SUBSCRIBER LOGIN






Search First Things

Advanced Search

RSS

Postmodern Conservative
Archive

Categories

Monthly


Masthead

Founding Editor
James Poulos

Contributing Blog Editors
James Ceaser
Ralph Hancock
Peter Lawler

Associate Bloggers
Samuel Goldman
Jonathan Jones
Jason Joseph
John Presnall
Carl Scott
Pete Spiliakos

Blogroll




A Sprawling Debate
Saturday, March 20, 2010, 2:56 PM

In a recent post, Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute takes on Austin Bramwell’s argument that suburban sprawl is the result of government planning. How can this be, O’Toole asks, when notorious sprawls like Houston don’t even have a zoning code? Bramwell responds by pointing out the litany of non-zoning regulations that discourage mixed-use neighborhoods scaled for pedestrians. He points out that in Houston buildings must be set back at least 25 feet from the street and provided with free parking–which pretty much guarantees a landscape of strip malls.

I can’t add anything to the debate on land-use law, although Bramwell’s case seems pretty convincing. But there is a broader issue that’s worth isolating from the specific details. That’s the meaning of “planning”. While O’Toole sees planning primarily in fiats concerning ends–what gets built where–Bramwell recognizes that government can exercises as much influence by determining the means of economic activity.

To use a popular example,  American cities and states rarely decree a price floor for residential real estate. But by imposing building codes that require the use of more expensive materials, they effectively set a minimum price for housing. Sometimes results like this are an unintended consequence. In other cases, governments use indirect regulation to influence behavior without being seen to do so. Consumer preference for detached houses with a scrap of yard is one factor contributing to sprawl. But “hidden” planning is evidently another, as documented by countless studies of the housing policies of the 1940s and ’50s, which included the physical destruction of hundreds of traditional neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal.

You’d expect libertarians to be sensitive to subtle forms of influence as well as obvious coercion. But they often fixate on gross  attempts to regulate citizens’ behavior, while ignoring “nudges” like the location and dimensions of highways and other roads, a tax code that favors home-owners over renters, and a political commitment  to keeping gasoline cheap. A reasonable case can be made for all these policies. But let’s not pretend that our built environment is exempt from planning just because it hasn’t been decreed by a dictatorial Secretary of Suburbanization.


Obama’s Legal Vision
Saturday, March 20, 2010, 9:17 AM

And now, my conclusion about where Obamacare falls into the law-versus-politics schema I mentioned, below, in the context of marriage and divorce. There was one real highlight and moment of clarity for me in Obama’s now-infamous Baier interview: the sequence where the President insisted that, because making the bill law was the right thing to do, he — and, presumably, the rest of us — could, in perfectly good conscience, dispense with the chore of considering whether whichever legislative process wound up making the bill law was wrong in any way. There was simply no remorse and no discomfort on this point. Because making law what the President wanted to make law was the right thing to do.

Now, it is clear that the moral force of mere health care reform is inadequate to power this sort of fixation. The system is broken, to be sure; but at least some honest commentators on both sides know and agree that this bill breaks the system further, by way of entrenching and extending its worst features, with one exception: a significant number of Americans without health insurance will get coverage. Nobody believes we would, or should, be unhappier if more Americans were able to pay their medical expenses. To pretend that this is the issue is to perpetrate a fraud. The practical issue is whether the experiences of our uninsured, once summed, constitute a moral problem so grave that all Americans face, and America itself faces, a non-negotiable moral obligation to insure them now, with this bill. Only if that is true will it be true that passing this bill is the right thing to do.

But we didn’t get from the President the kind of fervent moral passion on this point that a regular person, or even a pundit, might be forgiven for associating with one of the habitual or characteristic emotional states of Americans past and present. In some areas of governance — say, foreign policy — I actually believe this no-drama dispassion has served the President, and the rest of us, extraordinarily well, especially under the circumstances. And I suppose I’m relieved to an extent that Obama is not playing John Brown on health care reform.

But I’m distressed, to a more immediate and perhaps larger extent, by the way that the only possible moral justification for viewing the law of health care as utterly more significant than the politics of health care amounts to an intellectual footnote for the President. It seems to me that the President is actually operating on a much higher, grander, and, yes, troublesome level of moral abstraction. The central moral commitment or conviction that seems to be shining through Obama’s remarks on the supremacy of legal outcomes over political process is that legislating itself is a moral act — one which legislatures like ours seem incapable of performing properly. Precisely because our Congress is a complex representative system driven by actual political practice, it is too deformed and crippled to achieve legislative excellence. When we, or the President, places a demand upon our Congress to do so, things get — in the President’s word — “ugly.” By contrast, we are led to believe, fiat is beautiful.

