John Schwenkler draws my attention to this:

Capitalism the Creator

The Mises Circle goes to Seattle to address contemporary issues in liberty, and the role of capitalism as the main force for every form of progress in our age. We live amidst its fruits — technology, culture, philanthropy, human well being — and have yet to appreciate the source. Indeed, among the most passionate opponents of the free market are those who have benefitted most enormously from it. Here we have a profound failure of understanding at work.

Well, I am a big fan of capital. My main — possibly my only — problem with capitalism is that it’s so devoted to public opinion, yet so unable to control it. This is a little bit of a contrary thing to say, since most critics of capitalism rage against the way that commodification dupes otherwise innocent people into lusting after objects they never would otherwise. Commodification merely empowers them to act on their longing for what others have, and it does so, indeed, in a way (thank you Paul Zak) that’s far less violent than it otherwise would be. Like a good renegade Protestant, I insist that the upright individual always bears personal responsibility for differentiating between needs and wants (even as those terms shift with the times and with particular circumstances).

The main Marxist (but really Rousseauvian) line of attack tries to outdo me here by charging that capitalism manufactures real needs which are nonetheless unnatural, i.e. corrupt. My counterargument is that this sometimes is so, but (a) natural corruption is more of a problem than artificial/historical corruption at the margins, (b) eliminating artificial corruption will never erase our natural/ahistorical corruption, and (c) sometimes as the human race blunders forward we encounter problems that can’t be solved very cleanly or beautifully, and we should thank God that we fudged through the rotten times in a way that enabled us to somehow wind up here.

So I’m perfectly willing, actually, to appreciate the creative power of capitalism, so long as we recognize that human creation is never unconditionally good, because the power of humans is naturally or ahistorically errant. I’d further go out on a crazy limb and claim that Christians, deists, atheists, and others can all share this position, at least in theory. Both capitalism and human creativity lose much of the fear factor if the twin illusions of innate human goodness and human perfectibility are tossed out the window. Bottom line: when it comes to creative capital unhinged, the “relentless pursuit of perfection” is basically fine when applied to a Lexus and horrible when applied to Man.

There is no way I’m going to be able to get through the 172 pages of the California marriage cases opinion anytime soon [pdf]. But in my punchdrunk way I can cherry pick a few items.

First I have to get out of the way the personal confession that gay marriage as a constitutional question leaves me feeling very punchdrunk indeed, and punchdrunk on thin ice. I’ve been trying to determine why exactly, and hopefully this post will get it across. There are two key portions of the opinion — the closing fanfare of the majority opinion and then of the closing dissent — that might throw it into focus. Last things first:

Democracy is never more tested than when its citizens honestly disagree, based on deeply held beliefs. In such circumstances, the legislative process should be given leeway to work out the differences. It is inappropriate for the judiciary to interrupt that process and impose the views of its individual members, while the opinions of the people are still evolving. Restraint is the hallmark of constitutional review. “[I]f the judiciary is to fulfill its role in our tripartite system of government as the final arbiter of constitutional issues, it cannot hope to escape the tension between legislative policy determinations and the challenges raised by those who would seek exceptions thereto. We can, however, while entertaining such challenges, seek to hold the tension in check by always presuming the constitutional validity of legislative acts and resolving doubts in favor of the statute.” (Dawn D. v. Superior Court (1998) 17 Cal.4th 932, 939, italics added.)

The majority abandons this judicious approach. Instead of presuming the validity of the statutes defining marriage and establishing domestic partnership, in effect the majority presumes them to be constitutionally invalid by characterizing domestic partnership as a “mark of second-class citizenship.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 118.) This judicial presumption contravenes the express intent of the Legislature to equalize the rights of spouses and domestic partners.

Now, consider what I take to be the crux of the majority’s decision:

As discussed above, because of the long and celebrated history of the term “marriage” and the widespread understanding that this word describes a family relationship unreservedly sanctioned by the community, the statutory provisions that continue to limit access to this designation exclusively to opposite-sex couples — while providing only a novel, alternative institution for same-sex couples — likely will be viewed as an official statement that the family relationship of same-sex couples is not of comparable stature or equal dignity to the family relationship of opposite-sex couples.

