I have for a while neglected this blog, for two reasons. One, and I know I've said this before, I have been invited by Will Truman to blog at his Hitcoffee site. The other is that I've been a bit more aggressive about writing guest posts at Ordinary Times.
I probably won't do a lot of cross-posting between here and at the other sites, mostly because I'm too lazy. I may, however, continue to post here from time to time on matters that are more "personal," perhaps even "experimental," and that I don't think the people at Hitcoffee or Ordinary Times would necessarily be interested in. Each of those sites has its own comment culture and "audience," and I want to respect that.
I still welcome comments here, and my email account, which I try to check at least once a weekday and usually on the weekend, too, notifies me when they're made.
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Monday, April 6, 2015
Observations about Spain, part 2 (politics)
(This post is cross-posted at HitCoffee.)
In my last post, I promised to write about Spanish persons' thoughts on politics. But what I have to say is probably more about the process of observing others' views and my wish to avoid at least some of the pitfalls when doing so. In short, this post will be more about me than about Spain or the Spanish.
First a preface. I'm aware of (many of) my limitations. I know little of Spanish history beyond what anyone would know after having taken two semesters of Western Civ. I probably know even less about Spanish politics, and I haven't gone out of my way to educate myself. I also spoke with only a few people in Spain. And those people had their own motivations, their own biases, and their own reasons for saying what they did. The language barrier probably also prevented me from discerning much of the nuance of what they said--and probably prevented me from even understanding much, although my wife was there to translate. I write this because I don't want to be that guy who goes to Europe or who has European friends and says, "they believe x," and then uses that generalization as evidence in favor of their own preferred policies in the US.
One of my wife's set of friends is a family that is probably "middle class" in the sense of "people who do non-manual and professional-like labor and are relatively better off than most people" (and not in the American sense of "everybody who is alive and not super poor or a billionaire"). They had a lot of complaints about the government's restrictive laws for businesses. One person wanted to start up an internet business and sell things online, but the licensing and other regulations made it way too costly. That family also seemed to be concerned that those regulations created a too large black market economy.
That critique meshes pretty well with my own neoliberal views. But my wife and I met others who probably would have disagreed with her friends. For instance, one taxi driver we met was upset, if I understood him correctly, over the Spanish government's proposals to endorse austerity programs and taxes on workers and over its complicity with German monetary policy. That taxi driver, I assume from his comments but I'm also putting words into his mouth, wanted to keep many of the regulations which he believed protected workers like him but which my wife's other friends wanted to lessen or liberalize.
The Spanish people I talked to seemed much better informed about US politics than I was/am about Spanish or European politics. While it's probably a bad thing for Americans not to know as much about politics outside the US as they do about politics within the US, I decline to chide my compatriots too much for their ignorance, which as it happens is my ignorance, too. Spain is a smaller, less powerful country than the US and and daily life in Spain seems to be enmeshed in international affairs in more obvious, or at least more obviously direct, ways than daily life in the US is. It's not because Spanish people are more virtuous or American people are more "anti-intellectual." It's largely because circumstances demand greater attention to international matters.
Also, and with due respect to the people I met, their knowledge of US politics seemed on some level superficial. The people I talked to, not surprisingly (to me), disliked George W. Bush and "the Republicans." One person said, if I understood right, that the Republicans were the party of the past or the old guard (I believe his word was "ancianos"....although I might be misremembering or I might have misheard). However, I suspect, that the persons I spoke with don't quite understand how our system of single member district representation, along with our presidential (non-parliamentary) system, works. In other words, I don't think they fully realize that someone can vote for the Democrats or the Republicans without necessarily supporting even most of that party's platform.
I don't say this as an indictment against them. I have an even less firm grasp on Spanish politics and how the Spanish government works. When I saw mention on Spanish TV about "el presidente del gobierno," I thought they were referring to something like a prime minister--and wikipedia says I'm right--but I the word "presidente" tripped me up and for a second I thought Spain had a presidential system like the US or a presidential/parliament system like France. I'll repeat what I said above. The Spanish people I met know more about the US government than most Americans, including me, know about the Spanish government.
My lesson from all this is the unsurprising one that people resemble each other in their propensity to frame things in ways they can understand and that supports their own biases. The Spanish are human, just like me. That lesson seems corny or even "awe shucks-y," but the fact that I "learned" that lesson means that I had a caricature of what it meant to be European or Spanish or non-American. And now that caricature is less strong. (I'll concede that, as commenter David Alexander suggested in my last thread, I'd have a chance to learn even more lessons if I had gone to India or Saudi Arabia. I don't claim that my 9 days as a tourist in a western country necessarily exposes me to difference.)
In other words, and still not surprisingly, travel might help expose people to other worldviews in a way that my own provincialism does not. I don't mean provincialism as a self-deprecating epithet, either. I have a lot of reservations about cosmopolitanism and about "travel culture" and I believe those reservations still have merit. When one cuts oneself off from the local, one loses something and the loss is real. But going to Spain has demonstrated that those reservations have their limits and that if the loss is real, so is the gain.
In my last post, I promised to write about Spanish persons' thoughts on politics. But what I have to say is probably more about the process of observing others' views and my wish to avoid at least some of the pitfalls when doing so. In short, this post will be more about me than about Spain or the Spanish.
