Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the current ‘Commentator’ post. These are riffs on the news. The point is to identify the best, most interesting, and/or most provocative articles of the week and, in a subjective way, to explore their broader implications.
Best,
Sam
A TRUCE ON SPEECH
I got very annoyed a couple months ago with a piece by Atlantic writer Emily Oster calling for a ‘pandemic amnesty.’ Her laudable intention was that everybody had made mistakes during the pandemic and we should take a moment to forgive each other and to forget. Unfortunately, her proposed peace terms basically were that the vaccine skeptical should recant for being vaccine skeptical - while everybody else should concede that, like, outdoor transmission wasn’t really a problem.
So, peace terms are tricky, but in the spirit of the new year, here’s one. That we recognize a great deal of our collective angst over the last five or six years as confusion over the domains of acceptable speech and, as a society, attempt to revert to a single framework on regulating speech - which would, at a suggestion, be the First Amendment and the body of jurisprudence out around it.
There’s an eye-catching New York Times piece out that showcases just how mad our civic discourse has become on issues of speech. An adjunct professor at Hamline University, in St. Paul, shows an image of the Prophet Mohammed as part of an art history class. The image was from a 13th century Islamic history of the world by Rashid-al-Din. The professor showed it with all appropriate trigger warnings. Afterwards - very much as the professor had feared - a student complained to the administration. The administration rescinded its offer to the professor, Erika López Prater, to teach the next semester; and then the college’s vice president for inclusive excellence sent an e-mail to all university employees describing López Prater’s action as “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”
The story really perfectly encapsulates the controversies over freedom of speech in the woke era - the upshot of it being that Hamline, a liberal arts college, takes administrative action to enforce a strict interpretation of sharia law, and at the expense of iconographic traditions within Islam that very much do depict the Prophet.
The student who complained, Aram Wedatalla, said in an interview with the school newspaper, “I’m like, ‘This can’t be real.’ As a Muslim and a Black person, I don’t feel like I belong, and I don’t think I’ll ever belong in a community where they don’t value me as a member, and they don’t show the same respect that I show them.”
Which is a completely valid perspective, well expressed. But the response, really, is: tough luck. The law of the land is the Constitution with its broad acceptance of free speech - and the academic tradition of a school like Hamline is in line with the First Amendment. This has of course been a sore subject from the very beginning - since, in a largely Christian country, the protections on free speech extend to condoning blasphemy - and has been a source of tremendous bitterness for believers of all faiths who have had to accept a secular public life. The tension between the domains of belief and of secular jurisprudence has been responsible for many of the more piquant controversies in American history - it’s in the Antinomian Controversy in Massachusetts Bay, within years of the colony’s founding; it’s in Joseph Smith’s attempt to establish a Mormon theocratic state at Nauvoo; it’s in the standoff with the Branch Davidians at Waco - and the answer is always the same. The secular tradition has no intrinsic claim to rightness - in its way, it’s its own religion - but it simply is. It’s the foundational law of the land and can only be modified internally, through a legislative and judicial process dictated by the secular law itself. (To put this in more theoretical terms, a ‘closed’ system like a revealed religion always presents an insoluble paradox for an ‘open’ society, and the way to address that is for the ‘open’ society to adopt a somewhat arbitrary ‘closed’ domain like a Constitution as a civic tool.)
That set of principles has been fairly clear in public spaces. Where it gets muddy is, of course, within private institutions. At virtually every moment of their lives, an American is holding two passports - one of the public state; and the other of the ‘policy’ of whatever private institution they happen to find themselves in at any given moment in time. As a constitutional fissure, this has - if anything - been ever more deep-seated than the question of religion; and the Constitution is much less clear-cut on the boundaries between the rights of private citizens and the rights of private institutions. (In theoretical terms, it’s possible to think about this as the framers getting tragically caught between a patrician, Lockean conception of the ‘rights’ of property and a more revolutionary sense of ‘universal’ rights.)
