Digging Thucydides in Lisbon - Miguel Monjardino (The City Journal)

 A História da Guerra do Peloponeso, por Tucídides, ainda é uma grande leitura para os tempos atuais, válido tanto para história, estrito sensu, como para relações internacionais, no sentido lato, pois que tratando das más decisões tomadas por Atenas em suas alianças com outras cidades-Estado gregas na luta contra Esparta. Mas, as interpretações feitas a partir da sua obra, como se existisse alguma "armadilha de Tucídides" no caso de uma suposta disputa hegemônica entre os EUA, o poder estabelecido (ou Atenas), e a China, equivocadamente identificada com Esparta (por ser "ditatorial'), refletem apenas a paranoia inacreditável de acadêmicos americanos – no caso, o professor Graham Allison, de Harvard – que se deixaram contaminar (o termo é apropriado, não só pela peste em Atenas, que vitimou o próprio Péricles, mas pela pandemia do século XXI) pela paranoia dos generais do Pentágono (que têm por obrigação ser paranoicos). Essa postura confrontacionista dos americanos – como se eles fossem atenienses agressivos e arrogantes – é sumamente equivocada, inadequada e prejudicial, não só aos dois gigantes da economia mundial, mas a todos os demais países, em especial os países em desenvolvimento, que poderiam se beneficiar com duas locomotivas do crescimento global e das possibilidades de cooperação entre elas, dada sua complementaridade absoluta.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

MIGUEL MONJARDINO

Digging Thucydides in Lisbon

China’s rise has led to pat citations of the Athenian historian, but one must truly study his work to understand it.

https://www.city-journal.org/digging-thucydides-in-lisbon

The City Journal, May 8, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/digging-thucydides-in-lisbon

At the March 18 meeting of senior American and Chinese officials in Anchorage, Alaska, Yang Jiechi, director of China’s Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, clarified his country’s position: “The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.” Xi Jinping’s sobering message to the Biden administration was that the United States can have peace or war. Amid the political fallout of Anchorage came a deluge of references to Thucydides, the Athenian general and historian who wrote The History of the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century B.C. “The Thucydides Moment?” asked the Nikkei Asia Review after the meeting. General Xu Qiliang, vice president of China’s Central Military Commission and the country’s top military officer, spoke about the “Thucydides trap.” Indeed, such references have become almost mandatory since Harvard professor Graham Allison coined that expression a decade ago to warn about the dangers of a contest for supremacy between the U.S. and China.

But Thucydides never wrote about the trap. What he wrote, in the beginning of the History of the Peloponnesian War, was: “In my view the real reason, true but unacknowledged, which forced the war was the growth of Athenian power and Spartan fear of it.” This is one the greatest sentences ever written in political analysis, but it can be interpreted only with reference to Thucydides’s views about power, the nature of the Athenian and Spartan regimes, and the realities of empire, money, political psychology, time horizons, and war. Our current fixation with the “Thucydides Trap” has led to an unfortunate oversimplification of his work.

Thucydides has been hosting the longest-running seminar in international politics, and the price of admission for those who want to enroll in it is simple: you have to read him. Since February, I’ve been doing just that with the class of 2021—I call the students, born in 2000, “the last class of the twentieth century”—of the Institute for Political Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal, where I am a visiting professor. Laura Lisboa, a gifted student who graduated with distinction in physics at Instituto Superior Técnico and then switched to work in political science, is the teaching assistant.

Covid-19 has upended our lives. Since March 2020, I’ve been waiting out the pandemic in Angra do Heroísmo, a World Heritage Site in the Azores, while the class reads Thucydides in their homes across Portugal. Zoom has become indispensable for us—at a price. “I don’t want to sound spoiled,” said a young woman in our first class. “We are healthy and, unlike many, we have food on the table. My point is, up to the beginning of the pandemic, university was about being together. Now, in spite of all this technology, I don’t think we are together at all. We used to talk through the night. We shared ideas in bars and libraries. We went out. Now we look at the same walls every day. Today is just like yesterday. Nothing will change tomorrow. We had to learn how to live isolated. It’s been really hard to find the motivation to study and write. When will we be together again? I miss going to live concerts.”

I feel for them. University shouldn’t be like this. I’ve had to reconsider everything about the content and rhythm of education in the digital world, though two decades of work in television have proved helpful.

While Covid-19 cannot be compared to the plague that devastated Athens from 430–427 B.C., it has helped the class appreciate the power of Thucydides’s description of a contagious-disease outbreak in the middle of a war. Among the many casualties of this plague were Athens’s senior statesman Pericles, his sister, and his two sons. The class examined François-Nicolas Chifflart’s Pericles at the Death Bed of His Son and Michiel Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City and read his funeral oration to the sound of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. I asked: was Pericles, who devised a military strategy based on attrition against Sparta and its allies, responsible for the plague and its consequences? The students didn’t reach a consensus. “The way I see it, the war with Sparta was inevitable,” said one. “The plague was not something he could have predicted. Events surprised him. I don’t think he is responsible for this.” “I disagree,” argued another. “I believe he is washing his hands of the responsibility here. This is not leadership. If I was at the assembly, I would trust him less after this.”

Athens agonized over the decision, but eventually struck a defensive alliance with Corcyra (now Corfu). The Athenians believed that the island—with its privileged geopolitical position in the northwest and a powerful navy—would enhance Athens’s security and help the city-state maintain a favorable balance of power with Sparta. Events then took a surprising turn. Instigated by Corinth, an ambitious and risk-taking city, revolution and a bloody civil war consumed Corcyra. Sparta and Athens intervened.

In his powerful account of these events, Thucydides gives his opinion about the drastic changes in values that the civil war brought about. It is essential reading for any political education; as the class read, Schubert’s “Ständchen” D957played in the background. “Why did Sparta withdraw its navy from Corcyra?” asked one perplexed student. “They were winning here. What’s wrong with this Alkidas, the Spartan admiral?” “This is really shocking,” said another. “I mean, fathers killing sons. And the Athenian admiral does nothing. He could have put an end to this horror. This looks like something that Sparta would do, not Athens.” “Perhaps,” said another, “but Corcyra’s geopolitical location is really important for Athens. I believe this is about necessity in war. Just like the Spartans in Plataea. The Athenian fleet is there to deter more foreign interventions and give time to the popular party in Corcyra to turn the civil war in their favor.” “Yes,” observed one student, “but this is not what Athens had in mind when it accepted the alliance. Now they will have to commit more naval forces in the northwest.” “What I find puzzling is how unstable Corcyra is politically,” said another. “How can they be a good ally of the Athenians?”

