Well, going to Argentina without telling anyone is a bit weird. A politician having an affair, not so weird.  No, not John Ensign, Mark Sanford:

The married father of four emotionally apologized to his wife, staff and others at a news conference after returning Wednesday from a trip to Argentina that followed a dayslong absence. He staff had said the Republican was hiking on the Appalachian Trail.

Sanford says he met the woman about eight years ago and it became romantic about a year ago. He says his wife and family have known about it for the past five months.

I guess we can at least be rest-assured that several of the sons of Mitt Romney are robust enough that there is going to be a natural deterrent against their father having a midlife life crisis that leads to extra-marital adventure.

Mark Sanford went hiking without telling the powers that be. It seems that a public person can’t have a private life. I understand the objections, but it all seems a bit overwrought. Sanford is a governor of a moderate sized state. There are plenty of disincentives toward public service, but this is getting ridiculous.

I recently read The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914, a cultural history somewhat in the tradition of Tony Judt’s Postwar. Rather than focusing on the economic data from the first age of globalization, or the Byzantine aspects of diplomatic history which presaged the Great War, The Vertigo Years surveys the terrain of intellect and art, from Cubism to Freudianism. Even obscure social phenomena such the renewed enthusiasm for dueling get significant treatment. Of course the Scramble for Africa and the flexing of military muscle in the interests of colonial expansion does loom large in the background.

But did the quest for empire matter at the end of the day? Britain and France were imperial nations par excellence, had been, and would continue to be for several decades. Other nations such as the Netherlands and Portugal had relatively modest possessions. Germany and Italy famously attempted to cobble together colonies out of the leavings of what other powers had neglected. And finally Switzerland, Sweden and other assorted nations remained out of the game. But did it matter? Does the current prosperity of the French state (or lack of) as opposed to the German state have any roots in the fact that Germany’s colonial experience was truncated and marginal at best? My friend John Derbyshire has observed that with the fall of the British Empire Britain itself went into decline. From this some might suggest that the rise of Britain, and in particular England, tracked the rise of its Empire. But in Farewell to Alms Greg Clark suggests that the roots of the economic take-off of the 19th century can be discerned in the 17th and perhaps even earlier. The Netherlands had a long and relatively sucessful history of empire in the Indies, and the VOC was in many ways the model for the modern corporation. Belgium, a creation of the 19th century, had a short and rather ill-starred experience with empire. And yet there is little difference between the two today economically.

I suspect that colonial empires loom large because they feed the vanity of great men. How many people remember today the supposed economic benefits which would accrue from the British acquisition of Burma? Pragmatic men, such as Otto von Bismarck were suspicious of the colonial project. The “resource curse” is well known in economics today, windfall wealth that is unearned tends to eat at the heart of a society. If Greg Clark is right the origins of the Industrial Revolution in Britain lay not in the raw materials and luxury goods which were secured via colonialism, but through the gains of productivity generated by the human capital of the British people themselves. Perhaps greatness did not come to Britain because of empire, but the empire was an effect of its greatness.

I found Dr. Grant Havers’ rumination on the relationship between paleoconservatism and Protestantism of interest, though the broad points were not surprising to me. James Kalb at the Traditionalism FAQ notes that “Protestantism often has an uneasy relation to traditionalism,” before adding that “Nonetheless, it is not monolithic and one should distinguish cases.” This is clear from the fact that Mr. Kalb brackets out Anglicanism into its own section from Protestantism more broadly. There are obviously substantive grounds to do this, but it emphasizes that within Protestantism there is a great deal of variation. Though David Hacket Fisher’s thesis in Albion’s Seed is couched in an integrative cultural fashion, it is clear that the “Cavalier” Anglicanism is a distinct Protestant tradition from that of “Puritan” New England. Though I believe that the argument that the Radical Reformation was likely the root of much which is unpalatable, and to be fair, praiseworthy, of the modern world is a strong one, on occasion it seems to me that its opponents claim too much. Years ago I read Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church: A 2,000-Year History (thanks to pointer from Lew Rockwell’s site). An interesting narrative, but it seemed that the author felt that the Reformation was a disaster both because it destroyed the cosmopolitan liberal international order of the medieval world, and, because it ushered in the liberal international order of the modern world!

