Rust Belt Philosophy

Yeahhhhh, so, remember that thing about how easy psychology is? I may have to qualify that.

"The violent loss of life involved in such acts [as the recent Norwegian domestic terror attack] always pulls them toward unintelligibility. So it should be no surprise then that the more evil such an act is, the more unintelligible it becomes. The act of shooting unarmed civilians can dress up in a variety of justifications-written in a 1500-page manifesto, perhaps-but at its core we ultimately find no ratio, no basis in any real and positive good. What we find there is madness: a lack of any true intelligibility...These killings are evil not because they may be associated with a left or right-wing critique of society, but rather because they reflect a complete rejection of society as it is. They would rather destroy the world than live in one that does not fully conform to their preferences. That has nothing to do with any stance regarding the political common good; that is nihilism, pure and simple."

Give Walter Williams at least this much credit: he sure knows how to mine for quotes.

"During the 1930s, there were a number of federal government interventions that changed the black employment picture. The first was the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which mandated minimum wages on federally financed or assisted construction projects. During the bill's legislative debate, the racial objectives were clear. Rep. John Cochran, D-Mo., said he had 'received numerous complaints ... about Southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics getting work and bringing the employees from the South.' Rep. Clayton Allgood, D-Ala., complained: 'Reference has been made to a contractor from Alabama who went to New York with bootleg labor. ... That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country.' Rep. William Upshaw, D-Ga., spoke of the 'superabundance or large aggregation of Negro labor.' American Federation of Labor President William Green said, 'Colored labor is being sought to demoralize wage rates.' For decades after Davis-Bacon enactment, black workers on federally financed or assisted construction projects virtually disappeared. The Davis-Bacon Act is still on the books, and tragically today's black congressmen, doing the bidding of their labor union allies, vote against any effort to modify or eliminate its restrictions.

The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 broadened the number of workers covered by minimum wages, with negative consequences for black employment across a much wider range of industries. Good intentions motivate most Americans in their support for minimum wage laws, but for compassionate public policy, one should examine the laws' effect."

The solution to the high rates of unemployment among African-Americans, Williams believes, is to undo these racially motivated pieces of legislation and thus allow for things like four-dollar-an-hour wages. Of course, this only goes to show that one must also examine the effect of not having laws, because at four dollars an hour an individual would have to work 2500 hours in a year just to get above the poverty line. In other words, at four dollars an hour, it would be unfeasible if not impossible just to live while working just one full-time job (and it's totally unclear that companies would even offer that much). Williams makes it out to be the case that our choice is between unemployed black folks and severely underpaid black folks, but this is a choice we should roundly reject. Unless he cares enough about black people to make sure they're employed but not enough to, y'know, give them a good education or safe neighborhoods in which to live or any of that stuff, Williams should take his good intentions and use them in a constructive way instead of attempting to set us back decades.

Somebody needs to give Melissa Matthes a crash course in the philosophy of personal identity - not to mention a crash course in basic reading comprehension.

"According to [excellent sex advice columnist Dan] Savage, 'We can’t help our urges, and we should not lie to our partners about them.' In a post-Freudian world, it’s difficult to imagine that anyone really still believe this — believes, that is, that 'our urges' are simply natural, pure, 'truly us,' 'our authentic selves.' As Weiner’s penchant for sexting demonstrates, our desires are cultural — expressions of our social, cultural, even economic location. Weiner’s sexual desire is aroused and fulfilled by a modern technology. 'Our urges' are a complicated intersection of nature and culture...And we know (at least since Augustine) that humans need a community of virtue in order to desire rightly. Yet, Savage makes it seem as if any sexual desire one has (unless it involves feces, children, pets, incest and the dead) is legitimate. And, while I appreciate these caveats, they are insufficient. Not because I think we should be policing sexual desire in some draconian, puritan way, but because it is still worthwhile for each of us to explore in more detail how desires are cultivated, why we want what we want, and, perhaps, what is the difference between 'real' and 'artificial' wants. Or perhaps more accurately, it is still worthwhile to consider which wants, desires, urges are themselves symptomatic of other more foundational desires — perhaps for power, intimacy, or recognition. Again, it’s unclear why sexual desire is privileged."

Besides the stuff she just gets plain wrong about Savage's ethic - "if I desire it, it must be good" is a terrible summary of his view and borders on the malicious - Matthes is operating under at least two major misconceptions about the ethically relevant features of personal identity. The first of these relates to the relationship between authentic desires and cultural ones. Matthes evidently believes that the two sets are distinct, such that any authentic desire does not express "our social, cultural, [or] even economic location" and vice versa. But she offers no evidence in favor of this view and it's not something that we can just accept on its face. It sure seems like at least some culturally mediated desires can also be authentic, or at least can become authentic over time or with reflection or something. Indeed, it's sort of incumbent on Matthes to tell us which of our desires aren't culturally mediated in some way or other. She wouldn't, I don't think, want to disqualify all of our desires, yet it also is surprisingly difficult to find a human desire that hasn't been affected in some way or other by culture.

And why, exactly, does being culturally mediated disqualify a desire from being ethically relevant? An unspoken but crucial premise here is that Savage ought not care so much about sexual desire because sexual desire is or might be "symptomatic of other more foundational desires." But so what? This reply has nothing at all to do with Savage's contention that unfulfilled sexual desires are frequently fatal to marriages and so is incapable of meeting him on moral ground. Even if we assume that every nonstandard sexual desire (which, note, presumes such a thing as a standard sexual desire) is synthetic in the way that she describes, we're still left with the fact that people actually care a great deal about fulfilling those desires and continue to care about them even after our best efforts to dissuade them from doing so; in other words, she still has to grapple with the ethical problem that Savage addresses. This, again, seems to result from her having created a distinction where none exists: even synthetic desires can be ethically relevant.

All of this would make sense if only there were some kind of ontology of desire such that natural desires could be cleanly separated from artificial ones in a way that revealed something about morality. Sadly, however, Matthes fails to make even a modest effort to address this gaping hole in her position, and without such support there's simply no way to take her seriously. Dan Savage might not be the next David Hume, but he's managing to cause real fits for people who want to dabble in sexual ethics without giving it its due. This isn't something we can just figure out just by throwing around the names of dead white guys (Freud, Augustine) and collecting freshman-level social science concepts (foundational desires, the intersection of nature and culture). It takes real work and real thought, and until Matthes demonstrates the capacity for either she has nothing valuable to say.

Whether or not we'll ever have an episode 2 I don't know, but this sort of thing has worked out well in the past so I figure I'll just go with it. Our first failed comedian is Michele Bachmann. I know what you're thinking: how can she be a failed comedian, she's hilarious! True. But that's unintentional, unlike this.

