Categories
Political Philosophy Politics Videos

Scalia Seems Confused About Natural Law


Noted Catholic and right winger Scalia was recently asked – in his rephrasing of the question:

Why shouldn’t we follow the unamininty of the world [regarding] assisted suicide…homosexual sodomy…abortion…[&tc]?

His response was rather odd. He argues that judges don’t have any special expertise to decide these issues, therefore they should be decided by the people. (This part isn’t odd. It makes sense to me, though with some caveats.) But then he goes on to incorporate this with his belief in natural law:

I believe in natural law, but I believe that in democratic political instituions,  it’s up to the people to decide what they think natural law demands…Because we all disagree on natural law. Why say whatever a bunch of judges think is the answer? That makes no sense in a democracy. There are no clear judicial answers to these questions. And since there aren’t it seems to be it’s the kind of a thing that in a democracy we debate with one another and we ask the people what do you think natural law requires.

Here’s where he’s lost me. Because the primary precepts of natural law should be evident to every rational human being* – regardless of religion. Hell, it should be evident to animals – so evident that they act in accordance with it naturally. Thus we all shouldn’t “disagree on natural law.” We should tend to agree – and we should actually agree if we act according to our natures. Thus, the opinions of other people in the world actually does provide evidence of natural law – though it could be attempted to be explained away as some mass perversion.

I don’t disagree with the position Scalia is defending – that these contentious social issues should when possible be decided by the more democratic political institutions rather than the judiciary (although the judiciary has tended to follow public opinions) – but I find his argument itself puzzling. I think these issues should be decided by the more social institutions because I believe they are social decisions primarily. Scalia seems to be arguing that these are governed by natural law – which, given the role we have given judges to extrapolate from current law and apply it to specific situations, is exactly what they would need to be doing with natural law. “Joe Sixpack” – to use that derogatory phrase Scalia and Palin like so much – may know natural law as he knows the rules of the road. But we entrust judges with applying the rules of the road with rationality tempered by wisdom. They don’t always – but that’s their job. Their experience taking a set of rules that are knowable and applying them to specific situations is exactly the type of experience that “Joe Sixpack” doesn’t have – and would make judges more expect.

But – and here I speculate – it doesn’t seem Scalia believes in natural law as the term was created by Thomas Aquinas. (N.B. I haven’t kept up-to-date on modern day natural law theory, so if any informed readers could inform me if modern day Thomists have entirely eviscerated Aquinas’s definition with some work-around, let me know.) Instead he believes that issues like “assisted suicide…homosexual sodomy…abortion” &tc are inherently political. Thus, they should be decided by the political institutions rather than judicial ones. This undermines the case made by Robert P. George (along with many members of the Catholic Church hierarchy) regarding why the church must take political stands on issues involving natural law (where it happens to agree with the Republican Party.)

* As Aquinas wrote in the Summa Theologica: “[W]e must say that the natural law, as to general principles, is the same for all, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge.”

Categories
Barack Obama Domestic issues Politics The Opinionsphere

The Future of the Tea Party

As soon as I write about all the great columns David Brooks has been producing recently, he goes ahead and writes this one.

Now, it isn’t bad – and it is certainly interesting. But in predicting the rise of the tea party conservative movement, Brooks is extrapolating too much from a short term trend. Brooks himself should be able to see this, as he writes:

A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.

Which is why I would be wary of extrapolating some broad tea party movement sweeping through Congress a year hence – and even more of listing the tea party movement in the litany of defining influential groups of the decade beginning with the hippies defining the 60s, the feminists the 70s, and the Christian conservatives the 80s. (Especially given how similar the Contract with America/Ross Perot crowd was to the tea party – and how that simply fizzled in the 90s.) The tea party crowd may define the coming era – but I would be extremely wary about prognosticating that given our rapidly shifting political environment. I would even be wary of presuming they will help the Republicans win many seats back in the 2010 midterms.

