Keeping David Brooks Honest

David Brooks is the only of the New York Times columnists other than the excellent Krugman that I read with any regularity.  He’s been called, with some merit, the “thinking man’s conservative”.

Brooks occasionally produces good points, and occasionally writes a real whopper of a column.  Today was such a day.  In today’s column, he started off with a gimmicky comparison between two “friends” of his, David Hume, the notorious Scottish skeptic and atheist, and Jeremy Bentham, a utilitarian.

Perhaps it was apparent what the column would be from the start, but it degenerated to its destination even more rapidly than I expected, with it quickly becoming obvious that one of the friends – Hume – was Republicans, and the other – Bentham – was the Democrats.  Bentham has a million razzle-dazzle proposals about how he’s going to make the world a better place… he means well, but he doesn’t comprehend his own ignorance.  Meanwhile, Hume is paralyzed by indecisiveness, not even knowing what wine to order with lunch because he doesn’t know what entree you’ll choose.

Because yeah, Republicans are so indecisive.  Like the Republicans Brooks is comparing Hume to, of course, Hume quickly comes to the conclusion (decision, decisively) that the magic of the free market will solve everything.  On health insurance, he says “Why don’t we just set up insurance exchanges with, say, 12 different competing policies?  We’ll let everybody choose a policy, and we’ll let people keep any money they save.”  That sounds like a pretty specific solution to me.

What’s worse, Brooks is proposing this solution not because he’s really “in the dark” about what will work and what won’t work, he’s proposing it because he thinks that this itself is the solution that will work.  As I said, this is not an agnostic solution, this is a religious devotion to the “magic of the market”, even if it’s a government-created market, that is not different in kind from Democratic technocracy, but is in fact its exact mirror image.

In the end, at least as far as Brooks’s friends are concerned, both Bentham and Hume are utilitarians.  They both want what’s best – profitable, useful, full of utility – for the people, they just disagree on what the best way to get it is… and they disagree on what some of the facts are.  Republicans, not wanting to tackle global warming, prefer to dispute its existence.  (I’ll give this more thought in a coming post, I may be being a bit unfair there…)

Brooks has his own agenda too.  In the end, he uses this alleged difference between Hume and Bentham that he has discovered to argue that Democrats are more susceptible to lobbyists.  He’s got a good point… no Republican has ever taken money from a lobbyist, not one, not ever.  To state more strongly, both parties are exactly the same in this respect, or at least if you’re going to argue that they’re not, give some hard numbers, instead of a crappy analogy that abuses two of the greatest thinkers of recent history, both of whom are probably spinning in their graves over how they are portrayed in this column.

True skepticism is not even knowing if these are the problems we should be tackling.  If you want to see an agnostic throwing his hands up in the air at what government should be up to these days, read my post on Real Big Problems.  Don’t look to Brooks’s “I’ve got your answer right here with all my razzle-dazzle proposals” Hume.  I’m the true ignoramus.  I have no idea what today’s problems are.

Website Review – Lifeforliberty.org

Those visiting Lifeforliberty.org will want to start from the rear, where the breadth and organization of the website is at once visible, although in fairness to its authors, it was meant to be read from the front in a linear fashion; I will suggest quickly clicking through each page to reach the table of contents.

Lifeforliberty.org is a call to action for the implementation of several core libertarian desiderata.  It advocates non-violent protest as a means to achieve these desiderata, providing a brief sketch of how non-violent protest works, what it can hope to achieve, and what level of activism will be necessary to achieve a national impact.  The conclusion is that roughly 250 protesters, over 25 metropolitan areas, could cause sufficient disruption to garner national media attention.  This is predicated on the assumption that only one major highway need by blockaded in each area to create a sufficient disruption.  I am no expert on civil disobedience, so I will note evaluate this.  It is simply Lifeforliberty.org’s goal.

Being a thinker, my interest in Lifeforliberty.org is analytical.  What do these people want, why do they want it, and why have they chosen the means of non-violence as  their means of achieving it?

Lifeforliberty.org wishes its protesters to continue their actions until five demands are met: disassembly of the Federal Reserve, substitution of a national sales tax for a national income tax, enactment of a Constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, enactment of a states’ sovereignty amendment, and enactment of a campaign finance amendment.  Though it will add significantly to the length of this review, I feel it necessary to deal with these demands one by one.

1) The dissolution of the Federal Reserve is an interesting idea.  This has been a pet project of Ron Paul, and many others, for some time.  On a principled level, I am not sure that the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional.  Congress’s old excuse for everything, the interstate commerce clause, appears to justify an organization whose function is to provide stability to the federal economy.  On a practical level, I think that this stability is a desirable thing.  I resent the recent incursions of the Federal Reserve into morally questionable territory, but I do not think it clear that these incursions were a necessary result of the nature of the beast.  After all, these actions were unprecedented, and perhaps with some legal tweaking, they will also be unrepeated.  For those unconvinced of the Federal Reserve’s importance, this link explains its basic functions, while a brief but rigorous excursion into macroeconomics, such as the one provided by Olivier Blanchard, should provide an understanding of why these functions are important.