War, as Thucydides reminded us, is a “violent school.” Francisco Goya, the Spanish painter, knew this too. We discussed his masterpiece El tres de Mayo en Madrid, and some of his drawings and etchings currently in exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Civil strife and the powerful emotions that it elicits pose the greatest dangers to any society.

When our seminar drew to a close, we had covered plenty of ground. Our first deep dive into Thucydides’s work, in February, was unsettling. “Do we have to know all this?” asked one student after reading the first paragraphs of the History of the Peloponnesian War and looking at the maps. “I never heard about many of these cities.” “The political context is very confusing,” observed the aide-de-camp of the class. “We don’t live in Thucydides’s time.” Quite right. But there is something about the way Thucydides writes that progressively draws readers into his work, into the dark pit of a long and destructive war. By the end, students had chosen their sides in the war: some Athenians; others Spartans; a few believing that Corinth was right in challenging Athens and pressuring Sparta to step up in defense of its allies; others curious about Persia, the superpower of the time. (As far as I know, Corcyra has no supporters. “They are just like Hannah Montana,” argued a student, tongue in cheek. “They want everything and don’t understand that all of this happened because of them.”) Thucydides became personal to them.

“I have a question,” said a pro-Athenian student. “If Pericles was alive at the time, would he allow this level of violence in Corcyra? I was really shocked by this.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” he replied. “I doubt he would be so brutish. This is not his Athens. Something has changed.”

Yes, up to a point. War happened. That changed everything. Athens was not the same after Pericles’ death in 429 B.C., but the city had been an ambitious imperial democracy for decades. The Athenians always feared revolts by their allies. In his last speech, Pericles was blunt about it: empire was “like a tyranny—perhaps wrong to acquire it, but certainly dangerous to let it go.”

Thucydides, an Athenian and senior military officer who witnessed the rise and fall of his extraordinary city, wrote to tell us that the world is difficult, ambiguous, and complex. Politics and strategy possess too many variables; a few are interdependent. To quote one of his paragraphs to try to explain current events—such as the competition between the U.S. and China—is not enough. The Athenian general wanted us to read his work and to argue with him. That’s why I’ve looked forward to my conversations with the class of 2021 about The History of the Peloponnesian War. Many years from now, when their sons and daughters ask them what they read at university, the members of the last class of the century will be able to say, “I read Thucydides at the Catholic University.”

Miguel Monjardino is a visiting professor of geopolitics and geostrategy at Portuguese Catholic University.

Photo by Sunil Ghosh/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

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O homem que salvou NY, Felix Rohatyn, salvo do Holocausto por Souza Dantas

O sobrevivente do Holocausto que salvou New York da falência devia sua vida ao mais humano dos diplomatas brasileiros, o embaixador Souza Dantas, quem lhe deu o visto para escapar da França ocupada pelos nazistas num dos momentos mais sombrios da história do mundo.

Municipal Master

Felix Rohatyn helped save New York—with some unintended consequences.

Nicole Gelinas is a City Journal contributing editor, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street—and Washington.

The City Journal, December 19, 2019

Felix Rohatyn—Holocaust survivor, investment banker, U.S. military veteran, and ambassador to France—died Saturday at 91. He lived a remarkable life, escaping Austria and then France as a child and rising to the top of New York’s financial world. He’s most remembered, though, for a public role. In 1975, Governor Hugh Carey tapped him to save New York City from municipal bankruptcy. He ably did that—in large part through financial innovation.

Starting in the 1950s, New York spent beyond its means. Beginning in the mid-sixties, the city began borrowing to paper over gaps between day-to-day revenues (taxes) and day-to-day spending (fire, police, sanitation, education, and, increasingly, social services such as welfare). By the spring of 1975, New York projected a billion-dollar “cash-flow interruption” against $5 billion in annual tax revenues, because the city’s banks were nervous about lending money to an insolvent city and were about to cut off the cash. The city didn’t need money just to fund its current-year deficit; it needed money to refinance the $3 billion in short-term debt it had already incurred. Otherwise, it would default— representing the biggest bankruptcy ever in the world of municipal finance, which investors considered nearly as safe as U.S. Treasury bonds.

To avert a default, the standard story goes, New York State and the federal government stepped in. The feds guaranteed state-issued bonds to save the city. In return for this aid, the state appointed a panel of wise men (and one woman) to oversee the city’s spending. The city embarked on a firm path of fiscal responsibility. New York was saved through fiscal discipline, and went on, starting in the 1980s, to thrive again.

This story is partly true. New York did spend beyond its means, and it did need rescue, and the city’s top financiers and businessmen, led by Rohatyn, engineered that rescue after the political class had failed.

Contrary to the accepted narrative, though, New York never cut back its spending on a sustained basis. Starting in the mid-seventies, the city laid off police, sanitation, education, and other workers, and those cuts contributed to an atmosphere of decline, not resurrection, and helped accelerate population loss. In 1975, Rohatyn even mused of a city where volunteers performed necessary clerical work, though this idea was quickly dismissed. Within a year, Rohatyn realized the error of his logic and sought to avoid more layoffs, which he called “counterproductive.”

In mid-1975, Carey appointed Rohatyn to head a new state entity called the Municipal Assistance Corporation. The new entity, chartered by the state legislature, resembled a traditional public authority, such as the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority, but with no real function. It was a shell corporation to raise debt. Lawmakers allowed MAC to raise billions from bond investors by automatically diverting city sales taxes to the state, which would transfer them to MAC. MAC would use this sales-tax revenue to pay the interest on its debt before handing any money left over back to the city. The city, thus, would lose control over a big portion of its own tax revenues (and, through a separate state panel, its budgeting authority). Because of this mechanism, as well as an eventual federal guarantee, investors considered MAC bonds safer than the city’s general-obligation bonds, still paid out of general tax revenues that the city might squander. Rohatyn bought the city time, which, when it comes to refinancing debt, is as good as gold.

In the early eighties, Wall Street took off, and new residents and tax revenues poured in. In 1975, city tax collections totaled $5 billion; by 1985, they had reached $11 billion. Over that critical decade, revenues kept up with the high inflation of the era—no mean feat. New York City invested in better infrastructure, including rebuilding the subways after decades of neglect, and began to reverse the cuts in public services that had plagued the seventies and early eighties. With more disciplined, data-driven policing, among other things, and the rebuilding of deteriorated bridges, the city began using its tax dollars more wisely.

New York was still a high-tax, high-spending city after Rohatyn, but it became better run. Today’s record revenues—$59 billion in major tax revenues in 2018—are more than twice the 1975 total, after accounting for inflation. Today, New York City owes $90 billion, nearly three times the total owed in 1975. Per capita, that’s nearly $11,000 per person, nearly 60 percent more than the runner-up city, Chicago, and more than twice the average of other large cities, according to city comptroller Scott Stringer.

