Some thoughts on yesterday’s discussion of Livy, Zinn and the relationship of morality and power in human history.  The author is Jones Very, a minor but interesting nineteenth-century American poet and commentator.  The poem is taken from his collect of sonnets on Reconstruction; it was written in 1868.

Reflections on the History of Nations

When I consider mighty nations’ fate,
Their rise, their growth, their grandeur, and decline;
And all their varied history contemplate,
I see and own in each the Hand divine!
Not of themselves they rose to wealth and power,
And gained on earth a glory and a name;
Alike, to God, the nation of an hour,
And that which stands a thousand years the same.
To such as walk in righteousness and truth,
He gives long years of steady, sure increase;
They, like the eagle, shall renew their youth,
Their honor and their glory never cease;
While such as from his just commandments stray,
Shall sudden fall; or waste by slow decay.

Two things have me thinking about morality and historians this week.  First, I’ve been re-reading Livy’s Early History of Rome to prepare for this Monday’s class in Grand Strategy.  Second, Howard Zinn (author of A People’s History of the United States) died this week.  Livy and Zinn were both wildly popular historians, both wrote about political conflict between rich and poor, and both believed that working historians had a duty to instruct the public about how states ought to be organized and how virtue was necessary for a healthy republic.

They were different in many ways.  Livy was a man of power–his history meshed well with the political project of Octavius Caesar, then busy remodeling the Roman Republic into the Empire of later times.  Zinn was a man of the opposition to power; Noam Chomsky called Zinn his favorite historian.

Both largely displaced earlier writers; Livy was the ’safe’ choice for readers in Imperial Rome.  He was nostalgic enough for the lost freedom and dignity of the republican era not to sound like an apologist for the permanent dictatorship of Rome’s imperial master, but his analysis of the moral failures of the later Romans was unsparing enough to demonstrate the necessity for imperial rule.

Zinn similarly fit the moral fashions of his time and his work has supplanted many of his predecessors.  He retained enough of the old American faith in the future to write a forward-looking history in which the idea of popular struggle might one day result in the creation of a just and free society.  Yet he was also harsh enough about the nation’s past that he never sounded like an apologist for American reality.  Before Zinn ‘progressive’ historiography generally saw the American story as one of gradual improvement and celebrated the emergence of American freedom over time.  Progressive history was also patriotic history.  Zinn separated the belief in progress and justice from the American story and wrote about the growth in the power and might of the United States as the frustration of the popular hunger for change and for real progress.  What earlier writers thought of as patriotism becomes chauvinism and nationalism in Zinn’s account, and rather than a unifying force helping society as a whole to progress, patriotism becomes a divisive force used by elites to divide and rule the mass.

This, interestingly, is one of the points of contact between the two writers.  Livy also was keenly aware of the political nature of patriotism, and many of the stories he recounts involve the efforts by the senatorial elite to divert the plebeian masses from their political goals by invoking national security.  (Don’t fight with us about the powers of the tribunes; the Etruscans are attacking!)

Of the two, I greatly prefer Livy.  This is not because of his political sympathies; he made his peace with Augustus a bit too easily for my taste, and the heightened and sentimental contrast he paints between the putatively pure ancient Rome and the sordid mess of his own day not only had the effect of reducing any chance of a republican restoration in his own time; it has served as an apology for tyrants ever since.

Zinn’s sympathy with the little guy, his belief that there is a wisdom among the masses that the elites never quite understand, and his insistence that history’s losers still ought to be heard from all strike me as more decent and humane than Livy’s sleek, official point of view.  And of course Zinn is a careful historian in ways that would have been meaningless to Livy.  Livy seems to have made a reasonably responsible use of the documentary sources that he had, but living in a time when historical records were much scarcer than they are today and when standards of historical scholarship were at a relatively early age of development, much of Livy’s work consists of very rich and wide conjectures erected on a flimsy foundation of folktale with perhaps a few spare facts thrown in here and there.

Yet ultimately Livy is a more serious student of power and social conflict than Zinn.  Diagnosing the failure of the Roman Republic, Livy points to failures both among the elite and the mass.  The elite became greedy, shortsighted, and lost all sense of restraint in the competition for power and office.  The simple habits and manners of former times were replaced with every kind of decadent luxury; the strict personal sexual restraint and the pious worship of the gods which once characterized Roman elites yielded to a philosophy of immediate gratification and the pursuit of spiritual ‘ecstasy’ in various mystery cults from the east.  The collapse of personal ethics led to a collapse in the ability of Rome’s elite to lead their society.

The masses were also corrupted by success.  Their growing political power in the state did not make them more virtuous or wise.  They continued to follow demagogues who promised easy riches based on redistribution.  They did not acquire the habits of virtue and personal restraint that were being given up by the elites.  Instead they imitated their worst features and attempted to practice the vices of the rich.

Neither the people nor the elite would observe the restraints of custom or law in the quest for power and wealth.  Gradually, Rome’s institutions of governance broke down.  Without honorable men there could be no justice at law; judges and juries could both be corrupted.  Legislation increasingly failed to balance private and public interest and sought to enshrine the narrow goals of factions in the framework of the state.  Ultimately the private chaos and immorality led to anarchy, passion and bloodshed in the public sphere.  Rome tore itself apart in civil conflicts, each more brutal than the last, until Augustus Caesar imposed the peace of slavery on the broken fragments of the greatest republic, before ours, that the world had ever known.

This tragic story of the destruction of public freedom by private vice — whatever its relationship to the actual events of Roman history — remains one of the most compelling stories ever told.  It has certainly been a major force in American history; George Washington and his colleagues consciously sought to emulate the virtues of the early Roman republicans as Livy describes them.  In giving up command of the Revolutionary Army to return to his farm, Washington saw himself reenacting the story of Cincinnatus.  Overthrowing George III was compared to the overthrow of Tarquin the Proud, the last King of Rome.  The link between private virtue and public freedom was returned to over and over in the political debates of the revolutionary era and on down to modern times.

Patriotism, understood as the love of the state as the embodiment and guardian spirit of the hopes of all classes of the people, was the link between private virtue and public well being. read more »

…or at least order in, because I’ll be (briefly) on Special Report with Bret Baier tonight, at 6 PM EST, to discuss Obama’s foreign policy challenges, stemming from my recent article in Foreign Policy on Obama’s dueling Jeffersonian and Wilsonian impulses.

