Tuesday, November 30, 2004
The Way of Truth
Cross-posted to GNXP.
The person you agree with 100% of the time is yourself. And sometimes, even that isn't so! Running a weblog focused on diverse topics I stumble on to many areas where I disagree with person X and agree with person Y, and many areas where the converse happens. The person with whom I will disagree will sometimes attempt to call me back to Reason, or suggest that I Really Can't Believe That. It's like my mental faculties just escape me now & then! To paraphrase H. L. Mencken there are individuals who live in terror that someone, somewhere, out there can conceive of a rational opinion at variance with their own!
I exaggerate for effect. We all succumb to this tendency now & then. As a species we seem intent on focusing on individual battles rather than tracking the progress of the war, perhaps this is what makes strategic thinkers "geniuses," they are not modal personalities. This shouldn't be too surprising when you realize that though we are shaped by ultimate considerations they work through variations in proximate traits. If you don't survive the battles, you won't live to enjoy the fruits of victory in war.
Human beings have confirmation biases. That is, we are more likely to accept evidence that confirms our hypotheses. We also have coalitional biases, that is, we are more likely to give credence to individuals who we know share our other biases, and this can even work to counteract confirmation bias on occassion (that is, you accept weak evidence for hypothesis A but individual 1, who you share multiple other biases with, offers evidence for B, and so the evidence for A looks far weaker to you now).
In terms of specifics, you see these coalitional and confirmation biases show up in various manners. For example, my admiration for Paul Gross is grounded in the reality that he shares two particular biases of mine: he fights creationism where ever it rises to battle science, and also keeps an open mind on topics relating to human nature (from evolutionary psychology to human biodiversity). Now, I happen to disagree with some of Dr. Gross' opinions on foreign policy, but I don't particular care about that topic much so it doesn't really diminish my admiration for him.
Back when I was a "hardcore" libertarian and a freethought activist, I was heartened to find out that non-theist philosopher Antony Flew was also a committed Thatcherite (Flew has expressed a recent openness to Deism FYI, so I haven't labelled him a negative or implicit atheist as I would have 1 year ago). This tendency for humans to exhibit correlation on numerous variables is not surprising, that libertarians are generally secular & self-perceive their views as "rational" would be no great surprise to anyone (or that they are mostly male). The most common explanation for this tendency is that there are underlying axioms or experiences that commonly shape one's opinion on alternate hypotheses. For example, if one adheres to a new found respect for "traditional wisdom," a turn torward the dominant religion and simultaneous acceptance of conventional social mores might be expected. On the other hand, I think people often dismiss the more unpredictable sociological angle: one may switch from Democrat to Republican if one joins a church where everyone is a Republican not because of a genuine heart-felt change in personal values, but because everyone else is a Republican (the values then change in a Pascalian fashion as the constant refrain of the new truth seeps into your brain).
But enough theory, I would like to address a specific. On occasion, some regular readers of my opinions express dismay that I take an elitist attitude toward the evolution/creation "controversy." That is, I tend to discount the creationist opinions of the American public for two reasons, first, I don't think they are deeply felt, and second, they are wrong. Now, the truth is that I may believe that it is wrong for schools to serve only kosher meals or only vegan meals (in deference to the dietary restrictions of some students), but, it is not an opinion that I would not be particularly concerned about this even if "my side" lost the battle at a school board meeting. The latter political dispute is of a different kind that the former scientific dispute.
I am not one who is going to deny that science is totally innocent of norms, values and "unproven" assumptions, but, I will assert that convential political "debates" occur primarily because humans are often unable to eloborate and clarify for each other their deep-seated instincts and values which could render their opinion rational, at least in light of their axioms, to other disputants. The axioms of science are more naked and transparent (methodological naturalism, a reliance on evidence, inference and reason), and the means take priority over the ends! This last part is crucial: I don't believe that teaching creationism in the public schools is a disaster for the negative effect it will have on evolutionary theory per se, rather, I worry about the corrosive effect it will have on those children who might later be influenced by the scientific method, with all its checks & balances and its reliance on good faith (rather than plain faith).
Am I being paranoid? Perhaps, but civilization does hang in the balance, because the modern world is contingent upon the open society, and especially science (republicanism and institutions of civil society are necessary for genuinely innovative science in my opinion, but the affluent middle class society which feeds these values would be untenable without the scientific revolution).1 I am of the mind that the world has produced only one true scientific society, that of Europe in the 17th century (which later expanded to become coterminus with the world). Evolutionary psychologists have addressed our cognitive difficulties with the scientific mode of thought, and only a small minority of individuals in our ostensibly scientific culture will be involved with science or technology in their daily lives, but these individuals are a necessary condition for the perpetuation of middle class affluence. To flourish and grow young scientists and engineers need a culture that will enable them. The creeping in of creation science and other assorted qwackeries will not result in the death of our civilization in one fell swoop, but this is another battle that needs to be viewed in the context of the war against human nature, the war against confirmation bias, groupishness and all the assorted drives and tendencies shaped by our environment of evolutionary adaptiveness (EEA).
But, I must admit that there is a reason that some people sympathize with the public will to insert their norms and values into the realm of science, and that is because those norms and values have been driven out of other domains of knowledge which are more amenable to manipulation. The rise of multiculturalist political correctness in the United States seems to have resulted in the flight from the classrooms of a positive discussion of the preconditions of the shaping of the republic. The seminal importance of religion in both the cultures of New England and Pennsylvania might be deemphasized so as not to seem biased toward Christian faith. The fact that modern civilization as we know it was created by white Europeans seems to be something that must be addressed with discomfort. The reality that this fact has the implication that much of modern art, with its profuse plentitude derived from middle class affluence, is generated by white European men is also another source of discomfort for the cultural elite. The War Against Science accusation against religion has become part of the zeitgeist, engendering a greater hostility toward "godless science" than there need be.
An erosion of Western cultural values in the classrooms should not be compensated for by the insertion of a system-of-thought that simply no longer exists within the purview of modern science, itself one of the crowning jewels of Western civilization! Rather, we must return to a fideltiy toward Truth, no matter the consequences, no matter how politically unpleasant they might be in the modern age, because for every unpleasant Truth, there are pleasant ones, depending on where you stand. Yes, the founders of the original colonies might be considered distasteful religious fundamentalists or evangelicals, but many of the founding fathers were Deists or liberal Christians. Yes, racism was endemic to early American society, but nevertheless there were exceptions like the Quakers who would refuse to have anything to do with those owned slaves and argued for a universal freedom. Yes, the native peoples of this continent were decimated, but in the end they were not exterminated and today still exist as autonomous nations with their communal freedoms intact.
We are the ones, irrational humans, who impute to Truth a positive or negative light. Prior to the rise of Western civilization truth was more subjective, it has proximate utility as a frame to model the world so that our existence could be safeguarded and genes perpetuated. But with the efflourescence of the Greek spirit in Western civilization we began to move past proximate considerations and look toward the ultimate goals, toward a culture of rational Truth and openness. We gave up our proximate fixations, at least in rhetoric if not always practice, in the interests of ultimate methods which tunneled themselves undernearth the high gradient generated by human bias and prejudice. We should always remember that Western civilization has grown by leaps & bounds by a particular constraint of means which felicitously gives rise to glorious ends.
1 - I offer a conundrum that modern science is partially dependent on the existence of the society that it created. I think one can resolve this by remembering that the methods of science have evolved over the past few centuries, the elite and gentlemenly orientation of science is not the science of today. And in any case, sometimes good ideas can fruit in salty earth by a capricious toss of the dice by God or Nature.
Saturday, November 27, 2004
Naturalism v. Intelligent Design
(At the invitation of Aziz Poonawalla, I'm cross posting this from RedState to Dean Nation. Thanks for the invite!)
In a previous thread, I posed a question whether creationism and evolutionism could be considered to be scientific ideas, given Karl Popper's stipulation that science must be able to accept that its core theories may be proven false at any time.
In that thread, a core idea seemed to leap out. In comparing the two ideas, the theory of evolution depends upon the philosophy of naturalism, while creationist theories rely upon the concept of intelligent design.
When speaking about the emergence of life, the core difference that is the root of the differences between the two ideas is the origin of specific features of living organisms that result in life. The theory of evolution states that these features are the result of random natural processes influenced by intelligent considerations. The theory of intelligent design disputes that random processes and environmental factors are able to produce these features in living beings. In intelligent design theory, these features are the result of being designed for the purpose of life by an intelligent creator.
While the nature of the creator in intelligent design is unspecified, at some level the creator must possess a supernatural character. (Else the theory descends into nonsense as questions about what intelligence created the creator become an endless loop.) Given the supernatural nature of the creator, it is clear that questions about intelligent design are not answerable within a scientific framework as the supernatural aspects of the theory are not within the realm of science. (In contrast to evolution theory, which states that the origin is the result of ordinary natural processes that can be assessed via scientific means.)
In the modern debate between evolution and creationism, it appears that rather than the differences being unique to the two theories, the differences between the two are only symptoms of a larger debate whether naturalism or intelligent design (or other approaches) are more valid methods of obtaining knowledge.
So given these thoughts, I will put forth the position that the debate between the creationists and evolutionists on a scientific level is meaningless. The level at which the debate should be conducted is at the philosophical level. While science is unable to deal with questions whether an all-powerful god created a universe thousands of years ago with the appearance that it is much older, philosophy can deal with these questions by asking whether it is possible for intelligent designers to exist and why they would behave in such ways, should they exist.
So, questions for the readers: First, am I full of hooey in this assessment of the creationism v. evolution debate? Is this really a debate that should be had within the confines of science, or is philosophy the proper venue?
Second, if one chooses to believe that science is an imperfect vehicle for discovering the truth (whatever that means), must such an honest person also entertain all alternative supernatural explanations for things like origins? If the answer is no, is there a rigorous process an honest knowledge seeker may use to determine whether one supernatural explanation must be given more weight than another?
Finally, if following the debate up to the philosophic level leads to another debate surrounding the nature of gaining knowledge, is there any point to bumping the debate up levels (should mankind have conceived of levels above philosophy that have relations to philosophy akin to the relationship philosophy shares with science), or are we experiencing a phenomenon that is not unlike Gödel's incompleteness theorm?
In a previous thread, I posed a question whether creationism and evolutionism could be considered to be scientific ideas, given Karl Popper's stipulation that science must be able to accept that its core theories may be proven false at any time.
In that thread, a core idea seemed to leap out. In comparing the two ideas, the theory of evolution depends upon the philosophy of naturalism, while creationist theories rely upon the concept of intelligent design.
When speaking about the emergence of life, the core difference that is the root of the differences between the two ideas is the origin of specific features of living organisms that result in life. The theory of evolution states that these features are the result of random natural processes influenced by intelligent considerations. The theory of intelligent design disputes that random processes and environmental factors are able to produce these features in living beings. In intelligent design theory, these features are the result of being designed for the purpose of life by an intelligent creator.
While the nature of the creator in intelligent design is unspecified, at some level the creator must possess a supernatural character. (Else the theory descends into nonsense as questions about what intelligence created the creator become an endless loop.) Given the supernatural nature of the creator, it is clear that questions about intelligent design are not answerable within a scientific framework as the supernatural aspects of the theory are not within the realm of science. (In contrast to evolution theory, which states that the origin is the result of ordinary natural processes that can be assessed via scientific means.)
In the modern debate between evolution and creationism, it appears that rather than the differences being unique to the two theories, the differences between the two are only symptoms of a larger debate whether naturalism or intelligent design (or other approaches) are more valid methods of obtaining knowledge.
So given these thoughts, I will put forth the position that the debate between the creationists and evolutionists on a scientific level is meaningless. The level at which the debate should be conducted is at the philosophical level. While science is unable to deal with questions whether an all-powerful god created a universe thousands of years ago with the appearance that it is much older, philosophy can deal with these questions by asking whether it is possible for intelligent designers to exist and why they would behave in such ways, should they exist.
