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How Technology Really Threatens Liberalism
Sunday, March 14, 2010, 12:50 PM
James Poulos

Courtesy of Alan Jacobs, I see some academics are starting to grapple with the issue. But how successfully? Danah Boyd tackles Google Buzz:

“Nothing that the Buzz team did was technologically wrong,” Ms. Boyd said. “Yet the service resulted in complete disaster.”

Google got into trouble, she said, by linking something that people associate with being inherently private — their e-mail accounts — with something that is very public — status updates on a social network. The result was “a series of social disruptions,” Ms. Boyd said.

The blunder, she said, reflected a broader muddying of the line between what is private and public online. The idea that information exists in a binary world — public or private — no longer applies, she said.

“Google assumed people wanted different parts of their contacts converging and collapsing,” she said. “But just because people put different parts of their lives online doesn’t mean they want them in one place.”

More troubling, she said, is what Google’s flub may portend for the future.

“I can’t help noticing that more and more technology companies are exposing people’s information publicly and then backpedaling a few weeks out,” she said.

Ms. Boyd pointed to the recent changes in Facebook’s privacy policy that made more of its members’ information public by default. “Just because something is publicly accessible doesn’t mean people want it to be publicized,” she said.

The results could be harmful and damaging if they were to expose people’s information in ways they were not expecting, she said, and these issues are only likely to get more convoluted in the future.

“Neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both,” she said.

Let’s be clear about the reason we are experiencing this convolution the way that we are: leading tech companies have a colossal financial interest in making people convolute public and private. Any interest in persuading people that it’s a good idea to deconstruct the public/private divide in their personal lives — or, really, to let them be deconstructed — is ancillary at best to that larger financial interest, and at worst antagonistic.

Excuses like those Boyd’s ominous remark seems to portend — “nothing we did was technologically wrong” — are easy enough of targets to aim at and hit. And I’m not one to pretend that a few big corporations are singlehandedly responsible for taking our precious public/private distinction and shattering it at the feet of a golden idol. The fact is, we democratic individuals have come to recognize that cultivating, maintaining, managing, and policing liberalism’s essential public/private distinction is a lot more and harder work than we might be willing to allocate our precious resources (time, energy) toward. What it requires in particular — at the porous frontier between what’s personal and what’s not — is, I think, a rather robust, regular, and adult form of citizen politics.

Unfortunately, we have a longing to escape from that sort of politics, even at the cost of a robust, regular, and paternalist form of state-administered law. The journey there, as I see it, is characterized by the awkward-turtle sort of line-drawing generated by decisions like Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Lawrence v. Texas – where concepts of publicity and privacy become increasingly meaningless under the pressure of putting the stamp of authoritative law upon a much different divide — between what I’ve called official and unofficial life.

The divide between official and unofficial puts some private and some public things in one basket, and others in another. Regardless of what a particular American citizen thinks about homosexuality, abortion, or exes lingering in electronic address books, this is a significant shift in our social and political order, and it ought to attract more attention, as such, than it has. The implications of a shift toward official/unofficial life, and away from public/private life, are profound. And they throw into stark relief, I think, some of the ways in which a more progressive life may quickly become less and less liberal.

I would point out that the essentially erotic interest Americans seem to have in abandoning the public/private distinction is a lot different from the essentially monetary interest some American corporations have in getting as many of us to do that as possible. Neither our changing mores nor our developing technology are making a mess of public and private so much as moving to replace them with new categories that leave the public/private distinction looking quaint, arbitrary, and incoherent. The trouble is that the Googles and Facebooks of the world are pushing in this direction without a clear enough understanding of how the ‘progressive’ aspect of our mores represents a contingent vanguard and not a historically destined popular movement.

Yet at the same time, our innovative geeks seem genuinely blindsided by the severity of the residual relationship problems that they have caused to come back and haunt Americans uncomfortably and improvisationally negotiating the space between disrupted public and private realms. This emotional tone-deafness seems to me all too typical of geekdom, a world in which the self-evident inherent goodness of new features blinds us to the disruptions they inflict on the human realities they depend on. As the least socially awkward among us have always already known, the ultimate stomping ground for those seeking the experience of new features is society itself, with its potential of endless relational couplings and decouplings. Historically, those of us looking to max out those kinds of experiences have been the bugs, not the features, of liberal society. Tech companies geeking out on the profitable possibilities of ever-more-social transactions, official and unofficial, fail to realize that they are working to crash liberal society. And because of this, backlash against their efforts to do so are met with an awkwardness and confusion almost as poignant as those of their customers who have suddenly been plunged back into relationships they thought had been safely quarantined, online no less than off, in the past.

