Foreign Policy Reality

Ever since Vietnam, Democrats have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into standing up for US interests in the world.  In their heart of hearts they really believe the neo-Marxist, anti-colonialist, rich-get-richer while the poor get poorer view of the world.



There is of course a vein of truth in the anti-colonialist world view.  The west, armed with its science, its politics, and its religion, has swept all before it during the last 500 years.  You either signed up or you got buried.  The problem for non-western societies was ably summed up by a Chinese Christain in David Aikman's book Jesus in Beijing. Let's look at his words in full.

One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact the pre-eminence of the West all over the world... We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubt about this.

Let us look at Barack Obama's "reset" foreign policy and Cairo speech and "apology tour" in the light of this testament.  Because right now the Christian western idea is facing a challenge from Muslims in the Middle East.



It misses the point to talk about Muslim terrorists as crazy "extremists."  The Islamists understand, and rightly, that they are facing a do-or-die moment.  Either they push back against the power of western Christian capitalist democracy or they will be swallowed up into the western orbit.  This has happened time and time again over the last 500 years.  Some countries, like India, have pushed back and made a practical accommodation with the western way.  Some countries, like Russia and China, have gone through hell.  Many nations have been obliterated: think native Americans.



Some nations have made a heroic stand against the west: Plains Indians and their Ghost Shirt movement, the Chinese and their Boxer Rebellion.  And of course there is the course of the Indian national movement that began with the Great Rebellion of 1857 and ended with independence 90 years later.



Sometimes the barbarians at the edge of empire swarm into the empire and take it over.  That happened in Europe during the first millennium with the Sack of Rome and with the Mongol invasions of the 13th century.  China has repeatedly been invaded from the north.



But willy-nilly, the job of a US president is to push back against threats to US power and the Pax Americana.  President Obama pretends that he has done that: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.  Unfortunately the Benghazi killings remind us that Al Qaeda is definitely alive.  What is needed is not just stunts like the bin Laden operation and the drone operations but a cultural offensive, to show and to prove, in bin Laden's apt catchphrase, that the US is the strong horse and Islam is the weak horse.



Terrorism is, of course, an admission of weakness; it is military and cultural force hiding in the weeds and jumping out occasionally to create a spectacular diversion.  But it needs to be opposed calmly and firmly.



Meanwhile, the Muslim exodus from the Middle East to western Europe and to the US is going to transform Islam, just as the industrial age has transformed the native peoples of Europe and the US.  Anyone can explode bombs, but governments and businesses are driven by the need to perform, and the ability to deliver for their subject peoples.



When I voted for President Obama in 2008 it was primarily to force the Democratic establishment to face the reality of the post 9/11 world.  The result has been most satisfactory.  The illusions of the liberal faithful have been well and truly demolished, as Guantanamo lives and Bush's Patriot Act continues.  And Obama's foreign policy has been utter confusion as its anti-colonialist dream hits realpolitik reality.



It's up to Mitt Romney tonight to signal a return to reality, and begin the long, slow repair to the US strategic stance in the world.

Why We Need Intuitions AND Concepts

OK, says Kant in the first Critique.  You could say that appearances that we get from our senses chunked together with intuitions are all there is.  Just as Hume suggests with his "associationism."  That's the point of his setup before the Transcendental Deduction:

Appearances might very well be so constituted that the understanding should not find them to be in accordance with the conditions of its unity.  And everything might lie in such confusion that, e.g., in the succession of appearances nothing would offer itself that would furnish a rule of synthesis and thus answer to the concept of cause and effect, so that this concept therefore would be entirely empty, nugatory, and without significance.  Appearances would nonetheless offer objects to our intuition, for intuition by no means requires the functions of thinking. (B123/A90)

Sorry to punch all that out, but it's important.  Kant here is making Hume's argument.  Hey, maybe our mind just gathers up appearances in a bundle and reads the patterns therein.  So maybe we just note the patterns and say, wow, there's a pattern here!  First the sun rose yesterday, and then it rose today!  Maybe there's a pattern here.  No need for analysis; no need for thinking; no need for concepts.

But Kant cannot accept this.  When we "cognize" an object, he claims, we do more than make a reactive burp in response to sense impressions.  And  so he lurches into the Transcendental Deduction to prove that we synthesize our bundle of intuitions using the forms of intuition in space and time and concepts derived from the categories, and then we unify the synthesis into a judgment about an object in an act of apperception, of a self-conscious validity claim.

Kant calls this objective validity, which is a bit of a push, since he's talking about a "valid" cognizing of a unity of synthesized intuitions with the help of the concepts of the understanding into a unified "object."  The notion of "objective validity" is obtained by calling things by the conveniently right names.

For us, the interesting thing about Kant's argument is its foreshadowing of the modern approach to reality.  Kant is claiming that we are not really passive consumers of appearances, but purposeful actors.  We take the stuff coming in over the transom and organize it in our minds in a strategic effort to understand and judge what is going on out there in the tough and challenging world.  We process our sense data and then construct in our minds a picture of what we have seen.  We "think" what we see and advance our claim of what we have seen and what we judge we have seen.

