21.2.04

The Marsh Arabs Are Back

Via OxBlog, it looks like some environmental restoration is going on in a Middle East water system:

Marshes A Vengeful Hussein Drained Stir Again That is just a sampling of the fates met by the displaced dwellers of these marshes in southern Iraq, once among the largest wetland ecosystems in the world. In the early 1990's, in a move that transformed the very face of nature in this country, Saddam Hussein ordered the 7,700-square-mile area drained and its residents attacked to force out Shiite Arabs he suspected of resisting his rule. Last spring, local engineers began breaking dams and levees upriver to reflood the area, and Mr. Abdullah says he now uses his twisted hand [broken by Saddam's police] again for what it was meant to do — poling his boat, cutting reeds and casting fishing nets. ... Noble savages they are not. Many clamor for electricity and paved roads, and some say they prefer concrete or brick homes to the primitive arched reed houses scattered throughout the marshes. Some of the families who stayed in the area through the 1990's say they would like to hold on to the dry-land farming they have developed rather than return to an existence dependent on fishing and water buffalo.

I don't have anything insightful to add at the moment, but it's a really interesting bit of journalistic political ecology.
Stentor Danielson, 13:26,

The Perils Of Co-Ed College

Jon Mandle at Crooked Timber points to an article (pdf, scroll to the end) in which a Harvard alum-turned-professor compares relations between the sexes in his day and today:

Men are less spirited than they were in my day, when we lived in relative isolation from women. Men today are always in the presence of women, hence always in fear of making fools of themselves before women. College men have become premature husbands.

Granted I've never attended an all-male college, and perhaps Harvard is different from Colgate, but I find this analysis counter to my experience. The underlying assumption here is that the main reason young men would not "be themselves" is a desire to impress women. I find that wrong on two counts (well, three, but since my experience is as a heterosexual, I'll grant for the sake of argument the author's presumption that all Harvard undergrads are straight).

First is the idea that men want to impress, in a romantic/sexual sense, any and all women. I wouldn't say I was "not myself" around women whose affections I wanted, but I was more self-conscious about showing my best side. However, such women were only a very small fraction of all the women I interacted with. The fact that Missi and Bethanie were female didn't make my behavior around them any different from my behavior around Mikey or Dan.

Second is the idea that the only reason men would not "be themselves" is in order to score romantically/sexually. Young men have many things to prove to many people, "I'm a suitable romantic/sexual partner" being just one of them. For example, in an all-male situation there's pressure to prove to the other men that you're manly enough. Indeed, in my experience this need to alter your self-presentation to gain the acceptance of other men is if anything stronger in an all-male environment. When gender is the criterion for whether you're allowed to be there, it becomes more important to prove that you belong. Co-ed groups shift the balance toward gender-neutral criteria of coolness.

I can sort of see how this idea may have arisen. When your environment is all male almost all the time, your behavior around other men may come to seem "normal" or "yourself," obscuring the ways you alter your self-presentation. And when you only see women when they're deliberately imported as dates, your interactions with them are dominated by the romance/sex issue and the different self-presentation that a formal dating ritual requires.

There may also be a question of individual differences in ability to fit in. Due to either nature or nurture, I get along easily with women, but I'm not particularly macho, so a co-ed environment suits me just fine while the problems of a gender-segregated one stick out. The author of this article, on the other hand, may be for whatever reason very comfortable in all-male environments, while acutely aware of the self-presentation demands of courtship.
Stentor Danielson, 12:04,

20.2.04

San Fransisco, NM

There has been so much same-sex marriage recently that Google News has gotten confused:



The story is about San Fransisco, but the graphic is clearly the flag of New Mexico.
Stentor Danielson, 23:06,

Begging The Question

Donald Sensing attempts to defend the idea that the existence of childless heterosexual couples is accidental, and therefore doesn't affect the validity of the "homosexual couples can't get married because they can't have kids" argument:

As a social institution, marriage is defined in aggregate, not in particular. This fact argues against a Nominalist position that if two same-sex persons obtain a marriage license, that they are in fact married. It also shows why the pro side's snark that many male-female married couples never have children is irrelevant: out of any random 100 heterosexual marriages, the overwhelming majority will conceive children of their own, within the marriage bond, but out of any 100 same-sex unions, exactly zero will do so. Hence, the lack of children in a small minority of male-female marriages is accidental to what marriage does and what it is for, but the inability of same-sex unions to have children within the bond is inescapably central to their relationship.

