There Is No 'Paradox of Thrift'

Frightened by tough economic times, formerly spendthrift Americans are beginning to save. But the shift is causing alarm among some economists and commentators. Prudent savers, say these writers, are exemplars of the "paradox of thrift," which holds that the practice of thrift, while seemingly wise and rational for the individual, can be harmful for society.

So it is that a Wall Street Journal headline warned: "Hard-Hit Families Finally Start Saving, Aggravating Nation's Economic Woes." A story in the New York Times said the "re-emergence of thrift as a value" presents a serious problem: "Economists call it the Paradox of Thrift." Another Times piece cautioned: "Putting away money and paying down debt may be good for one family's kitchen-table economics, but the broader economy suffers in the short term when millions of families do it." Nobel Prize- winning economist and syndicated Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly beats this drum. And a recent Newsweek cover, evoking World War II recruitment posters, featured a stern-looking Uncle Sam pointing at the reader with the patriotic appeal: "I Want YOU to Start Spending!"

In the 20th century, the paradox of thrift found its greatest champion in John Maynard Keynes. In his Treatise on Money (1930), Keynes argued that "mere abstinence is not enough by itself to build cities or drain fens." It is enterprise that builds. "If Enterprise is afoot," he explained, "wealth accumulates whatever may be happening to Thrift; and if Enterprise is asleep, wealth decays whatever Thrift may be doing. Thus, Thrift may be the handmaiden of Enterprise. But equally she may not. And, perhaps, even usually she is not."

In 1931, in a radio address to the British people on how to fight back against the oncoming Great Depression, Keynes was more vehement about the futility of saving and the wisdom of spending. Sometimes, he said, saving one's money was "quite right," but at other times, including the present one, saving was "utterly harmful and misguided." He bluntly warned his fellow citizens: "The best guess I can make is whenever you save five shillings, you put a man out of work for a day." He concluded with an Uncle Sam-like appeal to patriotism:

Therefore, O patriotic housewives, sally out tomorrow early into the streets and go to the wonderful sales which are everywhere advertised. You will do yourselves good .  .  . [and you will] have the added joy that you are increasing employment, adding to the wealth of the country because you are setting on foot useful activities, bringing a chance and a hope to Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Belfast.

When writing for policymakers and economists, Keynes and his followers spelled out this idea in more formal terms. They posited that whenever a nation's desire to save exceeds productive investment, the result is a savings glut. The excess savings, because they are not smoothly turned into investments, are effectively quarantined from normal economic life, much as if the savers had hidden their money under the floorboards. This phenomenon in turn can help trigger a downward economic spiral, a sort of negative feedback loop in which reduced consumer spending causes greater unemployment, and greater unemployment reduces spending, and so on. In the end, everyone--including the well-meaning chap who saved his five shillings in the first place--comes out poorer.

Finally, periods of economic downturn, when people's natural concern for the future may cause them to try to save more, are precisely the periods in which savings gluts can do the most damage to society, by deepening rather than counteracting the downward turn in the business cycle.

Ever since Keynes, the proposition that thrift can be paradoxical has been widely accepted. It made its way into the best-known economics textbook of the second half of the 20th century, Economics by Paul A. Samuelson and (in later editions) William Nordhaus. Not only does it continue to influence each generation of policymakers and commentators, but among the general public, the notion is widespread that, in order to keep the economy growing, citizens have a duty, whatever else may happen, to keep on spending.

But is it true? Is there actually something paradoxical about thrift that can make it more a curse than a blessing for society? Here, in ascending level of importance, are five reasons why, in fact, there is no paradox of thrift.

5. Saved money is likely to be productive money.

It is actually possible to save too much. Anyone who is denying his children adequate food or medicine or endangering his own health in order to allocate more to savings is almost certainly saving too much.

As a group, however, Americans have never been at serious risk of oversaving. Over the past eight decades, the personal savings rate in the United States--the difference between earnings and expenditures--averaged about 7 percent. It reached about 11 percent in the early 1980s and then began a long, steep decline. By the time the nation entered the 21st century overleveraged and in debt, the personal savings rate had sunk to zero or below.

In recent months, as the economic horizon has rapidly darkened, the U.S. personal savings rate has soared. Last week the Commerce Department reported it at 5.7 percent, according to the Associated Press. By the end of the year, according to some economists, it may reach 7 or 8 percent. In other words, if they are right, by 2010 Americans may be saving at about the same rate that we've averaged since 1930.

No one would call this dangerous oversaving. On the contrary, even the current modest increase in the savings rate is good for families and the nation. The reason is simple: Savings--money diverted from consumption--are the only source of money for productive investment, and productive investment is the lifeblood of the economy.

By the same token, economists overwhelmingly agree that a high-debt, zero-saving society is one that has put itself at long-term risk. For a time, it may be possible to live the high life on borrowed money. Having other nations largely finance our ever-growing debts may allow us to kick the can down the road while continuing to shop as if there were no tomorrow.

But it's ultimately unsustainable. Over time, a thriving economy and a successful society require citizens who are willing and able to save for the future, and this fundamental fact will not change.

The "savings glut" described by Keynes and others, when the desire to save overwhelms our willingness to invest, may be a theoretical danger, but the weight of evidence suggests that it is not happening today in the United States.

The banking and finance crisis of recent months--which may already be easing--appears at least to some degree to have unnaturally frozen the flow of credit. And there appears to be a hesitancy among many investors. But no one is seriously suggesting that this problem could be solved by returning to the practice of shopping with money we don't have. After all, if that were the solution, there would never have been a crisis in the first place.

According to most analysts, the root of our financial crisis is enormously large, interlocking, and ultimately toxic structures of debt. And if piled-up consumer debt is part of the problem, running up still more consumer debt can hardly be the solution.

In fact, the solution lies in the opposite direction. An 8 or 9 percent personal savings rate in 2010, allowing households to reduce their debt and begin to live within their means, might actually ameliorate the banking crisis, insofar as it would once again position millions of Americans to become investors and wealth-builders over the long run.

More broadly, if we bracket for a moment the immediate and probably short-term failures in our banking system and take a longer view, the danger of a genuine American savings glut--savings in excess of productive investment--appears to be all but nonexistent.

Fundamentally, our economy is wide open and extremely dynamic. We value, and frequently reward, risk-taking and entrepreneurialism. Stand on any American Main Street and you can hardly throw a brick without hitting someone who is itching to start a business, make a new product, try out an idea, risk all to follow a dream. People around the world admire us (and occasionally despise us), and some of them end up coming here, for precisely these reasons. It is unlikely, under any reasonably foreseeable circumstances, that this deep-rooted American characteristic will disappear, or turn into its opposite, such that we suddenly have too many saved dollars chasing too few new challenges and new ideas. In America, saved money typically is productive money.

4. For individuals and families, it's always wise to live within your means.

Consider a 27-year-old woman from Missouri, a graduate of a community college, working as a sales representative for a big greeting card company. She is recently married. Her husband also works in corporate sales. Their annual income is $84,000. They have no children, but hope to start a family soon. And owning a home is one of their dreams.

They eat out a lot. They enjoy travel. Between them, they have five credit cards, with a balance of about $11,500. (A year ago, the unpaid balance was $9,000.) Some months, they try to pay down some of the principal, but for most of the past year, they paid only the minimum. Also, the husband still owes about $16,000 on his student loans. Sometimes, when an unexpected expense arises, his wife borrows money from her parents. Usually she pays them back, but not always. Together, the couple have about $700 in the bank.

Plainly, these two are spending too much. They have good jobs, a reasonable income, and no children, yet they are spending nearly every penny they have on short-term consumption, while slipping further into debt. If this pattern is projected even a few years into the future, they are almost surely looking at a painful financial crisis.

Then suppose the economy turns sour. Their companies are laying off workers and cutting back. The couple both still have their jobs, but they're worried.

As a result, they begin to make changes. The nice vacation they were planning--with the expenses to go on their credit cards--is now on hold. They try to eat out less, to cut back on entertainment, to be more careful with their dollars generally. They are being more responsible--but are they hurting their society by helping themselves in this way? Are they failing to consider, in the economic sphere, their patriotic duty?

It's hard to see how that could be the case. Indeed, most young couples are likely to feel much better about their chances of building a nest if they first build a nest egg. Once people begin to live within their means, moreover, all kinds of productive and pro-social things are likely to happen.

First and foremost, they become richer. That is the purpose of thrift. Not coincidentally, the most beloved and frequently quoted book on thrift in the history of the world, written by Benjamin Franklin, is entitled The Way to Wealth. It's almost a mathematical certainty that if people practice thrift over time--and avoid getting struck by lightning or run over by a truck--they will get richer. In all likelihood, they will get significantly richer.

Second, such savers are actually likely to spend more than people mired in debt. Couples who practice thrift and build wealth over time have more assets and savings, which in turn become productive investments, which in turn promote economic growth and development. Such thrifty couples also tend to pay more taxes. This whole dynamic is good for families and for their society. In fact, if the goal is more stimulative spending, thrift is the main way to get there.

So Americans who are now taking steps to get their financial house in order are not the problem for a troubled economy. They are the solution. No one should chastise them on the grounds that society paradoxically benefits from their overindebtedness. On the contrary, everyone should cheer their newfound thrift and hope that living within one's means becomes prevalent.

3. Governments, not individuals or families, are responsible for any deficit spending needed to moderate economic downturns.

It is true that a sudden drop in consumer spending--that is, in the demand for goods and services--can lead to unemployment, worsening an economic downturn. And in this situation, wise policymakers may wish to engage in deficit spending in order to stimulate demand, boost employment, and generally moderate the effects of the downturn. But this isn't a paradox.

Neoclassical economic theory has long taught that, in a downturn, government may properly engage in deficit spending, just as, in boom years, a wise government builds up a surplus. Keynes himself contributed to this idea. One happy result of this economic model is a balanced budget over the course of the business cycle. Another is a moderating of highs and lows. Just as calculated doses of fiscal restraint help keep the economy from overheating during upturns, so calculated doses of fiscal excess help moderate the effects and duration of downturns.

One can only wish that the Bush administration had respected these norms, instead of blithely running huge budget deficits throughout the recent go-go years. And one can only pray that now, as we confront the worst economic downturn in decades, the far larger deficits planned by the Obama administration are the right amount of federal deficit spending.

