Category: Philosophy

culture

What Is Wrong With Conservatives?

I wonder sometimes how a modern conservative maintains.

Romney has won the New Hampshire primary.  All the buzz now is how he’s going to have a much tougher fight in South Carolina, primarily because of the religious and social conservatives who will see him as “not conservative enough.”  There is a consortium of social conservatives meeting this week in Texas to discuss ways to stop him, to elevate someone more to their liking to the nomination.  And right there I have to wonder at what it means anymore to be a conservative.

I grew up, probably as many people my age did, thinking of conservatism as essentially penurious and a bit militaristic.  Stodgy, stuffy, proper.  But mainly pennypinching.  A tendency to not do something rather than go forward with something that might not be a sure thing.

I suppose some of the social aspect was there, too, but in politics that didn’t seem important.  I came of age with an idea of fiscal conservatism as the primary trait.

That doesn’t square with the recent past.  The current GOP—say since Ronny Reagan came to power—has been anything but fiscally conservative, although what they have spent money on has lent them an aura of responsible, hardnosed governance.  Mainly the military, but also subsidies for businesses.  But something has distorted them since 1981 and has turned them into bigger government spenders than the Democrats ever were.  (This is not open to dispute, at least not when broken down by administrations.  Republican presidents have overseen massive increases in the deficit as opposed to Democratic administrations that have as often overseen sizable decreases in the deficit, even to the point of balancing the federal budget.  You may interpret or spin this any way you like, but voting trends seem to support that the choices Republican presidents have made in this regard have been supported by Republican congressmen even after said presidents have left office.)

What they seem adamantly opposed to is spending on people.  By that I mean, social spending.  Welfare, MedicAid, unemployment relief, housing subsidies, minimum wage supports, education, and so forth.  With a few exceptions, we have seen conservatism take on the mantle of Scrooge and move to cut people off.  This has been in the name of States Rights as often as not or welfare reform, but in the last ten years it has come out from its various nom de guerre’s and stood on its own as an attack on Entitlements.

When you look at all the things, say, Ron Paul wants to eliminate from government, you can’t help but thinking that he believes government should do nothing for anyone.  If the factory up the road dumps toxic waste that gets into the water table and poisons your farmland, government should have no brief to take that factory to task and see to it you’re made whole again.  I assume the thinking is, well, you can take the factory to court, just like anyone else.  By “anyone” I take it they mean anyone with the means to mount a protracted legal battle.  Why isn’t it better to enforce laws to prevent the pollution in the first place?  If your boss pays you less for the same or more work based on your gender, according to this thinking there would be no governmental recourse to making your boss either explain the situation or do anything to rectify it.  Likewise, I suppose, in matters of race.  The assumption, I suppose, is that if you feel unfairly treated in one job, you have the right to go get another one.  This ignores the possibility (indeed, the fact) that this situation is systemic.  That’s something no one in the GOP seems to want to address—systemic dysfunction—unless of course they’re talking about all the aspects of government of which they disapprove.

Of course, this is not just Ron Paul.  Most of them, with the notable exception of the two candidates who haven’t a chance in hell of the nomination, seem to have some variation of the “smaller government” mantra as part of their platform.  Taken with the chart linked above, you have to wonder what they mean by “smaller” when it seems they spend as much if not more than the Democrats.  Obviously, Republican administrations have never cost us less money—it’s just that the money gets spent in ways that make it appear they’re focusing their attention on what is “important.”

Debating what is or is not important is certainly legitimate and we’ve been doing that for over two centuries.  And certainly intractability has never been absent from our political discourse—such intransigence led, most famously, to the Civil War.  But we have also grown accustomed to such stances being in the distant past, not part of our present reality.  Meanness in politics has always been around, but it seems the GOP has, at least in some of its members, embraced it in particularly pernicious ways.  The gridlock of the last couple of decades is indicative of the quasi-religious fervor with which members of a major political party have adopted as a tactic.

Newt Gingrich oversaw a government shut-down by instigating an intransigent position.  It can only be seen in hindsight as a power play, since the fiscal policies of the Clinton Administration saw one of the last periods of general economic well-being that reached a majority of citizens.  We wonder now what that was all about.  Gingrich’s “contract with America” was billed as a way to return control and prosperity to the average American, but that happened to a large degree without the hyperbolic posturing he indulged, so it’s a question now what happened.

I’m not going to review the politics of the time here, only point out that what was on the GOP’s collective conscience then and continued to be was their goal to disassemble the apparatus of government that militated against vast accumulations of wealth.  Again, in hindsight it is obvious, and Clinton himself was seduced into the program by signing the repeal of Glass-Steagal, which has led directly to the current economic situation.

Now here lies the peculiarity of our modern times.  You can lay out the causal chain of Republican collusion with the economic catastrophes of the last three decades and find general agreement, even among Republicans.  But when asked if they will continue to vote Republican, well, of course.

Why?

Anyone with a smidgen of historical memory cannot but see Obama as a right center president.  He has done virtually nothing that Reagan would not have been proud of (with the single exception of the Affordable Health Care Act).  Yet you would think he is the devil incarnate if you listen to the Right.  Hatred of Obama has grown to phobic proportions, coupled with more and more strident positions among the suite of Republican contenders for some kind of new rapprochement with Americans to establish—

What?  I’m not altogether sure they understand the kind of country they’re advocating.

Now John Huntsman has bowed out of the race, throwing his support behind Mitt Romney, who is still being viewed with suspicion by the far right of the party—hence the conference in Texas mentioned above.  Not that Huntsman would have had a chance with the evangelicals.  Not only was he reasonable about many issues, he was two things the Right cannot abide: one, he is an advocate for science, supporting both climate change science and evolution, and two, he actually worked for Obama as ambassador to China.  He is, therefore, tainted.

From the few things he has said about them, Romney is fuzzy on climate change and evolution.  One suspects he tends to accept the science but he’s been careful not to come right out and say it, which is tiresome.  But the fact that he has felt it necessary to soft-pedal his positions on these is a telling clue as to what the Right wants.

What they want, briefly, is an America as they always thought it should be.  The strongest, the richest, the least controversial, the purist, and able to do what it has always done in order to stay that way.

If this sounds like a fantasy, well, it is.  It’s Camelot, the City on the Hill, the New York That Never Was.  It is greatness without cost, freedom without dissent, progress without change.

