Category: Books
Three accounts of modern liberalism
I have a review essay on that topic in the latest TLS. Excerpt, on Philip Pilkington:
Pilkington’s sense of numbers, history and magnitude is sometimes off. He writes that “liberalism is forming broken, atomized people who are unable to pass on their genes to a future generation”, apparently oblivious to the fact that fertility rates are falling in many non- liberal countries as well – in Russia, for example – where they are lower than in the US. In China, fertility is lower still. Is the liberal goal really to “replac[e] the family with the state”? That sounds more like the non-liberal visions we find in western thought, running from Plato to the more extreme forms of communism in which children are encouraged to report on the supposed crimes of their parents.
We are told that “deindustrialization eviscerated American industry”, yet US manufacturing output is now barely below its pre-financial crisis peak, and service sector jobs tend to pay more on average today than do manufacturing jobs. Pilkington also promotes strange theories of trade imbalances, as presented by the non-economists Oren Cass and Michael Pettis but rejected by virtually all serious researchers in the area. Their view is that a huge economic restructuring is needed because China and Germany keep running trade surpluses while the US is in perpetual trade deficit. But in reality this arrangement seems as stable as any other macroeconomic state of affairs could be. It is Pilkington’s prerogative to disagree with the consensus, but we are never told why everyone else might be wrong. Overall, there is too much sloppiness here in service of the agenda of carping about liberal societies.
And on Robert Kagan:
An alternative and less neat vision of American history shows how liberalism has often relied on illiberalism, and not just accidentally. Lincoln was a significant abuser of civil rights, including on habeas corpus. The North’s campaigns in the Civil War killed many thousands of innocent civilians, not all of them in the service of legitimate military ends. You can argue that this may have been necessary, but liberal it was not. As for FDR, he tried to pack the Supreme Court and sought a significant expansion of executive power, making his administrations a methodological precursor of Trump. He did fight the Second World War on the side of liberalism, but he did not always use liberal means (eg the firebombing of Tokyo), and indeed a full respect for the laws of warfare might not have secured victory.
Once we see American history as a union of liberal and illiberal forces, we can relax a little about the current situation. Certainly, we are returning to some bad and illiberal behaviours of the past, and it is right to be concerned. Yet this seems to be more a feature of the ebb and flow of American politics than a decisive turn away from liberalism. Illiberalism has been prominent in the mix most of the time, and that is both the good news and the bad.
Interesting throughout, recommended, I believe it is the Sept.1 issue.
*Take a Girl Like You*, by Kingsley Amis
This excellent and neglected novel deserves a new look in our time. As Christian Lorentzen points out in his useful introduction, if you are interested in (non-Submission) Houellebecq, this is the next place to go. How exactly did we get on the Houellebecq sexual emptiness path to begin with? This novel was published in 1960, and it shows the first steps toward the sexual revolution and the rise of more open sexual competition, with a nod in the direction of what the final results are going to be.
In the novel the old sexual world is still there, and largely in control. There is a distinction between “good girls” and “bad girls,” for instance, or if you are traveling with an opposite sex companion there needs to be talk of “separate bedrooms.” But the characters discuss birth control, and one asks the other why don’t they just…do it? The novel shows how the older world started to break down and morph into what was to come later.
I will not spoil the ending for you.
Interesting and insigthful passages abound. For instance:
“He’s got a sensual face. But he doesn’t know much about women, I think. He talks all the time, and this isn’t necessary, as we women soon learn.”
Or:
He kissed her very thoroughly, without trying to do anything else, and indeed without any of the toiling and moiling, let alone the moaning and groaning, gone in for by the too-serious ones, and/or the ones who put up a show of being serious.
pp.169-171 have the best analysis of “lookism” I have seen.
Amis understands the slippery slope phenomenon very well. He even suggests that greater promiscuity is bound to lead to regularly bisexual women.
Recommended, an easy and fun read, and if it helps you norm my evaluation I did not love Lucky Jim by him.
