All Those in Favor of Personal Responsibility, Raise Your Invisible Hand

Over at Mad Melancholic Feminista, my fairy blog mother Aspazia has an amazing post about health care, women, and class. It is well worth a read. As a good philosopher, I will respond by completely ignoring the point of her discussion and taking off on a complete throw away line she tosses in. She makes a reference to the "personal responsibility crowd" and I responded with a half-cryptic comment that I think deserves to be filled out.

The idea is that when conservatives use the phrase "personal responsibility" they don't mean personal responsibility. It is dog whistle politics. It means something else, it is a code word that they understand. What they are really saying when they use the phrase "personal responsibility" is that all sociological factors must be ignored in policy discussions. Any social forces that produce predictable regularities in a given population are sheer accidents. The only thing you look at when explaining why someone acted the way they did is personal choice. "Personal responsibility" is meant to convey to the listener that agents are fully and completly culpable for their actions because there are no external influences to be discussed.

The politics of personal responsibility is a reaction. Sociology was founded in the 19th century by people who were trying to expand the fields of psychology and economics -- which themselves were still well in the early phases of being treated scientifically. Physics envy among those interested in looking at people-related phenomena led them to model the human sciences on Newtonian physics. In the 18th century, Newton's gravitational action at a distance would be taken over as Smith's invisible hand. Just as physical forces guided a planet in its orbit, so economic forces would guide rational people in their fiscal dealings. In the 19th century, this would be expanded beyond labor/currency questions to social properties more generally. We can observe, put forward hypotheses, and test statistical regularities in the same inductive way and expect there to be invisible social forces that guide things like class, education, unemployment, criminality,...

The founding fathers of sociology were not disinterested students, but were social reformers as well. They wanted to know how society worked so that they could help improve it. Since those early days, the left has been fascinated with the ways in which social forces play into social ills and the ways in which that structure could be remolded to make it more equitable. The idea of social progress through social engineering (back when that wasn't a dirty phrase) has remained a hallmark of the approach to society's problems from the left.

In the US, this hit its zenith during the civil rights movement. It was undeniable that American society was set in a way to at least disadvantage, at most completely disenfranchise a subpopulation. The social structure was clearly unfair and for justice to be done, the structure itself needed changing. The left succeeded to such a degree that even Elvis was singing "In the Ghetto." LBJ's "Great Society" promised/threatened to be a new "New Deal." White guilt allowed for progress in rehemming the American social fabric.

But white guilt has a short shelf life. In the Reagan 80's, it lost its potency amongst those in the middle and Reagan played this like a virtuoso. Personal responsibility became a buzzword that meant, "Sociology does not exist. The structure of society is irrelevant. We are not making anymore changes. Don't even look to see if there are advantages and disadvantages. They do not exist. We are not listening. Lalalalalalalala. I can't hear you. Oh, say, can you see..." It was a full on backlash against addressing social ills by changing sociological factors. You are to look at the individual and that is all. Nothing else matters. People are not pre-disposed by their circumstances, they act in complete freedom. (Yeah, there's something like this on the left of the early 20th century amongst the existentialists). They make this move, of course, because reshaping society means social programs which are tax funded.

Have some on the left taken it too far and downplayed the agency of the individual? Sure, but by in large most on the left are more than happy to say that individuals bear some responsibility for their actions. Liberals do not deny that people are responsible for their actions, but just because people bear some responsibility does not mean that society as a whole does not bear some as well. If my brother and I hold up a 7-11, I am not innocent because he is guilty. But if this is true, then we are responsible for helping bring about the changes needed to make these sorts of things less likely. And that may mean surrendering some unearned privileges. And this is exactly what those pushing the personal responsibility line do not even want on the table.

The irony, of course, is that these privileges are the bouncing baby boy of Adam Smith's invisible hand. The market forces to which those folks defer at every step were simply extended beyond the economy. But when the move was seen as disadvantageous, they simply refused to say, "Like father, like son."

PTSD and Normality

In last week's discussion of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, MT made an interesting statement,

What especially makes distant times and cultures seem unfathomable to me is that what I count as "trauma" begins there as a child, and even the concept of what childhood is for and about may differ (even for a time and place so near as the coal-mining regions of the U.S. before child labor was abolished...or growing up nowadays in crack-ridden urban gang warfare zones). I suppose it's hard for something to get noticed as a syndrome when it applies to whole classes of people.

This touched on some thoughts that I myself have been having about PTSD.

We do take very much for granted the ease and lack of danger of contemporary life. Our personal sense of history tends to go back three generations. One's grandparents' time is likely the farthest back one gets a sense of and anything that has been constant over three generations intuitively appears to have always been the case. But life outside of the last three generations in the Western world is quite different. Statistics about infant mortality just 100 years ago are stunning. MT is right that our sense of trauma is one that comes from a staggering degree of comfort and security.

Add to this the fact that in the state of nature, we are from somewhere in the middle of the food chain. We were not the top predator, we were prey. Our psychological capacities came about quite recently in an evolutionary time frame. While I have concerns about certain claims by folks playing in evolutionary psychology, there is no doubt that mind has an ineliminable biological component that is the result of selection pressures. Our psyche, deep down, is that of the hunted. Hobbes was right that life in the state of nature was "solitary, nasty, brutish, and short" (I once had a blind date with a woman like that). Since our biology is in part derives from our place in the state of nature, is, as MT suggests, PTSD natural?

I do not mean natural in a normative sense in which natural is good and ought not be tampered with or prevented. Rather, I mean it in the sense that farming is not natural, we take land and we get from it more than would naturally be produced by it. We remove what would naturally be growing there, plant what we want, keep out weeds that would otherwise grow there naturally, augment the nutrients in the soil beyond what would normally be there, add water beyond rainfall,... I have to work very hard to keep my garden from reverting back to its natural state. I may work with nature to some degree in trying to grow organic vegetables, but there is no doubt that I am working against nature as well. In the same way as we cultivate land, we seem to cultivate minds in the way we structure society and perhaps PTSD is a type of weed that occupies a particular niche in the cerebral ecosystem of the psyche of a hunted species.

PTSD seesm to be the result of rewiring certain parts of the brain by experience. Such an encoding mechanism would make sense in learning to avoid dangers. But this is exactly what worries me. It was not as if some infectious agent had invaded my grandfather's body and we just needed the proper drug regimen to ward it off. It was his own body he was fighting. Websites like this one from the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health seem to aim for what my grandfather experienced as a best case scenario. He was able to go on to live a normal life despite the PTSD that haunted him until his last moments. If this is the case, and PTSD is something that must be lived with and not cured, then we must come to grips with the real human costs of our social choices -- not only war, especially wars of choice, but also social and economic injustice as MT points out. Unfair labor laws and unsafe neighborhoods can have lasting effects. If Hobbes was right that morality is what takes us out of the state of nature, then we seem to be ethically bound to be vigilant in creating a civilized world where as few people as possible live lives afflicted by trauma.

The War on Comedy

If you have not read them, see these posts for an introduction to Comedism, the new religion; passages from The Comedist Manifesto, our holy book; Comedist support for evolution and gay marriage; and how Comedism was founded.

This week's sermon: The War on Comedy

Fellow Comedists,

While we work to spead our message of joy and laughter across the planet, there are dark, unfunny forces opposing us. Yes, there is a war on comedy. But we cannot let them win. We must be vigilant in doing the work of the Cosmic Comic. We will prevail.

It is not the secularists we are worried about, no, they tend to be a pretty funny lot by in large. No, the war on comedy is being waged by the fundamentalists. Don't let the "fun" part fool you friends, there is nothing fun about the war they are waging against us.

The central concept in Comedism is the joke. Think about how jokes work. There are two parts to a joke. First comes the set up that makes you think about some situation in a particular way. A chicken crosses the road; the Pope, a rabbi, and a Viagra salesman walk into a bar..., some possible world is sketched for you, a scene that you think you understand.

Then comes the punchline -- "to get to the other side" or "well, at least my beer is no longer flat." What makes the punchline funny is the incongruity that it forces upon you. You now must make sense of the situation from the set-up in a completely different way. The humor exists in that moment when your brain is struggling to make sense of the two completely different competing scenarios. For a joke to be a joke, there must be more than one way to look at the world.

And that is the central belief of Comedism. There are always different ways to look at reality. The world is a multi-faceted place and it is the appreciation of these distinct perspectives, even ones that seem irreconsilable, that makes life rich, interesting, and most of all, funny.

But this is exactly what the fundamentalists of all stripes deny. They think there is one truth and one truth only...and they think that they alone have it. They do not even allow the possibility that there are multiple ways to understand reality. This is why fundamentalists are not funny and why they have declared a war on Comedy.

But we will not stand by and let them try to eliminate humor, joy, and laughter. No. We must be funny. And so I will leave you with this joke:

Sol Rosenberg dies and his soul appears before the pearly gates. There was a book and behind the book stood Saint Peter. "Oh no," Sol wails, "All this time I was a good Jew and now this happens. Just my luck." "Calm down, Sol," Peter says, "All that really matters is that you have lived a good and caring life, and you have, so I am pleased to welcome you into heaven." "Thank you so much," Sol replies.

