Unhumble

One thing that I learned from Ta-Nehisi Coates is that: "You should never judge yourself by the standards of the owner of the boot presently on your neck." Or, less dramatically, that you shouldn't judge yourself by the standards of your critics. When I first read it, it seemed like one of these sayings of deep wisdom that is worth filing away somewhere, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was a simple admonition to be true to yourself as you experience yourself, and not as others do.

I do not believe in deities. I simply find no evidence for them in my world, in the same way that I find no evidence for ghosts, psychics or sorcerers. This does not mean that they do not exist, however. But if you left me with no other options, I would wager that none of them were real, and be confident that I'd be the one going home with the cash when it was all said and done.

But, as I noted, I do not stand firmly on the position that deities, et al must be fictional. In many circles, this is considered "humility" on my part. Which I understand. But I would note that when I speak to Christians and Moslems about their faiths, conceding that they may be incorrect in their understanding that God is real is not considered "humble." In the worst case scenario, that sort of doubt is considered sinful. Humility in faith means something completely different to them. In light of this, I suspect that praise for "humility" in non-believers is less about praising a virtue than it is about hoping to leave open an avenue of conversion.

My lack of belief in anything supernatural works for me. I can put together a workable understanding of how the world came to be and manage a viable system of ethics and justice without recourse to a controlling entity. I do not need my life to having anything that resembles, "meaning." (I think. I have never been exactly clear on what it means for life to have "meaning" in the first place.) If I need to understand myself to be part of something greater than myself, I need only look down at the Earth, or up into the sky. Neither of those things care one whit if I am here tomorrow or not, yet I would be very put out were either of them to go away.

But I know any number of people who believe in deities, several who believe in ghosts, some who believe in psychics and even a few who believe in sorcerers. And I like these people, and out of respect for them, I accept that they live in a world that is fundamentally different from my own. And out of respect, I let them stay in it. And so I have no interest in bringing them into my world. I understand the worldview that says that I am doing them a disservice by letting them live in a delusion, but my answer to that is that it works for them, and there is no harm in it. Religion may not make people good, but it doesn't make them dicks, either - we are all perfectly capable of being either of those things regardless of what faith we follow, or don't follow. The traits our species has are independent of such considerations.

Not feeling a need to undermine what works for other people is, like the understanding that the Universe is too vast a place to ever know either in its entirely or with certainty, in my estimation, different from humility. Likewise, the confidence that something one is unable to find any evidence of is not actually there, is different from faith.

The Liberty State

In The Atlantic yesterday, David Frum turned comments from an Oxford Union discussion on liberty and security into a column, which I read. The basic jist of things is that compared to other factors that work to suppress free speech and expression in the United Kingdom (and, presumably, the United States) counter-terrorism powers are very low on the list.

It's interesting that Mr. Frum quotes Lincoln's “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts—while I must not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces him to desert?” in the defense of the security state, and then goes on to reference Roosevelt's four freedoms: freedom from fear, of speech, of worship and from want as the reasons why said security state should exist. After all, the "wily agitator" was exercising his freedom of speech. Lincoln's casting of the soldier boy as "simple-minded" was designed to shift a measure of culpability from the actor to a speaker. But the very concept of Freedom of Speech is that speech is neither control nor force - the choice to act as one will, which is not a guaranteed freedom, is always with the actor. Wily agitators, like terrorist recruiters, may frighten us, but when we then criminalize particular speech out of fear, we create as many problems as we solve.

Mr. Frum's argument comes down to this: When the government acts to curtail Terrorism, it is addressing a genuine source of fear. And since an essential component of functional liberty is to be free from fear, there is no trade-off between counter-terrorism and liberty.

But what about other fears? Whether you agree with them or not, many Americans find the threat posed by gun violence in the United States a legitimate worry. And, to be sure, there is no measure by which even the most dedicated radical terrorists on the planet do in anywhere near as many Americans as are shot every year by their countrymen, even after decades of decline in the overall homicide rate (and even the absolute numbers). Does this then mean that there is no trade-off between expansive government anti-firearms programs and liberty? (Many of Mr. Frum's fellow conservatives would certainly say that there is...) In areas where street crime is endemic, does the freedom from fear trump the right to Keep and Bear Arms? If not, why not? Why is the fear of street crime or mass shootings any less appropriate for government to act on than the fear of terrorism?

And when Mr. Frum references "mobs seeking to impose their definition of social justice by force," he conveniently ignores that these are people who are acting on a fear of injustices that "the dedicated police and intelligence professionals" and the government that employs them, have decided are not worth acting on. And in situations like this, when you have two groups linked by their mutual fears of each other, which group is entitles to freedom from their fear? Cue the "terror poker" games, as each side seeks to cast itself as the one more terrorized by the actions of the other, to justify seeking the intervention of the apparatus of the state. And as definitions and understandings of "justice" are neither indisputable, universal nor eternal, why should be there an assumption that governments and law enforcement are acting on ideas of justice shared across society? Or that, in the absence of shared ideas, that government should be given a free hand to choose which ideas to enforce?

Using a right to be free from fear as one basis for liberty, and expecting governments to act on that, introduces a level of subjectivity that one can argue that governments don't do very well with. But it also introduces a definition of liberty that involves freedom from any interference, not just that imposed by governments. Mr. Frum views the strident tone and threatening gestures of modern social justice movements as threats to liberty, but it doesn't take much to rouse Americans more broadly to death threats against people they find reprehensible for one reason or another - while I find complaints about the portrayals of women in video games to be trivial, for some people that rises to the level of a capital crime. And again, why should an often-abused right of anonymity on the internet be ignored if other fears call for expansive government powers and intrusive surveillance? And where does this leave more informal levers of social control? Are boycotts then threats to liberty?

