Politics

Those Darn Medical Missionaries

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Dr. Kent, the Christian medical missionary who survived contracting Ebola. Also, apparently, a more alarming concern than Ebola itself.
Dr. Kent, the Christian medical missionary who survived contracting Ebola. Also, apparently, a more alarming concern than Ebola itself. (At least if you’re a certain kind of intellectual who might write for Slate.)

I’ll give Brian Palmer this: in his article for Slate he’s not at all shy about telling us how he really feels. It’s great, he says, that Christian medical missionaries are out there trying to do good works in Africa: “Rather than parachuting in during crises, like some international medicine specialists, a large number of them have undertaken long-term commitments to address the health problems of poor Africans.” And yet, after all the kind words like these he has to say for medical missionaries, they only serve to underscore the weirdness of his central point:

When an infected American missionary was flown back to the United States for treatment…  a fair number of Americans were thinking a much milder, less offensive form [thinking that he should “suffer the consequences” or that he was “idiotic”]. I’ll hold my own hand up. I still don’t feel good about missionary medicine, even though I can’t fully articulate why.

So let me point out the first obvious irony, which is for someone flying the proud flag of rationalism and skepticism to be so open and honest about his totally irrational and credulous animosity towards Christians. Gee, if only we had a word to describe irrational, unarticulated prejudices…The sad part is that religious skepticism has descended so far below the heights of freethinking iconoclasm that no one even seems to remember when rejecting theism was a carefully considered intellectual proposition that actually meant something. Now it’s a fashion statement. Some of us don’t like normcore. Some of don’t like Christianity. People are weird, am I right?

I’m definitely not the first to take Palmer to task, and I’m avoiding the most obvious problem with his argument. David French handled that admirably in his piece for the NRO:

In other words, [Palmer] has a problem with medical missionaries because they’re not operating in first-world hospitals with first-world reporting systems and first-world systems of legal accountability? If there weren’t staffing shortages, drug shortages, a lack of large health-care facilities, and all the other issues that dominate developing-world medicine, we wouldn’t need medical missionaries.

French is right, and so I don’t repeat it. Instead, let me raise just one other issue. It’s subtle, I think, until you state it out loud. Then it seems really, really awkwardly obvious. We’re on the threshold of an unprecedented humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Africa with the potential to kill millions (both directly and from the resulting chaos and upheaval) and, on the verge of this nightmare, Palmer thinks it’s a good time to talk about the queasiness with which he regards the religiosity of strangers? That is what the threat of a continent-wide pandemic makes him think is a really pressing issue?

Now that’s some privilege right there.

What’s Behind Rising Police Militarization and Violence?

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Obviously one of the big discussions since Ferguson has been race relations. But another big discussion was prompted not by the initial shooting of Michael Brown, but by the heavy-handed response of the police to subsequent demonstrations. In particular, there were a lot of pics of the heavily-armed police with comments from Iraq and Afhganistan vets saying, basically, that the cops in Ferguson had heavier body armor and weapons then our front-line combat troops in an actual war zone.

2014-10-01 Ferguson Police Iraq Comparison

There’s a lot going on, including historical reasons why police departments in black neighborhoods tend to be staffed by white officers from other neighborhoods, but one of the biggest problems fueling the rising militarization of police forces is the message the the world is becoming a scary, threatening, hostile police for cops in some new and dangerous way. In a conversation with a friend on Facebook, I decided to do some really quick back-of-the-envelope calculations to determine if there was any evidence of the idea that cops today face new threats that make their jobs more dangerous in the past. I found some police mortality data here and stuck it in Excel. Then I did look backs for 10-, 20-, 30-, 40-, and 50-year periods with a simple linear trend. It was clearly negative in every single case. You want to get police death tolls as low as they have been in recent years? You have to go literally back to the 1950s. And that’s not adjusted for population, so it was actually probably safer back then, too.

Meanwhile, the list of botched, military-style police raids is growing. To give you an anecdote, Salon covered a story in June of a SWAT raid where the cops tossed a flashbang grenade into a two-year-old’s crib, blowing a hole in his chest and nearly killing him. No drugs were found in the house, and the target of the raid wasn’t even present. The good news is that the little boy survived. The bad news is that–after promising to pay for the nearly $1,000,000 in medical expenses required to save his life–the Georgia county changed their mind and is refusing to help at all. Lest you think that this is just one rare, isolated incident, the CATO Institute has an interactive map of hundreds of botched SWAT raids from across the country.

The most recent story is of a South Carolina state trooper panicking and shooting an unarmed man in the back when the man tried to get his wallet to show his ID as the trooper had requested. The state trooper has already been fired and faces criminal charges, and luckily the unarmed man survived. Radley Balko wrote an article about this (A (sort of) defense of South Carolina state trooper Sean Groubert) in which he made a lot of the same points I had already uncovered: police fatalities are trending downwards. Despite this, however, rhetoric about danger and violence is on the rise and police training is increasingly focused on aggressive violence instead of de-escalation. Balko writes:

Yesterday I wrote about another police shooting, the killing of John Crawford in a Beavercreek, Ohio, Walmart. I suggested that the incident may have been due to the sensationalization of mass shooting incidents, and the misperception that such incidents are common. After my post went up, the Guardian reported that indeed, the officer who shot Crawford had recently attended an a “pep talk” for police about responding to calls that may involve an active shooter.

He goes on to describe the “pep talk” as a highly manipulative presentation in which police officers were encouraged to imagine that their own family members were at risk unless they acted with “speed, surprise and aggressiveness” to take out the threat. Even if, as the case happened to be, the threat was a man holding an empty BB gun.

