Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja

“Clueless” Meets “Lost in Space”: Will Thomas on “Interstellar” (SPOILERS)

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Will Thomas of The Atlas Society has just written a review of “Interstellar” that is clueless enough to make David Brooks’s commentary on the film seem like sublime wisdom by comparison. Thomas seems to belong to the Ideological Checklist School of Film Criticism, according to which a film’s aesthetic merits are reducible to its satisfaction of or deviation from a fixed and unimaginative set of doctrinal criteria. “Interstellar” seems to score something of a B+ on Thomas’s grading rubric, but the grade itself is perhaps of less interest here than the rubric.

“Interstellar,” we’re told, “shouts to the world that Americans should be achievers, but then it steals from them the ability to succeed.” There we have it, in one slovenly sentence: a film must have an ideological purpose; it must shout that purpose; if it features Americans, it must be shouting to the world about America; and its supposed aesthetic failings must be described as an offense against the Holy Grail of political economy, property. From a start this reductive and philistine, Thomas leaves himself only one direction to travel in aesthetic space—down. And down the aesthetic wormhole he goes. What follows are a few unexceptional (and unenlightening) paragraphs of commentary and plot summary. And then we get to “Interstellar film values.” Get out your checklist.

“Interstellar cheers for values an Objectivist can love,” we’re told. Is the purpose of art to function as cheerleader for moral or political values? Thomas’s avatar Ayn Rand didn’t think so: “Art is not the ‘handmaiden’ of morality,” she wrote, “its basic purpose is not to educate, to reform or to advocate anything” (The Romantic Manifesto, p. 22). I’d infer that its basic purpose is not to “cheer,” either, but I don’t expect that lesson to have been internalized by the people responsible for “Atlas Shrugged Part 3.”

So what does the film “cheer” for? I have to quote directly here:

Interstellar cheers for values an Objectivist can love. The film several times explicitly and approving quotes Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night,” with its refrain “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” In this and other ways, the film thus directly says that we should strive to survive, know, achieve, and live.

This is a tragic-comic interpretation of Dylan Thomas’s poem. The lines in question do not “directly say that we should strive, know, achieve, and live.” They don’t implicitly say that, either. They’re an irrational rebellion against death, and contrary to Will Thomas, that is how they’re depicted in the film. The character who repeatedly utters the Dylan Thomas lines lives an outwardly successful but actually aimless life in rebellion against the reality of death: he deceives people, drives them to insanity, and sacrifices them to a lunatic quest that masquerades as an act of striving, knowledge, achievement, and life, but isn’t one. It’s instructive that Will Thomas hasn’t grasped that it is a masquerade. I’d like to think that movement-Objectivists can still cheer for or at least discern the difference between achievement and its counterfeit, but optimism sometimes gets the best of us.

Death is what Ayn Rand calls a “metaphysical given,” and her view of such givens is that wholehearted acceptance of their reality is required for the serenity proper to human life: “To rebel against the metaphysically given is to engage in a futile attempt to negate existence” (Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 37). That’s exactly what the character in question does. “[W]hen no action is possible, one must accept nature serenely” (PWNI, p. 43, my emphasis). “Raging into the night” is anything but serene, and is the exact opposite of what Rand was prescribing. To get this wrong is to get both Rand and the universe wrong. But leave that to the self-appointed Objectivist “experts” at The Atlas Society.

So what does the film get wrong, according to our inquisitor?

But here’s the thing: for all their striving, the heroes are incapable of succeeding on their own. Instead, a deus-ex-machina rescue saves them at the crucial junctures. Cooper has no plan to fly again before a strange message delivered by gravitational fluctuations in some dust directs him to NASA’s secret project. And there would be no NASA project without the wormhole that someone (a being from the 5th—physical—dimension?) has plonked there out by Saturn. And this feature carries over into the climax of the film. The heroes cope and deal as best they can with what opportunity gives them, but we see that they could not solve their problems themselves.

That is a spiritually enervating betrayal of the film’s key themes. It says, in effect, “Pray, pray, for someone else to set things right.”

Suppose that I denied that I could solve all of my problems all by myself all the time—in the ridiculous sense of never relying on anyone besides me for help, and never conceding that the solution of a problem extended beyond my self-enclosed resources at a given time. Would that prove that I was advocating a resort to prayer, or would it simply suggest recognition of an obvious fact about the nature of human life—that we sometimes cannot solve our own problems in the envisioned way? Not a difficult question to answer, unless you’re in the grips of an ideologically-inspired fantasy that commands you to forswear the assistance of others, and then commands you to think ill of those who ask for it. Never mind that given the actual structure of the actual world we live in, the first group will actually solve the problems they confront, and the latter group will not. People in the grips of fantasies don’t notice things like that.

Perhaps that is why Thomas fails to notice that his summary of the film contradicts what actually happens in it. In fact, the heroes do “solve their problems themselves” in the relevant sense of that phrase. The small group of astronauts who blast off for the wormhole do not, it’s true, leap into space like Team America, fly to the wormhole, and fashion some facile derring-do technological “solution” to “the problem,” as you’d expect, say, in a very long re-run of Macgyver. But they do solve the problems they face in a way that entitles them to full credit for having done so, regardless of the help they seek: they get credit for seeking it, and for figuring out how to use it to their advantage, no mean feat under the circumstances.

Incidentally, I don’t mean to be denying that there are facile derring-do solutions in the film. There are some of those, too. But that only proves my point: a depiction of two sets of achievements can hardly be construed as an attack on achievement.  See the film for yourself, and you’ll see what I mean.

Far from being a celebration of achievement or reason, Thomas’s claims here are a slap in the face to the characters’ exemplification of precisely those values. What is spiritually enervating is not the film, frankly, but his one-eyed commentary on it.

According to Thomas, “[t]here are other, smaller betrayals of the reason-achievement theme as well.”

The Earth’s crisis, though never fully explained, is put down at least in part to human arrogance and industrial farming. No one seems able to engineer a response to the plagues, nor does anyone appear to be trying. Environmentalists will feel vindicated.

This is just a blatant misdescription of the film. What’s true is that the Earth’s crisis is never fully explained—full stop. It is not “put down to human arrogance and industrial farming.” It is just left unexplained. One character in the film attributes it to human arrogance, but his claims are never confirmed, and the film never suggests that his claims are right (or wrong). (And the film’s protagonist, Cooper, can hardly be called humble.)

