A Practical Philosopher

The Right to Intolerance

2014-01-12T06:58:00.003-05:00

York U student’s refusal to work with women sparks rights debate | Toronto Star:

University: last bastion of the He-Man Woman Haters Club

Nothing like a good debate over rights to start the new year. In this case, the question is one of religious sensibilities and interpersonal relations: can a young man refuse to work with a young woman in observance of religious principles? Is such a refusal disadvantageous or unfair to the woman?

What intrigues me most about this case is the way the university has ended up wearing the problem and I think that is the real injustice of the story. The facts are fairly simple: a male student in an on-line Sociology class had a face-to-face group work project that required him to meet in public with female students which he was prohibited from doing on religious grounds. It is worth noting that he took the course on-line to avoid interacting with women in the first place. As he wrote in his request,

“One of the main reasons that I have chosen internet courses to complete my BA is due to my firm religious beliefs,” the student wrote. “It will not be possible for me to meet in public with a group of women (the majority of my group) to complete some of these tasks.”

His professor, inclined to deny the request, sought advice from the Dean of the department and the university's human rights officer, both of whom decided to approve the request. And there the matter should have rested and ended. Instead, the professor disagreed and, in what has increasingly become a commonplace, went straight to the media with the story.

Oh, you poor multi-billion dollar organization

Now, one of the largest universities in Canada needs no help from me in defending itself, but really how is this just? The professor, unwilling to make the call, deferred to a superior who granted the request. Now, unhappy with the outcome, he's indulging in moral back-seat driving, and in criticizing the very decision he lacked the courage to make he's casting the university in a poor light. I mean, really, I could understand if this had been some arbitrary policy decision of the university unexpectedly dropped on him without regard for his professional ethical stance, but that isn't the case here: he asked for someone else to make the decision because he couldn't. As far as I'm concerned he wrote himself out of the story and the only ones with any valid objection are the women in the class.

I have no doubt this professor is an otherwise well-intentioned and ethical man but his conduct in this case stinks of the kind of passive-aggressive opposition to authority common in adolescence. It's what I call defiance-compliance: I will refuse to make my own decisions and instead seek and follow instructions to the letter as a form of hostile obstructionism (i.e. if you are constantly supervising and directing me you can't get your own work done). In co-opting the media he has swung a double-edged sword at the university and inadvertently cut himself: he may have succeeded in making the university look bad, but he has also made himself look petty.

What Was the Pussy Riot Case Really About?

2012-08-18T22:45:00.001-04:00

There has been a lot of handwringing over the conviction of the Russian "punk" band Pussy Riot on charges of "hooliganism." Like Kony 2012 just a few months ago, the story has attracted frenetic international media scrutiny, and in keeping with the fifty-shades-of-grey social justice mythos at the heart of US foreign policy (the US, of course, having called dibs on the white square), the three young, beleagured women at the heart of the story have become symbols of post-something (post-Communist, post-reformation, post-Cold War, post-thaw, on and on . . .) oppression at the hands of Putin's KGB-flavoured government. Setting aside for a moment the question of whether the women actually committed a crime under Russian law (and indeed the degree to which any of the various opinions on the case are well-informed) there seems to be near unanimity of opinion that the trial, conviction and sentence are unfair.

A sampling of "criticism from around the globe" tells an interesting tale:

Catherine Ashton, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said the two-year sentences give to the women were "disproportionate" to the crime and added to the intimidation of opposition activists in Russia.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a statement: "While we understand the group's behaviour was offensive to some, we have serious concerns about the way that these young women have been treated by the Russian judicial system."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the sentence was "excessively harsh" and "not compatible with the European values of the rule of law and democracy to which Russia, as a member of the Council of Europe, has committed itself."
British Foreign Minister Alistair Burt said in a statement that the verdict "calls into question Russia's commitment to protect fundamental rights and freedoms."
Although celebrities such as Madonna, who had spoken out against the charges previously, did not comment on Friday, others took to Twitter to voice their concern.
Rocker Bryan Adams tweeted "Outrageous ... Russian singers jailed just for speaking their mind?"
On his Twitter account, "Lord of the Rings" actor Elijah Wood posted "a shame to hear the Pussy Riot were found guilty, but not surprised."
Amnesty International said the trial was politically motivated and the women were wrongfully prosecuted for a legitimate, if potentially offensive, protest action, adding that the verdict was "a bitter blow to freedom of expression" in Russia.
Europe's main security and rights body, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said the verdict was part of a growing tendency towards curbing freedom of expression.

These are some big guns: Amnesty International, The EU, the White House, the German Chancellor, the British Foreign Minister and, uh, "Rocker Bryan Adams," "actor Elijah Wood," and (strangely name-dropped despite not actually saying or doing anything) Madonna. Madonna? This is "global criticism"? If we separate C-Listers Adams and Wood and disregard the not-appearing-in-this-story Madonna and the other unnamed "celebrities," we are left with representatives of the US, Great Britain, Germany and the EU, all of whom have a vested interest in low-balling estimates of Russia's status as a player. Oh, and Amnesty International? Despite its claim that it doesn't accept money from any government, AI has received money from the governments of the US, the UK, the European Commission, and other governments. In fact, the government of the UK was one of the top five donors to AI in 2009.

Well, it's not like we get all our money
from US-friendly governments.

Ok, so this is only one source, and while it's unfair to cherry-pick sources, this was a random selection. I mean, really. The first story I come across, selected at random, contains strong evidence of bias and questionable motives. What does this prove? In itself nothing, really. But keep in mind that the media obscure rather than uncover reality. We only ever hear about what some editor deems newsworthy, but editorial decisions of newsworthiness are deeply influenced by beancounters and shareholders: "What sells" trumps all. The stuff we do hear about is questionable. After all, we don't get the facts about events, we get someone's version of events with no way to determine its reliability, never mind accuracy. We just take it for granted that what we see is "right." Add in issues of foreign language translation, dubious sources, political bias, corporate influence . . . Which brings us around to the questions at the core of this story. What happened? What was the crime? What were the charges? Is there any basis to the claim that Pussy Riot was unfairly tried?

What Happened?

Here are the published facts in the case:

In February, Pussy Riot, which has a history of conducting impromptu, illegal public performances, entered Christ Saviour Cathedral in Moscow and conducted an impromptu, illegal public performance consisting of a profane prayer to Mary asking her to get rid of Putin
Their dress, profane language and obnoxious performance offended the religious sensibilities of the parishioners and clergy present
Despite being told they were violating the sanctity of the church, they refused repeated requests by the clergy to stop their performance
They (or someone acting on their behalf) recorded and released a video recording of the event which further insulted the church

What Was the Crime? What Were the Charges?

Petty hooliganism under Russian law is like a combination of disorderly conduct, causing a disturbance and mischief, and it carries similar penalties. Usually it's reserved for drunks, vandals, bar-fighters, bush-partiers and the like. Malicious hooliganism -- the charge against Pussy Riot -- is for more serious acts committed against public peace and order for political, racial, religious or other motives. The Criminal Code of Canada has similar provisions against Common Nuisance, interference with Clergy, trespassing, etc.

Was Pussy Riot Unfairly Tried?

There are really two questions here: was the trial conducted according to Russian law? Were the charges even justified in the first place? According to many reports, the answer to the first question is no, and they claim there were serious irregularities in the way the women were charged and held. This is a question for the appellate courts to address, and, under Russian law, they are entitled to appeal. As for the second question . . . well, this is the more controversial of the two, and I would have to argue that, if the facts as presented are accurate, then yes the charges were warranted.

Consider: where in Canada can any musical group conduct a disruptive public performance without a permit? Where in Canada can anyone enter into a place of worship without permission, disrupt and offend the worshippers with profane language and obnoxious music? Where in Canada can anyone trespass on private property, act inappropriately and refuse to stop or leave, then release a video recording of the whole thing on the Internet? Would Russian politicians and celebrities jump to the defense of an obscure Canadian band under similar circumstances? And given that Pussy Riot faced up to seven years in prison but got two including the five months they have already served, it's tough to see this as the iron fist of Putin (who himself expressed his wish that Pussy Riot receive lenient sentences) crushing dissent.

None of this, incidentally, takes into consideration the content of Pussy Riot's performance. Whether they were protesting Putin or poutine is irrelevant: by locating their act in a cathedral in Moscow, Pussy Riot crossed the line and they knew it. This is a band, after all, with a history of unlicensed public performances. They had done this sort of thing before and got away with it. Their trial had nothing to do with their criticism of Putin and their objection to the close relationship between the church and state (I mean, really, are we to believe that, in all of Russia, this is the biggest threat to Putin's presidency? This, this, is the hill he wants to die on? Pussy Riot? Please!). From beginning to end this was exactly what it appears to be: a trivial, ineptly-managed criminal case against a pretentious "performance art" band that staged a half-baked political protest in a church to get publicity. Well, they got it through a combination of social media, lingering western Russophobia, the celebrity bandwagon effect and sheer dumb luck, and now, cynically they have cultivated an image for themselves as hapless victims of reactionary oppression.

Whatever Putin's flaws, the hype over Pussy Riot overlooks a critically important issue: this case was not about the state violating Pussy Riot's right to free speech. It was about the state upholding and defending the sanctuarial rights of the church (and its people) in a country where, just a generation ago as part of the Soviet Union, those same people were persecuted just for holding religious beliefs. Those who ignore or forgive Pussy Riot's violation of the sanctity of a church -- and those who roll their eyes and suggest that the court was just using religion as a pretext -- are hogging both sides of the debate, suggesting at once that Russia violates freedoms in the course of protecting them. Last time I checked, the job of balancing rights and freedoms was the hallmark of a progressive government and the sign of a healthy society.

Like Canada.

The Ethics of Eating Meat

2012-08-13T19:53:00.001-04:00

Self loathing is one of those traits that separate us from the other animals: no other creature has the capacity to hate itself. It's a strange, insidious emotion that plays both sides of the villain-victim dynamic: it can emerge from guilt and remorse over past misdeeds or as the result of abuse and mistreatment that create distorted perceptions of personal moral worth. Either way, self-loathing redirects violent impulses inward.Personality and conduct disorders, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and addiction disorders are some of its effects, but they are extreme and slow: incremental suicide, the self-inflicted death by a thousand cuts.

Sometimes, however, self-loathing rebounds, and people direct their rage at others. It’s a kind of projective/reflective resentment: they don’t see people for who they are; they project onto other people their own self-image and hate them for what they see. But where the true misanthrope retreats into the solace of narcissistic disdain for others, the autophobe craves the company of others; after all, what could be worse than being alone with the one person you hate most? Of course this is all irrational and unconscious, and none of us is self-aware enough to see it. All we really know, and all that really drives us, are the people and things we love and desire, or hate and resent. Sometimes the people and things we love are also the ones we hate and sometimes not; when they’re not (and sometimes even when they are) we feel a deep, abiding need to destroy them.