So here’s one of the big problems: humans are really, really bad at dealing with risk in a rational way. Mass shootings are exceptionally rare events,[ref]Although they might be less rare, thanks to all the attention they get.[/ref] but they are horrific and grab our attention the same way that, for example, shark attacks do. This isn’t to say no changes were needed, however. During the Columbine shootings, the police waited for hours while victims bled to death because doctrine at the time called for establishing a secure perimeter and waiting for overwhelming force. This was because the threat was assumed to be some kind of hostage situation, not a murder-suicide killing spree. Since that time, cops have adapted to new policies that call for first responders to engage immediately (even without backup) in the event of in-progress killing. That’s good[ref]It’s also heroic.[/ref], but Balko’s article suggests we’ve gone too far in that direction and are training cops to jump to the worst possible assumption and pull the trigger. Similarly, and this is my own hypothesis, but it seems as though necessary social reactions to ease the trauma of officers who have used deadly force[ref]Dave Grossman, in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, describes the important social functions that are necessary to help combat veterans reintegrate into peaceful society, for example.[/ref] may also have gone overboard:

In its damning report on the Albuquerque Police Department last April, for example, the Justice Department noted that the city’s police “too often use deadly force in an unconstitutional manner in their use of firearms,” “often use deadly force in circumstances where there is no imminent threat of death or serious body harm,” and that this was caused by serious deficiencies in training. In fact, the DOJ report found that officers who did use improper deadly force were often held up as heroes or examples within the department. [emphasis added]

But there’s another possibility that Balko doesn’t consider, and that is that the cops might be responding to a very real increase in violence despite the lack of an increase in fatalities. The problem here is a subtle one, but it’s one that’s been reported before. Essentially: we tend to measure violence in terms of fatalities, but as medical technology improves you can end up getting an apparent decrease in violence (fatalities) even as actual violence is increasing (number of gunshot victims, for example). This isn’t hypothetical. As the Wall Street Journal has reported:

The number of U.S. homicides has been falling for two decades, but America has become no less violent. Crime experts who attribute the drop in killings to better policing or an aging population fail to square the image of a more tranquil nation with this statistic: The reported number of people treated for gunshot attacks from 2001 to 2011 has grown by nearly half.

So the murder rate is going down, but the number of victims of gun violence are going up. And the driver for that is medical technology:

Emergency-room physicians who treat victims of gunshot and knife attacks say more people survive because of the spread of hospital trauma centers—which specialize in treating severe injuries—the increased use of helicopters to ferry patients, better training of first-responders and lessons gleaned from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Our experience is we are saving many more people we didn’t save even 10 years ago,” said C. William Schwab, director of the Firearm and Injury Center at the University of Pennsylvania and the professor of surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

It’s possible–and this is just my speculation–that the same trend could be taking place to an even greater degree among police officers. The trend of greater survival after gunshot would be based primarily on two things: 1. superior equipment (e.g. ballistic vests) and 2. superior training. In other words, it’s possible that the wide perception among police officers that they face a more hostile and dangerous world may be true even if the raw statistics on fatality don’t bear it out because measuring just fatality is missing the underlying violence.

I don’t have the data to draw conclusions on this, but there’s definitely enough evidence that commentators like Balko might want to be more cautious in their dismissal of the concerns of LEOs and the easy conclusion that “By most any measure, the United States is less dangerous than it’s been since the 1950s.” The truth might not be so simple, and on an issue this important we’ve got to dig a little deeper and find out what is really going on.

Sameness or Sexism

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2014-09-24 Ginger Rogers

Just came across a blog post by Patrick Rothfuss that made me a little sad. Here’s the relevant portion:

Today Oot came up to me and asked me if I’d like to play a game.

“What kind of a game?” I asked him.

“Oh you know,” he explains, sounding very matter-of-fact. “A guy game. Because we’re both guys.”…

[T]his stuff is insidious… This constant, low-grade sexism is everywhere. It sneaks in.

I’m skipping some text, but it really is the case that Rothfuss goes straight to sexism without any other statement from his son at all. A distinction is drawn between guy games and girl games and that alone is the basis for crying sexism.

So let’s get a couple of things straight. First: the presumption that any gender difference is a form of discrimination or sexism is pernicious. There really are differences between the sexes, and refusing to acknowledge those differences will hurt someone. Since I’m responding to a particularly extreme view, I can pick particularly easy examples to illustrate this point. If you deny physiological differences between boys and girls, then there’s no basis for girl- and boy-only versions of sports. No WNBA aside the NBA and no USWNST aside the USMNST. Obviously, in sports, denial of stereotypical differences would be mostly bad for girls. And, although there’s still controversy, an increasingly large number of people believe that denial of differences in education are mostly bad for boys. Wherever there are significant differences between male and female, and there are at least some such differences, denying those differences will do at least some damage to boys, girls, or both.

Second: a big motivator for calling out sexism is that doing so is a powerful cultural signifier. If you want to be popular with the right sort of people–and if the right sort of people are intellectual, progressive, etc.–then you write about sexism. There’s a cadre of sci-fi and fantasy authors in particular (Patrick Rothfuss, John Scalzi, Jim Hines, and Mary Robinette Kowal all come to mind) who regularly use their prominent blogging voices to personally weigh in on this issue. I’m sure that a lot of their motivation is genuine, but it would be foolish to ignore the role that displaying in-group status has. Meanwhile, it’s easy to find similar cadres of sci-fi and fantasy authors (notably Larry Correia) who do the exact same thing from the opposite end of the spectrum.[ref]The values they espouse are different, but the process of subsuming values as mere symbols of in-group status to maintain tribal boundaries is the same.[/ref] It’s bad because it’s polarizing, and it’s downright creepy because of the overt religiousness of so much of the language. White male privilege is the new original sin:

It’s like trying to keep dust out of your house. You can do a lot, but ultimately, *you* are one of the main reasons there’s dust. You track it in on your clothes without knowing it. And even if you somehow managed to avoid that, you’d still shed skin cells. Even if you don’t want to.

Third, the fact that discussion of sexism functions so prominently as a means of expressing tribal loyalty means that there’s enormous pressure to discard nuance. Every instance of sexism you can find to write about in a poignant and self-aware way will raise your status. So there’s a strong incentive to (1) see sexism everywhere and (2) not think too critically about any given potential instance. People who think about these things in more detail will protest that I’m taking a kind of straw man because virtually no feminist who’s thinking and writing seriously about the issue is going to take the extreme position that there are no gender differences or that we should ignore the gender differences that exist. No one seriously wants to merge the USWNST and the USMNST, right? I get that. I’m not trying to paint all social liberals with the brush of this one blog post by a highly gifted author with (to my knowledge) no actual expertise or training in sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, etc. What I want to show, instead, is the way that potentially usefully sophisticated and productive critiques of society can be subverted by the gravitational pull of popularity.

