Nested Wrestling

I've always found there to be a fascinating tangle in the right-wing apology festivities surrounding environmental regulation.

There are the two claims generally put forth, almost always in tandem, in such a way as to gain strength from each other, like two orbiting bodies. The first is the idea that the environmental/human impact is not real. The second is that the ensuing regulation would be far worse - more disruptive, expensive, etc., if not an outright immoral taking.

There's an odd parallel to the tax-rate debate, where a primary, more empirical claim is wrapped within a seemingly impenetrable layer of subjective and unproven nebulousness. The testable environmental claim sits upon a throne-claim
of philosophical piety in the form of policy dithering, back-peddling and weak appeals to property right. There is a great deal of empirical data on the leveraging of human and social capital into financial success (i.e. the scaffolding of privilege), yet it too gets nestled in a tangled web of high-minded appeal to pseudo-developmental philosophy and - just as magical - supply-side kabuki.

The Limits of Rhetoric

The left wing base of the Democratic party has been growing increasingly frustrated with Obama for most of his presidency, the perception being that Obama hasn't turned out to be the kind of "fighter" they wished him to be.  This seemed to have reached its zenith in a piece by Drew Westen in the NY Times, entitled "What Happened to Obama?".  Yet Jonathan Chait offered what I consider to be a powerful response,

Westen's op-ed rests upon a model of American politics in which the president in the not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen's telling, every known impediment to legislative progress -- special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion -- are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama's failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon. 

What’s odd to me about this phenomenon Chait identifies (I think correctly) of the left’s infatuation with rhetoric, is that it doesn’t seem to really exist on the right. Sure, they speak in powerful language, but I think that power resides as much as anything in pure ideological simplicity and intransigence. It would be the equivalent of Obama saying he doesn’t want any spending cuts, only tax increases, period.

Yet this is why we call the right crazy. Aside from substantive incoherence, they are simply taking positions that literally threaten the economy on a massive scale. This isn’t a function of Republican rhetoric, but the composition of the Republican electorate and the conservative movement in general.

So, to try and match this phenomenon on the left, to try and drum up something similar within the voting left merely through rhetoric – through one man! – seems quite silly. At best it is cynical political posturing. Maybe it would be a good thing to be able to muster such a united front on the left. But doing so would likely come at great cost. Political unity and passion is one thing, but we don’t want the left to go go crazy. We don’t want ideology to trump reality and evidence. We don’t want an authoritarian mind-set that bristles at nuance, that is unable to reach across the aisle, that is only interested in demagoguery and simplistic fear-mongering.

I don’t presume to have any answer to how to best respond to what seems such a frustratingly successful parade of right-wing dullardry. But I’ll gladly take the liberal-friendly principles of free thought and measured truth-seeking over authoritarianism’s blockheaded success.

What We Get For Our Taxes

A common criticism on the right of Warren Buffet's recent plea for higher taxes on the rich was basically, "You like taxes so much, you pay 'em!"  One is reminded of the infamous government-off-my-medicare sign.

People so ready to complain about taxes seem to forget how important the government is to almost every area of our lives.  If you don't like taxes, you should probably be ready to do without medicare and social security.

Not only that, but they should also opt out of libraries, parks, public schools, police services, etc. They should probably also avoid out of businesses who employ people who depend on such services, or depend on them themselves. They should stop eating food that has been inspected, living near natural hazards that have been guarded against, using drugs that have benefited from government research, or using technology that has been supported and developed by the government.

They did some silly news show recently where they asked a family to remove everything in their house that was made outside the US. Maybe they should do a similar show about people who have to live without direct or indirect government assistance. After (hopefully)surviving a few weeks, an actor playing Ronald Reagan could show up and introduce himself: “Hi. I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Probably won’t sound so scary then.

The Persecution of Subjectivity

Sarah Palin uses the term "lamestream media".  Climate change skeptics routinely refer to "climategate", the theory that global warming is nothing but a conspiracy invented by climate scientists in order to obtain more research funding.  The media in general is repeatedly accused of merely being a mouthpiece of liberal bias.

What’s weird about this dynamic, is that it sets up a terribly circular kind of cognition. What gets published is assumed to be wrong, and thus exists as a sort of evidence of the truth of one’s own position. In fact, the more reporting the media does, the more research, evidence, etc. it presents, the more evidence of its own falsity.

