Dear Catastrophe Blogger

1/8/2004 | link

Just a quick note that the new Belle and Sebastian album, Dear Catastrophe Waitress is really, really good. I picked it up a few weeks ago but had only listened to it a couple of times. Up there with If You're Feeling Sinister.

 

Impolite Sodomites

1/8/2004 | link

So the catalyst for this is a Corner post from Tim Graham:

Howard Dean decides that his decision to back gay "civil unions" was actually a faith-based move. "The overwhelming evidence is that there is very significant, substantial genetic component to it...From a religious point of view, if God had thought homosexuality is a sin, he would not have created gay people."

Sure, Howard, I remember the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. God thought about destroying them for their sins, and then remembered he'd given everyone the genetic predisposition for all that, so it couldn't be sin, and they were spared? Dean is telling voters that the Word of God is irrelevant to his religious views.

Of course, "sodomy" is now a synonym for "ass sex," but if you actually look at the story, you'd be hard pressed to conclude that's actually the reason for the city's destruction. Recall that a couple of angels show up to suss out the town, Lot invites them in for dinner, and the rest of the men in the city attempt to break down the door and gang rape them. God is duly horrified and torches Sodom. Multiple choice—the conclusion a sane person draws from this story is:

(A) God disapproves of the gang rape of guests; you should show travellers hospitality, as Lot did.

(B)Aha! God hates gay sex!

Sure, there are a handful of other spots where homosexuality is called an "abomination," and there's Paul's hissy fit in Romans. Of the few things said in the Bible about homosexuality, I don't think there's much of anything nice. But are we really supposed to infer that what was primarily wrong with the men of Sodom in this story was that they tried to rape men coming through town? God would've been a-OK if they'd gone after a pair of female angels? Always struck me as the sort of interpretation that tells more about the reader than the story.

Of course, Tim can always appeal to Leviticus' proscription of homosexuality for his attack on Dean. I'll even give him ammunition: Dean also appears to be against slavery and has never once called for exiling couples who have sex during the woman's menstrual period! Clearly, the "Word of God is irrelevant to his religious views." Go get 'em Timmy!

 

Shameless Self-Promotion Twofer

1/7/2004 | link

On the Reason website today, I've got a look at religion and politics: "Gott Mit Uns." And in the January issue, now online, there's "Self Delusions," my review of Owen Flanagan's The Problem of the Soul

 

So This Is the New Year...

1/5/2004 | link

...and I don't feel any different. The clanking of crystal, alas, comes from my car window being smashed during the night as I move into new digs for a new year—a cute house over by the U Street corridor that I'm sharing with two other libertarian geeks. Despite my irritation at having to replace the window, I'm happy to report that (though there was—stupidly—a computer left in the back) the only thing taken was Salome and three quarters of Wagner's Ring Cycle. (They opted not to take Siegfried, for reasons unclear to me.) I guess we get a better class of vandals and thieves here in DC...

I'm still in the process of moving, but I anticipate that the combination of (1) windows and (2) ceilings more than 3 inches above my head will make enough of a contribution to my mental heath and productivity that posting volume here will pick up once I'm settled.

 

20 Answers

12/29/2003 | link

I was recently flattered to be asked to do an installment of Crescat Sententia's 20 Questions. The whole series is interesting: there are links to previous editions on CS's left-column blogroll.

 

New at Reason

12/29/2003 | link

A new CBO report on the long term budget outlook inspired some reflections on the problems of reforming entitlement spending in "Ride the Death Spiral."

 

How Santa Made Me an Atheist

12/27/2003 | link

Raised in a thoroughly secular household, the odds of my becoming a believer were probably slim from the start. But it was, oddly enough, Christmas that ensured it'd never happen.

I don't remember clearly when my parents first told me about Santa Claus, but I do remember being skeptical. Flying reindeer? How was that possible? Bringing presents to every child on the planet? Surely that couldn't be done in a single night. Even if it could, how could you possibly fit enough presents on a sleigh without constantly running back to the North Pole for reloads? If someone had this kind of technology, why weren't we trying like crazy to replicate it?

I don't think my parents had expected these sorts of questions. They just looked at each other, seeming a bit surprised, and let it drop. Come Christmas day, they gave it one final attempt: "Look, Santa ate the cookies we left out." I considered that for a moment. I don't think I'd encountered Occam's Razor yet, but the first thing to occur to me was: "I bet Dad just ate them! That's more likely than flying reindeer." At which point they gave up.

