Samir Chopra's Blog, page 62

On Being Of Only Average Intelligence

Around the time that my teen years were to commence, I took an IQ test. My brother had stumbled upon one HJ Eysenck‘s famous IQ books–it would have been either Know Your Own I.Q. (1962) or Check Your Own I.Q. (1966)–and after testing himself, insisted that I do so too. Intrigued by this mysterious entity called ‘intelligence quotient‘ and possessed of a–what else?–childish trust in the power of quantification to reveal reality’s contours, I took the test.

The scores were humbling. I emerged with a 120. Eysenck’s scale informed us that this score placed me in the ‘average’ category. Well above the ‘deficient’, the ‘retarded’, the ‘mentally infirm’ but well below the Mozarts of this world. And certainly well below some pesky teenager the Guiness Book of World Records had anointed the world’s IQ king. I had arrived at the same score as my brother, so at least he hadn’t bested me, but this was scant consolation; I had been hoping to show up–in this cerebral domain–someone who was certainly my physical superior.

My score was mortifying. I had been assured by many around me–my parents mostly, but also many of my aunts and uncles–that I was ‘very smart’, that I was ‘so bright,’ destined for bigger and better things. This assessment of my intelligence was, I think, based on two factors: one, I read a great deal at a rapid pace, and two, my spelling was impeccable, the closest I’ve come to achieving perfection in any walk of life. But now, this strange test that asked me to–among many other species of mental trickery–manipulate shapes and find patterns in numbers, all the while keeping one nervous eye on the clock, had rudely brought me down to earth. I was one of the lowing, bleating herd; I was unexceptional; I was a follower, not a leader.

Unable to fully reconcile myself to this demotion on the grand totem pole of human worth, I resolved to take the test again. I did so. My score unblinkingly returned to the same point on the scale. Distraught, I told my mother the bad news. Contrary to her suffused-by-motherly-love assessments, I was only ‘average.’ My mother told me to not worry. A little later, when I conveyed my grim tidings to my father, I received much the same instructions. (I do not know if I invited them to take the test; perhaps my anxiety about finding out that my parents too were merely ‘average’ stayed my tongue.)

It was with some relief therefore that I greeted the skepticism directed at these quantitative assessments of a supposedly monolithic entity: I was suitably receptive to the arguments that scorned the crude shoehornings of something quite as indeterminate as human intelligence into a neatly marked off numerical scale. Such claims fell on fertile ground; I was ready to receive reassurance all was not lost, that I could hold my head up again and hope for vindication on some other intellectual battleground.

I’m still waiting.

Hermione Lee On Wasting Nothing

The Art of Biography series of interviews at The Paris Review includes the following exchange between Hermione Lee and Louisa Thomas in No. 4:

INTERVIEWER

This is something you consistently look at—the ways in which a period that is commonly considered a dead period in a writer’s life feeds into their work. I’m thinking especially of Cather and her journalism, and Wharton and the marriage years before she writes.

LEE

There’s a wonderful quotation from Proust, which that great Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen uses. She puts it in her preface to The Last September. “It is those periods of existence which are lived through carelessly, unwillingly, or in boredom, that most often fructify into art.” Isn’t it excellent that that can be the case. My friend Victoria Glendinning has a motto she uses, which I sometimes steal—“Nothing is wasted.” It’s a very reassuring and consoling idea, even if it isn’t always true. Think of those terrible phases in your life when you’re just grinding along, or you’re missing your way, or everything seems arid and disappointing. It helps if you can say to yourself, But something will come out of this. Penelope Fitzgerald wrote a note to herself that I take to heart—“Experiences aren’t given to us to be ‘got over,’ otherwise they would hardly be experiences.” [links added.]

This is very encouraging, I must admit, for someone quite used to ‘grinding along’ and ‘missing [my] way’ all the while thinking that ‘everything seems arid and disappointing.’ Perhaps that ‘experience’ itself will form the basis of what I write in the future as indeed, my terrible distraction and attention-deficit, which keeps me from writing and reading as well or as often as I would like to, has served as subject for several posts on that topic.