This is a classic hallmark of denialism. One or more established channels of authority are denied legitimacy, paving the way for essentially any suitably convenient counter-narrative. Another troublesome area of authority increasingly distrusted by conservatives is academia. And with academia and journalism largely slain, or at least hobbled to the point where their legitimacy is deemed unreliable enough to dismiss at whim, reality itself becomes enormously subjective.

Interestingly, this bears striking resemblance to moral relativism, a traditional critique of the left by the right. Yet where moral relativism is about denying all external moral authority, here we have a denial of external factual authority. Truth and fact is merely what one witnesses with one’s own eyes.

There is one other difference, however. While moral relativism tends to eschew all external moral authority, this kind of factual relativism, rooted in individual factual authority, is amenable to specific, non-traditional, non-establishment figureheads of factual authority. These would be the strong leader types who through a reinforcement of individual factual understanding, are able to exact an obedience to their own factual authority. The right has an especial fondness for leaders who are able to command their own individual fact universes. Yet their authority does not come from expertise or as representatives of any body of scientific or journalistic research. It largely draws its strength from the degree to which it mirrors the follower’s own preconceptions.

One of the classic techniques of public speaking and persuasion is to make the audience feel like you “are one of them”. Audiences are routinely praised, never insulted, and information is presented in a non-threatening manner. Yet a special feature of this kind of conservative leadership has to do with individual authority. The common feature among these leaders is that their position demands absolute righteousness and inerrancy. After all, as their authority is almost entirely rooted in their own cognition, in their limitless conviction and assumption of total knowledge, they cannot appear to be susceptible to error or lack of prior knowledge. This would call into question their very authority itself, and – having no outside authority upon which to rely – all authority would be lost.

So, you can see how the circular trap has been set: external factual authority dismissed, individual factual authority remains. Yet rudderless on its own – and no doubt prey to feelings of self-doubt and, likely, alienation, it finds comfort in leadership. But that leadership must also dismiss external authority, and so becomes a sort of super-individual factual authority.

In many ways, what we are talking about here is populism, defined by the emphasis on the individual, en masse, and away from established authority. A mass of individuals rootless in a sea of distrust naturally seeks coherence and support. To the extent that liberalism embraces traditional factual authority (journalism, academia), it will have nothing to offer an individual intent on limiting his factual authority to his own personal experience. To the extent that conservatism dismisses traditional factual authority, it will find great success in offering leaders who remain fact-independent, tethered to the realities as experienced by the anecdotal experiences of individuals, their factual authority based in what their audiences already believe.

People often claim to love Sarah Palin because her opponents hate her so. What they are really saying is that in her opponents hatred of her, they see a hatred of themselves. She is merely a projection of themselves after all. She is a political figure, concerned with political ideas, but at the same time a representation, an embodiment of her followers’ own factual authority. So while her opponents may attack her ideas, and even her claim of factual authority itself, her followers feel as though they are being attacked, as well as their claim to factual authority.

This sense of persecution has been long felt by the right. Never more so it would seem than today, when distrust of the media and academia seems to have reached an all-time high, reinforced no doubt by the rise of FOX news as a network devoted to presenting the individual-as-factual-authority, as well as an increasingly fragmented internet media that takes factual relativism to new extremes. Yet journalism and academia are nothing without factual authority. Their mere existence actually presents a sustained threat the the notion of individual factual authority. In some sense, they do represent a kind of persecution, in the sense that their authority represents the persecution of ignorance and individual bias and anecdote, the persecution of subjectivity.

Choice and Hofstadter's Envelopes

Keith Humphreys writes about an important distinction to be made regarding addiction, and the fact that it represents a fundamental altering of the brain.  However, he reminds us, there is a difference between addiction being a lasting disease that someone has no control over, and one that the individual can fight, albeit with great difficulty.

It is reasonable to say to someone who is not addicted “Please be more responsible about your substance use — you are choosing to act in a fashion that may eventually get you addicted.” It is equally reasonable to say to someone who is addicted “Are you being responsible in the management of your addiction, are you attending your AA meetings, staying out of bars, etc?.” But it is not logically reasonable to say “Why don’t you stop being addicted?”. They would if they could, but they can’t, and that should I think evoke some sympathy, which is in no way contradictory with expectations that the person will be responsible about how they manage their disorder.

