SOCRATIFIC

Index

2018-12-11T23:37:00.000-05:00

Existentialism

Religion

School

Aristole
Literature: Birthday Boys, Dubliners 1, Dubliners 2, French Lieutenant's Woman, Middlemarch 1, Middlemarch 2, Prufrock, Romeo and Juliet
Existentialism 1, Existentialism 2
Jesus
Kant 1, Kant 2
Nietzsche: Pain and Suffering, Perspectivism, Eternal Recurrence
Plato 1, Plato 2
Political/Social Philosophy: Plato, Hobbes, Marx, Rawles, Nozick

Politics

Af-Pak: 12/08, 04/09, 09/09, 09/09, 10/09, 11/09, 11/09. 01/10, 06/10, 06/10, 07/10, 08/10, 09/10, 01/11
Blowback: 12/09, 01/10, 03/10, 05/10, 05/10
Corporatism
Drones
Evangelicals: Colson, Chuck, 06/10, 11/10; Groohtuis, Doug, 11/08, 07/09; Torture, 05/09, 05/09; War, 10/06, 05/09, 09/11; Gay rights, 07/12, 06/12
Global warming: 11/11, 12/11
Guns: 08/12, 08/12, 12/12, 01/13, 01/13
Military Industrial Complex: 10/09, 08/10, 08/10, 12/10
Iran: Arguments against war, 04/08, 05/08, 02/10; Rationality, 06/09, 12/09, 03/09; Solutions, 04/10
Iraq: 07/06, 10/06, 09/08, 09/08, 04/10
Islam: Against terrorism, 06/09, 08/09, 11/09; Islamophobia, 07/10, 03/11
Israel-Palestine Conflict: Apartheid, 03/10, 03/10; Blowback, 12/09; Christian theology, 08/09, 05/10; Gaza 2011, 04/11; Gaza blockade, 01/10, 06/10, 06/10, 06/10, 02/11: Gaza, Cast Lead, 02/09, 09/09, 07/09, 09/09, 09/09, 04/11, 04/11, 04/11, 04/10; Gaza disengagement, 2005, 01/09, 07/10; Gaza flotilla massacre, 06/10, 06/10; Israel Lobby, 03/09; Media bias, 01/09; Hamas, 07/09, 08/09; Israeli rejectionism, 03/09, 11/09, 12/09, 03/10, 07/10; PLO, 01/11; Property rights, 06/10, 07/10; Settlements, 06/09; Water rights, 10/09
Legal War on Terror: 11/09, 11/09, 11/09, 01/10, 03/10, 06/10
Libertarianism
Misc. People: Edmonds, Sibel, 10/10; Fox News, 04/08; Muslim Brotherhood, 02/11, 02/11; Obama, 04/08, 12/09, 11/09, 09/10, 01/10, 02/10, 02/09; Palin, Sarah, 09/08
Motivated Cognition
War and morality: Just war theory and US wars, 12/09; Utilitarianism and Af-Pak war, 03/10
Love
Russia
Torture: 08/09, 01/10
Troops: Anthony, Michael, 10/09, 10/09; Suicides
Walmart

Sartre (Part 1)

2017-12-29T22:20:00.000-05:00

In the coming months I'd like to finally read Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. My plan for doing so is to use Professor Paul Vincent Spade's class lecture notes as a guide, and in keeping with Professor Spade's advice to first read Edmund Husserl's The Idea of Phenomenology, as well as Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego and Existentialism is a Humanism.

* * * * *

Spade's Introduction to Husserl

Descartes believed that we can avoid epistemic error if we only affirm what appears to us clearly and distinctly (Principle #1). And what things can we clearly and distinctly perceive? My own existence, and the way things appear to me, the appearances, the phenomena.

Descartes believed that all phenomena are mental events, mind-dependent (Principle #2). Spade: It's like we're watching a movie; the phenomena are the pictures we see, representations of the external world. So how can we know what's really happening in the world? If we can't find an answer, we left with solipsism. Descartes tried to avoid solipsism by arguing for God's existence, but most subsequent philosophers rejected this answer.

If Husserl wants to avoid Descartes' solipsism, he must reject one of his two principles.

* * * * *

Kant. Noumena, the thing in itself = the realities behind the appearances (phenomena, the thing as it appears).

Kant, unlike Descartes, holds that the mind contributes something to the phenomena. The mind organizes perceptual data in certain ways. In other words, "c'ness is not altogether a passive observer of phenomena. It is active. It imposes a certain organization, a certain order on the raw data of sensation." Phenomena is a product of (a) "the raw data of sensation" and (b) "the interpretation imposed on those data by the mind." This is constitution. An ego that imposes this order is a Transcendental Ego.

Kant believes there humans put imposes certain categories on sense data -- e.g., causality, existence, substance/property. Kant does not believe that the categories apply to the noumena.

Kant believed we could be sure that our phenomena of reality were not accurate representations of the phenomena.

Kant noted that every thought we have, every perception we make, is from our own point of view. This is important b/c it means that "all our concepts, and so too all phenomena, which those concepts describe, carry with them an implicit reference to ourselves and to our point of view." Consequently, phenomena are not accurate representations of things-in-themselves. "Things-in-themselves are whatever they are with no special reference to us; phenomena, on the other hand, necessarily involve a reference (even if only an implicit one) to ourselves."

Note: Kant is not saying: My point of view might correspond with reality, but it might not, and I'll never know for sure. Rather, Kant is saying that the mind constitutes reality. (Which maybe means that c'ness totally shapes the way I see reality, so much so that maybe we couldn't even fathom what relaity would look like apart from our c'ness????)

But now we're back at solipsism. This is idealism, "the view that all reality is in some sense mental." It's hard to see how idealism differs from solipsism.

Kant of course can never know if there really is a thing-in-itself, and so it makes no sense to talk about noumena, just phenomena.

* * * * *

Husserl initially promised a way out of this idealism/solipsism.

Husserl's natural standpoint assumes that cognition is possible, in other words, it assumes that there is correspondence b/t our thoughts and what we are thinking about.

The phenomenological reduction = our judgments are confined, reduced, to the phenomena; we're not inferring from the phenomena something else.

H believes that my ego (or perspective) is not part of the phenomena, but I must take account of my perspective in any complete description of the phenomena.

First sense of immanence and transcendence = inside (the mind) and outside (the mind). If I think about Mars for ten minutes, then that thought is immanent in my act of thinking, while Mars itself is transcendent to my thinking about it. // Second sense of Immanence and transcendence = something is transcendent, not immanent, if an inference is required before I can make a clam about that thing.

H wants to find something that is transcendent in the first sense and immanent in the second sense -- in other words, something that is (a) outside the mind and (b) directly present to the mind (not present as result of inference).

The eidetic reduction. Universals are things that are directly given to use (redness is example; it is here now, and it is there later). Universals are objects of c'ness and they transcend c'ness.

The theory of intentionality: every act of c'ness is always c'ness of something. Thus, every act of c'ness transcends itself.

Intentionality makes transcendence possible! The ego is a passive observer. But in his later works, H abandoned intentionality in favor of the doctrine of constitution -- the transcendental ego organizes the raw data of experiencing, organizing, unifying, individualizing.

Terror Management Theory (TMT): A Summary (Part 2)

2017-12-29T01:50:00.001-05:00

Responses to "The Other"

As previously discussed, cultural worldviews are vital to human thriving, as they mitigate death anxiety that would otherwise be debilitating. Cultural worldviews are maintained through consensual validation. Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski (2015) explain:

Cultural worldviews gain strength in numbers. For beliefs to serve as effective bulwarks against existential terror, people must be absolutely certain of their validity. However, most of the core beliefs we depend on for psychological security are based on faith rather than fact; they cannot be unambiguously proven. Consequently, the more people who share our beliefs, the more sure we feel that they are correct. If just one person believed God spoke to Moses in the form of a burning bush, antipsychotic medication would be sought to relieve this poor soul of his florid delusion. But when the same belief is shared by millions of people, it becomes unassailable truth. (location 2275)

Being around people who don't share our worldviews is consequently problematic, especially when mortality has been made salient. Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Greenberg (2003) write that we try to minimize the threat of "the other" in one of five ways. First, we might convert to their worldview (p. 29). In other words, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, and adopt another worldview to mitigate your death anxiety. Second, we might try to convert them to our worldview (p. 30). Third, we might try to reconcile our two worldviews, incorporating parts of their worldview into ours (p. 31). Fourth, we might disparage our opponents, as making them seem pathetic and foolish bolsters faith in our own worldview (p. 29). Fifth, in extreme cases, we might try to annihilate them. "Often, the most compelling way to eliminate the threat posed by people who are different...is to kill them and thus prove that your vision of reality must be right after all” (p. 32).

These authors argue that disparaging others is the most common response to people with different worldviews, and indeed some of the first TMT studies showed that reminding people of their mortality causes them to have less favorable views of those with opposing worldviews (Greenberg et al., 1990). Subsequent research has shown that mortality salience causes people to become more physically aggressive towards others.

McGregor et al. (1998), for instance, divided college students into two groups; one group was asked to write about their next exam, while the other was asked to write about their own mortality. Students were then given information about a student in a nearby cubicle, including that student's political identity. Students were told that the other student disliked spicy foods, and they were then asked to pour some hot sauce into a cup that the other student would have to consume. Students who'd written about their next exam poured out a modest amount of hot sauce for students who agreed and who disagreed with their political beliefs. On the other hand, students who'd been reminded of their mortality poured out a modest amount of hot sauce for students who shared their beliefs but a large amount, more than twice as much, for students with opposing political beliefs (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2015, locations 2471-2485).

Other studies have corroborated these findings. Pyszczynski et al. (2006) conducted a study in which Iranians were separated into two groups; participants in the first group were asked to write about dental pain, while those in the the second were asked to write about their own death. Participants were then asked to read two questionnaires, one completed by a Muslim who believed that martyrdom attacks against the United States were morally justified and another by a Muslim who believed that such attacks were not justified. Those who'd been asked to write about dental pain indicated that they were more interested in joining the cause of the anti-martyrdom respondent, while those who'd been asked to write about death indicated that they were more interested in joining the cause of the pro-martyrdom respondent (pp. 528-530).

Pyszczynski et al. (2006) conducted a similar student with American students. In this study, students were asked to write about either intense physical pain or the September 11 attacks. Students were then asked (a) whether they believed the US should engage in preemptive attacks against countries "that may pose a threat to the United States in the future, even if there is no evidence that they are planning to attack us right now," (b) whether the US should use nuclear and/or chemicals weapons "to defend our interests at home and abroad," and (c) whether the US should attempt to kill or capture Osama bin Laden "even if thousands of civilians are injured or killed in the process." Both liberal and conservatives students asked to write about physical pain tended to oppose these aggressive military actions. Liberal students asked to write about 9/11 were no more likely to support these aggressive actions, but conservative asked to write about 9/11 were significantly more likely to support such actions (pp. 531-533).

Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski (2015) point to another study which "found that death reminders made Americans more accepting of US intelligence using brutal and humiliating interrogation techniques (torture) on foreign suspects" (location 2498; see Luke & Hartwig, 2014). They also note that "[p]arallel studies in Israel found that reminders of mortality led politically conservative Israelis to view violence against Palestinians as more justified. These participants were also more supportive of a preemptive nuclear attack on Iran" (location 2498; see Hirschberger & Ein-Dor, 2006).

Practical Implications

TMT researchers have shown that the awareness of death can be an incredibly destructive force, contributing to neuroticism and a host of mental illnesses. Although adopting a worldview might effectively protect one against these problems, it can cause one to be aggressive towards outsiders, both verbally and physically. What's the answer, then? TMT research suggests three possibilities.

(1) Bolster your self-esteem. Considerable research has shown that self-esteem is correlated with lower levels of anxiety, as well as superior mental and physical health (Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, Arndt, & Schimel, 2004, p. 438). As discussed earlier, bolstering self-esteem also reduces death anxiety as well the need for worldview defense.

(2) Face death head on. Although our tendency might be to avoid thoughts of death, we might benefit from confronting these toughts. As we've seen, tremendous harm often comes when we try to banish death from awareness. Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski (2015) write, "Through diligent efforts to become familiar with the prospect (and the inevitable fact) of dying, one ideally becomes psychologically fortified to the point where, as Montaigne put it, 'I am at all hours as well prepared as I am ever like to be, and death, whenever he shall come, can bring nothing along with him I did not expect long before'" (location 3739).

(3) Engage in constructive forms of death transcendence. Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski (2015) write, "Making peace with one's death is surely a worthy goal with many psychological and social benefits. We humans are, however, not psychologically equipped to fully acquire such equanimity without an enduring sense of significance that extends beyond our individual existence" (location 3765). Borrowing from Robert Lifton, they discuss five types of death transcendence: (a) biosocial transcendence ("passing on one's genes, history, values, and possessions" or identifying "with an ancestral line of ethnic or national identity that perseveres indefinitely," (b) theological transcendence (believing in the existence of an incorporeal soul which will endure bodily death), (c) creative transcendence ("contributing to future generations through innovations in art, science, and technology), (d) natural transcendence ("identifying with all life, nature, or even the universe"), and (e) experiential transcendence (achieving " a sense of timelessness accompanied by a heightened sense of awe and wonder," something which can be achieved through drugs, meditation, certain cultural rituals, and "activities that provide a sense of flow, of losing oneself in contemplation and enjoyment") (locations 3765-3777).

* * * * *

Notes

Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., Rosenblatt, A., Veeder, M., Kirkland, S., & Lyon, D. (1990). Evidence for terror management theory II: The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who threaten or bolster the cultural worldview. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(2), 308-318.

Hirschberger, G., & Ein-Dor, T. (2006). Defenders of a lost cause: Terror management and violent resistance to the disengagement plan. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32(6), 761-769.

Luke, T. J., & Hartwig, M. (2014). The effects of mortality salience and reminders of terrorism on perceptions of interrogation techniques. Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, 21(4), 538-550.

McGregor, H. A., Lieberman, J. D., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Arndt, J., Simon, L., & Pyszczynski, T. (1998). Terror management and aggression: evidence that mortality salience motivates aggression against worldview-threatening others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(3), 590.

Pyszczynski, T., Abdollahi, A., Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., Cohen, F., & Weise, D. (2006). Mortality salience, martyrdom, and military might: The great Satan versus the axis of evil. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32(4), 525-537.

Pyszczynski, T., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Arndt, J., & Schimel, J. (2004). Why do people need self-esteem? A theoretical and empirical review. Psychological Bulletin, 130(3), 435-468.

Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The Worm at the core: On the role of death in life [Kindle version].

Terror Management Theory: A Summary (Part 1)

2017-12-27T11:19:00.000-05:00

The Theory

All mammals, including humans, experience terror when faced with the threat of death. Upon seeing a predator, an animal in the wild enters a state of fight, flight, or freezing. Similarly, if my car begins to spin out of control or if I wake up to discover a suspicious lump, I will have this same response. But unlike other mammals, humans are capable of experiencing this terror even when death is not imminent. I can be young and healthy, but simply contemplating my eventual demise can be enough to fill me with terror (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2015, location 208).

This can create significant problems. Having this fight-flight-freeze response in the face of an imminent threat is adaptive, but having it in the absence of such a threat can be debilitating, preventing one from carrying out the activities required for healthy, productive living. According to terror management theory (TMT), humans learned to solve this problem by creating cultural worldviews. A cultural worldview is a belief system which (a) affirms that existence has order and meaning, (b) prescribes standards for right behavior, and (c) confers value and death transcendence to those who meet these standards.[1] By believing in a cultural worldview and attaining the self-esteem that comes from meeting its standards, we're able to escape the terror that comes from death awareness (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2004, p. 20).

Unfortunately, cultural worldviews are incapable of perfectly protecting us from this terror. For the fact remains that worldviews are human inventions, and although certain worldviews might in fact be true, there's no way to verify this. If anything, reality gives people reason to question their worldviews, for life can be cruel and unfair, seeming to contradict the rosy narratives which worldviews affirm. The surest way to strengthen a worldview is to surround oneself with like-minded people. For worldviews are maintained through consensual validation, meaning that confidence in one's worldview is bolstered by being around people who share that worldview and weakened by being around people who oppose that worldview.

Research

In order to test the validity of TMT, researchers devised two empirically verifiable hypotheses: the morality salience hypothesis and the anxiety-buffer hypothesis.

Mortality Salience Hypothesis

The mortality salience hypothesis states that, if in fact cultural worldviews serve the purpose of mitigating death anxiety, then reminding people of their mortality (mortality salience) will cause them to attempt to bolster those worldviews (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2004, p. 20). Since worldviews are maintained through consensual validation, it further follows that making mortality salient will cause people to react more positively to those who share their worldviews and more negatively to people who oppose their worldviews.