But this observation does strike me as potentially prescient – and I’d like to see Brooks explore the idea more fully:

The Obama administration is premised on the conviction that pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise should have the power to implement programs to solve the country’s problems. Many Americans do not have faith in that sort of centralized expertise or in the political class generally.

I’ve argued in the past – rather vaguely and putting the matter in starker terms – that this is a potential problem. But to the extent the approach favored by the Obama administration is “tinkering,” as I believe the current evidence seems to show, I think they avoid the worst of this policy trap. The tinkering approach manages to both be technocratic and epistemologically modest – at its best capturing the best aspects of a conservative reticence and a liberal desire to innovate. What it isn’t is especially democratic – which I still believe is problematic.

The tinkering approach also creates a political problem as it does not yet have a compelling story associated with it – as FDR’s New Deal did, as JFK’s New Frontier did, as LBJ’s Great Society, as Reagan’s focus on cutting back government to release individual initiative – to renew Morning in America did, as Clinton’s triangulation did, as the Contract With America did, as Bush’s War on Terror and Ownership Society and Compassionate Conservatism all did, as Obama’s campaign for Change We Can Believe In did, as the tea party’s hyperbolic screams of protest against Nazi-Communist policies has already, as the left’s chants of “Sellout!” have already. Without this compelling story, this mythic goal, the tinkering approach has been portrayed as centralizing, big government, 1980s-style liberalism – or the embrace of Bush-era policies and the selling of Washington to special interests. The tea party has been able to get traction largely because the Obama administration hasn’t found a compelling story to explain its tinkering approach. If the administration is able to find this story, anchoring it in some series of news events, it could entirely shift the momentum and defang the tea party just as Clinton was able to do with his triangulation in the 90s.

Side note: Brooks is able to describe the tea party’s position in a far more compelling way than I have heard any supporter of the movement (of which Brooks is not.) But I think he gives the movement too much credit:

The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.

If the movement evolves in this direction, it would be able to gain more traction – but at the moment all I see are howls of rage.

[Image by Rberteig licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Politics The Opinionsphere

Ressentiment Redux

Julian Sanchez:

But national-level political communities really are communities now, in a fairly robust sense. Between dedicated cable and radio channels and the Internet, you really can live in them in a pretty literal and immersive way… What’s really pernicious about a politics of ressentiment is that it cuts that tether—it enables a political identity that’s generated and defined by political conflict itself…

Part of the problem is that politics is no longer seen as a narrow tool for addressing some well-defined set of problems, but a kind of all-purpose machine for the satisfaction of human desires…

We don’t need to do some kind of probing psychoanalysis, because this stuff isn’t subtext; it’s text.  Remember Palin’s infamous “death panels” post? It wasn’t just a claim that the government would deny care; the fear was that this was Obama’s “death panels” getting to decide how worthy you are. Liberals treated it as a generic argument about “rationing,” but by its own terms it was an argument about being judged. Conservatives’ favorite photo of Obama has him with his nose in the air looking down on the hoi polloi, testifying to his purported arrogance. Then the outrage over a strained reading of an Obama remark about “putting lipstick on a pig”: He’s calling Sarah (and therefore you!) a pig! The message is pretty insistent: They think they’re better than you. It’s not, again, that I’m asking why people hold certain policy views and concluding that it’s really about this kind of cultural resentment. I’m asking why the political coalition organized around this set of views is putting so much emphasis on this frame, and whether it isn’t ultimately a bad idea to.

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Domestic issues Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

In Praise of Tinkering: Health Care Reform

[digg-reddit-me]Critics of the health care reforms before Congress can be divided into two camps:

  • those who claim that the legislation would simply be a “government takeover” of one sixth of the economy – which is simply nonsense; and
  • those who claim the bill doesn’t do enough, that it doesn’t have an overarching theory, that it merely “tinkers” with the problems with health care.

I won’t be dealing with the nonsense claim today. As to the second claim, I concede that the bill merely tinkers with solutions to our problems – but that is the main reason I am optimistic about its success.

