The Rise of Identity Politics: An Audit of History Teaching at Australian Universities

The Rise of Identity Politics: An Audit of History Teaching at Australian Universities
The Australian newspaper:
Janet Albrechtsen, Columnist

"Bad ideas flourish in dark places. The Rise of Identity Politics: An Audit of History Teaching at Australian Universities in 2017, ­released on Monday by the Institute of Public Affairs, exposes the dirty ­little secret about history teaching in Australian universities. Rather than rigorous learning about ­important historical events that underpin our dem­o­cracy, history teaching in this country is drenched in identity politics.

Worse, this distortion of history into political ideology is a bellwether of a more profound political disorder that threatens the future of our Australian liberal project.

In a healthy liberal democracy, we contest ideas and we know our democracy is in good shape when the best ideas triumph and the bad ones are sent packing. The Berlin Wall wasn’t dismantled by soldiers but by ideas about individual freedom that appealed more than communism. Today a different menace threatens our democratic health, one that seeks to dismantle our tool for trouncing bad ideas. We’re not just quibbling over different ideas; we’re also arguing over the value of having a healthy contest of ideas. Skewed history teaching is symptomatic of a contest that will determine the future of our democratic project.

The audit by Bella d’Abrera — director of the IPA’s Foundations of Western Civilisation Program and who has a PhD in history from Cambridge University — of 746 history subjects taught across 35 Australian universities found that more subjects (244) focus on the politics of indigenous issues, other race topics, questions of gender, environment and identity than the story of Western civilisation. More history subjects mention race than the Enlightenment by a factor of four to one. The Reformation is cited in only 12 of the 746 subjects and liberalism is mentioned only seven times. More subjects reference Islam than Christianity.

Drawing on work done by British historian Niall Ferguson, who is professor of history at Harvard University, the IPA prepared a list of 20 core topics in the history of Western civilisation. They include ancient Rome, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, any period of British history, the US revolution, the industrial revolution, Nazism, fascism, communism and the Cold War, and more. The IPA audit found a strong focus on ancient Greece and ancient Rome and the 20th century, “while the events of the intervening millennia are relatively neglected”. In other words, the great historical heritage that built our liberal democracy is not offered by many history ­departments.
Writing online for The Conversation on Thursday, Trevor Burnard, head of school and professor of history at University of Melbourne, rebuked the audit as misguided, arguing that history depart­ments faced two problems: limited funding and students who weren’t interested in Western civilisation. Referring to his own speciality, Burnard wrote: “The reason British history is less taught now than it once was has little to do with politics, and everything to do with student preferences. I would love for students to be fascinated in what I am interested in. Some are. But most aren’t.”

If students arrive at university with little curiosity about the historical triumph of freedom, it’s ­because we haven’t passed on that legacy to them. Students aren’t taught the astonishing story of Western civilisation at school or university. And the adult realm of politics is equally useless.
As IPA executive director John Roskam writes in Audit of History Teaching, we’re in trouble when a senior Liberal MP, federal Treasurer Scott Morrison, waves away the most fundamental freedom in a liberal democracy, freedom of expression, as something that “doesn’t create a single job (and) doesn’t open a business”.

When Gillian Triggs, the former boss of the Australian Human Rights Commission entrusted to defend fundamental freedoms, scolded Australia as a country where “Sadly, you can say what you like around the kitchen table at home”, we’re in double trouble.

And taxpayer-funded public broadcaster ABC, committed to all kinds of diversity except a diversity of voices, signals a preference for ideological homogeneity, not a healthy contest of ideas that emerged from the Enlightenment.

As Roskam says, this contest of ideas gave us a “legacy of liberty, of inquiry, of toleration, of relig­ious plurality, and of social and economic freedom. Western civilisation pioneered the recognition of universal human rights.” He quotes Rufus Black, the master of Ormond College at the University of Melbourne, in The Importance of a Liberal and Sciences Education: “The triumph of freedom and reason is not a law of physics, it is just an idea that has captured our minds for a tiny period of human history. There is no certainty it will continue to do so unless we choose to argue for its values and ensure that we pass it on as it was passed on to us, hard won from authoritarian rule of many forms.”
The historic battles, physical and metaphysical, that shaped our modern liberal project, where we are all equal, regardless of skin colour, creed, sex or sexuality, should be the foundation stone of every history department across Australian campuses. Instead, history teaching is mired in the politics of race, sex, sexuality and identity.

This intellectual regression has its roots in postmodernism, and identity politics has become its political arm. Under the dishonest rubric of “progressive” politics, postmodernism cemented into universities the notion that history and language are corrupted by those who hold power. Ergo history needs to be told through the lens of oppression and language needs to be proscribed to protect victims of the oppressors.

Under the same sham of protecting people, universities are now cottonwool campuses. Last week at Cambridge University, students were given a trigger warning about Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus. The Bard’s work has been added to a growing list of literature — F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Ovid and Euripides — now deemed offensive by coddled students and muddled academics. Last week To Kill a Mockingbird was removed from a school district in Mississippi because it also offends students. A decade ago, this anti-intellectualism would have been unthinkable.
Determined to police words and speech, proponents of identity politics label opponents as racists, sexists, misogynists, homophobes and Nazis. The aim is to drive a spoke into that critical piece of ­intellectual machinery known as the marketplace of ideas because critical thinking threatens their ­regressive ideas.

