e.m. cadwaladr

A Case for Conscription

2012-01-27T09:25:00.000-08:00

Recently, I ran across a fascinating concept in a book1 by the late sociologist Stanislaw Andreski. He asserted that, in general, the social equality of a society stands in direct proportion to what he termed its military participation rate, or M.R.P. To put this another way, the more a society needs a substantial and diverse portion of its citizenry to fill out the ranks of its arm forces, the less disparity can exist between those citizens and their ruling elites. In even simpler terms, mass armies promote increased democracy, while elite armies promote the concentration of power. Since, for Andreski, power is always reducible to either the use of force or the potential use of force, the relation described above follows simply as a corollary.

If we accept Andreski’s rule, for which he offers an impressive body of historical support – much more than is usual for a social scientist – an examination of current trends is the United States is rather alarming. Due, among other things, to a declining tolerance for the loss of American lives since the war in Viet Nam, our military has evolved into a compact, elite, highly technological-oriented force. The idea of a draft, let alone the levying of armies on anything like the scale that we employed in World War Two, has become politically unthinkable. Even in the face of two unpopular wars, voluntary recruitment remains sufficient – if only just – to fill the ranks of our superbly equipped but numerically modest forces. Such shortfalls as occur are filled by foreigners willing to exchange their services for citizenship. As these recruits are unfamiliar with our traditions and liberties, and as they are motivated chiefly by economic need, we can only consider them mercenaries – albeit of convenience rather than disposition.

Whatever these changes in the size and composition of our armed forces may mean militarily, politically they merit our concern. While we are used to taking a certain pride in the fact that our army is composed of volunteers, one consequence of this policy has been that unpopular wars are actually easier to conduct than they used to be. The war in Viet Nam caused a great deal more controversy than the wars in either Iraq or Afghanistan have done. This is true not because the latter were more justifiable to the public, but because many dissenters (or sons of dissenters) were obliged to participate in the former. People may have reservations about the war in Afghanistan, but since they don’t have to go or send their children they are unlikely to take to the streets. Wars conducted by machines, mercenaries, and tiny minorities of citizens mostly drawn from the underclass don’t arouse the same level of either patriotism or outrage as wars that involve conscription. They are simply mediocre television programs as far as the most of public is concerned.

According to Andreski’s principle, the public’s relative indifference toward current and future wars may only be the beginning of our problems. It has generally been difficult for any government with a large conscripted army to employ it to quell rebellions or intimidate dissent. Even in the Soviet Union, the maintenance of an enormous army during World War Two forced at least a moderation of Stalin’s tyranny.2 Soldiers do not like to brutalize the civilian masses they are recruited from. The employment of highly-trained, rigidly-disciplined troops begins to overcome this restraint. The employment of mercenaries makes it negligible. The growing use of robotic devices opens the prospect of removing it altogether. In the end, we do not have civil liberties because we are protected by laws, but because we have some means of protecting ourselves. Civil liberties are meaningless when we as citizen are either impotent or indifferent in their defense. While a powerless public may not be subjugated immediately, the erosion of rights will proceed inexorably, if gradually, as those in power find their authority unchecked. An honest look at history shows this almost without exception.

Consider the second amendment to the US constitution:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

In recent years, we have tended to focus on the right to bear arms as an individual right, and I am not attempting to rebut this interpretation. Perhaps, though, we should not consider the founder’s belief in a militia a mere historical curiosity. While they obviously needed a militia to defend the republic from external enemies, I believe that they were also aware that an army drawn from the citizenry, owing its ultimate allegiance not to men but to principles embodied in the constitution, was necessary to protect us from internal dissolution. Obviously times have changed, and we cannot turn our high tech weapons over to colonial minutemen. We should, however, be wary of an overreliance on tiny bodies of over-indoctrinated special forces, mercenaries, and soulless machines.

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1 Military organization and society

2 A close examination of Soviet military policy supports Andreski’s rule, though at first glance the USSR would seem to have been an exception. It is true that the Soviet military was both enormous and drawn from all ranks of society. Two deliberate counteractive measures should be noted, however. First, the Soviet Union had a deployment practice common to many large, ethnical heterogeneous empires: they levied units of a single ethnic group and deployed them in distant parts of the country where they were functionally foreign troops. Second, the Soviets fostered resentments between soldiers levied in different years. Each year’s conscripts were encouraged to abuse those that succeeded them, the end result being that every unit’s soldiers were divided into three mutually hostile groups, according to their year of enlistment. There is no good military reason to sabotage unit cohesion. It only reduces the effectiveness of the force. The only practical reason the Soviets would have established such a policy would have been to render the army less capable of organized revolt, every soldier being automatically distrustful of most of the others. (See: Inside the Soviet Army, Viktor Suvorov)

Keystone

2011-12-20T09:02:00.000-08:00

The Keystone pipeline controversy offers a good example of the irrationality into which American public discourse has devolved. In brief, the proposed pipeline would bring oil processed from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries in the US, ultimately as far south a Texas. Despite a completed environmental impact study, the environmental lobby has persuaded the Obama administration to block the project, chiefly (though not exclusively) on the grounds that tar sand development is proving to be an environmental catastrophe in Canada.

No one, not even the oil industry, disputes that the damage being done to northern Alberta is monumental. There is no hiding the destruction that surface mining tar sands is creating. If this were the 1960’s, and the world had plenty of oil reserves, we might be able to stop this tragedy. This is not the 1960’s however. There are no cheap and available oil reserves to tap. Even Saudi Arabia is in decline. If the demand for oil had not exceeded the supply, they wouldn’t be processing oil out of tar sands in the first place. It is naïve to imagine that, in an ongoing liquid fuels crisis with oil at $100 a barrel, and gasoline fluctuating between $3 and $4 a gallon in the US, than everyone in the world is going to put the interests of Canadian wildlife before their own. The Canadian government has been very clear about their intentions. They will develop and sell the oil, if not to the US with a pipeline going south, then to the Chinese with a pipeline going west. Thus, unless the American environmental lobby is advocating and immediate US occupation of Alberta to end the development, their efforts will not save a single fish or caribou. They can have their moral satisfaction with higher fuel prices, and the heightened economic ripple effects such prices must inevitably produce, while the dirty evil tar sand extract propels trucks in China. Personally, I’m a realist. I don’t think that fish or caribou really want to die, but neither do I think they particularly feel better about dying if they are killed for non-Americans. These nasty resources are going to be tapped. The worse the global economy gets, the more desperate people will become and the more environmental concerns will recede from their attention. One should not be proud of this, but to imagine it will be otherwise is simply to deny human nature. People may love nature in the abstract, but not many will be happy to freeze or starve for the sake of preserving it.

On the other side of the debate, the oil industry and their political allies have trumped up the story that the tar sands offer a solution to American dependence on middle eastern oil. Based on the scale of Keystone, this would appear to be simply a lie. The total capacity of the pipeline, upgraded to its final phase, would be 1.1 million barrels per day. US oil demand stands at about 18.7 billion barrels per day. Keystone then, could meet about 6% of US oil demand. We currently import over half of our consumption (some sources estimate much more), so it doesn’t look like 6% from the Alberta tar sands is going to let us kiss our OPEC friends goodbye. Fools on the left, liars on the right. Take heart though – this is only the beginning.

Love

2011-12-14T08:45:00.000-08:00

Those who have read my other essays will either be puzzled by my choice of such a topic, or will wince in expectation of my ruthless dissection of it. It is my belief that nothing knowable should be excluded from the realm of rational and methodical analysis. I do not believe that anything is sacred in the sense that we should merely look on in acceptance and awe, and give up any attempt at understanding. Love, for me, is a state of the human brain (and probably some other animal brains). It is a state which can be defined and characterized, and such demystification should neither eliminate nor taint the experienced condition for anyone.

The term “love” has many different meanings, especially if one widens one’s scope of inquiry to the equivalent words in different languages, but what I want to find here is the common thread that binds all of the various meanings together. There are obvious differences between loving a lover, a friend, a thing, an activity, or an idea. Yet, in all these cases, to love is to dissolve the distinction between oneself and the object of one’s love. Physical love involves the obvious collapse of the usual social barriers of space and clothing. Non-physical love of another person involves the collapse of the distinction between their interests and one’s own. It is to be happy or sad for another, rather than merely for oneself. To love an object is to extend one’s own self identity with that object. The painting is the extension of the painter into the inanimate world. Similarly, to love a piece of music is to feel a certain emotion that the music publically projects into the world. The music and the emotion are, or at least seem, a single unified experience. To love an activity is either to experience some physical pleasure from it, or to extend and enhance one’s identity with it. Thus, again, one dissolves the barrier between the activity and oneself. To love an idea is to define oneself in terms of that idea. To love justice is to perceive oneself as just. All love, then, is an expansion of the self.

It is not true, however, that every entity or process with which a person becomes inseparable is the object of love. As I type, I do not think about the location of the individual keys. I think about the words; my hands move over the keyboard, typing the letters. Typing is a part of my being in some very real sense, but I by no means love to type. I do not hate typing. I am indifferent to it. It is an extension of my capacity, but not of my identity. I never take pleasure in my identity as a typist. Sadly, one can have similarly loveless deep familiarity with other human beings, from loveless marriages to the false geniality that is often the pattern of modern professional life. We can even be indifferent to our own beliefs. Some people are lifelong church goers, and spend all that time sitting quietly while their minds wander, not to atheism but to irrelevancies. Yet if asked, they will say they believe in God and love him faithfully.

It is possible, too, to be attracted to something without wanting it to attach it to oneself. Many physically attractive people have very unattractive personalities, and are thus both attractive in one sense and repellant in another. One may be deeply fascinated with the idea of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, but that doesn’t mean one would ever want to do so. It is possible to be attracted to someone or something without having the slightest intention of including that person or thing in one’s actual life. Love requires both attraction and a commitment to embrace the object into one’s life in a substantial way. It requires a willingness to give time, and a willingness to let oneself be changed and defined, at least to some degree, by that which one commits to love.

If love is the expansion of self into realms beyond one’s own mind and physical presence, then the counter tendency is not so much hate as an abiding selfishness. Hate is a revulsion or fear of something already close which has violated an individual’s security or sense of equilibrium. Hate, as has been said, is often the consequence of love – and expulsion of an entity once beloved. Selfishness, on the other hand, is a contraction of the self where love is its expansion. Love embraces -- selfishness walls off. Love risks – selfishness hedges and protects its narrow interests. Love for mere objects, in a pretty, possessive sense, can be seen as weak form of love, or perhaps as a substitution for love. To love inert things is, after all, less risky than loving living breathing beings with motives and vicissitudes of their own. Things are extensions of the body; beloved persons are extensions of one’s perception of the self.

Virtually all of human behavior can be understood in terms of these two countervailing forces: love and selfishness. Life is a boundary dispute with the universe. Strictly from an evolutionary viewpoint, it is not always obvious which strategy is best. To love and embrace the whole of humanity is to put your arms around many who do not and often cannot love you. It is the greatest possible risk. On the other hand, love has a reciprocal character. The open, caring person attracts the love of others, while the narrowly self-interested sociopath attracts the love of others only by deceit. No human being, I suspect, quite inhabits either absolute extreme. No one loves everything and everyone, without the slightest though about their own individual interests. Likewise, no one is truly a solipsist, acknowledging no consciousness in the world apart from their own. Rather, each of us negotiates an arrangement between our unique identity and the wider world, expanding or contracting our view of what matters to fit our circumstances and our physiology. Although these tendencies are not readily quantifiable or readily predictable in action or extent, they are none the less substantial -- states of affairs in the physical world.

Responses to M.C. Planck's comments on my most recent OWC article

2011-12-13T09:16:00.000-08:00

Mr. Planck has brought up some interesting issues in response to my most recent Occupy Wall Street assessment, which I think are worth addressing. Here’s an extract from his comments:

“Another flaw in our public media is this meme of equivalency. Yes, there are loons on the Left; but sheer honesty compels us to admit that the Right, especially Fox news, is completely out of control. Yes, Dems play partisan politics; but the current environment of automatic filibuster and non-negotiation is unprecedented.

“And yet the media, which tries so hard to paint OWS as ugly, refuses to show history: that Republicans are acting ahistorically obstructionist, that the wealth gap is ahistorically large, that the rejection of science and embrace of religion by politicans is ahistorically pointed. We are in a period of truly frightening change, and all of it is coming from one side of the line.

“Despite OWS, we can't expect more than 50% of young people to bother to vote. Despite OWS, we can't expect anybody to understand bank regulation or support it. Despite everything that has happened, the American electorate simply can't be bothered to pay attention, learn a little history, and vote.”

I am not entirely sure what Mr. Planck is referring to as the public media’s “meme of equivalency“. I admit that I do not spend hours rigorously scouring television and the internet everyday, tallying up the sentiment, but on the whole it appears to me that the public media is only becoming ever more partisan. In some cases, this no doubt reflects the genuine political sentiment of the owners and the editors of the media outlets in question. In other cases, it is probably just the natural outcome of the discovery that inflammatory positions are good for ratings. In any case, I have seen very little news coverage lately that implied the opposing parties in American politics were “equivalent”. I do take the position that they are equivalent, in some sense. So does Ralph Nader, in a somewhat different sense. There is a certain tendency among the more moderate media outlets to pretend that we are not in pivotal times, and that if you ignore the world and click the heels of your ruby slippers together three times you’ll be just fine. If this is what Mr. Planck has in mind, I would agree that some portion of the press has been deceitfully inattentive. Whatever one may feel about the state of the world, one may not rationally believe that we can settle back down into a state of inert material bliss in which smart people in high places will take care of everything. Economics and nature both have other ideas.

Unlike Mr. Planck, I really do see a sense in which the two great motive groups within American politics are essentially equivalent, though not necessarily similar. I choose my words carefully here. I say “motive groups” because there now appears to be considerable weakness in both formal political parties. Inevitably, I will have to over-generalize simply to be coherent, using the terms “right” and “left” as though they represented homogeneous groups – which neither term does.

I would distill the current aggregate position of the American right as follows:

America is in an economic and security crisis because of a weak president, a corrupt congress, and decades of failed liberal policies. We need to restore our economy by de-regulating business and reducing the tax burden on people who create jobs. We need to restore our standing in the world by getting tough, particularly with the enemies of Israel. We need to get back to our traditional values to stop the general rot of our culture. We have plenty of oil; the liberal environmentalists are all that stand between us and energy independence.

Alright, now let’s take this apart. For me, that last position is the most important and the most absurd, so we’ll start with that. Newt Gingrich and others have recently made the claim that the US not only has enough oil for itself, but enough to supply Europe as well. In reality, the US hit peak oil production in the early 1970’s and has been in a general decline ever since. Under the second Bush administration the US oil industry experienced the most favorable conditions imaginable: high prices, self-regulation, and massive subsidies. Yet oil production didn’t rise. Is it plausible that, in the most heavily explored region of the globe, we’ve now suddenly discovered oil we couldn’t find for the last four decades – and right before an election? No, it isn’t plausible. The politicians are simply jiggering the numbers as usual, counting all the theoretical oil reserves, and not the recoverable reserves. Since the real basis of economics in any modern industrial state is energy, this misconception is the linchpin for all the others. The real economy, the manufacture of real tangible wealth as opposed to the practice of inventing money out of thin air, cannot take place without energy consumption. Growth cannot take place without increasing energy consumption. The broadly acknowledged global peak production of oil is now several years behind us. Globally, we are now in something a bit worse than a zero-sum game. Until or unless someone finds a viable replacement for oil, we are in a declining game. Thus, none of the Reagan era thinking about just giving business a free hand can make any headway against the erratic but remorseless decline in liquid fuel supplies we can expect. Money left in the hands of the wealthy will probably do what it has done since the fall of 2008 – wait for favorable conditions that may never come again. In the mean time, all the trumped up jingoism does nothing but provide a conscience-saving veil to hide our ongoing efforts to control the world’s remaining oil reserves. If Bin Laden had never existed, we would have had to invent him soon. The minor resurgence in traditional values issues is, in part, is a genuine reaction to a culture which has grown nauseatingly decadent and valueless. It is also, in part, merely a naïve attempt to reclaim a half-remembered past when ordinary Americans were better off and more secure. On the whole, rather little about the worldview of the right is grounded in reality. It is bound to lead to disappointment, to put it very mildly.

Now let’s look at the current aggregate position of the American left:

American is in an economic crisis because of the greed of the ultra-rich and their Republican cronies. Our security crisis is the result of militarism and adventurism by Republicans, culminating in the second Bush administration. We need to help the poor, the unemployed, the underprivileged, and the immigrant population until such time as the crisis has passed and they can help themselves. We can do this by taking a fair share from the rich. We won’t need to worry about the rest of the world if we just show them what nice people we are. Our only significant cultural problem we have is the racism of the right . We might be running out of oil, but global warming is a bigger problem. Both will be solved by some combination of wind, solar, and biodiesel, which will also jump start the economy by producing new jobs.

Having taken the position that energy is the key issue on the table, I will start with that again. Wind, solar, biodiesel, et al, are lovely and useful things. We’ll see more of them in our future. To borrow a phrase from James Kunstler though, they “will not be enough to run Disney World, Walmart, and the interstate highway system.” The numbers don’t add up. You can’t have a liberal, middle-class, 20th century lifestyle on green energy any more than you can have a conservative, middle-class, 20th century lifestyle on non-recoverable oil. Neither Volvos nor Suburbans run on dreams. Nature never guaranteed us a perpetuation of the present -- only nicer. Likewise, while green energy will no doubt produce some number of new jobs, you cannot rebuild prosperity by making the energy sector more expensive and more labor intensive. Cheap oil was the magic of the industrial age. Without it, we are now in a completely different game. Given this reality, the dream of government riding to the rescue of ever growing numbers of unfortunates is simply untenable. Keynesian economics depend on periods of prosperity to restock the coffers of the treasury. If the depression goes on long enough, spurred by high energy costs and the high cost of the international competition for a variety or scarce resources, Keynesianism is thrown back on the fatal option of an inflationary monetary policy to pay its bills. It is painfully apparent that we’re already there, with the government creating money to make up for a revenue shortfall with no end in sight. The bitter irony is that inflation is the most regressive tax of all. The only people who prosper in inflationary times are people who own real, tangible assets (gold, land, capital equipment) – this is to say, predominately the rich. The poor may subsist for now on various “entitlements,” but they must also become ever more dependent on them, in an environment in which everyone’s dollar buys less and less. On the matter of foreign policy, it is true that the Bush administration undermined any affection the rest of the world might have had for the US, but we are now entering and era of global completion for dwindling resources -- which will not be decided by popularity in any case. The Arab world will not give up their remaining oil because we institute a Muslim outreach program, and neither will the Chinese give up their toe-hold on prosperity to make sure Americans can retain their lifestyle. As I’ve said, this is a whole new game. Taxing the rich of their increasingly devalued paper may or may not be justified, but it will not resolve the underlying problem of a shrinking economy. This is a political strategy, not an economic one.

To summarize, the left and the right share a common problem of having utopian delusions of endless and inevitable progress – they simply have delusions of different flavors. Personally, I’m not very interested in determining which unworkable fantasy is better than the other. They are equivalent insofar as neither is tenable.

On the matter of Mr. Planck’s lament that “Despite OWS, we can't expect more than 50% of young people to bother to vote,” I am compelled to ask – what encouragement did OWS ever give anyone to vote? OWS was, from its inception, an abrogation of the normal political process of voting. Their goal was never to elect people to represent them, but simply to blackmail the existing leadership into compliance by creating disorder. They may well be correct in this approach, given the corrupt condition of our public institutions, but it seems odd to even ask why they have not spawned voters and candidates. The Tea Party movement, whatever one thinks about it, must be admitted to have been far more focused on “getting out the vote.” OWS, a symptom of our decline, has no solutions to offer at all – not even untenable ones.

Occupy Wall Street Update #1

2011-11-21T09:13:00.001-08:00

In an earlier post I stated that Occupy Wall Street was straightforwardly a youth movement. I still think that is basically true, but its character has begun to change in certain ways that merit a note. The original gathering in New York appeared to consist mainly of middle class college students, not only from New York, but from other parts of the country. They seemed to be a pretty typical body of college students, full of enthusiasm and naïveté, out to save the world from itself. Some of the subsequent protests, notably the ones in Oakland, appear to be of a wholly different character. The movement has begun to attract the underclass.

I suppose this was inevitable, but I cannot be blindly enthusiastic about the underclass either. There is, to be sure, a huge population of Americans that we sometimes refer to as the working poor. I have some sympathy for this group, have once been one of their number. These people often have some real right to complain, but they are unfortunately not the sort of people who tend to show up at protest events, or at least not those who make the most noise. Rather, that role often falls to what Marxists would call the lumpen proletariat -- those people who would not want productive work if they could get it, that are predisposed (for one reason or another) to have their way by violence or larceny, who come with a brick rather than with a sign, and delight in cracking the heads and breaking the windows of strangers while decrying how unfair life has been to them. These are the people who will burn their own neighborhoods to the ground given only the opportunity, then blame the rest of us for making them do it. These are the people who will turn a peaceful protest into a bloody riot. Put them up against a militaristic police force like that of Los Angeles, and you are bound to get exciting TV. The 2012 TV season appears to be shaping up nicely.

To continue in that vein, but on a different note, it is fascinating how the protests get covered by the right wing press. They appear to have dusted off their rhetoric from the 1960's and found every word of it still serviceable. Thus, they portray the protesters as drug-addicted, unclean, sexually promiscuous, lazy bums whose sole purpose in life is to defecate on a police cruiser. This is eerily familiar. No doubt some of the protestors do check one or more of those boxes. The problem is, no crowd of ten thousand people or so is going to be composed purely of angels. People get beaten, sometimes to death, at professional baseball games -- but no one suggests that baseball fans as a group are murdering thugs. When we don't look at the crowd as a whole, we can paint them almost any way that suits us.

It may seem contradictory to say that the Occupy Wall Street movement is accumulating a bad element, and then go on to say that they are being unfairly characterized. This is not so. In Oakland, and other places, a non-constructively militant element has begun to assert itself. This does not mean that the college students, the recently unemployed, and other constituents of the movement are inclined toward violence. It means, rather, that protests are organic entities that attract different sorts of people at different stages of their development. One cannot blame the entire crowd for the actions of one segment, but it is also true that one brick, or gun, or Molotov cocktail is bound to ruin everybody's day. Everybody, that is, except the right and left wing media outlets -- each of which can find at least one brute in the riot on the other side that will hammer home their ongoing narrative.

Social Freedom

2011-11-18T09:39:00.001-08:00

In and earlier essay, I examined the idea of free will, which I take to be chiefly concerned with freedom in an absolute sense – whether or not we can be original sources of causation. By “social freedom,” I mean something rather different. In this essay, I intend to focus on the way our actions are constrained by others within a broadly social context. Political freedom, economic freedom, and religious freedom can all be subsumed under the broader topic of social freedom. The fact that these topics have usually been treated independently has been the source of much confusion, and it is this that I hope to rectify.

Social freedom in its most general sense concerns itself with what we may or may not do because of the assent or constraint of other people. It excludes questions that concern abilities or constraints we have because of the impersonal and unconscious laws of nature or due to our own intrinsic qualities. No one constrains our freedom to fly by flapping our arms rapidly. One will neither be arrested, nor fined, nor excommunicated for attempting to fly in this manner. It simply will not work. On the other hand, presuming one is minimally able-bodied, nature does not constrain us from the act of shoplifting. We are constrained from shoplifting because it antisocial, criminal, or sinful. This is the realm of social freedom.

Other people can constrain our freedom in a variety of ways. Most obviously, if one is physically imprisoned, one is constrained by barriers put in place by others. Constraints need not be physical, however. The threat of violence, or constraint, is itself a constraint. Likewise, the threat of ostracism is a functional constraint. Humans are social animals. To be part of a society is to avoid creating too many social barriers between oneself and others on whom one is dependent. Limitations in available resources are another constraint. The ownership of land is a simple example. One may be free, in a legal sense, to purchase a certain parcel or land, but this freedom is effectively nullified if the land is owned by someone else who adamantly refuses to sell. In all cases, social freedom is more-or-less narrowly defined by the customs, laws, perceptions and prejudices of the particular society in which one lives.

To make the unqualified statement “I am free” or “I live in a free country” is to assert nothing. It is essentially like saying “I am big”. Without some context to refer to, the word “free” means no more than the word “big”. You are free, probably, to read the next sentence in this essay and to draw your next breath. Beyond that, your freedom is wholly contingent on the vagaries of circumstance. Social freedom has no natural guarantor that stands above the social context that defines it.

It is usually more meaningful to talk of specific rights than to discuss freedom in some extra-contextual sense. Again, we must avoid the vague connotations usually carried by the term "right," and reduce it to some workable definition. A right is behavior or state of being that is acceptable within a certain social context. To exercise a right is to either do something acceptable or be something acceptable. Rights are entirely social in nature. Copper does not have a right to conduct electricity nor does it need one. The electrical conductivity of copper is inherent rather than volitional. There is no copper that can elect to be non-conductive. Similarly, the sheer fact of one’s existence cannot be socially constrained. One can be ostracized, or even executed, but no one can be utterly removed from the physically causal world. Even if someone kills you, you still were, and your existence in one region of space-time will continue to yield consequences indefinitely.
Rights sort all behaviors into acceptable and unacceptable realms. They define both individuals and the societies they inhabit. Societies, in an important sense, are no more that the application of a certain set of interpersonal constraints to a certain body of people – and rights are merely the field of action left unconstrained. If one had the universe entirely to one’s self, the idea of rights would have no meaning.

Being the product of the vicissitudes of human beings, all rights are both temporary and provisional. There is no such thing as a right which cannot be taken away. Beyond one’s brute existence, however fleeting, there are no actions or future states of being (other than death) which cannot be constrained by some human agency. We have rights only at the sufferance of others.

I will not go so far as to say the term “rights” is synonymous with the term “privileges”. The term “privilege” carries connotations which imply something even more fleeting than a “right”. Privileges are always granted by specific authorities, whereas rights may be the basic assumptions of a certain culture, not granted by anyone in particular. Indeed, many rights are no more than a reflection of such cultural norms. If someone cuts us off in traffic most of us feel we have a “right” to honk our horns. This is an actual right, as it is certainly possible to imagine a society where such horn honking would be unacceptable. It is not, however, a delineated “privilege” that anyone in particular has bestowed on us. It is merely an acceptable display of frustration in our culture.

Politics and Economics

A great error has occurred in assuming that political and economic rights are somehow neatly separable. John Stuart Mill and other like-minded people put forward a notion of freedom that was almost wholly political. In other words, all excessive social constraints worth our concern originate with political authorities. The government, whether oligarchic or democratic, present the only important danger to individual freedom in Mill’s view. Karl Marx and others of his school took essentially the opposite view. They believed that the most important impediment to individual freedom is economic. In other words, that it is not the government that enslaves a person but the employer or the landlord. In truth, the entire distinction between political and economic authority is illusory. Let me illustrate with two examples.

Imagine a society with a high degree of individual political liberty – universal suffrage, equal rights before the law, all the usual trappings of a liberal society – but no constraints whatsoever regarding the exercise of property rights. Now, imagine a family living in a house they own, but which is wholly surrounded by someone else’s property. The only access to their house is across this second party’s land. One morning the family wakes up to discover that their neighbor has posted a “NO TRESPASSING” sign on their access route. The family’s dilemma is simple. They may break society’s rules by violating their neighbor’s property rights, or they may starve. In such a case, the government has not curtailed the family’s freedom, but simply upholds the property rights of their neighbor.1 One could argue that, as the guarantor of property rights, the government is still responsible for the family’s fate, but it is clearly not the active agent in the curtailment of the family’s freedom. Anything the government might do to resolve the matter, perhaps allowing the family to cross their neighbor’s land in order to vote for example, would necessarily constrain the neighbor’s right to chose who may or may not cross his land. Is it less of an assault on freedom for the government to actively constrain the neighbor’s right than to passively constrain the family’s? Political freedom alone simply will not save us from this kind of situation.

The case using opposite conditions is even more straightforward. Imagine a society with all sorts of economic guarantees – the right to work, free healthcare, public pensions, etc. – but which excludes the general public from all meaningful political processes. It is easy to see that under such circumstances any rights exist only at the whim of those who govern. The government is, after all, that body which is sustained neither by its wisdom nor by its benevolence, but ultimately by its monopoly on the use of force. When governments are unconstrained by the annoyance of democratic institutions and find it desirable to curtain individual rights there is seldom any mechanism in place to stop them.2

In actual practice, both economic and politic spheres preside over exactly the same question: who is to exercise material control over a society’s material assets, and thereby exercise control over other peoples’ lives. To be politically powerful is to be able to set people and things into motion to carry out one’s will. To be economically powerful is the same. Power is fungible. Typically, political and economic rights are played off against one another by people who benefit from increasing the centralization of power in one realm or another. An understanding of what freedom means within the context of any particular society involves more that the veneration of whatever rights it happens to bestow – it involves a critical examination of the constraints its citizens take for granted.

At this point, we also need to acknowledge that freedom is a somewhat self-contradictory notion. To grant everyone the right to vote, for example, is also to deny everyone the right to be an unelected despot. We are accustomed to thinking of universal suffrage as a freedom, and a laudable thing, but it is a curtailment of freedom in some absolute sense. It deprives one of the freedom to rule arbitrarily. That this is probably a good thing is beside the point. Many constraints on individual freedom are certainly in the public’s best interest. Few if any of us would prosper long under conditions of absolute anarchy. Too often, though, people confuse freedom with equality, when the two are actually contrary notions. To be guaranteed equality in any area of life is to have someone else denied the freedom to excel in that area. To have freedom in any area is by necessity to have the potential to excel beyond someone else’s talent or means.3

Religion

Religious freedom is nothing short of an oxymoron. All religions are, or at least contain, elaborate systems of constraints on individual behavior. Even a religion like Zen Buddhism, which at first blush seems unburdened by arbitrary rules, constrains its followers to certain patterns of thought. Even such self-serving belief systems as Satanism demand that their followers be obediently anti-altruistic. Thoroughgoing nastiness requires a certain dedication, after all.

What is usually meant by “freedom of religion,” then, is the freedom to practice whatever system of religious constraints your upbringing and inclinations happen to mark out for you. It means that the government promises not to go out of its way to oppress you for oppressing yourself. Of course, when governments do persecute certain religions (or the denial of them) it is, straightforwardly, a curtailment of individual freedom too. Again, our interest here is in describing the nature of social freedom, not in arguing about what is or isn’t beneficial. Arguably, a government which criminalized a belief in ghosts would do the public a service by advancing the cause of truth, but this must be balanced against social costs of employing such draconian interventions against the minutia of peoples’ beliefs. Those societies perceived as un-free are not necessarily those that have the most constraints, but are often those who impose constraints the most gratuitously.

Within religions themselves, I am aware of no rights that are offered in the usual sense of the term – that is, in the sense we would use in saying one has the right to vote or the right to free speech.4 Gods are capricious, and do not grant to mortals any concessions that they cannot overturn if the whim suits them. Rights within a religious context would constrain omnipotence. Rather than enumerating freedoms, religions generally promise rewards for obedience and conformity. I have heard such constraints described as freedom, just as I have heard the world we live in, complete with disease, natural disasters and all the other sources of human suffering, described as evidence of “God’s love”. While constraints may be a good thing, and may even be conducive to individual happiness, it is incoherent to say that freedom is constraint, just as it is incoherent to say that causing or allowing untold suffering is an expression of love. This is simply to hijack the positive connotations of a certain term and apply them to its opposite.

Like political and economic systems, religious beliefs prune away the myriad ways in which an individual might behave and think and leave behind a relatively uniform, predictable personality. We are defined not by our freedoms, but by our boundaries. If you know a person has a certain job, lives a well-adjusted life in a certain culture, and ascribes to certain religious beliefs – you can infer a great deal about them. A truly free individual, unconstrained by any social conventions or beliefs, might behave and think in any number of different ways, being bound only by the ineliminable forces of nature. The socially adapted individual must conform to a great many behavioral expectations if society is to function at all, and what remains to be recognized as freedom is merely the residual latitude a society is prepared to tolerate.

Conclusions

It would be a mistake to think that we constrain ourselves by conscious choice or that human societies are unique in having constraints. Any pack of wolves or troop of baboons will show plenty of examples of social constraints and even ritualized behavior. Obviously the wolves and baboons do not sit down and discuss a sort of social contract under which they will live. They do not delineate their rights in documents. They know instinctively that they live safer, easier lives when they cooperate, and between this instinct and subsequent learning they become functional members of their own small societies. Human beings are not different in kind from wolves or baboons in this respect, but differ from them only in their capacity for abstraction and complexity. Each of us trades freedom for security to a high degree, and does so unconsciously and uncomplainingly. Our genes compel us to do so. Those who are indifferent to society’s scorn are aberrations, and suffer predictably.

If one has a desire to understand one’s place within a social context, rather than merely react to one’s perceptions, it is well to remember no one is ever really free. Questions of freedom are really only questions about what rules we will have – not about whether we will have rules. The consistent feature of episodes of social anarchy is that they are hastily replaced with some degree of order. Power abhors a vacuum. Sooner rather than later, people coalesce around a leader who, for better or worse, will offer them the promise of security. The equal, free, and ungoverned society that 19th century anarchists proposed was never more than a dream. They believed that human societies could get along perfectly well with neither leaders nor laws. The objective evidence of history, however, shows that social stratification is not an artificial condition created only by a few avaricious miscreants, but a normal state of affairs in which almost everyone gravitates toward their own particular social position. Constraints on individual freedom thus arise spontaneously. Any society which provides tolerable conditions for enough of its members will be stable as long as it can do so. I myself may chafe under constraints on information access or constraints on speech, but I know well that many of my fellow citizens would live quiet happily without these things, and would be quite content with food, shelter, a little alcohol, and a football game on television. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness can, for most, be adequately replaced with life, stability, and the pursuit of entertainment.

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1 For those who imagine this sort of exercise of power by the private sector is farfetched, consider the various historical applications of the truck system in which employees were paid in either goods or company scrip instead of standard money. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_system ) Here we have a system that was the functional equivalent of slavery, but which, in most cases, operated in a political context that gave its victims the right to vote, legal equality, and exactly the same property rights as their exploiters.

2 Soviet Russia is the trite but apt example. Initially, a great deal of effort was invested in giving soviet citizen various positive economic rights, but in time, as power became more centralized, these rights withered. Stalin continued to give lip service to the Marx’s ideal of a state organized for the common man while in fact presiding of the most centralized authority imaginable.

3 Equality, too, is self-contradictory. It must be granted that no real body of human beings is equal by nature. We all have differing abilities as well as differing starting circumstances. Thus, equality must always be artificially enforced by some governing authority. Members of such a governing authority, however, must necessarily be unequal to those governed. Were they not so, they would have no authority.

4 Thomas Jefferson’s poetic formulation in the American Declaration of Independence is an interesting, and generally misunderstood, example of the juxtaposition of rights with religion: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The legal meaning of “unalienable” is non-transferrable. It is certainly true that neither one’s life, nor one’s liberty, nor one’s pursuit of happiness can be transferred to another person who is either dead, enslaved, or unhappy. I am convinced, too, that this is precisely what Jefferson meant. While there may have been additional reasons for amending Locke’s formulation of “life, liberty, and property,” it is plain that property is readily alienable. Jefferson was making an observation about the uniqueness of these entities; he could not have been suggesting that they were entities that it was beyond the capacity of human beings to curtail. He was certainly aware of gallows, prisons, and the many ways that the pursuit of happiness might be impeded. To say that these entities are endowed by a creator was, for a deist like Jefferson, not much more than saying that they exist. If he had believed that the creator was prepared to protect such “rights” against human interference he could not have been aware of the realities of 18th century life. His intention, then, had to have been to establish these rather general notions as rights within the new republic, not to assert that a creator was the guarantor of these freedoms. In his reference to equality too, it appears that Jefferson may have only been referring to the equivalence of one individual’s state of being alive with another’s state being alive -- or free, or happy, as the case might be. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are unquantifiable and in some sense equal in potential. If that is all he meant, Jefferson was not asserting much about equality in any practical sense.

What does the Occupy Wall Street movement want?

2011-10-26T09:08:00.000-07:00

The goals of most American protest movements have been obvious. Consider those of the last sixty years. The Civil Rights movement wanted black people to have the constitutional rights that they had been promised. The anti-war movement of the 1960’s wanted an end to the Viet Nam war, or at least an end to the draft. The Equal Rights movement wanted equal rights for women. The Gay Rights movement wanted equal rights for gays and lesbians. The Tea Party movement wants a reduction in taxes and, more generally, a reduction in the size and power of government. But what exactly does the Occupy Wall Street movement want?

The initial demand around which the Occupy Wall Street movement coalesced, the only demand the movement has ever articulated more-or-less clearly, was that President Obama “ordain” a commission tasked with ending the influence of money in Washington D.C. On its face, this is unworkable to the point of being quixotic. The framers of this demand have apparently never read the President’s delineated constitutional powers. This is perhaps a minor objection, since neither Obama nor his immediate predecessor seem to have read them either. A worse oversight is that they don’t seem to have taken note of who the Presidents friends are. I doubt that either Tim Geitner or Larry Summers are big proponents of the removal of money from politics. One might as well demand the Federal Highway Administration “ordain” a subcommittee to abolish cars.

