Eccentric Eclectica

Freedom at Work and Libertarians

2009-11-11T19:42:54Z

Why are libertarians so afraid of governmental interference in personal freedoms but seemingly so blase about business or management interference in worker’s liberty?

Two recent essays and posts by Timothy B. Lee and at Reason magazine reminded me of this conundrum.

It seems obvious to me that a worker surrenders plenty of freedoms as soon as he or she enters the workplace. In some cases it is a surrender of political opinions in workplaces where having a different political point of view from your boss can get you fired.

But at a most basic level it is the routine of the workplace that is a loss of freedom. How many times have you gone into a meeting with a brilliant idea and been shot down by the boss for some reason? The decision wasn’t made by you - it was made by a bureaucrat in the home office who just happens to work at the same company that you do. How is that less of an infringement on your freedom than some bureaucrat in Washington D.C. telling you to pay more taxes or requiring you to pass a background check before you can purchase a gun?

For many people working in blue-collar jobs freedom is curtailed by the schedule, which determines when you can eat, when you can rest, when you can go to the bathroom. See Robin Hanson on borg at work, but not home

Robert Charles Wilson, in his most recent novel Julian Comstock, describes a future American society in which indentured servitude has returned after economic decline. In one conversation the landed gentry describe the justness of indenture by saying that people can only own their selves if they have the right to sell themselves. If someone has the right to inherit the estate of their parents then they should also inherit the debt or indenture.

I’m just as susceptible to the siren song of freedom as the next person but I see the limits on my freedom around me all the time, not just at the state capital or in the White House. We are all subject to limits on our freedom. The problem with libertarianism is that it sees only a single obstacle to freedom - the government.

Contingency and Political Positions

2009-11-11T19:30:36Z

I just finished rereading A Theory of Justice by John Rawls for a philosophy reading group. One of the themes I noticed is the attempt to deal with contingency in politics.

Rawls acknowledges that everyone approaches political decisions from their own point of view, with unique biases and ideas. The original position is designed to overcome these biases by acknowledging them and then rationally agreeing to make decisions while ignoring individual personal biases. For Rawls it is possible for people to use reason to overcome their prejudices. Once those prejudices are slaked then the real work of political justice can begin by the four-stage process of building just institutions based on the two principles of justice agreed upon behind the veil of ignorance.

A few days ago James Kwak at the Baseline Scenario wrote a post on whether hard working people deserve to make more money. Kwak acknowledges that contingency is as important to financial success as hard work. Sometimes people just get lucky and get very rich as a result. Is Bill Gates really work so much harder than any other software CEO that he deserves a financial result that is orders of magnitude greater than other CEOs?

Connecting Conservatism and Liberalism Through the Environment

2009-10-06T01:11:10Z

My recent trawls around the internet have brought up some interesting finds that seem to cross ideological lines. A week ago David Brooks fired off a column linking the recent recession to a decline in America’s financial values. Brooks decries the growth of debt and consumption as a falling away from our previous virtues of hard work and thrift. I put on my very skeptical hat whenever I hear someone talking about decline from a previous golden age, but I think that Brooks may have something.

Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally.

If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.

It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos — the righteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses that their groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of the larger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.

A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.

At the same time I’ve been following some of the depressing links David Pollard has been posting on environmental decline. Pollard and the people he links to approach the problem from a liberal perspective that is different from Brooks. Sharon Astyck starts off with a piece calling for us to dream up a new life for the future.

And other analyses are equally problematic. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that radical lifestyle changes are coming, whether we like them or not - whether they come from adapting to a deeply damaged climate or from addressing the crisis, whether they come from adapting to depletion or from enduring it, our lifestyle will not be the same for very long. And the danger of telling people that they can have all the things they want - a future for their children and an affluent present now - is that when they realize (and they are realizing right now) that this is not true, that there’s not enough money, or time or alternative energy to provide it, people will be very, very angry indeed. It is not pleasant to tell people hard truths. It is less pleasant to deal with people facing hard truths who believe they have been lied to. I believe we are seeing the early stages of the political unrest that will accompany this sense of being lied to, of having lost more than is being accounted for on both the left or the right, and I also believe quite strongly that unless a true and comprehensible story is offered, false ones will be taken up, and used as bludgeons….

