Reductionism

Theodore Dalrymple writes of Belgium, in a way that sounds very familiar:

As I write, Belgium has not had a central government for more than 500 days. While I must admit, as an occasional visitor to that country, that the difference between Belgium with and Belgium without a central government is not apparent on casual inspection, this interregnum may take the theory of limited government too far. 

The reason that Belgium has lacked a government for so long is that the country is divided into two populations (actually three, but the third is too small to count) with incompatible politics: French-speaking Wallonia and Dutch-speaking Flanders. Belgium is officially bilingual, yet you see not a word of Dutch in Wallonia and not a word of French in Flanders. The division could not be starker if barbed wire separated the two provinces. Only in the capital, Brussels, does one find any concession to bilingualism. 

Historical and economic factors deepen the division between the two regions. Wallonia, though it contained a minority of Belgium’s population, long dominated its culture and economy. Even the Flemish upper class spoke French at home, while Dutch was the language of the peasantry; until recently, Belgian schools forbade children from speaking Dutch in class. With the decline of Wallonia’s coal and steel industries and the economic rise of Flanders, however, the pattern of dominance changed. Flanders went from being the poor relation to being the rich one, albeit with something of an inferiority complex. In the process, it started to make large transfer payments to Wallonia, which suffered from comparatively high unemployment. Such payments rarely promote goodwill between groups. Resentment is common among both the donors, who harbor suspicions that the recipients are exploiting them, and the recipients, who indulge in mental contortions to explain their dependency away. 

It is no surprise, therefore, that the largest political parties in Flanders are either nationalist or free-market; both philosophies lead to reducing or stopping the transfer payments. It is equally unsurprising that the largest political party in Wallonia is socialist and wants the payments to continue or increase. The Wallonian socialist party’s patronage powers in its territory are almost feudal in nature and extent; the last thing that the party of social change wants is actual change. 

If not quite deterministic, Dalrymple's description is reductionist:  the difference between free-marketeers and socialists boils down mostly to which side of transfer payments they find themselves.  The principles follow the economics as nicely, on this example, as they ever did in Marx's theory.

I take us all to be a bunch of free-marketeers and nationalists; I assume that most of us are also not receiving any transfer payments from the government.  Are we in the same boat as the people of Flanders -- thinking ourselves principled, but really driven by rice-bowl issues?  Are our opponents in the same boat as the people of Wallonia, having concocted an idea of "fairness" and "justice" that is really limited to a desire to be paid out of someone else's wallet?

Both sides have elaborate arguments to the contrary.  Dalrymple's suggestion is that these arguments are not rational, but rationalizations.  What do you think?

The Fat Man

Since I spend most of my time with ancient and medieval writings, I'm sometimes a little surprised when I run across what contemporary thinkers take to be an interesting puzzle. From the Stanford Law Review, "The Fat Man":

Consider one of the most famous hypotheticals on the subject of self-defense: the Fat Man puzzle. In Fat Man, you find yourself in a small boat at the bottom of a chasm. Although there are many versions, what they have in common is that an enormously fat individual is hurtling down from the cliff. You have no idea why he is falling—whether, say, he jumped or was pushed. All you know for sure is that if he hits you, you die. You have no space to maneuver, and no time to escape. Fortunately, you are armed with your trusty Fat Man gun. You can pull the trigger and vaporize him, thereby saving yourself. 

Theorists of self-defense usually posit that killing another to protect the self must be based either on the status of the attacker (e.g., enemy soldier in war) or what the attacker is doing (e.g., actively shooting at you). The Fat Man problem usefully divorces the justification for violent self-defense from the motive of the assailant. Robert Nozick’s original version of the problem stipulated that Fat Man has been pushed, and is therefore morally innocent; thus theories of self-defense that depend on what the attacker is doing (e.g., is he engaged in aggression?) cannot justify the use of the vaporizer.* 

And yet the Fat Man problem is in other ways too easy. Augustine, to take an example, would surely have rejected the use of the vaporizer gun, on the ground that your life is not intrinsically more valuable than the Fat Man’s. Liberalism’s refusal to weigh lives against each other also makes calculation difficult. Yet I find that my students have little difficulty with the problem, answering as Nozick intended: they are by and large perfectly willing to blow Fat Man to smithereens to save themselves.

This situation is exactly identical to a non-theoretical problem that we've discussed here just recently:  the case of abortion where a zygote is wrongly implanted in the mother.  Without needing the machinery of a "Fat Man Gun," we can see that the moral issues are fairly straightforward:

1)  Party X is going to be killed by Party Y unless Party Y is killed first.

2)  Party Y is doomed anyway.

This case brings out two issues that are important to ideas about the use of force.  The first is that innocence is sometimes not a purely moral issue:  sometimes innocence is practical.  The baby is surely morally innocent, but practically the baby (or the Fat Man) is going to kill someone.  Thus, we can consider using force against a kind of target that normally would be exempt from consideration.

