Polygamy Revisited

In discussing yesterday's comments, TheWife suggested a post extending and clarifying the polygamy portion of the argument. Fortunately, Lindsay over at Majikthise has done it for me and, no doubt, better.

We need to remember what the original claim was -- the slippery slope claim that if you allow gay marriage, you are forced to allow polygamous marriage. The point is that same-sex marriage does not require any structural changes to our current notion of marriage, just admitting that gay and lesbian couples deserve equal treatment under the law. While there is nothing inherently morally problematic about polygamous marriage contracts and we certainly could negotiate them, they provide a structurally different model that requires a redefinition of our notion of marriage.

Of course, these definitions are just legal constructs and we could reconfigure them any way we choose, but physicists figured out long ago that the three body problem has no exact solution and the same would be true in this case. No matter how carefully you negotiated and tried to work out the contract with multiple spouses, that damn reality is going to eventually throw a situation at you that will cause a conflict of rights that would not be a problem for marriage between couples, regardless of the distribution of genitalia. It is not a difference of degree, it is a difference of kind. And the fact that it is a difference in kind stops the slippery slope. It isn't that we can't allow polygamous marriage, it's that we aren't forced to allow it under our current structure. But that is what the conservatives want you to believe.

Oh, and the part about Lassie not being able to marry Timmy because he was really a male dog...actually he was trans-species -- a female cat trapped inside a male dog's body. I think it could have worked, but it was the 50's and you know how repressive the whole time period was... Nobody talked about things like that back then.

Einstein's Jewish Science

The characterization of the theory of relativity as "Jewish science" is often held up an example of what I call the philosopher's fallacy, that is, making claims about how the world does or does not work based upon explanatory schemes for which we have little evidence, but which we want to be true because we've worked them out in such great detail. These explanatory schemes can be quite elaborate, detailed, and often appeal to very deep-seated hopes, fears, and beliefs. The problem here, of course, is that the world is going to work in the way it does, whether we want it to be that way or not. In light of the current war on science, the latest front being the war on epidemiology, it is worth looking at the Einstein example in a bit more detail.

What could be meant by the phrase "Jewish science"? The usual sense we attribute to it is the trivial one: the theory came from the mind of a Jew. Einstein had a Jewish mother, so by Jewish and Nazi standards (the former being more restrictive) he was Jewish. Einstein did not believe in the God of Abraham, and so in terms of metaphysical belief was not Jewish. So was relativity "Jewish science" in this trivial sense? Yes and no.

This claim is not quite as absurd as it may seem. Einstein's theory of relativity replaced Newton's mechanics. Newton's theory, while undeniably furthering the clockwork universe view in which the material world was a well-oiled machine without any need for an interactive God, came from a very theological place. It was a reaction against Rene Descartes' attempt to divide the physical world of objects from the spiritual realm of souls. Newton's physics sought to explicitly put the Divine back in the material universe by making space itself God's sense organ. The absolute and inviolable natures of space and time were metaphysical testaments to the unchanging perfection of God. Then along comes Einstein who argues that both spatial lengths and temporal durations (not to mention simultaneity at distant points) are not absolute but depend on one's frame of reference. Einstein's relativity was an affront to Newton's physicist's Christianity. That fight was lost, but some reactionaries like the Discovery Institute's William Lane Craig battle on.

We love to take this period and oversimplify it, so this sense of the phrase is often the end of the discussion. We love the Hogan's Hero's picture of the Nazis as bumbling idiots. But life is more complicated than that. Philipp Lenard, who received the Nobel prize in 1905 for his work on cathode rays, was one of those who viciously attacked relativity and Einstein declaring the theory "a Jewish fraud." It was not a matter of pure ignorance.

(Lenard did have a personal beef with Einstein. Lenard was a master experimenter who played a major role in discovering the photo-electric effect -- which Einstein won his Nobel prize for explaining. The explanation was a significant piece in starting quantum mechanics and Lenard was furious that Einstein's name was the one attached to the phenomenon in most minds at the time.)

The oversimplification in the usual understanding comes from the fact that term "Jewish" meant several things to Germans of the period. At the time, the term had a distinctly political connotation. Anti-Semitism has deep and awkward roots in Germany. (Indeed, the word comes from German scholar Wilhelm Marr's attempts to differentiate his sociological argument for the inferiority of Jews, Antisemitismus, from the mere Jew hating, Judenhass, of the common bigot an die Strasse.) Before WWI, Kaiser Wilhelm II was a radical Christian, but made sure not to completely alienate Jewish financiers. Jews could hold certain jobs, but not significant political posts. After the war, with the fall of the old order and the imposition of Republican Democracy, Walther Rathenau became the first Jewish foreign minister -- until he was assassinated. "Jewish" became code for the new Social Democrats and had the sense of anger that things are no longer how they were back in the good old days.

The First World War split German society much as contemporary American society is split. The nationalistic, religious, patriotic, anti-scientific right was pro-war and determined to maintain that they did not start the war and if they did it was necessary pre-emption and furthermore they didn't lose the war and if they did it was because of internationalistic, pro-science, anti-morality, minority-coddling, progressive center-left weren't patriotic enough to support the war. (Germany had an active far left as well. the arguments between the Communists and the Social Democrats were also quite nasty.)

The Kaiser equated German militarism with German identity. To oppose the war, therefore, became the same thing as being anti-German. The poster child of this was Albert Einstein. We have this iconic image of Einstein as an older, rumpled, playful sage with unruly grey hair. But in his younger days, Einstein was extremely political. He left Germany at 16, swearing never to return, but was lured back by Max Planck who had built the finest physics department in the world at the University of Berlin.

When WWI came to pass, Einstein saw the nightmares of his youth realized and stood in opposition to the war when doing so was extremely unpopular and seen as anti-German. After the war, with feelings still raw towards their neighbors, the right seethed to see Albert Einstein used as a good-will ambassador. And Einstein went out of his way to use phrases that he knew would send the right-wing back home absolutely ballistic. He wrote and spoke in ways that political scientists and economists consider naive, but were politically quite effective in providing a folksy and plain-spoken finger in the eye of the German conservatives. Einstein was the Michael Moore of Weimar Germany. When Einstein went with Chaim Weitzman to the United States on an Allied ship to raise funds for a Jewish university in Jerusalem, his trip was seen in the same way as Jane Fonda's trip to North Viet Nam.

To call Einstein's theory of relativity "Jewish science" really was not terribly different than calling Darwin's theory "liberal science." The war against modern physics in Germany between the world wars was a part of the broader culture war, something that is eerily reminiscent of what we are seeing today. This is not to say that things here are exactly like they were there or that we are headed towards fascism or anything of the sort. But history is important and understanding what was happening on the ground is crucial if we take seriously the notion "never again."

The John Show Needs Your Help

For those in Adams County, Pennsylvania, you are no doubt acquainted with The John Show, philosopher John Bardi's Wednesday night public access open-forum call-in show. This show is truly one of a kind. It is a quirky, fun, and interesting exploration of the ideas and minds of south central PA.