"Rep. Michele Bachmann's (R-MN) presidential campaign says critics are making much ado about nothing when it comes to her viral quote stating last week's East Coast earthquake and hurricane was a message from God to overspending DC politicians...Her campaign insists it was all in good fun."

Ha ha! Natural disasters sure are hilarious, right? Actually, though, it gets worse when you see the actual quote:

"I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending."

I flatter myself that I have a pretty finely honed sense of humor, such that I can appreciate jokes that I don't actually find funny for one reason or another. This, however, is just not funny. She plays it too straight for it to be goofy sarcasm; she doesn't let it run long enough for it to be parody; her vocabulary displays a painful lack of comic irony ("morbid obesity"? I thought Republicans were against the anti-obesity stuff); and generally there's just no angle from which comedy could enter the quote.

Our winner today, though, is an unnamed Russian soccer fan.

So there's this phenomenon, at least here in the states, wherein an individual of a minority race fails to display the characteristics that are stereotypical (at least here in the states) of that race and is thereafter accused of selling out or betraying that race or not being [insert racial adjective here] enough. Typically this condemnation comes on the part of misguided liberals (or, at least, liberals who have let their mouths run ahead of their brains), which is problematic for liberalism because the idea is a bad one and so reflects badly on the view. I think, however, that we have now found the conservative analog.

"My suspicion is that when Mr. Buffett says that his investment behavior is not influenced by marginal tax rates or other nettlesome provisions in the tax code, he betrays his true motivation for making that next billion. For him, investment is a sport from which he apparently derives great pleasure. Why not project that same mindset on his other fabulously wealthy friends? If we could clone Buffet a thousand-fold, surely we would all be wealthier and the making of tax policy would be easier."

Of course, Michael Franc isn't talking about Buffett's race. Rather, the relevant subject - the feature that defines the class that Buffett is "betraying" - is his tax bracket. Buffett's behavior and attitudes, Franc is saying, reflect badly on rich people not because they're bad per se but because they simultaneously misrepresent the laudable behavior and attitudes that most rich people actually display and encourage the undermining of those people's interests:

"[W]hat about the millions upon millions of small business owners for whom the marginal tax rate does make a difference? What about those investors and entrepreneurs who invest to make a profit? For them, the current environment of tax-code uncertainty and several agencies’ regulations-on-steroids approach is a show stopper."

See, Buffett (according to Franc) is too cavalier with his status. He doesn't understand that the other rich people don't have it as good as he does. Unlike him, they're just trying to get along, and what with these constant attacks against their class they're scared silly - really, it's no "wonder why there is so much capital on the sidelines awaiting a positive, pro-growth signal from Washington." (Never mind the fact that the capital is being held mostly by companies whose business models have nothing to do with investment; facts are less than important for Franc.) If "rich" had the same sort of normative behavioral connotations that, say, "black" does, Franc would essentially be saying that Buffett (despite his actual wealth; much like people can say the same thing about race despite someone's skin color and ancestry) isn't rich enough.

If this isn't a good argument when liberals make it, though, it's not likely to work out real well for conservatives, either. For one thing, Franc's claim that "uncertainty" is the problem doesn't support his recommendation that Washington adopt "pro-growth" (i.e., low-tax) policies: a strong pro-tax stand would supply just as much certitude as a strong anti-tax stand, so uncertainty alone won't cut it. Another flaw in his argument is that Buffett's position makes no mention of the reason why people are earning the money they are. So let's hypothesize that some investor is out there making $500,000 every year not because of any sense of adventure or thrill but just "to make a profit" - for Buffett, that just doesn't matter. (Nor, in fact, should it.) Most of Franc's argument rests on this specious distinction between "good" rich people (who are just trying to make it, dontchaknow) and "bad" rich people like Buffett, but the character of the individual in question makes no difference to the efficacy of the policy.

Much like the "not black enough" argument, then, Franc's position basically boils down to the following not very convincing claim: since we're both the same (class), he should want the same things that I want. Without any real evidence that anti-tax policies will help the economy (and, at this point, there is no such evidence) or that people have a right to their money just in virtue of really, really wanting it (likewise), Franc is just complaining that Buffett has and is advocating for values that Franc himself doesn't like. Even if still wrong, it's one thing when oppressed people do this. To watch a rich guy take this road is just disgusting.

As time has gone on, the arguments against same-sex marriage have become more and more indirect, with one of the most roundabout ones being that legalized same-sex marriage will force (for a truly warped definition of the word "force") believers to violate their religious consciences in the granting of marriage licenses, the provision of adoption services, and so on. We hear something rather similar when it comes to liberal sexual health policies, too - religious people need to be able to opt out of providing abortions, (true) information about abortion, contraception, or really anything that might possibly help somebody control their reproductive life. So clearly this story is going to end well for the school, right?

"The Star-Spangled Banner may yet wave over Goshen College in Indiana, but no one's going to be singing about it.

The Mennonite campus is dropping the national anthem in favor of 'America the Beautiful' before all sporting events, saying the latter song better represents the college's religious values and pacifist tradition."

I mean, c'mon - it's just a freakin' song! If religion is a strong enough excuse when it comes to selling condoms, surely it's strong enough to allow these people not to sing a song if they don't want to.

"The public, however, may be less understanding about the school's decision. When a conservative radio talk show host blasted the school for not playing the anthem in 2008, administrators received hundreds of phone calls and emails from angry listeners.

On Wednesday, Rosemary Reder of the American Flag Society, a group dedicated to teaching flag etiquette and protocol, accused the college of disrespecting the country. She called for spectators at Goshen's upcoming games to loudly sing the national anthem on their own."

Gee. What a surprise. Truly I am shocked.

I just want to say, though, that the Goshen people should be happy that they're not living in France. Having taken French in grade school, I was obligated to sing along with the French national anthem a large number of times and so could not fail to notice how weirdly bloodthirsty it is:

"Arise, children of the fatherland
The day of glory has arrived
Against us tyranny's
Bloody standard is raised
Listen to the sound in the fields
The howling of these fearsome soldiers
They are coming into our midst
To cut the throats of your sons and consorts

To arms citizens! Form your battalions!
March, march
Let impure blood
Water our furrows"

I guess bombs are actually more effective than bayonets, but you just don't get quite the same ferocity with airstrikes as you do when you talk about watering your fields with the impure blood of your enemies. Personally, I rather like the barbarity of the old national anthems. It's a reminder of the way we used to be, at least if we care to listen. I don't know that we need to sing them before every single sporting event, granted, but I think it could be very instructional to ponder on the eager violence of our national anthems - which, I suppose, puts me in the same general category as Goshen college on this matter. I only wish that we here in America were more sympathetic towards the religious, because clearly then we would be able to take this more seriously instead of reacting like the godless amoral people we (and especially the good folks over at the American Flag Society) must really be.

