Economically Liberal, Socially Conservative

A provocative piece by Samuel Gregg, “Markets, Catholicism, and Libertarianism” (Public Discourse, October 24, 2016) reminds me of an idea for a post that flitted through my aging brain a while back. Gregg writes:

In a recent American Prospect article, John Gehring maintains that Catholics like myself who regard markets as the most optimal set of economic conditions are effectively promoting libertarian philosophy. Gehring’s concerns about libertarianism and what he calls “free market orthodoxy” have been echoed in other places.

The generic argument seems to be the following. Promoting market approaches to economic life involves buying into libertarian ideology. . . .

What [Gregg and other] critics seem to miss is that a favorable assessment of markets and market economics need not be premised on acceptance of libertarianism in any of its many forms. . . .

Libertarianism’s great strength lies in economics. Prominent twentieth-century libertarian economists, such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, made major contributions to the critique of socialist economics.. . . .

Philosophically speaking, Mises associated himself, especially in Human Action (1949), with Epicureanism and utilitarianism. Hayek’s views were more complicated. While his Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973/1976/1979) rejected Benthamite utilitarianism, Hayek embraced a type of indirect-rule utilitarianism in works such as The Constitution of Liberty (1960). He also articulated progress-for-the-sake-of-progress arguments and social evolutionist positions heavily shaped by David Hume’s writings.

Such philosophical views are characteristic of many self-described libertarians. . . .

None of the above-noted contributions to economics by Mises and Hayek are, however, dependent upon any of their libertarian philosophical commitments.

That’s exactly right. The great insight of libertarian economics is that people acting freely and cooperatively through markets will do the best job of producing goods and services that match consumers’ wants. Yes, there’s lack of information, asymmetrical information, buyer’s remorse, and (supposed) externalities (which do find their way into prices). But the modern “solution” to such problems is one-size-fits-all regulation, which simply locks in the preferences of regulators and market incumbents, and freezes out (or makes very expensive) the real solutions that are found through innovation, entrepreneurship, and competition.

Social conservatism is like the market liberalism of libertarian economics. Behavior is channeled in cooperative, mutually beneficial, and voluntary ways by the institutions of civil society: family, church, club, community, and — yes — commerce. It is channeled by social norms that have evolved from eons of voluntary social intercourse. Those norms are the bedrock and “glue” of civilization. Government is needed only as the arbiter of last resort, acting on behalf of civil society as the neutral enforcer of social norms of the highest order: prohibitions of murder, rape, theft, fraud, and not much else. Civil society, if left alone, would deal adequately with lesser transgressions through inculcation and disapprobation (up to and including ostracism). When government imposes norms that haven’t arisen from eons of trial-and-error it undermines civil society and vitiates the civilizing influence of social norms.

The common denominator of market liberalism and social conservatism is that both are based on real-world behavior. Trial and error yields information that free actors are able to exploit for their betterment and (intended or not) the betterment of others.

“Feelings, nothing more than feelings”

Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on the physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms to a certain condition, the condition of being physical. Of course, physicalists don’t deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance don’t seem physical — items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are either physical or supervene on the physical.

Daniel Stoljar, “Physicialism” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
first published February 13, 2001, substantively revised March 9, 2015)

Robin Hanson, an economics professor and former physicist, takes the physicalist position in “All Is Simple Parts Interacting Simply“:

There is nothing that we know of that isn’t described well by physics, and everything that physicists know of is well described as many simple parts interacting simply. Parts are localized in space, have interactions localized in time, and interactions effects don’t move in space faster than the speed of light. Simple parts have internal states that can be specified with just a few bits (or qubits), and each part only interacts directly with a few other parts close in space and time. Since each interaction is only between a few bits on a few sides, it must also be simple. Furthermore, all known interactions are mutual in the sense that the state on all sides is influenced by states of the other sides….

Not only do we know that in general everything is made of simple parts interacting simply, for pretty much everything that happens here on Earth we know those parts and interactions in great precise detail. Yes there are still some areas of physics we don’t fully understand, but we also know that those uncertainties have almost nothing to say about ordinary events here on Earth….

Now it is true that when many simple parts are combined into complex arrangements, it can be very hard to calculate the detailed outcomes they produce. This isn’t because such outcomes aren’t implied by the math, but because it can be hard to calculate what math implies.

However,

what I’ve said so far is usually accepted as uncontroversial, at least when applied to the usual parts of our world, such as rivers, cars, mountains laptops, or ants. But as soon as one claims that all this applies to human minds, suddenly it gets more controversial. People often state things like this:

I am sure that I’m not just a collection of physical parts interacting, because I’m aware that I feel. I know that physical parts interacting just aren’t the kinds of things that can feel by themselves. So even though I have a physical body made of parts, and there are close correlations between my feelings and the states of my body parts, there must be something more than that to me (and others like me). So there’s a deep mystery: what is this extra stuff, where does it arise, how does it change, and so on. We humans care mainly about feelings, not physical parts interacting; we want to know what out there feels so we can know what to care about.

But consider a key question: Does this other feeling stuff interact with the familiar parts of our world strongly and reliably enough to usually be the actual cause of humans making statements of feeling like this?

If yes, this is a remarkably strong interaction, making it quite surprising that physicists have missed it so far. So surprising in fact as to be frankly unbelievable.

But if no, if this interaction isn’t strong enough to explain human claims of feeling, then we have a remarkable coincidence to explain. Somehow this extra feeling stuff exists, and humans also have a tendency to say that it exists, but these happen for entirely independent reasons. The fact that feeling stuff exists isn’t causing people to claim it exists, nor vice versa. Instead humans have some sort of weird psychological quirk that causes them to make such statements, and they would make such claims even if feeling stuff didn’t exist. But if we have a good alternate explanation for why people tend to make such statements, what need do we have of the hypothesis that feeling stuff actually exists? Such a coincidence seems too remarkable to be believed.

Thus it seems hard to square a belief in this extra feeling stuff with standard physics in either cases, where feeling stuff does or does not have strong interactions with ordinary stuff. The obvious conclusion: extra feeling stuff just doesn’t exist.

Of course the “feeling stuff” interacts strongly and reliably with the familiar parts of the world — unless you’re a Robin Hanson, who seems to have no “feeling stuff.” Has he never been insulted, cut off by a rude lane-changer, been in love, held a baby in his arms, and so on unto infinity?

Hanson continues:

If this type of [strong] interaction were remotely as simple as all the interactions we know, then it should be quite measurable with existing equipment. Any interaction not so measurable would have be vastly more complex and context dependent than any we’ve ever seen or considered. Thus I’d bet heavily and confidently that no one will measure such an interaction.

Which is just a stupid thing to say. Physicists haven’t measured the interactions — and probably never will — because they’re not the kinds of phenomena that physicists study. Psychologists, yes; physicists, no.

Not being satisfied with obtuseness and stupidity, Hanson concedes the existence of “feelings,” but jumps to a conclusion in order to dismiss them:

But if no, if this interaction isn’t strong enough to explain human claims of feeling, then we have a remarkable coincidence to explain. Somehow this extra feeling stuff exists, and humans also have a tendency to say that it exists, but these happen for entirely independent reasons. The fact that feeling stuff exists isn’t causing people to claim it exists, nor vice versa. Instead humans have some sort of weird psychological quirk that causes them to make such statements, and they would make such claims even if feeling stuff didn’t exist….

Thus it seems hard to square a belief in this extra feeling stuff with standard physics in either cases, where feeling stuff does or does not have strong interactions with ordinary stuff. The obvious conclusion: extra feeling stuff just doesn’t exist.

How does Hanson — the erstwhile physicist — know any of this? I submit that he doesn’t know. He’s just arguing circularly, as an already-committed physicalist.

First, Hanson assumes that feelings aren’t “real” because physicists haven’t measured their effects. But that failure has been for lack of trying.

Then Hanson assumes that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Specifically, because there’s no evidence (as he defines it) for the existence of “feelings,” their existence (if real) is merely coincidental with claims of their existence.

And then Hanson the Obtuse ignores strong interactions of “feeling stuff” with “ordinary stuff.” Which suggests that he has never experienced love, desire, or hate (for starters).

It would be reasonable for Hanson to suggest that feelings are real, in a physical sense, in that they represent chemical states of the central nervous system. He could then claim that feelings don’t exist apart from such states; that is, “feeling stuff” is nothing more than a physical phenomenon. Hanson makes that claim, but in a roundabout way:

If everything around us is explained by ordinary physics, then a detailed examination of the ordinary physics of familiar systems will eventually tells us everything there is to know about the causes and consequences of our feelings. It will say how many different feelings we are capable of, what outside factors influence them, and how our words and actions depend on them.

However, he gets there by assuming an answer to the question whether “feelings” are something real and apart from physical existence. He hasn’t proven anything, one way or the other.

Hanson’s blog is called Overcoming Bias. It’s an apt title: Hanson has a lot of bias to overcome.

Social Justice vs. Liberty

The original position is a central feature of John Rawls’s social contract account of justice, “justice as fairness,” set forth in A Theory of Justice (TJ). It is designed to be a fair and impartial point of view that is to be adopted in our reasoning about fundamental principles of justice. In taking up this point of view, we are to imagine ourselves in the position of free and equal persons who jointly agree upon and commit themselves to principles of social and political justice. The main distinguishing feature of the original position is “the veil of ignorance”: to insure impartiality of judgment, the parties are deprived of all knowledge of their personal characteristics and social and historical circumstances. They do know of certain fundamental interests they all have, plus general facts about psychology, economics, biology, and other social and natural sciences. The parties in the original position are presented with a list of the main conceptions of justice drawn from the tradition of social and political philosophy, and are assigned the task of choosing from among these alternatives the conception of justice that best advances their interests in establishing conditions that enable them to effectively pursue their final ends and fundamental interests. Rawls contends that the most rational choice for the parties in the original position are two principles of justice: The first guarantees the equal basic rights and liberties needed to secure the fundamental interests of free and equal citizens and to pursue a wide range of conceptions of the good. The second principle provides fair equality of educational and employment opportunities enabling all to fairly compete for powers and positions of office; and it secures for all a guaranteed minimum of all-purpose means (including income and wealth) individuals need to pursue their interests and to maintain their self-respect as free and equal persons.

Samuel Freeman, “Original Position,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
February 27, 1999, with a substantive revision on September 9, 2014

Rawls, like many moral philosophers, presumes to judge all and sundry with his God-like mind. He uses it to fabricate abstract, ideal principles of distributive justice. Thus the real and possible world is found wanting because it fails to conform the the kind of world that’s implicit in Rawls’s principles. And thus the real and possible world must be brought into line with Rawls’s false ideal. The alignment must be performed by the state, whether or not Rawls admits it, because his principles are inconsistent with human nature and the facts of human existence.

There can’t be an original position. Human beings are already in myriad “positions,” of which they have extensive knowledge. And a large fraction of human beings wouldn’t willingly act as if they were “deprived of all knowledge of their personal characteristics and social and historical circumstances.” Why? because they wouldn’t deem it in their interest. The original position and the veil of ignorance are therefore nothing but contrivances aimed at justifying Rawls’s preferred social, political, and economic arrangements.

Further, there isn’t — and never will be — agreement as to “general facts about psychology, economics, biology, and other social and natural sciences.” For example, many of the related entries in this blog are representative of deep divisions between respectable schools of thought about such subjects as psychology, economics, evolution (as it applies to race and “natural rights”), criminology, etc. Rawls writes blithely of “general facts” because he assumes that they point to the kind of world that he envisions.

