The Only Winning Move

It’s interesting to look at the history of ideas as an evolutionary process, by which parent ideas adapt defenses to survive their circumstances which they then pass on to their descendendants. Presumably, we’re all aiming at The Truth, whatever that is, and we try out solutions until one seems to fit. And once one seems to fit, people become invested in it, often beyond the merits of the idea. Which is not unlike natural selection, really - since an individual creature doesn’t usually opt out of the gene pool once he realizes his geneset is less than ideal. Rather, he resorts to various kinds of gaming the system. Rape is presumably one of these, and it’s an interesting question whether this kind of thing is an adaptive advantage (in that strong-willed, physically capable, aggressive genes get passed on), or a polluting of the selection process (no reason it can’t be both, I suppose).

An analogy in the history of ideas would be things like Faith, or False Consciousness. Marx must have realized early on that his system was not viable because it had the huge problem of explaining why workers went to great lengths to obtain the very factory jobs that it was claimed were oppressing them. Typically, one does not leave his home, move somewhere else at great expense and then stand in line begging to be oppressed! So it was necessary to invent “False Consciousness,” by which workers were confused about their circumstances. The Revolution was delayed because people weren’t educated enough … or something.

Maybe it started out as a mutation, but now it’s in the geneset of the Left, and it won’t let go! The reason why it’s helpful to think of it as a kind of genetic inheritance, actually, is because I see False Consciousness being employed even when it can’t POSSBLY be the right analysis (Marx, at least, really was dealing with largely uneducated contemporaries), almost as if by reflex.

Take, for example, the constant references to “raising awareness” about the dangers of smoking in campaigns to ban same. Does anyone HONESTLY think there’s anyone alive who doesn’t know not only that smoking is dangerous but also in exactly what way it’s dangerous? Can anyone POSSIBLY believe that people are still confused on this score? Back in the “Mad Men” 60’s, of course, it was not only possible but likely that a good chunk of the population was confused. I’m guessing no one who truly paid attention ever thought that inhaling chemically-treated smoke would be good for them (certainly not when it’s the kind of chemicals that go into cigarettes!), mind you, but advertisements of the day definitely promoted the idea that smoking might be healthy. I don’t think it’s a stretch to believe that a lot of the not-so-conscientious actually bought it. But now? Everyone in my generation saw pictures of blackened lungs when they were 6 and can quote the cancer statistics in their sleep. We’ve all seen the video about the guy who talks though a hole in his neck. We’ve all had our heartstrings tugged with weepy stories about people watching their loved ones slowly die, and we’ve all been shocked with the horror of something SO ADDICTIVE that someone would actually smuggle a cigarette into an oxygen tent and inadvertently blow himself up. Awareness is raised as high as it’s going to go, and so any talk of “raising awareness” at this point is just transparent: the person advocating it is just asking the government to foot the bill for his political campaign. The thing is, False Consciousness is so ingrained in the Left at this point that I don’t think the people looking to “raise awareness” of that of which everyone is already very much aware actually notice the contradiction. If they sat down and thought about what they were doing, they’d spot it in an instant, of course, but politics, as we all well know, isn’t always about rational thought so much as herd mentality. You don’t like smoking, and your friends don’t like smoking, and you and your friends are all left-wingers, and someone floats the idea that smokers might not know what they’re doing, and because everyone in the group is steeped in leftist political training that idea seems as natural as the sun rising, and no one does it the courtesy of a second though. Kind of the way that religious types, if they really stopped to think about it, would know that God didn’t make the subway late to punish them for eating too much jam, and yet the idea that God pulls even such minute strings as these is so ingrained in their thinking that they don’t think twice about it. At least, that’s the only way I can explain it to myself.

Another more personal example. I am the TA (”AI” in IUSpeak) for a Topics course called “Language and Politics” in which we analyze the speeches of political actors as linguistic devices. In essence, looking at language as a kind of technology that political actors use to get what they want. Well, the other AI is a big feminist and recently voiced a concern that we weren’t doing enough analysis of speeches by women (never mind that Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin have featured prominently so far). I fired back that we were choosing speeches that well illustrated the concepts we were covering in class, and that I didn’t appreciate the suggestion that me and the main instructor had been ignoring speeches by women for sexist motives. And so of course the leftist fell back on her training: he wasn’t doing this on purpose, but Society-capital-S has trained him so well in the language of male superiority that he doesn’t even know he’s excluding women anymore. (!!!) Not only that, but when asked why she felt it was important that we have x number of speeches by women - where x is an integer that can only be accessed internally by her by polling her own private feelings, as far as I can tell - she honestly said, and I can’t stress enough that this is a real quote:

I believe that it is worthwhile to do, to make women more visible in our class presentations, and to demonstrate that politics, for good and for bad, is not just about what men have to say.

And I’m left scratching my head trying my damndest to imagine a person who thinks that politics is “just about what men have to say.” Honestly? No, she simply can’t actually believe this. This is like “raising awareness” of the dangers of smoking. Everyone is already well aware that politics is “not just about what men have to say.” Because just like with smoking, everyone in my generation and afterward has heard countless times already just how much politics USED to be just about men, but how women are making headway now and how wonderful a thing that is, and how someday there will be a female president, etc. And of course you look around you and you know this is true. The Speaker of the House is female. The Secretary of State is female. That same female Secretary of State came within inches of the presidency herself a year and a half ago. There are two women on the Supreme Court. The previous Congress (110) had a record number of women - 90, which is just under 20%. It’s true enough that women are underrepresented (as a proportion of the actual population) in politics - certainly in US politics. But it’s safe to say that there are enough of them that no one is confused about politics being an exclusively male domain. I mean honestly, what does my co-worker think, that Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton just sit there at meetings and nod their heads while the men are talking? That Margaret Thatcher did this? The Sonia Sotomayor does this? That all those countless majority opinions that Sandra Day O’Connor authored were ghostwritten? Again, I think it’s just reflex - kinda the way you instinctively hit rather than grabbing a gun when threatened, just because that’s what’s in your geneset. False Consciousness is so deeply embedded within the ideological geneset of the Left that it’s what they resort to in a pinch, even if they can’t possibly really mean it.

I wonder if Libertarians have something like this? In our caricatured version I suppose answering “the market will fix it” to any social challenge is one such thing. But that’s a caricature - I think those of us (and I’m definitely one) who count as market fundamentalist Libertarians don’t reach for the market explanation as so much a reflex as out of a real belief in it. The difference, in other words, is that I’m aware that I’m a market fundamentalist, and that usually when I offer “the market will fix it” solutions it’s not because I’m parrying with something that I learned from waxing on and waxing off, it’s because I’ve actually thought about how market mechanisms will respond to the problem and sincerely believe that they will work.

But then, we’re none of us ever as self-critical as we should be, so maybe I do put too many eggs in the “market” basket out of sheer reflex from time to time. Or maybe I and libertarians like me have other tics that I’m just not consciously aware of. Maybe. But my genuine guess is that we don’t, and that’s because Libertarianism isn’t in the spotlight enough to put Libertarians on the spot often enough (har) to develop these kinds of kneejerk defenses. That may be changing, though. One can hope!

Interesting (though in retrospect probably obvious) thought gelled out of a discussion with Alexis about animal rights: there are both raising and lowering solutions to inequality problems, and a lot of times people get pigeonholed into saying things they don’t really mean by failing to consider the raising solution if they’ve already thought of the lowering solution, or vice versa.

I’m not just borrowing terminology from Syntax. “Raising” and “Lowering” for meta-politics is this: when you’re confronted by a percieved inequality, such that one group is, from where you stand, getting an unfair share of the attention surrounding something, there are two broad ways of evening things out. You can “raise” the other groups to the status of the privileged, or you can “lower” the privileged to the status of the excluded. And of course two corollaries probably go without saying here: (1) that of course one can both raise and lower at the same time in the same problem space and (2) that raising and lowering will in many situations be empirically indistinguishable anyway, as they are relative terms.

I wonder whether there isn’t a correlation between awareness of the existence of “lowering” solutions and predilection for libertarian political tendencies.

Consider gay marriage. The fundamental injustice is that heterosexuals have de facto property rights that homosexuals do not. And here is an issue where I think that the “raising” solution is inappropriate. Typically this issue gets framed in terms of what gays are being denied, and so the obvious solution that occurs to everyone is to extend the marriage franchise to include them. We have hetero marriage, so it seems unproblematic to extend this to include homo marriage. But to me this isn’t the REAL issue, and assuming that it is is a mistake that leads to all sorts of nasty side effects. For example - it leads people to make the frankly ludicrous suggestion that love between the members of a homosexual couple is somehow less real until the government puts a stamp of approval on it. The idea that anyone’s feelings need legitimizing by the state is laughable in any other context, and yet on this issue people buy into it because they cannot think how else to articulate their frustrations. Another nasty side effect is that the problem of government sanction of lifestyle is not eliminated, merely transformed. Other kinds of a priori legitimate relationships are left out in the cold, such as polygamy, polyandry, group unions, temporary unions, and good ol’ fashioned living in sin. By continuing to exclude these groups, people who argue that the government should stay out of people’s bedrooms ironically end up legitimizing its role there.

None of these problems come with the “lowering” solution, however. The lowering solution is to take official sanction away from heterosexual couples. It just says “fine, we agree, this privilege is no longer justified (if it ever was), so now you have to live like everyone else.” Under the lowering solution, the government really does get out of everyone’s bedrooms, and everyone is on a level playing field. To the extent that there are legal marital unions, it’s up to the people involved and their lawyers to hammer out a contract.

