21.8.04

New At OSP

My first, and hopefully only, comment on the Swift Boat nonsense.

Well, I'm actually mulling over an expanded version of this as a column for the Scarlet or OSP. Although the hypothetical column would be less about "this Swift Boat controversy is stupid," and more about how it would have been better for Kerry to frame his campaign around his investigative projects as a Senator, since that would link in well with the storyline that the Bush administration is corrupt. Instead, he was petrified of being labeled "weak on defense," and so he decided to spend his time strutting around in his Purple Hearts. The war hero thing has been both a distraction from issues that matter and a failure on its own merits (Republicans still think he's weak on defense).
Stentor Danielson, 11:06, ,

20.8.04

What Has Marx Done For Us Lately?

I'm no Marxist, but I'm surrounded by them here at Clark. It's always interesting to see politically center/left criticisms of Marxism (as opposed to the positivist and postmodernist ones), because they seem to be addressing a theory with such different emphases than the Marxism I usually encounter. Take this article, linked to by Abiola Lapite. It goes through Marx's main predictions (in more detail than the usual "there hasn't been a revolution, and Marx didn't forsee the Nazis" summary judgement) and finds them all more or less wanting.

Modern-day Marxists, on the other hand, put little emphasis on Marxism as a predictive tool. A cynic would say that's because the evidence is rather embarassing. Marx himself seems to have generally been in agreement with the school of thought promoted today by the functionalists that society can be studied as an object in the same way that the natural sciences study their respective objects. You simply observe and derive predictive laws about your field. What the article refers to as the "strong" version of historical materialism (which modern Marxists would label "vulgar Marxism") is well-suited to this type of view. Social change is driven by the development of the forces of production, and society's knowledge of itself is a mere ideological superstructure with no causal power against the economic base.

The opposing view points out that social science is a reflexive enterprise, because its results become part of the object of study (i.e., society learns the results of social science and bases future action on that knowledge). This makes a society a slippery object of study, and social science becomes as much about critique as it is about explanation. Perhaps because of functionalism's affinities with bourgeois liberal thought, modern Marxists have signed on to the reflexivist project. It's not a move without textual support, given Marx's pithy statement in his early Theses on Fuerbach that "the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." The stronger your reflexivism -- and Marxists often hold a very strong version, in order to more adequately highlight the ideological failings of bourgeois functionalists and positivists -- the less possible it is to make any useful predictions about the future. What Marxists do instead is focus on finding points of attack for oppressed people and social movements.

Whatever the merits of Marxism as such (and I'm sometimes hard-pressed to identify what is uniquely Marxist in a lot of modern self-labeled Marxism, besides a tendency to blame capitalism for all our ills and to claim Marx as the source of whatever fuzzy and irrelevant ontological claims one is making), there are some interesting things that have come out of some of the Marxist writing that I've read. Take for example my reaction to this bit in the aforementioned article:

Capitalism developed spontaneously and organically from the spread of commerce. Nobody planned it and it did not need an all-embracing ideology, whereas socialism was an ideological construction. Ultimately, capitalism is human nature at work—that is, man's greediness allowed to follow its course—whereas socialism is an attempt to institutionalize and enforce fraternity.

It has been Marxist writers who have pointed out to me the way that capitalism* was planned -- not in the kind of detail that the Soviet bureaucrats aimed at, but planned nonetheless. To get off the ground, capitalism required the forcible and premeditated enclosure of private property, carried out in England at the behest of the incipient sheep barons. The integration of colonial posessions into the capitalist system was likewise a deliberate installation of capitalism. For example, Britain imposed cash-only taxes on its African posessions in order to break down traditional economic systems and force people into the wage labor market, while in India they implemented a selective mix of protectionism and free trade in order to goose enterprises based back home. The ideology driving this was not as doctrinaire as Leninism, but it existed, rooted in the classical liberalism of Locke, Smith, and Mill. As for capitalism being human nature at work, Marxists have made much of the fact that the behavior of capitalist entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers is historically specific and learned. To describe it as simply humans' greedy nature unleashed is a bit of ideological apologetic that ignores the complicated set of norms of trust and proper behavior that allow capitalism to function.

