The World Bank reported last month that for the first time in world history, extreme poverty will likely fall below 10% of the global population this year. This is encouraging and provides strong evidence that the goal of eradicating extreme poverty worldwide by 2030 is achievable. World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said,
This is the best story in the world today — these projections show us that we are the first generation in human history that can end extreme poverty…This new forecast of poverty falling into the single digits should give us new momentum and help us focus even more clearly on the most effective strategies to end extreme poverty. It will be extraordinarily hard, especially in a period of slower global growth, volatile financial markets, conflicts, high youth unemployment, and the growing impact of climate change. But it remains within our grasp, as long as our high aspirations are matched by country-led plans that help the still millions of people living in extreme poverty.
Poverty continues to be concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, yet both have seen reductions in poverty: South Asia dropped from 18.8% in 2012 to 13.5% in 2015 and Sub-Saharan Africa dropped from 42.6% in 2012 to 35.2% in 2015.
To get a bachelors degree in English literature at the University of California at Los Angeles, one of the most prestigious colleges in America, you must take courses in Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability or Sexuality Studies; in Imperial Transnational or Post-Colonial Studies; and in Critical Theory. But you are not required to take a single course in Shakespeare.
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But here is the particular point I want to make.
As I understand it, the attempts to highlight historical minority voices is a well-intentioned attempt to rectify historical injustice. I think this is a noble endeavor, but an impossible and even nihilistic one for two reasons.
The first reason is the danger of importing contemporary perspectives backwards in time and applying them to history in ways that are misleading. For example, it’s common to say that the canon is full of dead white guys. But the idea of “whiteness” as it exists today is a relatively recent invention. Go back in time just a couple of centuries and you will find, for example, that the lines between proper Anglo-Saxon Americans and Irish Catholic Americans was very, very stark. Blurring them together into one category and applying that category across centuries of time and continents of space is hopelessly confused and (ironically) whitewashes some particularly ugly incidents of prejudice and discrimination in our history.
The second danger is that, in our effort to right historical injustices, we run the risk of whitewashing history. I take it as a given that one of the injustices is that oppressed people do not have the opportunity to develop their talents to the extent that privileged elites do. The historical canon of Western thought reflects this reality. The best ideas tended to come from the elites. Not because the elites had more talent or were superior. Absolutely not. But because–being elites–they had the time, resources, and freedom to engage in pursuits other than bare survival. Trying to retroactively right that wrong is admirable, but impossible. Short of a time machine, we cannot go back in time and give to the victims of oppression the time, resources, and freedom of which they were robbed. The best we can do is acknowledge the fact of the robbery.
This is not to say that the elites had an absolute lock on art or philosophy. Clearly they did not, and when a great thinker or artist arose in spite of all the obstacles set in their path, we should celebrate him or her all the more for overcoming those obstacles.
But, all-in-all, I believe that we should accept the imbalanced historical canon as the complicated, fraught heritage that it truly is. There is much that is great and beautiful in it, but it’s systematic lack of diversity is an important testament to the systematic oppression and injustice of the world in which it originated. If you try to fix that by balancing the canon, you run the risk of acting as though oppression was not so bad after all, as though oppression were so light a burden that it never lead to frustrated ambitions, broken dreams, or neglected works of genius. But it did. Oppression does all of those things. That is why it is evil. That is why it impoverishes us all.
St. Thomas Aquinas, who originated the Principle of Double Effect. (We’ll get to that at the end.)
One of the things people don’t realize about the pro-life movement is that “pro-life” is more than a euphemism for “anti-abortion.” There is a coherent philosophical outlook that underlies both the opposition to abortion and, for example, the opposition to legalized physician-assisted suicide. In both cases, there is a combination of (1) a deep-rooted belief that each human life has value, regardless of the capacity of the person in question and (2) a concern for the dignity and rights of society’s most vulnerable.
It is true that most of the pro-life movement is focused on the abortion issue most of the time, but that’s entirely natural: there are roughly 1 million abortions every year. That’s currently the biggest issue. But the movement also opposes legalizing physician-assisted suicide, and a couple of articles do a good job of explaining why.