There is a more fundamental point at play in Lee’s remarks. As the friends and families of writers ruefully note, everything serves as raw material for writing. If the dramatic, the astonishing, the spectacular, and the curious can be so pressed into service, then why not the boring, the mundane, the tedious, the weekday? They too make us and our lives into what they are.

As for material being ‘wasted,’ every book project of mine generates, besides a manuscript file, a ‘bit bucket‘ file, a space where I keep all that I excised from the book: sterile notes, irrelevant asides and digressions, redundancies, orphans of truncated chains of thought. This collection can grow alarmingly large; my current ‘bit bucket,’ for a book whose notes–I will not dignify that misshapen mass with the appellation ‘draft’–run to about eighty thousand words, is almost seven thousand words and twenty-three pages long.  These buckets have, over the years, not been pressed into service; the material collected in them has not found its way into other writings of mine. But neither have I deleted them. I have not given up on them. Here, I’m a hoarder; driven by the same spirit that animates Lee remarks, I persist in hoping that they will ‘fructify’, if not into ‘art’ then at least into the passably readable.

The Pleasures Of Anger

Anger is toxic, corrosive, and damaging; it is the poison we imbibe to hurt others. But like other substances described as ‘poisons’ anger is also intoxicating. As those who have ever felt ‘the red mist’ draw down over their eyes will readily testify, an outburst of anger is wholly controlling; a terrifying loss of self-control. But not one that is wholly unpleasant. And thus anger may be addictive too.

As the experience of happiness can be pleasurable, so can that of anger. This aspect of anger may partially explain its resilience in our emotional frameworks; part of the adaptive character of anger, its continuing survival, might be the pleasure it affords its ‘sufferers.’  Anger is difficult to control, to ‘reign in’; an acknowledgement of the pleasure anger provides may enable us to understand why ‘pointless anger’ and ‘raging’ and ‘venting’ exercise the hold they do. Those driven to drink wake up with hangovers; it is the price they pay for the pleasures of the night before. Those driven to anger may pay the price of broken relationships to experience the pleasures of the red mist. Those who require anger management require treatment in much the same way substance addicts do; they have found a source of once-pleasurable indulgence that has ‘gone wrong.’

There is little doubt about anger’s constructive qualities;  we are exhorted to ‘get, and stay, angry’ if we want to bring about change in this world; we are asked to cultivate an emotion supposed corrosive. Anger appears as a vital tool of our emotional arsenal; a good slave and a bad master. Anger makes us uncomfortable; in seeking to rid ourselves of it, we find the motivation to bring about desired moral and political change. But anger provides too, a space for indulgence of exhilaration. The experience of anger can be feelings of power and moral superiority. These are not unpleasant emotions.

Anger, a primary moral emotion, cannot play the vital constructive role it plays in moral condemnation and outrage unless it provided an affective state that was ‘welcoming’, one that provided more ‘comfort’ than the state of non-arousal from which it represents a departure.  Moral anger has the motivational and affective force that it does precisely because moral anger is pleasurable too. To feel that anger is to feel alive; to deny that anger is to anesthetize ourselves. The angry person told to ‘work through’ his anger, to ‘get over it,’ to ‘overcome it,’ is asked to substitute a bland, affect-less state for a pleasurable, emotionally charged one. Anger is not just frustration or fear writ large; anger is an uncontrollable itch, indulgence in which brings relief and pleasure. In anger we let ourselves be overcome, taken over. Such occupations will not proceed as smoothly as they do if they were taking place in an unreceptive environment.

We condemn some forms of pleasure-seeking—perhaps free soloing, which is dangerous, encourages reckless copycats, and leaves families anxious and scared. We might condemn the angry in similar terms.  The addict’s pleasure seeking is condemnation-worthy when it interferes with life projects; his own and those of others. These are the grounds on which we may condemn the addict. And the angry.