The problem with the dissent, I think, is that it must ignore that the definition of marriage itself has been put in controversy. This is a problem because the call of the case is for the justices themselves to rule on the legal definition of marriage in California. And that is a problem because jurisprudence looks to the tradition and history of the meaning of the terms addressed in the statute — worth doing not only in a pinch, but because the laws of a state and the will of the citizens are not always the same thing. It is good to maintain the presumption that they are, but the majority is correct to recognize that there are times when it is not, and courts must be forced to confront that possibility at least in times when cases before them hinge on the express question of whether that’s so. The danger is that if the court takes the law to be the final word on the voice of the people — that is, if the court takes the opinions and sentiments of the citizens to be fully expressed by the letter of the law – then the court will be strongly inclined to erroneously take the wording of controverted laws as totally representative of the tradition and history from which they appeared. There is, however, especially where opinion is evolving, a gap that must be recognized.

The trouble is that the majority opinion recognizes that gap only as a consequence of first resolving that it does not exist. This is absurd, so let me explain. When the majority says that gay unions not recognized as gay marriages (with gay marriages, in a quantum leap, recognized yet further as gay families) “likely will be viewed as an official statement that the family relationship of same-sex couples is not of comparable stature or equal dignity,” what the majority is really saying is that the majority itself certainly views the letter of the law as an official statement that the family relationship of same-sex couples is not of comparable stature or equal dignity. That strikes me as a point of law which the court is free to argue over, and in fact should argue over in grappling with the case. But the majority does something else entirely when it then applies its own present judgment concerning the meaning of the letter of the law to the future public meaning of the spirit of the law. It asserts, in essence, that the meaning of the letter of the law has a determinate effect on the evolving opinions of the people and the historical traditions from which they derive. Actually, what the majority really asserts is that the meaning of the letter of the law “likely” has such an effect, which is a cop out designed to escape the burden of responsibility for the rest of the sentence. How likely, one wants to ask? What is the degree of likelihood? Among what group of citizens? Having first determined that the meaning of the letter of the law controls popular opinion, the majority proceeds to rule that the meaning of the letter of the law is actually other than what it meant when it captured prior public opinion, i.e., popular opinion does not control the meaning of the letter of the law.

This is a rather nerve-wracking one-way street, especially because the majority permits only the court to drive both ways. But this is not why I feel punchdrunk on ice while trying to analyze gay marriage and constitutional law. Bad jurisprudence is easy to criticize; bad rulings may be comfortably despised. That’s an easy way out on this one. Here, by contrast, the questionable jurisprudence is at least in part the product of a very real breakdown of the rule of law. Specifically, the meanings of some of the most important terms we use in politics have collapsed. Under such circumstances, there is no higher arbiter of the meanings of these terms than the highest court with proper jurisdiction — here, the California court. Look carefully at this phrasing:

…because of the long and celebrated history of the term “marriage” and the widespread understanding that this word describes a family relationship unreservedly sanctioned by the community, the statutory provisions that continue to limit access to this designation exclusively to opposite-sex couples…

The key terms here are ‘marriage’, ‘widespread’, ‘understanding’, ‘family’, ‘relationship’, ‘unreservedly’, ’sanctioned’, ‘community’, ‘limit’, ‘access’, and ‘designation’. The term ‘marriage’ is the one under controversy, and so has been stripped of any prefab definition. The term ‘widespread’ is impossibly vague. The term ‘understanding’ fails to capture the depth and character of public judgments about marriage. These judgments are sometimes mere ‘opinions’, sometimes are fiercely held ‘convictions’; sometimes they are well thought through, sometimes they are not. To declare that some unquantifiable but sufficiently large number of citizens share some unqualifiable but sufficiently coherent mental characterization of marriage as an unreservedly community-sanctioned family relationship is to abstract bizarrely away from the way plain people think about marriage. God knows what a ‘community’ means in this context. A state? A county? A town? ‘Community’ is a wholly meaningless term here. ‘Unreservedly’ is similarly nebulous. And if we all know what ‘family’ means, why must the term be thrown into ambiguity by the qualifier ‘relationship’? How is a family different from a family relationship? These sorts of verbal curlicues are not mere flourishes. They are acts of cluttering up and evasion which are decisive to the reasoning, such as it is, of the majority opinion.