2) The demand for the repeal of the income tax, and its replacement with a sales tax, makes me hang my head in shame for all libertarians.  While the income tax has become an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of citizens, this is again not the nature of the beast, but a result of Congress’s addiction to social engineering through taxation, and the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to stand up to Congress.  Furthermore, the idea that a national sales tax would not quickly be plagued by every single one of the problems that currently plagues the income tax is naive beyond expression.

3) The enactment of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution is perhaps Lifeforliberty.org’s most intellectually persuasive idea.  While macroeconomists, including the excellent Paul Krugman, often strongly make the case for the critical importance of expansionary fiscal policy – usually entailing massive budget deficits – I think that historically, it remains to be seen that such policy will not ultimately poison every nation that embraces it.  It is not easy for a democracy to elect a leader who promises higher taxes and lower spending, particularly with the old Republican canard – still obsessing the popular imagination – that promises higher revenues through lower taxes.  The macroeconomists appear to have the weight of current history on their side, because even with recent events, public debt as a percentage of GDP has remained relatively stable (look at the graphs on the right).  But it will not necessarily always be so, and some form of legal straitjacket, even if it is less restrictive than the one envisioned by Lifeforliberty.org, is an intriguing idea.  Public debt cannot rise above 100% of GDP anyone?

4) Enactment of states’ sovereignty amendment… I had hope to provide a link for the further explication of this idea, but it does not appear to have much backing in the libertarian, or even states’ rights communities.  Most people are simply in favor of a return to the Tenth Amendment.  Ignoring this minor philosophical difference, I will make a few remarks.  First, it seems to be the opinion of many legal scholars, as exemplified by a recent Harvard panel discussion, that the Constitution, while a very good thing, is not necessarily the pinnacle of good governance.  In particular, a government strictly constructed according to the Constitution may not be able to provide the level of stability and safety that it is necessary for a modern nation to have to survive.  Nonetheless, I personally think that it ought to be considered desirable to have our federal government on a firmer legal footing than the one it is currently on; if the Constitution becomes nothing more than a scrap of paper with antiquated ideas, then the limitations on the powers of our government essentially disappear.  Perhaps amendments to the Constitution are the way to do this, but that a states’ sovereignty amendment will be a panacea is not at all clear to me.

5)  The idea for a campaign finance reform amendment is as naive as the national sales tax, and merits no discussion.  Campaign finance reform itself, of course, merits a serious national discussion.

In short, Lifeforliberty.org makes a variety of demands, some more coherent and interesting than others, but many, at various levels, hopelessly naive.  While I do not wish to spend too much time kicking naive thinkers while they’re down, I must note that occasionally, Lifeforliberty.org’s rhetoric gets the best of it: “None could claim that the implementation of any of these five measure [sic] would bring irreparable harm to our beloved nation, while it has become undeniable that not acting upon these issues has led us upon a [sic] inexorable road to ruin.”  In the first place, I just did deny that we’re on the aforementioned road to ruin, and I’m hardly the most hostile audience these people will encounter.  In the second place, if this statement is true, then this movement should meet with virtually no resistance at all.  Should I start buying canned goods now?

Lifeforliberty.org does contain a couple of interesting ideas.  First, “We shall not cease until ALL of our demands, every last one, has been legally instituted in the full spirit of their intent!”  In short, the composers of Lifeforliberty.org have proposed to gather a group of 250 like-minded people, use these people to lay a stranglehold on our nation, and not to remove their grip until their demands are met.  While they characterize their movement as non-violent, from this perspective, it appears that they are proposing to take the rest of us hostage.  Either they believe their message is totally self-evident and will meet with universal embrace – which is evidently not the case – or they wish to impose their idea of good governance on others by what amounts to force.

The use of such force is the hallmark of a radical ideology.  In a previous post, I discussed that for a radical ideology to be logically coherent, it had to meet three criteria: it had to be of critical importance to the national dialogue, it had to be of immediate importance to the national dialogue, and it had to be obvious to the vast majority immediately upon hearing.  While Lifeforliberty.org effortlessly passes the first criterion, believing their message to be of the utmost importance to the survival of freedom, they present little argument that action is needed tomorrow, next week, or next year – indeed they present no timeline for the expected decay of our great nation – and it seems clear that their message is not manifest to everyone (unless I am exceptionally dense).