The protestors are not, it seems, a coherent, well-organized movement with a succinct objective. They are a vague mass of human beings whose interests cannot really subsumed under is single slogan. They rally around certain websites and internet entities (such as Adbusters and Anonymous) but do not appear to be under any organization’s actual direction. This is contrary to what both the liberal and conservative media establishments would have us believe. The Occupy Wall Street movement is not an energetic junior branch of the Democratic Party, no matter how many Democratic politicians and liberal academics rhapsodize about them, with a timidly raised fist and a twinkle of nostalgia in the eye. Neither the movement the tool of American communists and socialists that Fox would have you believe it is, notwithstanding that a handful of communists and socialist have pitched tents among the protestors and are carrying out their usual desultory recruitment efforts. As of now, at least, this is a youth movement plain and simple. If you watch the protests on TV, you will see plenty of interviews with older people in the crowd. If you watch the more random, less crafted clips on YouTube that were shot by the protestors themselves you will rarely see a person over thirty.

Unlike the anti-war youth movement of the 1960’s, in which at least the young men involved had an obvious goal – to avoid being thrown into the senseless meat grinder of Viet Nam – this protest’s connection to its object is far more abstract. While it is true that money has greatly, perhaps even irrevocably, distorted the American political process, the young are probably the group least equipped to detect and understand that influence. It isn’t as though they have seen their purchasing power steadily eroded over decades, or worry much over the potential collapse of Social Security. They grew up in a world where rapid change was the norm, and tend to believe that any person over thirty years old, any idea over ten years old, and any gadget older than last Thursday is not only worthless but contemptible. They have only just begun to notice that events outside of their circle of friends might be important. Fine comprehension of political and economic matters is simply not the hallmark of the young, in this generation or any other. Action and enthusiasm are. Accordingly, to stand with one’s friends and chant at a very old building down the street full of detached, wealthy, middle-aged men seems like a possible way to change the world – especially if the commercial media has told you every day of your short life that yours is the smartest, best, and coolest generation that ever existed. Youth has always been an uncomfortable mixture of naïve innocence, passion, and not-quite-insufferable narcissism. And courage too, if only born of blind belief. This has not changed. The protestors are there because they have been promised more than the real world can give them, or, to put it another way, because the difference between how cool they think they are and how indifferent the raw world of economics is to their aspirations is intolerable. Maybe shouting and making a nuisance of oneself will work. It sometimes does with adults.

I show my age, I know, but I will not give the young, en masse, more credit than they deserve. Some are more precocious than others. Most will become more circumspect and practical if they live long enough. Few if any are capable of sifting the details of such enormous questions as they are confronting with anything approaching wisdom. None of us would be willing to let a twenty-year-old perform surgery on us; it should be no less worrisome to imagine a large number of them dictating the future course of the nation – or the world. Not, I will admit, that their elders have been doing much better.

A restive population is an animal in search of a head. It may find one, or create one, but it is usually better off if it does neither. The jeering, absurd face of Anonymous is not a much more comforting entity than anything it claims to oppose. Only a teenager could want the world to be ruled by a cartoon, generated by nameless hackers from the depths of cyberspace. Adults generally prefer computer games they can turn off, and at least want leaders who will lie to them in honestly televised flesh. Anonymous and similar groups have basically brought phishing to politics, as if things were not already illusory enough.

Like the Iranian and Egyptian movements from which it derives some inspiration, Occupy Wall Street is bound to the culture of texting and tweeting that have become the modern norm. This is likely to give it both staying power (as any kid with a cell phone can be an organizer now that he or she knows how) and vulnerability (as anyone who wants to either monitor or infiltrate the movement’s activities can easily do so). It is likely to also keep the movement vague and unconcerned about specifics, as it is far easier to gather a thousand people for an event than to arrive at any consensus about what the event is supposed to accomplish when they get there.

Occupy Wall Street is not, at least at this point, in any position to accomplish anything other than minor disorder and misleading press coverage. It is not a cure for a disease, but rather a symptom. Like the Tea Party movement, it is an indicator that most people are angry at having been functionally disenfranchised by political and economic processes that favor a few elites to the exclusion of everyone else. Unlike the Tea Party, it is unlikely to spawn a new class of congressmen and senators. To be a congressman you have to be at least twenty-five, and that is already the twilight years of cool. The movement can only accomplish things by scaring people with an overdose of anarchy, and that will not be pretty, nor will the results be predictable. It will not go away, however. Expect all sorts of sound and fury.

The Unexamined Game

2011-09-09T08:56:00.000-07:00

Considered in the abstract, there are striking similarities between the near collapse of the global financial sector in 2008 and the series of events that precipitated the First World War. The kind of reasoning we use in connection with human institutions often transcends the specific purposes of the institutions themselves, applying as well to major banks as to national governments. Let us first consider, briefly, the events that lead to war in 1914.

In the minor nation of Serbia there was much bad feeling toward the neighboring Austrian empire. Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian patriot, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Austria demanded that Serbia redress the matter in a way that would effectively nullify Serbia’s sovereignty. Serbia only partially complied. Austria used this less than complete submission as a pretext to declare war. Russia, bound by treaty to protect Serbia, mobilized its army. Germany, allied with Austria, declared war on Russia. France, allied with Russia, declared war on German and Austria. Germany invaded Belgium as a militarily favorable route to France. Britain, bound by treaty to defend Belgium, declared war on Germany. Four years of carnage and bloodshed were required to break the ensuing military deadlock.

What is notable here is the nature of the alliance game. Every government that was pulled into the war had sought to manipulate the political system of Europe to enhance its own influence and security. None had formed alliances with the immediate intention of going to war. They had all either hedged their political adventures by allying with a major power, or, in the case of the Russo-Serbian and Anglo-Belgian agreements, had attempted to protect weak friends from the ambitions of powerful enemies. The general conflagration that followed was the result of no one’s explicit intention. Rather, it was the collective result of each participant’s pursuit of advantage and risk mitigation.

Consider the events that led up to the crash of 2008. Prior to the crash, there was a huge proliferation of risk mitigation through the use of hedge funds. In essence, the large banks formed a network of interlocking alliances and agreements that gave them sense of security that was not really merited. While each individual risky derivative investment was mitigated by some carefully crafted bet, few people were paying any attention to the dynamics of the system as a whole. As in the First World War, when the first domino fell the rest followed inevitably.

It is a weakness of human beings that they tend to take the stability of the environment their institutions operate in for granted. While they recognize that their institutions themselves can have ups and downs (advancing one’s country or one’s business is the whole point of any political or economic game) there seems to be an innate assumption that game itself is more-or-less immutable. Thus, in Europe before the First World War statesmen jockeyed for position within the European balance of power, but never fully grasp that their own actions would collapse the European political system as a whole. Likewise, banks finding ways to leverage thin air into unprecedented levels of nominal wealth never really grasped that they were undermining the very basis of real wealth – the forces of industrial production.

Clearly, neither Serbia’s nor Austria’s national pride were worth the sixteen million deaths attributed to the First World War. Similarly, it is difficult to image the extraordinary expansion of paper wealth for a few in any way compensates for either the loss of real wealth for the many, or the wholesale damage to global economic stability which is still playing itself out. Neither event, however, appear to be the result of malice in any pure sense. In truth, humanity is simply ill-equipped, at least at this point in our evolution, to cope with nations and business institutions of the current gargantuan scale. To paraphrase the popular aphorism – we act globally, but think locally.

Before the Crash

2011-09-01T09:14:00.000-07:00

If you have ever been in a car crash, you have probably experienced a moment, just before the collision, in which you became aware that it was inevitable. In that instant, everything falls away. Your journey becomes irrelevant. Your plans evaporate in the face of a future both violent and unpredictable. Perhaps there is terror. Perhaps a certain feeling of detachment. Life holds its breath.

That feeling seldom leaves me now. The world has gotten away from us. It follows its own trajectory, beyond anyone’s actual control. Some confluence of overpopulation, resource depletion, and climate change awaits us. Governments unravel. The global financial system shudders and buckles. The idea of eternal progress – more and better every year, more and better every generation – reveals itself to be little more that a comforting fairy tale. A circus act. A gross, insulting lie. We will be waking up from our collective dream now. Brace yourself! Get ready!

But how does one get ready for the unknown? Especially when, to be sure, most people still cling tightly to that dream. “…Look at my new smartphone – see? I can tweet with people in Uganda if I want to. We will all have electric cars soon! There’s no problem! There are some very smart people out there who will take care of everything! I was guaranteed a future – you understand me – GUARANTEED!!!...” I shrug. I hold my breath. Time slows. The moment drags on, month by month, a car crash in extreme slow motion. Most of the other passengers still believe we will just be at the mall soon, and that once we get there everything will just get better and better. More and more…

I cling only to physics and to history. To facts. I am here. I look out the windshield in mute amazement. My existence, the momentary flicker of my consciousness, may be snuffed out by what’s to come. In hard times, people suffer. People die. There’s your guarantee, if you want one. A rough impact after a high speed run. Brace yourself! Get ready!

Power and Distance

2011-08-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

In any relationship of where one person or group of persons holds some power over another, the likelihood of that power becoming oppressive increases as the likelihood of contact between two parties decreases. This law holds true regardless of the type or nature of human institution in question. It is as true of left wing governments as of right wing governments. It is true of corporations. It is true of religious hierarchies. While it is always possible for people to treat one another badly face-to-face, it is always easier to deal callously with people that one neither knows nor sees.

This principle sounds so obvious as to hardly be worth mentioning. We have all been on the receiving end of someone else’s thoughtless policy at one time or another. We have all asked ourselves “what idiot made that rule?” Nevertheless, whether we lean left or right, we tend to think that there is some ideal way to organize society. We believe that creating a decent society is just a matter of getting all the rules right. My contention here is that any manipulation of other peoples’ lives on a large, impersonal scale, no matter how well intentioned, will eventually degenerate into an attempt to make human beings conform to the needs of a system, rather than making a system conform to the needs of human beings.

One example of this is the rise of industrial regulation. Unquestionably, it is a good thing that industries be prevented from despoiling their environments in gross and obvious ways. It is a good thing that they should be prohibited from producing unduly dangerous products, or putting employees in serious danger. The guiding principle in all such regulations is one of safety. However, human institutions have a life of their own. Beyond creating rules to advance the cause of safety, the work of the regulator will eventually creep into other realms. They will produce regulations to benefit themselves, or to manipulate industries to suit someone’s theories, or, often, simply for the reason that they can – in other words, purely for the exercise of power. Many laws and policies produce paperwork without producing any tangible benefit to anyone. Of course, in the absence of industrial regulation one finds abuses of similar character rendered by the industries themselves. When it is profitable to despoil someone else’s land or extract money that does not correspond to any actual goods or services it is a rare corporation that will quibble about ethics. It is not a failing of this group or that group. It is simply in the nature of human perception that the problems of distant parties are always tenuous abstractions while producing benefits for oneself, one’s family, one’s institution, or one’s cronies is a far more pressing concern.

Neither should we think that we are discussing a tendency that is a unique disease of power. While this sort of moral myopia is most dramatically expressed by those who wield authority, it is the social distance, not the possession of authority, which is the root of this tendency. Consider the September 11th attacks. A great many Arabs around the world openly reveled in the attacks, not because they hated any of the victims personally, but because they hated America, the ally of Israel, in the abstract. Likewise, many quite peaceable Americans, the sort of people who would readily come to the aid of any real individual in distress, were calling for what amounted to blood vengeance on behalf of their country. Patriotism is nothing if not the reduction of individuals to abstractions. It is the mass dehumanization of both the enemy and oneself. Yet none of this, on either side, was whipped up by any real authority. Rather, it sprang spontaneously from ordinary people.

If, as a species, we want to build a future with less suffering than our past then we had better put at least two unworkable ideas behind us. First, we need to give up on a magical belief in ideal systems. We cannot legislate and organize our way to utopia. To value any idea as more important than a life can only end in denigrating life. Second, we need to drop the recently revived idea that we can extract moral perfection from a careful study of nature. Everything is nature – including the Holocaust. It is only the plasticity of human beings that offers any real hope. The trick is to invent without falling in love with our inventions, not to maintain unwavering fidelity to the customs of banobos and baboons.

Signs

2011-08-19T09:15:00.000-07:00

Almost every day I see some person standing by an exit ramp. Usually the person is young. Nine times out of ten the person is male. Nine times out of ten he is white. He holds a sign made of corrugated cardboard. Almost invariably it reads, “I will work for food.”

Some open their hearts, or their wallets at any rate, and hand the man a dollar or two and the requisite allotment of pity. Some hurl insults and accusations. Most pretend he isn’t there, and wait impatiently for the green light to release them from his presence. He’s a polarizing figure, this man with the sign. He gets on our nerves.

When I am in a rational frame of mind, as I do endeavor to be, I ask myself what I can actually know about a stranger based on a scruffy appearance and a sign. I cannot know much. I cannot know his personal history at a glance. I cannot know whether or not he has made an honest effort to find work. I cannot know whether or not he is a habitual panhandler or simply someone who has fallen on hard times. I can reasonably infer, though, that the purpose of the sign is more to elicit plain charity than to advertise a willingness to work for food. No one picks up strange men by the highway, takes them home to mow the yard, and gives them a can of beans in payment. People buy off their consciences with cash from the safety of their cars. Even if work were offered, certainly it must be more profitable to stand by the road holding a sign than to do some menial task for actual food. The sign, at least, is merely a cliché – and almost certainly a lie.

There are, of course, few jobs to be had. Our country is not organized to assure that there are either jobs or dignity. There is much talk of these things, in high circles and in front of the camera, but people have been shed from the economy year after year, decade after decade. What remains is only a thin, fragile shell of professionals, nervously clinging to their jobs, and various detached elites who only shuffle paper and juggle numbers. For most of the rest, there has been the indignity of either public charity or Wal-Mart jobs. We have outsourced the making of things to others. A great nation has been traded for a credit bubble.

The panhandler is what America has produced. We will see more of him. He is the product of our collective ambition and complacency -- the delinquent offspring of our contempt and our self-satisfied generosity. We shrink from his image because he wakes us from our cultural conceit. We fear we might become him. A nameless artifact, standing by an exit ramp. Invisible. Despised. Unnecessary.

Why I am not a Bright

2011-08-11T09:17:00.000-07:00

I do not oppose the promotion of a naturalistic worldview. To the contrary, have spent a good deal of effort, both in personal interactions and in writing to promote and clarify just such a view. I do not believe in any exceptions to a fundamentally materialist perspective. Nothing in my unique experience has ever required anything beyond a straightforwardly monistic ontology – this is to say that I believe that there is matter-energy, in all of its astonishing variety, and I have never encountered either empirical evidence or logical necessity of anything else. Nevertheless, I disagree with the Brights Movement on several points.

The Brights Movement has accepted the following definition of a bright (lower case “b” – a person who meets the criteria to join the movement):

• A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview
• A bright's worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements
• The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview

My worldview aligns perfectly with the first two criteria. I shall have much to say about the third, but, at least by my own interpretation, this seems almost a corollary of the previous two. It is difficult to imagine an individual whose ethics and actions are independent of his or her beliefs, naturalistic or otherwise. One can, or course, fall short of one’s own ethical standards, but this does render those standards non-existent. On the other hand, to have a naturalistic worldview and a deliberately theistic ethical system would be incoherent. I suppose one might conduct one’s life in a generally unexamined way, accepting whatever cultural norms happen to be prevalent without really thinking about them, but I hesitate to call such a heuristic of blind conformity “ethics”. The matter of actions is even more straightforward. If one’s actions do not align with one’s worldview, a serious neurological problem is usually indicated. Action has a kind of primacy over mere assertion. If a person eschews the supernatural in public, but prays earnestly to hedge his bets, it is the prayer rather than the assertion that defines his beliefs. We are as we do, not as we merely say.

The purpose of the third criteria becomes clear as you read more of the Brights Movement web site (http://www.the-brights.net ). The people who composed the guiding principles of the movement are never succinctly credited, though one may assume Paul Geisert, Mynga Futrell, Daniel Dennett, and perhaps Richard Dawkins were involved. Whoever composed them, it appears the belief they are trying to foster, as a sort of subtext to the movement, is that naturalism and egalitarianism are inseparable.

The site recognizes, then brushes aside, a great diversity of beliefs and opinions among those who might fall under the general category of brights. Any bright can be a Bright (upper case “B”) – a person who formally registers with the movement. One finds, in an explanation of the second principle of the movement, the following almost breathtaking statement:

“Each person deciding whether to self-identify by the shared characteristic—a naturalistic worldview—has employed a personal understanding of the terminology (including supernatural and mystical) and of any brief elucidation elsewhere on the site. We see little need to reach a common understanding of these terms, or to explicate beyond what is provided on the home page. We anticipate that those individuals who joined the constituency employed for all these terms some understanding in general use that they personally find apt.”

I believe the intent here was to avoid being mired down in philosophical hair-splitting, but throwing the definitions wide open is extraordinary. A movement founded on the notion that there is some concrete reality that underlies experience is taking an incongruous stance when it shrugs off specifics in the interest of not offending anyone. Still, I suppose we are all in this together.

The only important distinction to be made from the Brights’ perspective is between brights and supers:

“Antonym: A person who is not a bright is a super. That’s the noun term for someone whose worldview does incorporate supernatural/mystical element(s). In other words, a super's worldview is not naturalistic.

Individuals are either brights or supers (can’t be both). There are brights of all stripes and supers of all stripes – one humanity, one world.”

Alright then, we have a simple bifurcation of “one humanity” into two camps – albeit divided by a line it would be impolite for us to survey carefully -- brights on one side, supers on the other. All Brights are necessarily brights. Any bright who wishes to join the movement can do so simply by signing up -- that is, by choosing to self-identify as a Bright. Logically then, there can be no prerequisite to becoming a Bright other than the three quoted above – essentially, having a purely naturalistic worldview, whatever that happens to mean to that individual. To state this another way, by definition there can be no brights that are not eligible to be Brights. If you are not eligible to be a Bright, it can only be because you are a super.

The stated principle goals of the Brights movement are:

A. Promote the civic understanding and acknowledgment of the naturalistic worldview, which is free of supernatural and mystical elements.

B. Gain public recognition that persons who hold such a worldview can bring principled actions to bear on matters of civic importance.

C. Educate society toward accepting the full and equitable civic participation of all such individuals.

Setting aside any perverse pleasure one might take in being persecuted, no one with a naturalistic worldview can object to being granted a respectable status by his or her own society. This seems a worthy and entirely laudable set of aims. The problems occur elsewhere. Principle number eight is elucidated in this way:

“We intend to work to grow a constituency of Brights able to exercise social and political influence in a constructive fashion. The Brights movement is not by design an anti-religious force in society. The overall aim is civic fairness for all, which necessitates there being a place in politics and society for persons who hold a naturalistic outlook.

There is a human penchant for creating us/them classes in which the "them" is viewed as negative or repellant. Although some individual Brights may have negative views of persons who hold supernatural beliefs, the Brights movement does not proclaim superiority or a disdain for others. What is sought is social acceptance and civic equality. This movement unequivocally rebuffs not only verbal comparisons that cast Brights as lesser citizens than the religious, but also those that cast the religious as lesser citizens than the Brights.”

I must tread carefully here to avoid the idle charge of bigotry, but the text has now led us into a contradiction. It is certainly possible to have a thoroughly naturalistic worldview without being absolutely egalitarian. Perhaps I want to constrain people in group X because of some real, empirical experiences I have had, or, indeed, because of some scientifically conducted study I have seen. If this is the case, I still meet the criteria necessary to be a bright (including, I think, the ethics and actions criterion) – but I am clearly at odds with the movement’s founding charter. The idea that I can be an accepted part of a movement that “unequivocally rebuffs” views that I might, given sufficient evidence, publically hold is a non sequitur. Functionally, entertaining any negative views about members of a religion as a class disqualifies one from the Brights Movement. The term “bright” is descriptive, but the term “Bright” is normative. To join the movement is to formally assent to a certain ethical and behavioral restrictions not encompassed within a naturalistic worldview itself. Tiresome though it is to say so, the Brights Movement blithely stuffs its head into Hume’s Guillotine, slipping deftly from an “is” into an “ought”.

Christians often try to score a point against atheism by pointing out that Joseph Stalin, an atheist, was a mass murderer on a spectacular scale. Dawkins and others have pointed out, quite correctly, that Stalin was not a mass murderer because he was an atheist. Following the reasoning of the Brights Movement, however, we would have to conclude that Stalin was a super because he was not egalitarian. One can certainly bifurcate humanity in whatever way suits one’s purposes, but the bifurcation begins to break down when you help yourself to the ultimate attribution error, however nicely or cleverly you do it.

The notion that one must treat all religious persons as equal citizens is, frankly, irrational on its face. It may well be a workable and enlightened position if your neighbors happen to be Buddhists or Unitarians. It becomes less workable and enlightened, however, when one has the misfortune to live next to the Westboro Baptist Church. Tolerating the vehemently intolerant rarely produces reciprocity. If one’s neighbors happen to be hard-line Wahabi Muslims, or anyone else whose religious beliefs relegate non-believers to the status of non-persons, a rigorous adherence to the principle of civic equality is a unilateral fantasy. Civic equality can only exist between compatible parties, and some beliefs are simply not compatible.

Now let’s return to the third criteria of the bright definition:

• The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview

If one’s goal were simply to further the civic status of brights, one would not necessarily have to begin by defining a set of ethical standards. If brights are viable as a social group at all, it can only be because they share some common practical interests. The bare desire for acceptance may well be a sufficient common ground in itself. Virtually all brights, however egalitarian or anti-egalitarian, would have to agree with such an appeal to self-interest. When one promotes an egalitarian set of ethics in this context it can only be either as a goal in itself or as an expedient tool in accomplishing the movement’s stated aims. The terms “fairness,” “equitable,” and “justice” are bandied about so often on the site that there can be little doubt that the authors are either extremely cynical or they genuinely believe in equality as something more than a temporary expedient. They are entitled to such beliefs. The problem is not that the authors have a certain concept of equality that they desire to see promoted, but that they have conflated equality with naturalism, either naively or dishonestly.

In the web site’s Action Area #1: Reality about Human Morality the authors proceed to lay out their program:

“Prerequisite to all activity is that we acquire expertise to assemble an absolutely indisputable basis for our assertions in the morality domain (the foundations of morality are understood by scholars). It is important to firm up understanding within the constituency of what is known about the natural underpinnings of human morality so that Brights can more effectively counter ‘common knowledge’ that morals are presented to humanity by a supernatural deity through scripture.

When we can articulate and defend a naturalistic basis of morality, then we can proceed to set forth goals for educational action, develop clear and soundly based messages (in terms that can be readily understood by lay persons, and especially transmitted via media), build a useful resource ‘tool box’ for Brights on the Web for their explanations, and so on. We must get together both our ‘subject’ and our ‘lesson plans.’”

The intention is to deduce morality (and by extension egalitarianism) from nature. This should be a more straightforward task than they are making it -- though they are correct that convincing the ignorant is a different matter altogether. If one has a purely naturalistic worldview then it follows that one does not believe that anything exists apart from nature. The question of whether something is natural or not becomes simply a matter of asking whether it exists or not. Unnatural is synonymous with non-existent. If anyone is moral, including a delusional supernaturalist, then it is at least trivially true that morality itself is natural. However, it must also be admitted that the supernaturalist’s delusions are the product of nature in exactly the same sense. If evolution were a guarantor of good epistemology, we would not need to even have this discussion! Proving that morality is a product of nature gains one nothing. Error and brutality are likewise products of nature. If morality were the necessary product or nature, again, we would have no problems.

A more honest, and I think more naturalistic, approach to the question of morality is to accept the fact that human behavior and beliefs are quite plastic. We are not entirely bound by genes. While some rudimentary aspects of morality are no doubt innate, all developed moral systems are essentially cultural artifacts. They are, to use Dawkins’ word, memes. Most religious strictures, however strange, served some function at one time. They were practical experiments in social organization, whether their organizers realized it or not. They often accomplish good things, like developing a sense of social cohesion, and bad things, like narrowing the minds of their adherents. The Brights Movement itself is just such a social experiment. It gives most of its members a certain sense of belonging. It espouses high ideals. It does not turn a very critical eye on its own principles and their cultural origins. To an outside observer, it is apparent that the Brights Movement is not a haven for the rigorous atheist or skeptic, but simply a re-branding and re-focusing of modern western liberalism, complete with all the multicultural baggage such an origin entails. Those who direct the movement raise equality and civic justice as inspiring banners, but they are not truly serious about such principles in actual practice. Again, from Action Area #1: Reality about Human Morality:

“…Beginning this project, The Brights' Net provided means for constituents who indicated interest in its goals to communicate with one another to plan a strategy. That mechanism proved unwieldy and unproductive, and so we abandoned the process and established a committee of Brights with a designated project director to lead the effort.”

It would seem that in the bright new world some animals are more equal than others. In the Brights Movement, the doctorate is power. I have serious reservations about democracy too -- but at least I do not pretend otherwise. The history of political movements organized and run by academics is not so encouraging that I would care to entrust them with either my identity -- or my ethics.

_____________________________
All Quotations cited from www.the-brights.net

What We Can’t Know

2011-07-07T08:51:00.000-07:00

Consider a snail. If you have ever watched a collection of snails in an aquarium over some reasonable period of time, you may have noticed that their behavioral repertoire is rather limited. Snails move about, eat, mate, deposit eggs, and recoil from attack or contact with certain substances. They have sufficient senses to allow them to locate food, and to determine whether an object they encounter is something edible, another snail, something attacking them, or something composed of an objectionable substance. The variability of behavior from snail to snail is not great, though some are more active than others. They do have some capacity to learn, but most snail behaviors appear to be intrinsic to their genetic makeup rather than the result of learning. New hatchlings and large adults behave identically in most respects. It is, at least at present, impossible to say whether or not the snail is “conscious” in something like the sense that human beings are. It is also impossible to say whether it perceives any experiential difference between what it “knows” genetically and what it “knows” as the result of learning.

With apologies to the biologists who study such animals, I believe the behavioral outline above offers a reasonable basis for making inferences about the cognitive world of the snail. It must surely be conceded that a snail’s understanding of the cosmos has limitations, even if the character of its understanding (what it is like to be a snail) remains alien to us. We can reasonably claim to know, for example, that no amount of patient training is ever going to allow a snail to read a sentence – even if we use Braille characters that the snail could, at least, perceive. A snail’s nervous system consists of a few connected ganglia, sufficient for its narrow repertoire of senses and behaviors, but clearly not much more. It can no more use its simple nervous system to read a sentence than you or I can fly by flapping our arms.

That a snail lacks the physical capacity to read is obvious, yet many human beings (including many very intelligent ones) believe the kilogram and a half of fatty tissue in their craniums gives them sufficient capacity to generate a fact from any state of affairs whatsoever. To put this more colloquially, we tend to believe that everything that can exist or occur is knowable to us. We don’t believe, of course, that any human being is omniscient -- able to attach facts to all states of affairs at once. We would also admit to certain spatial and temporal constraints. For example, we do not claim that we can know, at present, any minor details of the local conditions on any of the extrasolar planets astronomers have discovered. This is a spatial problem – we could know if we where there. Likewise, we don’t claim to know whether the statement “Socrates ate more than 100 kilograms of olives in his lifetime” is true or not. This is a temporal problem – we do not have access to unrecorded states of affairs from the 5th century BCE. What we do tend to believe is that any given state of affairs is understandable to at least some exceptionally intelligent member of our species, given that he or she is in the right place at the right time with the right set of observational instruments. It would not occur to most of us that, perhaps, we only glide across the glass of some aquarium, inside a larger universe that we not only do not know – but cannot know.

If a snail could somehow devote one of its ganglia to the knowledge that its capacity to understand the universe was limited, it would not be to its evolutionary advantage. Its nervous system is probably already taxed close to its limits by the meager cognitive tasks it has, and it is hard to see how being aware of its epistemic limitations would help it survive and propagate its genes. Most human philosophers have not been notably prolific breeders either, so it would be unfair to expect great biological success from a philosophically inclined snail. A more complex animal, like a cat, probably has plenty of neuronal capacity to spare on the knowledge of its own cognitive limitations, but lacking an abstract language in which to think it would have no way of formulating such knowledge. If we can imagine that there are states of affairs beyond our capacity to know, it is only because we can model such a situation symbolically. If your cognitive world consisted wholly of sensations and memory, you would have nothing to model the unknowable with. One cannot conceptualize the unknowable directly, but describing it by analogy is fairly easy -- as I have just done by comparing us with snails.

The great majority of human beings could probably understand the argument for cognitive limitations I have made above, even if the idea itself has never occurred to them. That it is not the common view, however, is probably natural. As a species, we have not had language (by which I mean language capable of expressing propositions) very long, and written language is an even more recent development. We don’t think it odd that the ancient Greeks did not discover DNA, even though there is every reason to believe their brains were just as capable as ours. One needs to discover other things first. The acquisition of knowledge is a cumulative endeavor.

Reduction

While what we usually think of as our “collective knowledge” expands from generation to generation (and seems to be expanding at an ever greater rate) there is no reason to believe this trend is without limit. Not only do our brains (or perhaps any brains) have physical limitations, but there may be a limit to the number of states of affairs that could, even for some hypothetical omniscient mind, correspond to uniquely meaningful facts. Although the number of states of affairs may, in some sense, be infinite, finite descriptions of at least some infinities is possible even for normal human beings. For example, one could imagine a ball in any one of an infinite number of positions along a 1-meter long track – arguably even this would represent an infinite number of states of affairs. We can, however, express this infinite number of states of affairs with a single, finite description:

A ball in any one of an infinite number of positions along a 1-meter long track.

This sort of description is, in general, what the laws of science attempt to do. E=mc2 is just a simple way of expressing a relationship between an enormous number of actual concrete particles of matter and their equivalencies in energy. Science can be described, in fact, as an attempt to reduce the incomprehensibly large number of states of affairs to a manageable collection of symbols. Not that this reductionism is the unique province of science. Any generalization we make is an attempt to make our cognitive world more manageable. Consider:

Zeus is the source of all lightning.

While this may not be a very satisfying explanation to us, it is at least a causal reduction of the phenomenon of lightning. It gives the initially chaotic phenomenon of lightning a locus we can relate to. To the snail, lightning flashes can only be random occurrences, not interpretable in any broader context. To the cat, perhaps, lightning correlates with rain. A cat might derive such an association through experience, but without a propositional language the causal underpinnings of the phenomenon must remain forever inaccessible. Neither the snail nor the cat can have any awareness of states of affairs beyond its senses. Only a being with a language capable of manipulating abstractions can penetrate the limit of its own direct perception.

The difference between empirical and purely imaginary models of the world is worth noting. Let’s stay with our example of explaining the origin of lightning.

The empirically derived explanation of lightning is that it is an electrical current caused by an enormous difference in electrical potential between a storm cloud and the ground. This is a simplified explanation, but it should suffice for our purpose here. It is an empirical explanation because, with the proper instruments, we can detect this difference in electrical potential – or to put this another way, we can extend our senses with instruments to become aware of a previously unknown state of affairs. Using this explanation as a starting point, we might construct devices that produce lightning on a smaller scale. Or, we might produce
devices that predict lightning before it occurs. Knowing that metal conducts electricity more readily than air, we might construct lightning rods to protect our buildings from potential fires. Empirical models let us uncover relationships in nature, and in so doing let us make make predictions that are reliable enough to be useful.

Now, consider a purely imaginary explanation. What do we gain by attributing lightning to Zeus? As I’ve said, it does give the phenomena a psychological underpinning (it gives us a feeling of understanding) – but it offers little else. We cannot devise a means to either detect or predict Zeus’s’ actions. Neither are we likely to build machines that emulate powers that we assume to be unique to Zeus. We merely trade the mystery of lightning for the mystery of Zeus’s power. Such supernatural explanations of phenomena effectively preclude further inquiry. We cannot study magical, invisible, capricious beings empirically, even to disprove their existence. All that we can do is add conjecture onto what is already a conjecture, speculating that we might appease Zeus with such and such a sacrifice, that Zeus was displeased with the farmer who’s olive tree the lightning struck, etc. We can, in fact, create hypothetical causal chains with no empirical basis ad infinitum. You can posit a god to explain what has happened or what is happening, but not to reliably tell you what will happen – so the necessity of maintaining coherence requires that such explanations always be created post hoc. Language makes this possible, just as it makes science possible. The Zeus hypothesis does not let you predict that farmer X will probably be struck dead if he stands on top of a hill holding a pitchfork during a thunderstorm -- it only lets you conclude, in hindsight, that lightning must have struck farmer X because he sinned against the gods.

Technology

To return to my original line of thought, we might be tempted to think that science and technology will eventually gives us the power understand everything, or, more technically, to uncover facts to describe each and every state of affairs. After all, look at what the last few decades alone have brought: telescopes in orbit which plumb not only the depths of space but also of time, and particle accelerators that fission matter into ever finer and more elementary particles. Still, impressive though these things might be, the snail metaphor is still instructive.

Imagine you equipped a certain snail with a device that let it detect the sound of food pellets being dropped into its aquarium. Further assume that these pellets always fell slowly to the same spot on the aquarium’s floor. The snail might learn to associate the new stimulus with the future appearance of food in a particular place. It would be able to detect a state of affairs beyond the normal capacity of its senses and it would “know,” at least from a functional perspective, something that other snails didn’t. But would a snail so equipped have any greater capacity for knowledge? Obviously not. It would still be limited by having only a very rudimentary nervous system. While sense-augmenting devices let one detect new things, they do not make brains any bigger or any more capable. There is plenty of evidence that challenging mental activity increases one’s intelligence, but again, it is obvious that no amount of stimulation is going to make a snail literate.

One might argue that certain devices, like computers, do more than merely expand our senses. They perform calculations and other sorts of arguably “cognitive” tasks. Might intelligent machines expand our cognitive capacity to the point that all states of affairs will be knowable to us? While the expansion of knowledge that has been brought about through the use of computers is truly breathtaking, the answer to this question is probably also no.

Facts are cognitive entities – propositions which correspond to states of affairs. They are the exclusive province of beings. For something to be knowledge, it requires a knower. In the end, however a fact is discovered, whether by sight, smell or the study of the output of a computer program -- it must be knowable by a being to be a fact. If, hypothetically, a computer where to produce some article of data that no one was capable of understanding, such data could not constitute a fact. Artificial Intelligence advocates might claim that such a computer would itself possess knowledge. John Searle’s Chinese Room argument seems a pretty compelling refutation of this position, but whether a computer can have intentionality (can “know” in other words) or not is irrelevant. Even if our hypothetical computer were fully intentional, if it knew facts that we cannot know – they would not be facts to us. For us to ascribe such artificial knowledge to ourselves would be like saying that primeval lungfish discovered Relativity because Einstein ultimately evolved from such organisms. The number and nature of potential facts is limited by the number and nature of states of affairs, but the number and nature of actual facts is limited by the capacity and circumstances of individual knowers. To express this point another way, every individual’s total knowledge is limited to some subset of the universe of potential facts that it has both the capacity and the particular fortune to possess -- whether that individual is a snail, a cat, or a human being.

In this light, what exactly do computers do? Computers are tools, analogous in certain respects to written language, particularly the language of mathematics on which they depend. Computers process and sort information much more rapidly than we can, allowing us to assimilate that information in new ways. My point is not that such tools cannot put new facts within our grasp, but only that they cannot do so without limit. If an individual finds Einstein’s Theory of Relativity incomprehensible given any number of analogies and explanations, there is nothing a computer can do to overcome this limitation. Returning to our snail analogy, no device, no matter how clever, is going to let a snail comprehend a sentence in the way that you or I do.

It is of course imaginable that computers or some other technological device will extend our cognitive grasp just enough for each individual state of affairs to be knowable by some human being or other. Again though, there is no reason to assume this will happen. Extending a snail’s cognitive horizons with some range of sensors and calculating devices would not be sufficient to put all states of affairs within its grasp, certainly. There is little difference between the assumption that we can know everything using only our innate capacity and the assumption that we can know everything using our innate capacity augmented by a few very useful but problematic tools.

Collective Knowledge

We should be wary not only of the idea that we can share facts with hypothetical artificial intelligences, but also of the idea that we can share them with one another. The idea of collective knowledge is deeply deceptive, whether we are discussing the totality of facts possessed by humanity as a whole or merely some small set of facts known by two individuals. (For our purposes here, we will define knowledge as some collection of facts.) We are accustomed to thinking of any discoveries recorded by human beings as having been placed into some vast Jungian unconscious that we somehow share in just by being human. We realize, or course, that to understand the principles of Relativity we are probably either going to have to read Einstein’s work or have it explained to us by someone who already understands it, but there is still a sense in which we tend to feel such knowledge is the discovery and communal property of our species as a whole. I assert that such a notion of collective knowledge is meaningless. In truth, Relativity or any other collection of facts must be “discovered” by each individual who possesses it. Our individual discovery of Relativity differs from Einstein’s only in that we have Einstein’s written documents to point the way, whereas Einstein had only the less developed works of his predecessors. Einstein may have made the discovery, but to share his facts we need to understand them just as he did. What we refer to as collective knowledge isn’t knowledge at all, but merely the collection of expedient paths to facts that have been wrested from the material universe by others and recorded in symbolic form. Facts reside in individual beings -- not in species or in books.

Dispensing with the notion of collective knowledge has very serious ramifications for epistemology in general. Consider the apparent fact that Mt. Everest is the highest peak on Earth. How do we know this? We “know” this because, by a very lengthy and determined application of the laws of trigonometry, a group of 19th century surveyors calculated the mountain’s height. Subsequent groups of surveyors have confirmed the height of Mt. Everest (within some small margin of error). By various means, human beings have also surveyed the whole of the globe sufficiently to have noticed any other mountains which might have higher peaks, and it so happens that none of them do. The laws of trigonometry can be shown to be extremely reliable, as, no doubt, can the other methods both modern and 19th century surveyors have used. The problem is that, by our strict definition of the term fact, only someone who has surveyed Mt. Everest and all of the world’s other high peaks personally, and who has a thorough understanding of all the relevant trigonometric facts used in the survey, can possess the fact that Mt. Everest is the highest peak on Earth. We will set aside, for now, the argument that one’s own senses can’t be trusted. For argument’s sake, let us imagine both our surveyor’s senses and our own are absolutely reliable.

