I’m reading Thomas Kuhn’s controversial classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which Kuhn put forward, among other things, the suggestion that there not be any sense in which we can say that modern science puts us closer to the truth than Aristotelian and Ptolemaic science. Kuhn rejects the kind of foundationalist epistemology that claims we can have objective certainty about our knowledge. Since intellectuals were practically required to take a position on Kuhn in the several decades after he published, I’ve been flipping through the books on my shelf to see if I can make more sense out of discussions of Kuhn the second time through.

List night I pulled down Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and found that its one reference to Kuhn was simply dripping with disdain:

So psychologists like Freud are in an impossible halfway house between science, which does not admit the existence of the phenomena he wishes to explain [i.e. consciousness], and the unconscious, which is outside the jurisdiction of science. It is a choice, so Nietzsche compellingly insists, between science and psychology. Psychology is by that very fact the winner, since science is the product of the psyche. Scientists themselves are gradually being affected by this choice. Perhaps science is only a product of our culture, which we know is no better than any other. Is science true? One sees a bit of decay around the edges of its good conscience, formerly so robust. Books like Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions are popular symptoms of this condition.

-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. 200.

Bloom is contemptuous of Kuhn and other thinkers that he takes to be relativists because he takes the desire for wisdom to be the starting point of philosophy, which is for him the only truly worthy way of life. Taking non-foundationalism as a starting point — a paradoxical position, perhaps — makes mush of the yearning for truth. If the transcendentals are out of reach, why strive? A large part of the rhetorical power of Closing comes from the series of insults in the early part of the book, which Bloom designed to evoke the passion he wants to see: You have no connection to literature! You have no heroes! Your taste in music disgusts me!

But the non-academic can make good use of non-foundational thinking without doing away with the hope for the Good, the True, the Beautiful. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my reading, it’s that a good grasp on the transcendentals is hard to come by. That is to say, real access to truth, if you can get it, is either the product of immense intellectual achievement or it’s a truly precious gift, a pearl of great price. For someone who doubts her access to truth and hasn’t formally joined an intellectual tradition, a non-foundational stance is actually good way to navigate our intellectual culture, where competing conceptions of the world offer radically different answers to the question of what the world’s really like. The non-foundational stance means that the searcher puts off the task of trying to find one way of talking that explains all the other ways of talking, and instead tries to understand different speakers in their own terms. If the searcher is reflective enough to be aware of her own tradition — and searchers should be reflective in this way — then she no longer has to consider those outsider her tradition to be fools, liars, or makers of drastic mistakes.

What’s the alternative? Bloom offers a ready-made intellectual history, into which the searcher is supposed to fit other thinkers until she has time to study them on her own. Bloom wants to convince us that any thinker we come across will fit somewhere in the frame, and that we can express their thoughts and expose their errors in the language that he offers. In my experience, non-scholars who take this approach set themselves up to terribly misunderstand thinkers that don’t fit easily in the frame. While a deep and careful study of a hard-to-understand thinker could conceivably yield a real understanding of what that thinker meant to say, the non-scholar probably doesn’t have the time for such a study, and ends up with a reduced image or a bad reading of, say, Sartre or Derrida.

It is better, I think, for the non-scholar to adopt the non-foundational stance when exploring the landscape of contemporary inquiry. The layman doesn’t have to take the position that truth is always, necessarily, and forever out of reach: her non-foundational stance can and should be combined with a sincere hope that somewhere out there somebody’s getting it right.

I think this Amanda Marcotte piece is pretty interesting.  She touches on the idea of work and community and how the modern workplace has, until very recently, served to cut us off entirely from our loved ones during the day.  This, she asserts, was not always the case.  People used to come into more contact with their loved ones during the day in the past and this served to create a more organic, more humane work place.  She riffs off a TED talk by Stefana Broadbent (below) which talks about how modern communication technology has actually allowed people to regain some of this ability to communicate with loved ones during the work day.

What Broadbent recorded was that the explosion in communications technologies are instead restoring a little bit of what was simply part of life 150 years ago—constant contact with your intimates during your work day.  If you’re over 30, you’ve probably marveled at how much the work day has changed because of this, and as Broadbent notes, it’s extremely different from the era when even personal phone calls were not part of life at work.  (And still aren’t in many blue collar jobs.) It used to be that once you were in the office, the outside world simply didn’t exist.  Huge news events could happen and you wouldn’t find out, and you were mostly ignorant about what your friends and relatives were up to during the day.  Now, between text messaging, cell phones, IM, and social networking, we spend huge portions of our days keeping lines of communication with our intimates open.