I think lowering type solutions appeal to libertarians because they are minimalist. We don’t say it out loud often, but one of our motivations for wanting to shrink the government - in addition to just wanting to leave people free - is wanting to make the law clear and accessible. And lowering solutions typically do that. They ELIMINATE special exceptions in favor of laws that apply to everyone equally. To the extent that laws can be made simple and universal, the system itself becomes simple, universal, and easier to maintain.

My question is whether this is a general category of thinking that extends to other domains as well, such that people with libertarian sensibilities could be identified by their positions on other issues. And I think it’s possible it can. The discussion with Alexis was about animal rights, but including animal cognition. She’s a vegetarian, and her reasoning there is that animals are sentient, and so we owe them moral consideration - what is typically called an “ethical vegetarian.” And I really agree - that animals are sentient and that we owe them moral consideration. I will not use products that I believe are unnecessarily tested on animals, and I prefer to eat meat (such as beef) that I know has been killed humanely. I don’t have any ethical problem with eating animals - since this seems to be the natural order, and humans are certainly evolved to be ominvores - but I can certainly understand the case from the other side. I have a problem with any moral system that extends full rights to animals - but only because of the communication barrier. Animals don’t seem to extend rights to me, and since rights are reciprocal, I can’t really do it unilaterally, etc.

In any case, the relevance to raising and lowering is that I hear a lot of goofy opinions about animal cognition that I think are the result of applying a raising solution when a lowering one is more appropriate. A lot of vegetarians (though not Alexis, I should hastily add!) - wanting to persuade people to give up meateating - are led to make exaggerated claims about the mental abilities of animals. It is a raising solution in that it attempts to raise animals to the status of humans, and it doesn’t work because it’s self-evident that animals do not have the same range of reasoning abilities nor the same mental capacity that humans do. The lowering solution avoids this problem though - and the lowering solution here is to give up on the idea that human mental abilities are different in kind, in favor of saying they are just different in magnitude. In other words, give up on the idea that humans have souls - at least for political and ethical purposes, which is independently appropriate in a secular society anyway.

And this extends, much more interestingly, to the question of whether machines can think. As far as I’m concerned, they can, and this is not an interesting question. Edsger Dijkstra puts it nicely:

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

In other words, computers only don’t think if you’re willing to ascribe some sort of unjustified mystical status to human thinking. If you’re not - and I’m not - they do. They recieve inputs, process them internally, and produce outputs. It’s thinking - just as humans do. It may not be done according to exactly the same methods - and certainly it’s not done in the same medium - as human thinking, but if we ever replicated a human brain in silicon it would be essentially the same. This falls under the rubric of “to the rational mind, nothing is inexplicable, merely unexplained.” Human thought - especially consciousness - is largely unexplained, but I reject the idea that it is inexplicable! And this is, it seems to me, a lowering solution rather than a raising solution. The raising solution would be to say that there IS something inherently mysterious about thought, but that computers (bzw. animals) can do it - whatever it may be - too, and so they’re in the privileged group. Mine and Dijkstra’s opinion is a lowering solution because it asserts that there’s nothing special about human thinking - it is just thinking, and if there’s a difference between human and computer thinking then it’s a difference in complexity and wiring, not in fundamentals. I am a meat machine.

Applying raising solutions when lowering ones are more appropriate also accounts for the ease with which people are confused by the charge that Atheism is a religion. This is a raising solution - but to an insidious end. In using it, Chrisians seek to afford Atheism the same categorical status that their religion has in hopes of avoiding their burden of proof (this, at least, is already a named fallacy). So they say things like “Atheism is a faith, because it’s asserting that which can never be satisfactorily proven: the existence of a negative.” But of course Atheism is making no such claim. What believers fail to understand is that atheists aren’t as concerned with them as they are with atheists. Not believing in God has the same status as my not believing in all those other things that I don’t believe in because I have not been supplied with adequate evidence: unicorns, leprechauns, the Loch Ness Monster, magic, telekinesis and so on. It’s not that these things are a priori impossible, it’s just that (a) believing in them would require some revisions to the model of the way the world works that I’ve built up on the basis of my experiences, and (b) although I might be willing to do that if I had seen convincing evidence of their existence, there isn’t any such convincing evidence. The burden of proof is on the people who believe in unicorns, leprechauns, the Loch Ness monster, magic, telekinesis … and God. *I* am the one who is owed an explanation - and everyone knows this, and they further know that the burden of proof has never satisfactorily been met, and so one sneaky way around this problem is shifting it to me by “generously” “raising” Atheism to the status of a religion. My point here is that I think so many people fall victim to it because there is a general tendency to err on the side of raising solutions. But the lowering solution is the appropriate one: religion is a hypothesis about reality that has to meet the same burden of proof as any other. It may well be that individual believers have access to information that they cannot share with the rest of us (because it is available only by mystical and personal revelation), and that obviously suffices to ground their own beliefs, but it is inadequate for anyone else. I am an Atheist until someone can show me either that there is a God (in which case I will become a believer), or that it is likely that there is a God (in which case I will become an Agnostic). I call myself an Atheist because I do not overlook lowering solutions to the same extent that most people do. (Most people - recently including Noah, to my mild chagrin - implicitly accept the validity of the raising options and call themselves “Agnostics” out of a misguided sense of fairness).

So this sort of error is pervasive. Now, I’m not making any claim that it’s always an error to prefer the raising solution to the lowering one. But I guess I am making the claim that people are more likely to err on that side than the other - if only because they are more existentially comfortable with “building things up” than “tearing things down.” One of the reasons why Libertarianism is a hard sell is because it tears things down, and if we’re going to sell it at all we face the problematic task of selling a system of negative liberties as a progressive step forward. People are inherently unsatisfied with answers that are “none of the above,” and too frequently that’s what our answer is. But of course I assume in general that there are also cases where the raising solution is appropriate in an environment where the lowering solution has been applied instead.

An interesting question is which Socialism is? I can see the case both ways. On the one hand, it’s a lowering solution because it focuses on bringing down the rich and powerful to the level of everyone else. On the other hand, it’s a raising solution, because it focuses on extending the status of the privileged to all citizens. But I think what asking this question at all really serves to illustrate is that we can’t always extend neat models of categorizing things to all domains. Socialism is neither a raising nor a lowering solution - it is simply a category error, based on false assumptions about the purpose of government and the ends of human society.

Today on Econlog Bryan Caplan falls prey to a persistent(ly annoying) misunderstanding about what it is that Philosophy does. His springboard is Ayn Rand claiming that no one has satisfactorily answered the question of why we need an ethical system. (Actually, I think she says they haven’t even tried.)

Here’s Rand:

No philosopher has given a rational, objectively demonstrable, scientific answer to the question of why man needs a code of values. So long as that question remained unanswered, no rational, scientific, objective code of ethics could be discovered or defined. The greatest of all philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it and why he evaluated them as noble and wise.

And here’s Caplan’s comment:

Suppose every one of these sentences were correct. Wouldn’t this imply that until she constructed her arguments, no one knew the difference between right and wrong?

In a word, no.

To recap a comment I left on his blog (and actually one Kevin Pearce beat me to it) - we don’t need to know why things happen to know that they happen. Objects on Earth fall whether or not I am schooled in Physics, and I was able to take advantage of this fact (by, say, tipping the cereal box to get food to come out) long before anyone suggested to me that it might be extraordinary. If sports interviews are useful for anything, in fact, then for documenting this truth: people who lack even rudimentary knowledge of Physics or Physiology frequently outperform PhDs in either subject at applying them, from a certain point of view.

Ah, but is that example fair? Physiology isn’t really about teaching people how to move, right? It’s more about knowing how the body works so that we can repair it when it breaks. PhDs in this subject are MUCH better at it than star athletes.

But see, I think that’s the point about Philosophers of Ethics as well. It’s true that many (most, actually) Philosophers of Ethics end their books with what they believe to be the correct prescriptions for human behavior. But I would submit that this is not, properly speaking, their job. Their job is not to invent morality, per se, because that’s already been done a long time ago. Rather, their job is to tell us what morality is and how it works as a system. What does it mean when an ordinary person claims that something someone else did is “wrong?” What assumptions are built into that claim? In what ways do moral systems break down and how do we avoid that? On what basis, if any, can moral systems be profitably compared? THESE are the things that Philosophers should study - what Caplan rightly terms “meta-ethics” in another post. To the extent that they do their job well, their theories should, of course, inform our decisionmaking, just as one presumes that some knowledge of Physiology is useful at least for basketball coaches in helping their athletes perform better. But the primary job isn’t telling us what’s right and what’s wrong, it’s telling us what “right” and “wrong” mean.

Seen in that way, I can’t help but chuckle a bit at statements like this one:

If the reason why “murder is wrong” is that it violates the Categorical Imperative, then it follows that (a) before the Categorical Imperative was discovered, no one knew that murder was wrong, and (b) the vast majority of people who never have and never will understood the Categorical Imperative still don’t know that murder is wrong.