But whatever else may be true of deficit spending during downturns, the job must necessarily fall to governments. It makes no sense, from either the individual's or the society's point of view, to urge already over-indebted citizens and families to do anything other than start living within their means, so as to begin building wealth, instead of only consuming and borrowing.

Furthermore, it is far more efficient for the government to borrow than the individual. The U.S. government can borrow money to cover its deficit spending at an interest rate of 2 or 3 percent--a fraction of the 20 percent or more that families pay on credit card debt.

Then, there is what the economist Mancur Olson called the logic of collective action. There are some goals which, even when favored by all as individuals, cannot be achieved through individual action. For example, if one shopkeeper in a big, dirty city stops throwing his garbage into the street, he can have only a slight impact on the overall problem. And if he pays for private garbage removal, his costs will go up while his neighbors' costs remain constant, a development that could ultimately threaten his livelihood. The only real solution is for all the shopkeepers at once to change their behavior. There are many other illustrations of the logic of collective action, and deficit spending to stimulate the economy is one of them.

If, in the spirit of Keynes's famous appeal, a patriotic housewife sallies forth to serve her country by maxing out another credit card, she is like the shopkeeper. Her splurge will hardly affect total consumer spending, though it will make her and her family worse off. Which is why today's patriotic but intelligent housewife will instead sally over to a savings bank or credit union and make a deposit--an action that will almost certainly make her and her family better off and, by helping her move from dependent debtor to independent saver and investor, be good for society.

For these reasons, priming the economic pump in the short term must be done collectively, through the actions of government, instead of individually, through the private overspending of citizens and households. This concept is completely consistent with the thrift ethic, and there is nothing paradoxical about it.

2. Assuming that there is a paradox of thrift encourages waste.

The story is told that Keynes, in a fancy washroom at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington in 1934, instead of taking a single towel to dry his hands, dramatically pushed the entire pile of clean towels to the floor and crumpled them, explaining to his listeners that this way of using towels would do more to reduce unemployment and stimulate the economy than using a single towel.

The story may be apocryphal, but it captures the essence of the alleged paradox of thrift. In this view, it is "Enterprise" that generates wealth--regardless, as Keynes put it, of "whatever may be happening to Thrift." Accordingly, if tossing clean towels onto a dirty floor will generate a bit more "Enterprise" among underemployed hotel workers, then by all means start tossing, and thrift be damned, since it is inactivity that constitutes the ultimate danger. The values traditionally associated with thrift--carefulness, conservation--become a sideshow at best and do harm at worst.

At the center of this argument is the unethical and finally counterproductive encouragement of waste. A great weakness not only of the critique of thrift, but also of much economic analysis, is the dubious claim that every dollar spent on economic "Enterprise" is the equivalent of every other dollar spent on it.

But there is no such equivalence. A dollar spent on bottled water is clearly not as good--not as productive, as wise, as helpful to society--as a dollar spent on a tap water purifier. A dollar spent on a lottery ticket is not as good as a dollar spent on a DVD. A dollar spent on junk food is not as good as a dollar spent on healthy food. And, no, a dollar spent on cleaning needlessly dirtied hotel towels is not as good as a dollar spent on, say, improving service in the hotel restaurant.

This fundamental misconception--the idea that buying stuff is buying stuff is buying stuff, and that all of it is equally valuable to the economy--is harmful wherever it finds expression, but it is particularly harmful in the United States, where we are already dangerously in thrall to the idea that vast amounts of consumption are necessary and good.

Especially in the United States, we need to make more, and better, distinctions about how we spend our money. We are arguably the most wasteful society on the planet. On the one hand, many of us buy amazing amounts of stuff we don't need and that fails to enrich our lives. On the other hand, there are numerous domains of American life--transportation, health care, education, leisure time, and others--that cry out for more, and more prudent, expenditures.

1. Properly understood, "thrift" means the ethic and practice of wise use.

If Keynes had merely insisted that there is a "paradox of saving," that would have been an interesting proposition. But Keynes chose to call it a paradox of thrift. That is a provocation, for "thrift" is a larger and more culturally consequential idea than "saving."

Keynes apparently didn't know this. In A Treatise on Money, he criticized "that voluntary abstinence of individuals from the immediate enjoyment of consumption, which we call Thrift." And then, remember, he insisted "it should be obvious that mere abstinence is not enough by itself to build cities or drain fens."

For Keynes, and countless others who have admired and followed him, thrift is abstinence, plain and simple. It's a wholly negative concept--it means not doing something (not enjoying the goods of consumption). It connotes passivity, quietude, voluntary withdrawal. That's why Keynes could contrast "Thrift," which for him means inactivity, with "Enterprise," which for him means activity.

But the root of "thrift" is "thrive," and a thrifty person is one who thrives.

Thrift connotes growing, flourishing, spreading out. A commonly repeated maxim from thrift's heyday as an American public value is that thrift makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before. There are plants that are commonly called "thrift." The celebrated 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica--the very edition that Keynes would have used in the 1920s--thus explains that "there are several species of plants, such as the sea-pink, Armeria maritima, or March rosemary (Statice) which from their vigorous growth are often termed 'thrift.' "

Thrift connotes industry, hard work, prosperity. The goal of thrift is to gain and enjoy the good things of life. Says the 16th-century poet John Lyly: "Thy heart's thirst is satisfied with thy hand's thrift." The great apostle of thrift Benjamin Franklin says: "Be industrious and frugal, and you will be rich." When Franklin similarly advises that "Industry need not wish," he is offering a strategy for getting one's wishes: Be industrious. That strategy, he tells us, "consists very much in Thrift." Franklin openly states that "wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it."

Thrift connotes abundance. Thrifty people, as we've seen, tend to earn and spend much more than thriftless people. Says the 16th-century poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney: "Thrift is the fuel of magnificence."

The thrift ethic is a secular expression of the religious principle of stewardship. The main idea is that we are not the owners of our wealth, but rather the trustees, who are therefore ethically obligated to use our wealth wisely and carefully, for our benefit and for the benefit of others. The Puritan divine Cotton Mather, who strongly influenced Franklin, writes in Essays to Do Good, published in 1710: "This may be said of all our estates: what God gives us, is not given for ourselves, but, 'for the Lord.' " A quarter-century later, Franklin, in Poor Richard's Almanac, omits the theology and puts it this way: "The noblest question in the world is What good may I do in it?"

Thrift connotes saving, carefulness in spending, sustainability, and conservation. While such capacities do not define thrift, they are integral to the larger concept of wise use. Careful spending, for example, as we learn from several old writers, is "the handmaiden of generosity." Franklin constantly emphasizes the importance of frugality. For many decades during the 20th century, U.S. and British mutual savings banks gave away to their depositors small metal "Thrift Banks" (to save coins in) and pamphlet-style "Books of Thrift" (full of tips for Mom and Dad about household budgeting). A character called "Uncle Thrift," the star of an American children's book published in 1923, raps: We will be a thrifty nation, / When we all learn conservation.

Put the pieces together, and the concept of thrift turns out to be a sophisticated call for the ethics and practice of wise use. Thrift is the art of making the wisest use of all that we have--time, money, possessions, our health, and our society's natural resources--to promote both our own flourishing and the social good. The concepts most contrary to thrift are idleness and waste.

As the countless American and British advocates of thrift over the past several centuries knew, the notions of "mere abstinence" and "inactivity" can't remotely sum up the thrift ethic. When it comes to understanding what thrift is, Keynes and company are not even close. Indeed, it is only by misconceiving thrift that they have been able to foist a pernicious concept on the public mind.

To most people, the phrase "paradox of thrift" means that thrift can be a bad thing. The very existence of the phrase invites us to believe that personal restraint can be harmful and personal irresponsibility can be socially beneficial, that wastefulness is not so bad after all, and that what appears to be wise for me and my family can actually hurt society. It is past time to jettison such bankrupt thoughts and put the "paradox of thrift" out of its misery once and for all.

David Blankenhorn is president of the Institute for American Values and a co-editor of Franklin's Thrift: The Lost History of an American Virtue.

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The Gitmo Myth and the Torture Canard

On January 21, 2009, President Barack Obama issued his first executive order: He was closing the detention center at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba and calling a halt to the military commissions created in late 2001 to try terrorist suspects detained there. Like the startling opening chord of a Beethoven symphony, Obama’s action was intended to herald a new tone in America’s “war on terror” and a restoration of America’s moral standing. The response was electric. The facility at Guantánamo (Gitmo for short) had become “America’s most notorious prison,” as Fox News put it. In the minds of many, it was the American equivalent of the Bastille or the KGB’s Lubyanka prison: a dungeon used to isolate, intimidate, and torture generally hapless inmates, many of whom were innocent of any crime against the United States. Dana Priest of the Washington Post took to the paper’s front page to proclaim joyously that “with the stroke of his pen,” Obama had “effectively declared an end to the ‘war on terror,’ as President George W. Bush had defined it.” Now Obama could begin the process of rehabilitating America’s image around the world, the very image Gitmo had done so much to blacken.

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Then several strange things happened. Obama’s order “closing” Gitmo actually left it open for a year, ostensibly until new arrangements could be made for the 240 or so inmates still detained there—though Obama admitted privately it might have to stay open longer than that. Later, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that, far from being “the Bermuda Triangle of human rights” that Human Rights Watch’s Wendy Patten had dubbed it, Gitmo was in full compliance with the humane-treatment provisions of the Geneva Convention. Meanwhile, the military commissions, which Human Rights Watch and others groups had denounced as a travesty of justice, were only being suspended for 120 days, pending a review—and, indeed, following that review, will be reinstated almost exactly as they were before.

If one adds to this mix:
• the twelve separate inquiries into the abuses alleged by critics and former detainees at Gitmo that found no evidence of those abuses taking place;
• the revelation during the release earlier this year of the so-called “torture memos” that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques had been applied to exactly three suspects in the course of eight years and had never been standard operating practice at Gitmo;
• the evaluation by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point that 73 percent of Gitmo detainees were “a demonstrated threat” to Americans;
• and, finally, the fact that the detention facility was created in the wake of a declaration by Congress in September 2001 that “all necessary and appropriate force” should be used “against those nations, organizations, or persons” [emphasis added] responsible for the attacks of September 11;
—one may be permitted to wonder why, exactly, the pressure to close the prison facility has been so intense and long-lasting.