The second is one that any ancient thinker would have understood:  doom changes moral calculus.  We don't have a case here where we can save Party Y.  We are either allowing them to die, or killing them ourselves.  The outcome for them is not different.  Thus, we do our moral work on the issues that we can affect.

Taking action against such a target is a tragedy, but it may also be a duty.


*  The footnote here says that "theories that rest on moral culpability would not justify shooting down an airliner carrying 100 innocent passengers and 3 hijackers, when the hijackers intend to fly into a building, killing everyone on board, and hundreds or thousands more on the ground. This is not to say that shooting the airline down cannot be justified; the calculus relies on a combination of consequentialist body-counting and double effect."  But this is not correct:  there is no need for a "combination" of this sort, because one of the components of the medieval doctrine of double effect is proportionality.  Modern consequentialist thinking does not need to be added to make sense of the calculus; St. Thomas Aquinas established standards for dealing with that aspect of the question.

One of Those Ideas...

So there's this woman in New Zealand who decided to answer her bills by auctioning off part of her backside:

Bids on a cheeky online auction, giving the winner the chance to tattoo an image of their choice on a Lower Hutt woman's buttock, have topped the $10,000 reserve price with a week still to run. Tina Beznec is selling a 9cm by 9cm space of skin on her Trade Me auction "YOUR tattoo on my Bum!!" after being made redundant twice in the past year....

Ms Beznec suggests the canvas is the perfect place for a marriage proposal, business promotion, or an artist wanting to share a design. 

She is promising the winner's idea - no matter how outrageous - will end up on her rear.

'Well, that's just a terrible idea,' you may be saying, 'but the world is full of quirky individuals, and one such example is no reason to..."

Breaking Headline:  Backside Tattoo Auction Sparks Copycat Craze!

Some ideas the world would have been better off without.

Wicked, Wicked Woman

Cassandra has apparently decided to begin posting again, in spite of her many previous threats to be done with it forever.  You'd have thought she might have mentioned it to us!

150 Conservative and Evangelical Leaders Endorse Santorum

This has to be very encouraging for the Santorum campaign, and also for any of us whose hope for 2012 lies in consolidating conservative opinion behind a single candidate.  While not an "evangelical" myself, and not much given to joining organizations of any kind if I can help it, it's good from my perspective if it helps move people in  one direction.

Mr. Santorum hadn't seemed to me to be one of the serious candidates until Iowa, but I wonder to what degree that judgment was improper.  It was made based on the fact that no one seemed to take him seriously, plus his infamous Google problem.  The latter, though, was a work of viciousness by a character of low morals who ought not to be granted a veto over anything.  The former is an unfortunate necessity of democratic politics, because no matter how good your candidate is, he can't win if no one will vote for him.  (Not that this usually stops me; I can't recall the last time I voted for someone who won a primary election.)

So, Santorum?  He gave a good speech at the Iowa convention, and since I have been paying attention, I like what I see of him.  I won't go as far as Mr. David Brooks in endorsing his vision, but I do agree that we need to think about a system that looks out for the interest of those Americans who play by the rules and work hard. Santorum clearly believes in such a system, though it is worth noting that he rejected Gingrich's bashing of Bain capital, and truly groups like Bain are a necessity in a free market economy.  Gov. Perry wasn't wrong to call them "vulture capitalists," though -- the positive contribution they make is very similar to the work that vultures do for the world.  Any man who spends enough time in the wild comes to like vultures.



I think I could vote for Santorum, all things considered.  We have to choose from what is on the table.  Of those options, this may be the best.

Dueling Chanters

The concept is Appalachian, but the execution is Irish enough.

Humans in Big Gatherings

Interesting infographic.

Another Take on Abortion

With h/t to Power Line, this image makes one aspect of the question pretty clear. Regardless of where one falls on the abortion question, the grandparents have a large, if not decisive role.

Eric Hines

What were those Taliban doing in those Marines' latrine anyway?

To put this in a little perspective, In WWII, Marines were boiling the flesh off of Japanese skulls and sending them home to their girl friends.

A Stinging Rebuke

It's not every day that you see our Supreme Court decide an issue 9-0.  On the other hand, given the merits of the case, any other split would have been quite alarming.  Though the case revolves around a mundane question of just why a woman was fired -- for cause or for health -- the EEOC's position on what they were prepared to recognize as a minister was outrageous.

SCOTUSblog notes that Alito's separate opinion was joined by Kagan, which is another remarkable feature of this decision.

Good Point

The "Young Americans Foundation" reports:

Young people today face a three-pronged attack on their financial security—educational debt from their past, unemployment in the present, and a future plagued by the burden of massive government debt. The government is largely responsible for all three problems. 