Kundera On Nostalgia For The Present

In Identity (HarperCollins, New York, 1998, pp. 40), Milan Kundera has Chantal thinking nostalgically about her love, Jean-Marc, but:

Nostalgia? How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? (Jean-Marc knew how to answer that: you can suffer nostalgia in the presence of a beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more; if the beloved’s death is, invisibly, already present.)

Sometimes when I’m looking at videos and photos of loved ones I find myself overcome by a curious melancholia, a wistfulness of sorts. I’m perplexed; why is this so? These people, whose images I am gazing at, whom I love and care for, are still very much with me; they continue to enrich my life. Why does the sight of them introduce a sensation that is ‘nostalgic’, akin to the feeling that one might get on gazing at a scene never to be re-staged, a vista never to be viewed again? (The images I speak of are not ones that should be properly productive of nostalgia: they are way too recently produced for that, and even the sense of time elapsed cannot account for the depth and pathos of the associated melancholia.)

Kundera is right, of course, that this is because we have anticipated a future without our loved ones; we are not content to live in the present; we must look ahead as we always do. Our joy at the presence of our loved ones then, is always mingled, always touched and inflected, by a hint of terror; indeed, this fear, this paralyzing nightmare which flickers at the margins of our thoughts, might be what makes our joys of love quite so sweet. Parents know this the best perhaps, but lovers do too. Just like a jealous lover torments himself by thoughts of the times before he met his beloved, of those she loved and left, of a time when he was non-existent in her romantic calculus, we inflict ourselves on the pain of an imagined future that is bereft of those we love. As we walk side by side by those we love, we imagine ourselves alone, unable to share what we see with that pair of eyes which now supplements ours.

There is another reason too, I think, for reactions similar to mine–where we are looking at images of loved ones who still live with us. We have experienced losses in the past; we have spent much time gazing at visual mementos that remind us, again and again, of what we have lost. The act of viewing an image has itself become infected with a particular kind of superstitious threat: to look on too long is to tempt fates, to turn this gazing into all we might have left. And images themselves threaten: this is what your loved ones are reduced to; this is all that shall remain. We might shrink from the act of capturing images, afraid that we are tempting fate; perhaps we should be content with the concrete. And, of course, the present.

Vale Norman Foo (1943-2015)

On July 23rd, while on vacation in Canada with my family, I received a brief email from an old friend informing me that Norman Foo, Professor Emeritus at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, had passed away. Norman had been diagnosed with lung cancer–he was a non-smoker–early in 2012. His response to his diagnosis and prognosis had been magnificent, and he had ‘battled’ the disease as bravely, and with as much good humor as any human could ever be capable of. He was kind enough to continue to inform his friends about his treatments with progress reports about his condition that were leavened with humor and scientific curiosity about the processes at play in his body. But his cancer had finally caught up with him, and his struggles and suffering had come to an end. He will be deeply missed by all those he left behind: his family and his friends, many of whom were part of his extended academic family.

Norman was my academic supervisor during the two years I spent at UNSW as an Australian Research Council post-doctoral fellow; he was the best ‘boss’ I ever had. The scare quotes are there because there was nothing bossy about him. His research group, the Knowledge Systems Group (KSG), dedicated to devising logics for artificial intelligence–in areas such belief revision, knowledge representation, reasoning about actions–saw him as a friend, a mentor, and an avuncular and paternal figure rolled into one. This relationship meant that our group enjoyed strong interpersonal ties off-campus too; it didn’t feel like an extension of work, rather ‘work’ was where a group of friends gathered during the day too. Our camaraderie was, I daresay, a well-known fact in the global logics for artificial intelligence research community; once, at an academic conference, a fellow researcher said to me with some admiration, “You guys don’t have a research group, you have a support group!”

Norman was an academic manager too, of course; he made sure everyone in his charge–his undergraduates, his doctoral students, his post-docs–had all the resources, academic, infrastructural, financial, they needed to get their work done. There was no breathing down our necks; we worked on what we were most interested in, at our pace, in our style. He encouraged collaboration and urged us to submit co-authored papers to conferences and journals. Small wonder that those two years in Sydney were among the most productive I have ever had; my hunt for an academic tenure-track position was greatly facilitated by my stint there.