*Though it should be noted that Marxists and libertarians tend to speak past each other when they use the words "capitalism" and "socialism." To Marxists, whatever system we have in place now is the essence of capitalism -- any government interference, no matter how extensive, is regarded as part and parcel of what the system requires. Libertarians, on the other hand, would reserve unqualified use of the label "capitalism" for a Hayekian utopia. Socialism, meanwhile, is to a modern Marxist a sort of nebulous something else. It's certainly not what the Soviets had, which Marxists describe as a sort of ultra-capitalism (on the theory that if capitalism is oppressive, then the oppressiveness of the Soviet regime is evidence that it must be capitalistic). Libertarians, of course, are only too happy to agree with the USSR that it was a socialist country.
Stentor Danielson, 21:39, ,

19.8.04

Trackback

If you've been wondering why I have a Haloscan logo under "Acknowledgements," it's because a month or so ago I tried to implement trackback using their service, but couldn't get it to work and wound up just giving up. Now it seems to be all ready to go. I'm debating switching my comments over as well, since Yaccs goes down rather more frequently than I'd like. So now the one person a month who links to me can send a trackback ping as well.
Stentor Danielson, 17:37, ,

Nader Haters

I can't think of any real way to measure this, but my subjective observation is that many Democrats hate Ralph Nader more than they hate George W. Bush. The volume of Bush hatred is far greater, of course, because W has given us more to work with. But with regard to intensity of hate, I think Nader comes out on top. It's sort of an irrational sounding situation, since Nader hate is derivative of Bush hate -- Democrats only hate Ralph because his candidacy helped Bush win in 2000 and makes it more likely that he will win again in 2004.

One reason, I think, is a sense of betrayal. Democrats knew all along that Bush wasn't going to do what they wanted. Nader, on the other hand, seems like he ought to be an ally -- yet he stabbed the Democrats in the back. In the worst cases this feeling manifests as an air of entitlement -- Nader's votes rightfully belong to the Democrats yet have been stolen from them. Bush's votes, meanwhile, are either lost causes (true conservatives) or won fairly on the field of battle (swing voters).

Because Nader and his supporters are (at least from the Democrats' perspective) fellow travelers in the realm of policy, they seem like more rational beings than hardcore Bush voters. There's little point in hating people so brainwashed with conservative ideology that they would support Bush -- it's like hating an earthquake or a crocodile. But Nader supporters seem like they ought to know better. Hence the desperate rehashing of the same strategic voting argument, in the hopes that its logic (it convinced the Democrats in question, after all) will sink in. Bush hatred, on the other hand, gives up on argument and skips straight to ridicule and snark. (Some of the same desperate persuasion-by-repetition comes out in the head-shaking over why libertarians vote Republican. But it's muted by a lack of a sense of entitlement to libertarian votes, and libertarians' lack of a figurehead personality for hate to crystallize around.)
Stentor Danielson, 17:04, ,

Climate Suffering

Europe 'Must Adapt On Climate' Europeans must learn how to live with a changing climate as well as seeking to limit its effects by cutting emissions, the European Environment Agency says. ... The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests the global average temperature could on present trends be from 1.4 to 5.8C warmer in 2100 than in 1990. The EEA says the comparable temperature increase for Europe is between 2 and 6.3C.

Grist bills the EEA report as showing that "Europe will suffer worse, and sooner, than other parts of the world from climate change." I found that a surprising claim, given that the standard view is that climate change will hurt people in the developing world most. But as it turns out, Grist's phrasing was not quite right. The report shows that Europe will experience greater warming. We already knew that climate change will be greatest in temperate zones (though some secondary effects, such as rising sea levels, would be more evenly distributed). But greater climate change does not necessarily mean greater suffering. Suffering is a combination of exposure and vulnerability. By a stroke of luck, countries in the temperate zone not only contribute the most to causing climate change and experience the most climate change, but are also the richest and therefore the most able to adapt to climate change. It's a lack of adaptability that leaves the largely tropical developing world at a disadvantage in the suffering department.
Stentor Danielson, 15:54, ,

18.8.04

Keyes Vs. God

I've made my first, and probably only, comment on the Illinios Senate race over at OSP.
Stentor Danielson, 14:25, ,

Lock Your Doors

J. Puma asks why people lock their doors:

Okay, so, when you're locking your doors, you are acting under the assumption that *at least* 51% of the individuals who might pass your house will attempt to enter. You're locking the doors because you're pretty sure that more people would try to break in and steal stuff or harm you than not. You're assuming bad intentions in at least 51% of the population of your neighborhood, town, city. ... Wanna know what the actual rate is? According to Bureau of Justice statistics, the actual chance (as of 2002) that someone would break into your house and steal your stuff is . . . 2.77%.

Where is he getting this 51% figure? To do risk calculations, you multiply the chance of each outcome by its magnitude. So let's say I would experience 10,000 units of harm if someone did come into my house and steal my stuff. At about a 3% chance of that happening, that's an expected value of -300 units if I leave my door unlocked. The other option is locking the door. Let's say I experience 10 units of harm from locking my door due to the hassle of having to get my keys out every time I come or go. Since I'll get that harm every time, the chance of it happening is 100%, making the expected value -10. So it's -300 versus -10 -- clearly locking the door is the smart choice, given even that small chance of robbery. Of course, the numbers I plugged in are ex recta, but they're in the right ballpark (being robbed is far worse than having to lock your door), and they illustrate the right way to do these calculations.