Rosenblatt, A., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Pyszczynski, T., & Lyon (1989) were the first ones to test this hypothesis. In their first experiment, they presented municipal court judges with information about a prostitute and asked what they would set her bond at. Half of the judges were simply given information about the case and asked to make their decision, while the other half were first asked to briefly write what would happen to their bodies upon death and what emotions were elicited when they thought about death. The researchers hypothesized that the judges asked to write about their own mortality would have a more negative reaction to the prostitute since her lifestyle flouts the worldview of the judges, thus raising the possibility that their worldview "may not be universally valid." And indeed these judges came down much more harshly on the prostitute, imposing an average bond of $455, compared to $50 for the first group (p. 682).

In another experiment, Rosenblatt et al. (1989) asked a group of college students to recommend a reward for a woman who helped the police catch a criminal. Just as in the first experiment, half of the participants were simply given information about the case, while the other half were first asked to write about their own mortality. Just as predicted, the students in the mortality salient group showed a greater eagerness to reward the woman, recommending an average reward of $3,476, compared to $1,112 for the control group (p. 684).

The following year, Greenberg et al. (1990) tested whether "similar effects could be shown for reactions to targets who bolster or threaten the cultural worldview in other ways" (p. 309). These researchers took a group of Christian college students and asked half of them to briefly write about their own mortality. All of the students were then asked to evaluate two questionnaires, one purportedly filled out by a Christian and the other by a Jew. The students who hadn’t been reminded of death evaluated the Christian and Jewish writers equally, while those who had been reminded of death evaluated the Christian writer more positively and the Jewish writer more negatively (pp. 310-313).

In a second experiment, Greenberg et al. (1990) asked a group of college students to read three short writings, one espousing positive views of the United States, one espousing negative views, and a third espousing mixed views. The students whose mortality had not been made salient rated all of the writers fairly equally, while those in the mortality salience group held favorable views of the pro-American writer and negative views of the anti-American writer.[2]

These initial studies have been corroborated by hundreds of subsequent studies, one of which even showed that mortality salience increases physical aggression against one's political opponents. These studies have shown that the the mortality salience hypothesis holds up in different cultures, including indigenous cultures (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2004, p. 22). These studies have also shown that these mortality salience effects can be produced by other means -- e.g., showing participants footage of gory automobile accidents, interviewing them near funeral homes, and subliminal priming -- and that "reminders of other negative events, such as social rejection, failing an exam, intense pain, or losing a limb in a car accident," have not been shown to "produce the same effects as being reminded of one's mortality" (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2015, location 328).

Anxiety-Buffer Hypothesis

The anxiety-buffer hypothesis states that if self-esteem protects us against death anxiety, then bolstering self-esteem will mitigate death anxiety when mortality is made salient (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2004, p. 20). Greenberg et al. (1992) gave participants a psychological profile purportedly based on their answers to a questionnaire. Some participants were given neutral evaluation reports while others were given positive reports. After receiving these results, half of the participants watched a clip from the documentary Faces of Death, while the others watched a clip of peaceful nature scenes. Participants then completed questionnaires measuring self-esteem and anxiety. Just as expected, those who received positive evaluations reported higher self-esteem than those who received neutral evaluations, and those who received neutral evaluations reported more anxiety if they watched Faces of Death than if they watched the nature clip. But everyone who had their self-esteem boosted reported equally low levels of anxiety, whether they watched Faces of Death or the nature clip (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2015, locations 768-794).

In a second experiment, Greenberg et al. (1992) had participants take what they believed to be an intelligence test. Some participants received no feedback on the test, while others were told that they did especially well on the test. Half of the participants were then hooked up to a machine and told that they would receive a series of painful electric shocks, while the others were asked to watch some colored lights. Participants who received no feedback on the test were more likely than those asked to watched the colored lights to perspire when anticipating the electrical shocks, a physiological indication of anxiety. But those who had their self-esteem bolstered were no more likely to perspire when expecting to be shocked than were those who watched the colored lights (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2015, locations 794-847).

Subsequent research has shown that not only does bolstering self-esteem mitigate death anxiety when mortality is made salient but also that bolstering self-esteem reduces the worldview defense which occurs after mortality is made salient. Like Greenberg et al. (1992), Harmon-Jones et al. (1997) gave a group of students a psychological profile, some of the profiles containing neutral evaluations and some containing positive evaluations. Harmon-Jones et al. (1997) then asked some students to write about their own mortality and others to write about television. Students were then asked to read and evaluate a pro-American essay and an anti-American essay. Just as predicted, those students who did not receive a self-esteem boost and whose mortality was made salient rated the pro-American writer more favorably than the anti-American writer, while students who received a self-esteem boost and whose mortality was made salient rated both writers equally (pp. 26-27).

Harmon-Jones et al. (1997) conducted a second experiment, this one replicating the conditions of the first experiment with one difference: instead of receiving a temporary self-esteem boost, students were categorized based on their dispositional self-esteem (as indicated by their scores on the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale). Again, just as predicted, those students with moderate self-esteem scores in the mortality salient condition rated the pro-American writer more favorably than the anti-American writer, while those students with high self-esteem scores in the mortality salient condition rated both writers equally (pp. 28-30).

* * * * *

Notes

[1] Death transcendence can be literal or symbolic. Literal death transcendence implies the existence of souls which will endure after one's bodily death. Symbolic death transcendence implies that something one does will endure after they themselves die. Examples of symbolic death transcendence include having children, achieving fame, contributing to a cause, being part of a group.

[2] Although the first TMT studies showed that death reminders cause people to attempt to bolster their worldviews, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, Simon, & Breus (1994) found that this effect could be weakened by making some seemingly minor changes. In one experiment, Greenberg et al. (1994) again asked participants to evaluate pro-American and anti-American writers, but this time that had those in the mortality salient group to think about death longer and more deeply. This time, participants in the mortality salient group were less likely than those in the Greenberg et al. (1990) study to view the pro-American writer favorably and the anti-American writer unfavorably. In another experiment, Greenberg et al. (1994) had some participants in the mortality salient group take a break before evaluating the writers while having others evaluate the writers immediately after writing about death. Those who read the essays after a short break viewed the pro-American writer favorably and the anti-American writer unfavorably, while those asked to rate the essays immediately after the death reminder rated the writers equally.

Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski (2015) write that based on these and additional studies, researchers concluded that people use two different psychological defenses in response to thoughts of death (location 2914). Proximal defenses are activated when thoughts of death are in our conscious awareness, while distal defenses are activated when thoughts of death have been relegated "to the fringes of our consciousness" (location 2927).

Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon (1999) define proximal defenses as "relatively rational, threat-focused cognitive maneuvers that push these thoughts out of consciousness." Proximal defenses might accomplish this through distraction -- e.g., "after passing a gruesome accident scene, a person might turn up the radio" -- or by using "various rationalizing cognitive strategies to deny one's current vulnerability." For example, "people may remind themselves that they get a lot of exercise, don't smoke, have relatively low levels of serum cholesterol, and so on. If thoughts of this nature are implausible because of clear evidence to the contrary (i.e., if people are aware that they do indeed possess risk factors of these sorts), they may use other cognitive strategies, such as denying the extent of risk that such behaviors or characteristics entail, focusing their attention on whatever evidence might be available to support a long life expectancy, or promising themselves to do what they can in the future to increase their life expectancy (e.g., I'm going on a diet next week, quitting smoking, and starting an exercise program)." Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon (1999) define distal defenses as defenses which "address the problem of death in a more indirect symbolic manner by providing a sense that one is a valuable contributor to a meaningful, eternal universe. Rather than pushing the problem of death out of consciousness or rationalizing it away into the distant future, distal defenses provide security by making one's life seem meaningful, valuable, and enduring."

* * * * *

References

Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., Rosenblatt, A., Veeder, M., Kirkland, S., & Lyon, D. (1990). Evidence for terror management theory II: The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who threaten or bolster the cultural worldview. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(2), 308-318.

Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., Simon, L., & Breus, M. (1994). Role of consciousness and accessibility of death-related thoughts in mortality salience effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(4), 627.

Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., & Pyszczynski, T. (1997). Terror management theory of self-esteem and cultural worldviews: Empirical assessments and conceptual refinements. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 29, 61-139.

Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Pyszczynski, T., Rosenblatt, A., Burling, J., Lyon, D., ... & Pinel, E. (1992). Why do people need self-esteem? Converging evidence that self-esteem serves an anxiety-buffering function. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(6), 913.

Harmon-Jones, E., Simon, L., Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., & McGregor, H. (1997). Terror management theory and self-esteem: Evidence that increased self-esteem reduced mortality salience effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(1), 24.

Pyszczynski, T., Greenberg, J., & Solomon, S. (1999). A dual-process model of defense against conscious and unconscious death-related thoughts: an extension of terror management theory. Psychological Review, 106(4), 835.

Rosenblatt, A., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Pyszczynski, T., & Lyon, D. (1989). Evidence for terror management theory: I. The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who violate or uphold cultural values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(4), 681.

Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The Worm at the core: On the role of death in life [Kindle version].

Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2004). The cultural animal: Twenty years of terror management theory and research. In J. Greenberg, S. Koole, & T. Pyszczynski (Eds.), Handbook of experimental existential psychology (pp. 13-34). New York: The Guilford Press.

American Politics and Conflicts of Interest

2016-08-11T12:12:00.000-04:00

Politico's Katy O'Donnell writes, "No matter who wins in November, the next president will bring enormous potential conflicts of interest to the Oval Office...Americans could see a leader regulating the same banks that lend the Trump Organization millions of dollars, or one negotiating with foreign governments contributing millions to the Clinton Foundation." O'Donnell goes on to note something which all of us should find deeply troubling: such conflicts of interest are perfectly legal.

This past week some conservatives have trounced on Hillary Clinton for influence which the Clinton Foundation might have had during her tenure as Secretary of State, but as O'Donnell reminds us, this a bipartisan problem, one involving presidents, vice-presidents, members of Congress, and staffers.

Meriam-Webster defines a conflict of interest as "a conflict between the private interests and the official responsibilities of a person in a position of trust." We see this all the time in Washington. We saw this during the Bush years when the administration, led by officials with deep connections to defense contractors, led us into war. The friends and former colleagues of these officials benefited greatly from war. Perfectly legal.

We see this in the revolving door that exists between Congress and corporations. While still in office, many lawmakers make deals to work for these corporations upon leaving office, and in the interim they push legislation that benefits their future employers. For instance, Senator Judd Gregg spent his final years in office "fighting reforms to bring greater transparency to the derivatives marketplace." Once a private citizen, he went to work for Goldman Sachs. Congressman Billy Tauzin pushed for Bush's prescription drug expansion and also helped "block a proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate for drug prices." In the five years after leaving office, he made $19 million as a lobbyist for pharmaceutical companies.

There's also the reverse revolving door wherein soon-to-be Congressional staffers receive "six-figure bonuses and other incentive pay from corporate firms shortly before taking jobs in Congress." An investigation by The Nation found that many of these staffers "are well positioned to influence multibillion-dollar legislation on issues ranging from tax policy to defense, and which impact their previous employers."

And of course conflicts of interest can result from campaign donations. Citizens United enabled corporations to “spend unlimited amounts of their treasuries’ money on political advertisements.” "In effect," Noam Chomsky writes, "the decision permits corporate managers to buy elections directly." Perhaps just as troubling, corporations do not have to publicly disclose that they're spending this money," thus preventing voters from understanding who is truly behind many political messages.”

I think that reasonable people can agree that none of this benefits the average citizen. If we care about democracy, we really need to do something.

Reading Carl Bernstein's 'A Woman in Charge'

2016-08-07T01:19:00.000-04:00

Carl Bernstein's A Woman in Charge (2007) is a painstaking and I think honest biography of Hillary Clinton. It dispelled me of some myths I'd grown up hearing from my Republican family. I'd been taught, for instance, that Hillary was an opportunist who latched onto Bill because she knew he was going places. But Bernstein shows that Hillary was "on her way to becoming a political meteor" long before meeting Bill. She become a prominent antiwar leader in college, got elected student body president her senior year, and delivered a politically-charged commencement address that ended up being published in Life magazine. As one classmate put it, "It seems wildly tragic that we know she could have been president if she had just not even married him" (62).

And the evidence shows that Hillary genuinely loved Bill. One friend described her as being "besotted," "absolutely, totally crazy about Bill Clinton." Whenever Bill would be driving up to visit, her "face would change. It would light up." Some described her as being "near-obsessed with her relationship with Bill to the extent that her moods were dictated by the frequency of her phone conversations with him and the vibes she was picking up over the line from Arkansas" (97). One aide described the couple this way: "They would constantly argue, and the next thing you know, they'd be falling all over each other with 'Oh my darling...come here baby...you're adorable...' then throwing things at each other, and then they'd be slobbering all over each other" (113).

Bernstein shows that Hillary, whatever else you might think of her, has sincerely held the values she's spent her career defending. She grew up accepting the Republican beliefs of her martinet father but began to rethink things after her Methodist church hired a new youth minister when she was in high school. The minister had been a Freedom Rider and preached that that true faith is accompanied by a concern for social justice. One night he invited Hillary and some other students to hear Martin Luther King speech and afterwards took them backstage to meet the reverend (35). She increasingly began to take up the fight for justice herself. Upon graduating from Yale, she famously chose not to go into corporate law but instead worked for Marian Wright Edelman's Children's Defense Fund. Shortly after moving to Arkansas, "she was the leading force in creating Fayetville's first rape crisis center, the consequence of a student coming to HIllary and telling of her experience after being raped" (127).

But by no means is this book an apology for Hillary. Yes, we read how during Bill's 1974 run for Congress her "high-minded ethical insistence" ran afoul with his campaign managers. A lawyer who represented the state's dairy interests offered the campaign $15,000 with the implicit understanding that if elected Bill would "serve the interests of the dairy industry once he was in office. But Hillary fought the deal during a heated election eve meeting," telling Bill, "No! You don't want to be a party to this!" (114). But Berstein also tells us that this decision might well have cost Bill the election, and in the years that followed Hillary "would be far less committed to the high road and much more concerned with results" (115).

Her Methodist faith has stayed with her over the years, and Bernstein details both its positive and negative effects. A White House aide said during the Lewinsky ordeal that her faith "explains the missionary zeal with which she attacks her issues and goes after them," as well as "the really extraordinary self-discipline and focus and ability to rely on her spirituality to get through all this." Others in the White House believed her faith engendered self-righteousness: "She elevates her staying with [Bill] to a moral level of biblical proportion. I am stronger than he is. I am better than he is. Therefore, I can stay with him because it's my biblical duty to love the sinner, and to help to try to overcome his defects of character. His sins are of weakness not of malice" (36).

She also evidently used her faith to support the ends-justifies-the-means approach to campaigning which she adopted after the 1974 election. In the years that followed she would join Dick Morris in trying to convince Bill of the need to run negative adds (166-67). Hillary and Morris "believed that you had to make somebody else the villain before you got fatally tarred yourself." This strategy "became a dominant leitmotif of Clintonian governance, a strategy meant to allow Bill's big ideas and grand goals -- and Hillary's tempered idealism and experience -- to flourish" (168). Stan Greenberg admired this about Hillary: "I think that Hillary was of that point of view that you were not going to have people's confidence unless you could show that you're strong and tough against your opponents. Your opponents need to know that you're not going to be passive, you're not going to be a punching bag, that you're not going to get pushed" (203).

Bernstein articulates what a trailblazer Hillary was in the women's movement. She began her career during a time in which few glass ceilings had been broken. The partners at Rose Law Firm was reluctant to hire her simply because she was a woman. "How will we introduce her to our clients?" one associate asked Vince Foster and Web Hubbell, noting that the firm's important clients were all men (129). This environment demanded a kind of no-compromising toughness of women, and Hillary was up to the challenge. Her colleagues and clients at the firm found her "intimidating -- not because she was particularly aggressive, but because she was rarely, if ever, deferential" (130).

Hillary must be given credit for much of Bill's success in Arkansas. She proved to be his rock whenever he faltered. Bill was "capable of self-absorption, self-defeating distractions, juvenile outbursts, a debilitating weakness for women, and a tendency to throw it all away when he was on the edge of greatness. This was particularly true -- and would become more so -- when left to his own devices, without the constant help, guidance, and encouragement of his wife" (154-155). After losing a gubernatorial election in 1980, Bill slipped into a debilitating depression, and friends believe Hillary is the one who helped him pick up the pieces, providing him with the assurance, giving his life much needed structure, and ultimately convincing him that his political career was not over (160-163).

