j a c k *

No Accounting for Jerks...

Our industry's big trade show, SIGGRAPH 2005, is next week.  So I was driving home from work yesterday, after busting my butt all day to get ready for a show that could make or break our tiny company, and Sam Seder was on the radio working hard to get listeners to call their representatives to vote "no" on CAFTA.  Admittedly I've been out of the loop on this one since I've been heads-down working to make my company succeed, and I couldn't make the call he was urging since I don't think that people should use phones while driving (and I'm one of those insane people you've heard about who doesn't even own a cell phone).  But I listened to what he had to say and it seemed reasonable given that what I've heard about CAFTA has all been bad.

Then some sort of small business owner called in to argue.  We'll call him Gary.  I don't recall exactly what he said, but it followed a very familiar plot line.

"I don't understand," he whined, "why I should care if some guy wants to take his business to some other country."  He then continued on a weird non-sequitor, "After I've invested millions of my own money in my business, shouldn't I have the right to take opportunities where I can do what I'm supposed to do -- make money for my company?"

I'm not even completely clear what argument he was trying to make, but the form indicated it didn't really matter.  "Why am I supposed to care..." is not designed to engage rational argument; it's employed to put the opposition on the defensive.  Not only is your argument incorrect, it says, but first you have to engage my enthusiasm.  Of course you never can.

To his credit, Seder gave the caller several good reasons why he should care despite the fact that this individual might make more money exploiting cheap labor in other countries.  At the very least Seder explained why other people care about this particular bill and it's consequences.  As predicted, it didn't really matter.

"I don't understand," the guy began again, apparently after not listening to anything the host had just said, "why I should care..."  And he did the whole spiel over again, about millions of his own money and how it should be his choice and so forth.  At this point I would have hung up in disgust or shouted "I just told you why you should care!" but Seder pressed on with examples, like how businesses cause far more degradation of the public highways than all the commuters and holiday motorists put together and yet highways are paid for mostly out of individual taxes.  The poor rich businessman finally fell back on what he felt was his ultimate trump card.  "But I took the risk," he said proudly.

Risk?  Risk?  This guy doesn't know risk.  Putting millions of your own dollars into your own business is not a risk.  That's a goddamn golden opportunity.  Not everybody gets to do that.

Risk is going to work every day at Wal-Mart knowing you have no health insurance because the company pays you slightly less than the government-mandated threshold level to get it, and hoping you don't get sick.  Risk is being fired from your dead-end job when bills are due, and hoping your meager savings hold out for food and shelter.  Risk is putting your phone and your car payment on the credit card so you can keep interviewing, hoping that you have a new income before the bill collectors start calling.  The real risk is just living as a lower income person in this country.

What did Gary do to feel he deserved so much credit?  As an entrepreneur he invested his savings in something that he anticipated would net him a positive return.  The very worst thing that could happened to this guy, if he really sunk his whole fortune into his venture and it turned out badly, would be that he would become a lower income person himself.  Gary's downside risk is the everyday life for millions of Americans.

Sorry, but you get no sympathy from me.  Your much vaunted "risk" doesn't justify trashing any responsibility you might have to other members of the society in which you live and thrive.  The "risk" you take in seeking your fortune does not relieve you of the responsibility to the orphans of capitalism -- the truly poor who live by the skin of their teeth day after day.  If you want to sidestep them you cannot get past me with a simple "why should I care..?"  You should care because your mama trained you to care.  Or perhaps you thought you knew better, and more's the pity that we all have to learn that lesson again because your mama failed.

Gary does not speak for me or the millions of other small business owners who have the ability to think beyond our bottom line.  We know that a just and equitable society is an essential part of any success we might achieve, and we pay our taxes and accept the restrictions on our businesses gladly.  We'll make Gary do his part too, even if he doesn't want to.  Tell Gary, if he calls again to bleat about why he should care, that it's called a level playing field and even if he doesn't care, a lot of us do.

- jack*

Rove the Invader...

Can we finally at long last put to rest the noxious notion that Karl Rove is a genius?  If he's so smart, how come he's in so much trouble?

