Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 779

Yes, my sexuality is a choice: Why I reject the “born this way” narrative

American culture is beginning experience the ethical turn in how we understand sexuality. It was only four years ago when Cynthia Nixon was lambasted for claiming her sexuality was a choice. Today, however, more people than ever—including countless young celebrities like Kristen Stewart, Miley Cyrus, St. Vincent, and Amandla Stenberg—are refusing to pick a label when it comes to their sexuality. Refusing a label is a choice. The progressive move away from identity categories negates the need for the normative, “born this way” narrative that has been used to socially validate them. As Stewart said in a recent Variety interview,

“You don’t have to immediately know how to define yourself. . . Me not defining it right now is the whole basis of what I’m about,” she added with idiosyncratic unflappability. “If you don’t get it, I don’t have time for you.”

Adults choose who to have sex with, how to have sex, where they have sex, and the frequency with which they have sex. Libidinal desires may exist beyond our control, but we do very much have control how to act upon those desires externally in the world with other people. To put it personally: “I just don’t fall into a vagina and stay there,” is how I jokingly explain my belief that sexuality is a choice. I am drawn to women and will happily talk about scissoring and other exquisite lesbian stereotypes, for sure, but there’s not an inescapable magnetism forcing me to leech onto women.

This position flies in the face of the accepted narrative within gay circles that have adopted the phrase “born this way” for social justice and moral justification, as well as for political expediency. (Although, according to the most recent PEW Research data from 2013, I am one among the 42 percent who believe “being gay or lesbian is ‘just the way some choose to live,’” as opposed to 41 percent of those surveyed who subscribe to the “born this way” argument.) I am an atheist and harbor no religious ascetic values like shame or guilt about who I have sex with or how I have sex. In terms of American politics, because our rights and laws are predicated on socially sanctioned identities, sexuality has been conceived as an ontological trait or biological certainty. Take the relevant example of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). This federal law targeted a specific group of people. Consequently, we have had work within America’s paradigm of identity politics to prove we are collectively oppressed in order to obtain equal rights.

Despite the necessity of identity politics in procuring equal rights, I understand sexuality to be a choice through feminism. With roots in materialist, ethical and existentialist philosophies, my feminism draws from Nietzsche, Kant, Sartre and Foucault; Beauvoir, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Johnson. For existentialists like Sartre and Beauvoir, humans are free through making choices and, more importantly, through taking responsibility for those choices. “There is no trace-out path to lead man to his salvation; he must constantly invent his own path,” Sartre said in an interview in 1945. “But, to invent it, he is free, responsible, without excuse, and every hope lies within him.”

Life demands making a series of choices—not among an infinite panoply of options, but among those options determined by our socio-economic conditions. Societal constraints on women’s “sexual vocation,” as Beauvoir refers to it in “The Second Sex,” challenge their freedom. Yet, she acknowledges women’s sexual vocation is possible if she “commit[s] herself with the same decisiveness” as men do in their sexual exploits.

Beauvoir was arguably the originator of the idea that sexual liberation was integral to ending women’s oppression. In “The Second Sex,” she writes that “freedom is recognized in woman’s sexual activity.” It is through a woman’s sexual vocation that she can attain autonomy—that she can become an independent woman.

Feminism also influenced my sexuality through the interrogation of heterosexuality as a patriarchal institution. Adrienne Rich was just one of many lesbian radical feminists to decry heterosexuality as fundamental to women’s oppression. “Compulsory heterosexuality,” she contends, is not natural or a biological certainty, but rather a social construct that allows men to control women’s sexuality. Her ideas cohere with those of French lesbian feminist Monique Wittig, who, in her seminal essay “One Is Not Born a Woman,” unpacks the fallacy that heterosexuality is natural, or normal. Cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin argues similarly in her essay “Thinking Sex,” maintaing not only that sexuality is a product of society, but that desires, even, are “constituted in the course of historically specific social practices.”

The history of heterosexuality has produced the “born this way” narrative as a consequence of situating homosexuality as deviant. Because of psychoanalysis, because of the medical institution and the subsequent policing of bodies, “the homosexual [became] a species,” to quote Foucault. Sexuality is the institutionalization of sex acts.  The homosexual is a modern invention—technically, as an identity is was created before the heterosexual. Some rationale had to be given for this deviancy, and what better way than to locate homosexuality in nature, in biology, as something God created? The justification in nature mimics that of heterosexuality. Yet, if sexuality is socially constructed and expressed through culture, then there is no norm, nor is there deviance.

Framed within recent feminist debate, this view is akin to what many call (some do so derisively) “choice feminism.” But my understanding of “choice” is not about abundance, but discrimination. To make a choice—to have sex with someone or to identify with a specific sexual orientation—entails judgement. By saying that my sexuality is a choice, I hold myself accountable for all my actions. And to make oneself accountable to both one’s self and to others in the world is, I think, the optimal form of a civic-minded ethos.

Claiming ownership of my sexuality holds me accountable for my actions—accountability is freedom. Accountability is power. It is empowering to take possession of my identity and my acts. Women break the cycle of oppression through their sexual liberation. Our power manifests through our freedom to make choices and to take responsibility for those choices. And that includes sexuality.

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“The Monkees songbook is maybe the third-best”: Peter Tork claims the bronze—right after the Beatles and the Stones

Peter Tork (Credit: AP/Jeff Daly)

They may not be the young generation anymore, but the Monkees still have something to say. Their first new album in 19 years, “Good Times!,” features the legendary surviving members — Mickey Dolenz, Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork — defying the odds and offering a full plate of exuberant tunes in time for the summer. There are vintage tracks culled from the Monkees archives and composed by some of their famous collaborators from the ’60s, like Harry Nilsson (the title track), Goffin and King (“I Wasn’t Born to Follow”), Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart (“Whatever’s Right)” and Neil Diamond (“Love to Love,” which features vocals from Davy Jones, who passed away in 2012).

In addition to newly composed material by the band, the generation that grew up on MTV reruns of their classic sitcom have come out to represent for their shaggy heroes, too. Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne produces, plays bass and also contributes power-pop songwriting; songs from Rivers Cuomo, Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller, Andy Partridge and Ben Gibbard are also featured.

Peter Tork and Mickey Dolenz kick off a summer North American tour on May 18 in Ft. Myers, Florida. “Good Times!” is out May 27.

Here, Peter Tork discusses the new album, the old times, why it’s tricky to mourn Jones and who owns bragging rights to the third-best songwriting catalog of all time. (Hint: they’re not your stepping stones.)

It’s been a long time since the last studio album, “ Justus.”

Almost 20 years.

And Davy passed away in 2012.

And we can’t even celebrate the anniversary every year because he died on leap year day. You know, February 29th?

But he lives on on the record. Emotionally speaking, how did you feel about going in the studio again after that?

Well, it was all right. I love to record, and get my chance to play a little banjo here and a little keyboard there and sing a little, and write a little song and sing another little song. All that stuff is right up my alley.

Are you always writing songs?

Yes. I actually wrote (this album’s) “Little Girl” back in the day as a sequel for Davy’s (Monkees 1967 classic ballad) “I Wanna Be Free.” A chance for him to sing another beach love song, and I had this idea, Davy needs another song, and lo and behold there was this song.

Did the notion to make a new record stem from the tour you did (in honor of Davy)?  

By the time the 50th anniversary was looming on the horizon, (Rhino, who are releasing “Good Times”) were delighted at the thought of kicking up a fuss about it, having a stir. And I think it was an inspired choice to get Adam Schlesinger to produce it.

Were you a fan of Fountains of Wayne and his soundtrack work?

I certainly did know “That Thing You Do,” and that’s a tremendous calling card for this kind of a project.

Adam is uncanny with pop melodies.

Yeah, that’s exactly right. So he was absolutely the man, and we’re very lucky to have had his assistance on this. Due to his exact sensibility he manages to straddle the world of the pure ’60s pop on the one hand, with the modern indie sensibilities on the other.

The vocals sound like you guys have been frozen in time.

We do. When Michael joined us on the road in 2012, it was astounding to hear that same voice do those same songs.

Did he play “Circle of Sky?”  That’s my favorite Monkees song.

Yeah. But he wouldn’t do it in the same key.

Where did all the vintage “new” material come from?  The “Monkee vaults”?