My deep concern is that this kind of nonsense is now the reigning vocabulary in jurisprudence and politics. The legacy of political correctness is a will to illiteracy, a conscious destruction of particular meaning as an affront to abstract principles, an attack on the facticity of words in favor of their plasticity and contingency. We now want, and have created, a vocabulary of words designed to have no reliable meaning. We need these words in order to evade the costs of commitment to the behaviors they describe. And we want to enshrine legal rights to both make and break those commitments, as free of cost as possible. On the public side, this means institutionalizing an official right to equal recognition; on the private side, this means abstracting morals and ethics in order to minimize, if not eliminate, the suffering of guilt.

In such a situation, it’s devilishly hard to mount any kind of functioning counterattack to the linguistic moves made by the majority. The dissent can only fall back on the truisms of prudence. What the dissent should have done is confront the linguistic problem head-on. But the resulting exchange would hardly have been appropriate for a court, because in order for a court to function, the meaning of the terms at the center of its cases must not only be generally agreed upon by the public but by the court itself. And that’s simply absent now.

Still, that’s no excuse for these abstract and nonsensical qualifiers, which do the most to undermine the legitimacy of the marriage cases ruling. Yet it is unclear to me how the majority could have even couched the ruling in more particular language. Should it have been the language of love? Of contract? Of sexual behavior? Of sexual feeling? Of a yearning to raise children? It is impossible for the court to explain in concrete, particular terms why it is that gay marriages and gay families merit official celebration and respect of a kind identical to that afforded straight marriages and straight families because we, and our culture at large, have no idea of how to explain it to ourselves. Our opinions are somewhere out ahead of us, and we are groping toward them; mores are shifting out from under us and no one seems particularly responsible for it. We are like Lincoln, who said of the civil war that ” I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Just as the coherence and comprehensibility of the Union fell apart in the years leading up to 1860, the coherence and comprehensibility of our basic units of social order are falling apart now. All we can do to restore them, legally speaking, is rely on the opinions-cum-laws of court and legislature. But the whole point is that restoring them legally is inadequate to the task before us, which is a new shared conviction in the metaphysical truths lived through our social institutions. The old one is plainly unraveling. No courthouse or statehouse will knit a new one.

I’m inclined to agree with Sonny’s cut-the-hurt-feelings-and-campaign take on the hot story of the day. I don’t think Bush was talking about Obama. I really could care less whether Bush was talking about Obama, because the inanity and tiresomeness of Bush’s remarks are equally profound whether he was thinking overtly about Obama or thinking covertly about how to safely consume a pretzel. I could parse what a foolish and elementary error it is to lump terrorists and “radicals” into a single group, much less one you’re not supposed to talk to, but will this really accomplish anything? Or will it cause one side of this debate to say “terrorism is so bad we can afford to treat ‘radicals’ as if they were already terrorists,” and the other side to say “Mommy, Bush is othering me again” — ? Obama’s remarks may make for wrongheaded policy — I happen to think that in some instances they do and in some they don’t — but Bush’s remarks typify the clumsy, overgeneralized, harping, dull, and rote approach to democratization that has made his administration such a sustained failure. Given that he has the best material in human history to work with — political liberty as God’s gift to Man — that’s quite a feat.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr user and presumptive Obama voter Tal Bright.)

Star intellectual Steven Pinker, who should be careful whom he calls stupid, has penned (for The New Republic) an attack on the President’s Council on Bioethics that makes my ridicule of Martha Nussbaum sound like a call-in to Delilah. It is so easy to think up a list of insults for this piece that I will save them for print publication and refer you to Yuval Levin’s searing retort at National Review. But it is impossible not to throw in my two cents, and it might even be worth doing so.

First I should be clear that I know and like several people who are affiliated with the President’s Council, at least some of whom reciprocate. Second, in the interests of full disclosure, I study political theory, one of Pinker’s most unfavorite non-sciences, at one of Pinker’s most reviled medieval dungeons — Georgetown University, a dank Papist redoubt in which I was repeatedly ‘put to the question’ as a first-year PhD student until I became the Zombie of Rome I am today.

