LI is again having to eat its words this morning. We so often complain that the Bush culture has exclusively favored the wealthy. In a story in the WP this morning, there is a great refutation of that thesis in the lifestory of Sunny L. Sims:
“Three years ago, Sunnye L. Sims lived in a two-bedroom apartment north of San Diego, paying $1,025 in monthly rent. Then she landed a dream job, with $5.4 million in pay for nine months of work.
Now she owns a $1.9 million stucco mansion with lofty ceilings on a hilltop, featuring sun-splashed palm trees and a circular driveway.”
The cool thing is, she owes this upward trajectory entirely to the Bush administration’s decision not to do pesky supervising over private contractors working for Homeland Security. Ms. Sims, in the weeks after 9/11, incorporated a company, Eclipse Events Inc, which subcontracted events planning for another company, NCS Pearson Inc, and went big time on a non-competitive contract “… to help hire a government force of 60,000 airline passenger screeners on a tight deadline. With little experience, her tiny company was asked to help set up and run screener-assessment centers in a hurry at more than 150 hotels and other facilities. Her company eventually billed $24 million.” There are a few minor accounting matters: “$15 million in expenses submitted by Eclipse could not be substantiated. For example, auditors were able to find supporting documents for only $326,873 of the $5.8 million that Eclipse spent directly on accounting, administration, consulting, management and contract labor.” However, given the outstanding success of the Homeland Security department in doing the job that the Confederate government wants it to do – suck money into Republican and Red State venues to profit an array of defense industry businesses – one has to admire the fact that a program that supposedly was supposed to do things like hardening target sites like nuclear reactors has failed to do that almost all along the line, but has been tremendously successful at valeting and pouring sodas for meet and greets with potential passenger screeners.
And Ms. Sims? “The auditors noted that Sims not only paid herself $5.4 million in compensation as "President/Owner" but also that she gave herself a $270,000 pension.”
We are lead by geniuses.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
genes
Jerry Fodor strings together some nice crochets against evolutionary psychology in the TLS this week. His argument, which in itself is pretty hard to beat, is that if psychology relies on motivations, it can’t, uncontroversially, reduce those to the “motivations” of the gene. Fodor uses one of those analytic uninteresting examples – Davidson liked buttering toast and lighting the furnace, and Fodor likes Mr. Jones carrying an umbrella. Fodor says that the fact that Mr. Jones is carrying an umbrella doesn’t tell us Mr. Jones’ motives for carrying an umbrella. He could think it is going to rain; he could want to give the umbrella back to its owner; he could be making a style statement. And then he writes: “It’s more of a problem – and Buller is quite clear on this – that an Adaptationist account of Jones’s behaviour may need to appeal to a motive that explains his action but that Jones didn’t actually have; not consciously, not unconsciously, not at all. It’s a main tenet of psychological Darwinism that the “ultimate” motivation for an adaptive behaviour is to maximize one’s relative contribution to the genetic endowment of one’s breeding group. So (still assuming it’s an adaptation) what Buller calls the “proximal” cause of Jones’s behaviour is that he wants (maybe consciously, maybe not) not to catch his death of cold and he believes (maybe consciously, maybe not) that he won’t catch his death of cold if he doesn’t get wet. But the “ultimate” cause of his behaviour is his wanting to maximize his contribution to the gene pool of his breeding group, which requires, inter alia, that he not be dead. That, to repeat, is what Jones really wants, assuming that his umbrella-carrying behaviour is an adaptation; and it’s what his ancestors were selected for wanting in the old days back on the savannah.
The trouble is, of course, that Jones wants no such thing – not consciously or unconsciously either. Jones may never have so much as heard about breeding groups; his ancestors certainly never did.So, really, what are we to make of motives that explain one’s actions even though one doesn’t have them? And who is it that is motivated by Jones’s genotypic ambitions if it isn’t Jones? Notice, once again, that this is a kind of puzzle that is proprietary to Psychological Adaptationism; it doesn’t arise for evolutionary explanations of the opposed thumb, or of bipedal gait, or of the anatomy of the retina; that’s because neither your motivations, nor your ancestors’, nor anybody else’s, come into the story about why thumbs work the way they do. It’s Psychological Adaptationism, not Adaptationism per se, that is raising this spectre of unattached motives.”
What Fodor is getting at is what Stephen Jay Gould called the bookkeeping fallacy. According to Gould, there is a difference between finding out that there is a mathematical spread of genes through a population and taking it to be the case that genes are riding organisms as vehicles to spread themselves through a population. The one could well be the effect of various causes in the population due to organisms – selection pressure could well be working at that level. The other view, however, has something that makes genes transcend selection. Or at least makes them agents of a mysterious kind. One could say that a successful toymaker has made toys that make him money, but the money hasn’t caused the success of the toys – that success came out of the things money bought, the advertising, the assembly line, the designers, the parents and kids who for their various reasons bought the toys, etc. It isn’t that there isn’t a selection level for money – one could invest in toys or armaments – but that the money itself is not a cause on the toy level (I could spend more money and make a suck toy, that gets nowhere, for instance).
It is odd that Fodor doesn’t mention Gould’s argument. There’s a letter to the Human Nature from Val Dusek that attributes the bookkeeping metaphor to William Wimsatt. Dusek sums up the idea nicely, commenting that it was employed, after Wimsatt, in an article by Lewontin and Sober: “Using Reichenbach's notion of "screening off" causes they [Lewontin and Sober] claim individual genes rarely if ever function as causes in selection processes. Dan Dennett lamely replies in Darwin's Dangerous Idea that counters can be important. Gould and Lewontin do not deny this. They simply say they are results not causes of selection. The situation is similar to that in economics. Labor can be a numeraire of profits, but that hardly justifies the labor theory of value, because many things can be numeraires. Stock predictors who use "technical" approaches do a kind of astrology on share price fluctuations and numbers of shares sold, but do not claim to be following causes of this within corporate structure and production that "fundamentalists" claim to be analyzing.”
I have doubts about this takedown of labor theory, but the analogy to technical analysis is pretty good. Except for one thing – technical analysis really does just use patterns in the past, whereas the theory of gene propagation is dealing with creatures that actually can endow or not, in various ways, their descendents with kinds of chromosomes. Hamilton’s work with ants was not only descriptive, but it has predicted patterns among ant societies having to do with descent. In a sense, the problem here is thinking that “bookkeeping” and the next “level” of selection are completely separate.
Dawkins and Smith and Williams have a different take. This is from Mark Ridley on the units of selection. He is considering lion hunting, which naturally involves selection. But is the important selection done by the organism “lion” or the genes?
