Tom Milstein

Monday, December 17, 2007

Marxism for the Orthodox

Orthodox Marxism

(Marxism for the Orthodox)

by Tom Milstein

Karl Marx, whose entire theory of history revolved notoriously around the concept of class, distinguished between two types of class identity, or consciousness: a class “in itself,” and a class “for itself.”

A “class in itself” was simply a social group whose objective circumstances rendered it a class as Marx defined classes – for example peasants in feudal society, or workers in industrial capitalist society. According to Marx, a class occupied a fixed, objective relationship to the “means of production,” whatever that happened to be in a given historical epoch – the land in feudalism’s rural agrarian economy, factories in capitalism’s urban industrial system.

A “class for itself” introduced a subjective dimension into Marx’s historical analysis, the dimension of consciousness. A class for itself was simply a class in itself that had become aware of itself as an historical actor. For example, the embryonic bourgeoisie of early and middle feudalism in Europe was a class in itself, because it clustered together in trading towns in the interstices of feudal society, occupied a fixed position in relationship to the means of production (trading the products of feudalism for profit), and developed a culture and way of life unique to itself. But this bourgeoisie did not become a class for itself until after the Protestant Reformation, and especially the Enlightenment, which caused members of this class to begin thinking of themselves as the representatives of society’s general interest. Soon the bourgeoisie was plotting to overthrow the twin pillars of feudalism: the Roman Catholic Church and the monarchy-aristocracy.

In other words, the European (and American) bourgeoisie transformed itself from a mere “class in itself” into a “class for itself” – but only after it had managed to transmute the other-worldly ascetic dream of Calvinism into a secular call to revolutionary arms, so to speak (of course, this reinterpretation process was helped along by such unpleasant historical events as the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of the French Protestants).

A recent column on the Op-Ed page of the New York Sun by Meyrav Wurmser entitled “The New Focal Point of Israel’s Schisms” (attached) got me to thinking about these arcane Marxian notions. Ms. Wurmser is described in her bio as “a neoconservative scholar of the Arab world. She is married to David Wurmser, Middle East Adviser to US Vice President Dick Cheney. She is also a member of the conservative US think tank, the Hudson Institute.” Be all that as it may, the focus point of her “New Focal Point” column is the Israeli Army, and in particular, the great prominence of kippah seruga – “knit-cap” religious Orthodox – in the IDF, especially in the elite combat units which make up the backbone of its fighting forces, and in the middle and upper (although not the topmost) tiers of the officer corps.

Ms. Wurmser notes that membership in these military units has traditionally been identified with “’ownership’ of the nation,” a Zionist property title which arose when left-wing secular Kibbutz youth supplied the army’s elite cadres. Now of course these committed youth have ceased to exist or have other interests. Their place has been filled by young people from the religious nationalist milieu in Israel. And therein, says Ms. Wurmser, lies the problem – a problem, as her article title suggests, of schism.

She implies, without quite saying so, that the reason – or at least, a reason – for Israel’s military debacle in Prime Minister Olmert’s 2006 War in Lebanon, was rabbinical disapproval of the war, rooted in fear of the consequences of victory: “…after Prime Minister Olmert stated that a victory in Lebanon would provide the impetus for another disengagement in the West Bank, leaders of the religious national settlement movement, rabbis, and thousands of settlers, sent word to their sons in the military telling them to disobey military orders that would take them to war.”

From this insinuation, she proceeds to the main point of her article, which is that if the Annapolis Conference and its aftermath lead to peace agreements requiring extensive Israeli territorial concessions to a Palestinian State, “future withdrawals may turn Israel’s defense forces into the focal point of the country’s schisms.” In other words, the new Zionist title-holders in the IDF cannot be trusted to carry out the orders of the duly constituted civilian authorities of Israel. They will place their loyalty to “the Scroll” over their duty to the State.

Personally, I came away from this piece with the sinister feeling that Ms. Wurmser is hiding behind the role of Cassandra in order to proffer strategic advice to Israel’s American Jewish enemies about how to take apart the Zionist entity. Given her sterling credentials (she is after all an associate of Richard Perle!), I hope I’m wrong about that. But right or wrong as I may be about her motivations, she has laid out a blueprint for the demolition of Israeli society. And that blueprint takes me right back to Karl Marx’s observations about class.