But of course, since the isolation was the product of culture, we can’t expect culture not to strike back.  Broadbent notes how people who work in many low status occupations, like bus drivers and factor workers, are facing increasingly punitive monitoring to make sure they don’t check in with family and friends during the day.  Broadbent treats this like a human rights violation, and I’m inclined to agree. If people are getting their work done, monitoring them to make sure they don’t use their downtime to talk to people they love is only going on in order to debase them and suggest that their personal lives don’t count.  I’ll go a step further and argue that the monitoring is valuing debasement and control of working class people over actual economic concerns like profit and saving money.  It uses resources to monitor workers, after all.  But more than that, I’m skeptical of the idea that unhappy people are better workers.  People who can’t communicate with loved ones often spend a lot of their mental energies worrying about those loved ones, in my experience.  Communication that you can control doesn’t offer nearly the distraction that your colleagues can offer by barging in and demanding your attention whenever they want, too.

This makes sense to me.  Then again, the average high school student in America spends five and a half hours a day in front of a screen, and there is little doubt in my mind that this sort of always-online-or-watching-tv culture is bad for society in the long run.  Nor is our increased sedentary lifestyle exactly beneficial to our societal health or temperament. 

That being said, I think the benefits of technology should not be overlooked either, and if new avenues of communication are allowing friends and loved ones to keep in touch more, that’s undeniably a very good thing.

I’ve always thought a more likely reason for our atomization was our car culture.  The ability for families to spread out over such long distances, and the need to drive to get anywhere at all have led to people living further and further apart from one another.  My mom had seven siblings other than herself, and each one lives in a different city now, with their own families.  Only one stayed in her home town.  This was unheard of a generation previously.  Now it is the status quo.  My family has chosen a different path, and has decided to stay in our home town where our families live so that our children will have deeper and stronger ties to their community than we did growing up. 

In any case, I think it is the physical distance we have placed between ourselves and our neighbors, families, and friends that has contributed most to our atomization, and which has led directly to the more psychological and spiritual distances we see forming – as our children are raised either in single-parent homes or without any real connections to their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and communities in general.  In some sense, then, the communication technologies we have developed allow us to compensate for this distance.  Rather than blaming social networking or other communications technology for our increased atomization, perhaps we should view them as a subconscious attempt to remedy something we, as a culture, barely understand about ourselves – as an attempt to bridge the distances between one another.

Watch the TED talk after the leap.

[Read more →]

Sullivan nods approvingly at this passage from Conor on Avatar’s Na’vi:

The problem with the noble savage cliche is that it is demonstrably untrue. The people who inhabited North America before the arrival of Europeans warred, died for lack of medicine, sometimes killed animal herds so unsustainably that they faced starvation — so despite the manifold wrongs done by the Europeans to indigenous peoples, it is inaccurate and simplistic to screen stories where savage Europeans war with noble natives living in utter harmony with nature.

James Cameron isn’t portraying native people of our world. His alien protagonists aren’t intended as stand-ins for the Navajos or the Aztecs or the Cherokee. In his different world, the native people really are in communion with nature. Were his purpose to comment on European history, this would be a terrible choice, but in fact Avatar is a film whose purpose is allowing humanity to reflect on its circumstances and fallen nature in a novel way. That is why I approve of the decision to portray the kinds of natives that were shown.

Conor is off the mark here.  Cameron’s Na’vi were the noblest of noble savages – hands down the least complicated, least dynamic, most shallow savages written into a major film in – I don’t know – decades?  Years?  A really long time.  And Cameron was commenting on European/American history.  Science fiction is always about history.

The movie theatre I saw this in was packed, and about half the audience were Navajos.  My home town is mostly white, but the second largest racial demographic is Native American – mostly Navajo and some Hopi.  In college, pretty much all my lit classes were on multi-cultural themes, but the vast bulk of time was spent on Native American literature in particular.  I have spent more hours than I care to count thinking about these issues – about Native American rights, land rights, the various myths and religious themes which surround Native American culture, and the ways in which popular culture (and Hollywood) has portrayed native peoples in America.  I have a number of friends (past  and present) who are Navajo (or Diné, as they prefer to be called).  We even have a public elementary school here which teaches one third of all its material in the Navajo language (and one third in Spanish).

