Rational Philosophy

John McCain on The Daily Show with John Stewart

Last night, as I watched a TiVo’d John Stewart skewering delegates on the last day of the Republican convention, I wondered what it is about small town values that the Republicans love (but can’t define) and that seems to keep America stuck in the mire of bad politics.

If you didn’t see it, Stewart’s convention crew walked around with microphones asking Republican delegates what ’small town values’ meant to them. With big smiles on their faces and earnest willingness to answer the delegates came up with such laughable answers as “real people, real values,” “traditional marriage,” “fishing,” “church.” (The video is posted on the Daily Show website - highly recommended.)

But even those of us who distrust and disagree with the sentiment with which republicans freight the term, we all seem to understand that the essence of ’small town values’ might mean something genuinely appealing and good. So what is this essence, and how has it become distorted and misused.

Block Island, Rhode Island

I spent the bulk of the summer on Block Island with my family. Block Island is essentially a small town with a lot of tourists. (And these are mostly east-coast tourists from New York and Connecticut.) It’s easy to distinguish the tourists from the islanders. The tourists are in a hurry. They’re often nervous and rude. They lock their cars. They expect to get screwed over. They complain about stuff. The islanders understand that there aren’t that many places to go on the island, and everywhere is pretty close. You can trust people because for the most part, there’s nowhere for them to escape to. You couldn’t steal a car and get it off the island (which is car-accessible only by ferry.)

Block Island is a great lens through which to observe that the essence of small town values means enforced responsibility through enforced community.

It’s a lot easier to be rude or unfair to someone if you don’t know them and if you’ll never see them again and don’t have to rely upon their personal contribution to the community you live in. In a small town, people do know one another and rely upon one another and society functions very much as it has done for millions of years. The inherent rules of small social groups therefore tend to operate without the need for too much overt oversight and enforcement. What’s not to like about that?

But this is the problem: The rest of the country is made up of places where that kind of reinforcement can’t be relied upon. And this is the other part of the problem: Conservative Republicans wrap a whole lot of crap into the concept of small town values that has nothing to do with the core function of a mutually-reliant community (such as traditional marriage, fishing and church.)

And this is why ’small town values’ have become the political ruin of America. So much hog-swill passes for the reasonable subject of informed debate under the auspices of what small town folk care about. Every Republican candidate dives in or gets sucked in to the vortex of endless political distraction of the conservative agenda. And this means the every Democratic candidate gets sucked in, too, for fear of committing political suicide.

Other advanced Western nations don’t waste political time endlessly rehashing abortion statutes, gun control, separation of church and state, the teaching of creationism. ‘Small town values’ are the concrete boots of American politics, and until we lose them we won’t have an effective political process that will allow the nation to move forward and solve the very real problems of war, alternative fuel sources, and climate change.

Related Posts from Around the Web:

Small Town Values? I Gotz ‘Em - I’m from a small town in New Jersey, and I’m politically progressive in every possible way. Watch this clip from The Daily Show, in which people attending the Republican National Convention spoke about their views on small-town values. …

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“Art is science made clear.”

- Jean Cocteau

“your head gonna make a dead end on your street”

- Velvet Underground (White Light / White Heat)

Yesterday’s post left me with a disquieting murmur in the back of my mind. ‘Too easy,’ it muttered. And here comes Jean Cocteau to remind me that art is science made clear.

Can we criticize the New Yorker and Barry Blitt on social or political (or sociopolitical) terms for portraying the Obamas as a Muslim and a terrorist in the White House? No. Can we criticize them on artistic terms? Perhaps…

Decrying Blitt’s cartoon as tasteless and offensive doesn’t mean it’s not satirically funny; instead, it lends the cartoon a couple of the stock credentials of satirical humor.

To understand the failure of the cartoon one must look to Cocteau: ‘art is science made clear,’ he insists. Considering the New Yorker’s high standards, does the cartoon make clear the science it satirizes?

Yes, and  no.

Yes, it parodies the ridiculous public fears and scurrilous Foxian paranoia about the Obamas as anti-American sleepers.  The New Yorker satisfactorily defends each subversive element of the cartoon (the Muslim garb, the gun belt, the burning flag) as a reinforcement of its plain and simple satirical intent — to explode the damp squib of right wing racism.