Come on. If the reason that objects on Earth tend to fall is because of the gravitational attraction between them and the much larger planet they’re nearest to, we’d hardly conclude that this was not the case before someone discovered this fact! Likewise, if Kant asserts that what we mean when we say that an action is moral is that its prescription could be made a general rule (that’s the Categorical Imperative in paraphrase), it hardly follows that before Kant wrote that, no one knew how to be moral! We knew about gravity, and even how to use it to our advantage, long before Physicists came along and made our knowledge precise and explicit, and I see no reason why the same can’t be true for morality. More or less everyone has concepts of right and wrong (even psychopaths have them in an abstract sense; they frequently leverage this knowledge in manipulating others), but few people have very precise or explicit ideas of what these notions really mean. Which is true of about every subject, actually. People manage to work, profit, save, and make purchases without ever cracking an Economics textbook, buy clothes that suit them without any training in Fashion Design, appreciate music without knowledge of Music Theory or Audition, etc. etc. etc. Caplan is confusing expert knowledge in Ethics with our everyday applications of morality.

And in that sense I think Rand is right on the money that no one has ever given us a satisfactory explanation for why we need a code of values. Kant and Rand are, in fact, the only two philosophers* I can remember having come up with reasonable answers to this question. Which is a shame, because I think answering that question is indeed among the primary tasks of Philosophers of Ethics. That as opposed to giving us particulars on how to behave, which is unfortunately the more usual content of treatises on Ethics.

Caplan leverages his mistake to try to argue for Ethical Intuitionism - “the view that some moral premises are obvious on their face, and therefore require no proof.” I agree with the first part; I’m not sure about the second. There are certainly some moral premises that are obvious on their face, but I’m not sure we don’t want or can’t have an explanation for them. Rather, I should think that these truths are the jumping off point for Ethics. Just as the earliest Physicists noticed that things fall and tried to explain (and, later, quantify) this, Ethicists should notice that certain things simply are right or wrong, and use that as a starting point for investigating why this is the case. A successful ethical system is one that can show why these things are true, or at least what would be different if they weren’t.

Ethical Intuitionism is the proper view for everyday people going about their lives. If we had to stop and explain why what we all know is wrong is in fact wrong all the time, it would be extremely difficult to interact. But for people who study Ethics professionally, this is giving up. It’s the Philosopher’s equivalent of Optimality Theory - which mistakes a good system of organizing lingusitic facts for an actual explanation. The job of Philosophers is explaining self-evident things. Once they start saying “this is because it is,” they’ve given up.

* Actually, I’m in the camp that prefers to think of Rand as a novelist who dabbled in Philosophy, so make mine one helping of “only Kant” on this score.

There are hundreds of ways to be unscientific, but one of the most common is misunderstanding the relationship between theory and practice. Here’s a quote I found on Facebook today - apparently originally from this cogsci paper - that is illustrative of the problem:

Opportunity costs be damned, some trade-offs should never be proposed, some statistical truths never used, and some lines of causal/counterfactual inquiry never pursued.

So on the one hand, this seems to want to have done with the economic way of thinking (”opportunity costs be damned”), but on the other hand, it frames itself in economic terms (opportunity costs, trade-offs). It reads like someone who understands the use of science to a point, but wants to keep some things off limits. Indeed, if you read the paper (which is a summary of “sacred values” research), that is what is intended. This is meant to characterize the religious mindset, which it notes without argument is important to the functioning of human society.

I wonder. I agree that this is religion pure. There are, in general, two classes of superficially science-friendly anti-scientism, which we could call the religious objection and the hyperscience objection. The hyperscience objection is that mindset that thinks that data can speak for itself without a theoretical framework in which to be interpreted - radicial empricists. These people think they’re more scientific than scientists, and they constantly rail against all the “formalism” in science - but in fact they don’t have a goddamned clue what science is all about. Science is NOT simply listing facts - it’s all in the method of interpreting those facts. Just performing some lab tests is not science, in other words - it has to be a controlled experiment with a stated aim to count.

The religious objection is what’s being characterized above. It basically takes a bunch of things that the individual wants to believe for whatever reason and ropes them off limits to inquiry. Specifically, I think the religious thinker doesn’t object to any scientific methods or particular datapoints, he just refuses to reach certain conclusions, no matter how clearly they follow from the data. In general, I don’t mind the religious objectors as much as the hyperscience objectors. Religious people are capable of being - and frequently are - quite scientific, they just have their limits, and at least they are honest enough to admit that those limits exist, and kind enough to tell the rest of us what they are.

I think the limits are often hastily adopted, though, and that’s what I want to complain about. The quoted material is a case in point. It reads like someone who wants to say that there are limits to what economic models can explain about human decisionmaking, but in fact it’s not obvious from the statement that one need depart from the model. There is a way of stating the concern within an economic framework: just say that some costs are infinite.

I should think that there are a number of advantages to this. First, saying that some costs are infinite, rather than saying that thinking about some opportunity costs is “off limits,” begs the question of what happens when two things of infinite value come into conflict in a way that folding your arms doesn’t - and so it invites the thinker to address an important question he was trying to avoid. Second, it avoids the false dichotomy of choosing between “theory” and “reality.” People like to talk about “theory” as though it were some dry, abstract thing that has nothing to do with real life. They’re right that it’s dry and abstract, but wrong that it has nothing to do with real life. The crux of the first point is that theory is valuable because it makes one’s assumptions explicit and thereby points toward important areas of inquiry. And anyone who understands the crux of the first point will have no trouble with the second: theory exists to help us think more clearly about experience; it is neither confusing about experience nor removed from it, but merely a disciplined way of approaching it.

It is clear to me that humans are moving away from explicit religion. But dropping out of church and giving up on God doesn’t mean you’ve left religious thinking behind; the roots run deep. We see this all the time in politics, for example - someone declaring off limits or taboo certain key arguments their opponents need to make their case as a way of short-circuiting the debate. For example, “if it will save even one life, it’s worth it, because you can’t put a price on human life!” It sounds nice, but it’s bollocks, first because you can put a price on human life, at least in terms of other lives, second because their opponents generally aren’t advocating anything like pricing lives in the first place, and third because the speaker of such lines is always very much aware that whatever it is he or she is advocating does have a cost, and they’re bringing this up precisely to avoid discussion of that cost. Just because Marx said it doesn’t make it wrong: religion is the opiate of the masses, and this kind of thinking is lazy and self-defeating.

As an undergrad I took a bioethics class that was cotaught by a philosopy and a biology professor, and the biology professor was not only a Baptist, but he was also openly hostile to any philosophical approach to Ethics. He had been teaching the class alone (for pre-med students) for years, and somehow they’d talked him into sharing it with the Philosophy Department the year I was in it. He clearly thought of it as a way of just talking about weird medical cases to get pre-med students used to thinking about them; he didn’t seem to much like the idea of taking a systematic approach to moral decisionmaking. Which is really weird for a scientist, when you think about it. If you know that you have a class of students who are frequently going to be faced with a lot of very tough ethical decisions, WHY NOT teach them to approach these decisions systematically? The last day of class he and the other professor reserved for giving their own opinions about the issues uninterrupted, and Dr. Shull used his to rail against Philosophy, more or less. At some point he said “now honestly, show of hands, how many of you will really take into account what Kant thinks when making decisions?” Mine was the only hand to go up - which is a point of personal pride, but also a point of disappointment in the others. Shull seems to think that considering what Kant would say is some kind of weakness, as though I can’t think for myself - but to me just the opposite is true. When I want medical treatment, I consult an expert. When I want my car fixed I consult an expert. Why wouldn’t I be willing to consult an expert about moral issues? And indeed, I’m not so much consulting an expert as internalizing his advice and applying it, or not, as it suits me. It doesn’t mean I have to adopt everything Kant says without review, but I find the systematic approach to thinking about moral questions helpful - primarily because it gives me a vocabulary to make my own moral assumptions explicit, like any good theory should - and I think a lot of nonsense in interpersonal relationships and political discussions could be avoided if more people were willing to take systematic approaches to moral questions. At some point I raised my hand to make a counterpoint, and although he hesitated, he stuck to his guns and didn’t recognize me, the floor having been reserved on the last day of class for professors’ rants. But I think my question was a good one, and I would like to hear an answer from a religious person at some point. The question was, “if you just justify everything by an appeal to your feelings, how do you ever expect people to discuss and reach compromises on things since we can’t question each others’ feelings?” Feelings are for friends and family, they’re not for the general public. When someone is deliberately putting something off limits to discussion, they’re generally, in my experience, covering up a fraud. I DID say Dr. Shull was a Baptist…

The truth is, opportunity costs are always important to consider, and while we should perhaps avoid discussion of some trade-offs where possible, we shouldn’t put them off-limits entirely. There is no need to fear statistical truths so long as we understand what statistics really say, and the only lines of counterfactual that shouldn’t be pursued are the absurd or misleading. It’s all on the table, so let’s discuss it. Ostriches stick their heads in the sand to avoid seeing predators, but that doesn’t make the danger go away.

In a lively, but somewhat mean-spirited, thread on Samizdata, we have been discussing the extent to which Ayn Rand’s philosophy as written is responsible for the boorish public behavior of some of her followers. It’s an important question, for two reasons. On the one hand, it’s become a kind of stock response to any mention of Rand to say something along the lines of “well, I would read it, by I try to steer clear of cults.” This is often an argument from ignorance or intimidation, but it’s so common that Objectivists really need to get to work on countering it if they hope to make any more gains. On the other hand, that parry would hardly be so common if it weren’t at least partly true. It’s simply undeniable that a lot of people who represent Objectivism to the public meet the description. So my own opinion is that we have to admit that there is at least something about Objectivism that accounts for the behavior, even if I think that the extent to which that behavior is actually representative of Objectivism is greatly exaggerated in the public imagination.