St. Peter leads Sol down a long hallway with many, many doors. "Excuse me for asking," says Sol, "but what are all of these doors for?" St. Peter explained that each door led to a different room in heaven and that each religion had their own room.

"Which one is this?" asked Sol. "That is for Catholics," St. Peter said. "I hate to ask," said Sol, "but my son married a Catholic and his in-laws were such lovely people before they passed away. Would you mind if I just said hello?" "Of course not," said St. Peter.

After a few minutes, Sol emerged and they continued down the hall. "And what door is that?" asked Sol. "That is the atheist room." "I feel terrible for asking, but when I had my shop, the fellow next to me was an atheist, and..." "Please," said "St. Peter, motioning towards the door, "It is no problem at all."

After greeting his friend, Sol and St. Peter continued down the hallway. After a little while, St. Peter stopped Sol and motioned for him to be quiet and walk very softly. "We must not make a sound," St. Peter whispered. The crept slowly and silently along until they stopped in front of a door down the way. "Here you go, welcome to the Jewish heaven," said St. Peter. "Thank you very much," said Sol, "but I must ask. Why did we have to be so quiet when passing that one door?" St. Peter rolled his eyes and said, "That's the fundamentalists, they think they're the only ones up here."

PTSD: What About the Children?

My grandfather, with whom I was very, very close passed away from cancer while I was in graduate school. I was very fortunate that he lived only minutes from Johns Hopkins where I was finishing my dissertation and that his last couple of weeks were clearly his last couple of weeks, so that I and the family as a whole could be with him.

He had lived a full life: raising a family, running a business, raising orchids and making bonsai trees, kibitzing with everyone he met. But the defining time of his life had been World War II, during which he had been a paratrooper in the 82nd airborn, jumping behind the enemy lines before D-Day. As a teenager, I would mow my grandparents lawn and then sit with him for hours listening to old Yiddish jokes, arguing politics, and hearing the war stories. He always made sure that I knew that it was the convicts, colorful criminals with off-color pasts, let out of jail so they could serve in this unit that brought him home alive. And though it remained unsaid, it was always clear that in some indirect way I owed my existence to these people I was very lucky not to have had to associate with. Big Boy Buchanon, Jimmy D, the whole cast of them led to stories that might have been left on the editing room floor after shooting the Dirty Dozen. They were exciting, they were funny, they were poignant. Those were Pop Pop's stories and I heard them all countless times.

But when he was dying -- it was the cigars, not the Nazis that finally got him -- even though he was surrounded by the people he loved most in the world, it was the war that commanded his attention with a ferocity I had never experienced. My parents, my brother and his fiance, my soon to be wife, my aunt and uncle, all my cousins, we all sat with him up in his bedroom; but in his last two days he drifted back to Europe and the war. Sometimes it was hallucinatory, other times he knew he was in his bedroom, but he couldn't pull his mind off of the war. I saw in my grandfather's face something I had never seen before, fear. Beyond fear, it was true horror. And he would not talk about it. I tried for two days, hoping that describing it would exorcise it from his spirit. His agony was not from the disease of his body, but something in his mind. It was so painful to see my beloved Pop Pop in this anguish that I gladly would have taken the burden. But he would not speak. He would not dare expose me to whatever it was. His last act on Earth would be to protect his loved ones from his deepest demons the way he had protected the country decades before.

I will never know the particulars of it, but I know full well what it was. It was post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. In America, we think of the homeless Viet Nam vet mumbling to himself when we think of the problem. It is a soldier's ailment; a sad, but necessary part of defending larger abstract principles. But that is wrong. In our comfortbale lives, it is only our military who are most often exposed to the sort of trauma that gives rise to the disease.

And this underlying assumption about PTSD came out last week when we had Pacifica radio correspondant and author Aaron Glantz on campus for a talk (please read his book How America Lost Iraq.) He is a very insightful person who has spent much time in Iraq as an unimbedded reporter seeing first hand what real life is like for real people in Iraq. As several of us sat and chatted, someone mentioned one of the lingering costs of the war being returning troops with PTSD. His response was to look curiously and say that, yes, many of our soldiers will likely come back with it, but did we not realize that we are leaving an entire nation with it.

Much of the entire current generation of children in Iraq right now will have the same time bomb planted in their minds that my grandfather had. And it is not only Iraqis: children in Sudan, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, wherever the tragedy of war is allowed to exist. They will be able, most of them, if their political, social, and economic situation allows, to grow up and function, but the trauma of their past will never leave them. There is no closure or any other pop psychology notion that can be brought in here to smooth the edges -- their minds, souls, spirits have been unalterably affected. That change will incapacitate some, but for others will be more dormant, but still present.

Our two oceans are such an incredible luxury for us. It keeps us at a comfortable distance from most of the rest of the world so that the suffering need only be observed from our living rooms between game shows and sitcoms. But that suffering does not end when the cause is mitigated. PTSD is not just for soldiers. Political decisions have lasting human consequences with very long half-lives.

Science, Society, and Lingerie

Two very interesting studies out to show that the naive version of the nature/nurture distinction has no place whatsoever in discussions of human sexuality:

Echidne of the Snakes discusses a University of Chicago study comparing the relative happiness in one's sex life with the relative status of women in one's culture. They found -- surprise, surprise --

Sex is more satisfying in countries where women and men are considered equal, according to an international study of people between the ages of 40 and 80 by researchers at the University of Chicago. Austria topped the list of 29 nations studied with 71% of those surveyed reported being satisfied with their sex lives. Spain, Canada, Belgium and the United States also reported high rates of satisfaction. The lowest satisfaction rate - 25.7% - was reported in Japan. The study was led by sociologist Edward Laumann, considered a top authority on the sociology of sex, who believes the findings show that relationships based on equality lead to more satisfaction for both genders.

As an entrant in the "obvious truth of the year" contest, we have Professor Laumann who summed up his findings with the old chestnut, "When mama's not happy, nobody's happy." Social structures influencing satisfaction with that part of life that ought to be the source of joy, passion, and intimacy...who would have thought?

The other study, blogged over at Goldbricker in her usual insightful and snarky fashion, was recently published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. This study demonstrates that men shown images of attractive women and lingerie are more likely to act irrationally. Subjects who were exposed to the images while engaged in a financial game were more likely to enter into unfair deals than those in the control group. Challenging Professor Laumann for "obvious truth of the year," are the researchers of the University of Leuvan with,

The suggestion is that the sexual cues distract the men's thoughts, preventing them from focusing on their task - particularly among those with high natural testosterone levels.

At the press conference, the lead researcher was quoted as saying,

These finding are preliminary, but certainly suggest a statistically significant relat... hey, who is she? I wonder if she's Austrian...

And in response to the obvious next question,

The researchers are conducting similar tests with women. But so far, they have failed to find a visual stimulus which will affect their behaviour."

Green Beret? Red Herring.

A dozen retired Generals have called for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. The President continues to insist he's done a heckofa job and stand by one of the architects of the incredibly successful plan to invade Iraq and disband the Iraqi Army, leaving trained military forces, angry, recently, and unemployed, while leaving depots full of military-grade explosives unguarded. The call for a Secretary of Defense's ouster by formerly high ranking military insiders during wartime is almost unprecedented. It is a big deal. So how does the administration respond?

The President got two questions about it yesterday at his press conference announcing his new chief of OMB and sounded quite testy, on the verge of throwing a fit. The transcript does not do it justice, you have to listen to the audio.

Rumsfeld himself held a press conference yesterday at which he laid out his successes as Secretary of Defense, including those from the Ford administration, but assiduously avoiding mentions of Iraq. He contended that the generals were really just upset about the changes he wanted to bring to the military and characterized the generals position as one of a normal disagreement that people have all the time.

But today, we saw the next phase. Yesterday, Rumsfeld met with a standing group of retired generals who meet regularly with the Secretary before going off to do press interviews. They get a briefing at the Pentagon and receive their talking points for the week's news programs. We got an inside look at them this morning from retired Major General Robert H. Scales who was interviewed on Morning Edition this morning by Steve Innskeep.

We see from both Rumsfeld and Scales the three main moves that they are using to deflect the real discussion instead of legitimately answer it. (1) Red herring -- don't actually talk about the major blunders in Iraq, change the subject, (2) Strawman -- instead of dealing with the actual argument put forward by his detractors, claim that their really beef lies somewhere else and that it is trivial, (3) Ad hominem -- give caricatures of the dissenting generals as whiny, back-stabbing cry babies who are really acting out of sour grapes.

The question of Rumsfeld's performance and the accusations of incompetence by the generals is a major topic. But in response, Scales takes the conversation in a different direction. What we talked about wasn't the past, it's the future.

Specifically the issue we had for him was, "What's the next big thing in Iraq? What should the American people be looking forward to as a sign of progress? Is there a signpost or is there something along the way in the next few months that will give the American people confidence that this war is going in the right direction?" And the answer, curiously Steve, was that he responded it was the formation of a government. He made the point, which I think is probably valid, that this is much more political than it is military right now. And a lot of the confidence of the American people, and also the Iraqi people, rests on the ability of Iraqi parliament to get its act together.

