Commentator
Repercussions of Green Energy, Woke controversies, the Security State, Gitmo
Good luck finding any real information online on the fall of Sri Lanka’s government - a major event affecting a nation of 22 million people.
I’ve never really understood why the western press has such perfect indifference to various parts of the world, Sri Lanka being one of them. The answer of course is that the audience can’t being themselves to care - but why this complete lack of interest by the public in actual dramatic, important events when every shard of maybe-news connected to Brittney Griner or the Depp/Heard trial or AOC is comprehensively devoured?
Anyway. The best analysis I’ve read so far - out of very slim pickings - is by Michael Shellenberger pinning the crisis on the radical environmentalists. Shellenberger’s argument is that Sri Lanka’s leaders “fell under the spell of Western green elites peddling organic agriculture.”
I don’t entirely trust Shellenberger. I’ve interviewed him before, am impressed with his knowledge of the energy sector and his pugnacity, but he is subject to the usual fate of mavericks - seeing everything through their particular lens and the wrongs that have been done to them. Shellenberger’s axe to grind is with a naive and politically irresponsible environmentalism, which is interested in gestures and green-washing and is absolutely incapable of making the tough political decisions that are necessary to actually address global warming.
In Shellenberger’s view, Sri Lanka is a clear political casualty of the naïveté of the environmentalists - which becomes a reprise of the failed development schemes that, out of similarly misplaced idealism, beset the Third World in the later part of the 20th century.
I don’t really know enough about Sri Lanka to deal with Shellenberger’s claims - and nobody in the media seems to know anything either. The coverage so far has been the sitcom-ready tale of the priest, the digital strategist, and the playwright who fomented an activist uprising against the government and somehow succeeded - and a mumble of policy-speak on what the underlying issues are. Shellenberger’s argument jibes with all the serious reporting I’ve read - The New York Times, for instance, ran a sobering piece at the end of last year about the devastating impacts of Sri Lanka’s ban on imported chemical fertilizers, which led, within a few months, to the nearly complete collapse of the agricultural sector, although, somehow, the organic farming debacle hasn’t made the cut in The Times’ recent recaps of the crisis.
A very clear case of the deleterious affects of naive environmentalism is Germany. Here, Shellenberger is a good guide as well, but other people - Lea Booth’s piece here and this long article in Der Spiegel - are making the same point. The culprit in Germany is the spectacularly misguided Energiewende - the Green Party’s concerted campaign to move Germany towards renewable energy. Unfortunately, they couldn’t make real inroads in fossil fuels, so they went after the target closer at hand - Germany’s nuclear reactors - managed to shutter those, notwithstanding their zero carbon emissions, and then when solar and wind failed to close the gap left by nuclear the response was to invest more heavily in fossil fuels from Russia. Economic decisions have political consequences, and Germany’s reliance on Russian gas accounts directly for Germany’s utterly anemic response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine - a few helmets, the promise of never-delivered supplies, and, now, an increasing lack of will to enforce the economic blockade against Russia.
The Green Party can’t entirely be blamed for Germany’s reliance on Russian gas - ordinary political corruption of the Gerard Schröder variety has a great deal to do with it as well - but it is important for the environmentally-minded to every once in a great while examine the political consequences of the drastic reforms that they endlessly and airily propose. At the time of the Energiewende I was working on an environmental series and we accepted, I must say, the claims of the Energiewende completely uncritically - and it seemed like an embarrassment to the U.S. that Germany was so far ahead. But this is the importance of dealing seriously with real-world politics. The closing of the nuclear plants as the capstone of the Energiewende had nothing do with carbon emission reductions or global warming and everything to do with environmental optics. At the same time their closure did nothing to reduce consumption - which led to years of dependence on Russian gas and now, in a belated bid for energy independence, a return to coal plants. Astonishingly - and Schellenberger is good at dissecting the lies that underpin this decision - Germany has decided to continue with the deactivation of its nuclear plants on schedule, no matter the the energy crisis that is ripping through its economy. It’s very difficult even to begin to justify this - the deactivation of nuclear means more Russian natural gas means more political conciliation with Putin. Everything here adds up to a really shameful moment in Germany’s history. That has many causes - as likely does the collapse of Sri Lanka’s government - but one of them, it’s more than fair to say, is the utter unworldliness of the environmental movement, the failure to understand that even well-intended actions have pernicious consequences.
