The quants: how a new breed of math whizzes conquered Wall Street and nearly destroyed it, by Scott Patterson, Crown Business, 2010. $27.00, 337 pp.

Wall Street titans like Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld, AIG CEO Hank Greenberg, and scam artist Bernie Madoff have emerged as the central villains of the financial crisis. But in The Quants, Wall Street Journal reporter Scott Patterson introduces us to a breed of mysterious figures who played a crucial role in the crisis but have largely avoided media scrutiny. They are the quants, analysts who use arcane mathematical techniques to reap enormous financial rewards.

More Riemann than Rothschild, the quants bring advanced mathematical knowledge from academia to Wall Street in order to execute complex and lucrative trades. Patterson focuses on the men behind the formulas, giving us a fascinating glimpse into their motivations and eccentricities, without casting judgment. Ultimately, though, his story suggests that the quant subculture and methodology helped bring about the financial crisis. And despite the huge losses they sustained, the quants will remain stars on Wall Street for the foreseeable future, relatively safe from populist anger.

Beating the Dealer

Patterson appropriately begins his book with a poker game, in which young quant prodigies vie for the respect of their bosses. Card games are a favorite pastime of the quants; the mix of competition and calculation is intoxicating for them. Edward O. Thorp, a noted mathematician and legendary investor, did pioneering research into blackjack strategy before realizing that his ideas could be applied to trading convertible bonds. The entire cast of The Quants began their careers after reading Thorp’s classic 1962 book, Beat the Dealer.

Patterson’s quants are, at heart, math whizzes out to solve a challenging problem whose solution, only incidentally, can make them billions of dollars. What lures them to Wall Street is  the desire to win more than the desire to earn money—hence the fascination with poker and blackjack. In cards and in investing, the quants look to win for winning’s sake; taking home the pot is just a bonus.

The quants got their start as star students in math and science, and then migrated to New York to test their algorithms in an industry then run largely by men making gut decisions. (Not all even waited to graduate. Ken Griffin, Harvard Class of 1989, put a satellite dish on the roof of Cabot House and traded convertible bonds on his grandmother’s bank account.) Patterson describes the tension on Wall Street between the quants and the old-guard traders, whom the quants affectionately deride as “Big Swinging Dicks,” and traces it back to tension between the nerds and the preppy jocks at Harvard.

The Biggest Casino of Them All

While The Quants is a story about geeks, Patterson helpfully assumes that his audience will not necessarily grasp the difference between Brownian motion and Gaussian copula. Nor must one be a banker to appreciate the book. Although some knowledge of finance is certainly helpful, you need no PhD or MBA to understand Cliff Asness’s computer-smashing rampages at Goldman Sachs or Ken Griffin’s single-minded quest to build Citadel Investment Group into an empire. At its best, The Quants is more about the people than the formulas.

But even as Patterson focuses on the unique personalities of his subjects, he links them with a theme that he, quite frankly, pounds into the reader’s brain. In fact, he repeats one narrative so frequently that the book can be summarized thusly: the quants, looking for “the Truth” in “the biggest casino of them all,” nearly brought down the whole system. Patterson ends a chapter with this page-turning tease: “If Boaz Weinstein could hold on long enough, [the trades] would pay off. They had to. The market couldn’t avoid the Truth. Or so he thought.” How could the market avoid the Truth? We do not find out for another 150 pages. Lines like “Those close enough to the action could almost feel the fabric of the financial system tearing apart” add vague tension but clarify little. The repetition of such clichés is a symptom of Patterson’s attempt to make a complicated financial crisis seem like the inevitable result of his subjects’ high-stakes games.

Quants in the Crisis

Still, Patterson offers an interesting theory about how common quant strategies exacerbated the financial crisis. He starts with the common intellectual heritage and tight-knit community of the quants. Nearly all see themselves as the arbitraging “piranhas” from Eugene Fama’s Efficient Market Hypothesis. Fama famously posited that an asset’s price in efficient markets (including the American stock market) would reflect all of the available information about the asset. Thus, the only way to beat the market would be to have information that no one else has, or to act fastest on newly released information. Like piranhas devouring fresh meat, traders arbitrage “incorrect” prices until they reach equilibrium. The quants designed models to discover the closest approximation of what the “true” value of an asset should be, and used the best computers to act fast on newly released information.