Worse, the demand of identity politics that people be treated differently according to race, sex, sex­uality and other forms of identity threatens the core premise of our liberal project that all individuals are of equal moral worth. It’s a staggering inversion of the great civil rights battles of the past century, and a reminder that when people are ill-informed about the past, they are likelier to ­embrace a less liberal future. The latest Lowy Institute Poll where only 52 per cent of people aged ­18 to 29 believe that “democracy is preferable to any other kind of government” is not shocking, it’s inevitable.

Halting the momentum of ­regressive identity politics depends on an intellectual army of iconoclasts who understand that the story of our liberal project must be learned, defended and passed on to the next generation. We need free thinkers such as Camille Paglia, the feminist who, this month, exposed how women’s and gender studies departments came to be “frozen at a certain point of ideology in the 1970s”. Only a radical will ask, what has gender studies contributed to the sum of human knowledge? And rebels such as Jonathan Haidt, the American social psychologist leading the push for universities to reclaim their positions as places of intellectual curiosity. And Lionel Shriver, too, the American author who ­exposed the fundamental flaw of identity politics during her past visit to Australia: “I don’t believe that membership of a larger group constitutes identity. I don’t think being female provides me with an identity. I don’t think it means that I have a character. That’s not my idea of what character is.”

In his recent book, The Strange Death of Europe, British author Douglas Murray traces the triumph of cultural masochists — “only the nations of Europe and their descendants allow themselves to be judged by their lowest moments”. This pathology of guilt has led to a “guilty, jaded and dying culture” in Europe and this virus is spreading across the West.

And let’s not mince words. When the heritage of Western civilisation is devalued in Australian schools and university history departments, debased by our political parties and human rights ­bureaucracies, and snubbed by sections of the media too, it ­becomes a numbers game. I joined the IPA years ago because the ­voices of freedom need critical mass so that the virtues of freedom can be nurtured, defended and passed on to the next generation to do the same. The way forward is to instil in each generation an understanding that our great inheritance comes from the story of Western civilisation. That’s why Roskam and his team at the IPA are ­engaged in this critical contest of ideas that must not be dismantled by the self-loathing politics of identity. Consider this a call to arms."

The Happiest Graph on Earth - The decline of extreme poverty

The Happiest Graph on Earth

By Ian Morris

Board of Contributors, Stratfor

No one would expect sunshine and smiles from an organization called the National Intelligence Council. One of its main tasks is to prepare a document called "Global Trends" once every four years for the new or re-elected U.S. president, laying out likely scenarios for how the world will develop over the coming decade or two. The most recent version, published in January, is every bit as intense as you might anticipate. Its three-page preface warns that we are facing "rising tensions between countries" at a time when "Global growth will slow, just as increasingly complex global challenges impend." Worse still, while "regional aggressors and nonstate actors will see openings to pursue their interests ... Nor is the picture much better on the home front for many countries." And these are just the headings in bold face: The fine print is even more alarming.

But the National Intelligence Council is not all doom and gloom. I gave a talk a few years ago in its offices in Langley, Virginia. The council's members were a lively, thoughtful and witty group, whose ability to see multiple sides to every story — perhaps the defining feature of the true strategist — was extraordinary. Fittingly, their latest Global Trends report is subtitled "Paradox of Progress." The heart of the paradox they describe is summed up by the graph reproduced here, showing the change between 1820 and 2015 in the number of humans living in absolute poverty and the number of people living above that miserable level.

When I'm teaching, I like to call this "the happiest graph on Earth." Inevitably, because my background is in premodern economic history, I have some quibbles with the council's data. I strongly suspect that by 1820, only three-quarters of the world's population had incomes below the equivalent of $1.90 per day. Most of the other quarter were merely poor, rather than extremely poor, living it up on as much as $2.50 per day (for comparison, the global average is now over $25 per day) while a tiny minority made much more (Rome's first emperor, Augustus, had personal assets worth something like $4.6 trillion in today's terms). This recalculation, based more on archaeological and anthropological observations than on the kind of data the council's sources used, would slightly diminish the graph's impact — but only very slightly. The graph remains miraculous, and hardly anyone living before 1820 would have believed it possible.

Discussions of poverty in recent years have focused relentlessly on inequality, and gloomy tomes analyzing its rise within most nations during our lifetimes — Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century and my colleague Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler — have deservedly become depressing best-sellers. Up to a point, this is as it should be: Inequality is important, and a series of psychological studies has shown that among both chimpanzees and humans, those who rise to the top of steep hierarchies tend to be happier, have better health and live longer than those who do not.

However, the council's graph shows the limits of the focus on inequality. The global economy has lifted well over a billion people out of extreme poverty since the 1980s. Never in human history have so many people experienced such rapid gains in health, lifespans and perhaps happiness too. In fact, so many people have escaped from extreme poverty that the World Bank felt forced to redefine what counted as misery in 2015, raising the bar from an older limit of $1.25 per day to the current one of $1.90. This has been the post-Cold War world's greatest triumph. Its greatest tragedy, of course, is that the better part of another billion people still languishes in extreme poverty, but everything suggests that number really will dwindle to zero over the coming decades. We know how to eradicate extreme poverty.

