Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Reflections on a Friend’s Shift from Libertarianism to Progressivism

No Comments

A while back I lamented a trend in conventional political commentary — that as a general rule, conservatives tend toward syllogistic argumentation whereas progressives more often rely on emotive claims and ad hominem attacks.

A recent discussion with my friend Alaric proved most enlightening about why rhetorical strategy varies by ideology and how one’s political leanings can directly affect a person’s system of critical reasoning — as evidenced by his own significant ideological evolution.

But to get to that point, we must start a dozen years ago, when I joined the Herald as a new staff columnist and Rick was the paper’s Web editor. Before running the online desk, he ran the opinion desk, and he continued to contribute occasional opinion pieces even after shifting responsibilities. So I got to meet him through weekly opinion-staff meetings.

In those days, he was a fairly conventional libertarian, obsessing about negative liberty and chanting the “no force or fraud” mantra like a political Om. For example, he took the position in one of our point/counterpoint column pairings in favor of the legalization of prostitution because the transaction — including, as it does, solicitation and consent — doesn’t entail force/fraud/coercion. My counter was that poor women may well be effectively coerced by their pimps or by the consequences of their financial condition, but such was the dogmatism of his libertarian leanings that he dismissed that point by saying that the immediate transaction of solicitation+purchase+sex didn’t involve meaningful coercion by the john, so … nyeh nyeh. (I might be misremembering this slightly.)

Over the years we maintained our friendship; indeed, we still work together, but now for a hospital instead of a newspaper.

Starting around 2007-2008, I started to see a bit of an ideological shift from my dear old walking caricature of a libertarian. He began to eschew the concept of negative liberty. I understand he ended up as an Obama voter. Our recent political debates became unusually contentious and he is, at this point, probably firmly enmeshed in the progressive left.

So last week I invited him to Grand River Cigar for a tasty dram of Port Charlotte 7 and a Partagas 1845 to discuss (not debate) the nature of his ideological move. The two-hour session proved enlightening. Some conclusions worth highlighting:

  • Part of his move includes a religious component — his ongoing private study of the “four horsemen” of the New Atheism has emboldened him to reject arguments rooted in religious premises and to feel safe enough to stand up for atheist perspectives instead of apologizing for them or paying milquetoast obeisance to religion’s asserted right of privileged access to the public square.
  • His disillusionment with the dogmatic center/right started where mine did — the pre-surge collapse in Iraq coupled with GWB’s response to Hurricane Katrina and the silliness about Harriet Miers for SCOTUS.
  • His experience as a husband and as someone who budgets carefully has engendered a not-insubstantial cynicism about corporations and wealth. I won’t say he’s at the point of resentment but it’s clear that he’s more open to redistributivist policies than once he was and his trust in the integrity of large corporations isn’t very high.
  • And why is he more tolerant of radical egalitarianism? Because his big fear is social instability akin to the French riots a few years ago or the current breakdown in Greece, and his solution to this is to ensure that everyone has decent-paying jobs and a generous social welfare net. The theory is to remove the socioeconomic kindling today to avoid a broader conflagration down the road. The prospect of a violent class war genuinely scares him — I think because mass riots and social breakdown threatens the material safety he worked hard to achieve, and he’s developed a risk-averse, safety-oriented sensibility as a way of protecting his current position. (He is an avid reader of social history, so I wonder if there’s a latent influence here from his readings about the establishment of community regimes?)
  • As such, he no longer believes that negative liberty is sufficient. As best I understand it, I think he believes the deck is stacked against normal people by corporations and unresponsive government such that negative liberty, in itself, is a dead letter: Nice in principle, meaningless in execution. Since power, wealth and prestige are (so it’s claimed) a function of prior access to power, wealth and prestige, an ordinary person has little chance of substantial material success on his own right and by his own effort (c.f., Obama, B., “you didn’t build that”). Thus, a system that provides for a base level of economic security for all citizens — funded by the wealthy — addresses the disparity in opportunity between top and bottom and at least ensures that the bottom has enough to mitigate the risk of social instability.
  • Concurrently, his shift from coldly syllogistic reasoning to something more emotive pervades his thinking on all levels. He said, for example, that he now understands why “the personal is the political” and tends to agree. The human condition ought to trump all other considerations, so any argument that leads us away from giving everyone the resources they need to live happy and fulfilled lives may be rejected prima facie because the conclusion — no matter how logical — fails to respect the dignity of individual persons and their alleged right to a material safety net that preempts violent social disorder.
  • Because the political and the personal are so intertwined, the threshold for what constitutes an ad hominem shifts — arguments and arguers who don’t support the basic point about positive economic entitlements or communitarian sibboleths simply don’t enjoy the same right to be treated respectfully because their conclusions are, a priori, both wrong and immoral.
  • He is not a Kool-Aid drinker of the Left; he seems aware that his new ideological abode has foundations as shaky as the one he left, but nevertheless he seems more temperamentally comfortable in his new home. He admits that future experiences may well prompt additional movement and doesn’t seem to foreclose the chance that could well come back to conservatism later in life.