Ultimately, these lucrative methods turned toxic when the sub-prime crisis arrived. The quant funds had grown large enough that “hall-of-mirrors-like, it became difficult to tell the difference between the model and the market itself.” The quants believed that their models represented, rather than approximated, true asset values, and they made trades that were big enough to move the markets toward those values. But when sub-prime losses led one large fund to scramble for cash to cover its loans, it unwound the entire quant system, causing the market to move in the opposite direction from where it was expected to go. Since nearly all of the quants had similar investments, as each quant fund cut its losses, it made the next fund’s losses worse. The rapid computer-executed trades only added to the volatility.

The New Deans

Still, in spite of the huge losses that Patterson recounts, the quants are probably here to stay. This is in part due to the tight-knit quant culture that the book so ably portrays. They are endlessly devising new moneymaking strategies, and are once again earning enormous profits for the banks and hedge funds that employ them. It was the same story after the crises of 1987 and 1998. It seems that, for all of their recent failings, the quants have permanently upset the old  “Big Swinging Dick” order. The professors are the new barons of Wall Street, and they appear poised to accrue even more power. They are like “civil engineers … after a bridge collapse,” Patterson writes: they’re to blame, but they’re also needed for the rebuilding. The Quants is a great starting point for understanding how the members of this new financial elite brought down, and might again build up, our nation’s economy.

Jeffrey Kalmus ‘12 is the Webmaster.

Taming the gods: religion and democracy on three continents, by Ian Buruma, Princeton University Press, 2010. $19.95, 132 pp.

In his new book Taming the Gods, British-Dutch writer Ian Buruma recalls the outrage and death threats that greeted the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The incident united British intellectuals, Buruma writes, leading “many multiculturalists, anti-racists, and pro-Third Worldists to join conservatives in their stand against Islam.” Since the 9/11 attacks, however, debates about Islam in Europe have been vigorous,  and accusations of appeasement and xenophobia have flown back and forth.

Taming the Gods seeks to offer a reasoned discussion of the proper relationship between religion and politics. Buruma approaches this perennially vexing problem with a unique blend of political theory and history, spanning Europe, Asia, and North America. While the novelty of his approach yields fresh historical perspective and some insight on European Islam, it does not offer a truly unique contribution to the larger church-state debate. Instead, Buruma advances the standard liberal line that the passions of religion must be “tamed” and all citizens must follow the rules of democracy, without offering concrete solutions for applying this framework.

The Western Front

Buruma begins with a crash course on the Western problem of church-state relations. While his summary of classical thinkers like Hume, Spinoza, and Rousseau occasionally becomes textbook-like, he offers fascinating connections between those writers and the historical development of democracy. For example, he says that Tocqueville’s idea that “unbelievers attacked the Church more as a political rather than religious enemy” explains both the persecution of Catholics in revolutionary France and their marginalization in 19^th century America.

Buruma argues counter-intuitively that modern-day Europe and America are not as different as American critics of godless Europe and European detractors of American zealotry hold. He finds that every European country has a distinctive way of balancing religion and secular government, and that the United States is a variation on, not a departure from, this theme. The religious-fundamentalist elements in America, he points out, historically have supported democracy more strongly than similar factions have in France or Germany.

Eastern Promises

Buruma then turns to the East and examines China and Japan, disputing “the notion that only monotheistic religions pose problems for secular politics.” Confucian thought, though it contains the oldest formulation of the right of rebellion against unjust authority, has strong themes of obedience that have been manipulated by leaders like Mao to thwart democratic movements.

In Japan, State Shinto suppressed secularizing trends in the 19^th century. The divine authority of the emperor ruled out the possibility of democracy until after World War II. While Buruma shows that the issue of political and religious authority is not a uniquely Western problem, the lesson he draws is not particularly earth-shattering: government and religion often make a dangerous combination.

Liberal Eurabia?

Buruma’s central argument is clearest when he criticizes those frequent warnings about how Islam is a threat to European society. He lines up with other liberals in that he condemns Islamophobia and argues that the emergence of a democratic European Islam is possible. But he also warns of the great danger posed by the refusal of Islamic fundamentalists to recognize the legitimacy of the secular European states in which they live. This problem creates the necessity of “taming the gods,” or reigning in religious extremism.

Distancing himself from conservatives, Buruma points out that this cause will be hindered, not helped, by xenophobic and exclusionary reactions against Muslims. He argues that liberal tolerance must extend even to illiberal doctrines and practices, as long as they are pursued peacefully. Liberalism for Buruma is not a way of life but a mediator between different ways of life, not all of which need to be perfectly liberal or modern.