The Makings of a Wealthier World

Two big things went into creating the happiest graph on Earth: globalization and energy capture. Since Adam Smith worked on The Wealth of Nations in the 1770s, there has been a long-term trend toward more open, interconnected markets, lower barriers to trade and higher volumes of long-distance commerce. The trend certainly hasn't been consistent: Napoleon's Continental System set it back for nearly a decade between 1806 and 1814, the Great Depression did so even more dramatically in the 1930s, and there have been plenty more times when protectionism temporarily triumphed. However, despite constant pushback from conservatives, more and more of the world has joined an increasingly global market, raising incomes (but also inequality) enormously.
Despite the astonishing gains of the past two centuries, many experts believe that a lot of money is still lying on the globalizing table. According to the World Economic Forum, if every country reduced trade barriers by improving the performance of their border administration and transport infrastructure just halfway to the standards of best global practice, the world's GDP would grow by $2.6 trillion (4.7 percent), with the gains flowing disproportionately to the poorest places in the world. Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, would see GDP grow by 12 percent. If these calculations are anywhere near correct, more globalization can play a huge part in ending extreme poverty.

Increasing energy capture, though, historically has been even more important than globalization in buoying the poorest of society. Before the Industrial Revolution, even the most developed agrarian economies the world had ever seen — Rome in the first century or two A.D. and China in the 11th and 12th — hadn't raised per capita energy consumption above about 30,000 kilocalories per day. Typically, adults each directly consumed less than 2,000 kilocalories per day as food; the rest went toward fuel, transport and the myriad other tasks an agrarian economy needs to accomplish.
Learning how to harness the energy trapped in fossil fuels annihilated these limits. By 1820, when the council's graph begins, British energy budgets had already risen above 40,000 kilocalories per person per day. They reached 92,000 in 1900, and in the 2010s Americans consume roughly 230,000 kilocalories per person per day (an unhealthy 3,770 of them as food, and most of the rest to power our airplanes, SUVs and laptops). Along the way, engineers learned to use new kinds of fossil fuel, advancing from coal to oil and natural gas, to transmit the energy in new forms (above all, electricity) and to convert energy into almost anything we wanted. Between 1500 and 1900, Western farmers roughly doubled wheat yields per hectare, largely by increasing the amount of energy invested in agriculture by adding more manure and draft animals. Between 1900 and 2000, by contrast, American farmers quadrupled output but did so by investing 80 times as much energy per hectare, now in the forms of gasoline-powered machinery, chemical fertilizers and electric pumps. Without the explosion in energy, the right-hand side of the happiest graph on Earth would still look a lot like the left-hand side.

Even more than in the case of globalization, vast gains in energy capture are still available. Huge reserves of fossil fuel remain in the ground, and new extraction techniques are making them accessible. However, most geologists and climatologists think that the massive use of coal, oil and natural gas since 1800 has already damaged the atmosphere and oceans so severely that exploiting these reserves to the full would be a very bad idea. Fortunately, though, engineers are beginning to deliver extraordinary advances in capturing clean energy and storing it in new kinds of batteries. Estimates of the likely impact vary (and the National Intelligence Council has done a commendable job in pulling many of them together), but increasing numbers of engineers and investors expect the 21st century to experience an energy bonanza even wilder than that of the 19th and 20th centuries.
If these interpretations of the council's graph are anywhere near accurate, we can realistically expect the combination of globalization and the ongoing energy revolution to eliminate extreme poverty altogether within the lifetimes of many of the people reading this column — or, at the very least, to force the World Bank to raise the bar for extreme poverty again, this time to a much higher level.

Putting America's Poor First

The most obvious way to falsify my prediction would be to slam the brakes on globalization and new energy research, which is precisely what many governments seem keen to do. U.S. President Donald Trump, often seen as a spokesman for both economic nationalism and traditional fossil fuel industries, recently told the United Nations, "We have it in our power, should we so choose, to lift millions from poverty," but he went on to argue that globalization was not the way to do this. "As President of the United States," he said, to applause, "I will always put America first, just like you, the leaders of your countries, will always, and should always, put your countries first."

If enriching the poor begins at home, though, driving down the number of people living in extreme poverty is likely to become less of a priority for most governments. Not only do fewer than 10 percent of the world's population now live on less than $1.90 per day, but they are also concentrated in a shrinking number of places. Kathryn Edin, a sociologist, and H. Luke Shaefer, a professor of social work, argued in $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America that many Americans do in fact live in extreme poverty but reached this conclusion by excluding all non-cash transfers and benefits. No one can deny that life is very hard indeed for the poorest Americans, and Edin and Shaefer's stories are truly harrowing. But with a federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour — 30 times higher than the World Bank's cutoff point for extreme poverty — and the likelihood that by 2022 one-sixth of Americans will live in states or cities with a $15 per hour minimum wage, the struggle against poverty in America is not the same as that in the Central African Republic, where the International Monetary Fund reports the average income to be just $1.75 per day.

