This Is Not News

I thought of something I wanted to say as a follow up to my post about the Catholic Church and indulgences last week, specifically the part where I said

the major tension I’ve always felt running through Christian thought: on the one hand, there’s the notion that it’s all in God’s hands and we should trust that things happen for a reason and it will all work out. And on the other hand there’s the notion that what we do with our lives matters.

The way I wrote this, the tension is not exclusive to the Catholic Church – heck, it’s something I’ve commented about before, talking about the problem with explanations. But I do think the tension is especially noticeable in Catholicism and some other religions because there’s the additional assumption that the reason is a good reason, motivated by a benevolent and omnipotent planner. A determinist materialist doesn’t have to worry about why bad things happen to good people – they do because that’s the way the atoms bounce.

At any rate, I’ve been thinking about this tension a lot in the wake of the Chris Benoit murder story, as I read about people who knew Benoit try to reconcile their vision of him with what he had actually done. And I’ve seen people talk about steroids and stress and too many chair shots to the head in the effort to find a physical explanation.

And this may well seem odd, but the whole thing got me to thinking about Paul Hester, the original drummer for Crowded House. In 2005 Hester went out to walk his dogs and instead decided to hang himself. He left behind two young kids. And when I thought about how this would affect those kids, and then I thought about a man who would selfishly inflict that pain on his own children, I got pretty ticked off. And because I didn’t want to be angry at a dead guy, who I figure has enough problems, I tried to mitigate the act by reminding myself that Hester had always been subject to funks and may well have been clinically depressed, and so perhaps something in his body had simply overwhelmed him at that moment and made him unable to think through his actions. But if I try to follow that line of thinking, sure, I don’t have any reason to be mad at him anymore – but there’s not really much reason left to think positively, either. If the depression that drove him to suicide was merely a determined physical event, doesn’t the same thing hold true of his drumming talent and the sense of humor that helped define his band and earn him so many fans? Are there any heroes left to sheer for if we’re all just along for the ride?

• Dave Thomer posted on July 2, 2007
  The casual nature almost makes me more inclined to the determinist point of view with Hester - sort of wondering ...
• Earl Green posted on July 2, 2007
  I've never quite been able to let Hester off the hook myself, for precisely the reasons stated. I feel ...

I’ve started prepping for a course in Moral Philosophy I’ll be teaching this summer, and I decided to include a hefty chunk of Plato’s Republic. I’ve mentioned this before, but the Republic is the first major work I studied in my first college philosophy course, and it also the first major work I covered in the first course that I taught. So it’s a bit of a sentimental favorite. I like it because I can use it to address so many different areas of philosophy, an then show how each area can link to others.

(I also have a sneaking suspicion that Plato’s guardian class is an inspiration for the Jedi in the Star Wars prequels, but that’s another post. Not sure how well that illustration would go over, but hey.)

I had always used the G.M. A. Grube translation of the Republic that was revised by C.D.C. Reeve, but a couple of years ago I discovered that Reeve had put out his own edition. So this summer I decided to give it a look, and I’ve decided to switch. In terms of the translation itself, I’m about the farthest thing from an expert on ancient Greek, so I can’t comment on its accuracy. But Reeve has decided to convert the format of the work into something of a drama, with every speaker identified and with the background narration put into italics. As Reeve suggests in his introduction, students are going to find this immeasurably easier to read, and anything that removes roadblocks between the student and the material is worthwhile in my book.

I learned today that Richard Rorty passed away a few days ago. I never interacted with him directly, and I disagreed with at least 75% of what I read from him, but in many ways he’s probably responsible for what I’ve done with my life for the last eight years. His work helped revive interest in John Dewey within American philosophy, even if many people subsequently disagreed with his interpretation of Dewey – and I was certainly one of them. And Rorty’s repeated claims that there are no ways to philosophically justify a belief in democracy were one of the major motivations for me to attempt to do exactly that – an effort that led to the creation of this site. So in a way, Rorty’s the reason you’re here, too. Not a bad legacy to leave behind, and people will be arguing with the texts he left behind for decades. I’m sure he wouldn’t have it any other way.

I was reading through some post-mortems on the Philly elections that discussed the relatively low turnout – somewhere around 35% of registered voters showed up, and you could probably adjust those numbers to get lower figures (for all voting-age residents) or higher (just for Democrats, who were the only party with a competitive primary). The idea that many people express is that this low turnout is a bad sign – that candidates can not motivate citizens to go to the ballot box and exercise some control over their government. And there’s a part of me that agrees, that figures that voting is the minimum level of participation required in a democracy.

