Positive Liberty

Ready for a challenge to your preconceptions? Try this one.

I’m a cartoonist, so naturally I pay attention to comics. So I know from long experience, it’s hard to have a discussion of why the overwhelming majority of comic book readers are boys without someone suggesting that boys are biologically more visually-oriented. Since girls are language-oriented, it’s only natural that girls prefer reading prose, and boys like comic books more. It’s often suggested that folks who think that social factors are why so few girls read comic books are ignoring science in the name of feminist ideology.

Stop here. Before you continue, ask yourself if the biological explanation for why (on average) boys and not girls read comics rings true to you.

Because the truth is, I should have put the paragraph about comics in the past tense. Today, the majority of young comic book readers are girls - by far the best-selling comic books in the USA are manga (translated Japanese comics), which are read mostly by girls.

Go read the whole thing. I don’t doubt that there are innate differences between the sexes in many areas, but it troubles me that so many are so eager to claim that they do so much, particularly when the actual science runs far behind their speculations. (See P Z Meyers on this one, and while you’re at it, read his take on the Iraq elections.)

I am reminded of two episodes in the history of science.

First, the philosopher René Descartes saw vortices in everything, including stars, wind, and even the then-puzzling phenomenon of continuous motion through space. “Shouldn’t stuff just stop when a force isn’t acting on it?” asked the leading philosophical lights of the day. In response, Descartes declared that his vortices held fired projectiles, and planets, aloft.

While the mathematics behind the vortex actually was quite cutting-edge at the time, the vortices themselves ended up doing a great deal less than Descartes imagined. It’s actually painful to read some of his treatises on science today, particularly when he talks about the circulation of blood and tries, weakly, to relate it to his theory of vortices.

DNA may well be the Cartesian vortex of our time: It is appealing precisely because we do not quite understand it; our incomprehension allows us to write whatever we wish upon the poorly-understood but probably legitimate phenomenon, and call it science. Unfortunately, these examples are best seen in hindsight, leaving us to guess at the limits of our prejudices today.

Because this is a history blog, let me share another example, this one a lot more dubious–and closer to home..

In the eighteenth century, it was believed (for a time, anyway) that women were more susceptible than men to the subtle influences of animal magnetism. Women’s bodies more easily picked up peculiar emanations of subtle magnetic fluid because their emotions were more finely tuned than those of men.

Hey, it made perfect sense to Parisians in the 1780s.

The trouble was of course that animal magnetism was false and perhaps deliberately fraudulent. No, nothing that transpired at Harvard–or even in the manga industry–seems at all fraudulent. We should beware, though, when an idea fits our preconceived notions a little too perfectly, or when a scientific theory seems to explain too much.

After months of deep pessimism about the Iraq war, I have to admit that I am encouraged by the conduct of the Iraqi elections so far. It’s still too early to come to any firm conclusions, but the voting seems to have gone as well as anyone could reasonably have hoped. The counting phase will if anything be more delicate and important to monitor, and it will be interesting to watch as events unfold in the coming days. Let’s hope that it too goes well.

Josh Claybourn at In The Agora has links and commentary. Here’s the key passage as I see it:

Iraqi expatriates living in Syria are able to take part in the vote, even though Syrians can’t take part in the democratic process of their own country. What impact will this have on countries like Syria? A successful Iraqi election may very well be the most significant step for freedom and democracy since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

There is nothing like the power of a good example; I can only hope it outweighs the ill-will that we have accumulated so far.

Today does bring a lot of good news on that front. This AP story suggests that the Iraq vote is making a lot of middle eastern dictators very, very nervous. And they should be. I think it’s also no coincidence that a top Saudi diplomat suggests that women may soon be able to vote. Thanks, but we shouldn’t need to invade your neighbors to make it happen.

Look for Saudi fundamentalists to claim that women’s suffrage is fine for lukewarm Muslims like the Iraqis–but that the better sort would never allow it. Only a select few people are pure enough to disenfranchise half the population, and just remember–a really holy society would be an absolute monarchy.

Regarding the prospects for permanent change in the middle east, I still remain deeply skeptical on two fronts. First, as I have written before, a democracy without respect for individual rights means nothing. Without firm protections for persons and property, without protections for the freedom of thought and expression, democracy is indistinguishable from mob rule. The choice of which thug ends up holding the stick isn’t a choice worth fighting over.

Second, even if all goes well, then this election will only prove that an utterly incompetent, heavyhanded, and rights-violating democratic intervention can sometimes still succeed. It will not prove, however, that our intervention was competent, deft, or respectful of human rights. It’s far too late to change any of that.

Still, best of luck; I really hope this thing works out. If, a year or two from now, Iraq looks like Poland or East Germany in the early 90s, then it will be time for a major reconsideration of my foreign policy beliefs. We’ll just have to wait and see.

“Police Ordinance, to forbid leaving any Peas or Beans, and Leaves or Stems of Artichokes on the public square of the Rue des Ecosses” — Title of a French law dated May 20, 1757. Bibliothèque Nationale, F-23716(792).

When Prof. David Beito asked me to join Liberty & Power, I hesitated, saying that my academic work wasn’t about libertarian topics.

Beito’s reply was simple: “Don’t worry about it.” But I worried anyway, and what came out were a number of suggestions about early modern historiography for the classical liberal.

I specialize in the intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so in theory I have a lot to cover. I am sure I will discuss some of the great minds of the era eventually, but for right now I want to focus on the world they inhabited. I believe that the material background to the Enlightenment has been neglected by nonleftists, and I find this neglect to be troubling.

The historiography of mentalité in the mid 20th-century sense–and worse, the historiography of material conditions–is so colored by Marxist assumptions that classical liberals seldom want anything to do with it. More times than I can count, I have seen conservative or classical liberal historians deride the very idea of studying chairs, dresses, bread, horses–or artichokes.

Ideas, we hear again and again. Study the ideas, because the rest is just a lot of Marxist distraction.

Nonsense, I say.

And we should be worried indeed if we ever saw our anti-material prejudice confirmed: If the economic conditions of the past turn out to be explicable only in Marxist terms, then Marxism has won. But if the economic conditions of the past are amenable to other forms of analysis, then there is no telling what they might reveal.

My first argument, then, about economic conditions and their relationship to the mentalité of the early modern era is that the are absolutely worth studying–for us just as for leftists, and possibly a good deal more. A really robust classical liberal historiography of the early modern era ought to consider these issues thoroughly rather than just brushing them aside to talk about, you know, ideas.

Keep in mind that we need not subscribe to the Marxist notion that material conditions determine a society’s ideas. It is frankly an outdated notion even in the academy, and its only remaining impact, so far as I can tell, is to make nonleftists afraid of studying anything besides the canonical great minds of history. But studying the great minds in isolation is like trying to do ecology by examining mounted trophies alone. Between these two extremes–between ideas as superstructure and ideas as the only things worth studying–there is an entire universe of complicated interplay among historical ideas and material conditions. It’s time we started having our say about it.