The Wokes v. The Anti-Wokes v. The Mostly Anti-Woke But Also Somewhat Anti-Anti-Wokes
I’m starting to get drawn into these Substack spats between the wokes and the anti-wokes - and the questions of whether the anti-wokes occupy any sort of moral high ground over the wokes. Freddie deBoer points out that the anti-wokes are monetizing outrage in much the same way that the wokes have been - and the tightly drawn political battle lines create all the usual dynamics, bitter and profitable trench warfare for narrow slices of intellectual real estate, while real structural, societal issues go terminally unaddressed.
Fair enough. I’ve been starting to have a certain fatigue with articles about canceled professors and outrageously persnickety Human Resources departments. But the terms of the debate are real and they are profound - and woke v anti-woke v the moderately anti-woke who are critical of the more anti-woke isn’t all just internet bloviating.
For starters, wokeism makes plenty of good points and is a deep-seated structural critique of society-as-it-is. The premise is that we are collectively bound by a bad social contract. That contract came to be through the interplay of violence and pervasive inequality. It made certain kinds of sense in very different environments, in which survival was at a premium, wealth originated from the land, and protection rackets were to some extent needed to safeguard the sources of wealth. But the deficits and the obsolescence of that system are more than obvious - and, most egregiously, the various codifications of that system tended to occur before women or a range of ethnic groups were included in Western public discourse. The underlying argument of wokeism is to tear it up and start from scratch - in a society that has a degree of civility in social interactions, in which wealth is generated through a bewildering variety of super-structural instruments, and in which equality is held to be a central social tenet. There is a real idealism underlying wokeism and it has already had real achievements - rewriting the canon and opening up access to all kinds of voices that were marginalized in their own time; creating a more intense awareness of how social interactions are politically charged and how innocently-intended remarks or habitual behaviors may be loaded with structurally-encoded aggression and may cause deep pain; opening up social space for modes of interaction that are more nurturing and better attuned to trauma.
But. The notion of starting from scratch is fanciful. The Woke Revolution seems to be predicated on ignoring basic realities of human biology and history - gender dimorphism, the exigencies of the sex drive, the existence of the fight for resources, the existence of power structures, the propensity for violence, the mysteries of human psyche, the deep-seated need for sublimation. In other words, the entire delicate dance of human history leading to the present moment is discarded - disowned as patriarchy or dominance or, in the most extreme formulations, as white supremacy. And the mentalities proposed to accompany the woke revolution - stay in your lane, check your privilege, etc - are all recipes for docility and utterly unresponsive to the beauties and complexities of human nature.
So these debates are not trivial at all - not dismissed with Freddie deBoer’s plague-on-both-your-houses point that various champions of the debate stand to profit from it or with The New York Times’ occasional claim that cancel culture doesn’t really exist. The debate represents a fault line in how we deal with history and how we conceive of ourselves as individuals and as a collective. It’s striking how convulsive and pervasive these arguments have become in the last three or four years - utterly fracturing the technocratic liberal consensus that prevailed as recently as the early 2010s - and, on the whole, it may be a good thing: we are in a different technological reality from any society that has ever existed, we are all to some degree forced to be philosophers and to examine first principles. Some part of me is very excited by the whole breakdown of civic discourse - the sense that, for the first time in my life, there are actual philosophical stakes in public discourse, that ideas really actually matter.
However, the issue at the moment for the anti-wokes isn’t even the philosophy of wokeism. From the anti-woke perspective, wokeism has its colossal flaws and represents a philosophical dead end, a flattening of the human spirit. But that’s not to say that there aren’t ideas in it that are worth engaging with - that the wokes aren’t right in many of their critiques of Western civilization. The issue is ‘capture’, the ways that the institutions have caved before woke dogmas and given up, with no fight whatsoever, on core principles with their own mission. The blue-chip universities and newspapers have been the most dramatic casualties of institutional capture, but similar phenomena appear to have occurred throughout the old liberal order, in medicine and public health, in tech, in the expansion of Human Resources and of a business culture focused on virtue-signaling and ideological compliance.