Yeah, Andrew Sandoval is Mr. superfan producer. Andrew is the keeper of all things Monkee. He can tell you pretty much who played on which cut from memory, by and large.

You have some heavy songwriters here from your past.

Got the Harry Nilsson and the Jeff Barry and the Carole King, and Neil Diamond. I think we might even have a Boyce and Hart song in there.

Yes, these are the very people that wrote your eternal songs—

Yeah, all the great Monkees hits.

What about the new stuff that’s getting such attention in the press?

Well sure, Rivers Cuomo and all those other indie guys.

How do you politely say yes or no when someone comes to you and says “I wrote you a song?”

I didn’t do that. That was the Rhino guy. He was the one who said yes or no to this song, that song.

How do you in the studio make an Andy Partridge song not sound like XTC? How do you Monkee-fy it?

Well, I had never spent much time listening to those guys, so I don’t know how they sound, which means as far as I’m concerned, you just do the song directly. Here’s the lyrics, here’s the changes, here’s the key. They sent us a demo, you learn from the demo, but once you hear the demo, you say, I’ll play that bass part as well as I can; you just do the best you can. It’s just naturally going to happen that you don’t sound like them any more than necessary.

Is this designed to open up the fanbase to Weezer fans, or vice verse?

That’s a good question. It’s not that we’re trying to bring our people to them, but to bring their people to us. Obviously, if our fans become Weezer fans, we’d be delighted. Thrilled to death to be in the community.

Do you think Monkees are still living down a certain prejudice from the ’60s?   That you were pre-fabricated?  Not a “real” band?

No, I don’t. I think that has disappeared. The knives out, the prejudice, the disdain for the Monkees, that’s an old people’s trip, we’re not interested in that.

The songs have proved themselves to be among best of 20th century pop.

I actually agree, I think the Monkees songbook is maybe the third-best song book. You can’t beat Lennon/McCartney. 

So who would be number 2?

Stones, I think. They did the blues, and that counts for a ton in my world. So third, maybe? That’s not bad.

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This is one weak nominee: Hillary Clinton’s problem isn’t Bernie Sanders. It’s Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton (Credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid)

No matter what you think about Hillary Clinton as the presidential primaries wind down, there is one undeniable fact that lingers in the background. Despite having had enormous advantages from the start of the campaign—no serious competition from within the party, solid support from national party leaders, a massive war chest and a nationwide grassroots network built over the course of decades in national politics—Clinton has struggled to put away a 74-year-old Jewish socialist who has had almost no establishment support.

Say whatever you want about Clinton’s lengthy résumé—and her credentials are indeed impressive—her performance this primary season is hardly indicative of a strong candidate.

Indeed, Clinton concedes that she’s not a natural politician, lacking the charm of her husband or the charisma of Barack Obama. But what should be troubling to those who hope to see a Democrat in the White House next year is that Clinton seems to suggest that this weakness isn’t problematic, that her résumé and policy-wonk reputation will be enough to carry her on Election Day.

Maybe. But don’t be too sure.

Look no further than the 2000 election, when another policy-wonk Democrat with little charm or charisma—Al Gore—failed to ride his impressive credentials to the White House. Gore, a two-term vice president with prior lengthy service in both the Senate and House, lost to an anti-intellectual GOP opponent with no Washington experience. Sound familiar?

Many Democrats are having difficulty accepting the fact that Clinton, despite her résumé, is a weak politician. In this state of denial, their defense of Clinton becomes aggressive, as they lash out at Bernie Sanders for staying in the race, implying that Clinton has earned the right to glide to the finish line unopposed.

A prime example of this Clinton-entitlement mentality can be found in a recent Boston Globe column by Michael A. Cohen, entitled “Bernie Sanders declares war on reality.” Cohen insists that Sanders is “illogical, self-serving, hypocritical” and “intellectually dishonest” in trying win the nomination by swaying superdelegates away from Clinton. “Instead of coming to grips with the overwhelming evidence that Democratic primary voters prefer Hillary Clinton to be the party’s 2016 presidential nominee,” Cohen writes, “Sanders continues to create his own political reality.”

Unfortunately, Cohen ignores the fact that the “overwhelming evidence” isn’t strong enough to allow Clinton to claim the nomination with pledged delegates alone. Had the evidence been so overwhelming, courting superdelegates would be irrelevant. Because Clinton has been far from dominating in the primaries and caucuses, the true “political reality” is that she will need superdelegate support to secure the nomination. Fortunately for Clinton, she appears to have the support of an overwhelming majority of superdelegates, but those allegiances can change up until the time of the convention vote, so Sanders is alive as long as the race comes down to a fight over them.

Sanders has correctly criticized the superdelegate system as undemocratic, but there is nothing hypocritical or illogical in his continuing the fight within that system. To denounce the rules of a race does not preclude a candidate from competing within those flawed rules. With party insiders having disproportionate power as superdelegates, the system tips the scales strongly in Clinton’s favor, as Cohen surely knows, yet he still cries foul at Sanders pressing on within that system.

Such specious arguments not only distract from the uncomfortable reality that Clinton is an extremely vulnerable candidate, they also fail to recognize that the Sanders campaign represents an agenda that is fundamentally different from Clinton’s. This is not a debate between two candidates with slight differences in substance or style, but of two vastly disparate philosophical views.

Even if Sanders loses the nomination contest, which at this point appears likely, he represents an egalitarian, democratic vision that is highly skeptical of corporate power and the neoliberalism that Clinton represents. This agenda has resonated, fueling a surprisingly strong campaign that has energized many, especially younger voters, and those supporters expect that their message will be carried all the way to the convention. For Sanders, stopping the fight at this point would be senseless.

Clinton herself has the tact to refrain from urging Sanders to exit. She instead is doing the smart thing by basically ignoring him and focusing on Donald Trump and the general election. Still, there can be no doubt that she would love to be in Trump’s position, having no opponents remaining with any mathematical chance of seizing the nomination.

The fact that she’s not in such a position, and that her race for the Democratic nomination continues to be pestered by an old lefty who has served three decades in politics without even registering as a Democrat, should be a grave concern for her and her supporters. Although her credentials are strong, her candidacy isn’t—and blaming that on Sanders would be nothing but a form of denial.

 

 

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James Madison was an artist, and the Constitution should be read like poetry

James Madison (Credit: Wikimedia/National Gallery)

May 1 is Law Day, a day set aside to honor the role law, justice, and equality play in improving American society. To mark the occasion, the National Book Review interviewed Burt Neuborne, the Norman Dorsen Professor of Civil Liberties at NYU Law School, about his book Madison’s Music, a brilliant and deeply original interpretation of the Constitution — which argues that the First Amendment should be interpreted less like a disembodied set of rules, and more like a poem or piece of music.

1. Madison’s Music takes an unusual approach to constitutional interpretation: you say that the First Amendment should be read as a kind of “poem,” and that we should look for the “music” of its chief drafter, James Madison.  What do you mean by this?

I use the ideas of poetry and music as metaphors to challenge a strictly literal approach to reading the First Amendment that focuses on a single word or phrase, but loses sight of the larger story that the full 45 words of the text narrates. I argue that true fidelity to text requires, not a slavish dedication to clause-bound literalism, but an understanding of how each word in a complex text plays a role in a larger context. The art of reading a constitution, I argue, is much closer to reading poetry than reading a shopping list.

2.  In your book, you have a fascinating theory for why the First Amendment starts by prohibiting the establishment of a religion, and ends with protecting the freedom to petition government – could you explain why you think Madison put the rights in the amendment in this order?

Madison and the other Founders did not throw a pot of ink at the wall and allow the splatter to dictate the order and structure of the First Amendment. There is a deep structure hiding in plain sight in the text that explains why each word, and each idea, is in its proper place describing the arc of a democratic idea, from its inception in the protected conscience of a free citizen, to its free articulation, mass dissemination, collective advancement, and formal enactment. Decoding that deep structure will help us to read our most important legal text more coherently.

3.  You say that Madison wrote the First Amendment as a “meticulously organized road map of a well-functioning democracy” – and that the current Supreme Court has failed to correctly interpret it. What do you mean by this?