So, questions for the readers: First, am I full of hooey in this assessment of the creationism v. evolution debate? Is this really a debate that should be had within the confines of science, or is philosophy the proper venue?
Second, if one chooses to believe that science is an imperfect vehicle for discovering the truth (whatever that means), must such an honest person also entertain all alternative supernatural explanations for things like origins? If the answer is no, is there a rigorous process an honest knowledge seeker may use to determine whether one supernatural explanation must be given more weight than another?
Finally, if following the debate up to the philosophic level leads to another debate surrounding the nature of gaining knowledge, is there any point to bumping the debate up levels (should mankind have conceived of levels above philosophy that have relations to philosophy akin to the relationship philosophy shares with science), or are we experiencing a phenomenon that is not unlike Gödel's incompleteness theorm?
Thursday, November 25, 2004
The compatibility of scientific literacy and faith
I'm fully aware that my last post was somewhat uncharacteristically strident. Do read the updates to that post for some responses to good critiques I received. However, it did provide a starting point for the next Dean Nation "theme" - the neccessary compatibility of scientific literacy with religious belief. Here's the two main principles at play:
1. religious teachings have no place in a science curriculum. In a school setting, religious beliefs belong in religion or cultural classes, not biology or geology.
2. religious beliefs shoudl not be excluded from the public sphere, but shoudl occupy their proper position within it. A strong distinction must be made between evidence-based approaches to inquiry (such as Science) and faith-based-approaches to inquiry (such as Religion).
I'd also like to plug these old posts of mine that relates to the discussion:
1. religious teachings have no place in a science curriculum. In a school setting, religious beliefs belong in religion or cultural classes, not biology or geology.
2. religious beliefs shoudl not be excluded from the public sphere, but shoudl occupy their proper position within it. A strong distinction must be made between evidence-based approaches to inquiry (such as Science) and faith-based-approaches to inquiry (such as Religion).
I'd also like to plug these old posts of mine that relates to the discussion:
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
How to talk with Bush voters http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/lakoff/howtorespond
Just (barely) in time for Thanksgiving, probably the first family get-together since the election for most people.... how to respond to the Bush voters in your family
UPDATE (Aziz): The single most important one is reprinted below the fold:
Also note that of the lengthy list of guidelines in the link, they can all be distilled into four simple rules: 1. Show respect, 2. Respond by reframing, 3. Think and talk at the level of values, 4. Say what you believe.
UPDATE (Aziz): The single most important one is reprinted below the fold:
Show respect to the conservatives you are responding to. No one will listen to you if you don’t accord them respect. Listen to them. You may disagree strongly with everything that is being said, but you should know what is being said. Be sincere. Avoid cheap shots. What if they don’t show you respect? Two wrongs don’t make a right. Turn the other cheek and show respect anyway. That takes character and dignity. Show character and dignity.
Also note that of the lengthy list of guidelines in the link, they can all be distilled into four simple rules: 1. Show respect, 2. Respond by reframing, 3. Think and talk at the level of values, 4. Say what you believe.
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
No compromise on science http://www.time.com/time/columnist/jaroff/article/0,9565,783829,00.html
There are some issues that I simply don't see a route for reasonable compromise. One of these is in math and science education. There is a disturbing trend by the culture warriors to promote religious belief as scientific fact, within the public domain rather than in their churches where it belongs. See below the fold for an example, on how national park service officials are forced to give lip-service to Creationist accounts of the Grand Canyon's origin, and prevented from discussing the scientific natural history.
Being Purple does not mean that the "median" position of every ssue must be embraced. Sometimes the Blue position, and sometimnes the Red position, is truly the Purple one. When it comes to scientific fact, there is no place for the discussion of religious belief. Likewise in the schools. The proper place to inculcate religious teaching is at home and in the church.
It is true that science is not about fact, it is about thery. The scientific method is about asking questions, then finding evidence to support the answers, and always being open to the possibility of new evidence that could change the conclusions. The goal is to model Reality and Objective Truth, not define it.
Yes, that does mean that Evolution is a theory. But the validity of a theory is measured by how well it fits the evidence - and any competing theory has to fit the same evidence at least equally well for it to lay any claim to being equal. Creationism, usually resting on the laurels of the Bible and a flawed understanding of Thermodynamics (hint: the Earth is not a closed system. See that yellow thing in the sky?), completely fails to meet that standard.
I will proudly state that I do believe in Creation (or rather, Intelligent Design). I don't see much reason to find Creation and Evolution at odds, either (the 6000 year old figure is solely an estimate by Bishop Usher which has no doctrinal authority other than tradition). But in my belief system, all knowledge derives from Allah and the tools of reason we have been given by Him are so we can better appreciate his Glory as reflected in the natural world. Science, the method, is the ultimate use of that gift and therefore an act of worship in and of itself.
Here's the article. I see this as the intellectual equivalent of the destruction of Bamiyan. I think that these people would pave the Canyon if they could. And I am hopeful that the extremist faction that promotes this brand of scientific illiteracy truly is a fringe voice that the majority will rise to silence. Hopeful, but also pessimistic.
UPDATE: Someone rightly asked me to justify my "pave the canyon" comment while in discussion at GNXP. I am NOT saying that this guy's book is equivalent to destroying the Canyon. What I am saying is that these Creatioonist-extremists' selective Biblical interpretation of the Flood origin is an attempt to blunt the threat that the Canyon presents by its very existence to Creationist dogma.
Ask yourself - what does the Canyon's origin really have to do with human origins? Nothing! Except that it provides empirical evidence which Creationist theory cannot account for. Rather than modify the theory to account for the new evidence (as Science does), they must "destroy" the evidence.
Unfortunately for the Creationist-extremists, the Canyon is too big to physically destroy. So, they resort to symbolical destruction, via revisionist co-opting of the evidence to serve their interpretation.
After all, the Flood has nothing to do with Creation either. The Flood is just a Biblical event that they have seized upon in order to lend their symbolic destruction of the Canyon some authority.
UPDATE 2: Another fair question in the discussion at my RedState diary, ie why I am suddenly pro-censorship. I am not. I have no problem with Vail's book being sold or read in libraries or bookstores. However, the bookstore at the Canyon should be for education purposes, to help promote scientific inquiry and natural science. It represents an enormous (I would say, even Divine) opportunity to help spread scientific literacy and stimulate children especially to pursue careers in scientific pursuit.
If Vail wanted to publish a book that said, "heres the Genesis account of creation, heres why evolution doesnt square with the Bible" then that would be one thing. This book is arguing against the scientific fact of the Canyon's age and origin, and implicitly lumps this basic geologic knowledge in with Evolution. He then makes a wildly speculative assumption that the Flood carved the Canyon despite zero evidence even in the Bible itself about gigantic chasms in Arizona. So he not only ignores scientific evidence, he doesn't even present Biblical evidence! It's essentially a fantasy and has no place in an educational setting.
This is why the book's sale is not innocous at the Canyon bookstore. He's welcome to sell the thing anywhere else, give free copies away on hikes, whatever.
Being Purple does not mean that the "median" position of every ssue must be embraced. Sometimes the Blue position, and sometimnes the Red position, is truly the Purple one. When it comes to scientific fact, there is no place for the discussion of religious belief. Likewise in the schools. The proper place to inculcate religious teaching is at home and in the church.
It is true that science is not about fact, it is about thery. The scientific method is about asking questions, then finding evidence to support the answers, and always being open to the possibility of new evidence that could change the conclusions. The goal is to model Reality and Objective Truth, not define it.
Yes, that does mean that Evolution is a theory. But the validity of a theory is measured by how well it fits the evidence - and any competing theory has to fit the same evidence at least equally well for it to lay any claim to being equal. Creationism, usually resting on the laurels of the Bible and a flawed understanding of Thermodynamics (hint: the Earth is not a closed system. See that yellow thing in the sky?), completely fails to meet that standard.
I will proudly state that I do believe in Creation (or rather, Intelligent Design). I don't see much reason to find Creation and Evolution at odds, either (the 6000 year old figure is solely an estimate by Bishop Usher which has no doctrinal authority other than tradition). But in my belief system, all knowledge derives from Allah and the tools of reason we have been given by Him are so we can better appreciate his Glory as reflected in the natural world. Science, the method, is the ultimate use of that gift and therefore an act of worship in and of itself.
Here's the article. I see this as the intellectual equivalent of the destruction of Bamiyan. I think that these people would pave the Canyon if they could. And I am hopeful that the extremist faction that promotes this brand of scientific illiteracy truly is a fringe voice that the majority will rise to silence. Hopeful, but also pessimistic.
UPDATE: Someone rightly asked me to justify my "pave the canyon" comment while in discussion at GNXP. I am NOT saying that this guy's book is equivalent to destroying the Canyon. What I am saying is that these Creatioonist-extremists' selective Biblical interpretation of the Flood origin is an attempt to blunt the threat that the Canyon presents by its very existence to Creationist dogma.
Ask yourself - what does the Canyon's origin really have to do with human origins? Nothing! Except that it provides empirical evidence which Creationist theory cannot account for. Rather than modify the theory to account for the new evidence (as Science does), they must "destroy" the evidence.
Unfortunately for the Creationist-extremists, the Canyon is too big to physically destroy. So, they resort to symbolical destruction, via revisionist co-opting of the evidence to serve their interpretation.
After all, the Flood has nothing to do with Creation either. The Flood is just a Biblical event that they have seized upon in order to lend their symbolic destruction of the Canyon some authority.
UPDATE 2: Another fair question in the discussion at my RedState diary, ie why I am suddenly pro-censorship. I am not. I have no problem with Vail's book being sold or read in libraries or bookstores. However, the bookstore at the Canyon should be for education purposes, to help promote scientific inquiry and natural science. It represents an enormous (I would say, even Divine) opportunity to help spread scientific literacy and stimulate children especially to pursue careers in scientific pursuit.
If Vail wanted to publish a book that said, "heres the Genesis account of creation, heres why evolution doesnt square with the Bible" then that would be one thing. This book is arguing against the scientific fact of the Canyon's age and origin, and implicitly lumps this basic geologic knowledge in with Evolution. He then makes a wildly speculative assumption that the Flood carved the Canyon despite zero evidence even in the Bible itself about gigantic chasms in Arizona. So he not only ignores scientific evidence, he doesn't even present Biblical evidence! It's essentially a fantasy and has no place in an educational setting.
This is why the book's sale is not innocous at the Canyon bookstore. He's welcome to sell the thing anywhere else, give free copies away on hikes, whatever.
Faith-Based Parks?
Creationists meet the Grand Canyon
Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2004
At a park called Dinosaur Adventure Land, run by creationists near Pensacola, Florida, visitors are informed that man coexisted with dinosaurs. This fantasy accommodates the creationists’ view that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that Darwin’s theory of evolution is false. Among the park exhibits is one that illustrates another creationist article of faith. It consists of a long trough filled with sand and fitted at one end with a water spigot. Above the trough is a sign reading “That River Didn’t Make That Canyon.” When visitors open the spigot, the water quickly cuts a gully through the sand, supposedly demonstrating how the Grand Canyon was created, practically overnight, by Noah’s flood. That’s nonsense, of course, but what else would you expect at a creationist park? Certainly, one might think, this couldn’t be acceptable at, say, a National Park, right? Think again.
Two-thirds of the way across the continent, some four million people annually visit Grand Canyon National Park, marveling at the awesome view. In National Park Service (NPS) affiliated bookstores, they can find literature informing them that the great chasm runs for 277 miles along the bed of the Colorado River. It descends more than a mile into the earth, and along one stretch, is some 18 miles wide, its walls displaying impressive layers of limestone, sandstone, shale, schist and granite.
