Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Political Courage

There is one thing that modern political movements, such a #MeToo, Antifa, and #MarchforOurlives have that previous, more substantive historical movements, e.g. abolition, civil rights, fair labor laws, etc. lacked: fashion. Likewise there is something that the historical movements had that their contemporary counterparts lack: courage.

Marches on Washington in which a speaker addresses a gathering of hundreds of thousands of like-minded and approving activists, with the support of mass media and pop culture figures takes little courage. The payoff is not in achieving the stated goals of the underlying movement but in garnering the accolades of fellow travelers, all withing the safety of popular emotional trends. The courage of the mob really isn't courage, it is pandering.

If someone asserts that they are courageous for standing up to the "patriarchy," or "fascists," or the "gun lobby," ask them if they would continue to do so if it meant being labelled a racist, by one's peers. would they still be courageous? The neighbors of the San Bernadino killers weren't. The Broward county school district wasn't. the police in Rotherham weren't either. Emotional trendiness is not courage. If someone asserts that there is nothing more important than school safety, ask them if they support doing research into all of the factors that might bear upon teenage violence including race, single parent families, psychological history and drug use. Would they advocate this even though it means being accused of "shifting the focus" or injecting race, or doing something that must be similar to something the Nazis did not did not do?

Hashtag advocacy, guerrilla theater on sympathetic campuses and social media celebrity are reflections of transient emotional appeal. They lack the essential spine necessary for long lasting and just change.

Saturday, March 03, 2018

Equality

Equality is one of those virtues so esteemed that we seem not to care that our conception of it is totally contrary to our experience. It has assumed sort of a free-form righteousness that anything other than unthinking deference to it is scandalous.
Equality is of course something, and our western tradition is that it is something desirable. (“…did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped.” [Phil 2:6]; Liberté,Égalité, Fraternité; and “We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal.”) But the concept enjoys much greater esteem in slogans than in practice. Evolutionary biology is possible precisely because individual organisms are not equal. The field of metrology exists only because things are unequal, and in fact the only reason to measure and rank things is because they are unequal. The number of ways that humans are unequal to each other are too numerous to list, or even contemplate. Individuality is a consequence of inequality in certain characteristics. "All animals are equal" of course, but some are more equal than others.This witticism would not resonate if the political concept of equality did not carry its own inherent contradictions.
Equality is the very rare exception to the natural rule; yet when it comes time to criticize social and political institutions, confuse sentiment with thought, and look for a cudgel with which to bludgeon social order, equality vaults to the top of the list of virtues. When the reality of inherent inequality makes us tongue tied and confused, we regain our bearings by talking about fairness.
None of this is to say that equality, in those interstices where it is actually found or seriously pursued, is bad or foolish, but those instances are limited. Religious traditions at least postulate an equality that makes sense: that humans are equal in the eyes of God. All persons are endowed with equal human dignity until they relinquish it by their choices.The legal concept that all persons are equal before the law can at least be given the benefit of the doubt. Beyond this, reality demands consideration. People are not biologically equal. They are not equal with respect to fortune and misfortune; they are not economically equal. They are, in general, not equal in any way that can be remedied by social engineering, government meddling or use of force. Decent people and wise governments treat people equally, all else being, well… equal, but they do not make people equal. The moral is that it is not equality itself that it the virtue, it is the way we freely treat each other that is. That is what we should really care about, not how we measure it, not how we enforce it, not how we codify it, but simply how we do it when no one is watching.

The role of government

With regard to the proper role of government, the issue is not whether centralization is good or bad per se, or whether people would be happy with any amount of government service as long as it is provided well. There are some things that I would want government and only government to do, and there are some things I would not want it to do at all regardless of how well it is perceived at doing them.
I want government and only government to provide an army. Same with local police protection. I only want the government to investigate the cause of plane crashes, perform foreign espionage, and operate criminal courts. I do not want the government to run newspapers, churches or social organizations (implicating respectively freedom of the press, religion and association). I don’t want the government to be responsible for the details of airplane design, or fashion design for that matter. I don;t want the government to manage musical bands or comedy tours.
These preferences arise from consideration of how different types of incentives affect different institutions. Some institutions thrive with a profit motive, others are corrupted by it. Some institutions function well because of a sense of community that is missing from larger entities. The incentives that optimize the performance of government are different than those that do the same for private enterprise or charitable organizations. Sometimes this works in favor of the government doing stuff, sometimes it means the government should defer to better options.
As a general observation, by no means rigorously verified, government seem to be at its best with projects; defeating the nazis, going to the moon, building the interstate highway system, etc. and at its worst with the ongoing management of the mundane. Hence the familiar jokes about the DMV,, Amtrak and less funny jokes that are the Veterans Administration and the Indian Health Service.
The choice is not dichotomous between government and private industry. My own personal opinion is the the hospital system in this country was at its best when it was primarily a charitable enterprise, organized by religious orders and civic organizations, and it has not been improved by intervention of either government or profit-seeking institutions. I would not want to see the Boy Scouts listed on either the New York Stock Exchange or the Blue Pages of the phone book.
Government, private enterprise and charitable organizations are all necessary and beneficial. Each does some things better than the others; and there are certain things to which each is ill-suited.
Because diversity or something.