Not everyone feels this way: Opponents use this perception to attack the bill from both the left and right, some on each side seeking to make the case for more radical changes and some for leaving things as they are. The Iowa State Senate Democrats wrote, “As a nation we can not continue to tinker with health care reform.  We must make major transformations.” Donna Edwards warned that the health care reforms being debated without a public option were “just tinkering around the edges.” Then from the right, there are those pressing the radical measure of ending Medicare and Medicaid and every other government involvement in health care – and those who favor allowing insurance to be sold across state lines which would eradicate most regulations as states raced to the bottom to attract the insurance industry. Others say that the bill’s modesty is a reason to give up, lest by trying to fix things we mess things up more. A conservative editorial claimed that “tinkering with a mess only makes a prettier mess.” Chairman of the RNC Michael Steele meanwhile made it his mantra to claim that the Obama administration is “conducting a dangerous experiment” and a “risky experiment with health care.”

Even many of those defending the bill seem disappointed but resigned to its modesty. They often blame Obama for deferring to Congress rather than proposing his own legislation, presuming that if the Obama administration took a stronger hand in shaping the bill it would have a grand logic, a coherent and fully formed strategy for universalizing health insurance and curbing health care costs. (Though the bills now under consideration are almost exactly what Obama proposed during his campaign.)

This perception of mere tinkering rather than some grand social engineering project has been the bill’s political weakness. Without a coherent big idea or story to sell the plan, it created an opportunity for Republicans to take each individual part and make it a bogey-man for some big idea that they would claim was the real reason for the reform: rationing! euthanasia! government-mandated abortion! socialist indoctrination of your children! &tc. Later, progressives, feeling betrayed at the demise of the public option which many had considered the real reason for the reform, and similarly unable to find the big idea behind the plan, quickly settled on the idea that it was a bailout to the insurance industry.

But despite these political disadvantages, a bill that is modest enough to tinker is the best policy solution. This approach is epistemologically modest – it seems designed to avoid hubristic assumptions about the power of government and to take advantage of the process that Nassim Nicholas Taleb called “black swans

Trial and error will save us from ourselves because they capture benign black swans. Look at the three big inventions of our time: lasers, computers and the internet. They were all produced by tinkering and none of them ended up doing what their inventors intended them to do.

This idea of tinkering imbues all of Obama’s policies and his governance so far. It represents a synthesis of the core conservative critique of Reagan, Hayek, &tc with an empirical approach towards government generally favored by liberals. In other words, Reagan correctly saw that there are limits in how well government can address societal problems – as liberal projects of social engineering backfired. He demonized it in his affable way, for example claiming that “The ten most dangerous words in the English language are ‘Hi, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ”

Barack Obama absorbed this critique – and saw the limits of centralized planning and the power of markets that lay at the core of Reagan. But he did not adopt Reagan’s visceral hatred for government. Instead, he believed government could be useful. Rather than seeing government as something that needed to be attacked, he adopted Hayek’s view that “we needed to think of the world more as gardeners tending a garden and less as architects trying to build some system.”

As I wrote as part of my summing up of the case for Obama last November:

Tinkering is the best we can do in a world we only imperfectly understand. Anyone looking at Obama’s policy proposals can see that he is a tinkerer rather than a revolutionary. For example, he seeks to build upon our current health care system rather than demolish it as McCain does in one manner and socialists do in another.

With the impending fiscal crisis upon us, driven by rapidly rising health care costs, the primary goal of the reform has been to cut costs. (Which counter-intuitively actually is aided by universal coverage, as even the libertarian Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman acknowledged.) A number of health care experts have similarly praised the current health care reform effort for its modest but positive steps coupled. Atul Gawande in an influential piece in the New Yorker asks: “The health-care bill has no master plan for curbing costs. Is that a bad thing?” He concludes:

Pick up the Senate health-care bill—yes, all 2,074 pages—and leaf though it. Almost half of it is devoted to programs that would test various ways to curb costs and increase quality. The bill is a hodgepodge. And it should be.