First a preface. I'm aware of (many of) my limitations. I know little of Spanish history beyond what anyone would know after having taken two semesters of Western Civ. I probably know even less about Spanish politics, and I haven't gone out of my way to educate myself. I also spoke with only a few people in Spain. And those people had their own motivations, their own biases, and their own reasons for saying what they did. The language barrier probably also prevented me from discerning much of the nuance of what they said--and probably prevented me from even understanding much, although my wife was there to translate. I write this because I don't want to be that guy who goes to Europe or who has European friends and says, "they believe x," and then uses that generalization as evidence in favor of their own preferred policies in the US.
One of my wife's set of friends is a family that is probably "middle class" in the sense of "people who do non-manual and professional-like labor and are relatively better off than most people" (and not in the American sense of "everybody who is alive and not super poor or a billionaire"). They had a lot of complaints about the government's restrictive laws for businesses. One person wanted to start up an internet business and sell things online, but the licensing and other regulations made it way too costly. That family also seemed to be concerned that those regulations created a too large black market economy.
That critique meshes pretty well with my own neoliberal views. But my wife and I met others who probably would have disagreed with her friends. For instance, one taxi driver we met was upset, if I understood him correctly, over the Spanish government's proposals to endorse austerity programs and taxes on workers and over its complicity with German monetary policy. That taxi driver, I assume from his comments but I'm also putting words into his mouth, wanted to keep many of the regulations which he believed protected workers like him but which my wife's other friends wanted to lessen or liberalize.
The Spanish people I talked to seemed much better informed about US politics than I was/am about Spanish or European politics. While it's probably a bad thing for Americans not to know as much about politics outside the US as they do about politics within the US, I decline to chide my compatriots too much for their ignorance, which as it happens is my ignorance, too. Spain is a smaller, less powerful country than the US and and daily life in Spain seems to be enmeshed in international affairs in more obvious, or at least more obviously direct, ways than daily life in the US is. It's not because Spanish people are more virtuous or American people are more "anti-intellectual." It's largely because circumstances demand greater attention to international matters.
Also, and with due respect to the people I met, their knowledge of US politics seemed on some level superficial. The people I talked to, not surprisingly (to me), disliked George W. Bush and "the Republicans." One person said, if I understood right, that the Republicans were the party of the past or the old guard (I believe his word was "ancianos"....although I might be misremembering or I might have misheard). However, I suspect, that the persons I spoke with don't quite understand how our system of single member district representation, along with our presidential (non-parliamentary) system, works. In other words, I don't think they fully realize that someone can vote for the Democrats or the Republicans without necessarily supporting even most of that party's platform.
I don't say this as an indictment against them. I have an even less firm grasp on Spanish politics and how the Spanish government works. When I saw mention on Spanish TV about "el presidente del gobierno," I thought they were referring to something like a prime minister--and wikipedia says I'm right--but I the word "presidente" tripped me up and for a second I thought Spain had a presidential system like the US or a presidential/parliament system like France. I'll repeat what I said above. The Spanish people I met know more about the US government than most Americans, including me, know about the Spanish government.
My lesson from all this is the unsurprising one that people resemble each other in their propensity to frame things in ways they can understand and that supports their own biases. The Spanish are human, just like me. That lesson seems corny or even "awe shucks-y," but the fact that I "learned" that lesson means that I had a caricature of what it meant to be European or Spanish or non-American. And now that caricature is less strong. (I'll concede that, as commenter David Alexander suggested in my last thread, I'd have a chance to learn even more lessons if I had gone to India or Saudi Arabia. I don't claim that my 9 days as a tourist in a western country necessarily exposes me to difference.)
In other words, and still not surprisingly, travel might help expose people to other worldviews in a way that my own provincialism does not. I don't mean provincialism as a self-deprecating epithet, either. I have a lot of reservations about cosmopolitanism and about "travel culture" and I believe those reservations still have merit. When one cuts oneself off from the local, one loses something and the loss is real. But going to Spain has demonstrated that those reservations have their limits and that if the loss is real, so is the gain.
Saturday, April 4, 2015
Observations about Spain, part 1 (random stuff)
(Cross-posted at Hit Coffee.)
My wife and I just returned from our honeymoon in Spain. (We had actually gotten married about two years ago, but for a variety of reasons we’ve had to wait until now.) Here are some of my observations/thoughts.
1. I had never been to Europe or to any country other than the US or Canada before our trip. It was weird to be crossing the Atlantic, knowing that what once had been a great barrier could be crossed in hours.
2. My Spanish is very poor. I can understand my wife (who speaks it well), but my ability to speak the language is, err, “challenged.” Still, I was surprised at how much I was able to understand when others spoke it. It was also interesting to hear the use of “vosotros”/”vosotras” and what is known as the “Castillian lisp.” I knew both features marked Iberian Spanish from the American Spanish I’m more used to. But it was interesting to hear it in person.
3. I was oddly surprised at how much American influence was evident in the culture. I say “oddly” because I knew/know that American culture has a pretty wide reach and that Europe is in that “western” mold. But still, it was striking to me how much Spain seemed like the US. The fact we were in only two locales may have affected my impression. We stayed in what is probably downtown Madrid, although we visited some friends of my wife in a more residential area of that city. We also stayed in Santiago de Compostela, in what is probably the touristy part (where the big Cathedral is). We visited some friends there, too, but they lived nearby that area.