In this muddy terrain, there have been temptations, all across the political spectrum, to set rules for private institutions that far more narrowly constrain free speech than the Constitution does. When I was growing up, this seemed to be primarily a right-wing game - ‘family values’ entailed ‘parental controls,’ ratings for the motion picture industry, a strict code of conduct for network television. I remember, in my days as a school bus lawyer, being particularly incensed about the MPAA ratings - and, even if none of the other sixth graders seemed to be especially bothered by it, I still think I was right. Even something as apparently anodyne as the limits on cursing on network television basically ruined network television - in a society where everybody cursed, network shows lost their ability to accurately mirror the underlying society. I wasn’t as aware of it at the time, but liberal curbs on ‘hate speech,’ the adoption of ‘speech codes’ at various liberal arts colleges, were, similarly, an attempt to apply tighter restriction on speech within private institutions. That tendency has metastasized - it underlies everything that’s emerging out of the #Twitter Files, with Twitter seeing itself as a conscientious citizen enforcing moderation standards (and not quite noticing or caring that the moderation standards tended to be narrowly partisan), and it is at the heart of the ‘safe spaces’ movement that has created stringent speech codes on college campuses.
Anytime there is a flood of stories like Hamline, like the academic controversies that have been roiling the country for the last half-decade, that usually means that it’s time for courts to rule. My personal hope would be that the courts tend to strike down private codes of conduct that are inimical to the spirit of the Constitution. The move this week of the Federal Trade Commission to ban non-compete clauses is very good news on this front - the state rightly intervening to protect the rights of individuals from the private institutions that employ them. The vast universe of coercive private policies - sweeping non-disclosure agreements, speech codes, DEI rules - would be similarly open to governmental intercession. But, unfortunately, courts are slow and equivocal; the division between public and private space really is a murky Constitutional area; and the latest significant Constitutional ruling on free speech, Citizens United, only muddied matters further.
In a recent piece for Persuasion, the attorney and columnist David French argues that, even when the judiciary is slow to act, we can still think like judges. “Back in my legal days I led legal times that followed a few simple rules,” French writes. “First, public institutions must comply with the first amendment and they should be sued if they don’t. Second, private institutions have the freedom to craft their own rules, but if they promise free speech they should deliver and there is no better model for delivering free speech than the first amendment.”
That sounds very reasonable to me. Of course, a statement like “there is no better model for delivering free speech than the first amendment” is just a matter of opinion, but it is an opinion that has the backing of American jurisprudence and presents a way out of our current free speech morass. Instead of trying to settle all the thorny questions of academic freedom in the comments section of The New York Times or by endless contentious debate, as we are doing now, just admit that the era of content moderation - both in its ‘family values’ iteration and in its ‘safe spaces’ iteration - hasn’t worked and fall back on the wisdom of the First Amendment. Which means that - like in any good compromise - nobody gets everything they want. No paradise of ‘family values,’ no paradise of all-inclusive ‘safe spaces’ - but a broad acceptance of free speech with rare and signposted exceptions like Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “clear and present danger.”
Again, just referencing the First Amendment doesn’t solve everything. It’s possible for private institutions to essentially opt out of the First Amendment on a limited basis - religious schools and institutions have been doing this for a long time and there’s a strong body of jurisprudence behind it - but there is always the understanding that, when push comes to shove, the constitutional mandates prevail. As French notes, schools and companies that explicitly set themselves up to protect First Amendment values could save themselves a lot of grief by refraining from the temptation to establish their own body of legislation. The recent drops of the #Twitter Files neatly document the ways in which a corporation that is ostensibly all about free speech, like Twitter, can manipulate itself into a stringent censorship regime. Conversations from 2017 reveal that Twitter - correctly - wasn’t particularly worried about a Russian troll attack; and that outside criticism convinced Twitter to override its own internal review and decide that the system had been compromised. By the time of the Covid outbreak, Twitter had established a truly post-modern system of content moderation - first having its bots take a crack at ‘problematic’ content via a keyword search and then referring questionable cases to offshore cube forms. With the result that accounts found themselves frozen for, in some cases, just citing peer-reviewed literature - or even the CDC’s own data. Meanwhile, colleges have had a somewhat laudable desire to create safe spaces for students, but, in the end (as we’re learning the hard way) it’s impossible to serve two masters. The colleges have to make up their mind about whether they believe in academic freedom or in DEI. They can’t prioritize both.