And, oh yes, it was formed about 4,500 years ago, a direct consequence of Noah’s Flood. How’s that? Yes, this is the ill-informed premise of “Grand Canyon, a Different View,” a handsomely-illustrated volume also on sale at the bookstores. It includes the writings of creationists and creation scientists and was compiled by Tom Vail, who with his wife operates Canyon Ministries, conducting creationist-view tours of the canyon. “For years,” Vail explains, “as a Colorado River guide, I told people how the Grand Canyon was formed over the evolutionary time span of millions of years. (Most geologists place the canyon’s age at some six million years). Then I met the Lord. Now I have a different view of the Canyon, which according to a biblical time scale, can’t possibly be more than a few thousand years old.”
Vail’s book attracted little notice when it first appeared in the NPS stores in 2003, until a critical review by Wilfred Elders, a respected University of California geologist, brought it to light and took apart its pseudoscientific claims. That led David Shaver, who heads the Geologic Resources Division of the Park Service, to send a memo to headquarters urging that the book be removed from the NPS stores. “It is not based on science,” he wrote, “ but on a specific religious doctrine…and should not have been approved for in NPS affiliated book stores.”
The presidents of The American Geological Institute and six of its member societies also weighed in, expressing their dismay to the Park Service. Noting that the Grand Canyon “provides a remarkable and unique opportunity to educate the public about Earth science,” the scientists urged that, “in fairness to the millions of park visitors, we must clearly distinguish religious from scientific knowledge.”
But when Grand Canyon National Park superintendent Joe Alston attempted to block the sale of Vail’s book at canyon bookstores, he was overruled by NPS headquarters, which announced that a high-level policy review of the matter would be launched and a decision made by February, 2004. So far, no official decision has been announced.
Even worse, according to the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), an organization that includes many Park employees, papers obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that no review has ever taken place. Indeed, PEER claims that the Bush Administration has already decided it will stand by its approval for the book and that hundreds more have been ordered. “Now that the book has become quite popular,” explained an NPS flack to a Baptist news agency, “we don’t want to remove it.”
Even more troubling, PEER charges that Grand Canyon National Park no longer offers an official estimate of the age of the canyon, and that the NPS has blocked publication of guidance intended for park rangers that reminds them there is no scientific basis for creationism. The group has been increasingly concerned about what it calls the Park Service’s “Faith-Based Parks” and the agency’s seeming indifference to the separation of church and state Among other moves, for example, NPS has allowed the placing of bronze plaques bearing Psalm verses at Grand Canyon overlooks. PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch is indignant, “If the Bush Administration is using public resources for pandering to Christian fundamentalists, it should at least have the decency to tell the truth about it.”
Is this religious bias, as some creationists charge? Hardly. It’s more than likely that the majority of scientists, environmentalists and others protesting the NPS stand are themselves intelligent, rational Christians who are convinced by overwhelming evidence that the Grand Canyon is no Johnny-Come-Lately. The creationists have demonstrated again that they are scientifically illiterate, and out of step with the 21st century.
Leon Jaroff was the founding managing editor of DISCOVER, the newsmagazine of science, and was a longtime correspondent, writer and editor for TIME and LIFE.
Monday, November 22, 2004
Theater of Abortion
Since Aziz posted about abortion, I figured I would give it a try. Unlike many people who assert that they personally oppose abortion but back the right to choose, I personally support first trimester abortion without qualification but am ambivalent about the courts imposing its universal national legality via the right to privacy. Though in the generality I support Roe vs. Wade I worry about the corroding impact it has had on the legitimacy of the courts and the respect for law by the citizenry of the republic. But I come here not to rehash my own qualms, but to address something a bit different: the reliance on reflective thinking on the issue of abortion and its limitations.
When individuals speak of abortion in a political context, they have their talking points. For example, if you are "pro-choice" (support abortion-rights) you believe that a woman has a right to privacy, a right to her own body, etc. (if you are an anarcho-capitalist you would reframe it as a woman having a right to her own bodily property). If you are "pro-life" (oppose abortion-rights) you would assert (more or less) that life-starts-at-conception, or that there is a sanctity of life, and so on.
The general mode of thought here is to present axioms, infer propositions and offer up a chain of reasoning by which you support your argument. This is great in terms of clarifying the positions linguistically, but I believe it has resulted in a perception of more polarization than actually exists substantively on this issue and tends to expose contradictions in behavior.
For example, pro-life individuals often question the logic of pro-choice Catholics who believe that abortion is wrong personally, who even grant that it is murder, but still support its legality. I tend to sympathize with their confusion because I share it. Nevertheless, I must go one step further, and ask, why do the pro-life individuals not take up arms (as some have) in defense of the rights of human beings, persons, who they believe are being exterminated, acts of infanticide which in their literature are labeled a Holocaust? Some pro-life individuals might be pacifists, but many are not. In the past year many conservatives have defended an invasion of Iraq, resulting in the shedding of American life, in the name of freeing Iraqis from the bondage of a dictator. Why is it that these same pro-life conservative Americans simply choose to use political means (which have for the past generation been rather ineffectual) in opposing what they believe to be the murder of millions of innocents, potential co-citizens?
I think the problem is that we are overemphasizing reflective rational thinking. I don't believe that language expresses well the gray area of personhood that the fetus encompasses. Though pro-life individuals will assert an identity between an autonomous person and the fetus, their actions belie such a belief. Rather, the fetus exists in a gray land between non-human and human, it demands political action in its interests, but does not command the moral outrage that is necessary for violent action. Similarly, though some abortion-rights supporters might be unequivocal about their support for the legality of the practice and might even assent to the assertion by some activists that the fetus is just a "clump of cells," if like Bill Clinton they were confronted with an aborted fetus in a jar they would recoil. Though they might make the assertion that the fetus is just a clump of cells, intuitively they feel that it is something more, it is the gray land between cells and person, and so its naked presentation can elict revulsion, shock and outrage.
At this point you might be wondering if I am suggesting a Kassian "Wisdom of Repugnance" argument is appropriate to this issue. Not really, because I don't think repugnance is inherently wise. It just is. We must not deny that we have predispositions, biases, that issue from the basic structure of our brains, shaped by evolution and given form by the interaction between our genetic template and environmental input. When I titled this post the "Theater of Abortion" I am playing upon Daniel Dennett's idea of the "Cartesian Theater," that we have the conceit that all our actions and beliefs are exposed to the world and under the guidance of the conscious mind. When it comes to abortion we behave in such a fashion, as if our religious teachings or secular political beliefs are the sum totality of our feeling on this topic. I think this is a superficial element that is easily extracted and repackaged for political debate, but there are things going on "under the hood" that must be addressed.
Many cognitive scientists have suggested that the human mind is organized as specialized modules, independent functions designed by evolution to deal with certain problems. Additionally we have cognitive predispositions to various behaviors and mental constructs. We learn language with ease, all humans share a similar taxonomy for animals (folk biology), we tend to have similar interest in gossip (Theory of the Mind), even toddlers have a basic understanding of physics (folk physics). Infants when presented with animals or objects can clearly anticipate that the animal will move and interact with it in a protean fashion, while mechanical objects tend to be stable or reactive. They are surprised when objects disappear or reappear in peculiar ways, or manifest behaviors outside the anticipated range for their "kind." I am not saying here that humans are born with a knowledge of rocks and birds, I am just saying that we have predispositions, templates, neural channels, that are ready to receive inputs that express certain ideas or feed us specific stimuli.
What does this have to do with abortion? Well, let's look at the example of a dead body first. If you are a Abrahamic monotheist you officially accept the idea of bodily resurrection so the body is sacred. Fine. I am skeptical that most Abrahamic monotheists emphasize this idea over the alternative that the soul ascends to heaven after death leaving the body to decay (the more Hellenistic rather than Hebrew strand in Judeo-Christo-Islamic thought), but you have an axiomatic out. Nevertheless, I would assert that non-Abrahamic religionists and nonreligious people still imbue the body with some amount of sanctity that their axioms would deny as rational. After all the body is not going to be resurrected, it is empty of life or soul, it is an inanimate piece of decaying flesh. But still the body is generally revered in some fashion. Why? The dead body still looks human! It triggers cognitive templates of "humanness," and so you still want to interact with it in a human like fashion. You also note that the dead body is inanimate, as if it was an object. So you know it isn't human no matter what your gut tells you. The body is in a no-mans land, it is not recycled organic matter quite yet, but neither is it an animate human being. We need to honor and respect it, after which we can bury it (where it is decomposed and dehumanized) or cremate it (a conscious attempt to blot out its signs of human-form). After this it ceases to trouble our imaginations and we can focus on the memory of the individual as they were when they lived.
Now you probably know where I am going: just as the dead body stimulates the human template, so images of a fetus, or the knowledge of what a fetus looks like will tend to stimulate the human template. I don't care how much N.A.R.A.L. tells you it's just a clump of cells, once the cell develops and organizes to the point where the fetus is recognizably humanoid, then you enter the gray land of not-human and human. But the fetus is not a fully fleshed person, it does not interact with us, it is not autonomous and not normally animate. In other words it does not trigger all the cues that tells us that someone is human and we should interact with them as a human. And so you have the reason why pro-life people can get enraged, but not enraged enough to pick up their guns and prevent murder.
Of course you aren't going to get pro-life and pro-choice people to get together and admit, "Yeah, the fetus is somewhat human, somewhat not," and make peace. Nevertheless, I think the Japanese have one answer: they mourn the aborted fetus. Perhaps the perception by some pro-lifers that abortion-rights supporters are callous about life could be mitigated if there was more public acknowledgement and ritualistic mourning, something that indicates that something not quite animal and not quite human was killed, if not in any rationally definable fashion, at least on some instinctive level. Human beings are social animals. The rhetoric of abortion-rights tends to deny this, that is, it is a choice between a woman and her God (or what not), but that woman lives in a world filled with other human beings who care about her and her choices. I do not mean to imply that women should be ashamed or repentant about abortion, but I have known women personally who make a great effort to assert that they are cavalier about the act. Pro-life tracts which glorify and depict post-operative women as traumatized no doubt play up the stress for effect, but I do think they are effective propaganda because it seems highly plausible that abortion is a traumatic and psychically charged act. Acceptance of this reality is the first step to some sort of operational modus vivendi between the two sides of the debate. It is a nod to the reality that there are things outside the rational and explicable at work here, forces deeply personal and private that defy simply clarification into talking points.
When individuals speak of abortion in a political context, they have their talking points. For example, if you are "pro-choice" (support abortion-rights) you believe that a woman has a right to privacy, a right to her own body, etc. (if you are an anarcho-capitalist you would reframe it as a woman having a right to her own bodily property). If you are "pro-life" (oppose abortion-rights) you would assert (more or less) that life-starts-at-conception, or that there is a sanctity of life, and so on.
The general mode of thought here is to present axioms, infer propositions and offer up a chain of reasoning by which you support your argument. This is great in terms of clarifying the positions linguistically, but I believe it has resulted in a perception of more polarization than actually exists substantively on this issue and tends to expose contradictions in behavior.
For example, pro-life individuals often question the logic of pro-choice Catholics who believe that abortion is wrong personally, who even grant that it is murder, but still support its legality. I tend to sympathize with their confusion because I share it. Nevertheless, I must go one step further, and ask, why do the pro-life individuals not take up arms (as some have) in defense of the rights of human beings, persons, who they believe are being exterminated, acts of infanticide which in their literature are labeled a Holocaust? Some pro-life individuals might be pacifists, but many are not. In the past year many conservatives have defended an invasion of Iraq, resulting in the shedding of American life, in the name of freeing Iraqis from the bondage of a dictator. Why is it that these same pro-life conservative Americans simply choose to use political means (which have for the past generation been rather ineffectual) in opposing what they believe to be the murder of millions of innocents, potential co-citizens?