The standard argument is that the public shift in attitude toward Gitmo was gradual, and reflected a growing disillusionment with the war on terror as the sordid details of how George W. Bush and his assistants chose to wage it came out, including the supposed secret use of torture. Once the detention center had become a cesspool of human-rights abuse, the evil spawned there then seeped into other facilities where prisoners in the Bush war on terror were being held, most notoriously the Iraqi prison at Abu Ghraib. In 2004, former Vice President Al Gore announced that Abu Ghraib “was not the result of random acts by a ‘few bad apples’: it was the natural consequence of the Bush administration policy” of retaining and interrogating inmates at Gitmo.

What this account and others like it fail to take into consideration are the aggressive and unending efforts of a cadre of lawyers, activists, left-leaning Democrats in Congress, and civil libertarians against the facility, its purpose, its goal, and its existence. These efforts began even before it was opened, in November 2001, and continue to this day. The anti-Gitmo forces worked tirelessly to shape the public perception that Gitmo was the red-hot center of an aggressive policy approach that led the leftist financier George Soros to declare: “The biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush.”

The enemies of Bush and Gitmo have succeeded brilliantly. But in so doing, they have done grave violence to the truth about the Guantánamo Bay facility, have aided in the release of prisoners who have since committed acts of terrorism outside the United States, and may yet succeed in having Barack Obama’s government release young men with terrifying ambitions for murder and mass destruction onto the soil of the United States.

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WHY GITMO?

In October 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan to crush the al-Qaeda terrorists who had free run of the country and the Taliban government that was housing them. Within weeks, the U.S. military found itself holding tens of thousands of prisoners, including foreign al-Qaeda fighters who had been training in terrorist camps in the Afghan hinterland.

The tale would later be told that many of these prisoners were hapless shepherds, farmers, and even tourists caught up in the fighting, and that the Northern Alliance, the Afghan guerrilla group with which the United States was allied in the fight against the Taliban, was handing over innocent men whom they falsely dubbed al-Qaeda members in order to collect a money bounty.

In point of fact, the military captured more than 70,000 men and put every one through a rigorous screening process. Ten thousand were released immediately. By the time the military had completed its work, only 800 remained in custody. These were the ones they had deemed hard-core trained terrorists who could not be released without running the risk they would rejoin the battle. The question was what to do with them.

From the beginning, the Department of Defense and its head, Donald Rumsfeld, were deeply reluctant to take on the job of detaining these prisoners who, unlike normal POWs, fought for no country, wore no uniforms, and had systematically broken the rules of war. In a conventional war, prisoners are held to keep them from being returned to the fight. The problem here was that there was no conventional battlefield; in a war of terror, a combatant can theoretically strike anywhere in the world. It was not clear to anyone what was to be done with this new model of stateless combatant. Rumsfeld “hated the idea of being a jailer,” as his aide Douglas Feith relates in his memoir, War and Decision, in large measure owing to the fact that they were not automatically covered under the Geneva Convention. Deciding how they were to treated or tried posed immense legal difficulties that no lawyer at the Department of Defense was eager to take on.

Finding a place to put them proved the easy part. In 1987, a prison had been set up for the United States Southern Command at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The site was a military location and therefore secure—so secure that eventually the CIA transferred its “high-value” al-Qaeda detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed there. It was not in a Muslim country, which lessened the possibility of a prison break or other political complications. Finally, it was under United States control but not on United States soil—which, according to a 1950 Supreme Court decision in Johnson v. Eisentrager, meant that prisoners could be lawfully brought under American custody from various international locations to be detained and processed without the involvement of civil courts.

Gitmo was never meant to be a prison where inmates were to serve sentences for crimes. It was, in the words of a Defense Department document, a detention facility set up in order to prevent “enemy combatants from continuing the fight against the US. and its partners in the war on terror.” Its goals were military and tactical, not juridical or penal. Still, the conditions under which these unconventional prisoners were to be held did involve questions.

The questions were especially complex because the facility became a place where military, FBI, and CIA interrogators would all become involved in questioning al-Qaeda suspects to determine who was guilty of involvement in the 9/11 plot and whether other attacks were being planned or were imminent. Since all these agencies operate under different legal strictures, sorting out who could do what was immensely difficult.

In the end, addressing all these legal questions fell to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), then led by John Yoo.

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THE MEMOS

Yoo was tasked with providing a set of ground rules for detention, interrogation, and trial of the detainees. The Department of Defense had wanted to treat these as three separate issues. However, Yoo and the OLC lawyers believed they had to be handled as parts of a single policy—especially since at the same time they were also setting guidelines on how the CIA would be allowed to question suspects that fell into its hands.

Those rules and memos were assembled over the course of many months bridging 2001 and 2002, in the immediate shadow of 9/11 with the possibility of a second massive attack looming on the horizon. Later, the press would brand them “torture memos,” and the Obama administration’s decision to release the full texts of those memos in April 2009 fed the frenzy. However, they could just as well be branded “anti-torture memos.” Yoo and his colleagues used them to define the boundaries at which interrogation of unwilling and uncooperative prisoners would cross over into the category of torture. Once those boundaries were breached, any action would be illegal under United States law and international treaties, including the 1994 United Nations Convention Against Torture. They looked to practices by Israeli as well as British intelligence services that had undergone legal scrutiny in their own countries, and they also considered historical norms about torture since the Middle Ages.

The OLC understood as well as any of its later critics that torture—the cruel and needless infliction of pain in order to dominate and control others or to exact confessions or information—was barbarism. It was precisely in order to prevent such barbarism that the memos were drawn up in the first place. It was also why then, and later, army and CIA interrogators tried to avoid even drawing close to those boundaries without explicit authorization.

Critics further assert that the OLC memos “denied” Geneva Convention status to the al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners at Gitmo. One key lawyer, Michael Ratner, has claimed that by “ignoring” the Geneva Convention in this way, the Justice Department rules were in “violation of half a century of U.S. precedent.” This is incorrect. Yoo and the OLC were not making policy in the memos. They were attempting to describe the law as it stood. As Yoo has pointed out, it was up to the president and the president alone to decide whether the Gitmo prisoners should be treated in accordance with Geneva Convention standards (which he did, in 2002). The prisoners in no way fit the standard of “lawful combatant” as defined by the Geneva Convention’s Common Article 3 and therefore could not automatically be accorded the treatment the Convention required. Indeed, because they were not in uniform and were fighting under no flag, the rules applying specifically to that category could not apply without violating the sense of the Convention itself—although that did not mean they could be treated in any way the Gitmo guards and commandant saw fit.

There were other practical reasons for refusing to treat the Gitmo prisoners like German or Italian POWs in World War II, or somewhat later, Iraqi soldiers captured in Operation Iraqi Freedom (no one, then or later, ever suggested that the Geneva Convention, including Common Article 3, did not apply to prisoners captured in Iraq). Al-Qaeda recruits are trained in the arts of conspiracy, assassination, and murder. A system of open barracks, as in a conventional POW camp, would allow detainees to organize plots, even rebellions, within the compounds (organizing riots in a POW camp is a violation of Common Article 3 of the Convention), and to take vengeance on their own number who were suspected of confessing or cooperating with American authorities. Detention in separate cells, as in a conventional prison, seemed the only way to overcome this logistical nightmare.

The rules on Gitmo detention and on interrogation constituted a valiant attempt to deal with an unprecedented legal situation. The same was true of the system of military “commissions” or tribunals for trying suspects at Gitmo. Here the Justice Department largely followed the precedent of tribunals used by the American military during World War II, and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1942 decision Ex Parte Quirin.

Again, critics of the tribunals would accuse Yoo and the Bush administration of trying to make an end run around the United States criminal-justice system by establishing a separate judicial review process for terror suspects and turning Gitmo into a secret offshore detention haven outside the scrutiny of the American justice system. In fact, Yoo and his colleagues were trying to protect the American legal system from stepping into a political-military minefield. Imagine that the Gitmo terrorists had been put into the standard criminal-justice system, with its time-consuming rules about due process, habeas corpus, and countless appeals. Imagine, further, that in the course of all this there had been a second major attack like 9/11, or an al-Qaeda-inspired riot occurred in a U.S. prison that had involved the taking or murdering of hostages. There would have been immense public pressure for the administration to “do something,” to bend or break normal rules in the interest of swift justice. That highly plausible scenario, made reality, would have threatened the integrity of the American justice system. The commissions were intended as a prophylactic means of protecting the American legal system from an unprecedented situation it was not designed to manage.

The plan backfired. The enemies of the Bush White House and the war on terror were working on their own political agenda, involving an attack on the Gitmo system through the courts.

_____________

ENTER STAGE LEFT

When President Bush announced in November 2001 the establishment of the detention center and plans for military commissions to try cases, Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights was furious. “The idea that you could pick up people anywhere in the world and hold them forever without a trial is outrageous,” he later told the magazine Mother Jones. Ratner immediately began organizing an effort to offer legal counsel to the first detainees, and organized teams of attorneys working pro bono from some of Washington’s largest law firms to bring suit on behalf of the detainees.

Ratner is a veteran of the ideological wars inside the United States. The Center for Constitutional Rights was founded by the late William Kunstler, who had served as defense attorney for the Chicago Seven, the Black Panthers, and other violent radical groups. Ratner himself had been at the head of the National Lawyers Guild, once a Stalinist front group, before representing Fidel Castro, members of Hamas, and Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh who organized the original bombing of the World Trade Center back in 1993. One of Ratner’s colleagues, Lynne Stewart, was eventually convicted of providing material aid to Rahman while acting as an officer of the court. Ratner publicly defended Stewart’s actions, and was a dedicated foe of the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Ratner’s allies in the fight for the detainees included Islamist lobbying groups willing to spread the notion that the Gitmo detainees were victims of racial and religious discrimination; liberal lawyers at prestigious Washington firms who had been taught by their law professors that the law’s role is to effect social and political change and who wished to do something more meaningful than work on corporate mergers; and eventually a Democratic party understandably looking for an issue it could use to undermine public support for George Bush (running in the mid-80s in early 2002) and get them back in the political game.

In February 2002 Ratner filed his first petition for habeas corpus for a British-born Gitmo detainee named Shafiq Rasul—a petition that would have fateful consequences two years later. At the time, however, the focus of Ratner and his allies was not torture or the interrogations at Gitmo. Instead, they worked to plant the idea in the public’s mind that most, if not all, of these inmates might be innocent victims, picked up on the battlefield by mistake.

