Rational Philosophy

On postulates and their place in shaping our lives.

“Wishful thinking,” so says Roger Cohen, “often masquerades as analysis.” He’s referring to those who warn that the days of U.S. world leadership are numbered. And yet Cohen could have been speaking of himself. He refers to the United States as “the most vital, open, self-renewing and democratic society on earth.” And says that to imagine that Europe or China “can become powers of influence equal to the United States within the next half-century is implausible.” (Did he forget about the rapid decline and fall of empires far grander and more imposing than that of the present day United States?)

As the hook for his thesis Cohen uses the fascination of the rest of the world with the current presidential election. They come with their cameras and microphones, Cohen surmises, because they recognize the importance of America and America’s choice of leader. But throughout the terms of Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton (twice), the rest of the world viewed American politics as uninteresting, its leaders more or less interchangable. Surely, the reporters come from far afield because American politics is suddenly interesting. They come for the spectacle of an African american man competing with a woman for the democratic candidacy, and to goggle at the spectacle of ever-more-wacky conservatives pandering to the religious right at a time when the rest of the civilized world has long since disentangled its politics from overt religious influence.

While Cohen alludes to the horror the world feels at the Bush presidency and legacy, he doesn’t dwell on it. Why? Well, I suppose because that would destroy the foundation of his argument.

What kind of leadership does Cohen think that America has been providing to the world on human rights, civil rights, education, environmental protection, and economic development? I’m sure the world can do without the kind of leadership we’ve been providing on interventionism, dissembling, torture, cronyism, intermingling of church and state, and corporate corruption.

Last week I expressed simultaneous excitement and disquiet at the news that a team of scientists had synthesized life in the form of a bacterium. This week, the Science Times ran a fluff piece about a secret message (the name of the Venter Institute and the names of those on the team) encoded into the genome of the bacterium by arranging the letters of the constituent amino acids in a particular sequence. On reading about this, the ratio of my excitement to my disquiet dropped considerably. Move over natural selection, here comes Will Shortz.

Another team of scientists, this time anthropologists, have been looking back 650 years to the time of the Black Death to try to learn something about the plague that killed millions across Europe. They have deduced that the plague, which was previously thought to have killed indiscriminately, taking the young, the old, the healthy, and the sick, in fact tended to kill those who were weakened by previous illness, age or malnourishment.

These three examples of conjecture give us insight into the philosophy of the concept.

In the first instance, we have Roger Cohen speculating from a position of fear. He conjectures that the doomsayers about American supremacy are wrong because he wants them to be wrong.

In the second instance, we have a team of scientists playing with nature, conjecturing about the boundaries of scientific achievement; the insertion of a secret message into the genome reveals a lack of gravity about their work and the seriousness of its consequences.

And in the third instance, anthropologists take conjecture and submit it to careful testing in order to help society better understand the pathology of epidemics, perhaps helping ultimately to save millions of lives.

Without conjecture we would have no progress. Conjecture lets us ask what will happen if? as well as did this happen because?

The basis for our conjecture and the intent of the conjecture determine whether the questions being asked have value and yield positive results. Or, not all conjectures are made equal. It takes little speculation to state that American world leadership will, one day, come to an end, that we will need to grapple with the troubling issues raised by the creation of synthetic life, and that the world will face the risk of new epidemics. What takes courage and foresight is to face these speculations with the integrity and seriousness they deserve.

And with that said I’m off to bet on the Giants to win the superbowl…

(OK, that’s one of my four lies for today.)

On lying and its uses: Rudy, McCain, Bush, and your average guy.

After Giuliani’s thankfully dismal showing in Florida, the rush to spout fibs found Giuliani and McCain vying for who could tell the biggest whopper. First Giuliani suggested that he had failed in Florida because his opponents had built up too much momentum in earlier primaries, whereas, in fact, Giuliani spent a lot of money and time in New Hampshire before retreating from that state. McCain countered with the gracious and fallacious compliment that Giuliani had “invested his heart and soul” in the race, which of course was exactly what Giuliani hadn’t done, otherwise he would have performed much better. McCain followed this up swiftly with an upper-cut of an untruth declaring that Giuliani had “conducted himself with all the qualities of the exceptional American leader he truly is.” Giuliani tried to recover with a transparent falsehood of his own; that he had run “a campaign of ideas.” But McCain, again, clearly had him beat.