In any case, instead of offering more opinions on ground well trod, I thought it would be interesting to look at differences between Catholics and Protestants in nations which have a long history of each faction. The World Values Survey has large sample sizes for the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Hungary. These are nations which have a long tradition of both Catholicism and Protestantism, and these confessions do not align with particular ethnic boundaries (both French and German Swiss are Catholic and Protestant). Though there are many variables, I thought it would be informative to look at political self-identification as well as opinions in regards to abortion, a topic where one would assume there might be some difference. In both of these situations individuals could respond on a point scale, so I collapsed them into more compact categories. So for political orientation you see quintiles along Left-Right axis (e.g., Left = 1 and 2, Right = 9 and 10, Center = 5, and so on). For abortion I simply split it between those who leaned toward the practice being unjustifiable and those leaned toward it being justifiable.

Notes:

1) Dutch Protestantism has suffered a much greater defection rate than Catholicism. There are now more Dutch who identify as Catholics than Protestants, though the category of “Nones” is predominantly Protestant in origin and my personal experience is that these individuals may lack positive religious sentiments, but retain an anti-Catholic stance.

2) Swiss Catholics tend to be more concentrated in rural areas than Swiss Protestants (e.g., the Forest Cantons).

3) Hungarian Protestantism is geographically concentrated in the east of the country.

4) The data is from WVS wave 5, so from 2005.

To the scientifically trained my experience is that Freud, along with Marx, is the byword for all that was wrong with attempts by those in domains which were manifestly non-scientific to accrue to themselves the prestige of natural science. Richard rightly alludes to the fact that this goes back, at least in the case of working natural scientists, to the criticisms of Karl Popper. The fruits of Freudianism in an immediate scientific sense were minimal I would judge.

But in hindsight I would admit that most working scientists presume Freud to be a false idol without having read the man’s work, or even the criticisms of Popper himself. Some would argue that the dominant framework within modern cognitive psychology owes as much, or more, to Freud as it does to the Behaviorist paradigm which it overturned. Additionally, most working natural scientists know little about Popper aside from the idea of falsifiability, and are unaware that his ideas are considered old-fashioned within philosophy of science itself. Nor would working scientists care much, as philosophy of science has little to do operationally with the day to day of science as a practice (I would judge that most scientists have a world-view in line with a naive logical positivism, without having ever heard of logical positivism or knowing that the movement has little influence in philosophy of science today).

For myself, I generally repeated the platitudes about the falsity of Freud and the importance of Popper’s insight for years without examining the ideas in their original form (as opposed to third hand allusions to the principle of falsifiability in barely read introductions to phylogenetic papers where results and discussion were of more interest and philosophical issues were ignored). Reading some of the original material gives one a more nuanced perception, as opposed to the black and white cut-outs which populate the historical mythology of science.

In any case, these two posts from a friend who is a practicing cognitive psychologist made me go back and read some Freud, In Defense of Freud and Freud as Literature; Freud as Science.

Bryan Caplan observes of Behaviorial Geneticists versus Policy Implications:

In most disciplines, experts oversell their ability to give useful policy advice.  In behavioral genetics, however, experts strangely undersell their ability to give useful policy advice….

...The upshot: Behavioral genetics makes its politically-correct critics angry because the scientists are putting the politically correct in an awkward position: Deny the science, abandon some of their favorite policies, or sound like dogmatic ideologues. It’s no wonder that they’re angry - and no wonder that they deny the science.  They’re not just making the best of a bad situation; they’re also getting a little revenge on the researchers responsible for their unpleasant predicament.

