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None so blind

August 7, 2012 – 10:30 am
By Lorenzo

In the course of exploring the history and dynamics of bigotry, of moral exclusion, and the history of money (particularly the similarities between the goldzone Great Depression and the Eurozone Great Recesssion), it has become clear to me how very poor conservatives tend to be at learning from history. Which is not, of course, how conservatives typically see themselves. On the contrary, they usually regard themselves as respecting the lessons of history.

Alas, this is not often not true. What one sees instead is a repeat of past mistakes.  So, just as during the Great Depression, we now get “hard money” conservatives worrying about the prospect of inflation even as inflation expectations are low and falling. The same people economist R. G. Hawtrey characterised in the 1930s as shouting ”fire!, fire!” in Noah’s flood. They cling to what gives them a sense of order, what dangers resonate for them, rather than seeing clearly what is before them.

Been here, done that
Similarly, the current debates over queer* emancipation are literally a re-run of past debates over Jewish emancipation–right down to exactly the same accusations being made against queers as were previously made against Jews (being an offence against God, being against the Christian basis of Western civilisation, that they corrupt everything they touch, that they prey on children, that they spread disease, etc etc). Ever since the Enlightenment, and particularly the Industrial Revolution, the opponents of equal protection of the law have always, in the end, lost. Yet here conservatives are, mounting the same barricades all over again in a cause it is clear they will and are losing.

Upon examining these recurring patterns, you build up a checklist of the standard evasions. For example, Rafe Champion’s recent comment that:

That is why I have so much contempt for the Same Sex Marriage brigade. Nobody is suffering for want of same sex marriage. Get  your freaking priorities in order and do something to help people in genuine need.

Anyone familiar with the history of unequal legal standing recognises this one: it is the “wait your turn” response. And, strangely, it turns out never to be “your turn”, there are always more urgent matters.  It is, of course, a nonsense view of social action, as if there is a single set of priorities that everyone must follow and things can only be changed or approved in a single sequential order. It is a way of dismissing the group seeking equal treatment as “clearly” morally deficient because they do not have “proper” moral priorities.

It also shows a deep failure to engage in that act of moral imagination that Adam Smith called sympathy and put at the heart of his moral analysis in The Theory of the Moral Sentiments. Of being apparently unable to project from the importance marriage has in one’s own life, and the life of those around one, to others.

SF writer John Scalzi has expressed how unequal standing in society works quite nicely with his recent post on different levels of social difficulty. (With follow-up posts here and here while fantasy author Jim Hines has one here.)

The lack of any sense of history among conservative-minded folk can be striking. Consider the efforts of CIS sociologist Peter Saunders, who has been getting some mileage in conservative and libertarian circles with this spectacularly stupid effort:

Two thoughts strike me about all this.

One is Friedrich Hayek’s warning about the vanity of the intellectuals. Intellectuals are affronted by social institutions (such as free markets and monogamous marriage) that have evolved over hundreds or thousands of years without people like them ever having consciously invented or designed them. They think evolved institutions are not ‘rational,’ and they believe they can do better. The only argument for leaving marriage unreformed is that it has been this way for a very long time, but that is never going to win the day with ‘modernisers,’ in whose ranks we have to include Prime Minister ‘Dave’ Cameron.

The second thought is that gay marriage will not bring the bourgeois social order crashing down, but it is one more step in Antonio Gramsci’s call in the 1930s for a revolutionary ‘march through the institutions.’ Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, realised that Western capitalism would not be destroyed by economic class struggle, for it is good at meeting people’s material needs. What was needed, therefore, was a long-term campaign against the core institutions through which bourgeois culture is transmitted to each generation. Break the hold of the churches, take over the media, subvert the schools and universities, and chip away at the heart of the citadel, the bourgeois family, and eventually, the whole system will fall.

To see how empty this is, ask yourself this question, which of the following would the above not be an argument against?

(1) Equal rights for Jews.

(2) Equal rights for Catholics (in Protestant countries).

(3) Equal rights for Protestants (in Catholic countries).

(4) Equal rights for women.

(5) Abolishing slavery.

(6) Giving workers the vote.

(7) Abolishing racial segregation.

(8) All of the above.

(9) None of the above.

If you answered (8) all of the above, yes precisely.  If a civil rights struggle is safely in the past, then it becomes sanctified and “of course” conservatives do not want to go back and revisit it. But, the current civil rights struggle; that is a threat to the social order, just as all previous civil rights struggles were threats to the social order. Including, in yet another repeated trope from Jew-hatred, giving a small minority amazing corrupting power to bring down, or at least seriously threaten, the entire social order.

Civil unioned couple subverting the bourgeois order

Part of being conservative is having a sense of the fragility of social order. Likely too strong a sense; as Adam Smith famously observed, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.

But that sense of the fragility of social order seems to often come with a notion that, unless the current limits are adhered to, there are no limits. Hence, for example, assuming that unless heterosexuality as a compulsory norm is accepted, somehow one ends up with bestiality. Hence also the notion of the enormous corrupting power of small groups. They are outside the set limit, so acceptance of their legitimacy destroys all limits.

Yet, one of the striking things about the various emancipation struggles is how society ended up working better, not worse, from their success.

There is no great mystery as to why. Not only are the talents of the group made much more accessible to the wider society, social resources are also no longer wasted repressing them. Moreover, the group in question then becomes invested in the existing social order, rather than alienated from it. The problem is not having a sense of the fragility of social order, the problem is thinking that social order requires people be confined in very unequal social cages. Again and again, this has proved to be flatly not true. The society conservatives were “defending” proved to be much more resilient, with far greater capacities for renewal, than they were willing to admit.

Contagious exclusion
But it is worse than that. Not only does the false belief in the “necessity” of unequal social cages cause a great deal of utterly unnecessary human misery, it also creates real dangers through the exclusion contagion effect; if you habituate people to the notion that there should be unequal social cages–that unilaterally morally and legally excluding people by category is fine–then there is no reason that you and yours will not end up on the losing side of that idea.  We can see that playing out in front of us as conservative Christians have begun to receive milder versions of the social (the moral and legal) exclusions that they have so long advocated and practised for queers. Conservatives who complain about the constraints on political correctness on them, but then insist on much more vicious constraints being imposed according to their sexual correctness, illustrate the point nicely.

But it has a much longer history than that. Jews wanting to oppress queers and pagans because they were against the message of God found themselves being repressed by Christians who–entirely agreeing with the Jews about the queers and pagans–then added the Jews into those to be repressed for being against God’s message made flesh in Christ. Then along came the conquering Muslims who–entirely agreeing with the Christians about the queers, the pagans and the Jews–then added the Christians into those to be repressed for being against the Messenger of God, Muhammad. A sense of history and its lessons should provide a sense of the dangers of unequal moral cages, of putting people into categories of moral exclusion.

So entitled
Which is precisely the sense of history that is lacking in so much conservative commentary. The same lack of a sense of history which talks of “the definition” of marriage as being between a man and a woman, completely failing to notice Biblical polygyny–but then, “the definition” of marriage as between a man and one or more women does not have quite the same ring to it. Add in Himalayan polyandry, and “the definition” of marriage as being one or more men and one or more women starts to really get out of hand. Add in the same-sex marriages and unions which were recognised by lots of cultures (including Amerindian cultures and Roman law) and one can see that the much touted “by definition” notion of marriage is simply the legacy of past imposed exclusions enforced through brutality. What has been going on in the drive for queer emancipation is not modern “decadence” but the withdrawal of the necessary enforcing brutality. Consequently, natural human diversity is openly re-asserting itself; particularly as lower transport and communication costs are making it so much easier for dispersed minorities to organise.