The inmates themselves were happy to oblige. Shafiq Rasul, for example, told Ratner and anyone who would listen that he was no terrorist. He was an innocent tourist whom the Taliban had abducted while he was traveling in Afghanistan, and that during the American invasion he had been forced to take up an AK-47 to use in self-defense. Rasul’s story and similar ones told by two other Gitmo captives born in the English town of Tipton, Ruhal Ahmed and Afiq Iqal (later known as the Tipton Three), became the centerpiece of Ratner’s campaign to open the gates at Gitmo. Their picture adorns his 2007 book, The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld.

Clearly, Ratner insisted, an injustice had been done to these and other foreign nationals caught in the American net after the war in Afghanistan. The fact that Bush had excluded Gitmo from normal judicial review meant that the innocent were bound to suffer, while the remote location of Gitmo ensured that they were left to the mercy of their jailers.

Ratner’s portrait of Gitmo’s detainees was wildly off the mark. But it did reflect the fact that, in its early months, conditions at Gitmo were chaotic. The population of the naval base had swelled from 2,000 to 10,000, among them military personnel, FBI, CIA, Army as well as Drug Enforcement Agency interrogators, doctors, Arab translators, and Muslim chaplains, and of course, the detainees themselves. One of the first structures in the prison camp was a trailer for the International Commission for the Red Cross, which had full access to the detainees and collected mail to be sent to their relatives.

New soldiers and units were constantly rotating through. No one had yet properly defined how Gitmo would function as both a detention and an interrogation facility. In addition, there were no rules on how to punish inmates who attacked their guards or otherwise violated camp rules. There was, and never has been, a disciplinary system for prisoners at Gitmo. To this day prisoners are not punished for their crimes or offenses, even when they attack guards or pelt them with feces.

In fact, before Major General Geoffrey Miller took charge as commandant in November 2002, Gitmo was, according to one eyewitness, “an island of divided loyalties and waning morale.” The environment had grown so stale and hermetic that it became a breeding ground of rumor about unorthodox and bizarre interrogation tactics, including inmates who claimed they were being slapped, shouted at, or subjected to loud music; interrogators pretending to defecate on the Koran; and female interrogators sitting on detainees’ laps in order to humiliate them, or splashing them with red ink pretending it was menstrual blood. Every one of these was investigated and proved false, but the rumors were passed along by FBI interrogators in memos that expressed concern about Gitmo interrogation tactics being used by personnel working for other cabinet agencies. They seemed to verify the picture painted by Ratner and others that the facility was reeling out of control.

_____________

THREE CATEGORIES

In point of fact, the main problem was that Gitmo was proving an ineffective facility when it came to uncovering intelligence. Given the hardened nature of the terrorists being held there, and the urgency of getting information from them, an experienced Army interrogator named Paul Rester (who arrived at Gitmo in 2002) had assumed that the “gloves would be off” in interrogation tactics. To his shock, he found the rules were stricter even than the Army field manual’s: “It was a much more restrictive environment than anywhere else I’ve conducted interrogations.” Prisoners were allowed to defy their questioners and treat them with contempt, even as FBI and Army interrogators were often working at cross-purposes.

Perhaps the best case study was that of Muhammad el-Qahtani, a Saudi national caught by U.S. forces on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan in December 2001. Like other al-Qaeda operatives, Qahtani claimed that he was an innocent man who had only been visiting Afghanistan to buy and sell falcons. Interest in Qahtani changed abruptly in July 2002, when the FBI learned that he was the same Qahtani who had been denied entry at Orlando Airport on a flight from Canada on August 4, 2001—and that Muhammad Atta, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, had been waiting at Orlando Airport that same day.

Suddenly deemed a “high-value” detainee, Qahtani was moved on orders of the Navy to its brig on the base for isolation. There the FBI took charge and for 30 days carried on a desultory interrogation with its usual, buttoned-down, fully Miranda-warning-inspired style of criminal investigation—and got nowhere.

After thirty days, the Army stepped in and took charge. The FBI was furious at its removal from the case, and its investigators sent e-mails decrying the military’s attempts at breaking Qahtani’s will, which included yelling, calling him names, subjecting him to sleep deprivation and loud music, and duct-taping his cell shut. “It was stupid and ineffective,” Paul Rester later said. “But it wasn’t torture or abuse.”

However, one FBI agent saw the guards bring a growling dog into the interrogation room, which he assumed was being used to intimidate Qahtani—although subsequent investigation showed that dogs at Gitmo were used to escort prisoners back and forth to their cells, not to threaten them. Since that detail was included in the FBI e-mails, and later leaked, the idea that dogs were used to abuse prisoners would become a fixture in the false portrait that was being painted of the goings-on at Gitmo.

Interrogators were still getting nowhere, so on October 11, 2002, the head of the Southern Command, General James Hill, was asked to approve an enhanced interrogation schedule, divided into three categories of coercion beyond those covered in the U.S. Army field manual:

Category I, yelling and deception.

Category II, stress positions for up to four hours, light deprivation, removal of clothing, shaving of facial hair (very shaming to a Muslim male), and exploitation of fear phobias, including fear of dogs.

Category III, “the use of scenarios” to convince the detainee that his life is in danger, including waterboarding.

On November 15, against FBI objections, Hill approved the use of Categories I and II, but not Category III. He also approved a plan for applying them to Qahtani by degrees on a thirty-day schedule beginning on November 23. On December 2, Rumsfeld weighed in with his own authorization, which, again, did not include waterboarding. Rumsfeld had his doubts in any case, and on January 15 rescinded his authorization pending further review.

Still, that proved to be enough time to break Qahtani. He was subjected to 20-hour interrogation sessions, being tied to a dog leash (no actual dogs were involved), having water poured continually on his head (but no waterboarding), while women’s clothes were dropped on his face and a bra strapped across his clothed chest. These and other humiliations, including turning up the air-conditioning to uncomfortable levels, did result in Qahtani’s brief hospitalization in early December with brachyocardia. However, none remotely approached the definition of torture defined by the OLC’s August 2002 memo as administering physical pain equal to the intensity “accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” or psychological harm “lasting for months or even years.”

By then, Qahtani had confessed that he worked for al Qaeda. One by one, without hesitation, he picked out pictures of all nineteen of the 9/11 hijackers and called out their names—and admitted that he, not Zacarias Moussaoui, had been slated to be the twentieth hijacker. He also revealed that the true mastermind of the attack was Osama bin Laden’s deputy Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Qahtani also fingered another Saudi al-Qaeda operative, Adnan el-Shukrijumah, who was in the United States organizing another 9/11-style attack for the summer of 2004. Khalid Mohammed’s subsequent capture in Pakistan in March 2003 revealed still more details which, we now know, enabled the Bush administration to foil a second wave of suicide attacks directed at Los Angeles.

Whether Qahtani’s interrogation constituted “torture” might be a matter of debate, but not, it seems, to the new Obama administration. For according to an argument advanced by Obama’s Justice Department in May regarding the possibility that the concentration-camp guard John Demjanjuk would be tortured were he to be deported to Germany, the Qahtani interrogation could not be judged to have risen to the standard of torture because meeting that standard would have required “his prospective torturer [to] have the motive or purpose” of inflicting extreme pain and suffering. That was certainly not the case with Qahtani.

By any standard, his interrogation had also yielded valuable, actionable intelligence that saved American lives. It also established two unquestionable facts about Gitmo. The first was that coerced interrogations were the extreme exception, not standard practice, at the facility. The other was that Rumsfeld and the Bush administration were extremely reluctant to endorse any of these techniques, to the point of overriding the wishes of their own officers in the field, and that the administration was prepared to withdraw permission for enhanced techniques, up to and including waterboarding, almost as soon as they were granted.

However, the leaked FBI memos allowed critics to obfuscate both these points. They felt free to claim that the extraordinary measures taken against Qahtani were standard practice at Gitmo for all detainees; and that far from being reluctant to use these techniques even within the guidelines set out by the OLC, the Defense Department couldn’t wait to use them. Still, those counterclaims gained little traction until the revelations about Abu Ghraib broke in the spring of 2004.

_____________

ABU GHRAIB

It is important to remember that the exposure of the abuses at Abu Ghraib came not from a reporter or human-rights advocate or international agency, but from within the Department of Defense itself. It was the classic case of a government agency learning about abuses and violations of specific guidelines, thoroughly investigating the abuse, alerting higher-ups of the problem, and then dismissing and punishing those responsible—while developing additional guidelines to prevent it from happening again. The Abu Ghraib investigation, in short, was government at its most responsive and effective.

All the same, it was a propaganda gold mine for Ratner and his allies. Now they could attach a series of disturbing visual images to their stories about treatment of Gitmo detainees—in fact, in The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld, Ratner has exterior pictures of prisoners at Gitmo’s Camp X-Ray followed immediately by interior snapshots from Abu Ghraib, as if they were in actual sequence. The implication was that what happened at Abu Ghraib was normal procedure in Gitmo.

By that spring, also, Democrats were looking for a campaign issue to derail President Bush’s reelection chances. The Bush administration’s “culpability” for Abu Ghraib was made to order. “Shamefully,” Senator Edward Kennedy said on the floor of the Senate, “we now learn that Saddam’s torture chambers [are] reopened under new management: U.S. management.” Reading the FBI memos in light of the Abu Ghraib pictures, Senator Dick Durbin compared the Gitmo jailors to Nazis and the Soviets in the gulag, henchmen of some “mad regime—Pol Pot and others—who have no concern for human beings.”

So Democrats were quick to embrace the thesis put forward by Seymour Hersh in his book Chain of Command: Even if Bush and Rumsfeld hadn’t actually ordered the abuses at Abu Ghraib, still, their “hard” approach to the war on terror, denying Gitmo suspects American-style civil rights and allowing coercive interrogations, had created an atmosphere in which torture was condoned and even common. Hersh attempted to make this explicit by pointing out that Gitmo’s former commandant, Geoffrey Miller, had been sent to Iraq to advise on interrogations in August 2003. Here was clear evidence, Hersh and others claimed, that the Bush administration had wanted to extend Gitmo’s “reign of terror” into occupied Iraq. But the opposite was true. Miller had been sent to Iraq precisely to make sure that American prisoner detention facilities there lived up to the rigorous standards applied at Gitmo under Miller’s tenure.

