debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

21.1.06

Salvophilia

Jamais Cascio accuses James Lovelock of "apocaphilia" for his recent article claiming that it's too late to stop global warming. I found Lovelock's article overwrought and not properly pessimistic -- more an exasperated response to the lack of action thus far, and a smug warning that nature would indict us for our foolishness (Egalitarianism rather than Fatalism, to use Cultural Theory terms). But I think Cascio engages in the reverse sin, which we could call "salvophilia" -- the conviction that salvation is always possible, that it's never too late to turn around and avoid danger.

The problem with salvophilia is brought out nicely by this exchange in the comments to Casico's post. First, Pietro offers this scenario in defense of Lovelock:

You will agree that there is a time to act and a time after which acting would not help anymore. If you are on a car, going at 200 km an hour against a solid wall, when you are at 1 meter from the wall it is too late to turn, stop or jump out. The time to act was there, it has just passed.

Frank Shearar gives a typically salvophilic response:

Regarding this 200 km/h analogy, since we know so little about the Earth and its systems, perhaps the analogy might be more accurately described by covering the windscreen. We know we're careening towards a wall, we know that if we don't stop in time we're strawberry jam. So when do we start slamming on the brakes? As soon as we can, of course. Even if we're only 1m from the wall and it's too late, because we don't know it's too late.

There are a couple interesting things to note in Shearar's comment. First is the device of covering the windscreen. This goes farther even than most salvophilics to deny the possibility that knowledge of the future is possible. Pessimism, of course, depends on having an educated guess about what the future will bring, upon which to base the claim that salvation is impossible or at least exceedingly difficult and unlikely. But so does salvation. To save ourselves, we need to be able to predict the potential for disaster as well as the effects of whatever actions we propose to take. If our windscreen is covered, how do we know there's a wall in front of us, and how do we know that slamming on the brakes might save us (as opposed to, say, getting us fatally rear-ended by the tractor trailer behind us)?

But more importantly, salvophilia takes a too-narrow view of the costs and benefits associated with salvation. The choices are made too stark -- either the danger hits or we're saved. The magnitude of the danger is amplified, a la Pascal's wager, such that any finite investment in preventing it is worthwhile. The costs of such an investment are minimized -- after all, what are you really wasting by pushing the brake, even if it does turn out to be useless? At the same time, the possibility of coping is ruled out (note that apocophilia does this as well). A driver who figured that he'd either slam on the brakes successfully or die in a dramatic fireball would not, for example, bother buckling his seatbelt, or even shielding his face with his arms. Yet a proper pessimism is a call for just such coping strategies. It does not argue for doing nothing, as the salvophiles in Casico's post imply. Rather, it argues that given what we know about the likelihood of different scenarios and the difficulty associated with them, we'll ultimately be better off if we save our energy and resources to use for coping, rather than wasting them on a futile attempt to stave off the danger event.

My own assessment is that climate change is deserving of some non-apocophilic pessimism. The danger is real and great, but it is not the world-ending, human-race-ending, or even civilization-ending event that it's often made out to be (including by Lovelock). On the other hand, the options available to us in 2006 that would prevent serious climate change are too small or too difficult (politically and economically) to make much difference. The wise route, then, is to think about ways of coping with climate change.

Stentor Danielson, 17:21, ,

16.1.06

Gay Witches At The Blood Drive

Abiola Lapite is upset over a recent threat by South African gay activists that they will begin lying to blood donation personnel in order to be able to give blood. The activists argue that the ban on gay donors stigmatizes gays. Lapite's concern is that, given the higher incidence of HIV among gay men, these activists are putting the nation's blood supply at risk.

Pointing out that gays (or any other group) present a higher risk of donating HIV+ blood is not, however, sufficient justification for excluding them. People can't be simply categorized into "risky" and "not risky." Every donor has some risk, however miniscule, of introducing a disease into the blood supply. It's necessary to weigh the costs and benefits of any proposed exclusion. Neither Lapite's judgment that the additional risk is too great to justify the benefits of an increased blood supply, nor the activists' view that the benefits are greater, is prima facie irrational. (This is assuming, of course, that the risk-benefit standard is being applied impartially across all risk factors.)

I'm no epidemiologist, but I can't say I'd be upset if blood donation systems around the world stopped excluding gays' blood (certainly the Red Cross isn't helping the case for broad precautionary exclusions when it constantly tells us how precariously low the blood supply is). Nevertheless, I'm unhappy with the gay activists' tactics -- including the mere announcement of the threat, even if nobody ever follows through on it. This is because I think this tactic will tend to reinforce homophobia.

Gays play a role in the modern worldview similar to that of witches in pre-Enlightenment times. They're both seen as traitors, infiltrators invisibly moving among us, undermining the foundations of the community. Think of the worries about gays "turning" otherwise straight people, or opening the floodgates to other forms of immorality. The idea of gays presenting a higher risk of HIV fits perfectly with this*. Blood is a primal substance, and thus it's the first thing for the Other to be prohibited from sharing.

The threat that gays will lie in order to give blood plays right into this way of thinking. "You're kicking us out for being witches? Well, we'll show you what witchcraft is!" While they may succeed in getting the blood services to give up on asking about donors' sexual histories, they would do so at the expense of reinforcing the idea that gays are secret traitors, infiltrating the center of the community's life.

*This is not to say that gays don't in fact have a higher rate of HIV -- but as the Cultural Theorists are quick to remind us, "it's true" is not a sufficient explanation for why people believe something. And of course what we make of that difference in rates is quite cultural.

Stentor Danielson, 13:54, ,

Social Science vs. the ACLU

Eugene Volokh raises the question of whether the ACLU has an anti-Christian bias -- specifically whether, as claimed by Clayton Cramer, they fail to defend free speech by Christians on the same terms that it defends non-Christian speech. Volokh makes two main arguments, both of which are expanded by others in the comments: 1) there are many reasons other than bias against the speech that an organization might decline to get involved in a free speech case, and 2) the ACLU has fought for Christians' free speech rights in a number of cases. In the comments, I suggested that a bit of social science would be necessary to really resolve the dispute:

I don't think listing cases is a very helpful way of looking at this -- it's just argument by anecdote. We need to determine the total number of free speech cases in each category that were filed, as well as the proportion of them that the ACLU participated in [update: Richard Aubrey points out that we should count as negative any cases where the ACLU is involved on the anti-speech side]. In other words, whether, over some specified time frame, the following is true:

(number of cases involving non-Christian speech that the ACLU got involved in)/(total number of cases involving non-Christian speech) = (number of cases involving Christian speech that the ACLU got involved in)/(total number of cases involving Christian speech)

Should there turn out to be a statistically significant difference between the two sides of the equation, that would constitute evidence of pro- or anti-Christian bias on the part of the ACLU (though one could [update: definitely should] then go back and refine the equation by factoring in other issues like the legal strength of the cases or the other resources available to the speaker's side).

I'd love to be able to give even some rough numbers as to the answer here, but as a non-lawyer I lack the resources and skills to even calculate my bare-bones equation, much less to incorporate the effect of all the mitigating factors that would be needed for a reliable answer. All I can do is mention my own suspcion, which is that the results would vindicate Volokh and the ACLU.

Stentor Danielson, 13:32, ,