My second argument, in support of the first, will be to claim that the Old Regime resembled the modern command economy much more closely than most left-leaning historians of material conditions would like to admit.

In a sense, it is a trivial argument: We all know quite well what absolutism did in practice. But it’s worth recalling that most historiographical starting points are indeed trivial, and that the real work they do is not to announce anything profound, but to reorient our thinking. Conceiving of recent western history as the gradual escape from the command economy–including its socioeconomic manifestations–is exactly what we ought to be doing.

To that end, absolutism and communism shared many assumptions about man, society, and government. They also shared a number of on-the-ground material conditions. These factors–and ultimately the governmental structures they helped to produce–interacted continually with one another, producing some striking parallels.

Yes, it’s anachronistic to compare absolutism and communism too closely, and this anachronism does limit the argument. For instance, it would be difficult to teach this stuff unmodified in my introductory history classes. Students might be tempted to learn only about modern command economies or about the Old Regime, weakening their understanding of both. This is the last thing I want; analogies should expand the mind rather than contract it.

And yet dwelling on the similarities does have its uses. I’d like to look first at some of these systems’ commonalities, then progress to what I think they do for us in theoretical terms.

Consider the law against artichoke litter on the Rue des Ecosses. A law against littering may be a reasonable thing (negative externalities and all), but it staggers the imagination to think that a law against artichoke littering could have had any marginally useful purpose. It looks to us like any number of stupid laws that we suffer under today, made by well-intentioned but short-sighted social engineers who don’t know the first thing about life in the real world. It deeply offends our libertarian sensibilities.

Incredibly, it seems to have been the eighth law of its type; similar prohibitions had been issued in 1639, 1641, and every few years thereafter for a century. And, as the current example warned, “contraventions of this law… cannot be too severely nor too carefully punished.” Penalties included fines, prison time, and–oh yes–confiscation of the offending artichoke. In the days when people still commonly stole bread to eat, this last was no small matter.

The obsession with artichoke litter was not an aberration: During the era between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the centralized state asserted a degree of control over both the market and the individual that had never been witnessed before. These controls were minute in their detail and excruciating in their severity. Laws and quasi-legal instruments decreed the religion of the country, the dress of its inhabitants, the minute details of virtually all economic activities, the days of fast or feast, the days of forced labor to be extracted from the peasantry–and the informal but brutal systems of military draft and requisition.

While Marxism may have declared itself two full dialectical leaps ahead of the Old Regime, the overlap could still be stunning, and it showed in both the material conditions and the shared assumptions of the Old Regime. Perhaps it could hardly be otherwise when a small group of people exercised nearly all political power, and when it did so chiefly by making detailed rules about the conduct of daily life.

For instance, what would we call a society with a tiny political class, a vast regulatory system, and laws against speculation, compound interest, and the accumulation of capital?

And where shortages of basic commodities are all too common–and constantly ascribed to speculators?

And where it is assumed that persons born to a given social station would almost certainly remain there?

And where would-be entrants into virtually any enterprise face barriers that were almost always prohibitive?

And where the ruling class openly despises commerce, yet seizes property and even labor on the thinnest of excuses?

And where that ruling class flouts its own rules against commerce, largely to earn enough money to remain in the ruling class? And where bribery is business as usual?

What would we call it when a governmental or quasi-governmental committee determines the varieties, prices, and allocations of virtually all commodities, from the most essential to the most superfluous?

What would we call a regime that relies on show trials, disappearances, executions, forced labor, and geographic exile as its chief methods of “justice?”

What would we call it when the leaders of that state proclaim that theirs is the natural order of things, and that the system was not merely workable, but inevitable?

What would we call it when the state controls the presses? And when all the best artists, scientists, and philosophers are all driven underground–or else kept as pets of the state?

And when the leader was the one whom destiny had appointed, incapable virtually by definition of doing any wrong?

All of these phenomena are well known to historians; they describe early modern France, Spain, Prussia, Russia, and even England to a lesser extent. A classical liberal historiography of this era would begin by looking at these social conditions, economic controls, and deep operating assumptions. It would see them in part as a way of understanding the intellectual background to the great minds of the era: These great minds lived in what we might now be tempted to call command economies.

The economic controls of the early modern era brought with them the inefficiencies of any planned economy, yet in theory at least, the state was a single human body, acting harmoniously in all of its parts. Virtually no one envisioned government as something imposed upon society. On the contrary, a key component of the mentalité of that era was that government was divinely woven into all aspects of society and even of nature itself.

The order of society was reflected and recapitulated in all of society’s orders and sub-orders–as well as in the natural phenomena: The human body possessed a head, just as the state or the church possessed a head, just as animals and plants possessed heads. Government conceived on this model could not be anything other than natural. (For more on this idea, Michel Foucault is particularly worth reading. Yes, that Michel Foucault.)

The idea that individuals experience government as something outside of themselves was a conceptual innovation of the early modern era. Even by the era’s end, many still declared that government was purely natural and essentially innate: One excited orator during the French Revolution held that France’s new constitution was “written on the hearts of all good citizens.” In a system like his, there could be no break between the individual and his government, and a paper constitution would be wholly superfluous.

Likewise, the relationship of class to government was essentially unknown in this time: A class in the Marxist sense consists of individuals who exist in peculiar relations to one another and to the surrounding society; governments arise as tools of the ruling class. A growing body of research confirms, however, that while thinkers of the early modern era had clear ideas about race, gender, and social “orders” based on nobility, the notion of economic class was far more difficult to them and certainly did not function as Marxist theory would predict. (I am thinking primarily of the recent work of Sarah Maza, for those of you who are interested.)

Earlier socioeconomic historians tended to overlook the early modern fusion of individual and government with all other aspects of life. It was an easy mistake to make, particularly given the Marxist frame of mind, which seeks out class conflicts everywhere. As stated above, early modern societies usually theorized themselves as integrated wholes; they believed firmly that harmony between people of various social stations was not only desirable but purely natural. Economic classes, if they existed at all, were flaws in the system. As in communism.

The harmony that absolutist states saw in themselves was much like the one that communism would seek to achieve. The command economy that the early modern era possessed through ingrained mental habit, communism recreated through deliberate practice.

In the early modern era, liberty for the individual was nearly as unwanted as liberty for the hand or the liver, for nearly all individuals were held to possess some proper place in the system. So too, communist propaganda liked to describe workers as cogs in the great machine. The parallel could not be more obvious.

It was the task of the classical liberals to abstract the individual from society and the citizen from government–an enormously counterintuitive idea given their surroundings. Ironically, it was only this distinction that made the Marxist re-integration of government into private life and economics seem radical or new. Without the classical liberal synthesis, communism might have seemed like a whole lot more of the same.

