George Will smackdown

George Will's latest article contains some specious empirical claims about global warming, and the internet has responded with force.

The curious and the heroic

Conservative commentators David Brooks and George Will had strikingly different reactions to the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. For Brooks, the demonstrations of large groups working in synchronicity evoked a sort of scientific curiosity about how a society like China's and one like ours might be fundamentally different, and what that might mean for the future of geopolitics:

The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world.

[...]

...experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts....Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships.

[...]

...what happens if collectivist societies snap out of their economic stagnation? What happens if collectivist societies, especially those in Asia, rise economically and come to rival the West? A new sort of global conversation develops.

The opening ceremony...was part of China’s assertion that development doesn’t come only through Western, liberal means, but also through Eastern and collective ones.

For George Will, on the other hand, the ceremonies brought to mind a more straightforward analogy to--what else?--Nazi Germany:

For only the third time in 72 years (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980), the Games are being hosted by a tyrannical regime, the mind of which was displayed in the opening ceremonies featuring thousands of drummers, each face contorted with the same grotesquely frozen grin. It was a tableau of the miniaturization of the individual and the subordination of individuality to the collective. Not since the Nazi's 1934 Nuremberg rally, which Leni Riefenstahl turned into the film "Triumph of the Will," has tyranny been so brazenly tarted up as art.

A worldwide audience of billions swooned over the Beijing ceremony. Who remembers 1934? Or anything.

Both Brooks and Will are interested in the same basic question: the question of the threat of Chinese collectivism. But their attitudes are very different. Brooks looks to empirical research to try to understand Chinese society, and regards it as something that is historically new under the sun, an alternative--and perhaps distinctly Chinese--route to development. Will, on the other hand, is all too ready to understand China as a 21st century reincarnation of 20th century Nazi Germany. Zhang Yimou is Leni Riefenstahl; Beijing is Berlin; 2008 is 1934.

Brooks casts himself as the curious commentator who believes that the world can be understood via empirical research at the sociological and neuro-psychological level; Will casts himself as the heroic voice in the wilderness who believes that the world is best understood via historical analogies.

I'm not sure if one approach is categorically better than the other, or if there might be a third kind of sensibility that is a better choice than these two. But personally I find the Brooks outlook more prudent and more open to new possibilities--and therefore, in a world that is difficult to divine, more sound.

What is honor?

Though I disagree with George Will's position on the housing/credit crisis, something else he mentions in that op-ed--something about John McCain--rings absolutely true:

McCain's only solecism is his loopy idea that mortgage lenders should make a "response" that is "similar" to General Motors' policy of interest-free financing immediately after Sept. 11. Patting himself on the back, as is his wont, McCain said he is too honorable to "play election-year politics" or "allow dogma to override common sense." Then he cast this issue as he casts too many issues, as a matter of patriotism, saying of lenders: "They've been asking the government to help them out. I'm now calling on them to help their customers and their nation out."

...

McCain practices the politics of honor: He thinks that whatever his instincts tell him is honorable must be so and that those who think otherwise are dishonorable. This makes him difficult to deal with but does no other harm, as long as it is kept separate from governing.

This indeed seems to be a pattern with McCain: he'll get it into his head that something is or isn't honorable/patriotic, and then get all bull-headed about it one way or the other. But the problem is, it is not as if he ever really explains exactly what he means by these classical virtues, nor how a particular policy position upholds them. George Will is right to question in what sense lenders owe borrowers lower interest rates as a matter of patriotism--if McCain is really committed to individual freedom and the free market, then lenders should be able to set interests at the market rate. It seems as though McCain is in the awkward position of advocating the principles of the free market, and yet condemning anyone who actually follows them as dishonorable or unpatriotic.

Maybe the purest example of McCain's arbitrary virtue-mongering is his bizarre fixation with banning Ultimate Fighting matches, even though his favorite sport, boxing, is clearly more brutal:

When I tell people I'm an ultimate fighting fan, they invariably respond: "Don't people get killed all the time doing that?" But no one has ever been killed at the UFC--though boxers are killed every year. No one has even been seriously injured at the UFC. On the rare occasions when a bout has ended with a bloody knockout, the loser has always walked out of the ring.