It is a counter-intuitive, and thus difficult thought, that after a certain critical mass of affluence, better comes from less, not more. A better future for our children comes not from greater affluence, but less, and the preservation of resources for the future. A better life for us in the present involves fewer hours of work, and thus, more freedom - and fewer possessions and less affluence.

Astyck and Brooks are saying the same thing: we need to curb our baser impulses and live a thriftier life. One of them sees the problem as impending environmental doom the other as an economic and moral dissolution. Both of them reach the same conclusion that we need to rein in the profligate way of life we’ve become accustomed to during the past 40 years, especially in America. If there is any common ground between conservatives and liberals I think it will be built on this ground.

September 2009 Review

2009-10-01T04:49:14Z

A brief recap of things I wrote on during September 2009.

I started the month with two pieces in reaction to rereading Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard. The first on the difficulty of faith and the second on the stages of psychological and spiritual development.

Two articles on economics prompted some thoughts on the link between money and producerism and the rhetoric of consumerism and choice. Too often the latter becomes a substitute for public and political choice.

I cleared out an old entry to list my top 7 favorite scholars.

I mused on postmodernism and intellectual decline after reading Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan and discussing it with some fellow scholars.

Finally I wrapped up the month with reports on two recent events I attended: a talk by Dane Smith on investing in Minnesota students and a discussion by Harry Boyte on expertise and the knowledge wars.

Harry Boyte on Beyond the Knowledge Wars

2009-09-27T02:41:41Z

Harry Boyte, a senior fellow at the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota, spoke to the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum on the topic Beyond the Knowledge Wars. The event was held at the Hosmer Public Library in Minneapolis.

Boyte began by discussing the cult of the expert, the ultimate outgrowth of the philosophical positivism and objectivism that dominated intellectual culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Objectivity became the byword for intellectual investigation, demanding the removal of all self-interest or awareness from the research process. He summed this up by the advice he once heard given to a sociology Ph.D. - “never research a topic that you are interested in.” The fear of contamination by personal biases and interests pushed academia to extol research over outreach.

There have been many critics of this ethos of detachment, but so far their impact has been minimal. The administration of the University of Minnesota bought into the “ponzi scheme of becoming the third best public research university in the world.” The result was the closing of general college. Further back in time Boyte described some of the changes to the coop-extension program which was transformed away from community building into an expert service provider. Another current of resistance was the tradition of the land grant colleges.

The cult of the expert is expressed in politics as mobilizing - get out the vote, door knocking and canvassing, robo-calls. It is the dominant political formula of our time. Mobilization was originally the strategy of the left, but now all politicians use it. It begins by defining an enemy, frames the issue as good versus evil using a simplified script, and then distributes it to the masses with the subtext that the masses are being victimized. It is the Nader and the PIRG formula, and recently it has been the Rove, Gingrich, and Beck formula. The problem with this view is that it treats people as stereotypes, labels, or abstractions. How will the Southern white male respond to message X? What will the soccer mom think of this commercial?

The apotheosis of this form of politics was seen in 2008 when Mark Penn told Hillary Clinton that the only way she could win was by accusing Obama of being a terrorist sympathizer. Clinton stepped back from that edge. John McCain had a similar moment when he took the microphone from the woman in Minneapolis who accused Obama of being an Arab.

The antidote to this problem, according to Boyte, is an organizing paradigm, a viewpoint that acknowledges the “irreversible, plurality of the human condition.” It is a return to the original meaning of politics - how to deal with people different than the self.

Boyte offered some positive examples of resistance, such as the recent work by the Centers for Disease Control to promote community resilience, or the shift among development economists from only talking about government and market solutions to talking about community power. In St. Paul there is the Jane Addams School for Democracy connecting college students and immigrants and at the University of Minnesota William Doherty is working on a program for citizen professionals.

I basically agree with Mr. Boyte’s critique of the current situation, but the examples of hope seem very small bore compared to the scale of the challenge. I asked him about the reaction to his work among the business community and he basically said that he hadn’t presented the ideas to them. There were some local business alliances working on citizen business issues, such as the Citizens League and Target Corporation, but the overall scope was small.