On a less happy and more serious note, the editorial board of the NY Times brings our attention to the latest lies from George W. Bush. If you’re going to tell lies, I suppose that delivering them in a state of the union address endows them with a deep and lasting sense of moment and history. The Bush legacy will be in large part one of mass deception – about weapons of mass destruction, the illegal activities of the government and its agencies, and the intent and actions of Bush himself. As The Times points out, Bush’s reconciliatory rhetoric conflicts with his deeds, yet again, as he refuses to respect certain new legal provisions that would increase oversight of military contractors, their actions, and the acts of government agencies by asserting in his signing statement that these provisions step on his constitutional powers.

Bush is an inveterate and habitual liar. One can presume, by studying his behavior and his words, that he feels no remorse about his lies and that he believes the ends justify the means.

Which brings me to a recent study that finds that people admit to telling about four untruths per day and that two-thirds of those polled don’t feel guilty about lying. Now, statistics can be misleading, but in this case, as one commentor wryly observed, asking people to admit to how many lies they tell will probably result in under-reporting rather than over-reporting. (Another study lends support to this theory by finding that people underreport the number of their sexual partners unless they’re told that they’re hooked up to a lie-detector.)

The actual numbers concern me less than the philosophy of lying.

We lie, it seems, to avoid unwanted repercussions, to sway the course of events by untruth. This applies to the fib “no, you don’t sound bitter” as well as to the deception of a nation so that you can fill your cronies’ coffers. 

Essayist Harold Nicolson defined a person who tells the truth as ’someone who, when they tell a lie, is careful not to forget they have done so, and who takes infinite precautions to prevent being found out.’ This is humorous, of course, but hints at the “humanness” of lying. Surely very few people habitually tell the truth, and those that do would be considered odd and unnecessarily blunt. One generally likes to be lied to if one looks lousy or has made a fool of onesself, for instance.

Is this a distinction that helps us? Lies are OK if the person wants to be lied to.

And what about lies that avoid unreasonable conflict? If we know that someone will react unreasonably to the truth, does that justify a lie?

It seems that we get much more worked up about the lies people tell to get away with something, to avoid being held accountable for their actions, unless the accountability is unreasonable or irrational. (We like the idea of Robin Hood. And we support the concept of the resistance fighter who lies to the oppressing power.)

The intent of the lie and the legitimacy of the repercussions of the truth then seems to be far more important, rationally speaking, than the act of lying itself.

Which brings us to the concept of honesty. When we speak of honesty as a virtue, we are really speaking of the bravery that comes with telling a difficult truth, of risking the consequences. What seems to be lacking in politics today is the bravery to tell difficult truths. One by one the candidates shift positions in order to sound more appealing to the voters, or to cast shadow on an opponent. McCain has done it, Romney has done it, Clinton has done it, Obama has been accused of doing it (did he snub Hillary Clinton deliberately or unintentionally before the state of the union address?)

And I wonder if we were to be served up an honest politician, would we elect them, truth and all, or would we prefer to be lied to?

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“Today, I am not the person I was ten years ago.” Karl Svensson, a convicted murderer, told his Swedish classmates at medical school when his past caught up with him. The prestigious Karolinska Institute eventually side-stepped the unprecedented question of whether to expel Mr. Svensson simply because of his past criminal acts — once a neo-Nazi, apparently, Svensson’s crime had been deemed a hate crime. Instead, the institute expelled him on a technicality — he had falsified his high school records by substituting his assumed name for his birth name of Hellekant.  The story raises two very interesting questions: 1. Can we change? and 2. Should a person who has committed this kind of crime be allowed to practice medicine (or another similar profession)?

The New York Times editorial board has endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate. Its opinions supporting the endorsement of Clinton for the Democratic and McCain for the Republican vote make fascinatingly candid reading. The Times’ opinion of Clinton again raises the question of whether someone, fundamentally, can change. It left me wondering whether Clinton has changed, and, if so, whether she has changed enough to overcome the disadvantages in her character that have revealed themselves so often in the past — her divisiveness and “I know best” intellectual hardness. The Times uses the example of her “famously disastrous foray” into trying to solve the healthcare issue to support its premise that she has changed and now displays a new understanding of what’s to be done.

