Darwin & Meaning

Ross Doubthat wonders what all the fuss is about Darwin's bicentennial last year. I'm not sure what his own worldviews may be, but his tone seems generally dismissive of the degree of jubilation surrounding the occasion. For him, today's Darwinism is

"at once an unchallenged scientific paradigm and a wildly contentious theory of everything; a Church militant warring against creationists and fundamentalists and a debating society of squabbling professors; a touchstone for the literary intelligentsia and a source of secularist kitsch."

As a conservative, one wonders whether Doubthat isn't simply miffed that Darwinism has always been a nasty thorn in the side of the anthropocentric religiosity that buttresses his philosophy.

Personally, I find Darwin's synthesis of evolutionary theories profoundly spiritual, something I have difficulty finding elsewhere. Where in the past spirituality took for granted that the world was unknowable, modern man doesn't have this luxury.

Traditional forms thus seem like narcissistic self-involvement, or fantastical religious dogma. If the answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" is "To continue asking the question", then Darwin has opened for a us a profound insight into not only where that road leads, but from where it comes.
(img: The 'Evolution' of Darwin - Peter Bond)

The Real Harry Reid Gaffe

So apparently in 2008 Harry Reid

"thought that Barack Obama could win the presidency because he was "light-skinned" and did not use a "Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

Aside from the clunky use of the term negro – I think the analysis is spot on. Not to mention something that you’d find general agreement with in any Black Studies department. Americans are racist, white supremacists straight up.
Whether we’re conscious of it or not, and even as it is obviously not a good thing, it is understandable. The African American experience has, and continues to define us. It is an ethnicity that against all odds has persevered – holding on to its singular heritage, carrying with it both the dysfunction of genocidal brutality, and the wisdom and innovation of a people who have found ways to not only hold on to their identity but continually push the boundaries of what is culturally possible under centuries of oppression.
And America is what it is because of our racial history – both our greatest expressions of freedom and our worst savage excesses. Obama is an exemplar of this contradiction. He is what he is both because of and despite of who he is, and who we are. As a country we have been through so much, and from the beginning have reached for the highest rung despite it always being just beneath our grasp. As such our narrative has been one of epic triumph – and epic failure. The two define each other tragically. Even as we elect the first African American to highest public office, we have people casting the most vile and racist attacks – their seething hatred couched as it often is behind thin veils of humor.
As expressed in the words Obama himself reiterated, “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice”, humanity is searching for freedom, even as it is far from there yet. There is no evidence that any such objective morality exists, but as defined by the basic human impulse to apply one’s own aspirations to those of his fellow man, our biological predisposition is indeed toward empathy and fairness.
Harry Reid is a leader of the party that, although having not always done so in the past, currently spends much of its time seeking ways to redress the imperfections of our past, expressed as they are in the social and demographic stratifications we see at present. Where its opponents see equality and freedom, it sees inequality and struggle. So it would stand to reason that he would see the historic achievement of Obama’s election in the context of a society still struggling to attain what it would ultimately like to see but presently finds itself incapable of adequately fulfilling.
Reid's remarks have been portrayed as out-of-touch, if not racist. Republican chair Michael Steele responded that

It's an old mind-set when you're using language in 2008 that harkens back to the 1950s and '60s...

Yet his own party almost unanimously holds the view that there exists little racism in American society today, and the little that does is irrelevant to the equality of opportunity that exists for all races. This despite the fact that we see large gaps in achievement between whites and blacks. What his party fails to do is distinguish the difference between the opportunity that exists and the means with which one is able to attain it. Therefore they make no distinction between the young boy growing up in poverty and the boy growing up heir to a fortune. That the two should be allowed by society to grow up and suffer two distinct fates is not perceived as an injustice as all by Republicans. Democrats on the other hand, see this as a grave misfortune, especially as it is a direct result of the immoral social arrangement of past generations.

