The ISI/Liberty Fund colloquium for graduate students on federalism and constitutionalism held at the Russell Kirk Center in Mecosta was a great time.  We had two fine discussion leaders in Profs. Carey Roberts and Jim Bond and an interesting mix of law, history and political philosophy students to work through some choice readings from The Federalist, Anti-Federalist writings, the Hayne-Webster debate, Calhoun and more modern texts (sections of the European Constitution and several Court rulings of the past decade or so).  I had the privilege and honour of meeting Mrs. Kirk at the Center, and she was good enough to have us into her home on a couple of occasions.  She is a charming and engaging lady, and a great hostess.  The Center certainly keeps her busy–she was in Indianapolis last week, where Rod Dreher, Max Goss and others spoke, and as I understood it she will be at another ISI event next week as well.  

As a Byzantinist, I was something of the amateur among those who did their work on political theory and American history, but I enjoyed being part of the discussions both during and after the sessions.  I also made a trip over to the used bookstore there in town, finding a few nice volumes, including the reminiscences of Anna Dostoevsky and a Defoe title I had never heard of before.  The weekend was very pleasant, and I look forward to a chance to do something like that again, though I will be glad to be through with the conference season in a few weeks.  All of the events I have gone to this year have been excellent, but I will be glad to be traveling a little less after next month.

Another tack seems to be to deemphasize material remains and cultural complexity, and suggest that the energies of the post-Roman Western world were funneled into Christianity. Ward-Perkins notes that encyclopedias of Late Antiquity are heavily tilted toward coverage of religious arguments, schisms and transformations, with relatively little space given to architecture, secular learning or politics. In other words, though Late Antiquity might be materially poorer than the Classical Imperial period, at least in the west, it was spiritually superior. Frankly, to me this is reminiscent of Communist era attempts to dismiss the consumer cornucopia of the capitalist world by suggesting that socialist man was spiritually richer if materially poorer. ~Razib

Ward-Perkins, like Liebeschuetz before him, is absolutely right to emphasise the archaeological and material evidence that shows undeniable economic contraction and the relative decline of Greco-Roman urbanism of the classical type.  Indeed, no one working in late antiquity really denies any of these claims of fact, and every decent history of late antiquity in the Mediterranean world takes account of these changed material realities.  Late antique historians certainly talk about architecture, for instance, at least as far as the Eastern Empire goes, since the modeling of church basilicas on secular halls and the magnificent achievement of Hagia Sophia are but two remarkable legacies of the late antique period.  If there is a great deal of attention paid to religious arguments and schisms in late antique studies (in my opinion, there is not nearly enough attention actually paid to religious controversy and heaps and heaps of attention paid to hagiography), that is because there were quite a few of them happening with rather significant consequences for the development of different parts of the Mediterranean world.  Each time you have someone sniff with Gibbonian disdain for religious contentions over an iota, you will wind up with five cultural historians who want to dedicate their lives to defending the importance of such contentions.  Each time someone comes along and says, “But, look, people really were poorer!  Things got worse!” the cultural historians will groan and say, “Yes, we understand.  Now let’s talk about something really interesting.”  These two approaches should not have to be at war with each other, since they are inherently complementary.  Obviously, comparisons of late antique scholarship to commie propaganda in any context will not encourage this sort of happy collaboration.   

Where the cultural and late antique historians part company with the late Romanists and archaeologists is in their evaluation of the worth of the period and its production, or rather the former believe that the period should receive the attention appropriate to a crucial period of transformation that contains answers for, among other things, how the medieval world came into being. 

Late antiquity had to be invented as a separate period and basically as a new concept because generations of classicists had told everyone that once the glory of Rome had passed everything went to hell and wasn’t really worth talking about.  Even traditional church history in the West used to stop at Chalcedon, as if the theologians were conceding that the fate of the empire and the fate of really interesting theology were inextricably linked. 