UPDATE: For a sane debate among tech-education enthusiasts that might go at least one step outside the rut, see here (h/t PEG).

UPDATE 2: And for some further thoughts at a hopefully not too vertigo-inducing level of abstraction, see here.


The National Standards Fixation
Sunday, March 14, 2010, 9:36 AM
James Poulos

Some policy controversies are wearying. Not because they have worn their importance down over decades spent in the argumentative rock tumbler, of course. High-stakes issues tend actually to get more portentous, over time, as we sink greater and greater emotional and intellectual investments into them. But this very fact promotes an unfortunate style of argument that comes to dominate and dictate the substance. It’s a familiar story: for too long, we have ignored xxxx, which has now amounted to a national crisis in xxxx — one which can only be solved by immediate, decisive action, and if you still want to talk it over you’re either irresponsible, willfully stupid, or (most recently) a nihilist.

I’m bothered by the way in which this moral narrative has managed to swallow up the health care debate without actually accomplishing the kind of political change it demands. Still, I’m not terribly concerned that the intelligent versions of the opposing sides of this debate aren’t getting a fair hearing. It’s a testament to the importance of the health care debate that we, Stupak’s defectors aside, haven’t exhausted our own interest in the big issues at stake. There are other debates, however, where the side opposing the universalist view of problems and solutions seems to have lost the will to coherent opposition. In general, our ability to articulate the wisdom of rejecting policy universalism is waning. On some occasions this matters more than others. One case that’s too important to let slide, no matter how wearying it is to struggle against the universalist mantra, is education.

The universalist take on education has been whipped into the public consciousness for so long that many of us, if gently prompted, could mutter its talking points in our sleep. It has become a brooding omnipresence of conventional wisdom, a veritable creed. Its tenets are simple:

* The only education that really matters is in math and science.

* Math and science education really matters because globalization is irreversible and irreversibly accelerating.

* In a world globalizing like this, the only way to ensure a thriving economy is to beat other economies at filling jobs that require competence in math and science at the lower end and expertise at the higher end.

* America isn’t an economy like this.

* The only way to make America this kind of economy is from the top down.

* Only a universalist view of the problem lets us see that the only way to accomplish top-down change is through a universalist solution.

And so we get, in today’s New York Times, this editorial:

The countries that have left the United States behind in math and science education have one thing in common: They offer the same high education standards — often the same curriculum — from one end of the nation to the other. [...]

The standards, based on intensive research, reflect what students must know to succeed at college and to find good jobs in the 21st century. They are internationally benchmarked, which means that they emulate the expectations of high-performing school systems abroad.

This is not a call for a national curriculum. [...]

As recently as the early 1990s, national standards were viewed with suspicion in much of the country. Attitudes began to change as governors saw that poor schooling had crippled a significant part of the work force, turned state colleges into remedial institutions and disadvantaged the states in the global market.

The proposed standards were developed in a collaboration among 48 states and the District of Columbia, suggesting that national opinion, once bitterly divided on this question, has begun to coalesce.

It seems so difficult to get a hearing in opposition to this kind of pitch — who could dare be against greater success? — that I am tempted not to bother. But on the other hand, so few people are making a concerted effort to do so that there may be a point after all. What is particularly galling is that the universalist standards used to generate the supposed necessity of universalist, education-nationalizing solutions are applied with a rank inconsistency that rises past the level of whim to that of blatant selectivity. When a comparison between the US and some other country isn’t relevant to universalist projects, it’s discounted as nondata or statistically insignificant. But when a comparison is relevant, look out! We rank x places behind South Korea in Aptitude Y, as demonstrated conclusively by Study Z, we are scolded, without any sort of reference to why this fact, and not an infinitude of others, matters in the totality of the circumstances, and, worse, without any sort of explanation as to why our trailing ranking matters.

This problem is particularly embarrassing when it comes to India. At least with China, the claim that we must stop at nothing to compete at a comparative qualitative and quantitative disadvantage in math and science with the statist behemoth is silently reinforced by our fear of losing global hegemony to a power with interests and ideas in competition with our own. Why on earth would we want to put the screws to ourselves in this regard with India, a friendly English-speaking democracy? Because a nationwide push for standardized math and science performance will keep customer service call centers in America, where they belong?