Buruma’s recommendation for the future is simple, perhaps too simple. Maintaining a liberal society that includes illiberal citizens is more easily said than done. Buruma’s work admirably rejects the reprehensible extremes of theocracy and xenophobia. But his elegant writing hides a dearth of real proposals for some of the thorniest issues, such as how to assimilate Europe’s swelling Muslim population and how to incorporate religious viewpoints into public debate without violating the spirit of secularism. Ultimately, in spite of its vagueness when it comes to practical solutions, the strength of Buruma’s book lies in his call to tame not only religious extremism, but extremist reactions against extremism as well.

Casey Thomson ‘13 is a Staff Writer.

Photo Credit: Flickr (Fabbio)

The view of Jerusalem from the exit of Yad Vashem

liberal American Jews feel from Israel and the American organizations that support it (i.e. AIPAC). He argues that Zionist organizations have moved rightward with the Israeli government and have largely shut out liberal dissent: “…by defending virtually anything any Israeli government does, they make themselves intellectual bodyguards for Israeli leaders who threaten the very liberal values they profess to admire.”  Jonathan Chait’s response pushed back against Beinart’s idea that the leaders of the American Jewish community repress criticism of Israel. In a two-part (and counting) conversation with Beinart, Jeffrey Goldberg discusses how different groups of Jews view how much the Palestinians are to blame, if at all, for the current problems, among other issues in Beinart’s essay.  But I think that Chait and Goldberg miss one of Beinart’s most forceful arguments:

This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood—a drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967—strikes most of today’s young American Jews as farce.

As a self-identifying young-liberal-American-Jewish-Zionist, i.e. a member of the exact demographic Beinart wishes were larger, I agree completely.  When Jews make up 25% of Harvard undergraduates, when the New York Times op-ed page has pieces by Krugman, Brooks, and Cohen, it’s hard to feel like a victim.  When I stayed in Israel for a few days after my Birthright trip this past January, I felt no need to see more of the sites; I was happy to enjoy the beaches and cafés of Tel Aviv, enjoying the world-class city Israelis have built from scratch in the past half-century.

Israel’s Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, has a more positive message than, say, the Holocaust museum in DC.  Its architecture reinforces that; there are some light and some dark areas in the building, and the museum’s exit overlooks the (beautiful) hills of Jerusalem. I think that we are at the exit of the museum, that we have this beautiful, modern country, and we are content with nothing more than peace within the current borders.  And I think that my fellow youths feel similarly.  We want to focus on what’s outside the museum, not what’s inside it. My generation feels as if we’ve largely overcome the history of victimization, and we’d respond better to arguments which don’t break down for someone who believes that today’s Jews, American and Israeli, are a wealthy and powerful people who deserve a state but who can withstand threats often portrayed as existential.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons (David Shankbone)

Particularly brilliant, I think, is his piece on Elena Kagan:

About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities.

If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic.

If you listen to people talk about Elena Kagan, it is striking how closely their descriptions hew to this personality type.

Kagan has many friends along the Acela corridor, thanks to her time at Hunter College High School, Princeton, Harvard and in Democratic administrations. So far, I haven’t met anybody who is not an admirer. She is apparently smart, deft and friendly. She was a superb teacher. She has the ability to process many points of view and to mediate between different factions.

Yet she also is apparently prudential, deliberate and cautious. She does not seem to be one who leaps into a fray when the consequences might be unpredictable. “She was one of the most strategic people I’ve ever met, and that’s true across lots of aspects of her life,” John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor, told The Times. “She is very effective at playing her cards in every setting I’ve seen.”

Tom Goldstein, the publisher of the highly influential SCOTUSblog, has described Kagan as “extraordinarily — almost artistically — careful. I don’t know anyone who has had a conversation with her in which she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade.”

Kagan seems like a lot of kids I’ve known: perfectly reasonable and perfectly well-liked; highly strategic and highly effective; and totally, utterly averse to risk (and its rewards). I buy Lawrence Lessig’s case that this is what our conservative Court needs most: not a “great dissenter,” but a great “majority maker” for liberals. And I also get that Kagan is nominated to be judge, and that reasonableness and carefulness go with the territory.

But I read Brooks’ account of the meritocracy and I nod. I think: “What about us?” Not judges, not majority-makers, we don’t have to be perfectly reasonable, perfectly well-liked. In fact, I think there’s a lot to be said for that George Bernard Shaw line that “all progress depends on the unreasonable man [or woman]“; that progress depends on people who aren’t afraid of trouble; on those who believe in life as a playing out of Beckett’s injunction to “try again, fail again, fail better.” I don’t think Kagan (at least not by reports) would agree that this is how life unfolds, and that’s fine. Neither would the Organization Kids, definitionally, and that’s fine too. But that doesn’t mean Brooks is wrong; his critique — that the meritocracy creates new power and thus new people — is still trenchant. Just look at Ivy League universities today…

Thoughts?

