Rust Belt Philosophy

Pretty much everyone, I suspect, thinks of themselves as good reasoners. Some of them even write blogs conspicuously devoted to the pedantic and obsessive pursuit of sound logical practices. But not everyone who plays this particular game is a winner.

"The creation of auxiliary propositions ad hoc must be done if one does not want to be paralyzed in building models for reality by the exigencies of real world experimentations and observations. Not surprisingly, the history that created [science as we know it] is littered with ad hoc auxiliary propositions."

Steven Brenner, for instance, has not actually found a case of ad hoc reasoning when he says that we must account for "the exigencies of real world experimentations and observations." When we say, for example, that "emeralds are green when examined under [such-and-such a level of] white light," the bit at the end isn't something that we tack on to justify a previous finding. It is, instead, an attempt to make sure that we're asking well-formed questions. Indeed, it would be a fallacy to leave out the thing about white light: without that kind of specifying phrase, there's no really coherent way to interpret "emeralds are green." After all, "emeralds are green" is (in this context) supposed to be a scientifically testable hypothesis - but, just taken on its own, does not even come close to suggesting an appropriate test. Precision, in the scientific context, is not a way of introducing a fallacy but a way of avoiding one.

This same point applies, albeit in a very different way, to Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, who say that

"the major neo-Darwinist problem...is that natural selection, in analogy to artificial selection, depends on the existence of a mythical 'Mother Nature.' But since there is no Mother Nature, 'she is a frail reed for [adaptationists] to lean on. Ditto, the Tooth Fairy; ditto the Great Pumpkin; ditto God. Only agents have minds, and only agents act out of their intentions, and natural selection isn’t an agent.'"

The error here should be obvious: while artificial selectors actually do select things (like, perhaps, childlike features), the image of natural selection is just an image. Nobody actually thinks that nature considers the various traits of certain biological entities, weighs them based on some criterion, and then opts to have only some of those biological entities die (or fail to reproduce). In reality, the idea of natural selection is a complex statistical claim about the long-term effects of persistent survival pressures on changing populations, focusing on the putatively causal relationship between those statistical findings and the changing traits of those populations. (And, again, note that the level of complexity and detail of the claim in question is not one that scientists added on after the fact but one that is essential to the claim belonging to the realm of science in the first place.) Taking evolution to rely on the actual, literal "selection" of some creatures over others by an intentional "Mother Nature" is just trollish.

As has been the case in a large number of recent posts, I cannot help but see this as an attempt to reason with the gut instead of the brain. Brenner, it seems, would require science to explain why emeralds "are" green instead of allowing it to explain that emeralds only look green under certain conditions (and when seen by certain viewers) - or, alternatively, to explain that emeralds are green (in some nontraditional sense), but simply looking at them is a shitty way of testing that. Likewise, Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini have evidently been duped into thinking that the actual science of evolution must be able to live up to the metaphors used to communicate it to the world at large. All of this is about as helpful and productive as denying that electrons have "spin" because they don't actually spin or denying the existence of wormholes because actual worms don't make them, and these sorts of mistakes are why I take it as a tenet of good reasoning that one has to leave one's feelings at the door. If you can't bring yourself to consider the possibility that emeralds aren't green in the way you perceive them to be, or that natural "selection" isn't selection in the sense that you're most familiar with, you should just stay on the sidelines.

So I'm puttering around online yesterday doing some research for this here blog, and I see that there's something called the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance. Sounds promising. Unfortunately, though, the IRFA doesn't appear to have a section for op/eds or position papers, which is where most of my material comes from. But they do have a newsletter containing relevant links, and in the newsletter for this past November 15th I see the following two headlines back-to-back:

• Dolan's Decree: Archdiocese of New York Policy on Same-Sex Marriage
• Jonathan Rauch Asks: Will The Gay Movement Become Tolerant?

And I think, "Well, those sound like plausible source material, let's check them out." So first I look up the Rauch piece, which reads in part:

"Majority status changes the political calculus in a fundamental way, one that requires us to move, and move quickly, to a majority mind-set. How many times have you heard someone say something like, 'What’s the harm in demanding marriage now? Sure, the public may not be ready, but if we don’t insist on marriage, we won’t even get partner benefits.' That’s minority thinking...

Not every religious accommodation is valid, and it’s not always clear where to draw all the lines. But the smart approach is to bend toward accommodation, not away from it, whenever we can live with the costs. Of course, any kind of discrimination exacts a cost, if only to our dignity. Tolerating intolerance is painful. But the Indiana University students who took their cupcake order to another bakery and called for dialogue [instead of suing the bakery that turned them down for being gay] got it exactly right."

Y'know, I'm almost starting to think that dear ol' Dennis isn't paying attention.

"Britain's jobless young people are being sent to work for supermarkets and budget stores for up to two months for no pay and no guarantee of a job, the Guardian can reveal...Young people have told the Guardian that they are doing up to 30 hours a week of unpaid labour and have to be available from 9am to 10pm [or risk being] stripped of their £53-a-week jobseekers allowance."

It's not even a challenge to find counterexamples to Prager's claim that "the rich [don't get] rich through deceitful or violent means." And it's not even a matter of enforcing the law as we understand it, because the law as we understand it is trivially easy for rich people to abuse. For instance:

"For months, major banks have been dealing with the fallout of the 'robo-signing' scandal, following reports that the banks were improperly foreclosing on homeowners and, in many instances, falsifying paperwork that they were submitting to courts. Banks have been forced to go back and re-examine foreclosures to ensure that homeowners did not lose their homes unlawfully...