It is hard not to slip into snark, because the tenets of the universalist creed on education are founded on such weak assumptions. The same basic errors in thinking you see among global-warming crisis-mongers reappear in giant form when it comes to globalization crisis-mongers. Fear of the future leads to a dramatically blinkered and filtered view of the present. The ‘major industrialized nations’ we are supposed to measure ourselves against face serious problems that are simply edited out of their appealing competitive profiles. The hugely idiosyncratic paths that have determined appealing features of those countries’ profiles are ignored or mentally suppressed. And the misfortunes that befall industrialized nations which obsess over scientific excellence at the expense of cultural and political competence at the level of the individual citizen are forgotten, if ever they were learned.

I cannot emphasize enough that none of this means that challenging global trends are not real, or that obtuse self-satisfaction is the answer. Conservatives have not done a good enough job of proving this out. But they are at a disadvantage: too few audiences, popular or elite, seem to have the time or the patience even to hear them out. Nonetheless: if the top-down, universalist view of a crisis of global warming is deeply misguided, a prudent consciousness of the unpredictable calamities that are likely to result from climate change more generally is a fine idea — and one that generates a completely different approach to policy, in style and substance. Similarly, the universalist view of our education problem distorts and masks its true character and extent. Our obsession with producing competent/low-skilled technocrats at the bottom of our workforce and expert/high-skilled technocrats at the top has caused us to deepen and accelerate the destruction of the local conditions that make possible, in a broad-based way, the general education into American culture and American citizenship that we really need to flourish, in this century or any other.

Can we have it more or less both ways — better math and science education and better education in the humanities, with one eye on international challenges and one eye on our domestic health? Certainly. But not if we give in to the universalist temptation. If ever there were a place to level the critique, advanced most recently around here by Ivan, that the ideology of technocracy relies upon commitments or convictions which themselves have no grounding in science and cannot be justified by instrumental reason, this would be it. The consequence of this sleight of hand is the impression that it cannot be a coincidence that technocratic ideologues wind up being the main beneficiaries, in prestige, power, and wealth, of the policies they push and the rhetoric of crisis they rely on.

The further impression is created that ideological technocracy will, paradoxically, never deliver us from the mode of crisis manifest in whichever particular panic has seized the day. By stipulating a permanent state of exception from which we can never truly escape, the only option available to us is a therapeutic one — technocracy as an endless coping mechanism. This therapeutic logic transcends merely political or partisan divisions of right and left. The real attack against the kind of ideological technocracy favored by the left is grounded in a deeper philosophical insight than even conservative political theory can provide. Critics of modernity are inclined to state the architectonic opposition as between philosophy and science. But the decisive issue, I am going to venture to suggest, is that at this level of abstraction it becomes more and more impossible to distinguish science as such from politics as such. Which again, for those readers with long memories, brings us back to Strauss’s closing words on Machiavelli, and, hopefully, another round of reflection from our Dr. Hancock.


Do Tea Partiers Dream Of The General Will?
Friday, March 5, 2010, 8:36 AM
James Poulos

David Brooks thinks so. But to link the tea parties to the ’60s left by way of Rousseau, he has to draw our attention away from the nationally disaggregate and locally-rooted character of lots and lots of the tea partiers. The recent tea party convention does underscore how the tea parties have been able to leverage themselves into prominence by giving a preexisting minor national movement a bigger stage. But the tea party convention must not be mistaken for the tea party phenomenon itself, even setting aside the internal and external debate over how organic or authentic the convention and its organizers may be. If anything is tempting tea partiers to coalesce around a handful of leaders stars, it’s not the emancipatory psychology of mass revolution — it’s a near-instinctive understanding that, now more than ever, celebrity equals publicity and publicity equals power.

That said, there really are serious overlaps between the Rube Power campaign of the tea partiers and, say, the Freak Power campaign of 1969-70 Colorado immortalized by Hunter Thompson. And Thompson distinguished himself from the rest of the radical left most spectacularly by being a romantic pessimist like Benjamin Constant, not a romantic optimist like Rousseau.


‘Disney-Like Sensorial Interfaces’
Sunday, February 28, 2010, 7:47 AM
James Poulos

Don’t call it a simulacrum.