Forget Hume, Kant says.  I offer you a whole new world of active, purposeful "cognizing."

Kant's Best Shot: "Objective Reality"

In the Transcendental Deduction, Kant hauls out his big gun against Hume's "associationism:" he calls it "objective reality."  The idea is that if you run your lumber through Kant's three-stage lumber mill, inserting raw logs of sense impressions into the circular saw that slices the sense impressions through the forms of intuition, and then you assemble the manifold of resulting log intuitions into the synthesis of a stacked pallet, then you can judge the resulting stack of Grade A two-by-fours as a "necessary unit of the apperception in the synthesis of intuitions."

Why is this objective?  Because writes Kant, "[the] transcendental unity of apperception is that unity through which all of the manifold given in an intuition is united in the concept of the object.  It is called objective on that account[.]"(§18, B140)  Get it?  Since the thinker has united his manifold of sense impressions into a unified single object, he now has an objective reality.  The "subjective unity of  consciousness"  (Hume's association) is merely a "determination of inner sense" without the uniting into a single object.

So while we have merely a bundle of sense impressions we don't have a unified object, and therefore no objective reality.

What Kant seems to be trying to argue is that an objectively valid judgement is one that makes a claim, an assertoric judgment, as "this body is heavy."  This is a claim that can be agreed to or denied by others.  The statement that "bodies and heaviness seem to go together," i.e., a weaker claim than Kant's phrase "If I carry a body I feel a pressure of weight" comes closer to the Humean idea of a bundle of impressions.

But really, it seems to be much more sensible to accept Hume's skepticism that you can never really apply objective criteria to a truth claim about an association, and move to modern neo-pragmatism and say that look, the science is settled on this, at least a low velocities, so we know, from our concepts of the understanding, that bodies are heavy and bodies of gold are really heavy.  Until someone proves us wrong.

Romney's Plan vs. Obama's Plan

People have been complaining that the President Obama of the presidential debates doesn't seem to "have a plan."  We all know that Governor Romney has a five point plan: energy, job training, expanded trade (but penalize Chinese cheating), cut deficit, reduce taxes on middle class.  We know that because he keeps telling us.  But what about Obama's plan?



Come on guys, of course Obama has a plan.  It is to ask the rich to "pay a little more" and to expand training and teachers.  That's what he keeps telling us.  He's still gaga over green energy, but he seems to have experienced a "come to Jesus" moment on fossil fuel, at least for now.



Really, there is not much to choose between the two, excepting on taxes.  Obama wants the rich to pay a little more; Romney says he wants to keep the top 5 percent paying 60 percent of the total (is that income tax only or income tax plus payroll taxes?).



It's what they are not saying that matters.  What they are not saying up front at the debates is that it's doubtful that Obama would reduce spending from the current level at 22 to 24 percent of GDP.  Romney's plan is to cut federal spending back to 20 percent of GDP.  That means, according to some, that he'll cut everything to the bone except Social Security, Medicare, and Defense.  Makes sense to me.



As a Republican partisan I'd like to think that Romney will achieve his spending goal.  But as a betting man I'd guess that the federal government will get out of its jam through a combination of inflation, debt default, financial repression, and open confiscation.  Why?  Because that's what governments do.



The bottom line, if you are an individual American, is that in the next few years it's going to be really difficult to hang onto your money, either in real wages or investment income or in real capital appreciation.  Because while you are trying to live your life and keep a little aside for a rainy day the government is going to be trying to fill in a gigantic hole in its finances.  One way another, the government front-end loader is going to take a chunk out of your little pile and dump it into the hole.

"Thoughts without content are empty"

It's one of the most quoted zingers in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Thoughts without content are empty.  Intuitions without concepts are blind.

OK.  So what is the chap talking about?  Kant's whole game is to deal with the David Hume challenge, his so-called "associationism."  On this view we humans are more or less passive consumers of a bundle of sense impressions of the real world.  Kant's strategy is to turn this on its head.  No we don't associate sense impressions with the real world.  We take formless sense impressions, view them with the forms of intuition about space and time, synthesize them with intuitions, and then own them as ours by applying the pure concepts of the understanding to our intuitions and finally applying judgments.

The experts call this the "togetherness principle."  You need both concepts and intuitions to achieve useful judgments about the world as it appears to you.   Kant repeats his famous apothegm several times:

• "[N]either concepts without intuition corresponding to them in some way nor intuition without concepts can yield a cognition."
• "Thus pure intuition contains merely the form under which something is intuited, and pure concept only the form of thinking of an object in general."
• "Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought."
• "The understanding is not capable of intuiting anything, and the senses are not capable of thinking anything."

