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French President Jacques Chirac said today: “As far as we’re concerned, war always means failure.”

James Taranto in the WSJ’s blog responds: “CNN doesn’t say what language he was speaking when he said this, but if it was French and not German, the statement refutes itself.”

Yes, we’re dangerously close to Godwin’s Law here, but the idea that there is nothing worse than war is so utterly inimical to Western values of freedom and democracy (values that have continually required defending at the point of the gun) that Europeans should be embarrased not to at least be open to the idea that force is sometimes utterly necessary and proper.

As Bill Saffire says in tomorrow’s NYT, “Pyrrhic victories [such as appeasing Iraq] are part of the backdrop to the existential crisis that the Security Council is bringing on itself. The Iraq issue is not war vs. peace. It is collective security vs. every nation for itself.”

France should recall how they fared the last time they walked away from their collective security committments (by shamefully selling out Czechoslovokia at Munich).

The NYT reports on the Segway, and gives the first realistic justification I’ve ever seen for getting one:

Mr. Tropea said some people argue that he has bought an overpriced “geek magnet.” But it is rather a people magnet, especially for the opposite sex, he said. “If I wasn’t married, this is what I would need to meet girls,” he said.

It is no exaggeration. A young woman catches his eye and asks about his ride. “Can you go fast?” she asks, and raises an eyebrow playfully. “Do you think you could catch me?”

I just got back from giving 31 one hour presentations for Pixonics in 3 days in a darkened suite at the Las Vegas Hilton during the Consumer Electronics Show. I’m exhausted, but they were great meetings and I’m glad I did it.

The CES atomosphere put me in mind of Wordsworth:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

New York Metro on online dating and promiscuity (though the point is applicable to all of modern life):

“There is probably a downside — a more liquid, fast-moving marketplace may cause some people to feel that they can always trade up, and you can make a case that endless options are the enemy of contentment,” says Rufus Griscom, co-founder of Nerve and chairman of Spring Street Networks. “This is the quote-unquote late-capitalist existential crisis. Well, you can reminisce about the good old days when you lived on the family farm and married your cousin. Sure, life is simpler and more stable when people have very few options. I’ll take the present.”

BTW, the faux historicism implied in “late capitalism” makes it one of my favorite phrases.

I keep blathering on about pluralist ideals of market democracy, and yet I live in a country where far less than 50% of people vote. Gordon Mohr argues that one shouldn’t vote unless you’re familiar with the issues.

First, rather than saying that you shouldn’t vote unless you’ve studied the issues, I would just say that you should study the issues. Voting or not is certainly a matter of personal preference, and I’m comfortable with people making the choice not to vote. Of course, I’m also comfortable with people who decide to vote even though they’re not familiar with the issues, as I believe the right to vote (even to vote poorly) is a fundamental human one.

My only concern is that voting does require a certain naive belief in democracy and even an irrational belief that one person can have an impact. That is, voting is almost impossible to justify as a matter of simple economics.

To see why, assume that your city of 100,000 is voting to raise the minimum wage from $6 to $10 an hour, which will directly mean your salary goes from $12 K to $20 K a year. What could be more obvious than that you should take the hour to go vote, right? Well, no. Technically, with majority-take-all voting (like we use in the States), your vote only matters if it’s the tie-breaking one. If about half the folks are going to vote, that’s a 1 in 50,000 chance that your vote will matter. Multiply that by the $8,000 you’ll get if the vote passes, and the expected value of you voting is 16 cents. Since you already make $6 an hour, your time is definitely worth more than 16 cents.

Now, there’s still a whole raft of reasons to vote, such as civic responsibility, the warm feeling it gives you compared to the billion or so people who don’t have the right, the huge regret you’d feel if the measure really did lose by 1 vote, etc. However, it’s just not worth doing solely for the economic basis. (And, of course, most votes have far less clear economic benefits, and your impact is diluted across more voters.)

On the other hand, all sorts of areas of modern life (from co-worker interaction, to friendships, to dating, to most areas of morality) would be quite unpleasant if they were decided solely on a rational economic basis. For instance, I don’t think we should dump our toxic waste to Africa (as former Treasury secretary and now Harvard president Larry Summers once facetiously suggested), even though resulting deaths in Africa would have far less economic impact than ones here (due to their lower incomes).

Michael Ignatieff from the NYT writes on the American Empire:

The Greeks taught the Romans to call this failure hubris. It was also, in the 1990’s, a general failure of the historical imagination, an inability of the post-cold-war West to grasp that the emerging crisis of state order in so many overlapping zones of the world — from Egypt to Afghanistan — would eventually become a security threat at home. Radical Islam would never have succeeded in winning adherents if the Muslim countries that won independence from the European empires had been able to convert dreams of self-determination into the reality of competent, rule-abiding states. America has inherited this crisis of self-determination from the empires of the past. Its solution — to create democracy in Iraq, then hopefully roll out the same happy experiment throughout the Middle East — is both noble and dangerous: noble because, if successful, it will finally give these peoples the self-determination they vainly fought for against the empires of the past; dangerous because, if it fails, there will be nobody left to blame but the Americans.