4. The disaster with the Lufthansa airplane happened the day before we left for Spain. My wife and I had both read about it, but declined to mention it to the other for fear that it would make the other nervous about the flight. We thought we were keeping it a secret. However, Spanish media covered the disaster quite extensively. (The plane had taken off from Barcelona). I’m not sure how the coverage there compares to coverage in the US, or how it compares with coverage of other air disasters, like the TWA 800 flight in 1996. (I mention that flight because my niece knew two of the people who died.)
In my next post, I’ll make a couple of observations about what little I grokked of Spanish persons’ thoughts on politics.
My wife and I just returned from our honeymoon in Spain. (We had actually gotten married about two years ago, but for a variety of reasons we’ve had to wait until now.) Here are some of my observations/thoughts.
1. I had never been to Europe or to any country other than the US or Canada before our trip. It was weird to be crossing the Atlantic, knowing that what once had been a great barrier could be crossed in hours.
2. My Spanish is very poor. I can understand my wife (who speaks it well), but my ability to speak the language is, err, “challenged.” Still, I was surprised at how much I was able to understand when others spoke it. It was also interesting to hear the use of “vosotros”/”vosotras” and what is known as the “Castillian lisp.” I knew both features marked Iberian Spanish from the American Spanish I’m more used to. But it was interesting to hear it in person.
3. I was oddly surprised at how much American influence was evident in the culture. I say “oddly” because I knew/know that American culture has a pretty wide reach and that Europe is in that “western” mold. But still, it was striking to me how much Spain seemed like the US. The fact we were in only two locales may have affected my impression. We stayed in what is probably downtown Madrid, although we visited some friends of my wife in a more residential area of that city. We also stayed in Santiago de Compostela, in what is probably the touristy part (where the big Cathedral is). We visited some friends there, too, but they lived nearby that area.
4. The disaster with the Lufthansa airplane happened the day before we left for Spain. My wife and I had both read about it, but declined to mention it to the other for fear that it would make the other nervous about the flight. We thought we were keeping it a secret. However, Spanish media covered the disaster quite extensively. (The plane had taken off from Barcelona). I’m not sure how the coverage there compares to coverage in the US, or how it compares with coverage of other air disasters, like the TWA 800 flight in 1996. (I mention that flight because my niece knew two of the people who died.)
In my next post, I’ll make a couple of observations about what little I grokked of Spanish persons’ thoughts on politics.
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Family Guy and the Banality of Evil
[A version of this is posted on Ordinary Times here. This version is slightly edited for some typos and formatting.]
This post is about "Family Guy," and I promise I'll get
there. But first I'll start with a long
passage from George Orwell's 1984
(hat tip, Eric Blair). Toward the beginning of the novel, the
protagonist, Winston Smith, writes the following in his diary [bold added by
me]:
"April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never "
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Now back to "Family Guy."
I'm not sure it's okay to watch the show. I like it.
I don't watch it much anymore, but that's mostly because it's on at inconvenient
times for me. But it's hard to know
whether I should laugh at the humor.
Or some of the humor. Many of its
jokes are pretty innocent. Take the
scene where an errant golf ball crashes through a china shop and destroys all
the porcelain vases and other breakable things.
A bull, who had been in the china shop innocently browsing the wares,
now faces blame from the owner who was in a back room and didn't see what
caused all the damage. (Sorry, I can't
seem to find a YouTube link to it, but it's funnier if you watch it than if you
read my description.) Some of the humor also
strikes me as decent social commentary. When Peter meets the crows
from Dumbo and makes his comment about "good ole fashioned family
racism" [not really offensive, but probably not safe for work], it's
hard to deny he's on to something. There
are also a lot of fart jokes that aren't really my thing but are harmless.
But some humor crosses the line.
Take the scene where a barbershop quartet makes fun of an AIDS patient,
or the repeated jokes about and abuse toward Meg, or the neighborhood pedophile
character. Everyone's mileage varies and
the line-crossing jokes can sometimes be argued to have a point beyond harming
others for the sake of laughter. Examples
[not safe for work]: here, here, and here.
Finding the point—finding the justification for the humor—requires us to
rely on irony. We don't really think
that it's appropriate to make fun of someone with a terminal illness. We don't really think bullying a teenage girl
is a good thing to do. We don't really
find pedophilia funny. Instead, we (by
which I mean, "me and others," because this is something I do) say
it's so bad it's funny. In fact, it's
funny precisely because it's so bad, because we would never do those things or
condone them being done outside movies or tv, or at least outside the cartoon
world. It's the type of thing we laugh
at everyday. We might also say that
"Family Guy" is "an equal opportunity lampooner." I have problems with that argument, both as a
general argument and in the particular case of "Family Guy."
But how can we be sure that our laughter or enjoyment is not just another
way of performing cruelty? It's not
right to make fun of people with terminal illnesses, but there was a time not
too long ago when it was okay or at least not beyond the pale in at least some
otherwise respectable circles to make jokes about "the gay
disease." Bullying isn't funny
except when it is. How many times have I
made a comment on the internet that I believed to be funny but was probably on
some level bullying? (Answer, probably
at least a few.) Pedophilia and other
forms of sexual abuse isn't funny, but I suspect a goodly number of people here
have occasionally laughed at "prison rape" jokes or whatnot.
Most people who make such jokes or who find troublesome things to be funny
aren't sociopaths. But I'm not so sure
that sociopaths don't make such jokes.
