Kit Kat Bar in Japan

Kit Kat Bar in Japan: British Import Takes Center stage!

Tejal Rao The New York Times

 The seven-story Don Quijote megastore in the Shibuya district of Tokyo is open 24 hours a day, but it’s hard to say when it’s rush hour, because there’s always a rush. A  of aisles leads to one soaring, psychedelic display after another presided over by cartoon mascots, including the mascot of Don Quijote itself: an enthusiastic blue penguin named Donpen who points shoppers toward toy sushi kits and face masks soaked with snail excretions and rainbow gel pens and split-toe socks. The candy section is vast, with cookies and cakes printed with Gudetama, Sanrio’s lazy egg character, and shiny packages of dehydrated, caramelized squid. It’s one of the few places where an extensive array of Japan’s many Kit Kat flavors are for sale. Though the chocolate bar is sold in more than 100 countries, including China, Thailand, India, Russia and the United States, it’s one of Japan’s best-selling chocolate brands and has achieved such a distinctive place in the market that several people in Tokyo told me they thought the Kit Kat was a Japanese product.

A Kit Kat is composed of three layers of wafer and two layers of flavored cream filling, enrobed in chocolate to look like a long, skinny ingot. It connects to identical skinny ingots, and you can snap these apart from one another intact, using very little pressure, making practically no crumbs. The Kit Kat is a sweet, cheap, delicately crunchy artifact of the 20th century’s industrial chocolate conglomerate. In the United States, where it has been distributed by Hershey since 1970, it is drugstore candy. In Japan, you might find the Kit Kat at a drugstore, but here the Kit Kat has levels. The Kit Kat has range. It’s found in department stores and luxurious Kit Kat-devoted boutiques that resemble high-end shoe stores, a single ingot to a silky peel-away sheath, stacked in slim boxes and tucked inside ultrasmooth-opening drawers, which a well-dressed, multilingual sales clerk slides open for you as you browse. The Kit Kat, in Japan, pushes at every limit of its form: It is multicolored and multiflavored and sometimes as hard to find as a golden ticket in your foil wrapper. Flavors change constantly, with many appearing as limited-edition runs. They can be esoteric and so carefully tailored for a Japanese audience as to seem untranslatable to a global mass market, but the bars have fans all over the world. Kit Kat fixers buy up boxes and carry them back to devotees in the United States and Europe. All this helps the Kit Kat maintain a singular, cultlike status.

Kit Kats begin their lives as large sheets of wafer, which are sandwiched with cream and cut into small fingers. Here, the individual segments are being coated at the factory in Kasumigaura. 

Kit Kat flavors including plum wine, purple sweet potato and Shinshu apple at a Don Quijote megastore in Tokyo. Spencer Lowell for The New York Times

Tomoko Ohashi making green-tea and strawberry Kit Kats in the Kasumigaura test kitchen. Spencer Lowell for The New York Times

The Kit Kat first came to Japan in 1973, but the first 100 percent, truly on-brand Japanese Kit Kat arrived at the turn of the millennium, when the marketing department of Nestlé Japan, the manufacturer of Kit Kats in the country, decided to experiment with new flavors, sweetness levels and types of packaging in an effort to increase sales. Strawberry! A pinkish, fruity Kit Kat would have been a gamble almost anywhere else in the world, but in Japan, strawberry-flavored sweets were established beyond the status of novelties. The strawberry Kit Kat was covered in milk chocolate tinted by the addition of a finely ground powder of dehydrated strawberry juice. It was first introduced in Hokkaido — coincidentally and serendipitously — at the start of strawberry season. Since then, the company has released almost 400 more flavors, some of them available only in particular regions of the country, which tends to encourage a sense of rareness and collectibility. Bars flavored like Okinawan sweet potatoes, the starchy, deep purple Japanese tubers, are available in Kyushu and Okinawa. The adzuki bean-sandwich bars are associated with the city of Nagoya, where the sweet, toasted snack originated in a tea shop at the turn of the 20th century and slowly made its way to cafe menus in the area. Shizuoka, where gnarly rhizomes with heart-shaped leaves have been cultivated for centuries on the Pacific Ocean, is known for its wasabi-flavored bars.

The most popular kind of Kit Kat in Japan is the mini — a bite-size package of two ingots — and Nestlé estimates that it sells about four million of these each day. In any given year, there are about 40 flavors available, including the core flavors — plain milk chocolate, strawberry, sake, wasabi, matcha, Tokyo Banana and a dark-chocolate variety called “sweetness for adults” — plus 20 to 30 rotating new ones. In August, Nestlé was preparing to release a shingen mochi Kit Kat, based on a traditional sweet made by the Japanese company Kikyouya, which involves three bite-size pieces of soft, squishy mochi packed with roasted soybean powder and a bottle of brown-sugar syrup, all assembled to taste. It seemed almost presumptuous for Nestlé to flavor a chocolate bar like shingen mochi, which is rooted in traditional Japanese confectionary, then stamp its brand on it and produce it en masse.

A sales clerk was restocking the Kit Kat display in Don Quijote when I asked her which were the most popular flavors. She shook her head. “They’re all popular,” she said. She gestured at the empty tunnels of matcha-, grape- and strawberry-flavored Kit Kats that she was filling as a small group of Chinese tourists carried armloads of glossy snack bags and boxes back to their shopping carts, undoing her work. An Australian father and son rushed by in a panic, their cart heaped with gifts to take back home. “Which one, Dad? Which one?” the child asked desperately, pointing to all the varieties. “It doesn’t matter,” the father shouted, as if the timer on a bomb were running out. “Just take one!”

The Kit Kat was first produced as a crisp, four-finger chocolate wafer bar in the 1930s, in Britain, by the chocolate manufacturer Rowntree’s. The company was named for Henry Isaac Rowntree, who bought a small grocery store in York that also operated a cocoa foundry. In the 1860s, the foundry was known for its finely ground rock cocoa, but the business grew quickly into candy- and chocolate-making. From the beginning, the Kit Kat was self-consciously packaged as a kind of workingman’s chocolate — as if the break of the bar could be aligned with the break the working class deserved from the monotony of their day. The Kit Kat was meant to be plain, unpretentious, cheerful. The stars of its commercials were often construction workers, cops or commuters taking five hard-earned minutes to enjoy a moment of sweetness in an otherwise bleak day.

