I'm not a heretic!

You scored as Chalcedon compliant. You are Chalcedon compliant. Congratulations, you're not a heretic. You believe that Jesus is truly God and truly man and like us in every respect, apart from sin. Officially approved in 451. Chalcedon compliant 100% Pelagianism 75% Modalism 75% Apollanarian 50% Nestorianism 42% Monophysitism 42% Gnosticism 33% Socinianism 25% Monarchianism 25% Arianism 25% Albigensianism 17% Adoptionist 17% Donatism 0% Docetism 0% Are you a heretic? created with QuizFarm.com

...but I do seem to be, um, a Satanist

You scored as Satanism. Your beliefs most closely resemble those of Satanism! Before you scream, do a bit of research on it. To be a Satanist, you don't actually have to believe in Satan. Satanism generally focuses upon the spiritual advancement of the self, rather than upon submission to a deity or a set of moral codes. Do some research if you immediately think of the satanic cult stereotype. Your beliefs may also resemble those of earth-based religions such as paganism. Satanism 79% agnosticism 63% Islam 50% Christianity 50% atheism 46% Paganism 42% Hinduism 33% Buddhism 29% Judaism 21% Which religion is the right one for you? (new version) created with QuizFarm.com

Liberals--meet the working class!

American Prospect Online - Just What Is the Working Class?

[F]ully 29 percent of voters have some college education but no degree, slightly outnumbering those with a bachelor’s degree or more. The “some college” group was, according to 2004 exit polls, the educational cohort in which Bush achieved his best performance. Thus, the conservative inclinations of the educationally defined working class are largely attributable to the sentiments of its best-educated members...In whatever sense working-class conservatism is real, it is a phenomenon of middle-income -- or slightly richer -- whites, with attendant consequences for political strategy. People in this range don’t benefit from Republican economic policies oriented toward tax cuts for the very rich, but neither have they felt the sting of Republican budget cuts that have been targeted at the truly poor. Consequently, winning their votes will probably require something beyond crass appeals to alleged economic self-interest, whether or not these are coupled with moves to the right on other issues.

Vance Packard got it right about class in The Status Seekers. I read the book about 30 years ago but it left a lasting impression because it was one of those books you read when you are very young which, in a striking way, explains life and leaves you with a permanent template for fitting in all future experiences.

According to Packard's taxonomy there were 5 classes in American society. At the top a small ultra-rich, ultra-elite; at the bottom a small underclass consisting of people who were in one way or another dysfunctional and either living on the street or close to it. In the middle, the interesting part, there were: the lower class (working poor), the lower middle class (working class) and the upper middle class.

The great divide was between the Upper and Lower Middle Class which, Packard compared to the bright line between officers and enlisted personnel. The lower classes could aspire to the lower middle class but only an exceptional few could make it across the line. The divide wasn't one of income either because, on Packard's classification lots of Lower Middle Class people were earning lots more than lots of Upper Middle Class people--these were the days when unionized blue collar jobs were plentiful and paid well. But everyone knew where the line was--it was the line that's now marked by the divide between college graduation and some-college-no-degree.

Packard's characterization of the Lower Middle Class, it's folkways and distinctive virtues was dead on. The characteristic virtue of the class system's "noncoms" as he called them, was discipline: following and enforcing the rules, keeping their noses clean and maintaining order. That was how they rose through the ranks to get where they were. They were the steady workers, the churchgoers, the sober, self-disciplined family men who didn't blow their paychecks on drink, gambling or cheap women and the housewives who diligently saved money, supervised their children and ran orderly households.

Discipline, order, cleanliness, obedience, thrift, hard work and diligence were their success strategy. And they were wedded to these virtues because they were painfully aware of what was for them the alternative: poverty, debt, squalor, insecurity--the vices and miseries of the social layer immediately beneath them who played Gin Alley to their Beer Street. They believed in self-reliance and desert because by their own efforts, they had achieved all the success for which they could hope. Their great fear was disorder because they were painfully aware that their position was both privileged and precarious: slacking off, letting go, taking to drink or disobeying the rules would get them busted to private.

These social noncoms, understandably, hated us, life's junior officers. They had worked their way up through the ranks by hard work, self-discipline and sacrifice; we, in virtue of inherited wealth and privilege, got in a notch above them. We had everything they had and more without working or sacrificing for it. We could get away with virtually anything. We didn't follow the rules but weren't punished. We didn't work. We went to fancy colleges, used drugs, dreamed, played at revolution, broke the rules, screwed up in every way that would land them in the gutter but were bailed out at every turn. Even worse, we made no secret of despising their most fundamental values--self-discipline, obedience and order--and were intent on undermining the social practices that kept chaos at bay. Worse still, we admired the layers below them, the trailer trash and slum-dwellers, and pushed for policies to benefit the undeserving poor at their expense.

Now Matthew Yglesias notes, correctly, that these are the people liberals need to win over--not the true working poor who are more solidly democratic than ever. But I cannot imagine how. Even if conservative policies that benefit the ultra-rich don't help them, the classic liberal-socialist economic agenda geared to promoting the interests of the underclass and working poor will not help them either. Contrary to the Thomas Frank thesis they are not voting against their economic interests and they are not rabid Fundamentalists intent on establishing a theocracy. They want Beer Street--a clean, disciplined, orderly, safe world where hard work and good behavior pay off. Who doesn't?

Reflecting, I ask myself why I don't--or at least why I don't go with their program. And my answer--which would never fly politically in the US--is that by knocking a little wealth off the top we can make everyone upper middle class.

I suppose what drives me morally isn't either compassion or guilt but outrage at arbitrariness, inefficiency and waste. It was a arbitrary that I got pulled out of the office where I worked after high school and sent to college where I could take classes that interested me, argue about politics and philosophy in the coffee shop, lie on the grass writing papers and doing logic problems and ride my bike while the other girls in that office were trapped there all day doing repetitious, mind-killing drudge work. It was inefficient and wasteful that their lives were so crumby when creaming a little off of the top, where it would hardly be missed, could make their lives so much better. They weren't the underclass or the truly poor: they were the respectable lower middle class--girls only a year or two older than me but married, working to help save for down payments on houses before they could quit to have babies, older ladies who'd gone back to work to help put their kids through college. I listened to their conversation and got a sense of how perfectly awful their lives were--how constrained and dull, without aspirations, without any possibility of real achievement, without even any serious interests--just working hard, saving money and following the rules.

It isn't lives of the truly poor that make this whole system offensive. They can do better and someone should probably give them a kick in the pants. What makes it offensive is that, realistically, if you are not born into the officer class and are not spectacularly smart--much smarter than I am--the best you can do is the life these lower middle class women lived.

Affirmative Action: Poisoning the Wells

I don't do informal fallacies so I'm not sure whether this is the tag for the fallacy that appears in these two articles on affirmative action and assisted suicide.

In the first, the author argues that since the "role model" argument for affirmative action is unsound and therefore that affirmative action is unwarrented. In the second the editorial writer from the NYTimes applauds the Supreme Court for supporting the Oregon law premitting assisted suicide on the grounds that assisted suicide is opposed by the Bush administration invoking a conservative Christian ideology.

The gist of both is that because a given argument for a thesis is bad the thesis is bad and that, whatever you call it, is a fallacy. Even though the role model argument for affirmative action is, as the author notes, baloney, there are good and, I believe, compelling arguments for affirmative action as the only practical means for counteracting ongoing discrimination. There are also good, though I'm not sure whether compelling arguments, against assisted suicide that do not assume any religious doctrines, namely that if the practice is legal and socially acceptable, patients who do not want to suicide out will be under pressure from over-burdened families and medical personnel allocating scarce resources.

From the logical point of view, piling up bad arguments for a thesis shouldn't make any difference. From the rhetorical point of view it undermines credibility. The remarkable thing is that politically savvy operators, who are not logically fastidious but interested in persuasion by fair means or foul, pile up bad arguments in support of the positions they want to push. In camera they may discuss the legitimate reasons for the policies they want to push but in public they throw in the kitchen sink--every bad argument, every sentimentality, every myth that they believe will promote their agenda. Invariably this program undermines credibility.