“We must discuss one other matter before considering the significance of the genic unit of selection. Critics, such as Gould, have objected that gene frequencies change between generations only in a passive, "bookkeeping" sense. The frequency changes provide a record of evolution, but are not its fundamental cause. True natural selection, the critics would say, happens at the level of organismic survival and reproduction. For instance, the actual selection in the lion example happens when a lion catches, or fails to catch, its prey. The differential hunting success drives the gene frequency changes, and it is a mistake to identify the gene frequency changes as causal. Williams and Dawkins, however, do not deny that the ecological processes causing differential organismic survival produce gene frequency changes within a generation. What they deny is that this ecological interaction of organisms means that natural selection directly adjusts the frequencies of organisms over the evolutionary time scale of many generations.
An easy philosophical method has been developed for deciding whether natural selection works on genes, or larger phenotypic units. We can consider a phenotypic change such as a new hunting skill, and ask whether natural selection can work on it if it is produced genically and if it is produced non-genically. In the lion's case, the skill is produced genically--the advantageous new hunting behavior was caused by a genetic mutation. Now suppose that the same advantageous phenotypic change was caused by a non-heritable phenotypic change, such as individual learning or some developmental accident in the lion's nervous system. The thought-based experiment provides a test case between the organismic, phenotypic, and genic accounts of evolution. In the genic case, we know that natural selection favors the improved hunting type and the gene for it increases in frequency. But what happens in the phenotypic case? The individual lion with improved hunting ability will survive and produce more offspring than an average lion, but no evolution, or natural selection in any interesting sense, will occur. The trait will not be passed on to the next generation. Natural selection cannot work directly on organisms.”
That gives us, of course, a weird dualism in which the genes are something other than the organism. What are they? In the English school, they are ultimately bearers of information. Information longs to be free, and works through the mere lion. But of course one wonders what kind of improved hunting type we are talking about. If the organism doesn’t survive its childhood, or starves to death in a drought, it is not about to pass on those genes. It does seem like the “information” centric idea that has created a distinction between the gene and the vehicle to such a degree that natural selection only works on the information is not an entirely convincing model.
“What matters, in the process of natural selection, is that some of the lion's offspring inherit the mutation. These offspring, in turn, produce more offspring, and the gene increases in frequency. The gene can increase in frequency because it is not fragmented by meiosis (like the genome) or returned to dust by death (like the phenotype). The gene, in the form of copies of itself, is potentially immortal, and is at least Permanent enough to allow its frequency to be altered in successive generations.”
What matters, one feels like replying, is that the lion mates with a lioness. That permanence is so severely constrained that the horniest lion can’t mate with the most agreeable of mice.
In other words, the genocentric view defended by Ridley has the unintended consequence of virtually liquidating the notion of the species, which was where Darwin began. This isn’t good.
Perhaps I should say something about Hull’s interactor model. Or perhaps I’ll leave it for now.
The trouble is, of course, that Jones wants no such thing – not consciously or unconsciously either. Jones may never have so much as heard about breeding groups; his ancestors certainly never did.So, really, what are we to make of motives that explain one’s actions even though one doesn’t have them? And who is it that is motivated by Jones’s genotypic ambitions if it isn’t Jones? Notice, once again, that this is a kind of puzzle that is proprietary to Psychological Adaptationism; it doesn’t arise for evolutionary explanations of the opposed thumb, or of bipedal gait, or of the anatomy of the retina; that’s because neither your motivations, nor your ancestors’, nor anybody else’s, come into the story about why thumbs work the way they do. It’s Psychological Adaptationism, not Adaptationism per se, that is raising this spectre of unattached motives.”
What Fodor is getting at is what Stephen Jay Gould called the bookkeeping fallacy. According to Gould, there is a difference between finding out that there is a mathematical spread of genes through a population and taking it to be the case that genes are riding organisms as vehicles to spread themselves through a population. The one could well be the effect of various causes in the population due to organisms – selection pressure could well be working at that level. The other view, however, has something that makes genes transcend selection. Or at least makes them agents of a mysterious kind. One could say that a successful toymaker has made toys that make him money, but the money hasn’t caused the success of the toys – that success came out of the things money bought, the advertising, the assembly line, the designers, the parents and kids who for their various reasons bought the toys, etc. It isn’t that there isn’t a selection level for money – one could invest in toys or armaments – but that the money itself is not a cause on the toy level (I could spend more money and make a suck toy, that gets nowhere, for instance).
It is odd that Fodor doesn’t mention Gould’s argument. There’s a letter to the Human Nature from Val Dusek that attributes the bookkeeping metaphor to William Wimsatt. Dusek sums up the idea nicely, commenting that it was employed, after Wimsatt, in an article by Lewontin and Sober: “Using Reichenbach's notion of "screening off" causes they [Lewontin and Sober] claim individual genes rarely if ever function as causes in selection processes. Dan Dennett lamely replies in Darwin's Dangerous Idea that counters can be important. Gould and Lewontin do not deny this. They simply say they are results not causes of selection. The situation is similar to that in economics. Labor can be a numeraire of profits, but that hardly justifies the labor theory of value, because many things can be numeraires. Stock predictors who use "technical" approaches do a kind of astrology on share price fluctuations and numbers of shares sold, but do not claim to be following causes of this within corporate structure and production that "fundamentalists" claim to be analyzing.”
I have doubts about this takedown of labor theory, but the analogy to technical analysis is pretty good. Except for one thing – technical analysis really does just use patterns in the past, whereas the theory of gene propagation is dealing with creatures that actually can endow or not, in various ways, their descendents with kinds of chromosomes. Hamilton’s work with ants was not only descriptive, but it has predicted patterns among ant societies having to do with descent. In a sense, the problem here is thinking that “bookkeeping” and the next “level” of selection are completely separate.
Dawkins and Smith and Williams have a different take. This is from Mark Ridley on the units of selection. He is considering lion hunting, which naturally involves selection. But is the important selection done by the organism “lion” or the genes?
“We must discuss one other matter before considering the significance of the genic unit of selection. Critics, such as Gould, have objected that gene frequencies change between generations only in a passive, "bookkeeping" sense. The frequency changes provide a record of evolution, but are not its fundamental cause. True natural selection, the critics would say, happens at the level of organismic survival and reproduction. For instance, the actual selection in the lion example happens when a lion catches, or fails to catch, its prey. The differential hunting success drives the gene frequency changes, and it is a mistake to identify the gene frequency changes as causal. Williams and Dawkins, however, do not deny that the ecological processes causing differential organismic survival produce gene frequency changes within a generation. What they deny is that this ecological interaction of organisms means that natural selection directly adjusts the frequencies of organisms over the evolutionary time scale of many generations.
