debitage

7.6.07

Square States

Strange Maps points out an interesting 1838 map proposing to cut Australia up into 10 equal-area states. The map is entertaining as a change from the actual six states and two territories, particularly given some of the naming choices -- southern WA is named "Victoria" (modern Victoria is merged with southern NSW into "Guelphia"), while the Kimberlies and Kakadu become "Tasmania" (the island now using that name retains its 1838 designation of "Van Diemen's Land").

But the map is also a nice commentary on 19th-century European attitudes toward nature. Newly "discovered" lands like Australia were seen as blank slates, whose settlement could be rationalized and organized into mathematically and administratively pleasing forms without regard for nature or history. Just a couple years prior to the drawing of this map, the colony of South Australia had been established based on a plan for systematic, intensive (Europe-style) agricultural settlement. This was also the era of the US's Northwest Ordinance, which established the system of chopping the land into square blocks and allocating them for sale to settlers or other uses based purely on the surveyor's geometry.

To those of us in the 21st century, the divisions in the 10-state map look absurd -- Dampieria (northern WA) and Nuytsland (Nullarbor plain) would have almost no population, while Sydney and Melbourne would both be in Guelphia. One may perhaps excuse the mapmaker because of the great ignorance that prevailed among Europeans about Australia's interior. Melbourne had only just been founded. Few explorers had ventured beyond the comparatively well-watered southeast and southwest corners of the continent, and it would be many years before hope of finding a great inland sea or mighty river would be given up. The favorability of Australia's climate (in terms of both rain and bushfire) was consistently either overestimated or assumed to be improvable by good farming practices (it was believed that "rain follows the plow," and crops would squeeze out more flammable vegetation). Yet this ignorance just highlights the hubris of the European view. It didn't matter to them what the real characteristics of the country were, because the best form of settlement could be determined a priori. (I don't know anything about the author of the ten-state map, but Edward Gibbon Wakefield had never even set foot in Australia when he created the plan for settling South Australia.)

Stentor Danielson, 12:07, |

From Aristotle to Rousseau via Wilderness

Philosophers' arguments for the preservation of nature often turn on the Aristotelian distinction between natural objects and artifacts. Wilderness is more valuable than human-altered landscapes because it exists on its own terms, whereas the meaning of an artifact is imposed on it by humans. Some proponents of this line of thinking go so far as to say that domesticated animals are so shaped by humans that they're of no more worth than a hammer or paper cutter.

There are various problems with this school of argument. The most commonly noted is its use of a human-nature dualism, in which nature is a holistic system and (non-Noble-Savage) humans are inevitably exogenous interferers who can only damage (never sustain, improve, or productively provoke) the course of nature. Less often noted is the flawed analysis of artefacts that the argument depends on. On the one hand, artifact-making is a process of alteration, not creatio ex nihilo, so any artefact is a product both of its human* creator but also of the cooperation and resistance of the chunk of nature that the creator took as his or her material -- after all, there's a reason we bred dogs from wolves, not from fish. Further, there is no reason to think that the creator's purposes bind anyone else's evaluation or the object. I think that existentialism is correct in holding that objective essences can only be self-defined (note that this would not rule out "autopoietic" defenses of nature preservation, in which natural entities, like human individuals, are self-defining systems -- though I disagree with autopoietic arguments on other grounds).

Also problematic is the anti-artifact perservationist view of human-to-human relationships. Preservationists of this stripe, who clearly count humans as non-artefacts, seem to be committed to taking one or the other sociologically indefensible extreme on the spectrum of liberal to communitarian views of humanity. At the communitarian pole, "humanity" can be concieved of as a single entity with shared will and purposes. At the liberal pole, each individual is a presocial atom that can be in conflict with others over the use of nature but whose essence is independent of interactions with others. Either of these positions would deny the ability of humans to be artifacts -- for communitarians because the only possible purposeful shaping of humanity would be self-shaping (since humanity is the only shaper), and for liberals because individuals cannot be shaped by anything.

But of course neither of those extreme poles is realistic. Humans are shaped by other humans, both physically and mentally. This shaping is an inevitable consequence of growing up and living socially, not just a process that occurs in cases of oppression. Human beings are, on the preservationist argument at issue, just as artifactual as humanized landscapes. Thus holding to the Aristotelian analysis of artefacts seems to imply a need to return to a Rousseauian state of nature. In Rousseau's original state of nature (unlike Hobbes' more famous vision), humans are spread thinly enough over the land that they never interfere with one another (much less with nature), living lives that are solitary and hence free of shaping by others. Or we might be led the other way to Rousseau's ultra-communitarian ideal for a society too large to remain in a state of nature: a republic guided by the "will of all" that harmonizes people and hence makes all shaping of humans into collective self-shaping.

*Or in a few cases, animal.

Stentor Danielson, 03:59, |

5.6.07

Recognizing The Limits Of Your Cultural Appropriation

Kevin's recent post on the ethics of cultural appropriation reminded me that I've had a post on the subject kicking around in my head for a while that I ought to get written down. The lefist position holds that cultural borrowing is OK as long as it's respectful of the originating culture. This respect means not damaging the originating culture through your appropriation, and acknowledging the authority of the originators. As Kevin puts it:

You can be white and into Hip Hop, but if you don�t know about the Last Poets or Kool Herc, if mentioning the Zulu Nation leaves you with a blank stare, I�m questioning you. Dressing a certain way and talking like you�re a so-called gangsta or whatever you imagine Black folks talk like means nothing.