Name calling

It is remarkable how much progressive policy discourse consists of name-calling. Rather than refine and hone the principles and substance of a particular position, energy is diverted into discovering new ways of implying malignant character on the other side. The contemporary political vocabulary contains a dearth of rights, obligations, duties, compromise and political philosophy, and an excess of racist, sexist, homophobe, climate denier, rape apologist, hater,Iislamophobe, white supremacist, bitter clinger, etc. The governor of California described those who disagreed with his views on immigration enforcement as “troglodyte.” In addition, there are more subtle forms of name calling, less directly offensive but equally content-free such as denouncing another’s “privilege,” insinuating that another is aggressive or violent by claiming they make one feel “unsafe,” and by implying that the only possible basis for disagreement is “hate.” There is also the cynical and rather deluded gibe that one;s political opponents are “on the wrong side of history.”
It is interesting to contemplate the details of this phenomenon. When did we decide that the argument methods of second graders is preferable to reason and common courtesy? When did we decide that logic is subordinate to emotional satisfaction? I would suggest that name-calling is simply a cheap way of exploiting a socializing instinct, a boorish way of implying that if ones opponent does not agree or at least silence his own argument, that he is “the other.” It attacks the emotional security one finds in a good reputation and explicitly declares that a person;s beliefs either conform with those of the name-caller, or are the result of bad character. This approach to discourse lacks room for complexity or the notion of “however.” Thus, when it moves people to action (usually poorly thought out and silly action) it is prone to excess and obsession, such as pulling the Dukes of Hazard from TVLand, disinviting commencement speakers, sanctioning fraternities, for the conduct of other fraternities (or conduct that turns out to have been imaginary) and banishing those who are insufficiently outraged by the "right" things.
I suspect that our age invented none of these things; that there have always been principled thinkers of all political orientations as well as mountebanks and populists, bullies, sophists, con artists, and demagogues. But our age seems to have been overcome lately with a discourse of name-calling and political opportunism that not only obscures thoughtful and innovative dialogue, but hinders real progress. We seem to be more interested at the moment in emotional indulgence rather than thinking through many of the complex problems in our civic life.

Moral outrage

The term “moral outrage” is misleading. The subjects are not selected for their moral basis but for their immediate emotional appeal. The progressive enterprise is not a twilight struggle between good and evil, it is a ceaseless campaign of emotional bullying. Strident emotional appeals are used, not because there is some moral principle in need of a champion, but because the tactic is a useful to those whose ultimate goals are political power.
H.L. Mencken observe that “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless stream of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” “Moral outrage” is simply a newer version of this same principle. Now the premise is that the “good” people are in constant moral peril from the “bitter clingers” who will not see the light and therefore must have their views delegitimized.
Plaintiff’s lawyers are quite transparent about the underlying principle. A good number of them have adopted the “Reptile Strategy”, so named because it appeals to the emotional “reptile” part of jurors’ brains, rather than the more troublesome, rational part. Recall that, after the Sandy Hook shootings that gun control advocates explicitly demanded that action be taken before passions cooled. Emotions tend to override reason in the short term and therefore emotional appeals demand immediate action. Emotions also tend to be notoriously bad counselors, and the strategy of using them to whip up the populace has a rather shameful pedigree: lynchings, pogroms, riots, and revenge massacres.
As practiced in modern politics, the “moral outrage” gambit has a few distinguishing characteristics:
1.) Being an emotional appeal, it cannot bear rational scrutiny; something must be done now without reflection. The science after all, is settled; the counter arguments are invalid because they were advocated by the Cato Institute or heard on Fox News (the ad hominem fallacy); “Reagan did something similar” (the tu quoque fallacy,) “a new poll says that….” (argumentum ad populum), “Experts say…” (argumentum ad verecundiam), etc., etc., If you are appealing to emotion, fallacies are your friend.
2.) There is a clearly defined, malevolent other. Dissent can only be based in bad character with no room for good faith disagreement. The goal is not to persuade but to divide and demonize. “We” are entitled to have our way because we ‘think right’.” If the opponents words are insufficiently outrage inducing, resort to one of President Obama;s favorite rhetorical device, “there are those who say…,” the straw man fallacy; there can be no good faith disagreement.
3.) Because the other is defined solely by their opposition, consistency of the proponent’s arguments is unnecessary. Therefore, President Obama can “evolve,” Senators can be for something before they are against, and we can take credit for successes that we actively opposed. It doesn’t matter if Elizabeth Warren, or Diane Feinstein, or Al Gore has one set of rules for themselves and another for everyone else, because the contest is between “us and them,” not between differing concepts of what is best for the country.
4.) People who do not think right should be banned from participating in civic life. “Moral outragers” like to ban things. Support traditional marriage, lose your job. Question global warming or campus rape statistics, face expulsion from professional institutions. Show insufficient fealty for the emotional play of the day and endure death treats on Twitter. “Moral outrage” does, and always has created a lot of ugliness; bigotry pretending to unearned virtue.
This is not to say that there are not true moral outrages. The proper response however requires a resort to reason and not emotion; to think, and not merely to feel. It is a real tragedy when moral people do immoral things because they are “outraged.”

