Phatic Hiatus

Antichrist Profiling

During the last presidential cycle (actually, during pretty much every presidential cycle) one of the candidates (Obama) was accused of being "the antichrist" in a whisper campaign, this time on the internet. The quality of the argument was pretty poor, relying on his age and religious background, which really aren't spelled out anywhere in biblical apocalyptic literature. But the counterargument wasn't just that those particular arguments were implausible, it was that the general idea of Barack Obama being the antichrist was itself absurd.

In responding to this, I tried to carefully distinguish one of these arguments from the other. If you take apocalyptic literature seriously as saying something about the future destiny of humanity (whether as an actual roadmap, or just a sort of repeatable template for the kinds of power traps that tend to afflict dominant empires), then you need some kind of reliable method for distinguishing a possible candidate for the antichrist from someone who poses no harm. If Barack Obama is definitely not the antichrist, then there must be some criterion for antichristhood on which he fails.

For reference, I'm referring to the eschatological antagonist called the "beast" (Rev 13-19) or the "lawless one" (2 Thess 2), who might also be an extension of the OT archetype of the final king in Daniel 11. The actual term antichristos is used in 1 John in a more general sense to refer to those who oppose the doctrine of the Incarnation, and those are a dime a dozen these days. Matt 24, which is apocalyptically flavored, never mentions a single unifying figure, just a collection of many false christs and false prophets.

Let's play the game of supposing that there really is a single "antichrist" figure (person or regime) that will emerge in the end times. That seems to be something of a consensus among early church commentators, at least, who had their eyes on each new Roman Emperor. Roughly speaking, I see the following historical traits of someone who behaves as an anti-Christological figure, which at the time Scripture was written almost certainly were written in language designed to invoke the behaviors of various rulers in the Greco-Roman world:

1. Global hegemony (Rev 13:1-5,7), including both military (13:4) and commercial (13:17) control.
2. Widespread popularity (Rev 13:8, 2 Thess 2:12) arising from deception (Rev 13:14). This is reinforced with "signs and wonders".
3. Personal arrogance (2 Thess 2:4, Rev 13:5).

In the present geopolitical, the first criterion makes it almost essential that the antichrist would be the leader of one of the world's major nation-states or alliances. The President of the US is the best candidate, since at the moment our military and economic influence are far ahead of our nearest rivals. Of course, China and Russia are still within striking distance. An Islamic world figure seems much less likely.

The second criterion requires a popular and charismatic figure, not just nationally but globally (Rev 13:3). That, at least to my mind, automatically rules out anyone falling below 50% in national polls, or having little support in the international community. People like George Bush or Dick Cheney just aren't popular enough, certainly in the international community, to meet this baseline.

The third criteria is highly subjective. Almost everyone who runs for high political office needs to be just a little arrogant, in the "this nation needs me" sense. But what's really needed here is some conviction that the government of the antichrist is standing in the place of God, and equating God's will with his own activities. This is the classical meaning of "blasphemy" (Rev 13:5), trying to associate oneself too strongly with God. For example, when Jesus forgives sin (Matt 9:2-6) he's accused of being a blasphemer, since that authority properly belongs to God.

The last criterion is rarely satisfied in a literal sense, except by outrageous cult leaders who could never succeed in decieving the nations. But in the more limited sense of claiming authority to decide what is or isn't sin (like Jesus redefined the Sabbath), I think a lot of politicians trivially satisfy this requirement. For example, Obama was a sponsor of the Matthew Shepard act in his first year in the US Senate, which some observers contend might have made pastors who opposed homosexuality vulnerable to prosecution, or shut down Catholic agencies that fail to place children in homosexual households. This amounts to claiming to right to redefine the boundaries of sin through political power, I think, although none of this has happened yet. Some progressive Christian organizations have made the same criticism of the Bush administration, which seemed at times to base its overly confident foreign policy on various scriptural allusions, sometimes in explicit ways.

In my opinion, someone who wants to strongly argue that Barack Obama couldn't possibly be the antichrist would make the strongest argument by attending to the second criterion. An antichrist needs to be exceptionally popular on the national and global scale, needs to deceive people into turning away from biblical doctrines (2 Thess 2:10-11), and needs to base this deception on signs and wonders (2 Thess 2:9, Rev 13:13). Consider these the three subcriteria of criterion 2.

The first of these certainly seems satisfied by the current presidential administration. Whether that popularity will hold up indefinitely remains to be seen.