Wrapped Kit Kats at Nestlé Japan’s Kasumigaura factory before being sorted into packaging. Spencer Lowell for The New York Times

Chocolate being poured over the wafers in molds. Spencer Lowell for The New York Times

In Japan, Kit Kats were first licensed by the Japanese sweets company Fujiya, which capitalized on the chocolate’s general association with Britain and the West. Early Japanese TV commercials for the candy drew on the chocolate bar’s British roots to promote it as a foreign product, depicting British soldiers breaking for a treat. But in 1988, Nestlé acquired Rowntree’s and took over manufacturing and sales in Japan, eventually changing strategies. Since 2010, sales in Japan have increased by about 50 percent. Japanese Kit Kats are now produced in two Nestlé-owned factories in Himeji and Kasumigaura.

There are three ways for a new Japanese Kit Kat flavor to make its way into the world. The classically trained pastry chef Yasumasa Takagi, a kind of Kit Kat maestro, was brought in by Nestlé as a collaborator in 2003, after the success of the strawberry Kit Kat. He may decide he wants to make a special bar and propose the new flavor to Nestlé — his first was passion fruit in 2005. The marketing team may also build a partnership with a brand, like Tokyo Banana, the locally famous cream-filled cakes on which the Kit Kat flavor is based, then ask a product-development team to experiment so they can bring a sample bar to the pitch meeting. Or the product-development teams themselves may feel inspired on a late night in the test kitchen after one too many cups of green tea and vending-machine sweets.

Only the fanciest bars are devised by Takagi, made with higher-grade chocolates and other ingredients, like dehydrated seasonal fruits, and sold in Kit Kat Chocolatory stores, the boutique-like shops for luxury versions of the bar. In some cases, they are decorated like plated desserts at a fine-dining restaurant, the Kit Kat logo entirely hidden by tiny, delicate, colorful crunchies, or individually wrapped like a gift — a single Kit Kat finger in a crinkly plastic wrapper, tucked inside a box. After Kohzoh Takaoka, now chief executive of Nestlé Japan, persuaded Takagi to work with the company, Takagi decided he wanted to make the bars more sophisticated, to play with the form and sweetness levels. He wanted, as he put it, to make Kit Kats for grown-ups, like the Chocolatory Sublime Bitter, a long, cigarillo-like bar of 66 percent dark chocolate, packaged in black and gold. (The marketing team uses the word “premiumization” to describe this part of Kit Kat’s strategy.) Now Takagi runs the brand’s Japanese Chocolatory shops, including the one where I met him, in a particularly posh part of the Ginza neighborhood in Tokyo.

“Japan is No. 1 in terms of sales and profits, compared with Nestlé’s other markets,” said Ryoji Maki, Nestlé Japan’s marketing manager at the time, who was dressed in a beautifully tailored suit and eating a tiny pudding cup. Nestlé did a market test after its strawberry flavor caught on in Hokkaido in 2000, to see how much production would be required for sales to go national. What it found was that the strawberry Kit Kat was especially popular among tourists, both Japanese tourists and those from abroad. Subsequent market tests suggested that Kit Kat had potential not just as a candy but as a kind of Japanese souvenir. The company looked to Kobe, Tokyo, Kyoto and other cities and wondered how to develop a chocolate for each that consumers might associate with the places themselves. Now Nestlé’s most recent flavors focus on regional Japanese products — maple-leaf-shaped cookies, plum wine, roasted tea.

There are also carefully chosen collaborations that capitalize on Japan’s culture of omiyage, which can be loosely defined as returning from travels with gifts for friends, family and colleagues. The Kikyou shingen mochi Kit Kat, which would go on sale in mid-October, would be sold right alongside the real Kikyou shingen mochi at souvenir shops and in service areas along the Chuo Expressway, a major four-lane road more than 200 miles long that passes through the mountainous regions of several prefectures, connecting Tokyo to Nagoya. With any luck, people would associate the Kit Kat with the traditional sweet and snap it up as a souvenir. But for this to be a success, for Kit Kat to expand into the souvenir market, consumers would have to believe that Kit Kat, originally a British product, was Japanese, and that although it was manufactured in a factory far away, it somehow represented the very essence of a region.

Wafers in production at the factory. Spencer Lowell for The New York Times

An assortment of Kit Kat flavors found in Japan, including sake. Spencer Lowell for The New York Times

Before I could enter the Kasumigaura factory, northeast of Tokyo, I had to zip up an all-white coverall and place a white plastic skullcap under a hard white helmet, tucking in all of my hair. I had to wrap the exposed skin of my neck in a white scarf. I had to change out of my sneakers into the provided white slip-ons and take a fully clothed air shower with Takeshi Iwai, the factory’s production manager, in a sealed room the size of a linen closet. Afterward, side by side, we sticky-rolled our entire bodies for dust and lint and eyelashes and any other invisible debris that might still have been clinging to our clothes, to avoid contaminating the chocolate.

It smelled strongly of cocoa and toasted almonds on the other side of the doors. Iwai assured me that this scent changed daily, often more than once a day, according to what was being made. He also warned me not to run, because I might slip in my new shoes. Iwai studied microbiology at university and has been working for Nestlé since 2001; he has managed the Kasumigaura factory for the last three years. Wafers were the beginning of the line, the beginning of every single Kit Kat.

I stood mesmerized for a few minutes under an archway of uncut wafers, like edible golden window panes, which were being cooled by ambient air before they reached an actual cooler. I heard almost nothing Iwai said over the sharp clanging and drone of the machinery. The factory is large and open, loud and clean, its production lines totally transparent. But the wafers had been baked out of sight, most likely between engraved, molded plates. Now they looked like thin, delicate altar breads, floating above us. They formed a continuously moving line, the sheets traveling up and curving toward pumps of cream in the distance.

What makes a Kit Kat a Kit Kat? A Nestlé executive told me it was the shape of the connected pieces: those long, skinny ingots with their recognizable, ridge-like feet of chocolate surrounding each base. A few people said it was the logo itself, in big blocky letters, embossed on the top of each bar. But when I spoke with Takagi, the pastry chef, he didn’t hesitate. “The wafer,” he said. “The wafer!”

Wafers are an art form within the food industry. And although plenty of companies make decent wafers, there is something about the Nestlé wafer, Takagi said, that is quite extraordinary. Not that he knew exactly what it was. The wafer was the corporate secret, the heavily guarded soul of the Kit Kat. But like many lightweight, low-fat industrial wafers, the Kit Kat wafer is, very likely, mostly air and gelatinized wheat flour. It is crisp but not brittle. Crunchy but not dense. It is fragile but still satisfying to bite into. It is totally and alarmingly dry to the touch, like packing material. But after it has been touched with a little saliva, it doesn’t even need to be chewed, and you can swallow it with no effort. Plain, the wafer is almost but not entirely tasteless. It has a very gentle sort of toastiness, barely there, but with an almost bready flavor. A sort of toast ghost. Not that it matters. A wafer’s highest purpose is the nuance of its crunch.