Tea & Tom
Sunday, January 24, 2010, 10:17 AM
James Poulos

The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. [...] Obama should bring together the country’s leading innovators and ask them: “What legislation, what tax incentives, do we need right now to replicate you all a million times over” — and make that his No. 1 priority. Inspiring, reviving and empowering Start-up America is his moon shot. [...] You want more good jobs, spawn more Steve Jobs. — Tom Friedman

It’s become increasingly hard to take Tom Friedman seriously, but his latest op-ed is so odd and confused, in such an important way, that one has to say something. Though the tea partiers have given our left-leaning commentariat plenty of reason for caricature, what’s lost in the easy jokes and dismissive pigeonholing is a serious understanding of the animating force of the tea partiers’ movement. I’ve tried to say a few things about it here and here, without the benefit of Friedman’s foil. Here now are a few more observations:

* Who more than the tea partiers favors small businesses? The idea that the tea partiers long only to ’stop things’ is so juvenile and crude that it hardly merits comment. But Friedman uses that idea to contrast a vision of real productive growth driven by individuals taking charge of their own destinies, which — last time I checked — is precisely the positive agenda that all tea partiers, regardless of sect or faction, tend to promote. Only a pundit like Friedman, however, could blind himself to this actuality, intent as he is on realizing in American practice what his beloved Chinese government has made possible only in theory: the marriage of ancient Egyptian despotism with the modern dynamism of Hong Kong. Only the government, you see, has the extraordinary, unilateral power necessary to breed and launch a million innovators! Only the government, Friedman exhorts, can save us from slipping into dissolute quietude. Tocqueville on acid, Hobbes on crack: what could possibly unite the average libertarian, the conservative of any stripe, me, and a tea partier selected at random, if not Friedman’s belief that the self-realized innovators of tomorrow are the listless, powerless lumpenbourgeois of today? Ask yourself, Mr. Friedman, if you see such creatures loafing around America today: how did they get that way?

* The answer would be the same despotism he champions. I suppose Friedman imagines that any government so devoted to the cause of innovation can hardly be despotic. But this is to confuse means and ends. The sort of freedom governments manufacture and instrumentalize in a policy-driven pursuit of national prosperity cannot be mistaken for liberty. Politically speaking, liberty is not a means to anything but an end itself. Ironically, Friedman’s Tocquevillian fear that our springs of action have been sadly weakened is belied daily by real America, red blue and purple. It turns out that we did not transform en masse into lumpenbourgeois under the tutelary rule of federal-national government. We may have 99 problems, but a shortage of the energy required for innovation is not one. We are, alas, surfeited with micromanagerial government, government interested in the petty details of our lives and animated by some compulsion to intervene in them. Often, “leave us alone” conservatives worry that meddling of this kind is pursued for its own sake, or out of the tyrant’s love for simply beholding the exercise of his own power. More often than not, though, the compulsion to manage and nudge and sculpt and manipulate behavior may be driven by a fear like Friedman’s: that without some vigilantly tuned and retuned matrix of government incentives and disincentives, we rubes of suburbia will squander our productive potential, falling prey to the expertly-managed systems of ’80s Japan, ’90s Taiwan, ’00s China, or whatever economic menace will cast its shadow over the ’10s.

* The folly of Friedmanesque thinking is in its privileging of economics over politics. It cannot conceive of liberty politically, as an end. It can only contemplate liberty economically, as a means. I know there are at least a few libertarians who will stand up and shout at this formulation, on the theory that it’s possible to think of liberty economically as an end. We can take up that question later if anyone would like. At any rate, it’s an economic view of liberty as a means that brings with it a political commitment to an activist, interventionist tax policy of incentives and disincentives. And it’s an economic view of liberty that leads us to believe that, because economic policy can manufacture productivity better than political liberty can facilitate it, we should pour our energies into shaping and implementing economic policies. The key to national greatness, on this view, is policy greatness. But the key to this view is that national greatness, of the sort you can obtain with the greatest policies, is more important than political liberty. I almost said “is of more value,” because, indeed, on this view, importance is determined by value, and value is determined economically.

* I recognize that my call for more political liberty is fairly weak relative to, say, a call for a return to true civic republicanism. Hobbesian defenders of Friedman might ask why I should bother when I concede that the basic character of the American regime is properly as Hobbesian as it already is. They might accuse me of making a rhetorical mountain out of a practical molehill. I’d answer by pointing to Andrew Sullivan, who, like me, is somewhat torn between the Oakeshottian-Hobbesian view of the state and a view more like that of Ron Paul by way of Locke. Andrew’s recent choice has been to defend the President much more robustly out of a judgment that the Oakeshottian-Hobbesian view needs to prevail at the present moment. My choice is to lean in the other direction. This is not a theoretical clash of the titans, although the theoretical stakes are clear enough; this is practical politics, and it is how America works.