Notice what just happened. Instead of addressing the actual concerns about whether the prosecution of the war has been marked with incompetence, Scales changed the subject to what would be good news to look for in the future. Admire the rhetorical power of this move. First, it takes you away from the errors of the past which are real and puts you into the fantasyland of your hopes for the future. Something that is not real and hence cannot be challenged on any factual basis. But it also is a fantastic emotional jujitsu. You were concerned with the incompetence concerning the leadership of the war effort because you really care about the country and the troops. But now by looking backwards instead of forward and in playing the blame game, you are neglecting the war and the troops. If you really cared about them, you would forget about what we did or didn't do for them and just help us envision the future. Nothing could be more uncaring than caring. National security demands forgetting about what we did to national security.

But not only that, the herring gets redder when you realize that the move was to take us completely away from the war at all. Progress in the war comes from political progress in the Iraqi parliament. If you want to see how well the war is going, look somewhere other than the war. This is the logical version of "your shoe is untied."

When Innskeep gently tried to call the general on Rumsfeld's strawman reconstruction of the generals' objections, suggesting that there might be actual reasons why the generals were making their voices heard other than a desire to avoid change, we got a new direction.

Well, certainly, the Secretary has been an instrument of change. I don't think any of us doubt that, but I'd also contend that the change in the Army began before he came on the scene. Many of us who were involved in what's commonly referred to as transformation began out efforts in the mid-90's after the first Gulf War in an effort to do what Mr. Rumsfeld continued to do when he came into office which was to build a streamlined Army, to build an Army built around brigades rather than of divisions, to build an Army that was capable of projecting itself into distant, very remote places in various corners of the world. This was something that we've all bucked. Those of us wear a green uniform have been engaged in for over a decade.

So, again, let's avoid the real question about competence in Iraq and make it about a trivial issue.

But there's one more subtle point in there that warrants pointing out, the "green uniform" comment. One undertone to the characterization of the generals as whiners is the claim that they are angry because thy are Marines and they perceive a bias on Rumsfeld's part towards the Army and its special forces instead of the Marine Corp. The dig that we in green have been doing this for over a decade, is a subtle backhand slap at Gen. Zinni and company. Pure ad hominem.

When Innskeep once again tried to get Scales to reply to the actual claims of the generals, we got the whipped cream on top.

I don't want to speculate on where the concerns are. I think the consensus among the group was as follows: this is not about Mr. Rumsfeld, this is not about disgruntled generals, it's really about what's in the national interest. That's where our focus was, Steve. The real question is to get on with the war, to look forward instead of backward, and to figure out where we're going. To establish a secure Iraq defined by a free market economy, representative democracy, and most of all security. And most of the discussion back and forth between us wasn't about his past record, but was questions from him about where we should be going in the future.

How to deal with actual concerns? Say that even discussing them would be "speculation." Clearly, to speculate would be irresponsible, so there is no sense in actually dealing with the real charges at all. Cute. We'll just call the generals "disgruntled" a label that doesn't address their concerns, but lets you the listener know that you shouldn't even consider what they have to say.
Then we get that phrase "the real question is." I train my critical thinking students to be on the look out for this varmint. Any time you see it, odds are you are looking at a red herring. The reason someone is telling you what the real question is, is because they don't like the actual real question and want to change what it is you are talking about. And what is the real question? The future, couched in terms of concern for national security. If you really cared about keeping this country safe, you wouldn't ask questions about the competence of those whose job is keeping the country safe.

Almost makes you want to not even assign a critical thinking text sometimes.

It's a MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD World... or the MAD cHatter

Much is being made of whether the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) would still work with a world of nuclear powers like Iran and North Korea. Ron Jacobs at counterpunch, James Robbins at National Review On-line, Slavoj Zizek at In These Times, and Belle Waring at Crooked Timber all weigh in on the question.

With the Soviet Union and China, the line goes, we could be assured that they wouldn't if we didn't and we wouldn't if they didn't. But it is different with these rogue states. I mean, they're crazy.

Surely the "mad mullahs" caricature heard from alarmist voices on the right is a cartoon. The idea that "'those people' are not rational and since we see them supporting suicide bombers, why would suicide nuclear bombers be any different" is surely flawed. But at the same time, the logic that undergirded MAD is different in this case than it was in the Cold War. There seem to be two main senses in which the current context is different.

1) The US, USSR, and China were all in the same league with respect to international reach, economic security, and military power (until the Soviet Union collapsed, of course). But with Iran and North Korea, you walk up to the table with an imbalance. You have a big guy/little guy situation and this does make for a different equation. When the odds are against you, or at least can be perceived to be against you, moves that would be utterly irrational in a normal situation can become quite rational. The odds of hitting the lottery are so slim that it is not a rational thing to do, but if all you have is a buck and you desperately need many more and it is the only possible way out of your jam, then the move becomes rational despite the long odds. The MAD doctrine as originally understood was based on a big guy vs. big guy, Cold War model of diplomacy, and that ain't what we've got here. Iran and especially North Korea may perceive themselves of having their backs against a wall while surrounded by bigger guys. This is not a good scenario for the stable stalemate that lay at the heart of MAD.

2) Bush's doctrine of premature Iraqulation threatens the basic premise underlying MAD from the other side. MAD only works if both sides perceive an immovable stalemate as the most likely, and most secure option. Each must believe that their arms will deter the other side as much as the other other side's cache will deter them. Both sides need to be completely comfortable in the belief that as long as they don't move, the other side won't either. There needs to be a universal perception of predictability. But the invasion of Iraq weakens this. Bush has shown himself, in word and deed, to be one who does not provide an absolutely dependable sense of necessary predictability. The saber rattling and undertaking major military action without complete planning gives evidence that one cannot rely on a stance of "war only when absolutely necessary." Just as the American right sees "mad mullahs" in Iran, the Iranian right sees "baffling Bushies" in Washington. The last thing you want, if you are looking for a stalemate, is nervous or unpredictable people with twitchy trigger fingers.

Add to both of these, the work that the Bush administration has done to undermine MAD: the push to develop the Star Wars missile defense shield and the bunker buster nukes both deny the central premise that we won't if you won't. The smaller sized packages make it more likely that we will use atomic means as strategic and not catastrophic weapons and the missile defense shield is designed to make it so that we can launch a nuclear strike on you with fear of reprisal. MAD was on the ropes before the announcements from Pyang Yang and Tehran.

This is not to predict a catastrophe. Iranians and North Koreans love their children, too. There is no doubt that having one of three "axis of evil" members invaded and occupied by US forces made nuclear arms seem all the more necessary for the other two evil-axees precisely for MAD-based reasons. If they have bomb, they won't be invaded -- they're playing for a tie. MAD is likely to hold -- not making it, of course, any less mad. The point, here, however, is that the foundation for this version of MAD is nowhere near as stable as it was during the Cold War, not because of mad mullahs, but for a number of other factors. And that makes me, at least, quite nervous.

I Don't Get the Flag Burning Thing

So the House has passed a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning again. I understand that the reason this continues to come up is that it is red meat for the conservative base. I understand that this is a clear-cut appeal to emotion. What I don't understand is why it packs any sort of emotional pop at this point in time.

The American flag is a symbol, nothing particularly interesting there. But a symbol for what? The trivial answer is that it represents the country. As a representation of the country, it also represents the values, ideals, and aims of the nation. Among these is freedom, which is why it was a favorite in the 60's amongst the counter-culture -- think of Peter Fonda's character "Captain America" in Easy Rider. The freedom that the hippies sought certainly was not in line with what the conservatives pictured as American, but the use of the flag as a symbol that invoked this freedom was not exclusive, it was not meant to draw lines between us and them. To the contrary, it was meant to say that they were Americans, too -- that they loved the liberty afforded them by their citizenship and showed that they were far from anti-American -- indeed, it was intended to show that they were fully realizing what they thought was the potential of being an American.

But then came Viet Nam. The flag was now adopted as the symbol for the pro-war movement. But, as Hanno pointed out to me a while back, it was at this point that the symbol became exclusive. When an overtly and explicitly political movement adopted the flag as a symbol, it now came to signify that only conservatives were real Americans.

It was in this context that flag burning became a political statement. It was meant not only to express disapproval of the war in Viet Nam, but also outrage about the terms which were now being used to define "American" in a way that kept them out of their own country. The right, by turning the flag from a symbol of unity, representing the whole country and its common shared history and values, into a mere tool of political persuasion desecrated it as a symbol. It was this politically degraded flag that became a target of political speech. Burning the flag was not an anti-American act, an act of attacking a symbol of the nation because the flag's function as a symbol of the nation as a whole had been lost. Destroying a flag, at this point, was no more anti-American than destroying a peace sign. The two were not representations of the nation as a whole, but mere political symbols representing viewpoints and their destruction was a visual representation of opposing the political perspective.

But that was then. This is now. The flag no longer has the same symbolism. No one on the left cringed when the captain of the US Olympic hockey team draped himself in the flag after their stunning victory in 1980. It was a standard part of the stump speech of Howard Dean that the flag belongs to all of us, not just to the right-wing of the Republican party. After the 60's, the flag became the national symbol again. It was largely depoliticized.