Photo credit: NYTimes

The evidence of Shahzad’s mediocrity begins with a Spring 1998 transcript which, quoting the New York Times, “showed that he earned D’s in English composition and microeconomics, B’s in Introduction to Accounting and Introduction to Humanities, and a C in statistics.”  Peretz comments:

Let us give Shahzad the benefit of the doubt: He was a certified mediocrity. Nothing better. Why does America desire such certified mediocrities? … what conceivable national interest was served in giving such a dross of a young man a student visa?

I’m not sure what Peretz is suggesting; perhaps a GPA requirement for nationalization?  Not exactly — such an implied requirement would only apply to immigrants of certain races.

We do have anself-interested [sic] obligation to deal with Latin American would-be immigrants and sojourners, if for no other reason than that they are our neighbors, very close neighbors; and the prosperity of Mexico, the islands, and below Mexico to Central and South America is therefore our concern.

There are also countries (of which, by the way, Pakistan is one, like India and South Korea and others) from which talented men and women want to come to live and work in the United States. The emphasis should always be on talent, rigorously measured.

This pretty clearly, if accidentally, suggests that talented immigrants don’t come from Latin America.  So (a) all the talented people in Latin America want to stay put or (b) there are none to begin with.  Either way, Peretz creates a strange double standard: It’s okay for Mexican immigrants to be construction workers, but Indian immigrants better be doctors.  I don’t think that the proximity argument suffices because air travel makes even Pakistan only a day away.

Peretz finishes:

Frankly, we have enough of our own mediocrities not to go out of our way to welcome others. And we should especially scrutinize those from countries in which terror is now part of the national culture.

I don’t see how this is a useful prescription; should we scrutinize a Pakistani accountants with a couple of C’s more closely than a Pakistani engineer with straight A’s? Isn’t the latter more dangerous?

Underlying Peretz’ post are racism and intellectual snobbery rather than constructive ideas on the relation between immigration policy and terrorism.

Photo Credit: Flickr (pjern)

Sam gives us the standard-line “progressive critique” of the clubs. His is an argument that’s been made many times before — by the likes of April Yee here, Sabrina Lee here, and most recently by Daniel Herz-Roiphe, a club member, here – and baseically says the following: final clubs are bad because they perpetuate racism, elitism, and sexism by glorifying masculinity, traditionalism, and heteronormative groupthink. Sabrina Lee writes, in her definitive expression of the progressive critique, that, “Final clubs, as inherently exclusive institutions, foster a homosocial environment that creates a whole host of social problems, including intensified notions of male superiority, heightened sexual aggression, heteronormativity, and the inability to ethically evaluate one’s own actions.”

To me, this goes too far. And then again, it doesn’t seem to go far enough.

First, I suspect that the argument on its merits is weaker than some believe. All evidence points to the fact that the clubs are more racially and economically integrated than ever before. They might not be “diverse” in a substantive sense (I’ll get to that in a second) but it’s true that the progressive critique is getting progressively weaker. I haven’t done any fieldwork, but I do have final club friends. The final clubbers that I know are not elitist, or racist, or homophobic. Not even close.

Do final clubs propagate certain race and class norms? Yes. And that’s important. But it is, at the same time, hardly damning. Final clubs can do what they want (within the bounds of the law). And institutionally, they’re perfectly right in selecting for and preserving their own self-image – for which institutions, after all, do not? The Crimson? The Hasty Pudding Theatricals? The Advocate? The IOP? Any sociology of the Harvard extracurricular scene would reveal that there is a multiplicity of sub-cultures here, each a hierarchy predicated on subtle judgment, explicit exclusion, implicit control, etc. Do final clubs restrict women? Yes. But so do frats.

My point isn’t that final club culture is good — far from it, in fact. My point, instead, is that the progressive critique goes about arguing for the right things in the wrong way. By postulating the existence of final club “victims” — of people on the receiving ends of final clubs’ deprivation – the progressive critique makes the case against the clubs essentially litigious. One wishes to shout: Harvard students aren’t victims! Don’t pretend that they are. To say that final clubs are a crime is to take a very low view of your peers — of the final club males, who aren’t criminals, of the folks that show up to the parties (who really do go voluntarily…and look so pretty and have such a nice time) and of the vast majority of people that don’t care one way or another. As a court case, the progressive critique is a laughing stock.

Thus my critique of the critique: it’s too easy to dismiss; it overplays its hand; it’s impossibly adversarial. No one is going to admit that they’re a sexist pig or a racist pig or a pig pig. And most Harvard students have no reason to. If that’s our only argument, then we’re always going to be shouting from the outside of their old, clubby doors.

