life. Their neighborhoods lack both the economic independence and social isolation necessary to be as autonomous (and therefore as enduring) as villages.

City dwellers use the word "community" differently than their rural counterparts. Rural people rarely use the word at all. The degree of social cohesion implied by the word is such a basic condition of rural life that it rarely needs acknowledgement. "Community" is something people notice in its absence, as a fish notices the absence of water when it is thrown on dry land. The modern proliferation of the term’s use in urban contexts (the black community, the gay community, etc.) is telling. There is a difference between a real community, in which the members are materially interdependent, and a merely nominal community, in which the members are simply proximate or share some common characteristic or interest. One is an autonomous social and economic unit, the other is a mirage. The most desperate use I have heard made of the term is in the phrase "Internet community". Facebook is no more a meaningful form of community than a McDonalds commercial is a nutritious meal. Social networking is, at heart, an attempt to compensate for the alienation that is an inevitable feature of urban life. It is socialization stripped of both presence and accountability. It is a parody of community, where third-rate personal advertisements take the place of human beings.


II. Further Considerations

Having laid out my central thesis, I should concede a number of points. Obviously, population density is not the sole determinate of one’s political orientation. Individual upbringing counts for much. The tendency for people to grow more conservative as they grow older is a commonplace – though this is not wholly independent of my thesis, since in a time of rapid population growth older people will have formed their predispositions in a world that was generally less urbanized. Older people might remember when their towns were villages, or when their cities were towns or at least smaller cities. It is also true that whole societies sometimes reorient themselves in response to historical events. For a couple of months after the 9/11 attacks, virtually all Americans were conservatives. The common yearning of the whole society was to return to the pre-9/11 world, a time in which we had all felt safer. No one really wanted to just smile and get comfortable with terrorism. For a moment, everyone agreed. The opposite sort of transformation occurred in the defeated Axis nations after the Second World War, particularly in Japan. At that moment in history the status quo had culminated in utter defeat and ruin. Tradition had been violently and decisively discredited, and there could be no thought of going back. Liberalization offered at least the hope of a life beyond the abyss.

Another point that I need to acknowledge is that the communal nature of rural settlements and the alienating nature of urban ones are relative. It would be foolish to believe everyone in a modern American village of a thousand people knows everyone else in that village, or is intimately bound to them economically. Likewise, it is obviously not true that cities are places utterly devoid of such connections. We are talking about relative positions on a continuum of urbanization, not about two fixed, immutable states.

On a grander scale, national and even global social and political orientations are also relative, evolving over space and time. Those that call themselves liberals today would have been unabashed socialists by 19th century standards – people who believe that government should play a large and direct role in mediating our daily lives. Contemporary conservatives are, by 19th century standards, classical liberals – people who reject the idea of overly centralized authority, particularly in the realm of economics. The conservatives of at least the early 19th century, on the other hand, held a medieval view that is all but extinct today – that power naturally resides (and should reside) with those who control the largest tracts of land. It is reasonable to see such political metamorphoses as evolutionary, as indeed they are, but it would be a mistake to just assume that they represent a kind of incremental moral progress toward some future ideal state. Rather, the shift of power from landed nobility (or its equivalent) to merchants and manufacturers, and subsequently to government bureaucracies and central banks, has simply been the inevitable consequence of subjecting human populations to ever more capable technologies and ever more concentrated urban environments. Put a hundred people on an island and they will organize themselves into a certain sort of social system. Put a million people on an island and they will naturally produce a rather different social system. Give them cell phones and televisions and they will produce yet another. Nothing about such changes is either necessarily positive or necessarily negative. It is merely the collective result of the adaptation of many individual human beings to the conditions of life with which they are presented.

The intellectual precursors of the trajectory humanity is now on were formulated during the Enlightenment, but mass political change was really the end product of the Industrial Revolution. It was then that rapid technological change and urbanization began in earnest. Humanity has been getting more urbanized and more technologically capable ever since. Rapid technological advancement and population growth have, until very recently, always reinforced one another.1 By making agriculture and transportation more efficient, and by creating many entirely new means of livelihood, new technology spurs population growth. At the same time, larger populations with a greater variety of demands spur technological advancement. Given a relatively free, relatively educated population, sheer numbers spur technology forward too. It is significant that almost all of the most innovative nations are comparatively populous. Germany, France and the UK are all populous nations by European standards, and also produce the most new inventions there. The US has a huge middle class population, which has always been able to turn out brilliant innovators at a reliable rate. As the Chinese and Indian middle classes have begun to grow, they too get their predictable allotment of technologists and entrepreneurs. Israel, on the other hand, despite a highly educated populous simply lacks the numbers to produce more than a scattering of geniuses, and is responsible for few significant inventions.