I have received an appeal from Joe Hicks, the show's producer. Unfortunately, after eight years, the show is in need of help:

Lately we have been encountering significant problems seeking even the modest funding necessary to keep John on the air. I am not writing you to solicit funds, I am merely looking for suggestions. In order to air the John Show we need to accumulate a total of $50 per week in underwriting and sponsorship. We offer 30 second advertising spots aired four times a day seven days a week as compensation for contributions. If we cannot find this support by the end of the month the show may have to go off the air. I took John's class as a freshmen before moving to University Park as a sophomore. I consider him to be a fine educator and after four years at University I found few classes to be as stimulating. If you can offer me any aid in finding support, public or private, for the further dissemination of philosophical thought in Adams County please contact me.

If you or someone you know is intersted in helping keep this institution of free-flowing thought on the air, please contact Joe at jhicks@actv.org. With such modest needs, hopefully we can save the John Show. Joe wanted me to be absolutely clear that they would not be asking if they weren't in real danger of losing the show. Please help if you can.

Gettysburg readers, what are your favorite John Show moments?

Countering the Slippery Slope Nonsense: Why Gay Marriage Doesn't Lead to Box Turtle Nuptials

One of the standard arguments provided by the homophobic right against gay marriage is a form of what we call the domino fallacy or the slippery slope argument. The idea is that if you take that seemingly innocuous first step, it automatically leads to a second, which will force a third, and so on and so on until, next thing you know, there we are in Satan's own livingroom listening to Yanni on 8-track. In the case of marriage, the argument goes, if we open up the institution to same-sex couples, then we will be forced down the slippery slope to include all sorts of unusual couplings including cross-species arrangements. While Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania prefers to think about dogs in this way and John Cornyn of Texas is more fond of box turtles, James Dobson, in his book Marriage Under Fire, chooses to go down the donkey trail:

"Why will gay marriage set the table for polygamy? Because there's no place to stop once that Rubicon has been crossed. Historically, the definition of marriage has rested on a foundation of tradition, legal precedent, theology, and an overwhelming support of the people. After the introduction of marriage between homosexuals, however, it will be supported by nothing more substantial than the opinion of a single judge or by a black-robed panel of justices. After they have reached that dubious decision, the family will consist of little more than someone's interpretation of rights. Given that unstable legal climate, it is certain that some self-possessed judge somewhere will soon rule that three men, or three women, can marry. Or five men and two women. Or four and four. Who will be able to deny them that right? The guarantee is implied, we will be told, by the Constitution. Those who disagree will continue to be seen as hatemongers and bigots. Indeed, those charges are already being leveled against Christians who espouse biblical values. How about group marriage? Or marriage between daddies and little girls? Or marriage between a man and his donkey? Anything allegedly linked to civil rights will be doable, and the legal underpinnings for marriage will have been destroyed."

Marriage between a man and his donkey...adds a whole new layer to that "not coveting thy neighbor's ass" thing.

So what is wrong with this slippery slope argument? Why doesn't allowing gay marriage also force us to offer to marry polygamists? adults and children? humans and animals?

What marriage is and why opposing gay marriage is immoral

"Marriage" has several different meanings. It is a religious ritual, a social status, and most importantly for us, a legal status. Marriage is a contractual arrangement between two people to adopt a legal status which confers upon them certain legal rights. In fact, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of the US Congress, issued a report in 2004 that stated that there are 1,138 such rights, privileges, and protections under the law afforded to married couples.

What is at issue in the gay marriage question is nothing but the legal status. The issue at hand is whether hospital visitation rights, inheritance rights, power of attorney, being able to file joint tax returns, and all of the other legal protections ought to be denied to people because some folks' religion doesn't like the way that these people -- many of whom are not in their religion -- make love.

Marriage exists to eliminate ambiguities in law that arise from the fact that we do tend to couple up. We arrange our lives in such a fashion that it makes it impossible under the social contract which organizes society to give rights and responsibilities to individuals whose lives are completely intertwined. There is not my money and my wife's money, there are our assets. There is not my house and my wife's house, there is our home. There are not my children and my wife's children, there is our family. When talking about tax liabilities, child welfare decisions, and life choices in general, the responsibilities and benefits are ours together. We are what Thomas Hobbes called an "artificial individual; it makes no sense to think of us as two completely different people in some legal circumstances because we decide and act as a single entity and the law must account for that. If one of us were in an accident that caused that person to be incapacitated, the decision making rights for that person immediately go to the other partner. If one should pass away, all assets and liabilities, all responsibility for the children immediately go to the survivor. Questions about these sorts of thing need to be completely unambiguous to avoid problems like the Terri Schaivo fiasco where different family members were trying to wrest control from each other to further their own agendas. Marriage exists to make perfectly clear who has what rights and responsibilities and who shares what rights and responsibilities.

This has nothing to do with churches, synagogues, mosques, or temples. If a religion wants or doesn't want to perform a ceremony binding any given couple together in they eyes of their god(s), they may choose to or not to at their own discretion. It's your club, run it how you will. But this is a question of whether we deny rights, privileges, and protections under the law to honest, tax-paying, law-abiding citizens.

To oppose this equal treatment under the law is nothing but bigotry. They may try to wrap that bigotry in the cloak of religious righteousness, they may try to argue that their immoral stance comes from family or other values, they may feign concern for the children, but these are all red herrings designed to pull your eye away from the fact that all they are really trying to do is deprive innocent citizens of rights because they find the way they have sex to be yucky. Gay and lesbian couples are every bit the same in terms of commitment and acting as a unit, and therefore, there is no reason to exclude them from the disambiguating legal status of being married.

But what about polygamy?

But doesn't this start us down the slippery slope to hell? No. Consider first the case of polygamy. People are capable and some desire lives intertwined with more than one person. Couldn't three people make decisions as a unit and wouldn't this argument require affording the legal status to all of them?

No. The purpose of civil marriage is to make sure that the location of rights and responsibilities is perfectly clear. Polygamy would not only not make these issues unambiguous, it would entrench further ambiguity into the law. It would do the opposite of what civil marriage is meant to do. When Groucho proposed marrying two women, one said to him, "But that is bigamy," to which Groucho retorted, "It's big of me, too. It's big of us all. Let's be big for a change. What do you say?" The problem with polygamy is that we cannot always count on everyone to be big. Squabbles will occur and the point of marriage is to make sure that there is a clear legal way to resolve them. If we allowed Terri Schaivo to have two husbands and they disagreed on her care, then who gets the final word? This is exactly the sort of question marriage exists to answer. Polygamy not only wouldn't answer it, it would make it unanswerable. Gay marriage does not entail the necessity to legalize polygamy any more than, say, interracial or interfaith marriages do, that is to say, not at all.

How about marrying children?

Dobson and the others argue that gay marriage requires being able to marry minors. No. The idea is to make clear where there are joint rights and responsibilities and where those rights and responsibilities lay when one partner is incapable of exercising them. Minors cannot possess all the rights and responsibilities of adults. Hence, they could not enter into relationships wherein they would be asked to fulfill obligations that they cannot have. Whether this should also hold for adults who act like children...we can consider that later.

Ok, but what about the dogs, box turtles, and donkeys?

Same line of reasoning, of course. Animals may or may not have moral rights, but under our social contract they do not have legal rights. Since animals cannot be held legally responsible and cannot participate in making decisions, they cannot be married. If children do not rise to the standard, then clearly neither do box turtles. As for Dobson's donkeys, I have known many people who married jackasses, but that is a different question.

One might object that Lassie was quite capable of making life or death decisions for little Timmy, so "shouldn't they be allowed to get married?" I don't think it is a real concern because while Lassie seemed gentle and caring on screen, everyone knows that off-camera she was just a little bitch.