Of course this applies to both sides of the political spectrum. There’s an incessant gravitational pull towards extremism the moment you declare an allegiance to a particular ideology. It becomes an arms race to see who can show they are more committed than their fellow partisans. It also ensures that opposed ideologies have a steady stream of prominent but incompetent spokespersons who constantly pump out a dumbed-down, inflammatory version of the ideology to keep the other side’s anger and righteousness sufficiently aroused. As someone who is staunchly conservative in their beliefs, I am in no way immune to these effects, but my hope is that writing about the non-partisan aspect of the question as I’ve tried to do in this post can suck some of the oxygen out of the partisan flamewar.

There is a fourth and last point, and it’s an important one. Nothing in this post should be construed in any way as an argument that Patrick Rothfuss is a bad person or a bad parent. The biggest reason for that is that judging him on such grand scale based on one blog post would be lunacy. I don’t know him personally, and even if I did I would still not have any basis for forming a judgment like that. Honestly, my impression of Rothfuss as person and parent based on that blog post is rather high. Parents always get a lot of things wrong. The most important thing we can do, I believe, is try sincerely to get it right. Rothfuss sounds like a father who is really trying, and I respect that immensely. I can say no better for myself. Besides, when all the angst was said and done, he went and played with his kid. As far as parenting goes, that’s all that really mattered in that blog post.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Saint of Scientism

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2014-09-22 NDT
Doesn’t this look like it could be a screen shot of a televangelist?

 

The overtly religious behavior of supposedly secular, anti-religious opponents is becoming increasingly obvious, but the reaction to revelations of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s plagiarism are surprising even to me. This, my friends, is what happens when you tip a sacred cow.

The story comes from Sean Davis by way of The Federalist. Davis has done some digging and has found that many of the punchiest and most perfect quotes Tyson uses to excoriate religious believers who don’t grasp the magnificence of science are punchy and perfect because he made them up.

The fabrications were not a one-off thing. They were deliberate and calculated, crafted with one goal in mind: to elevate Tyson, and by extension his audience, at the expense of know-nothing, knuckle-dragging nutjobs who hate science. Tyson targeted journalists, members of Congress, even former President George W. Bush. And what was their crime? They were guilty of rejecting science, according to Tyson.

There’s only one problem. None of the straw man quotes that Tyson uses to tear them down are real. The quote about the numerically illiterate newspaper headline? Fabricated. The quote about a member of Congress who said he had changed his views 360 degrees? It doesn’t exist. That time a U.S. president said “Our God is the God who named the stars” as a way of dividing Judeo-Christian beliefs from Islamic beliefs? It never happened.

That’s already a pretty interesting story, but before I had a chance to write about the other shoe dropped. Folks, naturally enough, started adding this information to Tyson’s Wikipedia page. This is pretty standard fare: whenever a person with a Wikipedia entry gets connected to some major controversy, there’s usually a section in their entry dedicated to discussing the charges. But, in this case, Wikipedia editors did not take kindly to anyone besmirching the honor of their patron saint!

According to a review of the edit history of Tyson’s page, one long-time Wikipedia editor deleted an entire pending section summarizing the issue of Tyson’s fabricated quotes. Another editor attempted to insert a brief mention of Tyson’s fabrication of the George W. Bush quote. That mention was also deleted. When it was reinserted, it was deleted yet again by an editor who describes himself as a childless progressive and an apostle of Daily Kos (h/t @kerpen)… Literally every single mention of Tyson’s history of fabricating quotes has been removed from Tyson’s Wikipedia page.

The only thing possibly worse than the fanatical desire to protect Tyson’s image from reality is the viciousness with which Davis, for daring his sacrilege, is pilloried by his opponents. It is, as he describes, overtly religious.

These lovers of science don’t actually love science, because science requires you to go where the evidence takes you, even if it goes against your original hypothesis. What many of Tyson’s cultists really like is the notion that one can become more intelligent via osmosis — that you can become as smart and as credentialed as Tyson by merely clapping like a seal at whatever he says, as long as what he says fits the political worldview of your average progressive liberal.

Davis’s analysis is particular interesting from a Mormon perspective, because the Book of Mormon closely identifies false prophets with flattery. Examples:

  • And he [Sherem] preached many things which were flattering unto the people; and this he did that he might overthrow the doctrine of Christ. – Jacob 7:2
  • Yea, and [the people] also became idolatrous, because they were deceived by the vain and flattering words of the king and priests; for they did speak flattering things unto them. – Mosiah 11:5
  • And [Nehor]  had gone about among the people, preaching to them that which he termed to be the word of God, bearing down against the church; declaring unto the people that every priest and teacher ought to become popular; – Alma 1:1
  • But behold, it is better that thy soul should be lost than that thou shouldst be the means of bringing many souls down to destruction, by thy lying and by thy flattering words; – Alma 30:47 (This is Alma speaking to Korihor, another false prophet)

It’s not just a generally religious template that Tyson is enacting. It’s some of the worst religion has to offer: the promise that if you give a prophet loyalty this means you are superior to your neighbors. It’s a message seductive as it is sinister.

The Primordial Origins of Marriage

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Michelangelo's Creation of Eve. Detail from the Sistine Chapel.
Michelangelo’s Creation of Eve. Detail from the Sistine Chapel.

You can find plenty of attacks on “traditional marriage” these days. These pieces generally take a historical approach, looking at how the institution of marriage has changed throughout history and how widely they differ from 1950s stereotypes. There is a legitimate point to this analysis, marriage has changed quite dramatically from time to time and from place to place, and there are certainly modern embellishments that are anachronistically applied to the tradition backwards throughout time.

Unfortunately, the political assumptions that frequently accompany such critiques distort the analysis. Closer inspection reveals that the same core aspects that defenders of traditional marriage emphasize are much, much older and more deeply embedded into the institution of marriage than critics and maybe even defenders of traditional marriage realize.

