Politics and Modality

Is Anybody Happy? - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Joe the Plumber! Joe is, of course, the conservative guy from northwestern Ohio who told Obama: “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more” because he planned to buy a business that he hoped would reel in more than $250,000 a year in profits. The proper answer, as Obama should have known, was: “No, it won’t.”...Joe the Plumber, it turns out, is actually named Samuel and is not a licensed plumber. He has a lien on his house for unpaid taxes. While his professional life is still a little hazy, there is not much evidence he’s ever going to become a small business owner. And he would be a beneficiary of the Barack Obama tax plan.

So why is Joe/Sam not a rational self-interested chooser?

It depends on what you mean by "self." Sam, a grunt who works for a local handyman outfit, is interested in the well-being of a possible self, Joe the Plumber--his counterpart at another possible world. Lost in logical space, he imagines that he is Joe, a hard working plumber at that possible world, who is about to buy a business that will bring in $250,000 a year. So Sam supports actual world policies that will benefit Joe who is, in a latitudinarian sense, a "self."

This is no more or less rational than Diana-Worship. During Princess Di's brief, inconsequential life millions of fat, working class housewives adored her. It is hard to understand way they didn't resent her. Here was a woman who had everything anyone could possibly want, including immense wealth and the prospect of being Queen of England but was still whining. But instead, lost in logical space, they empathized with her vapors and her silly romantic notions. They had princess-counterparts at other possible worlds and a "self"-interested concern for their well-being.

Maybe that's one of the differences between economic liberals and conservatives. Conservatives are modal optimists. They imagine themselves at possible worlds where they are better off, where their counterparts are rich plumbers or even richer princesses and, out of modal "self"-interest, support policies that would benefit their privileged counterparts even at their own expense. Liberals, like me, are modal pessimists. We obsess over the plight of our unlucky counterparts and promote policies that would benefit them--usually at our own expense.

I never did like Princess Di or have any lively sense of what my taller, slimmer, richer counterparts are up to at their respective possible worlds. But I have a very vivid sense of my unlucky counterparts' lives and constantly spin out their stories in great detail.

I have never gone through a check-out line without imagining what it would be like to be a supermarket checker, trapped in a 2 x 2 space for 8 hours a day, doing endless, boring, repetitive tasks, with no product to show, no possibility of achievement and no way out. When I order stuff on the phone, I imagine being a "customer service representative" locked into a cubicle in a room full of women in cubicles taking phone orders, thinking about ways out. I could go to beauty school at night or take a course to be a medical records clerk, but how much better would that be? Besides, after a day at this job I'm knackered. I go home and cook, clean up, and then all I'm good for is vegging out in front of the TV. I can also easily imagine myself as a data entry operator, trapped in a cubicle inputting meaningless figures. I'm under constant supervision and every keystroke is monitored. There's no way out. The only other jobs I could get are equally bad.

I imagine myself a working class housewife pushed out of the house by my husband, Joe the plumber. "Get your fat ass down to Walmart and get a job, bitch." What can I do? If I leave this jerk I'll be working at Walmart anyway and be poor to boot. I once had options, when I was too young to appreciate them, but I don't any more. I could have gotten better grades in high school, gone to college and got a more interesting job. But I didn't. So now I'm stuck in a life of soul-sucking, mind-killing drudgery and there's no way out--at least not in this possible world: I can still read romance novels, follow the lives of the rich and famous on TV and imagine being Princess Di.

Whose fantasies are more rational? Harsanyi pumps our intuitious about fairness by asking us to imagine ourselves living everyone's life in turn. This is, now that I think of it, a restricted possible worlds fantasy and one that poses some metaphysical difficulties. We are to imagine a range of possible worlds, one for each member of the current population, which are qualitatively exactly similar to the actual world but where we ourselves are different people. Alternatively, we are to imagine ourselves as modal super-persons, transworld merelogical sums of persons at these possible worlds, and ask how the world should be in qualitative terms to make the modal super-person of which we are world-bound parts better off.

This pumps liberal intuitions very effectively because there are ever so many more miserable lives than good ones.

