A Site for Moderate Realism and Interest-Based Policy
By Michael F. Duggan
Is it just me, or does anybody else find it adorable (and not a little absurd) that a portion of a single, overpopulated species that is destroying the Earth’s biosphere, would dedicate one day out of the year to saving the biosphere from us?
By Michael F. Duggan
When you remove shock from the battlefield, you take away decisiveness and introduce stalemate and attrition.1 What barbed wire, flat-trajectory bullets, and machine guns were to the battlefields of 1914-18, drones, loitering munitions, and highly-mobile artillery are to the Ukraine War after its intensification in February 2022. On its face, the Offensive Revolution that emerged in the final phases of the First World War, which gave the Second World War its dynamic qualities as Blitzkrieg and made generals like Guderian, Patton, Rommel, and Zhukov look like geniuses compared to their chateau-bound counterparts of the Great War, and which has dominated great powers ground war doctrine ever since, is failing in eastern Ukraine.
As former U.S. intelligence officer and weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, has observed, small unit tactics and a decentralized command structure have replaced the “big arrow” offensives typical of the Second World War as fact and the Cold War as theory. As with the failure of the offensive mode of war throughout most of the First World War (cavalry, which had traditionally provided mobile battlefield shock and decisiveness, was rendered useless in 1914), strong new defensive weapons have once again bolstered the power of the intrinsically stronger mode of war. If the defensive power of the weaker army is stronger than the offensive capabilities of the stronger army, then stalemate will ensure until attrition once again favors the side stronger in the aggregate. The Russians therefore, have adopted something akin to what historians call the “bite and hold” tactics of the First World War.2 The result, since the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive last summer (a series of attempted breaching operations without air or artillery superiority), has been a front-wide effort of small gains on the part of the Russians, aimed at grinding down the other side.
Some military pundits and wannabe experts in the corporate media have declared the age of the tank to be over. This may or may not be true. The technological side of war is a game of measures and countermeasures, and it is difficult to know if the stymying of the offensive revolution is a fleeting phenomenon—it is possible that effective anti-drone technologies may be in the offing in the near future—or if the tank is going the way of the mounted lancer, chasseur, dragoon, and hussar.
Notes
By Michael F. Duggan
Last month was the hottest March on record worldwide. The previous twelve months were also the hottest on record. 2014-2023 was the hottest decade recorded. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are now around 424 parts per million, the highest levels since the Pliocene about 3 million years ago. Nothing to see here, folks. Go back to what you were doing.
By Michael F. Duggan
I never put much stock in programs touting the perfectibility of humankind. Consciously or unconsciously, I always subscribed to the sentiment expressed by the late Tony Judt: “If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying the consequences.” All utopian revolutions fail, and attempts at sweeping holistic change result in instability and eventually violence. The best we have are piecemeal solutions (Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies).
Two foundational thinkers who I never warmed up to are John Locke and Karl Marx. Locke, in all of his narrow, legalistic glory, believes that people are so rational that we need only a minimal framework of rights and laws to allow them to do the right thing. Anybody who has read history, sociobiology, or a newspaper knows that this is nonsense. I like the idea of rights, but believe that they are enforceable fictions with no independent existence. Marx believes that people (at least the proletariat tribe) are so benevolent, so cooperative, so rational, that they will band together out of historical necessity into a worker’s paradise. It is difficult to know where to begin to criticize such a ridiculously rationalistic outlook.
Before Locke and Marx, there was Thomas Hobbes, the primitive English realist whose life spanned the most tragic period of modern Western history before the World Wars. Hobbes, who lived to be 91 and died peacefully on the magnificent Chatsworth estate, held that in a state of nature, life is “nasty, brutish and short,” and that this state is one of war of all against all. I liked the realism of Hobbes, but thought that he goes too far. If life was a continuous universal struggle reminiscent of a vulgar understanding of the Darwinian jungle, then it seems that we would have all killed each other off by now.