It’s true that no one seems able to engineer a response to the plagues, but there is no way to infer from the film that no one has tried to; Thomas’s claim to that effect is sheer confabulation. Anyway, here’s a thought: what if a plague struck and no one was able to engineer a response to it? Thomas seems to imply that the suggestion itself requires some sort of indulgence in irrationality. Really? Why?

Elsewhere in the review, Thomas cheerily concedes the possibility that a spaceship could travel through a gravitational wormhole. Why then reject the possibility that we might lack a feasible engineering response to a plague that struck the planet? We currently have no response to the possibility of an asteroid strike. Does that mean an asteroid couldn’t strike the planet? We currently have no response to the possibility of disasters caused by sudden global warming. Does that mean that no such warming and no such disasters can take place? Can we assume, a priori, that we will have an engineering solution in place when the sun implodes? Bastardized Julian Simon dogmas aside, how could anyone know such a thing? Thomas seems to think that human technology (and by implication reason) can dictate terms to nature, and that a film that refuses this conceit has somehow betrayed reason. I’m afraid that isn’t the way the world actually works. For once the question can be posed without resort to metaphor: what planet is Will Thomas on? (On the topic of catastrophic events and possible responses to them, I highly recommend Richard Posner’s Castastrophe: Risk and Response.)

Thomas continues:

Another theme in the film, repeated at key moments, is that emotions, or at least love, allow us to form connections across space and time: they are lauded as a form of intuitive awareness transcending our three dimensions. In fact, the full arc of the story trades on this insight. When the most scientific people in the universe recur to this idea, the film paints reason as a hollow and insufficient exercise.

What the film is saying about love’s relation to reason is not entirely clear, but precisely because it isn’t clear, it’s susceptible of a more charitable interpretation than Thomas’s. We don’t need to infer that the film “paints reason as a hollow and insufficient exercise,” or that it claims that love displaces reason at all; perhaps the film suggests that reason cannot properly be exercised unless it does so alongside love.

If Thomas had read Ayn Rand with a little more care, he’d realize that in fact, she agrees with what I take to be the film’s account of love, not with his. What is the weapon one needs to fight the enemies of human flourishing? she asks in her 1971 essay, “The Age of Envy.” “For once, it is I who will say that love is the answer—love in the actual meaning of the word….love as a response to values, love of the good for being the good….What fuel can support one’s fire? Love for man at his highest potential” (The New Left, 1975 edition, pp. 185-86). An exercise of reason devoid of love is not an exercise of reason at all.

Keep that passage in mind as you watch the very last scene of “Interstellar.” Then ask yourself who’s gotten the film right. But whatever you do, don’t be dissuaded by Thomas’s ridiculous review from seeing it for yourself.

Postscript, December 9, 2014: This article, “A One-Way Trip to Mars? Many Would Sign Up” in today’s Science Times, is a perfect example of the psychological superficiality of discussions of space exploration and space travel (as alluded to in my discussion with Jurgis Brakas in the comments). Being “scientific” in the narrow, reductive, geeky sense, the article devotes about three columns to discussion of the logistical difficulties of getting a person to Mars, then spends a few incredibly facile paragraphs on what it would be like to live there–i.e., what it would be like to be a Martian.

Yet Mars remains a forbidding, frigid place, with an average temperature of minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit and an unbreathable atmosphere just 1 percent the density of Earth’s and consisting largely of carbon dioxide. Colonists would live in artificial podlike habitats, grow vegetables in greenhouses and get their protein from insects. No pets, sorry. And if you plan on going outside — as you will, often, to repair infrastructure battered by the chronic Martian wind, or to wipe off solar panels encrusted with the ubiquitous Martian dust — you must wear your spacesuit at all times.

In short, a lifetime on Mars would be like a life sentence in an unimaginably lonely, cruel, and dangerous prison. It doesn’t take an expert in mental health to see that an environment like that would be a breeding ground for mental illness or insanity. But apparently such trifling considerations aren’t the fodder for serious discussion in science journalism today: psychology isn’t scientific, so it takes a back seat to discussions of other things. One enthusiast, an engineer, dismisses the psychological issues with a facile cliche: “We’re a species that explores and pushes our boundaries. By exploring our own planet, we’ve developed technology to make our life more comfortable.” He might want to read up a bit on the historiography of exploration on Earth to discover what else happened en route to that destination.  One supposed enthusiast, “planning to get married in September,” is “willing to leave her husband behind should a Mars passport bear her name”–for the rest of her life! Talk about devotion. It’s supposed to be amusing, but is it?

Unsurprisingly, the most profound comment on the whole thing is a side-bar excerpt from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles:

…and the men shuffled forward, only a few at first, a double-score, for most men felt the great illness in them even before the first rocket fired into space. And this disease was called The Loneliness.

Postscript, September 21, 2015: I was gratified to see this Op-Ed in the Times, adding some useful details to the anti-Mars arguments I made in the last postscript.

Stop coughing, stop texting, and shut up: toward a new ethic of concert-going

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I’ve got aesthetics on the brain, which is usually what happens when I’ve got a lot of grading to do. Also known as self-distraction. 

Anyway, here’s an article at the website of WQXR-FM on the violinist Kyung Wha Chung’s recent performance in London, with some ill-tempered comments by yours truly, weighing in on the much-discussed “coughing child controversy.” It’s really just an anti-concert-audiences-today rant, one of my favorite subjects, whether I’m discussing rock or classical audiences. My comment is posted at 4:25 pm, under “Irfan Khawaja from Lodi, New Jersey.”

Happily, the Decorum Martinets seem to be out-commenting the Narcissistic Entitlement Defenders in this conversation. Some of my favorite comments include those of LAP from New Jersey, Glenn, Peter from Rosedale (on Andres Segovia), ilyatrakht, Reindeer Games, CastaDiva from New York, Dariv, Prevum Cor from Mexico City, and Ramona Perez Finkelman from Nyack. But it’s heartening to see lots of others.

We shall overcome.

Roderick Long on “Reverse Racism”

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For obvious reasons, racism and reverse racism are very much on everyone’s minds nowadays. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to blog on those topics right now (or blog on Ferguson); I’m too much in the thick of end-of-semester grading and the like. But Roderick Long has an interesting post on the topic at his blog, to which I’ve offered a bunch of typo-laden comments.