It is also elitism without earning it.

Just as one example, the continued harangue for deregulation.  The case is made—or, rather, asserted—that growth, including jobs, depend on less regulation, that regaining our standard of living and reinvigorating American enterprise requires less government oversight.  How this can be said with a straight face after three decades of deregulation have brought commensurate declines in all those factors, leading finally to near-Depression level unemployment, astounds.  This is surely a sign of psychosis.  From 1981 on there has been a constant move to deregulate and in its wake we have seen devastation.  The airlines were deregulated and within less than two decades most of them had been through bankruptcy, many of them no longer exist (TWA, Pan Am?), and service has suffered.  Oil was deregulated with the promise of holding prices and increasing production, but we have had regular if staggered rises in price, chokes in supply, and an environmentally worse record of accidents.  The savings and loan industry was deregulated which resulted in a major default and rampant fraud, the loss of billions of depositors money and a housing crisis, and we then watched the same thing happen with the deregulation of banking.  How much more evidence is required before that mantra of “deregulation will lead to more jobs and better service” be seen for what it is—a lie.

The Far Right of the GOP is living in a fantasy.  The problem with that is they have a profound influence on the Party mainstream, which is exactly why reasonable candidates like Huntsman and Johnson have no chance of garnering Party support and people like Romney have to waffle on positions in order to woo the tail that is trying to wag the dog.

What I do not understand is how those who make up the mainstream of the Party can continue to support policies that make no sense.  Momentum is one thing, but this has gone on far too long to be attributed to that.

I do not here claim that the Democrats have legitimate and sensible alternatives.  They have their own set of problems.  But Democrats have generally been willing to abandon a policy that is shown not to be effective.  Right now that says a lot.  It’s not much of  a choice, but frankly it is more in line with the country I grew up understanding us to live in.

 

 

 

 

culture

Tilting At Icons: Christopher Hitchens 1949 – 2011

Unless you’ve been living on Mars or under a layer of primordial loam these past few decades, you know who Christopher Hitchens is. He has died. He was an unapologetic pragmatist, atheist, and iconoclast to the end. For an extended obit, go here.

I only knew Hitchens through his work, of which I’ve become quite impressed and even fond in the last few years. He did not tilt pointlessly at windmills. Rather, he spoke truth in the face of sham, questioned revered assumptions, and generally made us all twitch over some specious bit of received wisdom we thought reliable. And he did it in ways and under conditions that often ran counter to public courtesy. “Speaking ill of the dead” was never something he avoided, especially when death seemed about to bestow what in his opinion was an unearned and poorly-considered status on someone. For instance, Jerry Falwell. When most other commentators were suspending whatever critical commentary they might have indulged simply because the man had died, Hitch continued to go after him, unwilling to allow his death to gloss over what Hitch considered monstrosities of ego and policy. Here he is jousting with Sean Hannity:

He had a talent for giving as good if not better than he got from some of the most practiced mouthpieces in the media, rarely ever being shut down or bested in highly-charged, barbed exchanges with pundits attempting to just shut him up. His language skills matched a razor-sharp intellect and he had no qualms about speaking his mind, usually in a way that allowed little purchase for facile counterpolemic.

Here he is at length, discussing his book God Is Not Great, which brought him into line with Richard Dawkins as one of the most hated of the so-called “New Atheists.”

Before all this he had the temerity to attack one of the most unexamined and misunderstood of our modern icons, Mother Theresa. He got a lot of flack for his unflinching analysis of her cult and her hypocrisies. Even non-Catholics balk at saying much of anything negative about her, which is a curious effect of the kind of image-making Theresa used and was used on her. The rush to beatification had all the earmarks of desperation—the need for a popular public figure of piety to bolster the flagging reputation of Mother Church—and it seems to have worked even for those who would otherwise have nothing to do with Catholicism. Mother Theresa has become the byword for a kind of innocent generosity, a pure aching love for humanity that ignores specifics and embraces the general as if the most simpleminded of approaches to problems has a special sanctity. Hitch was one of the few who dared to actually look at the practice of her organization and present the contradictions and, indeed, the grotesqueness at the heart of her philosophy.

He also baffled many of his supporters by doing something I admire above all else. He held views that he deemed right regardless of the political spectrum along which they fell. So he could be a socialist and a hawk. He could be a severe critic of the military-intelligence combine and a patriot. His politics was all over the map in terms of Left-Right and to me it showed the silliness of doctrinaire positioning. He had no patience with idiocy, no matter the side to which it was attached.

Through all this, he was also a generous and polite debater. In a lengthy exchange with Al Sharpton he was never less than cordial, even if unyielding on his principles. He showed us how to do it and not be a bully.

Unless he felt he was being played.

Even when I disagreed with him I admired him. I would say Rest In Peace, but he would not have accepted the implications underlying the sentiment.

I’ll miss him.

culture

Speech, Money, Personhood

Senator Bernie Sanders is sponsoring a Constitutional Amendment to deny corporations the right to be considered persons. His speech is worth a listen.

What amazes me is that this needs to be explained at all. This is one of those no-brainers that anyone on the street ought to be able to understand without much thought. Obviously a corporation is not a person.

But in the esoteric realm of political philosophy, we entertain all manner of chimera for the purposes of achieving certain ends. What we have demonstrated in the Citizens United case and previous court pronouncements regarding money as speech is that when yo break something down far enough, you find you can reassemble it just about any way you want.

Among the many factors that have gone into this debate, the one that seems the slipperiest is the idea that money is speech. This is actually a tricky argument and in many ways very persuasive, since money is the means by which we conduct our lives. On its most basic level, with regards to speech, without money there is no publishing, therefore the dissemination of speech is sorely hampered.

Yet no one mistakes a printing press for the words it reproduces.

I said that very carefully. A printing press produces no words at all. A writer—a human being—does that and the press merely reproduces them. It is a significant distinction. Without the press, the words still exist. Somewhere.

Here’s the thing. Money is not speech. It is a tool. Period. Speech transcends money. For one thing, you can’t horde speech. You can’t stockpile and then dump it in such a way that it will buy something. Speech is not traded in stock markets.