Similarly, there’s Rawls’s “list of the main conceptions of justice drawn from the tradition of social and political philosophy.” I doubt that Rawls is thinking of the conception that there is, or ought to be, an absolute rejection of any kind of social-welfare function wherein A’s gain is “acceptable” if it (somehow and by some impracticable measure) offsets B’s loss. But that position is implicit in the idea that there ought to be “a guaranteed minimum of all-purpose means (including income and wealth) individuals need to pursue their interests and to maintain their self-respect as free and equal persons.” This is nothing but cover for redistribution. Who decides how much of it is enough? Rawls? The social engineers who buy into Rawls’s conception of justice? Well, of course. But what justifies their stance? Their only real recourse is to impose their views by force, which reveals Rawls’s philosophical rationalization for what is, necessarily, a state-enforced redistributive scheme.

And who says that a person who accepts state-enforced handouts (the fruit of theft) will thereby maintain his self-respect and is a free and equal person. In fact, many recipients of state-imposed handouts are lacking in self-respect; they are not free because as wards of the state they subject themselves to its dictates; and they are equal only in an irrelevant, rhetorical sense, not in the sense that they are the equal of other persons in ability, effort, or moral character.

Rawlsian equality is an empty concept, as is the veil of ignorance. The latter is a variant of Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” The categorical imperative is a vacuous bit of philosophical rhetoric that doesn’t get around reality: Human beings often act as if there were a “law” for everyone else, but not for themselves.

The “veil of ignorance,” according to Wikipedia (as of July 2010) requires you to

imagine that societal roles were completely re-fashioned and redistributed, and that from behind your veil of ignorance you do not know what role you will be reassigned. Only then can you truly consider the morality of an issue.

This is just another way of pretending to omniscience. Try as you might to imagine your “self” away, you can’t do it. Your position about a moral issue is your position, not that of someone else. Rawls’s position is Rawls’s position, and that of persons who like the redistributive implications of his position. But who are Rawls and his ilk to set themselves up as neutral, omniscient judges of humanity’s moral, social, and economic arrangements? Who died and made them Gods?

In the end, justice comes down to the norms by which a people abide: They can be voluntarily evolved and enforced socially, or in part by the state (e.g., imprisonment and execution). They can devised by clever theorists (e.g., Rawls) and others with an agenda (e.g., redistribution of income and wealth, abolition of alcohol, defense of slavery), and then imposed by the state.

There is a neglected alternative, which Michael Oakeshott describes in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays:

Government…as the conservative…understands it, does not begin with a vision of another, different and better world, but with the observation of the self-government practised even by men of passion in the conduct of their enterprises; it begins in the informal adjustments of interests to one another which are designed to release those who are apt to collide from the mutual frustration of a collision. Sometimes these adjustments are no more than agreements between two parties to keep out of each other’s way; sometimes they are of wider application and more durable character, such as the International Rules for for the prevention of collisions at sea. In short, the intimations of government are to be found in ritual, not in religion or philosophy; in the enjoyment of orderly and peaceable behaviour, not in the search for truth or perfection….

To govern, then, as the conservative understands it, is to provide a vinculum juris for those manners of conduct which, in the circumstances, are least likely to result in a frustrating collision of interests; to provide redress and means of compensation for those who suffer from others behaving in a contrary manners; sometimes to provide punishment for those who pursue their own interests regardless of the rules; and, of course, to provide a sufficient force to maintain the authority of an arbiter of this kind. Thus, governing is recognized as a specific and limited activity; not the management of an enterprise, but the rule of those engaged in a great diversity of self-chosen enterprises. It is not concerned with concrete persons, but with activities; and with activities only in respect of their propensity to collide with one another. It is not concerned with moral right and wrong, it is not designed to make men good or even better; it is not indispensable on account of ‘the natural depravity of mankind’ but merely because of their current disposition to be extravagant; its business is to keep its subjects at peace with one another in the activities in which they have chosen to seek their happiness. And if there is any general idea entailed in this view, it is, perhaps, that a government which does not sustain the loyalty of its subjects is worthless; and that while one which (in the old puritan phrase) ‘commands the truth’ is incapable of doing so (because some of its subjects will believe its ‘truth’ to be in error), one which is indifferent to ‘truth’ and ‘error’ alike, and merely pursues peace, presents no obstacle to the necessary loyalty.

…[A]s the conservative understands it, modification of the rules should always reflect, and never impose, a change in the activities and beliefs of those who are subject to them, and should never on any occasion be so great as to destroy the ensemble. Consequently, the conservative will have nothing to do with innovations designed to meet merely hypothetical situations; he will prefer to enforce a rule he has got rather than invent a new one; he will think it appropriate to delay a modification of the rules until it is clear that the change of circumstances it is designed to reflect has come to stay for a while; he will be suspicious of proposals for change in excess of what the situation calls for, of rulers who demand extra-ordinary powers in order to make great changes and whose utterances re tied to generalities like ‘the public good’ or social justice’, and of Saviours of Society who buckle on armour and seek dragons to slay; he will think it proper to consider the occasion of the innovation with care; in short, he will be disposed to regard politics as an activity in which a valuable set of tools is renovated from time to time and kept in trim rather than as an opportunity for perpetual re-equipment.

Such was the wisdom of the much-violated and mutilated Constitution of the United States. Its promise of liberty in the real world has been dashed by the Saviours of Society — idealists like Rawls, opportunists like FDR and LBJ, and criminals like the Clintons.

* * *

True Confession, New Resolution

RETRACTED AS HOPELESSLY NAIVE. SEE, FOR EXAMPLE, MANY SUBSEQUENT POSTS, INCLUDING BUT FAR FROM LIMITED TO Leftism As Crypto-Fascism: The Google Paradigm AND What’s Going On? A Stealth Revolution

I spent 30 years at a defense think-tank. There were many things that I liked about it, and a few things that I didn’t like about it. The thing that I disliked most was the way in which some senior managers and many analysts offered criticism. They practiced a perverted version of the Socratic method. Instead of working with the author of an analysis to improve it, they would keep probing the weak points of he work — or more correctly, the analyst’s ability to explain and defend it — and leave the analyst melting in a puddle of mortification.

I resented that kind of criticism when it was aimed at me, and when I saw it being aimed at others. (I was involved in the creation of a mock “seal” for the hazing sessions that were led by a former president of the think-tank. The seal displayed the motto “Nibbled to death by ducks.”) But I often resorted to the method when I was the critic. Human nature is like that.

~~I am here to confess (as I just did), to repent (as I hope I am doing), and to enter onto the path of righteousness (as I hope I will).~~

The most constructive way to offer criticism, in my experience, is to put yourself in the place of the person you are criticizing. Try to understand the issue at hand, as he sees it, and try to understand the way he comes at the issue. If you get “inside” that person’s mind, you can then talk to him about the problem in a way that he understands. From there, you can work with him to improve whatever it is he is seeking to improve — be it the Navy’s choice of a new weapon system or the opportunities available to low-income persons.

I know that a person’s political views are largely a matter of temperament, and for that reason not always susceptible to change by appealing to facts or logic. But political views are nevertheless changeable, in the way that a person who is addicted to drugs or alcohol will overcome his addiction — if he understands that he can do it, and will live a miserable life and die miserably if he doesn’t.

~~I am also aware that leftists — who are the usual targets of my criticism — do not often (or perhaps ever) respond constructively to conciliatory statements. As I say here,~~

leftists can be ruthless, unto vicious. They pull no punches; they call people names; they skirt the law — and violate it — to get what they want (e.g., Obama’s various “executive actions”); they use the law and the media to go after their ideological opponents; and on and on.

Nevertheless, this blog is but a pinprick on the vast hide of leftism. Perhaps it will be more effective if I make a greater effort to understand what leftists want, and try to appeal to them on that basis, instead of preaching to the choir of libertarian-conservatives as I often do.

~~* * *~~

~~Related reading and viewing:~~

Jonathan Haidt, “Why the Centre Cannot Hold in America, Europe, and Psychology” (Heterodox Academy, August 9, 2016). This is an introduction to Haidt’s recent speech at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention in Denver, where he addressed the causes and consequences of political polarization.

~~A video of the speech: https://youtu.be/vAE-gxKs6gM~~

~~PowerPoint slides: http://heterodoxacademy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/haidt.APA-2016-lecture-on-polarization.for-posting.compressed.pptx~~

~~PDF version of the slides: http://heterodoxacademy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/haidt.APA-2016-lecture-on-polarization.slides-for-printing.pdf~~

Winners and Losers

Steven Landsburg has a provocative post. His point seems to be that those who focus on the “losers” from free trade “want us to conclude either that free trade is not a good thing, or that at the very least, the winners should compensate the losers.”

Landsburg continues:

This strikes me as an extraordinarily dishonest way of arguing, because pretty much nobody ever argues this way about anything else, even though every policy change in history has created both winners and losers. In fact, every human action has both winners and losers. When Archie takes Betty instead of Veronica to the ice cream shoppe instead of the movies, both Veronica and the theater owner lose out. It does not follow that all human actions are wrong, or immoral, or should be discouraged by law, and it does not follow that all human actions should be followed by compensation to the losers.

What I object to — aside from Landsburg’s habitual use of “us,” which suggests some kind of collective consciousness at work — is his unfortunate, if inadvertent, endorsement of the idea that every human action has both winners and losers. “Winner” and “loser” are terms that properly apply to persons who are engaged in some kind of contest or bet. The rest — which includes just about everything — is just life. Stuff happens: Veronica doesn’t go the movies with Archie; American steelworkers lose jobs; dinosaurs become extinct.

Except when government is involved. Government action changes the natural course of human events, the course that they would take in a society that is bound by shared beliefs, language, and customs (or norms). A government of a relatively small or close-knit geopolitcal entity may act in accordance with and reinforce societal norms, but the governance of the United States has long since become something else: a set of interlocking dictatorial regimes (federal, State, and local) bent on enforcing rules designed on high, sometimes with the intention of favoring specific groups. Those specific groups have something that the ruling caste wants: money, influence, and votes.

Government acts legitimately only when it does things that would be done by a cohesive social group. Self-defense is one of those things. When government wages war in defense of its citizens, it has a claim to legitimacy — though the soundness of the claim depends on the necessity of the war and the skill and efficiency with which it is waged. When government executes murderers it legitimately exacts justice and deters more murders — though the soundness of the claim depends on the swiftness and fairness with which executions occur. A foreign enemy isn’t a loser, he’s an enemy. An executed murderer isn’t a loser, he’s a recipient of justice.

But beyond defense, justice, and the even-handed representation of Americans’ interests in foreign capitals, there is nothing that government can claim as a legitimate function. Government’s forays into welfare, for example, are destructive of private charity and go far beyond what a well-functioning social group would allow, in that they discourage work and saving. Social Security and Medicare, for example, don’t just mimic private charity toward the poorest and sickest of the elderly population, they benefit even the the wealthiest and healthiest of Americans. Social Security benefits and the market value of Medicare (as insurance) can easily raise a retired couple’s effective income from, say, $250,000 to $300,000 or $325,000. That’s not charity, it’s middle-class and upper-middle-class welfare. (I don’t mean to suggest that the wealthiest should be forced to subsidize everyone else; that’s a socially and economically destructive idea that I’ll not bother to discuss here.)

There’s much more to government than spending, of course, There’s also the vast web of regulations that has been spun by government at all levels. Regulations alter the course of social and economic intercourse, as they are meant to do. The justification is usually either “for your own good” or “for the good of group X.” In any event, social norms and incentives to work and save are subverted by those who believe, wrongly, that they can subvert those norms and incentives without inviting unintended consequences. The Great Recession, for example, was caused by regulation, not deregulation.

It has come to pass that many of government’s fiscal and regulatory interventions are rationalized as efforts to “level the playing” field and compensate “losers” for the “unfair” advantages enjoyed by “winners.” But such language masks a presumption that there are better social and economic arrangements and better outcomes — which, of course, are known to those who use such language. This is called the nirvana fallacy, the invalid comparison of imperfect reality to imagined perfection.

