Redeeming Value

The elections in the States are mostly decided, now, with Patty Murray having locked up Washington and clearing up some of that unsettling picture: we have, as a nation, shifted the balance of (especially financial) power in government to a party which seems to have no platform. I do know what their platform isn't, but a lot of stuff isn't. Like Louis C.K. would advise, "Some things are, and some things are not. Because you can't have 'everything is'--then, nothing wouldn't be. You'd have giant ants in top hats, tap dancing, all sort of crazy shit." And as a result of what we now don't know anything about, I have discovered something.

First, what we do know. Most clearly, we do know that we have elected three new congressmen who are categorically opposed to abortion, and one in particular from Kentucky, who is against it even in the case of the mother's life being compromised. I don't agree with it, not least of all because it's logically inconsistent--if you're for small government and for government charge over women's right to choose, your brain is either non-functioning, or you just don't like women very much, or you're religious, which fervently compels you to both. And speaking of inconsistency--and incompleteness, while we're at it--we know that there is a huge groundswell--a thing whose type I quite like--which has an aim that I very much do not, to the point of being scared of it. This is one of the principle points I am planning to come to in a later post, concerning the Contract from America. One pervasive theme that seems to exist in a lot of the rhetoric I read or see indicates that we, as a nation, are falling away from both deontological ethics and empirically-based utilitarian ethics, and we are starting to embrace a virtue-based system of ethics. By no means is this switch embodied by one part and not by another; nearly everyone with a microphone or under a spotlight seems to be guilty of this, and the only variance is the degree to which those ethics are supportable a priori or, which is more convincing in government, by way of precious evidence. This is deeply concerning to me; virtue ethics are a turret whose gunman does not require training to operate it.

When you embrace the fundamental truth of virtue ethics, that intrinsic and instrumental value are relative and individually determined, you necessarily trust everyone to make his or her own judgements about the common good and about the production of happiness against a rubric that you admit does not exist. In other words, you could equally defend selfishness and charity, and you can do either one as often and as vibrantly as you feel is appropriate. The kickback, and really the only check against being inconsistent or heinous, is that people eventually just stop hanging out with you, if you are horrible. But what if everyone behaves this way? Where is the check? And how can you tell who is more horrible, if that is all you are used to; or you are given a choice between equally vapid, detrimental options; or you are too ignorant to know the difference between horrible and nourishing? If you refuse to outline a cogent and consistent moral outline, as with deontology, then you lose even an attempt at rigidity or predictability. If you refuse utilitarianism, you admit that past evidence is not sufficient to persuade you that some action or attitude or stance is, or can be, more likely to cause happiness in people than another. And, having shrugged off those two structures, you embrace the whirlwind of relativism which has snapped up virtue ethics, and which can drop that system on its head, in a field a thousand miles away from where it was standing seconds earlier. All the systems have their flaws, and I have written a handful of papers on these; but I don't understand why, when the consequences of the decisions made by our politicians routinely govern our air, our bodies, our privacy, and our futures, we would so quickly abandon the idea that predictability is precious. It seems that we would rather vote for who we think a person is, and we want to leave behind what a person does and why a person chooses what he does.

I am confused by almost every politician who exists, because it seems as though they are either bad at thinking, bad at empathizing, or bad at feeling shame. To be worse is to be all three, and therefore to be the vast majority of suited grinners who we would see in newspapers, if we read them enough to know that you are doing us a disservice even by shaking our hands. I am confused by the people who are allowed to vote in our country, because of exit poll data and because of quotes in media. I am confused by priorities inculcated by most adults, in most states of the union, most of the time. I feel as if my future, or at least my satisfaction with it--my sense of confidence--is standing in front of a pillbox, and I am already looking down at my chest, touching the tear in my scorching jacket, knees weak and teetering, breathing smoke.

A Heartbreaking Work

The decision which was made on May 26th by the California Supreme Court was in every way a concussion to the hope that I have for my future. The decision to uphold Proposition 8, passed in November of last year by a 5% margin, was extremely divisive. I can remember the intense despair that many of my friends and I felt, not because it hampered our ability to marry, but because it spoke so poorly of the tolerance common to the meagerly rational electorate. My view of that degree of hateful discrimination was, as it is ever more, simply this: I cannot bear the thought that so many people who are so bad at thinking are given so much power.

For me, ethical decisions are almost entirely logical processes which, while frequently stressing because of their ability to produce several rationally supported answers, are at the very least justified, arguable on some basis common to opponents, and amenable to scrutiny and revision. I will revisit this point often in this blog entry, in the debates which will inevitably follow it, and indeed throughout my life, owing to the maddening insistence of a worldview that almost any pain is a better option than intellectual numbness. The first part of my criticism stems from the way that people voted on the initial ballot; it is an issue of predictability. Deplorably, the voter data speaks volumes about the way in which lifestyle, not logic, informs the way that people vote.* I thought that in the supreme court, a body whose title trumpets the gravity of its purpose, there must be a tendency to get it right. In other words, I do not have confidence that any random majority will choose the right thing most of the time, but I do hope that a trained and rigorous council of experts will do just that. Today, that sentiment is proved worthless.