And so the real gaffe here is not that of Harry Reid, intent as he is on creating a more just and equitable society, where all men are truly free to achieve their dreams. Instead it is the continuing gaffe of Republican thought that speaks of a hollow freedom in which all men are purported to be free, yet who in reality are born to live out lives of desperation and pain. It is a smothering gaffe that seeks to rewrite history while absolving guilt or responsibility.

As a fellow Democrat, Obama's response highlighted the difference:

I accepted Harry's apology without question because I've known him for years, I've seen the passionate leadership he's shown on issues of social justice, and I know what's in his heart.

Afghanistan Bake Sale

A while ago I wrote about "the evil corporate overlords who ostensibly profit from war put out propaganda via their media tentacles and party apparatchiks." I wrote that this is an unhelpful straw man put forth by tired liberal ideologues. Military spending isn’t simply popular because politicians are paid off. It has more to do with a political class stuck in tired thought. But we do have an extremely asymmetrical foreign policy budget. Military projects vastly outnumber the more peaceful, or at least non-violent ones.

Sure, it’d be nice if we didn’t spend our money foolishly. But before we get there we need to start by doing a cost-benefit analysis. (Shouldn’t that be up there somewhere with the golden rule?)

What’s so odd is that conservatives, for all their hatred of wasteful spending, think nothing of plunging cash into warfare. And yet one could make a reasonable case that, all told, war has actually made us considerably less safe. I don’t know if I would go that far personally.

But I would say that if we spent half as much money on so-called soft power we could see at least as much progress on national security. With the money left over we could have set up every major US metropolis with a version of the Harlem Childrens’ Zone and be well on our way to dramatically cutting prison terms, revitalizing our nation’s urban centers and seeing record increases in productivity.

I Don't Understand My Fellow Americans

I don't understand my fellow Americans.

If many of them had their way there would be no justice system. There would be good-doers and evil-doers. Period.

The concept of "rule of law" to them is a joke. Our founding principles of fairness, nuance, tolerance and human dignity, subsequently substantiated by science again and again, are foreign to them.

It's as if there's this large artery of evil, pumping out anger, fear, pridefulness, resentment, and other reptilian emotions responsible for everything wrong with the world. And they just mainline it, along with the the xenophobes, the racists, the majoritarians, the theocrats, the homophobes, etc.

They got theirs. Good and evil. Black and white. Fuck everyone else.

Our prison system is a festering nightmare of cruelty. We can't decide whether to punish or rehabilitate, so we just let people rot - subjected to daily humiliation, brutality and threat of death. Then we wonder why recidivism rates are so high. To many convicts, life inside isn't so different than the outside - with it's "game" mentality, dysfunctionally anti-love and anti-life.

But we didn't really care about them before they went to jail. So why care now? We set them up to fail and then kick them while they're down.

The whole mindset of American conservatism makes me physically ill. The pomposity. The callousness. The knee-jerk assumptions. The cowardice. The narrow-minded ignorance. The hypocritical values. The selfish greed. The impatience. The failure to put themselves in the shoes of others. The uncritical embrace of tradition. The acceptance of inequality. The self-satisfaction.

















Pieter Bruegel - The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride


So much of it can be chalked up to simple ignorance. But what about the college-educated conservatives? What about the ones that make it their business to understand the world? There are other religions. There are other types of people. There are other ways of viewing the world. Did they never read about studies of human behavior? Anthropology? Philosophy? Economics? Colonialism? Race relations?

Why is their view of why people do what they do so different from mine? Why is mine so much more concerned with systemic injustice? Why is theirs so concerned with deflecting blame? Why is mine reflected in every major faith's emphasis on humility, sacrifice, love and kindness, the least among us - while theirs in the absolute congratulation of the self? I'm a fucking Atheist and I know this!

The politicians represent them. The media feeds on their worst, most craven impulses (within FCC limits - an irony). But they live and fester on their own, seeping into the sunless nooks and crannies of darkened, blinded thought. Unconcerned with ever looking at the world in a truly fresh or objective manner, everything must first be passed through conservative goggles of "the free market & me".