Here I insist on a distinction between Objectivist ideology and its presentation in Rand’s novels. To the extent that Rand is responsible for attracting the kinds of arrogant, verbally aggressive, mindless devotees that characterize the public image of Objectivism, I think it will have almost entirely to do with her presentation of her ideas, and little to do with the content thereof.

If Jeff Walker’s book is a reliable source - and that is by no means certain - Rand was proud to describe herself as “the foremost living author of propaganda.” I hope it’s true - because that is always how I’ve read her books. They are propaganda, and I do not mean that in a disparaging sense of trying to trick the reader into accepting a doctrine the author does not really believe. I mean that in the wholly complimentary sense that they are trying to provide an emotional punch to what would otherwise be dry theory. I read Atlas Shrugged every two years or so - and entirely for propaganda purposes. I am not expecting to learn anything new - rather just trying to find some inspiration. We all slip into depression and inactivity from time to time; Atlas Shrugged helps me get up off my ass and back in the game.

Once you understand that her books are an advertising campaign for her philosophy, a lot of other things fall into place - including the fact that it isn’t very difficult to find people in the real world who fit the Objectivist caricature. Here’s how it works. There is a sense in which Ayn Rand is pop culture. She herself was no fan of pop culture and may have resented the comparison - but I kind of doubt it. She was, after all, aiming to reach the general public rather than effete literary snobs - and so the more books she sold the better.

The hallmark of pop culture is that it’s adolescent in the sense of being “easy.” This isn’t to say that it only appeals to adolescents - far from it. But it does appeal most strongly to adolescents. They are the ones most likely to take it deadly seriously and to build their identities around it. It is easy to understand why. Adolescence is time of great contradictions. We are, on the one hand, desperate for independence, and on the other hand painfully aware of just how dependent we really are. Adolescents are eager to escape their parents’ households but harbor serious (if only barely conscious) doubts about their ability to do so. So they are looking for things that are “empowering” - in the sense of being shortcuts to The Truth about Life. This is why, for example, they are so quick to fall in love, or adopt a new religion, or join cults - because all of these are fast tracks to Middle Age. The unifying feature is that there isn’t time to ponder carefully and shop the options: one needs answers and needs them now.

I think there is a similar psychology at work in the Ayn Rand devotee. They are typically going through a philosophical adolescence - where they’ve sensed something vaguely fishy about popular opinion and need to break free of it but lack the patience to do the reading and thinking required to come up with a workable alternative of their own. It isn’t that they’re unwilling to do this, necessarily. In fact - most of them will eventually. It’s rather that they need to “be somewhere” now. When you want to articulate opposition to the mainstream, you need to do so from certaintly, and that’s what they lack, at least initially. So Miss Rand supplies it for them. And so I think there’s really nothing remarkable about the mindset of your stock Ayn Rand fanatic. It’s the same mindset that leads people to declare Bob Dylan a great poet or the Beatles great musicians. I personally think Bob Dylan is an incoherent rambler - but for the sake of argument let’s say that he actually is a passably good writer who’s just not my style, and the people who like him legitimately like him. It’s nevertheless clear that he’s not a great writer - and the only reason people insist that he is is because they found themselves bored by High Literature and in need of an alternative. Dylan presents himself in an accessible pop-culture format that they can relate to instantly, and so “passably good” gets promoted to “great.” Now - the Dylan fans who are still reading will want to protest. Dylan IS good stuff, they’ll say. And fine - not to me, but if he is to some people, I have no problem with that. My point is that I can certainly, without too much difficulty at all, dig up people who are obsessed with Dylan all out of proportion to his actual significance or ability - who call him a “prophet” or a “visionary” or insist that his music “changes the lives of millions.” Poppycock - of course (and Dylan himself, by some accounts, would be the first to agree) - and yet there it is. I think most serious Dylan fans would insist not only that these people aren’t the majority of Dylan’s fans, but that they furthermore tend not to “get” Dylan at some important level. Nothing about the existence of these people says anything one way or the other about how good Dylan is or isn’t. All their existence proves is that he’s high-browed enough to flatter their vanity while being accessible enough to meet their time constraints.

The great contradiction of pop culture - the tightrope any pop artist must walk - is precisely this, in fact. The opus must be exclusive enough to make the devotee feel he’s gained some insight, but not so exclusive that there’s any real mental effort involved. The barrier to entry must be simultaneously low and high - and I think a lot of the volume of pop paraphrenalia that gets sold is accounted for by resolving just this contradiction. OK - so you’re a Doors fan. That’s good for about 20 min., until you realize that everyone else is too. So now you’ll need posters and T-shirts and buttons and bumper stickers to show that you’re more serious about it than they are. And. So. On. Your band gets free advertising, and you get a cheap sense of accomplishment.

Of course, this stage doesn’t last very long. If you’re really a Dylan fan, and there’s really something to the lyrics beyond what I hear in them (aka C₂H₅OH), then you eventually stop being obnoxious and hyperbolic about it and settle down to really appreciating them. And as time passes, maybe you do meditate on them and gain the kind of subtle appreciation that’s normally reserved for high arts. Maybe it really is that rewarding, once you’ve put in the effort. I wouldn’t know, obviously, having been put off by the man early on. Well, my point is that I think Ayn Rand, as a pop artist herself, runs a similar course with a lot of people. They’re obnoxious when they start out, but like with any other group of fans they grow out of it pretty quickly. People who are lifelong Rand cultists are as rare as people who are lifelong Dylan cultists. In the vast majority of cases, they grow up and either gain a deeper appreciation for her philosophy, or they move on. Just as the people who call Dylan a “prophet” and mean it are neither a representative sample of Dylans fans, nor even the subsection of his fans who appreciate him the most, the public face of Objectivism is neither the typical nor the most devoted reader of Rand. They’re just the visible ones - and they see to it that they hog the spotlight because of psychological needs that have little to do with any actual conviction about what’s on the page.

The people who behave in this way have an understanding of Rand that is, while not exactly wrong, certainly lacking in depth. Nothing new here - this is generally the case with zealots. The question is whether there is anything in Rand - in contradistinction to other political writers - which lends itself to attracting zealots?

Obviously, yes. Rand’s writing style is direct and uncompromising. She makes exaggerated claims about the importance of her philosophy in philosophical history. She identifies clear enemies and has a working concept of false consciousness. She draws her heroes in superhuman terms, implying that people who agree with her on every particular are themselves heroic. Most importantly of all, there is a mismatch between what is characterized as obvious in her fiction and what is actually obvious in real life. As will have been said of any pop talent - she “makes it look easy” - where “it” is in this case living life on John Galt’s terms.

Now, the central question under discussion on Samizdata is how much of a tradeoff there is between accessibility and putting off more circumspect potential recruits. Certainly attracting a lot of Peikoffs will have the side effect of alienating some other, more intelligent, people that you might prefer to win. The question - given that Rand is actively trying to change the culture - is whether the numbers come out in her favor.

That’s an empirical question to which I obviously can’t give a definitive answer wihtout research - but my harbored guess is that the numbers work out in our favor and how. And I think the reason they do is because Rand’s approach appeals to people at exactly the right time in their lives in exactly the appropriate way. In terms of the “right time,” it appeals to people in college or their early 20s - people who feel confused and confined and have some amount of concern for not wasting their lives, for being on “the right track.” In terms of the “appropriate way,” it appeals to thoughtful people who want credible answers, but who are not primarily philosophers - who are, indeed, suspicious of nitpicking for its own sake, who are practical and ready to get on with their lives. That some people will be seduced more by the tough talk than the ideas is the unavoidable price to pay here. And that these people will be the more visible members of the movement is inevitable, as explained above. But the majority of people who are turned on by Rand will find it useful as a gateway. It plugs the gaps that need plugging and helps them get on with their business. And as and when they have further questions, which most of them will, they will read more Rand and, eventually, other libertarian philosophers as well. They may start out as shallow devotees, but few will remain so for very long. Quite the contrary - they will, over time, apply a more critical eye, and so benefit from the subtler parts of the arguments. And so for every one Leonard Peikoff or Nathaniel Branden who makes it onto television, there are ten others who get honest answers to their questions, and who in turn spend their time reading liberty-minded philosophers rather than the Rawls and Hegel they might otherwise have occupied themselves with.

Ultimately, despite the rough edges, I think Rand does the world a great service. Atlas Shrugged is my favorite novel - for a number of reasons - and I have found a lot of her philosophical essays rewarding as well, even if they are no longer my primary reading choices in opinion essays. I approve of 95% of her political philosophy (we disagree on taxation), and about 90% of her aesthetic philosophy. I agree with her ethics but think they could’ve been worked out more clearly, and I don’t rate her epistemology much at all (it is clear to me that she hasn’t read much epistemology - at least not very carefully - despite her claims to the contrary).

There is no doubt in my mind that a lot of popular objections to Rand’s literature are objections to her political opinions masquerading as literary commentary. For example - one frequently hears that her characters are “cardboard” and “exaggerated.” Well, yes - but isn’t it interesting that no one makes the same complaint about Herman Hesse or Flannery O’Connor or Franz Kafka? It is not unusual for novels of ideas written by people with an agenda to feature fantastic elements as a way of shocking the reader into a more accurate perception of reality, and yet somehow when Rand does it it’s an inexcusable fault.