And then there was Hume, who said that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” His outlook is between Locke and Hobbes, but tending toward the latter. Now this was on to something, and a perspective with real nuance: people are capable of reasons but it is not dominant in them. They are not perfectible, but nor are they completely deprived. Throw Montesquieu into the mix and divided government and the balancing of power, and you have something like a modern republican outlook, like that embraced by the Founders and Framers. Jefferson and the antifederalist perspective favored the individualism and right-orientation of Locke, and Hamilton and the Federalists favored the centralization, law and order, and the balancing of power of Hume and Montesquieu. The two views merged powerfully in the modern ideas of social democracy prescribed by Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. This, I thought, was the best a nation our size could probably achieve.
As an American and a historian, I embraced the view that combined Lockean idealism and Humean realism. But over the past couple of decades, I have had a sneaking suspicion that the United States that I have known might have been just a fleeting moment, an apex, the moment of zero gravity at the top of a rollercoaster’s highest parabolic curve, and the we are probably on the way down. Throw in some modern sociobiology and Malthus and population theory, and Hobbes might turn out to be right after all.
O.J. Simpson is dead. He died of prostate cancer in Las Vegas on April 10, 2024.
When I was a kid and teenager, he was simply “The Juice,” a physical genius who played for the Bills and then the 49ers. In 1973, he carried the ball for 2,003 yards. He appeared on the large and small screen in productions as different as Roots and The Naked Gun series. He had the face and physique of a god, the urbane personality of a natural pitchman, good comic timing, and the courtroom luck of Lizzie Borden. He is probably the man who killed his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman on June 12, 1994. And yet so many people still misunderstand the overarching subtext of the “Trial of the Century.”
When Simpson was acquitted, some white Americans, who had apparently never heard of Klaus von Bulow, were incensed at seeing an obvious murderer walk. The fact that the accused was a black man, and the victim a white woman, certainly had a lot to do with it. Some African Americans were gleeful at the acquittal, as if Simpson somehow represented the multitudes of innocent black men who were lynched during the Jim Crow era for alleged crimes against whites. Ironically, both perspectives miss the point that the outcome of the case had more to do with wealth than race.
If O.J. Simpson had been a poor white man or a poor black man relying on appointed counsel (or if he had served out the full sentence for his 2007 conviction for armed robbery and kidnapping), he would have likely died in prison rather than in Las Vegas.
By Michael F. Duggan
I know that exceptional national leadership is the exception rather than the rule. Without necessarily embracing monarchy, one could argue that there were more great leaders among the 41 kings and queens of England since 1066 than among the 45 U.S. presidents since 1790 (although I am not sure how you compare a medieval warrior king like Richard the Lionhearted to a modern social democrat like Franklin Roosevelt). Britain is a small nation and its monarchy has been drawn from a few regal families. The United States is a sprawling land empire, whose system is increasingly open to all comers. Its political history is the history of the expansion of the franchise.
I would not go as far as Henry Adams, who saw the succession of U.S. chief executives as essentially a record of entropy disproving Darwin’s theory. Rather, there seems to be something counterintuitive at work suggesting that a larger pool of potential leaders does not guarantee good, great, or even better leaders.
Consider: The entire generation of the Founders and Framers (actually three generations, stretching from Franklin, born in 1706, to Hamilton, born in 1757) was drawn from a population of between 2 and 3 million (far fewer if we only count the white male elite population that was eligible to hold office). Lincoln was drawn from a population of around 31.4 million, and FDR from a population of around 125 million. The current U.S. population is around a third of a billion people, perhaps considerably higher, and the yet best we can do is Biden and Trump?
It seems that we have effectively fine-tuned our system to eliminate or scare off the best potential leaders among us. Either that or the brightest and most capable people today are either too greedy or cowardly (or both) to run for high office.
By Michael F. Duggan
My favorite nineteenth-century American painter is Winslow Homer. Perhaps more than any other visual artist, he marks the arrival of a mature and distinctive American aesthetic after a protracted and derivative adolescence. His seascapes are especially powerfully—nobody captures the amoral fury of the sea like Homer.
