debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

25.11.05

New In The Kiosk

A passing comment in this Philocrites post reminds me of a pet peeve that deserves some time in the Kiosk. I'm a pretty stong nominalist, so I'm generally very accomodating when someone finds a certain bit of terminology offensive. But I have to draw the line at getting worked up over the use of "Democrat" as an adjective (e.g. "the Democrat Party"). Certainly "Democratic" is grammatically correct, but it's absurd to be offended when someone drops the "ic" -- heck, you're just handing them a stick to poke you with. Then again, given that the Democratic Party's actual positions are increasingly indistinguishable from the GOP's, I guess partisans need to find something to justify their fierce rivalry.

Stentor Danielson, 11:24, ,

Meta Cultural Theory

Cultural Theory argues that none of the four biases (Hierarchy, Egalitarianism, Individualism, and Fatalism) is entirely superior. All four are necessary, in some combination, for a functioning society. On the one hand, it's an appealing idea that seems to offer a useful direction for policymaking. But on the other hand, allowing this higher-order view seems to threaten to let Cultural Theorists transcend the basic theorem of Cultural Theory: that everyone is biased.

But what actually happens is that the biases reappear at the meta level. The question of "how do we coordinate and balance the application of different biases?" is one that admits of four irreconcilable answers. The most obvious is a sort of meta-Hierarchy -- a set of clear rules specifying when and where each first-order bias is applicable. More popular in the Cultural Theory literature is meta-Egalitarianism, under which all four biases are invited to the table to share their perspective as equals. The idea of the complementarity of biases has been most deeply investigated by Michael Thompson, whose study area -- the Sherpas -- exhibits meta-Individualism, a practice of allowing the four biases to compete to see which is most effective at running each sphere of life in a given set of circumstances. And of course there's meta-Fatalism, in which we just hope for the best in our configuration of biases.

Stentor Danielson, 11:05, ,

24.11.05

Thanksgiving Day Cynicism About Bird Flu

Over at Obsidian Wings, hilzoy has a somewhat naive post about the pros and cons of using a quarrantine to control bird flu:

... If there is a good chance that a quarantine would contain the spread of avian flu in the US, then I think there would be a serious case for imposing one.

But this is ONLY true if there is a good chance that a quarantine would, in fact, work. If it wouldn't, then you incur all the considerable costs of imposing a quarantine without getting any of its benefits at all. And that would just be stupid: exactly like trying to stop an influenza pandemic by walking around saying "go away, you silly virus!", only with much, much greater costs.

Her eventual conclusion is that the nature of flu means that the benefits of a quarrantine are quite small, and hence not worth the costs. As a utilitarian, I think cost-benefit analysis of the type hilzoy proposes is certainly the way policy problems ought to be analyzed. However, as a pragmatist, I recognize that weighing the costs and benefits to society of a policy is somewhat tangential to the way policy is actually made.

In real policymaking -- particularly when dealing with a Big Problem like bird flu or terrorism, the goal is not to reduce the costs and increase the benefits until the latter exceeds the former. Rather, it's to raise the cost until it's commensurate with the importance and scaryness of the problem (provided, of course, that somebody else is paying that cost). A cheap but effective solution is no good because its cheapness fails to do justice to the seriousness of the problem. We need to feel like we're making big sacrifices in order to preserve some important value and meet some pressing need. Quarrantining strangers is thus going to have great appeal as a response to an epidemic of bird flu.

Consider, as another example, Obsidian Wings' favorite issue: torture. Various cost-benefit arguments have been made about torture -- pro-torture people raising "ticking time bomb" scenarios and anti-torture people presenting evidence that torture is a hugely ineffective way of getting reliable information. Unfortunately, both types of argument are usually beside the point. For the vast majority of torture supporters, what weighs in torture's favor is not the benefits it's likely to bring in terms of combatting terrorism. It's the costs that torture imposes. Torture is seen as good because it shows that we're willing to go to really great lengths* to do something about terrorism.

The anti-torture side is a bit more complex. It's not that anti-torture people don't see terrorism as a big problem that we should demonstrate our resolve against. Rather, they don't see torture as something eligible to be counted as a cost, treated as causing a finite level of harm that can be weighed against other pros and cons in some sort of moral calculus. They take a deontological attitude that torture is wrong, period. This is why the ineffectiveness of torture is only brought up as an uncomfortable afterthought. To even think of torture as a cost, rather than as a sin, is for most anti-torture people a sin of improper moral reasoning.