After the Senate released their version of the bill, health care expert Jonathan Gruber was quoted:

My summary is it’s really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can’t think of a thing to try that they didn’t try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here….I can’t think of anything I’d do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn’t have done better than they are doing.

Health care reform is the clearest experiment testing whether the government can work by properly aligning incentives rather than brute, centralized takeover.* It is an attempt to tinker with our unsustainable system – which on its own would be “sure to raise your taxes, increase your out-of-pocket medical expenses, swell the federal deficit, leave more Americans without insurance and guarantee that wages will remain stagnant” – rather than to demolish it and start anew.

It isn’t as exciting as some grand effort to re-shape 1/6th of the economy or a moral crusade to help those being victimized by evil private industry. Rather, it is a bet that out of a million pilot projects, something will help and we will be able to see that it does, and adapt it to a larger scale. It is a bet that it is better to expand health insurance as much as possible and to establish it as a universal right and responsibility than to wait for something better. It is a bet that government can improve things, while acknowledging that unintended consequences will ensue and it should tread carefully. It isn’t the exciting rhetoric of Change You Can Believe In! – but it is a step towards change we can believe in.

Update: I would propose this explanation – of tinkering and epistemological modesty is a better explanation than either of the two described by Ed Kilgore in a very interesting piece for The New Republic:

To put it more bluntly, on a widening range of issues, Obama’s critics to the right say he’s engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector.

* Though sometimes, brute, centralized government takeover is best – the military and the courts being two items like this everyone could agree on.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

Categories
Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Bipartisan in Substance

Ezra Klein makes an important observation that – for those who accept it – changes dramatically how the political battles of the Obama administration are viewed:

We are less bipartisan in process even as we have become more bipartisan in substance.

Klein points out – as I had earlier – how Obama’s proposals for health care reform and cap and trade for example both have a solid grounding in previous Republican approaches to these problems – and in fact take into account many of the Republicans’ deep-seated distrusted of government action in general. Yet despite this, Republicans have continued to claim that Obama is the second-coming of Stalin – repudiating ideas they only a short time ago embraced.

One can see the seeds of this entrenchment against Obama in the Republican reaction to Bill Clinton – as they truly hated and demonized the man as a radical leftist even as he governed as a moderate liberal. Republicans were still willing to work with Clinton on a number of initiatives including welfare reform. Thus far, they have embraced a nihilistic path of pure opposition to Obama.

The Democrats did not similarly react to George W. Bush – as they proved willing to work with him on matters that they held to be important and/or which were popular with their constituencies. For example, the No Child Left Behind Act, Bush’s several rounds of tax cuts, and Medicare Part D. Democrats were willing to work with the White House despite the extremely partisan processes instituted in Congress cutting Democrats off from policy-making. And they were willing to hand Bush victories that were not “bipartisan in substance” – most especially his tax cuts which were thoroughly partisan and ideologically motivated.

In other words – Klein’s statement that, “We are less bipartisan in process even as we have become more bipartisan in substance” only holds true for the past year. To some degree, this is House Democrats fault for making the process less bipartisan – but I find it hard to blame them considering the unprecedented procedural tactics used by the Republicans as well as their unprincipled intransigence.

Categories
Criticism Economics The Opinionsphere

Victor Davis Hanson’s “Productive Classes”

It’s always interesting to watch a pundit venture from his field of “expertise.” Scratch a bit beneath the surface, and anywhere outside of their expertise they tend to be rabid ideologues. Every virtue they bring to their perspective on what they are an expert in vanishes. Generalists on the other hand seem to bring the same worldview to everything – whatever it may be. (My goal with this blog is to be a rather amiable generalist.)