I’m not going to bother with the radioactive trope of un-Americanism here. Long before Obama, fiat was hardwired at searing times into our national consciousness. Anyone who likes to trace our American political philosophy back to classical roots has got to admit that Plato leaves us uncertain at best about when legislative fiat is worse than the alternative. And there must be little doubt that the abstract ideal of legislation, in the western tradition, is the work of a single Lawgiver.

Charges of un-Americanism are beside the point, which is that a legal philosophy that views the power of the Lawgiver as a beautiful ideal and the authority of political practice as an ugly clutch of impediments to this ideal is a troublesome one. It is troublesome, perhaps most of all, because the beautiful ideal of the powerful Lawgiver is ill-suited to being realized in a country like ours — no matter whether that’s true because of ‘something in our collective DNA’ or because of ‘a concatenation of contingent circumstances’ or because of ‘our path-determined political history’ or anything else. In the United States of America, and real or imaginary countries like it, Obama’s moral philosophy of law can manifest only through an unwieldy, unaccountable, unmanageable, and often incompetent bureaucratic administrative apparatus — one which makes the unwieldy, unaccountable, unmanageable, and often incompetent legislative apparatus of our actual legislatures look, by comparison, like a model of administrative excellence.

In America, paradoxically, our messy political process of legislation, warts and all, loses to the Great Lawgiver in the legislative-excellence competition — while trouncing the agents upon which the Lawgiver must depend in the competition for excellence in governance.

The problem, of course, is that in this competition it is possible for nobody to win the gold medal. It is possible, in fact, for nobody to win at all. One side will simply lose more, and lose harder, than the other. That is the condition we seem to be plunging deeper and deeper into today. It is, in part, what David Brooks is getting at in talking about ‘the broken society’. What is most troublesome about Obama’s legal vision is that it strongly suggests the President does not understand this. “Something is better than nothing” — unless you think this is true because insuring uninsured Americans is so important as to be worth doing even through a bill as wretched, misbegotten, and irresponsible as this, it is not true. I’m concerned that President Obama thinks not only that it is true as a rule that something is better than nothing, but that it is a fundamental principle of legal philosophy, one that converges with morality itself, because bending the arc of history even a little bit toward the Lawgiver’s beautiful ideal is oftentimes the most, and the most heroic thing, we can do. This is incrementalism in the service of all too immodest ends, and in the case of this health care bill, it is a recipe from top to bottom for more governance, worse governance, and lots of it.


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

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.


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

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.


On Lifestyle Choices
Saturday, December 19, 2009, 3:40 PM

Reihan says something that gets the wheels turning:

At the moment, my side, the partisans of going after downscale voters first, is losing the argument to those who recommend going after the voters Michael Petrilli has described as “Whole Foods Republicans.”

What makes these voters potential Republicans is that, lifestyle choices aside, they view big government with great suspicion. There’s no law that someone who enjoys organic food, rides his bike to work, or wants a diverse school for his kids must also believe that the federal government should take over the health-care system or waste money on thousands of social programs with no evidence of effectiveness.

These voters, interestingly, are almost the opposite of Rod Dreher’s “Crunchy Cons,” the Birkenstocked Burkeans who are more aptly described as evangelical hippies than as affluent cosmopolitans with a libertarian streak a la the voters Petrilli has in mind.

I’m unsure that we can assume with quite as much confidence as we could in, say, 2003 that bike-riding localists who “want diversity” are likely to be upwardly mobile. In fact, I suspect that ‘cosmopolitan’ attitudes about the way humans should relate to nature are quickly coming decoupled from economic class in America. The relationship between class and putatively ‘cosmopolitan’ attitudes about acceptable human-to-human relations is another matte — one that’s harder to think through clearly in some important ways. But ‘crunchy’ lifestyle choices really aren’t luxuries in the fashion of other material goods commonly sought after by the upwardly mobile. Organic food is not that much more expensive, seeming, at least to my unempirical eye, to be getting a bit cheaper all the time. And certainly forsaking that $1799 flatscreen this year, or every 2 years, would allow many otherwise budget-conscious Americans of modest means to get choosier about the quality of their everyday food. Surely a bike is cheaper than a car; surely a diverse public school is cheaper than a private school curated according to specific tastes, interests, and affinities of any sort. And so on.