This is the moral philosophy of bizarro-world David Hume. We see it in gay-bashing politicians caught in gay sex scandals; we see it in anti-drug crusaders caught with drugs; we see it in love-preaching religious leaders caught molesting children. This isn’t mere hypocrisy. It’s self-nullification like one of those clever little Useless Machines that you turn on and a little arm reaches over to turn itself right back off again. It's another version of the Liar's Paradox: "This sentence is a lie" (which in turn leads us down the road to the Verifiability Criterion and radical verificationism, Cartesian Doubt, St. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God . . . which is to say, off on a wildly frustrating and elliptical tangent). The point is that self-nullification and self-loathing drive some people to destroy in others the thing they fear most in themselves.

Now there is no doubt we are animals and to whatever degree we can talk about "animal nature" or even "human nature" it's clear we have certain traits and behaviours similar to many other animals. We hunt and forage for food, build nests and protective dens, compete and fight over mate selection, form collectives and develop social hierarchies, We eat other animals too -- raw, cooked, preserved, fresh, young, old and even prenatal. We do these things because we are predisposed to do them by our very animalness despite our desire to elevate our species above basic animal behaviour. But that's not the same as denying its reality. For some, our animal heritage is disgusting, repugnant and personally offensive. They reject their own animalness, and assert their self-loathing as a morally superior position as a rationalization. Vegetarianism (and for those on the extreme, veganism), once a personal preference, is now a movement embracing such concepts as animal rights and personhood, speciesism, animal liberation, and even violence and terror against humans in defence of animals.

But we are animals, and while intentionally cruel treatment of other animals is indefensible (and against which we enact laws), it is hard to accept the arguments of radical vegetarians/vegans that carnivorism in unethical. The usual claims are more or less the following:

Eating meat inflicts suffering upon animals
Plants are sufficient to meet our nutritional needs
Raising or hunting animals for food violates their rights
Asserting human needs over animal needs is "speciesist"

What the pro-veg camp lacks in depth and subtlety of its arguments ("live and let live") it makes up for with unwavering conviction, intolerance for dissenting opinion, repetition and volume -- in short, zealotry. And this is where we came in: self-loathing, projection, resentment, hate and scapegoatism. Not exactly a recipe for the reasonable meeting of minds. Not exactly an ethical stand either, and no amount of repetition, volume, ad hominem argument, and moral superiority can square that circle. Vegetarians and vegans who continue to confuse questions of taste for questions of ethics should expect their detractors to confuse their passion for pigheadedness, their urgency for stridency.

Advantage and Disadvantage

2012-07-11T07:59:00.001-04:00

What does it mean to be disadvantaged? Is disadvantage about not having stuff or not having access to stuff or not having awareness of how to get access to stuff in the first place? By what standards do we evaluate disadvantage? There are many ways of looking at the question of disadvantage because it's a highly relative concept. Even trickier is trying to understand what advantage is: is it material goods or access to systems, services, wealth or privilege that only certain people get to enjoy? And if so, is a lack of any of them necessarily disadvantage?

Any discussion of advantage and disadvantage is really a discussion of rights and freedoms in a democratic society. If we agree that disadvantage is a social ill that the government must fix, then what we're really saying is that disadvantage is a form of inequality. It follows from this that if we allow people to live in a state of disadvantage we are violating their rights guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But which rights, and what exactly do they guarantee?

Here are the sections of the Charter:

It might help to start with a concrete example of a disadvantage like, say, poverty. Most of us would agree that there is a wide (and widening) gap between rich and poor in Canada, but have no real idea of the size of the gap. According to Statistics Canada it is stunning:

The distribution of net worth
Total net worth of Canadians reached $4.9 trillion in 2005, a 41.7% growth from 1999. Favourable economic conditions, a strong real estate market, and a rebound in the Canadian stock market contributed to this increase. The increase in net worth was not shared equally among all families. The survey ranked family units into five groups or quintiles from lowest net worth to highest. Each represented 20%, or one-fifth, of all families. Median net worth for all family units increased 23.2% over the period (Table 1).

Family units in the top 20% of the wealth distribution had a median net worth of about $862,900 in 2005, up 28.5% from 1999. The 20% at the low end of the net worth scale had a median value of $1,000, a 9.1% decline from 1999. The 20% at the low end also had a 2.4% increase in their debt load for each $100 of assets, while the debt load for the top 20% grew at a slower pace (+1.6%). The largest increase in debt load occurred in the fourth quintile where debts per $100 of assets grew to $17.69, an increase of over 12% compared to 1999.
The fact that nearly 70% of total net worth was held by those in the highest quintile resulted in significant differences in average (mean) net worth relative to the median. These differences reflect the extent to which the wealth distribution is unequal. The mean was nearly 2.5 times the median net worth in 2005. (The more the average exceeds the median, the more the wealthiest family units in the country contribute to the increase in the average.)

As in 1999, the 2005 survey confirmed the relationship between income and the accumulation of wealth. Family units who reported after-tax income of $75,000 or more in 2004 had a median net worth of $505,700, up 15.2% from 1999 (Table 2). On the other hand, family units whose after-tax income ranged between $20,000 and $29,999 saw a 21.2% decline in median net worth.

So in economic terms, there is gross inequality in Canada: 60% of the population holds only 10.5% of the wealth. Think about that for a moment and let that sink in. In what ways can we say that people are equal when their economic realities are so radically different? What are their common experiences, shared values, communal goals? What can they point to as evidence that in the eyes of the law they share equal status? We've previously seen how personal attractiveness influences peoples' perceptions of merit, how marital status influences perceptions of parenting ability, how wealth corrupts, and how some moral theories reinforce inequality. But how do we account for such disparity in wealth holdings? Even more to the point, how do we account for the change from 1999 to 2005? It is the most basic of cliches, but it is clearly the case that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Even though there is clear and measurable inequality, you'd be hard-pressed to convince anyone that simply being in the lowest 20% is a violation of anyone's rights because equality rights do not apply to outcomes, only opportunities. Everyone in Canada has access to free, compulsory K-12 education, medical care, social services and police protection. Everyone in Canada who is eligible and willing can pursue post-secondary education, job training and re-training, apprenticeships, and other forms of work preparation. Everyone in Canada has a guaranteed retirement income and employment insurance protection for unexpected job-loss. Yet the disparity remains.

Disadvantage is not a single problem, it's a constellation of problems and effects all tangled together and some are direct causes of others. Jonathon Wolff and Avner De-Shalit call this "corrosive disadvantage" -- i.e. a perceived disadvantage may be the result of an earlier, unseen disadvantage that itself may have been caused by a still-earlier root disadvantage. In the case of wealth distribution we may think that the solution is to alter the tax system to redistribute wealth more fairly or disclose salary figures to shame high-income earners. Both of these have been tried with little success, as the numbers above suggest, because they fail to address the underlying corrosive disadvantages that result in inequitable wealth distribution. Another way of saying it -- and this is no profound insight -- is that wealth distribution is a symptom of deeper social problems, not the problem to be solved.

Here are some examples of corrosive disadvantage: divorce and marital discord, including domestic violence; personal health and/or mental health issues; drug/alcohol addiction or dependency; learning disabilities; poor nutrition; inadequate early childhood education; chronic unemployment and underemployment; crime. Again, no great insight, and it is a good exercise to trace the ways a single corrosive disadvantage causes a chain of further disadvantage.

Consider poor nutrition: research confirms that poor nutrition hinders brain development in children, impairs cognitive functioning, saps energy levels, increases health problems and hampers learning significantly. The learning gaps that result grow wider as children progress through the education system resulting in increased incidence of failure, lower self-esteem, poor attendance, and higher drop-out rates. Low educational attainment results in limited employment opportunity, mobility and satisfaction, as well as poor functional, financial and social literacy skills. They are more likely to live in poverty and their children are more likely to repeat the cycle.

What is to be done? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that children are properly fed and clothed, stimulated and entertained? How do we get at the root causes of social disadvantage and fix them?What should we do when parents fail in their duties? These are tough questions that lead us to face some of our most cherished beliefs about family, children and parenting. Maybe the question isn't one of rights, but rather in what order of precedence do we list our rights.

The Messiah Complex

2012-06-07T19:28:00.001-04:00

Well? What are you waiting for? A better job? A better time? A better house?

Seems we're always waiting, hedging, forecasting, expecting. When is It coming, the something that will make what we have now look sick by comparison. The something that will elevate us from our current state to a better state. The diploma. The degree. The title. The position. The thing.

You are not good enough and neither is anything you have. You lack. Right now, right now, the weather is wrong, where you live is temporary, something will be better tomorrow, a possible new job is in the not-too-distant future, and your next <insert big ticket item here> will be so much better than what you've had to put up with so far.

Your pension will ensure your retirement is comfortable, just as your insurance will make sure they are looked after if something happens. The market is looking up but oil will be more expensive next quarter so when interest rates come down next year you'll refinance. The new model year will have better features, but it doesn't come out until December. But when it does . . .

You live in sacrifice expecting something will make all this worthwhile: the sacrifice is big, the payoff bigger. Delayed gratification requires patience now. Future reward for current cost: prove to others you are moral, you lived a good life. Future reputation for current anhedonism.

The Messiah. The Mighty Quinn. Godot. Moshiach. Windows 8. When it comes we will at last know true happiness.

Academic Freedom: PhD Required.

2012-06-04T09:23:00.000-04:00

Canada News: Alberta court sides with ex-students who criticized prof

This guy must know what he's talking about.

One of the hallmarks of Western higher education is tenure, the ranking system for professors. Generally speaking, the purpose of tenure is to guarantee professors academic freedom from political interference. Tenure is as old as the universities themselves, and it reflects a profound vision of the importance of education as a means to find truth. Tyrants and totalitarians target universities for suppression with predictable regularity because they know they have more to fear from truth than guns in the hands of the people. Academic leaders around the world fiercely defend tenure and academic freedom -- not, as cynics would argue, because of job security but because of their commitment to the truth.

Tenure, therefore, is a sword that cuts two ways because freedom always comes with duties. This, at first, seems like a contradiction. Most of us think of freedom as self determination, self direction, self preservation and the like -- in short, the antithesis of duty. But a moment's reflection shows why duties and freedoms are two sides of the same coin: if I am to enjoy my freedoms, I have to agree to allow you yours. The old observations about swinging my fist and falsely shouting fire in a theatre illustrate this perfectly: I am free within certain boundaries of action and expression.

So it is with academic freedom: if you are to claim that you have inalienable rights as a professor, you have some necessary duties: you must obtain qualifications; you must remain current in your field; you must submit to peer evaluation of your competence; and you must publish openly and freely to advance the cause of education. In other words, you have to be good, and just as important, you have to be seen as good. So when a couple of students -- twin brothers, as it turns out -- publicly criticized the quality of instruction they received at the hands of their law professor (oh, such delicious irony), their university should have supported them, perhaps by requiring the professor to respond to their criticisms, or by holding an informal hearing to allow the students to voice their complaints.

Instead the university put them on probation and ordered them to apologize, saying “ . . . you are not being sanctioned for expressing your opinions on this site. You are at liberty to do so,” the dean wrote. “It is important, however, that your views are not based on false premises, conjectures and unsubstantiated assertions that are injurious to individuals or institutions and their hard-won reputation.” Which is fine, really, assuming of course that the university conducted an investigation to determine the veracity of their claims. It didn't. Worse, as the news story reports, when the students fought their punishment in the courts "the university argued that its students do not have the right of freedom of expression because the Charter does not apply to universities."