Lifting up the "left behind" in rich countries and eradicating the last stubborn pockets of global extreme poverty are very different projects, and in the 2010s electorates in Western democracies have increasingly pursued what they see as solutions to the first problem at the expense of solutions to the second. Economists predicted that by 2030 the Trans-Pacific Partnership would be adding $492 billion (0.6 percent) to global GDP, $130 billion (0.5 percent of GDP) of which would flow to the United States while proportionately more would go to poor countries such as Malaysia and Vietnam. Both the Democratic and Republican nominees for the U.S. presidency in 2016 felt compelled to reject this deal. Similarly, American and European politicians alike rushed to distance themselves from the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, even though economists expected it to raise GDP on both sides of the Atlantic by between 0.3 and 0.7 percent.

American political reservations about pursuing an energy revolution have also grown. Trump's campaign platform promised to roll back regulations on carbon dioxide emissions, which would help coal and oil compete against renewables, and his administration's draft budget for 2018 included cuts of 6 percent for the Department of Energy and a whopping 31 percent for the Environmental Protection Agency. In June, the president announced the United States' intention to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement, though more recently his administration's position seems to have softened.

If I am interpreting the history behind the happiest graph on Earth correctly, and globalization and the search for new energy sources are indeed the main forces that drive down extreme poverty, much of this sounds like unhappy news indeed. But even so, I remain optimistic that the World Bank will raise its bar yet again in the next few years. William F. Buckley famously defined a conservative as "someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop," but standing athwart the happiest graph on Earth just seems quixotic. Those who try are likely to merely surrender to a rival control of the 21st century's two greatest forces.

For neither force is the identity of this rival much of a mystery. China's opening to global markets since the 1970s has marked the single biggest step in reducing the number of the world's extremely poor, and at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, President Xi Jinping pledged that "China will keep its doors wide open" in the "hope that other countries will also keep their doors open to Chinese investors and maintain a level playing field for us." Putting his words into practice, Beijing has successfully promoted its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as an alternative to the Western-dominated World Bank and its Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in place of the crippled Trans-Pacific Partnership.

At the same time, renewable energy is already growing faster than total energy demand in China, leading the consumption of fossil fuels to fall by 1.4 percent in 2015. That year, China also accounted for 28 percent of global electric vehicle sales, 32 percent of solar panel installations and 47 percent of wind installations. In 2016 it overtook Europe in wind power, and by 2020 it will probably surpass the Continent in solar power, too.

Historians sometimes like to say that mastering coal allowed Britain to dominate the 19th century, and mastering oil allowed the United States to dominate the 20th. If mastering the wind and sun allows China to dominate the 21st, the happiest graph on Earth will keep getting happier — but at a terrible price for the West.

A 19th Century Lesson from Friedrich Nietzsche on the Use and Abuse of History

A Lesson on the Use and Abuse of History

Reva Goujon

VP of Global Analysis, Stratfor

Friedrich Nietzsche's observations about the misuse of history to sow chaos in the present hold as true today as they did in the 19th century when he wrote them.

A lot of history is being casually tossed around these days. We see it from energized segments of the "alt-right" throwing up Nazi salutes, calling for a "revolution" against "the Bolsheviks" and marching to chants like "Jews will not replace us." We see it from their anti-fascist adversaries on the left, branding themselves antifa, a movement that draws its roots from the Antifaschistische Aktion resistance from 1930s Germany. We see it from world leaders when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan brazenly calls his German and Dutch counterparts Nazis and fascists and when U.S. President Donald Trump ardently defends Confederate statues as symbols of "heritage not hate." We see it from jihadist groups like the Islamic State when a member of the Barcelona attack cell calling himself Abu Lais of Cordoba spookily reminds Spanish Christians to remember "the Muslim blood spilled" during the Spanish Inquisition as the group fights to reincorporate "Al Andalus" into a revived caliphate.

The Third Reich. The Bolshevik Revolution. The American Civil War. The Spanish Inquisition. This is heavy, heavy history. Yet in the words of some actors, some of the darkest days of our historical memory seem to take on a weightless form in today's angst-ridden political discourse. While jarring to observe, this kind of historical levity is to be expected whenever the world moves through a major inflection point. When more wretched periods of history lie just beyond the horizon of the current generation, they become fuzzy, impersonal anecdotes rather than visceral memories that impress upon everyday lives. And when the future looks especially bleak to that same generation, a raucous few can capture the minds of many by plunging deep into the depths of a blemished history to conjure up leaders and legends that, with a bit of polishing and dusting off, can serve as the unadulterated icons of a new world order.

Today's antifa movement models itself after Germany's anti-fascists in the 1930s.

The reasoning behind the tactic is fairly simple. Leaders and movements that try to implement a revisionist agenda in the world crave two things: credibility and power. If the masses can be seduced by a narrative with historical legs (however flimsy those legs may be), then power will presumably follow. And if credibility does not come naturally, then the amassing of state power enables the distortion of facts and silencing of critics. After all, mimicking history is a far easier strategy to pursue than trying to understand and innovate yourself out of the deeper problems of the present.