My very interesting Conversation with Seamus Murphy
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Seamus Murphy is an Irish photographer and filmmaker who has spent decades documenting life in some of the world’s most challenging places—from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to Nigeria’s Boko Haram territories. Having left recession-era Ireland in the 1980s to teach himself photography in American darkrooms, Murphy has become that rare artist who moves seamlessly between conflict zones and recording studios, creating books of Afghan women’s poetry while directing music videos that anticipated Brexit.
Tyler and Seamus discuss the optimistic case for Afghanistan, his biggest fear when visiting any conflict zone, how photography has shaped perceptions of Afghanistan, why Russia reminded him of pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, how the Catholic Church’s influence collapsed so suddenly in Ireland, why he left Ireland in the 1980s, what shapes Americans impression of Ireland, living part-time in Kolkata and what the future holds for that “slightly dying” but culturally vibrant city, his near-death encounters with Boko Haram in Nigeria, the visual similarities between Michigan and Russia, working with PJ Harvey on Let England Shake and their travels to Kosovo and Afghanistan together, his upcoming film about an Afghan family he’s documented for thirty years, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Now you’re living in Kolkata mainly?
MURPHY: No. I’m living in London, some of the year in Kolkata.
COWEN: Why Kolkata?
MURPHY: My wife is Indian. She grew up in Delhi, Bombay, and Kolkata, but Kolkata was her favorite. They were the years that were her most fond of years. She’s got lots of friends from Kolkata. I love the city. She was saying that if I didn’t like the city, then we wouldn’t be spending as much time in Kolkata as we do, but I do love the city.
It’s got, in many ways, everything I would look for in a city. Kabul, in a way, was a bit like Kolkata when times were better. This is maybe a replacement for Kabul for me. Kolkata is extraordinary. It’s got that history. It’s got the buildings. Bengalis are fascinating. It’s got culture, fantastic food.
COWEN: The best streets in India, right?
MURPHY: Absolutely.
COWEN: It’s my daughter’s favorite city in India.
MURPHY: Really?
COWEN: Yes.
MURPHY: What does she like about it?
COWEN: There’s a kind of noir feel to it all.
MURPHY: Absolutely.
COWEN: It’s so compelling and so strong and just grabs you, and you feel it on every street, every block. It’s probably still the most intellectual Indian city with the best bookshops, a certain public intellectual life.
MURPHY: It’s widespread. It’s not just elite. It’s everyone. We went to a huge book fair. It’s like going to . . . I don’t know what it’s like going to, Kumbh Mela or something. It’s extraordinary.
There’s a huge tent right in the middle, and it’s for what they call little magazines. Little magazines are these very small publications run by one or two people. They’ll publish poetry. They’ll publish interesting stories. Sadly, I don’t speak Bengali because I’d love to be reading this stuff. There are hundreds of these things. They survive, and people buy them. It’s not just the elite. It’s extraordinary in that way.
COWEN: Is there any significant hardship associated with living there, say a few months of the year?
MURPHY: For us, no. There’s a lot of hardship —
COWEN: No pollution?
MURPHY: Yes. The biggest pollution for me is the noise, the noise pollution.
Interesting throughout.
What should I ask Jonny Steinberg?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. From Wikipedia:
Steinberg was born and raised in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa. He was educated at Wits University in Johannesburg, and at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and earned a doctorate in political theory. He taught for nine years at Oxford, where he was Professor of African Studies. He currently teaches at Yale University‘s Council on African Studies.
Three of Steinberg’s books – Midlands (2002), about the murder of a white South African farmer, The Number (2004), a biography of a prison gangster, and Winnie & Nelson (2023) – won South Africa’s premier non-fiction prize, the Sunday Times CNA Literary Awards making him the first writer to win it three times.
I am a special fan of Winnie & Nelson, which I consider to be one of the best books of the last ten years. He is currently working on a biography of Cecil Rhodes. So what should I ask him?
Could China Have Gone Christian?