You can suppress speech, but it doesn’t go away. You can withhold it, but then it does nothing, serves no purpose. You can’t exchange one set of words for another and derive greater value. Speech does not have the structure or limitations of money, nor is it susceptible to vagaries of finance.

Speech transmits ideas—all ideas—while money simply is an idea, one idea, which not everyone shares. Speech in its purest form cannot be owned. Yes, you can copyright a particular form of speech, but the fact is anyone can do that for their particular forms, and those forms are the expressions of individuals. You can’t prevent someone from using speech by keeping it from them. No one is homeless or hungry because they don’t have enough speech*.

To assert that money is speech is to cheapen actual speech and turn it into a market commodity. A democracy cannot function that way.

Which is, of course, the whole point. Those most ardently in support of money-as-speech don’t trust democracy, for all the reasons that separate them from those who have no money. The CEO in the board room can’t abide the fact that some homeless person’s speech has the same fundamental value as his, that in terms of rights and freedoms they are equals simply because speech as a freedom is not bankable.

On the other hand, I recognize the appeal of being able to define personhood any old way you choose—because if you can do that, you can later take that definition away from whoever you want.

*Of course, you may be ignored and your speech overlooked because you’re homeless and hungry. It is not the speech that determines your condition, but the other barriers and circumstances, most of which have to do with money.

culture

Poll Positions

Comes a point when it is obvious that one’s sympathies lie in a particular direction, whether we want to admit to them or not.  Politically, I tend to try to find something worthwhile across the Left-Right spectrum.  I am, in some ways, a conservative guy.  I’ve never had much issue with a sensible fiscal conservatism, but it has grown increasingly difficult to find anything supportable in the Republican Party.  The kind of conservatism I found sympathetic at one time is such a minor part of the public face of conservative politics these days as to be almost gone.  It is not enough to say to me “Well, it’s still there, once they get in office that will come to fore.”  I don’t see it.  What is more, I don’t care.

Mitt Romney may yet be the GOP nominee and that wouldn’t be a completely horrible thing, but in order to get there he may find himself agreeing to push platform positions he might otherwise fine offensive.  In the meantime, look at the list of alternating absurdities who have been swapping places for the last few months.

Herman Cain.  I have always felt, honestly, that someone from the corporate world—think Ross Perot—would make a mediocre to terrible president.  The structure of the two environments is utterly different.  The priorities are significantly different, often in subtle ways, and the mindset that makes for a successful CEO I think would be like a fish out of water in the realm of federal politics.  But Cain demonstrated a lack of empathy and a lack of understanding about how taxes play out across varying economic lines.  His “999” proposal was absurd on its face, but a little calculation shows it was just one more gimme for the corporate sector at the expense of everyone else.

Michele Bachman is an embarrassment.  If it hadn’t been made clear before, at the debate where she criticized Cain’s tax plan by saying “if you flip 999 over you discover that the devil is in the details.”  Some people may have thought she was joking, but based on the rest of her “philosophy” she was quite serious.  It is very hard to explain how this woman has achieved her political position other than to accept that she is acceptable to people I certainly don’t see eye to eye with on almost any level.  The insulting way she told a high schooler that “gays have the same right to marry as anyone else in this country—as long as a man marries a woman” not only completely sidestepped the point the student was making but tried to sell a facile bit of social legerdemain as if it was a valid point.  She keeps harping on the bankrupt line that gays are somehow demanding a special privilege when that is flatly not true—they are demanding the same right all Americans assume is our birthright, to be who we are and have the laws of the land apply equally to us.  To the Bachman’s of the nation, “being who you are” is only acceptable if who you are meets a specific criterion.

She’s the prettier face of Rick Santorum, who is so obsessed over other people having sex that any kind of policy position he might have on any other topic gets totally drowned out by his raving about sex.  (We should by now realize that generally people who go on and on about how other people are obsessed with sex are themselves far and away more obsessed with it than the people they’re complaining about.  In Santorum’s case, his obsession borders on the macabre.)

Now we have Newt Gingrich, who has the virtue of being insulting to just about everyone in turn.  Poor kids have no habit of work?  Please.  Some of the laziest people I’ve ever met were young adults from moneyed families, usually freshly-minted out of a college they got through as an alumni student.  They are privileged, spoiled, arrogant, and utterly unable to conceive of what work actually is.  Now like all superlatives, this is clearly not true for all of them.  But if you acknowledge that, you have to acknowledge that anything that comes out of Gingrich’s mouth along these lines is almost always a superlative and therefore always false.  But this is more that that “the unemployed are that way because they choose to be and the rest of us shouldn’t be required to pay for them” bullshit the GOP has been pushing since Reagan.

Not content with slandering a whole class of people with whom he clearly has no experience, Gingrich then went on to trot out the old canard that Christianity is “under siege” by virtue of the nation being awash in paganism.  Firstly, he doesn’t have his facts right—the fastest growing segment in the country in terms of religion is the non-religion group, both people who have stopped self-identifying with any denomination and outright atheists.  I know it is common for people who don’t know any better to mischaracterize atheists as pagans, but Gingrich doesn’t have that excuse—he is a smart, educated guy.  So I can only assume that he’s playing to the paranoid proselytes, just like the others.

Who does that leave?  Poor John Huntsman, who doesn’t have a chance, but is the only one of the bunch who is avowedly pro-science and at least is reasonable about tax reform.

Here’s the problem with the current GOP line.  It is soaked in denial, it is retrograde, and it is mean.  This is possibly not all their fault—the party has been dominated for decades now by people who are steeped in social paranoia and resentment and the fear that all the things they think are important are losing meaning.  They don’t understand why so many people have no use for their values.  Many of them don’t like women in power.  A lot of them are homophobic.  And all of them are blinded by the false association between freedom and capitalism pushed by the last three Republican administrations into a state of assuming that anything—anything—that hints of socialism will doom the country.  But mainly they are driven by resentment and antagonism to anything that makes them feel ignorant and provincial and irrelevant, somehow not seeing that they manage to do that to themselves.

I would like to see a healthy Republican Party, one that would serve as a sensible counterweight to the progressivism that has characterized their opposite numbers—a progressivism that is all but gone from the public view because of a spineless attempt to mollify the increasingly vitriolic Right.  We don’t have that.  And I can’t in good conscience vote for any of them.  Every time they get someone reasonable, they either ignore them or drive them out of the Party.  The GOP has been doggedly destroying itself for thirty years.  This was the Party of Lincoln—progressives that ended slavery and advanced the cause of civil rights.