An easy philosophical method has been developed for deciding whether natural selection works on genes, or larger phenotypic units. We can consider a phenotypic change such as a new hunting skill, and ask whether natural selection can work on it if it is produced genically and if it is produced non-genically. In the lion's case, the skill is produced genically--the advantageous new hunting behavior was caused by a genetic mutation. Now suppose that the same advantageous phenotypic change was caused by a non-heritable phenotypic change, such as individual learning or some developmental accident in the lion's nervous system. The thought-based experiment provides a test case between the organismic, phenotypic, and genic accounts of evolution. In the genic case, we know that natural selection favors the improved hunting type and the gene for it increases in frequency. But what happens in the phenotypic case? The individual lion with improved hunting ability will survive and produce more offspring than an average lion, but no evolution, or natural selection in any interesting sense, will occur. The trait will not be passed on to the next generation. Natural selection cannot work directly on organisms.”
That gives us, of course, a weird dualism in which the genes are something other than the organism. What are they? In the English school, they are ultimately bearers of information. Information longs to be free, and works through the mere lion. But of course one wonders what kind of improved hunting type we are talking about. If the organism doesn’t survive its childhood, or starves to death in a drought, it is not about to pass on those genes. It does seem like the “information” centric idea that has created a distinction between the gene and the vehicle to such a degree that natural selection only works on the information is not an entirely convincing model.
“What matters, in the process of natural selection, is that some of the lion's offspring inherit the mutation. These offspring, in turn, produce more offspring, and the gene increases in frequency. The gene can increase in frequency because it is not fragmented by meiosis (like the genome) or returned to dust by death (like the phenotype). The gene, in the form of copies of itself, is potentially immortal, and is at least Permanent enough to allow its frequency to be altered in successive generations.”
What matters, one feels like replying, is that the lion mates with a lioness. That permanence is so severely constrained that the horniest lion can’t mate with the most agreeable of mice.
In other words, the genocentric view defended by Ridley has the unintended consequence of virtually liquidating the notion of the species, which was where Darwin began. This isn’t good.
Perhaps I should say something about Hull’s interactor model. Or perhaps I’ll leave it for now.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
LI is a little bummed. We wanted to stick out our tongue and dance around and pull down our pants and moon a petition that has been cobbled together to “condemn terrorism” that has attracted the signature of loony luminaries, like C. Hitchens and Nick Cohen and, etc., etc. You can tap dance out the rest. The whole gang. But Crooked Timber got there before us. So in the interests of economy, we’ll stick into this post our comment to CT, with some revision. Ah, but to preface this: what wasn’t argued about on the CT post was the very nature of these kinds of petitions. What in the world are they for? Are they supposed to go forth and make the conspiring militants in Samarra tremble as they hold the blasting cap? Are they supposed to rally a victim population that is crushed and trembling because they haven’t heard from the brigade of stalwart intellectuals just over the horizon? Are they supposed to influence policy in any country whatsoever? There is less sense and more vanity in this kind of petition than there is in anonymously dedicating a song to the one you love via your local dj.
Any petition against terrorism that ignores the one glaring and salient fact—that the promise made by George Bush to bring down Osama bin Laden in 2001 was callously and criminally unfulfilled—doesn’t seem to me worth the piece of paper it is written on. I think a condemnation of terrorism that was serious would, at the very least, point the finger at the failure of financing governments like Pakistan’s , which have worked hand in glove with terrorism in the past, to “police” terrorism now; it would condemn any government or coalition that used the war on terror as a disguise to hatch a war for a very different purpose, as the U.S. and the U.K. did in 2002; and it would condemn the villification of real anti-terrorist measures (for instance, police measures) in favor of faux anti-terrorist measures (as in, military action against countries that were not generators of terror), such as happened in the last presidential campaign in the U.S. It would also remark on the continuing civil damage that occurs when the war on terror is used as a diversion to wage a war of choice. That civil damage consists in spreading an unease among the population as governments engage in preliminary deceits that have to be shored up with further deceits. When anti-terrorist politics goes hand in hand with the politics of manipulation and misinformation, we know that anti-terrorist measures are not aimed at terrorists, but at entrenching the governing class’ privileges and assaulting our rights. Among the signatories are many, such as Christopher Hitchens, who have spent a lot of ink in the last two years trying to persuade people that Osama b is either dead or so crippled he doesn’t matter—a use of diversionary propaganda in support of the policies of the invaders of a bystander country that is, arguably, acting with extreme negligence vis a vis any terrorist threat, if not constituting a passive aid to the terrorists themselves. I myself would sign an anti-terrorist petition – being always a brave blogger, willing to put my very signature, that most precious of things in the whole wide world – on a petition that clearly outlined how a malign symbiosis between terrorists and “anti-terrorist” politicians in the West has left civilians more vulnerable to violent death or injury, and how anti-terrorism requires a global reckoning with this fact as a preliminary to a real anti-terrorist policy.
Any petition against terrorism that ignores the one glaring and salient fact—that the promise made by George Bush to bring down Osama bin Laden in 2001 was callously and criminally unfulfilled—doesn’t seem to me worth the piece of paper it is written on. I think a condemnation of terrorism that was serious would, at the very least, point the finger at the failure of financing governments like Pakistan’s , which have worked hand in glove with terrorism in the past, to “police” terrorism now; it would condemn any government or coalition that used the war on terror as a disguise to hatch a war for a very different purpose, as the U.S. and the U.K. did in 2002; and it would condemn the villification of real anti-terrorist measures (for instance, police measures) in favor of faux anti-terrorist measures (as in, military action against countries that were not generators of terror), such as happened in the last presidential campaign in the U.S. It would also remark on the continuing civil damage that occurs when the war on terror is used as a diversion to wage a war of choice. That civil damage consists in spreading an unease among the population as governments engage in preliminary deceits that have to be shored up with further deceits. When anti-terrorist politics goes hand in hand with the politics of manipulation and misinformation, we know that anti-terrorist measures are not aimed at terrorists, but at entrenching the governing class’ privileges and assaulting our rights. Among the signatories are many, such as Christopher Hitchens, who have spent a lot of ink in the last two years trying to persuade people that Osama b is either dead or so crippled he doesn’t matter—a use of diversionary propaganda in support of the policies of the invaders of a bystander country that is, arguably, acting with extreme negligence vis a vis any terrorist threat, if not constituting a passive aid to the terrorists themselves. I myself would sign an anti-terrorist petition – being always a brave blogger, willing to put my very signature, that most precious of things in the whole wide world – on a petition that clearly outlined how a malign symbiosis between terrorists and “anti-terrorist” politicians in the West has left civilians more vulnerable to violent death or injury, and how anti-terrorism requires a global reckoning with this fact as a preliminary to a real anti-terrorist policy.