The Taiping Rebellion is arguably the most important event in modern history that even educated Westerners know very little about. It’s also known as the Taiping Civil War and it was one of the largest conflicts in human history (1850–1864), with death toll estimates ranging from 20 to 30 million, far exceeding deaths in the US civil war (~750,000) with which it overlapped. The civil war destabilized Qing China, weakening it against foreign powers and shaped the trajectory of 19th- and 20th-century Chinese politics. In China the Taiping Civil War is considered the defining event of the 19th-century.
The most surprising aspect of the civil war is that the rebels were Christian. The rebellion has its genesis in 1837 with the dramatic visions of Hong Xiuquan. In his visions, Hong and his elder brother traveled the world slaying demons, guided onwards by an old man who berated Confucius for failing to teach proper doctrines to the Chinese people. (I draw here on Steven Platt’s excellent Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom). It is perhaps not coincidental that Hong began experiencing his visions after failing the infamously stressful Chinese civil service exams for the third time. It wasn’t until 1843, however, after he failed the exams for the fourth time, that he had an epiphany. A Christian tract that he had never read before suddenly unlocked the meaning of his visions–the elder brother was Jesus Christ, making Hong the second son of the old man, God.
With his visions unlocked, Hong threw himself into learning and then teaching the Gospels. He quickly converted his cousin and a neighbor and they baptized themselves and began taking down icons of Confucianism at their local school. Confucianism, of course, underpinned the exam system that Hong had grown to hate (Recall, that a similar pattern is visible in India today, where mass exams generate large numbers of educated but frustrated youth).
The wild visions of a lowly scholar wouldn’t seem to have the makings of a revolutionary movement but this was the beginning of the century of humiliation when China was forced to confront the idea that far from being the center of civilization it was in fact a backward and weak power on the world stage. Moreover, China was governed by foreigners, the Manchus, who despite ruling for 200 years had never really integrated with the Chinese population. Hence, Hong’s calls to kill the demons merged with a nationalist fervor to massacre the Manchus. Hong proclaimed himself the Heavenly King and his movement quickly grew to more than a million zealous warriors who captured significant territory including establishing the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom with its capital at Nanjing.
The regime banned foot‑binding, prostitution and slavery, promoted the equality of men and women, distributed bibles, and instituted a 7-day week with strict observance of the sabbath. To be sure, this was a Sinicized, millenarian Christianity, more Old Testament than new but the Christianity was serious and real and the rebels appealed to British and Americans as their Christian brothers. One Taiping commander wrote to a British counterpart:
You and I are both sons of the Heavenly Father, God, and are both younger brothers of the Heavenly Elder Brother, Jesus. Our feelings towards each other are like those of brothers, and our friendship is as intimate as that of two brothers of the same parentage. (quoted in Platt p.40)
Now, as it happened, the Heavenly Kingdom fell to the Qing, but it was a close thing and could easily have gone the other way. Western powers—above all Britain, but also the United States—hedged their bets and at times fought both sides, yet for short-sighted reasons ultimately tilted toward the Qing, an intervention Ito Hirobumi later called “the most significant mistake the British ever made in China.” Internal purges fractured the movement, alliances went unmade, and crucial opportunities slipped away. Yet the moment was pregnant with possibility. Hong Rengan, Hong Xiuquan’s cousin and prime minister from 1859, pushed sweeping modernization: railroads, steamships, postal services, banks, and even democratic reforms. These initiatives would likely have brought what one might call Christianity with Chinese Characteristics into closer alignment with Western Christianity.