Civil marriage is a legal status that has good reason to exist and there is no reason not to extend it to couples of the same sex. At the same time, the function of that status means that the slippery slope that the right claims to exist is complete and utter nonsense.

Stephen Colbert: Comedist Martyr

Much has been made of Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondent's Dinner last weekend. I'd like to add a Comedist perspective.

Comedians use the term "bomb" to mean that your routine was not well-received by your audience. Colbert walked into a hostile room. A room he knew would not appreciate his pointed humor, yet he went through with it anyway. He intentionally bombed. He was a martyr for comedy.

He knew that it would be a hostile room and the reaction has been predictable. My favorite is the Washington Post's Richard Cohen. Cohen writes,

"First, let me state my credentials: I am a funny guy. This is well known in certain circles, which is why, even back in elementary school, I was sometimes asked by the teacher to "say something funny" -- as if the deed could be done on demand. This, anyway, is my standing for stating that Stephen Colbert was not funny at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner."

What immediately comes to mind is Bruno Kirby's cameo as a Sinatra-loving limo driver in Spinal Tap. He explained that he knew great music and that these no talent rock and rollers were no good and the whole thing was just a fad anyway. In the same way, Cohen knows funny and this isn't it, the whole Colbert thing is just a fad. What really comes to mind is the reception of Lenny Bruce. You heard the same condemnations of being rude, inappropriate, disrespectful, disgusting. And, like with Lenny Bruce, among the lefty, well-educated, hip crowd the routine absolutely killed.

But what about the room? Forget about Bush. Think about the crowd, the White House Press Corpse. Colbert's shtick is to skewer exactly the correspondents and pundits in the crowd. Thinking that they would laugh at his bit is like thinking that Andrew "Dice" Clay would be well received at a meeting of the National Organization of Women, or thinking that letting Louie Anderson headline a Weight Watchers gathering would be a good idea, or thinking that Foster Brooks would get laughs at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, or thinking the Chris Rock would be great at a Klan rally.

But it is not only being lampooned. This is a group that has a lot of internal conflict. These are people who have the primo spot in the world of journalism. These are people with big egos for being star reporters. They think they confront the greatest power on a daily basis and are the fearless front line of truth for the world. Now with this image of self-importance, they have been whooped. They have been threatened and turned into lapdogs. They know it and it is an unspoken truth. This was able to be swept under the rug as long as things didn't get too bad. But along came the debacles in Iraq and Katrina. Now the fact that they have failed to do their jobs not only became obvious, but the results have been devastating. And here was their night to congratulate themselves. They dress up and say to themselves, "My aren't we important. We'll eat, drink, and laugh at how much of an elite insiders club we are." They invite a comedian to come and do inside baseball jokes. Jokes about their strengths, jokes about how insular they are.

But Colbert did the opposite, his jokes pointed to the elephant in the room that everyone had agreed to ignore. Indeed, the ignoring of the elephant served as the foundational lie that they all needed to keep their self-images from being completely inconsistent with reality. It was an arrangement based entirely on bad faith. They all knew that the Emperor had no clothes and they also knew that if they said it, they would get beheaded. So they made livings commenting on the Emperor, making especially sure to never bring up issues of wardrobe. Then along comes Colbert and says, "Hey look at the Emperor's shirt. How does he get it to match the tie so perfectly? And my goodness, look at how those pants are tailored! Would you turn around, sir, and let us see how well it fits through the groin?" Everyone knows there are no pants and they all know that there are parts they are not supposed to look at because it is rude. Colbert was pointing right to those parts, but pretending -- exactly in the way that the reporters do -- that the pants were there. But when it was done by the Jester, the charade that everyone agreed to ignore was put front and center. As in King Lear, only the Fool speaks the truth.

Colbert bombed, but he did it for us. And so we say to him,

"I have been asked to read the following prepared statement on behalf of the Movement. 'We, the People's Front of Comedism, brackets, officials, end brackets, do hereby convey our sincere fraternal and sisterly greetings to you, Stephen, on this, the occasion of your martyrdom. Your dying on stage will stand as a landmark in the continuing struggle to liberate the parent land from the hands of the Neo-conservative aggressors, excluding those concerned with drainage, medicine, roads, housing, education, viniculture, and any other Republicans contributing to the welfare of Comedists of both sexes and hermaphrodites. Signed on behalf of the P.F.C., etcetera.' And I'd just like to add, on a personal note, my own admiration for what you are doing for us, Stephen, at what must be, after all, for you, a very difficult time."

(Anyone who does not recognize where this is cribbed from, shame, shame, shame. Your penance is to rent this and say ten "Hail Montys.")

Anchors and News Readers

I'm a philosophy teacher. I'll be the first to admit that when I say "I don't get it," I'm usually being disingenuous. It's an old classroom trick. But this time I really don't get it. Katie Couric, anchor of CBS Evening News? I've never been a fan, so maybe the fact that I simply find her grating is biasing my view, but... Katie Couric?

I heard an opinion piece on NPR a few weeks ago arguing that the shock at the move was based on sexism. No, I was really glad to have Madeline Albright as our Secretary of State, but at the same time, I really would prefer that Vanna White not be put in that role. It isn't a matter that females can't project the same gravitas as someone with a deep Cronkite-like voice. I think Margaret Warner and Gwen Ifill, for example, do fine jobs over at The NewsHour and that is a much more sober program.

But Couric is no Margaret Warner. The executive producer said, "What people appreciate most about Katie is that she's real -- that's really her up on the screen. I cannot wait to start working with her." Is it that she's real? Real what? Is it that they are trying to put a happy face on the news hoping that it will increase ratings. People don't want heavy, they want light. Is it just the next step in marketing the news? You've got FOX for the meat and potato conservative dads, now you need someone the soccer moms will like.

But if that is right, am I just doing the same thing? I'm a nerd and I want a news nerd, damn it. How dare they take this position away from us. We deserve the spot. Maybe it is a Freudian subconscious kind of reaction stemming from a lingering resentment of all the perky, good looking cool kids in high school, the fraternity/sorority/lacrosse player types in college who got all the dates. (Before someone brings it up...in college, I played lacrosse, but I was not a lacrosse player.) They always had the social power and now they are taking away one of the things that was ours.

Or maybe the corporate, network evening news, as irrelevant as it is becoming, is still something that should be more serious, more intellectual, more staid. Like health care, when you make it just another product in the marketplace that you are trying to sell for maximum profit, you are undermining the product itself and doing a disservice to society. Maybe, like asparagus, some things just aren't meant to be chocolate coated with rainbow sprinkles.

Dishonest or Ignorant? You Decide

I hate the saying, "There are no stupid questions." Yes there are. There are also dishonest questions, loaded questions, leading questions. There are all kinds of ways to ask bad questions.

My favorite is from the winter Olympics a few years back. After hyping speed skater Dan Jansen in a particular race continually for several days, Jansen took a spill and wiped out in one of the first turns of the race. In the post-race interview, the correspondent looking to explain away the fact that an American would have screwed up, gave Jansen an easy way out with the open question, "Was the ice slippery today?" Jansen, who earned my eternal respect, gave the interviewer a "what are you smoking" kind of look and said in a somewhat condescending tone, "It's ice. Ice is always slippery."

