Belly Full of Wine

OK, a couple of posts have intervened, but here is the list of heroes I promised. These are famous people whose intelligence and audacity have had a revolutionary impact. Also, to be a hero of mine, they must somehow appeal to my particular sense of what is most admirable in a person. Please leave a comment to tell me who your heroes are.

Edward O. Wilson
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
Steven Weinberg
John Marty
Howard Dean
Jimmy Carter
Thomas Jefferson
Ludwig van Beethoven
Paul Kurtz
Mark Twain
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Edward O. Wilson is a leading researcher of ants. He became famous for writing Sociobiology. He became my hero when he wrote Consilience, because it finally makes clear how the scientific, materialistic worldview that grew out of the Enlightenment affects our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. is America’s greatest living historian. He is a passionate, sensible, non-communist leftist. I read his memoir, and now I finally understand why a person would wear a bow tie.

Steven Weinberg is a Nobel laureate in physics. He is a principle figure in our modern understanding of cosmology, which depends on the application of particle physics, our most basic science, to the history of the universe. He wrote The First Three Minutes, which explains what we know about the time immediately after the big bang. More than that, he provides clear-eyed explanations of what modern science means for our lives.

John Marty is a Minnesota state senator from Roseville. He is principled, honest, and idealistic. He is able to explain how ideals and moral values should be translated into public policy. I volunteered on his campaign for governor.

Howard Dean, like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., is a passionate moderate. He knows that public policy really matters to real people, and he is passionate about making policies that let government work for everybody.

Jimmy Carter is a moral man who let his morality guide his public service, both in government and outside it. He is easily our greatest president since FDR.

Thomas Jefferson embodies the Enlightenment, and he understood that he was in a special place in history when the new ideas of the Enlightenment were being put into action.

Ludwig van Beethoven inherited the marvelous artistic tradition of classical era music (as exemplified by Haydn and Mozart), and then he transcended that tradition in a way that few artists in any field have ever dreamed of.

Paul Kurtz is the greatest living proponent of secular humanism. He is able to write in a way that is clear and direct while recognizing and responding to all the myriad approaches that people have to religion and philosophy.

Mark Twain is perhaps America’s greatest wit, and he uses that wit to subtly comment on human nature as it relates to what is good and right. If only all moral philosophy were such a pleasure to read.

Martin Luther King, Jr. did more than see injustice where others saw the way things had always been – he also saw the way things could be and worked tirelessly towards that end. His vision still resonates.

Andy asks in comments whether I was comparing Lincoln’s war between the states with Bush’s war in Iraq. I was not. But, it is an interesting question. Why did Bush go to war?

I read Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack and Woodward makes it clear that although Bush may have believed Iraq had WMD, that was not his motivation for war. He knew the evidence for WMD was weak, but he endeavored to use what evidence we had for WMD to sell the war, even though he knew it was a sales job and not a true casus belli.

The most interesting thing in Plan of Attack is the discussion of Powell’s stance on the war. Powell believed that Bush never understood the ramifications of war. Bush made a show of serious deliberation and said over and over that this was the hardest decision that a president has to make. But, in Powell’s opinion, Bush never really knew how hellish, how unpredictable, war really is.

That said, I think Bush’s decision is best understood from a personal, psychological point of view. Bush went to war to be decisive, to be dramatic, to be tough. He went to war to let America stand tall. He went to war because he believed in American wars in general, not because this war was a good idea in particular. Remember, this is a man who thought the Vietnam war was a good idea at the time and who never stopped thinking that. He thought a bad war was a good war even after the fact. Once in power, he chose to fight another bad war, even though it could have been avoided.

Good conversation in comments at Think Progress after a post about Pozen rejecting Bush’s private accounts plan.

People keep saying this will happen in 2018 and that will happen in 2041. Let’s remember that the government’s track record at predicting the economy or federal budget even 5 or 10 years out is miserable. The idea that they can predict what will be happening in 2041 is laughable.

Also, note that the prediction everybody talks about assumes lower-than-historical productivity growth and lower-than-historical immigration. I don’t see why productivity growth should slow (my company is innovating and advancing productivity – are the rest of you slacking off?) and I sure don’t see why immigration should slow down – that’s a guess about future politics which is even less certain than economic forecasts.

buckshot, you are simply mistaken when you say “Congress cannot ‘pay back’ the trust fund. Those billions ($1.6 trillion, I believe) are all long gone.” Would you also suggest that Congress cannot pay back the rest of the federal debt? Our market system disagrees with you, because millions of investors, institutions, and foreign banks are right now buying US treasury obligations at low interest rates – rates which show their faith that they will certainly be repaid.

The predicted long-term shortfall between SS taxes and promised SS benefits works out to about 2% of GDP. Bush’s tax cuts were also about 2% of GDP, so reversing them would approximately cover the shortfall. That doesn’t cover the existing debt, but there is no reason that taxes can’t be raised further. That is, no reason other than a lack of votes in Congress and a president to sign on. In any case, to avoid a crisis it is not necessary to pay back all the debt, merely to keep the debt reasonable relative to GDP, so that it can be carried without disrupting the economy.

As a practical matter, the SS trust fund debt will be repaid. No politician of any party is going to vote to default on debt held by the trust fund while continuing to repay debt that is held by Chinese and Japanese banks.

Abraham Lincoln ran for president as a known abolitionist. He was elected entirely by northern states – no southern state voted for him. Before he took office on March 1, 1861, the south had declared its secession.

The question is, why did Lincoln fight? He repeatedly said he fought to save the union, but did he really? What is so valuable about the union? Wasn’t he really fighting over the same issue that caused the south to secede – slavery? Didn’t he fight because he hoped to free the slaves in the south? Wasn’t that the only point of “preserving the union”?

If he fought against slavery, but said he fought to save the union, to whom was he speaking? My take is that abolitionism was a notion of the intellectuals, and didn’t have majority support in the north. He went to war as a principled stand against slavery, but sold it as a bid to save the union.

The Gettysburg Address tries (brilliantly) to tie together the saving of the union and the freeing of the slaves. He starts by harkening back to the founding fathers and their conception of liberty and dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal. This falls a bit flat, since they also recognized slavery in the constitution.

The crux of the speech is this: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” This one sentence gives the reason for the war. The rest of the speech is a memorial to the dead and an exhortation to continue the fight that they “shall not have died in vain.” Which, if you think about it, isn’t a good reason by itself. If they had died in a bad cause, keeping up the fight wouldn’t have been a good idea.

So the war was to preserve a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality for all men. But this is merely an arbitrary conflation of two ideas. There was nothing inherent in a nation so conceived and so dedicated that made it unlikely to endure, or that led to the war. Part of the nation had slipped away from the ideas of liberty and equality (or you could say more accurately that they had failed to keep up with their evolution). But, Lincoln was fighting for those ideas – saving the union was merely a means to that end.

Why is this interesting? Only because I have heard it said that Lincoln didn’t fight to free the slaves but rather to save the union. This is usually accompanied by a quotation like, “I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be ‘the Union as it was.’”

A quote that reveals more about what Lincoln thought is, “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then exclusively to save the Union.” Here, saving the union is explicitly a motivator for others.

Lincoln and the Civil War have been well-studied, and I doubt any of this is new, except to me. But, I have been thinking about Lincoln in the context of making a list of my heroes, and that list will be my next post.

Here are some Lincoln quotations. Here is the text of the Gettysburg Address.

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