I wonder how quickly that opinion would change if a professor were arrested for publishing comments critical of the government. Academic privilege is a feature of academic activity, not a perquisite of obtaining a PhD.

Our Home and Native Police State

2012-06-03T23:25:00.005-04:00

Just make yourself comfortable.
This will only take a year.

Toronto News: Byron Sonne walks free, but the G20 forever changed his life

So what redress is available to someone who does nothing wrong yet finds his life destroyed by the actions of the state because it didn't like what he was doing and saying? How should a civil society repay that kind of wrong? Is this about money? Is there a suitable amount? If there is, what would that say? "Thank you for your patience while you are imprisoned. Should our investigation determine that you've done nothing wrong, you will receive the appropriate compensation as determined by Schedule A: Payments for Human Rights Violations. Refer to Appendix C."

And come to think of it, what has happened to Canada? How did a country that was once seen as an enviable example of human rights protection and personal freedom from state interference allow this kind of thing to happen? I mean, where are we? Alabama circa 1963? When Martin Luther King Jr. famously described his dream, he was talking about a future that existed in Canada by 1983 with establishment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

But now?

Words, Words, Words: What You Say and What That Says About You

2012-05-27T08:06:00.000-04:00

Dinosaurs, birthdays not allowed on tests

Look mom, a dragon!

Here's another one of those "outrage of the day" stories that drive conservative news chains like the Toronto Sun sideways. They seethe about Political Correctness Gone Crazy or liberal hypersensitivity or that curiously infuriated flavour of nostalgia that usually ends with head shaking and "what-has-this-world-come-to"? It's not hard to sympathize with them either because, on the surface, it seems absolutely ridiculous to deny the existence of common words that are part of every kid's daily experience. Really, what is so terrible about the word "birthday"?

There's more to this than what we might first think because the words we use have a big impact on who we are and how other people perceive us.

Adn taht's teh turth!

The English language is a funny thing. Words and expressions come in and out of fashion for reasons we don't understand, while deliberate attempts to create a craze usually fizzle (if they even get noticed). But the ones that catch on really stick. See how many of these you recognize:

Say, that's swell!
We're copacetic.
He's a real hepcat.
You're one hurtin' buckaroo.
That's good . . . NOT!
Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .
What does that have to do with the price of eggs?
She's the bee's knees, the cat's pyjamas.
Don't have a cow!

Yes, they really looked like this.

All of these were commonly-used expressions that seemed to be everywhere all at once, including tv shows, movies, books and magazines. In some cases mass media helped to spread them, but in others people used them for years before the media adopted them. But now think about your reaction to them, and your impression of people who use them. What comes to mind? If someone talked to you using slang from the 1950s, what would you think?

Language is much more than the words we use: it's also the attitudes, biases, perspectives and preconceptions that inform the way we see the world. The study of the relationship between language and culture is called Linguistic Anthropology, and it takes a fascinating look at how words, dialects, slang, and even so-called proper speech affect our thinking and, in turn, our society. In a way, we don't just use our language to communicate, we use it also to shape and set the limits of our world view. After all, there's no way to think about a certain idea unless we have a word for it. For example, here are some examples of foreign language words and their meanings:

Kummerspeck (German): The excess weight gained from emotional overeating.
Hikikomori (Japanese): A socially-withdrawn young person who is obsessed with video games.
Kaelling (Danish): A miserable woman who swears at her kids in public.
Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan): A look shared by two people that suggests unspoken mutual attraction.
Schlepp (Yiddish): To carry clumsily; a clumsy, awkard person.
Drachenfutter (German): A conciliatory gift a man brings his wife after upsetting her.
Nakama (Japanese): A close friend you consider part of the family.
Dépayser (French): The disorientation that arises from not being in your own home country.
Potlatch (Chinook): Deliberate and conspicuous destruction or waste of wealth for the purpose of demoralizing an impoverished enemy.

These are not just concepts we lack in English; they give insight into social and cultural mores that we do not necessarily share. We have some rough approximations -- circumlocutions -- but the lack of specialized vocabulary means we don't share the ideas with the same degree of precision. So while we might understand the idea of kummerspeck we don't understand all the nuances and shades of meaning, much as a German might not quite get the subtle meaning of "confirmed bachelor," "henpecked" (or the somewhat more vulgar variation, "whipped"), "rainmaker," or "pork barrel."

The better we understand how people think the better we can understand their moral, political, social and cultural values, and the way to understand how they think is by examining their language use. The old action thriller movie Broken Arrow gives a great example: upon learning that the term "broken arrow" is a military code word for a nuclear device that has gone missing as the result of an accident, a character remarks, "I don't know what's scarier, losing nuclear weapons, or that it happens so often there's actually a term for it. "

So when we hear about efforts to filter words or deny their usage, we have to look carefully at the motivations and the longer-term implications. In some instances the effort is worthwhile: racial epithets like "nigger," "spick," "gook" and "dago" were in common use as recently as the 1990s, but have now almost disappeared along with negative attitudes about the people they name. This is also the downside: ideas disappear with lost words. The theory of Newspeak in Orwell's Nineteen Eigthy-four describes this best:

By 2050-earlier, probably-all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron - they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will beno thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

The Rules Paradox

2012-05-13T22:01:00.001-04:00

Wait. You mean you just didn't realize
armed robbery is a crime? Ohhhhh!
Why didn't you say so!

Why do we even have rules? Do they do any good? Consider:

In Ontario, going 50 km/hr over the speed limit is considered "stunt driving" and carries a 1 year licence suspension, up to a $10,000 fine, an immediate 7 day vehicle impound, and a criminal record. Something like 20,000 people have been charged since the law came into effect in 2007.

I don't drive that fast. Ever. I don't need a law to tell me not to. The stunt driving law holds no relevance for me. Approximately 20,000 people in Ontario do drive that fast apparently, despite the law. The law is clear; everyone knows it exists; no one could reasonably believe it's a bad law (like, say, arbitrary store-closing hours laws); no one could reasonably believe driving that fast is safe. Yet 20,000 people broke the law and got caught doing it. The law is irrelevant to them as well. After all, it didn't deter them. So what's the purpose of a law that doesn't stop the very people it targets from committing the very acts they're predisposed to commit?

But officer, it can't go less
than 200 km/h!

Laws and rules are reactive -- we see something we don't like and we write a rule to prevent it from happening again. But if that's all it took policing would be dull work indeed. Most often, we see subsequent breaches of the rule and attempt to rewrite the rule to make it even more firmly against the acts we dislike. In Ontario, for example, speeding fines doubled twice since 1990. We also attach penalties, fines, and conditions to the laws so that those found guilty will be less inclined to break them again. It's like we're saying Ok, this time we mean it." Again, if it were that easy there'd be no such thing as recidivism.

So the law doesn't deter people who don't break laws since, well, they don't break laws; and the law doesn't deter people who do break laws; it doesn't curb the likelihood of reoccurrence; and it doesn't warn others not to break laws since they either are or are not going to anyway. Anyone whose job involves enforcing rules will tell you that a small number of people commit most of the infractions, whether major or minor. Rudy Giuliani, when he was Mayor of New York, instituted an aggressive enforcement campaign and found, to everyone's surprise, that major crime incidents decreased in neighbourhoods when the petty criminals were in jail. Police would round up the subway turnstile jumpers, and the number of muggings, robberies and sexual assaults would drop off. They realized that the key to major crime prevention is petty crime enforcement.

The problem is, of course, there are no statistics on crime prevention because you can't measure the number of crimes that didn't occur. Think about it: if I plan a robbery but don't go through with it, how would anyone know? There's no "crimes I almost committed" database to track what didn't happen. Enforcement is, like the law, reactive and statistics-driven, but the stats measure effects, not effectiveness. There's a big difference: exercise will drive up your heart rate (effect) but heart rate alone cannot tell you if exercise improves your health (effectiveness).

So we need a different way of thinking about rules, laws and enforcement, some means to predict and prevent rather than observe and react. More work is needed on mental health and behaviour to find the leading indicators that will help us identify earlier who is likely to engage in anti-social behaviour. More understanding of causes vs. triggers; fewer disincentives to compliance, aka red tape; stronger cultural and social strategies to isolate and marginalize criminals rather than romanticize and idealize them (The Godfather effect); more good is good, less bad is good.

Get on that, will you?

Happy Birthday: You Probably Don't Exist

2012-05-12T07:41:00.001-04:00

I love pancakes.

Today is my son's birthday, and this got me thinking about my own mortality. In an earlier post I talked a bit about the brain-in-a-vat problem, also known as Descartes' Evil Genius theory, also known as the plot of The Matrix. Essentially the basic problem, or question, is how can you be sure that you are not really just a disembodied brain in a vat (BIV) and all your experiences are part of an elaborate computer program? In Descartes' version, long before the advent of computers, the question is a little different: how can you be sure that some evil deity-like figure hasn't tricked your mind into perceiving a falsified reality? The Wachowski brothers took it from there when they sat down to write The Matrix.

But the purpose of this question is to come up with the answer -- i.e. if you argue that you're not a BIV, how can you know for certain? Recently, however, the question of whether we're BIVs has taken a somewhat different approach: what is the probability you actually exist? Turns out the answer is a lot less reassuring than you might expect.

This is your fantasy?

This new version of the question is called The Simulation Hypothesis (SH) and it takes the brain-in-a-vat/evil genius/Matrix scenario to the next, uh, logical, level. Rather than suggesting that you empirically exist and a computer fools your senses, the SH suggests that all of existence, yourself included, is nothing more than a computer simulation, a video game, a Star Trek-style holo-deck fantasy. In short, we're Sims.

See, the thing is, we can't argue convincingly for existence. In fact, the SH suggests it's far more likely that we are Sims. In fact, the SH argues there's only a remote probability that we're not Sims. Wait. What? What? Whatever happened to Descartes' assertion "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I exist")? Wasn't that supposed to remove any doubt as to our existence? Well, as it turns out, no: it really only resolved the question of whether our senses can be fooled. It technically doesn't question our actual existence but it comes to the conclusion we must exist since we can think independently of what our senses tell us. The SH throws a wrench into that by saying that even our thinking is part of the simulation -- in other words, it's not that our senses aren't fooled, it's that we are programmed to believe that we're thinking.

The logic of the SH begins with a simple proposition: we are almost certainly living in a computer-simulated world. How do we test it?

To be true, the SH requires a technologically-sophisticated civilization.
All civilizations either a) advance to the necessary level of technological sophistication or b) die off before reaching the necessary level.
If a civilization reaches the necessary level it either a) has an interest in creating Sim worlds or b) has no interest in creating Sim worlds.
If a civilization is interested and creates Sim worlds, then the number of Sim worlds >1, and the number of Sim people is greater than earth's current population.
As the number of Sim worlds increases, so does the number of Sim people.
The ratio of Sim people to real people expresses the probability that you are a Sim.