When a wafer doesn’t meet standards — when it is cracked, broken, improperly embossed — it is tossed into a tall plastic bin next to the factory line. The company recycles these substandard wafers as local animal feed. “This is the countryside, so we have farms,” Iwai said with a shrug. The good wafers — smooth, intact, deeply and evenly embossed — move along the line. They are covered with cream, then sandwiched with another wafer and more cream. The arms of a huge, gentle machine with extraordinary fine-tuned motor functions do all the work of building the Kit Kat, smoothing the cream and pressing the wafer on top of it, then pass the large, sheet-cake-size sandwiches along a slow conveyor belt through a massive cooler. After they’re cut, four sheets at a time, the Kit Kats begin to look familiar, like ladyfingers.

On the molding line, the chocolate depositor fills empty Kit Kat molds with tempered chocolate, and the fingers are dropped in and covered with more chocolate. A scraper removes excess chocolate and smooths the surface. When the chocolate is cooled, the bars are popped out and whipped through a wrapping machine. On my visit, the mostly automated factory was making several types of Kit Kat, including chestnut — a seasonal flavor for the fall — made with white chocolate and a mix of chestnut purées from Europe and Japan. The production line was a barely interrupted blur of white, like dotted lines rushing by on the highway, becoming indistinguishable from one another.

I learned that Kit Kats were slightly, subtly different all over the world. In Britain, Nestlé uses milk crumb, a sweetened, dehydrated milk product, to make the bars. In the United States, Hershey uses nonfat milk and milk fat, while in Japan, the factories work with whole-milk powder. In Japan, Nestlé buys most of its cacao beans from West Africa. In the United States, a mix of beans from West Africa and Latin America is favored.

Almost everything changes, but the wafers? The wafers never change. The wafers have a fixed standard that needs to be maintained, and deviations are not acceptable. Standing beneath the fresh, moving wafers, I asked Iwai if I could hold one, as if it were a newborn, and I did not expect him to let me. But he reached into the line and pulled one out, passing it toward me with two hands. The breeze created by his movements seemed to curve the wafer inward with pressure, but it didn’t break. What I wanted to know was if this wafer, the one in my hands, would pass Nestlé’s standards, but Iwai wouldn’t share many details about that. All I knew was that the wafer was huge, golden, marked with square cups and totally weightless. That if it hadn’t been still warm from the oven, I wouldn’t have known it was there. That if this was the soul of a Kit Kat, then holding the soul of a Kit Kat was like holding nothing at all.

Kikyouya, originally a small, family-run sweet shop that specialized in kintsuba, a Japanese sweet filled with red-bean paste, has been making shingen mochi since the late 1960s. A single package of Kikyou shingen mochi is complex, but it’s also small — small enough to fit in your palm — and contained in a flexible plastic box that’s wrapped in a soft sheet of pretty, floral-printed plastic and sealed with a topknot. It’s messy to eat, or at least it can be, but the clever packaging considers this: The wrapping itself doubles as a tiny tablecloth to prevent stains and spills. Before I knew this, I ate shingen mochi in my hotel room, as Tokyo was being soaked by the outermost edges of a passing typhoon. With my first bite, I sent a little cloud of roasted soybean powder into the air and coughed with surprise. The rice cakes were soft, chewy, delicious. And where the brown-sugar syrup trapped the powder, it turned into a gorgeous caramel sludge. I couldn’t quite imagine how a sweet like this, one defined by such varied textures, and by such a distinct form, could ever be transformed into a chocolate bar.

Tomoko Ohashi making green-tea and strawberry Kit Kats in the test kitchen. Spencer Lowell for The New York Times

Left: Shingen mochi produced by Kikyouya. Right: The new shingen-mochi-flavored Kit Kat. Spencer Lowell for The New York Times

Tomoko Ohashi was the lead developer on the Kikyou shingen mochi Kit Kat. Ohashi, a soft-spoken woman from Mito in Ibaraki Prefecture, ate shingen mochi when someone brought it for her as a souvenir from Yamanashi, the prefecture where it’s still made today, and she knew how beloved it was. What she didn’t know was how the mochi texture could translate into a chocolate bar. “I was also very worried about replicating the flavor,” she said, standing in the test kitchen of the factory in Kasumigaura, wearing the factory’s all-white uniform with its white hoodie pulled tightly across her hairline.

The kitchen didn’t look like a lab. It was more like a real pastry kitchen, full of dehydrated fruit powders and matcha organized in tubs, chocolate molds and serrated knives and a marble counter for tempering chocolate. The challenge with shingen mochi, Ohashi said, was finding the balance between the soybean powder and the syrup. Because the sweet is so adaptable, everyone who eats it calibrates it obsessively, adjusting the ingredients so it tastes the way they like.

Ohashi started work on the new flavor last September, and she finished it in May. In tests, she would make about 50 pieces of four to five different versions by hand, tempering chocolate on the marble table, and then taste them side by side, looking for the right balance of soybean powder to sugar syrup. The rice was the shingen mochi itself, but it couldn’t play such a big part in the chocolate bar. “There’s no device or machine for putting a rice cake in a Kit Kat,” Ohashi said sadly. She knew, from the start, that it wouldn’t be possible to replicate the texture of fresh mochi — tender, almost slippery in the mouth — in a chocolate bar. She did, to be true to the mochi, end up putting sticky rice in the Kit Kat’s cream filling. Did the sticky rice in the Kit Kat help to mimic the mochi texture? “No,” Ohashi said, bursting into laughter because she had made an uncomfortable kind of peace with what she could and could not do within the boundaries of her form. “Actually not at all.”

After all the testing, Ohashi concentrated all the flavorings in the cream filling: the sticky rice as well as soybean powder and brown-sugar syrup. The bars went on sale on Oct. 15, with packages of nine selling for 780 yen, or about $7. Standing in the test kitchen, I unwrapped the new flavored Kit Kat and broke into it with a crack. The bar was a mini, two tiny connected ingots. They were ivory, eggshell, the off-white color of a rich lady’s kitchen, and the fine cream filling inside appeared a light brown.

Just a few days earlier, I had made a pilgrimage to Kikyouya’s factory in Yamanashi, where workers wrapped thousands of pieces of fresh shingen mochi by hand each day, to see exactly what Nestlé was trying to capture. On my way, I stopped for lunch at a small noodle restaurant and sat by the window, eating a pile of salted plums. I could see busloads of tourists filing out in the parking lot, their floppy hats secured with strings, their shirts wet with sweat. They were fruit hunters. Yamanashi is green, dense with red pine and white oak forest and beautifully kept orchards that cut deep into its slopes. Fruit hunters pay to eat as much ripe, seasonal fruit as they like in a short span of time. Say, 30 minutes of thin-skinned peaches, or fat pink grapes, or strawberries, warmed from the sun, dipped into pools of sweetened condensed milk.

