Ideas

Are human difference and equal dignity opposed?

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig digs up this Will Saletan piece from 2007 on “liberal creationism” and l’affaire Watson, and comments:

What’s curious to me is that in this new age of scientism, Christian ‘superstition’ — our ethics, our value commitments, our axiomatic beliefs about the value of human life and dignity — is again becoming the hallmark of our ridiculousness. None of this is to say that evil hasn’t ever been done in the name of God, of course it has, but that isn’t what’s being lampooned here. Rather, the Christian commitment to the equal dignity of all people is conflated with piggish ignorance of science, which is synonymous with progress. …

The trick for Christians of this era will be to push back on the new scientism — on the truism that some people are just worth less, say, in market terms — while living in a world that identifies a total commitment to human dignity as a ridiculous superstition.

My first thought reading that sentence was, if people really are valued differently in the market — if they’re valued at all — is it not a little ridiculous to insist on the infinite worth of every human being? But so what?

I find this debate immensely frustrating because of all the point-scoring. You’ve got progressives like Saletan trolling secular liberals about the limits of their belief in evolution, and tradcons using it to say progressive assumptions about the world are informed by eugenics. Also it’s hard to separate from the history of white supremacy and American race relations in general. But let’s pretend we can for a minute.

In the years since Saletan wrote that, evidence has continued to build in favor of the idea that the story of human evolution is much more complicated, and in some cases much quicker, than we ever thought. I’m thinking of Neanderthal/Denisovian DNA being found among Asian and European populations; Harpending and Cochran on the Amish getting more Amish even in a couple of hundred years, or the cold-weather gene in Tibetans. I don’t find this scary or problematic at all, I think it’s beautiful. But whatever you think about it it’s getting difficult to ignore. I suspect this also means the guardians of political correctness will fight all the harder against the James Watsons of the world. That said, it makes about as much sense to say a person of African descent is stupider as saying a German is descended from cavemen.

I suppose there’s a case to be made for the “we don’t want to know” side; that this is a Pandora’s Box that society wisely leaves closed, and any conflation of ethics and science can only be a dilution of the former that leads to bad places. I’m sympathetic to that idea, but the robust alternative to Saletan’s “subtler account of creation and human dignity” (which, for the record, I don’t agree with), cannot be insisting that every human being everywhere in the world is exactly five-and-a-half feet tall, or an equivalent claim about intelligence. Think of it this way; say you have a perfect calculator that can measure all of a person’s qualities and give you a number of their worth in market terms. Say you can shrink that person and make him stupider, like playing an RPG backwards. Their value in the market would go down, but their value to God is unchanged. Earning less than your calculator number would be unfortunate or even unjust, and I suppose it could even be unjust that one’s number is not higher. But it makes no sense to take issue with the calculator itself, since it’s just a tool, and it certainly doesn’t bestow value, let alone infinite value.

Moreover, it’s important to ask whether insisting that human difference — which is to say, inequality — and equal dignity are opposed makes it more difficult to argue for equal dignity, especially as the evidence in favor of human difference seems to be growing. Two people can have unequal capacities but equal dignity. Scientism isn’t just the belief that evolution exists, it’s a whole complex of ideas that reduces people to instrumentalities. One could even say the vastness of human difference is further proof of the Christian idea that we are estranged from one another, and that trying to ameliorate that estrangement through policy, eugenic or otherwise, is usurping a role that properly belongs to God.

I also wonder if there’s an interesting natural law argument in the fact that progressive eugenicists were all about birth control as a means to breed “better” people, but the people who use it today are mostly the kind they would have wanted having babies. Is that to say modern America is dysgenic? I don’t know, but I doubt it will lead to good consequences. Is it scientistic to worry?

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Coming of age with The American Conservative

I must begin by thanking Jordan Bloom for the invitation to become a contributor to The Mitrailleuse. Some readers may know me from my intermittent blogging from about 2009 to 2011 for The American Conservative. Others might even know me for my frequent appearances in roughly the same period at Mondoweiss. And perhaps a few might know me for my first book that was released in 2011, Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism. In April, the book I’ve been at work on ever since will be released, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History.

Introducing myself effectively is in many ways exceptionally timely this month with the demise of The New Republic. As an intellectually curious young person who came of age at virtually the very moment of the September 11 attacks, I learned to have a particular hatred for The New Republic at the tail end of its recently much-ballyhooed heyday. I’m mature enough now to have an appreciation for those who are lamenting the apparent demise of the public intellectual and their forum in political magazines as a matter of principle. But in all candor I remain blind to the greatness and romance surrounding TNR, and in particular Leon Wieseltier’s back-of-the-book.

