This article at First Things by Robert R. Chase is a fascinating look at religious themes in science fiction. I’ve always felt that science-fiction was far less amenable to religion than fantasy, but thinking about much of the science fiction canon I’m not so sure this is true. Chase mentions both Lewis’s Space Trilogy and the excellent post-apocalyptic novel  A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr., both excellent examples of religion’s – and specifically Christianity’s – role in science fiction.

Two science fiction books I’ve read recently have been Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin and Joe Halderman’s The Accidental Time Machine.  Both these novels touch on religious themes – though not in terribly positive ways. Spin has dueling theologies, in a sense, playing the hyper-technological benevolence of an advanced robotic entity against the radicalism of a new wave of Christians obsessed with the Rapture and what they perceive to be the end times. That being said, in the rather more blatant libertarianism of science fiction, the real villains of Wilson’s story are not the religious at all but the government.

Halderman’s Time Machine is a bit more light-hearted, and contrasts future America’s against one another. In one time we are witness to an east coast in the thrall of a theocratic totalitarianism; in another we experience the vapidity of a super-prosperous and super-lazy future capitalistic society. In the theocratic future we travel to M.I.T. which has become the Massachusettes Institute of Theophony. In the prosperous suburbs of a state-spanning Los Angeles, we encounter a populace that never has to work, whose citizens gain degrees in shopping and have, for lack of a better term, become incredibly stupid.

In any case, you should read Chase’s article as he goes into much greater depth on the matter.

Like Will, I was at Philip Blond’s Georgetown lecture on Thursday. Unlike Will, I was predisposed to agree with everything Blond said. I came away a bit disappointed, though.

I find little to argue with in the actual policies he proposes, which mostly involve empowering local bodies, public and private, and disempowering large or international bodies, public and private.

His philosophical positions, however, are a little incoherent at the margins. For instance, he fully endorsed the position that we need an account of what a good life consists in in order to make political decisions, a position familiar to critics of Liberalism from an Aristotelian point of view, but then identified himself as an “Antique Liberal” (while in the same breath condemning Locke) and declared his allegiance to the liberal premise that individuals in pluralistic  societies should follow their own conceptions of the good while debating them publicly and neutrally with others. He did not try to give an account of how the state might embody so-called “thick” views about what makes for a good life while at the same time serving as a referee amongst the many competing visions of the good life put forward by its citizens.

This was shortly after saying, puzzlingly, that his work was in the MacIntyrean tradition but that he doesn’t think MacIntyre is right about the failure of public reason in liberal society, which is, after all a fairly central element of MacIntyre’s position and its derivatives.

Most confusing of all was his position on markets. He condemned neo-liberalism, but his reasons for doing so oscillated during the talk. On the one hand he seemed to suggest that the problem with neo-liberals is that they were not thorough enough, undermining the true principle of laissez faire with various state subsidies for various large businesses. On the other hand, he floated the idea that the whole idea of free markets relies on a misconstrual of human sociality, a criticism entirely at odds with his first.

I am grateful that Blond has the ear of David Cameron, and I certainly hope that his influence is decisive in determining the future course of the UK. But while I recognize the difficulty of articulating a contemporary conservative vision that isn’t in thrall to neo-liberalism, I can’t see that his views add up to a coherent political philosophy independent of the exigencies of policy.

Update: A friend of mine offers a tentative rejoinder:

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Following the meme, here are the ten books that changed my life the most.

• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. This book de-Catholicized me, or at least it began the process. It set me on the path to libertarianism, after I’d read Atlas Shrugged. It offered a sense of life, and a lifelong obsession. I still live here a lot of the time.
• The Once and Future King by T. H. White. The most insightful book about government ever written for young people. It taught me that government is a nasty business, even at its best. I have never since been able to see government as noble in the way that I think most people do.
• Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama. Sparked another lifelong interest — the French Revolution, which was also a nasty business, but an instructive one. After years of reading in French history, I have all kinds of complaints with this book, but it’s still a great read.
• Candide by Voltaire. I pick this one out of Voltaire’s many short stories both because it’s one of the longer ones — plausibly, it really is a book — and also because it’s familiar. Voltaire’s style, his absurdism, and his sense of justice have always appealed to me.
• The Book of Predictions by David Wallechinsky, Amy Wallace and Irving Wallace. Published in 1981. Obscure but fascinating; its influence would be hard for me to overstate. Every year on New Year’s Day I revisit this book to see what various people got right and wrong about the future, which I’ve been lucky enough to live to see. Patterns have emerged over time, and these patterns have deeply influenced how I think about society.

