Stuck in Society With You

Libertarian Mathew Kahn argues that climate change is real, however in our attempts to adapt to it, we ought not incentivize irrational choices, such as building levees so that people can continue to live in low-lying areas.

Humans are incredibly irrational decision makers.  Assuming they are not underlies our greatest tendencies to apologize for inequality and injustice.  We tell ourselves, "It is their own fault.  They could have done differently.  They made a rational choice."  Yet again and again, we see that people do not.  Any businessman who has ever depended on advertising knows this well.  Any politician who has calculated his message knows this.  Any one who has struggled with diet, a budget, or quitting smoking knows this.

The problem is that it is near impossible to understand the irrational drivers of our own behavior.  With great work, we can find ways to counteract this irrationality, but it is largely in the darkness that we work.  God knows what it is that is driving you to take that bite of the fattening donut?  Your bad childhood?  The time you spent reading Zorba the Greek?  An impulsive temperament?  All the brain research and psychology that exists can only give us the faintest hints.  The fact is that the causal mechanisms at work in any given second, when each of our billions of neurons involved in the choice is firing off with its 7000 connections, making up the entirety of consciousness and unconsciousness, is unfathomable.

We learn to counteract the irrationality, in order to supposedly act more rationally.  Yet are we really acting more rationally, or have we simply been able to design habits for ourselves that have out-maneuvered the negative impulses?  "Rationality" is merely shorthand for *choosing the correct option*. 

In a fundamental way, society can be thought of as a vast, evolving system of habit formation.  At the individual level, we feel very rational and "in control".  But at the macro level, patterns emerge that tell a very different story.  Instead of individual, rational actors we see the products of systems such as family, peer relations, education, government, and social norms that conspire to design not only an individual's ability to make correct choices, but - more foundational still - an individual's ability to design for himself the ability to make correct choices.  Thus, the choice as whether to eat the donut or not is dependent not only on an individual's choice, but the individual's prior ability to have designed for himself the ability to make that choice.  For instance, after week three of having successfully fought the 8am donut cravings, the choice to not eat the donut will be far easier than it was on day one.  (I'm not actually hip to diet design, but you get my point: successful routines for habit formation are successful because they are routines, not individual, isolated choices).

So, does this mean that no one ever ought be held accountable?  Should we all get to make base, easy, immediately gratifying decisions with no concern for external effects, with the excuse that we had no control?  This is generally the first response many have to the argument I have presented.  Yet this is a case in which patient, nuanced thinking is called for!  If you will recall, I spoke of the element of social design in individual decision-making.  Just as we would set for ourselves a course of habit formation that we hope will bring about correct decisions, so too we set for society a course of policy that we hope will bring about correct social behavior.  So too we design our formal and informal social institutions.  The idea is to look ahead and put in place systems that we hope will flourish.  This utilitarianism makes the question of blame somewhat irrelevant.  Policies ought be designed that foster, through the mechanics of incentives, social good. 

If the question was mere utility, it could be answered by either side of the aisle.  It could mean lowering taxes on the "job-creators", harsh sentencing for criminals, or letting residents in low-lying areas suffer rising tides without assistance - the right-wing model.  Or it could mean a more left wing emphasis on the benefits of redistribution, leniency, or shared burdens.  To the extent that these are subjective, evidence based controversies, the chips will fall where they will.

But what is removed from the equation is the moral posturing that has traditionally been wrapped up in left vs. right politics: no one is to blame.  So, even if we will all benefit from "job-creators" getting tax breaks, they are not inherently morally superior by their good works.  They have merely been the recipients of social circumstance that have allowed them - being in the right place at the right time - to do good things.  We can argue until the cows come home about the extent to which their work is actually good, and how much money is the right incentive for them to continue whatever it is they are doing.  But in the end, they are products of *us*, as the saying might go, "we built them".

And so too did we build those who, at the other end of the spectrum, we now see are playing out what society has designed for them in the form of irrational, self-indulgent or poorly-planned behavior.  We can also argue about the extent to which these people's behavior is all that bad, or whether by circumstance it appears so (the "negligent mother" may indeed be working two jobs and thus have no ability to look after her delinquent son).  But regardless, again, "we built them".  So when designing policies that, in the interest of deterrence, or disincentivization, will create hardship on individuals caught in such a tangled web of causality, we must admit that, as they are not the originators of their actions, rather society is to blame, their hardship is a form of Earthly purgatory. 

It may allow us to sleep easier at night believing that the many who suffer do so at their own choice.  But it is a convenient fiction. 