The one that might not be obvious is student loan debt, but government policies have also led to massive increases in it.  This is both by making such lending (to youth without capital) easier by subsidizing the process; and also, at the state level, by massively increasing tuition in order to suck up every dime that the Federal government was willing to help the kids borrow.

Government policies, meanwhile, have managed both to over-regulate and under-regulate the economy, resulting in the massive unemployment.  Regulations on industry and manufacturing have made it far, far harder (and far, far more expensive) to open a new and productive business.  Under-regulation of financial gamesters, as well as political pressure from Congress, allowed for the inflation of the housing bubble.

So, yes, if you're young, government is very much your problem.  Any government spending is coming out of your hide, as is the debt created by the past generations.  Think carefully about what you really want the government to do.

Perhaps Here Too

We should be startled if we were quietly reading a prosaic modern novel, and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a fairy tale. We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in Cranford, after tidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to fly away on a broomstick. Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen's young ladies who had just met a dragoon were to walk a little further and meet a dragon. Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place in British history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do with rational and almost mechanical accounts of encampment and engineering, of a busy bureaucracy and occasional frontier wars, quite modern in their efficiency and inefficiency; and then all of a sudden we are reading of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars against men as tall as trees or as short as toadstools. The soldier of civilization is no longer fighting with Goths but with goblins; the land becomes a labyrinth of faërie towns unknown to history; and scholars can suggest but cannot explain how a Roman ruler or a Welsh chieftain towers up in the twilight as the awful and unbegotten Arthur. The scientific age comes first and the mythological age after it. 

From Chesterton's A Short History of England.

St. Joan of Arc

Another event I missed by a few days is Joan of Arc's 600th birthday.  The link is to artwork done in her honor; here is Mark Twain's.

Old Hickory Said...

We're a few days late on this, but only a few.  On 8 January 1815, American forces, largely militia, led by Andrew Jackson defeated elements of the most powerful military in the world.

It's a more interesting story than the famous song suggests:



That makes it sound like Jackson won in a walk, against an inept opponent.  In fact the British forces were disciplined and supplied with artillery and rockets, and the fighting lasted half a month.  It is only the remarkable disparity in casualties that make it seem, with hindsight, like an easy victory.

It's Even Worse Over There Than We Feared

I've never heard of Ryan Air before, but it sounds like an Irish/European Southwest Airlines on steroids, relying on no-frills flights, unfashionable airports, and a uniform 737 fleet.

Those of us who don't travel in Europe won't be able to take advantage of Ryan Air's many ten-quid flights. That doesn't mean we can't enjoy this guy tearing the European Commission a new one. H/t Maggie's Farm, which gave this talk the appropriate title: "Why the EU Will Never Again Ask an Actual Innovator to Speak at an Innovation Convention." His explanation of why Ryan Air charges a fee for your checked baggage is priceless.

Margaret Thatcher gave the airline one of its early breaks. The entertainingly snide Wiki article gives detail about the wide variety of preposterous suits that have been brought against this innovative airline, which got one of its early breaks from Margaret Thatcher.

The airline's own website is here.

It's Probably Wrong To Enjoy This So Much

I've got a friend who really, really hates Tim Tebow.  I've been enjoying watching him foam at the mouth at various points during the season.  He's a huge Broncos fan too, from Denver -- it's really Tebow that he hates, hates, hates.

So, naturally, I just sent him an email.

Woosh...

...and there goes the Christmas tree, which we left up a little longer than usual this year.  I'd normally make some remarks about a long, cold and joyless winter ahead; but lately it's been more like March than January.  Daffodils are up, and the frogs are singing by night.  I feel like I ought to be able to jump on the motorcycle and take off for wherever with tent and Bowie knife, as the blood suggests in the springtime.

Speaking of Women and Jews...

...which we were doing both in the last post and in the recent post on Medieval Islamic poetry, Haaretz reports on Jewish prayer from 1471. Just to keep the accounting clear, though both are "medieval" these prayers are several hundred years later than the period in Spanish history in which female Jewish poets were absent (it's also 246 years after Magna Carta, which is to say, a little longer than America has existed as a nation):

According to the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), the 600-year-old siddur replaces the traditional prayer recited by women, “Blessed are You, Lord our God, Master of Universe for Creating me According to your Will”, with “Blessed Are You Lord our God, Master of the Universe, For You made Me a Woman and Not a Man.” 

The prayer offered by the 1471 siddur stands as a clear counterpart to the morning prayer recited daily by observant Jewish men: "Blessed are You For Not Creating Me a Woman".

The article runs with this in several directions, but let me offer something from a thinker -- who happens to have been both a woman and of Jewish extraction -- whose approach to this question strikes me as the right one. I'm speaking of Hannah Arendt, who wrote quite a bit about the differences that define us. She has a pretty sophisticated approach, so bear with me as I try to explain it, because I may not convey it quite right the first time.

