31.12.04

Visitations

I'm going to be doing a lot of traveling for the next week, so posting is unlikely.
Stentor Danielson, 01:10, ,

30.12.04

Cultural Theory Reinvented

Someone needs to introduce Virginia Postrel to Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky*. It appears that she's reinventing their wheel. Here's Sebastian Holsclaw's nutshell summary of Postrel's book The Future and Its Enemies:

Virginia has a key idea which clarifies some of the difficulties we have in analyzing polticial cleavages along a left-right split. She speaks of dynamists and stasists. In her description, dynamists are willing to embrace the messy nature of unguided social and technological change, while stasists do not. In her terminology stasists come in two major varieties--reactionaries and technocrats. Reactionaries wish to control change by reversing it and returning to a previous (and quite possibly mythical) golden age. Patrick Buchanan is used throughout the book to give examples of reactionary thinking. I think the choice of 'stasist' is revealed to be a bit poor when Virginia goes on to describe technocrats. Technocrats attempt to tightly control change, often with the idea that an elite number of top-down experts can efficiently control and direct the important changes in society.

My own summary of Cultural Theory is here. Comparing the two, it's pretty simple to map them onto each other -- dynamists are individualists, reactionaries are egalitarians, and technocrats are hierarchists. Like the early formulations of Cultural Theory, Postrel's scheme leaves out the fatalists. She also sees something like the "group" dimension -- expressed as an attitude toward change -- as more fundamental, since she groups reactionaries and technocrats as subspecies of stasists. She sees this stasist axis as dominant in modern America, while Cultural Theory at least initially claimed that individualist-hierarchist was the dominant coalition and that egalitarians could only maintain themselves as outsiders.

It's interesting, in a meta-theoretical way, that Postrel and Douglas/Wildavsky would both come up with such similar theories. Postrel is an unabashed dynamist, while Wildavsky was clearly an individualist (Douglas I'm not entirely sure about). So perhaps there's something in the dynamist/individualist outlook that makes this theory appealing. There's also another parallel between Postrel's formulation and the early version of Cultural Theory. Postrel is bent on advocating the dynamist view. Wildavsky started out as a strong partisan for the individualist cause -- he wrote one book making many of the same arguments that Holsclaw quotes from Postrel, and his initial formulation of Cultural Theory was couched as an attack on egalitarianism (which at the time he called by the more disparaging name "sectarianism"). Later on, though, Cultural Theory adopted a more pluralistic outlook arguing that some balance between the four worldviews is necessary. There's a hint of this in Postrel's admission that for a dynamist system to flourish, there needs to be an underlying stasis of basic rules.

*It's possible that she's quite familiar with them and just decided for whatever reason that she wanted to make up new terminology. Bear in mind that the sum of my knowledge of her theory comes from the Sebastian Holsclaw post I'm referring to.
Stentor Danielson, 15:36, ,

29.12.04

Assisted Suicide

I don't think I've ever seen anything in Spiked that I agreed with (though I don't read it regularly). The latest article to come to my attention is a list of arguments against assisted suicide. The author even flubs what should be an easy refutation -- it should be enough to point out that pro-suiciders' claims that classical societies allowed suicide is irrelevant to the question of whether we should allow it. Instead, he decides to go the Godwin route by pointing out that the only historic society that allowed suicide was Nazi Germany.

One of his better -- though still, I think, wrong -- points is to argue that allowing assisted suicide* will lead to a devaluing of human life, particularly the life of people with terminal illnesses or severe disabilities:

Even Mary Warnock pointed out, what sort of society tells its members that it values their right to starve to death, especially if they are a burden on society? Surely a mark of civilisation would be to offer people in despair some sort of argument that their lives are valuable, that they do have some worth. Instead, right-to-die advocates project their own gloomy estimation of the worth of human life on to these poor souls.

In support of this sentiment he offers the story of a disabled woman whose doctors assumed incorrectly that she wouldn't want to be resuscitated. I recognize that there's a danger of slippage between "it can be rational to want to die, for example in X situation" and "people in X situation ought to die." But we must remember that the former does not logically entail the latter. Indeed, to the extent that this slippage occurs, it undermines the basis of the pro-suicide argument. The pro-suicide argument is about the autonomy of the patient to define what constitutes a meaningful and worthwhile life for him or herself. Assuming that a person ought to want to die takes that autonomy away.

The article's point of view is that we ought to take that autonomy away in the other direction: "Every death is ugly and undignified, as life is wrenched away, leaving an inanimate, waxen corpse." In other words, the opinion of the patient about what his or her life is worth is irrelevant, because we know a priori that every additional breath is infinitely valuable.

*The British bill he's responding to actually goes further, requiring doctors to assist the suicide of patients who request it. I'm uncertain at the moment whether that goes too far, but luckily the distinction doesn't bear on the arguments in this post.
Stentor Danielson, 01:51, ,