I think the problem is that we are overemphasizing reflective rational thinking. I don't believe that language expresses well the gray area of personhood that the fetus encompasses. Though pro-life individuals will assert an identity between an autonomous person and the fetus, their actions belie such a belief. Rather, the fetus exists in a gray land between non-human and human, it demands political action in its interests, but does not command the moral outrage that is necessary for violent action. Similarly, though some abortion-rights supporters might be unequivocal about their support for the legality of the practice and might even assent to the assertion by some activists that the fetus is just a "clump of cells," if like Bill Clinton they were confronted with an aborted fetus in a jar they would recoil. Though they might make the assertion that the fetus is just a clump of cells, intuitively they feel that it is something more, it is the gray land between cells and person, and so its naked presentation can elict revulsion, shock and outrage.
At this point you might be wondering if I am suggesting a Kassian "Wisdom of Repugnance" argument is appropriate to this issue. Not really, because I don't think repugnance is inherently wise. It just is. We must not deny that we have predispositions, biases, that issue from the basic structure of our brains, shaped by evolution and given form by the interaction between our genetic template and environmental input. When I titled this post the "Theater of Abortion" I am playing upon Daniel Dennett's idea of the "Cartesian Theater," that we have the conceit that all our actions and beliefs are exposed to the world and under the guidance of the conscious mind. When it comes to abortion we behave in such a fashion, as if our religious teachings or secular political beliefs are the sum totality of our feeling on this topic. I think this is a superficial element that is easily extracted and repackaged for political debate, but there are things going on "under the hood" that must be addressed.
Many cognitive scientists have suggested that the human mind is organized as specialized modules, independent functions designed by evolution to deal with certain problems. Additionally we have cognitive predispositions to various behaviors and mental constructs. We learn language with ease, all humans share a similar taxonomy for animals (folk biology), we tend to have similar interest in gossip (Theory of the Mind), even toddlers have a basic understanding of physics (folk physics). Infants when presented with animals or objects can clearly anticipate that the animal will move and interact with it in a protean fashion, while mechanical objects tend to be stable or reactive. They are surprised when objects disappear or reappear in peculiar ways, or manifest behaviors outside the anticipated range for their "kind." I am not saying here that humans are born with a knowledge of rocks and birds, I am just saying that we have predispositions, templates, neural channels, that are ready to receive inputs that express certain ideas or feed us specific stimuli.
What does this have to do with abortion? Well, let's look at the example of a dead body first. If you are a Abrahamic monotheist you officially accept the idea of bodily resurrection so the body is sacred. Fine. I am skeptical that most Abrahamic monotheists emphasize this idea over the alternative that the soul ascends to heaven after death leaving the body to decay (the more Hellenistic rather than Hebrew strand in Judeo-Christo-Islamic thought), but you have an axiomatic out. Nevertheless, I would assert that non-Abrahamic religionists and nonreligious people still imbue the body with some amount of sanctity that their axioms would deny as rational. After all the body is not going to be resurrected, it is empty of life or soul, it is an inanimate piece of decaying flesh. But still the body is generally revered in some fashion. Why? The dead body still looks human! It triggers cognitive templates of "humanness," and so you still want to interact with it in a human like fashion. You also note that the dead body is inanimate, as if it was an object. So you know it isn't human no matter what your gut tells you. The body is in a no-mans land, it is not recycled organic matter quite yet, but neither is it an animate human being. We need to honor and respect it, after which we can bury it (where it is decomposed and dehumanized) or cremate it (a conscious attempt to blot out its signs of human-form). After this it ceases to trouble our imaginations and we can focus on the memory of the individual as they were when they lived.
Now you probably know where I am going: just as the dead body stimulates the human template, so images of a fetus, or the knowledge of what a fetus looks like will tend to stimulate the human template. I don't care how much N.A.R.A.L. tells you it's just a clump of cells, once the cell develops and organizes to the point where the fetus is recognizably humanoid, then you enter the gray land of not-human and human. But the fetus is not a fully fleshed person, it does not interact with us, it is not autonomous and not normally animate. In other words it does not trigger all the cues that tells us that someone is human and we should interact with them as a human. And so you have the reason why pro-life people can get enraged, but not enraged enough to pick up their guns and prevent murder.
Of course you aren't going to get pro-life and pro-choice people to get together and admit, "Yeah, the fetus is somewhat human, somewhat not," and make peace. Nevertheless, I think the Japanese have one answer: they mourn the aborted fetus. Perhaps the perception by some pro-lifers that abortion-rights supporters are callous about life could be mitigated if there was more public acknowledgement and ritualistic mourning, something that indicates that something not quite animal and not quite human was killed, if not in any rationally definable fashion, at least on some instinctive level. Human beings are social animals. The rhetoric of abortion-rights tends to deny this, that is, it is a choice between a woman and her God (or what not), but that woman lives in a world filled with other human beings who care about her and her choices. I do not mean to imply that women should be ashamed or repentant about abortion, but I have known women personally who make a great effort to assert that they are cavalier about the act. Pro-life tracts which glorify and depict post-operative women as traumatized no doubt play up the stress for effect, but I do think they are effective propaganda because it seems highly plausible that abortion is a traumatic and psychically charged act. Acceptance of this reality is the first step to some sort of operational modus vivendi between the two sides of the debate. It is a nod to the reality that there are things outside the rational and explicable at work here, forces deeply personal and private that defy simply clarification into talking points.
Saturday, November 20, 2004
Clintonian shade of Purple
Thoughtful excerpts from Bill Clinton's speech at the dedication of his Presidential Library:
Democrats and Republicans both would be wise to remember that slogan. The Democrats have never really been able to understand how inclusive the concept of "The People" needs to be for Clintonian success to follow. And it's clear that today's GOP, in preparation to eviscerate any semblance of oversight for ethical lapses, has forgotten it entirely.
My deep personal disappointment in him aside, I still can't help but consider him the most authentically American president, genuinely committed to repesenting all of America and not just one arbitrary political shade, in modern history. Clinton was a great President because he never thought of this nation as "our team and their team" and that was deeply reflected in his policies. Clinton was the President of all of us.
and of course, he always had the best sense of humor:
I believe the job of a president is to understand and explain the time in which he serves, to set forth a vision of where we need to go and a strategy of how to get there, and then to pursue it with all its mind and heart, bending only in the face of error or new circumstances and the crisis which are unforeseen; a problem that affects all of us.
When I became president, the world was a new and very different place, as I said. And I thought about how we ought to confront it.
America has two great dominant strands of political thought -- we're represented up here on this stage -- conservatism, which, at its very best, draws lines that should not be crossed; and progressivism, which, at its very best, breaks down barrier that are no longer needed or should never have been erected in the first place.
It seemed to me that in 1992 we needed to do both to prepare America for the 21st century: to be more conservative in things like erasing the deficit and paying down the debt and preventing crime and punishing criminals and protecting and supporting families, and enforcing things like child support laws and reforming the military to meet the new challenges of the 21st century.
And we needed to be more progressive in creating good jobs, reducing poverty, increasing the quality of public education, opening the doors of college to all, increasing access to health care, investing more in science and technology, and building new alliances with our former adversaries, and working for peace across the world and peace in America across all the lines that divide us.
CLINTON: Now, when I proposed to do both, we said that all of them were consistent with the great American values of opportunity, responsibility and community. We labeled the approach "New Democrat." It then became known as the third way, as it was embraced by progressive parties across the world.
But I liked the slogan we had way back in 1992, "Putting People First." Because, in the end, I always kept score by a simple measure: Were ordinary people better off when I stopped than when I started?
Democrats and Republicans both would be wise to remember that slogan. The Democrats have never really been able to understand how inclusive the concept of "The People" needs to be for Clintonian success to follow. And it's clear that today's GOP, in preparation to eviscerate any semblance of oversight for ethical lapses, has forgotten it entirely.
My deep personal disappointment in him aside, I still can't help but consider him the most authentically American president, genuinely committed to repesenting all of America and not just one arbitrary political shade, in modern history. Clinton was a great President because he never thought of this nation as "our team and their team" and that was deeply reflected in his policies. Clinton was the President of all of us.
and of course, he always had the best sense of humor:
Yes, this library is the symbol of a bridge, a bridge to the 21st century. It's been called one of the great achievements of the new age, and a British magazine said it looked like a glorified house trailer.
(LAUGHTER)
And I thought, "Well, that's about me, you know. I'm a little red and a little blue."
(LAUGHTER)
Thursday, November 18, 2004
Evolution Discussion http://bjulrich.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_bjulrich_archive.html#110079710701570629
A conservative friend of mine and I have been discussing how evolution, intelligent design, and the like fit into a hypothetical school's biology curriculum. His initial post is here, my response here, and his response here. The thing that leaps out in all this is that we are having a discussion rather than calling each other names like anti-religious leftwinger and rightwing theocrat. If people can discuss this stuff, what can't they discuss if only they focus on solutions rather than winning a zero-sum game?
NOT a purple Dean Nation http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1931498717/ref=ase_unmedia-20/103-5161939-0487050?v=glance&s=books
Two of Aziz's posts this week generated a bit of a dust-up in the comments (Divider not a uniter, and Defuse the demonization cycle). It seems to me that this shows a bit of a "red-blue split" here in Dean Nation, and one that can be explained by by George Lakoff's concept of framing. Further, this might help us all understand the red-blue split in the country a bit better.
The dust-up stemmed from Dean's use of the name "Slobodan Milosovic" in connection with his description of techniques which Bush used in winning the election. For some people, "Slobodan Milosovic" evokes a strong, dominating frame of a demon, Bush is obviously not a demon, so the facts of what the rest of what Dean said did not fit that frame. For others, the frame was not evoked, and we just saw a very loose analogy between types of techniques used. (Actually, Dean inadvertantly created a NEW frame, and if repeated and repeated then the words "Slobodan Milosovic" would not invoke a demon frame but a "sleazy Republican tactics" frame... this is not to say it is a GOOD frame, it probably isn't.)
I'm currently reading Lakoff's book. It is quite interesting and explains why (1) elections are decided by voters who vote their identity (not necessarily their interests), (2) how "truth will NOT set you free" (explaining what blue/red staters see as "the facts" will not convince red/blue staters of anything, because facts are useless without frames to stick to), and (3) how DLC-like "moving to the right" is absolute suicide for Democrats. Among a lot of other things.
Maybe I'll post more here as I read the book. But I encourage others to get it. Also, much of it is excerpted on the Rockridge Institute site, which is definitely worth a browse. Your first impression might be that it sounds a little new-agey (e.g. strict father v.s. nurturing parent worldviews), but there is a lot of substance there.
UPDATE (Aziz): Moved the bulk of the post to the Extended Entry. Preserve front-page real-estate!
The dust-up stemmed from Dean's use of the name "Slobodan Milosovic" in connection with his description of techniques which Bush used in winning the election. For some people, "Slobodan Milosovic" evokes a strong, dominating frame of a demon, Bush is obviously not a demon, so the facts of what the rest of what Dean said did not fit that frame. For others, the frame was not evoked, and we just saw a very loose analogy between types of techniques used. (Actually, Dean inadvertantly created a NEW frame, and if repeated and repeated then the words "Slobodan Milosovic" would not invoke a demon frame but a "sleazy Republican tactics" frame... this is not to say it is a GOOD frame, it probably isn't.)
I'm currently reading Lakoff's book. It is quite interesting and explains why (1) elections are decided by voters who vote their identity (not necessarily their interests), (2) how "truth will NOT set you free" (explaining what blue/red staters see as "the facts" will not convince red/blue staters of anything, because facts are useless without frames to stick to), and (3) how DLC-like "moving to the right" is absolute suicide for Democrats. Among a lot of other things.