* One final note. The tea partiers are consistently ridiculed as washed-up old white people, as the defunct humans of the lingering, but not much longer lingering, past. The tea partiers are taken as the latest conclusive evidence that the party of conservatism is simply the party of those who already have whatever human beings want to have — cosmic opponents of the party of those who do not yet have those things. It’s the Party of the Old vs. the Party of the Young. This is straight out of Emerson, whose ‘eternal politics’ of old versus young was itself an economics of nature. Relative to others on the right, I rarely invoke Aristotle to prove anything, but Aristotle here is the antidote to the facile transcendentalist critique of the tea partiers. For Aristotle, the presence of a middle class was essential to political liberty. The typical explanation of why focuses on the way that Aristotle’s middle class combined a bourgeois interest in stability with a rather upper-class property interest. Unfortunately, the typical explanation stops here; few bother to ask why middle-class people have these interests as a rule. What is the specific characteristic middle-class interest in stability and property, and what is driving it? I think the plain answer is that the middle class is defined by middle age — by those who are no longer young but not yet old, and therefore completely break the frame of Emersonian generation-gap analysis. It’s silly, given how similar Emerson and Nietzsche are on nature as a condition in which nothing really is but everything is becoming, that the heirs to Emerson in this regard refuse to recognize the middle aged as existing in a state of becoming that makes young-versus-old analysis ridiculous. In desperation, they exhume, ’60s generation-gap analysis, which held that anyone over 30 is in the Party of Old. In its new zombie formulation, however, the idea would be that anyone who acts old in their personal life is Old for political purposes — which leads us back to the need for follow-through in our thinking on the Aristotelian middle class. I can’t conceive of a middle class defined by middle age whose particular interests in stability and property aren’t defined by the creation and/or continuance of family. The middle class, conceptually and in practice predominantly, is the class of people who are starting to have kids and raise them. The tea partiers are spearheading what is and must be a middle-class movement — a movement not of the old but the middle-aged, not of those who are conservative because they have nothing left to create but who are conservative because they have just begun creating in earnest. America’s most influential old person, lest we forget, is Steve Jobs.


Fatal Distraction
Friday, January 15, 2010, 4:06 PM
James Poulos

My take on race, Reid, and the politics of meaning is up now at the Guardian. Snip:

In a panic over the chance to unseat Senator Reid, the GOP is in danger of making permanent our misbegotten descent into the crackpot belief that racial symbolism is more real than our actual race relations. Inherited from deconstructionist academics whose postmodern school of thought had already become fatuous in the 1990s, the idea that inequalities of power institutionalised into our language were the key to social change has metastasized into our whole society. It is a sad, but not surprising, turn: when real change seems to become impossible, we strain to lose ourselves in the therapeutic shadowplay of change theatre. Our obsession with “changing the tone” belies our lost hopes of ever changing the substance, either of Washington politics or of race relations.


On Bankruptcy
Sunday, December 20, 2009, 10:29 AM
James Poulos

I think America’s system of easy bankruptcy is one of the jewels of our economic and political institutions, because it allows people who genuinely cannot repay their bills to get a fresh start as quickly as possible. I think non-recourse mortgages are an excellent idea, which I would like to expand, not destroy. I think that America’s incredibly deep credit markets indisputably do a lot of harm to the minority of people who simply cannot control their spending as long as they have access to credit, or who ignorantly rely on high-cost credit to smooth their cash flows—but they are also the reason for our mobile labor markets and the dynamism of our entrepreneurial system, and on balance do much more good than harm.” — Megan McArdle

There is a reason for the altogether singular indulgence shown in the United States toward a trader who goes bankrupt. An accident like that leaves no stain on his honor. In this respect the Americans are different not only from the nations of Europe, but from all trading nations of our day; their position and needs are also unlike those of all the others. — Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol II, Ch. 18 (Concerning Honor in the United States and Democratic Societies, 622 Mayer ed.)