  Lesson one: psychics are never worth your time. The most accurate forecaster in the book is F. M. Esfandiary, by a landslide (yes, that guy). He got many things wrong, but it’s clear that he was in another league from all the rest.

  The biggest mistake made by nearly all forecasters (though not so much by Esfandiary) is to think that the future would be controlled by a central agency or authority. No one imagined how decentralized we would be in 2010. We were blindsided by a mostly libertarian, decentralizing technological revolution. This is a tremendously good thing. Most predictors were pessimists, and they were mostly wrong.

• Island by Aldous Huxley. It’s hard to read or understand this book without Brave New World, but Island is a positive statement of Huxley’s beliefs, not a negative one, so what he really thinks comes across more clearly. It’s also the only utopian society in fiction that I’d ever really want to live in. The others either leave me cold or make me want to run away as fast as I can. I’d have some problems with Huxley’s utopia, but I think I could live in it.
• Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. Sort of a stand-in for all of his other works. Didn’t dare cite The Order of Things because that one’s so hard to understand that I’m not sure whether it’s had an influence on me. Whenever I try self-consciously to “be” a libertarian in my writing, I often end up sounding like Foucault.
• Virtually Normal by Andrew Sullivan. Andrew would do better to blog less and to write more in print. He’s an extraordinary prose stylist, and maybe among the best of all time, when he slows down. When he blogs, he’s repetitive and formulaic. I learned to write by reading Virtually Normal. It was also the first book I ever read about gay politics, and it seemed just so clear, so right, and so wise.
• Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett. This is the closest I’ve ever read to a convincing theory of everything. The book is too modestly titled, however, because while Darwin is certainly the key to the story, we also get Diderot, Hume, Leibniz, Popper, Gould, Penrose, and a host of others. It’s an intellectual tour de force, and especially remarkable for its linkage of biological evolution to a theory of mind.
• Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World by Jack Goldstone. This book nearly destroyed my faith in non-quantitative historical methods. I take it as a reminder that while philosophy may be a tyrant, she is a tyrant with short, pudgy little arms.

Alex Chilton, RIP:

Your faithful correspondent donned a collared shirt and ventured into Georgetown last night to listen to Philip Blond’s presentation on “Red Toryism” (Blond’s Wikipedia entry is here; the Porch has a good introductory post here). Blond’s ideas have attracted a murderers’ row of the League’s favorite bloggers, so I thought I’d (briefly) summarize his presentation and offer a few thoughts of my own.

As I understand it, Blond’s argument goes something like this: Both the political Left and political Right have embraced a philosophy of radical liberal individualism, which undermines civic virtue and communal solidarity by valorizing individual choice above all else. Consequently, our political system oscillates wildly between government encroachment and radical deregulation because political rights have become wholly contingent on our relationship to the state. Blond seeks to revitalize conservative politics by restoring what he terms classical liberalism, which emphasizes civic virtue, subsidiarity, and explicitly moral political goals that go beyond maximizing choice. In the realm of ec0nomics, Blond calls for breaking up “corporate oligopolies,” local competition, and encouraging poor and working class citizens to become “stakeholders” in the economy (shades of Bush’s “ownership society?”). In the realm of politics and civic life, Blond stressed the importance of civil society and spoke out in favor of radical decentralization, a concept he explicitly links to Catholic subsidiarity.

Despite my nasty libertarian streak, I found a lot to like in Blond’s talk, particularly in his enthusiasm for decentralization and local competition. My only quibble is that while Blond’s diagnoses are often compelling, his proposed solutions are sometimes less so. When talking about the importance of political subsidiarity, for example, Blond spoke of “giving democracy back to the streets,” which sounds more like a Students for a Democratic Society slogan than a concrete political program. “Driving capital to the periphery” and decentralizing our financial system sound great in theory, but I’m still left to wonder how economic subsidiarity works in practice. One important caveat: I’m new to Blond and was late to the lecture, so my first impressions may not do justice to the Red Tories’ program.