The question I should have asked is how this message is going to be carried into the suburbs. I support his goals and the programs he works on, like the Jane Addams school and democracy promotion in Africa, but I see the center of the action as the suburbs for two reasons. Practically, the suburbs are where elections are currently won and lost in America. If we can’t convince suburbanites of this critique and the need for a more democratic form of education then change may never come. Ideologically, the problem is there are so few people in the suburbs who know what democracy. We, in the suburbs, are the ultimate ignorant consumers of government service. The attitude is “give me my driver’s license as rapidly as possible and then get out of my way, I need to go to work and pick up the kids for soccer practice.” There is very little citizenship in the suburbs, nor is there very much community.

The vision of a cocreative, relational, community-based future of education is enticing. I look forward to helping to build that future with Mr. Boyte.

Dane Smith on Smart Investments for Minnesota Students

2009-09-26T02:53:08Z

Dane Smith, the president of Growth and Justice a local Minnesota think-tank, spoke to the Twin Cities Chapter of the IEEE Education Society on Friday. The event was held at the Bakken Museum on Lake Calhoun.

Mr. Smith began by laying out the assumptions made by Growth and Justice when considering education policy in Minnesota. Like many think-tank presidents he describe the mission of Growth and Justice as being bipartisan, neither conservative nor liberal. He believes, and so does his organization, that government can be a force for good in the community. Government investment in human capital can have a beneficial effect on the future. Smith contrasted this with the conservative view of Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, and his oft-quoted message that government needs to be shrunk and then drowned in a bath tub.

To burnish his conservative credentials Smith said that Growth and Justice doesn’t oppose business reflexively, as some liberal groups do. Growth and Justice has worked with business groups to call for a reduction in corporate taxes in Minnesota and to support transportation investment.

Given this background Smith described the report Smart Investments in Minnesota Students which was completed at the end of 2008. The goal of the report was to “Develop a progressive policy agenda that defines successful education outcomes, identifies who should be accountable for those outcomes, and shows how to improve educational results for Minnesotans, from early childhood through post-secondary study.” To accomplish this the organization partnered with nationally recognized education scholars to find positive education interventions that are supported by sound research, with the ultimate hope of increasing higher education attainment fifty percent by 2020.

Currently education is the largest state budget expenditure, accounting for almost half of the state outlays. The bulk of that money goes to salaries and compensation. Growth and Justice estimates that $1 billion has been cut from the education budgets across the state over the last 10 years since Jesse Ventura became governor. A study by the Minnesota Department of Revenue supports Smith’s claim that the Minnesota tax system has become more regressive over the last decade. The lowest income decile pays an effective tax rate of 14.9% where the top decile only pays 10.3%. If the tax reforms of the past 10 years were rolled back then an additional $2 billion dollars in revenue would be gained. Half of that would lead to the $1 billion proposal for education.

The education spending proposed by Growth and Justice divides into three parts: the early years of infancy through kindergarden and elementary education, higher education preparation in middle and high school, and the launch into life assistance for students moving into post-secondary education. Approximately $400 million would be spent on early intervention, $255 million on school-age intervention, and the final $340 million on the transition to post-secondary education.

For early intervention they propose nurse home visit programs, expanding child care access, social skills training, quality half-day preschool, class size reduction, and intensive focus on early skills acquistion. School age reforms would be more rigorous coursework, intensive tutoring, in- and out-of-school social support like mentoring, college prep curriculums, more parental involvement, and increased student counseling. The transition to post-secondary education would mean an increase in counseling services, teen pregnancy and dropout prevention, and need-based aid for higher education.

I was particularly surprised to hear that Minnesota now has the third lowest number of counselors per high-school student in the nation. I guess things change a lot over time. Overall I thought Mr. Smith gave a reasonable and cogent presentation about the difficulties facing Minnesota education and some of the reasonable reforms that might improve things.

The biggest barrier to change remains Tim Pawlenty and his no-new-taxes pledge. The effective tax rate in Minnesota has declined over the past decade but the economic boom promised by the conservatives has failed to materialize. We know what doesn’t work, now we just need to have the courage to try something different.

The Persistence of Decline

2009-09-25T15:08:42Z

Last Saturday I met with some friends from the Minnesota Independent Scholar’s Forum to talk about Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan.

The book is a short, well-written introduction to the many ways people use history for purposes other than understanding or getting to the truth. It parallels Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson. Both MacMillan and Anderson discuss the often contentious moments when history becomes part of nation building and community definition. People use history for many purposes and some of those purposes can be dangerous. Nazi Germany, though a bit of a hackneyed example, shows the risks of reading too much into history.