A few generalized observations:

  1. There’s a serious ethical problem at the heart of the Left’s willingness to dismiss or even demean opponents who don’t share their underlying sociopolitical conclusions. There’s very much a “purge the kulaks” sentiment in some quarters of the progressive movement, such that conservatives or center-left liberals who don’t toe the line aren’t merely wrong but morally defective. And thus not worthy of serious consideration or even civil treatment. The way that progressives treat people who disagree on global warming provides an illustrative case in point: If you disagree with the alleged consensus position, then you are a “denier” who should be shunned and not even allowed to articulate a contrary opinion or present divergent evidence.
  2. The growing divide between Left and Right feels less and less like policy disputes and more and more like irreconcilable worldview divergence. The trend toward shifting modes of discourse (emotive vs. syllogistic privilege in argumentation, for example) means that it’ll be harder to bridge the partisan divide for a middle-ground solution. The party that does the best job of capturing the independents, then, will probably do best at the ballot box. Unfortunately, both parties are polarizing and the activist wing on both sides is sufficiently loony that most clear-thinking folks will come to disdain politics even more than they currently do.
  3. The economic fault line of egalitarianism keeps rearing its head. Conservatives generally favor equality of access to opportunity; progressives generally favor equality of result even if that means redistributing from the successful to the unsuccessful. Basic ideas like what “fairness” means will keep throwing sand in the gears of government.
  4. Never underestimate the fear of instability or risk. The “bread and circuses” approach to buying off the poor to keep them compliant remains a core part of progressive ideology, even if they don’t see it those terms.

Watching Rick’s ongoing ideological shift provides some insight into why people shift their entire philosophical grounding. I’m glad he’s my friend and I appreciate the chance to talk about these issues with him.

The conclusions, though, about what brings people to the Left or to the Right do serve as giant signal fires about the possible social discord that lies ahead.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Reflections on a Friend's Shift from Libertarianism to Progressivism

No Comments

A while back I lamented a trend in conventional political commentary — that as a general rule, conservatives tend toward syllogistic argumentation whereas progressives more often rely on emotive claims and ad hominem attacks.
A recent discussion with my friend Alaric proved most enlightening about why rhetorical strategy varies by ideology and how one’s political leanings can directly affect a person’s system of critical reasoning — as evidenced by his own significant ideological evolution.
But to get to that point, we must start a dozen years ago, when I joined the Herald as a new staff columnist and Rick was the paper’s Web editor. Before running the online desk, he ran the opinion desk, and he continued to contribute occasional opinion pieces even after shifting responsibilities. So I got to meet him through weekly opinion-staff meetings.
In those days, he was a fairly conventional libertarian, obsessing about negative liberty and chanting the “no force or fraud” mantra like a political Om. For example, he took the position in one of our point/counterpoint column pairings in favor of the legalization of prostitution because the transaction — including, as it does, solicitation and consent — doesn’t entail force/fraud/coercion. My counter was that poor women may well be effectively coerced by their pimps or by the consequences of their financial condition, but such was the dogmatism of his libertarian leanings that he dismissed that point by saying that the immediate transaction of solicitation+purchase+sex didn’t involve meaningful coercion by the john, so … nyeh nyeh. (I might be misremembering this slightly.)
Over the years we maintained our friendship; indeed, we still work together, but now for a hospital instead of a newspaper.
Starting around 2007-2008, I started to see a bit of an ideological shift from my dear old walking caricature of a libertarian. He began to eschew the concept of negative liberty. I understand he ended up as an Obama voter. Our recent political debates became unusually contentious and he is, at this point, probably firmly enmeshed in the progressive left.
So last week I invited him to Grand River Cigar for a tasty dram of Port Charlotte 7 and a Partagas 1845 to discuss (not debate) the nature of his ideological move. The two-hour session proved enlightening. Some conclusions worth highlighting:

