Rust Belt Philosophy

There is, I think, something almost sinister in what Mona Charen says about the rich. I do, however, really appreciate the fact that she actually uses the phrase "the rich" instead of one of its many false English cognates.

"I'm for the rich, and not just because the top 1 percent of earners in America paid 38 percent of income taxes in 2008. And not just because I suspect that attempting to tax the rich more will only lead to more tax avoidance, not more tax revenues for the federal government. I'm for the rich because, with some exceptions, they've earned their money. A Prince and Associates study found that only 10 percent of multimillionaires had inherited their wealth...I'm for the rich because nearly all of the rich people I've met are extremely public-spirited. They volunteer. They form committees to improve things in their communities. And they are incredibly generous with their money. As Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute notes, 'The top 10 percent of households in income are responsible for at least a quarter of all the money contributed to charity, and households with total wealth exceeding $1 million give about half of all charitable donations.'"

"I'm for the rich because they create the dynamism and energy of a growing economy. The rich create businesses and hire people. A wealthy person gave me my first job. And I'll bet the same is true of you."

One of the charges I laid against new urbanism was that it required sacrifices the likes of which (so far as I could tell) none of its advocates had accounted for. Reconfiguring cities so as to support a small-town feeling and a small-town social model is not just a matter of meeting one's neighbors but also would require major changes in the way that day-to-day life operates - which, in turn, impinges on all the models with which we're most familiar. Well, it turns out that at least one new urbanist (or new urbanist-ish person) is clued in to that fact. It's not much, one person, but it's a start.

"[I]t seems reasonable that the cycle of moral degradation and cultural disintegration (because it is, ultimately, the destruction of human happiness on both the personal and societal scales) ought to be interrupted wherever possible. And perhaps working to reclaim our physical environment—to foster more humane communities, to defragment and decommercialize our milieu—is a place where some of us could start."

When Miriel Thomas talks about "defragment[ing] and decommercializ[ing] our milieu," she's proposing exactly the kind of sweeping changes that I think would be necessary in order to support the new urbanist project: the goals of new urbanism, explicitly or otherwise, depend on having a certain set of economic factors and a certain kind of urban layout in place, and these are such that things must be defragmented and generally noncommercial. All of that, then, is good - at least, for new urbanists.

But there's some bad stuff here as well. Thomas, for one, almost certainly overstates the relationship between "moral degradation" and the state of one's physical environment (perhaps because she overstates the extent of our moral degradation). If the architecture and layout of a neighborhood affect the morality of the neighbors therein at all, they probably do so in a pretty weak and limited way. The other major problem is that she acknowledges that new urbanism needs defragmentation and decommercialization but never attempts to show that it can have those things.

There are, after all, reasons why our communities are fragmented and full of commercial dreck. Suburbs thrive because people want to have the economic advantages of cities (cheap goods, reliable basic services, good jobs) without making the social compromises that go along with them (decreased personal space, increased diversity). Unless Thomas knows some very interesting things about architecture, she won't be able to reverse this trend just by making buildings prettier. Similarly, we have "ugly shopping malls strewn about to make consumption more efficient" because people like consuming and our regulations are written so as to encourage their development. Thomas talks about redesigning our living spaces as though that would be a baby step that might lead to further changes, but she fails to realize that her suggestion will only be possible if we've already made a whole host of changes in the way we value things and the way we translate those values into action. Nor would these be small changes: the difference between shopping at a giant supermarket and shopping at one or many small grocery stores is pretty significant, and food is only one of the areas in which we've chosen to trade crude economic efficiency for other goods. To name another example, just in the past few years we in Pittsburgh have gained a giant corporate movie theater in one of our suburbs but lost a smaller, locally owned movie theater in one of our neighborhoods. This didn't happen because of some powerful faceless company or because of heartless bureaucrats but because we, the people of the city of Pittsburgh, chose in sufficient numbers to stop patronizing the one movie theater and to start patronizing the other. I don't mean to say that this sort of situation presents an insoluble problem - what can be done can, in most cases, be undone - but Thomas shows no appreciation of the seriousness of the situation that she faces.

If new urbanism is going to take root, it isn't just going to be a matter of building nicer neighborhoods or making sure that we have as few billboards as possible. Even if we disregard the fact that communal integration is no guarantor of moral promotion, our current level of integration is something we've chosen and will likely continue to choose. Rather than attempting to redress this with roundabout solutions like making communities more livable, new urbanists might want to consider adopting some of the more direct policies liberals have been asking for (and that conservatives have been arguing against) for ages: more racial integration, better and more wide-ranging primary education, strong support for public and alternative transportation, and so on. I concede that the appearance and arrangement of our buildings may contribute to the unhealthy parts of our culture, but that contribution must surely be a tiny part of the whole. If new urbanism can only offer gimmicks like this instead of taking on the real problems, I'm not sure why we should be impressed.

I only ask because there are so many times when I read the thoughts of an economist and it turns out that those thoughts approach people as though they were totally foreign entities, capable of being analyzed only through the most esoteric and abstruse of methodologies. For instance:

"Now, the world is more competitive and requires more specialised skills. The labour market rewards individual capital, being adaptable, knowing your industry, keeping your skills fresh and having a network of peers. The best way to build this is by changing jobs more frequently; a good job now must enhance your personal skill set which you can take somewhere else. That is why even before the crisis, average tenure was declining and most job churn was voluntary. This is a large shift in our definition of what a good job means."

A.S., the author of this piece, makes one glaring error at the beginning in asserting that "individual capital" (like "knowing your industry" and "having a network of peers") is a kind of skill. This goes along with what I've been saying about the whole plight of the unemployed thing: if an individual's skill set is only part of the picture and the rest of the picture is stuff that's irrelevant from the perspective of pure economics, we just can't keep pretending that companies are going along with pure economics. It's a fantasy, and A.S. should've known better than to perpetuate it with this imprecise classification scheme.

But the bigger problem is the bit at the end, the part where A.S. concludes that there has been "a large shift in our definition of...a good job." Let's take for granted the premises here, namely, that average tenure (i.e., length of stay at one job) has been trending downwards and that most job switching has been voluntary in the recent past. This could indeed mean that our opinions of jobs have changed, so that our behavior patterns have changed as well in the context of having and seeking jobs. On the other hand, it could mean that jobs have changed and that that is the change that produced different behavior. Think of this as though it's a conversation about Weezer albums. The fact that Weezer's fanbase changed drastically over the course of its existence could mean that Weezer's early fans simply developed different tastes in music and so are now listening to, say, the Black Eyed Peas or Maynard Ferguson or someone. But it could also be (and in fact was) the case that Weezer's music itself changed and that their fans would happily have stayed with them if they'd only stopped themselves from writing songs with no interesting instrumentation and crappy lyrics. The difference between these two scenarios is pretty significant, obviously, but that distinction seems either to have been lost on A.S. or not to have occurred to A.S. at all. Incredibly, this is true even though A.S. admits that jobs have changed significantly in the recent past:

"We’ve come to define manufacturing jobs as high quality because of the stability, good wages, and tenure-based benefits they provided to many people. But new technology and globalisation have changed the nature of work."

Could it be, then, that our idea of a good job hasn't changed much at all? Just perhaps? Because, and I dunno about you but, that stuff sounds pretty good to me, the stability and the good wages and the tenure-based benefits. And if A.S. were a human, one might expect, those things would sound good to A.S. as well - presumably even economics writers value having job security, receiving decent pay, and being rewarded for their loyalty. And this is why I wonder sometimes if economists aren't people. Because even the tiniest bit of introspection, I predict, would have saved A.S. from making this mistake and thereby reinforcing, yet again, the horribly flawed notion that the market always knows what it's doing.

Today, for your pleasure, I present to you the difference between offense as conceived by Democratic voters (but interpreted by conservatives) and offense as conceived by Republican ones (but interpreted by liberals). First, the Ds through the eyes of the Rs:

"Today one of America's most important conservative leaders is under brutal assault from the radical left, and he desperately needs conservatives from across America to rally to his defense. His name is Russell Pearce and he is the President of the Senate in Arizona.

In a replay of Wisconsin, labor unions, radical green movements and left wing Latino organizations are pouring money into a recall effort against Senator Pearce."

And now the Rs through the eyes of the Ds:

"Maryland Clinic Landlord and Family Under Attack

It was no real surprise that anti-choicers protested Germantown Reproductive Services late last year. After all, Dr. LeRoy Carhart had just begun seeing patients at the Maryland clinic, and the provider has long drawn the ire of antis.

But now the protestors have shifted their focus away from Dr. Carhart and onto Todd Stave, the clinic’s landlord, and his family. Antis are standing outside his child’s middle school with graphic signs; they are publicizing his picture, home address, and phone number; and they are deluging his family with phone calls at home."