It therefore surprises me that Steven Landsburg, who is super-rational and a stickler for accuracy, would invoke “winners” and “losers.” To do so lends aid and comfort to the proponents of social and economic engineering.

It might be said, with some justice, that government interventions create winners and losers. But what those interventions really create are dependents and victims. The dependents are the tens of millions of Americans who rely on government welfare and government grants of privilege (e.g., affirmative action, regulatory protection from competition, subsidized loans). The victims are the tens of millions of Americans who pay directly for such privileges (e.g., high marginal tax rates, regulatory infringements on liberty, suppression of free speech and association, theft of property rights), and the 300-million-plus whose income is far less than it would be in the absence of fiscal and regulatory interventions, which are damaging to economic growth.

A person who earns an honest living as an investment banker, baseball player, or movie star and makes millions of dollars a year isn’t a winner, in the proper sense of the word, he’s just being rewarded according to the value placed on his efforts by those who pay for them. A person who earns a pittance because he’s an illegal immigrant who can’t speak English and has no particular skills isn’t a loser, he’s just being rewarded according to the value placed on his efforts by those who pay for them. Veronica isn’t a loser because Archie prefers Betty, she’s just another beautiful girl who can probably land someone better looking and richer than Archie. The theater owner isn’t a loser because Archie doesn’t take Veronica to the movies, he’s just another businessman who’s in the wrong business if the loss of two customers for one night is a big deal.

Let’s get real and quit calling people winners and losers when they’re not playing games or making bets. Let’s get real and start talking about those who are dependent on government and those who are its victims, which is just about everyone but the politicians and bureaucrats who feast at the public trough.

And, yes, I do mean to say that most of the dependents and enablers of big government are its victims. Such are the wages of social dissolution and economic ignorance.

Logical Fallacy of the Day

“Cincinnati mourns gorilla killed to save boy.” That’s the headline of a USA Today story, which says (in part):

The Cincinnati Zoo was open Sunday for Memorial Day weekend tourists, but the gorilla exhibit was closed indefinitely after authorities killed a gorilla that attacked a 4-year-old boy who fell into the enclosure’s moat.

Zoo President Thane Maynard said the boy crawled through a barrier Saturday, fell 10 to 12 feet and was grabbed by the zoo’s 17-year-old male western lowland gorilla, Harambe.

The Cincinnati Fire Department said in a statement that first responders “witnessed a gorilla who was violently dragging and throwing the child.” The boy was with the 400-pound animal for about 10 minutes before the zoo’s Dangerous Animal Response Team deemed the situation “life-threatening,” Maynard said.

Police confirmed the child was taken to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center near the zoo and was treated for non-life threatening injuries.

“The choice was made to put down, or shoot, Harambe, so he’s gone,” Maynard said. “We’ve never had a situation like this at the Cincinnati Zoo where a dangerous animal needed to be dispatched in an emergency situation.”

Maynard said the Dangerous Animal Response Team followed procedures, which they practice in drills. He said no one had ever gotten into the enclosure in the 38-year history of the zoo’s gorilla exhibit.

“It’s a sad day all the way around,” Maynard said. “They made a tough choice. They made the right choice, because they saved that little boy’s life. It could have been very bad.”

After the gorilla was shot, zoo employees unlocked the gate and two firefighters quickly retrieved the child, according to the fire department.

Two female gorillas were also in the enclosure.

“We are all devastated that this tragic accident resulted in the death of a critically endangered gorilla,” he said in a news release. “This is a huge loss for the zoo family and the gorilla population worldwide.”…

The decision to shoot Harambe instead of tranquilizing the animal was made in the interest of the boy’s safety, Maynard said.

“In an agitated situation, it may take quite a while for the tranquilizer to take effect,” he explained….

Maynard also explained that while Harambe didn’t attack the child, the animal’s size and strength posed a great danger.

Before I get to the logical fallacy, I must comment on some aspects of the story. The first is the apologetic tone of Maynard’s statement. Why apologize for doing the right thing?

Then there’s the contradiction. Maynard is reported to have said that the gorilla didn’t attack the child. But the fire department’s statement says that the gorilla was violently dragging and throwing the child, which seems more plausible.

And why was the situation deemed life-threatening only after the child had been in the gorilla enclosure for 10 minutes? It was life-threatening the instant that he climbed into the enclosure. Perhaps it took the response team that long to arrive at the scene and decide to execute the gorilla — an unconscionable delay.

Anyway, the logical fallacy is that “Cincinnati mourns.” That’s typical headline guff, and a logical fallacy. To ascribe an emotion or trait to a geopolitical area (and thus to all of its inhabitants) is a form of reification, which is the treatment of an abstraction as if it had material existence.

There is no “Cincinnati” to mourn, grieve, or otherwise experience emotion. There are many, many Cincinnatians (and New Yorkers, Americans, etc.) who have many different emotional reactions to notorious events: the killing of a gorilla, the death of Princess Diana, and so on. One of those reactions is indifference, which is often the proper one.

The headline writer could have written “Cincinnati rejoices in rescue of child from gorilla’s clutches.” But that would have been just as fallacious. There are Cincinnatians (and others) whose main (and sometimes only) reaction to the killing of the gorilla was to mourn it, and even to claim that it had been deprived of due process of law. But such views — I suspect and hope — are in the vast minority.

Were I given to reification, I would say that the events in Cincinnati reveal the callousness of America. The headline writer focused on “mourning” for the gorilla, while giving second place to the child’s well-being. And there were several bystanders who recorded the event with their cameras instead of turning away in horror.

I report, you reify.

* * *

Creative Destruction, Reification, and Social Welfare

“We the People” and Big Government

Society

The Tenor of the Times

Below are some links that I’ve collected about the culture war, political correctness, political hypocrisy, and other disturbing features of the contemporary scene. I don’t agree with everything said by the writers, but I believe that they are broadly right about the madness into which America seems to be rapidly descending.

Each link is followed by an excerpt of the piece that is linked. The excerpt — usually but not always the lede — is meant to entice you to follow the link. I urge you to do so.

* * *

Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, “Author Retracts Study of Changing Minds on Same-Sex Marriage after Colleague Admits Data Were Faked,” Retraction Watch, May 20, 2015 (et seq.):

In what can only be described as a remarkable and swift series of events, one of the authors of a much-ballyhooed Science paper claiming that short conversations could change people’s minds on same-sex marriage is retracting it following revelations that the data were faked by his co-author. [Leftists love to fake data to make political points (e.g., economics and climate studies). — TEA]

Jason Morgan, “Dissolving America,” American Thinker, June 29, 2015

The instant media consensus is in: the Confederate flag atop the South Carolina statehouse has got to go. The battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, we are told, just doesn’t represent who we are as a nation anymore.

But if we are going to take the Confederate flag down because it no longer represents us, then there is no reason why we shouldn’t take the American flag down, too. Not just from the government buildings in South Carolina, but from every home, ship, office, and church throughout the entire American territory. Because neither flag has anything to do with who we are anymore. Old Glory is now just as much a meaningless relic as the republic that created it — as obsolete as the Stars and Bars became in April of 1865.

Bill Vallicella, “SCOTUS and Benedict,” Maverick Philosopher, June 30, 2015:

[Quoting Rod Dreher]:

It is time for what I call the Benedict Option. In his 1982 book After Virtue, the eminent philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre likened the current age to the fall of ancient Rome. He pointed to Benedict of Nursia, a pious young Christian who left the chaos of Rome to go to the woods to pray, as an example for us. We who want to live by the traditional virtues, MacIntyre said, have to pioneer new ways of doing so in community. We await, he said “a new — and doubtless very different — St. Benedict.”

So now you are out in the desert or the forest or in some isolated place free of the toxic influences of a society in collapse. The problem is that you are now a very easy target for the fascists. You and yours are all in one place, far away from the rest of society and its infrastructure. All the fascists have to do is trump up some charges, of child-abuse, of gun violations, whatever. The rest of society considers you kooks and benighted bigots and won’t be bothered if you are wiped off the face of the earth. You might go the way of the Branch Davidians.

Heather Mac Donald, “The Shameful Liberal Exploitation of the Charleston Massacre,” National Review, July 1, 2015:

In fact, white violence against blacks is dwarfed by black on white violence. In 2012, blacks committed 560,600 acts of violence against whites (excluding homicide), and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence (excluding homicide) against blacks, according to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey provided to the author. Blacks, in other words, committed 85 percent of the non-homicide interracial crimes of violence between blacks and whites, even though they are less than 13 percent of the population. Both the absolute number of incidents and the rate of black-on-white violence are therefore magnitudes higher than white-on-black violence. There is no white race war going on.

Steve McCann, “America’s Destiny in the Balance,” American Thinker, July 1, 2015:

Beginning in the 1930’s, under the aegis of Franklin Roosevelt, the nation began a drift to the left as a reaction to the Great Depression. However, those truly committed to socialist/Marxist philosophy and tactics remained in the shadows until the 1960’s. The Viet Nam war protests unleashed far more than just a demand for an end to the war. Those that blamed America for all manner of alleged sins in the past and determined to transform the United States into a socialist/Marxist nirvana were able to step out from behind the shadows and enter the mainstream of national legitimacy. This swarm of locusts soon enveloped the higher levels of academia spawning countless clones to further infiltrate all strata of society — most notably the mainstream media, the entertainment complex and the ultimate target: the Democratic Party. These vital segments of the culture are now instruments of indoctrination, propaganda and political power.

Victoria Razzi, “Asian American Studies Professors Stay Silent on Asian vs. Black Integration,” The College Fix, July 1, 2015:

An 80-year-old Duke University professor recently argued that Asian Americans have integrated into America better than African Americans, a controversial and contentious assertion that caused uproar and prompted the scholar to be labeled a racist.

Eugene Slavin, “The White Privilege Lie,” American Thinker, July 1, 2015:

Of all the invectives launched against the United States by the resurgent American Left, the charge that in America, White Privilege reigns supreme is the most insidious and culturally ruinous.

Its intent is unambiguous: leftists perpetuate the White Privilege lie to smear America and its institutions as inherently racist, and therefore unworthy of adulation and in need of fundamental socioeconomic transformation.

David Limbaugh, “I Told You Things Are Getting Crazier,” CNSNews.com, July 7, 2015:

The world is upside down, inside out, sideways, crazy, nutso. Bad is good; up is down. Left is right; right is wrong. Evil is good; insanity is sanity. Abnormal is normal. Circles are squares. Hot is cold. Luke warm is red hot — among Republicans, anyway. Common sense is uncommon. The world is otherworldly. Dissent is “hate.” Diversity means conformity. The good guys are the bad guys; virtue is vice; sophistry is intellectualism; jerks are celebrated; debauchery is glorified; the holy is debauched. Let me share some of these headlines, which speak for themselves — loudly and depressingly.

Robert Joyner, “The Hypocrisy of #Black Lives Matter, July 4th Edition” Theden, July 9, 2015:

As Theden has argued before, the Black Lives Matter movement is one that very clearly does not care about its own stated goals. The name implies that the movement exists to protect and enrich the lives of blacks, but it spends its time protesting often spurious cases of police brutality and, more recently, the flying of “offensive” flags. It is conspicuously silent on the number one threat to black lives in America, which is other blacks. The movement routinely hectors whites, but frankly the preponderance of evidence shows that whites already value black lives more than blacks do themselves.

Fred Reed, “‘Payback’s a Bitch’: Rural Wisdom and the Gathering Storm,” Fred on Everything, July 9, 2015:

The furor over the Confederate flag, think I, has little to do with the Confederate flag, which is a pretext, an uninvolved bystander. Rather it is about a seething anger in the United States that we must not mention. It is the anger of people who see everything they are and believe under attack by people they aren’t and do not want to be—their heritage, their religion, their values and way of life all mocked and even made criminal.