Back in April, JPMorgan Chase, which was not one of the 10 banks that the OCC examined, agreed to a $56 million settlement over allegations that it had overcharged members of the military on their mortgages."

Fifty-six million dollars is about the amount that JPMorgan Chase's eight top executives earned in cash bonuses alone over the past three years, just to give you a sense of scale. They, however, did not have to contribute a cent to the settlement - and this despite the fact that JPMorgan Chase was one of the banks that received government aid in the form of bailout money.

This, of course, is not the reason why we should raise the top marginal tax rate (and, quite possibly, introduce more tax brackets with still-higher tax rates). It would be clumsy and stupid to say that we have to get at rich people through taxation because our justice system isn't doing it (or because, as in the UK, the law apparently condones short-term slave labor), so this in and of itself does not make for a good reason to raise taxes for the wealthy. Nonetheless, this sort of thing is pretty damning evidence that the Occupy movement has a legitimate complaint. Too much of our society is premised on the squeaky-clean, well-oiled-machine image of capitalism, and we aren't going to make significant progress in fixing what's gone wrong until we face up to the ugly realities that capitalism allows and even encourages.

Richard Garnett sounds like he's got a gripe:

"[I]n the context of new rules, recently proposed by the Obama administration's Department of Health and Human Services, [Obamacare would] require all new insurance plans to cover contraceptives, sterilization and even some abortion-causing drugs...The proposed rules should be scrapped...

Governments should neither require nor penalize religious belief, and they should not meddle in religious disputes or presume to resolve religious questions. Such matters are outside the competence and authority of secular officials."

Even if we don't agree that all religious groups should be allowed e.g. to resolve their own disputes, it shouldn't be too hard to see that it would be a pretty serious violation of our First Amendment if the government did any of the stuff that Garnett says it shouldn't do. At the very least, I certainly don't want the feds doing any of that stuff. But, um. Would they?

Beliefs, much though they may connect to actions, are not actions. A belief regarding the wrongness of contraception, therefore, is not the same as the act of refusing to provide (or pay for) contraception, nor is the act of providing (or paying for) contraception the same as believing that doing so is proper. Whatever actions the government would require or penalize, then, would not be the religious beliefs that Garnett seeks to protect. For very similar reasons, it is simply not the case that the government would "meddle in [a] religious dispute or presume to resolve religious questions." Religious organizations would still be completely free to debate the morality of contraception and so on, and even to decide that providing it would be a violation of their tenets. They just wouldn't be free to decide that they're going to put their tenets ahead of the law - which, surprise!, is exactly what this comes down to for Garnett.

"In addition, governments hoping to make good on Madison's promise will sometimes accommodate religious believers and groups by exempting them from rules and requirements. This sounds like special treatment for religion, and indeed it is."

Logically speaking, nothing else matters in his argument besides this. All that stuff about being able to believe as he wishes and to debate religious tenets on his own terms - though it sounds convincing - is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand. If he believes that special pleading should be enough to win the day for his side, Garnett should quit pretending that he has other interests in mind - and if he doesn't believe that special pleading is enough, he should quit pretending to be interested in the American way of life. There are plenty of theocracies out there already, we just don't need to turn ourselves into one as well.

Normally we're a whole month into the NBA season by now, but thanks to the FUCKING LOCKOUT I won't be seeing my beloved Spurs in action for another 20-odd days. Instead of dwelling on that and grinding my teeth, though, I want to try to deal with it in a constructive way - and, as it happens, Megan Seling has just such a way.

You see, you just can't take the effect and make it the cause.

"God has ordained sexual intercourse as a means for spouses to express their love through a complete gift of self. The intense bond that a husband and wife share through sexual intercourse is meant to unite the spouses and strengthen their relationship, and the love between them can also be fruitful in the conception of a child...Spouses who utilize IVF are foregoing the unity that comes with the complete gift of self during the marital act. The spouses are using their reproductive organs not to achieve unity through a total commitment of love, but they instead are using them as mere instruments in the creation of a child...

Married couples dealing with infertility need to understand the importance of suffering if they want to uphold the plan of God for conjugal love and avoid methods such as in vitro fertilization."

I've seen some pretty callous shit from people before, but this one sits pretty high on the list. "Married couples dealing with infertility" are dealing with infertility and so cannot "uphold the plan of God for conjugal love." It's absolutely sick to beat up on people who already can't have kids biologically by telling them that they're screwing up God's plan by using IVF. For them - at least on this version of "God's plan" - they couldn't have succeeded in the first place! That "God's plan" failed for them is the reason they use IVF, not a consequence of them using IVF. There's also a false dilemma here insofar as these couples almost certainly do also "express their love through a complete gift of self" - i.e., fuck each other - but this stuff about "the importance of suffering" is nauseating.

This is from Townhall, granted, but even then, is a little basic research really too much to ask?

"Americans are the most generous people of any industrial nation. We give more of our time and money than do the Germans, British and Japanese. Note that those states have a bigger public sector than we do. Maybe they feel they gave at the office."

Larry Elder's implication here, I think, is that we are the best of the countries named. But are we? As of 2008, we ranked 19th out of 19 industrialized nations in measures of poverty and life expectancy. That's last place, for those of you who aren't too good at math, and being in last place means that we came in behind "the Germans, British, and Japanese." And hey - maybe that's why we need to be so generous, or something. This doesn't have to be about Elder being wrong (though I think he is). It's just about making sure that people who read this stuff actually have some halfway-decent amount of information - or, as in the next case, making sure that the information they have is actually true.