This is not to say that the right hasn't been trying to repoliticize and reclaim it. The magnetic flags on the bumpers of cars, trucks, and SUV's is clearly an attempt to redraw that line using OUR flag, the flag of ALL AMERICANS, but no one on the other side is biting (with the exception of ANSWER-type folks who seem eager and more than happy to repeat every mistake the left made in the 60's out of some sort of misplaced sense of romanticism). No one, at least no one inside of the US, is burning flags. It ain't happening. No one opposed to the conservative movement is really interested in burning flags, except to bring a potential legal challenge to what is clearly an unconstitutional abridgment of political speech. But that is not a protest burning, but a technicality necessary to protect the most basic liberties that this country stands for. So I don't see why is it still a rallying cry for the right. What am I missing?

I would say it's a strawman, but even strawmen don't burn flags. (Strawmen, after all, are themselves quite flammable and stay away from fire altogether -- remember the scene in the Wizard of Oz.) So why is it back? Is it a bizarre form of nostalgia on the right just like electing someone named "George Bush" in 2000 would make seem as if Clinton never defeated George Bush I in 1992? Is it a generational thing? Do older conservatives support this more than younger ones? Why would this be one of the things the GOP is rolling out as a central plank of their strategy for the upcoming elections? Is it like Hollywood remaking the classics hoping that the new King Kong would capture people like the original when anyone with half a brain could tell that the new version would be so inferior to the original that it would only bring derision? I just don't get the flag burning thing.

The Birth of Comedism

How did the new religion, Comedism, come to be? It was many years ago (well, nine), when I was teaching ethics at night for a local community college. I was trying to draw the distinction between ethical precepts and social mores. A student raised his hand and asked, "What are mores?" I looked straight at him and replied, "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a more." Hearing the groans of pain from my students, I realized that set ups that perfect don't just happen. That could not have been a random humorous occurrence. Think of all the possible combinations of words. To have those exact words, phrased as a question, with a captive audience,...no, that had to be the result of humorous design. I was in the presence of the Divine Comedian.

And so I came to realize that it was my job to spread the gospel of Comedism.

The structure is similar to that of the Judeo-Christian picture. Life is a test, when you die, your soul ascends to the pearly gates...in front of which is The Book. Behind The Book is Saint Shecky who tells you of your eternal judgment. You get only so many set ups in your few years on Earth and for every punchline you deliver, that is one mark in your favor. The "that's amore" line, one in the plus column for me. But if you miss one...

A year after the ethics class, I was out for a walk. As I ambled along, a couple walked past me. The man looked at me with a strange puzzlede look on his face. He said to me, "Didn't we just see you with a dog?" I said, "No. You must have me confused with someone else." As they walked away, I realized the correct answer was, "Excuse me. That was my wife." I had lost a Divine set up. So much the worse for my comic soul.

If you make more than you miss, you are admitted into comedy heaven where you sit at the right hand of Groucho. If you miss more than you make, you go to comedy hell where it is very hot and all the drinks are in dribble glasses. If you come out even, it is comedy purgatory for you, where you have to watch nothing but re-runs of Three's Company for all eternity.

So live a holy life, be funny. Remember the first two commandments. "Thou shalt not kill...unless thy have really good timing" and "Thou shalt not steal...unless it's a really good line and you're sure you can deliver it better."

Live, love, and laugh.

Irreverend Steve

A Secular Jew at Easter

A colleague asked me the other day whether we were having a seder for Passover. We're not. She's not Jewish, but her husband is...well, he is as much as I am which is not very much. They were doing it for the kids.

Now, if there were anything resembling a regular Jewish ritual that I would want my kids exposed to, it would be the seder. It was always my favorite. With my family, that many words, that much time, and that much wine, something very, very funny was bound to happen...a lot. With the singing and the laughing, I always loved Passover. But since my brother, my cousins and I have started rolling out the next generation, no one has the room to do it. But the question is whether we should do something inferior, something less spirited, so there is at least some trace of it for the kids.

This is an issue that I have wrestled with since TheWife was first with youngin'. I abandoned the "invisible magical man in the sky" hypothesis long, long ago -- before my bar mitzvah, but that's another story. I have no desire to enforce faith traditions upon my kids that I do not subscribe to, but at the same time I feel that there is something they are being denied. It was my choice to step away, a choice my kids won't have since they won't have anything presented to step away from.

At the same time, even without the religious aspect, in some sense, I am a Jew. When I watch Woody Allen or Mel Brooks movies, I get the jokes. I like a good deli sandwich--on rye, no mayo. There is a long tradition of activism at the heart of the community that I would love to see them in touch with. Whether it was labor laws, registering African-American voters in the South, the women's rights and gay rights movements...there were always disproportionate numbers of Jews on the front lines fighting for justice. This is the part of the community I am proud to be associated with. Like any community we are multi-faceted and there are sides that I do not miss, as well. But I know all this because I was raised in Yiddle Central. There were so many Jews in my school, even the African-American kids stayed home on Yom Kippur. My kids, on the other hand, are growing up in an area where secular, muchless Jew, is rare.

Their lives aren't completely deviod of Jewish influence. I play Klezmatics CDs around the house. They see my family arguing politics loudly around the dinner table. We make lots of puns and bad jokes. They love fried matzo, latkes, and blintzes. And they know how to use all those yiddish phrases I know how to properly use in context, but don't know the literal translations of. But my in-laws are Catholic, and, while TheWife is not, we do the Easter thing. There's a great egg hunt all over our yard, a nice dinner at the in-laws, Easter baskets... I mind none of this because (a) it brings my children joy and (b) TheWife only lets the kids eat one piece of the chocolate, meaning... (and you goyim get much better chocolate. The stuff in those cheap little gold coins? Dreck.)

It seems that if they are getting one side, they should get the other as well. But, to be honest, I feel it would be disingenuous to just go through the motions of a religious ritual that I don't believe in. I don't think all Jews should be in Jerusalem next year. This would be a lot of Jews and the only way we'd fit is if we spilled over into East Jerusalem...and many of the Israeli government's actions in that sphere make me ashamed to be a Jew. My own relationship, like so many of yours, I know, is complicated. If there was a family seder, we'd go as we have in the past. But to do it myself? I would feel wrong doing it, but I feel wrong not doing it.

The part I always liked least was the bit about the Wicked Son who was called wicked because he did not include himself amongst those who needed to partake in the Passover rituals. With all of the real evil in the world, all of the suffering, war, malice, and lack of genuine empathy for others, this hardly seems to make him truly wicked...but I'm sure he was conflicted.

Catfish and Creationism

It was reported in the New York Times today that scientists in the arctic found a fossil of a 375 million year-old fish able to walk on limbs. It is being cited as a possible connection between ancient sea dwelling animals and tetrapods, the earliest land-dwellers. Filling in this missing part of the puzzle will generate plenty of work for evolutionary biologists.

And, of course, every boon to evolutionary biologists requires the usual political nonsense. From the Times article,

Dr. Shubin's team played down the fossil's significance in the raging debate over Darwinian theory, which is opposed mainly by some conservative Christians in this country, but other scientists were not so reticent. They said this should undercut the argument that there is no evidence in the fossil record of one kind of creature becoming another kind.

First of all there is no "raging debate over Darwinian theory." As if (1) this evidence was really that crucial to making a reasonable case for speciation, (2) the opponents will treat it honestly. But it does warrant some thought about how and why it undercuts the creationist or intelligent design argument.

The usual line that you see so frequently is that creationists or ID folks are putting together a purely eliminavist case. They do nothing but try to poke holes in evolution and then assert that this shows that their preferred alternative must therefore be true. But this alternative is not scientific, the line goes, because, following Karl Popper, it is not falsifiable and all scientific propositions are falsifiable. These discoveries serve to not only undermine the negative arguments of the anti-Darwin crowd, but highlight the unfalsifiability of their own view.

The problem is that Popper's view is wrong. Even the best scientific theories have parts that are unfalsifiable. Take Newton's first law that anything in motion with no net external force applied to it will move in a straight line at uniform speed. This is unfalsifiable -- there are no objects subject to no net external forces. This is not true of anything and yet is a founding principle of the theory.

One claim is that there theory as a whole is falsifiable. But when counter-examples are found, we do not -- as Popper requires -- consider the theory refuted, rather we make changes to parts of the theory but do not touch other parts. This was exactly what happened when the planet Neptune was discovered. The orbit of Uranus was not as predicted,so instead of throwing out Newton's theory, we changed another assumption, that there were seven planets. Real scientists, doing real science, refused to allow parts of the real sceintific theory to be falsified.

This was all pointed out by Popper's student Imre Lakatos. Lakatos argued that parts of every scientific theory are considered unfalsifiable. This hard core would never be messed with, but was surrounded by a protective belt of other assertions. This belt could be adjusted as needed to save the hard core. There are unfalsifiable parts of evolutionary theory, just as there are in ID. Indeed, the work of some of the more clever ID folks seems to show that in information theory and other branches, there may be something that is at least indirectly falsifiable about intelligent design. If some versions of creationism and intelligent design are indeed unfalsifiable, it doesn't mean that every such version is necessarily, in princple, so.