So, to be clear: a sufficiently advanced civilization could create millions of simulated worlds with hundreds, or thousands, or even billions of billions of simulated people. That means the number of real people (i.e. us) is a ridiculously small proportion of the population of the universe, so small as to be unlikely. And even if we were the real people, it makes more sense to assume that we're the ones making Sim worlds. Since we don't have such technology, it isn't us. So the best conclusion is that if such a civilization has created Sim worlds, probability theory says we are almost certainly Sim people who only exist in a computer program.

Turn right. I mean, to the right. I mean . . . oh, damn.

Aside from the question of what is real, you really have to wonder what is the value of faith, law, morality, justice? Why should we love or care about anybody else? In other words, why be good?

Carpe diem, my son.

The Beauty Myth? Or . . .

2012-05-09T20:36:00.001-04:00

You can trust me. I'm pretty.

So it looks like all that time spent in front of the mirror pays off. According to a recent study, pretty people make more money. Shocking. Frankly, this this is old news. In some industries this makes sense. Television news viewers, for instance, tend to prefer attractive young women alone (or paired with middle-aged men), and employers generally prefer attractive people in front-line positions because they are perceived to be smarter, more trustworthy and more effective at their jobs. Yep. That's right. All you have to do is sit there and look good and people automatically credit you with competence.

Well, that is, unless you're too attractive, in which case you cause resentment, jealousy and perceptions of lower intelligence. Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth is a damning portrayal of this problem: in it, Wolf recounts multiple examples of women whose attractiveness was a liability. In one case a female news anchor was fired for not being attractive enough, while in another case one was fired for being too attractive. One wore too much make-up, another not enough. Her book became an international best-seller and gave a name to a frustrating paradox.

You're obviously qualified.
When can you start?

20 years on and it hasn't gone away: one study found that HR managers are more inclined to hire attractive people, again unless they're too attractive. Another study tested trustworthiness and found not only that attractive people are more trustworthy but also that they were expected to be more trusting and generous. Then there's the study that showed that women stare at handsome men but don't remember them after. Or how about the study that asked participants to use non-physical cues to identify people with psychopathology: they pointed to the physically unattractive ones. Criminal defence lawyers know that good-looking defendants are more likely to be acquitted, or if convicted, receive more lenient sentences. On the other hand, physically attractive people with psychological disturbance are judged to be more maladjusted than less physically attractive people with the same psychological disturbance. So many mixed messages. What's a babe-magnet to do?

. . . and thanks to botox this smile is
frozen on my face.

Attractiveness is measured in other ways too: we tend to judge healthy and fit people attractive; we see people with positive personal qualities as attractive; we see those with whom we've shared a tumultuous emotional event as more attractive; we find people with very specific physical proportions more attractive; we even find people more attractive if we do favours for them!

And of course, the other side of the coin: attractive people are considered egocentric, materialistic, vain, shallow, aloof, elitist, cold, and unfriendly. Oh, and intimidating, rude, dismissive, entitled, arrogant, demanding, demeaning, pretentious, unscrupulous and corrupt.

I guess the simple summary is that we are terribly ambivalent about attractive people. I recently ran into a high school classmate who was -- and still is -- very attractive. She told me that back in high school she rarely had dates, and most boys (myself included) avoided eye contact when she looked at them. I confessed that I thought she was way, way out of my league. She told me that it took her a long time to understand that guys could feel that way about her, and in all those years she had simply believed she was ugly.

She also told me she would have dated me if I'd asked.

Damn.

Halos and Hairsplitting

2012-04-22T13:03:00.000-04:00

Rick Vaive walks free

He's handsome: he wouldn't drive drunk.

In acquitting Rick Vaive of the charges of impaired driving and having more than 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood, the judge in this case said "there wasn't proof beyond reasonable doubt his ability to drive was impaired by alcohol." I was surprised and disappointed by this verdict because the judge seems to have been confused by, or ignorant of, the law.

Here are the facts:

Vaive admitted to drinking six beers over the course of a golf game before driving
He had been drinking and playing poker the night before
He had been observed driving eratically and hit a curb
He was stumbling, weaving, and, disturbingly, urine-soaked.
He stank of alcohol
He failed a breath analysis twice after being arrested albeit outside the statutory 2 hour time frame.

Impaired driving is a Criminal Code offence, not a Highway Traffic Act offence, with two separate elements:

The impairment of the ability to drive.
The presence of more than 80mg of alcohol in 100ml of blood

In logic these are OR conditions not AND conditions. To be convicted of the crime of impaired driving, the Crown must prove beyond a reasonable doubt the accused had some impairment affecting his/her driving ability OR had a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.08%. As a matter of practice people are usually charged with both -- i.e. there was an impairment AND there was too much alchohol -- but as a matter of law they can be convicted of either one.

The issue for the court to decide isn't the cause, but the degree, of impairment. Alcohol has a reliable and predictable threshold (i.e. 0.08%) that is proven to impair driving ability, so, technically, drinking and driving is only a crime once alcohol impairs the ability to drive. The courts and legislation have affirmed that BAC of 0.08% causes impairment, but the quantity needed to achieve that level varies from person to person. But -- and this is the where I think the judge went wrong -- it isn't the only factor to consider when deciding the question of impairment. Many things can affect your ability to drive to the point of impairment: medication, fatigue, illness, drugs. Again, the question isn't what? but to what degree?

So, if you are impaired by anything and driving OR if your blood alcohol is more than 80mg/100ml while driving you are guilty of impaired driving. This is analogous to say, theft: if you take someone else's wallet, use the credit cards and cash, and sell the identification, you're guilty of theft and each act would be sufficient to convict.

In Vaive's case, the judge focused solely on whether Vaive's "ability to drive was impaired by alcohol." But she threw out the baby with the bath water, so to speak, because she failed to consider the second question of whether his impairment was caused by some other factor. That's what the law says: either impaired ability or blowing over 80 is sufficient cause for conviction. Essentially, she ruled that because she couldn't say for sure that alcohol caused impairment, he was therefore not impaired.

This is a serious error in reasoning, a huge error, that no judge should ever make: lack of evidence for X is not the same as evidence that X does not exist. This is the black swan problem, the life on other planets problem, the existence of God problem, the dark matter problem, the string theory problem . . . just because you can't show something is true doesn't mean it is false: it's undecided pending further evidence. But in Vaive's case, there was ample further evidence of impairment: he admitted fatigue and medical issues including sleep apnea affected his ability to drive that day. So even if he was stone sober the judge had evidence to convict.

So why didn't she? According to one reporter, "she believed his version of the story, she said, because she found Vaive a credible witness: he has no criminal record, played an elite level of hockey and gives back to the community with charity golf tournaments." So presumably if he were less likable, he'd be less credible?

The Incentive Fallacy

2012-04-14T22:39:00.000-04:00

“But I think the only way to improve student achievement is to teach better. We don’t have a student learning problem. We have an adult learning problem. We have to learn to teach better.” -- Montgomery County Schools Superintendent Joshua P. Starr

What motivates teachers? The answers may surprise you. Studies over the past 40 years, according to writer and speaker Dan Pink, show that most incentive schemes fail, and in some cases worsen performance in business. Incentives like bonuses, trips, rewards and even sales commissions actually do more harm than good in many cases!
That’s fine in business, but what about education? The recent trend toward merit pay for teachers in the US is, in his view, also doomed to fail. You can read his thoughts on this on his blog. So what is the answer? How do we motivate teachers to perform better if throwing money at them isn’t the answer? He makes some very specific and provocative suggestions that tie together many different strands of research into creativity, engagement and satisfaction.
In short, he argues that three key factors motivate people more than monetary incentive schemes: autonomy, mastery and sense of purpose. He makes a strong case for encouraging creativity and motivation by doing the opposite of what we usually do (i.e. supervise, manage, oversee, direct, structure): get out of the way and trust.
Check out his TedTalks video from 2008:

And here is a shorter, cleverly animated version from RSAnimate:

So, What Exactly Does "Negotiate" Mean?

2012-03-28T09:16:00.001-04:00

Economic realities have forced the governments of Canada and Ontario to release “belt-tightening” budgets recently. Weirdly enough, Ontario’s Liberal Party government under Dalton McGuinty has tabled a budget that could have come from a Harris-era Jim Flaherty, while Stephen Harper’s Federal Conservative government – i.e. Jim Flaherty – produced one that would be right at home on the desk of Jean Chretien. The Ontario budget is the more drastic of the two, calling for billions in spending cuts over the next few years. The key area targeted for cuts, naturally, is salaries in the public sector.

Canada’s federal system put responsibility for health care and education on the provinces way back in 1867 when no one could have foreseen the growth and development of these two industries. These are capital-intensive operations with little direct return on investment. Every dollar put into education today produces something like $7 in tax revenue at some time in the distant future since a better-educated populace earns more money. Same goes with health care: every dollar spent on smoking-cessation or healthy eating programs yields future savings in expenditures plus higher taxation revenues as healthier people work longer and spend more money. But governments are only around for four years and the public memory is vanishingly small so no one’s getting elected in 2012 on a platform called Prosperity 2030.

So this leaves Ontario in a pickle. Costs are high, revenues are down, creditors are nervous, and the seismographically sensitive media paint a picture of a government teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. The time is now, everyone sternly warns, to make tough decisions to secure our future and ensure we can continue to offer the services and, well, you know the rest. Dwight Duncan, the beleaguered Finance Minister, dutifully trotted out his party’s “sustainability plan” --- and by the way, isn’t it time for that word to retire? --- that assumes the public sector of approximately 1,000,000 people will accept multi-year pay and grid freezes, benefits reductions, pension claw-backs and more in the name of doing “their part.” He has invited the representatives of each employee group – from doctors to teachers to data clerks – to sit down and “negotiate” fair settlements. If he doesn’t get the salary freeze he wants, he’ll legislate it: “We will deal with our partners at the bargaining table before we take those steps," Duncan told reporters. "But we have to achieve these fiscal numbers."

Ok. I get it. His government is broke. He needs to save money and public opinion is rarely on the side of public servants when it comes to salaries and benefits. Bob Rae and Mike Harris could tell you that. And really, public servants are paid well and the proposed pay freezes won’t drive them (well, us, since I am one) into poverty. What I don’t get is the weird insistence on negotiation as a means to get the deal he needs. The amount he needs to save is non-negotiable; the people he needs to extract the money from is non-negotiable; the term of the contracts he wants to write is non-negotiable; and the method by which he wants to get the money is non-negotiable. Oh, and if the negotiations fail – i.e. he doesn’t get a voluntary agreement with all these non-negotiable terms – he will legislate the terms to impose them. So why would anyone negotiate? (Full disclosure: though I am included in the broader public service, my employee group is not included in the “negotiations” as it is not covered by a union contract. My terms and conditions are determined by my employer, and the requisite funding is set by legislation.)

In the opening scenes of The Godfather, Michael Corleone explains the “family business” to his girlfriend who is meeting the family for the first time, and he tells a story about how his father and Luca Brasi “negotiated” with a bandleader. “Luca held a gun to the bandleader’s head and my father assured him that either his signature or his brains would be on the contract. He signed the contract.”