I was slightly resentful at first—why were they trying to deceive me? I thought perhaps they'd hoped that the idea of a magical old man watching my every action, and doling out (or withholding) presents accordingly was some kind of threat to make me behave well. In the end, I concluded that probably that was what some parents were hoping to do—I knew the story was told to lots of kids—but that mine had just thought that it would be fun for me, a game of make-believe. That's why they'd just given up when I didn't seem inclined to play along.

Sometime soon after, when I started kindergarten, I first encountered the notion of "God" via another child. Again, I don't remember the specifics. But I remember thinking: "Oh, I know this game." I decided not to spoil the make-believe for the other kid. When he was older, surely his parents would explain that they hadn't been serious.

It was sometime in first grade that I first realized that the adults—some of them anyway—were serious. This troubled me vaguely. On the five minute walk from the Norwood Public School to my house, I seriously considered the possibility that there might be a God for the first and last time. If there were such a being, why would he hide himself, instead of showing up to prove his existence to everyone, especially if he cared so much whether people believed in him? And it didn't seem to explain "where we came from," because there was no explanation of where he'd come from. Why just trade one mystery for another, weirder one? No, it seemed pretty cut and dried: This was like Santa. Someone had made up a story about a magical man rewarding and punishing, just to get folks to behave. Except this one seemed to have stuck better for some reason. I also remembered some picture-books about Norse myths that I'd enjoyed reading earlier, stories explaining thunder and lightning as battles in Asgard. Some of it was probably like that, too, I figured. But we knew that those were just stories.

Strange, I thought as I walked up the driveway, that some grownups apparently still believed this variation on the Santa-story. Oh well, I concluded as I shrugged off my jacket, surely there couldn't be very many of them.

 

A Novel Idea

12/27/2003 | link

While home for the holidays, Dad handed me a copy of a book inscribed to him by one of his former medical students: The Muse Asylum by David Czuchlewski. I started and finished it that same evening: An engaging, deftly written first novel that—being about people recently out of college finding their footing—I (unsurprisingly) found resonant. Though looking at the synopsis of his sophomore effort, I see he's got something for the "recent Princeton grad who can't quite get over his college girlfriend" theme.

Anyway, when I finished, it occured to me that this guy must've been no more than a year or two older than I am now when he wrote it and that, moreover, it was a highly satisfying first novel that he'd managed to produce while worrying about a med school courseload. I've toyed for years with various ideas for novels, or at least short stories—for a long time, I expected to be writing fiction when I "grew up." But it was just that: Toying with the idea. Now I'm thinking I may want to give it a serious shot.

Despite my sci-fi sympathies, I think I may try my hand at a historical novel. I've always wanted to write something about the Mesmer commissions: a fictional premise that would be considered too contrived and outlandish if it hadn't actually happened.

The story in a nutshell is: Franz Anton Mesmer, the inventor (or, as he claimed, "discoveror") of "animal magentism" from whose name we get "mesmerism," was making a splash in French society during the years between the American and French revolutions. Louis XVI is skeptical and appoints a pair of scientific commissions to discover whether Mesmer is a miracle worker or a charlatan. The commissions include eminent scientists, including ironically, both the great chemist Lavoisier and Doctor Joseph Guillotin, inventor of a new "humanitarian" execution device. The commissions were chaired by the new ambassador from the recently-founded United States, one Benjamin Franklin. The cast of characters would also include Mozart, a disciple of Mesmer's who included a reference to Mesmer in Cosi fan Tutte.

It's hard to imagine a better fictive setting within which to play off against each other the Dionysian and Apollonian impulses, or the constructivist and critical forms of rationalism associated with the very different revolutions in France and the US. Do I actually have time to give this a serious shot? I have no idea. But I'm going to order some of the books I'd need to begin doing research. Worst case scenario, I'll learn something useless and fascinating.

 

Joss Whedon, Existentialist

12/27/2003 | link

Among various gifts I was delighted to receive this Festivus (including a badass chess set to replace one destroyed by rampaging kittens) was the full run (on DVD) of Joss Whedon's fantastic sci-fi western Firefly, which was cancelled last year by shortsighted Fox executives in what historians will doubtless regard as the biggest cultural travesty since the razing of the library at Alexandria.

