The Stupid! It Burns! (mawwaige edition)

Atheists Have No Business Suing over Marriage (or Anything)

An atheist organization has sued the Indiana state government over its marriage statute. The atheists are arguing that the law forbids them from having their own non-religious official perform a marriage ceremony.

This is where I start asking a few questions. Here’s the first one: Where in the atheistic evolutionary worldview is marriage necessary or even an ethical norm? Marriage is a creation ordinance ordained by God. If it’s an invention of man, then it is a convention that shouldn’t have any legal or cultural standing. . . .

Let's just repeat that last line: "If [marriage is] an invention of man, then it is a convention that shouldn’t have any legal or cultural standing."

Thoughts on Libertarianism

As I mentioned, I'm going to be debating/speaking with a Libertarian on campus next week. I have some questions about Libertarianism I'm hoping he will answer.

The most obvious questions is, what precisely is Libertarianism? Is it just a laundry list of political positions? There's nothing wrong with that — both the Democratic and Republican parties take this approach; it's called a "platform" — but it would be nice to know if there really is a cohesive, non-trivial philosophy underneath.

Without putting words in anyone's mouth, the most concise description of Libertarianism I've heard is that state power should prohibit the initiation of coercion, and only the initiation of coercion. But this description doesn't seem coherent; specifically, the initiation of coercion seems to equivocate with the use of force the speaker does not like or that goes against his or her personal or class interests. Again, there's nothing wrong with a specialized, subjectivist, interests-based political philosophy, but it doesn't seem helpful to label a subjectivist philosophy as objective, and it's dishonest to justify a specialized interpretation with our moral intuitions about the general, literal interpretation.

Is Libertarianism better because it's more moral, or is it more moral because it's better? In other words, is Libertarianism justified on moral grounds or pragmatic grounds?

Are there objective reasons to consider the use of economic power non-coercive? Or is it just that Libertarians approve of economic power and disapprove of physical, directly violent power? Again, it's unproblematic to approve of one kind of power and disapprove of another, but does Libertarianism make the distinction explicit, and does it refrain from equivocation to leverage moral intuition?

Thoughts on the "planned economy"

I'm going to be debating/speaking with a Libertarian on campus next week; we've tentatively set the date for Oct. 25. I want to get a few of my thoughts on the planned economy down.

We have to be very careful about what precisely we mean by a planned economy. Both planning and economics are complex topics, so a planned economy is not simply a binary. The question is not just whether to have a planned economy, but what parts of an economy should be planned; we have not only the extrema of "nothing" and "everything," but also "these parts but not those parts." Therefore, saying that some part of the economy should or shouldn't be planned doesn't entail that we should plan everything or nothing.

Furthermore, that some communist economies have planned some part of the economy to bad effect means only that there's some evidence that planning that specific part of the economy might be a bad idea. The evidence, though, would not be conclusive; cultural, political, sociological, and historical elements in a society affect economic policy as much as or more than pure scientific economics.

It's also worth noting that economic planning is the status quo. First, most companies, and almost all large corporations, are organized along lines most people naively ascribe to communist governments. A cadre of self-appointing* bureaucrats, the executive management, makes most decisions about how to deploy internal resources within the corporation. This cadre has near-absolute power over not only junior members of the cadre, but all the employees. Employees are not only expected to obey, but expected to obey enthusiastically, and they must not overtly contradict the executive cadre. Yes, employees are at least technically free to leave, but the point here is that the fundamental organizational structure is itself viable.

Second, macroeconomic capital allocation is already made by a very small group of people: those who control not only their own personal capital, some of it very large, but also the executive cadres that control corporately-owned capital. Again, the point is not how the capitalist class (owners + executives) is organized (which is, of course, very different from how any group managing investment in a communist system), but that the status quo already is that a small group of people controls actual investment.

*i.e. the existing bureaucracy appoints its own new members.