Maybe I'll post more here as I read the book. But I encourage others to get it. Also, much of it is excerpted on the Rockridge Institute site, which is definitely worth a browse. Your first impression might be that it sounds a little new-agey (e.g. strict father v.s. nurturing parent worldviews), but there is a lot of substance there.
UPDATE (Aziz): Moved the bulk of the post to the Extended Entry. Preserve front-page real-estate!
Rights of Life
I support Roe vs. Wade. The states-rights solution is simply not acceptable to me for the same reason that states' rights would not be acceptable for civil rights.
As a classical liberal, I firmly believe that the right of an individual over their person is supreme, and inviolate from interference from (1) government, (2) social entities, or (3) other individuals. As a humanist, I believe that the dignity of life is its single most important metric. These two principles, taken together, are why I consider myself a "modern" liberal.
However, with rights come responsibilities...
The problem with most pro-life positions is the complete denial of the classical principle of indivdual liberty. Liberal not in the "leftist/progressive" sense, but rather the concept of liberty itself. Fundamentally, "pro-life" is an autocratic, not a liberal, stance. Using the power of the state to prevent abortion is just as illiberal as using the power of the state to force abortions (such as is done in China).
Why isn't using the power of the state to prevent murder equally autocratic? Because there is universal moral concensus, independent of theological arguments, that murder of someone else (ie, external to your self) is unnacceptable. Murder is the ultimate violation of an individual's liberty.
The problem with most pro-choice positions is the complete denial of the humanist principle of the dignity of life. Humanist in the sense of celebrating the potential of the human being to contribute to society, be a force for good.
Why isn't euthanasia equally anti-humanistic? Because keeping someone alive beyond their time, in severe pain and no hope of cure, is cruelty, and violates that dignity of life. Death is a natural process, not one to be feared, or staved off desperately at all costs. Dignity and meaning is as essential to life as blood flowing through veins or breath intake of lungs.
It is precisely because the unborn child is in a grey area - neither completely "individual" in its own right, nor fully integrated into the mother's person. There is no such grey area with murder of another person. The existence of this grey area between autonomous individuality and dependent sub-entity is the driving force between allowing abortion at earlier stages of pregnancy and outlawing it at later phases.
These are difficult and highly subjective moral issues. But at the extremes, away from the grey area, we can at least claim more certainty. A child just weeks from full term is nearly autonomous - therefore, partial birth abortion procedures are indeed close cousins to murder. However, immediately post-conception, the fetus is barely more than a clump of the mother's own flesh, with some traces of genetic information from outside. Abortion in this case is a close cousin of liposuction or trimming your nails. I am deliberately using inflamatory analogies to murder or liposuction for these extremes to force those of us encamped solidly upon one or the other end of the spectrum to assess the full implications of our position. We must choose our principles first and then accept the consequences.
I am a classical liberal, in that I believe that the individual is an autonomous entity. I also am a humanist, which is why I support "modern" liberal causes such as welfare, social safety nets, etc because they provide the dignityof opportunity to the common man who for sake of circumstance may not enjoy the priveleged life that I lead. I think that it is possible - no, compulsory - to respect life and to appreciate and value the moral argument of preserving it when possible - but also to recognize that preserving life for its own sake, in violation of the principles of humanism and liberty, is not preserving that which makes life worth living.
And what about collateral damage in war? Next time.
As a classical liberal, I firmly believe that the right of an individual over their person is supreme, and inviolate from interference from (1) government, (2) social entities, or (3) other individuals. As a humanist, I believe that the dignity of life is its single most important metric. These two principles, taken together, are why I consider myself a "modern" liberal.
However, with rights come responsibilities...
The problem with most pro-life positions is the complete denial of the classical principle of indivdual liberty. Liberal not in the "leftist/progressive" sense, but rather the concept of liberty itself. Fundamentally, "pro-life" is an autocratic, not a liberal, stance. Using the power of the state to prevent abortion is just as illiberal as using the power of the state to force abortions (such as is done in China).
Why isn't using the power of the state to prevent murder equally autocratic? Because there is universal moral concensus, independent of theological arguments, that murder of someone else (ie, external to your self) is unnacceptable. Murder is the ultimate violation of an individual's liberty.
The problem with most pro-choice positions is the complete denial of the humanist principle of the dignity of life. Humanist in the sense of celebrating the potential of the human being to contribute to society, be a force for good.
Why isn't euthanasia equally anti-humanistic? Because keeping someone alive beyond their time, in severe pain and no hope of cure, is cruelty, and violates that dignity of life. Death is a natural process, not one to be feared, or staved off desperately at all costs. Dignity and meaning is as essential to life as blood flowing through veins or breath intake of lungs.
It is precisely because the unborn child is in a grey area - neither completely "individual" in its own right, nor fully integrated into the mother's person. There is no such grey area with murder of another person. The existence of this grey area between autonomous individuality and dependent sub-entity is the driving force between allowing abortion at earlier stages of pregnancy and outlawing it at later phases.
These are difficult and highly subjective moral issues. But at the extremes, away from the grey area, we can at least claim more certainty. A child just weeks from full term is nearly autonomous - therefore, partial birth abortion procedures are indeed close cousins to murder. However, immediately post-conception, the fetus is barely more than a clump of the mother's own flesh, with some traces of genetic information from outside. Abortion in this case is a close cousin of liposuction or trimming your nails. I am deliberately using inflamatory analogies to murder or liposuction for these extremes to force those of us encamped solidly upon one or the other end of the spectrum to assess the full implications of our position. We must choose our principles first and then accept the consequences.
I am a classical liberal, in that I believe that the individual is an autonomous entity. I also am a humanist, which is why I support "modern" liberal causes such as welfare, social safety nets, etc because they provide the dignityof opportunity to the common man who for sake of circumstance may not enjoy the priveleged life that I lead. I think that it is possible - no, compulsory - to respect life and to appreciate and value the moral argument of preserving it when possible - but also to recognize that preserving life for its own sake, in violation of the principles of humanism and liberty, is not preserving that which makes life worth living.
And what about collateral damage in war? Next time.
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
defuse the demonization cycle http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2004_11_14_dneiwert_archive.html#110045679136011973
I took some heat in comments for arguing that Dean's rhetoric about Bush and Milosovic hurts rather than helps the Purple cause. David Neiwert, whom I admire tremendously for his yeoman's work in chronicling the illiberal extremism on the right, has a solid post that relates to the issue. He writes:
The key is that the cycle of demonization serves to benefit extremist conservatives. For liberal moderates (and conservative moderates, who are clearly not wanted under the GOP's supposed "big tent") to prevail means fighting on fair turf. The voices here that argue we should meet venom with venom are, quote simply, playing directly into the extremists' hands. I reject the false dichotomy. So should you.
Highly recommend reading the rest of David's post, as it is far more eloquent and clear in its purpose than I am being.
Unfortunately, the response of many blue-staters has not exactly been helpful. Somewhat unsurprisingly, they have in some cases returned the contempt with contempt. These have ranged from suggestions of blue-state secession and flights to Canada to rebuking the South in no uncertain terms. Some of this reaction is silly, and most of it is understandable catharsis, but liberals have to understand that it only fuels the dynamic at work here.
One of the keys to this dynamic is that both sides have been portraying the conflict in terms of broad stereotypes of urban, suburban and rural dwellers. When the red-state ideologues view the political landscape, they see pockets of godless, atheistic crypto-socialists populating the blue urban centers. For blue-state ideologues, the results of the 2004 election are proof that rural America is populated largely with gun-toting, Bible-thumping moralists who condone bigotry.
It's clear that conservatives have neither the incentive nor the intention of breaking this cycle; after all, they have benefited from it. It is indeed entirely by their design. If liberals are interested in breaking the cycle, they're going to have to discard their stereotype
The key is that the cycle of demonization serves to benefit extremist conservatives. For liberal moderates (and conservative moderates, who are clearly not wanted under the GOP's supposed "big tent") to prevail means fighting on fair turf. The voices here that argue we should meet venom with venom are, quote simply, playing directly into the extremists' hands. I reject the false dichotomy. So should you.
Highly recommend reading the rest of David's post, as it is far more eloquent and clear in its purpose than I am being.
Monday, November 15, 2004
Divider, not a uniter http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000718777
Howard is already taking heat for this one:
A fair charge?
As usual with Dean, he makes a valid point but drapes it with an inflammatory metaphor that completely obscures it - and in the process, undermines his own goal.
Dean's point is that the GOP strategy solidly rests on a foundation of drawing a dividing line across America - where "Us" are righteous and "Them" are craven, and that teh very concept of a principled vote for Them is a contradiction. There are plenty on the supporters on the left who share that opinion. But the difference is that the Kerry campaign did not enshrine that attitude as electoral strategy. The Bush campaign never even tried for teh Independent vote - and Kerry did. Bush's campaign events were for the true believers only, complete with loyalty oaths. Kerry's were open to all.
For all the hand-wringing by self-identified Red Staters about how the Blues hate them, the venom for the Blue matches it equally. Here's what a Red guy thinks about Blue children:
That's MY daughter he's talking about. And the stereotypes he proudly displays are the result of a cultural war that has been fomented largely by the conservative media, especially on talk radio (I live in Houston. I listen to this stuff daily) where "liberals" are demonized hourly for being everything that the True Patriots fancy themselves holier than.
The truth is, that there has indeed been a culture war ging on - and regardless of who started it, it needs to stop.
"The truth is the president of the United States used the same device that Slobodan Milosevic used in Serbia. When you appeal to homophobia, when you appeal to sexism, when you appeal to racism, that is extraordinarily damaging to the country," Dean charged. "I know George Bush. I served with him for six years [as a fellow governor]. He's not a homophobe. He's not a racist. He's not a sexist. In some ways, what he did was worse … because he knew better."
A fair charge?
As usual with Dean, he makes a valid point but drapes it with an inflammatory metaphor that completely obscures it - and in the process, undermines his own goal.
Dean's point is that the GOP strategy solidly rests on a foundation of drawing a dividing line across America - where "Us" are righteous and "Them" are craven, and that teh very concept of a principled vote for Them is a contradiction. There are plenty on the supporters on the left who share that opinion. But the difference is that the Kerry campaign did not enshrine that attitude as electoral strategy. The Bush campaign never even tried for teh Independent vote - and Kerry did. Bush's campaign events were for the true believers only, complete with loyalty oaths. Kerry's were open to all.
For all the hand-wringing by self-identified Red Staters about how the Blues hate them, the venom for the Blue matches it equally. Here's what a Red guy thinks about Blue children:
spoiled, bored, self-centered, angry, dispirited, whiny and uncontrollable thugs, sociopaths and cowards.
That's MY daughter he's talking about. And the stereotypes he proudly displays are the result of a cultural war that has been fomented largely by the conservative media, especially on talk radio (I live in Houston. I listen to this stuff daily) where "liberals" are demonized hourly for being everything that the True Patriots fancy themselves holier than.
The truth is, that there has indeed been a culture war ging on - and regardless of who started it, it needs to stop.
Sunday, November 14, 2004
Letting history do your work
Update: I have cross-posted over at my blog. Feel free to join any discussion threads that might pop up over there.
Last week I linked to a page which indicated that my political preferences were "Right Libertarian." In four words I could be described as "socially liberal fiscally conservative," but that's a simplification, because my emphasis on process and localism means that I am a republican federalist before I am an ideologue. As a background for this post I would like to offer that I have lived for the past four years in a very "blue" small town in southern Oregon, but I went to a high school in a very "red" small town in eastern Oregon. On an individual level I have known people who were convinced that Democrats worshipped Satan and Republicans were Nazis. In a Republican milieu I often feel somewhat like a Democrat, and in a Democratic milieu I feel like a Republican...