"Consider that to deal with 'the poor,' the federal government has a vast array of agencies, programs and policies. But only about 30 cents of each dollar designated for the poor actually gets in the hands of the recipient. Contrast this with the United Way, Salvation Army and other private charities where 90 cents of each dollar donated gets to a beneficiary."

According to United Way's own website, 90% of their income does indeed go to something called "Program Expenses" - but that "includes Investor Relations, Community Impact Leadership and Learning, Public Policy, Brand Leadership, Campaign and Public Relations and promotional material sales." Assuming that the Community Impact category is the one that most directly benefits people, the United Way only spent about 28% of its money directly on needy people.* Similarly, the Salvation Army appears to spend somewhere around 16% of its Program Services budget on what it calls Direct Services,** which is a pretty far cry from the 90% that Elder cites.

When did this sort of thing become okay? I have to assume that there was some point in the past at which people had more integrity than to straight-up report false "facts" - or, failing that, at which other people had more integrity than to let them get away with it. But it sure doesn't look like that's the case now, and that's pretty sad. Politics is hard enough on its own, I should think. We just don't need to make it harder by obscuring the facts at every turn.

*Calculation runs as follows: .9*(Community Impact budget)/(Program Expenses budget) = (.9*26541)/(85456) = 0.279...
**And even if other expenses figure into the total amount that "gets in the hands of the recipient," it's nowhere close to 90%: employee salaries and benefits alone run to almost 41% of their budget, so even if they literally gave away every other penny they could only get to about 60%. Then again, some of this goes to things like "worship centers," which are not really in the same category as food stamps no matter how you feel about worship centers generally.

"[I]n order to reject religious faith, an atheist, presumably, must first grasp something of what it entails. That would seem a fairly simple, straightforward condition for being an atheist."

"The belief in God, as I hope any first year theology student would tell you –and this is quite independently of whether you do happen to believe in God or not, I think the point applies both ways– belief in God has very little indeed to do with subscribing to the proposition that there exists somewhere a supreme being. [Similarly,] the doctrine of creation isn’t about that at all. It has nothing whatsoever to do with [the start of the universe]. The New Testament, for example, has almost nothing to say about God the sort of celestial manufacturer...Creation doesn’t concern the manufacture of the universe, and if you want to know what it does concern, then if you’ll approach me later in private, for an extremely modest fee, I’ll let you know."

Lest you think that racism is the only bad thing still floating around, allow me to offer some correction.

"Canadian paint company CIL Paints has launched a paint color collection to appeal to men. The actual colors are the same as previous shades but the names have been changed to be more manly. 'Mo Money' is the new name for 'Fairytale Green.' The paint color 'Lexington Park' is now called 'Dirty Socks.'"

Sorry, but I'm just not real eager to spend my money on a shade of gray called "Dirty Socks." You jackasses.

Also in the category of things I'm not buying, there's this.

"[Edith] Stein points out that motherhood may be rooted in biology, [but] she adds that women can live out their call to motherhood in myriad ways: mentoring, advising, caring, and inspiring. Stein went so far as to say that women should not give up their feminine ethos when they enter male-dominated professions; to do so would leave them profoundly unfulfilled."

I mean, okay: women should not stop "mentoring, advising, caring, and inspiring" as soon as they enter the workplace. But d'you know what? Neither should men! And none of this is because women are "call[ed] to motherhood" (any more than it's because men are "called to" fatherhood): people should mentor, advise, and such at their jobs because that's the right thing to do. This has nothing to do with whether or not a "woman’s body stamps her soul with particular qualities that are common to all women"* - but it sure is telling that some people feel the need to defer to biological determinism in order to justify simply caring about other people.

These may not be quite on the same level as denying women the right to vote (or [allegedly] systematically paying women less than men), but both of these cases show how sexist premises and attitudes continue to make things worse than they need to be, either by introducing new stupidities or by covering up the existence of old ones. I dunno about you, but even with all of my background-level pessimism about humans I feel like we can do better than this.

*Which, bizarrely, is a view that these people claim is not equivalent to "saying that biology is destiny."

Some of you may already have heard about this, but just to catch you all up:

"Mormons oppose abortion, except in extreme cases like rape, incest or where the life of the woman is in danger—and require that church elders be consulted. In 1990...a married mother of four...recounted her own experience after doctors advised her to terminate her pregnancy when she was being treated for a potentially dangerous blood clot. Her bishop got wind of the situation, she wrote, and showed up unannounced at the hospital, warning her sternly not to go forward. The article did not identify [Mitt] Romney as the bishop, but [its publisher] later did."

Sounds pretty disturbing, dunnit? Even speaking as someone who will never have his life put at risk by a pregnancy and will never have his decision-making process deformed by the kind of religious pressure described above, this sort of freaks me out. According to Matthew Schmitz, though, I'm just being an anti-religious bigot.

"Let’s set aside the question of whether or not Romney was sufficiently careful and pastoral in this delicate and difficult situation. The central fact is that whenever one chooses to enter a religious community—as so many Americans do—one precisely does makes one’s personal choices the business of one’s fellow believers. And in many congregations the responsibility for upholding doctrine and faithful practice falls to certain leaders, presumably, in this case, Mitt Romney. What was he supposed to do? Counsel his fellow believer—a believer whose soul had been entrusted to his guidance—to undergo a procedure that would violate the faith they shared?"