Bari Weiss, who’s become the majordomo of the anti-wokes, is particularly good both at chronicling the daily outrages of ‘capture’ and of pinpointing the underlying issue which is cowardice - a complete inability of the liberal institutions to stand up for what they’re meant to believe in, meritocracy, intellectual independence, the spirit of critical inquiry, etc. The more exculpatory way to put it is that the liberal institutions were simply unprepared for what was coming. They were so sure of their moral superiority, so focused on their ancient enemy, the right-wing, that they were completely oblivious to the challenge coming from their own ranks and which swept away their values with the alacrity of a cultural coup. It was very easy for the administrators of the blue-chip institutions to believe - actually, I think many still do believe - that the woke reforms, greater inclusivity and diversity, reexamination of the canon, focus on safe spaces, querying of historical roots, were essentially anodyne and were part of an ongoing project of amelioration, the liberal order become even grander and more benevolent, and they failed to notice, or found it easier not to notice, that they were rewriting their own charters, dedicating themselves to ideals of social justice as opposed to ideals based around merit - and, in so doing, lost track of some basic realities of how-the-world-works. These changes in mission and tenor of the liberal institutions happened so fast that there was no room for any real public debate over them - and at the time they occurred the anti-wokes didn’t really exist, they were professors, editors, administrators trying to hold onto their jobs, as opposed to footloose freelance intellectuals. I can understand deBoer’s point that they getting a bit tiresome, predictable, shrill, but, look, ultimately this is what public discourse is for - debate on complicated, difficult topics within which there are profound points of disagreement. And if that can get wearying, well, much less so than the drumbeat of the army of the righteous.
There are a handful of articles this week dealing with the development of the American security state - identifying the point of origin as 1941 rather than 1776, as Andrew Bacevich succinctly puts it.
And there’s a certain intellectual satisfaction in having the terms of debate put so starkly and then having various thinkers fall on opposite sides of it. Harper’s intones that ‘The American Century’ is over - like a master of ceremonies closing up the era of history that was announced by Henry Luce in Life Magazine in 1941. Robert Kagan, of the neoconservative Kagan clan, declares himself firmly recommitted to a re-up on the original Luce vision - making the point that interventionism was a hard position to take in 1941, harder than people remember, and is just as difficult and as necessary now. Andrew Bacevich, army colonel manqué and terror of the U.S. military establishment, argues that interventionism - and the imperial project - was ill-conceived from the very beginning, maybe, maybe, justifiable in the unique circumstances of Hitler and Tojo but that otherwise the isolationists were right in their geopolitical perspective and it’s well past time to bring the curtain down on the U.S. security state.
My own feelings on this are so tangled that’s is difficult to come up with any real conclusion. I’ve spent the last week around a lot of broken military veterans. The sense there is that nothing about the military system as it is that works - the military is basically America’s social services and it comes at the expense of everything else in the society. On the other hand - and this is really important - the rest of the developed world has more or less foregone its own defensive structure, turning its protection over to America. Call quits to the ‘American Century’ and see how that news is received in Seoul, Taipei, Warsaw, Kyiv. The unraveling of the American security state is not really something that will occur through magazine articles or that can happen tomorrow. There’s a very tricky dance here of the U.S.’ allies being willing to invest in their own defense forces - and the U.S. being willing to let them do it - and for that sort of handover to occur suddenly could mean a whole collapse of interests, as happened dramatically in Afghanistan.
But there is something useful in at least framing the debate. And the point - which both Kagan and Bacevich share - is that American imperialism, the security state, the logic of interventionism all have absolutely nothing to do with the Constitution or with American democracy as we generally think of it. This state-within-the-state emerged within a fairly short period of time and the really decisive act here was Franklin Roosevelt’s courting of war in the late 1930s and early 1940s. And, as both Bacevich and Kagan agree, the America Firsters - the ‘realist’ school of that time - had a perfectly valid geopolitical argument against intervention. Their point was that America had very little to be afraid of - the two oceans provided sufficient protection - and, from the vantage-point of national security, Roosevelt’s policy was nothing but reckless. As Herbert Hoover put it in a letter just after Pearl Harbor, congratulating himself for seeing where Roosevelt’s foreign policy would lead, “This continuous putting of pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bitten.”
What Kagan is saying is that, from the strict logic of selfishness, the America Firsters had a point in 1941, just as the growing coalition of critics of the U.S.’ Ukraine policy have a point now - and their logical-enough points are almost completely irrelevant to the situation at hand. “The anti-interventionists’ arguments were not as weak as they are often portrayed,” he writes. In the case of 1941, the grounds for Roosevelt’s intervention had very little to do with geopolitical nuts-and-bolts. It was based on a certain Manichean vision that there was a ‘philosophy of force’ out in the world i.e. Fascism which demanded a counteracting weight. But, at the same time, the ability to serve effectively as that counteracting weight required an expansion of an imperial vision, America becoming a global power operating on the model of a self-sustaining security state and with very little input from Congress or any representative body whatsoever.
I don’t think I will ever be convinced, no matter how cynical I get, that the U.S.’ provocations from 1937 onwards, the U.S.’ evident desire to enter into war with Germany and Japan were not justified by the enormity of the Axis’ atrocities and military aggression. But it is absolutely true that a foreign policy like Roosevelt’s directly contradicts foundational American principles - George Washington’s admonition to avoid ‘foreign entanglements,’ Jefferson’s Republican virtues, etc - and that there is a direct line from Roosevelt’s aggression to Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and however many other dirty wars.
