Elsewhere on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, he asks forgiveness from Ta-Nehisi Coates for offending him in their race-and-IQ exchange. He doesn’t back down from his viewpoint, but seems to sincerely regret having hurt someone he respects. A decent thing to do, this post. Sullivan adds:

But Ta-Nehisi points to a deeper question and it is one I have wrestled with. How do I live with the knowledge that writing about such things as merely empirical matters, when they are freighted with profound historical evil, will deeply hurt many, and could help legitimize hateful abusers of information? What responsibility does a writer have for the consequences, good and bad, of good-faith pieces he writes? Is merely citing the massive amount of data showing clearly different racial distribution for IQ an offensive, cruel and racist provocation? Is raising this subject worth anything anyway? … My core position is that a writer’s core loyalty must be to the truth as best as he can discern it.

I think any morally responsible and self-aware writer who weighs in on matters of public controversy should wrestle with this. In past jobs, I have been frustrated with colleagues who did not want to look seriously at evidence of Muslim extremism in America, not so much out of p.c. (though there was some of that with some folks), but out of a genuine fear that any threat to the community that might exist because of local Islamic extremists was outweighed by the prospect that someone may take that information and do violence to innocent Muslims — or even Muslims guilty of nothing more than holding unpopular opinions. I have thought, and still do think, that their caution is unjustifiable, and that bad men are taking advantage of their good will to have their activities unscrutinized.

Still, in general, it’s not a black-or-white question. The time this became most clear to me was at an international journalism conference, in a discussion about how much information to reveal in news stories. We Americans naturally believed that we should tell as much of the truth as we could, and let readers sort out the meaning. Journalists from India, Bangladesh, and the region strongly disagreed. They said that if their newspapers or media outlets gave all the information about every violent episode, including (most importantly) the religious identities of the parties involved, there is no question that people, and not a few people, would die from the ensuing riots and communal/sectarian violence. This was a real-world question that always had to be in the mind of journalists in those areas. It was not an abstract question for them.

There are dangerous facts, the knowledge of which threatens certain people, institutions, the social order, and so forth. Must they be made public no matter what? I think as a general matter, the presumption has to be on the side of disclosure, but that’s not a mandate. That’s simply to say that the more “dangerous” a fact, the greater the discretion that must be employed when deciding whether or not to make it public. If a reporter in wartime gets a tip about troop movements, he doesn’t have the moral right (or, as it happens, the legal right) to broadcast that information. If a reporter discovers during wartime that a general is taking bribes from a defense contractor, the moral equation shifts. Many times people who believe facts dangerous to themselves should be suppressed do so under the excuse of the common good (I’m thinking about you, Your Grace). But the fact that authorities can and do abuse discretion to cover their own backsides does not mean that discretion itself is a discredited concept.

Five years ago, the science site Edge.org published a scientific symposium in which respondents — most of them prominent scientists and science journalists — answered the question: “What’s your dangerous idea?” The question was bounded like this:

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

Some of the more interesting ones:

Daniel Goleman (psychiatrist):

As with any new technology, the Internet is an experiment in progress. It’s time we considered what other such downsides of cyber-disinhibition may be emerging — and looked for a technological fix, if possible. The dangerous thought: the Internet may harbor social perils our inhibitory circuitry was not designed to handle in evolution.

Jesse Bering (psychologist):

Science is an endless series of binding and rebinding his breath; there will never be a day when God does not speak for the majority. There will never be a day even when he does not whisper in the most godless of scientists’ ears. This is because God is not an idea, nor a cultural invention, not an ‘opiate of the masses’ or any such thing; God is a way of thinking that was rendered permanent by natural selection.

As scientists, we must toil and labor and toil again to silence God, but ultimately this is like cutting off our ears to hear more clearly. God too is a biological appendage; until we acknowledge this fact for what it is, until we rear our children with this knowledge, he will continue to howl his discontent for all of time.

Marco Iacoboni (neuroscientist):

Media violence induces imitative violence. If true, this idea is dangerous for at least two main reasons. First, because its implications are highly relevant to the issue of freedom of speech. Second, because it suggests that our rational autonomy is much more limited than we like to think. This idea is especially dangerous now, because we have discovered a plausible neural mechanism that can explain why observing violence induces imitative violence. Moreover, the properties of this neural mechanism — the human mirror neuron system — suggest that imitative violence may not always be a consciously mediated process. The argument for protecting even harmful speech (intended in a broad sense, including movies and videogames) has typically been that the effects of speech are always under the mental intermediation of the listener/viewer. If there is a plausible neurobiological mechanism that suggests that such intermediate step can be by-passed, this argument is no longer valid.