In neither case do the authors really use the word "attack" in a strictly correct sense, but it seems relatively clear to me that one of the uses is much less inaccurate than the other. The thing that liberals are doing in Arizona is not only not an attack but is a wholly legitimate way of responding to unacceptable governance. After all, they couldn't do it unless it had been specifically written into legality by (I'm thinking) the Arizona state constitution. Harassing a landlord, on the other hand, is very probably written out of legality by the Maryland state criminal code.

So while neither of these is an attack, it certainly seems far more disingenuous to use that word in the former case than in the latter, and this is worth remembering the next time somebody tries to run some lazy false equivalence argument about how both sides use overheated rhetoric. To call a massive invasion of privacy an attack may be overblown, but the sentiment behind the word is essentially accurate. To say the same thing of a parliamentary procedure, meanwhile, is simply sophistic.

From Mitt Romney, a.k.a. the smart one:

"I think it’s a real problem when you have half of Americans — almost half of Americans that are not paying income tax. My own view with regards to tax policy is that we ought to provide help to the people that have been hurt most by the Obama economy, and that’s the middle class. It’s not those at the low end and it’s certainly not for those at the very high end. It’s for the great middle class, the 80 to 90 percent of us in this country."

Yeah, so 50% of Americans don't pay any income tax* and you want to raise their taxes but you want to make the tax code easier to bear for 80-90% of Americans? Somebody check my math on this one, but I'm pretty sure that means that he wants to both raise and lower the taxes on at least 30% of Americans.

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From Rick Perry, a.k.a. the Texan miracle worker:

"Texas Gov. Rick Perry's efforts to tout his record on jobs and the economy as a centerpiece of his presidential campagn [sic] took a hit today with new figures from one of his own state agencies: They show the Texas unemployment rate increased to 8.5% in August -- the highest level in more than 24 years and more than twice the rate when Perry took office in December 2000. "

Oh, Michael Isikoff, you're so silly! Don't you know that in the USA a policy is successful if it works for a year or two? Why, for us the phrase "long-term consequence" is basically an oxymoron!

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From Nikki Haley, a.k.a. the anti-waste candidate:

"I've never felt like I had to back up what people tell me. You assume that you're given good information. And now I'm learning through you guys that I have to be careful before I say something."

And hey, what better way to cut down on government waste than to instantiate costly government programs based on the totally and completely unvetted word of some random person, right?

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And from John Fleming, I guess a.k.a. the selfish asshole:

"By the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over."

There isn't actually a fallacy here, I just wanted to put this in a post. Also, for the record, Mr. I'm-a-big-ol'-job-creator Fleming seems to exemplify approximately none of the attributes usually attributed to job creators. The man owns Subways, for crying out loud. How much entrepreneurial genius does it take to own a Subway, and how much does a Subway really improve the quality of anybody's life? I'm thinking not much - which, coincidentally, is the same extent to which I'm impressed by any of these people.

*Which is a lie, incidentally.

Over the past several months I've taken some time to look at a few of the ways in which people are arguing for a new pro-urban civil engineering/design philosophy, aptly enough called "new urbanism." All in all I have found this philosophy to be underwhelming, mostly because it often presumes what it is trying to show (namely, that cities are better at producing people who are cohesive, happy, politically involved, or whatever). This presumption, I have come to believe, is based in a number of demonstrably false premises, one of which is expressed with convenient clarity by Darryl Hart.

"All religious groups have their internecine squabbles and the places where such fights take place. They used to be confined to magazines and journals, and so only followed by the faithful who subscribed or who lived near a theological or church library that took the periodical...What has not changed, however, is the constituency for whom such debates mattered. In most cases, the intended readership was also the group for whom the debate had the most bearing. If a religious communion ruled that membership in the Lodge was incompatible with church membership, the reader who was thinking about joining the Masons paid attention. But the debate had no such interest from the reader’s Jewish neighbor."

One unspoken premise of new urbanism, I feel, is that each community is more or less a closed system. Most new urbanist authors appear to recognize the fact that no city will ever contain only one culture in the way that some small towns or villages once did (and, perhaps, still do). Rather than attempting to homogenize cities, they want to build cities in such a way as to allow all the communities therein to thrive on their own terms. That sounds great, except it ignores the fact that running a bunch of communities in sequence is very different than running a bunch of communities in parallel. That new urbanism appears to conceive of the ideal city as a geographically localized collection of independent small towns, then, is a problem: contrary to what Hart thinks, the "internecine squabbles" of Masons and Christians can indeed matter very much to Jews. It won't matter to Jews qua Jews, probably - Judaism isn't too likely to change its tenets based on the theology of its neighbors - but this is just the thing with urbanism in general: in an urban environment, it's not possible to pretend that your Jewish neighbors are only Jews. They're also participants in your local economy and politics, members of your local social organizations, students at your local schools, and so on. Your stability and prosperity, then, depends at least in some weak sense on the stability and prosperity of your Jewish neighbors, and vice versa.

This may not sound particularly threatening to the new urbanist cause, as I did use the qualifier "weak." But I also used the qualifier "at least," and I do think that there are frequent cases of allegedly intramural conflicts having widespread effects. One easy example is the way in which the Catholic church and its supporters are trying to twist the arms of legislators by threatening to cease providing adoption services if same-sex couples receive the same rights as heterosexual ones. Yes, the Catholic position on gay adoption and gay parenting is the sort of thing that used to be (and, to a large extent, still is) "confined to magazines and journals, and so only followed by the faithful who subscribed or who lived near a theological or church library that took the periodical," but d'you know what? It's affecting non-Catholics, too, and is apparently going to continue to affect non-Catholics for the foreseeable future. One potential explanation for why we make the mistake of thinking that our stuff is only going to affect us (for the relevant definitions of "our" and "us") is that we, like Anthony Esolen, are confused about which stuff is really just ours.

"I am a localist, because I believe that local government and local groups should do most of the practical governing in our lives—the educating of children, for instance, keeping the peace, and celebrating feasts."

This is weird from the beginning because Esolen, the localist who lives in Rhode Island, is Catholic and so presumably looks to the Vatican for at least some practical governance. Unless the Vatican has relocated from Rome to Providence - which, granted, would not be an entirely unfounded move, given the meaning of the word "providence" - that seems to put his self-proclaimed localism in question. But even besides that, the problem with Esolen's localist view (which is, of course, the sort of thing that's a key part of new urbanism) is that he categorizes "celebrating feasts" an act of "practical governing."

In part I think that he makes this mistake because "governing" for him is practically synonymous with "living." Most new urbanists avoid that particular error, happily, but that doesn't mean that they can properly distinguish private-facing activities from public-facing ones. If we believe, as Esolen does, that our ethnic/religious/generically communal feasts are either universal or have no public implications, that misconception will lead us to make some bad conclusions about the effects of those feasts on the broader population. When this happens in America we sometimes get things like the "war on Christmas" (which is the concept that Christians use to hide their distress at the fact that Christmas is, contrary to their assumptions, not a universally celebrated holiday and not something that everybody wants to have thrown in their faces) and the "war on marriage" (which is the concept that religious bigots of all stripes use to hide their distress at the fact that queer people exist and that you're not allowed to tie them to the back of your pickup truck and drag them around the town square). If we can't rely on ourselves to tell when a practice or belief really is localized and contained, it should be no wonder that we can't reliably form closed-system communities that will get along peaceably and fairly.

I also cannot help but to think that this mistake - the thing where we think that our stuff is everyone's stuff - is a large contributor to the popularity of new urbanism, and maybe says more about the movement than anybody intends. Every new urbanist, it seems to me, supports new urbanism in part because he (or she - but usually he) feels as though new urbanism is finally going to allow him (or her) to do all the stuff (s)he wants to do - fishing enthusiasts will be able to fish, religious believers will be able to worship, bicyclists will be able to bike, and so on. Besides the fact that this is a fantasy even on its own terms, it ignores the fact that fishing and worshiping and biking and really almost anything you can think of is not just an activity that affects the participants. My biking, for instance, presents a challenge for drivers and pedestrians. It's not much of a challenge, granted, but it's enough of one to make a difference. You can imagine, then, the kind of impediment a fisher or worshiper would face given that other people want to use that river or that block of land, too, and so you just can't throw a lure or build a church wherever works best for you.

With all of this in mind, I am beginning to entertain a certain idea as to what the central flaw of new urbanism is. If my guess is correct, new urbanism's problem stems from its effort to divide urban populations into constituencies for whom given debates do and do not matter, when in fact the promise of new urbanism can only be achieved when we take into account the reality that urban populations are not divisible in that way precisely because they are urban populations. Or, to put it more succinctly: if you want to figure out a way to help everyone get along, odds are you won't find it by asking everybody else to leave you alone.