This morning I was having my morning coffee in the Impressionist Wing of the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens, and noticed that the butler had folded the restfully pink pages of the FT over to the latest story on the health care debacle now unwinding in Washington.

“Any particular reason you want me to see this, Jeeves?” I asked.

“Well, sir,” he said, “this is one of those issues that people are talking about.  Perhaps you should consider it for your web log, sir.”

I’m putting this in because I want to make sure Matthew Yglesias understands how these things work.  Information has a way of ‘trickling up’ even at the Mead manor; the housekeeper often overhears the chatter of the kitchen maids and the grooms.  She will sometimes pass this on to Jeeves — and if he thinks it is important, he will–respectfully of course–pass it on to me.  This, for example, is how I learned about the ‘hop-hop’ music that so many young people seem to follow today.

In any case, the flailing health care reform effort on Capitol Hill perfectly illustrates the difficulties that surround American policy making as the ‘blue model‘ implodes and we struggle to plan our future at a time of rapid social and technological change.

The American health care system today does a lot of things very well, but it has two basic and intractable problems.  Not enough people have secure enough access to the system and the system’s costs, already very high in comparison to costs internationally, are on course to explode as the number of older Americans rises sharply in coming years and as the availability of new treatments drives an acceleration in spending per person.  The first problem creates a strong ethical reason for reforming the health care system, and the second, sooner or later, will require that we do something.  While there are some synergies between the two problems–bringing everyone into the insurance system will raise revenues and rationalize health care delivery (fewer emergency room visits, more and better preventive care)–on the whole, solving the first problem by enhancing universal access tends to raise the cost of the system overall.  And to the degree that government subsidies are used to make health care more affordable, the increase in cost will directly affect the state and federal budget picture, with costs that are certain to grow dramatically.

There are some cultural problems at work.  The United States is a very diverse country; developing a single health care system for the U.S. is less like developing a national health care system for Sweden or Slovakia or Spain, and more like trying to develop a single health care system for the whole European Union.  I suspect that if the Europeans were trying to develop a single, EU-wide health care system, they would be struggling as hard as we are to design and pay for something that would cover hundreds of millions of people with very different income levels, expectations and priorities.  We are also an optimistic, death-denying culture.  This has its good points, but it does make us culturally predisposed to throw a lot of money and resources into attempts to hold death at bay long after rational hope has been exhausted.  We are also culturally inclined to avoid hard choices and decisions.  All the children are above average — and all the patients should get everything they want when they want it.

Politically, we are something of a consensus society.  That is, our federal constitution was designed to require a very wide domestic consensus before Congress can enact sweeping legislation.  The heavy representation of small states in the Senate (Wyoming has as many senators as California) frequently checks the will of the larger and more urban states.  The bicameral congress, the system of frequent elections in the House, the two-thirds requirement for treaty ratification and the committee system all sprinkle sand in the legislative gears.  Beyond the constitutional constraints, custom and tradition have gradually developed non-constitutional but very real barriers to sweeping change — like the system of senatorial courtesy which often gives even individual senators a veto over presidential appointments or the filibuster itself, which can require a super-majority on most issues.  All this ensures that American deliberations over large and important matters will turn into complex bargains among many interest groups.  That, from the standpoint of our founding fathers, wasn’t a defect of the system.  It was one of the features that they hoped would make the system stable and durable.

The Blue Legacy

When you put all these factors together, it’s not hard to see why a reform effort that addresses one sixth of the largest economy in the history of the human race would likely bog down in a frenzy of horse-trading against a background of partisan bickering.  But there is an additional factor at work, one that may just turn health care reform from difficult to impossible.  That is the collapse of the blue model I wrote about yesterday: the implosion of the post-Second World War social and economic model that (at considerable cost) produced two generations of relative security and stability in American life. read more »

Here in the quiet precincts of the stately Mead manor in exclusive Queens, as the dew gently falls over the mist-shrouded lawns and the pigeons coo soothingly from the historic-landmarked eaves, it is sometimes hard to believe, but out there in the workaday world the long and graceful decay of the American social model is accelerating into a more rapid and dangerous decline.  The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore, and the gaps between the social system we’ve inherited and the system we need today are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper them over or ignore them.

In the old system, both blue collar and white collar workers hold stable jobs, a professional career civil service administers a growing state, with living standards for all social classes steadily rising while the gaps between the classes remain fairly stable, and with an increasing ’social dividend’ being paid out in various forms: longer vacations, more and cheaper state-supported education, earlier retirement, shorter work weeks and so on.  Graduate from high school and you were pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment in a job that gave you a comfortable lower middle class lifestyle; graduate from college and you would be better paid and equally secure.

Life would just go on getting better.  From generation to generation we would live a life of incremental improvements — the details of life would keep getting better but the broad outlines of our society would stay the same.  The advanced industrial democracies of had in fact reached the ‘end of history’: this is what ‘developed’ human society looked like and there would be no more radical changes because the picture had fully developed.

Call this the blue model, and the chief division in American politics today is between those who think the blue model is the only possible or at least the best feasible way to organize a modern society and want to shore it up and defend it, and those who think the blue model, whatever benefits it had in the past, is no longer sustainable.

That division is going to begin to erode in the next few years because the blue model is breaking down so fast and so far that not even its supporters can ignore the disintegration and disaster that it entails.

AT&T and Ford Are Blue in More Than Just Their Logo

The blue model rested on the post-Second World War industrial and economic system.  The ‘commanding heights’ of American business were controlled by a small number of monopolistic and oligopolistic firms.  AT&T, for example, was the only serious telephone company in the whole country, and both the services it offered and the prices it could charge were tightly regulated by the government.  The Big Three car-makers had a lock on the car market; in the halcyon days of the blue model there was no foreign competition.  A handful of airlines divided up the routes and the market; airlines could not compete by offering lower prices or by opening new routes without special government permission.  Banks, utilities, insurance companies, trucking companies had their rates and, essentially, their profit levels set by federal regulators.

The stable economic structure allowed a stable division of the pie.  Workers (much more heavily unionized then than now) got steady raises and stable jobs.  The government got a stable flow of tax revenues.  Shareholders got reasonably steady dividends.