MAC-style structured finance—and the city’s fantastic wealth—keep this carousel going. Even with a near-record population and historic tax revenues, more than $50 billion of New York’s debt is borrowed through nonprofit shell corporations, not through general-obligation bonds. Borrowing through such special-purpose entities lets New York garner higher bond-credit ratings and lower interest rates than more traditional borrowing would allow.

And what of that short-term debt New York borrowed so long ago—its MAC debt? New York never paid it back. In 2004, the state, through a different shell nonprofit, the Sales Tax Asset Receivable Corporation, borrowed $2.5 billion to refinance its remaining 1970s-bailout debt. Peel off layer upon layer of refinancing, and New York still owes that money that it borrowed to make its payrolls in the early 1970s. The long grace period that Felix Rohatyn helped create for New York may not last forever.

Photo by Chris Kleponis/Getty Images

A crítica ao terceiro-mundismo dos irmãos Naipaul - Fred Siegel

The Truth-Tellers

V. S. and Shiva Naipaul exposed the contradictions of Third Worldism.

Fred Siegel is a City Journal contributing editor and the author of The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.

City Journal, March 1, 2019

The Social Order, Winter 2019

In the 1970s, when the ideas of Third Worldism had reached their apex, I became enamored of the work of two gifted writers: V. S. Naipaul and his brother, Shiva Naipaul. V. S., who died last year at 85, won the 2000 Nobel Prize for literature; his comparably talented brother, Shiva, 13 years younger, died at 40 from a sudden heart attack in 1985. Both were born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and went on to study at Oxford and then make lives for themselves in England. They were the grandchildren of Hindu indentured servants brought from India to replace the slaves who had once worked the colony’s sugar plantations. Their father, Seepersad Naipaul, was a journalist and an aspiring novelist.

Intellectually and emotionally, the Naipaul brothers were caught up in the experience of the Indian diaspora in Africa and South America as a direct result of the circumstances of their birth, which gave them a different perspective on the so-called Third World from what was conventionally offered by Western devotees of dictators in Castro’s Cuba, Forbes Burnham’s Guyana, Ben Bella’s Algeria, or Nasser’s Egypt. American and European leftists looked to those charismatic leaders as charting an alternative path to independent development, apart from the West or the Soviet Union. Their thinking, unlike that of the Naipauls, did not hold up well.

Try as it did, the New Left proved unable to capitalize on American disarray in the wake of an era of tumult that included three major political assassinations, American troops mired in Vietnam, deadly urban riots, and the tumult of the 1968 Democratic Convention. The unrest extended well into the 1970s, culminating in the disgrace of Watergate. But as the New Left itself petered out, other left-wing phenomena moved center stage. In Europe, for example, elements in the then-powerful French and Italian Communist Parties attempted to create a Bolshevism that wasn’t sustained by bayonets. While Euro-Communism collapsed before the fall of the USSR, some of its trappings—such as bureaucratic centralism—wound up re-created in the European Union.

In the aftermath of decolonization, however, many intellectuals portrayed Western prosperity as an outgrowth of the immiseration of the global South. The Third World—not the imperialist West or the sclerotic Soviet Empire—would be the source of neo-Marxist redemption, leftists argued. An influential early book in this regard was 1944’s Capitalism and Slavery, by Eric Williams, the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. Williams argued—erroneously, as subsequent research made clear—that the triumph of capitalism was enabled by the brutality of slavery. By the early 1960s, neo-Marxist economic arguments would be overshadowed by the publication of The Wretched of the Earth, by psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. A decorated veteran, Fanon fought for the Free French in World War II, after his native Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean, fell under the control of the collaborationist Vichy regime. After the war, Fanon studied medicine in Lyon. Assigned to a psychiatric facility in Algeria, he found himself drawn to the Front de Libération Nationale, a guerrilla group fighting to free Algeria from French control. Fanon served, among other roles, as the provisional Algerian government’s ambassador to Ghana. He died of cancer in Maryland in 1961, just 36 years old, having been brought to the Bethesda Naval Hospital, reportedly by the CIA, following unsuccessful treatment in the Soviet Union. The Wretched of the Earth, his last work, would appear that year, with an introduction by the famed French litterateur and apologist for Soviet Communism, Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sartre rhapsodized about the raw energy of Fanon and the anticolonial peasants, whom he portrayed as the only hope for redeeming an enervated Europe no longer capable of carrying out the Marxist mission. “We were men at their expense,” claimed Sartre, who spent World War II in Parisian cafés, writing plays that passed the scrutiny of the German censors. But now, he declaimed, the peasant revolutionary “makes himself a man at our expense.” Redemption for this “fat, pale continent” could only emerge out of the cauldron of anticolonial contempt. “We made history,” Sartre wrote, “and now it is being made of us.”

Taking his cues from the non-resister Sartre, Fanon insisted that “violence alone, violence committed by the people”—organized and educated by leaders—“makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them.” Fanon, in a trope revived in recent years, insisted that anyone without black blood had a “Hitler hidden in him.” These arguments were adopted by the Black Panthers, Caribbean revolutionaries, and the brutal “big men” of African dictatorships.

Many college students of the 1960s were exposed to this Third Worldism through film. Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, a hymn to Arab-Muslim guerrilla warfare against French colonialism in the 1950s, was enormously influential, for instance. Also important was the Maoist Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, which consisted largely of alienated Parisian students ruminating on their alienation in sub-Dostoyevskian gasconades.

For the cosmopolitan V. S. Naipaul, Islam was an imperial religion that erased local culture and history. (TED THAI/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES)

The Naipaul brothers viewed the ideological terrain of anticolonialism and Third Worldism with an astringent eye. Trinidad, with its mixed Indian, white, black, and Chinese populations, was itself an education in cultural plurality. Seepersad Naipaul had as a teacher, and later rival, the Marxist C. L. R. James, who denounced colonial overlordship, while insisting on the value of Western civilization; V. S. would later describe James as “the master of all topics.” By way of their father and James, who embraced Western tradition, the brothers brought Enlightenment values to their mordant descriptions of the goings-on in the newly liberated nations of the Caribbean and Africa.

Like James, both brothers wanted to be part of the larger Western world beyond Trinidad, and all three settled in England. Still, the brothers had no use for the “self-selecting blindness” of London’s bien pensants; nor did they identify as conventionally English. “Every writer,” V. S. remarked, “is, in the long run, on his own; but it helps, in the most practical way, to have a tradition. The English language was mine; the [English] tradition was not.”