C'mon, really? I'm expected to buy this? Be serious.

"[T]here are some truths that the Nazi has a general right to. Not the right to be told where Jews have been hidden, but the right to the truth that only by conversion from his wicked purposes can his soul be saved. However, despite the limits of the Nazi’s general right to the truth, the Nazi can also be said to have a right not to have us solicit his trust [by offering information] with the intention of betraying it [by lying]. To do that is contrary to the love that we owe to all."

Yeah, because it isn't "contrary to the love that we owe to all" to play silly word games instead of doing what you can to protect innocent people from being murdered. Get the fuck outta here, Tollefsen and Pruss. No, I mean that literally: move to another country. I know that the odds of me needing a place to hide in this country are low and that neither of you lives anywhere near me now, but just in case I'd really like to know that I won't end up in one of your attics.

Today's piece of synchronicity: having already planned to write something on the subject of manifest destiny and its connection to a particularly poisonous strain of thought, and having just seen the baseball-themed movie Moneyball last night, this morning I found an article by Elizabeth Scalia using baseball as a way of explaining the concept of manifest destiny. She does this by exploring the reality of heartbreak in the game.

"The heartbreak is what makes it great, and the source of the heartbreak is the clutch—that period of time (and it can last for a moment or for years) when everything meaningful in your life fades into a peripheral nothingness until an outcome is known. In the clutch, love is balancing—one foot, en pointe—along a thin wire of hope, and still determining if, or when, the next foot might be safely employed.

The clutch makes us hold our breath in the name of love. It is the biopsy report we are waiting to hear about on our husband; it is what keeps us from fully sleeping until we hear our kid pull into the driveway; it is the acknowledgment that we lack control over an outcome, and the wondering that comes before the knowing."

The startling thing about this reasoning, at least for me, is the striking similarity it bears to the words of Judge Holden, by far the most interesting character in Cormac McCarthy's tremendous Blood Meridian. Discoursing on the subject of war, Holden says the following:

"Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all."

Holden, I should note at this stage, is a psychopath. In addition to the numerous crimes which he commits - including, and I swear that I am not making this up, drowning puppies - Holden's stated purpose in life is to gain control over the whole of the world so as to bend it to his will. Whatever charisma McCarthy implants in his words, then, is a threat and a challenge to the reader: we are apt to follow along with Holden's proclamations, but if we were to do so we would effectively adopt a maniac as our teacher. He continues (with my emphasis):

"Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man's hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man's worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god."

That Holden is deranged is made fairly evident from passages such as this one, but McCarthy's prose hints at something more important. Humans, as readers of this blog should by now know, are apt to see (and to seek) purpose. In the absence of (perceived) purpose or pattern to reality, our cognition often runs aground, leading to rational and emotional distress alike. Accordingly, incautious reasoners often attribute cosmic or divine agency to events that they cannot (or will not) otherwise explain; Scalia, for example, compares the interval between the pitcher letting go of the ball and the batter's swing to "the space between a prayer of supplication and the surrender of 'Amen.'"

But her lack of caution itself does not tell us why she selected this particular kind of explanation or why people in general, as McCarthy says through Holden, view games as "validation of a man's worth." She could equally well have reasoned that there is no explanation that all, for example - that, in other words, "the clutch" is any point at which the course of history up until that point is insufficient to determine the course of history afterwards and so randomness is the only way to proceed. That she (and we in general) cannot interpret events "without [involving] agency or significance either one" is therefore a phenomenon in need of investigation and explication, because it cannot be understood just using the information that she herself provides. Luckily, I think that I have an answer.

Recall that Holden takes "the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory [to] inhere in the worth of the principals and define them." In plain English, this is to say that losing (or winning) identifies the value of a competitor as low (or high); although he says at first that the outcome of (e.g.) a sport turns on "the skill and strength of" the competitors, his real opinion is that such competitions are "trial[s] of worth," that is, opportunities to gauge who is the better (more valuable, worthier) person. Yet we know from experience and history that this is not so. (Holden, for all his eloquence and surety, is wrong about quite a lot.) Dan Marino never won a Super Bowl but was unquestionably a better quarterback than 2001 Super Bowl winner Trent Dilfer; John Stockton (dirty player though he was) had orders of magnitude more talent than Beno Udrih, but Udrih has two championship rings where Stockton has none; and I guess there are probably some examples of this sort of thing in baseball as well. Nor is this phenomenon limited to sports - scientists, historians, philosophers, inventors, artists, and thinkers of all sorts are routinely overshadowed by their lesser counterparts, both in their lifetimes and afterwards. To seek confirmation of one's worth in the results of one's activities, then, is a known error - it is, in essence, a variety of the fallacy of argumentation by adverse consequence. Rather than evidence of right thinking, then, this sort of thing is more likely to be evidence of a cognitive bias. I think psychologists usually call this one projection: rather than acknowledging one's own feelings on a topic, one attributes those feelings to others (inventing, if necessary, the others in question). What I am suggesting, in short, is that the "clutch" to which Scalia refers has no existence in the real world but exists only in our heads - that, to say it differently again, it has nothing to do with "the acknowledgment that we lack control over an outcome" but has everything to do with our inability to acknowledge what we do control, namely, the way that an outcomes affects us.

It's important to separate these tangled threads (the outcome and our response to the outcome) because failing to do so can lead us to wrongly focus on that which cannot help us and to wrongly disregard that which can - for instance, by attempting to punish the poor (read: unworthy) for their poverty in order to turn around the economy. Christianity often addresses this psychological problem by teaching its followers that everything is a sign of love, so communicating the idea that your worth is totally disconnected from your circumstances. This was the notion at the center of The Tree of Life, and, as we saw, although it can indeed help to relieve the burden of looking for concrete manifestations of one's destiny it also leads to a number of problematic normative implications (e.g. that self-defense in the face of abuse is unloving). Chuck Palahniuk, of course, half-jokingly turns this notion on its head by asking people to believe that God hates them. This, too, serves to disconnect one's worth from one's circumstances, but it's equally wrong-headed and has equally absurd implications. Moreover, no system like this is really effective: just as Christianity has the prosperity gospel, any system that attempts to reconfigure the cosmic or divine will is almost certainly doomed to fail because the problem is not the content of the cosmic will but its posited existence in the first place. There is nothing in reality to correspond to Holden's "larger will" and there is nothing in reality to receive Scalia's prayers. How we value ourselves in the face of events that are (or even just that seem to be) outside of our control is a matter that we decide, and pretending to push that decision off onto a nonexistent cosmic entity will only make things worse.

That would be the word to describe Tim Hsiao, who was most recently seen making a total mess out of what might generously be called the ethics of the family. Well, Hsiao is back, having read my critique and subsequently learned approximately nothing.

"A critic of mine has pointed out that one can avoid this by treating the family as a social construct akin to basketball, where one can make evaluative judgments in the framework of the agreed upon conventions. Yet this seems inadequate, for the analogy holds weight only if we agree in advance to play within the framework of a certain governing body. But what if we don’t? Suppose that half of the teams in the NBA were to split and form a new league with their own rules. Would this be breaking the rules of basketball? Arguably not, for they are not subject to any higher standard."

Hsiao, sadly, has utterly misunderstood my objections. The first of these, that good qua construct is different than good qua good, apparently sailed right over his head: no matter what construct we're talking about (families, basketball, whatever), there is always a "higher standard" to which actions are subject. That standard is morality, which is by definition the highest standard of conduct. It may very well be the case that, following Hsiao's extension of my example, FIBA-rules basketball is (at least nearly) morally equivalent to NBA-rules basketball. But d'you know what? We have to have a higher standard of measurement in order to say that they're (about) the same; the words "the same" have no meaning outside of a system of measurement or comparison. Thus, we can evaluate the actions of families even without comparing those actions to some idealized notion of what a family is. We would just do so with ethics plain and simple rather than family ethics, is all. That Hsiao evidently missed this entire argument says nothing good about his capacity for philosophical thought.