Therefore, I see communism as endorsing not total economic planning, but more (and different) planning than a state capitalist would endorse, and probably a lot more (and a lot different) than a Libertarian would endorse.

Specifically, communism entails that the allocation of capital, i.e. investment, is heavily planned by "the government."

It's very important to understand that what we mean by "the government" varies according to what regime we're actually talking about.

Under a republican capitalist paradigm, such as the one we presently have in the US, "the government" comprises whichever faction of the capitalist class has greater popular support. Our current paradigm can thus be called a democratically modulated plutocracy.

Under "Communism of the Parties," the paradigm operative in China and the Soviet Union, "the government" consisted of one or another faction of the national Communist Party, itself a self-appointing oligarchy (that considered itself an aristocracy). I'm told there are some reasonable historical and social reasons why China and the Soviet Union ended up with an oligarchy, notably that the societies at the time of the communist revolutions had very little democratic popular culture. Furthermore both, but especially the Soviet Union, faced immediate, severe threats to their continued existence (e.g. Hitler), and could not afford to leisurely develop a democratic culture.

Even so, I don't much like the "Communism of the Parties" paradigm; I'm pretty much opposed to any oligarchy. And we do have something of a democratic culture in the US, and we don't have any severe existential threat. (Islamic "terrorism" does not in any way threaten the continued existence of the United States.)

"Democratic" socialism, a supposedly worker-friendly state that operates under the institutions and practices of republican capitalism, is problematic. The institutions of a capitalist republic evolved to support, well, capitalism; so long as private ownership of capital gives disproportionate economic power to the capitalists, they have both the motive, opportunity, and means to co-opt socialist trustee representatives. Sebastian Haffner documents an especially appalling instance in Failure of a Revolution, where the leaders of the Social Democratic Party turned against the workers they were supposedly representing to maintain their own prestige and privilege borrowed from both the capitalists and the hereditary aristocracy, unleashing and cooperating with the forces that would lead directly to Hitler and the Nazis.

I advocate something different: democratic communism. "The government" under democratic capitalism is a direct democracy, the people themselves, not their easily co-optable trustee representatives.

There are two obvious difficulties with direct democracy. The first is the scaling problem. It's very difficult to put every political and macroeconomic decision to a vote of more than 300,000,000 people, and even if we could, it would seem hard to ever get an affirmative decision. (Why should I care about building a new microchip factory in Indiana?) The second is the problem of expertise: what does it take, for example, to start a farm? There are a lot of issues there? What's the optimal size for a farm? What sort of equipment does it need? What sort of people? These are questions that only a trained agricultural economist can answer. We can't expect the people as a whole to be experts in anything.

I don't have the answers to these questions. We do have some clues, however. The Paris Commune used delegated representation instead of trustee representation. The representatives were arbitrarily recallable; unlike trustee representatives, individual delegated representatives did not have the power of office. Second, delegated representatives could not gain personal economic power. So perhaps we can use a system of delegated representation to solve part of the scaling problem.

The expertise problem is a little easier to solve because we already know how to separate expertise from interests. My physician, for example, is an expert in how my body works, but her expertise does not give her the power to control my interests. She can tell me that working too much is bad for my health, and do what she can to mitigate the effects of overwork, but she can't make me work less. It is up to me to use her expert knowledge to balance my own interests in good health and long hours.

That's essentially the same relationship that any political government has—or should have—with its bureaucracy. The bureaucrats are the experts in how to actually implement policy, and inform the political government of the objective consequences and limitations of policy choices, but it is up to the political government to actually make policy choices. The political government might choose unwisely, but lack of wisdom seems to be an inescapable part of the human condition. We've tried nearly every form of government imaginable, and every form has made astoundingly unwise decisions. The question is not whether we make mistakes, but what kind of mistakes we make. I'd rather we made the people's mistakes, not some aristocracy's.

Freethought Blogs

Since as far as I can tell, all of the Freethought Blogs link only to other Freethought Blogs on their sidebars, I'm not going to link to any of them myself on my own sidebar.