  • Part of his move includes a religious component — his ongoing private study of the “four horsemen” of the New Atheism has emboldened him to reject arguments rooted in religious premises and to feel safe enough to stand up for atheist perspectives instead of apologizing for them or paying milquetoast obeisance to religion’s asserted right of privileged access to the public square.
  • His disillusionment with the dogmatic center/right started where mine did — the pre-surge collapse in Iraq coupled with GWB’s response to Hurricane Katrina and the silliness about Harriet Miers for SCOTUS.
  • His experience as a husband and as someone who budgets carefully has engendered a not-insubstantial cynicism about corporations and wealth. I won’t say he’s at the point of resentment but it’s clear that he’s more open to redistributivist policies than once he was and his trust in the integrity of large corporations isn’t very high.
  • And why is he more tolerant of radical egalitarianism? Because his big fear is social instability akin to the French riots a few years ago or the current breakdown in Greece, and his solution to this is to ensure that everyone has decent-paying jobs and a generous social welfare net. The theory is to remove the socioeconomic kindling today to avoid a broader conflagration down the road. The prospect of a violent class war genuinely scares him — I think because mass riots and social breakdown threatens the material safety he worked hard to achieve, and he’s developed a risk-averse, safety-oriented sensibility as a way of protecting his current position. (He is an avid reader of social history, so I wonder if there’s a latent influence here from his readings about the establishment of community regimes?)
  • As such, he no longer believes that negative liberty is sufficient. As best I understand it, I think he believes the deck is stacked against normal people by corporations and unresponsive government such that negative liberty, in itself, is a dead letter: Nice in principle, meaningless in execution. Since power, wealth and prestige are (so it’s claimed) a function of prior access to power, wealth and prestige, an ordinary person has little chance of substantial material success on his own right and by his own effort (c.f., Obama, B., “you didn’t build that”). Thus, a system that provides for a base level of economic security for all citizens — funded by the wealthy — addresses the disparity in opportunity between top and bottom and at least ensures that the bottom has enough to mitigate the risk of social instability.
  • Concurrently, his shift from coldly syllogistic reasoning to something more emotive pervades his thinking on all levels. He said, for example, that he now understands why “the personal is the political” and tends to agree. The human condition ought to trump all other considerations, so any argument that leads us away from giving everyone the resources they need to live happy and fulfilled lives may be rejected prima facie because the conclusion — no matter how logical — fails to respect the dignity of individual persons and their alleged right to a material safety net that preempts violent social disorder.
  • Because the political and the personal are so intertwined, the threshold for what constitutes an ad hominem shifts — arguments and arguers who don’t support the basic point about positive economic entitlements or communitarian sibboleths simply don’t enjoy the same right to be treated respectfully because their conclusions are, a priori, both wrong and immoral.
  • He is not a Kool-Aid drinker of the Left; he seems aware that his new ideological abode has foundations as shaky as the one he left, but nevertheless he seems more temperamentally comfortable in his new home. He admits that future experiences may well prompt additional movement and doesn’t seem to foreclose the chance that could well come back to conservatism later in life.

A few generalized observations:

  1. There’s a serious ethical problem at the heart of the Left’s willingness to dismiss or even demean opponents who don’t share their underlying sociopolitical conclusions. There’s very much a “purge the kulaks” sentiment in some quarters of the progressive movement, such that conservatives or center-left liberals who don’t toe the line aren’t merely wrong but morally defective. And thus not worthy of serious consideration or even civil treatment. The way that progressives treat people who disagree on global warming provides an illustrative case in point: If you disagree with the alleged consensus position, then you are a “denier” who should be shunned and not even allowed to articulate a contrary opinion or present divergent evidence.
  2. The growing divide between Left and Right feels less and less like policy disputes and more and more like irreconcilable worldview divergence. The trend toward shifting modes of discourse (emotive vs. syllogistic privilege in argumentation, for example) means that it’ll be harder to bridge the partisan divide for a middle-ground solution. The party that does the best job of capturing the independents, then, will probably do best at the ballot box. Unfortunately, both parties are polarizing and the activist wing on both sides is sufficiently loony that most clear-thinking folks will come to disdain politics even more than they currently do.
  3. The economic fault line of egalitarianism keeps rearing its head. Conservatives generally favor equality of access to opportunity; progressives generally favor equality of result even if that means redistributing from the successful to the unsuccessful. Basic ideas like what “fairness” means will keep throwing sand in the gears of government.
  4. Never underestimate the fear of instability or risk. The “bread and circuses” approach to buying off the poor to keep them compliant remains a core part of progressive ideology, even if they don’t see it those terms.

Watching Rick’s ongoing ideological shift provides some insight into why people shift their entire philosophical grounding. I’m glad he’s my friend and I appreciate the chance to talk about these issues with him.
The conclusions, though, about what brings people to the Left or to the Right do serve as giant signal fires about the possible social discord that lies ahead.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Religion

Divine-Command Ethics in a Secular World

1 Comment

A quick review from Moral Philosophy 101: The divine-command theory of ethics holds that morally laudatory behavior is that which conforms to the will of God or a canonical text; morally blameworthy behavior is that which contradicts divine teaching.

For an ethical theory, divine command is hard to beat in its simplicity. The tough questions about the source of morality or the proper content of a praiseworthy life don’t need to be determined, they merely need to be consulted through a religious text or spiritual leader. Unlike the sophisticated mental gyrations that deontologists or utilitarians must make to obtain some degree of logical coherence for their moral system, people who get their ethics from God have an easy go of it. As they say: RTFM.

Assuming, of course, that you actually believe in God and accept as binding the principles of whatever holy scripture you profess. A problematic assessment, insofar as the patterns of modern religious belief shift religious conviction for more and more people from a deep-seated, unquestioning faith toward a cultural or familial artifact to be observed but not necessarily internalized.

It’s ironic, then, that in the Western world, there’s a resurgence in divine-command ethics — fueled not by organized religion, but within those belief systems that substitute as a quasi-religious alternative for a mostly atheist or agnostic worldview.

The most obvious expression of the “new” divine-command ethics derives from the unshackling of ideology as a first-order motivator, particularly but not exclusively with folks from the Left. Their decline in respect for institutional authority means that neither religious nor political leaders can inspire unquestioned loyalty that helps to impose an externally locused belief system on them. Freed from religious norms and disdainful of mass culture, these souls “deify” their ideological predispositions and use internally derived principles (made absolute) as the yardstick of morality.