During the last election cycle I voted for John Kerry, mostly because I thought that George W. Bush's foreign policy had a high probability of failure, and, I wanted the Republican Congress to begin behaving like Republicans again.
Now that we are going to go through the second phase of Bush II, many of my friends are rather frightened. In the arena of foreign policy, I tend to share their qualms, though with less rabidity. On the other hand, I think the terror over a restoration of pre-1960s social conservatism is overblown. The America that I see at the end of 2004 is simply not anymore socially conservative than Bill Clinton's America. In fact, it is far more "progressive" in many ways.
Why don't we start with porn, an issue many men would rather not speak of, but which is near & dear to our "hearts" when we are single. When John Ashcroft became Attorney General there were some well founded concerns that there would be a "rollback" of the relative pornotopia of the Clinton administration. The breaking of the Internet during the Clinton years was a boon for the adult web because the Clinton Justice Department viewed porn with benign neglect, choosing to focus on other more pressing issues. With the election of Bush in 2000 many were concerned that prosecutions might ensue. And certainly there have been clamp downs on the most extreme porn purveyors, but though I haven't done a scientific survey, I suspect the growth of the adult web continues apace during the Bush administration. Some of you might think this is a trivial observation, but it is a metric, a leading indicator on the pulse of the country. Britney is more lascivicious than she was during the Clinton years, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire seems tame now and my 12 year old brother is deleting "Zoo Lovin'" porn spam from his hotmail account. A repressed Victorian Age has not been ushered in because the concerns of social conservaives have been superseded by technological realities and pop culture inevitabilities.
In the area of gay rights the debate has also moved quite far. Remember, Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act! Today, George Bush is trying to one up him, but no one believes that Congress will actually pass the Constitutional Amendment. Civil Unions are part of the everyday parlance and some jurisdictions have even solemnized gay marriages. Far from being a trailblazer of social conservatism in this area, the Republican administration is fighting a losing rearguard action. Most young people, even Republicans, agree that gays are here, and they are going to stay. Queer as Folk arrived in 2000 with the Bush administration and now homosexual make-out sessions on T.V. don't have the capacity to shock as they once did. All is not good in the world of gay rights, and equality is not here, but there has been a sea change in my lifetime. It took 100 years between 1865 and 1965 for black Americans to become fully normalized as citizens of our republic, it stands to reason that it will take another decade or two for homosexual individuals to become just another banal feature of our civic world.
OK, abortion. I favor abortion rights. But if Bush appoints a conservative Supreme Court Justice to team up with Scalia and Thomas, I still don't think Roe vs. Wade will be overturned. Additionally, even if it is, I don't think it will matter. States will then have the right to do what they want about abortion according to popular consensus. That means Utah and a whole bunch of conservative states will restrict it. That means almost nothing will happen in states like California and New York. But you know what, in terms of raw numbers, it won't matter much, because it's already difficult to find a place to get abortions in extremely conservative states anyhow! Unlike the United States, Europe legalized abortion through popular mandates, and so you have a patchwork of laws, with some states like Ireland and Portugal banning the practice, others like England with relatively liberal abortion laws, and others like Germany somewhere in the middle. And unlike the United States abortion is not nearly the controversial issue it is on this side of the Atlantic, and I think part of it is that the democratic process worked its way through the issue.
This is just a general sketch with a few issues, but my overall point is simple, the cultural Left has won the substantive battles, leaving the Republicans with rhetorical victories in "values." The rise of South Park Republicans is a leading indicator. The fact that "Christian rock" is hard to differentiate from "lite alternative" aside from its relatively positive message is another indicator of the acidic effect that worldly pop culture is having even on the explicit bastions of pre-1960s culture. History marches on. The fact is that many social conservatives are so vehement because in their hearts they know they are losing. The anger and contempt that some on the cultural Left direct toward "hicks" or "white trash" does nothing more than inflame them (I do not presume to say that this is a common or universal sentiment, but I've heard it often enough). Here you have the peculiarity of a culture moving Left, but economically depressed people shifting Right because of values issues. Ultimately the elites continue to push the envelope, but the masses can make their voices heard through democratic means.
To make arguments on cultural issues I believe Democrats have had to shift to the far Left simply because their central planks have been conceded (don't discrimate against gays, don't outlaw abortion, etc.). John Kerry defending public funding of abortion is something most people are not comfortable with. The gay rights movement making a push for marriage equality through the courts simply slots into the stereotype promoted by Rightist culture warriors toward the masses. Howard Dean saying he didn't want to "listen to evangelical preachers anymore" when they minister to 1/3 of the American population at the same time when those who have "No religion" doubled in the past 10 years emphasizes what the cultural Left opposes rather than what is promotes.
You can probably gather from the above that on the core issues I tend to be in agreemant with the cultural Left. My main difference is that I do not believe in such an aggressive national promotion of social change when core principles have already been secured, as the winds of American history tend be on the side of shifts toward more freedom, more tolerance and more pluralism. Rather than rowing ahead I would prefer to allow the winds to fill the sails and just glide on.
Personally, though I disagree with the party of the Left on economic issues in general, I tend to agree with the analysis of my friend John Emerson that economic issues have been neglected by Democrats. Now, I am not saying there is no difference between the Democrats and Republicans on social & economic issues, but my current perception is that the Republican elite tends to pay lip service to social issues while focusing in economic issues in execution while the Democratic elite tends to pay lip service to economic issues while focusing on taking an absolute stand on particular social issues (abortion rights for example).
My own feeling as a libertarian who is often dismayed by the megalomania displayed by leaders of the Republicans and Democrats is that we need a vigorous two party system to maintain a balance. At this point I feel we have a choice between the tax & spend party on the Left and the borrow & spend on the Right. For the Left to take up its proper role in checking and blocking the party of the Right, it needs to refocus in a substantive non-symbolic fashion the importance of bread & butter issues. But any shift will not be accepted as sincere if the Democrats do not pull back from a massive cultural push on all fronts for social liberation through the federal judiciary, and I'm not just speaking of gay rights, but social issues in general. If a shift does not occur I suspect that the Democrats will always remain at the cultural center of American politics, but ten years shifted out of phase (that is, always about a decade ahead of its time), always at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Last week I linked to a page which indicated that my political preferences were "Right Libertarian." In four words I could be described as "socially liberal fiscally conservative," but that's a simplification, because my emphasis on process and localism means that I am a republican federalist before I am an ideologue. As a background for this post I would like to offer that I have lived for the past four years in a very "blue" small town in southern Oregon, but I went to a high school in a very "red" small town in eastern Oregon. On an individual level I have known people who were convinced that Democrats worshipped Satan and Republicans were Nazis. In a Republican milieu I often feel somewhat like a Democrat, and in a Democratic milieu I feel like a Republican...
During the last election cycle I voted for John Kerry, mostly because I thought that George W. Bush's foreign policy had a high probability of failure, and, I wanted the Republican Congress to begin behaving like Republicans again.
Now that we are going to go through the second phase of Bush II, many of my friends are rather frightened. In the arena of foreign policy, I tend to share their qualms, though with less rabidity. On the other hand, I think the terror over a restoration of pre-1960s social conservatism is overblown. The America that I see at the end of 2004 is simply not anymore socially conservative than Bill Clinton's America. In fact, it is far more "progressive" in many ways.
Why don't we start with porn, an issue many men would rather not speak of, but which is near & dear to our "hearts" when we are single. When John Ashcroft became Attorney General there were some well founded concerns that there would be a "rollback" of the relative pornotopia of the Clinton administration. The breaking of the Internet during the Clinton years was a boon for the adult web because the Clinton Justice Department viewed porn with benign neglect, choosing to focus on other more pressing issues. With the election of Bush in 2000 many were concerned that prosecutions might ensue. And certainly there have been clamp downs on the most extreme porn purveyors, but though I haven't done a scientific survey, I suspect the growth of the adult web continues apace during the Bush administration. Some of you might think this is a trivial observation, but it is a metric, a leading indicator on the pulse of the country. Britney is more lascivicious than she was during the Clinton years, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire seems tame now and my 12 year old brother is deleting "Zoo Lovin'" porn spam from his hotmail account. A repressed Victorian Age has not been ushered in because the concerns of social conservaives have been superseded by technological realities and pop culture inevitabilities.
In the area of gay rights the debate has also moved quite far. Remember, Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act! Today, George Bush is trying to one up him, but no one believes that Congress will actually pass the Constitutional Amendment. Civil Unions are part of the everyday parlance and some jurisdictions have even solemnized gay marriages. Far from being a trailblazer of social conservatism in this area, the Republican administration is fighting a losing rearguard action. Most young people, even Republicans, agree that gays are here, and they are going to stay. Queer as Folk arrived in 2000 with the Bush administration and now homosexual make-out sessions on T.V. don't have the capacity to shock as they once did. All is not good in the world of gay rights, and equality is not here, but there has been a sea change in my lifetime. It took 100 years between 1865 and 1965 for black Americans to become fully normalized as citizens of our republic, it stands to reason that it will take another decade or two for homosexual individuals to become just another banal feature of our civic world.
OK, abortion. I favor abortion rights. But if Bush appoints a conservative Supreme Court Justice to team up with Scalia and Thomas, I still don't think Roe vs. Wade will be overturned. Additionally, even if it is, I don't think it will matter. States will then have the right to do what they want about abortion according to popular consensus. That means Utah and a whole bunch of conservative states will restrict it. That means almost nothing will happen in states like California and New York. But you know what, in terms of raw numbers, it won't matter much, because it's already difficult to find a place to get abortions in extremely conservative states anyhow! Unlike the United States, Europe legalized abortion through popular mandates, and so you have a patchwork of laws, with some states like Ireland and Portugal banning the practice, others like England with relatively liberal abortion laws, and others like Germany somewhere in the middle. And unlike the United States abortion is not nearly the controversial issue it is on this side of the Atlantic, and I think part of it is that the democratic process worked its way through the issue.
This is just a general sketch with a few issues, but my overall point is simple, the cultural Left has won the substantive battles, leaving the Republicans with rhetorical victories in "values." The rise of South Park Republicans is a leading indicator. The fact that "Christian rock" is hard to differentiate from "lite alternative" aside from its relatively positive message is another indicator of the acidic effect that worldly pop culture is having even on the explicit bastions of pre-1960s culture. History marches on. The fact is that many social conservatives are so vehement because in their hearts they know they are losing. The anger and contempt that some on the cultural Left direct toward "hicks" or "white trash" does nothing more than inflame them (I do not presume to say that this is a common or universal sentiment, but I've heard it often enough). Here you have the peculiarity of a culture moving Left, but economically depressed people shifting Right because of values issues. Ultimately the elites continue to push the envelope, but the masses can make their voices heard through democratic means.
To make arguments on cultural issues I believe Democrats have had to shift to the far Left simply because their central planks have been conceded (don't discrimate against gays, don't outlaw abortion, etc.). John Kerry defending public funding of abortion is something most people are not comfortable with. The gay rights movement making a push for marriage equality through the courts simply slots into the stereotype promoted by Rightist culture warriors toward the masses. Howard Dean saying he didn't want to "listen to evangelical preachers anymore" when they minister to 1/3 of the American population at the same time when those who have "No religion" doubled in the past 10 years emphasizes what the cultural Left opposes rather than what is promotes.
You can probably gather from the above that on the core issues I tend to be in agreemant with the cultural Left. My main difference is that I do not believe in such an aggressive national promotion of social change when core principles have already been secured, as the winds of American history tend be on the side of shifts toward more freedom, more tolerance and more pluralism. Rather than rowing ahead I would prefer to allow the winds to fill the sails and just glide on.