Briefly, for those of you who have not had time to read the public content the 6-1 majority decision, or about any of the defenses for either side, here is an unbiased recapitulation of the reason that the appeal was denied. After Proposition 8 was passed, the opponents to the proposition alleged that the vote amounted to a revision, which necessitates that two-thirds of the legislature rule in favor of its ratification. The corollary of this argument is that the law which would be enacted as a result of passing Proposition 8 is not simply an amendment to the state constitution, and therefore not available to the public to decide based on opinion. It is inaccurate, although understandable given the intense frustration prompted by the CASC decision, to suggest that the court ruled that a ban on same-sex marriages is constitutional. In fact, they have done the opposite of this only last year, whereupon over 18,000 same-sex couples were legally married. Rather, the CASC ruled first, in 2008, that marriage should extend to same-sex couples, and has ruled now, in 2009, that the public does indeed have a right to vote that it wants an amendment to the state constitution which would disallow this sort of union. Attorney General Jerry Brown also asserted in his appeal that the proposition would violate a Californian citizen's right to privacy, and that it rescind an inalienable right. The CASC flatly denied both of these appeals, stating simply: "No authority supports the attorney general's claim."

I say categorically that if you have voted in favor of Proposition 8, if you do favor its sentiment, or if you support the efforts of anti-appeal campaigns in that vein, I have an overwhelming and unmatched disdain for your position. There are many opinion-related matters in a wide variety of fields in which I may oppose a certain view in the argument for which I can see some sort of merit. That is to say, it is absolutely the case that I have disagreements with people, but I can almost always see that my opponent has some reasoning. Gay marriage is one instance which is not governed by this general rule of understanding. In my research of the initial proposition and of the recent court decision, I have encountered dozens of criticisms of gay marriage and of the position supporting gay marriage. Every tiny word of it is nonsense, and wholly unsupportable by any mind with the slightest portion of decency, modesty, or honesty. Not only do I firmly revile the desire to ban gay marriage, but I can see absolutely no evidence to support the assertion that is it either ethically supportable or utilitarian. The anti-gay marriage position is small, it is disgusting, and it embarrasses me every last second that it is allowed to be propagated.

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*According to the raw data collected and aggregated by the Sacramento Bee following the poll results, those most keen to vote to restrict the legality of gay marriage were: Republican or conservative (82/85%), black (70%) or Hispanic (53%), Protestant (65%), Catholic (64%), a high school graduate (56%), older than 30 (55% for voters 30-44; 54% for voters 45-64; and 61% for voters 65 and older), gun owners (62%), supportive of the war in Iraq (85%), and supportive of Bush's policies and presidency (86%). According to the same data, those who voted to support the gay right to marriage were: registered Democrats, independents, or liberals (64/54/78%), white or Asian (51%), non-religious (90%), and post-graduate students (60%). Interestingly, 61% of the people who voted YES on Proposition 8 also said that race was a factor for their vote in the Presidential election.

Broken Wheel

"Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives."
Chuck Palahniuk

About two weeks ago, my knee betrayed me. I have no job, and I have no dependable schedule, so I am clothed in the evils of idleness. I do nothing all day which acts as evidence that I have existed that day. I make sandwiches, I ride my bike, I watch and listen to podcast debates, and I do one-legged pushups on the floor of a cramped bedroom. In the case that I had entered a time machine and I was concerned about irreversibly altering the future by polluting the past, this is the sort of life I would have to life in order to make sure that I affect nothing. Twelve days whipped by like the leaves of a flipbook, and I have made nothing with them. I hope that I do not have to experience this fate, but if it happens that I am one day lain in bed and around me are gathered the people I love, it is possible that I will look back on days like these have been and think to myself, there is no limit to what I would give to have those days back for the doing. I should crumple up the time I waste and shoot it at the wire basket next to my desk, like so much paper that is issued from the hands of writers who are obsessed with--and constantly motivated by--attempting to produce things of merit. I am often one of these; I have not been, recently, and my mood has soured noteably as a consequence.