Following Schmitz's example, let's set aside the question of whether this woman ever actually chose to enter the Mormon religion. More than likely, she was born into it, which (even for the extremely pro-religion Schmitz) brings up a whole different set of ethical questions - but we're just going to ignore that for now so that we can concentrate on what is indeed "the central" issue here: just how much does one give up in virtue of being part of "a religious community"?

It probably isn't just the privacy of "one's personal choices." Romney probably didn't show up, for instance, when this woman was thinking about buying a Dell laptop as opposed to an Apple laptop. Schmitz therefore probably means something more along the lines of "one's personal choices relevant to the faith they share." Except this doesn't appear to be the case either - at least, not for Mormons. One's political actions are certainly personal in the relevant way and are also the subject of scrutiny in some other religions, but even though Mormons "are urged to be full participants in political, governmental, and community affairs" there doesn't appear to be any point at which a Mormon's political actions (or lack thereof) would earn that person a visit from his or her local enforcer.

So it's not just that all choices will be exposed and scrutinized, or even that all choices that bear on the religion's stated doctrines or preferred practices will be exposed and scrutinized. It seems, in fact, that the only choices that will be exposed and scrutinized are the ones that the religion in question says will be exposed and scrutinized. Even then, though, this says nothing about the lengths to which the representatives of that religion can or should go in order to expose and scrutinize the choices in question. Schmitz, in other words, still has not justified Romney's actions even if we agree that his actions were dictated by his religion because he (Schmitz) still has not demonstrated that Romney's actions did not cross some other line. To draw a comparison, Mormons also forbid the consumption of coffee, but I doubt that even Schmitz would say that Romney would be justified in cutting off a fellow Mormon's hands in order to prevent that person from drinking a latte. As such, even if this woman's (planned) abortion was in some sense Romney's "business," we can still say that he was wrong to show up uninvited to her hospital room and try (forcefully, apparently) to talk her out of it - not, of course, because cutting off someone's hands is the equivalent of coercing them into making a very dangerous decision, but just because we know that there is a limit on behavior that Schmitz has not considered. This is even compatible with Schmitz's claim that Romney (or someone) should know about such decisions and be able to affect them: if the woman sought him out for his advice, it would have been perfectly acceptable for him to counsel her in the way that he did. On at least two levels, then, Schmitz's defense of Romney fails to be specific enough: it doesn't tell us that he was right to act on that particular choice and it doesn't tell us that he was right to act on it in the particular way he did.

Even if we end up agreeing that this woman forfeited her privacy in this case and that Romney's actions were therefore wholly defensible - which I don't think we will, but - it would be important to come to that conclusion for the proper reasons. Following Schmitz's overly simplistic reasoning would suggest that religious leaders have Rights! and that religious followers are, accordingly, little more than serfs (at least, when it comes to religious matters) - and it doesn't take an anti-religious bigot to see why that's not a good idea to promote.

Since today's first post was about some wishful (albeit self-abusive) religious thinking, I think it's only fair that I balance things out in the second post by writing about some wishful economic thinking.

"I wish to ask whether, in an affluent, productive society, we should generally expect income inequality to rise while expecting psychological satisfaction—I’ll call it 'happiness inequality'—to converge...First, an initial point that has been made many times before but cannot be ignored: productivity increases the possibilities for living a life according to your desires rather than according to your needs. Throughout history, as well as throughout the world today, most people have toiled and suffered to produce enough for the necessities of life. Productivity increases create surpluses, and producing a surplus means others can satisfy their needs by partaking in your productivity."

Although I would like to say that this is just wrong because that's the way it comes off, I am sad to say that I cannot do so because I simply am not sure what this guy is trying to say. Here some possibilities:

1. "[P]roductivity increases the possibilities for living a life according to your desires" because productivity multiplies life-plan possibilities without eliminating any, thereby only ever increasing the odds that one will be able to live the life one wants.
2. "[P]roductivity increases the possibilities for living a life according to your desires" because productivity multiplies life-plan possibilities overall even though it also eliminates some, which means that one's odds of being able to live the life one wants are only ever improved by productivity.
3. "[P]roductivity increases the possibilities for living a life according to your desires" because productivity makes it harder for anyone to e.g. starve to death, thus increasing the odds of one being able to do what one wants without e.g. starving to death.

First of all, happy Evacuation Day:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Happy Evacuation Day
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Second, this is depressing.

"What we really want [out of life] is spiritual vibrancy of a lasting kind, and we have become increasingly skeptical that religion can fit in that space...Vibrancy doesn’t come to us through our religious efforts, although discipline, growth and knowledge may. But vibrancy—life within our soul—is the effective work of Jesus...

It is a helpless, empty feeling to know that we do not have the depth required to care for these things, only to try to manufacture those feelings on our own and watch ourselves fall short. This happens because our flesh does not naturally crave service or selflessness."

Lisa Whittle, I think, intends for this to be a message of hope and positivity, but I just can't bring myself to read it that way. For one thing, it's not true, and anything that's supposed to be uplifting but is in fact false automatically fails to be uplifting in my book. It might work to tell children not to worry about their teeth falling out because of the tooth fairy, but I expect adults to have a slightly higher standard when it comes to being cheered up.