They wouldn’t even let Lincoln speak at the conventions these days.

Art

China Mieville and the Ideology of SF

Now for something fascinating having to do with writing. I just saw this lecture by China Mieville, who I feel is one of the most interesting writers working today. He’s tackling a subject I’ve chewed over quite a lot—the distinction between SF and Fantasy and the theoretical arguments about SF exceptionalism. I have some quibbles, but I would love to sit down with this guy and hash this through, because, to my ear, he’s exactly where I’ve been in terms of what to look at when talking about this.

 

 

I don’t disagree with a single critical element he brings up—and, as he points out, none of what he brings up is particularly new.

One quibble I have is a minor historical point, and this may be a result of my arrival in the genre as a potential practitioner at a time in which advocates of Fantasy were the ones making the grand argument that science fiction was “merely” a subgenre of fantasy—a claim many SF writers (and readers) took loud exception to. Fantasy was gaining ground then in the market and was shoving SF aside as the apparent preferred genre of fantastic literature and was basking in its ascendancy and making claims about how the two really weren’t any different. (Interesting that Darko Suvin’s assertions were published in 1979, about the time this argument was being made most forcefully, a few years before the market reflected the preference of Fantasy over SF.)

For my part, aside from matters of taste, I’ve never really argued that SF is “better” than Fantasy, at least not in any theoretical sense. Only different. I’ve found most examples of hybrids problematic at best, absurd at worst, because of—as Mieville points out—the ideological underpinnings informing them as genres. So the only reason I have ever had a dog in that hunt came from the assertion made by Fantasy advocates about SF being a sub-form and, occasionally, inferior (sometimes by virtue of being hypocritical, sometimes by virtue of an embarrassing specificity).

(As a personal observation, I find I prefer reading SF and find it very difficult to read Fantasy. However, I can watch Fantasy easily and pleasurably. Only when the quite different faculties employed in reading come into play do I find most Fantasy simply unappealing.)

Anyway, I’d like to offer the video above. I found it quite fascinating and lucid and I agreed with about 90% of it.

Art

Denial of Agency and Being Off Base

Recently I participated in a brief exchange on Shelfari that annoyed me.  On a science fiction thread a commenter said he (or she) had recently read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and had enjoyed it even though the fictional conceit was off base.  I asked why and the response was  “His worldview is off-base because it is humanistic – it excludes God.”

That annoyed me.  Actually, it pissed me off.  The exchange ran a little while and then I suggested it be moved or abandoned.  The admin allowed that it was a troublesome thread and it would be better to just stop it.  I withdrew (except for one more exchange about why it had troubled me since as it continued it turned into a typical “does god exist” thread.  My annoyance was with the assumption that stories can be judged automatically off-base because they don’t take into account a particular belief.

When pressed, the original commenter admitted that it was Asimov’s world view in general that was the problem—which means that the beliefs (or disbeliefs) of the author were used a priori to judge the quality of the stories.

Here’s the problem with that:  fiction is about the human condition and the writer is responsible for getting the character and interactions within a story right.  In other words, to tell the truth about people, how they feel, what they do, why they think or act certain ways.  To do this, the writer must imaginatively assume the viewpoint of the characters (to greater or lesser degrees) in order to treat them honestly so what is then written about them is a true picture.

To do that, the writer must be an observer, a very accurate observer, a student of people, of humanity, even of civilization and culture.

To claim that a writer cannot write truthfully about the human condition unless he/she already holds a particular world view is sheer, slanderous nonsense.  At its most basic, it suggests that to hold a particular world view might guarantee that a writer not only can but will write the truth, and that simply doesn’t follow.

But further, it suggests that the truth of human beings is hidden from a writer who doesn’t believe a particular way.  Extend that, and you can take the position that a writer of any other religious view must be incapable of writing accurately and truthfully about people as compared to  a writer who holds a preferred view.  You are immediately immersed in the unsolvable debate over which view is the Truth (capital T) and which false.  Or, furthermore, you would have to accept that a believer would be incapable of writing as honestly about atheist characters, since that is a world view not shared.

We would, very simply, be unable to speak honestly and truthfully to each other.

One would have to accept that stories written (truthfully, honestly) by a believer would somehow be different than stories written (honestly, truthfully) by an unbeliever.  But that would deny the universality of human experience.

On a meaner level, this is a denial of agency.  It’s very much like the argument put forth by those who think Shakespeare is a pseudonym for another author, one of which is the Earl of Oxford.  The argument says that “William Shakespeare” lacked the education and aristocratic sensibility to have penned works of such insight about nobility.  This completely discounts the richness of imagination writers must apply to any subject of which they lack first-hand knowledge.  It says I, if I were Shakespeare, could not possibly have imagined what I wrote and told the truth so accurately because I didn’t possess the proper “world view.”  You can see this argument used against any author or group of authors another group (usually not authors) seek to deny validation.

(I suggest finding a copy of the late, great Joanna Russ’s How To Suppress Womens Writing  for a detailed examination of this process.)

It suggests two things that are false—one, that there are human experiences to which only select groups are privy and that no one on the outside can possibly know about, and two, that human experience is not universal on some basic level that underlays all successive experiential additions.

If a religious writer wrote truthfully about two people falling in love and an atheist wrote about the same two people, and both told the truth of what they observed and described the experience of those two characters honestly, how might they differ?  For either of them to make the case, within the story, that their world view mattered in the telling of human truth, the author would have to intrude and, to greater or lesser degrees, proselytize.  You would end up with a bad story at best, propaganda at worst.

Throw a dozen or two dozen stories on a desk without attribution.  No one knows who the writers are.  Tell me what the beliefs are of the author of each story.  (This presumes excellent stories, truthful stories.)  The idea that an atheist, a humanist, would write “off base” stories because of their world view is a denial of agency.  What that says is that no writer not a believer could write a truthful story about believers, or that a believing writer could not possibly write a story about atheists.

Nonsense.