Early in the discussion someone stated that current history scholarship was much worse than the history written in the late 19th century, back then the scholars actually took part in lengthy exchanges in the journals over ideas and questions of real merit. Today we’ve declined into a bunch of postmodern doubters who don’t believe in history or the truth. I bristled silently through the whole diatribe and let it pass. But the conversation continued and I started hearing some generic arguments about how bad current history education was compared to the great teaching of the past. This was too much, so I spoke up and pulled things back from the brink. We agreed that education was just as bad/good in the past as it is now. In the past there was too much memorizing of dull lists of dates, today there is too much feel good political correctness. (I could’ve argued the latter point about modern political correctness but I didn’t pursue it.) And then my adversary said he had been talking about scholarship not education and the conversation shifted away form the topic. Another in my long list of failed attempts to beat back the beast of declension narratives.

I don’t know why I’m so opposed to these just-so-stories about the decline of something, anything, from a golden age in the past. I felt the same way a few weeks ago when I was talking about poetry and technology. It seems like everywhere I go there is another tale of decline to listen to. I’m beginning to degenerate into quotations - “The past is a different country; they do things differently there.” - attributed to Lesley P. Hartley.

I’m beginning to wonder if there is a psychological temperament at work that makes some people see decline, others see progress, and even fewer see nothing but change. I believe that I’m in the latter camp, neither a believer in ridiculous improvement nor a complainer about fabulous loss. But there is a cost to being a moderate; Aristotle may have praised the golden mean but the only thing in the middle of the road are the unwritten books of authors who didn’t have a axe to grind. I sometimes feel as though my failure to choose between decline and progress is the surest route to the rhetorical doldrums.

History is filled with sudden and gradual changes. The problem I have, and I think it may shared by MacMillan, is when the changes of history are used to make an ideological point about the present in order to advance extrahistorical arguments. The complaints about past historical scholarship I mentioned earlier were made in the service of a larger, hidden complaint about postmodernism. I would rather say that the process of writing history has changed and leave it at that.

But the demand for judgment is never ending. Changes can’t just be acknowledged as changes; they must be evaluated. Was postmodernism a beneficial change for historical scholarship? Are we better or worse off today than we were 100 years ago? The answer to that question puts me into a predicament. I can see evidence for both sides. I’d much rather have the medicine of today than the medicine of the nineteenth century. On the other hand I’d much rather have the streetcar and railroad network of 1900 than the highway mess of 2000.

I’m reluctantly willing to abandon my equanimity and read the former as an example of progress, but reading the latter as a decline raises all sorts of doubts. Perhaps it is a purely political choice: liberals see progress, conservatives see decline.

But this conclusion sticks in my craw even more than the problem I began with. Is it really all just a matter of politics? This feels more like a surrender than an explanation.

My Top 7 Scholars

2009-09-24T21:15:24Z

My top 7 scholars:

Donald Davidson. Reading “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” is still one of the high points of my philosophic career. I was a pretty naive cognitive relativist in college when I read this essay and it convinced me then and still convinces me now that humans share much more intellectual and cognitive background than not.
Thomas Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions altered my perception of science and forced me to question my belief in a naive, progressivist narrative of scientific development. It also put a great word into wide circulation — “paradigm”.
Lorraine Daston. A relative newcomer to the list within the last 5 years. I still haven’t finished reading Objectivity by her and Peter Galison, but the short essay on the history of objectivity I read for my STS (science, technology, and society) class still echoes in my memory.
George Lakoff. I first encountered Lakoff through his work on moral metaphors in politics. There are a number of times when I think that he pushes his ideas further than they can be sustained, but the whole nation-as-a-nuclear-family idea is still powerful.
James P. Carse. I read Finite and Infinite Games in the final years of high school so I actually own an original hardcover edition. I’m still enamored of the idea that there are games played to win (finite) and games played to continue play (infinite). Breakfast at the Victory, his book of essays is also great.
Douglas Hofstadter. Godel, Escher, Bach made me want to be a cognitive science for a couple of years. I’m still interested in the field but took a turn toward the philosophical end of the topic.
Ian Hacking. I read The Taming of Chance a few years ago while working on a paper about the history of statistics in the nineteenth century. Hacking’s book was a central part of my thesis.

Inspired by a post I found while trawling through the MinneBar links. An old link but still worth considering.