Church historians obviously have a hard time going along with a full-on decline and fall view, since it quite explicitly devalues the epoch of the Church’s great early efflourescence.  Tell them that the world of the 4th and 5th centuries are a “period of decline” and they will throw Chrysostom and Augustine back in your face, and they are right to do so.  Cultural historians are horrified at the idea that a whole range of centuries, in which cultural production of various kinds (including Neoplatonic philosophical works, the work of the 4th and 5th century rhetoricians and the secular court poetry of, say, Corripus and George of Pisidia) remained fairly high but had changed form, should be put on the back burner because those centuries represent a relative worsening of material conditions compared to an earlier period.  Imagine if early modernists took the same approach, ignoring the 17th century because life was so much more miserable and so much more full of religious controversy in many parts of Europe than in the 16th–how absurd would that be?

On the whole, late antique historians today try to avoid speaking in terms of either decline or superiority.  This is a result of cultural history dominating late antique studies, and there are certain things to be said against arguments about transformation that are so vague that one might conclude that no one is paying that much attention to content, but one has to understand the tremendous prejudices and biases built in to the traditional narrative sweep of European history that late antique historians battle against all the time.  They are compelled to speak in terms of transformation and change because so many people still think of the period as one of collapse and ruin.  The old apologetic interest in the Age of Faith is not what it once was and there is also a reluctance among the scholars, most of whom are not necessarily particularly religious, to engage in a lot of Christian triumphalism.  If anything, late antique studies of late have often been aimed at rehabilitating the religious deviants and heretics of the period to give a complete picture of the social fabric of that world.  That actually seems to me to be a very worthwhile thing to be doing (it is also, in a way, the kind of thing I am doing, though with less heretic-rehabilitation and more focus on the meaning deviant theologies had for their adherents), and it does not require us to dismiss or ignore material evidence and the realities of straitened conditions that this evidence shows.

Conversely, the pro-America vote is only 1% in Argentina. When did Argentina become the most anti-American country in the world? Even the French and the Palestinians are more sympathetic to a leading role for the U.S. Weird. ~Kevin Drum

I have two words for Drum: debt default.  The ruin of the Argentine economy accelerated after the default of 2001, intensifying already widespread dissatisfaction with neoliberal “austerity” measures.  Loss of confidence in the government and the dollar-pegged currency among foreign investors had been worsened by the decision to devalue the peso.  There had already been a run on the banks, which ended up destroying the savings of much the Argentine middle class and forcing a freezing of savings that then deepened the recession.  The resulting meltdown after the default flung hundreds of thousands and millions below the poverty line and sent unemployment skyrocketing.  The Economist reported in February 2002:

Such is the awe-inspiring severity of the economic, financial, political and social collapse that has befallen Latin America’s hitherto richest country and its third-largest economy. 

That tends to put people in a bad mood.  At the time, this was blamed squarely on the U.S.-backed, World Bank/IMF-approved neoliberal policies of the Menem and de la Rua governments.  The Argentine meltdown was the beginning of the end of the neoliberal era in Latin America.  There are now no governments in Latin America that would go within ten feet of the label neoliberal, much less the policies associated with it.  As neoliberalism goes, so goes the reputation of the United States, which was the principal sponsor of the doctrine.   

American refusal to bail out the Argentines, announced in the editorials of The Wall Street Journal among other places, made the association between the economic collapse of Argentina and America even stronger.  Good job, WSJ–another bright and shining victory for “free markets and free people”!  Add to that decades of Peronism and economic populism, both of which flourish when they have an outside force politicians can blame for the woes of the country, and it is not hard to understand why Argentinians have particularly hard feelings towards U.S. leadership in the world.  As they probably see it, if the U.S. had a much lower international profile Washington would not have been able to press unsuitable policies on their government–indeed, it would not have even tried to do so.  It is not surprising at all that 84% of Argentines don’t trust the United States to act responsibly.  

Interestingly, Argentina is relatively more sanguine about America functioning as the “world’s policeman”–more Americans (76%) believe the U.S. is doing more along these lines than it should than do Argentines (62%).  Running up against that is the figure showing 75% of Argentines who think the U.S. should have fewer bases around the world, which is a higher percentage to take this view than any other country listed in this survey (France is a close second).