Monday, July 25, 2005
keeping tabs on the latest vileness -- get it while its hot
Keeping tabs on the vile things the Bush administration is doing is an exhausting task. LI sometimes feels that it is all too much, and we should get some sleep. But duty calls. So, this little article in the Sunday NYT about the newest initiative to destroy effective HIV programs in Brazil in the name of that morality that has made the Red States famous (for meth use) caught our attention.
Brazil has a very good anti-AIDs policy. It involves making sure that prostitutes, who have a union in Brazil, have condoms. It involves distributing clean needles. It involves rationality.
“One gauge of Brazil's success in confronting AIDS is to compare the situation here with that of other developing countries, many of which have sent delegations to study the Brazilian program. In 1990, for example, Brazil and South Africa had roughly the same rate of prevalence of H.I.V. among their adult populations, just over 1 percent.
Today, some studies indicate that 20 percent or more of South African adults of reproductive age are infected with H.I.V. or have AIDS, an estimated total of more than 5 million of the country's 44 million people. In Brazil, in contrast, the rate has dropped nearly by half, and the number of patients being treated has held steady, at about 600,000 out of a total population of 180 million.”
The Bush response is to look at this from the compassionate viewpoint. Compassion tells us that a life isn’t worth being saved if it is engaging in promiscuity and getting high:
“Mark Dybul, deputy coordinator and chief medical officer for the Bush administration's global AIDS initiative, is also taking part, and says the prostitution controversy is not only overblown, but is also an example of the many misconceptions about American policy.
"On the ground, this isn't an issue," Dr. Dybul said in an interview here on Friday. "Part of a compassionate response involves meeting people where they are and working with them."
He added, "Each country has a sovereign right to make decisions for themselves, and we respect that." But in order to receive American aid, he said, "it does require an acknowledgment that prostitution is not a good thing and to be opposed to it."”
Isn’t that sweet? And so the U.S. is yanking its support for the Brazilian system, until Brazil does the right thing, the compassionate thing, and criminalizes prostitution, making prostitutes the jolly targets of serial killers and plague, like they are in God’s own country, the U.S. Sometimes, compassion means leaving the world just a little bit more hellish than you found it.
On to the incompetence scene, where an unusual rhetorical turnabout is happening. Back in 2002, Al Qaeda was connected to all America’s enemies, and all of America’s enemies were Saddam Hussein. But now, three years later, with Al qaeda a fully operating organization in Pakistan, the new line is that nothing is connected to Al Qaeda. After all, if the London and Egyptian explosions are connected to Osama, the uncomfortable question might be, who is that Osama fellow? Bush has answered that definitively last year, when he said in the debates, very strongly, that he knew who Osama was. He’d read all about him in the back of the Little Pet Goat book. The CIA had paperclipped a 5 page cartoon book showing him and his nefarious crew. There were arrows, too, pointing to all of the players and giving their names. It was very informative. The president is very informed. The president is very resolute. The president stays the course.
Today's message comes with a little phone tune: don't worry, be happy! It turns out that nothing has anything to do with Osama, that funny little cave dweller. This is from the NYT:
But Al Qaeda's true form these days is a question mark. A majority of the officials interviewed call it a badly hobbled, barely functioning organization. Its top commanders have been captured or killed, and its two top leaders - Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri - have been in hiding for nearly four years.
One senior counterterrorism official said, "Al Qaeda is finished. But there is Al Qaedaism. This is a powerful ideology that drives local groups to do what they think Osama bin Laden wants."
Keeping up the brave tradition of Judy Miller, the article is basically propaganda for the White House conveyed via the anonymous. Good Work! Message: we did not fuck up in the spring of 2002 by arrogently letting Osama escape while we turned to an unnecessary war that we shoehorned into the legitimate concern about terrorism. Not us. Not with a secretary of War as brave and cuddly as Rumsfeld, and his merry men, oh so bright and gay. We smashed Osama way up. He has nothing, nothing to do with any explosions you may hear in the background. Although, remember, he had everything to do with Saddam Hussein, you see, in a sly, subtle, non-verbal kind of way. One of those gang terrorist handshake kind of things.
The amazing success of America’s policy is bringing freedom lovin’ to a neighborhood near you! With compassion, of course, on the side.
The WP has a different story. Must not have surveyed the same top top top counterterrorism officials. It is headlined Al Qaeda Leaders Seen in Control. How terribly bad of those reporters. They obviously were using the wrong Rolodex to survey the proper experts.
“The back-to-back nature of the deadly attacks in Egypt and London, as well as similarities in the methods used, suggests that the al Qaeda leadership may have given the orders for both operations and is a clear sign that Osama bin Laden and his deputies remain in control of the network, according to interviews with counterterrorism analysts and government officials in Europe and the Middle East.”
That is not the right message. Message should be: we are safer today more than we’ve ever been before. It gets worse.
“But intelligence officials and terrorist experts said they suspect that bin Laden or his lieutenants may have sponsored both operations from afar, as well as other explosions that have killed hundreds of people in Spain, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Morocco since 2002. The hallmarks in each case: multiple bombings aimed at unguarded, civilian targets that are designed to scare Westerners and rattle the economy.”
So unhelpful. So uncompassionate. Luckily, we can completely turn our minds off to such articles. And put complete trust in the counter terrorism experts who run the gamut, from Douglas Feith to Karl Rove, in assuring us that there is no man with a bomb behind the curtain.
Brazil has a very good anti-AIDs policy. It involves making sure that prostitutes, who have a union in Brazil, have condoms. It involves distributing clean needles. It involves rationality.
“One gauge of Brazil's success in confronting AIDS is to compare the situation here with that of other developing countries, many of which have sent delegations to study the Brazilian program. In 1990, for example, Brazil and South Africa had roughly the same rate of prevalence of H.I.V. among their adult populations, just over 1 percent.
Today, some studies indicate that 20 percent or more of South African adults of reproductive age are infected with H.I.V. or have AIDS, an estimated total of more than 5 million of the country's 44 million people. In Brazil, in contrast, the rate has dropped nearly by half, and the number of patients being treated has held steady, at about 600,000 out of a total population of 180 million.”
The Bush response is to look at this from the compassionate viewpoint. Compassion tells us that a life isn’t worth being saved if it is engaging in promiscuity and getting high:
“Mark Dybul, deputy coordinator and chief medical officer for the Bush administration's global AIDS initiative, is also taking part, and says the prostitution controversy is not only overblown, but is also an example of the many misconceptions about American policy.
"On the ground, this isn't an issue," Dr. Dybul said in an interview here on Friday. "Part of a compassionate response involves meeting people where they are and working with them."