But… and here Cocteau helps enormously, it isn’t necessarily funny, because, despite all of these well placed clues, it isn’t made clear.

The New Yorker is a liberal magazine. I love to read it.  I’ve often said that I could be happy reading the New Yorker and nothing else.  (Not strictly true, but it has some damn fine writing.) It’s also, despite the wry, dry, sprightly daggers of its prose, an essentially sensitive publication. It skewers the bad guys. While for the good guys it reserves a blunted point.

I worked so hard yesterday to repress this awareness. I wanted to laud the New Yorker and Barry Blitt. But as I scrolled through the New Yorker cover cartoons seeking out examples of the same kind of abrasive satire I knew deep down that I wouldn’t find anything quite like the Obama cover.

We see Ahmadinejad being being enticed to a game of footsy in the bathroom stall, Bush as a housemaid standing over a cigar-smoking Cheney, the neocons up to their necks in a muddy flood… Jubilant snickers at the expense of the bad guys.

But with the Obama cartoon, those at whom we would snicker are absent.  If we laugh at the cartoon, we don’t laugh with the Obamas and we can’t laugh at them.  The objects of our laughter, the conservative commentators and our narrow-minded neighbors, don’t even make the frame.  They’re nowhere but in the dim recess of the cartoonist’s mind’s eye.  Considered from this perspective, the cartoon veers toward the tragic. The victims take center stage.  But clearly the cartoon cannot be tragic if the supposed victims don’t know it. The Obama’s expressions betray satisfaction and mischievous glee.

If the New Yorker in its cover cartoon had, as does the Onion in its copy, a history of satirical lampoon with no holds barred, the cartoon would make more sense; its art would be science made clear. But given the absence of this history, the cartoon’s immediate psychological impact tends to muddy its message.

Not that any of this matters in practical terms. The tiny fraction of the population who even read the New Yorker and would pay any attention to what it has to say aren’t inclined to think that the Obamas might be terrorists, no matter what cartoon it runs on the cover.

A couple more for Barry Blitt, with sympathy and respect…

“The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.”

- Jean Cocteau

“Hey, white boy, what you doin’ uptown,”

- Lou Reed

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The New Yorker has a long history of offending people with its notoriously tasteless and offensive output of low-brow hackery. Obama spokesman Bill Burton rightly dismisses the magazine’s latest outrageous cover cartoon: “The New Yorker may think… that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” Burton says, before he draws a fiery breath, “but most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”

We agree, indeed. What else would we do, applaud the New Yorker for tackling head-on the kinds of issues that all other publications skirt?

Satire has no place in an enlightened society. After all, to appreciate satire one must simultaneously understand the direct impact of the satirical object as well as its indirect object. Surely we shouldn’t be expected to hold opposing or divergent concepts in our minds at one time, that’s just barbaric! This is one nation under god, godamnit!

I sympathize with Barack Obama or Bill Burton, or whoever it was who most felt the affront of the New Yorker’s tasteless and offensive campaign. Getting to be president is a sensitive business and one must protect one’s thin skin if one is going to successfully attain the office.

Republican opposer — John McCain — no stranger himself to satire, limped nimbly to Obama’s support, declaring: “New York can go take a hike! Oh, wait a minute, there aren’t any decent hiking trails around New York. Come to think of it, the only place you can even safely fire your gun in New York is from the roof of a New York City housing project, and who would want to set foot in one of those places…”

(McCain may be old but his mind wanders beautifully.)

So, when you get your hands of a copy of the current New Yorker, be sure to set it on fire and toss it into the grate as quickly as you can. At least, tear off the cover and set fire to that… we’ll decide later what to do with the rest of it.

But before you toss the cover, take a quick look at the cartoon: See how Blitt has cunningly distorted Obama’s face so that it seems confident, unperturbed, wily even. What a scam, what a ruse.

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On human potential, personal development, and the philosophy of growth.