David Bodanis (writer):

I wonder sometimes if the hyper-Islamicist critique of the West as a decadent force that is already on a downhill course might be true. At first it seems impossible: no one’s richer than the US, and no one has as powerful an Army; western Europe has vast wealth and university skills as well.

Diane Halpern (psychologist):

For an idea to be truly dangerous, it needs to have a strong and near universal appeal. The idea of being able to choose the sex of one’s own baby is just such an idea.

Daniel Hillis (physicist, computer scientist):

I don’t share my most dangerous ideas. Ideas are the most powerful forces that we can unleash upon th world, and they should not be let loose without careful consideration of their consequences. Some ideas are dangerous because they are false… but there are also plenty of true ideas that should not be spread. … I have seen otherwise thoughtful people so caught up in such an idea that they seem unable to resist sharing it. To me, the idea that we should all share our dangerous ideas is, itself, a very dangerous idea. I just hope that it never catches on.

You knew I was going to ask: What is your dangerous idea? Anybody who wants to plead the Hillis on this, I respect that. Remember, your dangerous idea is dangerous not because it’s false, but because it is, or might be, true.

As usual, Andrew Sullivan pushes his “Christianist” idea far, far, far beyond any rationality. He actually wrote this sentence in a post about Egypt’s Islamist party victories:

We have the equivalent of a democratic Islamist party in the US. It’s called the GOP.

This is the same thing as wild-eyed conservatives looking at Obama and seeing our Bolshevik-in-Chief. Or not being able to tell the difference between a parakeet and a 747 because hey, they both have wings and fly.

Do you want to know what an Islamist political party looks like? There are different kinds of Islamists — there’s the Iranian kind, the milder Turkish kind, the Egyptian kind — but they all believe that Islamic law should be at the foundation of political governance. Hamas is the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s affiliate in Gaza, which they rule via democratic election. Here is their charter. Read:

Article Two: The Link between Hamas and the Association of Muslim Brothers

The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a world organization, the largest Islamic Movement in the modern era. It is characterized by a profound understanding, by precise notions and by a complete comprehensiveness of all concepts of Islam in all domains of life: views and beliefs, politics and economics, education and society, jurisprudence and rule, indoctrination and teaching, the arts and publications, the hidden and the evident, and all the other domains of life.

And:

Article Eight: The Slogan of the Hamas

Allah is its goal, the Prophet its model, the Qur’an its Constitution, Jihad its path and death for the case of Allah its most sublime belief.

Of course. The Muslim Brotherhood’s slogan is: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” Not only can you not find Republican Party leaders who say anything like this with regard to Christianity and the civil order, you’d have to go to the far reaches of Idaho or somesuch place to find Christians who say such things. To the extent it exists at all in American Christianity, it’s on the fringe of the fringe. In Egypt, political parties who believe this about Islam and the civil order just won a majority in Parliament.

Islamists are called that not as a pejorative, but as a descriptive; they believe that Islam in an all-encompassing system, and seek to govern by its precepts. To be sure, there is a wide spectrum of Islamist belief, and the future of the Arab world will be determined not in the rivalry between secularists and Islamists, but between factions of Islamists. Still, it is sheer crackpottery to say that the Republican Party’s relationship to Christianity even remotely resembles the Freedom and Justice Party’s relationship to Islam — which, by the way, is, theologically and structurally, a far more political religion than Christianity.

Then again, what do I know? Perhaps Sarah Palin will start dressing Trig out like the Hamas Baby in the photograph above. Maybe the Veggie Tales folks are busying themselves creating a Christian version of the tale of Farfour, the Hamas Mickey Mouse murdered by the Jooz.

UPDATE: To be clear, I don’t object to the term “Christianist” because it is offensive. I object to it because insofar as it is meant to draw an equivalence between political Islam and political Christianity, it is untrue and misleading, and makes clear-headed thought and debate about the role of Christian religion in American politics more difficult.