I had come to know of Norman and the KSG while finishing my doctoral dissertation. I noticed many important papers in my chosen field–belief revision–were published by members of his group, and encouragingly enough for a field that straddled philosophy, mathematics, and computer science, it included a philosopher as well. Even before I completed my PhD I had resolved a post-doctoral stint with his group would do me much good; I could be assured my application would be reviewed sympathetically. This was because Norman, despite an exclusively scientific education in engineering, mathematics, and computer science, took keen interest in the philosophical foundations of his field. He was an autodidact in this domain; he prided himself on not being one of those ignorant scientistic types that so frequently embarrass the scientific community with their disdain for philosophy.

I first met Norman at the International Joint Conference for Artificial Intelligence in 1999. I was nervous and diffident, in awe of the many high-powered academics who floated past me, too busy catching up with their equally well-placed colleagues and collaborators. But Norman and his group instantly took me in; they were friendly and welcoming, and made me feel instantly at home among them. One night, at dinner, after finding out I had not yet received any financial support for my trip to the conference, members of his group took up a collection at the table and picked up my tab. I think Norman had something to do with the spirit of generosity on display. A day later, Norman and his group took me along to an impromptu workshop at nearby Uppsala University. It was a blessing; I was able to present my doctoral work in a sympathetic and intimate atmosphere and make an implicit case for inclusion in his group. A couple of days later, over beers in Stockholm, I asked him if there were any openings for post-docs; he said he would send me the job notice if any came about. A couple of months later, I received an email from him. It was on; I should apply. I did so and was successful in securing the fellowship, thus launching my academic career.

Norman’s politics were straightforwardly progressive; he was a member of Australian Greens, and loathed the Liberals. (He thought Labor had sold out.) When I was working in Sydney (2000-2002), John Howard and Phil Ruddock ruled the roost and he despised both of them, accusing them of working to turn Australia into a reactionary bastion of xenophobia, US-directed sycophancy in foreign policy, and neoliberalism. Norman had a taste for the risqué and delighted in telling off-color jokes; he delighted too, in skewering the hypocrisy of sexual prudes and the overly religious. After his cancer diagnosis, he went on a tear in social media, posting links and comments that mocked one pompous, hypocritical, political and religious ass after another.

I have many fond memories of Norman, but a simple one, I think, shows off his personal qualities the best. The day I arrived in Sydney at the UNSW campus, Norman took me over to my new office and introduced me to my office mates, a pair of post-doctoral fellows. Shortly thereafter, he took me on a guided tour of campus, helping me with my administrative and logistical needs, showing me the various offices that would be of most importance in my work on campus. In each case, he personally introduced me to the relevant staff. Later, stepping off campus, he showed me local shopping spots in case I decided to live close to campus. I remember feeling some amazement as we walked all over and around campus. This was a senior professor, in charge of a research group; he had many academic responsibilities; he could so easily have directed one of his ‘minions’ to help me out, and returned to his many pressing commitments. Instead, with no ego and little pretension, he had chosen to personally orient me, to make me feel at home as well as he could. He succeeded.

It is one of my deepest regrets I was not able to travel to Australia and meet him in the years following his diagnosis. But thanks to oft-derided social media, we were able to stay in contact; he liked some of my blog posts and often linked to them, or commented. I was glad I was able to make him laugh a few times, and perhaps also snort in outraged agreement.

Norman was unique; I will miss him. As will all of those who he supported on many, many personal and academic fronts.

Onya Norman. You were a champ. RIP.

