A question people continue to ask, decades after his death: how can we take Heidegger seriously as a philosopher, given his outright embrace of Nazism? The instinct to ask the question is the one Jesus referenced in the passage whose citation is the title of the post: When judging prophets, you will know the tree by its fruit.
So if that is right, and it seems right instinctively, poison fruit means a bad tree. But many medicines are poisons if taken in the wrong proportion.
I've been reading Heidegger recently, and some commentaries on him. He is said to be a genius, and if he impressed Hannah Arendt he must have been something like one. On the other hand, I get the strong impression that many of his commentators don't understand what he wanted to say -- not, I mean, that I understand things they have failed to understand, but that I get the sense they are flailing a bit. It is fairly clear that we are still not sure exactly what he meant to say, or why he wanted to say it.
That makes it hard to say just where he went wrong. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe says it was in being too tied to the organic: favoring the family and therefore the blood, and therefore 'the race,' against the cosmopolitan. But it is possible to err in the other direction too. We often see that from liberal pundits who want to suggest that the US military ought never to be deployed except when it isn't in our interest (for humanitarian reasons, that is, but never because the US has something to gain). It may be that there is a poison here, but it may also be a medicine if you can get it in the right place, and in the right proportion.
Somehow he failed to do that.
When oil failed to peak
Stanley Kurtz has a three-part article in National Review Online about the movement to divest university funds of their fossil-fuel holdings. In part one, he introduces us to Bill McKibben, the anti-Keystone XL pipeline activist who advocates leaving 80% of known fossil-fuel reserves underground. "Since writing off 80 percent of reserves would wreck the oil industry’s profitability, McKibben maintains that only government compulsion can keep all that energy underground — through a steeply escalating carbon tax, for example." He also notes the discovery by McKibben's ally Naomi Klein "that the reparations movement had dropped its polarizing label and had seized instead upon 'climate debt' as a backdoor way of advancing global wealth redistribution."
Part two traces McKibben's advocacy of controlled economic decline.
Part two traces McKibben's advocacy of controlled economic decline.
McKibben is convinced that averting global warming requires a winding-down of modernity. . . . Th[e] [pre-modern] world of tight families and interdependent neighbors, says McKibben, was far more satisfying than our hyper-individualist, consumer-driven, tech-saturated present. He explains that his attraction to this pre-industrial social model long predated his encounter with the “greenhouse effect” in the Eighties. . . . Living in an increasingly isolating, secular, and materialist universe, McKibben’s young followers seem intent on turning climate apocalypticism into a substitute religion. That won’t fill the gap. You can run from the economy, but you can’t hide. And catastrophism alone will not a morality make.McKibben has pivoted adroitly to address changing beliefs about fuel reserves and climate, from global cooling to global warming, and from peak oil to the need to sequester 80% of supplies that suddenly are burgeoning to dangerous levels:
Just three years after McKibben consigned peak-oil denialism to the dustbin of history, peakism itself looks ready for the broom. Drilling techniques like hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and other technologies for tapping so-called unconventional oil have ushered in a new era of fossil-fuel abundance. And it has all followed the classical economist’s playbook. As oil scarcity forced prices up, technical innovations once too costly to consider increased supply. Mistaken end-of-oil predictions have been issued since the dawn of the industrial age. All have been swept away by technological breakthroughs driven by the law of supply and demand.
While a few peak-oilers hold out, McKibben himself seems to have surrendered. Not scarcity but fossil-fuel abundance is our problem, he now says. His divestment campaign is essentially an attempt to induce peak oil artificially, via political pressure.Today's final installment examines the level of debate-squelching needed to make all this seem like good sense to the voters now emerging from fine campuses.
"Extraordinary"
What does 'extraordinary' mean?.
I would have thought an example such as the Whiskey Rebellion or the Civil War would have been more to the point. The question isn't whether there might possibly be circumstances in which a President can use military force on US citizens, but exactly what the defining terms are.
Yes, the president does have the authority to use military force against American citizens on US soil—but only in "an extraordinary circumstance," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a letter to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Tuesday.Well, nobody doubted that, if "extraordinary" means "a state of war or insurrection." The examples given in the letter are Pearl Harbor and 9/11, both odd examples since they don't involve US citizens as aggressors. If you'd shot down the planes on 9/11, for example, you'd have killed some US citizens... but it would have been accidental to your purpose. It would have been justifiable under the Just War Doctrine of Double Effect for that reason.
I would have thought an example such as the Whiskey Rebellion or the Civil War would have been more to the point. The question isn't whether there might possibly be circumstances in which a President can use military force on US citizens, but exactly what the defining terms are.
Trauma
The school where a budding juvenile delinquent chewed his poptart into the shape of a gun and was suspended is now offering counseling for anyone traumatized by the event. As Reason.com notes:
To be fair, the phrasing leaves open the possibility that the students would be "troubled" not by the imaginary gun but by the suspension, and by the ensuing realization that they're powerless pawns in a vast, incomprehensible game run by madmen.
Arms manufacturers voting with their feet
Sounds like some sensible states may get a chance to lure jobs away from gun-hating home states.
Price fixing
We're sure it will work this time.
The natural gas industry is experiencing a boom from shale and fracking. Dow Chemical wants to keep gas prices low so it will have a cheap source of feedstock. "'Unchecked LNG export licensing can cause demand shocks, and the resulting price volatility can have substantial adverse impacts on U.S. manufacturing and competitiveness,' Mr. Liveris [of Dow] said in prepared testimony" before a Senate committee. Translation: If gas producers can sell overseas, the increased demand will raise prices, and I deserve to have them held artificially low.
It's encouraging to see that J. Bennett Johnston, a Louisiana Democrat with 24 years of experience on the U.S. Senate Energy Committee, completely grasps the principles of supply, demand, and pricing:
The natural gas industry is experiencing a boom from shale and fracking. Dow Chemical wants to keep gas prices low so it will have a cheap source of feedstock. "'Unchecked LNG export licensing can cause demand shocks, and the resulting price volatility can have substantial adverse impacts on U.S. manufacturing and competitiveness,' Mr. Liveris [of Dow] said in prepared testimony" before a Senate committee. Translation: If gas producers can sell overseas, the increased demand will raise prices, and I deserve to have them held artificially low.
It's encouraging to see that J. Bennett Johnston, a Louisiana Democrat with 24 years of experience on the U.S. Senate Energy Committee, completely grasps the principles of supply, demand, and pricing:
The free market might not always lead to everyone's definition of the sweet spot, but experience has shown that it is a better allocator and regulator than bureaucrats and politicians. We should heed the admonition of Adam Smith that demand begets supply: Allow the free market to allocate the nation's newfound energy bounty.Unfortunately, he's been out of office since 1997. The current batch of idiots will try anything to destroy the newly booming energy market, whether it's lunatic EPA regulations, price-fixing schemes, or squelching of pipelines. Thank Heaven for the House. For now.
Spring is Coming
Aye, and so are the rakes.
St. Patrick's Day is close, now. It's worth getting a song in your heart.
Now here's another song, perhaps appropriate given the recent push for gun control and the general utilitarian desire to control us for our own good.
Well, the Irish aren't the only ones who have their hearts in the right place.
St. Patrick's Day is close, now. It's worth getting a song in your heart.
Now here's another song, perhaps appropriate given the recent push for gun control and the general utilitarian desire to control us for our own good.
Well, the Irish aren't the only ones who have their hearts in the right place.
Past Things Are Never Probable...
...nor improbable. Not, at least, if you are English.
What does it mean to say that there was a chance of a past event going otherwise? It means saying that the past is not ruled by physics, at least not as we generally understand physics. The house burned down for physical reasons that ought to be reliable: the heat plus the fuel plus the air. Given that, and a response from the fire department slower than Y, and the house should burn.
I think the judges got this one right. Taking an alternative view requires some philosophical sophistication that is incompatible with democracy. But even given that sophistication, it seems wrong to me.
The idea that you can assign probabilities to events that have already occurred, but where we are ignorant of the result, forms the basis for the Bayesian view of probability. Put very broadly, the 'classical' view of probability is in terms of genuine unpredictability about future events, popularly known as 'chance' or 'aleatory uncertainty'. The Bayesian interpretation allows probability also to be used to express our uncertainty due to our ignorance, known as 'epistemic uncertainty', and popularly expressed as betting odds. Of course there are all gradations, from pure chance (think radioactive decay) to processes assumed to be pure chance (lottery draws), to future events whose odds depend on a mixture of genuine unpredictability and ignorance of the facts (whether Oscar Pistorius will be convicted of murder), to pure epistemic uncertainty (whether Oscar Pistorius knowingly shot his girlfriend).Well, yes, that seems to be right. It's true that Bayesian probability allows you to assign probability to past events, but it is characteristic of the Bayesian approach that a probability that reaches 1 or 0 never changes thereafter.
The judges went on to say:The chances of something happening in the future may be expressed in terms of percentage. Epidemiological evidence may enable doctors to say that on average smokers increase their risk of lung cancer by X%. But you cannot properly say that there is a 25 per cent chance that something has happened. Either it has or it has not.
What does it mean to say that there was a chance of a past event going otherwise? It means saying that the past is not ruled by physics, at least not as we generally understand physics. The house burned down for physical reasons that ought to be reliable: the heat plus the fuel plus the air. Given that, and a response from the fire department slower than Y, and the house should burn.
I think the judges got this one right. Taking an alternative view requires some philosophical sophistication that is incompatible with democracy. But even given that sophistication, it seems wrong to me.
If a tree falls in the forest
This story about a Florida Supreme Court decision upholding a drug arrest on the basis of a dog alert when no narcotics could be detected by humans reminds us of the dangers of outsourcing intelligent judgment to experts. Apparently the science of dog detection is settled.
First Confession
So today I made my first confession to a priest, as opposed to a kind of general confession to other people -- as I sometimes have confessed to you. It was a remarkable experience. I'm not sure what I expected it to be. What it was instead was a remarkable lightening, a genuine release of weight. I can't quite explain it, but perhaps some of you know what I mean. My sins have been grave, and greatly regretted; and to be absolved of them turns out to be moving in ways I did not expect.
I mention this in case any of you have been thinking about it. I wouldn't have thought that it would make any difference, but it turns out that it matters a lot.
I mention this in case any of you have been thinking about it. I wouldn't have thought that it would make any difference, but it turns out that it matters a lot.
Here it comes again!
Periodically a certain contingent in Washington re-discovers the problem that some Americans seem unwilling or unable to save up enough money during their working lives to provide for a secure retirement. What to do? According to Employment Benefit News,
Granted that it's a public policy problem if too many Americans lack retirement funds, is the solution really to keep enacting mandatory government retirement funds, spend the money on something else, discover with shock that people don't have adequate retirement funds, and enact new mandatory government retirement funds?
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, plans to introduce legislation this year to require businesses that don’t offer a pension or 401(k) plan with a company match to automatically enroll workers in a so-called USA Retirement Fund. . . . “The dream of a secure retirement is getting fainter and fainter,” Harkin said Feb. 12 in a speech at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. “Savings rates are low and there’s no simple way for people to convert their savings into a stream of retirement income they can’t outlive.”Wait. Don't we already have a mandatory USA Retirement Fund? I know conservatives say it's flat busted, but it's an article of faith among progressives that conservatives are spouting defeatist nonsense: the Social Security system is fine.
Granted that it's a public policy problem if too many Americans lack retirement funds, is the solution really to keep enacting mandatory government retirement funds, spend the money on something else, discover with shock that people don't have adequate retirement funds, and enact new mandatory government retirement funds?
Against Feminism and the Modern World
Last week Cassandra posted an article praising Ace of Spades for his embrace of the label "feminist." There follows at Cassandra's place a long discussion, involving several of you, which seems to take as read the idea that some form of feminism is compatible with conservatism, and indeed a necessary condition for a just society. I'm disinclined to agree with either proposition.
That is not to say that I think that a just society ought to treat women badly: that would be nonsense. I hope that my respect for all of you, and the women you know I value in my private life, will convince you to take this criticism of feminism as a criticism of a bad strain of ideas, and not an attack on women as a whole. (See "Feminism as Analog to Christianity," below.) I simply believe that the feminist movement is not the way to a just society, neither for women nor anyone else, because it is rooted on some principles that are incompatible with right principles of justice, with our ideas about the market, and with our ideas about the role of the state. The problem is that conservative thinkers are apparently unable to deploy a criticism of the movement that does not seem to be a criticism of women, which has severely damaged them. Yet conceding the ideas means losing the overall debate about the structure of a just society.