Hillary also played a key role in reforming the state's educational system. Bill made her chairwoman of his Education Standards Committee in the early 1980s, and her "preparation for her assignment...was exhaustive, her expertise made almost as sharp as that of professionals with years of experience" (171). Her task force recommended mandating teacher-testing and requiring school districts to "uniform, state-imposed standards for curriculum and classroom size" (172). Although these reforms were unpopular with teachers unions, they proved to be incredibly successful: "the percentage of high school graduates who went on to college increased within four years from 38 percent to 50 percent," and school districts followed their instructions and reduced classroom sizes and began offering classes in foreign languages, advanced math, and science (174).

Through this all, her devotion to Chelsea remained "absolute and unconditional." Both she and Bill were "hands-on parents. Given the time-devouring nature of their public lives, they found a remarkable amount of time to be with their daughter: discussions at the dinner table, driving her to school, cheering from the soccer sidelines, Scrabble games, and enjoying movies" (149).

Bill developed an enormous debt of gratitude for Hillary and continued deferring to her after becoming president. She urged Bill to reject the advice of his more Washington-savvy advisers and remain combative and non-compromising with his political opponents. But this strategy, which had been so effective in Arkansas, did not work in Washington. Lawrence O'Donnell, who served as Pat Moynihan's aide, said, "When your purpose is to pass legislation, you don't set up war rooms and you don't believe that you are going to vanquish the opposition." Bernstein writes that Hillary was "in a permanent state of warfare with Congress, including members of their own party" (407), and as a result her husband's popularity began to plummet.

But what really hurt Bill's presidency was Whitewater and other related scandals, most of which involved Hillary. The accusations of their critics were ultimately shown to be baseless. After an investigation that lasted six years and cost taxpayers $52 million, the office of the special prosecutor could find no evidence that the Clintons had broken any laws, save Bill's lie about sex (349). And yet Hillary continually refused to cooperate with investigators, which only raised more suspicion and made matters worse.

Bernstein posits a number of explanations for Hillary's behavior here. In part she stonewalled because she worried they would learn about more of her husband's sexual affairs. She also possessed a "fierce desire for privacy and secrecy" (553). She had always "zealously protected herself (and her family) from almost any invasive inquiry that might reveal something of her emotional life, her deeper ambitions, or her machinations" (221). Finally, she "seemed unable, or unwilling, to grasp the desires of less antagonistic citizens, members of Congress, and the press to be given straightforward, timely responses to legitimate questions" (366). She'd devoted her life to public service and had recently been tasked to deliver her husband's promise of providing universal health coverage, and she believed that all reasonable people shared her priorities and did not care about these trivial matters from the past.

It's not clear how much Hillary has learned from these scandals, as her response to the recent email controversy has been eerily similar to her response to the Starr investigation. Her email usage was not illegal, although certainly careless and stupid, but instead of just coming out and admitting her error, she's again engaged in a type of lawyer-speak and subterfuge that has only made her situation worse. But in other ways Hillary has clearly learned from her mistakes. For instance, when she ran for the Senate in 2000, "she did the opposite of a lifetime's instincts: she restrained her tendency toward unequivocal advocacy and the assertion of her own strongly held views" and instead went on a "listening tour" of New York.

Although an effective PR move, the listening tour wasn't just for show. Ezra Klein has recently written: "[A]s I interviewed Clinton's staffers, colleagues, friends, and foes, I began every discussion with some form of the same question: What is true about the Hillary Clinton you’ve worked with that doesn’t come through on the campaign trail? The answers startled me in their consistency. Every single person brought up, in some way or another, the exact same quality they feel leads Clinton to excel in governance and struggle in campaigns...Hillary Clinton, they said over and over again, listens."

Klein initially didn't think much of Hillary's supposed listening skills, "[b]ut after hearing it 11, 12, 15 times," he began to take it seriously. He talked to a former Senate staff member who recalled how every few months Hillary would gather together her staff for "card-table time." Hillary would open up two "huge suitcases" which were "stuffed with newspaper clippings, position papers, random scraps of paper." "It turned out that Clinton, in her travels, stuffed notes from her conversations and her reading into suitcases," and she and her staff would pick through the papers. They would then put these papers into different piles on card tables: "scraps of paper related to the environment went here, crumpled clippings related to military families there." The staff member says that these notes "really did lead to legislation," as Senator Clinton "took seriously the things she was told, the things she read, the things she saw. She made her team follow up." And "[h]er process works the same way today." Several Clinton aides told Klein "that the campaign’s plan to fight opiate addiction, the first and most comprehensive offered by any of the major candidates, was the direct result of Clinton hearing about the issue on her tour."

Hillary has also developed a less combative and more team-building approach to governance. After becoming a senator, "[t]he first senators she sought out for conversation, for co-sponsorship of small but useful legislative initiatives, for prayer, for a drink, or for lunch in the Senate dining room tended to be those who had opposed the Clintons the most vigorously." Bernstein writes that she "identified who her enemies were, or those of her husband, and waged a war to win them over." "That was the internal institutional strategy. The external strategy was to show her constituents that she wouldn't let them down. She worked particularly hard for those who didn't support her" (547).

* * * * *

I can't say that I like Hillary more, or less, after reading this book, but I can definitely say that I understand her better. I can see that she's far from the demonic force that the far right has claimed. Hillary is a person of faith who has spent her life driven by a passion to make life better for society's most vulnerable citizens. She has an excellent mind and has learned from many of her mistakes. And she's also flawed. Her intense desire for privacy has at times led her to make awful decisions. And for all her intelligence, "when it comes to herself, she sees with something less than candor and lucidity. She sees, like so many others, what she wants to see." Bernstein laments that her 2003 memoir, when "judged against the facts," "underlines how she has often chosen to obfuscate, omit, and avoid" (552).

Hillary, in sum, is a remarkable woman, one who cares about people and has the ability to effect real change. And she also has some not insignificant weaknesses. After reading this book, I'm convinced that she has the ability to be an excellent president. I'm also convinced that if she's not careful she could easily get mired in the type of petty scandals which could sink her administration.

Two Must-Reads for Bernie-or-Busters

2016-08-01T20:15:00.002-04:00

First, Noam Chomsky argues why progressives in swing states should vote for Hillary Clinton. Here are some highlights from his article:

"The broader lesson to be drawn is not to shy away from confronting the dominance of the political system under the management of the two major parties. Rather, challenges to it need to be issued with a full awareness of their possible consequences. This includes the recognition that far right victories not only impose terrible suffering on the most vulnerable segments of society but also function as a powerful weapon in the hands of the establishment center, which, now in opposition can posture as the “reasonable” alternative. A Trump presidency, should it materialize, will undermine the burgeoning movement centered around the Sanders campaign, particularly if it is perceived as having minimized the dangers posed by the far right.

"A more general conclusion to be derived from this recognition is that this sort of cost/benefit strategic accounting is fundamental to any politics which is serious about radical change. Those on the left who ignore it, or dismiss it as irrelevant are engaging in political fantasy and are an obstacle to, rather than ally of, the movement which now seems to be materializing."

Chomsky then articulates eight principles for "lesser evil voting":

Voting should not be viewed as a form of personal self-expression or moral judgement directed in retaliation towards major party candidates who fail to reflect our values, or of a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites.
The exclusive consequence of the act of voting in 2016 will be (if in a contested “swing state”) to marginally increase or decrease the chance of one of the major party candidates winning...
One of these candidates, Trump, denies the existence of global warming, calls for increasing use of fossil fuels, dismantling of environmental regulations...Trump has also pledged to deport 11 million Mexican immigrants...Trump has also pledged to increase military spending while cutting taxes on the rich, hence shredding what remains of the social welfare “safety net” despite pretenses.
The suffering which these and other similarly extremist policies and attitudes will impose on marginalized and already oppressed populations has a high probability of being significantly greater than that which will result from a Clinton presidency.
4) should constitute sufficient basis to voting for Clinton where a vote is potentially consequential-namely, in a contested, “swing” state.
However, the left should also recognize that, should Trump win based on its failure to support Clinton, it will repeatedly face the accusation (based in fact), that it lacks concern for those sure to be most victimized by a Trump administration.
Often this charge will emanate from establishment operatives who will use it as a bad faith justification for defeating challenges to corporate hegemony either in the Democratic Party or outside of it. They will ensure that it will be widely circulated in mainstream media channels with the result that many of those who would otherwise be sympathetic to a left challenge will find it a convincing reason to maintain their ties with the political establishment rather than breaking with it, as they must.
Conclusion: by dismissing a 'lesser evil' electoral logic and thereby increasing the potential for Clinton’s defeat the left will undermine what should be at the core of what it claims to be attempting to achieve."

* * * * *

Vox's Dara Lind points out that Bernie-or-Busters are squandering their chance to hold Hillary accountable, and in so doing they're squandering their chance to advance the progressive movement.

Lind writes that Hillary has shown that she's responsive to the demands of her constituents. When her base applies heavy pressure for her to move left on a given issue (e.g., criminal justice reform, a $15 minimum wage), she generally moves to the left. And in this regard she's no different than most politicians. For instance, liberal activists applied heavy pressure on Obama early in his presidency -- e.g., interrupting some of his speeches before the repeal of DADT or "before he implemented the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for young unauthorized immigrants in 2012" -- and in private he essentially ackowledged that such tactics worked. "In meetings with progressive activists, Obama often tells a story about Franklin Delano Roosevelt telling labor leader A. Philip Randolph, 'I agree with you, now go out and make me do it.' Ironically, FDR probably never said that — but Obama's use of it reflects how he himself understands politics. And when pressured enough, on immigration or the Keystone XL pipeline, he delivers."

"Here’s the thing, though, about working to get a politician to move to the left (or in any other direction): when the politician tells you what you want to hear, and supports a policy to pander to you, that’s a victory. It doesn’t matter whether they actually believe the sentiment. It matters that they know you believe the sentiment, and they’ve decided the most important thing is to do what you want.

"That usually means that the most effective activists in this style make clear demands of politicians about what they want to see, and then praises the politician when it happens.

"When Bernie Sanders was asked to say that black lives matter, and did — and started name-dropping Sandra Bland in speeches — that was a victory. The activists who’d criticized Sanders and his campaign acknowledged and praised it (even while remaining annoyed with some Sanders supporters)."

Many Bernie-or-Busters, on the other hand, have made it clear that they'll be against Hillary no matter what. Their goal doesn't seem to be moving Clinton to the left but demonstrating that she is illegitimate.

"This is the question that left dissenters need to ask themselves about Hillary Clinton, if they haven’t already: is there anything that Hillary Clinton can do to redeem herself to you?

"If there isn’t, you can continue to protest her existence, but don’t be upset if she doesn’t respond — you wouldn’t accept a response if you got it.

"If there is, figure out how you can make her do it — especially (if she is elected) in January. You won’t be alone. In fact, you might be surprised to see that some of the people who supported Clinton in 2016 are right alongside, waiting to remind her of what she owes."

Why We Can't Agree about (Some) Basic Facts

2016-07-31T01:12:00.001-04:00

Motivated Cognition

Dan Kahan defines motivated cognition as "the unconscious tendency of individuals to fit their processing of information to conclusions that suit some end or goal." Sports fans provide a great example of this, as they tend to believe that controversial officiating calls that favor their team are correct while those that favor the other team as incorrect.

The mechanisms of motivated cognition are diverse. "They include dynamics such as biased information search, which involves seeking out (or disproportionately attending to) evidence that is congruent rather than incongruent with the motivating goal; biased assimilation, which refers to the tendency to credit and discredit evidence selectively in patterns that promote rather than frustrate the goal; and identity-protective cognition, which reflects the tendency of people to react dismissively to information when accepting it would cause them to experience dissonance or anxiety."

Cultural Cognition

Kahan et al. (2013) argue that a great deal of political conflict can be explained by a type of motivated cognition he refers to as cultural cognition. Cultural cognition is the unconscious tendency of individuals to steer "away from beliefs that could alienate them from others on whose support they depend in myriad domains of everyday life." People "have a large stake—psychically as well as materially—in maintaining the status of, and their personal standing in, in affinity groups whose members are bound [by] their commitment to shared moral understandings. If opposing positions on a policy-relevant fact—e.g., weather human activity is generating dangerous global warming—come to be seen as symbols of membership in and loyalty to competing groups of this kind, individuals can be expected to display a strong tendency to conform their understanding of whatever evidence they encounter to the position that prevails in theirs."

These authors write, "In the absence of divisive cultural conflict, citizens of all levels of science comprehension generally form positions consistent with the best available evidence." For instance, the public "is not polarized over the utility of antibiotics in treating bacterial infections." "But when a policy-relevant fact does become suffused with culturally divisive meanings, the pressure to form group-congruent beliefs will often dominate whatever incentives individuals have to 'get the right answer' from an empirical standpoint." For instance, even though denying the science on climate change will have adverse long-term consequences, people are primarily motivated by the adverse consequences of believing something that is contrary to their affinity group: "loss of trust among peers, stigmatization within his community; and even the loss of economic opportunities."

An Important Study

Kahan et al. (2013) asked a simple question: "Why does public conflict over societal risks persist in the face of compelling and widely accessible scientific evidence?" These researchers tested two possible answers: first, there is disagreement about such issues because many people have limited knowledge and reasoning skills; second, there is disagreement because we have this unconscious tendency to avoid beliefs that could alienate us from our respective affinity groups.

Kahan et al. (2013) conducted a study involving 1,100 individuals. Researchers first tested the subjects' political beliefs and their numeracy, i.e., their ability to correctly draw inferences from quantitative data. Researchers then gave subjects two different problems which required them to draw inferences from empirical data. First, subjects were given the purported results of a study of a new skin-rash treatment and asked to determine whether the treatment had been effective. Subjects were then given the purported results of a study of a gun-control measure. Some of the gun-control studies showed that banning concealed weapons had made the cities in question safer, while other studies showed that the ban had made the cities less safe.

Researchers hypothesized that the more numerate subjects would do a better job interpreting data from the skin-rash study, and that was indeed the case. Researchers also hypothesized that all subjects would do a worse job interpreting data from the gun-control study, and that too was the case. Predictably, those who opposed gun-control were more likely to interpret that data as supporting their belief and those who supported gun-control were more likely to interpret that data as supporting their belief. Researchers finally hypothesized that more numerate subjects would more likely to interpret data from the gun control accurately, regardless of their prior beliefs. Researchers were shown to be wrong in their hypothesis, as the more numerate subjects actually did a worse job interpreting data from the gun-control study. Kahan et al. explain this result by noting that "more numerate individuals have a cognitive ability that lower numeracy ones do not" and that they "use that ability opportunistically in a manner geared to promoting their interest in forming and persisting in identity-protective beliefs."

Kahan et al. (2013) bring the results together: Citizens do not "remain divided over risks in the face of compelling and widely accessible scientific evidence" because they are "insufficiently rational." Rather, "they are too rational in extracting from information on these issues the evidence that matters most for them in their everyday lives. In an environment in which positions on particular policy-relevant facts become widely understood as symbols of individuals’ membership in and loyalty to opposing cultural groups, it will promote people’s individual interests to attend to evidence about those facts in a manner that reliably conforms their beliefs to the ones that predominate in the groups they are members of. Indeed, the tendency to process information in this fashion will be strongest among individuals who display the reasoning capacities most strongly associated with science comprehension."

How to Save the Republic

Kahan (2010) writes, "The ability of democratic societies to protect the welfare of their citizens depends on finding a way to counteract this culture war over empirical data." Since Kahan's research shows that simply educating the public about these controversial issues will not reduce conflict, we must communicate in ways which have been informed by the findings of cultural cognition. Kahan has proposed three strategies.

First, identity affirmation (Kahan, 2010). This involves presenting information "in a manner that affirms rather than threatens people's values," as "people tend to resist scientific evidence that could lead to restrictions on activities valued by their group. If, on the other hand, they are presented with information in a way that upholds their commitments, they react more open-mindedly. For instance, people with individualistic values resist scientific evidence that climate change is a serious threat because they have come to assume that industry-constraining carbon-emission limits are the main solution. They would probably look at the evidence more favourably, however, if made aware that the possible responses to climate change include nuclear power and geoengineering, enterprises that to them symbolize human resourcefulness. Similarly, people with an egalitarian outlooks are less likely to reflexively dismiss evidence of the safety of nanotechnology if they are made aware of the part that nanotechnology might play in environmental protection, and not just its usefulness in the manufacture of consumer goods.