If we strip out of Marx’s ideas about class his “means of production” gobbledegook, we are left with some very cogent political sociology. For the religious Zionist segment of Israeli society fits perfectly the definition of a class “in itself” that has not achieved the level of consciousness necessary to become a class “for itself.” It has stumbled into possession of the keys to the Israeli Kingdom in a fit of utter absent-mindedness, filling the ideological vacuum left by the implosion of secular Left-wing Zionism without the slightest intention of using this power politically in order to become the new masters of the State.

This ambiguous role, the role of a class in itself which has been propelled by blind historical forces into the position of having power without any corresponding will to power, is a prescription for political and social suicide. To possess power unconsciously, with no corresponding program for using power in order to transform society and thereby legitimate that power, is to stimulate in the minds of one’s enemies morbid fear and fierce hatred. Shy protestations of political innocence and disinterest do not appease these enemies, they only aggravate their fear and hatred.

The religious Zionist community in Israel finds itself in the potentially tragic role of a class in itself which has unconsciously ascended to an extremely dangerous and exposed position of power. In order to survive, it must negotiate the difficult but feasible ascent to true power – the power which is conferred upon a class for itself, a class which understands and accepts its historical mission and embraces its political destiny. If religious Zionism shrinks from this challenge, Ms. Wurmser has accurately presented the consequences – the schismatic disintegration of the central institution of the State of Israel, which is not the laughing-stock government, but the IDF. Such a disintegration will not be bloodless. And most of the blood will be ours.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

What's Orthodox in Karl Marx?

Orthodox Marxism

(Marxism for the Orthodox)

This ambiguous role, the role of a class in itself which has been propelled by blind historical forces into the position of having power without any corresponding will to power, is a prescription for political and social suicide. To possess power unconsciously, with no corresponding program for using power in order to restructure society and thereby to legitimate that power, is to stimulate in the minds of one’s enemies morbid fear and fierce hatred. Shy protestations of political innocence and disinterest do not appease these enemies, they only aggravate their fear and hatred.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

White-eyes

The New York Times
January 14, 2007

For Human Eyes Only

By MICHAEL TOMASELLO

January 14, 2007

LeIpzig, Germany

COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT is said to have prepared his troops for a charge from the British Army at the
Battle of Bunker Hill by telling his men, “Don’t one of you fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”
If the opposing army had not been British men but rather a horde of charging chimpanzees, the American
troops would have been summarily overrun. Why? Because neither chimpanzees nor any of the other 220
species of nonhuman primates have whites of the eyes, at least not that can be easily seen. This means that if
their eyes are looking in a direction other than the one in which their heads are pointing, we can easily be
fooled about what they are looking at.

Why should humans be so different? And yet we are. We can’t fool anyone. The whites of our eyes are several times larger than those of other primates, which makes it much easier to see where the eyes, as opposed to the head, are pointed. Trying to explain this trait leads us into one of the deepest and most controversial topics in the modern study of human evolution: the evolution of cooperation.

The idea is simple. Knowing what another person is looking at provides valuable information about what she
is thinking and feeling, and what she might do next. Even young children know that when a person is looking
at one toy and not another, she most likely prefers that toy and may reach for it. Professional poker players
are often so worried about others reading their minds by reading their eyes that they wear sunglasses.
Evolutionarily, it is easy to see why it is to your advantage to be able to tell with maximum certainty where I
am looking. You may use this information to detect food you wouldn’t otherwise have seen, or to detect the
dominant male approaching in a fighting mood.

But evolution cannot select the color of my eyes based on advantages to you. Evolutionary theory tells us that, in general, the only individuals who are around today are those whose ancestors did things that were
beneficial to their own survival and reproduction. If I have eyes whose direction is especially easy to follow, it must be of some advantage to me.

If I am, in effect, advertising the direction of my eyes, I must be in a social environment full of others who are
not often inclined to take advantage of this to my detriment — by, say, beating me to the food or escaping
aggression before me. Indeed, I must be in a cooperative social environment in which others following the
direction of my eyes somehow benefits me. Of course, it’s possible that having large whites of the eyes serves some other purpose, like enabling me to advertise my good health to potential mates. But such an advantage would apply to other primates as well.

Cooperation, on the other hand, singles out humans, as humans coordinate activities to do such things as
construct buildings, create social institutions and even, paradoxically, organize armies for war.
In a recent experiment, our research team has shown that even infants — at around their first birthdays,
before language acquisition has begun — tend to follow the direction of another person’s eyes, not their
heads. Thus, when an adult looked to the ceiling with her eyes only, head remaining straight ahead, infants
looked to the ceiling in turn. However, when the adult closed her eyes and pointed her head to the ceiling,
infants did not very often follow.