Second, more importantly: My problem with the progressive critique is that it lets the final clubs off the hook. I know this from experience. When my final club friends hear the argument that the clubs are racist/elitist/sexist, they invariably tune out. They agree on substance that being a chauvinist pig is bad, but they look at their own record (non-white, not rich, loving long-term partner, liberal, whatever) and they assume they’re in the clear. But they’re not. Supporting final clubs is still wrong, and we need a vocabulary to express that, even to the hard cases (especially to the hard cases, for they — not the rapists proper — are the ones we might hope to convince).

I begin then with the premise that while racism/elitism/sexism are necessary standards for anyone to be held against, they’re not themselves sufficient standards. “Not raping girls,” in short, is not the sine qua non of your responsibilities to this community; being a Harvard student means so much more. My case is that final clubs are bad because they don’t do good – because they exist in this community and yet never give back to it; because they have resources and yet work only for themselves; because they don’t try to make this school (or this world) a better place.

In other words, final clubs don’t break the rules of our community; they violate its spirit. To quote from the student handbook: “By accepting membership in the University, an individual joins a community ideally characterized by free expression, free inquiry, intellectual honesty, respect for the dignity of others, and openness to constructive change.” Final clubs disgrace the premise of Harvard community. They reject our togetherness: their resources are spent helping themselves or aggressively excluding others. And they reject some of our most basic shared values as an educational institution – values like openness, merit, diversity and public-spiritedness.

It’s not the students who are backwards, it’s the institutions. They exist like old, malignant growths lodged between a University that’s democratizing and a world that’s more meritocratic and diverse than ever before. So I speak not as an activist but as a consultant. I’d say to the clubs, if given the chance: in the 20^th century, power might have come from exclusion and traditionalism pastiche and etiquette. But the world is changing. You need another strategy. In today’s world, power comes from inclusion, from networks, from creativity and heterodoxy and awesomeness. So long as the clubs reject these principles, they represent retarding forces on the progress of our moral and intellectual sensibilities as a community. They slow us down.

My case against final clubs, then, is not that they’re bad because they hurt some of us. They’re bad because they’re not good. In situating themselves in opposition to our community they hurt themselves and, in that way, they hurt all of us.

Photo Credit: Flickr stream of eileansiar

If they made posters of Supreme Court Justices, I’d put John Paul Stevens on my bedroom wall. The man is a progressive hero — first and foremost, for his longevity. In 2006, the liberal radio station Air America made a parody of “Hang On Sloopy” called “Hang On Stevens” — with lyrics like, “Stevens, I don’t care if you lose your mind, just wait until Bush leaves before you resign.” Past Sandra Day O’Connor and William Rehnquist and David Souter, Stevens hung on. And he probably could have kept going. He plays tennis twice a week, at 90 years old!

Still, his retirement is well-deserved. And thankfully, we don’t need Stevens to hang on anymore. We can only hope that President Obama finds someone as thoughtful and, yes, empathetic as Stevens to fill his shoes.

Appointed by Republican Gerald Ford in 1975, Stevens was not always an icon of the left. He has claimed that he didn’t change — that the Court changed around him. But it’s hard to take that seriously. Over the course of 34 years, Stevens has changed his mind on affirmative action, obscenity, and the death penalty, always moving in a more liberal direction.

Even his last major opinion, his dissent in the Citizens United campaign finance case, reflected a long-ago flip-flop. In January, Stevens caustically wrote, “While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.” In 1978, though, a Stevens-backed majority ruled that speech doesn’t lose the Constitution’s protection “simply because its source is a corporation” — the same sort of claim made by the Citizens United majority. It’s a shame Stevens wasn’t always as liberal as we’ll remember him, but he should feel no shame in admitting that he learned on the job, that he came around.

On some issues, of course, Stevens has been consistent. He has always protected a woman’s right to choose, upheld the separation of church and state, and defended the federal government’s power to regulate the economy. And in the last ten years, he has made his name, and shaped his legacy, as the intellectual leader and chief strategist of the Court’s increasingly beleaguered liberal wing.

What we might call Stevens’s heroic era began in 2000 with Bush v. Gore, an affront to democracy that Stevens unabashedly identified as such. In the early part of the Bush era, Stevens helped the liberals eke out major victories, or at least stave off major defeats, by assigning opinions to centrist justices like O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy and then rallying the liberal troops. This savviness gave us cases like Lawrence v. Texas, the major gay-rights victory; Grutter v. Bollinger, the last vindication of affirmative action; and Roper v. Simmons, which forbade the death penalty for crimes committed by minors.