Second, pluralistic advocacy (Kahan, 2010). This involves ensuring that "sound information is vouched for by a diverse set of experts. In our HPV-vaccine experiment, polarization was also substantially reduced when people encountered advocates with diverse values on both sides of the issue. People feel that it is safe to consider evidence with an open mind when they know that a knowledgeable member of their cultural community accepts it. Thus, giving a platform to a spokesperson likely to be recognized as a typical traditional parent with a hierarchical world view might help to dispel any association between mandatory HPV vaccination and the condoning of permissive sexual practices."

Third, narrative framing (Kahan et al., 2011). "Individuals tend to assimilate information by fitting it to pre-existing narrative templates or schemes that invest the information with meaning. The elements of these narrative templates—the identity of the stock heroes and villains, the nature of their dramatic struggles, and the moral stakes of their engagement with one another—vary in identifiable and recurring ways across cultural groups. By crafting messages to evoke narrative templates that are culturally congenial to target audiences, risk communicators can help to assure that the content of the information they are imparting receives considered attention across diverse cultural groups (Jones & McBeth 2010)."

* * * * *

Jones, M. D., & McBeth, M. K. (2010). A narrative policy framework: Clear enough to be wrong?. Policy Studies Journal, 38(2), 329-353.

Kahan, D. (2010). Fixing the communications failure. Nature, 463(7279), 296-297.

Kahan, D. M., Jenkins‐Smith, H., & Braman, D. (2011). Cultural cognition of scientific consensus. Journal of Risk Research, 14(2), 147-174.

Kahan, D. M., Peters, E., Dawson, E. C., & Slovic, P. (2013). Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government. Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper.

Yes, Bernie Bros, Hillary really is progressive

2016-07-27T12:37:00.000-04:00

Many conservatives fear that Hillary Clinton is a raging liberal, while the Bernie Bros make her sound like the modern incarnation John C. Calhoun. Hillary is certainly not as liberal as Bernie Sanders, a self-described "socialist," but there can be no doubt that she is solidly liberal.

Evidence #1: Senator Clinton had a liberal voting record.

DW-NOMINATE, an algorithm that computes roll call votes, rated Hillary as the 11th most liberal member of the Senate from 2001-2008. The algorithm shows that Clinton was considerately more liberal than the median democrat and considerably more liberal than Senator Obama. David Hawkings notes that Hillary cast far more votes against George W. Bush than most of her Democratic colleges, proving herself "a reliable opponent of Bush’s economic policies, including opposing the trade liberalization agreement with much of Central America. And she opposed a long list of White House nominations, including John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. for the Supreme Court."

Hawkings adds that Hillary's voting record represents a center-left ideology that is "quite comparable to the way she’s been representing herself as a candidate in 2016." He further notes that her voting record received high ratings from liberal advocacy groups. "She voted the way big labor wanted 95 percent of the time and cast ballots the way social and economic liberals had hoped 90 percent of the time — as calculated by averaging her eight annual scorecards on key floor votes identified by the AFL-CIO and Americans for Democratic Action. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the personification of modern mainstream liberalism, yielded average percentages just a point or two higher." It's also notable that she received incredibly low scores from conservative advocacy groups -- e.g., 11 percent from the American Conservative Union, 8 percent from Americans for Prosperity, and 0 percent from Eagle Forum.

Evidence #2: Hillary has consistently voiced support for liberal ideas

Harry Enton points out that Hillary "also has a history of very liberal public statements." She "rates as a 'hard core liberal' per the OnTheIssues.org scale. She is as liberal as Elizabeth Warren and barely more moderate than Bernie Sanders. And while Obama is also a 'hard core liberal,' Clinton again was rated as more liberal than Obama."

Evidence #3: Sanders ain't no saint

All things are relative, and although Sanders is clearly to the left of Hillary, it needs to be pointed out that Sanders' rhetoric has at times been belied by his actions. For instance, although Sanders has spent much time attacking Hillary for the 1994 crime bill that Bill Clinton signed into law, Sanders in fact voted for the bill. The Senator has tried to explain his vote by citing the bill's ban on assault weapons, but Patrick Caldwell points out that "the initial House version that he voted for didn't include the assault weapons ban, a provision added by the Senate." Similarly, Sanders has criticized Bill Clinton for a 1996 bill which prevented immigrants from overstaying their visas, but Sanders also voted for that bill. Additionally, Sanders voted to keep Guantanamo Bay open, and in 2000 he voted for the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, a bill which loosened the government's ability to regulate derivatives and in turn helped cause the 2008 financial crisis.

Bernie Bros and Gary Johnson

2016-07-25T15:43:00.000-04:00

And so many Bernie Bros are turning to Gary Johnson. This phenomenon has already been discussed by some, and I've recently seen examples of it on Facebook.

I find this so surprising because it's not like Gary Johnson is Bernie-lite. Hillary is the Bernie-lite candidate in this election and Johnson, if anything, the anti-Bernie. For example, Johnson wants to eliminate corporate taxes and implement a national consumption tax, a move which would disproportionately benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor and the elderly. Johnson has proposed that he would balance the budget by implementing massive spending cuts to programs that primarily benefit the vulnerable, including Medicare and Medicaid. And he would raise the Social Security retirement age to as high as 72.

Johnson is liberal on some social issues, but so is Hillary, and it wasn't social issues that animated Bernie Bros in the first place. It was Bernie's economic message, and the more you learn about Johnson, the more you realize that he's against every jot and every tittle of this message. He's favorite political philosopher is Milton Friedman. He's said he would sign the Trans Pacific Partnership into law. He supports right-to-work laws. And although he admits that global warming is anthropogenic, he doesn't believe the government should take action to reduce carbon emissions.

And so here is more evidence that Bernie Revolution was perhaps not such a large step forward for progressive ideas but in many ways a personality cult. Look, I think Bernie's a true champion of the people, and I think many of his supporters really care about the issues. But these Libertarian-flirting Bernie Bros are a confused mess.

Explaining Bernie-or-Busters

2016-07-23T22:39:00.000-04:00

I find the Bernie or Bust crowd infuriatingly irrational.

I've argued before that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be a boon to the progressive movement. I think my argument was well-reasoned and well-supported. But Bernie-or-Busters -- or simply, BoBs -- seem impervious to reason and evidence. Bernie or Bust is a religion, one in which Hillary Clinton plays the part of evil itself, while Bernie is some demigod sent to earth to save humanity.

I'm hardly exaggerating. Here's what one BoB says about Hillary: “We are not going to vote for the demon named Hillary just because you are threatening us with the devil named Trump.” I have BoB Facebook friends who speak as though there is absolutely no difference between Hillary and Donald Trump: "I despise both of them. They are both disgusting and appalling beyond description. I have no answers."

And here's a sampling of Bernie worship. "You give me hope and strength to keep living, Bernie Sanders." "Bernie, from where I was standing yesterday in Madison, you looked Olympian...I'm not much of a religious man by any stretch. But I promise you this: the almighty has smiled on you." "You have restored my hope in good and it gives me strength to fight for another day." "I get goose bumps just looking at you."

I like Bernie. I respect Bernie. Had he won the nomination, I'd have a Feel the Bern bumper sticker on my car right now. But Bernie is not Christ incarnate. In the Bush years he cast a significant vote for the gun lobby. In an interview with the New York Daily News he couldn't explain how he would carry out his plan to break up the banks. PolitiFact has rated a higher percentage of Bernie's statements as being false than it has for Hillary.

And Hillary really isn't as bad as BoBs believe. She might be to the right of the Vermont socialist, but she's solidly left of center, and there's every reason to expect her to continue pushing the Obama agenda if elected. Obama, of course, is no dyed in the wool progressive but a left-leaning pragmatist. But for some reason BoBs have not demonized him. Although Obama would certainly fail any progressive purity test, BoBs nonetheless praise him for advancing important progressive policies.

BoBs, it seems, can only be explained in psychological terms. I don't intend to deliver some smug psychoanalysis here, but I don't know how else to explain their jaw-dropping irrationality. I'm reminded of Ernest Becker, who eloquently argued that humans can't help but engage in transference, a term traditionally used to describe the process in which therapy patients unknowingly transfer the feelings of dependence and awe they once felt for their parents onto their therapist. Becker broadened the definition of transference, writing that deep down we're all essentially scared children, scared by the many uncertainties and cruelties of existence, and so we unconsciously go around adopting new transference figures.

That is to say, in order to assuage our existential anxieties, we basically endow certain people with an exaggerated sense of goodness and power. We then put our trust in these figures, depend on them, and in so doing have our deepest anxieties relieved, just as children lean on their parents to relieve their deepest anxieties. Some people deal with their anxieties by leaning on the divine, others by leaning on romantic partners or celebrities or politicians.

So I think many BoBs have done something like this. They've unconsciously made Bernie into a super-human. For them, Bernie really does approach moral perfection, and of course when you're on the side of pure goodness, you necessarily view your enemies -- e.g., Hillary Clinton in the primaries -- as manifestations of evil. And so now that the great Bern has fallen, BoBs can't help but continue seeing Hillary this way. Even though -- to repeat myself -- she's a solidly left of center candidate who would further the progressive cause.

Sadly, the casualty of this holy war might not just be Hillary Clinton but the progressive movement itself and consequently the millions of Americans whose well-being depends upon this movement's success.

The Case Against Donald Trump

2016-07-23T13:21:00.000-04:00

I shouldn't need to make a case against Donald Trump, because the case against Donald Trump seems so incredibly obvious. And yet as I scroll through my Facebook feed, I see that some friends are supporting the man. What follows are seven arguments meant to persuade individuals of all political persuasions that Donald Trump is unfit to be president.

Argument #1: Donald Trump has very little regard for the Constitution.

Trump's disregard for the First Amendment is well known: he's said the government should be empowered to shut down parts of the internet and to close mosques, and he has promised to "open up" libel laws so that he can more easily sue journalists who criticize him. Trump has also long held contempt for the Fifth Amendment's the prohibition against seizing private property except for "public use," as evidenced by his lobbying efforts over the years to use eminent domain to force unwilling homeowners and business owners to sell to him. Nor does Trump value the Fourteenth Amendment, which his promise to deport natural-born citizens whose parents came here illegally blatantly violates. Furthermore, he has shown contempt for the separation of powers, the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against torture, Article II's implied prohibition against unilaterally abrogating treaties, as well as Article's I and III, as evidenced by his plan to govern through broad executive orders.

Argument #2: Donald Trump is a sociopathic liar.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact has to date fact-checked over 200 of Donald Trump's statements and concluded that 72 percent of them are either False, Mostly False, or Pants on Fire. The organization has never given a politician so many negative ratings. Similarly, FactCheck.org stated, "In the 12 years of FactCheck.org’s existence, we’ve never seen his match. He stands out not only for the sheer number of his factually false claims, but also for his brazen refusals to admit error when proven wrong." Politico measured "how many lies Trump told over the course of 4.6 hours of speeches" and "found that he lied, on average, once every five minutes." Huffington Post "catalogued his lies over the course of just one town hall event" and "came up with 71 lies." From the claim that he watched "thousands and thousands of people" cheering as the World Trade Center collapsed to the claim that his campaign is "100 percent" self-funded to the claim that 81 percent of murdered whites are killed by blacks -- Trump lies habitually.

Argument #3: Donald Trump is alarmingly ignorant of policy issues.

Senate Republican Leader and Trump supporter Mitch McConnell stated in June that Trump needed to pick "someone highly experienced and very knowledgeable" as a running mate "because it’s pretty obvious he doesn’t know a lot about the issues." We've repeatedly seen in debates and interviews that Trump loves to make bold proposals but when asked for details simply cannot deliver. The Washington Post writes: "Existing trade deals are 'stupid,' but Mr. Trump does not say how they could be improved. The Islamic State must be destroyed, but the candidate offers no strategy for doing so. Eleven million undocumented immigrants must be deported, but Mr. Trump does not tell us how he would accomplish this legally or practically." Eugene Robinson noted after reading the Post's hour-long interview with Trump: "Donald Trump’s ignorance of government policy, both foreign and domestic, is breathtaking" and that he "appears to know next to nothing about the issues that would confront him in the job." It's not surprising that Trump is not much of a reader.

Argument #4: Donald Trump is not a successful businessman.

Trump claims that his extraordinary business acumen uniquely qualifies him for office, but the truth is that his father was an enormously wealthy real estate tycoon who made his son's venture into real estate possible. The elder Trump not only loaned Donald $1 million to build the Grand Central Hyatt in 1978, but he guaranteed a $70 million construction loan. Over the years, Trump has bankrupted six companies, including two Atlantic City casinos in the early 1990s at a time when other casinos were thriving. Max Ehrenfreund points out that his net worth would be far greater today had he simply put his money in an index fund. And as Marco Rubio pointed out earlier in the year, Trump has had many, many failed businesses, including Trump Mortgage, which he opened at the height of the housing bubble, declaring that "the real estate market is going to be very strong for a long time to come," only to be forced to close shop when the bubble burst 18 months later.

Argument #5: Donald Trump is a sexist.

I don't think that Trump's three marriages and extramarital affair with a beauty queen discount him from office, but if the tables were turn and Hillary had engaged in such behavior, many conservatives would be making it an issue, and so I think it's worth mentioning. It's also worth mentioning that Trump has a long history of making degrading remarks about women -- e.g., telling the opposing counsel at a deposition that she was "disgusting" after she asked to take a break to pump breast milk for her three-month-old daughter and publicly referring to women as "bimbos," "slobs," "unattractive," etc. An NY Times article earlier this year featured interviews with over 50 women who have known Trump on a personal level over the years and revealed "unwelcome romantic advances, unending commentary on the female form," and "unsettling workplace conduct."

Argument #6: Donald Trump is corrupt.

Trump has an especially long and ugly history of unethical dealings. Most well known is Trump University, a now defunct wealth seminar which received a D- rating from the Better Business Bureau and which former workers say used fraudulent tactics to prey upon the elderly and uneducated. There are currently three pending lawsuits accusing the operation of fraud, false advertising, unfair business practices, and violating "financial elder abuse" statutes." Many other scandals plague Trump; e.g., a recent USA Today investigation "found hundreds of people -- carpenters, dishwashers, painters, even his own lawyers -- who say [Trump] didn’t pay them for their work."

Argument #7: Donald Trump is an unprecedented flip-flopper.

Most politicians flip-flop from time to time, but the frequency and significance of Trump's flip-flops are truly unprecedented. I could give example after example, but for the sake of space will provide just two. Last September he plainly stated that he supported asylum for Syrian refugees. Three weeks later he said at a campaign event, "I'm putting the people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration, that if I win, if I win, they're going back." In recent years Trump said that "Hillary Clinton is a terrific woman," that she is "smart," "tough," a hard worker, that she would "make a great president." And well, we know what he's said recently.

Why Progressives Must Vote for Hillary Clinton

2016-07-22T20:49:00.002-04:00

Many progressives support Jill Stein for president. I can understand this decision among progressives not living in swing states, as this seems like a good way to both promote the Green Party and protest some of Clinton's positions. But for those who living in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Colorado, any good that might come from voting Green would be far outweighed by the tremendous damage caused by a Trump presidency.

Some say that there's no difference between Hillary and Trump, that they're two sides of the same coin, but this claim is refuted by an honest examination of their policy proposals. Look at their budget proposals. Trump has promised massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, tax cuts which the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) estimates would increase the national debt by $12 trillion. Trump claims he would balance the budget by implementing "big time" spending cuts, but he has not specified which programs he would cut. Since he would increase military spending (how else to "completely rebuild our depleted military"), it follows that he could only balance the budget by making enormous cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Hillary, on the other hand, has proposed increasing taxes for top-earners, mainly the top one percent, a move which the non-partisan Tax Policy Center estimates would increase revenues by $1.1 trillion over the next decade. Clinton says she would use these savings to do such things as expand Obamacare, increase funding for veterans, improve infrastructure, and fund early childhood education and college. CRFB says that Hillary "deserves a lot of credit for committing to pay for all her new initiatives and for largely meeting this goal."

So let's review. Hillary has an economic plan that is both progressive and responsible. She would increase taxes on the wealthy in order to expand social programs which would primarily benefit middle class and lower-income Americans. Trump, on the other hand, would exacerbate wealth inequality, which in turn would either cause the debt to skyrocket or social safety net programs to be slashed.

If we look at further differences between the candidates, the choice for progressives becomes even more obvious. For example --

Federal minimum wage -- Hillary wants to increase it, while Trump wants to leave it alone.
Health care -- Hillary wants to expand Obamacare, while Trump wants to replace it with a system which CRFB says will cost more money and cover fewer people.
Abortion -- Hillary supports a woman's right to choose, while Trump has stated that women who have the procedure deserve "some form of punishment."
Same-sex marriage -- Hillary wants to preserve this right, while Trump has said he would support Supreme Court justices who would overturn the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling.
Environment -- Hillary accepts the findings of climate science and supports enforcing environmental regulations and funding clean energy, while Trump has said that "the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese" and that he would abolish the EPA.
Gun control -- Hillary supports moderate gun control measures, while Trump opposes expanding background checks and banning assault weapons.