Blond’s philosophy also seems better suited to cultural renewal than, say, political or economic reform. His most compelling examples of Red Toryism in action – A Birmingham neighborhood taking back the streets from pimps and drug dealers; the persistence of Northern Italy’s artisan economy – struck me as the result of cultural factors that aren’t easily replicated or recreated through state action. When we do transmogrify a cultural agenda into a political one, the results are sometimes messier than anticipated, which may have been what Ross Douthat was getting at when he asked Blond about the parallels between his philosophy and Bush’s compassionate conservatism at the end of the presentation.

One last observation: Blond spoke movingly of the plight of poor and working class citizens stuck in low-wage service jobs with no prospects for social mobility. His economic vision stresses the importance of creating stakeholders – skilled artisans, small businesspeople, and so on -  who feel more invested in their communities. This reminded me of the American experience after World War II, when millions of returning GIs received free college educations and federally-backed homeownership loans helped create the American middle class. But while these programs were largeky  successful, they’re not exactly models of decentralized governance. Is Blond willing to compromise or moderate his small government sympathies to create new economic stakeholders? I ask because state efforts to create or impart social capital – from public schools to the Federal Housing Administration to Bush’s compassionate conservatism – are rarely characterized by decentralization or subsidiarity.

Exit question: Is liberal society, as Blond suggests, fundamentally dependent on older traditions, cultural practices, and civic institutions? Does radical individualism undermine these institutions? I know Blond isn’t the first to make this argument, but his prognosis was both unusually grim and surprisingly persuasive. I’d be curious to hear what the League’s commenters and contributors have to say on the subject.

I’m going to make a few predictions about the future of U.S. healthcare, provided that the bill under consideration passes.

First, the bill will prove substantially more expensive than projected. Ezra Klein is naive to take the CBO numbers at face value, and Peter Suderman is right to dig deeper, but I strongly suspect that that’s not the half of it.

Significant upward revisions are on the way, but only after passage. Everyone will profess to be surprised. Everyone will be lying, because large new federal programs usually cost more than expected. There will be fights about whether a very large sum of money — the difference between today’s estimate and the future’s — is really all that large. These fights will be of little consequence.

Second, I predict that Obamacare will trundle along despite all of the above. I hope I’m wrong on this, but I don’t see a serious repeal effort in the near term. Once something’s done in Washington, it’s very hard to undo, even if everyone agrees that it’s a bad policy.

Third, even if the bill is implemented more or less as we see it now, I predict that U.S. health outcomes will not substantially improve relative to other countries. I predict this because U.S. health outcomes are already fairly good. There’s not a lot of room for relative improvement, even if we do spend more money. We’re in the middle of the pack of industrialized nations today, and I expect that we’ll still be in the middle of the pack ten years from now, barring any major localized catastrophes (civil war, plague, nuclear attack, a major dollar crisis, or the like).

A substantial part of the difference in health outcomes between the United States and the world’s very healthiest countries stems not from lack of health insurance, but from the American lifestyle. Americans eat more, drive more, and exercise less than most other wealthy nations. We have more accidents, more heart disease, more diabetes, and more cancer owing to things that aren’t addressed here at all. These are things we will presumably keep right on doing to ourselves.

Giving many more people free or subsidized insurance will certainly improve some people’s particular health outcomes, but it won’t have a large effect on health outcomes across the board. Many of the newly covered people will be poor but young and healthy. They won’t especially need the insurance, and it won’t help their health in the least. Policies like these buy a small amount of health with a large amount of cash. The rest becomes a corporate subsidy.

Now, the corporations may need this subsidy to pay for the new requirement that they cover people with preexisting conditions and the other various restrictions they will face. But this just brings me back to my biggest problem with the bill as it’s finally being voted on: What is “state-subsidized mandatory insurance for anyone with a preexisting condition,” if it’s not a farmed-out corporatist version of socialized medicine? I’ve wondered about this for a long time but never found a satisfying answer.

If I’m right in this hunch, then even single-payer could prove to be a better system than the one we’re on the verge of implementing, which seems to further marry the worst aspects of both the market and socialism, albeit in a spectacularly inefficient way. It seems also to foster more entanglements between big corporations and the government, of exactly the sort that genuine libertarians hate, and that liberals ought to hate as well.