Ontario threatens to legislate wage freezes

Free Will (Not Free Willy)

2012-03-22T22:07:00.001-04:00

So, it’s hard to determine if Determinism is even compatible with Incompatibilism . . .

Ah, the debate over free will vs. determinism. Philosophers adore their binary oppositions: mind vs. body, materialism vs. idealism, empiricism vs. rationalism, realism vs. conceptualism . . . In my naive way I have a hard time understanding why a good theory has to be one or the other, and sometimes I think the academic publishing industry foments "controversies" that don't actually exist for the sake of justifying their own existence (but I digress, and that is a different discussion).

I'm not much interested in a discussion of the theoretical groundwork -- at least not in this space. I'm more interested in questioning whether we accept free will, and if so, how it "works" on various levels in our lives. If we don't accept it, then I'm interested in exploring what exactly it is we are doing when we make decisions in our lives. I have long thought about these questions and I'm not entirely sure I have decent answers (or at least answers I'm ready to face). In short, I am beginning to believe that free will doesn't exist in any meaningful sense, and that our daily lives are narrowly and rigidly controlled by a combination of internal and external factors most of us are powerless to change.

For example, we view adolescence as carefree and frivolous. Teens have no duties, obligations, responsibilities . . . the few we give them they mismanage . . . they sleep so much they might as well be cats and dogs . . . they have no pressures or worries unlike their harried parents.

Of course these are silly stereotypes. The fastest growing mental health issue amongst adolescents is anxiety as evidenced by behaviour problems such as missing school, fighting, drug/alcohol abuse, and senseless risk-taking. Depression is another common side effect of anxiety that can lead to suicide. But what do teens have to be anxious about? Let's see:

school system relentlessly hyper-focused on achievement and grades
cultural obsession with material wealth coupled with media messages of economic doom and gloom
hyper-vigilant, bully-paranoid parents
shifting and artificial definition of "friend" as a result of social networks
risk aversion, or more accurately, risk misplacement, due to societal litigation-defensive mentality
perception that post-secondary education costs are spiraling up out of reach

Every generation has its problems, and parents are sometimes their own worst enemies. But the average high school kid is on a road with few turns. Finish high school in four years, get your post-secondary education or training, and be in a career-oriented job by age 22 so you can work until at least age 67 or maybe 70. If you're lucky we'll still have pension plans by then. Free will? I guess, but only in the sense that a free-range turkey you're raising for Thanksgiving dinner has "free will".

Ask yourself how "free" you really are in your life. What decisions can you make unencumbered by any sense of duty or obligation to anyone else? Can you decide tomorrow to walk away from your job? Your spouse or kids? Really. How free are you? Whether free will exists is irrelevant. The real question is how will you make the time you have available more meaningful?

"Damn, Man, I'm the Governor! Could You Just Shut Up?"

2012-03-18T10:07:00.004-04:00

I always love it when I come across this kind of story. It's got all the makings of one of those situations where a seemingly trivial event leads to larger revelations of corruption and the eventual unraveling of a political career. The story is that the Republican governor of New Jersey is forcing the merger of two state universities in what I can only surmise is some sort of cost-cutting move. According to critics, this decision was done at the state level without any consultation with the schools themselves, so some students attended a town hall meeting to question the governor on the plan. It ended badly with the governor getting into a bickering match with one of the students, having the police remove him from the meeting, and calling the guy "idiot."

It appears there are some in NJ who find this governor's style refreshing and genuine, while others are disgusted by his lack of decorum and respect (Ontarians experienced this kind of thing in the 90s under then Premier Mike Harris). The student himself, an Iraq/Afghanistan veteran of the Navy Seals, has avoided attacking the governor personally and focused instead on the issues, though his conduct in the meeting is questionable -- he interrupted repeatedly while the governor attempted to answer his questions.

What I find more interesting here is the governor's attitude and self-image as reflected in his comment "Damn, man, I'm the governor! Could you just shut up?" The old Acton comment about power corrupting people springs to mind, though I'm not sure in this case it's power so much as the illusion of power. According to some of the stories about him, he has been known to use his office and aggressive manner to dominate others. He has even misused government assets, taking a state helicopter to his son's baseball game, and attacked a state legislator who questioned him for it.

Even more interesting is that this kind of thing is so common it reads like the outline of a movie.

Act 1: narcissist politician gets elected on populist reform platform, but allegations of impropriety, arrogance and abuse of office soon surface
Act 2: crusading reporter digs deeper, finds evidence of corruption and impropriety that causes political scandal and sharp battle lines.
Act 3: public outcry, lots of hand-wringing and soul-searching, political crisis declared, Messiah returns from political wilderness, wins battle. Roll credits.

Do these people never learn?

Senator Tries to Pass Bill Declaring Single Parenting is Child Abuse

2012-03-14T21:46:00.008-04:00

Another salvo in the war on women. Once again the spectre of male dominance of women casts its shadow. If it weren't so frightening (and frankly weird) it would be funny. Well, come to think of it, it is blackly comic insofar as it reveals thinking so incoherent that it could pass for a Monty Python skit. I mean, really. Look at the stats:

2/3 of all divorces in North America are initiated by women
the most commonly-cited cause is "Mental Cruelty" (usually a catch-all for neglect) followed by infidelity, violence, addictions and incompatible expectations (not in this order)
most U.S. states and Canada have "no-fault" divorce laws requiring equitable division of assets
nearly 9 in 10 women will have custody of children
the average woman suffers a 27% decline in standard of living after separation/divorce while the average man enjoys a 10% increase

So imagine a woman with two children finally works up the courage to leave her husband. Assume he's violent, cocaine-addicted, and unfaithful. She moves with the children in to a small apartment because she has no cash pending division and sale of their joint assets. She works full-time, has a decent salary and benefits, but now must pay for day-care, gas, insurance, rent and other bills on her own (the husband is still paying the bills at the former residence). Despite her husband's conduct she isn't entitled to any compensation -- no-fault divorce laws say cause doesn't matter -- so she is financially worse-off, and may need additional work or longer hours to make up the shortfall. She manages and juggles all family responsibilities and has less time with her kids as a result. Now this legislator wants a law to say that she is a neglectful child abuser. Talk about a stacked deck!

As long as misogynist legislation remains in the books, we will never have justice. Now I know there are plenty of men who complain that the laws are slanted against them, and there are many examples to validate their claim. I don't deny their feelings, and I think what this highlights is the inherent failure of legislation to deal properly and fairly with divorce. The system needs fixing.

For Richer, For Poorer

2012-03-04T22:21:00.000-05:00

Richer people break the law, take candy from children

I've been trying to come up with a clever quip as a lead in to this story but in truth I got nothing. It isn't news. It isn't surprising. It isn't even particularly disturbing. Well, wait: it is disturbing, or at least should be; maybe it's just that we are getting so used to this kind of thing that we no longer realize how awful it truly is. I don't know. What I do know is that this is such a stereotypical image of the rich that it's almost comic, conjuring, as it does, images of a surly Montgomery Burns

turning his dogs loose on Girl Guides. What is the essential nature of wealth, and why do the accidents of birth and contingency confer such a disproportionate sense of supra-legal authority, moral dessert and entitlement to social and political benefit?

It's a problem as old as civilization itself: the haves and have-nots and the different way the law appears to apply to them. In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four Goldstein's book describes the eternal struggle of the classes; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared that all of human history is about class struggles; the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler and Nazism, hell, even the Salem Witch Trials all had their roots in rich vs. poor divides.

To me it's fascinating to look at the many different definitions of wealth. In Kenya I saw Maasai men tending herds of cattle, and despite living in conditions that, by our standards, are far below grinding poverty, the ones with large herds are considered rich and influential men, and their children are highly sought in marriage. Substitute cattle for land, and Kenya for England circa 1200 AD and the situation is similar. Then again, the abstract concept of currency, or cash, that is the basis of our concept of wealth would probably confuse that 13th century English feudal baron, and perhaps future historians will write scholarly articles for uncomprehending masses trying to explain how our complicated system of commodity futures speculation, investment banking, and derivative markets creates real wealth from abstract measures of value.

What's more of a puzzle (and, frankly, concern) to me is the irrational manner by which wealth leads to credibility, credibility to influence, influence to political power, political power to legislative control over economic systems that reinforce wealth. And more to the point, why do so many other evidently legitimate factors fail to lead to credibility and influence? Some examples:

Global Warming Data: who's right?

Climate change: skeptics undermine scientists who demonstrate the human causes of global warming. Who is influencing public policy more?

Production trends mirror discovery trends

Peak Oil Theory/Oil Depletion: the proponents of fossil fuels dismiss scientists who demonstrate that usable oil exploration, recovery and production have peaked and supplies are in decline. Who is influencing public policy more?

Wealth is politics, and the implications are awful. And though you really have to have money to run a campaign, studies suggest that having more money is not a sure way to win an election. So, on the evidence, wealth is dehumanizing, ineffective, and arguably even harmful to the democratic process yet we continue to venerate and worship the wealthy who form our "ruling class." I am reminded of the words of former Ontario Premier Mike Harris who snidely observed that the Ontario NDP was the party of "schoolteachers and housewives," as though somehow ordinary people do not belong in the democratic process.

At the same time I came across the first headline, above, I found this one too:

World News: Split between rich and poor greater in cities, UNICEF reports

Of course, in democratic countries, political representation is population-driven. The more people, the more seats, and since cities have more people, they tend to drive elections. In other words, with the cities to win the elections. How do you win the cities? Appeal to the wealth. Successive Ontario governments since 1995 have gotten elected by appealing to the large urban areas with populist and popular reform commitments. Win the cities, win the election. And again the message is a bleak one: money talks and the language it speaks is power.

Over the coming months, the Ontario government faces a crisis unlike any seen since the early 1990s: huge deficits, low tax revenue, bleak economic forecasts, and all of its public sector union contracts set to expire at once will mean bitter fights over necessary spending cuts, program rollbacks and potential job losses. In the name of money we will risk progress made in education, health-care reform, social services, policing . . . I mean, these are core government functions: if they can't get these right . . .

But the greater point is that, to do its job, the government will be forced to demonize and demoralize its own workforce, undermine its credibility, and give the people of Ontario the message that it is not to be trusted. Borrowing the late Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field generator, the government will try to convince Ontarians that the very people they need to rely on most are not credible when it comes to public comment on destructive government policy but perfectly competent to implement that policy.

Great work if you can get it, but trying to keep this all straight is too much work for me.

The Majority Rules, Right?

2012-02-26T10:57:00.002-05:00

Often we hear children throw around the expression "majority rules!" when they try to sort out conflicts. Whether it's deciding on rules to games, order of precedence, or who the unlucky one is who has to go into the scary neighbour's yard after the ball, the notion of settling the dispute democratically is, in theory anyway, ingrained into us early. Of course there are also instances of disputes and differences being settled somewhat more anti-democratically, but the point is that adults -- parents, teachers, police, coaches -- consistently teach kids from a young age to use grown-up political methods. In most cases it's effective: kids seem to understand pretty early on some pretty sophisticated democratic ideas first espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, John Locke, and other 18th century political philosophers.