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Footnotes

¹This was demonstrated by the case of Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, where inmates used their mosque (deemed off limits to U.S. personnel) to dig an escape tunnel and build a cache of homemade weapons, including concrete shards and bombs built from feces, socks, and flammable hand sanitizer. When the tunnel was discovered in March 2005, prisoners rioted for four days, injuring several U.S. soldiers; ultimately infantry units and a Black Hawk helicopter had to be used to restore order. As Kyndra Rotunda relates in her book, Honor Bound, the Camp Bucca incident, almost completely ignored by the American press, weighed heavily on the minds of Gitmo staff.

² Meanwhile, the 2004 commission headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger cleared the Defense Department and Bush administration of any responsibility for what had happened at Abu Ghraib.

³ According to Richard Clarke’s memoirs, Against All Enemies, Vice President Al Gore cheered them on. Clarke tells the story of Gore coming to a 1993 NSC meeting where the idea of “extraordinary rendition” was proposed. While White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler had his doubts, Gore had none. “That’s a no brainer,” Clarke says Gore declared, “of course it’s a violation of international law. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.”

Testing

One of the advantages of having Barack Obama as president of the hyperpower, is that it puts his great mass of fans, in America and abroad, in the position of having to think about real problems. It turns out the solution to each of them was more complicated than "get rid of Bush." The world does not spontaneously change when the president changes.

North Korea, Iran, and a seriously unstable Pakistan continue to present plausible and pressing nuclear threats. Islamist terrorists continue to seek soft targets right around the world; and the fanatic Islamist ideology continues to win adherents, even in New York prison cells. For that matter, problems of disease, poverty, petty tyranny and oppression, with or without war, continue to afflict our species, regardless of who comes and goes from an office in Washington. America's allies become no more likely to pull their weight, and no less apt to strike self-serving rhetorical postures.

The banking problems, the environmental and other notional issues, must be seen in a new light. It is no use just inventing bogeymen, and accusing them of imaginary crimes. Suddenly the facts matter, and the advantages of pretending disappear. Can we really afford to drain the whole economy to douse a financial brush fire? Can we afford to demonize the whole wealth-creating class? If the "threat of global warming" is (as becomes increasingly obvious) a gigantic imposture, can we afford to remain hostage to the environmentalists' perpetually escalating demands?

The farce over Guantanamo illustrates all of this. From a grand initial "symbolic gesture" -- a promise to vindicate "human rights" by closing this offshore holding tank for the world's most dangerous terrorists -- the Obama administration learned why Guantanamo was set up, and why each decision was made, right down to waterboarding three of the inmates to get urgent information on the next terrorist hits.

The Guantanamo arrangements were a bad solution to an intractable problem, but all the other solutions were worse. And now, Obama's "symbolic gesture" must confront Dick Cheney's hard facts, and the new president may begin to learn what is wrong with symbolic gestures.

The Obama administration has taken a pass on confronting Iran's nuclear threat to annihilate Israel: the president publicly giving the ayatollahs until the end of the year to do what they will, after his symbolic offer of direct talks was mostly spurned. Instead, he will focus on getting concessions out of Israel, in the hope that a cosmetic "two state solution" can change the optics throughout the Middle East. The clock continues ticking.

But in North Korea, no opportunity remains for postponement.

On Monday, the North Koreans performed a controlled underground explosion of a nuclear device of up to 20 kilotons. This was their second nuclear test: the first, in October 2006, was for a device of less than one kiloton. The first test went badly; this latest appears to have gone well. From these facts alone we see that their technicians have made immense progress.

Last month, Pyongyang tested another long-range ballistic missile, also in defiance of all the agreements it had made with the Bush administration, and its neighbours. We thus have a rogue state indifferent to world opinion that is rapidly acquiring the means to alter the geopolitical map by its ability to incinerate a city such as Tokyo.

What, then, is the symbolic gesture that will make them stop? For the North Korean politburo remains unmoved by the president's various expressions of grave concern.

The policy of the Bush administration, prior to 2007, was to apply real and increasing pressure on the regime, from cutting off aid to intruding upon its international financial transactions. This persuaded North Korea to make the agreements they have now comprehensively broken. The U.S. State Department remains in love with "engagement" -- it is their professional myopia -- but the time comes when a president has to act.

In the case of North Korea, that time is now. America's new president has the support, potentially, of a Chinese government that is seriously distressed by Pyongyang's behaviour. He has a Japanese government that never doubted the need for consistent, decisive action. And in Lee Myung-bak, he has a South Korean president who is a fully-declared U.S. ally, who enjoys popular support for confronting the crisis, and who appreciates the failure of past symbolic gestures. Therefore President Obama has an unusually promising opportunity to show that he is not a chump.

He has indeed what may be his make-or-break opportunity to show not only North Korea, but through what he does there, Iran and the rest of the world, that he can move beyond symbolic gestures. But he must take steps that visibly change North Korea's behaviour to pull this off.

Pravda: American capitalism gone with a whimper

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?

These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more then a whimper to their masters.

Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.

So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK's Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.

Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper...but a "freeman" whimper.

So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses? Senator Barney Franks, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.

The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

Stanislav Mishin

The article has been reprinted with the kind permission from the author and originally appears on his blog, Mat Rodina

The Case Against Sotomayor

Top 100 Bicycle Retailers 2009

The Church of the Bicycle Jersey

Yea, Brethren, open now your books to Revolutions 53:12. When Sunday morning rolls around and the spousal unit says "Why don't you ever come to church with me?" Face it: You know that you pray at the church of the bicycle, and this is no false idol. You figure anything that can get you 100 km down the road for the cost of a bean and cheese burrito is worth praying toward. In fact, I think they otta make you reverend. Maybe you should hold forth on Sunday mornings at the front of your flock. Before the meek inherit the earth let them grovel on your wheel a bit. Halleluiah!

Church of the Bicycle icon on the front, book of revolutions, 53:12 on the shoulders, clerical collar. Formal enough for Sunday services, casual enough for the coffee social after. 3/4 length hidden zipper, 3 roomy pockets on the back for your emergency ministry kit. Made of Aries Micro Plus sublimated fabric, Designed and Manufactured in California. Ships with a mess of Church of the Bicycle temporary tattoos (which were made in Arizona since you were wondering).

Pelosi v. The CIA

Niebuhr and Obama. What does the president’s taste for the theologian foretell?

Is Food the New Sex?

Of all the truly seismic shifts transforming daily life today — deeper than our financial fissures, wider even than our most obvious political and cultural divides — one of the most important is also among the least remarked. That is the chasm in attitude that separates almost all of us living in the West today from almost all of our ancestors, over two things without which human beings cannot exist: food and sex.

The question before us today is not whether the two appetites are closely connected. About that much, philosophers and other commentators have been agreed for a very long time. As far back as Aristotle, observers have made the same point reiterated in 1749 in Henry Fielding’s famous scene in Tom Jones: The desires for sex and for food are joined at the root. The fact that Fielding’s scene would go on to inspire an equally iconic movie segment over 200 years later, in the Tom Jones film from 1963, just clinches the point.

What happens when, for the first time in history, adult human beings are free to have all the sex and food they want?

Philosophers and artists aside, ordinary language itself verifies how similarly the two appetites are experienced, with many of the same words crossing over to describe what is desirable and undesirable in each case. In fact, we sometimes have trouble even talking about food without metaphorically invoking sex, and vice versa. In a hundred entangled ways, judging by either language or literature, the human mind juggles sex and food almost interchangeably at times. And why not? Both desires can make people do things they otherwise would not; and both are experienced at different times by most men and women as the most powerful of all human drives.

One more critical link between the appetites for sex and food is this: Both, if pursued without regard to consequence, can prove ruinous not only to oneself, but also to other people, and even to society itself. No doubt for that reason, both appetites have historically been subject in all civilizations to rules both formal and informal. Thus the potentially destructive forces of sex — disease, disorder, sexual aggression, sexual jealousy, and what used to be called “home-wrecking” — have been ameliorated in every recorded society by legal, social, and religious conventions, primarily stigma and punishment. Similarly, all societies have developed rules and rituals governing food in part to avoid the destructiveness of free-for-alls over scarce necessities. And while food rules may not always have been as stringent as sex rules, they have nevertheless been stringent as needed. Such is the meaning, for example, of being hanged for stealing a loaf of bread in the marketplace, or keel-hauled for plundering rations on a ship.

These disciplines imposed historically on access to food and sex now raise a question that has not come up before, probably because it was not even possible to imagine it until the lifetimes of the people reading this: What happens when, for the first time in history — at least in theory, and at least in the advanced nations — adult human beings are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want?

This question opens the door to a real paradox. For given how closely connected the two appetites appear to be, it would be natural to expect that people would do the same kinds of things with both appetites — that they would pursue both with equal ardor when finally allowed to do so, for example, or with equal abandon for consequence; or conversely, with similar degrees of discipline in the consumption of each.

In fact, though, evidence from the advanced West suggests that nearly the opposite seems to be true. The answer appears to be that when many people are faced with these possibilities for the very first time, they end up doing very different things — things we might signal by shorthand as mindful eating, and mindless sex. This essay is both an exploration of that curious dynamic, and a speculation about what is driving it.

As much as you want

The dramatic expansion in access to food on the one hand and to sex on the other are complicated stories; but in each case, technology has written most of it.

Up until just about now, for example, the prime brakes on sex outside of marriage have been several: fear of pregnancy, fear of social stigma and punishment, and fear of disease. The Pill and its cousins have substantially undermined the first two strictures, at least in theory, while modern medicine has largely erased the third. Even hiv/aids, only a decade ago a stunning exception to the brand new rule that one could apparently have any kind of sex at all without serious consequence, is now regarded as a “manageable” disease in the affluent West, even as it continues to kill millions of less fortunate patients elsewhere.

As for food, here too one technological revolution after another explains the extraordinary change in its availability: pesticides, mechanized farming, economical transportation, genetic manipulation of food stocks, and other advances. As a result, almost everyone in the Western world is now able to buy sustenance of all kinds, for very little money, and in quantities unimaginable until the lifetimes of the people reading this.

One result of this change in food fortune, of course, is the unprecedented “disease of civilization” known as obesity, with its corollary ills. Nevertheless, the commonplace fact of obesity in today’s West itself testifies to the point that access to food has expanded exponentially for just about everyone. So does the statistical fact that obesity is most prevalent in the lowest social classes and least exhibited in the highest.