Members of racial and ethnic minorities do not have anything special to offer as faculty members. They are not needed as "role models." "Diversity" in schools or workplaces is of absolutely no value: the business of these institutions would go just as well if they were staffed entirely by white, Anglo males. Women do not have anything special to contribute to the workplace; they do not have distinctive "management styles" that make it in any firm's interest to hare them for management positions.

The purpose of affirmative action and equal opportunity policies is to counteract ongoing discrimination, to benefit women and members of minorities who would otherwise be excluded or treated unfairly. It would be nice if that were a win-win situation but it is not: it is a win-tie situation where employers are required to adopt practices that benefit women and minorities but do not either harm or benefit them. It is hard to sell these policies by appeal to fairness, which is their true justification, because employers are self-interested but the Good Lie that "diversity" is good for colleges, schools and firms has worn thin, obscures the real. compelling arguments for maintaining them and undermines the credibility of supporters.

Life As Good As It Gets

I’m sitting in a corner of my porch, on the north side where it wraps around the front of my house, barely visible from the street behind the trees on my lawn and the massively untidy bougainvilla in full flower that is invading. I am having an illegal cigarette out here (I officially quit last August) to facilitate revisions to a paper I’ve had quasi-accepted by a journal. I am drawing wifi from the house.

My bike is here, locked to the porch rail, and the bike pump in which I invested that has a special fitting for skinny racing-bike tires (my bike is a very elegant looking, ultra-slim, drop-handle bar racing bike that’s even lighter than the usual because it’s extra small). It’s splendidly sunny and I’d estimate in the ‘60s, most of the foliage is green and even the hanging baskets at the front of the porch are in flower: there are some advantages to living in Southern California. I’ve locked the gate from the back yard so that my dog (chocolate lab) can’t bug me but I go in every once and a while to scratch him and tell him what a good retriever he is—which he appreciates. The birds are singing—and my cats are lurking in the undergrowth…waiting.

I probably won’t work out today. But I hope I will get to playing the piano a little and going through the French learning program I have on my computer.

About 30 years ago I resolved that I would never get used to how good things were when they got good or forget how bad they could be and, laus deo, I never have. The simple fact of being able to organize my days as I choose, to do what is in effect piece work rather than punching a clock, being stuck in a place looking busy when there’s nothing to do, is about 80% of what makes it as good as it gets. The rest is probably evenly divided between my computer, my papers, my bike, my house, my family and my animals.

That’s about it: no moral to this story. I can’t fathom what more anyone could want, except possibly an additional lab and more cats.

Tribalism as a Prisoner's Dilemma

It would be a salutory effort to look over the wars, revolutions and civil strife of the last sixty years and see how many of the participants got an outcome (taking account of war casualties and so on) better than the worst they could conceivably have obtained through negotiation and peaceful agitation. Given the massively negative-sum nature of war, I suspect the answer is “Few, if any”

Reflecting on the outbreak of peace in Aceh (and ongoing war in Sri Lanka), John Quiggan over at Crooked Timber asks whether war is worth it--and concludes, unsurprisingly, that it is not. That may be true enough but it's a separate question whether rational players can risk negotiation, peace-making, cooperation and other less costly policies where tribal patronage systems are entrenched.

In the tribal patronage system everyone takes care of his own--and no one takes care of anyone else. If members of your tribe are in power you, your family, and your village, get jobs, roads and other amenities; if members of competing tribes are in power you get nothing and on the worst case scenario, you and your kin are vulnerable to ethnic cleansing.

You cannot choose your tribe or opt out of the tribal system. Even if you are a liberal cosmopolitan by conviction, you will be identified as a Hutu or Tutsi, Serb, Croat or Bosnian, Sunni, Shi'ite or Kurd, Irish Catholic or Protestant and you will benefit from the system or lose out accordingly. So even if you are a liberal cosmopolitan, because you know the system is entrenched, and know that everyone else knows it too, as a rational chooser you are going to vote for your tribesmates and, if necessary, fight to see to it that they get into power. So will other rational choosers, by the same reasoning, even if they are liberal cosmopolitans too and would rather cooperate.

Sometimes, when the current tinpot dictator's regime gets too bad it becomes worthwhile for members of different tribes to form coalitions to get him out. But such coalitions are short-lived because the ethnic card is always in play. Once coalitions achieve their immediate ends it is played and it's back to business as usual.

I grew up in New Jersey under this tribal system where everyone took care of their own and no took care of anyone else or expected to be taken care of by anyone else. It was bliss to leave, to go to school in the Midwest, where at least some things were open and above board, where there weren't 1000 unwritten rules to negotiate or no-go areas to avoid, where there was at least the pretense of fairness and public-spiritedness. I never had any sympathy for my classmates who deplored the white bread homogeneity of the Midwest and effused about the wonderful local color of ethnic neighborhoods. It's all very nice to visit those Little Italys and Chinatowns to the extent that they're theme parks for the tourist trade, but real ethnicity, real tribalism is the root of most, if not all, evil. All that local color and ethnic food, both here and abroad, aren't worth it.

I'm not cut out for politics

After Alito's Testimony, Democrats Still Dislike Him but Can't Stop Him - New York Times

I don't understand why Democrats, are fighting the Alito nomination or more generally why, as a contributor and supporter, I get a dozen emails a day urging me to fight in every trivial skirmish and support every lost cause against Republicans. I do not understand why the Democratic party insiders who set this policy or the midlevel functionaries who send me email haven't figured out how to choose their battles. Alito will get through. Everyone, including the Democrats who are grandstanding at his hearing, knows this guy will get in. What is the point? I'm sure Republicans are doing the same thing--I just don't get Republican email.

All this constant skirmishing over trivial issues, dead issues, lost causes and proposals that aren't really objectionable except insofar as they're supported by Republicans just gives people--especially young people like my kids (biological and pedagogical)--the idea that partisanship is no more than tribalism, that there is no real difference between Republicans and Democrats and that politicians are all just after power. It destroys faith in the political process and alienates the best people so that the whole business of politics becomes increasingly a game for power brokers and politicians on the take, with expensive variety shows to "energize" the base.

My (biological) kids are Greens--throwing energy into a heat sink. My students for the most part haven't got a clue and don't care. A few, the smartest, are libertarian-style conservatives because they're convinced that liberals are well-meaning but naive mush-heads. Years ago, teaching "social ethics" we got into a discussion of the controversy over Nestles' program to push baby formula in third world countries. A student patiently explained to me that Nestles couldn't just give away baby formula to poor women though maybe there should be charities to help them pay for it--and was amazed when I explained what breasts were for and how they worked.

Arrrrgh--I could scream! I wish there were a viable third party too. But because of the way the American system operates their can't be. Maybe the best thing would be to throw my energy into working for voting reform to break the two major parties lock on power--which, of course, insures that voting reform has no more chance than a third party. Maybe I should collaborate with my son the mathematician to evangelize for Condorcet voting--the geeks love it.

Every four years, with minor festivals in between, we're treated to this circus--debates, conventions, giant potlaches, speechifying, grandstanding, smear campaigns, focus groups, politicians groomed and trained--the utterly vacuous Bush parroting his tag lines and the utterly insincere Kerry in his hunting outfit dragging a dead goose out of the woods to show the rednecks he was ok with guns. They treat us like idiots. Behind the scenes there are issues and ideologies on the table but they assume we're too dumb to understand so this is the crap we get.

It isn't just politics either--it seems like every damned institution and organization--businesses, schools, churches, what have you--operates on the assumption that people can't grasp even the most elementary abstractions, can't follow the simplest arguments, don't care about facts, have no principles, are incapable of critical reflection and only respond to sound bytes, manipulation, cheerleading and noise. And they imagine that "using psychology"--formerly Rhetoric, now Communications--is tremendously clever and sophisticated. I am swamped, drowning in this bs. Well, at least I can teach Logic!

China: The American Dream

American Prospect Online - The China Path: "It%u2019s true that democracy needs capitalism. Try to come up with the name of a single democracy in the world that doesn%u2019t have a capitalist economy. For democracy to function there must be centers of power outside of government. Capitalism decentralizes economic power, and thereby provides the private ground in which democracy can take root.

But China shows that the reverse may not be true -- capitalism doesn%u2019t need democracy."

I went a conference in China a year ago last summer and it was perfectly awful. We climbed the Great Wall of China, visited the Forbidden City, toured the Panda preserve and cruised down the Yang-Tze; we stayed in glitzy hotels and flew out of a glitzy airport built to impress businessmen and tourists with money. But I didn't feel good until we landed in Tokyo.