I've had a couple of Dan Jansen moments myself this week. The first was Sunday when listening to Meet the Press. In a discussion about gas prices and energy policy, Tim Russert referred to Brazil's move to become energy self-sufficient with a policy that makes significant use of ethanol from sugar cane which Brazil grows. Russert asked energy secretary Samuel Bodman why we haven't done what Brazil did.

It would be one thing if Russert were starting on a serious line about the connection between the administration and big oil, but, of course not. He let the secretary get away with simply saying that Brazil was a good model. Yeah, ecological degradation, funding terrorism, economic dependence that limits foreign policy options. I'd say getting off Middle East oil seems like a peachy idea.

Ok, so Brazil has a President, Luis Ignacio "Lula" Da Silva of the Workers' Party, who has been a lifelong advocate for unions and the working people of Brazil. While we have a millionaire President and a multi-millionaire Vice President who are very wealthy because of oil companies. These are the oil companies who, by personal invitation of the Vice President, wrote our energy policy. We have a President who repeatedly ran oil companies into the ground until they were bought out at irrationally high prices by Saudi oil money. This administration receives huge financial donations and support from the Petrolium interests. Hmmm, I wonder why we are not moving towards Brazil-style energy independence. Was Russert's question an honest request for information? Honest or ignorant? You decide.

The second case was on Monday, listening to Tom Moon's critique of Neil Young's new album, "Living With War" which is an album about our current administration and the war in Iraq. After giving a positive, but not glowing discussion of the cd, Moon ended with what apparently to him is a real puzzler, "Why did it take a 60 year old Canadian to come out with songs

This is a guy who reports professionally on music and the music industry for a major news outlet. Let's just assume that he has recently come out of a coma and never heard of the Dixie Chicks. We have an music industry that has undergone significant consolidation. Corporate controls what music comes out. In doing this they work with the distribution end, broadcasters who have also undergone incredible consolidation and also have long and deep ties to the President. When a younger group did express anger with the war, they were, shall we say, discouraged from continuing to express their views. Companies that can make sure that a group's music remains hot, held corporately sponsored bon fire to burn instead of broadcast their music. Other young artists might have possibly been aware of this, even if Moon was not. I wonder why only an aging hippie who would appeal to the aging hippie demographic comes out with an anti-war album. Dishonest or ignorant? You decide.

College Loans and the General Good

Michael Tomasky has written a wonderful article that has been blogged about many times, many places wherein he argues that the unifying Democratic theme needs to be "promoting the common good." Will Rogers' famous line that "I don't belong to any organized political party, I'm a Democrat" has never been more true and Tomasky argues that while the party has numerous factions all promoting their own agendas, the common ground between them is the promotion of the common good and that it ought to be the hook upon which we hang our rhetorical hat. When people ask what do Democrats stand for, the answer ought to be making this a better world for everyone, raising all boats, or some other equally cheesy metaphor about the common good that differentiates the party from views based on greed, selfishness, xenophobia, biogotry and other vicious positions that are based on "me first" thinking.

I thought of Tomasky's piece yesterday while reading this piece from CNN that compares the burden of college loans on today's students with life sentences. We saddle people with such unbelievable debt loads coming out of school -- an average of $15,622 for public universities and a staggering $22,581 for private institutions -- that they have little choice but to postpone life plans or change their trajectories altogether in order to make payments.

I see it first hand every day. Not only in my students, but in my colleagues. Full grown adults with very good jobs whose life choices about issues as important as when and if to have children are affected by their college loans. If we really believed in family values, this would be on every politician's radar screen. On the back end, people are delaying or choosing not to have families because of the debts; on the front end, parents live in constant fear of it. Families with children today have two worries that are always hanging over their heads. First, is to make sure that they don't lose their health insurance. But not far behind is "how in the world are we going to be able to afford to send the kids to college?"

If we want to look at it as a political problem, then we ought to take Tomasky's approach and think of this in terms of the common good. There are no better issues politically to champion than health care and college loans. They ought to be on every single pair of Democratic lips every time they are in the same county as a voter or a camera. They are about the health and well being of our children. Why aren't the Democrats pounding the fact that the Republican Congress just passed the largest cut ever to federal student loan programs -- $12.7 BILLION gone from college students -- at the same time interest rates are going up. Yeah, now that we've knocked them down, let's give the two-thirds of students who rely on loans a nice kick in the groin.

But it isn't just a politcal question, it is a moral issue. It is about whether we believe in social advancement. The statistics about the gap between those with and without a college degree are legion. Because of the wage differential, the only way to afford a family is to go to college, but because of the debt load, if you go to college you won't be able to afford a family. What are we thinking?

But again, this is not just about giving upward mobility and the financial means to be in control of life decisions for individuals, this is about us as a society. Education is not vo-tech training. Do NOT pull out that old chestnut, "Not everyone needs college," or "College isn't for everyone." Classist bullshit. I taught night school and community college and night school at a community college for years to people whose jobs did not require college level math or writing. Don't tell me that these people "don't need college." Yes, it is absolutely true that some people are better off waiting until they are older. Plato argued that we should not educate people until they are 40 because before that they are more interested in the life of the body than the mind -- and they ought to be. No doubt, this is true for some and everyone has his or her own life path to follow which may not lead right to college matriculation following high school. BUT, thinking deep thoughts, reading great books, learning about the workings of society and the world around us, becoming better more organized thinkers and writers enriches everyone. Grad school is not for everyone, but college which helps people become thoughtful, analytic, well-read people with critical and creative skills ought to be available to everyone.

And this is not merely a matter of personal enrichment. These makes people better for the marketplace, the townsquare, and the voting booth. Society as a whole, especially one that purports to be a democracy, benefits from a better educated population. We need to return to civil fucking discourse if we are going to have any hopes of getting decent policy decisions from our elected officials concerning the hard questions like global warming, economic justice and growth, education, and health care. It is a common good and common benefit demands common investment. Something strucuctural needs to be done. We need commitments to affordable health care and education for all. You should not have to sacrifice your first born, or opt to delay or not to have her in order to get a college education. If this does not become a central plank in the Democratic platform, you'd think they don't want to win elections. You want to stand for something Dems? Stand for families. Stand for affordable college.

Ummmm...This Seems Important

On Hardball last night, an interesting statement was made by David Schuster, a correspondent for MSNBC. He said,

"INTELLIGENCE SOURCES SAY VALERIE WILSON WAS PART OF AN OPERATION THREE YEARS AGO TRACKING THE PROLIFERATION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS MATERIAL INTO IRAN. AND THE SOURCES ALLEGE THAT WHEN MRS. WILSON'S COVER WAS BLOWN, THE ADMINISTRATION'S ABILITY TO TRACK IRAN'S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS WAS DAMAGED AS WELL."

Ok, so let me see if I understand this whole story.

1) A forged document claiming that Iraq was seeking to buy yellowcake uranium ore from Niger was passed along to American intelligence. The forgery was so bad that it took the International Atomic Energy Agency, using Google, a mere half hour to determine it was not authentic.

2) The claim in the document was doubted by intelligence officers, but fit in well with the story that Iraq was an imminent/gathering/potential threat to the US and this warranted the invasion which was not popular at the time.

3) The Vice President asked the CIA to look into this claim.

4) The CIA sent Joe Wilson to Niger to check it out.

5) Wilson wrote a report for the CIA contending that there is no credible evidence that the claim is true.