He added, "Each country has a sovereign right to make decisions for themselves, and we respect that." But in order to receive American aid, he said, "it does require an acknowledgment that prostitution is not a good thing and to be opposed to it."”
Isn’t that sweet? And so the U.S. is yanking its support for the Brazilian system, until Brazil does the right thing, the compassionate thing, and criminalizes prostitution, making prostitutes the jolly targets of serial killers and plague, like they are in God’s own country, the U.S. Sometimes, compassion means leaving the world just a little bit more hellish than you found it.
On to the incompetence scene, where an unusual rhetorical turnabout is happening. Back in 2002, Al Qaeda was connected to all America’s enemies, and all of America’s enemies were Saddam Hussein. But now, three years later, with Al qaeda a fully operating organization in Pakistan, the new line is that nothing is connected to Al Qaeda. After all, if the London and Egyptian explosions are connected to Osama, the uncomfortable question might be, who is that Osama fellow? Bush has answered that definitively last year, when he said in the debates, very strongly, that he knew who Osama was. He’d read all about him in the back of the Little Pet Goat book. The CIA had paperclipped a 5 page cartoon book showing him and his nefarious crew. There were arrows, too, pointing to all of the players and giving their names. It was very informative. The president is very informed. The president is very resolute. The president stays the course.
Today's message comes with a little phone tune: don't worry, be happy! It turns out that nothing has anything to do with Osama, that funny little cave dweller. This is from the NYT:
But Al Qaeda's true form these days is a question mark. A majority of the officials interviewed call it a badly hobbled, barely functioning organization. Its top commanders have been captured or killed, and its two top leaders - Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri - have been in hiding for nearly four years.
One senior counterterrorism official said, "Al Qaeda is finished. But there is Al Qaedaism. This is a powerful ideology that drives local groups to do what they think Osama bin Laden wants."
Keeping up the brave tradition of Judy Miller, the article is basically propaganda for the White House conveyed via the anonymous. Good Work! Message: we did not fuck up in the spring of 2002 by arrogently letting Osama escape while we turned to an unnecessary war that we shoehorned into the legitimate concern about terrorism. Not us. Not with a secretary of War as brave and cuddly as Rumsfeld, and his merry men, oh so bright and gay. We smashed Osama way up. He has nothing, nothing to do with any explosions you may hear in the background. Although, remember, he had everything to do with Saddam Hussein, you see, in a sly, subtle, non-verbal kind of way. One of those gang terrorist handshake kind of things.
The amazing success of America’s policy is bringing freedom lovin’ to a neighborhood near you! With compassion, of course, on the side.
The WP has a different story. Must not have surveyed the same top top top counterterrorism officials. It is headlined Al Qaeda Leaders Seen in Control. How terribly bad of those reporters. They obviously were using the wrong Rolodex to survey the proper experts.
“The back-to-back nature of the deadly attacks in Egypt and London, as well as similarities in the methods used, suggests that the al Qaeda leadership may have given the orders for both operations and is a clear sign that Osama bin Laden and his deputies remain in control of the network, according to interviews with counterterrorism analysts and government officials in Europe and the Middle East.”
That is not the right message. Message should be: we are safer today more than we’ve ever been before. It gets worse.
“But intelligence officials and terrorist experts said they suspect that bin Laden or his lieutenants may have sponsored both operations from afar, as well as other explosions that have killed hundreds of people in Spain, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Morocco since 2002. The hallmarks in each case: multiple bombings aimed at unguarded, civilian targets that are designed to scare Westerners and rattle the economy.”
So unhelpful. So uncompassionate. Luckily, we can completely turn our minds off to such articles. And put complete trust in the counter terrorism experts who run the gamut, from Douglas Feith to Karl Rove, in assuring us that there is no man with a bomb behind the curtain.
Sunday, July 24, 2005
one more time
LI’s post, yesterday, on the Nagelian voter,was supposed to be clear as daylight, or the reflection of same from your beloved’s eye at the moment of spiritual union. It was also supposed to fit into our larger project of thinking about politics beyond parties. We take on the big projects at LI. We pull out the autocad. We hire the temps. Rereading it, I see I wasn’t as clear as daylight. There was a lot of scrambled egg in the spiritual union. Two points, then. Harry wrote a reply from the more skeptical side at Scratchings. I think I agree with Harry in one respect, and in one respect I don’t. The agreement is that the specific act of voting itself is a negligible political act. The unimportance of the act is emphasized by the convergence of the parties. The fact that there is no difference between the parties means that there is no difference made by the vote -- or at least that is the instrument used by the governing class to to degrade voting, and thereby assure themselves continued power. They can adopt this strategy because voting is a certain kind of social act. My post didn’t make it clear enough that the effect of the act, which is important, can and should be divorced from the act itself. The difference between the real effect of the vote and the global effect of voting is evidence that we are dealing, here, with a symbolic object in Victor Turner’s sense. To see how the vote is a symbolic object, think of other objects in games. A football, to use a standard example, is in itself merely an unintelligently designed ball, harder to hold than a standard round ball, harder to kick, and a little easier to toss long distances, compared to a round ball of equal size. One’s interest in the ball itself doesn’t really go much beyond these observations. A game in which possession of the football endows the players of the game with their positions and their roles arises, of course, not out of the football itself, but out of its symbolic value. There is some intersection between the affordances of the ball and the role it plays – that is, there is a reason that the peculiar shape of the football fits the game of football – but in general, the interest in the game does not arise from fascination with the ball itself. It is the very rare fan that cheers the ball, or worries about it. Nor do fans puzzle much over the importance of the ball. Other objects in the world can be imagined to have a personality. There are pornographic tales narrated by sofas. When I was a kid, I had to watch an anti-drug film narrated by a drop of LSD. But footballs in themselves aren’t haloed with even that kind of aura. My own view of voting is that there are times that it is better not to vote, but there are no times, in a democracy, when it is better not to be a voter. Not being a voter is a form of social death. A lesser form among the hierarchies of zombies, but a form, nevertheless. This is where I do disagree with the nihilistic approach to voting. It does make a difference that 25 percent of black males in Alabama have been disenfranchised. The termination of their legal right to vote is not the termination of a triviality. Alright then. Clear as a bell, eh? The second point I should clear up is that I meant, in my last post, to be descriptive. Whether or not I like the fact that voters are Nagelian, I think that is how they are. And the voters that are Lockean – the well informed voters, the meritorious voters – are not un-Nagelian. They are a sub-group of Nagelian voter. (The hopelessness of philosophy is that it drives you into these linguistic oddities, but so it goes). What that means is simple: Lockean voters view their intelligence, which convention defines by the comparison mechanisms in schools (an absurd way to define intelligence, but I’m not going to kick against the pricks) as much more important than other groups. There. All better now.