At the same time, history is just as important to internalize in tense times like these. How else will current and future generations learn from and avoid the mistakes of their past?

Tackling the Dilemma of History

It is this very dilemma of how to responsibly treat history that German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche tried to tackle in an essay titled "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" as part of his Untimely Meditations series. When Nietzsche published this work in 1873, just two years following German reunification led by Otto Von Bismarck, he described himself as "out of touch with the times." While most everyone around him was celebrating the music of Richard Wagner and erecting monuments to the heroes of the Franco-Prussian War in the act of knitting together a unified German state, Nietzsche was a bit of a wreck thinking about all the ways this exercise in German nationalism could go terribly awry. His musings on the role history should play in audacious political times are particularly apt in today's "historical fever."

Nietzsche argues that the fundamental purpose of history should be for life. And as we live, we must understand our past without becoming enslaved to it. To underscore the importance of living in the present, he describes with envy the "unhistorical" beast, grazing among a herd in a valley with finite horizons on all sides, living in an eternal state of forgetfulness. In contrast to the human, ever-burdened by the past, the honest beast lives blissfully, as a child does, freeing the mind to think and achieve great things. "The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without dizziness or fear, will never know what happiness is. … And no artist would achieve his picture, no field marshal his victory, and no people its freedom, without previously having desired and striven for them in that sort of unhistorical condition."

The opposite of the unhistorical mind is the superhistorical being, one who takes history much too seriously and thus feels little point to living in the present. In between these two minds are the more even-minded and optimistic historical beings — those who use history to serve the living. They look to the past with reverence to understand the present and to frame a vision for the future.

Nietzsche then goes on to describe the three approaches to history: Monumentalism, Antiquarianism and Criticism. No single approach is the right one; each can be used in combination and at an appropriate time and context. If misused, however, "destructive weeds" will sprout and pull society down into chaos.

The Monumentalists are on a historical search for glory. This can be a dangerous exercise, for if the past is viewed as something that can be imitated and reinterpreted into something more beautiful, then it can easily fall into a trap of "free poeticizing" by people serving up mythic fictions to "weakly cultured nations" craving hope and direction. In a prophetic peering into the Third Reich, Nietzsche warns that the Monumentalists are most dangerous as superhistorical people when they are not anchored to a particular place. When saturated in a myth of cultural superiority and lacking in geopolitical boundaries, "less favored races and people" roam around, "looking for something better in foreign places," and competition and warfare ensures. While such thinking in the past has fueled foreign adventurism and destructive wars, the Monumentalists today are more concerned about a nativist agenda on their home turf. Chants by the alt-right like "our blood, our soil" and campaigns against "cultural Marxism" taking over the world stem from a stubbornly anchored place and people who believe their white, European-derived race is being diluted by "the other," who belong on the other side of the fence.

(Stratfor)

The Antiquarian, like the Monumentalist, tends to look at history through rose-colored glasses, but wants to preserve the past in a traditionalist, literalist sense rather than use history to generate life. "Man envelopes himself in a moldy smell" and steeps himself so deeply in the past that he will take little interest in what lies beyond the horizon. The modern jihadist drawn to the Islamic State banner can be seen through this lens, believing that a return to a seventh-century Islamic way way of life will restore virtue in man and glory to the Islamic world.

The third approach to history that Nietzsche describes is the critical one. He writes that a person must have the power to break with the past in order to live. This, he argues, can be done by "dragging the past before a court of justice" to look at history with a critical eye. In describing a "first and second nature," he describes how a generation that looks at its past and can recognize its ills alongside its virtues sets the stage for the next generation to study its past with a healthier, more critical view of history, and thus society is better off in the long run. In this thought, Nietzsche may have been a tad idealistic. In reality, as we can see today, several decades is long enough to wear down the critical eye and blur our historical memory for the worse.

The Limitations of the Critical Approach

The critical method may appear like the most pragmatic and reasoned approach to history, but here, too, we must be careful. To make the point that we can never fully internalize the time, place and conditions of our past to perfectly understand it, Nietzsche dramatically asserts that "objectivity and justice have nothing to do with each other." One can "interpret the past only on the basis of the highest power of the present."

This lesson in critical history is an important one for the modern-day globalist fighting to extinguish resurgent flames of nationalism. While the 20th century horrors of unhinged nationalism need to be represented in starkly honest terms to prevent a repeat of the past, it is just as important to remember the economic, social and security conditions that give rise to those ideological currents in the first place. Nationalism is a natural product of the human condition and need not be blanketly vilified in all forms. While some German integrationists want to remain committed to a docile existence in the European Union, German students may tire of history books that overly fixate on the catastrophe of the Third Reich. While the message "Never forget!" matters, there comes a time when rational people looking for purpose and seeing problems with the current order want a fuller historical understanding of their past to comprehend who they are and where they come from instead of drowning themselves in guilt.

