Where's the outcry?

American Prospect Online - Fighting for Fair Treatment

In Memphis in 1997, Burlington Northern hired Sheila White to operate a forklift in its rail yard. The other employees, all men, were furious -- even though none of them had the qualifications to run the forklift -- because forklift driver was considered the plum job. White’s foreman and co-workers told her insistently that they didn’t think a woman should be working there in a rail yard.

Is it really possible that in 1997 people were still talking about “men’s jobs” and “women’s jobs”? Yes, it’s illegal. But forklift operator, a coveted blue-collar job that often pays more than ordinary factory or day laborer work, is widely considered a man’s job, and women are often told they can’t do it...

Employers are getting away with blatant sex discrimination because there’s no public outcry -- indeed, almost no public scrutiny at all. Think how easy it was for me to grab a good seat to hear Burlington Northern v. White, with two long empty rows of press seats behind me. Yes, it’s important that women have the right to decide what happens inside their uteruses. But it’s just as important that we be able to support ourselves. When will we start to care passionately about whether women are treated fairly on the job?

Those who talk don't know and those who know don't talk. To rehearse the obvious, we the talkers--academics, journalists and political activists--don't know any forklift drivers and have never considered forklift driving as a career option. We've had abortions or know people who have or can imagine being in a circumstances where access to safe, legal abortion would be important for us, our daughters or people we know.

Of course it's important that women have the right to decide what happens inside their uteruses. But from the plain, crude utilitarian perspective it is, if anything more important to eliminate sex segregation in employment. Last time I looked, the index of sex segregation in the labor force was 60%, that is, to eliminate sex segregation in employment, 60% of working women would have to have to change jobs. I don't have disaggregated figures but it's a safe bet that jobs that don't take a college degree--the majority of jobs, and the ones that we, the talkers, don't notice--account for most of that figure. In any case, far more people suffer from the effects of sex segregation and the male-female wage gap, and including not only women but children living in poverty as a consequence, than will ever be directly effected by policies on abortion or, as noted in the article, the other liberal signature issue--gay rights. This isn't to say that progressives should drop these issues--but that they should pay more attention to bread-and-butter issues that aren't of immediate concern to their "base": the talkers.

I've just gotten back from a conference on discrimination at which participants addressed the question of what constituted (wrongful) discrimination. Most thought that this was a vexed question. I don't understand this skepticism: if a woman can't get a job driving a forklift, or having gotten one against the odds can't keep it because her forman and mates object to a woman doing a "man's job," that is discrimination. A slim majority argued that even if there was wrongful discrimination in employment, it would be wrong for the state to intervene. There were subtle reasons for this involving "rights."

It was actually one of the best conferences I've attended--and I'm a conference junkie. The discussion was terrific. But sometimes I felt that I was from a different moral universe. To me, as a consequentialist, the problem is obvious, even if the fix is difficult and complicated: lots of people are badly off because women can't get "men's jobs" and, to a lesser but not negligible extent, because men can't get some fairly desirable "women's jobs." The costs to people whose choices are restricted by this system is much greater than the benefits to clients, customers and co-workers who want people who do various jobs to look the part. The market isn't working so it needs to be fixed. The hard part is figuring out the most efficient way to do it or, realistically, to make some headway in that direction. Things will never be perfect, but they can be better. Why is this so hard to see?

The sense I got was, oh sure, if you're a Utilitarian its easy but let's see what we can make of the discrimination issue operating within a framework involving "rights," "autonomy" and that sort of thing. But why not turn this on its head: we know what discrimination is in central cases--we know the meaning even if we don't know the analysis--and we know it's wrong. Now let's come up with an ethical theory to explain why, and figure out how to fix it. Consequentialism does a really good job.

Next weekend I'll go to the local SWIP (Society for Women in Philosophy) conference where I will do another number, this time on multiculturalism, arguing again on consequentialist grounds that what Sen calls "plural monoculturalism," the "salad bowl" model, is a bad thing for the same reasons that Sen does: it restricts individual choice. Whereas I had fun at the discrimination conference, and get a fair hearing from rights-obsessed libertarians and deontologists, I have the sense that many members of SWIP don't want me there--when I arrive it's like "Oh, shit, here comes H. the Utilitarian." I go because I am very, very interested in feminist issues and related questions, like the multiculturalism question, because I want comments on papers I write on these issues, preferably hostile since those are in many respects the most helpful, and because this is the most accessible venue for discussing these issues. But I get panned for not being a real feminist--not only at SWIP meetings but in print: I discovered ex post facto that I'd been cited in a book on "backlash" as part of the backlash to feminist philosophy.

Well, why, dammit? From the practical point of view I am on board with the agenda. I argue for the elimination of sex roles. I argue for affirmative action, including hard quotas. I'm pro-choice and support equal treatment for gays, though these just aren't the burning issues for me. Increasingly, academic feminists--particularly in philosophy, have latched onto crazy theories to defend programs for promoting women's equality and this just plays into the hands of the opposition. I have data, I have arguments and I have a fairly respectable, if controversial, ethical framework to support feminist claims. Where's the beef?

The Euston Manifesto

The Euston Manifesto - Home

We are democrats and progressives. We propose here a fresh political alignment. Many of us belong to the Left, but the principles that we set out are not exclusive. We reach out, rather, beyond the socialist Left towards egalitarian liberals and others of unambiguous democratic commitment. Indeed, the reconfiguration of progressive opinion that we aim for involves drawing a line between the forces of the Left that remain true to its authentic values, and currents that have lately shown themselves rather too flexible about these values.

I've just signed the Euston Manifesto--do thou likewise (if you agree with the version of unrepentant liberalism represented on this blog).

In spite of the incompetence and corruption of the Bush regime, and popular disapproval, it is unlikely that Democrats in the US will benefit unless progressives commit to a reasonable, coherent political agenda and disabuse the American public of popular myths about liberalism.

In the US, the Left's agenda was set during the Vietnam era and remains inextricably linked with the anti-war movement and the cultural revolution of the period. To most Americans, Liberalism means playing Dove rather than Hawk in both foreign and domestic policy, denigrating America, and buying into the romantic cultural relativism that was popular amongst privileged undergraduates during the late '60s.

That is not what Liberalism is all about. The core value of Liberalism is the liberation of individuals from constraints imposed by race, sex, class and all unchosen circumstances that limit their options. I, and many other Liberals believe that, as a matter of empirical fact, the most effective way to achieve these ends is through social engineering, stringent, rigorously enforced government regulations prohibiting discrimination and a big government tax-and-spend welfare state. But whatever works is fine with me.

These ends are however inimical to cultural relativism. Traditional societies are racist, sexist and tribal--they severely restrict individuals' options on the basis of unchosen characteristics and circumstances of their lives. Such cultures are defective and the aim of Liberals should be to liberate individuals from them rather than to preserve them. These ends, moreover, license interference in the affairs of sovereign states. When dictatorial regimes violate the rights of their citizens or conduct genocides, intervention is warranted. War is a last resort but if that is the only way to stop such regimes from beating up on their citizens, so be it.

Some on the Left will take this as compromise, as Centrism, or even crypto-conservatism. Not. The aim of Liberalism is to promote individual wellbeing by eliminating poverty, expanding individual options and liberating individuals from the constraints imposed by defective cultures. If this means dismantling defective cultures and waging war against oppressive regimes then so be it. There is no compromise possible when it comes to individual wellbeing, no compromise or surrender when it comes to the promotion of the welfare state.

Next stop--Iran

The New Yorker: Fact

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

Here we go again--though this time the plan seems to be a low-casualty air war (on the American side) with the use of tactical nuclear weapons to bust underground bunkers not ruled out. Is it sabre-rattling? A trial balloon to see if the American public are agreeable? Or is it, as the Iraq war was, a fait accompli?

It's not too hard to understand, really. Last night on the Sopranos, when Tony felt he was losing his grip, he beat up his young, buffbody guard just to show who the alpha male still was. When you're on this merry-go-round it's stay on top or get ground up in the machinery.