Having thought about the issue over the past few days, I really do disagree with Roderick in some fundamental ways. I don’t think “reverse racism” is a useful or even entirely coherent concept, and don’t think his thought-experiments prove what he takes them to prove. In fact, I don’t think thought-experiments are a particularly helpful way to think about racism in the first place: in my view, something about the subject demands an “ecological” or “in vivo” rather than thought-experimental approach. In other words, the topic demands engagement with the living, breathing complexity of real-live experiences of racism, not with thought-experiments that abstract away from them. I also think that if the topic is racism, as it should be, Roderick’s focus on black-white relations in the U.S. is overly narrow, and problematically distortive of our thinking. It doesn’t even capture race relations in the U.S., much less race relations beyond American borders.

In particular, Roderick’s discussion ignores anti-Semitism altogether, a topic on my mind because I’m at work on a review of Neil Kressel’s “Sons of Pigs and Apes”: Muslim Antisemitism and the Conspiracy of Silence (forthcoming in Reason Papers, February 2015). I agree with parts, and disagree with other parts, of Kressel’s argument, but I think his book does a good job of exposing the defects of what he calls “antisemitism minimization strategies.” Unfortunately, though he doesn’t explicitly discuss antisemitism (because he doesn’t discuss it) I think Roderick’s minimizations of the moral wrongness of “reverse racism” amount, whether wittingly or not, to something like the minimization strategies that Kressel criticizes. Insofar as Roderick can be read as disagreeing with Kressel, I agree with Kressel.

But this all pretty telegraphic, I realize. Blame my day job for that. Back to grading some intensely mediocre papers on aesthetics.

The Politics of Voting: Four Suggestions

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about voting. I have Jason Brennan to thank for having stimulated me to sustained thought on the subject, via his much-acclaimed book, The Ethics of Voting. As I’ve said before, I agree with Brennan’s thesis in a general way, but the more I think about the details of his argument, the less plausible I find them. (I find his arguments for voter disenfranchisement downright hopeless.) Here’s a link to the 2013 Reason Papers symposium on Brennan’s book, and here’s a link to an earlier critique at PoT of Brennan’s account of character-based voting.

I’ll have more to say about Brennan’s arguments as I find the time to write about them. Meanwhile, here are four quick thoughts on voting, three of them relevant to American elections, the fourth to Israeli elections. In each case, it seems to me that the wrong issues are being discussed–when they’re being discussed at all–and that we ought to change the terms of debate. Only the last of the four topics is relevant to Brennan’s work.

(I) Felon Disenfranchisement
There’s been a lot of talk in the past few years about felon disenfranchisement: felons in the U.S. (perhaps elsewhere, but I don’t know) are deprived of the right to vote. Here’s a fairly typical piece from The New York Times criticizing felon disenfranchisement as racist.

I find discussion of this topic confused. There are at least three different issues involved here; each needs to be distinguished from the others and discussed on its own terms.

(1) A first issue is: given an ideal definition of “felony,” and a well-functioning criminal justice system, should felons be permitted to vote, or should they be deprived of that right as an inherent part of their punishment?

My answer is, “they should be deprived of the right to vote.” I endorse a debt-based conception of punishment according to which, when we interact with someone, we owe him or her (at a minimum) respect for their rights. When someone violates those rights, he incurs a debt to the victim–a debt consisting of compensation for the lost value of the exercise of the victim’s right, among many other things. Punishment, in my view, ought to consist of repayment of that debt. If the debt can’t be paid in full–and for a variety of reasons, it may be impossible to do so–offenders can permissibly be deprived of those goods that would count as ill-gotten gains from crime.

Some simple examples: If you rob me, your voting to dispose of my income without having compensated me for the commission of the crime counts as an ill-gotten gain. Since you’re not entitled to such a gain, you can be disenfranchised. If you kidnap me, what you’ve done is illicitly to try to “govern” my actions by brute force. If I survive, you owe me compensation for your trying to rule me in this way. But voting is a case of ruling me, as well. So ruling me by the ballot counts as an ill-gotten gain (or would) until you’ve paid off the debt you incurred by kidnapping me. And so, once again, you can be disenfranchised until you do.

Suppose that the repayment-requirements on such debts are prohibitively high–high enough that they can’t typically be paid in full by anyone, regardless of how wealthy they are. On my view, government should in such cases have the authority to deprive offenders indefinitely of the right to vote. If you (the offender) can’t compensate me (the victim) for what you’ve done to me, you don’t have the right indirectly (i.e., by voting) to decide the disposition of goods that belong to me. And that, in effect, justifies the disenfranchisement policy we currently have. (For a somewhat similar view of punishment, see the work of Daniel McDermott, who defends what he calls a debt-based conception of retributivism. I’m not sure where McDermott stands on felony disenfranchisement, however.)

Suppose now that we think of government, on Lockean grounds, as a kind of mutual-defense pact for the protection of rights. In that case, any attack on the rights of any member of the pact is an attack on the rights of every party to the pact. By implication, a debt owed to the victim is simultaneously a debt owed to every party to the pact. If the debt in question cannot be discharged in full–and if the crime is serious enough, it probably can’t be–then the parties to the pact can permissibly deny the offender access to ill-gotten goods in lieu of full payment of the debt.

This resolves the old problem of the “missing beneficiary.” For example: if you murder me, you incur a debt to me for having done so. Of course, being dead, I’m not around to collect the debt. In that case, you owe a debt to the rights-respecting members of my society–via their agent, government. Now suppose that you can’t pay the debt in full. In that case, they can deprive you of certain categories of goods on my behalf as well as theirs. One good they can deprive you of is the right to vote: after all, your having that right would give you the right to dispose of the income that they have earned while you still owe them compensation for the right you’ve violated. And you’re not entitled to that. (Incidentally, even if I’m physically unavailable to collect a debt for having been murdered or wrongfully killed, I could during my lifetime have set up an escrow account as an insurance policy in the event of my murder/wrongful death. In that case, an offender might still be obliged to compensate me posthumously, with the proceeds going to my heirs or to the state, as my will or lack of one implies.)

Something similar would apply to rape, to assault and battery, to drunk driving, and to plenty of other recognizable felonies. In short, I don’t see why, as long as we define “felony” properly, felons should be allowed to vote. The debts they’ve incurred to the rest of us are sufficiently high that we needn’t worry so much about whether they have the right to govern us, or dispose of our income. They don’t. I don’t mean to suggest that we have no obligations toward them. I just means that access to the ballot isn’t one of them.

(2) Second issue: is the operative definition of “felony” in the U.S. a good one? Does it, on moral grounds, include and exclude the appropriate items?

