A cottage industry of articles has arisen to take jabs at "identity politics", claiming that it Balkanizes a pluralistic democracy and cannot unite diverse voters. Some attribute Clinton's loss to identity politics and claim that identity politics should be abandoned if Democrats want to form a winning coalition.
Identity Politics = Identity Advocacy + Precision Governance
To understand whether or not "identity politics is dead", as some claim, first we need to understand what exactly "identity politics" is and is not. For the separate consideration of people with identities voicing their needs and the governance that addresses the unique needs of people with identities, It helps to separate "identity politics" into identity advocacy and precision governance. After all, the requests of the governed and the actions of the government are held to different standards, the former allowed full liberty to have their own opinion and the latter required to stay within legal limits of power defined in our Constitution.
"Identity advocacy" is the direct advocacy for government intervention on behalf of individuals of particular racial, gender, religious, ethnic or other identities. While the motivations of citizens' requests are inextricable from their identities, their advocacy is not identity advocacy until its highlighted problems and/or proposed solutions are for the explicit or implicit purpose of their identity group.
There do not and should never exist limits to advocacy based on a person's identity, and often identity advocacy can illuminate shortcomings of or injustices in our union that citizens of other identities are not exposed to. For instance, Black Lives Matter has illuminated the shocking rates of police violence against Blacks, something that white people might never notice otherwise, and consequently motivated many white people to prioritize criminal justice reform. Identity advocacy is not a bad thing - it is, in fact, a very good thing for people to voice their unique needs in a representative government, as hearing about people's unique needs in the government-triage of our pluralistic democracy may allow for precision governance that helps precisely those who are ailing.
The cowboys like Ammon Bundy who occupied the Malheur Wildlife Refuge are ailing from a combination of falling beef prices, federal acquisition of lands near their locales, and burdensome environmental regulations that limit cattle grazing on those federal lands. The Sioux in North Dakota are suffering from a pipeline built up-river that threatens their water supplies and a U.S. government that neglects their sovereignty and territory as laid out in past treaties. Women are suffering from rape, unequal pay, sexual assault and microaggressions that inhibit their ability to thrive. These identity advocates point out specific grievances; if and, if so, how these grievances are addressed is fair game for platform modification by any representative or party in power looking to secure votes.
Identity advocacy points out problems faced by identity groups, but, as noted by the failure of Occupy Wall Street protests, identity advocates' movements are made more effective when they propose solutions for their problems. Proposed solutions are either social or political - either we're trying to convince people to behave differently, or we're trying to convince the government to change its policy. Any individual is free to propose social or political solutions for their grievances, but some proposals and some modes of proposing are more successful than others - when trying to persuade, the customer is always right.
To examine the interplay of social and political solutions, consider the conservation of elephants. The political solutions include ivory bans and punishments for those involved in the ivory trade. The social solutions break up into two categories: getting people to support an elephant-friendly economy by not buying ivory, and building a coalition of allies who will march, motivate others, and vote in favor of elephant-friendly policies.
Identity advocacy can be more effective if it can carefully balance social and political solutions. The political solutions must be reasonable - Pro-elephant policies that prohibit people from killing any animal is not reasonable given the abundance of meat-eaters in our society, so, while some vegetarians would support such a policy, it's more effective to keep proposals within the bounds of what's attainable, such as bans on imported ivory and punishments for ivory traffickers. For social solutions, it's ineffective to tell anybody who is not an ardent environmentalist that they are "world-killers" and immoral; it is far more effective to discover common experiences and goals - maybe they don't like elephants, but they do like giraffes - and recruit people based not on the in-group morality but on out-group appeal. After all, almost all racial, religious and gender identity groups are minorities, so they will need to build coalitions of people who are not members of their own identity; if they wish to succeed they will benefit greatly from extending beyond their own identity group's morality and internally-effective arguments (that is, arguments that resonate with in-group but not out-group folk) in order to build a coalition and change people who are not members of their own. Inter-group communication is made possible by the fact that, despite our identities, we are human beings and often we have experiences that are analogous.
Ammon Bundy's cattle ranching business is struggling, so he and others propose the political solutions: a combination of reducing the federal acquisition of land and releasing the restrictions on cattle grazing and other extractive and agricultural uses of those lands. Ammon Bundy et al. also attempt to build a coalition by increasing their visibility through a tense, gun-loaded occupation of a wildlife reserve; guns on a wildlife refuge are arguably an ineffective way to build the sympathy of others outside those who already support them. Far more effective for Ammon Bundy might have been to get people to love cowboy culture, to lodge a peaceful protest by showing cowboys on horses rounding up cattle and show cops kicking the cattle and scaring the horses (thereby appealing to our common, human dislike of violent people). The Sioux are suffering from a pipeline that threatens their water supply on land that, according to treaty with the U.S. government, should be theirs, so they propose the political solutions of stopping pipeline construction and the social solutions of building awareness of Native American sovereignty and suffering so that a coalition of non-Native Americans can come to their aid in this and other battles.
Identity-based advocacy is the nature of advocacy in a pluralistic democracy and the proposed political solutions bring the promise of precision governance, defined as carefully crafted policy designed to aid precisely those who need it. However, any effort at identity-based governing must channel identity advocacy into the bounds of legal and, in other manners, acceptable limits. The construction of a policy for the explicit purpose of protecting an identity group may often violate the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, but the threat of identity-based governing comes not from the explicit favors for identity groups, but for the implicit or effective favors that are recognized as such by the constituents of an identity group not being favored. Even in constitutional democracies without an equal protection clause, precision governance based on identities runs the risk of making government policies appear as arbitrary in-group favoritism at best, or out-group oppression at worst. Identity advocates are wise to consider this in their social and political proposals and find ways to either exchange favors with all groups in accordance to their need or draft political proposals that, although initiated to help a particular identity group, are phrased in such a way as to admit any other identity group should the other groups find themselves in a similar need.
The left argues that forcing or even allowing teaching creationism in public school biology classes is a policy with the implicit intent and overall effect of favoring Christian theology over scientific theory. Teaching creationism in public schools would seem less particular to Christians if, instead of creationism, the Christian advocates suggested a "religion" class and, instead of just Christianity, they advocated the teaching of other religions; absent such concessions, the teaching of creationism in public schools is an attempt by Christians to curry favor for their identity group and theirs alone. The right argues that affirmative action is a policy with the implicit intent and overall effect of favoring non-whites in publicly funded schools. Affirmative action will seem less particular insofar as any group that claims under-representation and/or some agreeable measure of historical oppression is allowed similar benefits; if it were possible for white conservative Christians to demonstrate their low acceptance rates into Ivy Leagues relative to their share of the U.S. population, a more equitable affirmative action would factor this into account. Attempts at precision government are always sneaking their toes over the line of equal protection, but it's clear that both identity advocacy and identity-based governance is a bipartisan game.
Criticisms of Liberal Identity Politics
If identity politics is bipartisan, why are liberals being blamed for identity politics? While part of this criticism is unfair and due to a restricted definition of identity politics to include only the liberal arms of identity politics, it's more productive to seek the substance of the criticisms instead of discounting it based on the superficial confusion of identity politics. The most vocal critics of identity politics point to "social justice warriors" (SJWs) and Black Lives Matters (BLM), so let's start there. Analyzing these two movements in the paradigm presented above suggests that liberals' problem is not "identity politics" but instead a more nuanced mix of poor identity advocacy and missed opportunities for identity-based governing coalitions.
In particular, liberal identity advocates are slow to accept that bad apples obstruct coalition building in identity politics (instead preferring to blame others for judging a movement based on bad apples), tending to reflexively fight instead of include requests for admission of other identity groups, proposing political solutions that are unconstitutional or perceived as designed for the exlusive benefit of one identity group, and pushing for political solutions to social problems for which precision governance is inappropriate. Liberal representatives are failing synthesize these advocates' positions for precision governance into policy visions that include members of other identities (such as rural and/or white, working-class Americans).
1) Bad Apples
The first set of criticisms stems from bad apples. It's important to know that a movement will often be judged by its worst members, not just its formal positions, especially by those who initially have some disagreement and if that movement is composed of members who are not part of the critics' identities. Black Lives Matter critics point to a few bad apples as their reason for not supporting the movement, often citing riots (leaving behind the black/white riot/protest assignment bias in the news) and a few nasty signs as having shaped their perspectives that BLM is inciting racial tensions (never mind that some of this perception is manufactured by fake news from Russia). A few Muslims commit acts of terror and suddenly the movement to stop American imperialism in the middle east is branded as "hating America" and a fiery Islamophobia ensues. A few cowboys take over a wildlife refuge with guns and suddenly all cowboys and "hicks" are exempt from liberal sympathy. Police in some locales shoot innocent black men, generating criticism of police everywhere in the U.S.
Movements and organizations are judged by both their message as well as its members, a sad fact of humans' tendency to stereotype to simplify their world. Until the disease of stereotyping is cured, the imperfections of human nature are best recognized and worked with. We can be the change we wish to see - take every action as limited to precisely those who commit it. However, many people, conservatives and liberals, blacks and whites alike, will always judge out-groups by the actions of the few most offensive members, and use such judgements as reasons for not approaching or working with the out groups. Corporations have evolved to deal with this human tendency: when a twitter storm erupts over an offensive comment by one of their employees, they quickly fire twitter-stormed sexist/racist/homophobe in their ranks because they know the importance of preserving their brand. Instead of saying "that's just one employee! Look at our webpage and our official statements", they combine their official statement with a denunciation of the offending member and a re-orientation within the company for how to behave in accordance to the company's values. Identity advocacy groups must be aware that their brand is represented by their members, and members must be aware that they are representatives of their movements' brand. When it comes to coalition building, the customer is always right and the art of the sale is deciding which people are probable customers.
Thus, one body of critiques against liberal identity politics stems from conservatives' reluctance to agree with liberal policy that is rather lazily reinforced by pointing to the bad apples in liberal identity advocacy movements instead of rising above the mob and making more substantial critiques about the proposed social or political solutions. Liberals (and conservatives like Ammon Bundy) can improve on this by encouraging compassion, peace and kindness in their protesters. The Sioux at Standing Rock have been remarkably effective by taking control of their movement's purpose: they instruct all who join that this movement is a peaceful, ceremonial prayer to protect water (a clear, crisp statement of the movement's intent) and that if you can't say "I love you" to the police, you should stay at camp and not participate in the direct actions with police officers. There are bad apples who agitate police, but they are "called-in" (not called-out) - and incomers are encouraged to always call-in people who stray from the peaceful intent of the movement - thereby preserving the peaceful intent and appearance of the movement. When blogging, tweeting, protesting or talking in support of some movement, liberals should keep this in mind - consider whether your words are matching the compassion and message that makes for a successful movement.
2) "But what about us?"
A second reason for the criticisms against liberal identity politics stems from ineffective/damaging reactions to what-about-isms. Cops are shooting black people... but what about cops being shot? If we care about shootings, shouldn't we care about cops, too? Black people are poor and suffering from public health disparities... but what about rural white Americans who are suffering from increasing mortality rates due to depression and opioid addiction? If we care about public health disparities, shouldn't we care about rural white Americans, too? Often, the response is "that's not the point!" and "you're not an ally!", commonly resulting in defensiveness and an audience (the what-about-ers) tuning out the identity advocates as only interested in themselves and not some broader coalition (liberals do this to conservatives, too, for example when we respond to pro-lifers by saying "what about poor people and refugees?", and use the defensiveness of pro-lifers to argue that they really are not pro-life).
What-about-isms are red herrings, and attacking the red herring is not a good strategy. At worst, the red herring is someone's deliberate effort to derail the conversation, and attacking them does in fact derail the conversation and make the identity advocates look narrow-minded and self-interested. At best, the red herring is someone from a different identity group who is also suffering - such people present a unique opportunity for coalition building by showing compassion and drawing analogy between suffering groups. Perceived out-group what-about-isms are often opportunities for a bigger in-group. We should be quick to recognize people who are also hurting, have compassion for them, and find ways to help them, too. Compassion is the ultimate glue for human coalitions. Verified claims of suffering should be met with compassion - doing so will show that the identity advocates are not interested in only themselves, but are interested in a better world and will work with others towards meeting their own needs. In defining a larger in-group, precision governance can be broadened to include more agreeable proposals - moving from stopping cops from shooting black men to more general criminal justice reform, mental health services for police, and violence-prevention programs is a move for an overall better world, made more probable by a bigger coalition. Other identity advocates should be embraced insofar as it doesn't directly conflict with the needs of the original identity group.