The Offensive Stupidity Of The No-Fly List

Last Friday (July 31st) my wife, my daughter, and I were to fly back from Vancouver to New York City after our vacation in Canada’s Jasper and Banff National Parks. On arrival at Vancouver Airport, we began the usual check-in, got groped in security, and filled out customs forms. The US conducts all customs and passport checks in Canada itself for US-bound passengers; we waited in the line for US citizens. We were directed to a self-help kiosk, which issued a boarding pass for my wife with a black cross across it. I paid no attention to it at the time, but a few minutes later, when a US Customs and Border Protection officer directed us to follow him, I began to. We were directed to a waiting room, where I noticed a Muslim family–most probably from Indonesia or Malaysia–seated on benches. (The women wore headscarves; the man sported a beard but no moustache and wore a skull cap.)

I knew what was happening: once again, my wife had been flagged for the ‘no-fly’ list. The first time this had happened had been during our honeymoon to Spain some eleven years ago; the last time my wife had been flagged was on our return from Amsterdam four years ago. (That’s right; my wife had been allowed to fly to the US from Europe, but her entry into the US was blocked.) On each occasion, she had been questioned–in interrogatory fashion–by a brusque official, and then ‘let go.’ There was no consistency to the checks; sometimes they happened, sometimes they did not. For instance, my wife was not blocked from traveling to–or returning from–India in 2013. At the least, the security system being employed by the Department of Homeland Security was maddeningly inconsistent.

But matters did not end there. It was not clear why my wife had been placed on the ‘no-fly’ list in the first place. Was there something in her background data that matched those of a known ‘terrorist’? This seemed unlikely: she had been born in Michigan, grown up in Ohio, attended Ohio State University, gone to graduate school at the City University of New York, and then law school at Brooklyn Law School before beginning work with the National Labor Relations Board as a staff attorney. (During her college days, she had worked with a student’s group dedicated to justice in Palestine, but that seemed like slim pickings. On that basis, you could indict most Jewish students who attend four-year liberal arts colleges in the US.) But she is Muslim–or, as my wife likes to say, ‘she was born into a Muslim family’–and still retains her Muslim last name after marriage. That could certainly be a problem.

After the first instance of our being detained at an airport, we had expected no more detentions; after all, the US’ security officers would have noticed that a particular passport number, belonging to a particular American citizen, had been incorrectly flagged at a border check; they had ascertained to their satisfaction that all was well; surely, they would now remove that name and number combination from their lists and concentrate on their remaining ‘targets.’ The first check would have acted as a data refinement procedure for the learning data used by their profiling software; it would now work with a cleaner set and generate fewer ‘false positives’–like my wife. That’s how learning data systems are supposed to work; the ‘cleaner’ the learning data, the better the system works.

But that had not had happened. Over the course of the past eleven years, my wife was detained again and again, leading up to this last instance on last Friday. On each occasion, the same procedure: ‘Follow me please; sir, you stay right here.” (Mercifully, in Vancouver, perhaps noticing we had a child with us, the border officers allowed me to accompany her to their chambers.) And then, the questioning, which sought to establish her  credentials: “What’s your father’s name?” What’s your mother’s name” “Where do you work?” and so on. Finally, “Thank you, ma’am. You can go now.” But none of the information gathered in these sessions had any value whatsoever as far as the no-fly profiling system was concerned. That remained magnificently impervious to the empirical particulars of the world outside; as far it was concerned, my wife was still guilty. Sometimes.

When the interrogation of my wife had ended, I asked the border officer: “How do I get my wife off the list?” His reply: “I don’t know.” I then asked: “Do you have any idea why she was flagged today?” His reply: “She has a pretty common last name.” I stared at him, dumbfounded. When Sinn Féin was rated a quasi-terrorist organization, did the US flag every Irishman at JFK who bore the last name Adams? Could it really be possible that this profiling system was as stupid as this officer was making it out to be? But that hypothesis was not so implausible; there was nothing in my wife’s background that would indicate any reason to place her in the same class as those folks who might be potential 9/11’ers. Moreover, this profiling system remained dumb; it did not ‘learn'; its conditional probabilities stayed the same no matter what its handlers learned about its learning data.