Bacevich, looking at that legacy, would very much like to throw in the towel and return to Jeffersonian principles. “Better in my estimation to give up entirely the pretensions Henry Luce articulated back in 1941,” he writes. “Rather than attempting to resurrect the American Century, perhaps it’s time to focus on the more modest goal of salvaging a unified American republic.” I understand and respect that reasoning, but, for me, isolationism is a very dirty word, the Ukrainian cause is just and hinges on ongoing U.S. support, and it’s very difficult to accept that there isn’t some principle embedded within FDR’s 1937-1941 foreign policy that can’t be salvaged and applied to the world now. That principle could be articulated more or less in Luce’s terms - as a righteous opposition to the ‘philosophy of force,’ of which Putin is very clearly an avid practitioner, or in some now very passé vision of the U.S. as the ‘world’s policeman,’ ‘leader of the free world,’ etc. The phrasation isn’t so important. What is clear, though, is that nothing in the 1776 conception prepares the United States for a righteous war in Ukraine. To justify that requires a real cognitive leap, but the leap isn’t exactly unprecedented. That was the leap Roosevelt took and it was - I will always believe - justified within the context of that time. For the United States to participate in Ukraine’s fight - and to maintain the will for it over an extended period of time - requires a certain cognitive tying-in to the logic of 1941 as opposed to 1776, an acceptance of empire, of overseas entanglements, of a somewhat Manichean view of the world as opposed to one based strictly on the ‘realist’ logic of nation-states. It’s not the most attractive national self-conception, and it has nothing to do with American ‘founding values,’ but, as far as I can see, there isn’t a morally-viable alternative. Putin has given the U.S. no choice.
I don’t really understand what’s happened with Guantánamo Bay - why it’s been so impossible to close. I’m mentioning it here - and linking to a New Republic article on the topic - because it’s one of these issues that really should never go away, that needs to keep getting raised.
The New Republic article is written in the same spirit - all about the widespread indifference to Gitmo, the lonely civil rights lawyers who are continuing the struggle.
The narrative here is that Guantánamo Bay operated under completely false pretenses - the notion that it housed the most dangerous of the terrorists was always nonsense and in fact the bulk of its prisoners were just low-level combatants usually caught fleeing the battlefield in Afghanistan. A declassified memo of Rumsfeld’s reported that Gitmo had come to serve basically as a “prison for Afghanistan.” In this version there was no real reason why Obama couldn’t have closed Guantánamo Bay as per his campaign promise. He simply delayed it and then felt that he had lost the political capacity to do so. I was really startled by this at the time - that Obama could have blundered so badly by saying that he would close Gitmo as an opening act of his presidency and then over eight years just never got around to it. I think I assumed that Obama had his reasons - that there really were super-terrorists in Gitmo and nowhere else to house them - but apparently not.
Something like this speaks to the incredible strength of the American security state, the inability for a relatively popular two-term president to get anything done.
At another level what this speaks to is just the deep and utter pointlessness of America’s War on Terror, the stain on the national record that will never be erased. There was a profoundly unsatisfying article and documentary that appeared recently, a Guantánamo Bay torturer zooming with a torturee. He couldn’t do it, after a great deal of build-up the conversation tapered off - “the conversation lasts 18 minutes and 46 seconds and ends in frustration for both sides,” comments the article’s author, “when the video connections ends the two are left unreconciled.”
The torturer flounders around saying things like “It is important for me to get it straight that I did not ask for your forgiveness” and “I am not convinced of your innocence, I still believe you are an enemy of the United States” while at the same time admitting that what he did was “wrong” and “one hundred percent torture” and “should never have been done” - a whole string of logical contradictions which clearly are unresolved in his own mind regardless of how much time he has had to reflect on what happened. The point, I guess, is that there just had been no national reckoning with Iraq and Afghanistan in the way there was with Vietnam and we even lack the language really to do it. Guantánamo is a reasonable place to start - the ‘anti-Statue of Liberty,’ as Thomas Friedman nicely phrased it - but not so. There is still almost no ability to grapple with Gitmo, to understand why it happened and why it couldn’t be undone.
Never thought about organic farming this way before
So cool! Thank you for doing this. A whole way of talking/wrting that's missing from so much of what I read. By the way, is there a way to break this up into separate articles? It's kind of bulky in the format it's in.