Rhetoric of Markets - Consumers and Choice

2009-09-22T14:07:25Z

Another of my favorite economic-moral connections is choice. I recently talked with a friend about health care and choice and was treated to the full-on Republican explanation that as long as people have choices they will do fine. Choice becomes the most important value and making bad choices becomes the fault of the individual. The organizations and social structures that force a particular choice are glossed over or completely ignored. It all fits into the Randian argument of the economic overman.

Lawrence Glickman wrote an article about the defeat of consumer protection in the 1960s and 1970s at Baseline Scenario. He argues that the main conservative argument during the 1960s and 1970s was against government bureaucrats controlling the choices of consumers. Conservatives marched out the standard slippery slope arguments about how the creation of one agency to protect consumers would lead to catastrophe for all businesses. Government could never solve a problem because they were always captured by special interests. Glickman calls this the triumph of conservative populism.

I’m particularly interested in the next rhetorical move that Glickman describes.

The flip-side of bureaucratic arrogance and over-reach, according to the critics of the consumer movement, was the assumption of incompetence on the part of ordinary consumers. The very call for an agency on behalf of consumers was an expression of the bureaucrats’ lack of faith in the abilities of their countrymen and women. Ronald Reagan, the ex-Governor of California, criticized the consumerists–whom he compared to Orwell’s “Big Brother,” in several op-ed pieces and radio commentaries in 1975–for “promoting the notion that people are too dumb to buy a box of corn flakes without being cheated.” Reagan concluded that “professional consumerists are, in reality, elitists who think they know better than you do what’s good for you.” A group of Senators who opposed the CPA also rejected the view, which they claimed was implicit in CPA legislation, “that all consumers are mental midgets who must look to Washington to find out how to manage their personal lives from some bureaucratic consumer `representative’ who will have neither the time nor the knowledge to shop for and cook a decent supper.” According to the advertising executive, Arthur Fatt, the consumer movement sees “the typical consumer as a moron.” The celebration of the intelligence of ordinary Americans became a component of conservative anti-elitism and an element of its populism. If consumer advocates were snobs condescending toward those they claimed to protect, it was easy to dismiss their proposal as tainted since, as the business journalist Mary Bennett Peterson wrote, “those the Movement is designed to protect can actually wind up as its victims.”

In time such dismissals of liberal proposals became rote but in the 1970s this was a new line of criticism, one that successfully consolidated conservative ideology. As the CPA bill languished after its final defeat in 1978, conservative groups correctly foresaw the opportunity for what Jeffrey H. Joseph, of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called a political and legislative “bonanza.” And indeed the terms of that victory foreshadow the rhetorical (and electoral) victories of Reaganism and the concomitant delegitimation of liberalism. The Wall Street Journal did not exaggerate when it noted that the CPA bill was “killed by words” and those words continued to resonate long after the once-popular federal consumer protection idea faded from public memory.

The rhetoric ties into the “rugged individualist” cliches that have been a mainstay of American culture. I think promoting choice is valuable, but the consumerist view of choice described by the opponents of regulation is a stunted view of choice. In this view the only real choices made by people are choices made on the market.

The current health care debate plays out the same argument. There are some conservatives who argue that giving money to individuals so they can buy their own insurance will automagically reduce the cost of health care because consumer’s will be able to search for the best bargains on drugs, hospitals, doctors, and insurance. But the virtue of consumer choice is being oversold. The problem is that different people will need different amounts of health care during their lifetimes. Is there any just reason for a poor person to get less care than a rich person?

James Kwak at Baseline Scenario finishes the argument

People start out in different economic circumstances, and they suffer different fates in their lives. Without redistribution in some form, the ones who are poor and get sick will simply not be able to afford health care. Cashing out their employer health benefits and giving them “choice” won’t change that – especially if they don’t have employer health benefits to begin with. Yes, insurance can play a redistributive role on its own, but it only works if poor people can afford to buy insurance that will cover them against serious illness. And once they have that insurance, then the price signals so beloved of conservatives won’t function anymore. The problem is really very simple: for price signals to work, you have to be willing to let consumers run out of money, since no one can predict his future health care needs. And then they die.

So what really frustrates me about this whole “consumer choice” fraud is the premise it begins with. It starts out by framing health care as a problem of consumer incentives – health care is too cheap. This is a factually accurate framing that leads you to a dead end (unless you think people who underestimate their future sickness should die).

