7.5.04

Posting Like Crazy

After barely posting anything all week, I've suddenly got a zillion little things to say. If you're not sick of hearing from me by now, you might be interested in my latest contribution to Open Source Politics, "In Defense of 'Climate Change'"
Stentor Danielson, 17:21,

So Up My Dissertation Alley It Hurts, Part II

Residents Remain Cool To Wildfire Protection ... Fire Chief Manuel Navarro, was a battalion chief in Oakland, Calif., in 1991 when a wildfire exploded, killing 26 people and destroying 3,300 homes. Residents blamed the department for not telling them about the risk. Navarro swore after that experience he would always warn people in areas prone to wildfires and tell them how to protect themselves and their homes. ... Complacency among residents who won't trim back the forest around their homes and a disregard for safety issues bother fire officials. Last year, when Colorado Springs banned new cedar shingle roofs, homeowners ignored the warnings and rushed to install wood shingles just before the deadline. ... [Homeowner Howard Gill is] frustrated some neighbors refuse to do anything. He thinks their inaction increases his danger. "But I can't do anything about it," he said. ... [Homeowner Lee Wolford said] "There's always a concern for fire. But you live with the risk. We have a wood deck that we’re getting rid of. We're putting on a fire-retardant deck. We want to minimize the risk, but we don’t want to destroy the atmosphere. I'm not going to cut down every tree within 50 feet of my home. That's asking a lot."

This story hits a lot of important themes -- fire department frustration over homeowner noncompliance, homeowners valuing aesthetic amenities and private property over fire safety, trans-boundary and collective risk colliding with a fragmented property regime, and fatalism or "it can't happen here" attitudes.
Stentor Danielson, 17:19,

Romney Vs. Climate Change

Romney Hedges On Global Warming As he introduced a new state policy to combat global warming, Governor Mitt Romney had a surprise for the environmentalists gathered along the Charles River Esplanade yesterday: Personally, he's not sure global warming is happening. During a news conference at which he formally announced the Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan, Romney said he decided not to take sides in the debate about "is there global warming or is there not, and what's causing it." ... "If climate change is happening, the actions we take will help," Romney wrote. "If climate change is largely caused by human action, this will really help. If we learn decades from now that climate change isn't happening, these actions will still help our economy, our quality of life, and the quality of our environment." Romney said yesterday he considered the new climate plan a "no-regrets" policy. Even if greenhouse gases turn out not to be driving climate change, he said, the state will have improved air quality, stimulated the economy, and saved money by reducing its appetite for energy. -- via Quark Soup

The story's lead paragraph (whose framing is apparently endorsed by Quark Soup, since quoting it is the entirety of the post there) is the likely, but unfortunate, way that Romney's position will play out. The focus will be on the apparent hypocrisy of proposing a plan to deal with a threat you don't believe in. Environmentalist enthusiasm for the plan will be tempered by the feeling that he's giving aid and comfort to climate change skeptics and the lost opportunity for a "Sister Souljah moment" as a Republican stands up to endorse the idea of human-induced climate change.

The most popular explanation offered for the weird positioning, raised later in the Globe article, will likely be the sort of "strategic positioning" argument that characterizes most political discussion. Romney is unlikely to win over most environmentalists (since they care about other issues as well), while he needs the support of climate skeptics. Thus he gives rhetorical reassurance to them even as his policy undercuts their cause.

But the more important thing that seems to be happening -- or what could be made to happen if the public discourse fixates on the second two paragraphs that I quoted rather than the first two -- is an attempt to move the debate beyond the "economy vs. environment" impasse that dominates most discussions of climate change. It's dangerous, of course, to maintain that the transition to a sustainable society can be made painlessly. But it's also true that environmental and other values are not a zero-sum game.

Romney's framing of his skepticism is in a sense an attempt to achieve an overlapping consensus (a sort of "Sister Souljah moment" on the pragmatic, rather than ideological, level). His affirmation of a shared viewpoint with skeptics is not merely damage-control for a policy that skeptics won't like. It's a positive claim that his policy can be justified with regard to their values. He's saying "even though my policy looks like it's something They would like, I'm still one of Us, and speaking as one of Us, I can say that We ought to support it. We can work with Them without selling out Our values." At the same time, though, I think "They" (and I'm part of Them) need to listen to Romney's case and recognize that They share the relevant values, and that it's worth trying to move forward without achieving agreement on all of Their values.
Stentor Danielson, 14:21,