At the time it appeared, Hobbes’ famous illustration of the body politic wasn’t at all a new idea. But Hobbes still counts as one of the first liberals because he asserted that social harmony was neither inevitable nor natural: For him, human order was voluntary, a product of human design. Of course, one may doubt whether the Hobbesian state was voluntary in any other sense of the word, but it was a start, and Hobbes’ contemporaries usually considered him a dangerous misfit.

A liberal order is a self-consciously artificial order. By contrast, both Marxism and early modern absolutism declared themselves to be purely natural–even as both, ironically, required artichoke-type regulations to prop themselves up. In practice, they employed available tool of coercion to preserve the fiction that they were inevitable and natural.

This is why critiques originally aimed at the Old Regime remain so telling today. With the rise of the command economy, everything old became new again. From 1789 to 1917, the political world experienced a revolution in the oldest sense of the word–Politics turned right around to where it used to be. But the hub, the individual, did not go far.

So what do we make of this argument? Admittedly, it’s far too unfocused to be offered as a proper argument in academic history at all. Historians want rigor, not evocative hints and parallels. I’m still not quite willing to give up on it, though, partly because it does such interesting intellectual work.

First, it undercuts one important idea of modern Marxism. For Marxists, history progresses from ancient and feudal lordship to bourgeois capitalism to proletarian communism. Suggesting that communism resembles some peculiar formations of the early modern era–not feudalism, but something both more and less than feudalism–puts communism back in the place it deserves. It renders communism a historical phenomenon just like any other, existing not in the future, but in the past. (And since when did historians claim to see the future, anyway?)

Second, it historicizes the practice of communism by pointing up its intellectual lineage. An anti-commercial vein runs deeply through western thought, from Plato and the Bible through Rome, the medieval era, and even to the present. A new look at the early modern world helps to flesh out that picture–and to show how communism owes far more to the past than it ever dared to admit. Toynbee famously termed communism a Christian heresy, but I believe things run broader and deeper than just that.

Third, it foregrounds classical liberalism by pointing out the real work that early modern thinkers accomplished: More than anyone else, they conceived of the separation of the individual from state and society. The early modern era created the individual human being as an analytical subject. (Perhaps I should reference Michel Foucault again, but I think I’ve stretched the limits of the L&P readers’ tolerance already. “Foucault for classical liberals” will be the subject of another post.)

I’d like to end with another nod toward the limits of this argument: It is a preliminary sketch and very little more. I haven’t done nearly enough thinking in this area to take it much further. And for all I know, someone else has written along these lines already. If they have, I would certainly like to read it. If not, it might make a decent theoretical article after I fleshed it out appropriately.

In any event, I wanted to solicit some feedback, to clarify the idea by writing it down, and to get it into a decent referencing system in case anyone wants to consult this material in the future. Please do let me know what you think.

Update: Jonathan Dresner comments, in part as follows:

The French anti-littering laws which he cites (that’s where the artichokes come in) reminds me a great deal of the sumptuary laws of Tokugawa (1600-1868) Japan: frequently repeated, oft-ignored attempts by the state to intervene in social processes though inconsistently applied state power (because the state didn’t have the power to apply consistently). These seem like evidence of a will to command absolutism, but not evidence of the ability to anything resembling totalitarian control. Only with the total public participation of the French Revolution do you get anything like totalitarianism before the early 20th century bureaucratic state reaches its various zeniths (and those only work with broad popular support to bolster their substantial applications of terror; after popular support wanes, so does the state’s claim to total command and control). The differences are too real to gloss over, but the theories are indeed interestingly consonant.

In general, I would agree with this difference in practice. One draft of this piece even made note of it, pointing out that industrialism and mass communication made a unified government/society/individual matrix seem like a real possibility once more–while also expanding the potential harm that state interventions could do. Industrialism magnifies everything, our virtues and vices alike.

A lot of H. L. Mencken hasn’t worn so well over the years–but every so often you stumble upon something that could have been written today. Agree or disagree, you can’t help but wonder where Mencken came up with it:

All the benefit that a New Yorker gets out of Kansas is no more than what he might get out of Saskatchewan, the Argentine pampas, or Siberia. But New York to a Kansan is not only a place where he may get drunk, look at dirty shows and buy bogus antiques; it is also a place where he may enforce his dunghill ideas upon his betters. [from “The Calamity of Appomattox,” cited in A Mencken Chrestomathy, p 199.]

Robert Wright has a must-read op-ed in the New York Times today. The thesis:

Oddly, the underlying problem is that this Republican president doesn’t appreciate free markets. Mr. Bush doesn’t see how capitalism helps drive history toward freedom via an algorithm that for all we know is divinely designed and is in any event awesomely elegant. Namely: Capitalism’s pre-eminence as a wealth generator means that every tyrant has to either embrace free markets or fall slowly into economic oblivion; but for markets to work, citizens need access to information technology and the freedom to use it - and that means having political power.

If you don’t already subscribe to the New York Times online, here is your excuse. Go do it now.

Today I have several meta-blog announcements for my readers.

First, I turned on trackbacks. I have no real experience with trackbacks, but I understand that they can help readers follow the conversations going on around our blogging neighborhood. They mostly seem to be working, though I’m not at all sure how they do it.

(Technorati guys, please take note: My incoming link stats appear to be stuck again. They’re at a higher level, but have not moving for the last few days. Is it possible I’ve done something wrong in my template? I know I’ve edited it rather radically…)

Second, I have accepted an invitation to join Liberty & Power as a permanent member. L&P is a libertarian-leaning group blog at the History News Network; it’s filled with people who are far more intelligent and vastly better qualified than I am.

I accepted this invitation in part because it will mean–shamelessly–zero extra work on my part. Old-time Positive Liberty readers take note: I still plan to post all of my writings here exactly as normal; the only change is that I will crosspost a piece at Liberty & Power whenever I think it might be of particular interest to classical liberals.

So if you are reading Positive Liberty and enjoying it, nothing will really change. But if you like what I am doing, you may want to read Liberty & Power, too. Notable bloggers there include Chris Matthew Sciabarra, David Beito, Roderick Long, and Radley Balko. (Disclaimer: No, I haven’t read all of their books. Yes, I’ll get to them eventually. And by the looks of it, I’m going to have to write a bio page, too.)

The third big development is that I will be guest blogging at In The Agora during the month of March. At this time my posting here will probably be very light, as I will also be going through that final dissertation crunch. (Yeah, I know, why did everyone have to take interest in me right now?)

In The Agora is a smart, generally conservative group blog that possesses a rare commodity: visitors who make worthwhile comments. The commenters at In The Agora quite often disagree with one another rather than just adding a bunch of “amens” at the end of a post. Sometimes the discussion can be very, very sharp, but almost always it is polite and thought-provoking.

Kinda like my place. Yeah, I think I’m going to like it there too.

Lastly, a good friend of mine is visiting from abroad, so my blogging for the rest of this week will probably be light.

Once upon a time, there was a country that loved democracy.

It was also the greatest country on earth. The world loved and respected the country’s scientists, writers, artists, and musicians. Its armies were unquestionably the strongest.

