Why Liberals Misunderstand Conservatives

Jonathan Haidt is one of the most amazing people working in social science today. Along with J.D. Greene, and, in a different way, Antonio Damasio, Haidt has made incredible innovations in understanding the psychological, neurological, and evolutionary origins of human ethical/moral life.

Read this (pdf). (You should also read this [pdf], but it's a bit longer and on a different subject matter.) Here's the abstract:

Researchers in moral psychology and social justice have agreed that morality is about matters of harm, rights, and justice. With this definition of morality, conservative opposition to social justice programs has appeared to be immoral, and has been explained as a product of various non-moral processes, such as system justification or social dominance orientation. In this article we argue that, from an anthropological perspective, the moral domain is usually much broader, encompassing many more aspects of social life and valuing institutions as much or more than individuals. We present theoretical and empirical reasons for believing that there are in fact five psychological systems that provide the foundations for the world's many moralities. The five foundations are psychological preparations for caring about and reacting emotionally to harm, reciprocity (including justice, fairness, and rights), ingroup, hierarchy, and purity. Political liberals have moral intuitions primarily based upon the first two foundations, and therefore misunderstand the moral motivations of political conservatives, who generally rely upon all five foundations.

Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. His five foundations (which, unlike the categories that philosophers will pull out of their asses, are based on the statistical assessment of cross-cultural data) offer a radically novel approach to ethical life.

But, if that weren't a breathtaking enough insight (tears literally came to my eyes when reading this piece [I know, it's a strange tendency I have that when I read about ideas so profound I tear up; I just think it's an indication that I'm in the right business]), he shows how the "impoverished" ethical worldview of political liberals leads us to misunderstand our conservative compatriots, and ascribe motives to them that are just not fair.

When the moral domain is limited by definition to two foundations (harm/welfare/care, and justice/rights/fairness), then social justice is clearly the extension of morality out to the societal level. The programs and laws that social justice activists endorse aim to maximize the welfare and rights of individuals, particularly those whom the activists believe do not receive equal treatment or full justice in their society. If social justice is just morality writ large, it follows that opposition to these programs must be based on concerns other than moral concerns. Social justice research is therefore in part the search for the non-moral motivations ­ such as selfishness, existential fear, or blind prejudice ­ of those who oppose social justice, primarily political conservatives. For example, one of the leading approaches to the study of political attitudes states that political conservatism is a form of motivated social cognition: people embrace conservatism in part "because it serves to reduce fear, anxiety, and uncertainty; to avoid change, disruption, and ambiguity, and to explain, order, and justify inequality among groups and individuals" (Jost et al., 2003, p.340; see also Social Dominance Orientation, Pratto et al., 1994). This view of conservatives is so widespread among justice researchers that it sometimes leads to open expressions of self-righteousness and contempt.

Ben is also a fan of Haidt, and has actually had the opportunity to meet him. He told me that Haidt is the only liberal academic he's encountered who actually seems to understand conservatism. One endorsement, albeit from the most intellectually rigorous conservative I know of, may not suffice to show that he's actually getting the conservative mindset right, but it's a good sign.

Now, if you haven't yet read the whole thing, you should.

His explanation of the culture war is amazing. It's more complex than that, but he certainly has reached a key insight (see his comment about Jon Stewart's interview of Rick Santorum, in particular).

As someone who has worked very hard to understand the conservative mindset--which is so difficult because academics are almost invariably political liberals or, in rare cases, libertarians, which more or less amounts to the same thing (except they seem to reject the whole care/harm ethic and are even more morally impoverished!)--I think this is extremely helpful.

Moreover, it makes me question my own moral beliefs. Now, it seems to me that there is a rational basis for the aspects of morality in which the group is valued over the individual (the hierarchical/traditional and ingroup foundations), but as far as I can tell, purity is based on a mere illusion. If, as Haidt suggests, this last developed as a response to avoiding contaminated meat, it seems that with contemporary understandings of sanitation, disease, and so forth, the purity ethic has been "outgrown".

What disgusts us now is merely an indication of what tended to cause sickness to our ancestors, but now, at best, disgust serves as an intuitive approximation of disease-causing substances. It's interesting that Martha Nussbaum, in her latest book, argues that disgust should have absolutely no place in social policy and law. I tend to agree, since we can now accomplish the function that purity intuitions used to perform through modern medicine and biology.

Now, this does leave untouched the "divine" aspects of the purity ethic, but I'm also inclined to dismiss these as superstitions. Today, there are more rigorous, proven methods of taking care of our bodies and treating it like a "temple": diet, exercise, stress regulation, sanitation, etc. Since the rejection of gay marriage is largely, although not entirely, premised on a disgust of sodomy, I still think there is no sound basis to this, for reasons I just stated.

I won't further explicate Haidt's article or his other body of work (I have other things to do, including responding to people about my last post, which I increasingly feel is inadequate, although I think this stuff sheds a new light on part of what I was trying to get at), but I encourage you to read more of him if you have an interest in ethics (and who doesn't?).

Criminal Justice

This evening I had a phone conversation with Ben. Let me stress once again how vital it is to expose yourself to diverse opinions and arguments. I truly believe that, if not for Ben and his thoughtful conservatism, I would be far less fair and reflective in my thinking.

There are a couple of social issues in particular in which his arguments are especially strong and well supported by evidence. Welfare policies and affirmative action are two such examples, but I'm going to talk about a third one here: the criminal justice system.

My goal is to try to flesh out Ben's arguments somewhat and, since most of my readers are thoughtful liberals and leftists, see how you respond to them, because I really can't find compelling objections. (I apologize, Ben, if I distort your arguments. Feel free to correct me as you see fit.)

One of the key insights of his conservatism is his emphasis on applying psychological research on human behavior to thinking about social issues. This more behavioristic approach is anathema to many liberals--it can be very paternalistic--but even if one accepts Mill's harm principle, it is still compelling (for, we do not exist in isolation; few actions harm the self alone).

The basic idea, as I see it, is that a society should reward good behaviors and punish bad ones. Now, this can be controversial, so let's just apply it to those examples in which almost everyone would agree. For instance, we recognize that violent crimes (murder, assault, rape, etc.) should be punished. Even if there are root causes to violence which we should be addressing, this is no argument against setting up a system that discourages violent behavior.

A good psychologist knows that punishments are most effective if they are swift, certain, and severe. In our current system, this is often not the case with punishments. It's easy, particularly for first-time offenders, to get off with a light sentence or no sentence at all. It would be in our interest (and theirs!), however, to discourage first-time offenders from getting into a habit of committing crimes. If they can get away with it, that serves as an incentive to repeat criminal activities.

If we are interested in deterrence and reform, then the research would support this conclusion about the nature of effective punishment. Swift, certain, severe punishments are more effective deterrents to be sure. Insofar as they deter future acts by appropriately punished criminals, they can also have a reforming effect.

Now, learned helplessness is a possibility with excessively cruel punishments like torture--and there may be negative side effects to any punishment--but these are matters that can be decided empirically. (Since Ben knows the research far better than I, I trust his judgment about the results of experiments, if not always about their normative implications.)

At this point I want to raise a few objections, both theoretical and practical: 1) Our criminal justice system should be... well, just. Punishments should fit the crime and innocent people should not be punished. 2) The tendency to commit crimes is the result of a combination of genetics and developmental conditions, such so that it is unjust to hold people responsible for happening to be born into a bad situation. 3) There are many crimes in which the law is draconian, for instance drug-related offenses. In other words, practically speaking we find numerous violations of the first concern. 4) Racism and other biases are deeply entrenched and ineliminable in our system, so that harsher punishment is, in effect, a racist policy.

In the case of 1, I think there is a serious concern. Our criminal justice system operates with a principle of assumed innocence in which the burden is on the state to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Conservatives note that these safeguards sometimes go too far; in any case, a compelling case can be made that we err too much on one side. More innocent people are let free but so are more guilty ones. It is an empirical question whether this generates positive social utility, but the current evidence seems to be in support of the conservative stance.

This starts to work in the direction of the second objection, to which one might pose the following response. Even if we grant that individuals lack free will and, thus, responsibility for their actions, this does not mean that we shouldn't treat them as if they were in control of their actions. It can be better both for the individual and for the larger community to assign blame and punish wrongful acts.

For the individual, because a stronger punishment is more likely to change behavior (if one jail sentence is so horrific, it will discourage perps from doing things which would send them back to the slammer). For society, because it is able to isolate and contain behaviors that threaten order and stability. (Again, of course, these arguments rely on certain empirically observable conditions.)

But isn't there a tension here between responsibility and policies based on predicting behaviors? Perhaps, but there is a way to look at the role of the state in a way that is more compatible with individual autonomy. Certain actions that individuals might choose will be made to come at a higher cost, so that people will be discouraged from doing those things.

Third, we come to a practical objection. In some cases, there seems to be no significant, demonstrable harms involved; in others, no viable options for individuals except for crime. The two "long wars," on drugs and terror, are excellent examples of government going too far to restrict individual rights.