The positive consequences of advancing technology have been many and are, for the most part, obvious. In the industrialized world, we now live longer than our ancestors did. We certainly have the potential to know more. The list of advantages of living in modern times is lengthy, though to some extent debatable. Those things we have lost are less apparent because most of us are unaware, at least consciously, that they ever existed. Cultural stability is an unimaginable condition for most people in modern societies. We are conditioned from birth to believe that we either reinvent ourselves continuously or face obsolescence. We can expect, in old age, to live in a world that bears little resemblance to the one in which we were born. A sort of corollary to this is that we lack any rational sense of belonging. The community, as a stable, predictable unit of social organization, is all but extinct. Let’s return to our primitive village for a moment to see if we can throw some light on this obscure idea.

As I have already observed, the basis of village organization is function. As animals, human beings are simply more able to cope with their environment in groups. People don’t live in groups because they love each other; they live in groups because they need each other. Or, perhaps even more bluntly, they love each other because they need each other. This is a deep genetic trait. We were social animals before we had villages, or language, and probably even before our ancestors had the ability to walk upright. We want to belong to some group almost as strongly as we want to survive, and in some instances even more so.

The conditions of modern life tend to erode our sense of social stability at both ends. Not only does the community become unwieldy beyond a certain size, but the pressures and demands of urban life also undermine that most basic unit of social organization -- the family. Individuals move from one city to another in search of work. Both opportunity and scarcity contribute to this diffusion. In boom times the ambitious pursue opportunities far from their homes. In lean times, everyone seeks employment anywhere it can be had. Once the traditional extended family might have offered some support in times of scarcity, but once that institution is scattered across the country we are left to fend almost exclusively for ourselves.

In the absence of either a real functional community or a family, human beings must meet their unfulfilled need for belonging with something else. Modern societies offer a number of alternatives, but all of them are essentially illusory.


III. Palliatives for a lost sense of Belonging

The most obvious palliative for a lost sense of belonging is nationalism. Indeed, the rise of nationalism closely parallels the rise of industrialism and urbanization. The progression from one attachment to the other is intuitively simple. The nation, usually in an ethnic sense, becomes a sort of village or family writ large. The ardent patriot does have a sense of belonging, but the difference between patriotism and village solidarity is a tragic one. The relationship between the individual and the village is mutually beneficial in a way that the relationship between the individual and the nation can never be. Villages are networks of human relationships that are simultaneously functional, reciprocal, and personal. Individuals can be treated unjustly in a village, but even such mistreatment is fundamentally personal – no one is simply an anonymous cog in a heartless social machine. Nations, on the other hand, are innately heartless. They lack the capacity to care about the individuals that theoretically constitute them. No one really matters to the nation. We are all merely cogs in the unconscious machinery of the state. Such benefits as we might derive from being members of a particular nation are ultimately the result of decisions made by real people – other cogs in the process – not by any deliberate action of the nation as a whole.

Since human beings generally do not derive a sense of belonging from participation in unconscious processes, patriotism requires an illusion. The nationalist loves the nation as though it were a conscious, living entity. To expand this further, evolution has only given us a limited repertoire of emotional attachments – those suitable for living in small groups. "Love of beneficial bureaucratic processes" was not high on the list of feelings our troglodytic ancestors would have found useful. We are predisposed to mould our relationships with abstract entities in personal terms, no matter how incongruous. In the cold light of reason, a nation is really nothing more than a belief. It has no empirical existence of its own. It shares with the village the property of being a social collective, but it is a collective compounded of the very yearning to belong – rather the more substantial sense of belonging that stems from a set of tangible, functional relationships.