So: Bigger deficits, no significant attempt to repeal, no big improvement in health outcomes, and more corruption in the form of state-corporate collusion. Those are my predictions. Oh, and at some point a new crop of Democrats will get fed up with it all and try to implement single-payer. By then we won’t even be able to pretend to pay for it.

For a post with such seemingly low stakes, my recent musings on St. Patrick’s Day received an impassioned reaction. There are a lot of reasons for that. The most interesting, even if not the primary one, is that in our liberal society we don’t know quite what to do or say about culture.

Rod Dreher pointed out that most St. Patrick’s Day revelers aren’t too concerned with the holiday’s meaning:

…do most Americans out getting sozzled on green beer today really have the slightest idea about what the actual Irish people suffered? I don’t think so. I think most of us have this idea of the Irish as a fun-loving people who love to drink beer, tickle leprechauns, and listen to U2. And that’s about it.

Will highlighted the praiseworthy meaning of our odd little holiday:

A group that was once thought of as completely alien is now firmly established within the American mainstream. You can take several lessons from this experience, but the one that seems most relevant is that the United States has been astonishingly successful at assimilating disparate ethnic groups. This strikes me as something worth celebrating.

But can both Rod and Will be right? Can St. Patrick’s Day be a celebration of successful minority integration (a la Barack O’Bama) and be a holiday that no one actually thinks about? Well, yes. The essence of culture, and of ritual, is that it has the power to express and transmit an unselfconscious and implicit cultural memory.

Some people might be reluctant to acknowledge that any ritual has cultural substance. This is exactly the line of thinking that I want to oppose. Culture and ritual matter. They allow us to express and preserve truths that can’t be transmitted effectively in any other way.

There’s a fear, often a hope, that in liberal society ritual forms no longer have any meaning. Legal forms, holiday celebrations — many things that look very much like cultural practices and rituals — can be understood as merely contractual or diversionary, anything but elements of a real and describable culture. But if it’s possible for rituals to have meaning without anyone articulating that meaning explicitly, it’s also the case that we may not be able, by simple power of statement, to give it a new meaning (though of course that meaning might change in other ways). Sometimes we call this meaning religious instead of cultural. We punt on the question of culture and hope it lands on the far side of the wall of separation.

And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake! – Sir Thomas More, A Man For All Seasons

There has been no shortage of writing about the video that Liz Cheney’s Keep America Safe group produced that criticizes Department of Justice lawyers for representing the “Al Qaeda 7″. I’m not convinced that I’m qualified to offer anything more of value on the specifics that have come out surrounding the not subtle charges of impropriety, failure of loyalty towards country in time of war, all the way to jihadist sympathies, so I won’t be trying. But the whole affair speaks to some of the deeper concerns with which I’ve been wrestling of late.

Not surprisingly, everyone’s favourite NRO zealot Andy McCarthy has added his two cents to the discussion, which has kicked up a brand new cloud of dust into which various parties have charged, blades drawn,

Here is the legal profession’s message for the American people: “We’re just more important than you are.” Members of any other profession or institution would be indicted for coming to the enemy’s aid during wartime. Lawyers not only demand immunity from the ordinary duties of citizenship, but they insist that you admire them, or, at the very least, regard them as above criticism for volunteering their services to those trying to kill Americans.

Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy seems to have penned the gold standard in response to McCarthy noting,

Finally, McCarthy strangely overlooks the basic fact that much of the litigation for the Guantanamo detainees concerns whether they are in fact the enemy. McCarthy presupposes that we all know that all the folks at Gitmo are terrorists, and the only issue is whether we feel like helping them knowing that it hurts America. But like the soldiers at the Boston Massacre, and like other criminal defendants, the Guantanamo detainees are “the accused.”

At True/Slant, Conor Friedersdorf dug out the real life case that makes Kerr’s final point,

Thus Mr. al-Rabiah. It isn’t just that he was an innocent man thrown into Gitmo, or that he was held even after a CIA analyst concluded that he was innocent, or that National Security Council Staffers were aware of his innocence and actively trying to bring about a review of his detention — Mr. al-Rabiah’s case is apt because after the CIA’s 2002 determination of his innocence, he spent another seven years wrongly imprisoned, regaining his freedom and seeing his children only after retaining the help of American attorneys.