3) Insistence on unconstitutional or biased precision governance
A third body of criticisms against liberal identity politics is substantial disagreement about the constitutionality of proposed political solutions. Most notably are the criticisms that college students' requests for safe spaces amount to restrictions on free speech, that identity-based roommate requests violates equal protection, and that policies restricting microaggressions disproportionately target whites and men and are thereby potentially unconstitutional, absent a broader definition of microaggressions that does not name particular identity groups and which has the capacity to recognize as microaggressions actions and words that subordinate whites, men, and others. These criticisms are substantive critiques and should be taken a bit more seriously when contemplating political solutions to identity advocacy. The criticisms are concerned that the proposed political solutions of identity advocates are intended to explicitly or implicitly favor the advocating group at the expense of another.
There are three ways to address substantive disagreements about proposed political solutions.
The first, and least recommended, is to disregard them and attempt to tyrannize over the opponents by constructing a merciless majority. A direct sprint for the levers of power will cause a previously peaceful society to begin a zero-sum struggle for power and tyranny, despite the existence of more amicable alternatives; liberals could gain what they see as justice but, in the words of Hume, it would be obtained "at the expense of nobler virtues and more favorable circumstances".
The second solution is to modify the proposed political solutions to ensure they are more inclusive. If one wants safe spaces for women, minorities and non-hetero folk, then they should consider providing safe spaces to men, whites, Christians, and homophobes, or otherwise define their boundaries of what groups are tolerable in a manner that is unambiguous and agreeable to most. A rule that "we tolerate people who tolerate others" defeats itself by either hypocrisy, as it does not tolerate the intolerant, or impotence, as it is powerless to not tolerate the immoral. Liberals can try to construct palatable, well-defined norms on what they do and do not tolerate. Microaggressions, for instance, can be defined in a way that is identity-neutral, or the qualifying characteristics of an "oppressed group" should be written so as to include the possibility of reverse-oppression or oppression of groups in the future which are currently the oppressor. The challenge with such rule-writing, however, is that the rules become so long and carefully written in an attempt to be precise yet fair that they might ultimately forbid everything or accomplish nothing.
The third solution is to seek normative social solutions instead of formal political ones. "Social justice", after all, is inherently social, and not all disputes need to be resolved with policy. If a daughter feels oppressed saying prayers at the dinner table of her parents' house, it's unreasonable for her to request a law banning prayer at dinner tables in her house, but very appropriate for her to engage with her family, voice her needs, and attempt to build a coalition supportive of her wishes to not say prayer at the dinner table. Communities can arrive at their own rules that accomodate the wishes of aggrieved identity groups without having to pull the levers of federal policy-making. Social justice movements are attempting to re-define social norms for what's tolerable and what's not, with about the same deep divisions and frustratingly slow progress as the age-old debate about whether the toilet seat should be left up or down. A law for how to leave a toilet seat would undermine respect for laws, but social movements can raise awareness of others needs and change social norms about how one ought to behave (if you're a man, I encourage leaving the toilet seat down; if you're a woman, I encourage leaving the toilet seat up - such kindness makes the world go 'round and is precisely that "nobler virtue and more favorable circumstance" one wishes to have).
Of course, the social justice issues at college campuses have higher-stakes than dinner-table prayer and toilet seats. Universities are a vital organ in our political and economic system, a place where the youth are trained into professionals and the intellectual community analyzes and reacts to the behaviors of powerful political or economic entities. Social justice warriors (SJWs) see college professors and sometimes the entire colleges as an 'bottleneck institution' separating promising youth from fulfilling employment. Microaggressions, hate speech, racially-biased curricula, dorms, and even the use of pronouns are seen - and sometimes empirically demonstrated - as obstacles to the career development of promising young minorities attempting to access the same opportunities as their peers. Given the amount of public funding received even by private schools, there's room for some policies that ensure a more level playing field at the bottleneck institution. However, the point remains: not every social grievance can be resolved through political reforms.
4) Democrats' failure to translate identity advocacy into a clear party platform.
While identity advocates are free to advocate for their own policies, however extreme they may be, political parties must conceive ways to synthesize the grievances of a plurality of identity advocates into constitutional and palatable platforms.
Republicans have attempted to do this with Reagan's slogan that "the government which governs best is that which governs least", thereby justifying lower taxes (appealing to their business and rich constituents), more delegation of powers to states (appealing to Christians who want to teach creationism or outlaw gay marriages and white nationalists who want to suppress votes of non-whites), less federal regulations on public land (appealing both to businesses and the Ammon Bundy's of the world), and more. A careful observer, however, knows that the Republicans' slogan is not a primary principle of their governance but rather a convenient thing for them to say repeatedly, as they are also composed of geopolitical hawks and military-identity advocates who grew up in DODD schools and consequently support a very hefty military budget that allows the U.S. to effectively govern a great deal abroad and enforce an international order - a far cry from a government which governs least.
The Democrats problem is not identity politics, but the failure to construct a platform that unifies their diverse interests, including the white working class and rural voters that they lost to Trump. A long list of what amount to political earmarks is not a platform but a confusing Frankenstein ideology that can quickly contradict itself. Providing protection for blacks against police, support for police in their dangerous job, free-speech on college campuses and restrictions on paid-speech from corporations in public elections are all noble goals, but they are not a platform.
My favorite example of a platform for liberalism is provided by Pope Francis: we must work together for human dignity. Democrats can put themselves as the party of human dignity - placing the priorities of people above profits, unions above corporations. A party of human dignity recognizes the indignity of poverty, police brutality, police officers' traumatic work conditions and lack of psychological support, student debt in an era when college is a necessity for economic mobility, environmental degredation, climate change, national debt handed to our children, accellerating entitlement costs, and - yes - the plight of the white working class.
Allowing the rich to pay a lower share of taxes than the money they earn while poor people beg on the streets and poor schools can't boost their students to college is an affront to human dignity. Stereotypes of Blacks as criminals, police brutality against and harsher sentences for black men is an affront to human dignity. Building a pipeline under the Missouri by use of eminent domain is an affront to human dignity. Allowing well-financed corporate megaphones to out-shout individual voices in a presidential campaign is an affront to the human dignity. Allowing corporations to benefit off American economic and political stability and then leave their workers broke and out-of-work when convenient for them is an affront to human dignity, a corporate exploitation of our American generosity. Paying our mothers, daughters and sisters nothing while simultaneously failing to punish the creeps who sexually assault them on the way to the office or in the board meeting is an affront to human dignity.
A "Human Dignity" platform is just one example of a platform that synthesizes myriad interest groups and identity advocacy groups into one Democratic party. It will certainly have its limits - for instance when Republicans claim that prioritizing endangered species over endangered ranchers is an affront to human dignity - but it can allow Democrats to represent their coalition, with an argument that appeals to many, without excluding out-groups by apparent favoritism of vocal identity-advocacy groups like BLM, environmentalists, feminists, and more.
In Conclusion
Identity politics is not dead - it's misunderstood or misrepresented.
All politics are "identity" politics once members of an advocacy group begin to self-identify based on their shared grievances. Suppose the world started afresh with no memory of the historical events which define contemporary identity groups but the "clean slate" had the exact same political and socioeconomic circumstances we see today: some people would feel unfairly persecuted by cops and imprisoned, so they advocate for criminal justice reform; some people would feel disenfranchised by barriers to voting and advocate for voter rights; some people would feel socially excluded from college due to a variety of cultural barriers and advocate for more equitable admissions and treatment in college campuses. As all of these advocates organize and see themselves again and again, they would begin to recognize that they all have more melanin in their skin, or some other defining characteristic, and begin to self-identify based on their shared experiences (and others, clearly, perceive them based on the melanin concentrations in their skin). This thought experiment is not to neglect the historical processes (slavery, Jim Crow, the heritability of wealth & opportunity) which have amplified the prominence of contemporary racial/ethnic minorities' identities in the US, but rather to argue that "identity politics" is an inevitable, self-organized social phenomenon of grouping and self-identifying based on shared grievances.
If people's grievances are less extreme, they are less likely to self-identify based on those grievances - for example, "Vietnam Vet" is a facet of many folk's personal and political identity largely due to the intensity of their shared experiences, grievances and needs (mental health counseling, affordable healthcare, etc.), whereas "Blink 182 Fan" is not a very potent personal or political label due to a lack of shared experiences, grievances and needs. If the world started aggressively persecuting anybody who liked Blink 182 - denying them jobs, gerrymandering their votes, shouting slurs at them while they walked with their kids - then rest assured "Blink 182 Fan" would become an identity group. If you find identity politics distasteful, then you can either try to put your head in the sand (do nothing), suppress the identity group (the sprint for the lever of power you may regret later) or, more sustainably, you can try to address some of their needs by assisting coalition building and the translation of advocacy into social and political solutions.
Understanding identity politics can help us understand the mechanisms by which identity groups can enact change. Identity politics is comprised of identity advocacy and precision governance, and the distaste of liberal identity politics stems not from identity politics itself - as conservatives play "identity politics" with evangelicals, gun-rights advocates, white nationalists and more - but instead from a combination of unpalatable social solutions proposed by advocates, an inability of representatives to synthesize diverse requests of identity advocates into inclusive party platforms and political solutions, and sometimes outright out-group tribalism: racism, sexism and xenophobia.
Identity advocates can benefit from remembering the importance of managing their message like a business - the customer is always right and bad apples can ruin your business. Representatives of identity advocates can help by translating the needs of identity groups into viable policy solutions. Identity advocates, even if they perceive themselves as victims of oppression, may benefit by remaining open to building a broader coalition of supporters, especially when a legitimate, verifiable claim of "what about us?" is proposed to expand the scope of an identity advocacy movement - analogy and compassion are powerful tools to unite diverse coalitions.
Precise politics requires identity politics - identity advocacy of a specific problem in favor of a specific solution. In emergency medicine triage, responders are encouraged to advocate for their patient - such local situations need to be heard in order to more efficiently allocate resources. In political triage, identity politics can be utilized as an effective tool for precision governance in a complex world, but requires understanding the tools of identity advocacy and the limitations of identity-based governance.
Sunday, December 4, 2016
Friday, March 18, 2016
The Moving Goalposts of the Good Life - part 1
As a scientist, it's hard not to love Aristotle's approach to ethics. When considering the question: "what is the good life" for a human being, Aristotle went straight to the data and recognized the importance of first characterizing a "human being" using the empirical evidence. Humans, concluded Aristotle, don't just grow and move like plants and animals, respectively, but they also, unlike all other living things, rationalize, and so the good life for humans is to grow, move and, especially, reason well to act in accordance with virtue.
Aristotle did a damn good job for an ancient Greek. However, our empirical world has expanded and, consequently, our understanding of what makes a "human being" has *ahem* evolved since Aristotle's time. Any biologist or virtuous rational thinker with access to empirical evidence will tell you that, provided this world isn't the Matrix, humans evolved from chimps, chimps evolved from primates, primates from mammals, and so on to the base of the tree of life. All living things on Earth arose from a common ancestor, evolved, speciated and evolved some more. Out of this rotisserie of speciation, evolution, and extinction emerged a talkative bunch of apes that make tools, talk about themselves being human and moralize about the good life.
Over the next couple of posts, I'm going to entertain to what extent we can use modern biology to characterize human nature enough to postulate a good life for human beings and, if so, what is the good life? How are humans evolving with the rise of a rainforest of tools from iPhones to the internet, and how can we keep our sight on a good life in a changing world? All the while, we will beware the naturalist's fallacy of saying "because it is in our nature or evolutionary history, it is therefore good". Humans may have evolved psychological adaptations to allow us to murder, rape and be in polygamous relationships (as evidenced from the coronal ridge of the penis, which is remarkably good at uptaking competitors' sperm), but that doesn't mean it's good.