This period will also be remembered for Stevens’s brave defense of the rule of law in a string of decisions rejecting Bush counter-terrorism policies. In 2004 he led a six-justice majority in holding that federal courts had jurisdiction over the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The Bush Administration would no longer be able simply to ignore detainees’ claims of wrongful detention. In 2006, Stevens wrote the opinion overturning Bush’s military commissions because they had not been authorized by Congress and violated the Geneva Conventions. Finally, in 2008, this line of cases culminated in Boumediene v. Bush, which rejected even congressionally authorized military commissions as offensive to the right of habeas corpus. After September 11, few would have guessed that a majority of the Supreme Court would be courageous enough to stand up for the procedural rights of terror suspects. Stevens deserves a great deal of credit for that outcome.

Of course Stevens wrote a few decisions that shouldn’t sit well with liberals. I don’t want to suggest that he was the ideal Supreme Court Justice, as if such a thing exists. In 1989, Stevens refused to protect flag-burning under the First Amendment, hearkening back to “the soldiers who scaled the bluff at Omaha Beach” under the Stars and Stripes. (Stevens himself served in the Pacific Theater.) And in 2008 he upheld a photo-ID requirement that, like most anti-voter fraud laws, disproportionately hindered the poor and the elderly from exercising their right to vote.

But neither Supreme Court justices nor the nominees chosen to replace them should be held to a standard of ideological purity. With regards to nominees, we couldn’t do so if we tried. No prominent lawyer, judge, or politician is going to have a track record on every constitutional question that might arise in the next thirty years. And if they did, they’d never be confirmed. Our broken political process demands that nominees say nothing interesting or substantive; platitudes and evasions are the name of the game.

The next several weeks will, of course, be given over to fevered and uninformed speculation about whom Obama might nominate to replace Stevens. I’m not going to pick a favorite. Harvard parochialism doesn’t decide the issue for me — how could I choose between Elena Kagan, Elizabeth Warren, Cass Sunstein, and Martha Minow? If I wanted a smart, liberal, female law professor from Stanford, I’d have to flip a coin between Pam Karlan and Kathleen Sullivan. Better to just wait and let Obama pick for me.

Still, I can say this much: Obama is probably never going to have such a good chance to appoint a bona fide liberal to the Court. There’s no doubt the Democrats are going to lose at least a handful of senators in the fall, making any post-midterm nominations much dicier. And, as the New York Times reported last week, Republicans may be wary of being portrayed (accurately) as “knee-jerk obstructionists.” My bet is still that they’ll filibuster anyone Obama nominates; they cannot afford to deflate their base’s balloon before the midterms.

So the question becomes whether the nominee can be sold to the public and to the handful of reasonable GOP senators. Ultimately, “wise Latina” or not, Sonia Sotomayor was broadly popular from the get-go, and there just wasn’t enough there for honest Republicans to oppose. Let the Republicans complain; if Obama appoints the right person, things will fall into place. We need someone like Stevens, someone who we’ll be cheering to “hang on” thirty years from now.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Last weekend, Harvard’s Model United Nations conference for college students took place for the 56th time, drawing thousands of students from all over the world to Boston Park Plaza. As an uber-important (or not) Assistant Director to the E.U. committee, I got to observe first hand how students acted as delegates from countries they didn’t come from and to debate the possibility of a unified European army. Needless to say, they fleshed out a brilliant resolution to transform the future of the European Union, one that reflected a great deal of compromise from all quarters. And at the end of the slightly-gruelling and sleepless process, everyone is congratulated, and then congratulated again. The non-stop schedule, coupled with an array of talent and vibrant backgrounds shooting from all corners of an overstuffed semi-luxury hotel creates a genuinely-electric atmosphere. When it’s all over, you can’t help but feel like you were part of something special, something that, once again, has to be tragically put off until the same time next year. Then you go back into the real world, work off the emotional hangover, and suddenly find it very easy to dismiss the relevance of the whole thing.