There were a lot of problems with the old system.  For one thing, it rested in large part on systematic discrimination against women and minorities.  For another, consumers had very little leverage.  If you didn’t like the way the phone company treated you, you were perfectly free to do without phone service.  If you didn’t like badly made Detroit gas guzzlers that fell apart in a few years, you could get a horse. read more »

The Great Meltdown continues; the London Times reports that British government official responsible for monitoring compliance with UK freedom of information law has found that the ‘climategate‘ scientists at East Anglia University violated the law.  Although neither the scientists nor the university can be prosecuted because the revelations about their behavior came after the time limit specified by law, the Information Commissioner’s Office will propose changes in the law so that future violations of this nature could become subject to legal action.

Although President Obama urged Congress to pass a cap-and-trade bill in the State of the Union address, he seems to be flogging a dead horse.  Inaccurate predictions and unethical behavior by some of the leading figures in the climate change movement have given skeptics enough ammunition to ensure that a nervous U.S. Congress will not pass a serious climate change bill in 2010.

The news about East Anglia’s violations came the day after Britain’s chief science adviser spoke out publicly about the inadequate track record of some key figures in the global warming movement, warning in the words of the London Times that  there was an urgent need for more honesty about the uncertainty of some predictions.

He is absolutely right; the anti-climate change movement will not soon regain the credibility it has lost.

John Tierney, science reporter at the New York Times, is one of the better reporters out there; in the past he’s attracted the wrath of the climate change true believers.  And he makes a lot of good points in his piece in today’s paper as he defends both IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri and Al Gore from some of the less informed and less fair criticisms of their business links.

But he misses the elephant in the room.  It’s not that Pachauri has business ties to companies that will make money if anti-climate change policies are adopted.  Those ties are intellectually irrelevant if ethically questionable; scientific statements should be evaluated on the basis of science.  If a tobacco company-sponsored study on smoking is good science, we should pay attention.  If a study sponsored by Mothers Against Drunk Driving is hooey, we should discount it whatever the motives of those behind it.

But Tierney’s point, however well taken, doesn’t get to the real case against Pachauri: the institute he heads, TERI, has been using the fraudulent claim of Himalayan glacier melt to raise money and inject hysteria (the fierce urgency of now) into the policy debate.  That’s wrong, whether Pachauri is making money out of it or not.

Forget ‘conflict of interest.’  The problem here is twofold: lying for gain, and deliberately injecting false information into public debates to score policy points.

Oh, and there is one other matter.  When the well respected Indian scientist V.K. Raina came out with a thoroughly documented and careful report on the state of the Himalayan glaciers, Pachauri denounced him for practicing ‘voodoo science’.  He would like an apology.  He should get one.

Like a new car once it’s spent a few weeks ferrying the kids to school and soccer practice, 2010 no longer feels like such a fresh and shiny new year.  Our new year’s resolutions aren’t surviving that much better than the ones for 2009 or 2008 did, for that matter, and the holiday season feels like it was over eons ago as winter stretches bleakly ahead into the indefinite future.

This is not my favorite time of year.

But the new decade is still just starting out, and it’s a useful exercise to think about what kinds of problems and opportunities it is likely to bring.  For the last couple of weeks I’ve been writing about some of the major global trends that are likely to be driving events in the new decade.  Now I want to shift gears and write about America’s situation going forward.

This is one of those moments when it’s fashionable to be gloomy about America’s prospects.  The Obama administration has lost that fresh New President smell and the President, once widely hailed as The One who was coming to transform Washington, is preparing for his first State of the Union in dismal political circumstances.

But what is going on in America is much bigger than the political problems of one leader.  Our country is heading into a period of rapid and radical change for which we are not well prepared.  This is a global phenomenon, not an American one; as I wrote earlier this month, the acceleration of technological, social, economic and political change is the most important trend of our times.

All things being equal, this accelerating change will be good for the United States.  For hundreds of years, our comparative advantage in world economics and politics has been our society’s breathtaking ability to generate change, adjust to change, harness change and thrive on change.  Today as the United States and the world confront massive waves of accelerating change, we have a better chance than anybody else of surfing the incoming waves rather than being swept off our feet and carried out to sea.

But there are no guarantees.  In fact, there are two important reasons why the incoming changes will be harder for us to master than just about anything we’ve faced before.

First, the changes are bigger and faster moving than ever.  The continuing revolutions in IT and communications technology are not only driving social and industrial changes like the rise of the internet and the crisis of the old media companies.  They are making financial markets harder to understand and regulate.  By facilitating the development of global supply chains they have accelerated the rise of manufacturing in the developing world, producing not only political and economic problems in the US, but changing the global balance of power.  By allowing the automation of many skilled jobs, they are challenging the economic foundation of professions like law and accounting.  More, because faster, more powerful computers stimulate, facilitate and expedite the work of scientific discovery and technological innovation, the explosion of computing power is turbocharging the overall process of scientific and technical development.

Even by the standards of the last 300 years, this is a lot of acceleration and change.  If we are struggling to cope, that is partly because there is so much to cope with.

The second factor is that this new wave of change is affecting the people and the organizations whose job it is to understand and manage change.  It is hard, for example, for journalists to think clearly and positively about a wave of change that is destroying their livelihoods.  Professional civil service workers in government cannot be expected to embrace with enthusiasm technologies that make their jobs obsolete.

The learned professions in the United States — lawyers, doctors, nurses, accountants, educators, journalists, government bureaucrats — are under the gun.  The IT revolution is going to put them all through the wringer — the way it has already put blue collar America through the wringer by a combination of automation and outsourcing. The upper middle class did very well in the last generation, even as blue collar incomes stagnated and in many cases fell.  The next phase of change will challenge the institutions and the livelihoods of America’s managers, professors, lawyers and others in the same way that it has already thrown journalism into the maelstrom.

These changes are necessary and in the long run benign.  Dramatically and thoroughly restructuring the professions will ultimately make the vital services they provide much cheaper and much more widely available — just as the destruction of the old manufacturing guilds in the industrial revolution eventually made manufactured goods much cheaper.  But just as the spinners and weavers fought the new machines, so we can expect a lot of our intellectuals and managers to fight the challenges to a system that has worked very well for them.