For example, Victor Davis Hanson is an expert on ancient warfare. However, he wrote last week a column in the National Review about the “war” on the “wannabe rich.” His evidence of such a war is based on the idea that someone who is extremely wealthy has far more money than he or she needs – and so, increased taxes don’t hurt them much. Which is, of course, the entire basis for the progressive taxation that Hanson is trying to reject – that money beyond a certain base of income serves little use. The utility of more income for someone making $500,000 a year is undoubtedly less then for someone making $50,000.

Hanson also attempts to play the populist card in the class struggle between the “haves” and the “have mores” – or the “haves” and the “have yachts.” According to Hanson, those making between $200,000 and $500,000 are the “productive classes who want to be rich” (the 95% of Americans making less are not mentioned) and those making more are the corrupt elites. It’s a rather interesting view – quite Randian in its conclusion: “continue to punish and demonize [the productive classes], and the country will grind to a halt – as we are seeing now.”

More mature libertarians and conservatives often look at Rand through the somewhat rosy lens of adolescence when they first discovered her – but they find her theories to be fundamentally lacking. Hanson though seems to still view the world through this adolescent lens – and doesn’t realize how it sounds to claim that those who are still making $500,000 in the midst of this recession are deliberately grinding the economy to a halt because they feel demonized and burdened by paying a slightly higher percentage of their taxes than they did a few years ago (but still less than they did under Clinton, Bush I, or Reagan.)

Categories
Politics The Opinionsphere

The Utter Moral Certainty of Right Wing National Security Policy

Andrew Sullivan:

[Obama] is the barrier between us and a form of fascism, imbued with utter moral certainty, that now animates the core of the GOP.

I’m less taken with Sullivan’s invocation of fascism to describe the core of the Republican position on national security than I am with his description of their “utter moral certainty.” The proto-fascism charge may be accurate, but as a matter of political rhetoric, it has little impact due to its overuse – as George Orwell acknowledged years ago in his Politics and the English Language. This charge of “utter moral certainty” though is specific and captures something essential about the national security positions of the right wing. That, plus an unbounded faith in the power of centralized government action. How else can one understand the defense of torture? Or the expansion of secrecy? Of the unprecedented expansion of the power of the executive? The holding of prisoners by executive authority alone?

Categories
Criticism The Opinionsphere The Web and Technology

“The past should stay in the heart, where it belongs.”

I believe it was Ezra Klein who posted a link to this article with the note that he’s read authors on the same themes, but that this was better written than any other similar piece. I agree. William Deresiewicz writes a truly conservative piece – by which I don’t refer to the right-wing community held together by ressentiment, but a political and social temperament that sees value in tradition – a conservatism that stands athwart history yelling, “Stop” as William F. Buckley wrote. Deresiewicz explains how  Facebook is destroying friendship:

Facebook holds out a utopian possibility: What once was lost will now be found. But the heaven of the past is a promised land destroyed in the reaching. Facebook, here, becomes the anti-madeleine, an eraser of memory. Carlton Fisk has remarked that he’s watched the videotape of his famous World Series home run only a few times, lest it overwrite his own recollection of the event. Proust knew that memory is a skittish creature that peeks from its hole only when it isn’t being sought. Mementos, snapshots, reunions, and now this—all of them modes of amnesia, foes of true remembering. The past should stay in the heart, where it belongs. [my emphasis]

Even so, you should become a fan of 2parse.com on Facebook today!

Categories
Life

A recovering procrastinator of pleasure

John Tierney:

Acknowledge what you are: a recovering procrastinator of pleasure.

It sounds odd, but this is actually a widespread form of procrastination — just ask the airlines and other marketers who save billions of dollars annually from gift certificates that expire unredeemed.

Indeed, I have never visited the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the New York Stock Exchange, or almost any other Manhattan landmarks – which I have at times taken as a kind of metaphor for my years as a twentysomething. As I wrote in an email last year, edited to provide context:

I was thinking – while walking back to Penn – about how you said that now was the time to visit the Empire State Building, to stop living for the weekends, to stop being held back by my commute, my daily routines:

I know I over think things; that I choose the safe, dependable
pleasures over the riskier joys too often; I probably need to be
pushed and to push myself to say, “Yes,” more often. But though I
sometimes get stuck in a kind of rut, I do have a tendency to make
bold moves when I reach a certain point.