Cultural anthropologists argue that humans are hard-wired socially to adopt belief systems that help differentiate friend-from-foe in larger social contexts while providing a reservoir of meaning about one’s purpose and destiny. The reasons for this are vast and deep — E. O. Wilson presents a good high-level overview of the concept in his recent book,The Social Conquest of Earth. Long story short, we need beliefs that situate us within the whole. Religion has played this role for millennia; more recently, religion has been augmented by ideology or nationalism, but the underlying tendency remains unchanged and in some places “augmenting” is giving way to “supplanting.”

As fewer Westerners profess unwavering support for any specific modern faith tradition, the tendency for social belonging — with all of the moral norms attendant to membership — transfers from religion and large-scale politics into increasingly granular social structures with local leaders and deeper passions and less of an intellectual superstructure to keep these local belief systems from falling into solipsism.

Radical environmentalism serves as an excellent case in point. Forget the stereotype of granola-eating, pot-smoking, Birkenstock-wearing long-haired hippies banging drums and communing with Gaia. There are plenty of respectable folks who fit nicely into polite society who nevertheless no longer have a private belief in God and subscribe to radical environmentalist theory. There’s a reason, after all, that Greenpeace types or urban anarchists often hail from upper-middle-class backgrounds: They had a conversion experience, and have traded the boring, empty churches of their parents for the hip, authentic religion of struggle on behalf of the Earth. Anyone who’s read about Saul on the road to Damascus understands the archetype; anyone who’s ever spoken to a radical environmentalist understands their need for social inclusion.

Thus we see increasingly blind obedience to canonical norms:

  • Humans are causing global warming that will destroy the Earth.
  • People who don’t agree that “climate science is settled” are heretics who deserve to be ostracized.
  • Corporate greed must be rejected if the environment is to improve.
  • Humans have all sorts of socioeconomic rights to income security and access to organic/local foods and any opposition to this must be overcome by any means necessary.
  • &c, &c.

One reason that political debate about climate change is so bitter is that it’s taken on the trappings of religious warfare. True believers fight against those who cast a more skeptical eye on some environmental nostrums. The evidence of the phenomenon is vast and deep: Just look, for example, at how the prophets at East Anglia conspired to reject from peer-reviewed journals any suggestion that the (made-up) numbers supporting climate change were, in fact, problematic. Fair-minded people don’t act like this. People caught in the grip of divine-command ethics, do.

I’m picking on the environmentalists because they’re an obvious target, but the shift I’ve outlined covers many newer “faith traditions,” including those who continue to protest against Darwinism or struggle against abortion. Although it seems that this phenomenon is rooted in the Left, the Right isn’t immune to it, either.

The most fascinating aspect of all of this is that the one ethical system that’s so often derided as being the simplistic holdout for the unenlightened seems to naturally attract those who wear their sense of sophisticated upon their sleeves.

Divine-command theory, in a classic sense, proves philosophically interesting because it’s inherently unfalsifiable at its core. This “rock” that anchors religious morality, if unchained by texts and priests and centuries of practical experience, can lead to curious inversions of generally accepted ethics. Like, for example, radical environmentalists who deliberately spike trees in such a way that loggers could be seriously injured or even killed.

Put differently: If any particular implementation of divine-command ethics is unconstrained by institutional or cultural norms, the risk that “anything is permissible” in service to the ideological point at its core increases the relative gridlock and fragility of the political process.

Ethics without God is possible. God-based ethics without God, however, increases the risk of radical absolutism that poisons the well for everyone.

Politics & Culture

Obamacare’s SCOTUS Aftermath: We Need to Limit the Tax Power

1 Comment

I am glad I didn’t get my hopes up about SCOTUS in re: Obamacare. I was disappointed to hear the entire PPACA was upheld, to be sure, but I wasn’t spiking the football after the public hearings, so I don’t have to walk back any pre-decision irrational exuberance.

The kicker in the Roberts decision is that the Commerce Clause can’t justify the individual mandate, but the same effective result is possible under the federal government’s tax powers.

The Court’s decision, as I understand it (I haven’t read the texts yet so I’m relying on third-party synopses), seems reasonable on its face.

The problem for small-government types seems to be in the Court’s clear holding that there are few practical limits on the taxing power. As long as something can be taxed, it’s open to control even absent any other enumerated power of the federal government to justify non-tax regulations.

Thus: The Congress can’t force you to buy broccoli, but it can fine you if you don’t. From a legal perspective, this is coherent. From a public policy perspective, it’s an absolute mess of the “po-tay-to, po-tah-to” variety.

To fix the problem before it gets worse, conservatives ought to unite around an amendment to the Constitution that sets explicit limits on the scope, nature and purpose of taxation.

Not being a Constitutional scholar, I’m not the guy to draft such a proposal. But I could see something like this:

The Congress shall pass no law affecting public revenues that regulates the behavior of citizens unless such tax, tariff or credit supports a regulatory activity permissible under the non-tax enumerated powers of the federal government.

Yes, we need to repeal and replace. We also need to heed the Roberts Court and put clear constitutional limitations on the federal government’s use of its tax power as the next iteration of an elastic Commerce Clause.