Even if Whittle's theory were true, though, it's hard to see why it wouldn't be cause for mourning instead of celebration. It's not even so much the part about how we can't ever be happy on our own. I mean, yeah, that's some depressing, defeatist shit: the thought that all of one's efforts are moot is pretty much never the sort of news that's going to put a smile on one's face. But the really troubling part for me is the part about how we're all doomed to be unhappy (without Jesus) because we're all such terrible people. The idea that I can't really bring myself to care altruistically about my family or friends, that my concern for the environment or the poor or the Iraqis or whatever is actually somehow problematically selfish,* is really insulting and would be incredibly depressing if I were stupid enough to take it seriously. Whittle herself may have gone through a period of severe apathy - which, y'know, only happens to be a pretty standard part of clinical depression - but this is why we can't make conclusions based on a sample size of one: her experience does not stand in for human typicality, nor does any of ours. I'm certainly willing to say that Whittle herself struggles to feel altruistic without imagining the source of that altruism to be a bearded white guy in sandals, but that seems to me to be no more universal than the struggle that some people encounter when they try to orgasm without imagining themselves to be anthropomorphized cartoon animals. It's incredibly sad that some people have convinced themselves - or have had it beaten into their heads by, say, their parents - that they cannot be loving people without first loving an invented deity, but their experience (especially in the face of overwhelming evidence) should hardly be taken as an indicator of what is or isn't possible for people in general.

*In the moral context, there are problematic and then unproblematic kinds of selfishness. I take it that caring about one's family just in order to receive a larger inheritance is problematic, for instance, but even Whittle would likely be hard-pressed to say that it's troubling to care about one's family because one wants to be a good person and believes that caring about one's family is the right thing to do. That kind of selfishness, I think, has to be excused, if not praised and promoted.

Posting will resume as usual tomorrow. In the meantime, here is Arlo Guthrie:

This atheist typology is so awful that I can't even link to it except indirectly:

1. Religious belief has no serious intellectual content at all. It is and always has been little more than superstition, the arguments offered in its defense have always been feeble rationalizations, and its claims are easily refuted.
2. Religious belief does have serious intellectual content, has been developed in interesting and sophisticated ways by philosophers and theologians, and was defensible given the scientific and philosophical knowledge available to previous generations. But advances in science and philosophy have now more or less decisively refuted it. Though we can respect the intelligence of an Aquinas or a Maimonides, we can no longer take their views seriously as live options.

There's actually a third option, and on Feser's blog he explains that there may be more in addition to the three he lists, but I have a very hard time not seeing this as anything other than an intentional effort to create a false choice for skeptics. It is, I think, fairly obvious that a theory can be "little more than superstition" and "developed in interesting and sophisticated ways"; "sophisticated superstition," in other words, is really not a contradiction in terms. What's even worse is that Feser implies that we can't respect the intelligence of any religious believer ever unless we admit at least that religion is only implausible because of "advances in science and philosophy." The game here is simple: he wants to put the onus on skeptics to say which advances have made religion implausible, because then he gets to play defense (all the while holding over our heads the threat of making us out to be disrespectful). (Incidentally, Leah Libresco appears to fall for this false choice hook, line, and sinker - that's her post I'm linking to up there, you can see for yourself.) But why should we play along at all?

For one, it should be clear that having a wrong belief (or even a whole class of wrong beliefs) does not disqualify one from being intelligent. In fact, there are some wrong beliefs that one can come across only by having a relatively high level of intelligence. To make the relevant analogy, Tim Hardaway went oh-for-seventeen in an NBA game, but that doesn't mean he was bad at basketball; in fact, the only way anyone can go oh-for-seventeen in an NBA game is to be pretty damn good at basketball (because otherwise they wouldn't be in the NBA in the first place). There is, therefore, ample ground between options 1 and 2 for skeptics to stake their claims without either being overly deferential or overly dismissive.

Feser's bigger problem, though, is that he thinks that e.g. Christianity could be made rationally plausible "given [different] scientific and philosophical [premises]." Immediately we can question how much he actually believes this, because if he's one of those science-can't-disprove-religion people then he must also commit himself to the idea that science can't prove religion. Even if he really means to talk both about science and philosophy, however, it's incredibly difficult to think up premises that logically imply the truth of any specific religion. Sure, Feser could point to the ontological argument or whatever as a way of proving the existence of some god or other, but which religion do you know of that merely asserts the existence of some god or other? This might well enable Feser to privilege theistic religions over atheistic ones, but, again, he wants to talk about religions - whole entire religions - and not just theism. Here, let me even list out Aquinas's "five ways" proofs, which he seems to find so sophisticated and compelling:

1. Unmoved mover
2. First cause
3. Contingency and necessity
4. Degree and perfection
5. Teleology

Stop the...compilers, I guess!* Libertarians Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch want to regulate the private sector - but only, it seems, because the alternative would be to actually help people.

"Like Tea Party activists, Occupy Wall Street protesters are right to rail against bailouts for big banks and financial institutions that are politically connected. But student loan forgiveness advocates are wrong to perpetuate yet another cycle of bailouts. It’s never right to socialize losses while privatizing gains. That’s what the banks did – they risked their money on stupid investments and then got made whole at the expense of taxpayers."

"Last week, a federal judge in Mississippi sentenced a mother of two named Anita McLemore to three years in federal prison for lying on a government application in order to obtain food stamps...

Compare this court decision to the fraud settlements on Wall Street. Like McLemore, fraud defendants like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank have 'been the beneficiary of government generosity.' Goldman got $12.9 billion just through the AIG bailout. Citigroup got $45 billion, plus hundreds of billions in government guarantees.

All of these companies have been repeatedly dragged into court for fraud, and not one individual defendant has ever been forced to give back anything like a significant portion of his ill-gotten gains. The closest we've come is in a fraud case involving Citi, in which a pair of executives, Gary Crittenden and Arthur Tildesley, were fined the token amounts of $100,000 and $80,000, respectively, for lying to shareholders about the extent of Citi’s debt.