So, whether the Na’vi are simple “stand-ins for the Navajos” or whether Cameron was trying to write his very own native-from-scratch is immaterial.  Surely Conor has heard the term “extended metaphor” before.  Cameron’s alien moon, Pandora, may not be the American frontier, and the Na’vi may not be the Diné, but the parallels are obvious and purposeful.  And the real problem is not that such parallels exist but that Cameron’s handling of his Pandoran tribal people is so one-dimensional.

Why not rip off The Last of the Mohicans and have some bad Na’vi thrown into the mix?  That would at the very least be more interesting, and certainly more honest.  A film wherein the natives are not only exploited but turned against one another – whose weaknesses are exploited as well – would be more complex and realistic.  Or Cameron could have taken some pages from the The Mission - a film which took seriously the questions of colonization, religious colonization and the indigenous response, and the merits of passive resistance. [Read more →]

“In short, liberals and conservatives refuse to see the areas in which they have common ground because far too often they simply cannot get past the cultural markers that prevent them from even listening to the substance of what their cultural opposites are saying.” ~ Mark Thompson

In this post Mark is responding to what he sees as Jamelle’s assertion that the “hidden” welfare state is bad, whereas the “visible” welfare state is good.  Essentially Mark is asserting that liberals attempt to build the visible welfare state on top of the hidden welfare state, whereas libertarians and conservatives try to make the hidden welfare state smaller and more visible.

Now, I think this is not really what Jamelle was saying.  I think Jamelle was saying that we have a welfare state and that many Americans both appreciate the services that this state provides while at the same time not really realizing that it’s a welfare state providing them – the whole “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” thing.  He’s saying that Americans exist in an illusion of free markets and bootstraps while in reality we have a very large state apparatus which provides safety nets, subsidies, and numerous other benefits to countless people and businesses.  What he’d like to do is make that more obvious so that people appreciated it more and then, in turn, supported a further expansion of the welfare state once they realized what a good thing it, in fact, was.  Contra Jamelle, conservatives and libertarians would like to draw down the welfare state because they see it – whether it is visible or hidden – as an encroachment upon liberties, upon the economy, and upon prosperity, job growth, and so forth.  These two goals are entirely at odds.

So I don’t think that it is simply a cultural barrier which prevents liberals and libertarians/conservatives from working together.  I think it is a fundamental political difference in core beliefs about the size and scope of the welfare state which separates the two groups.

But it’s also the culture.  After all, politics is secondary to culture.  Cultural beliefs and norms and expectations drive politics – not the other way around. While political shifts can lead to shifts in culture, this is usually unintentional. Mark is certainly correct that it is the cultural divide more than anything which keeps liberals and conservatives from forming a united front, but then again that isn’t the whole story.  I think some groups of conservatives or libertarians could align quite nicely with specific elements of the left.  We’ve seen such an alliance in economics, actually, with the stronger elements of both the right and the left embracing free trade.  But the Tea Party right and the progressive anti-corporate, anti-free-trade left have much less of a chance at uniting because of the vast, gaping cultural divide between the two sides.

Can you honestly see Glenn Beck and Michael Moore coming together on many issues?  Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich may both be united in their opposition to many more mainstream bills and practices in Congress, but when it comes to their political goals the two are – save perhaps on foreign policy – complete opposites.  Their ultimate goals may be similar – a more honest government, working harder for the people and not for the elites and the corporations – but Kucinich and the progressives believe this can be done with a bigger state and smaller private sector, whereas Paul believes that the state is at the heart of the issue and should be dismantled as much as possible.

I’m very drawn to Mark’s liberaltarian cause, and to the idea of the sides working together in this way.  I’m just perhaps too cynical to believe in it.  I myself am rather a mixed bag and can find common cause with both elements.  But most people in these groups are not mixed bags. They’re die-hard partisans.  And they don’t like each other much, or at least what the other stands for and believes in – especially culturally, but politically too.

Despite my recent disagreements with Conor, one area where he is indubitably correct is in criticizing conservatism’s inability to engage the culture in which it must exist.  This, to me, is not a political issue – it has little to do with winning elections or with governance – but it leaves conservative cultural critiques utterly tone-deaf, ghettoized, irrelevant, and incapable of understanding context.  Sonny Bunch and Peter Suderman notwithstanding, there are few things more dreadful to read than a conservative television, music, or movie critic or even just a conservative attempting to discuss television, music, or movies.  Today presents us with Exhibit 1,234,324 (estimated) of this problem: conservative outrage over this week’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The cause of the outrage?  In the episode, Larry David accidentally urinates on a picture of Jesus Christ hanging in a bathroom.  The typical Curb Your Enthusiasm set of misunderstandings, inappropriate conduct, etc. follows. 

