The Doctor Who episode “The Zygon Inversion” provided some timely social commentary given some of the recent attacks in Paris, Beirut, and elsewhere. The second part to “The Zygon Invasion,” the story focuses on a splinter group of a shape-shifting alien race known as the Zygons. The episode revisits the characters and storyline of the 50th anniversary episode, in which a peace treaty was negotiated–thanks in no small part to the Doctor’s use of a memory wipe[ref]For those who doubt how cool this can be, just listen to the music that accompanies the Doctor(s)’s (yeah, there’s three of them in this episode…) entrance into the peace negotiation[/ref]–between humans and the attacking Zygons (whose home planet had been destroyed in the Last Great Time War). The Zygons were allowed to stay and live out their lives in peace disguised as humans. Yet, a Zygon revolution takes place, eventually leading to the Black Archives in London. There, UNIT leader Kate Stewart and the Zygon splinter group leader “Bonnie” (now disguised as the Doctor’s companion Clara) face off over the Osgood Box(es): devices that contain two buttons each. The buttons in Kate’s box could either set off a nuclear device beneath London or release Z-67 gas into Earth’s atmosphere, killing the Zygons alone (Kate’s preference). On the other hand, Bonnie’s box could either permanently change all disguised Zygons back into their original form (Bonnie’s preference) or permanently keep them in their chosen disguise.
The standoff results in one of the best Doctor Who speeches of the rebooted series and certainly one of Peter Capaldi’s highlights. The speech skewers both radicalism and the war hawks’ responses to it. It also briefly reflects the trauma that lingers long after the war has stopped.[ref]The Ninth Doctor often suffered from survivor’s guilt and a hatred of the Daleks, which was potent in the episode “Dalek.” The Tenth Doctor described the war as “hell.” The Eleventh Doctor described his war incarnation as “the one who broke the promise [of the Doctor’s name]” and thus was his dark “secret.”[/ref]
The Economist has a fascinating and potentially infuriating piece on Asian-Americans. In short, Asian-Americans find themselves being discriminated against (particularly in academia) because of their success. The history of Asian immigrants has not been a happy one: “The largest mass lynching in American history, in 1871, in which 17 Chinese were murdered; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited Chinese immigration; the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans in the second world war, when relatively few German- or Italian-Americans were interned: all were symptoms of a racism that was reserved not just for African-Americans.” Despite these earlier disadvantages, Asian-Americans on average
are unusually well educated, prosperous, married, satisfied with their lot and willing to believe in the American dream: 69% of Asians, compared with 58% of the general public, think that “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they are willing to work hard.”” It is their educational outperformance that is most remarkable: 49% of Asian-Americans have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 28% of the general population. Whereas Asian-Americans make up 5.6% of the population of the United States, according to the complaint to the Department of Education they make up more than 30% of the recent American maths and physics Olympiad teams and Presidential Scholars, and 25-30% of National Merit Scholarships.
Recent research suggests that “Asian outperformance is thanks in large part to hard work” rather than innate differences or socioeconomic status:
[Amy] Hsin and [Yu] Xie’s study showed a sizeable gap in effort between Asian and white children, which grew during their school careers. When the researchers asked the children about their attitudes to work, two differences emerged between Asian and white children. The Asians were likelier to believe that mathematical ability is learned, not innate; and Asian parents expected more of their children than white ones did. The notion that A- is an “Asian F” is widespread. Another study, by Zurishaddai Garcia of the University of Utah, shows that Asian-American parents are a lot likelier to spend at least 20 minutes a day helping their children with their homework than any other ethnic group.
Despite their hard work and incredible performance, research finds that
Asian-Americans need 140 SAT points out of 1,600 more than whites to get a place at a private university, and that blacks need 310 fewer points[ref]”Yet in California,” the article reports, “where public universities are allowed to use economic but not racial criteria in admissions, 41% of Berkeley’s enrolments in 2014 were Asian-Americans and at the California Institute of Technology 44% were.”[/ref]…Top universities tend to admit blacks and Hispanics with lower scores because of their history of disadvantage; and once the legacies, the sports stars, the politically well-connected and the rich people likely to donate new buildings (few of whom tend to be Asian) have been allotted their places, the number for people who are just high achievers is limited. Since the Ivies will not stop giving places to the privileged, because their finances depend on the generosity of the rich, the argument homes in on affirmative action.[ref]Yet, surprisingly, “the Asian-American community is unwilling on the whole to oppose affirmative action. It tends to vote Democratic, and many of its members recall the years when they were a despised, not a model, minority. So those who dislike the way the system works tend to argue for it to be adjusted, not abolished; and some say that Asians should actually support it.”[/ref]
There is much more. Worth reading the entire thing.
I shared a post by AEI’s James Pethokoukis last month on how not to reduce inequality. In a recent post, he provides more reasons to be wary of the usual “solutions” provided by the hardcore anti-income inequality crowd. These include:
“[C]ompanies that are best able to navigate the globalized, technologically intensive modern are more profitable and pay their workers better than those who can’t.”