On the question of whether the universe would be depicted differently, well now that is a bit more interesting, but the fact is that the universe is how it is and both atheist and believing scientists see it, measure it, explain it pretty much the same way.  They may argue over first causes, but in the advent of thirteen billion years since that event, both see the cosmos essentially the same way.  Atoms operate the same way for both, gravity is the same for both, the life and death of stars…

But in fact, it was not the stories that prompted that initial remark, but a knowledge of the author’s world view that colored the perception.  (Of course this is one more reason I tend to tell people that if they really love an artist’s work, see, hear, read as much of the work as possible before finding out anything about them.  The personal facts of an artist’s life can ruin the appreciation for the work.)  This is a dishonest gage.  It sidesteps the only valid metric, which is, does this story say true things about people?

I won’t go so far as to say that a writer’s world view doesn’t affect the work.  The whole point of doing art is to express personal opinions about subjects.  But at the level of good art, all authors’ work must hold up in the court of truth, and to suggest that certain world views de facto  prevent someone from telling the truth about the subject at hand is overreaching at best.  You can certainly say of certain writers “his/her beliefs so color their work that it is skewed from truth” but it is not correct to say “these beliefs guarantee that their work will be skewed from truth.”

It also suggests that personal experience can be disingenuous at its core if it leads to conclusions inconsistent with a preferred world view.

Denial of agency indeed.

 

 

culture

The Final Solution

No, this isn’t about The Holocaust (capital H) but about something more gradual, systemic, and pernicious.

Georgia is about to execute Troy Davis.  He was convicted of killing a cop.  There are irregularities in the case, namely a majority of “witnesses” have since recanted their testimony.  The rest of the evidence is circumstantial at best, but the state of Georgia is going to kill him anyway.  He was tried, found guilty, sentenced, and his last appeal was denied.

I have a simple, unsentimental reason for opposing the death penalty.  You can’t take it back.

Here is a list of the people exonerated from Death Row since 1973.  From the late 80s on, DNA has become an important factor, but it is a relatively minor one.  Chief factors include witness recantation, capture of the “real” perpetrator, or review of the trial and findings that the State had done a shabby job.

I do not have a problem with the idea that some people may deserve to die.  Life, in and of itself, is not sacred to me.  It simply is.  And we make choices, some of them bad, and decisions get made that have consequences, and people should be held accountable for their actions.

If I walk into my home and find someone there, uninvited, who is raping my wife, has killed my dog, and will likely kill my wife when he’s finished, and I can do so, I will kill him.  I have no moral qualms about that, nor any question about my right to do so.  (Yes, I will probably have to go to counseling afterward, because the taking of a life under any circumstances is a Big Deal.)

But if I come home and find my dog and wife dead already and a month later someone is arrested for it, tried, and convicted of the crime, I do not want him to receive the death penalty.  Maybe that sounds perverse, but it comes down to two simple caveats:  the State tries and convicts innocent people all the time and I do not have 100% confidence that they can do better and if I can’t be 100% sure, I don’t want someone being sure on my behalf, not in something as final as this.

But secondly, I don’t want the State to wield that power.  Certainly it can be argued that certain crimes are so bad that only death may be proper, but laws change and the crimes under which death is dealt can be determined by politics as much as by justice.  I want the State barred from applying that penalty in all cases because I do not trust that only those crimes with which I may have sympathy will receive it.

In short, basically, if I catch the son-of-a-bitch doing the crime and put him down, that’s fine.  After the fact, I will settle for incarceration because I do not want the State to have the power of life and death, especially since they do not use it fairly, nor is the system sufficient to guarantee they kill only the criminal.  Obviously they do not.

By the same token, I do not have the right to go on my own hunt for someone with the view to exact vengeance.  If the State can’t get it right, how can I?  If I miss the chance by not being there when it is done, I can’t recover it and acting on my own is as bad as the State screwing up.

There are countries where the death penalty is used for adultery or blasphemy.  No, we don’t do that here.  But we do have it for treason, and that, it seems to me, is rife for misapplication.  Society changes, politics is fickle.  We don’t kill people for having sex out of wedlock or cursing or suggesting certain ideas aren’t true.  Today.  I’d rather we begin to accept as a principle that the death penalty is never appropriate and find some other way to deal with our urge for vengeance—because that’s all it really is.  We’ve killed a lot of innocent people with it because we were angry.  Not just.  Angry.

And you can’t take it back if you find out you had the wrong guy.

culture

9/12

I didn’t write anything for yesterday’s commemoration.  Many others, most far better suited to memorializing the day, said a great deal.  My paltry mutterings would add little to what is, really, a personal day for most of us.  Like all the big anniversary events, the “where were you when” aspect makes it personal and maybe that’s the most important part, I don’t know.

Instead it occurred to me to say something about the element of the disaster that puzzles most of us, even while most of us exhibit the very trait that disturbs us deeply in this context.  One of the most common questions asked at the time and still today is in the top 10 is: how could those men do that?

Meaning, of course, how could they abandon what we consider personal conscience and common humanity to perpetrate horrible destruction at the cost of their own lives.

The simple answer is also the most complex:  they were following a leader.

I’m going to string together what may seem unrelated observations now to make a larger point and I will try to corral it all together by the end to bring it to that point.

Firstly, with regards to the military, there are clear-cut lines of obligation set forth, the chief one being a soldier’s oath to defend the constitution.  There is a code of conduct consistent with that and we have seen many instances where an officer has elected to disobey orders he or she deems illegal or immoral.  There is a tradition of assuming that not only does a soldier have a right to act upon conscience, but that there is an institutional duty to back that right up.  The purpose of making the oath one to the constitution (rather than to, say, the president or even to congress) first is to take the personal loyalty issue out of the equation.

To underline this a bit more, a bit of history.  The German army prior to WWII was similarly obligated to the state.  German soldiers gave an oath to protect Germany and obey its laws.  Hitler changed that, making it an oath to him, personally, the Fuhrer.  (He left in place a rule explicitly obligating the German soldier to disobey illegal or immoral orders.)

Unfortunately, human nature is not so geared that people find it particularly easy to dedicate themselves to an abstract without there also being a person representing it.  (We see this often in small ways, especially politically, when someone who has been advocating what is on its own a good idea suddenly comes under a cloud of suspicion.  Not only do people remove their support of that person but the idea is tainted as well.  People have difficulty separating out the idea from the person.  The reverse is less common, that a bad idea taints a popular leader.)  Dedicating yourself to supporting the constitution sounds simple in a civics class, but in real life people tend to follow people.  (Consider the case of Ollie North, whose dedication to Reagan trumped his legal responsibility to uphold the constitution and its legally binding requirement that he obey congress.)