Bill Vallicella, “Is Reason a White Male Euro-Christian Construct?,” Maverick Philosopher, July 10, 2015:

[Quoting John D. Caputo]:

White is not “neutral.” “Pure” reason is lily white, as if white is not a color or is closest to the purity of the sun, and everything else is “colored.” Purification is a name for terror and deportation, and “white” is a thick, dense, potent cultural signifier that is closely linked to rationalism and colonialism. What is not white is not rational. So white is philosophically relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued — it affects what we mean by “reason” — and “we” white philosophers cannot ignore it.

This is truly depressing stuff. It illustrates the rarefied, pseudo-intellectual stupidity to which leftist intellectuals routinely succumb, and the level to which humanities departments in our universities have sunk.

It’s all depressing. Have a nice day.

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XV)

Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

* * *

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

This descent into the Dark Ages will not end well. It never has in the past. [“Building the New Dark-Age Mind,” Works and Days, June 8, 2015]

Hamson’s chronicle of political correctness and doublespeak echoes one theme of my post, “1963: The Year Zero.”

* * *

Timothy Taylor does the two-handed economist act:

It may be that the question of “does inequality slow down economic growth” is too broad and diffuse to be useful. Instead, those of us who care about both the rise in inequality and the slowdown in economic growth should be looking for policies to address both goals, without presuming that substantial overlap will always occur between them. [“Does Inequality Reduce Economic Growth: A Skeptical View,” The Conversible Economist, May 29, 2015]

The short answer to the question “Does inequality reduce growth?” is no. See my post “Income Inequality and Economic Growth.” Further, even if inequality does reduce growth, the idea of reducing inequality (through income redistribution, say) to foster growth is utilitarian and therefore morally egregious. (See “Utilitarianism vs. Liberty.”)

* * *

In “Diminishing Marginal Utility and the Redistributive Urge” I write:

[L]eftists who deign to offer an economic justification for redistribution usually fall back on the assumption of the diminishing marginal utility (DMU) of income and wealth. In doing so, they commit (at least) four errors.

The first error is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness which is found in the notion of utility. Have you ever been able to measure your own state of happiness? I mean measure it, not just say that you’re feeling happier today than you were when your pet dog died. It’s an impossible task, isn’t it? If you can’t measure your own happiness, how can you (or anyone) presume to measure and aggregate the happiness of millions or billions of individual human beings? It can’t be done.

Which brings me to the second error, which is an error of arrogance. Given the impossibility of measuring one person’s happiness, and the consequent impossibility of measuring and comparing the happiness of many persons, it is pure arrogance to insist that “society” would be better off if X amount of income or wealth were transferred from Group A to Group B….

The third error lies in the implicit assumption embedded in the idea of DMU. The assumption is that as one’s income or wealth rises one continues to consume the same goods and services, but more of them….

All of that notwithstanding, the committed believer in DMU will shrug and say that at some point DMU must set in. Which leads me to the fourth error, which is an error of introspection…. [If over the years] your real income has risen by a factor of two or three or more — and if you haven’t messed up your personal life (which is another matter) — you’re probably incalculably happier than when you were just able to pay your bills. And you’re especially happy if you put aside a good chunk of money for your retirement, the anticipation and enjoyment of which adds a degree of utility (such a prosaic word) that was probably beyond imagining when you were in your twenties, thirties, and forties.

Robert Murphy agrees:

[T]he problem comes in when people sometimes try to use the concept of DMU to justify government income redistribution. Specifically, the argument is that (say) the billionth dollar to Bill Gates has hardly any marginal utility, while the 10th dollar to a homeless man carries enormous marginal utility. So clearly–the argument goes–taking a dollar from Bill Gates and giving it to a homeless man raises “total social utility.”

There are several serious problems with this type of claim. Most obvious, even if we thought it made sense to attribute units of utility to individuals, there is no reason to suppose we could compare them across individuals. For example, even if we thought a rich man had units of utility–akin to the units of his body temperature–and that the units declined with more money, and likewise for a poor person, nonetheless we have no way of placing the two types of units on the same scale….

In any event, this is all a moot point regarding the original question of interpersonal utility comparisons. Even if we thought individuals had cardinal utilities, it wouldn’t follow that redistribution would raise total social utility.

Even if we retreat to the everyday usage of terms, it still doesn’t follow as a general rule that rich people get less happiness from a marginal dollar than a poor person. There are many people, especially in the financial sector, whose self-esteem is directly tied to their earnings. And as the photo indicates, Scrooge McDuck really seems to enjoy money. Taking gold coins from Scrooge and giving them to a poor monk would not necessarily increase happiness, even in the everyday psychological sense. [“Can We Compare People’s Utilities?,” Mises Canada, May 22, 2015]

See also David Henderson’s “Murphy on Interpersonal Utility Comparisons” (EconLog, May 22, 2015) and Henderson’s earlier posts on the subject, to which he links. Finally, see my comment on an earlier post by Henderson, in which he touches on the related issue of cost-benefit analysis.

* * *

Here’s a slice of what Robert Tracinski has to say about “reform conservatism”:

The key premise of this non-reforming “reform conservatism” is the idea that it’s impossible to really touch the welfare state. We might be able to alter its incentives and improve its clanking machinery, but only if we loudly assure everyone that we love it and want to keep it forever.

And there’s the problem. Not only is this defeatist at its core, abandoning the cause of small government at the outset, but it fails to address the most important problem facing the country.

“Reform conservatism” is an answer to the question: how can we promote the goal of freedom and small government—without posing any outright challenge to the welfare state? The answer: you can’t. All you can do is tinker around the edges of Leviathan. And ultimately, it won’t make much difference, because it will all be overwelmed in the coming disaster. [“Reform Conservatism Is an Answer to the Wrong Question,” The Federalist, May 22, 2015]

Further, as I observe in “How to Eradicate the Welfare State, and How Not to Do It,” the offerings of “reform conservatives”

may seem like reasonable compromises with the left’s radical positions. But they are reasonable compromises only if you believe that the left wouldn’t strive vigorously to undo them and continue the nation’s march toward full-blown state socialism. That’s the way leftists work. They take what they’re given and then come back for more, lying and worse all the way.

See also Arnold Kling’s “Reason Roundtable on Reform Conservatism” (askblog, May 22, 2015) and follow the links therein.

* * *

I’ll end this installment with a look at science and the anti-scientific belief in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.

Here’s Philip Ball in “The Trouble With Scientists“:

It’s likely that some researchers are consciously cherry-picking data to get their work published. And some of the problems surely lie with journal publication policies. But the problems of false findings often begin with researchers unwittingly fooling themselves: they fall prey to cognitive biases, common modes of thinking that lure us toward wrong but convenient or attractive conclusions. “Seeing the reproducibility rates in psychology and other empirical science, we can safely say that something is not working out the way it should,” says Susann Fiedler, a behavioral economist at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany. “Cognitive biases might be one reason for that.”

Psychologist Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia says that the most common and problematic bias in science is “motivated reasoning”: We interpret observations to fit a particular idea. Psychologists have shown that “most of our reasoning is in fact rationalization,” he says. In other words, we have already made the decision about what to do or to think, and our “explanation” of our reasoning is really a justification for doing what we wanted to do—or to believe—anyway. Science is of course meant to be more objective and skeptical than everyday thought—but how much is it, really?

Whereas the falsification model of the scientific method championed by philosopher Karl Popper posits that the scientist looks for ways to test and falsify her theories—to ask “How am I wrong?”—Nosek says that scientists usually ask instead “How am I right?” (or equally, to ask “How are you wrong?”). When facts come up that suggest we might, in fact, not be right after all, we are inclined to dismiss them as irrelevant, if not indeed mistaken….

Given that science has uncovered a dizzying variety of cognitive biases, the relative neglect of their consequences within science itself is peculiar. “I was aware of biases in humans at large,” says [Chris] Hartgerink [of Tilburg University in the Netherlands], “but when I first ‘learned’ that they also apply to scientists, I was somewhat amazed, even though it is so obvious.”…

One of the reasons the science literature gets skewed is that journals are much more likely to publish positive than negative results: It’s easier to say something is true than to say it’s wrong. Journal referees might be inclined to reject negative results as too boring, and researchers currently get little credit or status, from funders or departments, from such findings. “If you do 20 experiments, one of them is likely to have a publishable result,” [Ivan] Oransky and [Adam] Marcus [who run the service Retraction Watch] write. “But only publishing that result doesn’t make your findings valid. In fact it’s quite the opposite.”⁹[Nautilus, May 14, 2015]

Zoom to AGW. Robert Tracinski assesses the most recent bit of confirmation bias:

A lot of us having been pointing out one of the big problems with the global warming theory: a long plateau in global temperatures since about 1998. Most significantly, this leveling off was not predicted by the theory, and observed temperatures have been below the lowest end of the range predicted by all of the computerized climate models….

Why, change the data, of course!

Hence a blockbuster new report: a new analysis of temperature data since 1998 “adjusts” the numbers and magically finds that there was no plateau after all. The warming just continued….

How convenient.

It’s so convenient that they’re signaling for everyone else to get on board….

This is going to be the new party line. “Hiatus”? What hiatus? Who are you going to believe, our adjustments or your lying thermometers?…

The new adjustments are suspiciously convenient, of course. Anyone who is touting a theory that isn’t being borne out by the evidence and suddenly tells you he’s analyzed the data and by golly, what do you know, suddenly it does support his theory—well, he should be met with more than a little skepticism.

If we look, we find some big problems. The most important data adjustments by far are in ocean temperature measurements. But anyone who has been following this debate will notice something about the time period for which the adjustments were made. This is a time in which the measurement of ocean temperatures has vastly improved in coverage and accuracy as a whole new set of scientific buoys has come online. So why would this data need such drastic “correcting”?

As climatologist Judith Curry puts it:

The greatest changes in the new NOAA surface temperature analysis is to the ocean temperatures since 1998. This seems rather ironic, since this is the period where there is the greatest coverage of data with the highest quality of measurements–ARGO buoys and satellites don’t show a warming trend. Nevertheless, the NOAA team finds a substantial increase in the ocean surface temperature anomaly trend since 1998.

….

I realize the warmists are desperate, but they might not have thought through the overall effect of this new “adjustment” push. We’ve been told to take very, very seriously the objective data showing global warming is real and is happening—and then they announce that the data has been totally changed post hoc. This is meant to shore up the theory, but it actually calls the data into question….

All of this fits into a wider pattern: the global warming theory has been awful at making predictions about the data ahead of time. But it has been great at going backward, retroactively reinterpreting the data and retrofitting the theory to mesh with it. A line I saw from one commenter, I can’t remember where, has been rattling around in my head: “once again, the theory that predicts nothing explains everything.” [“Global Warming: The Theory That Predicts Nothing and Explains Everything,” The Federalist, June 8, 2015]

Howard Hyde also weighs in with “Climate Change: Where Is the Science?” (American Thinker, June 11, 2015).

Bill Nye, the so-called Science Guy, seems to epitomize the influence of ideology on “scientific knowledge.” I defer to John Derbyshire:

Bill Nye the Science Guy gave a commencement speech at Rutgers on Sunday. Reading the speech left me thinking that if this is America’s designated Science Guy, I can be the nation’s designated swimsuit model….

What did the Science Guy have to say to the Rutgers graduates? Well, he warned them of the horrors of climate change, which he linked to global inequality.

We’re going to find a means to enable poor people to advance in their societies in countries around the world. Otherwise, the imbalance of wealth will lead to conflict and inefficiency in energy production, which will lead to more carbon pollution and a no-way-out overheated globe.

Uh, given that advanced countries use far more energy per capita than backward ones—the U.S.A. figure is thirty-four times Bangladesh’s—wouldn’t a better strategy be to keep poor countries poor? We could, for example, encourage all their smartest and most entrepreneurial people to emigrate to the First World … Oh, wait: we already do that.