It’s tempting to call this a Kafkaesque situation and let it go at that. (And perhaps throw in a few complaints about the petty harassment this generates; the Muslim family I saw waiting with us missed their flight, and the solitary male was rudely told to move at one point.) But there is more here; this system, this ‘silver bullet’ that is supposed to keep us safe and for which we should be willing to give up our civil liberties is useless. And dangerously so. Its very strengths, to look for patterns and evidence and generate plausible hypotheses about the guilt of its subjects, are compromised by its design. I’ve speculated why my wife’s entry in the no-fly list has not been deleted and the only plausible explanation I can come up with is that whoever makes the deletion takes a very tiny risk of being wrong; there is an infinitesimal probability that the ‘innocent’ person will turn out to be guilty, and scapegoats will then be found. Perhaps that fear of being indicted as the ones who the let the Trojan Horse through stays their hand.

Whatever the rationale, the end-result is the same: a useless, dangerous, and offensive security system that on a daily basis–I’m quite sure–subjects both citizens and non-citizens of the US to expensive and humiliating delays and interrogations. And makes us safer not at all.

CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity: Masterfully Flawed Apologetics

CS Lewis‘ Mere Christianity is rightly acknowledged as a masterpiece of Christian apologetics; it is entertaining, witty, well-written, clearly composed by a man of immense learning and erudition (who, as befitting the author of the masterful Studies in Words, cannot restrain his delightful habit of providing impromptu lessons in etymology.) Lewis is said to have induced conversions in “Francis Collins, Jonathan Aitken, Josh Caterer and the philosopher C. E. M. Joad” as a result of their reading Mere Christianity, and it is not hard to see why. The encounter of a certain kind of of receptive mind with the explication of Christian doctrine that Lewis provides–laden with provocative analogies and metaphors–is quite likely to lead to the kind of experience conversion provides: an appeal to an emotional core harboring deeply experienced and felt needs and desires, which engenders a radical shift in perspective and self-conception. Christianity offers a means for conceptualizing one’s existential and pyschological crises–seeing them as manifestation of a kind of possession, by sin, by the Devil–and holds out the promise of radical self-improvement: the movement toward man–all men–becoming Christ, assuming a moral and spiritual perfection as they do so.  All the sludge will fall away; man will rise and be welcomed into the bosom of God; if only he takes on faith in Christ and his teachings. This is powerful, heady stuff and its intoxicating powers are underestimated only by those overly arrogant about the power and capacities of reason and ratiocination to address emotional longings and wants.

It is clear too, from reading Lewis, why Christianity provoked the ire of a philosopher like Nietzsche. For they are all here: the infantilization of man in the face of an all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-good God; the terrible Godly wrath visible in notions such as damnation; the disdain for this life, this earth, this abode, its affairs and matters, in favor of another one; the notion of a ‘fallen man’ and a ‘fall from grace’ implying this world is corrupt, indeed, under ‘occupation’ by an ‘enemy force.’ There is considerable self-abnegation here; considerable opportunity for self-flagellation and diminishment. No wonder the Existential Stylist was driven to apoplectic fury.

Lewis takes Biblical doctrine seriously and literally; but like any good evangelical he is not above relying on metaphorical interpretation when it suits him. (This is evident throughout Mere Christianity but becomes especially prominent in the closing, more avowedly theological chapters.) Unsurprisingly for a man of his times (who supports the death penalty and thinks homosexuals are perverts), the seemingly retrograde demand that wives unquestioningly obey their husbands, which might have sparked alarms in a more suspicious mind about the sociological origins of such a hierarchy-preserving notion, is stubbornly, if ever so slightly apologetically, defended.

Lewis’ arguments are, despite the apparent effort he takes to refute views contrary to Christian doctrine, just a little too quick. His infamous trilemma arguing for the Divinity of Jesus and his dismissal of the notion that his supposed Natural or Universal Law of Morality cannot be traced to a social instinct are notoriously weak (the former’s weaknesses are amply referenced in the link above while the latter simply pays no attention to history, class, and culture.)