Our difficulty getting our heads around (no pun intended) consciousness, action and responsibility once again makes it all so difficult.


For this reason, I’ve found it important to work out as best I can whether or not I have free will. There is just so much in life that is riding on whether I answer a yes or no to that question.

In my opinion, we don’t have contra-causal free will. What this means is that we will never have been able to do anything other than what we had done. Yet we can choose to do things differently in the future. Here’s why that isn’t paradoxical. Our thoughts always exist in the past, in the sense that even our projections of the future are based on recollections of the past. So everything is filtered through our past; My thoughts as I type this are nothing more than the sum of everything I have ever learned. I can choose to do anything I like, but that choice will only have ever been the sum of what I had previously known.
I think the thing that tricks us up, and fools us into feeling like we have more control than we really do, is the simple fact that we are only ever conscious of the tiniest portion of what we are, of what is driving us. Even when we try and be as rational as possible, we routinely fail because our very ability to be rational and logical is dependent on what exists in the unconscious.

What addiction seems to add to this is that we have more limited control over what we choose to do when we have become addicted. This would explain the fact that addiction can be a spectrum, and work in tandem with many other areas of our ability to choose.

Speaking of that “ability to choose”, whatever the heck it is, I have to bring up Douglas Hofstadter’s conception of it (as I follow it). He describes the way in which a stack of envelopes, to the blind eye, can feel as though it has a large, round lump in the center. This is the area in which a slightly larger mass of paper forms at the tip of the fold. Yet individually, each envelope seems perfectly flat. So too are we limited by our cognitive faculties to only ever seeing or feeling either one thought at a time, or what feels like a solid mass, or consciousness.

The question of blame then seems quite difficult. It would be like blaming that sensation of there being a large, round mass in a stack of envelopes. We can feel it, we can even measure it and blame it for something that really did occur, but the closer we inspect it, it sort of unravels into nothingness.


So instead of blaming, I propose, we simply do our best to reflect upon what happened in the past and try to make any adjustments we can so that the same course does not get taken again. In terms of the envelope, since we don’t have access to the entire shape, we can make educated guesses about each separate envelope and try to adjust them so that hopefully when they assemble into that whole it will be the shape we approve of.

Kicking and Screaming

I've written about this before, but I'm always struck by the sense of antipathy conservatives have towards discussions of race or hatred.  I know conservatism is nuanced. But it is a movement nonetheless, with standard talking points and rhetoric that act as stand-ins for large assumptions and intuitions.

It's an empirical claim, too (I'm sure someone has done the research).  Do a Google search and you will come up with very little in the way of conservative thoughts on race that aren't merely about defending perceived liberal critiques.  I mean real, good-faith attempts to try and understand what racism (and hate, for that mater) is. 

It seems a subject better left alone. Yet it is a problem - the "other" - that rears its ugly head again and again. The more we know about it, the more we can keep from falling into old patterns of thought. Far from being some thing that is "over", it is all around us.

There is a narrative about power imbalances, out groups, etc. that I embrace, as do most liberals. That's how we can see a deep resemblance between racism and antipathy of homosexuality by religious followers, and consider the embrace of a hateful textual interpretation as rooted in larger historical oppression. Of course, we don't stone people to death, as it says to do in the bible. Yet why don't we apply the same "intuition" to its homophobic passages, dispensing with them as needed (along with all the other idiotic biblical "teachings")? Because we have yet to truly call homophobia out as the hate it is, just like sexism or racism.

As far as I can tell, it is a fact that conservatism isn't interested in connecting these dots. Whereas literally thousands of books, magazine articles, academic papers and studies have been written by the left on these dynamics, inspired by and in turn inspiring progressive cultural protest movements.

It makes sense. Conservatism in general has always been interested in maintaining the cultural status quo. The fact that this has often meant maintaining racial, sexual, gender, class dynamics seems at best (to the more liberal right) a sort of unpleasant sacrifice, at worst (to the far right) a happy constant.

