Sunday roundup

 Sorry for the prolonged absence. Let's just say some health issues arose. Alas, it's a new day and there's much to avail ourselves of, so let's get started.

Greg Weiner has a piece at Law & Liberty entitled "Why We Cannot Just 'Follow the Science'" that makes clear that other actors besides those who collect and analyze data need to have a say in drawing public-policy conclusions. He begins by citing the opprobrium Jopn Stewart came in for as a result of a recent conversation with Stephen Colbert, in which Stewart made the following remark:

“Science is incredible,” Stewart told Stephen Colbert. “But they don’t know when to stop.” And then he went, apparently, too far:

Can I say this about scientists? I love them and they do such good work but they are going to kill us all. … Here’s how I believe the world ends. … The world ends, the last words man utters are somewhere in a lab. A guy goes, ‘Huhuh, it worked.’

But why should his view get dismissed out of hand? 

Paul Waldman of The Washington Post, reasonably arguing that celebrities should swim in their own lanes was particularly defensive of experts:

[Stewart’s] attack on expertise reminds us why expertise is so important. … That’s not to say that experts don’t often have biases or blind spots, because they do. Sometimes, they can be catastrophic. But it’s not because experts can’t be trusted, it’s because something kept them from seeing what they should have, or — perhaps more often — they just didn’t have enough information to arrive at the best judgment.

That view of experts is built atop a romantic idea of human nature. Substitute “politicians” for “experts,” and one can see why. Are we so far removed from the 20th century that scientific and technocratic abuse is unthinkable? Waldman may be correct that most experts mean well, but that does not address the reality that people with power need to be watched. Expertise can become tyrannical when it denies the authority of politics to question it. That is not to accuse any individual of doing so, but a theory of complete deference to experts—besides entangling itself in internal tensions—abdicates political responsibility.

There is a direct line between an ethic of deferring to experts and early 20th century Progressivism, a movement whose leaders—like Woodrow Wilson—would not all survive today’s scrutiny. Wilson himself is proof that expertise can be helpful or haughty. It can inform judgment or so ensconce itself in rigidity that accommodation to circumstances becomes impossible.

Early Progressives, like Lester Frank Ward, were so enamored of expertise that they thought the scientific method could be applied to politics. Their motive bears emphasis: In Dynamic Sociology, Ward argued that expertise was necessary because citizens were ignorant. The point was to empower “the few progressive individuals by whose dynamic actions social progress is secured.” The use of experts could “place [Americans] upon the highway to a condition of intelligence which, when attained, will in turn work out the problem of inaugurating a scientific legislature and a system of scientific legislation.”

Never mind the condescension. This is a road to abuse. Especially in today’s academic climate of hyper-specialty, scientists might well not see either the potential dangers of their work or, more important, sources of knowledge beyond it. Stewart’s prediction of scientists wreaking disaster—delivered, again, as a comedic rant—should not be dismissed out of hand.

While we're on the subject of the politicization of the word "science," Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute says that righties - principled righties willing to engage in substantive discussion of particular issues, anyway - have the better argument where climate matters are concerned, but they need to formulate a way to participate in the conversation and stay away from dismissive bonehead-isms:

So long as Democrats can get away with presenting theirs as the “party of science,” they will continue to operate with a significant strategic advantage when it comes to public debates on climate policies that will have profound impacts on the country for generations to come. Instead of merely dismissing the faux science that lends support to climate alarmism as a “hoax,” conservatives must do more to engage with and reclaim the growing body of scientific evidence that supports their climate-change realism.

Stephanie Slade at Reason asks why fusionism wouldn't still be a viable way forward.  Fusionism was the basis for the rise of the 20th century conservative movement. It was basically the brainchild of Frank S. Meyer, one of the original editors of National Review. The problem for those 1950s-era thinkers seeking a way to unite libertarians - with their free-market purism and hands-off approach to individual behavior choices - with traditionalists, who brought a fealty to a transcendent order, and its implications for individual choice. There's been a lot of talk about how, since the lay of the world-stage land is so different in the post-Cold War era, the fusionist alliance is hopelessly fractured. Slade asks, is that necessarily so?