Unlike apple-picking in the fall in the United States, the fruit doesn’t really function as a souvenir, carried home in baskets to commemorate an idyllic, well-documented visit to the countryside. Fruit hunters travel to eat the fruit on site, right off the trees, in their allotted time. When the concept was explained to me, I thought the time limit seemed embarrassing. But seeing the fruit hunters of Yamanashi, I realized that it wasn’t embarrassing at all. It was practical, it was beautiful and it acknowledged that souvenirs were, like memories, at best only approximations of the moments they represented. That it was, in fact, completely impossible to remove a taste from its origin without changing it in the process.

“How is it?” Ohashi wanted to know. The Kikyou shingen mochi Kit Kat was smooth to the touch, shiny. It had a brilliant, crumbless snap, which gave way to a pure white chocolate and caramel flavor and a lightly savory note. It was sweet, it was good. It was in balance. And it recalled fresh Kikyou shingen mochi, vaguely, like a memory gone soft around the edges.

Tejal Rao is an Eat columnist for the magazine and the California restaurant critic for The Times. She has won two James Beard Foundation awards for restaurant criticism.

Why Spinoza still matters

Why Spinoza still matters

(Repeated from 2016)

At a time of religious zealotry, Spinoza’s fearless defence of intellectual freedom is more timely than ever

junio 7, 2016

Samuel Hirszenberg, Spinoza (1907) . Courtesy A. A. Deineka Picture

Gallery, Kursk, Russia.

In July 1656, the 23-year-old Bento de Spinoza was excommunicated from the Portuguese-Jewish congregation of Amsterdam. It was the harshest punishment of herem (ban) ever issued by that community. The extant document, a lengthy and vitriolic diatribe, refers to the young man’s ‘abominable heresies’ and ‘monstrous deeds’. The leaders of the community, having consulted with the rabbis and using Spinoza’s Hebrew name, proclaim that they hereby ‘expel, excommunicate, curse, and damn Baruch de Spinoza’. He is to be ‘cast out from all the tribes of Israel’ and his name is to be ‘blotted out from under heaven’.

Over the centuries, there have been periodic calls for the herem against Spinoza to be lifted. Even David Ben-Gurion, when he was prime minister of Israel, issued a public plea for ‘amending the injustice’ done to Spinoza by the Amsterdam Portuguese community. It was not until early 2012, however, that the Amsterdam congregation, at the insistence of one of its members, formally took up the question of whether it was time to rehabilitate Spinoza and welcome him back into the congregation that had expelled him with such prejudice. There was, though, one thing that they needed to know: should we still regard Spinoza as a heretic?

Unfortunately, the herem document fails to mention specifically what Spinoza’s offences were – at the time he had not yet written anything – and so there is a mystery surrounding this seminal event in the future philosopher’s life. And yet, for anyone who is familiar with Spinoza’s mature philosophical ideas, which he began putting in writing a few years after the excommunication, there really is no such mystery. By the standards of early modern rabbinic Judaism – and especially among the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam, many of whom were descendants of converso refugees from the Iberian Inquisitions and who were still struggling to build a proper Jewish community on the banks of the Amstel River – Spinoza was a heretic, and a dangerous one at that.

What is remarkable is how popular this heretic remains nearly three and a half centuries after his death, and not just among scholars. Spinoza’s contemporaries, René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz, made enormously important and influential contributions to the rise of modern philosophy and science, but you won’t find many committed Cartesians or Leibnizians around today. The Spinozists, however, walk among us. They are non-academic devotees who form Spinoza societies and study groups, who gather to read him in public libraries and in synagogues and Jewish community centres. Hundreds of people, of various political and religious persuasions, will turn out for a day of lectures on Spinoza, whether or not they have ever read him. There have been novels, poems, sculptures, paintings, even plays and operas devoted to Spinoza. This is all a very good thing.

It is also a very curious thing. Why should a 17th-century Portuguese-Jewish philosopher whose dense and opaque writings are notoriously difficult to understand incite such passionate devotion, even obsession, among a lay audience in the 21st century? Part of the answer is the drama and mystery at the centre of his life: why exactly was Spinoza so harshly punished by the community that raised and nurtured him? Just as significant, I suspect, is that everyone loves an iconoclast – especially a radical and fearless one that suffered persecution in his lifetime for ideas and values that are still so important to us today. Spinoza is a model of intellectual courage. Like a prophet, he took on the powers-that-be with an unflinching honesty that revealed ugly truths about his fellow citizens and their society.

Much of Spinoza’s philosophy was composed in response to the precarious political situation of the Dutch Republic in the mid-17th century. In the late 1660s, the period of ‘True Freedom’ – with the liberal and laissez-faire regents dominating city and provincial governments – was under threat by the conservative ‘Orangist’ faction (so-called because its partisans favoured a return of centralised power to the Prince of Orange) and its ecclesiastic allies. Spinoza was afraid that the principles of toleration and secularity enshrined in the founding compact of the United Provinces of the Netherlands were being eroded in the name of religious conformity and political and social orthodoxy. In 1668, his friend and fellow radical Adriaan Koerbagh was convicted of blasphemy and subversion. He died in his cell the next year. In response, Spinoza composed his ‘scandalous’Theological-Political Treatise, published to great alarm in 1670.

Spinoza’s views on God, religion and society have lost none of their relevance. At a time when Americans seem willing to bargain away their freedoms for security, when politicians talk of banning people of a certain faith from our shores, and when religious zealotry exercises greater influence on matters of law and public policy, Spinoza’s philosophy – especially his defence of democracy, liberty, secularity and toleration – has never been more timely. In his distress over the deteriorating political situation in the Dutch Republic, and despite the personal danger he faced, Spinoza did not hesitate to boldly defend the radical Enlightenment values that he, along with many of his compatriots, held dear. In Spinoza we can find inspiration for resistance to oppressive authority and a role model for intellectual opposition to those who, through the encouragement of irrational beliefs and the maintenance of ignorance, try to get citizens to act contrary to their own best interests.

Spinoza’s philosophy is founded upon a rejection of the God that informs the Abrahamic religions. His God lacks all the psychological and moral characteristics of a transcendent, providential deity. The Deus of Spinoza’s philosophical masterpiece, the Ethics (1677), is not a kind of person. It has no beliefs, hopes, desires or emotions. Nor is Spinoza’s God a good, wise and just lawgiver who will reward those who obey its commands and punish those who go astray. For Spinoza, God is Nature, and all there is is Nature (his phrase is Deus sive Natura, ‘God or Nature’). Whatever is exists in Nature, and happens with a necessity imposed by the laws of Nature. There is nothing beyond Nature and there are no departures from Nature’s order – miracles and the supernatural are an impossibility.