At best, I suspect that we can arrive at an ethical prescription combining some utilitarianism and enlightened self-interest with game-theoretic arguments for how humans react/interact and resource-consumption + innovation models for how human actions modify their environment. My hope is to avoid the worst, namely a modern eugenics somewhere near my current suspicions - a sad but honest realization that human nature is, as all evolutionary systems are, ultimately defined by a struggle for existence, a zero-sum competition between races or cultural groups, in which case perhaps the secret to a good life lies in finding peace with war: "may God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
Tentatively, I plan to hack into the forest of unanswered questions with the following branches of thought in sight:
1) What is a human and its environment?
2) How are humans and their environment changing?
3) How do human actions and ethics modify the human environment?
4) What is a good life for a living thing, given the environmental context in which it has evolved?
5) What are possible "ethically stable states" - ethics which, if adopted by enough people, produces a stable environment and some form of stable, good life for the humans evolving in that environment.
In short, this modern approach will attempt to reconsider the biological insight into the good life, given the evolving human biological, cultural, political and tool systems in which this good life should take place. Can we give any lasting advice to humans 2,000 years from now?
Aristotle did a damn good job for an ancient Greek. However, our empirical world has expanded and, consequently, our understanding of what makes a "human being" has *ahem* evolved since Aristotle's time. Any biologist or virtuous rational thinker with access to empirical evidence will tell you that, provided this world isn't the Matrix, humans evolved from chimps, chimps evolved from primates, primates from mammals, and so on to the base of the tree of life. All living things on Earth arose from a common ancestor, evolved, speciated and evolved some more. Out of this rotisserie of speciation, evolution, and extinction emerged a talkative bunch of apes that make tools, talk about themselves being human and moralize about the good life.
Over the next couple of posts, I'm going to entertain to what extent we can use modern biology to characterize human nature enough to postulate a good life for human beings and, if so, what is the good life? How are humans evolving with the rise of a rainforest of tools from iPhones to the internet, and how can we keep our sight on a good life in a changing world? All the while, we will beware the naturalist's fallacy of saying "because it is in our nature or evolutionary history, it is therefore good". Humans may have evolved psychological adaptations to allow us to murder, rape and be in polygamous relationships (as evidenced from the coronal ridge of the penis, which is remarkably good at uptaking competitors' sperm), but that doesn't mean it's good.
At best, I suspect that we can arrive at an ethical prescription combining some utilitarianism and enlightened self-interest with game-theoretic arguments for how humans react/interact and resource-consumption + innovation models for how human actions modify their environment. My hope is to avoid the worst, namely a modern eugenics somewhere near my current suspicions - a sad but honest realization that human nature is, as all evolutionary systems are, ultimately defined by a struggle for existence, a zero-sum competition between races or cultural groups, in which case perhaps the secret to a good life lies in finding peace with war: "may God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
Tentatively, I plan to hack into the forest of unanswered questions with the following branches of thought in sight:
1) What is a human and its environment?
2) How are humans and their environment changing?
3) How do human actions and ethics modify the human environment?
4) What is a good life for a living thing, given the environmental context in which it has evolved?
5) What are possible "ethically stable states" - ethics which, if adopted by enough people, produces a stable environment and some form of stable, good life for the humans evolving in that environment.
In short, this modern approach will attempt to reconsider the biological insight into the good life, given the evolving human biological, cultural, political and tool systems in which this good life should take place. Can we give any lasting advice to humans 2,000 years from now?
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Crossing the Social Justice Chasm
Okay, so this post is going to be incredibly sensitive so I want to start off with one thing, and if you start to get angry and upset and righteous, come back to this one thing: I want nothing more than a world in which all people are endowed with the same liberty, the same opportunity, happiness, quality of life, protection under the law, you name it. The question is: how do we get there?
I ask "how do we get there?" because it feels like we're not getting there. Instead of getting to that "city upon a hill", we seem to be seeing a fragmentation of the city into warring tribes. This is a problem I've wrestled with for years as waves of feminism have lapped against the white-sand shores of patriarchal norms, as Muslims were persecuted following 9/11, as black kids were getting shot, as latinos were sprinting away from extreme poverty and violence straight into a white-brick wall of xenophobia. The discussion has bubbled and popped, bubbled again into new life, evolved, and tensions rose and the movements bled, torn apart by their own internal disagreements.
In a way, this post is one of those internal disagreements. However, read carefully, this post is an olive branch and my sincere effort to bring people together, because I know Muslims, blacks and Latinos, Native Americans and a large set of overlapping, un-recognized types of victims (for example - I have a profound hearing loss and there are all kinds of norms - speak quietly, indoor voices etc. - that run contrary to the needs of the hard of hearing), and I know a bunch of men who were victims of bullying (I was part of this cycle, a bully who was bullied), who were socialized around white men to say things that make women and non-whites uncomfortable, and whose instinctive drives for love and sex are parasitized by infinitely many mosquitos of porn and ads of unrealistically sexy women. I know black people who talk differently around black people than around white people (but when they find out you've got a good taste in R&B and aren't afraid to sing and dance, they open up), Latinos who don't want to speak Spanish with gringos (but when they find out you love Latin America, they open up), White men who are hardened by norms they never invented and unintentionally perpetuate (but when they find out you appreciate some things they do, maybe an Irish play writer, a German song, or a French pastry, they open up).
Having seen and known these people, I'm often torn by the contemporary discussions of social justice that, I feel, are creating chasms where we need to be building bridges. My first experience of this effect came from the seminal Mansplaining article, where a guy in Aspen talks to a respectable lady from New York about a book that, it turns out, she wrote. It happens time and again that women are subordinated by men who assume the women don't know what's going on, and so the lady in New York used the gentleman in Aspen as a special example of this general pattern of subordination in speech. It was termed "Mansplaining", and then suddenly women everywhere had a word to place on the action.
I totally empathize with the woman - I have had countless dudes tell me ridiculous things that I know much more about (one guy insisted there were only three bald eagles ever in the state of New Mexico, one guy told me New Mexico was never a part of Mexico) - and if this would happen to me more regularly than it does, especially if it happened in my professional life, I would be writing a blog post about this pattern of behavior and trying to find out how we can fix it. I would've called it "sex-splaining" to humbly admit that it could go both ways, but whatever - that woman and I have a lot in common.
However, when I read this article, I couldn't help but also empathize with the man, and I think that is why, not standing entirely on one side or the other, I so consistently fall in the chasm on these social justice debates. The guy was living in Colorado, a wild-western state with a large number of Christians and a relatively recent urbanization. What's more, he was an older gentleman, so it's not like he read "The Smurfette Principle" in college. Heck, he probably never even read that article and might not even know what the word "mansplaining" is. Maybe he did feel more confident talking down to the woman because of his socialization under antiquated norms... or maybe he thought she was attractive and was excited and overly eager to share his knowledge on this one thing they have in common. I don't know, but I thought it was important to know this guy's motivations before judging his behavior. When I finished reading the article, I was grateful to have learned more about this common and subordinating interaction and now I am more careful about it in my personal life. However, I felt very uneasy about the straw "man" made of this Aspen dude.
Why was the lady in New York sure that this particular guy was a sexist jerk? Or even a jerk? More information about the intentions of the man is needed to know just how malicious this mansplaining is, because people come from different cultures and part of living in a pluralistic society is learning, to the extent possible, how we can live our own lives with our own norms about male-female interactions while letting other people live theirs. Would we charge a cheif of an Amazonian tribe with mansplaining? Doing so feels very culturally imperialistic, borderline fascist - why should people living elsewhere subscribe to our own norms? There are clear cases of black and white - other people can eat whatever (non-endangered-animal) food they want, but no matter what their cultures we will not tolerate murder or genocide. However, the etiquette of a man talking to a woman, insofar as this guy in Aspen was motivated by patriarchal self-perpetuation, seems like it should be fair for people to... well.. choose. Feminism is about choice, right? not limiting the scope of acceptable choices to what is deemed acceptable by feminists, but that principle of choice that any human can agree to.
The straw man in Aspen ticked me off, as did the gender biased term "mansplain" that arose from a straw man, and I argued about it with some people on facebook and finally shut up because it seemed impossible to explain that (1) we need to understand what the man is thinking if we want to fix it and (2) we shouldn't make a word that labels men as the only people who talk-down to women. However, many people saw my remarks as invalidating the NYC lady's experience and, while I wanted everyone to at least try to see the world through Aspen Dude's eyes, I didn't want my colleagues to think I'm a sexist ass (even if their opinions were, in my opinion, not fair). Ironically, when a woman named Lesley on xoJane made a (very well-written) argument to the same effect, it was embraced by many of those same people as "a good point" and proof that feminism marches along. We, the well-meaning social justice world, created a word that is gender-biased in an effort to eliminate gender biases, and it felt to me like that discussion was not open to input from men. In the process, that single article and that single word pushed the gender worlds farther apart by creating a culture that does not try to empathize with people different from them (in this case, men who were brought up with disagreeable social norms) - which is precisely the culture I think we need to fix.
The same thing happened when a friend of mine was accused of unwanted sexual penetration. Right now, consider your initial reaction to that statement "I (you note: white man) am upset because a friend of mine was accused of unwanted sexual penetration". If you reacted strongly to that statement, the hairs on your back raised immediately because (1) you assumed the friend was male, (2) you assume he is more likely guilty than not and (3) I'm part of a counter-progressive culture standing in the way of women's rights. It's possible that some people will stop reading immediately after hearing that statement, because their minds are already made up.
Well, it turns out that, after a thorough investigation by the school, it was discovered that the girl was accusing the guy because she didn't want to admit to her best friend that she willingly slept with her ex-boyfriend. So, it was easier to claim that she was raped than to admit to her friend that she had done something wrong.
My friend is very likely a marginal case in the world of sexual assaults. Sexual assault is incredibly awful, most accusations of sexual assault probably have some legitimacy behind them, and sexual assault is more likely to be perpetrated by men than women. However, the culture in which we assume that he is guilty because he is a man is, in the blind eyes of justice, no different from the culture in which we assume someone is guilty because they are black. My friend was not innocent until proven guilty - he was a guy accused of rape, so he needed to prove his innocence with six months of digging up every text he could. That kind of social justice is anything but. Even if, statistically, black people are more likely to commit crimes, it is wrong to assume someone is guilty because they are black, it is wrong to be afraid of someone because they are black, to shoot them because they are black. These stereotypes reinforce the divide and don't provide room for people to be good, much less incentive. If you were black and always getting arrested, where's the motivation to be good if you get arrested anyways? My friend was innocent, yet people looked at him like a rapist. It is not the people, but the behaviors that we need to address, and the labels we give people, originally intended to identify the types of victims, become catalysts for stereotypes and cause us to lose our focus on what warrants punishment - a committed crime, not a perceived criminal. Hate the sin, love the sinner.
I listed two cases that differ from standard feminism and favor men - mansplaining and sexual assault on college campuses. In fairness, let me turn the tables a bit.
Men's rights activists have some legitimate positions (lower the hairs on your back to recall that, above, I started by saying that the woman's experiences in the mansplaining article were legitimate and that sexual assault is wrong and a real problem). For instance, our boys are doing terribly in public schools. What's more, men are far more likely to end up in prison than women. Whether due to an unhealthy socialization of men or due to a criminal law that disproportionately identifies and punishes crimes perpetrated by men, we have a serious inequality. When we see black people in prison, we rightfully think "criminal justice reform", but when we see more men than women in prison, we are remarkably silent. However, in my opinion, Men's Rights Activists are painfully ineffective at moving us towards men's rights; they are too busy being obstructionist to women's rights and wading in their own puddle of victims' tears while providing little of substance for how we can achieve greater equality. While women are blogging and engaging in substantive discussions - some even in line with men's rights concerns about labels like mansplaining, and many advocating for things like Planned Parenthood that help women without hurting men - the MRA is just throwing stones at feminism with no intention of building a bridge. Sure, men are going to jail - but lashing out against the "privileged" women is not the answer. Nowhere close.