“Everyone is as God has made him, and oftentimes a great deal worse.”
- Miguel de Cervantes

“The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.”
- Frank Herbert

US science fiction novelist (1920 - 1986)

Without reading too much into the respective literary ouevres of these two authors, we may not be surprised that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, observer and recorder of human failings and doomed repetitions, takes an essentially pessimistic view of human nature, while Frank Herbert, a creator of alternative realities, perceives unlimited boundaries for knowledge and achievement. (Herbert spoke with enthusiasm about the positive power of science fiction to point to possibilities, including potholes or chasms that we should avoid.)

Biographers describe Cervantes the young man as brash and idealistic. He fits Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck’s model of a person with a “fixed mind-set.”   “If You’re Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow”, in this week’s NY Times, discusses Dweck’s theory of fixed versus flexible mind-sets. In Dweck’s own words: “People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed tend to push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.”

Dweck believes that society’s obsession with natural ability thwarts our capacity for growth.

Don Quixote’s imaginary battles against windmills and flocks of sheep speak to me of his creator’s struggle with the idea of fixed potential. That Quixote’s engagements, won or lost, are illusory magnifies the futility of these attempts to conquer fabricated enemies and prove himself worthy of his love. As he grew up, Cervantes’ family moved from town to town, never settling. It’s easy to imagine Cervantes the brash, idealistic, talented young man wanting to achieve something real, but unable to stand long enough on firm ground to be sure of what was real, each move to a new place confirming the isolated and unchangeable nature of his self.

Contrast this with the assertion of Frank Herbert’s son that his father didn’t finish college because he took only to the courses that interested him, forgoing required classes. Herbert worked at writing for many years before achieving success, relying on his wife’s income to support them. He submitted his landmark science fiction work — Dune — to 20 publishers before it was picked up for publication by a smallish press.

Obviously, even within Dweck’s postulate, talented people can achieve success (Cervantes may be a prime example), but she claims that people can achieve more success if they maintain a flexible mind-set. (She cites several mighty examples from the business world — John F. Welch Jr. of General Electric, for his emphasis on teamwork over individual genius; Louis V. Gerstner Jr. of I.B.M., who praised ‘the thousands of I.B.M.’ers who never gave up on their company’; and Anne M. Mulcahy of Xerox, who turned an eye to morale and staff development even as she made tough cuts.)

If you’re reading this and thinking “jeez that sucks, I’m one of those people with a fixed mind-set;” I’d hold out a little branch of hope, attached to a big old tree of potential. To begin the conversion from a fixed mind-set to a flexible mind-set we need only accept the concept of self doubt. What if we aren’t born fully formed and unchangeable? What if we accept that growth is possible but takes work…

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On exciting brain research, insightful psychological studies, and the latest shocker from the ill-thunk war on terror.

Quotes of the day:

“I can’t speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D. policy on interrogations,”

Lt. Col Patrick Ryder, in reference to the Guantánamo interrogation training chart repurposed from 1950s Chinese torture methods that elicited false confessions.

“All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.”

H. L. Mencken US editor (1880 - 1956)

Using structural and functional brain imaging, scientists now have unprecedented insight into the mechanisms of thought. Writing in the Public Library of Science, Liza Gross cites the ‘form follows function’ edict of architect Louis Sullivan, which itself echoed Aristotle’s essential philosophy of form, in describing the findings of Patric Hagmann, Olaf Sporns, and their colleagues. Hagmann and Sporns found that a dense set of core neural pathways acts as an interconnection hub to the brain’s cerebral cortex the home of higher cognitive thinking and self awareness. The elegant, symmetrical spread of pathways — like the branches of a tree extending from the trunk — correlates to the brain’s seamless processing of information on different levels and in different ways. (Gross’s use of computer technology analogies I find unhelpful. The brain is not like a computer, after all, a computer is, somewhat, like the brain.) Interestingly, the hubs correspond to a recently reported neural system that shows increased activity levels when we are at rest.

Psychologists seem to have uncovered where we aim some of that resting activity — self rationalization. (”The duality of virtue: Deconstructing the moral hypocrite.” Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, in press. “Moral Hypocrisy: Social Groups and the Flexibility of Virtue.” Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno. Psychological Science, 2007.) The researchers devised cunning experiments to lure subjects into choosing an easy chore over a hard one while maintaining that they’d been acting fairly in leaving the harder chore for someone else. In the abstract, the subjects understood that choosing the easy chore wasn’t fair, but in practice most of them chose it anyway. But the true genius in the research came when the researchers asked the subjects to hold a sequence of numbers in their heads while they judged the fairness of their choice. All of a sudden they judged their actions just as harshly as anyone else would.