For those of us who are not world-traveling surveyors with an intimate understanding of trigonometry, the information that Mt. Everest is the highest peak on Earth must rest on a series of inductions. Maintaining our earlier use of terms, we induce that the expedient paths to facts that have been set forth by our surveyors would actually lead to those facts if we had the means and inclination to pursue them. In other words, we believe the people who originally made the assertion about Mt. Everest’s height did not merely express an idle opinion, but made careful and systematic measurements that could be repeated by anyone with the means and knowledge to carry them out. We treat the propositions of sources we trust as though they were facts. Indeed, we could not advance very far in our understanding of the world if we had to be rigorously skeptical of all material assertions made by others. To return to our Relativity example, Einstein accepted the results of other people’s experiments as both the material basis and confirmation of his theory. This kind of justification depends entirely on the idea of collective knowledge.

I do not wish to have my position confused with David Hume’s, although there are similarities. It was Hume’s position that inductions were untenable because the future would not, by necessity, follow the past. He asserted that even those facts that we consider laws of nature are mere correlations based on repeated experience. With nothing substantial we can point to as a cause, inductions, no matter how reliable, prove nothing. To offer a common example, when we drop an object and it falls to earth, the explanation offered by classical physics is that it has done so because the unseen force of gravity has acted on its mass. In Hume’s explanation, on the other hand, the existence of gravity is not a fact. What we call “gravity” is merely a convenient description we use to generalize past events.

My critique of induction here is far more modest. My position is that all facts, if we are using the term with philosophical rigor, must be both empirical and personal. We know, and only know, that which we ourselves have experienced. We may induce, after a few observations, that objects released near the surface of the earth are reliably drawn to it. I concede to Hume that we cannot know this has always been so, will always be so, or that something similar would have to occur in all possible worlds. I will even concede that, due to the very incompleteness of our understanding of states of affairs and the fallibility of our sense organs and nervous systems, that by calling something a “fact” we can only mean that it is probable within the sphere of our experience. Despite these sweeping concessions, it is still obvious that induction cannot simply be dismissed. In a practical sense, the observation of correlations between various phenomena is how all organisms capable of learning actually learn. Hume’s objection is interesting and may well be of philosophical use, but I have no intention of trusting in Hume’s skepticism by leaping from a rooftop in the hope that my notion of gravity is purely a habit of mind. It is worth noting that Hume, who lived to the moderate age of sixty-five, does not to appear to have forsworn the mundane physical correlations of the world either.

My position is that experience suffices to assert that the linguistic entity “gravity” does describe a state of affairs, however imperfectly, but that a distinction must be drawn between facts derived from personal experience, and beliefs drawn from the communicated assertions of others. I can test the existence of gravity myself -- even without subjecting myself to the risk of fatality. On the other hand, if someone else asserts that Mt. Everest is the highest peak on earth, unless I want to make the extraordinary effort to test their assertion personally, I must make an induction about their credibility. This must necessarily produce a weaker induction than any I can make from experience. To start with, it suffers from the fallibly of the senses of the person asserting it, compounded by my own in receiving the assertion. Further, I cannot know without empirical verification whether or not the person making the assertion is simply lying. Since I lack direct experience of the cognitive processes of others, this is always a possibility. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the problematic nature of language itself. Symbols are not states of affairs, but representations of states of affairs. Language is always subject to interpretation, which is to say its semantic content varies in accordance with each individual’s understanding of its symbols. Even in essays such as this one, where I am at great pains to define my terms, one must always proceed as though most terms maintained their semantic fidelity without this special effort. Language, too, is capable of describing things that are not states of affairs even without deliberate deception. The party making an assertion can be honest, coherent, and have the same semantic interpretation of terms as the listener – and still be describing something that is a wholly cognitive construct. It is not my intention to imply that information we receive through language alone is worthless. Much of it can and should be believed. Rather, I simply wish to make clear that such information is different in kind from facts derived from experience.

Senses are given a peculiar status in philosophy, probably because of the antiquity of philosophy’s origins. The Greeks and other ancient peoples had a variety of ideas about the physical locus of what they understood as “the mind.” Some thought it was in the heart. Few had much understanding of the function of the brain. Aristotle thought the function of the brain was to cool the blood. All ancient cultures, on the other hand, understood what eyes and ears did, even if they did not know precisely how. They knew the loci of all the physical senses. It is hardly surprising, then, that they thought of senses and minds as very different kinds of things. No one would think that a person without eyes could see, but before the mind was associated with the brain it was at least plausible to think of the mind as non-corporeal. This division of our mind from our senses has persisted, via Descartes and others, into modern times. It might be useful to reexamine this. We now have plenty of reasons to believe that the brain is as necessary to our cognitive existence as our eyes are to our vision. Our minds are features of our nervous systems just as our senses are features of our nervous systems. The cells that make up the critical parts of our sense organs are very similar to the cells that make up our brains. Perhaps it would serve us better to think of our senses and our cognitive capacities as one intimately interconnected whole. If we eliminate the sense-mind distinction and think in terms of whole nervous systems interacting with states of affairs, sense data become more respectable. While admittedly fallible, our direct experience is still the closest approach to knowing a state of affairs we can possibly make.

There are two cognitive realms which are often put forward as non-empirical sources of facts, usually subsumed under the rubric of a priori knowledge. These two candidates are mathematics and logic. We shall address each in turn.

Mathematics

To begin, let’s consider what mathematics is. Fundamentally, mathematics is a language. In application, it is a language that describes states of affairs in terms of either discreet entities or arbitrary divisions of measurable properties. A simple example of how the language of mathematics symbolizes discreet entities is the process of counting.

The figure above consists of 2 dots. By counting the dots, we are engaging in a form of linguistic simplification we referred to earlier. The ability to describe an entity consisting of multiple similar components by naming a single component (“dot”) and assigning it a quantity (“two”) lets us describe an infinite number or entities with a finite number of symbols. Without this ability, a figure of 3 dots would require a completely unique identifier, not merely a concatenation of “three” and “dots.” To symbolize a collection of figures consisting of from one to one thousand dots would require the memorization of a thousand completely unique names. With the ability to count and the example of the figure above, the description “28,721 dots” is not only meaningful but precise. (For the sake of argument, we will ignore potential differences of pattern, size, color, etc.) We need only understand the symbol “dot,” the ten symbols used for decimal numerals, and the system by which decimal numeral symbols are conjoined.

Having learned to count, arithmetic relationships follow naturally with the addition (no pun intended) of a few more symbols. Consider the following constructions:

1 + 1 = 2

At their simplest level, the cognitive operations of arithmetic do not even require symbolization. It seems likely that any sentient animal with an ounce or so of brain could understand the relationship between what we symbolize by “1” and “2” in a purely sensory way. Again, though, the symbols “+” and “=” are abstractions for relationships we can actually see in simple instances but cannot see in large or complex ones. 1 + 1 depicted as dots is easily grasped; 2,329,091 + 28,721 depicted as dots is not.

The problems that occur with arithmetic symbolizations are not ones of coherence (for the most part, mathematics is coherent) – but problems of correspondence. Consider this example:

(The images represent piles of salt.)

If our numeric symbols correspond only to discreet entities, then it is apparent from this illustration that 1 + 1 = 1. Adding two small piles of salt together, we get one larger pile. This is not a trivial matter. Clearly there is some relationship between the original 2 piles and the larger pile that would result from their combination. Just as clearly, 1 + 1 = 1 cannot be taken as a general law of nature. We might as easily have divided the salt from our original 2 piles into several even smaller piles, and concluded 2 = 3, or 2 = 4, or 2 = 5, etc. Even though all entities are countable, the numeric relationships between them don’t necessarily correspond to the language of arithmetic. A quantity “x” cannot equal both 1 and 2. This would violate ex falso quodlibet. (We shall address the factual status of logic later.) If the common arithmetic relationship 1 + 1 = 2 really does symbolize a truth, it is not a universal truth but one which requires additional language to specify its domain.

Well, what about the other possibility -- describing states of affairs in terms of arbitrary divisions of measurable properties? Let’s reconstruct our previous example as follows:

When we measure the mass of the salt (in grams in this case) we appear to have rescued our system of arithmetic as a language capable of reliably describing states of affairs. Again, happily, 1 + 1 = 2. However, by accepting that our system of arithmetic may work on measureable properties like mass but may fail to describe some meaningful relationships between entities we have already dealt it a serious blow.

The problem is that the state of being an entity is not immutable. One might be tempted to think that the problem lies with using vague, amorphous entities like “piles”. After all, a pile is not an entity in any sense but proximity. Unfortunately, the problem goes deeper than the vagueness of the word “pile”.

If one were to dissolve our 2g salt in 100g of water, the result would be 102 grams of salt solution. 2 + 100 = 102. Again, arithmetic has faithfully described the combinations of arbitrary units of mass. Basic chemistry tells us, though, that salt (at least common table salt) is defined by its molecular nature, and that a salt molecule consists of a sodium atom bonded to an atom of chlorine. (For sake of argument, we will treat these assertions about basic chemistry as facts.) By this definition, the entity we identified as salt ceases to exist when dissolved in the water. The salt solution contains water molecules, sodium ions and chlorine ions – but does not, strictly speaking, contain any salt. The term “salt” is not a vague conceptual one like “pile,” but describes an actual material substance – a state of affairs. In other words, the “truth” of arithmetic relationships does not apply to chemical identities either, unless you specify its domain with some non-mathematical language. We might say that two chemical entities have become either one (a salt solution) or three (water molecules, sodium ions and chlorine ions). Here too, the problem is not that mathematics isn’t applicable to chemistry, but simply that isn’t applicable to all relationships between all types of chemical entities. At least with regard to identities, we always need terms that are not native to mathematics to specify the kinds of relationships that can be accurately described mathematically.

In our examples thus far, arithmetic relationships between arbitrary divisions of measurable properties (mass in grams in the cases shown) have consistently held true. Perhaps arithmetic does, at least, express universal truths for material relationships of this sort. Unfortunately, Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity has shown that even mass relationships are not so simple. It turns out that the mass of an object increases with its speed – an occurrence that becomes significant as the object approaches the speed of light. If we could accelerate our 1g salt pile to various large fractions of the speed of light, it would attain masses of 2g, 3g, 4g, etc. Elaborate and expensive experiments have demonstrated that this actually occurs, so it can be said that 1g, 2g, 3g, 4g, etc. are all quantities that could correctly represent the mass of the same concrete entity under different circumstances. Further, using Einstein’s mass-energy equation (E = mc2) does not save us here for essentially the same reason I have stated above: while the relationship between mass and energy can be expressed mathematically, the entities involved in the relationships must be described in language that is external to mathematics. While this hardly invalidates either the concept of mass or the use of mathematics in symbolizing useful relationships in physics, it does show that we cannot put a naïve trust in even the most basic arithmetic assumptions.

There is an often cited quotation from Galileo: "The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics ...without which it is impossible to understand a single word; without which there is only a vain wandering through a dark labyrinth”. Even setting aside the rather broad metaphor implied by the phrase“the book of nature,” this is a very misleading assertion. As a language, all mathematics is really capable of is describing quantitative relationships between symbols. It is a supplementary language which can only describe states of affairs by conjoining its symbols to the symbols of a natural language. Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2 only means something because its component parts, E, m, and c are quantified symbolizations of Energy, mass, and the speed of light. The formally equivalent statement X = yz2 does not, by itself, represent anything. It may be true or false, depending on the states of affairs X, y, and z happen to symbolize. It is not inherently true by virtue of its form. Moreover, there are relationships in nature that are not inherently quantitative, for which un-augmented natural language is a perfectly suitable language of description. The assertion “deer eat dandelions” symbolizes a state of affairs quite efficiently. Mathematically extended descriptions of the motions of a deer’s teeth and the biochemistry of dandelions could be used to represent the same state of affairs, but doing so would negate the very strength of mathematics – the reduction of complexity.

Logic

If mathematics cannot be freed the hegemony of experience, then perhaps logic will fare better. Obviously, there can be no meaningful inference without logic. The idea of proving that logic is inherently untrustworthy is self-contradictory. Indeed, the significance of such an assertion being self-contradictory is, itself, dependent on logic! Unlike mathematics, the rules of logic can be applied to relationships between states of affairs without the need of specifying their applicable domain. Where X = yz2 is only true for certain material substitution of the variables, the same does not seem to apply to rules of inference. Consider dictum de omni for example:

x → y
y → z
______
:: x → z

The very nature of logic is such that one may substitute any conditionals that follow the formal structure without fear that our logical language will conflict with the relationships between states of affairs. One may arrive at false conclusions, but false conclusions are not problems so long as they result from false premises. We could say:

(a) All cats are radishes.
(b) All radishes are vegetables.
(c) Therefore, all cats are vegetables.

The logic holds, because the argument as a whole can be expressed as a conditional of the form:

(a & b) → c

Since a is false, c does not follow by necessity. Logic may claim to express relationships that are applicable to all states of affairs, whereas mathematics does the very useful but more limited work of describing specific relationships between states of affairs as those relationships are uncovered.

Because of their universal applicability we may in some sense call the rules of inference “facts,” but they are no less dependent on empirical verification than the assertion that Mt. Everest is the highest peak on Earth. As evidence for this, consider the following (rather drastic) thought experiment.

Imagine a sapient, conscious human being born without any senses whatsoever. This individual must lack not only the senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, but also any ability to perceive gravity, temperature, motion, pain, or any other entity we would recognize as sensation. Imagine, further, that our unfortunate subject has an otherwise normal, fully-developed human brain. What, we must ask ourselves, would be the cognitive contents of such a brain?

Of course, we cannot know – but we can make educated speculations. There are at least a few mental states that seem to be intrinsic to our brains themselves. Virtually all human beings occasionally dream that they are falling. We can speculate that our insensate human might have such dreams. These dreams end for us when we are startled into consciousness and our physical senses overrule them, but without such senses our imaginary person might continue this odd, non-referential experience of falling indefinitely. On the other hand, it is possible that, lacking the experiences of gravity and motion to refer to, falling dreams might never occur. One can certainly have a latent capacity which circumstances deny expression. People with damaged optic nerves can have the rest of the physical apparatus necessary for sight fully intact. Another universal (or nearly universal) human trait is a fear of snakes. This does not seem to be learned; humans fear the first snake that they see. Is it possible such an instinctual fear might occasionally be triggered without experience? Might our subject have a spontaneous state of anxiety over a nameless imaginary entity, and would that entity be perceived as having a certain form, no matter how vague? Perhaps, but I doubt it.

While we cannot know what such a person would think or know, we are not wholly ignorant of the consequences of less severe forms of congenital sensory deprivation. Studies have shown, for example, that people born deaf and blind have great difficulty grasping the very idea of symbols. It is simply not plausible, therefore, that a totally insensate person would know, a priori, the axioms of arithmetic. In a world without perception, what would there be to count? My assertion is that logic is, in the very strictest sense, a posteriori as well. A prerequisite to understanding any rule of inference is an understanding of the concept that the universe can be divided into discreet entities. Without any empirical knowledge whatsoever is seems likely that the insensate human’s mind and universe would be one in the same.1 Even if, as I’ve conjectured, such a person could experience some manifestation of the universal human fears of snakes, it is questionable whether or not this fear would seem anything other than an unpleasant condition of the universe as a whole. In other words, the entire known universe being comprised of one’s cognitive state, there would be no basis for the concept of any relationship between discreet entities.

While I assert that logic is a posteriori in an absolute sense, the capacity to use certain rules of inference is an intrinsic feature not only of humans, but of many (and perhaps in some sense even all) animals. While this capacity requires experience to manifest itself, the capacity itself is innate to our biological form. When I was taught the rudiments of symbolic logic it struck me immediately that all that I was learning was a language with which to express relationships that I already understood, but that no one had specifically made me aware of. We need to make a distinction between being aware of logical relationships as abstractions, and having the capacity to make certain logical inferences by the very nature of our nervous systems.

Consider the thought experiment in the illustration above. An observer (in this case my cat Laszlo) is positioned to watch a ball rolled across a floor. Laszlo does not know anything about formal logic. The ball rolls behind a chair, disappearing at position A and reappearing at position B. After a couple of trials, Laszlo notices the ball reappearing at position B, and thereafter will run to intercept the ball at position B as soon as he sees it disappear at position A. There is only one plausible explanation for this behavior: Laszlo understands the rule of inference formally known as modus ponens:

a → b
a
______
:: b

Indeed, any conditional behavior whatsoever implies an innate capacity to apply this rule. Any organism capable of learning to initiate a particular behavior in response to a particular sensory stimulus is capable of applying the rule of inference we symbolize as modus ponens.2 The capacity to apply the rule does not require an awareness of the rule itself, but both the capacity to apply the rule and the capacity to be aware of the rule require experience at least of some fundamental kind, the experience of entities and the relationships between them. Thus, experience is a prerequisite to all knowledge, and may even be a prerequisite to all cognitive activity of any kind.

Conclusions

To put the concepts I have outlined above to some practical use, let us briefly consider the epistemological difficulties of two disciplines: economics and quantum physics.

Economic processes, considered in some raw, physical sense, must consist of the aggregate consequences of some large number of individual human behaviors, constrained, of course, but a large number of non-human physical factors. To follow the logic of reductionism, economics reduces to psychology (plus the non-human physical factors); psychology reduces to biology; biology to chemistry; chemistry to physics. While reductionism raises problems of its own, it is reasonable to assume that nothing in economics is fundamentally outside the physical realm. Looked at as physics problems, however, assertions about economic relationships are considerably more complex than our brains can hope to grasp. It is a problem of sheer scale. Even if we could grasp all of the subsidiary causal steps down to the last displacement of an electron, and even putting the problems of data collection and errors of precision at that scale aside, we would still lack the computational resources, even with modern computers, to solve such problems.

As a consequence of our own limitations, when we attempt to explain economic processes we inevitably derive our explanations from gross behavioral truisms, inadequately substantiated theory and statistics drawn from past events. Of these sources, statistics are probably the most reliable. Statistics are, in principle at least, grounded in states of affairs – in things we know to have actually occurred. However, using statistics to make economic predictions presents at least two major problems. First, the people who compile economic statistics (usually governments) generally have a stake in the figures and bias them accordingly. One need only make a cursory examination of the United States’ Consumer Price Index to see how serious this problem can become. Second, it is fundamentally erroneous to assume that a given set of comparable statistics will yield the same economic outcomes in two populations divided by culture, temperament and time. In other words, experiments in economics are accidental and by nature unrepeatable. Derivation of relationships that obtain in one society in one period of history may be illuminating, but certainly cannot serve as the basis for mathematically precise prediction.

Accurate or not, the mathematics involved in economic calculations can be quite elaborate. Again, mathematics is a language, and being the language of precise definition its use tends to imply a degree of understanding that is not necessarily warranted. It is perfectly possible to express erroneous, or even ludicrous, relationships mathematically. Still, it is entirely fair to ask the question – what fraction of the time do economists get their predictions right? Considered from this perspective, the present state of economic understanding is comparable to the state of medical knowledge in ancient times. If a person were sick or injured in Greece of the classical era, he or she would probably have been better off with a physician than without one; this is not to say, however, that such a physician’s ignorance or hubris could not easily result in fatal consequences.

It is not my purpose to discredit economics as a useful discipline, but rather to put it into some sort of intelligible perspective. One must not mistake mathematics and the aura of credentials for a robust, factual understanding of a subject. Nearly the full content of some disciplines, chemistry and geology for example, are within the capacity of the human nervous system to understand. In the case of disciplines like economics or psychology, however, the greater part of the subject’s domain is necessarily beyond our full grasp.3 We may make asymptotic improvements to our statistical and theoretical models, but we struggle in vain against the sheer buzzing swarm of minute but relevant variables.

Quantum physics presents a different problem altogether. It does not appear, at least superficially, that individual processes at that level of physical organization are incalculably complex, and neither does it seem, with deference to Heisenberg, that data collection itself presents a fatal limitation. Rather, quantum physics appears to tax our very ability to understand the behavior of unseen entities symbolically to, and probably beyond, its limit.4

I once heard Lawrence Krauss, a well-known theoretical physicist, express the opinion than no one has ever understood quantum physics. While this is merely anecdotal, it is worth considering. It is hard to imagine any other discipline, except perhaps the rather dubious study of divinity, in which a leading authority would not only make such a confession, but would make it without the slightest embarrassment. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is accepted to be more than a little difficult to grasp, but physicists don’t say that no one, including Einstein, has ever understood it. I believe what Krauss meant by his statement was that, while we can describe quantum relationships mathematically, they are so far outside our normal understanding of states of affairs that we cannot understand them in any other way.

To return to chemical relationships as a basis of comparison, we can imagine shared electrons circling around nuclei in a certain way, thereby binding atoms into molecules. We can have a certain picture in our heads of how such relationships work. The real states of affairs cannot be entirely like the cognitive models we use to grasp them, but the models provide a close enough analogy that we can accurately understand the relationships.

In quantum physics, the similarities between the analogies we can grasp and the underlying states of affairs that actually exist grow ever more tenuous and provisional. Our understanding is grounded neither by direct observation nor by broadly workable analogies, but instead must rest on our confidence in the syntax of mathematics itself. While the mathematics continues to serve up accurate predictions we have some justification in saying the physicists are learning about new states of affairs, but clearly we are probing the outer limits of our cognitive aquarium. The utter inaccessibility of such knowledge to all but a very few minds should alone provide good evidence that, in this direction, we may be nearing the end of our reach. Sooner or later, even the mathematical reductions of this realm seem likely to prove inadequate. One can only describe the inconceivable in terms of the conceivable. Nothing in our evolutionary legacy made it advantageous to be able to unravel the inner secrets of the strange quark.

Summing up, we can know only what we have the capacity to know, and we generally fall a good deal short of that limit. I do not agree with Wittgenstein’s view that we have no business saying anything about the unknowable, but I would allow that no epistemological work gets done by filling the dark void beyond our reach with either gods or fanciful mathematics. The likelihood that we are not the measure of all things is a worthwhile discovery in itself. The aquarium constrains -- but also defines.

___________________________________________________________

1 There is plenty of evidence from studies of early childhood development that even perfectly normal children are not born with the understanding that the concrete universe is something different from their minds.

2 It is important to note that inanimate objects, or even plants, involved in conditional relationships are not applying modus ponens. Such relationships are conditional, but not intentional. When a plant bends toward the light, it isn’t doing so in response to learning. It is aware neither of why it bends, nor that it bends. Its behavior, like that of pebble dropped into a pond, is utterly non-cognitive.

3 Well, at least the interesting aspects of psychology are beyond our full grasp.

4 I am neither a mathematician nor a physicist. I freely admit that I am basing my assertions more on outward impressions of the discipline than on any exact personal knowledge.

Happiness is…

2011-06-08T08:46:00.000-07:00

As a young child, I had a small squarish Peanuts cartoon book entitled “Happiness is…” On each page, it had a captioned drawing of something it proposed to be synonymous with happiness. I believe the first page had a picture captioned “Happiness is a warm puppy.” In the way of a children’s book, it was not a bad effort. Obviously, it was not a very analytical look at happiness, but it was good enough to induce some measure of happiness in any child who could relate to its imagery. It is my intent, here, to do a little better analytically. I will not attempt to actually make anyone happy.

In any non-trivial examination of happiness, one must take it as a given that we are discussing something ultimately reducible to a physical condition of the brain. If one postulates an extra-physical realm for emotion, or any other sort of mental process for that matter, rational discussion ceases. I do not say that we are unfeeling machines, but rather that there is a machinery of feeling. If we discuss emotions without such an understanding, we tend to invent entities rather than describe reality. We can talk about happiness apart from brains, but only in the way we can talk about the aerobatic capabilities of angels or fairies. However, since I am not a neurophysiologist, I will not attempt to examine happiness at the level of synapses and neurotransmitters. Even if I could, I doubt that such an examination would prove fruitful. My purpose in confronting, from the outset, the gross physicality of emotions is simply to shear away the possibility of metaphysical distractions. Feelings are rooted in chemistry, not in spiritual ether.

My second assumption is that matter follows rules that are intrinsic to it, and that at the gross level of complex organisms these material underpinnings still apply. It is not necessary to understand these rules fully, either in detail or in their aggregate, to talk about them meaningfully. We can know that we cannot fly without having a very sophisticated understanding of either gravity or aerodynamics.

Finally, I make the specific claim that natural selection is a gross manifestation of more fundamental natural laws. Evolution is a kind of macro-process of physics, and as such it is as legitimate to interpret our behavior from that perspective as it would be to interpret our physiology in chemical terms. Having stated these assumptions, we may now proceed.

Happiness is a very broad term. It may mean anything from the simplest physical pleasure to the most subtle intellectual satisfaction. I mean to encompass the full range of things that make people “happy” because I believe that all happiness can be reduced to a category of brain states. Different parts of the brain may be involved in different varieties of happiness, but they are all fundamentally physical states. To be a little more specific, all forms of happiness are brain states to which we are attracted. To put this in the form of a working definition:

A state of happiness is any condition which our conscious behavior aims to achieve.

We often behave in ways that ultimately fail to achieve a state of happiness, but I am making a definitional claim that happiness is the goal of every deliberate action that we make. We may fail
because our capacity to foresee the consequences of our actions is imperfect, because our goals are unattainable, or because we sacrifice a future state of happiness for an immediate one, but we strive for happiness nonetheless.

The obvious corollary to our working definition of happiness is:

A state of suffering is any condition which our conscious behavior aims to avoid.

Again, this is a definitional claim. If an individual avoids something, it constitutes a perceived state of suffering for that individual. In this formulation there are no absolute states of either happiness or suffering that are common to everyone. One individual’s delight may be another’s misery. For this reason, I have forsaken the usual formulation that pleasure and pain are the underlying motivations of all sentient beings. These two conditions usually have the connotation of being essentially sensations, which is too limiting of a realm of motivation to account for all behavior. Further, pleasure and pain can motivate certain peculiar individuals in unexpectedly contrary ways, and even normal human beings may be willing to endure certain pains for “pleasures” with no obvious physical manifestations. For example, a person might endure a vaccine injection for the sake of future health, even though that “health” will never be manifest in a particular sensation. Being definitional, my claims about happiness and suffering are less liable to contradiction.

Given that humans evolved to their present state under the same sort of selective pressures that drive evolution in other organisms, it is reasonable to suppose that those things that make us happy – those things to which we are attracted – are typically things that helped us to survive in the past. The enjoyment of things like food and sex are obvious prerequisites to our survival as a species, for example. Finding happiness in problem solving is also straightforwardly advantageous as a survival trait.

Those things that at least some human beings enjoy that are disadvantageous or neutral to the project of survival can be attributed to one of three types of causes. First, it may be that something once advantageous has become disadvantageous under current conditions. Our taste for sweet or fatty foods was beneficial in an environment in which such things were not superabundant. It is now a source of happiness that induces obesity and diabetes. Second, non-advantageous sources of happiness may be the result of natural variation. Some fraction of any population is always going to exhibit anomalous behaviors (motivated by anomalous desires). Evolution, it must be understood, does not make moral judgments. It simply populates the future with the descendents of the successful procreators of the present. Homosexuality, for example, is a human variation that obviously has no reproductive benefits. Nature does not mind if an individual foregoes reproduction, it just puts an end to that individual’s particular genes. Finally, some sources of happiness are clearly the consequences of capabilities that have evolved in association with some other function. It is hard to imagine where an appreciation for art or music came from if not from simply having a brain that acquired a taste for patterns after generations of observation and problem solving. Even today, connoisseurship doesn’t confer enough advantage to conceivably be a driving force in evolution. We appreciate art and music because we can, and because doing so is at least rarely harmful.

Returning to our main line of thought, happiness and suffering are the motive forces of behavior. Or, more precisely, they are the perceived experiences that accompany those motive forces. It is certainly possible to separate the perceived experiences from any functional use, even at the organic level. Give a person certain drugs, and he or she will be happy or miserable in the complete absence of any other circumstantial cause. Under normal circumstances, however, the motive forces of happiness and suffering drive complex behavior in pretty much the same sense that electricity drives a computer. Without such a force, the machinery alone does nothing. Without emotional reinforcement of at least some minimal kind, we would be incapable of either directed action or directed thought.

I do not wish to imply that what makes us happy is entirely predetermined by genetics. I believe it largely is, but brains are works in progress and change in response to the environments in which they are immersed. Music offers a good example of this environmental acculturation. There may be something fundamental about music that practically all humans enjoy, but it would be ridiculous to think that some people have classical music genes, while others might have reggae genes. To a considerable extent, our brains adapt our conditions of happiness to fit our particular circumstances.

Happiness may find its evolutionary origin in some primordial physical pleasure, but it is clear that the brain is capable shifting its goals around to create new behavioral objectives. Most things modern humans do involves pursuing happiness through a tangle of symbols and other human constructs, and we seem to take pleasure in such abstract ventures with or without any tangible gain. What does one achieve by winning a private game of chess or solving a crossword puzzle? If one derives a sense of security from prayer or other worship, where exactly does that sense of security come from? Even a theist has to admit that other people’s gods are probably illusory, but give those people comfort nevertheless. Organisms with complex brains produce constructs that that lead to behavioral variation in a way analogous to the way all organisms produce bodily variation. I suspect, too, that these mental variations, on average, don’t fare any better than their physical counterparts. We do much that only makes our lives more difficult. If those difficulties are severe enough, our survival as individuals and as cultures hangs in the balance.

The sources of happiness are not entirely genetic, and neither are they entirely memetic. This is to say that while we are the products of both physical inheritance and culture, we are also the products of individual accident. I enjoy the music of Erik Satie, for example, even though no one in my family, and no one I know in my particular culture, shares this sentiment. Some resonance with Satie’s music is apparently a characteristic of my particular brain, and I was made aware of that resonance by an accident of circumstance. Similarly, people like or dislike certain foods, either because of some individual sensory response or because certain individual positive or negative events have been associated with those foods. Happiness and suffering are the expression of a unique set of mental preferences that are continuously remolded by one’s interaction with the world.

In an earlier work, I demonstrated that free will, in the sense of being a true originator of causal processes, is an illusion.1 This bears heavily on the notion of happiness, because it is commonly supposed that happiness and freedom are almost inseparable. This is plainly false, at least in terms of my definition of happiness. Consider that definition again:

A state of happiness is any condition which our conscious behavior aims to achieve.

Since freedom, in the sense of being independent of the rigors of external causes, does not even exist it would be ridiculous to talk about it in connection with a behavioral goal. The second sense in which we use the term “freedom,” the sense that freedom is the capacity to carry out our plans without obstruction, bears some relationship to happiness, but the two things are still not inseparable. There are, for example, people who are happiest under what the rest of us might consider very constraining systems. There are many people who thrive in very tight military hierarchies. There are even a few people who find themselves most comfortable in prison. For such people, happiness consists of letting someone else make most of their decisions, and their behaviors tend to seek out such orderly and limiting environments. I think it is fair to say that monastics and others who thrive under severe religious regimens are also examples of this mindset.

A variant of the “happiness is freedom” hypothesis is the belief that the more choices we have, the happier we are. First, I think this is an illusory position on its face. Whether we want to recognize it or not, our decision-making processes are ultimately brain processes too. Until someone can point to something which goes on in the brain that is not subject to the laws of physics and chemistry, the very term “choice” will remain essentially meaningless. One can only speak intelligibly about perceived choices, which is to say sensory, memory, and conceptual entities that the brain has not yet processed into action. Putting this technical objection aside, the assertion that more happiness is synonymous with more choices is still false. Even ignoring the military and religious cases noted above, decision making becomes a burden to even the most free-spirited, ungovernable personalities beyond a certain point.

To give a trivial example of such overload, imagine going into an ice cream parlor and being given a catalog of not 31, but perhaps ten or twenty thousand available flavors. On picking something appetizing on page twenty five, imagine then being made to specify the amount of ice cream you want to the nearest gram, your exact temperature preference to the nearest tenth degree, and then to have to select the shape you want in formed into from yet another large catalog of possibilities. This would certainly be an abundance of choices, but would hardly make most people very happy. It is true that many people seem to delight in ordering their Starbucks coffee to exacting specifications, but they are not exacting without limit. Further, when people place such complex orders, there appear to be other factors involved than a delight in variety. A delight in affected connoisseurship is only the first that leaps to mind.

Evolution has no doubt inclined most of us to find happiness in abundance, for which the perception of choice is probably a mere proxy. An abundance of food, for example, is obviously conducive to survival so long as one doesn’t gorge oneself into an unhealthy state. If one perceives a choice of desirable foods, it implies abundance as a precondition. In the particular case of food, variety is also healthy in itself. I doubt, though, that an ape offered ten bananas, ten oranges, ten apples, and ten melons is going to be any less happy than the same ape offered forty unique varieties of fruit. For most individuals, the pleasures of choice reach a point of saturation pretty quickly.

I believe this analytical examination of happiness is useful, not only because it frees us of metaphysical constructs but because it frees us of the narrow confines of our usual cultural norms. All human beings, indeed all conscious beings, seek happiness in accordance with their own genetic and environmental histories. The sum of what makes us happy or unhappy is the greater part of what defines us as individuals. While my perspective of this is an essentially neutral one, I am not a relativist. Even without saying that some forms of happiness are “better” than others, it is still possible to say that some forms of happiness are more attainable that others, lead to less inevitable suffering, and are more conducive to survival. Deriving happiness from other peoples’ misery always makes more suffering in the world, and often even makes more suffering than happiness for the perpetrator. Deriving most of one’s happiness from the illusory constructs of the imagination is also a losing pursuit. The brain evolved to deal with the things of the physical world, and the physical world still has the power to bite us if we take it for granted.

Each of us is work in progress, a sort of locus of passions, fears, knowledge and misconceptions continuously re-tabulating itself and cranking the results out in the form of behavior. Happiness is the reward we get when we find that we have momentarily gotten where we wanted to go. Suffering is what we feel when we don’t get there, or when we do and discover it is not what we expected.

---------------------------------------------

1 http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2010/03/case-against-existence-of-free-will.html

President Obama's Long Form Birth Certificate

2011-05-26T18:40:00.000-07:00

I am not a "birther". I’ve never been especially impressed with President Obama, but neither have I been impressed with many of his detractors. I began to look into the issue of his birth certificate very recently because a friend sent me a link to a YouTube video that caught my attention. I have decades of experience with digitally processed images, scanners, and things of that sort. It appeared to me that the author of the YouTube video had uncovered something interesting, so I decided to examine the PDF of the long form birth certificate myself, largely out of professional curiosity. I have political opinions on this issue, but I will reserve any comment on those opinions until the end. First, I will deal, to the best of my ability, in facts.

[Click to Enlarge]

The image above is a portion of the document in question, and is provided only for reference. The PDF document is greater in extent and contains more information. Everything I care to say has to do with the region above, and not with the peculiarities of the stamps, the security paper, etc.

The actual PDF on the Whitehouse web site is divided into a number of layers. There is a background layer, which includes the pattern of the green security paper, the lines of the form, and an odd scattering of seemingly random parts of the text, including parts of the typed and written text. There are several higher layers that include individual stamps. Between the background layer and the stamp layers is a single layer that contains most of the printed, typed, and written material. It is this layer I will chiefly focus on.

I cannot say with any certainty how the separate image layers were generated. As others have pointed out, such layering is not a normal artifact of the scanning process, and this was claimed to have been a document scanned from a copy. As has also been pointed out, PDF optimization can create layers but the layers this document is sorted into is not consistent with that process. I tend to agree, but for the purposes of my evidence it doesn’t really matter how the layers were originally generated. The primary text layer got there somehow, and I intend to show that it contains features that are almost certain evidence of tampering in and of themselves.

The primary text layer has to have been, at some point, reduced to a binary image. Let me try to explain this in layman’s terms. All digital images consist of a grid of individual picture elements – "pixels". In a color image, each pixel has a particular color. In a grayscale image, each pixel is a shade of grey. In a binary image, each pixel is normally either white or black. Binary images have an unmistakable "jagged" look. Images of text are commonly saved in binary form, because binary data saves file space. PDF optimization can create a layer of binary material out of things like text and form lines. This may or may not be how the primary text layer was created, but in any case it is binary, composed of pixels of only two types.

When a typed character is reduced to a binary image, it becomes a pattern of black and white squares. If you type a thousand letter "B’s" on an old manual typewriter, like the one a person would have used to fill in a 1961 birth certificate, no two letters will be exactly alike. The grain of the paper and the typewriter ribbon, the pressure and the speed with which one strikes the key, and other factors produce many variations on the same basic letter. When you scan such a typed document as an image, you create even more variations because of the physical properties of the scanner. While binary images of letters are less varied than color or grayscale ones of the same resolution, they are still so varied that at the 300 dpi resolution of the long form birth certificate PDF, it would be highly improbable to find two letters exactly alike. The President’s birth certificate contains at least two letters that are absolutely identical, pixel for pixel.

[Click to Enlarge]

If a person has a layer of binary text he or she wants to make changes to, the easiest way to do it is to copy words or characters that already exist elsewhere in the text. One can just copy and paste letters to make new words, rather like an old kidnapper’s ransom note. As you can see in the illustration above (magnified for clarity), the "B" and the second "I" in "OBAMA, II" are identical to the same two letters in other places. It is likely they were copied to, and not from, this location for reasons I will outline later.

Modifying binary text of this kind is comparatively easy to do, because the white (or transparent) background behind the images eliminates the risk of creating artifacts in the process of moving letters around. It is also fairly easy to alter the copied letters to make them look authentic. That is, if one understands what one is doing and isn’t careless.