And just as technology has made sex and food more accessible for a great many people, important extra-technological influences on both pursuits — particularly longstanding religious strictures — have meanwhile diminished in a way that has made both appetites even easier to indulge. The opprobrium reserved for gluttony, for example, seems to have little immediate force now, even among believers. On the rare occasions when one even sees the word, it is almost always used in a metaphorical, secular sense.

Similarly, and far more consequential, the longstanding religious prohibitions in every major creed against extramarital sex have rather famously loosed their holds over the contemporary mind. Of particular significance, perhaps, has been the movement of many Protestant denominations away from the sexual morality agreed upon by the previous millennia of Christendom. The Anglican abandonment in 1930 of the longstanding prohibition against artificial contraception is a special case in point, undermining as it subsequently did for many believers the very idea that any church could tell people what to do with their bodies, ever again. Whether they defended their traditional teachings or abandoned them, however, all Western Christian churches in the past century have found themselves increasingly beleaguered over issues of sex, and commensurately less influential over all but a fraction of the most traditionally minded parishioners.

Of course this waning of the traditional restraints on the pursuit of sex and food is only part of the story; any number of non-religious forces today also act as contemporary brakes on both. In the case of food, for example, these would include factors like personal vanity, say, or health concerns, or preoccupation with the morality of what is consumed (about which more below). Similarly, to acknowledge that sex is more accessible than ever before is not to say that it is always and everywhere available. Many people who do not think they will go to hell for premarital sex or adultery, for example, find brakes on their desires for other reasons: fear of disease, fear of hurting children or other loved ones, fear of disrupting one’s career, fear of financial setbacks in the form of divorce and child support, and so on.

Even men and women who do want all the food or sex they can get their hands on face obstacles of other kinds in their pursuit. Though many people really can afford to eat more or less around the clock, for example, home economics will still put the brakes on; it’s not as if everyone can afford pheasant under glass day and night. The same is true of sex, which likewise imposes its own unwritten yet practical constraints. Older and less attractive people simply cannot command the sexual marketplace as the younger and more attractive can (which is why the promises of erasing time and age are such a booming business in a post-liberation age). So do time and age still circumscribe the pursuit of sex, even as churches and other conventional enforcers increasingly do not.

Still and all, the initial point stands: As consumers of both sex and food, today’s people in the advanced societies are freer to pursue and consume both than almost all the human beings who came before us; and our culture has evolved in interesting ways to exhibit both those trends.

Broccoli, pornography, and Kant

To begin to see just how recent and dramatic this change is, let us imagine some broad features of the world seen through two different sets of eyes: a hypothetical 30-year-old housewife from 1958 named Betty, and her hypothetical granddaughter Jennifer, of the same age, today.

Begin with a tour of Betty’s kitchen. Much of what she makes comes from jars and cans. Much of it is also heavy on substances that people of our time are told to minimize — dairy products, red meat, refined sugars and flours — because of compelling research about nutrition that occurred after Betty’s time. Betty’s freezer is filled with meat every four months by a visiting company that specializes in volume, and on most nights she thaws a piece of this and accompanies it with food from one or two jars. If there is anything “fresh” on the plate, it is likely a potato. Interestingly, and rudimentary to our contemporary eyes though it may be, Betty’s food is served with what for us would appear to be high ceremony, i.e., at a set table with family members present.

As it happens, there is little that Betty herself, who is adventurous by the standards of her day, will not eat; the going slogan she learned as a child is about cleaning your plate, and not doing so is still considered bad form. Aside from that notion though, which is a holdover to scarcer times, Betty is much like any other American home cook in 1958. She likes making some things and not others, even as she prefers eating some things to others — and there, in personal aesthetics, does the matter end for her. It’s not that Betty lacks opinions about food. It’s just that the ones she has are limited to what she does and does not personally like to make and eat.

Now imagine one possible counterpart to Betty today, her 30-year-old granddaughter Jennifer. Jennifer has almost no cans or jars in her cupboard. She has no children or husband or live-in boyfriend either, which is why her kitchen table on most nights features a laptop and goes unset. Yet interestingly enough, despite the lack of ceremony at the table, Jennifer pays far more attention to food, and feels far more strongly in her convictions about it, than anyone she knows from Betty’s time.

Wavering in and out of vegetarianism, Jennifer is adamantly opposed to eating red meat or endangered fish. She is also opposed to industrialized breeding, genetically enhanced fruits and vegetables, and to pesticides and other artificial agents. She tries to minimize her dairy intake, and cooks tofu as much as possible. She also buys “organic” in the belief that it is better both for her and for the animals raised in that way, even though the products are markedly more expensive than those from the local grocery store. Her diet is heavy in all the ways that Betty’s was light: with fresh vegetables and fruits in particular. Jennifer has nothing but ice in her freezer, soymilk and various other items her grandmother wouldn’t have recognized in the refrigerator, and on the counter stands a vegetable juicer she feels she “ought” to use more.

Most important of all, however, is the difference in moral attitude separating Betty and Jennifer on the matter of food. Jennifer feels that there is a right and wrong about these options that transcends her exercise of choice as a consumer. She does not exactly condemn those who believe otherwise, but she doesn’t understand why they do, either. And she certainly thinks the world would be a better place if more people evaluated their food choices as she does. She even proselytizes on occasion when she can.

In short, with regard to food, Jennifer falls within Immanuel Kant’s definition of the Categorical Imperative: She acts according to a set of maxims that she wills at the same time to be universal law.

Betty, on the other hand, would be baffled by the idea of dragooning such moral abstractions into the service of food. This is partly because, as a child of her time, she was impressed — as Jennifer is not — about what happens when food is scarce (Betty’s parents told her often about their memories of the Great Depression; and many of the older men of her time had vivid memories of deprivation in wartime). Even without such personal links to food scarcity, though, it makes no sense to Betty that people would feel as strongly as her granddaughter does about something as simple as deciding just what goes into one’s mouth. That is because Betty feels, as Jennifer obviously does not, that opinions about food are simply de gustibus, a matter of individual taste — and only that.

This clear difference in opinion leads to an intriguing juxtaposition. Just as Betty and Jennifer have radically different approaches to food, so do they to matters of sex. For Betty, the ground rules of her time — which she both participates in and substantially agrees with — are clear: Just about every exercise of sex outside marriage is subject to social (if not always private) opprobrium. Wavering in and out of established religion herself, Betty nevertheless clearly adheres to a traditional Judeo-Christian sexual ethic. Thus, for example, Mr. Jones next door “ran off” with another woman, leaving his wife and children behind; Susie in the town nearby got pregnant and wasn’t allowed back in school; Uncle Bill is rumored to have contracted gonorrhea; and so on. None of these breaches of the going sexual ethic is considered by Betty to be a good thing, let alone a celebrated thing. They are not even considered to be neutral things. In fact, they are all considered by her to be wrong.

Most important of all, Betty feels that sex, unlike food, is not de gustibus. She believes to the contrary that there is a right and wrong about these choices that transcends any individual act. She further believes that the world would be a better place, and individual people better off, if others believed as she does. She even proselytizes such on occasion when given the chance.

In short, as Jennifer does with food, Betty in the matter of sex fulfills the requirements for Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

Jennifer’s approach to sex is just about 180 degrees different. She too disapproves of the father next door who left his wife and children for a younger woman; she does not want to be cheated on herself, or to have those she cares about cheated on either. These ground-zero stipulations, aside, however, she is otherwise laissez-faire on just about every other aspect of nonmarital sex. She believes that living together before marriage is not only morally neutral, but actually better than not having such a “trial run.” Pregnant unwed Susie in the next town doesn’t elicit a thought one way or the other from her, and neither does Uncle Bill’s gonorrhea, which is of course a trivial medical matter between him and his doctor.

Jennifer, unlike Betty, thinks that falling in love creates its own demands and generally trumps other considerations — unless perhaps children are involved (and sometimes, on a case-by-case basis, then too). A consistent thinker in this respect, she also accepts the consequences of her libertarian convictions about sex. She is pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, indifferent to ethical questions about stem cell research and other technological manipulations of nature (as she is not, ironically, when it comes to food), and agnostic on the question of whether any particular parental arrangements seem best for children. She has even been known to watch pornography with her boyfriend, at his coaxing, in part to show just how very laissez-faire she is.

Betty thinks food is a matter of taste, whereas sex is governed by universal moral law; and Jennifer thinks exactly the reverse.

Most important, once again, is the difference in moral attitude between the two women on this subject of sex. Betty feels that there is a right and wrong about sexual choices that transcends any individual act, and Jennifer — exceptions noted — does not. It’s not that Jennifer lacks for opinions about sex, any more than Betty does about food. It’s just that, for the most part, they are limited to what she personally does and doesn’t like.

Thus far, what the imaginary examples of Betty and Jennifer have established is this: Their personal moral relationships toward food and toward sex are just about perfectly reversed. Betty does care about nutrition and food, but it doesn’t occur to her to extend her opinions to a moral judgment — i.e., to believe that other people ought to do as she does in the matter of food, and that they are wrong if they don’t. In fact, she thinks such an extension would be wrong in a different way; it would be impolite, needlessly judgmental, simply not done. Jennifer, similarly, does care to some limited degree about what other people do about sex; but it seldom occurs to her to extend her opinions to a moral judgment. In fact, she thinks such an extension would be wrong in a different way — because it would be impolite, needlessly judgmental, simply not done.

On the other hand, Jennifer is genuinely certain that her opinions about food are not only nutritionally correct, but also, in some deep, meaningful sense, morally correct — i.e., she feels that others ought to do something like what she does. And Betty, on the other hand, feels exactly the same way about what she calls sexual morality.

As noted, this desire to extend their personal opinions in two different areas to an “ought” that they think should be somehow binding — binding, that is, to the idea that others should do the same — is the definition of the Kantian imperative. Once again, note: Betty’s Kantian imperative concerns sex not food, and Jennifer’s concerns food not sex. In just over 50 years, in other words — not for everyone, of course, but for a great many people, and for an especially large portion of sophisticated people — the moral poles of sex and food have been reversed. Betty thinks food is a matter of taste, whereas sex is governed by universal moral law of some kind; and Jennifer thinks exactly the reverse.

What has happened here?

