President, Nobel Laureate, and All-Around Cool Dude

So, first off, I suppose a congratulations is in order to President Obama.

Of course there will be critics - there always are - but I particularly love a day when a person lambasting the award as proof that "these prizes are political, not governed by the principles of credibility, values and morals" could either be a blogger at The Corner or Khaled Al-Batsh, the leader of Islamic Jihad in Gaza. (It's the latter, in case you were wondering.)

There is a case to be made that this is "premature" - after all, the president has been in office less than nine months, and to put it gently, the world's various problems aren't exactly solved. But I think the point the Nobel Committee was trying to make was that, in a short amount of time, Obama has fundamentally and radically reoriented the American stance toward the world, restoring it to its traditional stance of cooperative leadership. He has devoted significant time, resources, and political capital early on in his presidency to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; he has ended torture and other stains on America's human rights record; he has articulated a vision of nuclear disarmament and worked to set the world on that course; he has reached out to the Islamic world in a spirit of respect and peace; and he has subtly but effectively undermined an aggressive Iranian regime without firing a single shot. And he did much of this with the blessing and assistance of the international community, working within traditional international institutions and respecting international norms. Certainly some of the world's embrace of Obama is based on relief at the end of the Bush era - to outsiders, what we call "unilateralism" looks more like a middle finger - but to suggest that this man is not uniquely responsible for major advances in the cause of world peace is unfair and shortsighted.

Lots of people will charge - in fact, I've seen it already - that all he has done is "give a speech or two." "Give a speech, win the Nobel Peace Prize! If I had only known it was that easy!"

This criticism, of course, reflects a staggering amount of ignorance about the significant day-to-day work that presidents and governments do. There is no doubt that Obama and his team have put long hours and no small amount of elbow grease into the nuts and bolts of these issues. Governing is a slow and difficult process.

But more to the point, this criticism misses the obvious reality that public gestures are important. That's how you motivate regular people and pressure governments, and it's how world leaders set the course of international affairs. Barack Obama could have set the course, as his predecessor did, towards unilateralism and unnecessary wars. He could have ignored the issue of nuclear disarmament, waited until the last minute to get serious about Israel/Palestine, denied the reality of global warming and the catastrophic effects it could have on the world, refused to engage in diplomacy with America's enemies, defied international law and human rights by torturing prisoners, and regarded other world leaders as obstacles rather than partners in the pursuit of global peace. That kind of behavior certainly wouldn't have been without precedent.

But he took a different course. He dove right into some of the thorniest problems in the world, all of which demand attention and priority - and none of which can wait. And if we have inched closer to a solution to any of those outrages against peace, it is because of the aspirations and work of this specific person. The world is a very different place today because Barack Obama is President of the United States. I think that's worth recognizing.

How Charming!

Andrew Sullivan highlights Jerry Coyne's dispatch from a major meeting of atheists last weekend:

Dan Dennett talked about interviews with active priests and ministers who are atheists, and also mounted a hilarious attack on theologians like Karen Armstrong, who mouth pious nonsense like, “God is the God behind God.” Dennett calls this kind of language a “deepity”: a statement that has two meanings, one of which is true but superficial, the other which sounds profound but is meaningless. His exemplar of a deepity is the statement “Love is just a word.” True, it’s a word like “cheeseburger,” but the supposed deeper sense is wrong: love is an emotion, a feeling, a condition, and not just a word in the dictionary. He gave several examples of other deepities from academic theologians; when you see these things laid out — ripped from their texts — in a Powerpoint slide, they make you realize how truly fatuous are the lucubrations of people like Armstrong, Eagleton, and Haught. Sarcasm will be the best weapon against this stuff.

The first time I read this, I thought there was no way that's what Coyne meant to say - his words must have been, for lack a better phrase, "ripped from the text." Then I went and read the whole thing in context, which is what you do when you have even a modicum of respect for people with whom you disagree - or for the pursuit of knowledge generally.

But that didn't change anything. Coyne is actually suggesting that "ripping" the words of major writers "from their texts" - something the rest of us call "taking things out of context" - is the best way to engage in debate, rather than a tactic which would get you dismissed from any serious conversation. After all, most people respond positively to sneering contempt and lazy intellectual posturing. I think it's clear that whatever small interest people like this have in changing minds is totally overwhelmed by the pleasure they get from patting each other on the back. (By the way, for those who are interested, I took a more comprehensive look at this issue here.)