The proximate provocation for this post is a piece by Angela C. at By Common Consent: The Myth of Traditional Marriage.[ref]This piece is an extrapolation of the comment I left there.[/ref] The core assumption that leads Angela astray is that marriage is an invention. As she writes:

Depending on whom you ask, marriage was either invented by men to protect or to oppress women.  And some men would argue that marriage was invented by women to domesticate men (a pouty version of the protection argument).

Of course, Angela is also employing the highly partisan assumption that the invention of marriage had to have been sexist: either the outright misogyny of exploitation or the insidious sexism of assuming women need protection. As objectionable as this assumption might be, it’s actually far less important than the subtle assumption that marriage is an invention.[ref]Astute readers might also point out that by dismissing any explanation in which women play a proactive role rather than exist as passive subjects she risks enacting a pernicious form of sexism herself.[/ref] Which is to say that it is a social construct.

The explanation of why this idea of social constructivism is associated with socially liberal politics is an interesting one, but it is mostly also outside the scope of this post. I will just point out that it is associated with socially liberal politics. The most obvious example, of course, is the argument that gender is a social construct distinct from biological sex.

2014-09-17 Everything is ChemicalsImplicit in these theories is the peculiar notion that society is not biological. It is peculiar because it is most often embraced by those who either outright deny the role of a supernatural deity in creating humanity or at least downplay it in favor of scientific explanations. But it’s quite difficult to see how science can provide any metaphysical justification for treating humans and our society and its constructs as one class of beings and the natural world as another. It’s very much like the natural foods advocates who warn against eating anything “chemical” without realizing that everything is chemicals. Social constructivism—at least in its most extreme and naïve form—is a modern superstition.[ref]I anticipate getting some stern replies from those with expertise in this area. I welcome the contribution of experts, but the popular understanding of technical concepts is also a relevant target of analysis and critique.[/ref]

So let us set aside the assumption that marriage is an invention, a deliberate construction willfully created by humans to accomplish a consciously desired end. I don’t mean to say let’s assume that marriage is not an invention. I’m merely saying: if we don’t make that assumption do we find any more likely candidate explanations? And, as it turns out, we do.

To understand the origins of marriage we first have to understand a little bit about the differences between human beings and other animals. The answer is that humans have evolved to make a very high-risk, high-reward tradeoff. The risk is that our offspring are basically helpless for an exceptionally prolonged period of time. This requires enormous resources to feed them and keep them safe. The reward is that, in exchange for that helplessness, our offspring are incredible learners (and then, later in life, incredible teachers). Learning and teaching are what humans do better than any other species. Human babies are useless at running or fighting or hiding, but they are tremendous geniuses at things like language acquisition. We have highly plastic brains that take a long time to learn anything, but that can eventually learn just about anything. That single difference pretty much explains the difference between chimps using sticks to forage for ants and humans launching the Space Shuttle.

The reason why this change has such huge dividends is that it separated human knowledge from human genetics. Other animals are capable of some pretty amazing behaviors (like migration), but these are often instinctual. That means the information is genetic. Advantage: no one has to teach it. Disadvantage: the animals can only learn and change as the speed of genetic evolution, which takes place across hundreds or thousands of generations. If the migration pattern needs to change in an abrupt way, monarch butterflies can’t just tell the next generation to take a different route next time.

Humans, on the other hand, initially used society as a repository for knowledge. Each generation could teach the skills (from language to tool use) to the next generation. This meant that exchange of knowledge (for example when a new tool was discovered) could be exceptionally rapid both across generations and across tribes. That was the basis for creating (eventually) written language, which only further increased the pace since now our knowledge can be transmitted and reproduced even more rapidly and cheaply and widely. In short: other animals learn at the speed of genetics. Humans learn at the speed of memetics which, in the Internet Age, is the speed of light.

This is pretty cutting-edge science because it relies on concepts like group selection that—although initially proposed by Darwin—have been considered more or less impossible until recently. No one could figure out how to make it work: why would one individual sacrifice altruistically in order to benefit his tribe? In short: how do you get trust? Advances in game theory and complexity science have for the first time made it possible to illustrate how these obstacles can be overcome, and therefore how it is possible for groups to compete against each other (and therefore to have group evolution) rather than just individual organisms.

So now we’ve learned two key things. The first is that the chief difference between humans and other organisms is that we have really, really expensive but also really, really high-performing offspring. The second is that this idea carries with it the notion that groups compete and evolve, which is to say that societies can compete and evolve. Most notably, these are intrinsic to what it means to be a human being. They predate any history and go back to the origins of our species.

Which means that marriage predates our history and goes back to the origin of our species, provided we define marriage as (1) monogamous sexual pairing of males and females who (2) cooperate to feed, protect, and teach their offspring. This behavior must be as old as humanity because humanity is impossible without it. Without cooperation, human children cannot be raised by subsistence cultures. They are too expensive. But without sexual monogamy, males and females are not equally vested in the offspring. These behaviors therefore co-evolved with humanity itself.

So we’ve just bypassed all the historical, cross-cultural analysis of formal marriage institutions by a couple hundred thousand years, at least. So much for an “invention.” What does the story look like from there?

Well, all of the individual cultural variations around the kernel of marriage (monogamy and cooperative child-rearing) end up only being possible because of the integral role that the kernel of marriage played in our society. The logic can’t work any other way. Why would someone use marriage as the basis for political alliance, for example, if monogamous, child-rearing relationships weren’t already fundamental to human society? No one would think to invent marriage from scratch for the purposes of political alliance and, if someone did think of it, it would never work because there would be no foundation to build upon.

So it is absolutely true that marriage comes in a wide variety of cultural and legal and historical instantiations, but it is only the variety that is in any sense invented or constructed or arbitrary. They inventions only exist because there was a stable foundation upon which to build them.

Oral language was not invented. It evolved. Written language was not invented. It evolved. Nation-states were not invented. They evolved. Markets were not invented. They evolved. And, like these other bedrock institutions, marriage was not invented. It evolved. Just as oral and written languages vary widely, just as forms of government run the gamut from tribal chiefs to Prime Ministers, and just as the laws for doing business vary from place to place: so do does the institution of marriage alter and change from time to time and from place to place.