The general theme I see as I straddle the chasm is that well-meaning people are more likely to see their own victimhood - and with every victim there is someone who is making out just fine - and less likely to recognize the legitimacy of the victimhood, with regard to other desirable liberties or equal protection, of those who are making out just fine. A key epiphany here is thta inequality is not a general statement but rather depends on the particular desirable good or state of being under consideration - there is different degrees and directions of inequality depending on what desirable good or state of being we're looking at. Men are getting paid more than women, and women are going to jail less than men. Women are more likely to get raped than men, and men are more likely to unknowingly raise a kid that's not their own. In all of these cases, it helps to be less general about "inequality" and more specific about the precise type of inequality we're trying to alleviate - income inequality, inequality in public school performance, inequality in crime and punishment, inequality in norms for acceptable dress in the officeplace, etc. Furthermore, comparing inequalities should be avoided at all costs - inequality in income is incomparable to inequality in rape or imprisonment - because different desirable goods are apples and oranges. We need to revolutionize our way of thinking about inequality so that we no longer attack labelled people "on the other side" of the inequality chasm, but instead see them as people, with their own kinds of suffering. To bring up the most loaded class of victims in history, consider Jewish people. Even if Jewish people are more likely to get into ivy leagues, possibly because of stereotypes or in-group favoritism or economic inequality, for example, they still suffer from extreme and atrocious acts of antisemitism around the world and while we fight for equality on college admissions we should also fight for equality in the treatment of Jewish people around the globe. Instead of trying to weigh apples and oranges to see if it a group's advantages and disadvantages "average out", we should recoil at the suffering of a fellow human and try to help. If someone gets paid more than other people, but is dying due to an inequality in access to healthcare - we should give her some healthcare.
In addition to the underlying definitions of inequality, it seems as if well-meaning people have forgotten the real reason for wanting to fix inequality - because it's virtuous (and much needed) to care about *other* people. It's as if social justice has marched to far ahead of its leaders and has evolved some behaviors that run contrary to the principles that drew me in to begin with. I will always fight for equality, but as both sides march away from each other, I find myself alone in the middle, where the discussion needs to be if we are ever to come together to fix these problems. Much of the eFeminism tweets and blogs that invalidate my experience as a male march away from Bell Hooks' memo that "feminism is for everyone" to the point where men can get fired (Tim Hunt) for voicing their experiences about gender interactions. The (disputably) well-meaning MRA sprints away from Gandhi's call to "be the change you wish to see in the world" as Men's rights groups shoot burning arrows to undermine women's rights. When privilege becomes so intimately tied to "white" that we create a term marching us farther from Dr. King's stern yet inclusive compassion calling on us to always "judge a man not by the color of his skin, but the content of his character".
I'm a white, deaf scottish, Irish, German, Mexican, Native-American guy who grew up in an upper-middle-class family going to some of the poorest and roughest public schools in one of the poorest states in the nation. Like every other human being, I'm a mutt - trace it back far enough, and your life was made possible by two people from different backgrounds falling in love with each other. I don't fit into the labels we have defining the two sides in the war for peace and equality. I try to be very sensitive in my treatment of some indisputably identified victims because, more than all of those labels, I'm a human being and so is every other person in the world. I'm not black, but you bet your ass #BlackLivesMatter - the disproportionate shooting of black people in this country is atrocious and we need to fix it. I'm not a woman, but you bet your ass I'll be calling out the cat-callers, people talking down to women (even if the talkers are women), and people discriminating against women in pay and hiring, and trying hard to alleviate all manners of other sufferings brought to my attention through the women in my life and online who report their suffering. I'm a man, but that should not affect your emotional reaction when I point out that there are so many men in prison, or men referred to as "creeps" or try to understand the motivations behind "man-splainers" and cat-callers in an effort to talk them into different behaviors.
We're all human. We're all socialized by an imperfect world and we identify clear imperfections. Women are being paid less and raped more. That's awful and we need to fix it. Black people are being shot and arrested. That's awful, and we need to fix it. Men are being thrown in jail. That's awful, and we need to fix it. We've come so far - instead of being complacent with these imperfections, we are using the internet to become well aware of so many kinds of suffering, and we are all burning to change them, or at least some of them thereby permitting compromise. There's so much positive energy in the push for a better world, we just need to find a way to channel it. We all see where we want to go, now we just need to figure out how to get there.
In the process of getting there, we have marched apart, thrown stones, and divided into warring camps that label each other almost as different species that can never understand each other, but, as we all intuitively know, that is not how we're going to get there. The story of the move for justice parallels the Tower of Babel - we are so close to working together to the point where anything is within our reach, but in the process of working together we've disagreed over the color of the bricks or the size of the stairs and been divided into camps that can never work together to accomplish anything. However, unlike the tower of Babel, there has been no God dividing people into camps, only people dividing each other into camps - that means there's a solution within the reach of us.
So how do we get there? In all humility, I don't know - I'm just one guy - but I can tell you my guess based on what's worked for me. In my political discussions with friends, I can tell you that the most unifying fuel is compassion and the most productive engine is pro-active thinking. We need to love everybody - definitely the victims but even the sinner - and try to understand why they're doing what they're doing. Then, and only then, can we start to think proactively about how to fix this. Why do guys commit crimes, rape among them? Why are guys doing so poorly in schools? Why are cops shooting black people - how much is due to racism (corrected by counseling on racial attitudes) and how much is due to their work environment (corrected by better mental health care for cops and serious, societal introspection on why we are so violent)? Why do people cheat on each other, leading one spouses to discover another baby is in the picture, and what can we do to promote more honesty in relationships?
None of these discussions can be solved by the victims alone, because victims are often suffering so greatly that they are scraping madly to breathe and arrive on the shores of justice that they may likely inflict harm on the beneficiaries of inequality (note: I did not call them the "perpetrators" of inequality, because sometimes the beneficiaries of inequality never intend to be unjust). Nor can these problems be solved by beneficiaries - the beneficiaries are doing fine, and are more focused on their own problems/victim hood/experienced injustices.
The infinite pile of overlapping labels and bias for personally experienced injustices motivates fewer labels and more common humanity. If there's anything we have in common, it's that we have a lot of labels in our social network, that in some ways we're a beneficiary, and in some ways we're a victim. Any human can sort through their personal labels and the labels of their loved ones, find which label has the greatest perceived inequality, and that is the problem they likely care most about. For me, it is environmental injustice and the treatment of people with special needs, because I grew up in the great outdoors, cultivating a love of the world's biodiversity, and because I have had a profound hearing loss. I also care about Gingers, but whatever - you can call me a daywalker and I'll laugh about it, because the Irish and Scottish immigrants are doing alright now. While these labels define our own lives, they do not preclude compassion for other people. In fact, often it's a simple analogy that leaps over the walls between labels and helps us see that we're really the same thing. Despite my initial white-guy reaction to #blacklivesmatter, my (unbelievably intelligent) girlfriend*, using my connection to nature, pointed out that somebody saying "save the rainforests" is not saying "f*** all other forests", and in an instant I was converted. The people who disagree with the victims' memes and are scratched by the victims' reaches for justice are often not hateful bigots but are limited by their experiences, and so the way to reach the beneficiaries of inequality is to talk with them about their experiences and find the connection.
Compassion is the key, because, to me, compassion is about seeing the similarities, not the differences; it's about feeling what it's like to be another person, walking a mile in their shoes, and appreciating them has humans bound by their circumstance, just like the rest of us. Our labels come from our environment and our ancestry, yet our on the small scale our environment is an artifact of our birth and, on the large scale, we're all inhabiting the same world. As for differences in ancestry, the story of our ancestors written in our DNA is 99.9% similar. The chasms that divide us are seams on rocks in the mountain of humanity that unites us.
So, to cross these chasms, I encourage all of us to find those people and groups that make the hairs on our back raise in defense, and, after a few deep breaths, earnestly try to understand what makes them tick. Walk a mile in their shoes, not trying to understand them out of pity or superiority, but rather to feel for yourself - what do they value? What would make them feel happy? How can we help? How is that similar (not different) to my own experiences?
If you're pro-choice, try to imagine how much it hurts to think of babies being killed in our democracy because of a supreme court ruling, and how happy you'd feel if that could stop, someway, somehow. If you're pro-life, try to see that, in the ambiguity of defining the onset of human life, especially in light of modern biology's ability to make clones from skin cells, liberals' definitions based on sentience have some merit. If you're a dude who doesn't really prioritize street harassment, try to imagine a giant guy with overwhelming physical dominance harassing you on the street, calling you out on your tiny biceps, or maybe grabbing your junk and humiliating you in front of the world... and then imagine how that experience would shape your feelings when walking through a world of predatory eyes looking at your chest and ass, and how that is amplified by knowing the history of women's rights. Imagine if your greatest fear on a first date was not "looking bad" or "saying something stupid", but "getting raped and/or killed". If you're a woman, try to imagine being socialized as a simple-minded jock and trying to navigate the landmines of sexism in your profession, landmines that can label anything you do - talking to a girl you like, being somewhat awkward because you like her, can result in being called a "creep" (which, in the mind of a well-meaning dude, is a species of offense in the same family as rape), explaining things to a colleague can become "mansplaining", sharing your feelings about a "distracting" sex drive in a conference in South Korea can get you fired, and sleeping with the wrong girl in college can become rape. If you're white, imagine seeing someone who looks like your kid get shot by a police force that is overwhelmingly not white - imagine if all cops were Muslims and Mexicans and white kids were getting shot - imagine not being able to ask people for directions without them defensively gathering closely or, sometimes, lashing out in straight-up racism, imagine walking down the street with white boys leaning out the window shouting a word that conjures up generations of suffering written in your DNA and still present today in your environment. If you're deaf, imagine how annoying it is for people who can hear well to have some loud-mouthed person hogging the verbal space in a room.
I'm convinced that if enough people sought out this universal compassion on their own volition, the people around them would see, hear and read this kind of compassion, be drawn to it, emulate it, and that tower of Babel can be built.
* My girlfriend is the better half of the brains behind the core content of this article. She and I have had many intense discussions about these topics and she has displayed the patience of a saint as I've tried to wrap my head around things she understands so easily, but in the process of our discussions, some lasting until 3am, we have arrived at some remarkable revelations that I just had to share with the world.
I ask "how do we get there?" because it feels like we're not getting there. Instead of getting to that "city upon a hill", we seem to be seeing a fragmentation of the city into warring tribes. This is a problem I've wrestled with for years as waves of feminism have lapped against the white-sand shores of patriarchal norms, as Muslims were persecuted following 9/11, as black kids were getting shot, as latinos were sprinting away from extreme poverty and violence straight into a white-brick wall of xenophobia. The discussion has bubbled and popped, bubbled again into new life, evolved, and tensions rose and the movements bled, torn apart by their own internal disagreements.
In a way, this post is one of those internal disagreements. However, read carefully, this post is an olive branch and my sincere effort to bring people together, because I know Muslims, blacks and Latinos, Native Americans and a large set of overlapping, un-recognized types of victims (for example - I have a profound hearing loss and there are all kinds of norms - speak quietly, indoor voices etc. - that run contrary to the needs of the hard of hearing), and I know a bunch of men who were victims of bullying (I was part of this cycle, a bully who was bullied), who were socialized around white men to say things that make women and non-whites uncomfortable, and whose instinctive drives for love and sex are parasitized by infinitely many mosquitos of porn and ads of unrealistically sexy women. I know black people who talk differently around black people than around white people (but when they find out you've got a good taste in R&B and aren't afraid to sing and dance, they open up), Latinos who don't want to speak Spanish with gringos (but when they find out you love Latin America, they open up), White men who are hardened by norms they never invented and unintentionally perpetuate (but when they find out you appreciate some things they do, maybe an Irish play writer, a German song, or a French pastry, they open up).
Having seen and known these people, I'm often torn by the contemporary discussions of social justice that, I feel, are creating chasms where we need to be building bridges. My first experience of this effect came from the seminal Mansplaining article, where a guy in Aspen talks to a respectable lady from New York about a book that, it turns out, she wrote. It happens time and again that women are subordinated by men who assume the women don't know what's going on, and so the lady in New York used the gentleman in Aspen as a special example of this general pattern of subordination in speech. It was termed "Mansplaining", and then suddenly women everywhere had a word to place on the action.