Bush got on and now there's no other way off. Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. A high-tech air war to take out the Iranian government and blast the country back to the stone age is about the only way he can win back his constituency and refurbish he legacy: George W. Bush--not a bungler after all but a homocidal lunatic. He has nothing to lose at this point and might as well go for broke.

And you know what? If he manages to get this show on the road Americans will love it. Journalists will film the mushroom clouds, brave bomber pilots will be interviewed on CNN, flags will wave and after a 3 week blitzkrieg, with Iran flattened, we'll have the decisive victory we thought we'd get in Iraq. The moral: no half-measures, don't expect the wogs to throw flowers at tanks driving through their streets--just blow the place up and be done with it.

Sopranos II: The Hotel California

EAGLES %u2014 ( Hotel California Lyrics )

On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair
Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim
I had to stop for the night
There she stood in the doorway;
I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself,
’this could be heaven or this could be hell’
Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way
There were voices down the corridor,
I thought I heard them say...

Welcome to the hotel california
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely face
Plenty of room at the hotel california
Any time of year, you can find it here

Tony is comatose, in intensive care, dreaming of a stay in a California convention hotel. And will die--but not just yet. All bets are off but there's enough information now to make some educated guesses.

Predictably, AJ has gotten kicked out of college and, consistent with his character, tells Carmella about it just outside the ICU where she's spent the night. But now we also know how AJ will meet his end: on his shift with Tony (after he's been bullied and shamed into doing his duty), AJ announces that he's going after Junior to avenge the shooting. So the circle is complete and the parallel is perfect: Jackie, Rose, and Jackie, Jr.--Tony, Carmella and AJ--the mob boss, the widowed first lady, and the punk kid, too dumb and ironically too lacking in moral fiber to make it onto the first rung of organized crime. In case it isn't sufficiently obvious, recall Carmella's conversation with Rose in the hospital waiting room. Carmella makes excuses for AJ's behavior but Rose, always reliable, won't have it: AJ is a selfish brat. Carmella, who takes this as a criticism of her child-rearing practices makes a feeble attempt to suggest that she's reading Jackie's character onto AJ--but sees that that is quite accurate.

Tony will die. Gene's suicide set the theme:

You can checkout any time you like,
But you can never leave!

And Carmella blurted out to the doctor, "Does he know that he's dying?--the fallacy of many questions. The seven souls in the intro to the first episode are leaving, the silver cord that attaches him to family, friends, work, world broken strand by strand. And at Gene's funeral--funerals are where a good deal of Family business gets done--the business is reconfigured to anticipate Tony's death. Silvio Dante passes out the new assignments and sets up Carmella's widows' pension.

But Tony can't die immediately because there isn't another male character that's sufficiently developed to carry the show for the rest of the season and the "bonus" episodes. So while Tony is on ice, while the strands are broken we have to detach from Tony and be drawn into one or more of the other male characters. I can't guess who it will be. Chris is the obvious candidate but in some respects the most difficult to draw us because we know so much about him from the outside.

There's also another literary problem here. We need time to develop sympathy for some other male character or characters so Tony has to stay on ice to keep us in. But so long as Tony is in hospital dying it's difficult, if not impossible, to play comedy. And for me, and probably a large minority of other viewers the chief appeal of the Sopranos was as a family sit-com. Surprisingly, reading some fan sites, most viewers are more interested in the crime drama and soap opera strands--which can play while Tony is in the ICU so the show can go on, but not hitting on all three cylinders.

Meanwhile, in this episode we've been with Tony in the Hotel California--initially, at least, such a lovely place--at a businessmen's convention in keeping with Tony's view of himself as a "captain of industry type" (as he puts it to Melfi on one occasion). The problem is that Tony isn't there. He's lost his identity kit and picked up a wallet and attache case that belong to one Kevin Finity--"Kev Infinity" as a guy in the bar puns or Kevin Finity. Definitely metaphysical. Tony has really lost his identity here--Kevin isn't even Italian and we remember the other vision of hell in the Sopranos, Chris's brief visit during which he discovers that hell is an Irish bar where every day is St. Patrick's Day. Chris is "just visiting" and we get the comic relief of Carmella's Prayer and her women's magazine notions about seeing the white light at the end of the tunnel. Nothing like that here.

The other parallel of course is Tony's dream episode when he sleeps at the Plaza. But this time there's no out--he can't make the morning call to Carmella, just as he couldn't complete the 911 call. And he is definitely losing it--slapped around by a Buddhist monk (the ultimate contrast--the mafia boss vs. the Buddhist monk), fallen down the stairs, told he has incipient Altzheimers, all themes wrapped around the goings on in the hospital room--the bald Asian doctor, Carmella's remarks about the MRI, Junior's dementia.

The Hotel California episode is worthy of Sartre or Camus. Tony falls in with a group of middle management/sales types--on a treadmill, selling junk, doing junk, going to glitzy hotels to drink and screw. In the booth at the bar the women, who he predictably tries to seduce, notes that they're all in the same club:

Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said ’we are all just prisoners here, of our own device’

Now that the Sopranos is set to end there's no compelling reason for the writers to pull ratings so they can be as arty as they please, and that, I suspect, is what they will do--because this is the Great American Novel. Of course I have my own tastes--I think the other leading contender is the body of Updike's Rabbit books and stories, and for many of the same reasons.

So I predict that in due course, once the business has been reconfigured and other male characters have been adequately developed, Tony will die. I do hope that there won't be a pious episode posing ethical questions about removing life-support. There will be the mob funeral and, I'm almost certain Meadow's announcement of her pregnancy. Meadow is a good girl and a smart girl, but she doesn't have any real career plans or serious interests--doctor or lawyer, what's the diff? She'll marry Finn and do ok. Once Tony is out of the way the remaining episodes of the season will be business as usual under the new regime--including AJ's attempt to whack Junior and AJ's death. But, I believe, the 8 bonus episodes will be the Gottendammerung, the Twilight of the Mob. Hardly a happy ending since the FBI are the heavies.

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
’relax,’ said the night man,
We are programmed to receive.
You can checkout any time you like,
But you can never leave!

Taliban at Yale

OpinionJournal - John Fund on the Trail

Never has an article made me blink with astonishment as much as when I read in yesterday's New York Times magazine that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former ambassador-at-large for the Taliban, is now studying at Yale on a U.S. student visa. This is taking the obsession that U.S. universities have with promoting diversity a bit too far. Something is very wrong at our elite universities.

Oh, dear. When I was Mr. Hashemi's age I was a member of SDS and took part in an abortive plot to blow up the Pump House at Lake Forest College--a small, octagonal building at the campus edge of Faculty Circle. Since there was no ROTC program we planned to put up a sign saying "ROTC Building" first, and then blow it up. Fortunately, even though we knew a cooperative chemistry major who cooked meth, we couldn't find anyone willing or able to provide high explosives.

This was definitely small potatoes, but we were Cromwells guiltless our our country's blood. There just weren't any explosives to be had in the North Shore suburbs, or AK-47s. And, with GREs and LSATs in the offing our SDS chapter dissipated: we were, as some of the true believers complained, co-opted.

I'm all for co-optation. According to some ancient statistic I picked up, it costs more to sent a boy to Borstal (is there still such a thing?) than to Eton. The solution is obvious, although Borstal Boy Brendan Behan seems to have enjoyed his experience in the youth correctional system and writes of it with nostalgia reminiscent of Tom Brown's School Days. As for twenty-something terrorists, I'm all for sending them to Yale--or at least Lake Forest College--in the interests of strategic co-optation.

There are mad, bad people all over who can't be co-opted. But they don't get much of a following from people who have to prepare for the LSATs. Most of us are only moderately bad and, even if we wish it were otherwise, not mad at all. We're prudent, self-interested and corrupt: given the prospect of crass material comfort we wouldn't blow up an ornamental gazebo.

This is an extension of Jarad Dimond's Dangerous Idea that "tribal peoples often damage their environments and make war. Why is this idea dangerous?" asks Diamond.

Because too many people today believe that a reason not to mistreat tribal people is that they are too nice or wise or peaceful to do those evil things, which only we evil citizens of state governments do. The idea is dangerous because, if you believe that that's the reason not to mistreat tribal peoples, then proof of the idea's truth would suggest that it's OK to mistreat them. In fact, the evidence seems to me overwhelming that the dangerous idea is true. But we should treat other people well because of ethical reasons, not because of naïve anthropological theories that will almost surely prove false.

