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.

Ears

First, before I lay into my actual topic, I encourage everyone to take a long look at the blog maintained by my good friend Kyle. He has assembled a savant-status review of the music released in 2008, which can be found here, and his proper blog homepage can be found just to the left: it is appropriately titled "Kyle's Grand Scale of Debauchery". Many congratulations to him for such a stellar and comprehensive narrative, and an encyclopedic knowledge about this medium.

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It has struck me--and here I mean that, although it has always been a sensation that has antagonized me, I have recently began to experience and internalize a sort of visceral disgust--that there are a very few people who are in the public view who are interested in acting in accordance with the advancement of the quality of humankind. It makes me double-over, the intense frivolity that arches over even very serious issues, such as the ongoing violence in the Gaza Strip. I have only just graduated with an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and in accordance with that meager status, I am not able to affect a great deal of action: as an individual and single author, I simply have no civic power. A reader might now think it prudent to start a response to this entry, leading in with the feeble comfort, yes, you do have power, for everyone who has a voice has power. But I am embarrassed and something close to heartbroken when I watch television news, or more broadly, any format which allows for people to give their opinion on world affairs or current events and conditions. The amount of triviality, or poor research, or feeble logic, or adulterous ideological barking that fills a segment is inarguably devastating to the public good.

One of the more startling things about these kinds of programs is the prediliction of both the guests and the hosts to know nothing and think badly, but speak loudly. I am not sure how it is that we can allow for the course of discourse to be inexorably linked to the whim of whomsoever controls the largest media conglomerate. It is not the hegemonic power that concerns me, it is the seeming destiny of those powers to pervert truths in order to advance certain viewpoints which is most disturbing, or more exactly, the drive to stimulate in the viewing audience a specific, boisterous reaction; the shows are inflammatory to an audience that cannot decide for itself, and grotesque to an audience that can: they are vacuous. With the broad scale of power that primetime news and talk shows seem to have over the majority opinion, or at least the potential sway that they are permitted, it seems that a shared goal of these organizations should rightly be to infuse some sort of message aimed at correction of a problem.

Ought not we each to seek solutions, instead of create noise for its own sake? One's own opinion--or worse, serving as a proxy for another's opinion--serves no intrinsic purpose, and satisfies no glaring need: it occupies space in our social narrative, but provides nothing in the way of quality. It is clutter. When one does not position himself rightly, and instead he filabusters and exclaims and postures, he objectively discredits his own cause; subjectively, though, he often becomes more appealing because of the lazy intellect and poor decision-making of the American dullard. In other words, two things may happen that make the fool appear amicable, and worse, intelligent: his audience may identify with or be tricked by his raucous language, and thus be set at ease that he has their interests in mind; or, he may, in all of his yattering, shut out the voice of the reasoned speaker, or otherwise turn off the appetite of the audience towards rationality, patience, and keenness. Anti-intellectualism in America is pervasive, and it is self-fecundate--for when all that is offered in the way of information is blind lauding of an ideology as a construct, and not analysis for its specific products, the world and the complex issues it contains become polarized.  Thus conceived, all one must do is pick either side, and then curse the other for its vices, never minding a careful reflection about his confederates or about problems that still exist in the world; when a person belongs to a side, that identity is enough to encourage the fool to feel secure that he is making a difference. There it is, then, the great ideological problem of the 21st century: the idiot is made the prince, and his enemy the scholar is become the bore.