Role reversal

Betty and jennifermay be imaginary, but the decades that separate the two women have brought related changes to the lives of many millions. In the 50 years between their two kitchens, a similar polar transformation has taken root and grown not only throughout America but also throughout Western society itself. During those years, cultural artifacts and forces in the form of articles, books, movies, and ideas aimed at deregulating what is now quaintly called “nonmarital sex” have abounded and prospered; while the cultural artifacts and forces aimed at regulating or seeking to re-regulate sex outside of marriage have largely declined. In the matter of food, on the other hand, exactly the reverse has happened. Increasing scrutiny over the decades to the quality of what goes into people’s mouths has been accompanied by something almost wholly new under the sun: the rise of universalizable moral codes based on food choices.

Begin with the more familiar face of diets and fads — the Atkins diet, the Zone diet, the tea diet, the high-carb diet, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, and all the rest of the food fixes promising us new and improved versions of ourselves. Abundant though they and all their relatives are, those short-term fads and diets are nevertheless merely epiphenomena.

Digging a little deeper, the obsession with food that they reflect resonates in many other strata of the commercial marketplace. Book reading, for example, may indeed be on the way out, but until it goes, cookbooks and food books remain among the most reliable moneymakers in the industry. To scan the bestseller lists or page the major reviews in any given month is to find that books on food and food-thought are at least reliably represented, and sometimes even predominate — to list a few from the past few years alone: Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma; Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation; Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories; Bill Buford’s Heat.

Then there are the voyeur and celebrity genres, which have made some chefs the equivalent of rock stars and further feed the public curiosity with books like Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly or Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter or The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef. Anywhere you go, anywhere you look, food in one form or another is what’s on tap. The proliferation of chains like Whole Foods, the recent institution by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of state-mandated nutritional breakdowns in restaurants in the state of California (a move that is sure to be repeated by governors in the other 49): All these and many other developments speak to the paramount place occupied by food and food choices in the modern consciousness. As the New York Times Magazine noted recently, in a foreword emphasizing the intended expansion of its (already sizeable) food coverage, such writing is “perhaps never a more crucial part of what we do than today — a moment when what and how we eat has emerged as a Washington issue and a global-environmental issue as well as a kitchen-table one.”

Underneath the passing fads and short-term fixes and notices like these, deep down where the real seismic change lies, is a series of revolutions in how we now think about food — changes that focus not on today or tomorrow, but on eating as a way of life.

One recent influential figure in this tradition was George Ohsawa, a Japanese philosopher who codified what is known as macrobiotics. Popularized in the United States by his pupil, Michio Kushi, macrobiotics has been the object of fierce debate for several decades now, and Kushi’s book, The Macrobiotic Path to Total Health: A Complete Guide to Naturally Preventing and Relieving More Than 200 Chronic Conditions and Disorders, remains one of the modern bibles on food. Macrobiotics makes historical as well as moral claims, including the claim that its tradition stretches back to Hippocrates and includes Jesus and the Han dynasty among other enlightened beneficiaries. These claims are also reflected in the macrobiotic system, which includes the expression of gratitude (not exactly prayers) for food, serenity in the preparation of it, and other extra-nutritional ritual. And even as the macrobiotic discipline has proved too ascetic for many people (and certainly for most Americans), one can see its influence at work in other serious treatments of the food question that have trickled outward. The current popular call to “mindful eating,” for example, echoes the macrobiotic injunction to think of nothing but food and gratitude while consuming, even to the point of chewing any given mouthful at least 50 times.

Alongside macrobiotics, the past decades have also seen tremendous growth in vegetarianism and its related offshoots, another food system that typically makes moral as well as health claims. As a movement, and depending on which part of the world one looks at, vegetarianism predates macrobiotics.¹ Vegetarian histories claim for themselves the Brahmins, Buddhists, Jainists, and Zoroastrians, as well as certain Jewish and Christian practitioners. In the modern West, Percy Bysshe Shelley was a prominent activist in the early nineteenth century; and the first Vegetarian Society was founded in England in 1847.

Around the same time in the United States, a Presbyterian minister named Sylvester Graham popularized vegetarianism in tandem with a campaign against excess of all kinds (ironically, under the circumstances, this health titan is remembered primarily for the Graham cracker). Various other American religious groups have also gone in for vegetarianism, including the Seventh Day Adventists, studies on whom make up some of the most compelling data about the possible health benefits of a diet devoid of animal flesh. Uniting numerous discrete movements under one umbrella is the International Vegetarian Union, which started just a hundred years ago, in 1908.

Despite this long history, though, it is clear that vegetarianism apart from its role in religious movements did not really take off as a mass movement until relatively recently. Even so, its contemporary success has been remarkable. Pushed perhaps by the synergistic public interest in macrobiotics and nutritional health, and nudged also by occasional rallying books including Peter Singer’s Animal Rights and Matthew Scully’s Dominion, vegetarianism today is one of the most successful secular moral movements in the West; whereas macrobiotics for its part, though less successful as a mass movement by name, has witnessed the vindication of some of its core ideas and stands as a kind of synergistic brother in arms.

To be sure, macrobiotics and vegetarianism/veganism have their doctrinal differences. Macrobiotics limits animal flesh not out of moral indignation, but for reasons of health and Eastern ideas of proper “balancing” of the forces of yin and yang. Similarly, macrobiotics also allows for moderate amounts of certain types of fish — as strict vegans do not. On the other hand, macrobiotics also bans a number of plants (among them tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and tropical fruits), whereas vegetarianism bans none. Nonetheless, macrobiotics and vegetarianism have more in common than not, especially from the point of view of anyone eating outside either of these codes. The doctrinal differences separating one from another are about equivalent in force today to those between, say, Presbyterians and Lutherans.

And that is exactly the point. For many people, schismatic differences about food have taken the place of schismatic differences about faith. Again, the curiosity is just how recent this is. Throughout history, practically no one devoted this much time to matters of food as ideas (as opposed to, say, time spent gathering the stuff). Still less does it appear to have occurred to people that dietary schools could be untethered from a larger metaphysical and moral worldview. Observant Jews and Muslims, among others, have had strict dietary laws from their faiths’ inception; but that is just it — their laws told believers what to do with food when they got it, rather than inviting them to dwell on food as a thing in itself. Like the Adventists, who speak of their vegetarianism as being “harmony with the Creator,” or like the Catholics with their itinerant Lenten and other obligations, these previous dietary laws were clearly designed to enhance religion — not replace it.

Do today’s influential dietary ways of life in effect replace religion? Consider that macrobiotics, vegetarianism, and veganism all make larger health claims as part of their universality — but unlike yesteryear, to repeat the point, most of them no longer do so in conjunction with organized religion. Macrobiotics, for its part, argues (with some evidence) that processed foods and too much animal flesh are toxic to the human body, whereas whole grains, vegetables, and fruits are not. The literature of vegetarianism makes a similar point, recently drawing particular attention to new research concerning the connection between the consumption of red meat and certain cancers. In both cases, however, dietary laws are not intended to be handmaidens to a higher cause, but moral causes in themselves.

Just as the food of today often attracts a level of metaphysical attentiveness suggestive of the sex of yesterday, so does food today seem attended by a similarly evocative — and proliferating — number of verboten signs. The opprobrium reserved for perceived “violations” of what one “ought” to do has migrated, in some cases fully, from one to the other. Many people who wouldn’t be caught dead with an extra ten pounds — or eating a hamburger, or wearing real leather — tend to be laissez-faire in matters of sex. In fact, just observing the world as it is, one is tempted to say that the more vehement people are about the morality of their food choices, themore hands-off they believe the rest of the world should be about sex. What were the circumstances the last time you heard or used the word “guilt” — in conjunction with sin as traditionally conceived? Or with having eaten something verboten and not having gone to the gym?

Perhaps the most revealing example of the infusion of morality into food codes can be found in the current European passion for what the French call terroir — an idea that originally referred to the specific qualities conferred by geography on certain food products (notably wine) and that has now assumed a life of its own as a moral guide to buying and consuming locally. That there is no such widespread, concomitant attempt to impose a new morality on sexual pursuits in Western Europe seems something of an understatement. But as a measure of the reach of terroir as a moral code, consider only a sermon from Durham Cathedral in 2007. In it, the dean explained Lent as an event that “says to us, cultivate a good terroir, a spiritual ecology that will re-focus our passion for God, our praying, our pursuit of justice in the world, our care for our fellow human beings.”

There stands an emblematic example of the reversal between food and sex in our time: in which the once-universal moral code of European Christianity is being explicated for the masses by reference to the now apparently more-universal European moral code of consumption à la terroir.

Moreover, this reversal between sex and food appears firmer the more passionately one clings to either pole. Thus, for instance, though much has lately been made of the “greening” of the evangelicals, no vegetarian Christian group is as nationally known as, say, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals or any number of other vegetarian/vegan organizations, most of which appear to be secular or anti-religious and none of which, so far as my research shows, extend their universalizable moral ambitions to the realm of sexuality. When Skinny Bitch — a hip guide to veganism that recently topped the bestseller lists for months — exhorts its readers to a life that is “clean, pure, healthy,” for example, it is emphatically not including sex in this moral vocabulary, and makes a point of saying so.

C.S. Lewis once compared the two desires as follows, to make the point that something about sex had gotten incommensurate in his own time: “There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.” He was making a point in the genre of reductio ad absurdum.

But for the jibe to work as it once did, our shared sense of what is absurd about it must work too — and that shared sense, in an age as visually, morally, and aesthetically dominated by food as is our own, is waning fast. Consider the coining of the term “gastroporn” to describe the eerily similar styles of high-definition pornography on the one hand and stylized shots of food on the other. Actually, the term is not even that new. It dates back at least 30 years, to a 1977 essay by that title in the New York Review of Books. In it author Andrew Cockburn observed that “it cannot escape attention that there are curious parallels between manuals on sexual techniques and manuals on the preparation of food; the same studious emphasis on leisurely technique, the same apostrophes to the ultimate, heavenly delights. True gastro-porn heightens the excitement and also the sense of the unattainable by proffering colored photographs of various completed recipes.”

With such a transfer, the polar migrations of food and sex during the last half century would appear complete.

Respecting some hazards, ignoring others

If it is true that food is the new sex, however, where does that leave sex? This brings us to the paradox already hinted at. As the consumption of food not only literally but also figuratively has become progressively more discriminate and thoughtful, at least in theory (if rather obviously not always in practice), the consumption of sex in various forms appears to have become the opposite for a great many people: i.e., progressively more indiscriminate and unthinking.