But there are individual characteristics that languages, governments, and markets must have in order to exist at all, and similarly there are traits that marriage—despite its many variations—must exhibit in order to exist. Those are sexual monogamy between men and women raising their biological children. Which, not at all coincidentally, are the characteristics that are of utmost importance in the minds of social conservatives defending “traditional marriage.” Whether you believe that marriage was ordained of God by divine fiat in a literal Garden of Eden, was orchestrated by God through the process of natural selection and evolution, or simply evolved spontaneously without any help from a Creator of any kind: marriage remains the fundamental institution that made the human species possible.

The key lesson to learn here is not necessarily that marriage should never change. Marriage—the entire package including the biological kernel and the social embellishments on top of it—changes all the time. Some of those innovations are bad. When society codifies marriage in a way that treats women as property to be bought or sold or gives men a legal right to rape their wives, then society is leveraging the power of the biological kernel of marriage to do great evil. But when marriage is used as a model to care for those in need—like with fostering or with adopting children—then in that case we’re building something beautiful and worthy on top of the foundation that we’ve inherited to work with.

Because this isn’t an argument that marriage should never change, this post cannot function as a direct argument against same-sex marriage, open marriages, or other currently controversial topics. It is possible to believe that the kernel of marriage has filled its evolutionary purpose. Now that we have enormously greater economic prosperity, perhaps the old rationales no longer apply.

This may be so, but at least those who advocate changes to marriage at a fundamental level ought to admit that they are tinkering with the evolutionary foundations of human society. To use a computer analogy: debates about marriage that get to its essential characteristics are not like swapping out one app for another. They are about making changes to the kernel of the operating system. It would be best to know what one is doing before one undertakes such an endeavor. Those propounding the “myth of traditional marriage” manifestly fail to apprehend its true nature and significance. Therefore, they are the last folks I want involved in the process.

Some Things I’ve Learned from Ferguson

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2014-09-09 Ferguson

A lot of the writing that has come out since Ferguson has focused on the disconnect between anger in black communities and apparent indifference in white communities. A lot of these articles have been unhelpful. They start with the premise that Michael Brown’s shooting was obviously illegal and immoral when the reality is that we don’t know. There are reasonable grounds to suspect the shooting was justified. From that erroneous premise, these pieces quickly conclude that the only reason for white people to remain silent on the issue is cowardice, racism, or both. This is unfair, often self-righteous[ref]Especially when the writers are white and don’t demonstrate any deeper awareness of the problem.[/ref], and never helpful.

The problem, I think, is that the shooting of Michael Brown was just a spark that ignited a powder keg. As a symbol, it’s potent, but in terms of understanding the real problem it’s a distraction. Not only because the events are unclear, but also because it puts focus on police-community relations, which are a small part of the real problem: the larger relationship between municipal governments and poor communities. The best article I’ve read on that is the Washington Posts’s How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty. The story is relatively simple: fairly innocent violations that would be a speed bump to someone in the middle class are much more disrupting to people who don’t have the same kinds of safety nets and flexibility. These folks are easily trapped in a cycle of violations that are too expensive (literally, in terms of dollars) for them to escape. Meanwhile, the local governments profit from the unending cycle of fines and fees: “Some of the towns in St. Louis County can derive 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts.” Read the article, however, to truly understand the scale and perversity of the parasitical relationship between local governments and the populations they are supposed to serve.

It’s a serious problem and a serious injustice that underscores another criticism that I’ve seen liberals make of social conservatives. For all that social conservatives are worried about federal overreach, it’s historically federal or state governments that have stepped in to stop injustice perpetrated by state and local governments. Fear of federal tyranny seems utterly inexplicable in communities that have a history of seeing federal law defend them from local tyranny. Perversely, it doesn’t help that conservatives do see an issue to be angry about in Freguson: the violent initial overreaction of local police to peaceful protests. Militarization of local police is a serious concern, and the fact that conservatives see something legitimate to be upset about can make them all the more mystified when that concern is not acknowledged or shared by liberals.[ref]This isn’t to say that liberals ignore police militarization, but they certainly don’t seem to see it as fundamental to the Ferguson story./[ref]

It’s an old story, really. Both sides have points, but they fail to apprehend each other’s respective points of view. It is deeply unfortunate that sensational, random, tragic stories–like what happened to Michael Brown–seem to be the only thing that gets people talking. It’s not really a conversation when both sides are talking past each other.

Are Liberals the Real Authoritarians?

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2014-09-12 che_guevara_tshirt

I’ve been very influenced by Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral foundations theory which, in a nutshell, postulates that there are 6 components to intuitive moral reasoning, and that conservatives tend to apply them all but liberals only use a narrow set. The foundations are:

  1. Care/harm for others, protecting them from harm.
  2. Fairness/cheating, Justice, treating others in proportion to their actions (He has also referred to this dimension as Proportionality.)
  3. Liberty/oppression, characterizes judgments in terms of whether subjects are tyrannized.
  4. Loyalty/betrayal to your group, family, nation. (He has also referred to this dimension as Ingroup.)
  5. Authority/subversion for tradition and legitimate authority. (He has also connected this foundation to a notion of Respect.)
  6. Sanctity/degradation, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions. (He has also referred to this as Purity.)

According to Haidt, liberals consider chiefly care/harm and  liberty/oppression, leaving the rest (including authority/subversion) to conservatives. But is that really true? Are liberals so anti-authoritarian? Or do they just have different authorities in mind? Megan McArdle has her doubts:

In the ultra-liberal enclave I grew up in, the liberals were at least as fiercely tribal as any small-town Republican, though to be sure, the targets were different. Many of them knew no more about the nuts and bolts of evolution and other hot-button issues than your average creationist; they believed it on authority. And when it threatened to conflict with some sacred value, such as their beliefs about gender differences, many found evolutionary principles as easy to ignore as those creationists did. It is clearly true that liberals profess a moral code that excludes concerns about loyalty, honor, purity and obedience — but over the millennia, man has professed many ideals that are mostly honored in the breach.

And, as it turns out, McArdle’s instincts are on to something. She points to an article by Jeremy Frimer for the HuffPo: How Do Liberal and Conservative Attitudes About Obedience to Authority Differ? The Surprising Result of My Study. After coming across extreme reverence for Che Guevara in Brazil, Frimer reconsidered the stereotype that conservatives are uniquely authoritarian:

Past psychology studies had found that conservatives have the more favorable attitudes toward statements such as, “If I were a soldier and disagreed with my commanding officer’s orders, I would obey anyway because that is my duty.” Did conservatives have a good feeling about this statement because they think that people ought to obey (in general), or because they support the military and its agenda? I suspected it was the latter.