I whine about the cliched social liberalism of the NYT Magazine, but it really does some things very, very well. This, for example, is great explanatory journalism, from the NPR Planet Money team, which writes (or at least Adam Davidson does) regularly for the Magazine. It tells you the basics of why Europe is in big trouble, in language we can all understand. Excerpt:

Europe’s problems are a lot like ours, only worse. Like Wall Street, Germany is where the money is. Italy, like California, has let bad governance squander great natural resources. Greece is like a much older version of Mississippi — forever poor and living a bit too much off its richer neighbors. Slovenia, Slovakia and Estonia are like the heartland states that learned the hard way how entwined so-called Main Street is with Wall Street. Now remember that these countries share neither a government nor a language. Nor a realistic bailout plan, either.

Lack of fluency in financialese shouldn’t preclude anyone from understanding what is going on in Europe or what may yet happen. So we’ve answered some of the most pressing questions in a language everyone can comprehend. Though the word for “Lehman” in virtually any language is still “Lehman.”

Alan Jacobs defends Tolkien from Adam Gopnik’s assertion that “Lord of the Rings” is too morally black and white. Jacobs says that’s not true, and gives example. Then:

Modern liberalism likes to think that all our problems are epistemological: we are afflicted by never knowing with sufficient clarity what we ought to do. Our fictions tend to reflect that assumption. Tolkien, not being a modern liberal, thought it more interesting to explore situations when people know what they need to know but may lack the strength of will to act on that knowledge. He might say, and with some justification, that contemporary literary fiction is not simplistic in regard to such problems but oblivious to them.

Good grief, is there anything the welfare state is unwilling to cover?!:

Medicare, the nation’s medical safety net for seniors, on Wednesday announced it would extend its coverage forobesity screening and “intensive behavioral therapy,” ensuring that roughly 30% of the 42 million people insured by the program can undertake a weight-loss program supervised by their doctor.

The decision by the federal government to cover face-to-face doctor visits as an aid to weight loss is likely to prod private insurers, many of whom have been reluctant to cover medically supervised obesity treatments, to follow suit.

Medicare‘s decision will permit beneficiaries — typically those 65 and older — to see a physician once a week for a month for obesity counseling, then once every other week for an additional five months if they have a body mass index above 30 — the standard definition of obesity. If the beneficiary loses three kilograms or more — 6.6 pounds — in that period, Medicare will approve an additional six monthly doctor visits for further counseling.

This is insane. Sam MacDonald reported this in another combox thread, commenting sarcastically:

Because they cannot lose weight without intensive  counseling.

Guess who’s all for it?

“I think it’s fantastic,” says Dr. Marijane Hynes, a primary care physician at George Washington Medical Faculty Associates Weight Loss Clinic.

How are we going to pay for this? Medicare is already well along the trajectory to insolvency within this decade, and now we’ve just added another benefit for 1/3 of its recipients. Because, as Sam — who lost well over 100 pounds by making his mind up to do it — points out, there’s this idea that people are helpless over their own appetites without expert guidance.

And what a crock this BMI is. I am about 15 pounds overweight, but it’s hard to see that because I have a big frame. But when I recently had my BMI taken, it said that I was right on the borderline between being overweight and obese. Ridiculous. If a slender-framed person of my height (5′ 11″) was carrying my poundage (197), he might be obese. Me, not. I bet that many of those “obese” Medicare patients are not obese at all.

This whole thing is deeply frustrating to me. Obesity, and the complications that go with it — diabetes, heart disease, etc. — is a huge medical problem in this country. Nobody can deny that. But do we really need to have the government pay experts to tell people to stop shoving food in their faces, to eat healthier, and to get off the couch and move around some? Is this really so hard to figure out?

Famed Freddie Mac house historian for hire Gussie Fink-Nottle says all that money he got from corporate clients to introduce their products to his friends in government was not lobbying by another name, but rather evidence of his good citizenship. No, really:

Mr. Gingrich, a former House speaker who has repeatedly said during his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination that he has never acted as a lobbyist, added, “They want to say isn’t that lobbying? No it’s called being a citizen. As a citizen, I’m allowed to have an opinion.”

Too right! What a coincidence that Fink-Nottle’s opinion happened to coincide with the interests of health care companies hoping to do business with the government, whose members Fink-Nottle just happened to have a personal relationship with. Imagine that. If it looks bad, well, who are you to question the motives of a man who would put his marriage at risk, and lose it, in the service of his country? Why do you hate America?