As they say, “read the whole thing!” Currently the most emailed piece in The New York Times is Rising Above I.Q. Scientists know very well the sort of research and findings intellectuals and the public find acceptable. One set of conclusions will usher a chorus of denounciations, while others will prompt laudatory praise.

Reading Gavin McInnes’  most recent contribution to Taki’s Magazine, I assumed that “Ho-Chunk” was some obscenity which I wasn’t familiar with. But actually Ho-Chunk is another term for the Winnebago tribe. I had a politically correct philosophy professor who always strained to refer to the Haudenosaunee instead of what they are more commonly known as, the Iroquois (in fact, I see that my professor wasn’t pronouncing it correctly in any case!). Somehow I feel that Gavin’s intent in using the term “Ho-Chunk” over the more familiar Winnebago had little to do with cultural sensitivity. But perhaps I misjudge the gentleman and am being uncharitable.

This week’s This American Life featured activist-turned-FBI-snitch Brandon Darby. If you’re curious about Darby, see Revolutionary to rat: The uneasy journey of Brandon Darby. I was more interested in Darby’s recollections of attempting to run an anarchist collective in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward in the wake of Katrina. Their task was to distribute what was needful to the needy. Anyone who has met anarchists knows that their utopian vision melts in the face of genuine attempts to recreate society from the ground-up. Often they produce a functioning order which replicates all of the faults in the societies which they yearn to tear down.

Darby recounts that some of the anarchists unilaterally decided to switch to a vegan kitchen. His response was that since all the food was donated this wasn’t practical, on top of which the people who were consuming the food produced by the kitchen were not vegans themselves and probably wouldn’t be too excited about being forced to eat only vegan food. I know that Left-anarchists produce a lot of literature, if you can call it that. But the tension between freedom & community is not something they can evade, but one which they do not seem to want to address. It is a conundrum which eventually led to Fusionism, the specific boundaries between these two values define the nature of any concrete order. Freedom always has constraints, but Left activist groups often don’t confront this because they are highly self-selected and strongly socialized toward the norms which are common to their subcultures. Their radical freedom of choice actually exists within the narrow parameters of the normative framework which they all share, and the illusion of ordered chaos is maintained through isolation and retreat from the genuine diversity of the world. When I have entered the premises of these sort of collectives I am generally struck by two things. First, the generalized squalor, since they often attract social parasites who shirk communal chores. Second, the peculiar rites and customs which they’ve internalized so as to “manage” their relationships with each other (e.g., a real example, what’s the appropriate etiquette to invite someone to an orgy? It was more complicated than I would have thought).

Well, since I’m already a dork I’m going to talk Trek again as Richard’s post brought up a lot of interesting issues, and he started it (again). I’m not hardcore Trekkie, I haven’t even watched all the films, and haven’t read more than one Star Trek novel (Spock’s World, for the record). Nevertheless in my younger days I was an avid consumer of science fiction and so have always taken an interest in Star Trek (though like many fans of science fiction in book form I tend to get irritated with the conflation of SF in TV & film with science fiction as a whole). Over the years of watching the shows on and off, and using the marvelous facilities of the internet, I’ve apparently collected a fair amount of Trek lore which I can divulge to those unfamiliar with the “canon.”

First, Richard’s observation that Vulcans resemble Jews is entirely defensible. Leonard Nimoy is of course Jewish, and his own background bled into the Spock character, who he basically created over time. And most obviously some of the exoteric aspects of Vulcan culture were derived from Judaism through the Nimoy’s input. Additionally Gene Roddenberry, a classic post-World War II liberal, added the Spock character with his visible differences from the other humans in the Enterprise crew to generate storylines which were obvious comments on race relations in the 1960s. The relationship between humanity and the Other in science fiction is going to have to co-opt preexistent motifs, in the West the relationship between Jews and gentiles is going to be clearly one which makes intelligible some interspecies relationships. But I think there’s an even more accurate model of which human culture the Vulcans resemble, and that is the Chinese.