About That

Conor Friedersdorf, speculating on which Republicans could win the 2012 race, offers this headscratcher:

My somewhat uninformed guesses: David Petraeus and Colin Powell (who’d have all kinds of difficulty winning the primary). These accomplished generals share one related trait: deep credibility as men who are serious about national security, enabling them to run as sane, experienced stewards, rather than bellicose idiots so desperate to seem toughest on terrorism that they spend the primaries calling for “doubling Gitmo” and competing to see who would torture in more contrived ticking time bomb situations.

They’re also both post-partisan figures of the kind that Americans seem to like, haven’t got long voting records to be picked apart, and can nevertheless credibly claim more executive experience than President Obama.

I have to say, I can't imagine executive experience being a real clincher when you're running against an incumbent President.

Tea Party-ese

Buzzfeed translates.

(Sorry for the scant updates over the last several days. I've been too busy to write much lately, but things around here will pick up again next week.)

Obama's Healthcare Speech

I think Frank Rich put it pretty well this morning: short of a "suicide pact," Congressional Democrats weren't going to let healthcare reform fail, so the idea that this was a "make or break" speech for the President is little more than an example of the breathless, hysterical "win the morning" mentality embodied in the 24-hour news cycle.

I think the speech, though, accomplished some important goals: it almost certainly united Congressional Democrats and asserted Presidential leadership at a time when Barack Obama's practice of deferring to Congress seemed to be harming his agenda. It made an effective case for reforming the healthcare system, it candidly addressed some of the B.S. being spread around by shameless liars like Sarah Palin (I'm glad he used the word "lies"), and it successfully positioned the President where he should be: above the fray, guiding the discourse but not mired in it.

It was not, as Sen. Lindsey Graham bafflingly claimed (or maybe not so bafflingly, since he was just giving red meat to the FOX News crowd), a combative and uncompromising speech: the President provided a defense of the public option but explicitly said he wouldn't insist on it; he expressed willingness and even eagerness to hear other ideas; he pointed to John McCain and praised him for a policy idea; he spoke convincingly of self-reliance, freedom, and the healthy American skepticism towards government - while emphasizing that determing how much government is appropriate is something that good, patriotic Americans can disagree on. Consider this passage near the end:

That large-heartedness -- that concern and regard for the plight of others -- is not a partisan feeling. It's not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character -- our ability to stand in other people's shoes; a recognition that we are all in this together, and when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand; a belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgment that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise. [...]

You see, our predecessors understood that government could not, and should not, solve every problem. They understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom. But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, the vulnerable can be exploited. And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter -- that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

If anything, he was too polite to Republicans, since he has been met with almost nothing but dishonesty, demagoguery, and bad faith throughout this entire debate. (The passing reference in the above passage to "facts and reason" being "thrown overboard" was far more charitable than I would have been, but that's why I blog and he governs.) Most House and Senate Republicans have behaved disgustingly; they deserve derision and to be shut out of the process. Yes, yes - I know that's not how politics works. I don't need a lecture on the mechanics of the Senate, or on the intricacies of major legislative efforts. But at some point, people have to be held responsible for their actions. Lucky for them that the President is remarkably civil towards his antagonists - but unlucky for them that his mind is on the long haul, and he's undermining them every day.

A great example of this was the way he movingly spoke of Ted Kennedy, using the moment as an opportunity to speak about Kennedy's life goal of healthcare reform and his bipartisan bona fides. Obama didn't name a single Democrat when he talked about Kennedy's friends, but he named three Republicans in the room - Sens. Hatch, McCain, and Grassley. That's classy as well as effective.

Ultimately, the speech probably changed very little about the final form of the bills pending in Congress - although it now appears that the public option is dead, which is a depressing development due in no small part to inconsistent messaging and weak support from the White House. Obama should not have raised expectations and made such a strong case for the public option if he was willing to let it die less than a week later.

But on a more positive note, the speech took the focus away from Congress and gave the impression of "ownership" of whatever happens back to the President. That's good, since he's considerably more popular than Congressional leaders, and this process should be an evaluation of his leadership skills. I think the President gave a great speech, and I think he'll end up with a good bill. When it comes to a problem as huge as healthcare, a process as maddeningly difficult as legislation, and the incredible dishonesty and acrimony dominating American politics, that's nothing less than brilliant.