TOWARDS A TRUCE IN UKRAINE?
Luke Mogelson has a really commendable piece in The New Yorker describing his visit to the front lines in Donetsk with a reconnaissance unit, comprised largely of foreign volunteers.
The piece gives the flavor of the fighting in Ukraine better than anything else I’ve read. It’s what you’d expect - grim trench warfare, featuring artillery bombardments and sneak attacks on trenches, and with abandoned houses and treelines as, often, the only source of cover.
What’s most resonant is the mentality of the soldiers on the frontline. The International Legionnaires who have stayed are the professionals, the ones with an addiction to combat. “It was just an excuse to be in this environment again,” a New Zealand Army veteran called Turtle tells Mogelson of his decision to be there. “In the end, it’s just that I love this shit. And maybe I can’t escape that—maybe that’s the way it’s always gonna be.”
That’s a bit different from the Ukrainians Mogelson encounters who tend to be more just regular people - an historian specializing in Ancient Greece; a folk dancer - and carry themselves very differently (and have a different appetite for risk) from the Legionnaires.
Mogelson had been in Donetsk in late October. His experience of the front line is very similar as described by Andrew Kramer in Bakhmut this week. The tactics emphasize aerial observation by drone - often just simple commercial drone. And the experience of the war is of brute force. “It’s a grim stalemate that has taken on the rhythms of a heavyweight title bout, with each side going toe to toe in one of the longest-running battles of the war,” writes Kramer. That’s the artillery bombardments that are compared, always, to Verdun - and the appearance of Wagner Group convict soldiers that are used, Kramer reports, predominantly as human wave cannon fodder. He quoted a Pentagon official as saying, “Essentially they take the brunt of whatever Ukrainian response there is. Then you have better trained forces that move behind them to claim the ground that these individuals have walked over.”
What’s clear from writing on the ground is that both sides are acting as if they expect a long drawn-out fight with fresh offensives in the spring. Some slender hopes this winter of peace talks have so far, apparently, led to nothing. Le Monde Diplo reports back-channel communication between the U.S. and Russia and with, surprisingly, the Pentagon rather than the White House pushing diplomacy. And Henry Kissinger has a December op-ed that’s a useful glimpse of how the Beltway may be envisioning a settlement. Territorial lines would be redrawn to where they were before February 24th - Russia keeping Crimea and its 2014 gains and leaving everything else; and Ukraine’s involvement in a NATO bloc considered a fait accompli.
Kissinger’s proposal is meant to counteract the Western hardliners who are hoping for the collapse of Putin’s Russia, but the real question of course is whether a settlement along those lines would be acceptable to either of the combatants. A peace process that would “link Ukraine to NATO, however expressed” sounds like anathema to Putin. And it would be very hard to convince Ukrainians, after all their sacrifices and successes, that they should accept referendums in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Kissinger isn’t wrong. In broad outlines that does sound like what has to happen. I could imagine Ukraine accepting those terms - NATO protection being the critical piece of it. Putin is a different matter and, at the end of the day, this is still his war. My sense is that he’s a bit like ‘Turtle,’ the New Zealand Legionnaire, and would prefer war to peace - barring outright victory, probably a long, simmering war like the Donbas War was for eight years, which helps to keep the propaganda coordinated and internal dissent stifled. So if there is a window to a ceasefire this winter, it seems to be very narrow - and more likely that both sides would slug it out for another year and see where that gets them.
I was very struck by a section in Kissinger’s op-ed. He writes:
As the world’s leaders strive to end the war in which two nuclear powers contest a conventionally armed country, they should also reflect on the impact on this conflict and on long-term strategy of incipient high–technology and artificial intelligence. Autonomous weapons already exist, capable of defining, assessing and targeting their own perceived threats and thus in a position to start their own war. Once the line into this realm is crossed and hi-tech becomes standard weaponry – and computers become the principal executors of strategy – the world will find itself in a condition for which as yet it has no established concept.