This means trouble.  The upper middle class is disproportionately powerful and influential in American society.  It’s going to fight, hard, to defend the status quo.  At the same time, the upper middle class is the part of our society which is supposed to do the thinking and the innovation that equips us for change.  But instead of eagerly anticipating change, fighting for its adoption and developing clever plans for overcoming resistance and implementing change, the upper middle class is going to be devoting tremendous brainpower to resisting, subverting and delaying it.And the problem won’t just be their resistance; it will be their inability to grasp and their unwillingness to exploit the enormous opportunities that new technologies and new institutional arrangements create.

America’s success in the next generation will be largely dependent on our ability to master social and economic change.  Those best placed in our society for this job, and those whose responsibility it would normally be to lead the change process will be unable and unwilling to do their job well.  This will make the change process more disruptive and painful than it has to be and it will distract and divide our society at a time we will need to focus our attention on a world that will be having an even harder time than we are.

There are some who think that to cope with all this we are going to have to change who we are, and become less ‘American’ — less individualistic, less risk oriented, less religious, less ambitious, less concerned about economic growth, less nationalistic and so forth.

Well, we can always improve, and our national character is not without faults.  But in dealing with our emerging challenges I think we are going to have to be more American than ever; the qualities that got us this far are the ones we will have to draw on in what is going to be both a terrifying and exhilarating ride through the white water rapids ahead.

If the Democrats liked health care, they will love cap and trade.

An expensive and divisive attempt to fix a problem that, if we trust the polls, most Americans don’t think exists, the cap and trade bill that is next on the Democratic agenda has all the hallmarks of a historic train wreck.  Right now, the Democrats are sleep walking toward catastrophe on this one; if the White House doesn’t act and fast, cap and trade will further undercut the President’s standing and undermine Democratic prospects come November.  Fortunately, there’s a window in which he can act; President Obama needs to move quickly and decisively to take control of this while he can.

Whatever the policy merits (and while climate skeptics want no policy at all, the ‘climate community’ is divided on the issue, with many preferring a carbon tax to cap and trade), this was always going to be a political headache for the White House.  Cap and trade legislation would pick winners and losers across the economy; both voters concerned about home-state jobs and industry groups with special interests are going to make this legislation a long and ugly slog.

Worse, despite all the happy-clappy talk about ‘green jobs’ it was always going to be hard to get public enthusiasm for a bill designed to raise the costs for significant sectors of the American economy.  Moderate Senate Democrats from red-leaning states are even more reluctant to go out on a limb for cap and trade than they are for health care–and the filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate would be very hard to get.

It is shaping up to be an ugly choice.  Fresh off the health care bill, do you infuriate your environmentalist base and complicate the President’s international agenda by quietly backing off from cap-and-trade–or do you and the congressional Democrats spend another year on another controversial, complicated, lobby-driven (and quite possibly doomed) bill that doesn’t create jobs in the short term and that nobody understands?

Fortunately for the President, though possibly not for the planet, developments overseas in the last few days may have taken the last, quivering momentum out of the global drive for a binding agreement on global warming.  With a bit of luck and skill the White House can seize the mantle of leadership on the climate issue while avoiding the pain and anxiety of supporting a particular bill.

While Americans were watching Massachusetts, the prospects for serious global action on climate change were melting faster than the glaciers in the Himalayas.  This isn’t hard to do; despite confident and apocalyptic IPCC predictions of their imminent demise, the Himalayan glaciers are actually doing well.  In a scandal potentially far more damaging than the release of injudiciously worded emails from prominent climate researchers last November,  IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri has been forced to withdraw the prediction that the Himalayan glaciers, vital elements of a watershed on which hundreds of millions of Asians rely, would disappear by 2035.

It’s always embarrassing to withdraw a prediction, but this is worse than most.  The prediction was very high profile: a leading element in the case many advocates made that climate change was an urgent, immediate problem that had to be addressed right away.

Worse still, the prediction was based on hot air.  There were no peer reviewed studies, no scholarly sources, just some off the cuff remarks by a not-very-well known climate scientist in a popular magazine.  Knowledgeable experts tried to alert the IPCC to the totally bogus nature of the prediction – their concerns were ignored.  The IPCC chairman then attacked critics of the published estimate as practitioners of ‘voodoo science.’  The collapse of this house of cards is not only a humiliating comeuppance; it raises extremely grave and serious doubts about the reliability of other headline predictions in the report.  Were there other facts that the IPCC thought were ‘too good to check’?  And can we rely on the IPCC’s assurances that there aren’t?

The answer, unfortunately, is no.  We can’t.

It gets worse.  A chief proponent of the bogus science turns out to be TERI, an Indian research center whose director is–Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC.  Pachauri’s institute has used this bogus prediction repeatedly and aggressively in its literature and its fundraising.  As recently as January 15, 2010, just 5 days before the IPCC withdrew the prediction, TERI was boasting of receiving £310,000 ($500,000) from the Carnegie Corporation and the “lion’s share” of a £2.5 million ($4.03 million) from the European Union for its work on the disappearing glaciers.

There is no evidence that Chairman Pachauri has done anything legally or ethically wrong and a full investigation may and hopefully will clear him completely–but based on what we know now it is hard to argue that this is the performance of a man who is both competent and honest.  Even if Pachauri steps down, the IPCC and the climate science community will face substantially higher levels of skepticism and mistrust from an abused public.  In the meantime, attention has shifted away from science and climate issues towards issues of trust; fairly or not the combination of ‘glaciergate’ and ‘climategate’ has given climate skeptics a major boost.

Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, the chances for significant action by India and China have precipitously fallen.  New Delhi this week was not just the site of angry exchanges between IPCC chair Pachauri and his critics, it was the setting for a meeting of the Basic countries (Brazil, South Africa, China, India) whose agreement is crucial to any global climate agreement.

The Chinese representative shocked the press by telling reporters that we need to keep “an open mind” about whether human activity is responsible for climate change.  The BASIC countries agreed that the Copenhagen agreement was in no way binding.  China, India and other rapidly developing countries have clearly been less than enthusiastic about accepting any limits on their future growth.  A Chinese government whose hold on power depends on sustaining growth rates of eight to ten percent per year into the indefinite future can only go so far.  India faces similar constraints and politicians in the world’s largest democracy can never look as if they are willing to sacrifice Indian living standards to please environmental activists in the wealthy world.