And while it's a fallacy to say that because Socrates is a man,
therefore all men are Socrates, the family resemblance between "Family
Guy" humor and what cruel people do and probably laugh about is disconcerting
to me. Think of the bullies you may have
known or people who have punched down (or even up) at you and the jokes they
tell. I'm not so sure they don't tell
themselves they're not laughing at the person or the disability or the racial
or sexual identity. I wouldn't be surprised
if they say instead that they're just laughing at the irony of it all.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I began this post with the Orwell quotation for a reason. What Winston Smith observed at the movie
theater is what I'm suggesting happens with "Family Guy." What entertainment we consume and partake in
is also part of what we put out there and might very well contribute to a
violent project. Think of the history of
blackface minstrel shows, which arose during slavery and flourished during Jim
Crow.
The analogy is not perfect.
I wouldn't be surprised if in Smith's dystopic world, people are required
to watch such movies whereas in our real world we have a choice whether or not
to watch "Family Guy." And Jim
Crow has been dismantled, at least formally.
There's also the idea that as consumers of entertainment we are
detached. We suspend disbelief. And in so doing we are, as I noted above,
"laughing at the irony of it all."
Am I just being puritanical?
Not in the
Menckenian sense of the word. I'm
not tsk-tsk'ing. I'm not arguing that "Family
Guy" should be banned. I'm not endorsing
a letter-writing campaign or boycott to get it off the air. I'm not even urging anyone else not to watch
it. I'll probably watch it or reruns someday
in the future.
Maybe I am being puritan in another sense, though. I believe that what we--by which, again, I
mean "you and I"--perform and do is part of who we are and shapes
what we become. I resist calling that
"puritanism" because doing so seems to imply that only puritans care
about such things.
And we should consider what we laugh at. It's not always an easy call. The "prole" in Smith's passage might
be on to something.
Saturday, February 7, 2015
Duress on the dotted line
[Cross-posted at Hit Coffee, which Will Truman has invited me to join. His site's a good one--and he and his other co-authors are pretty good writers, so you might want to check it out.]
Free will in the marketplace is a useful construct. But it's a construct nevertheless and can't
explain everything.
About 15 years ago, I was interested in joining a gym. There was one near where I worked—it's part
of a national chain that I'll call "23-Hour Fitness."* I went there on my 30-minute lunch break to
check out their prices. What I got was
an aggressive sales pitch that lasted about 45 minutes. They gave me a tour of the place and a sit
down discussion over the various "membership options," which varied
so slightly in price and services that it was hard tell the differences among
them. When the people I was speaking
with couldn't find a "membership rep" (who, apparently, was the only
one there with authority to sign me up), I finally made my escape, telling them
I had to get back to work.
This may seem weird to someone who hasn't experienced a
similar ordeal or who has a stronger will than I do. But I felt guilty about
leaving them without signing up, almost as if I had unfairly taken their time
only to leave them in the lurch at the last minute. In fact, if they had found a "membership
rep," odds are at least even that I would have signed up just to leave
with a clear conscience. And for the
record, I knew in the first 5 or 10 minutes that I didn't want to join at all.
What if I had signed and wanted out? There probably were (and are) some consumer
protection policies that could have helped me.
Maybe a grace period of 3 days.
Maybe a cause of action in small claims court or other court. Maybe some government consumer protection
commission. There probably also were
(and are) some non-governmental opportunities.
I could have gone to the "consumers' advocate" that most local
media seem to have. I could have gone to
the Better Business Bureau. I could have
closed my checking account to prevent the automatic debits.
I'm not confident most of those things would have worked or
that I would have availed myself of them.
I can imagine feeling just as intimidated going in on day two of the
grace period and speaking with these same folks as I had during the signup
meeting. And I wouldn't even know how to
pursue a claim in court. And the media
option is luck of the draw (they probably get scores of complaints a month and
can follow up only on a handful) while the BBB option amounts to a harmless
tsk-tsk against the offending company.
(Closing the checking account might have worked, but I'll leave that
aside because it's not convenient to my narrative.)
My point, though, is that I might have done something
because I felt compelled to even though I "knew" that I had no
obligation to do it and "knew" doing it was a bad idea for me. That's a problem. But I'm not sure what solution—policy
solution or otherwise—can adequately resolve that problem, where
"adequately" means, I suppose, that which would protect others
similarly situated. Grace periods can be
lengthened. Causes of action can be made
easier to pursue in court. Etc.
Some solutions are better than others. I wouldn't ban gym contracts, for
example. And something is to be said for
an adult taking responsibility for her or his actions. And at the end of the day I guess the
important thing is I didn't sign, and the problem (for me, in that instance) is
hypothetical.
*Disclosure: 23-Hour
Fitness is not necessarily related to any organization with a similar sounding
name.
Sunday, February 1, 2015
How Democrats can help Scott Walker win the presidency
The short answer: harp on his lack of a college degree. Nothing is going to endear the Democratic cause to millions of swing voters more than pointing out and deriding one thing they likely have in common with the Democrats' opponent.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Saturday, January 17, 2015
First question, am I a bread thief?
(I've just posted a slightly edited version of this at the OT as a guest poster. Click here to read it and the comments.)
When is it wrong to steal and when is it okay?
If you believe that all property is theft, then it's not much of a
stretch to believe it's never wrong to steal, unless you're talking about
someone who owns property, in which case it's wrong for that person to steal. If on
the other hand you believe that private property is the eleventh commandment
handed down from Mt.