And the reason for this, frankly, is because my adolescent romance for the life of the mind – from politics to literature to ideas – was with The American Conservative. I still remember well when I was 17, first seeing and reading the first issue in the magazine section of Borders at White Flint Mall; two institutions now joined in meeting their reward by TNR, which memorably blasted the premier of TAC as “Buchanan’s surefire flop” (only in the recent coverage did I realize that this was a tasteless reference to The Producers, in the company of their charming headline on the vindication of Iraq realists in 2004, “Springtime for Realism”).

Some background is in order: I was a Jewish kid from Bethesda, Maryland who got his GED as soon as he turned 16. I was in community college for the next two years at the same time I was actively pursuing a highly unstable brew of radical involvements on both the left and right, fancying myself some kind of journalist-revolutionary (like 12-year old Henry Hill, I was living in a fantasy). The critical point of departure for my intellectual journey was some time just after 9/11, as I was becoming enamored with Justin Raimondo, who proved a formative influence to be sure, and discovering that his seemingly half-crazed notion about the Trotskyist roots of neoconservatism was very much true – it turned out my father knew several of them through the Harvard Young People’s Socialist League (Elliott Abrams, Josh Muravchik, and Daniel Pipes well; Bill Kristol just slightly. Anyone curious as to why he didn’t become a neocon should read his recent book on new urbanism).

In other words, the much-storied New York Jewish intellectual tradition, that Carol Kane assured the young Alvy Singer was a wonderful cultural stereotype to be reduced to, was in many ways a birthright. And yet I fell in love with TAC. In that first year or two as America was being conquered by Iraq, I still had high hopes for the Green Party, and even on the eve of TAC’s premier was startled to see Rod Dreher’s “Crunchy Cons” cover story at National Review and knowing there had to be a much, much, much better forum for this (by the time the book came out in 2006, I was of course well past recognizing that the typical figure covered in the book, if asked why they weren’t involved with the Green Party, would simply answer “because I like a steak every now and then”). When I was 18 and first living on my own, I subscribed to four magazines – The American Conservative, The Progressive, Chronicles, and an intriguingly semi-serious short-lived left-anarchist bi-monthly called Clamor.

I hardly need revisit the intellectual climate that surrounded the launching of the Iraq War, and why it was no contest between TAC and any more mainstream magazine – even the sincerely antiwar and often thoughtful liberals at The American Prospect could never stir the intellectual passions. Nor does a great deal need to be said here about what slowly but surely disillusioned me with the radical left, though to this day a large part of me is mystified as to why Bill Kauffman (or for that matter Jim Webb, at least in his career as a politician) is considered anything but a perfectly kosher man of the left. (more…)

Libertarianism and Catholic Social Teaching

Sharp stuff from Opus Publicum:

There seems to be a self-satisfied sense among some proponents of CST that libertarianism is synonymous with insanity, and that is simply not true. There are, I believe, serious philosophical and empirical shortcomings to be found within libertarianism, to say nothing of the fact many (though not all) of its tenets clash with the plain dictates of CST. However, this simpleminded view of libertarians-as-madmen or, worse, libertarians-as-demons should give all of us pause, at least to the extent that we still consider ourselves Christian. And at the very least, it’s worth keeping in mind that not all libertarians—even Catholic libertarians—are committed to the same set of policy preferences. If someone cannot tell the difference between the views of Jeffrey Tucker and Tom Woods on the one hand, and Samuel Gregg and Michael Novak on the other, they probably don’t have any business critiquing Catholic libertarianism.

Not that noting this will likely matter. As I have discussed elsewhere on Opus Publicum, there are a number of young (and some old) Catholics concerned with CST who seem to be numb to the reality that CST neither ordains nor makes much room for socialism. Of course, what is recognized as “socialist” often depends on who is doing the looking; Anarcho-Capitalists are far more sensitive to such things than, say, a Distributist. Still, it should be clear to all with eyes to see that CST imagines a state regulatory apparatus of a far more modest size than what we now see in the United States and Europe. And even though CST does not support the absolutization (or even the near-absolutization) of property rights, the Church’s social encyclicals express reservations about overtaxing and overregulating the economy. What some of these pro-CST Catholics don’t seem to realize is that the further they drift toward unabashed socialism, the more easily their positions are susceptible to withering critiques from the libertarian camp.

Adam Gurri on telescopic morality

From Front Porch Republic:

There is one version of the history of modern media that is a story primarily about a drug, developed to make its users feel anger with delightful intensity. Refinement of this drug has made some great leaps in a very short time — it used to be you had to wait until a certain time of day to get it. Then you had to deal with having it mixed in with a lot of filler material. Now you can go straight to the social media site of your choice, where you and your fellow junkies can trade images of victims overlayed with condemning quotes, or infographics which expose injustice in striking bar and pie charts. And now the shared experience of other people’s outrage has become part of the concoction, and it is immeasurably more potent as a result.