Grant Us Wisdom, Courage, And Heterosexuality

Speaking of the National Day of Prayer, take a look at the list of suggested prayer topics. Of the five institutions that they want us to pray for, the instructions for four of them are appropriately general and innocuous requests for guidance and responsibility. But under the heading "Education," we're not told to pray for the wisdom of our teachers and the moral and intellectual development of students. Rather, we're told to specifically pray against the spread of "homosexual propaganda." Neither of the two orientations -- nondenominational generalities or specific policy prescriptions -- is necessarily wrong, but it's strange to see them mixed together like that.
Stentor Danielson, 13:56,

City Sizes

Will Baude links to this list of the world's largest cities in the course of reflecting on how easily one's geographical perceptions can get outdated in this changing world. For example, he's surprised that Sao Paulo is now third (after Tokyo and Mexico City).

I had the opposite reaction. Having heard a fair bit about the world's changing demographics but not having done any formal reading about it, my perceptions have overshot the mark in terms of how much city size ranks have shifted. So I was surprised to find that Washington-Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston all still outrank the major US growth centres like Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, and Phoenix. Lagos is a surprisingly small 26th on the list, and Buenos Aires hasn't surpassed London. On an Australian note, I hadn't realized that Sydney beats Melbourne by such a comfortable margin (as well as edging out Berlin).
Stentor Danielson, 13:49,

The Opiate of the Bushes

Remarks By President Bush On National Day Of Prayer ... Americans do not presume to equate God's purposes with any purpose of our own. God's will is greater than any man, or any nation built by men. He works His will. He finds His children within every culture and every tribe. And while every human enterprise must end, His kingdom will have no end. Our part, our calling is to align our hearts and action with God's plan, in so far as we can know it. A humble heart is not an indifferent heart. We cannot be neutral in the face of injustice or cruelty or evil. God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice. And it is the deepest strength of America that from the hour of our founding, we have chosen justice as our goal. Our greatest failures as a nation have come when we lost sight of that goal: in slavery, in segregation, and in every wrong that has denied the value and dignity of life. Our finest moments have come when we have faithfully served the cause of justice for our own citizens, and for the people of other lands. And through our nation's history, we have turned to prayer for wisdom to know the good, and for the courage to do the good.

The obvious issue to take with Bush's speech is its monotheo-centrism. He ascribes essentially Christian beliefs to "we Americans," not recognizing that many Americans believe something quite different. I'll leave the details of that case to others who can express them better than me.

What interested me is that, while it's Christian-centric enough to alienate non-Christians, it's pretty poor Christianity. I don't mean that simply in the sense that I think Christianity is consistent with, even demands, the kind of tolerance and impartiality that atheists and pagans would ask for. I think it would be appropriate if Bush spoke from his heart about his faith and what it means to him. But even if we rewrite his remarks to talk in personal, rather than collective, terms, the version of religion he gives is remarkably shallow. The speech is made up mostly of comfortable platitudes and pro forma humility before God. Perhaps part of it is a failed attempt to say something innocuous and uncontroversial in order to placate the non-Christians, and is simply a case of winding up with the worst of both worlds. But I think it's also indicative of a larger kind of malaise that tends to surround Christianity as a de facto national religion.

One of Jesus' major messages, as I see it, was "you cannot be righteous enough to earn God's love, but God loves you anyway." There are two parts there -- one a challenge, the other a reassurance. Both are critical, but Christianity has tended to emphasize the latter. And no wonder -- a message that lifts up the persecuted will have more appeal than one that is critical of the self-assured. The sinners and tax collectors flocked to Jesus while the scribes and Pharisees rejected him. Thus it was the sinners and tax collectors, the people who were most interested in the uplifting side of Jesus' message, who set the tone for the development of Christianity after Jesus' departure.

This balance of emphasis is all well and good when you're preaching to people who need to be uplifted, and Christianity has thrived among people who are persecuted. But the message gets distorted when it's preached to those who have power. For those whose faith comes before their experience, they invent persecutions in order to feel that their life coheres with the Christian message. For those whose experience comes before their faith, the Christian message becomes a sort of reassurance. Bush's speech stays squarely within his, and his audience's, comfort zone. He uses all the familiar phrasings, whose very habitualness saps them of their meaning, turning them into a bit of familiar ritual. The message of the speech is that we Americans are on the right track, that we're Godly people. It's all very self-affirming. And it's not at all what I think Jesus would have said to an audience of the leaders of the most powerful country in history.