*Pun intended

Stentor Danielson, 20:33, ,

22.11.05

Guns, Germs, and Marx

A while back I mentioned
that a Marxist mailing list had picked up one of my posts about Jared Diamond. At the time the online archive of the list had expired, but I recently discovered (through my referrer logs) an available archive of their discussion.

Stentor Danielson, 14:37, ,

Bad Astronomy

I'm in no way a trained astronomer (I actually don't even like astronomy -- for whatever reason stargazing doesn't appeal to me all that much). So when someone tries to use astronomy to prove a philosophical point and even I can see that they're wrong, there's a problem. I'm reading a book about Deep Ecology, and I came across this line from founder Arne Naess:

Modern astronomy, which I have followed since the 1930s, indicates that the universe is growing, and I feel that I am growing with the universe; I identify with the universe -- the greater the universe, the greater I am.

Unfortunately for Naess, the sense in which the universe is growing is quite different from the sense in which a person's growth is a desirable thing. The universe is not growing in the sense of developing and becoming richer. It's growing in the sense of expanding. All that's happening is that its bits and pieces are getting farther apart.

Stentor Danielson, 14:24, ,

21.11.05

Immoral Men

Linda Hirshman argue that the main thing holding us back from gender equality today is the household division of labor. The fundamental problem is that men won't do their share of the work -- indeed, the work-family dilemma never even appears on their radar. Certainly there's a mutually reinforcing relationship between inequality in the workplace and inequality at home, and workplace discrimination is a real problem, but I think Hirshman is right that in many cases today it's the home relationship that acts as the heavy flywheel keeping the structure in place.

I don't agree so much with where Hirshman goes from there, however. She first claims that the persistence of inequality shows that "choice feminism" has failed. After all, the women who opt to quit full-time work and take on the lion's share of the housework and childrearing will all tell you it was their choice. Hirshman lambasts the "choice feminists" who allowed this to happen by not condemning housework as unfulfilling drudgery that women should refuse to accept. But I think a more sophisticated idea of choice still works. A naive choice perspective only asks whether the selection of an option was freely made. A more sophisticated view of choice also asks about the parameters of the choice -- what was the set of options presented, and who had to make what choices at what time? Feminism has done much to reduce the overt inequality of unfree choices, but powerful structural inequalities persist in what choice sets people are presented with. Thinking this way allows us to condemn the inequality in society without blaming individual women for choices that were, given the circumstances, perfectly rational -- and without denying that an equal society will (due to variation in tastes and abilities) include some families where the woman does the housework alongside ones where the man does and ones where the work is split equally. Besides, if we condemn housework in such uncompromising terms, how do we expect to convince men to take up their fair share?

This brings us to the next point: for all her talk about how feminism has failed by not being radical enough, Hirshman never utters the four magic words: I blame the patriarchy. All of these unequal relationships contain a man, and yet Hirshman tiptoes around pointing a finger at them for perpetuating (albeit usually passively, by failing to question the prevailing social structure) the inequality. Her discussion of solutions all focus on how women can increase their bargaining power through things like career-focused education and marrying more vulnerable men. Those strategies are fine as far as they go -- at worst they deprive couples of the crude economic rationalizations for traditional gender roles*, and at best they provide crucial leverage against a sexist husband. But if we're looking to re-inject a moral element into household gender politics, let's start with this: men have a responsibility to examine their own attitudes, behaviors, and assumptions, and to correct those that are incompatible with real equality. Men must be held responsible by other men and women, and boys must be taught from a young age that household equality is their responsibility too. A man who fails to do his share of the work, or who fails to seriously face the same questions that his wife faces, is acting immorally. Sadly, it seems that most heterosexual men in contemporary America are immoral.

*Of course, this is easy for me to say, since I think no household making more than $50,000 a year (except with significant extenuating circumstances) has much right to complain about finances or sacrifice other things for more money.