Healthcare must be neither redistributive, nor bad for business or me. The free market couldn't have made it the way it is. And government will only make it worse.

Economic catastrophe couldn't possibly be the fault of a free market. Government couldn't possibly help. In fact, they must have caused it. The solution is a freer market.

The problem with education couldn't be society or a failure of the free market to meet social needs - it must be government and unions (organized labor). Although we can't exactly stop offering public education, right? I mean, they are children after all.

The problem with the criminal justice system can't be solved by supporting people before they go to prison, or helping them learn to be better individuals once they get there. The solutions is simply to lock more people up, for longer, and offer less support! (Oh yeah - and let's blame the cost on prison guard unions).

Who am I kidding. What problem in the world could not be solved by free markets and people "deciding" to do the right thing? If they don't, it's their fault. There are no social forces at work! You have a choice to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior and if you don't, you'll burn in Hell anyway!

Problem fucking solved.

Truth and Torture

Matt Yglesias asks:

At any rate, I would be interested to know how far the public—or how torture-loving conservative elites—would be willing to go on this. In a lot of ways terrorism cases strike me as unusually unpromising venues for torture. Something more banal like trying to get a low-level drug dealer to spill the beans on his supplier could really work. My view is that routinized deployment of brutality by government officials isn’t going to produce any systematic gains, so it doesn’t make sense to uncork this kind of treatment on Abdulmuttalab or Generic Drug Dealer X. But for torture enthusiasts is there anything special about terrorism suspects?

I've followed a similar logic with the support of torture. If any form of it is acceptable policy then there are surely plenty of applications. Every single argument I've heard for it could easily be applied to local law enforcement - gangs and drug cartels come to mind, not to mention kidnappers, murderers, etc.

And it could be done quite efficiently, with no lasting physical harm. I'm sure there are all manner of horrifically painful things you could do to a body. And we haven't even begun to study it properly. We could start running sophisticated tests on pain thresholds and procedural classifications.

In a recent New Yorker article on the conservative CEO of Whole Foods, Nick Paumgarten writes of:

a tendency, common among smart people, to presume that everyone in the world either does or should think as he does—to take for granted that people can (or want to) strike his patented balance of enlightenment and self-interest. It sometimes sounds as if he believed that, if every company had him at the helm, there would be no need for unions or health-care reform, and that therefore every company should have someone like him, and that therefore there should be no unions or health-care reform.

I think this beautifully describes the mindset behind pro-torture policy. Under the right circumstances (say, the ticking time-bomb) the right people (say, the patriotic armed forces) will do the right thing. While torture may in perfect circumstances be ethical, the world is not perfect. We will not always (ever?) know for certain whether a ticking time bomb really exists - or whether a suspect has information on an impending drug deal - or where a missing girl might be located.

This sort of black and white, reductionist thinking is, to use a favored word of the right, "evil". It distorts truth by redefining reality and erecting shadows. It makes rational debate impossible by changing the rules to fix broken logic. The rule of law and due process are thrown away because "these people are terrorists", yet how could they be defined as such without due process, unless one invokes a sort of alternate reality where circumstances are always perfect, where Lynddie England and her superiors do not exist.

There are rules of logic to dispatch this absurdity. The most basic is the axiom:

All x are z.
Y is an z.
Therefore, y is z.

And its negative:

All x are z.
Z is x.
This does not mean z is x.

Thus:

All terrorists are suspects.
Mister A. is a suspect.
This does not mean Mister A. is a terrorist.

Now, having already made this error in calculation, the modern conservative returns to reason and makes the following logical determination:

Liberals want to treat suspects as if they are not terrorists.

This is a perfectly reasonable conclusion, ladled as it is upon a heaping pile of defecated sense. It would be as if I truly believed all dogs were vicious predators and accused you of unwise leniency in proposing they be allowed to roam freely in parks. This is a common error on the right. The starting assumption is incorrect, and yet logic is subsequently applied. So if all gays are dangerous & mentally ill, then accepting their lifestyle is surely unwise. If abortion is murder, than doctors who perform them are murderers. If every man makes his own lot in life, then the state should not interfere at the expense of others.