Subsequent studies bore Frimer’s (and McArdle’s) suspicions out. If you ask about liberal authorities (e.g. “an environmentalist”) then suddenly you get anti-authoritarian conservatives and authoritarian liberals, leading Frimer to conclude: “Rather than thinking of liberals and conservatives as being fundamentally different psychological breeds, I now think of them as competing teams.” Frimer goes on to speculate that the reason we associate conservatives with authoritarianism is that, over time, authorities become conservative. But I think that depends on conflating two separate notions of conservatism: the literal one (e.g. those that maintain traditions) and the more common one (the right-wing of American politics, which is a blend of traditionalism and classical liberal philosophy). Authorities probably become traditionalist over time for obvious reasons. Once you control the institution, you have a vested interest in the institution. But there’s no reason why the institution should correspond to classical liberal philosophy vs any other philosophy other than historical accident.

For me there’s one more big question: where does this leave Haidt’s moral foundations theory? I think it’s plausible that Haidt is right about the 6 dimensions, but wrong about the divide between liberals and conservatives. It might not be that liberals don’t care about authority or sanctity. It might simply be that they don’t recognize their own innate moral drivers because, in American politics, the authority and sanctity considerations of the left are covert. We think of the military and police as authorities. We don’t think of academic as authorities, but they are. We think of purity as a religious concept, but it’s no different in function from the kind of purity that drives orthorexia (aka “Whole Foods syndrome”).

I would further speculate–just speculation at this point–that being cognizant of moral drivers allows them to be better moderated. Conservatives are self-conscious about their respect for authority, which permits critique of that authoritarianism. Liberals, however, are in denial of their authoritarian tendencies and so they are basically unchecked, which is dangerous.

Some Thoughts on Mean Conservatives

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2014-09-11 equality-to-liberals-and-conservatives1

Conservatives have a reputation for being mean: callous, unthinking, insensitive, cruel. You get the picture.[ref]Liberals, perhaps, have a corresponding reputation for being dumb: naive, sentimental, idealistic. But let’s just stick with conservatives for today.[/ref] Part of the reason conservatives have that reputation is because it’s politically advantageous for liberals to portray them that way. But part of it comes from conservatives themselves who–to a degree that I think is more true than with liberal commentators–tend to say things that are combative, adversarial, and aggressive. The question I’ll address today is this: why?

I’d like to ask of you, the reader, to entertain the notion that it might be something other than sheer meanness that animates the way some conservatives appear to pick fights unnecessarily. And this might be tough, because I’m going to focus on Ann Coulter, who is arguably the meanest of all conservative commentators out there commentating today. I have plenty of friends who will go into paroxysms of rage at the mere mention of her name or sight of her picture, but I’ve never been one to shy away from controversial topics. Besides, I’m not going to try to convince anyone to accept her points of view or nominate her for “Most Compassionate.,” I am, however, going to speculate on what it is that makes her write the way she does, and further speculate that it is something other than a heart as tarnished and black as coal.

I discovered Ann Coulter as an undergrad and for me her books[ref]Treason and How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) are the two that I read at the time.[/ref] were a revelation. It turns out, however, that they were also not entirely accurate. The first example that comes to mind is from her book Slander where–in the first edition–she alleged that the NYT ignored Dale Earnhardt’s death as evidence of the disconnect between red and blue America. Except, of course, that the NYT did cover it:

The New York Times did, in fact, cover Earnhardt’s death the same day that he died: sportswriter Robert Lipsyte authored an article for the front page that was published on February 18, 2001. Another front page article appeared in the Times on the following day.

It was also from Coulter that I learned that all the racist white Southerners during Jim Crow were Democrats, but she left out the part where they all switched to Republican after the Democratic Party embraced civil rights.[ref]And there died the last remnants of my capacity to care about political parties in America other than tactically.[/ref] But the real end of my Ann Coulter fandom came when I went to see her speak and stayed afterwards to get my books signed. In fairness to her, I was the last person in line and she was probably really, really tired. But when I asked her about coalition-building with moderate, patriotic Muslim-Americans her response (which I cannot recall with accuracy and won’t try to reproduce) was so utterly dismissive that it left me completely disenchanted.

I know that for a lot of people admitting that you liked Ann Coulter at any time in the past is something you would confide only in embarrassed tones and with lots of assurances that you were young and stupid then. But I’m not embarrassed about it. I’m always trying to find aspects of common wisdom that everyone else accepts that are actually wrong. That’s a dangerous quest ’cause when the common wisdom is right you look doubly like a fool, but I’m not ashamed of being willing to look like a fool for the sake of bucking conventional wisdom. And this seems like a good time for some William James:

He who says ‘Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!’ merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe…. This fear he slavishly obeys. …For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world. . . .It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

Now, returning to Ann Coulter, even though I can’t consider myself a fan in an unqualified sense any more, I still do carry both respect and affection for her and her writing. I think she’s often but not always very funny and always smart even when she’s wrong. But I’ve learned a couple of other things that, naive as it might be, make me think I have some insight into her character and–along with it–the fundamental reason why conservatives come across as mean, callous, etc.

One of the big insights for me came when a couple of students threw pies at Ann Coulter during a speech in 2004. Pie-throwing, or just pieing, is one of those things that sounds funny until you think about it seriously, as this writer for the New Republic did:

As a concept, throwing pies at pompous bores is pleasing. As a reality, it’s not pleasing at all. It’s one thing to parody, to tease, to lampoon. Jon Stewart throws metaphorical pies at hypocrites and fools several days a week. It’s another thing to see a face distorted and dripping with foam or custard as the person sits blinking and trying to take stock of what happened. Just watch Anita Bryant weeping.[ref]Check out the article for videos of people being pied, including Ann Coulter.[/ref]

In addition to the initial incident, however, Coulter later claimed that the local DA dropped the charges against the students against her wishes. Media Matter blamed Coulter because she didn’t show up at the trial. Coulter, for her part, wondered what strange legal system Arizona must have such that if a victim doesn’t show up at a trial the charges are automatically dropped, and further claims that when she asked if she was required to attend and when and where the trial would be held, she got no response at all. I don’t think it’s obvious from those two posts what the truth is, but I do think that in most cases calling someone a liar because they didn’t show up at the trial of someone who physically assaulted them would be justifiably called “victim-blaming.” I’d call the whole thing–from pie-throwing to mocking–simply this: bullying.