Only by curtailing the scope of the government’s taxing authority can we avoid future debacles like Obamacare.

Politics & Culture

Obamacare's SCOTUS Aftermath: We Need to Limit the Tax Power

1 Comment

I am glad I didn’t get my hopes up about SCOTUS in re: Obamacare. I was disappointed to hear the entire PPACA was upheld, to be sure, but I wasn’t spiking the football after the public hearings, so I don’t have to walk back any pre-decision irrational exuberance.
The kicker in the Roberts decision is that the Commerce Clause can’t justify the individual mandate, but the same effective result is possible under the federal government’s tax powers.
The Court’s decision, as I understand it (I haven’t read the texts yet so I’m relying on third-party synopses), seems reasonable on its face.
The problem for small-government types seems to be in the Court’s clear holding that there are few practical limits on the taxing power. As long as something can be taxed, it’s open to control even absent any other enumerated power of the federal government to justify non-tax regulations.
Thus: The Congress can’t force you to buy broccoli, but it can fine you if you don’t. From a legal perspective, this is coherent. From a public policy perspective, it’s an absolute mess of the “po-tay-to, po-tah-to” variety.
To fix the problem before it gets worse, conservatives ought to unite around an amendment to the Constitution that sets explicit limits on the scope, nature and purpose of taxation.
Not being a Constitutional scholar, I’m not the guy to draft such a proposal. But I could see something like this:
The Congress shall pass no law affecting public revenues that regulates the behavior of citizens unless such tax, tariff or credit supports a regulatory activity permissible under the non-tax enumerated powers of the federal government.
Yes, we need to repeal and replace. We also need to heed the Roberts Court and put clear constitutional limitations on the federal government’s use of its tax power as the next iteration of an elastic Commerce Clause.
Only by curtailing the scope of the government’s taxing authority can we avoid future debacles like Obamacare.

Politics & Culture, Social Media, Marketing & Privacy

Corporate Speech: A Threat to Public Health?

No Comments

Color me perplexed.

The same people who railed so strongly against Citizens United and lament the alleged corrupting influence of corporate money in politics now express concern about last week’s Supreme Court ruling prohibiting unions from levying special assessments against non-members in a closed shop, when the levy is intended for political agitation.

If you cut through the rhetorical crap, the message seems to be: Corporate speech bad, activist/labor speech good. Nice gig, if you can get it.

You see this tendency most audaciously expressed with some of the defenses offered of late in support of Mayor Bloomberg’s fatwa against sugary beverages. One friend of mine, who used to be a libertarian before he drank deeply from the Obama Kool-Aid (now there’s a sugary, nutrition-free drink I’d favor banning!), told me that bans are justified in part because corporations market sugary drinks to the masses, and the masses therefore are sufficiently influenced that they sip their way into an obesity that translates into socialized long-term avoidable health care costs. Only the power of the state, wielded by the vanguard of health commissars to ban large-size sugary drinks, can turn the tide against the wave of obesity set to roll across America like muffin tops on the first warm day of spring.

When I ask whether individuals should accept responsibility for what they consume, the response is: Well, corporate marketing influences people, so deploying state power to regulate what they’re marketing is permissible.

My response: So what? I’m exposed to hundreds of marketing messages each day. I saw like a dozen tampon ads on TV yesterday but that doesn’t mean I’ve developed a subliminal compulsion to purchase feminine hygiene products.

Marketing has two primary purposes — to make someone aware of a new product or service and to influence a person’s decision about which product or service a person should partake when shopping in a specific market. Hence, the goal of a Ford ad is to get you to buy a Ford when you’re in the market for a new car — not to force you to join the car-buying market.

Don’t be fooled: The Bloomberg ban and anti-corporate-speech agitation stem from the same root — the belief that corporations have an agenda that almost universally is inconsistent with the public good, and that citizens are usually incapable (to their ultimate detriment) of escaping the marketing messages of these corporations.

In short, it’s a conspiracy theory. Evil billionaires deploy “advertising” and helpless citizens are compelled to obey, thus fattening the pockets of corporate hegemons while leading to environmental despoilation, obesity, false consciousness and whatnot that the rest of society will have to pay for. Only the power of the regulatory state can protect the people from utter ruination while protecting society from the harmful externalities these fatcats would force society to bear.

Of course, there are two chief problems with this schema, apart with the slighlty snarky way I’ve presented it.

First, to the extent that corporations are legal entities, it’s not clear why their speech should be less protected than that of other organized groups. Corporations are associations of citizens who band together for a common purpose — e.g., profit. They’re often beholden to shareholders who prefer that the corporation focus on profit and not on social engineering. In this sense, corporations are fundamentally no different from other associations, including labor unions and political parties and non-profit interest groups. They are aggregations of people joined together for a common purpose. That one’s First Amendment rights should be curtailed on account of that purpose (provided, of course, the purpose is legal) seems odd. Any restriction on corporate speech, for example, should mirror restrictions on union speech or the speech patterns of various NGOs and non-profit entities.