I’ve written before about our capacity to change as it relates to the concept of free will and personal development. Being conscious allows us to choose between options, and to select options that may be difficult, unattractive or counter to our immediate instinct. Through this reasoning we can see that it is possible to develop new levels of awareness and new patterns of behavior, to make choices different from those we would have made in the past.

But if we examine the concept of behavioral change we find a composite concept. And we tend to conflate and confuse its constituent parts: When I ask, “can we change?” I could really be asking two separate questions. The first: “Can someone become altered such that the same impulses will lead to different immediate responses?” And the second: “Can someone become altered such that the same impulses will lead to different eventual responses?”

Ten years go, in an angry confrontation, Svensson reacted violently. His immediate response was to be urged to violence. And he acted on this immediate response by lashing out.

To say that Svensson’s immediate response may have changed, we would have to believe that he would not feel urged to violence if faced with a similar confrontation ten years on. I would say that we have very little reason to believe that Svensson or anyone could change in this way simply through reflection and remorse. Our immediate, instinctual response is pre-conscious, and therefore isn’t subject to conscious influence.

On the other hand, to say that Svenssion’s eventual response may have changed seems a much more reasonable and rational conclusion. Svensson, still feeling a violent urge, could now have a modified conscious response and resist the desire to lash out.

Svensson’s classmates were split over whether he should be allowed to stay on. Those that supported him said that he’d paid his debt and, by inference, should be trusted to have changed his conscious response to confrontation. But we can infer that those of his classmates who still distrusted him understood and feared that his immediate response to confrontation (or other stress) could and indeed would still be violent.

Should a violent killer, rehabilitated in his conscious actions, be trusted in the medical profession? To answer that question we would need to understand the degree and range of provocation that Svensson may react violently to, and the strength of his newfound ability to keep his emotions in check. In the absence of reliable ways and means to measure these variables, it would seem reasonable for society not to want Svensson providing medical care. Svensson has rights of freedom, but it also seems reasonable for society to say that he has forgone some of those rights (such as an unfettered choice of career) by his past actions.

So to Hillary Clinton: Although the circumstances are very different, we are confronted with the same logical argument. As I understand it, the instinctual fervor of Clinton’s liberal ideological passion inspired and limited her original approach to tackling the healthcare issue. Her newfound understanding means that she’s better able to consciously override her immediate divisive response. But the concern remains that she would encounter similar instinctual responses in a broad range of political situations.

As we’ve seen with Bush and as tends to happen to those in high office, the stresses and demands of the job certainly don’t make it easier to overcome one’s immediate responses. As the Times’ opinion points out, Clinton has been succumbing to these impulses during her campaigning, underscoring the perspective that we have reason to doubt that she has truly learned to keep her immediate responses in check.

Obama, on the other hand, reveals a more promising character for non-devisive leadership. This then narrows the gap between the candidates that the Times claims to exist, and perhaps even makes Obama the more logical choice. It becomes a matter of character versus experience. I for one would choose character every time.

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My apologies for being off the air for the past 4 days. The servers at the data center that hosts my site had technical problems, in the course of fixing which my site was inadvertently deleted… (Of course, I was highly irrational while my site was down, fearing that it would never be back.)

I have a post to load up from Friday and will resume my regular Monday through Friday daily posting schedule tomorrow.

But, over the weekend, I did find time to load up three YouTube videos of new songs, one of which reprises my feelings about the Bush presidency.

The Ballad of George W. Bush

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Clouds over Olympic competition in Beijing, mammoth trading fraud in Paris and synthesized life.