All of which suggests that shifts in the culture are cutting against the polarity sketched out by Reihan and Petrilli. Specifically, Reihan seems correct to observe that the typical crunchy con isn’t likely to be a small-government yuppie, but wrong to follow Petrilli in assuming that all ‘cosmopolitan’ lifestyle choices line up in the same way with certain economic indicators. The social mores of upwardly-mobile cosmopolitans, in short, have cultural valences with heavy political implications that their environmental mores simply don’t. There’s nothing about a commitment to individual-scale, family-scale, and even community-scale crunchiness, remember, that dooms a person to supporting cap and trade. Although technically there’s no reason a person living out liberal lifestyle choices of, say, a sexual variety has to translate their behavior into a political agenda, many such individuals do. This a trend I expect to continue.

The close link between ‘personal preference’ and politics is what’s loosening when it comes to crunchy or green ‘lifestyle choices’. Bundling socio-sexual and cruncho-environmental behavior under the same category of ‘lifestyle choices’ is increasingly misleading — suggesting that ‘lifestyle choice’ itself is increasingly an underspecified and euphemistic term that impedes, rather than facilitates, our ability to understand who we are today.


Sayonara, Weber!
Wednesday, December 2, 2009, 8:18 AM

Via Tyler Cowen, a paper by Davide Cantoni  casts some doubt on the efficacy of the Protestant Ethic:

Many theories, most famously Max Weber’s essay on the ‘Protestant ethic,’ have hypothesized that Protestantism should have favored economic development. With their considerable religious heterogeneity and stability of denominational affiliations until the 19th century, the German Lands of the Holy Roman Empire present an ideal testing ground for this hypothesis. Using population figures in a dataset comprising 276 cities in the years 1300-1900, I find no effects of Protestantism on economic growth. The finding is robust to the inclusion of a variety of controls, and does not appear to depend on data selection or small sample size. In addition, Protestantism has no effect when interacted with other likely determinants of economic development. I also analyze the endogeneity of religious choice; instrumental variables estimates of the effects of Protestantism are similar to the OLS results.

Does anybody else appreciate the irony of the above quoted paragraph? Remember, this is Weber that we’re talking about.


If we add ONE more strawman to this pile, we’ll be in serious danger of a brushfire
Tuesday, December 1, 2009, 1:32 PM

The Climategate tiff continues to annoy me. I have serious concerns about the methodology that has been used in the mathematical models which purportedly “prove” that we need to spend trillions of dollars, keep the third world in poverty, and restructure the global economy in order to avert impending disaster. Such concerns are greatly amplified and exacerbated when I see something like this. At the very least, it seems reasonable to believe that advocates of Action Now (TM) carry a significant burden of proof.

What has been the response of those who have an interest in assuaging my concerns, heightened as they are by some of the non-email items in the Climategate Data Dump? They practice a preaching-to-the-converted style of rhetoric by attacking the weakest arguments of the skeptics. Hence the constant refrain of “look, there’s no conspiracy!” and “in whose interest would be a conspiracy?“. Julian Sanchez refers to this as the “weak man” argument. It’s lazy, intellectually dishonest, and doesn’t convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with you. Convincing people would involve directly addressing their arguments or attacking your own weakest points and then explaining why you still believe your position to be reasonable. There has been a palpable lack of this.

As Arnold Kling has pointed out, very, very few of the skeptics believe that a conspiracy exists. Rather, they see a small, insular group of well-connected people that has defined that which is science to be that which agrees with them; and have, perhaps unconsciously, but we now know very consciously, excluded all differing viewpoints from participating in the scientific dialogue. That isn’t hard to do; in fact, speaking as someone who’s currently involved in some scientific fights (regarding modeling of nonlinear dynamical systems, no less), it’s extremely common. Nor does it require a conscious conspiracy. It’s human nature.

And yet, those who have an interest in assuaging my concerns persist in spending all their time attacking a non-argument that neither I nor any other vaguely serious concerned person has advanced. It’s eerily similar to Democrats who think that they can “win” the healthcare debate by proving that death panels don’t exist or that comparing Obama to Hitler is a bad thing. They’re right: death panels do not currently exist, are unlikely to exist in the near future, and comparing Obama to Hitler is bad and stupid; but there are plenty of other perfectly legitimate reasons to oppose the legislation as it stands.