Saturday, July 23, 2005
what is it like to be a voter?
I am, stripped of a few eccentricities, a Keynsian liberal. However, I think liberalism's attempt to shake the existential edge off politics is futile and ultimately damaging. The left, when it is healthy, and the right, when it is not, both know that politics is all about dread and ecstasy.
That politics might be an existentialist errand is very much part of what I take to be the salient characteristic of contemporary election-based democracies. To get to that characteristic, let me quote a recent comment to one of our posts by Kmort, and then let me tell you why I believe his point is misguided:
“The Rousseauian impulse is I believe a big problem of yankee politics. Populism is as bad for authentic liberals as it is for the more intelligent conservatives. With a few higher standards for voting--say basic reading comprehension test at the polls (I would say ex-felons who pass it should be permitted to vote) or a college-degree requirement think of how much more accurate and meaningful the vote would be.”
If election based democracy is simply about input from those with an intelligent grasp of the issues, the “Rousseauian impulse,” which gives a free ride to those who have no such grasp, would seem fatally flawed. However, I don’t think election based democracy is about those with an intelligent grasp of the issues, at least if that grasp is defined in terms of having informed opinions about policy. In our opinion, a philosophical defense of democracy has to begin with a better description of how voting functions in a democracy in the first place. What kind of feed back is voting? I propose that we look for the answer to that question using Thomas Nagel’s essay, What is it like to be a bat?
Now of course Nagel’s essay doesn’t seem like it is about politics at all. It is about the narrow set of questions that are posed by the cognitive sci school to frame the problem of consciousness. And, famously, Nagel suggests that these questions do not pose the central problem of consciousness at all : “…the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.”
What it is like questions grab hold of subjectivity, rather than deductive activity:
“We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence. It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing.2 It is not analyzable in terms of the causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behavior—for similar reasons.3 I do not deny that conscious mental states and events cause behavior, nor that they may be given functional characterizations. I deny only that this kind of thing exhausts their analysis. Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness. With out some idea, therefore, of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of physicalist theory.”
The defense of the participation of the people in the government has traditionally been couched in terms of their education and their information about the policy issues. The Kantian dictum about enlightenment -- that it is the people treated as adults, or grown into their adulthood -- is often taken to be about the people educated. Relieved of their superstitions by some suitable immersion in the bath of facts. However, to me the "adulthood" does not stand for a list of facts known. It stands for a complicated system of controls on behavior, for the capacity for a range of emotions, for imagination, for empathy, etc., etc. In the same way, defining the voters participation in the government in terms of checking things off the list of things known is much like defining the consciousness solely in terms of deductive or inductive mechanisms. Or, at a stretch, in terms of intentionality.
The picture I am against is like this: your educated voter looks up candidate x’s view on the issue of lowering or raising tariffs on the import of bananas, and looks up candidate y’s view of same, and – deciding which view accords with his own intelligent view of banana importation – votes accordingly. Votes, in fact, can be reduced to a digital function: for/not for.
I think this is a bare and distorted view of what voting is about, and how it functions in a democracy. The voter, on this account, merely confirms or disconfirms views represented by x and y. On this basis, we think, democracy has no real strength that would explain not only its survival, but its survival in competition with its rivals of all sorts. It would simply be a system with a lag in the decision making process, called an election, as opposed to say tyranny, where the lags are unpredictable, and are called the hysterical fits of the ruler. Since it is unlikely that any voter has the amount of knowledge to make a competent judgment about not only the banana import issue, but, say, subsidies to the ethanol industry and car safety standards and the proper foreign policy to assume towards Gabon, if election based democracies depended on a set of voters with competent listable knowledge alone, I wouldn't give it much chance of survival.
The question of success, here, is often obscured by the rhetoric of morality. Democracies are supposed to possess some moral superiority. I have my doubts about this. Any time a political system becomes dominant, you find intellectuals busy justifying the system as morally superior. So far, the most long lasting governmental arrangement known to man involved the ruler marrying his sister and being acclaimed, at some point or another, a god, before his dead body was embalmed and interred under a certain tonnage of rock. In my opinion, this doesn’t sound like the height of morality, although it makes for very impressive postcards. We think that the success of democracy, given the success of other governmental arrangements in the past, probably does not have to do with its moral status, and probably has more to do with structural qualities it possesses.
This is the reason I don't think voting is well described by the Lockean model. I don’t think voters are like that. I prefer the Nagel voter. The Nagel voter votes, of course, in the for/against mode. But the Nagel voter votes from what it is like to be him or her. This is why the motives of the Nagel voter aren't simply confirming or disconfirming, and why the appeal to him or her is going to be about the emotions around the issues, or the issues as passions. And why the idea that is sometimes bruited about by liberal commentators about injecting ideas into a race and the scandal of not doing so is wrong – not wrong morally, but wrong organizationally. When, for instance, in the last election, the Swift boat veterans threw mud at Kerry, it was a perfectly legitimate ploy. After all, we are voting for someone who is going to have mud thrown at them constantly. The people who believed the mud were likely not going to vote for Kerry anyway. But the people who were persuaded by that ploy were not persuaded so much by the idea that Kerry was, I don’t know, a coward or a traitor – it wasn’t the ideational content, in other words, that moved them – as much as they were moved by the response. This isn't to say the better man was elected. It is to say that politics is about electing politicians, not better men. And that the system's success is peculiarly linked to what makes politicians successful.
Of course, polls are not sensitive to these things: polls ask questions about itemized issues, in a pre-digested sentiential form. There are, of course, millions of Lockean voters out there, and they are variously scandalized by the lack of intellectual content in American political campaigns. And LI has sympathy for that indignation. In fact, my indignation is easily aroused about what I see as gross stupidity on the part of politicians. Or about lies. Etc. Of course, the latter is a good instance of the situatedness of a political slant. I find the lies leading up to the Iraq war very upsetting. But I find the lies Clinton used to cover up his sex with Monica Lewinsky very irrelevant, a proof, at best, that laws against sexual harrassment in the workplace have been badly framed.
Just as I don’t want to throw deduction out as the enemy of consciousness, we don't want to entirely junk the image of the well informed voter. But eventually, the voting input is about what it is like to be an Irish ex-cop in New York city, or what it is like to be a embittered ex writer and insane blogger in Austin, Texas, etc., etc.
So, in my example above, I am not as indignant about lies per se, due to my being well informed, as I am indignant because I am the type of person who gets indignant about certain lies at certain times, and that is finally due to my total situation. Now, if LI is right about this, it still begs the question of the social nature of that tacit knowledge. Votes are additive, whereas tacit knowledge is emergent. That's a perhaps inevitable discrepancy in social action. But I will reserve pondering that question for another time.