Personally, though I disagree with the party of the Left on economic issues in general, I tend to agree with the analysis of my friend John Emerson that economic issues have been neglected by Democrats. Now, I am not saying there is no difference between the Democrats and Republicans on social & economic issues, but my current perception is that the Republican elite tends to pay lip service to social issues while focusing in economic issues in execution while the Democratic elite tends to pay lip service to economic issues while focusing on taking an absolute stand on particular social issues (abortion rights for example).
My own feeling as a libertarian who is often dismayed by the megalomania displayed by leaders of the Republicans and Democrats is that we need a vigorous two party system to maintain a balance. At this point I feel we have a choice between the tax & spend party on the Left and the borrow & spend on the Right. For the Left to take up its proper role in checking and blocking the party of the Right, it needs to refocus in a substantive non-symbolic fashion the importance of bread & butter issues. But any shift will not be accepted as sincere if the Democrats do not pull back from a massive cultural push on all fronts for social liberation through the federal judiciary, and I'm not just speaking of gay rights, but social issues in general. If a shift does not occur I suspect that the Democrats will always remain at the cultural center of American politics, but ten years shifted out of phase (that is, always about a decade ahead of its time), always at the wrong place at the wrong time.
faith, not culture. values, not marketing.
The link to Brad Carson's lucid editorial in TNR has been widely praised, with good reason. If you don't have a TNR account, read it here. However, New Donkey has a very cogent analysis that is in one sense even more important:
Agreed. As a devout man myself, who just ended 30 days of pious observance (Eid Mubarak to everyone), the very word "cultural" is itself a kind of denigration. For people like myself, it's not about culture - it's about faith. Which itself is a deeply human enterprise - faith is what drives hope, what drives imagination, what drives ambition, what drives love. Those who sneer at faith don't realize that they themselves possess it and rely on it as well - just to a different degree.
The Right claims a monopoly on "values". But what those of us on the Left (disclosure: I am NOT a Democrat) need to do is fight for that word. The word "values" matters, it's "prime real estate" in the landscape of the public mind. Likewise, we can NOT allow "culture" to enter our lexicon, because it imediately imposes another barrier to surmount when trying to craft a true Purple alliance across the (IMHO arbitrary and falsely imposed) electoral divide.
We need to talk about faith, not "culture". And we need to reclaim "values" - by pointing out that when the Right uses that word, they really mean "marketing". The Right pays lip service to values while crafting a message tailored to hit all the right rhetorical buttons, but which represents a failure to abide by those values. The clearest example is the emerging crusade againt birth control - all under ostensibly pro-life justification. Does this make sense? I think not*.
Its time to actively talk about values - and to call out marketing when we see it. And it's time to ditch "culture", and embrace faith, at a human level, not a religious one.
If I sometimes seem obsessed with the cultural dimensions of contemporary politics, it's because I am in a continuing rage over two dumb ideas that far too many Democrats are determined to embrace, losing election after losing election:(1) economic issues, if you scream about them loudly and abrasively and "populistically" enough, will trump cultural issues, which are essentially phony, and (2) there's no way to deal with voters' cultural anxieties without abandoning Democratic principles, since cultural issues are all about banning abortion and gay marriage and so forth.
Agreed. As a devout man myself, who just ended 30 days of pious observance (Eid Mubarak to everyone), the very word "cultural" is itself a kind of denigration. For people like myself, it's not about culture - it's about faith. Which itself is a deeply human enterprise - faith is what drives hope, what drives imagination, what drives ambition, what drives love. Those who sneer at faith don't realize that they themselves possess it and rely on it as well - just to a different degree.
The Right claims a monopoly on "values". But what those of us on the Left (disclosure: I am NOT a Democrat) need to do is fight for that word. The word "values" matters, it's "prime real estate" in the landscape of the public mind. Likewise, we can NOT allow "culture" to enter our lexicon, because it imediately imposes another barrier to surmount when trying to craft a true Purple alliance across the (IMHO arbitrary and falsely imposed) electoral divide.
We need to talk about faith, not "culture". And we need to reclaim "values" - by pointing out that when the Right uses that word, they really mean "marketing". The Right pays lip service to values while crafting a message tailored to hit all the right rhetorical buttons, but which represents a failure to abide by those values. The clearest example is the emerging crusade againt birth control - all under ostensibly pro-life justification. Does this make sense? I think not*.
Its time to actively talk about values - and to call out marketing when we see it. And it's time to ditch "culture", and embrace faith, at a human level, not a religious one.
Thursday, November 11, 2004
Fight brewing over Dean for DNC Chair http://www.nysun.com/article/4549
what a surprise...
Look, I've been arguing for a Purple State approach myself, but the "political center" that the supposed "Democratic moderates" are speaking about is not a true synthesis of ideas from left and right, but rather Republican-lite. Look at the evidence:
Carson himself says it's unlikely, but the point here is that the Democrats are explicitly thinking they need to be conservative to win the South. That, despite the fact that more people voted for Kerry in Texas than any other state besides New York and California.
The Democrats basically want to try to continue playing the Red Blue game, and are willing to abandon their certitude to do it. It's clear that Dean's approach, unbashedly liberal and unafraid to make the argument that liberalism is worth being proud of, in blue or red territory, is the only way that the Democrats can really reinvent themselves successfully. Anything else will just be another failed excuse.
UPDATE: ABC News has more on this. A possible Rosenberg/Dean combination? Intriguing.. Rosenberg's NDN network was just as innovative, and visionary, as Dean's campaign, with respect to Hispanic outreach. The list of challenges that the new DNC Chair will face seems almost tailored for Dean's skills and leadership, too.
Democratic moderates are gearing up to mount a campaign to block a former presidential candidate, Howard Dean, from succeeding Terence McAuliffe as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, arguing that his election to the top post would prevent the party from moving to the political center.
Look, I've been arguing for a Purple State approach myself, but the "political center" that the supposed "Democratic moderates" are speaking about is not a true synthesis of ideas from left and right, but rather Republican-lite. Look at the evidence:
Speaking on CNN, an outgoing Democratic senator from Louisiana, John Breaux, warned that Dr. Dean is the wrong man for the job. "We're going to have to move to the center," Mr. Breaux said.
"There's nothing wrong with that," he added. "We can keep the base in by having good, solid Democratic ideas. But you'd better know how to expand them. Otherwise you're going to be a party that loses elections. We've lost three in a row now. And I think moving to the center is where the answer is."
[...]
Southern Democrats are also pushing former Rep. Brad Carson of Oklahoma, who lost a Senate bid last week to Republican Tom Coburn. Mr. Carson, who received the endorsement of the National Rifle Association, ran as a moderate.
While acknowledging that he would be a longshot, the chairman of the Oklahoma Democratic Party, Jay Parmley, said Mr. Carson is exactly the kind of politician the national party should be turning to. "We need a moderate and a conservative to lead us into the midterm elections," he said.
Carson himself says it's unlikely, but the point here is that the Democrats are explicitly thinking they need to be conservative to win the South. That, despite the fact that more people voted for Kerry in Texas than any other state besides New York and California.
The Democrats basically want to try to continue playing the Red Blue game, and are willing to abandon their certitude to do it. It's clear that Dean's approach, unbashedly liberal and unafraid to make the argument that liberalism is worth being proud of, in blue or red territory, is the only way that the Democrats can really reinvent themselves successfully. Anything else will just be another failed excuse.
UPDATE: ABC News has more on this. A possible Rosenberg/Dean combination? Intriguing.. Rosenberg's NDN network was just as innovative, and visionary, as Dean's campaign, with respect to Hispanic outreach. The list of challenges that the new DNC Chair will face seems almost tailored for Dean's skills and leadership, too.
Administrative notes
Some new rules in town, especially with regard to comments. Read on..
We now have two different types of comment systems:
* The Daily Open Threads are a free for all, anyone may post there, even anonymous users. No moderation will be performed whatsoever, it's a pure Darwinian environment.
* The Discussion threads attached to each post require registration with Blogger. No partisan insults, personal attacks, or other kinds of disrespect. No stereotypes of red staters or denigrations of President Bush. Basically, these comment threads are for an elevated tone and a serious debate. I will be deleting comments without warning to enforce this.
Note that registration with Blogger has the side benefits of automatically giving you your own blog! Any Dean Nation regular who registers to post comments and then starts blogging will be listed on request in a dedicated blogroll on the Dean Nation front page.
I can't think of any other blog that has a dual-comment system like the one we are experimenting with here. Let's see how that experiment runs. I think it will be very rewarding. My sincere desire is for the Discussion threads to become a true ideal of rational debate and dialog, beyond the narrow slice of moderate left. Respectful disagreement is the hallmark of success.
UPDATE: Pleaseleave any comments about the site layout, problems, etc here or in the open threads, I will try to tweak the site so its more pleasing to the eye and easier to read. Give me feedback!
We now have two different types of comment systems:
* The Daily Open Threads are a free for all, anyone may post there, even anonymous users. No moderation will be performed whatsoever, it's a pure Darwinian environment.
* The Discussion threads attached to each post require registration with Blogger. No partisan insults, personal attacks, or other kinds of disrespect. No stereotypes of red staters or denigrations of President Bush. Basically, these comment threads are for an elevated tone and a serious debate. I will be deleting comments without warning to enforce this.
Note that registration with Blogger has the side benefits of automatically giving you your own blog! Any Dean Nation regular who registers to post comments and then starts blogging will be listed on request in a dedicated blogroll on the Dean Nation front page.
I can't think of any other blog that has a dual-comment system like the one we are experimenting with here. Let's see how that experiment runs. I think it will be very rewarding. My sincere desire is for the Discussion threads to become a true ideal of rational debate and dialog, beyond the narrow slice of moderate left. Respectful disagreement is the hallmark of success.
UPDATE: Pleaseleave any comments about the site layout, problems, etc here or in the open threads, I will try to tweak the site so its more pleasing to the eye and easier to read. Give me feedback!
The Electoral Dragon http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/
Along the lines of the 2004 electoral maps earlier, here is a county-level map, with the counties adjusted for population size. Counties that were more than 70% red or blue are colored solid, as per Kevin Drum's suggestion. As some have observed, the result looks like a dragon! Click below to see it...
Adjusting for population is I think essential to understanding the electoral layout, because after all our democracy is "one person, one vote" and not "one acre, one vote" as some partisans clearly pine for a return to.
Others have pointed out reasonably that since the number of electoral votes is actually the number of representatives plus the number of Senators, smaller states are technically under-represented in this map - states such as Wyoming get double the EC they would based strictly on population. But since that is a constant offset, applied to all states, it can be subtracted out - even from the larger states like California. All states are technically under-represented, by the same amount, so the above representation truly is the most accurate.
Adjusting for population is I think essential to understanding the electoral layout, because after all our democracy is "one person, one vote" and not "one acre, one vote" as some partisans clearly pine for a return to.
Others have pointed out reasonably that since the number of electoral votes is actually the number of representatives plus the number of Senators, smaller states are technically under-represented in this map - states such as Wyoming get double the EC they would based strictly on population. But since that is a constant offset, applied to all states, it can be subtracted out - even from the larger states like California. All states are technically under-represented, by the same amount, so the above representation truly is the most accurate.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
abortion morality vs professional ethics http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-11-08-druggists-pill_x.htm
There have been reports of pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for birth-control pills. These illustrate the fundamental contradictions in the conservative case against abortion, which I think ultimately harm the pro-life cause.
Make no mistake on my own position here - I agree that a pharmacist shoudl be able to refuse to dispense a medication on moral grounds. However, professional ethics require that they acknowledge the patient's medical needs - as prescribed by a doctor.
As the article notes, the American Pharmacists Association has a policy that says pharmacists can refuse to fill prescriptions if they object on moral grounds, but they must make arrangements so the patient can still obtain their meds. However, the fact that in the Madison case, Klein admits that license revoication is unlikely, suggests that the policy has no teeth.