More generally, people who are badly off--poor, ignorant and oppressed--behave badly and, arguably, they behave badly because they are badly off. To cope with hard, brutal circumstances you have to be hard and brutal. The richer, more educated and more privileged people are the nicer they are--because they can afford to be, and because there are opportunity costs for bad behavior. So the solution, again, is obvious. Treat people well--not out of a smarmy sense of compassion, or because we think they're too nice or wise or peaceful to do evil things, but because it produces results. Prep school, not reform school; Yale, not Gitmo.

Sopranos Redux

OK. I was wrong. This was a very surprising episode and a good one because the writers resisted the impulse to turn it into a warmady: it was not soft.

The major plot which, presumably announces the theme for the season, was the impossibility of getting out. Tony will not release a minor character, who comes into an inheritance, from is mob obligations and the character, who it turns out has been ratting to the feds all along, squeezed between the mob, the cops and his family, hangs himself. It echoes the Adrianna theme: the feds lose an informant by turning the screws too tight.

it's the echoes of earlier episodes that make this series a cut above the usual and provide an aesthetic unity that make it, as I still believe, the Great American Novel. Carmella does lunch with Angie Bumpasera, widow of Pussy who's gotten whacked, and they compare their new cars. Carmella, impressed, asks Angie if she's bought the car herself and Angie, who doesn't get it, says that she paid cash because it was a better deal.

Recall the episodes following Pussy's whacking. Tony, in the finest traditions of the Mob, takes Angie on as a financial dependent, but gets angry when it turns out that she is driving a Cadillac while pleading poverty to Carmella. He smashes in the windows of her car and warns her that if she needs money he is the only legitimate source--she isn't to complain to Carmella or attempt, what he regards, as scams. Angie, who has been trying to pick up extra cash by passing out samples in the local supermarket, then persuades Tony to let her run Pussy's body shop, and does a decent job of it--such a decent job that she can buy her own car, and a very nice one at that, for cash, something Carmella envies.

Carmella's pseudo-business, financed by Tony, is not doing so well. In partnership with her father, she's built a "spec house" on a $600,000 lot in the woods where Tony buries his bodies. Predictably De Angelis pere has cut corners illegally expecting that that inspectors can be bought off and, it seems, they can't. Without being smarmy, there's a heavy moral message here: if you run an honest business, like Angie's body shop or Hesch's music business, even if you get help from the mob, you will get a car, or a horse farm, and do ok. If you run a pseudo-business or a front operation, like Carmella's construction business or Adrianna's night club, you will not do ok. The theme here should be the Mob and the Protestant Work Ethic.

There are other fascinating threads that will be picked up. Artie and Charmaign are getting back together, which I predicted. And I suspect that the deal is that Vesuvio will not be a front for the Mob. Then there is the solidarity of mob women theme--Carmella mending fences with both Angie and Ginny. I'm not terribly worried about Tony's being shot by Uncle Junior--he did dial 911 even if he didn't manage to say anything when they answered. The paramedics will come to the house, keep Tonly alive and get him to the hospital.

I'm more interested in Janice and Bobby. Bobby plays with model trains--wearing a train-drivers cap. Who's surprised? Janice, awful as ever, has had a baby. This is really, potentially at least, a story of redemption. I am still convinced that at the end, Tony will die (or less likely be incarcerated), the Jersey mob will collapse, and Bobby and Janice will walk out unscathed, possibly into a sitcom. Maybe because Janice, that perfectly appalling fat, curley-haired, redheaded, hippie bitch is a little bit of an alter ego but I'd also like to see Virtue triumph, and the only virtue left so far is Bobby.

Sopranos: The 6th Season

OK. I just finished grading my logic midterms and posting the grades. Now we can get down to serious business.

First of all, there should not be a sixth season of the Sopranos because the 5 seasons represent a perfect aesthetic unity and, in themselves, constitute the Great American Novel. The whacking of Adrianna was the perfect climax and the loose ends which anyone could pick up represented the perfect ending.

Here is now the system works. Adrianna, the epitome of virtue within the system had to be whacked because the idea of virtue-within-the-system is inconsistent. Meadow gets out. This is the Seventh Seal theme, the dance of death: Meadow and Finn are the young couple who will survive. As for the others there is no exit. They settle for their destiny. Carmella had a shot but there's no realistic chance: her only option is business as usual. Consider the reconcelliation scene: Tony promises to be more discrete about his indiscretions and gets her an Hermes scarf; then they go into the woods, where he dumps his bodies and plan a new house. And that is it: men provide money and protection; women put up with business as usual. It beats typing.

Now as to the new season. AJ will get whacked at some point though not initially I think. He can't get into college but he's too dumb to make it in the mob (as Tony confesses to Malfi on one occasion). There's nowhere for this character to go. This has been a theme since the beginning. This kid is initially nice but dumb. Carmella pushes him beyond his academic capabilities because college is the only way out of the family business--and both Carmella and Tony want their kids to escape. But pushing only makes AJ resentful and undermines any possibility of his getting into some legitimate career. Here is tragegy: the very efforts the Sopranos make to keep AJ from getting into the Mafia make it inevitable that he will get in--and get killed. I'm certain about this scenario. It's the only literary possibility for this character.

Junior. Probably the first episode will be Uncle Junior's funeral. Death by natural causes: Junior cheats the hangman. This isn't really inevitable, but there isn't much further to go with this character.

Nothing else is really motivated at this point. What I'm most interested in is the Bobby=Janice menage. Apart from the deceased Adrianna, Bobby is the only truly good person in the bunch. Like Tony he's a border crosser (on the model of Hermes, Persephone, and Heracles who can go to the Underworld and come back). In the Pine Barrens episode tough guys Pauli and Chrissy end up as desperate children, completely incompetent in South Jersey. They can't make it in the real world. Bobby, who's been through normal experiences like hunting with his Dad saves them.

Bobby's never even really done anything bad. His main job has been being Junior's caregiver. He never does violence: when we see him at work all he does is bully a guy at a bar into installing the mob's preferred candidate in a union position. Small potatoes.

The trouble is that no one in the mob can get out so to get Babby out the family has to collapse. Bobby is good so can't turn states evidence. As with Adrianna, being good in the mob is an impossible position: loyalty demands badness but disloyalty is itself bad. Ultimately Tony will get killed (or possibly sent to jail)--he can't get out. Then I think Bobby, who's small potatoes and not worth going after, will train to be a geriatric nurse. And he and Janice, incredibly, will survive. Janice is, after all, a surviver.

I think the last episode will be Tony's funeral and then, back at the Soprano's household, Carmella weeping in the kitchen while chopping vegetables, Meadow standing at her side mixing the dip tells her, shyly, that he's pregnant for a bitter-sweet ending. That, in any case, is the way it should be played.

I'm rushing to get this in before the first episode of the Sixth Season airs tomorrow. Remember--you heard it here first!

Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . COVER STORY . Right to Live . August 26, 2005 | PBS
Leslie Burke took his case to court, asking that artificial nutrition and fluids not be withheld when he becomes incapacitated. A high court agreed, ruling that doctors must abide by the wishes of the patient if those wishes are expressed while the patient is still competent. Disabled rights groups cheered the verdict. Not so Britain's National Health Service, which must pay the bills; not so many doctors; and not so the General Medical Council, which appealed.

This is the stuff we need to hear. We'd like to believe that there was a pre-established harmony in these matters. That people who are inconvenient or expensive to maintain would want to be put down. The media run innumerable feel-good stories to soothe us and persuade us that what we want--to be rid of inconvenient people who impose an emotional burden on us and whose maintenance costs money--is in their interests as well as ours.

Sorry. Not so. I would trade the destruction of the entire universe for one more minute of survival, in any state whatsoever. That isn't a moral decision. It's a prudential decision--that is what I want and, I believe, getting what one wants, whatever it is, is the greatest good.