The Supreme Court reads the First Amendment – indeed, the entire Bill of Rights – as a series of unconnected words and clauses. I swear they would read the syllables as separate concepts if they could. Each of the six clauses of the First Amendment is treated as a freestanding legal silo that exists in majestic indifference to the words and concepts surrounding it. Thus, in deciding efforts to regulate campaign finance, the Court pulls 10 words out of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech”), ignores three – “the freedom of” – and reads the remaining seven words without considering how they fit into the full 45 words. The result is an Imperial Free Speech clause that makes it impossible to protect egalitarian democracy from the rich. If the Justices listened to Madison’s Music, they would understand that the First Amendment is democracy’s best friend, not its hostile schoolmaster.

4.  One of the conclusions you draw from all of this is that there is a First Amendment right to vote.  Could you explain why that is – and why it matters?

If we understood the First Amendment as a narrative of democracy, we would understand that voting is protected as the quintessential exercise of political expression and association. We would also realize that a right to vote is implied by the Petition clause as the only appropriate response to an incumbent’s failure to respond to a petition. Recognizing a First Amendment right to vote is important because the current practice of using the Equal Protection clause to protect voting is too risky because the standard of review is too weak. Voter ID laws have survived Equal Protection scrutiny, but could never withstand First Amendment scrutiny.

5.  On the matter of speech, one of the things you fault the Supreme Court for is paying too much attention to speakers, and not enough to hearers of speech.  Why is this a problem?

Speech is a process that includes both a speaker and a hearer. Speaking to a void without hearers would be a meaningless act. The Supreme Court has correctly vested the speaker with human dignity, and has invoked that dignity to justify broad protection of speech. But hearers have dignity, too. Current First Amendment doctrine all too often ignores the dignity of hearers, treating hearers as pinatas to be battered by speakers with no recourse but to run away. I believe the Court should acknowledge that hearers have dignitary rights to be protected from certain forms of speech, and get on with the hard work of forging a doctrine that recognizes the dignity of both speakers and hearers.

6.  You suggest that a more democratically focused interpretation of the First Amendment would have led to different outcomes in some important cases, including Citizens United v. F.E.C.  How should a Supreme Court that properly read Madison’s Music have decided Citizens United?

A Court that hears Madison’s Music would, first, recognize that corporations lack human dignity and, therefore, do not have full First Amendment rights. While hearers may have rights that are enforceable by corporations, no hearer wants to be battered into submission by an avalanche of corporate campaign spending that drowns out competing voices. In addition, Madison’s Music would tell the Court that the First Amendment is all about protecting a democracy of equals. Allowing unlimited campaign spending by corporations makes a mockery of the idea of equal participation in democracy.

7.  The Supreme Court is at a crossroads now, with the loss of Antonin Scalia.  What does the next appointment mean for the future of the First Amendment – and, perhaps, for putting a greater focus on Madison’s Music?

The stakes couldn’t be higher. The shift from a Justice like Scalia, who claimed to read the Constitution’s text literally and historically (but who always seemed to find a meaning that agreed with his social, political, and religious views), to a newly appointed Justice willing to grapple with the entirety of the text may shape the meaning of the Constitution for the rest of the 21st century. Will the Constitution continue to be a fortress for the rich and powerful, or will we, once again, read our Constitution as a great engine of egalitarian democracy?

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This is how “Lean In” feminism evolves: By smashing that “special place in Hell” that keeps us silent

Medeleine Albright, Taylor Swift, Sheryl Sandberg (Credit: Reuters/Adrees Latif/Danny Moloshok/AP/Richard Drew)

Last week, in anticipation of Mother’s Day celebrations across America, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg delivered a moving message about her newfound appreciation for the struggles of single moms after the sudden and unexpected loss of her husband. Sharing her note via Facebook (where else?), Sandberg stressed that her substantial challenges don’t compare to those of other mothers raising their children without a partner and without comparable financial and social support. The Facebook post was the medium elevated to its highest form: she shared a heartfelt personal experience, thoughtfully reflected on how it is colored by her privilege, and pivoted to her role of activist, advocating for systemic changes that would lessen the burdens single mothers carry today.

That thoughtful reflection was a crucial aspect of her post’s appeal that is characteristic of the executive and author. As Elissa Strauss writes in Slate, the note “offers an important modification to her ‘get it, girl’ feminism, which was widely, and often unfairly, critiqued when Lean In first came out. Sandberg was never as obtuse as many of her critics made her out to be; she didn’t ignore or deny the external factors standing in the way of gender inequality.”

Indeed, every handful of pages in “Lean In” contains yet another self-aware reminder from Sandberg that her encounters with sexism cannot be divorced from her class privilege, often followed by a compelling case that the injustices she faced were worth remedying nonetheless. She frequently makes the argument that greater female representation in the c-suite was important not just for female executives, but all women in the workplace, who could benefit from having a powerful advocate in senior leadership.

This argument is another cornerstone of “Lean In” philosophy, the notion that women have a particular responsibility to help each other. Sandberg uses this personal moral obligation as a jumping off point, suggesting it might serve as a model for feminism as a movement. “Every social movement struggles with dissension within its ranks, in part because advocates are passionate and unlikely to agree on every position and solution…There are so many of us who care deeply about these matters. We should strive to resolve our differences quickly, and when we disagree, stay focused on our shared goals.” Sandberg approvingly quotes Madeline Albright’s now infamous, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women,” remark. The line has since been used by Albright in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade female voters to choose Hillary, and by Taylor Swift in an an unsuccessful attempt to persuade female comedians to stop making jokes about her during award shows.

The suggestion that women ought to emphasize harmony and unity over debate is a departure from Sandberg’s view of healthy corporate culture. In “Lean In,” she emphasizes that employees must feel comfortable enough approaching management with workplace grievances. “Seek and Speak Your Truth,” a chapter of “Lean In,” is filled with charming anecdotes about representative instances at Facebook. Practicing his less-than-fluent Mandarin, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s requests that an employee use simpler language to express a concern cause her to blurt out, “My manager is bad,” a strong but clear and forceful statement. A summer intern suggests that Zuckerberg work on his public speaking skills, and he publicly thanks him for the honest feedback and recommends him for a full time offer. This approach to management stresses that honest communication and constructive criticism are crucial tools for better-run and, ultimately, more productive workplaces.

Sandberg is absolutely right to note that critiques of women in positions of power often veer toward the petty and personal, as the largely unfounded attacks on her illustrate. She even notes that women themselves can be the worst offenders. “Obviously, a negative attitude cannot be gender based if it comes from another woman, right?” she writes, “Wrong. Often without realizing it, women internalize disparaging cultural attitudes and then echo them back. As a result, women are not just victims of sexism, they can be perpetrators.”

The fact that women can also be sexist only serves to illustrate that criticism of their beliefs is often legitimate and, thus, warranted. The unfortunate tendency of our culture to levy personal insults at women rather than engage in substantive and respectful debate doesn’t detract from the utility of the latter. Constructive criticism in social movements can offer similar advantages to constructive criticism in the workplace, a fact Sandberg herself acknowledges. “Some people felt that I did not spend enough time writing about the difficulties women face when they have an unsupportive partner or no partner at all,” she wrote last Friday. “They were right.” Sandberg’s admirable and thoughtful internalization of critiques made “Lean In” as a movement stronger, more effective, and, most importantly, more ethically sound. Her latest evolution proves that women can help other women precisely by engaging in passionate, sometimes public, disputes which cause them to challenge their own beliefs.

Refusal to embrace these opportunities undermines Sandberg’s healthy views of privilege on a practical level. A movement that attempts to squash dissent rather than engaging with dissenters will always prioritize the needs of its most privileged, powerful members. Healthy dialogue and, when necessary, debate is a prerequisite of intersectionality. True feminism is about solidarity, yes, but this does not mean that women at the bottom need to swallow their disagreements with women at the top. Instead, it demands that women at the top exercise their privilege to amplify the voices of women at the bottom. And then, more importantly, that they listen to what they have to say.

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Fear our new robot overlords: This is why you need to take artificial intelligence seriously

"Teminator Genisys" (Credit: Paramount Pictures)

There are a lot of major problems today with tangible, real-world consequences. A short list might include terrorism, U.S.-Russian relations, climate change and biodiversity loss, income inequality, health care, childhood poverty, and the homegrown threat of authoritarian populism, most notably associated with the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party, Donald Trump.