[Click to Enlarge]

To understand just how improbable it would be to find two identical letters in the President’s birth certificate, I have shown two examples of close mismatches (again magnified for clarity). The green and red letters were taken from different places in the document. The black letters in between show the pixels shared in common, while the red and green pixels around the edge of the black letters show the differences. The extent of the variation is bound to vary with the size and complexity of the letter, but both the "S" and the "B" vary by more than forty pixels. As I’ve said, these are close mismatches, and there are plenty of matches in the document, struck with the same key, that vary even more. Still, let’s err on the side of caution and say that the average variation is about 40 pixels.

If the variation were much smaller, say, only one pixel, then there would only be two possible patterns for each letter. The odds of any two letters of the same type being identical would be 50%. If they varied by only two pixels, there would be four possible patterns – a 25% chance of an identical match. The odds decrease exponentially; 2 raised to the 40th power is a staggering number: 1,099,511,627,776. In other words, 40 randomly varying pixels make the odds of any two letters of the same type being identical about one in a trillion. Of course, there may be some patterns that are more likely than others; there are multiple capital "B’s" and "I’s" in the document, but even allowing this it is hard to imagine the odds getting any better than one in a billion. This is more than close enough for practical certainty. There may be more matching letters in the document for all I know. I only spent a couple of hours looking.

Now, consider where the identical matches occur. They occur in the President’s last name. The inference here is obvious. The likely purpose of the forgery was to hide the fact that the President was born out of wedlock, and that his last name on the original document was "Dunham", his mother’s maiden name.

[Click to Enlarge]

As you can see above, the apparent manipulation of the President’s mother’s signature also adds weight to the theory that he was simply illegitimate. Her partial signature is the only signature material on the binary text layer. It is plausible that "Obama" was added and "…unham" was overwritten from the same source to make the alteration less conspicuous. Note, too, that if "OBAMA, II" replaced "DUNHAM" in the typed text of the President’s name, two of the needed letters, "A" and "M," were already at hand. I have searched in vain for the missing "O", second "A", the comma, and second "I". Perhaps they were modified from other letters. Someone with more time, better software, and a flair for statistical analysis may succeed where I have failed.

The matching letters, I believe, are conclusive evidence of tampering. The document does hold certain other mysteries, many of them no doubt wholly innocent . Finding letters moved from place to place makes the proposition that the birth certificate is a forgery from the ground up rather unlikely. It would have been far easier to have cleaned someone else’s form and simply typed in all the text. I believe the President was probably born when and where he said he was, and had the biological parents he has always claimed to have had.

Presuming my theory about the President’s illegitimacy is correct, there is something both ironic and sad about the whole affair. It hardly matters to me whether his parents were married or not. This is not 1961, and I doubt that it would matter to most people now. The people it would matter to probably despise Obama anyway. It is hard for me to believe that none of the experts among the president’s enemies have found the same evidence and come to the same conclusions I have. It seems at least plausible that they have made the political calculation that rousing suspicions of a "Manchurian candidate" is a profitable adventure, but exposing a person’s illegitimacy might only seem a callous, brutal exercise. Lacking either any special ill will or political calculation, I, however, can present my evidence with an entirely clean conscience. Truth cannot be negotiated.

7/4/2011 - Note:

This article has, not surprisingly, stirred up a considerable amount of anger from some, and criticism in some variety. Some of these criticisms may be worth looking into, and, having given the matter consideration, I would like to address two of them.

There has been a persistent criticism that there is no controlled study here to support my technical evidence. My initial view was that, given the nature of my argument, comparison with other documents hardly seemed necessary. The first person who raised this issue (Mr. Planck) demanded a double-blind study of Hawaiian birth certificates of the same age. Since this is obviously beyond my resources either in time, money, or authority this seemed to be just an expedient attempt to stifle the matter. Having given this further consideration, I realize there are other types of control studies that can be done. I don't have the time to do the work at the moment, but I welcome anyone else to conduct the following experiment.

One would need to type, on a manual typewriter, some large number of letter "B"s. The more the better, but the larger the number the more tedious the matching process is going to be. The sheet should be copied on a modern copier once, preferably but not necessarily onto security paper of the approximate type used for the president's birth certificate. The copy should be scanned at the same resolution one sees on the PDF. I don't recall what that resolution turned out to be, but the PDF can be used as a guide. The scan can be either a TIFF or can go directly to PDF if the scanner allows. (This may seem haphazard, but since I don't know the exact process used to scan and optimize the birth certificate, we can only be so precise.) Optimize the scanned image. Adobe Acrobat Professional is the software I would use, but you might be able to optimize in other Adobe applications as well. Extract the resultant binary text layer from the resultant PDF. (I would suggest using Adobe Illustrator for this process.) Now comes the fun part. Compare each "B" with every other "B" to see if any of them match. If you are proficient with Adobe Photoshop this is not as bad as it sounds. Make a duplicate layer and use the "Difference" setting. Matching "B"s will disappear, while non-matching ones will show the differences. Scoot the layer around in a systematic way, and you should be able to complete the comparisons in a few hours. Report the number of exact matches you find, if any. If the pixel dimensions of the characters are about the same, you do the process right, and you find a match in a something less than a thousand characters, I will consider my argument refuted and publicly say so. I reserve the right to raise any doubts I might have about your process, but even if I doubt it I will still post a link to you trial on my original article -- as long as you've had the courtesy to be civil.

Could I do this test myself? Yes, but I don't have either the manual typewriter or the time. It hardly matters who conducts the experiment.

My second proposal is to do something similar regarding my statistical analysis. If you can show that my math is wrong, I'll post a link to you evidence on my original article. If I understand your refutation and accept it as correct, I will acknowledge my error.

I check comments on my site regularly, and can be reached by commenting on this post.

e.m.c.

Quantitative Easing or "How I learned to stop worrying and love inflationary policy"

2011-05-16T09:20:00.000-07:00

An amusing and terrible realization dawned on me the other day. Let's take it as a given that the chief purpose of the US Federal Reserve’s recent policy of “quantitative easing” (i.e., printing money out of thin air) is to produce enough inflation to scare people into spending their money before they lose it. At least in theory, as people spend the money they had been sitting on, the additional economic activity creates growth, jobs, prosperity, etc. This is basic economic theory. Unfortunately, even ignoring the deep structural problems presented by peak oil and other resources issues, “quantitative easing” was fatally handicapped from the outset.

The Consumer Price Index, America’s official index of inflation, has been so jiggered up with substitution, hedonics, and various other accounting tricks to make the number look less scary (so politicians can get reelected) that the official inflation rate is probably at least 10% lower than the real one. In other words, while the Fed wants to scare you into some constructive spending, the whole inertia of official statistics seeks to lull you into the comfortable illusion that things are really not that bad. The only forms of inflation ordinary people notice in the short term are in food and gasoline, both of which have long since been taken out of the CPI specifically to make the rate look lower. “Quantitative easing” is hindered from sending signals to the economy because the recipients are already largely anesthetized to the message. It would take hyperinflation to break the barrier of the government's own dishonest statistics. Of course, either the congress or the president could remedy this problem at any time by giving us all the true figures on inflation, and admit that both political parties have been lying to us for decades. Really, they could…

I can’t help but be reminded of Stanley Kubrick’s famous movie, Dr. Strangelove. In that movie, the Soviets built a doomsday device that would trigger automatically if their nation was attacked. It should have been, therefore, the ultimate deterrent to nuclear war. Unfortunately, they kept it a secret.

The Epistemology of Panic

2011-05-03T08:54:00.000-07:00

I have a friend whom I have always considered sane. He’s a decent, useful member of society. He has a reasonable, practical mind in most respects. He can solve problems. He has religious beliefs, but has never struck me as a zealot. Nevertheless, my friend now believes that we are on the cusp of the biblical “end times”. He cites, as evidence, the words of a vague collection of Christian scholars he does not know. He accepts their authority not on the basis of their past reliability, but merely on the personal resonance of their claims.

At the same time, my friend shrugs off impending calamities for which there is good evidence. He believes that God can destroy America, but scoffs at the idea that anyone or anything else can. Climate and energy emergencies are as unreal to him as his religious apocalypse is to me. He clings to words and symbols, like “freedom” and the flag. It does not seem to register that in a universe at the whim of a vengeful deity the kind of freedom he imagines would be impossible. It does not seem to matter that the flag doesn’t have a place in scripture. Indeed, the world that I see as a collision of natural forces acting in a painful but still orderly way, he sees as a collection of emotional loci without any threads to connect them. I watch, in horror and fascination, what I can only describe as the functional collapse of a human mind.

I have long had a gnawing apprehension that faith has very dangerous potentials. If one begins to believe things undemonstrated by experience, it erodes the very basis of one’s understanding. It begins by ignoring the empirical world, and ends by denying it. I see this everywhere I turn now. It is not the sole province of the religious. It is abundantly clear that most economists, politicians and business people do not believe the physical world puts any limit of expansion. They believe we can grow the population and the economy at a few percent per annum forever, provided only that we balance the numbers correctly. That human ingenuity has no bounds. That we will solve all problems as needed, again, if we just manage to keep our organizational ducks in a row. If these beliefs are any better than scriptural dogmas, I challenge anyone to show me how.

The Death of Bin Laden

2011-05-02T08:51:00.000-07:00

Last night I waited for the president to tell us what the press already had, namely that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. Once again, being witness to history leaves me ill at ease. I certainly wouldn't question that a kind of justice was done. Delusional, homicidal maniacs are never a good thing to have around, and all the less so if they are charismatic enough to lead mass movements. Nevertheless, when I hear of the crowds outside the White House mindlessly chanting "U-S-A!" I sense that we have only won the latest round or a deepening blood feud. Our masses are as delusional to think that this victory will make radical Islam cower as their masses were to think that 9/11 would make us cower. My post of last week seems all the more prescient now.

The president, of course, took credit. One should not expect nobility from politicians. He was careful, as Bush was, to try not to cast our actions as a general assault on Islam, which in some abstract legalistic sense it actually isn’t. I have a hard time imagining, however, that we have not created a martyr in the eyes of many. People are not rational about these things.

My local TV station announced that they’d received a flood of emails triumphantly forecasting that oil prices will go down now. Perhaps these people were only predicting that commodity speculators might sell off enough of their oil futures to drop the price of few dollars a barrel. Perhaps – but I doubt it. I think what they believe is that we licked those Arab’s good, and now they’ll open the tap for fear we’ll whack them hard again. God bless the U.S.A. – we have our pride back now! It’s still inconceivable to the average American that the oil party may be rapidly winding down, scared Arabs or no scared Arabs.

Militant Islam and U.S. Policy

2011-04-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

The present relationship between militant Islam and the United States can be explained in terms of two basic human traits. The first is the belief in out-group homogeneity. The second is an irrational reliance on hope.

Out-group homogeneity can be neatly summarized by the classic bigot’s dictum – “Those people are all alike.” It is the belief that one’s perceived enemies are people with a uniform set of characteristics and motivations. In other words, our enemies are not individuals with unique personalities like ourselves; they are just a homogenous mass, each interchangeable with any other. They are people in some raw physical sense, but they are not persons like we are.

It is clear from their public statements that Al Qaeda’s leadership takes the stance that all Americans and other western peoples are a monolithic mass. They hold us collectively responsible for a variety of offenses against Islam. Their argument is that we elect our leaders, and are therefore collectively responsible for the actions of our governments. To kill any westerner, then, is to strike a blow in defense of Islam. If I were to assume that every Muslim shares this position, I would be indulging in a belief in out-group homogeneity myself. It is never quite that simple. In all likelihood, there are many more Muslims who vaguely sympathize with Al Qaeda than there are actual potential suicide bombers. It is also almost certainly true that the vast majority of Muslims care more about the immediate problems of their daily lives than they do about their grievances with distant foreigners. Only a very few fanatics live and breathe ideology; most people spend their energies on issues nearer to home.

Unfortunately, knowing that Muslims are individuals does not make the conflict between their culture and ours disappear. It is true that most Muslims, and particularly most Arabs, do not like us. Their reasons vary. Some focus on our unquestioning support of their enemy, Israel. Others resent the assortment of corrupt dictatorships we have nurtured within the Muslim world. The more devoutly religious hate us for desecrating their holy lands with our mere presence. There is, in fact, very little reason that many Muslims should like us. Their culture and ours are antithetical. Nevertheless, neither party is in a position to ignore the other. We are trapped in a mutually distasteful and unwanted embrace. We need the oil under their lands to fuel our way of life. They need the goods that they can ultimately exchange for that oil to support their growing population. They hold a power over our economy that we resent; we distort their societies in ways that they resent. It is only the pursuit of self-interest that has bound us together.

U.S. policy toward the oil producers of the Middle East has until now been fairly simple. From Franklin Roosevelt through the second Bush administration, our policy has been to support pliable authoritarian regimes in the region, and ignore the Arab populous whenever possible. Heartless as it may sound, it is pointless to be morally indignant about such policies. No nation I am aware of makes a habit of putting the interest of a foreign populous above its own national interests. Other great powers have propped up dictators and created puppet regimes. In our quest for oil, we have only pursued the most effective option left to us in a post-WW2 political climate that abjures brute conquest or other people’s sovereign lands and resources. A policy of supporting dictators has often proven successful, at least in the short term. It has only failed when an authoritarian partner overstepped his acceptable limits (as Saddam Hussein did in Iraq) or when he became excessively burdensome to his own people (as Mubarak did in Egypt or the Shah did in Iran).

Shows of international altruism and human fellowship offer an alternative approach. While such policies have a nice progressive feel about them, we should not be fooled. They are almost always motivated by some political gain, either international, domestic, or both. This strategy of friendly gestures appears to be the course the Obama administration is undertaking with Islam. Our president has made conciliatory speeches in Muslim capitols, has charged NASA’s chief administrator, Charles Bolden, with the incongruous task of Muslim outreach, and has taken a relatively cool stance toward Israel. The obvious inference is that he is trying to make friends among the Muslim public, particularly the Arabs, rather than continuing the age old policy of manipulating their resources through local authoritarian regimes. Here we have “the audacity of hope” expressed in actual doctrine. Nice though it may seem, it is difficult to have much confidence in this approach.1 People with long standing grudges are not easily swayed by words or gestures. They require real substance -- if they can be swayed at all. At this point in our history, an American president would probably need to sever our alliance with Israel entirely to make any popular headway in the Arab world. Whether one is a fan of Israel or not, one must agree that cutting them adrift would not be likely to improve stability in the Middle East. They, too, are a legacy America is stuck with.

The best that Obama’s sweet talking can hope to achieve internationally is to nudge some little fraction of non-committed Muslims a few inches toward our cause. Our cadre of crooked local rulers knows the game, and doesn’t need the public relations overtures. The fanatics of Al Qaeda and its affiliates are obviously well beyond the reach of anybody’s secular charm. The only words that interest them were written in the 7th century. A young Muslim with no future, fervent faith, and nothing better to do with his life than to end it in an explosion, is unlikely be halted in his tracks by Obama’s measured show of friendship. Bin Laden offers paradise; Obama offers nothing but his questionable charm.

The president’s gestures make a greater impression domestically, however. They serve to infuriate and terrify the American conservative base. Americans of most stripes believe in out-group homogeneity too. While friendly diplomatic overtures cheer liberals, who want to see Muslims as essentially just misunderstood (if perhaps uncomfortably misogynist), the same policies leave conservatives in an apoplectic fume. “These are the people who attacked us on 9-11!?” they shout -- as if every Muslim in the world, all 1.5 billion of them, were personally complicit in the attack. Having seen this attitude at first hand many times, I believe there is very little short of the exhaustion of war that would moderate such views.

The exhaustion of war, unfortunately, is very likely what we shall have. Whatever one may say about the hardened bigotry that exists on both sides, the fact remains that the Middle East still has the largest concentration of the world’s oil reserves, and America will not tolerate the consequences of losing that supply for the sake of either moral principle of international law. Like it or not, a widening general war between the west and Islam appears all but inevitable. The opening moves are now well behind us. Given the religious, cultural, and in most cases even racial differences, the conflict to come is bound to be a very ugly affair. With so much a stake, it is bound to also be long. A miraculous softening of popular sentiment would, of course, be welcome -- but I do not expect one.

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1 Venezuela’s Hugo Chaves attempted something similar by offering poor Americans free heating oil. This, at least, was a substantial material offer, but nevertheless failed to create any pro-Venezuelan sentiment worth noting.

Martha

2011-04-12T09:17:00.000-07:00

When I was a child, I was introduced to the story of the passenger pigeon. About the size of a dove and rather nondescript in appearance, this bird was once so common that its flocks could fill the sky. It was hunted to extinction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely to provide cheap meat for cities in the eastern United States. As a boy of five or six, I saw the stuffed bodies of several passenger pigeons at the Cincinnati zoo. There was also a bronze statue of the very last surviving pigeon, who had died at the zoo in 1914. The zookeepers had named her Martha. A tiny stone building housed the bodies and a few pictures, as a sort of memorial gesture. I remember looking up at the desiccated, dusty specimens in the display case, trying to imagine that they had once been alive. They were as inanimate as corn husks. Thinking about this pigeon holocaust, back in the distant past before my parents had been born, was enough to bring a tear to my eye. “Human beings are cruel and thoughtless,” I concluded then and there. I was ashamed of my species.

I am long since grown. I have almost forgotten the age when I had no idea there was any difference between emotions and the truth. I rarely cry over anything now, least of all dead pigeons. Nature doesn’t change because we have certain feelings about it, and neither does it stay the same because we want it to. If we want to see nature as it really is, we have to put aside our notions of how we feel it ought to be.

Facts are simply facts. All wild animals (and probably most tame ones too, including people) spend their lives in one long quest for food, mates, and security. Each individual will die. There are no exceptions. Sooner or later, either the probabilities of predation or accident will catch up with you, your food will run out, or you will succumb to old age or disease. This is nature. I do not now believe that the last passenger pigeon suffered in any special way that ordinary pigeons don’t. Martha, the last of her kind, lived, probably had good days and bad days in some unknowable pigeon way, and died. Individual animals know happiness and suffering; species do not. In the same way, individual human beings know suffering – while nations do not. It is each of us that possess the fleeting quality of being alive – it is never the collective.

Nature isn’t kind to species. The various forms of plants and animals arise through the inexorable processes of biology. Some are well adapted to their circumstances and thrive for a time. Others, that are less well adapted, decline and disappear. This is evolution. It is nature in actual practice. Our hubris as humans is that we have settled on the peculiar idea that we are not a part of nature -- that we are somehow above the process looking down. This is nothing but make-believe and human chauvinism. Like Martha, we are born, we live out our measure of summers and winters, and we submit to the permanent dissolution of our consciousness in death. This is nature too.

We now may be more numerous than passenger pigeons ever were. We are unusual animals, to be sure, with our technology and social complexities, but we are subject to natural limits whether we like them or not. We thrive under conditions that are favorable to us and will decline when those conditions become unfavorable. We just happen to be dynamic enough, and numerous enough, to drive many other species into extinction. Humanity, from a neutral point of view, is like a swarm of locusts or a bloom of algae. Collectively, we are an enormous, sudden and spectacular natural event. Individually, we are just hungry, restless, inquisitive animals. Civilization is neither a noble march of progress nor an environmental evil. It is just what biology makes it. Like locust swarms and red tide, it is a population event – something that expands to meet its natural limits and then subsides. We are neither a threat to the processes of biology as a whole, nor are we the custodians of those processes. Nature is not our friend. Nature is not our enemy. It is the context in which each of us exists, even if we never see the ocean, a wild animal, or a tree firsthand.

The emotion that I once felt for the fate of the passenger pigeon may have been intellectually misplaced, but it certainly was real. The fact that our feelings do not change reality to suit us doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Hearts, too, are natural things. Whoever decided to call the last pigeon Martha did so with some sense that she was a being, an animal with life and a mind, and not an inanimate lump of bronze like her statue. We may be subject to nature in every respect, but we are not just mechanisms. We have the capacity of awareness, and the most fundamental things of which we are aware is that we are alive and conscious, and that other beings around us are alive and conscious too. To look into the eye of a stuffed specimen in a display case is to see only a body – but to look into the eye of any living animal, be it a pigeon or a human being, is to be aware of a mind, however unreachable or alien. We see an unmistakable reflection of ourselves. We experience, directly, what life is.

It is when we begin not to see people and animals as beings that we descend into a mere mechanical existence. Perhaps what we should remember about the passenger pigeon is not that we drove them to extinction, but that we mined them as unfeelingly as though they had been a seam of coal. We treated them as things, and to that extent we became mere things ourselves.

Life on Earth is not going to end because we snuff out the existence of a group of birds with a certain pattern of plumage, or a type of fish with a certain number of stripes. The biosphere has recovered from more egregious insults than we are likely to inflict. Our actions are unlikely to put an end to photosynthesis, sexual reproduction, the tetrapod body plan, lungs, wings, or any other of biology’s pivotal inventions. We will reshape the world. The damage that we do is almost all attributable to our exponentiating numbers, but it would be naïve to imagine that any individual is going to forsake reproduction, let alone existence, for the sake a bird or a fish. Our collective trajectory will play itself out, a collection of forces too large for us to grasp except in fragmentary glimpses.

Martha’s little shrine is not an apology to nature. It is a monument to the irreconcilability of our compassion and our appetite. This is who and what we are.

Global Warming Reheated

2011-03-29T08:50:00.000-07:00

The public wrangling over global warming reveals more about human nature than it does about the physics of the atmosphere. A scientific proposition with such enormous negative social consequences was bound to produce an active and not-particularly-scientific opposition. Likewise, the creation of an active opposition to the global warming hypothesis has itself produced a counter-reaction of activist supporters. Between the two camps – conservatives on one hand and liberals on the other – a great deal of hot air has definitely been produced, and a wholly scientific question has been obscured with ideology. Worse still, this ideological bickering has seized the public’s attention, masking a more immediate fossil fuel crisis that is likely to make the global warming debate seem painfully naïve.

Let’s start with what passes for “debate.” In brief, the common conservative position is that global warming is a hoax. This is really quite a claim. To believe global warming is a hoax, you have to assume that a very large number of the world’s scientists are willing participants in a conspiracy. You have to believe they all got together in secret and agreed to just dispense with the core scientific principle of fidelity to the data, and proceeded to cook the books in a way which might wreck havoc on the world’s economy but offer no obvious benefit to themselves. As I said, it’s quite a claim.

Those of us who remember the beginnings of the global warming debate, back in the 1970’s or before, remember a scientific community that was very reluctant to commit itself. “It might be happening,” they said, “but let’s wait for more data.” It took an enormous amount of data and a great deal of time, often decades, to convince the great majority of the world’s scientists that the global warming hypothesis was a fact. The hoax position, which implies that the world’s climate scientists coalesced enthusiastically around a handful of prominent activists, is not only contrary to the discipline of science itself, but is contrary to the actual history of the global warming hypothesis.

The counter argument of many conservatives, from commentators on Fox News to many ordinary mortals that I work with, tends to take the following form: “Look at all the snow and cold weather we’ve had this year – you call that global warming!?” It is as if these people envision the Earth’s atmosphere as a bathtub full of hot water. Pour a little hot water in, and pretty soon the bath water will be at the more-or-less the same temperature from end to end. When scientists say the world is getting warmer, they mean that the average world temperature is on the increase – not that it is getting warmer at each and every location on the world’s surface. Thinking global warming means that it gets warmer everywhere is like thinking your car’s air conditioner will work better if you dump a bag of ice in your gas tank. Climate, in reality, is an extremely complex thing -- much more complex than the energy ecology of an automobile. It may, in fact, be so complex that we will never be able to predict its changes except in crude generalizations. This is one of the reasons why scientists don’t agree about just how much global warming we can expect. This lack of certainty about the future, however, does not mean we know nothing about the present.

The global warming problem has two aspects. One of these aspects, prediction, presents an extremely difficult problem scientifically. The other aspect, measurement, is far more straightforward. We know how to measure air temperature with great precision from a location on the ground. Our measurements from space are less precise, but the method is more than accurate enough to detect substantial change. Decade by decade, if not always year by year, these measurements show that the average overall world temperature is increasing.1 Yes, it might get really cold in Pennsylvania now and then, but this is more than offset by warm temperatures in oceans, in Siberia, etc. Unless the data itself is being fabricated, the assertion that Earth has consistently gotten warmer for the last few decades is not a theory, but a brute and simple fact. Any scientist worth the name would welcome as many honest reviews of their data and their methods as anyone would care to make. The whole purpose of science, after all, is to uncover facts in nature. If the data were fraudulent, any decent scientist would want to know.

The anti-global-warming people do point to frauds and conflicts of interest. I have no doubt that there are a few unscrupulous scientists out there, who take positions for reasons other than the scientific rigor. I have even less doubt that there are liberal activists who would happily bend the facts to match their particular agendas. What many people do not seem to understand, however, is that in matters of physics motivations are not determinants of fact. The question of whether the world is round or not really never hinged on whether Christopher Columbus was going to make a profit by getting his backers to believe it was. It just is round. Even if you could prove that Columbus himself was a malicious con artist, whose real goal was to make the Spanish crown look silly by going out and sailing off the edge – it would not make the world flat. In exactly the same way, Al Gore’s personality and motives do say something about whether or not you can trust him as a human being, but they neither prove nor disprove assertions he promotes about the physical world. In the end, only measurement, reason and time can actually resolve these questions.

Many conservatives do now take the position that climate change is actually happening – but that no one can prove that human activity is the cause. They are correct. Causality is difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove. The principle article of evidence that human beings are causing global warming is the correlation between rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and rising global temperatures. The two graphs look very similar, so a causal relationship is implied but still not proven. We do know from actual experiments, however, that carbon dioxide really is a greenhouse gas – which is to say, it is more opaque to heat than ordinary air. It would be ridiculous to say that atmospheric carbon dioxide doesn’t produce any global warming, and it would be equally ridiculous to say that human activity does not produce substantial amounts of carbon dioxide. The burning of fossil fuels undoubtedly contributes to climate change, but it is true that we cannot say for certain that it constitutes the dominant cause. There may be something else going on – again, the climate is a very complex thing.

So, conservatives that believe in climate change tend to argue that it’s probably not our fault, we probably can’t prevent it from getting worse, and we will just have to deal with its consequences as they come. Most climate scientists believe that human activity probably is the principle cause, but they admit that they cannot predict either the magnitude or the detailed consequences of the change. Liberal activists take the worst case scenario, which we will get to shortly.

A final argument some conservatives make, usually quietly – though I have heard Rush Limbaugh actually express this on the air – is that God just wouldn’t allow a thing like global warming to happen. From my perspective, this is seeking reassurance in the land of make-believe, but let’s grant them God’s existence for the sake of argument. Even if there is a God, the historical record, let alone the scriptural one, doesn’t show him coming to humanity’s rescue very often. Civilizations rise and fall. We are not spared plagues, earthquakes, floods, or bad cable TV shows. We have no reliable evidence that God bends the rules of nature in sudden and surprising ways to solve our problems, and certainly no non-scriptural evidence that he spares us the consequences of our collective actions. Further, if there is a God, I don’t see any obvious patterns in his behavior that would lead me to believe that anyone can predict his actions. Perhaps Mr. Limbaugh hears the voice of God inside his head. It is more likely, though, that the voice inside his head is actually his own.

Having scrutinized the deniers, let us turn our scrutiny on the activists. Science aside, the conservatives have assessed the cultural dynamics correctly. Whether it turns out turns out to be scientifically demonstrable or not, anthropogenic global warming is the perfect liberal cause celeb. What could fit the liberal narrative better? Global warming is the ultimate white industrial mea culpa. We wicked, nasty Europeans are ruining the entire Earth! More delicious still, the most obvious culprits are big corporations, who pollute the air then force us to buy their wicked products, big cars, gasoline, etc. The contemporary liberal mind is drawn to such a proposition like a fruit fly to a pile of old bananas.

The problem with activists, as opposed to scientists, is that they tend to measure ideas against their existing narrative, not against the empirical data. In this deprecation of reality, they are much like conservatives. Conservatives don’t want anthropogenic global warming to exist, not merely because it would have unpleasant physical consequences, but because it would repudiate some key features of their worldview. They want to believe that more and more is better and better, that the physical world itself will never change, and that if grandpa had a two-ton vehicle then they shouldn’t have to settle for anything smaller. Liberals also have an emotional stake in anthropogenic global warming. They want it to exist. It not only reinforces their worldview, it offers all sorts of petty conservational measures they can take – measures which chiefly function to make them feel better about themselves.

Consider the high-efficiency light bulb. A nice device. It uses less energy – at the socket. Of course, it requires a good deal more energy to make than a conventional bulb. It also contains more toxic substances, and is therefore a much nastier thing to toss in the garbage. Don’t think about those things, though, and you can pat yourself on the back for making a difference. Ethanol is an even better example. What could be better than running your car on the wholesome goodness of corn? The problem, fortunately, is that by the time you work out all the fuel costs of growing corn, fertilizing it, spraying pesticides on it, transporting it, and processing it – you use more energy making ethanol than you get out of it. The ethanol scam is on the decline now, but it served its real purpose while it lasted. It made many people feel they were being ecologically responsible – and no doubt made a fortune for others. Hybrid cars are certainly a nice idea too. Like the high-efficiency light bulbs they are costlier in energy to manufacture and full of toxic substances, particularly in their batteries. They might be a net success, as far as carbon dioxide emissions go, but they are hardly an unmitigated advance. The most telling invention of recent years is probably the hybrid SUV. They burn about as much gas as a conventional mid-sized car, but some are nearly as big as a Suburban. Here we see the truth about what the average liberally inclined American really wants. It is to live a lifestyle of excess with the smug satisfaction of not noticing. To put some high efficiency light bulbs in the living room, then burn several hundred gallons of aviation fuel to fly somewhere interesting on vacation. In short, to push the conscience just a little beyond where the intellect might go looking for it.

An interesting aspect of the liberal perception of global warming is that they leap not merely to the worse predicted case, but to the worst imaginable case. After watching An Inconvenient Truth, my stepdaughter walked away with the impression that life of earth itself was at stake. If she did not altogether grasp the science, she did at least grasp the film’s core message – we bad Americans are destroying the Earth. Without the science to mark out its natural limits, the famous hockey stick temperature curve implies a rapid temperature increase that will burn the Earth to a cinder – unless, of course, we all pitch in right now with those high efficiency light bulbs and those hybrid cars.

I used to believe that liberals, on average, were a more rational, better educated group of people than conservatives. I now think the two groups have approximate parity as far as education and rationality are concerned. They just have different delusions that they live by.

All of the actual climate change predictions that I am aware of are based on computer models. Their margins of error are immense by scientific standards, simply because the complexity of making such predictions is immense. At worst, not including certain speculative complications like the total demise of the deep ocean currents, these predictions call for a few degrees of temperature rise over the course of the century, accompanied by perhaps a few feet of sea level rise. This would not be insignificant. I would not recommend buying beach front property in the next hundred years, nor even a condominium in a low lying coastal city. If there is more heat in the atmosphere, we will have more hurricanes and other extreme weather. Changes of local climate can be expected to force populations to move in some places, which will cause political tensions and provoke some wars. Some species of animals will become extinct, some will decline, and others will flourish. Despite all of these changes, however, I see nothing in the climate models that is likely to exterminate us as a species, nor utterly change the trajectory of civilization. Forces and conditions that could produce such crushing outcomes do exist in nature, but I think the threat of global warming is an inconvenient pressure rather than a catastrophic blow.

We stand on the brink of a far more immediate, far more certain disaster, one that only a few of us seem willing to even recognize. Typically, this disaster is labeled peak oil, but it is really whole collection of shortages that either will occur or are already occurring as the demand for global resources outpaces the declining supply. Others have articulated the nature of this problem better than I can hope to, but for those who are unfamiliar with the idea I will do my best to lay it out in brief.

All of our major energy resources are essentially non-renewable. There may be new coal, oil, and natural gas in Earth’s future, but it will not be created on anything like a human time scale. Fossil fuels are a limited pool of stored energy that we are rapidly burning up. We have been consuming oil for about a hundred years. We have been consuming significant quantities of coal about twice that long, and natural gas for slightly less time. Almost all the evidence indicates that we have now consumed a little more than half the oil that exists on Earth. Statistical evidence indicates that once you have extracted half of any non-renewable resource like oil, annual production will decline inexorably until it is either all gone or what remains is not worth the cost of extracting. This has been clearly demonstrated in countless individual oil fields, in dozens of whole nations, and is inevitably true of the world in general as well. We face a future of not merely increasing oil prices, but actual shortages. This is simply what happens when an inelastic, exponentiating demand exceeds a declining supply. Natural Gas reserves are threatening to peak soon too, even with improved extraction technology. Coal reserves, which we are used to being told are practically infinite, may also peak in twenty years or so. The usual optimistic estimates include a great deal of coal that would cost more energy to extract than could be gotten from it, and are also based on rates of consumption that are decades out of date. What seemed like an unlimited resource two hundred years ago, when the world had a little more than a billion people, is now looking very limited when the world has nearly seven billion and a much greater energy demand per capita.

Again, this is merely a brief sketch of the problem. I would encourage anyone who reads this to look at the evidence others have put forth. I have included a number of reasonably concise video links below.2

If the anthropogenic global warming theories are correct to any degree, there can be no doubt that burning fossil fuels has caused some amount of climate change. However, most of the climate models global warming experts are basing their predictions on assume a rate of fossil fuel consumption that may simply not be possible. To get the grand catastrophes the global warming activists are worried about would probably require the burning of more fossil fuels than we have left, or at least more than we will be plausibly able to extract. In essence, they are urgently advocating that we avoid a future that real circumstances make highly unlikely anyway.

One has to wonder why energy depletion and its multiplier, population growth, have received so little attention. Actually, I believe the lack of interest is not that difficult to understand. Neither people on the political right nor people on the political left really want to know about this problem.

All the right’s aversions to global warming apply with redoubled force to energy depletion. Global warming threatens worsening weather disasters and other consequences by late century, but energy depletion puts a stake through the heart of the myth of endless economic growth – right here, right now. It means that we are absolutely not the masters of the world, and that civilization will have to shrink and stabilize to survive. It is bad news for both wealth and freedom.

The people on the left, on the other hand, love their human tragedies to stay a nice safe distance in the future or in some suitably pathetic third world country. A sudden and permanent shortage of oil is not going to be a problem they can demonstrate against on the weekends. Energy depletion is an all-inclusive, omnipresent sort of problem, one for which our full participation won't be optional. The hybrid and the fancy light bulbs will not dispel the darkness anymore.

Scientists, with a few gleaming exceptions, have ignored the problem because it really doesn’t involve much science. Energy depletion does not require any science to prove – it is simply an accounting problem. It is a much duller issue than global warming, which offers many interesting scientific challenges. Proving that peak oil is happening is at best a job for an economist, most of whom, unfortunately, have an almost religious faith in unlimited economic growth. For most successful economists, market forces are more real than the limitations of the physical world. Most of the people who have raised the warning on this issue are geologists, with a few scientists from other disciplines, a scattering of journalists, and few oil men of unusual integrity.

For various reasons, the new renewables (wind, solar, and biofuels) cannot hope to make up for the loss of cheap oil and cheap gas. They may eventually keep us from a future without any electricity at all, but none of them will replace the liquid fuels used in transportation and agriculture, and none of them are ready to replace coal very quickly. People who are glib about solar and wind power tend not to do the math. Enough wind farms and solar collectors to produce even a significant fraction of our electricity would require an enormous investment in energy to produce, just at a time when energy is growing more expensive and more scarce. We are accustomed to thinking of such industrial production as something that just happens, as if by magic and a sprinkling of dollars, but the magician’s trick behind it all is the power of cheap energy.

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1 There is also a huge body of circumstantial evidence. Glaciers are retreating in most places, from mountains in the tropics to the polar regions. The number and severity of storms is on the increase. Such things consistently point to a greater amount to energy in the atmosphere.

2 I strongly recommend the following videos:

Albert Bartlett is a physicist who has been following the problems of overpopulation and energy depletion since the 1960’s. This video (1 of 8) is the best-argued and most politically neutral presentation of the problem that I am aware of. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

Richard Heinberg is a geologist and lecturer on the subject of peak oil. This video (1 of 5) is one of his lectures. There is much more Heinberg material online. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybRz91eimTg&feature=related

There are several full length documentaries on the topic of peak oil, but “A Crude Awakening” is, again, the most politically neutral. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z9T5XPrDvg&feature=related

Casualties

2011-03-01T08:48:00.000-08:00

One early morning in late 2001, during the initial phase of the war in Afghanistan, I was astonished by an item on the network news. Sometime in the previous day, Taliban soldiers had succeeding in shooting down an American helicopter with a dozen or so men on board, killing them all. What astonished me was not that we had lost a few men, but that both the military spokesman the reporter covering the event seemed to be in a state of indignant shock. It seemed not to have occurred to either of them that if American soldiers engage in warfare, even against people fighting for an admittedly nasty regime, it’s understandable that the enemy will do their best to kill us. If I remember correctly, the military spokesmen even used the phrase, much used by President Bush at the time, that the enemy troops who shot down the helicopter would be “brought to justice,” – as though the mere act of killing American soldiers in battle were now a war crime.

Let us take a long look backward. On June 6th, 1944, American forces landing on the coast of Normandy suffered the loss of 1465 dead and several times that number wounded or missing. This was a bloody day for America, though not the bloodiest day in World War Two, and by no means the bloodiest in American history. America lost nearly 420,000 lives during the course of World War Two, an average of over 300 per day. While widespread hatred of our German and Japanese enemies was understandable and unquestioned, there is no evidence that the American public expected the slaughter to be altogether one-sided, or considered the fact that the enemy was killing American soldiers morally shocking in itself. We were shocked by the Holocaust, and by the mistreatment of prisoners, but not by the tragic consequences that have always been the nature of armed conflict. Between then and now, two important things have changed. The first is America’s attitude toward war. The second is the way in which America conducts war.