Some of the conservative problems may arise because many conservatives don't really like women, but I do. Furthermore, you will find that I am criticizing not just feminism but the entire modern political project.
I recently told Tex that you should always ask a "conservative" what he means to conserve, and a "progressive" what he takes for progress. In my first two sections, I will explain some general principles that I think need to be conserved at all costs. In the later sections, we will talk about feminism more precisely.
I. Just What Is Meant By Equality?
The proposition that Ace offered is based on what he thinks "low-information females" take feminism to be:
Yet we still have some definitions to make, because we need to ask what it means to "have equal rights." What is a right? (These are little questions, small matters, aren't they? What is 'equality'? What are 'rights'? But on these little things the whole world turns.) Now there are several answers to that question that people have proposed, some of which are better than others. My own (which I take to be Jefferson's, but also Robert the Bruce's, and the idea behind Magna Carta) is that rights are pre-political conditions for the formation of a polity: that is, they are the things that a group of people agreed to as conditions for accepting a government, the defense of which is the purpose of the government, and the abrogation of which makes the government illegitimate and fit for overthrow. But that is not the only answer we could give.
Another discussion we have had recently concerns Rousseau's project. Now Rousseau was a very bad man, as he himself was first to admit. He clearly despised himself, and in part because he knew he didn't live up to his own ideas. His ideas, though, have been very persuasive to many people, and form the root of a very broad current of modern thought. In part this is because he did a very wise thing, and expressed his ideas not in the form of an argument -- not as I am doing here! Arguments like this are a waste of everyone's time -- but in a novel. The novel is called Emile, or On Education, and it is one of the most influential books ever written.
Rousseau makes the argument that our rights arise from what it takes to perfect a human being. Now this has roots in an older, better idea: the idea of Aristotle and Ibn Rushd and St. Thomas Aquinas that there are certain natural rights, which is to say that our natures makes certain things necessary, and therefore we must find a way to have those things. Such things include food and shelter, but also sex of a procreative nature (because we must, as a species, produce the next generation) and a social structure stable enough to raise children (because children must be educated in order to assume their roles in society). That last aspect is Rousseau's staring point: what would it take not merely to raise a child to assume a role in society, but to raise a human being to be morally perfect? Whatever that is, since the end is so high -- the moral perfection of the individual -- it must be a kind of natural right. If you deny them any aspect of it, you and not they are responsible for their failure to achieve this perfection.
There are three things that make this a deadly idea. The first is that it is beautiful. The idea that humans are basically good, and that if only we raise them right they will grow up to be wonderful and perfect creatures, is the hope of every parent. It is also entirely untrue. Many evils are bred in the bone. Many children raised right turn out to be wicked. Some of them do terrible things that their parents never taught them to do. Nevertheless, this is what we wish were true. It is what we hope for our child. It is something we already try to achieve. And thus, it was persuasive.
The second is that it puts the emphasis on perfection. Now all things are subject to the law of diminishing returns. Even if perfection were in fact achievable (which it is not), and if it were merely a question of providing enough resources to the child in the right ways at the right times (which it is not), perfection requires a level of expense that no society can ever meet. The child needs shelter -- but not a shack! The child needs education -- and the very best sort. The child needs health care -- complete and thorough. The child needs... well, whatever it takes to ensure that the child is denied nothing that might stand between that child and perfection. And it has a right to these things, you see, because if we deny them to the child we are taking on any sins it may someday create. We are responsible, because we selfishly denied the resources the child needed to actualize his or her own moral perfection.
The third thing, then, is that the idea puts the responsibility for immorality on everyone except the actor. This surely sounds familiar, and well it should. In fact you see several of our greatest problems as a society rising from this source: the idea of "positive rights," that is, that you have a "right" to be given things at someone else's expense; and the idea that you aren't really responsible for the things you do wrong. These are attractive ideas for many people (perhaps especially for Rousseau! For he was a very bad man, as he himself knew).
So let us return to the original question. What does it mean to have equality, or "equality of condition"? Well it could mean that the rights that the government was structured to protect are extended to you as to everyone else. "Equality of condition" does not mean material condition, and it certainly does not mean that you are as good or as wise or as fat as everyone else. It means no more, on Arendt's terms, than that the government structured to protect freedom of religion and ensure a trial by jury protects your freedom of religion and ensures you get a trial by jury. That is the medieval view, out of which grew Jefferson's view, and mine.
But there is room to go all the way up: "equal rights" could mean that we defend a material right to whatever you need to achieve your own moral perfection, a perfection for which you are not responsible, and whose absence indicates chiefly that you need more material resources to be directed to you (from, necessarily, someone else).
So it will not do to endorse "equality" in a "low-information" way. You have to fight, and you have to fight every time, over the precise meaning of these terms. You have to make sure people understand what is at stake. Getting it wrong here means losing the whole argument, and indeed the whole society.
So one thing I wish to conserve is the idea of what it means to have rights, and a notion of equality that is limited to having equal rights on these terms. That is the first general principle.
II. Against Universality
Another problem with "equality" as a standard is that it implies that everyone should be subject to all and only the same rules. This is very basic to the modern political project. Kant thought that the moral law was self-legislated, but purely rational; and therefore, as reason is the same for all people, it would turn out to be the same not only for any human being, but for any rational agent of any kind. Hegel thought that universality was a basic necessity for any rule to be just. This is a terrible mistake.
Equality can rightly only mean equality of rights, where rights are viewed in the particular way described above. It cannot mean equality of anything else. One thing it cannot mean, for example, is equality of duties. A parent has responsibilities that are unique to that role. They took them on freely (with the obvious exception of pregnancy by rape, which we can break out as a special instance deserving a separate discussion). They are bound by these duties for two reasons: because they chose them, and because they have an obligation to their blood. Someone cared for them as an infant, or else they would not be here to choose and act themselves. It would be immoral to refuse to do for your child what was done for you: that minimum, at least, is owed as a debt from grandparent to parent to child.
This is a general principle that we have lost sight of as a society. Aristotle said that justice means treating relevantly similar cases similarly. Note how different that principle is from the "equality!" that we hear in our own time. First of all, there is the discussion of what is relevant. Take any two individuals and any problem, and ask how the cases are relevantly different. You will come up with a very long list! The only relevant similarity may be the problem (which, by hypothesis, we assumed to be the same -- in actual fact there will be differences in the problem, too).
So what does this principle of justice require? First, that the cases be handled "similarly" rather than "exactly the same way." If a true universal was in play, we would expect exactitude: "For all x, if x then y." But that is not what Aristotle is suggesting. What he is suggesting is that the cases be handled in a way that is not entirely out of proportion, not that they should be done in exactly the same way regardless of circumstance.
And circumstance is the second condition. If "relevantly similar" is a basic condition for justice, then a refusal to consider relevant differences means that you are insisting on injustice.
There are a huge number of relevant differences in any two people. Justice cannot therefore be a set of rules. It must involve practical wisdom, applied to each case as the unique problem that it represents. There can be no universals in justice. What we are looking for is similarities and differences, and each of these need to be taken seriously in order to come to a just result.
The problem with universals is that they destroy this human, and humane, capacity to talk about people as the individual people that they are. They reduce you to a mathematical figure, an x that goes with a y. That application of cold logic to human beings and human institutions lies behind the destruction of so much that we hold dear. Some of you may be following along in this lecture series on Hegel that I suggested to Cassandra. If you aren't, do no more than listen to the episode from Valentine's Day (that is episode 12, from 02-14). You will recognize that Hegel's mode of thought, as presented by this very modern and insightful professor, underlie the destruction of marriage and the family in our society. It is this very modern approach to thinking about these human institutions that is destroying them. The argument is logical, and it is universal, and it is deadly. Human beings require more practical wisdom -- what Aristotle and the Greeks called phronesis, the application of wisdom to particular facts in order to achieve justice.
So another thing I wish to conserve is phronesis. That is my second general principle.
III. On Markets and Freedom
With those general principles in mind, let's talk about something that is really modern: economics. Markets are old, but economics in a real sense did not exist before Adam Smith. Much of what we call the conservative movement is built around a love of these economic ideas, which have produced a prosperity unheard-of in human history. Though I have offered criticisms of existing economic theory elsewhere, which I trust you will keep in mind, here that is not my purpose.
Rather, I want to talk about freedom as it arises from and relates to markets. Now one reason to love markets is that they are exercises of freedom. It is possible both to overstate and to understate this principle. If you want to overstate it, you will ignore the fact that we are usually engaged in the market out of necessity: we have to eat, we have to pay our rent, we have to buy the things we need to survive. Thus, you can criticize the market as an institution of freedom because participation in it is not a fully free choice. It is forced upon you by your nature that you must find a way to be useful to others in order to survive.
But it is also possible to understate the freedom that the market makes possible -- indeed, I just did it. By focusing too much on the fact that you must participate in the market, you lose sight of the wonderful things that the market makes possible. For one thing, you can buy a Harley Davidson motorcycle. These would not exist if it were not for markets. The freedom of the roads is a function of the market that made the Harley possible, and which also created the wealth that was used to make the roads on which a Harley can glide. If you can find a way to make yourself useful enough to your fellow man, you will become free in ways that no human being ever was in decades before. Meanwhile, people striving to make themselves useful produce new forms of music and art, food and drink, clothing and thought, so that the array of choices is ever improving.
Now all of this is based on free choice. If you are willing and able to pay the price, you may transact for anything you wish. Nor is the price fixed: you can offer a different price, and if the seller is willing, transact a bargain.
So one of the criticisms I want to deploy against feminism is a market-based criticism. Ace's formula can't be adopted without debate, but the alternative formula being offered has a more cleanly-defined standard for equality and for freedom. Equality is economic equality (equal pay for equal work given equal years of experience -- about which 'equality' we will say more directly): freedom is freedom to leave the market.
Now that is a nice freedom! We just said that participation was necessary arising from our natural needs -- so in order to have that freedom, you have to arrange to be taken-care-of by someone else. Now that is an economic transaction, viewed in a certain way: you are providing some service (say, the raising of children and the keeping of house) to some other party who will provide for your economic needs in return.
On this reading, what is really being sought is not the freedom to leave the market. It is, rather, a demand that a certain kind of transaction should be treated as respectable. A kind of feminism would criticize this: it would say the woman is being 'kept,' or something similar, and that this must needs be a despicable condition to which no woman ought subject herself. Another kind would endorse it, as respect for the free choice of the woman ought to be at the basis of respect for women in general.
But it should be clear that neither is the correct reading. What is happening here is not chiefly or properly an economic transaction at all. It is the taking-on of an unequal duty: the very one I suggested before as an example, the duty of parenthood. This has nothing to do with economics, which again did not exist before Adam Smith. It has priority. The respect due to the parent is not anything like 'do not show disrespect for an economic choice that I am free to make,' but rather the positive and genuine respect due to someone who is doing their duty. This is the moral sphere, not the economic sphere. Of course it ought to be treated with respect, and the very highest respect. It is not merely an exercise of freedom, but the fulfillment of duty.
Now, there is a reply to this, which is to say that nothing escapes the laws of economics. What right do you have to take on a duty that you cannot support? If you cannot support a child -- either through your own economic activity, or through a blood alliance with someone who both can and will -- how dare you have one? On the other hand, from this perspective, if you can and will ensure that the means are there to support the child, how dare anyone question your free choice?
A lack of questioning your free choice is not adequate, though: a greater respect is due to the doer of duty than that. We have to recognize the overlapping but independent spheres in order to see the behavior in its proper moral light. It is right, on market terms, insofar as the economics have been worked out so that the child can be supported by the parents. But it is right, on moral terms, in a far stronger way. It is the answering of duty, and duty is among the highest calls that we know.
That is the answer to the question of "the freedom to leave the market," but what about the demand for economic equality? That also raises interesting problems.
Take a person who wishes to buy not a Harley but a Yamaha motorcycle. There are reasons to do this: for one thing, Yamahas are at least as well-made, possibly better-made in some cases, and yet they are cheaper due to the popularity of the Harley brand. But let us say you are motivated simply by patriotism. You're an American, and you want to own an American-made bike. Is there anything wrong with that? Possible answers are yes and no.