I could keep going. I could talk about Trump's desire to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, his plan to ban Muslims from entering the country, his blatant advocacy of war crimes, his threat to default on the national debt, his enthusiasm for Voter ID laws, his belief that the world would be safer if more nations had nuclear weapons -- all positions which Hillary firmly opposes. I could also discuss how Trump is a bigot, a misogynist, a narcissist, a sociopathic liar.

Hillary might not be as progressive as Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders, but she has a history of supporting left-of-center policies, and there's every reason to believe she would continue doing so once elected. Donald Trump, in contrast, advocates reactionary, plutocratic ideas. Slashing safety net programs would devastate millions of Americas. As would repealing Obamacare and abolishing the EPA and appointing anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court.

Yes, voting for Jill Stein might (but might not) push the Democratic Party further to the left, which might (but might not) benefit us in the long run. But this is an irresponsible gamble to take when we know that a Hillary presidency would push forward a relatively progressive agenda, whereas a Trump presidency would wreak serious, lasting harm on our most vulnerable citizens.

Election 2016: Clinton's Emails

2016-07-07T13:23:00.001-04:00

Background
While Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton used a personal email account, which was hosted on a personal server, to conduct official business.

This practice was rare but not unprecedented
A May 2016 State Department Office Inspector General (OIG) report stated that many State Department officials over the past few administrations have at times used personal emails to conduct official business, but the report found that only Clinton, Colin Powell, and a former ambassador had used private systems on "an exclusive basis for day-to-day operations."

This practice violated State Department policy
Government employees are permitted to send official emails on private systems[1]. But in recent years the State Department issued various memos stating that the majority of one's official emails should be conducted on State Department systems.[2] The State Department's Inspector General stated that Clinton had an obligation to discuss her email practice with the Department's Chief Information Officer and Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security. These individuals have stated that they would have not approved her email practice had they been aware of it.[3]

Some of Clinton's emails contained classified information
The FBI reviewed over 30,000 Clinton emails and found that 110 emails contained classified information at the time they were sent, and 3 of those emails were marked classified at the time, although they were not properly marked.[4]

Clinton probably didn't know that these emails contained classified information
Clinton says that she viewed classified information in hard copy, and indeed emails from her tenure show Clinton staffers discussing that they couldn't email confidential information over the private server.

It's true that the FBI found that Clinton sent 3 emails that were marked classified, but FBI Director James Comey testified before Congress that these emails were not marked in accordance with State Department procedures and that Clinton therefore might not have known they were classified.[5]

Clinton was "careless"
Comey stated that Clinton and her colleagues "were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information" and that "any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position" should have known that many of the classified matters discussed in her emails should not have been discussed in "an unclassified system."

Clinton did not break the law
Comey stated that there is no precedent for prosecuting Clinton, as there is no evidence that she intentionally mishandled classified information or acted disloyally to the United States.[6]

Law Professor Steve Vladeck explains Comey's conclusion by noting that "federal law doesn't prohibit the discussion of classified information over unsecured networks." Some have suggested that Clinton broke the Espionage Act, but Vladeck explains that Clinton did not violate 18 USC 793(d), which forbids giving classified information to "any person not entitled to receive it," because her emails were to staffers authorized to receive such information.

Others have argued that Clinton violated 18 USC 793(f) of the Espionage Act, which forbids officials from allowing, "through gross negligence," classified information to be "removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed." But Dan Abrams points out that the legal meaning of "gross negligence" is not the same as "extreme carelessness," which is how Comey described Clinton's email practices. Abrams further points to a 1941 Supreme Court ruling which stated that the authors of the Espionage Act only intended to criminalize actions intended to injure the United States.[7]

Clinton's staff deleted some work-related emails
Clinton's attorneys said they deleted 32,000 emails which were "personal and private," many of which the FBI recovered. Comey confirmed that some of these deleted emails were in fact work-related. Comey stated that the bureau found no evidence that these latter emails "were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them."[8]

There is no evidence that Clinton's account was hacked.
Comey stated that the FBI "did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked."

Even if she'd been hacked, the hackers would not have learned any government secrets
Overclassification has long been a problem in the government, and mention of certain topics is automatically classified, even if the information discussed is already well-known to the public. Seven of the eight top secret chains contained publicly-accessible information about the CIA's drone program. The eighth chained described a conversation with the president of Malawi. Mention of the drone program and conversations with foreign leaders are automatically classified.[9]

Clinton's motives were not nefarious
Hillary Clinton is deeply paranoid and not without good reason. Dylan Matthews reminds us that the Clintons have been viciously, often unfairly, besmirched since 1992. "When their close friend killed himself," Matthews writes, "they were accused of murder. When they lost money on a bad real estate deal that a friend who turned out to be a con artist suckered them into, it triggered a federal investigation...When they tried to clean up a White House office that the FBI was investigating for financial improprieties, the independent counsel wound up looking into their actions."

Matthews concludes that this blatantly unfair treatment left Bill and Hillary "sufficiently jaded and paranoid," causing them to believe that "their own conduct is irrelevant to whether they’ll be targeted," which in turn lead to carelessness, which in turn lead to more scandals, and so on. I think there's something to that, and I also think that the Clintons, knowing that their opponents will distort any little action in hopes of vilifying them, have become especially secretive, which in this case has backfired colossally.

Clinton hasn't really taken responsibility for her actions
Clinton didn't do anything awful, but she did violate State Department policy, and her actions were clearly stupid and potentially harmful to US security. She's said she made a mistake and regrets relying solely on her private server, but as Alan Jacobs writes, she really ought to give a sincere, humble apology -- e.g., “What I did with that private email server was stupid and wrong. I am sorry and I will learn from this and not make the same mistake again. And, just for the record, the ability to admit when I’m wrong is one of the major points that distinguishes me from my opponent.”

* * * * *

[1] A 2009 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) regulation states that "federal agencies may allow their employees to send and receive work-related emails 'using a system not operated by the agency.'"

[2] The State Department's Inspector General noted in a recent report that between 2005 and 2011 the State Department revised the Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM) and "issued various memoranda specifically discussing the obligation to use Department systems in most circumstances and identifying the risks of not doing so." Throughout Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, "the FAM stated that normal day-to-day operations should be conducted on an [Automated Information System]."

[3] The Inspector General "found no evidence that the Secretary requested or obtained guidance or approval to conduct official business via a personal email account on her private server."

[4] These were the emails that Clinton returned to the State Department in 2014. The FBI also recovered several thousand emails that Clinton had not returned, some of which were recovered by reviewing archived emails of government accounts to which Clinton had emailed. Of these additional emails, three contained classified information.

[5] Andrew Prokop explains that the emails in question did not bear "the traditional headers at the top of the document saying they were classified. Instead, Comey said, each had the letter C in parentheses -- a marking for confidential classified information -- down in the body." Saith Comey: "I think it’s possible, possible that she didn’t understand what a C meant when she saw it in the body of an email like that. I don’t think our investigation established she was particularly sophisticated with respect to classified information and the levels."

[6] Comey: "In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here."

[7] Comey also testified that the FBI did not seriously consider prosecuting Clinton for violating this statute because there is concern over its constitutionality.

[8] Comey: "Our assessment is that, like many e-mail users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted e-mails or e-mails were purged from the system when devices were changed. Because she was not using a government account—or even a commercial account like Gmail—there was no archiving at all of her e-mails, so it is not surprising that we discovered e-mails that were not on Secretary Clinton’s system in 2014, when she produced the 30,000 e-mails to the State Department."

[9] Fred Kaplan writes that, "[a]s anyone who’s ever had a security clearance will tell you, the labels secret and confidential mean next to nothing." Regarding the top secret emails, Kaplan notes that "[s]even of the eight email chains dealt with CIA drone strikes, which are classified top secret/special access program—unlike Defense Department drone strikes, which are unclassified. The difference is that CIA drones hit targets in countries, like Pakistan and Yemen, where we are not officially at war; they are part of covert operations. (Defense Department drone strikes are in places where we are officially at war.) But these operations are covert mainly to provide cover for the Pakistani and Yemeni governments, so they don’t have to admit they’re cooperating with America. Everyone in the world knows about these strikes; nongovernment organizations, such as New America, tabulate them; newspapers around the world—including the New York Times, where some of the same reporters are now writing so breathlessly about Clinton’s careless handling of classified information—cover these strikes routinely." Kaplan notes that "[t]The other top secret email chain described a conversation with the president of Malawi. Conversations with foreign leaders are inherently classified." All of which means that, "even if Russian, Chinese, Iranian, or Syrian spies had hacked into Clinton’s email servers, and if they’d pored through 60,000 emails and come across these eight chains that held top secret material, they would not have learned anything the slightest bit new or worthy of their efforts."

How to Be an Existentialist: Some Practical Advice

2015-02-17T17:08:00.000-05:00

Existentialism urges us to live according to our own personal values, not the values we learned from our parents, culture, etc. Existentialism, in other words, asks us to develop our essences and be ourselves (Martin, Campbell, and Henry, 2004, p. 433).

Martin, Campbell, and Henry (2005) write that having a close brush with death generally emboldens people to be themselves, to live according to their own values. They write, “Compared to individuals who have not had a close brush with death, those who have (1) Feel more able to refuse doing things they do not want to do, (2) Report less concern with social rejection and the opinions of others while also reporting more concern for the welfare of others, (3) Are less easily intimidated and display a greater willingness to take risks” (p. 223). These authors note that “[b]eing self-directed is not the same as being self-centered,” as “the kind of intrinsic orientation often adopted by close brush survivors is inversely related to narcissistic self-interest” (p. 223).

How can we explain this growth? The authors consider a couple of different explanations.

1) The posttraumatic growth model holds that trauma can spur psychological growth by, first of all, shattering people’s basic assumptions about life.As an example they imagine someone whose belief that they are too young to get a certain disease is shattered one day when they're diagnosed. According to this model, once someone's basic assumptions are shattered, they often adopt beliefs that are more closely aligned with reality. Moreover, individuals faced with trauma might “be provided with opportunities they did not see before (e.g., new careers, new relationships), gain insights that allow them to function better than before (e.g., increased self-efficacy), and experience greater social support” (p. 224).

2) Research shows that clients often benefit by relinquishing control over some areas of their lives. One study found that relinquishing control, often to a spiritual power, can help clients cope, increasing “feelings of relief, the ability to think more clearly, and the ability to work more productively toward a goal” (p. 226). Another study found that “the more individuals were able to let go of their unattained goals,” the less they felt nervous and distressed (p. 226).

When someone has a brush with death, they often “wake-up to the conclusion that at least some of their pursuits are misguided” (p. 227). “To the extent that they were guiding their life on the basis of generic cultural theories, individuals may look away from such theories toward more personally valid experiences” (p. 227).

There are ways, aside from having a near-death experience, to bring about these changes in individuals. “We have found, for example, that merely asking individuals to write about their death can decrease their reliance on scripts and stereotypes and increase their reliance on bottom-up evaluation guided by self-reflection” (p. 228). They also recommend mindfulness practice, as well as Rogerian therapy, where “therapists attempt to create a setting of unconditional positive regard to help clients explore the use of their personal feelings as a guide to their behavior in place of inauthentic guides they may have adopted under conditions of worth (i.e., I’ll only love you if you act the way I want you to act)” (p. 228)

* * * * *

Martin, L.L., Campbell, W.K., & Henry, C.D. (2004). The roar of awakening: Mortality acknowledgement as a call to authentic living. In. J. Greenberg, S.L. Koole, & T. Pyszczynski (Eds.), The Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology (pp. 431-448). New York: The Guilford Press.

Martin, L.L, & Kleiber, D.A. (2005). Letting go of the negative: Psychological growth from a close brush with death. Traumatology, 11(4), 221-232.

The Meaning of Life: Some Notes

2015-02-10T17:10:00.000-05:00

When philosophers talk about “the meaning of life,” they usually mean that life has some sort of purpose. But not just any purpose. They usually hold that this purpose must be a good purpose, an animating purpose, the type of purpose that makes one feel that life is worth living. Edwards (2008) has this sort of definition in mind. A person, he writes, can be said to have a meaningful life when they devote much of their time to achieving “some dominant, over-all goal or goals” and when they do so “with a special zest that was not present before” (pp. 124-125).

Taylor (2000) adds two more attributes to the definition of “meaning”: significance and permanence. An activity, he writes, can be said to be meaningful “if it has some significant culmination, some more or less lasting end that can be considered to have been the direction and purpose of the activity” (p. 23).

Life can be said to be meaningful in two different senses. First, life can be meaningful in an objective sense, meaning that life itself has a meaning, one that is either “structurally part of the universe, apart from human subjective evaluation; or dependent upon some external agency other than human agency” (Klemke, p. 190). Second, life can be meaningful in a subjective sense, meaning that an individual’s life has meaning, that is, a consuming purpose which makes that individual excited to go on living.

* * * * *

Many find life meaningless viewed sub specie aeternitatis, that is, from an eternal or cosmic perspective. Seachris (2013) writes that there are four components to this perspective. (1) Temporal component: “From the cosmic perspective, humanity exists against the backdrop of temporal vastness; human history is but a momentary flicker" and in a relatively brief period of time “humanity and all its traces [will] have vanished” (p. 608). (2) Spatial component: “In this viewpoint, one takes an expansive perspective on the entire cosmos, and one finds a tiny little earth populated by, among others, the human race. The accompanying pessimistic worry is: how could something so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things really matter all that much?” (p. 609). (3) Modal component: “human existence...appears to be radically contingent. There is no deep reason for why you or I exist.” As Stephen J. Gould wrote: “We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because comets struck the earth and wiped out dinosaurs, thereby giving mammals a chance not otherwise available” (p. 609). (4) Ontological-normative component: “Ultimate reality, on this view, is, at bottom, merely mindless, intentionless, purposeless, and valueless matter in motion. Value and normativity have no place in what is real on this view” (p. 610).

* * * * *

Given the above definitions, it follows that if God does not exist, then life very likely does not have an objective meaning. This realization causes many to feel that life is absurd and thus very possibly not worth living (Camus, p. 8). But this does not necessarily follow. Klemke (2008) believes that, even if life does not have an objective meaning, it can still have a subjective meaning. He writes: “I, for one, am glad that the universe has no meaning, for thereby is man all the more glorious. I willingly accept the fact that external meaning is non-existent (or if existent, certainly not apparent), for this leaves me free to forge my own meaning. The extent of my creativity and thereby my success in this undertaking depends partly on the richness of my own psyche” (p. 193).

Conversely, it does not necessarily follow that the existence of God would make life worth living. Put differently, even if life had an objective purpose, even if this purpose had the attributes of significance and permanence, we still might not find that life meaningful, worth living. To make this point, Crosby (1988) reminds us of the Euthyphro dilemma. He writes: “[I]t is at least conceivable that the gods could command something which we would not be able to recognize as good, in terms of our own experience or reflection. In such a case, it would not be good for us, in any meaningful sense of “good,” no matter how insistent the gods might be upon our accepting it as such. They might punish us terribly for violating or failing to respect their commands, but no amount of punishment in itself could convince us that the commands were good” (132).

Crosby suggests that many deem that life without an objective meaning is not worth living because they come from an anthropocentric culture, one which has held for millennia that the universe was created for humans. By contrast,he writes, a Buddhist culture would not have been shocked by the revelations of Copernicus or Darwin (p. 128). Consequently, Crosby suggests that we should challenge this long-held assumption and try to find comfort in believe that we exist, not as the center of the world, but with “a democracy of creatures” (pp. 129-130).

* * * * *

Camus, A. (1991). The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. (J. O’Brien, Trans.) New York: Vintage Books.

Crosby, D.A. (1988). The specter of the absurd: Sources and criticisms of modern nihilism. New York: State University of New York Press.

Edwards, P. (2008). The meaning and value of life. In. E.D. Klemke & S.M. Cahn (Eds.), The Meaning of Life: A Reader (pp. 114-133). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Klemke, E.D. (2008). Living without appeal: An affirmative philosophy of life. In. E.D. Klemke & S.M. Cahn (Eds.), The Meaning of Life: A Reader (pp. 184-195). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Seachris, J.W. (2013). The sub specie aeternitatis perspective and normative evaluations of life's meaningfulness: A closer look. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 16(3), 605-620.

Taylor, R. (2000). Good and Evil. Amherst: Prometheus Books.