Karl Rove's political success is more akin to the unchecked proliferation of an invading species.  In any ecosystem the native species have co-evolved.  While it would be incorrect to say that they cooperate, they have nonetheless reached an evolutionary equilibrium in which they all act as checks on each other.  All the different flora and fauna have adapted to the strategies of their peers so that none of them manage to dominate at the expense of the others.  Since evolution is slow, it's difficult for a native species to arise that can readily exploit an open ecological niche since it will be countered by competitive species, in evolutionary time.  (In the long view, of course, evolution is brutal and vicious, and day to day it's red in tooth and claw, but we can entertain the Romantic fantasy as long as we use an intermediate temporal window.)

But an invader is different.  It can arrive overnight, fully-formed and ready to thrive in ways that the native species have never had to deal with.  Introduce rabbits or snakes to a remote island habitat and in a few decades native species which have been stable for millennia are threatened or endangered.  Birds that evolved to forage on the ground because there were no significant predators suddenly find themselves snake chow.  Herbivores that managed to eek out a living on the slow-growing native plants find themselves simply out-eaten by the ravenous rabbits.  Even if they can find food, they are devoured by the native predators whose populations have now blossomed by gorging on rabbit fecundity.

Rove exploits a niche just like any other invading species.  The various political animals, as they co-evolved before Rove, generally agreed upon Easily Verifiable Truths.  Facts formed the background against which arguments were framed, but no one would seriously challenge an Easily Verifiable Truth since their opponents would have no difficulty refuting their claim.  But the rise of a conservative intellectual infrastructure, coupled with the politicization of scientific issues like evolution or global warming, provided an opening for the right kind of remorseless opportunist.

Rove doesn't just disagree with Easily Verifiable Truths, he turns his campaigns on a complete inversion of the truth.  Where other conservatives are content simply to argue that the Easily Verifiable Truth is not so easy to verify and perhaps we should consider alternatives, Rove not only says it's false but that the truth is actually the exact opposite.  Kerry a decorated war hero?  No, a traitor who lied to get his honors.  McCain a canny and upright public servant?  No, an insane vet with a black baby.  Mark Kennedy a friend of families and a champion of child welfare?  No, a pedophile.  Anne Richards a competent and inclusive governor?  No, a willing tool of the gay agenda.

The techniques that Rove uses to advance his anti-Truth in the public mind largely hinge on the fact that voters rarely verify truths for themselves but rely instead on the testimony of others.  The professional pundit class and the easily manipulated mass media, together with the wide reach of the direct mail and electronic "whisper campaigns" provide the vectors for this disinformation, allowing Rove and his clients to stand aloof and remain untarnished.  The lies they originate are always chosen to be the type that tend to spread fastest, relying on word of mouth to get them halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on it's trousers.  (Although I suspect this is less a matter of craft than of chance.  If you watch them facing a novel situation they just pump out dozens of smears and see what people like to gossip about.  Those then feed back and get reinforced.)

The key to Rove's life as a political weed is weak defenses in the rest of the ecosystem.  His attacks are so outrageous that the victims mostly react with disbelief, stunned into a slack-jawed silence.  Once they realize that the attacks are hurting them they find out that publicly defending themselves hurts them more since it validates what would be a nasty rumor so it can graduate to a reasonable criticism.  "If it's not true," the largely non-thinking public thinks, "why would he have to deny it?"  But the main issue is the perversion of journalism.  It used to be that newspapers made their money by pointing out where politicians were wrong, but now they make their money by assuring the public that the Republicans are right.  With the major news companies in this country unwilling to point out the Easily Verifiable Truth for fear of having their access cut off, Rove (and if he goes, the next guy like him) will be able to use his not-at-all-ingenious Johnny-one-note strategy to score success after success.

Fortunately there are signs that the progressives are evolving in response, however slowly.  The growth of the Reality-Based blogging community took very little time, the rise of left-wing radio talkers somewhat longer.  But TV continues to slide to the right, especially with the recent erosion of PBS, and major newspapers and magazines are hopeless cases because of their declining economic fortunes.  However, there is one entity that has not succumbed to the need for access or the great god of money, and that is the justice system.  It still accepts the Easily Verifiable Truth as true, and for anything harder to verify it has hard and rigorous rules for evidence, advocacy and peer review.  Here's hoping Rove finds those citizens a little harder to spin.