What I have advocated here is further discussion, rather than the immediate action that Lifeforliberty.org proposes.  Interestingly, Lifeforliberty.org has an answer for this too: “At this juncture, to hold on to the hope that situations will significantly change within the existing state of affairs goes beyond mere foolish denial and flies into the realm of flagrant irresponsibility.  One must have the courage to relinquish empty hope before one can rightly consider an alternative course of action.”

I found this statement fascinating.  It often does appear to me that our national dialogue is hopelessly corrupt.  The major news organizations appear to cater to twelve-year-olds, the most-listened-to talking heads are irrational bombasts, and good ideas seem to get little circulation.  Am I just wrong?  Is it my evaluation that is skewed, and my dialogue that is corrupt, or is Lifeforliberty.org correct?  Perhaps it is in fact true that mere talking will never solve anything, that the right voices will never be the loudest and most-listen-to.

What is the reason for optimism?  Oddly enough, I think China is the reason for optimism.  In China, the citizens of the free world have the opportunity to witness a brutal, repressive regime, a nation utterly repugnant to all lovers of freedom and humanity, but also a nation of rising power, of economic prestige, and soon, of prosperity and happiness.  In short, China gives the free world the perfect antithesis of all that we hope to be.  In this way, in a dramatic history of peoples more powerful than any voice, perhaps we will discover who we truly wish to be.

On God, America, and Baseball

Today I went to a baseball game.  During the game, I noticed something strange.  As someone who has adored baseball for nearly ten years, it is no longer often that I notice something strange.

For those who are not familiar with the sport, all you need to know is this: at a point late in the game, the “seventh-inning stretch” occurs, an unusually long break in the game where fans stand up, stretch, and sing a song called “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”.

This seventh-inning stretch was no different from most.  I stood up, stretched, belted out my best “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”, and took my seat.  No sooner had I settled back, ready for a good inning of baseball, when the announcer said the following: “Now, please stand up and take off your hats while we sing ‘God Bless America’.”

You can imagine the reaction to such a statement of a devoted, patriotic atheist.  I stood up, marched straight to the announcer’s booth, and proceeded to explain to everyone present that, although the founding fathers were deists, and occasionally referred to a “God” in their writings, America is a state, and as such, is secular.  (By contrast, for theocracies, see churches.)  I explained that we have no bonded religion, and that as a country devoted to freedom for all men, regardless of religious persuasion, we perhaps ought to be particularly careful to avoid overemphasizing God in our cultural traditions.

Actually, I did not do this.  Instead, I thought about how very hard it would be to persuade someone of the truth of what I wished to say.  I thought about how very deeply intertwined a certain kind of patriotism has become with a particular chauvinism for the Christian religion.  Ultimately, what I thought was how it came to be that I was listening to “God Bless America” at a baseball game.

You see, although I’ve not been to a baseball game in quite some time, it did occur to me that this singing of “God Bless America” represented some sort of new tradition.  Specifically, it was a tradition that has grown up in the wake of September 11th, 2001 (confirmed by Wikipedia, which must be true!).  In the wake of September 11th, 2001, the New York Yankees began singing “God Bless America” at all of their baseball games.  In fact, they frequently featured performances by Ronan Tynan, a talented singer with a penchant for performing an “extended” version of the song, which includes this prologue: “When the storm clouds gather / all across the sea, / let us swear allegiance / to a land that’s free. / Let us all be grateful / for our land so fair / as we raise our voices / in a solemn prayer.”

This prologue makes explicit that the form of “God Bless America” is a prayer.  Why is this a problem?  As both an atheist and a patriot, my ordinary reaction to a patriotic reference to God would be to let it slide, as I do every time I handle our money, which has the motto “In God we trust,” engraved upon it.  The reason I could not do so at this baseball game was that I could not escape the suspicion that the singing of this song, this particular song, is a calculated attack upon atheists and liberals.

I cannot escape the suspicion that it is similar to the attack mounted upon liberals and athesists by George Docherty in the famous 1952 sermon that eventually inspired the addition of the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.  Doherty argued that without the words “under God”, the Pledge of Allegiance was indistinguishable from various pledges and oaths of fealty made by citizens and soldiers of any other country.  Ultimately, his arguments inspired Congress to pass a resolution altering the Pledge, on the theory that communists would be unable to recite the new, God-ified Pledge of Allegiance, because they did not believe in God.

In a similar way, I think, the singing of “God Bless America” is calculated to weed out those citizens who are not patriotic enough.  America, it is said, is “one nation under God”, and anyone who disputes any part of this phrase is not with us, but against us.  Anyone, for example, who objects to singing “God Bless America” is not on the side of America, but on the side of the terrorists who attacked her.  Anyone who does not accept the obvious fact that this country is a Christian country ought to leave.