Yes, it may be the case that some of our laws are unjust, but this is more an argument against such laws rather than an argument against penalizing people who break the law. The principle that the punishment should fit the crime works both ways: in too many cases individuals who have acted in horrific ways have not been adequately penalized.

That fair punishment is difficult to implement does not constitute an argument against its value. Moreover, it does not necessarily limit the ability to challenge unjust laws. Even the act of going to prison can provides a means of protesting injustice (consider MLK's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail").

Finally, we reach the issue of racism. This is an underlying theme in all the social issues I mentioned above. An amazing thing about many otherwise intelligent liberals is that as soon as race (or gender or sexuality) enters into the picture, all self-reflective criticism stops. Their implicit argument runs like this:

1. Anything that is racist (sexist, heterosexist, etc.) is beyond the pale.
2. Any policy (empirical result, standardized test, etc.) which puts blacks (other racial minorities, women, gays and lesbians, etc.) at a disadvantage is racist (etc.).
3. Thus, etc.

This kind of argument is also used to discredit research on IQ and other controversial measures; any study which shows statistically significant group differences is automatically labeled racist. In academia, to be labeled a bigot is a death knell; even if you're tenured, no one will listen to you anymore.

When you try to discuss issues like this in a public forum you get: "Oh, didn't you know that Stephen J. Gould has definitively shown that race is not even a biological category?" "Didn't you get the memo that all gender differences are socially constructed?" "Haven't you heard that there's a gay gene and sexual orientation is not a choice?" I find this kind of thoughtlessness infinitely annoying. In some cases it may happen to be correct, but let's not lie about what the evidence is, even if it hurts our case.

Thus, even if we grant that the criminal justice system is systematically racist, this objection is more an argument against current judicial practice rather than against conservative legal principles. Instead of letting blacks off on crimes for which whites are acquitted, we might just as consistently convict more white lawbreakers.

I don't know that I find all of these responses adequate, but generally speaking this mode of argumentation is one that liberals too easily dismiss, or don't even consider in the first place.

Even in a non-paternalistic state it just makes sense to discourage uncontroversially bad behavior and to encourage people to develop themselves as much as possible. This is certainly not incompatible with social reforms targeting poverty and discrimination or with human rights. Let's keep in mind that people who break the social contract thereby justly lose some of their freedoms.

So, is this case at all compelling? What do y'all think?

Intuition, Reflective Equilibrium, and Utilitarianism

I just finished reading a recent article by Peter Singer discussing the research findings of, among others, 3 very interesting researcher: Jonathan Haidt, J.D. Greene, and, to a lesser extent, Antonio Damasio. The question that these researchers seek to ask is perhaps the central question of moral psychology: Why do we think the way we do about ethics?

[Singer's article is highly, highly worth reading (as is the work of these researchers), and if you'd like a copy of the pdf, let me know and I can send it to you. Or you can look it up yourself: Singer, Peter. "Ethics and Intuition." The Journal of Ethics (2005) 9: 331-352.]

Investigate the details for yourself, but the basic findings have been thus: for most people, ethical judgments based on emotional reactions (i.e., "intuitions") precede the justifications for these judgments, which are usually ad hoc rationalizations. In those people who rely more on rational considerations, they tend to have the same emotional reactions, but don't employ them. Instead, they spend time reasoning--it's been shown that they take longer to produce a judgment--before they articulate a judgment.

So that's step 1 of the argument: moral intuitions play a major role in our ethical lives. So why do we have the intuitions that we do? The short answer is evolution within a social context. For a longer answer, see Singer's article.

Singer, who wisely disparages attempts by people to turn survival of the fittest into a norm, now goes beyond the question of origins, asking a version of Korsgaard's "normative question": why should we trust our intuitions if they developed merely as a response to certain selective pressures that our anecestors faced? In essence, this is a refusal to accept "natural" as a more characteristic--there is no intelligible conception of it that is consistent and, as my colleague Jeff has pointed out, invocation of the word is often an excuse to ignore other people's points of view.

The conclusion that Singer reaches is that we have no reason to trust our intuitions, knowing what we know, no reason to apologize for evolution's "nature red in tooth and claw," the blind, slow and gruesome process of trial and error that allowed us to be the beings we are today only through a great cost of suffering.

An implication of this is that views which appeal to moral intuitions as a basis for ethics, such as Rawls' use of "reflective equilibrium," are extremely questionable. Singer suggests that there is no reason to even factor intuitions into ethical decisions, that they observe absolutely no weight.

This also flies in the face of Bernard Williams' view about avoiding theory in ethics. The justification he provides for this is largely an intuitive one. But why trust those intuitions? They are not merely given, but are open to question. History is full of unquestioned prejudices which could only be dissolved after being put to the test.

That's all I'll say for now. Singer's article includes the beginnings of a response to those who think that we need some intuitions, such as that pain and death are bad, even if we're utilitarians. I think it's more difficult than this, but I find myself tending to side with Singer here. Socrates was constantly going around and getting people to examine their core intuitions.

Should not ethical philosophy, while employing moral psychology for therapeutic purposes (that is, only by recognizing our natural limitations and by training, building new habits, can we become better people), nevertheless be practiced in a similar critical way?

The Force of Argument

I've been thinking about Richard Posner's claim to the effect that deliberative democracy is argued for in bad faith.

The model that is implicit for DD, he contends, is the academic seminar; the academic theorists who advocate DD know that in such a context they have more power, since arguing is pretty much what we academics do best.

Really, we're sick of all the ignorance and manipulation in politics, and think that we could do things better, that we could show people how things really ought to be, if only they'd just listen! These supposedly democratic theorists are just would-be philosopher kings.

I think there's some truth to this--quite a bit, actually. Is it at all strange that the best reasoners among us (and philosophers have been shown to be pretty much the only group of people who reason well) should want a society governed by reason? The force of argument is the strongest weapon we possess. On the right political terrain, we'd be as the English longbowmen at the Battle of Agincourt, grimly outnumbered but triumphant at the end of the day because of our piercing intellects.

(That may just be the best metaphor I've ever devised. If nothing else, it's certainly the most pretentious. Yay, me!)

There was this episode of South Park on last night about people who drive hybrid cars and citizens of San Francisco, in particular, who go around thinking they're so much more progressive than everyone. As a result, they end up polluting the atmosphere with "smug," eventually leading to a storm which wipes San Francisco off the map as it "completely disappears up its own asshole."

As someone who has been known to don a T-shirt that reads "I assume my reputation for arrogant presumption precedes me," I feel qualified to speak as an expert on the subject of smugness and self-absorption. And it's endemic among intellectuals. Many of us won't admit it, but in our behavior we clearly evince it.

We're smart people, so we've always been told, and we think that we know other people better than they know themselves--just look at all the manifestations of the whole "hermeneutics of suspicion."

"Oh yes, what you said, that's not what you mean. As a (trained psychoanalyst/member of the Marxist vanguard/Ueœbermensch), I can say with authority that you're under the spell of (the Oedipal complex/false consciousness/bourgeois ideology/ressentiment). Let me tell you what's really going down..."

And we hold the unwashed masses in contempt. Maybe we're more sympathetic to the plight of African Americans and other racial minorities, but look at the way we stereotype the South or white working class men who vote Republican. "They're voting against their interests!" we say with confidence.

Maybe the world would be better if smart people ran things. But not necessarily. I find that often I care more about ideas than I do about people. And I wonder whether many of the failed political experiments of the 20th Century, with all their suffering, desolation, and death, weren't the results of this kind of attitude.

And yet, I still have faith that we can do things better. That reason and inquiry do actually make the world a better place. That democracy and science and technology and education make us better, stronger people.

But we must act with caution and prudence. When our ideologies matter more to us than our fellows, we must take pause. Admit our own ignorance and limited perspective.

And yet, this seems to me one of the aspirations of deliberative democracy. Reasoning may be our particular strength, but it does have the potential to overcome prejudice and provincialism. By thinking critically, we do recognize our own limitations, but also begin to arrive at solutions for overcoming them through cooperation. Let's not lose sight of that.

So, at the end of this post, I feel like Posner's cynicism is not completely justified. The fact of the matter is that we're not calling for elitist forms of governance. We want to enable people to develop themselves and exercise their own powers of self-determination. We are educators, not propagandizers or advertisers.

Even though there's often a fine line between instruction and indoctrination, there is nonetheless a substantial difference. We do perform the world a service. Now let's not be snooty about it.

Let's just junk those "Dumbocrats" and their bleeding-heart "smellfare" program...

This is an interesting little piece on the overall worthlessness of the Democratic Party. An excerpt:

The Democratic leadership has sold itself to the highest corporate and military bidders, offering its furtive political support to facilitate the looting of any assets, American or otherwise, that can be had for the taking. It is Democrats who make possible the retailing of "globalization" which is nothing so much as a blank check for corporate capital to arbitrage one country against another in its relentless pursuit of the cheapest labor and the weakest environmental laws. It was the Democrats who championed and pushed through NAFTA and the WTO.