The result is a series of headlines decrying the blasphemous contempt for Christians this displays – how, after all, could anyone think urinating on a picture of Jesus Christ is amusing or socially acceptable or anything other than a blatant attempt to marginalize Christians?

The problem is that this line of thinking completely, utterly, and preposterously misses the point of the show, not to mention the punchline: Larry David is an asshole.  Not just a little bit of an asshole, either, but quite possibly the world’s biggest asshole.  That Larry David’s politics happen to be liberal has not a lick to do with why his show is funny.  Indeed, to the extent his politics are involved at all, it is to make fun of his own politics, which in some cases result in him being an even bigger asshole (witness the episode where he abandoned a woman mid-coitus because he learned that she was a Republican).  David’s character in many ways is in fact supposed to be a liberal Archie Bunker, just without the lovable core.  As such, Larry David’s character is the type of character that could only be played by a liberal; were he played by a conservative, liberals everywhere would be complaining about how the show paints an unfair picture of liberals. 

The point of Curb Your Enthusiasm is absolutely, positively never that you’re supposed to laugh with Larry David, it’s that you’re supposed to laugh at Larry David.  If you ever – ever – think that Larry David is supposed to be a hero or a decent person or that his character intends his actions to be humorous, then you’re not only missing the point of the show, you’re probably a complete asshole yourself.  What makes the scene in this particular case funny isn’t that someone urinated on a picture of Jesus Christ, it’s that Larry David is the type of asshole who would urinate on a picture of Jesus Christ and show absolutely no remorse for it.  In short, he’s not mocking Christians, he’s mocking himself.

And if you honestly don’t think that David would have been willing to, say, draw a picture of Muhammed for similar purposes, then you’re just not getting the point.  Indeed, the main reason why you’re unlikely to see David do that on his show is that in this country it wouldn’t be remotely asshole-y enough; too many people would be cheering him on for it to have any kind of comic effect in the context of the show.

Via Memorandum.

UPDATE: In case the above is still unclear, the difference between laughing at and laughing with a character is summed up by the fact that Larry David’s character on Curb is the type of person who would think that “Jerk Store” is a witty and funny comeback:

Continuing the discussion Chris began earlier, Scott asks:

Erik, in Chris’ opening salvo, he mentions his general disdain for the current political parties and the role they play in US politics as one driving factor in his inability to land on one side of the fence over the other. To what degree does a dissatisfaction with our current political institutions drive your own unique perspective and lack of obvious affiliation? What is the nature of that dissatisfaction and how do you see it playing out on the larger field of political discourse?

I suspect dissatisfaction with political institutions is more or less a state of nature.  When you’re on the winning team (for a while) you must guard your advantage jealously; when you’re on the losing team you must suffer defeat after humiliating defeat.  When you remain an independent you possess the cold comfort of being neither winner nor loser, and share less of the spoils but also less of the suffering.  Always there are gripes to be had.

I suppose my larger dissatisfaction is less political and more cultural.  I’m mostly socially liberal.  I’m pro-life, but I’m also pro gay-marriage, very comfortable in most socially liberal settings, have many liberal friends, and so forth.  Still, social liberals also tend to be very socially liberal, much like socially conservatives tend to be very conservative, and this can be alienating.  Absolutism can be alienating, and we live in a culture, for better or worse, that caters to absolutism, regardless of the vast swath of moderates and independents out there. [Read more →]

In the comments to Scott’s post last week, greginak (who was one of the few to hone in on Scott’s central point) asked for the “posters to offer criticisms of their own theories.”  This seemed like an interesting and worthwhile exercise, so I figured I’d give it a try, with some help from Monty Python.  I should note that for the most part, these critiques are going to be of libertarianism (excluding the pure anarchist variety, to which a lot of these critiques don’t apply) in general rather than my theories that deviate from run-of-the-mill libertarianism (if such a thing exists). 