And as I said, it loved democracy.

It loved democracy so much that it was willing to go to war so that democracy might spread. What’s more, the country pointed out, the enemies in this war had attacked us first. And the country was entirely correct to say so.

Just look at them, the country declared: They are tyrants and religious fanatics; they represent everything that is backward and reactionary in the world. It was a reasonable argument.

The country in question, though, was the wave of the future, and it talked passionately about a revolution in human affairs. Our democracy-loving country, the one chosen by destiny, would bring light to the dark corners of the world.

But all was not well at the revolution: The civil liberties that the country championed abroad were crumbling at home. The country’s politics turned into a mess of squabbling and mostly idiotic factions. Intelligent people withdrew from public life in disgust.

People who fancied themselves conservatives in the truest and most modest sense of the word wrote dire warnings to our democracy-loving country. They urged it away from the course it had taken, but the country did not listen.

Patriotic citizens of that country talked in outraged tones about emigrants who wanted to leave the great, democracy-loving country. “Traitors,” they were declared. Yet some departed all the same.

But at first the war went well. The enemy nations were easy prey, in part because the democratic country had superior technology, excellent commanders, and a willing populace to support the cause.

The trouble, though, was with the subjugated peoples, who never really took to the idea of democracy, nor of liberty, which is if anything a much harder idea to grasp. At long last, after a bloody war of attrition, the democracy-loving country had to withdraw. In the end, many of its citizens wondered if this was the same country they had known and loved. They barely recognized it anymore.

The republics that our country had set up evaporated overnight in the heat of religious fanaticism and–dare we say it–love for tyranny.

For generations, these countries would mistrust freedom and democracy; for generations, they would equate liberty with fanaticism–and tyranny with order. The efforts of our democracy-loving nation would set back the cause of liberty for well over a hundred years.

Hey, don’t look at me like that. All I did was write… a summary of the French Revolution.

Perspectives is the news magazine of the American Historical Association. It has the thankless task of matching the population of graduate students with the much smaller pool of available jobs. This month’s issue featured two articles of note for the would-be historian.

First came the 2004 job market report. Its overwhelming pessimism is more evidence that my failure to find a job this cycle wasn’t entirely my fault:

“Only one third of the people who received PhDs from history departments over the past 15 years found jobs in the departments and organizations listed in the latest edition of the [AHA] Directory.” The remainder had to seek employment elsewhere.

“This survey also found that the pool of applicants is much larger than previously suspected. One out of every three faculty hired by listing departments in the United States received their PhDs either in another discipline or from a university located in another country.”

“Jobs advertised in Perspectives fell 1.8 percent from the year before, from 870 to 854, even as the number of new PhDs reported to the Directory rose 6.5 percent… It has now been 12 years since we could report there were more new jobs than PhDs.”

“As bad as those trends might appear, they actually understate the problems for new PhDs. Many of the openings advertised are only for senior members of the profession and short-term post-doctoral fellowships (which were counted for this survey only if they paid more than $25,000 per year). [Some fellowships do pay less.] …This year… we found that the number of jobs advertised to junior scholars declined 6.2 percent.”

“Most worrisome are the declines in fields with the most PhDs–North American and European history. Job openings in European history fell 18.5 percent from the year before, to 150 openings–the lowest level since the 1997-1988 academic year.”

“[T]he pace of retirements from history departments eased a bit… For the third year in a row, history PhD programs are projecting a 4 percent increase in the number of new graduate students admitted to their programs.”

I know, I know, I usually hate it when people shirk personal responsibility for their failures. I like to tell myself that if I fail–ever, on anything–then I should look first to myself.

“But are you really to blame?” you might ask. I’m not sure, but at the very worst it’s a useful delusion. No other approach to failure has ever led to self-improvement.

The job numbers are obviously discouraging, but they reveal an important fact: Some students are still getting jobs all the same. To the extent that I am not one of them, it’s clear that I need to work harder. What else can I possibly conclude? What else, that is, that will do me any good in the future? Blaming my failure on the market isn’t going to help me the next time around. Working harder just might.

But were anyone to ask me about graduate school, I would confidently advise them to run away as fast as possible. If they truly love history, then they may read just the same books at home. They can even blog about them with Caleb and I, with Timothy Burke, and with the good folks at Cliopatria. Given enough discipline and critical thinking, they can acquire many of the mental habits and research skills that historians usually have. History is a fine intellectual pursuit, and I do wish that more people would take it up as amateurs. If nothing else, it would certainly make more careers for academic historians.

Back on the subject of finding a job, the current issue of Perspectives also profiles a web site for people in exactly my position: Frustrated students near the end of their graduate studies who might be interested in non-academic jobs. The site is called Beyond Academe, and I recommend it to the aspiring historians who read this site. If you are like me, the following quotes will leap out at you immediately. They come from an interview with Alexandra Lord and Julie Taddeo, the site’s founders:

The most damaging misconception is “this odd belief that history PhDs who work outside of the academy, whether as public historians, journalists, policy analysts, or whatever, are ‘failures,’” a belief that has “no basis whatsoever,” Lord said.

The belief comes, I think, from the lack of institutional interest in nonacademic jobs during the late phase of a historian’s graduate training. Yet if fully 2/3 of graduate students go on to nonacademic jobs, then the academy is seriously misplacing its priorities. Here is just one example:

Another pervasive myth is that history PhDs in nonacademic careers are anti-intellectuals who “must not have really loved history, teaching, or research if they left the field,” said Lord.

Bingo. It’s not usually an explicit prejudice in academia, but it’s certainly there beneath the surface. It’s also what annoys conservatives about the academy: Universities are the pinnacle of thought, and everything else is, well, an afterthought.

There are also some practical obstacles to making the transition to a nonacademic job, such as knowing where to start looking for one. Taddeo said, “as graduate students we tend to isolate ourselves–our only contacts are with each other and we tend to idolize our advisers and fear letting them down.” Those seeking nonacademic positions have to learn what Taddeo said she learned to do: “aggressively network, approach complete strangers, and … ask for help.”

…If historians regard themselves as narrow specialists in only one topic, and think that their graduate education provided no “real” skills, then “you cripple yourself on the job market,” said Lord.

Beyond Academe provides abundant help on repositioning oneself as a nonacademic, and I plan to work at it aggressively in the coming year. Now, I won’t give up on finding an academic career, of course. Coming from a good school, my chances at the academic lottery are probably better than average. Yet if I am going to have a non-academic career, it would be far better to plan it with open eyes than to stumble into it thoughtlessly.

Forgive me for repeating myself, but if only one third of all PhDs in history ever end up working as academic historians, and if two thirds end up elsewhere, shouldn’t the academy focus more–rather than less–on securing jobs for the majority? It may be easier to help place students in teaching positions, but it can’t be that hard to place them elsewhere: Two nonacademics with a website are already doing more in their spare time than many entire departments.

