Free Will and the Immigration Debate

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I keep meaning to post about free will. Everybody loves posts about free will! Obama’s recent decision about immigration finally prompted me to come up with something. So this is about politics as much as it’s about free will.

I have never really understood free will. Where does this freedom come from, if we don’t postulate a soul or some other non-material entity that has no basis in science? If everything is deterministic (except for some stuff down at the quantum level), where does the freedom come from? I’ve read Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, and I don’t really get it. It seems to me that he comes up with a kind of free will by redefining what free will means away from what everyone thinks it means.

So I don’t see how we can have free will. And if free will doesn’t exist, where does responsibility come from? And similarly, where does merit come from? In what way do we deserve what we have — or not deserve what we don’t have?

A point Michael Sandel made in his course (and book) Justice brought this home to me in a personal way. Sandel gives the Justice course every couple of years to hundreds of Harvard students. In the course, he talks to the students about the concept of “moral desert”. And he brings up the issue of admission to Harvard. These kids have gotten into Harvard because they’re smart and talented. Well, OK, there are plenty of kids who are smart and talented. But the kids who got in worked hard and studied hard and accomplished amazing things with their talents. Isn’t that the difference? Well, OK, but — at this point Sandel asks for a show of hands: how many of the kids in the audience were the first-born in their families?

Every time he gives the course, an astonishing number raise their hands. So, what do we make of this? Being the first-born helps you get into Harvard. But no one chooses their birth order. He quotes John Rawls (another Harvard philosopher): “No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.”

I graduated from Harvard. Yay for me! But I have never been able to figure out why this should say anything good (or bad) about me. I didn’t make myself intelligent; I didn’t make myself hard-working — I just always seemed to be that way. I wasn’t the first-born in my family, but I certainly got plenty of support and encouragement in my studies. If I had wanted to make different choices along the way, could I have? I have no idea. But I suspect not — I am who I am.

This brings me, in a roundabout way, to immigration. The immigration debate always seems to me to circle around moral desert and, ultimately, about free will and determinism. What do we who were born in America deserve because we were born here? Beats me. It just seems to me that we are awfully lucky, the way I was lucky in my parents and my genes and my upbringing. Do the immigrants who are here illegally deserve to be thrown out? They’ve broken the law! But the kids covered by Obama’s decision haven’t exactly broken the law — they’re just here, where life has put them. They can no more change who they are than I can change who I am. We can make the case that throwing them out will help the economy or reduce the need for bilingual education or whatnot– at the expense of untold human suffering, of course. But I think that case is far from clear.

Anyway, as a reward for reading this drivel, here is the great Bonnie Raitt singing “Luck of the Draw.” (She too attended Harvard for a while.)

Prejudice and Conservatism

Posted on April 7, 2012 by Richard Bowker

John Derbyshire, a conservative writer, has kicked up a fuss with an article that apparently is his version of “the talk” that Black parents have with their kids. I couldn’t get to the original, which may have been taken down at this point. These quotes are from a piece about the article in the New York Daily News:

Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).

Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character

Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

Possibly there is some kind of conservative attempt at humor going on here; without seeing the original it’s hard to judge (and I generally find it difficult to figure out when conservatives are trying to be funny).

The Daily News writer says of Derbyshire: “An editor at the supposedly esteemed National Review, he is a perfect poster boy for what conservatism has degenerated into. This is not the courtly philosophy of Edmund Burke, but the delusional ideology of Glenn Beck.” But, ya know, I have Mr. Burke right here behind this sign, and this is his paean to prejudice:

You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings, that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of men and ages…. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engaged the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

One of the successes of modern liberalism has been to give a fully negative connotation to the word “prejudice,” such that conservatives feel compelled to deny that they are in any sense prejudiced about anything (in the same way that liberal politicians feel compelled to deny that they have anything but the highest regard for “free enterprise”). But it seems to me you can make the case that prejudice is an essential feature of conservatism–prejudice represents the hard-won wisdom of the past, which we discard at our peril. Derbyshire makes explicit how this philosophy works in practice.

Here, by the way, is an article from today’s Boston Globe about the black version of “the talk.”

Another Assassin, Another Victim

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Following up on The Destiny of the Republic, I’ve just read The President and the Assassin by Scott Miller, the story of William McKinley’s assassination by the anarchist Leon Czoglosz. (Like The Destiny of the Republic, this book’s Kindle price is $14.99, putting it within a couple of dollars of the hardcover’s discounted price.)