We could imagine it using that the clock metaphor pop science shows use to help us understand geological time: "At 11:30 pm the dinosaurs emerge; at 5 seconds to midnight we have the Industrial Revolution." Imagine: for 12 hours you are an illiterate peasant farmer working to eat and eating to work; for another hour or so you're a member of a hunting and gathering tribe, trudging endlessly through the jungle looking for edible berries and hoping for a large mammal kill so that you can get a little protein and take a rest; for another 3 or 4 hours you're a beggar, prostitute or hustler in an urban slum; for most of the time left you're scanning groceries, inputting data, flipping burgers or working in a call center; for half a minute you're successively a college professor, a lawyer, a dentist and a plumber with a $250,000 a year business; for a nanosecond you're a movie star, a professional athlete, a best-selling author and Princess Di.

For perhaps 5 or 6 hours you're sick and in pain. For most of the day you're physically exhausted. For all but two or three minutes you're engaged in mind-killing drudgery--trapped, constrained, in an agony of boredom.

Harsanyi got it right: this is the version of the Golden Rule that bites. The problem with political conservatives and other Romantics is not a lack of sympathy but a lack of imagination.

Whining? Whatever...

Peter Schweizer on Liberal Whine on National Review Online

Howdy, boys and girls. Did you know there's a new word that has replaced whatever as an argument-stopper and conversational trump-card--at least for those of you who're of the conservative persuasion? Yes, indeed. The new W-word is whining.

You may wonder how a verb which has fairly stringent criteria for application can take the place of "whatever," a mere flatus vocis suitable for all occasions. But don't worry: the strict-constructionist dictionary definition is passé. Nowadays "whining" covers any dissatisfaction with one's circumstances or critique of the status quo. So, as evidence of liberal whining, National Review pundit Peter Schweitzer notes:

A wide body of research shows that modern liberals are much more likely to complain about things in their lives. Conservatives are more content with their lives. When asked “How satisfied are you with life these days? Sixty-six percent of conservatives said “very satisfied” compared with only 46 percent of liberals. Conservatives are more likely to say they love their jobs (53 percent vs. 41 percent) and even enjoy their hobbies more (63 percent vs. 51 percent). When asked by the Social Capital Survey whether they were satisfied with their income, liberals were more than three times as likely to say “not at all satisfied” — even when they earned the same as conservatives.

I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that conservatives are more satisfied with their lives than liberals. After all, being conservative means wanting to conserve the status quo, so it stands to reason conservatives would be more satisfied with the way things are than others. In fact, you don't need to produce data to show that conservatives are more satisfied with the way things are than non-conservatives: that's true by definition.

I'm not sure why conservatives think that liberals' dissatisfaction reflects adversely on them. After all, dissatisfaction comes from setting high standards. What can be wrong with that? I'm dissatisfied with my weight, with my students' performance in logic and with the rudeness and incompetence of various "customer service representatives" with whom I deal. Would I be a better person if I were satisfied being a fat slob, if I didn't care whether my students could do logic problems or whether people did their jobs properly?

Conservatives however invariably make an intuitive leap from people's expressions of dissatisfaction to the charge that they are representing themselves as "victims," a habit they hold defines liberalism:

Barack Obama understands the language of victimhood and uses it effectively. And victimhood has become a central tenant of modern liberalism. As Kenneth Minogue argues in his classic book The Liberal Mind, modern liberalism is completely wrapped up in “suffering situations.”

Funny I never noticed that. Obama, preaching the audacity of hope, always seemed to me a very optimistic, up-beat guy. In fact the only people I ever hear talking about victimization are conservatives who whine about liberals' supposed proclivity for claiming to be victimized.

I guess what puzzles me, given the new latitudinarian concept of whining, is whether it is possible to express any dissatisfaction with the status quo without counting as a whiner. If not, then the conservatives' complaint that liberals, those of us who are not altogether satisfied with the way things are and work for improvement, is simply the claim that liberals are not conservatives. And being a liberal myself I don't think that's something they have any right to whine about.