I confess much of this argument is aimed squarely at the right, who though at times concede some degree of social determinism, generally downplay it, if not deny it completely.  After all, who then, if not government is going to help enfranchise those whom society has failed to give an equal design?  The utilitarian case for less government action is rather weak.  And, more noticeably, a great portion of right-wing framing is not utilitarian at all, but rather a direct appeal to an assumed agency ("I built it"), or merely a sense of unfairness at the notion of social design - redistribution is unfair because well, "I built it".  The truth is that, were government indeed pared down to only its most basic elements, poverty and class-mobility would not suddenly cease, or even diminish.  The supposed moral hazard in provision of social services, or even such things as student loan forgiveness - as former candidate Romney complained about -  is a convenient excuse for a callousness that comes from not seeing individuals as determined by social design, whose ability to make rational choices is constrained by a prior ability to develop in themselves this ability, and so on, outwards into the fabric of socialization.

So I'm all for utilitarian incentives.  But when their effect is serious hardship in the lives of real people, we must ask ourselves if there was not another, better way to have both incentivized good choices, without having allowed such trauma to have occurred.

Skepticism vs. Denial

Often, those who deny the science on anthropogenic global warming fashion themselves "skeptics", as if that label and the cold objectivity it implies would somehow make them seem more serious.  Yet scientific skeptics they most definitely are not.  From wikipedia:

A scientific (or empirical) skeptic is one who questions beliefs on the basis of scientific understanding. Most scientists, being scientific skeptics, test the reliability of certain kinds of claims by subjecting them to a systematic investigation using some form of the scientific method.

What I think people find especially galling, is the extent to which AGW deniers are denying science. And by "science", I mean the established system upon which we all depend - especially as laypeople - for objective measurement of reality, the process of peer review and consensus building.

What I find peculiar, is the willingness of people who are not experts in climate science, to assume themselves qualified to be "skeptics" of scientific consensus. While not necessarily conspiratorial (although the climate gate thing basically went there), the phenomenon is similar. The assumption is that a bedrock component of authority, the global scientific body, is untrustworthy (likely because of personal bias), and therefore can be discounted.

This is how conspiracy theories work. The first thing you do is discount the established authority, whether the media, government, academia, or science. Once that is accomplished, you basically have free reign to argue whatever you want, facts having been "relativized". You find this again and again in a variety of areas, where quackery thrives because of a dismissal of the only established authority. Therefore, unless one is personally an expert, reality for all intents and purposes does not exist. The conversation has been removed into a vacuum of ideology.

Ice Floes

Today I was pointed towards this column on the effects of climate change in the San Diego Union-Tribune.  More specifically, the comments section, and how decisively conservative they were.

Interestingly, the comments vacillate between denial, and spiteful joy in the possibility that the sea might be rising - "what great fishing opportunities!"  I can't help but think that the former is the same old hand-waving-as-a-smokescreen-for-true-rightwing-perspective found in the latter.  You can't generally come right out and say you don't give a shit about the earth or most of its (brown) people, so you come up with one elaborate ideological scheme after another. 

This sort of callous "political incorrectness" is widespread on the right.  So much so that it seems to go to a more fundamental issue of temperament.  It's an attitude that takes an almost gratuitous pleasure in human frailty.  I work with a woman, for instance, who routinely jokes that the poor, emotionally-damaged children she teaches "ought to be rounded up and shot".  Understand, she has a dark sense of humor, and this is gallows humor at its finest.  But the attitude comes directly from a larger worldview that is often very conservative (she claims to be a moderate, despite her husband's devotion to Rush Limbaugh in the car).  And the right is filled with just this sort of quasi-humorous social-Darwinist commentary.  Tune in to AM radio for an instant and you're thrust right into a cauldron of anger, disgust and open hostility towards the "weak". 

To the extent that conservatives hate liberalism, it seems largely due to liberals' unending devotion to the plight of the "weak".  This is what they cannot stand.  Whether it is blacks, women, gays, Muslims, or owls - this "concern" continually expressed absolutely drives them mad.  Obviously, the implication is that they, due to a lack of expressed empathy, are callous, greedy bastards.  Yet maybe they are?

Of course, there are the polls that find conservatives give at least as much on average to charity as liberals.  And as generally very church-going folk, I have no doubt this is true.  But one cannot help but notice their general air of righteous individualism: "I got mine, get your own - dammit!"  The term "politically correct" itself seems to define a de facto stance of humility and charity in communication that conservatives would simply not abide - at least in all but the most racially offensive situations (a barrier straining at the edges after the Obama presidency).