More worrying still, however, is that his supposed counter-example is in no way a threat to my position. I am more than averagely familiar with the rule differences between the NBA and other competitive basketball organizations, so this sort of question doesn't exactly take me by surprise. I learned with painful clarity from '04 to '08 that good (and even great) NBA players could play like shit with the FIBA rules, so Hsiao's hypothetical isn't even really a hypothetical for me but a reality that I've already had to deal with. The answer, simply and unsurprisingly, is this: when a social construct has multiple forms or expressions, one must evaluate participants under each of those forms separately. Rudy Fernandez, for example, shows up big-time in international play but sort of can't hack it in the NBA; similarly, as I just said, our '04 Olympic team had plenty of NBA-level talent but was really and truly incapable of playing well under FIBA's rules. The very fact that Hsiao understands that different rules make for different results means that he should have seen this response coming, so it's disturbing that he somehow didn't. And, in fact, it's precisely because of the plurality of basketball rule sets (or family structures) that my position makes sense. The family is a social construct and as such we cannot rely on the so-called nature of the family to guide our behavior any more than we can sanely take the rules of (NBA) basketball to be a guide to life. We can (relatively) easily say what makes for a good NBA point guard as opposed to a good FIBA point guard just like we can (relatively) easily say what makes for a good American mother as opposed to a good Chinese mother, but none of that matters except insofar as one is willing to play along with the rule set (i.e., social convention) in question. To repeat myself, morality is the highest standard of behavior, and it would be absurd to attempt to overrule it with the contents of a mere social construct.

To see this, one need look no farther than the rest of Hsiao's article, in which he says that

"two individuals of the same-sex cannot be parents in principle, for they are incapable in principle of reproduction. If same-sex couples cannot be parents, then it follows that they are not entitled to the same adoption rights which opposite-sex couples enjoy, for only those capable of being parents have the right to adopt...While it is true that procedures such as in vitro fertilization allow same-sex couples to be parents, they are still not parents in the relevant sense — that is, in regard to each other. Such procedures still at their core rely on heterosexual union and thus must involve donated sperm or egg from a third party."

Here Hsiao is permitting himself to take a number of social conventions much too far. (Whether this is because he really deeply believes them or is just playing along, you will note, is "rather beside the point.") He wants to say that same-sex couples cannot ever be parents for the same reason that VHS tapes cannot ever be cheese sandwiches: physical reality simply rules it out. There are, however, a slew of problems with this argument, starting with the fact that (at least some) same-sex couples can reproduce (emphasis mine).

"In recent decades, a new possibility for LGBT parenting, same-sex procreation (where two women could have a son or daughter with equal genetic contributions from both women, or where two men could have a son or daughter with equal genetic contributions from both men), has become a possibility, through the creation of either female sperm or male eggs from the cells of adult women and men. With female sperm and male eggs, lesbian and gay couples wishing to become parents would not have to rely on a third party donor of sperm or egg."

Granted, this isn't a moral situation so much as a scientific one, but the pattern is the same: Hsiao wrongly allows his social training to make him doctrinaire about matters that call for much more subtlety. Yes, reproduction typically does not require any special technology and so typically takes place with one male and one female human; moreover, Hsiao's warped image of the family is one that only permits heterosexual intercourse. But same-sex procreation is simply not impossible in principle as Hsiao claims - reality, again, takes precedence over social convention.

Further, Hsiao equivocates on the meaning of "parent." It is a plain fact even to someone with his batshit-colored glasses that same-sex couples can, in fact, parent in the usual sense of the word. That is, they can raise and care for children, providing love and moral guidance and material comfort and so forth. What we want to know when we ask about same-sex adoption is whether LGBT couples have the right to do that, whatever we're calling it. This argument, then, addresses a concept of adoption (and parenting, and so on) that is meaningless in any moral or political sphere. For all the good that this argument does, he might as well argue against the FAA on the grounds that humans can't fly like birds do. The reality of same-sex parenting in the usual sense of the word is the real issue at hand, yet Hsiao permits himself to ignore it in favor of a social pretense, and this is what dooms his argument.

This act of pretending filters even into his ontology - which, quite honestly, should no longer be a surprise for anybody reading this blog. By now, this kind of willfully deluded tripe should look sickeningly familiar:

"In philosophical terms, the family is grounded in the having of certain essential properties, regardless of whether or not they are contingently realized. So while infertile opposite-sex couples cannot have children of their own, they are still capable of conjugal [i.e., reproductive] acts and thus retain the right to adoption."

Although we are most familiar with seeing this kind of thinking applied to abortion and human dignity, the fallacies are the same here. Infertility is, of course, a physiological condition, so when Hsiao says that infertile couples "are still capable of" reproducing he means that the could hypothetically reproduce if their physiologies were different. This is fine insofar as it goes, except that same-sex couples could also reproduce if their physiologies were different: for any two gay men in a sexual relationship, it is true that we can (at least in our own minds) rearrange their physiologies so that one of them is a woman and both of them are fertile and so they, too, "are still capable of conjugal acts." In order to prevent this sort of consideration from spoiling his rather stupid argument, Hsiao would have to posit an arbitrary line that divides real possibilities from fake ones - but (a) such a line would, again, be arbitrary; (b) drawing such a line would ruin his own argument, as he, too, relies on conflating the epistemologically (apparently) possible with the ontologically (actually) possible; and (c) Hsiao has already demonstrated himself to be incompetent when it comes to separating from the possible from the impossible even when we have direct empirical evidence about what's possible readily at hand. To think that he could do it when such evidence is not just unavailable but nonexistent, then, would be wildly optimistic.

As I've reiterated throughout this post, Hsiao's problem is that he - likely due to his philosophical training, it shames me to say - has decided to privilege a social fantasy over the real world. Over the course of his two posts, he has devoted an inordinate amount of time to his idea of the "essential nature" of the family and yet no time at all to the question of what morality is. This should provide some evidence that I wasn't kidding around when I laid out some guidelines for building an ethical theory: Hsiao never said what to value or how to value it, instead opting to base his whole system of thought on "a world of convenient folk-wisdom fantasies" that he hoped would answer those questions for him. Not only did this not happen, his blind reliance on social convention led him to embrace several logical fallacies and even to attempt to gainsay scientific reality. A better philosopher might have made this wreck seem plausible on its face, but Hsiao's bumbling doesn't even rise to the level of being specious. He's simply wrong, and it's a real shame that some of us apparently don't realize it.

Or, rather, start disbelieving.

"Fundamentalists of every sect are, pretty much by definition, strongly committed to the literal truth of all of their scripture. But the garden variety 'believer,' I suspect, may often be more accurately thought of as a 'suspension-of-disbeliever.' (Somewhere in the back of my head is that CollegeHumor video about religion as a species of fanboyism.) When you think about the actual functions that religious narratives serve in people’s lives, literal truth or falsity is often rather beside the point, and yet suspension of disbelief is a necessary condition of immersion in the story. On this view, Richard Dawkins is a little like that guy who keeps pointing out that all the ways superhero physics don’t really make sense."

Though he's a little late to the game, Julian Sanchez is bringing to light an interesting and (probably) (at least) (semi-)important question about how to understand religion in modern societies. Although I think he does us a disservice by grouping believers into "fundamentalists" and "garden variety 'believers'" who don't actually believe a thing - evidence, Julian? Testimonials? Anything? - we can ignore his questionable demographic distinctions and focus instead on the question of what to do about the suspension-of-disbelievers he mentions, because surely this is a group that exists even if its size is probably less than Sanchez makes it out to be.

So: suspension-of-disbelievers. For Sanchez, they are "closer to what I think my initial view of Sherlock Holmes probably was: I knew that Watson 'was' Holmes’ faithful sidekick, and that Moriarty 'was' his archenemy, but if you asked me whether I meant this 'was' in the sense of a historical truth claim or only as a 'truth' about a fictional narrative, I suspect I would have initially been surprised by the question, because nothing about my relationship to the narrative or my reasons for enjoying it turned essentially on whether the events it depicted had really happened." Let us investigate this claim by looking at the thinking of a non-fundamentalist Catholic, Julie Rubio.

"It is important for Catholics to articulate just why we disagree with [awesome sex advice columnist and sexual ethicist Dan] Savage, that is, why adultery is not [ever] good for your marriage. It’s because we think sex is a practice that aims at total self-giving, a ritual remembering of lifelong vows, an act of mutual vulnerability and radical intimacy. We uphold fidelity because it is the virtue that allows for two people to enter into this emotionally risky act time and time again, affirming their love for each other in spite of imperfection, growing stronger together instead of leaving when things get boring or difficult."

Again, Rubio is not a fundamentalist. She's a liberal Catholic, for whatever that's worth, and, while she certainly does believe in the literal truth of a bunch of Catholic teachings, you will notice that none of those teachings really appear here. I think this makes her more of a garden-variety believer and less of a suspension-of-disbeliever, but, again, that's not the point I'm trying to make here. Rather, the point I'm trying to make is that views like Rubio's don't depend on anything stronger than suspension of disbelief. In fact, I think they can often exist and thrive even without that.