The tragedy of the thing from the perspective of the Action Now (TM) crowd is that I was a pretty committed believer in global warming and a believer that we had to do something big up until 6 months ago or so. Since then, I’ve become much more skeptical and conflicted. Not disbelieving, mind you, just skeptical, particularly with regard to the severity of the problem and the proposed solutions. A robust response to the leaked CRU emails by my former comrades could have done a great deal to rope me back into the fold. Instead, the utter lack of a serious response has driven me even further away. I imagine that I’m not alone in this.


The Elephant in the Room
Tuesday, December 1, 2009, 5:38 AM

There I was, quietly chuckling over Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson’s back and forth (and forth) on the reasonableness of cryonics, when somebody decided to bring Derek Parfit into things.

Says Julian:

In reality, our ordinary way of talking about this leads to a serious mistake that Robin implicitly points out: We imagine that there’s some deep, independent, and binary natural fact of the matter about whether “personal identity” is preserved—whether Julian(t1) is “the same person” as Julian(t2)—and then a separate normative question of how we feel about that fact.  Moreover, we’re tempted to say that in a sci-fi hypothetical like Bryan’s, we can be sure identity is not preserved, because logical identity (whose constraints we selectively import) is by definition inconsistent with there being two, with different properties, at the same time. And this is just a mistake. The properties in virtue of which we say that I am “the same person” I was yesterday reflect no unitary natural fact; we assert identity as a shorthand that serves a set of pragmatic and moral purposes.

In fact, pace Julian, there exists such a binary property which I would consider to be the only property that matters — in fact I suspect that it’s the one that most of our pragmatic and moral determinations end up piggy-backing off of — namely the property of it being me. Yes, I’m being cute; but I’m also making a serious point.

I’ve found that the favorite rhetorical trick of reductionists when they are confronted with the brute fact that the only question anybody actually cares about in the philosophy of personal identity, the question raised when somebody waves a gun in my face, the question of my survival, of whether I will experience the experiences of some hypothetical future entity, is to declare the question illegitimate in some way. This can take a number of forms. I’ve seen people claim (amazingly, with a straight face) that the only questions that have meaning are those which can be posited in a de-personalized vocabulary. I’ve seen people claim that since the concept of personal identity is poorly defined, we can ignore such questions, since there is no binary further fact in question, which leads to:

“Why is personal identity poorly defined?”

“Because reductionism is true.”

“Congratulations. Your position is self-consistent. Now were you trying to convince me of something?”

I am forever running across people who tell me that they were “convinced” by Reasons and Persons. Convinced of what? R&P convinced me of exactly one thing: you can’t half-ass reductionism. If you share a subset of Parfit’s premises, Parfit does a very good job of convincing you that you need to subscribe to some extremely counter-intuitive conclusions. I wouldn’t count the result as terribly surprising, but it’s nice to see it laid out in a well-organized fashion. What utterly baffles me, however, is that anyone could even conceive of this as a strategy for convincing somebody who is not a reductionist to become a reductionist. In fact, if you do not have a prior commitment to reductionism, Parfit should drive you away from reductionism. He shows us what the price of reductionism is, and part of that price is having to believe, as Julian appears to, that contrary to what every fiber of my being tells me the question of my survival is not binary. Julian’s prior commitment to reductionism must be very deep indeed.

In fairness, Parfit does make a token attempt at winning over people who do not already agree with him, though his heart is clearly not in it. This generally takes the form of thought experiments in which the question of my survival is very difficult, perhaps even physically impossible to know with certainty. Parfit then seeks to parlay this epistemological shakiness into ontological shakiness: “if you’re not sure whether you’d be alive or dead in this situation, perhaps this suggests that the question is meaningless”, goes the seductive whisper. In fact, it suggests the exact opposite to me: namely that while the question is of ultimate importance, the answers are not forthcoming, and therefore when I live in the universe of philosophy of mind thought experiments, I should act conservatively and avoid transporters and replicators even if by doing so I inconvenience myself.

Getting back to Bryan and Robin, I find Bryan’s position to be the more reasonable. Since we have no way of knowing whether we would survive cryonic freezing and unfreezing, we have no reason to seek out cryonics, and no reason to avoid it either. I do have a question for Robin however.