Our nearest primate relatives, the African great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas) showed precisely
the opposite pattern of gaze following. When the human pointed her eyes only to the ceiling (head remaining
straight ahead), they followed only rarely. But when she pointed her head only (eyes closed) to the ceiling,
they followed much more often.

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that all great apes, including humans, follow the gaze direction of
others. But in previous studies the head and eyes were always pointed in the same direction. Only when we
made the head and eyes point in different directions did we find a species difference: humans are sensitive to
the direction of the eyes specifically in a way that our nearest primate relatives are not. This is the first
demonstration of an actual behavioral function for humans’ uniquely visible eyes.

Why might it have been advantageous for some early humans to advertise their eye direction in a way that
enabled others to determine what they were looking at more easily? One possible answer, what we have
called the cooperative eye hypothesis, is that especially visible eyes made it easier to coordinate close-range
collaborative activities in which discerning where the other was looking and perhaps what she was planning,
benefited both participants.

If we are gathering berries to share, with one of us pulling down a branch and the other harvesting the fruit, it
would be useful — especially before language evolved — for us to coordinate our activities and communicate our plans, using our eyes and perhaps other visually based gestures.

Infant research, too, suggests that coordinating visual attention may have provided the foundation for the
evolution of human language. Babies begin to acquire language through joint activities with others, in which
both parties are focused on the same object or task. That’s the best time for an infant to learn the word for the object or activity in question.

We are still a long way from figuring out why humans evolved to do so many complicated things together —
from building houses to creating universities to fighting wars. But the simple fact that we have evolved highly
visible eyes, to which infants attune even before language, supplies at least one small piece of the puzzle of
how.

Michael Tomasello is the co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Extremism in Israel

POLITICS NOW

by Abraham Berkowitz & Tom Milstein

March 14, 2007

Religious Zionism, and the broader modern Orthodox movement, must call themselves to account: the opponents of the peace process have killed twice since the Oslo accords were signed, and both murderers were shelanu, from our camp. Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 innocent Arabs at the Maarat HaMachpaila — Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs — graduated from American modern Orthodoxy’s flagship institutions. And Yigal Amir, the admitted assassin of Yitzhaq Rabin, was a product of Israel’s Hesder program which combines Tora study with military service and is a current student at the Law School of Israel’s leading modern Orthodox university.

To be sure, by the time these men killed they were no longer true partisans of Religious Zionism or of modern Orthodoxy. Baruch Goldstein had become a follower of Meir Kahane long before he entered the Tomb of the Patriarchs on that fateful Purim day, while Yigal Amir appears to have been deeply entangled with Israel’s GSS when he pulled the trigger on Yitzhaq Rabin. But these facts, at most, only mitigate the responsibility. They do not absolve us. Both killers were educated at our institutions and grew up under our flag. In some perverse way, the education we gave them — or failed to give them — allowed them to be turned into deadly instruments. And so we must call ourselves to account and take stock of our movement.

But no honest accounting can be rendered until we first release ourselves from our humiliating dependence on the political ideologies our opponents. In recent times, this self-imposed political addiction has driven our movement to the Right side of the political spectrum. Since the early 1980’s, from about the time that Yitzhaq Shamir replaced Menachem Begin as the leader of the Likud Bloc, Religious Zionism practically ceased to function as an independent political movement. Instead Religious Zionism nearly dissolved into the secular neo-conservatism and Cold War geopolitical calculations of Shamir’s Likud. During this period, Religious Zionism contributed little more than a religious or Biblical patina to the security arguments which Likud’s secular neo-conservatives advanced against world pressure to trade land for peace — pressure which they pretended was Communist (or “Leftist”) inspired. When the fall of the Soviet Union revealed that the true source of this pressure was not Communist or Leftist but rather American, our reliance on the Likud’s security-based arguments left us utterly disarmed. Most distressing of all, as part of our surrender to the secular Right, we allowed the tens of thousands of religious settlers in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, the flower of our movement, to be turned into human pawns, hostages to the vicissitudes of the Likud’s strategic calculations and political ambitions.