The notion that the social order requires unequal social cages entails a commitment to treat people badly and then sneer at them for attempting to change things so they are no longer treated in such a way. This can extend to sneering at them for voting for or supporting people who promise not to treat them like crap–such as sneering at gays for voting Green when that is the only significant political Party that stands forthrightly for equal protection of the law.

But, as the excluded have no legitimate perspective, they not thought of in these terms. Blaming them for seeking change is inherent in the way moral exclusion operates to relegate the excluded to being a separate moral species.

Underlying notions of moral exclusion is a massive sense of entitlement–particularly when in deciding who is, and who is not, a “proper” form of the human. After all, who do you think is entitled to declare you not a “proper” form of the human? If the answer is “no one”, then what gives you the monstrous sense of entitlement to do so to others?

Speaking from personal experience, you can tie yourself into knots trying to “prove” that you are a “proper” form of the human until you realise how monstrously improper the entire question is. Not only is it is based on the aforementioned massive sense of entitlement, but it is a question which is posed for no other reason than to oppress, repress and exclude.

Significance error
But part of what is going on is a deeply flawed vision of the past. The problem is not believing that the past can teach us; that is true. Given that there is no information from the future, we only have past and present experience to guide us. The problem is in failing to fully interrogate that past. The problem is not giving the past credence, doing so is simply sensible; it is giving the past (or at least the legacy handed down to us) a presumption of positive moral significance.

Ironically, constrained vision conservatives tend to make the mirror image mistake that unconstrained vision progressives do. Where the former tend to give the legacy of the past positive moral significance, the latter tend to give that legacy negative moral significance. But in loading that legacy with moral presumption, both outlooks block the learning that comes from intelligently interrogating the past; from giving it credence but not presumptive moral weighting.

St Dominic presiding over an auto-da-fe (or medieval commissar presiding over show trial).

Not coincidentally, both groups are attracted to notions of social purity and harmony, which are both ideals of conformity–and thus exclusion–where difference is profoundly stigmatised. In the extreme versions of these ideals, society is purified, and harmony achieved, by simply killing the disharmonous and impure. C20th manifestations of this–in the name of racial purity by the Nazis and class harmony by Leninists–have been characterised by conservative intellectuals as a sign of the “death of God” in Western culture. This is nonsense on stilts, because the notion that society is purified, and harmony with the purposes of God achieved, by killing a vulnerable minority is straight out of the natural law theology of Genesis 19 as developed by Philo of Alexandria and adopted so enthusiastically by Church fathers such as St John Chrysostom, patron saint of preachers via St Paul’s use of natural law terminology in epistles such as Romans. (That St John was such an enthusiastic preacher of Jew-hatred just illustrates the power of the contagion effect.) Purifying killing of members of vulnerable minorities is one of the founding ideas of clerical Christianity.

Natural law theory–with its notion that the form in the world and the form in the mind are the same and its use of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy where the conclusion gets to determine the ambit of its premises–provides both the “authority” to define the human and to exclude contradictory evidence, including contradictory experience, as illegitimate and perversion. Which is the authority to exclude from the “properly” human. (Hence the Vatican treating homosexuals as “objectively disordered“.)

That the greatest exponent of Christian natural law theory, St Thomas Aquinas, was a member of the same order that dominated the medieval Inquisition is not some weird coincidence. That error has no rights was the fundamental principle of both.

In order to see this contagion effect, however, one must not see the morally excluded as some sort of separate moral species the treatment of whom has no implications for “real” people. But the whole point of moral exclusion is to create such separate moral species, thereby blinding oneself to the implications of what one does.

(Still, equal protection of the law; how is this hard? How is it subversive?)

Either way, it is a matter of taking human experience seriously. Moral exclusion is based on massively discounting human experience. But so is failing intelligently to interrogate the past. That is why they march together so well.

 

*Note on terminology: By queer I mean anyone who is homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, transgender or intersex. That is, anyone who does not fit into the straight category of conventionally male or female and heterosexual. According to CDC data (pdf), queers so defined make up about 10% of the population. In a planet with over 7 billion people, that’s a lot of people. Even in the Anglosphere of the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, that is over 40 million people. Since these conditions are either congenital, or so near to such as to make little difference, it is impossible to have a queerfrei society as queers will just continue to be born. If you are so inclined, you will always have the queers to kick around.

By Lorenzo | Posted in Australia, Feminism, History, Human/Civil rights, Law, Marriage, Personal liberty, Philosophy, Public Policy, Sexuality, Society, The Right | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (67)

Tony Abbott is a Spanker

August 6, 2012 – 8:40 pm
By DeusExMacintosh

50 Shades of Grey

Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has admitted he’s not only a reader of “mummy porn”, the steamy sub-genre of literature featuring descriptions of sex scenes, he has a preferred author.

Mr Abbott told the Sydney Triple M breakfast show The Grill Team, that he had read both The Bride Stripped Bare by Australian author Nikki Gemmell and Fifty Shades of Grey by British writer E. L. James and that he prefers the homegrown variety.

When asked if he had read the best selling book, Mr Abbott admitted he had. “I’ve read Fifty Shades of Grey,” he said. “I think it’s a bit of an eye opener.

“It was interesting, but, I must say … Nikki Gemmell has a book, The Bride Stripped Bare, which I think is a much better book.”

- Brisbane Times

By DeusExMacintosh | Posted in Australia, Fark!, Funnies, Literature, Politics, Popular culture, Sexuality | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (4)

Fifty Shades of Meh

August 6, 2012 – 8:02 am
By Legal Eagle

SL and I must be en rapport because we’ve both jumped on the Fifty Shades of Grey bandwagon at the same time: her earlier comments are here. The common thread is that neither of us are impressed, and neither of us likes bad writing. The difference with my review is that I broke my resolution not to read the books, and actually began reading Fifty Shades of Grey the other night.

I wanted to read it to see what the hoohah was about. It has just become Amazon UK’s best-selling e-novel yet. But to me, the big question is not how many people buy Fifty Shades of Grey — the question is how many people finish it, and how many people buy the next two books? I can tell you that (a) I didn’t finish it, and (b) I won’t be buying the next two books. About three fifths of the way through the novel, I got incredibly bored. I skipped to the last two chapters. I know, I know, it’s anathema to any red-blooded book reader, and an extremely rare act of desperation on my part. Then I skipped to the spiels about the next two books at the rear of the book. And I suspect that’s all I’ll ever read of them again. (Fortunately for me, I didn’t actually purchase it – a friend had two copies and gave me one).

For those who have been hiding under a rock, the synopsis of the book is this: virginal naive female university student meets rich and controlling mogul who falls in love with her and inducts her into a world of increasingly kinky sex. And, well, that’s the book in about a sentence. I suppose I wouldn’t have become so irritated at the book had it not been so badly written. There was a serious overuse of certain adjectives and adverbs, and if I heard one more time about the female protagonist’s “inner goddess” I was going to scream.

I’ve said in an earlier post that I expect two things of a good book:

Some books are purely for enjoyment. Some we read because they have a “hook” – we simply must find out what happens. I would put The Da Vinci Code in this latter category – it was appallingly written, but I had to find out what happened – it was the archetype of a “page-turner”. We read other books because they are beautifully written – but if there isn’t a hook to pull us through, we might not finish the book (eg, The Eye of the Storm by Patrick White – exquisitely written, but finishing the book is like wading through half-set concrete.) The very best books have a “hook” and are well-written to boot. Mmm, such books are pure pleasure.