The Congressional Heckler

By now everyone has heard (or heard about) Rep. Joe Wilson shouting "You lie!" during the President's speech, so I don't need to tell the story - but read between the lines of this sentence from the NYT's account. This is cold:

"Mr. Wilson also phoned the White House and reached Mr. Emanuel, who accepted an apology on behalf of the president."

He "reached" Rahm Emanuel - which means he's not important enough to have a direct line. And President Obama was not going to hear his apology, so Rahm accepted it instead.

My schedule is pretty hectic over the next day or so, but as soon as I can put together some refined thoughts on the speech, I'll post them.

Fear and Knowledge

Over at Empirical International, Matt has a couple of excellent posts answering ten "challenges" to evolutionary biology posed by Jonathan Wells, a prominent intelligent-design advocate. The challenges are part of an old chain email that tries to convince high-school students to confront their unsuspecting biology teachers with ammunition against the supposed fraud of evolution. Ever the gentleman, Matt writes, "Wells holds PhDs in Molecular and Cell Biology from Berkeley and Religious Studies from Yale, so he's obviously no slouch and I do not believe he is deliberately trying to deceive people." Well, speak for yourself, Matt. I've been blogging for over a year now, so my ability to assume good faith was lost long ago.

Kidding aside, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Dr. Wells is honestly questioning widely-accepted science (instead of cynically selling out to hacks and pseudoscientific organizations like the Discovery Institute, where he is a fellow). Matt already addressed the numerous scientific errors Wells makes in his criticisms, a task for which he is manifestly more qualified than I am, so we'll put aside those concerns for the time being. For my part, I'd like to explore why seemingly-intelligent people cling so desperately to junk science like intelligent design in defiance of all logic and scientific consensus. I think the phenomenon raises some interesting issues.

There's no small amount of fuss about a supposed showdown between science and religion in our age, and among highly-educated people, I imagine the consensus is that science is "winning." Until 9/11, there was a rough agreement that religious faith was waning, at least in the developed world, and it's not hard to imagine why some people - and I'd place Wells and his ilk among them - feel threatened. There's something very scary about the prospect of one's world seemingly fading away, an unsettling feeling that your cherished, familiar traditions are being replaced by an indifferent empiricism whose evangelists are openly hostile to your heritage. Or at least that's how they see it. For others of us, the picture is considerably less bleak: the advancement of human knowledge is exciting and potentially world-changing, and regardless of our religious beliefs, it should be considered a good thing.

Fundamentally, that's why ID advocates are off-base. Religion - or at least Christianity - is not about making empirical claims. It's not about explaining, in any scientifically meaningful sense, how the universe came to be, and when it addresses its subject matter appropriately, its claims are beyond the realm of scientific testing. The temptation to scientifically explain the world using God is misguided and counterproductive.

It didn't start with intelligent design, though. We can look back at least as far as 1613, when the Flemish Jesuit Leonardus Lessius published De Providentia Numinis, an argument about God and Christianity which proceeded by venturing into explanations of the physical universe. It was, to say the least, a troubling sign of things to come. As the philosopher Michael Buckley writes:

De providentia numinis occupies a position from which the Church will seldom depart in its apologetic response to the gradual rise of atheism in the Western world. Lessius’ problematic methodology separates the question of god from the cognitive claims of Christology in the classic distinction between revelation and reason. The centrality of Christ is relegated to revelation – Christ does not evoke faith in the Father; his intelligibility is consequent upon faith. What Lessius presents is not the person and message of Jesus, but those cosmological and historical experiences which are open to any human being.

When you think about it, this is a pretty remarkable shift, one which basically amounts to a tacit admission that personal experience of the sublime is intellectually insufficient as grounds for belief. Born of this sentiment is the fundamentalist tendency to look for "answers in Genesis," which will always be a fool's errand. Religion should not appeal to science for coherence, not only because it doesn't need to, but also because science doesn't need religion. Science is perfectly coherent without religion.