If the answer is yes, it is because we are once again overlapping the moral and the economic spheres. You may say that patriotism is not a worthy value: that patriotism is really just another name for nationalism, the destroyer of worlds. Or you may say that patriotism is fine, but not American patriotism, because remember Dresden and Hiroshima and slavery and the murder of the Native Americans.
But if the answer is no, we are defending the principle of free choice. It is none of my business why the guy bought the one bike or the other: the money was his, and his reasons are his, and he can do whatever he likes. This freedom is something that many conservatives, and all libertarians, want to conserve.
Yet now look at the question if we ask about what a worker is worth. Take two workers, A and B. An employer is willing to pay A $20 an hour for A's labor, but only $15 an hour for B. Assume (A,B) have spent the same number of years in similar jobs, and have roughly similar outcomes in sales or whatever other means of performance are relevant. One of (A,B) is male, and one female. Is this transaction right or wrong?
Under the feminist critique, it is wrong if B is the female (especially if the employer is male, but even if it is a female, and especially if the reason is that the employer prefers to have male employees). It is less problematic if B is male. But the real problem is, to what degree is it any of our business?
What justifies us in telling the employer that he or she must employ A and B at the same rate? It isn't economic theory. The economic theory of value is that the value of something is nothing other than what the buyer and seller agree upon. If the employer offers B $15/hour, and B accepts, that's B's market value. It's not fair or unfair, it is settled by the only standard economics has to offer.
So we must be looking into the moral sphere, which is the sphere of rights and duties. Is there a duty to pay A and B the same rate? Where would such a duty be located? (Remember, one of A and B is female and one male, but it's not determined which one.)
One place we might locate such a duty is in their dignity as human beings. But if we introduce human dignity to the market, we've got a whole set of problems with the marketplace. The marketplace is about exchanges of valuable things, in which I offer you a good or a service that is worth something to you. What is my dignity worth to you? If the answer is "nothing," you're not usually obligated to pay. (If the answer is more than nothing, let me know and I'll help you set up recurring payments at whatever rate you think my dignity is worth.)
In other words, what we've come to view as "equality" here is not the equality of rights from the first section. It has something important to do with equality of outcomes. But we have no basis for this: there's nothing in our moral or philosophical standards that justifies favoring equality of outcomes in the market. Furthermore, there is nothing in our general principle on equality that justifies it, because that principle has nothing to do with unequal outcomes. It has only to do with ensuring equal rights.
Elise wrote in the debate at Cassandra's place that "I think when I get around to starting the New Federalist Party, my slogan in going to be, 'Almost everything is none of my business.'" But here is one thing that we normally would take to be none of our business, which we are making explicitly 'our business.' It is unclear just why we are doing so in this market-related matter, because doing so is a violation of our usual principles as pertain to the market.
IV. Strains of Feminism
In addition to the market critique, there is a problem that arises from feminism's internal divisions. Tex was talking recently about how she is reading a lot of discussions about the sad state, or crumbling, of feminism. Surely we have all been reading long enough to know that this seems to be the perpetual state of the movement. The apparent crumbling does not represent an actual crumbling. What is at stake is that the movement is genuinely diverse, and its internal tensions are real (indeed they are healthy).
The acceptance of a "low-information" version of feminism as a label for yourself, though, doesn't solve anything. There are strains of feminism that really deserve a wholehearted rejection. I'm sure all of you can name a few, but I want to talk about one in particular. This is the Marxist-influenced feminism, which has taken an interesting idea and used it in a particularly bad way.
You're familiar with the word "deconstruction," which characterizes so much post-modern thought. The idea originates with another French philosopher, Derrida, and the concept works like this: wherever you find a hierarchy, or an ordering of one thing as better than or more-important-than another, you should reverse the hierarchy and see what happens.
As a way of critiquing our received standards and beliefs, it's an interesting approach. Sometimes it reveals genuine insights, although one must always be careful to be sure that one understands why the hierarchy was built in the first place. This is like Chesterton's example of the fence in the middle of town -- you can't take it down until you can explain why our ancestors thought it was important to build it: it didn't happen by accident, and we need to know the reason in order to evaluate whether we still need it or not. If you do know, though, you can evaluate the reason perhaps better in light of the mental experiment of what it might be like if things were otherwise.
The Marxists took the thought experiment for a practical program. Marxism is built on the idea of revolution. Overturning hierarchies is thus its real business. The idea that you ought to overturn hierarchies mentally is appealing to them, but only as a first step toward overturning them practically. But overturning practical structures, which have proven their worth over centuries, is a practice that should be undertaken only carefully and on Chesterton's standard: it should not be the reflexive position.
I know a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in Women's Studies who has decided to write her dissertation against "dualism." Now she doesn't mean what you or I mean by the word, which is that there might be an immaterial soul or a mind in addition to the material body and brain.
She means that any sort of thought that divides things and orders them is wrong. If you divide things into male/female, good/bad/, right/wrong, up/down, you're engaged in the kind of thinking that gives rise to oppression because you think your hierarchy justifies boosting the one and suppressing the other. But of course she is doing the same thing: by saying this is wrong, she is dividing it from what is right. She is led by the logic of Derrida's ideas, and Rousseau's, to an impossible place. If you accept the "low-information" version of the movement, in the eyes of the "low-information" voters you are endorsing the whole structure. But the structure is leaning dangerously.
I am only sketching this argument, but the point is this: at least most, and possibly all, of this movement is based on untenable currents in philosophy that deserve to be rejected outright. Because the movement is wrapped up with the dignity of women, however, women feel inclined to defend it. What we need is another way to defend the dignity of women, one that does not stand on bad philosophy.
V. Feminism as an analogue to Christianity
The real root of this embrace of "feminism" by conservatives thus is not conservative principle, but seems to be something like patriotism among women for women. That's not bad -- no more than patriotism generally -- and I don't mean to criticize it. I cannot be guilty of patriotism toward women, but I can certainly be an ally of their nation.
Consider what Cassandra says here:
I want to raise an analogy to Christianity, which is even more all-embracing than feminism. (In theory, it is all-embracing, even for non-Christians.) Christians seem to be pretty good at criticizing themselves internally, but they tend to reject criticisms of "Christianity" as a whole that come from outside. Almost no Christians have a problem rejecting Fred Phelps' so-called church, but if someone tried to paint the whole of the faith as defined by Phelps' nonsense, that outsider would receive a well-deserved rebuttal.
The problem we all face, though, is that we do need to find a way to field the criticisms of feminism as a whole. This ought not to be, and if done properly should not be seen to be, a criticism of women. Women like Tex's mother are outstanding, deserving celebration whether or not we want to apply a given label to them. (Do we know if it is a label she chose for herself?) There needs to be a principled criticism available to us.
If we can't do that, we're in trouble. Maybe it's possible to criticize the movement from within it, but I doubt it. I am inclined to criticize the movement from very far outside it: for my problem isn't with the internal structures of the movement so much as with its foundations. It is the whole modernist project that has gone wrong, with its embrace of universality and French philosophy. In rejecting that, I'm rejecting not just the roots and branches of feminism, but the darkened earth from which it grew.
That kind of wholehearted rejection must be done from outside. So I cannot join Ace, or anyone else, in thinking of myself as a feminist. In love and respect for women, however, I declare myself devoted. I gladly accept the duties that follow from that declaration. I see no reason why it should not be possible to fulfill those duties and live out that love without embracing the label or what it represents.
That is not to say that I think that a just society ought to treat women badly: that would be nonsense. I hope that my respect for all of you, and the women you know I value in my private life, will convince you to take this criticism of feminism as a criticism of a bad strain of ideas, and not an attack on women as a whole. (See "Feminism as Analog to Christianity," below.) I simply believe that the feminist movement is not the way to a just society, neither for women nor anyone else, because it is rooted on some principles that are incompatible with right principles of justice, with our ideas about the market, and with our ideas about the role of the state. The problem is that conservative thinkers are apparently unable to deploy a criticism of the movement that does not seem to be a criticism of women, which has severely damaged them. Yet conceding the ideas means losing the overall debate about the structure of a just society.
Some of the conservative problems may arise because many conservatives don't really like women, but I do. Furthermore, you will find that I am criticizing not just feminism but the entire modern political project.
I recently told Tex that you should always ask a "conservative" what he means to conserve, and a "progressive" what he takes for progress. In my first two sections, I will explain some general principles that I think need to be conserved at all costs. In the later sections, we will talk about feminism more precisely.
I. Just What Is Meant By Equality?
The proposition that Ace offered is based on what he thinks "low-information females" take feminism to be:
1. Women are equal to men; andNow recently we have had several relevant discussions about the difficulty of defining terms. One of the terms that we really need to define in order to have this debate is "equality." This isn't just about feminism: Hannah Arendt, the late-20th century philosopher, raised the point more explicitly about what it meant to be Jewish in Europe.
2. Women's values and beliefs are just as important as men's; and
3. Women have, or ought to have, ambitions equal to men.
Now, it seems to me likely that a great number of low-information female voters probably believe that's about the extent of what "feminism" is, and that anyone calling himself, or herself, a "non-feminist" is against such things. Which of course we're not; virtually nobody is.
Equality of condition, though it is certainly a basic requirement for justice, is nevertheless among the greatest and most uncertain ventures of modern mankind. Though more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become. This perplexing consequence came fully to light as soon as equality was no longer seen in terms of an omnipotent being like God or an unavoidable common destiny like death. Whenever equality becomes a mundane fact in itself, without any guage by which it may be measured or explained, then there is one chance in a hundred that it will be recognized simply as a working principle of a political organization in which otherwise unequal people have equal rights; there are ninety-nine chances that it will be mistaken for an innate quality of every individual, who is ‘normal’ if he is like everybody else and ‘abnormal’ if he happens to be different. This perversion of equality from a political into a social concept is all the more dangerous when a society leaves but little space for special groups and individuals, for then their differences become all the more conspicuous.”Now what Arendt is saying here is difficult to get at first pass. She starts off by saying that "equality of condition" is "a basic requirement for justice." But what does she mean by "equality of condition"? It isn't that conditions be equal for everyone -- that's just what she says isn't achievable, and gives rise to dangerous trends (such as thinking the poor to be inferior, or the rich to be sneak-thieves). What she means by it is a very limited form of political equality, without any regard at all for what people do with it, or how they end up: "otherwise unequal people have equal rights."
(Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism.)
Yet we still have some definitions to make, because we need to ask what it means to "have equal rights." What is a right? (These are little questions, small matters, aren't they? What is 'equality'? What are 'rights'? But on these little things the whole world turns.) Now there are several answers to that question that people have proposed, some of which are better than others. My own (which I take to be Jefferson's, but also Robert the Bruce's, and the idea behind Magna Carta) is that rights are pre-political conditions for the formation of a polity: that is, they are the things that a group of people agreed to as conditions for accepting a government, the defense of which is the purpose of the government, and the abrogation of which makes the government illegitimate and fit for overthrow. But that is not the only answer we could give.
Another discussion we have had recently concerns Rousseau's project. Now Rousseau was a very bad man, as he himself was first to admit. He clearly despised himself, and in part because he knew he didn't live up to his own ideas. His ideas, though, have been very persuasive to many people, and form the root of a very broad current of modern thought. In part this is because he did a very wise thing, and expressed his ideas not in the form of an argument -- not as I am doing here! Arguments like this are a waste of everyone's time -- but in a novel. The novel is called Emile, or On Education, and it is one of the most influential books ever written.
Rousseau makes the argument that our rights arise from what it takes to perfect a human being. Now this has roots in an older, better idea: the idea of Aristotle and Ibn Rushd and St. Thomas Aquinas that there are certain natural rights, which is to say that our natures makes certain things necessary, and therefore we must find a way to have those things. Such things include food and shelter, but also sex of a procreative nature (because we must, as a species, produce the next generation) and a social structure stable enough to raise children (because children must be educated in order to assume their roles in society). That last aspect is Rousseau's staring point: what would it take not merely to raise a child to assume a role in society, but to raise a human being to be morally perfect? Whatever that is, since the end is so high -- the moral perfection of the individual -- it must be a kind of natural right. If you deny them any aspect of it, you and not they are responsible for their failure to achieve this perfection.