But I do think we have to allow that there is something in Rand that attracts the riff-raff. What I think we should stop concedeing (often by silence) in the public forum is that any of it has to do with her ideas and opinions. It is the delivery that attracts the fanatics - and that is necessarily so because her novels are novels of ideas that aim to change the culture. They have mass appeal, as is required of books carrying out such an aim. Mass appeal is not a fault in my eyes. Is it in yours?

TOWM quote of the day comes from Jerry Gaus - professor of Philosophy at Arizona - from a light-hearted defense of Scrooge published in The Philosopher in 1997:

I wish to suggest a reevaluation of [Scrooge and Marley's] two positions: what usually comes easy is making other people’s business your business, and what constitutes a difficult achievement, and a real virtue in a free society, is understanding your own business and refraining from interfering with other people’s.

Quite right. And this goes to the heart of my problem with Nudge, a seemingly well-meaning but ultimately pernicious book that’s making the rounds on the national discussion circuit right now. The book advocates what it terms libertarian paternalism - more commonly called soft paternalism. The idea is to skew people’s decisions without impinging on their freedom of choice. So, to use an example that one of the authors (Thaler) is fond of, we might arrange deserts at a cafeteria so that the healthier ones are closer, thus encouraging people to choose “wisely.” Or companies might prefer opt-out health insurance schemes, so that employees are automatically enrolled unless they specifically request not to be included (this as opposed to opt-in schemes, where they must fill out forms to be included).

This seems all very well-meaning - and perhaps some of its proponents do mean well. But what I think Gaus correctly recognizes is that there is something inherently antisocial about the very desire to influence the lifestyles of others. Or - perhaps “anti-social” is not the right word. It all depends on what kind of a society it is that you want, I suppose, when determining what counts as “anti-social.” Gaus draws a contrast between the “Great Society” and the “Multicultural Society.” In each type of society, diverse populations have learned to live together peacefully - but they differ as to their method. In the “multicultural soceity,” there is a presumption of value among all the different groups - and an accompanying license to bar those groups that are ultimately not “of value,” by whatever the standards of the society are. Difference is seen as a source of value, in fact - but therein lies the catch. Once we have decided that we tolerate difference because it is valuable, we are essentially still conservative. That is, we still evaluate our neighbors according to how much cultural treasure they bring to the table. True - we’ve made a civic virtue out of trying to appreciate and find strength in differences, and this is a step out of the country club. But we’re still focused on social harmony and still concerned with making sure that our neighbors think the “right thoughts” and have the “right opinions.” The “Great Society,” by contrast, functions according to the “live and let live” principle. In this society there is no particular civic virtue in trying to find value in our differences - our strategy for coexisting is that we leave each other alone. If I agree not to hurt you and you agree not to hurt me, we don’t have to like each other or approve of each other’s lifestyles to coexist.

What’s new in Gaus is a recognition that there’s a human impulse to control people. There’s an instinctive insecurity about one’s environment, say, and so there’s a natural impulse to have it as comfortable as possible. The multicultural society channels this impulse rather than replacing it. It makes a deal with us: first we have to honestly try to like the people around us. That’s our part of the bargain. What we then get in return is the right to demand certain kinds of mindsets from those around us: they are required to try to like us too. And what’s implicit in all of this is that if there’s a segment of the population that we decide we don’t like - after having honestly made this effort - we’re allowed to regulate them out of existence (or at least out of the neighborhood). The Great Society requires that people actually overcome this impulse. Members of the Great Society accept that they cannot control the lifestyles of others (beyond ensuring that there is no direct harm) - they give up such control in exchange for others giving up the same control over them.

The idea that this desire to control the lifestyles of others is a real human impulse hits at something that has always made me uncomfortable about Nudge but that I’ve never been able to properly articulate until now: the sense that people who like this book are being self-indulgent in some way. Gaus is very clever in framing his essay around pornography (it was written during the big Hustler controversy). The feminist complaint about pornography has always been that it legitimizes instincts that men should rather be trying to supress. The fear is that some guy watches a vid of gang rape and gets from it license to do the same in real life. And in fact, this isn’t an idle fear - any fantasy functions by licensing things we’d like to do but circumstances (physical or moral) won’t allow. Fortuantely, the overwhelming majority of us are able to separate fantasy from reality. We’d like to go bust skulls and clean up crime, but we understand why that’s wrong, so we read Spider-Man instead. Well, now I know what makes me uncomfortable about Nudge - and it’s the same thing that makes feminists uncomfortable about porn. It’s because I know that at some level the people who read and approve of Nudge are looking for license to indulge themselves in their base desire to control other people’s lives. All of us suffer from the vanity that we “know better” about how others should be living, and Nudge is written for those people who have not quite fully convinced themselves that they’re not allowed to intervene. Oh, they get the legal argument that we’re all allowed to live as we wish so long as we don’t hurt people, but they haven’t quite emotionally let go of the social engineering dream. Deep down inside they still want to remake the world in their image, and Nudge gives them an excuse to indulge in just a little bit of that.

The great advantage of sexual porn over Nudge is that porn is obviously ridiculous - and in fact frequently ridiculed. There’s a clear line between what goes on in porn and what goes on in reality, and people watching porn know their viewing pleasure is temporary. Whatever mental acrobatics get one from porn to actual assault are just that: acrobatics that are ultimately the responsibility and creation of the perp. Nudge, by contrast, is written by respectable people with impressive degrees, and its whole purpose is to perform the necessary mental acrobatics for you. It is, as it were, training people in the art of cognitive dissonance about wanting to control others and simultaneously wanting to be the kind of person who believes in freedom.

Sorry kids, can’t have it both ways. But Gaus is right: this is hard. And so “what constitutes a difficult achievement, and a real virute in a free society, is understanding your own business and refraining from interfering with other people’s.” Right. So, Nudge readers: if you want to become better people, throw away your ethical porn and live the wholesome life! Not that it’s any of my business…

Since yesterday’s post pointed to a good read on the financial crisis, how ’bout a bad one for today?

This article is both right and wrong. The gist of it is that Doug Kaye heard a program on Fresh Air that explained to him that Credit Default Swaps are like betting - which they are. Basically, it works like this. You are an institution, and someone is in debt to you (say, you are a mortgage lender, and the person under one of your mortgage loans is in debt to you). You can now “sell” that debt to someone else in any number of forms; this is a credit default swap. The form that Kaye is talking about is similar to buying insurance. If you’re the institution that owns the debt, you might talk someone into paying you a premium on it at fixed intervals, and if the debt goes bad, then you now owe them a one-off payment. If the debt matures as expected, well, bully for you, you pocketed extra money (on top of the interest you were presumably already making on the debt). The current crisis is largely blamed on a bigger-than-expected number of these credit default swaps turning bad (turning out to be “toxic,” in the jargon).

So yes, at least this form of CDS is like betting. The creditor institution “bets” that the debt will mature; the investor “bets” that the debt will default.

Where I can’t follow is this bit:

These really are bets and the reason they’ve brought down our econoy is that there’s no limit to the number of bets that can be placed on a single underlying mortgage or traunch. As a simplistic example, for a $300,000 mortgage AIG can sell as many bets as it wants. Since the bets aren’t backed by the mortgage itself, let alone the collateral (the real estate), there could be tens of millions of dollars riding on that single mortgage. It’s not just the kind of leverage we’re used to in which you borrow money in order to make ore investments. No, these aren’t *investments* — they’re *bets*. And just like in Las Vegas, the amount that can be bet on something isn’t limited by the value of that thing.

So let’s pick some nits here. While it might be true in principle that the amount that can be bet is unlimited, it’s hardly true in practice. No one (rational) is going to sell $10million worth of CDS security on a $300,000 mortgage! Assuming the basis (the percentage of the one-off payout that your investor pays you per annum for the privilege of “betting” - call it his ante) is 5%, then your expected loss (the amount of money you stand to lose discounted by the likelihood that the mortgage will get paid on time) is already higher than the value of the mortgage itself! And this is to say nothing of the fact that you’ll actually pay out $10million if the mortgage goes bad. So as I said, no rational person would do this. That’s not to say that there aren’t irrational players in the market - but even an irrational player will have a hard time making this sell for a number of reasons. First, how do you manage to sell $10million worth of security on a $300,000 mortgage? I guess it’s prettty easy to sell the first $100,000 chunk. Your investor will pay you $5,000 a year on the chance of getting $100,000 if the mortgage defaults. Since you’ve only sold the one chunk, and since that chunk is worth less than the mortgage itself, it must seem like a pretty good deal. But what if you turn around and try to sell another 100 of these? Obviously, people are going to notice that you’re pretty damn confident that the mortgage is going to be repaid (after all, you’ve just put $10million on the table on a $300,000 pot that says it will), and they’ll be less willing to take your bet. In order to get people to buy them, you’ll have to sell at lower and lower basis rates, thus increasing your expected (future) losses. And if the basis rate gets low enough, no one will even buy them at all no matter how cheap because they’ll be close to completely certain that they won’t get their payout. A really low basis rate is a market signal that you’re hugely overleveraged, and people don’t like to lend to people who won’t be able to pay back. So sure, it’s like Vegas. Where he’s got it wrong is that even in Vegas the amount that can be bet on something IS limited, in some sense, by the value of the thing being bet on. At the very least, it’s limited by our confidence in our opponent’s ability to make good on his bet, and that confidence has a lot to do with how much he “raised,” and whether we think his decisions are rational. If the pot contains $300 and someone raises to $10,000, you FOLD - because the risk of losing $10,000 is more serious than the expected gain of $300. Only in highly extraordinary circumstances does anyone take such a bet, even if you think the dude is bluffing.