Now, if the book had simply been badly written, I probably would have finished it because I’ll finish almost anything with a “hook” to find out what happens. Heck, I read The Da Vinci Code from cover to cover. I might be an English literature major, but I’m not a book snob. But the problem for me with this book was that it didn’t hook me. I didn’t like any of the characters, and I didn’t care enough about what happened to them. They were one-dimensional and irritating. I got so sick of hints about the characters’ family circumstances which gave rise to their cliched pop-psychology hang-ups. There was no depth to the emotional interactions: they were just a lead-in to the next sex scene. And the way in which the sex scenes were written was turgid and not in the least sexy. (To be fair, it’s really hard to write a good sex scene. Many famed literary authors have been nominated in the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award: see the 2011 winner here).

Why was this book so popular? I’m going to muse on it. [Spoiler alert and not necessarily safe for work over fold]

Read More »

By Legal Eagle | Posted in Books, Feminism, Literature, Popular culture, Sexuality | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (32)

Fifty Shades of Fed Up

August 5, 2012 – 8:28 pm
By skepticlawyer

Brought across from Facebook, with minor emendations:

[Skepticlawyer] is getting rather sick of repeated requests for her opinion on 50 Shades of Grey, so here is a public announcement to the effect that she will not be reading it, with her reasons:

1. I have a low tolerance for bad writing. The fact that I know a reasonable amount about literature does not mean I read everything on offer. Life is too short and I do have a day-job (one that does, alas, involve reading a great deal of bad writing).

Please remember you are making this request of someone who once learnt an entire foreign language because she was annoyed with poor English translations from that language.

Also remember that you are making this request of someone who stops reading books if they are badly written or badly translated. I gave up after 10 pages of Twilight. I also stopped at the end of the first Stieg Larsson book in part because of this. The bad translation was on top of implausible characterisation and shocking inaccuracies in its portrait of the Swedish welfare state. As most of you know I am a classical liberal not enamoured of welfare states generally or the Swedish one in particular, so it takes quite a bit of error to make me leap to any given welfare state’s defence.

2. If I wish to read smut, I have a classics major. This means I can read well-written smut if I so choose.

3. I do not wish to be dragged into debates about the effect books (or other artistic works, like films) have on their readers. There is one particularly popular review of 50 Shades of Grey being shared on the interwebs that makes arguments of this type. Suffice to know that there is no evidence – none, zip, nada, zilch, zero, the big goose egg – that literature or films or other artistic representations have any specific causal effect on general human behaviour. People since Plato have argued that art can make people immoral or moral, well-behaved or criminal, and I have to say that just because a great thinker made that argument doesn’t make it any good.

That point goes in both directions, too.

I love Steven Pinker and think he is a brilliant and careful scholar, but when he argued that the 18th century novel contributed to the growth of human sympathy and compassion characteristic of the period, I had to restrain myself from throwing The Better Angels of our Nature across the room. There is not a shred of evidence for this. American Psycho will not make you debased or cruel or inclined to chop people up in your spare time. Pride and Prejudice will not teach you the difference between good and bad manners or how to judge character.

4. There is nothing so diverse as human sexuality. Nothing. People opining on what they perceive to be trends or patterns in this area are very often commenting on a very limited range of behaviours, limited thanks to the scope of their available research and their professional obligations. If I were to opine on human sexuality no doubt it would be coloured by my previous experience as a lawyer working in criminal justice. Any impression I thus conveyed would almost certainly be a false one.

5. 50 Shades of Grey is popular. Here is a universal truth: bad stuff can tap into something primal and be immensely popular. Gladiatorial shows. Rubber-necking at train wrecks. Etc. People are strange. See point 4 above. FWIW, I don’t actually care what people read or watch, as long as it is made legally (so porn is fine, but child porn is not, etc). Porn can be great. Catullus crosses over into porn quite a bit, and it’s awesome.

6. When it channels Plato: to wit, arguing that reading certain books or watching certain films has a causal effect on behaviour, or contributes to misogyny, or whatever (the arguments are both confused and confusing), feminism is deeply unconvincing. I prefer my feminism to be convincing, so here is a request: please stop it, feminist scholars, you are bringing a great and noble cause into disrepute.

7. It would be nice if we could all stop with insisting that creative productions of whatever sort show some sort of measurable effect of interest to the social sciences or sciences. Of course, it may be that one day we will discover that they do have measurable effects: science does indeed march on. If they don’t, however, it doesn’t matter. Things do not always have to be for something. They really don’t.

8. The graphic shows some inspired product-placement from Edinburgh’s Cameron Toll Sainsbury’s. Clearly some mums are having to explain to the kids that the batteries are for mummy’s toys…

By skepticlawyer | Posted in Books, Fark!, Feminism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (6)

Shoggoth lives!

August 4, 2012 – 7:00 am
By Lorenzo

On Murano, the glass island, they have glass sculptures.

They tended to be rather starkly modern, but I was taken with this one (possibly for somewhat Lovecraftian reasons). OK, it does not actually look much like a Shoggoth but that is where my mind went. (I presume it is some sort of sea anemone.)

This is also the Saturday chit-chat post.

By Lorenzo | Posted in Art, Saturday chit-chat | Tagged , , , | Comments (11)

A chicken in the sex class

August 2, 2012 – 11:30 pm
By skepticlawyer

Apologies for the distinctly pomo headline, but it actually goes some way to highlighting the salient points in the latest gay rights stushie to engulf the United States. Yes, the chicken in the sex class stushie started simply enough… with (and in) a fast food chain.

Playing chicken

The fast food chain in question is Chick-fil-A, which has neither made its way across the pond to the UK nor, so far as I am aware, to Australia or New Zealand. Like better known US fast-food exports, it is Southern, its chicken is fried, and its owners are religious. Very religious.

Chick-fil-A has long adhered to a chain-wide ban on Sunday trading (common in the Highlands and Islands over here, but unusual in the 24/7 take-away culture of the USA) and has even gone so far as to enquire into its franchisees’ family arrangements: wanting to know if are they married, say, or if their children are all their own. The company is wholly in private hands, and not listed on the stock exchange. Its CEO (Dan Cathy) also has a long history of donating to various religious organisations, particularly those opposed to gay rights. These groups range from the benign to the appalling: the latter include bodies involved in promoting Uganda’s ‘kill the gays’ bill:

Opposition to gay marriage has become a matter of pride for the Georgia-based chain. Worse by far is the support, as IRS forms show, by the WinShape Foundation (Chick-fil-A’s charitable arm) for various anti-gay bodies including Exodus International, whose leaders talked up its gay “cure” in Uganda before the country introduced legislation that threatens gays with death or imprisonment — although Exodus now says that going to that anti-gay conference was a mistake.

The problem with Chick-fil-A goes beyond LBGT issues. A former worker recently filed a lawsuit against the parent company in which she claims that a franchise owner of a Chick-fil-A in Georgia fired her so she could be a stay-at-home mom. The corporate culture embraces an overt religiosity, from prayer meetings at business retreats to asking people who apply for an operator license to disclose their marital status and number of dependents.

[It is odd how much of this Western posturing involves Uganda; what did Uganda do, one wonders, to invite such prurient attention from Western crazies? What sets Uganda apart from other small African nations with similar social and economic problems - poverty, tribalism, weak institutions, localised conflict, etc?]