Americans now see wars differently for several reasons, but I believe that chief among those reasons has been that, over the last forty years or so, the media has gradually redefined our expectations.1 Ever since the Viet Nam War, wars have become TV shows. Television (and now the internet) brings the carnage of war into people’s living rooms in a way that overwhelms the purely military aspects of these events. The Normandy invasion, for example, was a military success – but if a TV cameraman had been there, walking down that beach and showing us hundreds upon hundreds of dead and mutilated men, any ordinary viewer would have thought it a disaster. War is horrific even in its success. The natural reaction of non-sociopathic people to witnessing violent, individually senseless killing is revulsion. If a hundred people die in a plane crash that’s a tragedy, and it naturally seems an equal tragedy if a hundred soldiers die in a battle. There is, however, a difference. It is not the purpose of airplanes to kill their occupants, so a plane crash is straightforwardly a tragedy. It is the purpose of warfare, however, to achieve some political end by typically lethal means. This is an ugly but irrefutable truth. Wars are not sporting events. When, as a society, we become too squeamish to accept more than a handful of casualties in war, we greatly limit the means by which we can conduct wars.

The direct consequence of the revulsion of Americans for paying for their government’s political ends in blood has been the contemporary focus using drones and other long range means of killing. Though spectacularly expensive and militarily limiting, long range weapons have the inestimable political advantage of reducing field casualties on our side. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, America lost a mere 300 soldiers, largely because the Iraqi army (and more particularly its command structure) was broken in advance by tremendous numbers of smart weapons. The media, and the American public, came to assume this level of casualties would now be the norm. Smart bombs and cruise missiles, in the civilian mind, offered the promise of making war an almost one-sided affair. World War Two, and even Viet Nam, were now forgotten.

It would be a mistake to think that our technological prowess has made us any more peace-loving. Rather the contrary. As far back as the Reagan administration, American Presidents apparently stopped considering the bombing of other nations tantamount to going to war with them. Reagan bombed Libya, Clinton fired cruise missiles at Afghanistan and bombed Serbia, George W. Bush and Obama have both fired cruise missiles into Pakistan. None of these actions have been publicly acknowledged as acts of war, and, in general, the American public has taken little interest. What matters is simply that few if any Americans have been killed in such attacks. This stands in stark contrast to public reaction to the truck bombing in Beirut in 1983 and the helicopter shoot down in Somalia in 1993. Both of these incidents forced the withdrawal of US forces due to casualties well less than we incurred on an average day in World War Two.

Notably too, during the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, we kept our troop numbers to a bare minimum, and have expanded our deployments only very grudgingly. Our peak deployment in Iraq was 165,000. Our current deployment in Afghanistan is 98,000. By contrast, our peak deployment in Viet Nam was 537,000. Small deployments not only save money, but reduce the attritional casualty risk. The fewer Americans there are on duty guarding foreign street corners, the fewer there are to kill. Still, this policy has obvious consequences. In Viet Nam, the most favorable ratio of native civilians per American soldier was 37 to 1 – in a conflict we ultimately lost. In Iraq, that ratio never got any better than 182 to 1. In Afghanistan, the ratio is now about 306 to 1. It is hard to see how such a small commitment in troops can hope to control a hostile nation street by street.2

America’s new reliance on technology over soldiers has other serious consequences, both moral and military. Obviously, getting too comfortable with the notion of conducting foreign policy with cruise missiles and bombs alone has odious moral implications. That hardly seems to need elaboration. Less obviously, our preference for such means probably also makes the American civilian population a good deal less safe.

Consider the position of our enemies and potential enemies. Bombing cannot help but kill some number of non-combatants, especially if it is conducted anywhere near settled areas. The foreign soldier on your street corner might at least be seen as keeping the peace, but there is no such thing as a friendly cluster bomb. Everyone hates a faceless enemy who kills civilians from the sky. A desire for vengeance is inevitable, but who can serve as a target for such vengeance? American soldiers, if the enemy sees them at all, are few and far between. They patrol from one fortified base to another, protected by armored vehicles most of the time. Our enemies probably realize that if they could kill a hundred Americans in one fight at one time, they might drive us out of their country like the people did in Lebanon and Somalia. However, American soldiers have gotten remarkably good at killing while not getting killed themselves. Standup battles against American troops are losing propositions. While guerrilla warfare is an option, an enemy’s preferable choice, if he has the means, is to take the fight to our civilians. America’s weakest links are its open borders and its well-known intolerance for pain.

Historically, there seem to be only two workable methods of defeating the kind of guerrilla force we now have to face around the world. The first is to flood the enemy’s country with so many soldiers that you can isolate the guerillas from the non-combatants that support them. As the record makes abundantly clear, we have neither the political will nor the fiscal resources to draft a half million or more soldiers for such an undertaking. Our politicians know all too well that reinstating the draft for any overseas adventure has become political suicide. They no longer even suggest the possibility. The second method of dealing with guerillas is simply to wait them out. Sooner or later, the people of an occupied country may simply grow tired of the fight. This can take decades or more. Consider the British experience in Northern Ireland. This option, too, takes a patient stoicism Americans no longer have.

In practice, American military capabilities are now limited to the following. Using our impressive technological might, we can destroy the militaries and infrastructures of most other nations, at a high financial cost but a relatively low immediate cost in American lives. We can deter direct, large scale attacks on the US itself using both our conventional forces and the threat or nuclear retaliation. We can conduct small, convert, Special Forces operations. Anything further would risk too many casualties.

Despite what most of us would like to believe, America is an empire. We consume a disproportionate amount of the world’s resources, and we have, since World War Two, been willing to manipulate other nations by threats, embargos, espionage and occasional force to maintain that resource flow. Whatever one might feel about it, even a cursory examination of US foreign policy will reveal this to be a fact. Conflicts since the war in Viet Nam, however, have revealed that we are now an empire with a weakness. While we are militarily capable of destroying other nations, we have become quite incapable of occupying them effectively, whether for resource extraction or any other purpose. As oil becomes more scarce, it is always possible that Americans may decide that maintaining their lifestyle a few more years is worth the blood of their sons and a few of their daughters. Mass psychology is difficult to predict. At the moment, however, we appear to be trapped between our desire to maintain our imperial status on the one hand, and our refusal to accept the violent realities of war on the other.

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1 Whether or not the media’s manipulation of our expectations has been deliberate or accidental is an interesting question, but one I cannot answer. It would be hard to say that it was deliberate without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. Personally, I believe the shift in expectations has been the result of underlying attitudes on the part of reporters and editors nationwide, most of whom came of age during the Viet Nam war. I would be surprised if such realignment were the result of a deliberate plan.
Americans, as a nation, have developed peculiarly incompatible attitudes toward war. On the one hand, we have gotten very squeamish about the loss of American lives. On the other, a certain preoccupation with the warrior image is beginning to permeate American society. We no longer have “soldiers.” We have “War Fighters.” I’m not sure who “War Fighter” is, but I think he is a friend of Superman and Spiderman. This is an interesting topic in itself.

2 It is not my intention to slight the role of our allies, but the preponderance of troops in all these conflicts have been Americans.
Some would argue that we have defeated the insurgency in Iraq. Let’s wait ten years and see. Let’s not forget that we declared victory in Viet Nam in 1973.

Why Rational People Disagree

2011-01-26T08:45:00.000-08:00

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.
-- Voltaire

A few months ago a friend sent me an email, asking, in obvious frustration, how we could share so many common beliefs about the world yet come to such disparate conclusions about political issues. I think this was an excellent question, and well worth answering seriously.

Fundamentally, people disagree because their most of their beliefs are supported by evidence that is at best fragmentary and at worst imaginary. To make the distinction between beliefs that are justifiable and those that are not, let’s look at a simple example of each type. First, consider the following rough-and-ready proposition:

Water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

Assuming we are talking about more-or-less pure water in typical conditions that prevail on the surface of the earth, and putting aside miscellaneous philosophical problems involving measurement, etc., this proposition is quite straightforward. We all know what water is, at least in a raw, experiential way. Most literate people are at least vaguely aware that the property they perceive as hot or cold is reliably measureable, and even if they aren’t familiar with the Fahrenheit scale they are familiar with the relationships between numbers. 32 is bigger than 31.

The freezing water proposition can be put to the test any number of times and yield the same result within a very small margin of error. It is not a proposition about which normal, reasonable people can differ. There are no special sects of people that firmly believe that water freezes at 78 degrees Fahrenheit because their ancestors believed it, or because it was so written in their holy books. The freezing point of water is a testable, reliable, and comprehensible fact.

Sadly, most of our beliefs are far less straightforward than the one described above. Consider this proposition:

Doubling the length of jail sentences will substantially reduce the rate of criminal of theft.

Let’s assume we are proposing this as a general rule – that we are making an assertion we expect would be applicable to all societies at all times. This claim would be extremely complex and difficult to prove.

In the case of the freezing water proposition, we were dealing with an inert physical substance – not with the convoluted causal logic of human beings. Considered as a physics problem, it is not especially difficult to understand how the behavior of water molecules causes a change of state from water to ice at a certain temperature. Having understood this, it doesn’t matter whether we are talking about a drop of water or an arctic lake. The same physical principle applies. Even if we do not understand the underlying physics, we can still take note of the monotonous reliability of the phenomenon of freezing.

The theft proposition, on the other hand, is staggering when considered as a physics problem. The number of factors that influence even individual behavior are almost without limit. Further, the precise influence of each factor can neither be readily calculated nor measured. It is doubtful whether the human brain could grasp the operations of even one other brain of equal complexity, except in either crude generalities or fragmentary details. To make matters worse, the number of factors that must influence the rate of criminal theft would have to be something like the huge (if unknown) number of factors influencing each potential thief, multiplied by the total number of potential thieves. Even specifying what information one would need to collect is daunting, let alone the question of knowing enough about causal relationships to process that information into any sort proof.

For the sake of argument though, let’s imagine we could solve the formidable problems of working out the exact physics of the brain -- and everything that might influence the brain. Let’s further assume we have access to some super-computer with the capacity to process the consequences of every life event down to the spark of every neuron in the brains of millions of people. It would still not be enough. We would still be faced with an enormous problem of the actual data collection. How does one see into several million people’s heads – all at once, down to the precision of the last conceivably relevant neuronal event? Somewhere along the line, I suspect we would encounter some form of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. If so, it may even be that we simply cannot gather enough data – no matter how technically proficient we are.

The difference between the freezing water proposition and the theft proposition is not one of kind, but one of complexity. Both really are just physics problems – dependent on the behavior of physical things that are subject of physical constraints.1 One proposition is within our capacity to assert with something like certainty, while the other simply is not. It should not be surprising that the universe abounds with process we can never fully understand. Nothing we actually know about the universe demands that all the factors relevant to our theft proposition be wholly and simultaneously comprehensible to us. That’s a good deal to ask of three or so pounds of grey matter that did not evolve to solve that sort of problem.

Our understanding of most things (and of almost all things involving human behavior) is, to put it mildly, incomplete. When faced with propositions that are fundamentally beyond our capacity to test, we generally attempt to reduce them to the simplest approximations we can personally tolerate. We content ourselves with probabilities or explanatory constructs.2

How might we attempt to justify our belief in the theft proposition? Typically, we would look for instances in which doubling the length of jail sentences was tried. Armed with such examples, we would create an argument based on probability. However, even if declines in theft were frequently found to follow a doubling in the length of jail sentences, we would still have nothing close to certainty. We would not know whether or not other factors may have accounted for the declines. We would not know whether or not the results were peculiar to the particular cultures in which they occurred. Thus, our “understanding” would rest on the implicit assumption that the correlations we chose to identify trump all other correlations, known or unknown. In other words, we are predisposed to assume that the evidence we have represents the dominant agents of causation, and any evidence that we don’t have is unimportant. This is not a weakness, but an inherent characteristic of the human mind. If we didn’t make such assumptions, we couldn’t make inductions and our brains would not be of much practical use.

Of course, some beliefs aren’t justified with any obvious logic – not even merely inductive logic. If we believe that the theft proposition is true because it plainly makes intuitive sense, we are justifying the belief with a narrative. A narrative is essentially a coherent framework constructed from one’s own prior assumptions and imagination. It depends on the assumption that ideas that are easy to believe are probably true. We can, of course, believe all sorts of silly and erroneous things and still be coherent, because coherence (in the non-philosophical world) only demands we avoid intolerably obvious affronts to logic. Narrative arguments need little evidence; they only need an air of plausibility.3

When faced with problems that are beyond our full comprehension, we actually have no choice but to content ourselves with either oversimplifications or narrative conjectures. Since both of these alternatives are generally presented in the form of truths (typically as declarative statements) they carry more persuasive weight than they can rationally bear.4

We know little about politics, economics, sociology, etc – in the same sense that we know the rudiments of the physical sciences. While history might seem to be an exception to this uncertainty, it too crosses the threshold into conjecture when it attempts to deal in causes rather that the enumeration of mere facts. We can say with reasonable certainty that the battle of Gettysburg took place in July of 1863. When we attempt to explain why it took place, however, we are only making educated guesses. Every historical event, in time, ceases to be a collision of physical causes and becomes an author’s narrative. History tends to become a chronicle of Kings, Presidents and Generals because explaining their behavior is always much easier than explaining the behaviors of the vast, undocumented masses of humanity, let alone the clockwork of the entire physical world.

Given that we can only understand most subjects obliquely and incompletely, it shouldn’t be at all surprising that few of us have exactly the same beliefs. Each of us has a different set of incomplete and problematic data from which to wrest his or her tenuous conclusions. Watch any economics talk show on television and you will see any number of “experts” with any number of substantially different views. All that they make clear, collectively, is the chronically tentative state of their field. The same is true for politicians, psychologists, or anyone else who deals in the murky territory of human interaction.

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1 I am a reductionist in a limited sense. I believe the universe is essentially a machine – a collection of interrelated physical processes. I do not believe, however, that physics (as a discipline) can solve many of the practical problems human beings actually deal with. I have no reason to suppose that Stephen Hawking’s impressive abilities would make him either a good administrator or an effective general, for example.

2 Yes, strictly speaking the freezing water proposition can be consider probabilistic as well. We infer it is a law of nature because of its monotonous regularity. I do not argue that claims like the freezing water proposition are subject some fundamentally different category of test, but simply that they can be tested. Broadly psychological or sociological problems can rarely even be precisely stated, let alone adequately tested.

3 One need look no further than 9/11 or UFO conspiracy theories for striking examples. While lacking in evidence, these theories mimic the structure of truth. They depict events as causal chains.

4 I do not claim any special dispensation for my own arguments, least of all my political ones.

The Great Divide

2010-12-23T10:16:00.001-08:00

Years ago, I took a job at a midsized company in the Ohio. The company is located in a rural village of about two thousand people, and despite the isolation I decided to move there. I had only been living there a few days when I was stopped on the sidewalk, several blocks from my apartment, by a small boy staring up at me curiously. "You work with my dad," he said. Finding this a little surprising, but assuming he must be the son of one of my immediate coworkers, I asked him who his dad was. He told me, but I did not recognize the name. I told him he must have mistaken me for someone else. He shook his head confidently and pedaled off on his tricycle. The next day I asked one of my coworkers who the boy’s father was. As it happened, the boy’s father did indeed work for my company – on the assembly line in a different building half a mile away. This is when I came to understand, clearly, that I had not simply moved from a metropolitan area of nearly a million people to a village of about two thousand – but had crossed an invisible boundary between one culture and another.

It is my hope to show, among other things, that the fundamental difference between liberalism and conservatism is not one of competing rational ideologies but simply one of culture, and that the dominant factor behind their cultural distinction is neither ethnicity nor religion – but simply the inevitable consequence of population density.

　
I. Demographics and Conditions of Life

Most urban dwellers are liberals. Most people living in rural areas are conservative. Compare the two maps above. The one on the left shows US population density and the one on the right shows candidate preference in the 2008 presidential election. We will take it as given that most of the people who voted for McCain are conservatives and most of the people who voted for Obama have at least some liberal leanings. Studying the two maps will show that wherever the population density is high Obama voters (presumed liberals) predominated, or were at least more common than in surrounding rural areas. Even in the south, cities show purple rather than the surrounding red. The blue regions along the Pacific and Mid-Atlantic coast correspond particularly well. McCain voters (presumed conservatives) predominated in rural areas with only a few exceptions. In the south and west, patches of blue in rural areas correspond to one minority group or other, not surprisingly voting for our first real minority president. Only in New England and the upper Midwest did the largely non-minority rural populations contradict the trend by voting for the Democrat. Regions of intermediate population density, predictably, show a mixture of the two political cultures. The lower Great Lakes region, with its mix of cities and countryside, shows a patchy appearance on both maps. We are accustomed to thinking that political orientation is an individual choice, and to some extent it is, but the correlations shown by the maps are too strong to be coincidental, and this comparison is not an isolated example. Clearly, there is something causal at work here – some distinction between rural and urban lifestyles and interests, which manifests itself in voting patterns.

Consider the conditions of life of both urban and rural groups.

Urban life is characterized by diversity and anonymity. These traits are not peculiarities of American or even western cities, but are, to some degree, characteristic of cities everywhere. Cities inevitably contain as broad a range of human beings as exist in any particular society. Living in a city does not demand a deep philosophical belief in human equality, but it does demand a certain rudimentary toleration of people who look or behave differently. Most human interaction in cities is impersonal, occurring between strangers. The relation of the individual to the city as a whole is one of residence, not one of community. For the urban resident, the city is not so much a giant village as it is an artificial wilderness. It is a place that combines variety and opportunity with a certain degree of perennial insecurity and random danger.

Rural life, on the other hand, is characterized by uniformity and familiarity. The range of occupations, religious beliefs, and ethnic traditions are all much narrower in villages and small towns. Inevitably, the inhabitant of a village interacts with familiar people most of the time. Familiarity is an imperative of the culture. For better or worse, rural communities are not places where one can live anonymously. Not surprisingly, the pressure to conform is also much higher in rural than in urban areas. Tolerance, where it exists, is more of a personal choice and not a demand made by the nature of the environment itself. The village is a safe and comfortable place – providing one is both willing and able to conform.

To illustrate the difference more clearly, let’s consider the position of a non-conformist in each environment. Imagine a person who, for whatever reason, converts from Christianity to Norse Paganism. I could use atheism, Islam, open homosexuality, or many other interesting and topical possibilities for my example – but Norse Paganism seems nicely neutral and shouldn't inflame anyone’s emotions unnecessarily.

In a city, among the anonymous multitudes, our new covert’s religion would only be noticed by a handful of people, and then only if the convert were vocal about it or decided to make some outwardly visible sign. Those people who did notice might raise an eyebrow, but the rule of the city is generally one of at least behavioral indifference, so our neophyte Norseman would be tolerated and largely ignored. Close friendships and family relationships would be affected, of course, but the people at the bank, the grocery, and the license bureau would simply shrug and go on about their business. One Norse Pagan in a city of a million is irrelevant.

A lone Norse Pagan, in a village of a thousand, would have the misfortune of being interesting. "I noticed you weren't in church – were you sick?" the bank teller might ask. "Did you know John so-and-so is not a Christian anymore?" the bank teller might later inform the grocery clerk. The smaller the town, the fewer real strangers there are. In a village, not only will our neophyte Norseman stand out, but his eccentricity will be the topic of conversation and legend. In a city, a transient oddity is quickly forgotten; in a village it becomes part of an oral history that carries on for decades.

The sense of common interest -- of community -- which villages have and cities lack, is the very heart of the cultural distinction between the two, and is worth exploring in more detail.

The innate conservatism of the village is our common cultural history. No city on earth arose spontaneously out of the mud, stocked with ready-made sophisticated urbanites. Cities are a new thing in human social evolution; living in small groups has been the norm.

The social ties that bind people living in small, natural groups are generally functional ones. Primitive villages, like bands of hunter-gatherers, are autonomous entities. They contain all of the skills and physical means necessary to maintain their constituent members. They prosper to the extent that those members work together for the common good. If villages tend to be intolerant of outsiders and individualists, it is at root because such people are the least likely to act in the interests of the community. Bigotry may be an ugly thing, but it is rooted in survival strategy.

There are far fewer functional ties that bind the inhabitants of a city together. The taxi driver and the florist only rarely benefit by one another’s actions. The employees of car dealership and those of the corporate accounting firm do not depend on each other economically. Everyone in the city shares some common basic services (police, fire, street department, etc.) but these are administered by anonymous professionals with little direct involvement by the populous. In short, most of the conditions of life in a city are beyond one’s daily influence.

When one is unhappy with conditions in a particular urban neighborhood, one moves to another neighborhood if the means are available. Urban dwellers might be just as suspicious and resentful of outsiders as their rural counterparts, but since they have fewer social ties to their neighborhoods than a villager to his or her village, they are more likely to relocate than to fight for the preservation of the status quo.

A phenomenon that often occurs when new immigrants move into cities is that they to flock to neighborhoods populated by people from their home countries. In the U.S., this occurred among European and Chinese immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and is occurring with Mexican immigrants today. It would be a mistake to think this pattern can be explained entirely by the attractions of a shared language or a shared ethnicity. It is equally driven by a desire to replicate, as much as possible, the social relations of rural life in an urban setting. Wealthy immigrants from urban settings are far less likely to settle in such groupings. Everything else being equal (and in the absence of enduring differentiators like race and religion), "urban villages" tend to disintegrate within a few generations. This is so not merely because succeeding generations learn the language, but also because they become accustomed to the general uncertainties of urban life. Their neighborhoods lack both the economic independence and social isolation necessary to be as autonomous (and therefore as enduring) as villages.

City dwellers use the word "community" differently than their rural counterparts. Rural people rarely use the word at all. The degree of social cohesion implied by the word is such a basic condition of rural life that it rarely needs acknowledgement. "Community" is something people notice in its absence, as a fish notices the absence of water when it is thrown on dry land. The modern proliferation of the term’s use in urban contexts (the black community, the gay community, etc.) is telling. There is a difference between a real community, in which the members are materially interdependent, and a merely nominal community, in which the members are simply proximate or share some common characteristic or interest. One is an autonomous social and economic unit, the other is a mirage. The most desperate use I have heard made of the term is in the phrase "Internet community". Facebook is no more a meaningful form of community than a McDonalds commercial is a nutritious meal. Social networking is, at heart, an attempt to compensate for the alienation that is an inevitable feature of urban life. It is socialization stripped of both presence and accountability. It is a parody of community, where third-rate personal advertisements take the place of human beings.

II. Further Considerations

Having laid out my central thesis, I should concede a number of points. Obviously, population density is not the sole determinate of one’s political orientation. Individual upbringing counts for much. The tendency for people to grow more conservative as they grow older is a commonplace – though this is not wholly independent of my thesis, since in a time of rapid population growth older people will have formed their predispositions in a world that was generally less urbanized. Older people might remember when their towns were villages, or when their cities were towns or at least smaller cities. It is also true that whole societies sometimes reorient themselves in response to historical events. For a couple of months after the 9/11 attacks, virtually all Americans were conservatives. The common yearning of the whole society was to return to the pre-9/11 world, a time in which we had all felt safer. No one really wanted to just smile and get comfortable with terrorism. For a moment, everyone agreed. The opposite sort of transformation occurred in the defeated Axis nations after the Second World War, particularly in Japan. At that moment in history the status quo had culminated in utter defeat and ruin. Tradition had been violently and decisively discredited, and there could be no thought of going back. Liberalization offered at least the hope of a life beyond the abyss.

Another point that I need to acknowledge is that the communal nature of rural settlements and the alienating nature of urban ones are relative. It would be foolish to believe everyone in a modern American village of a thousand people knows everyone else in that village, or is intimately bound to them economically. Likewise, it is obviously not true that cities are places utterly devoid of such connections. We are talking about relative positions on a continuum of urbanization, not about two fixed, immutable states.

On a grander scale, national and even global social and political orientations are also relative, evolving over space and time. Those that call themselves liberals today would have been unabashed socialists by 19th century standards – people who believe that government should play a large and direct role in mediating our daily lives. Contemporary conservatives are, by 19th century standards, classical liberals – people who reject the idea of overly centralized authority, particularly in the realm of economics. The conservatives of at least the early 19th century, on the other hand, held a medieval view that is all but extinct today – that power naturally resides (and should reside) with those who control the largest tracts of land.

It is reasonable to see such political metamorphoses as evolutionary, as indeed they are, but it would be a mistake to just assume that they represent a kind of incremental moral progress toward some future ideal state. Rather, the shift of power from landed nobility (or its equivalent) to merchants and manufacturers, and subsequently to government bureaucracies and central banks, has simply been the inevitable consequence of subjecting human populations to ever more capable technologies and ever more concentrated urban environments. Put a hundred people on an island and they will organize themselves into a certain sort of social system. Put a million people on an island and they will naturally produce a rather different social system. Give them cell phones and televisions and they will produce yet another. Nothing about such changes is either necessarily positive, or necessarily negative. It is merely the collective result of the adaptation of many individual human beings to the conditions of life with which they are presented.

The intellectual precursors of the trajectory humanity is now on were formulated during the Enlightenment, but mass political change was really the end product of the Industrial Revolution. It was then that rapid technological change and urbanization began in earnest. Humanity has been getting more urbanized and more technologically capable ever since. Rapid technological advancement and population growth have, until very recently, always reinforced one another.1 By making agriculture and transportation more efficient, and by creating many entirely new means of livelihood, new technology spurs population growth. At the same time, larger populations with a greater variety of demands spur technological advancement. Given a relatively free, relatively educated population, sheer numbers spur technology forward too. It is significant that almost all of the most innovative nations are comparatively populous. Germany, France and the UK are all populous nations by European standards, and also produce the most new inventions there. The US has a huge middle class population, which has always been able to turn out brilliant innovators at a reliable rate. As the Chinese and Indian middle classes have begun to grow, they too get their predictable allotment of technologists and entrepreneurs. Israel, on the other hand, despite a highly educated populous simply lacks the numbers to produce more than a scattering of geniuses, and is responsible for few significant inventions.

The positive consequences of advancing technology have been many and are, for the most part, obvious. In the industrialized world, we now live longer than our ancestors did. We certainly have the potential to know more. The list of advantages of living in modern times is lengthy, though to some extent debatable. Those things we have lost are less apparent because most of us are unaware, at least consciously, that they ever existed. Cultural stability is an unimaginable condition for most people in modern societies. We are conditioned from birth to believe that we either reinvent ourselves continuously or face obsolescence. We can expect, in old age, to live in a world that bears little resemblance to the one in which we were born. A sort of corollary to this is that we lack any rational sense of belonging. The community, as a stable, predictable unit of social organization, is all but extinct. Let’s return to our primitive village for a moment to see if we can throw some light on this obscure idea.

As I have already observed, the basis of village organization is function. As animals, human beings are simply more able to cope with their environment in groups. People don’t live in groups because they love each other; they live in groups because they need each other. Or, perhaps even more bluntly, they love each other because they need each other. This is a deep genetic trait. We were social animals before we had villages, or language, and probably even before our ancestors had the ability to walk upright. We want to belong to some group almost as strongly as we want to survive, and in some instances even more so.

The conditions of modern life tend to erode our sense of social stability at both ends. Not only does the community become unwieldy beyond a certain size, but the pressures and demands of urban life also undermine that most basic unit of social organization -- the family. Individuals move from one city to another in search of work. Both opportunity and scarcity contribute to this diffusion. In boom times the ambitious pursue opportunities far from their homes. In lean times, everyone seeks employment anywhere it can be had. Once the traditional extended family might have offered some support in times of scarcity, but once that institution is scattered across the country we are left to fend almost exclusively for ourselves.

In the absence of either a real functional community or a family, human beings must meet their unfulfilled need for belonging with something else. Modern societies offer a number of alternatives, but all of them are essentially illusory.

　
III. Palliatives for Belonging

The most obvious palliative for a lost sense of belonging is nationalism. Indeed, the rise of nationalism closely parallels the rise of industrialism and urbanization. The progression from one attachment to the other is intuitively simple. The nation, usually in an ethnic sense, becomes a sort of village or family writ large. The ardent patriot does have a sense of belonging, but the difference between patriotism and village solidarity is a tragic one. The relationship between the individual and the village is mutually beneficial in a way that the relationship between the individual and the nation can never be. Villages are networks of human relationships that are simultaneously functional, reciprocal, and personal. Individuals can be treated unjustly in a village, but even such mistreatment is fundamentally personal – no one is simply an anonymous cog in a heartless social machine. Nations, on the other hand, are innately heartless. They lack the capacity to care about the individuals that theoretically constitute them. No one really matters to the nation. We are all merely cogs in the unconscious machinery of the state. Such benefits as we might derive from being members of a particular nation are ultimately the result of decisions made by real people – other cogs in the process – not by any deliberate action of the nation as a whole.

Since human beings generally do not derive a sense of belonging from participation in unconscious processes, patriotism requires an illusion. The nationalist loves the nation as though it were a conscious, living entity. To expand this further, evolution has only given us a limited repertoire of emotional attachments – those suitable for living in small groups. "Love of beneficial bureaucratic processes" was not high on the list of feelings our troglodytic ancestors would have found useful. We are predisposed to mould our relationships with abstract entities in personal terms, no matter how incongruous. In the cold light of reason, a nation is really nothing more than a belief. It has no empirical existence of its own. It shares with the village the property of being a social collective, but it is a collective compounded of the very yearning to belong – rather the more substantial sense of belonging that stems from a tangible, functional relations.

That patriotism is more virulent among rural conservatives than among urban liberals does not contradict the notion that villages are inherently more socially secure and comforting places than cities. As I outlined earlier, the whole of society is in a state of flux, and even rural areas are being transformed by the dominant urban culture. Our entertainment media, which grows more global and more pervasive by the year, is targeted at urban audiences. It denigrates the rural or traditional. Thus, the rural conservative feels the erosion of existing social institutions more acutely than the urban liberal. The latter is constantly having the normalcy of modern life, no matter how bizarre or hostile, reaffirmed by television and the internet. The rural citizen, on the other hand, receives only a steady stream of condescension and the treat of largely unwanted change. When, through pressure of the dominant culture, the village begins to fail as a functional entity the villager loses something real. It is natural enough to look for a substitute of similar kind but of a grander scale – however sadly illusory it might be.

Theistic religion is more complex than raw patriotism, and its attraction to either rural or urban populations is not simply the attraction of a substitute community. In traditional rural villages, churches serve as a natural focal point of community life. Whatever else they may be, they are the roof under which the whole community sits. They have a social function that is largely independent of any religious teaching they might offer. Even if the sermons are dull and uninspiring, the congregation draws significant strength from the simply solidarity of attendance. Rural churches give the community a unique opportunity to see itself as a whole.

A service at an urban megachurch is something rather different. The congregants of a megachurch are not a community as such, but a scattering of people drawn from a wide area. They may draw some passing sense of strength from their very numbers, but in the end they are essentially an interest group of otherwise disassociated people. Like attendees at virtually any other urban venue, they come to be entertained – in other words, to be distracted from the stresses of urban life. No megachurch could sustain itself with a dull and uninspiring pastor. Congregants would simply shop for their salvation somewhere else.

Significantly, the conditions of urban life have transformed religion (at least in the US) by making it more energetic but at the same time less demanding. While the content of sermons must be entertaining, it cannot be very restrictive. In a village, people attend the church the village happens to have; in a city, they attend the church that suits them. Given a choice, most people will adopt whatever form of their religion demands the least of them. Consider how many modern churches emphasize verse John 11:26 ("And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.") This is the lowest possible common denominator to which Christianity can erode. Simple belief is the cheapest cover charge that any deity has ever required. The Catholic Church, though much in retreat, still wants the faithful to follow certain rules. A few protestant churches in rural Appalachia still ask congregants to show their faith by handling venomous snakes. John 11:26 asks only a little credulity, which you have to possess to derive any comfort from Christianity anyway.

To be succinct, rural religion tends to demand more arbitrary concessions from its adherents but also offers them something valuable by strengthening their social relationships. Urban religion doesn’t dare demand much, has far less to offer, and has to compete with every other form of distraction the city can create. Let me be clear, however. Urban churches need not be harmless, watered-down versions of their rural brethren in regard to their condemnation of non-believers. On the contrary, in the absence meaningful moral strictures to violate, the only thing that delineates the congregation from outsiders is belief. This, too, is a desperate attempt to give adherents a sense of belonging and mutual solidarity – by the common expedient of raising an external enemy against whom they can contrast themselves.

While the Enlightenment began the downfall of religion among intellectuals, urbanization began the downfall of religion among the masses. The very anonymity of urban life made participation in religion optional, and the diffuse and transient nature of urban congregations has made the social benefits increasingly negligible. All that remains for the urban believer are grand promises of salvation and rewards in the afterlife. While these have a certain appeal for many people starving for a feeling of security in a ruthless urban world, it is well beneath the threshold of cynicism for most. The majority of urban dwellers, as well as the majority of people who could be broadly considered liberal, are not explicitly atheists. They have not rejected faith so much as they simply do not take the time to bother with the question. If you ask them directly "do you believe in God?" they tend to shift around uncomfortably and mutter things like "sure – I guess so." Their very lack of interest makes such an affirmation meaningless.

Another attachment that provides an essentially empty sense of belonging is a devotion to organized sports. Here too, we have a cultural entity that developed hand-in-hand with urbanization. Sports like baseball began as pastimes for ordinary people to participate in. Socially, they functioned to strengthen the bonds between actual team members. Teams then began to represent larger entities, cities and businesses. Their chief social consequence became the creation of a sense of unity among the spectators. Widespread though it might be in both our cities and our countryside, it isn’t hard to see how shallow this illusion of belonging actually is. After all, very few people actually feel any special sense of duty toward their fellow fans of team "x". Devotion to a team may offer a vague sense of identity for an individual, and provide a superficial point of connection to fellow supporters, but can offer little in the form of substantive relationships. No fellow fan is going to either trust a person or assist him on the basis of their mutual fandom alone. No player feels very obligated to any individual fan. If nationalism is a poor parody of the relationship one might otherwise have had to a small and functional community, then fandom is one step even further removed – a parody of nationalism. The fan pours out his enthusiasm for those he not only has no influence over, but who have in turn no substantive influence over him. Nationalism is, in one sense, the political exploitation of our natural longing for community – a one-sided but still relevant exercise. A love for organized sports is merely the embrace of community’s ghost image – an exercise whose only social consequence is distraction.

Other forms of fandom function similarly. The cultish fascination with movie series like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings should not be surprising. Both offer the attractive magic of religion without the uncomfortable restrains and limitations. Fantasy blooms most plentifully where religion is the weakest, chiefly in cities and suburbs. Fantasy offers the young yet another kind of community of the mind, a much more interesting and appealing one than the dull, dysfunctional, pseudo-communities of their parents. The knowledge that trying to live in such fantasies becomes a self-consuming psychosis beyond a certain point is no deterrent to children, and little deterrent to many adults. Believing in Harry Potter’s mythos is, after all, only slightly less rational than believing in Christianity – and not in the least less rational than believing in Scientology.

　
Lastly, returning nearer to our main theme of comparing liberalism with conservatism, we should consider the palliative dimension of belonging to a political party. That membership in a political party offers a person both a sense of community and a sense of identity is obvious. The distinctions between party membership and simple nationalism are less obvious, but are important nonetheless.

First, it should be noted that the pure nationalist must, to some extent, accept his or her country whole. The nation is defined by the whole, and if any subgroup of the nation is to be excluded it requires a special conceptual effort. For example, Hitler, an ardent nationalist, could not stop at portraying the Jews as merely a dangerous minority of Germans; they had to be portrayed as fundamentally non-Germans. If the nation is the parental entity before which all individuals must bow, then all that is evil and dangerous in the universe must be external to the nation. Those who are evil must be alien, born of alien blood. A pure partisan, however, need not make any special effort to cast enemies out of the common ethnic fold. Parties, too, are cultural entities at heart, drawing their defining boundaries around beliefs rather than genes. Republicans and Democrats don’t usually think of themselves as distinct genetic breeds. They think of themselves as believers in right ideas or right values.

In reality, there are few pure nationalists and few pure partisans. The two encompassing collectives are compatible and often reinforcing. The dominance of one tendency over the other varies with conditions. Thus, the Soviet state before the Second World War was a brand new cultural entity with a heavy facade of ideology. It centered on a party – the communists. During the war, however, the appeal of Russian nationalism was needed to rally a public sick of both military defeat and the failings of the communist program. After the war, the cultural and ideological experiment resumed its dominance over nationalism.

Parties are more palpable entities than nations. They have real leaders and sometimes even definite purposes. Straightforward ethnic nationalism is an emotional state. Its can have no purposes, per se. Political parties, though centered on certain cultures and their values, must inevitably support some recognizable program of policies. They must pin themselves to comparatively concrete statements of what they are for and against. This not only invites social division, but actually demands it. The pure nationalist wants the nation to move as one. The pure partisan wants to dominate those fellow countrymen who happen to have wrong ideas. The synthesis of the two, on the other hand, requires a redefinition of what the nation is. Whether a party is on the right or the left, the redefinition takes on essentially the same form – that of redefining the nation as a certain set of cultural values rather than as a certain ethnicity. For Americans on the right, America is a nation characterized by patriotism, distrust of government, fiscal restraint, and usually some measure of religious piety. For Americans on the left, America is a nation characterized by tolerance, fairness, and an unshakable faith in progress. Each group sees the other as misguided or demented and, while not actually external to the nation, possessed by ideas which are in opposition to the true national character. By this trick of national redefinition a person’s sense of belonging can be transferred from a nebulous abstraction to a collection of ideas, a body of leaders, or even a handful of slogans. Though parties are somewhat smaller entities than nations, they are still far too large to have reciprocal relationships with their lesser members. We belong to them far more than they belong to us.

IV. Modern Liberalism examined more specifically

Over the course of this essay I believe I have adequately summarized the predispositions of those we would classify as Conservatives. They are, broadly speaking, those people who find themselves on the trailing edge of social change. They are people who either like their lives as they are and want to keep them that way, or want to return to some mythologized state of the past, be it imagined or remembered. What, then, do liberals believe? What drives people on the leading edge of social change?