Miller decides he needs to use the standard flashback narrative structure for his book: Start with the act of assassination, then back up and use alternating chapters to show how each man ended up in Buffalo for the fateful act. This works OK, but it turns out that neither McKinley nor Czoglosz is sufficiently interesting to carry each one’s part of the narrative, so we end up with a detailed history of the Spanish-American war and America’s involvement in China and the Boxer Rebellion, contrasting with a detailed history of the Anarchist movement. This was fine with me, since I didn’t know much about any of that stuff. Here are some other random thoughts:

Wars went a lot faster in those days. The Spanish-American war was over in a matter of months.
The criminal justice system was also a lot faster. McKinley died on September 14, 1901. Czoglosz’s trial began on September 23 and was over on September 24. The jury spent 33 minutes to reach a verdict (although it didn’t take them that long–they decided to kill time in case it looked like they weren’t taking the thing seriously). Czoglosz was executed on October 29.
Deaths, on the other hand, were slower. Like Garfield, McKinley lingered for quite a while: he was shot on September 6 and lingered for more than a week.
Czoglosz is more interesting than Charles Guiteau because he was clearly sane. Still, he was pretty much a cipher–he had almost nothing to do with the actual Anarchist movement, and his motives for killing McKinley were obscure at best. He seems closer to Lee Harvey Oswald than John Wilkes Booth in the assassins’ hall of shame.
McKinley had a 56-inch waist. Sheesh.
Here’s another reason why I don’t really understand conservatism. Conservatism is about preserving the best of the past, our traditions, the wisdom of our ancestors. But how do you decide what’s wisdom, what traditions to preserve? The America described in this book was just awful–who would want to return to a world without child labor laws, where strikes could be destroyed by government violence, where industrialists ruthlessly cut wages to increase their profits….? Ayn Rand, maybe? Anarchists had a point–if this was the best that governments could do for the people, maybe we’d be better off without government.

Mistrust of science

Posted on April 1, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Kevin Drum provides us with this chart showing the trust in science by political stance since the 1970s:

I haven’t read the study from which this is derived, but the decline in conservative support for science seems accurate to me. I would have liked to see data going back to the sixties, because my sense is that the liberal support might have been lower than conservative support back then. Those were the days of questioning authority, of good intentions mattering more than clear thinking. But those days are long gone, and liberal support seems pretty stable.

The obvious explanation is that conservatives have gotten stupider over the years (or is appealing to stupider people, but that ain’t it. Trust in science has dropped more precipitously among educated conservatives than among uneducated ones. Drum says:

This is presumably part of the wider conservative turn against knowledge-disseminating institutions whose output is perceived as too liberal (academia, the mainstream media, Hollywood) in favor of institutions that produce more reliably conservative narratives (churches, business-oriented think tanks, Fox News). More and more, liberals and conservatives are almost literally living in different worlds with different versions of consensus reality.

This seems plausible. And, as Shermer notes in The Believing Brain, smart people are good at coming up with reasons to support what they already believe.

How do smart people decide not to trust science? One way is to fasten on perceived scientific misconduct like “Climategate” to prove that science nowadays is just politics and careerism. Another is to assert that it’s all relative, like Rick Perry’s characterization of evolution as “a theory that’s out there.”

Here is Stanley Fish in the New York Times saying the same thing in a more sophisticated fashion:

People like Dawkins and Pinker do not survey the world in a manner free of assumptions about what it is like and then, from that (impossible) disinterested position, pick out the set of reasons that will be adequate to its description. They begin with the assumption (an act of faith) that the world is an object capable of being described by methods unattached to any imputation of deity, and they then develop procedures (tests, experiments, the compilation of databases, etc.) that yield results, and they call those results reasons for concluding this or that. And they are reasons, but only within the assumptions that both generate them and give them point.

Vary the assumptions (and it is impossible to not have any), begin by assuming a creating and sustaining God, and the force of quite other reasons will seem obvious and inescapable. As John Locke said in his Letter on Toleration, “Every church is orthodox to itself,” and every orthodoxy brings with it reasons, honored authorities, sacred texts and unassailable methods of verification.

It is at bottom a question of original authority: with what conviction — basic orthodoxy — about where truth and illumination are to be found do you begin? Once that question is answered satisfactorily for you (by revelation, education or conversion), you cannot test the answer by bringing it before the bar of some independent arbiter, for your answer now is the arbiter (and measure) of everything that comes before you. Your answer delivers the world to you and delivers with it mechanisms for distinguishing good evidence from bad or beside-the-point evidence and good reasons from reasons that just don’t cut it.

So here is a very smart guy saying that there is no way of choosing among multiple approaches to the truth. So really Joseph Smith, say, is as worthy of belief as Einstein and Newton, as Dawkins and Pinker.

The standard answer to this (made repeatedly in the comments to his article) is that science, you know, works. The earth does in fact move around the sun. Germs do in fact cause diseases. If Fish got sick, would he rather be treated by a witch doctor or a medical doctor?

