Going in circles

Ta-Nehisi keeps the Willingham story alive. If you missed it, here is the New Yorker story that started all of this. In essence, a man was executed for a crime he almost certainly did not commit--as certain as science can make it.

Ta-Nehisi writes:

Texas justice is essentially sorcery, and there will be people who say that we can perfect it, that we can close the loop-holes. They're wrong. The problem isn't with loopholes--it's with us. We are fallible. Conservatives, more than anyone, should know that--it undergirds their entire philosophy. They don't think government can perfect much of anything. What makes them think we can perfect murder? I'd have a lot more respect if they just came out and said, "Yeah, it isn't perfect, but it's a price we should be willing to pay."

At first blush, I didn't have anything to say about this other than "Amen." But then, of course, I read the comments, and we all know what happens when we read comments.

The first:

Oddly enough I have been thinking about just this lately, but I have seen it from the exactly opposite perspective: Conservatives appear to believe that humans are, in fact, perfectable, but too often choose not to be perfected -- that if only people would chose better, if only we force better choices on the people who do not choose by our lights, humanity could be perfected.

Whereas liberals appear to have twigged that, no, actually, humans are walking piles of contradictions and misunderstandings, fallible at each and every moment. So let's create a system that guards against that, and allows us the room to pick ourselves up and make better choices, if it turns out that we've made bad ones.

This sort of thing drives me absolutely batty. I have seen arguments structured exactly like this from both sides and it's bullshit every time. It's bullshit for one really simple reason: Conservatism and Liberalism/Progressivism are just different takes on the exact same philosophy. They both come out of the broader liberal political tradition (I'm sorry, that's what it's called in academic circles. Reagan, epistemologically speaking, comes out of a liberal tradition no matter how right-wing he is, because he's descended from Adam Smith and Rousseau. Deal with it.) So when one side or the other sets out to prove how Conservatives have this particular take on the human condition and Liberals have another and this is why one is so much more reasonable or realistic than the other, to continue that same comment:

All of which makes the angry conservative make much more sense to me -- if you believe that human falliblity can be stamped out but people are choosing not to, you probably have a lot less patience for it, not to mention fury when other people's fuck-ups mess up your own Glory-bound life.

And yes, it is very frightening that people of this mindset make life and death decisions. Because they often don't understand human reality.

It just makes me crazy. You could just as easily say that "forc[ing] better choices on the people who do not choose by our lights" is what Liberal government programs do, and "a system that guards against that, and allows us the room to pick ourselves up and make better choices, if it turns out that we've made bad ones" is exactly what conservatives want in a free market. This kind of quasi-theoretical assignment of one thing to this camp and another to that is almost always just an exercise in proving why your team is better, but in what sounds like philosophical terms. If we want to argue policy, I say let's get into it. That's an actual discussion about actual differences (in some arenas, anyway). But this kind of "well my team has THIS take on perfectability which is SO much more realistic than your team's" thing goes nowhere.

A near-perfect example from later in the comments:

The line that chilled me was when Fogg said, "Science does not matter." He stands by his gut, what he calls "living in the real world."

I can't help but connect his thinking to the anti-science attitude of the religious right. In an effort to defend creationism, they've made it okay--even heroic--to spurn fact, testing, and reason.

The "science doesn't matter" attitude is not limited to the religious right or to creationists (as we know them today). It reminds me mightily of some of the proto-fascist writings of Carl Schmitt and some of the ideology in existence under Mussolini.

I know I sound like a winger right now, blathering about fascists and Italian dictators, but honestly fascists aren't the point--I'm not out to make anybody in this situation the political pariah that wingers are usually invoking when they say "fascist." What I care about is that there is a preexisting tradition in liberal politics (again, I'm referring to the intellectual tradition, not a political coalition) of privileging emotion, gut, and "my experience" over science or formalized knowledge. It gets down to different criteria for what's real or makes something real, and how one knows something or does not know it.

If you read the original New Yorker article, these fire experts talk about fire like a spirit that talks to them. There is no scientific way to discuss fire like that--they're operating out of a totally different framework. Now on the one hand, we could sit back and say, well, it's pro-death-penalty Southerners (easy code among many for right-wingers--Lord knows I'd be surprised if these guys voted Obama) now, and it was fascists last time--sounds like a right-wing problem! Lefties, pat yourselves on the back.

But that, too, would be bullshit. Because how many times has the right wing criticized the left for overprivileging individual experience and worldview? What is moral relativism--with which I generally agree, for the record--if not the assertion that at least some important aspects of our reality are created by emotion, experience, and culture, and not by science or natural law?


The political coalitions we know today as Liberal and Conservative are not on a spectrum from one extreme to another. They're one iteration of many possible Venn diagrams, or cluster pairs, or arrangements around a circle--whatever image you prefer--that use all the same ingredients. Every failing of the right's can be found to be a virtue of the left's, and vice versa.