So, what kept them from admitting their unfairness wasn’t a failure to recognize it, it was a failure to admit to it. And the act of hypocrisy required considerable brain cycles.

Interrogation experts should take note. If you want to extract an honest answer, break out the Sodoku puzzles rather than the water buckets and manacles.

Since form follows function, it is no surprise that the form of the administration’s war on terror has evolved into a horrifying, amorphous mess. The New York Times reveals that the interrogation chart used as a training device for interrogators back in 2002 derived from a 1957 article entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War.” Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist working for the Air Force, had put together the chart to document interviews with American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators falsely confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities (Chinese Torture Techniques - See page 4 of Biderman’s original report).

So, let’s see if I have this straight: In 1957, Biderman set out what Chinese interrogators did to obtain false confessions.  The army then used this to help them train the next generation of American soldiers so that they could avoid providing false confessions. And a few generations later the DOD used the same material to train interrogators on how to extract (false) confessions…

The only change made to the chart used at Guantánamo? The trainers dropped the original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

No, that wouldn’t look good at all would it, using “communist” coercive methods.

Here’s the opening sentence of Biderman’s 1957 report: “The United States Air Force has expended considerable effort to get a full, accurate and meaningful account of what happened to its personnel who were captured in Korea.”

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Barack Obama vs. John McCain, Robert Mugabe vs. Zimbabwe, Abu Ghraib detainees vs. US interrogation contractors.

“We don’t bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don’t dress well and we’ve no manners.”

- George Bernard Shaw

As the presidential campaign continues, the exchanges between the Obama and McCain camps have honed in on the relative patriotism of the two candidates. Retired General Wesley Clark, speaking on CBS’ Face The Nation and acting, we are told, as a mouthpiece of the Obama campaign opined that “I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.” Meanwhile, over on ABC’s This Week, Minnesota Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty said, “I think Barack Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope perhaps should be retitled ‘The Audacity of Hypocrisy.’ ”

Not surprisingly, Obama wishes to steer the campaign away from a contest over who is the more patriotic. He’s smart enough to know that patriotism is a double-edged sword, and principled enough to want to avoid hollow pledges of undying allegiance to the idea of a country. McCain, the ultimate ironist, knows that he will always win any such contest, not just because of his war record, but also because he can claim undying patriotism with sufficient earnestness to convince those who care.

But it seems that we have some philosophical distinctions to make before we can decide whether Obama or McCain is the better patriot. The media loves the stereotypical definition of patriotism, the flag-waving, ’til-death, America-the-greatest kind of patriotism. McCain understands this and allows himself to be adorned by that mantle.  Privately he understands that the people who inhabit the rest of the world might beg to differ. Nevertheless one can imagine that if he had to choose a preferred country, McCain wouldn’t hesitate to choose America.

Obama’s patriotism comes from a different bottle. Obama believes that we can and should put our allegiance somewhere; that we should invest our hope in the potential of a thing or place or person. Obama’s patriotism acknowledges and mourns the shame, faults and frailties of the country, past and present, and he resolves that we can and should do better. America, the land of freedom, Obama understands, is the land of slavery, segregation, rendition, invasion and torture. McCain understands this, too, but he’s not about to ruin his chances of election by pointing it out. For the many millions of Americans who believe in America the way that an apple believes in gravity — as something inevitable and unswervingly sure — Obama’s patriotism inspires suspicion, ridicule, and fear.

Is Robert Mugabe patriotic for defining Zimbabwe and constraining it to his definition? Morgan Tsvangirai, who withdrew as the opposition candidate because of violence and intimidation by Mugabe’s thugs, would doubtless argue he’s not.

Unfortunately the conceptual ground of patriotism rests in the drawing of distinctions between ourselves and others. We measure the qualities of our own country in opposition to those of other countries. The aim and end of patriotism must be to inspire in us the assurance that we live in the best country there is. As soon as it moves beyond a benign, feel-good, group hug (and it always does) patriotism becomes corrosive and dangerous.