My guess is that neoconservatives will not be smiling after seeing this.   

Col. Wilkerson has a simple phrase that will be very annoying to some: “Israel is a strategic burden on the United States.”  That certainly seems to be true.

Via Antiwar Blog

Compare and contrast the depths of stupidity and callousness to which politicians will go.  Here is Huckabee a few weeks ago in an interview with RCP:

There are things we need to be afraid of; we need to be afraid of Islamic fascists; we need to afraid of the internal terrors that we face. The fact that many people will go to work this Friday and get a pink slip and be told that the job they’ve been working at 20 years won’t exist anymore. The fear that people are going to get a phone call that their 8 year old has broken his arm on the playground and they’re not sure how they’re going to pay the doctor bill and pay the rent on the first of the month.

That’s real terror. I mean, people have to understand that there are many forms of terror in the United States. There’s a terror that exists because our healthcare system is upside down and we’re just so overwhelmed with chronic disease that it’s bankrupting us and making us non-competitive. Parents are afraid their kids are going to spend twelve years in schools and still not be prepared to challenge the issues of the world.

So those are real true forms of terror for many American families.

This week it was Obama’s chance to try to see the big picture in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre:

There’s also another kind of violence though that we’re gonna have to think about. It’s not necessarily physical violence but that the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways. Last week, the big news, obviously, had to do with Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women who were role models for all of us, role models for my daughter. I spend, along with my wife, a lot of time making sure that my two young daughters, who are gorgeous and tall and I hope will get basketball scholarships, that they feel good about who they are and that they understand they can do whatever they can dream might be possible. And for them to be degraded, or to see someone who looks like them degraded, that’s a form of violence – it may be quiet, it may not surface to the same level of the tragedy we read about today and we mourn, but it is violence nonethesame.

We [inaudible]…. There’s the violence of men and women who have worked all their lives and suddenly have the rug pulled out from under ’em because their job has moved to another country. They’ve lost their job, they’ve lost their pension benefits, and they’ve lost their health care and they’re having to compete against their teenage children for jobs at the local fast food place paying $7 an hour.

There is the violence of children, whose voices are not heard, in communities that are ignored. Who don’t have access to a decent education, who are surrounded by drugs and crime and a lack of hope.

There is something pretty badly out of joint if politicians find it appropriate to liken unemployment and slurs to terrorism and criminal violence.  Obama has been down this road before, of course, remarking to AIPAC that the problem is not so much terrorism as it is cynicism.  In one sense, he might have had a point, except that this is what he always says.  Kaus offers an explanation:

It suggests a mindset that tries to fit every event into a familiar, comforting framework he can spoon-feed his audience [bold in original]  without disturbing them.

A less charitable explanation is that Obama isn’t nearly as politically savvy as many of us, myself included, thought he was.  Perhaps he will keep saying similarly incredibly vacuous and/or obnoxious things for the next eight months.

Update: Steve Sailer notes that this bad speech is an expanded retread of an old Jesse Jackson routine.

It’s also worth noting that Obama almost literally cannot make a speech about anything without mentioning his parents, especially his father, his wife or his daughters.  Some might find this to be a touching attachment to family.  I find it to be a tiresome habit of trotting out his biography and family life as the only substantive, new things he ever has to talk about.

Update: Ross talks about the speech here.

Forty-eight percent of Americans 18 to 29 years old said the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, while 45 percent said the United States should have stayed out. That is in sharp contrast to the opinions of those 65 and older, who have lived through many other wars. Twenty eight percent of that age group said the United States did the right thing, while 67 percent said the United States should have stayed out. ~The New York Times

Via Ross

Well, if that’s right, it pretty much shoots to pieces my idea of a generational mass abandonment of the neocons and neolibs.  On the “bright” side, it could just be that my fellow youngsters are really ignorant and have no idea what they’re talking about when they say things like this!

This flattering picture, which makes even the senator blush, has seldom been challenged by political commentators or the public. And as of mid-March 2007, no one had tried in earnest to subvert the idea that, as president, Obama could help ease America’s racial tensions because his mother was white and his father was black.

