Values

On LinkinIn Pulse this morning, I encountered a column titled "Forget About Humanity." It's a critique of modern society and how we've structured it. The overall tone, as I perceived it, is set by the final sentence of the opening paragraph:

But yes, hurray, by all means, let's all run out and buy another gadget to distract us, from anything actually meaningful or real.

To which I plead: Not Guilty. I am not distracted from the meaningful or real by gadgets. Instead, as the author notes, I ration out my "understandably limited humanity" (By which I think Mr. LoPraeste refers to my attention, time and resources.) as I see fit to do so. And I believe that other people do so as well. And "[m]ost of us suffer the lot of the bungled and botched" precisely because we live in a world where billions of people ration their limited means in a way that makes sense for them, rather than as a part of a grand worldwide enterprise of global uplift. Speaking for myself, when I choose to answer an e-mail or a text message rather than taking action to combat human suffering, the absolute degradation of the planet or bankers sucking $30 trillion out of the global economy, it's not because I don't know what's important, or I'm somehow not "awake." It's because that e-mail or that text IS what's important to me at that moment. I fully understand what I'm doing, and what purposes I'm serving. It's no different than when I choose to eat dinner, go to bed or donate to the food drive that the United States Postal Service holds every Spring. Yes, when I chose to purchase a tablet computer rather than spend that money to directly aid those less well off than myself or donate that money to a charity, I directly contributed to my own focus on what Mr. LoPraeste considers the wrong things. One of those "wrong things" it turns out, may very well be that judgement.

We can argue what is actually meaningful or real. We can argue it indefinitely. (Just as we can argue what the definitions of "meaningful" or "real" are in this context, or whether they have workable definitions at all.) But one of the cornerstones of our human-ness, if not necessarily our humanity, is that we choose these things for ourselves. It is one of the freedoms we have, and that cannot be taken away from us. Yes, it makes for a world were the things that certain people value are different than the things that other people (sometimes including ourselves) want them to value. If we don't like what others value, then it is our responsibility to demonstrate to them how the things that we value are also of value to them - and of greater value than the things that they already place value on. I note the irony of being told that we often have "a relentless focus on talking instead of doing." Because publicly judging via a column on a web site is just that - talking. It is not taking steps to correct the problem, nor is it leading by example. "Do as I would have you do" is not the same as "Follow me."

There is no shortage of people who have determined that the best way to secure themselves in their basic "humanity" is to question someone else's. But humanity is either a birthright or it isn't - when we come to the conclusion that some people are worthy of the term "human" and others are not - and that our judgments are an accurate reflection of some objective reality, we are doing the very thing we often decry.

Powers of Creation

If, as we're so often told by conservative pundits, think tanks and politicians, "The government can't create jobs," what does one call being a career member of the military? A hobby? Even if you narrow that a bit and say that "The government can't create private sector jobs," you still have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of contractors to contend with. Because the United States spends a lot of time doing, well, stuff, and it needs people to do that stuff.

Where the ideology starts to fray, I think is in the idea that a collective of people won't do anything more than all of the individuals in that group would do. But even if you use this (fairly generous) understanding of the statement "The government can't create jobs," it seems iffy. In my apartment complex, there is a service that, if you buy certain trash bags, will come to your door and take those bags to the dumpster for you every evening. Sure, you could make the point that someone could come to everyone's door and ask if they would like to subscribe, but I suspect that the complex stepping in and setting everything up made it much more likely that it would be worthwhile for someone to do this. Basically, it created some number of jobs that might not otherwise exist. So if an apartment complex management team can create a job by arranging for a service on behalf of its tenants, it seems that a government could create a job by arranging for a service on behalf of its constituents. Sure - the extra costs passed on, to either the tenants or the constituents, could go to something else in the absence of a rent or tax increase. But that money could just as easily have sat under someone's mattress, not doing anything. To the degree that organizations take a certain amount of money from their members and increase the velocity of that money, they can create jobs - because a job is simply the creation of a good or service in exchange for some remuneration, rather than for the producer's personal consumption.

In the end, jobs are "created" by someone wanting a good and/or service and being willing to pay someone to produce same. It's simply an outgrowth of the division of labor that societies devise. The idea that particular groupings of people within a society, simply by virtue of the label attached to what they do, can or cannot "create jobs" doesn't strike me as accurate.

Waypoint

The Polar Pioneer, docked in Seattle. In the foreground is a "protest barge."

Royal Dutch Shell has plans for Arctic drilling this year, and is using the Port of Seattle as a stopover point. This being called the Left Coast for a reason, there have been protests; and even the City Council and the Mayor are getting in on the act.