While I agree with this view, I can't help feeling it's a bit one-sided. The one-sidedness may come from the paradigm (and most harmful) case of cultural appropriation being the white kid who's "really into" a certain other culture and imagines that donning a bowldlerized version of the superficial trappings of it makes him cool. By "questioning" a person like that, Kevin would expose his shallowness and point him in the direction of achieving his stated goal (partaking of whatever culture) in a more appropriate way.

This standard leftist response basically says "if you want to be into this culture, you have to be really authentically into it." I'm made a bit uncomfortable by the all-or-nothing implications that this outlook could take on, and the sense in some statements of the leftist position (albeit not Kevin's) that all of the parts of a culture are inseparably welded together such that they can only be partaken of in their original authentic context.

So let's take the example of the white hip hop fan in a different direction. I don't usually listen to hip hop, but I may someday happen to stumble across a hip hop song that for whatever reason does it for me. Since I'm not into hip hop, I would not be willing to expend the time and effort to listen to all of the important artists and learn all of the history so as to have the full context in which to place the one song. But with only the perspective in Kevin's quote above, that seems to be my choice -- get totally and authentically into hip hop, or stick strictly to indie rock*.

The "other side" to respectful cultural appropriation, it seems to me, would be cultural appropriation that acknowledges its limits. I can like that one song, buy the album, and listen to it over and over. But I have to be clear, with myself and others, the shallow level at which I've done the appropriation. I can't claim to be a "hip hop fan," or that liking that song is a bulwark against racism, or that I'm somehow closer to people who are genuinely part of the culture that song comes from. I have to accept that there are levels of appreciation of the song that are closed to me as long as I'm unwilling to get deeper into hip hop. In short, I can be inauthentic as long as I know how inauthentic I am and I present that inauthenticity honestly to others.

As someone who's in no position to be a victim of inappropriate cultural appropriation, I may be off base -- maybe there isn't any way to pull off this other side of the coin in a way that's truly respectful of the source culture. But I self-interestedly hope there is, if only to excuse me for creating Koftas Salvadore�as (which I sometimes tell myself is actually the whitest dish in my reportoire, because it's made via the traditional white techniques of crudely imitating the superficially interesting aspects of other cultures and throwing it all together in a bland mix).

* I don't actually know much about the history and full scope of indie rock either, but I've arguably imbibed all of the relevant cultural orientations just by being a middle class white person.

Stentor Danielson, 20:24, |

4.6.07

Voting Rights For Felons

It seems that the ACLU is suing Arizona because the state's felon disenfranchisement laws are excessively strict, impacting not just "common law" felons like murderers and rapists, but also "raar we get tough on crime" felons like nonviolent drug offenders and people who fail to pay court fees.

The responses to this development by commenters on the AZ Republic's site fall into three categories (all negative, of course):

1. Oh noes teh illegal immigants!!one! This doesn't actually have anything to do with felon disenfranchisement, but there's some sort of rule that every comment thread on the Republic's site -- whether the story be about Iraq, light rail, or Paris Hilton -- be 50% rants about immigration.

2. They knew they were losing the right to vote when they committed their crime. The problem with this response is that it proves too much. Any punishment could be justified this way, and thus we're left without any standards by which we can argue for or against a sentencing law. Death penalty for a parking violation? Sorry buddy, you knew that was the punishment when you decided not to move your car on street-sweeping day. At most, this principle might be applied to block judicial review -- there may be reasons why a punishment is more or less suited to a particular crime, but the court's job is not to question those policy judgments. However, commenters using this argument are not intending a procedural argument about the scope of the court's power independent of their policy preferences, but rather they clearly intend it as a substantive justification of the policy.

3. What if we let child molesters vote and they vote for legalizing pedophilia? Technically this argument is inapplicable to the ACLU's suit, which recognizes that serious felonies like child molestation may constitutionally be grounds for taking away the right to vote. Presumably these people are not deathly afraid of enabling a huge court-fees-reduction voting bloc. But it's legitimate to talk about the larger policy question (like I did in the previous paragraph!), on which many of us favor re-enfranchising all felons, so we should look at why this argument is wrong on the merits. It basically boils down to a position that people shouldn't be allowed to vote if we think there's a good chance they'll vote for the wrong thing. In this sense it's similar to conservative proposals for taking the vote away from DC residents or people on welfare because they'd have an incentive to vote for bigger government.

There is some room in designing a democratic system for procedurally promoting competence and the "right results," for example through mechanisms that promote deliberation, disenfranchising young children, and constitutional principles (like those the ACLU is appealing to) that are harder to change or overrule than ordinary laws. However, it is contradictory to the idea of democracy to prejudge the outcomes by disenfranchising people because they will vote the wrong way. If we're going to limit the voting public like that, why have voting in the first place?

The right to vote is not rooted in the likelihood that you'll tick the right box. It's rooted in the moral right to have a say in the conditions and circumstances that affect your own life, which is in turn rooted in respect for you as a distinct sentient being. Your sentience is not compromised by committing a crime or having wrong preferences, so neither should your right to vote.

Stentor Danielson, 12:06, |

3.6.07

Federalism

Is there anybody in this country who actually has a consistent position on federalism? I had no sooner finished reading this Scott Lemiuex post making the usual points about most conservatives' hypocrisy in citing federalism as a reason to oppose civil rights laws, when I came upon JMG at Grist calling the federal government "totalitarian" for wanting to override state and local GMO bans. Maybe we need to just admit that we all basically care about substantive policy outcomes, and so it's fine for the feds to take charge if and only if they're doing so in the service of substantively good policies. It doesn't sound very noble, but at least it's true.

Stentor Danielson, 12:05, |