Later that evening, after checking out one of the unaired episodes included in the set on my laptop, I started up my favorite episode, "Objects in Space" (script). It's the episode in which the mercurial (and more than a bit disturbed) River is really integrated into the crew of Serenity during a battle of wits with an enigmatic (and talkative) Boba Fett–inspired bounty hunter. (The bounty hunter, Jubal Early, is brilliantly portrayed by Richard Brooks, most recognizable from his very different role as Asst. DA Paul Robinette on Law and Order.)

Then I noticed that the episode had a running comentary audio-track by Whedon and, since I was still pretty awake, I decided to check it out. I was both pleased and astonished to see that, in fact, the episode had an existentialist subtext that I'd missed. (In retrospect, there are plenty of almost heavy-handed hints at this, but it hadn't occured to me to be looking for it in a TV show, even one of Firefly's caliber.) As it turns out, Whedon had been inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea—readers of which will, I expect, suddenly see the title "Objects in Space" in a new light. He also cites Camus' Myth of Sisyphus as an influence. And both the commentary and the episode suggest that Whedon's grasp of existentialist thinking is quite good—and not all of it is discussed in the commentary.

For instance, Whedon says that both the plot and visuals of the episode are intended to set up River and Early as reflections of each other: Both are, in a sense, outsiders who observe the crew with a detatchment that gives each a special sort of insight. But Whedon leaves out a bit.

Sartre, for example, had plenty to say about the objectifying gaze of the "other"—River and Early eavesdropping on the crew from above and below simultaneously—a link Whedon doesn't explicitly make. Neither does he mention the contrast, which I must believe he had in mind, between Sartre's twin corruptions of love, sadism and masochism. Early, rather obviously, embodies the former, exulting in the infliction of pain as he seeks to possess his quarry as an object. River, perhaps less obviously, fits the latter, claiming at one point to have literally disolved into the ship, and later offering herself up to the mercenary, saying: "I'll be your bounty, Jubal Early. And I'll just fade away."

I'm tempted to go back and read Nausea and Sisyphus again, then give it another viewing. I'm not exactly steeped in Sartre, so there's probably other things I've missed that Whedon didn't call attention to in his commentary. Philosophy profs looking for something a bit fun to show their classes: Here's an excuse to pick up the Firefly set.

 

Malls, Mass Culture, and Parasitism. (Or: Humbug)

12/26/2003 | link

Christmas is the time of year that brings out my least liberal, most elitist instincts, because it's one of very few times each year I end up forcing myself into a mall to try to find gifts for miscellaneous relatives in the minimum possible time. (I couldn't quite stomach it this year—I left after a few minutes and resolved to do all my holiday shopping online.) Via the Crescateers, I see that that Tim Sandefur has a Randian take on the season, blasting those:

who can go to the glittering world that is the American shopping mall—full of abundance, full of families, full of strangers who exchange peacefully value for value—people who can see the great wealth that on Thursday will make so many children’s faces light up with joy; who can relish the warmth provided by the mall’s climate control technology, and eat at their choice of restaurants and even have fruits out of season; who can see the magnificent cathedral-high ceilings we build, safely, in mere weeks, by modern technology (rather than extorted from the labor of serfs over miserable generations the way actual cathedrals were); who can see fantasies come to life on 24 screens of a movie theater for no other reason than to give people a little joy; who can see their friends aid their suffering with medicines that were unavailable to any previous generations; who can see all of these genuine miracles before their very eyes—and rather than shaking with joy, and embracing the wonder of these things, can spit at them; curse them....

Well, guilty. I find the whole thing revolting. There's a tiny, nasty, highly illiberal part of my psyche that says: if this is what brings you joy, a just universe would deny it to you. I can riff on the familiar rhetoric about markets satisfying everyone's preferences as well as the next guy, but my visceral enthusiasm about that line of argument (as opposed to my abstract commitment) varies inversely with the scrutiny I give the content of most of those preferences. Maybe, like Peter Bagge, I'll stop being a "self-righteous blowhard" about malls when I'm older, but whenever I hear them held up as some sort of apotheosis of capitalist society, I find myself thinking: "Jesus, then why not just do it by central planning? Some Soviet commissar could probably have come up with Love, Actually or The Gap." And don't malls run counter to one of the things Rand (rightly enough) liked about Christmas? The practice of exchanging gifts is most meaningful when you've thought about the recipient, gotten halfway into his head, and come up with something that the other person would like, but (ideally) might not have thought to get for himself. The choice of the gift is a statement about the relationship.