I’d say: “no” and “no.” This issue is the one that, in my view, actually gives rise to the felon disenfranchisement controversy. The real problem, it seems to me, is that we’ve made felons of people who shouldn’t be felons, and in consequence of that, have deprived people of the right to vote who should have it. If doing so has adverse racial consequences, my suggestion is: redefine “felon” more narrowly, so as to exclude certain categories of crimes from the list of felonies. If we do, I suspect that the “felon disenfranchisement” problem (insofar as it is a problem) either disappears or is greatly reduced in scope.

(3) Third issue: regardless of the definition of “felony,” is the U.S. criminal justice system systematically and unjustifiably biased against certain populations or sub-populations?

My answer: “probably.” No matter how we define “felon,” there will probably be residual problems in our criminal justice system, some of them with adverse racial consequences–some of them just plain old unjust–and those problems need to be addressed. But the resolution of those problems is not facilitated by the enfranchisement of felons. Convicted murderers, rapists, batterers, and drunk drivers have no distinctive insight into the rights and wrongs of criminal procedure. Nor does it make much sense to bank on the possibility that some small fraction of those convicted felons might be innocent (I’m sure some are), and might impart the wisdom of innocence to us via the ballot. The probabilities of that happening are tiny enough to render the venture as a whole quixotic.

The bottom line is that instead of crusading for voting rights for murderers, kidnappers, rapists, robbers, etc., we ought to be redefining “felony” and actively reforming the defects of our criminal justice system. Felon enfranchisement is just a distraction from those far more important tasks.

(II) Voter ID laws
Now consider voter ID laws. Here’s a usefully balanced article, also from the Times, suggesting that voter ID laws, while problematic, do not have the large-scale effects that some have alleged of them.

The standard argument for voter ID laws is that they pre-empt or minimize voter fraud. The standard argument against them asserts that there is little evidence of voter fraud in the U.S., that voter ID laws have racist effects, and that contrary to their proponents’ rhetoric, voter ID laws are covertly there to produce racist effects.

Once again, however, all this seems to me a distraction from the real issue. To see why, consider the tacit implication of the arguments against voter ID laws. Why, according to those arguments, are voter ID laws unfair? Spelled out, the answer is that large numbers of Americans lack the means to obtain photo IDs for themselves. Lacking access to photo IDs, they can’t meet the requirements of voter ID laws, and are de facto disenfranchised by them.

Suppose ex hypothesi that that’s true, and pause on it for a moment. Voting aside, isn’t that precisely the problem in need of discussion and rectification? How is it that large numbers of people in a first world country do not have access to the means of self-identification? Even if we do away with voter ID laws, the underlying problem remains in place. In other words, even if you don’t need an ID to vote, you need it for other things. How are people without IDs expected to open bank accounts, visit the doctor, or travel by plane–or get driver’s licenses, library cards, discount cards, or government benefits, etc.? Either they’re to do without these things because they lack ID, or they need access to these things, and must therefore obtain access to IDs. I would opt for the latter option, but no matter how you slice it, the issue is not voter IDs, but access to IDs as such. 

The scarce-access-to-IDs situation seems to me a good argument for having some equivalent of a national identity card in just the way and for just the same reasons that so many other countries have them. Here’s a case for them, from the Washington Post.

I agree with the reasons the Post gives for having them, but I’d give one more. It’s been argued by critics of social contract theory since Hume* that express consent theories of consent to government do not or cannot work because we never in fact consent expressly to government. I suppose that that’s partly true, at least for natural-born citizens; we don’t consent to government in the way that we consent, say, to the terms of a credit card. But I see national ID laws as a chance to respond to that problem. Why not structure the task of getting a national ID so that the act of getting one either requires express consent to the government issuing the card, or requires explicit non-consent? If you consent, you get an ID card, and with it, the benefits and burdens of “membership” in the polity. If you refuse consent, you don’t get a card, and can be denied the benefits of membership while being spared the burdens.

There are, to be sure, lots of complications here, many of them entangled in debates about immigration and immigration policy. I can’t settle those here. I would just say that it seems to me that the mechanism I describe is possible, and that its existence would rebut Hume-type arguments against consent, and solve some other practical problems as well. At the very least, focusing on our ID problem–which has significant adverse effects on people’s living their lives–beats focusing on a voter ID problem that seems not to have any significant effects on voting.

(III) Low voter turnout
Now consider the low voter turnout issue. The problem here is supposed to be that relatively few voters show up to vote. In partisan terms, that means that Democrats fare badly in the elections (which, of course, matters more to Democrats than to others). In more general terms, it means that our democracy is not as “robust” as it could be. Personally, I happen to think it means that the ballot choices we’re typically offered aren’t worth voting for, whether for or against. Here’s a website, FairVote.org, devoted to discussion of the issue. Once again, however, it seems to me that much of the discussion there and elsewhere is focused on the wrong things.

Suppose that we want to increase voter participation. (There are reasons not to want to, having to do with wrongful voting and voter incompetence, but set them aside.)  In that case, I’d offer two proposals:

(1) Put a “None of the Above” option on the ballot, so that voters can vote against all the (other) options on the ballot. As things currently stand, you can write “NOTA” as a “write in” on the ballot (I regularly do), but few people realize this, and most people surmise, correctly, that write-ins are meaningless. (I’ve encountered poll workers unaware of the fact that NOTA is a write-in possibility.) But if “NOTA” were on the ballot, it would be at least as significant as any other option on the ballot, and all those disgruntled voters who don’t vote because they dislike all the options might now vote in order to express that view.

(2) Move Election Day from Tuesday to the weekend. Yes, a small minority of mostly religious voters might be inconvenienced by that move (if so, they can use absentee ballots), but as it stands, huge numbers of working people are inconvenienced by Election Day’s having to compete with the workday. Change the day, and I suspect you’d increase voter turnout.

(IV) Voting and the right to complain
 Let me move now from American to Israeli elections, or more precisely, elections in Jerusalem. When I visited Israel/Palestine in 2013, I was both surprised and dismayed to discover that while East Jerusalemite Palestinians have the right to vote in Jerusalem’s municipal elections (though not in Israeli national elections), they almost unanimously refuse to exercise that right, even though their exercising it would substantially change the political landscape of Jerusalem, and benefit them. The argument I heard from Palestinians was that voting would legitimize Israel, which they refuse to do. Sadly, the few Palestinians who offered to run for municipal office, or to vote for pro-Palestinian candidates or causes, were widely regarded by other Palestinians as traitors to the Palestinian cause.