Jews and Judaism as we understand it today can not be understand without the West as a whole because the Jewish nation did not control its own fate until relatively recently with the emergence of Israel. What we term “Orthodox Judaism” is actually a particular Jewish tradition which managed to survive the rise of Christianity, and later Islam, and crystallized into its current form between the year 500 and 1000 AD. Though Spock’s role on the Enterprise deck to add species diversity which could be worked into the plot, the Vulcans live on a world where they control their own destiny and have produced a relatively homogeneous culture. In this way they resemble the Chinese, who developed their own self-understanding as the only civilized people in the known world. Like the Chinese (and the Jews) the Vulcans are obsessed their own history and antiquity (though since their life spans are on the order of 400-500 years their perspective would be a little different from ours), and like the Chinese it seems that their obsession with logic, their customs and traditions, serve to tame their natures and channel their impulses. To me the Vulcan fixation on logic does not resemble Talmudic Judaism as much as it does Confucianism, which if not necessarily logical, fixated on intellectual self-cultivation by an elite who navigated the amoral imperatives of autocratic Legalism and the utopianism of philosophies such as Moism. The Vulcan philosopher Suvak seems to be a Confucian of his age.

Finally onto the general points about the deracinated humans and aliens with a “thick” cultural matrix, I totally agree with Richard. Gene Roddenberry was a liberal atheist who was affected by the modernist ethos of his era (as well as pulp science fiction). The humans in the Star Trek universe reflect that, they are atheists (explicitly acknowledged in some of the later series). The Ferengis are villains who are based on capitalist Yankee traders; capitalism, materialism, etc. are all -isms which humanity has outgrown. On the other hand the aliens seem to have many very human tendencies sociologically. There is a reason that the Bajorans of Deep Space Nine are analogized to the Poles, with their religious sensibility, nationalist self-conception and resentment toward their Cardasian oppressors. One can imagine a simple reason for this: in science fiction the humans can seem quite alien because we still think of them as humans, but aliens have to be imbued with human characteristics to make them compelling. Science fiction is theoretically a genre of radical ideas, but like all narrative it needs to contend with the hardwired aspects of human nature. A good story is a good story, and has to follow its precedents, no matter what shape the protagonist takes.

OK, I think I’ve expended all the nerd capital I have for a bit now….

I recently read India:  The Definitive History, and am currently reading Neo-Confucianism in History.  When I survey these Eastern societies I am struck by the deep history which marks their current form. For example some of the rites around the Hindu God Shiva are prefigured in representations from the Indus Valley Civilization, 4,000 years ago. The Confucian ideology which has been the central organizing intellectual system of Chinese civilization looks back to a ethos which notionally dates back 3,000 years, to the time of the Duke of Zhou, though aspects of Han culture which remain today are also evident in the Shang era Oracle Bones. Hindu Brahmins and Confucian scholars are heirs to a tradition within their societies which reaches back millennia.

Contrast this with the histories of the civilizations of Western Eurasia.  Modern Egyptians take pride in the antiquity of their nation, but that is dead history, which the fossilized nature of the Coptic language witnesses. It can be argued that ancient Egypt ended with the closure of the pagan temple at Philae in the 6th century. The proud Victorians were learned in the classics…of Greek and Roman literature, not the Beowulf of their tribal ancestors. While the Chinese and Indians have been influenced by foreign ideas, the new and the old have ultimately made peace with each other. In contrast the world of Islam and Christendom were characterized by a spiritual rupture.

Certainly China and India have not stood still and it is trite to say they are “timeless.” But these Eastern societies are defined by evolution, gradual change. They have preserved a reverence for the ancient canon of their civilization, from The Analects to the Upanishads. In contrast the societies of Western Eurasia have been characterized by cultural revolution; within a few centuries of the rise of Islam the Levant and Egypt, which had been home to ancient peoples, had become part of greater Arabia. The Norse mythology is known to us today because of the antiquarian interests of one man, Snorri Sturulson. It is likely that American evangelicals are more familiar with the events in the life of Nebuchadnezzar than the average resident of Basra.