But we can, according to Lakatos, tell better from worse theories. Better theories are ones that need less adjustment or whose adjustments make it more testable -- that is, open to more cases where it might make wrong predictions. These theories are progressive. Worse theories are ones that need more frequent adjustment and whose adjustments make them less testable. These theories are degenerate.

This is what we see with each new fossil. It takes evolutionary theory makes a big progressive leap and the non-evolutionary theories need to adjust their protective belts in a way that makes them degenerate. There is reason to think that each one of these new discoveries does support evolution over its theologically inspired competitors, but it is not because of falsifiability as we often see claimed.

Nazi References, Patriotic Correctness, and Survivors on the Current State of Affairs

There was a piece on NPR yesterday about a self-described neo-Nazi running for the state legislature in Montana (although he's the only Republican in the race and MT tends to be quite red, it's a heavily Democratic district around Butte so there was little chance of his winning to start with -- less of a chance now that his allegiances are out in the open).

Over at Kos, there was a discussion about it yesterday under the title "Are Republicans Nazis? One Nazi says not quite, but close enough for him!" The diarist requested that we "pay special attention to the part where he describes why he's running as a Republican." The reasons stated by Sean Stewart, the candidate, for his choosing to run as a Republican were an understanding that third party candidates almost never win and that there were certain affinities between his beliefs and those of the Republican party, namely, being anti-abortion, pro-gun, and anti-gay.

The on-line world is well acquainted with Godwin's law which states that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." The claim in this case was that it was the exception to the rule because the person in question actually is a Nazi.

But this is wrong. What we are seeing here is the fallacy of guilt by association. It may be true that this neo-Nazi has some views in common with mainstream Republicans. This does not mean that comparisons between Nazism and American conservatism are warranted. Having some views in common with evil people does not entail that you share other views -- especially the really, really evil ones. It is a little known fact that the Third Reich was the first modern government to pass nature preservation laws. But the fact that Hitler's government passed the Tierschutzgesetz of 1933, the Reichsjagdgesetz of 1934, and the Reichsnaturschutzgesetz of 1935 does not mean that the Audubon Society or the Sierra Club can be tarred as fascist organizations.

Hitler and Nazi references are too cheap. Jon Stewart said it best when he said that, "that guy worked too hard for too many years to become that evil to have any Tom, Dick, or Harry come along and say, 'Hey, you're being Hitler.' No. You know who was being Hitler? Hitler." Any time someone of this generation makes a Nazi reference it ought to send up a red flag (not the kind with a swastika on it).

The people who have legitimate warrant to make such references are the ones who were there. To compare that time to this or any other time takes a sense of perspective that may only be acquired through direct experience or serious historical scholarship.

It is interesting, though, to hear from those who were there. I have been working for the last couple of years on an oral history project relating to the philosophers I write on. They are called the Logical Empiricists and worked mainly in Vienna and Berlin between the World Wars. When Hitler came to power and purged the universities in 1933, they were scattered as many of them were Jewish and all were quite vocal opponents of Nazism. I have been speaking with the few remaining members of the movement and their widows, children, and students. These people have been wonderful. They have been incredibly open with their stories and their remembrances, even ones that are quite personal.

But a strange thing has happened in virtually every interview. Once we have finished the conversation, there is always an awkward pause and then the person, at first somewhat tentatively but more and more stridently, voices serious concern about the current state of affairs in the US. When I engage them in the discussion, they go on to tell me how worried they are about the path that the US government is going down. Of course, if you sit long enough in a room with Jews you will eventually start talking politics. That is how life is. But this was different. It was as if they just want to make sure that something got said, that these things wouldn't go without having been talked about, that there would be no sin of silence.

These are people who all were affected by the war. One had his father, a logician trained under David Hilbert, die in Auschwitz; another, the widow of a prominent philosopher, had her father who was old and suffering from Parkinson's put a gun to his head and pull the trigger rather than wait for the Nazis to come for him; one was the daughter of a famous philosopher whose girl scout troop got folded into the Hitler Youth; and two were mathematicians and completely secular Jews who escaped -- the symmetry of these cases was stunning, in both cases their American wives (both remarried) felt it necessary to tell me their husbands' stories and how hard it was for them because the husbands themselves refused to say anything as they felt that any hardship experienced on their part was trivial compared with the suffereing of so many whom they knew perosnally. It seemed inappropriate, almost obscene, for them to dwell upon or glorify their own story in any way when they had the unbelievable good fortune to come to America and have wonderfully successful personal and professional lives while their friends and extended family suffered inexpressibly.

It is from these people, not some punk, college kid in Montana, that we ought to pay attention and take serious pause. The situation on the ground here seems to have changed since I first started conducting these interviews. No longer is the Minority Leader of the Senate publicly declared unpatriotic for voicing mild criticism of the administration. The protectors of Patriotic Correctness seems to have lost some of their enforcement power. But, nevertheless, we need to pay attention when our elders speak. And they are worried for their grandchildren.

How did ethics get reduced to abortion?

Aspazia, over at Mad Melancholic Feminista, asks a good question -- do anti-abortionists use the same logic as racists? The answer is, in part, yes. The explanation of that answer related to another interesting and seemingly obvious question that no one seems to ask, "How did abortion -- out of all the issues that we deal with in this culture -- become the issue?" how did all of ethics get reduced to abortion?

The answer is similar to why Ward Churchill, a little known academic, is opposing David Horowitz in public debates as the face of the left. How did this guy, who had little recognition, muchless influence on contemporary progressive viewpoints, become someone who could be put up as the face of the movement? The answer is that the right chose him and they get to set up the debate. This is not merely a quesiton of framing -- that deals with the linguistic structures we use in discussing issues. This is the even more important question of detemrining what it is that gets onto the cultural agenda in the first place, and the left was suckered into giving up that power. The source of this shift goes back a couple of decades.

Under Nixon, the Republicans realized that the only way to break the strangle hold that the Democrats had on federal politics was to find a way to bring some of the traditional Democratic voters into thier ranks. they looked for the most tenuous connection and found it in the South where vestiges of the not-so-Civil War had made the Dems the party of the region. But there was no wedge so divisive in the area as race and it could easily be used to sever the connection between the Dixiecrats and the party of the Voting Rights Act. (Kevin Phillips, one of the architects of this plan, has a new book out American Theology -- read it.)

After picking off low-hanging fruit like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace and those behind them, the right realized that just as Martin Luther King's power was in his pulpit, so too the white churches could be the best place from which to launch their political attack in the coming decades. The growing evangelical movement contained many working class voters who traditionally voted Democratic -- if at all. If they could be turned out on election with explicit instructions from clergy on how to vote Republican, it would allow them not only to control the South, but also the Midwest where racism under the guise of "states' rights" was not the motivator it was in the old slave states.

The problem was that the Republican platform opposed the actual intersts of those people.The solution was to refocus the southern strategy. No longer about segregation, they would pick a small handful of issues that these folks would go nuts over and paint a bulls-eye on the fronts of the despicable liberals. The left’s views could be lampooned as against the church, against God and country. This handful of bogeymen would keep closed ranks behind charismatic preachers wiht whom political bonds had been forged. And if the church was behind you, then the ethics game is won because how could the church not be on the side of moral values? And so absolute adherence to theological doctrine, some of it quite non-mainstream, became a standard substitution on large swaths of the right for any and all moral deliberation of any real depth.

The key is, in the Bard’s immortal phrase, “Discretion is the better part of valor.” Conservatives would take both the middle class and Evangelical working class away from the Democrats by being clever. The trick would be not only to pick their battles, but to then sucker the left into making those and only those battles into the entire war. It was the equivalent of setting up a rigged bet and making the rube go in all or nothing. It was ethical three-card monty and the liberals were sure they could find the queen this time.

The left had won the morality battle over civil rights, so the key was not to press the old racist line – that line is known to be a sure loser with the suburbanites. Instead of trying to reinstate Jim Crow, the right would instead focus their entire attack on a tiny little insignificant corner of the discussion, the unfairness of affirmative action. Everything else having to do with civil rights would be eliminated from the discussion and affirmative action in hiring and college admissions would become the sole battleground for all civil rights issues. Further, affirmative action would be spoken of only in terms of blind quotas that are cast as forcing the promotion of less qualified minorities into positions that by all rights belong to more qualified white men. The deepest, darkest fears of Suburbia – the loss of upward mobility, not only failing to keep up with the Joneses, but not even keeping up with the Jacksons – would be exploited. The delicious irony of this move is that civil rights advocates, those who had been willing to sacrifice their own lives to secure the rights of others, could now easily be portrayed as the ones in favor of discrimination. In this framing, supporting civil rights isn't morally right, it's morally wrong. Opposing civil rights is now both in the interest of white suburban families and morally justified.