6) The President's speech writers felt that it was a rhetorically powerful claim regardless of its truth or falsity and included it in the draft of the President's State of the Union speech. When members of the intelligence community vetting the speech objected to the claim, speech writers reworked the sentence so that instead of actually making the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium for nuclear weapons which is not true, Bush will say that British intelligence has said that "Iraq is trying to buy uranium for nuclear weapons." This report will be true, since the British wrote a report just repeating what we told them based on the forged document. But by saying it in this way, the President, in his only Constitutionally mandated report, will be able to say something that that is most likely false but will convince people that invading Iraq is necessary while not saying something he knows is false. He can lie without lying.

7) Ambassador Wilson, angry at the inclusion in the State of the Union speech of the Niger claim after his report on it, writes an editorial in the New York Times saying the claim was unsupported by intelligence.

8) Iraq is invaded. Things do not go according to plan. No weapons of mass destruction or advanced programs for developing nuclear weapons are found. Intelligence failures, like those connected with the attacks on 9/11, are cited. The intelligence community is faulted.

9) In a week when the White House also smeared ABC reporter Jeffrey Kofman by disclosing to Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report that Kofman was not only gay, but Canadian, because he reported an Iraq story the Bush administration didn't like, someone in the White House leaked the name of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, to the press. When Robert Novak printed her name, Ms. Plame, who was a covert CIA agent, had her career ruined. These two actions were clearly understood in the press to mean that if someone displeased the administration with their reporting, severe retribution is likely.

10) The President, when confronted about the leak said that he would find the leaker. The administration's defenders argued that since Ms. Plame was on desk service working out of CIA headquarters at Langley, she couldn't have been undercover or of very high intelligence value. Thus her outing her would have caused no harm to US intelligence operations.

11) The President never did find the leaker, but the Vice President's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, is currently under indictment for acts pertaining to the leak and its cover-up.

12) In his defense, Libby reveals that President Bush, himself, authorized the leak of classified information. The argument is made that it is impossible for the President to break the law in leaking classified information because as commander in chief, he has the power to classify and declassify information. And even though this information did not go through the proper declassification procedures and was not made public in the standard fashion, the claim of Presidential infallibility on this point deflects any possible wrong doing.

13) Iran announces it has nuclear weapons. Sabers on both sides are rattled. The US tests a new weapon designed to show Iran that we can destroy bunkers deep underground, like those used by Iran to develop their nuclear program.

14) It turns out that Ms. Plame was part of a group that was part of a group that was working on intelligence related to the Iranian nuclear program and that by outing her, our intelligence capabilities had been damaged by the non-leak leak.

So, does this mean that the President himself knowingly damaged US intelligence capabilities in a case that will possibly result in an air assault on Iran or a change in the power balance of an already unstable and geo-politically crucial region of the world? Am I off the mark here or did the President intentionally hamper our ability to monitor whether one of the axis of evil nations was acquiring one of the most deadly forms of armament, a fact that might be operative in taking us into another war? Isn't it bad thing that the leader of Iran, who said that Israel should be wiped off the map, now may have the power to do so and by harming our intelligence apparatus, didn't the President harm our ability to act earlier and possibly halt the program? Maybe it's just me, but this seems kind of important. Sure, not blowjob in the Oval Office important, but perhaps worthy of a bit more attention.

We Can Rebuild Him: Make Him Faster, Stronger, Funnier, Happier...

The left has a self-image problem. We seem to have lost our picture of ourselves and, with it, we seem to have lost our joy. We had a picture. Back in the 70's we had long-haired, guitar-playing, sweater wearing, multicultural kids holding hands and singing that they wanted to buy the world a corporately produced carbonated beverage. It was cheesy and campy, sure, but it was about freedom, peace, togetherness, caring, sex, and the care-free silliness of the Beatles in Help! Given the choice, you wanted to be us, not what they wanted us to be. But it wasn't just a marketing scheme trying to create some way to sell ovaltine to young baby boomers, it came in part from the liberation movement and the all the possibility that came with expanding freedom; and it came in part from the huge generation who happened to be at the age where they had to consider what they wanted "real life" to look like. Put the two together and there was a sense that a different model of living, a happier model was possible. Love was in the air -- of course, the notion of "love" was loaded with all kinds of political baggage, but that is exactly the point.

Then came the Reagan 80's. It knocked the crap out of us. It seemed like it was disaster after catastrophe. We had the US sponsored death squads killing innocents in Central America, bunny rabbits getting their eyes burned out for shampoo, Apartheid in South Africa, ecological calamities that if we don't stop right now [fill in name of species or important natural feature] would be gone forever, and on and on and on. Fast and furious, the issues that we HAD to take on just kept coming like chocolates on the conveyor belt in that Lucy episode. We were so busy putting out the fires and preventing the world from going completely to hell, that we lost track of the love.

The perceived success in elevating in the public mind the plight of those suffering from the famine in Ethiopia and homelessness on our own streets set the tone for the next generation of lefties. We got celebrities. We got concerts. We got news coverage. It became the default position. We became door to door sympathy salesmen. It was all about creating outrage about the next big problem. The meta-problem was that there were so many problems. Which one would be the one to galvanize our attention. It became a bustling marketplace of crises. And in the marketplace, too much supply could not drive up demand. We divided into camps to drive our pet concerns against the others. To get any press, you needed to be worse, you needed more emotion-laden images. The ratcheting up started. You had to have more distended bellies than the undernourished children last month. You had to have a more global ecological catastrophe. You needed a more vicious genocide. And with each step, the public got more and more weary, more and more skeptical, more and more immune.

That's part of the problem. We have been selling crisis for so long, that we no longer sell love. We have adopted a bunker mentality, hunkered down to hold what little ground is left that we have lost our dreams. We easily get branded as angry liberals for a reason, we are angry. I'm not saying we shouldn't be outraged. Damn right we should. That outrage is well placed and ought to be fueling our desire to right horribly immoral wrongs. But trying to create our outrage in everyone else does not work. It is a losing strategy. Yes, the other side does it, too. Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter -- all ragingly angry. But we are especially susceptible being blindsided by the anger charge because we have lost our picture. The GOP talking point that the Dems are "the party of no" resonates. We tell people, "no to smoking," "no to meat," "no to fun cars," no to fur," "no to titillating images," no to everything that is part of the image of American life that the other side is selling. They are selling chocolate and all we are saying is "no, only eat organically grown broccoli, I don't care if you like it." We will lose every single time.

Some kids on my campus on Valentine's Day were handing out literature to students explaining the horrible labor practices behind the chocolate and diamond industries. The idea was to make people realize that when they were getting something for their beloved, they were really contributing to global evil. It was a very well-intentioned act, but think about what it said. The people taking the literature were only trying to do something nice and thoughtful for their sweeties. They were trying to make their boy/girlfriend happy. They were trying to get some action with someone they were interested in. And what is the left saying? Expressing your care/love/lust makes you part of the evil syndicate. There is no parade we won't rain on. I am not saying that we should look the other way. I'm not saying we should cave in and be pollyannas. I'm not saying we should put off action. We do need to stop these labor practices that are the result of global corporate capitalism. But I am saying that we need to be smart about it and part of being smart involves doing it in a way that reinforces our picture.

What is that picture? We need to figure it out, but I agree with Al Franken that whatever it is, it need to include humor. Our lives are funnier and everyone loves funny. If those kids had been selling fair-trade organic chocolates and given out a free condom with each bar, their message would have gotten a much better reception. People would have been drawn in, instead of rolling their eyes and thinking "there they go again." Be funny. Be clever. Make it a natural part of actions of the left.