That patriotism is more virulent among rural conservatives than among urban liberals does not contradict the notion that villages are inherently more socially secure and comforting places than cities. As I outlined earlier, the whole of society is in a state of flux, and even rural areas are being transformed by the dominant urban culture. Our entertainment media, which grows more global and more pervasive by the year, is targeted at urban audiences. It denigrates the rural or traditional. Thus, the rural conservative feels the erosion of existing social institutions more acutely than the urban liberal. The latter is constantly having the normalcy of modern life, no matter how bizarre or hostile, reaffirmed by television and the internet. The rural citizen, on the other hand, receives only a steady stream of condescension and the treat of largely unwanted change. When, through pressure of the dominant culture, the village begins to fail as a functional entity the villager loses something real. It is natural enough to look for a substitute of similar kind but of a grander scale – however sadly illusory it might be.

Theistic religion is more complex than raw patriotism, and its attraction to either rural or urban populations is not simply the attraction of a substitute community. In traditional rural villages, churches serve as a natural focal point of community life. Whatever else they may be, they are the roof under which the whole community sits. They have a social function that is largely independent of any religious teaching they might offer. Even if the sermons are dull and uninspiring, the congregation draws significant strength from the simple solidarity of attendance. Rural churches give the community a unique opportunity to see itself as a whole.

A service at an urban megachurch is something rather different. The congregants of a megachurch are not a community as such, but a scattering of people drawn from a wide area. They may draw some passing sense of strength from their very numbers, but in the end they are essentially an interest group of otherwise disassociated people. Like attendees at virtually any other urban venue, they come to be entertained – in other words, to be distracted from the stresses of urban life. No megachurch could sustain itself with a dull and uninspiring pastor. Congregants would simply shop for their salvation somewhere else.

Significantly, the conditions of urban life have transformed religion (at least in the US) by making it more energetic but at the same time less demanding. While the content of a sermon must be entertaining, it cannot be very restrictive. In a village, people attend the church the village happens to have; in a city, they attend the church that suits them. Given a choice, most people will adopt whatever form of their religion demands the least of them. Consider how many modern churches emphasize verse John 11:26 ("And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.") This is the lowest possible common denominator to which Christianity can erode. Simple belief is the cheapest cover charge that any deity has ever required. The Catholic Church, though much in retreat, still wants the faithful to follow certain rules. A few protestant churches in rural Appalachia still ask congregants to show their faith by handling venomous snakes. John 11:26 asks only a little credulity, which you have to possess to derive any comfort from Christianity anyway.

To summarize, rural religion tends to demand more arbitrary concessions from its adherents but also offers them something valuable by strengthening their social relationships. Urban religion doesn’t dare demand much, has far less to offer, and has to compete with every other form of distraction the city can create. Let me be clear, however. Urban churches need not be harmless, watered-down versions of their rural brethren in regard to their condemnation of non-believers. On the contrary, in the absence meaningful moral strictures to violate, the only thing that delineates the congregation from outsiders is belief. This, too, is a desperate attempt to give adherents a sense of belonging and mutual solidarity – by the common expedient of raising an external enemy against whom they can contrast themselves.

While the Enlightenment began the downfall of religion among intellectuals, urbanization began the downfall of religion among the masses. The very anonymity of urban life made participation in religion optional, and the diffuse and transient nature of urban congregations has made the social benefits increasingly negligible. All that remains for the urban believer are grand promises of salvation and rewards in the afterlife. While these have a certain appeal for many people starving for a feeling of security in a ruthless urban world, it is well beneath the threshold of cynicism for most. The majority of urban dwellers, as well as the majority of people who could be broadly considered liberal, are not explicitly atheists. They have not rejected faith so much as they simply do not take the time to bother with the question. If you ask them directly "do you believe in God?" they tend to shift around uncomfortably and mutter things like "sure – I guess so." Their very lack of interest makes such an affirmation meaningless.

Another attachment that provides an essentially empty sense of belonging is a devotion to organized sports. Here too, we have a cultural entity that developed hand-in-hand with urbanization. Sports like baseball began as pastimes for ordinary people to participate in. Socially, they functioned to strengthen the bonds between actual team members. Teams then began to represent larger entities, cities and businesses. Their chief social consequence became the creation of a sense of unity among the spectators. Widespread though it might be in both our cities and our countryside, it isn’t hard to see how shallow this illusion of belonging actually is. After all, very few people actually feel any special sense of duty toward their fellow fans of team "x". Devotion to a team may offer a vague sense of identity for an individual, and provide a superficial point of connection to fellow supporters, but can offer little in the form of substantive relationships. No fellow fan is going to either trust a person or assist him on the basis of their mutual fandom alone. No player feels very obligated to any individual fan. If nationalism is a poor parody of the relationship one might otherwise have had to a small and functional community, then fandom is one step even further removed – a parody of nationalism. The fan pours out his enthusiasm for those he not only has no influence over, but who have in turn no substantive influence over him. Nationalism is, in one sense, the political exploitation of our natural longing for community – a one-sided but still relevant exercise. A love for organized sports is merely the embrace of community’s ghost image – an exercise whose only social consequence is distraction.