I find that a self-defeating and incoherent set of attitudes. East Jerusalemite Palestinians widely accept–and demand–government benefits from Israel, so it makes no sense for them to refuse to exercise political rights that are on offer from Israel, especially if the refusal to exercise those rights merely disempowers those who refuse to exercise them. The fact is, the budget for government services in East Jerusalem is in the hands of non-Palestinian Israelis, as are decisions bearing on the protection of Palestinian rights. As things currently stand, decisions on both sets of issues are made in ways that ignore or violate Palestinian rights. I would argue that respect for one’s rights is essential to one’s well-being. As it happens, the only efficacious way of ensuring respect for Palestinian rights in Jerusalem is to make changes to the budget and policies of the Jerusalem municipal authority. And the only efficacious way of changing the budget and policies of that authority is to vote to change them. So the options are: vote to defend your rights, or acquiesce in their violation and the consequent diminution of your well-being.

Suppose that we each  have a self-regarding moral obligation to promote our well-being (insofar as doing so is open to us). If so, give the preceding facts, Palestinians ought to vote. If “ought-hood” is sufficient for “duty” or “obligation,” then eligible Palestinian voters have a moral obligation to vote. Contrary to a recent argument of Jason Brennan’s, then, the case of East Jerusalemite Palestinians seems a picture-perfect example of the old saw that if you don’t vote, you shouldn’t complain–or more precisely, if you don’t vote, you shouldn’t complain about the things that voting would have improved, and that only voting can improve, at least for the foreseeable future. If you’re going to be taxed, and you’re going to be regulated, it makes no sense to stand by as your tax money is spent by everyone but you on everything but what matters to you. It likewise makes no sense to stand by as you are regulated to death by the people who are spending your money, as your rights go violated or ignored. Voting is in effect an act of self-defense, and self-defense is a moral obligation.

The obstacle here is supposed to be that it is not instrumentally rational for individual voters to vote, because individual votes cannot change the outcome of an election (or more precisely, cannot change the outcome of a sufficiently large election–a qualification that is sometimes relevant but often ignored in discussions of “voting,” as though all voting were large-scale voting). But if you know anything about Palestinian political culture, I think you’ll see that this objection is spurious. There is no need to worry about the efficacy or utility of individual votes qua individual if the voters in question don’t conceive of their votes in those terms in the first place. If voters naturally conceive of themselves as members of a solidaristic group, and can coordinate their efforts in a given direction as a group–and have a strong reason to do so, and might well be inclined to do so–then the unit of concern is not the utility of individual votes, but the the votes of voting blocs qua blocs whose members self-consciously act in concert.

I realize I’m describing an idealized case, but my point is, it’s a possible case. In fact, it’s more possible and plausible than half of the thought-experiments that clog the philosophical literature. (By the way, there is no contradiction between seeing yourself as an individual with an individual obligation to promote your well-being, and seeing yourself, qua voter, as part of a voting bloc. Membership in the bloc could precisely be what promotes your individual well-being, so that your individual well-being is what dictates membership and a solidaristic self-conception in the first place.)

Now suppose that Palestinians** get their act together, ditching the nationalist and Islamist rhetoric that has retarded their progress for decades. They come to see voting as an act of both collective and individual self-defense. They also see the defense of their rights as a contribution to the common good (which includes Israelis). Suppose (perhaps improbably but not impossibly) that the Israelis do not interfere significantly with Palestinians’ voting en masse.

Suppose further that Palestinians think of voting by analogy with having an intifada. In other words, as with the first intifada in the 1980s, they organize their efforts to vote strategically*** as a single unified voting bloc: they caucus, organize, and promise one another to vote for pro-Palestinian policies. Suppose that it is relatively obvious what these policies should be, and what the votes for these policies should be. Suppose, further, that voters are well-informed. Now suppose that a large number of Palestinians enter these caucuses voluntarily, and through caucusing, manage to ascertain (by mechanisms internal to the caucuses) that there are enough Palestinian votes among them to tip the scales of a given Jerusalem election. If so, each Palestinian voter could regard himself or herself as part of an assurance contract with all other Palestinian voters. And if so, each voter would have an obligation (to the others and to him or herself) to vote in the way he or she had promised in the contract.

My argument here is essentially that if you can organize a mass uprising–an intifada–you can organize a mass voter campaign. Further, if an intifada involves the implicit equivalent of an assurance contract (as it does), you can in principle model  a mass voter campaign on an intifada, and turn the campaign into an activity that involves an actual assurance contract. But if contracts bind, an electoral assurance contract yields a duty to vote. So under certain nomologically possible conditions, there can be a duty to vote, and given this duty, it can be irrational to complain about unfair or harmful political policies if you don’t vote.

I can’t work through all the details here, but take a look at Brennan’s argument in light of the preceding. Either my East Jerusalem case is a counter-example to his thesis, or it’s a defeater for it. In the first case, it refutes the thesis as stated. In the second case, it suggests that the thesis is highly misleading as stated. Given that, my argument requires that Brennan qualify his claims about the ethics of voting in ways that take more explicit stock of cases like the East Jerusalem one–something that would substantially change the “flavor” of his theory.

I realize that Brennan has an explicit discussion of strategic voting in his book (Ethics of Voting, pp. 129-33), and that the discussion includes a “strategic voting clause” (p. 131), but I think almost all of what he says talks past what I’m saying here. What he doesn’t discuss either in the book or in the article I’ve linked to, is the possibility that you could have a duty to vote in cases like the East Jerusalem one, that your vote would matter in those cases, and that you’d have no right to complain if you didn’t vote. (See the notes below for a comment on “strategic voting.”)

While you’re looking at Brennan’s arguments, read his discussion of “the moral disenfranchisement of poor minorities” in The Ethics of Voting, pp. 105-7. I find the discussion very inadequate even on its own terms, but for present purposes it’s worth noting how narrow it is. Like so many American writers, in writing about “minorities,” Brennan structures his discussion around black-white relations in the U.S., assuming somehow that what he says about that will generalize elsewhere–everywhere. It doesn’t. In particular, he assumes that “poor minorities [will] overwhelmingly qualify as bad voters” by his criteria, and offers some rather handwaving suggestions about how they’re to handle–or how he would think about handling–their disenfranchisement.

What he doesn’t consider is the possibility that the issues in contention in a given election may sometimes be entirely straightforward and require nothing in the way of the social scientific “credentials” he regards as necessary conditions for eligibility to vote. Putting aside the American case, I think this is patently obvious in non-American ones, like that of East Jerusalem. It takes no special social scientific wisdom to figure out that your interests, your rights, and the common good are better promoted by someone who stands for fairness than by someone who makes no secret of wanting to subvert your interests, violate your rights and exclude you from the common good. If Brennan’s epistemic elite hasn’t figured that out, frankly, they have a lot to learn.