Nietzsche also warns against taking science and a purely empirical approach to life too far. The German thinker, best known for the declaration "God is dead," was of course speaking at a time in European history when rationalism and scientific thought were celebrated by philosophers as the great escape from religion's straitjacket. The nuance to Nietzsche's argument is often lost, however. Nietzsche himself was an atheist, but he warned that if we went too far down the critical path and didn't leave any room for the Antiquarian memory, then we would strip society of religion, art and other enigmatic instincts that humans need to make sense of the inexplicable. As he put it, "all living things need an atmosphere around them, a secret circle of darkness" or else European culture would face a catastrophe in suffering the perils of nihilism. If Nietzsche were alive today, he would probably argue that overzealous technologists intent on erasing borders in an ever-globalizing world were setting it up for a violent clash.

Heeding Nietzsche's Warning

Nietzsche would also see the jumbled historical references feeding into today's political discourse as a gross abuse of history warning of much bigger problems ahead. In every camp of Monumentalists and superhistorians, there are some whose egos and visions are so big that they believe that the entire passage of history is to serve their modern agenda. Nietzsche saw this type in his day as well:

"Arrogant European of the nineteenth century, you are raving! Your knowledge does not complete nature, but only kills your own. For once, measure your height as a knower against your depth as a person who can do something. Of course, you clamber on the solar ray of knowledge upward towards heaven, but you also climb downward to chaos."

In fact, chaos is exactly what many modern-day radical Monumentalists are seeking. If one assumes an apocalyptic view of the world, as many among the alt-right and some within a rapidly thinning camp of ultranationalists in the White House have openly espoused, then their energy and focus will be on tearing down the current order at whatever cost to energize the masses to engage in their so-called revolution. To complete this aim, enemies need to be invented, the intelligentsia needs to be condemned and history needs to be revised. And whether they know it or not, the motto of the modern-day Monumentalist, in Nietzsche's words, will be the following: "Let the dead bury the living."

The Roadmap to a low carbon world is staggeringly difficult.

Scientists made a detailed “roadmap” for meeting the Paris climate goals. It’s eye-opening.

Updated by Brad Plumer@bradplumerbrad@vox.com Mar 24, 2017, 7:02am EDT

Back in 2015, the world’s governments met in Paris and agreed to keep global warming below 2°C, to avoid the worst risks of a hotter planet. See here for background on why, but that’s the goal. For context, the planet’s warmed ~1°C since the 19th century.

One problem with framing the goal this way, though, is that it’s maddeningly abstract. What does staying below 2°C entail? Papers on this topic usually drone on about a “carbon budget” — the total amount of CO2 humans can emit this century before we likely bust past 2°C — and then debate how to divvy up that budget among nations. There’s math involved. It’s eye-glazing, and hard to translate into actual policy. It’s also a long-term goal, easy for policymakers to shrug off.

So, not surprisingly, countries have thus far responded by putting forward a welter of vague pledges on curbing emissions that are hard to compare and definitely don’t add up to staying below 2°C. Everyone agrees more is needed, but there’s lots of uncertainty as to what “more” means. Few people grasp how radically — or how quickly — we’d have to revamp the global economy to meet the Paris climate goals. 

Surely there’s a better, more concrete way to think about this. So, in a new paper for Science, a group of European researchers try to do just that — laying out in vivid detail what would have to happen in each of the next three decades if we want to stay well below 2°C. Fair warning: It’s unsettling.

A simple (but daunting!) road map for staying below 2°C

They start with the big picture: To hit the Paris climate goals without geoengineering, the world has to do three broad (and incredibly ambitious) things:

1) Global CO2 emissions from energy and industry have to fall in half each decade. That is, in the 2020s, the world cuts emissions in half. Then we do it again in the 2030s. Then we do it again in the 2040s. They dub this a “carbon law.” Lead author Johan Rockström told me they were thinking of an analogy to Moore’s law for transistors; we’ll see why. 

2) Net emissions from land use — i.e., from agriculture and deforestation — have to fall steadily to zero by 2050. This would need to happen even as the world population grows and we’re feeding ever more people.

3) Technologies to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere have to start scaling up massively, until we’re artificially pulling 5 gigatons of CO2 per year out of the atmosphere by 2050 — nearly double what all the world’s trees and soils already do. 

 “It’s way more than adding solar or wind,” says Rockström. “It’s rapid decarbonization, plus a revolution in food production, plus a sustainability revolution, plus a massive engineering scale-up [for carbon removal].”

So, uh, how do we cut CO2 emissions in half, then half again, then half again? Here, the authors lay out a sample “roadmap” of what specific actions the world would have to take each decade, based on current research. This isn’t the only path for making big CO2 cuts, but it gives a sense of the sheer scale and speed required:

2017-2020: All countries would prepare for the herculean task ahead by laying vital policy groundwork. Like: scrapping the $500 billion per year in global fossil fuel subsidies. Zeroing out investments in any new coal plants, even in countries like India and Indonesia. All major nations commit to going carbon-neutral by 2050 and put in place policies — like carbon pricing or clean electricity standards — that point down that path. “By 2020,” the paper adds, “all cities and major corporations in the industrialized world should have decarbonization strategies in place.”