On Corruption
Sunday, December 20, 2009, 10:20 AM
James Poulos

I don’t usually say this — in fact, I’ve never said it — but go read Frank Rich: specifically, his long column on the Decade of Bamboozlement. Beneath the flash of the cons that characterized the past ten years, however, is a quieter and truer truth: corruption. It is, as even Machiavelli would admit, exceedingly difficult to avoid corruption in the course of a life devoted to seeming and not being. (Someone still needs to connect the dots between mass faux friendship and “actor’s faith” among democratic individuals.) Over the course of this decade, we have seen big cons revealed time and again to be the opposite of what they seemed. But the key to understanding how and why we are living in the age of the con is to rediscover the meaning of corruption.

When people speak of corruption they refer to corruption of the spirit and corruption of the flesh. Correspondingly, reactions against corruption have taken political and anti-political form. One of the primary tensions on the right nowadays being between those who want to fight corruption by rallying around classical republicanism and those who put more faith in the repudiation of political struggle itself, we might infer that enemies of corruption are destined to be divided. But this would be wrong. Though the anti-corruption coalition as a whole might never be more united than the average Venn diagram, the diagram’s middle portion contains some individuals convinced of the necessity of both a political and a non-political response to corruption — and able to organize the entire coalition, or a decisive chunk of it, accordingly. When this class of leaders appears, this particular age of the con will at last near an end.

But not, I think, without a fight. We have compiled a long list of excuses for corruption, and we may surprise ourselves in our hesitance to forget them.


On the Limits of Professional Expertise
Thursday, December 17, 2009, 9:18 AM
James Poulos

Matt Feeney has a great, tart post on Tiger Woods, which I nonetheless want to take in another direction. For Matt,

the prevailing sentiment unleashed over the last few weeks is not, in the most immediate sense, some reflex of racial loathing that we white people have been holding in store in anticipation of this moment. It’s disappointment – disappointment in Tiger Woods as a higher sort of regular guy, disappointment that what he seemed to illustrate about the essential soundness and stability of our most important and worried-about institution, he didn’t illustrate at all, that he was living in the bad old days we’re constantly telling ourselves we’d left behind, and living it up.

Perhaps, but here’s what I think. We’re less disappointed to see Tiger represent evidence that our marriages often fall far short of the ideal than we are chagrined and dismayed to see Tiger represent evidence that putting most of our effort into a life of demonstrated professional expertise will leave us with the sort of meaning deficit that nags in the kind of way that causes us to do reckless, irresponsible, indulgent, and, yes, even depraved things.

UPDATE: I’ve raised a few questions. Rather than linking to the tweets — shudder — I’ll just add a few remarks to the above. First, I don’t mean to imply that there is no meaning to be found in building professional expertise. Matt Crawford’s account of the way manual competence conduces to human flourishing through specifically professional relationships is, to my mind, beyond dispute. Indeed, in comments at a Georgetown panel on the purpose of college, Matt went on to rightly specify that professional expertise supplies people with the necessary conditions of mere life, too: there’s nothing wrong with chasing dollars by accumulating expertise in order to stay solvent — or even in order to build some wealth, necessarily. Certainly chasing dollars as an end in itself is a misunderstanding and evidence of what I called a ‘meaning deficit’ above. But that’s not the problem Tiger illustrates for us.

Tiger has created or unveiled a problem by undermining the whole logic of virtue derived from his professional expertise. It’s that expertise that’s imbued his ‘brand’ with such enormous, unprecedented value. It’s that expertise that’s caused big elite firms like Accenture to rent his identity, promising customers the experience of being ‘a Tiger’. That experience involves extreme confidence under highly structured but complex and changing conditions, and the superlative results that come from routine high performance under those conditions. These capabilities, and the outcomes they produce, are great, celebrated virtues today. Much is invested in them. Although they’re increasingly valued in men and women, they’re more relevant and important to men. The goods associated with Tiger have value primarily as external goods, for the rewards that come to those who demonstrate and display them. But they also have value as internal goods. When the general experience of confidently navigating sophisticated challenge sets so as to competitively produce outstanding solutions can be experienced specifically within a particular challenge set to which one has dedicated one’s life energy, some kind of self-actualization is understood to ensue in which the competitor (and, vicariously, his fans) partake of the fullness of individuality in all its romantic glory.