Stentor Danielson, 23:43, ,

The Purpose Of Marriage

PG makes quick work of the claim that marriage is about procreation:

I am much in agreement with Gallagher that the state's interest in marriage is that legal recognition reinforces an arrangement that is beneficial to the state. What I disagree wildly about is that the only benefit to the state marriages creates is procreation. For one thing, our government policy clearly doesn't see procreation alone as beneficial, or we wouldn't have five year limits on welfare and discouragement of further procreation by recipients (in some cases going as far as rewarding people financially for sterilization, which always gives me a creepy memory of the depiction in Midnight's Children of the radios-for-sterilization tradeoff during the Emergency). Rather, what the state sees as beneficial is the creation of relationships that prevent people from becoming burdens on the state.

... This is why the state has reason to recognize the union of two people even before they start popping babies, and why it does even for couples that never do. As far as I know, our government accords no privileges to people merely for making babies, but reserves benefits like tax credits to people who are raising children.

The fact is, our current legal landscape does not privilege childbearing. Now, I can see how a committed inverse Malthusian might, in response to the horror of a fallling (white) birthrate, advocate substantial reforms that would reconfigure current marriage law into a birth-promotion program. But I don't see how someone working from a Burkean conservative point of view could look at the status quo and then claim to defend it on pro-procreation grounds.

Stentor Danielson, 11:09, ,

20.11.05

Fixing Nature

A recent forestry bill introduced to Congress, the Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act (pro and con), got me thinking about the vexing question of human involvement in the natural world. The bill is aimed at promoting the recovery of forests from natural disasters, such as fires or hurricanes. A number of the provisions, such as enhancing monitoring of forest conditions and making cross-jurisdictional coordination easier, are unobjectionable. The core of the bill, however, is the recovery strategy it promotes: the bill's ideal is that after a fire (or other disturbance, but given my interests I'll focus on fire), crews would go in to log the dead and downed trees, then replant the area.

There are reasonable economic (if you don't log quickly, it will rot) and safety (a major fire can often increase the fire danger by killing a lot of the trees that were too juicy to burn, thus leaving more available fuel for the next fire) reasons for post-burn logging. But the rhetoric of the bill's sponsors is -- perhaps in an attempt to head off the likely objections -- phrased largely in terms of the environmental benefits. This makes an appealing image -- a healthy natural ecosystem has been wiped out by a disaster, and needs help regaining its fragile balance.

A strong trend in ecology has challenged the equilibrium model underlying the bill sponsors' version of environmentalism. This lends a more sophisticated air to the knee-jerk enviro reaction of "don't touch the forest." Disturbances like fire and hurricanes, we now know, are not exogenous forces that unexpectedly mess things up. They're part and parcel of the development and renewal of the ecosystem. Sweden is an excellent case study on this point. Earlier this century they attempted to improve their forests by removing snags and replanting after major fires -- only to find the ecology impoverished by the removal of what turned out to be critical elements of habitat. Active cleaning up of the forest here runs the same risk, of achieving a quick and aesthetically satisfactory recovery at the price of impairing the long-term ecology.

The presumption of natural resilience, however, also has its drawbacks. It presents recovery operations as a new exogenous interference, without which the forest could go happily on its way. But most of the forests in this country are already compromised by human activity. They're fragmented and hemmed in by settlement, choking on pollution, and deprived of key elements of their biodiversity. The disturbances, too, are not necessarily the ones that the forest evolved to handle, as human modification of the landscape and management practices have changed the type of fires that occur. America's forests are the creation of America's society, and therefore they cannot necessarily be left to handle their own maintenance. We are inextricably bound up in our forests' ecology, and therefore have to take responsibility for it -- a responsibility that may require active management at times.

This doesn't mean I'm in favor of the bill. A lot comes down to the particulars -- how hard is it really to do the necessary restoration work under present law? And are the projects that will be made possible under this law really aimed at improving the health of the environment, or is that just a cover for economically-motivated tree farming? I'm pessimistic on both counts, given the larger conservative approach to forestry that this bill springs out of. I'm especially wary of any measure that claims to streamline and speed up environmental projects, as that line of reform is at root an attempt to let big government and big business get on with their partnership of running things without having to deal with the pesky public. Certainly speed is sometimes important -- but that's all the more reason to get the public involved at stage one of the planning process, well before the disaster hits.

Stentor Danielson, 22:07, ,