Yet if you’ve been paying attention to the news for the past several years, you’ve almost certainly seen articles from a wide range of news outlets about the looming danger of artificial general intelligence, or “AGI.” For example, Stephen Hawking has repeatedly expressed that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” and Elon Musk — of Tesla and SpaceX fame — has described the creation of superintelligence as “summoning the demon.” Furthermore, the Oxford philosopher and director of the Future of Humanity Institute, Nick Bostrom, published a New York Times best-selling book in 2014 called Superintelligence, in which he suggests that the “default outcome” of building a superintelligent machine will be “doom.”

What’s with all this fear-mongering? Should we really be worried about a takeover by killer computers hell-bent on the total destruction of Homo sapiens? The first thing to recognize is that a Terminator-style war between humanoid robots is not what the experts are anxious about. Rather, the scenarios that keep these individuals awake at night are far more catastrophic. This may be difficult to believe but, as I’ve written elsewhere, sometimes truth is stranger than science fiction. Indeed, given that the issue of AGI isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, it’s increasingly important for the public to understand exactly why the experts are nervous about superintelligent machines. As the Future of Life Institute recently pointed out, there’s a lot of bad journalism about AGI out there. This is a chance to correct the record.

Toward this goal, step one is to realize is that your brain is an information-processing device. In fact, many philosophers talk about the brain as the hardware — or rather, the “wetware” — of the mind, and the mind as the software of the brain. Directly behind your eyes is a high-powered computer that weighs about three pounds and has roughly the same consistency as Jell-o. It’s also the most complex object in the known universe. Nonetheless, the rate at which it’s able to process information is much, much slower than the information-processing speed of an actual computer. The reason is that computers process information by propagating electrical potentials, and electrical potentials move at the speed of light, whereas the fastest signals in your brain travel at around 100 miles per second. Fast, to be sure, but not nearly as fast as light.

Consequently, an AGI could think about the world at speeds many orders of magnitude faster than our brains can. From the AGI’s point of view, the outside world — including people — would move so slowly that everything would appear almost frozen. As the theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky calculates, for a computer running a million times faster than our puny brains, “a subjective year of thinking would be accomplished for every 31 physical seconds in the outside world, and a millennium would fly by in eight-and-a-half hours.”

Already, then, an AGI would have a huge advantage. Imagine yourself in a competition against a machine that has a whole year to work through a cognitive puzzle for every 31 seconds that you spend trying to think up a solution. The mental advantage of the AGI would be truly profound. Even a large team of humans working together would be no match for a single AGI with so much time on its hands. Now imagine that we’re not in a puzzle-solving competition with an AGI but a life-and-death situation in which the AGI wants to destroy humanity. While we struggle to come up with strategies for keeping it contained, it would have ample time to devise a diabolical scheme to exploit any technology within electronic reach for the purpose of destroying humanity.

But a diabolical AGI isn’t — once again — what many experts are actually worried about. This is a crucial point that the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker misses in a comment about AGI for the website Edge.org. To quote Pinker at length:

“The other problem with AGI dystopias is that they project a parochial alpha-male psychology onto the concept of intelligence. Even if we did have superhumanly intelligent robots, why would they want to depose their masters, massacre bystanders, or take over the world? Intelligence is the ability to deploy novel means to attain a goal, but the goals are extraneous to the intelligence itself: being smart is not the same as wanting something. History does turn up the occasional megalomaniacal despot or psychopathic serial killer, but these are products of a history of natural selection shaping testosterone-sensitive circuits in a certain species of primate, not an inevitable feature of intelligent systems.” Pinker then concludes with, “It’s telling that many of our techno-prophets can’t entertain the possibility that artificial intelligence will naturally develop along female lines: fully capable of solving problems, but with no burning desire to annihilate innocents or dominate the civilization.”

Unfortunately, such criticism misunderstands the danger. While it’s conceptually possible that an AGI really does have malevolent goals — for example, someone could intentionally design an AGI to be malicious — the more likely scenario is one in which the AGI kills us because doing so happens to be useful. By analogy, when a developer wants to build a house, does he or she consider the plants, insects, and other critters that happen to live on the plot of land? No. Their death is merely incidental to a goal that has nothing to do with them. Or consider the opening scenes of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which “bureaucratic” aliens schedule Earth for demolition to make way for a “hyperspatial express route” — basically, a highway. In this case, the aliens aren’t compelled to destroy us out of hatred. We just happen to be in the way.

The point is that what most theorists are worried about is an AGI whose values — or final goals — don’t fully align with ours. This may not sound too bad, but a bit of reflection shows that if an AGI’s values fail to align with ours in even the slightest ways, the outcome could very well be, as Bostrom argues, doom. Consider the case of an AGI — thinking at the speed of light, let’s not forget — that is asked to use its superior intelligence for the purpose of making humanity happy. So what does it do? Well, it destroys humanity, because people can’t be sad if they don’t exist. Start over. You tell it to make humanity happy, but without killing us. So it notices that humans laugh when we’re happy, and hooks up a bunch of electrodes to our faces and diaphragm that make us involuntarily convulse as if we’re laughing. The result is a strange form of hell. Start over, again. You tell it to make us happy without killing us or forcing our muscles to contract. So it implants neural electrodes into the pleasure centers of everyone’s brains, resulting in a global population in such euphoric trances that people can no longer engage in the activities that give life meaning. Start over — once more. This process can go on for hours. At some point it becomes painfully obvious that getting an AGI’s goals to align with ours is going to be a very, very tricky task.

Another famous example that captures this point involves a superintelligence whose sole mission is to manufacture paperclips. This sounds pretty benign, right? How could a “paperclip maximizer” pose an existential threat to humanity? Well, if the goal is to make as many paperclips as possible, then the AGI will need resources to do this. And what are paperclips composed of? Atoms — the very same physical stuff out of which your body is composed. Thus, for the AGI, humanity is nothing more than a vast reservoir of easily accessible atoms, atoms, atoms. As Yudkowsky eloquently puts it, “The [AGI] does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.” And just like that, the flesh and bones of human beings are converted into bendable metal for holding short stacks of paper.

At this point, one might think the following, “Wait a second, we’re talking about superintelligence, right? How could a truly superintelligent machine be fixated on something so dumb as creating as many paperclips as possible?” Well, just look around at humanity. By every measure, we are by far the most intelligent creatures on our planetary spaceship. Yet our species is obsessed with goals and values that are, when one takes a step back and peers at the world with “new eyes,” incredibly idiotic, perplexing, harmful, foolish, self-destructive, other-destructive, and just plain weird.

For example, some people care so much about money that they’re willing to ruin friendships, destroy lives and even commit murder or start wars to acquire it. Others are so obsessed with obeying the commandments of ancient “holy texts” that they’re willing to blow themselves up in a market full of non-combatants. Or consider a less explicit goal: sex. Like all animals, humans have an impulse to copulate, and this impulse causes us to behave in certain ways — in some cases, to risk monetary losses and personal embarrassment. The appetite for sex is just there, pushing us toward certain behaviors, and there’s little we can do about the urge itself.

The point is that there’s no strong connection between how intelligent a being is and what its final goals are. As Pinker correctly notes above, intelligence is nothing more than a measure of one’s ability to achieve a particular aim, whatever it happens to be. It follows that any level of intelligence — including superintelligence — can be combined with just about any set of final goals — including goals that strike us as, well, stupid. A superintelligent machine could be no less infatuated with obeying Allah’s divine will or conquering countries for oil as some humans are.

So far, we’ve discussed the thought-speed of machines, the importance of making sure their values align with ours, and the weak connection between intelligence and goals. These considerations alone warrant genuine concern about AGI. But we haven’t yet mentioned the clincher that makes AGI an utterly unique problem unlike anything humanity has ever encountered. To understand this crucial point, consider how the airplane was invented. The first people to keep a powered aircraft airborne were the Wright brothers. On the windy beaches of North Carolina, they managed to stay off the ground for a total of 12 seconds. This was a marvelous achievement, but the aircraft was hardly adequate for transporting goods or people from one location to another. So, they improved its design, as did a long lineage of subsequent inventors. Airplanes were built with one, two, or three wings, composed of different materials, and eventually the propeller was replaced by the jet engine. One particular design — the Concorde — could even fly faster than the speed of sound, traversing the Atlantic from New York to London in less than 3.5 hours.