The Gun Debate Is Not About Disarming 'Good Guys'

2013-01-03T15:21:00.001-05:00

Since the Newtownshooting, many individuals, liberal and otherwise, have argued for stricter gun laws. These individuals, at least the ones of whom I’m aware, have not argued that we need to ban all guns. Rather they’ve argued that we need more sensible gun laws, laws that, for example, make it more difficult for criminals and schizophrenics to obtain firearms.

But instead of dealing with these specific arguments, many self-proclaimed gun-rights advocates have been attacking straw-man arguments. In a recent article in The American Conservative, for example, Rand Paul’s media director, Jack Hunter, writes that “[t]he calls for increased gun control after the Newtownshooting” are “demonstrably wrongheaded—and potentially deadly” and that they best way to prevent future Newtowns is to make sure that good guys have access to guns. As evidence for this, he adduces several armed citizens who have stopped gunmen[1] and then concludes:

“Banning knives would not have stopped Jack the Ripper. Banning guns will not stop the crazed few who seek to open fire on the public.

“To the degree that liberals get their way on gun control, there will be more deaths of innocents. I’m not saying that liberals would want the potential murders implied in the examples here to occur. But what they want legislatively would only—inevitably—lead to more killing.”[2]

But again, the liberals I’ve read and listened to over the past few weeks haven’t been arguing that we need to ban all guns. Most liberals seem to recognize that, even if desirable, that’s simply not going to happen, and they have consequently focused their energy on advocating specific, restrained measures, namely:

1) Banning military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.[3], [4], [5]

2) Requiring everyone to pass a criminal and mental health background check before being able to purchase firearms.

3) Making gun trafficking a felony.[6]

4) Abolishing the Tiahart Amendments, which, among things, largely prohibit states, cities, and local police forces from accessing the ATF’s gun-tracing database.[7], [8]

Liberals after Newtownhave been focusing on measures like these, not measures that would prevent “good guys” from having guns. If people like Jack Hunter would like to explain why these measures are so bad, then I’d be happy to listen. But they refuse to do this for the simple reason that these measures seem like no-brainers and have consequently gained the support of most Americans.[9]

Which is why extremists like Jack Hunter won’t debate these proposals. They know they’ll lose.

* * * * *

Notes

[1]Not all his examples, I should point out, are valid ones. For instance, he writes: “On December 11 a man opened fire in a mall in Portland, Oregon—that is, until he was confronted by another armed man who had a carry-and-conceal weapon. The gunman who had fired on shoppers then took his own life.” Once you research what actually happened in the Clackamas Town Center, however, you realize that it’s not at all clear that the concealed-carry holder caused the gunman to kill himself. After the shooting started, 22-year-old Nick Meli pulled out his own weapon, but he refrained from firing, afraid that he might hit a bystander. Meli believes that the killer saw him and that he didn’t fire any more shoots, save the one that ended his life, after their encounter (Mike Benner, “Clackamas mall shooter faced man with concealed weapons,” KGW, December 17, 2012). Police were on the scene within a minute after the shooting began and believe that their presence might have impelled the killer to shoot himself (Mariano Castillo and Holly Yan, “Details, but no answers, in Oregon mall shooting,” CNN, December 13, 2012). From everything we know, it’s not clear why the killer shot himself (Anna Griffin, “Clackamas Town Center shooting: 22 minutes of chaos and terror as gunman meanders through the mall,” The Oregonian, December 15, 2012.)

[2]“How Gun Control Kills,” December 27, 2012.

[3] The Brady Campaign offers what seems like a pretty reasonable definition of assault weapons (“Federal Gun Laws: Assault-Style Weapons: Frequently Asked Questions.”)

[4] In response to those who claim that the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban didn’t work, I would just point out, first, that the ban contained numerous loopholes that greatly hindered it. “Assault weapons and large-capacity magazines manufactured before 1994 were exempted from the ban, meaning that more than 1.5 million assault weapons remained in circulation. In addition, the country’s stock of large-capacity magazines actually continued to grow after the ban, because it remained legal to import them as long as they had been made before the ban.” The law also inadequately spelled out what constituted an assault weapon, allowing “the industry to continue manufacturing guns similar to those that had been banned.” Second, a 2004 study financed by the Justice Department concluded that the ban did lead to a small reduction in gun crime (Michael Luo and Michael Cooper, “Lessons in Politics and Fine Print in Assault Weapons Ban of ’90s,” New York Times, December 19, 2012).

[5] As proof that assault weapons can have defensive purposes, some have pointed out that during the LA Riots some Korean store owners used semi-automatic rifles to defend their grocery stores. Three points here. First, it’s not clear that assault weapons were used. In the following news clip, for instance, one individual (presumably a store owner or friend) can be seen with a more traditional hunting rifle and another with a handgun: “Korean store owners defend their businesses during the 1992 LA riots.” Second, it seems clear that assault weapons were not needed for defense. Evidently just displaying traditional rifles and handguns and firing them into the air was enough to deter looters (Ashley Dunn, “Looters, Mercants Put Koreatown Under the Gun: Violence: Lacking confidence in the police, employees and others armed themselves to protect mini-mall,” Los Angeles Times, May 2, 1992). Third, even if assault weapons were in fact needed to keep back looters, it doesn’t follow that the benefits of allowing such weapons to remain legal outweigh the costs. As recent events have made clear, assault weapons allow deranged gunmen to murder large numbers of individuals in a relatively short period of time. Making it harder for would-be killers to acquire such weapons would most certainly save lives, and achieving this goal makes a ban worthwhile, even if every few decades or so such a weapon might be used to keep a group of looters at bay.

[6]Michael Bloomberg, “6 ways to stop gun madness,” USA Today, December 19, 2012. See also Demand A Plan to End Gun Violence.

[7] “Tiahart Amendment Facts,” ProtectPolice.org.

[8] Another action that seems sensible to me: creating a nationwide database to track gun and ammunition purchases (Marc Parrish, “How Big Data Can Solve America’s Gun Problem,” The Atlantic, December 27, 2012).

[9]“Poll: More see societal problems in Sandy Hook shooting,” Washington Post, December 20, 2012.

Some Things to Consider Before Buying a Gun (An Open Letter to a Friend)

2013-01-02T00:57:00.000-05:00

So I hear you’re arming up.

I have to admit that I’m surprised. You’ve always struck me as something of a hippy. And I mean that as a compliment. I’ve always seen you as a Jesus-loving, pot-smoking (yes, I know you’ve been trying to stop) type of guy. Someone who isn’t above retweeting cute kitten photos. Again, I mean that as a compliment.

I understand that the Newtowntragedy has you rattled. I’m rattled, too. And I understand your reason for wanting to buy a gun and apply for a concealed-carry permit. I just hope you fully understand what you’re getting yourself into.

Along with its potential benefits, owning a gun comes with many risks. People with guns sometimes have accidents. Sometimes they mistakenly shoot themselves or others. According to the Center for Disease Control, there are around 15,000 accidental firearm injuries each year, around 600 accidental deaths.[1]

When you own a gun you also run the risk of your gun getting into the hands of someone who shouldn’t have it, for example, a child or criminal. Statistically speaking, when you purchase a gun you also increase your chances of committing suicide.[2] I know that your struggles with depression aren’t all that frequent, but at the same time I worry that during your darker moments it might not be good having a handgun so available.[3]

Of course, guns can also save lives. That’s why you want one. I get it. But I think you should know that the odds of this happening are infinitesimally small. You’re just not likely to ever find yourself confronted with a deranged gunman. This country is not nearly as violent as the media would have us believe. Senseless violence sometimes occurs, but the violent crime rate is actually at a 40-year low. The murder rate is lower than it’s been at any point since 1963.[4]

And even if you found yourself in the middle of a Newtown- or Aurora-like situation, it’s highly unlikely that you’d be able to save any lives. You just don’t have the necessary training, experience, and ability. Imagine that you’d been in that Auroramovie theater last year: it’s dark, smoke bombs going off, a gunman in full body armor firing an assault rifle. You really think you would have had any chance of taking him out?[5]

On those rare occasions when armed citizens have taken out gunmen, they’ve usually been individuals with sufficient combat training, usually off-duty police officers or retired soldiers.[6] According to Dr. Stephen Hargarten, a gun violence expert at the Medical College of Wisconsin, armed civilians in such situations are more likely than not to inadvertently “increase the bloodshed.” Even those individuals with the necessary training often fail to respond properly. Take the New Yorkpolice officers who, while trying to take out a gunman near the Empire State Building last year, inadvertently shot nine bystanders.”[7]

None of which is to say that a gun might not end up saving your life. It might. I’m just not sure that the potential benefits of having a gun outweigh the potential costs.[8] In addition to the problems I’ve described above, having a gun has a way of changing one’s mindset. As Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, puts it, “If all you have is a gun, everything looks like a target.”[9] Having that piece of cold metal strapped to your ankle can engender an inflated sense of fear and paranoia.[10] It can cause you to lose trust in others. (In this beautiful yet tragic world, we need to do all we can to increase, not decrease, our trust in others.) It can cause you to make foolish decisions that you wouldn’t have otherwise made. Indeed studies show that most purported defensive guns uses occur in “escalating arguments and are both socially undesirable and illegal.”[11]

Anyway, I’m done. I’ve given you my two cents. For the record, I think that you, and other mentally-stable, law-abiding individuals, have the right to own guns. I just ask that you carefully think through this issue before proceeding. And if you decide to go ahead with it I ask that you get the proper training, that you keep your gun secure, and that you always follow the four basic rules of gun safety as though your life and the lives of those around you depend on it, for they very well might.[12]

* * * * *

[1] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Injury Prevention and Control: Data and Statistics.”

[2] Linda L. Dahlberg, Robin M. Ikeda, Marcie-jo Kresnow, “Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study,” American Journal of Epidemiology, 160 (10), 2004.

[3] Over 19,000 Americans killed themselves with a firearm in 2010 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Injury Prevention and Control: Data and Statistics”).

[4] Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, “State and national crime estimates by year(s).” See also Andrew Mach, “FBI: Violent crime rates in the US drop, approach historic lows,” NBC News, June 11, 2012.

[5] Dave Weigel, "Could a Brave Citizen With a ConcealedWeapon Have Prevented the AuroraShootings?" Slate, July 20, 2012; "Could an Armed Person Have Stoppedthe Aurora Shooting? A Second Opinion," Slate, July 20, 2012.

[6] Forrest Wickman, “Do Armed Citizens Stop Mass Shootings?” Slate, December 18, 2012.

[7] Mark Follman, “More Guns, More Mass Shootings—Coincidence?” Mother Jones, December 15, 2012.

[8] Some will tell you that citizens use firearms in self-defense over two million times a year, but as far as I can tell this claim has been entirely debunked. See David Frum, “Do Guns Make Us Safer?” CNN, July 30, 2012.

[9] Alan Jacobs, “A Christmas Thought About Guns,” The American Conservative, December 26, 2012.

[10] Alan Jacobs, “Guns, Risks, Safety,” The American Conservative, December 17, 2012.

[11] Harvard Injury Control Research Center, “Gun Threats and Self-Defense Gun Use.”

[12] From Jeff Cooper: Rule #1: All guns are always loaded. Rule #2: Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy. Rule #3: Keep your finger off the trigger till your sights are on the target. Rule #4: Identify your target and what is behind it.

Some Thoughts on the Newtown Shooting and Gun Control

2012-12-21T20:15:00.000-05:00

Our 300 Million Guns Aren’t Making Us Safer

Ezra Klein points out that “[m]ore guns tend to mean more homicide.” The Harvard Injury Control Research Center, he writes, has “assessed the literature on guns and homicide and found that there’s substantial evidence that indicates more guns means more murders. This holds true whether you’re looking at different countries or different states” (“Twelve facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States,” Washington Post, December 14, 2012).

Lynn Stuart Parramore: “Consider a 2004 study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Researchers sought to determine whether having a firearm increases the risk of a violent death in the home and whether risk varies by storage practice, type of gun, or the number of guns in the home. Among the findings:

“People with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home.

“They were also at greater risk of dying from a firearm homicide (risk varied by age and whether the person was living with others at the time of death).

“The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home.

“People with guns in the home were more likely to have died from suicide committed with a firearm than from suicide using a different method.

“Bottom line: Researchers found that no matter what kind of storage was used, no matter the type or number of guns, having a gun in the home increased the risk of firearms homicide and suicide” (“Does Having a Gun in the Home Put Your Life at Risk,” AlterNet, December 17, 2012).

Smart Gun Control Measures Do Work

The New York Times: “In 1996, a ‘pathetic social misfit,’ as a judge described the lone gunman, killed 35 people [in Port Arthur, Australia] with a spray of bullets from semiautomatic weapons. Within weeks, the Australian government was working on gun reform laws that banned assault weapons and shotguns, tightened licensing and financed gun amnesty and buyback programs.

“At the time, the prime minister, John Howard, said, “We do not want the American disease imported into Australia.’ The laws have worked. The American Journal of Law and Economics reported in 2010 that firearm homicides in Australia dropped 59 percent between 1995 and 2006. In the 18 years before the 1996 laws, there were 13 gun massacres resulting in 102 deaths, according to Harvard researchers, with none in that category since.

“Similarly, after 16 children and their teacher were killed by a gunman in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, the British government banned all private ownership of automatic weapons and virtually all handguns. Those changes gave Britain some of the toughest gun control laws in the developed world on top of already strict rules. Hours of exhaustive paperwork are required if anyone wants to own even a shotgun or rifle for hunting. The result has been a decline in murders involving firearms.

“In Japan, which has very strict laws, only 11 people killed with guns in 2008, compared with 12,000 deaths by firearms that year in the United States—a huge disparity even accounting for the difference in population” (“In Other Countries, Laws Are Strict and Work,” December 17, 2012).

Ezra Klein points out that “[s]tates with stricter gun control laws have fewer deaths from gun-related violence”: “Last year, economist Richard Florida dove deep into the correlations between gun deaths and other kinds of social indicators. Some of what he found was, perhaps, unexpected: Higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness were not correlated with more deaths from gun violence. But one thing he found was, perhaps, perfectly predictable: States with tighter gun control laws appear to have fewer gun-related deaths. The disclaimer here is that correlation is not causation. But correlations can be suggestive” (“Twelve facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States,” Washington Post, December 14, 2012).

One Gun Control Measure That Would Make Us Safer: Banning Assault Weapons and High-Capacity Magazines

There really isn’t a legitimate civilian use for military-style assault weapons (for instance, the rifles used by the Sandy Hook and Aurora killers). Nor is there a legitimate civilian use for high-capacity magazines, which enable such killers to inflict far more damage than if they were forced to reload more often (William Saletan, “The Volume Killers,” Slate, December 18, 2012). Robert Wright writes: “Imagine the following world, which it’s within our power to create: It’s illegal to sell or possess a firearm—rifle or pistol—that can hold more than six bullets. And it’s illegal to sell or possess a firearm with a detachable magazine. In other words, once a shooter exhausted the six rounds, he couldn't just snap in another six-round magazine; he’d have to put six more bullets in the gun one by one.

“In this world, a significant number of those 20 Newtown first graders would almost certainly be alive. Lanza reportedly fired six bullets from his AR-15 just to get inside the locked school. So, in the alternative universe I just described, he would then have to more or less exhaust one of his two pistols to kill the principal and school psychologist he encountered after entering. At that point, as he headed for the classrooms, he’d have six more rapid-fire bullets left, after which he’d have to reload his guns bullet by bullet.

“Is there a single legitimate use of firearms that requires more than six rounds of continuous fire? Certainly not hunting. And not any sort of self-defense that’s realistically imaginable, unless you’ve recently antagonized a Mexican drug cartel” (“A Gun Control Law That Would Actually Work,” The Atlantic, December 17, 2012).

Another Gun Control Measures Would Make Us Safer: Requiring Mandatory Background Checks

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg points out that “nearly half of all gun sales in the U.S. are conducted without a background check. Criminals, the mentally ill, minors and domestic abusers are all prohibited from purchasing guns, but they all can do so as easily as attending a gun show or going online. The check takes only a few seconds, and it doesn’t infringe on anyone’s rights. That’s why polls show that more than 80% of gun owners support a change in law to require background checks for all gun sales.

“Fixing the background check system also requires the federal government to compel states to submit all necessary records on felons, domestic abusers, the seriously mentally ill and others to the background check system. Right now, far too many records are not in the system, which allows dangerous people—including the Virginia Tech shooter—to pass the background check and buy guns” (“Michael Bloomberg: 6 ways to stop gun madness,” USA Today, December 19, 2012).