Now, I guess you can do that at a mall. But generally, if I'm at the mall in the days before Christmas, it's because I've gotten lazy and I'm wandering around hoping that something will jump out at me for all the various people I've got to get something for. It's tailor made for the generic gift-giving-as-formality that Rand seemed not to like so much.

Anyway, reflecting on my snobby distaste for malls got me thinking that Hayek had it partly backwards, or at any rate, that there's a converse corrolary to one of his familiar arguments. Hayek said that mass society benefits in unpredictable ways from economic and cultural liberties that only a few (eccentrics or wealthy or whatnot) make use of. But it works the other way too. You can see Handel's Messiah at the Kennedy Center for about half the price of tickets to Melissa Ethridge at the 9:30 Club. You can see the Shins at the Black Cat for half that. And that's a funtion of raw social surplus. If we could only afford one musician, it would probably be Britney Spears or whoever's got her throne right now. If millions of people weren't snatching up her albums, we wouldn't have cheap mass produced compact discs and players for stuff with narrower appeal. In other words, I suppose I'm a cultural parasite on an economy that, like a kind of inverted digestive system, is primarily devoted to producing crap but churns out some nutrients as a byproduct.

 

NY2

12/22/2003 | link

Word is, the Olsen twins will be enrolling at my alma mater, where I hope and expect that their peers will subject them to the daily torture that they have so richly earned.

 

Back-Door Deontology

12/21/2003 | link

No, no, I'm not referring to Kant's dictum that all rational beings are obligated to have anal sex, but to this post by Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber. He's toying with a version of consequentialism that he believes evades some familiar intuitive objections to utilitarianism:

It’s a form of consequentialism, so in general it says the better actions are those that make for better worlds. (I fudge the question of whether we should maximise actual goodness in the world, or expected goodness according to our actual beliefs, or expected goodness according to rational beliefs given our evidence. I lean towards the last, but it’s a tricky question.) What’s distinctive is how we say which worlds are better: w1 is better than w2 iff behind the veil of ignorance we’d prefer to be in w1 to w2.

What I like about the theory is that it avoids so many of the standard counterexamples to consequentialism. We would prefer to live in a world where a doctor doesn’t kill a patient to harvest her organs, even if that means we’re at risk of being one of the people who are not saved. Or I think we would prefer that, I could be wrong. But I think our intuition that the doctor’s action is wrong is only as strong as our preference for not being in that world.

Weatherson ends up shying away from this theory on the basis of a version of the "moral saints" objection. But it strikes me that there's at least one or two more basic problems with this approach.

First, I don't see how one's entitled to the pervasive "we" here. The appeal of Rawls's veil of ignorance is that the constraints of the veil embed sufficient impartiality in the theory that you can generate moral principles from the non-moral, self-interested rationality of the parties behind the veil. The parties in the Original Position are characterized in a sufficiently stripped-down way (a problem of its own, but leave that...) that you're guaranteed to get moral convergence. Letting in moral intuitions behind the veil seems to defeat the purpose here.

Weatherson sort of glosses this by saying that "our intuition that the doctor’s action is wrong is only as strong as our preference for not being in that world." But why do we prefer not to be in that world? If it's because, say, we think people who knew they were in such a world would be subject to constant low-grade background fear of sacrificing, then haven't we just found another way of saying that, taken in context, allowing sacrifices and organ redistribution would be straightforwardly non-utility-maximizing? If so, I don't see how this ends up being any different from one garden variety utilitarian response—one that, for my money, missed the heart of the objection. If, on the other hand, our squeamishness is genuinely moral, the veil is redundant. Of course you can generate egalitarian conclusions if you specify that the parties behind the veil are all convinced socialists. But that rather begs the question, and assumes away the real-world moral disagreement that leads us to turn to theory to try to settle questions in the first place.

A similar but distinct point here is one Nozick made somewhere, I think: You can typically jigger up a rule that's teleological in form and yields a deontological result if you're willing to count certain aspects of conduct as part of the consequence you're evaluating. But this is just a way of putting deontology in consequentialist drag. Why bother? Even then, there are some aspects of side-constraints reasoning that are hard to capture in this form. Say that in an attempt to dodge these sorts of objections, you specify that part of what counts as a bad consequence is the use of other persons as "mere means." As long as you're still in a maximizing framework, that implies that you ought to sacrifice one innocent person if you could thereby prevent two other people from sacrificing two distinct innocent people for organ-redistribution.