First, from the Federalist, there is My Mom Just Died Of Brain Cancer. Here’s Why She Opposed Assisted Suicide. The article, by Mary Karner, explains why her mother Dr. Maggie Karner “used her last days on Earth” to campaign against physician-assisted suicide. The root of this opposition stems from the pro-life philosophy that I already mentioned. In an op-ed, Maggie Karner wrote that:
My brain may be cancerous, but I still have lots to contribute to society as a strong woman, wife and mother while my family can daily learn the value of caring for me in my last days with compassion and dignity.
The idea that a person’s dependence can be a blessing is a crucial and vital aspect of genuine humanism. We are not only valuable when we are strong and capable. We are also valuable when we are weak and incapable, because it is then that we give others the opportunity to sacrifice and to serve. Dr. Maggie Karner was not in denial. She didn’t think that, despite her debilitating and terminal diagnosis, she could keep positively contributing to her community or her family. She knew that, eventually, she would not be able to do so. But she understood that even then, she still had a vital role to play in the interdependent web of human society. Mary Karner agrees:
I’m here to say that she was right. No matter how hard it was and still is. She was so right. And the greatest honor of my life was to care for my mom in her last days.
Maggie Karner made another point as well. She raised the specter of a slippery-slope:
How long will it be before the right to die quickly devolves into the duty to die? What does this mean for all who are elderly, or disabled, or just wondering if they’ve become a burden to the family?
The important thing with slippery-slope arguments is to test them. Is the slope really slippery? And that brings us to the second article. This one is from the National Review: Assisted Suicide Increases Other Suicides. Wesley J. Smith states his thesis clearly:
I believe that assisted suicide advocacy pushes suicide generally because it communicates the message that self-termination is an acceptable way to end one’s suffering.
And then he backs it up with data. A new study in the Southern Medical Journal states find that, when physician-assisted suicide is legalized, there is an associated hike in self-inflicted suicide. This finding really underscores the risk Dr. Maggie Karner warned about: physician-assisted suicide isn’t just about providing a merciful death to those with terminal conditions. It changes the way we look at suicide. We are, as Smith writes, “becoming a pro-suicide culture.” This is inevitable. Once solution is seen as a good thing in some cases, as a solution, it is impossible for the scope of problems to which suicide is the answer not to begin to increase. And as it does, suicide will subtly shift from a mercy killing on behalf of someone who is suffering to an obligation of the old and the sick.
Humane societies care for their vulnerable members. They do not grease the slide towards death and call it mercy.
Two final points.
The first is that the pro-life attitude towards the law is far more nuanced than most critics would realize. The conventional logic is that the pro-life movement wants to ban abortion (for example) in order to coerce women into having children. This is so obvious that it seems strange to even question it. And yet, that’s not actually the case at all. Making something illegal is in fact almost never first and foremost an attempt to coercively modify human behavior. The criminal justice system does not exist to control behavior, but to provide consequences. Neither our laws nor our law enforcement agencies are set up to (for example) coerce people into not stealing or raping or murdering, but rather to catch and punish those who do after the fact. If we get a deterrent effect from that: great. But if we were actually in the business of enforcing laws via coercion, we’d have to start by getting rid of civil liberties.
On the contrary, the pro-life movement–and social conservatives in general–understand that “the law has a pedagogical function.” (That’s Smith citing U.C. Irvine professor of psychiatry Aaron Kheriaty.) In other words, there is a feedback mechanism between law and morality. It is impossible to legislate morality and foolish or insidious to try, but it is equally foolish or insidious to pretend that morality does not influence the law, or that laws do not influence morality. The biggest problem with Roe v. Wade is not that it formally permitted abortion, but rather that by enshrining abortion as a Constitutional right (in the United States the Constitution is our secular scripture) it essentially sacralized it. In a nation where abortion has been legalized gradually through the democratic process, the idea of “choice” would make much more sense because the law would have organically reflected people’s changing beliefs and would therefore reflect the nuanced and complex nature of abortion as a moral situation. But in a country where the highest court in the land determines that our founding document view abortion as a fundamental and inalienable civil right, all such nuance and complexity is wiped away.