It is the Democrats who similarly caved on Medicare, Roberts, Alito, bankruptcy, torture gulags, wiretapping, the immigration wall, tax cuts, and so much more. It is the Democratic leadership that speaks exultantly, rapturously, of "the magic of the market," and of "liberating the competitive spirit," all the while knowing that it means abandoning the American worker to the ravages of a bottomless spiral of downward mobility and inevitable immiserization. But rather than cast their traitorous acts as the regrettable betrayal they are, they spin their perfidy into yarns of opportunity, bolts of inspiration. Far from a broken nation, a bankrupt people, a lurking Stalinist regime, theirs is the more effective empire, the more efficient global economy, the kinder, gentler police state.

They are Potempkin "leaders", hired and sired from the same bank accounts as their Republican "adversaries," empty suits propped up by their corporate masters for the sole purpose of sustaining the illusion of opposition, but without any real intent to actually exercise it. They are political entrepreneurs, hawking their ability to round up the constituents and deliver the votes that will cheerily sell their own people down the drain. Their function in the political food chain is to occlude the fact of corporate takeover of government, to pacify a restive public into quiescence that their democracy remains vital, that their interests are being looked out for, that their country remains their own.

These are important things to remember. The utter horribleness of Bush makes us look to the Democratic Party as some kind of savior. Talk has begun in progressive circles about how we're going to end up turning to "electability" again to pick a candidate for 2008. We on the left must reconcile ourselves to this, because that's just how things are in US politics.

That's utter bullshit. If Al Gore and John Kerry had not been so obsessed with seeming electable and actually took a fucking stand on something, we wouldn't be in quite so bad a situation as we are now.

I can understand voting for the candidate you like the most, or the one most likely to satisfy your selfish interests, or the one who you feel sympathizes with your situation the most, or--heaven forfend!--the one most likely to serve the common good. But voting for the guy who you think is least offensive, who most other people would probably vote for, is just idiotic and a surefire way to lose elections.

Let me reiterate: I will not vote for Hillary Clinton. I will not vote for Joseph Biden. I will not vote for unprincipled DINOs selling themselves out to appear "moderate".

Give me Al Gore, Russ Feingold, Howard Dean (if he hadn't agreed not to run in taking the DNC chairmanship). Hell, give me Gore/Feingold '08. I'd even consider Edwards (I like his Two Americas story; he's not afraid to talk about class differences) or that Paul Hackett guy who's already been dicked over by the leadership.

Otherwise, I'm done. I will not accept the "political reality." This is nothing but a lame talking point that leads to forfeited hope and unproductive cynicism. The Democratic Party is not by any means entitled to my vote--their attempts to blame Nader for 2000 are just bullshit, and I stand by anyone who made that choice, even if they lived in Florida.

There is a whole community of progressive minded people who have had enough. We've been unhappy w/ Bush from day 1, and even though our rage has sort of plateaued (I mean, after a while it's just impossible to maintain that level of anger, and you almost get used to it), we're still mad enough to do something about it. At least I am.

DD in the Hizzy!

Deliberative democrats will be interested in this piece byJames Fishkin (co-author of "Deliberation Day") which talks about an effective form of deliberation called "deliberative polling".

This stuff has actually been tested and it works! It leads to informed decisions, increased sympathy for other positions, and increased interest in democratic participation. It almost sounds too good to be true!

UPDATE: Read this. It is brilliant. It reminds us that we have a long way to go before democratic advances like the one above have any chance of being implemented.

Thoughts on Ethics

This morning I read a piece that is one of the most challenging I have encountered in a long time. Assigned for my ethics class by the instructor, it is a potentially devestating critique of my fundamental ethical values.

Rarely do such opportunities come along in life, so I am overjoyed by this prospect of finding myself to have been possibly completely misguided. I will try to share some of my thoughts as I myself formulate them.

The piece I refer to is merely an excerpt from a larger essay entitled "Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair," by one J. Baird Callicott. The section of the article I read was largely an explication of Aldo Leopold's "land ethic," a view of which I have been vaguely aware but also thoughtlessly dismissive.

Let us think of human history since the Enlightenment, for the sake of argument, as characterized by an ever-increasing scope of moral consideration.

We begin by considering only the interests of our particular in-group, gradually expanding to include more and more individuals. So, to take a well-known example, only rich white guys had full rights in America, but then all white men, all men, and finally all men and women.

Of course equality under the law is only a first step, and many other struggles have been waged to expand the range of principles of equality, liberty, respect, etc. For the sake of simplicity, let us think of this as increasingly inclusive determinations of full moral status, or "personhood".

Now, battles are being waged to extend personhood status to (some) nonhuman animals, to human fetuses, to corporations, and perhaps someday to robots, cyborgs, and their ilk.

Callicott characterizes this as a continuum from "ethical humanism" (all humans deserve equal consideration) to "humane moralism" (all [or some] animals deserve equal consideration) to "reverence-for-life" (all lifeforms) to "pan-moralism" (all beings whatsoever). Pan-moralism, as a limit case, seems an outright absurdity unless you are a pantheist or hylozoist (i.e., you believe that consciousness is omnipresent in the universe).

All of these views share a few assumptions. First, there is a hierarchy in nature (whether intrinsic or agent-dependent) such that some kinds of things have more value than others. (This categorization wouldn't have to be a simple person/non-person dichotomy, but could include a range or continuum of values.) This ranking of individuals is usually thought to depend on certain "morally relevant" qualities, e.g., agency, rationality, sentience, or life.

Part and parcel with this is the presupposition that the value of a whole is merely the aggregate of the value of each individual. In other words, to use a utilitarian example, the greatest happiness is conceived not in terms of some overarching entity which feels happy or sad, but as a sum of the pleasures and pains of individual persons. Thus, these positions are all individualistic or atomistic.

Now, as someone who as considered himself a utilitarian and an ethical hedonist, I have seen sentience as the most plausible morally relevant criterion. To put it crudely, pain = bad, pleasure = good. Thus, I am sympathetic to the plight of nonhuman animals of a certain neurological complexity.

Now, if one is a completely consistent utilitarian and takes it to its logical conclusions, in my view, one must embrace, as amateur philosopher Dave Pearce puts it, "the hedonistic imperative". You can read about it here. To quote Mr. Pearce:

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life.

The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture - a motivational system based on heritable gradients of bliss. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. It is predicted that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event.

The basic idea is that we take all of the chemicals that cause pain out of existence, and replace them with chemicals that still provide the necessary information that pain conveys, but without the sting, the phenomenological unpleasantness. In other words, we make it so that pain doesn't "hurt" anymore, starting with humans and then to the whole of the natural world.

This line of reasoning is largely why I'm such a huge advocate of psychopharmacology, genetic enhancement, and other future technologies that have the potential to revolutionize life as we know it.

As well, it has committed me to a number of interesting conclusions, for instance: 1) a life of suffering is worse than no life at all, 2) the survival of individuals is a moral concern, but not the survival of species, 3) painless killing is (prima facie) admissible in cases where the individual lacks concern for its future survival (this has applications to issues such as euthanasia, abortion, and the humane raising of some nonhuman animals for human consumption), etc.

Thus, for instance, the argument that farm animals owe their existence to our carnivorous tendencies is not the least bit compelling for me. It would be better if there were no cows at all if the only life possible for cows was one of intense torment and suffering on a factory farm. It is better to (painlessly) kill an animal than to torture it.

(A somewhat unpleasant conclusion is also thus: if the world has more suffering than satisfaction [which is extremely plausible], it would be better if there were no world at all.)

Now, I'm not of the opinion that pleasures and pains of more sophisticated animals can be so easily ranked: there are qualitative differences beyond the merely quantitative (I agree with Mill on this point). I think that something like "flourishing" is more than just, say, the constant stimulation by an electrode of the pleasure centers of one's brain.

OK, so far has more or less been a summary of (certain aspects of) my ethical opinions. Last semester, however, as a result of reading Nietzsche, I began to ask the question: is suffering really so bad?

The ethic of health and strenuousness that Nietzsche seems to advocate is almost the antithesis of utilitarianism--and he is quite fond of poking fun at them. This raised a fascinating question, but ultimately I returned to my old view.

To defend this, my inclination was to say that Nietzsche was glorifying suffering for the sake of alleviating some of his own psychological and physiological pain: if suffering is noble, it's not quite so bad. (This is a point he more or less makes in Genealogy, anyway: what people can't stand is meaningless suffering, not suffering per se.)

Now, we finally get back to Callicott. In his explication of Leopold's view, he presents an "holistic" alternative to the atomistic conception of ethics dominant in Western thought. The land ethic is not something like the reverence-for-life ethic mentioned above which is merely an extension of previous views, but is based on a radically different principle, originally formulated by Leopold: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

My first reaction to reading this was that it was preposterous. As a firm believer of the maxim "things are neither good nor ill, but thinking makes them so," I found it implausible that there was any good in such a thing. (Of course, if it were the case that this is what humans valued, then it would be a good, but then the question is, "why value that?".)