The threat of Himalayan glacier melt had actually helped build a significant constituency to take the climate issue seriously in India; the collapse of the Chicken Little glacier prediction weakens those Indians who wanted to meet Europe half way.  At the same time, the growing disarray on the international politics of the issue makes it easier for reluctant countries to delay and resist — and for industry to lobby against unwanted restrictions.  It seems likely that neither India nor China will now move very far; in that case there is virtually no chance that the United States Congress will pass the kind of restrictive legislation the green lobby seeks.  With both President Obama and congressional Democrats on the defensive already, the White House simply cannot afford to lead a losing battle on a divisive issue like this one.  Climate skeptics newly energized by the shenanigans at the East Anglian email server and now at TERI and the IPCC will gleefully go after the administration on this issue hammer and tongs.

So what should the President do?  Giving up will infuriate his base and presumably violates his own sense of duty to the country and the world.  Yet going forward as if nothing had changed will be tremendously damaging politically — and is unlikely to result in legislation that is worth all the trouble.  Some suggest that he manage the issue through the EPA’s newly assumed power to regulate CO2 as a pollutant.  Is this really a good idea?  Should bureaucrats be cutting jobs by placing new regulations on industry during an election-year unemployment crisis?

More usefully, the President should recognize that a combination of poor decisions, poor communications and bad luck has compromised the ability of the climate science community to convince the public both about the nature of the threat and the steps needed to cope with it.  The best approach under the circumstance would be to appoint a high level commission including prominent scientists who are skeptical of the climate change evidence to review the evidence from top to bottom.  The community of climate skeptics has raised a number of concerns; some are clearly rather weak but others, as we see from the IPCC retraction of the glacial melting prediction, may have more merit.

We have reached a point where without a thorough and transparent review of the evidence and controversies surrounding it, we are unlikely to get a political consensus in the United States that can deal with this matter appropriately.  And if the United States cannot act, the Basic countries will certainly not.

A thorough, transparent and impartial review of the climate change debate will take time.  Many environmental activists will be enraged by this, arguing that the planet simply cannot afford the delay.  They may well be right — but delay is inevitable.  The world has many different countries, with many different sets of interests and many different political systems and public opinions.  The growing disarray of the international effort, combined with the political obstacles under current circumstances for strong legislation in the US have made delay inevitable in any case.

Not everyone will be convinced by such a commission.  But it now represents the best hope of developing a broad political consensus in the United States and given the reality of our institutions and culture, there is simply no way for us to go forward without it.

Working with leaders of both parties, with skeptics and supporters of the IPCC position on global warming, President Obama should appoint a presidential study group on climate and give it what, in the opinion of its members, is an appropriate time frame and mandate.  The panel would presumably review the evidence for climate change and the methods used to assess it, the arguments for and against the role of human activity as opposed to natural variation in climate, and the arguments concerning the impact of continued climate change and the various risks and costs associated with different strategies for dealing with it.  If there are further errors in the IPCC reports, the commission will find them; if there is evidence that the ‘climategate’ emails were part of a process that successfully distorted the scientific assessment of data, that will come out — and if these scandals are inconsequential that too will emerge from the review.  The evidence of the commission and its methods should be fully available to the public and its deliberations should be on the record.  The commission should be candid about the inevitable gaps and limits in its knowledge and its forecasts, not seeking to tilt the political discussion either way.  The members must be carefully vetted for conflicts of interest.  The role of advocacy needs to be clearly separated from the role of fact finding. Minority views must be treated with respect and care.

It is not clear that a commission of this kind can work — but it seems clearer every day that nothing else looks any more hopeful.

For the President and Democrats generally, this course of action seems attractive.  For one thing, it might work and create the political consensus that would ultimately allow the administration to get the kind of authority it needs at home and abroad to tackle this issue with any hope of success.  For another, it offers the President a chance to show the kind of leadership which many of those who voted for him hoped to see: cerebral, evidence based, post partisan, patient.  And finally, it offers a dignified alternative to what looks to be another messy battle that, by the time it finished in almost inevitable failure, would likely make the White House and Democrats generally nostalgic for the good old days when all they had to worry about was health care.

The credibility of the IPCC, the reputation and the job security of its chairman, the consensus among key (and rather skeptical) countries that global warming is man made and needs to be fixed:  it’s all melting away, to judge from the latest news from New Delhi.  The only thing that isn’t melting is the Himalayan icepack, parts of which, a British scientist points out, may actually be growing.

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri is gamely defending his job in the midst of a growing global press firestorm, arguing that the late, reluctant of admission by the IPCC that its Nobel prize-winning report on climate change contained significant errors has somehow increased the panel’s credibility.  But while Parchauri fights his critics, movement toward a global agreement to stop climate change is collapsing.  According to The Financial Times, a senior Chinese official has said that China wants to keep an open mind about the causes of global warming.  The FT reports that following a meeting with representatives of the other ‘BASIC’ countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) to follow up on the international climate conference in Copenhagen, China’s Xie Zhenhua told a press conference in New Delhi that “There is a view that climate change is caused by cyclical trends in nature itself…  We have to keep an open attitude.”

Xie went on to say that while the “mainstream view” was that climate change was caused by “the unconstrained emissions of developed countries during the industrialization process,” this was not necessarily so, as “there are some uncertainties.”

That doesn’t sound like a government getting ready sell painful policy changes to a skeptical public back home.  What seems more likely is that the meltdown of the credibility of both the IPCC and its chairman in the wake of ‘climategate’ and ‘glaciergate‘ is giving countries like India and China the political freedom to back away from the policy changes that climate campaigners want to see.

Meanwhile, it turns out that something isn‘t melting: the glaciers.  As Ben Cubby reports in The Age, the British climate researcher Dr. Hayley Fowler has pointed out that the Himalayan glaciers are actually holding up better than most others around the world.  “While winters in the western Himalayas were warmer, summers had been cooler in recent years, meaning that some glaciers in the west have been growing, not receding like others around the world.”

