Political Meta-Cognition

Polls that indicate many Americans believe Obama to be a Muslim have the media agitated and self-critiquing, in a way that similar polls indicating larger numbers of Americans believed W Bush complicit in 9/11 never did.

Lapsed conservative, David Brooks, a-historically, sees contemporary culture as the problem:

...[contemporary] culture places less emphasis on the need to struggle against one’s own mental feebleness. Today’s culture is better in most ways, but in this way it is worse.

The ensuing mental flabbiness is most evident in politics. Many conservatives declare that Barack Obama is a Muslim because it feels so good to say so... Issues like tax cuts and the size of government, which should be shaped by circumstances (often it’s good to cut taxes; sometimes it’s necessary to raise them), are now treated as inflexible tests of tribal purity.

To use a fancy word, there’s a metacognition deficit... Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.

Strauss taught that there is a natural friction between philosophy (or "metacognition") and -- in particular, but not exclusively, democratic -- politics, ultimately symbolized by the political death of Socrates, the first philosopher. He was skeptical of liberalism on precisely this point: its faith in -- actually, its bet on -- the real possibility, or even the inevitability, of a rational, "enlightened", (democratic) politics. To his critics, this is evidence of his anti-democratic project.

On the other hand, there is no shortage of evidence -- these sorts of polls included -- of the correctness of Strauss' critique. Confronted like this, liberal commitment to democracy wavers:

Churchill said: 'The best argument against Democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.' That was England back in the 1940's. Tragically -in the USA of 2010 - that conversation would only need to be 30 seconds.....

Read carefully, Strauss provides an approach towards upholding democracy as it apparently is, and not as one may wish it would be.

Do You

The season premiere of the Jersey Shore made mild (forgive me) waves, when America's Sweetheart Snooki, took on the President:

"I don’t go tanning anymore because Obama put a 10 percent tax on tanning. [Sen. John] McCain would never put a 10 percent tax on tanning. Because he’s pale and would probably want to be tan... Obama doesn’t have that problem. Obviously

Obama made even milder waves, previously, when evidence surfaced contradicting his claim he did not know who Snooki was.

A more interesting bit of zeitgeist may be found in the cast's (in particular Paul Delvecchio's), use of the phrase "Do You." Urban Dictionary, defines the phrase as "following your heart" and "acting in a way that satisfies you, not caring at all about what others think." This also appears to be the sense intended by Media Mogal Russell Simmons in his book of that title.

As employed by America's (or at least MIA's) MVPs, "Do you" instead conveys "stay out of my business," which, according to pollster Scott Rasmussen is the primary message ordinary voters are now trying to send to Washington.

Net Neutrality

The political debate around Net Neutrality provides a illustration of the difficulty of little-l liberal politics.

As generally framed, one side argues government ought to ban internet providers from differentiating service based on "kind of traffic or level of traffic", while the other side argues government interference will do more harm then good.

Proponents, rightfully, fear a landscape in which a few companies control information and stifle innovation. Critics, rightfully, fear regulatory capture as just as sure a path to that landscape and mock the concept of content-agnosticism:

A woman gets a pacemaker that "will wirelessly contact the hospital if she suffers from cardiac arrhythmia. Are you telling me that it would be illegal to prioritize that traffic over a video of a squirrel on water skis?"

On one side there are likely companies that dream of parlaying control of the (metaphorical) rails into control of the cargo. On the other, some Net Neutrality advocates recognize that their cause is being co-opted by groups whose agenda entails  "nationalization of everything from the communications and broadcast infrastructure to the failing newspaper business."

Within a rational politics, we would be able to adopt reasonable rules: Providers would have to treat similar content from different vendors agnostic-ally, but could prioritize certain sorts of traffic (eg: emergency medical), and sensibly manage levels of traffic.  Almost no-one in this debate believe that outcome at all likely.

He Taketh Away, Giveth

The Times describes the administrations thinking on mortgage finance

The Obama administration has been barraged with ideas for reworking the government’s role in housing finance... Mr. Geithner said continued government support was important... The absence of such support... would deepen future recessions because unsubsidized private companies would curtail lending...

The Journal reports that mortgage markets are being knocked.

The market for mortgage-backed securities has... taken a hit in recent days on growing talk of a "mega-refi" program... lots of refis would be bad for mortgage-backed securities investors.

It goes without saying that a government truly concerned that private companies not curtail lending, would not be pursuing policies that punished private lenders.

To me, this is emblematic of this administration's general economic approach: With one hand, use private sector inaction to justify expensive government intervention/expansion, while, with the other, punish/freeze private sector actors.

Rational Basis

Unsurprisingly, the district court judge found no rational basis behind denying gay marriages state sanction.

Douthat, acknowledges the weakness of the general conservative apologia in attempting his own, which, when stripped of pretension, amounts to little.