But that’s exactly what Steve Sailer, a columnist for the anti-immigration site VDARE.com, tried to do in a piece he submitted to the American Conservative magazine, where, at the time, I was assistant editor. Using quotes from Obama’s 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Sailer portrayed the senator not as a unifying figure, but as an angry black nationalist who completely rejected his white racial heritage as a young man and might do the same as president.

“[T]here is the confusing contrast,” he wrote, “between the confident, suave master politician we see on television and the tormented narrator of Dreams, who is an updated Black Pride version of the old ‘tragic mulatto’ stereotype found in ‘Show Boat’ and ‘Imitation of Life.’ ” Sailer surmised that Obama “offers important testimony about the enduring glamour of anti-white anger.”

Even before I read the piece I knew I wouldn’t like it. TAC’s editor, who was pleased with Sailer’s work, had told me as much. But I found the piece so offensive when I first read it that I jumped out of my chair and rushed into the managing editor’s office to try to kill it on the spot. She and the editor promptly dismissed my objections. The piece is provocative, they said—it’s edgy. It’s racist, I said—and the magazine will be regarded as such for publishing it.  ~Alexander Konetzki

Now I have briefly worked with Mr. Konetzki during the time he was at TAC, and I think he was and is a good editor.  I had heard about his resignation and the reason for it, which I thought was strange (especially after I read the “offensive” Sailer article), but I thought that it wasn’t a big deal.  People have strong disagreements about editorial priorities and tone and policies, and sometimes they part ways of their own accord.  While I don’t quite understand why some people go to work for a publication whose political leanings are both plain as day (had Mr. Konetzki never read a Steve Sailer piece in TAC before?) and evidently contrary to their own, I really don’t understand why they then act as if this state of affairs is both a surprise and an outrage.  Ross makes a good point about this here.  Jim Antle has fun with this here.  I understand even less why you would turn on former employers on account of this disagreement.  Resigning in protest is one thing, but public ridicule and using private conversations against your colleagues are something else all together.  Just because an association is brief does not obviate the need for at least a certain decent interval to pass before criticising your former colleagues (it’s been what, about a month?).  I don’t think any interval is long enough to make slamming your former colleagues and insinuating that they wink and nod at racist commentary an appropriate move, at least not unless you have a good deal more to back it up than does Mr. Konetzki. 

Of course, Mr. Konetzki cannot have really been entirely unaware that the great and good in establishment political circles in Washington and New York almost certainly already thought TAC was racist (among other things), partly because of its position on immigration and partly because it is vital to the great and the good to think this about anything related to Mr. Buchanan et al.  Naturally, nothing could be more untrue–not that any of this will likely matter to readers of the Monthly.  It is possible to object to Sailer’s interpretation of Obama, even to find it completely wrong, and not consider it racist.  It is possible Mr. Konetzki’s criticisms of the article would have gone over much better had he not immediately resorted to flinging a loaded charge with what seems to me to be too much ease.  Had he been more familiar with the typical and inaccurate criticisms of Sailer, he had to know that calling something that Sailer wrote racist would be guaranteed to make many conservatives ignore whatever else he had to say against the article.  If Steve Sailer sneezes, people say it is a racist sneeze; if he takes a sip of water, he must be doing it because he hates non-whites, etc.  They say this because he has the bad taste to talk about sociobiology and genetic differences as if they mattered in the real world.  In this article he then gave the ultimate offense: he suggested that the great multiculti political hope of the present moment tends to identify with one side of his background over the other.  If this is true, this is not obviously disqualifying; it may not even be an unattractive trait.  It is considered a negative only by those who think race and ethnicity are or ought to be entirely irrelevant to our entire political discourse.  Identifying with one group over another and championing their particular interests are not bad traits to my mind, but if that’s true about Obama this would directly contradict his current public image that so many people find appealing.   