But really, the expected value of locking your door is -310, because the 3% statistic that Puma offers is the chance of being robbed in a society where door-locking is common. It doesn't tell us how much higher the rate would be if people routinely left their doors unlocked. It seems quite plausible that locked doors deter people from burglary by making it not worth their while to try to break in (there's at least one guy who's been seen walking around the Union Station parking lot testing car doors, looking for ones that are unlocked). They probably deter a good deal of crime just in the planning stages -- people don't seriously consider stealing because they figure the doors will be locked. So if you leave your own door unlocked and have no problems, you may just be free-riding on the door-locking of your neighbors, which creates the impression in potential burglars' minds that all doors are likely to be locked. Puma seems to suggest that there aren't many people in this middle group who would be deterred by a lock -- either you're a hardened criminal who will smash the window, or you're a law-abiding citizen who wouldn't take anything even if the door was wide open. I find it hard to believe that the increase in burglary due to widespread door-unlocking would be so small as to make the expected value of being robbed after not locking your door less than the expected value of locking your door plus the expected value of being robbed anyway. The BJS statistics seem to back me up on this, as rates of theft (taking stuff when you have a legal right to be in the house) are four times higher than those of burglary (when you have to enter illegally). I find it hard to believe that moral qualms about trespassing, rather than the physical barriers to entry presented by things like locks, explain all of that difference.

Puma also suggests that the expected outcome of door-locking is really much higher than the small allowance I made for the hassle of getting your keys out. He argues that it cultivates a culture of distrust that is extremely damaging to ourselves and others. There is something to that. But in my mind there's not as much there as Puma thinks. Part of the reason is the habitual nature of door-locking. If anywhere, then here in Main South Worcester, the pragmatic calculation of door-locking weighs in favor of it. So I always lock my house and car. But the other weekend I was visiting a friend in rural Vermont, and I still locked my car. Was I terrified that her family might take my car, or that there was some burglar prowling the woods? Of course not. Reaching for the lock was automatic, a habit divorced from all feelings of distrust. Even here in Worcester, locking is largely habitual. I never see a neighbor or passerby (an adult one, at any rate) and wonder whether they might want to make off with my car or computer.

It's not merely the increased distrust (however justified it may be) of modern society that's the issue here. It's also the increased importance of private property. On the one hand, the negative utility of losing our stuff is higher than it would have been for people in the past, because we're more attached to it. On the other hand, we draw a strong line between the private and public spheres. Locking the door is not just a pragmatic precaution. It's also a ritual of sorts, signalling and reinforcing the demarcation between the home and the outside world.
Stentor Danielson, 10:45, ,

16.8.04

Bwuh?

For weird commentary on gay marriage, it's hard to beat this:

The Tragedy Of The McGreevey Marriage ... There are two kinds of gay men, those who, amid strong homosexual inclination, still harbor an attraction to women, and those who harbor none. Studies show that the overwhelming number of gay men are, like James McGreevey, in the former category. They are capable of having sex with a woman, and indeed 90 percent of gay men admit to having done so. It is for this reason that society should not legalize gay marriage and elevate it to the same plane as heterosexual marriages, because there is then no incentive for these men, who are in essence bisexual, to make an effort to direct their erotic focus toward women and raise their heterosexual attraction above their same-sex one. ... there is nothing cruel in encouraging men who have an attraction to both sexes to try and focus their sexual desire on women rather than on men. Indeed, gay men who are attracted to women usually make much better husbands and fathers since they are usually softer, gentler, more domesticated and more nurturing than their heterosexual counterparts. Indeed, if men with attraction to both sexes are not encouraged to explore their heterosexual attraction, we are condemning millions of women to lives of loneliness without husbands since the much higher proportion of gay men to lesbians creates a strong numerical imbalance between the sexes. ... But then there are men who find the idea of sex with a woman positively repulsive. Religious individuals and moralists who encourage gay men with absolutely no attraction to women to enter into the heterosexual institution of marriage are not only unrealistic, they are cruel, cold and heartless. The practice is immoral and deeply destructive to the marriage's participants, as well as to the children who follow. For these men, civil unions should be legally available as a viable alternative, and I find it absurd that it is religious conservatives who are the main obstacles to gay civil unions. -- via Mouse Words

So we should inhibit and stigmatize homosexuality enough that men who have even a little opposite-sex attraction go the heterosexual route, but not so much that they have to hide their un-acted-on feelings, and we should have civil unions only for people who are 100% gay.

If the point of encouraging bisexual men to marry women is the fear that so many straight women will be left single, then it seems like the Rabbi ought to encourage women to meet them halfway -- any woman with some same-sex attraction ought to get involved in a lesbian relationship, so as not to take men away from the straight women who need them.
Stentor Danielson, 10:29, ,