Sure, sure: she brings it upon herself. You can say that about a lot of people who are bullied. That’s because being bullied tends to make people scared and angry. We understand that when it’s about a normal human being, but for some reason we in America don’t treat famous people like normal human beings. Although they are.[ref]This is something I think about a lot, by the way, and not just with conservative pundits. The way Big Entertainment chews up and spits out starlets and child actors like Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears is, I think, a truly grim indictment of our culture. Everyone hates the paparazzi, but the mags that run the pictures don’t seem to be facing any boycotts.[/ref]

Look, as long as I’m writing a somewhat personal blog entry, I’ll go all in. First, I was bullied a lot myself in middle school. It was what I’d call pretty severe, including things like people vandalizing clothes in my locker while I was in PE, teachers leading the kids in  making fun of me, and administrators calling me a liar when my parents tried to stand up for me. Second, I have parents who are–at least in Mormon circles–moderately famous. And people treat them really poorly sometimes. I’ve seen my mother publicly lambasted and called a narcissist stooge of the patriarchy who is in it for the money by prominent individuals who should know better. It’s not just that the accusations are flagrantly false[ref]They are, and even though I’m biased let me just tell you: they really are.[/ref], it’s that they are the kind of accusations that you just wouldn’t make about a fellow human being. You make them against symbols, dehumanized enemies, or inhuman icons. Not against your brother, your sister, or your neighbor.

So how does it feel to be Ann Coulter? To have people throw pies at you and have other people treat it like a joke? To have people organize to shout you down when you are invited to speak, and to have their actions lionized and applauded as though a mob of angry people shouting at an unarmed woman in high heels is the paragon of bravery.[ref]Truth to power, indeed.[/ref]

I get it. The immediate response is: “I’m not Ann.” As in, I don’t voluntarily write a bunch of hateful stuff. So, just to recap, this woman invites criticism by having loud, offensive opinions that aren’t popular. If she didn’t want to be physically assaulted, she should just keep her mouth shut. You could even say she’s asking for it, couldn’t you?

Or maybe she deserves what’s coming ’cause she got paid. Well, I think Kirsten Dunst and Jennifer Lawrence and the other women who had their iCloud accounts hacked and personal photos stolen probably get paid a lot for their work–some of which involves looking beautiful–but call me crazy if that just doesn’t justify stealing photos, posting them online, or looking at them either. Being well-compensated for work shouldn’t be an excuse to dehumanize someone.

OK, well maybe Ann Coulter deserves it because she says mean things for money. I’m skeptical of that. First of all: nobody does anything for just one reason. I really doubt that Coulter or anyone else (say, Michael Moore) has such a pure profit-motive. Does anyone think that Ann was just going through life and then was like, “Hey, I know a great way to get rich. I’ll say really horrible things for money!” I’m sure that Coulter has some sincere principles. I’m sure Michael Moore does, too. I’m sure at least part of what she does is because she thinks it’s the right thing to do. After all, doesn’t everyone think–usually sincerely–that they are a good guy?[ref]If you imagine any other human being to be consciously operating on some nefarious motive, like pure greed, you’re probably already seriously off-track. Real life people are neither angels nor demons.[/ref] I’m sure her good intentions are also warped by the riches and adulation of the fans that love her. She wouldn’t be human if they were not. But my question, again, is does this justify how she is treated? I don’t think it does. The thing with all these rationalizations and excuses is just that: they are rationalizations and excuses. We know better.

Last personal note: Earlier this week I posted a long article about the myth that rape is exclusively about power. The immediate response from one of my more vocal critics was to call me a misogynist on his FB wall, and then there was a pile-on after that. As a general rule, I think of myself as someone who has relatively thick skin. I’ve debated on the Internet for many, many years and have been called all kinds of things. Usually, I laugh. I have also called people all kinds of things, although I regret that and have tried to reform.[ref]I know of at least two people I’ve made cry in debates. One in-person, one online. I’m not proud of that, but it shows you the kind of tactics I used to use.[/ref]

But there’s something different about being accused in abstentia. When someone is screaming at me and calling me names it might not be pleasant, but in a perverse way I know I’m important enough to warrant an excess of emotion on their part. It might be totally dysfunctional, but we’re communicating. We are in a social relationship. I am still connected. When a group of people mock you and you’re not even there, it feels different. It feels worse. It feels like being made into a non-person. As we learned from Kreacher in Harry Potter, the cruelest opposite of love is not hate. “Indifference and neglect often do more damage than outright dislike,” as J. K. Rowling put it. The reason that indifference and neglect are worse than hatred is that they amount to treating a human being like a thing instead of like a person. It is the absolute negation of our essential worth.

Just to twist the knife a bit, of course, the reason I wrote that piece is because I have known many women in my life who have suffered from sexual violence and I want to do something about it. For me, “doing something about it,” has to start with really understanding the problem. I may have been flagrantly wrong in my approach (although my critics haven’t swayed me that far yet), but whether I was right or wrong wasn’t even relevant to the attacks. The issue wasn’t how good my arguments were. The issue was what a terrible human being I am.[ref]Incidentally, someone should really warn my wife that she’s married to a misogynist.[/ref]

I think I have a pretty good handle on my own insignificance. I see the web traffic to my blog, and I know what web traffic is to some really major blogs. I am not a public figure. I don’t meet Wikipedia’s notability criteria. There are not hundreds or thousands or even millions of people out there talking about me. There’s this one rather odd individual who seems to have an unhealthy fixation and–by extension–some of his friends. I can shrug, not read his page in the future, and get on with my life. But this is true precisely to the extent that I’m inconsequential. Someone like Ann Coulter doesn’t really have that option and so when I think about how she goes about her day-to-day life, I have empathy for her and the vitriol she sometimes spews. I can see that feeling like you are living under siege would make lots of people want to lash out.