This is actually sort of an interesting question: is there an app called Imagination? (Or, iMagination?) Anybody know?

Over the past several weeks I've been doing an intermittent series on a particular group of interrelated right-wing memes regarding education, employment, and the American dream. If by some miracle I've picked up new readers since then, this is a good place to start; for the rest of you, we can just continue on from where we left off. In this installment, I want to look at another article by Jason "poorer and better and less like vandals" Peters.

"According to John McPhee, a former Commissioner of Land Reclamation by the name of Floyd Elgin Dominy believed every American had the right to an annual family vacation...Let us consider a contrary view...Certainly a vacation consists, or should consist, of plenty of leisure, but while you’re at rest you can never quite fend off the nagging sense that you’re paying a price in the 'satiety and aimlessness' of which John Crowe Ransom wrote."

We start out in the fantastical, with a story that sounds like it's out of a Golden Age Superman comic: "Astronomers discover planet made of" - ready? - "diamond."

"Astronomers have spotted an exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard.

The new planet is far denser than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon. Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond."

I mean, seriously, this is halfway between "object invented so as to be stolen by a super-villain" and "element of a Stanislaw Lem story." But y'know what's really fucking awesome? That we can even figure this shit out. What kind of crazy math and technology must've been necessary to come to the conclusion that a planet four thousand light years away is made of diamond? Truth, as usual, is stranger and more amazing than fiction.

And speaking of the strangeness of reality - actually, I'm not sure I can introduce this without spoiling the surprise.

"What on earth is GameChurch you wonder? Well, it consists of two things: Game (as in video game), and Church. Most of you are familiar with the 'game' part, but maybe not so much with the "church" part. We aren't talking about the kind of church with pews, ancient hymns, and musty smelling bibles, nor are we talking about the kind of overzealous homophobic ultra-conservative picket-sign-protest church. We're talking about real church."

"Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is the main character who drives cars, tackles forest fires and 'wastes terrorists in the outhouse.'"

And that, my friends, is all I have to say about that.

Look, I can even figure out some random woman I've never even met!

"It was 1974; at age 15 I found pornography in my house from my dad’s hiding spot. It was shocking, taboo, and exciting. I found myself checking it out frequently. The family suffered a divorce and all that goes with it, so I mimicked what I saw as coping by being in sexual sin for years, like the woman at the well.

From age 16-late 20’s, I partied a lot at discos and nightclubs; I used sexuality as a way to get attention in the wrong way. I was a walking wounded person, and very numb. Using pornography or the images that I kept from way back was a false comfort, and false intimacy. It was hard to keep a relationship, and I went for the ‘high’ of being in and out of shallow and short lived relationships."

Notice how the original emphasis misses everything of importance: it doesn't single out the part where she took her parents to be living "in sexual sin" as a result of their divorce; it doesn't highlight the part where she "used sexuality as a way to get attention"; it doesn't even point out the part where this woman found it "hard to keep a relationship." Any one of these things would be very serious, and in combination I can only imagine how messed up this woman must've been. But the earnest bloggers over at Dirty Girl Ministries (yes, their real name) somehow managed to overlook all of those parts and hone in just on the porn. Impressive, no?

Look: people who have serious psychological damage can abuse anything. Porn is one such thing, sure, but so is alcohol, gambling, food, technology, money, exercise, and pretty much anything else you can think of. It's good that this woman managed to find help, but it's bad that people are trying to use her story as a way of demonstrating that porn is inherently wrong and dangerous ("God showed me that the images in my head needed to go, and I needed to learn how He views sexuality, because after all, He made it") - especially when those same people advertise themselves as being interested only in stopping behaviors "that have become unmanageable." Porn - like alcohol, gambling, food, technology, money, exercise, and so on - is not inherently unmanageable. So here's my idea: how about, instead of going after the easy target, we as a society work harder on teaching people about reality (sexual reality, emotional reality, etc.) and giving them tools (material and cognitive) to deal with it? I know we'd have fewer awkwardly named anti-porn ministries out there, but I bet we'd have happier, healthier people.

One of the most popular apologetic arguments that one encounters on the internet (I can't say whether this is also true of professional apologetics, though) is that there is no morality without God. Sometimes this argument just reduces to a confusion about people believing in morality as opposed to morality actually existing, but there are also people who think clearly and unambiguously that anything would go in a non-theistic universe. This is all bullshit, though, and we've known that for centuries and centuries, so it'd be nice if we could just move on. Though Alex Pruss doesn't really do that here, I think he's beginning to, and that's good. If we can convince even theists that the atheism-means-amorality argument is as disreputable and flawed as it really is, that'll be one fewer bad argument that we have to waste our time rebutting.

"Now, if reliabilism is true, the question is whether the process, P, of evolutionarily forming beliefs about unobservable realities to help prevent defection in prisoner's dilemmas is reliable: is likely to produce true belief. But now observe that if no religious beliefs are true, very likely our religious beliefs also arose out of P. Positing supernatural judges who can see if one is sneakily defecting in prisoner's dilemmas is obviously quite helpful. Thus, we have two families of beliefs produced by P: moral and religious. If the religious ones are all false, the process is unreliable. If the process is unreliable, then its outputs are not knowledge. And so if no religious beliefs are true, we have no moral knowledge, and hence moral realism is false."

He takes as a premise the idea that moral beliefs were selected for because they "help prevent defection in prisoner's dilemmas in cognitively sophisticated hominids," and while I think this is a flawed assumption in a number of ways (for instance: does evolution really bear directly on beliefs? Wouldn't this be better conceived as a matter of memetics?) it doesn't really matter, because the argument is a bad one anyway.

Which would be obvious, right? You'd think that would be obvious. And yet here we have someone who apparently disagrees.

"'God is watching.' A liberal Christian group sent that warning in an ad addressed to Congress and President Barack Obama during the recent debt fight...'The Good Samaritan didn’t use a government credit card,' argues an ad countering Sojourners from the Values & Capitalism project of the American Enterprise Institute. 'The question is not whether to care for the poor, but how?'"

Okay, this sounds good so far. I mean, insofar as any political thinking based on thousand-year-old folktales can sound, this sounds good - the question really is how we should help the poor. So lay it on me, Jennifer Marshall: how should we help the poor?

"Each American born today inherits a debt of $200,000 because of runaway federal spending —and no house to go with it. It is immoral to pass on such levels of indebtedness to those who come after us...It’s easy to cherry-pick a couple of points to support a particular perspective. It’s harder to master and teach others the basics of the federal budget, so that citizens can reason together about the common good."