We would laugh if a doctoral program in a technical field treated careers this way, and yet the humanities have shut themselves off in a manner that would be unthinkable for any other field with similar career and graduation statistics. We sometimes wonder why so many people think of academics as isolated and impractical, yet it’s a message we’ve practically been screaming at the tops of our lungs. Changing the tone even a little bit would do more than just help students find good careers; it would also do wonders for our public image.

Scott and I visited the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore this Friday, and I highly recommend it to my local readers. The AVMA defines its collection as follows:

Visionary art as defined for the purposes of the American Visionary Art Museum refers to art produced by self-taught individuals, usually without formal training, whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself.” In short, visionary art begins by listening to the inner voices of the soul, and often may not even be thought of as ‘art’ by its creator.

It could be said that the AVMA collects modern folk art, yet even that definition is too restrictive for some of the works, which often use very “high art” techniques, including bronze casting, and which also make some very sophisticated commentaries on the world of high art itself, butting into the increasingly narrow artistic conversation that goes on at the very biggest galleries and museums.

The one thing you won’t find at the AVMA is familiarity; every artist is a new discovery. It contrasts altogether favorably with most museums of modern art, where you inevitably find the guy who does rough quadrilaterals on canvas, the guy who does decrepit mechanical spheres in bronze, and the guy who does emaciated sculptures of just about everything. I’m not going to argue about the merits of any of these artists. All I’m going to say is that if you have ever gone to a museum of modern art, you have almost certainly seen them before, and once you have seen one of their pieces, they very seldom surprise you again.

This is why big mainstream art is so moribund: Where is the variety? Where are the multiple voices? Only a tiny number of artists ever rise to the top, meaning that the modern art in most museums is almost always the same.

Happily, though, every single work at the AVMA was a surprise. The art there ranged from brilliant and life-affirming (like Cassandra Gillens)–to disturbed and disturbing (like J. B. Murry). We toyed with the idea that the latter’s “spirit script” bore a striking resemblance to the Voynich Manuscript, which may be a coded text–or may be nothing but a complex and clever forgery.

I found myself wanting to buy the Gillens work we saw and take it home with us, but sadly the AVMA’s gift shop didn’t have a poster or even a postcard. Maybe the people at CassandraGillens.com should think about it; I’d bet there’s a decent market.

DarkSyde of Unscrewing the Inscrutable has a post today reviewing some arguments about same-sex marriage and adoption. His post comes on the occasion of President Bush’s recent uninterest in the FMA.

One of the posts that DarkSyde links to is by Mark Olson of Pseudo-Polymath. Mr. Olson takes the conservative side, and I thought I would take this opportunity to respond directly to some of his arguments.

“I currently oppose Same Sex Marriage (SSM),” he writes, “for reasons relating to social engineering.”

Conservatives mistrust our ability to know the outcomes of social engineering, and ordinarily I agree with them. I believe, though, that in the case of same-sex marriage, Mr. Olson is relying on an argument that has more holes to it than he realizes. He writes, “Studies done in Scandinavia have shown that with the passing of SSM, the rate of children left in single parent homes has very much been on the rise…”

The studies he refers to were done by Stanley Kurtz; his analysis can be found here.

He writes, “In the mid-1990s, out-of-wedlock births, already rising, began a steeper increase, nearly doubling to 31 percent of births in 2003. These were the very years when the debate over the legal recognition of gay relationships came to the fore in the Netherlands, culminating in the legalization of full same-sex marriage in 2000. The conjunction is no coincidence.”

Yet the so-called steeper increase takes a magnifying glass even to imagine:

The scary red section of the graph seems to my eye nothing more than a continuation of trends that were already well underway, and it strains credulity to suggest that the mere existence of pro-SSM court decisions would suddenly cause people to have many more children out of wedlock. (”Hey, the homos are getting married!” “Yeah, so why should we bother?” “So… Let’s make some babies.”)

Dr. Lee Badgett, a professor of economics, has also suggested that the statistics do not bear out Kurtz’s allegations. The closer one looks at the correlation, the less stable it seems.

Interestingly, Alas, a Blog writer Bean has even suggested that laws favoring same-sex marriage actually increase the tendency to marry, but that some other types of laws do not: The Scandinavian countries’ generous welfare and cohabitation laws make living together without marriage much more attractive, and thus many straight couples delay marriage until after they have already had children. Domestic partnership registries, cohabitation benefits and the like clearly dilute marriage by making it seem just one of many possible options, while same-sex marriage sends the message that all people would do better with a more stable intimate life.

[Bean has made this argument very powerfully with a series of graphs that are (alas) not available due to her recent server move. (Note to Alas bloggers: Consider this a bleg to fix those links!)]

Further, there are strong reasons to blame the bad Dutch economy for whatever decline exists in Dutch marriage. Blame the welfare state if you like; I’ll probably agree with you.

Lastly, this piece of ridicule from Andrew Sullivan isn’t very substantive, but it’s still worth reading. Even if we are somehow wrong on why the Dutch data is invalid, correlation does not prove causality–and this maxim is one of the key reasons why we mistrust social engineering in the first place.

But what about the Hayekian argument that same-sex marriage ought not to be implemented simply because the results are unpredictable? We don’t really understand how human societies operate, after all, and thus it makes no sense to go adjusting things under the hood.

Johnathan Rauch, writing in Reason Online, has made some excellent arguments about why this objection may not apply to SSM. Mr. Olson, if you are a Hayekian in your social philosophy–which, at first glance it seems that you are–then you would do well to read this article. Challenge yourself, and you may be surprised.

Mr. Olson suggests a second reason why SSM should not be allowed–or at the very least, why it is unnecessary: “It is my understanding that all of the legal rights which [are] at issue that might be resolved by SSM already are available to the gay couples desiring them.”

But this understanding is incorrect.

Here is a list of federal rights unavailable to couples who are not married. Only some of these rights can be obtained through other means; others really are permanently unavailable. The rights we can obtain include inheriting property (after paying the legal fees and fending off the court challenges in states with super-DOMA laws), power of attorney rights (with more fees and hassles than you can imagine), joint child custody rights (only in a handful of states, with fees, and with infinitely more hassles than power of attorney), and hospital visitation rights (just be sure to plan your emergencies in advance, otherwise you might end up at a hospital where you didn’t sign the proper forms).

The list goes on and on. Some people may claim that gay couples get all or most of the same rights that straight couples enjoy, but these people know not whereof they speak. This claim represents a convenient dodge, one that makes straight people feel good about ignoring or opposing same-sex marriage. But however convenient it may be, the story simply isn’t true.

Because of the lack of blanket protections, same-sex relationships are being nickeled and dimed to death. There are also many rights that cannot be obtained by same-sex couples at all, and some of these are among the most crucial. They include immigration rights for same-sex partners, the right to sue for wrongful death and for disability payments, and, in many states, even the right to joint legal custody of children that the partners are raising together.