There are no values in Nature. Nothing is intrinsically good or bad, nor does Nature or anything in Nature exist for the sake of some purpose. Whatever is, just is. Early in the Ethics, Spinoza says that ‘all the prejudices I here undertake to expose depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end; indeed, they maintain as certain that God himself directs all things to some certain end; for they say that God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God’.

Spinoza is often labelled a ‘pantheist’, but ‘atheist’ is a more appropriate term. Spinoza does not divinise Nature. Nature is not the object of worshipful awe or religious reverence. ‘The wise man,’ he says, ‘seeks to understand Nature, not gape at it like a fool’. The only appropriate attitude to take toward God or Nature is a desire to know it through the intellect.

The elimination of a providential God helps to cast doubt on what Spinoza regards as one of the most pernicious doctrines promoted by organised religions: the immortality of the soul and the divine judgment it will undergo in some world-to-come. If a person believes that God will reward the virtuous and punish the vicious, one’s life will be governed by the emotions of hope and fear: hope that one is among the elect, fear that one is destined for eternal damnation. A life dominated by such irrational passions is, in Spinoza’s terms, a life of ‘bondage’ rather than a life of rational freedom.

People who are led by passion rather than reason are easily manipulated by ecclesiastics. This is what so worried Spinoza in the late 1660s, as the more repressive and intolerant elements in the Reformed Church gained influence in Holland. It remains no less a threat to enlightened, secular democracy today, as religious sectarians exercise a dangerous influence on public life.

In order to undermine such religious meddling in civic affairs and personal morality, Spinoza attacked the belief in the afterlife of an immortal soul. For Spinoza, when you’re dead, you’re dead. There might be a part of the human mind that is ‘eternal’. The truths of metaphysics, mathematics, etc, that one acquires during this lifetime and that might now belong to one’s mind will certainly remain once one has passed away – they are, after all, eternal truths – but there is nothing personal about them. The rewards or benefits such knowledge brings are for this world, not some alleged world-to-come.

The more one knows about Nature, and especially about oneself as a human being, the more one is able to avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to navigate the obstacles to happiness and wellbeing that a person living in Nature necessarily faces. The result of such wisdom is peace of mind: one is less subject to the emotional extremes that ordinarily accompany the gains and losses that life inevitably brings, and one no longer dwells anxiously on what is to come after death. As Spinoza eloquently puts it, ‘the free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death’.

Clergy seeking to control the lives of citizens have another weapon in their arsenal. They proclaim that there is one and only one book that will reveal the word of God and the path toward salvation and that they alone are its authorised interpreters. In fact, Spinoza claims, ‘they ascribe to the Holy Spirit whatever their wild fancies have invented’.

One of Spinoza’s more famous, influential and incendiary doctrines concerns the origin and status of Scripture. The Bible, Spinoza argues in the Theological-Political Treatise, was not literally authored by God. God or Nature is metaphysically incapable of proclaiming or dictating, much less writing, anything. Scripture is not ‘a message for mankind sent down by God from heaven’. Rather, it is a very mundane document. Texts from a number of authors of various socio-economic backgrounds, writing at different points over a long stretch of time and in differing historical and political circumstances, were passed down through generations in copies after copies after copies.

Finally, a selection of these writings was put together (with some arbitrariness, Spinoza insists) in the Second Temple period, most likely under the editorship of Ezra, who was only partially able to synthesise his sources and create a single work from them. This imperfectly composed collection was itself subject to the changes that creep into a text during a transmission process of many centuries. The Bible as we have it is simply a work of human literature, and a rather ‘faulty, mutilated, adulterated, and inconsistent’ one at that. It is a mixed-breed by its birth and corrupted by its descent and preservation, a jumble of texts by different hands, from different periods and for different audiences.

Spinoza supplements his theory of the human origins of Scripture with an equally deflationary account of its authors. The prophets were not especially learned individuals. They did not enjoy a high level of education or intellectual sophistication. They certainly were not philosophers or physicists or astronomers. There are no truths about nature or the cosmos to be found in their writings (Joshua believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth). Neither are they a source of metaphysical or even theological truths. The prophets often had naïve, even philosophically false beliefs about God.

They were, however, morally superior individuals with vivid imaginations, and so there is a truth to be gleaned from all of Scripture, one that comes through loud and clear and in a non-mutilated form. The ultimate teaching of Scripture, whether the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Gospels, is in fact a rather simple one: practice justice and loving-kindness to your fellow human beings.

That basic moral message is the upshot of all the commandments and the lesson of all the stories of Scripture, surviving whole and unadulterated through all the differences of language and all the copies, alterations, corruptions and scribal errors that have crept into the text over the centuries. It is, Spinoza insists, there in the Hebrew prophets (‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbour as yourself’ [Leviticus 19:18]) and it is in Paul’s letters (‘He who loves his neighbour has satisfied every claim of the law’ [Romans 13:8]). Spinoza writes: ‘I can say with certainty, that in the matter of moral doctrine I have never observed a fault or variant reading that could give rise to obscurity or doubt in such teaching.’ The moral doctrine is the clear and universal message of the Bible, at least for those who are not prevented from reading it properly by prejudice, superstition or a thirst for power.

Does Spinoza believe that there is any sense in which the Bible can be said to be ‘divine’? Certainly not in the sense central to fundamentalist, or even traditional, versions of the Abrahamic religions. For Spinoza, the divinity of Scripture – in fact, the divinity ofany writing – is a purely functional property. A work of literature or art is ‘sacred’ or ‘divine’ only because it is effective at presenting the ‘word of God’.

What is the ‘word of God’, the ‘universal divine law’? It is precisely the message that remains ‘unmutilated’ and ‘uncorrupted’ throughout the Biblical texts: love your neighbours and treat them with justice and charity. But Scripture, perhaps more than any other work of literature, excels at motivating people to follow that lesson and emulate its (fictional) portrayal of God’s justice and mercy in their lives. Spinoza notes that ‘a thing is called sacred and divine when its purpose is to foster piety and religion, and it is sacred only for as long as men use it in a religious way’. In other words, the divinity of Scripture lies in the fact that it is, above all else, an especially morally edifying work of literature.

And yet, for just this reason, Scripture will not be the only work of literature that is ‘divine’. If reading William Shakespeare’s The Tempestor Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn moves one toward justice and mercy, or if reading Charles Dickens’s Hard Times inspires one toward love and charity, then these works too are divine and sacred. The word of God, Spinoza says, is ‘not confined within the compass of a set number of books’.