I totally empathize with the woman - I have had countless dudes tell me ridiculous things that I know much more about (one guy insisted there were only three bald eagles ever in the state of New Mexico, one guy told me New Mexico was never a part of Mexico) - and if this would happen to me more regularly than it does, especially if it happened in my professional life, I would be writing a blog post about this pattern of behavior and trying to find out how we can fix it. I would've called it "sex-splaining" to humbly admit that it could go both ways, but whatever - that woman and I have a lot in common.
However, when I read this article, I couldn't help but also empathize with the man, and I think that is why, not standing entirely on one side or the other, I so consistently fall in the chasm on these social justice debates. The guy was living in Colorado, a wild-western state with a large number of Christians and a relatively recent urbanization. What's more, he was an older gentleman, so it's not like he read "The Smurfette Principle" in college. Heck, he probably never even read that article and might not even know what the word "mansplaining" is. Maybe he did feel more confident talking down to the woman because of his socialization under antiquated norms... or maybe he thought she was attractive and was excited and overly eager to share his knowledge on this one thing they have in common. I don't know, but I thought it was important to know this guy's motivations before judging his behavior. When I finished reading the article, I was grateful to have learned more about this common and subordinating interaction and now I am more careful about it in my personal life. However, I felt very uneasy about the straw "man" made of this Aspen dude.
Why was the lady in New York sure that this particular guy was a sexist jerk? Or even a jerk? More information about the intentions of the man is needed to know just how malicious this mansplaining is, because people come from different cultures and part of living in a pluralistic society is learning, to the extent possible, how we can live our own lives with our own norms about male-female interactions while letting other people live theirs. Would we charge a cheif of an Amazonian tribe with mansplaining? Doing so feels very culturally imperialistic, borderline fascist - why should people living elsewhere subscribe to our own norms? There are clear cases of black and white - other people can eat whatever (non-endangered-animal) food they want, but no matter what their cultures we will not tolerate murder or genocide. However, the etiquette of a man talking to a woman, insofar as this guy in Aspen was motivated by patriarchal self-perpetuation, seems like it should be fair for people to... well.. choose. Feminism is about choice, right? not limiting the scope of acceptable choices to what is deemed acceptable by feminists, but that principle of choice that any human can agree to.
The straw man in Aspen ticked me off, as did the gender biased term "mansplain" that arose from a straw man, and I argued about it with some people on facebook and finally shut up because it seemed impossible to explain that (1) we need to understand what the man is thinking if we want to fix it and (2) we shouldn't make a word that labels men as the only people who talk-down to women. However, many people saw my remarks as invalidating the NYC lady's experience and, while I wanted everyone to at least try to see the world through Aspen Dude's eyes, I didn't want my colleagues to think I'm a sexist ass (even if their opinions were, in my opinion, not fair). Ironically, when a woman named Lesley on xoJane made a (very well-written) argument to the same effect, it was embraced by many of those same people as "a good point" and proof that feminism marches along. We, the well-meaning social justice world, created a word that is gender-biased in an effort to eliminate gender biases, and it felt to me like that discussion was not open to input from men. In the process, that single article and that single word pushed the gender worlds farther apart by creating a culture that does not try to empathize with people different from them (in this case, men who were brought up with disagreeable social norms) - which is precisely the culture I think we need to fix.
The same thing happened when a friend of mine was accused of unwanted sexual penetration. Right now, consider your initial reaction to that statement "I (you note: white man) am upset because a friend of mine was accused of unwanted sexual penetration". If you reacted strongly to that statement, the hairs on your back raised immediately because (1) you assumed the friend was male, (2) you assume he is more likely guilty than not and (3) I'm part of a counter-progressive culture standing in the way of women's rights. It's possible that some people will stop reading immediately after hearing that statement, because their minds are already made up.
Well, it turns out that, after a thorough investigation by the school, it was discovered that the girl was accusing the guy because she didn't want to admit to her best friend that she willingly slept with her ex-boyfriend. So, it was easier to claim that she was raped than to admit to her friend that she had done something wrong.
My friend is very likely a marginal case in the world of sexual assaults. Sexual assault is incredibly awful, most accusations of sexual assault probably have some legitimacy behind them, and sexual assault is more likely to be perpetrated by men than women. However, the culture in which we assume that he is guilty because he is a man is, in the blind eyes of justice, no different from the culture in which we assume someone is guilty because they are black. My friend was not innocent until proven guilty - he was a guy accused of rape, so he needed to prove his innocence with six months of digging up every text he could. That kind of social justice is anything but. Even if, statistically, black people are more likely to commit crimes, it is wrong to assume someone is guilty because they are black, it is wrong to be afraid of someone because they are black, to shoot them because they are black. These stereotypes reinforce the divide and don't provide room for people to be good, much less incentive. If you were black and always getting arrested, where's the motivation to be good if you get arrested anyways? My friend was innocent, yet people looked at him like a rapist. It is not the people, but the behaviors that we need to address, and the labels we give people, originally intended to identify the types of victims, become catalysts for stereotypes and cause us to lose our focus on what warrants punishment - a committed crime, not a perceived criminal. Hate the sin, love the sinner.
I listed two cases that differ from standard feminism and favor men - mansplaining and sexual assault on college campuses. In fairness, let me turn the tables a bit.
Men's rights activists have some legitimate positions (lower the hairs on your back to recall that, above, I started by saying that the woman's experiences in the mansplaining article were legitimate and that sexual assault is wrong and a real problem). For instance, our boys are doing terribly in public schools. What's more, men are far more likely to end up in prison than women. Whether due to an unhealthy socialization of men or due to a criminal law that disproportionately identifies and punishes crimes perpetrated by men, we have a serious inequality. When we see black people in prison, we rightfully think "criminal justice reform", but when we see more men than women in prison, we are remarkably silent. However, in my opinion, Men's Rights Activists are painfully ineffective at moving us towards men's rights; they are too busy being obstructionist to women's rights and wading in their own puddle of victims' tears while providing little of substance for how we can achieve greater equality. While women are blogging and engaging in substantive discussions - some even in line with men's rights concerns about labels like mansplaining, and many advocating for things like Planned Parenthood that help women without hurting men - the MRA is just throwing stones at feminism with no intention of building a bridge. Sure, men are going to jail - but lashing out against the "privileged" women is not the answer. Nowhere close.
The general theme I see as I straddle the chasm is that well-meaning people are more likely to see their own victimhood - and with every victim there is someone who is making out just fine - and less likely to recognize the legitimacy of the victimhood, with regard to other desirable liberties or equal protection, of those who are making out just fine. A key epiphany here is thta inequality is not a general statement but rather depends on the particular desirable good or state of being under consideration - there is different degrees and directions of inequality depending on what desirable good or state of being we're looking at. Men are getting paid more than women, and women are going to jail less than men. Women are more likely to get raped than men, and men are more likely to unknowingly raise a kid that's not their own. In all of these cases, it helps to be less general about "inequality" and more specific about the precise type of inequality we're trying to alleviate - income inequality, inequality in public school performance, inequality in crime and punishment, inequality in norms for acceptable dress in the officeplace, etc. Furthermore, comparing inequalities should be avoided at all costs - inequality in income is incomparable to inequality in rape or imprisonment - because different desirable goods are apples and oranges. We need to revolutionize our way of thinking about inequality so that we no longer attack labelled people "on the other side" of the inequality chasm, but instead see them as people, with their own kinds of suffering. To bring up the most loaded class of victims in history, consider Jewish people. Even if Jewish people are more likely to get into ivy leagues, possibly because of stereotypes or in-group favoritism or economic inequality, for example, they still suffer from extreme and atrocious acts of antisemitism around the world and while we fight for equality on college admissions we should also fight for equality in the treatment of Jewish people around the globe. Instead of trying to weigh apples and oranges to see if it a group's advantages and disadvantages "average out", we should recoil at the suffering of a fellow human and try to help. If someone gets paid more than other people, but is dying due to an inequality in access to healthcare - we should give her some healthcare.
In addition to the underlying definitions of inequality, it seems as if well-meaning people have forgotten the real reason for wanting to fix inequality - because it's virtuous (and much needed) to care about *other* people. It's as if social justice has marched to far ahead of its leaders and has evolved some behaviors that run contrary to the principles that drew me in to begin with. I will always fight for equality, but as both sides march away from each other, I find myself alone in the middle, where the discussion needs to be if we are ever to come together to fix these problems. Much of the eFeminism tweets and blogs that invalidate my experience as a male march away from Bell Hooks' memo that "feminism is for everyone" to the point where men can get fired (Tim Hunt) for voicing their experiences about gender interactions. The (disputably) well-meaning MRA sprints away from Gandhi's call to "be the change you wish to see in the world" as Men's rights groups shoot burning arrows to undermine women's rights. When privilege becomes so intimately tied to "white" that we create a term marching us farther from Dr. King's stern yet inclusive compassion calling on us to always "judge a man not by the color of his skin, but the content of his character".
I'm a white, deaf scottish, Irish, German, Mexican, Native-American guy who grew up in an upper-middle-class family going to some of the poorest and roughest public schools in one of the poorest states in the nation. Like every other human being, I'm a mutt - trace it back far enough, and your life was made possible by two people from different backgrounds falling in love with each other. I don't fit into the labels we have defining the two sides in the war for peace and equality. I try to be very sensitive in my treatment of some indisputably identified victims because, more than all of those labels, I'm a human being and so is every other person in the world. I'm not black, but you bet your ass #BlackLivesMatter - the disproportionate shooting of black people in this country is atrocious and we need to fix it. I'm not a woman, but you bet your ass I'll be calling out the cat-callers, people talking down to women (even if the talkers are women), and people discriminating against women in pay and hiring, and trying hard to alleviate all manners of other sufferings brought to my attention through the women in my life and online who report their suffering. I'm a man, but that should not affect your emotional reaction when I point out that there are so many men in prison, or men referred to as "creeps" or try to understand the motivations behind "man-splainers" and cat-callers in an effort to talk them into different behaviors.
We're all human. We're all socialized by an imperfect world and we identify clear imperfections. Women are being paid less and raped more. That's awful and we need to fix it. Black people are being shot and arrested. That's awful, and we need to fix it. Men are being thrown in jail. That's awful, and we need to fix it. We've come so far - instead of being complacent with these imperfections, we are using the internet to become well aware of so many kinds of suffering, and we are all burning to change them, or at least some of them thereby permitting compromise. There's so much positive energy in the push for a better world, we just need to find a way to channel it. We all see where we want to go, now we just need to figure out how to get there.
In the process of getting there, we have marched apart, thrown stones, and divided into warring camps that label each other almost as different species that can never understand each other, but, as we all intuitively know, that is not how we're going to get there. The story of the move for justice parallels the Tower of Babel - we are so close to working together to the point where anything is within our reach, but in the process of working together we've disagreed over the color of the bricks or the size of the stairs and been divided into camps that can never work together to accomplish anything. However, unlike the tower of Babel, there has been no God dividing people into camps, only people dividing each other into camps - that means there's a solution within the reach of us.
So how do we get there? In all humility, I don't know - I'm just one guy - but I can tell you my guess based on what's worked for me. In my political discussions with friends, I can tell you that the most unifying fuel is compassion and the most productive engine is pro-active thinking. We need to love everybody - definitely the victims but even the sinner - and try to understand why they're doing what they're doing. Then, and only then, can we start to think proactively about how to fix this. Why do guys commit crimes, rape among them? Why are guys doing so poorly in schools? Why are cops shooting black people - how much is due to racism (corrected by counseling on racial attitudes) and how much is due to their work environment (corrected by better mental health care for cops and serious, societal introspection on why we are so violent)? Why do people cheat on each other, leading one spouses to discover another baby is in the picture, and what can we do to promote more honesty in relationships?
None of these discussions can be solved by the victims alone, because victims are often suffering so greatly that they are scraping madly to breathe and arrive on the shores of justice that they may likely inflict harm on the beneficiaries of inequality (note: I did not call them the "perpetrators" of inequality, because sometimes the beneficiaries of inequality never intend to be unjust). Nor can these problems be solved by beneficiaries - the beneficiaries are doing fine, and are more focused on their own problems/victim hood/experienced injustices.