I put that emphasis there in order to, well emphasize something. Marshall says that she's devoted to helping the poor, but when it comes right down to it her solutions* are about helping people who aren't poor. Reducing aid to poor communities in order to lower the debt on the middle class will not help the poor, nor will reducing aid to poor communities in order to benefit the common good (i.e., the good for the rest of us); it's hard to think of a more obvious couple of conclusions than those. This isn't to say that Marshall's overall plan is wrong or misguided - maybe (although not probably) the government has a responsibility to help the middle class more than it currently is even if this comes at the expense of the poor - but it sure would be nice if she didn't try to sneak in these anti-anti-poverty measures under the name of helping the poor.

*Save one: marriage, the "best circle of protection against poverty." Personally, I was always a fan of CoP: Red, but that's just me. Seriously, though, this is magical thinking and always has been; see a good portion of the early archives of this blog, at which time marriage was a much more popular anti-poverty totem among the right.

Part 1, in which Victor Hanson knows nothing of human psychology.

"A once civil and orderly England was recently torn apart by rioting and looting -- at first by mostly minority youth, but eventually also by young Brits in general. This summer, a number of American cities witnessed so-called 'flash mobs' -- mostly African-American youths who swarmed at prearranged times to loot stores or randomly attack those of other races and classes...[M]uch of the furor is because poverty is now seen as a relative, not an absolute, condition. Per-capita GDP is $47,000 in the U.S. and $35,000 in Britain. In contrast, those rioting in impoverished Syria (where average GDP is about $5,000) or Egypt (about $6,000) worry about being hungry or being shot for their views, rather than not acquiring a new BlackBerry or a pair of Nikes. Inequality, not Tiny Tim-like poverty, is the new Western looter's complaint."

This is exactly the sort of thing I mean when I say that philosophy needs a good underpinning of fact. Hanson assumes here that there was a point in time when poverty meant (was interpreted in the minds of the self-described poor as) something other inequality, but evidence from the science of human psychology suggests otherwise:

"A few years ago...I met with one of the top executives of one of the big investment companies. Over the course of our conversation he mentioned that one of his employees had recently come to him to complain about his salary.
'How long have you been with the firm?' the executive asked the young man.
'Three years. I came straight from college,' was the answer.
'And when you joined us, how much did you expect to be making in three years?'
'I was hoping to be making about a hundred thousand.[*]'
The executive eyed him curiously.
'And now you are making almost three hundred thousand, so how can you possibly complain?' he asked.
'Well,' the young man stammered, 'it's just that a couple of the guys at the desks next to me, they're not any better than I am, and they are making three hundred ten.'"

That's an excerpt from Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational; you can find a similar set of ideas in Dan Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness (I believe; I don't own a copy, sadly) or in any psychology journal you care to look into. I can even provide an example from my personal life: my family knew a guy who lived on one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, kept in touch with many friends regularly, had a prestigious and high-paying job, and maintained a very good relationship with his two young daughters. He killed himself, evidently because he didn't feel that he measured up to the people in his social set.

What we are learning now that absolute material deprivation is no longer an option for many of us is that poverty, like so many other concepts that have been handed down to us by our forebears, is not really just one concept. There's deprivation-poverty, where you starve or sleep on park benches, and then there's inequality-poverty, where you suffer psychologically from perceived or actual injustices in the distribution of goods and of social markers of status. (I may even be missing some.) If these rioters are dissatisfied with their living conditions - which, so far as I can tell, is still an inference at this point - it's not because of a change in how we see poverty (as though that sort of airy theoretical shift would somehow have trickled down to the masses in the first place), nor does it have anything to do with the right-wing moralizer's fantasy that the "state dole of the last half-century eroded self-reliance and personal initiative." It would, instead, be because the rioters are human. Hanson would feel the same way if he were in their position, as would I, as would almost everyone. Again: the empathy gap is in full force here to be sure, but if Hanson could be bothered to learn some fucking facts before opening his mouth he could still have avoided this pitiful and deeply cynical viewpoint.

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Part 2, in which Robert Epstein ignores the totality of economic history.

"A successful and sustainable political order requires stable legal and economic policies that reward innovation, spur growth, and maximize the ability of rich and poor alike to enter into voluntary arrangements."

Three sentences into his article, Epstein is already in deep shit. Even if we assume - contrary to all evidence - that "reward[ing] innovation [and] spur[ring] growth" are aided and not hindered by "maximiz[ing] the ability of rich and poor alike to enter into voluntary arrangements," that last idea is almost barbarous. Voluntary arrangements can nonetheless be entirely one-sided, and when we see rich people entering into such arrangements with people in dirt-poor countries we call it "exploitation." Is that really what we want here at home? Isn't it bad enough that we're exporting inhumane greed?

"Denouncing those who put ‘profits before people’ may stir the masses, but it is a wickedly deformed foundation for social policy. Profits, like losses, do not exist in the abstract. Corporations, as such, do not experience gains or losses. Those gains and losses are passed on to real people, like shareholders, consumers, workers, and suppliers."

I reiterate: the empathy gap is real and important, but so is the fact gap. Epstein is making an empirical statement here, namely, that when businesses take in more money than they spend (i.e., profit) they then transfer at least some of that extra money to "real people." This, unfortunately, is false.

"Anyone wondering where all the economy's jobs are might want to look into piggy banks of the world's biggest companies.

Cash is gushing into companies' coffers as they report what's shaping up to be the third-consecutive quarter of sharp earnings increases. But instead of spending on the typical things, such as expanding and hiring people, companies are mostly pocketing the money and stuffing it under their corporate mattresses."

The crowning entry in Epstein's series of outrageous statements, however, comes here:

"In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.

I’d take 2008 any day. In 1992, the country’s top 400 earners paid a total of $4.9 billion in taxes, which is a nifty sum to come from so few. But 16 years later, that amount rose to about $19.55 billion, leaving those most successful investors with an extra $71 billion in cash to invest in new ventures that could promise greater returns. This is win/win with a vengeance."

Yes, 2008 - as in, the year when unemployment climbed from 5 to 8 percent. That, for Epstein, is better than the year when unemployment started climbing from the low 7%s only to reverse itself and start a decline that would last until 2000. In 2008 the stock market lost thousands of points, despite the "extra $71 billion in cash [for rich folks] to invest," but in 1992 the market was still steadily climbing. So I guess rich people having more money while unemployment soars and the economy tanks is a win-win for Epstein, but not so much if rich people aren't doing as well even though the rest of us are doing fine. You can see why I don't think he's spent too much time or energy making ends meet; only a person obsessed with an elegant theory to the exclusion of all else (and thus someone privileged enough to sustain such an obsession) would call a situation a "win-win" when people were already suffering and things were only getting worse. I mean, I like elegant theories a lot and even I'm not willing to call the so-called great recession a win-win just because it confirms some of my theories about the world (which are, of course, not the same ones that Epstein talks about).