Hating on the gays… and the First Amendment

On July 16, Dan Cathy decided to be particularly ‘out-and-proud’ about his views when it comes to gays and lesbians, and, well, the internet exploded. Followed, of course, by the tinder-dry substratum of US public differences on this and related issues (abortion and contraception).

Progressive mayors and public officials threatened Chick-fil-A with zoning laws; to their credit, other progressive organisations (including the much maligned ACLU) swung into action, pointing out that, actually, no, that’s viewpoint discrimination and the US has an unusually well-drafted prophylactic against that sort of thing. It’s called the First Amendment. As James Peron points out, it became clear that the progressives who did want to get their hands on the levers of power and use them against people with whom they disagreed were a small (if powerful) minority, and that many conservatives (US definition) were engaging in rank hypocrisy:

A tiny handful of politicians went too far, however, threatening to use regulatory powers of local government to deny business, or zoning permits to the restaurant, in order to punish the owners, Don [sic] Cathy and his family, for their anti-gay views.

Such a move would be highly unconstitutional and a blatant assault on the First Amendment. If conservatives denied permits to businesses owned by individuals vocal in their support of marriage equality, there would be an outcry. So it was with this case.

Almost immediately, mainstream liberals started criticizing these threats. Conservatives, however, tended to look the other way and noticed only the minority position of these publicity-seeking office holders. Santorum huffed that the controversy shows “the absolute intolerance of the Left in America. There can be no dissent from what their position is.”

This comes from a man who wants government censorship of erotica, the Internet and video games — for a start. Over at the neo-con publication Commentary, Bethany Mandel claimed that liberal tolerance “only extends to those who agree with their worldview.”

Not in our city

Perhaps the most anguished response (albeit one still censorious) came from Speaker of the New York City Council, Christine Quinn. Quinn is lesbian and recently married her partner of many years (New York is one of the US states which has legislated for equal marriage). For the avoidance of any doubt, I wish to make it clear that I disagree with Quinn, even though constitutionally, she is on stronger ground. I do, however, want readers of this post to keep her arguments in mind:

Today, Council Speaker Christine Quinn took it a step further and wrote a letter to NYU President John Sexton asking him to sever ties with the chain, effectively kicking them out of the city. The only Chick-fil-A in New York is located on the NYU campus. She also asked that, should he kick them out, the employees from the Chick-fil-A be given new jobs with whatever restaurant they get to replace it. She also started a petition demanding Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy apologize and change his position on gay marriage.

Law professors have pointed out that denying [Chick-fil-A] the right to build within their city violates their First Amendment right, but Quinn’s request is different. NYU is a private university with a huge population of gay students. It might be easier (and legal) for them to get out of their contract, or simply not renew it once their current deal is up, than a government body not allowing them to build.

The pile on (or, to be more accurate, the bargain bucket)

From there, this could only get bigger. Conservative luminaries like Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee weighed in:

Today is National Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, at least according to Mike Huckabee. The evangelical minister and former presidential candidate — along with Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin and a host of other Christianist culture warriors — is mounting a counteroffensive after big-city mayors tried to shoo the Southern chicken chain from their borders, the Jim Henson Co. pulled its toys from Chick-fil-A’s kids’ meals, and the fast-food company has become a flash point for the whole LGBT community and all their sympathizers in the nonfundamentalist real world.

Next thing, of course, there was an anti Chick-fil-A day, with people proposing a consumer boycott. To the boycotters’ credit, there was no attempt to prevent third parties from trading with Chick-fil-A (a secondary boycott). Instead, it was a simple case of ‘don’t eat at this place, it supports toxic causes’. It has its counterparts in boycotts of Norwegian fish by environmental groups or — from the other side of the fence — the attempt by ‘One Million Moms’ to initiate a consumer boycott of US department store chain JCPenney (the US equivalent of Australia’s Target or the UK’s BHS) because it used gay comedienne Ellen DeGeneres in an advertising campaign.

Causes have consequences

In the process of watching the internet feathers fly, I’ve seen friendships come to grief and some of the most awful bigotry displayed. To my libertarian friends’ great credit (I am proud to count the HuffPo’s James Peron as one of those friends), they have tried to be consistent. Step away from the levers of power, everybody. Remember that if you wrest those levers from your enemies, they can wrest them from you. That’s the way democracy works. This is one issue where people are going to have to develop the maturity to agree to disagree.

I have also constantly been put in mind of Jonathan Rauch’s splendid essay for The Economist, ‘Majority Report‘. In it, Rauch argues that LGBT activists have to be very careful how they put their case as support for their cause moves from minority to majority in numbers. He observes:

In a messy world where rights often collide, we can’t avoid arguing about where legitimate dissent ends and intolerable discrimination begins. What we can do is avoid a trap the other side has set for us. Incidents of rage against “haters,” verbal abuse of opponents, boycotts of small-business owners, absolutist enforcement of antidiscrimination laws: Those and other “zero-tolerance” tactics play into the “homosexual bullies” narrative, which is why our adversaries publicize them so energetically. The other side, in short, is counting on us to hand them the victimhood weapon. Our task is to deny it to them. Two important strategic changes would go a long way toward doing that. First, accept legal exceptions that let religious organizations discriminate against gays whenever their doing so imposes a cost we can live with. Second, dial back the accusations of “bigot” and “hater.”

In the gay community, taking any kind of nonabsolutist attitude toward discrimination is controversial, to say the least—largely because we carry in our heads the paradigm of racial discrimination. In today’s America, though, the racial model is overkill for gays. Injustice persists, unquestionably, but the opposition is dying on its feet and discrimination is in decline. And, unlike white supremacism, disapproval of homosexuality is still intrinsic to orthodox doctrines of all three major religions. That will change and is already changing (younger evangelicals are much more accepting of same-sex relations than are their parents), but for now it is a fact we must live with.

Before we shrug and reply, “So what if it’s religious? It’s still bigotry, it’s still intolerable,” we need to remember that religious liberty is America’s founding principle. It is embedded in the country’s DNA, not to mention in the First Amendment. If we pick a fight with it or, worse, let ourselves be maneuvered into a fight with it, our task will become vastly harder.

Then there are the real-world, messy realities arising from both pro- and anti-Chick-fil-A ‘days’. Although rare, Chick-fil-A does have some gay employees. This young man was complimented by homophobic customers only to be abused on his way home (while no doubt dressed in identifiable Chick-fil-A clothing) as a bigot and hater:

Speaking to the Huffington Post, one employee described it as “hater appreciation day”, calling it a “very, very depressing” experience.

Another gay employee who has worked at the chain for seven years said he was confronted with homophobic attitudes from supportive customers but also abused by other members of the public who he believed supported the company’s position.

He said patrons would come into his outlet to support Chick-fil-A, and then “say something truly homophobic, e.g. ‘I’m so glad you don’t support the queers, I can eat in peace’.”

Conversely, he continued: “I was yelled at for being a god-loving, conservative, homophobic Christian while walking some food out to a guest in a mall dining room.

“It seems like very few people have stopped to think about who actually works for Chick-fil-A and what those people’s opinions are. They are putting us in a pot and coming to support us or hate us based on something they heard and assume we agree with.”

‘Rights talk‘

As most of my readers would know from reading this blog, I am deeply suspicious of entrenched rights. I don’t think people have inherent rights on the basis of their membership of the human race. I am suspicious (philosophical arguments aside) partly because Western states without entrenched bills of rights and with Westminster style parliamentary sovereignty have extended rights to minorities and the disadvantaged both more rapidly and with less rancour than states without parliamentary sovereignty and with entrenched bills of rights. Contrast Britain with the US, or Canada with Australia pre- and post- the enactment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Consider individual cases: abortion in the EU (which has followed the British model and enactment by Parliaments) as opposed to abortion in the US (judicial legislation via the SCOTUS).