Even Most NRA Members Support Many Sensible Gun Control Measures

Most NRA members, for instance, support closing the gun-show loophole. Most NRA members support prohibiting people on the terror watch list from purchasing firearms (Yes, it’s legal for people on the terror watch list to buy firearms, and the NRA supports this “right” of theirs.) Also contrary to the organization’s leaders, most NRA members think people should be required to report lost or stolen guns. And most NRA members support Mayor Bloomberg's plan to update the background check system (Cliff Schecter, “5 Issues that Divide Gun Owners and NRA Leadership,”AlterNet, July 22, 2012).

The 2nd Amendment Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

Robert Parry: “Indeed, when the Second Amendment was passed in the First Congress as part of the Bill of Rights, firearms were single-shot mechanisms that took time to load and reload. It was also clear that Madison and the others viewed the “right to bear arms” in the context of “a well-regulated militia” to defend communities from massacres, not as a means to enable such massacres…

“The intent of the Second Amendment was clarified during the Second Congress when the U.S. government enacted the Militia Acts, which mandated that all white males of military age obtain a musket, shot and other equipment for service in militias.

“The idea was to enable the young country to resist aggression from European powers, to confront Native American tribes on the frontier and to put down internal rebellions, including slave revolts. There was nothing particularly idealistic in this provision; the goal was the “security” of the young nation…

“But does anyone really believe that Madison and like-minded Framers would have stood by and let deranged killers mow down civilians, including children, by using guns vastly more lethal than any that existed in the Revolutionary era? If someone had wielded a single-shot musket or pistol in 1791, the person might get off one volley but would then have to reload. No one had repeat-firing revolvers, let alone assault rifles with large magazines of bullets” (“How the Right Has Twisted the 2nd Amendment,” AlterNet, December 15, 2012).

* * * * *

UPDATE

After reading the study cited by Parramore, I feel the need to point out that things are more nuanced then she implies. It’s true that those who have a firearm in their home are more likely than those without a firearm of being murdered. As Linda Dahlberg, et al. concluded in their study, “Results show that regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.” However, it’s important to keep in mind that the study merely showed a correlation, not a causal relationship, between owning a firearm and being murdered. As the authors conceded: “it is possible that the association between a gun in the home and risk of a violent death may be related to other factors that we were unable to control for in our analysis. For instance, with homicide, the association may be related to certain neighborhood characteristics or the decedent’s previous involvement in other violent or illegal behaviors. Persons living in high-crime neighborhoods or involved in illegal behaviors may acquire a gun for protection. The risk comes not necessarily from the presence of the gun in the house but from these types of environmental factors and exposures” (Linda L. Dahlberg, Robin M. Ikeda, and Marcie-jo Kresnow, "Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study," American Journal of Epidemiology, 2004, 160 (10): 929-936.

If the 'pro-life' movement really cared about life...

2012-11-26T19:38:00.000-05:00

The “pro-life” movement has become a joke. I simply can’t take it seriously. Case in point: Liberty University is again taking the Obama Administration to Court. Fox News reports:

“The school is challenging the constitutionality of the part of [the Affordable Care Act] that mandates employers provide insurance and whether forcing insurers to pay for birth control is unconstitutional under the First Amendment’s free exercise of religion clause.”[1]

If abortion is murder, as the Libertycrowd believes, then it should be doing all it can to support the administration’s requirement that insurers pay for birth control. Simply put, when women have free access to birth control, they have fewer unwanted pregnancies. And when women have fewer unwanted pregnancies, they have fewer abortions.

A recent study concluded that—quoting an AP story reprinted by none other than Fox News—“[f]ree birth control leads to fewer abortions.” The study tracked 9,000 St. Louis women who were offered free birth control. In what should have come as no surprise, these women had a significantly lower rate of unintended pregnancies than the general population. Teens in the study had especially low rates: “There were 6.3 births per 1,000 teenagers in the study. Compare that to a national rate of 34 per 1,000 teens in 2010.”[2]

The study further found that there were “substantially lower rates of abortion, when compared with women in the metro area and nationally: 4.4 to 7.5 abortions per 1,000 women in the study, compared with 13.4 to 17 abortions per 1,000 women overall in the St. Louisregion” and “almost 20 abortions per 1,000 women” nationally.

Sarah Kliff recently argued that better birth control methods—namely, intrauterine devices (IUDs)—are the most likely reason that the abortion rate has been falling. (Yes, the abortion rate has been falling.)[3]In the above study, women who used IUDs were 22 times less likely to have an unintended pregnancy than women using the pill. All of which led one of the study’s authors, Dr. Jeffery Peipert, to conclude that if women were given access to free IUDs the national abortion rate could very well drop by half.[4]

Which is why I can’t take so much of the “pro-life” crowd seriously. If they really cared about saving human lives, then they would take actions that would actually save human lives.

* * * * *

[1]“Supreme Court orders new look at Liberty University’s health care coverage,” November 26, 2012.

[2]Lauran Neergaard, “Study: Free birth control leads to few abortions,” Associated Press, October 5, 2012.

[3]“Surprise! The abortion rate just hit an all-time low,” Washington Post, November 23, 2012.

[4]Darshak Sanghavi, “Why Have Teen Pregnancy Rates Dropped?” Slate, July 31, 2012.

The Case for Boycotting Walmart

2012-11-24T00:24:00.000-05:00

1) Walmart does not take care of its workers.

According to IBISWorld, an independent market research company, the average Walmart worker makes $8.81 an hour.[1], [2] This is less than workers make at many competing companies. The average cashier at Costco, for example, makes $15.50 an hour.[3]

Because Walmart workers make so little, many of them cannot afford to buy health insurance. In 2009, just 52% of workers had employer-sponsored insurance. Given that Walmart has since increased premiums and eliminated insurance for part-timers, this number is undoubtedly much lower today.[4]

The company's low wages and inadequate benefits also affect non-employees. For instance, a 2007 study by the UC-Berkeley Labor Center concluded that its low wages drive down wages in competing retail stores.[5] Its low wages also have the end result of placing a heavy burden on taxpayers. Because they’re paid so little, a disproportionately large number of Walmart workers depend upon such government programs as Medicaid, food stamps, and subsidized housing.[6]

Many Walmart workers have in the past fought to improve their situation by organizing, only to be stymied time and again. Human Rights Watch, among others, has documented how Walmart has employed numerous tactics, some legal, some illegal, to deprive workers of this basic right.[7]

2) Walmart can afford to take care of its workers.

The Walton family is unbelievably wealthy, holding as much wealth as the bottom 41.5 percent of American families combined. Yes, you read that right: The Walton family holds as much wealth as the bottom 41.5 percent of Americans families, that is, 49 million families.[8]

Scholars at the Economic Policy Institute have shown that Walmart could easily increase worker pay while retaining its edge against competitors. Walmart currently has a profit margin of 3.57%. If it reduced its margin to its 1997 level (2.9%),it would still have a significantly higher margin than Costco (1.72%). If Walmart took this money and gave it to non-supervisory workers, each worker would receive an annual raise of 13 percent or $2,100.[9]

One study showed that if Walmart instead decided to charge higher prices in exchange for higher wages, consumers wouldn’t be greatly affected. If, for instance, Walmart bumped up worker wages to $12 an hour, the average consumer would pay an additional $0.46 per trip or $12.49 per year.[10]

3) Walmart, therefore, should take care of its workers.

Just elementary morality here.

4) Since Walmart refuses to take care of its workers, we must pressure it to do so.

And a boycott is probably the most effective way to do this.

* * * * *

Two Caveats: First, I feel the need to point out that this boycott isn’t intended to destroy Walmart. Rather, it’s intended to help Walmart workers and in so doing to make Walmart itself a better company.

Second, I don’t think the poorest Americans should feel guilty for shopping at Walmart. It’s true that Walmart has “Always Low Prices,” and people with limited means have to do what they have to do to get by. But I think that those of us who can afford to pay slightly more for, say, a second Blu-ray player, really should make an effort to shop elsewhere.

* * * * *

One Counterargument: The most common argument given by Walmart defenders is that Walmart’s low prices make up for its low wages. Instead of dealing with that argument here, let me refer you to Bernstein et al.’s “Tradeoffs Between Profits, Prices, and Wages.”

* * * * *

Notes

[1] Courtney Gross, “Is Wal-Mart Worse?” Gotham Gazette, February 14, 2011.

[2] The company’s CEO, by contrast, was paid a salary of $18 million last year (Anne D’Innocenzio, “Wal-Mart’s CEO paid $18.1 million in 2011,” Associated Press, April 16, 2012).

[3] The UC-Berekely Labor Center for Research and Education concluded in a 2004 study that “Wal-Mart workers in California earn on average 31 percent less than workers employed in large retail as a whole” (Arindrajit Dube and Ken Jacobs, “Hidden Costs of Wal-Mart Jobs: Use of Safety Net Programs by Wal-Mart Workers in California,” August 2, 2004). Gross, “Is Wal-Mart Worse?”

[4] Steven Greenhouse and Reed Abelson, “Wal-Mart Cuts Some Health Care Benefits,” The New York Times, October 20, 2011.

[5] Specifically, the study found that between 1992 and 2000 every additional Walmart store that opened in a given county caused overall retail wages to drop by 1.5 percent. “With an average of 50 Wal-Mart stores per state, the average wages for retail workers were 10 percent lower, and their job-based health coverage rate was 5 percentage points less than they would have been without Wal-Mart’s presence” (Arindrajit Dube, T. William Lester, and Barry Eidlin, “A Downward Push: The Impact of Wal-Mart Stores on Retail Wages and Benefits,” UC Berekely Center for Labor Research and Education, December 2007).

[6] Jordan Weissmann, “Who’s Really to Blame for the Wal-Mart Strikes? The American Consumer,” The Atlantic, November 22, 2012. A 2004 study concluded that each year Californians pay $86 million annually for public assistance programs being used by Walmart employees. “The families of Wal-Mart employees in California utilize an estimated 40 percent more in taxpayer funded health care [and “an estimated 38 percent more in other (non-health care) public assistance programs”] than the average for families of all large retailers” (Dube and Jacobs, “Hidden Costs of Wal-Mart Jobs: Use of Safety Net Programs by Wal-Mart Workers in California”).

[7] “Discounting Rights: Wal-Mart’s Violation of US Workers’ Right to Freedom of Association,” May 2007. See also Weissmann, “Who’s Really to Blame for the Wal-Mart Strikes? The American Consumer.”

[8] “Today the Walton family of Walmart own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of America,” PolitiFact.com, July 22, 2012; Josh Bivens, “Inequality, exhibit A: Walmart and the Wealth of American families,” The Economic Policy Institute Blog, July 17, 2012.

[9] Jared Bernstein, Josh Bivens, and Arindrajit Dube, “Tradeoffs Between Profits, Prices, and Wages,” Economic Policy Institute, June 14, 2006.

[10] Weissmann, “Who’s Really to Blame for the Wal-Mart Strikes? The American Consumer.”

Two Myths about Operation Pillar of Defense

2012-11-17T23:07:00.000-05:00

Myth #1: Hamas started the conflict.

This has been the narrative of much of the mainstream press. The New York Times, for example, stated earlier this week that Israel began dropping bombs in Gaza “after persistent Palestinian rocket fire.”[1]But, as Paul Pillar points out, “who appears to be retaliating against whom depends on when you start the clock.” Although it’s true that Palestinian militants often fire rockets into Israel, it’s also true that Israelregularly aggresses against those living in Gaza.[2]The blockade itself is a continuous act of aggression, one which continues to cause tremendous suffering among Palestinians.[3]

Pillar further points out that, while many media outlets have stated that the recent conflict began when Palestinian militants attacked IDF soldiers on November 8, these outlets have generally failed to mention that the soldiers were attacked after they, buttressed by four tanks and a bulldozer, invaded Gaza.[4]

Myth #2: Netanyahu just wants peace; he only ordered the assault on Gazato force Hamas to stop firing rockets into Israel.

If Netanyahu just wants peace, then it’s not clear why he ordered the assassination of Hamas military leader Ahmed al-Jabari on November 14. Jabari’s assassination, you’ll recall, triggered Hamas to declare that “the gates of hell” had been opened and to fire a flurry of rockets into Israel.[5]We now know that on the morning of his assassination Jabari received a cease-fire proposal from Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin. Baskin has for the past few years served as a liaison between Israel and Hamas and helped secure the release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011.[6]Baskin recently learned that Jabari was interested in establishing a long-term ceasefire with Israel, and so he drafted a proposal with Hamas’ Deputy Foreign Minister, Ghazi Hamad. Baskin believes that the proposal had a good chance of working, for, unlike previous proposals, this one “included both a mechanism for dealing with impending terror threats and a clear definition of breaches.” Israeli security officials were aware of the proposal, and yet Israel assassinated Jabari on the very morning he received it.[7]

If Netanyahu wants peace, then it’s also not clear why he doesn’t end the blockade. For a strong case can be made that the blockade is the cause of Palestinian terrorism. Just about any group that was daily subjected to the brutality and humiliation of the blockade would respond by trying to strike back at its oppressors. At the very least Netanyahu could ease the blockade—e.g., by allowing more exports—when Hamas reigns in extremist groups. Hamas has shown that it’s willing and able to reign in such groups, but Israel has given it few incentives to do so. By reversing this policy, Netanyahu could do much to protect Israelis.[8]

[1]Peter Hart, “When Does Israel/Palestine Violence Start?” FAIR, 11/15/12

[2] “The Symmetry and Asymmetry of Violence in Gaza,” The National Interest, 11/15/12

[3]UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs occupied Palestinian territory, “Easing the Blockade: Assessing the Humanitarian Impact on the Population of the Gaza Strip” [.pdf], March 2011.

[4]See also IMEU, “Timeline: Israel’s Latest Escalation in Gaza,”11/14/12.

[5]“Hamas says ‘gates of hell oepned’ as Israel kills military leader in Gaza,” The Guardian, 11/14/12

[6]“The Israeli academic who played a critical role in the Shalit deal,” Haaretz, 10/14/11.

[7]“Israel’s Shortsighted Assassination,” New York Times, 11/16/12.

[8]Daniel Byman, “Israel’s Gamble in Gaza,” Foreign Affairs, 11/15/12.

Why I’m Voting for Obama

2012-11-02T03:26:00.003-04:00

I’m not a fan of Barack Obama. With regards to foreign policy and civil liberties, his first term was in many ways a continuation of George W. Bush’s second term. He escalated the war in

Afghanistan

. He escalated drone attacks in

Pakistan

and

Yemen

. He tried to keep American troops in

Iraq

. He continued Bush’s policy of due-process-free indefinite detention. He did absolutely nothing for Palestinians. In sum, he largely governed like a sociopath, and if this were a just world he would be standing trial for war crimes.

But it’s not a just world, and Jill Stein doesn’t have a chance of winning. Our choice is between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. And as bad as Obama may be, I believe that Romney would be worse.

First, Mitt Romney’s foreign policy would certainly be more belligerent. Romney has sounded like a neocon throughout much of the campaign, and, although he’s toned it down for the general election, if we want to see how he would govern we need just look at his advisors. His inner circle, Rosa Brooks writes, “looks an awful lot like George W. Bush’s inner circle, mostly because they’re made up of the exact same guys,” people like John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Robert Kagan, Dan Senor, Eliot Cohen, and Eric Edelman. All of which means that a Romney presidency might very well mean war with Iran. It might mean a return to torture, extraordinary rendition, and CIA black sites, all of which Obama banned in 2009. A Romney presidency would certainly mean more money for the defense industry.

Second, Mitt Romney would drastically weaken the social safety net. Although he hasn’t released an actual budget, he’s made it clear that he’s committed to balancing the budget without raising taxes and without cutting Medicare, Social Security, or defense. As Ezra Klein points out, “To make Romney’s numbers add up, you have to assume that by the end of his presidency, Romney will have cut every federal program that’s not Medicare, Social Security or defense spending by 57 percent.” Which means that he would have to impose drastic cuts to programs that benefit the poor; we’re talking things like “Medicaid, food stamps, housing subsidies and job training.” Some estimates suggestthat “a Romney victory would deny health insurance to about 45 million [poor] people who would have coverage if he lost.”

Third, Romney’s policies would certainly be much more harmful to the environment. Obama hasn’t been great on environmental issues, but, as Brad Plummer recently reported, he “has taken a few modest steps to curb carbon emissions.” If we essentially continue these policies, we’re likely to see a decrease in carbon emissions by as much 16 percent by 2020. (Obama also invested quite a bit in clean energy in the stimulus.) Romney, by contrast, has made it clear that he would not do anything to reduce emissions.