But freeing ourselves from the suffocating embrace of the Right most emphatically does not mean returning to the arms of the Left. Israel’s political Left, the former socialist Zionists of the Labor Party and their anti-religious partners who currently constitute the Meretz Bloc, represents a political culture from which we were lucky to escape in 1977 following Menachem Begin’s first electoral victory. Already at that time, when the religious settlers in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza were still portraying themselves as the new halutzim, long before their settlements became “strategic assets,” it was already clear that the so-called traditional alliance between socialist and Religious Zionism had run its course. This alliance, which began in the pre-State period and lasted for the first thirty years of our national independence, led us to distort our world historical mission so as to better fit the socialist paradigm of our allies. And so, instead of building institutions to facilitate the ideals of Religious Zionism and the broader modern Orthodox movement we created miniature religious replicas of socialism’s grand institutions — a religious kibbutz movement, the Mizrachi bank, a religious workers union, and so on — which we then invested with great significance and too much influence.

But in 1967 we began a new course. The new generation of Religious Zionists who had grown up under Jewish sovereignty and who had been schooled by the late Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, determined to settle all of the new lands which had been won in the recent war in order to complete the Zionist revolution of “returning the children to their boundaries.” Their bold creation of “facts on the ground” propelled Religious Zionism onto the center stage of Israeli politics. Taking an independent stand on the “domestic” question of the territories brought Religious Zionism face-to-face with the single most important issue in Israeli foreign policy: the question of Israel’s final territorial boundaries. This issue would shape not only Israel’s role in the Middle East but also its relationship with the great powers beyond the region and especially with its superpower patron, the United States of America, and thus also with the American Jewish Establishment.

Religious Zionism now more than ever needed its own approach to international relations, to the role of Israel among the nations. But no such approach was forthcoming.

In the years since the 1967 war, modern Orthodoxy failed to advance any systematic approach to understanding the connection between Israel’s territorial boundaries and its relations to the nations. At a time when the strongest partisans of Religious Zionism were building settlements throughout the length and breadth of the Land of Israel, up to the Biblical borderline, modern Orthodoxy ignored the implications of this enterprise for the other nations of the world. Worse yet, we treated the entire matter as an internal Jewish affair, a battle between religion and secularism, as if the world outside was quite irrelevant to the debate over Israel’s proper boundaries. It was this blithe disregard of the outside world — so completely at variance with the engaged spirit of Modern Orthodoxy — that tore a gaping hole in our movement. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Into the political vacuum which we created by our refusal to face the foreign policy implications of our own “domestic policy” values — i.e., our demand for recognition of the sanctity of the boundaries of Eretz Israel — flowed the looney messianism of Meir Kahane and his sad band of hardened police provocateurs and gullible teenagers. It was this absurd, apolitical messianism which sprouted in our midst with such tragic consequences.

And so, when we call ourselves to account, we must recognize that what we need is politics now. As a first step in this direction, we must provide our partisans with a sound and serious political alternative to the capitulation counseled by the Left and the hollow security arguments espoused by the Right. This alternative must address the worldly significance of the Zionist revolution and especially of the “return of the children to their borders” without raising unrealistic, other-worldly expectations about the imminence of the Redemption. The Redemption will no doubt come in its time, with or without a clap of thunder or a hail of bullets. Meanwhile, we must go about our business of building the land while developing an answer to the very difficult question which we have avoided asking for the past thirty years: what will the “goyim”—the nations—say, and more importantly do, when we succeed in holding on to our entire patrimony, up to the Biblical boundary lines?

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Mighty Hunters, but Lousy Mothers

The New York Times

Neanderthal Women Joined Men in the Hunt
By NICHOLAS WADE

December 5, 2006

A new explanation for the demise of the Neanderthals, the stockily built human species that
occupied Europe until the arrival of modern humans 45,000 years ago, has been proposed by
two anthropologists at the University of Arizona.

Unlike modern humans, who had developed a versatile division of labor between men and
women, the entire Neanderthal population seems to have been engaged in a single main
occupation, the hunting of large game, the scientists, Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, say in
an article posted online yesterday in Current Anthropology.

Because modern humans exploited the environment more efficiently, by having men hunt large
game and women gather small game and plant foods, their populations would have outgrown
those of the Neanderthals.

The Neanderthals endured for about 100,000 years, despite a punishing way of life. They
preyed on the large animals that flourished in Europe in the ice age like bison, deer, gazelles
and wild horses. But there is no evidence that they knew of bows and arrows. Instead, they
used stone-tipped spears.