Now from the moral point of view, conflicting interests have to be traded off. Maybe it would not be the morally correct decision to keep Mr. Burke alive at the expense of the taxpayer. It certainly wouldn't be morally decent to trade the destruction of the entire universe for one more minute of my survival. Maybe it would be desirable to propagandize people into preferring to be put down when they are burdensome or expensive to maintain.

But let us at least be honest. We cannot assume that putting down people who are inconvenient or expensive is always in their interests. There is a conflict of interests between patients who want to survive and others on whom they impose a burden. Some patients may want to die. That's fine--pull their plugs or give them the wherewithall to suicide out. Others don't--let's not fool ourselves into thinking that they would be better off dead. Wellbeing is what one wants, whatever it is.

iPods, busywork and some reflections on altruism

I'm giving a midterm tomorrow so I've had some students in to see me. One, an ok and reasonably diligent one, came to my office plugged into her iPod and, after our discussion immediately pulled out the iPod to plug back in. I noted that my #2 son had the same model and we discussed its virtues. She said that she couldn't handle not having her iPod with her anymore--her music, she said, was her stream of consciousness and she felt naked without it. I supposed that I understood that but noted that when I'd tried using headphones it made me feel trapped and angry because I couldn't think about things. She said that she didn't want to think about things when she was out of class and needed her music because it filled her head.

De gustibus. It did seem crazy though. When I go to bed or have to take a long drive I like to have some project hanging or a question I'm interested in unsolved so that I have something to think about, something to entertain me. I can't imagine having this preference to have ones head filled with noise.

One thing I learnt though in my long and futile campaign to get ordained was that people have a variety of preferences, including some that I just couldn't figure. I discovered, for example, that among people who were involved in the Church there were a surprising number who had a taste to "do for" people, as they described it. They weren't Pharisees or hypocrites, they didn't just want to be seen to do good or only to seem to be good: they genuinely wanted to help. But on the other hand, they didn't just want things to be fixed or for people to be better off: they wanted people to be better off through their efforts and wanted to be needed.

And they didn't want to "do for" people because they were involved in the Church or because they thought there'd be any rewards for it in the here or hereafter. If anything, they got involved in the Church because it provided opportunities to "do for" people. In fact the whole operation seemed geared to provide opportunities, most of them bogus, for do-good work. When clergy talked about "empowering the laity" it meant providing busywork for laypeople to make them feel useful. The assumption was that lay people were so incompetent, unconfident and just lacking in the ability to organize any projects that they needed clergy to encourage them, give them direction and help them find projects to make them feel useful. It was infuriating--patronizing. Moreover I had to do all this stuff to build my ordination vita, and pretend I thought it was worthwhile.

The worst of it was the Daughters of the King. They prayed for people. Once a month on Saturday morning we met to to tweek the Prayer List, adding names for Healing and for Strength and Guidance, and dropping people who had either been sufficiently healed, strengthened or guided, or who had had their innings. Being cynical, part of the appeal was the gossip value, particularly for Strength and Guidance: the ladies liked chewing over all the details of people's diseases and personal problems. Still, that wasn't the whole of it: they really thought that they were doing a good job for people by setting up that prayer list and praying for them. What I really couldn't handle was the Prayer Chain. This was a round robin telephone call arrangement that was activated when any of the ladies got news of an urgent need to be prayed for. I would get a call and then have to call the next lady on the chain to pass on the the prayer request. And I prayed that I would get the answering machine. It was all, in a bizarre way, businesslike--launching into action and getting that praying done for the poor jerk whose case had been brought to the attention of the Daughters.

What was queer though, and not only about the Daughters, but about most of the women who were involved in these traditional church-lady activities was that they were more interested in what they thought they were accomplishing than in the intrinsic character of what they were doing. They would do any miserable shitwork if they thought it was going good--as they understood it. They counted the collection money, they organized fund-raisers, they worked in food pantries, they collected rags, junk and garbage for rummage sales, did every sort of miserable, boring, drudgery--and liked it because they thought they were being useful.

I just hated, hated the whole damn thing. I spent years trying to fit into this picture, to be a good person by these standards even though I didn't even believe that this was what being a good person was all about. It wasn't the metaphysical leap of faith I couldn't manage--because if the truth be told, even if I can't really give reasons, I buy the theology. But I do not buy the ethics: I do not believe that this taste for "doing for" people, for being useful, is intrinsically good and I am outraged that the Church not only promotes it, but flatters people for having it and identifies it as virtue.

I suppose in some circumstances cultivating this desire to be useful is a good thing: there is some shitwork that needs to be done. If you can get some people to do it for free and feel good about it that's fine. If you have a large population of women who have no disposable income or salable skills but lots of time on their hands it's worth squeezing all the work you can out of them however time-consuming--their time isn't worth anything and there are no opportunity costs. If an old lady spends 10 hours crocheting a tea cosy to sell at the Crafts Faire for $1.00 that's fine because there's nothing else she could be doing with those 10 hours. 10¢/hour is better than nothing/hour. If the Daughters of the King devote their time to maintaining a prayer list and running a prayer chain there's no loss because they don't have anything else to do that would either improve their lives or anyone else's. You fill your life with noise and busywork because there's nothing else, and something--anything--is better than nothing.

But when there are other possibilities, as there now are for most of us, that's another matter. Undergraduates don't have to fill their heads with noise: there are a billion things to think about and puzzles to solve, and they have the resources to plug into all this. Women don't have to spend their time organizing rummage sales or running prayer chains: there are a billion things they can do that are both more pleasurable and more productive. It isn't that thinking and puzzle solving are in some sense more virtuous or edifying than noise and busy work--they are simply more pleasurable, and usually more productive.

Abortion: The Unraveling Begins!

Balkinization

In response to the controversy over South Dakota's new law, three potential GOP candidates for President in 2008 have recently suggested they would sign a bill that banned almost all abortions:...A spokesperson said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., would have signed the South Dakota legislation, "but [he] would also take the appropriate steps under state law -- in whatever state -- to ensure that the exceptions of rape, incest or life of the mother were included.

So much for McCain, the only viable Republican candidate for 2008 (so far).

Republicans have misjudged their base when it comes to the abortion issue: most Americans may want parental notification requirements for minors--because they want at least the illusion of control over their daughters' sexuality--but they don't want abortion to be unavailable for them. As an article in yesterday's NYTimes notes that parental notification rules don't decrease the rate of abortion. In fact as it turns out in quite a few cases it's parents who want their kids to have abortions:

some workers and doctors at abortion clinics said that the laws had little connection with the real lives of most teenagers, and that they more often saw parents pressing their daughters to have abortions than trying to stop them. And many teenagers say they never considered hiding their pregnancies or abortion plans from their mothers.

This is hardly surprising. Here is why:

All decent parents want their kids to have good lives. In the past the only feasible career option for most girls was marriage: to have a good life a girl had to snag a good-quality, high-yielding male. The only way to do this was to restrict sexual activity: if you can get the milk for free there's no point in buying the cow. So parents wanted the threat of having a child out of wedlock as a deterrent--to keep their daughters from being promiscuous or selling themselves cheap. Moreover, if abortion was unavailable it was possible to force a shotgun marriage as a last resort. That is why, in the past parents wanted abortion to be, for all practical purposes, unavailable to their daughters.

Now women can't make a full-time, permanent career of marriage. They can't manipulate men into guaranteeing permanent financial support by refusing to put out--and shotgun marriages are a thing of the past. Moreover women have other, often more desirable career options. Parents might want to have the illusion of control over their daughters' sexuality but they certainly don't want them stuck with babies that would interfere with their education or career plans. They might want some deterrent effect for religious reasons or to motivate girls to use birth control, so they might want a parental notification requirement to make getting an abortion embarrassing. But if a girl does get pregnant most wouldn't want her to have that baby and certainly wouldn't want her to keep it at the cost of her education and career prospects.

Simple, isn't it?

So, if McCain is nominated, and supports these restrictions on abortion, all the Democrats have to do is run a few vignettes showing Good Girls (and nowadays Good Girls have sex) being told that they can't get abortions.

Girl: But I can't marry Adam--I'm only 17, and I've just gotten accepted to Yale! And he's going to UCLA!

Doctor: Well, if you said it was rape we might be able to do something.