That doesn’t mean I think lashing out is OK. Understanding is not excusing. To go back to my own past again, when I was in middle school and the bullying was at its worst I didn’t really have friends.[ref]The birthday party where only one kid showed up comes to mind. But, hey: it could have been nobody.[/ref] But I did have a group of kids who hung out at school before first class purely because we were all in the same place (the library) hiding from our own bullies. We put up with a lot of weird anti-social and unpleasant behavior from each other. Partially because we had to but also, I think, because we understood each other. We knew we weren’t exactly the best versions of ourselves. We knew that all of us would be smarter, more gracious, more competent, and better if our circumstances were a little different than they were.

This post is going to be a big joke to a lot of people who believe that trying to find empathy for rich folks, or for hate-mongers is a waste of time and who find the entire idea of a vulnerable pundit to be laughable. Believe me, lots of people will take from this, “Nathaniel likes Ann Coulter, ergo he is even stupider and more hateful than I thought!” and nothing more. I’m sad about that, but unwilling to modify the post for the sake of my reputation, such as it is. The message is what it is, and the command is to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.” (Matthew 5:44) By golly I just don’t see an exception for income or fame or ideology any more than I do for race or gender or sexuality.

The decision I’ve made is to remain unaffected by the mockery and scorn that comes my way (to the extent that I can) and try to stay true to my Christian ideals. Frankly, there’s very little of it (see above, re: my own insignificance) and if I can’t handle this trickle then that’s just sad. I will try to love my neighbor: even the rich ones. Even the famous ones. Even the pundits. And yes: even the dogmatically liberal bullies.

As a note: I absolutely don’t think conservatives are, on an individual basis, any better at treating their opponents with dignity and compassion. I can’t help but notice that we live in a world where the journalists, writers, editors, actors, directors, script-writers and–in short–the folks with their hands on the rudder of our culture are extremely socially liberal. In that context, I think conservative commentators face more pressure, especially the kind we don’t see because it comes from their peers in the news/entertainment industry–but I don’t for a second think that Michael Moore or Rachel Maddow have it easy, either.

I haven’t figured out how to reconcile all this love-thy-enemy stuff with my belief that facts matter, that policies are worth debating, and that some ideals and principles the world thinks are dumb are worth standing up for. But I’m working on it. I have this vision in my mind of having genteel adversaries who fight tooth and nail to defeat each other, but who always play within certain rules. And who are able to engage in witty banter, tokens of respect, and maybe even admiration and friendship despite being on opposite sides. Naive and stupid, perhaps, but it’s the best I’ve got. I like the idea that I could throw a party and all my friends would show up–no matter what their politics–and everyone would know they were welcome in my home. I think it’s harder to pull off than that, but like I said: I’m working on it.

So, going back to Ann Coulter one last time, I think partly what happened is that all the crap she has to deal with made her bitter, and that comes out in her writing. I’m not saying she didn’t do anything to bring it upon herself, or that she would be writing nothing but children’s fairytales if only people would be nicer to her. I’m also not saying there isn’t room for biting satire in political discourse: differnet people have different voices and some are going to be more abrasive than others. I don’t think there’s One True Tone for Correct Political Discussion. I just hope to avoid succumbing to bitterness and anger myself, and hopefully not pushing too many people too far in that direction either.

An Objective Net Neutrality Overview

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2014-09-10 Net Neutrality

I found this blog post on net neutrality to be a pretty good, unbiased overview of the debate. I’m actually somewhat undecided on the issue. The cons are pretty obvious. If ISPs are allowed to create different tiers for different kinds of Internet traffic, this will end up being a threat to the kind of innovation that has so far characterized the Internet and made all of our lives better. But there are also some potential upsides to a tiered approach to bandwidth because not all packets[ref]Internet traffic is broken up into discrete chunks called packets[/ref] are equal. As a consumer, I would be interested in treating packets for VOIP and gaming traffic as higher-priority (lower-latency) than packets for video streaming (high latency). You can’t really do that under the current system.

I think it’s possible that something more nuanced than complete and total net neutrality (all packets are treated identically) might be in order, but I’m not sure I trust regulators to be able to come up with reasonable, simple rules that give consumers more flexibility without introducing easy ways for people to game the system. I support net neutrality for now, but only as a kind of “least bad” alternative. I just can’t get all excited about the ideology of the argument.

No Such Thing as Safe Sex

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2014-09-06 No Such Thing As Safe Sex

It seems that whenever I post a particularly controversial topic I end up getting compared to Matt Walsh by people who don’t like what I’m writing. I can see the comparison: Matt Walsh is a social conservative who tackles controversial issues head-on. His approach is more combative than mine and I don’t always agree with that or with his arguments, but as a general rule I admire his writing. And I’d like to show you why. In a typical incendiary post called I will not teach my kids about safe sex because there is no such thing he includes this, I think, moving and beautiful account of human sexuality.

[N]o sex is safe. Sex is not supposed to be safe. Sex isn’t supposed to be physically perilous… but it is supposed to be an act of great depth and consequence. Sex is meant to be open and exposed. It’s meant to bring out scary and mysterious feelings of desire and devotion. Call that whatever you like, but you can’t call it safe.

Sex itself isn’t safe. On the other hand, committed relationships, fortified by the vows of marriage and reaffirmed daily by both spouses, are safe — and it is only in this context that the inherent vulnerability of sex can be made secure and comfortable.

I’ve done some chopping (not the brackets and ellipses) to remove some of the partisan barbs and get to the essence of his point.[ref]Read the original at his site. Tell me what you think of the difference if you like. I’m curious.[/ref]

So two things. One, as I said, I really do like this model of human sexuality where sex is viewed with something like awe and committed relationships become the safe environment for the raw and mysterious experience. Second thing: I think it’s always best to try and be charitable when reading folks who might have an ax to grind. I once had a professor (philosophy) who taught us that we should always read everything twice. Once, with maximum skepticism to refute everything wrong. And a second time, with maximum charity, to glean every drop of wisdom we could from it. I like that, and I think it’s something we can all strive for.