Sinai, then it's not much
of a stretch to say it's always wrong to steal.
Few of us (I suspect) swing in that way, and of those who do, most (I suspect)
at least allow for attenuating circumstances.
We'd say that sometimes, it's okay to steal. Or it's never okay to steal, but sometimes
it's at least understandable why someone might, and in some cases the thief and
not the rightful owner of what is stolen is the more sympathetic party. (I leave aside here the question of how one's
ownership becomes "rightful" in the first place, although the less
absolutist among us might very well address that question.)
Take the poor, starving bread thief, who steals a loaf from
SuperMegaWalCorporation to feed his family.
To honor the spirit of this example, we should suppose that the thief
has no other way to get bread or comparable aliment, that the family is truly
starving, and that SuperMegaWalCorporation will not be noticeably harmed by the
missing food item. (If you want, we can
stipulate that the bread is about to expire and SuperMegaWalCorporation would
have to write it off as a loss anyway.)
I suspect most of us would probably say it's not wrong for that person to
steal that item in that circumstance. Or
if we concede the theft to be wrong, most of us would hesitate before throwing
the full condemnation of law and morality against him.
How often do those circumstances actually happen? I don't know.
I suppose they occur more often in the developing countries than in the
first world. Not having lived in poverty
myself, for all I know the occurrence is much more widespread in the first
world than I think. But with due regard
to what I do not know or have not experienced, I suspect that such
circumstances tend not to occur in such a sheer, unrelenting form, where the
thief is so destitute, the stolen item so needed by people so easy to
sympathize with, and the "victim" of the theft so unharmed.
For most intents and purposes, the bread thief situation is pretty close
to a pure form or pure ideal, which real life situations may approximate but
probably rarely resemble exactly. The
destitute person may have made at least some mistakes or decisions that put him
and his family in their predicament or worsened their predicament. (Maybe a month ago he bought a king-sized
Hershey's chocolate bar and now could have spent the money on a loaf of bread.) The item stolen might be money, with which
bread could be bought, it is true, but other less necessary things can also be
bought. The thief might not even have a
family to support. Maybe the stolen
bread comes from the local bakery struggling to make ends meet and not from
SuperMegaWalCorporation. Or maybe the
"assets protection" employee at SuperMegaWalCorporation is a minimum
wage worker trying to support her own family and may have recently been warned
that one more shoplifting incident, no matter how trivial, will result in her
being written up.
I'm not saying any of this to trivialize hardship. Again, I have never known poverty. And I actually have a lot of sympathy for the
person who, for example, makes some very poor choices and is now suffering
hardship and who feels that best option at one point might very well be
shoplifting. I have less sympathy for
the SuperMegaWalCorporation. (But not no sympathy. There's a margin. Real people—employees, customers, and perhaps
elderly retirees who grew up in the Depression, fought World War II, and hold
all their savings in a 401(k) plan heavily invested in
SuperMegaWalCorproation's stock—are adversely affected, or would be if enough
such thefts occur.)
Rather, by calling the bread thief example a "pure form," what
I mean is that it's one end of a spectrum.
The closer one is to the "bread thief" condition, the more
justifiable—or at least understandable and sympathetic—the theft. The closer one is to Bernie Madoff's
condition ca. 2005, the less justifiable the theft.
But most of us aren't (I suspect) in the bread thief's
position and most of us aren't (I'm fairly confident) in Mr. Madoff's position
ca. 2005. We're (probably, or at least
sometimes) somewhere in between. Someone
with my affluence, advantages, and privilege would be wrong to shoplift from
SuperMegaWalCorporation (assuming that we're not talking about the rightness of
sticking it to corporate America). Someone who is poorer might be more
justified, or at least less wrong, to do so.
I'm not pleading for a way to judge others. If I were, I'd probably say the most
charitable thing to do is to believe from the outset that the thief in
question, even Mr. Madoff, probably on some level believes or has convinced
himself that he really is a bread thief.
But like most
injunctions against judging others, it's so hard to do in real life. For one thing, it's easy for me to plead
understanding for Mr. Madoff when I haven't been victimized by his scams
scams. For another thing, one paradox of
the New Testament's "motes and beams" admonition is that once you
invoke it against someone else, you're no longer honoring it.
Instead, I'm pleading for self-reflection. If I took a survey of the OT's readers, I
imagine that at least a majority would say that stealing is generally wrong, or
at least wrong in some circumstances, but acceptable (or mitigated) in other
circumstances. Same thing with
lying. Same thing with killing.
But how confident are we—how confident am I—that we are more
like the bread thief and less like Mr. Madoff?
Is that music video I watch on YouTube for free an instance of me
getting something I really need, or is it me stealing from the artist and
production crews? Does my suspicion that
Mr. Obama's "if you like your
insurance you can keep it" lie was necessary to pass the ACA justify the dishonesty as long as poorer
people get better coverage? (For the
record, I do watch/listen to YouTube music videos without any concern for
whether the video is sponsored by the artist.
And I
do temporize Mr. Obama's lie because of the end it (probably) helped
effect.)
Here's my takeaway. Whenever you
are tempted to do something that you otherwise believe is wrong, I suggest you
ask yourself, "Am I a bread thief."
If you can't honestly say "yes," then maybe you shouldn't do
it.