• “All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”  Government, both in terms of size and power, has grown to the point where it is possible to plausibly connect government intervention to almost any imaginable problem.  But although I believe this general libertarian inclination to point the finger at government for any given problem is correct more often than not, the converse of being able to link government to just about any problem is something that libertarians have a hard time recognizing.  Specifically, if government is now so large as to be able to take the blame for any problem, it is equally true that government is now large and powerful enough to take credit for any good. 
• “I dunno, must be a king….  He hasn’t got shit all over him.”  For all of our anti-government rhetoric and attempts to either blame poverty on government intervention or blame it on lack of personal responsibility or talent, libertarians do a poor job recognizing the inconsistency of their position to the extent we do not actually advocate anarchy.  Where libertarians blame poverty on government intervention, they they ignore that this logically means that as long as government exists (and again, this critique does not apply to anarchists), there will be people who benefit economically from the State and people who suffer because of it.  The only way to rectify this situation is going to be to take from those who benefit from the existence of the State and give to those who suffer from it.  Where libertarians (usually Randians) blame poverty purely on lack of individual responsibility or talent and credit individual responsibility and talent for success, they are ignoring the role of the State in defining the skill sets and activities that will make a person economically successful and are thus justifying the results of those actions.   The State (and by implication, the successful) thus may have a duty to in some significant way compensate those whose skills the State has deemed unworthy. 
• “I was hopping along, minding my own business, all of a sudden, up he comes, cures me! One minute I’m a leper with a trade, next minute my livelihood’s gone. Not so much as a by-your-leave! “You’re cured, mate.” Bloody do-gooder.”  One of the areas where the libertarian critique is strongest is in its warning against the unintended consequences of central planning and regulation.  The trouble is that we don’t do a very good job recognizing that de-regulation can likewise have its share of unintended consequences.  Often these unintended consequences can justifiably be overlooked on the grounds that the people hurt will be the people who were using a regulation for their own competitive advantage and thus are not really victims.  But other times, deregulation can mix with other still-extant regulations and laws to exacerbate the effects of those existing laws, hurting people who have not directly benefited financially from the previous regulation and who may even already be victims of the other regulation and thus see the effects of that other regulation increase even more.   Still other times, deregulation may only serve to strengthen the hand of businesses that already benefit from the protection of another regulation.  A good example of such a situation would be one where regulations severely restrict who can enter a given market while the deregulation gives those already in that market the ability to expand even more without a significantly increased threat of competition.
• “Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”  If Libertopia were to emerge out of nowhere tomorrow, we’d have a situation where the most powerful people, the people who really did wind up controlling people’s lives the most, would be the people who already possess the most wealth – wealth that has hardly originated in anything resembling a free market.  And so without some theory of intermediate redistributive economic justice, Libertopia would quickly come to resemble the type of oligarchy that arose after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
• “Stan: It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.  Reg: But you can’t have babies.  Stan: Don’t you oppress me.
  Reg: Where’s the fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?” Libertarians, with our focus on almost unimpeded rights, have a tendency to ignore the immediate problems right in front of our faces in order to focus on some relatively unimportant long-term ideal.  We’re too often tone deaf in this respect. 
• “Follow. But. Follow only if ye be men of valour, for the entrance to this cave is guarded by a creature so foul, so cruel that no man yet has fought with it and lived. Bones of full fifty men lie strewn about its lair. So, brave knights, if you do doubt your courage or your strength, come no further, for death awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth.”  We don’t live in a Coasian world with no transaction costs and in which information-sharing is perfect.  Although the lack of access to adequate knowledge is a fundamental assumption of libertarian critiques of central planning, it is all too easily forgotten about when arguing for less-regulated markets and for the power of local knowledge.  To be sure, local knowledge is generally far superior to centralized planning, but there will be occasions where individuals encounter something foreign to them of which the dangers will be unclear.  Centralized government can act on aggregated knowledge to ensure that individuals are protected from things about which they are inherently unaware.

I think libertarianism still offers the moral vision that I find most appealing, and I think the Hayekian critique of central planning is almost certainly correct.  But libertarianism is an ideology/comprehensive political philosophy.  And just like any other ideology or political philosophy, its adherents are going to be subject to a lot of blind spots when it is confronted with reality.  This doesn’t make libertarianism “wrong” in any sense of the word – if we were starting society from scratch, I can easily imagine any variety of functioning governments that would be consistent with libertarian philosophy.  But we’re not starting society from scratch and instead are dealing with a highly complex and developed world that won’t always be amenable to libertarian ideals.  Libertarians would do well to be cognizant of these imperfections even if they do not think these imperfections warrant a deviation from standard libertarian theory in a given instance.