Thus, just like corporations can’t withhold money from employee paychecks to pay for lobbyists, so also should union members be free from having dues deducted without their consent to engage in political lobbying. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Second, the specific claims against profit-seeking corporations rely on a curious thesis — that citizens are largely powerless to resist marketing. Although it’s undoubtedly clear that marketing influences behavior, marketing doesn’t determine behavior. If you’re thirsty and want a sugary beverage, and are in the mood for a 12-oz. serving, you’re not going buy a 44-oz. Ultra Gulp simply because you saw an ad for it. There’s no strong correlation between marketing and people engaging in self-defeating behavior. If you want 12 oz. of a drink, you’ll buy 12 oz. of a drink. The claim that corporations make it cheaper to buy in bulk — say, 44 oz. for $2 and 12 oz. for $1 — and therefore people will buy more than they want (at a higher total sale price) because they’re programmed to be bargain shoppers on a unit basis, strikes me as odd. Price sensitivity is a decision point for some people, but if you’re not price sensitive then bulk rates aren’t going to play into the analysis. If you are price sensitive, then this was already a factor that’s not related to a specific marketing initiative. Cart, horse.

Put slightly differently: Anti-corporate activists mistake the weak correlation between marketing and purchasing and assume that this correlation necessarily implies causation; this causative effect, in turn, needs to be regulated when people make market choices that these activists argue aren’t in the people’s best long-term interest.

My thought is this: Yes, some people are more sensitive to marketing messages than others, but the decision to engage in one behavior rather than another depends on a complex interplay of causes and effects — of which, corporate marketing messages necessarily play a very small part. If you’re going to drink enough Coke or Pepsi to become morbidly obese, then the determinative factor is likely a genetic predisposition to obesity or direct environmental factors and not TV commercials. To pick one very small and weak correlative factor and decide that it requires First Amendment restrictions seems like bringing a bazooka to a fly-fishing contest.

But even if we do decide that people are mind-numbed robots primed to obey every marketing message they receive even when it’s not advantageous to their survival, then whatever restrictions we place on corporate free speech must then be reflected in similar restrictions on the “corporate” speech of other corporate entities like labor unions, do-gooder non-profits and the like. Our system of laws requires equal treatment for equal conditions, and privileging the speech of non-profits over for-profits just isn’t supported by a content-analysis claim under the First Amendment.

The moral of the story: Attempts to regulate sugary drinks or corporate speech all spring from the theory that the average citizen isn’t capable of responding responsibly to marketing messages, therefore those messages must be regulated by benevolent overseers in government.

It’s for your own good. You moron.

Politics & Culture

“Can You Spare 65 Cents for a Brother?”

No Comments

Amidst my sundry errands yesterday — it’s been a busy weekend, because I’ll be on vacation in Las Vegas all next week — I stopped at a Burger King for lunch. As I sat in my truck, reading National Review and munching on my Whopper, a middle-aged African American male approached my window and yelled, “Hey. Hey, you.”

I ignored him. Just because a stranger wants my attention doesn’t mean he’s entitled to it, especially when I know what’s coming.

So he walks up to within five paces of the truck and yells, “Hey, man. You in the truck.”

I continue to ignore him.

So he walks up to my window and knocks hard on the glass. I look at him with a look of clear disapproval while he says, “Hey, man. Can you spare 65 cents for a brother?”

To which I replied: “Sorry, no.”

To which he replied, in a loud, high falsetto: “Damn.”

Then he shuffled away and stationed himself at the speaker stand at the BK drive-through, ready to ask for coin from anyone who decided they needed it their way that day.

I grow weary of aggressive panhandling.

Because I’m frequently downtown in Grand Rapids, I get approached for money almost daily. Sometimes it’s just the “Hey, you got a dollar?” routine and sometimes it’s “God bless you sir, I just need 50 cents for bus fare.” The more enterprising sorts insist on a full-blown conversation, demanding to shake your hand and asking questions about your day, your Christianity (or even, recently, to ask if I’m a racist). The goal of the panhandlers is to get some share of the cash in your pocket.

I’m not upset with the panhandlers, per se. After all, they have to make a living just like the rest of us. What bothers me their unwillingness to take no for an answer — to assume that they’re entitled to make their pitch in full. The best way to piss off a panhandler is to flat-out ignore him after he’s tried to get your attention 10 or more times. You’d think that after the fifth time you refuse to answer to a loudly shouted “hey, sir” or say “no, thanks” as you walk past, that they’d move on to the next target, but no. Doesn’t work like that, I guess.

I don’t contribute to panhandlers, largely out of (believe it or not) compassion. I’ve been around the block enough times to know that the money they’re soliciting isn’t going for food or for bus fare — it’s going to drugs and alcohol. The panhandlers are concentrated mostly on the stretch of Division Avenue between Franklin and Fulton. The Heartside neighborhood is chock full of homeless shelters and soup kitchens — in fact, a private study commissioned locally in Grand Rapids a few years ago concluded that the safety net for the homeless was perhaps too generous, in that the homeless had regular access to shelters and at least two large, full meals a day at no cost.

Alas, the aggressive panhandling works because wealthier passersby with money in their pocket are too conflict averse to respond to an assertive request for money with an equally assertive denial of such a request. There’s plenty of evidence that the more in-your-face, entrepreneurial style of panhandling can reap non-trivial income; some studies claim that well-practiced panhandlers can earn more each month than a full-time minimum wage job.