There are three things that make this a deadly idea. The first is that it is beautiful. The idea that humans are basically good, and that if only we raise them right they will grow up to be wonderful and perfect creatures, is the hope of every parent. It is also entirely untrue. Many evils are bred in the bone. Many children raised right turn out to be wicked. Some of them do terrible things that their parents never taught them to do. Nevertheless, this is what we wish were true. It is what we hope for our child. It is something we already try to achieve. And thus, it was persuasive.
The second is that it puts the emphasis on perfection. Now all things are subject to the law of diminishing returns. Even if perfection were in fact achievable (which it is not), and if it were merely a question of providing enough resources to the child in the right ways at the right times (which it is not), perfection requires a level of expense that no society can ever meet. The child needs shelter -- but not a shack! The child needs education -- and the very best sort. The child needs health care -- complete and thorough. The child needs... well, whatever it takes to ensure that the child is denied nothing that might stand between that child and perfection. And it has a right to these things, you see, because if we deny them to the child we are taking on any sins it may someday create. We are responsible, because we selfishly denied the resources the child needed to actualize his or her own moral perfection.
The third thing, then, is that the idea puts the responsibility for immorality on everyone except the actor. This surely sounds familiar, and well it should. In fact you see several of our greatest problems as a society rising from this source: the idea of "positive rights," that is, that you have a "right" to be given things at someone else's expense; and the idea that you aren't really responsible for the things you do wrong. These are attractive ideas for many people (perhaps especially for Rousseau! For he was a very bad man, as he himself knew).
So let us return to the original question. What does it mean to have equality, or "equality of condition"? Well it could mean that the rights that the government was structured to protect are extended to you as to everyone else. "Equality of condition" does not mean material condition, and it certainly does not mean that you are as good or as wise or as fat as everyone else. It means no more, on Arendt's terms, than that the government structured to protect freedom of religion and ensure a trial by jury protects your freedom of religion and ensures you get a trial by jury. That is the medieval view, out of which grew Jefferson's view, and mine.
But there is room to go all the way up: "equal rights" could mean that we defend a material right to whatever you need to achieve your own moral perfection, a perfection for which you are not responsible, and whose absence indicates chiefly that you need more material resources to be directed to you (from, necessarily, someone else).
So it will not do to endorse "equality" in a "low-information" way. You have to fight, and you have to fight every time, over the precise meaning of these terms. You have to make sure people understand what is at stake. Getting it wrong here means losing the whole argument, and indeed the whole society.
So one thing I wish to conserve is the idea of what it means to have rights, and a notion of equality that is limited to having equal rights on these terms. That is the first general principle.
II. Against Universality
Another problem with "equality" as a standard is that it implies that everyone should be subject to all and only the same rules. This is very basic to the modern political project. Kant thought that the moral law was self-legislated, but purely rational; and therefore, as reason is the same for all people, it would turn out to be the same not only for any human being, but for any rational agent of any kind. Hegel thought that universality was a basic necessity for any rule to be just. This is a terrible mistake.
Equality can rightly only mean equality of rights, where rights are viewed in the particular way described above. It cannot mean equality of anything else. One thing it cannot mean, for example, is equality of duties. A parent has responsibilities that are unique to that role. They took them on freely (with the obvious exception of pregnancy by rape, which we can break out as a special instance deserving a separate discussion). They are bound by these duties for two reasons: because they chose them, and because they have an obligation to their blood. Someone cared for them as an infant, or else they would not be here to choose and act themselves. It would be immoral to refuse to do for your child what was done for you: that minimum, at least, is owed as a debt from grandparent to parent to child.
This is a general principle that we have lost sight of as a society. Aristotle said that justice means treating relevantly similar cases similarly. Note how different that principle is from the "equality!" that we hear in our own time. First of all, there is the discussion of what is relevant. Take any two individuals and any problem, and ask how the cases are relevantly different. You will come up with a very long list! The only relevant similarity may be the problem (which, by hypothesis, we assumed to be the same -- in actual fact there will be differences in the problem, too).
So what does this principle of justice require? First, that the cases be handled "similarly" rather than "exactly the same way." If a true universal was in play, we would expect exactitude: "For all x, if x then y." But that is not what Aristotle is suggesting. What he is suggesting is that the cases be handled in a way that is not entirely out of proportion, not that they should be done in exactly the same way regardless of circumstance.
And circumstance is the second condition. If "relevantly similar" is a basic condition for justice, then a refusal to consider relevant differences means that you are insisting on injustice.
There are a huge number of relevant differences in any two people. Justice cannot therefore be a set of rules. It must involve practical wisdom, applied to each case as the unique problem that it represents. There can be no universals in justice. What we are looking for is similarities and differences, and each of these need to be taken seriously in order to come to a just result.
The problem with universals is that they destroy this human, and humane, capacity to talk about people as the individual people that they are. They reduce you to a mathematical figure, an x that goes with a y. That application of cold logic to human beings and human institutions lies behind the destruction of so much that we hold dear. Some of you may be following along in this lecture series on Hegel that I suggested to Cassandra. If you aren't, do no more than listen to the episode from Valentine's Day (that is episode 12, from 02-14). You will recognize that Hegel's mode of thought, as presented by this very modern and insightful professor, underlie the destruction of marriage and the family in our society. It is this very modern approach to thinking about these human institutions that is destroying them. The argument is logical, and it is universal, and it is deadly. Human beings require more practical wisdom -- what Aristotle and the Greeks called phronesis, the application of wisdom to particular facts in order to achieve justice.
So another thing I wish to conserve is phronesis. That is my second general principle.
III. On Markets and Freedom
With those general principles in mind, let's talk about something that is really modern: economics. Markets are old, but economics in a real sense did not exist before Adam Smith. Much of what we call the conservative movement is built around a love of these economic ideas, which have produced a prosperity unheard-of in human history. Though I have offered criticisms of existing economic theory elsewhere, which I trust you will keep in mind, here that is not my purpose.
Rather, I want to talk about freedom as it arises from and relates to markets. Now one reason to love markets is that they are exercises of freedom. It is possible both to overstate and to understate this principle. If you want to overstate it, you will ignore the fact that we are usually engaged in the market out of necessity: we have to eat, we have to pay our rent, we have to buy the things we need to survive. Thus, you can criticize the market as an institution of freedom because participation in it is not a fully free choice. It is forced upon you by your nature that you must find a way to be useful to others in order to survive.
But it is also possible to understate the freedom that the market makes possible -- indeed, I just did it. By focusing too much on the fact that you must participate in the market, you lose sight of the wonderful things that the market makes possible. For one thing, you can buy a Harley Davidson motorcycle. These would not exist if it were not for markets. The freedom of the roads is a function of the market that made the Harley possible, and which also created the wealth that was used to make the roads on which a Harley can glide. If you can find a way to make yourself useful enough to your fellow man, you will become free in ways that no human being ever was in decades before. Meanwhile, people striving to make themselves useful produce new forms of music and art, food and drink, clothing and thought, so that the array of choices is ever improving.
Now all of this is based on free choice. If you are willing and able to pay the price, you may transact for anything you wish. Nor is the price fixed: you can offer a different price, and if the seller is willing, transact a bargain.
So one of the criticisms I want to deploy against feminism is a market-based criticism. Ace's formula can't be adopted without debate, but the alternative formula being offered has a more cleanly-defined standard for equality and for freedom. Equality is economic equality (equal pay for equal work given equal years of experience -- about which 'equality' we will say more directly): freedom is freedom to leave the market.
Now that is a nice freedom! We just said that participation was necessary arising from our natural needs -- so in order to have that freedom, you have to arrange to be taken-care-of by someone else. Now that is an economic transaction, viewed in a certain way: you are providing some service (say, the raising of children and the keeping of house) to some other party who will provide for your economic needs in return.
On this reading, what is really being sought is not the freedom to leave the market. It is, rather, a demand that a certain kind of transaction should be treated as respectable. A kind of feminism would criticize this: it would say the woman is being 'kept,' or something similar, and that this must needs be a despicable condition to which no woman ought subject herself. Another kind would endorse it, as respect for the free choice of the woman ought to be at the basis of respect for women in general.
But it should be clear that neither is the correct reading. What is happening here is not chiefly or properly an economic transaction at all. It is the taking-on of an unequal duty: the very one I suggested before as an example, the duty of parenthood. This has nothing to do with economics, which again did not exist before Adam Smith. It has priority. The respect due to the parent is not anything like 'do not show disrespect for an economic choice that I am free to make,' but rather the positive and genuine respect due to someone who is doing their duty. This is the moral sphere, not the economic sphere. Of course it ought to be treated with respect, and the very highest respect. It is not merely an exercise of freedom, but the fulfillment of duty.
Now, there is a reply to this, which is to say that nothing escapes the laws of economics. What right do you have to take on a duty that you cannot support? If you cannot support a child -- either through your own economic activity, or through a blood alliance with someone who both can and will -- how dare you have one? On the other hand, from this perspective, if you can and will ensure that the means are there to support the child, how dare anyone question your free choice?
A lack of questioning your free choice is not adequate, though: a greater respect is due to the doer of duty than that. We have to recognize the overlapping but independent spheres in order to see the behavior in its proper moral light. It is right, on market terms, insofar as the economics have been worked out so that the child can be supported by the parents. But it is right, on moral terms, in a far stronger way. It is the answering of duty, and duty is among the highest calls that we know.
That is the answer to the question of "the freedom to leave the market," but what about the demand for economic equality? That also raises interesting problems.
Take a person who wishes to buy not a Harley but a Yamaha motorcycle. There are reasons to do this: for one thing, Yamahas are at least as well-made, possibly better-made in some cases, and yet they are cheaper due to the popularity of the Harley brand. But let us say you are motivated simply by patriotism. You're an American, and you want to own an American-made bike. Is there anything wrong with that? Possible answers are yes and no.
If the answer is yes, it is because we are once again overlapping the moral and the economic spheres. You may say that patriotism is not a worthy value: that patriotism is really just another name for nationalism, the destroyer of worlds. Or you may say that patriotism is fine, but not American patriotism, because remember Dresden and Hiroshima and slavery and the murder of the Native Americans.
But if the answer is no, we are defending the principle of free choice. It is none of my business why the guy bought the one bike or the other: the money was his, and his reasons are his, and he can do whatever he likes. This freedom is something that many conservatives, and all libertarians, want to conserve.
Yet now look at the question if we ask about what a worker is worth. Take two workers, A and B. An employer is willing to pay A $20 an hour for A's labor, but only $15 an hour for B. Assume (A,B) have spent the same number of years in similar jobs, and have roughly similar outcomes in sales or whatever other means of performance are relevant. One of (A,B) is male, and one female. Is this transaction right or wrong?
Under the feminist critique, it is wrong if B is the female (especially if the employer is male, but even if it is a female, and especially if the reason is that the employer prefers to have male employees). It is less problematic if B is male. But the real problem is, to what degree is it any of our business?
What justifies us in telling the employer that he or she must employ A and B at the same rate? It isn't economic theory. The economic theory of value is that the value of something is nothing other than what the buyer and seller agree upon. If the employer offers B $15/hour, and B accepts, that's B's market value. It's not fair or unfair, it is settled by the only standard economics has to offer.
So we must be looking into the moral sphere, which is the sphere of rights and duties. Is there a duty to pay A and B the same rate? Where would such a duty be located? (Remember, one of A and B is female and one male, but it's not determined which one.)
One place we might locate such a duty is in their dignity as human beings. But if we introduce human dignity to the market, we've got a whole set of problems with the marketplace. The marketplace is about exchanges of valuable things, in which I offer you a good or a service that is worth something to you. What is my dignity worth to you? If the answer is "nothing," you're not usually obligated to pay. (If the answer is more than nothing, let me know and I'll help you set up recurring payments at whatever rate you think my dignity is worth.)
In other words, what we've come to view as "equality" here is not the equality of rights from the first section. It has something important to do with equality of outcomes. But we have no basis for this: there's nothing in our moral or philosophical standards that justifies favoring equality of outcomes in the market. Furthermore, there is nothing in our general principle on equality that justifies it, because that principle has nothing to do with unequal outcomes. It has only to do with ensuring equal rights.
Elise wrote in the debate at Cassandra's place that "I think when I get around to starting the New Federalist Party, my slogan in going to be, 'Almost everything is none of my business.'" But here is one thing that we normally would take to be none of our business, which we are making explicitly 'our business.' It is unclear just why we are doing so in this market-related matter, because doing so is a violation of our usual principles as pertain to the market.