It wasn't the absence of democracy that made the place oppressive but the absence of even the most minimal amenities of a welfare state. Nothing was free--not education, not health care. Students competed fiercely for spaces in universities and those who couldn't pay the fees threw themselves in front of trains because without the credentials for admission to the urban elite, life was hell. Rural life was miserable, factory workers toiled at the most miserable jobs in the worst of conditions for a pittance, families were relocated at the government's discretion. In Beijing, the masses drudged all their waking hours: service workers in the tourist hotels where we stayed counted themselves lucky to be able to make their living pandering to rich American tourists like me, fetching and carrying; the rest worked from dawn into the night digging, building, hauling, sweeping, selling, eking out a living. Their industriousness made me sick.

My colleagues worried about academic freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of religion. I couldn't imagine what good democracy or any of these freedoms would do for anyone given that they were stuck drudging all their waking hours to pump up GDP and create glitz to attract foreign investment and the tourist trade. I wondered what the agenda was: to sacrifice a generation, or two or three, in order to get rich enough so that they could run a proper socialist welfare state where people didn't have to spend all their waking hours working or, more likely, to squeeze every last drop of sweat out of every citizen indefinitely to create more wealth.

This is the American dream--endless, backbreaking, mind-killing work to create wealth that no one has the leisure to enjoy and growing the economy keep down unemployment so that everyone will have the privilege of doing endless, backbreaking, mind-killing drudge-work until they're incapacitated. I can't think of anything closer to the popular picture of hell--shoveling coal into furnaces forever and ever, without any end and without any rest.

Reich is right, of course: capitalism isn't what it's cracked up to be. But I don't see why democracy is supposed to be so great either. What's important is leisure: the only freedom that really matters is freedom from work.

Does religion exist?

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Belief systems

There is no more a thing called religion that can be studied than there is a thing called life. In particular, there is no definition that will encompass religion and exclude everything that is not religion. The chief reason why people can never say that religion is "really" anything else is that it isn't, really, anything to start with.

Reading further it turns out that Andrew Brown's thesis is less apocalyptic: he argues that religion is, at best, a "family resemblance" notion so that attempts to find an essence characteristic of all the phenomena we ordinarily classify as religion are doomed to failure.

I'm not so sure. Here is a minimalist analysis of religion that I'd argue, applies to all central cases of religion, excludes all beliefs and practices that are clearly not religion and explains why the borderline cases are borderline. So try this: a religion consists of

(1) The belief that there is some supernatural reality
(2) A cult--public, private or both.
(3) The belief that there is some causal connection between the supernatural reality and the cult.

Each of these conditions is itself minimal, e.g. the "supernatural reality" in question can be anything from a theistic god with psychological states who acts in the world to an impersonal, transcendental something-I-know-not-what to a conglomerate of ancestors, daimons, faeries and godlets. It also doesn't include any ethical dimension which from our prejudice in favor of "Great World Religions" is usually thought to be central but, insofar as we want a criterion that everything we commonly understand as religion will satisfy, doesn't figure.

Counterexamples anyone?

Every religion I can think of satisfies these conditions. Atheistic versions of Hinduism and Buddhism for example recognize some supernatural something or other and recommend meditation and cultic activities as a means to get in touch with it. Borderline cases are borderline because they satisfy one condition but not the others. Neoplatonism, with its elaborate theology, isn't a central case of religion because it doesn't involve any cultic activity though if you regard it as the ideology of late Greco-Roman paganism the combination of Neoplatonic theology and pagan sacrifices and other cultic activities clearly is a religion. The North Korean dear leader cult isn't a religion because, even though it involves cultic activities, it doesn't involve any beliefs in the supernatural.

Ok? Objections? So that's religion: not as big a deal as most people think and something we can all enjoy even if we don't believe in the supernatural even in the most minimal sense.

By laying too much on religion, we're destroying it. By insisting not only on supernatural belief but ethical commitment for religious participation we dissuade people from participating in the cult: so the churches close, the myths die, the ceremonies fall into disuse, the processions stop, the hymns are forgotten--everything that matters about religion disappears and the world is a poorer, duller place.

Feminist methodology vs. feminist content

exogenous preference - Google Search

Here's a nice article by Ingrid Robeyns posing the question of whether there is a distinctively feminist economic methodology. It also poses the question, at a higher level of abstraction, of whether for any academic enterprise "Feminist X," what we are, or should, be talking about is the X study of issues that concern women or a peculiarly feminist (non-androcentric or womanly) way of doing X.

I'm inclined to go for the former. I don't know that much about econ (when I created this blog I subtitled it to reflect my hope to make it a group blog that included economists) but when it comes to my field I'm firmly committed to the idea that there is no distinctively feminist (or non-androcentric or womanly) way of doing philosophy. Feminist philosophy means (1) picking up philosophically interesting issues that have been ignored because they were "women's issues" and (2) arguing against biased, sexist views.

The paradigm of feminist philosophy is Judith Jarvis Thompson's classic article "In Defense of Abortion." Here is a very philosophically interesting issue, one that hits central areas in metaphysics like the problem of personal identity and in ethics, that didn't get much attention earlier because it was a woman's issue. Thompson, an excellent, mainline analytic philosopher write the classic article--so classic that if you google you won't even be able to find it because it's buried under secondary literature and links to student plagiarism services that produce term papers on it.

There is an even more abstract issue: for any disadvantaged group, X, does fairness to x people mean changing the system to operate in a way that's more conducive to (what are taken to be) x people's culture, interests, values, ways of thinking or does it mean fixing the system so that (1) we recognize the disadvantages x people are at, the discrimination they face, etc. and (2) working to fix things so that x's can plug into the niches formerly reserved for white males.

Here again, I go with the latter interpretation. When I was in SDS as an undergraduate we had a discussion about this and I was booed off the floor by someone who asked rhetorically, "Would you just want them to have color TV sets?" Of course I would--because that's what "they" and most other people want. I hit the same wall later when I was involved in the movement to promote women's ordination in the Episcopal Church and comrades in arms asserted that the aim was not to "plug women into the same roles men had occupied" but to work for structural change.

Well, structural change is all very well but when it comes to improving the situation of members of disadantaged groups per se that is just a matter of removing the disadvantages that prevent them from getting what members of advantaged groups get, i.e. leveling the playing field so that women and members of racial minorities, can occupy the same roles that white males do--however good or bad those roles might be.

Latte-drinking Liberal Hypocrites

In Middle Class, Signs of Anxiety on School Efforts - New York Times

The Bloomberg administration's efforts to invest immense attention and resources on low-income students in low-performing schools are causing growing anxiety among parents from middle-class strongholds who worry that the emphasis is coming at their children's expense...

Take Heidi Vayer, a former public school teacher and guidance counselor. She decided to remove her two daughters this year from public school in District 2 on the East Side of Manhattan and enrolled them instead in an independent school, Friends Seminary. "I didn't see things getting better," Ms. Vayer said. "The school increased class sizes, and I felt no attention was being paid to middle-class students who were there."

Here's a nice story from the NYTimes about what happens when a school system makes a serious effort to improve lower class children's academic performance: upper middle class parents, predictably, pull their kids out. Who's surprised if white working class parents who can't afford to buy their kids out of the system

When my daughter went to the local public high school, from which less than a quarter of students continued on to college, even though her performance in elementary school was mediocre, she was magically tracked to AP classes and propelled into the local elite world-ranked state university. I'm not complaining but I do wonder if had something to do with the fact that she is blonde and a native English speaker. The same thing happened to me--even though my performance in elementary school was dismal and I was, in addition, what was known as a "discipline problem." Somehow all the classes I ended up in, apart from gym, were populated by students from my elementary school and the one other "good" school in town.

Now I am pretty smart and so is my daughter. But I find it hard to believe there there weren't quite a few kids who were just as smart relegated to the academic lumpen proletariat. Of course not all lower class kids were dumped--the very good children, the hard-working, motivated kids who were not "discipline problems" probably got through the class filter. But I don't have the slightest doubt that lower class kids who, like me, were "underachievers" never got the second, and third, and nth chances that I got.