Democratic ideals of open government and free elections have given us the capacity to participate in government, and in theory the needs of the population as a whole are represented by the people we elect. And here is where the concept of Majority Rule needs the most careful scrutiny, for it can be the case that Majority Rule means Majority Tyranny. We are a competitive species and seek victory in even the lowest-stakes competitions, so it is no great insight to point out that when we lobby governments, or promote candidates who fit with our ideals, we expect to get our own way. Politics is about making trade-offs and compromises, but no matter how we soften it there will always be winners and losers. Only one candidate can win the election, only one policy can dominate, only one "side" can form the ruling class. The checks and balances built into government try to ensure that no single branch of government has too much power, and the constitutional guarantees of inalienable rights seek to protect people from harm. But the system is imperfect, and often the biases, prejudices, and even outright hatred of people toward those who are different can cause terrible injustices.

The worry is that sometimes, when our most cherished beliefs come into conflict, we apply the same winner-loser mentality and allow harm to come to those we are supposed to protect. A greater worry is that we will become so accustomed to sacrificing and trading off rights, that we will eventually forget that we're not supposed to. We hold the protection of rights as the supreme law, and the highest duty of government, yet we often have or witness debates about what rights are really worth protecting. Worse, we split hairs when it comes to deciding whether certain rights even exist. For example, we agree that the right to life is paramount, and that no one may deprive us of life; anti-abortion advocates sensibly argue that abortion is therefore wrong as it deprives the fetus of its life. The response, from those who believe that pregnancy is a form of infringement on a woman's rights, argue that a fetus is not alive, which in turn leads to digressive debates about when exactly life begins.

American philosopher John Rawls considered this problem as he sought to understand what makes a just society. He tried to understand the various approaches to moral decision making as they applied to public policy and came to the conclusion that all of them in some way or another resulted in unfairness. Utilitarian approaches -- i.e. that the right thing is what brings the greatest good to the greatest number of people -- permit unequal distribution of benefit and rational argument in favour of harm. Rationalist approaches, based on Kant's ideas of human dignity, permit passive allowance of harm in the name of ensuring individual liberty. Rawls' great insight was that justice is not found in morality but in fairness. Fairness, according to Rawls in his great work A Theory of Justice (1971), means that the benefits and protections of society must be distributed equally to ensure a level playing field. Inequality is permissible, he argued, to compensate for disadvantage, not to elevate or grant special privilege that results in certain people having more than others. It may be some people elevate themselves through personal effort or gain. Rawls' point is that public policy must not select for those people.

So does the majority truly rule? As far as Rawls is concerned yes, but the duty of the majority is to be fair to all and ensure that no group is deliberately privileged or disadvantaged by public policy. He proposed a method for setting policy that he felt would ensure fairness: the Veil of Ignorance. Simply put, he said that if we could decide on how to distribute rights and protections without knowing our place in society, that is, behind the veil of ignorance, we would make sure that all people got equal treatment and protection or we would risk ending up disadvantaged. Effectively, our own selfishness and fear of losing would compel us to be selfless and anti-competitive, and allow those who are disadvantaged to receive additional benefit that elevates them to the same level as everyone else.

Does it work? Well, consider what it brought us: special education programs, wheelchair accessibility, closed-captioning on television, braille on elevator keys, progressive taxation plans, foreign aid programs, and many other forms of redistribution, accommodation, modification, and support for disadvantage. Implicit in every law is the principle of protection for all people, and, as many politicians have come to understand, while your party may represent a particular segment of the population when it tries to get elected, it represents the population as a whole when it is in government. To be just, a government must first be fair, and the principles of fairness derive from our most cherished beliefs about equality. Getting to equality is the only work that matters.

(Un)Dressed for Success and Moral Parking Spaces

2012-02-24T20:45:00.003-05:00

According to several disgruntled women in the Italian town of Bagnolo Mella, there ought to be a law prohibiting Laura Maggi from dressing in revealing clothes at work. To be clear, this isn't a case of an employer forcing her to dress in skimpy outfits: she is the owner of a local bar and she chooses to dress provocatively, saying "it's just harmless fun." It's also good business: her cafe is apparently quite busy most nights, and reportedly attracts men from as far as 100km away. Locals gripe about traffic congestion and illegally-parked cars, while "seething" wives and "angry" girlfriends prohibit their men from going to her bar, the town's mayor among them, though to her credit she says how Ms. Maggi chooses to dress is not for the town to regulate. Her only policy concerns are about how to manage the increased traffic, parking problems, unruly patrons, and vandalism. Now, of course, with the story making international (minor) headlines, Ms. Maggi appearing on the Italian equivalent of Canada A.M. to talk about the "issue," and a flood of photos of her more revealing outfits making the rounds, things are likely going to get worse.

Ok, wait. An attractive woman with a nice figure in revealing clothes is serving drinks to men in a bar? Oh, my! What's next, patrons wearing novelty moose antlers on their birthdays <snicker>? Mismatched licence plates on the walls <gasp>? Mock newspaper stories of Olde Tymes <land sakes!>? Really? This is news? This is international news? This is the controversy of the day for February 24, 2012? I can get into my car and drive to countless local spots where attractive women with nice figures serve drinks in revealing clothes, and to my recollection there has never been a protest or any attention from the media ever. I don't think anyone even notices.What's really interesting is the assortment of headlines related to this story. Searching the name Laura Maggi in Google News yields the following series of headlines and associated news stories:

Sex Bomb . . . Busty Barmaid . . . Sexy Barmaid . . . Entrepreneur . . . Wait. What? Only one sees this as a business strategy by a clever business owner? Compare this to the descriptions of the various owners of Hooters:

"six Clearwater businessmen (Lynn Stewart, Gil DiGiannantonio, Ed Droste, Billy Ranieri, Ken Wimmer, Dennis Johnson)".
"Robert H. Brooks and a group of Atlanta investors"
"A consortium of private investors"
"Executives and developers"

You get the point. What's more, one article refers to Laura Maggi as a "coffee bar girl," placing her on the same level as "Hooters Girls," despite being the owner. Why is a woman who starts a risky venture like a restaurant (most fail in their first year) seen only as a "coffee bar girl," or "sexy barmaid" while the founders of Hooters are known as entrepreneurs? Why does a group of middle-aged men who start a restaurant featuring attractive women serving drinks in revealing clothing merit a Forbes profile, while a woman who does the same thing land in the "Weird News" section of the on-line editions?

A Threat to Public Order
According to one news story, "Several wives from the town have been on TV to complain. One said: 'It is outrageous and should not be allowed' . . . This town is quiet and respectable. Now we are known across the whole country because of the little amount of clothing this barmaid is wearing to serve drinks."

But wait, it gets better: according to the town's mayor Cristina Almici,

We have received several complaints from women about the bar and we are looking at what we can do with regard to public order. There has been a huge influx of traffic into the town since the news of Laura started to spread and this has led to incidents of bad parking and some minor acts of vandalism. We can’t stop people from going to her bar and I know it is very popular with men in the town – personally I don’t see any problem with how she looks or dresses. If anything, it’s the men who go there who have a problem. My husband is certainly not allowed to go there (my emphasis throughout).

Never mind a law; there ought to be an award for this kind of thing. Ever seen the video of the Most Useless Machine Ever? That's the first thing I thought of. What a dazzling display of self-negating, non-sequitur statements! Incredibly, her gibberish creates a bizarre link between Laura Maggi's appearance and public order. Take a closer look at how she manages this by disentangling her statements a bit:

some women object to Ms. Maggi's clothes and have complained to the town council
the town has seen an increase in visitors
the town has seen incidents of bad parking and vandalism
the bar is popular with local men
the town is powerless to tell Ms. Maggi how to dress
the town is powerless to prevent men from attending the bar
the town is looking at how to maintain public order
the mayor's husband is not permitted to attend at the bar
there is nothing wrong with the way Ms. Maggi dresses
the men who go there have a problem

Here are the implications of her statements:

Some women are offended by Laura Maggi
Many men are attracted to her
The men who visit her bar because of the way she dresses have a problem
The town has seen a rise in public order problems like bad parking and vandalism from local men and tourists
The rise in public order problems is attributable to Laura Maggi because of her popularity with men.
Therefore, the solution to the public order problems lies in diminishing Laura Maggi's popularity

All complete nonsense based on several flawed premises:

Laura Maggi is immoral because of her appearance
Men who find Laura Maggi attractive are immoral
Visitors to the town are undesirable
Except for Laura Maggi, petty crime would otherwise not occur

Consider: the only reason the increased traffic and tourism are considered public order problems is that they supposedly occur as the result of the desire to see Laura Maggi. But would the tourism and traffic be problems in any other context, say an art fair or a music festival? If not, then the townsfolk are profoundly consequentialist and arbitrary in their moral reasoning. If they'd forgive bad parking and inconvenience from increased visitors for their annual pottery and crafts show but not for Laura Maggi's bar, despite the economic benefits to the town, then it might be high time for Laura Maggi to board up the windows and get out of town. After all their brand of moral reasoning -- what I call Gulag Morality -- permits the justification of terrible acts of repression and brutality in the name of morality.

Where's the (Cloned) Beef?

2012-02-21T20:45:00.003-05:00

Karl Marx wrote "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." Debatable. Many people, however, ask the question "so what are you going to do about it?" to people who raise ethical problems. Well, it looks like, a few years back, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) issued a kind of X-Prize challenge as a way of addressing its opposition to human carnivorism. PETA offered $1M US to anyone who could develop and sell commercially genetically-engineered meat by June 2012, and it looks like a couple of Dutch scientists may be close.

Now this is a problem. It promises at once both to support and undermine the claims of vegetarians/vegans who reject eating meat on ethical grounds. I better say this up front: I eat meat because a) I like it and b) I reject the argument that says we have no right to eat other animals. That said, I think there are some interesting points for discussion worth exploring:

If the vegetarian/vegan objection to eating meat is that it is cruel to animals, will they eat test-tube meats? If not, why not? Don't they have a ethical obligation to eat meat once their objections have been addressed?
If test-tube meat reduces our reliance on farm-raised animals for food, what happens to that entire segment of the farming industry? Why is it more ethical to place the interests of animals ahead of the interests of literally millions of people whose livelihoods depend on "real" meat?
If we shift to test-tube meat, what will the effect be on the populations of the animals we no longer harvest for food? How will we manage -- let alone tolerate -- rapid growth in populations of chickens, pigs, cows, turkeys, fish, sheep . . .
Assuming there is no risk to human health from test-tube meats, and governments approve its production and sale, who will be the suppliers? Corporate for-profit laboratories? Will they have any obligation to make their products cheaply available in developing nations subject to chronic food shortages? What if they refuse?
How will the costs compare to "real" meat products? Are there wider economic implications that we have to consider? What related or dependent industries may also benefit or suffer?
If test-tube meat made by cloning animals is considered an ethical solution in this case, what about using test-tube organs cloned from people as a means of curing disease? Since the cloned meat does not come from real animal that endures cruely, would we argue that cloned organs do not come from real humans?