Indeed, it is entirely plausible that with only a few turns of history, China might now be the world’s most populous Christian nation. And if that seems hard to believe, consider what did happen. Sixty three years after the fall of Nanjing in 1864, China again erupted into civil war under Mao Zedong. This time the rebels triumphed, and instead of a Christian Heavenly Kingdom the world got a Communist People’s Republic. The parallels are striking: both Hong and Mao led vast zealous movements that promised equality, smashed tradition, and enthroned a single man as the embodiment of truth. Both drew on foreign creeds—Hong from Protestant Christianity, Mao from Marxism-Leninism. Both movement had excesses but of the counter-factual and the factual I have little doubt which promised more ruin. The Heavenly Kingdom pointed toward a biblical moral order aligned with the West, the People’s Republic toward a creed that delivered famine, purges, and economic stagnation. Such are the contingencies of history—an ill-timed purge in Nanjing, a foreign gunboat at Shanghai, a missed alliance with the Nian. Small events cascaded into vast consequences. For the want of a nail, the Heavenly Kingdom was lost, and with it perhaps an entirely different modern world.
*How to be a Public Ambassador for Science*
The subtitle is The Scientist as Public Intellectual, and the author is my very good friend Jim Olds, who works at George Mason University. A very timely topic, here is one excerpt:
I was only about eight weeks into my new job. I’d been sworn in and found myself very much thrown into the pool’s deep end. First, the job was much more than serving as the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) lead for President Obama’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) project. Second, the learning curve was very steep. There were meetings full of acronyms that meant nothing to me. And these were my meetings — with my direct reports. I had learned the hard way that the Eisenhower Conference Center in the White House complex was made of steel and acted like a Faraday cage: cell phones didn’t work there. Tuesdays started with breakfast at 7:30 a.m. and went straight through for 12 hours with meeting after meeting.
Recommended, most of all informative about the NSF and also neuroscience.
What I’ve been reading
David Woodman, The First King of England: Aethelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom. An excellent work. One of the best books on early English history, and also one of the best books on how the Dark Ages morphed into early Medieval times. Usually I find treatments in both areas difficult to follow, but this one produces a coherent and also non-exaggerated narrative. It also will make you want to visit Northumbria.
Edmund Phelps, My Journeys in Economic Theory. A fascinating memoir, I had not known he was so obsessed with Rawls and Nagel. He also loved the tenor Franco Corelli, and was a Birgit Nilsson fan too. Recommended, for those who like this sort of thing, and who already are familiar with the cast of characters.
Bench Ansfield, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City. Whenever a book demonstrates what people in New Jersey have known for decades, usually it is a good book.
Andrew Sean Greer, Less: A Novel. I do not like much in contemporary American fiction, but so far I am quite enjoying this one.
Bernd Roeck, The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance. 934 pp. of text, covers too many topics in too desultory a fashion?
Pablo A. Pena, Human Capital for Humans: An Accessible Introduction to the Economic Science of the People, is a good popular-level introduction to human capital theory.
There is Carl Benedikt Frey, How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations.
What should I ask John Amaechi?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is Wikipedia on John:
John Uzoma Ekwugha Amaechi // ⓘ, OBE (/əˈmeɪtʃi/; born 26 November 1970) is an English psychologist, consultant and former professional basketball player. He played college basketball for the Vanderbilt Commodores and Penn State Nittany Lions, and professional basketball in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Amaechi also played in France, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Since retiring from basketball, Amaechi has worked as a psychologist and consultant, establishing his company Amaechi Performance Systems.
In February 2007, Amaechi became the first former NBA player to publicly come out as gay after doing so in his memoir Man in the Middle.
John has a new book coming out, namely It’s Not Magic: The Ordinary Skills of Exceptional Leaders. So what should I ask him?
The decline in reading for pleasure
We measure reading for pleasure and reading with children from 2003 to 2023, using a nationally representative sample from the American Time Use Survey (n = 236,270). We found marked declines in the proportion of individuals reading for pleasure daily in the US, with decreases of 3% per year (prevalence ratio = 0.97, 95% confidence interval = 0.97, 0.98, p < 0.001). There were disparities across population groups, with widening gaps for those of Black (vs. White) race, with lower education levels and less annual income.
That is from a new paper by Jessica K. Bone, Feifei Bu, Jill Sonke, and Daisy Fancourt. I have not seen any plausible debunkings of this paper or result (which I believe), but if I do I will pass them along. Note by the way that Denmark is abolishing the VAT on books, in an effort to boost reading. It was formerly twenty-five percent, the highest in the world.