Victor Davis Hanson is visiting Europe. More precisely, Italy and Greece. Several profound insights into the nature of continental society follow:

After concluding another 16 days in Europe. I am again reminded how different their form of socialism  is, and yet how closely it resembles the model that Obama seeks for America. The vast majority of citizens lives in apartments, even in smaller towns and villages. Cars are tiny. Prices are higher than in the states; income is lower (The government taxes you to pay for things like “free” college, so you won’t have much to spend on antisocial things like your Wal-Mart plastic Christmas Tree or your second K-Mart plasma TV.)

Mass transit is frequent and cheap,  but often crowded and occasionally unpleasant. The stifled desire to acquire something—large house, car, deposit account—is of course not quite destroyed by socialism, but rather is channeled into a sort of cynicism and anger, often leading to a hedonism of few children, late and long meals, and disco hours until the early morning. The number of Gucci like stores selling overpriced label junk like 200 Euro eye-glass frames and 1000 Euro leather bags to socialists is quite amazing.

Clearly, this reflects Hanson’s experience in Greece and Italy, not “Europe.” And while Hanson’s observations are undoubtedly filtered through his own ideological lens, a lot of what he says rings true: unlike their Northern counterparts, Greece and Italy have always been on continent’s political and economic periphery. Not too long ago, Athens was being run by a military junta. Silvio Berlusconi’s checkered career is proof enough of Italy’s retrograde political culture. Taking either country as emblematic of Europe would be like using Mississippi as a prime example of the American economic and social model. Which is to say, other factors are at work here.

Cherry-picking favorable examples is a time-honored political tactic, which is why the Left is always talking about the dynamism of the Scandinavian economies – Nokia! Erickson! – or the fact that Denmark regularly tops Freedom House’s economic rankings. The bog-standard conservative rejoinder – something I happen to agree with – is that the political outcomes of small, culturally homogeneous European countries don’t necessarily track with the United States’ experience. It also follows that the defects of Greece and Italy aren’t much of a roadmap for liberalism in the Age of Obama.

Denmark and Finland do not vindicate progressive policy any more than Greece and Italy prove its ruinous consequences. The United States is a different country, and the impact of our policy choices tend to differ dramatically from the experience of even our closest political cousins. Hanson’s insights into the nature of “European” society notwithstanding, it would be better for all of us if we shied away from facile country-to-country comparisons.

“Judge Sotomayor was raised in public housing? So was I. Her mother was a nurse working late shifts? So was mine. When did white working poor people disappear off the face of the earth? Where are the eager listeners to their “compelling stories”?”

~John Derbyshire

John “Derb” Derbyshire pendulates between very sensible and very silly.  His defense of evolution and attacks against the ID nonsense in Ben Stein’s Expelled mockumentary (wait – that was a real documentary?) were typical Sensible Derbyshire.  Likewise, his recent assault on talk radio’s wrecking of the Right was brilliant and timely.

But there is also the silly Derbyshire.  The man is undoubtedly as sharp as they come, but he manages, nonetheless, to say some pretty stupid things.  I won’t necessarily hold his opinions against him – it’s his prerogative to be “a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one” as he once put it (and later clarified).  I, of course, disagree with him – especially on his points on homosexuality which I do not view as a “net negative” on society.  [Read more →]

by kyle cupp

I picked a fight with a book the other day. It was a work on ethics. I’ve occasionally taken it off the shelf and scanned a little here and there, but I’ve never devoted much time to actually reading it. I can’t say that engaging the text was my motivation in this instance. Despite my better judgment, I continue to feel a lingering temptation to approach works expressing views different than mine out of a desire to feel good about my own philosophy. And sometimes I succumb. I knew – okay, suspected – that this particular book on ethics presented arguments that I would find laughably poor. I had no intention of being challenged by the authors or even learning something from them. I wanted to revel in my own superiority.