Column A and Column B

The story of Josh Duggar—of the whole Duggar family, really—is a tragedy. Duggar’s actions were absolutely appalling, as anyone with a well-tuned moral compass could understand. Of course we should condemn Josh and his crimes: Contra Mike Huckabee’s strange statement, publicly denouncing sex criminals sends a resounding message that our society won’t tolerate such abuse. But even as we reprove him, we should remember the odious lies that were forced down his throat as a child. As much as Josh deserves our scorn, the young teen who perpetrated these crimes also deserves a small measure of our pity. Josh was born into a world of subjugation and repression. That doesn’t excuse his monstrous behavior. But it does help to explain how a man who spends his days espousing family values lost his own sense of morality.
Mark Joseph Stern. "Of Course We Should Condemn Josh Duggar. We Should Also Pity Him."

First, apologies for the long quote. This is a situation where I wanted to make sure that I pulled in all of the necessary context for what follows.

I understand the call to both Condemn and Pity Josh Duggar. But it seems like a call to have it both ways, when I think that it would be healthier to make a choice - either one's "moral compass" is objectively self-calibrating and acting in reprehensible ways is a sign of insufficient commitment to proper behavior, or we do as we're taught to do, and people's sense of morality is personal.

Note that this doesn't touch on whether Josh Duggar's actions were criminal and/or harmful. They were both. But that's a separate issue from whether or not there is a greater moral issue at stake.

I've never seen _19 Kids and Counting_ because it strikes me, as does much of "reality" programming, as Freak-Show Television. And, to be honest, the Point-and-Stare/Laugh aesthetic of it all makes me uncomfortable. But the Duggars, like any other phenomenon popularly understood to be a train wreck, are impossible to get completely away from. I won't claim to have read the public conversation around the show entirely correctly, but I think I understand the discomfort that it provoked in America's political Left. The unabashedly Conservative Christian Duggars have been described multiple times as openly using their show to promote their particular values as the only correct ones. They were preaching to a choir of people who see themselves as kept out of the élite of the American mainstream, and the sermon seems to have been "'Society' is different, and that's Bad."

And so when Mr. Stern relates that: "[...] much of the left has greeted the news of [Josh Duggar's] molestation charges with a kind of derisive, jeering disgust," I get it. Like anyone, people on the Left want to believe that they're good people, with well-calibrated moral compasses, and so are always alert for a chance to point out when a mighty critic has fallen. But the idea that it was Josh's upbringing that helped shape him into someone who is worth of pity for being "born into a world of subjugation and repression" is designed to take a singular critique of a man and reshape into a broader, if milder, indictment of a culture. (This has been going on for a while - people on the Left(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/14/lawrence-krauss-physicist-creationism-taliban-child-abuse_n_2687808.html) and the Right(http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2014/07/science-or-child-abuse-new-evolution-book-geared-to-preschoolers-teaches-children-they-evolved-from-fish-2995378.html), for instance, have leveled charges of child abuse for passing on one's beliefs to one's children.)

Which creates something of a paradox - as I first encountered the concept in college: "People are taught to behave in certain ways, but should held accountable for learning them." Our culture of making both the external what and the internal why of behavior important leads us to forget that for the most part, culpability doesn't matter. It makes sense to condemn the molestation of youth below the age of consent. This is a behavior that we have more or less collectively determined to be unacceptable. But once we've done that, why bother to condemn Josh Duggar? It may be satisfying to point at him and say (as is becoming popular): "You're a bad person and should feel bad." But what do we earn from that other than a sense of personal satisfaction?

Conversely, if we've decided that Josh Duggar is a monster, and fully responsible for what he has done, who cares what he was taught? A lot of people have been taught things that would appear to justify bad behavior on their part - yet they don't indulge in it. This is why the dueling accusations as to whether teaching creationism or evolution by natural selection constitute child abuse are completely irrelevant. Sure, they give people something to snipe at each other about, but Children and Family Services will never become involved over them.

We often appear to have difficulty deciding who to blame for bad things that happen. So we don't decide. We spread the blame around to anyplace we think it will stick. Which is understandable, but it doesn't solve the problems at hand.

The Right Side

It will be okay when I do it...

When it comes to crimes like murder, I don't believe that our biggest problem is our willingness to kill. Instead, it's our willingness to tell ourselves that our reasons for killing are the right ones.

[Art] Caplan draws a wise lesson from the Nazi doctors: Beware the human weakness for moral rationalization. But part of that weakness is the illusion in each of us that we have escaped it.
William Saletan. "Natural-Born Killers" Slate Magazine, 4 April, 2005

In the end, our weakness for rationalization doesn't lead many of us to violence - despite the tough talk, I doubt that Mr. Shaw would shoot down an unsuspecting person for the "sin" of hunting for sport. It's, likely just words. Instead, it leads us to look the other way when people we dislike are subject to violence. Or, perhaps worse, engage in character assassination.

There is nothing wrong, as far as I'm concerned, with backing things that suit one's purposes, even if those same actions would otherwise trigger protest. Where we fail is in owning up to our biases. Which gives us the idea that our moral sentiments are objective reflections of reality, and thus superior to those of people who disagree with us. And there is no price to high for others to pay in the pursuit of a higher ideal.