The crucial idea here is that the airplane underwent many iterations of innovation. Problems that arose in previous designs were improved upon, leading to increasingly safe and reliable aircraft. But this is not the situation we’re likely to be in with AGI. Rather, we’re likely to have one, and only one, chance to get all the problems mentioned above exactly right. Why? Because intelligence is power. For example, we humans are the dominant species on the planet not because of our long claws, sharp teeth and bulky musculatures. The key difference between Homo sapiens and the rest of the Animal Kingdom concerns our oversized brains, which enable us to manipulate and rearrange the world in incredible ways. It follows that if an AGI were to exceed our level of intelligence, it could potentially dominate not only the biosphere, but humanity as well.

Even more, since creating intelligent machines is an intellectual task, an AGI could attempt to modify its own code, a possibility known as “recursive self-improvement.” The result could be an exponential intelligence explosion that, before one has a chance to say “What the hell is happening?,” yields a super-super-superintelligent AGI, or a being that towers over us to the extent that we tower over the lowly cockroach. Whoever creates the first superintelligent computer — whether it’s Google, the U.S. government, the Chinese government, the North Korean government, or a lone hacker in her or his garage — they’ll have to get everything just right the first time. There probably won’t be opportunities for later iterations of innovation to fix flaws in the original design, if there are any. When it comes to AGI, the stakes are high.

It’s increasingly important for the public to understand the nature of thinking machines and why some experts are so worried about them. Without a grasp of these issues, claims like “A paperclip maximizer could destroy humanity!” will sound as apocalyptically absurd as “The Rapture is near! Save your soul while you still can!” Consequently, organizations dedicated to studying AGI safety could get defunded or shut down, and the topic of AGI could become the target of misguided mockery. The fact is that if we manage to create a “friendly” AGI, the benefits to humanity could be vast. But if we fail to get things right on the first go around, the naked ape could very well end up as a huge pile of paperclips.

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Donald Trump, “American Psycho” muse: How the “Art of the Deal” elitist became a poor man’s Patrick Bateman — and now he’s a real threat

Donald Trump; Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in "American Psycho" (Credit: Reuters/Carlos Barria/Universal Studios/Salon)

Three-quarters of the way through Brett Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho,” a detective visits Patrick Bateman’s office on Wall Street to inquire about a missing banker. Bateman, who has already told us how he murdered this man, does his best to remain calm. During an uncomfortable silence, he points to a book on his desk ― “The Art of the Deal” by Donald Trump. “Have you read it?” asks Bateman. “No,” says the detective. “Is it any good?” “It’s very good,” Bateman replies.

If we believe his narrative, Patrick Bateman is a rapist and a murderer, a psychopath whose life is a struggle between the violent, chaotic drives of the id and the critical, ethical constraints of the superego. In the above encounter, Bateman represents the id and the detective the superego, a symbolic enactment of Bateman’s core neurosis that constantly threatens to tear him apart. By showing the detective “The Art of the Deal,” Bateman is attempting to symbolically substitute one superego for another, his hero Trump’s sociopathic non-values for the detective’s legal and moral code, an alchemy that, in effect, invalidates the superego altogether.

Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” was published in 1987, four years before “American Psycho.” Critics remain divided about the reliability of both narrators — the fictional Patrick Bateman, whose crimes may or may not be hallucinations, and the very real Donald Trump, who has been challenged over many of his claims, including his family origins (Swedish versus German), the quantity of money his father loaned him to launch his real-estate empire in the seventies, and his record with regard to race- and gender-based discrimination. With regard to both books, however, one could argue that factual veracity is less important than the way each narrator attempts to present his persona to the reader.

Throughout the 367 pages of “The Art of the Deal,” Donald Trump tells us almost nothing about his emotional life. He describes his first wife, Ivana, only as “a natural manager,” “the most organized person I know,” and when he mentions the premature death of his brother from alcoholism, all he can say is: “It’s very sad because he was a wonderful guy who never quite found himself.”

When entrepreneur Steve Wynn calls to say he and his wife are divorcing, Trump is baffled by Wynn’s assertion that “we’re still in love, it’s just that we don’t want to be married anymore.” The emotional complexity of this statement is so baffling to Trump that he has to end the conversation then and there, describing Wynn as “a very strange guy.”

On one occasion, early on in the book, he reports being “moved” by the plight of a widow about to lose her farm, but his response is to call the bank and say, “If you do foreclose, I’ll personally bring a lawsuit for murder against you.” We are left suspecting this display of aggression was his motivation throughout. Indeed, his “forceful character” is a trait he is consistently proud of as evinced by his tale of punching a teacher in the eye while in second grade, and of how he liked to make “a ruckus in the schoolyard and at birthday parties.”

“It wasn’t malicious,” he says, “so much as it was aggressive,” a quality that, at New York Military Academy, he says he learned to channel into “achievement.”

Achievement, or winning, as he usually terms it, is Donald Trump’s ultimate goal. As he tells us on the very first page of “The Art of the Deal”: “I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” He uses this word, “kicks,” several times, that adrenaline high that comes from winning, the only feeling he valorizes or will admit to. “I don’t have time to think about my problems,” Trump told Time magazine in 1989. “When you start studying yourself too deeply you start seeing things that maybe you don’t want to see.”

In “The Art of the Deal” Donald Trump presents himself as a man wholly untroubled by his inner voice, unaffected by doubt, guilt, or shame. He derives his sense of worth entirely from achievement and personal gain, and considers emotions, values and ethics to be signs of weakness.

Patrick Bateman, in “American Psycho,” is equally averse to sharing his emotions. As a fictional character addressing an implied reader, his confession is necessarily private, but whereas Trump is publicity-seeking, bombastic, Bateman is masked, neurotic and private, a dark Batman to Trump’s Superman. When Bateman’s former lover asks why he bothers to work at all given his inherited wealth, Bateman replies, “Because I… want… to… fit… in,” a starkly different motivation than “doing it for kicks.”

Whether or not Bateman actually commits the crimes he describes, he is certainly psychopathic. The difference is that while Trump’s pathology motivates him to scale greater heights, Bateman’s impels him toward perpetual breakdown. It is a distinction that Trump, in a rare moment of psychological awareness, describes in “The Art of the Deal”:

I think of it as a controlled neurosis, which is a quality I’ve noticed in many highly successful entrepreneurs. They’re obsessive, they’re driven, they’re single-minded and sometimes they’re almost maniacal, but it’s all channelled into their work. Where other people are paralysed by neurosis, the people I’m talking about are actually helped by it.

The neurotic paralysis that Trump refers to is symbolized by Bateman’s encounter with the detective during which his id and superego are so evenly matched that his ego, required to mediate between the two, begins to crumble. This happens throughout the novel and, frequently, he tries to resolve the crisis by invoking Trump’s name or form as one might a god’s (30 times in total):

“Is that Donald Trump’s car?” I ask, looking over at the limousine stuck next to us in gridlock…

Faded posters of Donald Trump on the cover of Time magazine cover the windows of another abandoned restaurant, what used to be Palaze, and this fills me with a newfound confidence.

When Bateman meets his brother he tells him, “We’re going to a party Donald Trump’s having… Big fun. Very big fun… Donald’s a nice guy. You should meet him… I’ll… introduce you to him.” But this is fantasy. Bateman does not know Trump, only worships him from afar. At one point his fiancée explodes: “Not Donald Trump again… This obsession has got to end!” But it doesn’t end. It can’t. Donald Trump is all Bateman has to validate his increasingly deranged impulses.

For the first third of the novel, Bateman hides behind a smooth, sophisticated persona, although we, privy to his inner life, are aware that his fixation with designer clothing, furniture, beauty products and restaurants suggests a disturbed and obsessive mind. At a dinner party in the first chapter he gives an impromptu political manifesto that turns out to be compassionate and liberal, a sharp contrast to his openly racist and misogynist peers. Bateman even reproves them for using racist and anti-semitic slurs, and when one brags about teasing beggars with dollar bills, advises him to “Just say no.”

The turning point comes exactly halfway through, when he speaks kindly to a black homeless man, offering him money and food, before saying, “Do you know what a fucking loser you are?” and stabbing him repeatedly: “There’s a quarter. Go buy some gum, you crazy fucking n***er.” Bateman’s barbarism, we learn, is far more severe than that of his peers. He has a raw, deranged hatred for women and minorities, lacks any empathy, and fantasizes constantly about rape and violence.