Apparently smog and pollution levels in Beijing, host to this year’s Olympics, are nearly five times above World Health Organization standards for safety. Track cyclist Colby Pearce saw smog floating inside the velodrome in Beijing. He developed bronchitis, he said, because of air pollution. Fears of the dire effects of pollution on Olympic athletes run so high that the U.S. Olympic Training Center has been developing strategies to combat the performance-diminishing effects of smog, and a special mask to filter out most of the worst pollutants. Here’s the odd thing: As the U.S. and other countries have worked intensely on protecting their athletes from smog and pollution, they have protected their findings as fiercely as an athlete protects his lead in a race. Where is the Olympic spirit? Do we want athletes to win just because they’ve had access to a $25 face mask that poorer countries couldn’t afford to research and develop? How does this make for a level playing field?

Unfortunately, an early version of a NY Times story about massive fraud at Société Générale, complete with a couple of splendidly portentous quotes from a bank representative, has already been revised and those quotes removed. I’ll try to paraphrase: a bank spokesman referred to his state of serenity; he was very calm about the loss of $7.1 billion, he said, because it had been through the act of a clever individual and didn’t reflect badly on the bank’s fundamental solidity and stability… Hmmm. The most recent version of the story reveals a little less bullishness on the bank’s part. It tells of the dismissal of four others — including its head of global equity and derivatives trading, Luc François. And the bank’s chairman describes the debacle as “a very grave loss.” The rogue trader is “on the run.”

While the loss of $7 billion or so interests me, this wasn’t the amount that the trader stole, simply the amount that he put the bank in the hole for when it had to extricate itself from his fraudulent transactions. I found myself wanting to know how much money the trader (Jerome Kerviel, right) actually got away with. After the first few million, is it really worth it? And, further, if you have a job as a trader, aren’t you doing pretty well in the first place? (And, if this guy applied for a job at your organization would you hire him?)
Like many things in life, it seems that if you’re going to cheat you should at least be rational about it.

Far be it from me to give advice to those who want to defraud a bank, but surely it’s not rational to take positions that can add up to losses of billions of dollars. With numbers this big, eventually someone will notice, even a smug bank bigwig.

Back to Beijing: Surely the International Olympic Committee should be coordinating research that will protect the health and competitive effectiveness of Olympic athletes. Couldn’t the IOC fork out $25 for face masks, give advice on pre-games training, etc.? I know that world-class athletes have had a bad rap recently for gaining unfair advantages through the use of performance-enhancing drugs, but isn’t it rational that if you want to win you want to win on your merits not because you’re from a wealthier nation?

In what’s becoming something of a rationalphilosophy series on the risks of messing with things natural, I have to mention the success of scientists in synthesizing life from its constituent chemicals. Part of me rejoices at this achievement. If scientists can create life from chemicals then the supposed mystery of life’s appearance on earth gets a step closer to being demystified. That’s a good thing. But synthesized life could also mean the end of life on earth, or at least human life, unless we’re very careful.

I just got back from an evening out with a friend (hi, Neil). I was discussing these stories and he made the point that people just do some crazy, irrational things. I think that’s right. From the scientists synthesizing life because they can, to the trader defrauding the bank because he can, to the athletes and their training bodies seeking a smog advantage because they can, people just do stuff. I guess we are organisms that just do stuff. Being rational is kind of a new thing for us from an evolutionary perspective and often we find it hard to overcome the excitement of just doing stuff because we can…

On the recession, real or imagined, chronic problems that beset the nation, and the celebration of taste and art in a great cup of coffee.

With all that’s been written about the current economic crisis, be it mountain or molehill, it’s been surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) difficult to get to the bottom of the situation. I can’t escape the impression that the economy moves according to forces too complex for anyone to fully or reliably understand. The wisdom of hindsight abounds, but those still willing to predict what comes next sound more like doom-mongers or soothsayers than thoughtful, commanding economic theorists and commentators.

The Times has a piece that hints at some concrete economic indicators: According to David Rosenberg, a Merrill Lynch economist, the stock market is overvalued by 10 percent relative to corporate earnings and interest rates. And, judging by historic norms (by comparison to salaries and rents,) house prices are overvalued by 30 percent across much of Florida, California and the Southwest and about 20 percent in the Northeast. More about the rationality of these indicators later.