Dr. Fowler is a mainstream climate scientist who accepts the case for global warming and the need for policy changes to fight it, and her reports on the glaciers aren’t intended to undermine the science of climate change.  But it seems clear that the current leadership of the IPCC and some other climate institutes lack the stature and credibility to lead.  The only question is how long it will take the mainstream environmental community to realize this and start the necessary housecleaning.  It’s looking more and more that without some big changes in personnel and policies at the IPCC and a systematic review of the findings thus far, the world’s governments will never agree to make the policy changes that environmentalists believe we need.

Over to you, Mr. Gore.

The London Times continues to follow the glaciergate story–and it keeps getting worse.

The latest disclosure: Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s (formerly) prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (known as the IPCC), may have raised millions of dollars for his New Delhi institute on the basis of the totally bogus ‘glaciergate’ claim by the IPCC that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.

According the the London Times, Pachauri’s institute got money from the European Union and the US-based Carnegie Corporation to investigate a prediction that never had any scientific backing whatever, and one which all serious glacier scientists instantly recognized as impossible. The bogus claim was frequently repeated in the fundraising efforts — and reiterated as recently as January 15 when the IPCC was already under intense pressure to admit it had blundered.

This is now more than an example of eye-popping incompetence and gross neglect of elementary scientific standards by a body on whose authority the world is expected to make multi-trillion dollar decisions affecting every business and every person on the planet.

It is now, potentially, a criminal issue.  If Pachauri knew the claim was bogus and allowed these grant applications to go forward, he could find himself facing criminal charges.

But at the least his immediate resignation is required.  It was one thing to publish a false prediction in a long report–grossly incompetent and negligent, yes, but it was a long report and it was only one prediction.  An honorable person would at least offer to step down in such a situation; it might, however, be survivable for a bureaucratic street-fighter with little sense of shame.

That is no longer the case.  Before allowing this claim to be used for fundraising and, potentially, to be the centerpiece of a massive research effort, Pachauri had an inescapable obligation to investigate and verify the science behind the claim.  This he clearly failed to do; no reputable foundation or government can now fund any organization he heads.

Environmentalists should be the first to call for Pachauri’s resignation.  Those who truly believe that the world is in imminent peril and that a concerted effort is vital to save the planet from human caused climate change should be all over this story, demanding a full and thorough investigation of IPCC incompetence and possible criminality.  This is the only way that the serious scientists and thoughtful reformers who make up the overwhelming core of the climate change community can recapture the high ground and regain the public trust.

Meanwhile, the Indian press is also reporting increased scrutiny of possible conflict of interest charges surrounding Pachauri.

According to the Times, a groundswell is rising in India demanding that Pachauri step down.  Al Gore needs to be leading this charge in the US.  Where is he, and why is he silent?

Matthew Yglesias really, really doesn’t like me.  He’s come after me again on his blog, attacking me for being a graduate of Groton and Yale and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and yet presuming to know what populism is.  Please, Mr. Yglesias; I may not quite measure up to your severe standards as a horny-handed son of toil, but the large domestic staff here at the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens assures me that I understand their aspirations very well.  Just this morning the butler brought in the coffee and freshly ironed newspapers and I asked him whether Yglesias’ attack was unfair.

“Absolutely, sir,” he said.  “Preposterous.  Highly unfair. Will you be needing the Bentley this morning?”

So there, Matt.

But actually I’m here to praise Mr. Yglesias today, not to bury him.  He’s got an excellent post up that refers to the extraordinary reduction in world poverty that we’ve seen in the last thirty years. Here’s how he starts:

Amidst all these problems in the United States, it’s worth recalling that for much of the world these are actually the best of times:

World poverty is falling. Between 1970 and 2006, the global poverty rate has been cut by nearly three quarters. The percentage of the world population living on less than $1 a day (in PPP-adjusted 2000 dollars) went from 26.8% in 1970 to 5.4% in 2006 (Figure 1).

Let’s put this another way: in the last forty years the global poverty rate has fallen farther and faster than ever before.  More than a billion of the world’s poorest people have begun to escape degrading and destructive poverty.  Much more needs to happen, of course, but from the standpoint of justice and solidarity we should welcome the progress already achieved and do everything possible to support the continued progress of the world’s poorest people towards better, richer lives.

Up until this point, Mr. Yglesias and I are as one.  We join hands with Jeeves, Mrs. Beaton the housekeeper, James the chauffeur and even the groundskeepers and the scullery maids at Mead manor to sing the Internationale (click here to link to several versions in MP3 files) and hail the bright new day.

It’s all very thrilling, but there’s a problem: if the western left had its way, much of this progress would never have happened.  Without globalization, the export of manufacturing jobs to the third world and the development of multinational, risk taking giant financial firms by greedy bankers, this rise in world living standards would be much, much lower than it has been.  All these are trends that most of the left hates, but they are necessary if the world is going to achieve what the left most wants — a more just global order that in particular is more fair to the poor.

Bill Clinton and Tony Blair understood this; that is why history is going to look past their flaws and their errors and recognize them as genuinely constructive figures on the world stage.  But the true believers never accepted the Third Way; now they hope that to dismantle the ideas and the policies that under both left and right governments have facilitated a generation of earth shaking change.  Blair and Clinton would, I think, have done a good job if they had still been in office when the financial crisis hit.  They would have seen the need to reform a system that had gotten out of hand — but they would have understood the fierce moral imperative to preserve the dynamism that the new system was creating around the world.

I don’t know how Matthew Yglesias will ultimately reconcile his commendable concern for the world’s poor with the ‘progressive’ left’s attachment to economic and social policies that would condemn generations unborn to endless misery and want.  This is a problem that the American left as a whole has struggled with for decades.  It is not a simple issue: economic policies that improve living standards abroad tend to increase inequality at home.  Giving workers and entrepreneurs in poor countries more opportunities to compete with their counterparts in the rich world puts Americans and Europeans under some new and often very unwelcome competitive pressures.  I share many of the concerns of Yglesias and others on the left about the social and political consequences of these shifts in the rich world and agree with them both that there are no easy answers and that the interests of the less affluent in the advanced countries can’t be simply ignored even as we strain every sinew to reduce poverty abroad.