---

So, in light of these arguments, I want to propose the following legislative solution to America's political and economic problems: once an individual leaves high school (either by graduating or dropping out), that person is required to spend a full year working (or, failing that, looking for employment) in a minimum-wage job, during which time he or she will pay for his or her own food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and so on using only the wages earned from said job.** It'll be like Israel's compulsory draft, only shittier by several orders of magnitude. Then we'll all know what it's like to own "amenities" like refrigerators and ceiling fans but feel stuck in a meaningless daily routine, and hopefully we'll all be able to use that information to be wiser voters and better citizens. Or, y'know, we could alternatively continue to trust people like Hanson and Epstein to direct our nation's policies while being utterly ignorant of the relevant facts and totally unconcerned about the human implications of their views. Cause we all know how well that's been going.

*Are you shitting me?!
**These jobs could even be ones that are guaranteed to help the country, say, by repairing or rebuilding infrastructure, installing energy-saving features in homes, teaching, or working in child daycare. Talk about a win-win!

When it comes to defending meat-eating and bashing vegetarianism, animals are practically Kurt fucking Cobain...

"The meme that vegetarianism is 'cruelty free' is phony-baloney, unless one restricts his diet to oranges or something. The mice, snakes, birds, lizards, and other small animals torn to pieces in combines, the rats and mice poisoned in silos, and the animals burned in fields, don’t go gently into that good night. They die in more terror and agony than any steer or pig killed at a slaughter house."

"Great apes are magnificent animals. They are intelligent. They are closest to us genetically. But they are not us. [What do they think about?] Nothing. They aren’t thinking anything. They aren’t rational in the way we are."

Of this blog, anyway - I used to be all about the intersection of math and philosophy.

"To make sense of God, [Nicholas of] Cusa turned not only to holy scripture but to plane geometry...Think of a circle, he said, and then think of a straight line. By definition, the circle is not a line, and the line is not a circle. Now suppose that you’re sitting on a sand beach, with a wood stick in your hand, about to draw the circumference of a circle that is exactly one foot in diameter. So you start at the bottom, and you curl upwards after only a moment—after all, the circle is only one foot in diameter. If you don’t start curling upwards soon enough, the circle will wind up too large. On the other hand, if the diameter of the circle you’re about to draw is 10 feet, your upward curl will be more gradual. It’s going to take longer. You’re going to have to stand up and walk the stick around the circumference of the circle. The larger the diameter of the circle you are about to draw, the slower your upward curl is going to be. To draw a circle with a 100 foot diameter, you’re going to have to drag the stick through the sand with an upward curl so gradual it will seem at first almost indiscernible."

From this, Mark Goldblatt writes, we can safely conclude that "an infinite circle [is just] a straight line" and so contradictions can be true "at the point of infinity." If that last bit sounds like gibberish, just you wait - we'll get to that soon enough. For now, it's worth taking a moment to think about where Goldblatt's mathematics went wrong, because gone wrong they have: there is, alas, no such thing as a circle with an infinite radius.

There seem to me to be two oversimplifications at work here. First, and more obviously, Goldblatt confuses analogy with actuality. We can indeed say that a straight line is like a circle with a radius of infinity or that it can be treated as a circle with a radius of infinity, but in neither case would we be saying that a straight line is a circle. To think of something as another thing is often a useful way of learning what others know or discovering something new, but you can carry that too far; to dally for a moment in literature, there's a big difference between comparing someone to a summer's day and actually believing that that person is a summer's day. Whatever insights ol' Nick of Cusa developed by making this rough analogy, we should be careful not to confuse the analogy with something more literal and direct. Second, Goldblatt tilts the scales from the moment he begins to talk about the physical world. What we can or can't accomplish with sand and sticks is not indicative of mathematical truth in any way, shape, or form. Indeed, we can't even really draw a circle with those (or, in fact, any) tools, let alone one with an infinite radius. Again, Goldblatt is confusing an approximation for the genuine article in a way that is detrimental to his mathematical philosophy.

Impressively, Goldblatt continues to find ways to make this worse throughout the length of his article. At one point, for instance, he claims that infinity is "an endless series of very large numbers: x, x+1, x+2, x+3, and so on," which is among the most confused things I've ever witnessed somebody say about infinity (and remember, I was a math tutor in college). It's in applying this collection of misconceptions to cosmology, however, that he really goes off the rails. While we can't have an actual infinity in reality, he says, we can have one

"outside the realm of possibility. You can locate a First Cause of infinite duration there. But 'locate' must not be taken in the literal sense of the word. That First Cause, which, for the sake of convenience I’ll call God, cannot be located in space or time or, as it turns out, possibility. Even if God cannot be spatially or temporally located, however, He can be conceptually located. He can be conceptually located outside the realm of possibility...If we locate the Cause of the world outside the realm of possibility, that Cause becomes the Impossibility that accounts for possibility, the Nothing by which and out of which all things emerged."

This is so absurd that it simply doesn't merit a real response. Goldblatt, moreover, seems to know this - the whole point of this strategy, after all, was to embrace absurdity. But why bother? If we're looking for an answer to the question of why the universe exists - and I think Goldblatt, at least, is looking for such an answer - why settle for this? This is hardly better than not having an answer at all; in many respects, it may even be worse. Mathematics can most certainly handle the concept of infinity without degenerating into the sort of rambling incoherence that Goldblatt evidently favors, and if we hope to learn anything meaningful about the universe we're going to have to do the same.

Following on today's earlier post, it's time to bring back this story about pregnancy and politics that some of you may already have encountered. It stars Fox "News" anchor Megyn Kelly, who recently had a child and apparently learned in the course of that process that entitlement programs are, well, kinda nice. But, as Dan Savage notes, it took a firsthand experience of need to get her to that realization, thus inspiring the question:

"Wouldn't it be wonderful if conservatives could see the value of a particular social program without first having the need for it touch them in some personal way? When will conservatives make the empathy leap? Is it really that hard for a conservative to imagine having a gay child or a loved one stricken with a terminal illness or a drug problem or a baby?"

Fox, of course, would be the very same news network that endorsed a comparison between birth control and "pedicures," so this is no small change of heart on Kelly's part. The Family and Medical Leave Act, under which she received her post-birth benefits, was introduced by a Democratic representative, approved almost entirely by Democratic legislators (with Republicans voting almost entirely against it*), and signed into law by a Democratic president - and Kelly, believe it or not, doesn't think the bill is liberal enough. As tempting as it is, though, just to deride her for lacking the sort of minimal empathy that we expect from children, I want to add a little bit of a wrinkle to Savage's analysis.