I know very well why I'm not behind that check-out counter, why don't spend my days at a terminal inputting data, why I'm not stuck doing drudge work. I detest the system that traps people in these jobs not because I feel compassion for them--I don't like people like them--but because I know how easily I could have been in their position and because I know how completely arbitrary it is that my life is good and their lives are miserable.

Maybe we'd do better pushing this line rather than trying to promote compassion. Compassion is episodic and unreliable: it kicks in when we see flood victims clinging to the roofs of their houses but evaporates when we have to deal with refugees packed into squalid shelters. Compassion is selective: it attaches to pretty children and the "deserving poor" but not to the masses of miserable people who are unattractive and unpleasant to deal with. Compassion is seasonal: after an annual Santa Claus rally, when the Salvation Army buckets come out and the NYTimes runs stories about the 100 Neediest cases, it tanks. In any case, no one really feels very much compassion most of the time--in fact the natural human tendency is to be repelled by people who are badly off.

The real, reliable motivator of social improvement is the proximity of possible worlds where one could have been very much worse off. The way to get people motivated is to repeat, incessantly "that could easily have been you"--to rub in the fact that most of us who are better off escaped drudge work and poverty by sheer dumb luck, that our children are in those AP classes that interface seamlessly with the best universities by sheer dumb luck and to remind them also that even if they have escaped for now, in a society without safety nets, they and their children are always vulnerable. We need to display the momentum mori, the skull on the desk as a meditation object--pictures of supermarket checkers, of women inputting data at terminals, of sweat shop workers, with our faces edited in.

The fault is in our stars...not in ourselves

Adaptive Preference (pdf file)

I am now finishing the 9th or so revision of a paper on "adaptive preference" in response to comments from half a dozen referees which has morphed from a snappy little APA number to a 29 page monster. The original short version is linked.

I argue against Martha Nussbaum and others who cite cases where, allegedly, deprived individuals' adapt their preferences to their circumstances such that satisfying them does not benefit them as counterexamples to informed preference accounts of wellbeing. But leave the details aside--what vexes me at the gut level about Nussbaum's argument is the idea--which figures in a variety of contexts--that we do ourselves in: that we miss out on getting what is best for us because we are brainwashed, psychologically damaged, neurotic, self-defeating or simply confused, that correcting the external conditions of our lives will not by itself make things better, that we need consciousness-raising and therapy.

This is a pernicious lie. It is a lie because it suggests that a relatively rare pathology is the norm. There are some people whose problems are psychological--schizophrenics who are too flipped out to hold down a job or function socially and mental defectives who are just too dumb. But they can't be helped by talk therapy or consciousness raising anyway. For the rest of us, all that's required for the good life are the externals--money, leisure and entertainment.

However we have been bamboozled by the literati and the therapy industry, and convinced that the externals are not enough--that money can't buy happiness, that getting what we want will turn into dust in our mouths, that human beings by their nature are on a quest for Meaning and, perhaps most importantly, that the very idea that the simple, obvious material goods are either necessary or sufficient for the good life is hopelessly crude and naive. At the perfectly awful college for rich underachievers I attended we were constantly taught that divine discontent was noble, that crude materialism was bad, and that the goodies we had were "empty." We were encouraged to "find ourselves" rather than making decisions about further education and employment. We were coddled and petted, given extensions, incompletes and sympathy by faculty when we complained about broken relationships, writing blocks or identity crises, and taught to look down on blue collar kids going to state factory schools for mere job training.

Rhetoric aside, thinking about this as I revise my paper, rereading stories about illiterate, impoverished Indian women who would be delighted to have clean water, micro-credit loans to set up micro-businesses and primary school education for their children I am furious at the decadent rich kids I went to school with, striving after the wind, dissatisfied with goods beyond the wildest dreams of most of the human race, and worst of all, congratulating themselves on their dissatisfaction, on their superior virtue and discernment. And I'm furious at myself too because I was one of those kids--worrying about the Meaning of Life, whining for incompletes and congratulating myself.

I hope I know better now. I have everything I've ever wanted, everything that by my lights matters: a secure, interesting job; a beautiful house; leisure; the opportunity to travel; enough money to get pretty much anything I seriously want; a husband and children; and a really nice computer. That is it--that is all there is to life and it's good enough. The only serious moral problem in the universe is seeing to it that everyone gets that good stuff and the only tragedy is that we die and so can't enjoy it forever. The fault is in our stars: fix the external circumstances of peoples lives, get them that stuff and nothing else matters.

American Religion: Pagans wanted

Incredibly, I was interviewed for a radio show a few days ago--and asked to comment on why Americans are so very, very religious and how this ultra-religiousity shapes American politics and policy. Now, in the throes of espirit d’escallier I think I’ve got it.

From my professional perspective, as a philosopher, the core religious issues are metaphysical ones: questions about the existence and nature of God and post-mortem survival. So, in the standard philosophy of religion class we trot undergraduates through the classic arguments for and against the existence of God—Ontological, Cosmological, Teleological and Religious Experience vs. Problem of Evil and Verificationist Challenge—and material on the problem of personal identity that figures in discussions of the possibility of resurrection and disembodied existence. Then, insofar as we’re interested in Christianity in particular there are additional goodies: logic puzzles concerning the doctrine of the Trinity (my personal favorite) and worries about the idea of Incarnation.

We don’t have anything to say about ethics when it comes to philosophy of religion courses—that’s for ethics courses, of course. We might have something to say about miracles, because Hume did and if Hume was interested in a problem guaranteed it is philosophically interesting. But we don’t seriously believe that it’s of any real religious importance whether miracles, including the Virgin Birth and others reported in the Bible, really occurred. Religion from this perspective is essentially a matter of ontology—like the problem of universals: ethical and empirical issues, if they figure at all, are strictly peripheral. That is Phil 112, Philosophy of Religion, 3 units, term paper and 2 blue books, satisfies a humanities requirement—enjoy.

But that is not the way in which most people, religious or secular, view religion. For them the strictly metaphysical issues are not of primary importance. Religion is a total package, including a roster of empirical claims, and perhaps even more importantly, a vision of the Good Life and a variety of moral and political agendas. God and post-mortem survival come along with the package.

Americans are more sympathetic to the Package than Europeans but I doubt that this is because they’re less inclined to tough-minded empiricism. According to the figures I was looking at, from about a dozen websites which vary widely, averaging out, about 85% of Americans believe in God while only a bare majority of Brits do. But it turns out the percentage of Brits who believe in ghosts is significantly higher than the percentage who believe in God. Now it would be interesting to compare the difference in the percentage of Americans and Europeans who profess belief in God with the difference, if any, in the percentage of Americans and Europeans who believe in flakey nonsense—astrology, ghosts, “alternative” medicine, UFO abductions, reincarnation or generic spirituality. When I have time I’ll get the figures. But my guess is that the gap, if any, when it comes to beliefs about flakey nonsense is narrower than the God gap.

If this is so then my thesis is confirmed: Americans are no more religious in the Phil 112 sense than anyone else. Rather, for some complicated historical and cultural reasons, we are more likely to buy the vision of the Good Life associated with religious belief and the ethical and political agendas that go along with it than Europeans are. We buy into ontological and empirical claims, which we don’t really care about one way or the other, because they are part of the Package. In particular, my conjecture is that we distrust institutions, especially government, and are more likely than citizens of other affluent industrialized nations to believe that without religion people will run amok. We are more frightened of chaos breaking in than people in other affluent countries and more worried about violence; we place a higher value on self-discipline and are much more likely than Europeans to believe that religion is the most effective mechanism of social control.

Those of us who don’t buy this vision of the Good Life and the socio-political agenda are disinclined to buy the ontological claims—and are, by and large, unsympathetic to religion as such insofar as we regard it as a program for pushing through this agenda. So we run crusades against hill shrines, Christmas crèches in parks, and all the outward and visible signs of Christianity to stop what we see as creeping theocracy, a program to install Christian shari’a, suppress personal freedom—particularly freedom of sexual self-expression—and push through an ultra-conservative socio-political agenda.