The statistics he uses to show that childless heterosexual couples should be grouped with homosexual couples depend on grouping all heterosexual couples together. What if I pointed out that, while out of any random 100 fertile couples the majority will have children, exactly zero out of 100 couples in which at least one partner is infertile will have children. Doesn't that prove that childlessness among fertile heterosexuals is accidental and unimportant to whether their unions are really marriages, but that infertile couples are a whole other story -- you can call them married, but they can't be.
Stentor Danielson, 22:35,

A Fence In The Wasteland

Sebastian Holsclaw points to this story about a defensive wall being built by Saudi Arabia along its border with Yemen. Some commenters argued that this wall is not the same as the wall Israel is building to keep the Palestinians out, because the Israeli wall cuts through Palestinians' land, disrupting communities and cutting people off from ameneties like farmland and places of employment. This was my initial reaction as well. After all, much of the Saudi-Yemeni border runs through the Rub' al Khali, the "Empty Quarter." There aren't even any significant oil fields under that stretch of desert (the big ones are up north along the Persian Gulf).

Then I looked back at the story and saw that it described the frontier as running through "mountainous tribal territory." The land in question, it seems, is inhabited. The people affected are presumably bystanders, caught up in a dispute between two states.

I should have known better than to jump to the conclusion that any place is objectively a wasteland. It's a mistake that has underpinned countless abuses of indigenous people. For example, Native Americans in the southwest have been kicked off their land and subjected to secondhand radiation due to nuclear weapons testing because the people making the plans saw the southwest as desert, and therefore land that was otherwise useless (granted, the injustice would have been worse had they decided to, say, test the Manhattan Project in Manhattan, since there would have been more people affected). Most of the land along the Saudi-Yemeni border is useless to people in more "modern" cultures, such as myself of the Saudi elites. But the tribes who live there have developed a way of life that makes use of the land.

Desert areas complicate the assumption of wasteland problem because they are generally migratory. The modern eye measures the use of land by its degree of obvious modification by people. This assumes an intensive use, in which any area that's part of the production system is being used at all times. But intensive use of land requires large inputs of labor and capital, and it requires land that will sustain intensive use. The Arabian desert, like most, will not accept intensive permanent use (except for a few industries, like oil drilling). And population densities are so low -- and hence land so plentiful -- that there's little reason to go to all the trouble of intensification.

Nomadism is an extensive land use system. It involves a pattern of use shifting across a landscape. The less intensive the subsistence strategy, the more land is needed and the longer any particular parcel will be in its "rest" mode -- hence not obviously "in use," but necessary in the long run for the continued functioning of the nomads' livelihood. Colonial powers in Africa forced the native people into overintensification because they didn't understand shifting cultivation. They interpreted land not currently producing crops as wild (though degraded) land and turned it into parks and game preserves. In reality, the land was part of the agricultural system, but lying fallow at the moment. It would be needed later.

In the Saudi wall case, the interpretation of the land as wasteland may allow the connection among the various parts of a tribe's territory to be severed, disrupting the long-term functioning of their livelihood. Of course, I'm assuming there is such a tribe with a cross-border territory. It wouldn't surprise me, since the border in question is less than a century old and its exact location was disputed until recently. I don't know how much patrolling of the border would have already disrupted any nomadism there is in the area, and given that Native American tribes whose territories span the longer-standing borders of the US haven't given up, the fence may exacerbate the problem. Perhaps the Saudis know exactly what they're doing and just don't care -- I wouldn't put that past them.