Amid a torrent of positive press for Tanzania, Guyana, and Libya, Shiva Naipaul asked: “What do terms like ‘liberation,’ ‘revolution,’ ‘socialism,’ actually mean to the people—i.e., the masses—who experience them?” In his blistering 1978 travelogue about East Africa, North of South, he tried to respond. The answers, he explained, were “too uncomfortable for the self-selecting blindness of a West” devoted to political correctness, first and foremost. Shiva Naipaul portrayed a region corrupted by fantasies of wealth but backed by nothing of substance. He encounters a “businessman” dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase filled with magazines, pantomiming the image of success. Refusing to sentimentalize Africa or make excuses for its dysfunction, Naipaul explained that “at the height of the slave trade, African rulers seemed literally to have gone mad. To get hold of the guns and tobacco and brandy they craved, some chiefs betrayed and enslaved their own people.”

Walking through the basement of the Strand, the famed Manhattan used bookstore, in the late 1970s, searching for Walter Laqueur’s collection of essays on revolutionary guerrillas, I came across V. S. Naipaul’s concussive 1975 novel Guerrillas. Set in a fictional country that seems a hybrid of Trinidad and Jamaica, the novel is loosely based on the life of Michael X, a 1950s London pimp turned glamorous spokesman for Black Power and guerrilla warfare. Michael X, who became a pet cause for John Lennon, tried to nurture a Black Power movement in the infertile soil of Eric Williams’s Trinidad, and was hanged after committing a series of gruesome murders. Jimmy Ahmed, the Michael X character in Guerrillas, becomes entangled with a conflicted South African liberal named Roche and his radical-chic girlfriend Jane, who is drawn to Jimmy. “Naipaul is the real thing,” wrote Hilton Kramer in Commentary, noting the book’s literary qualities, “a novelist who creates a world, who conjures up compelling characters and commands our assent in their complex fate.”

As taken as I was by Shiva’s North of South and V. S.’s Guerrillas, my next three Naipaul books put me on even firmer ground. A Bend in the River, perhaps V. S. Naipaul’s finest novel, opens with the now-famous but fearsome line: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” V. S. was first inspired to write the book by the people he met while briefly in Kisangani, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—a country under the control of a brutal “Big Man,” Mobutu Sese Seko. The novel describes the frustrated journey of Salim, a Muslim from a merchant family on the east coast of Africa, who, like Naipaul, struggles with a sense of homelessness. “Our way of life,” Salim tells himself about the Indian settlement in Africa, “was antiquated and almost at an end.” It was no match, he thinks, for the rage of the black Africans freed from colonial bondage but still struggling to achieve revenge for their former humiliations. Salim moves deep inland to seek his own income and identity, but he fails at both—his life is increasingly shaped by the unpredictable emanations of the Big Man, the president-for-life who rules by rhetoric, guile, sorcery, and a generous helping of terror. There is a new dispensation, explains Naipaul: “black men assuming the lies of white men.” Everything is unsettled, dependent on the whim of the Big Man.

The book inspired my mentor, Irving Howe, who wrote that “for sheer abundance of talent, there can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V. S. Naipaul.” But it also drew bitter criticism from the likes of Edward Said, the chief Western apologist for Saddam Hussein and author of Orientalism, a widely read book on Western malevolence. Naipaul followed A Bend in the River with Among the Believers, a 1983 collection of nonfiction accounts of Islam in non-Arab countries. The theme that united the four treatments—of Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Indonesia—is that of Islam as an imperial religion. According to the strictest Islamists, everything prior to the revelation of the Quran was falsehood; thus, the pre-Islamic past, including local culture and history, should be obliterated. Years later, after 9/11, Naipaul returned to this theme, and was lambasted in the press for saying that Islam “has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. . . . [T]his abolition of the self demanded by Muslims was worse than the similar colonial abolition of identity.”

Such views were anathema on the cultural left, even in 2001. A generation earlier, my hip friends, like others in cosmopolitan circles, had embraced Michel Foucault’s support for the Iranian revolution. Foucault, who had succeeded Sartre as the leading luminary in the Parisian intellectual firmament, was at the height of his fabulist powers and would soon become a force on American campuses. In 1975, he had published Discipline and Punish, an attack on the Enlightenment, which he deemed an instrument of controlling repression. Though his book didn’t have an empirical leg to stand on, it was an intriguing narrative that has fueled the fantasies of graduate students and conceptual artists ever since.

Profoundly ignorant of Islam, Foucault, a homosexual, found in the “saintly” Khomeini’s “spiritual politics”—which included extreme hatred of gays—an endless source of transgressive innovation. Iran, he argued, had broken free of the West’s coercive insistence on evidence as the basis for argument and had instituted a “new regime of truth.” Foucault wasn’t alone in his enthusiasm, so foreign to the Naipauls’ sober view of the Islamic movement. In England, the weekly New Statesman, a few quibbles aside, exulted in the mullahs’ victory. In America, crusading journalist I. F. Stone spoke of “a victory to thrill a democrat’s heart.”

For my part, I couldn’t overlook the rancid anti-Semitism of the sinister new regime in Iran, and Naipaul’s chapters on Iran in Among the Believers would reinforce my views. Even with Khomeini still in power, Westernized Iranians from cosmopolitan north Tehran who drank martinis and disco-danced insisted that the ayatollah was a temporary phase. But in Iran, Naipaul visited the bazaars, where men burned with resentment against the shah’s apostasies. He found an Iran where religious fervor served as a cheap drug for the fevered masses. “Islam was the only thing that made humans human,” a student told him. The rule of the mullahs would not be temporary.

The reaction to V. S. Naipaul’s criticism of the Iranian revolution was mild, compared with the angry arguments set off by Shiva’s nonfiction account of the Jonestown massacre, published in the United States as The Journey to Nowhere. Most accounts of Jonestown focus on the outsize personality of Jim Jones, who led his flock from San Francisco to a gruesome death in the Guyanese interior. But in the mid-1970s, Jones was widely acclaimed in San Francisco as a “miracle worker” who had “triumphed on the battlefield of human salvation.” He had turned mostly African-American cast-offs and misfits from other churches into a well-organized political machine. Jones’s voter-turnout operation helped elect George Moscone mayor in 1975. Moscone, in turn, appointed Jones chair of the city’s housing authority. Jones’s installation ceremony was attended by the state’s two most powerful politicians—Governor Jerry Brown and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown.

With a disabused sensibility akin to his brother’s, Shiva saw the ideological insanity that linked the left-wing politics of the Bay Area—home of, among other cults, the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army—with Guyana, helmed by Black Power–proponent Comrade-Leader Forbes Burnham. Guyana, with a population of roughly 700,000, lies on the mainland of South America but is considered culturally, like Trinidad, to be part of the Anglophone Caribbean. Composed mostly of descendants of African slaves and East Indian coolie labor, Guyana, following its independence from England in 1966, looked to be a shining success for Third Worldism. Burnham welcomed Jim Jones as a fellow socialist, and his soldiers stood by as Jones’s followers murdered U.S. congressman Leo Ryan at a jungle airstrip—and as more than 900 people lost their lives when ordered by Jones to commit “revolutionary suicide.”