Now I guess that what I myself am is an agnostic Christian pagan. When it comes to empirical claims, I do not believe anything different from what any convinced atheist believes. I do not believe in miracles—not because I think that anomalies are impossible but because I don’t believe that there is any compelling evidence that such events have occurred. I have no sympathy for any distinctively Christian ethic: I am a utilitarian. I detest the political agenda of the Religious Right. I think that questions about the existence of God are philosophically interesting but don’t see any compelling reason to believe that God exists—or doesn’t exist. If I have to jump one way or the other I’ll jump for theism though because of plausibility arguments from religious experience. I hope that by the time I am old I will have convinced myself that I shall survive bodily death but I am not counting on it.

But I really, really like religion. I like the philosophical puzzles, particularly the doctrine of the Trinity, and I simply love the stuff of religion—the mysticism and the art. From my Phil 112 perspective, none of this is any more threatening or indicative of a large-scale socio-political agenda than Buddha statues in Chinese restaurants or “God bless you” when we sneeze. Religion at its core is just metaphysics and has no more import for ethics, politics or social arrangements than speculative doctrines about the ontological status of numbers or disputes about whether time travel is logically possible.

Religious myth, symbol, ceremony, custom and decor are cultural products which, along with their secular counterparts—patriotic parades and fireworks displays, birthdays, weddings, and other potlatches, secular holidays and all the rituals surrounding the cult of professional sport—make life enjoyable. The more the better. The myths, ceremonies and symbols of Christianity predominate because they are the part of our culture, in the way that Thanksgiving, Halloween and Super Bowl Sunday are. For religious believers, that is people who buy the metaphysical claims, they express religious sentiments; for others they are just entertainment. Everyone can play: no one is excluded unless they choose to exclude themselves (in the spirit of puritanical killjoys who object to beauty pageants because they “objectify” women or to contact sports and computer games because they glorify violence).

My current preoccupation is the history of Late Antiquity. This ‘world full of gods’ appeals to me—this world of countless gods and cults, domestic and foreign, where some believe, some half-believe and some do not believe at all, where it is not clear whether a given deity is understood as an intelligent being or causally efficacous individual of any other sort, an abstract philosophical principle or a metaphorical figure, and where it does not really matter. That is what I wish the world were—a world where all the rich stuff of Christianity played the role of the myth, ritual and symbol of Mediterranean paganism from which it descended.

It’s a trite romantic fantasy, in the spirit of Santayana—who got it dead right about American religion and character in The Last Puritan and entertained similar fantasies about culture Catholicism: “There is no God, and Mary is His Mother.”

Bush: The Speech, the War and the Hurricane

Bush, Saying U.S. Is Winning, Asks Patience on Iraq - New York Times

Nothing new in Bush’s speech this evening…at least nothing besides the admission that he screwed up. His groomers and trainers have finally got it across to him that strategic withdrawl is in order, time to admit that the intelligence was botched, that there were no WMD and, oh yes, that he’d been spying on American citizens since 9/11. It was, of course, a nuanced confession, not the blubbering 12-step repentance that may come later—after he leaves office. Just a little flutter to see if admitting fallibility wins sympathy or is perceived as a sign of weakness.

On substantive issues however it was the old time religion: the bad guys are out to get us and we have to get them first, and get them where they are so that they can’t get us at home. There was the same ritualized invocation of 9/11 and the fudge on the distinction between the Iraq program and the “war on terrorism,” pious remarks about spreading freedom and democracy, and best wishes for Christmas and Hanukah.

The confession—too little too late—will not make any difference because no one really cared about Weapons of Mass Destruction in the first place—any more than they cared about whether Reuben “Hurricane” Carter, a black boxer unjustly convicted of murder in my home town was really guilty of the triple murder for which he was sent to prison. The bottom line was that Carter was a big, tough black man and so a danger to the community. If he really killed those 3 guys, that was good: it justified us in putting him away. If he didn’t, that was also ok because he got put away anyhow.

No one really cared whether Iraq had WMD. The bottom line was that there were big tough guys who, if not exactly black weren’t quite white and were out to get us. If there were WMDs in Iraq that was good: it justified going over and getting them before they got us. If there weren’t, that was ok too because we would get them anyhow. One way or another, our leader was a Big Man who would hang tough and protect us.

But he didn’t. He couldn’t even deal with Hurricane Katrina.

What could he have done? Maybe, remembering film clips of Ike’s “I will go to Korea” speech, admit that the whole Iraq affair was a hopeless quagmire, announce that he would go to Iraq, negotiate with all parties, partition the country and fix the mess. If this miserable little shit had any real guts, beyond the scripted cinema variety it took to land on the deck of an aircraft carrier and announce “mission accomplished,” he would play it straight for once, put his life and legacy on the line and make a real attempt to fix what he broke. But he will not. If the Democrats want a successful candidate for the next election they will pick one who will.

I don’t care about this war because I don’t care about foreign policy. Wars come and go. War by its nature is bad and it’s a judgment call whether, for any given war, the good outweighs the bad or vice versa. But I find the utter gutlessness of Americans appalling: the gutlessness of Americans agonizing about crime in the streets and terrorist threats from abroad, locking up bad guys and locking themselves into gated communities if they can afford it, obsessing about dirt, germs, food additives, bird flu, porno on the internet, bullies in the schools, and anything that could conceivably offend anyone and the gutlessness of American politicians testing the waters, consulting focus groups, sampling polls and running chicken-shit from anything that could jeopardize their careers, reputations or physical safety.

One always feels reticent about expressing such sentiments if one hasn't been tested and, being a women (of a certain age), I wasn't: I was never in the military. But I swear by Jesus Christ that "I, a weak woman" could do better than these miserable wimps.

Academic Freedom

Keep 'Adam and Steve' Out of His In-Box. Is That So Hateful? - New York Times

Mr. Daniel, who repairs printers at William Paterson University and also takes courses toward a master's degree there, was reading his e-mail before work on March 8 when he came upon a message sent in connection with Women's History Month announcing the showing of a film, "Ruthie and Connie: Every Room in the House." Mr. Daniel, 63, who has been a Muslim since the 1970's, had no interest in the film. He believes his religion condemns homosexuality. So following the instructions, he sent a reply to the e-mail address of Arlene Holpp Scala, chairwoman of the department of women's studies.

"Do not send me any mail about 'Connie and Sally' and 'Adam and Steve.' These are perversions," he wrote. "The absence of God in higher education brings on confusion. That is why in these classes the Creator of the heavens and the earth is never mentioned."

Two days later, Dr. Scala filed a complaint with officials at William Paterson. It read: "Mr. Daniel's message to me sounds threatening and in violation of our University's nondiscrimination policy. I don't want to feel threatened at my place of work when I send out announcements about events that address lesbian issues." She said Mr. Daniel should be informed that he had violated university policy and that she was not sure what else should be done to censure him and "make me feel I am working in a safe environment."

What, if anything, was in this stupid woman's head? What on earth did she think that she, chair of an academic department--if you can call "woman's studies" an academic discipline--stood to gain by going after a computer tech on staff? I've seen comparable things happen and I'm baffled. It looks like you get some sort of prestige by demonstrating how weak and sensitive you are, how scared you are for your personal safety, and how loudly you can whine.

Dr. Scala, I suspect, was playing Let's Pretend. A cloistered (and I'd bet tenured) academic, she imagined herself a foot soldier in the feminist movement, a powerless woman working in a hostile environment, surrounded by big, hairy, threatening males out to get her, daring to assert herself and striking a blow for the sisterhood. And, of course, it must have been sweet to punish someone who held views with which she disagreed, particularly someone whom she believed could not fight back--makes me wonder how she deals with students who are foolish enough to take her courses and argue against the party line.

Mr. Daniel (who, being a competent technician, is probably just smarter than Dr. Scala) won his case. But I find it outrageous that silly asses like Dr. Scala can make frivolous complaints that jeopardize the livelihood of innocent parties without any adverse consequences.

Mediocre Affirmative Action Candidates

Conservatism and the pursuit of excellence

At our last dinner table conversation, my husband wondered why Bush nominated Harriet Meiers when it was so predictable that she would go down in flames.

This one is a no-brainer: the aim was to discredit affirmative action and make it politically feasible to appoint a white male. We do this in Academia all the time.

Faced with a hiring decision, colleagues piously proclaim that we will of course do everything we can to find a qualified woman. So, e.g. on one occasion we decided to open the search to candidates with an interest in philosophy of law as well as business ethics since, as one colleague noted, this would be more likely to attract women ("because, you know, you think of women more in connection with, like, LA Law and Allie McBeal than with business").