In a letter to Spinoza, the Cartesian Lambert van Velthuysen objects that, according to the Theological-Political Treatise, ‘the Koran, too, is to be put on a level with the Word of God’, since ‘the Turks… in obedience to the command of their prophet, cultivate those moral virtues about which there is no disagreement among nations’. Spinoza acknowledges the implication, but does not see it as an objection. He is perfectly willing to allow that there are other true prophets besides those of Scripture and other sacred books outside the Jewish and Christian canons.

The Bible’s moral message and its prescriptions for how we are to treat other human beings represents the authentic ‘word of God’. Spinoza insists, then, that true piety or religion has nothing whatsoever to do with ceremonies or rituals. Dietary restrictions, liturgical and sacrificial practices, prayers – all such elements typical of organised religions are but superstitious behaviours that, whatever might have been their historico-political origins, are now devoid of any raison d’être. They continue to be promoted by clergy only to create docile and obedient worshippers.

What Spinoza regards as ‘true religion’ and ‘true piety’ requires no belief in any historical events, supernatural incidents or metaphysical doctrines, and it prescribes no devotional rites. It does not demand accepting any particular theology of God’s nature or philosophical claims about the cosmos and its origins. The divine law directs us only on how to behave with justice and charity toward other human beings. ‘[We are] to uphold justice, help the helpless, do no murder, covet no man’s goods, and so on’. All the other rituals or ceremonies of the Bible’s commandments are empty practices that ‘do not contribute to blessedness and virtue’.

True religion is nothing more than moral behaviour. It is not what you believe, but what you do that matters. Writing to the Englishman and secretary to the Royal Society Henry Oldenburg in 1675, Spinoza says that ‘the chief distinction I make between religion and superstition is that the latter is founded on ignorance, the former on wisdom’.

The political ideal that Spinoza promotes in the Theological-Political Treatise is a secular, democratic commonwealth, one that is free from meddling by ecclesiastics. Spinoza is one of history’s most eloquent advocates for freedom and toleration. The ultimate goal of the Treatise is enshrined in both the book’s subtitle and in the argument of its final chapter: to show that ‘freedom to philosophise may not only be allowed without danger to piety and the stability of the republic, but that it cannot be refused without destroying the peace of the republic and piety itself’.

All opinions whatsoever, including religious opinions, are to be absolutely free and unimpeded, both by necessity and by right. ‘It is impossible for the mind to be completely under another’s control; for no one is able to transfer to another his natural right or faculty to reason freely and to form his own judgment on any matters whatsoever, nor can he be compelled to do so’. Indeed, any effort by a sovereign to rule over the beliefs and opinions of citizens can only backfire, as it will ultimately serve to undermine the sovereign’s own authority. In a passage that is both obviously right and extraordinarily bold for its time, Spinoza writes:

a government that attempts to control men’s minds is regarded as tyrannical, and a sovereign is thought to wrong his subjects and infringe their right when he seeks to prescribe for every man what he should accept as true and reject as false, and what are the beliefs that will inspire him with devotion to God. All these are matters belonging to individual right, which no man can surrender even if he should so wish.

A sovereign can certainly try to limit what people think, but the result of such a vain and foolhardy policy would be to create only resentment and opposition to its rule. Still, the toleration of beliefs is one thing. The more difficult case concerns the liberty of citizens to express those beliefs, either in speech or in writing. And here Spinoza goes further than anyone else in the 17th century:

Utter failure will attend any attempt in a commonwealth to force men to speak only as prescribed by the sovereign despite their different and opposing opinions … The most tyrannical government will be one where the individual is denied the freedom to express and to communicate to others what he thinks, and a moderate government is one where this freedom is granted to every man.

Spinoza’s argument for freedom of expression is based both on the right (or power) of citizens to speak as they desire, as well as on the fact that (as in the case of belief) it would be counter-productive for a sovereign to try to restrain that freedom. No matter what laws are enacted against speech and other means of expression, citizens will continue to say what they believe, only now they will do so in secret. Any attempt to suppress freedom of expression will, once again, only weaken the bonds of loyalty that unite subjects to sovereign. In Spinoza’s view, intolerant laws lead ultimately to anger, revenge and sedition.

There is to be no criminalisation of ideas in the well-ordered state. The freedom of philosophising must be upheld for the sake of a healthy, secure and peaceful commonwealth, and material and intellectual progress. Spinoza understands that there will be some unpleasant consequences entailed by the broad respect for civil liberties. There will be public disputes, even factionalism, as citizens express their opposing views on political, social, moral and religious questions. However, this is what comes with a healthy, democratic and tolerant society.

‘The state can pursue no safer course than to regard piety and religion as consisting solely in the exercise of charity and just dealing, and that the right of the sovereign, both in religious and secular spheres, should be restricted to men’s actions, with everyone being allowed to think what he will and to say what he thinks’. This sentence, a wonderful statement of the modern principle of toleration, is perhaps the real lesson of the Treatise, and should be that for which Spinoza is best remembered.

When, in 2012, a member of the Portuguese-Jewish congregation in Amsterdam insisted that it was finally time for the community to consider revoking the herem on Spinoza, the ma’amad, or lay-leaders, of the community sought outside counsel for such a momentous decision. They convened a committee – myself, along with three other scholars – to answer various questions about the philosophical, historical, political, and religious circumstances of Spinoza’s ban. While they did not ask us to recommend any particular course of action, they did want our opinions on what might be the advantages and disadvantages to lifting the ban.

We submitted our reports, and more than a year passed without any news. Finally, in the summer of 2013, we received a letter informing us that the congregation’s rabbi had decided that the herem was not to be revoked. In his opinion, Spinoza was indeed a heretic. He added that while we can all appreciate freedom of expression in the civic domain, there is no reason to expect such freedom within the world of orthodox Judaism. Moreover, he asked rhetorically, are the leaders of the community today that much wiser and better informed about Spinoza’s case than the rabbis who punished him in the first place?

No doubt, Spinoza would have found the whole affair amusing. If asked whether he would like to be readmitted to ‘the people of Israel’, he would most likely have replied: ‘Do whatever you want. I couldn’t care less.’

by Steven Nadler

Steven Nadler is the William H Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Spinoza: A Life (1999) and A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (2011).

Source Aeon

Staying

Staying

The power of place on literary minds

by Shawn Crawford on Flann O’Brien

Why do we stay? We lack the resources or the opportunities. We remain faithful to a place given to us through an accident of birth. We rage and complain but never wander very far, the reasons a cipher to ourselves. Even in America, a land of nomads and self-fashioning, most of us eventually find a place that is our Place, and feel compelled to return again and again. I continually meet people that define where they are merely in terms of where they left. We stay even in our absence.