I’m hoping to spend the summer of 2015 in East Jerusalem teaching at Al Quds University. While I’m there, I intend to make the case for what I call rights-based strategic voting by Palestinians in Israeli elections. Feel free to hit me with objections in the combox if you disagree with the sketch I’ve just given of it. I may well be hit with more than that while I’m there, and I’d like to start my preparations now.

*Actually, Hume concedes, almost parenthetically, that consent is a possible basis for political legitimacy: “I only pretend [aver] that it has very seldom had place in any degree, and never almost in its full extent” (paragraph 20). But that claim is entirely compatible with consent’s coming to be the basis of political legitimacy in the future by concerted effort aiming to bring it about. Considered as an argument against Locke on consent, what Hume says in “Of the Original Contract” strikes me as a series of ignoratios elenchi.

**For brevity, I use the word “Palestinian” throughout, but I don’t really mean to be restricting that to ethnic Palestinians. I’m using “Palestinian” as short-hand for those who would actively organize for and act on behalf of Palestinian rights in East Jerusalem. The bulk of those people would most likely be ethnic Palestinians, but not all of them would. It’s just too cumbersome to be explicit about this in every sentence.

***I’m using the term “strategic” in its colloquial, not its technical sense. In its technical sense, “strategic voting” is voting for candidates or policies that are contrary to one’s sincere preference, in the hopes that doing so will realize some preferred outcome. In the colloquial sense, “strategic” voting is simply voting to bring about some end by means of a collectively-adopted political strategy for bringing the end about. I happen to think that the technical concept of “strategic voting” is a confused and equivocal one, but that doesn’t matter. My scenario makes no reference to insincerity on voters’ part.

Postscript, Nov. 30, 2014 (relevant to proposal I, felon disenfranchisement): This blog post, at Slate Star Codex, is well worth reading on the race and criminal justice in the United States. It complicates the picture, but I don’t think it changes anything I said about felon disenfranchisement. Hat-tip: Kate Herrick.

Postscript, April 5, 2015 (relevant to proposal IV, voting and the right to complain): Useful background on the political situation in East Jerusalem, from the London Review of Books.

Postscript, December 25, 2015 (relevant to proposal II, voter ID laws): An interesting article in The New York Times about Mayor DeBlasio’s “New York ID” program and the obstacles to success it’s facing at area banks. All things considered, the program seems a step in the right direction.

“This video is private.”

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I’ve updated my post from earlier this month on The Atlas Society’s panel discussion, “The Objectivist Movement Today.” Apparently, the champions of “Open Objectivism” have decided to “privatize” the video of the panel I had criticized. In other words, if you try to access it from their website, you get a message that says, “This video is private.”

I would reconstruct the (obviously enthymematic) argument involved here as follows:

1. If the video is out of sight, it is out of mind.

2. If the video is out of mind, it is unreal.

3. If the video is unreal, then Khawaja’s criticisms of its contents are unreal, too.

4. The video is out of sight!

Hence

5. Khawaja’s criticisms of the video’s contents are unreal.

From (5) it follows straightaway that you need not take Khawaja’s criticisms very seriously.

Yes, it does follow. But is it true? The answer is “private,” but accessible to anyone with a functioning brain and introspective access to it.

Reminder: “Psychiatric Medications: Promise or Peril?” Fall 2014 Felician Symposium

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Here’s a reminder, for those of you in the New York/New Jersey Metro Area, of our upcoming symposium, “Psychiatric Medication: Promise or Peril? An Interdisciplinary Discussion.” The symposium is the third annual one sponsored by the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs, and is co-sponsored by the Felician College Department of Psychology, and Felician’s Graduate Program in Counseling Psychology. It takes place Saturday, December 6 between 1 and 5 pm in the Castleview Room on the Rutherford, New Jersey campus of Felician College. The Castleview Room is located on the second floor of the Student Union Center on the Rutherford campus. (The GPS address is 223 Montross Ave., Rutherford, NJ, 07070.)

The topic is timely enough as it is, but has been made particularly so by recent coverage of the issue in The New York Times, among other places. Check out this article on psychiatric drug use in children, as well as these follow-up letters on the same article. This review of Yochi Dreazen’s The Invisible Front discusses the use of psychiatric drugs for PTSD in returning veterans. Also worth checking out is Alan Schwarz’s controversial series on ADHD in The New York Times, which you can find by scrolling backward on his dedicated page at their website. Likewise worth checking out (and more supportive of the use of medications) are guest posts at the Times by Richard Friedman of Weill Cornell Medical College.

I’ve only scratched the surface of the popular literature on psychiatry, but I’ve found the work of Peter Breggin, Gary Greenberg, and Peter Kramer illuminating in addressing the important background issues. (For whatever it’s worth, despite his reputation among libertarians, I have generally not found the work of Thomas Szasz particularly helpful. And despite her reputation among mainstream readers, I have very mixed feelings about the work of Kay Redfield Jamison.)

Here’s the line-up of presenters at the Felician event:

Raymond Raad replaces Cheryl Kennedy of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, who unexpectedly had to cancel. I’m very grateful to Ray (who lurks on PoT) for doing the event on such short notice.

Whitaker’s work features prominently in a much-discussed two-part review by Marcia Angell in The New York Review of Books; for another view of Whitaker’s work, check out this highly critical review by E. Fuller Torrey, along with Whitaker’s response.

If you’re interested in issues at the intersection of philosophy, psychiatry, and psychology, and don’t know Christian Perring’s Metapsychology Online Reviews, you probably need to head there ASAP (see link above). [Added later: Perring is the author of the entry for “Mental Illness” for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the  main reference work in the field.]

Peter Economou not only has the distinction of having founded a Counseling and Wellness Center in New Jersey (see link above), but of being on the New Jersey State Board of Psychological Examiners (aka “the licensing board”)–and of being my academic advisor in the counseling program at Felician.

Hope to see some of you at the symposium.