But I think my real objection to this piece is an objection to the idea that betting is intrinsically worthless. It’s not. Betting is an extremely valuable instrument in a free market. It DOES serve a purpose, and that purpose is delivering infomration. Think about why you bet outside of Vegas and you’ll see what I mean. If someone makes an outlandish claim and you know he’s wrong, what do you do? Well, ideally you both break and go check it out on the internet, I suppose, but life happens in real time, and if you need the matter resolved now (probably to establish your dominance in the conversation or whatever), betting is a good way to do it. Talk is cheap, and betting is a way to make someone take responsibiilty for his statements. You bet he’s wrong, and if he knows he’s wrong he’ll likely back down. If he’s not sure, he might bet, but how much he bets will have a lot to do with exactly what his level of confidence is. If he’s very confident, you might back down. If he’s not so confident, you negotiate an amount that’s comensurate with each of your feelings on the issue. This negotiation process contains a lot of information both about how things are actually likely to be in the real world, and also how confident each of you are in your statements. The point here - again - is that betting isn’t done on thin air. It’s resolved according to rules and done with prior (but incomplete) information on both parties to the transaction. Since information in a market is distributed, “betting” can be a good way to aggregate it (see basically any of Robin Hanson’s papers for more detailed treatment of the idea). And since debt is inherently uncertain, the usefulness of such a tool in this domain is immediately obvious.

In any case, one is at pains to see what Kaye’s distinction between “betting” and “investing” rests on. Surely an investment is also a bet that a given enterprise will succeed? One doesn’t typically wantonly give one’s money to anyone who asks for it provided only that the beggar promises to “do something in the real world” with it! Typically, we first need some convincing that his venture will succeed, and then we need some kind of interest payment as a hedge against - what else? - the uncertainty that he actually will end up succeeding.

What went wrong with Credit Default Swaps is NOT that there is anything wrong with “betting,” and certainly not that there is a blazing white line between “betting” and “investing” such that the former is fantasy and the latter grounded. What went wrong is that the government polluted the enterprise by issuing implicit guarantees on mortgages that no rational person would have otherwise negotiated. The appropriate analogy is not Vegas as it actually is, but rather some perverse parallel universe “Vegas” where someone puts $300 in the pot, someone else comes along, looks over his shoulder and says “sheesh, you got fuck all! 2-clubs, 6-diamonds and three spades showing on the table, but I’ll bet $10,000 you win anyway,” and everyone else is confused about what to do until the casino owner comes along and says “don’t worry about whether he’s got the $10grand - I’ll back him up if he doesn’t.” At which point, OF COURSE everyone bets. But that’s a fantasy version of Vegas, and it’s obvious to anyone who’s passed junior high math why.

The trouble isn’t with “betting,” Mr. Kaye, it’s with a bookie being given an unlimited line of credit and yours and my expense and without our consent. “Betting” is what markets are all about. Working is what markets do when the government gets out of their way. When the government goes around to all the tables deciding who wins and loses - THAT’S when things get decoupled from reality. Only then.

In closing let me take the time to agree with this one of Mr. Kaye’s statements:

IOW, all of these bailouts are in order to cover the losses of bookies and to make sure that those who gambled get their payoffs.

Yes, that’s mostly right - and it’s every bit as immoral as it sounds. I would just like to add that none of the bets would’ve been anything like as high as they were if the bookie hadn’t known from the get-go that the government had his back.

To steal a phrase from the NRA - people don’t wreck economies, governments do.

Listening on the way to the office today was Philosophy Bites’ interview with Alex Neill on the Paradox of Tragedy. Basically the problem is this: if pity and fear are unpleasant emotions, then why do people write and watch/read tragedies? The answer, perhaps predictably, is that it isn’t really the pity and sorrow and all that that we enjoy (though we can appreciate, on a different level, how well they’re staged), it’s the insight into the human condition that keeps us interested. Art as search for truth.

Neill admits, however, that this theory runs into a bit of a problem with the horror genre. Take any angle on it you might, ‘profound’ isn’t really a word that springs to mind. Surely if people enjoy horror movies it’s gotta be because at some level they really do enjoy watching people suffer.

Well, maaaayyybe, is Neill’s response. More likely, he thinks, it’s just a visceral thrill on the level of riding a roller coaster. It’s a very physical explanation: we like the adrenaline rush that being afraid gives us, and horror movies are a way to get that without the accompanying danger. So the comparison between horror and tragedy isn’t entirely apt … seems to be the answer.

As for me, I buy this and I don’t. I mean, clearly there’s something to what he says. Certainly, to use his example, we don’t watch King Lear because it’s pleasant. And there are few, if any, people who honestly enjoy watching Lear get his eyes plucked out just for the sake of seeing someone suffer like that. No, what’s attractive about Lear is probably just what Neill says: dramatization of the human condition - a chance to examine from the outside.

That said, I think Lear is not unlike a horror movie in a lot of ways, I think there IS more to horror movies than just a visceral thrill, and I think tragedy and horror are not as different as he supposes.

For one thing, though I admit I’ve never read Aristotle’s Poetics, I was given the gist of it by my high school Literature teacher in class lectures, and Neill is leaving out an important part. It’s true enough that Aristotle talks about “the pleasure” of watching pain and suffering, and that he sort of leaves that paradox open for the reader to ponder. But on the whole Aristotle gives a bit more of an explanation than we’re led to believe here. Specifically, the enjoyment of pain and suffering comes at realizing - at the end of the production - that none of it was real, what Aristotle calls “catharsis.” The whole point of tragedy is thus meant to be that you are watching something more horrible than real life, and leave with the comfort that real life doesn’t actually get that bad - at least not that often. Tragedy therefore has to walk a very fine line: it has to be believable enough to suck us in, but exaggerated enough that we get to have our catharsis at the end.

That seems to me a pretty good summary of what goes on in horror as well. Now, don’t get me wrong. Clearly there are horror movies that operate at exactly the level that Neill suggests. These would be your basic C-level slashers - essentially any of the Friday the 13th series save possibly the first one. You know, the movies that only ever work when things are jumping out at you or getting killed in splattery ways. But good horror movies operate on a level that’s a bit closer to what Aristotle was talking about. As I’ve blogged here before, I think the functional mechanism in good horror movies is delayed realization. A skillful horror movie will litter the first 80% of its screentime with increasingly less subtle hints that something truly horrible is going on, but it always stops just short of forcing you to give up on the rational explanation. The climax comes in a revelatory moment where the protagonist is forced to face the reality that all her (it’s usually a “her”) wildest fears are true. That impossible thing, whatever it is, is real, and every bit as horrible as she’d supposed, maybe even worse.

After that, a good horror movie will wind quickly to a close. Because just like a good tragedy, it has to walk a really fine line keeping things just barely on the other side of believable. They have to be familiar enough that we can rationalize right with the hero(ine) up to the big moment, and the approach to that moment has to be slow enough that we don’t shoot our wad too soon. Because once it’s out in the open that the author isn’t playing by the normal laws of Physics, the clock starts counting down. It’s only a matter of time at that point before the viewer stops believing and the tension pops like a baloon.

Seen in that light - the mechanism is largely the same. There’s something useful in reminding ourselves just how scary the world can be. Who, honestly, hasn’t felt himself in a situation that was well beyond his control, worse than he originally thought, and yet with the sinking feeling that he knew all along? That’s all of us at work who’ve been backstabbed by a colleague, who’ve found out our girlfriend was cheating on us with our best friend, and … yes, those unlucky few who find out that the next door neighbor chopped their kid up into bits and baked him into a souffle. Hey, it happens, but I digress: it’s that whole unsettling feeling of “I saw it coming, but not clearly enough to do anything about it.” That’s the fundamental fear that good horror plays on, that feeling of not-quite-helplessness. And I think we enjoy it on the same level that we enjoy the relief of waking up from a really bad nightmare only to realize it was all just a dream. If Aristotle is right, that’s what motivates us to watch tragedy - and I think horror works on much the same level, albeit with a different emotion.

Horror, I should add, need not lack profundity. It’s true that most of it isn’t terribly profound, but I’m right with Stephen King in thinking that most memorable horror has a very real subtext. King famously analyzed The Amityville Horror (which I’ve never seen, but have heard is really silly and am therefore not in any great hurry to see) as a veiled allegory for home ownership. The Money Pit as morality tale, maybe. The idea is that people can quickly get financially overwhelmed by a new home - especially given that (especially today) most people buy more than they can really afford at the time anyway. King thinks Amityville speaks to that very ordinary fear in an allegorical, exaggerated way, and I see no good reason to disagree with him. And if he’s right about this, and if this kind of analysis holds up for other horror “classics” (again, can’t say I’m too comfortable with using Amityville here, but whatever), then there’s really not much distance between horror and tragedy at all. It’s just academic snobbery that grants the one “high literature” status and casts the other as “mere entertainment.”