That said, Yuval’s defense of the Council does a suitable job of cutting Pinker down to size, but a bit more could be done to hone in on the source of Pinker’s great ire. There are lots of little Pinkers running around out there, and as nice as it’d be to conduct a dignified conversation about dignity without any interference, simply laughing Pinker offstage is not likely to get the job done. No, fans of an openended bioethical future uninformed by religious worry will have to be persuaded that Pinker has jumped his shark and ours. Or at least I think I’ll have to help try.

Thus I’m somewhat pessimistic about concerning them on the basis of a conversation about human dignity. Pinker is right that dignity is a notoriously slippery concept; he hints at but neglects to admit that human dignity in the hands of someone like Nussbaum admits of all manner of new bioethical duties, like finding suffering strangers all around the world and making them into our political, philosophical, economic, and oh yes medical patients. Whereas the Council worries nobly about too little dignity, I worry (from an at least arguably noble position) about a glut of dignity, dignitomania, a cultural Wal-Mart of dignities, dignity on demand — a social system in which taking all claims to dignity at face value will result in absurdity, which always results from an enforced obsession with egalitarianism.

Demanding dignity, in short, can be its own special kind of undignified behavior, too. Since the Council is concerned with other issues — a pretty short list of possible human dignities that biomedicine might erase or render meaningless — I can’t fault its members for puzzling over dignity and thinking it through. That’s a worthwhile process, because if there’s one thing worse than indignity it’s undignity, a cognitive and moral void where there should be shared and individual judgments about what and who is dignified and why. Nonetheless, in the current culture dignity talk gives us a constitutional right to have one’s living arrangements recognized officially by the state as not just marriages but families. And whatever you think about that, it’s easy to see how discourses of dignity nowadays seem point us toward the same ‘progressive’ bioethics that the Council is so worried about. So I’m all for arguing about dignity on academic terms, but in order to win over the ordinary people who incline toward Pinker’s position, something else, some other discourse, is needed.

In fact, I think a promising language to speak is a discourse of neediness. Everyone wants their dignity recognized today but nobody wants to be recognized as needy. ‘Needy’ has virtually lost its quaint old meaning of ‘poor’, and today describes someone who’s inappropriately immature, egotistical, demanding, clingy, an emotional basketcase, a puzzle that doesn’t really want to be solved, a lapdog that bites if you push it off your lap. ‘Needy’ expresses one of the few of our value judgments that flirts with outright cruelty. It rejects the legitimacy of the claimant’s right to surcease of suffering. The claimant is encouraged, if anything, to take a chill pill. Neediness is a date-killer, a relationship-ender, a warning sign, an insult.

Consider in that light the crescendo of Pinker’s diatribe:

Worst of all, theocon bioethics flaunts a callousness toward the billions of non-geriatric people, born and unborn, whose lives or health could be saved by biomedical advances. Even if progress were delayed a mere decade by moratoria, red tape, and funding taboos (to say nothing of the threat of criminal prosecution), millions of people with degenerative diseases and failing organs would needlessly suffer and die. And that would be the biggest affront to human dignity of all.

Put aside for a moment the complexities introduced into this putatively pro-unborn position by, say, radical life extension. I want to focus on that word “needlessly.” It’s an old saw that, in modern times, today’s wants become tomorrow’s needs. After belaboring the unattractive relativity of dignity discourse, Pinker hangs his whole argument on the most relative term of contemporary life — ‘need.’ Yes, we have not yet fully relativized our ‘need’ for water. (Or are we?) Yet a scientist might perfectly well say that the whole point of technology is to eliminate old needs and create new, better ones. See how much better it is to stop ‘needing’ to boil water, or start ‘needing’ to take daily allergy pills? These are improvements.