IV. Strains of Feminism
In addition to the market critique, there is a problem that arises from feminism's internal divisions. Tex was talking recently about how she is reading a lot of discussions about the sad state, or crumbling, of feminism. Surely we have all been reading long enough to know that this seems to be the perpetual state of the movement. The apparent crumbling does not represent an actual crumbling. What is at stake is that the movement is genuinely diverse, and its internal tensions are real (indeed they are healthy).
The acceptance of a "low-information" version of feminism as a label for yourself, though, doesn't solve anything. There are strains of feminism that really deserve a wholehearted rejection. I'm sure all of you can name a few, but I want to talk about one in particular. This is the Marxist-influenced feminism, which has taken an interesting idea and used it in a particularly bad way.
You're familiar with the word "deconstruction," which characterizes so much post-modern thought. The idea originates with another French philosopher, Derrida, and the concept works like this: wherever you find a hierarchy, or an ordering of one thing as better than or more-important-than another, you should reverse the hierarchy and see what happens.
As a way of critiquing our received standards and beliefs, it's an interesting approach. Sometimes it reveals genuine insights, although one must always be careful to be sure that one understands why the hierarchy was built in the first place. This is like Chesterton's example of the fence in the middle of town -- you can't take it down until you can explain why our ancestors thought it was important to build it: it didn't happen by accident, and we need to know the reason in order to evaluate whether we still need it or not. If you do know, though, you can evaluate the reason perhaps better in light of the mental experiment of what it might be like if things were otherwise.
The Marxists took the thought experiment for a practical program. Marxism is built on the idea of revolution. Overturning hierarchies is thus its real business. The idea that you ought to overturn hierarchies mentally is appealing to them, but only as a first step toward overturning them practically. But overturning practical structures, which have proven their worth over centuries, is a practice that should be undertaken only carefully and on Chesterton's standard: it should not be the reflexive position.
I know a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in Women's Studies who has decided to write her dissertation against "dualism." Now she doesn't mean what you or I mean by the word, which is that there might be an immaterial soul or a mind in addition to the material body and brain.
She means that any sort of thought that divides things and orders them is wrong. If you divide things into male/female, good/bad/, right/wrong, up/down, you're engaged in the kind of thinking that gives rise to oppression because you think your hierarchy justifies boosting the one and suppressing the other. But of course she is doing the same thing: by saying this is wrong, she is dividing it from what is right. She is led by the logic of Derrida's ideas, and Rousseau's, to an impossible place. If you accept the "low-information" version of the movement, in the eyes of the "low-information" voters you are endorsing the whole structure. But the structure is leaning dangerously.
I am only sketching this argument, but the point is this: at least most, and possibly all, of this movement is based on untenable currents in philosophy that deserve to be rejected outright. Because the movement is wrapped up with the dignity of women, however, women feel inclined to defend it. What we need is another way to defend the dignity of women, one that does not stand on bad philosophy.
V. Feminism as an analogue to Christianity
The real root of this embrace of "feminism" by conservatives thus is not conservative principle, but seems to be something like patriotism among women for women. That's not bad -- no more than patriotism generally -- and I don't mean to criticize it. I cannot be guilty of patriotism toward women, but I can certainly be an ally of their nation.
Consider what Cassandra says here:
The horrified objections of many male conservatives, who nearly fell over themselves trying to convince Governor Palin that she reeeeeally didn't know what she was talking about (or that she should accept their definitions), managed to irritate even women like myself who don't particularly identify with feminists/feminism except in the vague general sense Ace describes.That's the problem we're facing here. On the one hand, feminism has a lot to criticize. On the other hand, it sounds to women like men are criticizing women, and that naturally provokes a defense.
I want to raise an analogy to Christianity, which is even more all-embracing than feminism. (In theory, it is all-embracing, even for non-Christians.) Christians seem to be pretty good at criticizing themselves internally, but they tend to reject criticisms of "Christianity" as a whole that come from outside. Almost no Christians have a problem rejecting Fred Phelps' so-called church, but if someone tried to paint the whole of the faith as defined by Phelps' nonsense, that outsider would receive a well-deserved rebuttal.
The problem we all face, though, is that we do need to find a way to field the criticisms of feminism as a whole. This ought not to be, and if done properly should not be seen to be, a criticism of women. Women like Tex's mother are outstanding, deserving celebration whether or not we want to apply a given label to them. (Do we know if it is a label she chose for herself?) There needs to be a principled criticism available to us.
If we can't do that, we're in trouble. Maybe it's possible to criticize the movement from within it, but I doubt it. I am inclined to criticize the movement from very far outside it: for my problem isn't with the internal structures of the movement so much as with its foundations. It is the whole modernist project that has gone wrong, with its embrace of universality and French philosophy. In rejecting that, I'm rejecting not just the roots and branches of feminism, but the darkened earth from which it grew.
That kind of wholehearted rejection must be done from outside. So I cannot join Ace, or anyone else, in thinking of myself as a feminist. In love and respect for women, however, I declare myself devoted. I gladly accept the duties that follow from that declaration. I see no reason why it should not be possible to fulfill those duties and live out that love without embracing the label or what it represents.
Motives
I've just finished another terrific book, "The Checklist Manifesto," by Atul Gawande, the surgeon whose book "Complications" I was admiring here several weeks ago. The book's focus is the usefulness of brief, efficient checklists modeled on those used by aircraft pilots, but a couple of mildly off-point anecdotes caught my eye.
First, Gawande describes the disparate organizational approaches to the Katrina crisis in New Orleans. He concludes that organizations are prone to break down in a crisis unless their management cedes control to the most far-flung workers. Rigid federal and state authorities froze up, as did many local authorities, but police and firefighters accepted and coordinated the help of hundreds of small boat owners to conduct unorthodox rescues of tens of thousands of residents. Many private businesses flailed in the complex aftermath of the disastrous storm, but WalMart shone. Its CEO announced:
The second anecdote concerned a CDC worker in Karachi who tried an inexpensive, low-tech solution to infectious disease outbreaks. Procter + Gamble wanted to prove the value of a new antibacterial soap. The CDC worker got a grant to study three groups: one supplied with ordinary P+G soap, one with the new antibacterial soap, and one left to its own devices for soap. Test subjects were encouraged to use the soap in six specific situations, such as just before feeding an infant. After a year, various infectious diseases dropped by between 35% and 52% in both groups using the P+G soap. The study was a failure in P+G's eyes, because the new antibacterial soap conferred no noticeable advantage, but it showed the CDC how a simple routine could combat persistent public health problems. The soap, Gawande says, was a "behavior-change delivery vehicle." It came with instructions for its use in six separate situations. The households already were using soap at the rate of two bars per week on average, but the study apparently caused them to use it more systematically and, because it was pleasant-smelling and well-lathering, more enthusiastically. "Global multinational corporations," as the CDC worker noted, "are really focused on having a good consumer experience, which sometimes public health people are not." What's more, the people enjoyed receiving the soap: "The public health field-workers were bringing them a gift rather than wagging a finger."
Getting back somewhat more convincingly to the "checklist" theme, Gawande interviewed a successful investor who put his colleagues into six categories according to how they evaluated the entrepreneurs who were seeking their venture capital. "Art Critics" assess entrepreneurs at a glance on the basis of intuition and long experience. "Sponges" gather information exhaustively, then go with their gut. "Prosecutors" challenge entrepreneurs with hard questions about how they would handle hypothetical situations. "Suitors" woo entrepreneurs rather than evaluate them. "Terminators" make a superficial initial choice and plan to fire and replace incompetents ruthlessly later. Finally, "Airline Captains" take a methodical, checklist-driven approach, consciously overriding their intuition. Gawande reports that the final category outperformed the rest dramatically, though they made up a small minority of the whole, which was dominated by Art Critics and Sponges. Why were the Air Captains so rare? Gawande muses that something in us makes checklists seem like buzzkills, like an abandonment of romantic ideals of competence. When his own experimental surgical checklist project for the World Health Organization showed impressive gains in reducing complications from infection and errors, he nevertheless felt a personal reluctance to implement them for his own surgical team: "[I]f I told the truth -- did I think the checklist would make much of a difference in my cases? No. In my cases? Please." It did, though, and it strengthened his conviction that modern humans are engaging in complex cooperative tasks that require a new approach to discipline and focus than comes naturally to us.
First, Gawande describes the disparate organizational approaches to the Katrina crisis in New Orleans. He concludes that organizations are prone to break down in a crisis unless their management cedes control to the most far-flung workers. Rigid federal and state authorities froze up, as did many local authorities, but police and firefighters accepted and coordinated the help of hundreds of small boat owners to conduct unorthodox rescues of tens of thousands of residents. Many private businesses flailed in the complex aftermath of the disastrous storm, but WalMart shone. Its CEO announced:
This company will respond to the level of this disaster. A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level. Make the best decision that you can with the information that's available to you at the time, and, above all, do the right thing.Wal-Mart had to close 126 stores; 20,000 employees and family members were displaced. But within 48 hours, more than half of the stores were open again and able to consider, "Oh, my God, what can we do to help these people?" On their own authority, managers began distributing diapers, water, baby formula, and ice to storm victims. They improvised crude paper-slip credit systems for first responders at a time when FEMA was still paralyzed. One assistant manager went through her badly damaged store with a bulldozer, salvaging what she could and giving it away in the parking lot. She also broke into the store's pharmacy in response to a local hospital's call for help. Senior Wal-Mart officials, rather than micromanaging or second-guessing these efforts, concentrated on coordinating with line employees and state agencies to meet needs as they arose. What has this got to do with checklists? I'm not sure. Gawande is struggling toward an approach to unpredictable complexity that avoids stultifying central control without accepting anarchy as its alternative. He approves of "a seemingly contradictory mix of freedom and expectation -- expectation to coordinate, for example, and also to measure progress toward common goals." He thinks this approach can be codified into simple checklists.
The second anecdote concerned a CDC worker in Karachi who tried an inexpensive, low-tech solution to infectious disease outbreaks. Procter + Gamble wanted to prove the value of a new antibacterial soap. The CDC worker got a grant to study three groups: one supplied with ordinary P+G soap, one with the new antibacterial soap, and one left to its own devices for soap. Test subjects were encouraged to use the soap in six specific situations, such as just before feeding an infant. After a year, various infectious diseases dropped by between 35% and 52% in both groups using the P+G soap. The study was a failure in P+G's eyes, because the new antibacterial soap conferred no noticeable advantage, but it showed the CDC how a simple routine could combat persistent public health problems. The soap, Gawande says, was a "behavior-change delivery vehicle." It came with instructions for its use in six separate situations. The households already were using soap at the rate of two bars per week on average, but the study apparently caused them to use it more systematically and, because it was pleasant-smelling and well-lathering, more enthusiastically. "Global multinational corporations," as the CDC worker noted, "are really focused on having a good consumer experience, which sometimes public health people are not." What's more, the people enjoyed receiving the soap: "The public health field-workers were bringing them a gift rather than wagging a finger."
Getting back somewhat more convincingly to the "checklist" theme, Gawande interviewed a successful investor who put his colleagues into six categories according to how they evaluated the entrepreneurs who were seeking their venture capital. "Art Critics" assess entrepreneurs at a glance on the basis of intuition and long experience. "Sponges" gather information exhaustively, then go with their gut. "Prosecutors" challenge entrepreneurs with hard questions about how they would handle hypothetical situations. "Suitors" woo entrepreneurs rather than evaluate them. "Terminators" make a superficial initial choice and plan to fire and replace incompetents ruthlessly later. Finally, "Airline Captains" take a methodical, checklist-driven approach, consciously overriding their intuition. Gawande reports that the final category outperformed the rest dramatically, though they made up a small minority of the whole, which was dominated by Art Critics and Sponges. Why were the Air Captains so rare? Gawande muses that something in us makes checklists seem like buzzkills, like an abandonment of romantic ideals of competence. When his own experimental surgical checklist project for the World Health Organization showed impressive gains in reducing complications from infection and errors, he nevertheless felt a personal reluctance to implement them for his own surgical team: "[I]f I told the truth -- did I think the checklist would make much of a difference in my cases? No. In my cases? Please." It did, though, and it strengthened his conviction that modern humans are engaging in complex cooperative tasks that require a new approach to discipline and focus than comes naturally to us.
I'll bet this isn't what he thought would happen to him
You have to wonder about this guy's karma. That's just harsh.