Mother: Are you kidding?

Doctor: Um, there is another possibility. You could say your father, um, molested you and then we could get a special dispensation for incest.

Father: %^&$^%$@#

Less is More

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Andrew Brown: When evolutionists attack

Dennett...is regarded as something of a demigod in the philosophical community. I think he finds it very difficult when people don't say to him, 'You were fantastic. Can I warm the bog seat for you before you take a crap?'

I can't remember if I made up the proverb, "You can't go wrong with a tautology" or if it's just an old chestnut like "One man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens." Doesn't matter, because it's true: the less you say, the more likely you are to be right.

In the midst of the Clash of Civilizations and Evolution Wars, with anti-religious sentiment amongst secularists at a high water mark, Dennett has taken the opportunity of publishing an anti-religious book. Nothing particularly wrong with that--but don't let's pretend that it will stop Islamicist suicide bombers in their tracks or dissuade school board members from pushing to include Intelligent Design in the curriculum.

Ruse is right: "I think that you and Richard [Dawkins] are absolute disasters in the fight against intelligent design ... neither of you are willing to study Christianity seriously and to engage with the ideas - it is just plain silly and grotesquely immoral to claim that Christianity is simply a force for evil, as Richard claims - more than this, we are in a fight, and we need to make allies in the fight, not simply alienate everyone of goodwill."

Anyone who is seriously interested in defending proper science teaching in the public schools should be making the case that Darwin's theory of evolution says less rather than more, in particular that it isn't inconsistent with religious belief. It's pretty clear that making the case that if you buy evolution you must reject religious belief will not convert anyone and will only induce the majority of religious believers to play modus tollens: "I'm a Christian, so I reject evolution." This is in fact why, shockingly, about half of Americans are skeptical about the theory of evolution. They're not Biblical literalists, they have no axes to grind but they're religious believers. The pope has declared that evolution is a scientific fact and not a mere theory, clergy from all mainline denominations have said the same, but the loudest voices, the ones they hear, are the voices of Fundamentalists and militant athiests with axes to grind who are at one in holding that religious belief is inconsistent with the theory of evolution.

The Confessing Church

The Gospel vs. H.R. 4437 - New York Times
It has been a long time since this country heard a call to organized lawbreaking on this big a scale. Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the nation's largest, urged parishioners on Ash Wednesday to devote the 40 days of Lent to fasting, prayer and reflection on the need for humane reform of immigration laws. If current efforts in Congress make it a felony to shield or offer support to illegal immigrants, Cardinal Mahony said, he will instruct his priests %u2014 and faithful lay Catholics %u2014 to defy the law.

Bravo! This is the real thing!

It's not worth doing well...

Holiday from the Enlightenment: "Features � Science and Humanities2006-02-27Holiday from the Enlightenment
God is back in fashion among intellectuals. But even spiritual movements today are motivated by Western fundamentalism: the Enlightenment. By Heinz Schlaffer"

Notwithstanding that, the recurrence of religious needs in the Western world is among the conditions for the Enlightenment. What all new religious converts wish for is nothing other than a comfortable Christianity that has been cheered up by the Enlightenment... Today's religious fantasies focus solely on Christianity's positive side: the promise of a meaning to life, the dear ego's continuation after death (in Heaven, of course, and not in Hell), the feeling of emotional security and personal distinction, the consolation offered by pretty ceremonies. When the new Pope and the writers Martin Mosebach and Hans-Josef Ortheil extol the latter as an advantage of the Catholic faith, they fail to see that the ceremony of Hinduism on Bali far surpasses the Christian competition as far as beauty goes. Wouldn't they do better to become Balinese Hindus?

This new yet old Christianity of the intellectuals is a wellness religion, one which has inherited from the Enlightenment the right to a maximisation of happiness..Followers of this cosy religion reap its benefits without foregoing a thing: neither pre-marital nor extra-marital affairs, neither whoring nor sodomy (as past generations of Christians called such deadly sins). What people are after is a religion that serves up gratifications rather than bans.

Sounds good to me. Very good in fact--and so good that I buy it.

In this remarkable screed, reminiscent of Kierkegaard's Attack Upon Christendomin which K. expressed horror at Professor Martensen's characterization of the genial Bishop Mynster as a "witness" for the Christian faith, a retired German professor rages about cheerful, Laodicean Christians who enjoy the comfort and "pretty cermonies" without taking the tough stuff, the sin and salvation story, the restrictions and penitential practices, seriously. Both agree that if Christianity isn't worth doing well then it isn't worth doing at all. But whereas Kierkegaard argued, modus tollenswise that Christianity was worth doing and, therefore, that it was worth doing will, the German professor suggests, modus ponenswise, that it is not worth doing well--"The Christians of the Middle Age" he writes,"... performed heavy penances and suffered privations to cleanse themselves of sin. Who has time today for such tortuous ideas and painful mortifications?"--and so is not worth doing at all.One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens.

I don't see why Christianity should be worth doing well--but I don't buy the conditional either. Most of us, including me, are second-rate at best and make a half-assed job of most of what we do. It's better than nothing. In fact, as Barry Schwartz cited in an earlier post suggests, the the Royal Road to the Good Life is satisficing. As far as Balinese Hinduism goes there is a very good reason why we aren't Balinese Hindus: we don't live in Bali and it isn't feasible to move there. Bali is an expensive tourist island in Indonesia and I doubt that most of us could even afford to retire there. Moreover, Hindu myths are not our myths and the history of South Asia is not our history: Hinduism isn't our culture religion. The best we can do is to make the best of Christianity--jettison the penances and privations, repudiate the Biblical literalism, intollerance and superstition, and enjoy the good things it has to offer: the art, architecture, music, liturgy, and mysticism, the romance of it.

What is this business of religion really all about? At bottom the fact that we think, or at the very least hope, that there's something beyond the brute facts of the material world and the mechanical principles according to which it operates--even if we do not believe that that Beyond intervenes and only hope that we can catch a few glipses of it here and now, in the experience of art, natural beauty and religious practice, and hope against hope that we may be able to contemplate it in another life. This hope is in any case tenuous.

As for religions, they're the packaging--they provide the art, myth and ceremony for facilitating that contact with the Beyond, if there is a Beyond, or at the very least producing desirable, lovely and intense experiences. Some religions are richer in those good things and better at doing this job than others: Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism, and Christianity in its Orthodox, and to a lesser extent, Catholic and Anglican, incarnations are rich and good at this; Islam, Judaism, low-church Protestantism and other aniconic, moralistic, preachy religions are not very good at delivering, though all religions can be tweaked to get the job done. We do the best we can with what we've got.

We're culturally and geographically constrained. We can't be Hindus or Buddhists because there are no Hindu or Buddhist temples on the ground. Adopting their "philosophies" is nothing. It's always seemed surprising to me that while quite a few Americans take up Buddhism to the extent of adopting the "philosophy" and meditating, they don't build temples: without temples and cult there is no religion. We can't, most of us, be Orthodox: even with temples on the ground, that history isn't our history. Without radical enculturation, and probably conversion at an early age, it isn't a real possibility for us. Like it or not, we are Latin Christians--that is our culture religion.

Kierkegaard would be horrified, and lots of people, both believers and unbelievers, follow him in this. There is a gut feeling they share--you shouldn't be pragmatic or self-indulgent when it comes to religion. But why? We don't have this idea when it comes to other departments of life. We aren't shocked if people say they took up a particular profession because it was available, because they were good at it and because they enjoy that line of work. Why do we expect more or different when it comes to religious practice?

What Women Want

<The Happiest Wives - New York Times

In a more egalitarian world, there would be more wives mining coal and driving trucks, and more husbands cooking dinners and taking children to doctor's appointments. But that wouldn't be a fairer world, as Nock and Wilcox found...The happiest wives in their study were the ones who said that housework was divided fairly between them and their husbands. But those same happy wives also did more of the work at home while their husbands did more work outside home.