Add sexual and racial discrimination to the mix. The Europeans, British and Australians have been much more successful with their parliaments making the laws. The Americans (and now, the Canadians – think of the endless wrangling over their hate speech laws) have huge and ugly fights over stuff that in terms of decisions one way or the other is properly in the hands of the people’s representatives. Yes, that means politicians. Yes, I know politicians are often woeful. So, however, are judges, and you can’t vote them out. It’s worth keeping that in mind.

This failure to think about what rights actually mean or what they do when entrenched means that large parts of them throughout the West now conflict with an important rule of law principle: to wit, treat like cases alike.

The ‘sex class’

While I have a great deal of respect and sympathy for Rauch’s position above, and have often cited him in argument on this blog, I think a statement of his with which I previously strongly agreed is theoretically wrong, and perhaps empirically wrong as well. When he says ‘accept legal exceptions that let religious organizations discriminate against gays whenever their doing so imposes a cost we can live with,’ he inadvertently reveals that religious organisations are allowed to discriminate against gays (and, by corollary, a much larger group, women) in ways that are flatly prohibited in other circumstances.

Religious organisations cannot engage in the same discrimination against people on the basis of race: if a black man wants to be a minister of religion in even the most conservative religious tradition, then provided he meets that body’s selection criteria, he cannot be refused entry. Change race to sex or sexuality, however, and the religious body can reject him or her on the basis of a characteristic over which he or she has no control – just like race is a characteristic over which an individual has no control.

You need to be aware that attempts by religious bodies to engage in racial discrimination in the same way that they engage in sexual and orientation discrimination were definitively ruled out (in the US) in Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983), a SCOTUS ruling that held that religious exemptions that allow churches to discriminate against women (gays were not, in 1983, even a twinkle in the SCOTUS’s eye) could not be extended to blacks:

[i]t would be wholly incompatible with the concepts underlying tax exemption to grant tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory private educational entities. Whatever may be the rationale for such private schools’ policies, racial discrimination in education is contrary to public policy. Racially discriminatory educational institutions cannot be viewed as conferring a public benefit within the above ‘charitable’ concept or within the congressional intent underlying 501(c)(3).

Parliaments and courts all over the West have come to the same conclusion as the SCOTUS in Bob Jones. Britain’s Equality Act 2010, for example, protects religious organisations from the heavy hand of human rights law when they discriminate against women and gays (in employment and elsewhere), but not when they discriminate against blacks and Asians. The discriminatory components of the Equality Act — at least with respect to LGBT people — are in the process of being beefed up even further in the wake of the Scottish Government decision to legalise same-sex marriage:

As indicated in the consultation, no religious body will be compelled to conduct same sex marriages – protection for religious bodies who do not wish to conduct same sex marriages already exists under UK equality law.

Where a body does decide to conduct same sex marriages, the Scottish Government also intends – again, in line with the view expressed in the consultation – to protect individual celebrants who consider such ceremonies to be contrary to their faith.

To give certainty around this protection, we consider that an amendment to the UK Equality Act will be required. We will work with the UK Government to secure agreement to such an amendment before the formal introduction of a Bill to the Scottish Parliament and with a view to it being in place before the Bill comes into force.

The relevant state-based laws in Australia are similar in intent and effect.

There is only one reasonable conclusion to be drawn from this: there are two different ‘rights’ classes lurking around in the mess of pottage that is human rights law. If you fall into the ‘sex class’ you get a smaller basket of rights than if you fall into the ‘race class’.

Bad luck, chicks and queers.

This ‘separate but equal’ caper means, often, there’s an undignified scramble to get one’s group into the ‘race class’: hence the persistent attempt by Muslim activists — in the UK and elsewhere — to conflate ‘religion’ with ‘race’ and make it an equally protected characteristic. Don’t want to be lumped in with the chicks and the queers, oh no. Might catch girl germs or gay germs.

Like cases alike

This represents a gross attack on the first principle of the rule of law, because like cases are clearly not being treated alike.

As I see it, there are only two ways to be consistent in this, but advocating either opens an almighty can of worms (and quite possibly an almighty can of whoop-ass) on the collective body politic.

1. End the artificial distinction between the ‘sex class’ and the ‘race class’ by stripping religious bodies of their capacity to discriminate on the basis of sex and sexuality, on pain of losing charitable status (as was done in Bob Jones with respect to race).

2. Accept that modern human rights law is an incoherent mess and do away with it altogether. Yes, Virginia, that means allowing private organisations to discriminate if they want to, on whatever basis.

I am a classical liberal, so I favour the latter, but not without enormous reservations. I hate being backed into an intellectual corner, but the global failure to think about the underlying problems in human rights law – going right back to the first attempt to universalise it in 1948 – mean that large parts of it simply no longer make any sense.  I also think that forcing people who do not like each other to associate has often had awful consequences. There is a reason why Equity did not, historically, attempt to enforce contracts of service. Because working with people who hate you is kind of sucky, and, you know, sometimes fatal.

Not without hating the queers

There is something else that the escaped chicken running around in the sex class has taught me in the last week, and it is this: it is impossible to separate monotheism from homophobia, but only difficult to separate it from misogyny.

Why is it impossible to separate monotheism from homophobia? For the simple reason that every monotheistic tradition hates on the queers, while very few polytheistic traditions do (it appears that the odd paganism out when it comes to queer-hatred is the Aztec religion, and I think it’s fair to say that the Aztecs are not a civilisation to which one ought to look for moral guidance).

By contrast, misogyny is present in many pagan traditions (think of Classical Athens, or Confucian China). It seems the effect of monotheism is simply to intensify it, as well as to engage in rights-stripping where women have previously enjoyed high status. This happened when Christians got their hands on the levers of power in the late Roman Empire.

Let me put it this way: imagine if slavery and misogyny had not existed in classical antiquity, only arising as a result of the emerging power of Christianity and, later, Islam. Women and blacks would no doubt feel entitled – if they then got their hands on the levers of power – to make life very difficult for Christians and Muslims. It would take preternatural levels of control on the part of the two groups in order to engage in liberal (UK definition) tolerance once they assumed authority (as opposed to recycling religious people as firelighters… oh, wait).

Of course, we all know that Christianity can do without slavery. Unfortunately, Islam may not be able to manage without slavery … it is more theologically awkward for Muslims to disavow it than Christians, because in Islam all law (including the law that sanctions slavery) is seen as divine, while Christian — or Canon law — has always been seen as a human creation, and mutable. No lesser figure than Aquinas cautioned against trying to know the mind of God.

Now, LGBT people are in the same position as blacks and women in my imaginary, Niall Fergusonish scenario above. Their position is only as it is because of monotheism. Had Athens/Rome emerged triumphant instead of Jerusalem (to adapt a phrase of Jason Soon’s), they would not be in this special, most-hated category. They would not be trailing in everyone else’s wake when it comes to what Steven Pinker calls ‘the rights revolutions’.

This reality is reflected in two anguished statements made by libertarian friends who also happen to be gay. One is from James Peron:

There are groups out there that hate blacks or Jews for instance. It is not socially acceptable. You can’t even get away with that sort of hate if you try to claim that God wants you to do it. People won’t accept it.

But, say the same, or worse, about gay people and suddenly you are “standing up for morality,” and “pro-family.”