That's What 'Too Much' Means
Theodore Dalrymple (via InstaPundit) wonders 'What will happen if I consume too much calcium?'
The answer reminds me of this little bit of British comedy, since Tex was whetting our appetites for that sort of thing.
The answer reminds me of this little bit of British comedy, since Tex was whetting our appetites for that sort of thing.
Ah, Miss Manners
Catching up on Miss Manners after neglecting her since before Christmas:
DEAR MISS MANNERS: How do you deal with a daughter-in-law who tries to take over in your kitchen? The holidays are here, and I’m dreading her getting in my way.
GENTLE READER: The most important thing is to refrain from mentioning the problem to relatives who scrupulously avoid getting in your way by settling themselves into comfortable chairs while you clean up. For that matter, it would be better not to mention it to the offending daughter-in-law, either. Rather, you should beg her assistance in such out-of-the-kitchen tasks as setting the table, collecting the Christmas wrappings for the trash, and the most important task of all, which Miss Manners’s own dear father described as “Go see what the children are doing and tell them to stop.”
Radical education
Alabama's state legislature pulled off an education-voucher coup this week, variously described as "historic" or "sleazy," depending on one's view of the salutary or oppressive effects of a state monopoly on education during the tender years. As HotAir notes, if voters disapprove of the parliamentary gambit that caused a fairly radical voucher program to emerge from a conference committee that was considering House and Senate versions of a very different bill, and then to obtain abrupt approval by a conservative majority, they will punish the legislators in the next election. If by that time concrete improvements have appeared in the educational prospects of students stuck in failing Alabama schools, voters may reward the gambit.
The school voucher controversy is of enduring interest to me. I abhor shoddy schools and ignorant educators, and revere personal choice and free markets, so much that I tend to embrace nearly any reform measure that takes a crowbar to a state or unionized monopoly. But as a counterpoint to my anarchic zeal, I try to follow the main arguments against vouchers. Today I will pass over the usual objections to cherry-picking of the best students or the unfairness to attributing school failure in broken neighborhoods to administrators or educators, and instead note an interesting theme in one of my favorite playing grounds, the comments sections to published reports on school-choice events. What I see is a visceral distrust and hatred of improperly supervised for-profit private schools, especially those operated on religious (or -- horrors -- even fundamentalist) principles. Apparently one of the greatest dangers of school voucher programs is the delivery of innocent children into the hands of creationists.
Returning to Sokal's "Fashionable Nonsense," which I wrote about yesterday, I note his warnings about the sad state of science education. He begins with C.P. Snow's much-quoted "Two Cultures" lecture:
If I had the responsibility to educate any children, I would want them to learn theories that hold up well to logical examination and experimentation. But surely there will be time later in their lives to modify any shaky theories they absorb in childhood. I'd be more concerned to know that they have been trained early in the habit of thinking through why and how they know something to be true.
____________
*As Sokal quotes: "Recent megalopolitan hyperconcentration (Mexico City, Tokyo . . .) being itself the result of the increased speed of economic exchanges, it seems necessary to reconsider the importance of the notions of acceleration and deceleration (what physicists call positive and negative velocities) . . . (Virilio 1995, p. 24)."
The school voucher controversy is of enduring interest to me. I abhor shoddy schools and ignorant educators, and revere personal choice and free markets, so much that I tend to embrace nearly any reform measure that takes a crowbar to a state or unionized monopoly. But as a counterpoint to my anarchic zeal, I try to follow the main arguments against vouchers. Today I will pass over the usual objections to cherry-picking of the best students or the unfairness to attributing school failure in broken neighborhoods to administrators or educators, and instead note an interesting theme in one of my favorite playing grounds, the comments sections to published reports on school-choice events. What I see is a visceral distrust and hatred of improperly supervised for-profit private schools, especially those operated on religious (or -- horrors -- even fundamentalist) principles. Apparently one of the greatest dangers of school voucher programs is the delivery of innocent children into the hands of creationists.
Returning to Sokal's "Fashionable Nonsense," which I wrote about yesterday, I note his warnings about the sad state of science education. He begins with C.P. Snow's much-quoted "Two Cultures" lecture:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration,[*] which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.Sokal goes on to diagnose the problem:
A lot of the blame for this state of affairs rests, I think, with the scientists. The teaching of mathematics and science is often authoritarian; and this is antithetical not only to the principles of radical/democratic pedagogy but to the principles of science itself. No wonder most Americans can't distinguish between science and pseudoscience: their science teachers have never given them any rational grounds for doing so. (Ask an average undergraduate: Is matter composed of atoms? Yes. Why do you think so? The reader can fill in the response.) Is it then any surprise that 36% of Americans believe in telepathy, and that 47% believe in the creation account of Genesis?It is not my purpose to express disrespect for the creation account of Genesis, whether viewed metaphorically or as a supernatural alternative to the ordinary mechanistic explanations of the origin of species. I merely think it bears examining how we teach our children to rely on the most current scientific thinking. How do we know that matter is composed of atoms? I was relieved to find that my first guess -- "something to do with how chemical reactions obey formulas that suggest the interaction of subunits of common molecules in a handful of simple predictable weight ratios" -- was pretty close. John Dalton made this important deduction in the early 19th century. Why do we believe in the evolution of man from earlier living forms? Do most children learn a useful answer to this question, or are they simply shouted at from the progressive and fundamentalist camps, respectively? I'd be willing to bet money that few primary school teachers, and fewer school board members, could address the question in terms that would hold water for ten minutes.
If I had the responsibility to educate any children, I would want them to learn theories that hold up well to logical examination and experimentation. But surely there will be time later in their lives to modify any shaky theories they absorb in childhood. I'd be more concerned to know that they have been trained early in the habit of thinking through why and how they know something to be true.
____________
*As Sokal quotes: "Recent megalopolitan hyperconcentration (Mexico City, Tokyo . . .) being itself the result of the increased speed of economic exchanges, it seems necessary to reconsider the importance of the notions of acceleration and deceleration (what physicists call positive and negative velocities) . . . (Virilio 1995, p. 24)."
The abuse of thought
I've just finished "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science," by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. What a treat! And if you're not inspired to order the book, you should be able to get a hoot out of the highlighted reviews, especially the review posted by "Laon" and the many comments attached to it.
Sokal submitted his absurd thesis, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," to a journal called "Social Text" in 1996 and was surprised to find they were prepared to publish it. Meticulously footnoted with nonsensical but unfaked quotations from postmodernists (heavy on the fawning citations to members of the Social Text editorial board), Sokal's masterpiece begins with this introduction:
Sokal and Bricmont make a plea for some ground rules in applying abstruse scientific or mathematical principles to social science. If they are to be used as metaphors or analogies, for instance, writers should remember that these rhetorical devices normally use the familiar to illustrate the unfamiliar, not vice versa. The authors also encourage their readers to use common sense in evaluating the more extraordinary claims set forth by masters of other disciplines:
Sokal submitted his absurd thesis, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," to a journal called "Social Text" in 1996 and was surprised to find they were prepared to publish it. Meticulously footnoted with nonsensical but unfaked quotations from postmodernists (heavy on the fawning citations to members of the Social Text editorial board), Sokal's masterpiece begins with this introduction:
[D]eep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the facade of "objectivity." It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical "reality," no less than social "reality," is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific "knowledge," far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relationship of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the culture fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular
Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step further, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg's quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science -- among them, existence itself -- become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.It's hard to see how the editorial board could get past "exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics" with a straight face, but they ate it up with a spoon. Sokal outed his own hoax in an article published simultaneously in another journal:
Like the genre it is meant to satirize -- myriad exemplars of which can be found in my reference list -- my article is a melange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever. . . . I also employed some other strategies that are well-established (albeit sometimes inadvertently) in the genre: appeals to authority in lieu of logic; speculative theories passed off as established science; strained and even absurd analogies; rhetoric that sounds good but whose meaning is ambiguous; and confusion between the technical and everyday senses of English words.Now, Sokal is no conservative. He describes himself as an "old Leftist," and decries the weakness of the left in abandoning the whole notion of truth. He quotes approvingly from Stanislav Andrewski in his 1972 work "Social Sciences as Sorcery":
So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world.I found that I could not sustain any focused attention on lengthy explanations of the writings of such luminaries as psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who wrote:
You can perhaps see that the sphere, that old symbol for totality, is unsuitable. A torus, a Klein bottle, a cross-cut surface, are able to receive such a cut. And this diversity is very important as it explains many things about the structure of mental disease. If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the same way one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease. . . . It is not an analogy. It is really in some part of the realities, this sort of torus. This torus really exists and it is exactly the structure of the neurotic. It is not an analogon; it is not even an abstraction, because an abstraction is some sort of diminution of reality, and I think it is reality itself.Okey dokey. Here's is Luce Irigaray's discourse on Einstein and sexism:
Is E = Mc2 a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possibly sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest. . . .You see the difficulty in parodying this sort of thing: it's hard to go any further over the top.
Sokal and Bricmont make a plea for some ground rules in applying abstruse scientific or mathematical principles to social science. If they are to be used as metaphors or analogies, for instance, writers should remember that these rhetorical devices normally use the familiar to illustrate the unfamiliar, not vice versa. The authors also encourage their readers to use common sense in evaluating the more extraordinary claims set forth by masters of other disciplines:
At this point [my critic] may object that I am rigging the power game in my own favor: how is he, a professor of American Studies, to compete with me, a physicist, in a discussion of quantum mechanics? (Or even of nuclear power -- a subject on which I have no expertise whatsoever.) But it is equally true that I would be unlikely to win a debate with a professional historian on the causes of World War I. Nevertheless, as an intelligent lay person with a modest knowledge of history, I am capable of evaluating the evidence and logic offered by competing historians, and of coming to some sort of reasoned (albeit tentative) judgment. (Without that ability, how could any thoughtful person justify being politically active?)
Sequester this
For several weeks we've seen horrified reports of the imminent "meat cleaver" effect of an ill-advised sequester approach to spending cuts. Many commenters agree that spending must be cut, but cannot understand how we could be backed into the corner of a style of cuts that everyone agrees is needlessly damaging.
But this is not some kind of horrendous unintended consequence of a well-intentioned Congressional budget-control action, frozen into place by partisan bitterness. The sequester is functioning exactly as President Obama designed it to function in 2011. He did not propose it as a method to rein in spending. He proposed it as a measure so painful to both parties that it would inevitably be replaced by a compromise -- and a compromise, for him, means tax hikes. For weeks now, the Republican-controlled House has been crafting alternatives that would achieve the same spending cuts, but without affecting critical government functions. The White House, and the Democrat-controlled Senate, refuse even to put these alternative measures to a vote. Why? Because Republicans, having already agreed to $600 billion in new taxes two months ago, refuse to raise taxes again. They insist instead on measures that will turn ham-fisted spending cuts into thoughtful ones, without "balancing" this independently helpful action with tax hikes. Their approach makes sense to me. Both Republicans and Democrats agree that the same amount of spending could be cut, but with less damage to the country. By what logic is a bipartisan agreement to avoid that uncontroversial harm something that taxpayers should "pay for" with a tax hike?
But making the spending cuts less harmful is something the President steadfastly refuses to consider. His position is not as irrational as it sounds. For him, the whole point of the sequester is leverage to induce tax hikes. A less painful sequester is almost as useless as no sequester at all. Nor is the problem that the proposed alternative spending cuts don't match the President's budget priorities; the House offered to give the President discretion in what to cut. He tossed that hot potato away instantly, threatening a veto. As his advisors said publicly, why would the President want to be associated even more personally with particular spending cuts than he already is? Why indeed, unless he genuinely cared about making the spending cuts less painful? He doesn't care about making them less painful. He'd make them more painful if he could figure out a way to do it. He certainly has been hitting the speech circuit to exaggerate their effect to the limits of his rhetorical ability.
Some of the spending cuts will hurt, and that's a shame -- but not enough of a shame to let the President use them as a threat to extract a second round of tax hikes less than two months after the first one. His behavior is a disgrace. It's time for "balance" in the form of spending cuts. Having already approved a large tax hike, House Republicans have made the difficult choice in favor of bad spending cuts that are better than either no spending cuts at all, which is the art of the possible as things now stand in Washington.