The whole climate change business is now a zone of hysteria, generating far more noise—mostly of a shrieking kind—than its importance justifies. Opinions about climate change are, as Greg Cochran said, “a mark of tribal membership.” It is also the case, as Greg also said, that “the world is never going to do much about in any event, regardless of the facts.”…

When Ma Nature means business, stuff happens on a stupendously colossal scale. And Bill Nye the Science Guy wants Rutgers graduates to worry about a 0.4ºC warming over thirty years? Feugh.

The Science Guy then passed on from the dubiously alarmist to the batshit barmy.

There really is no such thing as race. We are one species … We all come from Africa.

Where does one start with that? Perhaps by asserting that: “There is no such thing as states. We are one country.”

The climatological equivalent of saying there is no such thing as race would be saying that there is no such thing as weather. Of course there is such a thing as race. We can perceive race with at least three of our five senses, and read it off from the genome. We tick boxes for it on government forms: I ticked such a box for the ATF just this morning when buying a gun.

This is the Science Guy? The foundational text of modern biology bears the title On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Is biology not a science?

Darwin said that populations of a species long separated from each other will diverge in their biological characteristics, forming races. If the separation goes on long enough, any surviving races will diverge all the way to separate species. Was Ol’ Chuck wrong about that, Mr. Science Guy?

“We are one species”? Rottweilers and toy poodles are races within one species, a species much newer than ours; yet they differ mightily, not only in appearance but also—gasp!—in behavior, intelligence, and personality. [“Nye Lied, I Sighed,” Taki’s Magazine, May 21, 2015]

This has gone on long enough. Instead of quoting myself, I merely refer you to several related posts:

Demystifying Science
AGW: The Death Knell
Evolution and Race
The Limits of Science (II)
The Pretence of Knowledge
“The Science Is Settled”
The Limits of Science, Illustrated by Scientists
Rationalism, Empiricism, and Scientific Knowledge
AGW in Austin?

1963: The Year Zero

[A] long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT…. Time makes more converts than reason.

Thomas Paine, Common Sense

If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes. The modern separation of enlightenment and virtue, of thought and conscience, of the intellectual aristocracy from the honest and common crowd is the greatest danger that can threaten liberty.

Henri Frédéric Amiel, Journal

The Summer of Love ignited the loose, Dionysian culture that is inescapable today. The raunch and debauchery, radical individualism, stylized non-conformity, the blitzkrieg on age-old authorities, eventually impaired society’s ability to function.

Gilbert T. Sewall, “Summer of Love, Winter of Decline“

* * *

If, like me, you were an adult when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, you may think of his death as a watershed moment in American history. I say this not because I’m an admirer of Kennedy the man (I am not), but because American history seemed to turn a corner when Kennedy was murdered. To take the metaphor further, the corner marked the juncture of a sunny, tree-lined street (America from the end of World War II to November 22, 1963) and a dingy, littered street (America since November 22, 1963).

Changing the metaphor, I acknowledge that the first 18 years after V-J Day were by no means halcyon, but they were the spring that followed the long, harsh winter of the Great Depression and World War II. Yes, there was the Korean War, but that failure of political resolve was only a rehearsal for later debacles. McCarthyism, a political war waged (however clumsily) on America’s actual enemies, was benign compared with the war on civil society that began in the 1960s and continues to this day. The threat of nuclear annihilation, which those of you who were schoolchildren of the 1950s will remember well, had begun to subside with the advent of JFK’s military policy of flexible response, and seemed to evaporate with JFK’s resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis (however poorly he managed it). And for all of his personal faults, JFK was a paragon of grace, wit, and charm — a movie-star president — compared with his many successors, with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, who had been a real movie star.

What follows is an impression of America since November 22, 1963, when spring became a long, hot summer, followed by a dismal autumn and another long, harsh winter — not of deprivation, and perhaps not of war, but of rancor and repression.

This petite histoire begins with the Vietnam War and its disastrous mishandling by LBJ, its betrayal by the media, and its spawning of the politics of noise. “Protests” in public spaces and on campuses are a main feature of the politics of noise. In the new age of instant and sympathetic media attention to “protests,” civil and university authorities often refuse to enforce order. The media portray obstructive and destructive disorder as “free speech.” Thus do “protestors” learn that they can, with impunity, inconvenience and cow the masses who simply want to get on with their lives and work.

Whether “protestors” learned from rioters, or vice versa, they learned the same lesson. Authorities, in the age of Dr. Spock, lack the guts to use force, as necessary, to restore civil order. (LBJ’s decision to escalate gradually in Vietnam — “signaling” to Hanoi — instead of waging all-out war was of a piece with the “understanding” treatment of demonstrators and rioters.) Rioters learned another lesson — if a riot follows the arrest, beating, or death of a black person, it’s a “protest” against something (usually white-racist oppression, regardless of the facts), not wanton mayhem. After a lull of 21 years, urban riots resumed in 1964, and continue to this day.

LBJ’s “Great Society” marked the resurgence of FDR’s New Deal — with a vengeance — and the beginning of a long decline of America’s economic vitality. The combination of the Great Society (and its later extensions, such as Medicare Part D and Obamacare) with the rampant growth of regulatory activity has cut the rate of economic growth from 5 percent to 2 percent. The entrepreneurial spirit has been crushed; dependency has been encouraged and rewarded; pension giveaways have bankrupted public treasuries across the land. America since 1963 has been visited by a perfect storm of economic destruction that seems to have been designed by America’s enemies.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 unnecessarily crushed property rights, along with freedom of association, to what end? So that a violent, dependent, Democrat-voting underclass could arise from the Great Society? So that future generations of privilege-seekers could cry “discrimination” if anyone dares to denigrate their “lifestyles”? There was a time when immigrants and other persons who seemed “different” had the good sense to strive for success and acceptance as good neighbors, employees, and merchants. But the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its various offspring — State and local as well as federal — are meant to short-circuit that striving and to force acceptance, whether or not a person has earned it. The vast, silent majority is caught between empowered privilege-seekers and powerful privilege-granters. The privilege-seekers and privilege-granters are abetted by dupes who have, as usual, succumbed to the people’s romance — the belief that government represents society.

Presidents, above all, like to think that they represent society. What they represent, of course, are their own biases and the interests to which they are beholden. Truman, Ike, and JFK were imperfect presidential specimens, but they are shining idols by contrast with most of their successors. The downhill slide from the Vietnam and the Great Society to Obamacare and lawlessness on immigration has been punctuated by many shameful episodes; for example:

LBJ — the botched war in Vietnam, repudiation of property rights and freedom of association (the Civil Rights Act)

Nixon — price controls, Watergate

Carter — dispiriting leadership and fecklessness in the Iran hostage crisis

Reagan — bugout from Lebanon, rescue of Social Security

Bush I — failure to oust Saddam when it could have been done easily, the broken promise about taxes

Clinton — bugout from Somalia, push for an early version of Obamacare, budget-balancing at the cost of defense, and perjury

Bush II — No Child Left Behind Act, Medicare Part D, the initial mishandling of Iraq, and Wall Street bailouts

Obama — stimulus spending, Obamacare, reversal of Bush II’s eventual success in Iraq, naive backing for the “Arab spring,” acquiescence to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, unwillingness to acknowledge or do anything about the expansionist aims of Russia and China, neglect or repudiation of traditional allies (especially Israel), and refusal to take care that the immigration laws are executed faithfully.

Only Reagan’s defense buildup and its result — victory in the Cold War — stands out as a great accomplishment. But the victory was squandered: The “peace dividend” should have been peace through continued strength, not unpreparedness for the post 9/11 wars and the resurgence of Russia and China.

The war on defense has been accompanied by a war on science. The party that proclaims itself the party of science is anything but that. It is the party of superstitious, Luddite anti-science. Witness the embrace of extreme environmentalism, the arrogance of proclamations that AGW is “settled science,” unjustified fear of genetically modified foodstuffs, the implausible doctrine that race is nothing but a social construct, and on and on.

With respect to the nation’s moral well-being, the most destructive war of all has been the culture war, which assuredly began in the 1960s. Almost overnight, it seems, the nation was catapulted from the land of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver to the land of the ~~free-~~ filthy-speech movement, Altamont, Woodstock, Hair, and the unspeakably loud, vulgar, and violent offerings that are now plastered all over the air waves, the internet, theater screens, and “entertainment” venues.

Adherents of the ascendant culture esteem protest for its own sake, and have stock explanations for all perceived wrongs (whether or not they are wrongs): racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, hate, white privilege, inequality (of any kind), Wall Street, climate change, Zionism, and so on.

Then there is the campaign to curtail freedom of speech. This purported beneficiaries of the campaign are the gender-confused and the easily offended (thus “microagressions” and “trigger warnings”). The true beneficiaries are leftists. Free speech is all right if it’s acceptable to the left. Otherwise, it’s “hate speech,” and must be stamped out. This is McCarthyism on steroids. McCarthy, at least, was pursuing actual enemies of liberty; today’s leftists are the enemies of liberty.

There’s a lot more, unfortunately. The organs of the state have been enlisted in an unrelenting campaign against civilizing social norms. As I say here,

we now have not just easy divorce, subsidized illegitimacy, and legions of non-mothering mothers, but also abortion, concerted (and deluded) efforts to defeminize females and to neuter or feminize males, forced association (with accompanying destruction of property and employment rights), suppression of religion, absolution of pornography, and the encouragement of “alternative lifestyles” that feature disease, promiscuity, and familial instability. The state, of course, doesn’t act of its own volition. It acts at the behest of special interests — interests with a “cultural” agenda…. They are bent on the eradication of civil society — nothing less — in favor of a state-directed Rousseauvian dystopia from which morality and liberty will have vanished, except in Orwellian doublespeak.

If there are unifying themes in this petite histoire, they are the death of common sense and the rising tide of moral vacuity — thus the epigrams at the top of the post. The history of the United States since 1963 supports the proposition that the nation is indeed going to hell in a handbasket.

Read on.

* * *

Related reading:

Anything by Fred Reed
Arnold Kling, “Libertarians and Group Norms,” Library of Economics and Liberty, September 19, 2012
Lawrence W. Reed, “The Fall of the Republic,” The Freeman, January 8, 2014
Wesley Morganston, “Why Democracy Can’t Tolerate Free Speech,” Theden, April 20, 2014
Fred Reed, “The Heat Death of Democracy,” Fred on Everything, April 30, 2014
Jack Cashill, “The Suffocating Neo-Puritanism of ‘Progressive’ America,” American Thinker, May 2, 2014
Walter Williams, “America’s Budding Tyrants,” Townhall.com, May 21, 2014
Fred Reed, “Through the Eye of the Microscope,” Fred on Everything, July 1, 2014
Mark J. Perry, “Quotation of the Day on the ‘Affirmative Discrimination’ Fraud for Admission to US Medical Schools,” Carpe Diem, July 5, 2014
Isaac Cohen, “An ‘Ether of Sexism’ Doesn’t Explain Gender Disparities in Science and Tech,” Forbes, July 30, 2014
Leslie Ford, “Baker Who Won’t Make Cakes for Same-Sex Weddings Appeals Mandatory Re-Education Order,” The Daily Signal, July 31, 2014
Amity Shlaes, “Progressives Enthroned,” National Review Online, September 20, 2014
Adam Garfinkle, “The Wars of the Reluctant: The Bad, the Worse, and the Lousy,” The American Interest, September 23, 2014
Michael Cipriano, “Campus Hate Crime Hoaxes: A Best-Of List,” The College Fix, December 17, 2014
Victor Davis Hanson, “Fantasyland, U.S.A.,” Works and Days, December 22, 2014
Steven Hayward, “97 Percent of All Liberal Claims Are Wrong,” Power Line, December 22, 2014
Robert Joyner, “NYPD Officer Slayings: When the Left’s False Narratives Have Deadly Consequences,” Theden, December 22, 2014
Aaron Tao, “Apocalypse Not: The Legacy of Julian Simon,” The Beacon, February 12, 2015
Victor Davis Hanson, “The Reckoning,” Works and Days, February 15, 2015
Fred Reed, “Cometh the Censor,” Fred on Everything, February 15, 2015
Bradley J. Birzer, “How Livy Predicted the Fall of America,” The Imaginative Conservative, February 16, 2015
Alan Charles Kors, “The Age of Communism Lives,” Dissident, April 9, 2015
Keith Burgess-Jackson, “Trigger Warning,” Keith Burgess-Jackson, April 23, 2015 (be sure to follow this link)
Arnold Kling, “The Elite vs. the Elect,” askblog, May 5, 2015
Georgi Boorman, “Facts Are Dead; Long Live Insanity,” The Federalist, May 8, 2015
Arnold Kling, “On Freedom of Speech,” askblog, May 8, 2015
Mark Pulliam, “Disabling the Police,” City Journal, May 8, 2015
Noah Rothman, “In a New Display of Submission, State Dept. Orders GITMO to Stop Offending Castro,” Hot Air, May 8, 2015
Jazz Shaw, “If You Flunk Out of College You Can Always Sue Them,” Hot Air, May 13, 2015
Ed Morrissey, “Social-Justice Warriors Readying a New War on Free Speech?,” Hot Air, May 21, 2015
Michael Rubin, “Intelligence Report Shows Obama Asleep at the Switch,” AEI.org, May 21, 2015
Suzanne Fields, “The Killing of Free Speech: The Liberals’ War on Blonde Conservatism,” The American Spectator, May 25, 2015
Dave Huber, “FAA’s Quest for Diversity Discards Highly Qualified Candidates … and Endangers Everyone,” The College Fix, May 25, 2015
Jazz Shaw, “Oakland Protestors Protest New Protesting Policy,” Hot Air, May 25, 2015
Dave Catron, “Ready for Another Obamacare Price Hike?,” The American Spectator, May 26, 2015
John Hinderaker, “The Wages of Liberalism Is Death,” Power Line, May 26, 2015
Andrew Jacobs, “China, Updating Military Strategy, Puts Focus on Projecting Naval Power,’ The New York Times, May 26, 2015
Jeffrey Lord, “LBJ and Obama: Champions of Abject Poverty,” The American Spectator, May 26, 2015
Richard A. Epstein, “The ‘Income Inequality’ Warriors,” The Federalist, May 27, 2015
Steve Horwitz, “Anti-Semitic ‘Microaggressions’ and the True Price of Civilization,” Bleeding Heart Libertarians, May 27, 2015
Malcolm Pollack, “Gradually, Then Suddenly,” waka waka waka, May 27,2015
James Quarles, “We’re Paying More Than Ever for Government to Regulate Us,” The Daily Signal, May 27, 2015
James Sawhill, “EPA Busted for Ideology,” WUWT, May 27, 2015
Michael Pollack, “Don’t Worry, Despair,” waka waka waka, May 30, 2015
Michael Pollack, “No Exit,” waka waka waka, May 31, 2015
Michael Barone, “Is It Time for Civil Disobedience of Kludgeocratic Bureaucracy?,” Creators.com, June 2, 2015 (yes)
Scaramouche, “Most Gob-Smacking (and Patently Absurd) Statement of the Day,” Scaramouche, June 10, 2015
Gilbert T. Sewall, “Summer of Love, Winter of Decline,” The American Conservative, June 26, 2017

* * *

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XII)

Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

* * *

“Intolerance as Illiberalism” by Kim R. Holmes (The Public Discourse, June 18, 2014) is yet another reminder, of innumerable reminders, that modern “liberalism” is a most intolerant creed. See my ironically titled “Tolerance on the Left” and its many links.

* * *

Speaking of intolerance, it’s hard to top a strident atheist like Richard Dawkins. See John Gray’s “The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins” (The New Republic, October 2, 2014). Among the several posts in which I challenge the facile atheism of Dawkins and his ilk are “Further Thoughts about Metaphysical Cosmology” and “Scientism, Evolution, and the Meaning of Life.”

* * *

Some atheists — Dawkins among them — find a justification for their non-belief in evolution. On that topic, Gertrude Himmelfarb writes:

The fallacy in the ethics of evolution is the equation of the “struggle for existence” with the “survival of the fittest,” and the assumption that “the fittest” is identical with “the best.” But that struggle may favor the worst rather than the best. [“Evolution and Ethics, Revisited,” The New Atlantis, Spring 2014]

As I say in “Some Thoughts about Evolution,”

Survival and reproduction depend on many traits. A particular trait, considered in isolation, may seem to be helpful to the survival and reproduction of a group. But that trait may not be among the particular collection of traits that is most conducive to the group’s survival and reproduction. If that is the case, the trait will become less prevalent. Alternatively, if the trait is an essential member of the collection that is conducive to survival and reproduction, it will survive. But its survival depends on the other traits. The fact that X is a “good trait” does not, in itself, ensure the proliferation of X. And X will become less prevalent if other traits become more important to survival and reproduction.

The same goes for “bad” traits. Evolution is no guarantor of ethical goodness.

* * *

It shouldn’t be necessary to remind anyone that men and women are different. But it is. Lewis Wolpert gives it another try in “Yes, It’s Official, Men Are from Mars and Women from Venus, and Here’s the Science to Prove It” (The Telegraph, September 14, 2014). One of my posts on the subject is “The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality.” I’m talking about general tendencies, of course, not iron-clad rules about “men’s roles” and “women’s roles.” Aside from procreation, I can’t readily name “roles” that fall exclusively to men or women out of biological necessity. There’s no biological reason, for example, that an especially strong and agile woman can’t be a combat soldier. But it is folly to lower the bar just so that more women can qualify as combat soldiers. The same goes for intellectual occupations. Women shouldn’t be discouraged from pursuing graduate degrees and professional careers in math, engineering, and the hard sciences, but the qualifications for entry and advancement in those fields shouldn’t be watered down just for the sake of increasing the representation of women.

* * *

Edward Feser, writing in “Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink” at his eponymous blog (October 24, 2014), notes

[Michael] Levin’s claim … that liberal policies cannot, given our cultural circumstances, be neutral concerning homosexuality. They will inevitably “send a message” of approval rather than mere neutrality or indifference.

Feser then quotes Levin:

[L]egislation “legalizing homosexuality” cannot be neutral because passing it would have an inexpungeable speech-act dimension. Society cannot grant unaccustomed rights and privileges to homosexuals while remaining neutral about the value of homosexuality.

Levin, who wrote that 30 years ago, gets a 10 out 10 for prescience. Just read “Abortion, ‘Gay Rights’, and Liberty” for a taste of the illiberalism that accompanies “liberal” causes like same-sex “marriage.”

* * *

“Liberalism” has evolved into hard-leftism. It’s main adherents are now an elite upper crust and their clients among the hoi polloi. Steve Sailer writes incisively about the socioeconomic divide in “A New Caste Society” (Taki’s Magazine, October 8, 2014). “‘Wading’ into Race, Culture, and IQ” offers a collection of links to related posts and articles.

* * *

One of the upper crust’s recent initiatives is so-called libertarian paternalism. Steven Teles skewers it thoroughly in “Nudge or Shove?” (The American Interest, December 10, 2014), a review of Cass Sunstein’s Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism. I have written numerous times about Sunstein and (faux) libertarian paternalism. The most recent entry, “The Sunstein Effect Is Alive and Well in the White House,” ends with links to two dozen related posts. (See also Don Boudreaux, “Where Nudging Leads,” Cafe Hayek, January 24, 2015.)

* * *

Maria Konnikova gives some space to Jonathan Haidt in “Is Social Psychology Biased against Republicans?” (The New Yorker, October 30, 2014). It’s no secret that most academic disciplines other than math and the hard sciences are biased against Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, free markets, and liberty. I have something to say about it in “The Pseudo-Libertarian Temperament,” and in several of the posts listed here.

* * *

Keith E. Stanovich makes some good points about the limitations of intelligence in “Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking that IQ Tests Miss” (Scientific American, January 1, 2015). Stanovich writes:

The idea that IQ tests do not measure all the key human faculties is not new; critics of intelligence tests have been making that point for years. Robert J. Sternberg of Cornell University and Howard Gardner of Harvard talk about practical intelligence, creative intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, and the like. Yet appending the word “intelligence” to all these other mental, physical and social entities promotes the very assumption the critics want to attack. If you inflate the concept of intelligence, you will inflate its close associates as well. And after 100 years of testing, it is a simple historical fact that the closest associate of the term “intelligence” is “the IQ test part of intelligence.”

I make a similar point in “Intelligence as a Dirty Word,” though I don’t denigrate IQ, which is a rather reliable predictor of performance in a broad range of endeavors.

* * *

Brian Caplan, whose pseudo-libertarianism rankles, tries to defend the concept of altruism in “The Evidence of Altruism” (EconLog, December 30, 2014). Caplan aids his case by using the loaded “selfishness” where he means “self-interest.” He also ignores empathy, which is a key ingredient of the Golden Rule. As for my view of altruism (as a concept), see “Egoism and Altruism.”

Some Thoughts about Evolution

I came across this in a post about a psychological trait known as affective empathy*:

[I]f affective empathy helps people to survive and reproduce, there will be more and more of it in succeeding generations. If not, there will be less and less.

I’ve run across similar assertions about other traits in my occasional reading about evolution. But is it true that if X helps people to survive and reproduce, X will proliferate?

Survival and reproduction depend on many traits. A particular trait, considered in isolation, may seem to be helpful to the survival and reproduction of a group. But that trait may not be among the particular collection of traits that is most conducive to the group’s survival and reproduction. If that is the case, the trait will become less prevalent.

Alternatively, if the trait is an essential member of the collection that is conducive to survival and reproduction, it will survive. But its survival depends on the other traits. The fact that X is a “good trait” does not, in itself, ensure the proliferation of X. And X will become less prevalent if other traits become more important to survival and reproduction.

In any event, it is my view that genetic fitness for survival has become almost irrelevant in places like the United States. The rise of technology and the “social safety net” (state-enforced pseudo-empathy) have enabled the survival and reproduction of traits that would have dwindled in times past.

I’m only making an observation. Eugenics is the province of the left.

__________
* Affective empathy is defined by the same writer as the

capacity not only to understand how another person feels but also to experience those feelings involuntarily and to respond appropriately.

* * *

Greed, Conscience, and Big Government

The financial crisis of 2007-2008, which led to the Great Recession, has been blamed on several things. Financial institutions are leading scapegoats. In particular, there were the retail institutions that lent money at low interest rates (made so by the Fed) to high-risk borrowers (in keeping with government policy), and there were the Wall Street institutions that “poisoned” financial markets by securitizing bundles of high-risk mortgage loans.

In both cases, the institutions are said to have been “greedy” in pursuit of greater profits. That “crime” (which is only a “crime” when someone else commits it) was in fact “committed” in ways that were perfectly legal and passed muster with government regulators. In sum, the financial crisis and subsequent recession were deeply rooted in government failure — not “greed.” For chapter and verse, see Arnold Kling’s monograph, Not What They Had in Mind.

Nevertheless, greed is often blamed for the financial crisis and its aftermath. Why? Because it’s a simple, mindless generalization that plays into the left’s perpetual campaign against “the rich” — a.k.a. biting the hand that feeds them. And it’s certainly a lot easier for ignoramuses (leftist or otherwise) to parrot “greed” than to seek the truth.

With that out of the way, let’s take a closer look at greed and its antecedent, avarice.

Here is the primary definition of greed, as given by The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language (from The Free Dictionary):

An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth.