Model UN essentially creates an illusion. It acts as a key conspirator in perpetuating teenage idealism well into the late college years. There is one obvious reason for this. As none of the delegates truly represent the countries they are fighting for in the weekend’s various committees and assemblies, it is always possible to be reasonable, deliberate, and forward-looking. You can justify to yourself the loss of one thing for the gain of something much greater. In reality, representatives from nations like the U.K. and Czech Republic would probably leave bits of themselves strewn across the Brussels assembly before consenting to an E.U. army. At Model UN, provided we first establish a focus group to study the impact of national sovereignty, coupled with exemptions for neutral nations, it’s all kosher. And even if someone does give in to something really disastrous for them, it doesn’t matter because, well, it doesn’t matter. Unlike in the real United Nations, the greatest threat to stability comes from the delegation that may or may not have pre-written a draft resolution (a cardinal sin in the realm of Model UN), as opposed to something along the lines of Iran blowing up the world or climate change killing us all. In the end, it all comes to little more than a great big thank you and a teary kiss. Oh, and the assurance that every delegate will be one those fabled ‘world leaders of tomorrow’.

However, it’s this swell of good-feeling and optimism which may just, ultimately, make these conferences so unavoidably worthwhile. By the end of the weekend, participants have not only debated with each other at great length, but they’ve also had a good time. From the elegant, refined cocktail evening to the noticeably less-refined delegate dance, it’s hard not to adopt an essentially happy, optimistic view of things. For sure, people are able to stumble in to committee at 9 AM the next morning partly because they know they really don’t have to save the world. China is far more likely to give you a hug than take down Google when you’re not looking. As a raving wannabe-intellectual, I can only imagine that it’s got more in common with, say, the Congress of Vienna in 1815, than with any contemporary summit. Nowhere else today could you so easily replicate the atmosphere of overwhelming relief which followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars– just remember to swap the mistress-sharing between Castlereagh, Metternich et al with a few innocent kisses in the Park Plaza ballroom. And in doing this, Model UN clearly builds bridges which the world will need this century. Moreover, because delegates aren’t filled with a devouring sense of seriousness and patriotic allegiance to one’s country above all else, committees can actually come up with pretty good stuff, as they reach that all-important compromise. In short, Model UN is useful because it’s so unlike the real thing.

Maybe, if you replicated this set-up when the world really comes together at crucial moments– e.g. if you replaced Susan Rice (U.S. ambassador to the U.N.) with an accountant from Shanghai and vice-versa, as well as introducing a mandatory drinks’ hour– you’d end up with a better outcome and a better world. It’s easy to knock something as self-congratulatory as Model UN. The trouble is, it’s not obvious why the delegates who go to these things (led of course by an inspired team of Harvard students) would be any worse at solving today’s problems than our real world leaders.

In his post “Harvard’s Supposed Crisis of Faith,” Sam Barr criticizes Lisa Miller’s recent Newsweek article about the study of religion at Harvard:

“Of course religion is important to study, …even or especially if you’re a nonbeliever. But I also said, or implied, that she was wasting her time with this article, because religion is not in nearly such dire straits at Harvard as she supposed.”

Given the increasing prominence of religion-based issues on the world stage, it is imperative that students should be religion-literate (or, as Bill Maher might say, religerate).

That much, I think, we can all agree on. So the question then becomes, Are students actually being exposed to religion in their classes? Sam claims that they are, taking us on a tour of his own course planner. Yes, religion managed to creep its way into the courseload of one cool-headed liberal atheist (congratulations?); however, this doesn’t preclude the rest of the student body from graduating sans exposure to religion. Simply because students “can get a decent dose of religion at Harvard” (emphasis obviously mine) doesn’t necessitate that they will. Sure, if you’re interested in the study of religion, Harvard offers a host of diverse courses to slake your intellectual thirst. But what about those students without that burning desire? Undoubtedly for some Harvard students, class discussions about religion are probable, if not inevitable. But the fact is, this experience is by no means one shared by the entire student body.

Isn’t it the point of standardized curricula to ensure that students like these don’t fall through the cracks? If religion is as important as we profess it to be, shouldn’t we implement a mechanism such that every student graduates having engaged in religious dialogue?

Dramatic technological and social changes have re-configured the global landscape, and Harvard University responded accordingly last year by introducing the General Education program. This curriculum purportedly meets the demands of a transformed society by exposing students to several basic fields of learning, readying them for life beyond the Harvard bubble. And yet, with the elimination of the original “Reason and Faith” category, a required study of religion is conspicuously lacking in the Gen Ed program. If there is universal consensus (well, nearly – Pinker and his apostles are a stubborn bunch) that Harvard students should encounter religion in a classroom setting, then it is high time that we devise a concrete measure to address these concerns.

The shortcomings of a curriculum that “doesn’t require you to learn about anything” can certainly be overcome. Look at how the crafters of the Gen Ed curriculum integrated history into graduation requirements, for example – students are required to take at least one course that engages with the past. Could we not also require one course to involve a substantial study of religion? If religion is as ubiquitous as Sam claims, then levying the extra measure would really only affect the small population of students who aren’t already partaking in enthralling class discussions about religion.