But that's not the only reason why the ID-style approach is misguided - or why ID advocates are scared. There is another significant concern behind their way of thinking, one that has to do with the way people imagine nature. The Christian idea of a world created ex nihilo is not a world that precludes contingency, but it is a world where the contingent embodies (in some way) a divine idea or image, if not divine intent. It is a world in which, as Louis Dupré writes, "nature retains an intrinsically normative character," a "further stage in the process of revelation." For Christian thinkers of centuries past, nature was filled with meaning, if not intentional structure. Again, as Dupré puts it, "the epistemic apriori imposed no categorical structure upon the real, but a perspective for reading what was directly, but never simply or exhaustively, given." Most Christians, I imagine, are intent to continue viewing nature in this way, but the rise of evolutionary theory exploded forever the idea of a manifestly-ordered creation. Right?

People like Dr. Wells are afraid of the question - so they continue to insist, against all evidence, that evolution cannot possibly account for the world we see. They are, of course, wrong. Their work perniciously undermines real science to support pseudoscience. And on theological grounds, their efforts are completely unnecessary: contingency, however we imagine it to work in the universe, does not make the world devoid of meaning or beauty. God does not exist as some sort of heavenly puppetmaster, and it was always theologically childish to imagine God that way. However we may conceive of creation and of the nature that developed after the origins of the universe, we can at least admit the possibility of a pervasive divine grace, free from the temporal limitations of humanity, able to see what was, is, and will be; imbuing the world with meaning even as it unfolds in ways that are unpredictable to us. Vain attempts to fit science and the world into our preconceived notions of providence are doomed to fail. But the honest and unbiased pursuit of knowledge - whether scientific or spiritual - has the potential to unlock not just information, but understanding.

Breaking News!

Can anyone explain the purpose of the vague, uninformative, self-contradictory, and bizarre non-story the NYT is featuring this morning? The article, "Obama Faces a Critical Moment for His Presidency," contains the breaking story that...um...healthcare reform is important? Being president is tough? Add in the reporter's (philosopher's?) string of rhetorical questions, and you've got a real head-scractcher:

He faces a crisis of expectations tough to manage. Can he form a health care compromise that satisfies both his liberal base and fiscal conservatives in his own party, much less the other one? Can he stanch the slide in support for the war in Afghanistan even as he considers sending more troops? Can he soothe discontent with an economy that appears to have bottomed out but remains moribund? Can he change the tenor of debate in a capital that seems as polarized as ever?

Um, I don't know. That's why I read the newspaper. But that's far from the worst part of this piece. Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the hallmark of poor journalism: a simplistic narrative!

Mr. Obama is hardly the first president to run into trouble after the bunting and balloons have vanished, but his slipping support has fueled a narrative about a young and relatively inexperienced president who overinterpreted his mandate and overreached in his policies. His job approval rating has fallen to 56 percent from 62 percent since February in polls taken by The New York Times and CBS News. Other surveys register an even sharper drop.

Wait: having a 56% approval rating = unpopularity? And who thought that having a 62% approval rating after a month in office was sustainable? It's like the pundits who pretend to be shocked that healthcare reform used to have astronomically high public support, and now its support has fallen. Well, duh: when there's no plan to oppose, the abstract idea of "reforming" something sounds pretty good!

The second issue here is the narrative being "fueled" by "slipping support" (again, 56%?) If anything, the narrative is being fueled by lazy and opportunistic reporters who aren't interested in writing a nuanced story about why governing, even for someone as powerful as the President, is so difficult - and who know that "WUNDERKIND OBAMA SLIPPING FAST" is a much more exciting headline. Ooo, look! A hero is stumbling! One could write a story about the intricacies of Congressional politics, the slowness of bureaucracy, or the naturally incremental nature of the American political process - the kinds of helpful, informative pieces that normally appear in the NYT - but for today: narrative! Even weirder, then, that this sentence should immediately follow:

But his overall standing with the public is still healthy [...] If he ultimately gets some form of health care program passed that he can call a victory, this turbulence may ultimately be forgotten.

Translation: everything I just said is crap, and even I know it. If any kind of healthcare bill gets passed (which is basically set in stone at this point), we'll all forget that I wrote this terrible article.