On the second, I see some circumstantial evidence that the American public is shifting views on some moral issues (I've used homosexuality, since it's undergoing the fastest transition), but not shifting views on other moral issues. So far the verdict is out on this. The evolution of sexual morality today seems to have little to do with any single figure, and instead just reflects a gradual change in social standards. I can't really see a good argument to lay these developments at any political leader, including Obama.

On the third subcriterion, it's important to look at the two examples of specific "signs" given in Rev 13. The first is a recovery from a serious injury or malady, by someone associated with the antichrist's regime (one of the "heads" of the beast). That would be something accomplished with new medical technology, I assume, if it's a literal healing. Advanced medical technologies that might save someone from the dead could presumably be acquired by nanotechnology or stem-cell research. The second sign is "fire from heaven" (13:13), which seems easily satisfied by the use of modern bombs or missiles. Presumably the antichrist will not simply employ these as a deterrent threat, but actually use them in a military context, though perhaps just as a demonstration. Nuclear tests might qualify, and a nuclear exchange during war certainly would.

Of the three subcriteria under the second criterion, I see no evidence that Obama satisfies the second and third. He could, at some time in the future, and so concerned apocalypse-minded Christians should keep their eyes open. But for the moment, it's an unfullfilled possibility.

It's worth noting that at no point are Christians encouraged to struggle against the antichrist, just to remain faithful in the presence of persecution (2 Thess 2:15) and wait to be avenged (Rev 19:2). Presumably that's what we should be doing anyway, so I'm not sure that knowing the existence of the antichrist modifies our behavior all that much. At the same time, Jesus encourages his followers to pay attention to signs (Matt 23:33-34), so I don't think the exercise of being wary around people who might be deceivers is unwarranted. We clearly don't want to support the antichrist either!

Bonus: This piece by geologist Ken Deffeyes isn't remotely religious, but humorously outlines a possible path for an antichrist to take.

Your book is your entry-level step on a global crusade. Don't worry about finding a publisher. Self-publishing and print-on-demand will earn you better royalties. Aim for 50,000 words; you can easily do 1000 words per day, 2000 when you are fired up. Outline it carefully and write to the outline; otherwise you waste hours wondering what to say next.

Your book establishes your position as An Important Figure. After the book comes out, you'll want to milk the viral advertising on the Internet. Instead of Lili [sic] Riefenstahl, you'll need someone who can churn out two-minute video clips...

A big selling point might be your claim to mixed ancestry. Tell them about hybrid vigor. After you seize power, then you can settle scores with bankers and economists. Your past record should be free of scandals. If you got a 14-year-old girl pregnant, you better settle for something other than Savior of the Universe. Be very careful about being labeled a "terrorist." Preach love and affection for everyone, except geologists, bankers, and economists.

It's a good reminder that the next successful demogogue won't be a Hitler-like figure who seems strange and frightening to use, but rather someone who comes very much from within our own culture and attains popularity by reinforcing our existing prejudices.

The Better Judge

The small kerfuffle over Sonia Sotormayor's claim that a female minority judge would reach "better" decisions than a white male judge seems relatively less important than it might to me, in light of the economic challenges facing the nation. I suspect that there are dozens of other Democrats who believe that Sotomayor is correct but are afraid to agree in public with her, and so she deserves some credit for being honest. It's a shame when people are chastised for failing to tell the politically appropriate lies.

More to the point, it seems relatively obvious that Sotomayor's point is a sensible one. The primary function of the judiciary is to protect minority rights. In many cases, the imposition of a law on the rights of a minority group is subjective, and requires a judge to intuit whether or not it is "undue". This sort of language is sometimes baked right into the law itself, making it impossible to be strictly mechanical textualist. On balance, a court with representation from minority groups will probably do a better job of upholding the rights of those particular groups, having a natural awareness of what might psychologically burden or distress them.

Of course, that logic includes all minorities, not just the ones popular with Democrats. A minority of Americans are rural today, so the court would probably be well served to have fewer people from an urban background. A minority of Americans are Protestant evangelicals or Mormons, so the court would probably benefit from replacing one justice from an overrepresented group (like Catholics or Jews, who after Sotomayor would comprise eight of the nine seats) with a Baptist or a Mormon. Overall, I'd be happy with letting Democrats choose justices from their vulnerable minority groups as long as Republicans could do the same thing. I think that would, on balance, produce a more interesting and less insular court than one consisting of the smartest nine Catholic/Jewish Caucasian legal scholars in the country.