All along, Kant is arguing for the importance of both intuition and concepts in full human cognition.  Thus, Kant might have made things clearer had he written:

Thoughts without sensible content cannot apply to the real world; intuitions without rational concepts cannot be used for judgment.

For all its famous difficulty.  Kant's Critique does have its moments.

Voters and Free Stuff

I thought that President Obama won on points in the townhall debate last night, especially given the help of the replacement ref.  Imagine my surprise to learn that the "undecided voter" focus groups at FoxNews and MSNBC both leaned to Romney!



I guess that undecided voters are looking at a completely different debate.



But what troubles me is the questions, because they show the difficulty of moving forward.



There was the "women only earn 72 percent" question, and neither the president or the governor told the questioner that, look, it's time to end the women-are-victims game.  Women do better in school, earn 60 percent of the college degrees, meanwhile men, particularly low-income men, are dropping out of the workforce.  But how do you change a cultural meme that has served its term?  How do you talk to two generations of women taught to believe that they have been oppressed by the patriarchy since the dawn of time?



Or the question about the prospects for college graduates.  Both candidates swung into their standard pitches about the wonders of Pell grants and student loans.  Yeah.  Well, the ruinous cost of college today is mostly due to the money sluicing into colleges through government subsidies like Pell grants and government guaranteed student loans.  What have the colleges done?  They have built luxurious workout facilities and raised the fees and the salaries.  But when will the day dawn that a politician dares to suggest that the free stuff has got to go?



Mitt Romney is proposing to lower tax rates and simplify the tax code by cutting deductions.  So of course there was a woman asking about the mortgage interest deduction.  Now, I'd say that after the mess created by Fannie and Freddie with their $5 trillion in mortgage-backed securities and debt, and the mandates of the Community Reinvestment Act to force banks to loan to people that couldn't afford the payments, you'd have to say that the subsidy for mortgage interest in the income tax code sits right up there as something that has got to go.  But try telling the voters that.



That's why I doubt if the current debt problems can be solved with "austerity" and "cuts."  Just like in Europe, the program beneficiaries won't allow it.  The only way out of the jam is by default, by inflation and by financial repression, so that the government cunningly reduces the value of entitlements etc. by stealth and deception.



They say that Russia increased its public spending in the last decade from 15 percent of GDP  to 25 percent of GDP.  Now that revenue from oil and gas is declining the Putin government is facing a looming crisis.  But what in the world did the Russian government increase spending like that?  Well, obviously to buy support.  Even an authoritarian government needs support.  Especially an authoritarian government.



So governments are all the same.   They all get in power and maintain themselves by taxing the people and rewarding their supporters with free stuff.  Until they can't.

Are Space and Time Real?

We humans are born, live, and die, and experience ourselves moving through time.  We open our eyes and see objects before us.  It seems sensible to see space as a container, as Plato did, and time as the flow of a river.  But are they real?  Can we speak as Newton did of absolute space and time?

The early modern era brought these questions into sharp relief, and by the time that Kant came along there were several contesting notions abroad, from Newton's absolute space and time--though he insisted that humans could only experience relative space and time--to Bishop Berkeley's idealist notion that we cannot experience absolute space and time and so should content ourselves with experiencing sensible things.  For Hume, impressions come before ideas, so space is our interpretation of a bundle of impressions that seems to suggest extension.

Kant's Big Idea is to drive his ship between the Scylla of absolute space and time and the Charybdis of external impressions.  He doesn't want to prejudge the world as real, for Berkeley shows that our ideas of the world are all in the mind.  But he doesn't want to concede to Hume that the world imprints itself upon us.  Thus for him space and time are forms of intuition independent of experience.  They form a mental framework, forms of intuition, that the mind uses to make sense of sensible impressions.  Says he:

By means of outer sense [i.e. physical sensations of external objects]... we represent objects as outside us, and all as in space.

But he argues that the "representation of space" can't be obtained from experience but rather that "outer experience is itself possible only through this representation."  We do not get our experience from outside; we manufacture it inside us, and only then apply it to the outside world.

This is a theme that repeats itself again and again in Kant, and you can see that it comes down to us in current notions of the way that science works.  You have a problem, so you gather some data.  Then you come up with a theory in your mind, a mental idea of how the world works.  You test it against the data.  If it works, your mental idea is your new view of the world.  Until your wonderful theory crashes and burns and another theory comes up and supersedes it.

Now Kant does not consider space as an illusion, existing only in the mind.  He argues the reality of space for "everything that comes before us externally as an object."  But he insists on the "transcendental ideality" of space when we are talking about things in themselves.

When it comes to time, Kant asserts that "time is nothing other than the form of inner sense, i.e., of the intuition of our self and our inner state."  And it is a necessary condition of our experience of space as well, because we could not experience external objects unless they were experienced in time.

Again, Kant asserts the "empirical reality of time" an an objective reality of all "objects that may ever be given to our senses."  But not "absolute time". That "transcendental ideality" could "never be given to us through the senses."