I wish nothing but the best for those who are either down on their luck or suffering from a mental illness that deprives them of socioeconomic stability. I donate generously to United Way and I’ve volunteered as a chaplain. I’ve worked on Habitat for Humanity houses.

But I refuse to feed addictive behaviors just because a panhandler won’t take no for an answer.

Politics & Culture

"Can You Spare 65 Cents for a Brother?"

No Comments

Amidst my sundry errands yesterday — it’s been a busy weekend, because I’ll be on vacation in Las Vegas all next week — I stopped at a Burger King for lunch. As I sat in my truck, reading National Review and munching on my Whopper, a middle-aged African American male approached my window and yelled, “Hey. Hey, you.”
I ignored him. Just because a stranger wants my attention doesn’t mean he’s entitled to it, especially when I know what’s coming.
So he walks up to within five paces of the truck and yells, “Hey, man. You in the truck.”
I continue to ignore him.
So he walks up to my window and knocks hard on the glass. I look at him with a look of clear disapproval while he says, “Hey, man. Can you spare 65 cents for a brother?”
To which I replied: “Sorry, no.”
To which he replied, in a loud, high falsetto: “Damn.”
Then he shuffled away and stationed himself at the speaker stand at the BK drive-through, ready to ask for coin from anyone who decided they needed it their way that day.
I grow weary of aggressive panhandling.
Because I’m frequently downtown in Grand Rapids, I get approached for money almost daily. Sometimes it’s just the “Hey, you got a dollar?” routine and sometimes it’s “God bless you sir, I just need 50 cents for bus fare.” The more enterprising sorts insist on a full-blown conversation, demanding to shake your hand and asking questions about your day, your Christianity (or even, recently, to ask if I’m a racist). The goal of the panhandlers is to get some share of the cash in your pocket.
I’m not upset with the panhandlers, per se. After all, they have to make a living just like the rest of us. What bothers me their unwillingness to take no for an answer — to assume that they’re entitled to make their pitch in full. The best way to piss off a panhandler is to flat-out ignore him after he’s tried to get your attention 10 or more times. You’d think that after the fifth time you refuse to answer to a loudly shouted “hey, sir” or say “no, thanks” as you walk past, that they’d move on to the next target, but no. Doesn’t work like that, I guess.
I don’t contribute to panhandlers, largely out of (believe it or not) compassion. I’ve been around the block enough times to know that the money they’re soliciting isn’t going for food or for bus fare — it’s going to drugs and alcohol. The panhandlers are concentrated mostly on the stretch of Division Avenue between Franklin and Fulton. The Heartside neighborhood is chock full of homeless shelters and soup kitchens — in fact, a private study commissioned locally in Grand Rapids a few years ago concluded that the safety net for the homeless was perhaps too generous, in that the homeless had regular access to shelters and at least two large, full meals a day at no cost.
Alas, the aggressive panhandling works because wealthier passersby with money in their pocket are too conflict averse to respond to an assertive request for money with an equally assertive denial of such a request. There’s plenty of evidence that the more in-your-face, entrepreneurial style of panhandling can reap non-trivial income; some studies claim that well-practiced panhandlers can earn more each month than a full-time minimum wage job.
I wish nothing but the best for those who are either down on their luck or suffering from a mental illness that deprives them of socioeconomic stability. I donate generously to United Way and I’ve volunteered as a chaplain. I’ve worked on Habitat for Humanity houses.
But I refuse to feed addictive behaviors just because a panhandler won’t take no for an answer.

Politics & Culture

Local Politics: An Exercise in Depression

No Comments

I’ve mostly kept my powder dry about some of the drama going on in local politics. Time now to loose the fusillade.

  1. The ongoing drama about the Anuzis vs. Agema race for national committeeman vexes the mind. The state party remains fairly weak, a problem that plagued us during the Granholm years and shows no signs of abating. Although I appreciate Saul’s record, Delegate-gate (masterfully recorded by the folks at RightMichigan) is a big deal. Michigan is a bluer state than it ought to be in part because we have a bad track record of leadership at the state-party level, a problem that trickles down to candidate selection. I bear Anuzis no ill will, and I really don’t have a solid opinion either way about Dave Agema, but one thing I do know is that the old guard of the state party needs to be retired in favor of solid but pragmatic conservatives who will be more aggressive in the pursuit of the low-hanging fruit that Michigan offers but the leadership can’t ever seem to pluck. (Note: At this weekend’s state convention, Agema beat Anuzis — so Agema and Terri Lynn Land will serve as the state’s committeemen.)
  2. I exercise cautious optimism that the Kent County Republicans will get their act together. For years (roughly, the Joanne Voorhees stewardship) the county party felt more like a country club than a political organization, a place where well-connected people connected with each other. Several attempts to get involved, including phone calls and emails to various people in the county apparatus, were met with silence. And in the interim, we let folks like Justin Amash (Ron Paul’s heir apparent in the House) put MI-3 at risk of a Democratic pick-up. Word on the street is that the new leadership at the county level will be more open and engaging, but time will tell. I never had trouble getting involved directly in Kalamazoo or Ottawa; Kent’s impenetrability makes no sense.
  3. I submitted paperwork to run for precinct delegate. I’m not sure if it was received and properly processed — stay tuned. I’m told that Tea Party types have been quietly running for precinct delegate slots so that they can build a critical mass to “take over” at the county convention; surely, their efforts paid off with the Anuzis upset this weekend at the state convention. Usually, precinct delegate races are quiet non-events. The Tea Party makes it more interesting.
  4. The Rev. George Heartwell, mayor of Grand Rapids, recently made waves with a pro-Planned Parenthood spiel. Most of it didn’t make a lot of sense, and I understand that he’s apologizing at least for his tone because of pressure at the city commission meeting. It’s not clear why hizzonor felt the need to advocate for PP in the first place.