Money, Morality, and Ayn Rand

2009-09-16T01:05:36Z

Back in March there was a brief media flurry over a libertarian rant by Rick Santelli. I was struck at the time by the persistently moral language used by the right to describe economics and capitalism. Making money has become a moral obligation for the right and a reflection of the moral worth of a person. If you’re poor then you are a moral failure, if you are rich then you are an angel.

The language of morality pervades the discussion of economics and may be a cause of so much of the regular debate about economic policies that occurs. Economic decisions, for all the pontificating about rational man, are always moral decisions as much as they are rational decisions.

I recently heard an acquaintance talking about the difficulty of knowing whether the recent economic stimulus is working. Not even the putative experts can agree about whether it is working. A scientific controversy, like global warming or dark matter, is much easier to adjudicate because the moral dimension is reduced or non-existent.

At the New Republic Jonathan Chait reviewed two books on Ayn Rand and found her writings to be a major source for the moralistic tone of right-wing capitalists.

In these disparate comments we can see the outlines of a coherent view of society. It expresses its opposition to redistribution not in practical terms—that taking from the rich harms the economy—but in moral absolutes, that taking from the rich is wrong. It likewise glorifies selfishness as a virtue. It denies any basis, other than raw force, for using government to reduce economic inequality. It holds people completely responsible for their own success or failure, and thus concludes that when government helps the disadvantaged, it consequently punishes virtue and rewards sloth. And it indulges the hopeful prospect that the rich will revolt against their ill treatment by going on strike, simultaneously punishing the inferiors who have exploited them while teaching them the folly of their ways.

There is another way to describe this conservative idea. It is the ideology of Ayn Rand. Some, though not all, of the conservatives protesting against redistribution and conferring the highest moral prestige upon material success explicitly identify themselves as acolytes of Rand. (As Santelli later explained, “I know this may not sound very humanitarian, but at the end of the day I’m an Ayn Rand-er.”) Rand is everywhere in this right-wing mood. Her novels are enjoying a huge boost in sales. Popular conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have touted her vision as a prophetic analysis of the present crisis…..

Rand’s most enduring accomplishment was to infuse laissez-faire economics with the sort of moralistic passion that had once been found only on the left. Prior to Rand’s time, two theories undergirded economic conservatism. The first was Social Darwinism, the notion that the advancement of the human race, like other natural species, relied on the propagation of successful traits from one generation to the next, and that the free market served as the equivalent of natural selection, in which government interference would retard progress. The second was neoclassical economics, which, in its most simplistic form, described the marketplace as a perfectly self-correcting instrument. These two theories had in common a practical quality. They described a laissez-faire system that worked to the benefit of all, and warned that intervention would bring harmful consequences. But Rand, by contrast, argued for laissez-faire capitalism as an ethical system. She did believe that the rich pulled forward society for the benefit of one and all, but beyond that, she portrayed the act of taxing the rich to aid the poor as a moral offense.

Countless conservatives and libertarians have adopted this premise as an ideological foundation for the promotion of their own interests. They may believe the consequentialist arguments against redistribution—that Bill Clinton’s move to render the tax code slightly more progressive would induce economic calamity, or that George W. Bush’s making the tax code somewhat less progressive would usher in a boom; but the utter failure of those predictions to come to pass provoked no re-thinking whatever on the economic right. For it harbored a deeper belief in the immorality of redistribution, a righteous sense that the federal tax code and budget represent a form of organized looting aimed at society’s most virtuous—and this sense, which remains unshakeable, was owed in good measure to Ayn Rand.

I started a series on language and money last spring which I should return to. Once you start listening you realize that all of our talk about money is filled with moral judgments. My first post of the series talked about the difference between borrowing and leveraging, two terms for the same action but one used by the poor and the other by the rich. Some other terms that need pondering: angel investor, consume/invest, save/debt. Accounting also has a rich vocabulary for examination: asset, liability, appreciation, depreciation, balance sheet, double-entry, etc.

Stages of Moral Development

2009-09-15T00:35:56Z

In the spirit of answering my own questions from last weeks Kierkegaard discussion I noticed this interesting article on the cross-cultural similarities in moral development.

Researchers have been conducting studies of moral development across cultures. The summary by Bruce Bower at Science News suggests that there are universal themes to moral development across cultures. This contradicts the arguments of some scholars that Eastern and Western cultures have different values about the role of individuals, family, institutions, women, etc.