Competition, collaboration and regulation

Competition and regulation are not alternatives for each other. Competition, collaboration and government regulation serve different purposes. I would not leave it to competition to replace the FDA or the FAA.
Competition and collaboration are optimizing mechanisms, but they are not interchangeable. Competition optimizes processes whereas collaboration optimizes resources. Both have their role. 
Competition and collaboration are concerned with optimization. Regulation is (or should be) concerned with general welfare. Optimization relates to the maximum possible, regulation to the minimum acceptable. They serve different purposes and are essential in different ways. Successful societies seek out that elusive balance between competition, collaboration and regulation, and flourishing societies come close to finding it, but of course, being human, never quite get it exactly right.

Gun policymaking

There is one circumstance that even the must ardent gun control advocate must admit, if not of the fact, at least of the possibility: that the people who would profit or otherwise benefit from circumventing gun control regulations are smarter and better motivated than those doing the regulating. We see this phenomenon played out regularly with, for example, reference to the prevalence of illicit drug use, and historically with the prohibition of alcohol. The motivated creativity of someone who would make tens of thousands of dollars providing firearms manufactured in Mexico or Honduras to street gangs in a given American city is likely to trump the naive determination of earnest bureaucrats who do not understand the limited influence that government has on human nature. The semi-literate gang enforcer in Chino has much more in the way of practical smarts, at least in acquiring the minimum firepower necessary to an international criminal enterprise, than Dianne Feinstein or Bret Stephens. This disparity is likely to widen with advances in technology. Say what you will about bump sticks, the guy who came up with the idea was pretty sharp.
This is not an argument against gun control; it is an argument against the notion that restrictions will do much good. For good or ill, the technology of repeating firearms is about 150 years old; gun smithing is a community college degree, not an advanced course offering in the theoretical physics department at Harvard. An advanced civilization is much more reliant on the decency of its citizens for its survival than it is the force of its statutes. The Second Amendment applies only to the right to keep and bear arms, it is not necessary to their existence, nor to their availability in the criminal underground. Firearms themselves are not essential to the madness that perpetrates mass murder.
If Mr. Paddock, the perpetrator of the Las Vegas had not provided his own demise, one might reasonably wish to ask: was his primary motivation to shoot or to kill? Would he have foregone the anticipated satisfaction of killing if he had to forego the expected pleasure of shooting? We of course will never know, but even so, we can note, with just a cursory, off-the-top-of-the-head list, dates verified by Wikipedia, the following sample:
Date Number killed
May 18, 1927 45
December 12, 1986 98
December 7, 1981 43
April 19, 1995 168
March 24, 2015 150
March 20, 1995 12
March 11, 2004 192
June 11, 1964 10
December 19, 2016 12
March 1, 2014 31
February 27, 2002 59
May 17, 2010 44
June 3, 2017 8
July 7, 2005 56
The means used for these deaths included airplanes,, knives, sarin gas, explosives, motor vehicles, a flame thrower(!) and matches.
This list is not a sample of inadequate regulation, it is rather a specimen of psychopathic depravity against which the most competent of government is impotent.
The call for gun control is a symbolic protest against an uncomfortable fact: people that are crazy in their motives might be quite rational in their methods; they may in fact be quite ingenious in them. It is a form of inexcusable arrogance to assume that people who seem so illogical in their motives cannot outwit well-intentioned regulation, and the advice of “experts.”
None of which is to say that there should be no limits on guns or gun ownership. Reasonable regulation should be expected to have reasonable results. Expecting to confine the darker and disordered impulses of the psychopath by assuming that decent people cannot be trusted with the means of emergent defense is not reasonable.