Realize that when you tell me that a “lot of people agree with Don Cathy” it doesn’t help! Wow! I’m supposed to think that hate directed at me is tolerable simply because enough people believe it! No thanks.

I have been patient for decades. I’ve debated the haters, I’ve tried to reason with them, and I’ve tried my best to be a decent person. As I get older I run out patience. Thirty years ago I could think, “Hey, 20 years from now it will be so different.” Well, at some point you start to think you might not be around long enough to see those things.

This doesn’t mean I won’t try to change minds, but I won’t tolerate the obvious bigots. I won’t let them get away with their bigotry. I will call them on it and name it for what it is. It is not “morality,” but hate. It is not “godly,” but fully humane at the basest and most primitive level—it is not a view for civilized human beings.

Simply put, it you don’t think I should have exactly the same rights as you then go take a long walk off a short cliff—and know that I really wanted to say something a bit stronger there.

If you think I’m sinful, sick, immoral, anti-family, or whatever label you use to justify looking down on me, then just go away. I don’t want you in my life.

I put up with that sort of crap for my entire life and I simply won’t do it anymore. I won’t pretend that you are “well meaning.” I don’t care if you are or not, not when those comments or barbs apply to me, or to people I care about.

I heard hateful things from “friends” more times than I can count. Now, I don’t, because anyone who says those things, or holds those views, is no friend of mine. And, with Facebook, I can make it official. I wish life came with an “unfriend” button.

And this is from Tyler Johnson:

But when it comes down to it, I have freedom of speech too. I have the right to encourage people not to frequent the place. I have the right to air my grievances in a public manner. Nothing in constitutional law provides for a person to make a decision without there being consequences. A person cannot shout fire in a crowded theater without being responsible for the deaths of those that rush to get out. A person cannot shout “nigger” in front of a street gang and not expect to be beat to a pulp. Free discourse goes both ways, and no one side is to have free reign to say what they want to say without any voicing of disagreement.

Because discourse is a two-way street, there is no free-speech element that you are standing up for by showing your solidarity with Chick Fil-A or by joining the boycott. I don’t think any less or more of a person’s view on free speech by a person going to Chick Fil-A or by changing their profile pic to the official pic of the boycott. However, you are sending a message by joining in on the Chick Fil-A Appreciation Day.

By supporting the Chick Fil-A Appreciation Day, you are standing in solidarity with all of the donations, and with all that those donations stand for. In this case, you are standing in solidarity with the barring of any legal recognition of any loving same-sex relationships, including domestic partnerships and civil unions. You are supporting efforts to bring about the recriminalization of sexual relations between people of the same gender. You are standing in solidarity with the Ugandan government officials who sought to make it a crime worthy of the death penalty. If that is what you stand for, more power to you, and I will hope that you will choke on your chicken sandwich.

The Upshot?

There has been a great deal of debate in skeptic and atheist groups of late — both online and off — about unwarranted rudeness directed at religious people. Much of the concern is justified, for the simple reason — as my pupil-master taught me — one always catches more flies with honey than vinegar. However — and as much as I agree intellectually with Jonathan Rauch’s arguments (and do read his entire piece, it is excellent) — I think LGBT people have probably earned some slack. Every other kind of prejudiced horror on the planet — racism, misogyny, slavery, xenophobia — can and has existed entirely independently of monotheism. But hating on the queers? That only exists because one particular religious tradition has become globally dominant, especially in Western countries. When we ask LGBT people to be tolerant, we need to remember just how much we’re asking of them.

That’s worth keeping in mind, and not just when eating a chicken sandwich (of any sort).

By skepticlawyer | Posted in Britain, Feminism, Free Speech, Human/Civil rights, Law, Racism, Religion, scotland, Sexuality | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (60)

Student feedback and the right to reply

August 1, 2012 – 3:44 pm
By Legal Eagle

Litigation involving student evaluations of university lecturers is a topic I’ve touched on some years ago. Student evaluations are particularly nerve-wracking for a lecturer if she or he is a sessional lecturer (or in US terms, an adjunct lecturer). I spent some years as a sessional lecturer, and it really sucked. It was the lack of a proper office and title in part — a feeling that I wasn’t really ‘part of things’ — but it was also the insecurity of it all. Was I going to get a new contract for the next semester? In what subjects? How many classes would I get this time? In addition, if you are a sessional lecturer, then the renewal of your contract is particularly liable to be at the whim of student evaluations. The same may also be true for lecturers in ongoing positions who are just starting out: contracts may contain a provision that a certain teaching score must be achieved in order to have one’s appointment confirmed.

I like to know what my students think of courses in which I teach, and this past year, I’ve taken to giving my students an informal written feedback form half-way through the semester rather than waiting for the university’s online student evaluation to come through at the end of semester (when it’s too late already to respond to anything if there’s a problem). If there’s something that doesn’t work, or something that needs to be explained better, or if the text is confusing – I want to know so I can address that. Teaching and learning is a two-way process.

But how far should these surveys be used in ascertaining quality of teaching? In another post, I noted that I’d always been skeptical of the use of student evaluations for that purpose. I linked to a post by Dave Hoffmann at Concurring Opinions which outlined a paper which queried this:

…[D]oes “better teaching” improve educational outcomes? The case for its doing so would seem self-evident, but figuring out appropriate metrics is a difficult problem. What is better teaching? and what are better educational outcomes? A new paper highlights these tensions. From the abstract:

It is difficult to measure teaching quality at the postsecondary level because students typically self-select their coursework and their professors. Despite this, student evaluations of professors are widely used in faculty promotion and tenure decisions. We exploit the random assignment of college students to professors in a large body of required coursework to examine how professor quality affects student achievement. Introductory course professors significantly affect student achievement in contemporaneous and follow-on related courses, but the effects are quite heterogeneous across subjects. Students of professors who as a group perform well in the initial mathematics course perform significantly worse in follow-on related math, science, and engineering courses. We find that the academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status of mathematics and science professors are negatively correlated with contemporaneous student achievement, but positively related to follow-on course achievement. Across all subjects, student evaluations of professors are positive predictors of contemporaneous course achievement, but are poor predictors of follow-on course achievement.

That is, well-regarded, young, inexperienced teachers provide better short-term results (hypothesis: enthusiasm), but over the longer term unpopular, older, experienced teachers add the most value.

Of course, it is always possible to have popular, experienced teachers. (I can think of colleagues who are both experienced and enthusiastic). But everyone has classes which just don’t ‘work’ for one reason or another. Perhaps you’re teaching to a curriculum you’d not have chosen yourself. Perhaps its the first time you’ve taught the subject. Perhaps you’ve just got one of those classes which has a bad ‘feel’, where the majority are very unenthusiastic or unengaged. Perhaps some students just don’t like your style. If you’re a sessional lecturer who has drawn one of these classes, you’ve drawn a short straw.

All this is an introduction to an interesting US case to which a friend tipped me off about the other day. Insider Higher Ed has a post about an adjunct US lecturer who sued the college at which he taught after his contract was not renewed, allegedly as a result of a highly critical e-mail from a student:

A regular concern of adjunct instructors is that one or two student complaints — even totally unjustified grievances — can lead department chairs not to renew their teaching contracts.

On Thursday, a Florida appeals court gave a victory to one such adjunct, reversing a lower court’s ruling and finding that the college instructor is entitled to know the name of the student who accused him of being a poor teacher. The adjunct’s contract was subsequently not renewed, and he argued that the name might help him defend against false accusations that he maintains led to the nonrenewal.

The appeals court found that the student’s name in such a case isn’t protected by state or federal law — and that the adjunct was entitled to the name.