But then I get to thinking about the economics-driven analysis I encountered in my poli sci coursework. The framework is about figuring out what a “rational actor” would do, the assumption being that a rational actor is one who can compute costs and benefits and will not do things where the former significantly outweigh the latter. I have problems with this framework, but it does help put a question into perspective: why should anyone bother to vote? In my lifetime, I think I might have seen one story about a very local race that was decided by a single vote. And none of those were elections I voted in. So every time I have voted – and every time during my college years that I did not get an absentee ballot – my participation or lack thereof had absolutely no bearing on the outcome. If the person I voted for won, I could have stayed home and still gotten the benefit of that result. (This is the free-rider problem: if I can enjoy a public benefit without doing any of the work to procure it, why should I do the work? Especially when my contribution will make such a negligible contribution to the achievement of the benefit that it might as well be nonexistent?) If the person I voted for lost, I obviously was unable to prevent the undesirable outcome, so why not just stay home and save myself the trouble?

Thought about this way, voting is a completely irrational act, and in order to be successful political candidates have to somehow convince people to be irrational on their behalf to a greater degree than their opponent is able to do. Suddenly the nature of political campaigns makes much more sense.

Now, I’m still trying to work out in my head some way to make the act of voting a rational one, but so far the only luck I’m having is to take it out of the realm of the individual. It seems to me that if you’re going to make individual political action meaningful in any way, it has to either be a way that allows one-to-many interactions, so that what I do has a definite ripple effect, or be something that improves my own life in such a way that the social effects are incidental and not the whole point of the enterprise. That brings us back to the quest for more robust versions of democracy, but more on that another time.

Interesting story up on Yahoo from Reuters, suggesting that fruit flies may be making “decisions” independently of outside stimuli. The scientists who conducted the study argue that this might be an argument for something along the lines of free will. I will wait for the scientists and neurophilosophers to chime in on the comments, but I’m not sure I fully see the argument. It seems to me that the neurological argument for determinism always took the internal construction of the nervous system into account, and at the very least the Reuters article doesn’t pick up on that. If the different fruit flies had different internal configurations to start with, that would seem to explain the different results. At the very least it strikes me as a potential explanation. And if there is some kind of “purpose” being found in the decision making process of these fruit flies that’s not purely a neurological process, what kind of process is it? And is that process determinist?

Let me point you to a post on MyDD on the idea of pluralism and how it intersects with American politics right now; I had an interesting back and forth within the comment thread on defining pluralism and what demands it makes from a cultural standpoint – a theme that might be familiar to you if you’ve been reading this blog, but the conversation is worth a look.

In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey tries to distinguish between transactions that are private and those that are public. Private transactions have no significant effect on people who aren’t involved with the transaction. Public transactions have consequences that have a significant but indirect effect on people who aren’t a party to the transaction itself. When people realize that they’re being affected by these indirect consequences, they try to find some way to manage them, and that’s how governments form. (I’m shorthanding this a bit. Dewey takes a couple of chapters to set up this point, and that’s not entirely because of his occasional difficulties in making his point clear.)

I decided that a good way to illustrate this distinction was to, well, illustrate it. I asked my students to imagine that I was going to order a new PC from Dell (not likely any time soon), and to describe whose lives would be affected by this decision. The obvious starting place was that Dell and I would be affected, so I put marks on the board to indicate those two parties. Then we started digging. How is the computer going to get to me? Well, someone has to ship it, they said. So I drew a road connecting Dell and me, and a crude UPS truck. Who’s going to get affected by that truck? Neighbors who will be affected by smog and noise pollution, perhaps. So little exhaust clouds and houses got added near the truck. Where are the parts of the computer coming from? Well, they’re being manufactured in Asia, so I drew factories on the far side of the board, and then a boat taking the components to Dell in Texas. And so on and so on.

Now, despite the fact that my drawing was, quite frankly, terrible, I think this exercise was worthwhile. The students seemed to have fun thinking up all sorts of connections, and when we were done we had a framework to talk about how all of these ripple effects are shaped and regulated in our society. I may need to hit my sister up for some art lessons, but there’s definitely something for me to take away here in terms of how to get a point across.

When I was in high school DC Comics published a title called The Ray, about a teenaged hero who lived in Philadelphia. I bought a few issues but quickly lost interest. If I remember correctly, one of my major disappointments was that the colorist was making what should have been a bright, dazzling book too muted. But I also wasn’t crazy about the writing. The writer, some of whose books I had enjoyed in the past, was using a lot of slang and jargon in the dialogue, and my reaction as a Philadelphia teenager was that “people don’t talk like that – the guy’s trying too hard.� Well, a few years later I wound up in a Usenet conversation with the writer, who mentioned that he had lived in Philadelphia around the time he wrote the book and based the dialogue patterns on things he had heard around him.

That conversation has been rattling around for the last few days, as current media events and my own democracy research have converged on the idea of pluralism, the notion that rather than looking to form one single society that assimilates everyone who comes into it, a democracy should strive to promote and support the different small groups that have their own culture, thought processes, and ways of communicating and interacting with the world. Part of the aim is to get away from the notion that everyone needs to conform to a single dominant culture. Of course, all these pluralist groups are supposed to be able to relate to one another in a respectful fashion in order to keep the larger society flourishing. And my reaction to The Ray highlights the problem here, I think.