To be clear, my admonition is more like a suspensatory veto
than a red light. If you're not a bread thief, then maybe you shouldn't do what you're contemplating But maybe, pending further
investigation, there may be other reasons to do it.. I don't have a firm
opinion whether or when my admonition falls in line with the ethicist's holy
trinity of duty, virtue, and utility. But
I think it works as a good first step, a practical question we should ask
before action.
Ain't no fortunate son
(This is a reprint of a guest post I submitted to the Ordinary Times blog a while back. I have edited it, mostly for clarity, but if you want to read the original and the comments (which are now closed), please click here. Tod Kelly at the league came up with the title, which I think is a good one.)
Joseph Epstein has written a defense of the military draft at The Atlantic online. In that article, he rehashed the points generally raised in favor of the draft. But those points are not as strong as he thinks they are and they fail to address some critical objections to the draft.
We are probably all familiar with the arguments Epstein uses to argue for the draft. He says the draft would make policymakers more careful about committing soldiers abroad. He suggests that a truly universal draft would foster a sense of shared sacrifice among Americans, improve the military, and function as a social mixer, bringing together rich and poor, educated and uneducated, Gentile and Jew (and atheist?),* black and white, and so forth.
The “truly universal” in my previous sentence does a lot of work, and Epstein doesn’t utter the phrase. But it is the necessary component of what he advocates (“[a] truly American military, inclusive of all social classes….”). He presumably would not have approved of the “substitute” system of the Civil War, through which a draftee of means could hire a “substitute” in order to avoid service. He is critical of deferments during the Vietnam era, stating they made Vietnam “the first of our wars to be fought almost exclusively by an American underclass and, in part because of this, at no time did it have anything like the full support of the American people.”
His arguments don’t convince me. Let’s take what I believe to be his strongest point, namely, the egalitarian potential of compelling people from different backgrounds to work with each other. I can’t dismiss that point altogether. My only ready anecdatum runs in support of what Epstein says. The father of a friend of mine was drafted to serve in Vietnam. He says he entered the military a conservative racist and came out a pro-civil rights liberal. (I’m paraphrasing my friend’s own paraphrasing of what his father said. Take the dose of salt you deem appropriate.) I can’t deny that a “truly universal” draft might very well foster a sense of mutual understanding via interaction. And my own leveling instinct takes a certain pleasure in seeing some people (other people, not me, of course!) being knocked down a few pegs and compelled to work with their supposed inferiors.
But still, I’m skeptical. If one person becomes more broad-minded by working with a diverse group of people, I can imagine another type of person for whom familiarity fosters a hyper-tribalism of the sort that says, “I’ve worked with those people and believe you me, you don’t want to know them.” Okay, there will always be incorrigibles among us and maybe most people—maybe even most incorrigibles—really do soften their own bigotries by working with others.
I’m also skeptical because a “truly universal” draft is a fantasy, even when there is little likelihood of escaping service altogether. If it’s not hiring substitutes or winning deferments, it can be having connections to get you into the National Coast Guard Reserve, it can be having the social capital, intelligence, or skills to get the type of job that keeps you more out of danger. What about conscientious objector status? Well, if we are to have a draft, I’d want there to be C.O. provisions, and I’d want access to those provisions to be expansive ones. But then the draft is not truly universal (and C.O. status, as I understand, is hard to secure anyway, and someone with legal representation—read: social capital and real capital, or being born into a religious tradition that disavows violence—would have a much better shot at it).
But as I said, that was Epstein’s strongest point and I can’t dismiss it altogether. It reminds me of a very thoughtful comment ScarletNumbers made a while back in response to one of my posts on neoliberalism: “I would still rather have a Fortunate Son serve in an ‘easy’ position in the military as a draftee, rather not be in the military at all” (asterisk omitted). Even in an unfair system, some service for all is fairer than some people getting off free. And ScarletNumbers might have also added that in modern warfare, the “‘easy’ position” is not always safe or easy. (My uncle was “only” a mechanic in the military in World War II, and he had very disturbing memories of what he saw and underwent, especially during the Battle of the Bulge.) And at any rate, because non-combat positions outnumber actual “combat” positions, there is a strong likelihood that any given draftee would have the supposedly “easy” position.
But that last point—non-combat positions outnumbering actual combat positions—feeds into my critique of what I take to be Epstein’s weaker point, the notion that a truly universal draft would convince our policymakers to be more careful before committing soldiers to action. Because non-combat positions, which are supposedly “safer,” outnumber combat positions and because (I suspect) “only” a small percentage of people in actual combat positions suffer debilitating physical wounds, a policymaker might very well believe the odds are pretty good in favor his or her loved ones in the military, coming out okay.
I suppose that because we’ve never had a truly universal draft, I don’t really have a basis of comparison for Eptstein’s claim that policymakers would be more careful with their use of the military. But I will point out that Truman committed US soldiers to Korea pretty quickly even though there was a draft. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which occurred during a time when the draft was in force and which empowered President Johnson to wage the Vietnam War, passed the Senate with only two dissents, fewer dissents than the authorization to invade Iraq in 1991 and 2002.