Data on the effects of censorship in early modern England
We use a panel-data framework to study the effects of print censorship on early-modern England’s cultural production. Doing so requires distilling dispersed qualitative information into quantitative data. Integrating the historical record implicit in a large language model (LLM) with facts from secondary sources, we generate an annual index of print censorship. Applying a machine-learning (ML) algorithm to a major corpus, we construct document-level measures of the innovativeness (quality) and volume (quantity) of cultural production. We use pre-existing topic-model estimates to apportion each document among distinct cultural themes-three affected by censorship and five unaffected. We thereby assemble a yearly theme-level panel for 1525-1700. We use local projections to estimate censorship’s dynamic effects. Paradoxically, censorship raises the level of innovativeness in censorship-affected themes relative to non-affected themes. Censorship has a temporary chilling effect on the quantity of cultural production, with output recovering within a decade. Our findings are robust to the use of an instrumental-variable approach addressing the endogeneity of censorship. Our findings are unchanged when using three alternative LLMs to produce the censorship index. Using LLMs and ML to measure hard-to-quantify phenomena like censorship and cultural production, we provide new insights into the drivers of cultural evolution.
Here is the full paper by Peter Murrell and Peter Grajzl. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
*Capitalism: A Global History*, by Sven Beckert
This 1103 pp. book reflects a great deal of learning, and it is often interesting to read. It is well-written. So virtually everyone can absorb interesting things from it. In that sense I am happy to recommend it.
The book has two major problems however.
First, is “capitalism” the right way of centering a book topic across centuries and 1103 pages? What exactly ties all the different discussions together? And how many of them succeed in making original contributions to the areas they cover? There is a kind of “replacement level” left-wing series of cliches running throughout the narrative, but what else is unifying this story? I would rather read a book on any single one of the covered topics. And in too many cases the coverage seems only OK. For instance, the discussions of Pinochet’s Chile, and neoliberalism, in the book’s final chapter are not above the quality of basic media coverage, as you might find in the NYT.
Second, the author does not know what “capitalism” is. I am not going to insist on my pet definition, but consider a simple example.
Beckert (p.180) is keen to describe mid-17th century Barbados as capitalism, indeed as a kind of extreme or ideal capitalism. Well, in some regards. Yes there were markets. But King Charles I gave all the land to the Earl of Carlisle to distribute, and of course land was a centrally important asset back then. Might that be called…heaven forbid…statism? There was slavery too, at various stages of development, depending which years one is looking at. Is that really “an almost perfectly Smithian economy”? Smith hated slavery, and also considered it economically inefficient. The Navigation Act of 1651 limited trade with the Dutch, and could be considered a further deviation from Barbadian capitalism. The whole system was mercantilism built on land theft and slavery, and none of that is synonymous with capitalism. Nor are these distinctions clearly unpacked in the discussion.
Or look to the book’s epilogue. Cambodia is held up as the embodiment of current capitalism. Really? Not Poland or Ireland or Singapore? Or even the Dominican Republic? Better yet, how about multiple contrasting examples to conclude the book? Cambodia was ruled by vicious communists, suffered under a major murderous holocaust, still has an absolute dictator, ranks 98th in the Heritage index of economic freedom (“mostly unfree“), and lies in the thrall of Chinese domination, economic, political, and otherwise. I do understand there is now more FDI there, but this is hardly the proper representation of contemporary capitalism or its future, as the title of the final chapter seems to indicate.
The main problem is that the author has very little sense of what he does not understand. Above all else, it is an example of just how insular our institutions of elite higher education have become.
What should I ask David Commins?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. David recently published Saudi Arabia: A Modern History, a very good and useful book. He has numerous other books on Wahhabism, the history of the Gulf region, and also Syria. Currently he teaches at Dickinson College.
So what should I ask him?