But the center of moral gravity in world politics has decisively moved from the cause of greater equality in the rich countries to that of greater opportunity in the poor ones.  No serious person can ignore this, I think; the problem is particularly difficult for people on the social democratic left in rich countries.  The political base of those movements (organized labor in particular) has a set of interests that can be difficult to reconcile with those of the world’s struggling poor, but the ideology of the left, and commendably so, is committed to global solidarity with the poor.  Up to this point, the western democratic left has not found an answer to this problem; until it does, it is likely to face an uphill struggle in many countries as its moral instincts are in a state of permanent tension with its electoral base.

Still, all credit to Matthew Yglesias for hailing what so many leftists attempt to ignore: the gigantic progress the world has made in reducing poverty as globalization, like John Brown, marches on to free the slaves.

W.H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden was one of the great Anglo-American poets of the twentieth century.  Like T.S. Eliot, he was an Anglican who became more so with age; otherwise they went in different directions.  Eliot started out in Missouri and ended up domiciled in Britain, becoming a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39; Auden went just the other way, born in Great Britain and becoming an American citizen in 1946. Eliot was instinctively a man of the (sometimes anti-Semitic) right, Auden of the (briefly, totalitarian) left, though over time, he drifted as Mae West would put it: “I was born Snow White,” she once said, “but I drifted.”  Eliot was a high modernist who had many literary affinities with Joyce and Pound; Auden’s poetry was less mannered and more direct.  I admire them both tremendously; over the years I have spent more time with Auden.  I suppose that’s because reading Eliot is like attending a formal dinner party where the conversation and the food are both excellent; reading Auden is more like sitting in a comfortable chair by the fireplace to have a chat with an old friend.

A bit of advice to younger writers or to people of any age seeking to develop your voice — whether you are interested in fiction, poetry, journalism or even wonking: spend some time with both these guys.  They had fantastic ears for the English language; they bring a wealth and range of cultural associations to their work that gives it depth, resonance and authority; they know how to refract a subtle intelligence through language so that readers can see and appreciate their sensibilities; they can make themselves live on the page.

But it isn’t Auden the poet or Auden the essayist that I’m interested in this morning; it’s Auden the proto-blogger.  In 1970 he published A Certain World: A Commonplace Book.  In some ways this was a very typical Auden production: using an old literary form in a new way.  But it was also a way to do something once very difficult in print that the internet has now made much easier: to show readers the inside of a cultivated mind by sharing with them the small delights and insights that the writer gets from reading.  In A Certain World, Auden shows us how and what he reads on a wide variety of topics, often combining a short observation of his own with a longer quotation from another writer.  Today we would have no trouble recognizing this as a blog and a very good one; Auden looked back to an earlier literary model, the ‘commonplace book’.

Back in those gloomy pre-civilized days before Google and Wikipedia, when information lay scattered inaccessibly in books that were often poorly indexed not to mention bulky and expensive, people used to keep notebooks in which they jotted down memorable quotations, useful facts and sources, notes from their reading, phrases from conversation and so on.  For writers, these were important resources that greatly simplified the task of checking quotes and facts.  By Auden’s time the practice of keeping commonplace books, widespread in the eighteenth century, had become rare.  Books, though still clunky and, by Google standards, infuriatingly badly indexed (try googling a favorite phrase from a book versus trying to find it through a conventional index), had become much more available and most writers had access to vast university libraries of a kind that hardly existed when Swift and Addison were creating a new kind of literary culture in late-Stuart Britain.

So Auden’s commonplace book was, like much of his poetry, archaic in form: the conscious revival of a literary device that the rest of the world had left behind.  Yet, like Auden’s poetry, the book also looks ahead — not only are many of the perceptions and concerns of the book ‘modern’ but the work as a whole anticipates a new kind of writer’s engagement with the public: a direct and much more intimate conversation and sharing of sensibilities than conventional essay can allow.  It is a mosaic of a book: small, brightly colored fragments that, when you stand back, reveal something larger.  This is what many of us are doing today on the internet with our blogs; Auden was doing it in print back in 1970 when the internet was only a small gleam in the mind of Al Gore.

The pebbles in Auden’s mosaic are topics: love, humility, enchantment, dreams, sparrows, war.  They are arranged in alphabetical rather than thematic or chronological order — an excellent choice as it at once imposes some kind of order on the material but draws our attention to the way that the only bond that links the disparate subjects of the book is Auden’s interest in and take on the topics at hand.  At times, this format allows him to pursue a single theme through several ‘posts’: there are entries for Landscape, Basalt; Landscape, Cultivated; Landscape, Fens; Landscape, Limestone; Landscape, West of England; Landscape, Wild.  At other times, the format stimulates the reader by making provocative jumps: from, for example, Napoleon to Narcissus to Nature.

Not all of Auden’s ‘posts’ are equally successful.  The entry on Royalty takes us from a quotation from one of Ronald Firbank’s absurdly delightful novels to an anecdote about the invincibly Philistine Edward VII from Max Beerbohm, to an extraordinary story about Queen Victoria as told by Princess Marie Louise to two short and revealing quotes from George V.  The entry on Double Entendre works less well; double entendres are very context and time dependent and Auden looks awkward and even a bit foolish — like the aged roues of a Thackery novel, flirting and simpering well into their seventies.  Yet overall this is a book that instructs, stimulates and entertains.

Reading this book isn’t a complete education in itself, but it shows readers what kind of furniture you will find in at least one kind of educated mind.  The feel is a bit like Badger’s house in Wind in the Willows; comfortable chairs, piles of books and papers lying about; perhaps a faint smell of pipe tobacco and a cozy fire in the den.  Tastes differ; not everyone will want a mind furnished like Auden’s — but you will be better able to think about what kind of furniture you should acquire by looking at what he collected.

Dip into A Certain World.  It will startle and divert you; it will make you laugh and make you think.  It will give you an extraordinary window into an extraordinary mind; it will show you something new about what it means to be human.  It sets a standard of excellence to which all blogs should aspire, though very few will ever reach it.  This neglected classic will make you a better reader, thinker and writer; it will also make you a better and a more interesting person.  I had a paperback copy for many years, but it finally wore out.  I’m now on my second copy — second hand as the book is now out of print.  That one too is showing signs of wear; for years I wondered why I kept coming back to the book, flipping through a few entries at a time and occasionally sitting down to read it almost from cover to cover. Now I think I know: unconsciously, I was preparing to blog.  Auden knew that an old and discarded literary form somehow still had life in it and held a message for the future.