Other forms of fandom function similarly. The cultish fascination with movie series like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings should not be surprising. Both offer the attractive magic of religion without the uncomfortable restrains and limitations. Fantasy blooms most plentifully where religion is the weakest, chiefly in cities and suburbs. Fantasy offers the young yet another kind of community of the mind, a much more interesting and appealing one than the dull, dysfunctional, pseudo-communities of their parents. The knowledge that trying to live in such fantasies becomes a self-consuming psychosis beyond a certain point is no deterrent to children, and little deterrent to many adults. Believing in Harry Potter’s mythos is, after all, only slightly less rational than believing in Christianity – and not in the least less rational than believing in Scientology.

Lastly, returning nearer to our main theme of comparing liberalism with conservatism, we should consider the palliative dimension of belonging to a political party. That membership in a political party offers a person both a sense of community and a sense of identity is obvious. The distinctions between party membership and simple nationalism are less obvious, but are important nonetheless.

First, it should be noted that the pure nationalist must, to some extent, accept his or her country whole. The nation is defined by the whole, and if any subgroup of the nation is to be excluded it requires a special conceptual effort. For example, Hitler, an ardent nationalist, could not stop at portraying the Jews as merely a dangerous minority of Germans; they had to be portrayed as fundamentally non-Germans. If the nation is the parental entity before which all individuals must bow, then all that is evil and dangerous in the universe must be external to the nation. Those who are evil must be alien, born of alien blood. A pure partisan, however, need not make any special effort to cast enemies out of the common ethnic fold. Parties, too, are cultural entities at heart, drawing their defining boundaries around beliefs rather than genes. Republicans and Democrats don’t usually think of themselves as distinct genetic breeds. They think of themselves as believers in right ideas or right values.

In reality, there are few pure nationalists and few pure partisans. The two encompassing collectives are compatible and often reinforcing. The dominance of one tendency over the other varies with conditions. Thus, the Soviet state before the Second World War was a brand new cultural entity with a heavy facade of ideology. It centered on a party – the communists. During the war, however, the appeal of Russian nationalism was needed to rally a public sick of both military defeat and the failings of the communist program. After the war, the cultural and ideological experiment resumed its dominance over nationalism.

Parties are more palpable entities than nations. They have real leaders and sometimes even definite purposes. Straightforward ethnic nationalism is an emotional state. Its can have no purposes, per se. Political parties, though centered on certain cultures and their values, must inevitably support some recognizable program of policies. They must pin themselves to comparatively concrete statements of what they are for and against. This not only invites social division, but actually demands it. The pure nationalist wants the nation to move as one. The pure partisan wants to dominate those fellow countrymen who happen to have wrong ideas. The synthesis of the two, on the other hand, requires a redefinition of what the nation is. Whether a party is on the right or the left, the redefinition takes on essentially the same form – that of redefining the nation as a certain set of cultural values rather than as a certain ethnicity. For Americans on the right, America is a nation characterized by patriotism, distrust of government, fiscal restraint, and usually some measure of religious piety. For Americans on the left, America is a nation characterized by tolerance, fairness, and an unshakable faith in progress. Each group sees the other as misguided or demented and, while not actually external to the nation, possessed by ideas which are in opposition to the true national character. By this trick of national redefinition a person’s sense of belonging can be transferred from a nebulous abstraction to a collection of ideas, a body of leaders, or even a handful of slogans. Though parties are somewhat smaller entities than nations, they are still far too large to have reciprocal relationships with their lesser members. We belong to them far more than they belong to us.


IV. Contemporary Liberalism examined more specifically

Over the course of this essay I believe I have adequately summarized the predispositions of those we would classify as Conservatives. They are, broadly speaking, those people who find themselves on the trailing edge of social change. They are people who either like their lives as they are and want to keep them that way, or want to return to some mythologized state of the past, be it imagined or remembered. What, then, do liberals believe? What drives people on the leading edge of social change?