There is one painting of his however, that I had not cared for but which I now see as a powerful metaphor, a metaphor for a future Homer could have not have foreseen. This is his The Gulf Stream from 1899. To me it always seemed too busy, an overly dramatic piling-on of threatening elements—like the drawing of a child trying to include too much into one scene. The painting is of a black man stripped to the waist reclining on the deck of a de-masted, heavily listing sloop, apparently resigned to his fate.
Recently I saw the painting again, and it spoke to me powerfully realized as a metaphor, a prophecy come true for the current human predicament: the man’s artificial environment—the derelict vessel—is a barely floating wreck, subject to the chaos and caprice, the whims of the ocean. It is a temporal speck of flotsam, of human artifice, about to be reclaimed and assimilated back into nature (as with all of the human extended phenotype, the boat is not “artifice” but “human-altered nature”). Nature threatens in other ways ways: circling sharks in the foreground, attracted to blood in the water. On the horizon is a waterspout. And then there is the encroaching sea itself. The title of the painting provides another element: the Gulf Stream, a current—a river in the ocean—that is controlling the course of the sinking sloop, further denying humankind agency over its own fate.
Also in the distance is a faint and fleeting chance of salvation by human hands, a fully-rigged sailing ship on the far horizon heading past the unseen boat and apparently toward the storm, as the man on the boat looks unaware or uncaringly away in the opposite direction. This is where we stand, or recline, today.
Of course the metaphor is not a perfect one—no metaphor is—nature is not depicted as degraded or altered, as it is in our time, only primal and threatening, and unlike the man in the painting, so many of us today are either unaware or in denial of our predicament. Where the man looks away from the possibility of salvation, we look away from the threat itself either in ignorance or apathy rather than in hopelessness of our situation. By contrast, much of civilization superficially seems to be going strong, whereas the boat is little more than a hulk awash in the shark-swarming brine.
The relevant questions framed by the painting are: are things too far gone for the man and his situation, and are things too far gone for us and ours? Is there still hope for us and our world?
By Michael F. Duggan
Okay, so I am not a part of Taylor Swift’s target audience, and I would be surprised if I have listened to more than a dozen of her songs. But like her or not, pop music’s billion-dollar woman is impossible to ignore.
I have noting against Swift. She is clearly talented and protects energy and a positive image for her legions (armies, really) of young fans, or Swifties. The fact that she has tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of enthusiastic followers who are willing to shell-out big bucks for albums and sold-out concerts corroborates this. They, and in some cases their parents, love her and her music, and there is no reason to think that they are faking it. But does she warrant such acclaim and pecuniary reward?
Right after Swift’s Eras tour broke the billion-dollar mark, a friend of mine called me and asked me what I thought of her. In truth I think about her fairly little, other than during the occasional news story. Of her relationship with what’s-his-name, the football player, I couldn’t care less. To be fair, at 34, she is now a veteran in a cutthroat business that makes extreme demands on touring musicians, and her first album, released in 2006, is now older than many of her fans.
But my friend’s point was that, taken on her artistic merits, she seems to be a kind of patron saint for the mediocrity that characterizes so much of the music of our time. I listened to some of her songs and they struck me as unobjectionable, if unexceptional, and possessing verve and confidence. Her lyrics occasionally rose to the level of moderate (if unexceptional) inspiration. She also has a nice voice, and her songs sound overly-worked to me in a technological sense (like some of Beyonce’s songs). But is the whole package worthy of a clean billion for a single (albeit long) tour? I suppose a free trader would argue that anybody who can make that kind of money legally in a free market deserves it. Perhaps. But as regards aesthetics, I disagree.