Similarly, legalizing physician-assisted suicide (especially using “rights” rhetoric and especially if the courts are heavily involved) , will profoundly change the moral view of suicide in our nation, and that change will not be neatly contained within the category of suicides legally carried out by a physician. That’s what the evidence already demonstrates.
The second is an important clarification. The pro-life position holds that suicide is usually immoral, but it does not mandate that a person must be kept alive by all means necessary. This is a common false-choice fallacy, and it is simply not true. First–speaking legally–the right to refuse medical treatment (including the right to have someone with legal authority refuse it on you behalf) is an ancient aspect of our common law tradition. Second–speaking morally–the pro-life movement generally recognizes the Principle of Double Effect. Read the article for the full details, but here is the Cliff Notes version: you can’t deliberately kill someone to ease their suffering, but you can give them potentially lethally doses of pain medication if your sincere intent is to relieve suffering and not to bring about their death. In other words, the pro-life opposition to intentionally killing sick people doesn’t mean you have to make them suffer unnecessarily to keep them alive.
Just thought I’d get that one clarified, since I’ve seen it misunderstood (intentionally or not) on such a regular basis.
China ended its one-child policy this week, changing instead to a two-child policy. I don’t have much to say about it. A horrific, gendercidal attempt at social engineering that has led to immense human suffering has been softened. Yet, it is not enough. Sadly, as The Economist notes, many of those who wanted a second child have already been sterilized. I’m going to control myself and not lash out in anger over the lack of attention on my Facebook news feed or what seems to be actual support for the one-child policy in one form or another. Instead, I’ll just do what I usually do and post data:
Based on the now debunked threat of overpopulation that was popularized by Stanford University scholar Paul Ehrlich, the communist government subjected the Chinese people to forced sterilizations and abortions. Many newborn babies were either killed or left to die. Today, the Chinese population suffers from a dangerous gender imbalance that favors boys over girls at a ratio of 117:100, and a demographic implosion that threatens future economic growth and prosperity. In fact, as Human Progress advisory board member Matt Ridley shows in his book The Rational Optimist, population growth and economic expansion go hand in hand. The horrific consequences of the Chinese one-child policy are a reminder of what happens when governments are allowed to interfere in the deeply personal decisions of individual citizens and their families.
The claims of overpopulation doomsdayers were wrong. But those claims brought about immense misery. Let’s be grateful that we’re moving in a better direction.
A recent article from the Greater Good Science Center looked at research analyzing one of the main sources behind the high levels of happiness among the Danes: hygge. Hygge, the article explains,
is essentially drama-free togetherness time…Try to imagine going to a drama-free family gathering. There are no divisive discussions about politics, family issues, or Aunt Jenny’s dysfunctional kids. No snide comments, complaining, or heavy negativity. Everyone helps out, so that not one person gets stuck doing all the work. No one brags, attacks anyone, or competes with another. It is a light-hearted, balanced interaction that is focused on enjoying the moment, the food, and the company. In short, a shelter from the outside world.
The article also points out that high levels of inequality lead to unhappiness and that, according to one study, “rich Americans and Danes were equally happy,” but “low-income Danes were much, much happier than their American counterparts.” This could be interpreted as support for Danish models of social democracy. However, it is worth pointing out that family breakdown plays a major role in the lack of economic mobility among lower-income Americans, while wealth overall can have little effect.
There is a growing tendency among Latter-day Saint academics to talk about “bracketing” faith out of scholarship (although not everyone uses that term). While I grant that this method has certain benefits as a provisional mental or intellectual exercise, and I have gained some valuable insights both from works where such “bracketing” has been done and from engaging such exercises myself, I fear there are also corrosive effects that are not often recognized by its practitioners.
He goes on to outline two of these perils, and the post is definitely interesting and worth your time. But here’s the observation that struck me as the most interesting:
The second byproduct is that it creates what I call a “One Way Street,” between reason and revelation. Because faith is “bracketed,” i.e., blocked off from traveling with our reason into the realm of scholarship, faith and revelation have no influence on the conclusions reached. But these conclusions are still imported back into the practitioner’s faith. That is, they reshape and reform their faith in light of conclusions reached without faith.