Sam M sends along this link to vintage (ca. 1930s? 1940s?) ads in which women are exhorted to feel bad about themselves for being “skinny,” and to purchase products (e.g., “Wate On”) that will help them gain weight and appear more sexually attractive to men. Writes Sam — who, recall, wrote a good book about his own massive weight loss, which he accomplished without purchasing anybody’s product:

Interesting to me that the message is almost identical to what we are seeing now: You can’t control your weight. You need help. The help of an expert, a doctor… anyone who can help you overcome the absolutely insurmountable challenges that basic biology poses. Because your body is genetically programmed to be too skinny. Just send a check.

Sound familiar?

Yep.

George F. Will:

In the 1978 Bakke case concerning preferences in a medical school’s admissions, Justice Lewis Powell, the swing vote on a fractured court, wrote that institutions of higher education have a First Amendment right — academic freedom — to use race as one “plus” factor when shaping student bodies to achieve viewpoint diversity. Thus began the “educational benefits” exception to the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

But benefits to whom? For 33 years, the court has been entangled in a thicket of preferences that are not remedial and hence not temporary. Preferences as recompense for past discrimination must eventually become implausible, but the diversity rationale for preferences never expires.

Liberals would never stoop to stereotyping, but they say minorities necessarily make distinctive — stereotypical? — contributions to viewpoint diversity, conferring benefits on campus culture forever. And minorities admitted to elite universities and professional schools supposedly serve the compelling goal of enlarging the minority component of the middle class and professions.

But what if many of the minorities used in this process are injured by it? Abundant research says they are, as two amicus curiae briefs demonstrate in urging the court to take the Texas case.

Will goes on to cite evidence that affirmative action harms minorities by placing them in elite colleges where they are unprepared by their educational experience to work at the level required of them. Thus do many become discouraged, even self-hating, and drop out, whereas if they had gone to a second-tier university, one better suited to their strengths and educational preparation, they likely would have thrived. None of this speaks to the question of justice that racial preferences are supposed to address, but if true, it provides empirical evidence that the supposedly worthwhile consequences of “positive” racially discriminatory policies are a chimera.

Highly recommend taking a look at George Packer’s piece about inequality and the social contract in Foreign Affairs. It’s free, but you have to register to see it. Worthwhile. I think I might have linked to this here before, but if so, it’s worth a second look. Excerpts:

The Iraq war was a kind of stress test applied to the American body politic. And every major system and organ failed the test: the executive and legislative branches, the military, the intelligence world, the for-profits, the nonprofits, the media. It turned out that we were not in good shape at all — without even realizing it. Americans just hadn’t tried anything this hard in around half a century. It is easy, and completely justified, to blame certain individuals for the Iraq tragedy. But over the years, I’ve become more concerned with failures that went beyond individuals, and beyond Iraq — concerned with the growing arteriosclerosis of American institutions. Iraq was not an exceptional case. It was a vivid symptom of a long-term trend, one that worsens year by year. The same ailments that led to the disastrous occupation were on full display in Washington this past summer, during the debt-ceiling debacle: ideological rigidity bordering on fanaticism, an indifference to facts, an inability to think beyond the short term, the dissolution of national interest into partisan advantage.

Packer invites his readers to compare their lives today with that of Americans in 1978. Things were far crappier then in many respects, he admits. “By contemporary standards, life in 1978 was inconvenient, constrained, and ugly,” he concedes, and none of us would willingly return to that year. And yet, for all the stagnation, Packer argues, things were better in an important way. American institutions were still fairly functional:

We can upgrade our iPhones, but we can’t fix our roads and bridges. We invented broadband, but we can’t extend it to 35 percent of the public. We can get 300 television channels on the iPad, but in the past decade 20 newspapers closed down all their foreign bureaus. We have touch-screen voting machines, but last year just 40 percent of registered voters turned out, and our political system is more polarized, more choked with its own bile, than at any time since the Civil War. There is nothing today like the personal destruction of the McCarthy era or the street fights of the 1960s. But in those periods, institutional forces still existed in politics, business, and the media that could hold the center together. It used to be called the establishment, and it no longer exists. Solving fundamental problems with a can-do practicality — the very thing the world used to associate with America, and that redeemed us from our vulgarity and arrogance — now seems beyond our reach.