The same logic works in reverse for majoritarian branches like the Presidency and Congress. I think that Presidents and Senators need to be less niche-oriented, and should be able to reflect the average experiences and values of a range of different Americans. Someone like Jesse Jackson, from a very idiosyncratic niche of American culture, would probably be a polarizing and undesireable choice for President. There's nothing racist in pointing out that Obama's mixed-race heritage helps him to thread the needle better than a purer representative of one subculture (like Jackson) could.

Climate Wheel

The MIT Joint Program released a nice way to visualize the range of possible outcomes associated with climate change modeling projections over the next century. The wheels below compare the "comprehensive policy" approach of mitigating emissions to the "business as usual" approach of maintaining the status quo. As you can see, both of these have a range of options, but the average warming under business-as-usual is about twice as high.

A bit ominously, the projections for the "policy" case (around 2.5 C) are nearly identical to the projections for the "no policy" case under the previous round of modeling in 2003. In other words, the model now projects that, even with extensive policy solutions, warming with be about as bad as we thought it was going to be before, and without extensive policy solutions, it will be about twice as bad.

Regrettably, the current trend is toward the "no policy" case. First, only two countries (Great Britain and Denmark) are in compliance with the Kyoto 2012 targets. The European Community as a whole has declined by about 3%, versus a target decline of 12% from the 1990 baseline, and there seems to be little hope of meeting the targets on schedule. This decline is merely a preliminary to the larger technology transitions assumed by the "policy" wheel above.

But the real problem continues to be with emerging market economies. The Global Climate Project's Carbon Budget for 2007 finds:

Emissions increased from 6.2 PgC per year in 1990 to 8.5 PgC in 2007, a 38% increase from the Kyoto reference year 1990. The growth rate of emissions was 3.5% per year for the period of 2000-2007, an almost four fold increase from 0.9% per year in 1990-1999. The actual emissions growth rate for 2000-2007 exceeded the highest forecast growth rates for the decade 2000-2010 in the emissions scenarios of the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change, Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (IPCC-SRES). This makes current trends in emissions higher than the worst case IPCC-SRES scenario.

This is due almost entirely to growth in developing nations which are not Kyoto signatories:

The biggest increase in emissions has taken place in developing countries, largely in China and India, while developed countries have been growing slowly. The largest regional shift was that China passed the U.S. in 2006 to become the largest CO₂ emitter, and India will soon overtake Russia to become the third largest emitter. Currently, more than half of the global emissions come from less developed countries.

Much of the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked. If this is the best that progressive Europe can do starting from a favorable baseline, before warming was an international concern, I don't see how they're going to do much better over the next two decades.

This is one of the reasons I continue to be very worried about resource scarcity issues, as rising oil prices continue to make a case for peak oil occurring right about now, lurking "below the radar" due to the headline-grabbing credit crisis. The reason that prices are rising has a lot to do with OPEC controls, of course, but the reason why OPEC suddenly feels obligated to support prices at $80 a barrel has a lot to do with the expense involved in developing offshore and lower quality fields, so I think it amounts to the same thing. The loss of high quality fossil fuels is forcing everyone to switch to low-quality alternatives (China loves coal right now) and bituminous or lignite coal burns much less cleanly than natural gas. As a result, climate change policy may be forcing us into a dead end where peak oil ends up being pretty much the Kunstlerian nightmare that the guys holding the "end is near" signs have been telling everyone.

Just like economics is now becoming a matter of whether we get eaten by hyperinflation or by debt default, ecology is now becoming a matter of whether we get eaten by global warming or by peak energy.

Good News, Bad News

The good news is that at least one major economic indicator is back to where it was in November 2007, before the recession started.

The bad news is that it's the yield of the 30-year T-Bond, and federal debt is running at 80% of GDP.

I'm reminded of the old joke that goes "would you rather a crocodile ate you, or an alligator?" To which, minus the comma omitted in a verbal telling, the correct answer is that you'd rather the crocodile ate the alligator.

Would you rather that hyperinflation ate the real GDP, or the national debt? I'd rather that hyperinflation ate the national debt! Pity it's likely to end up eating both at once.

Climate Change: My Take

My mother emailed me to ask about global warming today, and since she's pretty much the only person reading my blog, I figured I might as well write something she's interested in reading. I mean, as opposed to another discussion of the divergence between currency exchange markets and the long-bond interest rate.

My beliefs about global warming can be summarized pretty well by this essay by Robert Rapier at the Oildrum. For those who don't bother reading the article, I can reproduce and extend the conclusions here in my own words.