I could go on all day listing the ethical problems this situation creates, but I guess I really have to wonder about an ostensibly ethical organization issuing this kind of challenge given the problems it raises. I understand, and share, the opposition to raising animals solely for their fur or skins, and I completely support any efforts to eradicate gratuitous animal cruelty. We don't need dog fights or cock fights or bull fights or closed reserve hunting. We don't need to mistreat animals. We may out of ignorance or incapacity allow animals to come to harm but that's a different matter from deliberate mistreatment.

Relax, it's just oil-based paint.

But I also don't agree that your moral or ethical problem is everyone's, or put another way, that something important to you is important. I don't mean I don't recognize things that are important to other people; I just mean I don't feel I have to follow a garden path simply because someone points it out to me, especially when that person uses a questionable methods to make a point. PETA has a track record of espousing and even using extreme methods to draw attention to its beliefs that, in my view, serve merely to attract extremists in need of a cause. I think that just harms their organization.

So, with PETA behind the bounty on cloned meat, I wonder if they haven't outsmarted themselves. They have a wide range of supporters who have different kinds of animal rights issues they try to promote. Human consumption of animals is only one, but it is one of their foundational issues. Any organization of more than one person that forms around an idea is subject to fragmentation. I don't care whether you're talking about religion, politics, health, education, art or even pop music: there will always be infighting and intrigue between the hardliners and the reformers, the conservatives and the progressives, the static and the dynamic. And again whether you're talking about religions or rock bands the public battles are vicious and explosive.

For example, consider the case of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Originally formed by Candy Lightner in 1982 after her 13 year old daughter was killed by a drunk driver, its stated aims were "to stop drunk driving, support the victims of this violent crime and prevent underage drinking." However, by 1985 Lightner left the organization she founded because MADD "has become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned … I didn't start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving." Similar conflicts occurred within the Black Panther Party, GreenPeace . . . Hell, even Monty Python parodied how interpretive differences lead to religious dogma and sectarian conflict in Life of Brian.

It seems inevitable that this too will lead to division within PETA and, by association, dozens of other similar organizations, because they are the kinds of movements that seem to foster zealotry. Most of us won't give our lives to causes, preferring instead to chip in a few dollars here and there to fundraisers. Those who do certainly act out of passion, self sacrifice, and personal commitment but, and it's an important point, not necessarily to the cause. Assuming the goals of the organization are identical to the goals of the members of the organization is the fallacy of division, and I think it's more common than the leaders know or admit.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Photoshop

2012-02-18T13:00:00.003-05:00

You have to look twice at this photo. Just for a moment, you're not sure if what you're seeing is real. You might be thinking, am I looking at a crime-scene photo? A wax museum exhibit? A pretentious art school installation? As the title says, this is a digitally manipulated, or photoshopped, picture (like Kleenex, Hoover, and iPod, Photoshop is a brand name that has become a generic term). When done well, photoshopping yields stunning results. And, of course, there are the not-so-stunning efforts as well.

Artistic merits aside, there are a range of issues created by photo manipulation.

I mean, people have been debating the structure of reality forever: what can we know? What kinds of things are there? Where do I begin and end? What are the limits of perception, knowledge, and awareness?

These are some of the so-called "big questions," the ones that are supposed to haunt us late at night, and, at the risk of going off on a bit of a whacked-out mind journey, it's interesting to consider the way a piece of software technology has the power to alter, deny, and even construct reality. For if it is true, as so many have argued, that we can only know what our senses tell us, and if it is furthermore true that our senses are easily deceived, then it must surely follow that deceiving our senses will affect our perception of reality. Bungled photoshops are comical enough, and we all know about how advertisers, fashion magazines, and celebrity periodicals enhance photographs, but what of deliberately constructed images of people and things that do not, objectively speaking, exist?

It's easy to pick out the ethical problems, but what of the implications for our understanding of what is real? We forget, sometimes, how truly limited and limiting our senses are: our eyes detect a vanishingly small range of electromagnetic frequencies; our ears only a slice of the audio spectrum. Insects have better eyes, most animals have better ears, and some animals, like dogs, have olfactory senses so acute that they more or less see odours. Bats use echolocation and sonar, fish have a form of homing mechanism that works like radar, and owls have infrared vision. The point is that humans have a much different perception and understanding of the world because of the way our senses work, and while I don't necessarily agree that the only way to know the world is through our senses, I think that the way our senses show us the world influences us psychologically and intellectually.

See, here's the problem: if I see a photoshopped image of a beautiful woman my first response is an emotional/psycho-sexual one. While I may know in my mind
that the image is distorted, whether subtly or grossly, the effect of the picture negates its methods. Think about it: as a male with hardwired preferences (that reach beyond the personal and into the instinctual) I am drawn naturally to women whose appearance approximates my ideal. It doesn't matter to the creature deep in my hypothalamus how a woman came to look that way (or even if she's a real woman at all): I instinctively react and it may take a moment or two for my rational side to awaken, analyze what I see and reject it. The subtle irony is that the image was crafted to suppress that rational response in the first place and make me see only the ideal.

The greater irony, aside from the point that my attraction is to a person who doesn't actually exist, is that my rejection of that image is not mine but society's. After all, my attraction derives from my instinct, but my rejection comes from my intellect which is formed by my education, culture, religion, experiences, relationships . . . in short the synthesis of all the things that are not me. Attraction to a real woman and to a fake woman are both irrational but for completely different reasons. Inversely, rejection of them are for many of the same reasons but they derive from different societal norms. I may fear moral disapproval from others, recognize of the pointlessness of the attraction, or have feelings of guilt and shame, but in the case of a real woman these have to do with my circumstances (age, marital status, profession, etc.) while in the case of a fake woman they have to with "her" circumstances. While the outcomes are identical, the processes behind them are very different. And I think that matters.

Why? Because in some ways this is an extension or formulation of Descartes' "Evil Genius Doubt" theory: I cannot know if what I perceive is real or the work of an "evil genius" or demon with the power to deceive my senses into believing it's real. And worse, I have no way of finding out because the evil genius deceives me into believing I can't. Hilary Putnam calls this the Brain in a Vat scenario, and Robert Nozick calls it The Experience Machine, though you might recognize it as the underlying problem of The Matrix. In all these different versions, the central issues are essentially the same:

Are there any qualitative differences between "real" reality and a perfectly-rendered "false" reality?

If so, what are they and how can you identify them?
If not, is there any way to know if you were in one or the other?
Given the choice between them, which would you prefer?

While these questions typically evoke dismissive eye-rolling about trivial philosophical pursuits, I think we have to reflect on them a lot more carefully. We live in The Age of Photoshop where fake people indistinguishable from real people can appear to have experiences indistinguishable from real experiences, and articulate lies indistinguishable from truth. In so doing, they can influence people who are unable to tell the difference. Think of the power. And here I must digress for a moment.

Before The Enlightenment, education was in the hands of the most elite of the elite: even the average aristocrat couldn't read or write, and certainly didn't have the intellectual prowess of, say, More, Machiavelli or Erasmus. By keeping education for themselves, the elitists were able to create the class system that only much later became associated with economics. While it is true that the elitists also controlled the wealth, the roots of social stratification began in tribal warfare, military alliances and the emergence of powerful "houses" that over time solidified into the aristocratic ruling class. The needs of increasingly complex social structures resulted in the growth of education for the elites to maintain their hold on power; literacy, law, and political theory became entwined with the religious/moral teachings of the Church so thoroughly that the Great Chain of Being became its own self-serving justification for the order it described. You can't move out of your "place" as that would violate God's plan.

Post-enlightenment universal education was the response to, and really the death of, irrational authoritarianism, though the seeds were sown in Mainz, Germany in 1450 with the development of Gutenberg's printing press. Just as it kick-started the Renaissance, it also kick-started a period of social, political, religious, and cultural tumult by making it possible to disseminate information rapidly. Martin Luther was quick to see its value and owed much of the success of his Protestant Reformations to it. In the first 100 years or so after its invention, millions of books ancient and new became available to people who previously couldn't access or afford them, and knowledge was no longer in the hands of the few. To maintain their hold on power, the ruling class needed something to replace the mystical authority, arcane knowledge, and divine rights that derived from sacred texts no one could read. They had the money, but the rise of educated professionals negated that. They had the titles, but the rise of educated politicians and bureaucrats negated that. They had the Church, but the rise of educated humanist academics negated that. What did they have left?

Well, as Marx pointed out, they realized that the real value -- the real power -- was not political but economic. It used to be that aristocrats could rely simply on the authority of the king to have their way, but not once the rapid shift of power in the 17th century from arbitrary monarchs to stable parliaments began. The Age of Exploration that also began with the spread of learning provided them with the solution they needed: they could exploit the economic value of their holdings. Previously property was wealth as a holding or investment, and only sale, lease or transfer yielded cash. Now, the ability to use the fruits of the property, whether in the New World or Europe, gave rise to the concept of "resources" and "mineral rights": the land wasn't the wealth as much as what it contained. This is why the aristocrats were so quick to grab up all the land grants in the New World and largely abandon politics and government to the middle class. Remember this was in pre-democratic times when equality wasn't a preoccupation: countries need money to run, money comes from taxation, the more taxes you pay the greater your share of power. So by acquiring vast stretches of empty land thousands of miles away, irrational to the rising middle class bourgeoisie, the nobles were able to create economic mercantilist empires that, in some cases, still exist today (e.g. The Hudson's Bay Company).

Ok, end of digression, and the point is an old one but worth repeating: reality is as much a social construct as it is what our senses detect. In fact, our senses actually filter the world so we can perceive it as it has been constructed for us. When people believed in the Great Chain of Being, reality included angels, devils, and God-on-the-horizon. When people believed in the geocentric theory of the universe, reality included the Music of the Spheres and bizarre planetary motions. And they didn't just believe in those things: their senses detected evidence that confirmed the existence of things we know now to be nonsense. What they were told, everything they were raised to believe, and all the available sensory evidence, worked together to shape a world that simply didn't exist. They were deceived by the Evil Genius and never knew the difference.

And this is my worry. This is why lies are so wrong. Aside from the interpersonal social contract violations, lies unchecked can easily become truths and our senses learn very quickly to filter out anything that doesn't fit with our beliefs about reality. It's not that we choose to ignore stuff, it's that we simply don't perceive it. Take your eyes, for example: if I fit you with special glasses that turn everything upside down, after a day or two your brain will fix it so you see everything right side up again. Or your nose: everybody has had the experience of going to a friend's house and noticing it has its own smell. Do you think yours doesn't, or do you just not notice it? Again, the point is that once you're conditioned to believe you're conditioned to perceive. Photoshop, like any technology, like the printing press, is morally neutral. But how we use it has profound implications for what the world will be.

Does Art Matter?

2012-02-12T10:58:00.002-05:00

Oscar Wilde famously declared "All art is quite useless" in his preface to A Picture of Dorian Gray. He meant useless in the most literal sense of the word: it has not a means to an end, but an end in itself. The purpose of art, in other words, is to be art. Not communication, not political propaganda, not investment commodities.