Here's why this article is b.s.: Tierney fudges the distinction between hedonism and the desire-satisfaction account of wellbeing. According to hedonism what makes us well off is getting pleasure or "happiness" which is something like that though not clear exactly what it is. According to the desire-satisfaction account or "preferentism" what makes us well off is getting satisfying our [rational, informed] preferences. Preferentism is the orthodox view and, without producing arguments for it suffice it to say, the view that I think is the more plausible. So let's for the sake of the argument assume preferentism.

Since most people prefer happiness to unhappiness there's not actually that much difference in practice when we consider individual cases. But differences show up in the aggregate. Suppose lots of people prefer pistachio ice cream to chocolate, but that pistachio is harder to get (true!) and more expensive. In these circumstances there are likely to be more happy chocolate-lovers than pistachio-lovers. Chocolate-lovers will find it easy and cheap to satisfy their preferences so there will be lots of happy chocolate-lovers pigging out. Pistachio lovers by contrast will find it hard and expensive to get their preferred dessert. They may be able to get what they want but the hassle and other costs associated with that will be high and so undermine their happiness, so in the aggregate there will be fewer happy pistachio consumers than chocolate-consumers: the costs of pistachio consumption undermine happiness. You cannot infer from the fact that most chocolate-consumers are happier than most pistachio-consumers that most people prefer chocolate to pistachio.

Now let's consider wives. There are some women who prefer traditional arrangements, where men bring in most of the income and women do most of the housework; there are others who prefer non-traditional, equalitarian arrangements. The traditional arrangement, like chocolate ice cream, is easy to get and cheap. Wives who prefer the traditional arrangement will find it easy and hassle free to get it: their preference will be satisfied and they will be happy. Wives who want to mine coal or drive trucks, or hate cooking and taking children to doctor's appointments, are going to find it hard to to get what they want and, if they get it, the costs will be high. If you work in the mines or on the trucks you are going to get hassled at work, face discrimination and have to deal with co-workers who hate your guts; if you don't like to cook, don't want to take your kids to the doctor, and would prefer to trade off leisure and domestic concerns for longer hours and harder work outside the home you are going to pay heavily to satisfy your preferences. You'll be hasseled by your colleagues in the mine and wrangle continually with your husband about household responsibilities. You are not going to be very happy--at least it is unlikely that you will be as happy as women with traditional aspirations who get what they want.

Consequently, given the high costs of egalitarian arrangements, it is likely that even if most women strongly prefer them to traditional arrangements, more women in the aggregate will be happier with traditional arrangements. It does not follow that ceteris paribus women prefer traditional marriages--ceteris are not paribus.

Tierney is, as usual, responding to a straw man: the idea that women's traditional role in marriage is somehow inherently demeaning and that no one could rationally prefer it. This is not what serious feminists claim nor do we claim that, as a matter of empirical fact most women would prefer truck-driving or mining to traditional pink-collar work. What we claim is that women have a damned hard time getting those truck-driving and mining jobs, and avoiding pink-collar work--and that this should be fixed. The data cited does not show that women don't want those jobs or that they prefer to play traditional roles: it shows that women who go with the flow have an easier time of it.

What do women want? Data showing that women who get x are by and large happier than women who get y doesn't show that more women want x than y.

The Paradox of Choice?

Is Freedom Just Another Word for Many Things to Buy? - New York Times

[P]eople who frame freedom in terms of choice are usually the ones who get to make a lot of choices — that is, middle- and upper-class white Americans (most of our study participants are white; we can't make any claims about other racial and ethnic groups). The education, income and upbringing of these Americans grant them choices about how to live their lives and also encourage them to express their preferences and personalities through the choices they make. Most Americans, however, are not from the college-educated middle and upper classes. Working-class Americans often have fewer resources and experience greater uncertainty and insecurity. For them, being free is less about making choices that reflect their uniqueness and mastery and more about being left alone, with their personality, integrity and well-being intact.

This is a superb article co-authored by Barry Schwartz, who argues in The Paradox of Choice that, contrary to the received wisdom, having the widest possible range of choices may not be a good thing. Citing empirical research, he notes that presented with a wide range of options many consumers either become stymied and incapable of making any choice or invest so much in search and deliberation that any additional utility they squeeze out by getting their ceteris paribus most preferred product is swamped by the costs of search and deliberation.

Does this show, as Schwartz suggests, that having "too many" choices is a bad thing? No. What it shows is that people should adopt satisficing rather than maximizing strategies--go for good enough rather then best. And this is just the old time religion: you should behave rationally--and that means recognizing the costs of search in utility calculations. Of course further search is always a temptation so to do this you may want to adopt procedures to restrict your options, like Ulysses bound to the mast. But that is itself a choice.

The interesting feature of this article, not in the book, is the class issue--which hadn't occurred to me but which, in retrospect, should have been obvious. Middle class people have a taste for choice as such--lower class people don't have that taste and, according to Schwartz, may actually regard choice as a threat:

In a recent study with Nicole Stephens at Stanford University, we asked college students to pick "three adjectives that best capture what the word 'choice' means to you." A higher percentage of those who had parents with a college education said "freedom," "action" and "control," while more of those whose parents had only a high-school education responded with "fear," "doubt" and "difficulty."...[W]hen we analyzed country music, preferred over rock by less-educated Americans in every region, we heard more mentions of self-protection and defense, as in Darryl Worley's observation, "We didn't get to keep [our freedom] by backin' down." When choice was mentioned, it was often as a prelude or coda to tragedy, as in George Jones's lament "Now I'm living and dying with the choices I've made."

Not surprising. If you have relatively few options, most of which aren't so hot, and you aren't very good at rational decision-making or used to making long-term plans, the best you can do is "walk the line." (Paul was playing a Johnny Cash song in the car about this). The best you can do is follow the social conventions for good behavior, military discipline or the rules set by your church. Choice means deviation from the rules--and for you, break the rules and you end up living in squalor, impoverished, strung out on drugs, wasted. The political ramifications aren't surprising either. Loosen up on the rules, go soft on punishment, and people will run amok. No surprise either that, when it comes to abortion, the working class aren't impressed by rhetoric about "choice"--that's precisely what they don't want their daughters to have.

Maybe the fundamental difference is about internal vs. external constraints. In some online discussion I remember a woman from the middle east saying that young men simply haven't got the idea that they can, much less should, check their impulses: if they see a woman dressed provocatively it's an invitation to rape. And they don't see it as their fault: how can they be expected to refrain from doing what they feel like doing? At bottom this is a special case of the assumption that people can't be expected to behave rationally--that they can't be either prudent or moral on their own steam, that they can't figure out what to do without socially imposed rules and can't control their impulses without external constraints--without cops, locks and the fear of hell. Choice leads to bad consequences in the long run--"living and dying with the choices I've made"--but people can't be expected to consider long-term consequences when they make decisions.

I don't buy Schwartz's conclusion:

What conception of freedom should Americans pursue? While the upper and middle classes define freedom as choice, working-class Americans emphasize freedom from instability...Similarly, many of the freedoms endorsed and advocated by U.S. foreign policy may not always resemble those desired by the people whom we hope to help. To govern well, both at home and abroad, Americans would be wise to listen to how freedom rings in different cultural contexts

Granted, the US shouldn't invade countries on the pretext of spreading "freedom." But I don't buy the idea that societies that restrict choice are ok because their citizens don't want choice. The question is whether their preference for limiting options is rational and informed. And it isn't. It's a consequence of the mistaken idea that people can't be expected to behave rationally--that they can't either make good, informed choices or control their impulses. Consider this remarkable piece of data from the article:

people...employed in middle-class jobs got upset when a friend or neighbor bought the same car as theirs because they felt that the uniqueness of their choice had been undercut. But those in working-class jobs liked it when others chose the same car because it affirmed that they had made a good choice.

The assumption these working-class people make is that they can't trust their own judgment, that there is simply no way of researching the respective merits of cars and making a purchase decision accordingly--the best you can do is conform. Incredibly they make this assumption when it comes to a decision that involves hard data and is relatively straight-forward--where all you need to do to make a rational decision is to buy the annual used car issue of Consumer Reports and look at the data. Think of how this assumption plays out in where there isn't hard data and where decisions aren't that straight-forward. Non-conformity is dangerous. Why? Because the only way you can figure out what to do is by following the conventions and doing what most other people do. There just isn't anything else to go on. Again, not surprising: one of the most obnoxious features of working class culture is the utter dread of non-conformity--in dress, behavior, ideas, everything.

