Friday, September 24, 2021

Today’s musing minute: Dennis Prager on religion and freedom.

This is where Dennis Prager loses me.

I mean he has done such and amazing job in producing media pieces pushing back against the toxic conventional wisdom on identity politics, climate policy, and some other stuff - including a bit on deficit spending, taxation, the national debt and so on.
Though, I suppose, like a lot of the people that appear on his Prager U platform, he identifies as a "conservative" I see compatibility between his views and the core values of classical liberalism. [I really hate the label "conservative"].
But, when it comes to religion he (like Ben Shapiro) goes soft. He wants to tie secularization to the loss of individual freedom. [A subtext is the incoherent implication that it is 'good to believe, it is good to be religious, as if somehow people could compel themselves to have faith.] The proposition that secularization is tied to loss of freedom is patently absurd. He suggests that secularization is 'correlated' with loss of freedom - apparently meaning that it is causally connected. He must know that correlation does not imply causation.
But, apart from that, the claim is false, the opposite of the truth. In fact, it is the embrace of fundamental universal individual human rights (John Locke leading to the Enlightenment, as exemplified by the work of the Scottish philosophers, in particular David Hume and Adam Smith, who were clearly irreligious) - the embrace of individual liberty that led to the unprecedentedly free and prosperous societies of today's world.
It was, in fact, the loss of the power that organized religions had to compel behavior (and belief?) that heralded the era of freedom of religion (ancillary to the freedom of expression, conscience, etc.). It is in no way the loss of religious belief that is responsible for the backsliding against individual freedom that we see today in America and Europe. He has misdiagnosed the problem - unforgivably, because it suits his narrative.
The loss of freedom, the expansion of government power to impose regulations on individual behavior is always a result of the rise of other kinds of organized "religions" (belief systems with another name) that are antithetical to individual liberty, antithetical to the belief in the inviobility of individual rights (including property rights, and rights to free expression). Such belief systems include “nationalism”, “communism” and most recently, the current American form of “progressivism” all of which sanction and promote the blatant violation of individual rights in the name of the “greater good” as required in the belief system (to wit, DEI). These are in a very real sense just the latest forms of secular “religions”.
Prager would be on firmer ground if he suggested, along with David Hume and F. A. Hayek, that organized religion, can be, and has sometimes, not infrequently, been a force for good in society, in providing a structure of behavioral norms conducive to moral behavior. But, this has always been in circumstances where religious organizations have had to compete for adherents, circumstances in which religion is, in fact, a lifestyle choice – not systems of compulsory commands. Where religious organizations and belief systems have been compatible with individual choice they have frequently, though not by any means always, been conducive to, or at least not contrary to, the core tenets of classical liberalism. Where, by contrast, religions have been coupled with political power, have possessed to greater or lesser extent the power to compel (such as the power to ban the teaching of evolution, or, indeed, to compel its being taught), then religion and liberty are enemies.
Prager is a religious Jew, and this is particularly relevant in his case because early on, as a result of the dispersion of the Jewish people. Jewish religious authorities lost the power to compel individual behavior (by contrast for example, to Christianity and Islam, which, upon acquiring political power became formidable systems of oppression). It is, therefore, doubly ironic for him to misdiagnose the loss of individual freedom as somehow causally related to the “loss of religion”. I wish he would just drop this stupid line of argumentation.

Saturday, September 11, 2021

The power of foreign policy counterfactuals

 

Today’s musing minute: The power of foreign policy counterfactuals. 

Arguing about foreign policy consciously or unconsciously implies arguing about history, usually fairly recent history. And arguments about history imply some level of expertise and a great deal of familiarity with mountains of details, an understanding of local contexts, and a grasp of the inevitable complexity of the particular social situations. Which is why I feel exasperatingly lost in such discussions. 

Key to any argument about particular foreign policy actions or strategies, are the myriad of counterfactual assumptions one has to make to advance any claim. Thinking about the recent US departure from Afghanistan, I was struck by a particular example of this. 

Those of us who feel intuitively that foreign adventures in nation building are extremely ill-advised and immoral are often hard pressed in concrete situations to justify our position in cost-benefit terms. Consider Afghanistan. Yes, our occupation cost a bloody fortune. There was loss of life of American soldiers, inefficiency and corruption. But, for twenty years, the lives of ordinary Afghans were better than they would have been (note the italics) had the US not been there to protect the government that succeeded the deposed Taliban regime. And now, that we have left, though the future is uncertain, perhaps it was worth it. 

You see the problem? We don’t really know what would have happened (the counter factual) had we (the US) fulfilled the mission of routing Al Qaeda and found a way to withdraw, with dire warning about any further collaboration with that group, who knows how long the Taliban would have been able to hang onto power? Even now, while the picture is bleak and expectations are anxious, maintaining a stringent theocracy is a costly business and the costs mount up over time. Will Afghanistan go the way of Iran and Pakistan, or will it look more like North Vietnam. What would have been and what will be?  Choose your counterfactual and you can justify just about any policy scenario.

What that tells me is that, given the incentive and knowledge problems in any large foreign policy adventure, abstinence is the better part of valor.