Unlike Trump’s, however, Bateman’s narrative cannot help but reveal his humanity, the pain he labors so hard to hide from himself and the reader. By piecing together odd scraps of information, we learn that he is “a child of divorce” whose father died when he was young and whose mother is in an insane asylum. When he goes to visit her she says, “You look unhappy,” and of course this is true: Patrick Bateman is an intensely suffering young man whose longing to hurt others conflicts with the feelings of shame, remorse and doubt he cannot successfully smother until finally he ends up sobbing: “I just want to be loved.”

Near the end of the novel, Bateman has killed, or claims to have killed, 14 people, including his former lover and a child. Broken and exhausted, he is filled with contempt for everything he sees, with the one exception of his hero, to whom his loyalty is constant:

Walking down Fifth Avenue around four o’clock in the afternoon, everyone on the street looks sad, the air is full of decay, bodies lie on the cold pavement, miles of it, some are moving, most are not. History is sinking and only a very few seem dimly aware that things are getting bad. Airplanes fly low across the city, crossing in front of the sun. Winds shoot up Fifth, then funnel down Fifty-seventh Street. Flocks of pigeons rise in slow motion and burst up against the sky. The smell of burning chestnuts mixes with carbon monoxide fumes. I notice the skyline has changed only recently. I look up, admiringly, at Trump Tower, tall, proudly gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight.

His euphoria does not last, however, as he notices two black teenagers “ripping off tourists” and has to fight away the urge to kill them. This is the end for Bateman: All he can do now is to gaze up at the tower and pray for his savior to come down. But by the final page we know he is on his own, condemned to lifelong torment without redemption. The last line sees him looking at a sign that reads “THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.”

Twenty-five years after “American Psycho’s” publication, Donald Trump has descended from his gilded tower. But he has not come to Wall Street. Instead, he has styled himself as a savior for those white males who share Bateman and co.’s sense of entitlement, but lack their economic status. Both groups oppose political correctness, feminism, gay marriage and the election of America’s first black president, but thus far, only privileged elites like Bateman and his peers have been able to flaunt their bigotry, white machismo and contempt for the weak and vulnerable with impunity. Trump’s strategy as candidate for the Republican nomination has been to offer these privileges to the people. In “Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again,” Trump’s latest book, he describes this constituency as:

… the bedrock of this country… those 45 million Americans stuck in poverty [who] have seen their incomes decline over the past 20 years. Understandably, their disenchantment and frustration at what’s happening grows every day, and it gets worse and worse and worse.

It is something Brett Easton Ellis commented on in a March 2016 interview for Rolling Stone, when he suggested Bateman might have been embarrassed by Trump’s campaign:

Trump today isn’t the Trump of 1987. He’s not the Trump of “Art of the Deal.” He seemed much more elitist in ’87, ’88. Now he seems to be giving a voice to white, angry, blue-collar voters. I think, in a way, Patrick Bateman may be disappointed by how Trump is coming off and who he’s connecting with.

Whereas Bateman and his peers direct their hatred downward―at homeless blacks, street “faggots” and prostitutes―Trump’s support base looks upward, at the liberals and “career politicians” who they believe, while funded by Wall Street, have outsourced American jobs to the Mexicans and Chinese, and allowed Latinos and Muslims to enter the country causing murder, rape and terrorism.

If the Trump of “The Art of the Deal” was Tower Trump, the Trump of “Crippled America” is Millenarian Trump. Whereas Tower Trump was brash, outlandish, but relatively calm, Millenarian Trump is permanently angry, bullying and macho, the sort one would be wise to steer clear of in a bar. On the first page of “Crippled America,” he writes:

Some readers may be wondering why the picture we used on the cover of this book is so angry and so mean looking. I had some beautiful pictures taken… I looked like a very nice person, which in theory I am… But I decided it wasn’t appropriate… I wanted a picture where I wasn’t happy, a picture that reflected the anger and unhappiness I feel…

And yet, Trump is not amongst those “overwhelming numbers of Americans who have not participated in the economic growth of the past year, or of the past 20 years.” Trump, in fact, has directly benefitted from all those things he rails against ― free trade, declining wage rates, outsourcing of manufacturing to Mexico and China, even illegal immigration. He is the corporate super-rich he accuses the politicians of serving, so why should he be angry? The clue is in “The Art of the Deal”:

The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.

I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration―and a very effective form of promotion.

Trump’s rage, then, is a made-for-television mask designed to attract as much attention as possible. It is a targeted rage too, aimed at mirroring and enhancing the anger of those disaffected white males, the so-called real Americans who believe their nation has been mortgaged to foreigners and minorities. Tellingly, in “The Art of the Deal,” he says of such people, “I categorize them as life’s losers, who get their sense of accomplishment and achievement from trying to stop others.” And now he has become their champion, a fact he makes explicit in “Crippled America”:

Nobody likes a loser and nobody likes to be bullied. Yet, here we stand today, the greatest superpower on Earth, and everyone is eating our lunch. That’s not winning.

In chapter two of “The Art of the Deal,” Trump lists the key strategies for success (“Trump Cards,” he calls them). These include “KNOW YOUR MARKET,” “USE YOUR LEVERAGE,” “GET THE WORD OUT” and “FIGHT BACK.” This is exactly how he has run his campaign. He has found his market in those disaffected white “losers” and presented himself as the only one who can turn them into winners. His leverage, his unique selling point, derives from his being self-funded, free from having to bow to pressure groups and the political correctness he despises, and therefore free to use the sort of abusive and bullying language career politicians do not dare to use. When his opponents have called him out for this, he has taken advantage of the publicity, “fighting back” with yet more invective and slander, and in doing so has succeeded in dominating every media outlet the world over. In “Crippled America,” he says:

I don’t mind being attacked. I use the media the way the media uses me―to attract attention… So sometimes I make outrageous comments and give them what they want… I’m a businessman with a brand to sell.

To Donald Trump, the presidency is a deal—a big deal, one he is determined to win at all costs. He continues to be motivated by the same thing that has spurred him on for the last 30 years — “kicks” — which in the context of his presidential bid seem to mean power, fame, celebrity, grandeur and, his ultimate goal, winning.

To these ends, Trump is quite prepared to turn America’s white barbarian id loose, that same force that created the Ku Klux Klan, the same force that led a 21-year-old to open fire inside a church during a prayer service in Charleston, that led a man to murder three Muslims over a parking dispute in Chapel Hill. By combining white male entitlement with economic frustration and the rhetoric of decline, he has turned what used to be a largely private, masked pathology into a mass, public phenomenon. His rallies have been attended by neo-Nazis, white supremacists and Klansmen, characterized by racism and violence; in 2015 two of his supporters beat up a homeless Hispanic man with a metal rod in Boston.

And this would appear to be only the beginning. Even if Trump goes no further than winning the Republican candidacy, he still has at least six more months to continue to displace that legal and ethical superego (that he calls political correctness) with his own brand of American psychopathy. Even if a Democrat is inaugurated in 2017, it may be years before this damage can be undone.

Twenty-five years ago, Simon & Schuster cancelled their publication of “American Psycho” (Vintage picked it up almost immediately) owing to its “sadistic contents,” while Otto Friedrich wrote in the New York Times that, “I think that this repulsive novel will contribute to the violence that afflicts our society.” Ironically, however, it was Simon & Schuster who published “Crippled America” in 2015, calling it “the must-read book of the year,” and it was Otto Friedrich who wrote Time’s famous cover story on Trump in 1989, concluding that he would probably end up like Howard Hughes, “a multibillionaire living all alone in one room.”

Yet here we are in 2016, with Donald Trump poised to become the Republican Party’s candidate for the presidency of the United States. In 1991, Brett Easton Ellis showed us the psychopathic culture of mergers and acquisitions on ’80s Wall Street, but if Donald Trump becomes president we could see an entire nation sway in this direction. We could witness poorer, economically disenfranchised versions of Patrick Bateman come out of hiding and into the streets to claim what is “rightfully” theirs. Even if Trump should fail in his bid for the presidency, history will surely adjudge “Crippled America” as a more harmful book than “American Psycho,” and Donald Trump a more malevolent figure than any other American psychopath, one who stands poised to change the moral character of a nation for decades to come.