Question for Robin (and anybody else who wants to upload): Suppose that I tell you that I have perfected a method of uploading your brain onto a computer, destroying your original brain, and then writing the computer brain data into a fresh biological brain in a manner that achieves arbitrarily fine physical accuracy. My method is foolproof in the sense that the newly “printed” copy of you can be guaranteed to respond in an identical manner to the old you when presented with identical stimuli. If you are certain that you would survive uploading, then the compensation I would have to provide you to test my machine should approach the value of your time, plus a fair price for any pain and suffering incurred. If the process is painless, and I conduct it during a time when you are asleep, extremely bored, or otherwise unable to accomplish anything useful; then you should accept any amount of compensation to try out my machine.

Would you accept any amount? I suspect that you would demand significant compensation, and that this is related to the fact that you are uncertain as to whether you would survive uploading.


Scattered Preliminary Thoughts on Ephemerisle
Wednesday, October 7, 2009, 3:05 AM

Those looking for the full-Gonzo narrative account of some of the more interesting 48 hours of my life will have to look elsewhere, if I ever get around to writing it. Short version: It was fun, nobody died.

What follows is more like a post-mortem that includes things that surprised me, things that answer the questions I had before setting out, and things that the readers of this blog might find interesting. As more ideas come to me, others post their reactions, and those in the comments post their queries, I will likely expand this and perhaps fold things into a new post. Let me also be clear that these impressions are based on a limited set of observations, and may not reflect the full depth of what was going on. Let me also be clear that it was a damn fun weekend.

  • The event was mercifully not anti-political in tone, as I had feared it might be. Organizer Patri Friedman at one point told me: “Ephemerisle without politics is like Burning Man without art”, and this message seems to have gotten through. While the planned “law boards” (chalk boards detailing the laws in effect on any given floating platform) were scrapped, most of the attendees kept the verbal focus on creating the conditions for innovation and competition among political systems rather than on creating floating libertarian utopias.
  • While it wasn’t anti-political, the whole thing was at times creepily non-political. It seemed to me like the demographic was evenly split between those who were primarily there to build floating stuff and those who were primarily there to party. I’ll attribute this for now to the fact that it took us a while to climb Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Debating and discussing political philosophy is difficult when one doesn’t have shelter, and construction of the floating platforms took much longer than anticipated. The next few years will be crucial for the future of the project — if major engineering challenges get met but people still aren’t debating, I think that spells trouble for Ephemerisle (seasteading would still work, however, the two concepts are synergistic but separate).
  • Barriers to entry for attending were paradoxically both too low and too high. They were too high for those building their own structures — something that very few people did — and too low relative to the structure-builders for those renting boats. This led to a palpable social division between the two categories. I’d say the right combination of fixes would be to hold the event in a location where it was slightly more difficult to bring rental boats, but also for the organizers to reach out and provide platform-building advice and support to those interested in attending.
  • Given how high the barriers to entry were, however, attendance was impressive. I’d estimate 150 people. I predict that number will go up sharply in the next few years; many of those who I interviewed expressed a desire to return, and many people that I spoke with upon returning expressed a desire to go. The idea seems to have legs, and I suspect it could go slightly viral.
  • My strong impression was that most of the participants could best be described as left-libertarian. I suspect that this was mostly due to the majority of participants being from the Bay Area, since seasteading is not a particularly left-libertarian idea. Curiously, however, most of the people I interviewed were under the impression that everybody else was a right-libertarian.

Let me start with that. I’m doubtless forgetting to report back some important intel. What question do y’all have about what went on?

Update 10/8/09: It occurs to me that I didn’t mention anything about the economic system at Ephemerisle — or lack thereof. There wasn’t much in the way of a functioning market, as most people were a little too self-sufficient. Also, there was a very strong communal ethos which heavily encouraged sharing and gifts while discouraging transactions. I suspect that this will change over time as the event grows larger and lasts longer. People will begin to specialize, and with specialization comes markets. In fact, I’m already thinking of useful services that I could provide next year.


GM: The Lenin’s-Mausoleum Years
Monday, June 1, 2009, 4:40 PM

So it’s official — GM’s bankrupt. Bring on the PR campaign. Actually, don’t; the agency entrusted with giving Americans “permission to believe” in GM again (as one of the Morning Joe heads just said) is the same bunch of geniuses who embarrassed GM with its suicidal robot Super Bowl ad. You remember…

(more…)

Older Posts »

Links

Blogs

Find Us

Contact