Art for Art's Sake as it was called, was a failed experiment in trying to express human values through art i.e. "real" or objectively human by virtue of our very humanity rather than our social constructs like politics, class, religion or nationality. What precisely those values are -- in other words, human nature -- has been the subject of as much debate as anything. Are we fundamentally good but corruptible? Are we essentially violent and aggressive animals? Are we rational beings with an endless capacity for knowledge and learning? And more to the point, whichever you believe, how would art adequately represent it?

The problem with art, or I should say Art, is that we tend to think of it as the exact opposite of "popular" -- i.e. for common people. We tend to think of Art in terms of stuffy museums and snooty galleries, and outrageously expensive black-tie opera, theatre, ballet and symphony events. Art is the arcane, esoteric pursuit of elites and critics who use a specialized vocabulary, attend closed conferences, and publish exclusive magazines and books). It is the butt of jokes, the source of stereotypes, the cause of resentment. In short, whatever it is, it's distant and unrelated to everyday people, everyday things, everyday values.

Or at least, if it is, it's not considered Art. William Blake united verse and image in his work just like greeting cards do today, but no one would call a birthday card Art; Shakespeare wrote popular plays for the masses just like Andrew Lloyd-Weber, but Lloyd-Weber is already half-forgotten; Disney tells the same stories people have told for ages, yet some have gone so far as to criticize Disney for corrupting our cultural heritage (read: our Art). Do we really think Aladdin was the pinnacle of Middle-Eastern literary achievement? Sleeping Beauty is culture?

Think about garden gnomes for a moment. Or Velvet Elvises. Van murals, spoon collections, cheap pottery, or knitted afghan lawnchair covers. What they have in common, aside from their capacity to induce eye-rolling, nudges and smirks, is that they are made by and for people with little-to-no concern for Art. The Saturday afternoon Flea Market crowd, buying tea cosies made from recycled shirts or backyard sculptures of storks made of old re-bar and sheet metal, couldn't care less about the silly debates of PhDs. And, regrettably, vice-versa.

Go to the dollar store and buy a cheap ramekin for your Campbell's soup can creme brule recipe, bury it in your backyard, and wait a thousand years for some future archaeologist to find it. It will be priceless. Load a dvd with pop music, bundle up the scripts to "Two and Half Men", get some pictures of your last vacation, and stick them into a time capsule with instructions not to open it for 200 years. Those who open it will celebrate its discovery and build a shrine around it.

This is the lesson of the Arthurian legends: the point wasn't to find The Holy Grail; the point was to have a higher purpose that made life itself worthwhile, and the Grail search was the manifestation of that purpose. The same can be said of art: it's not that we have Art that matters; it's that all art is an expression of what we value, love, hate, and even just find pretty. Why is that only for Art School?

How to Give Two Different Answers and Remain Consistent

2012-02-09T21:23:00.004-05:00

That was when John regretted
sleeping through his ethics class.

Ok, so the classic Trolley Problem is used as a test of moral reasoning. Basically it goes like this:

You are the driver of a trolley or streetcar that suddenly goes out of control. Unable to stop the trolley, you look ahead and see 5 workers on the tracks unaware of your approach. In a few seconds you will hit and kill them. Then you see a switch-track and you realize you can safely divert the trolley onto the next track. However, there is one worker on the parallel track. If you switch you will hit and kill that worker.

Question: Would you switch to the other track and kill one worker to save five?

Many people instinctively answer yes, and say things like "It's more preferable to take one life if it means saving five" or "Minimize the tragedy by cutting the deaths from five to one" -- mainly variations of the principle of do the least harm.

But what if we change the scenario slightly:

You are a transplant surgeon with 5 desperately ill patients, each requiring a different organ. Each of the five will die imminently unless you find appropriate donor organs. Your friend in the Emergency Room calls you to say that a homeless man has been brought in. He has no ID and no known family, and despite being in a coma, is otherwise healthy. His organs are a suitable match for your five patients.

Question: do you harvest his organs for your five patients?

In this case, most people say no, and argue that it is inappropriate for doctors to pick and choose which patients get to live or die, or human sacrifice is not acceptable in modern society. In other words it is more preferable to allow 5 to die because killing one to save them is wrong. This is the inverse of the trolley car case. Instead of do the least harm, this seems to say do no harm.

Intuitively we agree with the majority in both cases. We would kill one to save five in the first case and not kill one to save five in the second. We wouldn't allow five to die to save one in the first case, but would in the second. Why? What is the difference between these two cases? Here's another one:

You are hiding in the bushes. A group of men walk past you and you jump out of the bushes and shoot them all in the back, killing them instantly.
Question: are you a murderer?

Again, little disagreement here as most people say that this constitutes a particularly cowardly form of murder. But again, if we make a slight change:

You are a soldier hiding in the bushes. A group of enemy soldiers walk past you and you jump out of the bushes and shoot them all in the back, killing them instantly?
Question: are you a murderer?

Well? Is there a difference here? Is it acceptable for a soldier to kill in this manner?

In all these cases we have to ask what is the moral difference between them. More to the point, how do we determine the morality in the first place? Despite our universal condemnation of murder it seems we are willing to permit intentional homicide if there is a desirable (or at least less undesirable than the alternative) outcome. All of these are examples of a consequentialist moral view, i.e. the morality of an act is determined by its consequences. So let's subject our cases to a consequentialist analysis:

As the trolley car driver, you have been caught in a situation that is not of your making. You have only two alternatives and neither is appealing. But because the issue is one of scale, not intent, it is morally acceptable to divert the trolley car onto a parallel track at the expense of one life in order to save five lives.
As a surgeon, you are also in a situation that is not of your making. However, you are not faced with only two choices: you can seek other donors, explore treatment options, or even use artificial life support, so in this case, the issue is truly one of intent. It is not morally acceptable, considering all the options, to choose to kill a human being and use his/her organs to save five people. This is human sacrifice.
Hiding in the bushes with a weapon planning to kill people is morally indefensible. The arbitrary and pointless ambush slaughter of humans is completely absent any justification.
As as soldier in enemy territory, you cannot know the status of the war, and its very outcome could hinge on whether one of the soldiers establishes contact with HQ. Since your primary responsibility is to defend your country, it is morally permissible to ambush and slaughter enemy soldiers since their deaths could be necessary to the successful prosecution of the war.

To be fair, these are fairly simplistic examples deliberately set up to elicit the responses we want. How about two real-life examples:

A truck driver on a busy highway sees a collision between two stunt racing cars. If he continues straight ahead he will plow into them and cause multiple deaths and injuries. If he veers off the highway he will crash and most likely seriously harm or kill himself. He veers off and dies.
A cruise ship's captain routinely sails amongst an island chain for sightseeing. At one point, he has a chance to get in close to allow passengers to capture a particularly photogenic site despite being off-course and outside safe shipping channels. He changes course and runs aground resulting in several deaths.

There is no moral justification that can defend the ship's captain for the deaths he caused by going off course into unsafe waters, and no moral argument that can blame the truck driver for effectively committing a very public and violent suicide. Even if he had been unable to veer off and he collided with the cars killing dozens of people, or if he veered off and ended up killing someone else, we would not blame him.

So, killing with intent is wrong unless it is justified, and the justification is determined by the outcome which, as it turns out, is partially determined by the intent in the first place. Is there anything solid here?

Nobody Buys a Death House

2012-02-05T08:33:00.007-05:00

What famous playwright grew up here?

Apparently people will flock to your house if you hang a sign out front saying that someone famous once lived there. The tourist industry is about as subtle and sensitive as the riff raff who go crashing through historical buildings for the sake of . . . what? I'm not sure.

I'll confess to my own desire to visit famous places, and I'll confess to my own middle-class kitschy fascination with certain long-dead people from places I've never visited. I've often thought about going to Dublin for Bloomsday (which, as it turns out, entails visiting Joyce's house) or seeing Westminster Abbey to see Poet's Corner.

Mainly for the graves.

I'm not making fun of people for doing what I want to do, and really there are some great places of historical value we should all get to see. I'm more interested in looking at the why, especially when it comes to the value judgements we make about certain places. It seems strange and arbitrary to me that we are ok with taking a Jack the Ripper tour, or visiting concentration camps in Poland and calling it merely "A cultural experience," but we want nothing to do with places closer to home where terrible things took place. Case in point is the home of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka in Port Dalhousie, Ontario.

Behold the face of evil.

After the trial and conviction of Bernardo, the house was purchased by the city and demolished. And while I half-expected to learn that the ground was sown with salt, it turns out that a new house was built on the site. Of course, the address was changed and the owners have to tolerate the curious few who drive by looking for the spot (I was tempted to say "morbid few" but somehow it doesn't seem fair to condemn the people who want to see that house when much of Europe is a guided tour of humanity's violent history). In real estate circles, this is known as a "death house" and apparently it's a house you can't give away. People are so weirded out by the thought of buying one that in some places you have to include it on the disclosure form along with water problems and structural faults.

Fun, generous, charming.
Creepy. Definitely creepy.

Take the story of Carl Leone, from Windsor. Carl is an HIV-infected man convicted of aggravated assault in 2005 for deliberately having unprotected sex with women and underaged girls. His notoriety and court costs bankrupted his parents and forced them to liquidate their family-run music business. They lost everything, including their house. But because it has become associated with their son's crimes -- he apparently brought some of his victims home -- no one can stomach the thought of living there. If you're not squeamish and are looking to move to Windsor, apparently it's a steal. The price is way below what the rest of the houses in its fairly ritzy neighbourhood typically fetch.

Where do you draw the line when it comes to this kind of thing? Would you buy the home of a notorious sex offender or murderer like Leone or Bernardo? What if you were the owner of a notorious property? Would you just carry on as normal? Would you try to exploit its status as a means to make a quick buck or would you tear it down and replace it? If you visited such a place, where would you draw the line?

People affix labels onto places, calling them "immoral" or "evil." Can a house be immoral? If I live in a death house am I tainted? And again, given the inconsistency people seem to display on this, where is the line? It seems okay to own the property where notorious crimes took place, like the new owners of Bernardo's house, but not to occupy the house. Is this silly superstition? Fear of disapprobation from those who are superstitious?

It seems to work the other way too, and some places acquire moral status: you only need visit your local church, school, city hall, or even grave yard to see that people think they possess moral qualities. We fear defiling or harming them through improper conduct ("You can't do that! We're in church!") or language use, and we grow very squeamish at the thought of people buying them and using them for purposes other than their original intended use. Ever see a church get torn down? Or a school? It's unsettling.

People have a need to anthropomorphize our stuff, whether houses, cars, pets, or places. We talk nicely to our temperamental computers, scold our cats for misbehaviour, name our boats; we ascribe personalities to weather, assume preference in the direction of flowing water, respect lakes and rivers, and pity forests. We seem to lose track of where we end and the world around us begins, and this raises some interesting perspectives about personality, ownership, and the theory of mind. What is me and not-me?

Maybe the question we have to ask is not "what is moral" but "where is morality?"