Then we sort through candidates' files and conduct interviews, carefully weeding out the strongest female candidates on the grounds that given affirmative action policies they can get any jobs they want so we don't have a chance of getting them. Then we make the final decision, considering the pool of mediocre female candidates left and a few slightly better than mediocre male candidates. We bewail the fact that in spite of all our efforts to get a good female candidate we just have the "usual roster of weak women."

At this point, we congratulate ourselves on having tried our best--tailoring the job description to "feminine interests" and interviewing a preponderance of female applicants (except, or course, the ones with whom we wouldn't have a chance). We have the paper work to show that the female candidates that got to the interview stage are, by any criteria, less qualified than the male candidates and, crying crocodile tears, offer the job to a white male.

Let's face it, my male colleagues say: women are just mediocre. Where there's smoke there's fire--that's why you see so few women at the top, as CEOs of fortune 500 companies or in prestigeous academic positions, and why with all the affirmative action pressures we've been under for the last few decades you still don't get women at the top. Look at us: we did everything we could to get a qualified woman but the women we interviewed were just not competitive.

Charity Ends At Home

What Is Charity? - New York Times

[T]he nonprofit sector has drifted from core notions of charity...Only a sliver of giving to churches is spent on social services. Last year, of the 14 gifts that exceeded $100 million, only one - a $1.5 billion bequest to the Salvation Army from Joan B. Kroc, the widow of the founder of McDonald's - went to a human services organization, Forbes magazine says.

"In general, philanthropy seems to have stopped talking about poverty and race," said Jan Masaoka, executive director of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, which tries to strengthen charities. Small groups still get funding, but the sector "in some ways has retreated from taking on poverty in a larger-scale, more direct way."

If there's one thing that's true, it's that people give to people because they have a personal connection to the place they're giving to, and people who have personal connections to human service organizations are not usually people with money...People who grew up in comfortable, clean, prosperous suburbs have just never had as much familiarity with how many others live.

I grew up in a clean, prosperous neighborhood and, in any case, am no great philanthropist. But I have a vivid, if perversely selective, imagination. I can't imagine being sick so I don't give a cent to "charities" concerned with health care or medical research. But I can easily imagine being poor or being a member of a visible minority. So I give the lousy little amount of money I give to: the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Fund for an Open Society and and UNICEF and these days I've had a blast giving people virtual farm animals from the Heifer Project as gifts. The the cow I gave my son and his bride as a wedding present, the pigs, goats and chickens I've given to friends, and the swarm of bees I sent to my mother-in-law go to people in developing countries who know how to deal with them.

So I just thought I'd advertise a little. I don't know how many people visit my blog, but I thought I'd put up these convenient links in case you have some disposable income. BTW the Canadian Harambee Education Society is also a terrific deal: for $340 American money you can send a girl in Kenya or Uganda through high school.

It's not virtue that drives me but the vividness of modality that comes from reading too much David Lewis, and the lively sense that these possible worlds where I'm poor and have no options are just a hair's breadth away. I go into Walmart and see the women working there at pink-collar shit jobs for minimum wage, going mad doing miserable drudge work all day and living in poverty, and it always strikes me in the most vivid way how I escaped that by the skin of my teeth and pure dumb luck--how easily I could have been one or them, or someone who couldn't even get a job at Walmart. I see beggars at freeway exits and always think of how easily that could have been me, standing there all day with a cardboard sign, bored out of my head while the cars go past blasting me with exhaust fumes, with nowhere to go, nothing to do and no way out.

I'm writing now on preference and well-being. My intuitions may be screwy but I have the vivid sense that I'm actually less well off myself because possible worlds like this are so close by. So I give money and do what I can to fix the safety nets that cushion me from those possible worlds. It's hard to explain this gut-level fear: as a tenured professor I know there's no chance I'll end up working at Walmart or begging at a freeway exit, and there is sure no way that I'm going to wake up black one day. But this is all vivid and close to me.

DNA [Daily News & Analysis] - Opinion - Why is Paris burning?

"France took many immigrants from its former colonies, especially from Algeria and several African and Arab countries and refrained from providing any state help to uphold their unique cultures. Au contraire, it frowned on any display of cultural separateness, as was evident from the banning of the hijab (and, it may be pointed out, the turban, the crucifix and several other overt religious symbols) from state-run schools. All of this sounds noble and egalitarian, but in practice, France's non-white populations have found that they have the worst of both worlds. They have neither benefited from any affirmative action, which would guarantee them some jobs, nor managed to merge with the national social, cultural, political and most important, economic mainstream. Many of them live in high-rise ghettos with pathetic living conditions and high unemployment"

Well, bravo. This piece from an Indian publication gets it right and says it succinctly.

Here's $25,000--now go away

VDARE.com: 11/06/05 - A Buyout Option For Europe's Muslims?

Well this is a weird solution: pay immigrants to go back to their native countries. Almost as good as my late libertarian friend Deane's proposal to create a moat all along the US-Mexican border with sloping tile sides and stock it with aligators.

Eventually we did come up with a solution. Anyone who wants to get into the US has to spend a year in an Assimilation Camp where they will get a crash immersion course in English and other American folkways. They will also agree to change their names and resettle in areas where jobs for which they qualify are available and no or few other members of their ethnic group live. At the end of the year they will be moved to whatever area the state deems most suitible and given every reasonable form of help in finding housing, getting jobs, and otherwise getting set up including financial assistance and child care. And, of course, make sure that they don't get hit by racism by enforcing equal opportunity and affirmative action policies.

How many immigrants would accept that deal? Try it--I'd bet virtually all.

Paris burning

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Disabled woman set on fire as Paris riots spread

I remember the long hot summers when the cities burned in the US and, after Rodney King got beaten up, I was in Whittier reading a paper at Whittier College, up the hill from LA and we could smell the smoke.

It's easy enough to understand why most people set fires, loot shops and trash the streets: it's fun and profitable. When I was at music camp, at the end of the season, I bought a 10¢ ticket for a chance to bash an old upright piano with a sledge hammer. Who doesn't want to do damage and run amok--all the better if you can get a DVD player into the bargain.

But crowds are wise. Even if individuals are just out for rape and pillage, the crowd operates according to ideological commitment and a delicate sensitivity to time, place and circumstance. Why then and there?

In the US, I think, it was impatience and thwarted idealism. We had the idea that if Jim Crow laws could be pulled down everything would immediately be fixed. Then, after the inspiring speeches, sit-ins and martyrdoms, it was business as usual. The first generation of the civil rights movements compared themselves to their grandparents and thought they'd entered into the Promised Land; the next generation compared themselves to whites and were, legitimately, outraged. And so the first generation of immigrants compare their circumstances to their lives in very poor countries and are pleased; their children and children's children look around them and expect something better.

I've always been sympathetic to the French scheme of secularism and assimilation. But it's an empirical question of how best to achieve it. Denying the reality of racism doesn't make it go away. They should certainly stop schoolgirls from wearing Muslim headscarves--not because they're religious symbols but because they're an overt display of ethnic identity. If you live in a country, you have an obligation to assimilate. But the other side of the coin is that the state has an obligation to make it feasible--and that doesn't seem to have been happening in France.

Ought implies can and if the state, whether in France or anywhere else, is seriously interested in getting minorities to assimilate it has to see that they can--by dismantling racism, and by affirmative action and other policies geared to ending discrimination.

Inappropriate Touching

Hands Across Catholic America - Should churchgoers hold hands during Mass? By Andrew Santella

Not long ago, I heard a Catholic churchgoer complaining about a wave of inappropriate touching that had spread across so many American parishes. He wasn't talking about pederast priests and the sex-abuse scandal. What he had in mind was the way many Catholics have taken to holding hands in church while they recite the Lord's Prayer...Of course, most Catholics are neither vehemently touch-feely nor vehemently traditional. I'm not a big fan of hand-holding and have even complained about it in print. To me, it smacks of enforced good cheer and saccharine singalongs. But the trouble with being against hand-holding is that it puts you in league with the church's most ultra-orthodox flat-Earthers.

Same here--though, mercifully, hand-holding hasn't gone quite this far in the Episcopal Church. Still, apart from our son's wedding last summer, I haven't been to church now for, I think 6 years.