Mr. Frum's point that a well-functioning security apparatus tends to seem pointless is well-taken. But in asking us to place blind trust in the people that operate it, he presumes that they are incapable of using the control that they must necessarily be given for their own ends. And if Mr. Frum sees disagreements between different factions of the citizenry as impinging on liberty, it seems odd to presume that the simple act of becoming a police or intelligence professional makes one immune to the misuse of that control.

Now, You Don't

Not long after I first arrived in the Seattle area, I made my way downtown, and just walked around to see what the place was like. One of the things that stood out for me was the number of homeless people that I encountered. After I thought about it for a bit, it made sense. I've spoken to homeless people who managed to travel significant distances after they became homeless, and if I had the choice between being homeless in Chicagoland and homeless in the Puget Sound area, I'd pick the Puget Sound, all other things being equal. (Of course, given the fact that a good portion of my immediate and extended family live in and around Chicago, they are not equal, but I digress.) The main reason being that the weather is a lot better here if you have no choice but to be out of doors. I've already mentioned our tendency to judge the severity of the seasons by how many people they killed when I lived in northern Illinois. Being homeless is hard enough as it is - the weather conspiring to do them in is a complication that the homeless don't need.

So I understand why the greater Seattle area gives me the impression of greater homelessness than Chicagoland does. And given that, I make no judgements about Seattle for the size of its homeless population. But it strikes me that a lot of people DO make those sorts of judgements, or, at least, places perceive themselves to be judged. And this, perhaps is what pushes places to embrace design aspects intended to make public spaces less hospitable to the homeless and/or to effectively criminalize the things that homeless people do to get by. Laws against public camping or park benches that can't be slept on don't move people from the streets and into housing. Rather, they move the homeless from the streets of inhospitable municipalities to more hospitable ones - giving politicians a platform to claim that they've made the streets safer (for the affluent and politically-engaged, anyway) and citizens the idea that their neighborhoods are cleaner of riffraff. And these, in turn become points that they make to outsiders and newcomers to show themselves as being good citizens.

Freeing people from concern over being judged by the number of homeless people who are visible in the streets is one thing that might prevent initiatives designed to conceal or shift the problem. Granted, withholding judgement doesn't directly do anything to solve the problem of homelessness either, but it doesn't incentivize pretending that it isn't there.

Faith in the System

“Workers’ compensation systems grew up at a time when employers did not care about their employees. If one got hurt, you cast him aside and brought in the next immigrant to fill that job. Now companies are competing to be a best place to work.”
Corporate America’s unforgivable new swindle: Leveling workers’ compensation to nothing

And I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that Bill Minick honestly believes that. In the end, I think, that's the issue. People like Minick sincerely believe that organizations like the Texas business chamber really either want to, or have to, look out for their employees, or risk making their businesses non-viable. And I’m sure that Minick really does think that his schemes - even the ones that allow for employers to force employees to sign waivers against their rights to legal redress, or bear their own medical costs, are better for employees in the end.

And, that is at the root of any number of issues, this being just one of them - the cynics shield themselves with the sincere. Want to cast yourself as an upstanding business beset by unaccountable employees and scheming personal injury lawyers? Someone out there has drunk deeply of that Flavor-Aid and will convince themselves that they're doing the Lord’s work by shifting the burden. The fact that they, and you, stand to cash in is purely coincidence. And when you manage to screw somebody?

They’ll pause reflectively, and tell critics: “This is a difficult situation, it sounds like. There’s no occupational injury system that we’ve found yet that will provide perfect results in a 100 percent of cases.”

But if I’m an employer, I don't really care about perfection - what I care about is that all of the errors result in care being denied when it is called for, rather than being paid for when it isn’t. And if that means calling in the wife of the anti-workers’ compensation campaigner, whom I’m fairly certain will declare that the worker doesn’t need treatment, I’ll do that. Because, you know, “The whole deal is just kind of silly, like most of these deals are — people looking for free money.”

Whether people being compensated for on-the-job injuries constitutes “free money” is a subject of intense debate. But it’s unlikely that someone who thinks so is honestly interested in seeing their employees made whole at their expense. In a market were labor is actually scarce, and therefore valuable, working people have the leverage to walk away from bad deals - or the bed deals that others have had to suffer through. And under such circumstances, companies would have compete on working conditions. But we don't live in a tight labor market. And so I suspect that Minick’s faith will turn out to be misplaced.

Complex Addition

When I see this, the first thing that comes to my mind is as follows: "This is what the lord says: 'Cursed is the one who trusts in the capabilities and talents that were given to them and to others by, well, me, and thinks those are enough'."

And I can't grok that. But not for lack of trying. And certainly not for lack of people attempting to explain it to me. And I think that this is part of what separates non-religious people from the believers - differences in how they order the world and the logical constructs they use to understand it. And I think that's why it's such a difficult chasm to bridge - when someone tells someone else something that, for all the world, seems like 2+2=5 it's hard for the listener to understand how the speaker arrived at so obviously suspect an answer - or how the speaker expects them to take it at face value.

For my own part, I can understand that 2+2 does, in fact, equal 5. For certain values of 2. Which really don't seem much like 2 to me. But since they seem to be exactly like 2 for other people, I get how they arrived at their conclusion. This is unsatisfying for some, who are of the opinion that 2 is a universal constant. (Which, to be honest it is - it's part of the problem using a mathematical analogy in a case like this.) And I understand that the inverse is also true. That when I lay out my own case for 2+2, there are people who understand me to be saying that 2+2=5. It just the way of things.