Next example.  Many years ago, when I was still a teenager looking for a job, I answered an ad for a salesman position.  When I arrived for the interview I found myself in a large room with a group of people all of whom were receiving a sales pitch for the product by one man, who was doing a first-rate job of boosterism for it.  It was a reference book, maybe even an encyclopedia, I don’t clearly remember.  But his pitch was to our potential to make a lot of money selling this product, that it required dedication and belief in ourselves and what we were selling.  He was a good speaker, he got people fired up.

But he didn’t say much about the product.  My questions concerned that and what it would mean for the consumer, but except for the most cursory description, he talked very little about it.  He summed up his twenty minute pep talk by asking if there was anyone still not convinced this would be a good job.  I and a couple others raised our hands.  When I did so, I expected to be given an opportunity to ask about the product.

Instead, he gave us a sad look and said “Well, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

I was stunned and, by the expressions on the faces of the others who’d raised their hands, so were my fellow skeptics.  I said, “You’re not going to ask why?”

“Please leave,” was all he said.

Dazed, we left.  I realized much later that what he—his company—were looking for were people who, for their own self-betterment, would be willing to sell anything to anyone.  They did not want skeptics.  It might have been the greatest encyclopedia on the planet, but that didn’t matter.

The Joyce Meyer Ministries are in town this week, apparently.  This is an institution that makes an overt connection between religious fealty and material success.  People give great amounts of money to it to “spread the word” and some of them achieve a certain amount of success.   As with other grandstanding televangelists, the claim is certainly true for herself, her family, and closest associates, but many people have given everything to her and ended up with nothing.  The deeper question, though, is why would anyone continue to give to her institution if, as she claims, it is faith that actually pays off?  Can’t that be handled privately?  Or in another church or institution?

Which of course leads one to wonder at the elasticity of the faithful with regards to those ministers who have been exposed as frauds.  I have no real question as to the motives of people like Jim Bakker or Ted Haggerty or Jimmy Swaggart or even Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson.  I do have deep questions about those who continue to follow them despite revelations of impropriety and fiscal deceit and self-aggrandizement.

I had a customer once who was part of the Democratic Party machine in St. Louis and as long as you weren’t talking about politics he was a good guy.  But when elections were upon us, he would come in an just go on about this candidate or that, and always with the same  “We’ve got to see him elected!”  One year he was working on behalf of someone who had obvious credibility problems (and later was indicted), but his dedication was absolute.  When I pointed out the problems with the candidate, he just looked at me like I had lost my mind.  “But the alternative is a Republican!”  So what? I said.  Better an honest Republican than a crook.  The subsequent harangue I received made it clear that it did not matter who the candidate was or what he or she did, as long as they were Democratic there was simply no question of his support.

I watched people I knew become absolutely enamored of Ronald Reagan, almost from the start.  As his presidency went on and problems emerged, some simply would not abandon him.  They had dedicated themselves to the man and it didn’t matter what he did.  He made them feel “like a real American.”  There are people still who think Nixon was framed and those still who, despite detailed information about his personal life and his presidential decisions think that Kennedy walked on water.  No doubt there will be those who think Bush was one of the greatest presidents ever.

When we ask ourselves about the motives behind 911, this all-t00-human flaw must be at the top of the list.  The men who hi-jacked those planes and wreaked all that havoc had been living here.  They saw the people in their neighborhoods, they spoke to us, they breathed our air—and while I am not one of those who sycophantically hold the United States up as the shining model of political perfection and social maturity, by comparison this is a free country, a good country (which makes our failings and shortcomings all the more painful, because we have fewer excuses)—and yet they did that.  It is legitimate to ask “where were their consciences?  Where was their skepticism?  Where was their ability to make valid judgments?”

Many would like to believe that such men are so different that they cannot be understood.  They weren’t rational, they weren’t “normal,” they weren’t Like Us.

No?  How many of us questioned Bush’s program?  How many of us on this day ten years ago would not have backed his program?  Even in Congress, very few stood up to say “Wait a minute, what are we doing?”

Yes, I know, it’s more complicated than that.  And it is.  But then, it’s more complicated for the other guy, too.  And yet, it comes down to something very similar—go where the leader tells you to, do what the leader orders.  Ask no questions, after all the leader knows best.

Cults work because people want to follow a leader.  They have little trust in their own decision-making abilities, little confidence in their own ideas, even their own personalities.  On some level, the need for validation from a guru is essential for their ability to even get out of bed in the morning.  And I’m not talking about Moonies or Krishna or even the Sword and the Arm of the Lord or Aryan Nation, I’m talking about ordinary people with normal lives who dedicate a part of their psyches to an external source of affirmation.  It can be anything from a favorite musical group to a politician to a preacher, or even something as intimate as a lover or a friend, or something both intimate and impersonal, like AA or Alanon or a survivor’s support group.  What makes this hard is that the tendency is not always bad but sometimes is very positive, very necessary.

It is all-too-easy to hand over too much of yourself to someone else because it is easier than doing the necessary work for yourself.  Most of us do something like this at one time or another, probably a lot of us transfer our dedication from one thing (or person) to another regularly, in a kind of psychic load-sharing routine.  But some of us simply invest everything in one place, one person, and surrender our ability, even our right, to withdraw, to question, to say no when a demand becomes unreasonable or the relationship toxic.

I don’t believe in people that way.  I don’t believe in anything that way.  I don’t draw my validation from a blind commitment to a guru.  I did at one time but I grew out of it and now I find it bizarre when I encounter someone who does that to the point of being unable to accept criticism of the little god at the center of their being.

Which has led me to understand a reaction I’ve had for a long time.  Maybe we’ve all felt this.  When someone comes up to you and starts going on about how so-and-so or this-and-that saved their life, is the greatest thing ever, is the reason they function, I—and probably most everyone—automatically pull back, suspicious and a bit uncomfortable at the protestations of fealty.  I get uncomfortable around the hyper-patriotic and the extremely religious who insist on telling you how much they love their country or their god.  I wrote a little about that here.  I feel, justifiably or not, that they aren’t quite rational about this and maybe not quite reliable.  If the choice came between doing what was right and following their guru into hell, what would they do?