*Saving Can-Do*
The author is Philip K. Howard and the subtitle is How to Revive the Spirit of America. The book is short, to the point, in the “abundance + state capacity” genre. Excerpt, noting I will not double indent:
“Three major changes are needed to restore the authority to achieve results: a new legal framework, a new institution that can inspire trust in ongoing decisions, and a special commission to design the details of these changes.
New legal framework defining official authority.
Here’s a sketch of what a new infrastructure decision-making framework might look like:
- Separate agencies should be designated as decision-makers for each category of infrastructure. The head of that agency should have authority to approve permits. For federal approvals, all decisions should be subject to White House oversight. For projects with national or reigonal significance, federal decisions should preempty state and local approvals.
- Fifty years of accumulated mandates from multiple agencies should be restated as public goals that can be balanced against other public goals….a recodification commission is needed to reframe thousands of pages of detailed regulatory prescriptions into codes that are goal-oriented and honor public tradeoffs. But unti this canhappen, Congress should authoritze the executive brranch to approve permits “notwithstanding provisions of law to the contrary” — provided the executive branch identifies the relevanto provisions and provides a short statement of why the approvals are in the public interest.
- Processes should be mainly tools for transparency and should be understood by courts as general principles reviewed for abuse of discretion, not as rules requiring strict compliance. NEPA has been effectively rewritten by judicial fitat, so it should be amended to return to its original goals — to provide enviromental transparency, public comment, and a political judgment.
- The jurisdiction of courts must be sharply limited. Lawsuits should be allowed foro approvals that transgress boundaries of executive responsbility, not inadequate review of process, unless these are so deficient as to be arbitrary.
Changing law is always politicall difficult, but the second challenge is perhaps even harder: creating new institutions that can inspire trust.”
TC again: All worth a ponder.
*One Life to Lead*, and Scheffler’s stance on time neutrality
The author is Samuel Scheffler, and the subtitle is The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment. He is one of America’s leading philosophers, and proves it once again here.
Much of this book is devoted to arguing against Derek Parfit’s view of “time neutrality,” namely that a pleasure or pain is not intrinsically more or less valuable because it arrives earlier or later in time. Scheffler has some compelling examples of intuitions that seem to violate Parfit’s time neutrality. Here are two:
a) If you will have written say 6 good books in your life, you might at a moment of time care how many of them lie in your past, and how many lie in your future.
b) If a loved one dies, you want to be grieving for some particular period of time, and for a period of time of a particular length. You also (probably) prefer that most of the grieving passes after some particular period of time.
Scheffler has other examples too, but those force you to consider what time neutrality really means.
One possible defense of time neutrality is to invoke a ceteris paribus clause, namely when comparing different time periods a time neutrality standard is allowed to hold certain things constant across the two periods. Scheffler should have done more to consider that option. That said, a sufficiently strict ceteris paribus clause obliterates the distinctions between past and future, and threatens to make time neutrality a tautology (i.e., of course you should be time neutral if the past and present differ in no distinguishable regards).
Another possible defense is to suggest that time neutrality does not necessarily apply to individual “personalist” decisions, but it should rule impersonal judgments of social welfare and assessments of “what is best.” That is the stance I take in my Stubborn Attachments.
A third defense, but only a partial one, is to suggest that virtually all individuals, at the margin, should be more time neutral than they are currently.
A further trick might be to ask how Scheffler finds some of the counterexamples to time neutrality compelling, but presumably not all possible counterexamples are compelling. He is weighing the costs and benefits, and other philosophical considerations, of having most of the books in your life ahead of you rather than behind you, to continue with one of his exmaples. And finding those two states of affairs are not equally valuable. What discount rate should he be using to assess which are the effective counterexamples? What if that discount rate were in essence zero? Time neutrality would have re-entered through the back door. You have to choose some discount rate to evaluate all of those counterexamples and their degree of compellingness, and if Scheffler thinks the right rate is, say, three percent, he ought to come out and say so. But I suspect the arguments for that position would look rather weak, weaker than the arguments for time neutrality at the very least. And so there is a silence where he needs to give some answer or another as to how exactly costs and benefits get weighted through time.