And then there’s World War II. I admit, it lends support to Epstein’s point. That is so not only because of the sense of shared sacrifice Americans supposedly felt during the war, but also because before Pearl Harbor there was fairly strong, albeit eroding, opposition to entering the conflict, and FDR had a hard time convincing the US to go to war. Maybe what opposition there was to entry owed something to the fact that the draft had already been implemented in 1940? Even so, the “Good War” was, I hope, exceptional, as noted by the tendency to call it “good,” as if wars by definition are presumptively bad. If a similar conflict arises, or if, as in a hypothetical commenter Roger once offered, the Mongols are surrounding the city gates, I’ll be prepared to reopen the debate, at least as it applies to that conflict.**
But that debate will have to account for one objection that Epstein—who says that “[a]rguments against the draft…are mostly technical”—declines to address. Compulsory military service meets my common-sense definition (but apparently, not the Supreme Court’s definition) of “involuntary servitude.” It requires a person to put his life on hold for a time—I believe the standard term of service was two years during the Cold War Era draft—and while in service, that person can be ordered to put his life in danger. And I believe involuntary servitude is wrong, unless it is the punishment for a crime for which someone has been duly convicted. And even without the Thirteenth Amendment, I’d still believe it would be wrong.
True, the draft is not chattel slavery. But it is compulsory service, and if someone who would otherwise not choose to serve is compelled to serve or to face harsh consequences for not serving, then his service is involuntary.
The chief argument against my “involuntary servitude” point is to draw an analogy to jury duty or to the United States’ history of militia service. And while I don’t fully sign on to Vikram Bath’s argument against analogies, I’ll point out the differences between military conscription and jury and militia service. For most people called to jury duty, the process lasts only one day unless they are empanelled. For most people who are empanelled, the duty lasts only about a week. For only a small number, the duty may last months. And only in very rare, Grisham-style, circumstances is a juror’s life ever in danger. (Am I wrong? I admit I don’t have a cite, but I do ask for the proof.)
Militia duty, when it’s not just an opportunity for homosocial male conviviality, is regular training for the possibility that the local community, or perhaps the country, might be invaded or imminently threatened in some way. I’m not in principle opposed to militia duty defined that way. But even then, I’d want the threat to be imminent. And if the Mongols*** truly are at the city’s gates, I’d want to be sure that a tribute to pay them to go away is not a possibility before I’d admit to the state’s authority to compel my or anyone else’s service.
Whether in the moment I’d have the courage of my convictions to refuse to serve—or more likely, given my less-than-draftable age of 41, to help others refuse to serve—is another issue.
—————–
*Yes, I’m aware that Jewishness is as much an ethnicity as it is a creed, but Epstein’s example—a sergeant berating his Christian soldiers to go to Church and his “Hebrew” soldiers to honor the Sabbath—focuses on the creedal aspect of Jewishness.
**For the record, I believe Roger was arguing against compulsory service, stating that his hypothetical situation rarely arises.
***It probably needs to be said that I mean no offense to Mongolians or people with Mongolian roots. I also realize the “Mongol horde” was not what European and Chinese myth has made it out to be and according to one interpretation, seems to have fit in a pattern of China’s relationship with its neighbors to its North. See Thomas J. Barfield’s The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 B.C. to A.D. 1757. (1989)
Joseph Epstein has written a defense of the military draft at The Atlantic online. In that article, he rehashed the points generally raised in favor of the draft. But those points are not as strong as he thinks they are and they fail to address some critical objections to the draft.
We are probably all familiar with the arguments Epstein uses to argue for the draft. He says the draft would make policymakers more careful about committing soldiers abroad. He suggests that a truly universal draft would foster a sense of shared sacrifice among Americans, improve the military, and function as a social mixer, bringing together rich and poor, educated and uneducated, Gentile and Jew (and atheist?),* black and white, and so forth.
The “truly universal” in my previous sentence does a lot of work, and Epstein doesn’t utter the phrase. But it is the necessary component of what he advocates (“[a] truly American military, inclusive of all social classes….”). He presumably would not have approved of the “substitute” system of the Civil War, through which a draftee of means could hire a “substitute” in order to avoid service. He is critical of deferments during the Vietnam era, stating they made Vietnam “the first of our wars to be fought almost exclusively by an American underclass and, in part because of this, at no time did it have anything like the full support of the American people.”
His arguments don’t convince me. Let’s take what I believe to be his strongest point, namely, the egalitarian potential of compelling people from different backgrounds to work with each other. I can’t dismiss that point altogether. My only ready anecdatum runs in support of what Epstein says. The father of a friend of mine was drafted to serve in Vietnam. He says he entered the military a conservative racist and came out a pro-civil rights liberal. (I’m paraphrasing my friend’s own paraphrasing of what his father said. Take the dose of salt you deem appropriate.) I can’t deny that a “truly universal” draft might very well foster a sense of mutual understanding via interaction. And my own leveling instinct takes a certain pleasure in seeing some people (other people, not me, of course!) being knocked down a few pegs and compelled to work with their supposed inferiors.
But still, I’m skeptical. If one person becomes more broad-minded by working with a diverse group of people, I can imagine another type of person for whom familiarity fosters a hyper-tribalism of the sort that says, “I’ve worked with those people and believe you me, you don’t want to know them.” Okay, there will always be incorrigibles among us and maybe most people—maybe even most incorrigibles—really do soften their own bigotries by working with others.
I’m also skeptical because a “truly universal” draft is a fantasy, even when there is little likelihood of escaping service altogether. If it’s not hiring substitutes or winning deferments, it can be having connections to get you into the National Coast Guard Reserve, it can be having the social capital, intelligence, or skills to get the type of job that keeps you more out of danger. What about conscientious objector status? Well, if we are to have a draft, I’d want there to be C.O. provisions, and I’d want access to those provisions to be expansive ones. But then the draft is not truly universal (and C.O. status, as I understand, is hard to secure anyway, and someone with legal representation—read: social capital and real capital, or being born into a religious tradition that disavows violence—would have a much better shot at it).