In his book North of South, Shiva Naipaul refused to sentimentalize Africa or make excuses for its political dysfunction. (THE TIMES/CAMERA PRESS/REDUX)

By the mid-1980s, as once-vaunted triumphs in Mozambique and Cuba turned to tragedy, it was increasingly difficult to romanticize the revolutionary struggles of the Third World—but devoted Third Worldists were adept at ignoring tyranny when it showed up in the wrong places. The upshot, explained President Reagan’s UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, in her famous 1984 speech about the “San Francisco Democrats,” was to ignore oppression in places like Iran or Nicaragua, while “blaming America First.”

In the early 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union pushed the Third World off the stage for good—the Western Left seemed no longer interested in questions about the poorer world’s economic development or political evolution. Instead, leftists in the West became ever more fixated on calling out the failures and oppressions of their own societies—even as these societies tore down barriers of legal discrimination and achieved levels of social tolerance for once-outcast groups never before imagined in human history. In anatomizing the Left’s romance for distant oppressors and contempt for bourgeois democracy, the Naipaul brothers were among the great truth-tellers of our time.

Ecologistas sonhaticos: um perigo para a Natureza, e para a Humanidade - book review (The City Journal)

Books and Culture

Jerry Weinberger

The Earth Is Not a God

The false theology of radical environmentalists

The City Journal, 23 February 2015

Photo by Christian

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, by Alex Epstein (Portfolio, 256 pp., $27.95)

The seventeenth-century philosopher Sir Francis Bacon argued that the human mind had been squandered on superstition: metaphysical speculation, theological disputation, and violent political delusions. Bacon’s greatest American disciple, Benjamin Franklin, agreed. It would be better, both believed, to focus on the conquest of man’s common enemy: nature. Bacon and Franklin were right, but they misjudged superstition’s staying power. Fast-forward to a conversation I had with the late Arne Naess, the Norwegian father of “deep ecology” and guru of the European Green movement. With a straight face, Naess told me that the eradication of smallpox was a technological crime against nature. For Naess’s deep ecology, the smallpox virus “deserved” and needed our protection, despite having maimed, tortured, and killed millions of people.
In his sprightly recent book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Alex Epstein takes on Naess’s American progeny—people such as Bill McKibben and David M. Graber—who have become influential opinion-makers on the environment, fossil fuels, and technology. Epstein asks us to imagine someone transported to the present from a virtually fossil fuels-free England in 1712, when the Newcomen steam engine was invented. What would that person think of our world, where 87 percent of all energy is produced from fossil fuels? In short, he’d be amazed to find clean drinking water, sanitation, enviable and improving air quality, long life, freedom from much disease, material prosperity, mobility, and leisure.
Epstein makes a compelling “big picture” case that the interaction of technology and fossil fuels provides everything we take for granted today. He also reminds us of earlier hysterical predictions of doom concerning fossil-fuel use. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, environmentalists such as Paul Ehrlich predicted mass starvation by the year 2000 because “world food production could not keep up with the galloping growth of population.” Flat wrong: the world’s population doubled, and the average person today is far better fed than when the starvation apocalypse was announced. That’s because the other apocalypse proclaimed back then—the depletion of oil and natural gas by 1992 and 1993, respectively—also proved wrong. Since 1980, worldwide usage of fossil fuels increased massively, yet both oil and natural gas supplies have more than doubled, and we have enough coal to last 3,000 years.
Epstein explains what the environmental doomsayers could not or would not see: first, that “fossil fuel energy is the fuel of food”; and second, that the human mind is as powerful as Franklin and Bacon said it was. Humans discovered more fossil fuels, and technology used those fuels to industrialize food production. Moreover, fossil fuels enabled Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution in food science, which, unlike the political movement of that name, actually did something to improve world nutrition and relieve the suffering of millions. Ehrlich was also wrong about fossil-fuel pollution in the developed world. In the U.S., though the use of fossil fuels climbed steadily since 1970, emissions of pollutants decreased dramatically—thanks to technology.
Predictions of starvation, depletion, and pollution didn’t pan out. What about global warming? Epstein’s warming discussion should be required reading. He acknowledges the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide, which can be demonstrated in a laboratory. But the effect is not linear; if it was, every new molecule of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere would add a unit of heat equivalent to the one preceding it. Rather, the greenhouse effect is decelerating and logarithmic, which means that every additional molecule of carbon dioxide is less potent than the preceding one. Many theories of rapid global warming are based on speculative models of carbon dioxide interacting in positive feedback loops with increases in atmospheric water vapor. Most climate models are based on so-called “hindcasting,” coming up with explanatory schemes that predict what has happened in the past. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, since the only alternative would be clairvoyance—but predicting the past with a computer model is not the same as accurately predicting the future.
Most climate models, says Epstein, have consistently and dramatically over-predicted mid-tropospheric global warming. We haven’t “burned up,” as McKibben predicted we would in 1989. Some suggest that the warming is occurring in the oceans; but mean sea levels around the world have been stable or declining for the last 100-plus years. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels have increased by .03 percent to .04 percent and since 1850, temperatures have risen less than one degree Celsius (an increase that has happened in many earlier time periods). And for the past 15 years—a period of record emissions—there has been little to no warming.
The warming models may prove correct in the long term, of course, so Epstein asks a reasonable question: What if it becomes clear that, in the next 100 years, the seas will rise by two feet and the globe will warm by 2 degrees Celsius, as predicted by many climate scientists? The answer is simple, though often ignored by climate alarmists: we’ll adapt. Since the Industrial Revolution, and especially in the last 30 years, the human race has become progressively better at remediating the harmful effects of storms, heat, cold, floods, and so on. It’s irresponsible, says Epstein, to trivialize the power of technology to solve the problems generated by fossil fuels. Much of that technology could consist of fossil-powered techniques to capture and recycle or sequester carbon dioxide.
Epstein exposes the profound misanthropy motivating much contemporary environmentalism. He quotes Graber: “Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet . . . human beings have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth . . . and until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” Alexis de Tocqueville noted that democratic peoples have a tendency toward pantheism in religion: given their passion for equality, they come to think that everything is God. To radical Greens like Naess, Graber, and McKibben, everything is God, with one exception: the human being, whose “impact” spoils the “independent and mysterious” divine.
Why do hysterical warnings about sustainability and depletion persist despite the failure of the crackpot 1960s and 1970s predictions? Because the non-impact standard—conceiving of the environment as a loving but finite God—sees the environment as having a limited “carrying capacity” of gifts, such as arable land, water, and crucial minerals, in addition to fossil fuels. The more people on the planet, the closer we are to maxing out that carrying capacity, the thinking goes. Thus the urgent call, made in 2010 by White House Office of Science and Technology director John P. Holdren, to “de-develop the United States.” This notion of a finite carrying capacity discounts the powerful role of human ingenuity in finding natural resources. But the deeper problem is rooted in the divinization of the planet as something that simply is what it is.
Epstein argues brilliantly that the carrying-capacity superstition amounts to a “backward understanding of resources.” The fact is that nature by itself gives us very few directly supplied energy resources: most resources “are not taken from nature, but created from nature,” he maintains. Every raw material in nature is but a “potential resource, with unlimited potential to be to be rendered valuable by the human mind.” Right now we have enough fossil fuels and nuclear power to last us thousands of years. “The amount of raw matter and energy on this planet,” Epstein writes, “is so incomprehensibly vast that it is nonsensical to speculate about running out of it. Telling us that there is only so much matter and energy to create resources from is like telling us that there is only so much galaxy to visit for the first time. True, but irrelevant.”
Bill McKibben says that the post-Ice Age Holocene period is the only climate that humans can live in. Epstein responds that the Holocene is an abstraction that summarizes “an incredible variety of climates that individuals lived in. And in practice, we can live in pretty much any of them if we are industrialized and pretty much none of them if we aren’t.” Until the Industrial Revolution, the climate was dangerous for all human beings. Since then, we have marched steadily toward “climate mastery.” Fewer people die today from the weather than at any time in history. “We don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous,” according to Epstein. “We take a dangerous climate and make it safe.”
The non-impact standard is a pervasive but irrational prejudice—irrational because it’s a neo-pagan faith that the earth is in effect an uncreated God, and a prejudice because it’s asserted dogmatically by those who profess it and taken for granted by a public unaware of being in its grip. The default position on environmental matters is “respect” for the planet. It tilts opinion to focus only on the harms of fossil fuels and technology, not their benefits. The bottom line is always the same: humans should minimize their impact on nature.
Alex Epstein’s book is a breath of fresh air in this polluted opinion climate. The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels shows why fossil fuels are good for human flourishing in general and good for the world’s poor in particular. Epstein is a true friend of the earth—an earth inhabited and made better by human beings.

