I woke up this morning to a Wall Street Journal essay by Gerard Baker, the Journal‘s editor-at-large for the editorial page. He uses the recent flare-up about kitchen stoves to examine the current political environment.
Many have written about the cultural pressure and to what extent the media is dominated by an ideological bent that is out-of-whack with the sensibilities of the population of the whole. I have even done so, myself. Baker’s contribution this week is to examine how these generalizations manifest themselves in the specific.
Sensing a whiff that the government might ban a ubiquitous kitchen appliance, a “common sense” that seemingly cuts across political leanings and party lines caused many to rise up in protest. And yet, it was immediately reported that it was “conservatives” who had once again spun out of control and were attempting to create a new front in the cultural war – out of nothing. Time magazine, as quoted by the WSJ, informed us all “How Gas Stoves Became a Right-Wing Cause in the Culture Wars.” Those MAGA extremists strike again!
Objectively, Baker explains, it is the Commissioner of the Federal Consumer Products Safety Commission, Richard Trumka* Jr., who launched a new offensive in the culture wars by suggesting new regulations be heaped upon a widely-owned and popular consumer product. Furthermore, his war plan should be familiar to anyone who is paying attention these days. The “average citizen” gets hit, out of the blue, with a radical shift in lifestyle. When any object, those dissenters are called “denialist,” “anti-science,” or “extremist.” But amid all the consternation about the conservative destruction of our Democracy, Baker cites** some poling numbers that explain that it is the Democrats, not the GOP, who have “moved toward the extreme in the past few decades and in the process [driving] much of the cultural agenda.”
Towards the end he makes the statement that liberals “now seem heavily to favor the illiberal imposition of many of their notions.” It is a methodology they have used to great effect. He brings up the example of gay marriage, imposed by court ruling, but subsequently accepted by the public as a whole. Left unsaid are the myriad of changes imposed upon us against our will which continue to remain unsupported even as they are nigh on irreversible. Arguably, the left has been effective in forcing societal change through government and therefore they assume they can continue apace. On the right, some are clamoring that their people adopt a similar strategy to legislate a return to conservative values – thus defying decades of GOP complaints about out-of-touch representation and activist courts. It is an issue that I’d like to come back to, so hold that thought for now.
In today’s paper, though, Baker lauds the apparent victory for the stoves themselves in this “Great Gas Stove Rebellion” (as he calls it) as an example that sanity might occasionally prevail, even if only for a time. That this is so exciting to us (he and I) only serves to emphasize how small of a victory it actually is.
I was motivated to write about this because it seemed, to me, a great coincidence that I read this article immediately after (i.e. last night) picking up the book Micro, authored by a posthumous Michael Crichton. It is the second of three books published after his death, this one out since 2011. As with several of his later works, it doubles as a scolding of the environmental movement and their corruption of science.
The book begins with an (uncompleted) essay about one failure of the progressive left (although this isn’t exactly how he labels them). Even as they imbue the next generations with a passion for the defense of “mother nature,” they simultaneously remove children from direct and intimate contact with the natural world. Even as kids are instructed to worship all that is not human, they are denied the opportunity to play outside, to explore the world, and to interact with that other world that they are supposed to respect. He warns that this will create a gap in understanding that will then produce counter-productive actions and policy.
Perhaps like banning gas stoves from the kitchen?
It’s a continuation of one of his ongoing themes, for myself, I first encountered in Jurassic Park. In that book it read as more of a warning to mankind (and engineers and scientists in particular) to be more humble about the limits of our knowledge. In this essay he differentiates*** between the ability to manage a complex system (something for which we humans have a great aptitude) and being to predict a complex system (something we delude ourselves into thinking we have an aptitude for). Some people get filthy rich via the stock market, yes. Yet, he reminds us, if someone told us that he could predict stock prices, we would know he was either a liar or a thief. Why are we not just as skeptical by the latest “experts” and their absolute self-certainty?
I am here after only one night of reading and so I have little to say about the novel itself. Thus far, it is typical Crichton – even if it may feel a bit more simplistic than what I remember from him. Is it because he got that way near the end (see Next) or is it because this book is based on an unfinished product (author Richard Preston was tasked by Crichton’s estate to finish the manuscript from notes and research)? Is it because I’ve gotten used to the new generation of writers? I’m not sure I care to analyze. Micro does retain the Crichton recipe that compels the reader to race ahead. I’m sure I’ll finish the book soon enough.
It did strike me how the focus on nanotechnology, a subject of this novel, has pretty much faded away. When Crichton wrote his book Prey (2002), which explored this technology area, fear of the civilization-ending possibilities were effused in the culture as a whole. None other than now-King Charles III, then Prince, made it a personal project to warn the world of this danger. Almost twenty years later, the urgency of that impending crisis is all but forgotten.
Some panics subside and others rekindle, generation after generation after generation.
While I find myself talking Wall Street Journal, I’ll briefly mention another article, this one from their weekend edition. The Books section reviewed a work called The Tragic Mind by Robert D. Kaplan. It is a lecture disguised as apology from an author whose reporting from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1986 may have done much to convince American leaders the necessity of regime change. He now believes that tyrannical Hussein’s ability to keep order should have been respected and left intact.
The quote, referring to the author’s declared sense of guilt, misappropriates**** Shakespeare as “Heavy lies the head the wears the frown.”
It’s such a beautiful phrase. I would love to use it myself but I’d feel a bit guilty if I were to outright steal it. I also can’t really use it in context as I’d never heard of Kaplan before this past weekend. For what it’s worth, the quote immediately made me think of a certain potato-headed Scandinavian, thus tying everything back to radical environmentalism.
*Since I was really confused, I looked it up. Maybe you are too. If so, here is the deal. I couldn’t understand why Joe Biden appointed a AFL-CIO president to the Consumer Products Safety Commission and, anyway, didn’t he pass away? It’s the “Jr.” that’s the giveaway. The anti-stove Commissioner is, in fact, the son of the long time Labor Union leader. That Trumka Sr. even had a son was probably little known before said appointment – Trumka Jr. previously made a career as a mid-level lawyer for the Federal government.
**I’m not sure I interpret his numbers quite the way he does but I am in agreement with his conclusion.
***It actually corrects a nit that I’d always wanted to pick with him. When I first read Jurassic Park, I was working with so-called “supervisory control” systems. The kind of model-based control systems that he says are doomed to inevitable failure (“life, uh, finds a way”), can actually be entirely effective when implemented appropriately. Or, at least, so said I. His later statement about management versions prediction might even agree with me.
****The Shakespeare line is actually “[u]neasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
et tu, Bluto? 
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