Again, I wish we had a better choice. I wish Jill Stein were a viable candidate. But she’s not. The American public isn’t yet ready for someone like her. Which means that we have our work cut out for us. We need to continue working to educate people. But in the mean time, I’m voting for Barack Obama, whose policies will certainly harm less people than Mitt Romney’s.

Richard Beck on the Nature of Religious Belief: A Summary

2012-09-25T14:30:00.001-04:00

Introduction

Experimental psychologist Richard Beck has spent much of his career showing that Sigmund Freud’s take on religion was partially, but just partially, correct. To be more specific, Beck has shown that not everyone who embraces religion does so in a subconscious attempt to stave off existential terror. Although most believers might fall under this category, he writes that many believe for non-defensive reasons; that is, many believers “fully recognize [their] existential situation” and “actively refuse to believe as a means to repress existential terror.”[1]

Beck’s thesis is important, and I think believers and skeptics alike would do well to understand it. Many believers avoid some of the most important findings of psychology and consequently fail to understand themselves as they should. The end result is often faith that is unreflective and even harmful. Many skeptics, on the other hand, err too far in the other direction, condemning all religious belief as regressive and destructive and in so doing failing to understand the beneficial, perhaps indispensible, role that religion plays for many.

Defensive Believers

Beck points out that religious belief is uniquely suited to mitigate existential fear. That is to say, religious belief is especially effective at staving off the terror that results from realizing that there might not be a transcendent meaning to life and that we might not have incorporeal souls which survive death. Religion assures us that, “[d]espite appearances, life is inherently meaningful. Meaning and significance is granted by God and [our] particular existence is part of a Providential plan and design.” And religion assures us that death is not really the end, that “[t]here will be a blissful and eternal afterlife.”[2]

Defensive believers—that is, those who believe primarily to mitigate such fear—“tend to be strongly convicted that they are ‘right’ and that those who disagree with them are ‘wrong.’”[3] This follows because, in order to mitigate existential fear, one needs a belief that is airtight, that is capable of providing assurance. A belief that leaves room for doubt, that acknowledges, for example, that there might not be an afterlife, isn’t going to very effectively repress such concerns. Defensive believers also tend to “assume a personal sense of cosmic ‘specialness,’”[4] seeing themselves as “protected, unusually blessed, and as having access to special insight or knowledge.” Again, this follows because defensive believers believe primarily to mitigate existential fear, and believing that your god is looking out for you, answering your prayers, etc., offers further assurance that God is control and that your life has meaning.[5]

As proof that many embrace faith for primarily defensive reasons, Beck appeals to a number of psychological studies which confirm what terror management theorists refer to as the mortality salience hypothesis. Terror management theorists hold that people primarily adopt worldviews, both religious and secular, to mitigate their fear of death, perhaps the greatest existential fear. So the mortality salience hypothesis contends that, if terror management theory is true, “then asking people to think about their own mortality…should increase the need for the protection provided” by their worldviews.[6] Study after study has borne out this hypothesis. One study found that “[p]eople who believe in an afterlife become more confident in its existence after being reminded of death.” Another study found that people who believe in God become more confident in the existence of supernatural beings after being reminded of death. Still other studies found that religious people increase their “sense of disconnection from the natural world” and their belief in human souls after death reminders.[7]

Especially relevant to Beck’s purposes is a 1990 study by Jeff Greenberg et al. In order to understand the findings of this study, it’s important to understand that, because worldviews are “humanly created concepts for which there is no concrete proof, faith in them depends heavily on consensual validation. When others share one’s worldview, it implies that it is correct and valid; when others reject one’s worldview or hold alternative beliefs, it implies that one’s worldview might be wrong. Consensual validation of religious beliefs from others may be especially important because religious beliefs tend to run counter to direct experience. Gods and spirits are, by their nature, generally invisible and always ineffable. Religious faith involves accepting and attaching great value to things that can neither be seen nor verified directly.”[8]

Greenberg et al. reasoned as follows: if it’s true that (1) we hold worldviews to mitigate our fear of death and (2) faith in our respective worldviews is bolstered when we're around those who share our worldviews and diminished when we're around those who don't, then it should follow that (3) being around those who share our worldviews will mitigate our fear of death and being around those who don’t share our worldviews will exacerbate our fear. They reasoned that it should also follow that (4) we will be more likely to respond positively to those who share our worldviews and negatively to those who don’t and (5) reminding us of our mortality will inflame our fear of death and consequently cause us to respond even more positively to those who share our worldviews and even more negatively to those who don’t.[9]

Greenberg et al. confirmed (5) by taking a group of Christian students and reminding half of them of death. They then asked all of the students to evaluate two questionnaires, one purportedly filled out by a Christian and the other by a Jew. It turned out that the students who hadn’t been reminded of death evaluated the Christian and Jewish writers equally, while those who had been reminded of death not only evaluated the Christian writer more highly but also denigrated the Jewish writer.[10]

Existential Believers

Existential believers believe in God but, unlike defensive believers, they are “willing to sit with or even embrace the confusions, doubts, and anxieties of belief. That is, existential believers possess faith but fully face the fact that faith is, well, faith. Faith is not knowledge or certainty. Kierkegaard characterized this type of faith as a ‘leap’ undertaken with ‘fear and trembling.’ This ‘trembling’ is simply the consequence of not allowing faith to drift into a form of knowledge. As such, doubt remains a constant companion along the faith journey. Given this faith configuration, where no guarantees are attached to faith, the existential predicament of death remains present and unrepressed.” Also unlike defensive believers, “existential believers claim no protective buffer (i.e., they expect the proverbial rain—or lightening—to fall equally on the just and unjust), special insight (i.e., they find the future opaque), or cosmic destiny (i.e., they accept that they must make choices without clear information, guidance, or guarantee of success/blessing). All this contributes to their religious angst.”[11]

In order to prove that existential believers in fact exist, Beck essentially recreated the Greenberg study, taking a group of Christian students and reminding half of them of death. But unlike Greenberg et al., Beck subjected the students to a series of surveys in an attempt to further divide them into existential and defensive believers.[12] Positing that those identified as existential believers did not believe in order to mitigate existential fear, Beck hypothesized that reminding them of death would not cause them to respond more positively to those who shared their beliefs and more negatively to those who didn’t.[13]

Like Greenberg et al., Beck had his students read and evaluate two essays, one advocating Buddhism, the other advocating Christianity. In the end, he found that the existential believers rated the authors of both essays as equally attractive, even when they had been reminded of death. Meanwhile, he found that defensive believers rated the Christian author as being more attractive, even when they had not been reminded of death.[14]

Existential Believers, cont’d

So, contrary to Freud, it seems clear that not everyone who believes in God does so in order to obtain existential comfort. Some individuals, Beck writes, “resist the retreat into religious illusions as well as the pull toward unbelief. They exist in the murky middle between belief and disbelief, between faith and unfaith.” Such individuals “resolutely sit with the wreckage and rubble of life, much like the biblical character of Job in the Old Testament, and call out to a God who doesn’t seem to care or answer.”[15]

“Why,” Beck asks, “live with and endure these dissonances and ambiguities? Why suffer in this way? Why not simply let go of faith?” Because, he answers, “this is the only way they can remain truthful to their lived experience. The pieces of life and the life of faith are not so easily fit together. There are gaps, there are missing pieces, and someone has taken away the puzzle box showing us the grand scheme of things…Life resists our attempts at putting the pieces together, intellectually and emotionally.” But for existential believers, Beck continues, “some piece of the puzzle is their experience of God, the Divine, and the transcendent. The movement toward disbelief is untenable for [such individuals] because it would involve ignoring these pieces within their life experience,” just as their life experiences prevent them from becoming dogmatists, “the too easy belief that life makes sense, that the pieces of the puzzle are easily fit together.” Consequently, the existential believer “lingers, perhaps for a lifetime, in this ambiguous location, holding onto pieces, God among them, that don’t quite fit together.”[16]

Beck also argues that existential faith can serve as an antidote to hatred and violence. As we’ve seen, defensive believers tend to react negatively to those who don’t share their beliefs. Outside the laboratory, these negative reactions can take several forms—derogating those who are different, trying to convert them, or “obliterating them entirely” and in so doing “demonstrate[ing] that one’s own cultural worldview is indeed superior after all. From this perspective, humankind’s long and sordid history of violent inhumanity to other humans is thus understood as (at least in part) the result of a fundamental inability to tolerate those who do not share our death-denying cultural constructions.”[17] Given all this, it seems to follow that existential believers are “better positioned to approach Others with warmth, curiosity, and a spirit of hospitality.” Moreover, by “exposing oneself to the suffering, pain, and ambiguities of life is that the exposure allows one both to see and stand in solidarity with those who are suffering.”[18], [19]

* * * * *

Notes

[1] Richard Beck, “The Function of Religious Belief: Defensive Versus Existential Religion,” Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 2004, Volume 23, Number 3.

[2] Beck, The Authenticity of Faith: The Varieties and Illusions of Religious Experience (Abilene Christian UniversityPress: Abilene, Texas, 2012), 64.

[3] Richard Beck, “Defensive versus Existential Religion: Is Religious Defensiveness Predictive of Worldview Defense?” Journal of Psychology and Theology, 2006, Volume 34, Number 2.

[4] Beck, “The Function of Religious Belief: Defensive Versus Existential Religion.”

[5] Beck, “Defensive versus Existential Religion: Is Religious Defensiveness Predictive of Worldview Defense?”

[6] Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology, ed. Jeff Greenberg, Sander L. Koole, and Tom Pyszczynski (New York: The Guilford Press, 2004), 20.

[7] Kenneth E. Vail, Zachary K. Rothschild, Dave R. Weise, Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski, and Jeff Greenberg, “A Terror Management Analysis of the Psychological Function of Religion,” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2010, Volume 14:84.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski, Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology, 18

[10] Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, Abram Rosenblatt, Mitchell Veeder, Shari Kirkland, and Deborah Lyon, “Evidence for terror management II: The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who threaten or bolster the cultural worldview,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, February 1990, Volume 58:2.

[11] Beck, “The Function of Religious Belief: Defensive Versus Existential Religion.”

[12] Beck, first, had his subjects take the Quest Scale, which seeks to measure (1) one’s “readiness to face existential questions without reducing their complexity,” (2) one’s “self-criticism and perception of religious doubts as positive,” and (3) one’s “openness to change” (i.e., one’s openness to changing his or her religious beliefs) [C. Daniel Batson and Patricia A. Schoenrade, “Measuring Religion as Quest: 2) Reliability Concerns,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1991, 30: 4.]. As the designers of the Quest Scale write, one who scores high on the survey is “honestly facing existential questions in their complexity, while at the same time resisting clear-cut, pat answers. An individual who approaches religion in this way recognizes that he or she does not know, and probably never will know, the final truth about such matters. Still, the questions are deemed important, and, however tentative and subject to change, answers are sought” [C. Daniel Batson and Patricia A. Schoenrade, “Measuring Religion as Quest: 1) Validity Concerns,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1991, 30: 4).] So, in other words, those with high Quest scores are existential believers and those with low scores are defensive believers.

Beck also had participants take a survey that he himself designed, the DTS (Defense Theology Scale), meant to determine how cosmically special one feels. Those who score high on the DTS feel that they’re the beneficiaries of “Special protection(e.g., ‘I believe God protects me from illness and misfortune,’ ‘I believe that fewer bad things will happen to me in this life because God is protecting me from harm’); Special Insight (e.g., ‘God gives me clear and obvious signs to communicate His will to me,’ ‘When making a choice or tough decision, God gives me clear answers and direction’); Divine Solicitousness (‘Nothing is too small, like finding my lost keys, to pray to God about,’ ‘If you have deep faith and pure motives God will grant even your smallest requests’); Special Destiny(‘God has a very specific plan for my life that I must search for and find,’ ‘God has a destiny for me to find and fulfill’), and Denial of Randomness (‘Every event around us is a sign of God’s larger plans and purposes,’ ‘God controls every event around us, down to the smallest details’). In short, an individual with a high score on the DTS would feel ‘special’ in the sense of: being protected from harm or illness; being in direct communication with God; believing that God is especially solicitous of the individual’s requests or that God has a destiny planned for him or her; and that the small events of life are filled with clear purpose and meaning” [“Defensive versus Existential Religion: Is Religious Defensiveness Predictive of Worldview Defense?”]. So, in other words, those with high DTS scores are defensive believers and those with low scores are existential believers.

[13] Put differently, if it was true that these believers did not use their worldviews to mitigate existential fear, then, Beck reasoned, inflaming their fear of death would not cause them to attempt to bolster faith in their worldviews and thus cause them to respond more positively to those who shared their worldviews and more negatively to those who did not.

[14] Beck, “The Function of Religious Belief: Defensive Versus Existential Religion.”

[15] Beck, The Authenticity of Faith: The Varieties and Illusions of Religious Experience, 264.

[16] Ibid. 264-65.

[17] Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski, Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology, 18

[18] Beck, The Authenticity of Faith: The Varieties and Illusions of Religious Experience, 265.

[19] Which isn’t to say that defensive faith doesn’t engender anything positive. Beck lists some positive outcomes of defensive faith in “Defensive versus Existential Religion: Is Religious Defensiveness Predictive of Worldview Defense?”

Mitt Romney on Medicare: Facts and Fictions

2012-08-27T02:32:00.000-04:00

Mitt Romney:

“There’s only one president I know of in history that robbed Medicare, $716 billion to pay for a new risky program of his own that we call Obamacare” (PolitiFact).

The facts:

1) Under the ACA (Affordable Care Act), Medicare spending will continue to increase, only at a slower rate than it would have otherwise. “[B]efore the health law was passed, Medicare was expected to grow by 6.8 percent a year for 2010 through 2019. With the health law, that yearly growth rate is projected to be 5.6 percent during that same time frame, according to an analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation” (Kaiser Health News).

2) Thirty-five percent of these reductions come from the amount Medicare “reimburses hospitals and private health insurance companies.” “The health law changed how Medicare calculates what they get reimbursed for various services, slightly lowering their rates over time. Hospitals agreed to these cuts because they knew, at the same time, they would likely see an influx of paying patients with the Affordable Care Act’s insurance expansion” (WaPo) (The reason for this being “the law’s mandate for nearly all individuals to have insurance, which meant that providers and insurers would have millions of new paying patients and policyholders” [NY Times]).

3) Thirty percent of these reductions come from the amount “Medicare reimburses private, Medicare Advantage plans. That program allows seniors to join a private health insurance, with the federal government footing the bill. The whole idea of Medicare Advantage was to drive down the cost of health insurance for the elderly as private insurance companies competing for seniors’ business.” But that’s now what happened. “By 2010, the average Medicare Advantage per-patient cost was 117 percent of regular fee-for-service. The Affordable Care Act gives those private plans a haircut and tethers reimbursement levels to the quality of care administered, and patient satisfaction” (WaPo).

4) None of these reductions come from “the amount of benefits beneficiaries receive.” Moreover, the ACA adds some new benefits, including closing the ‘doughnut hole’ gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage, and new preventive services, such as an annual wellness visit with a physician” (Kaiser Health News).

5) Many analysts believe that reversing these reductions “would hasten the insolvency of Medicare by eight years—to 2016, the final year of the next presidential term, from 2024” (NY Times).

6) Additionally, reversing these reductions would “immediately add hundreds of dollars a year to out-of-pocket Medicare expenses for beneficiaries,” the reason being that “[b]eneficiaries, through their premiums and co-payments, share the cost of Medicare with the government.” So [i]f Medicare’s costs increase—for instance, by raising payments to health care providers—so, too, do beneficiaries’ contributions.” (Moreover, repealing the ACA “would eliminate expanded coverage of prescription drugs, free wellness care and preventive checkups.”) (NY Times)

7) The Ryan/Romney budget calls for the same $716 billion reduction. Romney/Ryan want to put this money “toward deficit reduction while Obama [wants to spend] it on health care for poor people.” Romney/Ryan argue that, because they’re using this reduction to cut the deficit, their plan would “make future cuts to Medicare less likely.

“But Romney/Ryan also add a trillion dollars to the defense budget. And they have trillions of dollars in tax cuts they haven’t explained how they’re going to pay for. So those decisions make future cuts to Medicare more likely. Meanwhile, Obama cuts defense spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, raises about $1.5 trillion in new taxes, and puts all that money into deficit reduction. So that makes future Medicare cuts less likely. So if the argument is that Romney/Ryan protect Medicare by putting the $770 billion in cuts towards deficit reduction, Obama protects Medicare by twice as much by putting the $1.5 trillion in new tax revenues towards deficit reduction. So far as the deficit is concerned, there’s no difference between a dollar from Medicare and a dollar from taxes” (WaPo).