It is pointless to argue over taste and preferences, but I think that we can make meaningful qualitative statements about art and entertainment. For instance, do Swift’s songs, which speak so powerfully to her fans, rise to the level of the nearly universal appeal of the better songs by the Gershwins, Hoagy Carmichael, Lennon and McCartney, Cole Porter, Rogers and Hart/Hammerstein, Schubert, Simon and Garfunkel, or Fats Waller? Are her lyrics as fresh and original as those of Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and the better acts of the British Invasion during the early and mid 1960s? Does her musical virtuosity push the limits to the same degree as the young Louis Armstrong, Big Beiderbecke, Sidney Bechet, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Jimi Hendrix, Stanley Jordan, Anita O’Day, Charlie Parker, Django Reinhardt, or The Who? Does her voice, although good, carry the depth of feeling of a Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, Otis Redding, or Hank Williams? Is her voice as fine as Sarah Vaughn or Ella Fitzgerald, as distinctive as Sinatra’s or Crosby’s, or as big as those of Aretha Franklin or Linda Ronstadt?
From what I have listened to so far, she does not rise to the level of any of these apples and oranges in these respective categories, and yet none of them ever made anything like a billion dollars in a single tour. During their first U.S. tour, The Beatles made an impressive minimum of $50,000 per concert (a little under half a million dollars when adjusted for inflation). By contrast, Swift makes between $10 and $13 million per concert. Is she really 20-26 times better than all four Beatles?
Where entertainment is powerful and singular, art is more subtle and multifarious, leading to innumerable interpretations and reactions. There is of course a huge grey zone between the two. Using this distinction, it seems to me that Taylor Swift has both feet in the entertainment category as a runaway pop sensation, although possibly not as an entertainer (much less and artist) for the ages. Time will tell, and I may be wrong. But then, even all these years later, I still don’t understand the unwaning appeal of Michael Jackson, Madonna, or Britney Spears among their fans.
By Michael F. Duggan
In Washington, D.C., a city crowded with monuments, the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, is my favorite.
We all know of the historian and writer, Henry Adams, but less well-know is his wife, Marian Hooper “Clover” Adams, a pioneering photographer who took her own life in 1885. Henry would commission the sculpture that would mark her grave, now his grave too. The sculptor is Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who called it The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding. Although heavy, it is prossibly my favorite American sculpture as well.
It was Eleanor Roosevelt’s special place in the city, and she would go there to sit and think. Twain liked it too and is supposed to have given it the informal title of Grief, the name by which I first knew it (it has also been called Despair). Adams opposed and resisted all of the names bestowed on the sculpture.
Of the androgynous, draped figure in bronze, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—who was friends with the Adamses and who once sat for a photographic portrait by Clover—wrote: “I should not call it despair any more than hope. It is simply the end and silence. The universe escapes epithets. It is enough if you find it beautiful and awful.”
Like Mrs. Roosevelt, I see the figure as female. Unlike Justice Holmes, I see in it a depth of human emotion confronted with loss.
By Michael F. Duggan
Americans love a parade and they love a military hero. I know, my father was one. Forty-five U.S. presidents were veterans and twelve generals became Commander in Chief. Until fairly recently, military service was virtually a requirement for national elective office.
Years ago a friend of mine who worked at a veterans memorial, was asked by some visitors what they could do to contribute (meaning volunteering in a conspicuous way at a symbolic site). He asked them if they had ever considered volunteering at a V.A. hospital. It wasn’t the answer they wanted to hear. Americans love yellow ribbons and bumperstickers supporting the troops, but we frequently lose interest after the parade.
We celebrate our veterans on Armed Forces Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Veterans Day. We celebrate their service and sacrifice. But if we really appreciated the cost of war to veterans, their families, and the country, wouldn’t there be a day set side to reflect on the causes of war and the reasons why we mortgage the lives of young American men and women? If you wish to celebrate the sacrifice of American servicemen and service women, take off one day every year and quietly reflect on the reasons why in recent years the country has gone to war. Whenever you hear or read about U.S. servicemen or servicewomen killed abroad, ask yourself about the wisdom of the policy that put them in harm’s way and if it is worth such sacrifice.
Such meditation might also provide a basis for precluding bad policies. And it is the very least a citizen can do to honor our soldiers, sailors, airmen/women, and marines. Of course we’d have to come up with a catchier name than Policy Meditation Day,