But then I began to see how this is the Nietzschean ethic in a different guise, one that sees organicity, health, wellness as morally good. What we want is a more "natural" life, w/o domestic animals but w/ hunting and meat-eating, one in which our primary concern is the ecosphere. This kind of view would regard humanity as a blight upon the earth, a cancer that has exceeded its appropriate place.

But still, why value organicity and wholeness and integration, especially if it has such radical consequences? Here, Callicott draws upon a number of analogies that are quite compelling.

First, he points out, consider the good of a human being. This is not simply the sum of the good of its individual cells. Some cells must "suffer" more than others, but if each cell was just fending for itself, it would probably be bad for the organism as a whole.

The same sort of consideration would apply to social contexts. One of the largest problems today w/ human societies is that individualism is destroying community. Each cares only for him- or herself, and the lot of us suffer as a result. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" just ends up giving us the finger.

This is a good point, I thought, although it could potentially lead to some sort of fascism. But it's not that Callicott denies moral significance to individuals. Rather, their value is determined functionally, by the role that they play in the whole. (This is still pretty fascist, but let's leave that aside.)

But, in his account of the function of pain and pleasure, he really got me. Pain serves the vital function of conveying information and adjusting behavior accordingly:

The idea that pain is evil and ought to be minimized or eliminated is as primitive a notion as that of a tyrant who puts to death messengers bearing bad news on the supposition that thus his well-being and security is improved.

Damn! I was floored by this analogy, but then he lays it on more heavily by pointing out that hedonism and other such views are "world-denying" and "life-loathing". Pain, fear, frustration, suffering, death: these are all parts of life. "If nature as a whole is good, then pain and death are also good."

Finally, even though he does not mention Nietzsche, he presents this very Nietzschean view:

Personal, social, and environmental health would, accordingly, receive a premium value rather than comfort, self-indulgent pleasure, and anaesthetic insulation from pain. Sickness would be regarded as a worse evil than death....

The hidden agenda of the humane ethic [espoused by utilitarianism, et al.] is the imposition of the anti-natural prophylactic ethos of comfort and soft pleasure on an even wider scale.

Now, these two statements struck me as remarkable. The first since it is so Nietzschean and the second because it's the very same conclusion that Mr. Pearce reached above--he doesn't hide that agenda.

OK, this post is massively long and should probably be broken up into parts, but I want to get it all down first. Where we stand we are presented with 2 radically different ethical worldviews, one of which is appealing to me since it's very Nietzschean (not too mention Spinozan [not "Spinozistic" b/c "Spinozism" is Hegel's awful bastardization of Spinoza]), the other of which coheres better w/ my scientific sympathies.

I am at an impasse. Nevertheless, I did come up with some criticisms to Callicott's view, which is really what I wanted to write about, but needed all that other stuff as preliminary.

So, Callicott advocates a sort of end to domesticity and perhaps even to civilization as we know it, b/c it is unnatural and artificial. It attempts to make the organic into the "mechanicochemical".

But, I thought to myself, why have this prejudice against the mechanicochemical? The biotic world is just one complex instance of it, even if it has certain interesting emergent properties. And if it's the emergent properties we like, then why advocate against technology, since it leads to even more interesting things.

In a nutshell, Callicott seems to view the human world as a "dominion within a dominion," to use Spinoza's phrase. On a more holistic view, everything is a part of nature, including the whole human world and all of its artifices. Strictly speaking, the human world is no less "natural" than any other part of the universe.

Moreover, why value things like stability and integrity? In essence, it's a sort of idealization of a particular state of affairs (even if it's one that is organic and dynamic). Even life itself will come to an end at some point. What happens is that we start to ask why anything at all in nature should be deemed good or bad. Everything is natural--what's so special about the organic?

And, I think that's true, strictly speaking (I agree with Hamlet and Spinoza here). But we can't live that way. Just because life evolved in a certain way doesn't mean that we have to like it. Why should we, as Callicott suggests "reaffirm our participation in nature by accepting life as it is given without a sugar coating"?

There are plenty of things that are "natural" that we reject. There is no intelligible sense of "natural" that makes it a coherent ethical category. Why shouldn't we view "nature" in the sense Callicott uses (the organic rather than the merely mechanicochemical) as something we should rise above?

Yes, there is an organicity in nature, but at what cost? Evolution is a blind process that works by trial and error. With animal life, the errors can be devestating. Evolution never "intended" something like torture to be possible; it's a nasty side effect of pain's informative function.

We have foresight. We can institute our own designs, improvements on nature's blind development. Shouldn't we do that? Shouldn't we remake the world in our own image?

From the perspective of the whole, whatever happens is equally "natural". And what then are we left with but the perspectives of individuals? So, let us give conscious beings consideration since they actually have a perspective, and to hell with the natural world except insofar as it aids our projects!

Perhaps this is my distaste of the outdoors speaking, but I would love to live in an "unnatural" world in which pleasure was more prevalent than pain. Pave over nature! Let's build domes over our cities! Why not? To whom does it matter?

And this is probably why I won't embrace something like a "land ethic." I don't particularly care for trees or rocks or rivers; I find a cityscape far more beautiful than a bunch of dumb old plants and dirt. Nevertheless, this has significantly challenged me, and I still have a lot more reflection to do about the subject.

But enough about me...

...let's talk about what you think of me.

In all seriousness, I just want to get a sense of who my readers--if any--are and what they think.

How's my writing or ideas? Any suggestions for improvement? Am I saying anything of value?

I'd like this blog to be more discussion oriented, so I'd also be open to hearing issues of interest to people, particularly if said topics relate to areas of my relative proficiency.

In the least, I'd like to know who you are--and I'm speaking particularly to people who read this who I don't know personally. There's at least one known unknown--her comment is what actually motivated this post--but I'd prefer to pare down the number of unknown unknowns.

All I request is that you identify yourself; anything else is gravy.

Logophobia, Alethophobia,Theophobia

When you learn the secret of how good philosophers use language, you start to see how so many of them are saying very similar things in different idioms.

One is raised to view concepts and objects as static, stable. Most of us are realists about the everyday things. A good philosopher allows his words to fluctuate and grow as he develops his argument.

For instance, Descartes tries to begin philosophy anew. Many accuse him of importing old scholastic concepts ready-made into his Meditations. But, if you read him charitably--as all good philosophers should be read--you see that the meanings of his words become increasingly clear and distinct as he progresses.

Spinoza is another great case, my personal favorite. He seems to be philosophizing with a synthetic, geometric (Euclidean) method. He gives definitions, axioms, postulates, and derives all the various propositions in his Ethics therefrom. Many have read this as a sort of cheating; if you grant a philosopher her premises, she's probably already won the battle.

However, Spinoza, as I understand him, is doing something different. He's not saying, "this is how things really are." He is saying, "let's cut the world up like this, and see what we get." Thus, he starts with God, i.e., what we imagine to be the totality of nature. Whatever exists, and is conceived through itself, is God. Thus, God is as surely existant as something like Descartes' Cogito.

One of the lessons I've learned as a philosopher is the potential for language to be highly constraining or highly liberating. If we don't allow our concepts to evolve, if we take our words as if they were things, we stifle thought, we let it ossify.

Like the ladder climbed up and then kicked out from under you, Spinoza's philosophy undermines itself, it leads to paradoxes. Spinoza warns us not to take any discourse as being final or definitive, even his own. His is just one possibility among indefinitely many others.

If we accept this and understand it, we are still not immune to error however. Many of us are in the grips of what I'd call "logophobia", fear of words. Philosophy makes its advances by useful misreadings of earlier figures.

So, for instance, postmodernism takes the traditional concept of truth as correspondence, and deconstructs it. Many of those influenced by this movement will thus be made very nervous about "truth"-talk. Even in an author recognized as like-minded, a postmodernist will see the word "truth" or "objectivity" or "universality" and instantly go on the offensive.

But, if he would only listen to the author, because good authors will tell you how to read their texts, he would not be so quick to read "truth" and understand "correspondence". This is a mistake--although it sometimes works for the better, producing new philosophies with different emphases but similar spirits. The subtle philosopher will undermine a term but then redeploy it, strategically.

Consider Spinoza. He proves that "good" and "bad" are just words that we tack on to the world, that things are neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so. And yet, in Book IV of the Ethics he (re)defines good and bad and uses it to argue for his own ethical stance. If we read this and accuse him of inconsistency, we completely misunderstand what he is doing.

So much of philosophy today is reaction to unpleasant words. No one is immune; we all have our little pet peeves, words and concepts that we abhor and dismiss. For me, God and assorted religious concepts like spirituality, mystical experience, reverence, and so forth have proven distasteful.

I was once a believer, but what now seems like an eternity ago, I quickly reversed my stance. It's not that I believed in an implausible deity; indeed, my conceptions of God were largely influenced by certain mystical thinkers and poets. I was more or less a pantheist. But in the end, even that came to disgust me.