But this does not impress boxing fans, who are the most vigorous opponents of extreme fighting. McCain sat ringside at a boxing match where a fighter was killed. When I asked him to explain the moral distinction between boxing and ultimate fighting, he exploded at me, "If you can't see the moral distinction, then we have nothing to talk about!" Then he cut our interview short and stormed out of his office.

What is disturbing here is that McCain's reasons for wanting to ban Ultimate Fighting seem pretty unexamined--like he took one look at it, decided it wasn't genteel enough for civilized society, and so chose to do the "right" and "honorable" thing by trying to get the perceived barbarism banned. But I think he owes fans of Ultimate Fighting a reason as to why their sport should be banned besides merely that it disgusts John McCain.

But that's trivial. An issue that is actually important in which McCain's gut-instinct sense of honor comes into play is the Iraq War. He often frames withdrawal in terms of something that would be dishonorable to do--but the reasons why he thinks this is so are sort of ambiguous to me.

There seem to be two different rationales in play. The first is that--as an empirical matter--if we were to withdraw troops, then it would unleash chaos and genocide in the region. This would be dishonorable--not just because we would be causing harm to innocents, but because this action would constitute a breaking of an American promise to Iraqis that we would render unto them a functioning democratic society. Besides the fact that I might disagree with the empirical claim that it relies on, I don't really see a problem with this rationale--indeed, if for the sake of argument I grant the claim, then I agree with McCain wholeheartedly.

However, there seems to be another strand in McCain's honor rhetoric, one that is a lot more alarming: he seems to think that withdrawing from Iraq is dishonorable because it entails defeat, and that defeat is unacceptable in and of itself:

In a recent interview, Randy Scheunemann, who runs the McCain campaign's foreign policy shop, noted that "Vietnam had a huge impact on John." Obviously. Less obvious: "It's not about his personal experiences in the war as a POW," he said. "It's about leading a group of naval aviators [after the Vietnam war] when they had to cannibalize parts."

Mr. Scheunemann is referring to a chapter in Mr. McCain's life when in 1974 he took command of the Navy's largest naval air squadron in Jacksonville, Fla. Nearly 20 of the squadron's 50 jets had been grounded for lack of maintenance, and some hadn't flown in years. Mr. McCain eventually managed to get all his planes flying again, a professional triumph. But the condition of the post-Vietnam Navy turned out to be an abiding lesson to Mr. McCain about what happens to a defeated military.

For McCain, it is as though the ramifications of a defeat for the military are so dire that it is worth it to achieve a "victory" at great cost just to avoid "defeat". But this is sheer lunacy, a view of the world that could only come from someone whose life experience is overwhelmingly defined by the military life, by war, by victory and defeat. Most people in America are not life-long soldiers and don't care about these marshal notions, as such: no one wants to continue to send soldiers and money to Iraq just to achieve some abstract ideal of victory. If we do go to war, there better be a real substantive reason for it, like to protect national security or prevent ethnic cleansing--and if we find ourselves in a war in which no such objectives can be achieved, then we better withdraw. Some would call this defeat--and I suppose they would be right, generally speaking. But they'd be wrong to call it dishonorable. Defeat isn't dishonorable if it comes as a result of a valid realization that the war is not worth the fighting for; indeed, there can be nothing dishonorable, in my view, about valuing the lives of individuals in this way.

What would be great is if there were someone like Socrates around who could grill McCain on these questions about virtues. What Socrates would do back in ancient Athens is hang out in the public square and get into conversations with the local big-shots. He'd often start by asking them a simple-seeming question about a virtue--like "What is courage?" or "What is justice?" or "What is truth?"--and proceed to cross-examine them on it until his victim tripped up by contradicting himself. Often times Socrates' point wasn't so much to prove one theory or another, but to demonstrate that, though the public figure he questioned might talk a lot about this or that virtue, he couldn't actually give a coherent account of what it meant, exactly.

I wonder just how badly McCain would do under this kind of philosophical cross-examination. If the interview about the moral distinction between boxing and Ultimate Fighting is any indication, I'd say he'd do pretty poorly.