Gitmo Prison Blues

While filling in at the Daily Dish, Chris Bodenner does us all a favor by tearing apart Elise Cooper's weak arguments against moving Guantanamo prisoners to facilities in the United States. Cooper's piece, titled (apparently without irony) "No Terrorists in My Backyard", brags that there was a consensus against housing Gitmo prisoners here among those interviewed: namely, security experts and members of Congress. The problem: they're nearly all Republican politicians. And one of the two security experts is Michael Chertoff, who hardly counts as impartial - when he was head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division in 2003, he sided with John Yoo's memo that exempted the military from federal law during wartime and authorized torture at the prison. He had a hand in making Gitmo the nightmare it was, and unfortunately remains, for the US.

Bodenner does a fine job demonstrating why none of Cooper's arguments make sense, and he notes that the piece "reads like a cobbled-together press release." It does have a bit of a thrown-together feel to it, especially this humdinger from Rep. Tom Rooney:

Congressman Rooney points out that since a lot of money was spent in making Guantanamo Bay a state of the art prison America should keep the detainees there. He does not support the Obama administration’s view that Guantanamo must be closed because of the stigma associated with it.

Where to start with this (besides the obvious question of why we elect such people to Congress)? How much Guantanamo cost to build has nothing to do with whether or not we should keep it open; that question is decided by its helping or hindrance of our national security objectives. So the "stigma" of Guantamano is a very good reason for closing it - but, just for clarity's sake, let's not call it a stigma. That understates its danger. Guantanamo is an incredibly powerful recruiting tool for our enemies, and since we can safely imprison terrorists without handing them a recruiting tool, the security cost of keeping it open far outweighs the benefits. With no coherent argument opposing this move, it's hard to characterize Republican behavior as anything besides posturing.

Nodding Towards Nullification

On a conference call organized by Americans for Prosperity, Sen. Jim DeMint and Rep. Michele Bachmann, two of the more reliably nutty members of Congress, made some oblique references to nullification when discussing the states' response to healthcare reform. From TPMDC:

A caller asked DeMint what the states could do in order to stop unconstitutional action by the federal government on health care. DeMint replied, "I think the key to pushing back against the federal government is some governors and state legislators who champion individual freedom."

DeMint said he would love to see states go to court to invoke the Tenth Amendment: "If we had some states come together and say the only way to save this country is to push back." He also added: "I think you'll see some states say no more, we're not going down with the federal government."A few minutes later, Bachmann commented on this possibility as well, noting that the efforts of some Republican governors to reject stimulus money failed in large part because they were too isolated from one another. A collective action, on the other hand, would stand a much greater chance of success.

The idea that states can selectively ignore or deny the validity of federal laws is nullification. Responding to the statements of DeMint and Bachmann, Josh Marshall - who, by the way, holds a PhD in American History from Brown, where he must have studied with Gordon Wood (jealous!) - calls nullification "a crackpot idea from the start" that "hasn't been seriously entertained anywhere in the county since the Civil War (with the exception of feigned attempts in the South during the Civil Right Era)." This is basically true, but allow me one small quibble: the assertion that nullification was a "crackpot idea from the start" doesn't ring perfectly true to me.

Nullification can be traced back before the Civil War to Thomas Jefferson, who most clearly articulated the idea in response to the almost-certainly unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which, among other things, criminalized "false, scandalous, or malicious writing" against the government. Jefferson was enraged by the Acts, and not just because they were a transparent power grab by his political rival, President John Adams.

In 1798, the consensus on the relationship between federal and state power was fragile at best, and Jefferson's Kentucky Resolution asserted boldly that "the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself." To that end, Jefferson (and James Madison, who drafted a similar resolution in Virginia) articulated a more compartmentalized vision of constitutional interpretation, arguing that each branch and level of government had the authority to interpret the Constitution for itself. Madison, it should be noted, was not willing to go as far as Jefferson on this notion: he proposed using the federal judiciary to settle disputes, and though he admitted it would not be a perfect system, he still insisted that "as some such Tribunal is a vital element, a sine qua non, in an efficient & permanent Govt. the Tribunal existing must be acquiesced in, until a better or more satisfactory one can be substituted." Basically, governments need an ultimate arbiter. Jefferson, for his part, preferred to settle disputes by democratic referendum (a view he defended in an 1823 letter). The problems with this approach are obvious, but it's still a bit of a stretch to assert that this theory was "crackpot from the start." It was certainly wrong, but Jefferson and Madison weren't just any random folks writing about government (cough) - and hey, they were wrong for pretty interesting reasons.