1. I think the climate will continue to demonstrate a long-term secular (i.e., non-periodic) warming trend, with shorter-term oscillations due to solar cycles and ocean currents. Currently we are at a point of low activity in the solar cycle, which means that warming is being suppressed. I expect it to resume a fast pace of increase by the end of the next decade.
2. I regard the majority of this warming as anthropogenic in origin, due to both CO2 (from industrial activity) and methane (from agricultural activity). Some portion of warming during the 1990s was due to natural effects, but currently natural effects (like solar activity) are reducing warming, so it doesn't make any sense to identify them as the cause of anomalously high temperatures for the last decade.
3. Since most human populations live in coastal areas, and are dependent on agricultural products grown close to sea level, a rise in sea levels would not need to be large to have substantial consequences. For every 10 cm rise in sea levels, I would expect about 100 million people (mostly in Asia) to die of famine, due primarily to the lost of coastal farming regions (for rice, etc.), and also due to altered precipitation patterns (droughts in some places, overwatering in others).
4. Changing this vision of the future would require quite substantial alterations of future energy use. Currently the projection is that global energy demand will rise from about 13 TW to about 50 TW by 2050, due to industrialization of the third world and rising standards of living, as well as population gains in Africa. Much of this energy will need to come from fossil fuel sources in the near future, particularly coal. This means that the rise in emissions from these nations will more than cancel out any small reductions in Europe and North America. In any event, even enthusiastic signatories to Kyoto are having trouble matching the targets set.
5. Even though reversal of warming trends is unlikely, I still think many of the proprosals designed to mitigate the rate of warming will reduce the loss of life by slowing the pace and allowing for better adaptation and migration of climate-sensative populations. I also think most of these changes will eventually be necessary anyway, due to resource scarcity, so it makes sense to begin them now while we are still "energy rich" (rather like Joseph saving up grain during the seven years of plenty).

That being said, I also think criticisms of the use of global warming as a cause in the environmental movement are often well-founded, and make important contributions to the debate.

1. Most advocacy groups tend to rely on "worst-case scenarios" which go far beyond the scientific consensus. For example, the "Inconvenient Truth" graphs showing much of Florida suddenly innundated by the ocean are based on the assumption of more than 7 meters of sea level rise. This is about ten to twenty times as large as the current IPCC median projection, and would only happen with substantial positive feedbacks.
2. Making substantial changes to world energy use would require major sacrifices that would reduce global economic growth. This would cause, for example, the loss of jobs and a decline in the standard of living, which indirectly affects access to many other services (medicine, education). These costs must be weighed against the benefits of a particular policy. If a policy reduces warming by less than 5%, but cuts global GDP in half, then it's clearly not a sensible trade-off at the level of cost-benefit analysis. Too many environmentalists assume that making it a "moral" issue bypasses the need for this analysis, but the costs also raise ethical questions. Is it really fair for the developed nations to tell India, Southeast Asia, and African nations to remain trapped in a state of poverty to save the planet, after we've already benefited substantially from fossil fuels ourselves?
3. Not all environmental impacts are caused by global warming, and too often complex problems in local ecosystems are reduced to handwaving and the assumptiong that "global warming must be causing this". The retreat of glaciers, for example, probably has a lot to do with deforestation, so this might still continue happening even if we could find a way to sequested carbon. Species extinction is primarily a matter of loss of local habitats, and only secondarily a consequence of global temperatures.
4. The supply of fossil fuels will continue to decline, and increasing demand will force the price to rise. This will promote the development of alternative energy technologies in the private sector. I think that many global warming projections substantially overestimate the volume of fossil fuels that are commercially viable to extract, which means that the problem will "solve itself" as they become expensive enough to force us to look for substitutes.

Despite the last point, I still think it makes sense to begin the implementation of those technologies now, before they are cost-effective in a free market environment. This is because declining energy resources will reduce economic growth, and in an economy with shrinking growth, long-term investments are much less likely to be made. Human psychology tends to function well in the short term, but poorly over timeframes longer than a decade.

A short version: I think the earth will inevitably face climate change, which will be bad, but not the civilization-ending apocalypse proposed by some advocates. I do, however, think that declining energy resources (a related problem) could greatly reduce the standard of living for most of the world, causing drought, disease, and famine. The steps taken to provide renewable energy will also have benefits in reducing global warming. So I prefer to look at a unified approach that focuses on finding secure and permanent resources to replace those that are becoming scarce and expensive, and at the same time requires new technologies to have a limited carbon footprint.

The More Things Change....