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The House science committee hates science and should be disbanded

Lamar Smith (Credit: AP/Harry Hamburg)

As if named by a Congressional Office of Dark Irony, The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology really seems to hate science.

Its current chair, Lamar Smith, R – Tex., is a climate change denier, seeing a conspiracy in the overwhelming scientific consensus on human-caused global warming, where the vast majority of experts in the world see only good science. In the last four or five Congressional sessions, the attacks on science made by the majority membership of HCSST have become increasingly unhinged and prolonged. Rather than acting on House Resolutions that advanced the aims of science, Lamar Smith assumed the role of small-government gadfly, irritating and exhausting scientific administrators like NSF Director France Córdova, over whose agencies HCSST had some purview.

In 2013, Smith embroiled the Committee in a meddlesome and amateurish investigation of NSF’s peer review process, picking out individual grants that struck him as not worth the money. He demanded copies of dozens of funded grants to review, to cite out of context, and, of course, to mock: “[H]ow does the federal government justify spending over $220,000 to study animal photos in National Geographic? Or $50,000 to study lawsuits in Peru from 1600–1700?”

To a scientist, these sound like questions that most likely merit long and complicated answers. The theoretical judgments of expert reviewers for granting agencies are based on arcane information not open to casual inspection. Any non-scientist with a touch of humility might understand that. After all, there are many far simpler things that non-scientists are not expected to know, like what causes the wind or what keeps water in the toilet bowl.

Whatever hubris underlies Smith’s meddling in cherished scientific practices like peer review, we should make sure that the NSF’s appropriations request is not being singled out for higher standards of accountability than are shown by the legislators themselves. How are expenditures justified in other bills? Lamar Smith voted in favor of the Farm Bill. How would he justify the Farm Bill’s public taxation for a $15 million ‘wool trust fund,’ a $170 million program to protect catfish growers from overseas competition, a $3 million tax bill to promote Christmas trees, and a nice, round $100 million to study how to get Americans to buy more maple syrup?

Smith announced the federally funded NSF’s responsibility to taxpayers to only fund research that will benefit U.S. citizens in a concrete way in the immediate future. This is an image of science unfamiliar to anyone who actually does it. If we embraced it, we would all be doing the genetics of corn. No one has ever been able to reliably predict the future of science. But fund research that pursues ideas identified by experts as theoretically promising, and the unanticipated benefits flow. To take just one example: Who would have guessed that a theoretical model of our mental lexicon introduced by psychologists of language (an area of NSF targeted for cuts by HCSST) would be used by the U.S. Adopted Names Council to reduce “sound-alike” prescription errors, like when a pharmacist accidentally prescribes Keppra, an anti-seizure medication, instead of Kaletra, an HIV antiviral medication, and thus avoid thousands of accidental deaths and illnesses?

Nobel Prizes winners in Economics have done research supported by the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) directorate of the National Science Foundation, but Smith looked to gut SBE nevertheless. He then scrutinized selected activities at the Department of Energy. There, Smith has been focusing the power of the Committee, such as it is, on activities that don’t seem very closely related to scientific oversight. Recently, he sent Republican members to scrutinize the Environmental Protection Agency’s considered scientific judgments (about the EPA’s Pebble Mine safety concerns over a gold-copper-molybdenum strip mine in Alaska), for example, Smith offered his presumably scientific opinion that “This is harmful to economic development and dangerous to the democratic process.” Under its charge to monitor the administration of many government offices, the Committee has badgered the IRS about the security of their Internet and email systems, and insinuated in public settings that the IRS is in violation of standards, and defiantly non-compliant. In each of these cases, the charge of the Committee was used by Smith to advance Republican aims and to criticize or frustrate Democratic initiatives.

It is not merely that the Committee has lost its way under the chairmanship of Smith; rather, it has no real way forward in the first place. Hastily assembled in 1958 in response to Sputnik’s launch, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has changed its name and reach no less than six times. This titular drift signals the Committee’s unprincipled vacillation in charge. The biggest problem, and the best publicized, is that powerful and longstanding members of the Committee have a contempt for science. This contempt is most potent when combined with an arrogance that renders them too ignorant to know when to defer to experts. On March 26, 2014, the HCSST met with the president’s chief science advisor, John Holdren, to complain that current science-based initiatives to slow global warming conflicted with their own individual understandings of the issues. As one member (of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, you recall) put it, it just didn’t make sense to say that people were causing global warming. After all, the earth had warmed up between the ice ages when there were no people around, so how could we blame humans for the current warming? “Just because we’re alive now,” he reasoned, “the tectonic plate shifts aren’t gonna stop, the hurricanes [and] tsunamis aren’t gonna stop, the asteroid strikes aren’t gonna stop.” These are—at best—uninformed, gut reactions. And these initiates are quick to substitute scientific testimony with their own intuitions.

This pattern of hostility toward and ignorance of science on HCSST has a long history. Immediately preceding Chair Lamar Smith was Chair Ralph Hall, R-Tex., whose own background in science is uncertain. What is certain is that he was born shortly after the discovery of penicillin and finished any college coursework before the discovery of DNA. Yet as chair he published an op-ed in the Washington Post in 2012, chiding the EPA for their “poor science.” No one knows where he acquired the scientific expertise to form that judgment. Maybe he got a science refresher from one of the science panels routinely contracted by the Committee. But that seems unlikely, because Committee members are evidently not required to attend those sessions. The procedures by which the Committee approaches these obscure and arcane scientific issues are also utterly nontransparent to the ordinary citizen. A Committee staff person with whom I spoke would not say who attended educational sessions, fell silent at the question of whether attendance was required, and would not discuss anything relevant to the House resolutions before them without special clearance. This nontransparency is ironic, because this is the feature that U.S. policymakers object to when they criticize administrative approaches to science policy used in England and France – in which scientists rather than legislators make the science policy.

This is not a problem with Ralph Hall, or with Lamar Smith. It is a problem with the way we play at democratic decision-making about science. Although we know that we want the lights to go on and our pipes to hold water, there is a reason that we don’t demand detailed, transparent descriptions from our electrician and plumber: We don’t have the knowledge to evaluate their explanations of circuitry or of vapor lock in pipes. The same goes for accountability in science. It is fine to ask scientists to explain their research to the public, but we cannot demand that they persuade that public of its significance; the public simply hasn’t the expertise to make those evaluations, and it isn’t the government’s job to patronize them about that.

Although the Committee has cost the U.S. taxpayers many millions of dollars in resources and person hours and opportunity costs, as the institutions of science fended off these ludicrous intrusions on the efficient administration of good science, its ineffectiveness as a law-making body has also limited its damage. So perhaps we should be grateful that, between 2005 and 2011, 743 bills came before the HCSST, and by my count 21 became law.

Given its cost in both knowledge and treasure, the HCSST could end tomorrow and leave only freed-up resources and a welcome quiet. House committees are rarely disbanded but, as we have seen, often renamed. The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has little to do with science anymore, if it ever did. Science is too arcane for initiates to judge technical issues underlying processes like ocean acidification, gene-splicing and disposal of dangerous chemicals, and it is not government’s job to sustain the illusion that they can. This is especially so when the loudest climate change deniers rely on fossil fuel companies to fund their reelections.

These battles, then, have nothing to do with intelligent persuasion or scientific evidence. And there is no reason to think it will ever change. Explanations for the Committee’s internal battles and ineffectiveness abound. At a recent policy conference I attended, employees at two different lobbying organizations told me, over drinks, that HCSST got nothing done because its members were known by Beltway insiders as “dim bulbs.” But that is too glib an explanation for the Committee’s profound dysfunction. As electricians say (or at least they should), “It’s not the wattage that matters; it’s the schematic.” A blueprint for this Committee should dub procedures that remove opportunities for conflict and corruption, procedures that prevent members from pursuing investigations based on suspicions that would not themselves pass peer review.

Some optimists might look to a more systematic method of citizen oversight. Voters need to know how untutored politicians on HCSST get advised and whether they show up for expert panels and educate themselves before deciding on a policy. Citizens need evidence that there is a political price to pay for dishonesty; the House should make the misrepresentation of scientific results a sanctionable or otherwise punishable offense. But until this committee learns how to compel responsible behavior from its members, science will continue to be used cynically by members who want to generate campaign funds and whip up the voting base.