Surely this misses the point. Pace Weatherson, I think we get squeamish about these examples because of a sense that morality has things to say about who we are and what we do, not merely about the desirability of what happens (even when who other people are and what they do are included in an account of "what happens").

 

Topping the (Indie) Charts

12/21/2003 | link

When I find myself wondering whether some new buzz-drenched band is worth checking out, my first stop is usually Pitchfork Media, which has posted its list of the best 50 albums of 2003. There are some unaccountable omissions—the new Death Cab album Transatlanticism, which takes a few listens to grow on you but is quite strong, gets dissed, as does The Libertines' Up the Bracket, Grandaddy's Sumday, and, probably most egregiously, The New Pornographers' Electric Version (my vote for the top slot, I think). The new Shins album is damn good, but I'm befuddled that they thought it merited the number seven slot, ahead of Broken Social Scene's You Forgot It in People, and I would've put the sophomore Strokes effort considerably lower as well. Finally... yeah, The Rapture are great, but best album of 2003? It's not a totally insane choice, but it did surprise me. Quibbles aside, though, I'm looking forward to combing through the list for gems I missed during the last year.

 

Shameless Self-Promotion

12/19/2003 | link

Last night at Cato Prom (aka the annual Cato Xmas party / cruise) a friend informed me that a few lines from my recent piece on campaign finance reform got picked up in USA Today. I do hope people realize I was kidding: I got one e-mail shortly after the original article went online excoriating me for my contempt for free speech.

 

Wrong Approach

12/19/2003 | link

I get an e-mail to Reason's letters address at least once per week from an unemployed IT professional outraged by outshoring. The most recent contained the following:

Americans are being penalized because their standard of living requires them to earn at least 60,000 a year against the 6,000 a year an indian makes and less for others.

Now, I'm not sure why this guy thinks Reason is a good place to send anti–free trade screeds in the first instance. But given that plenty of journalists (yours truly most assuredly included) make, umm, significantly less than the $60k per annum that this guy's "standard of living requires," I'm not exactly weeping here.

 

Money Quote

12/18/2003 | link

"I have recently been made aware of a market practice known as 'short selling' and am amazed that it is legal."
—Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson

(Via Overlawyered.)

 

Civil Disobedience to Campaign Finance

12/18/2003 | link

I often think that if people had to face up to what BCRA really says, and what speech it bans, there would be more outrage about it. That in mind, I think someone ought to take out take out an ad in late October in which someone says the following:

We believe in unfettered political discourse. That's why we are troubled that Senators McCain and Feingold and Congressmen Shays and Meehan sponsored legislation that restricts political speech when it's most important, during election season. We also believe that it was wrong for President Bush to sign a law that shows so little regard for fundamental liberties. By the way, this commercial is illegal. Because we've spent money to share these views with you, we've committed a crime, for which we can be punished under federal law.

Any takers? ACLU, I'm looking in your direction...

 

One Order of Science, Hold the Science

12/18/2003 | link

Will has a humorous and brutal takedown of an embarassingly bad Jenny Roback Morse piece on the "natural, organic" purposes of sexuality. Unlike many conservatives, Morse actually refers to evolutionary psychology while invoking "nature." Like most, however, she doesn't seem to have a clue about the science itself. Oh, and I'll add to Will's list of false claims she couldn't be bothered to spend 30 seconds checking on Google: She misquotes Shakespeare. The line from Othello is "making the beast with two backs," not "making the two-backed beast."

Also worth noting, by the way, are the various laugh-out-loud transparent false dichotomies that we get here. For instance:

A sexual partner is not a person to whom I am irrevocably connected by bonds of love. Rather, the sexual partner has become an object that satisfies me more or less well.

Yup. Either sex is part of a 'till-death-do-us-part commitment to your One True Soul Mate, or just masturbation with someone else in the room. No middle ground there. Isn't it nice to get a scientific perspective.

Anyway, I'll second Will on this. Your degree's in economics, Jennifer. How about you stick to that and stop embarassing yourself publicly?

 

Collected Works

12/11/2003 | link

I've gone through and linked my Reason pieces over on the Essays page.

/archives

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