PS., More grist for the mill: Though much of it is behind a paywall, I just happened to notice this piece by Mitchell Feinberg, “On the Moral Use of ‘Smart Drugs,'” in The Objective Standard. Perhaps readers who subscribe to TOS can tell us what Feinberg says. Meanwhile, neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland weighs in on the controversy in her recent book, Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain:

To the degree that I am optimistic, it is because there are scientific discoveries that obviously and unequivocally have been used to make life better–such as polio and smallpox vaccines; such as Prozac and lithium; such as hand washing by surgeons and the use of local anesthetics by dentists….(p. 23)

It does seem generally true that as we come to understand that a particular problem, such as PMS or extreme shyness, has a biological basis, we find relief–relief that our own bad character is not, after all, the cause and relief because causality presents a possible chance for change. If we are lucky and current science has moved along to understand some of the causal details, interventions to ameliorate may emerge. Even if a medical intervention is not available, sometimes just knowing the biological nature of the condition permits us to work around, or work with, what cannot be fixed. For some problems, such as bipolar disorder and chronic depression, medical progress has been greater than for other problems, such as schizophrenia and the various forms of dementia. As more is unraveled about the complex details of these conditions, effective interventions will likely be found. The slow dawning of deep ideas about the brain and the causes of neurological dysfunction has lifted us from the cruel labeling of demonic posesssion or witchery. (p. 31)

I take it that Churchland takes her neurophilosophical eliminativism about mind to prescribe support for the pro-medication (“promise”) side of the debate? If she doesn’t intend that, it’s not clear to me what she is saying. (Of course, it’s not clear to me how eliminativists can have intentions, either, but never mind.)

Postscript 2, November 30, 2014: Some excellent posts on psychiatric medications, care of Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex: SSRI’s, More Than You Ever Wanted to Know, and Such Crazy Feelings About Crazymeds.

My famous friends: name-dropping without (much) shame

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A couple of days ago, I wrote a post dedicated in part to discussing the work of people I either don’t know, or barely know at all. Today’s post is just the opposite: a name-dropping attempt to bask vicariously in the glory of others’ accomplishments, simply because they happen to be friends or relatives of mine. There’s no credit like unearned credit! I’m going to bold everyone’s name below, just to make this post look more like the gossip column that it is.

My friend William Dale is Associate Professor of Medicine at Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. (He has a half dozen other titles, but never mind.) He seems to make it into The New York Times every other day for his work on geriatrics, but here’s the latest, about the connections between his work and the National Social, Life, Health, and Aging Project at Chicago. And yes, that’s him in the header photo of their page.

I’m not sure I know Jose Duarte well enough to call us “friends,” but we have hung out a bit, so I’ll gloss over the niceties. Jose has been creating waves for his research, with Jonathan Haidt, on the political biases of research in social psychology. Here’s a piece in The New Yorker about his most recent publication. And here’s a link to the paper itself, “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Research.”

My friend Stephen Hicks is celebrating the tenth anniversary of the publication of his 2004 book, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. It’s gone through God-knows-how-many printings, and at least five translations that I know of, with more on the way. (I’d like to put in a vote for an Urdu translation, by the way.) I’d like to think that I made some tiny contribution to the success of the book; as co-managing editor of Reason Papers, I happened to edit  (all right, co-edit) one of the longer and more positive reviews of the book. But obviously, I couldn’t have done that unless Stephen had written the book (and Steven Sanders had written the review!) in the first place.

Finally, on the Famous Friend Front, my buddy Chris Sciabarra is featured in a piece on Ayn Rand in New York Magazine, improbably titled, “Ayn Rand, Girl Power Icon.” Amusingly, the piece opens with Chris’s professed puzzlement about the phenomenon, and only gets better from there.

I mentioned famous relatives. Did I tell you that my cousin Khawaja Saad Rafiq is the Minister of Railways for the Islamic Republic of Pakistan? I only mention that because here’s a piece featuring Saad bhai in the Pakistan Observer. In it, he takes issue with Jason Brennan’s thesis in The Ethics of Voting. According to Dr. Brennan, we have no duty to vote, but according to cousin Saad, the “Country Can Only Make Progress Thru the Power of Vote.” Well, Saad bhai doesn’t quite mention Dr. Brennan by name, but the implicit spirit of contention is there. I actually think that a conversation between Saad bhai and Dr. Brennan on voting would be a hilariously instructive affair for all parties. In fact, I offer in advance to serve as interpreter to overcome the language barrier* for the conversation. I rather doubt that the event will ever happen, but as a thought-experiment, I think it has a lot to recommend itself.

*PS, I kind of think that language would be the least of the barriers involved. Cf. Bernard Williams on real and notional confrontations, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, pp. 160ff.

Postscript, December 19, 2014: Amazingly, within a few weeks of my issuing a call for an Urdu translation of Explaining Postmodernism, Stephen Hicks has announced a forthcoming Hindi translation. Behold the power of PoT.

A pre-Thanksgiving expression of gratitude

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I’ve always had slightly mixed feelings about Thanksgiving—it’s not like Halloween is for me—but like most denizens of the First World, I certainly have my share of things to be thankful for. I suppose that sense of gratitude excludes the students who repeatedly fail to do the reading in the classes I teach (and text while I explain the reading they haven’t done); my loud and insensitive upstairs neighbors, who keep me up with with their late night and early morning stomping and yelling; the criminals who’ve recently been filling the police blotters with their exploits in my neighborhood; and the near-death experiences I have every day (often twice a day) while driving the Garden State Parkway. But there’s plenty to be grateful for despite all that. This post consists of an enumeration of some of those things–partly to express my gratitude in a public way, partly to induce readers to reflect on similar things in their experience, and partly just to share some of the discoveries involved. Call it a pre-Thanksgiving expression of gratitude.

One of the great joys of blogging is the opportunity it affords for discovering talented, dedicated people you’d never heard of before, and might never have heard of or interacted with but for the grace of WordPress. That goes for everyone who’s contributed to this blog since its inception this summer—co-bloggers, commenters, ‘likers’, and lurkers alike. Thanks to all of you. But I particularly wanted to take a moment to mention a small handful of bloggers and websites I’ve recently discovered through ‘likes’ on PoT, which have recently become big favorites of mine.

One is Brandon Christensen’s Notes on Liberty, which I’ve come to regard as the most interesting and intelligent libertarian blog on the Internet–and for whatever it’s worth (often, alas, very little), I’ve read them all. Between the NoL folks who come here (mostly Brandon) and the PoT heads who go there (mostly me), we seem to have developed a nice synergy between NoL and PoT, and I hope that continues.