But Mere Christianity, even if deeply flawed, is still worth a read: you witness an agile mind at work; you encounter a masterful writer; you find yourself challenged to provide refutations and counter-arguments; you even feel an emotional tug or two, letting you empathize with those who do not think like you do. That’s a pretty good catch for one book.

Let’s Hear It For The Trailhead

The trailhead is a good friend to all hikers, but it may be especially helpful to the day-hiker. There it is, the turnoff as indicated by the map, the sign indicating hiking and adventure are proximal, the quick check to ascertain the fullness of the parking lot–dismay if too full, glee if many spots still available, the helpful map indicating distances and local conditions (topographic, climactic, and sometimes warnings pertaining to fauna such as bears), and then finally, a glimpse of the opening steps onto the trail. That sight reminds you the trailhead is a portal to the wild; step through it and be transported–if you walk far enough. The trailhead is tame, but it lets you through to spaces and regions considerably less under the sway of man’s powers. (And let’s not forget the provision of a porta-pottie, which has the magical ability to make you lighter in body and mind before you start dragging backpack and body up and down slopes and scree.) In wilder, less developed hiking regions, the trailhead marks the end of the motorable road; ‘civilization’ goes no further; you are on your own now. In North America’s national and state parks, it marks the connection of the wilderness with civilization in a slightly different way. The road ends here too but it does not run out; it carries on elsewhere.

Returning to the trailhead is a pleasure too;  the hike is over, feet are sore, clothes are sweaty and prone to producing unpleasant chills when the wind picks up, the light may be fading, rest and relaxation and refueling beckon. The car may carry a change of clothes, some food, and even warmth as bad weather–the same winds and rain which sped up the last part of your hike–closes in. Many a hiker will pose for a weary but triumphant photo next to the trail map after completing the hike; a job–of sorts–well done. On occasion, of course, the sights and sounds of civilization audible and visible on the approach to the trailhead can serve as disconcerting reminders that you have left the pleasures–solitude, vistas–of the wilderness behind and that immersion in the weekday world awaits.

Sometimes you can return to the trailhead–after completing your hike for the day–and find out you’ve been a badass without even knowing it.  This photo was taken last Tuesday shortly after we–my wife, my toddler daughter, and myself–completed the Helen Lake hike in Banff National Park (Alberta, Canada). Along the way, we heard about grizzly encounters from other hikers on the trail–apparently, a pair had been sighted next to a creek crossing, and one had even charged a woman hiker as an aggressive warning. We debated carrying on–we weren’t carrying bear spray, as another hiker helpfully pointed out–and did, but behind us, the parks authority closed off the trail. On our return–we had skipped the Dolomite Pass section of the hike because it was getting late in the day–we commented on the relative absence of hikers and only found out the reason once we had returned.

 

Political Disputes Are Moral Disputes

Writing for The Stone, (‘Can Moral Disputes Be Resolved?‘, New York Times, 13 July 2015), Alex Rosenberg claims:

Moral disputes seem intractable….With some exceptions, political disputes are not like this. When people disagree about politics, they often agree about ends, but disagree about means to attain them. Republicans and Democrats may differ on, say, health care policy, but share goals — a healthy American population. They differ on fiscal policy but agree on the goal of economic growth for the nation….this is often a matter of degree. Political disputes can have moral aspects, too. The two sides in the debate over abortion rights…clearly don’t agree on the ends. There is an ethical disagreement at the heart of this debate. It is safe to say that the more ethical a political dispute is, the more heated and intractable it is likely to become.

These claims misunderstand political disputes and thus mischaracterize the nature and quality of the disagreements they give rise to.

Political disputes generate as much heat and light as they do because, very often, their participants do not share goals–opponents on either side of a political divide are well aware of this. I remain entirely unconvinced Republicans have a ‘healthy American population’ as a political goal, as opposed to ‘maximizing profits for the healthcare businesses – insurance, hospitals, doctors etc.’ Nothing in their actions and pronouncements suggests such an ascription would be remotely plausible. Only a commitment to shoehorn their views into some predetermined template of ‘acceptable political views’ could animate such an understanding of their political goals. Similarly, I do not think Republicans share the goal of ‘economic growth for the nation’ with me. Their concern appears far more limited, only extensible to a privileged–economically and morally–subset of the population. In these circumscribed political spaces, I find moral and metaphysical principles at work: that there exists a category of people termed ‘undeserving’, the members of which are not entitled to the benefits of the nation’s social and economic arrangements. These are not the principles that animate my political viewpoints.