This is truly realpolitik talk. His point is that nuclear weapons aren’t such a dire threat at the moment - Putin appears to be abiding by established international norms - but that AI weaponry is something different and is so potentially destabilizing that the major powers, the U.S. and Russia, should rush to some sort of agreement almost regardless of conditions on the ground. And if Kissinger’s World War I analogy to open his article is a bit annoying - the ’sleepwalkers’ comparison isn’t exactly apt in a situation in which Russia unilaterally attacked Ukraine - he may be right that we are on the cusp of a new kind of warfare that we do not understand and cannot control; and the longer the proxy war continues the greater the likelihood that we cross over into AI weaponry.
One more small point on Ukraine. An article in The New Statesman makes the annoying point that Ukraine really has to come to grips with its veneration of Bandera and the OUN heroes. “By insisting on the glorification of historical figures many allies find offensive, Kyiv is not only alienating its friends and providing fuel for Russian propaganda to falsely suggest that Ukraine is a fascist state, but actively obscuring the reality of its successful cosmopolitan society,” writes Ido Vock. This chiding of Ukraine really misses something essential about the region’s history - that Ukraine never had the opportunity to be independent; that it has slim pickings for national heroes given a centuries-long history of brutal oppression. It is difficult to be caught between a rock and a hard place more than Ukraine was during World War II - in the killing zone between Stalin and Hitler. It really shouldn’t be surprising that the Ukrainian partisans of that era have - as Vock writes - “chequered records.” From the perspective of the Ukrainians, this war is all about a self-determination that they have had for only fleeting moments in their history. Forget about Bandera and the OUN. If the Ukrainians continue to survive Russia’s attack, they’ll have a whole pantheon of new heroes.
NEW FRONT IN THE NEW COLD WAR
In a surprisingly in-depth article, Roger Cohen visits the “most forgotten of forgotten crises” - Central African Republic - and paints a compelling picture of, essentially, a new front in the new Cold War.
The article feels a little dated. We’re already in a different reality in which Russia’s military limitations have become obvious, but in Cohen’s trip to the C.A.R. it feels very much as if Russia is the empire on the move and adept at catching the Western order exactly where it’s most flat-footed.
The issue for the West is that its interventions tend to be slow and toothless. Cohen asks Flora Assangou, a woman in Bria, about the U.N. peacekeepers in the region and is told that they just do patrols. “Do the patrols help?” Cohen asks - to which Assangou just laughs.
That’s very much in contrast to the Wagner Group Russians who are perceived, in interview after interview, to have dispersed rebel groups and brought some degree of stability to the region. “We have calm thanks to the Russians. They are violent and they are efficient,” an official in Bria tells Cohen. “Russia came with answers to an urgent problem,” the C.A.R.’s former interior minister says. “The Russians kill. That brought us some peace,” Assangou says.
I remember, when I was in my early 20s, doing an interview with some veteran political scientist type, and being told at the end, sighingly, “The thing about soft power is that it’s expensive.” That’s the vulnerability that Russia, via Wagner, seems to be exposing. And whatever the interventions of the West - and of the really substantial U.N. peacekeeping force in the Central African Republic - it doesn’t compete with the effective administration of brute force in a war zone. “As elsewhere in the developing world, the West has seemingly lost hearts and minds here,” writes Cohen.
So, what to do? Well, first of all, be aware that the old Cold War dynamics in the developing world haven’t gone away. China has its influence all over Africa; I’m a little startled to realize how embedded Russia is as well. And, from the perspective of developing countries, the interventions of the imperial powers are understood as competing exports. China pours in money, Russia quick-fix mercenaries, and the West - whatever the West does. It’s worth understanding that, whether we like it or not, we really have transitioned into a multi-polar world of great power politics. In that framework, the kinds of bureaucratese solutions by somebody like the U.N. are no longer just harmlessly inefficient; they erode trust in the entire liberal order.
SCIENCE STALLED
In the Free Press, Joanne Silberner has a good primer on what’s gone wrong in the search for an Alzheimer’s cure - which can stand in as a microcosm for what’s gone wrong in science in general.