Packer goes on to argue that it was in or around 1978 that the postwar consensus arrangement broke down amid the pessimism and frustration of the era:

What was that arrangement? It is sometimes called “the mixed economy”; the term I prefer is “middle-class democracy.” It was an unwritten social contract among labor, business, and government — between the elites and the masses. It guaranteed that the benefits of the economic growth following World War II were distributed more widely, and with more shared prosperity, than at any time in human history. In the 1970s, corporate executives earned 40 times as much as their lowest-paid employees. (By 2007, the ratio was over 400 to 1.) Labor law and government policy kept the balance of power between workers and owners on an even keel, leading to a virtuous circle of higher wages and more economic stimulus. The tax code restricted the amount of wealth that could be accumulated in private hands and passed on from one generation to the next, thereby preventing the formation of an inherited plutocracy. The regulatory agencies were strong enough to prevent the kind of speculative bubbles that now occur every five years or so: between the Great Depression and the Reagan era there was not a single systemwide financial crisis, which is why recessions during those decades were far milder than they have since become. Commercial banking was a stable, boring business. (In movies from the 1940s and 1950s, bankers are dull, solid pillars of the community.) Investment banking, cordoned off by the iron wall of the Glass-Steagall Act, was a closed world of private partnerships in which rich men carefully weighed their risks because they were playing with their own money. Partly as a result of this shared prosperity, political participation reached an all-time high during the postwar years (with the exception of those, such as black Americans in the South, who were still denied access to the ballot box).

At the same time, the country’s elites were playing a role that today is almost unrecognizable. They actually saw themselves as custodians of national institutions and interests. The heads of banks, corporations, universities, law firms, foundations, and media companies were neither more nor less venal, meretricious, and greedy than their counterparts today. But they rose to the top in a culture that put a brake on these traits and certainly did not glorify them.

I can’t do justice to the scope and insights of the article by quoting it here selectively, so I hope you’ll read it. Packer puts his finger on the unintended consequences of popular cultural upheaval from both the left and the right that undermined and even destroyed the authority of traditional elites. It had some good effects. But America’s post-2008 economic crash reveals the down side:

This is a story about the perverse effects of democratization. Getting rid of elites, or watching them surrender their moral authority, did not necessarily empower ordinary people. Once Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and Walter Wriston of Citicorp stopped sitting together on Commissions to Make the World a Better Place and started paying lobbyists to fight for their separate interests in Congress, the balance of power tilted heavily toward business. Thirty years later, who has done better by the government — the United Auto Workers or Citicorp?

Packer is careful not to blame the American public for “false consciousness” — that is, voting against their own interests by shifting to the Republicans and rejecting Jimmy Carter and the sclerotic Democratic Party, and the welfare state they represented. People really were sick and tired of it. (An aside: my wife and I were in the waiting room of the Ford dealership in my hometown, waiting for our minivan to be fixed, when we stopped to look at a display case of Ford memorabilia. There was a button, if memory serves, from the late ’70s, advertising a great Ford incentive to buyers: finance your new Ford at a low, low 14 percent! That was 1978.)  More:

But that archetypal 1978 couple with the AMC Pacer was not voting to see its share of the economic pie drastically reduced over the next 30 years. They were not fed up with how little of the national income went to the top one percent or how unfairly progressive the tax code was. They did not want to dismantle government programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which had brought economic security to the middle class. They were not voting to weaken government itself, as long as it defended their interests. But for the next three decades, the dominant political faction pursued these goals as though they were what most Americans wanted. Organized money and the conservative movement seized that moment back in 1978 to begin a massive, generation-long transfer of wealth to the richest Americans. The transfer continued in good economic times and bad, under Democratic presidents and Republican, when Democrats controlled Congress and when Republicans did.

This is a key point, and one that resonates with me more than any of it, because it is part of the cultural revolution that has taken place too. And it comes from the left as well as the right. The loss of a sense of shame has — surprise! — created shamelessness:

But even more fundamental than public policy is the long-term transformation of the manners and morals of American elites — what they became willing to do that they would not have done, or even thought about doing, before. Political changes precipitated, and in turn were aided by, deeper changes in norms of responsibility and self-restraint. In 1978, it might have been economically feasible and perfectly legal for an executive to award himself a multimillion-dollar bonus while shedding 40 percent of his work force and requiring the survivors to take annual furloughs without pay. But no executive would have wanted the shame and outrage that would have followed — any more than an executive today would want to be quoted using a racial slur or photographed with a paid escort. These days, it is hard to open a newspaper without reading stories about grotesque overcompensation at the top and widespread hardship below. Getting rid of a taboo is easier than establishing one, and once a prohibition erodes, it can never be restored in quite the same way. As Leo Tolstoy wrote, “There are no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone around him.”

Read the whole thing. Really, it’s worth registering.