Ultimately I think of a multiplicity of not-fully commensurable perspectives on time neutrality are required to give a life meaning, and to make our attachments salient. And some of those perspectives ought to include time neutrality, and indeed will need to include time neutrality, most of all at the level of social choice. At some level or another, the time neutrality position will prove to be indispensable as part of the portfolio.
That is not where Scheffler ends up, but in any case I am happy to recommend this book strongly to anyone with an interest in serious philosophy.
Note that many other issues are considered in the work as well. He gives new arguments for “finding meaning in the whole,” yet without going overboard on dubious metaphysics. There is also an implied theory of obligation in his account, namely that you should act to help create more meaning and more attachment for others. His notion of “archived lives” is fascinating, but I fear it, and much of the associated discussion, gives one very neurologically specific understanding of memory too central a role in understanding human valuation and also human attachment.
It is all worth a ponder.
My entertaining Conversation with Annie Jacobsen
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Annie explore whether we should be more afraid of nuclear weapons or if fear itself raises the risks, who should advise presidents during the six-minute decision window, whether moving toward disarmament makes us safer or more vulnerable, what Thomas Schelling really meant about nuclear war and rational actors, the probability that America would retaliate after a nuclear attack, the chances of intercepting a single incoming ICBM, why missile defense systems can’t replicate Israel’s Iron Dome success, how Pakistan-India nuclear tensions could escalate, why she’s surprised domestic drone attacks haven’t happened yet, her reporting on JFK assassination mysteries and deathbed phone calls, her views on UFOs and the dark human experiments at Area 51, what motivates intelligence community operators, her encounters with Uri Geller and CIA psychic research, what she’s working on next, and more.
Excerpt:
JACOBSEN: I quote him in the notes of my book, and this is perhaps the only regret I have in the entire book, that I put this quote from Schelling in the notes rather than in the text. Maybe it’s more interesting for your listeners if we drill down on this than the big platitudes of, “Do more nuclear weapons make us more safe?” It goes like this. This was Schelling in an interview with WGBH Radio in 1986 in Boston.
He says, “The problem with applying game theory to nuclear war is that nuclear war, by its very nature, does not involve rational men. It can’t. What sane person would be willing to kill hundreds of millions of people, ruin the earth, and end modern civilization in order to make somebody called the enemy doesn’t win first?”
COWEN: But Schelling did favor nuclear weapons. That was his dark sense of humor, I would say.
JACOBSEN: You think what I just read was his sense of humor?
COWEN: Absolutely.
JACOBSEN: I believe it was a man in his elder years coming to the conclusion that nuclear war is insane, which is the fundamental premise that I make in the book.
COWEN: You can hold both views. It is insane, but it might be the better insanity of the ones available to us.
JACOBSEN: Yes. From my take, he, like so many others that I have interviewed, because, for some reason — call it fate and circumstance — I have spent my career interviewing men in their 80s and 90s, who are defense officials who spent their entire life making war or preventing war. I watch them share with me their reflections in that third act of their life, which are decidedly different — in their own words — than those that they would have made as a younger man.
I find that fascinating, and that’s my takeaway from the Schelling quote, that he came to terms with the fact that intellectualizing game theory — like von Neumann, who never got to his old age — is madness.
COWEN: Let’s say that Russia or China, by mistake, did a full-scale launch toward the United States, and they couldn’t call the things back, and we’re in that six-minute window, or whatever it would be with hypersonics. What do you think is the probability that we would do a full-scale launch back?
…COWEN: The word madness doesn’t have much force with me. My life is a lot of different kinds of madness. I’ve heard people say marriage is madness. A lot of social conventions seem to me to be madness.
The question is getting the least harmful form of madness out there. Then, I’m not convinced that those who wish to disarm have really made their case. Certainly, saying nuclear war is madness doesn’t persuade me. If anything, if enough people think it’s madness, we won’t get it, and it’s fine to have the nuclear weapons.
A different and quite stimulating episode.