Hunting large game at close range is perilous, and Neanderthal skeletons bear copious
fractures. Dr. Kuhn and Dr. Stiner argue that Neanderthal women and children took part in the
dangerous hunts, probably as beaters and blockers of exit routes.

Their argument, necessarily indirect, begins with the human hunter-gatherer societies, almost
all of which have a division of labor between the sexes.

At sites occupied by modern humans from 45,000 to 10,000 years ago, a period known as the
Upper Paleolithic, there is good evidence of different occupations, from small animal and bird
remains, as well as the bone awls and needles used to make clothes. It seems reasonable to
assume that these activities were divided between men and women, as is the case with modern
foraging peoples.

But Neanderthal sites include no bone needles, no small animal remains and no grinding
stones for preparing plant foods. So what did Neanderthal women do all day?

Their skeletons are so robustly built that it seems improbable that they just sat at home looking
after the children, the anthropologists write. More likely, they did the same as the men, with
the whole population engaged in bringing down large game.

The meat of large animals yields a rich payoff, but even the best hunters have unlucky days.
The modern humans of the Upper Paleolithic, with their division of labor and diversified food
sources, would have been better able to secure a continuous food supply. Nor were they putting
their reproductive core — women and children — at great risk.

David Pilbeam, a paleoanthropologist at Harvard, said the Arizona researchers’ article was
“very stimulating and thoughtful” and seemed to be the first to propose a mechanism for why
Neanderthal populations declined.

Dr. Stiner said the division of labor between the sexes was likely to have arisen in a tropical
environment. Indeed, it may have provided the demographic impetus for modern humans to
expand out of Africa, she said.

A rival hypothesis proposed by Richard Klein of Stanford University holds that some cognitive
advance like the perfection of language underlay the burst of innovative behavior shown by
Upper Paleolithic people and their predecessors in Africa.

Why did the Neanderthals fail to adapt when modern humans arrived on their doorstep?
Under Dr. Klein’s hypothesis, the reason is simply that they were cognitively less advanced.
Dr. Stiner said that in her view there was not time for them to change their culture. “Although
there may have been differences in neurological wiring,” she said, “I think another very
important key is the legacy of cultural institutions about social roles.” Is there a genetic basis to
the division of labor that emerged in the modern human lineage? “It’s equally compelling to
argue that most or all of this has a cultural basis,” Dr. Stiner said. “That’s where it’s very
difficult for people like us and Richard Klein to resolve the basis of our disagreement.”

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Land for Peace?

Land for War

Abraham Berkowitz, John Bradford, and Tom Milstein

7/19/2006

“Land for Peace” is now acknowledged by everyone to have failed. This failure should
have been recognized long ago, but hope triumphed again and again over reality and
“the dream” persisted in clouding the consciousness of the Israeli people.
Israel has her definitive Arab-Islamic answer to “Land for Peace”: war, war to the
uttermost, not just against the Hovels of the Settlers on the West Bank (demonized as
the source of all Israel’s problems), but even against the Palace of Israel itself, “Green
Line” Israel, Israel inside its “proper borders.”

“Land for Peace” used to be Israel’s grand strategy. It has failed. It is time to try “Land
for War.” The “Land for War” strategy is predicated on the failure of its predecessor. If
the Arabs will not make peace with Israel in return for the ceding of land conquered in
1967 and the founding of a Palestinian state on that land, it is time for Israel to turn the
tables and adopt the opposite approach: instead of giving up land in return for (the hope
of) peace, Israel should announce a schedule of annexations of the land formerly slated
for withdrawal. This schedule should be shaped by the continuation of the terrorist War
on Israel. Step one – in response to the attacks already carried out– should be the
immediate annexation by the State of Israel of the territory lying between Jerusalem and
Ma'aleh Adumim. This annexation should be declared irrevocable. The schedule should
then lay out further steps and stages of irreversible annexation of territories conquered
in the Six-Day War, each in response to terrorist attacks against Israel, in whatever form
they take and wherever they occur. If the terrorism does not stop, Israel should commit
to continued implementation of the schedule until nothing is left to annex.

What the “Land for War” strategy does is to effectively put the terrorists in charge of the
Israel’s annexation program. It says to them, “Every time you attack Israel, you enlarge
the Jewish State, and you correspondingly diminish the Arab patrimony. It’s your
decision.”