Update Oct. 14: Ed Brayton links outside FtB, so he'll go on my sidebar.

An interesting juxtaposition

On the one hand, we have Allen Small, Minarchy vs. Anarchy and the State:

The libertarian view of anarchy coincides with the concept of spontaneous order. That concept describes how the unhindered the free market operates by imposing its own rules on itself, such that there is a "spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos." . . . My background teaching biology made it very easy for me to accept spontaneous order in economics and society. Anyone that has ever studied biology will know that organisms, be they plant, animal or protist, live within "self ordered" ecosystems.

Just a little bit earlier, we have Chris Clarke, an actual scientist: The Balance of Nature [link fixed]:

One of the things that bugs me most about some of my fellow environmentalists, aside from the patchouli, is the near-religious adherence — even among those enviros who eschew religion — to the notion that natural ecological systems have an innate and emergent self-repairing property. It’s a dangerous idea that breeds complacency, and it’s really widespread. . . .

Here’s the thing: people really, really want to believe that ecosystems are self-repairing, because that way we can excuse the fact that our very existence these days seems to rend that hopefully self-healing fabric.

I don't think Small, however, will let the facts or truth get in the way of his self-serving opinions.

The economics of student life

Might as Well:

The predominant complaint about college students today (and probably of yesteryear as well) is that they put so little emphasis on academics. . . . [But] over time I am getting more sympathetic rather than less. I don't condone this attitude – not even a little – but I certainly understand it. In the past decade the cost of higher education has exploded, the benefits of holding a Bachelor's have plummeted, and life after graduation has become a grim prospect involving the phrase "back with my parents" for the majority of students. The job prospects for recent graduates are appalling and unlikely to improve anytime soon. Under the circumstances, it's not hard to understand why fun, albeit very expensive fun, is such a priority; they're not likely to be having much more of it throughout their twenties.

Christianity and Suffering

In An Attempt to Explain Christianity to Atheists In a Manner That Might Not Freak Them Out, Marc explains Christianity as a response to the problem of suffering. According to Marc, it is impossible to talk about the "purpose of suffering" without appealing to the supernatural. Marc's Christian explanation is that suffering is the result of "sin", but he defines sin in an unusual manner: the word "sin" derives from the Hebrew word "chattah" (or "chatta") that he translates as "missing the mark"; Marc claims, "We live in a world that 'misses the mark' of perfection." God, however, is perfect; He does not miss the mark: "God must be the standard of Perfection from which all things derive their relative goodness." Because we cannot look to "secularism" (i.e. naturalism), we must look to a God that is necessarily a standard of perfection.

But God as a "standard of perfection" does not imply Christianity. Christianity is, at its core the "bizarre" (yes, Marc himself uses that word) notion that God/Jesus "became sin", became absolutely imperfect, and then by dying, destroyed sin, destroyed imperfection. But God, being outside of time, did not destroy sin in the time-bound world; the world where sin, and therefore suffering, must be outside time. God does not wish to force us to this world without suffering, but by instantiating Himself in the person of Jesus into the time-bound material world gives us the option to enter the world without suffering after death. Marc spins an interesting story, but it problems, both internal and external, render it entirely unconvincing to the atheist.

Some of the internal problems are apparent in Marc's responses to objections to his points. The most obvious is his treatment to the objection that if

God is the fullness of perfection, and that to say that our universe is sinful — or imperfect — is to say that our universe is lacking total union with God, why then, would Perfection allow our imperfection? If God is all-powerful, surely he could forever stop us from sinning, and thus from ever suffering? Is he so cruel as to allow us to suffer, children to die, etc.?

Marc answers with the free-will cliche:

We are allowed to sin — and thus to suffer — because God loves us. If we could not refuse him, the fullness of perfection, we would be puppets attached to his celestial fingers. We could not not love God. But love, to be love, must be freely given. Perfection is meaningless if we have not the choice of imperfection. We are granted, in love, the opportunity to sin.