Which is why I hate it when people get into this thing about who understands human nature better. We all pretty much understand human nature the same. It's what we think that understanding means later that matters, and unless we're talking practical applications I don't want to hear about which party is better. They're the same. They're fraternal twins: all the same DNA, slightly different appearances. Use the same DNA a couple other times and you'll get other, slightly different appearances. On a genetic level, those differences are insignificant. On a practical level, it's how we tell the twins apart.

And that's all I really care about. Unless one of these two parties is currently proposing to abolish the death penalty, what good could it possibly do to debate which coalition better understands human nature or whose fault the Willingham travesty is? Neither party is doing anything about it; it's both of their fault, then. There's work to do, so let's quit yammering about Conservative vs. Liberal understandings of human nature and start trying to end executions of the innocent. People who want to sit there and yammer about the above are guilty of what gjeffries describes:

A man was put to death by us, as a society, under nothing more than character conjecture and those responsible for doing so merely shrug their shoulders and justify their actions? That's what affects me. It's not about the bias or ignorance; it's about the lack of reflection, lack of recognition of a higher purpose. It's not about them, it's about us. We can't let this happen.

If we were to reflect on it properly, we might come to a more productive conclusion about what's happening here:

mixedupfiles

I'd have a lot more respect if they just came out and said, "Yeah, it isn't perfect, but it's a price we should be willing to pay.

I think the subtext of so much of the behavior of the people responsible for Willingham's execution, at least as depicted in the New Yorker article, was a more chilling version of this. Killing him, whether or not he was guilty of the crime with which he was charged, WAS a price they were willing to pay. To them, Cameron Willingham was nothing but trash. Even if he wasn't guilty of murdering his three children in cold blood, he was guilty of being poor and distasteful to respectable white Texan society. Their world was better off without him cluttering it up, so why bother taking the necessary pains to provide him with justice under the law?

Doctor Jay

...we can't expect the people that perpetrated this to recant. They did what they did in good faith, believing that they were the instruments of justice, acting on behalf of the best interests of the community. And they made a terrible mistake. We do need to fix things, and get them out of the loop.

For starters, let's hope this goes somewhere.

Settlements strike again

Israeli soldiers denied Palestinians access to their own land [via Land and People]:

More than a dozen young Palestinians were forced to strip naked by Israeli troops, who insisted the measure was a security precaution after the group requested permission to access closed-off village land Friday afternoon.

The men, from Deir Istiya southwest of Nablus, were on their way to tend lands west of the village that are sandwiched between two Israeli settlements, Ariel and Immanu’el. The men all had permits to access the land, but were accosted by a group of at least 15 armed Israeli settlers and prevented from passing into their land.

Israeli troops intervened in the settler-farmer standoff by forcing the Palestinians to remove their clothes, then turning them away from the land.

I think sometimes that the true banality of evil is how boneheadedly stupid it is on occasion. I mean, there was no reason to believe that these particular Palestinians had ever done, or were planning to do, anything dangerous to Israelis or to the nearby settlements. They had permits, granted them by Israel, to access this land, which they legally and rightfully owned. But they were humiliated and denied that access based solely on their nationality/ethnicity (oh, race, so socially constructed). There's the evil.

But stupidity is how these soldiers, and others like them, don't seem to see why behaving this way only hurts their own cause. There's nothing grand and sweeping about this. Disgusting and low-minded as this behavior is, it doesn't even induce shock and awe in the reader--it's about on the level of rather bad bullying (in terms of the actual abuse at the moment, not its discriminatory and political meaning). It gains nothing for its perpetrators but ill-will.

That is the banality of evil--the sniggering of the bully or the blank stare of the functionary, never understanding the meaning of what he or she does. Evil that is understood, or justified, or explained away but unerringly committed, is certainly evil; but it is not banal. It is shiveringly creepy. Think of Dick Cheney versus Alberto Gonzales; for which do you feel contempt bordering on pity, and which makes your skin crawl?



_________________________
Disclaimer: I almost can't believe I feel the need to write this, but better safe than sorry: I am not saying that Israel is evil, banal or otherwise, or that Palestinians are blameless. The latter half of my rumination is more an abstract consideration of what I mean about stupidity and evil than it is a sweeping indictment of Israel. I maintain that the actions of these soldiers on this day are indefensible, but I am not painting Israel with their brush.

A more perfect human

The man is just so articulate.

Every day a little death

This is a really interesting piece on existentialism and conservatism. It opened up a whole intellectual community that I didn't know existed, and it was the first piece on or of existentialism that gave me some sense of what that philosophy (or, as he would have it, critique of philosophy) might really be about.