This is all very ad hominem, I guess.  But it isn't something I take lightly.  I tend to think of myself as generally nauseatingly moderate and wiling to crawl inside the mind of my fellow man.  Yet at the end of the day, I keep returning to the question of liberalism and conservatism as fundamentally character and temperament-based (the former largely learned, the latter not).  Is my character attack on the right simply a principled reaction - that which I feel in my gut?  Why is my accusation of "greedy" or "callous" necessarily different than their principled position of "individualism" and "freedom"?  Conversely, is their accusation of my being a "bleeding heart" or "tree-hugger" necessarily different than my principled position of empathy or naturalism?

We can of course from here concoct elaborate ideological and philosophical arguments for our positions, underpinned with facts and evidence, reasoning and logic, yet how much of the cart is being pushed before the horse?  How much, in the end, are we all just hand-waving in front of deeply-felt and generally intransigent "emotions" (for lack of a better word). 

And maybe a good deal of the problem is just that - our lack of a vocabulary, our lack of a meaning for words to describe.  Neither by neuroscience, nor psychology alone do we have more than a very incomplete picture of what is driving these deep-seated responses to the world.  The tantalizing question remains: how much of our feeling is being driven by ideas, and how many of our ideas are being driven by emotion?  And what is it that we are really feeling?  Anger seems one of the most triumphant emotions in politics, yet does not anger always have a source in another emotion.  What are we afraid of?  What are we mournful of?  What has been offended in us?

Through understanding the roots of our own feelings, the original causes of why we feel the way we do about an aspect of the external world, hopefully we will come to know better why we hold the beliefs we do.  Because what are our beliefs, but the codification of how we have chosen to interpret our response to external events?  All of which is nothing less than humankind's eternal struggle to know itself.  And in this we continue forever onwards.

Being the Bigger Person

A recent email newsletter from my congresswoman, Mary Bono Mack (R), noted that she was standing with her fellow Republicans in opposition to any climate change legislation.

It is often assumed that opposition to CO2 emissions regulations comes mostly from the large oil and gas interests who are out to protect their bottom line more than anything else.  I think this is no doubt true as far as it goes.  I'm reminded of a critique I heard of the Koch brothers financing anti-regulatory campaigns - that they were doing so because they stood to lose on investments they held, were regulations to go forward.

While that may be true, I also think it does great disservice to the serious threat their principles present. Were it only the case that those in opposition to regulation were only in it for the money. That's at least a case of simple logic, and can be argued against with an appeal to integrity and human decency.

But a principled case against government regulation is a much more complicated beast, and one that in and of itself is entirely consistent with ethical behavior. The problem is - form the pro-regulation point of view - is that a moral harm is occurring, and that the case goes from a simple appeal to righteousness, to larger themes of liberalism, tragedy of commons, etc.

Now, I do think there is a glaring inconsistency in the contemporary right's anti-climate change stance. The science is not a complex, nuanced political philosophy but hard data from very real and distinguished authorities. I think this is a case where an appeal to human decency and integrity needs to be made. Yet not on the merits of regulation in general, but in having the integrity to acknowledge when you have lost an argument.

Only the most insane libertarian believes in no regulation at all. So the debate becomes about the evidence of harm. We need to get these people to accept that continuing to pump the atmosphere full of CO2 - even if currently legal - is just as immoral as dumping 500 gallons of toxic sludge on to your neighbor's lawn. They've gone from denial of the process, to denial of the human element, to denial of the damage, to denial of our ability to end it. At his point it seems merely a matter of intellectual honesty and ideological integrity. You can be opposed to unnecessary regulation, and be for necessary regulation. Therefore, you can be for reduction in CO2 emissions.

Of course, the dodge will be "but the reduction is unnecessary". Well, then return to the science. I think many are afraid to really do this right because they (probably unconsciously) fear it will require a compromise in their ideology. But that's what being a "bigger person" is about. The left at one point had to give up on communism, despite how much they hated the thought of having to accept the many cruelties of the capitalist system. Yet one can still be against those cruelties - not having to relent in criticism, while still acknowledging the facts. This is how ideology evolves. And hopefully something better emerges. The left has probably given up much in its neoliberalism, but it has also gained much legitimacy, not least of which is its demonstrated ability to be serious. Conservatism used to have more of that levity within its grasp. Hopefully it will emerge sooner rather than later.