Similarly, the left won the morality battle over women's suffrage and were making head roads into the furthering of women's rights. So pick your battle and make that the only issue on the table. Instead of trying to take away the vote or defending unequal pay for equal work, all discussion of women’s rights would be single-mindedly focused upon the legality of abortion. Abortions aren’t needed by good girls from suburban homes, only those promiscuous sluts from the other side of the tracks who need to be taught to take responsibility for their wicked ways. By opposing abortion, the entire suburban ethos, as well as the chastity of their precious little girls, was being defended. Even more, everyone knows that God hates abortion as much as he hates gays, maybe more. Those who don’t condemn abortion are clearly showing how much they hate God. Those who were advocating justice for women, control over their lives and bodies, and a more fairly constructed family were portrayed as trying to murder innocent babies and destroy the foundation of the family and undermine faith itself. In this framework, with every other issue that concerns the welfare of women securely off the table, supporting women's rights isn't morally right, it's morally wrong.

And the same move is made on the environment, foreign policy, gay rights, public health, education,...wherever the left had the moral high ground, the right would seek some very small corner of the fight where the issue could be reframed in such a way as to threaten the comfort of the middle class. That issue would have its profile raised to the point where it could be substituted for the entire area of moral concern. In this way, the right could reduce the complexity of inter-related issues to one single debate that they were confident they could win and thus deem themselves morally superior. By carefully picking and choosing their battles against public schools, against helping needy children, against environmental regulation, they could invert the ethical equations making right into wrong. The left had attacked moral issues like the British Redcoats, openly marching in a row stretching all the way across the moral battlefield, sure of their power. The right would hide behind trees waging a guerilla war against morality, choosing where and when to fight moral battles.

And like Washington’s rag-tag army, they won.

What cemented the success of this move was its reception on the left. Progressives have a deep, core distrust of people or institutions who claim to have exclusive possession of unrevisable truth and/or principles of moral rightness and who demand unquestioning adherence. This is why blind patriotic correctness and certain forms of institutional religion are seen as deeply problematic. Liberals look at history to learn that even our most cherished beliefs may in time be shown to be wrong, there is something to be learned from folks who see or do things differently, and that when we hand over our minds to some authority – even one that is claiming to protect us from earthly or other worldly evil, be it Osama or Satan – we are inviting serious abuses of our loyalty by those in power. The examples are legion.

It was from this desire to avoid the closed-minded absolutism that lay at the heart of the new so-called “Moral Majority” on the right, that the left placed tolerance in a privileged position above virtually all other virtues. Since no one knows everything, we need to allow everyone a seat at the table. “If the right wants to say that ethics is a matter of appeal to absolute authority,” said progressives, “then we want no part of it. Let them have it.”

And so the liberals accepted the picture of ethics as blind adherence to radical theology and rejecting radical theology, they forfeited virtually all public discussions of ethics. And that is a big part of how we got to where we are today. That is part of the reason that war, hunger, pollution, and health care are no longer seen as issues of morality.

Giving Thanks and Birthday Wishes

Over at Mad Melancholic Feminista, my fairy blog-mother Aspazia had a wonderful post about realizing how good you have it. Today is my birthday, making it a good day for some introspection and reflection.

Like Aspazia, I am incredibly thankful in a world where so many get trapped in a mindless, "gotta keep the paycheck and health insurance, but I really hate my" job, that I get to do what I love. I play for a living. And do it with wonderful playmates, some at the college and others who also come out to play here.

Most important is my family, the joy of my life, especially TheWife. It amazes me just how many families out there are really screwed up, so to have a wonderful, warm, supportive family who is healthy (one recent surgery, not withstanding) around me is a source of comfort to no end.

One thing that this blog-thingy has brought back is the number of dear friends -- from every part of my life, from childhood to former students of the last couple years -- who are an indelible part of me. Thank you all for being there and for being thoughtful, passionate, and funny.

Life is a busy place and you often forget how charmed a life you live, especially when there are many who have it so hard. Thank you all and please know that I love you guys -- even the ones who for some reason have come to enjoy this silliness and come here to read, but whom I have yet to meet.

As I blow out these candles on my e-cake, let me make one wish (now that Tom Delay has droped out, it's down to one). TheWife took me out to celebrate the other night and as we were watching Big James and the Chicago Playboys, it was announced that Miss Olga was there celebrating her birthday, too...her 85th birthday. While I hope none of us are spending too much time in bars when we are 85 years old, I do hope that all of us, like Miss Olga, get to enjoy not only great longevity, but never give up enjoying that life we have. I wish for everyone the ability to seek out joy for years and years. Happy birthday Miss Olga...I want to be just like you when I grow up.

Judas, Spotted Owls, Bogeymen, and the "N-word"

Judas, the bogeyman of the Easter story, seems to be getting a facelift. Apparently not the greedy turncoat, he was instead the trusted confidant only doing what was asked of him according to a recently released Gospel.

It is interesting how, at times like this, texts which were seen as set and sacred and to the minds of many delivered fully translated and edited, are revealed to be the work of political wrangling. So it is with many of our narratives, they are works of politics and the bogeymen are constructed.

I've been seeing busses with advertsing for a movie called "Hoot," with the tag-line "It's time to stand up for the little guy." The image is of three kids standing between a bulldozer and a cute little owl (looking spotted). Kids protecting cute little owls against nasty developers. No doubt every bit as formulaic as any other Hollywood, kid's movie.

But what is interestng is that it is owls that are getting the protection. The anti-environmentalists have a narrative in which the spotted owl plays a special role. For them, the spotted owl represents what is wrong with caring about nature -- it shows how out of touch liberals care only about silly little birds they will never see and nothing of the people who live near them, their jobs, lives, or property rights. It is a strawman argument designed to justify a lack of concern about the world we leave our kids. If you are green-minded, then you prefer spotted owls over families and you are not the morally upstanding person you think. By not being worried about the environment, I am more moral than you. It is another classic example of the sort of inversion of values that Nietzsche pointed out.

What is interesting is that this is a deliberate effort to undermine that narrative, to take the spotted owl back as a symbol. To reclaim it much in the same way that Dick Gregory and Richard Pryor tried to reclaim the word "nigger" in the 60's and 70's -- by embracing it in a way that re-assigns its meaning, you counter those who use the symbol against you.

Judas and the spotted owl were bogeymen whose image may be getting a make-over. Others that we could reclaim?

Ultimate Dr. Seuss Geek Topic

In The Cat In The Hat Comes Back, the Cat comes returns to visit the brother and sister during the winter-time when they are tasked with shovelling a large amount of snow. The Cat goes into the house and takes a bath, leaving a large ring around the bath tub. When the kids start to panic, the Cat says that he knows how to clean it up and takes it off of the tub and onto the wall. When the kids tell him he needs to take it off of the wall, he lifts his hat revealing a smaller Cat A who takes it off of the wall and onto the rug. When this won't do, Cat A lifts his hat to reveal Cat B who puts it on the bed covers and so on with nested Cats C, D, E,... transfering the stain onto the bedsheets, the tv,...until finally it ends up on the snow. When the kids demand that the snow be cleaned, Cat Z is revealed with "VOOM" a cleanser so powerful it will clean anything and indeed, it takes the stain out of the snow.

This is exactly what Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap and the Logical Positivists hoped would happen with mathematical truth.

In the 5th century B.C., Euclid wrote the Elements, a book that took Greek knowledge of geometry and brought it together in an incredible fashion. By starting with a handful of definitions, 5 axioms, and 5 postulates, he showed how all of geometry could be derived with absolute certainty. It was one of the greatest acheivements in human thought.

But then along came non-Euclidean geometry which made use of different axioms. The question became which system is right. Surely, it had to be Euclid because the other systems were so screwy in what they said about space. If a contradiction could be shown to follow from the other geometries, then they could be rejected and Euclid wins the game. So the problem was to find a contradiction in non-Euclidean geometry.

It was a problem that had mathemticians working for centuries until Felix Klein, Eugeno Beltrami, and Henri Poincare (twice) created "relativie consistency proofs." These were ways to reduce non-Euclidean geometry to Euclidean geometry. The only way non-Euclidean geometry could have a contradiction is if Euclidean geometry had a contradiction. And surely Euclidean geometry did not entail a contradiction. Everyone believed it, but no one had ever proved it.

David Hilbert took a half-step. He was able to create a relative consistency proof that reduced Euclidean geometry to arithmetic. But did arithmetic contain a contradiction? Arithmetic could be reduced to set theory. But did set theory contain a contradiction? Each nested in the next, nested in the next, nested in the next. What we needed was meta-mathematical VOOM. That last step that would demonstrate in the bottom layer absolute consistency, that is to say, no possibility of contradiction.

Russell and Carnap thought they found it -- logic. If arithmetic could be reduced to logic itself, surely logic can't give rise to contradictions. Logic would be mathematico-philosophical VOOM!

But then came Kurt Godel. In 1931, Godel proved with absolute certainty that this consistency couldn't be demonstrated. That any logical system powerful enough to be able to prove all true sentence would also allow some false sentences to be provable, and that any logical system that proved only true sentence would miss a few.

Godel, who starved to death because he thought someone was trying to poison him, lived in a world closer to that of Dr. Seuss than the rest of us, but he proved to us with absolute certainty that it is impossible for us to be living in the world where the Cat in the Hat comes back.