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson. Back in my university days, I started reading the postmodernists and deconstructionists because I knew they were the latest and greatest bad guys, and I wanted to get to know their particular intellectual villainy so that I could heroically refute them. I had the truth. They were relativists who denied the truth. Or so I thought. Reading them turned out to be very unsettling, but this feeling was not due solely to what they said or even how they said it. I felt unsettled because I had heard from trusted lovers of truth that that these writers were enemies hell-bent on destroying the truth, and what I read of them didn’t seem to support this characterization. Suddenly I found myself asking, like Pontius Pilate, “What is the truth?” Hey, a lot can happen when you learn that Jacques Derrida, the dark lord of deconstruction himself, actually affirms justice, forgiveness, and hospitality. A lot can happen when you actually engage a text. [Read more →]

“Rather than deep moral and spiritual renewal leading to civic health, what if it’s our national solipsism and susceptibility to suggestion that pull us together, and pull us through? What if, rather than being stuck with virtue, we discover that, after a few initially painful changes in lifestyle, we can buy spray-on virtue in a can? If enough Americans decide that the TV show of their lives should feature them acting like engaged, conscientious citizens, might that not be just as good as a more “authentic” conversion?”  ~ Matt Frost

Matt has a point.  In fact, one reason why in my search for a workable localism I have dedicated a great deal of virtual ink searching for practical rather than moral solutions, is that I don’t think we will see any sort of moral sea change as a nation any time soon.  National reckonings are at best temporary.   I don’t think we will willingly change or restructure our spending habits – or even that spending in and of itself is a bad thing.  Rather we need to move back toward a style of consumerism which is more responsible - as in, less built on debt, and more on savings and hard work.  It’s much more likely that this sort of shift occurs through the tightening of credit, rather than the voluntary reduction of our appetites.

So what are these “practical” solutions?  There are a number, including reducing our dependence on foreign economies and cutting back military spending.  Restructuring our financial system is also vital.

For instance, we should seriously consider nationalizing troubled banks and then selling them back off with size or regional restrictions.  This would benefit the financial industry in a number of ways.  We need to do away with the terrible anti-capitalist notion of “too big to fail” which props up our oligarchy at the expense of the tax payer and to the detriment of healthy competition; in fact, the continued presence of these “too big” financial institutions may be directly impeding any sort of reasonable recovery that the stimulus at large hopes to usher in.  Commerce is at its best at smaller scales (even if these smaller operations do attain global reach), in which merchants, bankers, investors, etc. operate within communities and the dollars involved remain flowing through those communities, rather than bleeding out into the pockets of distant executives and share-holders, more concerned with quarterly profits than the long term.  This is not always possible, of course, but it’s worth shooting for, especially in our financial sector which obviously, when mismanaged, carries far too great a risk to the health of the global economy. [Read more →]

Freddie has made a strong argument against viewing autism as a positive thing to be celebrated.  In so doing – and keeping in mind that he is our resident liberal – Freddie argues that such views are political correctness run amok.  To complete the role reversal, I, one of our two resident self-avowed libertarians, am going to argue that at least mild autism, Asperger’s, and various other disorders, including ADHD, are in fact things that society should learn to celebrate. 

Freddie writes:

Autism has debilitating effects on many that have it, often with profound negative consequences for learning, self-control, communication, and the restraint of physical violence. I cannot personally comprehend the emotional toll of dealing with autism in a family– nor can I understand the depth and love found within the relationships between families with autistic members. The value of autistic people or the relationships austic people have are unquestionable. Who would want to question such things? But there is something wrong, and deeply sad, in eliding a love and respect for the people and relationships that are affected by autism into a respect for the disorder. Autistic people are beautiful. Autism is not beautiful.

For several years until relatively recently, I probably would have agreed 100% with this statement, which I think applies with equal force to other disorders such as ADHD.  Before that, I would have taken the hardline approach that these “disorders” were merely excuses for some sort of moral defect (although maybe not with respect to severe autism). 

I tend to think that we as a society have basically followed this evolution as well – these disorders were initially viewed as mere exuses for character flaws that should not be tolerated.  Eventually, as it became clear that they were becoming more and more a problem in society and it became more evident that people had little control over these traits, we learned to tolerate those with these disorders by defining them as diseases outside of the individual’s control but that should still be something to be corrected.

But I think there’s another step that we need to take as a society – one of acceptance, rather than mere tolerance.  Where I’ve come down is that at least mild forms of autism, and just about all forms of ADHD are really just unchangeable personality traits that, like all personality traits, have their upsides and their downsides but are hardwired into one’s genetic makeup.  People have them in varying degrees, and when they reach a degree where they do more harm than good according to our modern society, we call them disorders.  But ultimately, the problems they cause and benefits they create are a function of what our society values at a given moment.  People with these traits should have access to medication and treatment that allow them to better cope with modern society; but at the same time, society should do a better job recognizing the potentially positive aspects of these disorders and providing avenues for such people to funnel their efforts in that direction. 

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