So a part of me fears finding myself on my deathbed, renouncing my atheist ways, and just totally selling out to Jesus. But, thanks to philosophers like Spinoza, I am reclaiming religious terms for my own use, and my fear of such scenarios is waning. (For instance, I almost got hit by a car the other day, and my instinctive response was to yell "Jesus Christ!" [and to try to use my umbrella as a shield]. Interjections and ejaculations needn't reflect one's actual beliefs.)

I've started to think of spirituality more in the sense of the German term, geistigkeit, which has some traditional religious resonance, but which also is a term used to describe intellect, intelligence. Spirituality is metaphorical, ideal, something on top of our day-to-day existence that we struggle for.

Faith has been reclaimed by the pragmatists to take on larger connotations. It's impossible not to take some things on faith. I take for granted that there's an external world, that the sun will rise tomorrow, that I can't walk through solid objects, that other human beings have minds, that my actions have consequences, and so on. Ultimately, we find ourselves having to have some faith in matters concerning the efficacy of human activity. We could not muster the strength to act if we always thought of ourselves as doomed to failure (or guaranteed to succeed).

Now let's take the big one, God. A number of thinkers--Spinoza, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, James, Dewey, Tilich, Rorty--have humanized this concept. It stands, in Dewey's work, as the imaginative unity of ideals, one which it is up to us to enact--the good is not now realized in some ideal realm, but must be something we struggle for, that is created by our activity.

I do not believe that God was some dude named Jesus, or that God chatted with people like Moses and Mohammed. I do not believe that God loves us, or judges us, or guides us, or tests us, or anything like that. I will use the word God, but only in an impersonal, almost pantheistic sense. And, even then, it's not my word of choice (I'd sooner use nature, or universe).

My belief, which I cannot fully support at the present is that personhood is a complex phenomenon, and one that is fundamentally finite. A self must be able to differentiate itself from other things. If God is all-encompassing, there is no real distinction between "him" and "his creation". (And I don't even like to use the masculine pronoun: I tend to call God an it, unless I'm not paying attention, or if I'm feeling whimsical--maybe trying to piss off a bothersome Christian--I'll use "she".)

Since I deny the theistic coneption of God, I call myself an atheist. And yet I find myself using the term all the time: when I teach, in my seminars, in casual conversation, even when everyone present is a non-believer.

Personally, I find I have nothing against left-leaning and liberal Christians, Jews, and people of other faiths. I'd prefer religion/spirituality be a private matter, but of course I'm always happy to discuss it--just don't expect me to hold back. If you have an absurd belief, I'll tell you and show you why, if I can.

Let me raise one last question, which came to mind only today in my philosophy of religion seminar. Let's say that you grant that God is real, in an impersonal sense. What implications does this have in terms of attitudes and activities?

Can you "worship" an abstract God, can you "pray" to it? Should you? Can it be a source of hope or an object of love? (Here we might consider Dewey's unity of ideals or Spinoza's amor dei intellectualis) Can you have a special relation or connection with it?

Personally, I feel no need for these things, but I imagine that those of such a temperament would never be satisfied by the impersonal Deus sive Natura. I think there's something to Freud's characterization of God as a father-figure who offers security and stability (if not always affection).

But there are exceptions. It seems like theology and divinity students are satisfied with more sophisticated versions of God. And then there are secular-minded individuals who are cultural Catholics or Jews, who take solace perhaps in a faith community or in the comfort of ritual.

And all those are fine by me. I have no special access to truth that I could rule definitively on these matters. All I'd like is that you admit the same: that human beings are fallible, irrational, stubborn--that you just might be wrong. And if you grant that, then it only makes sense that religion should not play a major role in a heterogeneous political community in which people of different faiths and non-faiths must coexist and cooperate.

Russ, Russ, he's our man...

If you haven't signed the MoveOn petition supporting Senator Feingold's censure resolution, I strongly encourage you to do so.

Feingold seems to me like the real deal. If he's not a man of principle, he's the closest approximation of it in Congress right now.

Bush's approval rating is at an all-time low of 33%. Most people think that if he broke the law, he should be impeached. Tell me, why the fuck won't Democratic senators support this thing?

I'm starting to gain more faith in the left blogosphere. We're very polarized right now, but this is good. We are firm in our convictions. Part of this is that preaching to the choir does have an effect: it makes people more radical, more angry, more confident that they are in the right.

This is a mixed bag. Under the present circumstances, however, I think it is good for the country. Our constitution is in jeopardy. This is not political posturing. The undermining may not be devestating, but it is certainly there.

The Republicans are complicit, even "mavericks" like McCain eventually fall into line. The Democrats are cowering, afraid of fucking up. But they're fucking up by being afraid. Democrats, stop listening to these goddamned strategists who have been taking the party in the wrong direction for over a decade.

Follow the example of Feingold, Gore, Dean, Conyers, and everyone who actually gives a damn about this country enough to do something out of principle, rather than out of political expediency. That's what people want!

The more of you who come out and support Feingold, the less it will seem like an extreme measure. How fucking stupid can you be?

Anyway, Greenwald and Digby have been saying these things far more articulately than I. Read them. And don't lose hope. If we just assume the Democrats are incorrigible cowards we are following their very pattern by conceding defeat before the battle even begins.

We have the Constitution on our side, and we've come a long way (just read Chomsky on Vietnam, and you'll see how, for as bleak as things look, they're far, far improved).

Feingold in '08!

If you're like me, you're sick of the invertebrates who constitute the congressional leadership of the Democratic Party.

As one blogger put it, the only thing more disgusting than seeing what Bush is doing to our country is seeing the Democrats' (lack of) response.

For this reason, Russ Feingold is to be commended for proposing a censure of Bush. Really, Congress should be drafting articles of impeachment, or in the very least conducting a thorough explanation.

But since the Republican Congress, in its refusal to investigate Bush, has not only sacrificed a number of its core principles (federalism, economic restraint, caution regarding state intrusion, and so forth) but also abdicated its responsibility to serve as a check on executive power and as guardian of the rule of law, Feingold's censure proposal may be the only viable option to press for some measure of accountability.

Thus, Feingold is to be commended, along with other outspoken Bush critics like Dean and Gore. Any Democrats who attempt to distance themself from Feingold and his proposal are unprincipled cowards, plain and simple. I know and you know and a majority of Americans know that Bush has broken the law and must be held accountable.

As pointed out on Greenwald's blog, if the Democrats would but stand in unison here, it would aid in the credibility of this measure, such so that media talking heads might recognize it for the eminently reasonable proposal that it is and not dismiss it as radical, extremist, or (heaven forfend!) "liberal".

To thine own self be true?

"I...question the widespread view that Prozac and other drugs in its class are overprescribed. It's easy for those who did well in the cortical [genetic] lottery to preach about the importance of hard work and the unnaturalness of chemical shortcuts. But for those who, through no fault of their own, ended up on the negative half of the affective style spectrum, Prozac is way to compensate for the unfairness of the cortical lottery."
-Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (43)

This, from the second chapter of The Happiness Hypothesis, which I've only just begun to read. I can already tell I'm going to like it.

Haidt is engaged in a brilliant project. He's putting to the test bits of ancient wisdom on living the good life. His goal, although he doesn't know it, is a very Spinozan one: to find ways to increase reason's power over the (other) affects.

To this end, in this second chapter he prescribes 3 (empirically) proven techniques: daily meditation, cognitive therapy, and the use of antidepressants. The last has dramatically improved my life for the better and although my therapist is not in the cognitive school, the main focus of our engagement has to do with me coming to terms with my somatic and affective characteristics. Now, I'm even considering meditation: I could use some more self-discipline so that I can establish healthier habits, including more frequent exercise.

For those of you who have not read it, I strongly, strongly recommend reading his 2001 article "The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail". You can find a pdf of it here. I wrote a paper on the Spinozistic aspects of Haidt's theory, and for me it remains one of the most influential texts on my thought (along w/ Spinoza's Ethics and Theologico-Political Treatise; Darwin's Descent of Man along with a number of contemporary neo-Darwinian works like Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind; Nietzsche's Joyful Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and Genealogy of Morals; James' "Sentiment of Rationality," A Pluralistic Universe, and other works; and Mouffe's Democratic Paradox, to name some of the most striking examples).

As I read more of this stuff, I find myself increasingly excited about an area of research both philosophical and interdisciplinary. I am almost sure now that this is the general direction I shall take my dissertation research. The combination of philosophical wisdom and empirical research is extremely potent in terms of actually bringing about human flourishing.

Of course there's an ineliminable social/economic/political aspect to this also, but I remain skeptical of the power of theory to do much good in that realm. As we change humanity for the better by allowing one individual at a time to overcome the obstacles of fortune and live a happy, meaningful life, I suspect political progress may become increasingly more feasible.

Then again, a content citizenry might foster increased political apathy (I think this is a major component of the crisis of democracy today). Nevertheless, if we are utilitarian about it, there will likely be less suffering and that's certainly a good thing.