Pharmacists who refuse to accomodate a patient inconvenienced by that pharmacists' personal moral principles are essentially appropriating the role of the doctor in determining what is best for the medical health of that patient. Confiscation of the Rx slip is a gross abuse and demands license revocation.
This speaks to a larger issue. Why is birth control an issue? If the pro-life position seeks to stop abortions, then birth control seems an inherent piece of that effort. After all, without birth control options, the number of unwanted children rises, and the number of abortions will increase. Attempting to stifle birth control - even prior to conception! - is completely counter-productive to the fundamental goal of preserving life.
Note that we aren't talking about morning-after pills here. These religious pharmacists are trying to impose an "every sperm/egg is sacred" ethos upon the population, by denying them a basic and essential piece of family planning.
Now, a possible counter-argument is that abstinence would work better than birth control. However, abstinence is a lifestyle choice when it comes to adults. While I share conservatives' horror at teaching explicit sex education to grade school kids, I think that expectations of abstinenec are ludicrous for married couples who need to do basic family planning.
What's needed is a new way of formulating the case against abortion so that it is more results-orienetd rather than means-oriented. The latter is completely counter-productive. I seriously doubt that these pharmacists have really given any serious thought to their crusade, it's more of a knee-jerk reaction. With some effort, a more sensible position could be articulated that synthesises left and right that actually makes a genuine difference in reducing abortion nationwide.
Make no mistake on my own position here - I agree that a pharmacist shoudl be able to refuse to dispense a medication on moral grounds. However, professional ethics require that they acknowledge the patient's medical needs - as prescribed by a doctor.
For a year, Julee Lacey stopped in a CVS pharmacy near her home in a Fort Worth suburb to get refills of her birth-control pills. Then one day last March, the pharmacist refused to fill Lacey's prescription because she did not believe in birth control.
[...]
Lacey, of North Richland Hills, Texas, filed a complaint with the Texas Board of Pharmacy after her prescription was refused in March. In February, another Texas pharmacist at an Eckerd drug store in Denton wouldn't give contraceptives to a woman who was said to be a rape victim.
In the Madison case, pharmacist Neil Noesen, 30, after refusing to refill a birth-control prescription, did not transfer it to another pharmacist or return it to the woman. She was able to get her prescription refilled two days later at the same pharmacy, but she missed a pill because of the delay.
She filed a complaint after the incident occurred in the summer of 2002 in Menomonie, Wis. Christopher Klein, spokesman for Wisconsin's Department of Regulation and Licensing, says the issue is that Noesen didn't transfer or return the prescription. A hearing was held in October. The most severe punishment would be revoking Noesen's pharmacist license, but Klein says that is unlikely.
As the article notes, the American Pharmacists Association has a policy that says pharmacists can refuse to fill prescriptions if they object on moral grounds, but they must make arrangements so the patient can still obtain their meds. However, the fact that in the Madison case, Klein admits that license revoication is unlikely, suggests that the policy has no teeth.
Pharmacists who refuse to accomodate a patient inconvenienced by that pharmacists' personal moral principles are essentially appropriating the role of the doctor in determining what is best for the medical health of that patient. Confiscation of the Rx slip is a gross abuse and demands license revocation.
This speaks to a larger issue. Why is birth control an issue? If the pro-life position seeks to stop abortions, then birth control seems an inherent piece of that effort. After all, without birth control options, the number of unwanted children rises, and the number of abortions will increase. Attempting to stifle birth control - even prior to conception! - is completely counter-productive to the fundamental goal of preserving life.
Note that we aren't talking about morning-after pills here. These religious pharmacists are trying to impose an "every sperm/egg is sacred" ethos upon the population, by denying them a basic and essential piece of family planning.
Now, a possible counter-argument is that abstinence would work better than birth control. However, abstinence is a lifestyle choice when it comes to adults. While I share conservatives' horror at teaching explicit sex education to grade school kids, I think that expectations of abstinenec are ludicrous for married couples who need to do basic family planning.
What's needed is a new way of formulating the case against abortion so that it is more results-orienetd rather than means-oriented. The latter is completely counter-productive. I seriously doubt that these pharmacists have really given any serious thought to their crusade, it's more of a knee-jerk reaction. With some effort, a more sensible position could be articulated that synthesises left and right that actually makes a genuine difference in reducing abortion nationwide.
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Turn the DNC Purple http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apus_story.asp?category=1110&slug=Dean%20DNC
I have a feeling that Dean is going to make a bid for DNC Chair:
UPDATE: The inevitable Draft Howard petition website has sprung up.
Dean as head the DNC would be a strong move in favor of more Purple-based politics, in my opinio. The reason is that Dean was the first, and remained the only, candidate to articulate the idea that the Democrats should not concede the South. Re-orienting the Democratic Party towards a truly national one, rather than trying to cherry-pick a majority of selected regions, is essential towards changing the RedBlue political culture. At the very least, it would force the Republicans to compete on the issues in Red States, which would introduce more dimensions to the political dialouge than just "god, gays, and guns" - and I am not just talking about economic appeals. Rather, the opportunity for a morality-guided domestic policy, with regard to charity, social works, and a true culture of life (more on that soon...).
The important thing is to try to move away from the same old GOTV arms race paradigm and to try to craft a geniunely national platform.
There is a political benefit as well. The various factions within the Democratic party - the DLC, the Clintonistas, the Kennedy Clan, etc - all were united against Dean. In Kerry, they had the chance to finally unite and present their conscensus candidate (selected through the front-loaded primary schedule that McAuliffe, a Clintonista, crafted precisely for the purpose of a rapid selection). Kerry's failure has essentially bankrupted their political capital. Dean represents a bold change and in remains the Democrats' sole success story (with regard to transformative politics). As chairman, he would actually have a mandate of sorts, to try new strategies and stymie the firmly-inside-the-box inertia thinking of the old guard. After all,m he can simply say, "you torpedoed me, and you got your way - and you failed. Now its time to try it my way." That kind of freedom is almost comparable to that of, say, an incumbent President freed from the worries of re-election.
ADDENDUM: Steve Grossman is a former chairman of AIPAC, who seemed to be a turncoat during the Dean campaign's waning hours, but is someone who still has Dean's trust and therefore deserves benefit of the doubt.
UPDATE: Liberal Oasis disagrees, arguing that Dean should instead seek to be a Bill Kristol-inspired Strategist and Ass-Kicker At Large (SAKAL). It's an intriguing idea, but why wouldn't Dean's arguments be any less distorted if he were the SAKAL rather than the DNC Chair, by the right-wing smear machine?
UPDATE: The inevitable Draft Howard petition website has sprung up.
Former presidential candidate Howard Dean is considering a bid to become chairman of the national Democratic Party.
"He told me he was thinking about it," Steve Grossman, himself a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said Monday. Grossman was a Dean backer during the former Vermont governor's failed presidential bid."I strongly urged (Dean) to seek the position," he said. "Howard is a voice of political empowerment and that to me is important, for the Democrats to get their sea legs back as quickly as possible, to get beyond the disappointment of the last week and to believe there is a bright future ahead for the Democratic Party."
Dean has been outspoken since the beginning of his presidential bid in saying that the Democratic Party must establish a separate and unique identity from Republicans.
Grossman said that if Dean were to run for DNC chair, he would need to pledge that he would serve the full four-year term, thus ruling out a presidential bid in 2008.
Dean as head the DNC would be a strong move in favor of more Purple-based politics, in my opinio. The reason is that Dean was the first, and remained the only, candidate to articulate the idea that the Democrats should not concede the South. Re-orienting the Democratic Party towards a truly national one, rather than trying to cherry-pick a majority of selected regions, is essential towards changing the RedBlue political culture. At the very least, it would force the Republicans to compete on the issues in Red States, which would introduce more dimensions to the political dialouge than just "god, gays, and guns" - and I am not just talking about economic appeals. Rather, the opportunity for a morality-guided domestic policy, with regard to charity, social works, and a true culture of life (more on that soon...).
The important thing is to try to move away from the same old GOTV arms race paradigm and to try to craft a geniunely national platform.
There is a political benefit as well. The various factions within the Democratic party - the DLC, the Clintonistas, the Kennedy Clan, etc - all were united against Dean. In Kerry, they had the chance to finally unite and present their conscensus candidate (selected through the front-loaded primary schedule that McAuliffe, a Clintonista, crafted precisely for the purpose of a rapid selection). Kerry's failure has essentially bankrupted their political capital. Dean represents a bold change and in remains the Democrats' sole success story (with regard to transformative politics). As chairman, he would actually have a mandate of sorts, to try new strategies and stymie the firmly-inside-the-box inertia thinking of the old guard. After all,m he can simply say, "you torpedoed me, and you got your way - and you failed. Now its time to try it my way." That kind of freedom is almost comparable to that of, say, an incumbent President freed from the worries of re-election.
ADDENDUM: Steve Grossman is a former chairman of AIPAC, who seemed to be a turncoat during the Dean campaign's waning hours, but is someone who still has Dean's trust and therefore deserves benefit of the doubt.
UPDATE: Liberal Oasis disagrees, arguing that Dean should instead seek to be a Bill Kristol-inspired Strategist and Ass-Kicker At Large (SAKAL). It's an intriguing idea, but why wouldn't Dean's arguments be any less distorted if he were the SAKAL rather than the DNC Chair, by the right-wing smear machine?
Monday, November 08, 2004
Redistricting and Democracy http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/8417.html
Over at Cliopatra, K.C. Johnson looks at gerrymandering as a crisis in American democracy:
When our Constitution was designed, the founders saw the House a representing the changing whims of the masses, while the Senate with its lesser turnover would be where the issues of the day were deliberating by those of wisdom and experience. However, we're now in a situation where prior to this election - and maybe even now, with a couple of party defections - the Senate is the body most likely to change hands. As Dick Morris has often said on FOXNews, most Congressional seats are now little more than pensioned civil service positions dispensed by party patronage networks.
This is a crisis in democracy because it means that with control of the state legislature, a party can ensure its dominance of that legislature and by extension its congressional delegation for the foreseeable future barring a major shift in party allegiance in that state. This was always something of a possibility, but because the lid has now been opened on redrawing congressional districts whenever a legislature feels like it, has become easier than ever before. Is some demographic shift making things competitive again? Just tweak the lines here and there and make things safe again.
"Excluding the Texas gerrymander, last Tuesday three incumbent congressmen (two Republicans, one Democrat) were defeated; three more open seats changed parties (two previously held by a Republican, one by a Democrat). In only 12 other contests (CA 20, CO 4, CT 2, CT 4, IN 2, IN 8, MN 6, MO 3, NY 29, OR 5, SD AL, PA 6) did the winner prevail by less than 10 percentage points. (Two seats in Louisiana remain to be decided.) This outcome occurred at a time when a majority of voters believed that the country was on the wrong track and the country is mired in a war that (regardless of one’s opinions on its merits) clearly has not gone as the administration promised."
When our Constitution was designed, the founders saw the House a representing the changing whims of the masses, while the Senate with its lesser turnover would be where the issues of the day were deliberating by those of wisdom and experience. However, we're now in a situation where prior to this election - and maybe even now, with a couple of party defections - the Senate is the body most likely to change hands. As Dick Morris has often said on FOXNews, most Congressional seats are now little more than pensioned civil service positions dispensed by party patronage networks.
This is a crisis in democracy because it means that with control of the state legislature, a party can ensure its dominance of that legislature and by extension its congressional delegation for the foreseeable future barring a major shift in party allegiance in that state. This was always something of a possibility, but because the lid has now been opened on redrawing congressional districts whenever a legislature feels like it, has become easier than ever before. Is some demographic shift making things competitive again? Just tweak the lines here and there and make things safe again.