But as I said, that was Epstein’s strongest point and I can’t dismiss it altogether. It reminds me of a very thoughtful comment ScarletNumbers made a while back in response to one of my posts on neoliberalism: “I would still rather have a Fortunate Son serve in an ‘easy’ position in the military as a draftee, rather not be in the military at all” (asterisk omitted). Even in an unfair system, some service for all is fairer than some people getting off free. And ScarletNumbers might have also added that in modern warfare, the “‘easy’ position” is not always safe or easy. (My uncle was “only” a mechanic in the military in World War II, and he had very disturbing memories of what he saw and underwent, especially during the Battle of the Bulge.) And at any rate, because non-combat positions outnumber actual “combat” positions, there is a strong likelihood that any given draftee would have the supposedly “easy” position.
But that last point—non-combat positions outnumbering actual combat positions—feeds into my critique of what I take to be Epstein’s weaker point, the notion that a truly universal draft would convince our policymakers to be more careful before committing soldiers to action. Because non-combat positions, which are supposedly “safer,” outnumber combat positions and because (I suspect) “only” a small percentage of people in actual combat positions suffer debilitating physical wounds, a policymaker might very well believe the odds are pretty good in favor his or her loved ones in the military, coming out okay.
I suppose that because we’ve never had a truly universal draft, I don’t really have a basis of comparison for Eptstein’s claim that policymakers would be more careful with their use of the military. But I will point out that Truman committed US soldiers to Korea pretty quickly even though there was a draft. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which occurred during a time when the draft was in force and which empowered President Johnson to wage the Vietnam War, passed the Senate with only two dissents, fewer dissents than the authorization to invade Iraq in 1991 and 2002.
And then there’s World War II. I admit, it lends support to Epstein’s point. That is so not only because of the sense of shared sacrifice Americans supposedly felt during the war, but also because before Pearl Harbor there was fairly strong, albeit eroding, opposition to entering the conflict, and FDR had a hard time convincing the US to go to war. Maybe what opposition there was to entry owed something to the fact that the draft had already been implemented in 1940? Even so, the “Good War” was, I hope, exceptional, as noted by the tendency to call it “good,” as if wars by definition are presumptively bad. If a similar conflict arises, or if, as in a hypothetical commenter Roger once offered, the Mongols are surrounding the city gates, I’ll be prepared to reopen the debate, at least as it applies to that conflict.**
But that debate will have to account for one objection that Epstein—who says that “[a]rguments against the draft…are mostly technical”—declines to address. Compulsory military service meets my common-sense definition (but apparently, not the Supreme Court’s definition) of “involuntary servitude.” It requires a person to put his life on hold for a time—I believe the standard term of service was two years during the Cold War Era draft—and while in service, that person can be ordered to put his life in danger. And I believe involuntary servitude is wrong, unless it is the punishment for a crime for which someone has been duly convicted. And even without the Thirteenth Amendment, I’d still believe it would be wrong.
True, the draft is not chattel slavery. But it is compulsory service, and if someone who would otherwise not choose to serve is compelled to serve or to face harsh consequences for not serving, then his service is involuntary.
The chief argument against my “involuntary servitude” point is to draw an analogy to jury duty or to the United States’ history of militia service. And while I don’t fully sign on to Vikram Bath’s argument against analogies, I’ll point out the differences between military conscription and jury and militia service. For most people called to jury duty, the process lasts only one day unless they are empanelled. For most people who are empanelled, the duty lasts only about a week. For only a small number, the duty may last months. And only in very rare, Grisham-style, circumstances is a juror’s life ever in danger. (Am I wrong? I admit I don’t have a cite, but I do ask for the proof.)
Militia duty, when it’s not just an opportunity for homosocial male conviviality, is regular training for the possibility that the local community, or perhaps the country, might be invaded or imminently threatened in some way. I’m not in principle opposed to militia duty defined that way. But even then, I’d want the threat to be imminent. And if the Mongols*** truly are at the city’s gates, I’d want to be sure that a tribute to pay them to go away is not a possibility before I’d admit to the state’s authority to compel my or anyone else’s service.
Whether in the moment I’d have the courage of my convictions to refuse to serve—or more likely, given my less-than-draftable age of 41, to help others refuse to serve—is another issue.
—————–
*Yes, I’m aware that Jewishness is as much an ethnicity as it is a creed, but Epstein’s example—a sergeant berating his Christian soldiers to go to Church and his “Hebrew” soldiers to honor the Sabbath—focuses on the creedal aspect of Jewishness.
**For the record, I believe Roger was arguing against compulsory service, stating that his hypothetical situation rarely arises.
***It probably needs to be said that I mean no offense to Mongolians or people with Mongolian roots. I also realize the “Mongol horde” was not what European and Chinese myth has made it out to be and according to one interpretation, seems to have fit in a pattern of China’s relationship with its neighbors to its North. See Thomas J. Barfield’s The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 B.C. to A.D. 1757. (1989)
Friday, January 2, 2015
That myth might not be the myth you think you're busting
I've written a post on "myth busting" over at the Ordinary Times. Click here if you'd like to read it.
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