The task now, as I see it, is to pave the way for new life-altering techniques and technologies, and to fight against the Neo-Luddites who, though right in offering a critical voice and in stressing the very real possibility of doomsday scenarios, seek to impede scientific progress.

The Implications of Personhood

Consider the following argument.

1. A fetus is a person. (A claim anti-abortionists like to make.)
2. Killing a person is murder. (Leaving out some specifics, everyone grants this.)
3. Therefore, abortion is murder. (This is a conclusion following from 1 & 2 that anti-abortionists also like to draw.)

But let's continue the argument.

4. One definition of "first-degree murder" is the "killing of a person that is deliberate and premeditated." (The legal definition will vary from state to state, but this is pretty basic.)
5. Abortion is a premeditated act. (This is obvious. Accidental or spontaneous abortions occur naturally, but here we are talking specifically about the medical procedure.)
6. Therefore, abortion is an instance of first-degree murder. (This follows from 3, 4, and 5.)

You probably see where this is going now.

7. Those who commit, are tried, and convicted of first-degree murder typically face penalties as extreme as life in prison or execution. (This again varies from state to state.)
8. Therefore, as an instance of first-degree murder, women who have abortions should be subject to penalties up to and including life-imprisonment and death. (This follows from 6 & 7, although I'm being a little loose with my language here.)

Now, 8 is a consequence that few pro-lifers are willing to admit. Let's assume that they're at least minimally consistent and also oppose the death penalty. They would still be reluctant to want to put women who have illegal abortions (for instance, in South Dakota or Mississippi now) in prison, and certainly not for life.

Doctors who perform these procedures (in essence, the equivalent of hitmen) are subject to up to 5 years in prison under the South Dakota statute, I believe--but this is still well short of what a first-degree murder charge would confer.

Why do I raise this argument all of a sudden? Because of this video (h/t Digby).

While perhaps half the country calls themselves pro-life, a fair number still don't favor outlawing abortion. The people in this video all do.

But what's amazing is that despite dedicating years of their lives to this project, they've never thought once about the practical implications. One elderly woman in the video argues in a circle and clearly contradicts herself. It's funny and sad.

This is why premise 1 is ultimately implausible. Further reinforcement is found in this example (h/t Leiter), in which a right-wing radio host is asked whether he'd sooner save 5 petri dishes or a toddler in a burning fertility clinic. And while you may call something a "person", if you don't treat it like one, you are just being dishonest.

For a while, I had been working on trying to develop an argument in favor of the legalization of abortion that acknowledged, for the sake of argument, that a conceptus is ensouled (which seems to be the only plausible basis for confering personhood from the moment of conception).

Part of my argument was based on the finding that over half of pregnancies end in spontaneous abortions anyway. What happens to all those souls you might ask? (It depends on who you ask. The Catholic Church recently abolished Limbo so who knows where they all went. If you're a really nasty fundamentalist and think that only people who accept Jesus get to heaven, then they're all roasting over a slow fire somewhere.)

In any case, it's presumably the same as would happen to intentionally aborted fetuses. So it's really no great harm to a fetus to be aborted, besides the actual pain of the procedure, if it's done after the nervous system is sufficiently developed (I think a majority of abortions may occur even before this happens, but I'm not 100% on that).

To finish the story, my argument (which I sort of abandoned mid-formation) maintained that what made murder of an adult worse and justifiably unlawful was that, in addition to having whatever value a soul confers, adults also value their own lives. Fetuses and their ilk do not, so their murder isn't as great a loss. Let God judge those who have abortions. (Of course, then there's the whole problem with infants. Personally, I bite the bullet with Peter Singer on this one and see infanticide as less immoral--but still wrong!--than adulticide.) And so on and so forth.

But this, I think, is a far more promising direction. Once people realize what outlawing abortion actually does, what happens to women who will get abortions illegally, only the most diehard anti-choicers would continue to be in favor of an outright ban. (I mean the fact that women who have been raped don't even have an exemption in SD is just sick.)

There are a number of things I want to say to religious individuals in emphasizing this point on practical consequences. It's between a woman and her God if she chooses to have an abortion. Let the individual make the choice and if you're against abortions, don't have any! Tell your friends not to have any! Feel free to continue discouraging women from making that choice, but in the end let them make the choice.

Unless you're prepared to grant all of the things that come with personhood to children, infants, fetuses, and zygotes, you can't make a binary distinction between persons and non-persons. And if you don't go the all or nothing route, then you admit that while abortion may be like murder, it is not actually murder (the killing of a person in the full sense) and should not be subject to the same restrictions.

This doesn't yet prove that any or all abortions should be legally permissible. But at least it starts to raise questions and doubts. I mean, if you're so damn sure of the truth, why haven't you even drawn the most basic consequences for what you're advocating? Use your goddamned purportedly God-given minds, people!

Really, though, I wish more rightwing Christians took that whole "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" line from the Bible more seriously, and just stayed the fuck out of politics.

Distance and Moral Imagination

On my brother's recommendation, I got "Lord of War" via Netflix and watched it this evening. It's a powerful film, highly recommended. (It's about gun-running, although I'm not going to talk about that at all, at least not directly.)

There's something nice about movies--and books, too--in that they aid the moral imagination.

I'm not talking about documentaries or news or non-fiction generally. Yes, one can read about all the horrific goings-on the world over, but there's something about a good novel or film that puts you in the midst of things.

"Lord of War," among other things, is about the lies we tell ourselves to get through life. Even those of us who think that we act nobly, who make a concerted effort to take the moral highground, will find, if we care to look, that we inadvertently aid those very things we most oppose.

Through our inactions, our mundane everyday activities, we contribute to untold suffering the world over. And it's amazing how adept human beings are at rationalization. How easy it is to live with oneself!

I tell my students that no human being thinks of themselves as evil. There's a way in which Socrates is right that no one knowingly chooses the bad. Usually, we just make our choices, and if we find ourselves pressed with unpleasant consequences, we then reflect and find that our decision was justified, somehow. I mean, it must be! Our intentions are always good, aren't they?

But what else is there to do? What happens if no justification is satisfying? What then? Suicide is itself an action that requires significant justification. Leaving life because the world is too difficult for you--well, we could call it cowardly, or senseless, perhaps honest, but if nothing else I find it distasteful.

Distance. Distance from oneself and from others is a necessity in the modern world. There are too many people to care about. Most of human life prior to great civilizations is believed to have been spent in groups of no more than a few hundred. That may sound like a lot, but it's about how many acquaintances a person can have and still keep track of.

In small, close-knit communities, it's easy to keep track of others. The ability to detect cheaters is one of the means that enabled human beings to develop a conscience. In terms of survival and reproduction, those who can get away with being unscrupulous are the fittest (they have the most success passing on their genes).

However, if we live in cooperative communities, it is to our advantage to find those who game the system and ostracize them. At that point, having a reputation for being trustworthy, responsible, and kind is to your advantage. One of the easiest ways to acquire such a reputation is to actually be those things. And thus, moral sensibilities can be adaptive.

But today we live in a world with too many people to keep track of. The vast majority of people that you encounter in a day, if you live in a major metropolitan area, are people you will never get to know and will quite possibly never encounter again.

Thus, there is less of an impetus to be good. If you establish a bad reputation, there are always new people and new places elsewhere--you may not even have to leave home. And because rationalization is so easy, what's the point of getting upset if you dick a few people over? There are always opportunities to start fresh in a new place.

This is all obvious, there's no need to belabor the point. People do awful, terrible things to each other all the time. Some do it for a living. It's so easy to hurt someone, kill someone, if you don't know him or her. This is why wake-up calls like films and literature are so essential. They make it easier to empathize with people in different places and situations.

Unfortunately, too much empathy can be paralyzing. Here I sit, typing away, muddled with Weltschmerz, feeling utterly impotent to do something about it.

This is when I throw up my arms and proclaim that humanity is doomed. This is when I think about how much better we'd all be if we were more like bonobos and less like chimpanzees, and how great it would be if we could just redesign the human genome to make us exactly that.

Ideas are a great escape from responsibility. And they occasionally do make a difference, sometimes even for the better. More often than not they're probably just self-gratification.

But, enough. Now is the time for forgetting. The myths must be reinstated and I must "go on with my life." This painful sympathy is counterproductive. Back to distance, to rationalization, to the illusion that I'm doing my small part to make the world a better place.

At least it's a lie one can live with.

Cause for Hope

Glenn Greenwald reports on a news item that has given me more hope than anything I've read about current events in quite some time:

As Taylor Marsh notes, a new poll by Rasmussen Reports (the polling outfit most trusted by Bush followers) was released today, and it contains not bad news, but panic-inducing news, for Bush and his followers:

For the first time ever, Americans have a slight preference for Democrats in Congress over the President on national security issues. Forty-three percent (43%) say they trust the Democrats more on this issue today while 41% prefer the President.

The preference for the opposition party is small, but the fact that Democrats are even competitive on the national security front is startling. In Election 2002, the President guided his party to regain control of the Senate based almost exclusively on the national security issue.