In the 1980s, Alzheimer’s research appeared to have a major breakthrough - the discovery that dense plaques observed in the brains of Alzheimers’ patients were composed of beta-amyloid proteins. That would seem to be the path to a cure - developing a drug that cleared the plaques. Except that, unfortunately, around 20 drugs developed along that model failed to have any benefit - culminating in what Silberner describes as the “scandal” of Aduhelm (recently excoriated in a congressional inquiry) and the bad joke of lecanemab, touted as a “foundational gamechanger” by the industry despite doing nothing more than slowing deterioration by four-tenths of a percentage point in clinical trials.
The issue with the beta-amyloid hypothesis is that it plays so perfectly into Big Pharma’s view of the world that it becomes irresistible to the industry. There’s a problem - amyloid clumps - and then there’s a solution (a drug) that clears the clumps. And each new drug has some infinitesimal measurable benefit and everybody gets paid - lecanemab, with its four tenths of a percentage point in slowing deterioration, is expected to reach $9 billion in sales. And, meanwhile, no other hypotheses are tested and no real progress is made on Alzheimer’s treatment. As Rachael Neve, one of the early discoverers of the amyloid clumps and later an apostate from that hypothesis, wrote, “The amyloid hypothesis is one of the most tragic stories in modern biomedical research. The field of Alzhiemer’s disease research has effectively been at a standstill because of that…..It was dispiriting to see beautiful papers that proposed alternatives to the amyloid hypothesis relegated to second and third echelon journals again and again.”
What the Alzheimer’s ‘tragedy’ reveals is the limits of peer review and of consensus-driven science. The ‘groupthink’ that goes into the amyloid hypothesis - the word ‘cabal’ also gets tossed around - results in a self-perpetuating feedback loop, where that four-tenths of a percentage point can straightfacedly be called “robust” or “pretty impressive,” while conceding that “it didn’t stop the disease or make anybody better, not that it was supposed to.” And, although Silberner doesn’t mention it, the amyloid hypothesis has been marred by a major fraud - the recent discovery that a crucial amyloid-hypothesis paper (which went on to be cited in 2,300 additional publications) featured flagrantly doctored images.
The scandals in Alzheimer’s research speak to a broader and quieter problem - that, as a recent Nature paper reports, science simply isn’t turning up very much that’s new (“and no one knows why”). Nature phrases it as a distinction between ‘disruptive’ (i.e. paradigm-altering science) and ‘incremental,’ (i.e. paradigm-improving science) and reports that “the average CD index [measuring ‘disruptiveness’] declined by more than 90% between 1945 and 2010 for research manuscripts and by more than 78% from 1980 to 2010 for patents.”
There are a couple of different ways to interpret this. One - which I’m kind of inclined to - is that science has largely already happened. There simply is a limit to what can be discovered through the scientific method, and even though there are more scientists than ever working and, as Nature notes, “the number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades,” there just is less for them to find. But the more pedestrian hypothesis, which the Nature authors seem to subscribe to, is that scientific values have shifted. There is less interest in revolutionary breakthroughs and more in enhancement. As Nature’s Max Kozlov writes, “The authors analyzed the most common verbs used in manuscripts and found that whereas research in the 1950s was more likely to use words evoking creation or discovery such as ‘produce’ or ‘determine’, that done in the 2010s was more likely to refer to incremental progress, using terms such as ‘improve’ or ‘enhance.’”
Predictably enough, the debate within Nature comes to be about whether ‘disruptive’ breakthroughs are even to the good. John Walsh, of Georgia Institute of Technology, is quoted as saying, “In a world where we’re concerned with the validity of findings, it might be a good thing to have more replication and reproduction.” But, for me, the point is a bit different - that science isn’t exactly progressing, more spinning its wheels. For the most part, that’s probably harmless and has the benefit of keeping a lot of people employed, but there are real harms to groupthink - as the case of the amyloid hypothesis and the missing Alzheimer’s cure amply demonstrates.
The story of the professor is really crazy. If an ideology is completely beyond criticism, humour, or even coexisting with people who don't follow it, then there's something really fundamentally wrong with it. Completely agree with you on "tough luck". Wild stuff.