Now trusting to The Wisdom of Crowds isn't always an irrational strategy. Sometimes it's the best you can do. But the idea that there's nothing else you can trust, that even where you have access to data and are in an excellent position to make a decision on the basis of your own interests and preferences, you should trust the crowd and follow the conventions.

The conservative strategy that working-class people and members of traditional societies choose has high costs. Maybe this is one of those cases though where it's worth it for individuals but creates an overall situation that's not so hot--a suboptimal equilibrium. If you're a woman in a society where the sight of a woman's bare legs drives young men mad you'd better wear a burqa and if you're a young man in a society where all the women are wearing burqas the sight of women's bare legs will drive you mad. If you're working class, and inclined to drink away your paycheck, beat your wife and run up credit card debt, the best you can do is bind yourself to the mast: buy into Fundamentalism, vote for more cops, more prisons and harsher punishments, support strictness and constraint, walk the line. Where everyone walks the line and supports policies that enforce the rules, seeing no other reason to behave themselves, then people will run amok if the rules are relaxed and get into trouble if they get to make choices--and the system is locked in forever.

Not in Schwartz, but there was an experimental program for young offenders where, as an alternative to conventional prison time, boys were put into a program modeled after Marine boot camp (without the guns). They were yelled at, made to do forced marches with heavy backpacks and innumerable pushups--and loved every minute of it. They cleaned up their acts but, predictably, most ran amok as soon as they got out on the street. The moral of this is if you're a social planner or demiurge you can make some people better off by imposing discipline and restricting choice--but you had better be prepared to keep the lid on in perpetuity. If however you're a social planner, or at least if you're a demiurge you can, alternatively, teach people how to control their impulses, plan ahead, reflect on their options and make rational choices for themselves. This goes not only for working class conservatives who believe, wrongly, that too much choice is bad but middle class liberals who, Schwartz claims are overwhelmed by choices.

Maybe this issue is grabby to me--and I'm writing on it, the whole thing on preference including Schwartz's book--because on the one hand this claim is so counterintuitive and remote from my experience and on the other hand because I'm chronically angry at not having enough choices. I want x and I can't get it--that is the fundamental problem of the human condition. I not only get angry about the things I want but can't get--like terra cotta tiles for my bathroom floor: I stew about things I don't want but couldn't have gotten if I had wanted them. This business of anxiety and indecision, and the cliche of getting what you want and finding it as ashes in your mouth, just seems like more baloney by people who've been reinforced for whining and self-dramatization. The fix is easy: satisfice. Choose whatever suits and don't worry about what you missed. Reflect on what you want, do the research, and go for it. If you're indifferent, flip a coin, adopt a procedure for narrowing options or ask someone else to choose. Or bind yourself to the mast if you must--just don't bind me. Why is this so hard?

Dennett Breaking the Spell

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Beyond belief

In his preface, Dennett remarks that every foreign reader who saw drafts of the book complained of its American bias. His defence is that it is aimed at an American audience, since it is American fundamentalism that most threatens what he values about his own society. So, after the preliminary pep-talk to the choir, he gives a very forceful and lucid account of the reasons why we need to study religious behaviour as a human phenomenon: apparently this programme comes as a tremendous shock to those Americans who have never heard of Hume, William James, or even Terry Pratchett.

I haven't read Dennett's book yet though I will--but I read quite a number of reviews. Apparently one of his themes is that it has been taboo to subject the phenomenon of religious belief to critical scrutiny and that he is out to fix that.

This is a very American thing, reflecting the current culture war between Fundamentalists promoting their agenda and the rest of the American public who are not on board. But it isn't new. Even when I was in high school, quite a long time ago, I learnt that you could score instant points as an "intellectual" by making anti-religious remarks. All you had to do to impress teachers was to say, "God doesn't exist" and they would write flattering comments in the margin of your papers: "Good!" or "I can see you're really thinking!" It didn't seem to matter whether you gave reasons or not: there was the just the idea that atheism was a smart, intellectual idea while religious believe was a dumb, naive idea.

Being an "intellectual" wasn't just a matter of having the right views about religious matters either. We got the idea early on that there was a short list of intellectual ideas, about politics, ethics, social organization and a number of other matters. Being smart was a matter of trotting out the smart ideas. I have a strong suspicion that this is largely a consequence of the American obsession with objective type tests, in particular the role of the SATs, the multiple choice tests that determine college admission. In my high school English classes we got vocabulary lists every week to memorize for the SATs. Oedipus and Hamlet were all very well but we knew that our academic and professional prospects depended on memorizing those lists. Getting the right answers determined whether we would work in management (or marry men who did) and live in leafy suburbs or live in three room apartments and drive trucks (or marry men who did).

Judging from students' blue books and papers I don't think much has changed. Like all members of my tribe I continually write "evidence for this?," "where's the argument?" and simply "why?" in the margins. And students invariably complain that they have given me the right answers and don't understand why they got adverse grades, that they studied with other students who got higher grades, came up with the same answers, and don't understand why their grades were different.

So it was with religion. I lived a sheltered life and never actually met any real Fundamentalists--to me, and to many other Americans they were mythical beasts. But we inherited a ready-made rhetoric from H. L. Mencken reporting on the Scopes "Monkey Trial" who coined the term "Bible Belt" and referred to the citizens of Dayton, Tennessee where the trial was held as "yokels," "morons" and "hillbillies" and from Sinclair Lewis' portrait of Elmer Gantry, the quintessential Fundamentalist preacher. They provided the canonical critique of religious belief, the right answers and the right noises, and the picture of American-style Fundamentalism as the religious paradigm--bigoted, uncritical, unreflective, dogmatic, money-grubbing and hypocritical. Even when I was growing up, when religious practice was still the norm, Mencken and Lewis provided the socially correct take on religion and the correct SAT-style answers: even though nominal religious affiliation and church weddings were de rigeur they still provided the right answers, the smart ideas, that you got points for giving--there are all these fundamentalist yokels out there who are hypocritical, unreflective and uneducated, who beat up on people that have honest doubts (like Frank Shallard in Elmer Gantry) and who taboo the scientific or critical study of religion. I'm not exactly sure how church-goers during the 1950s reconciled this with their religious practice but they did. I think it was something like, "Well, we go to church because we don't rule out the possibility that There's Something There, and because the family that prays together stays together, but of course we're not like those despicable, hypocritical fundamentalist yokels in Gopher Prairie."

Whatever. Dennett is a very smart guy. His piece Where Am I?" is probably the funniest piece of real philosophy ever written. (The funniest parody is Paul Jennings' Report on Resistentialism). Dennett's book is probably pretty good. The thing is that in the US you can always get a hearing by bashing Fundamentalists, claiming that there's a taboo against the the scientific or critical examination of religion and representing atheism as a shocking, radical new idea. And you can still pass yourself off as an intellectual on the cutting edge by replaying Mencken's reportage on the Scopes trial in 1925.

Kids' Music

I hate it--I hate it. On Monday, a holiday, I spent the entire day driving around my No. 2 son, whose motorcycle was in the shop after another crack-up, and my daughter, home from college on a mini-vacation.

As soon as each of them got into the car they plugged their iPods into the dashboard (I don't even understand how this works). Paul goes for rap, including a rapper who is apparently an Orthodox Jew but sounds for all the world like a West Indian, as well as more eclectic contemporary fare; Elizabeth favors music she describes as "techno-ey."

I hate it all and after a day of driving them around--and spending lots of money on Van's shoes, expensive underwear and groceries for Elizabeth to stock the mini-fridge I bought for her dorm room--I was exhausted. Yes, I can recognize the difference in styles, but all this music occurs within a range of 3 notes with heavy precussion in the instrumental. Most of it seems to be modal. I tried extrapolating from the 3 notes and some of the passages could be construed as minor, but there really wasn't enough to extrapolate from and most of the time after about 3 bars they would throw in alien tones or modulate in crazy ways. Nothing was even by a stretch major. The lyrics, insofar as I could catch them, were largely surreal and depressing. The only lyrics I liked were in the chorus of one of Paul's songs which was a litany of random noun phrases followed by "fuck, yeah!" Most of the singers were out of tune by conventional standards and, at best, only slipped into key (what key?) after mini-glissandos and waffling.