To see this, begin by looking at what Rubio actually said. She disagrees with Dan Savage, she reports, because she believes that "sex is a practice that aims at total self-giving" and so on and whatever. Moreover, she thinks that it is literally not possible for "two people to [fuck] time and time again" without being faithful to one another because a lack of sexual fidelity will make it impossible to push through the times "when things get boring or difficult." The details of her view are troubling, of course, but for the purposes of this post it suffices to note that her beliefs in this area are all dogmatic ones. This dogmatism, however, does not take the form of a belief about history or cosmology or evolution or geology, nor is it a direct quote from any holy text or the crude appropriation of a biblical concept. Rather, Rubio has merely suspended her disbelief with respect to the things she has been taught by her church. She is participating in a social event ("we disagree"; "we think"; "we uphold"), and part of the price of entry into that event is conformance with certain axioms, including some about the nature of sex. As Sanchez intimates, this is no different from a bunch of nerds getting together to nerd out over Star Wars and taking for granted the idea that the Force has a light side and a dark side and it binds the universe together. Except for one thing: Rubio never stops suspending her disbelief. Her nerdy social event - her opportunity for willful suspension of disbelief - is her life.

Sanchez, then, is more right than he knows, and probably more right than he wants to be. When he says that "literal truth or falsity is often rather beside the point" when it comes to analyzing modern religious belief, we can interpret that as meaning not only that many believers are really suspension-of-disbelievers but, much more importantly, that suspension-of-disbelievers can have all of the problematic qualities associated with believers. This is the case because, again, when it comes our behaviors it often doesn't matter whether we take something to be literally true or not: so long as we pretend hard enough and long enough, we might as well believe it. Challenging the literal truth or falsity of religious premises, then, is useful even in the case of people who don't have religious beliefs per se. Suspension-of-disbelievers who agree with Rubio's patently unrealistic take on infidelity, for example, could stand to be educated about the real history and anthropology of sex, the concept of a ritual, the actual psychological limits and capabilities of humans, and so on, even if none of them believes a religious tenet that contradicts those actual facts. To adapt the cliche, your game of pretend ends where my nose begins, and if I have to be "that guy who keeps pointing out that all the ways superhero physics don’t really make sense" in order to prevent something stupid or harmful from happening then that's the guy I'm going to be.

Although maybe this is actually cheating a little bit - today's book is Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape, already semi-reviewed on this blog. But this is new material, at least for me, so I'm counting it.

"Harris is confident, though not sure, that neuroscience will one day be able to isolate the neural coordinates of well-being. Now, it would be foolhardy to claim with confidence that neuroscientists will never be able to manipulate chemicals in the brain to produce such feelings as happiness, pleasure, and fulfillment, but one may wonder whether this would produce real well-being. Harris claims that 'human well-being entirely depends on events in the world and on states of the human brain,' but this is annoyingly vague. Obviously, he means to suggest a very complex, interactive process in which the brain is shaped by our surroundings while also determining our reaction to them. The project is to discover the kind of upbringing that cultivates brains most fit for fulfillment and then to put those brains into the kind of environment that will fulfill them. But what if we could create these neural states without worrying about the real-world conditions we associate with the good life (as in the movie The Matrix)? Harris cites some neurological evidence that we 'like' true statements and 'dislike' false ones, but surely the brain’s response to truth and falsehood is also in principle manipulable. Would it matter that we were really slaves as long as we felt like we were in utopia? I think most of us have moral intuitions that would deem such a situation repugnant, but Harris doesn’t address these intuitions."

Andy Whinery, who must possess one of the least fortunate last names around, has a lot of stuff to say about how neuroscience can't replace morality, and I like most of it. This part, however, I don't like. Not one bit.

To begin with, I wish we could dispense with this stupid idea that The Matrix is somehow a frightening, terrible idea. The frightening terrible part of that movie had nothing to do with the matrix part, really, and there just is no good reason to think that simulations matter less than the real world. To take an example that actually exists, the stuff that people do in World of Warcraft - the relationships they make, the feats they accomplish, and so on - really do not matter any less than the stuff that people do outside of the World of Warcraft, at least if we're comparing apples to apples. (It matters that people eat real food, for instance, but that's not what WoW is for.) If you acquire an object in WoW, that is (so far as I know) functionally the same as acquiring an object in real life: you can use it, discard it, or sell it; you can let other people borrow it or just show it off to them; and so on.That the object is actually a sequence of code saved on some remote server doesn't make the slightest bit of difference, any more than it matters that the Stanley Cup is passed from team to team or that some of my stuff is in storage. I mean, in between earning a degree and receiving the piece of paper that we call a degree, your degree is just code saved on some remote server somewhere, yet very few people are concerned about that. Near as I can tell, this thing about simulations is nothing but unsubstantiated prejudice and needs to be dropped.

Thankfully, though, Whinery doesn't just talk about simulations. He also expresses a concern that real-world neurological manipulation could produce a "repugnant" scenario in which we feel "happiness, pleasure, and fulfillment" but would not experience "real well-being." This is a fairly common complaint lodged against utilitarianism, so it's not exactly surprising that Whinery brings it up (especially given the relative immaturity of Harris's ethical thinking). But I want you to try something: imagine that, instead of positive feelings, scientists learned how to manipulate our neurology so as to produce feelings of sadness, misery, and hopelessness. Having been so manipulated, would we then not be experiencing "real" suffering? Or, to take a perhaps even more compelling example, fibromyalgia produces widespread pain without any widespread injury and is suspected to be mostly or entirely neurological in nature. Are fibromyalgia patients, then, not experiencing "real" pain? The idea is just absurd. So why, then, would anybody think that positive feelings that result from neurological hacking are fake? Why arbitrarily count them out?

Whinery doesn't say, but he doesn't really have to just for the sake of a book review. I, however, am not going to be quite so flighty. Unless Whinery is willing to say that depressed people who have desirable living situations aren't "really" depressed because they lack "the real-world conditions we associate with the bad life" - and, similarly, unless he's prepared to pity happy people who happen to be unmarried or very poor or whatever - he should really shut up about the possibility that people might be able to achieve happiness, in the words of yesterday's post, "without living prudently and honorably and justly, and also without living courageously and temperately and magnanimously, and without making friends and without being philanthropic" (or, alternatively, without living with a flat-screen HDTV and a fast car and a zillion friends and a deeply meaningful job). Enough of this crap is enough.

Even if we could somehow discriminate between "real" pleasure (or pain) and synthesized pleasure (or pain), the distinction would have to be morally irrelevant. What matters is the welfare of those things that can have welfare, not whether or not their welfare corresponds tightly to some (likely culturally defined) concept of what is deserving of a pleasurable (or painful) reaction. It's Harris's own fault that he (apparently) didn't say this, but by the same token this is not an argument that he or anybody else should ever have to address. If Whinery or anybody else is really that concerned with the realness of their well-being, they're free to never avail themselves of psychopharmaceuticals, up to and including chocolate. Personally, though, I'm more concerned with preventing gratuitous suffering, and the last time I checked it doesn't hurt anyone to feel good.

It all makes so much more sense now...

It makes me sad to think that we as a species have barely grown up at all in 2300 years, but there it is.

"If you think Epicureanism means extravagant self-indulgence, think again. Lucretius was a follower of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, who did indeed argue that pleasure is a sign of the good. But Epicurus also wrote, 'we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality.' Another of his followers, Philodemus, explained that it is impossible to live in true pleasure, 'without living prudently and honorably and justly, and also without living courageously and temperately and magnanimously, and without making friends and without being philanthropic.'"

According to Swerve, which I now no longer feel the need to read having seen its review, Epicureanism got a lot of stuff right: "that the human soul does not survive the death of the body and that no gods preside over our existence, doling out rewards and punishments"; that "that everything around us is the result of (in [author Stephen] Greenblatt's words) 'an unexpected, unpredictable [well, maybe not so unpredictable] movement of matter,' causing atoms to clump together or break apart, forming all the recognizable objects of the world"; and that a successful moral theory will be focused on this (i.e., the) world. But this stuff about "true pleasure" just makes me sad.

There are lots of adverbs - in English, apparently the number is at least 1200. Figure, as a completely rough estimate, that half of these can't sensibly pertain to the verb "to live" and that half of the ones that can are either negative, neutral, or not valenced. That leaves us with one quarter of 1200 or 300 positive adverbs that describe the way that one could live. It would be a very silly game to try to list all of these adverbs out, and far sillier still to pretend that a life could not be good or pleasurable if it lacked one of the 300 positive adverbs that could possibly be used to describe it. (I think it would be even sillier still to try to pare down the list.) As I said, we've had at least 23 centuries to figure this out, yet there are still people wandering around who think that happiness can't be had without morality (and maybe vice versa as well). It would be interesting to learn how the Epicureans justified this, if at all, but it doesn't seem that Swerve provides this information, alas. Not that it should matter: we know more than the ancient Greeks did, so we shouldn't trust their ethics any more than we trust their science. If they were right about any of that stuff, we should instead seek to confirm it; if they were wrong, as they obviously were about pleasure, we should seek to improve on it.