That wrinkle is this: I think that at least some conservatives are already empathetic enough, that is, as empathetic as we could ever need them to be. Instead of lacking the ability to predict the likely emotional content of a person's reaction to a situation, I suspect that these people lack the ability to predict the descriptive content of a situation - that is, the situation itself. Kelly, for example, may indeed have simply failed to understand the importance of having time off to care for one's newborn - but she may also have failed to understand what it means to care for a newborn. This may sound even more condescending than the explanation Savage offers, but we've already seen once today how conservatives can take a pretty straightforward scenario (say, pregnancy) and blithely edit out all of the facts that don't fit their narrative (like all of the various complications of pregnancy). It is, after all, really hard to empathize with someone when you don't even understand what they're going through; most people's emotional appraisals of pregnancy would be vastly different, I suspect, taking into account its complications as opposed to not taking them into account. Likewise, trying to measure a life of poverty as a collection of stuff isn't really going to come close to measuring that same life as a whole life.

This is one of the reasons I always say that good philosophy cannot operate without good facts underlying it. We philosophers have a reputation for dealing with only the least substantial and most conjectural of matters, but there are almost always some tangible, observable, testable facts that motivate or inspire our reasoning. Get these facts right and you can reach some elegant and surprising conclusions, but get them wrong and you end up with ideas that are totally ridiculous, like the human dignity account of ethics or the idea that we should do more to help the rich than the poor. The empathy gap, then, might not be so bad all on its own if it weren't for the lies and distortions greasing its slopes - lies and distortions that, once one lives through the situation oneself as Kelly has done, one can no longer abide by.

*Their argument, according to wikipedia, was, incredibly, that "employers [would] engage in subtle discrimination against women in the hiring process" in order to not have to pay for pregnancy leave.

In a few days (if I am diligent) we'll read a treatise that is (or at least claims to be) against philosophy, and I want to take a moment to illustrate why I am not anti-philosophy even if I am in a shockingly large percentage of cases anti-philosophers. Start with Chris Tollefsen, professor of philosophy.

"In the drama of our recent debt crisis, a key announcement from the Department of Health and Human Services received inadequate attention: from now on, contraceptives (including the morning-after pill) and sterilization are to be considered 'preventative' medicine and will be entirely covered, along with other forms of preventative medicine, by insurance policies, without co-pay...In the case of contraception and sterilization, one can convincingly argue, first, that neither addresses an illness or a malfunctioning organ, and second, that the ability to become pregnant is in fact a sign of good health. So what disease is truly being prevented with these mandatory 'preventative' care procedures?"

We'll return to this in a good deal more detail shortly, but for the moment I want to note two things. First, contrary to what another author will shortly say, philosophy does matter for decision-making. We can see that quite clearly here, both in terms of the HHS's original reasoning and in Tollefsen's (bad) response to it: whoever wins, it'll be because their philosophical approach was found to be more worthy, and that's exactly as it should be. These aren't decisions that we can safely make without at least involving philosophical ideas and techniques. Second, and especially since Tollefsen himself framed this issue as existing in the context "of our recent debt crisis," it's dishonest and wrong of him to imply that the government's only health-care-related responsibilities are tied to health. As we have been so frequently reminded ever since a Democratic politician got elected to the White House, the government spends our money and has a responsibility to spend it wisely. If providing free contraceptive services makes health care cheaper, that's a reason to do it even if it really doesn't have any health benefits at all.

Moving forward a bit in Tollefsen's argument, we come to a philosophical blunder of truly impressive proportions:

"The HHS decision treats as a health care problem the social and moral problem of unwanted and unplanned pregnancy. And this is both a social and moral problem, it should be stressed: out of wedlock pregnancy is a widespread phenomenon, and is often devastating for the children so conceived, born, and raised. It is an injustice to them that their parents should be so reckless in their sexual choices. But injustice is not illness, and treating it as if it were is both untruthful, and dangerous, by addressing a moral problem as if it were subject to a technical fix."

"This basic assumption — that contraceptives benefit women’s health — evidences a fundamental misunderstanding. And what’s more, that contraceptive access should fall under healthcare exacerbates that error. Most simply, viewing contraceptives as items of healthcare confuses actual 'preventive services' — services that guard against some illness or disease — with physiological manipulations that 'protect' in the event of some free (i.e., otherwise avoidable) action."

Why would the government have to go through all kinds of effort to track our every movement? With Facebook, we'll save them the trouble - and pass the taxpayer savings onto ourselves! It's a win-win!

...whom I consider to be another one of those Major Philosophical Figures whose actual insights lag far behind his purported accomplishments and loudly touted philosophical importance, this is more or less all wrong. File it under "huddle together to conserve social warmth" or "Euthyphro dilemma," but whatever you do file it speedily thereafter in the trash bin.

"Liberal political philosophy is inevitably an individualist philosophy...I believe liberalism to be fundamentally intolerant of real religion, or true spirituality; I believe that this foments certain worrying currents of violent sedition at large in the world today; and I suggest that certain other seditious and non-seditious currents of religious (and non-religious) thought and action offer a resolution, a way out of the cul-desac of liberal political philosophy. I think, in short, that political philosophers, the contemporary left and radical intellectual thinkers in general should ditch liberalism, question their commitment to secularism, and consider the fertile possibilities that there are in alliance with religion."

Rupert Read is yet another academic philosopher whose work I would rank as being only marginally more valuable than the stuff you're likely to find in your local op/ed pages. In the linked paper he tries to go after John Rawls for being antagonistic to religion. While I find Rawls to be silly on a number of levels, this ain't one. Like him, I don't think it's a good idea to use religious principles in a political (i.e., public) context when those principles can't also be supported or at least closely approximated using only secular (nonsectarian) premises. For his part, Read seems not to believe that this can even happen - and that's only the start of his problems. "A religion," he says,

"can bear being hated; it cannot bear being deflated into an insignificant matter of merely ceremonial interest, with no ringing meaning for all, no existential or ethical depth, no consequential action-oriented message...Liberalism can tolerate religions only if they either strip themselves of ‘intrinsic’ aspects (i.e. are no longer truly a way of life, and are therefore in the end of no deep significance for their practitioners), or if their ‘intrinsic’ aspects are basically unthreatening to liberalism (e.g. if they preach simply ‘withdrawal’ from the public world -- to the (limited) extent permitted by law!). If one believes that true religion, true spirituality, is necessarily engaged, then one will accept neither of these."