But funny is not the only angle. We need a fuller picture. It should include being active in the outdoors. It should include being smart. Eating really good food. Having a lover free of socially constructed hangups. Being happy, not just angry. I'm not saying we should lose our edge, just that we don't need it to be our only side or our most public side. We need it to be a means to a better way of life, not an end which creates an angry unsatisfying life.

Help me out here. What is the picture of the life we are proposing? What is the dream? I understand that we all have different desires and that life decisions are deeply personal. I know we especially hate to try to rope people into things instead of letting them be autonomous agents, but at the same time, we can offer possibility. We can offer some building blocks from which to build the image of the perfect life. What are the positive possibilities we should be selling? I think health, outdoor activity, freedom, humor, and sexual liberation ought to be part of it. Other ideas?

Comedist Sunday School

For an introduction to Comedism, the new religion; passages from The Comedist Manifesto, our holy book; Comedist support for evolution and gay marriage; how Comedism was founded; and a note on the War on Comedy, see these links.

Friends,

We talked about knock-knock jokes earlier in the week and asked why we teach them to children when they really aren't that funny. In fact, the reason we teach them to children is the same reason they aren't that funny.

Remember how a joke works, there is a set up that sketches a situation that the listener thinks she understands, then along comes the punchline and the listener realizes that she was really supposed to understand the situation in a completely different way. The humor is in the transition, the time when the listener's brain is forced to try to see the world in two irreconcilable ways. We noted last week that humor requires the granting that there is always more than one way to see reality and this is fundamentally opposed to fundamentalism.

What the knock-knock joke does is to bring out the structure of the joke and make it a formalized part of the linguistic exchange. Every part of the joke is made explicit.

A: "Knock-knock" (read, I'm going to tell you a joke)
B: "Who's there?" (read, o.k. what's the set up?)
A: "Dwayne" (read, think of the normal situation in which a person is at the door)
B: "Dwayne who?" (read, ok, I'm thinking of the situation in which a person is at the door, but now give me the punchline so I can think about it differently)
A: "Dwain the tub, I'm dwowning!" (read, it wasn't a person's name, but a command given by someone with a speech impediment, isn't that funny?)

We teach children knock-knock jokes because they wear the intricate structure of a joke like an exoskeleton; the form that is usually contained on the interior is on the outside. In order to teach children how to tell jokes, we teach them to tell highly structured jokes first because joking is a sophisticated means of communication that requires training and linguistic sophistication. Knock-knock jokes are not funny because the structure is brought out to such an extent that we all know when the punchline is coming, we expect it. The timing of a knock-knock joke is telegraphed, something that in a normal joke is a bad thing. We surrender the virtue of timing, a crucial element of the joke, to teach the structure.

But while we need to teach children to express themselves like adults to be funny, they teach us to see the world like them. Children are funnier than we are. Children live in worlds in which there are not the rigid boundaries that we need jokes to help us shed. They are always seeing reality in multiple ways. When my wife's grandfather passed away years ago, her niece, quite young at the time, asked my sister-in-law where he was. She was told that "His body is back at their house." With innocent curiosity, but no revulsion, she asked, "And where is his head?" The thought of decapitating our recently deceased is horrible for us adults. Descerating a body, we would scream. But for children, whose world is fluid in ways we could only dream of, things are always open. True humor is a combination of adult linguistic sophistication and child-like openness to a world of multiple senses. Humor is a comedic joining of opposites.

To celebrate this, here is a knock-knock joke, a child's joke that ought not be told to the children.

A: Knock-knock.
B: Who's there?
A: Fornication.
B: Fornication, who?
A: Fornication like this, a black tie is optional.

Irreverend Steve

Who do you feel sorry for?

I feel sorry for the White House staffer in the communications office who is part of the group that needs to track media coverage of the administration and has the job of reporting back every morning about the Daily Show with a straight face and a somber or outraged tone of voice.

I feel sorry for Jeb Bush. He must watch every press conference by The Decider and feel like the Pete Best of politics.

I feel sorry for the callgirls hired by Mitch Wade and Brent Wilkes for Duke Cunningham and the alleged other Republican Congressmen. Having to do suffer the indignity of doing what they had to do for those pasty old white guys and then having to watch the media make a big deal about armoires. At least the fancy French furniture got to keep their drawers.

Whom do you feel sorry for today?

Marriage for (and against) Dummies

I'm working on the section of (what will hopefully be) my new book, Was It Morally Good For You, Too?: A Guide to Rational Ethics in Sex, Politics, and Other Dirty Words to be called "The Ins and Outs of Sexual Ethics." Comments and criticisms gratefully accepted.

There is, perhaps, no subject that provokes worse moral discussions in American culture than sex. As a culture we have no clue about how to talk about that part of every human life that ought to be the source of joy, passion, and intimacy. Instead we are presented with a classic case of false alternatives where we seem to be forced to choose between complete sexual abstinence except for the few instances of intentional insemination, on one hand, and whatever-floats-your-boat, anything goes, free-for-alls, on the other. And then mixed in with all of this are questions about marriage, as if marriage had anything to do with sex. Marriage has several distinct meanings which are conflated in our social conversation, often to hide a distinctly political agenda. If we want to talk coherently about the ethics of marriage, we need to make sure to clearly work out what these meanings are and keep them separate.

Some of the views we are arguing against often contend that sexual ethics are inextricably tied up with the notion of marriage. Marriage on some of these views is a sufficient condition, a sort of "have sex free" card, and on others it is merely necessary for ethical sex – you still can't wear a rubber thingy on your weewee. In order to set out the relation between sex and marriage, we first have to understand what marriage is.

This is not as easy as it might seem because there are several different meanings to the word and what often happens in our sloppy discourse about the topic is that people knowingly or unknowingly slide back and forth between different meanings when it suits their political purpose.

One sense of the term relates to a religious rite. Religions perform marriage ceremonies and those so wedded are seen within the faith community as having entered an special sort of relationship with one another or a three-way with God. This ceremony usually comes with rights and responsibilities on the part of the partners; sometimes symmetric, sometimes not depending on the faith and brand of theology within the faith.

But "marriage" has meanings beyond the religious rituals associated with it. It is also a social status. Married couples are seen by society as different from unmarried couples. There are non-religious, social expectations attached to being married, these of course, vary with the time and place, but we can think of sexual exclusivity, shared responsibility in the household, and the right to constantly bitch about your spouse's mother (For the record, I have a wonderful mother-in-law). These expectations may or may not be included in any given religion's picture of marriage, but hold across the society as a whole. What is expected of a wife or a husband, even for those with deep faith, comes from social structure as well as religious institutions.

In addition to the religious and the social notions of marriage, there is the legal sense which is completely distinct. Under this notion, marriage is a contractual arrangement between two people to adopt a legal status which confers upon them certain legal rights. In fact, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of the US Congress, issued a report in 2004 that stated that there are 1,138 such rights, privileges, and protections under the law afforded to married couples. We do tend to couple off and in doing so we arrange our lives so that it makes no sense to consider the couple to be separate individuals in certain legal contexts. There isn't my money and my wife's money, there is only our money. There isn't my house and my wife's house, only our home. As a couple we function in certain ways as what Hobbes' called "an artificial individual." It makes sense that we should file our taxes as a single entity and that inheritance rights should be implied.