- jack*

Update: The inestimable Paul Krugman weighs in on the Rove ecology.

Natural Wonder...

One of the common critiques of the rationalist, materialist worldview -- leveled by people who do not fully understand it -- is that it's cold and impersonal.  They argue that it takes the joy and wonder out of life, reducing human beings and relationships to mere things to be understood.  In fact nothing could be further from the truth.  I offer two interesting blogs as evidence.

It is difficult to be human and behave in a human way, it is difficult to reject our programming and accept people rather than judging them, it is difficult to ‘be with’ rather than ‘do to’ in understaffed, bureaucratic, undervalued environments and to reject the social prejudices that divide humanity – even so, it is vital that we struggle toward it, for otherwise we become part of the system of prejudices, theologies, bureaucracies that exclude and oppress so many of the people that nursing serves.

The rationalist social philosophy, most commonly referred to by the label of Humanism, is concerned primarily with human beings and their interrelationships.  As the Thinking Nurse ably demonstrates, this neither attempts to reduce human beings to a scientific formula, nor does it devolve into a cult of selfishness as some critics unfairly assert.  Instead by embracing the rational and the material the Humanist constructs a grounded morality which seeks to improve the life and experience of all people.  That which we can feel and perceive is most important: our family, friends, neighbors, countrymen and all the people of the world, not immaterial or non-verifiable beings with inscrutable motives.

The Humanists' worldly orientation gives them a unique affinity for the good works that are supposed to characterize the religious.  The materialist identifies human (and animal to varying degrees) welfare as the ultimate ethical concern.  The rationalist identifies the ways in which human welfare could be most readily improved.  The empiricist insists that all actions be tested against material results.  This feedback not only fosters continuing forward progress, but enobles the lives of those who strive for it.  It's odd that this survey left out Humanism as a worldview, and I suspect that many people get miscategorized.  Humanism is like existentialism without the emotional angst, and like post-modernism without the intellectual nihilism.

Although many scientists and authors have tried to express the extraordinary beauty and awe of the natural world as seen through science, Pharyngula has some great examples.  On what's fast becoming one of my favorite sites, PZ Myers waxes poetic about the state of being human:

We have this illusion that we are discrete and bounded, but we're really just temporary skeins of sensations and chemicals that enwrap some complicated chemistry, and interact with everything around us. "I" am something that changes with the length of the day, the bits of organisms that I'm constantly stuffing into the anterior end of my digestive tract, the viruses that sneak in and diddle my chemistry, the scents of the people around me. The universe is one big stewpot, and we just happen to be somewhat lumpier bits…but we're still thoroughly infiltrated with the broth, and we're mistaken if we think we're somehow independent of the stew.

The comments to this thread grapple with the problem that our everyday language with its easy and seductive categories can obscure the nature of reality that we have come to discover.  Scientific understanding has to transcend the barriers of commonsense thinking not out of some alliance with mysticism, but rather because of a commitment to describing the world as we really find it and not as we might prefer it to be.  Those who believe that our convenient linguistic pigeonholes describe intrinsic natural divisions are actually practicing the crudest form of reductionism.  When science finds an organizing principle that seems to bind together diverse and complex phenomenon, like evolution, we celebrate it.  Not because we want to force reality to follow laws of our invention, but because we see the hope of actually understanding something important about a deeply and awesomely complex universe.  An article in Nature can be as inspiring as any sermon for those who care to look.

In both the view outward into the world and inward into ourselves, the rationalist has a deep and abiding commitment to the True and the Real.  While we may be forced to abandon the comforting superstitions of our youth or the comfortable habits of our culture of thought, the rewards far exceed any costs.  We are bound together into a community that goes beyond any one system of belief and puts us all on a common quest.  The rising flood tide driven by a steady drip of scientific results buoys us all up, socially and spiritually, even as it may wash away older less accurate modes of thinking.  The quest for material truth, guided by reason, can lead to rich and deeply satisfying lives for those who pursue it with honesty and passion.

- jack*