This strategy will throw the Arab world into crisis, because while the Islamic extremists
of Hamas and Hizbollah don’t give a fig for the cause of Arab nationalism, the Middle
Eastern states which nurture and appease them do. Therefore “Land for War” will drive
a wedge between Arab nationalism and Islamic extremism. It will put the Islamists in
the role of gravediggers of the Palestinian state. It forces them to argue openly for the
supremacy of Islam over nationality. This is the great socio-political chasm of the Middle
East. A strategy which exploits this chasm is a strategy for victory rather than stalemate
and confusion.

Israel is bravely responding, as any self-respecting nation would, to the acts of
aggression perpetrated against her. But mere war, past a certain point, will only
perpetuate Israel’s no-win strategy. The time for a resolution of the Israel-Arab conflict
is at hand. Given the total failure of “Land for Peace” as a strategy, the necessary
political dimension of this war can only be supplied by “Land for War.” Neither the
Middle Eastern states nor the terrorist organizations which they harbor care about the
pain and suffering which Israel’ s military measures will inflict. In fact, these measures
by themselves have the effect of uniting nationalists and Islamic terrorists in a common
cause against the Jews. But the unfolding spectacle of Israeli annexation of Judea and
Samaria, step by inexorable and irreversible step, at a pace and to an extent dictated by
the terrorists themselves – that will have the opposite effect. It will devastate the anti-
Israel consensus in the Middle East and place the blame for Israel’s territorial
aggrandizement squarely on her supposed arch-enemies.

“Land for War” speaks to the Arabs in a language they understand: the language of lost
territory, the real and just price for starting and losing a war.

Abraham Berkowitz holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University in Political Science. He will be making
aliyah in August of this year.
John Bradford is an artist and teacher.
Tom Milstein is an Executive Director of a property management firm.
All currently reside in New York City.

Thursday, June 8, 2006

Gedankenexperiment

Thought Experiment

By Tom A. Milstein

June 8, 2006

Einstein made fruitful use of a creative technique called the “thought experiment” (Gedankenexperiment),
by which he meant a purely intellectual experiment in physical science, impractical
to carry out empirically, but bound by logic and constrained by the rule that it not violate any
fundamental physical laws.

Let us carry out the following “thought experiment”:

Something happens to flood the world with large quantities of new oil. That “something” might
be, for example, the discovery of large oil fields in politically benign areas, or a new technology
permitting oil to be brought up from areas previously thought inaccessible. Neither of these two
possibilities is excluded by the laws of geology or engineering. Since we are conducting a
thought experiment, a “what-if” chain of reasoning, we are entitled to consider either as our
starting assumption, however unlikely in practice.

What scenario logically unfolds from such a development?

Today oil sells at about $70 per barrel. Whatever factors have determined this price, the injection
of large quantities of new supply into the world market would obviously imperil the existing
price structure. If the supply bulge were large enough, the price would plummet. How low it
might fall is a matter of conjecture. But if the example of other economic raw materials offers
any guide, oil would probably sell at its true cost of production, plus a reasonable profit – perhaps
about a dollar a barrel.

So the first consequence of our thought experiment is that the economic interest represented by
the difference between oil selling at $70 per barrel, and oil selling at around $1 per barrel, would
be adversely affected. How big an interest are we talking about? The word “cosmic” comes to
mind. After all, oil is the key commodity in the modern world. Virtually nothing can be produced
without it. It is truly the prerequisite, the sine qua non, of all the world’s business. Ipso
facto, bathing the world economy in virtually limitless cheap oil would thus have a revolutionary
impact on the structure of that economy. Not only would the interest represented by oil at $70
per barrel be disrupted, but new interests founded on the much lower cost of producing goods
would move to the foreground. Like all newly-empowered economic interests, they would carry
with them new political, cultural and technological values, more rooted in entrepreneurialism,
technological innovation, and the deployment rather than the amassing of capital. The historic
balance between banking capital and production capital would tilt in the latter’s favor.

But wait! We have left an important and inevitable element out of our thought experiment scenario.
It is not reasonable to suppose that an interest whose power and influence we have not
shrunk from calling “cosmic” would gracefully bow out of the political struggle and exit stage
right from the theater of economic history. On the contrary, we ought to expect a serious effort
to appeal the verdict of the market and reverse the laws of supply and demand. Such an effort
would be consistent with Newton’s third law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
This reaction would constitute the second consequence of our thought experiment: the
effort by the enormous economic, political and cultural Establishment represented by oil at $70
a barrel to preserve its power and influence notwithstanding the collapse of its key asset’s price
(upon which our thought experiment is predicated).