I will round this off with three paragraphs from Nagel’s essay that give us a sense of how the Lockean defense of democracy differs from a Nagel-like defense of it. The Lockean, remember, is one who, like the reductionist, believes the way to understand the functioning of a government is to find the elementary parts and their combinations. And, above all, to avoid the non-discursive. For the Lockean, the last sentence of the third paragraph in this quote contains an idea too shocking not to be wrong, since it seems to make it impossible to perfectly combine rationality and government. And, after all, if government is simply decision-making – with its past being a series of decisions made, and its future a series of decisions to be made - then the Lockean has to be right. But if what Nagel is calling experience is not a decision – if it is a style, a set of attitudes, unpredictable variations among language games – and if experience is what democracy depends on, then the decision to suspend a voter’s right to vote, or the decision to impeach the person voted for or in some other way suspend his voted upon term, has to be done with the utmost caution, since it injures the experiential core of democracy:
“In the case of experience, on the other hand, the connection with a particular point of view seems much closer. It is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat? But if experience does not have, in addition to its subjective character, an objective nature that can be apprehended from many different points of view, then how can it be supposed that a Martian investigating my brain might be observing physical processes which were my mental processes (as he might observe physical processes which were bolts of lightning), only from a different point of view? How, for that matter, could a human physiologist observe them from another point of view?10
... This is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points of view toward the object of investigation. We describe it not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses, but in terms of its more general effects and of properties detectable by means other than the human senses. The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more objective is our description. It is possible to follow this path because although the concepts and ideas we employ in thinking about the external world are initially applied from a point of view that involves our perceptual apparatus, they are used by us to refer to things beyond themselves—toward which we have the phenomenal point of view.
Therefore we can abandon it in favor of another, and still be thinking about the same things. Experience itself however, does not seem to fit the pattern. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favour of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing? Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us. If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.”
That politics might be an existentialist errand is very much part of what I take to be the salient characteristic of contemporary election-based democracies. To get to that characteristic, let me quote a recent comment to one of our posts by Kmort, and then let me tell you why I believe his point is misguided:
“The Rousseauian impulse is I believe a big problem of yankee politics. Populism is as bad for authentic liberals as it is for the more intelligent conservatives. With a few higher standards for voting--say basic reading comprehension test at the polls (I would say ex-felons who pass it should be permitted to vote) or a college-degree requirement think of how much more accurate and meaningful the vote would be.”
If election based democracy is simply about input from those with an intelligent grasp of the issues, the “Rousseauian impulse,” which gives a free ride to those who have no such grasp, would seem fatally flawed. However, I don’t think election based democracy is about those with an intelligent grasp of the issues, at least if that grasp is defined in terms of having informed opinions about policy. In our opinion, a philosophical defense of democracy has to begin with a better description of how voting functions in a democracy in the first place. What kind of feed back is voting? I propose that we look for the answer to that question using Thomas Nagel’s essay, What is it like to be a bat?
Now of course Nagel’s essay doesn’t seem like it is about politics at all. It is about the narrow set of questions that are posed by the cognitive sci school to frame the problem of consciousness. And, famously, Nagel suggests that these questions do not pose the central problem of consciousness at all : “…the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.”
What it is like questions grab hold of subjectivity, rather than deductive activity:
“We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence. It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing.2 It is not analyzable in terms of the causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behavior—for similar reasons.3 I do not deny that conscious mental states and events cause behavior, nor that they may be given functional characterizations. I deny only that this kind of thing exhausts their analysis. Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness. With out some idea, therefore, of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of physicalist theory.”
The defense of the participation of the people in the government has traditionally been couched in terms of their education and their information about the policy issues. The Kantian dictum about enlightenment -- that it is the people treated as adults, or grown into their adulthood -- is often taken to be about the people educated. Relieved of their superstitions by some suitable immersion in the bath of facts. However, to me the "adulthood" does not stand for a list of facts known. It stands for a complicated system of controls on behavior, for the capacity for a range of emotions, for imagination, for empathy, etc., etc. In the same way, defining the voters participation in the government in terms of checking things off the list of things known is much like defining the consciousness solely in terms of deductive or inductive mechanisms. Or, at a stretch, in terms of intentionality.
The picture I am against is like this: your educated voter looks up candidate x’s view on the issue of lowering or raising tariffs on the import of bananas, and looks up candidate y’s view of same, and – deciding which view accords with his own intelligent view of banana importation – votes accordingly. Votes, in fact, can be reduced to a digital function: for/not for.
I think this is a bare and distorted view of what voting is about, and how it functions in a democracy. The voter, on this account, merely confirms or disconfirms views represented by x and y. On this basis, we think, democracy has no real strength that would explain not only its survival, but its survival in competition with its rivals of all sorts. It would simply be a system with a lag in the decision making process, called an election, as opposed to say tyranny, where the lags are unpredictable, and are called the hysterical fits of the ruler. Since it is unlikely that any voter has the amount of knowledge to make a competent judgment about not only the banana import issue, but, say, subsidies to the ethanol industry and car safety standards and the proper foreign policy to assume towards Gabon, if election based democracies depended on a set of voters with competent listable knowledge alone, I wouldn't give it much chance of survival.
The question of success, here, is often obscured by the rhetoric of morality. Democracies are supposed to possess some moral superiority. I have my doubts about this. Any time a political system becomes dominant, you find intellectuals busy justifying the system as morally superior. So far, the most long lasting governmental arrangement known to man involved the ruler marrying his sister and being acclaimed, at some point or another, a god, before his dead body was embalmed and interred under a certain tonnage of rock. In my opinion, this doesn’t sound like the height of morality, although it makes for very impressive postcards. We think that the success of democracy, given the success of other governmental arrangements in the past, probably does not have to do with its moral status, and probably has more to do with structural qualities it possesses.
This is the reason I don't think voting is well described by the Lockean model. I don’t think voters are like that. I prefer the Nagel voter. The Nagel voter votes, of course, in the for/against mode. But the Nagel voter votes from what it is like to be him or her. This is why the motives of the Nagel voter aren't simply confirming or disconfirming, and why the appeal to him or her is going to be about the emotions around the issues, or the issues as passions. And why the idea that is sometimes bruited about by liberal commentators about injecting ideas into a race and the scandal of not doing so is wrong – not wrong morally, but wrong organizationally. When, for instance, in the last election, the Swift boat veterans threw mud at Kerry, it was a perfectly legitimate ploy. After all, we are voting for someone who is going to have mud thrown at them constantly. The people who believed the mud were likely not going to vote for Kerry anyway. But the people who were persuaded by that ploy were not persuaded so much by the idea that Kerry was, I don’t know, a coward or a traitor – it wasn’t the ideational content, in other words, that moved them – as much as they were moved by the response. This isn't to say the better man was elected. It is to say that politics is about electing politicians, not better men. And that the system's success is peculiarly linked to what makes politicians successful.