After the Obama administration made a request for around $80 billion for continuing war funding, the Democratic Congress increased the actual appropriations for the second half of 2009 to $96.7 billion. Amortized over six months, that amounts to $16 billion per month. Some of that money is being extended into "security" operations in Pakistan. Even if that's good money, you can bet we'll be chasing it with bad money soon enough.

This is already around $4 billion more than the Bush administration was spending to support both wars in 2007, before we were in the middle of the worst economic crisis (say it with me) since the Great Depression.

Technically this isn't all for overseas operations, but the fact that Congress is padding out the operations budget with additional Pentagon appropriation requests isn't exactly a cause for pride.

I'm curious to see, when Americans finally realize how badly they've been duped, if Obama's poll numbers start to trend down to Bush levels. Probably not. He's black, after all, and the late night comedians don't make fun of him as often.

Satire: Weapon Of Convenience

Here's Ta-Nehisi Coates for the Atlantic, wringing his hands with the world-weary voice of adult reason, as the RNC childishly compares poor Pelosi to a James Bond villain.

And here's Andrew Sullivan for the Atlantic, one month earlier, cheerfully playing the same movie villain game with Cheney.

Debates over civility in politics consist, for the most part, of people on nominally different sides engaging in precisely the same behavior without ever possessing enough self-awareness to notice the parallels.

Deleveraging, Condensed

Two excellent articles on deleveraging in the financial sector and in households, which I condense for you here to save you the trouble of reading them.

The first article is by fund manager John Hussman, explaining why the system is already locked into either hyperinflation (the alternative he assumes) or public debt default (the option he doesn't consider). The financial sector bailout (TARP et al) has been accomplished by letting banks swap their bad paper (mortgage related securities) for good paper (newly issued short-term Treasuries). Treasury notes aren't money, they're an IOU. So in order for the banks to really be "recapitalized", they need to sell the Treasuries. If they sell them to the private sector, they're soaking up money from other parts of the private sector, which has no net effect on the money available for investment. In any event, the demand for Treasuries is pretty well saturated already. So presumably they'll be sold back to the government. At that point, the goverment will print money to cover them. The money supply (the most conservative measure, M1) will instantly double, which means all existing money will be worth half as much.

The banks used the government to turn a trillion dollars of fake money into real money at public expense, and are now prepared to dump all the new money back into the economy as part of the "recovery". The million dollars you saved for retirement? Inflation has already eaten $500,000 of it, unless you can spend it faster than a bunch of bankers who are desperate to start turning profits again.

The second article, by the Federal Reserve Bank of SF, describes the expected symmetry of the return to baseline of household debt. It took us over a decade to leverage, as household income was being supported by higher personal debt rather than increased earnings. So it's going to take us another decade to deleverage, in analogy with the corporate debt bubble in Japan, 25 years ago.. That means that we're about to face a greately weakened recovery, since a substantial fraction of our GDP (the part associated with rising consumer spending) is going to be absorbed by debt paydowns.

I'd guess we'll see average economic growth of around 0.5% to 1.0% over the next decade. Don't expect to earn any profits in the stock market - although you should still park money there or in some other floating equity as a hedge against inflation caused by the banking shenanigans.

A Missing Link?

The internet was abuzz yesterday about the discovery of... well, I'm still trying to figure out exactly what. It's obviously some kind of fossilized primate from the Eocene, but the media reports are so garbled that they can't seem to figure out what they're describing. Google thinks it's important enough to merit a holiday banner, but the first article I get when I click the banner (from the Daily News) makes me wonder if reporters are just uniquely credulous, or if the researchers are being intentionally misleading about the significance of their discovery.

The term "missing link" is typically used to describe some fabled common ancestor of both hominids and the other great apes. This article immediately pushes that interpretation:

A team of researchers Tuesday unveiled an almost perfectly intact fossil of a 47 million-year-old primate they say represents the long-sought missing link between humans and apes

This statement is basically nonsense to anyone who knows anything about current models of hominid evolution. If you go back 47 million years, you've moved to a time far earlier than any branching between humans and (other) apes could have occurred, much later, in the Miocene. This isn't a missing link between humans and apes. It is, at best, a missing link between anthropoid primates (monkeys and apes) and prosimians (like lemurs). It's far too primitive to represent anything that could correspond to a branch point between hominids and non-hominids, so either the researchers are lying (unlikely) or the journalists have no idea what's being described (very likely).