Making Guacamole All Night Long

So I was whipping up a batch of guacamole for dinner, listening to the Texas Tornados (I am eternally grateful to Egg for the CD). On comes their classic, "Who were you thinking of when we were loving last night." I began to wonder about the ethics of it. The lyrics go,

"You got more out of it than I put into it last night.
Who were you thinking of when we were loving last night,
was it a good looking stranger or a close friend of mine?
Who were you thinking of when we were loving last night?"

Is this betrayal? The partner didn't actually do anything with anyone else. Having "lust in your heart" ala Jimmy Carter as is certainly not as bad as having lust in your office ala Bill Clinton. No matter how committed you are to your partner, there are always people in the world who you find attractive. But does it make a moral difference if the image pops up mid-coupling?

Wouldn't or Couldn't? Immigration and an Economics Question

If you want to feel completely intellectually overwhelmed, think about the immigration question currently facing the US. Would more border guards or a fence mean less exploitation by smugglers and American business owners of people just trying to help their families by working extremely hard or would it just mean that those people would have it even worse? Would a guest worker program like that in Germany make for safer, more fair working conditions or would it undercut our labor protection laws by providing a permanent underclass of wage slaves that would harm American unskilled workers who are struggling so badly as it is? Would some sort of earned citizenship or amnesty program cause a flood of people into the country or would it just allow those who are here and contributing to be recognized for what they do? I know the answers to none of these questions.

Indeed, they are all empirical questions, but instead of hypotheses based upon good data, we get political rants. Offerring guesses based on intuition as if it were fact has a long history amongst philosophers who thought that they could derive the laws of physics through metaphysical contemplation, but now we see this "philosophers' fallacy" all over our political discourse. The form is to pick one factor that certainly has some role in the complex situation and pretend that it reigns over all other factors and gives you a simple answer to how a complex system will behave.

One of the places we see this error repeated is in the claim that there is an employment vacuum in our economy that sucks the people over the border. There are "jobs Americans won't do" and because of this lack of people to fill these open positions, a low pressure region in the unskilled labor market is created. But while we have a low pressure region here, there is an adjacent volume of high pressure in workers looking for these sorts of opportunities across the border and, according to the economic version of the first law of thermodynamics, the workers flow from high pressure to low in order to establish equilibrium. This is why we need a guest worker program, the line goes, because the invisible hand will pull in these workers anyway, so let's do it under conditions that will cause the least strain.

The part of the argument that baffles me is the first premise that there is necessarily a vacuum because there are jobs Americans won't do. There seem to be three competing lines of argument behind this claim. How seriously ought we take this oft repeated proposition?

The interesting version of this discussion seems to hold that this claim is really elliptical for, "There are jobs Americans won't do for low wages." We just conveniently leave off the end when we talk about it. One side then argues that if there really are these jobs for which there is a need, but little demand, the labor version of supply and demand dictates that the wages should rise to attract workers.

Labor advocates and organizations argue that this is exactly what employers don't want and like having illegals or guest workers who can be paid less, to keep wage costs down. It is a ploy to make the cost of doing business cheaper. Business groups, on the other hand, argue that paying market prices for filling these jobs would raise the overhead so much that prices on most goods and services would have to be raised significantly and this would cause inflation and deep problems for our economy and our cushy way of life. "Americans would be screeming at the prices" is the argument and it is simply obvious that we should have low prices even if some people must have a hard time feeding their families after a hard day's work to guarantee it. Would being able to buy less mean a slower economy and thus fewer jobs or would more money in the pockets of people working tough jobs mean that they would buy more and pick up the econoomy creating jobs around their increased wealth? Don't know. Economists?

But, like Greg over at The Talent Show, the line that fascinates me is the claim that "These are jobs Americans won't do" is not short for anything, that it is simply a fact of the world that no matter the wage, Americans won't...or CAN'T do these jobs. This was expressed explicitly by John McCain said in a speech to the AFL-CIO's Building and Construction Trades Department. When questioners argued that the answer to filling those positions was to pay a decent wage,

"McCain responded by saying immigrants were taking jobs nobody else wanted. He offered anybody in the crowd $50 an hour to pick lettuce in Arizona.

Shouts of protest rose from the crowd, with some accepting McCain's job offer. 'I'll take it!' one man shouted.

McCain insisted none of them would do such menial labor for a complete season. 'You can't do it, my friends.'"

So, the logic here is that no one would volunteer to do it, even at a higher wage, but when an American did accept the offer at the higher wage, the claim was switched from "No American would do it." to "No American could do it." In logic, we call that question-begging definition -- changing the meaning of a claim to guarantee it's truth. Do people like McCain really believe that these jobs can't be filled with higher wages or is it simply a disingenuous charade to make sure we keep prices (read: labor costs) low? Or is there an element of making sure that we don't allow those people upward mobility? Is this that Sneetch thing, again?

Oy ge-malt!

So, today I came across He'Brew -- the Chosen Beer. It was begat by the Schmaltz Brewing Company of San Francisco. Given that yeast is used to brew beer, my question is whether you can drink it during Passover if you let it go flat.

The Kaiser Says, "Let's Roll": The Return of Dada?

An interesting discussion over at Alicublog about the conservative commentator Elizabeth Fisher taking on the 1920's European art movement Dadaism at NRO. I will agree with Roy that making Dada a part of the right's current culture war is a lot like Jon Stewart coming out and doing Ike jokes...but there may be something else going on here.

Dada was the movement that included Duchamp's "Fountain," a urinal put on display. While it's intention was in part to mock art, it led to art being mocked as stupid, meaningless, and requiring no talent. And it is these criticisms that we see Fisher repeating. But this "insult to the artists' craft" was a reaction on the part of a certain group of European artists to try to make some sense of the horrors of World War I. It is an awful accident of history that The Bomb and the Holocaust have eliminated the memory of the Great War from our minds. WWI was an unbelievable atrocity against humanity. Trench and chemical warfare led to mass death under stalemate conditions. People died by the thousands with no noticeable difference in the war for reasons that could not be articulated. Death seemed completely without meaning. Destruction was senseless, but on a scale unimaginable. It was as if human life was treated as valueless.

The whole catastrophe was overseen by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Wilhelm believed that, because he came from a royal family, he ruled by the will of God and, despite the fact that he never served in the military himself, he believed that militarism was an essential property of the German character and that German militarism and industry ought to be seen as one and the same. God made Germany strong and German industries ought to profit from the militarism as much as possible. He was a terrible diplomat, being not at all tactful and strained relations in many directions. Further, like many Germans at the time, he believed that the time had come for Germany to be the Great European Power. Portugal, Spain, Britain, France, Turkey, the Austro-Hungarian empire had all had their turn. Now it was Germany's day and they could do as they pleased. So, claiming it to be an act of pre-emptive defense, Wilhelm invaded Belgium in what those on the left saw as starting an unnecessary war. The German nationalistic right denied that atrocities were committed against Belgians and thought that in the eyes of at least the Flemish Belgians, they should be greeted as liberators.

Then, when it was over, the old church-based social and political structures which provided the foundation for Western Europe's strictly structured class system lay in ruins. Everything that gave people their place in society seemed to have been undermined. In Germany, the place of this ossified social structure was occupied by a toothless Weimar government. "Little grey men in grey suits," a survivor of that period described them to me once. The world, high-brow society especially, seemed completely absurd, devoid of meaning, a facade, a joke. So artists returning to work after everything in their lives, including any sense of morality from the state regarding the sanctity of life, was destroyed for no good reason, sought to represent this absurdity. To continue making pretty pictures and selling them for large amounts of money after what had just happened was obscene. So they took to undermining the bourgeois structures of art the way the bourgeois structures of everything else had been undermined.

Dada was an attack on the conservative way of life and the evils of war that came from it: a war of choice started by a leader who was a tactless bully, who believed he ruled by the will of God because he came from a royal family, and that he had Divinely given right to militarily invade where and when he chose, and who tried to drive the profits of war into the pockets of connected corporations.

Maybe the right's current attack on Dada is just a pre-emptive strike...

A Sneetch is a Sneetch

In The Sneetches, Dr. Seuss creates a society with a two-tiered caste system. Star-bellied sneetches are socially dominant and plain-bellied sneetches are oppressed. Enter Sylvester McMonkey McBean. McBean has a machine that will put a star on a plain-belly, making it indistinguihsable from the biologically star-bellied. Thus, for $3 each, the plain-bellies are offered social advancement.

The genetically-endowed star-bellies are horrified at having lost their class indicator, but assert that the distinction still exists; they are still, they claim, the best sneetches on beaches. McBean then shows him his abilities to remove belly-stars thus re-establishing an easily observable distinction between upper and lower class. For $10, the star-bellies can once again be different from the common sneetch of the beach.

This starts, of course, "star wars" -- "in again, out again, round and about again," sneetch fashion changes with the moment. The sneetches spend all of their money trying to make sure that they are in the in-crowd. Once their money is all spent, McBean laughs all the way to the bank.