This I find utterly confusing. It would be one thing for Read to complain that religions cannot survive being excluded from politics - it wouldn't be right, though it would at least be better - but here he is clearly taking things too far. Even if, as he alleges, liberalism forbids religious people from participating in politics in a meaningful way, even Read has to admit that liberalism does not make that same restriction when it comes to the rest of an individual's life. Far from reducing all religions to "matter[s] of merely ceremonial interest, with...no existential or ethical depth," liberalism is completely open to allowing religious groups to participate in social projects. Want to run a food kitchen out of your church? Liberalism would let you do that. Want to run a clothing or food drive at your synagogue? That's cool, too. And let's not forget that some religions or religious sects simply don't mandate political involvement, contrary to Read's unsubstantiated claim that "true religion" and "true spirituality" necessarily include political involvement. Basically, the range of religious activities permitted by liberalism is as wide as anyone could want it to be even if theologically motivated political argumentation is disallowed. This, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with liberalism itself and so should have been obvious to Read before he even started: not all "consequential action-oriented" enterprises are political, so a ban on political activity would not under any circumstances amount to a ban on being "engaged," let alone a ban on "life-changing and world-changing action."*

But okay - let's say that liberalism isn't hostile to all religions, as Read bombastically claims. There are, nonetheless, surely some religions whose tenets require people to participate in politics in a way that corresponds to the ethical teachings of those same religions (in Read's language, whose "inner essence[s]" require political involvement). Would liberalism then be hostile to those religions? Not necessarily - but it wouldn't necessarily give Read what he wants, either. Take this paragraph as an example:

I would have thought that the modern zombie movie mythos could hardly have been more heavy-handed in its general allegorical approach, but apparently I would, again, have underestimated the human capacity for stupidity.

"Why did this rather obscure Caribbean cult of people in a drug-induced catatonic state get so easily transformed into such an elaborate metaphor of the post-apocalyptic world? And why did they think that the world after the collapse would be filled with people stripped of their souls, stripped of all feelings, whether of pain or pleasure, anger or joy, who spent their time relentlessly pursuing one product?

And then it struck me: they aren’t looking into the future, they are looking at the present moment; and they aren’t looking at what will be done to others; they are looking at what has already been done to themselves. The image, so silly on its face, resonates with the young because they know, at some intuitive level, that we are already in the midst of the apocalypse, that the world wishes to strip them of their minds and their hearts and make them pure consumers, and relentless consumers of one product, the advertiser’s dream."

Gee, really, John Medaille? The zombies are us? You don't fucking say. What a revelation this is. Maybe you and Ethan Cordray can put your heads together and figure out which country they were talking about when they called it No Country For Old Men, or whether The Tree of Life has a religious message.

"There is a clear pop-culture fascination with zombies. Part of this, I’m sure, is just an expression of our culture’s enjoyment of seeing violence performed on seemingly deserving subjects: Zombies can be killed in a variety of creative ways, and since they don’t feel pain and are already dead, there’s apparently no need to feel guilty about it.

But what if this fascination is about more than just gross-out gore and action thrills? What if it represents a subtle, subconscious understanding that something is wrong—spiritually wrong—with our culture...In Pauline terms, [zombies] are the sarx in its purest form. Without a soul to control it, the flesh is a slave to its own desires. The rise in popularity of zombies, then, may reflect a rise in anxiety over the elevation of appetite in modern life."

Yes, might zombie movies typically seek to identify a problem with our culture? Something, oh I don't know, having to do with hunger or desire? Don't go too fast, gentlemen, you may leave some of us behind.

Sarcasm (for once) aside, though, Medaille and Cordray are so late to the game that their film analysis, while mainly true, is seriously beginning to fray at the edges, thus pointing to what I believe is a flaw in their shared conclusion. I want to start by presenting my qualifications. Being a Pittsburgher, I have a special relationship with zombie movies: the original Dawn of the Dead was filmed in large part at the nearby Monroeville mall,* and my mother and both her brothers were involved with its production (she did makeup, they were a gofer and a zombie extra respectively). I've also seen that movie as well as its recent remake; Night of the Living Dead; Land of the Dead; Resident Evil and most of its sequels; 28 Days and Weeks Later; Shaun of the Dead; Dellamorte Dellamore (a.k.a. Cemetery Man); The Crazies remake; Zombieland; the first season of The Walking Dead; Pontypool; Planet Terror; [REC]; and other zombie media to be identified at strategic points in this post. I make an emergency zombie escape plan for every place I visit regularly, and I have more or less a full plan for surviving long-term inside my apartment in the case of a zombie outbreak. I won't go so far as to say that I'm Mr. Zombie or the world's number one zombie aficionado, but I would say that I'm more than qualified to speak on the subject.

With that out of the way, the first thing to say about Medaille and Cordray's reasoning is that they're certainly on the right track at the very least. Monster movies are notorious for revealing social anxieties, and while this has traditionally meant social anxieties about science (think Frankenstein or Godzilla) there's nothing that says that monster movies can't identify unease or dissatisfaction with something like culture. So we shouldn't be at all surprised that zombie movies, which are of course firmly ensconced in the monster movie category, might possibly point to some social anxiety or other. Especially since Dawn of the Dead famously used a shopping mall as the primary location for its storyline, it's natural to think that this anxiety pertains to consumerism in a fairly direct way: mindless acquisitiveness + total disregard for others + shopping mall = holiday shopping, at least for most of us, and that's not real good. Even if this simplistic line of thought was accurate with respect to the early zombie movies, however, it's been decades since this whole thing started and it would be silly to think that nothing has changed in that time. And, more subtly, what zombie movie makers see in their own works is not necessarily the same thing that attracts zombie movie watchers. In other words, we cannot simply look at the authorially intended social message if we hope (as Medaille and Cordray do) to understand why these movies are so popular. That will be a good place to start, perhaps, but not a good place to finish; indeed, many zombie movies are just zombie movies with no particular intended social message at all, so we would have to look elsewhere anyway.

One place we might seek answers is in the still-living human characters in zombie fiction. This might work because, unlike in the picture painted by Medaille and Cordray, the zombies themselves actually vary quite a bit from one universe to the next: while stereotypical zombies have essentially no intelligence and are motivated only by hunger, writers and directors (including Romero himself) often depart from the stereotype, granting zombies middling to high intellectual abilities and/or changing their interior lives and backstories. Zombie movie heroes, on the other hand, are almost always just people. Sam Raimi likes to have exceptional or weird protagonists, but pretty much everyone else uses "normal" humans (which is to say, not actually normal but conspicuously normal; characters chosen for the obvious way they represent normality). I want to argue, in part because zombies differ widely but heroes do not, that the modern popularity of zombie lore is a consequence of what we see in zombie heroes and not in the zombies themselves.