Von Hayek would suggest an indirect defense. He taught it was wholly rational to respect our cultural inheritance -- which he viewed as the product of a complicated evolutionary process -- as such. In his frame, to argue that a, for example, commonly-held traditional moral view is without rational basis, one has to assert deep understanding of the complicated interconnections binding us together as a society, and therefore the consequences that flow from upholding or rejecting that view. No person can rationally make that assertion.

That said, Judge Walker was not simply disregarding tradition. After all, our founding fathers envisioned a politics in which reason displaced passion.

Torat Chaim

Five Towns Jewish Times columnist and pulpit Rabbi Aryeh Ginzberg, caused local controversy, when, in a column aptly self-described as "painful", he asserted that a synagogue's invitation to Sara Hurwitz as a scholar in residence was cause for crying on Tisha b'Av.

Responding to similarly foolish comments by YU Rosh Yeshiva Hershel Schachter, Rabbi Shai Held made the following argument:

One can... be grateful to him for drawing an absolute line in the sand. The world of Jews committed to serving God through a life of Torah and mitzvot is divided between those who believe that gender roles are eternally fixed and immutable, and those who believe that new faces of Torah and halacha are revealed in every generation—as they must, if Torah is to remain a Torat Chaim, a Torah of life, dynamic and alive in every generation... I wish to make one very fundamental point: the time is long past for Jews to assume that the forces of reaction are somehow “more authentic” or “more religious” than the forces of dynamism, responsiveness, and creativity.

This dichotomy ignores the historical reality -- the mantra of "Hadash Assur Min haTorah" notwithstanding -- of a radically evolving American Orthodox Jewish community and the social reality of the Modern Orthodox Jewish community, which, while resistant to Rabbi Held's views on Halachic innovation, is inching slowly but decisively towards an egalitarian Rabbinate.

More fundamentally, the re-interpretation of Torat Chaim, to me, mirrors the manner in which Rabbi Held undercuts himself. Traditionally, "Torat Chaim" refers to Torah as the relationship between the Jewish People and their Living G-d. Something meaningful is lost in this de-sanctification/re-imagining along lines we more familiarly describe our constitution. It is only in the shadow of, in opposition to, "Hadash Assur Min haTorah" -- itself an (a-halachic and) a-historical re-interpretation -- that this new conception achieves richness and power.

[To be sure, the traditional meaning of Torat Chaim is difficult to uphold in our secular, scientistic, world. But de-sanctifying Judaism as a response to modernity is a cheap trick played by mediocre Rabbis. Rabbi Held can do better.]

In the end, the authoritative traditional teaching on Halachic innovation stands opposed -- and is, to my mind, superior -- to both these dueling modern concepts ("Torat Chaim" and "Hadash Assur Min haTorah"):

Rab Judah said in the name of Rab, When Moses ascended on high he found [G-d]... affixing coronets to the letters. Said Moses, ‘Lord of the Universe, Who stays Thy hand?’ He answered, ‘There will arise a man, at the end of many generations, Akiba b. Joseph... who will expound upon each tittle heaps... of laws’. ‘Lord of the Universe’, said Moses; ‘permit me to see him’. He replied, ‘Turn thee round’. Moses went and sat down behind eight rows. Not being able to follow their arguments he was ill at ease, but when they came to a certain subject and the disciples said to the master ‘Whence do you know it?’ and the latter replied ‘It is a law given unto Moses at Sinai’ he was comforted.

In reading this text, one can be certain that what discomforted, and then comforted, our Law-Giver, was not personal embarrassment, and then pride.

Myths

This blog is not in the habit of agreeing, even mildly, with Krugman, however, he opens a recent column with an insight similar to one of the underlying themes here:

When I was young and naïve, I believed that important people took positions based on careful consideration of the options. Now I know better. Much of what Serious People believe rests on prejudices, not analysis. And these prejudices are subject to fads and fashions.

The column illustrates this by arguing that the fear of "bond vigilantes" attacking the US sovereign debt that is currently driving policymakers is the fundamentally irrational product of prejudice, not analysis.

A different analysis -- one that better understood that the quantitative risk of an event is the probability of occurrence times the cost, and one one which still remembered the previous unthinkable-ness of the "bond vigilante" attack on Wall Street -- might view Krugman as providing a self-referential representation of a Serious Person whose beliefs rest on prejudices (or [in this case] material interests), not analysis.

Of deeper interest is the consequence of the -- agreed upon -- insight. Krugman advises his readers to be on guard for the "foundation of fantasy" in-, and therefore not be fooled by-, opposing arguments. This is likely be a rhetorical ploy: Krugman surely recognizes that if Princeton professors can rise above the natural prejudice that otherwise ensnares Serious People, his readership largely cannot. He is, then, intentionally strengthening their own prejudices by discouraging them from taking seriously -- analyzing -- opposing political arguments.

Properly analyzed, Krugman's column provides illustration that the true distinction is not between people/arguments guided by rational analysis vs those grounded in prejudice, rather between those which recognize the intrinsic limit/locality of rationality vs those which do-, or can-, not: There is, in the end, always a "foundation of fantasy" to be found beneath most any rational analysis; the question is what one does with it.