A ‘political goal’ is not a simple scheme for power sharing; it speaks to a possible arrangement of social, economic, and moral goods, and the animating premises for the arguments made on its behalf rest invariably on some larger vision of how the world should be. In short, political goals are infected with normativity; they seek to conform to the ordering of some table of values their proponents have in mind. It might be that in a particular sphere of politics, some goals have to be artfully disguised in order to make their realization more plausible; this can generate the illusion of ‘agreement on goals-disagreement on means’ which Rosenberg so charitably ascribes to contemporary political conflict.

Rosenberg makes a concession to the intractability of political disputes by admitting the moral nature of some subset of them, but he has mischaracterized them sufficiently to not notice the glaringly obvious conclusion we can draw instead: political disputes are just as intractable as moral ones; the reason for this is that at heart, that’s what they are.

Scott Walker: Destroying Tenure, Keeping You ‘Free’

Scott Walker is well on his way to destroying one of the finest systems of public education in this country.  Those who cheered his attack on public sector unions will cheer this move on too: it has everything they want. A repeal of tenure, destruction of faculty governance, budget slashing, more power to university administrators. Nation-hating leftists, lazy, corrupt, subversive teachers, insolent workers forming themselves into unions; these have all been disciplined and put out to pasture. The cheering from those who would have benefited the most from high-quality, affordable public education, from organized workers fighting for fair wages and better working conditions, will be the loudest. The masochistic tendencies  of those who elected Scott Walker will thus be prominently on display.  So will their sadistic ones, for they will enjoy the spectacle of uppity faculty and unionists brought to their knees, they will enjoy the idea of ‘someone else’ being told to work longer hours, just like they do.

Pay us less, make us work more, make universities more expensive for our children, let corporate managers, the one who rules our lives, run our universities too, let them hire and fire teachers and professors like they would hire and fire us–without reason, let them decide what our children will learn; our father, which art in heaven, thou hast made us powerless; make others powerless too, especially those that dare speak up for themselves. These are the rallying cries of those who elect Scott Walker, artfully packaged and funded by those who would actually benefit the most: monopolist capitalists like the Koch brothers. Wisconsin is tragedy and farce simultaneously.

I seem to remember another instance of this kind of phenomenon:

The emotional satisfaction afforded by these sadistic spectacles and by an ideology which gave them a feeling of superiority…[and] was able to compensate them–for a time at least–for the fact that their lives had been impoverished, economically and culturally….[it] resurrected the lower middle class psychologically while participating in the destruction of its old socioeconomic position. [Eric Fromm, Escape From Freedom, Henry Holt and Co., New York, pp. 219]

Why do the folks who voted for Scott Walker feel this way? Perhaps they are “seized with the feeling of individual insignificance and powerlessness…typical for monopolistic capitalism…[their] anxiety and thereby…hatred were aroused; it moved into a state of panic and was filled a craving for submission to as well as domination over those who were powerless.” [Ibid., pp. 218]

Perhaps I exaggerate; so let me turn to The Onion for a dose of much-needed realism, where, in the ‘candidate profile’ for Walker, we find:

Personal Hero: Sixth-grade teacher who inspired him to strip educators of collective bargaining rights and dismantle publicly funded higher education

Greatest Accomplishment: Stood up to people who make living pulling others from burning buildings

Gubernatorial Record: First governor in history to raise enough out-of-state funding to overcome recall challenge from own constituents

Chief Political Rival: Those who want to make a living wage

This same man will now run for president on a platform that will look very similar to the one he brought to Wisconsin.  We live in interesting times.