Of course, polls are not sensitive to these things: polls ask questions about itemized issues, in a pre-digested sentiential form. There are, of course, millions of Lockean voters out there, and they are variously scandalized by the lack of intellectual content in American political campaigns. And LI has sympathy for that indignation. In fact, my indignation is easily aroused about what I see as gross stupidity on the part of politicians. Or about lies. Etc. Of course, the latter is a good instance of the situatedness of a political slant. I find the lies leading up to the Iraq war very upsetting. But I find the lies Clinton used to cover up his sex with Monica Lewinsky very irrelevant, a proof, at best, that laws against sexual harrassment in the workplace have been badly framed.
Just as I don’t want to throw deduction out as the enemy of consciousness, we don't want to entirely junk the image of the well informed voter. But eventually, the voting input is about what it is like to be an Irish ex-cop in New York city, or what it is like to be a embittered ex writer and insane blogger in Austin, Texas, etc., etc.
So, in my example above, I am not as indignant about lies per se, due to my being well informed, as I am indignant because I am the type of person who gets indignant about certain lies at certain times, and that is finally due to my total situation. Now, if LI is right about this, it still begs the question of the social nature of that tacit knowledge. Votes are additive, whereas tacit knowledge is emergent. That's a perhaps inevitable discrepancy in social action. But I will reserve pondering that question for another time.
I will round this off with three paragraphs from Nagel’s essay that give us a sense of how the Lockean defense of democracy differs from a Nagel-like defense of it. The Lockean, remember, is one who, like the reductionist, believes the way to understand the functioning of a government is to find the elementary parts and their combinations. And, above all, to avoid the non-discursive. For the Lockean, the last sentence of the third paragraph in this quote contains an idea too shocking not to be wrong, since it seems to make it impossible to perfectly combine rationality and government. And, after all, if government is simply decision-making – with its past being a series of decisions made, and its future a series of decisions to be made - then the Lockean has to be right. But if what Nagel is calling experience is not a decision – if it is a style, a set of attitudes, unpredictable variations among language games – and if experience is what democracy depends on, then the decision to suspend a voter’s right to vote, or the decision to impeach the person voted for or in some other way suspend his voted upon term, has to be done with the utmost caution, since it injures the experiential core of democracy:
“In the case of experience, on the other hand, the connection with a particular point of view seems much closer. It is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat? But if experience does not have, in addition to its subjective character, an objective nature that can be apprehended from many different points of view, then how can it be supposed that a Martian investigating my brain might be observing physical processes which were my mental processes (as he might observe physical processes which were bolts of lightning), only from a different point of view? How, for that matter, could a human physiologist observe them from another point of view?10
... This is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points of view toward the object of investigation. We describe it not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses, but in terms of its more general effects and of properties detectable by means other than the human senses. The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more objective is our description. It is possible to follow this path because although the concepts and ideas we employ in thinking about the external world are initially applied from a point of view that involves our perceptual apparatus, they are used by us to refer to things beyond themselves—toward which we have the phenomenal point of view.
Therefore we can abandon it in favor of another, and still be thinking about the same things. Experience itself however, does not seem to fit the pattern. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favour of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing? Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us. If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.”
Thursday, July 21, 2005
bloodsucking for fun and profit
Sometimes it is nice to see the face of the virgin in a gimme cup. And then, sometimes it is nice to see the face of Satan in a NYT article.
The article in question is about Costco. Costco is famous for paying its CEO a reasonable salary, as such things go, and doing the same for its employees. The latter policy has pissed off certain Wall Street poobahs.
Emme Kozloff, for instance:
“Emme Kozloff, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, faulted Mr. Sinegal as being too generous to employees, noting that when analysts complained that Costco's workers were paying just 4 percent toward their health costs, he raised that percentage only to 8 percent, when the retail average is 25 percent.
"He has been too benevolent," she said. "He's right that a happy employee is a productive long-term employee, but he could force employees to pick up a little more of the burden."
And here is a Deutsche bank hoodlum:
“Costco's average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its fiercest rival, Sam's Club. And Costco's health plan makes those at many other retailers look Scroogish. One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco "it's better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder."”
Dreher and Kozloff are obviously sick with that sickness unto death that is the Bush culture. LI however, wishes them no other ill than a compensation package and a health plan like a Walmart greeter’s, children who hiss and spit at them in their old age, and a lifetime of permanent nightmares in which they wander, penniless, through the ruins of a country that they have made a career of debauching, chased by the people they have systematically shit upon who are armed with a healthy quantity of good dreamtime steel pipe. From all of us at LI, at least, they have our undying hatred. We just want them to pick up a “little more of the burden” of the inequality they have spread around with such abandon.
The article in question is about Costco. Costco is famous for paying its CEO a reasonable salary, as such things go, and doing the same for its employees. The latter policy has pissed off certain Wall Street poobahs.
Emme Kozloff, for instance:
“Emme Kozloff, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, faulted Mr. Sinegal as being too generous to employees, noting that when analysts complained that Costco's workers were paying just 4 percent toward their health costs, he raised that percentage only to 8 percent, when the retail average is 25 percent.
"He has been too benevolent," she said. "He's right that a happy employee is a productive long-term employee, but he could force employees to pick up a little more of the burden."
And here is a Deutsche bank hoodlum:
“Costco's average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its fiercest rival, Sam's Club. And Costco's health plan makes those at many other retailers look Scroogish. One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco "it's better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder."”
Dreher and Kozloff are obviously sick with that sickness unto death that is the Bush culture. LI however, wishes them no other ill than a compensation package and a health plan like a Walmart greeter’s, children who hiss and spit at them in their old age, and a lifetime of permanent nightmares in which they wander, penniless, through the ruins of a country that they have made a career of debauching, chased by the people they have systematically shit upon who are armed with a healthy quantity of good dreamtime steel pipe. From all of us at LI, at least, they have our undying hatred. We just want them to pick up a “little more of the burden” of the inequality they have spread around with such abandon.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
Anti-modernity
1. Anti-modern. This is the term Jacques Le Rider turns to repeatedly in his biography of Karl Kraus. Which is entitled, somewhat contra...
.jpg)
-
You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t... -
Ladies and Gentlemen... the moment you have all been waiting for! An adventure beyond your wildest dreams! An adrenaline rush from start to... -
LI feels like a little note on politics is called for. The comments thread following the dialectics of diddling post made me realize that, ...