Rational Philosophy

On the rise in America’s prison population, execution, and administrative wrongdoing.

The United States has a prison population far higher than anywhere else in the world. This is a recent phenomenon. About thirty years ago the US prison population started to climb and now other countries regard the US’s penal system as shocking.

The Supreme Court just upheld the use of a lethal cocktail injection for the administration of the death penalty, citing case law supporting the idea that the mere possibility of cruel and painful death isn’t a reason to put a stop to lethal injection. The constitutionality of capital punishment distracts us from whether it is a punishment worthy of an enlightened society.

And slowly but surely details of the Bush administration’s disregard for human rights and US law continue to emerge. Bush and his senior team spent a good deal of time and energy devising mechanisms that would allow them to torture detainees. (Of course, the administration’s blatant disregard for appropriate justification wasn’t limited to the abuse of prisoners. It has been a consistent pattern.)

These three examples seem to indicate a disturbing trend. Most disturbing, the Bush administration’s conviction that it is above the law, simply because it believes it is right. While Europe (much scoffed at by the likes of Bush) has moved inexorably and bumpily toward cooperation and enlightenment, the US has veered off on its own, deluded by the idea of itself as a nation that can remain fixed, or fixate, on the idea of itself as infallible.

As we’ve seen with the Catholic church in recent years, the infallible have a lot to learn. Errors of national ego punctuate the history of civilization like buckshot. The only thing that can save us from even worse transgressions and further isolation is a healthy dose of humility.

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…

The AP reports on the success of a Japanese team in making genetically modified mice that show no fear of cats. This demonstrates that mice fear cats instinctively, upsetting the more commonly held view that the fear is learned.

The scientists from Tokyo University found that the modified mice quite happily cosied up to the unmodified cats and played with them.

I’ve been reading a fascinating biography of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is getting a lot of play at the moment because of his role in insisting on the separation of church and state as America was being constituted. Jefferson, a Virginian, saw and felt the unfairness of a system in which religion gets forced on people. Fortunately for the country he was a persistent and forceful person who carried forward this conviction even when others would have been OK allowing some degree of intermingling.

Roger Cohen invokes Jefferson’s ideas in an opinion piece that counters Mitt Romney’s vapid criticism of European Secularism, echoing to some degree my own response the other day. Jefferson was an enlightened man. His father read the classics out loud to his family. He had a classical education at home and then at university. Jefferson had great sympathy for the enlightened movements of Europe, and considered anything short of a rational grounding for society unacceptable. In his native state, he reformed the laws of inheritance, for instance, because he thought them inherently unfair.

Jefferson, one can imagine, must be turning in his grave. As Europe has marched on to become widely secularist and for the most part enlightened, America has slumped into a nation riddled with weird zealotry and faith-based fervor, where politicians either make it in part because they genuinely appeal to the religious community or are cowed into pandering to that community. As I sit here, I can think of several reasons why this gap has opened up — the sheer size of America, isolating far-flung communities from the influence and challenge of rigorous thought, the psychological composition of the people who populated America — people came here seeking peace and prosperity trusting largely in their faith that God would provide, the long, lingering influence of slavery and segregation, which was propped up by the idea that whites were somehow better than blacks, a very irrational proposition. I’m sure there are many other potential explanations.

But, as I see it, the point is less how did this happen, and more, how will this change.

The NY Times reports on a new study that indicates that human evolution accelerated rapidly in the last 40,000 years. There’s debate about whether that acceleration has continued over the past 10,000 years, but the study brings with it some hope that we’re not done yet.

Back to those mice…

If mice are genetically programmed to fear cats, this tells us two things: First, that while environment can affect our thoughts and behavior, we start from a predisposition toward a certain psychology and physiology. (My fear of spiders, for instance, may have been influenced by my mother’s fear of spiders, but it was probably also an inherent fear.) Second, that mice evolved their fear of cats.

And if mice can evolve a fear of cats (which seems self-evident to my mind), then human beings can evolve to become more enlightened.

Did I skip a step or two? I fear I did.

1. Is it evolutionary progress to become more enlightened? If you question the answer to this, you’re probably reading the wrong blog.

2. What evolutionary pressure will cause the human race to become more enlightened?

Again, I can come up with several theories in answer to the second question, and I’m sure you’ll find your own. All other things being equal, I think that women are more likely to find enlightened men attractive and vice versa. Who wants to be married to a cave-man? An enlightened man will also be more helpful around the house and with the kids, prompting the woman to be OK having more kids with him. And enlightened people are probably less likely to die stupid, meaningless deaths.

As I argue in my book we’ll one day look back on religious fundamentalism as an anomalous blip in the history of America. The Japanese modification of mice to fear no cats gives me fresh hope that American genes will adjust over time to fear no smiting from on high. At which point the Bushes and the Huckabees and the Romneys of the world will disappear from the political scene with a puff of enlightened smoke.