Jerry Weinberger is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University.

Como as esmolas publicas pioram a vida das pessoas em lugar de melhorar - livro de Jason Riley (Fred Siegel)

Quem duvidar da afirmação e do argumento central do livro pode consultar um simples registro estatístico (que vou buscar para colar aqui, assim que conseguir recuperar).
Olhando-se para um gráfico da renda média da população branca nos EUA -- sim, eles tem essa mania de racializar tudo, e todos sabem como os EUA foram terrivelmente segregados no passado, mas a segregração mental e comportamental ainda continua -- e seu crescimento nas últimas décadas, se tem uma inclinação moderada para cima, ou seja, a renda progrediu, mas não espetacularmente: a renda per capita nos EUA deve ter passado de 20 mil a 45 mil dólares nos últimos trinta anos, sendo que a dos brancos deve estar em torno de 55 mil dólares.
A linha evolutiva da renda dos negros -- sim, são os mais pobres, independentemente de serem negros, mas por isso, e principalmente por serem negros e pobres, foram objeto de políticas de ação afirmativa desde o início dos anos 1960, quando terminou oficialmente a segregação, ainda praticada em muitos estados do Sul -- acompanha relativamente bem a dos brancos, mas obviamente vários patamares abaixo, cerca da metade da dos brancos. Melhorou um pouquinho mais, em algumas épocas, mas depende do ciclo econômico, do desemprego, da qualidade das escolas e de determinados programas governamentais, locais, estaduais ou federais.
No cômputo global, ambas linhas estabilizaram, uma relação à outra, as duas crescendo moderadamente.
Agora, se colocarmos a linha da renda dos imigrantes, ele são tanto asiáticos quanto latinos desde os anos 1960, com alguns aportes de outras regiões, veremos que essa linha ascende vigorosamente para cima, e já está cruzando a dos negros, e deve se encontrar com a renda média dos brancos dentro de duas ou três décadas (isso depende de quantos latinos vão continuar entrando, pois a linha exclusiva dos asiáticos anda mais rápido).
Essa é uma prova que os negros, ajudados nos últimos cinquenta anos pelos poderes públicos não conseguiram de verdade romper as barreiras da pobreza. De fato, eles parecem ter estacionado na pobreza, e isso devido basicamente aos programas de ajuda justamente.
Leiam esta apresentação, e não confundam: "Liberals", nos EUA, são social-democratas, ou socialistas de estilo europeu, interessados no distributivismo e nas políticas de corte igualitário.
Não deu certo nos EUA.
Por que daria certo no Brasil?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Books and Culture

FRED SIEGEL

The Poverty of Benevolence

Fifty years of the Great Society have made things worse for blacks, not better.

The City Journal, 2 July 2014

Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed, by Jason Riley (Encounter Books, 205 pp., $23.99)

A half-century ago, the Great Society promised to complete the civil rights revolution by pulling African-Americans into the middle class. Today, a substantial black middle class exists, but its primary function has been, ironically, to provide custodial care to a black underclass—one ever more deeply mired in the pathologies of subsidized poverty. In Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed, Jason Riley, an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal who grew up in Buffalo, New York, explains how poverty programs have succeeded politically by failing socially. “Today,” writes Riley, “more than 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers. Only 16 percent of black households are married couples with children, the lowest of any racial group in the United States.” Riley attributes the breakdown of the black family to the perverse effects of government social programs, which have created what journalist William Tucker calls “state polygamy.” As depicted in an idyllic 2012 Obama campaign cartoon, “The Life of Julia,” a lifelong relationship with the state offers the sustenance usually provided by two parents in most middle-class families.

Riley’s own life experience gives him powerful perspective from which to address these issues. His parents divorced but both remained attentive to him and his two sisters. His sisters, however, were drawn into the sex-and-drug pleasures of inner-city “culture.” By the time he graduated from high school, his older sister was a single mother. By the time he graduated from college, his younger sister had died from a drug overdose. Riley’s nine-year-old niece teased him for “acting white.” “Why you talk white, Uncle Jason?” she wanted to know. She couldn’t understand why he was “trying to sound so smart.” His black public school teacher similarly mocked his standard English in front of the class. “The reality was,” Riley explains, “that if you were a bookish black kid who placed shared sensibilities above skin color, you probably had a lot of white friends.”