The exodus of Irish writers from their country in the early 20th Century, most notably James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, would influence all of literature for the rest of the century. Before both could create, they would have to come to terms with an Irish culture that offered both a deluge of artistic tradition and a stifling insularity that threatened to eat every beautiful creature Irish writers produced. But they would become exiles in very different ways, although Beckett would work as Joyce’s literary secretary for a time, until he left to find his own identity and narrative path.and the Greatest Hair of Modern Literature

Joyce never left Dublin no matter how far he roamed. He occupied Dublin in his mind, obsessed over its topography, demanded to know of every change from friends, wrote of no place else his entire career. But Beckett would succeed by leaving in the most astonishing manner: not only would he leave Dublin in his work to inhabit a place that was Everywhere but Nowhere, he would leave English and begin writing exclusively in French. Moving to another language would give Beckett the order, discipline, and what he called the “impoverishment” needed to find his own voice and literature. He would create as close to the bone as possible and find the heart of modern human existence. And then he would put the work back together again in an English stripped of all flourishes.

While Beckett and Joyce would grow into titans of modern literature, another Irish writer would stay in Dublin, laboring to survive while producing a body of work both utterly brilliant and utterly unknown today except for a devoted cult following. That man was Flann O’Brien.

O’Brien, born Brian O’Nolan, did not flee Ireland as so many artists did in the years of Revolution and Independence. I will not begin to try and describe the desperate poverty and repressive culture the Irish lived under. Get yourself a copy of Angela’s Ashes. I once heard Bob Geldof, growing up in the tail end of those years, speak about his ferocious need to escape that world, a place he described as always cold and him always shivering, and head to London in his teens so he could make a life and music.

Although he was a brilliant student, mastered several languages, and could write anyone into the ground, O’Brien stayed in that trying world. We know little about O’Brien’s private life, but he seemed to stay to care for his eleven brothers and sisters; he seemed to stay because he thought it was his Ireland too; he stayed and became a sort of trickster and folk hero and sage all in one. He died young like Joyce, virtually unknown even to those that loved his writing because of the masks he had to wear to stay and survive.

Faced with caring for his family after the early death of his father, O’Brien chose to stay in the only profession that offered any hope of a certain income and a dependable pension: the Irish Civil Service. But the service required its employees to stay above politics and government disputes, so to pursue his writing Brian O’Nolan became Flann O’Brien and a host of other pseudonyms. He once carried on a literary feud with himself and a host of other Irish writers by sending countless letters under various names to the Irish Times, sometimes supporting his previous position and sometimes railing against it. The dispute proved so entertaining O’Brien would write a regular column under his other great pen name Myles na gCopaleen.

O’Brien lived his life speaking fluent Irish at home and English in public. He could think in Irish, unlike other writers who often just dallied with Gaelic, and it gave him an authority and voice beloved by both the local literary crowd and the barman reading Myles in the Irish Times. O’Brien refused to romanticize the Irish peasant the way so many expats and Yeats did; he knew the brutality of trying to survive and wrote a satiric novel about such mythologizing of Irish rural life called The Poor Mouth. Fittingly, it was composed in Irish and only translated into English years later.

In 1939 O’Brien’s masterpiece, At Swim-Two-Birds was published under the urging of the English author Graham Greene. Some critics will argue the book not published during O’Briens’s life, The Third Policeman, should receive the greater praise, but those critics are ninnies and should be slapped about the face and shoulders with the NYRB.

Let us go then, you and I, and ponder At Swim-Two-Birds. To wit, a student in Dublin embarks upon a novel about a man named Trellis, himself an author of Westerns set in Dublin. The characters in the novel live a rich and full life outside the book while the author sleeps and begin to plot how to do away with him for good. In between there occur digressions, a sub-plot with Irish heroes such as Finn MacCool, Mad Sweeny, and my personal favorite, the Pooka MacPhellimey, who likes to argue luck, philosophy, kangaroos and the importance of numbers because “evil is even, truth is an odd number, and death is a full stop.” If you are confused, just remember that for your sake I am leaving out a many other good bits for clarity.

O’Brien inhales all of Irish folklore and the conventions of the modern novel, rearranges them, satirizes them, exaggerates them, out-styles their style, and says, “Top that.” And to my mind no one ever has. Once you read At Swim-Two-Birds you realize how a movie like Being John Malkovich owes everything to it without surpassing its brilliance. The ability to point out and disassemble what you are doing at every turn while simultaneously entertaining the audience watching the performance has been the great enterprise of postmodern art. That for the most part these efforts just turn into a lot of winking and nudging and boredom testifies to the genius of O’Brien. Producing mediocrity and then justifying the mediocrity by proclaiming our self-knowledge of said mediocrity (Get it? Get it! I know it sucks, too. Hilarious. Now let’s make a sequel) is still just mediocrity.

Enjoy O’Brien in his own habitat. At one point in the novel we are notified by a press release that Trellis has managed to deliver a full-grown man without aid of conception through a process called Aestho-autogamy. Trellis gives credit for his success to Mr. William Tracy, a fellow writer of Westerns. Mr. Tracy felt many problems could be solved “if issue could be born already matured, teethed, reared, educated, and ready to essay those competitive plums which make the Civil Service and the Banks so attractive to younger breadwinners of today.” The article ends by informing us that

Mr. Tracy succeed, after six disconcerting miscarriages, in having his own wife delivered of a middle-aged Spainard who lived for only six weeks. A man who carried jealousy to the point of farce, the novelist insisted that his wife and the new arrival should occupy separate beds and use the bathroom at divergent times. Some amusement was elicited in literary circles by the predicament of a woman who was delivered of a son old enough to be her father but it served to deflect Mr. Tracy not one tittle from his dispassionate quest for scientific truth.

Despite his many guises, the true identity of O’Brien and gCopaleen was known to most of his Dublin admirers. Eventually his scathing wit, especially about Irish politics and government, would lead to his forced retirement from civil service. O’Brien would continue writing on a host of subjects and in many genres, including script work for radio and television (he once wrote a ballet for radio), until his early death, on April Fool’s Day, in 1966, at age 55.

In 1954, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses, O’Brien and his friend John Ryan embarked upon the first Bloomsday celebration. You heard me right; O’Brien helped invent Bloomsday. The crew consisted of O’Brien, Ryan, the poet Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, AJ Leventhal, and Joyce’s cousin Tom Joyce. Horse drawn cabs ferried the men about the city, retracing the path of the book. Each man played roles from the novel, and in suitable fashion the project had to be abandoned halfway through at the Bailey pub, owned by Ryan, due to drunkenness and general mayhem. Only an Irishman could manage to be thrown from his own premises. This fact alone makes O’Brien a constellation in the Irish firmament.