In planning our future, Scott and I have had to carefully research the places we could and could not live if we wished to adopt children together. When are straight people ever subjected to this? Denying rights to same-sex couples, or making these rights prohibitively difficult, merely for the sake of “protecting” heterosexual unions, makes no sense at all. How does inconveniencing a small and unobtrusive set of the population in any way make your marriage stronger?

And thus the choice is simple: We same-sex couples can cobble together a half-baked package of unreliable rights–or we can ask for what every heterosexual couple already enjoys.

Lastly, Mr. Olson writes, “Finally, one of the arguments in favor of SSM concern “respect” for the gay community.”

I must begin by saying that I do not seek respect for the gay community. Far too often, the gay community has been spoiled, immature, ignorant, and yes, purely anti-family. I don’t seek to apologize for these people. In return, I ask that you do not judge me along with them. I ask to be considered as an individual–not as a member of some shadowy, vaguely defined gay community.

The gay community is the receptacle, Mr. Olson, of all the stereotypes you have ever subconsciously absorbed (and in fairness, it serves the same function for me): It is the place where rights disappear and where humanity evaporates. Only by looking at individuals do we gain a proper understanding of individual rights. And the right to recognition for our long-term intimate relations is certainly an individual right. It does not belong to the gay community–or to any community. It belongs to you and to me as individuals.

If I need to prove myself to you, then I will: Scott and I have been in a stable relationship for six years–and legally married for the last year and a half. We own property, work, pay taxes, and contribute to our community in many valuable ways. Yet even the worst straight couples, couples composed of criminals and derelicts, get rights that we do not.

Conservatives may not care to look to closely at gay people, but even in the gay community–even in that scary gay community that you do not want to respect–a quiet change has been taking place. It’s been brought on by the reality marriage itself. Suddenly people like Scott and I are the role models, sometimes even for men twenty or thirty years our seniors. To be devoted to one another, to love and support one another our entire natural lives–This now is the goal of gay people as never before.

It isn’t social engineering. It’s a revolution.

The role models are no longer the porn stars, the gym bunnies, the drugged-out club kids, the angry sexual liberationists (who are, by the way, the most unsexy people in the world). Married couples and stable relationships have never been so admired in our little segment of humanity, and it’s a trend that I hope will continue.

You claim that you don’t want to give us your respect, Mr. Olson. But why not? Surely you must approve of what we are doing. Or would you prefer homosexuals to be more degenerate rather than less?

Now, I can understand that individual churches might not want to approve of gay unions; orthodox Jews do not perform marriages where one party is a gentile, and the Catholic Church will not marry anyone who has been divorced. These are sectarian issues, though, and I respect all religious differences: Any religion that does not wish to marry same-sex couples is welcome to refuse us. What I want, though–what I demand–is the respect of my government.

There’s that word again: Respect. What of it? The government does owe gay Americans respect, precisely in the way it owes all Americans respect. To respect some Americans, while remaining neutral toward others, is to create a group of second-class citizens.

In the United States, the government is the servant of all of us, gay or straight, and it owes all of us respect. It has an obligation to recognize our contracts, our loves, and our lifelong plans. We Americans even created this government as an instrument of our lifelong plans, as a means of preserving and defending them. That is why same-sex marriage is both right and necessary, and that’s why I am asking you, Mr. Olson, to reconsider your opposition.

Update: Mark Olson replies, thoughtfully.

What’s the shape of gay politics? Try “hollow in the middle.”

On the personal level, the case for treating gay people with decency has never been more robust. I would be willing to bet that more people are openly gay right now than at any other time in history. Acceptance of different sexual orientations has never been more widespread, and despite a recent backlash, the poll numbers still show an overwhelming trend in our direction.

It’s well documented that when a straight person actually knows a gay person, the prejudices vanish on both sides. The water cooler chats, the backyard barbecues, even the family reunions very often go our way so long as we just show up and affirm who we are. Sure, there have been a few failures down here (my own family, for example), but on the whole we have had great success at the very lowest level of politics.

Things are pretty good at the top, too. Yes, the Republicans still dominate the federal government, and the religious right still dominates the Republican Party. But right now there are few serious anti-gay initiatives underway at the federal level. The FMA is unlikely ever to pass, and most people now see the ban on gays in the military for what it really was all along: a national embarrassment.

Also at the top level, I can’t say I always agree with the Human Rights Campaign (my gripes with them are the subject of a future post), but I must admit that they have been the most successful gay rights organization of all time. HRC has never had more influence, more money, or more members than it does right now, and for that at least we should be happy.

Strong at the highest and lowest levels, the gay rights movement is weak in the middle. The midsections of American politics–school boards, city councils, and state governments–are more solidly against us than any other sector in American public life.

State legislators are woefully uninformed about gay issues, and what they do know is often just a pile of misinformation. Consider this quote from a site endorsed by Don Dwyer, one of my local representatives:

We believe it is necessary that church leaders across Maryland be exposed to the vile and militaristic agenda of extreme homosexual activists. Moral leaders must become aware of their intent to sodomize our children.

Between you and me, this stuff wouldn’t last thirty seconds at a water cooler chat. It wouldn’t go very far at the national level, either. Where it does work, though, and where we are losing the fight, is somewhere between these two extremes. (If you’d like to read more on Don Dwyer, here is one place to start. He is also the same delegate I blogged about earlier, the one who thinks that non-Christians can be disqualified from political office.)

The religious right gives high priority to winning the state legislatures, and their efforts are paying off.

Yesterday NPR did a piece about Focus on the Family. Interestingly, the group’s tactics could not have been more different from those of the gay rights movement: Focus on the Family has gone straight for America’s middle ground. “It’s really interesting. A lot of the political activity of evangelicals reads like something out of a civics textbook, about how people should be involved in their local communities and get active on issues that they care about, and become more involved and engaged in public affairs,” said John Green, a professor of political science at the University of Akron interviewed for the piece.

At its own site, a Focus on the Family news piece describes the group’s interest in state legislatures. It’s written with that contrived despair that characterizes so much of the group’s literature. But the strategy is clear:

“What states do really does make a huge difference on so many of these issues,” said John Paulton, director of family policy councils at Focus on the Family. “Many of these issues are primarily state issues.”

Still, Paulton said there is reason to be encouraged.

“I think the perception nationally that values voters really made the difference,” he noted, “will strengthen the hand, by and large, of pro-family leaders in the state capitols.”

Are we taking notes? We certainly should be.

Because of the efforts of groups like these, America’s political midsection is stuck in a time warp on gay rights. Local politics is a flashback to a time when “no special rights” was still an incisive slogan, when AIDS was purely the fault of gay people, and when the governor of Maryland, for one, could assert that same-sex marriage was “an oxymoron.” This he did just last year. Also last year, my husband Scott called another one of our state legislators–and had to explain to him what a civil union was.