Liberals and conservatives are both human beings, and as such are subject to the same human motivations. Liberals, being generally more urbanized, are rather less inclined to turn for security to functional communities they don’t really have, or be nostalgic about some mythologized past they either don’t know or don’t believe in. Nevertheless, though they are more accustomed to the alienations of modern life, they are still afflicted by them – if only less consciously. Only a tiny percentage of human beings are truly content without any communal context whatsoever. The alienated urban masses hunger for a sense of security and identity just like their rural counterparts.

The promise offered by liberalism, like that offered by nationalism, is couched in the assumption that we share a not only a common need, but a collective existence. To be a liberal is to believe that humanity as whole has a certain positive destiny – a destiny that can be reached by implementing a progressive social program. Stable conservatism lives in the present; agitated conservatism lives in the past; liberalism lives always in the imagined future. This means that change is not merely a hallmark of liberalism but a central element of the creed. Liberals believe that they are agents of positive social evolution. They believe that they can argue, legislate, and invent their way to a utopia of equality and universal happiness.

Since, as I’ve already outlined, the specific beliefs of liberals and conservatives both move further to the left as society becomes ever more urbanized, the criterion of whether one looks backward or forward for solutions is probably the only reliable demarcation of the divide. In many other respects, the two cultures are really quite similar.

Noble as it may sound, the love of liberals for humanity as a whole is just an even more grandiose cousin of nationalism. Rather than dividing the world into countrymen and foreigners, the liberal divides the world into liberals and obstructionists. They believe in a sort of global community of the enlightened, whose full realization is only barred by the bigoted, regressive obstinacy of conservatives. Put another way, they have an irrational love for their ideology rather than an irrational love for their nation. Practically speaking, one is little more tenable than the other. While the notion of humanity as a whole conjures up a nice utopian sentiment, it ignores the reality that humanity is composed of people with all sorts of beliefs and agendas, many of which are violently incompatible despite the basic commonality of human nature. The liberal tends to believe that the masses in other nations (particularly developing nations) are nascent liberals yearning to breathe free, while in reality most of the people of the world are conservatives within their own social contexts, often nationalist or religious or both. They may buy our Coca-Cola, but they have irrational utopian visions of their own. They no more want to be second-rate knock-offs of western liberals than they want to be second-rate knock-offs of western conservatives. One can love "humanity" as an abstraction – as an artifact of the imagination – but such a love rarely survives prolonged exposure to any real population in the real world.

In practice, liberals do not love all human beings as individuals either. It’s a very rare person who does. Liberalism is a cultural entity, and as such has its own schema of in-groups and out-groups, which vary a little depending on the subgroup of liberals in question. For example, I think it would be fair to say that American liberals, particularly during the civil rights era, despised white southerners as a class. If one happened to be an American liberal and a white southerner, a certain apologetic attitude for the latter was obligatory. The corollary to this particular prejudice was the unconscious assumption that all American blacks (or members of any other suitably downtrodden minority) were necessarily morally good. If a black American appeared to be less than perfect the fault was obviously that of some white bigot somewhere along the line. My point is not to deny that many white southerners (and plenty of white northerners) did (and in some cases still do) engage in bigotry, but to assert that Liberals tend to make the same kinds of sweeping generalizations about out-groups and in-groups that people of any other culture do.

American conservatives, for their part, tend to become incensed at the suggestion that any American soldier could ever be justifiably accused of a war crime. Soldiers currently have an almost holy status among conservatives, and the suggestion that even a single one of them might tarnish this image is simply proof that the accuser is a liberal who hates America.

What all such hardened generalizations have in common is that they support a particular group’s identity myth. White liberals see themselves as the good white people, bestowing social justice on the oppressed. It would muddy the water if any of the bad white people had any merit as human beings, or if any of the oppressed might be a little lacking in personal merit. The Robin Hood myth just isn’t as inspiring if, once in awhile, Robin steals from a philanthropist to give to an impoverished child abuser. For the conservative, the soldier is less a person than a living symbol of the nation -- a sort of walking talking flag -- who shoots the bad guys and passes out candy to children. Real soldiers, of course, are merely human beings with the usually variety of human traits. In a population of a hundred thousand of them, it is almost impossible that one wouldn’t find at least a few cold blooded sociopaths, just as one would expect to find in any city of that size. Nevertheless, the myth, however impossible, must take precedence over the grey, unhappy realities of the world. It is not a matter of truth, but of identity.