UPDATE: Looks like Saudi Arabia and Yemen have agreed to call off the fence. Incidentally, you'd think that al-Jazeerah could 1) afford some better web design, and 2) figure out that the Saudi Arabia-Yemen wall is different from the Israeli-Palestinian wall and change their accompanying graphics accordingly.

Also, the World Tribune is not the most reputable source, but they're quoting the Yemeni media (also probably not the most reputable source) as saying that there are in fact tribes whose territory is being cut, and that they're hopping mad about the fence. Luckily for them the fence has been canceled, although they may not be too keen on the joint military patrols that will take its place.
Stentor Danielson, 16:23,

Buck Of Mass Destruction

My comic from this week's Scarlet:



My commentary is "Will Deaniacs Become Naderites?" with its comic. Had you asked me a week ago, I would have put "Ralph Nader in track shorts" very low on my list of "things I think I'll eventually draw."
Stentor Danielson, 00:19,

19.2.04

Dean's Accomplishments

I understand that the disappointed followers of Howard Dean need to be able to convince themselves that they didn't waste their time, money, and enthusiasm over the past year. And I think that a good case can be made for Dean's importance. But I don't see how Aziz Poonawalla on the Dean Nation blog can say that one of Dean's accomplishments was to "transcend the divisive politics of Left-Right/Us-Them." In fact, I'd say one of Dean's accomplishments was to reinvigorate the politics of Left-Right/Us-Them, to challenge the politicians who had "transcended" those divides by giving up on Left and Us, to attack Right and Them without fear of the consequences, and to draw the hardcore partisans of the Left and Us back into the system. I can't find the article at the moment, but there was a good quote from the Governor in a Q&A forum a week or so back when he explicitly refused to give any platitudes about restoring bipartisanship and ending partisan enmity in Washington.
Stentor Danielson, 15:42,

This Is Why Debitage Is Not A Top-Tier Blog

I decided to read some more Habermas since, as interesting as Theory of Communicative Action was, it didn't address the ideas of his that are most relevant to my research. And it turns out that my previous post was both totally correct and totally unoriginal. The translator's introduction to Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action begins: "In his approach to moral theory Habermas is closest to the Kantian tradition," with an endnote citing a large body of literature in both English and German supporting the point.
Stentor Danielson, 14:43,

18.2.04

A Kantian View Of Habermas

Longtime readers may recall that I take a generally utilitarian perspective on ethical issues. A recent Crooked Timber post by Jon Mandle has me wondering how compatible utilitarianism is with my social-theoretic interest in Jürgen Habermas's sociology and the feminist critique of objectivity. More precisely, it seems that Habermas and the critique of objectivity fit nicely with a Kantian view of ethics. The nugget of Mandle's explanation of Kant's ethics -- the most comprehensible I've encountered, though I haven't been looking very hard -- is this:

... Agents give themselves ends. That means they take one state of affairs to be better than another and commit themselves to bringing it about, i.e., they will an end. When they do this rationally and reasonably, those states of affairs become valuable. ... So, when is a maxim (and therefore its action) rational? Suppose we thought that a maxim needed to have features A, B, and C in order to be rational. This would imply that the end specified by a maxim that has those features ? the goal of the rational action ? would be objectively valuable. If so, this would also imply that the end that a rational maxim specifies, and the reason for that end, must be such that everyone could act on them as well. If it were impossible for everyone to act on that maxim, it couldn?t specify an objectively valuable end. That means, in addition to properties A, B, and C, a rational maxim also has property U ? universalizability. The maxim must be such that everyone could act on it without undermining the attainment of the end it specifies. Now what are A, B, and C? How do we distinguish the rational maxims from the unreasonable and irrational ones? The obvious answer would be that the rational maxims are the ones that aim at the states of affairs that are objectively good and valuable. Utilitarianism, as we have seen, specifies that we aim at the state of affairs that maximizes utility since that is what is objectively valuable. But ? and here is the key ? Kant denies that there is any common end that all rational actions aim at. More precisely: the only way to specify what is in common among all rational ends is to invoke moral vocabulary. In other words, there is no pre-moral good at which all moral actions aim. So, there is no A, B, or C. All that we have left to distinguish the rational maxims is that they have property U ? we can adopt them and act on them, while at the same time willing that everyone adopt and act on them, as well, without those two acts of willing interfering with one another.