Unfortunately we as a society spend precious little time examining first assumptions. Instead, we argue past one another, infuriating each other in taking positions that seem highly illogical and thus incoherent. Yet what to do when so much of our wisdom is simply inherited and accepted with little understanding of historical context or philosophical underpinning? The degree to which one makes a critical examination of one's beliefs is the degree to which one comes in danger of being labeled an "elitist", defined of course in contrast to the populist, who in turn is defined by what is popular, not necessarily what is true.

The great American irony is that while we loathe authority because of its limiting of our natural freedoms, we find ourselves endlessly caught in a reactionary anti-authoritarianism that results in the limitation we seek to avoid. Our populism, fed by a media-political-complex, becomes itself an authoritarian limit on freedom. Current conservatism - a truest expression of this sort of populism - disdains the very authority that would seek to free us from ourselves. It disdains the government that might guarantee or freedom of opportunity. It disdains the university which might guarantee our freedom of thought. It disdains the media, which might guarantee our freedom of inquiry.

One might forgiven for wondering whether it disdains the very concept of truth itself. Recently, as part of an effort to debunk Darwinism on college campuses, Kurt Cameron (former television star and current evangelical figure) compared Darwinism to Nazism,

If you take Darwin’s theory and extend it to its logical end, it can be used to justify all number of very horrendous things.

What does this have to do with whether it is true or not? You can't decide when and when not to believe in truth. It just is, in all its ugly beauty. It may seem easier to believe that because it says being gay is wrong in the bible, that it actually is. Or that if you believe that a fetus has the right to life it does. Or that if you succeeded despite all odds than everyone can. Or that if a person is a terrorist suspect they are a terrorist.

The Corporatization of War

A popular, long-standing meme among the more radical progressive is that war is almost always driven by profit and greed of those who stand to gain from its engagement.

Aside from being wrong, the cynical, self-aggrandizing view that all this warmongering from the right comes down to profit is unhelpful. It detracts from the real motivations, which are more nuanced, less clear-cut, and demand a more thoughtful engagement with the facts.

I suppose the argument might go like this: the evil corporate overlords who ostensibly profit from war put out propaganda via their media tentacles and party apparatchiks. The average American conservative, unsophisticated as he is, mindlessly gobbles it up, ignorantly seeing it as sound political policy.

While nifty for the plot of the next Cameron flick (penned by Moore?), it's little more than paranoid left-wing hubris. The reality is that there is a considerable tradition of principled philosophy and political logic behind the "war on terror" and the rest of its neoconservative manifestations.

The tradition is mostly utter bullshit - expensive, ineffective and ultimately makes things worse. The entire profile is explained more succinctly by Freud than anything even the brightest CEOs could cook up. With the cigars, the oil-rig SUVs, the football & FOX 24 metaphors, the faux-classical pretensions, the manifest destiny theocratic sanctimony, mommy's boy indulgence - its all such rich material for warfare that the fact that a few lucky companies might see a profit is mere icing on the cake.

There are certainly structural arguments for how the military-industrial complex makes war more of a viable, sexy option. But to reduce humanity's longstanding tradition of the glorification and rationalization of war into a simple symptom of capitalism is an insult to the project of eradicating for good our reliance on it as a retributive substitution for effective and ethical policy.

Top Ten Films of the 00's

*This list does not include films of 2009. I have not seen most of them - certainly not the good ones.

















#10 - The Hammer


















#9 - Be Kind Rewind

















#8 - The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
















#7 - The Inheritance
















#6 - Stevie


















#5 - Borat

















#4 - City of God
















#3 - Ghost Dog

















#2 - Napoleon Dynamite



















#1 - Lord of the Rings Trilogy


Runners up:

Royal Tenenbaums
There Will Be Blood
Wall-e
Pan’s Labyrinth
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Let the Right One In
The Band’s Visit
Spirited Away
The Wrestler