Because there is no distinguishing between a couple in terms of ownership of property or guardianship of children, or authority on matters germane to their life, the married couple makes decisions as a unit and thereby assumes responsibility for those decisions as a unit. For this reason, they are given the special status of being able to speak for each other. This means that power of attorney in cases where one spouse becomes incapacitated automatically rolls over to the other spouse. If your married partner is in an accident, you make choices related to his or her care (even if those choices are disliked by an elected official who happens to be physician who makes a diagnosis from a video tape which disagrees with specialists who have actually been in the same room as your wife).

Notice that none of this has anything to do with having sex. Marriage, in this sense, is a legal status based upon joint ownership, responsibility, and decision-making. This is the only sense of marriage that the state has any jurisdiction over. It is a status granted by, defined by, and controlled by the state relating to matters of the government for legal purposes. State-sanctioned marriage has nothing to do with the morality of any given sexual activity engaged in by the married couple. Of course, we hope that all married couples have engaging, enriching, and enjoyable sex lives. Life partners make the best lovers. There may even be social or religious expectations relating marriage to sex, but these are entirely independent of marriage as a legal question.

For this reason, the contemporary debate over gay marriage is deeply flawed. The question at hand is purely one of assigning rights. The only version of marriage at issue is legal marriage. Put clearly, this is a question of rights, and anyone who opposes gay marriage is saying that there is a group of honest, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens of this nation who should be deprived of rights, privileges, and responsibilities under the laws of the land simply because they do not like who those people have chosen to make their lives with.

The appeal to religious definitions is a red herring. No one would force any church, synagogue, mosque or temple to marry anyone in their faith that they chose not to. If gay marriage was legal and a religious organization did not want to perform a religious ritual for a gay couple, they are perfectly free to decline. If your theology declares that in the eyes of your deity no same-sex couple can be joined in the bonds of holy matrimony, those are your metaphysical postulations, have at 'em. But the question of gay marriage has nothing to do with theology. It is a legal question of rights and rights only, and anyone who opposes gay marriage is saying that there is a group of honest, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens of this nation who should be deprived of rights, privileges, and responsibilities under the laws of the land simply because they do not like who those people have chosen to make their lives with. In my book, that's what we simply call biogtry and that is wrong.

Where Have You Gone, Mr. Wizard, Our Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes To You

As he is wont to do, PZ Meyers at Pharyngula has put up a great post looking back at the Dover/Intelligent Design decision, wherein he quotes a Seattle Times article on the Creation Wars. There are a couple of points from his discussion that I would like to comment upon.

The thesis of his post is call to remain vigilant. One court case does not a victory make. The Dover decision, he argues is merely a "stopgap." While a positive local development, it will become a rallying cry for the most intensely anti-scientific players to redouble their efforts. "We're holding the top of the wall while they undermine our foundations, and we know where that is going to lead." Those leading the attack on evolution theory are working on younger minds, while most of those on the front lines are working in higher ed. By the time the college profs get at them, their views have hardened and infected a wider population that may not make it into a college classroom at all or at least not one that deals with these issues. As such we need for our focus to be broader than our classrooms. "Every court case in this struggle, from Dayton to Dover, has failed to change a single mind, and while they have told us much about creationists and creationism, they've done nothing to educate people about science and evolution. And that's the only place where this war can be won, in public education, both in the schools and among the general public."

While I agree with the central proposition, I think that the situation is both better and more dire than presented. Dover wasn't a mere stopgap. It was more important than that. Sitting here in Gettysburg, not far from Dover, I would equate the case with Pickett's charge, the Confederates' move into the Union lines. The ID folks had soft general support until they started gaining traction with their "teach the controversy" campaign. This was brilliant packaging on their part. The question ceased to be about science and became a moral question of fairness. "If you are so sure about the superiority of evolution theory, why are you afraid of a fair fight?" It was a smartly placed trap. Any response could easily be typed as elitists or cry-baby. They were winning the PR in a big way.

I think the turning point was with Barbara Forrester's testimony. It was there (indeed throughout, but especially there), that the "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" defense was destroyed. The mask came off and the ID people had to shed their sheep's clothing and stand as the creationist wolves they are. What this did was crucial. Their case was built on a moral claim of fairness to two competing scientific theories; but at this point, they were shown to be liars. They were trying to deceive the public by putting up a product that was not "as advertised". As such, they lost the foundation for their moral case because the people who had bought into it realized that they had been played. They lost the fence-sitters who while generally not well-schooled in science, aren't knee-jerk anti-science either. At this point, the narrative changed. Science went from "Nasty big guy with a stick who refuses to play fair because he thinks he's above the rules" to "misunderstood victim who was innocent all along." what this has done is give us an advantage, an advantage we need to seize. The charge was repelled, now we need to make sure it will be the high water mark.

How to do it? Here is where PZ is exactly right. We need to take it outside the college classroom because that is where things really are won and lost. Not only because that is where the creationists have focused their efforts (they figured out that many high school science teachers are in their camp, those who aren't are less well trained at responding to their talking points, and those who can respond are often nervous about administrations and school boards who are in their camp), but because young minds are the ones who grow up to be citizens, scientists, and scientist-citizens.

I was in a 6th grade classroom a couple of years back because they had questions about relativity theory from a reading they had done. The request got forwarded to me by a colleague(I'm a philosopher with a physics background, work on interpretations of relativity theory, and have given several lecture series on the history of science and Einstein) and I went in trying to figure out how to make all of my best jokes age appropriate. I work in classrooms every day, but I was not ready for the energy I was about to experience. Oh, my, goodness. These kids were more than hungry for knowledge, they were starving. They had amazingly insightful questions about all kinds of scientific issues. At one point, a child was so excited about his thoughts on why a candle flame always goes up that he jumped out of his chair, grabbed the chalk from my hand, charged the chalk board and launched into a lecture. Boys, girls, children of color, children of European heritage -- they were ALL exploding with interest in science.

Then I came back to my afternoon college class with their blank stares and "Is this going to be on the exam?" I wondered what the hell we did to make those kids into these kids. Some of it, no doubt has to do with puberty and that hormone thing, but part of it isn't. I have a schtick I do at the beginning of every class. I say, "Ask me any question, auto mechanics to quantum mechanics. Anything." I get all kinds of questions, politics, personal relationship advice, smart-ass silliness. But a stunning amount are about science. But the sad thing is that they come from students who would rather stick an ice pick in their left eye than take a science course. They want to know about science, but we have lost them. On the other side, whenever I have a student excited to study science there is always a story about this incredible physics/chemistry/biology teacher s/he had in high school. Teaching at the secondary and high-school level is so unbelievably important that it is criminal that it does not receive more support.
But then there is the real opportunity afforded to us by Dover. We now have the big mo' in terms of public sensibility. We need to make the most of it. We need scientists to regain their places as public intellectuals. We need Mr. Wizard back, damn it. I am extremely proud of a former student of mine is now working for the Boston PBS station and is involved in the production of NOVA (the show that first made me fall in love with science). We now have outlets like the Discovery channel and Animal Planet. We need a new generation of Carl Sagans. We need people to make science fun and funny and interesting and exciting. We need to make science so cool that you start seeing designer lab coats coming down the Paris fashion runways.