The author would probably say that I just haven't thought far down enough, but I still think it's a bit of a crock. To me, this is really what the God Gene (which, of course, does not exist as a matter of science--I'm using it as a shorthand for a kind of personal predisposition or need) is all about. Either the sheer experienced fact, objectively real or not, meaningful or not, of one's existence is enough, or it is not. For existentialists (at least of this stripe), it is not; the screaming abyss of unmeaning is pain and chaos, and the starting point for either a way out or a way to live with it. From the essay:

Am I living in personal despair? No. No, I'm not. Things are pretty great, actually. That's the other reason. For all my clever criticisms of Karras, and Dreher, and the pomocons, I don't live my despair the way pure intellect perhaps insists I should. That's the laurel that my pragmatic approach to human life has rewarded to Karras and her inconsistent, but humane, refusal to live in the mind. She will, I suppose, have this last laugh. This is also, by the way, why the intellectual love of my life will always be Simone de Beauvoir, who crafted a livable existentialism, far thorougher and more compassionate than anything approached by Sartre and Heidegger. She recognized the existential death at the heart of living life too seriously.

What The God Gene means to me is this: some people ask a kind of existential question. They may answer it with religion, with conservative tradition, with community, even with genetics (The Selfish Gene, anyone), or with existentialism, but it is fundamentally the same yearning for a meaning, an explanation. Some people may not have an explicit answer so much as a certainty.

I'm an atheist who can't stand conventional atheism. And it's for this reason: only God can rescue human life from meaninglessness, if not me, if not the ego and the I. Atheists love to say that most religious people actually think like atheists. I think most atheists think like the religious, because they have not yet begun to imagine the wasteland of meaning that the death of God has left us in. (I think of Bill Maher and his stupid sneering face, and I see a man who wields the truth the way a chimpanzee holds a gun.)

But some people don't ask. I am one of these. If there is an explanation, I'll admit to being fundamentally skeptical of it, but I will allow as to how it may well be--because if there is one, I am immovably convinced that it is far too big to see. But I am 100% fine and dandy with either not knowing what it is, or, far more likely in my opinion, simply not having one. We are born. We live. We die and then we rot. These things are simple objective truths, in my view, and they are...neutral.

I was going to say "They are enough," but that would be false. "Enough" implies a need to be filled or a standard to be met. I have no such measure. These happenings of existence can never be too little, enough, or too much--too much for what? They are. What can be too little or too much, and what we bear responsibility for, is what we do in between. No, I don't know what "enough" is, or what the standard is; I mean only that these things can be evaluated, while the above neutralities cannot.

The beauty of this divide, to me, is that it ultimately doesn't matter. Whether we're living an existence pasted over a painful abyss of nothing, an existence granted us by a God, or just existing (does this make me a nihilist? I wish I had time to just sit around and read everything), we all tend to come out in the same place--buying groceries. Getting on with things. It's the nutjobs at both ends who get us in trouble.

This is random, but.

I want to know when economists lost their souls.

If you go back to the great works of political economy, the founding works of the discipline--The Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, Burke, Weber, etc. etc.--these men never forgot that they were dealing with people, and furthermore they never forgot what people were like. They were, inasmuch as they were able (and there's quite a difference on this front between, say, Smith and Weber) empirical in drawing their conclusions, and the evidence they examined was not only numerical or statistical.

I know that a lot has changed since their time. I know that financial markets have appeared, economies have grown and diversified, technology has taken off, and trade has expanded to an incredible degree. Of course we need analysts who can focus on the facts, the numbers, the trends, the uptick and the downswing. I get that. It's fine, even good (although, as we're seeing, it can all too easily become a sealed system that plays craps with the rest of us).

But I'm talking about the guys who write books. Not How To books about the stock market; books with titles like A Farewell to Alms. Philosophical economics.

Because, you see, the philosophical dimension of--well, just about everything--is what we've lost as the arts and sciences have developed, specialized, and diverged. Once upon a time, there were no biologists, chemists, physicists, economists, psychologists, etc.--there were philosophers, natural philosophers, natural historians. Such a broad scope allowed for greater vision (in certain ways) than what we have now.

This point can perhaps be better illustrated through a good old compare/contrast exercise. Here we go:

A Farewell to Alms is a book by an academic who studies economic history. It purports, in its introduction, to explain a) why the Industrial Revolution happened when and how it did (apparently one of the great smoking guns of economic history), b) how this phenomenon is actually the result of long, long trends in history rather than a concatenation of incidental factors, and c) why socioeconomic inequality persists after that Revolution--particularly the fact that the people of the poorest countries are actually worse off than they were in the Stone Age.