2020-2030: Now the hard stuff begins! In this decade, carbon pricing would expand to cover most aspects of the global economy, averaging around $50 per ton (far higher than seen almost anywhere today) and rising. Aggressive energy efficiency programs ramp up. Coal power is phased out in rich countries by the end of the decade and is declining sharply elsewhere. Leading cities like Copenhagen are going totally fossil fuel free. Wealthy countries no longer sell new combustion engine cars by 2030, and transportation gets widely electrified, with many short-haul flights replaced by rail.

In addition, spending on clean energy research increases by “an order of magnitude” this decade, with a sustained focus on developing new batteries, drastically reducing the cost of carbon capture and storage (CCS), and perfecting low-carbon processes for producing steel and concrete, plus improving smart grids, greener aircraft systems, and sustainable urbanization techniques. 

Meanwhile, efforts to start pulling carbon dioxide out of the air start this decade. That means reforesting degraded land and deploying technologies such as direct-air capture or bioenergy with CCS to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. By 2030, we’d need to be removing 100 to 500 megatons of CO2 each year and have a sense of how to scale up.

2030-2040: By this decade, hopefully, we’re reaping the fruits of major technological advances in clean energy. Leading countries like Denmark and Sweden should now have completely carbon-free grids and have electrified virtually all of their transport, heating, and industry. Cars with internal combustion engines “will have become rare on roads worldwide.” (Let that sink in.) Aircraft will be almost entirely powered by carbon-neutral fuels, say, biofuels or hydrogen. New building construction will be largely carbon-neutral, by using emissions-free methods for steel and concrete or through other techniques. And “radical new energy generation solutions will enter the market.”

Meanwhile, we’d need to be sucking about 1 to 2 gigatons of CO2 from the air each year, with a heavy R&D effort on expanding that further. 

2040-2050: By the early 2040s, major European countries are close to carbon-neutral, and the rest of the world is moving toward that goal by the end of the decade. Electricity grids are nearly entirely carbon-free: “Natural gas still provides some back up energy, but CCS ensures its carbon footprint is limited. Modular nuclear reactors may contribute to the energy mix in some places.” Lower-income countries are still using some fossil fuels, and the world is still emitting a small bit of CO2 in 2050 (about one-eighth the amount of today), but work continues on eventually phasing that out.

Finally, by 2050, we’d need to be removing more than 5 gigatons of CO2 per year from the atmosphere. It’s possible this is simply impractical — if we tried to do that all by burning biomass for energy and sequestering the resulting carbon (a “negative emissions” process), we might well run into serious land constraints that hinder agriculture. If, in the 2020s, we realize this will be the case, then we’ll have to revamp the road map to cut CO2 emissions from energy and industry even faster.

The paper also notes that the precise details of any road map will be tentative — after all, the nature of unpredictable technological change means it’s difficult to say what the world will look like in 2030 or 2040 or 2050. So policymakers will need to meet regularly, take stock of where they are, and revise as needed. 

This road map is staggering. That’s the point.

It’d be entirely understandable to look at this all and say, “That’s insane.” Phasing out sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2030? Carbon-neutral air travel within two decades? Cities going entirely fossil fuel–free in the next 13 years? Come on.

And fair enough. None of this is easy. It might well prove impossible. But this is roughly what staying well below 2°C entails — at least without large-scale geoengineering to filter out sunlight and cool the planet (a risky step). This is what world governments implicitly agreed to when they all signed on to the Paris accord. 

“We wanted to show what meeting those Paris goals requires,” says Rockström. “Up until now, we felt that scientists haven’t been very effective in communicating what these carbon budgets actually mean in terms of concrete action.”

Rockström and his colleagues argue that future UN climate talks should strive to create a much more detailed decade-by-decade road map along the lines of their Science paper, in order to gain much more clarity on what needs to happen to stay below 2°C.

Rockström adds that the road map’s sheer difficulty doesn’t mean climate action is hopeless. “You could just as easily see this becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he says. “Countries start taking these targets seriously and then begin pursuing the innovation needed to make this come true.” That’s what Moore’s law did for the semiconductor industry; the prediction that chip performance would double every 18 months helped guide firms in thinking what they needed to do to make that come true. A “carbon law,” Rockström argues, could do the same for countries and cities and companies.

Oliver Geden — a German climate policy analyst who wasn’t involved in the Science paper but who has criticized scientists and policymakers for obscuring what the 2°C target really requires — praised the broad approach here, though noted that some of the details were debatable. 

“One thing I like is that this is not just another global calculation [on CO2 emissions] that doesn’t talk about actors or policies,” Geden told me by email. “I think this should be the way forward, translating [overarching climate goals] into ‘policy portfolios’ and then asking policymakers if they are going to do it or not.”

For example, the paper lays out a specific timeline for deploying technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Most modeling scenarios for staying below 2°C now envision massive CO2 removal efforts, but few policymakers have acknowledged this fact. Presenting them with a detailed proposed timeline could, hopefully, change that. If it turns out that scaling up bioenergy with CCS is logistically impossible (as it might be), then at least we’d come to terms with that sooner, rather than keeping it as an unspoken background assumption in broad climate plans.