Finally, Kevin Drum notes both Kerr and Friedersdorf’s objections to the Cheney/McCarthy line of reasoning and adds,

The Andy McCarthys of the world endlessly lecture us about how this war is different because it’s fought on one side by non-uniformed terrorists. And there’s some truth to that. It is different. But one of the ways it’s different is that it’s not always simple to know who’s a real enemy combatant and who’s not. And if that decision is left entirely up to the executive branch, you’re practically begging for the same kinds of abuses that you get if you let the executive branch operate without oversight in any other area. Thus, lawyers and judges have a role to play. They aren’t aiding the enemy during wartime, they’re trying to figure out who the enemy really is. Even Andy McCarthy ought to be interested in that.

I agree that Kerr’s point about utilizing the judiciary system to determine who, precisely, constitutes an enemy combatant and who does not is a vital point. But an equally vital point, at least to my mind, is summed by another portion of Kerr’s retaliation wherein he revisits the John Adams analogy that has been floating about (emphasis mine),

When Adams agreed to represent the English soldiers, he was not fulfilling some sort of obligation: No one had to represent the Englishmen. Adams acted — and was criticized then, but celebrated now, for it — because he agreed to represent the soldiers out of a personal conviction that no person should face a trial without counsel.

This is, I think, a point that hasn’t gotten enough attention and strikes, at least by my lights, to the much more central core of what is so disturbing about McCarthy and Cheney’s line of thought.

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Will linked us to this piece by James Bowman earlier.  Bowman writes:

I mention this difference between the fantastical as it existed in olden times and today, which some may think a trivial one, because we are or ought to be coming to realize that acknowledged fantasy, of the kind the movies have inherited from science fiction, is a different kind of thing from fantasy that doesn’t know it is fantasy…. But if there is no longer any attempt at imitation of reality but only the aptly-described “magic” of the movies making new realities, then there is no longer any such thing as art as it has been understood for the last three thousand or so years in the West.

Then again, when someone writes of myths they believe in this is usually not considered fantasy is it? Such writing would surely be considered religious texts. Bowman misses a much larger and more important aspect of fantasy which is that it is – at its best – an elaborate allegory. Tolkien’s Middle Earth was not something he believed in, per se, but it was most certainly a vehicle through which he could explore his beliefs. The myths he borrowed from may have been more Pagan than Christian, but the themes Tolkien was exploring were certainly in the Christian tradition. As Michael Weingard notes in his excellent essay on the dearth of Jewish fantasy:

Christianity has a much more vivid memory and even appreciation of the pagan worlds which preceded it than does Judaism. Neither Canaanite nor Egyptian civilizations exercise much fascination for the Jewish imagination, and certainly not as a place of enchantment or escape. In contrast, the Christian imagination found in Lewis and Tolkien often moves, like Beowulf or Sir Gawain, through an older pagan world in which spirits of place and mythical beings are still potent. Nor is this limited to fauns and elves. This anterior world can be dark and frighteningly alien, as Tolkien has Gandalf indicate in The Two Towers. “Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves,” the wizard says, “the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not.” Lewis sounds the same note in Perelandra when, far below the surface of the planet Venus, his protagonist catches an unsettling glimpse of alien creatures, and wonders if there might be “some way to renew the old Pagan practice of propitiating the local gods of unknown places in such fashion that it was no offence to God Himself but only a prudent and courteous apology for trespass.”

Fantasy is, after all, an exploration of our history and of – to put it somewhat crudely – what it means to be human. The fantastical often serves as contrast to our own humanity. The ‘other’ serves as a sort of mirror. Tolkien’s elves are a glimpse at a sort of perfection we humans cannot attain – at least here on Earth (or Middle Earth). The humans in Narnia have a very special role in the determination of events there. Magic is a window (indeed, a house full of windows) into all the ways we could be, or wish to be, but are not and never will be. In a sense, fantasy takes new worlds and false histories and creates little laboratories of experience. It is more inward looking than science fiction, which is by its nature a forward looking genre. It requires that we see beyond the fantastic to get to the deeper meanings.

What it does not require, in any sense, is a belief in the fantastical worlds it creates, either on the part of the writer or the reader. Bowman misunderstands the very nature of fantasy. Tolkien’s exploration of power and loss (of the war-torn, fast-changing world he existed in, the death of the agrarian society and the rise of the machine) could have as easily played out in a non-fantastical piece (though perhaps it would not have been quite so memorable). He did not need to believe in his creation to believe in the meaning behind it, any more than he would need to believe in any other fiction he created – on our own world or in some other.