Since we have excluded a priori by the terms of our thought experiment the possibility of maintaining
or restoring an elevated price of oil, what we need to consider – from the standpoint of
its former beneficiaries – are ways and means of preserving its effects even after its cause has
been (hypothetically) removed. For it is upon these effects – not the price of oil itself – that the
above-mentioned Establishment bases itself.

A vast increase in the supply of oil would exert a massively depressing effect on its price. This
price has obviously been a hugely limiting factor on the consumption of oil, and therefore a
hugely escalating factor on the cost of things produced with oil. The price of oil has created a
regime of scarcity around the world’s most important single commodity. But abundant oil
would destroy this regime of scarcity and overturn high-priced oil’s applecart. Could a regime of
scarcity be reimposed based on some other criteria than price? In other words, could scarcity,
having been overthrown at the supply end of the economic curve, be reinstituted at the demand
end, where oil is consumed? If so, a lot of applecart passengers would be mighty grateful.
Global Warming! Al Gore is only the most prominent of the many Cassandras who have recently
arisen to warn us that all respectable scientific opinion now agrees that we are destroying
our planet with our uncontrolled emissions of petroleum combustion byproducts. For these
folks abundant cheap oil would not be a blessing, but the apocalypse, leading to new ice ages,
oceanic inundations, famine, pestilence, giant hurricanes, together with, no doubt, epidemics of
baldness, impotence, and date rape.

Global Warming, about which all scientists now unanimously agree (except for some miscreants
who don’t), provides the perfect rationale for instituting an artificial regime of scarcity to replace
the economic regime imposed by high prices and short supplies. Not the economy, but Mother
Nature herself, so help us Wicca, demands that limits be imposed on oil consumption, in order
to save Gaia, our violated planet. How very convenient for Nature to come to the rescue of the
$70 a barrel crowd also! Once before She performed this service, through the pious auspices of
the good Rev. Thomas Malthus:

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce
subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the
human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They
are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work
themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics,
pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and
tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks
in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.
-- An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1789.

For Malthus, scarcity was dictated by the his iron law of population, which he insisted would
always increase geometrically, outstripping food supplies, which could only increase arithmetically.
Malthus proposed his ideas just as the English landed aristocracy was becoming aware of
the threat which the new industrial system of manufactures posed to its ascendancy. His pessimistic
and anti-human doctrine of food scarcity helped create the political atmosphere which
resulted in the passage of Britain’s Corn Laws, high tariffs on imported wheat and other foodstuffs
whose purpose was to subsidize the country’s inefficient feudal estates and thus artificially
perpetuate the Tory aristocracy’s corrupt dominion over England against the modernizing challenge
posed by the Manchester industrialists.

Today it is not food but energy which is alleged to be scarce. Whether it actually is or not is beyond
the scope of our thought experiment. But it is certainly heartening to know that the same
doctrine of scarcity which preserved the English aristocracy can be trotted out in the 21st century,
suitably regarbed in the trendy couture of ecology, to perform an equivalent function for
our own $70 a barrel aristocracy in the disastrous wake of an (hypothetical) oil price collapse.
The dogma of Global Warming is thus the third consequence of our thought experiment. It
stands ready to rationalize the imposition of Energy Consumption Controls, no matter what the
price of energy production, in the name of saving the planet from mankind’s swinish overconsumption.
Such controls would no doubt take the form of huge new taxes on energy consumption,
thereby creating a massive cash flow into the world’s various environmental protection
agencies, governmental and private. So aggrandized, these high-minded bureaucracies will acquire
the clout to perpetuate an artificial regime of scarcity forever – or at least for a long time –
even if technology and capitalism combine to discredit the doctrine of scarce energy supplies.
This brave new form of socialism, based on the expropriation and redistribution of scarcity,
should inscribe on its banner, “Arise, ye prisoners of abundance. You have been all, you shall be
naught!”

But our little thought experiment has produced a very peculiar result: whereas a crash in oil
prices is purely hypothetical, Global Warming is with us now. Nothing hypothetical about it.
Thanks to Al Gore, we even have that ultimate 21st century validation of its really real reality, a
movie – named, with 66% mendacity, An Inconvenient (sic) Truth (sic). What are we to make of
this strange emergence of a causeless consequence?