Basic fairness

I usually admire George Will for being a good and intellectually honest writer, but I think he really misses the main liberal concern over McCain's noninterventionist approach to the credit and housing crisis. Says Will approvingly:

[McCain] says "it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers." For now, he is with Senate Republicans in opposing the Democrats' proposal to empower judges to rewrite the terms of some mortgages, an idea that strikes at the sanctity of contracts and hence at the ethic of promise-keeping that is fundamental to social life.

He goes on to criticize liberals as typically anti-market:

With the command-and-control propensity of contemporary liberalism, Clinton predictably advocates a policy that has a record, running from Roman times to the present, that is unblemished by success. It is the policy of price controls: Her proposed five-year freeze on interest rates would be a control on the price of money.

And concludes with a standard conservatives-are-all-about-
individual-responsibility-and-ipso-facto-the-free-market comment:

Obama says that McCain's (again, relatively) noninterventionist response to credit difficulties proves that he favors a "you're on your own" society. McCain, a center-right candidate seeking to lead a center-right country, should embrace Obama's accusation as an accolade, saying:

"This is the crux of the difference between the two parties -- belief in the competence, responsibility and accountability of individuals. When Obama characterizes my position as 'little more than watching this crisis happen,' he again has part of a point. The housing market must find its bottom, and no good can come from delaying the day that it does."

For all this talk of personal responsibility and the sanctity of the free market, it is amazing to me that Will doesn't so much as mention the 400-pound gorilla in the room: the Fed's multi-billion dollar bailout of Bear Stearns. There is widespread agreement--from economists of both liberal and conservative stripe--that it was right for the government to bail out Bear Stearns, because it and other firms in similar liquidity trouble are "too big to fail". That is to say, if Bear Stearns and other Wall Street financial institutions were allowed to sleep in the disheveled beds that they've made for themselves, the ramifications would be so extreme as to usher in a second Great Depression--causing a chain reaction of firm failures and a credit drought that would cause the economy to grind to a halt and implode (metaphors mixed: 4!). Since that would be a horrible disaster for everybody, it is widely agreed that, though doing so constitutes a "moral hazard"--i.e., would be rewarding bad behavior in the market--it is nevertheless necessary for the good of all to bail out these huge firms.

The liberal--or not even really liberal, just the common-sense question is: how can you justify bailing out the financial institutions while at the same time leaving individual homeowners to fend for themselves? It seems to me that basic fairness dictates that what is good for the goose is good for the gander: if you're going to bail out some players, you have to bail out all the players, irregardless of the accidental fact that some are "too big to fail" and others aren't. Sure, this consitutes a "moral hazard"--but isn't it true that your market morality has already been heavily compromised by the Bear Stearns bailout in the first place?

To George Will's credit, it appears as though, if it were up to him, there wouldn't have been bailouts for anyone, Bear Stearns included. At least, that's what I glean from this comment from his appearance on This Week with George Stephenopoulos:

The Republicans have now put themselves in a bind because people now say look if you have Wall Street socialism, whereby you save Bear Sterns, or at least save JP Morgan to buy Bear Sterns, and you are thereby socializing the losses and keeping the profits private, why not help everybody. Soon we’ll hear from everyone in the country who has a student loan. This is,it’s a burden, help me.

Setting aside the empirical question as to whether or not this course of action would have caused Depression II--a result that I think we can all agree is a lot worse than violating "the sanctity of contracts" and, by way of slippery slope, inviting the collectivist ire of indebted grad students--I think Will is guilty of the same sort of ideology-induced fallacy that affects liberals who want troops out of Iraq just because they never should have been there in the first place. In both cases, the question is of the form: Given that x has already occurred, what should we do about y? You can't just give an ideologically-pure, pat answer that condemns both x and y. The answer needs to acknowledge that the fact that x has already happened complicates things, and that, pragmatically, this affects our decision about y. For the liberal on the Iraq issue, that means acknowledging the possibility that leaving Iraq could be way worse than staying; and for Will on the housing crisis issue, it means acknowledging that there is at least a problem of perceived unfairness with regards to bailing out Wall Street while ignoring Main Street.