Somehow this gets lost in the Fish’s equivalence argument. And I suppose conservative elites will use the argument to buttress their suspicions of science. After all, even the New York Times has its doubts.

Life is stupider than fiction (part two)

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Richard Bowker

John Edwards. Geez. The Rielle Hunter story was bad enough. Compared to Jim O’Connor in Senator, Edwards acted like a complete clown — and in a presidential race. There is probably an interesting story behind his actions. Why does someone act that crazily? The death of his son? His wife’s cancer? Because he’s been successful all his life and assumes he can get away with it? Because he secretly wants to be uncovered as a fraud?

But the really interesting story belongs to his aide Andrew Young, the guy who initially claimed that he was the father of Rielle Hunter’s baby. Married with young children. A law school graduate. How do you become so invested in another person’s success that you’d do something like that?

In the novel, O’Connor has an aide named Kevin Feeney who somewhat fits the Andrew Young type. Kevin is described thusly:

There are two kinds of Irishmen in politics. There are the conventional hard-drinking ward heeler types, who are attracted to politics because so much of it involves simply sitting around and talking and doing favors for one another. And then there are those who are looking for a cause, who need to submerge themselves in an organization that is greater than themselves. These men don’t want to talk; they want to serve. Kevin is such a man.

In the old country, in another era, Kevin might have been a priest, preaching the Vatican party line about sex and marriage to village maidens, content to have his every thought and belief provided for him from on high. Until lately in America he would have ended up a Democrat, but the times are changing, much to my father’s chagrin. Kevin embraced the conservative philosophy as a young man, and then he embraced me. He was a volunteer in my first campaign, and he immediately made himself indispensable. I gave him a job in the AG’s office, and he has been with me ever since. He seems to disappear into the woodwork for long stretches, rarely speaking at our opinionated staff meetings, but he’s always there when I need him.

But I could never have imagined someone as committed to the cause, and as stupid, as Andrew Young.

Life is like fiction (only stupider)

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Senator is filled with political consultants who invariably give the senator smart, insightful advice, such as “Don’t go messing around with that beautiful reporter who says she wants to write a book about you.” In fact, everyone in the novel is pretty darn smart, including the senator, who knows he is screwing up even as he finds that he can’t help himself — that reporter is just too damn beautiful.

Life, you may be surprised to discover, isn’t like that. One can easily imagine a politician making gaffes in the heat of the battle — you get tired, you’re talking all the time, you forget what your consultants told you…. But how do you explain Romney Communications Director Eric Fehrnstrom’s Etch A Sketch comment? The whole point of Eric Ferhnstrom’s existence is to keep the campaign on message, not to reinforce the criticism that all Romney’s opponents have been leveling at him. He gets paid not to get tired, not to forget the talking points (which he probably wrote), not to make gaffes.

By the way, Wikipedia, which knows everything, has an entry on Michael Kinsley’s definition of “gaffe,” which is “when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” What Fehrnstrom said was, of course, completely true, and everyone knows that it’s true. (As a completely irrelevant aside, Kinsley lived upstairs from me freshman year at the World’s Greatest University.)

Here is the website etchasketchmittromney.com, which shows you how fast gaffes travel in the Internet universe.

Have conservatives always been this crazy?

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Senator is in the process of ebookification, so expect some political blogging, alas.

Senator is about a conservative Republican senator from Massachusetts in the middle of a difficult reelection campaign. Things don’t get any simpler for him when he discovers the body of his mistress, who has been brutally murdered in her Back Bay apartment. Many interesting complications ensue! And I look forward to recalling what they are when I reread the novel to discover what interesting typos the scanning process introduced into the text.

One of my goals in writing the novel was to make the senator (Jim O’Connor) as sympathetic as possible (so it’s written in the first person, for example). Who wants to read a novel whose protagonist is a creep? One of the challenges of meeting that goal is that, as a knee-jerk liberal, I needed to find a way to sympathize with a conservative. I have to say that I found that easier in the early 90s, when I wrote the novel, than I would find it today. Because to be a Republican in 2012 is to sign on to the crazy.

I’ll just assert the craziness here; listing the many examples would be too depressing. But a question of some interest is: what happened to the Republican party? Is the craziness a recent phenomenon? Or was it always there? Rick Perlstein, the author of the infinitely depressing Nixonland, argues that it has always been there. The standard response to this (which you can see in the comments to his article) is: hey, some liberals believe crazy things too! Well, sure. But the crazy liberals are not running the Democratic party. George Romney could stand up to the crazies in the 60s; Mitt Romney saw what happened to his father, and apparently decided that the only way to become president was to embrace the craziness.

I don’t have sufficient imaginative powers to sympathize with someone like that.