The infinite pile of overlapping labels and bias for personally experienced injustices motivates fewer labels and more common humanity. If there's anything we have in common, it's that we have a lot of labels in our social network, that in some ways we're a beneficiary, and in some ways we're a victim. Any human can sort through their personal labels and the labels of their loved ones, find which label has the greatest perceived inequality, and that is the problem they likely care most about. For me, it is environmental injustice and the treatment of people with special needs, because I grew up in the great outdoors, cultivating a love of the world's biodiversity, and because I have had a profound hearing loss. I also care about Gingers, but whatever - you can call me a daywalker and I'll laugh about it, because the Irish and Scottish immigrants are doing alright now. While these labels define our own lives, they do not preclude compassion for other people. In fact, often it's a simple analogy that leaps over the walls between labels and helps us see that we're really the same thing. Despite my initial white-guy reaction to #blacklivesmatter, my (unbelievably intelligent) girlfriend*, using my connection to nature, pointed out that somebody saying "save the rainforests" is not saying "f*** all other forests", and in an instant I was converted. The people who disagree with the victims' memes and are scratched by the victims' reaches for justice are often not hateful bigots but are limited by their experiences, and so the way to reach the beneficiaries of inequality is to talk with them about their experiences and find the connection.
Compassion is the key, because, to me, compassion is about seeing the similarities, not the differences; it's about feeling what it's like to be another person, walking a mile in their shoes, and appreciating them has humans bound by their circumstance, just like the rest of us. Our labels come from our environment and our ancestry, yet our on the small scale our environment is an artifact of our birth and, on the large scale, we're all inhabiting the same world. As for differences in ancestry, the story of our ancestors written in our DNA is 99.9% similar. The chasms that divide us are seams on rocks in the mountain of humanity that unites us.
So, to cross these chasms, I encourage all of us to find those people and groups that make the hairs on our back raise in defense, and, after a few deep breaths, earnestly try to understand what makes them tick. Walk a mile in their shoes, not trying to understand them out of pity or superiority, but rather to feel for yourself - what do they value? What would make them feel happy? How can we help? How is that similar (not different) to my own experiences?
If you're pro-choice, try to imagine how much it hurts to think of babies being killed in our democracy because of a supreme court ruling, and how happy you'd feel if that could stop, someway, somehow. If you're pro-life, try to see that, in the ambiguity of defining the onset of human life, especially in light of modern biology's ability to make clones from skin cells, liberals' definitions based on sentience have some merit. If you're a dude who doesn't really prioritize street harassment, try to imagine a giant guy with overwhelming physical dominance harassing you on the street, calling you out on your tiny biceps, or maybe grabbing your junk and humiliating you in front of the world... and then imagine how that experience would shape your feelings when walking through a world of predatory eyes looking at your chest and ass, and how that is amplified by knowing the history of women's rights. Imagine if your greatest fear on a first date was not "looking bad" or "saying something stupid", but "getting raped and/or killed". If you're a woman, try to imagine being socialized as a simple-minded jock and trying to navigate the landmines of sexism in your profession, landmines that can label anything you do - talking to a girl you like, being somewhat awkward because you like her, can result in being called a "creep" (which, in the mind of a well-meaning dude, is a species of offense in the same family as rape), explaining things to a colleague can become "mansplaining", sharing your feelings about a "distracting" sex drive in a conference in South Korea can get you fired, and sleeping with the wrong girl in college can become rape. If you're white, imagine seeing someone who looks like your kid get shot by a police force that is overwhelmingly not white - imagine if all cops were Muslims and Mexicans and white kids were getting shot - imagine not being able to ask people for directions without them defensively gathering closely or, sometimes, lashing out in straight-up racism, imagine walking down the street with white boys leaning out the window shouting a word that conjures up generations of suffering written in your DNA and still present today in your environment. If you're deaf, imagine how annoying it is for people who can hear well to have some loud-mouthed person hogging the verbal space in a room.
I'm convinced that if enough people sought out this universal compassion on their own volition, the people around them would see, hear and read this kind of compassion, be drawn to it, emulate it, and that tower of Babel can be built.
* My girlfriend is the better half of the brains behind the core content of this article. She and I have had many intense discussions about these topics and she has displayed the patience of a saint as I've tried to wrap my head around things she understands so easily, but in the process of our discussions, some lasting until 3am, we have arrived at some remarkable revelations that I just had to share with the world.
Thursday, January 28, 2016
Preventing the Cannibalism of Liberty
“the circumstances of justice obtain whenever persons put forward conflicting claims to the division of social advantages under conditions of moderate scarcity.” - John Rawls, The Theory of Justice
Human Control over the Circumstances of Justice
In his book, "A Theory of Justice", Rawls claims that people in the Original Position are aware of the circumstances of justice - the more or less equivalence of people, the scarcity of resources, and the potential for cooperation among people to yield a more utilitarian (or maximin) distribution of resources.
Rawls' contribution to contemporary political philosophy cannot be understated, and his book has motivated some excellent counter-points (my favorite being Sandel's "Liberalism and the limits of justice"). However, one quirk about this forum of modern philosophy of justice that has always monkey-wrenched by biological gears is the assumption that "conditions of moderate scarcity" exist outside of human control. In reality, we consume the resources on which we depend and we or our cultural memes (from attitudes on consumption and travel to the material objects such as computers and iphones themselves) reproduce and consume resources, and that consumption of resources leads to scarcity. You don't have to be Malthus to know that we live in a finite world, and consequently our growth becomes limited by the scarcity of resources; as living things, we engineer the circumstances of justice, and so much of this modern political philosophy falls short by failing to inspect the dynamics of resource consumption and, consequently, the human socio-political control over the circumstances of justice. Incorporating ecological and economic realities into our discussion of political philosophy can help us better understand how to maintain a high quality of life in human society by, at times, preventing the scarcity of resources that leads to intense, conflicting claims over the division of what few resources remain.
The Consumption of Resources: From Unrecognized Liberty to Bitter Justice
Liberty reigns in the abundance of resources, and often we take those abundant resources for granted. You are free to breathe, because oxygen is so abundant, and so we don't even recognize a world in which breaths can be regulated to ensure a fair distribution of breaths. However, put a group of humans inside a biosphere on Mars, and one could envision a political agreement specifying the "fair use of energy and oxygen." Because we take for granted abundant resources, their consumption often goes unnoticed. During the westward expansion of the United States (into land controlled by Spanish and Native Americans), land was seen as so abundant that anyone could build a house just about anywhere. There was no need to be just in our allocation of land out West. Today, every square inch of land in the United States is owned, and its movement from one owner to another is often a matter of justice - transfer of land to the federal government can be unjust for cattle ranchers, transfer of an empty lot to a real-estate mogul can be unjust for poor people who liked to use those empty lots for recreation. The previous abundance of land led to homestead policies that rewarded the consumption of abundant land for economic growth (this is currently happening in Siberia).
In ecological systems, living things produce an abundance of babies. In economic systems, an abundance of a resource makes it cheap and thus more easily utilized for the production of other resources which are scarce. If the resources are non-renewable, or renewed more slowly than they are consumed, these ecological and economic forces deplete the supplies, yielding fewer resources per-capita. Slowly but surely, previously abundant resources become scarce and, barring an improbable equal distribution of resources, there will inevitably be some inequality in the ownership of coveted resources. When the resources improve the ability of an organism or company to acquire resources, the inequality can perpetuate itself (well-fed lions are more capable predators; rich humans are better able to get degrees, connections and jobs, big companies have more money to expand and buy up new resources). Thus, humans, given the liberty to do so, will reduce the abundance of desirable resources - land, animals, power - until we become limited by scarcity. Barring political agreements to limit liberty despite the perceived abundance of resources, human ecological/economic systems will drive resources to scarcity and perpetuate inequality, thereby engineering the circumstances of justice.
Political Dynamics in the conversion of Abundance to Scarcity
The arguments for continued liberty and depletion of resources are that the resources are abundant and we need them now. If we get the resources now, we make money, and if we don't, then the our competitors will and we will lose. This tragedy of the commons makes it very difficult to protect resources until they become scarce enough for us to feel the tragedy. We did not notice a tragedy of the commons in the use of wild game until the buffalo and elk were nearly driven to extinction, and now, for fairness, constituents must pay large prices and submit to a draw for the possibility of receiving a hunting permit. We did not notice the tragedy of the commons in the emission of CO2 until record droughts, floods, snowstorms, heat waves, and melting of polar ice caps caused major human and economic harm and now, for fairness, we are in the process of signing agreements to ensure a just distribution of CO2 emissions across nations. We did not notice the tragedy of the commons in the world's fisheries until whales or other fish begin to make precipitous declines. The same stories played out for the use of lumber, land, fresh water, ores, and more: Resources abound, they are consumed until their scarcity is felt, and then by mutual coercion we agree to limit our consumption.
While it is reassuring that human political systems often limit the use of resources to ensure their preservation when they hit the wall of apocalyptic scarcity and the threat of revolt, it does not always worked because some resources that might be limiting or invaluable in future economies are currently non-limiting and, consequently, their preciousness is not felt. An example could be the species that are going extinct - they may contain medical clues that enable us to solve pressing global epidemics or food shortages later. Another example is space - the more people we have per-capita, the greater the risk and intensity of pandemics, and currently, we are filling space on the planet without any regulations on human reproduction motivated by epidemiological risk. Our political systems react to some resources - those whose combined contemporary importance and scarcity currently motivate a more just allocation - but are apathetic to resources that may be important in the future.
Furthermore, our political systems are apathetic as to whether or not the quality of life would be better with more resources. What if all of the world's 7 billion people would be happier in a world with 1 billion people - each person could have seven times the amount of personal space, seven times the probability of being drawn for a hunt, seven times the allowable catch from a fishery, and seven times the amount of water, not to mention less pollution in the air and water... or, if the same amount of pollution, then it comes with greater liberty to pollute without repercussion.
Temperance
These facts - the human-engineered scarcity of resources and the potential for a higher quality of life with more resources per-capita - motivate a precautionary temperance. Temperance - moderation, self-restraint - is the oft forgotten virtue in American political discourse. Temperance involves a restriction of liberty to preserve an abundance of resources and, with it, a quality of life that does not necessitate a bitter and emotional struggle for a just division of scarce resources. Temperance, in many cases, requires voluntarily restricting our liberty to prevent the circumstances of justice. Temperance is motivated by a desire to preserve a life of moderate liberty, made possible by an abundance of resources, by restricting only our ability to use the resources in excess. We do this because we know that the self-imposed limitations on our liberty now, when resources abound, will be far preferable to the bitter restrictions of liberty imposed by the struggle for a just division of those resources.
Temperance is a tough sell. It's hard to tell people to stop cutting down trees when there is still a forest, especially (in the words of Daniel Pauly) when the lumberjack and hikers have a shifted baseline of what is a "good" size of the forest. While the shifting baselines and relativity of human happiness blurs the lines about what is an objectively "good" amount of abundance for a high quality of life, it does not invalidate the existence of an optimum (which, granted, may change with evolutionary time). Yes, a kid raised in New Delhi will, statistically, have a much greater tolerance of high population densities than will a person raised in Alaska. However, if we were in charge of being mankind's zookeeper, we would agree that there is an appropriate sized habitat for producing the most admirable and healthy specimens. Too sparse of a habitat and humans will be lonely, too dense of a habitat and humans will be angry and diseased. Somewhere in the middle is an optimal habitat for humans, where most humans will grow up content, with sufficient abundance to carve out their own lives - if they want cities, they can move together with other humans to cities, and if they want space, they can move to the wilderness where there is space. Sometimes, the resource wants and needs of a human vary depending on the stage of life, e.g. some mountaineers in their reckless youth want vast wilderness and remote mountains to climb... so they can talk about it in cities when they are older. So, our lumberjack at the forest may have a shifted baseline, as may the people in the discussion about whether or not to stop cutting down trees, and so they may not realize that that forest is small, only those who, by their nature, disposition, and stage of life, yearn for open space will feel the claustrophobia of a small enclosure. The lumberjack's daughter could grow up, read stories about vast forests of the past, shift her baseline back to a historical level, and feel saddened by the state of the world.