I would add just one additional consideration. There is an underlying assumption that bracketing faith leads in some sense to an objective and/or neutral viewpoint. In principle, there is validity to this. If you’re going to have a Muslim, a Mormon, a Jew, a Catholic, and an Atheist all provide mutually accessible analyses, then a great deal of bracketing is necessary. However, in practice the objectivity obtained via bracketing is anything but. Instead of shooting for a minimalist and open-ended neutral territory, bracketing is susceptible to becoming little more than a thin veil for a suite of ideological assumptions that are just as robust as those underlying any faith tradition.
The secularism of Western intellectuals is emphatically not a mere Blank Slate. It is, instead, a collection of metaphysical commitments (e.g. materialist reductionism, scientism) paired with stark political postures (always left-leaning.) This means that bracketing is not only susceptible to the theoretical flaw Rappleye expounds, but in practice is even more susceptible to far more serious pitfalls.
This doesn’t mean there is no place for bracketing. A tolerant, pluralist society must leave room for bracketing not only within academia but in broader social conversation. But this should be genuine bracketing. Even if it is impossible to hit the target perfectly, we should still be aiming at a truly neutral standpoint.
Back in September the Internet was momentarily preoccupied by news that Turing Pharmaceuticals (run by Martin Shkreli) had purchased a company which made the generic drug Daraprim. Darapim “is used to fight toxoplasmosis, an infection to which unborn babies, AIDS patients, and certain cancer patients are vulnerable,” wrote Martin Tillier at NASDAQ.com. Darapim had been sold for less than $15 / pill, but Shkreli raised the price by more than 5,000% to $750 a pill. This–along with the news that VW had been faking emissions tests–made it “a bad week for capitalism.”
Lots of folks used this as an object lesson in why capitalism is bad, and so the torrent of memes began. I’ve collected a few in this post to give you a sample.
You see, Darapim is not protected by any patents because it is such an old drug. If it was protected by patents, then Shkreli could charge whatever he wanted without fear of immediate competition, but that wouldn’t be the free market at work. That would be government regulation at work, since government regulation is the thing that would be preventing competitors from selling the drug, too. So Darapim was only being manufactured by one company (the one that Shrkeli bought), but there was nothing to prevent other companies from entering the market.
When Darapim was priced at $13.50, no one bothered to compete. This is primarily because setting up a new drug manufacturing line is expensive and–although Darapim is a life-saving drug for the folks who need it–not many folks need it. But when Shrkeli hiked the price to $750, it created plenty of room for competitors to offer their own products.
And now one has. San Diego-based Imprimis Pharmaceuticals Inc. has stepped in to offer Darapim from their website for less than $1/pill. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Or, in the words of finance professor Ramon P. DeGennaro, “Nothing protects consumers better than competition.”
Couple of notes for those interested in the economics, by the way. This isn’t just a textbook econ 101 case of market entry. If nobody wanted to compete at $13.50/pill, then any company who entered after Shkreli raised the price to $750 would have offered their competing product at a price lower then $750, but higher than $13.50. If they could have made a profit at less than $13.50, they would likely have done so already. But Imprimis is selling Darapim for less than $1/pill. Why?
The answer is PR. Imprimis will probably lose money on every pill they sell, but–because Darapim is not a product that is going to get popular–they also already know the maximum amount they stand to lose, and they see that as an expenditure for a brilliant marketing campaign. Think of all the goodwill and publicity that Imprimis gets from standing up as the good guy to oppose Shkreli’s creepiness and greed. So this is about competition, but it’s about competition in a dynamic, interactive system with many, many products and services rather than just a simple case of competition in a single market with a single product.
Millie Fontana is an atheist raised by lesbian parents who–with the support of her mothers and also her biological father–has been speaking out against same-sex marriage. She stands with Christians (as she puts it) because only Christians are advocating for children in contemporary debates surrounding sexual ethics and law. Here she is, speaking with Ryan T. Anderson, at a conference in Australia. I think the video is well worth watching. (As usual, folks on email will have to visit the site to see the embedded video. Sorry.)
She makes a number of very good points, but here is one that I think was the most interesting. When asked by one of her mothers whether or not she would have felt more stable and secure if her mothers had been allowed to get legally married, Fontana replied with a question of her own: “How would psychologists have treated me for my underlying issues of fatherlessness if to acknowledge fatherlessness was a form of discrimination?”