Neither man was forced to admit to intentional fraud. Both got to keep their jobs."

Megyn Kelly, the Fox "News" correspondent who was already semi-famous for hopping on the pregnancy-benefits bandwagon as soon as she herself became pregnant, apparently now thinks that pepper spray is "a food product, essentially." Unsurprisingly, the internet has noticed.

• Mustard gas: it's a hot dog condiment, essentially!
• Homelessness: it's an extended camping trip, essentially!
• The Donner party: just a really cold, outdoor dinner party, essentially!
• Yellow cake uranium is just a dessert, essentially!
• Stonings: they're microdermabrasion, essentially!
• Forest fires: they're tree candles, essentially!

I wonder if this is the best that John Goodman can come up with because of how embarrassing his side has become:

"[W]hat exactly is 'progressivism'?...The progressives [of the 1940s] saw the state as properly involved in almost every aspect of social life. Herbert Croly [1869-1930] envisioned a government that would even regulate who could marry and procreate. In this respect, he reflected the almost universal belief of progressives in eugenics...

One of the ugliest stains on American public policy during the 20th century was the internment of 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II by the Roosevelt Administration. Another stain is the resegregation of the White House under Wilson. Bruce Bartlett argues that these acts were consistent with the personal racial views of the presidents and that the Democratic party has a long history of racial bias it would like to forget...

Bottom line: the next time you hear someone call himself a 'progressive,' ask him if he knows the historical meaning of that term."

Although I give him credit for taking this sophistry one step beyond the usual "party of Lincoln" sleight of hand, Goodman is still a liar for trying to conflate the past with the present. Yes, as a voter who leans heavily towards the Democratic side of the ticket, I'm well aware of the party's history. But d'you know what? I'd much rather vote for a party with a racist, oppressive past than a racist, oppressive present.

Alix Ohlin very nearly gets zombies right. Nearly - but not quite.

"If postwar fiction and popular culture were haunted by the technologies humans had made and the danger that they might backfire and destroy us completely, our own moment’s fears seem to take on a more manageable, face-to-face, if no less terrifying character. We live in an era of rampant overpopulation, ever-increasing consumption, and limited resources, and our monster of choice, today, is the zombie."

Ohlin, being a writer herself, is no stranger to the idea that monsters represent our fears. I just think she's wrong about what we fear, is all.

"[Colson] Whitehead’s main character [in Zone One], Mark Spitz (it’s a post-apocalypse nickname; we never learn his real one), is a descendent of Ben in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the movie that invented the modern zombie. Like Ben, Mark is practical, levelheaded, unsentimental, and unencumbered by family attachments. He doesn’t seem panicked or heartbroken. We are told at great length that he is the most mediocre man in the universe (a B-student all his life, a middling performer in sports and at work) and this mediocrity is, for some reason, responsible for his success as a 'sweeper' — a paramilitary job that involves going into abandoned buildings to flush out any remaining zombies."

As much as overpopulation and overconsumption may be the popular political fears that most cleanly map onto zombie imagery, Ohlin errs in assuming that the relevant fears must be political in nature. What we fear is something much closer to meaninglessness or nihilism, and Ohlin herself provides the evidence for this.

Again, zombies are not monolithic. In her article, Ohlin lists 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, Zombieland, and The Walking Dead as examples of modern zombie lore, but even in those four works we see a wide variety of zombie types and an equally wide variety of attitudes towards consumption and so on. Resident Evil, for example, is a much more classic good-vs.-evil kind of story with nary a word to say about sustainability, and its hero is actually of a piece with the monsters themselves: her super powers, like the zombies themselves, are the result of sinister experiments by the Umbrella Corporation. This, I think, is why Resident Evil is such an anemic (if long-running) franchise: its message is far too simplistic and (in a strange way) naive to find the zombie sweet spot. Yeah, sure, we'd rather have good triumph over evil, but what happens when the two aren't so easily distinguishable? Moreover, which of us can really envision ourselves as the super-powered Alice who runs around dodging lasers and registering headshots mid-backflip? Zombies are indeed more manageable, but that only means something if the fiction in question shows us a way for us to manage them (or, as the case may be, not).

This, of course, is what happens in her other three sources. 28 Days, Zombieland, and Walking Dead all feature normal protagonists - in Ohlin's words, "descendent[s] of Ben in...Night of the Living Dead." Even then, however, there's no consistent anti-consumption narrative at play. The zombies in 28 Days don't eat or even bite anyone. One of the protagonists in Zombieland spends the whole movie looking for a Twinkie. And, of the three, only Walking Dead features any kind of scene that promotes environmentalism by paying homage to the beauty of nature - and, in that scene, a child gets shot. Yes, all three (and Resident Evil) feature discussions about the scarcity of resources, but that's only one point in favor of the anti-consumption narrative and we've already seen several against it. Rather than trying to build a zombie literature framework from one historical case and then heedlessly imposing that framework on everything that follows regardless of the ways in which they differ from the original work, we would be better served to look for the things that all (good) zombie movies have in common.