He was right.

The list of trends that will be driving world history during the next decade looks pretty daunting; it’s even more so if you reflect that by my logic, the 2020s will be even more challenging than the 2010s and the 2030s will be more challenging still.

As I listed the trends that are likely to shape the next ten years, readers may have felt like the ancient Greeks watching evils and disasters clambering out of Pandora’s Box one by one.  Economic instability! Crisis in Africa!  Religions in conflict! The end of the world!

All that is real, and it is pretty much guaranteed to keep us on the edge of our seats as we watch the next decades unfold, but there is something else, too.

Hope.

The flood of change that threatens to overturn the world in the next decade is the instability of a rising tide, not a falling one.  New discoveries, new technologies, new ideas are going to transform the lives of billions of people.  More people than ever before will have access to information about the world around them and will be able to participate in the cultural and political life of their times.  Humanity will be able to provide for its physical needs at a lower cost and with lower impact on the environment.  Increasing numbers of people all around the world will escape the limits of absolute poverty and enjoy unprecedented opportunities to build better lives for themselves and their children.

The chaos and instability of the new decade is creative chaos; it is the chaos of birth and growth rather than of death and decay.

Even as the world’s problems grow in some respects more acute and more entangled, humanity will have more resources at its disposal to fight them.  The environment will be under pressure as never before from the rising per capita consumption of a rising human population — but we will have an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the relationship between human activity and the environment, we will have more and better technological alternatives, and we will overall have significantly more resources to direct toward the solution of environmental problems.

The economy may be more turbulent, but we will understand our new economy better and better as the decade continues.  Religious tensions may well rise, but religious communities and leaders will have more resources and more experience available to help them build tolerant, pluralistic societies.  The urbanization that will create both political and social turbulence also represents the escape of scores of millions of talented, creative people from stagnant rural communities. Many will suffer terribly in the transition; others will find their way to lives much more fulfilling than anything they could have found back at the farm.

We live in challenging times, but these are the challenges of youth and growth.  Humanity is beginning to grasp its full potential, to know itself, to guess at the potential of our talents — and to respect the limits of our world.  The challenges we face in the teens will sometimes feel overwhelming, but they are the challenges of creating a world that is more just, more open, more democratic and more flourishing than any civilization or culture humanity has ever previously built.

Hope and change: the two together will drive and define the next ten years.

The single best description of the changes in the world system I’ve ever heard came from Henry Kissinger.  When assessing the political importance of recent events, he said sometime after the fall of the Berlin Wall that “the unification of Germany is more important than the consolidation of the European Union.  The fall of the Soviet Union is more important than the unification of Germany.  And the rise of India and China is more important than the fall of the Soviet Union.”

Looking ahead to the next ten years, the biggest trend for the new decade is neither America’s rise nor its fall.  The United States is likely to end the decade more or less as it began it: as the most important single power in a complex international system — but as a hampered and harassed power with more mail in its in-box than it knows how to answer.

Instead, the big global trend will be the emergence of a post-European world order; the United States will be adjusting to this reality and shifting the center of gravity in its foreign policy from the Atlantic to the Pacific as it prepares for the post-Europe world.

The world we live in today is a product of European expansion and imperialism.  As Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France and Britain set up great empires, their merchants and their soldiers quite suddenly brought the world’s different civilizations and cultures into constant communication with one another.  Over time, the British established a unique global role for themselves by maintaining a balance of power in Europe and while laying the foundations for today’s economically integrated world system.  Europe has been in political decline since the outbreak of World War One almost a century ago, but the world still bears Europe’s stamp.  Three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council are European states (Britain, France, Russia); Germany thinks it should also have a place.  Disproportionate numbers of global institutions have their headquarters in Europe; European countries are significantly overrepresented in such organizations as the IMF and the World Bank.

That is only the tip of the iceberg.  International law has its roots in European history and culture; a world organized around Islam or a world in which China had become the dominant power 400 years ago would have very different legal systems from the one we use now.  The bureaucratic, legal and financial institutions of the international system also reflect European cultural and historical developments.

When the United States became the primary global power during and after World War Two, Europe was still the center of our world.  Our culture and our history were almost entirely wrapped up in Europe (especially because African-Americans were systematically marginalized in American intellectual life and racial theories still had many Americans in their grip).  European countries were the world’s largest and most advanced economies and Europe was the home of our closest allies and our most dangerous enemies.  The contest between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was to some degree a contest between two European social models seeking to shape the future of the world — and the fate of Europe was always at the center of the Cold War.

The end of the Cold War combined with the rise of Asia will introduce the world to a new kind of reality: a post-European world order.  The axis of world politics is rapidly shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific; the next decade will see many of the ‘European’ elements of global society in retreat. The balance of economic and political power will continue to tilt toward Asia; American policy will increasingly reflect this tilt in global politics; Europe’s power will be under pressure and in retreat in global institutions; and global institutions, ideas and legal practices will be shifting away from their European foundations.

In one of my blog posts last year, I wrote that the Copenhagen climate summit showed the new picture of world politics: for the first time ever, Europeans were completely excluded from a meeting at which leading world powers made important decisions on matters that Europe cared about.  On many issues in the upcoming decade, Europe will have one point of view, Asia another, and the U.S. will be somewhere in between.  In general, however, the U.S. will be more concerned about keeping Asia on board and happy with the world system; increasingly it will be in the American interest to help Asian powers rebalance the world power structure in ways that redistribute power from the former great powers of Europe to the rising great powers of Asia today.

In terms of demography, culture and economic structure, Europe tends to be at one end of the world’s spectrum: old, rich, seeking stability.  The rising powers in Asia and elsewhere tend to be younger, faster growing, more ambitious and hungrier for change and for growth.  They are less risk-averse, and more likely to see the future in terms of opportunity rather than threat.

They are also much less invested in the legitimacy of international institutions and practices.  A country like India, which has one vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations and is a relatively small stakeholder in the World Bank and the IMF, is less in awe of the UN’s ‘mantle of legitimacy’ than are many European countries.  read more »