The description of the conditions of a rational maxim resemble Habermas's description of the conditions of rational discourse. Rationality is not based on adherence to some objective calculus of logic. Rather, it's rooted in the giving of reasons. In Habermas's framework, a statement is rational if the person saying it is willing to back it up (or at least try) with regard to any of three lines of challenge -- the objective ("you're misrepresenting the world"), the intersubjective ("you have no right to say that"), or the subjective ("that's not what you really think"). The point of this willingness-to-back-up is that rational claims are made not in isolation, but to a hearer, with the expectation that the hearer can be convinced to accept them. Similarly, Mandle explains the criterion of an ethical maxim according to Kant as being based in the agent's willingness to recommend it as a course of action to anyone else. Habermas's conception is richer, as he delves into the question of how such agreement can be brought about through digging back to prior agreements and the construction of shared interpretations of the world, whereas for Kant it's merely the willingness and ability to universalize (Mandle refutes the view that Kantian ethics require you to actually try to universalize your maxims).

This form of rationality is apparent as well in the feminist critique of objectivity (I'm here thinking mostly of Donna Harraway's essay on "The science question in feminism") -- except that here it's called responsibility. The first element of the feminist critique is to argue that objectivity as classically understood is impossible because of how our perceptual apparatus is socially constructed. The second is to point to the consequences of the objective "god trick" -- by declaring objectivity, the scientist absolves himself of responsibility for his theory because "that's just the way things are." Rather, Harraway and others argue, we should take responsibility for our claims by situating them in our own positionality and experience. We stand behind it and offer our own experience as a reason for accepting it.

It may be possible to construct a responsibility-based utilitarianism. John Stuart Mill himself claimed that the principle of utility was not an analytic logical truth, but an unproveable axiom of the type that any ethical system must be built on. His famously failed attempt to show that utility was the only desirable thing was, seen through a responsibility-rationality lens, his shot at offering reasons why he, and anyone, would stand behind his claim.
Stentor Danielson, 19:27,

Biosolids

There are serious issues surrounding the use of sewage sludge as fertilizer. But I still find it hard to fault anyone for taking the "Heh heh. It's poop!" angle.
Stentor Danielson, 18:56,

Inuitionism As Solipsism

There are two general ways to construct ethical systems -- deductive or intuitionistic. A deductive ethics reasons out a logically consistent set of principles and demands that we follow them no matter what their consequences. Intuitionism in its simplest form is a case of "do what your conscience tells you." But it's possible to build a systematic ethics on an intuitionist basis. Systematic intuitionism* is a case of constructing a logically consistent set of principles that must also validate our intuitions. That is, if we know in our hearts that murder is wrong, and our ethical system leads us to justify murder, then the system must go. This type of reasoning is the basis for most of the challenges to deductive systems, generally in the context of contrived situations -- the utilitarian is condemned for being willing to kill 100 people to save 101 people, while the deontologist is condemned for being unwilling to tell a lie to save 1000 people.

This sort of systematic intuitionism is, in a sense, an attempt to do ethics the same way we do science**, to answer "ought" questions the same way we answer "is" questions. Scientific theories have two constraints -- they must be logically consistent, and they must account for our empirical observations. If the observations don't match the theory, the theory must give way. Intuitionism treats our ethical intuitions as observations or data points in this sense.