But this is not some kind of horrendous unintended consequence of a well-intentioned Congressional budget-control action, frozen into place by partisan bitterness. The sequester is functioning exactly as President Obama designed it to function in 2011. He did not propose it as a method to rein in spending. He proposed it as a measure so painful to both parties that it would inevitably be replaced by a compromise -- and a compromise, for him, means tax hikes. For weeks now, the Republican-controlled House has been crafting alternatives that would achieve the same spending cuts, but without affecting critical government functions. The White House, and the Democrat-controlled Senate, refuse even to put these alternative measures to a vote. Why? Because Republicans, having already agreed to $600 billion in new taxes two months ago, refuse to raise taxes again. They insist instead on measures that will turn ham-fisted spending cuts into thoughtful ones, without "balancing" this independently helpful action with tax hikes. Their approach makes sense to me. Both Republicans and Democrats agree that the same amount of spending could be cut, but with less damage to the country. By what logic is a bipartisan agreement to avoid that uncontroversial harm something that taxpayers should "pay for" with a tax hike?
But making the spending cuts less harmful is something the President steadfastly refuses to consider. His position is not as irrational as it sounds. For him, the whole point of the sequester is leverage to induce tax hikes. A less painful sequester is almost as useless as no sequester at all. Nor is the problem that the proposed alternative spending cuts don't match the President's budget priorities; the House offered to give the President discretion in what to cut. He tossed that hot potato away instantly, threatening a veto. As his advisors said publicly, why would the President want to be associated even more personally with particular spending cuts than he already is? Why indeed, unless he genuinely cared about making the spending cuts less painful? He doesn't care about making them less painful. He'd make them more painful if he could figure out a way to do it. He certainly has been hitting the speech circuit to exaggerate their effect to the limits of his rhetorical ability.
Some of the spending cuts will hurt, and that's a shame -- but not enough of a shame to let the President use them as a threat to extract a second round of tax hikes less than two months after the first one. His behavior is a disgrace. It's time for "balance" in the form of spending cuts. Having already approved a large tax hike, House Republicans have made the difficult choice in favor of bad spending cuts that are better than either no spending cuts at all, which is the art of the possible as things now stand in Washington.
Post-feminism
I keep running into posts this week about the sorry state of feminism, especially the "woe is me" or femivictimist man-hating post-modern variety. At House of Eratosthenes, one such post was combined with a touching tribute to the author's mother, whom he lost 20 years ago. I am inspired to post a tribute to my own mother, of whom I have no conscious memories, but who left behind an example of feminism that has always been at the center of my life.
Myra Ferguson was born in 1924. A fine student, she pursued studies that were nearly unheard of for women of her generation. She met my father, John E. Kilpatrick, when both were studying for advanced degrees in physical chemistry at the University of Kansas. They went on to study together at Berkeley, where my father, four years the elder, completed his Ph. D. My mother interrupted her own doctoral work to marry and have three children. I suppose she thought she would have time to return to her studies later, though as things worked out she did not.
In the meantime, she published research on her own and with my father. It is an amazing feature of the internet that some of her work is preserved there, like this paper on elastic constants and sound velocities from 1949, based on work for the Condensed Matter and Thermal Physics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she and my father still make a ghostly appearance on the list of former consultants and collaborators. It is touching that, in some later published versions, my father is listed as co-author in the second position -- something that can't have been a common practice in 1949. They were very devoted to each other. I have copies of several other papers they published together, but none I can locate on the net.
Myra F. Kilpatrick was diagnosed with cancer shortly after the birth of her third child, myself. She must have known how unlikely it was that any of the rudimentary treatments of the time would cure her. Nevertheless, she kept a journal of the doctors' efforts, and considered herself to be contributing to research. After one treatment, she noted that the doctors had learned something about just how far a patient's white blood cell count could drop without resulting in death. She died at home in the spring of 1959.
She faced headwinds during her entire short life, and was a feminist in my book, but she would have scorned to paint herself as a victim.
Myra Ferguson was born in 1924. A fine student, she pursued studies that were nearly unheard of for women of her generation. She met my father, John E. Kilpatrick, when both were studying for advanced degrees in physical chemistry at the University of Kansas. They went on to study together at Berkeley, where my father, four years the elder, completed his Ph. D. My mother interrupted her own doctoral work to marry and have three children. I suppose she thought she would have time to return to her studies later, though as things worked out she did not.
In the meantime, she published research on her own and with my father. It is an amazing feature of the internet that some of her work is preserved there, like this paper on elastic constants and sound velocities from 1949, based on work for the Condensed Matter and Thermal Physics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she and my father still make a ghostly appearance on the list of former consultants and collaborators. It is touching that, in some later published versions, my father is listed as co-author in the second position -- something that can't have been a common practice in 1949. They were very devoted to each other. I have copies of several other papers they published together, but none I can locate on the net.
Myra F. Kilpatrick was diagnosed with cancer shortly after the birth of her third child, myself. She must have known how unlikely it was that any of the rudimentary treatments of the time would cure her. Nevertheless, she kept a journal of the doctors' efforts, and considered herself to be contributing to research. After one treatment, she noted that the doctors had learned something about just how far a patient's white blood cell count could drop without resulting in death. She died at home in the spring of 1959.
Rights
Bookworm Room has been on a roll with video clips. This one reminded me of our discussion about the meaning of rights:
But I couldn't post that and not add the inspired take on every British schoolboy's terrifying memories of Latin class:
But I couldn't post that and not add the inspired take on every British schoolboy's terrifying memories of Latin class:
The muddled middle
How are RINOs like women? It's hard to tell what they want:
This is the dichotomy established by many moderate Republicans: shrill, rigid, movement conservatives on one side and open-minded RINOs on the other.
. . .
The RINO movement consists of . . . well, people who say they’re RINOs. They’re pro-library-voices and anti-tri-cornered hats and pro-middle-class. Beyond that it’s hard to tell. But the left seems to approve.
At any rate, let me offer some overtures to the RINOs. I’ll agree to doff my tri-cornered hat and stop firing musket blanks at my co-workers, several of whom have taken up my epistemic closure with the HR office. But I’m going to keep demanding smaller government and less spending, and I may occasionally even use an exclamation point.
We’re staring down tens of trillions in debt. If the RINOs have a better solution, I’m all ears.
Against Liberty
The government really does know better than you, writes the New York Review of Books, and that overturns the whole philosophical basis for liberty.
It occurs to me that, if they're going to insist on a utilitarian calculus of this sort, those of us who favor liberty can alter the calculus by raising the costs of coercion. If autonomy is not valuable enough to offset the benefits of us being led around by the nose, perhaps we should prepare to enforce some extra costs on anyone who attempts to deny us our traditional freedoms.
[J. S.] Mill offered a number of independent justifications for his famous harm principle, but one of his most important claims is that individuals are in the best position to know what is good for them. In Mill’s view, the problem with outsiders, including government officials, is that they lack the necessary information. Mill insists that the individual “is the person most interested in his own well-being,” and the “ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed by any one else.” ...Unreliable cognitive heuristics turn up again! In fact, the article mentions several by name that we have recently discussed. The fallout of these demonstrates that we should not be free.
But is it right? That is largely an empirical question... Many believe that behavioral findings are cutting away at some of the foundations of Mill’s harm principle, because they show that people make a lot of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging.
For example, many of us show “present bias”... Many of us procrastinate and fail to take steps that would impose small short-term costs but produce large long-term gains....
People also have a lot of trouble dealing with probability. In some of the most influential work in the last half-century of social science, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that in assessing probabilities, human beings tend to use mental shortcuts, or “heuristics,” that generally work well, but that can also get us into trouble....
Even when there is only harm to self, [behavorist Sarah Conly] thinks that government may and indeed must act paternalistically so long as the benefits justify the costs.So there you go. That's where the best and brightest are headed.
Conly is quite aware that her view runs up against widespread intuitions and commitments. For many people, a benefit may consist precisely in their ability to choose freely even if the outcome is disappointing. She responds that autonomy is “not valuable enough to offset what we lose by leaving people to their own autonomous choices.” Conly is aware that people often prefer to choose freely and may be exceedingly frustrated if government overrides their choices. If a paternalistic intervention would cause frustration, it is imposing a cost, and that cost must count in the overall calculus. But Conly insists that people’s frustration is merely one consideration among many. If a paternalistic intervention can prevent long-term harm—for example, by eliminating risks of premature death—it might well be justified even if people are keenly frustrated by it....
At the same time, Conly insists that mandates and bans can be much more effective than mere nudges. If the benefits justify the costs, she is willing to eliminate freedom of choice, not to prevent people from obtaining their own goals but to ensure that they do so.
It occurs to me that, if they're going to insist on a utilitarian calculus of this sort, those of us who favor liberty can alter the calculus by raising the costs of coercion. If autonomy is not valuable enough to offset the benefits of us being led around by the nose, perhaps we should prepare to enforce some extra costs on anyone who attempts to deny us our traditional freedoms.
Tons of fun
Something I learned from this WSJ article: there's such a thing as a federal Destructive Device permit, and it costs $200 (or $3,000 if you want to be a Destructive Devices dealer).
Port Lavaca is a small town about an hour up the coast from here. A 70-year-old resident runs the local bank and likes to drive a Chaffee tank around his parking lot.
Port Lavaca is a small town about an hour up the coast from here. A 70-year-old resident runs the local bank and likes to drive a Chaffee tank around his parking lot.
Earlier this month, Mr. Bauer, the Texas banker, took his Chaffee out for a spin in his warehouse parking lot. He had rigged the .50-caliber machine gun on the turret with a propane system that generates the noise and muzzle flash of gunfire, without the bullets. He fired off several bursts.
Minutes later, two Port Lavaca police cruisers pulled up. The first officer rolled down the window and asked dryly: "You know why we're here, right?"
Mr. Bauer assured him that no actual rounds had been fired. Still, the officer said, "we had multiple calls—people get scared."
The second policeman, Jeremy Marshall, got out of his car and eyeballed Mr. Bauer's tank. "Awesome," he said.
Police State (part 45)
I noticed this item today:
LOS ANGELES (AP) — At least six fired police officers want their disciplinary cases reopened after the Los Angeles Police Department began reinvestigating the termination of a former officer who left a trail of violence to avenge his firing.What, so there was something to Dorner's complaint after all?
A Speech at a Wedding
I don't know this fellow, but it sounds like he's gotten a few things right.
Best wishes, and best of luck, to the young couple.
Best wishes, and best of luck, to the young couple.
O fortuna
Only two days left before the apocalypse:
And when the Republicans opened the seventh seal of the sequester, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black and the stars fell unto the Earth; and our nation's ability to forecast severe weather, such as drought events, hurricanes and tornados, was seriously undermined. Lo, and the children were not vaccinated, and all the beasts starved in the zoos, and the planes were grounded.
Or so President Obama and his Cabinet prophets have been preaching ahead of the automatic budget cuts due to begin Friday. The bit about the weather is a real quote from the White House budget director.
But if any of these cataclysms do come to pass, then they will be mostly Mr. Obama's own creation. The truth is that the sequester already gives the White House the legal flexibility to avoid doom, if a 5% cut to programs that have increased more than 17% on average over the Obama Presidency counts as doom.
. . .
Before furloughing park rangers, maybe start with the 10% of the 75,000 Department of the Interior employees who are conserving the wilderness of Washington, D.C. Before slashing cancer research, stop funding the $130-million-a-year National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine that studies herbs and yoga. Cut after-school funding only after consolidating the 105 federal programs meant to encourage kids to take math and science classes.
Solidarity
Eighty-six firearms companies have joined Olympic Arms in refusing to sell arms to federal, state, or local agencies in jurisdictions that are infringing their private citizens' right to bear arms.
American Exceptionalism
Or, as the researchers put it, Americans are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic ("WEIRD"), even in comparison with their western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic European cousins. And yet, because of the fashionable assumption that cognition is hard-wired and somewhat independent of culture, most modern cognitive research unthinkingly relied on American undergraduates as its experimental subjects.
Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.In fact, it may not be at all easy to separate the inherent "hard wiring" of our thoughts from either their content or their context:
For some time now, the most widely accepted answer to the question of why humans, among all animals, have so successfully adapted to environments across the globe is that we have big brains with the ability to learn, improvise, and problem-solve.