Bob Herbert points to a more urgent matter than the economy, if we judge urgency by the degree of current and long term impact. Bob’s gloomy picture of the shameful state of schools in South Carolina stands as a sad example of the disparity between the haves and the have nots, and, because the poor conditions in South Carolina seem to relate to entrenched and systematic racism, the vast distance between the kind of country we want to believe we live in, and the kind of country we do live in. Talking about a school he happened upon, former South Carolina commerce secretary, Charles Way, says he couldn’t really believe his eyes. “It was the most deplorable building condition that I’ve ever seen in my life. How the hell somebody could teach in an environment like that is really just beyond me.” (Ben Tillman to the right, infamous racist, prominently honored at the SC statehouse.)

A school text book had a volume with the title: “One day man will land on the moon.”

Another dispiriting story reveals that the United States ranks at the bottom of the Group of 8 industrialized nations and 39th among 149 countries for its environmental performance. The United States contributes a quarter of the new releases of greenhouse gas emissions globally.

And how do I reconcile the current economic woes, the chronic, unaddressed problems facing the nation’s poor and its minorities, and the environmental disaster underway with my glee at reading about a $20,000 coffee maker?

I love coffee. I buy premium roasted beans from small companies. I grind them right before I brew. And I take great care to try to get the brew just right. So, the story about the lengths to which coffee houses will go to brew a great cup of coffee drew me in. It made me want to go downtown to Cafe Grumpy’s so that I can try a cup of coffee from an $11,000 coffee maker…

Back to the economic indicators of stock value relative to corporate earnings and interest rates, and house values relative to salaries and rents. Even if we take the calculation on trust, can we agree that these constitue reliable, rational economic indicators? I think not. As the world changes so economic norms change.

Judging stock valuation by earnings and interest rates perhaps works reasonably well over a short time period, but can it be applied consistently, without modification, over a long time period? Here’s one example of why I’m dubious. Technological innovation and the surge in importance of the Internet gives more reason to expect future innovation and technological growth now than ten or fifteen years ago. Isn’t it then appropriate to value companies, in general, somewhat higher than we would have valued them ten to fifteen years ago, because we expect future earnings to be higher?

And the model for judging house values by comparison to salaries and rents must surely change over time, too. As more people squeeze into urban and suburban areas, the relative value of land and space may increase more rapidly than salaries (that are affected by things other than land and space). Also, raw materials for building houses have changed in relative cost, building regulations have changed the way houses are built and what they cost to build, and the skill-sets of the laborers have changed… How can the model work without modification from one period of time to the next?

I’m still ruminating on how I can be so thrilled about a great cup of coffee when the state of South Carolina, for one, discriminates against minorities by so woefully neglecting their education. From a philosophical perspective I understand that I’m not the master of my desires, and that when living in society we need to grapple with our own desires and needs as well of those of others. Ideally I know I should balance my own interests with those of people around me. Which doesn’t necessarily mean disavowing my love of coffee.

If we’re to try to get the balance right, we need more exposure to the problems in our society. The increased public attention given to global warming has finally begun to have an impact on the way we live and the choices we make. We need more exposure to the lingering problems of racism, too. I agree with Bob Herbert that our politicians should be addressing matters of racisim rather than dancing around them.

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On economic expansion, the fear and actuality of recession, and global warming.

Top stories today dwell on the economy: “U.S. Markets Open With Steep Fall,” “Fed Cuts Rate 0.75% and Stocks Swing,” “Bank of America Profit Plummets.” The president’s confirmation last week that he would support a stimulus package didn’t seem to raise anyone’s level of optimism. All this fear of economic recession has me wondering about the much-touted virtue of economic expansion. As stocks tumble, losses post, and job markets shrink there’s an underlying presumption that growth is good, that higher economic value is good. But, if I understand this correctly, economic growth typically means higher consumption driving higher production. The exact mechanism of a stimulus package will be debated, but all seem to agree on a formula that supports economic growth by creating incentives for consumption and production.

The nagging question this raises for me is whether we should be thinking about economic growth in isolation from other important factors, such as global warming. I understand that at the most fundamental level a sharp recession means unemployment with associated misery and suffering; it seems entirely rational and appropriate to ward of an extended economic depression. What I’m curious about is whether economic growth is intrinsically good for the world.