I don't like the "horizontal dimension" in religion. I don't like the Peace, I don't like chatting in the pews before the service and I don't like running the gauntlet of ushers and greeters to get into the church.

It isn't that I'm misanthropic and it isn't that I'm afraid of germs. I am just shy: little social contacts and the protocols of friendliness stress me out. Not a lot: I've gotten used to saying hi to colleagues and minor chit chat with cashiers. But I would really rather not have it than have it: I like being private in public.

Sociability sometimes still overwelms me. I wanted to learn French--and one of the advantages of being an academic is getting to sit in on all the classes you want. But in the French II class I went to, as a pedagogical technique the instructor passed out lists of questions and had students go around to other students getting answers to the questions--a sort of scavenger hunt. I couldn't take it.

This is a really effective way to learn a language. After a summer of no French or in my case 30 years of no French, we were rusty. Then things started coming back--surprisingly. But I couldn't handle it. It might have been different if I were a traditionally-aged USD student, though even under optimal conditions I wouldn't have cared for it, but for me, as a professor, obviously older, it was just too uncomfortable. That's my quirk. I am, in this peculiar way shy. I would have stuck with it if I had to, but I didn't so I dropped the class.

What is surprising is the extent to which this kind of shyness is socially taboo--in the way that smoking or admitting that you like junk food is. It is not only shameful but, according to some, sinful. When I had a curmudgeonly letter published on Anglicans Online complaining about contemporary liturgy, the Peace and other elements of the "horizontal dimension" I was lambasted. Readers sent me emails, in some cases multiple emails condemning me as a reactionary and homophobe.

Homophobe? I suppose it's not entirely incomprehensible since social conservatives in the church have picked on liturgical revision as a symbolic issue to rally the troops. But I would bet that lots of people who had no axes to grind about same sex unions or other Red/Blue hot issues got in bed with these conservatives because they didn't like the horizontal liturgical style. After all if the guys in the pew next to me are gay, whether married in the church or not, how does it affect my church experience? What skin is it off my nose? Everything looks exactly the same.

If however I have to engage in "community" with ushers and greeters to get into the building, chit-chat with people before the service, shake hands or put up with hugs while making miserable noises about "justice, freedom and peace" that does profoundly change my church experience. Of course, ceteris paribus, I want to have enjoyable experiences and avoid stressful, unpleasant, embarrassing ones--why not?

At this point the pious, in a huff, snort "You don't go to church to get good experiences for your self" followed by a number of doctrinal claims about why one should go to church. Well, I don't buy any of them. As far as "building community" which, among the enlightened is supposed to be the purpose of church-going, if what that means facilitating little social niceties, hugging and chit-chat I can't see why this is supposed to be a religious duty. It is simply a taste that some people have and others don't have.

I suppose the idea is that friendliness is good because it spills over into altruistic behavior--that those of us who prefer using ATMs to chatting with bank tellers and find minor social interactions on the whole unpleasant are less likely to give to charity or work for social justice. But I doubt that this is so. Moreover, to the extent that friendliness and sympathy motivate altruism they seem to promote inefficient sentimentalities--sending out sympathy cards and hand-patting, taking Thanksgiving baskets to the deserving poor--rather than behavior that would be more efficient in maximizing utility, e.g. working and giving to promote the establishment of a welfare state. In any case, if what's wanted is altruistic behavior, promoting "community" is an inefficient, indirect and ineffective way to get it.

Friendliness is a taste--not a virtue much less a religious duty. And shyness isn't either a vice or a pathology but a feature of personality. I've leant how to make the appropriate noises, to act suitably in social situations, but it's something I'll never enjoy and I do not see why I should.

Give a pig!

Charitable Gift Giving that Makes a Difference | Heifer International

I just gave my son and daughter-in-law a pig for their almost simultaneous birthdays. I gave them a cow as a wedding present. Check out this link to the Heifer Project, a charity with low overhead that does lots of good.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Miers down

Miers Failed to Win Support of
Key Senators and Conservatives - New York Times

Harriet Miers has withdrawn and now, 7 am PDT, the TV pundits are running continuous coverage.

The remarkable thing is that everyone agrees Bush will favor women in appointing a successor. The administration doesn't seem to have any compunctions about affirmative action in appointing Supreme Court justices when, ironically, one of the qualifications for the position is opposition to affirmative action.

So here is a conundrum: why is affirmative action ok for ultra-elite high-visibility positions on the Supreme Court and in the Cabinet but not for the overwhelming majority of women who aren't in the pool for these ultra-elite jobs? What f-ing good is it if a few extraordinary women can get jobs as Supreme Court justices or Cabinet secretaries when the majority of women can't get a whole range of ordinary jobs that ordinary men can get?

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | This age of fanaticism is no time for non-believers to make enemies: "Humanists must assert the secularity and plurality of politics and citizenship; but in doing this we should not assume all believers differ from us. Christian humanists also believe politics is part of the secular sphere (the natural law, not the divine law). Religious fanaticism thrives domestically where there is either physical poverty or poverty of political and social ideals, and internationally where there is gross injustice. Humanists need to be more active in social policies and less fussy about the company we keep."

Humanists must assert the secularity and plurality of politics and citizenship; but in doing this we should not assume all believers differ from us. Christian humanists also believe politics is part of the secular sphere (the natural law, not the divine law). Religious fanaticism thrives domestically where there is either physical poverty or poverty of political and social ideals, and internationally where there is gross injustice. Humanists need to be more active in social policies and less fussy about the company we keep.

What a remarkably reasonable thing to say! Immured as I am at a Catholic college (and glad of it) I haven't seen an upsurge of anti-religous sentiment on the ground. But the chatter in the ether seems to be reaching a crescendo, Dawkins beating the drum with Dennett's obligato and a crowd of witnesses denouncing sharia and suicide-bombing as a natural and inevitable consequence of pernicious ontological commitments.

And that is what religion is: commitment to the existence of some supernatural being(s) packaged in a fabric of art, myth and liturgy. The idea that any metaphysical theory by its nature could drive people to lunacy and violence is as bizarre as the notion my mother and others 50 years ago entertained that daylight savings time was a Communist plot.

This is not intentionally naive. As it happens adherents of metaphysical systems form themselves into groups--and even more often, groups adopt metaphysical commitments as part of their corporate identity. They develop customs and policies and fight with members of competing tribes. So do ethnic groups, sports fans and street gangs competing for turf. Religious warfare is commonplace but it isn't at bottom theologically motivated--metaphysics is innert.

Tribalism and violence are part of our genetic heritage--religion, like blood kinship, language, football team fanship or neighborhood is just one of the markers we pick up to define our tribe, to sort out who we support and who we beat up. Metaphysics is epiphenomenal--Dawkins, Dennett and all the self-righteous secularists who've emerged lately to make the case that bloated ontologies produce social ills are either naive or, more likely, disingenuous.

People are more likely to do violence in the name of religion than in support of other intellectual commitments because in the aggregate religious people are more likely to be uneducated, tribal and sexually diamorphic. Football fans of competing teams wreck property and do violence to one another because they're working class lads; opera fans who worship competing divas do not trash the neighborhood and beat up on oneanother because they are effete snobs.

American Prospect Online - ViewWeb

There was a time when a "liberal" was something most people -- even some conservatives -- wanted to be. On the stump in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower said "we need in Washington liberal and experienced members of Congress." Eight years later, Richard Nixon quoted FDR's definition of a liberal as "a man who wants to build bridges over the chasms that separate humanity from a better life," and said, "It is a wonderful definition, and I agree with him."

But when Republicans began to go after liberalism, Democrats cowered in fear, not only trying to distance themselves from the term but embracing the idea that a "conservative" is a great thing to be...As part of a solution, many on the left have decided to start with a clean slate, ditching "liberal" in favor of "progressive." As a strategic move, this has much to commend it. Recent American political history has made it hard to argue that the root of "liberal" -- liberty -- belongs more to the left than to the right.

It depends what you mean by "liberty"--or perhaps what kind of liberty matters. The kind of liberty that matters to most writers who concern themselves with these issues, whether on the left or right, makes no difference at all to most people. Freedom of the press? How many journalists are there--and how many people who have any interest in serious news or opinion? Freedom of speech? How many people care about anything beyond gossip, shoptalk and the minutia of daily life? Business owners balk at the constraints imposed by the state--the rules and regulations about workplace safety and fair hiring practices and the burden of paperwork that undermines their liberty to do business as they please. But how many people own businesses?