Modern conservatism is of course much more enlightened and comfortable with the cultural change that has unfolded, with people like Sarah Palin calling themselves feminists - a concept that only a decade ago would have had Phyllis Schlafly pissing her pants. (I'm not sure, does Limbaugh still talk about "feminazis"?). And thankfully most of us can agree that interracial marriage is OK, and that diversity is important in the workplace.

So Glenn Beck has his rally and honors Martin Luther King, which is wonderful because the attendees genuinely honor his memory. However the irony is lost that conservatism was brought kicking and screaming onto the right side of history (that the whole notion of a conservative rally actually honoring a black leader seeming odd speaks volumes about current racial make-up of the Republican party). Conservatism still seems largely about whites talking to whites about whites. When minorities are mentioned, they tend to be cast as "the other", whether it's illegals, Muslims, gays or other non-conformist whites.

I mentioned "thousands" of books being written by the left that explore dynamics of race, identity, etc. Obviously the vast majority of people on the left haven't read them. But they have been influenced by those who have, and identified with the story being told. Something in them responded to these ideas. As they looked at the world, these ideas resonated with what they saw.

So what is it about the liberal impulse that sees black, latino or gay pride and is moved, not just to re-examine their own preconceived ideas, but to go out and try and convince others? Because all of this cultural progress doesn't happen by magic. It takes sustained effort, by thousands, millions to push new ideas and ways of thinking.

And what is it about the conservative impulse that recoils from this kind of progress, feels threatened by it? When conservatism began to push back against "political correctness", or "multiculturalism", it was a direct response to liberal advocacy of social change. Sure, some of it was about perceived over-reach, but it was rarely couched in sympathy with the larger project of cultural progress. It was defensive of what it felt was a direct attack on it itself.

Again, this goes back to a lack of openness to exploration of the roots of oppressive cultural dynamics. Political correctness was always about critically examining preconceived cultural assumptions and biases. It was a direct outgrowth of the liberal impulse to look at out-groups and the historically disempowered and find leverage points in society from which fundamentally hateful and oppressive ideas, cognitive failings, were perpetuated. Why do presidents have to be male? Why do the important voices in literature need to be white? Why are jokes about out-groups funny? Why aren't there more minorities in ads? Etc., etc. The conservative response to this, to the extent that there was one in the media, was relentlessly negative.

Something about cultural conservatism seems to be in a permanent state of timelessness. The now is always now. Things seem taken for granted that had to be fought for relentlessly. Sure, we all agree that racism is wrong. But that obvious assertion didn't happen over night and took vast amounts of work to overcome. The same with sexism. We're getting there with homophobia. Go back 20 years and conservatism was virulently anti-gay. I imagine in a decade conservatives will take it for granted that homosexuality is perfectly natural. Heck, they might even hold a rally and honor Harvey Milk!

That'll be the day.

Thinking about "The Help"

The movie The Help is out and stimulating discussions of issues of race and class.  Harold Pollack remembers a painful event from his childhood:

"....our family was close to our neighbors. Their children were cared for by a young black woman whose name I’m embarrassed to say I’ve forgotten. She slept in their basement. My dad did a lot of work around the house, and happened to have some extra moveable partitions. He gave one to her, so that she could have some extra privacy.

That night, the neighbors stormed over. They informed my parents that if they had wanted her to have a partition, they would have bought her one, and that my father had made an inexcusable intrusion into their home. There were some harsh words. Our families maintained polite but frosty relations from that moment forward."

 Things have certainly changed.  But in many ways, they have not.  Millions of people still work for poverty wages.  And taken broadly as a class of worker, there are distinct disadvantages they face that are not entirely dissimilar to what was so starkly a racial matter a few decades ago.  In fact, I wonder as I type this, whether the racial differences are still as stark.  We took a vacation up the California coast this summer and witnessed many fieldworkers who were all Hispanic, as far as I could tell, and likely undocumented.  We're used to the lowest forms of labor - in status, difficulty and pay - being done by minorities.

While we can I think agree that most overt racism has all but disappeared, at least as a primary factor in employment, structural problems remain in which large sectors of society are disenfranchised and almost destined from birth to lives of poverty and desperation.  And to the extent that any of us partake in the economy, certainly when we purchase services that directly require the labor of minimum-wage employees, we are exploiting their lack of empowerment.  The notion that they are all completely free individuals who could easily have decided to go to school and become lawyers or highly skilled workers is a convenient fantasy.