This response must be counted at best as controversial, rather than as decisive. Furthermore, Marc sets up his answer a little tendentiously, reverting to a more superficial definition of suffering as simple pain, physical or emotional; He "allows us to suffer" and allows "children to die." But the objection is not why God created pain, but how a perfect God could create an imperfect world. To create is to resolve an imperfection: how could a perfect being create anything? Marc's answer is entirely unsatisfying.

This crucial flaw notwithstanding, Marc does not give us any reason to actually believe his story. He gives us a version of the Politician's Fallacy: we need an answer to the problem of suffering, this is an answer to the problem, therefore this is the correct answer to the problem. But why should we believe his answer? Even if we must need to look to supernatural teleological, why should Marc's "bizarre" and paradoxical story be the correct one? According to the title, Marc wants to explain Christianity to atheists, but succeeds only in describing an especially weird, counter-intuitive, narrative that we cannot distinguish from pure fiction. We atheists are made of sterner stuff, he won't freak us out, but he fails to explain Christianity in a way that makes us see it as anything but fiction.

This indistinguishable-from-fictional narrative also appears on a specifically Catholic blog. Marc makes no effort to connect this narrative with Catholicism. How do we get popes and priests from an imperfect world. Remember, atheists are not really concerned with the metaphysical issues about God; those have been largely settled... in our favor. Instead, we are mainly concerned with religious justifications of worldly authority. Nothing in Marc's essay connects with any church, much less the Catholic church.

Finally, Marc's basic premise, that religion starts out from the necessity of finding the "purpose of suffering" is tendentious and objectionable. First, Marc is assuming his premise: if we must find purpose, we must, by definition, be looking for a teleological cause, the cause in a conscious mind. Since at least some suffering does not come from human minds, there must be at least a non-human teleology underlying suffering. Marc simply assumes that anyone who has experienced pain will look to a teleological cause: "(If you don’t believe [suffering needs an answer], develop leukemia, have a close family member die, and then try being content with not having any answers, meaning, or purpose." But of course, many atheists have experienced pain and loss, and whatever discontent we might feel, many do not see the lack of teleological meaning or purpose relevant. We have an answer: In a natural, indifferent, world of only physical law, shit really does just happen. If that's an answer Marc doesn't like, well, when did our opinions about the truth matter as to its truthfulness. If you fall off a cliff, you may not like it that your body accelerates towards the center of the Earth at ~10m/s², but you'll go splat at the bottom nonetheless. I don't need to find any purpose to suffering, so Marc's argument is a non-starter.

When someone makes their infantile fiction my business, I will call it just that: an infantile fiction to comfort themselves in a largely hostile material universe entirely indifferent to human happiness. But it really isn't any of my business; what do I care what story you need to tell yourself to get up in the morning? Why do you need my validation or approval? Especially when I'm just not going to give it to you, regardless of the effort you've put in to make it appear logically consistent. What I am concerned about is religious people's demands for political, economic, and social privilege. If you're not at least trying to justify your privilege, I'm just not interested.

I rag on philosophers often as being obscurantists, nit-pickers, and lovers of gratuitous complexity. But sometimes there are exceptions. I have some expertise in English composition as well as both general and religious philosophy, and Maarten Boudry's review of Alvin Plantinga's book, Where the Conflict Really Lies. Science, Religion and Naturalism, is a masterpiece of philosophy and perfect compositional technique. The review appears in the International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Group Newsletter, September/October 2012, starting on page 21. (via Larry Moran)

Innovation

theObserver has some thoughts on innovation. Lightly edited for typographical style.

Innovate. I hate that word. We even have to innovate the grammar we use to talk about innovation (mostly to hide the fact we don't actually have any new ideas).

But consider software. Usually software does not need much start-up capital, so we find a large amount of hobby groups collaborating over the internet and producing decent software under the open software model simply because they enjoy it. Or game modders who produce new content for games just for recognition in their virtual community. Or illegal file shares going to huge trouble to pirate or hack games.