Like actual chemically-induced pleasures, in excess this anger is a sickness. It consumes your waking thoughts, and takes your vitality with you when it leaves. When the dose is administered, an extreme form of tunnel vision sets in. You get sucked into a monomaniacal focus on the object of some injustice, far away from you or anyone you know, and are temporarily unable to see anything that is actually a part of your life. You lose sight of vulgar morality, the stuff that really matters, and succumb to the siren song of telescopic morality. You rage at things you cannot control at the expense of time you could be investing improving the state of affairs around you, for your family, your community. The long term effect of mainlining telescopic morality is utter hollowness; ethical triviality.

What we can learn from the anti-lynching movement about curbing police brutality

In the decades immediately preceding and following the turn of the twentieth century, gleeful crowds of white Southerners numbering in the hundreds frequently gathered to watch the lynchings of black Americans, oftentimes for the petty crime of stealing a hog, or none at all. By the 1960s, public lynchings had largely become a thing of the past and today, people react to photographs of this dark time in our nation’s history with shock and disgust. What brought an end to this era of mob violence?

Arguably, it was the actions of one former slave, Ida B. Wells, who collected and reported comprehensive data on lynchings in the South to prove that African Americans were more often victims than criminals when it came to lynchings, thus transforming public opinion and creating the possibility for political reform.

Tragically, disproportionate violence against African Americans continues today, albeit in a more subtle form. In a recent article for The Guardian, Isabel Wilkerson wrote that according to available data, the rate of police killings of African Americans today is roughly equal to the rate of lynchings in the early decades of the twentieth century. Then, every four days a black person was publicly murdered, often simply for stealing 75 cents or for talking back to a white person. While the rate of police killings of African Americans has fallen 70 percent over the last 40 to 50 years, it is still estimated that in today’s day and age an African American is murdered by a white police officer an astounding twice a week for offenses as egregious as walking up a stairwell.

While there are five times more white Americans, black people are three times more likely than white people to be killed when they encounter the police in the U.S., and black teenagers are far likelier to be killed by police than white teenagers. Additionally, the number of innocent people killed and assaulted by the cops is likely even higher than the data suggests considering that local police departments are not required to report police crime.

While white Southern lynchers in the early 1900s claimed that they were filling in where the legal system failed by serving as arbiters of vigilante justice whereas today murderers are more likely to hide behind police badges, in both cases racism was and is shrouded in promises to serve and protect. Then and now, stereotypes of black inferiority obscure systematic oppression and allow murderers to get away without so much as an inquiry. As Wilkerson wrote, “Last century’s beast and savage have become this century’s gangbanger and thug.”

Given the chilling parallels between the lynchings of the post-Reconstruction South and modern-day state-perpetrated violence against the black community, it is worth taking a closer look at the success of the anti-lynching movement for insights on how we might repair today’s political institutions and race relations.

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Nozick’s experience machine in the age of the Oculus Rift

The year is 1974. Harvard philosophy professor Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia has just hit the shelves. A few dozen pages in, Nozick prods you to consider a simple thought experiment: Imagine you had a choice between everyday reality and a fabricated, alternative existence provided by what he called “the experience machine.”

This apparatus, invented by neuroscientists, could be set in advance to provide you the feeling of all your desired experiences over the course of your life. Nozick assures us that this simulated existence would seem entirely real, although you’d merely be floating in a tank, attached to electrodes.

Hedonism is the view that pleasure (sometimes also labeled “happiness”) is the chief good humans strive for. If hedonism holds, then, by definition, all human action would be strictly a means to that end. When prompted with the opportunity to pre-program a lifetime of pleasurable experiences, hedonists would rejoice: they would strap into the experience machine. However, most people, feeling a deep unease even contemplating the choice, indicate they would decline the offer. From this we are left to conclude that people value more in life than felt experience alone. Nozick’s clever hypothetical is generally viewed as convincing among contemporary philosophers as a robust challenge to hedonism and utilitarian theories in moral and political philosophy based on it.

Now let’s flash forward forty years from the thought experiment’s formal philosophical introduction and have a look at the current state of affairs. Does the experience machine, or something like it, exist?

The world we live in is digitized and connected like never before and it just so happens that a lot of people spend a lot of time taking advantage of that. Some of today’s widely used technologies can feel like low-level experience machines, although none come close to being a proxy for Nozick’s. That is all about to change. Oculus, a kickstarter-launched company has created what might be the next screen to claim its place in the pixilated lineage of groundbreaking electronic devices. Its virtual reality (VR) headset, dubbed the Rift, provides an immersive first-person sensory experience that will have a wide range of applications in the future. Facebook executives thought so highly of the technology that they speculated it could become the globe’s “next major computing platform” and promptly coughed up two billion dollars to make it their own.

While virtual reality has been around for quite some time in various forms, this recent innovation represents a large shift towards real-life experience machines. Call it Nozick’s axis:

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While the Rift is impressive, any possibility of realizing Nozick’s famous thought experiment depends on how well VR matches up against certain characteristics of the conceptual machine.

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