Henrich has challenged this “cognitive niche” hypothesis with the “cultural niche” hypothesis. He notes that the amount of knowledge in any culture is far greater than the capacity of individuals to learn or figure it all out on their own. He suggests that individuals tap that cultural storehouse of knowledge simply by mimicking (often unconsciously) the behavior and ways of thinking of those around them. We shape a tool in a certain manner, adhere to a food taboo, or think about fairness in a particular way, not because we individually have figured out that behavior’s adaptive value, but because we instinctively trust our culture to show us the way.Nor is it only a question of learning rules about concrete physical dangers or building techniques. There are distinct differences across cultures in characteristic solutions to the Prisoner's Dilemma, in the identification of color, in the ability to evaluate differences in size and shape, and in the tendency to defer to group pressure in reaching an abstract judgment. We know less about what is innate in the human mind than one might guess from the way we often talk.
Hagel for SECDEF
Allahpundit writes:
I told you the yays would be closer to 70 than to 60. Final tally: 71-27. You didn’t seriously think these losers would go to the mat to block a nominee just because he’s manifestly unqualified, did you?Well, no. We crossed that bridge in 2008, when the American people decided that qualification was entirely dispensable in selecting the highest leadership.
You Can Take the Man Out of the South, But...
Right answer, wrong reasoning.
The problem isn't that the language he is using is Southern in an environment that is Northern, it is that it is familiar in an environment that is formal. The confusion is understandable. Offices for the last twenty years have tried hard to chuck the idea that they are formal environments. Regular business attire went from a suit, to a shirt with a tie, to "Casual Friday," to casual being the office norm. People stopped using their last names: not, "Good afternoon, I'm Joseph Smith from AT&T," but "Hello! I'm Joe from the phone company."
It is therefore easy to see how a young man could make the mistake of believing that he was in a laid back, informal environment among friends. Nothing could be further from the truth. The office was always a deadly place to drop your guard, but it is far worse now that the threats are masked by the casual air.
Someone should take this boy aside, for his own good, and explain all this to him. The modern office is full of landmines and hidden daggers. Formal manners are the only armor that offers any sort of defense.
Q. Husband Nicknames: My husband and I have been married six months. All is well and we have no real complaints. But he does have this annoying little trait that I am wondering if I am just being nit-picky or if I actually have ground to stand on. I will accept whatever decision you put forth. My husband is Southern and calls every woman sweetheart or sweetie. This only happened a few times when dating to an occasional waitress, but now I see that he does it with longtime friends, other men's wives, and co-workers. It grates me that he does this and doesn't even give me a different pet name. I ask him to stop but he says that's how he's been his whole life. Is this a marriage compromise that I should just let go?I don't know what part of the South he's from, but where I come from, we call every woman ma'am. I don't see any reason to stop living up to the traditions in which I was raised just because I leave home. Nobody asks the Yankees down here to slow down, or stop cursing every other word as is apparently the custom in the rest of the United States.
A: I live in Maryland, the land of Hon, and I enjoy those infrequent occasions when someone calls me that, though it's almost always from other women and in a retail setting. However, I don't care where your husband is from, calling every woman in his path sweetheart is both inappropriate and grating. Believe me, at his office the other women have discussed in the coffee room how uncomfortable his pet name makes them. Since you say he's from the South, but it sounds like he's not in the South, he needs to stop spritzing sweethearts everywhere. Even in the South, I can't imagine a young guy in the office expects to get away with calling his female colleagues sweetheart.
The problem isn't that the language he is using is Southern in an environment that is Northern, it is that it is familiar in an environment that is formal. The confusion is understandable. Offices for the last twenty years have tried hard to chuck the idea that they are formal environments. Regular business attire went from a suit, to a shirt with a tie, to "Casual Friday," to casual being the office norm. People stopped using their last names: not, "Good afternoon, I'm Joseph Smith from AT&T," but "Hello! I'm Joe from the phone company."
It is therefore easy to see how a young man could make the mistake of believing that he was in a laid back, informal environment among friends. Nothing could be further from the truth. The office was always a deadly place to drop your guard, but it is far worse now that the threats are masked by the casual air.
Someone should take this boy aside, for his own good, and explain all this to him. The modern office is full of landmines and hidden daggers. Formal manners are the only armor that offers any sort of defense.
Mandarins
Apropos of our recent discussion here (or at Cassandra's place?) about what our schools select for:
[L]ike all elites, they believe that they not only rule because they can, but because they should. Even many quite left-wing folks do not fundamentally question the idea that the world should be run by highly verbal people who test well and turn their work in on time. They may think that machine operators should have more power and money in the workplace, and salesmen and accountants should have less. But if they think there's anything wrong with the balance of power in the system we all live under, it is that clever mandarins do not have enough power to bend that system to their will. For the good of everyone else, of course. Not that they spend much time with everyone else, but they have excellent imaginations.
Now that's fun
My memories of the excellent time I had last night are somewhat confused, but I think it was something like this:
Several wineglasses were broken after we repaired downstairs to the firepit for the roasted-oyster segment of the party. We found a melted wineglass in the ashes this morning, and I am told that I instructed someone to throw it in, because "That's what it's there for."
A good time was had by all. We followed it up this morning with breakfast on a heroic scale for many stragglers.
H/t Bookworm Room.
Several wineglasses were broken after we repaired downstairs to the firepit for the roasted-oyster segment of the party. We found a melted wineglass in the ashes this morning, and I am told that I instructed someone to throw it in, because "That's what it's there for."
A good time was had by all. We followed it up this morning with breakfast on a heroic scale for many stragglers.
H/t Bookworm Room.
Hesitation and Anti-Chivalry
In the comments to the post below, a commenter writes:
These targets are for law-enforcement training, and are called the "No More Hesitation" series. The company confirmed the intention was to train police not to hesitate to shoot these kinds of people. It's also clear why that might be important: hesitating to shoot someone who already has a firearm pointed at you can get you killed. Thus, this series exists to help police practice shooting people with guns pointed at them even if they happen to be pregnant women, children, little girls standing next to their even smaller brothers, and so on.
Training to kill such people must be undertaken with a very serious mind. I can give a case when killing such a person -- without hesitation -- might be appropriate: but it is not a policing case. It is a case from war. If you are operating against the kind of enemy that brainwashes children, or uses pregnant (or apparently-pregnant) women as suicide bombers, you may need this kind of training. In this case an enemy is relying on your humanity to give them a window to conduct a high-casualty attack. Sadly we have seen this in places like Iraq and Israel, so it is a consideration we have to take seriously. If a quick kill is necessary to prevent the detonation of such a weapon, and if such a detonation would injure more innocent people than the child you are killing to stop it, then it might be justifiable.
Killing pregnant women or children even in those circumstances is a serious moral crime. However, in that special case, the crime is not yours. It belongs to the men who bent the weak to their evil will.
However, that special case does not seem to include the intent of these targets. The above article includes a comment from a reader, who points out that most of the series has people inside their own homes -- wearing night-dresses and so forth -- who are pointing guns at the police officer. Now this seems to be exactly the kind of case in which hesitation is most appropriate, as these people have a legitimate right to have a handgun and to be responding with it to an intrusion. De-escalation training is surely what is needed here: to try to find a way to walk the situation away from where shots get fired at all.
If instead you are training to shoot without hesitation, what you are doing is dishonorable. To honor is to sacrifice, of yourself or your possessions, for something or someone you value more. Honor is the quality of a man who does this.
The path of honor in a case like this is to hesitate, to make the sacrifice of taking the risk onto yourself instead of making the child bear it. The purpose of the strong is to protect the weak: it is the reason you were given strength. You should hesitate long before you kill a child to save yourself, or a pregnant woman, or the elderly. Anyone who cannot see that is dishonorable, and unfit to bear arms.
An organization that teaches the strong to protect themselves at the expense of the weak is evil. It should be disbanded, replaced if necessary but with an entirely new organization, with a new corporate culture and no members who were associated with the decision to execute this kind of training.
At this time, of course, we only know that this product line was made available -- we do not know which agencies or forces undertook to train with it. We should push to find out, and remove anyone who thought this was a good idea from public service.
Those are my thoughts, since you asked.
Off the topic, has anyone seen the "no more hesitation" targets being supplied to the Government? Like something that would be supplied to the "Einsatzgruppen". They are disturbing on a visceral level. Unlike all other official government products, they are uniquely non-diverse. Just an oversight, surely. Love to hear your comments on them, Grim-they represent a sort of "anti-chivalry".I have heard of these products, and seen them. You can read about the controversy here and here. Let's look at a few of them, and then I'll give you my thoughts.
These targets are for law-enforcement training, and are called the "No More Hesitation" series. The company confirmed the intention was to train police not to hesitate to shoot these kinds of people. It's also clear why that might be important: hesitating to shoot someone who already has a firearm pointed at you can get you killed. Thus, this series exists to help police practice shooting people with guns pointed at them even if they happen to be pregnant women, children, little girls standing next to their even smaller brothers, and so on.
Training to kill such people must be undertaken with a very serious mind. I can give a case when killing such a person -- without hesitation -- might be appropriate: but it is not a policing case. It is a case from war. If you are operating against the kind of enemy that brainwashes children, or uses pregnant (or apparently-pregnant) women as suicide bombers, you may need this kind of training. In this case an enemy is relying on your humanity to give them a window to conduct a high-casualty attack. Sadly we have seen this in places like Iraq and Israel, so it is a consideration we have to take seriously. If a quick kill is necessary to prevent the detonation of such a weapon, and if such a detonation would injure more innocent people than the child you are killing to stop it, then it might be justifiable.
Killing pregnant women or children even in those circumstances is a serious moral crime. However, in that special case, the crime is not yours. It belongs to the men who bent the weak to their evil will.
However, that special case does not seem to include the intent of these targets. The above article includes a comment from a reader, who points out that most of the series has people inside their own homes -- wearing night-dresses and so forth -- who are pointing guns at the police officer. Now this seems to be exactly the kind of case in which hesitation is most appropriate, as these people have a legitimate right to have a handgun and to be responding with it to an intrusion. De-escalation training is surely what is needed here: to try to find a way to walk the situation away from where shots get fired at all.
If instead you are training to shoot without hesitation, what you are doing is dishonorable. To honor is to sacrifice, of yourself or your possessions, for something or someone you value more. Honor is the quality of a man who does this.
The path of honor in a case like this is to hesitate, to make the sacrifice of taking the risk onto yourself instead of making the child bear it. The purpose of the strong is to protect the weak: it is the reason you were given strength. You should hesitate long before you kill a child to save yourself, or a pregnant woman, or the elderly. Anyone who cannot see that is dishonorable, and unfit to bear arms.
An organization that teaches the strong to protect themselves at the expense of the weak is evil. It should be disbanded, replaced if necessary but with an entirely new organization, with a new corporate culture and no members who were associated with the decision to execute this kind of training.
At this time, of course, we only know that this product line was made available -- we do not know which agencies or forces undertook to train with it. We should push to find out, and remove anyone who thought this was a good idea from public service.
Those are my thoughts, since you asked.
This Should Go Over Well...
The Georgia General Assembly has decided to consider a bill exempting itself from the gun control laws it imposes on everyone else. You might think they are chiefly interested in being able to carry a firearm to work during days when the Legislature is in session. No, actually, that's the one thing they're omitting. The exception to the law is structured as follows:
UPDATE: See the comments for a list of email addresses of the committee members considering the bill. I noted there that we can't be sure how many of them support it, so letter writers should not assume that they are writing to opponents.
UPDATE: Rep. Kevin Cooke, one of the committee members, has gotten back to me to clarify that he personally opposes the bill. He writes to express strong support for a strict-constructionist reading of the 2nd Amendment, and the right to bear arms. So we have at least one friend on the committee!
Current and former members of the General Assembly who possess a valid weapons carry license issued in this state; provided, however, that no member of the General Assembly shall be authorized to carry a weapon within the chamber of the House of Representatives or the chamber of the Senate.Special privileges for the government, the law for the little people. Well, we'll see if they have the guts to go through with it. I gather it's getting a pretty hot response from the citizenry.
UPDATE: See the comments for a list of email addresses of the committee members considering the bill. I noted there that we can't be sure how many of them support it, so letter writers should not assume that they are writing to opponents.
UPDATE: Rep. Kevin Cooke, one of the committee members, has gotten back to me to clarify that he personally opposes the bill. He writes to express strong support for a strict-constructionist reading of the 2nd Amendment, and the right to bear arms. So we have at least one friend on the committee!
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