In her better-known writings, Arendt speaks sharply against those who allow themselves to be defined by others, and brightly of those who seize upon the categories of their birth and use them to construct an identity that is theirs alone.  Thus, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (pp 81-5 in this edition), she has hard words for "inverts" (i.e., homosexuals) and "Jewish" men who hid in salons; but very high praise for Proust and Disraeli, who each took one of those qualities and constructed something worthy of a true individual.  In Disraeli's case, for example, he was in no way satisfied with being 'Jew-ish' -- he insisted on being a Jew, and in a way that was his very own.

Her position thus guards against the ravages of our modern identity politics, in which people are taught to think of themselves as members of a group -- she wants you to take whatever your genetic or cultural identity happens to be, and find a way to do something new and unique.  The quality of being Jewish or an invert, she says in OT, is "meaningless" when it is a way of putting people into groups:  it can only be valuable if it flourishes as a part of the character of an individual of worth.

That isn't the limit of her insight, however.  In her letters, she expressed a profound sense of gratitude for every kind of human difference that is truly, genuinely impossible to bridge.  It is my belief that you can find her reasoning for this in her horror at the Nazi movement -- which she encountered first hand, arrested by the Gestapo and later spending time in a concentration camp in France.  She writes of how Hitler was so proud of the SS for turning a thousand men into 'examples of the same type.'  That there are differences we cannot bridge is therefore something to be grateful for:  they provide sources of resistance to tyranny.

More than that, though, such differences also provide a unique perspective.  This is crucial to our ability to believe in our own perceptions of the world -- after all, our sense perceptions are often wrong.  Our eyes may fail us, or we may not be sure we heard correctly.  It is in hearing or seeing our perceptions confirmed by an independent observer, another person, that we gain confidence in our impressions.  The more independent the observer -- that is, the more genuine and deep the differences between them and us -- the more confidence we can have from their confirmation of our thoughts and impressions.

For that reason, it is right to feel gratitude for being a woman and not a man, and it is right to feel gratitude for being a man and not a woman.  It is right to feel gratitude for any difference given to us that cannot be bridged.  These things make us stronger, in that they give us access to parts of the world that our own perspective does not, and in that they can help us know how much weight it is safe to place on our own perceptions.

This -- Arendt calls it "plurality" -- is a strength that arises from human nature.  Therefore, it is a virtue:  one of the absolute ones.  It is a virtue for anyone, and a weakness in those who will not have it.

And Here I Thought I Was Old-Fashioned

 House Bill 1580 is the product of such a brainstorming session this summer between three freshman House Republicans: Bob Kingsbury of Laconia, Tim Twombly of Nashua and Lucien Vita of Middleton. The eyebrow-raiser, set to be introduced when the Legislature reconvenes next month, requires legislation to find its origin in an English document crafted in 1215. 

"All members of the general court proposing bills and resolutions addressing individual rights or liberties shall include a direct quote from the Magna Carta which sets forth the article from which the individual right or liberty is derived," is the bill's one sentence.

Can we start with getting them to cite the Constitution?

Some version of this concept might be a very good idea, although if you were going to pick one document the Magna Carta is probably not it.  A large number of its provisions pertain to issues like scutage, dowries, and feudal relief payments.  In general these no longer pertain to how we organize society (although perhaps we should reconsider the feudal system, which at least required that all recipients of government support provide the government with clear public services in return).   There are also some disabilities for women and Jews that force us not to consider the Magna Carta as the be-all, end-all of our rights.

On the other hand, there's something wholesome about the idea of requiring the government to prove its claims.  Rights language has been abused by those who favor an expansive government role (e.g., 'education is a right!', 'decent housing is a right!', 'health care is a right!', etc).  If the Magna Carta is not sufficient by itself, it might serve as one of a list of documents that show a given liberty or right to be well-recognized and of long standing.  The protection of rights and liberties of that sort ought to be one of our chief concerns.

For example, provisions 38-9 would be problematic for the administration's current policy toward assassination or indefinite detention of US citizens without trial:

In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it.

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.

These Are The Worst Pirates We've Ever Seen

Rear Adm. Craig S. Faller, who commands the carrier strike group, looked at the chart and radar images of the Sunshine’s location with something like disbelief. The Sunshine and the Stennis were only a few miles apart. “These might be the dumbest pirates ever,” he said.

It proved a chance to rescue some Iranian fishermen -- a good deed freely rendered to a people who have probably been told to expect no such from us.

Santayana wrote of England at her height as the "sweet, just, boyish master," and -- though there were times and places when England was fierce, and her justice was administered without remorse -- there are many examples that prove his point.  Much of what was said in honest praise then can be said in honest praise now, not of England alone, but of our combined navies operating to keep the sea lanes safe and free.