When you have groups that look at the world in different ways, and then express that worldview in different ways, there are going to be problems of interpretation. Those problems of interpretation can cause well-meaning groups to talk past one another, or interpret a differing viewpoint as a lack of respect. If communication and dialogue are going to be key to a democratic theory, there needs to be some kind of common framework that pluralist groups can work from, and I do not think that this can be merely a procedural consensus. There has to be a shared understanding of dialogue, democracy, respect, understanding, deliberation, and many other concepts. Not only are these required for communication attempts to be successful, they are required for communication attempts to begin. There are points of view that argue that deliberation is an elitist structure, one that puts a premium on rules of reasoning and conventions of dialogue that certain historically-advantaged groups are comfortable with and one that favors a slower approach to social change. These points of view argue that excluded groups shouldn’t be concerned about respect and deliberation – they should take action to make other people uncomfortable, to confront them with the problems and force immediate action. For a deliberative, democratic pluralism to work, a society needs to create a culture of deliberation, one that unifies the smaller cultural groups.

Now the $64,000 is how to make that happen.

I’m just going to throw up a link to an article in yesterday’s USA Today discussing Lost’s use of philosophical figures as namesakes for many of its characters. I’m quoted a couple of times in the article, but the real interesting discussion is probably in the comments thread. (There goes the online edition beating the print version again.)

• Dave Thomer posted on April 1, 2007
  I'll give you this advice on Lost: When you get the third season on DVD, the odds are pretty good ...
• rjmason posted on March 30, 2007
  Hey, that's cool. We're just now watching the second season of Lost on DVD. I had been pondering the significance ...

Jill Porter in the Philadelphia Daily News had a column last Friday saying that John Edwards should end his presidential campaign because of the recurrence of Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer. Most of her points seem pretty weak to me, and Porter seems to know it. She quotes a breast cancer survivor who says that the decision should be up to Elizabeth and John, and she says she’s sure that this is what Elizabeth wants. (Press coverage since Friday has only confirmed that impression.) So what Porter seems to be saying is that Elizabeth is wrong to want to continue the campaign, and that John should override her wishes and make the “right� decision for her. I can imagine a dozen other contexts where that paradigm would provoke outrage.

I don’t think Porter’s attempt at gender reversal really works, either. If Hillary Clinton were in this situation with Bill, I think that everyone on the planet would know that Bill would want the campaign to continue. Hell, he’d probably campaign from his hospital bed if he could. Would some people criticize her for it? Yes, but those people would likely criticize Hillary Clinton for the color of her socks. If she dropped out, they’d snicker that it just proved she wasn’t tough enough to handle the campaign, or to try and win without Bill around.

There is one point that Porter makes that gives me some pause, though. John and Elizabeth have two young children. They did not ask to go through this campaign. They did not ask for the stress that it causes. They did not ask for the extra burdens it will place on their parents. They did not ask to live in a world where their family pain would become political fodder. There is a point in asking whether this is fair to them. But truthfully, you could say the same of any candidate with young kids. I remember watching the 60 Minutes segment on Barack Obama and his family and looking at his two small daughters, and wondering what on Earth they might be in for during this campaign – and especially if he wins. Since I’m an Obama supporter, a small part of me felt selfish for wanting to take these kids’ daddy away for an all-consuming job for the next ten years or so. With the uncertainty that comes with Elizabeth’s cancer recurrence, I can imagine that such concerns multiply a hundredfold. It probably would be better for the Edwards kids, all things considered, if John wasn’t running for president and Elizabeth wasn’t working so hard on the campaign.

But here’s the reason why I went over to Neil Sinhababu’s site last night. Since he’s the most prominent Edwards-supporting philosophical utilitarian I know of, I couldn’t help but think of him as I pondered this question. (He had no commentary up at the time, but he’s since posted a link to this post.) John Edwards is running under a belief that if he becomes president, it will improve the lives of thousands, probably millions of children from where they would be if he were not president. I have no reason to doubt his belief is sincere, and I see no reason why John Edwards shouldn’t think he has a chance to accomplish that good. If he believes that the lives of millions of people will be better if he’s president, and the lives of his own children will be worse off (but still good), then it certainly seems like the ethical thing to do would be to help all of those other kids.

As a parent myself, there’s a part of that argument that goes against every fiber of my being. I feel like I have a special obligation to my daughter, that I have to put her well-being above the well-being of not just other individuals, but entire groups if need be. But in part, that’s because I don’t feel like there are other people to pick up the slack for what my wife and I (and our families and friends) don’t provide. That lack of trust, that lack of feeling like we’re all in this together, is precisely the problem that’s tearing up our society. Porter even points out the problem:

Few individuals have the opportunity he does: to quit work and be there for his family.
Many spouses in John’s situation would be desperate to do so, but need to continue working to earn a paycheck and perhaps retain health benefits.

John and Elizabeth Edwards may have an enormous opportunity to change that dynamic. If they’re right, I certainly can’t fault them for making that effort. In fact, I applaud them.