The compulsory “benevolence” of the welfare state, borne of the supposed expertise of sociologists and social planners, undermined the opportunities opened up by the end of segregation. The great hopes placed in education as a path to the middle class were waylaid by the virulence of a ghetto culture nurtured by family breakdown. Adjusted for inflation, federal per-pupil school spending grew 375 percent from 1970 to 2005, but the achievement gap between white and black students remained unchanged. Students at historically black colleges and universities, explained opinion columnist Bill Maxwell, “did not know what or whom to respect. For many, the rappers Bow Wow and 50 Cent were as important to black achievement as the late Ralph Bunche, the first black to win a Nobel Peace Prize, and Zora Neale Hurston, the great novelist.”

“Why study hard in school,” asks Riley, “if you will be held to a lower academic standard? Why change antisocial behavior when people are willing to reward it, make excuses for it, or even change the law to accommodate it?”

In the 50 years since the start of the Great Society and the expenditure of more than $20 trillion to alleviate poverty, millions of newcomers have entered America from Asia and from Africa. They generally arrived in poverty and have improved themselves by dint of self-help and hard work—those boring middle-class values that President Obama’s mentor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, denounced so strenuously. But if, as Riley demonstrates, the Great Society programs have failed in conventional terms, they have been an overwhelming political success. Together, government workers and the recipients of government benefits make up a formidable voting bloc. Yet their very political success may also prove their undoing: President Obama’s share of the African-American vote increased between 2008 and 2012, but during that period, blacks’ share of the national income declined and their unemployment rate increased.

“Everybody has asked the question,” Frederick Douglass said in an 1865 speech, “‘What should we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall. . . . And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs!” A century and a half later, Jason Riley echoes that advice.

Fred Siegel is a City Journal contributing editor and the author ofThe Revolt Against the Masses.

A Franca, a caminho de sua petite decadence (ou seria grande?) - Pascal Bruckner

PASCAL BRUCKNER

Gloomy France

As the young and entrepreneurial flee, the country struggles to compete and pay for its massive welfare state.

The City Journal, Winter 2014

WITH 200,000–400,000 FRENCH EXPATRIATES, LONDON HAS BECOME FRANCE’S SIXTH-LARGEST CITY.

Ricky Leaver/Loop Images/Corbis

Not long ago, I attended a colloquium of French scientists and philosophers in Corsica, France, called “How to Think About the Future.” With few exceptions, the astrophysicists, economists, physicians, and social theorists on hand offered dark visions of tomorrow. A new financial crisis, water and grain shortages, endless war, a general collapse of ecosystems—we were spared no catastrophic scenario.

A month earlier, as it happened, I had been invited by the environmentalist think tank Breakthrough to San Francisco, where I reflected with a group of thinkers on the Schumpeterian economic idea of “creative destruction” and its application to energy production. My experience there was quite different. Three days of vigorous and sometimes tense debates followed among advocates favoring, respectively, nuclear power, shale gas, and renewable energy sources. Defenders of threatened species had their say, too, but no one doubted in the slightest that we had a future, even if its contours remained unclear.

I recall an observation that Michael Schellenberger, Breakthrough’s president, made in the proceedings: “The United States’ greatest hope at present lies in shale gas and in the 11 million illegal immigrants who will soon become legal, 11 million brains that will stimulate and renew our country.” Such a comment, whatever one’s views on the specific policies that it implied, exhibited a hopefulness completely missing in Corsica—and hard to find in today’s France, which has outlawed not only the development but even the exploration of possible reserves of natural and shale gas, and which sees every stranger on its soil as a potential enemy. France has become a defeatist nation.

A striking indicator of this attitude is the massive emigration that the country has witnessed over the last decade, with nearly 2 million French citizens choosing to leave their country and take their chances in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the United States, and other locales. The last such collective exodus from France came during the French Revolution, when a large part of the aristocracy left to await (futilely) the king’s return. About a century earlier, almost 2 million Huguenots fled the country, frightened by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which had put Protestants on an equal legal footing with Catholics. Today’s migration isn’t politically or religiously motivated, however; it’s economic.

This is borne out by the makeup of the departing population, which consists disproportionately of young people—70 percent of the migrants are under 40—and advanced-degree holders, who do their studies in France but offer their skills elsewhere. The migrants, discouraged by the economy’s comparatively low salaries and persistently high unemployment—currently at 10.9 percent, with the private sector losing more than 360,000 jobs in the second quarter of 2013—have only grown in number since Socialist François Hollande became president. In the teeth of an economic downturn, Hollande imposed onerous new taxes on the wealthy; the government’s tax haul has hit 46 percent of GDP, the highest in the eurozone, reports The Economist. The president has taken to roaming through France’s cities and towns, seeking “the first tremblings of the recovery,” but his diatribes against the well-off—“I hate the rich,” he said on television—provide no more encouragement to young entrepreneurs than do his tax policies. If economic success is all but criminal in France these days, why not depart for places that reward it instead?

The young and enterprising in France soon realize that elsewhere—in London, say—obstacles to success are fewer and opportunities greater. The British capital is now France’s sixth-largest city, with 200,000–400,000 émigrés, a number of whom have made fortunes. They’ve re-created a familiar way of life in their new home, frequenting French restaurants and patisseries and often barely speaking English.

The emigration of France’s aspirational young has also taken the form of a colonial inversion. Just as Spaniards now go to find work in Latin America or Morocco and Portuguese head for Angola and Mozambique, the French have started to seek opportunity in North Africa and in the sub-Sahara, where the energy and the taste for innovation appear greater than back home. Of course, emigration can go wrong: disillusionment can set in with, or homesickness can wear on, recent exiles, causing some to return, beaten. This helps explain why emigration counseling is a French growth industry. A good example is Lepetitjournal.com, a website that offers career and practical advice for expatriates.

The exile rolls also include hundreds of thousands of French retirees, presumably well-off, who are spending at least part of their golden years in other countries: tired of France’s high cost of living, they seek out more welcoming environments. Our beloved country, in other words, has been losing not only its dynamic and intelligent young people but also older people with some money. I’m not sure that this social model can work over the long term.

The protests that swept France in autumn 2010 reflected the country’s defeatist attitude, too, though in a different way. The government of Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, hoping to put tottering public finances on somewhat firmer ground, sought to increase the average retirement age in France from 60 to 62. This was an inadequate measure to deal with the magnitude of France’s massive deficit, especially compared with Germany’s fixing of retirement at 67, but, as was typical of the Sarkozy era, it unleashed a gigantic wave of unrest. The French confronted the surprising spectacle of high school students demanding pensions. Even before starting their working lives, the adolescent demonstrators were already thinking about ending them. Their response to French stagnation contrasted with that of the young economic exiles. For the protesters, existence—even if it were mediocre—had to come with a government guarantee, from beginning to end. (Some time ago, the far-Left political leader Olivier Besancenot proposed the creation of a Great Strikers’ Party. What a wonderful notion: our youth, by joining, could go on strike without ever having worked!)