If Bush wanted to make his speech memorable and meaningful, he should have tried to reclaim the other side of Jesus' message. This is the side that challenges us, the side that reminds us that we're not good enough, that we don't understand well enough. Perhaps on the occasion of a national day of prayer in a religiously plural nation, it should be a call to really listen to people of other faiths or none, to let their perspective disrupt your assumptions about how you live your life. It should be phrased in fresh and undiplomatic language that would jar listeners and make them think, rather than stroke them with familiar concepts. How can Jesus' message, which was so shocking two millennia ago, have been made so banal in its skewed adoption by a comfortable majority?
Stentor Danielson, 02:33,

5.5.04

Warming West

A couple days ago, I complained that an AP story about climate change in the American West, as well as Chris Mooney's post about it, focused too much on the "is climate change caused by humans?" question. It looks like the Environment News Network is trying to frame the story my way, as they chose the headline " Debate over causes aside, warm climate's effects are striking in the West."
Stentor Danielson, 21:52,

4.5.04

Natural Law Or Social Conditioning?

Joe Carter brings up an interesting point with regard to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

Most everyone has simply stated that these soldiers “should have known” not to act the way they did. They seem to be under the impression that it is both obvious and beyond dispute and, therefore, no argument even needs to be made. Essentially, they're making an appeal to natural law. Like St. Thomas Aquinas, they agree that good and evil is intrinsic and knowable by all people (ST IaIIae 94, 4). These reservists should have known that such actions were wrong because all humans are endowed with the same moral intuition that humiliation and torture are evil acts.

Joe agrees that there is a natural law, but some degree of social conditioning is necessary to properly develop it. While the military builds a strong moral orientation into its members, reservists (such as the Abu Ghraib torturers) are exposed to the moral relativism of civilian culture that erodes their moral intuition. While not entirely sold on the idea that having the Geneva convention explained to them would have led the torturers to act right, he says "solid training on both the laws of war and the consequences for violating them might have been just the thing to stir their moral conscience."

There are two things I want to pick out of this argument. First is the question of implied natural law. I'm skeptical that humans share much more than a rudimentary inherent conscience (and that things that appear to spring from that inherent conscience are necessarily proper guides to action*). However, I don't think that one needs to presume a natural law framework in order to argue that the soldiers "should have known" not to torture. Though conservatives make a big deal out of the supposed moral relativism of modern life, there is a largely shared ethos -- as evidenced by the practically universal condemnation of the Abu Ghraib torture. Whatever its origin, the idea that you should not wantonly humiliate and torture anyone, even enemy soldiers of a different race and culture, is pretty well entrenched in American culture. So to say the soldiers "should have known" can refer to an element of "nuture" we expect them to share, not necessarily an element of "nature." The soldiers "should have known" not to torture in the same way that they "should have known" that you make words plural by adding "-s."

Second, the possibilities in Carter's post for the source of moral guidance are set up as either conscience or training. Either they just know that torture is wrong, or they should be taught that it's wrong. Both of these are individualistic notions -- either you look within your own heart, or you learn the principles in a rational manner.

What these options leave out is the importance of social reinforcement. People acquire their moral orientations from acting them out, playing the part of a moral person in interactions with others while having morality modeled for them by those who they admire or see as comrades. Eventually, the orientation becomes a habit, a role played effortlessly and subconsciously. This is how the military inculates the ethos that Carter claims non-reservists acquire -- indeed, "total institutions" like the military, or like the fraternities Carter talks about in his nice follow-up post, are especially likely to be scenes of this social production of morality. At Abu Ghraib, acting in accordance with the Geneva convention wasn't "how it's done." In fact, it's not just that they failed to assimilate non-torture morals. As per Carter's example of fraternities, the culture of Abu Ghraib likely reinforced a counter-morality that said that torture was not just acceptable but the proper way to treat prisoners. The same social mechanisms that have instilled in most of us an aversion to torture were twisted into promoting it. In such a scenario, individual conscience would have been swamped (unless it could ally with other consciences -- a classic collective action problem -- or reach out to outside sources of power, as the soldier who publicized the photos did).

*To link it back to my previous exchange with Carter, an evolved conscience is not as trustworthy as a God-given one.
Stentor Danielson, 19:34,

CA Fire Season Underway -- And How!