If Republicans don't have an electoral advantage on national security, what do they have? (To witness a little spastic panic from Bush followers, see here). And after two months of endless attacks on the President's lawless eavesdropping -- after which his approval ratings are pitifully low and Americans now distrust him even with regard to national security -- can we at least have those genius Democratic consultants stop announcing to the world that pursuing the NSA scandal will destroy the Democrats' electoral chances by making them look weak on national security?

Can you believe it? Anyone with half a brain has long since realized that the GOP is not good on national security despite typicallly being favored on that point. It looks like Portgate finally brought this to the attention of most Americans.

It's just delightful! I know that a lot of what's fueling the port scandal is racist and xenophobic, but whose fault is it for stirring up such sentiment? It's poetic justice.

The Bush administration is a band of criminals who have been trying to steal as much money from the American people as possible to give to their corporate friends. (I am not exaggerating here; I literally believe this.) But it looks like one case of cronyism too many for Dubya & Co.

Despite the efforts of the corporate media, it seems that people are finally, finally starting to wake up, to the point where a critical mass is being established. But Glenn is absolutely right that the Democrats should not just sit by idly:

But now is not the time for passivity. Democrats need to step up the aggression now more than ever and take advantage of this wobbly, weakened President. Now is exactly when the Democrats need not fear anything. Americans have abandoned Bush. They no longer trust anything about him - not his integrity, his veracity or his competence. Not even his ability to protect them. And he will not even have Congressional Republicans to protect him, as they will be looking for ways to distance themselves as much as possible.

The absolute worst thing the Democrats could do now is follow the advice of the chronic loser Beltway consultants who excessively calculate every step and drain the life, principle and passion out of everything they touch. More than anything else, what accounted for Bush's popularity in the past (which is where his popularity lies) was the fact that he projected firm, resolute conviction about things that he espoused. It's time for Democrats to demonstrate that attribute as well. Taking an emphatic stand for the principle that the President does not have the right to break the law would be a good place to start.

If Democrats can win on national security, Bush and the GOP have nothing. Nothing. If they can't scare voters, they have no power over them. It will be difficult, to say the least, to sever the fortunes of Republican congresspersons from Bush.

My hope is tempered by only one worry: election fraud. The GOP has probably stolen a number of congressional victories in at least the last 3 elections. However, if the backlash is strong enough, they won't be able to get away with it--at least, that's the hope.

If we had an independent media that would be much more plausible. At least there are enough people angry about this (38% strongly disapprove of Bush) that maybe they'd be willing to do something about it. I'm not talking violence, because I don't really approve of measures like that except in the most extreme circumstances. Widespread civil disobedience could have a marked effect.

But the truth is that our electoral system is broken. We need paper trails with all electronic voting, elections that are not run by partisan secretaries of state, an end to the unjust disenfranchisement of poor minority voters, and--perhaps most important of all--completely publicly-financed campaigns. More radical changes, like an end to the Electoral College, proportional representation rather than a winner-takes-all system, more opportunities for minor (third) parties, and so on, wouldn't hurt either

In any case, my point is that there is a lot we could do to make our system more democratic and less susceptible to fraud. These should be our first priorities, because it is only after such reforms that it would be plausible to implement the kinds of widely-supported changes (e.g., universal healthcare) that corporate interests keep off the political agenda.

Nevertheless, this recent news is cause for celebration. Here's to the UAE!

The Illusion of Stability, the Ease of Complacency, the Improbability of Hope

I spent a couple hours this afternoon catching up on political news and blogposts. Great googly-moogly, is it depressing.

It almost seems like a race to the finish to see how we'll wipe out our species. Global warming and climate change? An attack on Iran that leads to all-out nuclear war? Or maybe we'll get lucky, and only the US Empire will collapse. Significant economic troubles are looming on the horizon that will only be worsened by political instability--while both are in turn made worse still by extreme weather conditions and burgeoning natural disasters.

It's a vicious cycle of global instability that could lead to our extinction. Not something you really want to contemplate, and certainly not something you want to experience in your lifetime. Perhaps we'll face a second Great Depression, a third (or fourth, depending on who you ask) World War, or even a new Dark Ages. It's really impossible to predict, but unfortunately there are far more plausible scenarios in which things turn out horribly wrong.

I've not lived many years in this world, so I only have a couple decades of life to reflect on. Perhaps I underestimate human resourcefulness, our ability to come together in times of crisis, our indefatigable will to survive. But just because we've enjoyed decades of relative stability does not mean that this trend will continue indefinitely. I'm skeptical of the historiography of cycles that people use to comfort themselves when times are tough.

Hope is so difficult today. Sometimes I really understand the appeal of religious faith. There, you have something to hold onto, something immutable and eternal, a force of good guaranteed to win out in the end. Those of us who advocate a this-worldly attitude have no equivalent comforts to offer. As one of my professors likes to put it, our secular creed is a call for sustained effort, for hard work, but with no guarantees except for death.

It's tough to care about the world, about humanity, through this lens. It's easy to say fuck it, I'll just try to make life as pleasant as possible for myself and those I'm close to, the rest of the world be damned. Why bother?

I don't know the answer to this question. I haven't given up quite yet, but I already feel cynical beyond my years. On many days, I still have a short-sighted hope, for my own life-prospects at least. But then there are days like today, when I survey the world around me and it's all turned to shit.

So, I ask you, my few but dearly-appreciated readers:

How do you keep hope alive?

The Value of Impartiality

Last night I read a response to Gutmann & Thompson's deliberative theory by Stanley Fish. Fish's critique is truly devestating, and it raises some serious issues relevant for any partisan of democracy.

Perhaps most central to his critique is the way in which he points to impartiality--the pet principle of Habermas, Rawls, Nagel, and the bulk of deliberative democrats--as itself a controversial value without universal support.

This recognition has significant implications. Recently, I've been having some discussions with Ben about the possibility of a relatively neutral perspective in characterizations of American politics. Ben made the excellent point that to call any account biased is to equate the most careful and considered reflection with the most flagrant of partisan hackery. Impartiality, like any quality, admits of degrees.

Granted, but I didn't feel completely satisfied on this point. Yes, a kind of political neutrality seems desirable within the natural sciences and in many social sciences, but is it always a virtue? There are at least two ways in which I think not.

On the one hand, we can draw upon the example that Fish uses, the Mozert case. The plaintiff, a fundamentalist Christian, had a daughter in a public elementary school. Students were required to engage in a program of "critical reading" that was designed to foster openmindedness, the ability to examine different aspects of an issue and make a reasoned decision. In other words, the students were encouraged to adopt an impartial perspective on issues to make judgments without prejudice.

Now, virtually everyone I know would see this program as unproblematic. In fact, I require my students to adopt such a stance in class, to use arguments and evidence to make a case rather than bald assertions, and to treat those who disagree respectfully (which of course does not mean treating their statements uncritically). I think our nation would be much better off if schools could effectively promote values like these--and I think Fish agrees.

Nevertheless, promoting such a value is not itself a neutral act. While the court sided with the school, drawing upon the defense's distinction between exposure and indoctrination--the school was exposing children to different ideas, but not advocating any particular one of them--Fish points out that this really begs the question. This distinction, he writes,

rests on a psychology that is part and parcel of the liberalism [plaintiff] Vicki Frost and her friends don't want imposed on their children. In that psychology, the mind remains unaffected by the ideas and doctrines that pass before it, and its job is to weigh and assess those doctrines from a position distanced from and independent of any of them....

However, in another psychology, one undergirded by a conviction of original sin, the mind is not...so strongly independent. Rather than standing apart from the range of views that contend for its approval, it is, in its congenital weakness and disposition to be overwhelmed, at the mercy of those views; and accordingly, it behooves the parent or educator to take care lest their charges be influenced in the wrong directions, as they well might be if they were introduced to notions they were ill-equipped to resist. [from Macedo, Deliberative Politics, 91-2]

Now, my initial response to reading this passage was--and I wrote this in the margin--"But their psychology is the wrong one!" Surely, I thought, questions of human psychology are matters to be discovered empirically. There are at least two problems with this view. On the one hand, the Enlightenment psychology that liberalism presupposes probably isn't that true. With the exception of those academically-trained, few people are good at reasoning.

But, perhaps more centrally, wouldn't relying on the methods of empirical psychology yet again beg the question? Is the Christian more likely to trust what scientists have to say about the human mind over what they take to be the word of God? If we're going to be honest here, this disagreement goes all the way down.

So here we see one way in which impartiality is not uncontroversially virtuous. But, this brings me to the other case of when neutrality is undesirable--should we really be honest?

Let me be clear about what I mean. I'm not saying we shouldn't be honest with ourselves. If, as liberals and children of the Enlightenment, we value impartiality, we should recognize that here is a case where we're not taking seriously the views of fundamentalists and others who disagree with us. In a sense, it's impossible to be truly impartial here.