The usual stumbling block to intuitionism is that different people have different intuitions. It seems self-evident to many of us that there's nothing wrong with homosexuality, for example, but there are hosts of people whose intuition is exactly the opposite. How do we account for this? Well, how does science account for disagreeing observations? Generally, the explanation lies in the perceptual apparatus -- "you're colorblind," or "you're holding the telescope the wrong way." We don't use instruments to make ethical observations, but we can still explain inconsistencies in similar terms -- "you've been indoctrinated by your culture," or "you aren't taking into account all the relevant circumstances." Note, however, a crucial difference: anomalous observations of scientific phenomena are resolved through scientific explanations. Anomalous observations of ethical phenomena are resolved through scientific explanations. Ethics has to turn to science to account for its observations.

Within science, this same kind of realm-shifting can occur. The source of the anomaly may lie in the world being observed, or it may lie in the observer. To the extent that we prefer observer-side explanations for anomalous observed-side observations, we slide into solipsism. To the extent that ethical intuitions are explained away as scientific phenomena and no other basis for ethics is forthcoming, we slide into a sort of ethical solipsism.

*I was originally going to say that Rawls' idea of "reflective equilibrium" is an example of a systematic inductive procedure, but Rawls argues that in case of a conflict either the rule or the intuition must give way. It's thus an appealing concept on the surface, but he gives no indication of how the choice is to be made.

**I'm using the term broadly to mean explanations of the objective world.
Stentor Danielson, 12:23,

France And Turkey

While this post on A Fistful of Euros is militantly anti-headscarf-ban, the comments section is almost entirely pro-ban. One point brought up by some of the commenters is the fact that Turkey also has a headscarf ban, and it's phrased in such a way as to assume that the hearer supports the Turkish policy and therefore ought, for consistency's sake, to support the French. This was a bit jarring to me, as in my mind the Turkish headscarf ban had always been classified alongside Turkey's bans on Kurdish language and culture under the heading of "repressive policies instituted in a misguided attempt to foster nationalism and modernization."
Stentor Danielson, 02:09,

Kiosk

There comes a time at irregular intervals when I update the Kiosk. This time, the honor goes to links that become bold when you mouse over them. Color changes and underlining are fine. Links that are always bold are weird looking, but not offensive. But it bothers my typographical sensibilities when a link alters its width when you hover over it.
Stentor Danielson, 01:35,

16.2.04

The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Homosexuality

It concerns me that, according to Yahoo, I'm the web's foremost authority on "theorist weber gay marriage," yet I have no idea what Max Weber would have thought about gay marriage. Perhaps one could make an argument that gay marriage is an example of the increasing spread of instrumental rationality (in the sense that gay marriage advocates usually object to the supposed mystical sanctity of traditional marriage and point to the legal benefits achieved by getting married). Then we could point out to the Jerry Falwells that, according to Weber, this instrumental rationality thing originally came from the Protestant ethic.
Stentor Danielson, 23:55,

Postmodernism =/= Marxism

One of my pet peeves is people throwing around the word "postmodernism" without regard to the fact that it refers, not to liberal or leftist ideas in general, but to a very specific body of theory. In reporting the decline of social theory in English departments, the Christian Science Monitor falls into this trap:

Theory In Chaos An old joke used to ask, Where are the last bastions of Marxism? Answer: the Kremlin and the Duke University English department. But now that the Soviet Union has dissolved, the last defenders of Karl Marx's ideas may indeed reside on a pretty, Gothic-style campus in the pinewoods of North Carolina. For literary traditionalists, the riddle is apropos. They have long bemoaned the effete nature of postmodern literary theory, calling it as hopelessly out of touch with both reality and literature as was Lenin with real-life economics.

Anyone who can conflate postmodernism with Marxism knows precious little about either. Marx was a quintessential modernist thinker. Postmodernism (as well as poststructuralism) rose as a reaction against Marxism, and the two exchange heated polemics (which often boiled down to "more revolutionary than thou" arguments).

Marxism does propose that most of our knowledge about the world is socially constructed -- an ideology, in Marxist terms, generated by and used to justify the dominant relations of production. However, Marxism also posits that there is a truth about how the world is, and that through various devices -- such as dialectical reasoning and standpoint epistemology -- we can see through the ideologically impregnated world of appearances and understand the true exploitative nature of capitalism.