People work for money and use that money to buy goods and services. In large part these these goods and services consume natural resources such as raw materials, power and water. If the economy grows, therefore, we’re consuming more natural resources.

(Even the so-called “virtuous circle” of macroeconomic expansion by which an innovation leads to reduced costs and a corresponding increase in consumption, demands increased consumption of natural resources, unless the innovation reduces consumption of natural resources without generating a higher level of product consumption. A great counter-example of this is the length of time it’s taken to bring more efficient, longer lasting light bulbs to market. A great innovation from a natural resource perspective, but until recently, lousy from an economic perspective — the higher cost and lower profits inhibited the innovation from taking hold for a very long time.)

This is all incredibly obvious, and of course global warming has brought focus to the consumption of natural resources, particularly as the economies of third world countries grow and they become more industrialized, but what about economic growth in general? What about the seeming inevitable equation between growth and consumption? Can we really think about them separately?

I realize that I’m raising questions that are to some extent naive. Consumers consume what they want to consume. So, as with more efficient light-bulbs, influencing production should really begin with an influence on consumers. This is why raising awareness of global warming, disappearing species, and environmental protection plays such an important part in determining the future of the planet. But it strikes me that there can also be important governmental and economic influences on production and consumption, too.

This leaves me with two questions:

1. Is there a good balance between the size and health of the economy and the welfare of the planet?

2. At this time of threatened recession, and in general, does the government have an opportunity to stimulate “green” growth rather than “gray” growth?

In contemplating an answer to the first question, I’m thinking of something quite controversial: When considering the welfare of the planet we live on and feed off, consumption beyond that required for our health, sustenance and shelter is superfluous. If we use resources to make our lives easier or more comfortable we should be prepared to anwer for the consequences of such excess consumption. The size and health of the economy and the welfare of the planet already exist in an imbalance (in developed areas). Shouldn’t we be constantly measuring the degree of that imbalance and trying to keep it steady or falling? Isn’t a “green index” an essential economic measure?

This leads to an answer to the second question: If we were to develop a measure or index for our overconsumption, it would push us to develop strategies for stimulating the economy in ways that helped keep the index steady or falling. Why stimulate the economy indiscriminately? Why not disproportionately stimulate “green” sections of the economy?

If the government is good for anything, let it be good for good things, things that help society and the world.

On a cautionary note, if governments don’t do it, corporations will, and not always to the benefit of society. Is it beneficial to the world that Microsoft has pledged cash for technology training in the developing world? On the face of it, the investment seems noble enough. But Microsoft of course will be training the developing world to use Microsoft systems. Bill Gates is not one of the wealthiest individuals in the world for no reason. And despite Gates’ incredible focus on philanthropy, does his generosity and selfless distribution of a good part of his wealth justify retrospectively the profits that Microsoft has reaped from the unbridled growth in computer systems (much of which has been completely unnecessary — if Windows 95 had been a better quality operating system we wouldn’t have needed Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows XP, and Windows Vista…)

 

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On chubby cops, porky porcupine, and bouncy breasts.

The New York Post brings to our attention the breadth of the city’s police department… not in experience, but in waistline. It comes as little surprise to those of us who live or work in and around the city to learn that the NYPD has overweight officers. A quick trip to the bagel store or Dunkin Donuts and you’re bound to run into a cop or two. It’s hard to blame them. With the city’s precipitous decline in crime, what else is a peeky police officer to do all day? The Post seems to think it’s a problem that the city could have a 500-pound cop on the force. (Paul Soto, the Post informs us, retired with a body-mass index of 78.3, a mere 43.3 points over the level for someone considered obese.) This obsessive focus on smaller is better seems a little short-sighted.

As a case in point, Uruguayan scientists have found fossil evidence of a very large rodent, a distant relative of the porcupine that would have been more than eight feet long and a couple of thousand pounds. Showing an appreciation for this massive creature, researcher, Ernesto Blanco says, “It’s a beautiful piece of nature. You feel the power of a very big animal.” Where was Ernesto when the Post took a scoop out of poor Paul Soto?