Consider, in this light, an astounding 2005 survey of French youth, which showed that about three-quarters wanted to become government bureaucrats. So intently did they shun taking chances that they could imagine no happier future than working as (presumptively secure) state functionaries. Gravely affected by the weak economy, these young people make up the avant-garde of what may as well be France’s largest contemporary party: the Party of Fear. For the French have become afraid of everything: the world, poverty, globalization, Islam, capitalism, global warming, natural catastrophes—and even, to borrow an American phrase, fear itself.

No longer a world leader, contemporary France has apparently concluded that it must be nothing, and has increasingly abandoned itself to self-denigration. A nation that not long ago brandished its language as the natural idiom of the human race now seems to know only how to groan, rehearse the past, lick its wounds, and endlessly enumerate its failings, though with a suspicious self-satisfaction. Every year, dozens of books are published in France affecting the charm of despair. The French don’t like themselves any longer—they’re one of the world’s most depressed populations, a huge consumer of psychotropic drugs and tranquilizers—and don’t expect others to like them, either. A country so unsure of itself, needless to say, is incapable of inspiring enthusiasm among the young, whether immigrants or native-born.

To put it bluntly, France isn’t where things happen these days. Other players dominate the global arena: the Anglo-American world, Germany, the Gulf States, the rising powers of Asia, the emerging nations of Africa. History has passed us by; we have grown old without finding sources of renewal. Once France felt cramped within its modest territory; now it is detaching itself from Europe, and from the world, in the manner of an old man who feels the approach of death.

Yet the more provincial France becomes, the more it lapses into a pathetic vehemence. Wild lyricism and empty formulas replace concrete action. Economists, philosophers, politicians, and sociologists, at odds with the merchants of gloom, have sought to defend the French social model, portraying the rest of humanity as mistaken, even profoundly ill. We heard, for example, from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, president of the Left Party, who implausibly claimed that Germany was the country in dire straits, not France, despite our neighbor’s obvious comparative economic health. President Hollande conveys a similar message when he assures citizens that the French economy is back, or soon will be, and that we can again rest easy. The pro-Hollande press is masterful in its repeated delivery of this lesson. This brand of journalism reminds me of a song that became famous before World War II: “Everything is fine, Madame la Marquise, everything is fine / the stables are burning, the castle is in flames, but everything is fine, Madame la Marquise.”

Contemporary France, then, combines arrogance with self-hatred—a matchless vanity, rooted in the ages of Louis XIV and the French Revolution, with a lack of confidence typical of nations in decline. France lacks both the self-assured pride—without which nothing great can be accomplished—that has long characterized the United States and, more recently, China and India, and a curiosity regarding other cultures, the passion to learn from what is foreign, which is a sign of intelligence and reason. Our attitude makes us bound to lose on both fronts: pretension prevents us from benefiting from others’ experiences; doubt paralyzes us.

France remains blessed by its extraordinary beauty, which draws 70 million tourists a year, and it can still claim successful multinational corporations, a well-educated youth, a capable military, geological wealth, and a maritime surface that reaches from the Mediterranean to the Pacific and includes the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, thanks to the remaining confetti of our former empire. So where does our strange weakness, at once economic and spiritual, come from?

It has two deeper explanations, I believe. First is a hatred of money, a dual legacy of Catholicism and republicanism. I remember as a child in Lyon seeing the richest families arrive at Mass in the cheapest of automobiles, plainly dressed as they awaited the sacrament. Only when behind the gates of their properties did they abandon themselves to their prosperity, exchanging visits only with one another, and only then bringing out the best silver and scolding the servants. Quite unlike the unabashed pleasure that Americans take in wealth, the French way is to hide one’s goods, so as not to provoke envy.

To understand the French stance toward money, one should return to the well-known Balzac phrase: “Behind every great fortune there is a great crime”—as if the thirst for material success sprang from a desire to deprive others or prostitute their dreams. French leaders left and right have denounced filthy lucre. In 1919, for example, Leon Blum decried “this scum, this putrid fermentation that we see spreading over the surface of our economic life.” “My only adversary, that of France itself, has never ceased to be money,” said Charles de Gaulle in a 1969 interview with André Malraux. A few years later, François Mitterrand denounced “that king, money, that ruins and spoils everything, even the human conscience.” And Hollande, not to be outdone, declared during the 2012 election campaign not only that he hated the rich but also that he had only “one adversary, international finance.”

Such virtuous proclamations cannot replace actual policy in a modern nation. Even as France castigates the reign of money, our country fails to compete globally and suffers from economic stagnation and enforced austerity. King money reigns over a desert. Indeed, money is what is lacking in France—in public finances and among citizens (what the French fear most, by a large majority, is falling into a lower social class).

The second explanation is a widespread conformism, which paradoxically stems in part from our revolutionary history. Because the French made a great revolution more than two centuries ago, they seem to believe that they’re excused from the need to renovate and adapt. And what is distinctive about this conservatism is that it tends to be expressed in subversive language—since the far Left has, for the last half-century or longer, played the role of the French Republic’s superego. All legislation, all action, must be measured against its standard: no social or economic argument is acceptable that doesn’t start with a denunciation of the market and financial powers.

The far Left’s anticapitalism draws reinforcement from older French cultural currents: the idea of equality that lay at the heart of the French Revolution, which would inspire Russian Communism; and Jacobinism, according to which the state is the main agent of change in the nation and which helped do away with the intermediary bodies between individual and government. Given these premises, it’s not surprising that economic liberalism gets such bad press in France. The idea that the nation’s prosperity is not a pure governmental decision and that private actors can overturn the rules of the economic game unsettles some of our deepest convictions.

One discordant note to France’s current defeatism is the nation’s fertility rate, among the highest in the Old World, across all social classes. France is jarringly schizophrenic: we fight against our sense of gloom about the future, it seems, by repopulating our cradles. Here, though, we see the possibility of a fresh beginning, the chance that every generation has to look at the world anew. A nation alive in this way is one that can stumble, even fall, and still come back, better than before. If it is not to be buried in its own mausoleum, a country must prove able to break with old habits and find renewal, and a growing population makes this easier to imagine.

If France is not to become Europe’s new sick man, alongside Greece and Spain, it must rise to the challenge of competing with its neighbors and the world’s emerging economic powers. Indeed, it must accept existence itself as a challenge and undertake the necessary changes, in keeping, of course, with its national character. In an age of variable and fleeting patriotism, France must hold its children close but not expect them to show a limitless attachment. Perhaps the recent diaspora of the young and ambitious will one day be seen as the beginning of France’s salvation.

Pascal Bruckner is a French writer and philosopher whose latest book is The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse. His article was translated by Alexis Cornel.