Flames Force Evacuations; Man Arrested A series of wildfires in Southern California spread overnight, forcing thousands to evacuate their homes and leading to an arrest of a man suspected of igniting one of the blazes. As many as 4,000 homes had been evacuated since midnight between Corona and Lake Elsinore, according to fire officials. The "El Cerrito" blaze rapidly spread in Temescal Canyon near Interstate 15 since it was sparked early Monday afternoon and, according to wire reports, is estimated to only be 10% contained. ... Southern California's fire season opened Monday with fast-moving brush fires in Riverside, Los Angeles and San Diego counties covering more than 8,300 acres. Fire officials fear that scorching temperatures, and dangerous conditions could ignite another devastating fire season. ... But fire officials said they were beginning the season better-prepared to do battle this year, having launched efforts to eliminate vegetation around homes, cleared mountain evacuation routes, removed dead and dying trees damaged by drought and a beetle infestation, and added computerized systems to warn residents in the path of fires.

Stentor Danielson, 15:18,

3.5.04

Resilience

Via Chris Mooney, who hits the usual theme of how the media gives climate change skeptics too much credit, comes this interesting story about the effects of climate change on the American West:

Warm Climate's Effects Striking In West ... Forget talk of global warming and speculation of what it might do in 50 years, or 100. Here and across the West, climate change already is happening. Temperatures are warmer, ocean levels are rising, the snowpack is dwindling and melting earlier, flowers bloom earlier, mountain glaciers are disappearing and a six-year drought is killing trees by the millions. ... The West is unique in that it depends so heavily on snowpack — melting snow provides three-fourths of the water in streams. Over the past 35 years, temperatures across the region have inched up 1 to 3 degrees, causing the snow to melt as much as three weeks earlier, said Kelly Redmond, regional climatologist for the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, Nev. Lilac and honeysuckle bloom up to 10 days earlier. Warmer temperatures lead to a huge surge in woody plants that thrive in warm, wet conditions. Glaciers are retreating, roads are buckling in Alaska and shifting some supports on the 800-mile trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Already-low reservoirs are called upon to water fields and quench thirst for longer and longer periods after the seasonal snowpack is gone.

Reducing the human impact on climate is important, and if the problems hitting the West can get people to wake up to the problem, so much the better. But I think there's another important issue here that gets lost in the framing of this as a question of "is it natural or anthropogenic": the American West is not a resilient system.

We now know that ecosystems don't have stable climax conditions. They experience a great deal of variability in various flows and states. In order for particular organisms or assemblages to survive in such changing conditions, they need to have a certain amount of flexibility and buffer capacity in order to be able to roll with the punches -- a quality ecologists call "resilience."

Modern American culture, however, is rooted in assumptions about a very limited range of environmental variability. Our implicit cultural experience is based largely on a short time frame (a few hundred years) in northeastern America and northwestern Europe, two of the least variable ecosystems around. So we have an attitude that nature can be predicted and controlled, that we can see our carrying capacity and make full use of it. This works well enough for a while. But transplanted to the West -- which is a munch more variable environment -- it's a recipe for disaster.

Take water flows. Water is in short supply in the West, and growing more so as population grows. So people have developed systems of property rights to divvy it up. But those rights are established based on assumptions about how much water will be available. Because nobody is willing to lower their use or allow some water to be "wasted" in good years, everything is claimed (and then some -- the US has for years been failing to allow enough water to flow down the Colorado to meet Mexico's entitlement). When inevitable drought years hit, there isn't enough water to fill everyone's entitlement. But the rest of the system has grown up on the assumption that a certain amount of water will be available. Municipal budgets are strained, water-using businesses find their activities curtailed, and the effects potentially reverberate through the system. Perhaps they can get some sort of bail-out from those of us who don't have a water crisis, but that just props up the unresilient social structure.

It took half a century of boom-bust cycles for Australian sheep ranchers to learn not to treat good years as "normal." The West looks on course to get a harsh form of that lesson. (Though the Aral Sea area is in even worse shape, having built up a ludicrously unsustainable cotton industry during the relatively wet '80s and '90s.)