Initiatives and referenda have likewise been strongly against us, but I don’t for a moment agree that this reflects the pure, unreflective will of the people: Winning a referendum takes careful testing of ballot questions, massive legwork all across the state, and a get-out-the-vote drive that is both well-disciplined and and well-targeted. These referenda have been victories for mid-level political organizations, pure and simple.

In some states–Massachusetts is the obvious example–gay rights groups have started paying attention and working very seriously at the local level. But this has been the exception rather than the rule, and it seems clear to me at least that the time has come to rethink our priorities.

Local gay rights groups need our attention, now rather than later. The same goes for our state legislators, our city councils, and our school boards. Some of the most rabidly anti-gay organizations are winning in the middle, and we have no choice but to stop them: Those who start at the midsection of American politics very often end up at the top.

The Jefferson Seminar: A number of my blog neighbors have lately held interesting discussions on Jefferson and Christianity. Was Jefferson a Christian? And does it matter? In both cases, it depends very much on what you mean. Paul Musgrave assesses the complexities of the issue:

Jefferson viewed Jesus of Nazareth as being a great ethical teacher (a proposition that very few have debated). His redacted version of the New Testament, then, was meant to bring back the debate to the “ethical germ” of Jesus’ teachings.

[The] blunt characterization of Christianity as a necessary foundation for democratic rule is unsophisticated, [but] it’s also a standard formulation of a popular idea. (Popular, that is, in the United States.) That Christian ethics, divorced from any consideration of Christ as divine and God as an active player in human events, can play a role in the perpetuation of democracy is a more sophisticated version of this hypothesis; but even this requires the believer to say that there can be a Christian ethics without a belief in the metaphysical requirements of Christian theology, which cuts against the equally standard assertion that a belief in (the Christian) God is necessary for a moral life.

Caleb McDaniel offers a few helpful analogies, plus a lot of other good material. Note especially the first parenthesis; it recalls Jesus himself, who declared that “my kingdom is not of this world:”

I’ve already said in an earlier post that even if a nation could be Christian (and personally, I do not believe that particular noun can be modified by that particular adjective), profiling the religious beliefs of Founding Fathers would be more or less irrelevant to determining whether this one is. Many members of the Religious Right would bristle at the following arguments: Jefferson was a racist, therefore this is a racist nation; Jefferson was a man, therefore this is a masculine nation. But many participants in the debate on church-state separation accept arguments of the same basic form: Jefferson was a Christian, therefore this is a Christian nation; or Jefferson was not a believer, so this is a secular nation. Suffice it to say that I think settling the issue of how religion fits in the public sphere of a liberal democracy is too complex to be settled by a tug-of-war over individual Founding Fathers.

I agree entirely. I think the main value of pointing out Jefferson’s freethinking tendencies is to serve as a counterweight to those who claim that the United States is only a Christian nation, and that it cannot be a nation for those whose beliefs are unconventional. Pointing to Jefferson, who rejected the supernatural aspects of Jesus, helps to show that several of our very greatest Americans were freethinkers, and that the United States ought to be a nation for all of us.

Finally, Timothy Sandefur serves up a number of helpful quotes (and non-quotes) from our third president. Specifically, he has searched in vain for the source of the following passage sometimes attributed to Jefferson:

The reason that Christianity is the best friend of Government is because Christianity is the only religion that changes the heart.

Sandefur has studied Jefferson extensively, and he does not recognize this quote from any of his readings. He has also digitally searched for the phrase “changes the heart” in the Jefferson corpus, and it does not appear. Readers are invited to help source this quote if they can, but it won’t be easy.

To my ear, the quote sounds much more like Rousseau than anyone else in the eighteenth century. Yet among French intellectuals, Montesquieu held far greater influence over Jefferson’s thought than Rousseau. (Montesquieu incidentally deserves more attention in the American academy than he currently gets. But this is the subject of a future post.)

Sandefur also notes the following passage, in which Jefferson seems to answer many of our questions for us:

I…am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing every thing rational in moral philosophy which Greece & Rome have left us…. Plato…has been deified by certain sects usurping the name of Christians; because in his foggy conceptions, they found a basis of impenetrable darkness whereon to rear fabrications as delirious, of their own invention…. [T]he greatest of all the Reformers of the depraved religion of his own country, was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dung hill, we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man’s outlines which it is lamentable he had not live to fill up. Epictetus & Epricurus give us laws for governing ourselves, Jesus a supplement of the duties & charities we owe to others.

Was Jefferson a Christian? If it really matters–which we may legitimately doubt–then yes, Jefferson was a Christian. But he was a Christian in the same manner that I consider myself a devotee of Adam Smith. I don’t believe that Adam Smith performed miracles, nor do I think he rose from the dead, nor do I believe that he will bring us all eternal life with his Father in heaven. If someone told me these stories about Adam Smith, I would regard them as vulgar, pernicious distractions. And this is what Jefferson thought about the supernatural elements of Christianity.

No, I just think that Smith did a better job of social philosophy than anyone else, and that most good social philosophy since then has been in his footsteps. As to individual philosophy, I incline strongly toward Aristotle. Much like Jefferson believed that the philosophy of Jesus was a useful “supplement” to Epicurus and Epictetus, so too, I view Smith as a useful supplement to Aristotle, whom I regard as the best exponent of individual ethics.

Of course, if someone claimed that Adam Smith multiplied the loaves and fishes, I might not be inclined to argue.

Sci-Fi for the New Intellectual: In other news, Tim Sandefur also laments the decline of televised science fiction:

One of the highlights of this weekend was the Science Fiction Channel’s revival of Battlestar Gallactica, which premiered Saturday. It was wonderful! I don’t know if it’s just me or if TV has been getting worse, but I’ve been finding myself less and less interested in science fiction of late, and it was delightful to finally find a show I can care about and enjoy again.

Battlestar? Eh, I could take it or leave it. This weekend, though, Scott and I discovered Firefly, a remarkable science fiction series that was unjustly canceled after only one season, but that is rapidly becoming a cult classic. We absolutely loved it; we talked about the show until sometime after midnight yesterday, when I finally rolled over in bed and said, “look, we’ve got to get some sleep sometime tonight.” Yes, it was really that good. It’s got clever, well-constructed plots, action, suspense, symbolism, and a vision of the future that evokes, for me at least, some of the best in Victor Hugo’s fiction. Episode three, “Bushwhacked,” is actually quite similar to the major plot line in Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize, which is still my favorite novel of all time.

Scott and I have only seen the first three episodes, though, so please don’t e-mail me with spoilers. The rest of the series is on the way from Netflix, and we will watch it as soon as we possibly can. Any spoilers on my part will be given only with advance warning. When something this good comes along, you really don’t want it to be ruined.

Interestingly, the show’s appeal seems to have spread largely by favorable recommendations on weblogs. Admirers of Ayn Rand have especially liked it, so I suspect that Mr. Sandefur will want to have a look if he has not already.