Of course, it’s possible that if policymakers really grappled with what staying below 2°C entails, they might come away thinking it’s impractical or undesirable. They might decide to accept more global warming, say, 2.5°C or 3°C or more, and deal with the severe risks that result, from higher sea-level rise to droughts to crop failures. (I’ve written more on that here.) 

But something has to force that conversation. If this 2°C climate goal is going to loom over every international climate meeting, every white paper and discussion, then the least people can do is take it seriously.

Further reading

— Here is a history of the 2°C global warming target — and what it would mean to miss it. And note that no country in the world is currently taking the goal seriously.

— This new paper by Jesse Jenkins and Samuel Thernstrom looks at the research around achieving deep decarbonization in the electricity sector. Note that while it might be physically possible to decarbonize the grid using only renewables, a number of studies suggest it’d be much more cost-effective to harness nuclear power or coal/gas with carbon capture and storage as well.

— The Science paper is also a good framework for thinking about Donald Trump. Trump, recall, wants to dismantle US climate policies and slash clean energy research. In the short term, that probably won’t hamper the incremental decline in US emissions already underway, as natural gas and renewables keep pushing out coal in the power sector. But Trump’s policies could easily hinder the push for deep decarbonization in the US — or at least delay it until well after 2020, making the 2°C goal all the harder.

Why the West is still worth fighting for

Why the West is still worth fighting for

By Oliver Wiseman @ollywiseman

• The West's triumphalism after the Cold War was grossly premature

• The ideological threats we face are more potent than ever

• For all the foreign threats and internal angst, Western values still beat the alternative

Maurice Saatchi opened today’s Margaret Thatcher Conference on Security with a reminder that security is about more than nuclear deterrents, tanks and soldiers. Military might only gets you so far. As Lord Saatchi himself put it on CapX this morning, “How can we confront an ideology without an ideology of our own?”

The next question is obvious: what should that ideology be? Or, more specifically: when it comes to the numerous threats facing the West, what are the values that need not only to be defended with physical force but argued for with moral authority?

That this remains an open question in 2017 would probably have come as a surprise a quarter of a century ago, when it was assumed that, with the Cold War won, liberal democracy’s spread was inevitable, and that the case for Western values was so self-evident that it hardly needed to be made.

But as we now know, that triumphalism was grossly premature. There have been successes: not least the transformation of Central and Eastern European countries into prosperous democracies. Old challenges, however, remain, and new ones have emerged: Russia has not followed its neighbours’ Westward ideological shift; radical Islam has emerged as a lethal ideological competitor; and China, which grows more prosperous while remaining a one-party state, is not only shifting the world’s centre of gravity eastwards, but has established itself as an alternative political model to Western democracy.

Inextricably linked to these challenges – and the West’s response to them – are internal insecurities: economic, political, social and cultural worries that have thrown up internal threats at least as destabilising as those coming from overseas.

Facing up to those challenges has to start with establishing when, and why, we lost our ideological self-confidence. And at today’s conference that task fell to a well-qualified panel – comprised of Washington Post columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum; Lord Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi; Richard Chartres, who until recently was Bishop of London; and Telegraph columnist and Thatcher biographer Charles Moore.

There is a risk that such a discussion ends up, as Moore put it, being about “absolutely bloody everything”. But the conversation started straightforwardly enough: with freedom and democracy. As Anne Applebaum explained, though the West has ancient origins, as a modern political project it was established an “institutional and ideological challenge to totalitarianism”.

Yet from that starting point, tensions and contradictions creep in almost immediately.

For Lord Sacks, the split identified by Friedrich Hayek between the French and Anglo-American versions of human rights is at the root of almost all debates about what Western values should mean. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the American Bill of Rights may sound similar. But according to Lord Sacks, “they are very, very different”. The former is secular, the latter religious. The former is a formula for maximal government, the latter for limited government.

The problem, as Lord Sacks sees it, is that “in the last half century the French version has taken over the elites in America and Britain. The French tradition leaves little between the individual and the state.” So when the state is not meeting people’s needs, they turn to populism – “and populist politics,” Lord Sacks warned, “is the beginning of the end of liberty.”

For Richard Chartres, democracy is faltering because it lacks a demos. “When the demos disintegrates,” he said, “what follows is a crowd of atomised individuals.” For Chartres, one of the problems has been the “sinister view that we will bring about progress by purging memories” – in other words, by ignoring our history. To which the Bishop’s response came straight from the pulpit: “You don’t exorcise the Satanic by creating a spiritual vacuum.”

Yet if culture has forgotten history, then politics has become obsessed with economics. Applebaum argued that one of the lessons the West’s elites must take from the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s victory – however distinct those events may be – is that politics must be about more than prosperity.

“Having defeated Marxism,” she lamented, “we have adopted one of its key tenants, which is to say that politics is all about economics.” Brexit and Trump, she said, are both expressions of searching for something more profound than economics: sovereignty and identity, respectively.

The ideological threats to the West have structural advantages today that make them more potent than they were a generation ago. For example, as Applebaum explained, we underestimated the disruptive nature of the internet, and in particular the degree to which it disrupts politics: “People have been able to reorganise themselves and find new identities online, organising themselves through means other than traditional parties.”