It is a hard argument to answer, because in the wake of September 11th, a large part of the country has come to adopt this as their American narrative.  The jingoism and chauvinism that were so essential to Bush’s war in Iraq have become, to many people, the American tradition.  No amount of principled stands, and no declarations of patriotism will persuade our loyal songsters that atheists, too, love this country, but that they simply wish to sing a different song.  To these people, “God Bless America” is not a song, but the song.

It is unfortunate that it turned out this way, for it was not inevitable.  Take, for example, our real, actual national anthem.  In a mere eight stirring lines, the song recounts the valiant conduct of soldiers who defended the flag under British bombardment.  It ends by identifying America as “the land of the free and the home of the brave”… at once stating our core principle and our inherent obligation to defend that principle.  It does not once mention God or religion.  Why could we not affirm our love for America by singing this song?

I think that the national anthem example is even more telling.  The original poem from which the song was derived is four stanzas long, and the last stanza is essentially a glorification of God for the protection he has given our nation.  What is telling is that at some time in our history, sober and tolerant enough minds prevailed that this stanza was not chosen to unite the nation.  Rather, the first, secular stanza was chosen, and all Americans could sing it with a clear conscience.

This pattern, could, of course, have been followed again.  We could have chosen virtually any other patriotic song… “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”, “America, the Beautiful”… all, if you go enough verses, are littered with old references to God, but at least, for cripesake, none of them is a prayer, and at least none have, as their explicit theme, an exhortation to God to bless our country.  Such a theme could not be more irrelevant to an atheist.  But no, I cannot help but think that somewhere, in the caverns of his bitter heart, the man who started our newest tradition knew that the song he had chosen fit perfectly into the new, jingoistic, exclusivistic creed that our country was to follow.

Ultimately, of course, it does not matter.  The singing of “God Bless America” will become, to most, a thing for which the motions are gone through, but little significance is attached.  The references to God will becomes as incidental as those on our money, and another religious tradition will be engraved in our national subconscious.

As I said, the sort of patriotism that this embodies, a combination of meritorious love for country and lamentable xenophobia for all things other, is a difficult thing to contest.  Questioning the existence of God, or his relevance, in the first place, cannot be done without condescension, and in the second place, is likely to arouse deep existential uneasiness in the questioned.  For both these reasons, the argument immediately descends to an argument between the Self and the Other.  No questioning of any of the core values is permitted, and to question one is to deny the others; to question God is to hate America.

The atheists’ only hope to liberate America from this morass is not to contest it directly, but to create a new American narrative.  Such an American narrative must be compelling, inspiring, beautiful, and secular.  Furthermore, it must be deeply grounded in our patriotic traditions.  Only by creating and expounding such a narrative, allowing it to expand and replace other narratives, can the atheist hope to win the American mind.

On Bill O’Reilly and Pedophiles

This will be my first and last post on this subject.  It is not written in defense of pedophiles, but against those who attack them.  I have noticed over the last decade a great deal of venom toward pedophiles, especially in law-making bodies.  When a legislator wants to appear tough on crime, which is easier: to slap an extra life sentence onto convicted pedophiles, or to put another 100 cops on the street?

It’s just like the thousand other powerless minorities that legislatures love to use or abuse to slake the thirst of the rest of us.  Need to fund that barrel of pork for your favorite town?  Which is easier, to raise the income tax a quarter of a hundredth of a percent, or to slap another $5 per pack onto the cost of cigarettes?

The venom does not just serve legislators, though.  It also serves those who use pedophilia as a “gateway” crime.  Bill O’Reilly is an example of this type.  He will revile pedophiles in an effort to legitimize his “fair and balanced” perspective.  If the man’s beating up on pedophiles, he must be good, right?  If that good guy over there who hates pedophiles also hates liberals, liberals must be as bad as pedophiles, right?  These types will also move from pedophilia on to pot-smoking and abortion, complaining that all these law-breakers should be shot.

Finally, there’s the question of what good Bill O’Reilly’s venom does to the victims of pedophiles.  If Bill O’Reilly incites a thousand nutjobs to clamor for a law to be passed that adds another life sentence onto pedophile terms, is there any evidence that that penalty will act as a significant deterrent to these crimes?

And when Bill O’Reilly says, “A pedophile steals a young girl’s soul,” what effect does this have on pedophile victims?  Does it smooth their tortured attempts at a normal life, or does it increase the stigma attached to what has been done to them, does it distance these “soulless” victims from the rest of us?  Does it perhaps even increase the trauma attached to the event itself, does it on top of the distortion of normal social and romantic relations that comes with pedophilia add a layer of fear and horror to the reflections that come later in life?  Does the characterization of a pedophile’s victim as soulless make it easier or harder for that victim to share what has happened with someone they love?  Does the castigation and contempt cast on pedophiles uplift their victims, or make them seem even more pathetic, for having been used by such contemptible worms?