I don’t like that feeling, but I think I understand it now.  That level of dedication to something external suggests to me that they aren’t all there, that they’re using that dedication to make up for an absence of Self, and not just any self, but the self that can act independently of blind faith.  I find I don’t entirely trust them.

And it could be a lack of trust about almost anything.  When faced with that kind of dedication, I find myself almost automatically shutting down certain lines of communication, self-censoring, placing certain topics off-limits.  I don’t know what kind of reaction I’ll get if I say certain things.  I don’t know what this person will do if they feel I threaten their guru.  Most likely cut off similar lines of communications with me.

But that apparent inability to separate out a personal zone of skeptical self-awareness from the object of their obsession tells me that they will not always act on rational premises.  Actions may take the form of insisting certain books be removed from library shelves all the way to…flying planes into skyscrapers.

The 911 hijackers had to indulge a kind of interpretive censorship about everything they saw or heard in this country during their stay.  But it was an interpretation based not on their personal standards of right and wrong, their own skeptical assessment, but on what they had been told they would see by their guru.  Their guru used their culture to reinforce his vision and they had surrendered enough of themselves to his vision that they committed an atrocity.

The difficulty in all this is that we all interpret things based on who we listen to and what we’ve heard.  What the hijackers did, up until the moment they boarded those planes, was not particularly different from what any group does that is dedicated to a cause that seems to run counter to the larger culture.  Eco-terrorists go through the same processes.

I have always held myself apart from the influence of gurus.  Or tried to.  I will use my own judgment, thank you, and often it puts me at odds with momentary protestations of fealty for ideas or persons that I might even agree with, at least in part.    It’s hard work, continually reassessing—which part is me and which is them—and I can understand the impulse of hermits to extract themselves entirely from a culture in order to try to find which is which.  But that doesn’t work, either, because we need feedback in order to perfect judgment.

The lesson of 911 for me was not new but came with added force:  it is never good to follow a guru.  You may agree with someone, work with someone, associate yourself with their ideas, even like them, but trailing along after them like children after the Piper is never good.  Because you must always be able, when they one day turn to you and say “You have go do X for the cause,” to tell them no.  You have to be able to do so even if you don’t.  You may judge that what they’ve told you to do is a good idea—but you must make your own judgment.  It’s a pretty safe bet that if they tell you to go kill a bunch of people in the name of X, they do not have your or anyone else’s best interests at heart.

That goes for gurus, cults, churches, and governments.

culture

On Symbols and Fair Use

When you have a dream about an argument, maybe it has some weight and should be written about.  Recently, I posted a photograph on my Google + page.  This one, in fact:

 

My caption for it was “What more is there to say?”  Partly this was just to have a caption, but also to prompt potential discussion.  As symbol, the photograph serves a number of functions, from melancholy to condemnation.

It did prompt a discussion, between two friends of mine who do not know each other, the core of which centers on the divergent meanings of such symbols for them and a question of sensitivity.  I won’t reproduce the exchange here, because as far as I’m concerned the question that it prompted for me was one of the idea of “sacredness” and the appropriate use of symbols.

Which immediately sent me down a rabbit hole about the private versus public use of symbols.

Essentially, we all have proprietary relationships with certain symbols.  Since I already posted the image, the sign of the cross is one, and not just for Christians.  As a symbol it has achieved that universality advertisers dream of.  It is instantly recognizable as the sign for a faith movement just about everywhere.  It’s possible some aboriginal tribes in the beclouded valleys of New Zealand don’t know what it is, but on the level of international discourse it carries across all lines.

The public meaning is also fairly clear—it represents an idea and an institution.  The entire apparatus of the Christian faith is symbolized by it, the buildings, the books, the robes, the songs, the defining mythologies, and the philosophical ideas.  Publicly it is by and large regarded as a force for good.  Publicly, the ideas embodied suggest if not entirely represent a fundamental tendency toward morality and a stated ambition to achieve peace, love, and the concomitant positives associated with a redemptive philosophy.

But the private meanings are wildly divergent and stem from  both personal experience and long intellectual examination.  In some instances it is difficult to see how certain conclusions can possibly be based on the same thing.

So the question in my mind is, which is more valid?  Which should be protected?  The public meaning or the private?  And should they be kept separate?

In other words, in relation to the photograph above, does the “sacredness” of the symbol allow for not only a condemnation of the obvious vandalism that broke the stone cross in the first place but also a refusal to countenance sympathetic commentary for the breakage?  For those who find the symbol personally important, such assaults are seen as insensitive.  A violation.  Such sympathetic comments also yield a judgment of the person making the comments.  Obviously, this an antagonistic situation.  But what concerns me here is not so much the antagonism but the mutual rights of the antagonists to use that symbol each in their own way.

Let’s take something more secular.  Flag burning.  Obviously the symbol of the flag is a potent one, and with powerful public meaning.  Just as clearly, there is powerful private meaning and again this personal meaning can be wildly divergent.  And again, the question is, which meaning takes precedence?

More to the point, which meaning should take precedence?

If as some believe the image of the flag should be protected, rendering its use subject to specific prohibitions and allowable uses, does it still have utility as a symbol or have we reduced its capacity to represent ideas?  Or have we simply declared certain ideas related to it illegitimate?

Which goes directly to the question, can an idea ever be “illegitimate” as an idea?

Historically it’s clear that when a state attempts to bar the public dissemination of an idea, depending on the idea in question, an underground almost automatically springs up and suddenly the state has a problem it may not have had before—namely, a resistance movement.  One of the things that made early Christianity so powerful was its official banning by Rome.  The state drove it underground where it could not be observed or tracked and it grew on its own until the movement was so powerful that one day it emerged and became the state.

Like all such movements, it was then faced with exactly the same problem its predecessor faced—ideas it could not tolerate that needed banning.  And like most such movements, it fell right into the trap of political expedience and suppressed the free exchange of ideas.

It didn’t even keep the same symbol.  Originally the fish, the Ichthys, was the primary symbol, and we’ve seen it resurgence today as an alternative to the cross.  (The other prominent symbol came under Constantine, the Chi Rho, which includes a cross as an X overlain on a P, and enjoyed almost continual use as a subordinate Christian symbol up the present.)  But by the early 3rd Century, the cross had become so identified with Christianity that Clement of Alexandria could call it the Lord’s Sign.