This "objective" side of Marxism eventually merged with structuralism, producing theories that linked the world's processes together into a huge, and sometimes quite deterministic, system. Postmodernism and poststructuralism were the far wing of the reaction reestablishing the role of human agency against the all-pervading structure of later Marxists like Louis Althusser. Poststructuralism has developed this line of critique on the ontological level, exchanging the rigid systems of structuralism for shifting and contingent articulations of fragments of social structure and knowledge. Postmodernism has taken it in a more epistemological direction, challenging the tyrrany of logic by seeking to disrupt categories and systems of thought as soon as they're stated. Postmodernism has a second important feature of postulating (in appropriately vague terms) the emergence of a new, postmodern, historical era in which the certainties and progress of the Enlightenment are found to be hollow.
Stentor Danielson, 23:35,

Land Reform In South Africa

Red Tape Stalls S. Africa Land Transfers Soon, many hope, the wrongs of this history [of whites stealing land from blacks in South Africa] will come to an end. But in sharp contrast to neighboring Zimbabwe, where the government more than three years ago unleashed paramilitary forces to seize white-owned farms, many white farmers here are driving the process. They want to sell. ... Few blacks have the money to buy the land, or start a farming operation, leaving them dependent on the government to make the deals as well as offer them grants to pay for seed and fertilizer. And in many cases, desirable parcels of land are caught up in complex legal cases under the postapartheid land redistribution procedure. ... Elias Ramalatso, 39, said a group of residents in town filed a claim nearly seven years ago for three large farms in the area. Ramalatso, who has never farmed and who last worked as a cashier, acknowledged that one of the main reasons for the delay in getting the land is that a second black group also has laid claim to it. "The whole situation is very confusing," he said. "Still, we're unhappy that the government is taking so long to settle this. We are ready to farm, to try to earn a better living."

One big question the article leaves hanging for me is why the white farmers are so eager to sell. The article seems to suggest that the main motivation is a desire for racial justice, which supports the contrast set up with the violent conflict in Zimbabwe (though as I understand it, many of Zimbabwe's whites had been prepared to sell their land under a plan backed by the British, but that option was foreclosed by Robert Mugabe, who preferred violent seizure). Yet given the contentious racial politics of South Africa, that seems like a weak explanation -- though it may provide a convenient and not entirely untrue rhetorical cover for whites who wish to sell for other reasons.

I would speculate that a major factor is a resignation to the process of land redistribution, combined with a fear that things could turn violent. Lacking the backing of an apartheid government, white farmers may see their days as aristocrats numbered and want to get out while the getting's good. Another factor may be the general economic precariousness of much farming (it would be interesting to see whether the desire to sell was stronger among whites with less land). This has been a major impetus to the Oneida Nation's success in buying back large portions of the land it claims in its pending court case. The Oneidas, of course, have two advantages that the South African blacks lack -- lots of money and undisputed title to be the original inhabitants of the land in question (thus eliminating intra-Indian conflict). The situation differs somewhat, however, as the Oneidas are interested mostly in holding legal title and generally allow the farmers to continue to farm their land. In contrast, the South African whites would be getting out of farming since the point of the land transfer, in addition to the justice question, is to give poor blacks the resources to make a living.
Stentor Danielson, 22:47,

Separated At Birth

Is it just me, or does the picture on Ralph Nader's site look a lot like the one on Al Sharpton's site? (Scroll down a bit on the sites for the pictures in question.)
Stentor Danielson, 11:48,

15.2.04

Girl Scouts For Boys

I often tease my mom and sister about the Girl Scouts' use of cabins for camping trips and "Try It" badges. But if this mocking coverage of several social conservative screeds is to be trusted in its facts about the Girl Scouts' attitudes toward atheists and homosexuals, I'm tempted to inquire about whether they'd be interested in starting up a branch for boys. It might be easier than trying to get the Boy Scouts to live up to that "morally straight" thing.
Stentor Danielson, 22:56,