One of these, as Ohlin observes but does not sufficiently credit, is the way in which zombie heroes are always mediocre but "for some reason" excellent at making their way in the zombified world. 28 Days stars Cillian Murphy as a bicycle courier, Jesse Eisenberg is a college slacker in Zombieland, and the group of protagonists in Walking Dead is composed of normal people (one of whom, perhaps in a nod to 28 Days, is a pizza delivery guy). Indeed, Walking Dead even features a standard "you're getting soft" storyline in order to bring one of them back down to normalcy: two brothers, Merle and Daryl, both appear at first glimpse to be ultra-competent but villainous characters; but while Merle retains both his extraordinary skills and his sadistic racist tendencies, Daryl grows a conscience and finds that this hampers his ability to move smoothly through the zombie world. To do zombie fiction right, you must have a mediocre hero. Everything else depends on this, because the message of the story - in essence, the statement about what we ourselves can or can't do in the face of meaninglessness - cannot apply to us unless we can put ourselves in the protagonist's shoes. 28 Days, like many zombie movies, casts meaninglessness as a temporary state to be escaped with the right cast of allies; Zombieland takes a more absurdist approach, essentially saying that anything goes in a world stripped of purpose; and 28 Days investigates a whole wealth of potential sources of durable meaning, including (but not limited to) familial love, romantic love, optimism about the future, familial or simply moral obligation, and divine inspiration. But they're only capable of doing this because their heroes lack the rather excessive powers of someone like Resident Evil's Alice: unlike her, none of us cannot escape our condition through superhuman means.

Although the human characters in zombie literature share a certain mundane nature that, at least thinking logically, should disqualify them from being zombie heroes in the first place, that tells us nothing about the monsters themselves. As we've already seen, though, zombies aren't consistent in the ways that we are apt to think. They don't always consume, they aren't always symbols of overpopulation, and they don't need to represent us. They do, however, always destroy. They are always (at least seemingly) never-ending. And they are always unrelenting. Although this may seem perfectly consistent with the anti-consumption thesis, it's important to note that consumption-related fears end in apocalyptic destruction but zombie fears are far more Sisyphean: zombies, it very much seems, are not scary because of the way that they suggest that things will end. Rather, they scare us because of the way that they suggest that things will continue to be. Zombies, in other words, are more like entropy or Jen Fulwiler's misinformed atheistic nihilism than they are like any political fear you care to name. Far from any concern about global warming or water shortages in third-world countries, we zombie fans tend to worry that our lives and our efforts are spent on nothing - that our houses will crumble, that our loved ones will die, that all human beauty will be erased from the world.

And, really, why would we not? As I suggested the last time we did this, a lot of us spend four years in college making ourselves smarter, more capable, more moral people and then end up working dead-end jobs and living in debt - and that's if we find work at all. We don't necessarily want for material stuff or worry about the source of our next meal - although more of us do so than conservatives would have you believe - but I'm fairly certain that we all worry about making a life for ourselves. If any anti-consumption message exists in zombie fiction, then, I would think that it is this one: stop trying to sell us shit to make us happier, cause it ain't working. The OWS protests are significantly youth-driven - you don't think that those people feel the need to do something with their lives? Nobody would sign up to sleep on a sidewalk in late November and risk getting pepper-sprayed and/or beaten by police unless they believed in what they were doing. And do you know what the single most common complaint has been among my friends and acquaintances upon entering the working world? They don't know how not to work. Those of us who have managed to land office-type jobs have all had to figure out how to look busy for eight hours despite only having maybe five or six hours of work on any given day. You don't think that we don't find that to be slightly disheartening? We want to make the world a better place and we expect that our work will go towards that end. When we instead see things getting worse, it's hard for us not to feel like we're a little bit at sea (on which, see also LOST).

The concern here, I think, is not that we are all exceptional people who could change the whole world if given the opportunity. Again, superpowers are not the answer to the zombie conundrum. This, so far as I can tell, is supported by the current crop of super hero movies: although all the heroes therein are extraordinary, it's not their extraordinariness that makes them heroes. Rather, it's their willingness to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others (Batman, Captain America) or their coming to understand their own limits and role (Thor) or their rejection of the profit motive in favor of a more noble calling (Iron Man). This is also why zombie heroes can get away with being mediocre: we don't look to them for answers because of their skills but because of their virtues, because as we now know (all too well) skills alone are not enough to obtain a desirable outcome.

Only this pattern allows for subversions of the standard zombie storyline in which the protagonists aren't virtuous or in which their virtues are (as in the real world) insufficient to effect meaningful change, such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road or Whitehead's Zone One (remember him? the guy who wrote this book in the first place?). Eventually this hits home and Ohlin figures out that Zone One is about personal disenchantment and frustration rather than political or ecological crisis:

"Zone One becomes a study in anomie, examining what happens when love, family, ambition, and even fear have lost their power to propel. Zombies are the perfect incarnation of this affective state, offering the lingering nightmare of secular apocalypse without the saving moral grace of revelation...After all, New York is never what we dreamed it was going to be when we were young, and the zombie apocalypse is just another teacher of that hard lesson."

There are, of course, still political and ecological crises around, and it's not surprising that so many people still think that zombies are our response to such crises. But the bigger problem is that - thanks to a broken economy, dysfunctional politics, seemingly unstoppable corporate greed, and, it must be said, a diminishing of religious faith - we no longer feel certain that we can meet these crises. For zombie fans, our great war is a spiritual war, because we find that our ability to fight for what we believe is being taken from us at every turn. If that kind of frustration isn't enough to make you want to bash somebody's head in with a baseball bat, I don't know what will.

Sigh:

Neuroscience has failed to develop an effective chemical antidepressant! Neuroscience can't tell us why we're sad! Neuroscience isn't what we need to understand the brain! You know, just like physics isn't what we need to understand clouds:

"Think about the cloud. The water evaporates from the sea... and it moves up. And the thought is that this water should have spread uniformly over the sky. And yet somehow it doesn't quite. The water vapor actually coalesces into discrete clouds. Now why is that? How come the humidity inside the cloud is 100 percent and right next to it, it is practically zero? How come we don't know the answer to that?"