And that is why HCSST is no longer viable. This is too much oversight; too much babysitting to control mischief. And House rules won’t compel it. Members will vote their private interests, they will vote their constituencies, they will vote their campaign funders, they will vote their aspiration to rotate into a K Street lobbying position. What’s more, even if you could control conflict and corruption, you can’t make people respect science.

With dysfunctions so costly, rampant and chronic, it is time for the HCSST to pack up its tent, a rare event for a standing committee. But its troubles are that serious. If this assessment seems harsh, I defer to Scientific American, hardly a partisan magazine, which has called HCSST’s anti-scientific antics “a national embarrassment.” The U.S. should be embarrassed by a Sputnik-driven science committee now ironically reminiscent of Lysenkoism in Communist Russia, making judgments of “scientific fitness” based on partisan political expediencies.

When the national embarrassment is a standing committee of the House of Representatives, disbanding it would require a bill coming before the House floor, and then receiving a majority vote. Though rare, it has occurred. And there are other options available to end the madness but not the committee. But these procedures must be dusted off.

Science has a promising future, even if the HCSST doesn’t. The trick will be to use procedures of oversight that are as successful as science itself. There is a science of judgment that can help people, including legislators, make better decisions. In fact, it is one of the great ironies of modern policy-making that legislators use their gut reactions and horse sense to judge issues in psychological science and behavioral economics that have proved the unreliability of our gut reactions and horse sense. The main science body in the House shrugs off core scientific findings. Members misrepresent the contents of science bills. They ignore conflicts by taking campaign money from industries standing to benefit from their vote. The last two chairs have created a calendar of Committee activities based on imagined global and domestic conspiracies. No one is happy about this. Not the Committee. Not the American public. And especially not the science agencies of this Democratic administration. HCSST has become a sad, partisan pantomime of what science governance could be in an advanced democracy. The most sensible alternative is the European model of administrative law, in which Congress empanels experts, not legislators, to make science-related law. But that would be a challenge for the next administration.

 

 

 

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The nightmarish “unity” of the Republican Party: What Trump & Ryan have in common is very, very scary

Paul Ryan, Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters//John Gress/AP/Charlie Neibergall/Photo montage by Salon)

Shortly after their first meeting earlier this week, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan issued a joint statement announcing that their encounter was a “very positive step toward unification,” while stating that “the United States cannot afford another four years of the Obama White House, which is what Hillary Clinton represents.” Though Ryan did not endorse the billionaire, saying that it would take more than one meeting, he noted that it is “critical that Republicans unite around our shared principles, advance a conservative agenda, and do all we can to win this fall.”

With the Republican Party currently divided over whether to support Trump — who has made a campaign out of know-nothing chauvinism, the scapegoating of ethnic and religious minority groups, and impulsive taunting and name-calling of his critics — one must consider what exactly these “shared principles” really are.

When it comes to Donald, it’s hard to discern any genuine philosophical convictions or principles, other than an unwavering belief in his own greatness. Like Ahab’s monomaniacal fixation on Moby Dick, or Lenin’s single-minded commitment to the revolution, Donald Trump is completely devoted to Donald Trump. And the billionaire will say whatever he thinks will get him votes or attention, however deplorable (not that much unlike his Democratic opponent, come to think of it).

Since locking up the nomination, Trump has flip-flopped on various issues, expressing a willingness to raise taxes on the wealthy, claiming his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country was “just a suggestion” (no biggie), changing his stance on the minimum wage, and becoming entirely open to accepting checks from big donors, after criticizing his Republican opponents for doing the same over the past year. Sometimes it appears that Trump doesn’t even know what he believes in. (Other than himself, of course.)

Speaker Ryan, on the other hand, is firmly committed to reactionary policies that would sweep away all of the progress made during the 20th century, which makes his agenda even more dangerous than Donald’s. Ryan is more concerned with his right-wing politics than his party, as the New York Times reported on Thursday:

“Those close to Mr. Ryan say he tends to put his policy agenda ahead of party loyalty. ‘People in politics tend to be in two categories,’ said Peter Wehner, a director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives under President George W. Bush, who has known Mr. Ryan for two decades. ‘Some are drawn to politics because they like the games and mechanics, and their first priority is the party…Bob Dole fell into that category. Mitch McConnell is also that party guy. And Ryan is just more in that camp of ideas, and he thinks about the party mostly as a vehicle to advance conservatism.’”

Ryan is somewhat infamous for his adolescent infatuation with the anti-collectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand (once described as “nearly perfect in its immorality” by Gore Vidal), which he has yet to outgrow in his middle age. Ryan and his ilk believe in a philosophy akin to social darwinism — laissez faire capitalism, without any kind of democratic intervention or social programs to limit poverty and inequality. Ironically, the welfare state was originally introduced to save capitalism from itself (and the angry masses), which Randians like Paul do not seem to grasp.

The Republican Party — the party of so-called “conservative principles” — can be broken up into several different sects: the right-wing populists like Trump, who appeal to racial and religious resentments and xenophobia, while spouting anti-intellectual rhetoric; the social darwinists like Paul Ryan and Gov. Scott Walker, who would eliminate the welfare state and all business regulations to set the invisible hand free and usher in a new Gilded Age; the theocrats like Sen. Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Sen. Jim Inhofe, who believe evolution and global warming are liberal (or satanist) conspiracies; and neocons like Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. John McCain, who seem more sensible than their colleagues on domestic issues, but completely insane when it comes to bombing countries in the Middle East and supporting feudalistic dictators.

These categories obviously overlap — the GOP is unique in that it manages to promote Jesus Christ, chauvinism and social darwinism all at once. (Say what you will about Ayn Rand, but at least she understood that her individualist philosophy was antithetical to that of Jesus Christ’s.) Since Trump has taken over the party, these differences have become magnified — yet these numerous sects all share the principle of reaction.

As I noted in a previous article, “conservative” is too generous a label for the modern GOP. Leading Republicans do not want to conserve the status quo — like President Obama, for example, who is technically more of a conservative than Trump. The GOP is a party of reactionary politics and right-wing nihilism. True, there are still some moderate Republicans; but in the party of Trump, they are quickly becoming a minority.

In all likelihood, Ryan will end up endorsing Trump, because they are ultimately united in their reactionary outlook. Donald may not have the same commitment as Ryan to anti-collectivist principles, but they are both dedicated to fighting progress, and in the end, this will unify the party.

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4 reasons never to drink Budweiser ever again

Is Budweiser’s rebranding its beer to the name “America” a poor attempt to make beer great again? Because beer is pretty great already. What’s not is the controversy Anheuser-Busch and its parent company Inbev (the company behind Budweiser) has caused with these missteps, even more so than the confusing rebrand announced Tuesday.

1) Rape Culture

Budweiser made headlines this time last year due to a slogan on a Bud Light beer bottle.The slogan, part of the company’s “Up For Whatever” campaign, read: “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night.” After being called out for potentially promoting rape culture, Anheuser-Busch quickly apologized. “It’s clear that this message missed the mark, and we regret it,” Alexander Lambrecht, vice president of Bud Light, said on the company’s website.

2. Union Busting

Numerous anti-worker and union-busting initiatives have been championed by ALEC’s Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development Task Force, of which Anheuser-Busch is a member. Not only that, the beverage company went so far as to sponsor the 2015 ALEC annual conference’s open-bar cocktail hour.

3. Tax Evasion 

The European Commission announced in January 2016 that a corporate tax break to multinational companies that included Anheuser-Busch’s parent companty InBev, “amounting to total reductions equivalent to about $765 million, was illegal,” the New York Times reported:

One of the [35+] companies known to have used the technique is a Belgian subsidiary of the international brewing giant Anheuser-Busch InBev. Although Belgium’s official corporate tax rate is 34 percent, the subsidiary paid a rate of only about 4 percent on annual profit of about 60 million euros, or $65.5 million, in 2013.

Anheuser-Busch also uses a range of other tax benefits in Belgium, where the parent company has its headquarters, and paid a tiny fraction of 1 percent on its reported profit there of $1.93 billion in 2014.

4. Safety Violations

OSHA has cited Anheuser-Busch for safety violations in multiple cities, including Columbus, Houston and Jersey City, where the company was fined over $150,000.

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