However, the book fails utterly to do this. The author spends endless pages on minute details of statistics, lists of numbers, huge amounts of tables and near-incomprehensible graphs--largely, I believe, because he's trying to impress "real" economists. He tries to struggle through and actually answer his own questions, which are really not numerical matters--they are best dealt with through broad analysis and some decent research, some of which would be the kind of data he deals with (there's only so many data points on the price of English vs. Polish cotton you need in a chapter, really) and some of which would not.

Significantly, the notion of culture or notions of labor within different societies as a potential factor peeks through his tortured analysis (in about as good a shape as cheese would be after forcing it through a screen door--you know what it is, but you wouldn't want to touch it). Of course, because this sort of thing isn't his purview (because only Western Europe has economic history, natch), he has no idea how to tackle it and talks about the productivity of Indian loom workers vs. British ones. Rather than getting at any larger points about cultural notions of work, the workplace, the separation of work and private life, and time, he basically perpetuates the racist and colonial idea that a British man is worth ten Indians and closes the book with no real conclusion.

(When I finished this book I threw it to the other end of the couch. Can you tell?)

By contrast, we have Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen. Sen is a Nobel Prize winner, for the record, and I can see why.

Sen's book tackles the notion of "developing nations" and the way the institutions involved view and measure development. Generally, development is measured by GNP per capita (basically the wealth of a nation divided by its population). When that number goes up, we're doing good here, folks.

Sen argues that this measure and its similarly numeric companions can easily be misleading and, more importantly, are fundamentally misdirecting. "Development," he believes, is not a matter primarily of economic wealth but rather of "real freedoms" that people "have reason to value." That is to say, quality of life, health, longevity, freedom to work, freedom to marry and reproduce, etc are what constitutes development. (The "have reason to value" clause is key because it allows for the fact that ambitions and values can and should vary based on culture, circumstances, and so on.) Obviously, greater wealth can provide greater freedom, but it does not guarantee it and it cannot necessarily engender it. A striking example is the fact that while African-Americans are inarguably wealthier than Sri Lankans or Keralans (Kerala is a poor province of India), they are on average much shorter-lived.

I think it's important to note here that "development" and "human development" are separate in institutional and official calculus. Development is measured by dollars; human development is measured by lifespan, childbirth mortality, and similar statistics. I think it's fundamentally wrong that these two things have come to be seen as different--what's the point of development if not to improve the lives of citizens? It is, of course, argued that economic development will lead to better quality of life, but as we have seen with the World Bank and the IMF, attempts at development on an economic basis that has consistently ignored culture and more human measures like those of human development has, so far, largely failed.

Mr. Sen's book is almost completely devoid of charts, tables, and graphs, and certainly does not delve into pricing and labor details the way that A Farewell to Alms does. Yet it is not only a better read and a more coherent argument; it makes sense, in the common-sense way that Adam Smith's books did. It reflects our human reality, rather than the dogmas and conventions of financial analysis--a discipline that, in my opinion, should have been formally separated from the academic study of economics long ago.

I believe that financialism should certainly and always be grounded in the roots of economics; without that foundation, we end up with people making economic decisions and formulating economic policy that will not work positively or even functionally in the world. Indeed, I think that lack of grounding is how we have ended up with the pernicious economic doctrine and thinking we have today. Sen repeatedly cites Smith, Marx, and other greats of earlier economic thought as having considered humans, and the way we live, as more than rational economic pawns; and he argues that to consider people in the latter way--the way that economics has grown to view us--is not only false but also diminishing to humanity.

I remember a deep frustration, in reading this book, that it seems that so many economists--not just financial analysts or stock brokers, but people who deal with economic thought--seem to have lost these essential roots of their own discipline. This argument is (was--the book is several years old) important and reasonably novel in terms of development, but its basis is the same as that of the original works of economic thought. You can tell, because it's universally applicable (in my estimation). It's a perspective, a worldview, and it holds together. He says wryly at one point, and I agree wholeheartedly, that many of these people simply haven't read their Smith, or at least haven't done so with an open mind, and were they to do so their perspectives on what economics really is might change a great deal. The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, both written by Smith, have a great deal in common; and I firmly believe that much of the observation and thought that went into Moral Sentiments was essential to Smith's ability to invent a discipline that has grown to govern our world.


Economics is fundamentally the study of humanity. It studies human choice, human freedom, human action, human preference, and human resources (including ingenuity). The way these quantities are expressed is of their nature different in different circumstances and cultures, and economics' great theorists understood that (Weber is a strong example here). The modern economic establishment does humanity a disservice in focusing overmuch on numbers and disciplinary specialties; what's more, it often does a great many people serious harm. (This is why most people think economics is boring, but Freakonomics was a big hit--it gets at the stuff about economics that is fun, interesting, and familiar.) Economists would do well to step back and rekindle their inner philosophers if they truly have any interest in the quality of life for individuals, or for that matter in the beauties and subtleties of their discipline.