It struck me that I must be getting old. But then it struck me that I didn't even like popular music from the time that I was in college--though it wasn't nearly this awful. I also don't like the contemporary high art music my husband likes either--he's just gotten some CD by some Arlo Pert. I am shallow. I like Vivaldi--as I child in musical training I participated in about 30 performances of his Gloria, singing soprano, alto and tenor parts, and playing violin, viola, cello and flute at one time or another. And I can listen to the Four Seasons over and over and over again without getting sick. Vivaldi--fuck, yeah! Mozart--fuck, yeah! Haydn--I kind of like his string quartets even better: he created the form--fuck, yeah. Bach--fuck, yeah, yeah, yeah!!! I once tried to have sex while listening to the Bach b minor mass but couldn't because I understand the Latin without trying to translate and it was distracting.

Maybe part of it is just a preference for tone color. I like every string quartet. The real yummy kick is Dvorak New World--lush, self-indulgent and melodious. What I don't get is that "classical" music--the 500 greatest hits of the last 500 years that XLNC plays is yummy, obvious and pleasing--it's easy. It feels good. Why would anyone want to listen to music that's stressful and makes you angry or depressed? More grandly, I don't get the interest in the dark side of life: we run 2 sections of one of my colleague's courses on Death and Dying. Why on earth would anyone want to take a course on such a depressing topic? Elizabeth is taking a course in biomedical ethics. Again, why? I hate the dark side: "choose life." Truth is I don't believe that there's anything deep about darkness--or that sweetness and light are superficial. Vivaldi is good.

Anyway, I hate this bad, mad, rough, dark, kid music. Hate, hate, hate. I don't have much of a CD collection (and what I have consists entirely in string quartets and Russian church music) but by Christ I'm going to get one of these iPods and download every fucking string quartet I can find, also the Schubert quintet that isn't the Trout and the Brahms Triple, and plug this thing into my dashboard and blast it out next time these kids want to to out to get shoes.

Liberalism is good for women...so who's surprised?

Children, the Littlest Politicians - New York Times

IT was not so long ago that men and women voted along similar lines. Both sexes went overwhelmingly for Richard Nixon in 1972 and narrowly for Jimmy Carter in 1976. Today, though, the gender gap — that men lean right and women lean left — has become a political truism, and a series of new studies suggests that gender plays an even bigger role in politics than many believed. Having a son tends to make parents more conservative, it appears, while a daughter makes them more liberal.

Here's some data--and conjectures about the explanation, including the usual guff about women being soft and social while men are hard and individualistic: "Men...tend to prefer that individuals make decisions, a view that fits with Republican beliefs, while women prefer community solutions."

That hypothesis however doesn't explain why the gender gap is a relative novelty: biology doesn't change (at least not that fast) and if anything this hypothesis would predict abigger gender gap 30 years ago before feminism took hold, when women were socialized to be more "feminine."

The explanation, as most of the quotes suggest, is economic--but deeper than they suggest and not merely a matter of concerns about health care and safety nets as such. Women, like members of visible minorities, know that the race is not to the swift and that they are constrained because of accidents of birth that are visible and immutable. They recognize that the constraints are informal and social rather than formal and political--that their options for getting jobs and promotions, houses, mortgages and car loans are constrained because they're female or black. For us, government is the liberator that loosens those constraints and provides us with more options by prohibiting discriminatory practices. For white males those policies impose constraints, narrow options and pull away safety nets. There's an irreconcilable conflict of interests which, for men, is only diminished when they start to think about their daughters' prospects.

30 years ago women didn't have to worry about jobs, mortgages or car loans--or at least most didn't think they had to worry. Men would support them--work outside the home was optional--and men would qualify for the mortgages and car loans. Men's jobs would provide the health insurance and men would be their safety nets. Subsequently most women discovered that they were wrong. Marriage wouldn't provide security, men wouldn't commit to lifelong marriage or lifelong financial support, and even if they stayed married they would be forced out of the home and into the labor force. One way or the other they would have to compete for jobs and qualify for loans and the only way to see to it that they got a fair shake was to support government intervention to loosen the constraints on their getting these options on their own steam.

This hypothesis has the virtues of simplicity and power, and confirms the fundamental doctrine that people, male or female, respond to incentives. Everyone wants the greatest possible scope for desire satisfaction, the widest possible range of options. For white males the way to get is by minimizing the role of government; for the rest of us the way to get it is by maximizing the role of government. Everyone wants the same thing, viz. the greatest possible range of opportunities to get what they want.

War against boys--my foot

Salon.com Life | The campus crusade for guys

[Y]oung women might be more motivated to pursue higher education because, consciously or unconsciously, they sense that there are real economic advantages at stake. Her examination of a Department of Education sample of more than 9,000 high school students, interviewed over a period of eight years, revealed that women with bachelor's degrees earn 24 percent more than women without, while young men with bachelor's degrees experience no significant economic gains. For practical proof of her hypothesis, one need only consider that most well-paid, skilled, blue-collar professions continue to be dominated by men -- while minimum-wage jobs in hospitality and service remain the province of women.

If I were a guy I would never have gone to college, much less gotten a Ph.D. I went to college for exactly one reason: to avoid being a secretary. If I could have been a mechanic I would never have bothered. I wasn't motivated by the carrot--I was driven by the stick.

Forget about affirmative action for boys in college admissions. Why should they go? They don't need the credentials women need to avoid boring shit work. If you want to create a more even gender balance in colleges try affirmative action for blue collar trades and provide more opportunities for women who don't have academic credentials.

Let them eat cartoons

3 More Die in Pakistan Cartoon Protests

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Feb. 15 — Three more people were killed today, as tens of thousands of protesters, incensed at cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, took to the streets in Pakistani cities for a third straight day, clashing with police and torching western businesses, media reports and officials said.

How stupid and irresponsible it was for that conservative Danish newspaper to publish those cartoons--anyone could have predicted what the likely consequences would be. Here are 3 more people dead--over cartoons.

Of course journalists will make a fuss about Freedom of the Press. They're the Press and that's their job. But is it really such a monumental matter of principle? Why? Obviously, ceteris paribus the more freedom the better but ceteris are not paribus and it is pretty clear that the bad consequences of exercising freedom of the press in this case outweigh the benefits of grandstanding.

It's all more of the conservative let-them-eat-cake policy. Here are hordes of desperate people who don't have the time or money to buy newspapers and sit around reading them, most of whom couldn't read them anyway because they're illiterate, and these irresponsible, grandstanding fools are crusading for freedom of the press--let the eat newspapers. As far as Freedom and Democracy what does the current administration mean? Let's see, "freedom" means laissez faire capitalism, policies to benefit multinationals and the abolition of trade barriers. It also means eliminating free schooling, subsidized food, and other programs that benefit the very poor in poor countries--part of the Washington Consensus on how to discipline poor countries and stop their irresponsible, spendthrift behavior. And "democracy" means voting in pro-American politicians--not, e.g. Hamas.

It's pretty obvious why they hate us. We live in paradise and they live in shit. Our foreign policy is obviously geared to getting more power and more wealth at their expense--while we make hypocritical noises about Freedom and Democracy. Adding insult to injury we mock their primary cultural icon and then read their anger as religious fanaticism, confirming the Clash of Civilizations hypothesis, just showing that they aren't people like us and wouldn't appreciate the good life we have even if they got it. So no point in soft diplomacy or aid--they don't want reliable electricity, clean streets, or basic economic security. No siree--it would all be wasted. They just want to riot in the streets, memorize the Koran and beat up women.

I don't think the rage about these cartoons is in any way religious. If the cartoons didn't depict Mohammed but just showed racist representations of Arabs and South Asians or lampooned other features of their culture you would get the same result--possibly worse. They simply read these cartoons as saying "You people are scum--we laugh at you; we're going to beat you up, enslave you and wipe you out to further enrich ourselves."