Liberals and conservatives are both human beings, and as such are subject to the same human motivations. Liberals, being generally more urbanized, are rather less inclined to turn for security to functional communities they don’t really have, or be nostalgic about some mythologized past they either don’t know or don’t believe in. Nevertheless, though they are more accustomed to the alienations of modern life, they are still afflicted by them – if only less consciously. Only a tiny percentage of human beings are truly content without any communal context whatsoever. The alienated urban masses hunger for a sense of security and identity just like their rural counterparts.

The promise offered by liberalism, like that offered by nationalism, is couched in the assumption that we share a not only a common need, but a collective existence. To be a liberal is to believe that humanity as whole has a certain positive destiny – a destiny that can be reached by implementing a progressive social program. Stable conservatism lives in the present; agitated conservatism lives in the past; liberalism lives always in the imagined future. This means that change is not merely a hallmark of liberalism but a central element of the creed. Liberals believe that they are agents of positive social evolution. They believe that they can argue, legislate, and invent their way to a utopia of equality and universal happiness.

Since, as I’ve already outlined, the specific beliefs of liberals and conservatives both move further to the left as society becomes ever more urbanized, the criterion of whether one looks backward or forward for solutions is probably the only reliable demarcation of the divide. In many other respects, the two cultures are really quite similar.

Noble as it may sound, the love of liberals for humanity as a whole is just an even more grandiose cousin of nationalism. Rather than dividing the world into countrymen and foreigners, the liberal divides the world into liberals and obstructionists. They believe in a sort of global community of the enlightened, whose full realization is only barred by the bigoted, regressive obstinacy of conservatives. Put another way, they have an irrational love for their ideology rather than an irrational love for their nation. Practically speaking, one is little more tenable than the other. While the notion of humanity as a whole conjures up a nice utopian sentiment, it ignores the reality that humanity is composed of people with all sorts of beliefs and agendas, many of which are violently incompatible despite the basic commonality of human nature. The liberal tends to believe that the masses in other nations (particularly developing nations) are nascent liberals yearning to breathe free, while in reality most of the people of the world are conservatives within their own social contexts, often nationalist or religious or both. They may buy our Coca-Cola, but they have irrational utopian visions of their own. They no more want to be second-rate knock-offs of western liberals than they want to be second-rate knock-offs of western conservatives. One can love "humanity" as an abstraction – as an artifact of the imagination – but such a love rarely survives prolonged exposure to any real population in the real world.

In practice, liberals do not love all human beings as individuals either. It’s a very rare person who does. Liberalism is a cultural entity, and as such has its own schema of in-groups and out-groups, which vary a little depending on the subgroup of liberals in question. For example, I think it would be fair to say that American liberals, particularly during the civil rights era, despised white southerners as a class. If one happened to be an American liberal and a white southerner, a certain apologetic attitude for the latter was obligatory. The corollary to this particular prejudice was the unconscious assumption that all American blacks (or members of any other suitably downtrodden minority) were necessarily morally good. If a black American appeared to be less than perfect the fault was obviously that of some white bigot somewhere along the line. My point is not to deny that many white southerners (and plenty of white northerners) did (and in some cases still do) engage in bigotry, but to assert that Liberals tend to make the same kinds of sweeping generalizations about out-groups and in-groups that people of any other culture do.

American conservatives, for their part, tend to become incensed at the suggestion that any American soldier could ever be justifiably accused of a war crime. Soldiers currently have an almost holy status among conservatives, and the suggestion that even a single one of them might tarnish this image is simply proof that the accuser is a liberal who hates America.

What all such hardened generalizations have in common is that they support a particular group’s identity myth. White liberals see themselves as the good white people, bestowing social justice on the oppressed. It would muddy the water if any of the bad white people had any merit as human beings, or if any of the oppressed might be a little lacking in personal merit. The Robin Hood myth just isn’t as inspiring if, once in awhile, Robin steals from a philanthropist to give to an impoverished child abuser. For the conservative, the soldier is less a person than a living symbol of the nation – a sort of walking talking flag -- who shoots the bad guys and passes out candy to children. Real soldiers, of course, are merely human beings with the usually variety of human traits. In a population of a hundred thousand of them, it is almost impossible that one wouldn’t find at least a few cold blooded sociopaths, just as one would expect to find in any city of that size. Nevertheless, the myth, however impossible, must take precedence over the grey, unhappy realities of the world. It is not a matter of truth, but of identity.

Another striking similarity between liberals and conservatives can be seen in each movement’s response to the other’s political rallies. There are, inevitably, a few hardcore racists at any sufficiently large Tea Party rally. This shouldn’t be surprising. The Tea Party movement is, at present, a very decentralized movement. The Tea Party groups have neither the capacity nor the desire to carefully vet those who happen to turn up at their events. Populists cannot be overly choosy. Any group that opposes America’s first black President is bound to draw at least a few people who oppose him because he is black, but this does not mean the movement as a whole is racially motivated. People can have other reasons for opposing a president, as history abundantly shows. The left characterizes the Tea Party groups as racist because doing so drops them neatly into a category of enemies liberals already have, and this absolves liberals of the irksome burden of having to address the Tea Party movement’s actual platform. When the liberals hold rallies, conservatives do almost exactly the same thing. They consistently point out the handful of self-declared communists and socialists who turn up on such occasions, and demonize the rest of the people present as mere dupes of this traditionally hated fringe. Again, it is an easy way to avoid the irksome task of having to actually think about opposing ideas. Each side, on the other hand, takes the righteousness of its own cause as a given. This is chauvinism pure and simple.

　
V. Conclusions

In relatively secure and stable periods of history, when change is slow, the divide between largely urban liberals and largely rural conservatives is modest. At present, under the strain of enormous economic pressure, international instability, and dizzying technological change, the gulf is wide. This does not bode well for anyone. Rational people, if there are any, must find themselves caught between increasingly radicalized extremists at both ends of the political spectrum. The dexterity with which each camp spins a narrative blaming all the world’s problems on other is a testament to both human inventiveness and human credulity. There is little room for compromise between such factions. Even if there were, the ad hoc blending of two irrational extremes does not seem likely to yield anything sound. Considering civilization’s bloody history of civil wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions – we have reason to worry about each side’s insistence on ideological purity.

In truth, the aggregate behavior of human beings is almost never driven by reason. The larger the collective one examines, the less rational its behavior is. Individuals can be reasonable; villages can exhibit practicality; states can be managed wisely to some degree; the collective direction of humanity as a whole, however, is beyond the realm of rational control. It is probably also beyond the realm of what we, as individuals, can fully understand. We did not agree, as a species, to pursue our current trajectory. As individuals, no one asked us. Like anything else in nature, social evolution is ultimately the playing out of a vast, complex, and essentially non-conscious process. Urbanization is a feature of that process that we may, at least, recognize – and one with reasonably predictable social correlations.

The conditions under which we live change faster our basic motivations. Our very ability to overcome and dominate nature has led us into problems for which nature never prepared us. Important as entitlements, tax policy, and all the other topics of the day may be, they are all broadly symptomatic of a larger human problem – the problem of the instability which appears to be inherent in societies on the scale of tens or hundreds of millions. Considered on the timescale that we use to judge the viability of other species, the most enduring nations on earth are mere events. The imaginary collective of "humanity" is more an explosion than a steady march of progress.

In other species that have, for one reason or another, experienced explosive population growth the process inevitably continues until it meets some natural limitation. Typically, the species exhausts its food supply or induces some disastrous change in its environment. In many of the more developed nations population growth has slowed or even reversed, but overall there are still more and more human beings every year, sharing a fundamentally finite pool of resources. Technology cannot increase productivity without end, so a Malthusian catastrophe of some sort seems almost inevitable. This, if nothing else, may put an upper limit on urbanization and all that it entails. What sort of society human beings we might have at the upper limits of concentration, starved of either energy or food I shudder to imagine.
　
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1 The decline or reverse of population growth in most industrialized nations that has been occurring in recent decades is an interesting topic in itself, but beyond the already broad scope of this essay.

Note: I owe an acknowledgement to Eric Hoffer’s great work, The True Believer, though I arrived at many of his conclusions independently. It was his view that mass movements originated from the frustrations of people with certain personality types, and were brought into an active phase by their ability to awaken simmering dissatisfactions in the broader population. It is my view that this process is driven not so much by certain personality types (although such people do indeed serve as a focus for mass movements) but by a the general dissatisfaction of large segments of the public with their relative impotence and insignificance within the context of a large, bureaucratic, urban society. We simmer because we are members of corporate bodies too big to notice us. As Hoffer himself saw, we can only become fully numbed to the impotence and insignificance society imposes on us by sacrificing our individual identities to one collective vision or another.

A Word or Two on Greed

2010-12-20T08:48:00.000-08:00

As politicians haggle and maneuver over the question of taxes on the rich, the notion of greed is always with us, an ever-present subtext to such debates. It seems that no one, though, considers the notion of greed in any depth. It is enough to simply hurl accusations and accept one’s own moral high ground as a given. But are greed and wealth synonymous? Most of us who are not wealthy were taught to think so, either directly or implicitly. In truth, however, greed is just a characteristic of human beings. No group has a monopoly on it.

Consider this scenario. Imagine yourself completely without greed, absolutely committed to the laudable principles of fairness and human equality. It seems to me you would then be subject to the following proposition:

The per capita income of the world is approximately 10,500 US dollars. If you make more than this and do not give the surplus to people who makes less, arguably you are being greedy -- taking more than your fair share. For simplicity sake, let us assume that you are single and have no dependents. You certainly have the means to give the money away. No agent of authority is going to stop you from being charitable. Nor would it be too difficult to find recipients. Even if you felt justified in stipulating that “your” surplus should only go to people who are deserving (by whatever ethical criteria you might propose) deserving people on a planet of six billion are plentiful enough. Further, I can say from personal experience that $10,500 per annum is a sufficient sum to survive on in the US, albeit not very comfortably or securely. Certainly, you could find a way to do without a car, and modern television, and even take the risk of living without health insurance, in the interest of helping someone in Zimbabwe or Paraguay attain minimal shelter or food. This would be the fair thing to do. Still, supposing you didn’t want to give up "your" surplus, what excuses might you offer to your conscience?

You could say you deserve your income. You could argue that you contribute disproportionately to the wellbeing of humanity, and therefore ought to get a little more than the paltry world average. Perhaps you are a doctor and you heal the sick, or an industrialist who provides jobs for thousands of people, or a clergyman who at least imagines he saves their souls. If you are really serious about fairness, this argument for your exemption isn’t going to work in most cases. Maybe if you do enough direct and obvious good, a little extra income for healthcare might be justified to save your life -- but it doesn’t seem as justified to use it on your third vacation home. For that matter, it doesn’t seem much more justified to use it on more pedestrian luxuries. You get a big TV, and the Paraguayan peasant starves. Not a very equitable exchange.

The positive argument failing, you could always try the negative one: those who are poor deserve their poverty. Well, unless you are devoted to some sort of transcendent cosmic justice myth, believing that wealth, and probably everything else, gets parceled out by a deity who is fair by definition, this justification isn’t going to work either. After all, there are whole nations of malnourished, desperate people. It isn’t plausible that they all became destitute through acts of individual will -- even if we assume we have free will, which is at least an open question. In any case, only being fair to those whom you deem worthy of fairness isn’t very different from being unfair. We cannot really have principles if we make them up as we go along.

You could propose that you already make donations to charity, and that the amount you give is morally sufficient. Unfortunately, this still leaves that Paraguayan peasant starving as you sit comfortably behind your new TV. How can you be a moral person and believe that your enjoyment of some non-essential possession has the same value as another person’s life or health?

You might also think “I live up the moral standards of my society.” This will certainly not do, because so did Josef Mengele. The moral equality of human beings is a pretty meaningless ideal if it can be trumped by a mere ad populum rationale.

Lastly, you might argue that the wealth you have to offer is inconsequential compared to the wealth that others so unjustly horde, and that it is they who need to feed that Paraguayan peasant and not yourself. This argument has an interesting quality. The millionaire can wag a finger at the billionaire, the well-off professional can wag a finger at the millionaire, and the store clerk can wag a finger even at the well-off professional. Each makes a claim, at least implicitly, of being relatively fair -- of being innocent because others are more guilty. Is it true, though, that failing to prevent one instance of suffering is more moral than failing to prevent two instances – or are two failures more moral than a thousand? Is allowing a neighbor to suffer more moral than being indifferent to the suffering of a million people one will never know or see?

Other than actually impoverishing oneself, there is only one way to escape this trap. It is to accept that, though most people manage be generous to some degree, probably not one in a million actually pursues the ideas of fairness and equality to their logical conclusions. The person that does is fair. The rest of us are greedy -- prepared to let others suffer for the sake of our own comfort.

Human beings are not made morally different by the mere acquisition of wealth. People of all classes pursue similar patterns of generosity. They give to those that are close to them and, for the most part, they ignore those that they don’t personally know. Moreover, generosity itself is not always the purest of exercises. If you give to have a foundation created in your name, or to impress your friends, or to placate your deity, your motives are essentially self-serving. Of course, it’s all the same to our starving peasant -- but we are talking about intentions here, not consequences.

It is not my object to make the wealthy feel better about themselves. There are more than enough sycophants in the world to provide that service. It is more my object to point out to the rest of us how self-servingly hypocritical it is to think our relative poverty makes us, by necessity, morally better. The non-rich call the rich greedy for more-or-less the same reason that the rich call the non-rich lazy – to feel better about themselves. We can certainly debate the actual, tangible consequences or unrestrained capitalism -- just as we can debate the tangible consequences of socialism, or anything else. Adding moral indignation to such discussions, though, rarely contributes anything illuminating. Any attempt to make rational sense of human society must include putting aside those ideas that condemn or deny the actual nature of human beings.

Liberal Values – An Alternative View (Part 2)

2010-08-27T08:44:00.000-07:00

I’m promoting M.C. Planck’s comments on my previous entry (Liberal Values – An Alternative View) to the level of a new entry. His defense of Greta Christina’s position is interesting -- and probably representative in some respects. It merits a response in detail. M.C. Planck’s comments are in red italics; my responses are in black. – e.m.c.

Democracy

Naturally if your democratic society votes to end your democracy, you’re going to lose your democracy – one way or another. But that’s not the point.

The first point is that democracies out-perform other kinds of governments when measured by the goals people have of their governments. The second point is that the history of the world is the history of the advance of democracy. This does not mean there were not retreats; rather, it means that the retreats can be understood in terms of local conditions.

The Wiemar Republic, for instance, was in quite a fix. To a large degree the Germans could be said to have voted for Fascism instead Communism, since the continuation of Democracy simply was not a believable option.

If you view democracy as a technology (albeit social rather than physical) then this interpretation sounds much more reasonable. Hardly anyone would deny that the human race has steadily advanced in technology over the years, even while acknowledging that in many times and places it has temporarily declined. Recognizing that democracy – like any other advanced technology – requires an extensive infrastructure to arise and function explains its history. The loss of this infrastructure and the subsequent collapse of democracy is not necessarily a comment on democracy itself, anymore than the Tasmanian abandonment of fishing is a definitive comment on the viability of fishing technology.

Also it seems appropriate to point out that the Germans lost, and lost definitively. Even the Russians threw in the towel eventually, and the Chinese are certainly not spouting “Workers Unite!” these days.

The history of the world is no more the history of the advance of democracy than it is the history of the advance of ever larger authoritarian structures. It has been said, and very plausibly too, that Joseph Stalin was the most powerful individual leader in the history of the world. If I were an advocate of authoritarianism (which I am not) I might just as easily point out the recent trend toward at least nominal democracies as "retreats" from the ultimate trend of concentrating more and more power in fewer and fewer hands. If we consider the species as a whole, power was certainly more widely distributed in the stone age than it is now. In a tribe of thirty people, I might have a level of influence that I could hardly hope to have over any democratic government today.

We are living in a very unstable period of history for many reasons, including the proliferation of technology and its miscellaneous consequences to demographic and environmental issues. No one really knows where it is going. Like evolution, history is a complex set of interactions that proceeds with a certain lawfulness but with no deliberate purpose. History, ultimately, isn't about progress – it’s about physics. At the highest intelligible level, it’s about evolution. To believe that history is an inevitable upward movement toward some ideal state is purely wishful thinking. You can create such a narrative -- but only if you are willing to cherry pick historical events. Indeed the Nazi state was short lived, but then dozens of democratic governments in the third world have been equally short lived. You cannot plead "local conditions" to dismiss real instances that contradict your belief, and yet stand firmly behind that belief without anything to support it but equally explicable cases.

Indeed the Chinese are not shouting “Workers Unite!” – but neither are they rushing headlong toward anything even resembling democracy. Their authoritarian regime shows no sign of cracking any time soon, and gets along perfectly well with their particular species of capitalism.

Abortion

I have a very different view of both sides of this issue.

For the conservatives, I believe you have missed their mark completely. Their opposition to abortion is fundamentally about control over childbirth. To put it in the most charitable terms, the conservatives are attempting to maintain some stake in childbirth for men. A noble goal, but their chosen method is to punish women for having sex, which while being amazingly effective for the last 5,000 years or so is these days considered barbaric.

For the liberals, you have also missed the mark. Roe vs. Wade does not depend on the fetus not being a person or not having rights. Rather, it depends on the recognition that someone else’s rights cannot trump your own. We do not force people to take homeless bums into their house and feed them for 18 years until they are capable of feeding themselves, because doing so – however beneficial to the bum – would be hugely detrimental to the homeowner and not incidentally a complete destruction of fundamental rights. If they can force a woman to feed a parasite, then why can’t they force a man to do the same? Yes, the bum has rights: but so does the homeowner.

If pure pragmatism is your goal, a more defensible argument is that birth control + abortion is the safest public health policy. Pregnancy is perhaps the most life-threatening event most non-elderly women face. This has nothing to do with convenience or wealth; it simply recognizes that as long as sexual activity is a legally protected activity, people have the right to practice it with all due regard to safety. Banning elective abortions while retaining birth control would be like allowing motorcyclists to purchase helmets for their own safety, but not allowing them to go to the emergency room after an accident. Such a policy would be instantly recognized as simply a ploy to ban motorcycle riding.

Let’s start with your assessment of conservative motives. In the first place, roughly half of the conservatives out there, including many of the most vocal ones on this issue, are women -- for whom your proposed motive makes no sense. Second, even if you assume that all conservative women are the meek ideological slaves of conservative men (which, frankly, isn't even true in Afghanistan) this explanation still doesn’t work.

There are fundamentally two kinds of motivation: conscious ones, and unconscious ones. If you are positing a conscious motivation, then you believe that the majority of conservative men walk around thinking, more-or-less, “I need to maintain some stake in childbirth” or “I need to punish women for having sex.” This is not only doubtful, but surreal.

If you are positing a subconscious motivation, then you are either talking about some genetically innate characteristic, or some product of personal experience. The genetic case is going to be difficult to make. Young men, with the most at stake as far as assuring their progeny are carried to term, actually tend to be less “pro-life” than older men, for whom the issue is usually academic. Further, if a “pro-life” stance were a sort of phenotype you would expect it to breed true. In other words, a child of “pro-life” parents adopted into a “pro-choice” family would still tend to grow up with a “pro-life” stance, and you could expect similar results with a “pro-choice” child adopted by a “pro-life” family. I doubt that anyone has researched this, but I am pretty confident you would not find a real phenotype here.

What we are left with, then, is a subconscious motivation rooted in personal experience. I will not say that such things don’t exist, but unless you are also positing some sort of Jungian collective unconscious there is no way to get from a personal subconscious to the collective will of a group.

Not unlike Ms. Christina, you fail to ground your position in real phenomena. Anytime anyone says “group ‘x’ does ‘y’ because…” rational people need to become suspicious. Motivations are the province of individuals – not of groups. You can say that the culture of a certain group appears to have certain consequences, but that is not the same as saying that all (or even any) of the individuals within that group are aware of those consequences – and necessarily responsible for them. Your hypothesis smells unpleasantly of both a belief in out-group homogeneity and the fundamental attribution error. In more philosophical terms, it’s a linguistically coherent explanation -- it just doesn’t correspond to a consequential number of real peoples’ actual motivations. It’s a nice narrative for the liberal-feminist culture of which you are a part though, and it no doubt promotes solidarity within that context – not that I’m claiming that’s your motive… ;)

Moving on to your interpretation of the liberal position -- I’m more than a little stunned. You start out by saying:

“…Roe vs. Wade does not depend on the fetus not being a person or not having rights. Rather, it depends on the recognition that someone else’s rights cannot trump your own.”

Do you actually intend this as a general principle!? We are measuring (at least potentially) a life on the one hand, against a certain loss of personal freedom on the other. Given the adoption option, we aren’t necessarily even talking about a life-changing loss of personal freedom. If we apply your rule as a general principle, we eschew ethics altogether. Even Ted Bundy could have lived by such a maxim. After all, Ted would probably have agreed that the women he killed had a reasonable desire to live – he just didn’t believe their life-right trumped his right to a rather nasty pursuit of happiness! Ms. Christina’s whole point was to extol the virtues of fairness and avoidance of harm. The common thread between these virtues is the idea of altruism – making sacrifices for the good of another. Your rule is the antithesis of that. If someone else’s rights can never trump your own, then what exactly does it mean for them to have rights?

Then you go on:

“We do not force people to take homeless bums into their house and feed them for 18 years until they are capable of feeding themselves…”

Neither, in most of the industrialized world, do we force women to raise newborns to age 18. In the US at least, giving up a newborn for adoption is a very well-protected right. I will assume that this was just a rhetorical flourish on your part, and that you do not actually consider minor children merely “bums” or “parasites,” nor consider their upkeep something parents need not bother with if it’s inconvenient.

Regarding your last point, one must consider the context and the historical period one is discussing. I assume we are talking about the industrialized world at the present time. The leading cause of death among women of child bearing age in the US is, by a wide margin, auto accidents. Death by complications of childbirth is far down the list. I can’t think of a single instance of hearing about a woman dying in childbirth during my lifetime. I’m sure it happens somewhere. In less modern times it was certainly common, but with access to reasonable healthcare it is now quite a rarity. You need some newer actuarial tables.

Unfortunately, you have missed my principal point in any case. My point is not that abortion is necessarily wrong. I, for one, would not be inclined to repeal Roe v. Wade (though I might well draw the line at a different stage of embryonic development). I am certainly not in the “life begins at conception” camp. The point I was trying to make is that the issue is debatable, and that the fairly sharp division it draws between conservatives and liberals drops each group on sides of the debate that are counter to Christina’s theory. Your comments only draw that contradiction in starker relief.

I find it interesting that Ms. Christina imagines a time when we all might find eating a chicken sandwich morally repugnant – but when (I assume)* fairly late-term abortions will still be perfectly ok. This sort of inconsistency is well explained by a cultural model of the liberal-conservative divide. Plenty of good liberals are vegetarians, but hardly any are “pro-life” – so universal vegetarianism looks like and advance, whereas revisiting the abortion issue looks like a retrenchment.

* I admit I’m making assumptions about Ms. Christina’s views. She may be the world’s only pro-life, atheist, feminist, liberal, erotic author for all I know…

Universality of Fairness

You have touched upon an interesting notion, which I am not certain anyone but myself has really developed. The various levels of moral development – fear of punishment, desire for reward, peer approval, social contract, and universal rights – do not differ in theory so much as they differ in application. To explain: all people (even sociopaths) understand the concept of fairness, but differ on who to apply it to. The higher up the scale of moral development, the wider the circle of recognized moral agents. At the bottom, fairness is a one-way concept that only applies to the individual; near the middle it becomes something that applies to your peers (i.e. kin or tribe) but not necessarily to others. At the highest levels we move from personal relations to social relations, and finally to the recognition that fairness applies to all entities.

Viewed in this light conservatives certainly are ethical; they just limit their ethics to smaller groups. However, I very much disagree with the perceived inclusionary nature of conservatism: I believe you have underestimated both the strength of racial/national/class boundaries and the necessity that these groups have someone to be in opposition to.

Ms. Christina was probably referring to the work on authoritarianism as explained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism. I find myself quite swayed by that theory (and underlying research), so I recommend a study of it.

Of course I cannot disagree with your notion that people adopt veneers for the sake of social acceptance. However, the point of the RWA research is that there is a certain personality type who is far more likely to do this. Nonetheless, we all do it to some degree; but that does not invalidate Ms. Christina’s point. I may reflexively identify myself with physicists, but they are still right about gravity.

The other vector of thought that fuels Ms. Christina’s position is sociobiology: the recognition that morality is an evolutionary strategy. Human beings are obsessed with fairness because of our particular biological condition. We are, by and large, physically equal (even the differences between men and women are quite small compared to many other species); we are remarkably equal in mental capacity (here, the similarities of human cognitive ability are so much greater: even the dumbest non-defective human brain has vastly more tools at its disposal than the smartest non-human brain); and we are dependant on each other for survival (again, much more so than even the apes, our closest genetic kin).

In this view, there is clearly a single, best human morality, that is necessarily applicable to any creature in the same biological conditions (both genetic and environmental). And that is the morality Ms. Christina (and I) assert is universal. Our morality is as universal as our biology, and our biology is absolutely universal (once again, human beings are the least genetically diverse large mammal on the planet, excepting those species that are on the verge of extinction).

That morality can be summed up quite simply as fairness. And to the extent that conservatives value other things (such as social cohesion) over fairness, they deviate from the (human) moral ideal.

I can’t answer for that “do no harm” stuff, though: that’s just fuzzy-headed thinking. A truly moral person causes precisely as much harm to others as he would have them cause to him. In many cases this equates to fatality. Killing is not immoral (despite what many liberals seem to think); rather, killing in situations where you wouldn’t expect to be killed yourself is immoral.

And now I’ve gone and made a long post, too, despite the limitations imposed by your censorious comment box; which seems only fair. :D

Reading your first paragraph in this section, a fundamental difference between our views comes sharply into focus. You view moral differences, and perhaps many other sorts of differences as well, in terms of some sort of absolute, hierarchical, process of improvement. You rough out Kohlberg’s classic hierarchy, for example. While I might have a personal preference for certain categories near the top of your hierarchies, philosophically I prefer to view moral differences more horizontally – as alternative systems of social organization. That I may personally find some particular stance or other repugnant is not the point – what interests me most is how those systems actually function in the empirically real world. Mine is an essentially evolutionary perspective, and, contrary to the popular misconception, evolution does not move toward some absolute long term ideal, but merely toward what works best at any given moment. I’m not saying all systems are equal – I’m saying that if you really want to understand the world, becoming a cheerleader for your own accidental biases is a rather bad start.

The RWA research you reference above appears to be such poor science I would hesitate to even call it "research." Since you reference the Wikipedia article, and no one on the web has challenged its contents as not representing the theory fairly, I have to assume the article is in fact a reasonable summary.

To begin with, it suffers from the same problem IQ tests do -- the test itself becomes the definition of the property you are testing for. This is a hazard with almost all standardized assessments of this nature. You test against the biases of the people who compose the test. If the people who compose the test have an agenda you get a very bad test indeed. Consider what the article cites as the first item on the new RWA scale:

"Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us."

The article explains:

"People who strongly agree with this are showing a tendency toward authoritarian submission (Our country desperately needs a mighty leader), authoritarian aggression (who will do what has to be done to destroy), and conventionalism (the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us)."

Well, that sounds like very frightening stuff. Now, let’s alter the language only slightly, while trying to maintain the same essential content:

"Our country desperately needs a forceful leader who will do what has to be done to stamp out the new extremist policies and runaway corruption that are ruining us."

This still sounds like... authoritarian submission (Our country desperately needs a forceful leader), authoritarian aggression (who will do what has to be done to stamp out), and conventionalism (the new extremist policies and runaway corruption that are ruining us)." Of course, this sentence would have dovetailed neatly into any Democratic candidate's nomination speech during the 2008 US election cycle. Well, amusing as it might be, we can't all be Ring-wing authoritarians.

What I believe Altemeyer and his colleages have done is to assemble a compact set of stereotypically conservative traits that most liberals find especially abhorrent, then constructed a quite precise linguistic trap that would snare conservatives -- and only conservatives -- into identifying with that definition.

A common hallmark of good science (though I admit not one that occurs in absolutely all cases) is that it produces some surprising results. The RWA assessment appears to be so carefully crafted that the results are about as surprising as discovering that optometrists write more glasses prescriptions than other people.

The RWA article continues:

“In a study by Altemeyer, 68 authoritarians played a three hour simulation of the Earth's future entitled the Global change game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_change_game). Unlike a comparison game played by individuals with low RWA scores, which resulted in world peace and widespread international cooperation, the simulation by authoritarians became highly militarized and eventually entered the stage of nuclear war. By the end of the high RWA game, the entire population of the earth was declared dead.”

Again, if you look at the Global change game objectively you will have to admit the findings are rather problematic. As a socio-economic-military simulation of the world, the game is both crude and overly subjective. The game world is quantified along resource and population lines based on real numbers, but little if any attempt is made to model cultural or historic relationships between nations. Military and economic models are oversimplified for the sake of playability. Assessments of the effects of player’s decisions are often not handled algorithmically (by some neutral mathematical rule) but by the ruling of “facilitators” with their own personal biases. I have no doubt the game is an enjoyable exercise, but it proves little. A global simulation designed and refereed by conservative economists might be equally enjoyable, would probably yield very different results, and would be every bit as useless.

A classic study of authority like the Milgram experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) had real validity because it attempted to hide the game from the experimental subjects. They thought they were doing something real. The Global change game is, straightforwardly, a game -- not reality. Further, while the Milgram experiment put people into an unusual situation, it was one that was at least plausible for them to be in. The tiny population of world leaders the Altemeyer game attempts to have players represent are, in the real world, not drawn from some sampling of people from a common culture, screened only in accordance with how they performed on a psychologist’s test. On average, real leaders in the real world are a more cautious and deliberative breed. They have something real to lose. The global change game that actually played out over the forty-four years of the Cold War failed to produce a nuclear exchange, even though there were often authoritarians on both sides and always authoritarians on at least one side. Any candidate for a valid simulation of the future ought to also be a creditable simulation of the past. While Altemeyer’s game is dramatic and interesting, I don’t see the Rand Corporation seizing on it anytime soon as means of predicting the future behavior of actual nations.

Moving on to socio-biology, morality as an evolutionary strategy, you write:

“…In this view, there is clearly a single, best human morality, that is necessarily applicable to any creature in the same biological conditions (both genetic and environmental). And that is the morality Ms. Christina (and I) assert is universal… That morality can be summed up quite simply as fairness. And to the extent that conservatives value other things (such as social cohesion) over fairness, they deviate from the (human) moral ideal.”

In an absolutely homogenous, absolutely stable environment, there certainly would be a single ideal “morality” (i.e., a set of behavioral rules) to achieve any particular outcome you wish to define as humanity’s purpose. I don’t think humanity has anything remotely like a collective purpose, but for sake of argument we will just start with survival of the species as a sort of comfortable default. Alright then, everything else being fixed, there would be an ideal morality for species survival. The problem is that such a stable, homogenous world does not, and probably can not, exist. In a universe that is neither uniform from place to place nor from one year to the next, the ideal strategy for survival is bound to vary with changing conditions.

The only way to have a fixed ideal strategy in an otherwise variable world is to create an abstract goal which is associated with your strategy in a more-or-less self-referential way. So, for example, if you happen to define the purpose of humanity as showing devotion to God, then prayer is the ideal strategy regardless of any environmental circumstances, and perhaps even regardless of whether God actually exists or not. Abstract, circular arguments neatly evade empirical refutation – at the minor cost of being meaningless. If your argument is that morality just equals fairness and that people who sometimes rank fairness less than some other value are therefore immoral – you are making just this sort of definitional claim. On the other hand, if your argument is that fairness improves humanity’s chances of survival (or achieves any other broad objective) then you have to have a definition of fairness which can be clearly applied to enough real circumstances to support your case. I just don’t see that here.

What I believe you and Christina are actually doing (though not necessarily consciously) is merely arguing that your idealized view of members of your own culture (liberalism) are better than your stereotypical views of your enemy’s culture (conservatism). Since one of the popular precepts of modern liberalism is multiculturalism – a sort of tacit oath of universal tolerance to anything identifiable as a culture – liberalism’s enemies have to be definable in some fundamentally non-cultural terms. Enter Altemeyer and Co., ready to show that conservatism can be modeled as a psychological disorder. There hasn’t been such an inevitable lovefest since the Nazis met the eugenicists. (Forgive the hyperbole…)

My view is that liberalism and conservatism are cultures – or at least cultural entities. By this I mean that liberalism and conservatism are collections of beliefs and values espoused by certain definable groups of people, and adhered to largely for the sake of acceptance by members of those groups. Liberalism and conservatism are neither genetic predispositions nor individual psychoses nor the product of careful intellectual rigor – they are, to use Dawkins’ term, collections of memes.

I don’t expect either liberals or conservatives to be very happy with this perspective. No one likes to think his or her own cherished views might be nothing more than an accident of circumstances, but it isn’t difficult to show that, in most if not all instances, that’s exactly what they are. Conservatives rarely arise spontaneous among groups of liberals, nor do conservative populations churn out many liberals. Nevertheless, no one is born one or the other, any more than one is born with the ability to speak a particular language. These are learned social traits. Nor can either group can make the claim that their positions are the inevitable product of reason. This cannot be so as long as even the more intelligent members of both groups are willing to tolerate contradictions in their own positions that they would not tolerate in the positions of outsiders.

Let us be clear though. The recognition that liberalism and conservatism are both cultural entities in no way implies that they are functionally equivalent. There is no logical reason to be bound to any tacit oath of cultural neutrality. As systems of social organization, liberalism and conservatism each have unique advantages and failings. Given that we have some definite criteria for what “better” means, it would be absurd to think that some cultures are not “better” than others. Personally, I find certain theoretical aspects of both liberalism and conservatism admirable – but I also find that the more entrenched and militant these cultural ideologies become, the more their theoretical differences become irrelevant. To me, one snarling dog is pretty much the moral equivalent of any other. In that sort of contest, nature almost always picks the bigger, stronger dog.

Liberal Values - An Alternative View

2010-08-10T08:54:00.000-07:00

A Critical Analysis of Greta Christina’s “Why Liberal Values Really Are Better”

As an occasional contributor the Humanist Symposium, I make a certain effort to read other people’s articles there. Greta Christina’s article in edition #56 caught my attention, and seemed worth examining in some detail. My views are rather at odds with Ms. Christina’s. For the record, I am neither a conservative nor a liberal. I am a humanist in the general sense that I reject supernatural explanations for reality and put considerable value on the thoughts and feelings of others, human or otherwise. The only “ist” I am reasonably comfortable identifying myself as is “empiricist,” but if I ever find a movement of empiricists I will probably avoid it like the plague.

My objection to Ms. Christina’s argument isn’t that it lacks sincerity or good-intentions, or even that it’s badly reasoned by web standards, but simply that it doesn’t hold up well when applied to real people in the real world. For purposes of discussion, I have abridged her argument to the long italicized passage below. If you prefer to read her full article, it is available by following the link at the end.

Why Liberal Values Really Are Better

Liberals and conservatives don't just disagree about specific issues -- we disagree about core ethical values. Can a case be made that liberal values really are better?

… A number of researchers are coming to the conclusion that ethics and values aren't entirely relative, and aren't solely derived from particular cultures. Human beings, across cultures and throughout history, seem to share a few core ethical values, hard-wired into our brains by millions of years of evolution as a social species. Those values: Fairness, harm and the avoidance thereof, loyalty, authority, and purity…

… researchers are finding is that liberals prioritize very different values from conservatives. When asked a series of questions about different ethical situations, self-described liberals strongly tend to prioritize fairness and harm as the most important of these core values -- while self-described conservatives are more likely to prioritize authority, loyalty, and purity.

If these are core values, fundamental axioms of human ethics... how do we distinguish between them? I mean -- they're axioms. They're our ethical starting points. When they come into conflict, as they often do, how do we step back from them, and decide which ones we should prioritize?

I've been chewing over this question ever since I heard about this research. In other words, for at least a couple of years. And then, at an atheist conference I spoke at recently, the answer was dropped into my lap, so clearly and succinctly that I kicked myself for not having thought of it myself, by the conference's keynote speaker, philosopher and MacArthur genius Rebecca Goldstein…

Here's the idea.

Fairness and harm are better values -- because they can be universalized.

Goldstein's argument is this. The basic philosophical underpinning of ethics (as opposed to its psychological and evolutionary underpinnings) are:

(a) the starting axiom that we, ourselves, matter;

and (b) the understanding that, if we step back from ourselves and view life from an outside perspective, we have to acknowledge that we don't, cosmically speaking, matter more than anyone else; that other people matter to themselves as much as we matter to ourselves; and that any rules of ethics ought to apply to other people as much as they do to ourselves. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and all that. (Some version of the Golden Rule seems to exist in every society.)

In other words, the philosophical underpinning of ethics are that they ought to be applicable to everyone. They ought to be universalizable.

And liberal values -- fairness and harm -- are universalizable.

In fact, it's inherent in the very nature of these values that they are universalizable.

Fairness is the most obvious example of this. I mean, the whole freaking idea of fairness is that it be ought to be applied universally. Tit for tat. What's sauce for the goose is what's sauce for the gander. Yada, yada, yada. The whole idea of fairness is that everyone ought to be treated, not identically, but as if they matter equally.

And the value of harm, and the avoidance thereof, can easily be universalized as well. It can be applied to everybody. In fact, the history of the evolution of human ethics can be seen as the history of this principle being expanded to a wider and wider population: to people from other countries, to people of color, to women, etc. etc. etc. It can even be universalized further, and applied to non-humans. (It may well be that, in 200 years, people will look back on the way we treat animals with the same bewildered, "How on earth could they do that?" horror that we now view slavery with.) There's nothing in the principle of avoiding harm that prevents it from being applied to any creature with the capacity to experience suffering. It is an easily universalizable value.