Evolutionary biology has a certain "sentence first, verdict afterwards" quality that makes it hard for me to take it seriously as a science. It's a little like the Bush Administration's approach to the war in Iraq, where the war is being fought to find the weapons of mass destruction that justify fighting the war in the first place. You get constant admonitions from hyper-confident authorities about how foolish you are to believe such an obviously true and well-evidenced theory about some detail of hominid ancestry, and then the next minute there's a trivial discovery (a tooth, say) that gets the same authorities wildly ecstatic about how their theory is finally "proved". Here's the same muddled article again:

Scientists say the cat-sized animal's hind legs offer evidence of evolutionary changes that led to primates standing upright - a breakthrough that could finally confirm Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Great. A hundred thousand fossils in every museum in the world already, and apparently we needed this one to "finally confirm" Darwin. I assume any biologist reading this article is gnashing teeth when he reads a garbled line like this, despite (or maybe because of) the kernel of truth behind it.

In case you had any doubts about the scientific illiteracy of the authors, here's another paragraph that puts those doubts to rest:

Officially known as Darwinius masillae, the fossil of the lemur-like creature dubbed Ida shows it had opposable thumbs like humans and fingernails instead of claws

Absolutely all anthropoid primates have fingernails instead of claws, with the exception of tamarins, so that's nothing new. This isn't proof of any kind of missing link, it's just proof that monkeys and apes were a distinct suborder of primates in the early eocene. (What you'd really like to find is a fossil with something intermediate between fingernails and claws.) And all great apes have opposable thumbs like humans, though less developed. Again, a missing link should have morphological characteristics halfway between the two things it's ostensibly linking. That's Darwinian Gradualism 101.

The NYT is significantly less credulous than the Daily News, and reports (pretty much as I expected) that the discovery is being wildly overblown:

An article to be published on Tuesday in PLoS ONE, a scientific journal, will report more prosaically that the scientists involved said the fossil could be a “stem group” that was a precursor to higher primates, with the caveat, “but we are not advocating this.”All of this seems a departure from the normal turn of events, where researchers study their subject and publish their findings, and let the media chips fall where they may. But this campaign is only the latest example of the scientific media blockbuster, of which the National Geographic Society has become perhaps the most successful practitioner. It often gives grants to researchers, with National Geographic gaining the rights to produce television shows and magazine articles related to any discoveries.

If this media roll-out is science, then P.T. Barnum should be in line for a Nobel Prize.

And for the record, none of this "proves" anything useful about the contemporary religious debate over Darwin, which has mostly shifted to the question of why random variations occur. Finding intermediate fossils doesn't resolve the question of whether the changes that resulted in the emergence of new species were the work of random, slow, incremental changes, or whether they were sped along by divine finger-tweaking. That can only be resolved by the quantitative comparison of transitional species fossils to stable species fossils. If you find a lot more transitional species than stable species during periods that must contain rapid development, that matches the expectations of gradualism. If you find far more stable species than transitional species, then that confounds gradualism. We're a long way from being able to resolve which of these two situations is true, due to the uselessly small sample size.

More Magical Thinking

I've been keeping my eyes open for more signs that the political left is trying to reduce its discussion of all other issues so that they revolve around gay marriage, as their newly favored "flagship". Here's another great example from Foreign Policy. The argument in the article doesn't really make a lick of sense, but that's secondary to the new ethos of believing that gay marriage is the capstone of "freedom", and freedom is a magical elixir that rescues societies from deterioration. It's an updated version of the old melting-pot argument, which at least had the merit of being a simplified version of the more complex reality of educated elites from foreign nations migrating to a country that was capable of expanding rapidly into a fertile resource base.

Especially amusing detail: The best example of a closed or intolerant society is Japan, and its associated demographic collapse. Because we all know that creating a new class of infertile marriages is a surefire way to reverse demographic collapse. (Never mind that Japan was exactly the same society when it was experiencing 4% GDP growth in the last century, or that China is managing to grow at an insane rate despite limited political and cultural freedoms.)

My own assessment is that this is getting the cause and effect almost exactly backward. In the early stages of expansion, a new empire (Rome, or Great Britain, or the US) is fairly homogeneous, which creates a strong desire for participation and emigration by members of other nations within the hegemonic sphere of influence. The first waves of traders and immigrants are the most talented, since they have the freedom and foresight to take advantage of new opportunities. Then secondary, less-talented (or at least, more introverted and self-seeking) waves of new participation create burdens that disrupt the cohesion of the ideologically uniform empire.

Homogeneity creates success, success creates ideological diversity, and diversity creates centrifugal tensions that undermine further success.