Bowman writes elsewhere:

What I objected to in our contemporary fantasists — the question of their predecessors was too complicated for me to go into in such a short article — was that they deliberately and as a precondition of their art cut me off from any possibility of belief in the worlds they represent to me because they do not believe in them themselves. And if they don’t believe in them, why should I? And if I can’t believe in them, why should I care about them?

To draw a comparison between the fantasy of our modern world and the fantasy of some ‘olden-days’ is to miss the point of fantasy in the first place. Homer did not write fantasy novels, but the works of Homer, like the folklore and myth of so many cultures, provides the inspiration for much of what fantasists do today. If we believe in our own myths, after all, then they are not really fantasy.

Why should we care about these stories if we cannot be bothered to believe in them? I would say, quite simply, because the truth of a story is not always found merely in its narrative. If Bowman cannot see past the fantastical – something that even Homer surely wanted his readers to do – to see the humanity beneath it, then he is not reading either myth or fantasy in the way it was meant to be read. Nor Homer, for that matter.

Furthermore, we should read because we enjoy a good story. If we cannot enjoy a good story because the author who wrote it did not ‘believe’ it, then we should stop reading fiction altogether. Like perfection, a critic can easily become the enemy of the good.

Fantasy will never be like the ‘olden days’ and nor should it.  At least not in this world.

In the comments to my earlier post on Israel/Palestine, North and Michael Drew got into a very intelligent (and spirited) back and forth.

Michael eventually wrote the following (way down in the thread of comment #9):

The question is why or whether they [The Palestinians] would be interested in a state for themselves, knowing at this point what it would consist of (not what it might have done). You are eliding the question by saying that they should want it if they have interest in a state on that territory. That is the question. Palestinian nationalism is largely a thing of the 1980s and to some extent 90s. Since then, it has largely been a crutch for the U.S. and Israel’s efforts at peace. Whatever reason Palestinians once had to desire the state on offer has been long since spoilt by war and economic siege. I honestly don’t see what reason they would have to accept what they can now get. It would not even come with any guarantee of security from Israeli interference pursuant to “security interests’ — no Israeli government could ever take that off the table. Given the history, and given that the Palestinian “state” would be effectively demilitarized, the “state” would amount to nothing more than a voluntarily promise of nonintervention from Israel. The cumulative effects of economic isolation and sense that historical wrongs had only been institutionalized would guarantee eventual violence directed at Israel from the new “state,” and the cycle of intervention and retaliation would begin anew.

This is a very important and well articulated point of view.  As a quick review, my own sense of how crippled the Two State Framework is, led me to argue (in the comments) for the out-there idea that the US should take over the West Bank to create a kind of state-tutelage for the Palestinians, cover security for the Israelis, and separate the two populations.  An admittedly somewhat insane idea*, only surpassed in its insanity (I think) by the current state of affairs and its seemingly unstoppable trajectory towards Israel ruling over a stateless ethnic majority disenfranchised politically.  The consequences of an increasingly unstoppable Accidental Empire.

Michael’s argument gains support from Juan Cole, who in the conclusion to a classic takedown of Jeffrey Goldberg (always in good order), says the following:

Does Goldberg have a plan “B”? Because his two-state solution is so 1993. The problem is, it is almost certainly past the point where any such thing is possible, given the size and extent of Israeli colonies in the Palestinian West Bank. Goldberg admits that the only two likely outcomes of the current policies of Binyamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman are Apartheid or a one-state solution.  (boldface in original)

For those interested, the best argument I’ve ever read towards a a one state solution is that of Ali Abu Nimah (titled One Country).  The book makes some strong arguments and is definitely worth reading and considering, but I still admit to thinking there are serious potential flaws in the idea.  Flaws that push (as discussed in this interview with Abu Nimah) even people like Jimmy Carter and Noam Chomsky to favor a two state solution.  In that same interview Abu Nimah counters:

What I argue in the book [One Country], of course this isn’t about destroying Israel. It isn’t about turning things over from one day to the next. Palestine-Israel is not the only country that faces this sort of power struggle along ethnic, religious, and other lines. We have to look for structures, and I talk about this in some detail in the book. How they did it in South Africa, where by the way, the same sorts of arguments were made against ending Apartheid and against one person, one vote. We have to look at countries like Belgium, we have to look at Northern Ireland.