If you have any doubt that conservatives care more about helping companies than people, look no farther than their ongoing defense of hiring policies that exclude the unemployed.

"The White House argues, 'The exclusion of unemployed applicants is a troubling and arbitrary screen that is bad for the economy, bad for the unemployed, and ultimately bad for firms trying to find the best candidates.'

Trust Obama and his aides to think they know better than employers how to find the best employees. If the policy is self-destructive, firms that practice it will pay a price for their stupidity: the loss of good workers."

Notice that Steve Chapman never bothers to actually argue that "employers [know] how to find the best employees." He implies that they do by sneering at the Obama administration - which, by the way, also had to hire people - but instead of trying to support that implication he changes the subject. For all Chapman evidently knows, "Obama and his aides" do know how to find the best employees. Worse still, the point of the policy is not to punish stupid companies but to stop companies from punishing citizens. For Chapman to tout the market's ability to make "firms...pay a price for their stupidity," then, is entirely beside the point - it's on the order of pointing to the death penalty when somebody asks for better crime prevention measures. "Well, we might not be able to protect you in any meaningful way, but we're gonna fry any son of a bitch that hurts you." It's pretty cold comfort for an unemployed person to know (and really, not even know but hope) that the company that refused to even accept their application is going to suffer as a result.

Chapman's next terrible argument is that "companies that rely on this method may have good reason to steer clear of those with big gaps in their work history. In a fast-changing industry, last year's knowledge may be as useful as skill with an abacus." This might be reasonable, except that these companies aren't just targeting people with big gaps in their work history. (And, of course, it only might be reasonable: again, Chapman has not actually given us a reason to think that last year's knowledge is useless, only that it may be.) Continuing to do his best to misrepresent the situation, he continues on to say that unemployed people don't deserve the same protections that are doled out "on the basis of race or sex" because they "are not a group that has been victimized by age-old laws and customs based on false stereotypes and baseless fears." While this latter statement is true, its connection to the former is pretty much nonexistent: whatever used to be the case, unemployed people now are "victimized by...customs based on false stereotypes and baseless fears." In particular, they're victimized by the practice of discriminating against unemployed people on the false stereotype and baseless fear that unemployed people's "skills and work habits atrophy" and that they are "less qualified" - or, in Chapman's oh-so-unbiased phrasing, that unemployed people are "as useful as skill with an abacus." That this didn't used to happen only goes to show how utterly fucked up companies have now become.

The thing that really gets me about this article, though, is the way that Chapman can't bring himself to focus on anything but punishing people. Although his title refers to a way "to Help the Unemployed," judging by his article he couldn't care less about helping the unemployed - or, in fact, anyone else. We've already seen how he failed to accurately identify the purpose of anti-discrimination legislation, saying that its only purpose is to "mak[e companies] walk through a minefield" and so it isn't needed because the free market will punish stupid companies. We've also seen his eagerness to punish people who he himself admits "are unemployed through no fault of their own": they're useless, he says, so companies can do as they please. What's even more galling than that is that he concludes by suggesting that companies could even respond by punishing the government "by moving abroad." Basically, it appears that so long as someone suffers for something (or, in the case of unemployed people, for nothing), Steve Chapman will be happy. I cannot even come close to emphasizing how destructive this attitude is. You simply cannot run a country with the attitude that everything will work itself out if you just punish the right people at the right times in the right ways. Eventually somebody has to help someone else in order to get things moving. Chapman, it seems, doesn't want to help anyone, and I take that to mean that he doesn't want to have a functioning country so much as a nation-wide reality TV show only with no cameras and you can't opt out and the rules are, if anything, more insane. This is not - at least not yet - the United States of Corporations. Our businesses have to work for us, and people like Chapman (not to mention the people who run the corporations) need to figure that out right quick.

So far, this one deals with the book I am most likely to actually go pick up. If I do go pick it up, though, I'm really going to have to try to avoid being disappointed in the silly terminology.

"The fact that people at Pomona [College] responded most strongly to Barack Obama’s election as president and to Karl Rove’s appearance on campus seems to suggest that political participation today depends not on ethnic solidarity or a sense of civic duty as were sometimes present in our past, but rather on emotional stimulation. This lines up with research by philosophers Hubert Dreyfuss and Sean Kelly, who suggest in their new book 'All Things Shining' that when people lack shared intellectual assumptions, they turn to emotions for a sense of closeness. Thus moments of intense and shared elevation—found at political rallies, sports events and protests, among other occasions—offer the most meaningful experiences in a pluralistic society. Dreyfuss and Kelly call these experiences of collective emoting 'whooshing up.'"

The reasoning here is all muddled, but for the Front Porch Republic people that's nothing new. If you'll pardon my lapse, though, I'm going to let the original author off the hook and just try to cogitate a bit about this "whooshing up" thing.

An initial thought is this: if you want a sense of closeness, you're going to have to "turn to emotions." Even if the sense in question isn't an emotion (or a category/kind of emotion), it surely must rely in some way or other on emotions. Dreyfuss and Kelly, if they are on to anything at all and not just making things up, can therefore really only tell us about the character and/or quantity of the emotions involved. If they really say that emotions can be entirely replaced by "shared intellectual assumptions," they're dreaming.

Following on that thought, I cannot help but wonder what the difference is supposed to be between "emotional stimulation" and "ethnic solidarity" or "a sense of civic duty." At least when I experience ethnic solidarity (not often) or a sense of civic duty (somewhat more often), I experience it as, well, emotional stimulation. Certainly ethnic solidarity and a sense of civic duty are not intellectual assumptions. They can relate in varying ways to intellectual assumptions - that one is a member of an ethnicity, that one has a civic duty - but they are not themselves intellectual assumptions. Rather, they are experiences, usually "meaningful experiences." So maybe this is a clue: it's not just "emotional stimulation" of any sort that matters but specifically emotional stimulation that produces (or plain old constitutes) meaningful experiences. Certainly it seems plausible to think that it would be meaningful to walk around with a shared sense of civic duty, for instance, so that part holds up. But plausibility, I am constantly reminding myself, does not make it so. Was a relatively constant (if relatively low-level) meaningful experience in fact "sometimes present in our past"?

Unfortunately, I have no idea. Presumably Dreyfuss and Kelly did the research on this one, but then again maybe they didn't (yay theme week!). Using just what information I have, however, I can say this: "moments of intense and shared elevation" aren't exactly new, and they aren't exactly newly important, either. The Front Porch Republican who authored this article used only conspicuously modern examples in his list of whooshing-up-type events, but we could very easily add religious ceremonies, civic holidays, ethnic celebrations, and such to the list. And, in fact, politics and sports aren't really that modern in the first place, so the list is misleading even on its own terms. All of these things have been around for quite a while, and I'd be very surprised to learn that as a group they correlate in any way with the plurality of a society. Individual whooshing-up-type events might correlate (positively or negatively) with diversity, sure, but I thought the point was to say that "moments of intense and shared elevation" are more likely in pluralistic than in culturally monochrome societies, and this hypothesis could only be supported by considering the lot of them and not each (or any) specific one on its own.

So why does this seem so plausible, this idea that we've forsaken shared civic whatever in the name of increased sporting thrill? We certainly are more into sports than we used to be, so I think that helps - good ol' confirmation bias! But I also think that this theory (which may not actually be Dreyfuss and Kelly's theory per se) is successful because of what it ignores, namely, the reasons why people don't participate in our democracy. I think there's a name for this bias, too, but at any rate people tend to think of things that do happen (and, accordingly, reasons for things that do happen) more than things that don't happen (and reasons therefor) even though both categories of things are equally important. For instance, when Steve Nash runs the screen and roll with...sigh...Hakim Warrick and gives him a pocket bounce pass for a dunk...



...you notice Nash's court vision and ball control and Warrick's athleticism. What you probably don't notice is the stupid double team by LaMarcus Aldridge (not forcing Nash towards the baseline but instead giving him the angle for the pass) and the poor (read: nonexistent) rotation by Nicolas Batum. While Nash and Warrick's positive qualities certainly are responsible for the success of that play, Aldridge and Batum's screwups are equally responsible because they represent potential defensive responses that never happened. Similarly, I think that the whooshing-up theory, whatever its merits, fails to account for the slew of forces that are discouraging people (especially young people) from being politically active today. Our media is pathetic, our education system doesn't provide a solid basis of knowledge from which to approach political topics, our politicians don't respond to their constituents, and there's a concerted effort on the part of one political party to make voting harder, if not impossible, for many constituencies. None of this, you will note, is directly related to pluralism. (Indirectly, maybe.) Part of the plausibility of the whooshing-up theory, then, likely comes from the fact that it wrongly assumes that there are no social forces that serve to suppress political involvement but rather that our disengagement from politics has happened naturally or on its own.