Never a dull moment. Major lesson: Political leadership, no matter how high or low, is a public trust, not a personal endowment. So be responsive stewards.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Religion

Reflections on the “After Liberalism” Essays in “First Things”

1 Comment

Is contemporary liberalism (in its lowercase-L sense) an exhausted project, or simply in need of rejuvenation? Wilfred M. McClay, Yuval Levin and James R. Rogers address this weighty subject in the May 2012 issue of First Things. While the entire exchange — a lead essay by McClay, followed up with two shorter responses by Levin and Rogers — is well worth the read, one significant point from Rogers really hit home.

Responding to McClay’s reference to Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument “that emotivist propositions have replaced rational argument over objective moral ends,” Rogers advances the claim that “liberals believe that the emotivistic move reduces conflict and opens venues for conversation rather than conflict….” Why avoid conflict? Rogers suggests that the “residual horror at the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, underlined by the English Civil Wars, still prompts a visceral reaction by many to any hint of religion in the public square,” and thus by extension, contemporary politics must answer “whether religious belief is intrinsically dangerous and whether claims of absolute truth are consistent with forms of toleration sufficiently robust to offer credible assurance that devastatingly religious conflict will not be repeated.”

Put more simply: Contemporary liberals favor language and arguments that privilege individual feelings or perspectives, because doing so provides a partial block against abstract arguments sourced from absolute truth statements that, if left unchecked, could engender wide-scale social conflict. Hence the concern about Rick Santorum establishing a “theocracy” or the fear that conservative political ends constitute a “war on [insert demographic group here]” even when dispassionate observers believe the fears rhetorically disingenuous.

Take, for example, the gay marriage debate. Proponents on the left usually stake their arguments in a broad reading of human autonomy. Liberals rarely discuss marriage as a socioeconomic institution or a sacramental event and frequently dismiss communitarian objections to gay or plural marriage as inherently discriminatory. Instead, they talk about “marriage equality” or “the right to love whomever you wish” — language that elevates a person’s experiences and his emotional response thereto as an intrinsic good. When you pit a self-referential, emotional plea against an argument that prevents someone from allegedly being true to himself because of inflexible, “uncaring” institutional rules, the progressive will typically favor the former no matter how the latter’s logic unfolds. Why? Because if dispassionate social norms may be brandished to allegedly prevent a person from enjoying the fullness of a loving relationship, what other sociocultural violence may these norms inflict? Thus, the norm itself must be challenged to protect not just gays but everyone from the risk that those rules may be used as weapons against other people in other contexts.

In short: Progressives believe that sociocultural principles founded on abstract or religious truth-claims, by their very nature, increase the risk of theoretical social violence because they infringe on the self-actualization of people who don’t support those norms.  So, hey hey ho ho, your abstract norms have got to go!

Rogers’ insight illuminates in a different way the reasons that the progressive left disdains cultural authority and religion and privileges personal authenticity and a person’s emotional response. Yet it doesn’t answer the Lenin Question: What is to be done?

Commentators decry the polarization in the American electorate, yet the lion’s share of the reason has nothing to do with partisan affiliation but rather with the latent worldview differences between contemporary progressives and everyone else. No matter how you construct the arguments about the proper size and scope of government or fair tax rates or regulatory reform, you cannot escape epistemology. If a progressive by default will often reject “common good” or “historical practice” arguments because they conflict with an emotivist rebuttal, there’s no real chance for a meeting of the minds to resolve pressing political problems. You cannot negotiate or debate in good faith when the discussants haven’t resolved the stark differences in their logic models and value systems.

The central insight into the entire question raised by McClay is that contemporary liberalism faces an existential crisis; from a purely intellectual standpoint, the progressive inheritance is largely spent, with no clear path forward for the dominant political philosophy of the Western world. The question, though, is what happens next. Can liberalism adapt and reform? Will it be supplanted by something different? Will it collapse and some other value system fill the gap (as seems to be happening with the increasingly Islamization of parts of Europe)?

As a conservative in the contemporary American ideological sense, I have a vested interest in seeing liberalism as a political system rehabilitated and strengthened. Alas, it seems that the “fix” has to occur from within, but it’s not clear that anything short of crisis will help today’s progressives to re-evaluate the long-term self-destructive ends that their worldview logically entails.

1 … 4 5 6 7 8 … 19