There are many models out there for dealing with those sort of things. So that you have one person, one vote, full democracy, full equality, while at same time, ethnic communities, the Israeli-Jewish community, the Palestinian community, will have mechanisms for expressing their national identity, for decision making over issues that concern them. We have to stop thinking this very simplistic, binary way. And this is where I’m trying to take the discussion with this book.

While I generally think the idea of Two States is much more workable in theory, I’m leaning more towards the notion that it is has become unfeasible in practice, however preferred it might be at the hypothetical/policy level.  I think these kinds of discussions need to take place–what do we do if the Two State Solution fails?  What do we do if the Two State Solution is not workable, if there is no realistic path from here to there?

If the Two State Solution is dead (or at least becoming incapacitated with little to no hope of legitimate recovery), then we are left only with the choice of Israeli domination of a (soon to be) ethnic majority without political rights, which would call into question the legitimacy of the state of Israel and continue the horrible, right-less existence of the Palestinian people.  Or one state.  Again that binary choice occurs IF the Two State Solution is dead.  My own view is that The Two State Solution is increasingly on the precipice–while for others we’ve already fallen off that edge.

I think much more work needs to be done on thinking about what safeguards there would be in a One State framework.  Abu Nimah begins that discussion, but I think it needs to go much further.

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* I didn’t know these previous to TEH GOOGLE telling me, but apparently this fellow has argued that the united Israeli-Palestinian state become the 51st State in the US.

I’d just like to agree publicly with every last word of this piece by Glenn Greenwald:

[T]he bill recently introduced by Joe Lieberman and John McCain — the so-called “Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act” — now has 9 co-sponsors, including the newly elected Scott Brown. It’s probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act. It literally empowers the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect — including American citizens arrested on U.S. soil. The bill requires that all such individuals be placed in military custody, and explicitly says that they “may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,” which everyone expects to last decades, at least. It’s basically a bill designed to formally authorize what the Bush administration did to American citizen Jose Padilla — arrest him on U.S. soil and imprison him for years in military custody with no charges.

In what way does this bill differ from pure, thought-experiment grade tyranny? Of the kind that, in our country at least, is only dragged out to gesture at when you’re making an argument about something else entirely? And then you put it back up on the shelf with a quiet “but of course, that doesn’t happen here…”

Thinking of the Kuhn discussion, I’d like to look at how a mythical culture understands an innovation of techné/craft; here treated as both a divinely revealed gift and the ground of human tragedy.

We start with the Titan Prometheus. In the Theogony, Hesiod depicts Prometheus as a sly trickster who angered Zeus by giving him the bones of an ox wrapped in glistening fat to eat. For unclear reasons, Zeus responded by vowing to keep the secret of fire from mankind, but Prometheus secreted away a ray of fire for man in a fennel stalk, a story that could reflect earlier man’s experience with fire sparked by lightning and carried by similar means. When he found out, Zeus punished Prometheus by having him bound to a pillar, where his liver was munched on by an eagle each day and regenerated each night, until he was finally freed by Heracles. Man, meanwhile, was punished with the creation of woman, according to the misogynist Hesiod, the source of all his troubles. Ever the Zeus propagandist, Hesiod uses the Prometheus story to show, “It is impossible to hoodwink Zeus, or to surpass him”. But, of course, Prometheus did hoodwink Zeus.

Living in a time of Athenian optimism (mid-400s BCE), Aeschylus, instead, depicts Zeus as a tyrant, recently enthroned by coup, paranoid about losing power, and planning to exterminate man. Some readers doubt the generally pious Aeschylus could have created this Zeus, but he isn’t much different from the bullying character elsewhere in mythology. Also, Aeschylus doesn’t really describe Prometheus’s gifts as pure windfalls. For example, his first gift, the ability to imagine a happy future, hides from men their wretched actuality. The other gifts: medicine, astrology, writing, metallurgy, and fire are also mixed blessings. Man’s imaginative creations somehow alienate him from his own condition, allowing him to deceive himself as to his mortal physical state. Prometheus is still a trickster. This is pilfered divine knowledge, hidden from men because, with it, they would be as gods, but not gods. The human condition is tragic precisely because we can imagine a future brighter than we are allowed by nature. [Read more →]