“A new study on preschool finds that kids who attended Tennessee’s pre-K program were worse off by the end of first grade than kids who didn’t. And a new study on Quebec’s universal childcare program finds that “children’s outcomes have worsened since the program was introduced along a variety of behavioral and health dimensions.”
“Economist Alan Krueger, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, cautions that a national $15 an hour minimum wage “is beyond international experience, and could well be counterproductive.””
““What Is the Case for Paid Maternity Leave? by Gordon Dahl, Katrine Løken, Magne Mogstad, and Kari Vea Salvanes looked at a series of policy reforms in Norway which expanded paid leave from 18 to 35 weeks and found that “the expansions had little effect on a wide variety of outcomes, including children’s school outcomes, parental earnings and participation in the labor market in the short or long run, completed fertility, marriage or divorce.””
In other words, income inequality is in part driven by inequality between companies, pre-K schooling doesn’t help and might actually make kids worse off, minimum wage hikes won’t do the trick, and neither will paid maternity leave.
There are lots of articles about students (usually liberals) trying to prevent speakers (often conservatives) from speaking on campus. This is another article in that genre, but it is unusually interesting for a couple of reasons.
First, the object of the protests is a pro-choice[ref]Well, OK. Her views on abortion are pro-choice, but also clearly offensive to many in the pro-choice movement as well. Like many truly original thinkers, she offends everyone. Here’s a sample.[/ref], second-wave feminist.
Second, Helen Lewis (the author of the piece) decries the students for protesting Germaine Greer, and she is also a feminist.
So we’ve got a feminist defending a feminist from other feminists. All of whom, from what I can tell, are largely on the left: secular, pro-choice, etc. That is a really telling demonstration of just how hyper-ideological the left has become. Any deviation from orthodoxy, no matter how narrow, is met with outrage and suppression. No passes are given to the erstwhile titans of the field. Germaine Greer has been writing and advocating for feminism since the 1970s, but her half-century of work has earned her nothing. Feminism consumes its own.
Another interesting aspect, is that Lewis argues that the entire notion of protesting speakers itself exhibits a gender bias:
Student feminists want to stop the veteran feminist from speaking at universities – because of her beliefs about transgender people. But why are women always punished more than men for having controversial opinions?
So a feminist is attacking a feminist for attacking another feminist and, just for good measure, accusing them of perpetuating sexism and misogyny. I’m not merely chuckling with schadenfreude, mind you. I think Lewis is right. As an observer to the Mommy Wars and other examples of woman-on-woman repression, it seems that the mores and customs and assumptions of our culture (of all cultures) are largely dictated by women. And so, for example when complaints about modesty arise, I never find the accusation that men are busy policing women’s bodies to be very convincing. Sure, in Afghanistan or Iran that might be the case, but in the West when there is judgment and gossip about how one woman dresses, it is usually judgment and gossip from other women.
Don’t get me wrong. There are definitely examples of misogyny that come from men, and the harassment and abuse of women online is front and center. But it is worth noting that at least some of the complaints feminists have can be traced back… to other feminists.
This is, by the way, yet another reason why I do not accept the idea that “feminism” is just a name for “the idea that men and women are equal.” Clearly there is a lot more going on. Quite a lot more.
This article reports the results of a nationwide audit study testing how Christian churches welcome potential newcomers to their churches as a function of newcomers’ race and ethnicity. We sent email inquiries to 3,120 churches across the United States. The emails were ostensibly from someone moving to the area and looking for a new church to attend. That person’s name was randomly varied to convey different racial and ethnic associations. In response to these inquiries, representatives from mainline Protestant churches—who generally embrace liberal, egalitarian attitudes toward race relations—actually demonstrated the most discriminatory behavior. They responded most frequently to emails with white-sounding names, somewhat less frequently to black- or Hispanic-sounding names, and much less to Asian-sounding names. They also sent shorter, less welcoming responses to nonwhite names. In contrast, evangelical Protestant and Catholic churches showed little variation across treatment groups in their responses.
So, it’s those crazy evangelicals and Catholics–long associated with the American right and therefore with bigotry of every description–who were actually the most welcoming to minorities.
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.
Last week Secular Pro-Life reported on an interesting case from Australia. A woman who (at the time) was 26 weeks pregnant with a healthy fetus believed that an abortion would ease her suicidal feelings. The problem is that there are no doctors in Australia (population 24 million) who are willing to perform an abortion on a healthy 26-week fetus. In the United States, by contrast, there are 4 such doctors. (There were 5 until Kermit Gosnell was locked away.)