But I think there is a profound anxiety beneath that progressive confidence. I think regular people in everyday life recognize that we are not really debunking or disproving or conquering old needs while adding new and better ones. We are standing atop an ever-growing and kind of vertiginous and sometimes unstable pile of needs. The greater our needs, the harder we fall. And in our most self-referential world, keyed to an extraordinary sensitivity to our own discomfort and displeasure, our most serious need of all may be the need to relieve us of the pain of being conscious of having so many needs. The better our medical and biological technology gets, the greater number of apparently ‘needless’ instances of death and suffering there are to behold. We face a world of Nancy Kerrigans — plaintive shouters of “Why me?!” — if we cannot give ourselves a reasonable account of why at least some kinds of death and suffering are necessary: that is, why we need them.

What kind of ‘we’ would we mean if that ‘we’ needed at least some kinds of death and suffering? That’s an uncomfortable question, but it has a lot of answers — at the individual level, at the family level, at the political level, as a question of resource allocation and law, and at the international level. These are important — indeed, necessary — questions about the nature of justice and the scope of politics. And we can’t answer them by discussing them together if we turn over our definition of need to the blind progress of science. That doesn’t mean it isn’t sometimes great when science, blindly progressing, turns up cool, convenient, or life-saving improvements for us. It does mean that Pinker’s idea of ‘needless’ suffering is fraught with problems he tries but fails to sweep under the rug.

So go back to ‘neediness’ discourse. I started out by underscoring the pejorative force of the word ‘needy’, and I seemed to endorse that as an ounce of backbone in society today. Then why would I want to talk about how we should consider what type of suffering we ‘need’, whoever we decide ‘we’ are? Because really that means talking about why it is that people who agree with Pinker want technology to be blind. It isn’t because they have a disinterested and fanatical devotion to Free Science. It’s because they want us to become increasingly needy when it comes to mitigating and eliminating suffering, and they think of ‘we’ as the whole human race. These are interesting positions, but they’re not obvious ones, and they’re definitely not clearly practical ones. Why are Pinker and his sympathizers so deeply troubled by suffering? Why does the ‘problem’ of suffering seem to make them suffer so? And not just ’serious’ suffering — contrary to what Pinker seems to suggest — but suffering as such, along with death as such? Isn’t that position one that at least ought to have to defend itself?

The lame answer seems to be that any philosophy that tolerates suffering and death and recognizes them as integral parts of natural human life is a retrograde superstition tied moronically to the primitive idea that God created us for the purposes of punishment. Certainly I can think up a religion that could hold that position, but just as surely I can make some arguments about why ‘we’ shouldn’t be so needy about maximally and progressively mitigating or eliminating suffering that don’t depend on membership in the International Cabal of Catholic Thought, District of Columbia chapter.

The Council is right not to try to restore a single coherent definition of dignity. But as important as it is to continue to argue academically about the problem of dignity, I think the bioethically worried may have a better shot at engaging and persuading the public at large on the power that comes with limiting our own needs.

Andrew has a roundup of commentary on the possibility of coercive helpy heroism in Burma, meaning Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat doing one of their good back and forths (as usual) on the matter. I think they’re both right. Idealism and relativism, the two most significant elements of Western thought today, make for a total mess of policy — especially foreign policy — and an incoherent set of attitudes and frustrations about Burma.

Unfortunately, even a coherent set of attitudes about suffering, bad government, sovereignty, and coercive intervention might lead to a frustrating outcome: knowing that thousands upon thousands of people in Burma are suffering and that the ‘international community’ is, bottom line, okay with that.

In fact, more than one coherent set of attitudes might wind up with that frustration. What would really humble the West? An inescapable inability to gratify our desire to act on pity. I say this without trying to score any philosophical points. But it is very interesting as a marker of when and why internationalists might lose faith in international institutions — and whether that alone will cause them to ’stop coming to church’, so to speak.

Never before have two major parties gotten into such a competitive self-destruction competition. What Bush has done to the Republican party, with poodle-like levels of assistance from Congressional Republicans, is plain enough. But reading this New York Times dispatch on the John Edwards endorsement? Sloganeering’s been lowered to a whole ‘nother level. And the grassroots are being driven insane.

1. “I’ll just point out the obvious,” Mr. Edwards told one audience when he was campaigning in Iowa last year. “In the last — can I do the math, 45, 50 years — what is it, the last two Democrats who actually got elected president? Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton. Both of them talk like I do.”