So yes, we need to stop human-induced climate change. But that will merely dodge one bullet aimed at the West. In the long term, we need to build a more resilient settlement pattern and economy.
Stentor Danielson, 18:40,

And The Lord Saw That Evolution Was Good

The recent discussion of the new creationist theme park reminds me of an incident from my childhood. I was pretty big into dinosaurs for many years, so I read pretty much every book I could find about them. Well into the obsession I got hold of a creationist dinosaur book. It had stuff in it about how they found human footprints inside dinosaur footprints and how the "leviathan" in the Bible is a dinosaur. It was also the first place I had seen it explicitly stated that there were two views on the origin of species, evolution and creationism. I already knew all about evolution from the other dinosaur books I'd read. And I was well versed in the Genesis story, since I'd been a regular attendee of Sunday School. But it wasn't until I read this book that I really thought about how the two stories conflict. I was pretty confused (as were my parents -- they'd never heard the kind of claims that the book made). So we talked to our pastor about it (this was at a mainstream Lutheran church). He pretty much assured us that the book was crazy. So for my first experience with the religion-science battle, religion happily ceded ground.
Stentor Danielson, 17:44,

2.5.04

Old Fire

Two stories about the "earliest fire":

Middle Eastern Site Yields Fire Evidence More than three-quarters of a million years ago, early humans gathered around a campfire near an ancient lake in what is now Israel, making tools and perhaps cooking food, in the earliest evidence yet found of the use of fire in Europe or Asia. Researchers have found evidence that these early people hunted and processed meat and used fire at a site called Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in the northern Dead Sea valley.

Fossils Reveal Oldest Wildfire Scientists have discovered evidence for the earliest known wildfire in Earth's history, the journal Geology reports. It comes in the form of small plant fossils preserved as charcoal, which were unearthed by researchers near the town of Ludlow on the Welsh borders. The plant remains date to the Silurian Period, about 443 to 417 million years ago, say a Cardiff University team.

Stentor Danielson, 18:00,

Liberalism And Children

Hugo Schwyzer recently pointed to this old, but still interesting, article by Stephen Carter about the conflict between religion and the liberal state. It somewhat echoes my thoughts from the "religious left" debate. The argument turns on the distinction, used by John Rawls in his influential statement of liberalism, between comprehensive and political doctrines. Comprehensive doctrines are philosophical systems giving guidance on all aspects of life. Political doctrines, on the other hand, are doctrines that limit their application to the "basic structure" of the state. Rawls argued that liberalism must be merely a political doctrine, in order to avoid squashing the freedom of thought and practice of people with varying comprehensive doctrines (e.g. different religions). In making public policy, then, two kinds of reasons can be offered: "public reasons," which are based on the shared political doctrine and presuppose no commitment to any comprehensive doctrine, or "overlapping consensus," in which people each have their own reasons to agree to it (e.g. one person supporting welfare because it maximizes utility, another because it reduces capitalist exploitation, and another because God said so).

But Carter charges that liberals have been corrupted by power and that the modern state is engaged in promoting a comprehensive liberal doctrine. Rather than carving out accommodation for various belief systems, those systems are being trampled by liberal values. His major example is the public school system. There, children are being taught liberal values that conflict with the comprehensive religious doctrines parents may want to impart.

But thinking back to Rawls's reasons for limiting liberalism to a political doctrine, there's a good explanation for why liberalism would interfere with child-rearing. It's an implication not clearly addressed by Rawls, who built his system on the presumption of dealing with rational and independent adults, but it seems to follow from Rawls's ideas and standard assumptions about the nature of children.

The distinction between the state and non-state groups (like churches) in Rawls is based on coercion. It is presumed that people have no real choice about whether they live in the state. Rawls rules out emigration as being unfeasible for most people. Thus, the state must be governed according to principles that can achieve liberal or overlapping justification. Non-state organizations, on the other hand, are voluntary -- people may choose to join or leave at any time, and thus they may require anything they like of their members. Indeed, that voluntariness is to be enforced by the state -- nobody can be punished for apostasy.

Where do the family and schools fit in? For adults, the expansion of educational opportunities and the women's movement have made these institutions effectively voluntary. They present no more of a conceptual problem than a church or a recreational club. But children are a different story. While adults may get divorced or drop out of school, children may not. The principle of voluntary consent, on which liberalism's tolerance of non-state organizations and comprehensive doctrines rests, cannot be met in the case of children because they are presumed to be "below the age of consent," not yet fully rational and responsible people.

Thus, from the child's perspective, families and schools resemble the state more than they resemble clubs. And because of that, they must be run on liberal principles. It's only natural for liberalism to "encroach" there, and it doesn't constitute the promotion of a liberal comprehensive doctrine.

One response from the parent who wishes to raise his child in a non-liberal environment is that the child should be, from a liberal standpoint, a non-entity. The relevant choices are those of the parent, who is able to give consent. This is a tougher question, and one I don't have a ready answer for in this top-of-my-head blog post.
Stentor Danielson, 16:33,