The romantic in me wants to see O’Brien as a great hero, the man that stayed and attended his responsibilities and remains in relative obscurity for his efforts, ending his short life as an angry and somewhat broken alcoholic. I think about O’Brien when I see a yammering head ensconced in a New York studio claim to know what life is like here in the heartland, in the Oklahoma, as parochial and impenetrable as O’Brien’s Dublin, where I have chosen to stay. He doesn’t even speak our language, understands nothing of our daily existence, our joys and sorrows and above all fear, a fear that seems bent on consuming everything I love in the here here.

Perhaps all artists are exiles. All of them give up Life in some way to create beauty and truth for us, not because we deserve it, but because they cannot exist without such toil. You cannot gaze upon their creations without wanting to weep for their sacrifice and rejoice for what they have wrought.

Sen. Mitch McConnell calls deficit ‘very disturbing

Sen. Mitch McConnell calls deficit ‘very disturbing,’ blames federal spending, dismisses criticism of tax cut

Damian Paletta Washington Post

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday called the ballooning budget deficit “very disturbing” but said large federal spending programs were to blame, dismissing criticism that last year’s GOP tax cuts are saddling the country with more debt.

McConnell, in a Bloomberg News interview, also said there was little chance Republicans would be able to cut government spending next year if they retained control of Congress because any changes would need leadership from Democrats.

McConnell (R-Ky.) said that tackling the mandatory spending programs such as Medicare and Social Security, as well as Medicaid, could not be done by Republicans alone, suggesting that it was unlikely to occur unless Democrats controlled at least one chamber of Congress.

McConnell’s comments come as part of a fierce effort by Republicans and Democrats to reframe economic issues as they campaign ahead of midterm elections, which are in three weeks. Democrats have blamed last year’s GOP tax cut law for adding a projected $2 trillion to the debt over 10 years, while Republicans have castigated liberals for proposing an expansion of government health care programs.

But Republicans have abandoned numerous budget demands they put in place during the Obama administration, including an insistence that any new spending be offset by other cuts. They have also repeatedly raised the debt ceiling without seeking any budget changes and waived rules put in place to prevent an increase in the debt.

McConnell said that tackling the mandatory spending programs such as Medicare and Social Security, as well as Medicaid, could not be done by Republicans alone, suggesting that it was unlikely to occur unless Democrats controlled at least one chamber of Congress.

“I think it’s pretty safe to say that entitlement changes, which is the real driver of the debt by any objective standard, may well be difficult if not impossible to achieve when you have unified government,” McConnell told Bloomberg News.

McConnell’s comments came one day after the White House reported that the government ran a deficit of $779 billion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, a 17 percent increase from the year before. The deficit is expected to near $1 trillion next year and then surpass that level in 2020 and beyond, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Higher spending and stagnating tax revenue pushed the nation’s debt burden higher, the White House said. Business tax revenue fell sharply in the first nine months of this year because tax rates were cut under last year’s law.

Republican leaders, and White House officials, had promised that all of the lost revenue from the tax cut would be recouped from higher economic growth, though many budget experts from both parties believe this is unlikely.

“As November approaches, it’s clear Democrats stand for expanding affordable health care and growing the middle class, while Republicans are for stripping away protections for people with pre-existing conditions and cutting Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid to fund their giveaways to corporate executives and the wealthiest few,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer said after McConnell’s comments were published.

The economy is growing at a faster clip this year, but analysts believe it will soon begin to slow, in part because of higher interest rates, growing debt, and lower corporate earnings.

It is very unusual for the deficit to grow during a strong economy, as economic growth tends to bring in more revenue and lead to a drop in spending on things like low-income assistance.

But the White House and GOP leaders have pursued policies that increase spending and cut tax rates in the past 18 months, as Trump has said he is trying to rev the economy to encourage more growth. The tax cuts alone were projected to add $100 billion to the deficit this year, though some White House officials have dismissed those estimates.

Democrats warned during the tax cut debate that Republicans would widen the deficit through tax reductions and then seek to recoup the losses by cutting programs such as Medicaid, a health care program for poor and low-income families, and they seized on McConnell’s comments on Tuesday.

“Like clockwork, Republicans in Congress are setting in motion their plan to destroy the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that seniors and families rely on, just months after they exploded the deficit by $2 trillion with their tax scam for the rich,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement.

The government is projected to spend $4.47 trillion this fiscal year, according to CBO, and bring in just $3.49 trillion in revenue. The government will cover that $981 billion gap, known as the deficit, by borrowing money through issuing new debt.

There are a range of buyers of the debt, including China, but the cost of borrowing money rises as interest rates increase. The government is projected to spend $390 billion on debt interest payments, almost as much as the $401 billion it will spend on Medicaid.

For the first time in U.S. history, the government will spend more than $1 trillion on Social Security benefits this year, and another $776 billion on Medicare, which is a health-care program for older Americans.

Combined, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will account for 49.7 percent of all government spending this year, according to CBO, down from 50.6 percent in 2017. Defense spending, meanwhile, will account for 15 percent of spending this year, up from 14.8 percent in 2017.

Republicans spent most of the Obama administration complaining about increases in government spending, but they have largely backed down during the Trump administration, supporting his proposals to raise spending and cut taxes as part of his agenda.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) emerged as a leader of the Republican Party in recent years because of his insistence that the government do more to cut spending, and White House budget director Mick Mulvaney earned credibility with conservatives by taking a hard-line stance on debt when he was in Congress.

But neither Ryan nor Mulvaney have been able to advance major initiatives to cut spending since Trump took office, and Mulvaney has said Trump has rebuffed proposals to address programs like Medicare.

The U.S. government has more than $21 trillion in debt by some measures, and the aging population, combined with rising health-care costs and large debt interest payments, are projected to make the debt grow even faster in the near future.

McConnell blamed the recent run-up in the deficit on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, but there haven’t been policy changes in those programs to explain the major run-up in the debt in the past two years.

The bigger changes have instead been bipartisan agreements to remove spending caps on things such as the military, and last year’s tax cut.

White House National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow said in New York last month that the White House planned to try to address high levels of government spending next year, but he wouldn’t offer more details.

“I don’t want to be specific, I don’t want to get ahead of our own budgeting, but we’ll get there,” Kudlow said at the Economic Club of New York. “But I agree, we have to be tougher on spending.”

During the 2016 campaign, Trump vowed not to cut Medicare, Social Security or Medicaid if he became president. He has largely stuck to his promise not to cut Medicare, but he has proposed Medicaid cuts, and his advisers have also sought to make cuts in Social Security disability spending.

These proposals have largely fallen flat in Congress, however, as the White House didn’t signal that it planned to make any changes a priority, and lawmakers are often reluctant to take on divisive political issues without presidential leadership.