Another striking similarity between liberals and conservatives can be seen in each movement’s response to the other’s political rallies. There are, inevitably, a few hardcore racists at any sufficiently large Tea Party rally. This shouldn’t be surprising. The Tea Party movement is, at present, a very decentralized movement. The Tea Party groups have neither the capacity nor the desire to carefully vet those who happen to turn up at their events. Populists cannot be overly choosy. Any group that opposes America’s first black President is bound to draw at least a few people who oppose him because he is black, but this does not mean the movement as a whole is racially motivated. People can have other reasons for opposing a president, as history abundantly shows. The left characterizes the Tea Party groups as racist because doing so drops them neatly into a category of enemies liberals already have, and this absolves liberals of the irksome burden of having to address the Tea Party movement’s actual platform. When the liberals hold rallies, conservatives do almost exactly the same thing. They consistently point out the handful of self-declared communists and socialists who turn up on such occasions, and demonize the rest of the people present as mere dupes of this traditionally hated fringe. Again, it is an easy way to avoid the irksome task of having to actually think about opposing ideas. Each side, on the other hand, takes the righteousness of its own cause as a given. This is chauvinism pure and simple.


V. Conclusions

In relatively secure and stable periods of history, when change is slow, the divide between largely urban liberals and largely rural conservatives is modest. At present, under the strain of enormous economic pressure, international instability, and dizzying technological change, the gulf is wide. This does not bode well for anyone. Rational people, if there are any, must find themselves caught between increasingly radicalized extremists at both ends of the political spectrum. The dexterity with which each camp spins a narrative blaming all the world’s problems on other is a testament to both human inventiveness and human credulity. There is little room for compromise between such factions. Even if there were, the ad hoc blending of two irrational extremes does not seem likely to yield anything sound. Considering civilization’s bloody history of civil wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions we have reason to worry about each side’s insistence on ideological purity.

In truth, the aggregate behavior of human beings is almost never driven by reason. The larger the collective one examines, the less rational its behavior is. Individuals can be reasonable; villages can exhibit practicality; states can be managed wisely to some degree; the collective direction of humanity as a whole, however, is beyond the realm of rational control. It is probably also beyond the realm of what we, as individuals, can fully understand. We did not agree, as a species, to pursue our current trajectory. As individuals, no one asked us. Like anything else in nature, social evolution is ultimately the playing out of a vast, complex, and essentially non-conscious process. Urbanization is a feature of that process that we may, at least, recognize –- and one with reasonably predictable social consequences.

The conditions under which we live change faster our basic motivations. Our very ability to overcome and dominate nature has led us into problems for which nature never prepared us. Important as entitlements, tax policy, and all the other topics of the day may be, they are all broadly symptomatic of a larger human problem – the problem of the instability which appears to be inherent in societies on the scale of tens or hundreds of millions. Considered on the timescale that we use to judge the viability of other species, the most enduring nations on earth are mere events. The imaginary collective of "humanity" is more an explosion than a steady march of progress.

In other species that have, for one reason or another, experienced explosive population growth the process inevitably continues until it meets some natural limitation. Typically, the species exhausts its food supply or induces some disastrous change in its environment. In many of the more developed nations population growth has slowed or even reversed, but overall there are still more and more human beings every year, sharing a fundamentally finite pool of resources. Technology cannot increase productivity without end, so a Malthusian catastrophe of some sort seems almost inevitable. This, if nothing else, may put an upper limit on urbanization and all that it entails. What sort of society human beings we might have at the upper limits of concentration, starved of either energy or food I shudder to imagine.

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1 The decline or reverse of population growth in most industrialized nations that has been occurring in recent decades is an interesting topic in itself, but beyond the already broad scope of this essay.

Note: I owe an acknowledgement to Eric Hoffer’s great work, The True Believer, though I arrived at many of his conclusions independently. It was his view that mass movements originated from the frustrations of people with certain personality types, and were brought into an active phase by their ability to awaken simmering dissatisfactions in the broader population. It is my view that this process is driven not so much by certain personality types (although such people do indeed serve as a focus for mass movements) but by a the general dissatisfaction of large segments of the public with their relative impotence and insignificance within the context of a large, bureaucratic, urban society. We simmer because we are members of corporate bodies too big to notice us. As Hoffer himself saw, we can only become fully numbed to the impotence and insignificance society imposes on us by sacrificing our individual identities to one collective vision or another.