In my view, Sailer’s article was actually a sympathetic portrayal of sorts (though it also clearly had its critical and polemical elements), showing that Obama is not the absurd race-unifying comic book character candidate that his admirers would have him be, but a real person who has described how he understands his identity, heritage and upbringing in very personal terms.    Mr. Konetzki claims that Mr. Sailer misrepresented some things or simply got some facts wrong.  I would say that even if Sailer is misreading something in the book, that is much more likely a case of mistaken judgement rather than a distortion of facts.  Sailer’s error here was to try to make Obama into someone interesting enough to merit all the attention the man already receives.  No one wants to know what’s actually in the empty vessel they are busily pouring their hopes into, and they don’t respond well when they hear that the contents are not what they imagined them to be.  But it is actually quite difficult to see how it is racist to highlight those aspects of Obama’s struggles with his own identity that Obama himself includes in his published works and then to draw conclusions from the story about Obama’s views.  Perhaps Mr. Sailer pushed some interpretations farther than they merited or read into the memoir more than was there, but it is extremely hard to accept that the article isracist.

A few wrote to remind him [Pope Benedict] that, as far as “reason” was concerned, it was Arab rationalists like Avicenna and Averroës who, with their commentaries on Aristotle, had saved Greek thought from obliteration during Europe’s undeniably dark Dark Ages. ~Jane Kramer

Via Reihan

This would be nice, if it were true.  Yes, Muslims preserved the Greek learning that they found in the lands they conquered, but it wasn’t as if Greek thought was ever in danger of “obliteration,” since the vast majority of Greek literature and history was preserved by the, er, Greeks in Byzantium.  Muslims were especially keen on philosophy and scientific texts, and these they made use of and recopied down through the centuries, which then facilitated their introduction into western Europe.  But they had little use for the playwrights, poets and historians, whose works we have primarily because of the Byzantines, who were also preserving the philosophical and scientific texts at the same time. 

It might also be worth noting that Avicenna and Averroes were notoriously “unorthodox” by the Islamic standards of their day with beliefs about the eternity of the world and the like standing in direct contradiction to Islamic revelation.  One of these philosophers felt the need to imagine truth as running on two tracks that did not intersect very often: the truths of reason and revelation were both true, but they were not going to fit together or be reconciled.  Even when Islam had a place for philosophy, it was never as a “handmaid” to theology, but usually more in the role of a scullery maid who would be allowed to scrub the floors as long as she made sure to stay out of the master’s way.  The obvious points would be that al-Kindi, Avicenna and Averroes represent a limited phenomenon that rather underscores and proves Pope Benedict’s Regensburg observation about the nature of Islam.  These three, with perhaps a couple others, represent the greatest achievements of Islamic philosophy for its first six centuries, but they are relatively few in number and ultimately had much less significance for the overall development of Islamic thought than the jurists and mystics had.  There was a moment when a kind of actually Islamic rationalism was on the rise, and it was squashed in the ninth century and never really fully reappeared.  Even then, it was a highly eccentric movement within Islam and one deemed to be wrong on fundamental questions of theology, as indeed it would have to have been if the divinity of Qur’anic authority was going to be confirmed.

When there is a conflict overseas that involves foreigners killing each other, liberal and neoconservative interventionists are convinced that it is genocide, know that it will get much worse and demand that we “do something.”  When there is a conflict overseas that involves Americans fighting foreigners, neoconservatives and Jacksonians are confident that everything will get much better and the end is in sight, while liberal interventionists will say that things can only get worse.  Non-interventionists say, “Don’t get involved and don’t start wars,” and all the other groups tell them that they have no grasp on reality.

France is only the latest example of Europe’s left-right spectrum decomposing from below, as the lower-middle (heirs to the Poujadists and the Trotskyists) revolts against the orthodoxies of the upper-middle.  The mostly shallow fusionism of Ségo and Sarko marks a clumsy attempt to reconcile with the new political reality.  European politicians, at least, “Are All Pim Fortuyns Now.” I think it’s only a matter of time before a similar political landscape emerges here in the United States. We have the considerable advantage of a large and growing economy, and yet we also have a sky-high rate of incarceration that might soon become for us what tension over assimilation and immigration has been for Europe — and then some. ~Reihan Salam