When my brain is up to it, I sometimes visit Blogistikon, “a little storehouse of thoughts, puzzles, and problems about ancient philosophy.” It’s an acquired taste, I realize: one of their latest posts is on “relativity in the Peri Ideon,” and one before that was on Aristotle’s conception of opaque and transparent relatives. Frankly, some of it would be all Greek to anyone (when it wasn’t all Latin). But I enjoy it, when I understand it.

A more accessible favorite of mine is Jackie Hadel’s Tokidoki world travel photo blog, which I discovered by means of a surprise ‘like’ by Hadel on one of my posts. (We don’t know one another at all.) The sheer number of photos on her blog is pretty staggering, but the ones of Bethlehem, Hebron, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv brought back vivid memories for me. The ones of New York struck me as fresh and interesting, despite my having lived here (well, in New Jersey) for decades, and the ones of autumn in Japan not only induced me to want to go to Japan in the autumn, but managed to evoke some nostalgia for an autumnal trip that Kate Herrick and I recently took to southwestern Vermont, of all places. (You’ll have to look at Hadel’s photos to see why.) Hadel’s travel photos make an interesting study in comparisons and contrasts with those of my cousin Jawad Zakariya, who seems to have traveled just about as widely as she has—with eyes open and camera ready for some amazing shots, from Canada to Pakistan and points in between.

Browsing at Hadel’s site, I serendipitously discovered the poems of Kate Houck, which I now make sure to visit every few days, “for the love of words and what they inspire.” And I’m grateful to my Felician College colleague Richard McGarry for my belated but soul-gratifying discovery of the poetry of Mary Oliver. This particular discovery came not through the blog, but the old-fashioned way, after Rich pinned Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” to the bulletin board of the faculty lounge, where I happened to see it.  (It’s worth mentioning, incidentally, that it’s a direct violation of Felician College policy to pin anything, poems included, to a College bulletin board without the express approval and imprimatur of the office of “Felician College Events and Conference Services.” The operative premise seems to be that college faculty can’t be trusted to communicate with one another by means of flyers or other posted material, unless their communications meet the approval of an “Events and Conference Services” administrator–whether or not the administrator can herself be trusted to understand what the communications are about. “Wild Geese,” was not, I’m afraid, an approved communication, so that in reading it, soul-gratifying or not, I was breaking the law.)

The preceding stuff is pretty ethereal, I’ll admit—political theory, ancient philosophy, travel photography, and poetry. I’m thankful for all of it, but ultimately, Thanksgiving is really about gratitude for elementally material things, like food, drink, clothing, and shelter. To that end, I thought I’d draw attention to this item on world poverty, itself brought to my attention by Kate Herrick. Here’s the abstract from a quietly mind-blowing 2009 working paper by Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-I-Martin, “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,” recently discussed at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

We use a parametric method to estimate the income distribution for 191 countries between 1970 and 2006. We estimate the World Distribution of Income and estimate poverty rates, poverty counts and various measures of income inequality and welfare. Using the official $1/day line, we estimate that world poverty rates have fallen by 80% from 0.268 in 1970 to 0.054 in 2006. The corresponding total number of poor has fallen from 403 million in 1970 to 152 million in 2006. Our estimates of the global poverty count in 2006 are much smaller than found by other researchers. We also find similar reductions in poverty if we use other poverty lines. We find that various measures of global inequality have declined substantially and measures of global welfare increased by somewhere between 128% and 145%. We analyze poverty in various regions. Finally, we show that our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests involving functional forms, data sources for the largest countries, methods of interpolating and extrapolating missing data, and dealing with survey misreporting.

I don’t have the expertise to interpret their findings in any systematic or sophisticated way, and I realize that $1/day is a dismally low baseline. But an 80% reduction in world poverty rates over a 36 year period cries out for acknowledgement and gratitude, as well as for causal explanation and indefinite iteration.  It’s debatable whether the cause of the amelioration is capitalism, globalization, or whatever, but the point is, whatever the cause, it can’t be chance. And that by itself is something to be thankful for, even if we still have a long way to go before everyone has in the way of material resources what a small minority of us can be thankful for having.

One last item, simultaneously from the world of spirit and of matter. For fourteen years now, my dear friend Carol Welsh has been fighting a recurrent brain (and now spinal) tumor called an “ependymoma.” She tells her story at her website, “Adult Ependymoma: A Patient’s Story.” That story has so far included “three brain surgeries, one gamma knife radiosurgery, a placement of a shunt, a course of radiation and oral chemotherapy called Temodar,” along with spinal surgery and a diagnosis of breast cancer. In the fourteen years that Carol has fought this disease—or these diseases, however one counts them–I honestly have not been able to grasp how a human being could endure such undeserved punishment and not only survive, but do so with Carol’s grace and equanimity. She is, as far as I’m concerned, the single most awe-inspiring paradigm of the virtue of courage I have ever known.

Among the many lessons I’ve learned from her, one philosophically interesting one is worth mentioning. We inherit a bias, largely I think from Aristotle, of conceiving of the virtue of courage in fundamentally masculine and militaristic terms. Aristotle tells us in Nicomachean Ethics III.6 that since death on the battlefield is the paradigm of courage, it is “wrong to fear poverty or sickness”; the capacity to face such fears is a mere analogue of courage, not the real thing. Carol single-handedly convinced me–by example rather than argument–of the anachronism and error of Aristotle’s account. It seems to me that William James was right, by contrast, to suggest the need for conceiving of moral equivalents to war, and by implication moral equivalents to the virtues valorized by war.

The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade.

Having known Carol since college days, I’d say that Carol has for fourteen years exemplified the “better substitute” that James was wondering about. I’m thankful for the privilege of knowing someone with her courage.

Happy Thanksgiving Day, about a week and a half early.

Postscript, December 16, 2014: The Wall Street Journal story about world poverty made it to The New York Times the other day, describing it as “excellent news,” but burying it on the eighth page of the Sunday Business section. “[T]here is agreement,” the Times says, “that extreme poverty has been on the decline since the mid-1990s and that the decline has accelerated since 2000.” It then asks the obvious question: “What’s behind the shift?” But its answer is utterly uninformative:

Rising incomes in India and China are a major factor. Together, those two countries lifted 232 million people out of extreme poverty from 2008 to 2011 alone, according to one World Bank analysis.

OK, but why did incomes rise in India and China? Surely there’s a story there that deserves more comprehensive treatment than it’s gotten. On the face of it, it seems to me that libertarians have a better story to tell here than left-leaning liberals do. Liberals and leftists either need to tell a better story, or concede that libertarians have this part of the story right, and find a way of accommodating libertarian insights coherently within their conception of the economic world.