The central insight of fusionism is that the common good is best achieved when the state stays focused on protecting rights and liberties, leaving individuals and voluntary associations to do the rest. To be clear, there is nothing easy about that answer.

The post-liberal temptation is to believe that government power can be a substitute for the hard labor of institution building and cultural change. It isn't. The solution must begin at home—on the front porch, around the kitchen table, and in the mirror. The law is not a magic wand. There are no magic wands, and there is no shortcut to the good society. 

This one's a long read, but worth your while. Aaron Hanna, a black conservative writing at Quillette, is willing to concede that, overall, yes, the agency of individual human beings must be at the forefront of discussions about race, but that those of his classification need to fully consider all factors involved:

To the great frustration of black conservatives, progressive black thought has dominated the intellectual and cultural landscape over the last few years (decades, many would complain). As a result, conservatives have spent a great deal of energy criticizing progressive intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, and Isabel Wilkerson, rather than engaging in the kind of self-criticism that would help them develop their own arguments. Like most black conservatives, I am not convinced that racism/anti-racism is the best framework for advancing racial equality, that “caste” is the best metaphor for describing race relations in our country, or that movements to “defund” the police will decrease crime in majority black neighborhoods. But what do black conservatives offer other than criticism of progressive ideas?

CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen says that, no matter what voices from what sides insist that the US has been in Afghanistan too long and that that's the long and the short of the matter, the pullout now underway is going to be a disaster, and not just for the Afghan people:

Habiba Sarabi, an Afghan government negotiator engaging in talks with the Taliban, told CNN, "With the imminent removal of all United States forces in just a few weeks, the Taliban are moving rapidly, resulting in a swift deterioration in the security environment. We were caught off guard by the scale and scope of setbacks in the north."

The United States has contributed to the deteriorating security situation by consistently saying for more than a decade that it is leaving Afghanistan, which has undermined the Afghan government and strengthened the resolve of the Taliban who have won at the negotiating table from the Americans what they failed to win on the battlefield.

Without swift action by the Biden administration we could see in Afghanistan a remix of the disastrous US pullout from Saigon in 1975 and the summer of 2014 in Iraq when ISIS took over much of the country following the US pullout from the country three years earlier. That withdrawal was negotiated by then-vice president Biden.

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank, assesses that the Taliban now control 25 per cent of the Afghan population, while the government controls 40 per cent of the population, and just over a third of Afghans live in regions that are contested between the Taliban and the government

The Taliban have seized 50 of the country's 370 districts since May, according to the United Nations. 

The premise of the many years of US-Taliban negotiations has been that the United States will draw down militarily in exchange for the Taliban severing relations with al-Qaeda -- the terrorist organization it harbored at the time of the planning and execution of the terrorist attacks against the US on September 11, 2001.

This has been, to put it charitably, a charade, according to the United Nations, which reported just this month that the two groups remain "closely aligned and show no signs of breaking ties." The UN report notes that Taliban-al Qaeda ties have actually "grown deeper."

Rod Dreher, writing at The American Conservative, says that Joe Biden should be denied communion by the Catholic Church:

 The dilemma the Catholic bishops face comes down to this: is the Catholic Church meant to be a part of society, marching along with it, or is it meant to stand in the middle of the road, telling society to STOP? I think this question is at the heart of the division I observed among French Catholics when it came to my book The Benedict Option. Older Catholics there — Catholics my age (54) and older — tended to think the book was too radical. Younger Catholics, by contrast, understood it and accepted it. (This wasn’t universally true; I’m generalizing.) The difference, I think, has to do with how they see the Church’s relationship to the modern world. The older Catholics had not accepted that if the Catholic Church is true to itself, it will be hated by the modern world. The younger ones had, and had cast their lot with Catholicism, contra mundum. 

It comes down to this: in this moment, is the Church (not just the Catholic Church) called to be prophetic, or therapeutic? I think that only by being prophetic — calling the world out — can it be therapeutic, and heal the world of its brokenness.

Biden now says he's willing to sign the bipartisan infrastructure compromise Congress has crafted, one the scope of which is narrowed to stuff that most folks would consider to actually be infrastructure, and wait until later to work on the do-gooder statist stuff the Dems wanted to see included. As a result, Republicans are back on board with a favorable view of it.