Today several Abu Ghraib detainees filed suit (here in the US) against the government contractors they say tortured them. Surely we won’t find a better example of patriotism’s failures and illusions. The Bush administration, the face and fist of American foreign policy for the past seven years, repeatedly ignored, twisted and refashioned international conventions and US law in its treatment of the detainees. Official investigations naturally failed to find and attribute fault to any but the most lowly and least culpable offenders. And now the detainees have turned to the American civil justice system to seek recompense.

Contorting our national pride to find a silver lining even in this sad cloud, Susan L. Burke, of the Philadelphia law firm Burke O’Neil, had this to say about the suit: “These men came to U.S. courts because our laws, as they have for generations, allow their claims to be heard here.”

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“The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1919).

Nearly 90 years after Oliver Wendell Holmes cast the fortunes of truth onto the open market, Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt write that the processes by which we form memories aren’t as egalitarian as Holmes would have liked to think.

Deposited first in the hippocampus, pieces of information get drawn down and reprocessed each time we recall them. Once we’ve recalled them several times, the brain has written them to the cerebral cortex, weakening or severing the connection to the source of the information. And so, as researchers have now shown, we have ’source amnesia,’ an explanation (apart from stupidity) for why people still believe falsehoods to be true even after those falsehoods have been debunked. (Kerry and the Swift Boat smears, Obama and his religion…)

I’m intrigued as to why memory functions in this way:

As the human mind evolved it needed to be able to process and recall information. Some of this information would have been ultimately disposable, but very important and highly context sensitive (’I should stay clear of this part of the forest because I heard a bear growling here five minutes ago.’) Having a holding area like the hippocampus would allow us to store a lot of temporary data, much of which would be used briefly in a focused way, then let go.

Then there would be another class of information that we would need to recall over and again (’Red berries make you sick,’) without the fuss of recalling the context — this becomes the ‘rule set’ by which we live.

This second class of information can help us live safely and effectively. We build up our rule set and stick to it. And, if we’ve processed the original information correctly, the rule set will tend to do well by us. But, as Wang and Aamodt point out, when we’re misinformed or when we don’t process the original information correctly, or when lies get repeated often enough without a conscious internal effort to contradict or doubt, we end up believing falsehoods. Their advice: to be conscious about what we believe and contemplate the reverse.

And giving new hope to those who want to be able to process any information more effectively, researchers have found new evidence that we can change the way our brains work for the better. Back in April, several journalists (see below) wrote about research by a team from the Universities of Michigan and Bern that showed that memory training can increase fluid intelligence. The research adds to the growing body of data that the structure and makeup of the brain is more plastic than we used to think.

Although there are already several products on the market that purport to sharpen or improve brain power, the research results of the team from Michigan and Bern seemed so exciting and compelling that I decided to produce an affordable commercial software program that would allow anyone to benefit from the training at home. So today I’m blogging about my own news… You can now purchase the IQ Training Program for the paltry (in comparison to its value) sum of $23.75.

Brain Training Research In The News…

Wired…

Forget Brain Age: Researchers Develop Software That Makes You Smarter

“…a method for improving the general problem-solving ability scientists call fluid intelligence, otherwise known as “smarts.”

Science News…

Smarten Up

“If you’re looking for an intellectual picker-upper that doesn’t come in a pill, remember this: A relatively brief memory-training program jump-starts general reasoning skills and problem-solving proficiency…”

New York Times…

Memory Training Shown to Turn Up Brain Power

“A new study has found that it may be possible to train people to be more intelligent, increasing the brainpower they had at birth.”

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Lawyers who filed a class action on behalf of those who purchased the computer game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas have been surprised and disappointed that the class of those offended by the hidden sex scenes is very small. The scenes themselves, a legacy of pre-release versions of the game, weren’t even completed, and could only be accessed with special hardware or software. Of the many millions who bought the game only a couple of thousand have expressed interest in the settlement. The lawyers, on the other hand, stand to recoup fees of $1.3M if the settlement is approved by the court. Makers of the game should perhaps consider recouping these fees in turn by designing a new game called Grand Theft Lawyer.

This odd situation of the lawyers so misjudging the shrug factor of the game players when it came to the hidden sex scenes seems to highlight a curious matter of our perspectives on sex in general.