But I'm worried that we're not set up for it. We don't have the infrastructure. We train Ph.D.'s as lab technicians. We reward them with jobs and tenure only if their work stays inside the building. We need to realize that advancing science requires more than advancing science. As a physicist colleague of mine says, "I was never taught to talk dinner party physics." Just as lawyers have to do pro bono work, so we need to take our intellectuals and start to realize that outreach is a necessary part of the gig. It is too easy to be insular and when we don't come out to play, the vacuum is filled with charlatans and charismatics. We need an army of Don Herberts and Isaac Asimovs. Dover has given us this moment.

UPDATE: An intersting ID-related post today over at Buridan's Ass . Well worth the read.

Claim: There are no funny knock-knock jokes

Then why are knock-knock jokes always amongst the first jokes we teach kids? The topic of this weekend's Comedist sermon.

If you care to try to prove me wrong, give it your best knock.

For an introduction to Comedism, the new religion; passages from The Comedist Manifesto, our holy book; Comedist support for evolution and gay marriage; how Comedism was founded; and a note on the War on Comedy, see these links.

PNAC, PNAC. Who's There? Iran. Iran Who? Iran Away From The IAEA and There's Nothing You Can Do About It.

Iran is rattling sabers this morning. Nothing terribly new there, or is there? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is threatening to take Iran's nuclear project underground (figuratively, literally that's where much of it already is in order to avoid bombing attack) and Iran Focus is reporting that "Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a direct threat at the United States on Wednesday, saying that it would 'harm' American interests all over the world if an attack was launched against its nuclear installations, state television reported." The problem is not the threats, but the likelihood that they feel comfortable enough to possibly go through with them with the US completely bogged down in Iraq.

And things were looking so good in Iran not so long ago. We had figures like Mohammed Khatami who was the voice for a new generation of Iranians for whom the revolution was a chapter of history. Significant democratic reforms seemed imminent. Relations between the US and Iran were beginning to thaw. There was so much promise. Now the country is ruled by the hard-line ultra-conservative Ahmadinejad, is, or is about to be, a nuclear power, and is threatening to make $3/gallon gas look cheap. How did we get from point A to point B in so little time?

Part of the answer surely is comes from Khatami failing to deliver on big campaign promises. Despite a few head to heads with the old guard controlled Guardian Council -- many of which he lost -- major social changes didn't occur. But the international surely was as important as the domestic. Nothing helped the Iranian conservatives more than the American conservatives. In the 90's, when America could not be easily portrayed as the Great Satan, the pull of the clerics was diminished. When my cousin visited her in-laws in Tehran during this period, she found them, literally, doing the Macarena. But now, it is quite easy to redraw the old cartoon of America and have it pass as a portrait. The hatred is back and we have the neo-conservatives, in large part, to thank.

When George H. W. Bush replaced Ronald Reagan, he brought in his own people. He replaced many of the names we see today with a group that has come to be known as the "realists." Where Reagan's people saw the military as a tool of foreign policy to be freely used in places like Panama and Granada, Bush's people like Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell saw the military differently. Their picture was that the military ought to be used only when necessary; before committing troops, there must be a clear plan for going in, doing what needed to be done, and getting out; the military would go in heavy "with a big footprint" of overwhelming force and then get the hell out. The Reagan people had other ideas.

While on the outs, especially through the Clinton years, they organized themselves into a group called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Their founding figures are now household names: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, and our current ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad. When Cheney was appointed the chair of the committee to find a vice-presidential running mate for George W. Bush, the return to power of this group was all but assured. All that needed to happen was for G.W. to be installed in the White House.

The group included Francis Fukuyama who argued that liberal democracy had triumphed over all other political systems and that there was an emerging consensus about this across the globe. Like Hegel and Marx, who posited an "end of history," Fukuyama saw liberal democracy as the ultimate resting point towards which we as a planet were moving. The idea was simple. People want to be like the US, if we simply eliminate the obstacles, it will happen on its own. The central PNAC picture would be to eliminate authoritarian rulers, allow democracy to spontaneously appear, with it would come free market economies. This would be aided by our major corporations who would be part of the plan so that they would be right there on the ground behind the troops to provide the necessary technologies to bring the occupied country up to speed. They would have immediate access to the market and be able to corner it before anyone else stepped in. Democracy would spread and US based corporations would rake in HUGE profits. What could be better?

The only question was how to get rid of those pesky governments already in place. For this, we needed to reshape our military. No longer the 800 pound gorilla, it would become a cobra. No heavy footprint that required a lot of logistics and time, it would be quick, silent, and lethal. The rules against assassination would be lifted, special forces elevated, covert operations made easily available for foreign policy use. As soon as Bush Jr. was sworn in the changes started. Rumsfeld began working on transforming the military, Cheney began working on dismantling the standard diplomatic means, and Iraq was put immediately on the table as the first domino that would tip. It was easily vilified, it was under sanctions and so had a weak military that didn't require concern, and it had some of the largest petroleum reserves in the world.

Once Iraq was converted, every nation in the world would have two choices: fall behind us or fall because of us. You were in or out; and if you were out, you would soon be out. It would lead to American hegemony and any nation that was seen as a potential rival in power was seen as an enemy. Domestically, the quick victory with few casualties would win over the public. There would be none of the Viet Nam style pictures of coffins coming back and anti-war sentiment could be easily branded as anti-American because this would not be a protracted war, but the taking out of a dictator who opposed democracy and, after all, everyone loves a winner. If war could be waged with all the patriotic hoopla and none of the sacrifice, it could be easily sold. Inside and out, the world would have to follow the neo-cons. The 21st century would be the American Century.

And so we invaded. When Army General Eric Shinseki suggested that several hundred thousand troops on the ground would be necessary to secure Iraq after an invasion, he was immediately attacked in the media by PNAC founders Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and pressured out of the job into retirement. That many troops was old school, this was PNAC time. It would be done quickly with fanfare, embedded media for PR, and...

The spokesman had to sell the new branding. We needed the President to draw the line between us and them. He needed to use phrases like "us vs. them," "you are with us or against us," "dead or alive." Black and white language would mirror a distrust of diplomacy. We talk with our fists, so that we don't need to talk much. The initial group of targets would be set out as an "Axis of Evil."

But there were two main problems. First, the world did not fall in line. Europe -- old Europe, at least -- and much of the rest of the globe saw exactly what the plan was (of course, it was posted on their website, so this was not really very difficult) and didn't like it. Second, things in Iraq didn't quite shake out as planned. The result was a one-two punch to US foreign policy interests: on the one hand, the countries we most worry about perceive a pressing threat to their own well-being and feel the need for the most powerful weapons to defend themselves, on the other hand, with the US mired in Iraq, they see that we are virtually powerless to stop them.

And now, instead of having everyone cowering at our feet, they are laughing in our faces. By being school yard bullies, we have legitimized all the other school yard bullies. We taunted instead of talking and now we are getting taunted back. We're like the wide receiver who spikes the ball and does his in-your-face touchdown dance only to realize that he never really made it into the end zone, but spiked the ball on the 5 yard line. When Iran approached the US to discuss the situation under the former president Khatami with whom we surely could have done business, Dick Cheney's response was "We don't negotiate with evil, we defeat it." General Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff said "The secret cabal got what it wanted: no negotiations with Tehran." PNAC made our bed and now we are laying in it. Damn shame the pillow is radioactive.

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.