Kilts Here and There: This weekend, a group of mostly heterosexual kilt enthusiasts discovered my snarky, offhanded, oversexed musings on gay men in kilts. Unbeknownst to my regular readers, these kilted warriors started visiting Positive Liberty by the dozens, mostly to read what I wrote about kilts from several months ago. Back on their forum, some uncomfortable words were exchanged. But all’s well that ends well.

I encourage you all to don your kilts and go read it yourself.

A lot of bloggers have posted thoughts today on Martin Luther King Jr.

I didn’t write anything myself, as I spent the day with friends. Among the many posts I’ve read,
I like best the one at Unscrewing the Inscrutable. It’s pretty close to what I dream about, too.

Jon Rowe has an important post on James Madison and the separation of Church and State. I agree with substantially all of it, and here is an excerpt:

Neutrality, “religion blindness,” being able to neither “privilege nor penalize” religion are the standards that the Court should use to determine what degree of separation of Church & State is constitutionally required. Such a standard would explain why vouchers, for instance, do not violate the Constitution.

Conservatives might counter that Madison’s & Jefferson’s views weren’t dominant at the time of the founding. But a natural rights approach to the Constitution would ask whether the Madisonian, Jeffersonian view is necessary to respect the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence. Therefore, someone like Justice Thomas, or the entire bunch at Claremont, for instance, should support the degree of separating Church & State that Jefferson and Madison called for in their respective Virginia documents.

I would only add that whether or not Madison and Jefferson’s views predominated at the time, Madison was influential beyond any other individual in making the Constitution what it is, while Jefferson’s ideas on religious freedom ultimately found their way into the First Amendment. If we are to value the intent of the founders, we should recall that some founders were more important than others, and that these two were at the very top of the list.

I’ve developed the bad habit lately of posting lengthy follow-ups to previous posts (Orson Scott Card parts one and two; natural evil parts one, two, and three), and I regret to report that I am doing it again today.

It’s my hope, though, that readers can follow this post even if they have read neither Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Just War Against Terror nor my review of it posted below. The questions I will address–regarding pacifism and proportionality in just war theory–can be approached from many different angles, and I look forward to whatever perspectives my readers may have.

In the comments to the previous post, Caleb questions me about pacifism as follows:

Surely it’s not true that being a pacifist commits one to thinking that all peaces are equally good. Pacifists do not have to answer for every peace, any more than just war theorists have to answer for every war.

It’s certainly true that just war theorists don’t have to justify every war; on the contrary, they assert that only some wars are waged for proper causes, and that there are just and unjust ways to conduct a war.

Pacifists make a rather larger argument. It’s certainly true that pacifists distinguish between better and worse times of peace, and they have often worked nonviolently toward admirable goals. But to be perfectly consistent, a pacifist must consider any peace to be better than any war. If a pacifist ever determined that a war was justified, then he would cease to be a pacifist. He would become instead a just war theorist, albeit one who is less likely than most to regard a given war as just.

In another comment, NancyP takes defenders of the Afghan War to task for ignoring proportionality:

If we have been the victims of violence to the tune of about 3,000 noncombatants, does it make sense morally to take a course which for whatever reason is likely to kill 50,000 noncombatants? Say one fears the possibility (but not certainty) that that same small group that blew up the WTC will successfully deploy in NYC a dirty nuclear bomblet (explosive of conventional type, dispersing small quantity of radioactive material in populated area, for increased cancer deaths of 20,000 over 20 years). Does that allow one to commit genocide against the entire population of the country? Most people would say no. What if you can eliminate the group and cause under 500 civilian deaths, and provide substantial and effective reconstruction assistance to the country?

In fairness to Elshtain, her work really does discuss the issue of proportionality. My review, though, dealt primarily with ad bellum justification, the criteria by which we decide whether a given war is entered into properly. This category of just war theory is usually understood not to include proportionality, and thus my review didn’t say very much about the issue.

The other major heading of just war theory, in bello justification, concerns the methods by which we conduct a war once the conflict is already underway. These too must be proper for a war to be just, and proportionality is usually considered a part of in bello justification. On this subject, Elshtain writes,

The two key in bello requirements are proportionality and discrimination. Proportionality refers to the need to use the level of force commensurate with the nature of the threat. If a nation faces a threat from a small, renegade band carrying out indiscriminate assassinations, it does not call in a tactical nuclear strike; rather, it puts a mobile unit in the field to track down this band and stop them. [Elshtain, p 65]

Now wait, Afghan War opponents might say, wasn’t our response disproportionate to the injury inflicted upon us? Nancy seems to imply that while al Qaeda killed about 3,000 civilians, we killed some 50,000 of theirs.

This would indeed be troubling, except that the figure of 50,000 civilian deaths is almost certainly incorrect. As Elshtain points out [pp 67-68], estimates of civilian deaths compiled by human rights groups, the U.S. military, and The Los Angeles Times run between 1,000 and 2,000 as of July 3, 2002. Given that these agents have biases that probably run in different directions, it adds credibility that their figures are so similar–and so low. Still more importantly, what civilian deaths we did cause were accidental, and our efforts to prevent them were greater than in any other war in history.

Elshtain then writes,

The Los Angeles Times concluded that the numbers suggest a very low casualty rate compared with earlier Afghan conflicts. In the early battles between competing Afghan warlords, an estimated 50,000 civilians were killed, according to the International Committee for the Red Cross. Soviet air raids in March 1979 killed 20,000 civilians in a few days in the western city of Herat–just a fraction of the estimated 670,000 civilians who died during the ten-year Soviet occupation. [ibid.]

Elshtain recognizes that proportionality is a difficult challenge in the age of mass terrorism. Most emphatically, September 11 did not authorize us to enter Afghanistan and deliberately kill 3,000 civilians; eye-for-an-eye is not the underlying goal of proportionality. Likewise, proportionality does require us to turn around and head home after killing the 3,000th combatant.

What, then, does proportionality allow us to do? It allows us to use force sufficient to end the threat that we face, keeping in mind both the severity of the threat and the likelihood of collateral damage. The latter, though, is not to be understood as an absolute veto of all military action whatsoever–unless one wishes to give up just war theory altogether and instead make the argument for pacifism.

The nature of the threat before us is that a small group of people has determined to kill as many American civilians as possible. Given that group’s resources and composition, it is plausible to imagine them acquiring a nuclear weapon. Given such a scenario, I do not think invading the country that hosts them is a disproportionate response. (Nagging questions about cost-benefit analysis will be deferred for another time: Even the most devastating invasion of Afghanistan would cause less harm than a nuclear weapon in New York City.)

We acted to remove that threat, and while we have certainly had some success on this score, I can only wish that we had done more, not less. If we have failed to follow the principle of proportionality in Afghanistan, it is because we have not done enough. We ought to have done much, much more to address al Qaeda directly, rather than becoming distracted by a second war, one whose main justification was the indirect inhibition of al Qaeda. Above all, proportionality would seem to argue for putting first things first.