But, as I said, at least there's something going on here. Dreyfuss and Kelly may not have things exactly right, but at least it sounds like they're moving in the right direction - even if I wouldn't want them as assistant coaches on my NBA team.

Not exactly:

"Most believers...do not come to religion through philosophical arguments. Rather, their belief arises from their personal experiences of a spiritual world of meaning and values, with God as its center.

In the last few years there has emerged another style of atheism that takes such experiences seriously. One of its best exponents is Philip Kitcher, a professor of philosophy at Columbia."

This I find to be tremendously intriguing. Philip Kitcher, philosophy professor, has a way of deconverting people that doesn't rely on philosophical arguments? And Gary Gutting, philosophy professor, is going to tell us all about it? Sure - have at it, gentlemen.

"Instead of focusing on the scientific inadequacy of theistic arguments, Kitcher critically examines the spiritual experiences underlying religious belief, particularly noting that they depend on specific and contingent social and cultural conditions."

Oh, come now. I was promised an approach that would forgo philosophy, not one that would forgo science. Those two things are very different, Gary Gutting.

"Even more important, Kitcher takes seriously the question of whether atheism can replace the sense of meaning and purpose that believers find in religion...First, he offers a refined extension of Plato’s famous dilemma argument in 'Euthyphro' to show that contrary to widespread opinion, theism is not in fact capable of grounding the ethical values that make life worthwhile. Second, to show that secularism is capable of grounding these values, he offers a sophisticated account of how ethics could have evolved as a 'social technology' — a set of optimally designed[*] practices and norms — to satisfy basic human desires."

...

Really? Gutting thinks that Kitcher's method is better because it disregards "philosophical arguments," but also Gutting acknowledges that Kitcher employs the Euthyphro dilemma? Bullshit.

Anyway, aside from the very, very stupid way in which Gutting over-promised on Kitcher's ability to deliver philosophy-free atheism, I want to finish by pointing out the real problem with Kitcher's allegedly more touchy-feely approach. It's not that he doesn't use the big guns - evolution and the problem of evil and all that stuff. For one, he does use some of the big guns: the Euthyphro is not exactly a trifling curiosity. But for another, there are many ways to disprove religious tenets and I, for one, don't really care which one any given atheist uses. The argument from cultural diversity may not have the punch that the problem of evil has, but it's good and I like it. So no, that's not the problem. What's wrong here is that Kitcher isn't really being consistent.

At least if Gutting portrays him correctly, Kitcher wants to address "the sense of meaning and purpose that believers find in religion." So long as he understands the need to address this after having dealt with the question of whether religions are true, I am, again, fine with that. But is this what he actually does? Not insofar as I can see - whether or not "theism is...in fact capable of grounding [ethical] values," people feel like it is.** And, at least according to Gutting, they don't feel that way because of an argument but because of "their personal experiences of a spiritual world." Here we come to the difficulty, because we can see pretty clearly that Kitcher is not meeting believers on their level; rather than offering them another set of experiences of equal if not identical meaningfulness, he's arguing with them. The difficulty, therefore, is this: if Kitcher believes that no arguments will win out over religious experience then he's wasting his own time, because he surely is attempting to have some arguments or other win out over religious experience. I think this is the wrong choice, however, because it relies on a genetic fallacy: just because someone's belief originated outside any rational cognitive process doesn't mean that it can't be changed or overturned using rationality. But if Kitcher admits (as he should) that arguments can have an effect on even the most experience-drive believer, then his position reduces to "your arguments won't work but mine will cause mine are better," which is not terribly convincing or impressive.

Gutting, of course, has not the first clue that any of this is going on, which is really quite depressing and a pretty bad sign for professional philosophy, if you ask me. His only suggested improvement for Kitcher's approach is for him to find a way "of embedding their convictions in secular versions of the religious institutions, rituals and customs that even today remain vital fixtures in our social world," but this only underscores the fact that Kitcher hasn't delivered what he said he would: if he was really going to address experience-based believers on their own terms, he would have provided them with exactly the thing that Gutting says is missing, i.e., experiences. While I don't have anything against that idea (nor, however, do I agree with Gutting that it's something we absolutely need to do), it's a far cry from what Kitcher has actually done and he needs to acknowledge that. I'm fully open to the idea that some philosophy works better than other philosophy when it comes to convincing the masses, but what I refuse to do is to throw the concept of philosophy under the bus just because most people need to come at it from a different angle than the academics whose cloistered view of the discipline has come to define it.

*This, incidentally, is a ludicrous claim.
**The question of whether "secularism" could do the same, at this point, is not even relevant. If I get all the emotional fulfillment I want from a religion, what motivation do I have to look for more, let alone to look for more outside a religion?

Woo! What a great acronym. I can't wait to type that three more times. Aaaaaanyway...

"The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre thought that, without God, our lives are bereft of meaning...A promising and more inclusive approach is offered by Susan Wolf in her recent and compelling book, 'Meaning in Life and Why It Matters.' A meaningful life, she claims, is distinct from a happy life or a morally good one. In her view, 'meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.' A meaningful life must, in some sense then, feel worthwhile. The person living the life must be engaged by it. A life of commitment to causes that are generally defined as worthy — like feeding and clothing the poor or ministering to the ill — but that do not move the person participating in them will lack meaningfulness in this sense. However, for a life to be meaningful, it must also be worthwhile. Engagement in a life of tiddlywinks does not rise to the level of a meaningful life, no matter how gripped one might be by the game."

Todd May, Wolf's reviewer, just so happens to be a philosophy professor, so this sort of thing should be his bread and butter, right? Yeah. You'd think.

"If a life has a trajectory, then it can be conceived narratively. A human life can be seen as a story, or as a series of stories that are more or less related...What makes a trajectory a meaningful one? If Wolf is right, it has to feel worthwhile and, beyond that, has to be engaged in projects that are objectively worthwhile...There is not much difficulty in knowing what feels worthwhile. Most of us are good at sensing when we’re onto something and when we’re not. Objective worthiness is more elusive. We don’t want to reduce it simply to a morally good life, as though a meaningful life were simply an unalienated moral life. Meaningful lives are not so limited and, as we shall see, are sometimes more vexed. So we must ask what lends objective worthiness to a life outside the moral realm. Here is where the narrative character of a life comes into play."

I may be confused here (if so, I blame May's prose), but it seems as though May makes a huge mistake in the middle of this paragraph. Playing along with Wolf, May accurately (if redundantly) describes her position as one whereon a meaningful life "has to feel worthwhile and...has to be engaged in projects that are objectively worthwhile." He discards the first of these criteria as being too boring to warrant his attention, and I'm almost with him there: if you all don't know what it means to have your life feel worthwhile, you need to stop reading internet articles and go find a good therapist. (Seriously, I mean that.) There's more to be said about this, but I'll save it for later. As for the second criterion, May says that we shouldn't "reduce it simply to a morally good life," and that's where I start to get puzzled.

Why, I wonder, should objective worthwhile not just mean objectively morally good? May's answer, evidently, is that such a connection would cast "a meaningful life [as] simply an unalienated moral life," but that's not accurate: "unalienated" is far too weak a word to capture the feeling that one's life is worthwhile. This is very much like the excluded middle fallacy we saw yesterday: there's tons of room between "alienated" and "fulfilled" just like there's tons of room between "in line with the plan" and "against the plan," so it really is puzzling to me that May (or perhaps Wolf) would go out of his (or perhaps her) way to introduce this fallacy. Nor does May's further explanation clear things up:

"There are narrative values expressed by human lives that are not reducible to moral values. Nor are they reducible to happiness; they are not simply matters of subjective feeling. Narrative values are not felt, they are lived. And they constitute their own arena of value, one that has not been generally recognized by philosophers who reflect on life’s meaningfulness."

It is not that I disagree with May/Wolf. There are, unquestionably, narrative values - that is, values that make for good narrative - that are not reducible to moral values. The Joker, just to take one example off the top of my head, is a fucking great character if you're looking for an exciting or innovative or, well, meaningful narrative, but he'd be a fucking terrible character to meet in a dark alley (or a bright alley, or a bright main road, or really anywhere at all). But, um, we're supposed to be talking about what's worthwhile here, not just what's aesthetically pleasing or fruitful, and it seems as though May forgets about that distinction midway through.