Cause, y'know, it doesn't matter that it's only been fifty years since we figured out squid neurons, or that using chemicals to treat depression may well be like trying to debug a computer program with a soldering iron, or that there actually are effective physical treatments for psychological conditions. Clearly, if we don't currently know something about the way that something in the world works then that thing must be outside the realm of science altogether. And this, of course, is why we have to accept cloud exceptionalism.

As a fiction writer, I like GK Chesteron - heck, I even use a quote from one of his short stories as the signature on my personal email account. As a philosopher, however, he sort of makes me sick to my stomach.

"Chesterton’s view of women is not that they are chattel but that they are queens of their own realm. Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of monomaniacs.

The Distributist ideal is that the home is the most important place in the world. Every man should have his own piece of property, a place to build his own home, to raise his family, to do all the important things from birth to death: eating, singing, celebrating, reading, writing, arguing, story-telling, laughing, crying, praying. The home is above all a sanctuary of creativity. Creativity is our most Godlike quality. We not only make things, we make things in our own image. The family is one of those things. But so is the picture on the wall and the rug on the floor. The home is the place of complete freedom, where we may have a picnic on the roof and even drink directly from the milk carton."

That second paragraph doesn't sound so bad, right? But that first one, well...it more than makes up for it. Keeping women at home as a policy is fucked up no matter what the reason, of course, but it sure doesn't help when the reason is as patronizing and ignorant as protecting women from "the world outside the home." In the bioethics field we call this sort of thing "paternalism," and as Chesteron demonstrates it's no mistake that the word "paternalism" has masculine etymological roots.

As with CS Lewis, however, the dangerous part of Chesteron is not the part that we know recognize as being obviously wrong but the part that we might be able to accept. In this case, that's the second paragraph - that is, that stuff about home being "a sanctuary of creativity" and "complete freedom" and stuff. This is not to say that the first paragraph is irrelevant or anything, but if that's the cultural battle that his followers want to fight then they've already lost; Dale Ahlquist can pine all he wants for the good ol' days when men could "shelter" women from the harsh world by locking them indoors, but the mass culture is just not going to go back there. And though the two paragraphs are, of course, related - note how the home is "his" own piece of property - there are still serious problems with Chesterton's "Distributism" even after we strip the misogyny in the first paragraph out of the second.

To start, the only way to make home "the most importance place in the world" is to define it to be so, and such definitions are never as safe as they may initially seem. For example: if we take it as axiomatic that home is more important than any other place and we come across a conflict between our home life and some other part of our life, we will be led to think that we should choose in favor of our home life regardless of what the other part of the conflict is. A significant - huge, really - problem with Distributism is, therefore, its propensity to discourage moral action by closing off one's mind to the problems that lie beyond one's front door. A second problem is that we cannot even trust ourselves to be completely free within our homes, least of all if we have families. To think that one can build the world entirely in one's image is, as Ahlquist suggests, to think of oneself as a god, and that's a pretty maniacal kind of belief to have. (Ahlquist, strangely, seems utterly oblivious to this.) For one, we are often really bad at identifying the people who will be affected by our decisions. To list a really trivial example, playing your favorite music at full blast is probably not going to go over well with your neighbors. Less trivially, it might seem harmless to fill one's home with consumer electronics - say, I guess, because one conceives of oneself as a very high-tech sort of deity - but those devices are almost all built in horrific conditions by badly oppressed workers. However important it may be for you to watch the football game on a screen too large to see all at once from your couch, it's ludicrous to think that it's not more important for (say) Chinese factory laborers to have reasonable working conditions. In making this point I don't mean to say that we can't have nice things, but I sure as hell do mean to say that we can't justify having nice things by claiming that we get to do whatever we want in our homes because our homes are our sanctuaries or whatever. Most of all, we should be incredibly wary of Chesterton's idea that every person has the prerogative to make their family in their own image. Especially given the way in which Distributism evidently tries to seal off people's homes from the rest of the world (as though people's homes weren't a part of the rest of the world), it's tempting to just say that the way in which people raise their children is their own business (with, maybe, some exceptions at the extremes). But even if we want to say e.g. that the government shouldn't intrude on family-raising activities - which, in fact, we may not want to say - that absolutely does not mean that there are no other kinds of constraints that should stop people from behaving a certain way towards their families. Just having a child, in other words, is not in and of itself sufficient justification to form that child in one's own image.

Like Lewisian philosophers, then, Chestertonians tend to not say what they mean. When Ahlquist says that home should be the most important place in the world, what he means is: I would like to be excused for acting only in my own interests and the interests of those I deign to be my people even though others may need my help more. Similarly, when he says that the home should be a sanctuary, he means: I would like to have complete authority within the walls of my house no matter how I choose to exercise that authority. There's nothing wrong with loving one's home and trying to make it the most comfortable, safest place in the world for one and one's family, but there most certainly is something wrong with using the allure of home to cover up bad behavior or excuse bad thinking.

Oooh - you were so close, Barton Hinkle!

"Not enough people exercise their right to vote. Problem, right? Well, William Galston of the Brookings Institution has a solution: Force them to. The other day he took to the pages of The New York Times to explain why we should be 'Telling Americans to Vote, or Else.' (It doesn't seem to have occurred to Galston that making people exercise a right takes that right away, by turning it into an obligation.)"