Not one, then, but two types of meaning. To our great dismay, Tiger was driven to extremes of adultery despite accessing both these kinds of (still particularly male) meaning to an almost utopian degree. To be sure, for some professional athletes, that combo pack of meaning seems to be enough to keep them from slipping into sybaritic dementia. But Tiger is not some athletes. Tiger is the incarnation of our noble ideal. And he calls into question our ability to build lives of adequate meaning around participation in one of the many competitive showcases designed to organize and reward those (especially men) willing to discipline themselves into logging thousands upon thousands of hours of practice. Not only does he cast doubt on the ultimate value of the external goods of professional expertise; he casts doubt on the ultimate value of its internal goods, too.


Murder, He Lied
Thursday, December 17, 2009, 9:00 AM
James Poulos

Ross is right to come down on Ezra for reckless and irresponsible hyperventilating on health care. But let me dot the i here.

Ezra Klein kicked up a hornet’s nest of controversy by accusing Lieberman of being “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.” That “hundreds of thousands” refers to the number of Americans who die every decade because they don’t have health insurance — or rather, it refers to one study’s estimate of that number. Other studies, cited by Michael Cannon and John Goodman, suggest that the number is considerably closer to zero — or else that the link between health insurance and mortality might be too murky too penetrate. But of course there are still other studies that tend to confirm Ezra’s numbers …

Anyway, without trying to adjudicate these competing claims, I’ll just say that I would be very surprised if extending health insurance coverage didn’t have some positive effect on life expectancy for the newly-insured. And what’s more, I think liberals are absolutely right to be laying their emphasis on this point: It’s the best argument (and, indeed, increasingly the only argument) in favor of the current legislation. But I think Ezra’s missing the point when he acts puzzled that anyone who accepts his statistics would object to the way he went after Lieberman.

[...]

In this regard, the claim that “health care reform will save lives” is very, very different from the statement that “opponents of health care legislation are willing to let hundreds of thousands of Americans die.” The two may be factually similar, but only the latter waves the bloody shirt. And the bloody shirt is the enemy of both reasonable debate and good lawmaking. It’s a conversation-killer, and a policy destroyer.

Ross is too kind in allowing Ezra’s original language — Lieberman will cause people to die — to translate freely with the more accurate language of letting people die. This isn’t simply a matter of grammar or style. Ezra did not attack Lieberman for supporting a bill which would merely get out of the way while some significant number of Americans happened to die. He attacked him for seeming “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.” Anyone who doesn’t support the right bill, you see, is killing Americans. And since this is obvious, you see, anyone who doesn’t support the right bill wants to kill those Americans, and wants them to die.

This is more than moral grandstanding or shirt-waving. It’s an intentional distortion of an ethical precept at the very foundation of our philosophy of law. It’s a lie mobilized to discredit one’s political opponents, not just politically but morally. In truth, of course, to kill a bill that would prevent people from dying is not to kill those people — just as refraining from saving a person in mortal peril is not causing them to die. Any law student who didn’t sleep through torts can tell you this distinction is essential. Though it rankles morally, the fundamental legal and philosophical distinction between letting somebody die and causing their death avoids the systemic injustice involved in forcing individuals to be Good Samaritans. Two key points emerge. We must be free not to act morally in order to act morally. And the sort of discernment that enables individuals to decide whether or not to act in a specific moral instance cannot be properly cultivated without that freedom. I suppose there’s a third point: we ought to continue to live in a world in which individuals can and do cultivate that kind of moral discernment.

All this can’t be bulldozed away in the name of any piece of legislation, or in the name of preventing any kind of present or future suffering. That’s not to suggest that Republicans or conservatives or whomever should pretend that Democratic health care reform wouldn’t actually lessen or eliminate the suffering of some number of Americans or save some statistically significant number of lives. The problem is that knowing this doesn’t settle the issue of whether it’s the right reform. Where Ross sees a conversation-stopper in the claim that opposing the current bill means being willing to let people die, I see the start of a crucial conversation. After all, as Ross notes, “Every side of every debate [...] can plausibly accuse its opponents of being ‘objectively pro-death.’” Nobody really requires that every policy and every law be structured above all to maximize the prevention of suffering and death, because, ultimately, the minimization of suffering and death is not the purpose of politics or even the definition of justice.

None of which is to say, to be sure, that we have no moral interest in mitigating suffering or decreasing our number of untimely deaths. We have a profound and inescapable moral interest, of course; one which conflicts in likewise inescapable fashion with our interest in political liberty and prudent governance. Ultimately, the stewardship of those goods has a moral character of its own. To speak and act as if there is no moral tension at the heart of the politics of health care is to give in to the temptation to deny that we ourselves, as citizens and human beings, have to suffer that tension.

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