Now that same-sex marriage is the law of the land in the United States, there’s a sense in which you might say that this is a moot point. Legally you could be right, although I’m not certain. Some once-controversial issues become widely accepted, such as interracial marriage. Others, however, like abortion remain cultural sticking points for decades with no end in sight. It’s too early to tell which of these categories same-sex marriage will fall into, but there is certainly precedent for the possibility that Obergefell was not the last word any more than Roe has been. In any case, however, another point that Fontana made is certainly worth considering:
Until we as a society have a discussion that . . . includes everybody who has been raised fatherless or motherless, until this discussion stops shaming children in my position from coming forward, we should not be pushing marriage through. I am not going to stand here and be silenced by people telling me what was acceptable for me to feel, that I’m a bad person for wanting a father, that maybe I didn’t love my mothers enough because I wanted a father. It’s bull. And I won’t support it.
Economist Steven Horwitz has a recent post that is well-balanced in its approach to the social science on family structure. Responding specifically to W. Bradford Wilcox’s latest National Review piece, Horwitz brings up some excellent points that should be considered:
“[T]here are differences among single-parent households formed through: 1) the choice to have and raise a child by oneself; 2) death of a spouse; and 3) divorce. Each of these presents a different set of circumstances and tradeoffs that we might wish to consider when we think about the role of family structure.”
“The empirical evidence under discussion has to be understood with an “all else equal” condition. A healthy marriage will indeed produce better outcomes than, say, single motherhood. But there is equally strong social scientific evidence about the harm done to children who are raised in high-conflict households. Those children may well be better off if their parents get divorced and they are raised in two single-parent households with less conflict.”
“[T]o say that married parents create “better” outcomes for kids does not mean that other family forms don’t produce “acceptable” outcomes for kids. It’s not as if every child raised by a single mother, whether through divorce, widowhood, or simply not marrying the father, is condemned to poverty or a life of crime. Averages are averages.”
“[P]arents matter too…That parents matter too is most obvious with divorce, where leaving a bad marriage may be extremely valuable for mom and/or dad, even if it leads to worse outcomes for the kids. The evidence from Stevenson and Wolfers that no-fault divorce has led to a decline in intimate partner violence as well as suicides of married women makes the importance of this point clear. We can acknowledge that higher divorce rates have not been good for kids, but we can’t do single-entry moral bookkeeping. We have to include the effects of divorce on the married couple, because adults matter too.”
The above graph comes from the World Values Survey Database. As you can see, the vertical line moves from traditional values (religion, ritual, hierarchy, authority) to secular values, while the horizontal line moves from survival values (economic and physical security) to those of self-expression. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt provides this helpful explanation:
The best way to understand the graph is to consider that nearly all societies used to be agricultural societies. Pre-industrial farming cultures generally have traditional and survival values (they cluster in the bottom left quadrant of the map). Life is hard and unpredictable, so you should do your duty, pray to the gods, and cling to your extended family for protection.
But as countries industrialize and people leave the land and enter factories, wealth rises and values shift. Interestingly, countries don’t just move diagonally, from the poor quadrant (currently occupied by the Islamic and African nations) to the rich quadrant (anchored by Scandinavia, in the upper right). Rather, there is a two-step process. First, countries move upward, from traditional/survival values to secular/survival values. When money comes from fitting yourself into the routines of factory production, there’s little time or room for religious ritual. People express materialistic values in this quadrant—they want money, not just for security, but for the social prestige it can buy.
…Societies [then] transition to more service-based jobs, which require (and foster) very different skills and values compared to factory jobs. Also, as societies get wealthier, life generally gets safer, not just due to reductions in disease, starvation, and vulnerability to natural disasters, but also due to reductions in political brutalization. People get rights. The net effect of rising security is to transform people’s values in ways that the modern political left should love.
The World Bank reported last month that for the first time in world history, extreme poverty will likely fall below 10% of the global population this year. This is encouraging and provides strong evidence that the goal of eradicating extreme poverty worldwide by 2030 is achievable. World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said,
A 
Economist Steven Horwitz has a 