Conservative values, on the other hand, are not universalizable.

Quite the contrary.

It is in the very nature of conservative values -- authority, loyalty, and purity -- that they are applied differently to different people. It is in the very nature of conservative values that some animals are, and ought to be, more equal than others.

The conservative value of authority has, at its very core, the idea that certain special people -- i.e., authority figures -- ought to be respected and obeyed more than others, and ought to have the right to tell other people what to do, and ought to have the power to enforce those dictums. The conservative value of loyalty has, at its very core, the idea that certain special people -- i.e., people inside the in-group, the family or country or faith or what have you -- ought to be valued more than others. And the conservative value of purity... well, purity is a weird one, since it applies more to how people treat their own bodies, and less to how people treat one another. (Making it a pretty baffling ethical principle, in my opinion.) But when it does apply to how people treat other people (the notion of "untouchables," for instance), it has, at its very core, the idea that certain special people -- i.e., people who are considered pure -- ought to be treated as fully human... and that people who are considered impure need not be.

Conservative values -- authority, loyalty, and purity -- can't be universalized. They actively resist universalization.

So if you accept the idea that the philosophical foundation of ethics is that other people matter as much as we ourselves do, and that any principles of ethics ought to apply to other people as much as they do to ourselves, then that makes liberal values... well, better. Closer to that philosophical foundation.

http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2010/06/why-liberal-values-really-are-better.html

Well, let’s start with the idea of fairness being universalizable. The problem here is that we are talking about an idea that sounds very noble in the abstract, but which often leads to contradictions in actual application. The quickest way to illustrate this is to consider democracy, which might be seen as a subset of fairness – fairness in the realm of politics.

Democracy is straightforwardly fair, but survives only so long as a clear majority of the participants consider democracy itself inviolable. It begins to break down as soon as some large fraction of the polity wants to elect representatives who will abolish the democratic institutions themselves. What then, do good small “d” democrats do? They must either accept that, sooner or later, the anti-democratic opposition will win and democracy will end, or they must be willing to outlaw the anti-democratic party -- thereby effectively disenfranchising a large segment of the polity. In other words, either they let democracy be destroyed, or they destroy it themselves. This is not a bizarre example invented to make a philosophical point, but something that happens in the real world. The trite but valid example that leaps to mind is Germany in the 1930’s. The Weimar Republic essentially bowed to the general will, and let democracy be destroyed. I can think of other cases, but I won’t belabor the point.

What is true of democracy is true of fairness in general. The religious zealot who follows you down the street demanding your repentance might be acting in an entirely “fair” way within the context of his beliefs. He is “saved” so it is his duty to “save” you too. This is the Golden Rule. Likewise, people who burned witches did so (at least in principle) to save their souls – so their intentions were arguably “fair”. Whether there really are souls or witches or salvation is irrelevant with regard to the principle of fairness, because fairness cannot be measured against the standard of ultimate consequences, but must by practical necessity be measured only against the standard of intent. Thus, fairness is only universalizable, in a functional sense, within some homogenous (or “fairly” homogenous) social group. Given this restriction, it is not universalizable in any sense that merits the term.

Since we seem to be on shaky ground with regard to fairness maybe we had better move on to the avoidance of harm. It is almost a commonplace that the first step on the road to harming someone is dehumanizing them, either as an individual or as part of some group. Non-pathological individuals are much less likely to harm people they identify as persons than they are to harm those they identify as essentially non-persons. In war for example, it is always necessary to talk about the enemy in less-than-human terms, both for the benefit of the soldiers and the public at large. If liberals are innately predisposed to value an avoidance of harm above adherence to authority, and conservatives are predisposed to the reverse, we would expect these predispositions to manifest themselves with some consistency. Superficially, they do appear to. I have never seen a conservative at an antiwar protest, for example. Not many liberals are advocates of capital punishment. At least in certain cases of direct, observable, first order harm liberals do seem to be the kinder, gentler species of human being. But let’s not jump to conclusions too quickly.

Consider the perennial controversy over abortion. I will tread as lightly as I can here, knowing this is an emotional issue for many people. I do not intend to take a position one way or the other, but only to use the issue to illustrate a point.

If it is axiomatic that other persons matter, in some deep sense, just as much as we do ourselves, then it has to matter just what it is that constitutes a person. There is clearly no consensus, scientific or otherwise, on the point at which a human embryo becomes a person. The matter gets sorted out arbitrarily by the law for the sake of practicality, but I hope that we can agree the courts are not the best place to inquire into any sort of philosophical truth. Birth is a nice discreet event, but I don’t think many people would argue that a newborn infant was an absolute non-person only moments before birth – least of all a non-religious individual like myself who does not believe in a separate and disembodied soul. Somewhere in the period from conception to birth then, the status of personhood must, somehow, come into being. I see no reason to think this is the kind of question we will ever be sorted out objectively. There will always be room for individual belief -- and individual doubt.

If liberals tend to value avoidance of harm over the strictures of human authority, then one would expect most of them to oppose abortion. Since the personhood of a fetus is indeterminate, erring on the side of caution would seem to be the more humane course. Likewise, you would expect most conservatives to be at least tolerant of abortion, since it is legally sanctioned by their duly elected government, and since avoiding harm is a matter of lesser concern than obedience to authority. Obviously, these are not the positions either group typically takes. What is going on here?

Let’s deal with the conservative position first. It could be that the majority of conservatives that oppose abortion only do so because they have narrowly construed religious beliefs – in other words, that they do not really care about avoiding harm, but are simply bowing to religious rather than secular authority. I am very skeptical about this explanation. I know too many Catholics who have no particular love for their own church hierarchy, and openly defy it on many other issues, but are adamant about their opposition to abortion. There are at least two possible explanations that work better. The first is that, contrary to theory, many conservatives really do care about avoiding harm, and are perfectly capable of prioritizing that concern. This, I think, is true in many cases. The second explanation is that they simply believe what their group believes. It really is just culture after all. This is also often true, and we’ll pursue this in more detail later.

Now let’s turn to the liberal position. This is typically stated in terms of freedom of choice. A woman has sovereignty over her own body. That certainly sounds reasonable. Unfortunately, this position is a case of begging the question. By denying even the possibility that a fetus might be a person with some sovereign status of its own, a status that would limit the rights of the mother, the argument just assumes what it has no means of proving objectively. If the fetus does become a person at some point, however indeterminate that point might be, then from that time forward anyone committed to the avoidance of harm would have to uphold its right to live. While it is true that a fetus is wholly dependent its mother’s body, we clearly don’t take as a general principle that someone wholly dependent on us is fair game for us to dispose of as we choose. Infants are rather inconvenient too, but not many modern people consider infanticide acceptable in the name of personal freedom.

The more pragmatic pro-choice argument is that abortions are going to happen anyway, and that prohibiting them by law merely inconveniences rich women (who can seek abortions overseas) while putting poor women in danger. In general, I like this argument because it acknowledges the actual behavior of human beings. It accurately describes the era before Roe v. Wade. At base, it is an argument for the minimization of harm, asserting that the real consequences of repeal (harm to poor women who seek “backroom” abortions) will be greater than the possible but unknowable harm to those that might or might not be persons. Unfortunately, this argument suffers from the same testability problems as the status of fetuses in the first place, and is not very convincing to anyone who already considers abortion tantamount to murder.

The real reason most liberals are “pro-choice” is, I believe, exactly the same reason that most conservatives are “pro-life.” They are simply acculturated to hold these views. The thing that gets left out when you carve up social behavior into the five core valves is the motivation at the very heart of social behavior itself – the need for acceptance by one’s social group. Liberals are “pro-choice” because their subculture simply evolved that view. A more-or-less unconscious consensus formed that the rights of women, who are very present and very vocal, trump the possible rights of possible persons who are neither so visible nor so articulate. This is almost exactly the same process by which the rights of one’s own national or ethnic group trump the rights of foreigners in the eyes of conservatives.

Let me leave this insoluble abortion controversy and move on to something else – an example of philosophical inconsistency I can draw from personal experience.

Long ago (when I believed in ideologies) I was associated with one of the socialist parties in America. In this instance at least, I am going to do the unspeakable and equate American liberalism with American socialism. This does not mean I have been brainwashed by rightwing radio. It isn’t that I think American liberals are all that far to the left, but rather that I found the American socialists of the Reagan era to be, well, rather tame. Leon Trotsky once said that the socialism in America was an ideology for successful dentists. At least in the early 80’s, the American socialists I encountered appeared to be merely liberals who had either given up on the Democratic Party, or just found it not romantic enough.

During my youthful sojourn with the pseudo-far left, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. The ensuing war became a hotbed of discussion for the party while it lasted. For those of you born after 1982, or who were otherwise engaged at the time, here’s a short synopsis of the conflict.

Argentina claimed the Falklands, a cluster of islands several hundred miles of the Argentine coast, but the British also claimed them and were in actual possession. Most Falklanders were sheep, but the few thousand bipedal residents of the islands where predominantly of English decent. In 1982, Argentina sent troops to occupy the islands, hoping the British would simply not care enough to fight for them. The British did care enough. They sent a fleet and troops and retook the islands after two months of sporadic fighting.

The reaction of my group of pseudo-socialists to this pointless little war was fascinating. The war was in the news, so the party apparently felt they needed to take sides. Would they support England -- a western industrial nation with some definite socialist leanings (albeit socialist leanings that were being undermined by Margaret Thatcher) -- or would they support Argentina and its latest military dictator, Galtieri? The party’s national newspaper supplied the answer. We were to support our Latin brothers in their war against western imperialism! We must retake the Malvinas (the Argentine name for the islands).

In the first place, it was utterly meaningless for a small American leftwing party to take any side at all. They could not affect a local election, let alone alter the course of a war in another hemisphere. It was not as if any one of them were about to volunteer to fight for the Malvinas personally. It was all that they could do to keep up turnout at the weekly meetings. In the second place, Argentina started the war, getting about a thousand people killed for the sake of distracting the Argentine public from their own ongoing economic problems. Not really the noblest of motives, nor commensurate with the deaths of a thousand human beings. Third, Galtieri was a rightwing dictator. He wasn’t even for democracy, let alone socialism.

In essence, liberal values short circuited political principle. At the end of the day both the party’s leaders and the local membership just couldn’t bring themselves to side with a rich industrial European nation over a much poorer Latin American one. Poor people are good, rich people are bad. People of color are always the victims in their dealings with whites. Ideas like this are not the product of individual reason, but merely the ossified dogma of culture – in this particular case, a western liberal one.

Ms. Christina is right that the stereotypically conservative values of authority, loyalty, and purity cannot, in any real world, be “universalized” – at least not in the sense that she uses the term. “Universal” in the sense of being equally applicable to everyone. However, either Goldstein’s argument regarding ethics (or at least Ms. Christina’s interpretation of it) is flawed. Let’s look at it again:

… (a) the starting axiom that we, ourselves, matter;

and (b) the understanding that… we have to acknowledge that we don't, cosmically speaking, matter more than anyone else; that other people matter to themselves as much as we matter to ourselves; and that any rules of ethics ought to apply to other people as much as they do to ourselves…

In other words, the philosophical underpinning of ethics are that they ought to be applicable to everyone. They ought to be universalizable

The error in this argument is that it makes a leap to universal generalization that the rudiments of ethics don’t require. It says, in effect, that any view or action that can’t be universalized to absolutely everyone is not ethical. In other words, any apparently ethical restrictions a person might have in his or her personal dealings do not count as ethics if they exclude even one person. Noble and Kantian though this sounds, in practice it nullifies ethics as a useful concept. By such an exacting standard, perhaps the Dalai Lama is ethical -- but I can think of no one else who might be. In the real world, practically everyone who isn’t a sociopath is ethical within some social context and with a certain group of persons. The minimal prerequisite for ethical behavior is the acceptance of the worth of some other being – not all other beings. Notably, ethical behavior in its rudiments doesn’t require an admission of equality at all, but only a bare recognition that some other being has some intrinsic worth.

What the Goldstein/ Christina argument does is simply to define ethics as an absolutist version of fairness, and then shows (not surprisingly) just how ethical fairness is. At one point Ms. Christina almost sees the circularity herself:

“I mean, the whole freaking idea of fairness is that it be ought to be applied universally.”

Somehow, however, she misses the point. She has not discovered a truth in nature -- but merely measured her abstract values against themselves.

My harshest criticism of Ms. Christina’s assertion about the superiority of liberal values is that it is merely a liberal equivalent of conservative flag waving. That is, it serves no purpose except to make members of her particular subculture feel better about themselves. It in no way advances the universalist ideals it espouses, nor even attempts to. It is simply a neat philosophical trick for a group that requires something a little more intellectually satisfying than a patriotic song. To use an unusually blunt philosophical phrase – it does no useful work.

It’s worth noting that the vast majority of conservatives do have ethical standards – they just tend to be more applicable to people within their group than those outside it. Further, unless we are talking about some specific and deeply racist ideology specifically bent on genocide (Nazism is the trite example), conservative ideologies are merely intolerant – not exclusive. Most conservatives welcome everyone to accept their hierarchies, be loyal to their symbols, and observant of their moral codes. Nothing could be more “universal” than everyone trusting the same leaders and believing in the same God. By their own sense of the term “universal,” conservatives do not resist universalized values – they resist individualized ones.

A further fact that Ms. Christina alludes to in her full article (but, I think, underemphasizes) is that there is a distinction between a person’s ideology and his or her actual behavior. Most of us have probably met someone who espoused the most appalling beliefs, but was personally a decent and caring human being. We also meet the opposite sort – people who can speak rapturously of high ideals but are predatory and unfeeling in their actual behavior. This, too, shows that ideologies of any sort are often just a veneer that people put on for the sake of being accepted. What matters, ultimately, is not what someone advocates as an ideal – but what one does. Acting with compassion is rather more meaningful than talking about it.

I said at the outset that I am neither a liberal nor a conservative, and I hope by now I have made abundantly apparent why. If you genuinely value either truth or living beings you must be very careful about aligning yourself with any group’s consensus views. As soon as you begin to think “I am a member or group ‘x’ because the people in group ‘x’ are right,” you stand perilously close to believing “people in group ‘x’ are right because they are my people.” The transition is an easy and unconscious one.

Zeus smites Jesus

2010-06-15T14:19:00.000-07:00

In the southwest corner of Ohio, between Cincinnati and Dayton, there is an evangelical organization doing business as The Solid Rock Church. They have the kind of low but expansive building you would expect any self-respecting mega-church to have, but their real claim to notoriety has been, for several years now, a sixty-two foot statue of Jesus facing the highway. From this bare description, one might imagine a tall thin figure of stone like the one that stands over Rio de Janeiro – with its serene expression and open arms – a thing of some artistic merit if nothing else. If one imagined this, one would have probably been disappointed at the Solid Rock Church’s statue, which stood waist deep in the back of a large rectangular pond, and was made not of solid rock, but mainly of Styrofoam sprayed with fiberglass resin. Their Jesus didn’t embrace the world, but stood tilted back with its arms and head cast upward in a not-altogether-convincing gesture of submission and anguished piety. The less reverent people in the area referred the statue as the “Touchdown Jesus”.1 I myself usually referred to the thing as “Quicksand Jesus,” as it always looked to me like a man grasping for a hand to pull him out the muck at the bottom of the pond. A little south of the Solid Rock Church there is a huge flea market called Trader’s World. Trader’s World has a sign a bit taller that Solid Rock’s Christ, surmounted by a large horse made out of more-or-less the same materials, but rather better proportioned.

In any case, whatever the relative merits of the Solid Rock Church’s icon might have been, lightning struck it last night in a storm. Being constructed mostly of air and combustible plastic, it all but exploded into a quite impressive fireball which consumed itself before either Mary or the Apostles had a chance to shed a tear, and well before any of the local news people could point a camera at the event. Nothing remains of “Napalm Jesus” but a blackened steel armature. This armature looks like nothing in particular – perhaps Pablo Picasso’s impression of an oil derrick. To be frank, this is not of much aesthetic merit either, though it is at least a little less kitsch.

Following the event, the cameramen and reporters did show up. As one might expect, they pointed their cameras and microphones at the few stunned members of the congregation who had shown up too late save their plastic and fiberglass messiah. These people, all less than thirty and obviously dedicated to the church, expressed a uniform confusion about what the event might mean – which is to say, what was God trying to tell the Christians of America by smiting the image of his son? It did not seem to occur to any of them, reporters included, that the meaning of the event (if any) was that it just isn’t wise to build a tall, steel-framed structure covered in combustibles in the middle of a field. It did not mean that God was unaccountably angry, but merely that the things we do know about physics cannot be mitigated by any amount of prayer, belief or wishful thinking. The reporters nodded and smiled the fixed, neutral smiles that they are no doubt trained to smile. The members of the congregation, I assume, eventually went home – taking their impossible conundrum with them.

If I were a wag (which I am) and a newspaper editor (which I am not), I would have written an editorial today and headlined it “Zeus smites Jesus.” Well, that would solve the conundrum, wouldn’t it? Thunderbolts were Zeus’s gimmick, after all. Monotheism, even tripartite monotheism, makes an unnecessary mess of things like this. If there is only God and us, and God is angry, we must certainly be the cause. On the other hand, if we must have blind, irrational faith Polytheism would at least take us off the hook some of the time. After all, if Zeus burns Jesus’ statue, well, that’s a matter for Zeus and Jesus to work out on their own. We might happen be unfortunate enough to get in the way of their battles now and then, but at least we would be spared the narcissistic guilt of imagining the universe revolves around us. I am being silly, cynical, and intolerant of course. Reasonable, right-thinking people of good character erect half-million dollar idols out of fast-food-burger-box materials and consider them accidental auguries into the bargain. For this reason (and many others) I fully intend to remain a silly, cynical, intolerant skeptic – and may lightning strike me dead if I should falter.

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1 For those of you who aren’t Americans, a “touchdown” is a scored goal in American football.

A Critique of "Social Structure"

2010-04-01T09:08:00.000-07:00

The essay below was written by my father, Robert. He requested a response, and I though the exchange might be of possible interest to others. I present his work in its entirety, and will parse through it in detail.

-emc

Social Structure

Many years ago, several thousand young men were under orders to commit multiple homicides. Then, one day it was deemed appropriate for two Generals to meet and talk it over. They were not classmates, but both had attended the same military academy. To the vast majority of literate people it would have been very, very inappropriate for them to use their revolvers on each other. When so ordered, enlisted soldiers must kill their counter parts on the other side, but only under very special conditions are commissioned officers expected to kill each other, even their counterparts on the other side. Occasionally, during a war, a high ranking commissioned officer is killed, but the event is usually considered an accident, having little or no connection to the war.

Today in Afghanistan and Iraq there are a few hundred thousands of U.S. privates whose duty it is to kill natives of those two countries when so ordered. This and their own possible death are in the interest of making their own neighborhoods in the U.S. safer. In view of the fact that they are on duty "24 - 7", their salary is probably in terms of tens of dollars per hour. While this was going on, several, (possibly a few hundred) radio and television talk show hosts, Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann and others were discussing events in the middle east among other things. These gentlemen are almost never in harm's way, although they do sometimes launch some rather pointed remarks at each other. I suspect that these gentlemen's salaries are hundreds or even thousands of dollars per hour.

A few years ago a television personality, (Martha Stewart) served a few weeks in prison, (albeit one of the "nicer" prisons) for the crime of "inside trading." If I can depend my memory at all, it seems to me that I recall hearing our then President admit to having done the same thing. I do not remember anyone seriously suggesting that the President spend a few weeks in prison.

I used to feel that situations, such as those mentioned above were "not in the best interests" of the greater number of people. I even had two or three rules in mind that, over time might have changed the conclusions of these situations. However, even then I believed that most people would probably not "buy" the suggested rules. I also felt that war should be the last method to consider when trying to resolve international problems.

Then, I came across a book entitled "Sociology" circa 1971 by one David Popenoe. In said book I was reminded again of what my peers have been trying to tell me for years. "That's the way it IS!" According to the book, I have been not only negative and pessimistic, but also mistaken about virtually everything that has come to my attention!

The book also suggests that probably the most important requirement for the survival of any group is a stable social structure. Even the production and distribution of the necessities such as food, shelter and clothing are improved under a working social structure. An important part of the social structure is the establishment and maintenance of the social stratification. This determines the distribution of the desirables.

So it appears that the situations that I find difficulty in accepting are actually the desired results of maintaining a social structure. Considering my limited qualifications, this is really all I need to know.

War seems to be a good thing for at least two reasons:
1.) I seem to remember that during World War Two the prevailing disposition in the population was one of comradeship. People felt that, "We are all in this together."
2.) War seems to have the effect of reinforcing the social stratification. People in the middle and lower classes are told what they should do and when they should do it, thus relieving them of the responsibility of making decisions they are not qualified to make.

The current two wars do not seem to have the effect noted in (1) above. Perhaps they are simply not big enough.

Well, let us begin at the beginning…

Many years ago, several thousand young men were under orders to commit multiple homicides.

By definition, to kill a human being is, necessarily, to commit a homicide – but I am confident that that is not the point being made here. It is clear from the very outset that we will not be limiting ourselves to an objective discourse about facts, but will be subject to an attempt at emotional persuasion. This is an arena that I try, often not very successfully, to avoid. I have to grant that our emotions are important, and that our lives would be not only rather grey, but almost unimaginable without them. That being granted, a lifetime of observation has convinced me that very few problems, either personal or political, are ultimately solved by the application of invective or anger, no matter how righteous or justifiable it might be. Thus, despite the irony, I must at least attempt to approach any discussion of either war or inequality in a logical, methodical way. To discuss such matters in anger is not to understand them, but rather to be consumed by them.

Then, one day it was deemed appropriate for two Generals to meet and talk it over. They were not classmates, but both had attended the same military academy. To the vast majority of literate people it would have been very, very inappropriate for them to use their revolvers on each other.

This is a reference to Lee’s surrender to Grant at the close of the American Civil War.

When so ordered, enlisted soldiers must kill their counter parts on the other side, but only under very special conditions are commissioned officers expected to kill each other, even their counterparts on the other side. Occasionally, during a war, a high ranking commissioned officer is killed, but the event is usually considered an accident, having little or no connection to the war.

This is not an accurate portrayal of history. Officers are commonly killed and commonly called upon to kill. Many weapons are indiscriminate, killing or wounding anyone within a certain zone. While one might plead that these are special circumstances, most combat aircrews are composed chiefly of officers, and they both kill people in sizable numbers and subject themselves to serious risk of death. Many fighter pilots in both world wars no doubt killed far more enemy officers than enlisted men. Neither have officers been exempted from combat as parts of ships crews. A simple review of a few weeks worth of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan will reveal that in the current wars officers are killed in some approximate proportion to their number, even the occasional Major or Lt Colonel. Whether they are killed by enemy officers or partisan snipers seems rather immaterial. Either way, they are equally dead. While it is true that the highest ranks of commissioned officers are rarely killed in war, it is also true that cooks, quartermasters, and other sorts of “rear echelon” troops are rarely killed. All these groups avoid death for approximately the same reason: they are not of much military utility as direct combatants. In circumstances where they are of some actual use in harm’s way, high ranking officers will usually present themselves. Naval warfare is the most obvious example of this; it is a rare task force than is not commanded by an Admiral in situ.

If we may set aside our emotional reactions to war for a moment and look at it as a purposeful endeavor, it may become at least intelligible. I do not dispute that war is an inherently brutal, wasteful and tragic activity – I merely take the position that it is generally neither a mass exercise in cruelty for its own sake, nor a straightforward bloodletting of a nation’s lower classes. War is, as Clausewitz said, the “continuation of politics by other means.” As such, its motivations are essentially political ones. In general, wars are conducted either to expand or preserve the power of such bodies of persons as rule the countries involved. They may or may not be in the interests on the broad majority of the citizens of countries involved, and whether they are or not is not always an easy mater to determine.

At an operational level, the goal of war is not an orgy of “multiple homicides,” but rather the collapse of the opposing state’s capacity to continue military operations. This goal being accomplished, the victorious state’s political ends may (at least in theory 1) be carried out without resistance. From this perspective, it would not only have been “inappropriate” for Grant and Lee to attempt to gun one another down at the surrender table, but entirely senseless from a military point of view. It would not have changed the outcome of the war. Warfare inevitably involves a loss of life, and often a needless loss of life, but warfare is still, for the most part, a means to an end. It is only in a few truly exceptional conflicts that killing takes place as a deliberate policy of genocide, which is to say as an end in itself.

It has been apparent since the Gulf War of 1991 that contemporary American military doctrine centers on the destruction on the opposing state’s command and controls systems, which is to say, their headquarters and communications facilities rather than the opposing soldiers on the front line. The American military exercises this doctrine not because the Joint Chiefs are better, more humane people than they were in World War Two, but simply because they have the technology to carry out such a doctrine. Destruction of an opposing military’s leaders is an efficient means of rendering its conventional forces impotent. While this does not make either war in general or American foreign policy in particular necessarily moral, it does contradict the implied hypothesis that the goal of war is necessarily to kill a maximum of underlings while leaving the upper classes of both sides intact.

Today in Afghanistan and Iraq there are a few hundred thousands of U.S. privates whose duty it is to kill natives of those two countries when so ordered. This and their own possible death are in the interest of making their own neighborhoods in the U.S. safer.

Current U.S. troop deployment in Afghanistan and Iraq totals well fewer than 200,000. I have no idea what fraction of these are privates.

The U.S. is still a signatory to the Geneva Convention so, strictly speaking, who American soldiers may kill and when they may do so is more-or-less narrowly defined by international law. That such restrictions are often breeched during the actual conduct of a war is not a matter I would attempt or even want to dispute – this does not, however, mean that such restrictions are irrelevant. While not explicit, there is an implication in the essay that the soldiers of the United States would be bound, if ordered, to liquidate the populations of Afghanistan and Iraq in the manner that the SS liquidated the population of the Warsaw ghetto. There have certainly been occasional and predictable abuses of civilians among the soldiery, and even (I believe) actual war crimes originating in high government circles, but I don’t think the majority of American soldiers are either indoctrinated or inclined to gun down children in cold blood. Incidents occur, but they are incidents. Our soldiers are not an aggregate of saints, but neither are they an aggregate of butchering robots.

I sympathize with what I presume to be sarcasm, the notion that anything about the current conflicts ultimately makes us any safer. I would go further, in that I am appalled at the extent to which the slogan “support our troops” has come to be interpreted as “support our policy.” It is not a good use of the life of a soldier to shovel him or her into a grave without a clear purpose. If one believes that it is always wrong to question one’s government in time of war, then one must believe that the German people had no right to question their government after 1939. If one believes that rules that apply to Germans (or any other people) should not apply to us, then one is has taken the first patriotic step toward a very deep abyss. Whether or not a government’s policies are either moral or successful are questions one should always be able to ask. Whether or not the current conflicts make us any safer is debatable, and there appear to be worthy arguments for either position.

In view of the fact that they are on duty "24 - 7", their salary is probably in terms of tens of dollars per hour. While this was going on, several, (possibly a few hundred) radio and television talk show hosts, Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann and others were discussing events in the middle east among other things. These gentlemen are almost never in harm's way, although they do sometimes launch some rather pointed remarks at each other. I suspect that these gentlemen's salaries are hundreds or even thousands of dollars per hour.

A US Army PFC with a few years of service earns $1923 per month. If one works this out as an hourly rate on a 24-7 basis, the resultant figure is $2.63 per hour. Of course, soldiers do not have to pay for their own food, medical expenses, etc. – but let’s not muddy the water unnecessarily: celebrities don’t necessarily cover all of their expenses either. Olbermann’s annual salary is rumored at $4,000,000. Limbaugh’s salary in 2007 was $33,000,000. If one calculates Limbaugh’s hourly rate on a 24-7 basis (though it’s rather doubtful that he’s “on duty” all the time) one gets a figure of $3764.54 per hour. If you want look at his pay in military terms, Limbaugh is paid as much a US Army battalion, officers and all. Whatever one may feel about this, these are the facts.

The cliché that “money is power” is a very true one. Money is not only power in the sense of being able to buy political power, but is power in the more mundane sense of being able to buy goods and services. If one goes into a store and buys an object, one is exercising a form of power. Obviously, this power is not inherent in the money itself, but is present only by virtue of a common understanding among the people who circulate it. Power can be embodied in other forms. In medieval society, for example, money was important but a poor nobleman might still get the better of a rich merchant. Likewise, the clergy had rights and powers beyond the gold that they possessed (not that the material wealth of the church was in any way lacking).

Money is just a particular way of distributing certain social “rights,” but those “rights,” in one form or another, are an apparently inevitable feature of human social behavior. I cannot think of a single instance of a human society, of any size, that is not hierarchically structured. While there is a considerable variability from society to society in the depth of the disparity between their least and most powerful members, all societies distribute power unequally.

Getting back to example offered, an Army private has the “right” to acquire a certain amount of petty property, to gamble money on poker, stocks or other entities, to claim benefits provided in the contract he or she signed with the government, etc. Mr. Limbaugh has the “right” to a far greater amount of petty property, may speculate with vastly greater sums if he so chooses, and is neither encumbered by the heavy duties nor provided with the modest benefits of a soldier. He may, significantly, cease working forever at more-or-less the time of his choosing without fear of wanting for housing, food, or any common run of luxuries in his lifetime – or in fact, in many lifetimes. The soldier usually knows were his next meal is coming from, but has little promise of security to the end of his days.

While a “rights” perspective is not as neatly quantifiable as a financial one, it offers the advantage of allowing broader comparisons. One can, for example, compare capitalist and non-capitalist societies this way. Under communist hierarchies, for example, the lower strata of society have as many options and as much personal security as their governments (the highest strata of their society) are inclined to (or can) provide. The upper strata get as much compensation as they feel they deserve. Looked at from this narrow perspective, capitalism and communism are not greatly different. Both allow notably more social mobility that the hereditary hierarchies that preceded them. Getting rich in America or becoming a governmental official in Cuba are both at least within the realm of possibility for individuals from the lower classes of those societies; becoming a nobleman was not even a possibility for a medieval peasant.

While the salaries of TV celebrities, bankers, football players, etc, are out of any proportion to their demonstrable value to society, the system we live under makes no real claim to reward people in accordance with their social worth. A little less economic disparity might be nice, but any scheme that eliminates economic tyranny by introducing political tyranny is not much of an advance. The reverse is not that laudable either. Human beings have yet to devise a system of social organization that works for everyone. I am justifiably skeptical about this happening, ever. Evolution is not a process that tends toward a complete and uniform state of happiness for all the members of a species.

A few years ago a television personality, (Martha Stewart) served a few weeks in prison, (albeit one of the "nicer" prisons) for the crime of "inside trading." If I can depend my memory at all, it seems to me that I recall hearing our then President admit to having done the same thing. I do not remember anyone seriously suggesting that the President spend a few weeks in prison.

Here too, we have another example of the admittedly uneven distribution of power, not explicitly stated in law, but nonetheless quite apparent. People connected to the highest tier of government are only at the mercy of the law to the extent that some quorum of their peers chose to enforce it. The impersonal, bureaucratic wheels of justice that constrain the rest of us have difficultly punishing the people who invest those wheels with authority. This was true of Bushes’ insider trading, Cheney and others’ apparent complicity in war crimes, and Obama’s failure to publically produce his birth certificate.2 Martha Stewart, though a celebrity, had no extralegal powers. The best that she could do was hire expensive counsel. It wasn’t a charge like those against Michael Jackson, who had the option of just buying off the families of his accusers. Uniform justice is a pleasant ideal, perhaps even a useful one, but while one can be disgusted at its failure in application it takes an impressive naiveté to be shocked. Such events are as old as human society.

I used to feel that situations, such as those mentioned above were "not in the best interests" of the greater number of people. I even had two or three rules in mind that, over time might have changed the conclusions of these situations. However, even then I believed that most people would probably not "buy" the suggested rules. I also felt that war should be the last method to consider when trying to resolve international problems.

So spoke Don Quixote to the world. Well, perhaps an anarchist, pacifist Don Quixote – but Don Quixote nevertheless.

Personally, I agree that war should be the recourse of last resort. This also seems to be the general historical trend. As late as the 19th century, openly expansionist wars were the norm, especially wars conducted against technologically less advanced nations. There was relatively little moral backlash about the conquest of the British Empire, either within Britain or without. Such a series of imperialist wars would be utterly unthinkable now. One has only to consider the nearly universal backlash against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait or the more recent American invasion of Iraq. Most contemporary wars are either revolutions or civil wars resulting from the creation of artificial, multinational states in the wake of colonialism. Iraq, for example, is one state but essentially three nations. While such conflicts can be bitter, long, and bloody, the unabashed expansionism of earlier times has greatly abated. While wars of conquest still occur, the belligerents are usually more cautious and inclined to take greater care about the defensibility of their pretexts.

It is indeed unfortunate that we have not arrived at utopia in the course of one man’s lifetime. It is untrue, however, that amid all the carnage of the 20th century there haven’t also been significant movements away from warfare, and, at least here and there, some little progress toward more humane and equitable societies.

Then, I came across a book entitled "Sociology" circa 1971 by one David Popenoe. In said book I was reminded again of what my peers have been trying to tell me for years. "That's the way it IS!" According to the book, I have been not only negative and pessimistic, but also mistaken about virtually everything that has come to my attention!

The book also suggests that probably the most important requirement for the survival of any group is a stable social structure. Even the production and distribution of the necessities such as food, shelter and clothing are improved under a working social structure. An important part of the social structure is the establishment and maintenance of the social stratification. This determines the distribution of the desirables.

So it appears that the situations that I find difficulty in accepting are actually the desired results of maintaining a social structure. Considering my limited qualifications, this is really all I need to know.

I am neither familiar with the book referenced here nor have I made a formal study of the field of sociology. However, accepting that Popenoe’s assertions are as you have summarized, the point is so self evident as to be hardly worth making. As I have already stated, I cannot think of a single instance of a human society that is not hierarchically structured. For the sake of argument though, let’s try to imagine one.

Such a society, to begin with, would look nothing like ours in a physical sense. Nothing could be built beyond what a handful of friends might manage to wrest from nature. There could be no buildings of any great size, no roads, and nothing as complex as an automobile, certainly. There would be no music other than what a person might make on simple instruments crafted with the simplest of tools. It takes an organized society to produce anyone as specialized as a violin maker. There could be no symphonic music in any case, because orchestras are hierarchies. Likewise, it is hard to imagine science advancing very far without some organization to support the scientist’s inquiries, provide instrumentation, and disseminate discoveries. In the hierarchy-free society Beethoven and Einstein would have to dig potatoes, clean skins, or hunt and fish with everyone else.

The problems get worse. What if, in this amorphous mass of absolute social equals, some little group decided to seize some measure of power by threat of force or cleverness? What mechanism inherent in the nature of the amorphous mass would prevent them from succeeding? It would have to be some trait inherent in individual human beings. Even such a constraining entity as a circle of tribal elders is a body with special authority, and therefore a hierarchy. One cannot look to laws or other sorts of rules, because these are, themselves, features of hierarchies requiring someone to enforce them. While most human beings do resist authoritarian constraint beyond a certain point, it is evident in every society on earth that real human beings endure or even welcome authority up to that point. Power abhors a vacuum, and states of anarchy never last long. The hierarchy-free society can be no more than an imaginary construct, since its existence would require an isolated population of flawlessly egalitarian human beings. To the best of my knowledge, no such population has ever existed.3

Now, none of this is to say that more and deeper hierarchy is always better, or that the concentration of power without limit is either good or inevitable. I would not assert this. I merely assert that an absolute rejection of hierarchy is tantamount to a rejection of human nature. Any scheme of social improvement that requires that human beings be something other than what evolutionary forces have made them is bound to be repressive, and a repressive scheme that, by its own principle, cannot be enforced can equally not succeed. It is also quite an odd conception on its face that people could be free of oppression if only they adhered to certain unshakable rules.

War seems to be a good thing for at least two reasons:
1.) I seem to remember that during World War Two the prevailing disposition in the population was one of comradeship. People felt that, "We are all in this together."
2.) War seems to have the effect of reinforcing the social stratification. People in the middle and lower classes are told what they should do and when they should do it, thus relieving them of the responsibility of making decisions they are not qualified to make.

The current two wars do not seem to have the effect noted in (1) above. Perhaps they are simply not big enough.

Again, these assertions seem rather hasty. Wars tend to increase a sense of national unity if there is a widespread perception that the enemy poses a serious threat to the nation and its institutions. This is what happened during the Second World War in Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and eventually Germany. The polities of these states were all justifiably concerned about the consequences of loosing. When wars seem less justified, more people are inclined to dissent. The protests during the Viet Nam War are a clear example of this. A general feeling of righting an injustice will also provide some measure of public acceptance for a war, even without an existential threat. The difference in public opinion between the Gulf War of 1991 and the present Iraq War points out this tendency. Though there was no great sense of national peril during the Gulf War, there was a general perception that Saddam Hussein had done something unacceptable by invading another country purely for the purpose of conquest. As I alluded to earlier, opposing this invasion met the modern criteria for a “just” war. On the other hand, when it became apparent that the justifications for America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 were largely fabrications, a substantial fraction of America’s population began to oppose the war. While many people seem to have a penchant for blind obedience, it isn’t true that most of us do.

Clearly though, populations can be utterly divided by war – to the point of the very dissolution of the state. For example, the First World War destroyed the social order of Czarist Russia. It also created deep hostilities toward the sizable German ethnic group within the United States. Rule #1 is certainly in need of qualifications.