Many people in my generation feel like the lumberjack's daughter. There are no blank spots on the map, no unclaimed swaths of land, no giant herds of bison, no dodos, declining rainforests, depleted fisheries, polluted air, polluted streams, a changing climate and no place where you can, like the frontiersmen back in the day, horse-back ride with a gun and fishing rod, earning your food the old-fashioned way and camping by clean rivers as you travel the West or, like the Native Americans (who, for historical accuracy, fought each other for resources), had abundant herds of elk - ten times the number of elk available today. Our generation grows, as human specimens, on public lands set aside for recreation where we can horseback ride, set aside for conservation where we can chop down trees, and set aside for preservation where we can see species not yet extinct. These lands were major victories by forces of temperance like Aldo Leopold, John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt who thrived as humans and wanted future generations to thrive with wild things and vast, majestic places. However, our use of these lands is not governed by the same liberty felt by Leopold, Muir and Roosevelt, but instead is regulated by agreements, necessitated by the scarcity of these resources. We can only chop down so many trees by our permit. We can only camp for so long before over-staying our welcome. We can't hunt species that are sufficiently rare because their habitat is scarce and their populations threatened. At its best, these agreements give us a sense of responsibility and an obligation to give a good world to the future generations, but, at its worst, these rules confine us to circumstances of justice that would not exist had our ancestors been more temperate.
It could be worse. We could've waited decades until imposing rules and regulations on land, water, air, and game management , leaving us with smaller habitats, fewer game, dirtier air and water, and more people. However, looking forward, we can see many cases where resources are declining and future generations would benefit from our temperance, and modern political philosophy can help us recognize these cases by pushing the discussion of politics in America away from a bimodal justice vs. liberty tug of war and instead incorporating what we know about resource consumption through ecology and economics. When we see how humans engineer our own circumstances, we see that liberty, justice, and temperance are all intertwined - to preserve some liberties for future generations, we must be just and impose rules and regulations to preserve abundant resources before they become critically scarce. The "circumstances of justice" as described by Hume and Rawls are not facts of life, but instead they are often engineered by unrestrained liberty. Hume notes that justice may come at the expense of "nobler virtues and more favorable circumstances" such as benevolence (Sandel gives the example of a friend who insists on paying back, and being paid back, every penny lent, causing one to wonder the terms of the friendship). In American discource, justice and liberty are often seen as at odds - requirements that people be fair to the poor infringes someone's liberty to be selfish - but in some cases where liberty consumes resources and engineers scarcity, justice can empower temperance and restrain those liberties of excess in favor of 'nobler virtues and more favorable circumstances'.
Human Control over the Circumstances of Justice
In his book, "A Theory of Justice", Rawls claims that people in the Original Position are aware of the circumstances of justice - the more or less equivalence of people, the scarcity of resources, and the potential for cooperation among people to yield a more utilitarian (or maximin) distribution of resources.
Rawls' contribution to contemporary political philosophy cannot be understated, and his book has motivated some excellent counter-points (my favorite being Sandel's "Liberalism and the limits of justice"). However, one quirk about this forum of modern philosophy of justice that has always monkey-wrenched by biological gears is the assumption that "conditions of moderate scarcity" exist outside of human control. In reality, we consume the resources on which we depend and we or our cultural memes (from attitudes on consumption and travel to the material objects such as computers and iphones themselves) reproduce and consume resources, and that consumption of resources leads to scarcity. You don't have to be Malthus to know that we live in a finite world, and consequently our growth becomes limited by the scarcity of resources; as living things, we engineer the circumstances of justice, and so much of this modern political philosophy falls short by failing to inspect the dynamics of resource consumption and, consequently, the human socio-political control over the circumstances of justice. Incorporating ecological and economic realities into our discussion of political philosophy can help us better understand how to maintain a high quality of life in human society by, at times, preventing the scarcity of resources that leads to intense, conflicting claims over the division of what few resources remain.
The Consumption of Resources: From Unrecognized Liberty to Bitter Justice
Liberty reigns in the abundance of resources, and often we take those abundant resources for granted. You are free to breathe, because oxygen is so abundant, and so we don't even recognize a world in which breaths can be regulated to ensure a fair distribution of breaths. However, put a group of humans inside a biosphere on Mars, and one could envision a political agreement specifying the "fair use of energy and oxygen." Because we take for granted abundant resources, their consumption often goes unnoticed. During the westward expansion of the United States (into land controlled by Spanish and Native Americans), land was seen as so abundant that anyone could build a house just about anywhere. There was no need to be just in our allocation of land out West. Today, every square inch of land in the United States is owned, and its movement from one owner to another is often a matter of justice - transfer of land to the federal government can be unjust for cattle ranchers, transfer of an empty lot to a real-estate mogul can be unjust for poor people who liked to use those empty lots for recreation. The previous abundance of land led to homestead policies that rewarded the consumption of abundant land for economic growth (this is currently happening in Siberia).
In ecological systems, living things produce an abundance of babies. In economic systems, an abundance of a resource makes it cheap and thus more easily utilized for the production of other resources which are scarce. If the resources are non-renewable, or renewed more slowly than they are consumed, these ecological and economic forces deplete the supplies, yielding fewer resources per-capita. Slowly but surely, previously abundant resources become scarce and, barring an improbable equal distribution of resources, there will inevitably be some inequality in the ownership of coveted resources. When the resources improve the ability of an organism or company to acquire resources, the inequality can perpetuate itself (well-fed lions are more capable predators; rich humans are better able to get degrees, connections and jobs, big companies have more money to expand and buy up new resources). Thus, humans, given the liberty to do so, will reduce the abundance of desirable resources - land, animals, power - until we become limited by scarcity. Barring political agreements to limit liberty despite the perceived abundance of resources, human ecological/economic systems will drive resources to scarcity and perpetuate inequality, thereby engineering the circumstances of justice.
Political Dynamics in the conversion of Abundance to Scarcity
The arguments for continued liberty and depletion of resources are that the resources are abundant and we need them now. If we get the resources now, we make money, and if we don't, then the our competitors will and we will lose. This tragedy of the commons makes it very difficult to protect resources until they become scarce enough for us to feel the tragedy. We did not notice a tragedy of the commons in the use of wild game until the buffalo and elk were nearly driven to extinction, and now, for fairness, constituents must pay large prices and submit to a draw for the possibility of receiving a hunting permit. We did not notice the tragedy of the commons in the emission of CO2 until record droughts, floods, snowstorms, heat waves, and melting of polar ice caps caused major human and economic harm and now, for fairness, we are in the process of signing agreements to ensure a just distribution of CO2 emissions across nations. We did not notice the tragedy of the commons in the world's fisheries until whales or other fish begin to make precipitous declines. The same stories played out for the use of lumber, land, fresh water, ores, and more: Resources abound, they are consumed until their scarcity is felt, and then by mutual coercion we agree to limit our consumption.
While it is reassuring that human political systems often limit the use of resources to ensure their preservation when they hit the wall of apocalyptic scarcity and the threat of revolt, it does not always worked because some resources that might be limiting or invaluable in future economies are currently non-limiting and, consequently, their preciousness is not felt. An example could be the species that are going extinct - they may contain medical clues that enable us to solve pressing global epidemics or food shortages later. Another example is space - the more people we have per-capita, the greater the risk and intensity of pandemics, and currently, we are filling space on the planet without any regulations on human reproduction motivated by epidemiological risk. Our political systems react to some resources - those whose combined contemporary importance and scarcity currently motivate a more just allocation - but are apathetic to resources that may be important in the future.
Furthermore, our political systems are apathetic as to whether or not the quality of life would be better with more resources. What if all of the world's 7 billion people would be happier in a world with 1 billion people - each person could have seven times the amount of personal space, seven times the probability of being drawn for a hunt, seven times the allowable catch from a fishery, and seven times the amount of water, not to mention less pollution in the air and water... or, if the same amount of pollution, then it comes with greater liberty to pollute without repercussion.
Temperance
These facts - the human-engineered scarcity of resources and the potential for a higher quality of life with more resources per-capita - motivate a precautionary temperance. Temperance - moderation, self-restraint - is the oft forgotten virtue in American political discourse. Temperance involves a restriction of liberty to preserve an abundance of resources and, with it, a quality of life that does not necessitate a bitter and emotional struggle for a just division of scarce resources. Temperance, in many cases, requires voluntarily restricting our liberty to prevent the circumstances of justice. Temperance is motivated by a desire to preserve a life of moderate liberty, made possible by an abundance of resources, by restricting only our ability to use the resources in excess. We do this because we know that the self-imposed limitations on our liberty now, when resources abound, will be far preferable to the bitter restrictions of liberty imposed by the struggle for a just division of those resources.
Temperance is a tough sell. It's hard to tell people to stop cutting down trees when there is still a forest, especially (in the words of Daniel Pauly) when the lumberjack and hikers have a shifted baseline of what is a "good" size of the forest. While the shifting baselines and relativity of human happiness blurs the lines about what is an objectively "good" amount of abundance for a high quality of life, it does not invalidate the existence of an optimum (which, granted, may change with evolutionary time). Yes, a kid raised in New Delhi will, statistically, have a much greater tolerance of high population densities than will a person raised in Alaska. However, if we were in charge of being mankind's zookeeper, we would agree that there is an appropriate sized habitat for producing the most admirable and healthy specimens. Too sparse of a habitat and humans will be lonely, too dense of a habitat and humans will be angry and diseased. Somewhere in the middle is an optimal habitat for humans, where most humans will grow up content, with sufficient abundance to carve out their own lives - if they want cities, they can move together with other humans to cities, and if they want space, they can move to the wilderness where there is space. Sometimes, the resource wants and needs of a human vary depending on the stage of life, e.g. some mountaineers in their reckless youth want vast wilderness and remote mountains to climb... so they can talk about it in cities when they are older. So, our lumberjack at the forest may have a shifted baseline, as may the people in the discussion about whether or not to stop cutting down trees, and so they may not realize that that forest is small, only those who, by their nature, disposition, and stage of life, yearn for open space will feel the claustrophobia of a small enclosure. The lumberjack's daughter could grow up, read stories about vast forests of the past, shift her baseline back to a historical level, and feel saddened by the state of the world.
Many people in my generation feel like the lumberjack's daughter. There are no blank spots on the map, no unclaimed swaths of land, no giant herds of bison, no dodos, declining rainforests, depleted fisheries, polluted air, polluted streams, a changing climate and no place where you can, like the frontiersmen back in the day, horse-back ride with a gun and fishing rod, earning your food the old-fashioned way and camping by clean rivers as you travel the West or, like the Native Americans (who, for historical accuracy, fought each other for resources), had abundant herds of elk - ten times the number of elk available today. Our generation grows, as human specimens, on public lands set aside for recreation where we can horseback ride, set aside for conservation where we can chop down trees, and set aside for preservation where we can see species not yet extinct. These lands were major victories by forces of temperance like Aldo Leopold, John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt who thrived as humans and wanted future generations to thrive with wild things and vast, majestic places. However, our use of these lands is not governed by the same liberty felt by Leopold, Muir and Roosevelt, but instead is regulated by agreements, necessitated by the scarcity of these resources. We can only chop down so many trees by our permit. We can only camp for so long before over-staying our welcome. We can't hunt species that are sufficiently rare because their habitat is scarce and their populations threatened. At its best, these agreements give us a sense of responsibility and an obligation to give a good world to the future generations, but, at its worst, these rules confine us to circumstances of justice that would not exist had our ancestors been more temperate.