What about “avarice”? Here is the primary definition from the same source:

Immoderate desire for wealth; cupidity [another word for the same thing].

To call a person (or institutional collective of persons) “greedy” or “avaricious,” one must make normative judgments; that is, the person’s (or collective’s) desire for (material) wealth must be deemed “excessive” or “immoderate” or more than he “deserves.” When I consider the affluent leftists in the academy, the media, and government who make such judgements when they proclaim the “greediness” of bankers (but not film stars or professional athletes), my thoughts turn to John 8:7 — “Whichever of you is free from sin shall cast the first stone….” (It is telling that Paul Krugman, an undeniably affluent leftist, seeks — and fails — to avoid seeming hypocritical by focusing his attacks on persons in the top 0.1 percent of the income distribution.)

For a more thoughtful treatment of greed (properly avarice), I turn to the entry in the The Catholic Encyclopedia:

Avarice (from Latin avarus, “greedy”; “to crave”) is the inordinate love for riches. Its special malice, broadly speaking, lies in that it makes the getting and keeping of money, possessions, and the like, a purpose in itself to live for. It does not see that these things are valuable only as instruments for the conduct of a rational and harmonious life, due regard being paid of course to the special social condition in which one is placed. It is called a capital vice because it has as its object that for the gaining or holding of which many other sins are committed. It is more to be dreaded in that it often cloaks itself as a virtue, or insinuates itself under the pretext of making a decent provision for the future. In so far as avarice is an incentive to injustice in acquiring and retaining of wealth, it is frequently a grievous sin. In itself, however, and in so far as it implies simply an excessive desire of, or pleasure in, riches, it is commonly not a mortal sin.

I take two key points from this definition:

Acquisitiveness is bad when it becomes an end in itself, so that one becomes neglectful of family, friends, associates — and God.

Acquisitiveness is bad when it is abetted by deeds that do harm to others (e.g., thieving, cheating, and lying).

In sum: Acquisitiveness isn’t bad per se, and it may be good if it has good effects (e.g., the dispensation of charity, investments in job-producing capital). The potentially bad effects of acquisitiveness are what may make it bad. But the vice of avarice arises only when the bad effects arise.

But the judgment as to whether a person is guilty of avarice is the person’s. No human being can peer into the person’s conscience and say that he acts avariciously. This is not to excuse the person who simply forges ahead in life without examining his conscience. Such a person fears and refuses self-examination because he knows that he is doing wrong. The refusal to confront error is an admission of error.

Consider statist politicians, rule-writing bureaucrats, and the masses of voters who applaud and support them. The latter are avaracious for material goods that they haven’t and won’t earn by their own efforts. (They are spurred by more than a little envy, as well.) Their material avaraciousness is served by the lust for power (and material goods) that is endemic among politicians and bureaucrats, and their cheerleaders in the academy and the media.

Do these avaracious classes ever have more than a passing qualm about how they wield their vast power over the populace as a whole? I doubt it. Instead, they rationalize what they do by pointing to the good results that they expect to flow from various government programs, regulations, and transfer payments. They are ignorant or heedless of the mountains of evidence about the bad results that actually obtain — welfare dependency, fatherless homes, the huge economic costs of regulation, and diminished economic growth, for example. Their avaraciousness blinds them to facts, of which a small sample can be found here. (For much more, see the posts at this link and every issue of Regulation back to its inception in 1977.)

What might they find if they were to the face those facts and examine their consciences? This, if they are diligent:

I don’t like others to lie to me, cheat me, or steal from me. Nor do I like being told how I should live my life, especially if I’m not acting in harmful ways.

In those respects, I am like most of my fellow citizens.

I have no idea which of them, individually, is a liar, cheater, thief, or petty tyrant. Most of them are not all of those things, and few of them are any of those things on a significant scale.

Except when it comes to tyranny. Yes, there are many people in business and government who act like petty tyrants toward their subordinates. But those subordinates have the option of finding other jobs if their supervisors continue to tyrannize them.

As a citizen, however, I have no practical choice but to pay the taxes demanded of me by government and to obey its rules, even when those taxes support programs of which I disapprove and those rules are unjust and economically damaging.

When I use the power of government to get what I want, or to make others act as I wish them to act, I am nothing but a petty tyrant who abets the infliction of harm on others.

And a thief. Because government takes money from people who do me no harm.

And if government acts like a petty tyrant and thief toward others, it must be doing the same thing to me, on behalf of many of those others.

The Golden Rule says “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” I haven’t been living by that rule, nor have a lot of my fellow citizens. If I begin to live by that rule — begin to demand from government only what it owes me, which is protection from predators — perhaps others will follow my example.

And even if they don’t, I will have a clear conscience.

P.S. I didn’t mention envy, but I should have. It’s an unattractive trait, and when acted on it can cause harm. For example, I don’t envy highly-paid athletes and movie stars, despite the huge incomes they earn. But I seem to envy highly-paid managers and bankers. Perhaps that’s because I’ve been told so often that the rules of the economic “game” are rigged in favor of highly-paid managers and bankers.

That may be true, though it’s hard to tell given the long history and complexity of various laws and regulations. But most of the people who benefit from the “rigging” had nothing to do with it. It was done by politicians and bureaucrats. So the real solution is to undo the complex laws and regulations that support “rigging,” it isn’t to punish hard-working people by taxing them exorbitantly.

And while I’m thinking of politicians and bureaucrats, I must mention that they’ve done a very good job of rigging the system in their favor, with salaries, benefits, and pensions that most of them couldn’t command in the private sector. (The affluence of the Washington DC area is an insult to hard-working taxpayers.) The solution is obvious: Cut the bureaucracy that generates the rules that distort and discourage economic activity, and find ways to compensate politicians and bureaucrats according to the value of the private-sector jobs for which they actually qualify.

I wonder how avaracious politicians and bureaucrats sleep at night. That sounds judgmental, and I’m aware of the admonition “Do not judge others, or you yourselves will be judged” (Matthew 7:1). But in view of their demonstrated greed, I have no qualms about judging them.

Egoism and Altruism

From Wikipedia:

Psychological egoism is the view that humans are always motivated by self-interest, even in what seem to be acts of altruism. It claims that, when people choose to help others, they do so ultimately because of the personal benefits that they themselves expect to obtain, directly or indirectly, from doing so. This is a descriptive rather than normative view, since it only makes claims about how things are, not how they ought to be. It is, however, related to several other normative forms of egoism, such as ethical egoism and rational egoism.

I addressed psychological egoism and altruism several years ago in “Redefining Altruism” and “Enough of Altruism.” In the extended version of the second post, I wrote:

There is no “egoism” or “altruism,” there’s simply behavior that reflects an individual’s values, and which seeks to serve those values….

What we call “altruism” and “egoism” are simply manifestations of an integrated, internal decision process that thinks not in terms of “altruism” or “egoism” but in terms of serving one’s values.

My purpose was to deny the existence of egoism and altruism as “forces” that exist independently of human thought. I was especially set on showing that the motivation for an act which is considered altruistic can only be understood in terms of its effect on the the actor. That is, the actor necessarily advances his own values, even if he seems to make a sacrifice of some kind.

I admit that my position can be taken as a defense of psychological egoism. So, although “psychological egoism” stands for a simplistic explanation of complex behavior, it’s a better explanation than altruism.

Here is Jason Brennan, writing at Bleeding Heart Libertarians:

Peter Singer made famous a thought experiment like this:

You are walking down the street when you see a small toddler drowning in a shallow pool. You can save the toddler easily, but only if you jump in right now. Doing so will destroy your hard-earned smart phone, costing you $500.

Most people judge that we must save the child here; it would be wrong not to do so.

Now, what does ethical egoism say about this case? …

Ethical egoism isn’t quite the same thing as psychological egoism. Returning to Wikipedia:

Ethical egoism is the normative ethical position that moral agents ought to do what is in their own [sic] self-interest. It differs from psychological egoism, which claims that people can only act in their self-interest.

Nevertheless, what follows from Brennan can be read as an attack on the idea of psychological egoism and a defense of the idea of altruism:

Many people … are deeply confused about what counts as egoistic action….

Consider the following argument: Saving the kid is egoistic, because I care about kids…. Therefore, if I voluntarily save the kid, I save him out of self-interest.

But,

If I care about the drowning toddler and thus save him, I am acting to promote his welfare, not my own. It’s true that I am interested in his interests, or that his interests are an interest of mine, but that’s just a funky way of saying that I am altruistic. To be altruistic is to hold other people’s welfare as an end in itself….

If my sons died, I’d be sad. But the reason I feel joy when things go well for them and sad when things go badly is that I love them for their own sake–I view them as ends in themselves apart from my own welfare. Consider: Suppose my younger son is hurt. A genie appears and gives me two options. 1. He fixes my son’s injury. 2. He casts a spell instantly killing my son, erasing him from everyone’s memory, erasing all traces of him, and thus allowing us to go on as if he never existed at all. If I were just trying to avoid the bad feelings, I’d be indifferent between these two options. But I’m not–I’d pick option 1 over option 2, hands down. This means that I’m concerned not merely to avoid bad feelings, but to help for his sake. Again, it means I’m genuinely altruistic.

This reminds me of Rawls’s “veil of ignorance,” wherein the reader is invited to imagine an impossible counterfactual. In Brennan’s case, the impossible counterfactual is the non-existence of his son. The fact of his son’s existence colors Brennan’s evaluation of the the options posed by the genie. Brennan has feelings about his son, feelings that he (laudably) values over the alternative of having no such feelings.

What about Brennan’s assertion that he is genuinely altruistic because he doesn’t merely want to avoid bad feelings, but wants to help his son for his son’s sake. That’s called empathy. But empathy is egoistic. Even strong empathy — the ability to “feel” another person’s pain or anguish — is “felt” by the empathizer. It is the empathizer’s response to the other person’s pain or anguish.

Brennan inadvertently makes that point when he invokes sociopathy:

Sociopaths don’t care about other people for their own sake–they view them merely as instruments. Sociopaths don’t feel guilt for failing to help others.

The difference between a sociopath and a “normal” person is found in caring (feeling). But caring (feeling) is something that the I does — or fail to do, if the I is a sociopath. I = ego:

the “I” or self of any person; a thinking, feeling, and conscious being, able to distinguish itself from other selves.

I am not deprecating the kind of laudable act that is called altruistic. I am simply trying to point out what should be an obvious fact: Human beings necessarily act in their own interests, though their own interests often coincide with the interests of others for emotional reasons (e.g., love, empathy), as well as practical ones (e.g., loss of income or status because of the death of a patron).

It should go without saying that the world would be a better place if it had fewer sociopaths in it. Voluntary, mutually beneficial relationships are more than merely transactional; they thrive on the mutual trust and respect that arise from social bonds, including the bonds of love and affection.

* * *

A Logical Fallacy

The sub-hed of an article at City Journal asks “If human beings are naturally risk-averse, then what the heck happened on Wall Street?” The question can be expressed in the following syllogism:

Major premise: All humans are risk-averse.

Minor premise: Humans work on Wall Street (i.e., financial markets).

Conclusion: The humans who work on Wall Street are risk-averse.

It should be obvious to the casual observer that both the major premise and conclusion are false.

The article, by the way, is spot-on. Don’t be deceived by its flawed sub-hed.

What Is Truth?

Apropos nothing (or everything): Truth is not what someone says it is, or is not. Truth is truth, no matter the fame, wealth, position, or prestige of the person who proclaims a truth or advances a falsehood.

A Person’s Truth

Intellectual truth is what you “know” because the “knowledge” flows from a logical argument (which may be supported, in part, by “facts”). Real truth is what you know from direct knowledge.

Intellectual truth can be useful; often, it is indispensable. If your father tells you that it is dangerous — probably life-threatening — to drive a car into a stone wall at 60 miles and hour, you are well advised to heed your father. You should do so even though he probably doesn’t know of the danger from experience or observation.