2. Mr. Edwards spent several minutes praising Mrs. Clinton, which was met by loud boos by the largely white crowd who had filled the arena with no knowledge of the endorsement to come.

3. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign played down the endorsement with a terse statement from its chairman, Terry McAuliffe: “We respect John Edwards,” it read. “But as the voters of West Virginia showed last night, this thing is far from over.”

4. Mr. Obama, who accepted Mr. Edwards’s endorsement with praise for the speech and the man, also praised Mrs. Edwards and her commitment to health care. Asked if she would endorse him, he said, “I would not speak for Elizabeth.”

5. In response to a question from Wolf Blitzer of CNN, Mrs. Clinton also said that it was “probably right” that she made a foolish comment when she claimed that more “white Americans” were supporting her than Mr. Obama. She was responding to a remark by Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York, that her original “white Americans” comment was “the dumbest thing” she could have said.

What a nightmare. Democrats need a fake hick accent to win the White House? Elizabeth Edwards is hellbent on demonstrating her female independence by locking herself in the Fuhrer’s bunker? The Clinton campaign, through that walking, talking gila monster Terry McAuliffe, has reduced running for President of the United States to ‘this thing’ — and expects Largely White Crowds to cling bitterly to race? The voters of West Virginia showed that, in Hillary’s absence, West Virginia would have delivered its delegates to the heretofore unknown insurgent candidate Whitey the Clown. When Obama wins Idaho he’s out of touch with mainstream Democrats, but when Hillary wins a state that makes Idaho look like a Seattle suburb, she’s Queen of Middle America?

If Charlie Rangel’s looking for dumbest things this year, he’s going to be the hardest-working man in Congress.

Ramesh Ponnuru makes a point about this Vito business that I ought to be sure to respond to. Specifically, he takes issue with my hope that we can all agree to deem adulterous public officeholders bad persons:

Ross Douthat seems to agree. I don’t—especially with this “bad person” business. I certainly believe that someone who cheats on his wife has done a bad thing. I would be reluctant to judge someone a “bad person” without knowing the context. (A long-ago affair? Serial womanizing? One time, with regrets?) For that matter, I’m not sure that moral judgment usually requires us to divide the world between “bad people” and “not-bad people”; sometimes, categorizing people that way may make it harder for us to see clearly.

I wasn’t trying to hide the football, but in no way do I endorse a moral framework in which people are neatly divided into baddies and non-baddies. That doesn’t mean we can’t single out baddies from time to time. Ramesh is flat-out correct to recognize that a good moral framework needs nuances, not least because moral and immoral acts are themselves nuanced, milder or more severe, fleeting or protracted, etc., etc. There are several different vectors and spectra at work every time we make a moral judgment. But we should be able to focus a moral judgment in on someone and something and call it bad without fearing that, behind our backs, having aimed our opprobrium in one direction has caused our approval to magically fan out in all other directions.

One of the worst features of moral relativism is that it encourages this kind of fear: if morals are relative, then quanta of approval and opprobrium are interchangeable; to withhold praise while praising elsewhere is as good as to condemn. I think this is not just bad morality but bad logic, and as much as I want to be clear that I’m in full agreement with Ramesh on the moral-nuance tip, I have to insist that we can identify and discuss ‘bad persons’ without constructing ourselves as morally bulletproof ‘not-bad persons’. The way that the Christian injunction against casting the first stone has been secularized into a standing moral handicap does our politics a great disservice. Nobody forces politicians into politics; you join the game, you play by the rules. As I remarked earlier, I’m pretty concerned that many of us now believe that politics is such a rotten game that we should expect plenty of cheaters and go particularly easy on them if they’re MVPs. If we can’t punish bad actors despite being, ourselves, occasionally bad in some ways, we’re in for a losing record this season — and many to come.

(Dunce cap photo courtesy of Flickr user thane. No endorsement of violating museum rules implied. That’s moral nuance, people.)