I am not actually suggesting that any doctor will be forced to perform the abortion, but it does underscore the reality that “reproductive rights” are positive rather than negative rights. A negative right is a right to not have someone do something to you. A negative right to life, for example, means that nobody can kill you. But a positive right is a right to be given something. So a positive right to life might, for example, require someone else give you food or medicine. And thus, the Secular Pro-Life piece concludes:
Royal Women’s Hospital properly offered mental health care to the woman, and several individuals have come forward to adopt the child. But she remains fixated on abortion, and her case has become a rallying point for Australian abortion extremists. A local health minister “said she was concerned about limited access to abortion, particularly in regional areas of Victoria and was working on a new strategy for sexual and reproductive healthcare.”
What, short of conscripting doctors, would lead to a different result in this case?
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.
(Email subscribers need to visit this post on the website because YouTube videos do not embed.)
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.
I’m a little late with this post, since it came out in mid-October, but it’s about some political fundamentals and so it still applies. Besides, if you’re as depressed by Trump’s persistent popularity as I am, you need some good news. Yglesias’ main points in his article for Vox are that:
The GOP has a tremendous amount of political power right now, not only in the House and Senate but especially when you consider state-level positions across the nation.
A lot of the GOP infighting signals that the GOP actually has power worth fighting over and, more than that, the confidence that it can afford some infighting and still win
The Democrats have no real plan to regain power, but the GOP has at least two viable options to expand their own power base
This isn’t necessarily a prediction that the GOP is destined for success in the 2016 presidential campaign. The analysis has a lot more to do with the basically every other office in the United State (state and federal) except the White House. I’m not sure that GOP infighting is a clear-eyed as Yglesias seems to think (is there anything clear-eyed about Trump’s candidacy?), but I do think some of his analysis is very interesting, particularly this part:
Essentially every state on the map contains overlapping circles of rich people who don’t want to pay taxes and business owners who don’t want to comply with labor, public health, and environmental regulations. In states like Texas or South Carolina, where this agenda nicely complements a robust social conservatism, the GOP offers that up and wins with it. But in a Maryland or a New Jersey, the party of business manages to throw up candidates who either lack hard-edged socially conservative views or else successfully downplay them as irrelevant in the context of blue-state governance.
Democrats, of course, are conceptually aware of the possibility of nominating unusually conservative candidates to run in unusually conservative states. But there is a fundamental mismatch. No US state is so left-wing as to have created an environment in which business interests are economically or politically irrelevant. Vermont is not North Korea, in other words.
But there are many states in which labor unions are neither large nor powerful and non-labor national progressive donor networks are inherently populated by relatively affluent people who tend to be emotionally driven by progressive commitments on social or environmental issues. This is why an impassioned defense of the legality of late-term abortions could make Wendy Davis a viral sensation, a national media star, and someone capable of activating the kind of donor and volunteer networks needed to mount a statewide campaign. Unfortunately for Democrats, however, this is precisely the wrong issue profile to try to win statewide elections in conservative states.
In other words, the GOP can be competitive basically anywhere at the state level. This is why even several dark-blue states (Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Illinois) have Democratic state legislatures but Republican governors. (Overall the GOP has 70% of state legislatures and almost 2/3rds of governors are from the GOP.) The GOP does this by abandoning it’s ideological base and just running based on business interests. But the DNC can’t do the opposite. There are several states where their equivalent to business interests (labor unions) are too weak, and so in order to compete at all they have to appeal to their own ideologues.
The one thing Yglesias doesn’t mention is this: if the GOP is actually the pragmatic and ideological flexible party while the DNC is more hobbled by their ideologues, why is the impression in the media basically the exact opposite. Everyone “knows” that the GOP is full of frothing-at-the-mouth crazies while the DNC has an image of balanced rationalism.
And that, I think, is the real problem. The GOP is truly closer to the values of most Americans whereas the DNC is responsive to the interests of an elite class that dominates the national conversation: Hollywood, the mainstream media, and higher education.
Which is also why this piece doesn’t actually instill a bunch of rah-rah partisan enthusiasm in me.[ref]Well, that and the fact that I don’t think of myself as a person with any party loyalty whatsoever. My Republican voting record is entirely a means to an end, and I would switch to Democrat (or anything else) at the drop of a hat if that party or any other better represented my values and had a realistic shot at winning.[/ref] I don’t see the road paved for GOP dominance and–frankly–the idea of the GOP in total charge actually makes me nervous. I mean, we mentioned Trump already, right? Look–assuming we’re talking about someone like Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush–I’ll take a future where the GOP dominates in House, Senate, and White House, but the proposition actually fills me with dread. It’s worth it for the SCOTUS seats, but I’d much rather see both parties competing for American voters across the nation than a conflict based on the GOP’s proficiency at state-level gerrymandering on the one hand and the DNC’s reliance on Hollywood/jouranlism/higher-education acting as unpaid PR flunkies on the other. There are no winners in that scenario.
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.
The World Bank 
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4139120/StateSenateControl-Post-Election-GIF.0.gif)