It could be worse. We could've waited decades until imposing rules and regulations on land, water, air, and game management , leaving us with smaller habitats, fewer game, dirtier air and water, and more people. However, looking forward, we can see many cases where resources are declining and future generations would benefit from our temperance, and modern political philosophy can help us recognize these cases by pushing the discussion of politics in America away from a bimodal justice vs. liberty tug of war and instead incorporating what we know about resource consumption through ecology and economics. When we see how humans engineer our own circumstances, we see that liberty, justice, and temperance are all intertwined - to preserve some liberties for future generations, we must be just and impose rules and regulations to preserve abundant resources before they become critically scarce. The "circumstances of justice" as described by Hume and Rawls are not facts of life, but instead they are often engineered by unrestrained liberty. Hume notes that justice may come at the expense of "nobler virtues and more favorable circumstances" such as benevolence (Sandel gives the example of a friend who insists on paying back, and being paid back, every penny lent, causing one to wonder the terms of the friendship). In American discource, justice and liberty are often seen as at odds - requirements that people be fair to the poor infringes someone's liberty to be selfish - but in some cases where liberty consumes resources and engineers scarcity, justice can empower temperance and restrain those liberties of excess in favor of 'nobler virtues and more favorable circumstances'.
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Spiritual Self-Reliance
I took my dog, Jack, on a stroll to get coffee today. Coffee for me, not for Jack. It was a beautiful, bluebird morning, temperatures hovering around a mild 75 degrees and the humidity felt like it was nourishing your skin and not draining your soul as the heat of the past several weeks has felt. As we peacefully strolled down the streets lined with impeccable lawns and extravagant verdure, a rather frantic lady rolled down her window, looked at me, and asked for directions to get to Jadwin Gym.
Well, “asked” is a polite way to put it. She did not say “excuse me, sir, may I ask you a question?” Nor did she say it with the inflection in her voice that in the old days one would use when asking questions but nowadays everybody uses to sound like they’re perpetually unsure of themselves. Instead, she demanded knowledge from me: “Tell me how to get to Jadwin Gym,” in a fast, frantic, Jersey accent. I felt like the only thing that would’ve made her statement a better fit with her tone of voice would be to end it with “you mothafuggin’ hippie I will cut your balls off.”
Now, I’ve never been to Jadwin gym before. However, I have heard of it, and I am a Princeton student so I figured the least I can do is spend a second scrolling through my mental archives in hopes of finding “Jadwin Gym”. I asked her for a moment as I thought about it and displayed the interpersonal pinwheel of “ummmm…” “Kinkos…” no, farther… “Krispie Kreme…” no, farther still… “Jadwin gym” AHA! Here we are. All I could remember was the quadrant of campus where it could be found, a feat of amnesia I attribute to the pressure of her unforgiving gaze, which seemed to say that if I didn’t know where this place was, and if I didn’t hurry up and tell her, she would come to my house at night and cut off my balls while Jack watches.
I told her “okay, take a right onto this side street right here,” I pointed to the side street 15 yards away.
“Murray?!” she asked, frantically.
“Yup, Murray!” I replied cordially. Well, 'cordially' is a polite way to put it, since it's very likely that my face started to betray my feelings of amazement at her frantic presence and I started to look at her like she was the sideshow freak who could inhale a full cigarette in one breath and blow it out of her ears. “And then you’re going to follow Murray past Prospect to Western, which is right after Prospect. Take a right on Western, so you’ll be heading back this way,” I pointed the direction one goes after taking two right turns. “Then after just a few hundred yards, you’ll see the stadium on your left – you can’t miss it!” I smiled.
“Okay.” she said driving off, with a tone of disappointment and anger that perhaps arose from the fact that this whole interaction took an entire minute or that I couldn’t just take her straight to Jadwin. Or perhaps she was furious that my directions were not as good as a GPS that she would’ve had if her iphone had been charged which she wasn’t able to do because her husband-she’s-contemplated-divorcing-because-he-never-helps-with-anything took up all the outlets with his stupid TV and his own cell phone charger and her kids wanted her to do a million other things over the past week and then this one lady cut her off on the turnpike and… what does the lady on the turnpike have to do with her iphone? Nothing, really, but the lady on the turnpike has everything to do with why the cut-off-your-balls lady wants to cut off your balls, and why something as little as an uncharged iphone can be amplified to a monstrous presence that ruins your day and emits the BO of bitterness that sprints into the nostrils of everybody within a 20 yard radius of you, leaving them with a twisted sneer and hateful eyes.
This is nothing unusual for New Jersey, which I would bet is the angriest state in the nation (in fact, it made top-3 for "least happy"), but it’s all the more tragic when we consider that this contagiously stressed lady is packed into a state with 1188 other susecptible people per square mile, and so her chances of spreading this contagion are quite high. What’s even worse is that humans never build an immunity against stress or jerks, so the instant somebody is ‘healed’ and no longer infectious, they are right back in the pool of susceptibles just waiting to be infected by the dude who lost at poker or the lady who got a bad haircut or the guy whose baseball team suffered an ignominious loss and then drives like an asshole and cuts people off on the turnpike. It seems our adaptive immunity, often extolled as one of the most complex and beautiful systems created by evolution, which evolves within us over the course of our lives to recognize the most bizarre pathogens that we may have never encountered before, has not yet found a way to deal with people from Jersey.
Such is life in an overpopulated developed world. People have everything they could ask for, things that the founders of New Jersey couldn’t even dream of – we have medicine that has boosted our life expectancy to over 4 times that of my dog (who has already packed in more adventures into his life than most people from Jersey ever will); we have shelters that keep us cool in the harsh summers, warm in the freezing winters, and protected from the deadly trees that crash down during the torrential summer thunderstorms; we have more varieties of food that takes almost no preparation whatsoever (how many people in Jersey have harvested their own fruit, or killed their own cow?) – so much food so easily accessible that people literally die from having too much; We have ‘things’ – TV’s, iphones, computers, air conditioners, refrigerators, cars, airplanes, bowling alley, boob-jobs, hot tubs, jewelry, boutiques… the list goes on. People in Jersey have everything that humans thought they wanted, and yet one drive through New Jersey or one stroll to the coffee shop is all we need to see that Jersey seems to be missing something that matters more. A lot more.
A sense of humor? Courtesy? Humility? Human connection? Love? Compassion? Now where can people from Jersey buy those? Can I get a discount on Love if I get a second boob job? Which of the uncountably infinite strip malls in New Jersey sells Compassion at a good price? Is it the one in Lawrenceville? They have everything in Lawrenceville.
No, it’s not the one in Lawrenceville. It's not even in New Brunswick. In fact, it’s not in any strip mall anywhere because you can’t buy Love or Compassion, *you have to build it yourself*. Our reliance on others to make things for us and do things for us – building our houses, manufacturing our cars and iphones, preparing our food, pumping our water, solving our family problems (shrinks) – has made us so reliant on others for material salvation that we expect to rely on others for spiritual salvation as well. There’s a lot to be said about self-reliance in the 21st century, and revisiting Emerson is something I always recommend, but the most crucial form of self-reliance I want to focus on today, which we should never abandon no matter how developed and interdependent and globalized and Jersey-like the world becomes, is spiritual self-reliance.
By spiritual self-reliance I mean having the *endogenous* ability and the drive to cultivate compassion and connection with the world. To sit down - and want to sit down - and try to see the world through the eyes of the lady who wanted to cut off my balls, and think about how we can make her feel a bit happier next time. I’ve always been a righteous bastard when playing soccer, and one of my most lasting lessons from the sport is that you can’t control your God-given gifts, but you 100% can control your effort. We can’t control our innate ‘goodness’, our innate ability to make the world a more pleasant place for those around us, or our innate ability to turn those frowns upside down, but we 100% can control how hard we try. Thus, there’s a bit more to the story than simple self-reliance - there is also an implicit call for self-discipline, as we need to not only know that we can make ourselves contagiously happy, but we have to have the discipline to do it, and to keep doing it even after a lady looks at you like she wants to cut off your balls.
So how do we become spiritually self-reliant? Well, the exact opposite of spiritual self-reliance would be to live like a spiritual ectotherm. If I were to simply morph my mood to the average mood of strangers around me, I would be the angriest guy the 505 has ever met. However, simply ignoring the angry people will not give me any lasting satisfaction any more than repressing my unpleasant thoughts will give me lasting peace. Nor can I use pity disguised as compassion – “oh, that poor person is so angry… their poor life must really suck. It must be because they're ugly or they're not as good as me... They must have failed at everything… oh, that poor person…” That simply leads to entitlement which we see in too many organized religions “oh, that poor person hasn’t found {insert_savior_ here}… how pitiful they will look as they {insert_form_of_eternal_ damnation_here}...{pat_yourself_on_back_for_being_compassionate}”. I can’t ignore the people, and I can’t pity them, nor can I take of the role of an Atlas or a savior to bear the world's burden and solve their problems… at least not until I have solved my own problems. The option that seems best to me, and what I believe to be spiritual self-reliance, is to work diligently at solving my own problems in hopes of becoming a more radiant presence, and encourage people I know to do the same.
To be clear, by spiritual self-reliance I do not mean to propose that only in solitude can we find salvation. Nor do I believe we should not lean on our friends and family in a time of need and be there for them when they’re feeling down. In fact, I believe this sense of community is crucial and should be fostered whenever and wherever possible. I always think back to my times at the Christian Student Center at UNM. Despite not being a religious man by an Evangelical’s standard, I would find immense joy and sense of place in their presence, and it made me a contagiously happy person and would encourage me to invite others into the fold – to bring more people into the community so they could feel this love and appreciation that radiated from the community, love and appreciation that would later radiate from them as they walked out the doors of the CSC and into the world. By self-reliance, then, I mean that we should always work on our own (in addition to the help we get from others) to foster the DRIVE to be better, because even within these communities of light like the CSC there is a need for engines. The motion of love throughout the world is not perpetual, but depends on all of us to give it a push, and so by spiritual self-reliance I mean that we all cultivate our own desire to push.
I can’t fix New Jersey. In fact, I can’t even fix the life of that one lady who wanted to cut off my balls. Nor can I fix the life of the lady in the coffee shop just minutes later who became horribly upset when I accidentally stepped in quickly to grab my coffee from the counter (as she was moving in to grab her bagel)… it was a crowded room, and I couldn’t see her moving in… it’s a crowded state… it’s becoming a crowded world. We have a span of control that is far less than the number of people whose emotions we inadvertently influence over the course of our day. I can’t even fix the lives of 1/10th the number of people I bump into in my day… However, I can fix myself. By focusing my attention on my own self, my own thoughts, feelings and actions, I can cultivate a glowing compassion in hopes that, of all the interactions in my day that happen so quickly and are so far beyond my control, a respectable fraction of them can lead to the other person walking away feeling happier than they were moments before. Not happy that they got to cut off my balls, but happy that they got directions from a smiling man who would’ve helped them fix a flat despite almost certainly never seeing them again. Not happy that they splashed coffee all over my face, but happy that the gentleman said "pardon me" with a smile, and stepped back to let them get their bagel.
I wasn’t so lucky with the lady asking for directions, or the lady in the coffee shop for that matter, but no worries, I’ll bump into 100 more people today. Probably around 70 of them would answer “yes” if you asked them if they’re stressed out. If I’m lucky, by the end of my day I’ll be able to make some of them happy, and look back fondly on those smiles and thank-you’s I got from 2/5 people who I held the door for, the sincere laughs I brought out of a guy standing in line with me, and the giggles of delight I heard from the little girl who asked if she could pet Jack, only to have Jack walk up and kiss her on the cheek.
That is what happiness looks like in the overpopulated, developed world… it doesn’t come as an explosive force, an orgasm of joy that leaves people bed-ridden with goofy smiles on their faces… it comes slowly, in little trickles, seeping imperceptibly out of the crowds. You can’t notice from the droplets themselves, but you can see from stepping back and looking at the spring as a whole that it’s been seeping less and less as people have gotten more and more, making some people worry that the spring is running dry… But we know better. The spring happiness is not some reservoir that will eventually run dry, but instead will flow forever and we are the ones who control how much it flows, and its flow around us is determined not by how much stuff we have, but how much Love we have. We are the grains of sand out of which this spring flows, but no single grain of sand can single-handedly make the spring flow. The best we can do is focus on ourselves to ensure that our personality permits happiness to flow around us, hopefully helping those close to us do the same, causing those close to them to do the same, and so on… and always, no matter what, avoid becoming the impenetrable cement of someone who has lost the drive to love everyone and forgotten that compassion is not an act but a way of life.
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