Nevertheless, that does not mean that we should abandon talk of that value. Consider the alternative--it's been tried and I don't think that we want to go down that bloody road again. Rather, by invoking these kinds of values, we add rhetorical or strategic force to our agenda. Fish masterfully picks up on this, when he points out that, even though the only real reason they exclude views like Ms. Frost's is that they disagree with them,

As card-carrying liberals, Gutmann and Thompson cannot acknowledge dislike of a point of view as a reason for keeping it out of a conversation; after all, the very first premise of their liberalism is that private moral judgments should not be imposed on others in the form of public policy. Therefore, they must find a way of dressing up their personal moral judgments so they will appear to have been generated by a wholly impersonal mechanism. [ibid., 95; my emphasis]

G&T's insistence that all arguments must be in good faith, leaves them no room for strategizing and ultimately renders their position fundamentally inconsistent. This is why I largely prefer Mouffe's account; she acknowledges that there are limits to pluralism, that there's sometimes a fine line between good and bad faith arguments, and explicitly advocates a democratic agenda within these constraints.

Thus, if we are honest with ourselves and acknowledge that we have certain values that we would like to see dominant, then let us be less than fully honest with those who oppose us, using a strategy that draws on classical liberal values even while it circumvents them. This brings us to a strange place, almost a kind of left Straussianism, where we advocate one dialogue among the elites and another for the voting public.

Is this stance in any way justifiable? I mean, right Straussianism is the philosophy undergirding the current Republican leadership, which leads them to lie with impugnity and has gotten us into a whole mess of shit. Is it enough to say that this kind of Machiavellianism (in the vulgar sense) is alright for us since our position is the right one? Is there any other basis for such a position?

Well, in the first place, should we win out, then we wouldn't have to adapt such strategies and could then be honestly impartial--since everyone would agree on the primacy of this value. This is not a satisfactory answer, of course, because the fundamentalist could make the exact same argument, and it just ends up being a battle of wills to see who triumphs politically.

This is where I think theoretical justifications reach a limit. I cannot envision one that does not, in some way, implicitly beg the question. As many have pointed out, pluralism has only so much room for anti-pluralism; tolerance cannot tolerate intolerance. Nevertheless, I will not fall prey to Rorty's strategy of just giving up on our adversaries and speaking only to "we liberals". There are practical reasons in favor of liberal democratic values like impartiality, tolerance, reciprocity, and so forth (and here I grant that I have not been careful in distinguishing between these).

First, the commitments of political liberalism are minimal. You can maintain a wide array of beliefs on anything you want. You can be a Christian, a Muslim, a classical conservative, a libertarian, a neo-Darwinian, or a paranormalist--pretty much whatever your heart desires.

You just have to admit that you might be wrong, that people who disagree with you are not as a result utterly wicked or irrational but worthy of respect, and that living together in a diverse society sometimes requires us to sacrifice things that we hold dear. In short, the tent of liberalism may not fit everyone, but it's a hell of a lot bigger than the tent of fundamentalism or any other anti-liberal view.

But, and I see this as its greatest value, it gives a means of resolving our conflicts without the use of physical violence. If you disagree with me, I don't get a bunch of my friends together and then go burn down your house (while you're in it of course). No, we just argue, until one side wins out (by taking a vote or whatever).

This doesn't mean that there won't be coercion and other types of force--like the rhetorical or ideological force that is the seamy underside of rational conversation. This doesn't mean that there aren't costs, for instance, the less cohesive bonds of an individualistic, tolerant culture.

But what else can we do? We saw many political ideologies emerge and come into power in the last century (in the West) only to lead to genocide and other atrocities. Democracy has won the day. While modern democracies engage in far too much warfare against weaker, non-democratic states, at least they don't fight amongst themselves (or haven't yet).

In closing, I encourage those of you with an interest in political theory to read Fish's article--and Mouffe's The Democratic Paradox while you're at it--to see a number of these points made more articulately. And if you come up with any better political solution than liberal democracy, please let me know!

Political Discourse

If you look to your right, you'll notice that the first blog I include among my links is "driftglass".

The author of this eponymous blog is an extremely talented writer, who does a great job of mixing eloquence and forthrightness. His brilliant use of crass language (e.g., fundamentalists as "Christalopithecans" and "Christopaths", the GOP's "Fuck Everyone But Me" ethos, Rove depicted as "Don Karleone", and so on) often seems an appropriate response to the vulgar sentiment that emanates from the right these days.

Nevertheless, driftglass is representative of a breakdown in American political discourse. He does not take positions counter to his own seriously. He answers claims with epithets rather than arguments. He is a master of the ad hominem.

Now, to be fair, he sees himself as responding to a rightwing that has abandoned argument and adopted similar tactics. If they refuse to reason with their opponents, why should he bother reasoning with them?

I have recently been having email conversations with my dear friend Ben on divisiveness in American political life. Ben is that rarest of breeds, a reasonable conservative. (But I kid! He's really more of a moderate.)

In any case, if not for Ben, I might not recognize that there are reasonable cases to be made, for instance, against the welfare state and affirmative action, and for the death penalty and abstinence education.

In studying deliberative democratic theory this term, I find myself often thinking of Ben. The reason that we are able to remain friends despite considerable disagreements is largely due to the mutual respect we have for one another.

Theorists like Gutmann and Thompson see this attitude as the central virtue of a democratic society. So long as we feel a need to treat our opponents as reasonable people who happen to have different values, that is, so long as we feel a need to justify ourselves to them when it comes to implementing policies that affect us all, healthy political discourse can flourish.

Chantal Mouffe, perhaps my favorite contemporary political theorist, calls this relationship an "agonistic" one between "adversaries", as opposed to the "antagonistic" relation between "enemies".

Enemies are those whose motives we impugn. We see them as incorrigibly evil, hopelessly ignorant, or batshit insane. In Rawls' language, they are unreasonable and should thus be excluded from political discourse. As a result of this, those of us who remain politically active increasingly find ourselves talking only to those who disagree with us.

driftglass is a paradigmatic case; he never tries to reach out to the other side. Blogs that have made such an effort--Left2Right comes to mind--have been dismissed by many as being in bad faith and elitist. I used to read and respond to comments on that blog before the feature was disabled, but by then I had long since given up on it. All too often, the commenters were anti-intellectual, seeing fit to respond to a professor's elaborate arguments with a wave of the hand (or just the finger). However, to be fair, the professors themselves did not always argue in good faith.

I like deliberative politics insofar as it is an ideal that would probably make for a better, more democratic nation. Today, the powerful and wealthy see little need to justify themselves to anyone. Candidates are marketed like laundry detergents while political dialogue has degenerated to the dozens. Civic-mindedness and public-spiritedness are at a nadir. Secrecy and fearmongering are used to silence dissent. The state of our union is not merely not "strong"; it's hardly worthy of the term "union" at all.

It's easy to blame this on the GOP. After all, prominent elements within it are eliminationist, endeavoring to create a one-party state. Sometimes, the only effective response to force is more force. And yet, I am not willing to give up the fight for a more reasonable public sphere.

The American left--if it can even be called that--is itself divided. Internal dissent abounds, and is probably partly to blame for our relative impotence. Nevertheless, I see it as our greatest strength.

Many on the right are intolerant of internal dissent and only recently have significant cracks opened on their united facade. These days, I often ask myself, where are the Republicans with principles? Why have moderates allowed themselves to be bullied into silence? Thankfully, people like Rep. Heather Wilson and Sen. Arlen Specter are starting to come forward to question the GOP leadership.

Perhaps we will see an end to the unholy alliance of neocons, theocons, bigots, and libertarians that comprise the modern-day GOP. Our democracy could sure use more than 2 political parties. (A split in the right would also allow for a split in the left, so that those of us who are not members of the Republican wing of the Democratic party might actually have a voice.)

Part of the solution is recognizing that us-them is never a satisfactory categorization of groups. Sure, not everyone will respond to reason, but many still feel the need to justify coercion. Let us make efforts to talk in good faith to those who are willing to listen. If we are to be partisans, let us be partisans of respect, reciprocity, and reasonableness.

We are all human beings here. Perhaps not all of us are inheritors of the Enlightenment, but many of us are. We mustn't lose sight of that. The Enlightenment gives us the hope of creating a society based on principles of liberty, equality, and justice rather than on the maxim that might makes right.

Those who still favor patriarchal authority, revelation, and intuition over democracy, science, and reason remain our enemies. But, in truth, this group is not as large as we sometimes fear. Many religious individuals are our allies here; they see the human mind as a divine gift that should not go to waste.

Ultimately, education is our greatest tool. When I teach class, I tell my students--and quite honestly I mean it--that I care little about the content of their opinions but ask only that they try to justify what they say with reasons that most people would accept. Yes, that means I am excluding those individuals who see human reason as an affront to God's greatness, but is this really so much to ask?

Can a nation thrive with absolutely no values in common? So why not encourage this one minimal commitment that opens the doors to a healthy pluralism that does not require violence to resolve disputes? Have we not had enough bloodshed, enough conversions at the tip of a sword or the barrel of a gun?

Can't we just agree to disagree?