All true, but I fail to see a lot of downsides. Disengagement from the world to a degree where Osama bin Laden wouldn’t target the US is utterly inconceivable. We’ll continue to trade, and to travel, and to interact with people around the world, and this will make us an existential threat to totalitarian fundamentalists who realize that they cannot stand to have their stagnant ideas compared to the market democracies of the pluralist West.

And, so, I think we need to steady ourselves for the coming tribulations of an American empire, even one that’s oxymoronically dedicated to the idea that everyone, everywhere deserves the freedom to make choices about how they live.

Happiness had been a long-standing intellectual interest of mine, although the study has not produced a lot of breakthroughs for me. Here’s a fascinating NYT piece on hyperthymia, the condition of being uncommonly happy:

Cheerful despite life’s misfortunes, energetic and productive, they are often the envy of all who know them because they don’t even have to work at it….

So if some people are just born happy and stay happy for no good reason, does this mean that happiness is nothing more than a lucky combination of neurotransmitters?

For most people, no. Circumstance and experience count for a lot, and being happy takes work. But hyperthymic people have it easy: they have won the temperamental sweepstakes and may be hard-wired for happiness.

What are the 3 most important ideas anyone’s ever had? Obviously, there is no right answer to the question, and it’s arguably subjective enough so that the answers say more about the answerer than the question. Nevertheless, here are my choices:

3) Darwinism. As Richard Dawkins says in The Selfish Gene, never before was their a credible answer to the children’s question of “Why are we?” until Charles Darwin published his theory. Darwinism is, I believe, the best single idea anyone ever had, and is also a fascinating illustration of the scientific method, in that it’s been verified across a whole range of disciplines, from taxonomy to molecular biology to epidemiology.

2) The scientific method. Aristotle was a smart guy, with a lot of ideas. What he didn’t have was a sieve to filter the ideas that work from the rest. The scientific method can best be summarized as falsifiability, the concept that if you’re interest in truth, you have to test your ideas. So, if you read Aristotle, it’s amazing how wrong he is about so many things, and without the technology of the scientific method, he has no way of figuring out when he’s wrong or right. Of course, innovations as varied as modern medicine, modern agriculture, and most engineering would be impossible without the scientific method. On a more down note, I’ll mention Richard Feynman’s contention of how many aspects of modern life don’t take advantage of the scientific method, including most educational strategies, criminology, and management studies.

1) Free will. My vote for the most important idea is free will, the concept that we are responsible for our own decisions and actions. There’s a fresco cycle in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence where in the course of painting murals during the Renaissance, Masaccio gave expression to the idea of free will by adding perspective. Perspective requires a viewpoint centered on the individual, not an abstract god. No longer were we creatures ordered or controlled by god, but individuals, with choices and control over ourself.

From this idea of free will (which the Greeks had, but was then lost until the Renaissance), directly flows the concepts of liberal democracy and market capitalism. It is central to both how our civilization is organized and how we view ourselves.

Which I why I was so concerned to read this article from the NYT, which describes some intriguing (though hardly conclusive) evidence is accumulating that free will is an allusion, an artifice covering up “computations unfolding in a subconscious neural netherworld”. The author continues:

To me, choices, freely made, are what make life meaningful. Moreover, our faith in free will has social value. It provides us with the metaphysical justification for ethics and morality. It forces us to take responsibility for ourselves rather than consigning our fate to our genes or God. Free will works better than any other single criterion for gauging the vitality of a life, or a society.

Theologians have proposed that science still allows faith in a “God of the gaps,” who dwells within those shadowy realms into which science has not fully penetrated, such as the imaginary time before the Big Bang banged. In the same way, maybe we can have a free will of the gaps. No science is more riddled with gaps, after all, than the science of human consciousness.

Of course, we don’t have to give up liberal democracy and market capitalism if turns out that free will doesn’t exist, but it would make it harder to give them a philosophical foundation.

So, I had a great date last night with a woman who is 5′10″ tall (I’m 6′4″), and our conversation inevitably turned to the subject of shortism, which is discrimination against SHRIMPs (Severely Height-Restricted Individuals of the Male Persuasion). From the 1995 Economist, here is one of the most brilliant essays I’ve ever read, which starts from a ludicrous premise and concludes by calling doubt on all forms of government-sponsored affirmative action:
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