As such, it was the banner for the emergent and often militant quasi-secular institution that was the Roman Church.  The fact that it was a Roman form of execution is possibly relevant for this aspect as early on it would have had dual meanings—for many as a sign of punishment more than of sacrifice.  (Interestingly, there is a historical quibble with the cross as symbol based on Jesus’ execution as the Greek word in scripture is stauros, meaning an upright stake, without the cross-beam.  This is a quibble, since it was the Romans who crucified Jesus and the term was crucifixion.  But even in this we see the process of abstracting out meanings for different uses, since the emphasis is placed by Christians on sacrifice and, later, resurrection through the same symbol.)

The symbol has been retasked over the centuries.  As such it demonstrates the natural process by which the free use of symbols serves preferred purposes.  Once the meaning becomes fixed and institutional protections are put in place to guarantee one and only one meaning (publicly) you begin to see a gradual loss of vitality once you step outside the precincts of an agreed-upon iconographic definition.  It is then that institutional problems creep in and a breakdown of original meaning can occur.  If one is using the symbol to define something into existence without regard for what it may mean to others, then you produce a situation in which only two responses to the symbol are possible.  Complete acceptance or complete rejection.

To make arguments of fine distinction becomes a sisyphean task.  To say, for instance, that practices defended by the symbol are not really consistent with that symbol, to those on the outside take on the appearance of special pleading and even self-selected blindness.

Easier to dismiss the symbols and talk about the thing itself.  It is possible for a symbol to obstruct this kind of discourse by insisting on its own unity and, if you will, sacredness.  To criticize the point of contention is then to criticize the entire edifice, good and bad, and this is counterproductive.  For example, return to the whole flag burning question.  When the United States is engaging is actions that citizens regard as antithetical to their idea of “America”, wrapping these actions in the cloak of the flag binds them in with everything that is acceptable, even admirable, about America and makes it difficult to argue that the actions in question are not American—or, as happened during Vietnam, that the people leveling criticism are themselves patriots when they are seen to be criticizing the entirety of America rather than just one set of bad choices, since the choices have been “blessed” by the symbol of the country.  At some point it became necessary to shove aside the symbol since its use in the debate had become obfuscatory and divisive.  The dialogue that needed to happen was hamstrung because instead of being about an immoral war it became about the morality of the whole country, as symbolized by the flag.  Because the flag was held by many to be “inviolate” it became almost impossible for the opposition to use it to effect.  It had been taken out of its own utility because the public meaning had become fixed and ran counter to the private meaning of many of the citizens.

If this sounds like a great deal of abstract nonsense, take another example of the misuse of a protected symbol.

The Swastika, as symbol of the Nazis, was given legal protection by the Nazi regime.  It became illegal to desecrate it in any fashion.  It was applied to all official documents.  It was applied to published speeches, laws, passports, even scientific papers.  it became the absolute public identity of the German people and any dissent or attempts to set aside Naziism and its symbols in a debate over private meaning and public policy was prosecutable.  True, once an outlaw, the law didn’t apply to you, but in order to argue with the symbol and what it stood for, you had to become an outlaw.  It fixed the meaning of Naziism and rendered all dissent illegal.  Documents lacking the symbol were designated illicit.

There is, you see, great danger in “sacrilizing” symbols.

So what has this to do with an argument over sensitivities and judgments?  Since private meaning is exactly that, private, it would seem incumbent upon us to respect that each of us may have experiences and come to conclusions that are entirely at odds with public meanings.  If an expression of that dissension can be labeled insensitive, it can only be valid in the matter of other private meanings.  To claim the public symbol as one and the same with your private meaning as a way of preventing or invalidating critical remarks of the public symbol and its public meaning—by leveling the charge that the critic is being insensitive—can be seen as an attempt to remove the public symbol from the free exchange of ideas, to “fix” its meaning as inviolate even for those who see it as wholly otherwise.  This is hardly fair use since so often a return conclusion is offered about the nature of the critic—a conclusion which may be accurate or may be completely beside the point.  In either case, it is not an invitation to dialogue but a wall built to protect against the possible erosion of private meaning by means of critical examination of public symbols—and their public meanings.

My apologies if this has become a bit abstruse, but it’s a difficult topic to deal with in less than precise language.  The ideal is to always keep in mind the distinction between an idea and the holder of the idea.  Since many people, on both sides of any issue, insist on identifying themselves personally with an idea, this can be a problematic stance.  As many Christians say, “hate the sin, love the sinner,” depending on how closely the sinner identifies with the sin in question this may simply not be possible.  But it’s a start at acknowledging that experience is important and may not be invalidated by simple recourse to symbols—especially symbols that enjoy special protection from criticism.

Anyway, this is offered as a basis for discussion.  It would be interesting to see what comes of it.

culture

Our Dreams Are Sleeping

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is my favorite science pop star. He is right up there with Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan in terms of ability and scope and style when it comes to explaining science to the public. I’ve heard that a follow-up mini-series to Sagan’s superb Cosmos is in the works with Tyson as the narrator.

After this, I have to say, I love this guy:

Back in the Seventies, Robert A. Heinlein testified before congress about the benefits of the space program—the ones people don’t generally know about. Among some of them was the surprising fact that suicides among seniors was sharply down since the Gemini program and the announcement of the Apollo program. Years later I noted that suicides were back up after several cancellations.

We do not pay enough attention to dreams anymore. I don’t know what happened to us. Even in the dark days of McCarthyism we dreamed big dreams. What, have we suffered exhaustion? Possibly. But the more we gut the things that make people give a damn about getting up tomorrow, the worse everything is going to be. It is not all about money, as some would have us believe. Money is a tool. What are we doing with it? One part of our society seems bent on destroying the mechanisms of improvement for the average American while the other part seems unable to make a stand and say stop the carnage. One part has convinced another part that the problem is all about government redistribution of wealth and we should end entitlements and cut out all this useless spending and let private enterprise do everything. As far as I can see, right now, all private enterprise is interested in doing is building more casinos and feeding larger dividends to people who don’t want to pay taxes to support the dreams of the country.

It might help, though, if we actually had some dreams again. Time to wake them up and let them play. Before we forget how.