Ensuring religion’s place in the courseloads of Harvard students won’t take a miracle – far from it. We just need to sensibly re-evaluate the mission of the Gen Ed program and what we hope students will gain from their four years here at Harvard.

Photo credit: Flickr stream of AntyDiluvian.

Take Sullivan’s latest post on CPAC for example. He begins by heralding Ron Paul’s surprise victory in the CPAC straw poll, and ends up with yet another diatribe against Israel and the ”neocon” quest for an “unsustainable neo-empire.” As if Paul won at the mainstream conservative conference this year due to a massive groundswell for… neo-isolationist foreign policy.

But no matter, somehow the Project for a New American Century — and yes, Israel – must be drawn into this. Watch closely, because he moves fast (emphasis mine):

At least Paul has some core integrity; at least he believes in small government and has long been honest about what he wants to cut; at least he fully understands that continuing an empire with this level of debt is unsustainable and unconservative:

He will continue to be smeared by the more extreme neoconservatives precisely because they see his attempt to unwind an unsustainable neo-empire as an end to open-ended, unconditional support for an increasingly far right and fundamentalist Israel and an end to the PNAC global control ideology that is slowly corrupting this country and bankrupting its treasury.

Sorry, what? Who are these “more extreme neoconservatives” and what are the “smears” that they deploy in place of legitimate arguments? And is it merely Ron Paul’s less-than-unconditional support for Israel that irks them? Not, by any chance, their nearly 180-degree divergence on the orientation of foreign policy across the board?

If Sullivan had left it at “PNAC global control ideology,” it would have been minimally tolerable. But what does “fundamentalist Israel” have to do with global control, pray tell?

For Sullivan, this level of clarity is par for the course. Just over a year ago, he was harping on much the same quasi-conspiratorial nonsense.

How exactly does a Harvard PhD come up with a paragraph like this?

The closer you examine it, the clearer it is that neoconservatism, in large part, is simply about enabling the most irredentist elements in Israel and sustaining a permanent war against anyone or any country who disagrees with the Israeli right. That’s the conclusion I’ve been forced to these last few years.

Neoconservatism is not simply about anything. It is anything but simple. Most recently, it has referred to a set of ideas about American foreign policy with roots in hard-line anti-communism during the later decades of the Cold War. It has changed very little as a foreign policy doctrine since then, except that most of its proponents now find themselves on the American right and their primary ideological enemy has changed from communism to radical Islam.

Neoconservatives advocate the use of American power to promote democratic capitalist ideology around the world, on the premise that democratic expansion generally advances American interests. Hence their support for intervention in Bosnia in the 1990s, and their insistence on a sphere of democracy in the former Soviet Union (particularly through NATO expansion).

So what “forced” Sullivan to conflate neoconservatism, a broad set of deep-rooted ideas about American foreign policy, with the particular bidding of the Israeli right? If he has evidence that these are one and the same, he shares none of it with his readers. Instead of reasoned argument, we are left with rhetorical flourishes like this:

But America is not Israel. America might support Israel, might have a special relationship with Israel. But America is not Israel. And once that distinction is made, much of the neoconservative ideology collapses.

To recap: America does not equal Israel. Therefore, neoconservatives have nothing useful to add to the foreign policy debate. Their “ideology,” which has no connection to real American interests or values, actually collapses. Q.E.D.

For a seminar paper on American foreign policy this past semester, I checked out more than 30 books on neoconservatism and the Iraq War. For all of the griping about AIPAC’s influence in Washington, I never encountered a shred of evidence that the impetus for the American invasion came from the Israeli right. To put it another way: PNAC is not AIPAC, and once that distinction is made, Sullivan’s argument collapses.

I was once intrigued by Sullivan’s complexity as a thinker with no obvious “party or clique.” I am no longer charmed. It is as if Sullivan’s identity as a gay, Catholic, conservative Obama supporter is supposed to substitute for actual nuance in thought.

On the other hand, it is hard to keep up the same baseline of bombast and bluster when feelings take a back seat to facts. And maybe you don’t become the most popular pundit on the net by publishing conscientious dissections of Middle East policy.

So I am reading too much into it, you say; Sullivan is blogging, after all, and you can’t spell “blog” without a good part of “bloviate”.

Well, realizing that Sullivan is just another blowhard with a Harvard degree is half the battle as far as I’m concerned. Sullivan may or may not have the intellect of Oakeshott, whom he claims as his mentor, but he has the intellectual integrity of Olbermann and O’Reilly.

Photo credit: Wikipedia