True, he tries to recover later by saying that "[a]n evil life, no matter how intense or steadfast, is not one we would want to call meaningful," but this is pretty clearly an attempt to hand-wave a major hole in his (interpretation of Wolf's) position. Yeah, we don't want to admit that evil people can lead compelling lives because of their aesthetically relevant qualities, but the fact is that (some) evil people do lead compelling lives and so are rich in the narrative values that May talks about. Whether or not we want this to be the case is, alas, wholly irrelevant. May actually introduces this fallacy very early on when he defines "objective attractiveness" to mean that which is "generally defined as worthy": no matter what he or Wolf says, we just can't take a vote to decide what's objectively attractive or what objectively has narrative value. Even May himself can't avoid running into this inconvenient fact when he tries to produce some examples:

"An intense life, for instance, can be lived with abandon. One might move from engagement to engagement, or stick with a single engagement, but always (well, often) by diving into it, holding nothing back. One throws oneself into swimming or poetry or community organizing or fundraising, or perhaps all of them at one time or another. Such a life is likely a meaningful one. And this is true even where it might not be an entirely moral one.

We know of people like this, people whose intensity leads them to behavior that we might call morally compromised. Intense lovers can leave bodies in their wake when the embers of love begin to cool. Intense athletes may not be the best of teammates."

Yes, he only lists activities that are probably not evil activities. But this is just a distraction, and a flimsy one at that, because the relevant words and phrases say nothing that might exclude immorality. One can certainly "live with abandon," "diving into" whatever one does and living with "intensity," "holding nothing back," while at the same time being evil. One would simply have to dive into evil, be intensely evil, and so on, all of which are clearly possible for humans, having been accomplished by humans. So this is one gigantic problem with the Wolf/May hypothesis, that meaningfulness does not really exclude significant moral turpitude in the way they claim. At least insofar as I can determine without having read Wolf's book (yay theme week!), the attempt to rescue meaningfulness from the possibility of terrible evil is a total failure.

But there is another, and a more interesting, danger for Wolf. As May attests, in order for us to see the narrative aesthetic value in a human life we must conceive of that life "as a story, or as a series of stories that are more or less related." (That we can apply the same story-seeing mindset to a rock is an interesting way of approaching the alleged objectivity of this whole endeavor but would make too long an aside for an already overlong post. To be discussed in the comments, if anyone cares enough to ask?) At first there appears to be nothing wrong with this - who doesn't already conceive of their life as a story or a series of semi-related stories? But now we have to try to fit this in with Wolf's first criterion for a meaningful life: that life, which we now understand to be conceived as a story or a series of stories, must feel meaningful. This, unfortunately, is much, much harder than it sounds.

Yes, many of us conceive of our lives as stories; yes, many of us feel that our story-lives are meaningful; and, yes, (I am willing to grant for the sake of argument that) many of our lives are meaningful. But that does not mean that our feelings correspond to reality. As I've mentioned before, it can be awfully hard to achieve any real depth of insight into one's own character. Unless our feelings of meaningfulness actually correspond to the meaning in our story-lives, though, this whole thing falls apart: if I feel that my story-life is meaningful in virtue of my steadfastness to my principles but my story-life is actually meaningful in virtue of my adaptability in the face of changing circumstances, for instance, I have not achieved a meaningful life on Wolf's system. The points of failure in so complex a system are myriad, and this point appears to have been lost on May if not on Wolf herself. Should I misidentify the value, I'm done for. The same goes if I should misidentify the story, the connection between the value and the story, and so on. That May (and/or Wolf) overlooked all of this (or again conflated our feelings with reality) makes me think that we would be better off abandoning the first criterion and just saying that our lives have aesthetic meaning whenever they reflect narrative values that produce such meaning.

Especially since meaning in Wolf's sense doesn't come close to matching up either with moral goodness or with happiness, I see no reason why we should be motivated to seek it: when it detracts from our happiness it makes our lives worse, when it detracts from our morality it makes the whole world worse, and the best we can realistically expect from living a meaningful life is to produce some amount of beauty for an audience that doesn't exist and so could never appreciate that beauty. While it is true that at least some of us strive to live beautiful lives, neither Wolf nor May (nor, I expect, anyone else) has given a convincing account of why we should strive for that.

I know that Katie Kieffer doesn't want to see people go hungry or die from tooth infections or anything like that. I know she's not that uncaring. I know that. And I'm not shovin' that aside, y'know, like it don't mean anything.* There are just some days when it's harder to believe, is all.

"If you end up being cornered into accepting unemployment assistance against your free market principles, it will be difficult to maintain your integrity. It is far harder to stand up for the free markets while you are benefiting from the system than it is when you are independent of the system. The longer you stay on government assistance, the easier it will be to justify these benefits for the long-term.

You cannot control the government. You can only control yourself. Make a firm resolution to maintain your integrity while you are unemployed. Use this necessary evil of temporary public assistance as a launch pad to make yourself more financially and intellectually independent than before."

Okay, so this may not sound too bad. Hopefully it does, because it is in reality quite bad,** but maybe it doesn't. So allow me to provide some context.

We are, of course, currently in the midst of a recession, if not a depression. Unemployment - as officially measured - has been above 9% for some time now. Given this, it's reasonable to think that many people who are currently accepting unemployment assistance never thought that they would have to do so; some of these people, in fact, are even despairing with the whole system and adopting instead the all-or-nothing mindset long associated with poor black communities (and long derided by wealthy know-it-all white commentators). This is an important moment for our nation, then, because (as we've seen previously) we Americans often do a poor job of analyzing political possibilities when we fail to imagine the full ramifications of being placed in certain situations. Living in those situations, however, can fix that. If we no longer have to rely on our imaginations but can instead use our actual experiences, we can be surprisingly candid about how much we want the government to do stuff for us. Combined, these facts make for some (relatively) good news: now that more of us are being forced to live in situations we never thought we would live in, more of us can experience firsthand the conditions under which other people have to live all the time and so come to a far more accurate (and so far more politically useful) understanding of those conditions. This is pretty obviously not the best way to develop the empathy required to sustain a diverse modern society - critical thinking and knowledge of the facts would have sufficed - but it'll do in a pinch. Except, that is, unless someone like Kieffer comes in and ruins the process.

Because look at what it is she's trying to do. Her audience, at least in this article, is precisely the group for whom this experience should be a wake-up call: "conservatives and libertarians [who] find themselves without meaningful work [and] feel distressed and mortified at the prospect of accepting temporary government unemployment assistance to get by." Far more than their liberal counterparts, American conservatives and libertarians fail time after time to accurately assess the effects of poverty and unemployment (or just shitty employment). They imagine, to take the most relevant example, that receiving government aid creates a mindset of dependency, and this leads them to believe that the government should give as little aid as is reasonable - or, failing that, no aid at all. But, as Kieffer conveniently demonstrates, their firsthand experience receiving government aid can show them the error of their ways: far from turning them into leeches, being on unemployment makes them "feel distressed and mortified." She could hardly have picked a better example of the way in which we, as a society, should be reacting to the recession. The only problem is, she doesn't want us to react this way. She wants us to react in the exact opposite way.

As she says, conservative people who need the government's help could feel embarrassed by that fact. But she doesn't want them to feel embarrassed. Rather, she counsels conservatives to remember that "you can’t blame yourself" or otherwise feel depressed. Similarly, conservative people who need the government's help could come to see that help as a good thing - cause, y'know, it's preventing them from starving. But Kieffer doesn't want them to feel like it's a good thing, she wants them to feel like it's a "necessary evil." Most incredibly of all, Kieffer suggests that unemployed conservatives adopt the very mindset that conservatives have always attacked poor people for (allegedly) having: one of entitlement borne of perceived oppression. Because the government has already "unjustly appropriate[d] excess taxes, private property rights and free market opportunities from individual citizens" (i.e., have been oppressed), she says, those citizens have a right (are entitled) "to take government assistance."

Consciously or otherwise, then, Kieffer is fighting against the emotional maturation of the United States of America, and she's doing so at every step of the process. Perhaps even worse than that, she's asking us to overrule our own personal experiences in the name of dogma. We cannot feel what we are disposed to feel, her argument goes, because then we will lose our ideological "integrity." But why should any conservative seek to maintain his or her ideological integrity in the face of incontrovertible firsthand evidence that the ideology is false and destructive of human happiness? Kieffer fails to answer this question because she cannot answer it. Indeed, I am beginning to suspect that for many people on the right it is self-evident that one ought to support the conservative ideology, and so the thought never occurs to them that they might need to justify themselves. At any rate, we can only hope that Kieffer's advice falls on deaf ears - or, failing that, is overruled by bruised egos. Because if we can't learn our lesson after seeing the consequences of bad policy in our own homes, we might as well pack it in now.


*Sorry - I got to "I know that" and suddenly this was in my head. Thanks, associative system used by the brain to store and recall memories!
**Don't believe me? Kieffer's main inspiration in writing this post is Ayn motherfucking Rand, of whom Kieffer says that she "lends philosophical clarity to this dilemma." If you are a person for whom Ayn Rand is a helpful source of philosophical guidance, you are in some deep, deep shit.