Matt Williams, vice president of the New Faculty Majority, a group that represents those off the tenure track, said he was pleased to hear that the adjunct had won the case. “If your employment is on the line, you have to be able to defend yourself,” he said. Williams added that he has heard from many non-tenure-track faculty members that their contracts weren’t renewed after a student or two sent in an anonymous complaint.

Darnell Rhea, the adjunct in this case, sued Santa Fe College, in Florida, where adjuncts work on semester-by-semester contracts.

There was no dispute over Rhea being able to see — without the student’s name — the e-mail complaint sent to the chair. The e-mail accused Rhea of making “humiliating remarks” to students and of using “unorthodox” teaching methods. Rhea denied these charges but said that to truly rebut them, he needed to know his accuser. He said he suspected he could then show why the charges were untrue.

The college denied that it had made its decision not to renew Rhea’s contract based on the student complaint. But the college also refused to release an unredacted version of the e-mail, arguing that it was an “educational record,” protected by Florida and federal privacy statutes. A district court backed the college, and Rhea appealed, acting as his own lawyer.

A three-judge panel unanimously agreed that he was entitled to the student’s name. The decision focused on the idea that education records are about students.

Ultimately the Florida Court of Appeals found that the e-mail from the student was not an ‘educational record’ such that it was protected by privacy statutes because it did not contain information directly about a student; rather, it was directly about Rhea and his teaching methodology. Accordingly, the college will be obliged to disclose the name of the student. The court noted that Rhea’s argument was that ‘he was effectively prevented from defending himself by demonstrating that the unnamed student was not in a position to comment fairly and accurately on Rhea’s teaching methods and classroom conduct.’ It was a matter of due process. Rhea’s suspicion was that the critical review was submitted by a student who had only attended one class, and thus the student was not in a position to comment fairly on his teaching. Fair point, if this was the case. One wonders how the subject can make any sense if you only attend one class? I would think that someone who only attended one of my classes would not have a fair picture of the subject, or of me and my teaching skills. (Apparently when contacted by the media to be told of his victory, Rhea said, “Hot diggity dog! This is amazing!”)

In conclusion, it seems to me that student evaluations can only be part of the picture when assessing quality of teaching. There is a risk with using student evaluations as the sole basis for assessing quality of teaching that they might just measure who is the most popular lecturer, or reward lecturers who ‘spoon-feed’ rather than challenge students in a way which may be uncomfortable or difficult yet ultimately illuminating. (What the students want from teachers does not always mesh with what will help them learn). There should be a mixed system where teaching is assessed by peer review (i.e. other lecturers sitting in on and assessing classes), teaching portfolios and student evaluations. This seems fairer on the lecturer to me.

By Legal Eagle | Posted in Academia, Education, Law, Society | Comments (15)

The insidious reach of error

August 1, 2012 – 9:30 am
By Lorenzo

I have become deeply interested in the origins of money, which means reading the work of various historical anthropologists. As is often the case when reading other social scientists on matters of economic significance, one comes across a fair bit of economist envy. Compared to other social science academics (and, for that matter, humanities academics), economists’ skills are generally far more in demand outside academe; economists tend to get more, and more highly paid, consultancy work; they get to be talking heads commenting on events much more; and have more influence over public policy. What’s not to envy?

Worse, economics keeps invading other disciplines. Run down the list of what people get Nobel memorial prizes in Economics for and there seems to be no part of the domain of social science that economics and economists are not willing to invade. Worse again, mainstream economics tends to be enamoured of markets and private property, they study wealth and tend to approve of use of market mechanisms in general. All realms most academics have little to do with, are not comfortable in and often resent.

All of which shows up in the politics and outlooks typical in much of academe–especially when (other) academics write about economics and economic issues. This is not helped by the fact that being self-consciously clever folk simply living in “capitalist” economies seems lead to the conclusion that academics understand “capitalism”; a conclusion which is regularly adhered to more strongly than is warranted.

I once asked an Israeli archaeologist why archaeologists (and historical anthropologists) seem to be so influenced by Karl Marx. He replied that it was because Marx talked about economic surplus and they study the products of economic surplus, which makes sense. Though the appeal of broadly Marxian ideas to humanities and social science academics generally is clearly strong; an understandable reaction to academics’ circumstances and common resentments.

All of which has made it easier, alas, for one of Marx’s more profound errors to become part of many people’s common wisdom. An idea set out in the first chapter of Das Kapital:

…[commodities of equal value] must, as exchange values, be replaceable by each other, or equal to each other. Therefore, first: the valid exchange values of a given commodity express something equal; secondly, exchange value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it.

The notion that exchange is a matter of matching equivalences keeps turning up in the writings of anthropologists on money. It is a deeply wrong-headed way to look at exchange. Trades, exchanges, happen at points of intersection, not points of equivalence. The supply-and-demand “scissors” economists are so fond of are a good way to express what is going on.

It also helps explain why trade-with-strangers is regarded in many cultures as a dubious process, one that merges into swindling.

Trade as swindle
Suppose we have two peoples who are in contact with each other, perhaps across a sea.  One, call them the Cols, have a river that runs with gold. You put a fleece in the river, leave it for a while, come back and lo!, it has flecks of gold all through it. You retrieve your now golden fleece, pick out the gold and repeat.  Gold is not such a big deal to the Cols, because it is so easy for them to get hold of it.

Then there is another people, call them the Crims, who have an easy salt mine in their territory. You take a pick, swing it a couple of times, and loosen as much salt as you can carry. Salt is not such a big deal to the Crims, because it is so easy for them to get hold of it.

Clearly, the Cols and the Crims will swap gold for salt. Clearly, the Cols value the salt they get more than the gold they trade away, while the Crims will value the gold they get more than the salt they trade away. Each will leave thinking they have got a really good deal. Indeed, it is likely they will think they have been clever in convincing the other mob to trade away something “clearly” worth less for something “clearly” much more valuable. Trade with strangers is obviously a matter of ripping off the strangers.

First, there is no “equivalence” here, merely a point of intersection.  Secondly, both groups will be quite correct in thinking they “ripped” off the other mob because, in terms of their own valuations, they did.  The trade occurred because they had different, but intersecting, valuations. Which allowed both sides to enjoy gains from trade; to be better off than they were before the trade.

If trade was a matter of swapping things of equivalent value to the participants, no one would bother. It is precisely the different valuations that makes trade worth doing. If you see exchange as swapping equivalences, you will miss its nature and point.

Finding what is not there
But it is worse than that. You will start looking for what intrinsic “thing” makes them equivalent–in the case of Marx, leading on to the labour theory of value. The statement from Marx quoted above is only one of three false claims he makes in his argument for the labour theory of value. It is the second such, the first being:

The utility of a thing makes it a use value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity.

This is wrong, for utility is utility to someone. So, the utility of a thing does have existence apart from that commodity, it exists in the relation of the thing to the purposes of anyone who has a use for it. Having got utility and equivalence wrong, Marx then moves on to the third false claim:

… if then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour.

Which is also not true. Commodities also have the qualities of being made of materials (what economists call ‘land’) and by tools (what economists call ‘capital’); labour on its own produces little or nothing.

Even more basically, to be exchanged, such things have to be controlled by someone. Locke’s metaphor that a person in the state of nature acquires something by “mixing his labour” with it is misleading: what they do is take control of it (and, more importantly, that control is acknowledged by others). Any contribution of labour to exchange—whether in production or the realisation of value in exchange—is framed by such control: as is also true of land and capital. Moreover, the control has to matter: the thing has to have sufficient scarcity and be sufficiently wanted by someone for such control to matter. We can control a twig, but who cares? (Acknowledged) control, scarcity and wanting are the bases of exchange.