Indeed, the horizon of useful intellectual truth is vast and seemingly infinite. It encompasses much (but not all) of science, not to mention technology (applied science), and even folklore (where it represents insights gained by trial and error).

Intellectual truth intersects with real truth in many ways. A good example of an intersection is found in counting, which is the foundation of mathematics. We often count real objects that we can sense for ourselves in order to determine such things as whether there are enough eggs to make a cake, enough clean shirts to last until the next laundry day, etc. The act of counting came long before the development of mathematics as a discipline, yet mathematics tells us (among many things) why counting “works” and how to employ it in a variety of ways ranging from the simple and obvious to the dauntingly complex ways (e.g., from addition — a form of counting — and multiplication — a form of addition — to such abstruse subjects as number theory.

I use counting as an example because it leads to the moral of this post: Intellectual truth is real truth only where it comports with real truth. Intellectual truth which doesn’t comport with real truth — or which hasn’t yet been found to be consistent with real truth — is mere conjecture.

Current Events in Catholicism

Guest commentary by Postmodern Conservative.

I know that not everyone reading this blog has a direct interest in religion or Catholicism. But theologically-minded or not there’s no denying that the Catholic Church figures heavily in the news, especially on political and ethical issues. Many conservatives—from Ronald Reagan through to the current president—have seen this as an important (and benevolent) role at the very least. One can cite the “tag-team effort” of Reagan and John Paul II in the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. Then there is the enthusiastic alliance of George Bush and Benedict XVI in the ongoing culture wars.

At the same time, for many conservatives it is safe to say that the apparent “left turn” by the Church since the 1960s and Vatican II has been a source of consternation. This “modernization” (a.k.a. “modernism” in theological circles) or accommodation with contemporary culture is a point noted by people from every political viewpoint, by believers and non-believers alike. There is no disputing it. Yet whatever the superficial vicissitudes, it would seem that this change in policy has never affected Catholic fundamentals, which remain markedly unchanging. Still it has had an impact on day-to-day activities: the roles of the clergy and laity, the liturgy, pastoral policies, etc. And these things have been keenly felt, often with a sense of confusion and disappointment. Historically speaking, this is not without precedent. The Catholic Church has had plenty of ups and downs throughout the millennia—periods of apparent decline and corruption followed by reinvigoration and reform.

Now with the pontificate of Bendict XVI it is clear that the “Vatican II generation” is coming to an end, and in more ways than one. Benedict (Josef Ratzinger) was a key participant in the Council’s proceedings and will likely be the last cleric from that era to be made pope. He also signals the end of a generation because he has become one of the most outstanding critics of the post-conciliar Church. A good example of this is a recent discussion in Homiletic & Pastoral Review of Benedict’s encyclical Spe Salvi (“On Christian Hope”). As the Brian Graebe notes:

[I]t is what the encyclical does not say that has engendered no small amount of controversy. As numerous commentators quickly recognized, Spe Salvi contains not a single reference to any of the documents from the Second Vatican Council….. Throughout his writings, interviews and memoirs, Joseph Ratzinger clearly sees the legacy of Vatican II as having been hijacked, and needing to be restored to its proper place in the heritage of the Church.

Benedict is even more outspoken on the Catholic Mass (e.g., the liturgy) and his moves to restore the traditional forms of worship to the Latin (Western) Rite and to the Church as a whole. The recent Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum which has garnered so much attention, is just one example. And the Mass, being the public worship of the Church, is undoubtedly the most visible point of dispute in recent years. To put it in a nutshell, both conservatives and liberals have seen the liturgy as not only an outward manifestation of Catholic culture and piety but also as a crucial indicator of theological direction. They are both right. The question is, how did people respond to the undeniable confusion that erupted in the wake of Vatican II?

Many people (including priests, monks and nuns) simply left. It was one of the worst mass exoduses from the Church in its 2000 year history. Others stayed on, as they always do, with varying degrees of commitment. Then there were the theological minorities on the “left” and “right.” Some liked what had happened and wanted to push things even further: changing Catholic teaching on contraception and divorce, admitting women to the priesthood, etc. Others dissented in the opposite direction, criticizing the New Mass that came out of Vatican II as well as many of the pastoral decisions. This “dissent on the right” spanned the spectrum from cautious conservatism to outright schism (e.g., those who denied that the pope was really the pope). In particular, those who insisted on maintaining the old Latin liturgy and criticizing some or all of the post-conciliar Vatican policies were known as Traditionalists. Even these latter represented many different shades of opinion. However it is interesting that a large of number of traditionalists over the years, including some fairly strong critics of the Vatican’s past policies have reconciled themselves, no doubt encouraged by the new course in Rome. The most recent example is the traditional Redemptorists based in Scotland.

It is clear that this pope is on a mission. His efforts at the restoration of “pre-Vatican II” Catholicism, as some have put it, were understandably cautious in the first months of his pontificate. But he now seems to have the bark of Peter under full sail. In addition to promoting the old Mass, which has seen an explosion of interest since it was freed up last year, Benedict is planning a commission to restore the New Mass to its original, more reverent rubrics. Meanwhile, as the Church of England, which broke from Rome in 1534, continues to fall apart in its own eager concessions to theological and moral progressivism, Bish. Andrew Burnham has announced his desire for a mass return to Rome on the part of conservative Anglicans.

Populist myths to the contrary, direction comes from the top—whether it’s in a family, a government, or a church. And after decades of papal inaction and/or neglect, which reached a low point in the much publicized clerical sex scandals a few years ago, Benedict XVI is taking a hands-on approach which is filtering down to all levels. The new generation of clerics is generally more orthodox than their predecessors and it is these men who are being promoted to influential positions. For example, Raymond Burke, previously Archbishop of St. Louis and an outspoken conservative, is now the first non-European head of the Apostolic Signatura, the highest judicial tribunal in the Church. Meanwhile, Cardinal Cañizares Llovera, a champion of traditional liturgy, is due to be appointed head of the Congregation of Divine Worship.

Summary: Apart from these purely religious developments it will be interesting to see on a secular level what impact a reinvigorated leadership of the Church has on the worldwide culture wars, on such topics as abortion, “alternative lifestyles,” and so forth. Just a few generations ago Catholicism had a tremendous moral influence on popular culture in the United States. It seems likely that the left-liberal status quo, now at the zenith of power and hubris, will once again be challenged…. from the highest levels!

Poland: Winning the Culture Wars

Guest commentary by Postmodern Conservative.

Popular culture in Poland is very different from ours. There is widespread outcry over the fact that a 14-year-old girl is being pressured by Planned Parenthood to abort her unborn child. Most Poles find this politically-motivated emotional exploitation reprehensible. See: Poland in an Uproar after Coercive Abortion Pressure Put on 14-Year-Old by Planned Parenthood.

On a related note is the story of a Agata Mroz, a 26-year-old champion Polish volleyball player who chose to delay invasive therapy for a fatal case of leukemia until the birth of her baby daughter (April 2008) even though it lead to her death just three months later. See: 2005 Polish Volleyball Champion Sacrificed Her Life for Unborn Child.

This sums up what the culture war is really about, more than just ideology or polemics. As Edmund Burke pointed out long ago, the most important things in life are beyond politics and it is these things that define our political values, not the other way around. That may explain why the Poles are more successful in fighting the culture wars than many of their Western counterparts, despite the fact that they have the added liability of a totalitarian past. Nor can it be put down to simply a political reaction. After all, Russia is still a huge mess. The difference is Poland’s strong religious heritage which has survived political and cultural vicissitudes.

For a related commentary on Polish social conservatism, see our January 24 post.

Moral Culture Clash: Europe and the US

Guest commentary by Postmodern Conservative

Say what you like about American “puritanism” and the rest of it, there are some things we do have over the Europeans, like social priorities. According to veteran Catholic reporter John L. Allen, who provides sometimes sensible analysis for the National Catholic Reporter, there is a huge moral divide between American and European Catholics, and presumably between Americans and Europeans generally. Speaking about a visit to Rome this past April, he noted that

if the dominant “single issue” temptation for American Catholics is to focus almost exclusively on abortion, the analogous “single issue” tendency within Catholicism in Italy and elsewhere in Europe is the death penalty.

Although my guess is that Allen also opposes the death penalty, like many Catholic leaders, including the current pope, he points out that

For American Catholics, this focus on the death penalty rather than abortion can often seem terribly imbalanced. According to Amnesty International, there were 1,591 executions worldwide in 2006, while the estimated number of abortions around the world each year is on the order of 45 million. On a purely quantitative basis, some would argue, there’s no comparison in terms of which is the more grave threat to human life. Moreover, many abortion opponents would also argue that while all killing is wrong, with the death penalty we’re usually talking about convicted criminals, while abortion strikes at the most innocent and vulnerable (“What
abortion is to American Catholics, the death penalty is for Italians“).

It should be pointed out (and Allen does point out) that opposition to the death penalty on the part of the Church is a prudential option rather than a matter of dogma. Some believe that executing criminals is “unnecessary.” I respect those who are at least consistent in being against the death penalty and killing the unborn. But personally I say: punish the guilty, protect the innocent. To me the two are inextricably intertwined.

The Problem of Political Tribalism

Guest post by Postmodern Conservative.

Barrack Obama’s appeal to 90% of black American voters is an example of “political tribalism.” By this I don’t mean a slur on African ethnicity or any ethnicity in particular. The fact is that all sorts of people and races indulge in this sort of identitarian or group mentality. The Croats and Serbs of former Yugoslavia are an apt example. But whatever its manifestation, it is a problem that must be consistently combated. Any sort of balkanized politics is opposed to basic principles of western civic tradition, republican stability, and the rule of law.

For example, we saw political tribalism in the early ’60s in the way American Catholics, otherwise as a very conservative bunch, backed John F. Kennedy and later his brother Ted. Whole segments of the Church, bishops and priests included, bought into a political machine because they mistook a surface “identity” with their religious or cultural background (for example, working class Boston Irish) for real principles. In the end, the principles were lost and only the smarmy Kennedy mafia machinery remained. The modern faithlessness of Boston Catholics is now legendary. And while blacks have long had a reputation for religiosity and love of family, one can safely say that this has been totally imploded thanks to a similar sell out of morality for ideology. Both blacks and Catholics got sidetracked by what Lenin perhaps aptly called the “trade union” mentality in politics.

A rightist version of tribalism is evinced by John Derbyshire, a columnist for National Review, who has engendered controversy for his racialist views. Although married to an Asian women, he has made clear his dislike for blacks and likes cavorting with high-brow bigots like Jared Taylor. He admits he is a “racist,” albeit “a mild and tolerant one.” He is an ex-Christian turned New Ager who enjoys bashing proponents of Intelligent Design. He also is pro-choice and supports euthanasia. And I have run into a lot of right-wingers like Derbyshire who are hard-core on all the wrong issues, or on issues that are secondary to the more important social and ethical concerns of conservatism. In previous posts I’ve noted the problem of paleo-tribalists like Joseph Sobran and Samuel Francis.

What is particularly devious about modern tribal politics, whether of the class, ideological or ethnic variety, is that unlike the old barbarian clannishness, it makes a sham appeal to universal morality in denouncing oppression or discrimination. And many of those claims may in fact be true. But it then goes on to apply a totally subjective remedy which is no more than an expression of envy or hatred. It undermines any sense of equitable justice. It keeps the wheels of vengeance turning, and reduces human polity to a series of never-ending vendettas. This may be the way of savages (of the cultural or ideological variety) but it is totally out of keeping with our Greco-Roman notions of law and our Judeo-Christian moral heritage.

As Benjamin Franklin, himself an agnostic, once admitted: “If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it.” The point is that if political ethics are not based on something transcendent then they have become just another form of vice.

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