A new report on the safe, or unsafe, sex practices of New Yorkers tells us that people in the city have a fair bit of sex and that many of them don’t wear a condom when common sense would say they should. But it’s the comments on this story that quickly become provocative. Alongside people talking frankly and straightforwardly about the difficulties of dealing with desire and pleasure and the practicality of condoms, we have this creepy and passionate post: “burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful and receiving their dues… ”

Sex is something we’re set up to do, something that comes naturally, something that non-conscious creatures have no hang-ups about. So how and why did sex become such a tricky topic when humans developed consciousness?

I’ll hypothesize that there may be several reasons:

1. We realized that sex is a high-stakes activity — It can end up with children and long term responsibility, and it decides the future of our group.

So, when people figured these things out it became important to establish social rules and conventions that would prevent problems in the coupling business and ensure the best survival rate for the society.

2. We became aware that the act of sex and the state of desire change our perception of ourselves and the world around us. We became conscious of a diminishing sense of self control when we were aroused, of the strength of the sex impulse, and of the tug of certain stimuli (erotic triggers).

Being conscious of these things tended to bring us into conflict with another gross effect of consciousness — self-control. The tension between the two led inevitably to self-consciousness about sex, and, in the extreme, feelings of shame and embarrassment.

(These ideas are supported by the varying degree of openness about sex in different cultures.)

One woman who purchased the Grand Theft game for her fifteen year old son had this to say when asked whether she would have bought the game if she’d known that it allowed players to kill police officers: “Well, I think he does have games with violence,” adding that she would have “possibly” bought such a game — though not one that contained sex scenes like those in San Andreas.

And the beat goes on…

On Bear Stearns executives charged with deception, a military lawyer’s defense by attack, and Bush’s call for an end to the 27-year old ban on off-shore drilling.

Ralph R. Cioffi and Matthew Tannin managed two risky Bear Stearns funds that ultimately collapsed early in the subprime market tumble. The investors lost all their money. 100%. Federal prosecutors have now charged Cioffi and Tannin with deceiving investors while protecting their own interests. Cioffi and Tannin knew that the funds were losing value rapidly and could collapse, but presented a confident picture to investors. Meanwhile Cioffi moved $2M (of $6M) of his own money out into a lower risk fund.

Ranked on impact, Cioffi and Tannin’s deception falls at the far end of the deception spectrum. But if every business person who deceived were to be subject to criminal prosecution, America (and most everywhere else) would be out of business. In practice, crime becomes a matter of degree. Small, unremarkable lies go unremarked. Medium lies maybe wrinkle your reputation. Big lies with real impact get you shunned. And maybe a huge lie with devastating business impact will get you an indictment.

The concept of crime requires the concept of law. And the concept of law rests on the idea that we can codify certain acts as wrongdoing. Society identifies behaviors it doesn’t want to tolerate and enacts laws so that people can be punished for such behavior.  Cioffi and Tannin may have broken a codified law by lying (we’ll have to see what the courts say) but for sure they broke an uncodified law; they lied big and the people they lied to lost a lot of money.

Military lawyer Lt. Cmdr. William C. Kuebler has been going on the offensive in his defense of a Canadian, Omar Khadr, who has been charged with lobbing the grenade that killed an American soldier in Afghanistan in 2002. Kuebler has publicly and repeatedly attacked the military court system by which his client is being tried. Devoutly religious and ultra-conservative, Kuebler might seem like an unlikely activist. But he’s a stickler for fairness. It seems likely that Khadr isn’t an innocent party — he has the pedigree of a terrorist, and he wasn’t in Afghanistan sight-seeing. But Kuebler defends his aggressive defense tactics. “If we’re not advocating against the process,” Kuebler says, “we’re not competently representing our clients.”

Another way of reconciling Kuebler’s philosophy would be to say that if a society must have laws it should have some tension balancing the enactment and enforcement of those laws against the protection of its members against arbitrary, unjust or inappropriate indictment and punishment under the law. If not, the laws will inevitably become arbitrary, unjust or inappropriate.

Ironically, those who make law — politicians — are often some of the most deceptive and corrupt members of society. This, I expect, is no coincidence. Politicians have a feel for matters of rightness and wrongness because they identify with the urge leverage any advantage for their gain. And, as we’ve seen with Elliott Spitzer, they’ll be no less zealous for their empathy with the perpetrator of the crimes they seek to prosecute.