And another size matter in the news touches on the touchy subject of breast augmentation. After reading a sobering piece in the NY Times I’d suggest that women who get implants should hold on to that warranty. Implants don’t last forever, the story tells us. After ten years they’ll probably need replacing. And if you’re unlucky you may need additional surgery to remove associated scar tissue.

While the Times registers only subtle disapproval for women who resort to implants to achieve bigger breasts (what else, I ask, is a woman supposed to do if she wants bigger breasts?) the Post is more blatant in its bias against bigness. The sensation-seeking rag completely overlooks the rationale for a law enforcement body to maintain a wide range of weights.

This is conjecture on my part as the NYPD hasn’t stooped to defend its policy against the Post’s attack, but no doubt it can be very useful to have a few Paul Sotos on the force. How else to infiltrate a ring of doughy criminals, matching them pastry for pastry without raising suspicion? And I’m sure that the flyweights in the department invariably looked to Soto to sit on (not literally of course) a resistant arrestee. Fitness, speed and agility are valuable attributes, but they’re not everything.

Being a man and less amply endowed than Officer Soto I won’t have to worry about my breasts until I turn sixty. But I ask you, how many of us men would be considering cosmetic surgery today if the Lancet were to announce a successful and seamless procedure for penis enlargement?

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the logic or otherwise of war, protest, and reaction.

Today’s current events drew me to think about the philosophy of conflict in all its forms. Further reports of the violent and brutal repression of protests in Kenya, sparked by a reaction against the election results there, university protests against the Catholic church in Rome, Canadian condemnation (through its torture watch list) of inhumane detention and interrogation techniques being used by the US government, and the growing call for shoring up the economy with a stimulus package.

(Putting the economic stimulus package on this list may seem odd. But I deliberately want to stretch the idea of conflict to include “intervention” since it seems to me that the concept of conflict may be subordinate to the concept of intervention. (Another story I could have used as an example discusses Google’s philanthropic appendage — Google.org.))

The Kenyan troubles provide two philosophical questions: Can we logically and rationally examine whether violent protest is justified and under what conditions? And, secondly, can we logically and rationally examine whether harsh and violent suppression of protest is justified and, if so, under what conditions?

Emotionally, if we sense that a group has been wronged, we tend to sympathize with it in its protests. And if the protests meet with harsh suppression, we may even tend to sympathize with some level of violence on the part of the protesters. (This is why Ghandi’s philosophy of passive resistance caused such a stir and continues to stand out in people’s minds. It struck us as odd.) Conversely, if we feel that the group hasn’t been wronged in proportion to the protest, and that general order and safety is threatened by the protesters, we tend to sympathize with the use of some force (short of unwarranted violence) in maintaining order. I realize I’m not speaking for all of society in saying this, but just painting an emotional picture.

Rationally, though, can we justify violent protests or violent action against protests?

The student protests in Rome against the Catholic church raise a similar question without the violence. The Italian protests revolve around some of the incumbent Pope’s ill-chosen and perhaps ill-meant words.

And Canada’s arm’s-length but telling criticism of the US’s recent human rights record by putting the US on its torture watch list provides an example of confrontation that is charged because of the statement it makes rather than the mechanism it employs.

Which brings us to the sluggish economy and the growing support for some kind of stimulus package. Action, reaction. Situation, confrontation.

The concepts involved in confrontation seem to be 1. dissatisfaction with the status quo, and 2. judgment that it is right to act to effect some change to the status quo.

A conscious actors, human beings have gone beyond the simple response to stimuli that governs the actions of non-conscious creatures. Consciousness gives us the power to act against a stimulated response. In other words, we may be dissatisfied with a situation but decide to do nothing to change it. When an animal is moved to anger, it’s natural response may be to act aggressively. As human beings we can choose to act on this response or not.

As to the concept of dissatisfaction, we cannot control it. An adverse situation will either lead to dissatisfaction or it won’t.

Then there’s the question of whether it is right to confront the situation that has caused our disatissfaction, and how we judge this.

To put it simply, in the non-conscious world it is always right to respond according to the stimulus. Whereas, in the conscious world, it may not be right to respond to the stimulus.

The Fed and the politicians concerned about the slump must judge whether it is wiser in the long term to stimulate the economy than to leave it alone. The judgment on whether to confront the slowing economy should rightly take into account the long term economic impact. A confrontation based only on short term fears about a recession would be misguided.