I have to admit to being a bit annoyed at Neill through the interview, actually. For example, I think he’s simply wrong in saying that one of the “points” of King Lear is Gloucester’s observation that “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, They kill us for their sport.” That’s hardly the point of the play. The point of the play has more to do with Lear’s being “more sinned against than sinning.” The thing that makes the line between Lear and horror a particularly fine one for tragedies, in fact, is that Lear’s punishment is so obviously out of all proportion to his crime. But that, of course, is also the cathartic mechanism at the end. Yes, of course it’s within the realm of possibility that such things can happen to a person, but we take comfort at the end in equal parts because it’s all so exaggerated as to seem unlikely to ever happen to us, and because we know, as Lear comes to know, that he should have seen it coming. The point isn’t really so simple as “shit happens,” in other words. Indeed, I think one of Lear’s failures as a tragedy - why it doesn’t have Hamlet or Othello status - is that it pushes things a bit too far. Remember, push it too far and you break the spell; the entire craft depends on getting that delicate balance just right - keeping it just over the line of believable, but not so far over that we can’t get sucked in. King Lear is probably just a bit further beyond the line of believability than is good for it. Which is to say, no one really believes that his life is so tragic that it’s just a tale of gods toying with him like a fly. Gloucester’s speech, I think most people agree, actually serves to undermine the play a bit.

But alright, I’m picking nits. The point is just that I don’t think horror should be written off so easily. The mechanics of it as a genre are not really so different from what makes tragedy work. It’s true that there are considerably more “great” tragedies than there are “great” works of horror, but I’m not so sure that’s a necessary consequence of what the genres appeal to. Quite the contrary - I think it is possible to write “great” or “classic” horror. I think it just tends to happen less often partly because of the relative novelty of the genre, partly because of scientific prejudice, partly because of literary prejudice, and probably most of all just because what sorts of images evoke feelings of dread are really culture- and time-dependent. Vampires were scarier in Victorian England than they are in modern Seattle - a fact that psychologists are better-equipped to explain than writers, but a fact notwithstanding. Because tragedy operates on a less imagistic level - the much more rational/universal level of moral wrong - I think it’s easier to pull of one that passes as universal. But just because it’s easier to write great tragedy than great horror doesn’t mean great horror can’t be done.

I wonder if there is a name for the rhetorical trick whereby you take your opponent’s basic accusation and cite it as evidence of a basic personality flaw - intended to make you look good by comparison. I guess this counts as a subspecies of the ad hominem (”playing the man and not the ball”), but it’s particular and galling enough that I hope someone has seen fit to give it a name.

One example I came across early in thinking about these things was in the “scholarly” Japanese response to Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking. Her 1997 book was only published in Japan last year, its publication having been stalled by nationalists who insisted on including “corrections” in the text. They got their way by intimidating the family members of serious historical scholars hired to review the book, and what eventually happened was that their refutation was published, but not the primary text. I purchased a copy of the refutation on its release in 1999 - which I still have and which I assume the image-conscious in Japan were hoping had disappeard entirely - and it’s replete with instances of this tactic in action. One of the ones that stands out is a response to a caption over a picture of a decapitated Chinese head resting on a military barrier. He has something in his mouth, which Change reports as a cigarette. That’s certainly what it looks like, though the photo is a bit blurry and it’s hard to be sure. The refutation notes that the “cigarette, if cigarette it is, was obviously placed in the man’s mouth by the American photographer as a joke.” The implication is that if Americans are callous enough to consider it a “joke” to place a cigarette in a decapitated man’s mouth, they have no standing to criticise the Japanese for whatever attrocities supposedly took place in Nanking in 1938. Well - fair enough that we don’t know how the “cigarette” got in the man’s mouth. What struck me about this is how it attempts to dodge the question of what the decapitated head is doing on the military barricade in the first place. It stretches credulity that the Chinese locals just found one lying about and decided to put in on a Japanese military bariacde. To what purpose? More to the point, to what purpose that would’ve been worth getting shot at? The Chinese at this point were hardly fighting a propaganda war. Neither, for that matter, were the Americans, who were mostly ignorant of the incident. The most likely explanation for the head being on the barricade is as a sick warning to the locals by the occupying Japanese forces. Of course, since we don’t know the circumstances of how the head got there (or really even who took its picture), it’s probably unfair of Chang to cite it as “evidence” that a massacre took place. All the same, the implication as to how it came to be there given in her book is much more plausible than whatever the Japanese scholars have in mind as a counterstory (they don’t say). Realizing this, they seek to sidestep the issue by using the rhetorical trick in question: using the very accusation that Japanese soldiers put it there as the basis of an unfounded ad hominem response. The photographer, who might have been American (but we don’t know), probably put the cigarette there as a “joke” (but again, we don’t know), and the fact that even one (alleged) American can think of this as a “joke” where we Japanese scholars are scandalized by such a suggestion means in turn that Americans as a whole are more callous than Japanese, ergo the Nanking Massacre never happened. It certainly goes down in history as one of the least compelling arguments I’ve ever heard - but the fact of its not being stated explicitly lends it an effectiveness in the original text it does not deserve.

I came across a similar example today in Dinesh D’Souza’s latest column Why Bill Maher Made Me Laugh. It’s about Bill Maher’s film Religulous, in which Mr. Maher goes all Michael Moore on religious fanatics, with, I suspect, largely disappointing results. D’Souza is probably right when he says that “It is only in the company of obvious charlatans and simpletons that Maher comes off as the bright guy,” and that’s exactly why I don’t really have any interest in seeing his movie. It isn’t hard to find religious crackpots (they advertise themselves, usually), and picking on the mentally feeble is neither entertaining nor informative.

But D’Souza’s taking a cheap shot of his own, and that does interest me.

At times he says he is an agnostic, who simply holds the rational position that he doesn’t know what comes after death. But if you don’t know whether there is an afterlife, and even if you have no reason to believe in one, it hardly makes sense to attack those who hold a different view. After all, you yourself are in the dark and they might very well be right.

Well, that’s part of it. It’s true enough that Agnostics admit that they are “in the dark” about what happens after death, but that leaves unaddressed the more obvious issue of on what basis it is, exactly, that religious people claim to know what happens after death. To a cursory glance, after all, it seems inherently unknowable. Just because you yourself don’t know something doesn’t obligate you to respect anyone else’s best guess as to what the answer might be. Tie goes to the Agnostic, in other words - because the burden of proof is on the person making the claim of knowledge.

Now here’s where it really goes off the rails:

By way of analogy, I don’t believe in unicorns, because there is no evidence for them, but I haven’t written any books called “The Unicorn Delusion” or “Unicorns are Not Great” or made any documentaries denouncing unicorns. Maher’s agnosticism is clearly a pose. Like Christopher Hitchens, he is an “anti-theist” who hates the Christian God. And the main reason seems to be, as Maher himself says at one point, that this God has rules that interfere with Maher’s sex life.

Here it is again. Neither of us really know how the head got on the fence, but since your assumptions are a lot more plausible than mine, what I’ll do instead of addressing the issue is try to turn the fact that you bring it up at all into a moral indictment.

So let’s deal with this. First of all, as if it needed pointing out, the reason that no one makes documentaries denouncing unicorns is that the handful of people in the world who actually do believe in them grow out of it by age 18 as a general rule and never, ever seek to control anyone’s behavior as a consequence of their beliefs. To the best of my knowledge, there is currently as many as NO ONE advocating that we rewrite science textbooks to include reference to the possibility that unicorns might have evolved, possibly all of ZERO people setting off bombs in the name of unicorns, and the number of people pestering homosexuals for going against the Will of Unicorns is as high as NONE AT ALL. D’Souza is right that mere nonbelief in something does not motivate someone to write a book denouncing it, but then, Dawkins and Hitchens et al have never claimed to be writing these books just because they don’t believe in God.

Second, while it might be true that D’Souza doesn’t write books (though that point is debatable) or make documentaries denouncing Atheism, he certainly writes enough columns that qualify as denounciations. One of the more extreme is Atheism and Child Murder, in which he strongly implies, on the basis that Peter Singer believes in legal infanticide, that anyone who carries “Atheism” (as though it were a coherent belief system rather than a simple rejection of an unproven assertion) to its logical conclusion will end up believing in legal infanticide, as though Peter Singer were some kind of patron saint of Atheism. Whatever its logical shortcomings, it is nothing if not a brazen attack on Atheism which has, as its purpose, the hope of frightening off the curious. And even if we’re feeling generous and willing to let D’Souza off the hook on the technicality that his columns don’t fall into either of the categories book or documentary, there is no shortage of such material from other Christian apologists. The one making the rounds in the book category at the momentis Frank Turek’s I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, and in the documentary category it is of course Ben Stein’s Expelled. And these are merely the most current in a long list of prominent examples stretching back decades in the case of documentaries and centuries in the case of books. It isn’t as though Hitchens and Dawkins are operating in a vacuum here. They’re not exactly turning the other cheek, but then they’re not the ones claiming that as a moral virtue.

Third, the fact that “God has rules that interfere with his sex life” is a perfectly valid reason for a non-believer to oppose widespread belief in something the existence of which has never been proven. In fact, I can think of few better reasons. It is much the same reason that D’Souza doesn’t waste his time opposing belief in unicorns, to put a fine point on it. If believers in unicorns existed in large numbers and sought to control something as fundamental to D’Souza’s happiness and self-actualization potential as his sexual behavior, he might not think he could afford the luxury of just letting them be. This is by far the most galling of all the religious intrusions into people’s lives - believers and otherwise. They act as though it is childish and self-serving to enjoy a fulfilling sex life tailored to one’s own needs, but the only basis for this attitude that I can see rests on their as-yet-unproven claims that (a) there is this unseen, unknowable cosmic entity who cares how people have sex and (b) they know what this entity wants. Of course, logically speaking I cannot completely rule out the possibility that these claims are true. But I am not obligated, nor should anyone feel obligated, to take these claims seriously if no proof is offered for them. In short - if D’Souza thinks he is in a position to restrict Bill Maher’s sex life, then I’m right with Bill Maher in thinking that he owes Maher a bit more of an explanation than he’s giving. Certainly it is disingenuous to talk as though it were just obvious that Maher’s sex life needs modulating on the basis that some undocumented Sky Bully said so.