I’m trying to get to the idea of whether such a thing as natural or fundamental crime exists or is merely fabrication. In Plato’s dialogues Socrates pushes and pulls his interlocutors in an attempt to have them break free of the idea that something is right or wrong, good or bad, because we feel it is so. You can get many or most people to agree on whether some things are a crime. Other things tend to be more difficult to gain consensus on. But the ground of wrongdoing, if such a thing exists, must find its feet beyond human judgment.

The only pertinent to existence is whether it continues to exist. As human beings we feel this same urge. To continue to exist, to persist. And if we examine our feelings about right and wrong we find that they tend to stem from a judgment about whether an action will contribute to the persistence of a person or group or not.

A former co-worker asked me in an e-mail today whether consciousness, through the potential for personal growth, doesn’t offer in itself some goal or reward outside the persistence of humanity and existence. Valerie, a frequent commentor to this blog, coined a term ‘the evolution of consciousness’ which puts me in mind of the same idea.

I am tempted to subscribe to this idea. After all, why must consciousness be subordinate to material existence just because it came after and through material existence?

This may explain my disgusted reaction to George Bush’s grandstanding about oil drilling. I don’t even care whether he’s right. I just don’t like the idea that someone with so little integrity and such narrow thoughts could hold so much sway. If consciousness does have an independent evolutionary trajectory, we can only hope that the Bush’s of this world will one day be no more than fossils in the museum of intellectual history.

Related posts from around the web…

About those Bear Stearns prosecutions - … even if you weren’t convinced that was a certainty before? Or, like Bear Stearns hedge fund managers Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, do you instead steel yourself for eventual federal prosecution, complete with camera-ready perp walk?

The Chilling Effect Of The Bear Stearns Prosecution - But this case seems likely to make those discussions too dangerous to hold. The prosecution of these two Bear Stearns executives offers a bad lesson for Wall Street: If you have doubts about your strategy or returns, never put it in an …

When Military Justice Departs From The Bush Administration Script … - (1) Someone forgot to give Guantánamo tribunal judge Army Col. Peter E. Brownback III the memo about how his job is just to quietly produce convictions. Either that, or someone did a lousy job of vetting him before they made him a …

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On the Supreme Court’s split snub to Bush, shared childcare, and news media coverage of Hillary Clinton. (In two parts because it got really long…)

By a 5 - 4 majority, the Supreme Court has decided that this country wants, deserves and damn well should have equal rights of representation for its accused, whether they be detained at the local precinct for fare evasion, or captured, rendered, disappeared for three years and then reappeared again just in time for a Guantanamo military tribunal hearing before the election ends Bush’s reckless rampage through the fields of decency, honesty, restraint and respect for human rights. Hip hooray for equality!!

It’s a good thing, of course, that there is an odd number of justices on the supreme court. Equality in some matters — such as making decisions — isn’t helpful at all. It’s also not encouraging that the decision was so equally balanced. I would have preferred to see a little less equality in the spectrum of opinions. 7 - 2 perhaps? Or 8 - 1? How about some gross inequality? — a 9 - 0 decision in favor of upholding the constitutional rights of our detainees.

Chief Justice Roberts in his dissent said that the constitutional right of habeus corpus wasn’t really that important and that the detainees were really getting some very generous treatment. (I guess that happened while they were disappeared.) So four S.C. justices, almost half, don’t understand the fuss. This indicates a problem. The NY Times editorial frames it as a political problem, but one wonders how we can tolerate a system that could so easily politicize the court.

Without the concept of equality the world would be an odd, unendingly complicated place. And we owe the concept of equality to the orderly and consistent principles of existence. Space and time and the stuff of matter obeys laws of equivalence. The mass of a proton is the same wherever you go. (As a side note, I believe that this indicates that time and space and, fundamentally, units of energy are quantized, as I explain in the appendix to LIFE.) It is because we have this absolute equivalence that we can draw conclusions about presumptive equivalence — that the rights of one person should be the same as another, for instance.

Continued in Part II — shared parenting and the accusation of discriminatory coverage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

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