Children everywhere stew in the same pot of family conflict, with different cultural seasonings added for flavor, in Helwig’s view. When parents restrict behaviors that children regard as personal choices, such as what clothes to wear or which friends to hang out with, disputes inevitably arise. Parental restrictions on behavior that kids view as morally wrong or as a violation of conventional social rules are often accepted, even if grudgingly.

During the teen years, kids in Asian and Western cultures alike gravitate toward a broader class of moral imperatives, including rights to privacy, education and freedom of speech, Helwig and colleagues find in another new study published in the August Social Development. Adolescents also appeal to democratic notions, such as majority rule, to justify a preference for representative forms of government — even if they live in a communist or authoritarian society.

Helwig’s conclusions trigger skepticism from some psychologists, including Shinobu Kitayama of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who contend that moral reasoning fundamentally differs in Eastern and Western cultures. In Kitayama’s view, only individualistic Westerners put a premium on personal freedoms and rights. Asians steeped in responsibilities to family and society guard the moral integrity of their assigned roles and duties.

Kierkegaard proposed a three-stage theory of psychological development: aesthetic, ethical, and religious. As far as I know he was one of the earlier stage-based theorists of individual development. In the twentieth century the action switched to psychology and the big names of Piaget, Kohlberg, Turiel, and Gilligan. The studies summarized by Bower suggest that whatever type of development occurs during childhood it is similar across cultures.

I wonder how Kierkegaard’s highly individualistic explanation of faith would be received by Eastern cultures. To me Kierkegaard’s individual relation to God parallels a lot of the mystical experiences described in many religious traditions. It’s been a long time since I read about mysticism East or West, but one of the things I remember in the Western tradition is the role of paradox and individual experience.

If there is a God I’ve always been attracted to apophatic or negative theology as a route to belief or understanding. God cannot be described by human expressions, just as Abraham cannot be explained by Johannes de Silentio. We can only approach the divine asymptotically.

Difficulty of Faith

2009-09-13T20:40:38Z

I just finished rereading Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard. I read it for a philosophy course in college and returned to it at the urging of my book club.

One of the questions discussed during our meeting was what we got out of reading the book. I recognize the value of such a pragmatic criteria for book reading and use something similar more often than not. I’ve abandoned plenty of books because I didn’t think I’d get anything from them or felt like I’d learned enough from the pages I did read. Business books are especially prone to bloat and I drop them faster than a lot of other works.

The difficulty with using such a pragmatic criteria to evaluate Kierkegaard is my lack of religious faith. I waffle between describing myself as an atheist or an agnostic, but I’m certainly not a mainstream believer. Kierkegaard was a believer, but he wasn’t mainstream, in fact he disliked the church of his time more than I do the churches of today. So I think it’s hard to get a practical fact out of reading Fear and Trembling that I can apply to my everyday life.

The best I’ve been able to come up is the difficulty of faith. What makes Kierkegaard interesting, even to a person who doesn’t share his religious belief, is the psychological struggle he describes as being central to the action of faith. For Kierkegaard faith is hard, perhaps the hardest action a man can perform. I sympathize with that difficulty because the movement of faith is difficult for me as well.

I also like the idea that the movement of faith is an individual move, an action that can’t be done by, or at the urging, of a group of people. Ethics is something universal and shared by the group, but faith is absolute and particular. Part of the reason I distrust so many organized religions is the missing individual component. Sometimes faith seems to easy for a fundamentalist. Of course the personal experience may be different than the appearance of outward activity. It’s this distinction between inwardness and outwardness that is most valuable to me and hopefully of value to other believers.

How Long is a Day? How Heavy is a Kilogram? - In Praise of Metrology

2009-08-26T00:13:58Z

Every once in a while I notice a story about metrology, or the science of measurement, that reminds me how many of our concepts about the world are carefully constructed and contingent.

A few months ago I asked just how long ago the civil war was after hearing a story about a book stolen during the civil war and just recently returned. On the scale of a human life or generation the civil war is very recent history and yet America seems to have completely buried it in the past. Americans aren’t very good at remembering the past so the personal distance to the civil war is not really surprising.