People who construe liberty in these terms are highly privileged: they don't realize the real constraints on most people's freedom--poverty and drudgery. In the most fundamental sense liberty is just the absence of physical constraint. Most people don't have that privilege: work for most means being physically constrained, being confined to a small space--at a desk, behind a counter, at a check-out stand, at best, in a room. You punch in in the morning and there you stay--every day like a long plane flight--until you punch out. Most people have little choice about the work they do. They're also mentally constrained, doing repetitious tasks that make it impossible to think about anything else--inputting data, dealing with customers, answering phones.

Outside of the privileged few who have, by dint of dumb luck, managed to avoid "real work"--like me--this is life and there is no way out. I know this because, having been a bad girl in high school I ended up working for half a year as a clerk-typist at a bus company, until my mother bought me into an expensive college for rich underachievers. I was 17--some of the girls who worked with me were not much older, but they were dead. They were married, trying desperately to get pregnant--their ticket out. I listened to their conversation day by day (they wouldn't talk to me because I'd gotten into a political argument about the war in Vietnam early on). They had no aspirations because there were no options for them--the only career ladder lead to Office Manager, the position of Miss McCauley, an elderly spinster, occupied. Who wanted that? They didn't even want to travel. They just wanted out. There was nothing to learn, nothing to accomplish, nothing to make, no way to improve or achieve. Even going fast made no difference: when I finished my work and asked for more they laughed at me: "sort paper clips and look busy." That is what real work is.

My mother plonked down her money for tuition so I got out. But that is the only reason I got out--I was no different from any of them apart from simply being richer. When I got to Lake Forest College I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I didn't have to spend my entire day at a desk in one room. I didn't have to spend my entire day filing cards, stamping tapes and trying to look busy when I was done. And the only reason I didn't was because my mother had money--I took that to heart and it made my politics.

The whole aim of liberalism is to see it that people have options--that no one is stuck doing the drudge work I did permanently because they don't come from rich families. The market won't make that happen--that is simply an empirical fact. If my mother hadn't bailed me out I couldn't have worked my way though school as a clerk-typist for Intercity Trans. Co., Inc. I couldn't have afforded the tuition making, as I did, $60/week; I wouldn't have had the time to go to classes, much less study. I wouldn't have had the energy to do anything besides work--when I came home, I just went to bed and cried myself to sleep.

Liberalism is about liberty--real liberty: the provision of real options for people so that they don't have to do jobs like this if they're prepared to make the effort to get education and training.

Diapers

Dare to Bare - New York Times

Most babies and toddlers around the world, and throughout human history, have never worn diapers. For instance, in places like China, India and Kenya, children wear split pants or run around naked from the waist down. When it's clear that they have to go, they can squat or be held over the right hole in a matter of seconds. Parents and caretakers in these cultures see diapers as not the best, but the worst alternative. Why bind bulky cloth around a small child? Why use a disposable diaper that keeps buckets of urine next to tender skin? The trick is that infants in these cultures are always physically entwined with a parent or someone else, and "elimination communication" is the norm. With bare bottoms, they ride on the hip or back and it's easy to feel when they need to go... I was against the Western ideology of making my child independent and self-reliant. I rejected the crib, stroller and jump seat, all devices intended to teach babies to be on their own. Instead I embraced the ideology of non-Western cultures and opted for the closest kind of attachment I could get.

Why use diapers? Because we don't want to carry babies on our hips or be "physically entwined" with toddlers for most of the day. It's a matter of adult convenience not a cultural psychological bathroom fixations or the value we place on making our children independent. It's a matter of the value we place on our own independence, our own legitimately selfish desire not to be bothered by little kids.

Throughout human history and in places like China, India and Kenya women haven't been valued--our time wasn't worth anything. Our only job was to drudge for our husbands, children and extended families--carrying babies on our hips all day, making sure to put them on the pot before they pooped, carrying jugs of water on our heads, grinding meal, cooking whole grains from scratch and all the other labor-intensive fruits-and-nuts-approved activities that impose drudge work on women and eat up our time.

I didn't embrace the stroller and jump seat because I wanted to teach my babies to be independent: I used these labor-saving devices because I wanted to make things easier for myself. I slept in the same bed with my babies because it was easier for me, not because it was better for them. I never made any attempt to toilet train them because I didn't want to bother. When they got sick of wearing dirty diapers they started using the toilet of their own accord.

Let's get real here: running around with a bare bottom is probably more pleasant for little kids than wearing dirty diapers. But it's less convenient for adults. There is a conflict of interests and there is no reason why the child's interests should trump the adult's.

Articles like the one linked here set my teeth on edge. When my kids were babies the preaching was about using cloth diapers rather than paper and grinding your own baby food. And no one ever dared to say, "I don't make my own baby food because it's a hassle to grind vegetables and wash up the grinder--if there's some marginal advantage to the baby to get freshly ground food that's outweighed by the major hassle to me." No one dared say either "I use paper diapers because it's easier and I care more about my convenience than I do about the environment or my baby's comfort.

No one--that is no women--dared to say such things because no woman dared say "I count: my time and convenience matter as much as my kids' well-being so I will not sacrifice for them. Everyone, including me, counts as one, no one counts as more or less than one, and in case of a tie I come first."

Euthanasia: Me first--screw you!

a href="http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article318385.ece

The whole debate between conservatives and liberals seems to be distilled as one of whether getting what one wants is what is most important. I think it is.

But that's precisely why I oppose euthanasia. I want to survive as long as possible and I don't care how much of a burden I am on anyone. It's my life and all that I have. I don't want to be bullied or manipulated into having myself put down. I just want to live as long as I can--that's it. Fuck everyone else--I want to live.

I don't want some crappy little legislative policy empowering my relatives to pull the plug on me. It isn't a matter of stupid rules vs. what people want. It's what people want vs. what their relatives, and the state, want. Fuck them.

Kurt Vonnegut interviewed on PBS

NOW | PBS

What a detestable old fart. Speaking as an anthropology MA he notes that we need "little gangs," clans and extended families. Very romantic--he obviously hasn't seen tribalism on the ground in North Jersey--or even watched The Sopranos.

Vonnegut is of course a Humanist and, in fact, the honorary president of the Humanist Society. But this doesn't stop him from quoting the Beatitudes and making the conventional sanctimonious noises about how it didn't matter that Jesus wasn't God because what mattered were the marvelous things he said. Of course Vonnegut is very selective, citing the Sermon on the Mount but not the crackpot apocalyptic ranting or puritanical moralism.

He finishes with a little story about the joys of going out to buy ONE envelope and, on the way, smelling the flowers--waving to people in the street, chatting with salespeople and shoppers in the stores, concluding that we were "born to fart around." Well this is nice when you're an 85 year old millionaire celebrity. So sorry but I hate farting around--crapping around with the business of life makes me miserable and I am sick of hearing sanctimonious old farts preach about the virtue of going with the flow and stopping to smell the flowers.

What a despicable, over-rated, self-satisfied, old fart--consecrated as a cultural icon because he succeed in distilling the adolescent cynicism of ten million over-privileged children 40 years ago.

Taking Turkey Personally

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/10/04/eu.turkeytalks

I've been following the Turkish bid to join the EU for years now, and taking it personally. I was nervous when I read that Austria opposed them and felt genuine relief and pure joy when there was an eleventh hour reprieve.

Modern Turkey surely is a state that played it right: under Ataturk it modernized, Westernized and secularized. The Arabic alphabet was out, Roman alphabet in; women were emancipated, veils were out and men's turbans as well. The aim was to be European.

If the EU had rejected Turkey it would have confirmed the worst fears of all cultural outsiders, in particular all Muslims, viz. that exclusion was inevitable: that no matter how acculturated a nation or individual became there would be no way to overcome "otherness"--and appearance. The message would have been clear: we don't care how committed you are to democracy and the values of the Enlightenment, how much you want to assimilate, how far you will go to adopt the values and policies of liberal European nations--we will not accept you because you are Other, and because we don't want lots of swarthy Mediterranean types with big mustaches and lots of body hair getting access to our countries.