Now, there is no doubt that the system that oppressed plain-bellied sneetches was morally problematic and the star-bellies who perpetuated it were acting wrongly. But what about McBean? Does profiting from an immoral system make you complicit? If demand for your product or service is based on exclusion that you didn't create, is there anything wrong with providing that good or service? Was McBean liberator or manipulator? And if you happen to liberate while manipulating, does that excuse the manipulation?

What Science Should We Fund?

A recently released study shows no evidence that people who are prayed for do better after heart surgery than those who received placebo prayers. The long-standing myth of the efficacy of prayer as therapy was tested and the evidence clearly stands against it. Over at Pharyngula, there's been an interesting discussion of the study. (If you don't read Pharyngula, check it out. For my money, it's one of the best science blogs out there.)

P.Z. Meyers, in his usual subtle fashion, argues,

The whole thing is based on a wild-assed guess plucked out of thin air, with an expectation that no matter which way it turned out, the results would be meaningless. That isn't science, and it doesn't matter that they carefully followed the forms of a scientific study—it was a waste of time. It wasn't going to change medical or social practice, and wasn't going to lead to any insight on how to better heal people. No one is going to discourage people from praying because of its result, although if the data had skewed the other way, you just know we'd never hear the end of it.

What interests me about this point is the different possible goals for scientific study he sets out: technical or technological advancement in treatment (practical results), new insights (theoretical results), and social practice (public health). Since this study addresses none of these, it was not science worth doing, even if it was science; and science worth doing is science worth funding, hence it was a waste of researchers' time and money.

So what is science worth funding? Philosophers of science distinguish between three parts of the scientific process: the context of discovery (the psychological process by which hypotheses are first proposed), the context of justification (the testing procedures by which we see whether there is good reason to think a hypothesis is likely to be true), and between them is the context of pursuit (the inference that says that a given hypothesis is worth the time and energy to test).

Now philosophers from William Whewell to Karl Popper have argued that the context of discovery is free from any constraint. Come up with your hypotheses any which way. Kekule first came up with the idea that benzene has a ring-shaped structure while dreaming, after a good bit of wine. Schrodinger came up with his equation for quantum mechanics while doing something with a woman who was not his wife, that one ought not be doing with a woman who is not one's wife. "Wild-assed guesses plucked out of thin air" is no big deal. You get your hypotheses any way you can.

But we don't spend valuable and scarce resources on any and all "wild-assed guesses." There needs to be a gate-keeper. But what criteria should the gate-keepers use?

Federally funded grants go through a peer-review process. Fellow scientists in the area sit down with detailed propsals and determine which ought to be funded based upon their perceived value to the sceintific community. "How important would the results be in furthering this area of research?", "How likely is it that this research will produce worthwhile results at all?", "How expensive it would be to produce the expected results?" are all questions the panels consider.

But these criteria are "inside the scientific beltway" issues. They are crucial to members of the scientific community, but meaningless to most outside -- because contemporary science is embedded in a social context in which the majority of people are scientifically illiterate. There is no doubt that this gap between working scientists and the general population is a bad thing for all involved. Does this mean that science that seeks to bridge this abyss is desirable? If there are hypotheses with wide popular appeal, is it a waste of time for scientists to test them?

In this case, Meyers is probably correct that a negative result would not affect the beliefs of anyone on either side of the discussion. But consider the case of Gravity Probe B. It was a very expensive experiment designed to test a derivable result from Einstein's general theory of relativity. In the year 2004, when it was launched, no physicist held that the general theory of relativity lacked empirical support. This was also an experiment that would change no one's mind. But it garnered a lot of headlines because it was associated with Einstein. John Glenn went back into space in 1998 as a commercial for NASA. Is it a waste of money to do scientific pr?

Basic research funding is harder and harder to come by. The number of science majors among undergraduates is much smaller than desired the the number of non-science majors who take science courses as electives above and beyond requirements is extremely small. By not undertaking these wastes of time, is science harming itself? Isn't marketing, as distasteful as it is, a necessary evil? By not doing this non-science science isn't science doing a disservice to itself? On the other hand, by undertaking them are we harming science by cheapening it? Does it make sense to take real scientists off the job for publicity stunts? Should the impact on social beliefs, not just social practice be a part of the decision making process in determining what hypotheses to test? Is advertsing worth researchers' lab time and effort?

It seems to me that this is analogous to the case with charities on the left. We want to make sure that every dime goes to feeding the poor or saving the rainforest, not to feeding some Congresscritter at a fancy DC eatery. But then, the other side has no problem schmoozing and gets the legislation it has written creating more poor and less rainforest. I think scientists need to bite the bullet here. It may not be earth shattering for those inside, but it may be a step towards creating a less hostile environment for science. Scientists may be like the Democrats -- staying above the fray doesn't seem to work, it just makes you seem aloof. Science needs to fight back, even in cases that seem to make no difference. Sort of like running a candidate for governor in Montana.

Title Without a Paper

A classic from Hanno: Using one situation as a model of explaining another situation is called metaphor. If you were discussing the nature of metaphors and used another linguistic system as a model to illustrate how metaphors work, it would be a metaphorical explanation of metaphor, or a meta-metaphor. If you could explain what role those explanations have in spoken language, you could write the paper...

What's a meta-metaphor for?

Kai Hagen

Our first candidate endorsement goes to Kai Hagen who is running for Frederick county commissioner. Kai is a smart, committed person who has the right approach and the right values at this time of pressured expansion in the county.

For those of you from outside the area, Frederick county is the intersection of the sprawl from both Baltimore and Washington. Where the national version of the culture of corruption involves lobbyists and politicians, on the local level it involves developers and politicians. Kai has been active at holding our town and county level officials responsible for following proper procedure and in leading the charge for projects that will benefit all of the county's residents, not just enrich the developers. To have Kai on the inside, as a working member of the Board of County Commissioners, would be a large step towards a more responsive and caring county government.

Please check out his website (warning: Kai is running for office, so there are plenty shots of his incredibly good-looking family and very photogenic dog at various points) and think about acquiring a bumpersticker or sending some cash his direction. In county-wide races, even a little goes a long way. If you think that the Democratic party needs to be developing a deep bench full of good, smart, strong candidates for all posts from dog catcher up to President, check him out.

Give 'em hell, Kai.

The Comedist Manefesto

On this holiest of days, let us read from holy skriptures...


In the beginning, there was the LORD. And He was funny.

On the first day, the LORD made light. He made light of everything. And the LORD sat back and said, "This is funny."

On the second day, the LORD created the Heavens and the Earth (in a way that is completely consistent with our best current geological theories). And He created the sun, and did moon the Earth. And the LORD sat back and said, "This is funny."

On the third day, the Lord looked upon the Earth and created the land and seas. Upon the land He did create plants. And then He took the plant from the Earth and the water from the sea and created the squirting lapel flower. And the LORD sat back and said, "This is funny."

On the fourth day, the LORD created the animals. He created the chicken and its rubber facsimile. He created the elephant. And He sayeth unto the pachyderm, "Funny, you don't look Jewish." And he did elongate the trunk. The giraffe, upon seeing this, laughed and craned his short neck to gaze again upon the elephant's protruding proboscis. And the LORD sayeth unto the giraffe, "Think that was funny spot boy? Watch this." And the LORD placed the elephant and the giraffe side-by-side. And He did giggle. And the LORD did lose track of how many zebras He had created. And so He put bar codes on them. And the LORD sat back and said, "This is funny."

On the fifth day, the LORD created man in His own image, only not quite so well-endowed. And looking upon his loins, man sayeth unto the LORD, "What is this, some kind of joke?" And the LORD sat back and said, "This is funny."

On the sixth day, the LORD sayeth unto man, "No, but this is." And the LORD created woman. And woman did look at the loins of man. And she did laugh. And the LORD sayeth unto man, "Behold, your wife...please." And man did sayeth unto the LORD, "Behold her? I just met her." And the LORD sat back and said, "This is funny."

On the seventh day, the LORD did rest and sayeth unto the angels, "Watch this." And the LORD did sayeth unto man and woman that they could live in the apartment above the Garden of Eden Novelty Shop, rent-free. But that they could not partake of the fruit of the Tree of Comedy. And as a joke, the LORD had created woman a week before her period and had placed only a small amount of chocolate in the apartment. And she was pissy. And so woman did go to the Tree of Comedy. And she did take the yellow, elongated fruit. And she did cast aside its casing. And she ate of the fruit of the Tree of Comedy. Seeing this, man did comment upon the shape of the fruit of the Tree of Comedy and its similarity to the shape of his own loins. And he did quip that woman seemed to have no problem taking the fruit into her mouth. And woman did retort that the fruit was much larger, although just as hard. And man did turn to storm away. And man's foot did fall upon the peel of the fruit of the Tree of Comedy. And man did fall...down a flight of stairs...onto a skateboard...across the floor...out a window...and head first into a perfectly placed pool of jello. From the jello, the hindquarters of man did protrudeth. Looking down upon the hindquarters of man, woman did ask the serpent about the sphincter between the hindquarters. And the serpent did sayeth unto woman, "Rectum? Damn near killed him." And the LORD sat back and said, "This is fucking hilarious."

Oy-main.