For the emotional price I have paid by way of this lassitude, I have accrued quite a bit intellectually. I have watched or listened to something north of 20 debates and lectures, mostly revolving around the topics of religion, international human rights policy, or freedom of speech and press. I wish I could record the massive amount of thinking that I've done about these topics as a result of the impressive discourse, but sometimes the density of the material, combined with my poor organizational skills when I'm so furious with ideas, makes it impossible to summon order, especially among the interlacing topics. Here is a very brief list of the blogs which could come as a result of my only best use of time during my convalesence. My hope is that I will be able to turn this attrocious negative into something of a positive and productive experience, although my mood tonight, which is typical of how it has been most of the week, usually fosters either vitriol which I am sad to have thought or slop which I am embarrassed to have written. Intellectually and emotionally, then, it is obvious that I have good reason to resolve both my attitude and my body, but both of them are slow-going and neither mechanism cares much about my preference for not being ill.

1. Something comprehensive about my view on the role of religion in the world. This will easily be several essays, both perscriptive and descriptive. Specific topics needs to include dogmatism of any kind, the role and import of conversation, and the stricture that religion places around the neck of the global struggle to establish and ensure human rights. In each of these instances, I'm not sure that I can manage to reduce away the terrible fear I have about the way in which history will judge the time in which I lived.

2. Something about the terrible legacy of quarreling and antagonism beset upon us by the last administration, and the events that took place in its duration. I cannot listen to a single news telecast or talking heads show anymore without wondering what percentage of the truth I'm hearing. I very regularly hear two people say opposite things about the same event or person, so I believe there is one of two things happening. Either one or both of the people is wrong, or one or both of the people is lying. In either case, the quality and quantity of information to which I have access is depressing; the horrid clumsiness of intellectual pursuit confounds me every single day of my too short life. Should I have to constantly figure out whether or not I am receiving the truth, and how much of it? How can there be partisan news? Why can I not rely on something to just relate one small set of facts in a row? Nothing could be goddamned easier than this, and none of you will do it: you must taint everything. Well this is the world we have, because of it.

3. A short story I am working on about a man whose birth date had been confused.

4. A social contract theory for backpackers.

5. There is a Tennessee Williams quote that goes like this: "Why do I write? Because I found life to be unsatisfactory." So, something about that.

6. One of my primary historical interests, and political interests for that matter, is revolution. I have begun working on a short essay, informed by the ideology present in the entry about Dublin, that revolution must be non-violent in order to be successful.


Oh, to be able to travel again.

Morality in the Modern Communitarian Archetype

The thrust of communitarianism, as I understand it, is the assessment that we are no longer a nation-wide community, but rather we identify more closely with smaller communities based on some shared human quality, such as an ethical standpoint, pop culture appetite, linguistic distinction, and so on. Although the idea for this entry finds its genesis in a plenary session given by Michael Daxner, I have heard an identical sentiment very often in the States, and in a disturbingly increasing frequency: one man has no right to judge another, at least in part because the first does not and cannot know the circumstances of the other. I assume that in order to give the argument another figment of support, there is a tangential assertion that it is not proper or suitable for one person to judge another because that is not the charge of humans within a community or between communities. Neither of these claims holds any logical weight, not least of all because the people who hold the belief are necessarily all-purpose dunces, and I will seek to dissolve both of them with stark and abrasive force. Daxner raised several brilliant points, well-measured and finely conceived, which linked the idea of communitarianism to the practice of civil disobedience, examined the nature of morality as rooted in our self-consciousness, and then constructed a framework by which we could evaluate the legitimacy of a world court. Ubiquitous in his lecture were the themes of membership, responsibility, and judgement, which will likewise be echoed throughout this reflection.

One of the vicious dangers of communitarianism is that a system of checks is rendered execrable and, in some way, an unwelcome moral imposition. If communities are allowed to establish their own versions of morality and of law, two constructs whose differences I will attempt to outline presently, then it would be difficult to moderate which system of thought prevails in a community, and to determine how efficient and fair is that mode of action which punishes infractions. Indeed this is the crux of communitarianism, which forces a clumsy respect between communities, and more, a tacit permission for each to govern itself, based on internal laws and customs. This concept seems to be grossly incomplete, in two major ways, which confound the mind for their ignorance of the inclusions requisite to complex societies. First, communitarianism fails to acknowledge, and indeed plainly rejects the possibility of objective morality, even in cases which relate to basic efficiency. Secondly, because of the difficulty inherent in defining the boundaries--and thus the constituents--of a given community, communitarianism is a riddle whose amorphism augments the grasp of the powerful and striates the necks of the meek. It seems that if a community is defined too broadly, that is, if a community is based on something so broad as racial background but then contains several different and oppositional political ideologies, it would be impossible for every group to feel as if has a stake in leadership; the opportunity for alienation and subjugation based on ideological disagreement is obviously present, and given the non-interventionism implicit in communitarianism, that subjugation would have to be addressed internally. In simpler words, for all the cultural safety and heterogeneity that communitarianism provides, it likewise confounds the effort to assure intra-communal equality. Objectivism thus destroyed and disregarded, control is also lost, and balance is become dust.