Several proofs could be offered for such a claim, beginning with any number of statistical studies. Both men and women are far less likely to be sexually inexperienced on their weddings now (if indeed they marry) than they were just a few decades ago. They are also more likely to be experienced in all kinds of ways, including in the use of pornography. Like the example of Jennifer, moreover, their general thoughts about sex become more laissez-faire the further down the age demographic one goes.

Consider as further proof of the dumbing-down of sex the coarseness of popular entertainment, say through a popular advice column on left-leaning Slate magazine called “Dear Prudence” that concerns “manners and morals.” Practically every subject line is window onto a world of cheap, indiscriminate sex, where the only ground rule is apparently that no sexual urge shall ever be discouraged unless it manifestly hurts others — meaning literally. “Should I destroy the erotic video my husband and I have made?” “My boyfriend’s kinky fetish might doom our relationship.” “My husband wants me to abort, and I don’t.” “How do I tell my daughter she’s the result of a sexual assault?” “A friend confessed to a fling with my now-dead husband.” And so on. The mindful vegetarian slogan, “you are what you eat,” has no counterpart in the popular culture today when it comes to sex.

The third and probably most important feature of sex in our time testifying to the ubiquity of appetites fulfilled and indulged indiscriminately is the staggering level of consumption of Internet pornography. As Ross Douthat recently summarized in an essay for the Atlantic, provocatively titled “Is Pornography Adultery?”:

Over the past three decades, the vcr, on-demand cable service, and the Internet have completely overhauled the ways in which people interact with porn. Innovation has piled on innovation, making modern pornography a more immediate, visceral, and personalized experience. Nothing in the long history of erotica compares with the way millions of Americans experience porn today, and our moral intuitions are struggling to catch up.

Statistics too, or at least preliminary ones, bear out just how consequential this erotic novelty is becoming. Pornography is the single most viewed subject online, by men anyway; it is increasingly a significant factor in divorce cases; and it is resulting in any number of cottage industries, from the fields of therapy to law to academia, as society’s leading cultural institutions strive to measure and cope with its impact.²

This junk sex shares all the defining features of junk food. It is produced and consumed by people who do not know one another. It is disdained by those who believe they have access to more authentic experience or “healthier” options. Internet pornography is further widely said — right now, in its relatively early years — to be harmless, much as few people thought little of the ills to come through convenient prepared food when it first appeared; and evidence is also beginning to emerge about compulsive pornography consumption, as it did slowly but surely in the case of compulsive packaged food consumption, that this laissez-faire judgment is wrong.³

This brings us to another similarity between junk sex and junk food: People are furtive about both, and many feel guilty about their pursuit and indulgence of each. And those who consume large amounts of both are also typically self-deceptive, too: i.e., they underestimate just how much they do it and deny its ill effects on the rest of their lives. In sum, to compare junk food to junk sex is to realize that they have become virtually interchangeable vices — even if many people who do not put “sex” in the category of vice will readily do so with food.

At this point, the impatient reader will interject that something else — something understandable and anodyne — is driving the increasing attention to food in our day: namely, the fact that we have learned much more than humans used to know about the importance of a proper diet to health and longevity. And this is surely a point borne out by the facts, too. One attraction of macrobiotics, for example, is its promise to reduce the risks of cancer. The fall in cholesterol that attends a true vegan or vegetarian diet is another example. Manifestly, one reason that people today are so much more discriminating about food is that decades of recent research have taught us that diet has more potent effects than Betty and her friends understood, and can be bad for you or good for you in ways not enumerated before.

All that is true, but then the question is this: Why aren’t more people doing the same with sex?

For here we come to the most fascinating turn of all. One cannot answer the question by arguing that there is no such empirical news about indiscriminately pursued sex and how it can be good or bad for you; to the contrary, there is, and lots of it. After all, several decades of empirical research — which also did not exist before — have demonstrated that the sexual revolution, too, has had consequences, and that many of them have redounded to the detriment of a sexually liberationist ethic.

Married, monogamous people are more likely to be happy. They live longer. These effects are particularly evident for men. Divorced men in particular and conversely face health risks — including heightened drug use and alcoholism — that married men do not. Married men also work more and save more, and married households not surprisingly trump other households in income. Divorce, by contrast, is often a financial catastrophe for a family, particularly the women and children in it. So is illegitimacy typically a financial disaster.

By any number of measures, moreover, nontraditional sexual morality — and the fallout from it — is detrimental to the well-being of one specifically vulnerable subset: children. Children from broken homes are at risk for all kinds of behavioral, psychological, educational, and other problems that children from intact homes are not. Children from fatherless homes are far more likely to end up in prison than are those who grew up with both biological parents. Girls growing up without a biological father are far more likely to suffer physical or sexual abuse. Girls and boys, numerous sources also show, are adversely affected by family breakup into adulthood, and have higher risks than children from intact homes of repeating the pattern of breakup themselves.

This recital touches only the periphery of the empirical record now being assembled about the costs of laissez-faire sex to American society — a record made all the more interesting by the fact that it could not have been foreseen back when sexual liberationism seemed merely synonymous with the removal of some seemingly inexplicable old stigmas. Today, however, two generations of social science replete with studies, surveys, and regression analyses galore stand between the Moynihan Report and what we know now, and the overall weight of its findings is clear. The sexual revolution — meaning the widespread extension of sex outside of marriage and frequently outside commitment of any kind — has had negative effects on many people, chiefly the most vulnerable; and it has also had clear financial costs to society at large. And this is true not only in the obvious ways, like the spread of aids and other stds, but also in other ways affecting human well-being, beginning but not ending with those enumerated above.

The question raised by this record is not why some people changed their habits and ideas when faced with compelling new facts about food and quality of life. It is rather why more people have not done the same about sex.

The mindless shift

When friedrich nietzschewrote longingly of the “transvaluation of all values,” he meant the hoped-for restoration of sexuality to its proper place as a celebrated, morally neutral life force. He could not possibly have foreseen our world: one in which sex would indeed become “morally neutral” in the eyes of a great many people — even as food would come to replace it as source of moral authority.⁴

Nevertheless, events have proven Nietzsche wrong about his wider hope that men and women of the future would simply enjoy the benefits of free sex without any attendant seismic shifts. For there may in fact be no such thing as a destigmatization of sex simplicitur, as the events outlined in this essay suggest. The rise of a recognizably Kantian, morally universalizable code concerning food — beginning with the international vegetarian movement of the last century and proceeding with increasing moral fervor into our own times via macrobiotics, veganism/vegetarianism, and European codes of terroir — has paralleled exactly the waning of a universally accepted sexual code in the Western world during these same years.

Who can doubt that the two trends are related? Unable or unwilling (or both) to impose rules on sex at a time when it is easier to pursue it than ever before, yet equally unwilling to dispense altogether with a universal moral code that he would have bind society against the problems created by exactly that pursuit, modern man (and woman) has apparently performed his own act of transubstantiation. He has taken longstanding morality about sex, and substituted it onto food. The all-you-can-eat buffet is now stigmatized; the sexual smorgasbord is not.

In the end, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the rules being drawn around food receive some force from the fact that people are uncomfortable with how far the sexual revolution has gone — and not knowing what to do about it, they turn for increasing consolation to mining morality out of what they eat.

So what does it finally mean to have a civilization puritanical about food, and licentious about sex? In this sense, Nietzsche’s fabled madman came not too late, but too early — too early to have seen the empirical library that would be amassed from the mid- twenty-first century on, testifying to the problematic social, emotional, and even financial nature of exactly the solution he sought.

It is a curious coda that this transvaluation should not be applauded by the liberationist heirs of Nietzsche, even as their day in the sun seems to have come. According to them, after all, consensual sex is simply what comes naturally, and ought therefore to be judged value-free. But as the contemporary history outlined in this essay goes to show, the same can be said of overeating — and overeating is something that today’s society is manifestly embarked on re-stigmatizing. It may be doing so for very different reasons than the condemnations of gluttony outlined by the likes of Gregory the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas. But if indiscriminate sex can also have a negative impact — and not just in the obvious sense of disease, but in the other aspects of psyche and well-being now being written into the empirical record of the sexual revolution — then indiscriminate sex may be judged to need reining in, too.

So if there is a moral to this curious transvaluation, it would seem to be that the norms society imposes on itself in pursuit of its own self-protection do not wholly disappear, but rather mutate and move on, sometimes in curious guises. Far-fetched though it seems at the moment, where mindless food is today, mindless sex — in light of the growing empirical record of its own unleashing — may yet again be tomorrow.

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Mary Eberstadt is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and consulting editor to Policy Review.

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¹ As defined by the International Vegetarian Union, a vegetarian eats no animals but may eat eggs and dairy (and is then an ovo-lacto vegetarian). A pescetarian is a vegetarian who allows the consumption of fish. A vegan excludes both animals and animal products from his diet, including honey. Vegetarians and vegans can be further refined into numerous other categories — fruitarian, Halal vegetarian, and so on. The terminological complexity here only amplifies the point that food now attracts the taxonomical energies once devoted to, say, metaphysics.

² For a general discussion, see Pamela Paul, Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families (Times Books, 2005).

³ For clinical accounts of the evidence of harm, see, for example, Ana J. Bridges, “Pornography’s Effects on Interpersonal Relationships,” and Jill C. Manning, “The Impact of Pornography on Women,” papers presented to a conference on “The Social Costs of Pornography,” Princeton University (December 2008). For further information and for pre-consultation drafts of these papers, see http://www.winst.org/family_marriage_and_democracy/social_costs_of_pornography/consultation2008.php (accessed January 7, 2008). The papers also include an interesting econometric assessment of what is spent to avoid or recover from pornography addiction: Kirk Doran, “The Economics of Pornography.”

⁴ Interestingly, Nietzsche does appear to have foreseen the universalizability of vegetarianism, writing in the 1870s, “I believe that the vegetarians, with their prescription to eat less and more simply, are of more use than all the new moral systems taken together. . . . There is no doubt that the future educators of mankind will also prescribe a stricter diet.” Also interesting, Adolf Hitler — whose own vegetarianism appears to have been adopted because of Wagner’s (Wagner in turn had been convinced by the sometime vegetarian Nietzsche) — reportedly remarked in 1941 that “there’s one thing I can predict to eaters of meat: the world of the future will be vegetarian.”