Today I read a story about the kilogram at Chad Orzel’s blog. It seems that defining the kilogram in terms of a fundamental physical constant has proven to be much more difficult than for other constants like the length of the meter or the time of a second.

Attempts to redefine the kilogram have yet to yield anything, though. The problem, as always, is the gravity is so damnably weak.

Gravity may not seem like a weak force, but it is. The simplest illustration of gravity’s weakness is the old “rub-a-balloon-on-your-hair-and-stick-it-to-the-ceiling” trick. When you do that, the attractive force of maybe ten billion extra electrons on the balloon is enough to hold it up against the gravitational pull of the entire Earth pulling on a billion trillion atoms in the balloon. Gravity is preposterously weak compared to the electromagnetic force.

At one of the philosophy meetups I remember Harland arguing that a tree ring entails the age of a tree. But it’s not at all clear that our time words are ever that clear. Even a simple question like “How long is a day?” is really nested inside of an incredible network of assumptions and beliefs. Are we talking about mean solar day? Is a day from dawn to dusk? If I say that an activity took me a day to finish do we mean 24 hours, 8 hours, some other length of time.

With meaning there is a struggle/tension between precision (this is what scientists need in order to do their calculations or run the GPS system), perception (the fact that most people if asked to sit still for a minute would probably guess wrong at the length of time), and usability the exchange of information and coordination that takes place between people and individuals.

So I say long life and success to the metrologists who are constantly trying to improve our measurements.

Wittgenstein and the Three Spheres

2009-08-20T17:18:17Z

A note from a few months back when I was reading Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein. I’m posting it as a reminder to my future self.

Reading Wittgenstein is a challenge. But toward the end of Philosophical Investigations it seemed to me that there were three spheres of argumentation going on in Wittgenstein.

There is the sphere of ordinary language. This is the source for the examples and cases which Wittgenstein builds his argument. Ordinary language is the testing ground for his ideas and becomes the touchstone for evaluation.
There is the sphere of philosophy. This is where the skeptical argument is mounted, defended, and perhaps defeated or supported. But the skeptical argument is a language game played within philosophy itself and never in ordinary language. Being skeptical about mental states in ordinary language just leads to weird looks and people wondering if you’ve been reading too much philosophy again.
There is a metaphilosophy sphere where an argument about the value of philosophy itself takes place. This is where the therapeutic argument is made - too much time in sphere 2 is bad for our mental health.

Wittgenstein is strongly skeptical in sphere 2. He is perhaps too accepting of the truth of meaning in sphere 1. And sphere 3 is suggested by implication - the idea that philosophy should be a type of therapy.

A related question is where does jargon fit in? Jargon seems to be in a middle state. It’s not quite ordinary language but it isn’t really philosophical language either.

True Crime - Columbine

2009-08-17T13:53:58Z

It’s been ten years since Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris stormed Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, and killed thirteen people. Dave Cullen has just published the definitive book on the crime titled simply "Columbine". I read through it in less than a day.

Ten years after an event the key part of any retelling of a story is often a reevaluation of facts that we thought we knew: that Harris and Klebold were outsiders, that they targeted jocks and popular kids, that they were part of the trenchcoat mafia, that Cassie Bernall said she believed in God before being shot. Cullen’s task is to deconstruct those myths, most of which were planted by the instant media that surrounded the event, and try to triangulate toward the truth.

Cullen argues forcefully for the thesis that Harris was a psychopath and Klebold was mostly a follower when it came to the actual planning and killing. Klebold was definitely disturbed and depressive but he was more confused by life than actively hating everyone. Klebold’s journals show a painfully shy young man trying to find understanding and love in the world, being rejected and then fatally falling into the orbit of Harris who truly did want to destroy as many people as he could. All of this is supported by the journals and diaries Cullen reviewed.

I already had some inkling that Harris and Klebold were disturbed but I was surprised by the initial plans Harris had made to explode two large bombs in the cafeteria commons in the hope of killing the maximum number of people and then setting two more bombs to explode in the parking lot after the police and paramedics had arrived to kill another wave of victims. Harris was seriously disturbed.

There are some who see the hand of Satan at work in the Columbine killings. Colorado was, and continues to be a hotbed of evangelical Christianity, where the story of Cassie Bernall affirming her faith before death was just too good to pass up. To others it is a case of a psychopath and his companion going on a rampage of death. I think the latter explanation is a bit more comforting, but it still leaves a hole.