The search for a “common property” in things exchanged is completely wrong-headed, because exchange is a matter of intersecting differences, not matching equivalences.  One can, of course, compare the currently operating intersections of supply and demand and decide that at $50 for a pair of shoes then “equals” 10 cups of coffee at $5 each. But that is still not matching equivalences, it is matching points of intersection. Which will change as supply and demand for shoes and coffee change.

Pointing out that, for example, allocation of labour tends to shift with price merely tells us that we allocate labour towards things we value. We do the same with land and capital, it is just that we can usually do so with labour quicker and easier.

All of which hardly exhausts how thinking of trade as matching equivalences will lead one astray. It will, for example, encourage a quite mechanistic approach to economic activity, as if economies can be planned so as to just turn out the right mix of equivalences. Ironically, the search for some underlying extrinsic value (even in labour) that explains said “equivalences” does not humanise economic activity, it dehumanises it because it completely abstracts away from the diversity of human valuations, the human purposes, that drive economic activity.

It will also devalue private transactions–capitalist acts between consenting adults–since that is just “swapping equivalences”, not expressing preferences and improving utility. Which then undermines restraining state action, since “managing” swapping equivalences is rather a different thing than blocking mutually beneficial transactions. As the discovery role of private transactions is thereby also devalued (“equivalences” are “easily” knowable), the knowledge of officials is exaggerated, their ignorance minimised. It becomes that much easier to be dreadfully complacent about the problems in Seeing Like A State.

So, whenever you come across someone writing about exchange as “matching equivalences” you will be observing some who, in Keynes’s words, is the slave of a defunct economist and who understands economic activity and commerce (and, for that matter “capitalism”) a great deal less than they think they do.

By Lorenzo | Posted in Academia, Economics, History | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (13)

Friedman centenary

July 31, 2012 – 5:39 pm
By Lorenzo

Today (Tuesday 31st) is Milton Friedman’s centenary.  It seems appropriate to link to some Milton Friedman quotes here and here.  Various bloggers have offered their comments, including Bryan Caplan’s ode, Tyler Cowen notes how much he is still needed, Lars Christensen writes him a letter, and David Glasner continues his campaign against the Wall St Journal editorial pages. [UPDATE A black Marxist student remembers being impressed that, in 1960, Friedman had a black secretary.]

David Glasner’s tribute is an excellent summary:

Milton Friedman, by almost anyone’s reckoning, was one of the great figures of twentieth century economics. And I say this as someone who is very far from being an uncritical admirer of Friedman. But he was brilliant, industrious, had a superb understanding of microeconomic theory, and could apply microeconomic theory very creatively to derive interesting and testable implications of the theory to inform his historical and empirical studies in a broad range of topics. He put his exceptional skills as an economist, polemicist, and debater to effective use as an advocate for his conception of the classical liberal ideals of limited government, free trade, and personal liberty, achieving astonishing success as a popularizer of libertarian doctrines, becoming a familiar and sought-after television figure, a best-selling author, and an adviser first to Barry Goldwater, then to Richard Nixon (until Nixon treacherously imposed wage-and-price controls in 1971), and, most famously, to Ronald Reagan. The arc of his influence was closely correlated with the success of those three politicians.

Milton Friedman would cheerfully advise anyone about how to improve the economic condition of their people including (infamously) Gen. Pinochet and (often ignored) Communist China. (Pinochet, of course, relinquished power after losing a referendum; don’t see the Beijing regime doing that any time soon.)

Milton Friedman was an opponent of conscription [the highlight of his famous exchange with Gen. Westmoreland is here], in favour of drug legalisation, an innovative thinker on welfare (proposing the negative income tax and education vouchers) and a critic of the IMF and the World Bank. (In particular, he did not approve of the way the IMF protected banks and other institutions who lent to developing countries at the expense of their taxpayers.) As this paper (pdf) points out, Milton Friedman’s comments on Japanese monetary policy make it pretty clear he would not have been impressed by our current “hard money” monetary-contraction inflation hawks.

There is also a “fantasy Friedman” on whom various falsities are projected–such as that he supported IMF policy, that the Euro followed his proscriptions (he was deeply sceptical about its prospects) or that he only worried about inflation. The last is hilariously untrue, since he co-wrote the classic analysis of the dire effects of monetary contraction deflation, A Monetary History of the United States.

One of his great virtues was his ability to be clear, with a gift for vivid explanatory metaphors. An OpEd on “the Fed’s thermostat” (pdf) is a good example.  He once proposed “the mother-in-law test”. Any economic idea he could not explain to his mother-in-law over a cup of tea was probably wrong.  If you couldn’t be clear to interested lay folk, what was the point?

He thought Keynes was a great economist and was a friend of Friederich Hayek (though apparently they ended up agreeing not to discuss matters monetary, as their disagreements were too strong).

His son is also very independent minded, which speaks well of his parenting skills. David Friedman (who has no degree in economics and is one of the prominent early figures in the SCA) wrote one of the first pieces I ever read which applied economic reasoning to a non-”economic” subject–why C18th armies had bright complicated uniforms. (To make it clear if a soldier broke ranks, since the inaccurate muskets of the period worked best if fired at once in clumped groups, which also made the soldiers better targets.)

Paul Krugman [who respects Friedman] once wrote of something Milton Friedman had written that it was “typical Milton; too simple but mostly correct”.  To be “mostly correct” seemed to me then, and does now, as high praise.

Milton Friedman July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006. Requiescat in pace.

By Lorenzo | Posted in Academia, Drugs, Economics, Education, Public Policy, Welfare | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

Obligations VI and photos

July 30, 2012 – 4:11 pm
By Legal Eagle

As some of you might have noticed, I’ve been scarce over the last few weeks. This is because I went to London, Ontario to attend the Obligations VI conference (which covers private law: contract, tort, unjust enrichment, property, trusts, equity etc). The theme of the conference was “Challenging Orthodoxy”. If you know anything about legal academics, you’ll know that we weren’t too shy to rise to that particular challenge! Naturally I presented a paper based on the work I’d done in my book, with some updated content. It was a good conference. I enjoyed all of the presentations I saw, and I got to catch up with a lot of academic friends whom I only see at these conferences. I refer to and repeat my comments about private law made in the wake of the Obligations IV conference: private law oils the wheels of society. It is really important that our private law operate justly in order for our society to run fairly and smoothly.

Here’s my photo of the place where we were staying. It was really hot in Canada (something I didn’t quite expect) but the grounds were lovely.

 

I went exploring in the woods around. I noted that they looked oddly like the kind of woods that form alien planets in the Stargate TV series (hmm, I’m guessing that’s filmed in Canada).

Yeah, that last one is a rather blurry photo of a wild turkey, which really did say gobble gobble as it skedaddled away (much to my delight).

A bunch of us also braved the drive to Niagara Falls. Kudos to our Anglo-Australian driver who never once strayed near the wrong side of the road (and I’m glad it was he who was driving, not I). It was 38 degrees C, and boiling hot, so the spray from the falls was welcome. I don’t know if this video of water going over the edge of Niagara will work, but if it does, please do take a look – it’s simply hypnotic. [Update: click on the hyperlink, then click on the Niagara.mov hyperlink and you will see it.]

Update: Edited to add this gem from Lorenzo:

By Legal Eagle | Posted in Law, Personal | Comments (20)