But I’m not going to regret missing out on the Empire State Building.
I’m going to regret if I don’t write a novel.
I’m going to regret if I don’t run for Congress.
I’m going to regret if I don’t spend at least a year travelling abroad.
I’m going to regret if I don’t have a child, if I don’t live for some
time in Manhattan, if I don’t give enough to charity.
I’m going to regret if I lose an opportunity because I was afraid it
wouldn’t work out.

Which I suppose was your point.

[Image by 64iso licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Barack Obama Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

The Obvious Truths Neglected in Responses to the Christmas Bomber

[digg-reddit-me]As I mentioned today, David Brooks has been writing some damn good columns in recent weeks – and in his most recent, he reiterated a point I had made earlier. As I wrote:

Few seem willing to admit the obvious truth: No centralized power can keep us safe. No intelligence system will be perfect. No watch list will be all-inclusive. No screening procedures are foolproof. We can make it harder for a terrorist to succeed, but in order to win, we need to prevent every attack; while they only need to slip through the cracks once. And there will always be cracks. Even in a totalitarian regime, there are cracks. Part of the price we pay for a free society is vulnerability.

Brooks compared how the Greatest Generation – which greatly expanded government during the Great Depression and World War II – viewed government to how people presently seem to view government:

During the middle third of the 20th century, Americans had impressive faith in their own institutions. It was not because these institutions always worked well. The Congress and the Federal Reserve exacerbated the Great Depression. The military made horrific mistakes during World War II, which led to American planes bombing American troops and American torpedoes sinking ships with American prisoners of war.

But there was a realistic sense that human institutions are necessarily flawed. History is not knowable or controllable. People should be grateful for whatever assistance that government can provide and had better do what they can to be responsible for their own fates.

That mature attitude seems to have largely vanished. Now we seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved…

Brooks got a minor point wrong here – as he claims we “expect perfection from government.” My impression is that we demand perfection from the government and expect incompetence, which I would suggest has something to do with government clusterfuck that the 1970s represented along with the demonization of government bureaucracies by the Republican Party starting with Ronald Reagan coupled with the constant invocations of an all-powerful and competent government national security apparatus in mainstream thrillers and right-wing politics. Brooks continues:

At some point, it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t the centralized system that stopped terrorism in this instance. As with the shoe bomber, as with the plane that went down in Shanksville, Pa., it was decentralized citizen action. The plot was foiled by nonexpert civilians who had the advantage of the concrete information right in front of them — and the spirit to take the initiative.

For better or worse, over the past 50 years we have concentrated authority in centralized agencies and reduced the role of decentralized citizen action. We’ve done this in many spheres of life. Maybe that’s wise, maybe it’s not. But we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.

Greenwald is able to overcome his ressentiment for once (“I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but David Brooks actually had an excellent column…”) Greenwald continues to develop the idea:

The Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety.  Even though they knew that doing so would help murderers and other dangerous and vile criminals evade capture, the Framers banned the Government from searching homes without probable cause, prohibited compelled self-incrimination, double jeopardy and convictions based on hearsay, and outlawed cruel and unusual punishment.  That’s because certain values — privacy, due process, limiting the potential for abuse of government power — were more important than mere survival and safety.  A central calculation of the Constitution was that we insist upon privacy, liberty and restraints on government power even when doing so means we live with less safety and a heightened risk of danger and death.  And, of course, the Revolutionary War against the then-greatest empire on earth was waged by people who risked their lives and their fortunes in pursuit of liberty, precisely because there are other values that outweigh mere survival and safety.

I have yet to see any right winger continue to histronically attack Obama while acknowledging either of these two (essentially undisputed) points. Instead, they are forgotten or shunted aside as Obama is accused of all sorts of malfeasance and naïveté.

[Image not subject to copyright.]