Ignoring the sheer darkness of its sarcasm, rule #2 seems to be essentially a corollary of rule #1, and suffers from the same limitations. It is true that during both world wars censorship and economic controls were rife. There was a general decline in civil liberties in those nations that had previously had them. Likewise, the Bush administration attempted to use the Iraq War as a pretext for a general centralization of power, and not without some success. Still, extensions of emergency government powers tend to breed resentment if they are not rescinded at the conclusion of the emergency. While the tendencies toward the centralization of power are strong, so are the countervailing forces of decentralization and individual freedom. If this were not so, revolutions would never occur and trade unions would not exist.

It is no easy matter to conclude a critique of an essay about such far reaching and open ended topics. Obviously, the work reflects a number of views which are substantially different from my own, though I do not reject it all. I’m not an avid proponent of either inequality or bloodshed.

The essay reminds me of nothing so much as the beliefs of the 19th century anarchists. If I may be forgiven a brutal oversimplification, the anarchists believed that hierarchy was the sole source of evil in human society. If one could simply take away the bosses, human beings would live harmoniously and cooperatively forever. The source of all suffering was the evil of a few, and thus it might be readily expunged. In its simplicity, this was undeniably a beautiful dream. A handful of anarchists threw bombs into crowds, or shot the odd president or aristocrat here or there, but most simply hoped, grumbled, and brooded until their movement withered away. No person with a heart can wholly despise a beautiful dream, but one can certainly grow weary of the pile of invective that it rests on.

Compared to the life of our species, the life of any individual is fleeting. We know a little about our species’ origins, but can only conjecture dimly about its future. We play small parts during our tenure here, the full repercussions of which we lack even the capacity to understand. I cannot say that human beings will never live in perfect equality and perfect peace. I can say however, with reasonable confidence, that they never have. Many facts about the world are not to my liking – yet they are facts nonetheless.

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1 Guerilla war is an exception to this. While really a worthy topic in itself, I will suffice to say that most governments that set out to defeat another nation’s regular army do so in the hope that the opposing populace with acquiesce quietly after that defeat. No government wishes to engage in a protracted war with armed civilians.

2 Obama’s failure to publically present his birth certificate may seem trivial compared to plausible allegations of war crimes, but it is a perfect illustration of my point. Few of us have the opportunity to commit war crimes, but all of us are required to present identification from time to time. If you or I were applying for a driver’s license but told the examiner “I can’t show you my birth certificate – I will only show it to the highest official of your bureau, and then only on the proviso that its contents be kept absolutely confidential” – we would be escorted politely out of the office. Not so a senator and the darling of his party.

3 A failure to understand that hierarchies arise spontaneously was the undoing of 20th century communism. Neither Marx nor Lenin predicted the rise of Stalin, because they believed naively in a power that would emanate from the public as a whole in some completely unprecedented, inexplicable way. They made no provision for the possibility that anyone within their own organization might harbor any dictatorial ambitions. The result was little more than a medieval tyranny under a thick coat of red paint.

The Future of the Church

2010-03-24T13:23:00.000-07:00

Across from my stepdaughter’s apartment there is an old brick and stained glass church that has been converted into an indoor rock-climbing wall. I’m certainly no defender of religion, but this still strikes me as more than a little crass. Apparently the proprietors did have some slight sense of decorum though. There used to be a larger-than-life statue of Christ two thirds of the way up their new rock wall. They took him down. I suppose if they had been crass without limit, they would have just worked him into the pattern of other obstacles and handholds.

A Case against the existence of Free Will

2010-03-05T09:08:00.000-08:00

The term “free will” has essentially two meanings. The first definition of free will is that it is that state in which one’s decisions can be realized in physical actions. In this sense, if one is physically constrained by devices, disease or other externally induced circumstances one is, to the extent of the constraint, deprived of free will. The second definition of free will is that it is that state in which one’s decisions constitute a first cause. In other words, the possessor of free will does not make decisions because (or at least not wholly because) he or she is caught in the middle of some inexorable physical process, but rather the decision maker is the actual originator of physical processes. While I will deal briefly with the first definition in closing, my chief interest is in the second.

My argument depends on certain assumptions that, while admittedly arguable in themselves, are by no means weakly held positions.

My first assumption is that the order we observe in nature is not illusory, but rather refers to, however imperfectly, a body of stable relationships that exist in a fully ontological sense. If one assumes that we live in a chaotic universe in which the apparent laws of nature might suspend themselves at any time, then arguments of any sort are futile. Any understanding of states of affairs, no matter how tenuous, must admit at least some constrains to be coherent. When I use the term “physics” in my argument, I mean just this set of constraints and relationships, whether they are presently known to us or not.

My second assumption, closely related to the first, is that nature is fundamentally causal. This assumption alone does not preclude the existence free will. Indeed, to assume that anything can be a first cause one must certainly admit to the existence of causality. By “causal” relationships, I mean to describe relationships in which objects and events are bound together by necessity and not merely by accidental, albeit stable, correlation.

These preliminaries being assumed, let’s dissect the concept of free will a little further using a thought experiment.

I.

Imagine a flying bird. I don’t want to engage in a muddy debate about whether nonhuman animals have free will or not, so let’s just accept that our thought experiment bird, for sake of argument, does have free will in the sense of having the power of first cause. We can describe innumerable trajectories our bird might take across the sky, including many that plainly violate the laws of physics. For example, the bird may not fly a path that would require changes of direction too rapid for the aerodynamic forces it is able to exert with its feathers. Neither can it fly straight up for very long, for a variety or understandable physical reasons. Nevertheless, so long as our bird might fly along at least two alternative paths, however constrained by gravity and aerodynamics, we might still consider it free.

Compare the flight of our bird with that of a thrown ball. Notably, we can imagine exactly the same innumerable set of trajectories for the ball that we could for the bird. Unlike the bird, however, the ball clearly does not possess either free will, or any physical means of altering its own trajectory. Its path is, without question, wholly predetermined by physics. With our knowledge of physics we can predict its trajectory with impressive accuracy. Moreover, even if we knew nothing of the exact physical laws that govern its trajectory, merely watching the ball’s motion would give us an intuition that it is a “thing” and not a “being”. Apart from the relatively static properties of its mass and its shape, there is nothing about the ball which determines its trajectory. It does not “choose” to do anything. It is a neutral participant in an inevitable physical process.

The bird’s behavior differs from the ball’s in at least two ways, one from our point of view and one from its own. From our perspective, the bird is unpredictable; the ball is not. The bird appears to have free will, not because it is unconstrained by physics, but because we can imagine it taking any of any number of plausible paths. From the bird’s perspective (which we are privileged to know only because this is a thought experiment) it has the conscious perception of free will – which is to say, it is aware of having choices. The ball, of course, has neither plausible options nor any capacity for awareness.

Now consider an entity whose status is somewhere between a bird a ball – a heat-seeking missile. For those who are unfamiliar with such things, a heat-seeking missile is essentially an autonomous robot whose function is to intercept and destroy aircraft. It detects infrared radiation (heat) with a special camera and adjusts its course toward the source of that radiation using a rocket and aerodynamic surfaces. Such missiles are “smart” enough to fairly reliably distinguish between aircraft and heat sources that are not aircraft.

Like both the bird and the ball, the missile’s trajectory is limited to a considerable degree by external physics. It is subject to gravity, for example, and its ability to turn is limited by the aerodynamic forces it can exert with its control surfaces. While its trajectory is theoretically predictable (given one has knowledge of the characteristics of all the heat sources in the range of its camera) that trajectory would be much more difficult to either predict or describe than that of a merely ballistic object like a ball.

More significant than the missile’s brute obedience to physics is the fact that its behavior calls into question what it is that constitutes a “choice”. If there are a least two heat sources in front of it on which it might potentially home, then, in at least some sense, the missile’s behavior is the result of a “choice” between alternative imaginable paths. While no suitably educated observer would say the missile has “free will,” we nevertheless get into trouble when we attempt to explain the distinction between its actions and any real bird’s.

Assuming we have access to the knowledge of both the missile’s internal physics (its camera, actuators, rocket, software, etc.) and the environment in which it is operating, we can predict its behavior up to the level of precision of that knowledge. If it does something we did not predict we can infer that there is either something in the external environment we didn’t notice, some variance between the missile’s components and our assumptions about them, or, perhaps, some aspect of physics we simply don’t understand. We would not assume an inability to specifically account for the missile’s aberrant behavior constitutes an argument for it having “free will.” We assume, in short, that entities like balls and missiles behave in a way that at least would be entirely predictable if our knowledge of the relevant physics and states of affairs were sufficiently complete. We do not resort to endowing such entities with extraphysical sources of causation.

When we speak of other entities as having “free will,” whether they are birds or human beings, we are in effect denying that we might be simply facing problems of enormous physical complexity. In place of an unknown (and perhaps even unknowable) physical solution to the problem of behavioral unpredictability, we are postulating an explanation which is little better than magic. While we cannot logically disprove the existence of such extraphysical entities as “free will,” there is nothing necessary about them either. In fact, there are no bona fide examples of physical events that could not have their origins in some purely physical cause. There is much about the nervous systems of animals we do not understand, but there is nothing about those nervous systems that clearly renders them incapable of being the sole mediators between an organism’s environment and its intentional actions. Anyone who has ever been hungry or has consumed an appreciable quantity of alcohol can attest to the fact that material factors strongly influence choice, and it is at least plausible that all decisions are ultimately reducible to the net influence of various environmental and neurological factors.

We can’t say with logical certainty that “free will” does not exist, but since its existence is not necessary to explain behavior we can say that the assertion that it exists is a violation of the principle of parsimony. It is more parsimonious to look for explanations in some as-yet-unknown physical process, or even in some collection of physical processes so complex as to be unknowable, than it is to put forward the untestable assertion that there are extraphysical first causes.

II.

Up to this point, I do not believe I’ve covered any new ground. One can make damaging arguments against the existence of free will in entities external to oneself, but the strongest practical argument for free will is probably the introspective one -- the claim that “I know my own actions to be free.” This is a harder nut to crack, but I believe it is possible -- without resort to peculiar quasi-dualism proposed by epiphenomenalists.

When one says “I have a choice” what does this actually mean? The proponent of the free will hypothesis takes such an assertion to mean that there are multiple possibilities for one to select from – and I am using the term “possibilities” in a strict sense: something that can be a state of affairs, not something which is imaginable but impossible. What I am proposing as a counter to this view is that, while the capacity to imagine multiple “possibilities” plays a role in decision making, any actual decision itself can only be understood as ultimately reducible to some physical process. In simple terms, we perceive ourselves as free because we can and do imagine alternative actions before making a decision, but we inevitably choose from among those apparent alternatives the one which suits our predispositions best.

If I may take the liberty of generalizing my internal experiences to those of other human beings, I must conclude that most of our actions are straightforwardly mechanical. When I type the letter “m” for mechanical, I do not think to myself “maybe I’ll press the ‘m’ key to produce the letter ‘m’ instead of trying to do it with the ‘q’ key.” In truth, there is nothing in the process of typing the letter “m” that has even the appearance of a choice. I just press the “m” key and an “m” appears. Likewise, when I eat my dinner I do not generally entertain the “possibility” of eating it off the floor – though I am at least arguably “free” to do this. Most of our actions are driven by the well established reflexes we have accumulated over a lifetime. Some are driven by genetics. The sort of weighty decisions ethicists like to talk about are comparatively rare events.

When we do act in a way that involves making recognizable choices, what is it we are doing that differs from our reflexive involvement in the causal world? When faced with what we actually perceive as a choice, we weigh the relative merits of each alternative. We attempt to predict the future. We imagine alternative futures for the purpose of selecting the most attractive one. We never fail to select the most attractive one, “attractiveness” being defined by our unique set of heuristics, our background, our genetics, our current state of knowledge and awareness, and any number of other factors than manifest themselves, ultimately, in the state of our neuroanatomy. There is nothing about this process that requires any special causal powers.

Consider the trivial choice of selecting a snack from a vending machine. We approach the vending machine not merely with a handful of change, but also with a huge collection of memories and other sorts of predispositions. Typically, we eliminate from consideration all of those items experience has shown us we don’t like. We gravitate toward those we know we like the taste of, perhaps toward those we think might have some nutritional value, and perhaps toward those which hold some pleasant associations unique to us. We might also have acquired a heuristic that inclines to trying new things, or a heuristic that inclines us to avoid them. We might have cravings related to our metabolic state.

When we choose one snack over another, we may or may not be able to explain our decision. One might say, “cheese crackers are my favorite snack, and that is why I picked them.” Such an answer erodes the case for free will on its face because the chooser is substantially aware of the dominant causal factor in the choice. The chooser is predicting that the cheese crackers will taste better than the other alternatives, and “tasting better” is almost certainly reducible to some biochemical process.

One might say, on the other hand, “I could not make up my mind so I chose the cheese crackers.” This answer admits to no known cause on the part of the chooser, and might be explained in either of two ways. The choice is either genuinely random, or it is the result of some process of which the chooser is simply unaware. If a choice is genuinely random in some quantum statistical sense, then it can hardly be considered an act of free will. On the other hand, if a decision is the result of subconscious motivations (or something of that sort) then it is still the product of an antecedent cause, so the decision cannot be a first cause in itself. There is no more reason to ascribe special causal powers to the subconscious than to the conscious, and even if there were, the possession of extraphysical subconscious powers is clearly not what we mean when we postulate free will.

Yet another (and quite atypical) response our decision maker might make would be: “I chose the cheese crackers because I am free to do so, even though I would have preferred the cherry pie.” Although superficially this sounds promising, on analysis it is either a lie or a self-deception. To make a choice for the sake of proving one’s freedom is just to evaluate the goal of the selection task differently. It is merely to find attempting to make a particular philosophical point more attractive than selecting an attractive food. It illustrates not freedom, but merely the working out of different causal sequences that happen to be granted precedence at the moment. The decision to put a belief before a physical pleasure is no proof of freedom either, as it may also be easily explained in terms of yet other antecedent conditions acting on the decision maker’s neuroanatomy.

Ultimately, it is simply unintelligible to talk about a decision as an isolated cause. In practice, we know decisions always exist within the unique context of the decision maker’s cognitive world. It is always legitimate to ask why a decision maker made a particular choice, which would not make any sense if decisions were uncaused, spontaneous events.

Relating the vending machine example above to our earlier missile example is revealing. Both the behavior of a heat-seeking missile and that of a hungry human being can be explained (at least in principle) by wholly deterministic physical processes. Both entities, too, behave in ways which vary according to the circumstances they detect in the external environment. They differ, most fundamentally, at the level of intentionality. Where the human being makes a series of predictions and inevitably seeks the most attractive, the missile is not “attracted” to any outcome in the same sense, nor is it capable of anything that answers to the term “prediction”. It does not pursue its target because it has some internal conscious purpose which it is deterministically compelled to carry out. The machine operates by a comparatively simple and wholly unconscious algorithm, more-or-less as I do when I press the “m” key to type the letter “m”. What sets human beings, and no doubt a good many other animals, apart from machines is not some special power to initiate causation, but rather the ability to attach action to meaning and meaning to action. A bird may fly a course wholly determined by physical causes, but one of those causes is its particular purpose at any given moment – a purpose that entities like balls and missiles do not possess. Current artificially “intelligent” machines may respond to external events as if they were predicting the future, but the only actual predictions that can be inferred from their behavior are the predictions of their designers.

To state my position another way, the distinction between a mechanical reaction and a decision is not the interposition of free will, but the interposition of an awareness of causality itself. To make a decision, in the sense that human beings make decisions, is to model at least two imaginary causal sequences in imaginary space-time, and to pursue the outcome of one or other of these sequences. The predicted outcome is the goal we pursue in making a decision. Further, to make reasonably reliable predictions one must have a substantial working knowledge of the physical world in which one is immersed. Without such knowledge, predictions would simply be wrong too often to be useful. While nothing about this process requires free will, it is no mere brute reaction either. Making decisions based on such understanding, no matter how deterministic the actual mechanism of the decision might be, is certainly no small achievement.
Ironically, it is this very ability to model the future in a variety of ways that creates the illusion that we have special causal powers. What we call freedom is nothing more or less than the general belief that each of our predictions really could represent some future state of affairs.1 It is a byproduct of the impressively complex, evolutionarily advantageous, but ultimately deterministic, way our nervous systems respond to a varied but not wholly unpredictable environment.

I think it is necessary, at this point, to clarify the distinction between the position I have outlined and the position of the epiphenomenalist. The epiphenomenalist would agree that our decisions are fundamentally deterministic, in other words, that the nervous system behaves like an elaborate machine and that the entity we identify as “the mind” cannot exercise the power of first cause. However, the epiphenomenalist goes further in taking the position that our cognitive activity is inconsequential, playing no role whatsoever in our actions. My position is that, since our cognitive processes are inseparable from the neurochemical processes that constitute them, it is wrong to assume that our cognitive activity is inconsequential. The epiphenomenalist position is analogous to saying that a regular lattice of silicon and oxygen atoms somehow only contingently appears to be a solid at our level of perception, and that it might just as easily be a liquid. This is contrary to experience. Without intentionality we would not, and could not, participate in the causal universe in the way we actually do. My assertion is that what we perceive as a decision and what we define (and, to the extent that our instruments are capable, detect) as a brain process are merely different expressions of the same state of affairs. “Thoughts” are no more capable of being first causes than the neurochemical processes which constitute them, but, as they are features of physical processes, the subjective experiences we know as “thoughts” are logically bound to causality. I think epiphenomenalists make their mistake because they believe that “thoughts” really are first causes (even if only for themselves) and must therefore be causally quarantined to protect the integrity of a material universe which they concede is deterministic.

I would like to make clear, too, that the elimination of a first cause interpretation of our capacity to make decisions does not require that the universe be wholly deterministic. If quantum theory is substantially correct, some states of affairs, at least at the level of subatomic particles, are statistical rather than deterministic. While it is at least imaginable that some unknown causes underlie this apparent randomness, even if the statistical nature of states of affairs at that level is a brute fact it does nothing for the “mind-as-first-cause” hypothesis. Genuinely non-deterministic processes would render the future less predictable, but would not require, or even imply, any special causal powers of the mind.2

Finally, I would like to make clear (if I have not done so already) that while my position implies that decisions are, at least in a broad sense, computations, I do not take the position that a capacity to perform computations is a sufficient condition for intentionality or consciousness. John Searle’s Chinese Room argument seems to cover this issue forcefully enough, and I will not re-cover the same ground.3 My purpose in this essay is to show that we have no reason to suppose we possess the power to truly originate causal sequences, not to show that all of our cognitive processes are reducible to computation. Indeed, I don’t believe either intentionality or consciousness are computational.

III.

Inevitably, any attack on the idea of free will must come to terms with our own sense of self-identity. If we are not free beings – what are we? Well, from a starkly materialist perspective, we are merely the loci of a particular kind of causal complexity. Being a sort of “thick spot” in the field of causation may not be a very satisfying self definition for most people, but there doesn’t seem to be anything inaccurate about this view. A perhaps more satisfying but no less accurate self assessment is that we rare instances consciousness in a universe that is largely unconscious. Consciousness, while a difficult entity to define, is at least ontologically less problematic than free will. While freedom isn’t necessary to explain our experiences, consciousness certainly is. None of us can honestly entertain the notion that he or she is absolutely unaware. To engage in any sort of reasoning at all requires an awareness of something. Taking the position that the elusive entity I identify as “me” is fundamentally a conscious entity is therefore a more secure stance than assuming what is fundamental to my nature is freedom. It is perfectly possible to act and make decisions without pretentions to magical causal powers, but many of our actions would be impossible (or at least wildly improbable) without a conscious capacity to make predictions.

The other sense of free will, that of being unimpeded in carrying out one’s intentions, is wholly independent of the first cause definition. Whatever the nature of our decisions might be, our ability to carry out those decisions is subject to circumstances that are external to the decision making process. To say that I am free in the sense that I can carry out my deterministically derived decisions without external impediments is not a meaningless claim. Here too, however, our perception of freedom pivots on our assessment of our own identity. The deterministic processes that constitute my decision making are still identifiable as part of “me,” just as the deterministic processes that make my muscles function are identifiable as part of “me,” but any deterministic processes in my environment that prevent me from carrying out my decisions are not a part of “me.” While in some doggedly holistic sense this distinction may be trivial, it is probably inevitable that we organize cognition from the perspective of our unique identities. Evolution has predisposed us to model the rest of the universe as somewhere we live, not something we are.

The sense in that we are free when we are not externally impeded can be readily explained in terms of the determinist perspective I’ve proposed. Remember, to make a decision is to pursue the most attractive option among some set of imagined options. To suffer a loss of free will in the second sense, then, is just to have one’s options constrained to some subset of unattractive choices – or at least to be denied some plausible more attractive choice. Unless one is utterly paralyzed, one always has plausible choices of action. Even if one is utterly paralyzed, one still has plausible choices in regard to one’s own thoughts. A slave does not feel enslaved because he or she lacks imagined possibilities, but only because even the most attractive of those imagined possibilities is unpleasant.4

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1 This erroneous belief may even be necessary to the decision making process: if we were constantly aware that most of the causal sequences we imagine before making decisions simply could not occur, we might tend to engage in futile, and rather paradoxical, searches for the possible rather than the attractive.

2 I owe this observation to John Searle.

3 See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

4 In theory, one might be severely constrained by external circumstance and yet feel completely free. Consider the following thought experiment. Imagine a vending machine with the magical ability to predict our decisions perfectly. Before we push a button to make our selection, the vending machine disables all the other buttons. Thus, we are constrained not merely by our own internal deterministic processes, but by an external one as well. Provided the machine made perfect predictions, however, we would be oblivious to the constraint. While it is tempting to imagine that we are made less free as the number of options available to us is reduced, we are in fact only less free, in the sense of being materially constrained, when we perceive the actual constraint.

A Few Words on the Dangers of Language

2009-10-13T09:46:00.000-07:00

We are all born empiricists. As infants, we begin to learn about the world through our senses. We watch, we listen, we feel, we taste. We learn to manipulate objects. We learn to crawl, and eventually to walk, by trial and error. From the beginning, we are endowed with both a curiosity about our surroundings and a capacity to experiment and observe. This is our first and purest way of knowing.

Later, when we acquire some facility for language, we learn a second way to know about the world. Typically, we start this new exploration by asking questions of our parents. “What is that?” “Will it bite?” Using language, we can ask questions about things that are beyond our present means of discovering firsthand. “What is the sun made of?” “How old do trees get?” We learn to incorporate our empirically-acquired knowledge and our linguistically-acquired knowledge into some tentative, incomplete, but more-or-less functional picture of reality. So armed, we venture forth into the world.

These two ways of learning, experience and language, are the only two ways of learning we will ever possess. It is worth examining how these two methods differ in the kind of knowledge1 they provide, and what the consequences are of ignoring this distinction.

An important, almost defining, characteristic of empirical knowledge is that its truth has nothing to do with how we might feel about it. On a clear summer day the sky is its own particular shade of blue -- whether you happen to like that shade of blue or not. While we can change some parts of the world in certain ways, the lesson we learn by observation is that most things have stable characteristics, or predictable transitions thought a series of characteristics, that define them. To stay with childish discoveries for now, we discover that rocks are hard, heavy and relatively changeless on our human timescale. Apples, on the other hand, begin small and green, grow large and (usually) red, and (if uneaten) turn brown, soft, and inedible. While we are capable of imagining mushy rocks and indestructible green apples we will not find such things in nature. Illusions and other failings of our senses aside, our experience reliably shows us what is.

The knowledge we gain through language, on the other hand, is of a very different character. Even in the realm of what we might call material facts, experience and language spawn different kinds of ideas. To know by word of mouth that your grandmother is seventy-eight years old is not the same as being aware of her wrinkles, grey hair, and bent posture. In this case both physical perceptions and the linguistic expressions do, in some sense, refer to the same underlying reality, but while wrinkles have a physical presence, “seventy-eight years old” is a conceptual entity – something we cannot physically point to. The ideas we express in words, while they may refer to the world2, are fundamentally constrained not by nature, but merely by the rules of language. One could as easily say that your grandmother is 678 years old. While probably not true, the proposition is just as expressible as one that is true. While the empirical realm corresponds to what is, then the realm of language corresponds only to what is imaginable.

Every bit of knowledge we acquire through language alone is, in an important sense, imaginary. If I tell you, for example, that I once walked from Fort William to Glenelg in the Scottish highlands, unless you happened to witness my whole trek from end to end, you cannot know what I’m saying is true in anything like the same sense that you know what you ate for breakfast or where you spent yesterday evening. You imagine my journey, however abstractly, and you make a certain assessment about whether or not it actually occurred. If I tell you that I walked from Ascraeus Mons to the Fesenkov crater on the planet Mars you would also imagine my journey in precisely the same sense – even though you would probably make a different assessment regarding the truth of such a claim.

Knowledge we acquire through language is contingent in a way that empirical knowledge isn’t. When we are told something or read something, we automatically measure its plausibility against other ideas we have already accepted as true. In parallel to this, we also assess the credibility of the source. Were this credibility assessment always a measure of past reliability it would not be particularly problematic. (e.g., Jones has rarely been wrong about his forecasts of the weather, so if he says that it will rain today it probably will.) Unfortunately, credibility often rests on far less rational grounds. (e.g., Jones is my uncle, a model citizen, and a freemason in good standing -- so if he says that it will rain today it probably will.) Authority often has dimensions that have nothing to do with empirical reality.

Consider our earliest social relationships. It is normal for young children to accept the words of their parents as facts. In part, this may be based on empirical past performance: as long as parents are not grossly incompetent or deeply pathological they can be expected to answer most of their children’s questions about everyday matters accurately. It would be foolish, though, to imagine the trust that children have for their parents is altogether rational. In the first place, young children don’t have much existing knowledge to measure new knowledge against. They are innocent, ignorant or pathetically unskeptical – depending on one’s perspective. In the second place, parents have a privileged position as providers and protectors, and we are probably predisposed by millions of years of evolution to accept their authority, at least as children.

Parents, or at least some adult assuming some semblance of a parental role, serve as our first examples of credible authorities. It follows, then, that the parent-child relationship must be the model for all subsequent authority relationships, both with other persons and with non-personal entities such as gods and nations. Annoyingly Freudian as this may sound, I believe it is self-evident. If you have doubts about this claim, you need only ask yourself -- How could it be otherwise? What possible model for authority relationships could any individual experience earlier? Even if we assume the pattern for authority relationships is not learned but wholly ingrained in us genetically, we cannot escape the primacy of the parent-child relationship.3 Genetics, driven by natural selection, would tend to produce traits that are advantageous to our survival, and if our genes predispose us to trust anyone for the sake of our own survival it would certainly be our parents.

The connection between parental relationships and relationships to adult institutions permeates language. “Our father in heaven.” “The fatherland.” “Mother Russia.” “America’s founding fathers.” The word “patriot” derives, ultimately, from the Greek patēr, meaning father. Even phrases like “international brotherhood” imply a paternal relationship indirectly. In fact, one struggles to find a relationship with a national or religious institution expressed in any other terms. One may speak of “friendly nations,” but this “friendship” refers to a relationship between one nation and another, not an individual’s relationship to a nation.

Inevitably, we model new relationships on old ones. Having established a certain level of trust for an external authority from infancy, we are predisposed to look for truth in the linguistic constructions of others from then on. This is why the theist believes in scripture, why the patriot is stirred by patriotic speeches, and also, at least in part, the reason that the scientist trusts the contents of a professional journal. We cannot learn everything we want to know empirically, so we accept the assertions of those whose authorities with whom we feel connected. The professional group, the political party, the nation, the state, the church – all become surrogates for the family.

It is true that what human beings want to know is a different matter than who they are inclined to trust. Once the strictly necessary knowledge of how to cope our everyday environment is learned, the quest for further material with which to occupy our minds can proceed in various directions. It varies according to one’s culture, one’s class, and no doubt plenty of highly individual factors. Typically, however, the quest for such non-essential knowledge is bound up with the quest for personal identity. Having worked out how to eat and not to be eaten, one can dabble in luxury of experimenting with who one is. One can learn how to be a Christian, a communist, or a certified public accountant. Each of these identities has its own associated group of adherents and its own unique set of social rules. In terms of providing an identity they all meet the same need, even though they offer drastically different ways of looking at the world. Social identity is, as it were, familial identity writ large. It is an expression not of the need for a reliable source of knowledge, but rather it is the expression of the need for a reliable source of personal context and security. To be either a Christian, a communist, or even (to an admittedly lesser extent) a certified public accountant is to project what is essentially a family identity onto a group of individuals far too large and diverse to be a family. It is to expect a certain level of protection from inclusion in this group, even if, in some cases, this protection only amounts to a vague sense of social legitimacy.

The idea that all human beings are irresistibly drawn to seek the truth is a naïve one. We may all be born empiricists, but, as I’ve already at least implied, the practical function of empiricism is survival. Having burned one’s hand on a hot stove, one does not generally seek the opinion of an authority, even a parent, to confirm that it would not be wise to repeat the process. Most decisions, however, are more tolerant of error. Questions like “What is the sun made of?” may devolve naturally from the same innate curiosity that moved us to touch the stove, but whether the sun is a large gaseous ball of mostly hydrogen or god with certain peculiar attributes matters little to one’s immediate survival. This is another sense in which our “knowledge” is of two kinds: those things we substantially need to know and those which we merely want to know. Whether or not false explanations of apparently non-threatening phenomena might be dangerous to the species is another question, and we shall touch on that later.

It is worth noting that almost everyone makes at least an unconscious distinction between beliefs passed to them by language and hard empirical truth. Even people who claim to believe fervently in the power of prayer, for example, rarely attempt to stop their cars with a prayer when a nice substantial brake pedal is available. Likewise, they would seldom pray for purely spiritual sustenance as a replacement physically nutritious food. People pray for love, for cures from diseases, for emotional strength, etc. In short, they pray for things they do not know how to attain by any means they know through actual experience. They do not, in general, pray for alterations of the physical world that their experience tells them do not occur. They do not ask God to do the laundry because they know intuitively that nothing will happen.

Religion, ideology, culture, and even science, are cognitive luxuries – things we indulge in because language gives us the capacity to, and which then take on their own peculiar trajectories. They are the byproduct of abilities we’ve evolved for other purposes. We can use our legs to dance if we are so inclined, but natural selection did not produce our legs for dancing.

Making matters even worse for cause of truth is the fact that erroneous beliefs and destructive ideologies can be personally advantageous under certain circumstances. For an average Russian in the 1940’s, a worshipful attitude toward Stalin was a better survival strategy than one of outspoken dissent, no matter how much Stalin may have lied or how many millions may have died as the result of his decisions. Or, to offer a less brutal example, given that the actual goal of the average Christian is a sense of security within the family of the church, an open and rigorous skepticism is rather counterproductive, especially if one lives in a predominantly Christian community. The believer believes that God exists in more-or-less the same way that the avid football fan believes his last-place local team is still, somehow, the best. It is not a matter of what is, it is a matter of who one is – and who one’s friends are.

The esoteric nature of much of human knowledge, along with the natural tendency to put undue trust in the often arbitrary constructs that make up human institutions, conspires against our native empiricism. This is a truth which the most educated among us often find especially difficult to grasp. Watch any debate between one of the more articulate advocates of atheism and any devout believer and you will witness the same tragic pattern, almost without fail. The atheist begins with the assumption that God’s existence or non-existence is a question about nature -- something you can work out empirically, like the age of a tree or the distance from here to the moon. The believer begins with the assumption that God is the head of a grand spiritual family, a figure whose existence is as unquestionable as the existence of the believer him or herself. The atheist lays out a concise, empirical argument. Unconvinced, the believer counters with the truth according to scripture. “Don’t insult my intelligence,” is more-or-less what the atheist is saying. “Don’t insult my family,” is more-or-less what the believer is saying. The debate ends in mutual perplexity and irritation, and no one’s mind is changed.

I believe (if you will pardon the irony with which I employ the term) that empiricism is generally a good thing. To unpack this slightly, understanding nature is a good thing and one achieves that understanding by observation. Being able learn by observation was a useful capacity when we were infants, and it’s a useful capacity to us still. The real universe is a far richer and, if I may say so, a more interesting place than any of the illusory worlds human beings have managed to invent. Physical reality is not without its dangers and we have to face them, but we in no way lessen those dangers by inventing new ones of our own. For many, I realize, a universe denuded of gods of one sort or another would seem an unbearably lonely place. This is a sensibility I do not share and frankly cannot share. Ultimately, such imaginary parents always demand more of us than their dubious comfort is worth. You may love God, your country, or the ideology of V.I. Lenin – but there can be no meaningful sense in which any of these ghosts can ever love you. That you mean anything to your God, your country, or your ideology is the saddest of self deceptions. It isn’t hard to see that the willingness of people to slaughter one another over religious or ideological differences is not a trait that benefits our species as a whole, even if the odd individual might profit from it here and there. To be in love with one’s illusions is a personal tragedy; to be willing to kill for them is a tragedy for us all.4

If scientific and philosophical advancement is to be a boon to humanity we must guard against a tendency to become smug about our grasp of the truth. Knowledge should not be reduced to a mere initiation criterion for yet another narrow social group. If you are a humanist, a skeptic, or anyone with a generally empirical frame of reference, it is virtually certain that your views are the product of a unique and fortunate personal history. Illusions abound in human society and there is plenty of opportunity to succumb to them. If you have avoided or overcome such illusions, it is only because your personal circumstances have endowed you with a certain critical mass of empirical knowledge that has allowed you to see another way. In other words, you have learned enough real, substantiated facts to have a general sense of how things actually work, and have had enough experience to learn what sort of explanations are likely to bear scrutiny. If you have reached that point, then blind belief is simply not an option for you. Adopting such an empirical perspective is not a grand, heroic choice, but merely the result of a certain series of events. Had your life been only slightly different you might well have arrived at very different conclusions. If we are truly proponents of reason, we can hardly be outraged that the often intellectually stultified lives of others may have led them to adopt greatly different worldviews. Though we may naturally find their illusions frustrating, we may no more fairly despise the unenlightened than we may fairly despise the disabled or the illiterate. To do so would be, in itself, unreasonable. In the struggle against ignorance, intolerance is counterproductive.

To be a proponent of reason in an often irrational society is to strike a very difficult balance. While intolerance is counterproductive, a blind, all-encompassing tolerance can be nearly suicidal. One cannot placate the fanatically religious or the fanatically ideological with patience and civility. One must be willing to resist anyone who actively denies empirically substantiated knowledge, who impedes the progress of knowledge on purely superstitious grounds, or who seeks to impose ideas on another by brute physical force. Anti-evolutionists, bomb-wielding fundamentalists, political extremists and holocaust deniers must be opposed. On the other hand, we should never become so self-righteous in our dedication to the real that we feel it necessary to immolate Santa on a pile of Harry Potter novels. It must be admitted that some false beliefs can be genuinely harmless, and that often even deeply deluded people can be naturally humane enough to refrain hostile or intolerant actions. The difficulty, of course, is that in any more-or-less functional democracy other peoples’ personal beliefs manifest themselves in public policy. The next-door neighbor who believes in a celestial father figure may not be a problem, but the millions of neighbors who elect a demagogue who undermines your civil liberties certainly are. Unable to trust in deities, we must put our faith in education. Ironically, the best tool we have to dispel humanities’ delusions may be the very language from which those delusions are ultimately made.

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1 I am using the word “knowledge” in an everyday sense here, not in a narrow, epistemological one. I will use “knowledge” as a synonym for “belief” in certain cases. While the distinction between the two concepts is obviously important, I am striving for readability rather than philosophical rigor.

2 More rigorously, to “states of affairs”.

3 There are, perhaps, two distinct kinds of genetic predispositions to see the world in terms of authority, which we might call the competitive and the cooperative. Competitive hierarchies are the result of struggles for dominance between members of different species or of members of the same species that are not closely related. Birds contesting for mates and territories would be an obvious example. While this sort of hierarchy may have nothing to do with parental relationships, it is not the kind of authority I am referring to here. We do not, after all, adopt the beliefs of our enemies because we fear them. Cooperative hierarchies, on the other hand, are the result of a struggle to advance the common interests of close relatives. Animals as diverse as ants and human beings engage in this sort of authoritarian organization, and it may be said that even the lowly worker ant’s activities are driven by a parent-childhood relationship – in this case almost wholly driven by its genes.

4 Of course, by my own earlier admission, my beliefs are probably no more that the reflection of my own self identity. If I did not identify with certain views about what such a slippery term as “good” ought to mean, I would not indulge such a passion to proselytize.

A Pseudo Introduction

2009-09-25T09:06:00.000-07:00

I am inclined to say very little about myself. There are two principal reasons for my reticence. First, I have come to many conclusions that will doubtless offend some people. While I personally can live with the consequences of this, I do not care to have my family become the subject of threats from any loose cannon who happens to disagree with me. The world is amply dangerous enough. Second, my intention is to write about ideas which will, I hope, stand or fall on their own merits. This is not Facebook; my identity is not the message.

My intended areas of exploration are at best philosophical and at worst political. Living in America, I am likely to address American politics occasionally, probably from a sociological or historical perspective. For the record, I neither love nor hate America, nor do I love or hate any other country. I am writing to you with the sincere hope that you are a rational being. I am pretty much indifferent to your nationality, ethnicity, gender or even species. If you can read and think for yourself, and if your paws have sufficient dexterity to operate your computer, I am honored to have you as my audience. On the whole, my philosophical interests are broader and more forward-looking than my political ones. I intend to add fairly long and well-developed articles on philosophical topics from time to time, and perhaps to rant about politics more frequently and with less rigor.

Time permitting, I am open to dialog. I will reply to criticism or anything else that seems to invite a reply. I appreciate comments, especially well considered ones. I will happily engage in debate so long as it appears that we are ultimately advancing toward some better understanding of the topic. I have no particular interest in mere intellectual jousting.

Thank you for visiting,

e.m. cadwaladr