In Rome, the protesters seem to have forgotten about the value of freedom of speech by forcing the Pope to cancel his visit. Their confrontation seems to be based simply on short term anger at his visit rather than long term consideration of what’s best for the country. Perhaps they’d do more for separation of church and state by letting the sinister Ratzinger visit and countering his dubious social theories with elegant rebuttals.

But what of the philosophy of violent protest or suppression of violent protest? Again, it seems that, however abhorrent violence may be, the long term good or ill to society of violence must be weighed against the ill to society of the status quo. From the perspective of the good of humanity it was right and good for the nations of Europe and the US to fight the Nazis. The long term good to the world warranted the violence and loss of life incurred.

In Kenya, is more being gained through the protests than would be gained without them? If I understand the situation, the Kenyan protesters are confronting not just the election of a president they don’t like, but the suspicion of electoral fraud. In which case, for them, the very basis of civilized society is at stake. In which case, if they have good reason for their suspicions, it seems that their confrontation, meeting violence with violence if need be could be judged to be warranted.

Which is not to say that peaceful means of protest in Kenya or elsewhere should be disregarded or abandoned as either weak or ineffective. Far from it. As Ghandi showed, sometimes non-violence can be far more dramatic and dramatically effective than violence.

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On the FDAs approval of cloned animal products, Bush’s approval of Mubarak, and the NY Times’ disapproval of electronic voting.

A few days ago I wrote about the danger of messing with nature. Nature has taken millions upon millions of years to produce the world we live in, and its only guiding principle has been to constantly winnow out loose ends and poor choices. Evolution ensures that nature’s mistakes either become successes or are self-healing. When humans get involved in rejiggering nature we risk unforseen consequences.

It’s hard to blame the FDA for approving the sale of food products from the progeny of cloned livestock. The FDA’s job is not to play moral judge, nor to philosophize over the rightness of second-guessing nature. Instead it had to judge whether the food seemed safe. Whether the food industry leaps to sell the products and whether consumers want to buy them will play a part in how quickly and pervasively products derived from cloned animals make it to our tables, but it can only be a matter of time. One thing seems clear: We can’t rely on the FDA, nor farmers, nor food suppliers to prevent the inevitable. Which leaves us with consumers and, nature forbid, regulators.

While evidence of the administration’s destruction of evidence piles up at home, the inscrutable George Bush has been making an unprecedented (for him) tour of the middle east. We’re so worn down after suffering seven years of his bewildering ability to ignore the obvious that even his gravest acts of ethical side-stepping don’t surprise us any more. In Egypt Bush had this to say to the ruthless Mubarak: “I appreciate the example that your nation is setting.” Now, if he meant that with Egypt’s terrible record on free elections and human rights Mubarak has been making even the Bush Administration look good, that would be one thing, but I don’t think that’s what Bush had in mind. What he did have in mind, I believe, was Egypt’s support in the Bush administration’s war on terror; a dubiously relative merit if ever there was one.

The NY Times today called for an upgrade to electronic voting systems across the land… by entering a plea for jurisdictions to maintain parallel paper ballots. Quite rightly, the editorial focuses on what needs to be done to improve the chances that we’ll have a fair and reliable election result this year. What it doesn’t focus on is how we got ourselves into this mess in the first place. When in doubt, blame Bush. In large part fault does lie with Bush. The administration’s zeal for free markets and state independence has led to the current electronic voting fiasco. Surely when we’re dealing with the election of a president of the nation the federal government should shape and vet the introduction of a consistent and reliable electronic voting system. The demand for quality far outweighs the demand for the process to rest on free market forces. And surely since the election of a president demands consistency in process and accuracy from state to state, the matter of voting mechanisms shouldn’t be left to state control.

As in so many areas, these three examples demonstrate in very different ways that our process of government is very far from rational. To leave to the FDA the task of stemming the tide of animal cloning for food makes no rational sense. To twice elect a president of such passive incompetence and active contempt for what’s right and good makes even less rational sense. As does the reliance on decentralized muddle in devising a good scheme for capturing votes.

 

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