The trick D’Souza is attempting to pull it this: he’s sidestepping Maher’s main point (that religious fanatics won’t leave him alone) by trying to paint him as hypocritical as concerns his Agnosticism and the stated aims of his film. Perhaps Maher is hypocritical about his Agnosticism. Not having seen the movie, I don’t really know, but I would point out that if Maher devotes most of his film time to spoofing Christians then that is certainly consistent with the idea that he’s motivated more by a desire to be left alone than he is by Agnostic Evangelism, whatever that would mean. Perhaps Maher didn’t make that point clearly enough for D’Souza, but I doubt he would deny it in an interview if asked directly.

The point is this: certainly I can agree that if you not only believe in the Sky Bully but also that He wants you to go out into the world and convert everyone, that you might feel some sort of moral obligation to pester people to think like you. But surely the burden of proof is on you. In fact, nothing in Matthew 28:19 seems to suggest otherwise. The Bible doesn’t say “go out into the world and throw a temper tantrum every time someone fails to be persuaded.” Nor does it say “if anyone finds you unconvincing, immediately launch a character assasination against that person.” The way I read it - admittedly with an unbeliever’s bias - is that it says what anyone versed in logic already knows: that the burden of proof is on the person advancing the theory, never on the person who has reason to reject it.

As an Atheist myself (I take it a step further than Maher: I am an Atheist about unicorns, and I am an Atheist about God … and about everything else that seems unlikely, carries no explanatory power, and is in any case not reliably attested, for that matter), I can say without hesitation that I am generally willing to leave religious people alone to do whatever it is they do. As D’Souza says, I do not know what happens after death, and they might. So fine - they are free to lead their lives in accordance of whatever knowledge they believe themselves to have. What they may NOT do is put the onus on me to accept their knowledge (and the lifestyle they derive from it) without making a convincing case. I do not seek to change them; it is they who seek to change me. That puts the ball in their court, and I’m really getting tired of hearing them whine that not every serve we deliver sets them up for a slam.

The head is on the fence. Someone put it there. It seems a lot more likely that that someone was Japanese soldiers than Chinese civilians. But I’m willing to drop it if you are, since neither of us really knows. What I’m not willing to do is accept, on the basis of my challenge to your frankly disingenuous attempts to pretend that there was no massacre in Nanking when there patently was, that I’M somehow the more deceptive and hypocritical of the two. And so it goes with religion. You guys started it by passing blue laws, and trying to put Creationism in school textbooks, and banning sodomy even between consenting adults, and All that Other Stuff that amounts to nothing other than attempts to control people’s behavior based on a theory for which you have been unable, for 2000 years running, to produce any evidence. If we raise a gun to defend ourselves against being mugged at gunpoint, it is hardly becomming to point to our gun as evidence of any inherently violent nature on our parts.

Yes, for what it’s worth, I agree that people like Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins (and especially the odious PZ Myers) are behaving childishly. It would be far better for Atheists to just ignore Christians. After all, we’re not the ones with a burden of proof to meet, and releasing books and movies like Dawkins’ and Maher’s sort of draws and artifical line to hold when none is really there. More importantly, Atheism is not even a creed, let alone one that needs to be evangelized, and Dawkins and Maher muddy that point for everyone. But I do object to attempts like D’Souza’s to put us on moral equivalence. We are not morally equivalent. We are not the ones who tell you how to live, and we are not the ones who need to justify our beliefs to you. The burden of being convincing is on you. So start meeting it already if you really do have a basis for your beliefs, and stop with the ad hominem distractions. If you don’t want to explain how the head got on the fence, fine. But you’re going to have to at least address the issue of the massacre that took place nearby that is the most likely explanation for its being there.

I’ve never seen Sex and the City, and I have no plans to see the movie. But it’s a cultural phenomenon, and so I have been reading articles about it here and there. In one by Kathryn Lopez, I stumbled across what may be one of the best, most concise statements of my complaints with the current dating culture.

The movie, like the series, is an important cultural contribution. It’s a mirror. And you don’t have to be promiscuous or crass like Carrie and Samantha and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) tend to be to see a reflection. There is a real focus on men, and on what women do to men: Women don’t forgive men. Women don’t think about men and their feelings. For as sensitive as the modern man is supposed to be to a women’s feelings and as sensitive as a man is supposed to look, he’s not really supposed to register an opinion. Or slip up. Or be honest.

Indeed. That’s a nice summary of frustrations I’ve had in a large number of my relationships. In particular, I think, the bit about forgiveness. People screw up - and that means the woman as well as the man. When I forgive a girlfriend, even for “major” violations like cheating, she gets a clean slate. There may be some teasing here and there afterward, granted, but “I forgive you” means “we’re starting over.” It means she doesn’t have any hoops to jump through; it means there are no grudges; it means that I don’t emotionally blackmail her by constant petty reminders of things she’s done. I agree to share some of the burden and do some of the work, even though it’s not technically my fault or responsibility. That’s what forgiveness is.

Another supposed “girls’ show” (though I’m starting to have my doubts just how feminist it really is) - Buffy the Vampire Slayer - comes to mind here. In particular, the episode I Only Have Eyes for You - a second season bit which deals with forgiveness. If you haven’t seen it I won’t ruin it, only to say that the plot is a contrivance by which the character having difficulty understanding forgiveness ends up in the shoes of someone who needs it. Notable dialogue is Giles, explaining the concept to Buffy:

To forgive is an act of compassion, Buffy. It’s not done because people deserve it, it’s done because they need it.

Right. Forgiveness is not fair or just, and it’s most emphatically not about evening the score. There’s forgiveness for the same reason there’s charity. Yes, ideally everyone carries their own weight and is never a burden on anyone else. But here in the real world, people frequently make mistakes, get things wrong, and end up relying on others for things they have no right to ask for. We keep the whole messy thing going by occasionally “writing off debts,” if I may speak that way about relationships. If you go into a relationship honestly, with open eyes, then you know that your partner is going to screw up eventually - because everyone always does. If you really care about the person, you accept that, and you accept the mistake, and you move on.

Naturally, there are limits. You can’t forgive someone who has no serious desire to reform, for example. People screw up once, twice, maybe even three times if they’re weak (and we’re all weak in our ways). If you find yourself forgiving too often in short time span, however, it may be that the other person isn’t really devoted to you, or is starting to take you for granted - and in that case it’s time to seriously consider leaving, naturally. Relationships can’t be carried by only one partner.

And that’s exactly my complaint with a lot of the women I’ve dated. By this definition of forgiveness, I really wonder whether any woman has ever actually forgiven me for the times I’ve screwed up. When I think back to my dating history, I can think of one genunine example. That’s not a very good track record for the fairer sex.

I’ve frequently been in situations where I’ve been told I’m forgiven, of course. But it never seems to be actually true. First, to even get to the point where you’re (nominally) “forgiven,” you have to go through the whole weepy confessional conversation, which doesn’t seem to serve any real purpose except to have you repeat endlessly that you’re the one in the wrong. What generally comes next is rarely a simple “I forgive you.” Instead, we have to plan out how we’re going to build our relationship back up, which invariably includes enumerating all the things that are going to be different now that trust has been injured, or whatever. And then, forever after, whenever there’s an opportunity to bring it up in a not-so-veiled hint, that opportunity is virtually never wasted. Calling this kind of behavior “forgiveness” is Orwellian, really, as it’s nothing of the kind.

I’ve never understood the point of all this. It’s damaging, it’s NOT “commitment,” and it’s certainly not a path to happiness - for either partner. More than that, it’s simply unrealistic. People are not perfect, and I think the danger of shows like Sex in the City is that they teach people to make a sport out of finding fault. Things have improved from times past, to be sure. Girls these days know that Prince Charming isn’t coming to make everything better for them, and that’s a step. But they still act as though they deserve Prince Charming, and that’s a problem.

Giving up on finding the perfect mate isn’t selling yourself short - because there’s still plenty of room to be choosy from among the pool that’s available. And let’s be clear about this - people SHOULD be choosy. No self-respecting person wants less for themselves than the best they can get. It’s demeaning both for you and your partner if you settle. But the “best you can get” - that goal that you strive for - should still be something that actually exists.

Fantasy can be useful if channeled properly. Indeed, the human ability to imagine - to see things not as they are but as they should be - is probably one of our greater adaptive assets. But like anything, too much of a good thing can really come back to bite you in the ass. Forgiveness is a constructive channeling of fantasy, I think. Once the dastardly deed, whatever it may be, is done, it’s done; there’s no way to undo it or to completely forget it. So we do the next best thing: we summon an act of will and pretend it never happened. I don’t mean “pretend” in the sense of rewriting the facts in our memories, of course, but in the sense that we choose to act as if it never happened, to hold expectations as though it never happened, to carry on as though it never happened, etc. A destructive channelling of fantasy is when you endlessly blame people for not being exactly what you wish they were, or what you’d hoped they would be, or what you were imagining they’d be. If someone isn’t what you want, then leave them and go find someone else. If someone is what you want but made a mistake, forgive them. And if you only want things you know you’ll never find, then I’m sorry for you.