While zombies may resonate with our generation because we are uniquely inundated by consumer pressures, I find it much more likely that zombie heroes resonate with us because of what they represent: morality, competence, control, and freedom, to name just a few items off the list. Zombie heroes are almost always thoroughly good, even heroically good, people, which is typically drilled into our heads when we spend twenty minutes with the jerks they meet on their adventures. Racism, for example, is a common flaw of non-hero humans in zombie movies, and the heroes almost always confront and defeat it; another such flaw is fatalism, as the idealistic zombie heroes are almost always told to abandon their friends or leave people to die, again giving them a (somewhat blatant) foil. Zombie heroes also learn quickly, tend to have superior manual and/or cognitive skills, and display other characteristics that reveal both their mettle and their extra-ordinary abilities. This is usually hand-waved as being a sort of Darwinian consequence of the zombie world - the bumblers just die off, leaving only the best of the best - but this competence is still noteworthy because it flies in the face of the (near-universal) premise that zombie heroes are just normal people. On top of this, zombie heroes are typically both in control of their situations (at least for brief periods of time) and free to do as they choose. Importantly, insofar as these are limited they are almost always limited by other human characters and not zombies. His house is secure until he agrees to let in the travelers; her nomadic lifestyle is cut short when she meets someone who cannot survive without her expertise; the small village of survivors is holding out fine until one of them foolishly tries to acquire more supplies from the zombie-dense city. To me, all of this points in one direction: we zombie fans are frustrated as shit with the way things are going, and zombie worlds are (if you can believe it) a form of wish fulfillment.

In a way this seems to agree with Medaille and Cordray, but when I talk about dissatisfaction I'm not talking about the culture per se. Instead, I'm talking about the opportunities afforded to us by that intersection of culture and economics in which livelihoods are found. It's true that zombie worlds don't typically have materially wealthy protagonists, but the good guys also tend to get basic goods for free and whenever they're needed (think food, shelter, clothing, some basic forms of entertainment). Almost every mainstream zombie movie these days has a scene where the characters run through a grocery store and grab as much prepackaged food as they can see - if the message was as ascetic as Medaille and Cordray make it out to be, this would be quite out of place. Nor do the human heroes typically shun material goods in general; if anything, the deprivation and hardship of a zombie-filled world tends to awaken in them a newfound appreciation for stuff. Nor do so-called higher goods usually appear, at least in obvious ways: the traditional-way-of-life philosophy often espoused by people like Medaille and Cordray is practically impossible to find in zombie movies, which leads me to think that we audiences aren't secretly yearning to switch our consumer lifestyles for something more rustic and old-timey. To the contrary, I think that the popularity of zombie movies - if it expresses anything at all except that people like zombies - points to the utter lack of suitable (meaningful) work for us zombie fans.

Think about it. In the zombie world, your work is staying alive. That's your job 24/7, and while you don't get paid we've already seen that it pays for itself: you get all the food you can eat, free housing, and as much consumer crap as you can lug home and operate without electricity coming out of the wall. This job, moreover, will be challenging and meaningful, unlike the countless office jobs at which people currently work for maybe 4 hours and then read blogs or play TextTwist for the rest of the day. Your survival (i.e., your success at the job) will even be made all the more rewarding in virtue of the fact that almost everyone else is dead (i.e., has failed at the job): unlike today's mostly mindless, cog-in-wheel jobs, you'll know that you're special and that this specialness is getting rewarded. (And, as we've seen, this message is reinforced by making the protagonists beacons of ability, ethics, tolerance, and other valuable traits.) If you should ever want to move in a new direction or take a different approach to things, you're free to move wherever and whenever you want. Indeed, the only thing that ever screws up your performance in this job is other people getting in the way - which, incidentally, is not exactly an uncommon complaint among today's real-life office workers.

In addition to its other attractive features, I think that this hypothesis also helps to explain why bad zombie movies tend to focus more on the zombies whereas good zombie movies tend to focus more on the heroes. We aren't watching to see an elegantly plotted zombie uprising or a finely detailed scientific explanation of the zombie origin story - in fact, we couldn't care less about the zombies themselves. What matters most is to see a common person rising above outrageous circumstances and succeeding. This, I think, is why good zombie movies don't have to have anything in common in terms of the actual zombie mythologies they employ. Some zombies are undead, some are still living, some are dumb, some are smart, some are fast, some are slow, some are resilient, some die easily, some are magical, some are scientific, some are angry, some are just hungry...basically, so long as they relentlessly try to kill you, they're zombies. Nor do the politics matter. Again, Medaille and Cordray are enamored of the anti-consumerism explanation, but 28 Days Later (great zombie movie) is about contrasting civilization with barbarism and Serenity (excellent movie even if its zombies are only tangential) is about the dangers of tyrannical governance. Zombies, in essence, can say anything about the world, so long as they provide an occupation for the hero.

And speaking of heroes, two more examples will be instructive. In Shaun of the Dead, the main character is a straightforward case of This Loser Is You: Shaun has a shitty dead-end job, lives with one deadbeat roommate and one asshole roommate, is constantly botching his relationship, can't get along with his parents, and spends all his free time getting drunk at the pub. He is, in short, a British version of the guy from Office Space. Because the movie is a parody, everything is blown out of proportion and so Shaun as a character is a little on the extreme side, but it's not at all hard to see that they think there's a pattern at work: zombie movies are meant to appeal to people who feel like shlubs, so they give us heroes who are more or less shlubs. On the far other extreme we find The Road, which is the closest thing to a realistic zombie movie that you'll ever see. Yes, the scary monsters are technically humans, but the similarities between The Road and zombie literature are too numerous to be ignored: civilization has been laid to waste, most of the world is dead, dangerous monsters roam around in search of human flesh to eat, fleeing and prudent planning are vastly preferable to fighting, and so on. The scene where the man and the boy stumble upon an underground bunker and eat real food could have been taken from any zombie movie you care to name - it's a straight, uncut piece of standard zombie lore. But The Road has no interest in providing an adventure for its protagonists or even giving the audience a bland enough hero to project ourselves onto. Rather, it is concerned with deconstructing the standard parts of what makes zombie fiction appealing. There is no food, there is no medicine, there is no sufficient shelter, there are no reliable weapons, and all of this combines to make survival a burden carried rather than a victory won. Worse yet, the main character has been morally broken by the experience, constantly makes poor decisions, and has generally proven himself to be completely unsuited to the task; even his young child is superior to him, in almost every way. In effect, then, if Shaun of the Dead is an uber-zombie movie wherein the hero not only symbolically but literally repairs his life by battling zombies,** The Road is an anti-zombie movie (though, of course, it isn't just that).

Even assuming that I'm right, however, we can't say too much about society just based on the popularity of zombie movies. It could well be the case that jobs are actually just shittier (more demeaning, more mind-numbing, less rewarding, whatever) now than in the past, but it could also be the case that this generation of zombie fans has unrealistic expectations about the world - or it could be something else altogether. But the popularity not just of zombie movies but of zombie games, zombie defense manuals (yes, these exist), and zombie mythology in general suggests to me that there's more going on than just another cinematic screed against our spend-happy ways.

*RIP Tilt
**He patches things up with his girlfriend, his asshole roommate dies, he finds peace with his mom, and (as I recall) we're led to believe that he has moved up in the world by the end of the movie.