I urge you to go back over to the main DTO site and read James Dellinger and Phil Brand’s piece on Hawaiian ethnonationalism. I’ve said pretty much all I need to say about the subject before, but there’s a related angle on this story that I’m increasingly fond of and is probably best captured in its least overbearingly Yankee version  by Reihan, who gets as well as anyone why ethnonationalism is such a mindbendingly grave atavism coming from putative progressives. It, for example, is certain (given the reality on the ground) to doom Europe posthaste:

What if a horde of Italians flooded booming Munich, and then headed north to cheap accommodations in Berlin and lesser eastern cities? Enterprising Somalis and Bengalis and Senegalese would soon follow. I realize that this wouldn’t be terribly appealing to the neofascists and even to some of my fellow cultural conservatives, even if new arrivals were exempt from cradle-to-grave welfare protections and they brought intact families in tow. But surely Germany’s dying cities would be far better off. Some on the German right have called for “Kinder statt Inder,” i.e., children and not Indians, but Kinder aren’t always on offer, even if you accept that they are the superior alternative, which is not always obvious (though I have my pro-natalist sympathies). Economic power is shifting away from parts of Germany and Italy; surely they can shift population around in such a way as to make the best of what they have, and perhaps revive moribund cultures in the process.

Of course, it could be that I want Europe to become a continent-wide melting-pot because this is the highest expression of my American chauvinism, so Europeans should be wary.

I think this is about right. One of the most compelling reasons for serious European unification (which is not the same as administrative centralization, a lesson lost on Europeans for, I’m sorry to say, far too long) is the power of a single European state to redefine Europeanness as a political and cultural identity — a situation that, in turn, empowers Europeans to constructively face and integrate significant numbers of nonwhite immigrants. I’m sitting in St. Maarten right now, and the shadow of colonialism still lingers even though the practice itself is long dead. It’s usually no big deal but occasionally crosses over into the uncomfortable, and as much as Europeans hate to be lectured by Americans about which of our brilliant practical inventions for restless but upbeat living they ought to adopt, I must say that European unification was a European idea first, and a good one at that.

Apropos of (as Sonny’s mentioned) Newsweek’s claim that Obama faces an attack campaign portraying him as “the Other,” I ought to mention what a pet peeve it is to talk in terms of Otherhood, which is far too abstract a category to be of much analytical use and which Republicans, certainly, are far too anti-intellectual to deploy. No, for Obama the pluses and minuses are all personal: his particular character, his particular background, and his particular approach to politics are all, I think, too particular to fit neatly into a box marked The Other.

It’s much easier to label him as Out of Touch with Average Americans, on the other hand. And it’s important to pay attention to the way that this generalization, fair or not, is a different sort of paint for the partisan paintbrush than the abstraction of Otherhood.

Probably this is a conversation that quickens the pulse only among academics, but as social-science tropes that define left-leaning intellectual worldviews leach down into the parlance of our times, it’s worth our while not to confuse them with more typical, practical, and should I say legitimately homespun approaches to playing up how a politician Ain’t Like You.

Over at The American Scene, Matt Frost is undoubtedly right to question and even ridicule supposed experts about ‘Millennials’ — that latest incarnation of the Pepsi generation who are supposed to be, individually and in the aggregate, both so much more enlightened than their ancestors and so much more trenchantly aware of the emotional and practical limitations of that enlightenment (and, like, enlightenment per se) that they will affably, endearingly orchestrate the feel-good large-scale social recalibration of the year.

While I think that this is sort of true, insofar as there are a fair number of people I know or know of who seem to be living out lives that play into this narrative, I’m not sure there’s a lot to be gained from dubbing the Youth Shtick the world’s next great generational beta release. On the one hand, the recent development and explosion of niche affinity groupings makes generational self-selection for earnest young social pragmatists easier than ever. But at the same time, that dynamic, combined with others that pop generational psychology inevitably and deliberately obscures, seems to me to militate pretty firmly against a shared ‘Millennial’ experience.

Leading me to hope that we won’t end up with self-appointed or self-styled ‘Millennials’ running around as some kind of anti-Zakarian Vanguard dedicated to unifying their generation across the globe under the banner of improvised resource collectivism and intellectually rich cuddle parties, with Juneau as their capital and Juno as their god. And with a lameo core of social scientists trying to figure out how to incorporate these post-tragic freaks into their dubious social science models and engineer their curious forms of interchange into a force multiplier for the planetary restructuring of efficient labor.