Indeed, during the early days of the information revolution, software was given away free because of the culture during the late 60's and 70's. The guys who invented the spreadsheet gave it away free until Bill Gates swiped it and made billions.

So I don't think the financial carrot is necessary to motivate people to innovate or invent or create. Most writers write because they want to; most painters paint without any expectation of financial rewards. In some cases when financial rewards are offered (commissions, book advances etc), the work actually suffers because of deadlines and pressure.

Even the supermen in the Ayn Rand books don't work purely for financial profit, but because they are exceptional and cannot help themselves. Profit is their just reward, not the motivation. In Atlas Shrugged her revolutionary capitalists were portrayed as making great personal sacrifices by striking and leaving their work.

I think Marx wanted to free people from unnecessary economic labor so they could innovate and self-actualize. I've long considered most corporations parasites because they try to leech every bit of creativity possible from their staff to increase their profits. This leaves staff exhausted or even worse - content ! - at the end of their working day, fit only for the couch, their dreams put off until tomorrow.

"Communism" and "socialism"

Yesterday, a friend asked, "isn't socialism just a moderate form of communism?" This question brings up two issues.

The first is that the argument from moderation is a bit lazy. It is true that a lot of times, moderation is better than extremism. But it's not always true. Barry Goldwater was kind of an asshole, and but I think he was right when he said that (to paraphrase a little) extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. If we accept the political equality of democracy as one extreme, and the absolute tyranny of a single individual as the other extreme, is the moderation of of submission to an oligarchy therefore superior? If slavery is one extreme, and liberty another, where's the moderate position? A little slavery? Just that "X is moderate relative to Y and Z" is not by itself a sufficient argument for X.

The second issue is that the history of the distinction between "socialism" and "communism" is complicated. We can divide the ideological history of modern communism and socialism broadly into four periods:

1. Utopian socialism (pre-Marx)
2. Marxian communism
3. Early revolutionary communism (pre-1917)
4. Communism of the parties

Marx and Engels both criticized utopian socialism. One important difference between utopian socialism and Marxian communism is that the former typically is philosophically idealistic (the material realization of an independently-existing ideal form) and the latter is materialistic (development by the interaction of fully physical elements). Engels draws the distinction at length in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, 1892.

In Marx and Engels, or at least the translations I've read, socialism is either identically synonymous with communism, or socialism refers to an "early" stage of communism, when we still have to have social institutions to manage production; communism refers to a later stage, when the means of production have become sufficiently advanced that people can just work at whatever pleases them, without having to worry about the social utility of their labor. Lenin usually follows the latter distinction.

In the early revolutionary phase, when actual communists were trying to gain state power, a sharp distinction developed: between communists and "democratic socialists." The fundamental character of the latter was a desire to preserve and work within the bourgeois representative "democratic" (i.e. republican) system. Marx touches on the distinction in Critique of the Gotha Programme, but Lenin has the most thorough treatment in What is to Be Done? and The State and Revolution.

Finally, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party came to define (or legitimatize the de facto definition) of communism as rule by the meritocratic national Communist Party, hence the modern term "Communism of the Parties."

The distinction between communism and socialism is therefore kind of equivocal. If you look at the distinction drawn in the revolutionary phase, "socialism" means the preservation of representative democracy, and "communism" means the rejection of representative republicanism as fundamentally bourgeois, in favor of some other unspecified system. On the other hand, one might use a distinction based on Communism of the Parties, where "communism" means rule by the national Communist Party, and "socialism" means rejection of party rule in favor of some other alternative.

I personally reject both bourgeois republicanism and meritocratic rule of the Party, in favor more directly and thoroughly democratic political systems, such as the systems briefly implemented by the Paris Commune, of which Marx wrote approvingly in The Civil War in France. If people want to call themselves "socialists," and they mean a rejection of both rule of the party and bourgeois republicanism, then I'll call them comrades without quibbling over labels.